Ancient & modern – 19 December 2009

It has become increasingly fashionable in right-wing circles to argue that New Labour has always been hostile to, because ignorant of and anyway not interested in, history. I wish to argue that it is always vital to know your history, but it can be equally vital, sometimes, to agree with your enemies to forget it.

When Sir Kenneth Dover, one of the UK’s most distinguished classicists, reflected on the activity of history, he argued that there are two sorts of discipline — ‘scientific’ and ‘historical’. Science deals with universals, gathering and testing data with a view to generating repeatable experiments which prove the case in hand. History, the discipline covering what we might call ‘the humanities’, deals with what humans have done, said, thought, felt and created over thousands of years — in other words, the unpredictable, unique and individual. Repeatable experiment is not an option. The historian’s job is to produce hypotheses about humans on the strength of our experience and understanding of them — in the case of classics, when they are long dead and can be known only through surviving literature and artefacts: the most reliable hypotheses we can, so that we are not the victims of charlatans or liars peddling versions of the past for their own purposes.

That is well put, and the implication is that, if people can use the past to peddle lies, they can also use it to reveal truths. Is it reasonable, then, to ask whether the truths about the past (to distinguish it from our own personal experience) can be in any sense of practical use? To put it bluntly, are there lessons of history, or simply — a very different thing — lessons of historians?

The ancients certainly took the view that the past was usefully instructive.