This is the key lesson we should really learn from history: That things can always turn, that contingency is never to be underestimated, that we need to grapple with the vast universe of possible outcomes and the full complexity of past and present realities. Some thoughts: 1/
https://twitter.com/jbf1755/status/1441869055875444738
Yes, we absolutely can and should “learn” from history – but probably not in the way it’s often portrayed in the broader political and public discourses, and even by some historians themselves. There are very few clear-cut lessons to be had, no easy policy recommendations. 2/
Focusing on long-term structures and processes - trying to make sense of the world by exploring how it has become what it is today - necessarily changes our understanding of the present. But that’s not what is commonly meant by “learning” from history. 3/
The commonly-held idea of what it means to “learn from history” assumes that there are past precedents for the challenges we face today – that we can look at how people / societies handled those challenges in the past to get a clear sense of what “worked” and what didn’t. 4/
This view of the present’s relationship with the past is deceptively intuitive – “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it” is one of those aphorisms that politicians and journalists love to cite, especially in times of perceived crisis. 5/
How should we handle Covid? The threat of far-right extremism? A global economic crisis? Let’s find the analogue in the past – the Spanish Flu, Hitler’s rise, the Global Depression – and repeat what contemporaries did well while avoiding their mistakes. 6/
The problem with this idea is that history is, in fact, not a cycle of recurring situations, constellations, and challenges, which would allow us to simply apply the lessons learned from the last time a problem came up to the next time the same problem appears. 7/
History doesn’t repeat itself – and even if it may “rhyme” sometimes, the fact remains that we are necessarily dealing with something new and specific. History is not repetitive, not a repetition of the same; is it accumulative, an accumulation of specific experiences. 8/
We are not experiencing a rehash of the Spanish Flu – because we live in a world that already went through the Spanish Flu, was shaped by it, has been dealing with its effects in a multitude of ways. We are not re-living the past. We can’t be. 9/
As @mccormick_ted put it so wonderfully succinctly here, history is the study of the particular. Historians are not focused on identifying generalizable patterns from past examples that can then be applied to the present – they’re not out to extrapolate a model. 10/
https://twitter.com/mccormick_ted/status/1360986344026214406
Instead, historians focus on specific contexts, both in a diachronical as well as a synchronous sense; on the specific contingencies that shaped past outcomes; they revel in the complexity of factors, influences, and dynamics that influenced the past, instead of reducing it. 11/
I’m not saying this is better or worse than what other disciplines offer – but it is somewhat distinct. Because if you want to come up with generalizable features, with a model extrapolated from past example, you have to peel off the specific and foreground the general. 12/
This insistence on the particular, when taken seriously, will not yield the type of generalizable lessons other disciplines might offer; it kind of limits the applicability to present-day problems and makes the whole “learning from history” thing more complicated. 13/
So, how can we still learn from history? By applying the analytical skills we gain from dissecting past realities in all their contexts, complexities, and contingencies to the analysis of the equally complex present. 14/
The exploration of history can alert us to the full complexity of human action, individual as well as collective, to the complexities of political, social, and cultural change over time – and force us to develop analytical skills commensurate with that complexity. 15/
Grappling with history can unveil, through historical contextualization and comparison, through the study of long-term genealogy, that many things that seem “unprecedented,” “unique,” “new,” “exceptional” may in fact not be. 16/
Studying history should make us skeptical towards the idea that what we are experiencing in the present is “just the way things are / always have been / always will be” - or the type of exceptionalism that fuels the “It cannot happen here” perspective on the world. 17/
Studying history does not offer clear and easy lessons, but it does, when done right, provide us with a better toolkit that we can use to dissect and analyze the present. History doesn’t provide better answers – it equips us to hopefully ask better questions. /end
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
