Why Study History? | 5 Minute Video — Transcript

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1. 0:02Why study history?
2. 0:04Ironically, this question is as old as history.
3. 0:08Twenty-five hundred years ago, Thucydides, the great chronicler of the Peloponnesian
4. 0:12Wars between Athens and Sparta, and the man many call the “first historian” said that
5. 0:18“…I have written my work, not…to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession
6. 0:24for all time.”
7. 0:25Thucydides hoped that what he was writing would help future generations understand what
8. 0:30transpired in his day.
9. 0:32If they could learn from it and make better decisions, his efforts would not be in vain.
10. 0:38More than two millennia later, the American social thinker George Santayana said much
11. 0:43the same thing, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
12. 0:48But while knowledge of the past is a prerequisite to wisdom, it doesn’t give the historian
13. 0:53a crystal ball.
14. 0:54We must be modest in our claims: studying history provides an invaluable guide—but
15. 1:00only a guide—to current and future political, economic, military, and cultural challenges.
16. 1:07Just as it is dangerous to be ignorant of past events, so too it is equally risky to
17. 1:12assume that history across time and space will repeat itself in exactly the same fashion.
18. 1:19It never does.
19. 1:20Still, with the proper caution, studying history can warn us of dangers ahead.
20. 1:25For example, across the ages appeasing or ignoring enemies has rarely proven to be a
21. 1:30prudent strategy.
22. 1:32Usually, it’s disastrous.
23. 1:34The Greek city-states’ coddling of the Macedonian king Philip II, the weak Western democracies’
24. 1:41reaction to the aggression of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, and the indifference shown to
25. 1:46the dangers of radical Islam by an affluent West in the 1990s make this point.
26. 1:53There is another—perhaps less recognized—value in studying history.
27. 1:57Every generation, none more than our own, suffers from a pernicious presentism—the
28. 2:03arrogance that those now alive have created the most prosperous period in history.
29. 2:08The result is that too often we judge a materially poorer past by the same contemporary standards
30. 2:14of an affluent and leisured present.
31. 2:17Those who study history can avoid these fallacies.
32. 2:20Aside from the fact that the present is the beneficiary of the accumulated intellectual,
33. 2:24moral, and scientific contributions of the past, proper knowledge of the hardships of
34. 2:30prior ages teaches us the value of humility.
35. 2:34To take just one possible example, it might be an easy thing to chronicle what seems to
36. 2:39us prejudices recorded among the wagoneers on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s.
37. 2:45It is quite another to imagine how the trailblazers struggled to survive one more day in an age
38. 2:51without effective medicines, labor-saving machines, or adequate shelter.
39. 2:57Studying history also confers much needed perspective.
40. 3:01It’s neither fair nor wise to attempt to apply the moral standards of today to say,
41. 3:07the far more deadly 17th century when life, in the words of English philosopher Thomas
42. 3:13Hobbes, was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
43. 3:20The COVID-19 pandemic seems to many like a public health crisis without precedent—until
44. 3:26we take time to learn of the global outbreak of the H1N1 influenza virus in 1918.
45. 3:34The “Spanish flu” killed nearly 600,000 Americans in a nation of 100 million, with
46. 3:41a worldwide toll of perhaps 50 million dead—and yet our nation and planet survived and learned
47. 3:48from it.
48. 3:49One of the ways that I used to endure the tedium, dust, and noise of tractor driving
49. 3:54was to remember that my farming grandfather covered the same ground with a team of horses.
50. 3:59It took him two days of back breaking labor to cultivate four acres of land.
51. 4:05I could do it in an hour—sitting down.
52. 4:08But while technology improves, human nature does not.
53. 4:11That means we have, if we bother to look, a timeless connection to those who went before
54. 4:18us.
55. 4:19Their struggle to make sense of life is our struggle.
56. 4:23In this regard there’s still much to learn from King David, the Roman Emperor, Marcus
57. 4:27Aurelius, or Elizabeth I. And, we can draw strength and courage when all seems lost from
58. 4:33inspirational figures like George Washington, Frederick Douglass, or the Wright Brothers.
59. 4:40Finally, the study of history teaches to value caution over certainty.
60. 4:45We should avoid making judgments about who’s good and who’s bad as if we were watching
61. 4:50a morality tale in the present.
62. 4:53Major historical players like Julius Caesar, Robert E. Lee, and Napoleon were complex men
63. 5:00who at points in their lives did some good things.
64. 5:04That these efforts ultimately led to bad outcomes—made far worse by their own outsized talents—is
65. 5:11one of the many tragedies of history.
66. 5:14So, why study history?
67. 5:16Nobel prize winning American novelist, William Faulkner summed it up as well as anyone, “The
68. 5:22past is not dead.
69. 5:23In fact, it's not even past.”
70. 5:25I’m Victor Davis Hanson, senior historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
71. 5:31for Prager University.