I think it is time to raise the discussion to a higher level, one that addresses the field of History:

Why does Amazon carry only one book devoted to the lessons of history? It was written by Will and Ariel Durant in 1968 and won some sort of prize. Shouldn’t historians write updates to that book every year or so? If not, why not?

The Durants asked better questions than I have, and they directed them at historians. Here are a few:

Of what use have your studies been? Have you found in your work only the amusement of recounting the rise and fall of nations and ideas, and retelling “sad stories of the deaths of kings?”

Have you learned more about human nature than the man in the street can learn without so much as opening a book?

Have you derived from history any illumination of our present condition, any guidance for our judgments and policies, any guard against the rebuffs of surprise or the vicissitudes of change?

Have you found such regularities in the sequence of past events that you can predict the future actions of mankind or the fate of states?

Is it possible, after all, “history has no sense,” that it teaches us nothing and that the immense past was only the weary rehearsal of the mistakes that the future is destined to make on a larger stage and scale?

Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith, a unit of an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army, we may ask under the corresponding heads—astronomy, geology, geography, biology, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, politics, and war—what history has to say about the nature, conduct, and prospects of man.

It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed. [end of Durant’s remarks]

He was right about the hundred pages—it requires 600 pages to do the job.
In any case how would you judge the profession of history in light of Durant’s questions?

I have spent most of my life earnestly trying to answer these questions. I started long before I ever heard of Will and Ariel Durant. But he was headed in the right direction. His list “astronomy, … war” is incomplete. He needed to talk about systems. The GREEB institutions yield the answers to their problems by studying them for what they are human-made systems. They can be changed when they don’t work to please us. GREEB derives from our ideological institutions of Government, Religion, Education, Economics, and Business. Education should be part of the STEM group, creating “STEEM and GREB.” But it is not and it is hurting our society. If we don’t start teaching our children now to think rationally we will put an end to history, and it will be sooner than later.

Durant wrote another book, “The Greatest Minds and Ideas of all Times.” He did not name Albert Einstein as one of the greatest minds, and he did not name Einstein’s many theories, not even special and general relativity, as among the greatest ideas.

He did name Charles Darwin as one of the greatest minds, but he hedged a little. He said, “If Darwin was wrong…” Wow! More than a century after Darwin’s masterpiece was published Durant still had doubts. This means that his list of fields of study for historians to search for answers is, to be kind, rather feeble. Darwin’s great idea is the tool that will enable historians to answer Durant’s questions about human nature and finally provide for civilization lessons from history that will help our species. Until then, until historians adopt a scientific approach to human nature and its effects on society and its uses of the STEM institutions, history will become a dry, flowerless field, and it will be sooner than later.

Which of course also renders your questions moot.

I have no idea what you are talking about.

I would appreciate it if you would answer the questions I asked in my comment of July 29.

Let’s leave Harrison aside here, because it’s bad and of little value in arguing about actual history in any event.

I think to credit the end of Atlantic slavery to the British anti-slavery fleet alone is to really really miss the profound changes in the global economy that strongly mitigated against plantation slavery. You don’t necessarily have to buy the full-on Williams thesis or its more sophisticated forms in later syntheses, but the end of Atlantic slavery was not primarily a consequence of diplomatic relationships. Keep in mind too that an independent Confederacy after 1865 would not have been “the US that was a Great Power”, but in fact something rather closer to Brazil or Cuba: an agricultural economy increasingly dependent upon supplying industrial economies. If you want to follow the counterfactual you’re suggesting, you have to ask yourself what kind of presence a seceded South would have been within the Atlantic world. It wouldn’t have been the United States only smaller or anything of the sort.

“Right–I mean this is the thing, the notion that the Confederacy alone could have sustained slavery indefinitely is just an ugly variant on unwarranted American exceptionalism.”

Except that, compared to Brazil and Cuba and the Caribbean, America very much was exceptional. The US was effectively a Great Power that wasn’t acting like one yet and that could not be said of any othe slave-holding nations of the mid-to-late 19thC. Brazil could do nothing but fume impotently as the Royal Navy hunted down slave ships in Brazilian waters, other countries could be pressured to end the slave trade or abolish slavery by the opinion of more powerful countries, but that was not true of America.

It’s noticeable that while other nations, like Brazil, had to suffer the Pax Brittanica in sullen silence, in US-British disputces of the 19thC it’s always Britain that backs down in the face of American sabre rattling. I think this is why the Trent War is a fairly popular Civil War what if, as it offers a unique opportunity for Britain to win a war with the US by kicking it in the nuts while its distracted.

Or, as in Harry Harrison’s work, unite North and South in post-racial harmony against a common enemy.

Would it be “counterfactual” to say that the “causes” of the Civil War that we have argued over for all these years, were all in error and we have learned things since then that show other causes were in effect and still are? Or are we certain that we know the causes of the Civil War? Would it be more useful, I know it won’t be more interesting, to create a television series of what America would be like if we were to overpower these “factual” causes of the Civil War and build a future different from the one we are now hurtling into?

Or, put another way, are the causes of the Civil War the same factors that caused us to elect Donald Trump? That cause us to ignore the onrushing catastrophe of global warming? That cause us to say “to hell” with our posterity? What do we call the different futures that seem possible?

The common enemy of all people everywhere is the duality of human nature which gives rise to a conflict between the rational and the irrational. One variety of our species (tyranni) naturally, irrationally works against the common good—it is very aggressive, and does not hesitate to push forward to take power. The other variety (democrati) naturally, rationally works for the common good—it is timid and hesitates to confront the more aggressive variety. This duality leads us to ignore global warming, it causes us to say “to hell” with our posterity. It causes us to destroy our civilization.

Therefore, our new systems must rely on rationality as they apply our collective resources and powers to build and maintain the common good. It is rational to work for the common good. It is irrational to work against it. Wasn’t what happened in the South irrational? And wouldn’t only irrational men support it? Didn’t the South work against the common good?

Shouldn’t we write a TV series that describes a future that we would like to see? Shouldn’t we do it by describing how a small group of historians stopped blogging about “counterfactuals” and started blogging about the 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?” Shouldn’t all historians be working to answer these questions? Shouldn’t they be applying the lessons of history to warn us of the danger ahead? Shouldn’t they use the lessons of history to teach us how to avoid those dangers?

Years ago I read the first half or Henry James’ “The Bostonians”. It’s fuzzy in my memory now, but what I remember most clearly is a southerner in Boston who is depicted very sympathetically. Not as a representative of some slave-owning past that James wants to celebrate, but just as someone he is happy to no longer consider an enemy. The implicit attitude towards the Civil War is that was horrific, thank God it’s over. And if you have to have to ignore the plight of southern black Americans, so be it. That was worth it just to put this trauma behind us.

Yes. It’s easy to understand why–and it’s not just political calculation. It is that total war followed by legalized steps aimed at national reintegration or state-building was still an unfamiliar political and moral challenge. The closest before was maybe Napoleon’s new administrative order in conquered Europe.