history as a science?
This article on religion and government in the Times is all well and good:
The Politics of God, by Mark Lilla (excerpt from the upcoming book The Stillborn God)
But I find myself really doubting that historians are equipped to prescribe solutions to current problems. It is based in a distrust of the human mind's automatic ability to generate a coherent story to explain past events (and this "instinct" is quite magnified in cases where storytelling is one's vocation), e.g. Hobbes drove things that way and Rousseau that way. Psychology has shown that we generate spurious stories all the time to explain our own actions, and we understand complicated events better when couched in a social story - we love to find interpretable patterns in uninterpretable events. These "just-so" stories are fictions however, especially when describing the forces driving civilization (you might as well assign many causes of historical events to a butterfly flapping its wings in the Congo).
So the next step of the historian is hard to believe: having proven that the spun story is the driving force behind past events, this shows that we should do X in our current situation. This is a theory like any other in science, where based on proven past observations, we find new relations, and these new relations predict a, b, and c. I just don't think historical storytelling counts as any kind of reliable observation, let alone proof! It can't predict.
I'm being as extreme here (I might even disagree with my own argument). But I wonder how much the opposition to trashing history as a guide to the future arises because we value the neat understanding that comes from reading these stories (myself included), and we also value stories about the future - the natural reaction to an attack on something you like is hostility, especially if without this thing the world is nigh uninterpretable. By stepping back from this emotional response, this value found in stories can be discounted as an artifact of the human mind.
There are other tools, scientific ones, that should be used in guiding the encounter with the undead "political theology" that is the focus of the article. Scientists working on complex systems are applying these methods to social systems, for one example, possibly providing insight into the million places to set levers that will displace extremist ideas. Small things can make a big difference. Perhaps one day we can create a very detailed historical simulation, test different strategies, build theories, and use those predictions to inform action in the real world (this work is already beginning with social scientists testing theories of city evolution and resource use in online multiplayer game worlds). That would historical science.
The article is interesting, ignoring its conclusions about today. The full book may be amusing as well when it comes out.
The Politics of God, by Mark Lilla (excerpt from the upcoming book The Stillborn God)
But I find myself really doubting that historians are equipped to prescribe solutions to current problems. It is based in a distrust of the human mind's automatic ability to generate a coherent story to explain past events (and this "instinct" is quite magnified in cases where storytelling is one's vocation), e.g. Hobbes drove things that way and Rousseau that way. Psychology has shown that we generate spurious stories all the time to explain our own actions, and we understand complicated events better when couched in a social story - we love to find interpretable patterns in uninterpretable events. These "just-so" stories are fictions however, especially when describing the forces driving civilization (you might as well assign many causes of historical events to a butterfly flapping its wings in the Congo).
So the next step of the historian is hard to believe: having proven that the spun story is the driving force behind past events, this shows that we should do X in our current situation. This is a theory like any other in science, where based on proven past observations, we find new relations, and these new relations predict a, b, and c. I just don't think historical storytelling counts as any kind of reliable observation, let alone proof! It can't predict.
I'm being as extreme here (I might even disagree with my own argument). But I wonder how much the opposition to trashing history as a guide to the future arises because we value the neat understanding that comes from reading these stories (myself included), and we also value stories about the future - the natural reaction to an attack on something you like is hostility, especially if without this thing the world is nigh uninterpretable. By stepping back from this emotional response, this value found in stories can be discounted as an artifact of the human mind.
There are other tools, scientific ones, that should be used in guiding the encounter with the undead "political theology" that is the focus of the article. Scientists working on complex systems are applying these methods to social systems, for one example, possibly providing insight into the million places to set levers that will displace extremist ideas. Small things can make a big difference. Perhaps one day we can create a very detailed historical simulation, test different strategies, build theories, and use those predictions to inform action in the real world (this work is already beginning with social scientists testing theories of city evolution and resource use in online multiplayer game worlds). That would historical science.
The article is interesting, ignoring its conclusions about today. The full book may be amusing as well when it comes out.
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