PART I:
CHAPTER 1
Graeme Davison
‘Histories make men wise’, the Elizabethan essayist Francis Bacon declared.1 He was repeating the wisdom of the ancients: that the past furnished lessons for both leaders and citizens. The study of history long remained an essential part of the preparation of politicians, soldiers and many professions. Only in the last half-century has it been sidelined by other disciplines such as economics, law and political science in the university curriculum and the halls of power. When the Australian government in 2020 introduced reforms to make university graduates more ‘job ready’, it actually increased the cost of history degrees; ironically, the minister was himself a history graduate!
Now historians have begun to fight back. In The History Manifesto (2014) David Armitage and Jo Guldi issue a rousing call to arms. Historians, they suggest, have only themselves to blame for their marginalisation. They ‘hardly ever consider how history might promote human flourishing, nor do we debate whether some forms of historical work would advance it better than others’. Too much academic history is too narrowly framed and too inwardly directed. Meanwhile many of the most urgent questions of our time, from climate change to rising social inequality, cry out for the big-picture knowledge and long-term thinking that only historians can provide. ‘Historians of the world, unite!’ they urge. ‘There is a world to win – before it’s too late.’2
The History Manifesto drew enthusiastic support from some historians, scorn and scepticism from others.3 Some objected to its apocalyptic tone, others to the naivety of the authors’ belief that big history and big data could unlock the great problems of the age. Not all the most urgent issues of our time are global in scope, others insisted: what about the more intimate histories of race, sexuality and identity that inspired the liberationist causes of the past half-century and drew so much of the political and intellectual energy of contemporary historians – was this of no account?
Behind the divided responses to The History Manifesto lies a fundamental question, one that scholars and policymakers have often debated but never conclusively settled. They agree that history has – or ought to have – lessons for present-day decision-makers, but they are unsure about what they are. Is historical knowledge integral to the resolution of current policy dilemmas? Or is it, at best, useful background information? Can the techniques that explain events in the past be applied to planning the future? Or is the past such a foreign country that the traveller who knows its terrain best is also unable to venture into the future?
The wisdom of hindsight
Historians enjoy the benefit – or is it the handicap? – of hindsight. How often have you heard a politician, reminded of a policy gaffe, reply with irritation: ‘Well, of course, with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight …’ Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has had more than a few such reminders during the COVID-19 pandemic, even labelled his critics ‘hindsight heroes’.4 There’s a subtext here: only those in the room where it happened can really appreciate the push and pull of contending forces, the clash of opinions and arguments, and the intrinsic risks of politics. Those who dissect decisions after the event are mere spectators; wise but impotent. Yet when they write their memoirs, becoming historians of their own actions, only a rare politician – Barack Obama might be an example – acknowledges these uncertainties. More often, hindsight kicks in to justify, rather than explain, their actions.
My old friend, the economic historian John McCarty, used to compare the roles of the historian and the football pundit. In his retirement, the famous Collingwood footballer Lou Richards wrote a popular column for the Sun newspaper. Every Friday he reviewed the form and picked his winners, summarising the reasons for their expected success. If he felt particularly confident, he would say: ‘If Collingwood doesn’t win on Saturday, I’ll sweep Swanston Street with a feather duster.’ And sure enough, if Collingwood lost, the Sun’s front page on Monday would show Lou on his knees in the middle of the intersection. In his column he would explain, as confidently as he had previously explained why Collingwood was going to win, why it had actually lost. All the reasons that had pointed to the team’s success were forgotten and replaced by factors he hadn’t even considered on Friday. Historians, McCarty observed, are like football pundits who only write on Mondays. They never have to subject their explanations to the test of prediction or get on their knees with a feather duster.
Predicting the future, even when you have mastered the playbook of the past, is much harder than predicting next week’s football results. Perhaps that’s why claims for the value of history in current politics are often made tentatively or in the negative. George Santayana’s famous aphorism ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ is an example.5 History, it implies, may save us from repeating some past errors, even if it can’t tell us what we should do or what will actually happen. Historians tend to be less comfortable in the role of policy advisers than social scientists trained in positivist disciplines like economics. ‘History is a discipline infused with particularity, irony and contingency’, some British historians of public policy shrewdly observe.6 Our intellectual bias is towards complication rather than simplification. In policy debates we prefer the role of critic, of dousing the overly confident prognoses of other social scientists with the cold water of historical experience, to that of the futurist or prophet.
