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I’ve talked before at this blog about reading grant applications, for example, from recent undergraduates hoping to pursue a project in another country. Again and again, I’ve seen many of these applicants, especially those seeking to go to African countries, act as if they are the first person to ever think of tackling a given problem or issue in that country. As if there’s no one there who has ever done it, and as if there’s no one here who has ever gone there to do it. You could write this off as simply ugly Americanism, but it’s only a more specific example of a generally weak devotion to thinking historically, to putting one’s own story, one’s own aspirations, into motion.

That’s probably a large part of it, but some of it might be inherent in the grant-writing process itself, or in grant-writers’ mistaken notion of what the process requires. What I mean is, maybe those applying for the grants feel they have to stake a claim to the uniqueness or the pioneeringness of their project. And maybe grantors look for that. (Or maybe not. I have no experience writing grant proposals. I also apologize if you’ve covered this aspect in earlier posts and I’ve missed it.)

There’s the obvious, frequently made point that while history may not provide a ready-made solution, it does provide a much richer, more complicated understanding of where we are and how we got to this point. Trying to act without a historical understanding is like trying to be a doctor who never does diagnosis. Maybe every once in a while you’ve got a patient in the emergency room where you don’t need to know what happened because it’s obvious, and all you need to do is act–staunch the bleeding, bandage the wound, amputate, restart the heart. Usually though you really need to know how it happened, and what it is that happened, if you want to do anything at all to help.

And I was reminded of this:

My father, who had the outlook of a philosopher, used to say that there are three eternal questions which engage humankind: “Where did I come from? Where am I going? What should I do while I am here?” My mother, who had the outlook of an engineer, would counter with her four eternal questions: “Where do we stand? How did we get here? Where do we want to go? How do we get there from here?”

I would often talk with my father about the myriad answers to his questions, and it was lots of fun. But he would often close the discussion with a reminder that I should answer his third eternal question, “What should I do while I am here?” by trying to answer Mother’s four eternal questions.

If I understand you correctly, then history would help provide answers only to my mother’s first two eternal questions. Where should I go to find answers to my mother’s second two eternal questions: “Where do we want to go? How do we get there from here?” Should I consult experts in some part of the humanities, or should I look in the sciences?

It seems to me that we can clearly divide many of our institutions into two major groups: government, religion, education, economics, and business (GREEB) and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Where do I put the humanities? In education?

If we look at the GREEB institutions, it seems to me that they are ideology-based while the STEM institutions are fact-based. Which is history? Down here in Texas, and most of the old rebel states, history is largely ideology-based. What do we do about that? Who cleans up this mess? Historians? Government officials? If we have no such mechanism today, and we don’t, who will design it and build it? Historians?