The Use of History

by GARRETT MATTINGLY

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HISTORY enters into our plans to persuade the Germans and Japanese to give up murdering their neighbors, and to teach ourselves to cope with the post-war world. But what kind of history and how to use it are more than we know. A few years ago a great newspaper created a hysterical uproar by announcing that some of our undergraduates could not identify Millard Fillmore or explain the Wilmot Proviso. There ensued a clamorous demand that all our colleges put in a compulsory course in American history, presumably at the expense of the one course in European or world civilization which was all the history most of them did require. Since the worldwide catastrophe then engulfing us had originated in Europe, without the faintest reference to the Wilmot Proviso, one could only conclude that a number of distinguished educators, politicians, and editors expected the memorable names of American history to serve our young men as incantations against Japanese bullets and German torpedoes. And recently an American general was understood to say that the history taught eventually in Japan would specially glorify things Japanese, since that was how every people taught its own history.

If our universities, now revising their curricula, have attained any insights clearer than the general’s, they have not disclosed them. There, exactly, lies the root of the confusion. We Americans are, perforce, largely the products of a schoolroom culture. If our teachers are not agreed as to what history is, or what—if any—its use can be, how shall we not be confused?

This confusion in thinking about history is modern. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, educated men made the common-sense assumptions that they could influence events by their conduct, particularly by their choices between alternatives, and that they would choose more wisely if guided by experience. To Frederick of Prussia or Edmund Burke or Alexander Hamilton, just as much as to Maehiavelli or Plutarch or Polybius, history was the filtered experience necessary for the education of the ruling class. That was why men were concerned with it and what it was for.

This certainty dissolved during the same century and a half which saw the greatest development of historical studies. New, fruitful techniques were introduced, epochs were recovered from oblivion, narratives were enriched and clarified; and at the same time, historians began to have divided minds about the purpose of their labors. Unhappily enough, this uncertainty developed just when the beginnings of democracy were making some workable theory and practice of public education in statesmanship of paramount importance. There may have been a connection. Probably the sporadic interventions of the mob seemed to upset the accepted basis of the whole art of statecraft. One element in the pervasive romantic revolt against reason was surely the feeling that the irruption of the masses onto the stage of history had made public affairs no longer amenable to rational management.

Thereafter the currents began to set toward mystic poles and, as happens when reason yields to mysticism, history gave place to myth. The myth of the virtuous and immortal nation-state was the most popular, but there were many others: the myth of divinely legitimate authority; the myth of the demiurgic idea or tendency or contradiction; the myth of the hero-leader; the various myths of blood and race. One of these, or one like them, became the necessary theme of every historian who wanted to be taken seriously.

All these myths had one thing in common. They might unify groups or divide them, inspire the most brutal aggressions or the noblest altruism, compensate for feelings of class and race inferiority or solace philosophic despair, throttle or stimulate what the period called progress; but they were alike in being equally unsafe guides to rational political conduct.

Many of the myths have been losing respectability in recent years —partly because of their mutual hostility; but, to our continued confusion. one group has flourished prodigiously under a variety of plausible disguises. This is the group generated by the awe and deference which, by their achievements, the natural scientists have exacted from their less successful brethren. Its common characteristic, in all its various forms, is the basic assumption that historians can shake off their unconfessed sense of guilt and failure by behaving more like physicists. One may call this whole group, for want of a better term, “the myths of the social sciences,” and its proponents “the pseudoscientists.” The hero is always some avatar of the Historian.

In his most daring incarnation, he is the Finder of the Law, the seer who has proclaimed, or will proclaim, after patient search or sudden insight, the unalterable laws by which the universe of human societies is governed, and by which the whole course of future history may unerringly be plotted. Since historians have succeeded in prediction, so far, little better than astrologers, most of the would-be Finders have now seceded to the Sociology Department to change their luck.