Santayana’s aphorism rests on the assumption that yesterday’s mistakes are recognisable enough for the historian to spot them when they reappear. But does history actually repeat itself? The distinguished war historian Michael Howard concludes his book The Lessons of History (1989) on a sceptical note: ‘Each new generation is presented with new problems and new challenges, and analogies drawn from the past are likely to be more of a hindrance than a help in solving them … If the past has anything to teach us’, he writes, ‘it is humility – and suspicion of glib formulae for improving the lot of mankind’.7
As a military historian, Howard challenged an old tradition in which old battles were dissected in the classroom to prepare future commanders for the field. He widened the perspective beyond battlefield tactics to take in the wider array of forces – social and political as well as strategic – that influenced the outcome of conflicts. But such interpretative breadth comes at a cost; for the richer and more complex the story, the harder it is to extract easy lessons from it. The only lessons history has to teach, Howard decided, were the negative ones, of exploding myths and denouncing false prophets who put history at the service of ideology.
He may have been thinking of Marxists or other believers in what the philosopher Karl Popper called ‘historicism’ – the possibility of reading the future from the past. But by the end of the twentieth century few Marxists were still historicists. ‘We do not know where we are going’, the most famous Marxist historian of his generation, Eric Hobsbawm, wrote in the conclusion of The Age of Extremes (1994).8 While he could plot the contours of change across the twentieth century, and held onto his socialist faith that capitalism was doomed, Hobsbawm could not tell when or how it would end. This did not mean, he insisted, that the historian could have no influence on the future. Indeed, he argued, ‘we alone in the field of human studies must think in terms of historical change, interaction and transformation’. The historian’s understanding of the ‘limits, potentialities and consequences of human action’, Hobsbawm suggested, was essential for good public policy.9
Some seasoned politicians and policymakers have been less reluctant than historians to draw lessons from the past. Students in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government once sought solutions to current policy dilemmas in the history of past crises.10 In Great Planning Disasters (1980), the distinguished town planner Peter Hall reviewed a selection of failed plans – from London’s Motorways Concorde to the Sydney Opera House – seeking ‘rules of thumb’ for present-day planners.11 Why do historians hold back from such experiments? They may rightly fear that analogies will mislead rather than inform current decision-makers, pointing to cases like George W. Bush’s invocation of the Munich appeasement crisis in his decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Yet, since policymakers cannot refrain from historical analogies, it may be all the more important for scholars with a more complete knowledge of history, and a more subtle grasp of historical contingency, to be in the room where decisions are made. And while historical precedents may not tell us what to do, or what will happen, they may prompt fruitful questions.
The truth of the past
Michael Howard’s image of the historian as a myth-slayer or impartial witness calls to mind one of the most significant contemporary scenes of historical inquiry: the law court or tribunal. Any historian who has appeared as an expert witness is likely to have been struck by the similarities and profound differences between the protocols of the law and of the historical profession.12 Critical to both are concepts of evidence, truth-telling, contestation and balanced judgment. Yet historians, especially over the past 30 years, with the advent of postmodernism and critical literary studies, have often felt disabled by ‘the vertigo of relativity’.13
‘In academia’, notes Tom Griffiths, ‘we often rightly focus on the elusiveness and contestability of truth, but historians also have a civic responsibility to insist on the possibility of truth.’14 In his book In Defence of History, the distinguished British historian Richard Evans reflects on his experience as an expert witness in the courtroom battle between the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving and his American critic Deborah Lipstedt. History, he concedes, may be an uncertain form of inquiry, in which rival value systems and limited knowledge influence the investigator’s conclusions, but it is not so uncertain that some propositions, such as that Hitler bore no responsibility for the Holocaust, cannot be objectively ruled out.15 Like many other historians, Evans sought a middling position that acknowledged the contingency of historical inquiry but upheld its powerful probative value.
