I will try again, if you will indulge me just once more. My idea is one based on mathematics, not on race or some similar marker used by tyrants. Human nature can only be expressed within a narrow range of potential, recurring behaviors. There are only so many things that a person can do in any set of circumstances. In fact there are many, many more sets of circumstances than there are behaviors. So people, after a certain age, repeat their behaviors throughout their lives. Most people become one type, defined by a range of behaviors, and never change.

I think that you and I are probably similar types because of the life choices we seem to have made and the interests we seem to have. At any rate, based on what can be seen so far, we are on the same arc of expression. But you and I don’t become tyrants and we would not do so. We do not lust after power and we might not want it if it were offered. Others, however, in my view, can become tyrants and lust after power.

This range of expression of human nature is like a rainbow spectrum with willingness to give one’s life for another at one end and willingness to take another’s life at the other. There are only five bands. So the expression of human nature is very limited. And it exists across all races, creeds and cultures. It is brain-based, primarily.

So the sadists who perpetrated those “murderous episodes” are from band 5. There is already some recognition of my idea in the catalog of mental illnesses. People such as Mother Teresa are not considered mentally ill, but people like Hitler certainly are. So my view of History is that men shape it. They move it toward the self-sacrifice band or toward the sacrifice-others band, depending which band governs the leader in question.

When I look at history, it seems so clear that blood red is the color of the last 13,000 years and that those who blast the bodies of their contemporaries all share the same band of human nature. I further believe that means can be developed to identify these individuals and to keep them under control. I know that there have been many attempts to do this sort of thing and they almost always lead to disaster, but I just can’t shake the idea. I have seen hundreds of individuals in serious, dynamic situations in my life and they all act within this narrow range of behaviors — it never fails. And mathematically speaking, it can be no other way.

I am not espousing an ideology, I am saying that there is the possibilty that something akin to a medical diagnosis is in order and that any ideologue can have the disease.

Foucault’s idea, as you condensed it, is that most contemporary academics are tempermentally inclined to act in a certain way. I rest my case — in my spectrum of types of human nature, these academics fall into type 2 — those who want to help others live their lives the way they want to.

Historians argue forces, conditions, and structures rather than personalities and that is an amazing thing to me. No force, condition or structure ever pulled a trigger, or raped, or burned or… Only personalities do these things and only personalities order them to be done. Human nature is the root cause of everything human. Forces, conditions, structures are only the means for letting human nature of the worst sort do its evil work.

What if some historian rewrote history with the idea that the main actors should be medically diagnosed along the lines I have outlined. What would it show?

The thing is that most scholars, social historians or otherwise, are reluctant to abstract from that kind of account of one place, one history, one story, to a general-purpose argument about all places. A bit of that is simply the conventional modesty of historical argument, that historians in general tend to be reluctant to theorize on a grand scale. There are important exceptions: world historians do theorize on a grand scale, of necessity; historical sociologists like Charles Tilly do as well. Even there, however, historians often stick to arguing that there are lessons about modern societies to be learned that may not apply to premodern ones.

The missing piece–and here’s where Foucault enters in (you’re right to find him very difficult)–is that also most contemporary academics in the humanities are at least tempermentally and often explicitly anti-foundationalist, meaning they tend to avoid arguments that rest on absolutes, axioms, root causes, what is “natural” or “intrinsic”; they are suspicious of claims about human universals. That’s a bit due to the recent influence of postmodernism and postructuralism, but it also runs deeper and further back into the intellectual history of the 20th Century. After all, there’s some grounds for thinking that ideologies that make strong claims about human universals or absolutes lie behind some of the most murderous episodes of 20th Century history.

To get from “lessons about modern nationalism” or “lessons about modern bureaucracy” or “lessons about cultural difference in the world of the last two hundreds years” to “lessons about humanity”, you somewhere along the way have to think you’ve discovered principles that operate in most places, most times, most human beings. Economics and to a lesser extent political science are much more comfortable with those claims than history, with (in my humble opinion) mixed results. But I do think you’re right that there are times where historians could stand to shed a little of their ingrained suspicion of universals and talk about general lessons about politics, sociology, human character and so on.

I read Wilson again and he is just a tad nasty in his dismissal of theory — it seems too shrill. I agree about the scope of his ambition and perhaps that is why I am disappointed with the conclusions of Consilience.

But, in any case, I want things that are practical and useful to emerge from all of our analytic efforts. I am results oriented, I guess.

Historians, I have since learned from you and elsewhere, avoid lessons. They view their role as that of a reporter, it seems to me. When some historians say that there is nothing new any more, they are wrong. There is new knowledge and new applications of knowledge every day, and that fact is what allows them to study history professionally — otherwise they would be like the Man with the Hoe, brutalized, dirty, hungry and ignorant. Which leads me to the idea that poets draw better lessons from history than historians.

Finally, I wonder why historians write their stories the way they do. When they write about the Soviet Union’s beginnings they write about personalities. They write about Stalin and his “climb.” They don’t write about, in any real detail, the millions he murdered and brutalized. Historians seem to gloss over the blood and to me the blood is what it is all about. The most important question of history is how to stop the bloodshed and who better to answer that question than historians.

How do bloody tyrants get power in the first place, and how can they be identified and stopped? Why hasn’t that question been answered? What is inherent in the nature of some humans that gives them the internal authority to murder millions? Who are these people and how can we stop them? I think that the answer is being indirectly developed by those who are trying to understand the causes of human nature and its range of expression.

Our recent political history offers an important question about how our leaders are elected, and, even more importantly what kind of leader will they be? If we compared the public history of George W. Bush and H. Ross Perot, both Texans and in many respects similar, would we have been able to predict what they would do if elected President. How should we have made the comparative analysis, and what should we have done with the results?

From a systems analysis standpoint it is really not so difficult. The options open to each man, if elected, are actually rather few. All we need do is estimate the chances that each man would elect each option. A few election cycles of this and we might have something worthwhile.

So thanks for giving me a place to blither, or is it blather?

I think it’s easier for historians to think in terms of lessons learned if there’s some constraint on the kinds of history we’re talking about. For example, if you were to say, “What lessons have we learned about how societies achieve political stability?” then I think there’s a whole set of fairly concrete lessons that pop up. Or, “In military conflicts, are there consistent reasons why one side wins out?”

I am disappointed that historians, philosophers, and theorists of any stripe have not produced the huge list you described. I do understand some of the concerns that people might have in drawing conclusions about history, but what a wonderful thing it would be if every author of a history book of any kind would include a final chapter spelling out the lessons he/she thinks that the ordinary person should learn from his/her efforts. Without something like this, how will history become a predictive science?

I am worried that the details of history are already so overwhelming that ordinary people will not be able to learn anything from them. When I query Amazon about the lessons of history, only a book about Durant comes up.

After I sent in my original comments I was concerned that you might misunderstand the “smart guy” phrase. I meant it as a compliment, but I have to confess that my grandmother did not say exactly that. What she actually said was, “If you need to know something, don’t bother asking your Uncle Charles.” Uncle Charles was widely recognized as being one of the dumbest people in the county.

I will study your remarks further, but they have already helped me a lot.

On the lessons of history, I think there are two questions, and you ask both of them. Are there any lessons of history, and if there are, what are they?

Both of them are questions that genuinely allow for a wide range of answers.

There are perfectly consistent, well-reasoned, intellectually rigorous ways to argue that there are no lessons to history, none at all. Either because we can’t really know the past the way we know the present (we can’t experience, recreate or repeat it directly) or because nothing ever happens the same way twice even when it superficially appears to do so.

You can argue that there are lessons to history that are not universal or abstract, but very specifically about those aspects of our contemporary lives which are primarily determined by the weight of the past: racial identity, the Constitution, the relative wealth and poverty of the West and the Third World, Social Security, Christianity, and so on. In this context, history’s lesson is simply an understanding of why things are the way they are, and perhaps a warning that a train that’s been moving down a particular track for a long time is hard to shift.

Then there’s the argument that history’s lessons are potentially more abstract and universal. That I can learn something about my own life or personality, or about the condition of being human, by learning about Genghis Khan or human sacrifice in pre-Columbian Mexico or the early modern religious scholar Erasmus and so on. I think this is the way the idea of the “lessons of history” often comes up for most of us. Scholarly historians tend to be uneasy about this idea of the lessons of history, for a lot of reasons, some sound, some not so sound. On the not-so-sound side, it’s because this way of approaching the past tends to strip out a lot of the detailed knowledge that most specialized, scholarly historians spend their lives insisting upon. On the sound side, it’s because this way of thinking about the lessons of the past tends to vastly underestimate the important differences between past societies and the present, to disregard the reality of the way things were. It seems very easy to learn a lesson about war and futility from The Iliad, and it’s right that you should, but you also need to pay attention to just how utterly different the pre-Homeric Greeks were in the way they looked at war, violence, masculinity and so on.

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Let’s suppose that you’re happy assuming there are lessons to history, and that they don’t just have to be about understanding the specific history of some contemporary problem or institution, that there might be universal lessons about the human condition. Here I think maybe you can see why historians might be a bit nonplussed about what you should read, because in some sense any history holds those lessons for you, and it’s hard to predict in advance which lessons you’re craving. I just read a book on the Reformation, and there are a number of interesting things that it got me to think about in terms of what happens in societies that divide bitterly on ideological or religious lines. It also made me think again about the problem of evil, given how inhuman by my own standards the actions of many leaders in the Reformation were. Others might draw very different lessons from the same book.