A little below the Finder, and a more human and condescending figure, the Social Engineer promises presently to measure progress with a slide rule and to tell us how to circumvent our antisocial proclivities by some neat scientific dodge. The Interpreter of Relativities, on the other hand, is skeptical about engineering and the naive idea of progress. His role is to explain that the more things change, the more they are the same, and that the worst crimes and follies and mistakes of the past were really inevitable under the circumstances and their perpetrators quite nice people. Ancillary to these major heroes toil the hosts of Industrious Candidates, refusing to question the human relevance of their imposed or self-imposed tasks, hoping that the sum of their “contributions” will reveal the pattern of human fate — if pattern there be — by mere accretion.

Into our textbooks and classrooms and into our popular thinking have seeped the conflicting formulations of all these subgroups of the pseudo-scientists, to contend there with more flagrant myths and with the chivvied remnants of our common sense. Meanwhile, delicately aloof, stand the Hamlet-like Pure Scholars, wearing like a badge the sense of futility which afflicts their colleagues, and proud to claim that their studies are merely the idle amusement of superior minds. “L’histoire,” they assert, with slightly morbid dignity, “ne sert a rien.” Me learn from history that we learn nothing from history. By this time our confusion about the use of history is so complete that to hear on high authority that it has no use at all is almost a relief.

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UR deepest instincts and our common sense, however, reject so hopeless a conclusion.

If we are to find a use for history appropriate to our present needs, we had better begin by clearing our minds of false claims about it. Primarily this is a job for its teachers, but they may not carry it through without encouragement, and everyone concerned about the grave political problems of the next few decades ought to lend a hand. We shall need all the help we can get from history.

Most Americans are not likely, consciously, to seek such help from deliberate myths. Essentially, the view that socially useful fictions should be taught as history despairs of the general level of intelligence and suggests that the masses are to be manipulated by a hidden or overt ruling class. From the poisoning of history, as in Germany and Japan, to make it first an opium for the people and then a more deadly and maddening drug, we instinctively recoil. But, with the best of motives, we still dilute our schoolbook histories with myth, and some of us still insist that history courses should teach patriotism, regardless of strict accuracy. The danger is that even in small doses myth is a narcotic, steadying the nerves but blurring the edges of judgment, and its stealthy admixture with history may produce either a revulsion from the whole subject as doped, or an induced tolerance of the poison. Narcotics should be plainly declared on the label; myths should be left to the poets.

As for the unconscious myths of the pseudoscientists, they are marked for discard by two major misconceptions: a misunderstanding of the limitations of science, and a failure to distinguish between men and molecules or mice. The first misconception need not detain us. Jacques Barzun has some telling pages on it in Teacher in America, and a few hours with a good history of science ought to dispel it forever. The inability to tell men from mice is pertinent; even at the risk of banality we must examine it.

It appears in the complaint that while the natural sciences have been alarmingly successful in controlling nature, the social sciences have failed to control mankind. As a metaphor this was once striking; as logical statement it was always preposterous. Sciences do not control men: men control sciences. Men may use scientific knowledge in controlling natural phenomena — a knowledge of hydrostatics helps them to control floods — or they may use it in controlling other men — a knowledge of anthropology (assisted by ballistics) helps them to control primitive populations.

But the control will always be precarious because the behavior of men is more unpredictable than the behavior of water. Men are free, as water is not, because men can choose between alternatives. The key to this freedom is the ability to profit by experience. Even savages are not obliged to go on making the same mistakes over and over. They may learn to circumvent, the anthropologists and the machine guns, or to turn both against their tormentors. In other words, even savages can profit by attending to history. That is the main difference between men and mice. That is the point to which the historians should have been attending all along.

Because men have this power of intelligent choice, they can change their ways of doing things; and the more they can control their environment, including its political organization, the more choices they find open. For this reason they have been changing recently very fast — to the embarrassment of the Finders of the Law, who proclaim absolute social uniformities.

