I've been debating trying to put together a piece on what role I think that historians should have in society, but War on the Rocks' Thinking Historically: A Guide for Strategy and Statecraft I think already manages to capture quite a bit of what I was thinking of. (The quote in the title here is from Sandy Berger, who was national security advisor to Bill Clinton). Here's how the piece describes a historical sensibility (where I've highlighted some bits I thought important):
A historical sensibility includes several characteristics. First, this sensibility demonstrates a toleration and even appreciation of uncertainty, surprise, and unintended consequences in human affairs, and a comfort with indeterminacy and multi-causal explanations. It makes the unfamiliar familiar, while revealing the unfamiliar in what was believed was well-understood. Furthermore, the historical sensibility provides an empathy (though not necessarily a sympathy) for the past — a willingness to understand historical subjects on their own terms and as products of a particular time and place. This also means developing a consciousness of the powerful hold that history exerts on other cultures, leaders, and nations. It also acknowledges the fundamental importance of the perspective of the observer. Though the historian strives for an elusive objectivity, she admits that the who, what, and when of the historian matters quite a bit when reconstructing the past. Finally, a historical sensibility recognizes and appreciates complexity and, though willing to be proven wrong, casts a skeptical eye on claims of parsimonious models that claim to explain, generalize, and predict complex social, cultural, and political behavior.
There was some conversation a few months back - originally sparked by an article in The Atlantic called Why the U.S. President Needs a Council of Historians - about what the role of historians in society and public policy should be. Where criticisms of the idea like this one leave me though is with the notion that a council of historians might be best off limiting itself to critiques like these:
most complex and difficult policy choices involve what former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has called “51/49” decisions: In other words, it is very difficult to know, a priori, whether a difficult policy choice will turn out correctly, even if it retrospect it seemed obvious. This is true for good policies as well as bad ... History is full of surprises and unintended consequences, and intent only rarely produces the obvious and desired outcome.
In essence I think that a council of historians would be useful if it largely limited itself to this sort of advice - the embracing of human limitations and the understanding that just like those gone before are thinking is in some ways a product of our own time and likely has gaps and problems that we're often unable or unwilling to see.
One of my all-time most intriguing headlines comes from the LA Times in 1988: History Tests Canceled for Soviet Youngsters : Decision, Affecting 53 Million, Will Provide Time to Correct Stalinist 'Lies,' Izvestia Says. I don't think that the history common in the West at the moment is quite that bad, but often even award-winning histories can be of dubious reliability - e.g. Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve:
When I finished, I put down The Swerve on the table, and the academic side of my brain kicked back in. I had let myself read it as fiction. Yet it was supposed to be not fiction. When I thought of it as a scholarly book, and thought of all those thousands and thousands of people out there who read it and believed every word because the author is an authority and wins prizes, I realized: This book is dangerous. ... Having studied medieval culture for nearly two decades, I can instantly recognize the oppressive, dark, ignorant Middle Ages that Greenblatt depicts for 262 pages as, simply, fiction. It’s fiction worse than Dan Brown, because it masquerades as fact.
Or there's the play Hamilton about which History Today had said the following:
... then there is Alexander Hamilton himself. As is his perfect right, Miranda creates a Hamilton who is far more palatable to modern sensibilities than the real man would probably be. The real Alexander was a champion of what we call today ‘the one per cent’, who had much less faith in ‘the people’ and democracy than his nemesis, Jefferson. He argued that the president of the United States should serve on good behaviour, in other words, for life, barring misdeeds. The play links Hamilton to America’s uplifting 19th- and 20th-century immigration narrative, but he had no fondness for immigrants. Although to his great credit he was forward-thinking on racial matters, Hamilton was not the committed abolitionist the play makes him out to be. With all this said, Hamilton was never meant to be a documentary. As a creative work it seeks to tell its own truths in its own ways. Still, there is concern that Miranda’s version of Alexander Hamilton will come to shape the public’s view of the man and his times.
The piece follows this with the suggestion that the play might provoke people to dig deeper into Hamilton's life but I think that it's more likely to provide the illusion of understanding.
Let me leave you with one last quote from the War on the Rocks article, this one citing Gordon Wood:
Unlike sociology, political science, psychology, and the other social sciences, which tend to breed confidence in managing the future, history tends to inculcate skepticism about our ability to manipulate and control purposefully our destiny.
