The pithy answer is that historical perspective matters because without it, the tendency of your mind will be to draw conclusions based on an the limits of your own experience.
The dumbest example would be that if you’re only familiar with raspberries, there’s a good chance that you’ll infer that all red berries are delicious and healthy. The moment that you would encounter some poisonous red berries, you would eat them, and then you would die. With outside knowledge of different types of red berry, you’re less likely to make a false generalization.
This is what most thinking people do today: search for tiny pieces of context-free novel information which makes them feel good, draw inappropriate inferences from those tiny pieces, and then suffer when those conclusions turn out to be false.
It’s the same way with everything else, but attempts to turn all areas of human knowledge into a ‘science,’ regardless of the limitations and difficulties involved in science as it relates to human societies, has made it so that people, especially modern political leaders, tend to value the particularized, memorization-heavy, language-dependent, and innately subjective discipline of history. Instead, the hope has been to replace subjective history with objective social science. It’s not incidental that Marx and Engels considered history to be a science, and one that they had perfected.
Historical perspective matters in politics because many of the same issues come up many times through history, and the mistakes that leaders and the general population make tend to share similar characteristics.
Even for business people and technicians, knowledge of history helps in building a general understanding of how what you create and discover will land upon the public. It also helps in parsing out what is a social development and what is truly a scientific-technological development.
One of the reasons that Americans are the way that they are (and modern people in general), often bedazzled by what seem to be continually new developments, is because all developments are entirely new from their limited, childlike perspective. Certainly, this hasn’t always been the case — the founding generation and a couple of generations afterwards were deeply knowledgeable about both ancient and more recent history — but historical amnesia and a burning faith in the explanatory power of the social sciences are characteristic of westerners from the 20th century onward.
The top problem bedeviling most contemporary conservatives is that, not only do they conserve nothing, but they have no idea what it is that they are supposed to be conserving. It could at least be said that conservatives of the 1950s and 1960s knew the Bible, but it seems that today that it is mostly used as a prop for selfies and a source of cherry-picked and re-interpreted quotes rather than a cultural pillar.
People find themselves adrift in the present time, with few references about past events, and an extreme, obsessive focus on the lives of trivial people and unimportant events that just happen to be occurring now. Since there is no skeleton of historical context in the minds of the modern people, the only thing that they have is what draws their attention in the moment, which is usually some irrelevant plane crash, a pornographic video featuring a famous person, or the sad discovery of a slut’s corpse in a dumpster.
Just because something is happening now does not make it relevant, important, or even interesting. You study history because it gives you a chance to learn from the people who came before you, and to provide you with context that helps you to make more intelligent decisions. For some, the study is also inherently pleasurable, especially because the stories that have survived the indifference of the ages tend to be compelling ones.
I majored in Classics, graduated ’08. Even in a field based on dead languages and ancient history, the professors sold Latin as the best way to improve your LSATs. When asked why it was important to learn Latin or Greek (seeing as how everything had already been translated into English, of course), the response was always something geared toward present-orientation. It was along the lines of “We need people of today to tell us how the texts speak to us today.”
But the end result was not “Learn the wisdom of the ancients” so much as “Look, Ovid made poop jokes too, kids. How quirky and relevant!” or some sort of ancient validation of homosexuality.
Thankfully, when translating the Odyssey, you can’t help but learn something worthwhile, despite the best efforts of an awkward Marxist-Classicist dedicated to “being relevant”.
Feminist interpretations of Sophocles, etc.
I think what I’m getting from it nowadays is that if you read different translations, the feeling and message of the stories within can be radically different between versions. I can’t read the old languages, but I think the value is in reading the same version as was read historically. This is especially important with poetry, which has to be more comprehensively adapted in translation to be at all appealing.
An interesting example, though I can’t recall the exact part, is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I believe there was a speech or song or something-or-other given by a group of birds. In the original Latin, the birds were speaking in a particular dialect akin to an older, rural, hillbilly Latin.
The 19th-century translations, in keeping with the spirit of the text, rendered the birds speaking in a thick Scottish brogue.
The most recent popular translation, which we used, the birds rapped. As in, gansta-rapped.
Though most Latin and Greek has left me now (and though I hope to recover it), it’s still very valuable in reading the older texts because even a cursory knowledge of grammatical patterns and the process of translation allows you to catch where choices in translation are a major factor in understanding the text.
This holds for the Bible or really any other work, I think — even those not written in Latin or Greek. You can spot potential points of contention even without them being noted, and then have a very rough guide for going back and discovering why the choice was made in that manner, what other choices have been made in the past, and why that matters for the text.
This is why the American Puritans would jump between Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in their writing — to show command of the Bible in as close to the original language as possible.
An illustration of the dangers of illiteracy:
In my fraternity dining room, our resident “Campus Crusade for Christ” evangelical was discussing some sort of upcoming event about “Agape”.
In front of a rapt audience, and with an unbreakable straight face, I convinced him that “agape”, rather than a Greek word for “love”, was actually very specifically used in relation to pederastic homosexual relations in the ancient world. How could he not know this? How could his group promote the event under this name?
His face, full of horror at that point, still brings me chuckles.
Which particular dialect? Wasn’t it just Archaic Latin? It wasn’t widespread enough to form dialects, I believe.
I can’t remember, and my sources aren’t at hand. Might not have been a Latin dialect, so much as a Latin rendering of a Greek dialect. The translation with the “rap” was Charles Martin’s.
What is the most common rationale for humanities in general? Mental self-pleasuring? Status signalling?
That is the neutered version.
The past justification was political. The real justification is that it serves a useful political end in promoting the beautiful and the good. It also facilitates social cooperation by generating a common cultural framework.
Not to pick on you as an individual too much, but I’m tired of people babbling about ‘status signaling.’ Yes, it also signifies class distinction. But pick up a thesaurus and stop repeating the same phrases over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Also, today’s humanities performs a similar political function. It just does so in a degraded way.
For we Christians out there, learning our history really is just the commandment to Honour thy mother and father writ large. Somehow, our perverted society has turned this on its head and now each new generation teaches the last even more perverted/demented ideals than they had already embraced. All in the name of being progressive. The fact that it never occurs to the vast majority just how bassackward it is for motley bands of solipsistic young adults to be the drivers of “progress” (all ran by the New Left professors) is what boggles the mind.
Learning from history would imply someone from yesterday wasn’t an evil racist bigot. And we know from the average English professor that really that’s what they were, so how dare you try to repeat their successes and learn from their mistakes! Why, that would make you a patriarchalist. And on the wrong side of history to boot. Whatever the heck history is anyway.
Well put.