by CKR
Rebuttal I, with links to previous posts
Mark’s Rebuttal I
Mark and I seem to be in violent agreement on the uses of history. I’m delighted that he finds my thinking in good historical shape. I’m actually recycling the logic I learned in my physical science courses. Logic seems to continue pretty much the same in all disciplines. I’ll also add some heavy credit to my one college World History course, required as part of a liberal arts education and of not too much interest to me until I started looking into history seriously. There was a reason for all those dates! It actually makes a difference that event A occurred before event B.
The problem with analysis and synthesis needing different modes of thinking plagues all academic subjects and has become worse as academia has become more specialized. Analysis is valued because it’s easier to write a thesis that way: you can come to some sort of finite conclusion and therefore minimize your committee’s time and effort. There’s no telling where synthesis might go, or, frequently, how to judge it. The problem is somewhat less in the physical sciences, but it’s there too.
But synthesis is what is needed if history is to be applied to policy. Additionally, as I noted, whole books can be written on what appear at first glance to be simple statements and their policy ramifications. This requires a third tool, the ability to pull out and summarize the relevant variables. It is this tool that also brings in some of the potential distortions. Both ideology and the unbalanced historical perspectives that Mark notes can play a part. However, the use of this tool necessarily involves this sort of value judgement.
The application of this third tool in academia would help to bring academic history around to more practical applications, but too much danger (in academic terms) resides in these value judgements. Recent historical works try to make these limitations explicit, but they may also get bogged down in analyzing why those limitations have been chosen.
Strategic thinking states assumptions and the paths or scenarios that result from these scenarios. It seems that this might be a method that would allow academic historians to test syntheses and apply them to policy.
Nice article by Collounsbury. I think he is making some of the same points I made earlier, with specific application to Lewis and his forays into policy. Lewis’s limitation is that he has mixed his current politics into his commentary, not that he is a medievalist. I happen to be an amateur medievalist myself, believing that the 12th and 13th centuries are rich with ideas for today, but that would be a digression from our main subject(s).