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Americans are famously resistant to analyzing the mistakes of their past, as many critics noted at the time of the Iraq War, invoking philosopher George Santayana's famous quotation -- "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" -- when pointing out the parallels to the nation's entanglement in Vietnam some 40 years earlier.
But according to historian Gordon Wood, it is wishful thinking that historians can "ransack" the past for examples to emulate or avoid. Thus, even if American society were more inclined to learn from its past, it is doubtful whether that would actually lead to progress.
Wood, who is the Alva O. Way University Professor and a professor of history at Brown University, was delivering the 2006 Lionel Trilling Seminar in Low Library, hosted annually by the Heyman Center for Humanities in memory of the famed literary critic who was educated at Columbia and taught literature here for many years.
In Wood's view, it is a mistake to attempt to transpose the concept of "mistakes of the past" from individual psychology to political and social systems. And historians cannot seek to unveil "unpleasant" lessons from the past without undermining the integrity of past events. It is wrong, he said, to separate past decisions from the conditions that prevailed when those decisions took place.
For Wood, to study history is to acquire the wisdom of humility. Other disciplines, like political science and psychology, try to inculcate optimism about our ability to control and manipulate present and future; but history as a discipline recognizes that no one in history had the advantage of hindsight.
Great historians, he went on, are able to take us back into a different world, showing us limited choices faced by people then, as well as the limited control they had over their lives. He cited Drew Gilpin Faust as one such example. In her Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Gilpin Faust successfully demonstrated both the difficulties white upper-class Southern women faced in adjusting to new realities during the Civil War as well as the attempts they made to overcome those difficulties.
Responding to Wood, Robert Ferguson, the George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature and Criticism at Columbia Law School, agreed that it is a mistake to believe that history is on one's side as progress. Civilizations disappear regularly, and the worst of human behavior has appeared in every one, he observed.
Yet in Ferguson's opinion, we can at least derive hope from the idea that history has "two paradoxical pillars" -- that is, some historical movements have resulted in progress and improvement in the lives of groups of people even while demonstrating the disasters inherent in ambitious attempts at social engineering.
Wood responded that he was not optimistic enough to share Ferguson's belief in history's mixed messages. However, he said, he believes in using history to obtain an accurate sense of where we have come from, which can help us appreciate the complexity of human affairs. Despite its lack of specific lessons, history gives us the best guide for how to cope with the uncertainty of the future, he maintained.
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