Daniel Schafer: Learning from the Past to Better Manage the Future Part II

Greetings, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed my last post, “Daniel Schafer: Learning from the Past to Better Manage the Future Part I.” I know I did. LOL! So, if you did, then you’re in luck . . . “Daniel Schafer: Learning from the Past to Better Manage the Future Part II” begins – now!

CRAFT: What do you read for pleasure?

SCHAFER: Mostly non-fiction, actually.  I get a great deal of enjoyment out of reading history, so I hope that counts as “pleasure” even though some folks might see this as job-related.  I read a couple of science magazines, especially the articles on astronomy, physics, and archeology.  I subscribe to Harpers, The New Yorker, and National Geographic and read what I can.  I like to keep up with the news, especially international developments.  Most political news from the US makes me depressed, but I read policy analysis sometimes.  When I read fiction it’s usually big novels from countries I’m interested in.  I finally tackled War and Peace a few years ago – it’s such a good book!  Recently I’ve read a number of Turkish novels, particularly by Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel laureate for literature – My Name is Red, The Museum of Innocence, and Snow.  A few years ago I was on a Harry Turtledove kick, making my way through most of his “Great War” series.  There are eleven books in this series, you know, and I’ve still got one or two left.  I try to fit that sort of thing in when I can.

CRAFT:  Have you actually read the Qur’an or a translation of it?

SCHAFER: I don’t read Arabic, so I’m unable to read the Qur’an in the original.  I’ve read parts of the Qur’an in English translation, though I can’t claim to have read it all – not yet, anyway.  That’s something I have to look forward to.

CRAFT:  How many foreign languages do you know? What are they?

SCHAFER: I know Russian the best, having spent a year or so living there in the early 1990s.  I read Russian very easily, as long as the texts aren’t too literary or obscure.  Poetry and some forms of fiction will drive me to the dictionary, but scholarly writing and newspaper articles are no problem.   I can make myself understood in Russian and follow most speech, though rapid delivery and slang can trip me up.  There are several languages that I read for research purposes with a dictionary by my side, including Turkish, Tatar, Bashkir, German, and French.  Of these, German and Turkish are the two I might venture to speak in limited tourist contexts.

CRAFT: What role does history play in education? Do you feel history gets enough attention or focus in all levels of school?

SCHAFER: Ideally, history should be fundamental to one’s education.  Think about how we gain our knowledge about the world.  A huge role is played by direct experience.  We might learn not to touch a hot stove by doing so and getting burned.  Or we might obey the orders of our parents not to touch the hot stove, but only after direct experience has taught us that we should trust the advice of our parents.  But there is a limit to how much one can learn from direct experience.  The genius of the human race is that we have found ways to pass accumulated knowledge and experience down through the generations – this is what accounts for much of the progress of the species over the last several thousand years.  Initially this was done through oral traditions, as aged storytellers became the repository of human knowledge, or through face-to-face teaching, as parents and masters taught useful skills to their children and apprentices, whether in hunting, woodworking, music-making, or a hundred other endeavors.  With the invention of writing and the gradual elaboration of hundreds of different delivery systems through the years, from cuneiform tablets to printed books to the Internet, we have pretty much perfected the storage and delivery of accumulated human experience, though of course many skills are still passed down through physical demonstration. 

At its core, history is about learning from past experience in order to better manage the future.  In a sense, all academic disciplines and areas of human endeavor are fundamentally historical – they all attempt to learn from and build upon what people have done before.  But they might not acknowledge the historical essence of their discipline.  Each edition of a textbook in, say, accounting is ideally a little better than the previous one because there have been new developments in the field itself – new techniques, new technologies – or because the textbook authors have come up with a better way to present the material.  The writers of the textbook, presumably professors of accounting at a university somewhere, certainly know that they are drawing on past experience to provide guidance for future action, and they might even realize that this qualifies them as historians of their field.  But the point is that the accounting textbook, and textbooks in dozens of other fields, hides this historical outlook from the students.  Many fields are taught as if there is no past – only a static body of knowledge here in the present that students need to master.  History is the only discipline that students are likely to encounter in high school or college that explicitly and consistently reminds us that there is a past and that it matters.  Even the most tedious and date-driven high school history course can acquaint students with the notion that there is a vast reservoir of human experience – thousands of years’ worth – waiting to be tapped into.

            So, is history getting enough attention in American education?  I’m not sure that it is.  There are two sides to getting an education in history.  One is improving one’s grasp of basic factual knowledge about the past – when was the U.S. civil war, why it happens, how did it play out, what were the consequences, who was Martin Luther King, who was Gandhi, that sort of thing.  The other aspect is learning to “think historically.”  This is difficult to define, but includes things like learning to ask questions about the relationship between past and present, comparing similar events taking place at different times and places (e.g. U.S. Civil War vs. Russian Civil War), learning to work with primary historical sources so one can investigate the past oneself, learning to evaluate critically the conclusions presented by historians, etc. I’m not a specialist in high school education, but my sense is that delivering factual data is often the focus of the history class, while developing a more sophisticated awareness of history is a priority in only a handful of AP or IB programs.  At least that was my experience thirty years ago in high school, and I’m not convinced that things have changed much since then.  The problem, of course, is that teaching historical facts without training in historical thinking can be something of a dead end.  Without intellectual excitement, students get bored and turned off to history, so that they avoid history courses in college, where the level of intellectual engagement is much higher.