Telling the truth about history becomes more onerous in an era of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’. Academic history was shaped by the assumptions and protocols of a civic realm where opinion was tested by evidence and robust public debate. But as the channels of communication have multiplied, the sources of reliable information have shrunk along with the civic space for reasoned debate. Myths and lies – medical, religious, political and historical – circulate on the wild frontier of cyberspace, apparently unchecked by evidence or reasoned debate. ‘Honest History’, the website ‘supporting balanced and honest history’ created by David Stephens, Peter Stanley and their Canberra colleagues, is a valiant local attempt to wrestle this rampaging Goliath to the ground.16
When they lost faith in grand narratives of emancipation and progress, historians often turned to the past, either for consolation, or, increasingly, to settle accounts with its victims. In Australia, where the sins of the past were grievous and long buried, that task has been especially pertinent and burdensome. Australian historians have led the still-unfinished task of reckoning with the colonial legacy of dispossession, murder and exploitation of the First Peoples. ‘Truth-telling’ – one of the three main themes of the Uluru Statement from the Heart – is also the title of a recent book by Henry Reynolds (NewSouth, 2021), who has devoted his 40-year career to the historical encounter between the European and Aboriginal people.17
According to the Uluru Statement, telling the truth about the past is a prerequisite for healing, reconciliation and restitution in the present.18 Only when we know the truth, will we all – Black and White – be truly free. This assumption shapes other narratives of ‘truth and reconciliation’, such as the victim statements given in court proceedings or the pursuit of ‘historical’ cases of child abuse or sexual exploitation. Academic historians continue to play a significant role in these inquiries, although the bigger challenge may be to persuade other Australians of the truth of what is already well known. There is a risk, moreover, when the truths are hard, that telling them may reinforce fatalism rather than hope. Henry Reynolds is well aware of this trap and in celebrating the heroes of the ‘First Land Rights Movement’ – the humanitarian reformers of the early nineteenth century – he lays a foundation for a narrative of hope.19
Telling the history of the future: Hugh Stretton
Our overdue reckoning with the sins of the past cannot absolve historians from thinking about the challenges of the future. We are aware – perhaps more conscious than any recent generation– that we live in turbulent times. What can historians contribute to the task of navigating them? The twentieth century taught us the hazards of attempting to predict the future from the past; yet policies made in ignorance of the past are surely even more hazardous. Modern managers were often explicitly trained to root out institutional memory.20 Is there a middle path that acknowledges the perils of hindsight, the uncertainty of historical knowledge and the burdens of the past, yet enables us to play a constructive, as well as a critical, role in policy debates?
No Australian historian has thought as deeply about these questions as Hugh Stretton (1924–2015).21 He was regarded in his time as one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals and a social democratic thinker of international stature. With the rise of neoliberalism, his reputation declined. Now, as COVID-19 and climate change challenge the neoliberal paradigms that have governed public policy for the past 40 years, his writings may attract renewed interest.
Stretton was born and educated in Melbourne and served in the Australian Navy during the Second World War before winning a Rhodes Scholarship to study history at Balliol College, Oxford. ‘It is the more immediate and material function of history to make ready the tests and lessons of the past for application to the problems of the future’, he wrote in his scholarship application. ‘I learn what I can of the history of ancient and modern civilisations so that I may better understand the tasks that lie ahead of my generation in the troubled and perilous future.’22 This high-minded declaration was no platitude. His father, Judge Leonard Stretton, had demonstrated the perils of historical amnesia in a famous Royal Commissioner’s report on the 1939 bushfires. Hugh’s interest was further stimulated by his studies at Melbourne University, where his teacher Max Crawford’s 1946 paper ‘History as a Science’ became a lively subject of debate.
