167 sats \ 1 reply \ @ratiotile 24 Mar \ on: Debate: History is only useful to the extent that it can predict the future history
No, I think history is least useful to the extent we try to apply it to predict what will happen. I would even say anti-useful. So much suffering has sprung from the idea that the past should be used to predict what's going to happen in the future. It's anti-scientific, because we have no way of testing the claims until they happen. It tends to lead to totalitarianism, since it tricks intellectuals (and subsequently the people who read them, i.e. future leaders of governments) into thinking their study of history has provided them with the prescription to fix society for the rest of us.
I think it's very ingrained in us to want to think that the primary task of history should be prescriptive -- after all, if we're not using it to better the future, then what's the point? But if we're not being scientific about the claims we make, then whatever conclusions we come to from our false premises are likely to do us more harm than good. And we can't apply the scientific method to history the same way we can to the hard sciences, for example, because we can't control the variables and we can't make repeat-experiments. History is one long continuous event with an essentially infinite number of factors working together to bring it about. We should stop tempting ourselves into thinking we can predict it with certainty. I think we can even notice strains of totalitarian thought in ourselves when we start to dream about figuring out how to predict the future -- if you can predict the future, then it's just a matter of finding the answer to "what got us here?" and then once you convince yourself you've found that truth, you'll be tempted make demands from others in accordance with that truth, especially if you're a political leader.
So what's the point of history then?
I think it is much better to look at history in terms of what could happen or what has happened as opposed to what will. We should use it to falsify universal claims, claims of the type "X can never happen". If X has happened, then great! You disproved the claim. There are a lot of false claims out there that need disproving, and so thorough knowledge of history can get us closer not by finding the "one true take" on history that predicts the future, but rather through a process of elimination of disproving all the false claims that people make all the time. If we just started there, instead of wasting our time trying to predict the future, we'd make a lot more progress already.
You'd be surprised how many preconceived notions you have about history that need disproving, about what people were like, the ways in which they were different than us and surprisingly the same as us, etc. I remember once reading this diary entry by a 20-year old John Adams talking about the likely existence of aliens, and what that implied about their morals and faith. I didn't think people had the perceptual framework to think about aliens at the time. I was wrong. Not a very "important" thing to be wrong about I guess but still fascinating to me.
The book that completely changed my take on this, by the way, is The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper, who, it's worth mentioning here, was a friend of F.A Hayek. Absolutely fantastic defense of democracy, but begins by talking about how this view on being able to predict the future basically provided the intellectual basis for totalitarianism going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle and then moving from there to Hegel and Marx.
He also wrote a whole book about the impossibility of predicting the future and how dangerous the idea was called The Poverty of Historicism, which is on my reading list.
Finally, another big reason for me personally to study history, is that it's just so interesting. There are better, more interesting stories that actually happened than most TV shows and movies that people can even make up. And studying history also gives you a view into essentially the best and worst people who lived and what they were like, those who rise to the top to influence events. And while there are definitely a lot of terrible people, there are a lot of absolutely amazing ones too who willingly gave everything with the goal of improving our lives (not knowing who "we" would be), despite no tangible benefit to themselves except maybe being remembered by posterity. To study the heritage we received from them can be an inspiring and liberating experience.
Sorry for the rant haha, didn't think I'd type this much but this is such an important question.
Final reasons history is useful put into much better words, from Will Durant's The Lessons of History: