So you have a picture of how taking action can be a bad thing, and I have a picture of how it can be a good thing. Can history and historians help us decide which is which? Does history teach us that the civil rights movement was a good thing? My instinct, part of my human nature, shouts “yes, indeed.” W. A. Criswell, the leader of the Southern Baptists in Texas at the time, shouted “no.”

The civil rights movement, a good thing, is an example of an occupier creating a liberal and democratic society under force of arms. General/President Eisenhower sent regular army troops to Little Rock because Governor Faubus would not use the National Guard to enforce the law. Faubus was invoking “states’ rights,” a euphemism of the day that meant, “segregation now, and segregation forever.” Was Eisenhower’s action a “bad idea?”

So I take your point to mean that professional historians should not derive principles of human nature from past human behavior for fear that they will be used unwisely. I have wondered about this point for decades, perhaps long before you were born, and this wonder was a product of my detection of patterns human behavior in human history. And I have viewed the pace of human progress, in the last four hundred years, not to be swift but slow, far too slow. And this was due to an aspect of human nature: the tendencies of those in power to want to keep power no matter the cost to the powerless.

So where we go to divine and employ the “lessons of history?” Who will guide us? If not historians, then economists, or politicians, or lawyers, or doctors, or filmmakers, or …? If one imagines that those who will change society can come from any segment then where do they turn for data about what works and what doesn’t? How do we build on past successes? How do we avoid past mistakes? It is just not enough to say that everyone should read all they can about history. It takes too much time. I didn’t become a mathematician that way.

Yes, it is easy to say that human nature is not as cut and dried as mathematics, and that is so at the individual level. But it is not so at the level of large numbers. For example it is easy to predict that a sociopath will be elected to Congress this year, because they represent 4% of the population. It is easy to predict that some in Congress will steal from the national treasury in some fashion. I make those predictions now. Which members will steal and which will be the sociopath is unpredictable and unimportant fo the purposes of designing a form of government that will detect and stop any “adverse” actions these individuals may take.

So human nature is predictable and historians, it seems to me, are uniquely positioned to detect the effects of human nature on history. But they choose to focus on forces and movements rather than human nature. For example, historians try to answer the question of “WHAT caused the Civil War,” when they should focus on “WHO caused the Civil War.” The only way that “WHAT” can apply is when it means the aspects of human nature that caused certain individuals to resort to gunfire to have their way.

John Quincy Adams was Secretary of State under James Monroe. John C. Calhoun was Secretary of War. These men met with Monroe in his office in 1820 to discuss the Missouri Compromise. Afterwards Adams wrote in his diary:

“The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls. In the abstract they [the defenders of slavery] admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim all participation in the introduction of it, and cast it all upon the shoulders of our old Grandam Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They fancy themselves more generous and noblehearted than the plain freemen who labor for subsistence. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee??s manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat Negroes like dogs.

“It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice; for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin? It perverts human reason, and reduces man endowed with logical powers to maintain that slavery is sanctioned by the Christian religion, that slaves are happy and contented in their condition, that between master and slave their ties of mutual attachment and affection, that the virtues of the master are refined and exalted by the degradation of the slave; while at the same time they vent execrations upon the slave trade, curse Britain for having given them slaves, burn at the stake Negroes convicted of crimes for the terror of the example, and writhe in agonies of fear at the very mention of human rights as applicable to men of color.”

Adams was on the right track, but he didn’t quite get it. Slavery did not taint “the very sources of moral principle,” but humans whose nature made them think slavery was a good thing created an economy and a culture based on slavery. Certain malevolent aspects of human nature caused the Civil War, but the history I was taught and most of what I have read denies or ignores this fact. Surely historians agree that one man’s virtue is another man’s vice? And it follows that these two men have different human natures.

But finally I take your last comment to include the idea that historians either cannot or should not develop a map of human nature and its effects from history. If that is so, but it can’t be. I am being “overly quick.”

It seems that academia has two general ends in mind: the accumulation of knowledge, and the application of knowledge.

“Wisdom,” if never effectively applied, is of little value. Which part of academia takes the “wisdom” produced by professional historians and applies it to our world? Isn’t knowing how to effectively apply “wisdom” the highest form of “wisdom?” Shouldn’t historians be redefining “wisdom” to include principles and their application?

And what if some professional historians develop some “wisdom” that isn’t really “wisdom” at all. For example the writers that developed the “Lost Cause” version of the Civil War era had their version of “wisdom” accepted by the masses, including the “fact” that the white race was superior to the black race.

Who is to settle on the facts and the true “wisdom?” How should it be done? Perhaps facts and wisdom become true when they are applied to the real world. When one looks back at the rotten slaveholding South and their theories of white superiority and white supremacy what should one think? Do professional historians tell us that such “wisdom” is true or not?

I am fumbling here, but I just can’t stop thinking that historians are fumbling on a grander, and immensely more important, scale. It seems that they just throw their ideas into the air and hope the winds that blow through society will separate the wheat from the chaff.

The only way to play it is like Socrates and the hemlock. “Yeah, they made the wrong decision, but they are the state, so I gotta’ drink it, otherwise I betray my whole project.” If I didn’t take that stance, if instead I took my outsider status as evidence that I’m right, well, that way madness lies.

I think one of the greatest failings of academia is an inability to clearly and simply answer the question of “So what?” So many scholars can’t explain the real value behind their work to a non-academic. For all I know, a cultural historian writing about the spread of nineteenth-century hermaphroditic print culture may engage in as fundamentally worthwhile and valuable a pursuit as that of the plumber who fixes your sink. The difference is that a plumber can tell you in one sentence (or better yet, show you by turning on the faucet) why his profession is worthwhile. The cultural historian faces a much greater hurdle, and too often academics give up on clearing it.

None of the experts are adequate to the task. No single discipline is adequate to the task. But it may be that such a group of odd balls willing to have an adventure outside the comfy confines of their disciplines could do the job.

An apt analogy might be the band of super heroes, each with a different preposterous power, who work together to thwart evil and save the world. It isn’t merely division of labor since most real life tasks can’t be neatly parceled out to specialists. Sometimes a subgroup will jointly attack some facet of the problem, and then hand the partial solution off to another hero or subgroup to take it to the next level of completion while still others do independent work on sub assemblies.

Still, sometimes the bad guys win, and the monsters never really die. Job security.

The lessons discussion we had stays with me also. I think the thing I’d still say is that many academic historians do see lessons in history, it’s just that they don’t quite express it in that way, and at least some of the lessons that they see aren’t easily converted into policies or actions. For me at least, some of the study of history converts more readily into wisdom about human beings (individuals and societies), into understanding and empathy and predictive insight than it does into “The right way to handle an energy crisis” or “The best policy for dealing with inflationary pressures on currency”.

I object to the way you present your argument. You start with an indisputable element of physics and then generalize it into realms that lack precision. This is one of my principle objections to the way academics, there I go generalizing, work with us lesser folk.

I hope that you will concede that economics and history, for examples, by no means stand with physics in providing accurate descriptions, and predictions, of the world around us.

But I take another point that you made. From the first comment I made here years ago, I have tried to engage you on the practice of writing history by professional historians. I think they are mostly wrong in the way they go about it and they do so because they can preserve their authority and academic positions by being very careful. They don’t try to identify the lessons of history and apply them to the world around us. Perhaps that is impossible, and if it is then historians should say so. They should admit that their profession is just a variation of the many professions that make up the entertainment field.

Economists, on the other hand, are not so much enterainers as they are enablers. They provide a rationale for their employers to do what they please, as they, the employers, try to reshape the world for their own advantage.

But physicists apply the lessons of physics to the world and so they are forced to at least listen to ideas no matter their source. Facts are hard to ignore.

So, you wonder if it is worthwhile for academics to pay attention to “cranks.” I wonder if it is worthwhile to pay attention to many academics, such as historians, economists, and supreme court justices — who by the way, are the epitome of fortress academia.

As it happens, this description would describe Einstein very well. He grew up in a family with an electrical business, he had a self-taught, hands-on and deeply-grounded understanding of electrical devices and machinery (one reason, contrary to popular myth, that he ENJOYED his time working in the Swiss Patent Office and refused many offers to leave), and he continued to invent, and patent, practical electrical devices well into middle-age.