In Oxford, Stretton was an academic star, winning a college fellowship even before he sat his final examinations. He respected some Oxford historians but they did not share his urgent interest in the political uses of history. In 1954, aged just 30, he returned to Australia as Professor of History at the University of Adelaide. He had not written a doctoral thesis, entered an archive or published a history monograph. Only in his forties did he begin to publish, and then not history books but a series of strikingly original works on social philosophy and urban planning, such as The Political Sciences (1969), Ideas for Australian Cities (1970), Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment (1976), Urban Planning in Rich and Poor Countries (1978) and (his final book) a mammoth textbook titled Economics: A New Introduction (2015). Many readers may not have guessed he was a historian. Even Stretton himself sometimes doubted it. Yet, from first to last, his thinking about public policy was deeply historical. He was not a policy wonk who taught history on the side; everything he wrote about public policy drew on his understanding of history.
In 1992 Stretton accepted an invitation to address the ‘Ideas Summit’ in Canberra convened by his friend Donald Horne in an effort to lift the quality of public debate. He took the opportunity to advocate the value of history for policymakers. Three qualities, scarce in modern social science, were characteristic of history: it was holistic, uncertain and eclectic.
Who study societies of every kind, study them whole, know most about how they conserve or change their ideas and institutions, write in plain language, and generally know how uncertain and selective their knowledge is at best? Historians do. Their vocation is – roughly speaking – to give as good foundation as scholarship can to the kind of selective-but-holistic discourse about society that politicians, public servants, journalists and citizens use every day to arrive at their political judgments and policies. We should stop tagging historians as the people who study the dead past, and see them as the people who do their best – at whatever cost in certainty and precision – to study how whole societies conserve and change their social life.23
The value of studying history, Stretton suggests, is not in the specific information it imparts, or even the analogies it offers with contemporary problems, but something more elusive: a way of reasoning, an intellectual style, a trained capacity to think about problems in a distinctive way. His students were not trained to become cogs in an economic or political machine. They had acquired something more valuable, an ability to think historically about the future.
History and planning, Stretton argued, are kindred activities. In explaining events in the past, we employ a similar combination of values and skills that we can apply in planning the future. History is a corrective to narrowly technical approaches to planning. In telling us how things came to be, it illuminates the taken-for-granted, and potentially changeable, assumptions behind our way of life. By reviewing the chains of historical causation, it gives us a grasp of the complex, and often unforeseen, interactions between facets of society often studied separately. It illuminates the causes and effects of policies and decisions that seemed sound at the time but turned out to be flawed. It attends to the importance of different time scales in the process of planning. And it tells us something of what the present owes to the past and, in turn, what it might owe to the future.
Stretton’s boldest experiments in applying history to public policy took the form of scenarios – attempts to foresee the consequences of different policy choices by constructing imaginary, but realistic, narratives of their outworking. In the final chapter of his Political Essays (1987) he writes: ‘A long utopian tradition teaches that the best way to look forward is to look back. To foretell futures, set yourself a generation or a century ahead and tell your future as histories.’24 He first attempted such scenarios in Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment. The book appeared in 1976, in the aftermath of the oil price hike, as policymakers were debating how to deal with the likely rapid depletion of oil and other natural resources, but well before awareness of climate change deepened the sense of crisis. Which policies – far right, moderate right or moderate left – were likely to produce the best outcomes for different classes and for society as a whole? His scenarios, he emphasised, were not predictions, or even good fictions. ‘But they start from here and now and try to deal in real types of social interest and conflict and realistic mechanisms of historical change … This is a useful way to judge programs. If the history which seems to be required to fulfill a program is implausible, that may prompt second thoughts about the program.’25 Because you can’t foresee everything, he suggests, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to foresee as much as you can. If you want an example of the folly of a policy without a plan, look no further than Brexit. Only when the referendum passed did it become apparent how little consideration its supporters had given to the obstacles in their path.
