Choosing the correct analog

Is the 1929 Great Depression the best analog to the current downturn in the market? This article suggests that it is not. Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Real Great Depression by Scott Reynolds Nelson.

Thinking in Time

“Few would quarrel with Machiavelli’s observation that in order to know what is going to happen, one must know what has happened. But the lessons of history can be obscuring and misleading as well as illuminating and orienting.”

History, in other words, is important but capable of being all things to all men, in a manner of speaking.

These are the opening words of Professor Wolfram F. Hanrieder’s (UC, Santa Barbara) December 1987 review in The American Political Science Review of Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May. Neustadt and May make their goal very clear in the Preface’s opening line: “This book is addressed to those who govern–or hope to do so.” They intended their book to be a text for government leaders in the proper use of history as one decision-making tool among all of those available. Did it work? Hard to say unless someone manages to find a way to poll the apparatchiks who’ve used it.

Search at JSTOR: http://www.jstor.orgor read the review: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1962619 (If you don’t have access to JSTOR, don’t worry. There are plenty of reviews of this book out there.)

Get your own at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Time-Uses-History-Decision-Makers/dp/0029227917

Study War More

Many of the most stidently spoken historical lessons, examples, and parallels are drawn from the details of wars of the past. For Americans, Vietnam is the chief example. Pundits and would-be pundits use selected episodes from that war to argue on both sides of the current debate on the war in Iraq. One historian who has written a great deal about warfare, Victor Davis Hanson, writes that much of the commentary on warfare is uninformed by history. He suggests that, for our own safety, we should study war more to support rational and realistic decisionmaking.

“A wartime public illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself paralyzed in the acrimony of the present. Without standards of historical comparison, it will prove ill equipped to make informed judgments. Neither our politicians nor most of our citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair. So it’s no surprise that today so many seem to think that the violence in Iraq is unprecedented in our history. Roughly 3,000 combat dead in Iraq in some four years of fighting is, of course, a terrible thing. And it has provoked national outrage to the point of considering withdrawal and defeat, as we still bicker over up-armored Humvees and proper troop levels. But a previous generation considered Okinawa a stunning American victory, and prepared to follow it with an invasion of the Japanese mainland itself—despite losing, in a little over two months, four times as many Americans as we have lost in Iraq, casualties of faulty intelligence, poor generalship, and suicidal head-on assaults against fortified positions.”

Read more: http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=2299

Your lessons, my lessons

Sometimes the “lesson of history” is in the eye of the beholder. Nationalist leanings, culture, and any number of other modifiers can affect the lesson learned. For example, how would you answer this question: Who is the greatest Russian of the twentieth century? As of the middle of July, the Tsar and Stalin were neck and neck. Stalin strikes me as an unlikely choice for any American or Western European who might be more likely to select a pre-Putin modernizing leader like Gorbachev or an anti-Stalin dissident like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I doubt that the Tsar makes anyone’s list outside of Russia, assuming they remember him in the first place. An interesting but unanswered question is ‘what does it mean that Russians seem to hold the mass killer Stalin in such high regard?’ No answers here.

Read the London Times article:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4339108.ece?print=yes&randnum=1222385014066

or go here to see the article with the comments:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4339108.ece

More How To

Let’s suppose that you wanted to write an op-ed piece for the local paper. How would you go about using, in an appropriate way, historical examples? Well, thankfully, there are some guidelines you can use. The History News Service provides a long list that can be accessed here: http://www.h-net.org/~hns/opedstyle.html

This is an interesting step in the process: “4. Thicken and intensify the historical issue. Provide details.” I understand the directive to provide details, but I’m not sure what is meant by thickening a historical issue. Better is this part: “the historical analogy that people are using is dangerous and probably wrong….”

How To

In the article below, Garfinkle suggests six rules that need to be applied to the use of the lessons of history to contemporary situations, which I’ve shortened a bit.

• distinguish facts from non-facts.
• evaluate information without bias
• share information and ideas.
• strictly follow rules of evidence.
• distinguish correlation from causality.
• bear in mind the critical role of context.

He also notes that “a liberal arts education— the sort of education that future senior policymakers in this culture are liable to have— should include training in natural science.” I’d suggest that they might want a bit of economics in the mix as well. Actually, they all need to aspire to the title of “Renaissance Man.”

“How to Learn Lessons from History— And How Not To” by Adam Garfinkle

The matter of learning lessons from history has been a prodigious source of aphorism and free advice. George Santayana famously warned that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. Aldous Huxley quipped that the most important thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history. Oliver Wendell Holmes defined history as one damned thing after another (and George Shultz, following Holmes, defined foreign policy as the same damned thing after another). But what do we really know about how to learn from history, and how not to?

We know, first and foremost, that how we may learn from history is a function of the purpose to which the exercise is put. Read more: http://www.fpri.org/footnotes/071.200105.garfinkle.lessons.html

An analogy is worth a thousand words.

Politicians (and others) are often quick to search out (and sometimes apply mistakenly) historical analogies to modern situations. How many times has this one been used?

http://warhistorian.org/images/munich-analogy.jpg

Rhymes

Parallels in History

William F. Mugleston

The doctrine of the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems nonsense,” Crane Brinton observed in his classic, The Anatomy of Revolution. Indeed, as every history teacher knows, similar situations do keep recurring, in politics, international relations, social standards, personal behavior, and a host of other areas. Today’s headline-grabbing news story may well have its counterpart twenty, fifty, two hundred, or even two thousand years ago. Of course it is true that no two situations are ever exactly alike, for the players themselves are different and may perform and react in diverse ways. But the parallels are surely there. Mark Twain said it for all time: “The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

From OAH Magazine of History, (vol 14, no 3, Spring 2000). Read more: http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/korea/mugleston.html

History Lessons

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. -George Santayana

You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you. -Heraclitus

Heraclitus pointed out the fundamental error in Santayana’s statement some 2,400 years before Santayana uttered it. Nevertheless, people love to engage in the exercise of finding, to them, pertinent historical parallels to support some argument they are in the act of making.

In spite of the obvious truth of Heraclitus’s statement, this blog will try to find and post examples of interesting, if inexact, historical parallels and any discussions related to the topic.

The main reason for doing this is entertainment, though there are probably many others.

Another reason is that the essential characteristics of human beings change very slowly, perhaps on something like a geological time scale. If so, then a key component in any historical tableau is essentially constant and worth examination as it reacts to changing stimuli.

Finally, I have a nagging belief in the essential value of history as a source of important lessons if we can only figure out how to use it.