Why do you think it's important to study history? How would you apply historical lessons to current events?
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M$2 Answers
The cultural discourse is a 'discussion' that takes place over generations. It is manipulated by human bias. It is political, and displays all the human flaws and virtues. Every historical record has a hint of 'represented fact' in it; even the smallest grammatical or visual flavor in an object from the past can speak for some section of human culture, of human nature.
The cultural aspects of modern civilizations determine what the 'discourse' is currently focused on. For example, a political campaign may refer to values established by a Greek or Roman rhetorical performers, or an element of Jewish law. This is significant because knowledge of the 'conversation' that took place from the beginning of Jewish history, through Greek and Roman interpretations, and through dozens of societies in between, can help a modern person understand the underlying references in a given situation.
Essentially, anything we do today references something a culture did in the past. History is not unbiased, and the conventional idea of a 'moral lesson' from historical facts must necessarily be tempered with knowledge of discourse. It's a sort of 'meta-history' in which the fabric of culture is modified and tracked.
If you compare this discourse to the empirical facts that do survive, you can reveal useful knowledge about history. For example, Augustus wanted the people to see him as merely "first citizen," a speaker through which the people might have power. In reality, we can read the situation through historical discourse, and see that Augustus twisted his principate into a tool for his own decisions to have absolute weight.
This makes the moral "lesson" of all stages of history a very complicated topic. It calls into question the absolute nature of holy documents, legendary art, and leaders of the past.
A study of both empirical fact and discourse can together reveal human nature. This is the goal of historical study.
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M$
http://workingsmarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/ignore-history-.html
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M$
For practical application to modern events, I'd say that all those instances of humans using their culture's identity to further their own goals are pretty useful. For example, if you know that American liberals historically value separation of church and state, and know the chain of events that goes back in time supporting this, you could de-emphasize the fact that you value religious policies over ever-changing political policies. You could then make a point to reference some of those historical events that established the idea of separation of church and state in the first place. That could be considered a practical method of manipulating the discourse to gain the support of a demographic.
Organizationally and strategically: X city in history maintained powerful garrisons and high walls, but benefited most when allowing honest traders in and concerning the army only with approaching armies. Applied to modern practices: instead of forcefully establishing the security lines of your website, allow insignificant information to be taken and displayed at face value. Allow all users and viewers, but block the attempts to modify your database and code, and only the comments that contain spam and the most sensitive hate terms.
The Art of War is a good example of a guide combining at-the-time empirical data as well as discourse. The way it flows and references paradigms used in reference to popular myth and historical battle campaigns in ancient China indicate that it actively combines common sense and cultural identity. I don't know quite where I'm going with that, but the idea's appealing to me.
I've never studied Hegel directly, and I could basically describe post-modernism and deconstruction, but really this stuff I've touched on comes from a bunch of college art history courses. :-/ I wish I had the flexibility to take it as a major and/or a graduate degree, but pretty much I use its terms and figures to move along illustrations and web scripting...stuff. I wish I remembered all the names from just one contemporary art history course, but half of them are lost to me. :( So even if or when I'm mostly describing an art history term that a famous person coined and put into use, I often don't know it at any given time.
Have you been influenced by Hegel at all? Some strains of your response are evoking some thesis-antithesis-synthesis intuitions! That, and maybe some deconstruction or postmodernism? :-)
I guess I was concerned less with taking a moral lesson than a more practical lesson (though insofar as practical reason and morality are closely linked, I guess it's a fuzzy line). Basically I have seen very few history questions on Mahalo that were anything more than "help me with my school paper on X" and wanted to generate a bit of discourse on my own!
But I agree with what I take as one of your central points, that studying history can reveal much about human beings and human nature. And, presumably, the understanding we can get from there would be useful in contemporary issues, no? Even with many biased records, it seems that there would be areas of overlap. But also this seems like the domain of psychology and other social sciences... do you think history is useful any other purposes?
Good answer, very thoughtful.
Huh, Art History.. I should have taken more of those, at least at your school! That sounds sweet.