Not that men’s choices are ever unlimited. It is precisely the business of the social scientist (I should prefer to say historian) to help find out what real choices human beings have, and to make the relevant experience available. But the choice of free men cannot be dictated, or foisted on them by scientific sleight of hand, or even, with certainty, predicted. Man mastered all the other animals because he was less predictable than they were. That is why the insulting concept of the Social Engineer was obsolete before it was invented. All any science can do is to provide men with the knowledge which may help them to control themselves. For, within limits they have yet to discover, but always and unescapably to some limited extent, men really are in charge of their destiny. This is neither a myth nor a metaphor, but a fact.

In the United States we should like to delegate as much of that responsibility as possible to elected representatives and appointed experts, but we have found that a considerable part of it we cannot delegate. The experts either cannot make policies or cannot enforce them; the representatives represent us only too perfectly. By bitter experience we have learned how fruitless the most clear-sighted states manship can be without strong popular support, and how idle it is to expect elected persons to decide matters more wisely than they think the majority would approve. In the United States the people decide; we are at least that far along in democracy. If we are to decide wisely, we need access to the relevant experience. If there is anything useful for present statesmanship in the collective memory of mankind, we cannot afford to ignore it.

Some historians among us, and many teachers, have taken t his job of training citizens for democratic statesmanship with complete seriousness. They have not been ashamed of the dictum that history is past

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WE already have some notion of how to look for the useful experience. In spite of popular confusion, we have, in this country, made some correct and fruitful assumptions about history — chiefly, that an acquaintance with the development of our national institutions and politics is desirable for all citizens and ought to be taught in all public schools, and that the study of it ought to be encouraged, from this point of view, in colleges and universities. politics, or afraid to assert that the importance of past politics is its relation to present political alternatives. They have attempted to analyze the full background of our current political problems and have concentrated much of their attention on those major decisions of our past which illuminate not only our national experience but the whole nature of political choice.

In the study and teaching of American history this method of critical analysis and pertinent comparison has an honorable record and wide acceptance. We owe to it many of our most valuable insights into politics, and perhaps it is responsible in no small measure for the success with which we have surmounted our recurrent domestic crises, preserved and strengthened our democracy against heavy odds in the last two decades, and emerged from our perilous recent trials a richer, stronger, and more confident nation.

This fruitful way of looking at American history is steadily gaining adherents and attracting an increasing number of our ablest young scholars, and therein lies not only encouragement but danger. The tendency to concentrate on the recent history of the United States has begun to create a gap between our teaching in that field and in others, as alarming and ominous for the future as the contrast between our relatively successful solutions of our domestic problems and our continuous bungling in international affairs.

One suspects a connection. A college course in American History, under a good teacher, has become an adventure in political understanding in which only the dullest student can fail to see, if not his own practical interest, at least the practical interest of his community. A college course in European History or in the History of Civilization usually seems pointless by comparison. It is “cultural”—a term with unfortunate connotations of ostentatious uselessness and snob appeal — and is in constant danger of degenerating into a hodgepodge of the names of kings and artists and philosophers and the dates of treaties and congresses, dubiously enlivened by details of the quaint customs and deplorable behavior of foreigners, and loosely glued together with some condescending theory of inevitable development which implies the moral equivalence of all forms of conduct and the futility of human effort. Such courses students rightly regard as a burden to the memory and a weariness of the flesh, and promptly escape from them to English Literature or Freehand Drawing or some other “cultural” elective which, if equally unrelated to earning money, offers some present challenge or entertainment.

Not all courses in European history are made to seem so meaningless as this — there are exceptions under especially gifted teachers and in some whole departments; but talk to the teachers and students of enough American colleges, scan the outlines and skim the textbooks, and you will agree that the description is not unfair. And what happens in the colleges happens by necessity, in diluted form, on the lower levels. No wonder that the most obvious single fact about our armed forces abroad is their ignorance about all foreign countries and their open contempt for all foreigners. No wonder that that ignorance and contempt, in the last three decades, led the whole world to the brink of disaster and threatens, next time, to lead it beyond the brink.

