on history and humility

A fun coincidence related to my previous post on history: the leading story on Salon is a review of a book, "Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History," by Oxford historian Margaret MacMillen.

The most important lesson to be gained from history, she writes, is simply "humility ... Knowing that classical Chinese civilization valued scholars above soldiers or that the Roman family was very different from the nuclear one of the modern West suggests other values and other ways of organizing society."

To recognizes this is not, she maintains, merely "relativism," but rather the awareness that the threats, incentives and tactics that work on us won't necessarily persuade people in other cultures and situations. Americans, who often have so little understanding of what it's like not to live in an affluent democratic superpower, are especially prone to mistakes in this department, as our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have amply shown.

Cultural and historical particularity is why the dreams of scientific planners and rational bureaucrats never come to pass. (As the eulogies note, Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, was the "ultimate rationalist.") Persuasion is an art that requires empathy of the highest order. As MacMillen suggests, it is not fundamentally a humanist question (what if that were my mother, my child?), though we might very well want to ask that one too. It is a question of worldview (what if that were my people with that historical experience?).

Clearly, I'm preoccupied with empathy. My next post will be on Chief Justice Rehnquist's unplanned empathy workout.