To Learn or Not from History

There’s that famous saying about those who don’t learn from history being doomed to repeat it. But isn’t what Nassim Taleb wrote in The Black Swan equally true about the dangers of trying to learn from history?
“History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narrative (indeed), provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help in the future, without some caution. We can get negative confirmation from history, which is invaluable, but we get plenty of illusions of knowledge along with it.”

Taleb does have a point. Take the infamous Treaty of Versailles that was imposed by the victors of World War I on Germany. Everybody talks of that treaty as if it was an obvious blunder (the reasoning is that it imposed such impossible and brutal terms that it just sowed the seeds for World War II). But guess what? The French, who pushed the most for those terms, were just following historical precedent! Germany had imposed similar harsh terms on the defeated French not in some ancient past but in 1871. But that didn’t trigger a global war a generation later, did it?

Then there’s the problem of history being written by the winners. So if the facts are distorted, have half-truths and even outright lies, how does anyone learn anything from that mix? And how about when new information comes to light about historical events?

As a friend of blogger Shane Parrish told him:
“When people are looking into the rear view mirror of the past, they can take facts and like a string of pearls draw lines of causal relationships that facilitate their argument while ignoring disconfirming facts that detract from their central argument or point of view.”

All of which may well be why Taleb advocates the Menodotus approach to history: “know history without theorizing from it”.

All that said, sometimes people do learn things from history and the actions they then take seem to work out. Like the actions of the victorious Allies after World War II. They did not impose brutal peace treaties on the losers; the US did not demand instant repayment of war debts from Europe (even the winners owed the US big time); and in fact the US invested heavily to rebuild Europe (both winners and losers) and even Japan. Doesn’t that sound like learning from Versailles?

I guess the learning from history piece does have value at times; but it should be taken with some salt (not just a pinch).

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