Sticks and stones might break your bones, but bad historical analogies can bring entire nations to their knees. We know this in the United States, but we don’t like to talk about it very much. After all, it’s comforting to compare present challenges with those of the past. It allows us to read the historical record as a kind of instruction manual that will tell us what to do and what not to do.
John Stuart Mill called this approach to current affairs “the science of history.” We distill general principles from the historical record and apply them to solve political problems in the present. Of course, if history were actually a science, and could be mastered and wielded by the human will like chemistry or physics, then the century separating us from Mill probably wouldn’t be piled high with hundreds of millions of bloody and emaciated corpses. But unfortunately for us, human affairs are defined by indeterminacy, contingency, and particularity. Reality is always distinctly granular and impossibly complex. As a result, the principles we abstract from one situation and apply to another only ever pertain imperfectly at best.
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