Essay on how history teaches us to live
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Readers of Perspectives do not need to be persuaded that studying history is worthwhile. All of us, I assume, love history for its own sake; we want to know about the past because we find it challenging, frustrating, exciting, exhilarating, and depressing. And all of us believe that, by expanding our experience to the lives of men and women in different times and places, history teaches us valuable things both about others and ourselves. R. G. Collingwood expressed this with admirable economy when he said that we learn three things from studying the past: "what it is to be a man, what it is to be the kind of man you are, and what it is to be the kind of man you are and nobody else" (The Idea of History, New York, 1956, 10).
But what about the uses of history in a narrower, more pragmatic sense? Does the past provide lessons for the present, guidance for the future? In addition to telling us who we are, does history help us know what to do? I suspect that not many of us still share the confidence expressed by Lord Acton in his inaugural lecture of 1895 that "the science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.\" (Essays on Freedom and Power, New York, 1957, 25–26). Many of us doubt that the facts of the past are as discrete and quickly recognizable as grains of gold glittering in the sand; nor are we sure that the truth of past experience can so easily be deployed as an instrument for action.
However professionally skeptical we may be about learning from the past, there is no doubt that we try to do it all the time. We constantly tell stories about the past to our students, friends, children—and to ourselves—stories that are supposed to convey moral and practical lessons about how to behave. Physicians compile histories of their patients' diseases in order to make diagnoses and determine therapies. Military units write after action reports that provide the basis for assessing the reasons for success or failure. And, of course, historical lessons are part of every political discussion and debate. Again and again, our political leaders use the past to warn, admonish, and inspire the public; to criticize their opponents; and to justify their own policies. Historical analogies, comparisons, and metaphors are all around us; they are a source of collective wisdom on which we must rely. It is unlikely that we could live without them even if we wanted to.
It seems to me that one of our primary responsibilities as professionals is to subject the alleged lessons of the past to persistent critical scrutiny. Let me illustrate what I have in mind with two contemporary examples.
First, a relatively easy and straightforward one: the lessons drawn from a comparison between the American
occupation of Germany in 1945 and the occupation of Iraq in 2003. Resistance to American forces in Iraq, it was suggested, should neither surprise nor discourage us since similar resistance could be found at the beginning of the United States' extraordinarily successful project of nation building in postwar Germany. With the proper patience and resolve, this resistance would be overcome and a stable democratic state could emerge in Iraq, just as it did in Western Germany in 1949. This is an easy case because it rests on a single, empirically verifiable piece of misinformation: there was not, in fact, any violent opposition to American forces in Germany after May 8, 1945; indeed, the postwar German situation, as desperate as it was in many ways, was notable for the population's passivity and its lack of resistance to occupation authority. Not surprisingly, we have not heard much about postwar Germany in recent months.