Henry Ford once asserted that “history is bunk!” It seems he meant that we in the modern age need to forget the past and lean into progress. The unbridled irrationalists of our postmodern society might agree.
But George Santayana wrote something to the opposite effect: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” What he means by this seems obvious enough—at least at first. But when we realize doing history is indeed a tricky thing, our knees begin to wobble. Is history already determined? Is it directed by the great men (i.e, achievers of the world)? Or is determined, at least in part, but the choices we humans make?
Part science and part poetry, history as an attempt to preserve the past through a recorded narrative of the people and events that caused other events, which in turn, caused other events… you get the idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb seems to hint at the fact that building on what we think we know is to build on shaky ground. He writes, “History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.”
Taleb asserts that since we cannot see all of the factors that influence a particular event, but can only see the manifest event that is recorded in our history books, we are to some extent blind to the empirical realities of the historical narrative. He then proceeds to suggest three ailments from which the human mind suffers in its contact with history:
- The illusion of understanding. We might think we know what is going on but the world is much more complicated than we know; and, there are often random and unexpected events that must be factored in, events we sometimes don’t even know exist and therefore cannot factor in.
- The retrospective distortion. Since we can only assess matters after-the-fact, we tend to organize factors and events into a much neater categories than actually exist empirically (i.e., it’s messier than we think).
- The overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people. In other words, historians tend to “Platonify”—create explanations based on overconfidence in their own ability to know (i.e., educated people tend to conflate information with knowledge).
Perhaps, John Lukacs can be helpful. He sees the art or science of history as having developed through phases, and evolution of historical consciousness, as it were. He categorizes the developments into these following phases:
- Eighteenth century: History as literature (narrated past).
- Nineteenth century: History as science (recorded past).
- Twentieth century:
- History as a social science (ascertained past).
- History as a form of thought (remembered past).
In short, Lukacs builds his thesis about history on the last phase in the evolution of historical philosophy: the remembered past. Lukacs argues that the real meaning of history is not about what information it records or ascertains, per se, but what it can teach us about the significance of human existence—”emphasizing the existential—and not merely philosophical—primacy of truth: a more mature achievement of the human mind than even the mastering of certain forces through the scientific method, and certainly more mature than the simplistic conception of causalities.”
For further thoughts on History:
- Historical Consciousness by John Lukacs
- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Unless I was reading your summary superficially, it seems that neither Taleb nor Lukacs consider the validity of Providence. Unless we include that in our understanding of what history is, and what it means to document history, we’re blind as bats.
Yes. That’s Lukacs’s presupposition, ultimately. What he wants us to do with history, it seems, is to not try to dissect it for causality but to have a better understanding of the human condition,i.e., historical consciousness.