Is history a guide to the future?

An extract from Practicing History by Barbara Tuchman.

The commonest question asked of historians by laymen is whether history serves a purpose. Is it useful? Can we learn from the lessons of history? When people want history to be utilitarian and teach us lessons, that means they also want to be sure that it meets scientific standards. This, in my opinion, it cannot do, for reasons which I will come to in a moment. To practise history as a science is sociology, an altogether different discipline which I personally find antipathetic - although I suppose the sociologists would consider that my deficiency rather than theirs. The sociologists plod along with their noses to the ground assembling masses of statistics in order to arrive at some obvious conclusion which a reasonably perceptive historian, not to mention a large part of the general public, knows anyway, simply from observation - that social mobility is increasing, for instance, or that women have different problems from men. One wishes they would just cut loose some day, lift up their heads, and look at the world around them. If history were a science, we should be able to get a grip on her, learn her ways, establish her patterns, know what will happen tomorrow. Why is it that we cannot? The answer lies in what I call the Unknowable Variable, namely, man. Human beings are always and finally the subject of history. History is the record of human behaviour, the most fascinating subject of all, but illogical and so crammed with an unlimited number of variables that it is not susceptible of the scientific method. I say this bravely, even in the midst of the electronic age when computers are already chewing at the skirts of history in the process called quantification. Applied to history, quantification, I believe, has its limits. It depends on a method called 'data manipulation', which means that the facts, or data, of the historical past - that is, of human behaviour - are manipulated into named categories so that they can be programmed into computers. Out comes - hopefully - a pattern. I can only tell you that for history 'data manipulation' is a built-in invalidator, because to the degree that you manipulate your data to suit some extraneous requirement, in this case the requirement of the machine, to that degree your results will be suspect - and run the risk of being invalid. Everything depends on the naming of the categories and the assigning of facts to them, and this depends on the quantifier's individual judgment at the very base of the process. The categories are not revealed doctrine nor are the results scientific truth. The hope for quantification, presumably, is that by processing a vast quantity of material far beyond the capacity of the individual to encompass, it can bring to light and establish reliable patterns. That remains to be seen, but I am not optimistic. History has a way of escaping attempts to imprison it in patterns. Moreover, one of its basic data is the human soul. The conventional historian, at least the one concerned with truth, not propaganda, will try honestly to let his 'data' speak for themselves, but data which are shut up in prearranged boxes are helpless. Their nuances have no voice. They must carry one fixed meaning or another and weight the result accordingly. For instance, in a quantification study of the origins of World War I which I have seen, the operators have divided all the diplomatic documents, messages, and utterances of the July crisis into categories labelled 'hostility', `friendship', 'frustration', 'satisfaction', and so on, with each statement rated for intensity on a scale from one to nine, including fractions. But no preestablished categories could match all the private character traits and public pressure variously operating on the nervous monarchs and ministers who were involved. The massive effort that went into this study brought forth a mouse - the less than

startling conclusion that the likelihood of war increased in proportion to the rise in hostility of the messages. Quantification is really only a new approach to the old persistent effort to make history fit a pattern, but reliable patterns, or what are otherwise called the lessons of history, remain elusive... To me it is comforting rather than otherwise to feel that history is determined by the illogical human record and not by large immutable scientific laws beyond our power to deflect. I know very little (a euphemism for nothing) about laboratory science, but I have the impression that conclusions are supposed to be logical; that is, from a given set of circumstances a predictable result should follow. The trouble is that in human behaviour and history it is impossible to isolate or repeat a given set of circumstances. Complex human acts cannot be either reproduced or deliberately initiated or counted upon like the phenomenon of nature. The sun comes up every day. Tides are so obedient to schedule that a timetable for them can be printed like that for trains, though more reliable. In fact, tides and trains sharply illustrate my point. One depends on the moon and is certain, the other depends on man and is uncertain. In the absence of dependable recurring circumstance, too much confidence cannot be placed on the lessons of history. There are lessons, of course, and when people speak of learning from them, they have in mind, I think, two ways of applying past experience. One is to enable us to avoid past mistakes and to manage better in similar circumstances next time; the other is to enable us to anticipate a future course of events. (History could tell us something about Vietnam, I think, if we would only listen.) To manage better next time is within our means; to anticipate does not seem to be beyond us. Theories of history go in vogues which, as is the nature of vogues, soon fade and give place to new ones. Yet this fails to discourage the systematisers. They believe as firmly in this year's as last year's, for, as Isaiah Berlin says, the 'obstinate craving for unity and symmetry at the expense of experience' is always with us. I do not know what the new explanation is, but I am sure there must be some thesis, for as one academic historian recently ruled, the writing of history requires a `large organising idea'. I visualise the `large organising idea' as one of those iron chain mats pulled behind by a tractor to smooth over a ploughed field. I see the professor climbing up on the tractor seat and away he goes, pulling behind his large organising idea over the bumps and furrows of history until he has smoothed it out to a nice, neat, organised surface,in other words, into a system. The human being - you, I, or Napoleon - is unreliable as a scientific factor. In combination of personality, circumstance, and historical moment, each man is a package of variables impossible to duplicate. His birth, his parents, his siblings, his food, his home, his school, his economic and social status, his first job, his first girl, and the variable inherent in all of these, make up that mysterious compendium, personality-which then combines with another set of variables: country, climate, time, and historical circumstance. Is it likely, then, that all these elements will meet again in their exact proportions to reproduce a Moses, or Hitler, or De Gaulle, or for that matter Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed Kennedy? So long as man remains the Unknowable Variable - and I see no immediate prospect of his ever being pinned down in every facet of his infinite variety - I do not see how his actions can be usefully programmed and quantified. The eager electronic optimists will go on chopping up man's past behaviour into thousands of little definable segments which they call Input, and the machine will whirr and buzz and flash its lights and in no time at all give

back Output. But will Output be dependable? I would lay ten to one that history will pay no more attention to Output than it did to Karl Marx. It will still need historians. Electronics will have its uses, but it will not, I am confident, transform historians into buttonpushers or history into a system. Pearl Harbor is the classic example of failure to learn from history. From hindsight we now know that what we should have anticipated was a surprise attack by Japan in the midst of negotiations. Merely because this was dishonourable, did that make it unthinkable? Hardly. It was exactly the procedure Japan had adopted in 1904 when she opened the RussoJapanese War by a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. In addition we had every possible physical indication. We had broken the Japanese code, we had warnings on radar, we had a constant flow of accurate intelligence. What failed? Not information by judgment. We had all the evidence and refused to interpret it correctly, just as the Germans in 1944 refused to believe the evidence of a landing in Normandy. Men will not believe what does not fit in with their plans or suit their prearrangements. The flaw in all military intelligence, whether twenty or fifty or one hundred per cent accurate, is that it is not better than the judgment of its interpreter, and this judgment is the product of a mass of individual, social, and political biases, prejudgments, and wishful thinkings; in short, it is human and therefore fallible. If man can break the Japanese code and yet not believe what it tells him, how can he be expected to learn from the lessons of history?