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IF WE are to have the best chance to avoid some fatal error in the conduct of our future affairs, we must reorganize our study and teaching of all history, as we are reorganizing the American field, trying to make it a genuine training in democratic statesmanship. We must break the spell of the purely American past, end the false dichotomy between American and other history, and orient our training in statesmanship towards our present position in the world. We need to find out who we are, and what lies about us, and what real choices lie ahead. If the answers are to be had, they are in the collective memory of mankind.

Concerning our present political environment and the real choices it offers in the immediate future, few doubts are admissible. The United States is now the active center in one of the leading power groups in a world society. We affect and shall be affected by events everywhere on the globe. Our decisions must take account of the peoples and conditions of six continents and all the islands of the sea. Our first and most obvious task, then, is to see that Americans know enough history to act wisely in relation to Poland, Greece, Iran, and China, and all the other parts of the world where choices will confront us hereafter.

We cannot separate ourselves from this world society, however much we may want to. We are going to be involved with it more and more closely. The only real major choice offered us is whether we are going to cooperate with our neighbors in a constantly closer and more democratic union, or whether we are going to try to split them and dominate them at the risk of our mutual destruction. If we are going to live peaceably in the world, we had better learn to look at it, not as a tiger looks at a jungle, but as a man looks at his home town, trying to learn enough of its past and its problems, and of the character and habits of its people, to know where he fits in. These are essentially the questions we ask of the history of our own country. These are the questions we must learn to ask of the histories of all the countries of the world.

The point is that we shall not be able to express our choice of cooperation or a bid for world empire in a single dramatic plebiscite and then forget about it. Our choice will be expressed by a series of political decisions taken step by step, some of them partial and complicated and of obscure reference, and in making or consenting to them we are more likely to be betrayed by ignorance, faulty analysis, and irrelevant emotion than by a lust for power. So we need to know not only a good deal about the immediate background of current events everywhere, but as much as we can of all the relevant experience of the human past. Just as our personal decisions are not based exclusively on our own experience, but on everything we can learn of the experience of others, so for wise political choices we need the widest range of comparison possible. The valuable relevant experience may, and often will, be available not in the history of our own time but in the history of republican Rome, say, or ancient China, and the more such experiences we can put side by side, the better we shall understand them all.

Obviously college students (and the rest of us who are past college but who will have to learn history along with them if we expect to manage our own affairs) will find so vast a range of possible comparisons unmanageable at first. Teachers of history will have to select those critical periods which will best serve our major interests, and see that besides the necessarily rapid survey of the whole field of history (but not, one hopes, too rapid) such periods get intensive analytical study.

In selecting these periods and deciding how to look at them, the fresh work that is being done in comparative history, of which A. J. Toynbee’s great Study of History is the leading example, will be helpful. One critical period is certainly those wars of the giants which preceded past efforts to found “World States.” By looking at those parts of history, for instance, any citizen can check against past experience the improbable assumption, now current in high places, that the fewer and more powerful the states in a closed system, the more stable the balance among them will be. But a really profitable use of comparative history will require more thought and research than our historians have yet devoted to the su bject.

Less research is called for to establish our own identity, but some elementary errors of emphasis will require the rewriting of a good many textbooks. Led astray by the divisive nationalisms of the past century, and erring in common with their confreres abroad, some of our historians have innocently confused us about who we really are. But there is no real doubt. The United States is a subsociety of the great society of Western Europe. We are members of Latin Christendom or, if you prefer, of Western Civilization. It is not merely that we derive from it, and draw from it our heritage of tradition and most of our biological inheritance. We have always belonged to it, and we belong to it still. The fact that we are also a nation, with certain ways and traditions peculiarly our own, no more separates us from the European community than similar circumstances separate France or Portugal.

