Those who quote George Santayana on studying history may be doomed to repeat it
Part one on the nature of history and why we should study it
Almost inevitably when I ask students “why should we study history?” one of the first three students to raise their hand (and usually it’s the very first) will answer with something along the lines of, “so we don’t repeat past mistakes,” or even with a paraphrase of the famous George Santayana quote about how those who don’t study the past are doomed to repeat it.
This quote is true as far as it goes, and it has much to recommend it. But as a complete solution to the study of history, I’ve long been a bit dissatisfied with history “merely” helping us avoid future mistakes, and not just because “being doomed to repeat it” has become a bit cliché. In a follow-on post, I’ll offer some thoughts on the distinct domain of history, and what separates it from other disciplines. This post, however, will focus on the virtues and limitations of learning lessons from history.
- The past as a laboratory for human nature
It’s certainly true that almost any folly and failure of human action can evoke the memory of past examples, and the author of Ecclesiastes two millennia ago had already seen enough to pronounce that “there is nothing new under the Sun.” Around the same time, Thucydides said that his work of history was worthwhile because “the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.” Past examples of human action are indeed often helpful in illuminating the present and informing our decisions.
In asking a friend’s recommendation about a movie or restaurant choice, you piggyback off their experience and make a prediction that the movie or food in question will likely conform to their recollection. This is a rather marvelous feat of reason if you think on it long enough. We don’t need direct experience of a thing in order to know it well enough to have a judgment on it, and most of us are actually pretty sophisticated in knowing to account for variables like our friend’s bias for or against certain movies (knowledge which is also informed by past experience), or whether one restaurant in a chain may be as good as another. These small assumptions and filters we apply have surprisingly clear parallels to the consultation of historical sources and information.
Now scale this process up to the biggest questions of all; what is human nature, how does it function, and how can we best flourish and avoid failure? These are ultimately the great questions of human philosophy and all its subsidiary disciplines, of which history is merely one along with subjects such as literature. Philosophy uses reason and observation to generate and test ideas about ourselves (e.g., the career of Socrates), and literature uses artistic imagination to tell stories about the human condition that can inspire and inform us. The sciences can help us empirically understand ourselves and the world, so we can better ask and debate these philosophical questions. So also with history, which offers an advantage over other disciplines in that we can actually test our ideas in the historical record. As with scientific experiments, we can go beyond pure theory or story, and actually ask - did this really happen?
Suppose you really want to know which system of government is best, and try to prove it empirically. Given the obvious moral problems with experimenting on humans, we can’t very well kidnap four groups of individuals and drop them off on separate islands with different forms of government (Democracy, Republicanism, Monarchy, Anarchy, etc.), for us to observe and monitor over several generations. Aside from the inevitable human-rights trials, you’d still probably have bad data because these societies were artificially created in a vacuum, and wouldn’t reflect the long and complicated history of real human societies.
History really does let you play out the answer to “what happens when humans do X?” And the historical record is rich and varied enough that you can find examples which seem to answer almost any question imaginable, including on the very utility of studying history itself. The record of successful individuals (especially in politics and war) who studied history closely is so strong that no small number of figures have considered history to be essential to the practice of politics and statecraft. As Cardinal Andre-Hercule de Fleury, chief minister to Louis XV of France put it, “A man of mediocre status needs very little history; those who play some part in public affairs need a great deal more; and a prince cannot have too much.” There are a great many examples of leaders (especially political statesmen and military generals) who studied history closely. Situations requiring decisions about humans in complex situations will almost always benefit from having a large sample size of examples to draw on. Incidentally, the question of whether history is “only” useful for politicians and generals, and the difference between ancient aristocracies and modern democracies, is one I plan to return to in the future.
- Limitations, and a healthy dose of humility
While all the above sounds very nice, it deserves a rather large dose of caveats. While the past can act as an experiential guide to human action, it also has sharp limitations in what it can tell us, and in what we can do with its knowledge. Most obviously, there are the problems of incomplete information, and bias in our sources. Many areas in the past have large gaps in what we know reliably; much of our conventional narratives of Greek and Roman history come from which textual sources happen to have survived, or even just which fragments remain. And of course, filtering out the bias of our sources can be very difficult, especially when we have little else to go on. Imagine if the only surviving sources on controversial American presidents were their own memoirs, or a single monograph from a fierce critic (or loving admirer); this is nearly the case for a fair few Roman emperors.
Patchy records and biased sources, however, are really only the start of the problem. In fact, if you ponder the difficulty of truly understanding exactly what happened in the past and why long enough, you can work yourself into a state of almost utter skepticism about our ability to know anything at all. For one thing, differences in language, culture, religion, philosophy, etc., across times and places can make it very hard to tell if we truly understand what our sources are trying to tell us. For another, events and individuals can be very complex, with many different (often interdependent) variables at play. Consider a watershed event such as the causes of the Protestant Reformation. Depending on how big or small you want to make your narrative, you can easily include any/some/all of the following variables -
The geography of Germany
The development of Renaissance humanism and antiquarianism
The technology of the printing press and the spread of vernacular languages
Church corruption, indulgences and the Renaissance Papacy
The rise of the literate urban middle class in the late middle ages
The spread of popular devotion amongst the laity
Nominalism as a philosophical idea
Martin Luther’s constant personal anguish over guilt and absolution of his sins
The power struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the German nobility
The personal temperaments of Martin Luther, Johan Eck, and Pope Leo X
This list could be much longer, and only covers the initial Lutheran Reformation. It also doesn’t wade deeply into questions of historical contingency and whether someone else might have started the Reformation if Luther hadn’t once been caught in a terrifying thunderstorm, prompting his vow to take holy orders.
