Another Sunday Morning Debate
Claire Berlinski, Ed. ·
Sep 4, 2011 at 1:03am
Is it true that the more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do?
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Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
No interest in this one? Anyone have a better suggestion? I'm open to good ideas.
Oct '10
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
"The more extensive an author's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his powers in knowing what to do." Isaac D'Israeli, Literary Character of Men of Genius. The immediately preceding sentence runs "Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised; their progress is like those who travel without a map of the country."
Which is not to answer the question, but I became intrigued that the quote was almost invariably attributed to Isaac's son Benjamin, but with no source.
Edited on Sep 4, 2011 at 4:41amMay '10
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
My short answer is no.
It's true that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. It's true that a deep and broad study of history shapes the mind and can lend wisdom and understanding. But action is all about the will, not the intelligence. A person learns to recognize the right thing to do more by practice than by study. That is to say, the more we strive to do right day by day, the stronger and clearer our sense of right becomes.
Without that, vast knowledge of history is only bewildering and paralyzing.
Also and further (since I haven't yet used all my words), a person practiced in doing right will know how to interpret history, as others won't. He'll be able to separate the essential from the inessential, the causes from the effects, the good guys form the bad guys; he'll be able to recognize patterns and trends...
For others, the information has virtually no practical meaning. Or they may draw the wrong lessons and conclusions.
Edited on Sep 4, 2011 at 4:55amOct '10
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
How about taking something from Governor William Livingston of New Jersey: Americans do not exhibit the virtue that is necessary to support a republican government.
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
I wonder if the question isn't basically a bit too similar to debates we've already debated half to death here. Let me see if I can find a different topic.
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
katievs: My short answer is no.
It's true that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. It's true that a deep and broad study of history shapes the mind and can lend wisdom and understanding. But action is all about the will, not the intelligence. A person learns to recognize the right thing to do more by practice than by study. That is to say, the more we strive to do right day by day, the stronger and clearer our sense of right becomes.
Without that, vast knowledge of history is only bewildering and paralyzing. · Sep 4 at 4:49am
I spoke too soon! Well, let's keep this one going--I'm certainly interested--and I like Genferei's suggestion so much that I'll open a second debate for it.
Feb '11
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
C S Lewis observed (quoting loosely here) that if you want to destroy an infantry unit, you cut it off from its adjacent units. If you want to destroy a generation, you cut it off from its preceding generations.
Sep '10
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
Is it true that the more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do?
"History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought" -- Etienne Gilson.
Sep '10
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
He also observed that morality was a type of remembering which he did a pretty good job of arguing for in The Abolition of Man and I think Newman's The Idea of a University pretty much seals the deal.
Sep '10
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
But action is all about the will, not the intelligence. A person learns to recognize the right thing to do more by practice than by study.
That smacks of voluntarism to me.
Aug '11
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
Depends on the man doesn't it? A stupid man might not....
Its a bit like George Santayana's quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfill it" (I had to look it up in Wikipedia to see who said it), which interestingly I remember being quoted as "Those who DO NOT LEARN FROM the past are condemned to REPEAT it", which is something very different, isn't it? But I kind of prefer the latter, since it means specifically that you need to make an effort to learn the lesson of the past in order to not make the same mistakes again. But as we all know, people make the same mistakes over and over again in history. Even unbelievably catastrophic mistakes such as attacking Russia as, fortunately, Hitler failed to learn from the mistake of Napoleon.
From personal experience I can say that sometimes we CHOOSE to forget certain unpleasant realities. My own countrymen (Israelis) get stung again and again by the same overtures towards "Peace", and we just keep choosing to forget how brutal a motivated Islamist can sometimes be.
Edited on Sep 4, 2011 at 5:24amMay '10
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
But, the question isn't whether it's good to study history if we want to know what to do. Of course it is! The question is whether to know history is to know what to do.
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
Yes, exactly. And I wonder if the excessive study of history does not quite often lead to folly: It is a cliche that generals are apt to fight the last war; cliches usually emerge from somewhere.
Oct '10
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
(The following observations are based, in part, on David Deutsch's book, The Beginning of Infinity, which I'm presently reading.)
