Historians like to say that correlation is not the same as causation. But evidence of correlation is often the starting point for an inquiry into causation. Here is one such inquiry: How might the loss of humanistic thinking generally, and historical thinking specifically, be connected to the current dysfunction of American politics and to the erosion of America’s position in the world? In asking this question, I do not mean to suggest that the loss of humanistic and historical thinking is the only cause, or even most important one; clearly there are many causes. Some very important ones relate to form or structure, such as closed primaries and gerrymandering. But a quasi-mechanistic diagnosis of what ails the United States is inadequate. Something even more fundamental has gone wrong — a sickness of the soul, not just a sickness of the body. A sickness of the body calls for the sciences. A sickness of the soul calls for the humanities. The difficulty is that the humanities, as currently constituted, are in no position to provide a remedy, having themselves contributed to the illness in the first place. Properly understood, the scholarly humanities have both substantive and procedural commitments, which feed each other. The substantive commitment is that human beings are worth trying to understand in all their diversity and complexity. The procedural commitment is that there are certain rules, particularly concerning the use of evidence, that one must follow in attempting to understand human beings. These two commitments secure each other: we have rules to ensure that we are trying to understand people on their own terms, because it is so tempting to narcissistically impose our own humanity on others; and we see people in all their complexity because our rules encourage us to do so. The importance of rules is why the scholarly fields are called the scholarly disciplines, and not the scholarly do-whatever-you-wants. All the humanities enlarge our understanding of what it means to be human, but only the study of history does so by tethering that understanding to the largest store of facts (however they are interpreted) about real human behavior that we have, which is the past. This axiomatic realism is what distinguishes history from literature. While the other humanistic disciplines cultivate similar qualities of empathy and imagination, only the study of history subjects those qualities to the procedural requirements governing the interpretation of historical evidence. Unlike writers and poets and painters, historians must answer to those requirements: they are obliged to refrain from cherry-picking or inventing evidence, to consider alternative explanations, to test their hypotheses, and so forth, not only for the sake of intellectual rigor but also because we study real people, with no more or less human dignity than we ourselves possess. The complex interplay between the study of human beings who lived in the past and the rules governing that study are essential to the formation of a humane sense of self — one bounded by, and bounding, a sense of other selves. The historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood called this interplay “re-enactment” and saw it as fundamental to self-knowledge and to the knowledge of others. From his perspective, re-enactment involves a delicate balancing act between self-surrender and self-assertion, passivity and activity, altruism and narcissism. On the one hand, it requires trying to set one’s own ego aside in order to see the world through someone else’s eyes. On the other hand, the only way to translate, or make sense of, someone else’s life experience is in the context of one’s own. This attempt at sense-making is active, not passive: the historian re-enacting another’s knowledge “criticizes it, forms his own judgement of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it.” Hence, Collingwood reasoned, “it may thus be said that historical inquiry reveals to the historian the powers of his own mind.” Since people can gain these forms of self-knowledge and knowledge of others only through the historical method, it is as vital in the present as it is for the past: “If it is by historical thinking that we re-think and so rediscover the thought of Hammurabi or Solon, it is in the same way that we discover the thought of a friend who writes us a letter, or a stranger who crosses the street.” People who cannot think historically, in other words, are cut off from their own humanity and that of others, cut off from Milton’s “human face divine.” Much as historical thinking nurtures inter-subjective humility, so it nurtures inter-generational humility. If “re-enactment” of another’s experiences is how we establish our sense of self in space, then it is also how we establish our sense of self in time. The historian William Appleman Williams beautifully connected the methods of the historical discipline to its inter-generational substance: The method of history is neither to by-pass and dismiss nor to pick and choose according to preconceived notions; rather it is a study of the past so that we can come back into our own time of troubles having shared with the men of the past their dilemmas, having learned from the experiences, having been buoyed up by their courage and creativeness and sobered by their shortsightedness and failures. We shall then be better equipped to redefine our own dilemmas and problems as opportunities and possibilities and to proceed with positive rather than negative programs and policies. This enrichment and improvement through research and reflection is the essence of being human, and it is the heart of the historical method. Practicing the historical method cultivates, or ought to cultivate, a humble sense of our own temporal finitude, and along with it a sense of inter-generational stewardship. In effect, it extends the golden rule through time: do unto past generations as you would like future generations to do unto you. By treating past generations as subjects to be understood, rather than as objects to be manipulated for contemporary advantage, the present generation stakes its moral claim to be treated with the same
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence