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
