Care in the Use of History when facing the Future
Just in time for the weekend. Reflecting on the hard choices facing policy-makers following the Hamas terror attacks and Israeli reaction.
In the deep gloom of watching the renewed tragedy in Israel and Gaza, we should be careful to touch lightly the historical analogies that immediately come to mind or are promoted by opinion writers and analysts. This is brought home acutely in the last few days with the horrible killings by Hamas and the Israeli retaliation. All sorts of historical analogies were raised by commentators and policymakers: the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Israel’s 9-11, Israel after 1945, the Holocaust, the time of Pogroms. All these and more. All seem to link aspects of the horror and terror of the last week with these historical events, including the reactions and consequences to those horrors and how policy-makers responded, or failed to respond to the initial horrors.
All these historical references, and more, raised again for me the difficulty of evoking history especially if the calling up of an historical reference is designed to suggest some current action, or avoidance of a particular course of action suggested by the past to the current circumstance. You can often see this action/response to great power tensions. Invariably someone will evoke in current major power tensions and rivalry the run up to World War One with the actions and reactions of key actors of the time - Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, France and Great Britain. Too often it is described as the ‘rush to war’ by those leaders at that earlier time unaware of the horrors of the conflict that would follow. But a close reading of the decision making at that time shows far greater hesitancy on the part of decision makers, especially in Britain, most notably British foreign secretary Edward Grey.
Now back to today. The burst of historical references to the Hamas attack on Israel raised for me these difficult uses of history. A first reaction was to recall the volume by Margaret McMillan, titled The Uses and Abuses of History. Margaret is a notable scholar from both the University of Toronto and Oxford University. In the Introduction she wrote:
History can be helpful; it can also be very dangerous. It is wiser to think of history, not as a pile of dead leaves or a collection of dusty artifacts, but as a pool, sometimes benign, often sulphurous, which lies under the present, silently shaping our institutions, our ways of thought, our likes and dislikes. … There are also many lessons and much advice offered by history, and it is easy to pick and choose what you want. The past can be used for almost anything you want to do in the present. We abuse it when we create lies about the past or write histories that show only one perspective. We can draw our lessons carefully or badly. That does not mean we should not look to history for understanding, support, and help; it does mean that we should do so with care.
So care we must take and urge the same on today’s policy-makers. And that warning led me to remember a much earlier volume than that of Margaret McMillan. This was a book written by Ernest May, completed in 1973 and titled ‘Lessons’ of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy. Now Ernest May along with colleagues resurrected what was referred to as ‘applied History’. May together with a Harvard colleague Richard Neustadt taught courses in which students were invited to apply historical insight to contemporary social issues. Now, the resurrection of the ‘applied history’ approach in this and other volumes are hardly surprising given that the United States was experiencing the agonies of the Vietnam War and a rising torrent of questions over the advisability of US government policy in the Far East. Now May was of the view, his first thesis:
…that history helped to shape the thinking of some men at some recent points in time, I believe that it does so regularly and will continue to do so.
In addition, May argued:
The second thesis of this book is that policy-makers ordinarily use history badly. When resorting to an analogy, they tend to seize upon the first that comes to mind. They do not search more widely. Nor do they tend to assume that it will continue into the future, not stopping to consider what produced it or why a linear projection might prove to be mistaken.
The final thesis from May is:
The third thesis, corollary to the second, is that policy-makers can, if they will, use history more discriminatingly. They can seek alternative analogies and parallels and in doing so reflect on whether a moral seen in one case is a principle exemplified in many. Instead of merely projecting a trend, they can dissect the forces that produced it and ask whether or not these forces will persist with the same vectors.
And May then hopefully concludes:
The chief claim to be made for them is that, if well done, they might help free themselves from the analogies, parallels, or trend-readings which they might otherwise unthinking apply.
A lesson from this ‘long ago’ study, a simple one perhaps, is that if one wants to use an historical analogy one should list out the similarities between the historical analogy and the current situation. Many will of course do that. But then one needs to list out all the differences that can be perceived between the historical analogy and the current circumstance. And, few, if any, do that.
The bottom line: decision makers need to be careful, very careful, in grasping historical analogies in hopes of paving the way forward. It may be a trap.