No, the President Doesn't Need a Council of Historical Advisers

In college, some fellow students and I formed an organization called The Salem State College Socialists. Implicitly, we believed ourselves to be socialists. That makes the failure of our first order of business a rather comical debacle: defining socialism.

It seems backwards. You’d expect someone to figure out what a term means before they use it to label themselves. But not so for the Salem State College Socialists.

Nor for historians.

Around the time I completed my undergraduate history degree and entered a graduate program in history, I became extremely skeptical and critical of the field I was entering. In some ways, I thought of this as being analogous to Descartes’ use of extreme skepticism to arrive at a firmer foundation for knowledge. Descartes challenged every possible foundation of knowledge until he arrived at propositions about which he could have no doubt. Upon those propositions, he sought to establish a reliable understanding of truth.

Similarly, I wanted to abandon the uncritical recitation of self-serving clichés such as, “Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.” I cringe writing it. I wanted to know what exactly it is that historians do and what good it is.

A 2016 article in the Atlantic by Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson revived my interest in this topic. It proposes a White House Council of Historical Advisers. It rehearses the usual gripe about Americans not knowing enough history. And it makes the highly dubious claim that greater historical knowledge would have allowed recent presidential administrations to avoid various mistakes.

The authors' claims range from boring to irritating. For one thing, is there any academic field the practitioners of which express satisfaction at the level of the public’s knowledge of their field? Americans don’t know enough math. Not enough Americans realize how old the Earth is or accept that humans evolved from other primates. We get it already. It isn’t a revelation. The grievance is perennial and universal among academic disciplines.

But what is really wrong with the article is the implicit misconceptions that the authors—highly prestigious authors—have about their own field.

The White House Council of Historical Advisers could “take a current predicament” and try to “find clues about what is likely to happen.” The background assumption here is that “the past” falls uniquely within the purview of the historian.

But everyone studies the past. There is nothing else you can study. No one studies the present nor the future. Geologists, linguists, economists, and even laboratory scientists study things that have happened. They do not study things that are happening in this very moment, nor do they study things that haven’t happened yet.

If studying the past is not what distinguishes history, what does? Historians use written documents to create narratives of past events. History is a remedy for myth.

However, another defining feature of the field of history is that it does not attempt to formulate general principles that can be used to predict future events. As soon as you begin to formulate general principles that can be used to make predictions you have left the realm of history.

It is analogous to philosophy’s relationship to science. Just as the use of observation and quantification transform a branch of philosophy into a branch of science, the formulation of predictive principles transforms a branch of history into a social science.

The president already has expert advisers that look for past analogues in order to “find clues” about what might happen. They’re called economists. They’re called climate scientists. They’re called diplomats and national security advisers.

Surely there is always room to improve the quality of the information a president is receiving. But does anyone seriously think that having Graham Allison interrupting national security meetings to report that his analysis of the Bolshevik Revolution has led him to believe that ISIS may be an acephalous network would achieve that end?

Count me among the skeptical.