We have been confused about this, because in order to realize our separate identity we have been in revolt against being thought of as British colonials, and have not been able to conceive how, if we refused to be English, we could still be Europeans. And we have been further confused by the fact that we occupy a separate continent (as if the Greeks ceased to be Greeks when they set up their altars in Sicily), although in point of fact our first settlements were no farther from Atlantic Europe than Norway was from Rome before the thirteenth century, and our whole continent is nearer to Rome now than London was to Paris a little more than a century ago. In a very real sense, we are the most European of peoples, because we are the most generalized of Europeans and the freest to express what was fundamental in the European heritage.

To know ourselves, we must begin with this fact. We must learn at the outset that the Crusades and the rise of the towns, the Renaissance and the Counter Reformation, are all an intimate part of our own history and not just something that happened once in a foreign country. We may then go on to discover that our history as a colony and as an independent nation has also been a part of European history, interlocked with it at every step in spite of three thousand miles of water; and to understand why the major crises of Europe have always been our crises, and why our destiny must be the same as that of the rest of our great society: to merge into the greater society of the world, which we Europeans have, ourselves, made possible, or to die in the struggle to create it.

Much of our memory of who we are lies on the surface; we have only to look at it. But memory is a tricky thing, and the recovery of a complete identity is rarely an elementary or an easy undertaking. Nor is it likely that it is less difficult or less important for a society than for an individual to get rid of the phantasies and the blanks which block some memories.

For instance, consider the repressed memory of the oneness of Western Civilization. We have never really recovered from the shock of the breakup of medieval Christendom, because we have never faced what happened. We insist that there was no such unity, or that it was never broken, or that the break was a necessity of growth, and we tell superficial, and contradictory, and sometimes fantastic stories about what occurred. A large part the nationalistic histories of all our fragmentary subsocieties seems to be composed of phantasies invented to cover up an unbearable traumatic experience.

There are other such dangerous repressions in our history, some quite recent, others very early. The historian in the quiet of his study may be deceived about them. The teacher can identify them in the classroom by the resistance which their reexamination provokes. Or he may recognize the place to probe from a textbook; Olympian impartiality and fancy double-talk are the text book writer’s techniques of avoidance. Under them, as under an unhealthy scab, lies the festering conflict, still unresolved. In the dark corners of our collective memory we hide our old failures of brain and nerve, sources of present frustrations and anxieties. With conventional circumlocution, with outraged feelings, with illogical anger, we defend from recovery the memories we need to make us whole. If we are to face the future with confidence, we must take them out and look at them. Failures are more instructive than successes.

Obviously what I have said applies especially to our national past. Although we have so much to claim our attention if we hope to make history really useful to us, a survey of the whole past and a critical analysis of many parts of it, we cannot afford to neglect our own time and place. On the contrary, we must increase our study of American history and allow it to realize fully what is so far mostly a promise. Unless we can solve our domestic problems, we shall cut but a sorry figure in world affairs.

In concrete terms, all this means that we ought to double or treble or increase even more the amount of history we now teach, and run a solid block of required social science courses, grouped around history, right through our high schools and colleges, and teach them well. That’s impractical? It would cost too much money and take too much time, and crowd out valuable subjects like Applied Bookkeeping and Dress Design and Eighteenth-Century Drama, and oblige too many of our teachers to learn something besides the jargon of the schools of education?

All right; then let’s stop talking about exercising intelligent citizenship and training our less fortunate neighbors in democracy (as if the high and difficult business of wise political choice were a breakfast food to be sold by radio jingles and colored posters), and let us admit that we trust ourselves wholly to blind instinct and dumb luck and the dark forces of fear and greed. We might win through anyway. And no amount of study and rational analysis and knowledge will give us any certain guarantee of winning through. The future on which we are entering is the most dangerous for man since the Ice Age.

There is no cheap and simple way out of danger. We must meet each decision as it comes, wilh what wisdom we can wring from hard-bought experience. if the readier access to experience afforded by the study of history can give us anv help at all towards making the ineluctable decisions more wisely, — wisely enough perhaps to keep from blowing ourselves and our world into bits, — then the time and money for such study might turn out to be a bargain, even at a considerable fraction of our national income. How much. I wonder, will we gamble?