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Distinguish Rhetoric from Risk: Use Historical Methods to Analyze Present-Day Problems, with Timothy Snyder, History Professor, Yale University and Author, The Road to Unfreedom
Find familiar aspects
If a historian is looking at a problem in the present, I’d say he or she has three or four advantages. The first is that a historian will look at a problem and ask, what is familiar about this problem? History doesn’t repeat. That’s a cliche – it’s not true. It doesn’t even rhyme, which is what Mark Twain said, which is a beautiful sentence. That’s not really true either. But history does reveal certain patterns. So a historian will never look at a problem and say, “This is entirely new”. A historian will look at a problem and try to find the familiar aspects of it. That’s a very big advantage over certain other forms of analysis, because if you look at something and say that it’s totally new, that disables the mind right away. It also tends to disable, I think, political action. Because if something’s totally new, it’s very easy to take the next step and say, “Well, if it’s totally new, then what can I do about it?” Or you can say, “Since it’s totally new, all things are permitted”, which can also lead you in some really unproductive directions. So the first thing a historian will do is we’ll say, whatever this problem is, it’s not entirely new.
Be skeptical of sources
The second thing that a historian will do is that a historian will be skeptical about sources. So if you say, “The problem is x”, a historian will instantly cock his or her head and think, “Ok, well, this person says the problem is x, but let’s cast our minds out immediately to try to think of what the other 15 relevant perspectives on this problem are”. Is it actually a problem? Maybe it’s something which is desirable from certain points of view. So that’s a methodological reflex, that whatever your first person perspective is, that’s not the truth for me. The truth automatically has to come from comparing your perspective to a whole bunch of other perspectives. And that’s useful also because it can preserve the dynamism and the urgency of something while taking some of the subjective spin from it. So ideally, a historian or a historically trained person is less likely to be played by the presentation of a problem and more likely to skeptically figure out what its contours are.
See time as a flow
The third advantage that historians have, and this is the one that I find to be most relevant in the present, is that historians see time as a flow, or as something which is continuous. And this is incredibly important now because the way that the news cycle works, or the way that what I call the politics of eternity works, is that you get your brain bludgeoned every day by the emotions of the moment, as transmitted by very skilled political actors through very efficient media. And the result is that it’s so easy to either be elated or outraged every day, and to experience the day as a kind of complete unit where you wake up, you’re shocked, you’re outraged, and then by the end of the day you’re dissipated, you’re exhausted. And then you just begin the cycle again. Historians don’t believe in cycles, or at least good historians don’t believe in cycles. Historians think that there are long-term patterns. However exciting or however exhausting or however terrifying the thing is today, it’s part of some longer sweep. To give an extreme example, even nuclear war – so in the last few months, the subject of nuclear war has come up from all kinds of directions. The Russians threatened America that if Hillary Clinton wins, nuclear war is likely. Our current president threatens North Korea with nuclear war, and so on. It comes up all the time. And yet, even nuclear war has a history. There’s only been one and that was in 1945. And there’ve been a lot of moments where it was likely or less likely, like Cuba, and yet it hasn’t happened yet. So even something which is dramatic, and which is, as it were, designed to shock you out of thinking in time, even that can be put in some kind of a context. In other words, the weapons that are designed to get you to stop thinking, like let’s be afraid of the foreigners or let’s be afraid of nuclear war, if you think about those threats over time as part of some kind of larger flow, you’re less likely to be disabled and you’re more likely to distinguish the rhetoric from what actually might be the risk.