CRAFT: Where is the gap in the average person’s historical knowledge the widest? Where is it the narrowest?

SCHAFER: I’m not sure I can answer this question very precisely, since this is actually a very empirical question.  There have been any number of surveys finding that Americans don’t know this or that historical fact.  Googling “historical ignorance” can lead you to some very interesting articles and reports.  My own observations suggest that Americans know the most about the history they personally lived through (i.e. recent U.S. history), less about the more distant past of the U.S., even less about European history, and almost nothing about Africa, Asia, and South America.  Of course, there are history buffs everywhere who know a lot about particular subjects, and that raises the average a little.  I find that people gain more appreciation for history and its importance as they grow older.

CRAFT: In your opinion, what role does writing play in history and other disciplines?  

SCHAFER: It plays a central role.  Most historical stories worth telling are complex narratives with many characters, many factors to consider, and many relevant pieces of information.  This has to be worked through in written form, and is usually best presented to other people in writing.  Of course, there are gifted lecturers who can convey information or mental images very well in a storytelling format.  And occasionally there are very good historical documentaries that effectively tell a story or explain a historical situation.  But underlying all this is a written script, a set of lecture notes, and research based on written sources.  I find that I have my best conversations with students about historical method in the middle of a paper conference, as I’m trying to help them improve a draft of a historical research paper.  Writing and advanced thinking go hand in hand, in this field as in many others.

CRAFT: What is the most important thing students leave your courses with?

SCHAFER: What they actually learn is anyone’s guess.  In my dreams, though, they leave my classes with skills in critical thinking informed by historical awareness.  Plus the ability to write good footnotes.  Hey, if you can’t say where your information came from, you might as well be making it up!

CRAFT: What book of historical nature would you recommend that everyone read?

SCHAFER: I don’t have a specific recommendation – the important thing is to beginning expanding your historical awareness starting where you are.  Pick up a history book on a topic that interests you and read!  Then read another on the same topic.  Compare the two – who has a better take on the subject.  Pick a third book.  Pretty soon you’ve got a useful addiction going.  Although journalists and “public intellectuals” sometimes write very passable history, do look for things written by actual historians.

CRAFT: What book of historical nature would you recommend that any president, prime minister, or head of state should read?

SCHAFER: Collapse, by Jared Diamond – about how societies often fail because of poor choices they make concerning the environment.

CRAFT: Given the current world climate, are there things about Islam that we as a culture don’t understand?

SCHAFER: First, many Americans do not appreciate the incredible diversity of the Islamic world.  Muslims make up one fifth or more of the entire human family and they represent dozens or hundreds of ethnic groups, languages, and cultures.  As a religion, Islam is divided into many different movements and traditions, making it very difficult to identify a single “Muslim” perspective about just about anything.  There is no single code of “shariah law” that all Muslims agree on, nor do they agree on how or when it should be applied.  Some Muslim-populated countries use corporal punishment, others consider it barbaric.  Some Muslims follow people like Bin Laden, but many more are interested in peaceful, democratic change.  A man can legally marry four wives in Saudi Arabia, but polygamy is banned or discouraged in many other countries.  Examples of such diversity could be listed endlessly.  This makes it very hard to generalize about the Muslim world – though that doesn’t stop TV and radio commentators from doing this endlessly.

            Second, many Americans think that everything that happens in the Islamic world happens because of Islam.  In other words, religion is thought to be the only or the most important motivator of behavior.  So, when terrorists who happen to be Muslim detonate a bomb, Americans sometimes conclude that this was dictated or at least allowed by a tenet of their religion.  But when terrorists who happen to be Christian do the same thing, we look for motivations elsewhere and don’t decide that they did it because they were Christian.  This is a double standard that keeps people from reasoning clearly about Muslim-populated societies that have their own complex political, economic, and social developments.

CRAFT:  Did you see any of the numerous tragic events in the Middle-East and/or Islamic World coming?

SCHAFER: Well, I’m a historian, so I don’t normally predict the future.  What historians do is to study historical contingency.  What happened in the past?  What else might have happened?  Why did things go one way and not another?  What were the possible future paths?  This can help people think about the future.  What are the possible pathways into the future beginning at this particular point?  How might we prepare for the various contingencies that past history suggests might be possible?  Rather than say “such and such will happen” I prefer to reason as follows:  Given past experience we can expect that today’s situation in Egypt (for example) might lead to one of the following three/four/five situations – so let’s plan for each of them just in case.  If you fool yourself into thinking you can make precise predictions, you may prepare for only one eventuality – and you are bound to be wrong.  So in 2010, on the eve of the Arab spring, I think it was clear there was discontent with the existing regimes in many Arab countries.  But the possible futures looking forward from 2010 included: (1) people like Pres. Mubarak in Egypt might stay in power another decade or more, (2) regimes like Mubarak’s might be overthrown through al-Qaeda-style terrorism, (3) Mubarak might be toppled by a popular democratic revolution.  I would have said #1 or #3 were more likely than #2.  As it turned out, #3 was only months away, but I can’t claim to have “predicted” it.

Thanks for reading, peeps. Hope you enjoyed reading Dr. Schafer’s groovy character profile – both parts one and two. Because I did! If not, I have to knock some sense into you – LOL! Thanks again. Peace!

AW MML, HI