Even when we look closer to our own day, we can find it surprisingly difficult to understand an event or person. Consider how the cause of major wars and economic recessions that occurred within living memory are often hotly debated by seemingly very well-informed experts, who can’t arrive at any sort of consensus. Given that we could fill a library with books arguing on the cause of the First World War, how much less sure should we be of understanding the Thirty Years War? It's quite possible (probable?) that our best interpretations and theories of many important historical events and people are mostly reliant on flawed or skewed sources which offer us little means of assessing their accuracy.
Consequently, the study of history requires a large dose of humility…and a fair amount of hedging. A college professor of mine said that the words “would, could and should,” (used to express uncertainty) should be a historians close friend. We should always be careful about how much we really know about the past, and realize that a lot of what survives may be fuzzy around the edges. This humility and cognizance of limitations is itself another thing history can teach us. The list of individuals unpleasantly surprised by their own hubris is long indeed.
- The difficulty of knowing which past lessons to learn from
This can finally bring us back to the initial quote about failing to learn from history and therefore repeating it. For while history can teach us a great deal, it can also trick us if we’re not careful about what we ask it.
In the runup to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, pundits and political leaders in favor of the war made constant reference to the dangers of appeasing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and drew comparisons to the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement, in which Hitler was appeased into taking possession of all of Czechoslovakia. On the surface, the comparison seemed strong enough; in both situations a violent tyrant with a penchant for military expansion demonstrated a track record of defying other countries in the face of weak deterrence. On the other side of the debate, critics of the Iraq war also made historical comparisons, frequently warning about the dangers of being drawn into “another Vietnam.” The word “quagmire” became quite common at this time.
Of course in hindsight, one wishes those in favor of the war had been studying the history of insurgencies, and of the Sunni/Shia divide within Islam, instead of the diplomatic history of Nazi Germany. Before an event happens, it can be hard to know which historical parallel or analogy ought to be applied, and the very clarity of hindsight can often make it hard to appreciate the difficulty that comes with uncertainty before an event happens. Knowing which historical analogy to apply in a given situation requires developing the art of good judgment and prudence (fortunately, prudence is also probably the virtue that history teaches best).
When it comes to abusing historical examples, two common pitfalls to beware are motivated reasoning, and a lack of historical perspective leading to a very limited range of examples to choose from. Motivated reasoning (similar perhaps to cherry-picking) occurs when we already have a desired outcome we want to argue for, and we go looking for any possible historical lesson to support that outcome, whether or not the actual historical context fits the situation. Political actors and pundits are constantly guilty of grabbing whatever historical statistics and examples lie at hand in order to support an argument. This twisting of the historical record robs real human beings and events of all their uncertainty and complexity, leaving overly simplified and strained analogies behind. To some extent, this is always a problem when we try to generalize away from detailed bodies of knowledge (if you’ve ever heard someone take a subject on which you actually know a fair bit about, and flatten it down into a few superficial bullet points, then you know what this is like). But reaching for flawed analogies in order to support a predetermined position can often create a false sense of confidence that “history teaches us X.” One can easily imagine the error of those pundits urging the invasion of Iraq being reinforced by their very confidence that they were using history to avoid repeating past mistakes.
Sometimes, the wrong historical lesson is used simply because the speaker doesn’t have a broad range of alternatives to draw on. This is the proverbial “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” issue, and is related to the “beware the man of one only one book” aphorism. We can only reason and make analogies about that which we already have some idea of, and we’ll often take what we know best and are most interested in, and try to apply it to a problem whether or not it really fits. If you’ve ever known someone flush with enthusiasm after discovering a new idea or author, and who therefore constantly made reference to it at every possible opportunity, you may know what this is like. Similarly, history enthusiasts who only really know one time period or topic, and therefore examine everything through the lens of that interest, may find patterns and similarities that aren’t really there. American foreign policy debates sometimes give the impression that the only two historical lessons many of us know are the perils of appeasing Nazi Germany, and the dangers of Vietnam-style quagmires. Domestically, debates about the American Founding can give the sense that some students know little else about the Founding Fathers other than the fact that many were slave owners. A little historical knowledge may be more dangerous than none at all, and sometimes we need to know history simply to avoid falling prey to the suspect analogies of others.
- More humility, and taking the past on its own terms
Much of the solution to avoiding the pitfalls of historical cherry-picking and treating every problem as a nail to be hammered, again starts with humility in realizing that our knowledge of the past is limited and uncertain, but also that the historical record doesn’t exist simply as a tool at hand to be used however we like. Historical actors and events happened for their own complicated reasons, and we can often derive the most benefit from them only after strenuously trying to understand them on their own terms. History certainly can offer many useful lessons to help us in the present, but we must let the historical record guide us to the answers to our questions, rather than treat the historical record as a convenient set of examples we can select from at will.
In summary, given the popularity of the George Santayana quote on failing to study history and therefore repeating it, one wonders just how much history has been repeated by individuals who thought they had in fact already learned from it. In an attempt to avoid repeating them in turn, my next post will try to consider the core nature of history as a discipline of inquiry, and what it means for us to say that the past creates the present.
Brilliant post. Anybody who desires to become a leader should read this.