while I might buy that the past is strongly influenced by the present (“facts” change over time), I don’t think we have much of a model for the future to say much of anything about how it influences the past.
Or, I guess the point is, maybe it’s the same thing.
It's quite frankly fantasy level absurd to use the past to try to predict the future. The past was not recorded in detailed resolution, it was written by victors, it was not recorded in the first place, it was lost to time, it was the lived experiences of hundreds of millions of people...
"History" is at best a crude model of things that happen. Barely useful for describing the past and of zero value to predicting the future. This is applying technical analysis to humanity.
I think perhaps the narrative, the evidence on-hand, primary sources, etc. could all be considered and as a body of historical evidence we could say the understanding from our perspective continues to evolve; but there's no world in which the history changes. Events, causality, arrow of time, etc.
Do you really think History (as in the practice, not the story) will continue to follow the same rules post-internet as it did pre-internet?
Modeling the future path of that field on its past mechinations seems silly to me. Any sensible model of future history, I think, must be built on novel, untested understandings of the new physics of information, to have even an outside chance of predictive power.
Totally agree. History does not repeat And study history is not about prediction. It is about learning. In a sense perhaps we never learn from our mistakes totally and keep on loop on our karma. But still might be helpful. After all we are dealing with complex systems, from human body to society. These artificial one help and by itself interesting.
It is laughable to suggest that history does not change. Even studying history at the equivalent of high school had me comparing secondary sources from the 1960s, to the 1990s, to just a couple years prior. History, or rather our interpretation of it, is constantly evolving.
I expect it is the same for most of the humanities.
I happened to realize today that many if not all results we observe today is outcome of one or the other probable event in the past.
How often we analyze past near miss situations, or car accidents that did happen and change lives.
History is a chain of events, some of which are so prominent that they covered in books or passed through generations as tales.
Recent Same as Ever by Morgan Housel conveys in the first chapter literally this statement: one random thing can change entire history of humankind, especially in wars.
Yes, history is a fruitful source of evidence to disprove modern conjectures, but a poor way to prove conjectures. The predictive value of history is in how it teaches us to stop trying to make predictions.
The quote you give, is a nice example to see how history, historical research, etc has everything to do with setting the scene for the present, and not much to do with the past.
History is a present day activity. It is akin to the background scenery in a play - it provides the context for the present, it sets up our current stories. It's all to do with interpretation, and that is only ever present.
Isn’t history supposed to repeat itself and in that way tell us about the future? And isn’t history an insight into human nature and in that way illuminate modern issues?
I have the opposite take when reading history, especially very old history. The more I read the more I realize that people haven’t changed in thousands of years. The only real difference is speed of travel and communication.
Or, I guess the point is, maybe it’s the same thing.
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