Margaret MacMillan’s ‘Dangerous Games'

We think the past is over and can’t hurt us. As Lincoln suggested, we think that its received wisdom is inadequate to help us in the present. That’s partly true. But it is also true that the past is all we actually have, for better and for worse. One way or another, we need to reckon with

That’s where history comes in. But history is only as good as historians are. So history becomes an argument that shifts its ground continually too, temporarily coalescing into myths that we take for guideposts, mostly at our peril.

Faith in documents

For most of the past 2,000 years, most people in the West were taught to believe that the world was destined to a final end in which judgment would be passed on the living and the dead. That idea absolved history of most of its functions, except those illustrative of the myth.

When people slowly ceased to believe the myth, seers of various kinds rushed into the breach, attempting to enlist history on their side. This situation placed a great premium on the past as a thing that was knowable, and that might attain, with the right approach, the cognitive certainty of the sciences. The 19th Century German historian Leopold von Ranke argued that the truth of history lay in its documents, and that by sifting them thoroughly and objectively it could be brought to light.

We no longer make such an assumption, although it’s impossible for historians to proceed without vesting some sort of belief in the knowability of the past, and committing themselves on some level to the faith that an honest search for such knowledge can yield it, however imperfectly. Otherwise, we are entirely in the realm of myth making and propaganda.

Civilization regresses very rapidly at that point into ideological barbarism. Nazi Germany is the textbook example.

Balkan assumptions

These are the issues taken up in Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (Modern Library, 2013, $22). MacMillan, a Canadian, has written award-winning studies of the Versailles Peace Conference, Nixon’s opening to China and the life of women in British India. She is currently Warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

The questions MacMillan addresses have been taken up by historians since Nietzsche flagged them in the late 19th Century. Her book is intended for a thoughtful lay audience, and engages questions of theory only insofar as necessary.

History, as MacMillan points out, is used (and misused) by many people. Communities construct social, ethnic and religious identities based on their assumptions, often unexamined, about the past. Different groups make different and often conflicting assumptions, and many wars have started that way: See the recent Balkans or the present-day Middle East for egregious cases.

Czechoslovakia splits

In the 19th Century, the doctrine of nationalities asserted that self-constituted peoples had the right to political independence. Woodrow Wilson embraced that idea during World War I and thought that new states could be brought into the democratic fold even without previous experience of republican government. In practice, such states were hastily cobbled together, with disputed frontiers and aggrieved minorities. Twenty years later, only one of the new East European creations— Czechoslovakia— remained a democracy, and that country, when its democracy was restored in 1989 after 50 subsequent years of Nazi and Soviet domination, promptly split apart.

“Nation-building” was clearly not a success, but American policymakers in particular failed to take the point, which is how we wound up in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Obviously, such ideological covers served as an excuse for a more straightforwardly cynical imperialism, but they were blinders too, based on tendentious and simplistic misreadings of history.

One must, MacMillan notes, be especially careful when politicians cite history, partly because they are consumers of it in the same way that ancient rulers were of court astrologers, and partly, of course, because they are often positioned to shape it in dangerous ways. From the earliest days of the Cold War to those of George W. Bush (and beyond), Western statesmen habitually invoked the appeasement of Hitler at Munich as an excuse for bellicosity, a mindset that brought civilization to the brink of extinction in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Historians vs. politicians

One might begin with Hegel’s flat assertion that the only lesson of history is that it has no lesson to teach. But MacMillan is more sanguine. History, she says, shows us variety and difference, and a due appreciation of that can help us avoid hasty generalization and the unwise action that builds on it.

Then, too, historians are always re-evaluating the work of their predecessors, and occasionally even their own. A moving signpost is a poor guide to the road, or at least one that requires continual adjustment. Politicians haven’t the leisure to be historians, but assimilating their habits of caution can reduce facile mistakes.

No doubt these strictures are useful, but what they amount to is a counsel of restraint, and political leaders seldom achieve sovereign authority through timidity or self-doubt. What may be more important, if political democracy does prevail, is that their constituents know enough to keep them in check.

What was Pearl Harbor?

MacMillan relates the story of two men in a bar on the night of September 11, 2001. One said to the other that the Twin Tower attacks were just like Pearl Harbor. The other asked him what Pearl Harbor was. The first man replied that it was when the Vietnamese bombed a harbor and started the Vietnam War.

At that level of ignorance, no democracy can function, and power is unrestrained. Of course, college professors couldn’t stop the Iraq War any more than they could stop the Vietnamese one. Enough of them egged on Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush in any case.

But if knowledge is often helpless before folly or learned misjudgment, it’s still the only tool we have. Even what we call common sense is dependent on it. It may be not be much, and it will always be contestable. But we’re surely lost without it.