So to some extent, my answer would be to read well-written histories of people, places, events, ideas or institutions that interest you, and you’ll inevitably find lessons in those. Equally, I’d say try by whimsy to pick up a few that you have no prior interest in. One of the most amazing classes in terms of general “lessons” about human beings that I ever took was an undergraduate course on medieval legal practice in Iceland.

If there’s one kind of historical scholarship that tends to deliberately try to come up with lessons, or to generalize about the human condition, it’s “big-picture” world histories. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel; Ferdnand Braudel’s three-volume world history; and so on. That’s probably a good place to start, though I think sometimes that’s like trying to learn about what’s going on in a neighborhood in New York City today by peering at the Earth through a telescope from the Moon. For me, the more abstract “lessons” about being human come from the nitty-gritty historical details, from the littlest pictures rather than the whole enchilada. But when a historian writes a big-picture book, they almost have to generalize about human beings.

It would be kind of fun for a group of historians to just compile a huge list of one-to-two-line “lessons” of history along the lines of, “Never start a land war in Asia”, largely for laughs.

But, what I really would like to know is where to find the lessons of history. I’m retired and ordinarily I play golf every day, but it has gotten too hot for me. I therefore wanted to read. I’ve always heard that we need to heed the lessons of history so I wanted to learn what the lessons are. But it is not so simple, or at least not for me. I can find only one book on the lessons of history. The history books I have in my library don’t really point out any lessons. I sent this question to History News Network about a year ago, and it has appeared on their website ever since, but I have received no answers. I also sent this question to some national association of historians — also silence.

Are there any lessons of history?

By the way, the reason I’m asking you this question is that you seem like a really smart guy and my grandmother always said that if you need to know something ask a smart guy.

In economics, like in english, the 70s and 80s marks the ascendancy of high theory with Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium models, models of information asymmetries and incompleteness, game theory, rational expectations and real business cycle models in macroeconomics, and then what made (Uncle) Paul Krugman famous, new trade theory in international economics. All this based on mathematical sophistication. And this mathematical sophistication forced economics to “forget” a lot of what it knew in the more verbal and intuitive ’50s and ’60s and leave policy relevance behind(Krugman has an excellent little pamphlet on this loss in which he defends theory: Development, Geography and Economic Theory). Yet the ’90s has seen the rise of people who are statistically savvy, and not mathematically savvy, like Steven Levitt (though computing power has rendered deep knowledge of statistical theory unnecessary). An example of the change: a professor in the econ. department at Swarthmore told me I must take a second semester of mathematical statistics rather than topology (so much more fun!), which he would have recommended in the ’70s.

My experience with literary type theory is but two courses at Swarthmore: one of Professor Burke’s and a french course. In both, theory was something which the readings used and students threw around enough such that I couldn’t claim to actually have read Foucault, say, but I do have an idea of what a Foucauldian move is. I always felt a bit in over my head, and retreated to the more comprehensible (for me) math-based theory.

I went to Chicago as an undergrad when theory was in flower in the early 90s, and remember being transfixed when ass’t profs would read the class their conference papers by the magic of their argot. Once we left the room, I realized I had no idea what the paper meant, but boy it sounded powerful. Unfortunately, I tried to harnass the mystic quality of half-understood concepts in my BA thesis, and even worse, Michael Taussig’s “Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man” was one of my guides! Michael Taussig may do a lot of things in an interesting way, but narcotic-fueled ethnology is not a harried senior’s best friend. Ironically, my career has brought me to small schools that the imperial troops of theory (for better and for worse) have simply ignored or quickly left behind as unpromising terrain. If the empire of theory had equivalents on a world map, I think my institutions would be in northern Mauritania.

As someone who has taught at a small Catholic and a small state school, I’m struck by how little critical theory is used by instructors with students compared to other places I know. It isn’t a shocker, obviously! However, what I think is actually interesting is how the vocabulary of critical theorists can be used to differentiate people. When I look at some of the posts, it strikes me that knowing the language of “theory” could be cultural capital demonstrating class status outside as well as inside academe. The handful of students who go on to grad school from most of the places I worked at won’t know a thing about theory, and so they’ll have a steep learning curve that, say, a Colby or Williams student would not. And reading Zizek in high school? It strikes me people who went to a high school where he’s on the syllabus will be able to talk about their high schools the way elderly Africans I have interviewed talked about their missionary lycees being better than colleges today…