After the longest period of peace and prosperity in the history of the planet, once again we face a ‘troubled and perilous future’. A season of catastrophic bushfires, more terrifying even than those of 1939 and 2009, brought home the perils of climate change for the inhabitants of the driest continent over the summer of 2019–20. Inverting the history of seventeenth-century London, fire was followed by plague, a global pandemic whose end is not yet in sight as I write. Simultaneously, tectonic changes in the global balance of power have unsettled Australia’s external security. As they grapple with the consequences of these events, politicians and journalists often reach for the word which topped the Australian National Dictionary’s 2020 popularity poll: we are living, they say, in ‘unprecedented times’. Historians may quibble. Yes, indeed, there are features of this virus, and these historical circumstances, that are new, but not so new that the past has nothing to teach us.
Lessons from history: Thinking historically about the future
How might historians, following Stretton’s lead, contribute to policies for a post-COVID-19 Australia? ‘We need history because some things cannot be recognised as they happen,’ Tom Griffiths shrewdly remarks.26 We are more likely to recognise where we are, and what we are up against, if we place ourselves in historical perspective. In the first phase of the pandemic, many people hoped that the plague would quickly pass and our world would simply ‘snap back’ to 2019. The longer it continues, and the more its costs accumulate, the less likely that seems. Already it has lasted twice as long as the 1919 Spanish flu and, while the mortality in Australia is barely one-quarter of the previous pandemic, its impact on our more mobile, affluent and globally connected society is likely to be more enduring. If the country escaped relatively lightly during the first phase of this pandemic, it was because of historical advantages also apparent in 1919: strong borders (our restrictive immigration and quarantine policies sprang from a common root) and a utilitarian rather than libertarian approach to public health policy. Most of the conflicts that appeared in 2020–21 – between the Commonwealth and the states, hard and soft quarantine, rich and poor suburbs – also occurred in 1918. But there were big differences too: the Spanish flu killed more young people, there was no effective vaccine and – crucially – their protected agricultural–manufacturing economy was less vulnerable to shocks than our open trading service-oriented economy.
In 2006–2007, in anticipation of a future influenza pandemic, the distinguished American medical historian Howard Markel and his colleagues undertook a study of the effectiveness of the non-pharmaceutical interventions in the 1918 pandemic.27 During the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, journalists and public officials often turned to Markel for advice. But by 2021, with the arrival of the Delta strain, and growing resistance to traditional public health measures, Markel had concluded that the lessons of 1918 were exhausted. ‘We need to stop thinking back to 1918 as a guide to how to act in the future,’ he warned. ‘This is the pandemic I will be studying and teaching to the next generation of doctors and public health officials.’ His change of mind appeared in The Atlantic review under the title ‘History Won’t Help Us Now’.28 Yet Markel was not abandoning history at all, but simply recognising that COVID-19 was now part of it. As the past changes, so must our histories, and so will their lessons.
For a stimulating example of someone thinking historically about a post-COVID-19 future, I recommend Janet McCalman’s essay ‘It’s possible’ (2020). In 1945, McCalman reminds us, Australia and the world faced a future scarcely less ‘troubled and perilous’ than our own: millions of people dead, displaced, homeless and unemployed, many of the cities and economies of Europe in ruins, and over all the looming global threat of nuclear war. Yet, as we know now, ordinary people were on the threshold of the most remarkable period of prosperity in the history of the planet. What saved them was the heroic work of national and international reconstruction undertaken by the Attlee administration in Britain, the Curtin and Chifley governments in Australia and by the international agencies. ‘This story is important to retell,’ says McCalman, ‘because it gives us hope and a model.’29 COVID-19 has suddenly forced governments to abandon financial austerity and assume larger responsibilities for public health and welfare – might they now ‘return’ to something like the ambitions and values of postwar reconstruction? McCalman’s narrative of hope is something like one of Hugh Stretton’s scenarios – a vision of a better future inspired and informed by history.30
History and historians have a critical part to play in the conversation about what comes next. The past may be a different country, but not so foreign that it has no lessons for us. Critical reflection on the paths we have followed in the past is essential if we are to think beyond the straightjacket of current policy choices. Occasionally historians will be in the room where the big decisions are made. Much more often they will write the books and lead the debates that shape the politicians’ and policymakers’ thinking. As Hugh Stretton recognised, it may be more important for historians to educate the decision-makers to think historically than to participate in the decisions themselves.