The essential discovery of the Enlightenment is that progress is possible, that it can continue without limit, and that it is achieved by trying things (variation) and critically analysing their consequences (selection). This shouldn't be surprising since this is precisely the mechanism biological evolution has used to transform single celled organisms into the metazoans who inhabit Ricochet.
The value of history is not that it tells us what to do, but rather that it cautions us what not to do. Those ignorant of history will necessarily try things which have been conclusively demonstrated to be bad ideas in the past. History provides a filter for the variations we propose so we don't have to rediscover on our own the bad ones that never work.
Feb '11
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
"generals are apt to fight the last war"
I wonder to what extent this is due to the study of history versus due to direct personal experience. Certainly, the excessive belief of French generals in the power of the defensive during the interwar period was largely due to their personal experience in the first war.
Dec '10
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
I cannot find the quote at the moment,but PJ O'Rourke points out that in some parts of the world people can only remember history and will fight about injuries long past.
May '10
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
The claim "that the more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do" is a conditional one, hence it is false only if, in some context, its antecedent is true while its consequent is false. Innumerable counterexamples to this proposition exist.
Consider the invasion of France by the Wehrmacht in 1940. Nothing within the entire corpus of military history could have prepared the French military ex ante. The German incursion, the so-called "Blitzkrieg", with its focus on rapid attacks made by coordinating armoured and aerial units was unprecedented, hence the French, equipped with the largest army in Western Europe at the time, were overwhelmed nevertheless within a matter of six weeks. In this case, more extensive knowledge of what was done previously to repel invaders would not have informed the French on what to do concerning the Third Reich.
The statement is false because of the "problem of induction"; generalizations from previous events are not deductively valid, hence they cannot be known with certainty via induction. We can be "functionally certain" about many of our inductive inferences, but not metaphysically certain.
Mar '11
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
The general who is fighting the last war is not doing so because he spent too much time reading Xenophon’s Hellenika. He is committing this folly out of what he had himself seen and done in that last war. Said otherwise, he has relied too narrowly on “experience”.
But now we have a conundrum, don’t we? If our empirical experience cannot reliably guide us, where can we turn? Well, if history is the record of things passed that are communicated to us by those who experienced them themselves—isn’t their experience subject to the same limitation? Where can we turn?
Perhaps, we might answer, philosophy and religion—or, the laws of science and man, and the laws of God. But many of the former are born out of our experiences and experiments, and the latter to an even greater extent (after all, unless God is speaking directly to us, we are reliant upon those who have been blessed enough to have access to intelligences superior to man).
It would appear that in the realm of “knowing what is to be done” there is no substitute for that quality that a certain crafty Greek called “prudence”.
Sep '10
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
Yes! It's always the people, never the tool.
katievs: It's true that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. It's true that a deep and broad study of history shapes the mind and can lend wisdom and understanding. But action is all about the will, not the intelligence. A person learns to recognize the right thing to do more by practice than by study. That is to say, the more we strive to do right day by day, the stronger and clearer our sense of right becomes.
Without that, vast knowledge of history is only bewildering and paralyzing.
Also and further (since I haven't yet used all my words), a person practiced in doing right will know how to interpret history, as others won't. He'll be able to separate the essential from the inessential, the causes from the effects, the good guys form the bad guys; he'll be able to recognize patterns and trends...
For others, the information has virtually no practical meaning. Or they may draw the wrong lessons and conclusions. · Sep 4 at 4:49am
Edited on Sep 04 at 04:55 am
Mar '11
Re: Another Sunday Morning Debate
In the course of ordinary events, knowledge of what has been done can help one know what to do going forward.
But extraordinary events (like Labeit's example of the Blitzkrieg), make knowledge of what has been done before counter-productive. When one expects the future to come from a menu of the past, then we are slow to adapt when something unpredictable happens.
And since all of us (I hope!) think ourselves capable of doing or thinking something that is genuinely new, the past can indeed constrain our thinking going forward. It is a rare mind that can synthesize experience and history, and still come out with something new. It is much more common that novelty comes from people who are too unlearned to know what officially can or cannot be done. Ignorance is its own virtue in this respect.
So solid performance relies on knowledge of the past. Greatness requires either ignorance, or the ability to ignore the received wisdom.
Edited on Sep 4, 2011 at 6:14am