Two concepts of historical thinking

A ramble on today's unbearable book talk

ChatGPT generated this with the prompt ‘give me an image on thinking historically’

As I spent the last two hours listening to an American professor talking about ‘thinking historically’, I couldn’t help but think: Americans don’t get history.

I don’t mean it in the simple sense that the average American doesn’t know their country’s history. Obviously, they do not. In a deeper sense, even ‘experts’ don’t get history. The fact that the speaker is a well-respected, well-published and prominent professor of history invited to speak at the Hoover Institution, a preeminent think tank known for its expertise in history, only accentuates my point.

The book presented today is Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy by Prof. Francis Gavin of JHU, who also directs the prestigious Henry A. Kissinger Centre for Global Affairs at SAIS. The book will undoubtedly contain well-researched facts and reflective judgments to my benefit. Since I haven’t read it and do not plan to, this quick essay reflects only my thoughts on his book talk, not the book itself.

In all fairness, this book is aimed at policy-makers, specifically advising them on ‘thinking historically’. His claims make more sense in this restricted domain. He repeatedly used the term ‘decision-makers’, which clearly meant politicians. I find it foul to my ear to designate politicians with the exclusive term of ‘decision-makers’. This is 2025; if we learned anything from recent political history, it is the bureaucratic deadlock, inaction, paralysis and hair-splitting indecisions in political machineries, not their capacity for momentous change. I would have preferred the title ‘indecision-makers’ for politicians. And any good student of history (or just anyone who pays attention, really) would know that world-changing decisions often happen outside the political theatre, and especially in this day and age, could happen in offices, bedrooms, garages (in the case of Steve Jobs), villages, factories, schools, anywhere.

Admittedly, this is a small terminological quarrel that nonetheless reflects Gavin’s DC-centric view on thinking historically. To Gavin, history is a persuasive device that the DC-eager historians can use to talk to politicians, a tool which has the potential to be useful but often isn’t because historians have made a fool of themselves through phrases like ‘it’s complicated’, ‘it’s about the context’, ‘it’s a matter of contingency’, ‘it depends’, ‘it’s a matter of circumstances’, etc. Sure, politicians who make consequential choices won’t find wishy-washy answers helpful. History clearly isn’t alone in being a confusing subject; didn’t George Bernard Shaw once say that ‘If all the economists were laid end to end, they‘d never reach a conclusion’?

I’m sure there are better ways to do history-based policy advisory. As a professor at SAIS and director of Kissinger Center, Gavin is well qualified to ruminate on and prescribe for this niche. My main problem with his presentation - the reason why I became so agitated and offended by his talk - was in the things unsaid, and the frivolity with his view of history.

I situate myself in a Chinese tradition of ‘thinking historically’. I do not wish to venture immodestly to claim I am an ‘intellectual’, except when this means someone who cares about good empirics and public affairs. And for Chinese intellectuals, history is existential. In his book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, Ian Johnson describes this well. And the People’s Republic is a country that faced rounds of abhorrent political disasters - from the Anti-Rightist Campaigns, Great Leap Famine, Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Massacre, to the repression of Falungong, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslim groups and more recently Zero Covid Lockdowns, history matters both for the state and the people.

Every historical event is a contest of power and voices. Xi Jinping clearly gets the existential risk of history when he quoted a 19th-century Confucian scholar’s saying, ‘To destroy a country, you must first eradicate its history.’ The state regularly conducts mental acrobatics to justify its existence and continued dominance over society by rewriting, using and abusing history, despite its own glaring failures over its 76 years of history. In its official historiography, it chooses to tell the stories of foreign aggression - in the Opium War, the Eight-Nation Alliance, WW2 and the Korean War - to establish a narrative of unification and as a protector of all Chinese people. It also tries to claim credit to the fruits of progress where it can, most obviously with the Reform and Opening Up (though this legacy is under redefinition by the party).

For a society that suffered under communist rule, its history is different. It is a story of continued repression and persecution by a state that repeatedly cracked down on individual thoughts, religious customs, material affluence, educational opportunities, freedom of migration, child births or even basic human survival. And you don’t need to traverse far to see the pattern; just as anyone above the age of 80 about the Famine, 60 about the Cultural Revolution, 50 about Tiananmen, and 20 about Zero-Covid Lockdowns. History is present and alive, for the historical traumas left unprocessed throughout the ages, which were prohibited from discussion, investigation and prescription, will live even long past personal human memory and become a family trauma passed down through generations.

For Chinese intellectuals, China’s grievances were often less attributable to foreigners a hundred or two years ago, and much more to the Chinese state. The public-spirited Chinese intellectuals vow ‘never again’ to Maoist fanaticism, Deng’s ruthlessness, bloodshed, and Jiang’s securitisation of society. They contrast present practices with ancient history. Some, such as Qin Hui, diagnose China’s problems in the invention of imperialism at the turn of the Zhou-Qin dynasty. Others look to the transitions between the Sui-Tang, Song-Yuan, Ming-Qing, and Qing-Republican China to understand China today. The historical lens provides the weighty recognition of China’s political conundrum, an approach that consequently calls for patience, resilience and, in some cases, a regretting pessimism.

Few places on earth feel the weight of history more strongly than China. The geography of China certainly has a long history, though it did not always exist as one unified political unit called ‘China’. However, the same pattern of political contestation over history isn’t unique to China. Across authoritarian regimes, be it in Ottoman Turkey, Tsarist Russia, Modi’s India, Latin America, we see attempts at legitimation through writing nationalist history - some version of defeating aggressive foreigners to establish our own nationhood. And in response, the public-spirited intellectuals who rebel against the state’s narrative of history and attempts at justifying the present existence fight back with alternative histories of opposition. Xi Jinping calls this ‘historical nihilism’, a confusing term on its own but speaks to his fear of spiritual defeat by alternative national stories against his state.

Authoritarianism is unfortunate for the people living in it, but perhaps in a twisted way, it is a blessing for the subject of history. Political actions are met with reactions, repression only provokes a heightened attention to history and the facts the state so desperately tries to bury. ‘Thinking historically’ under an authoritarian regime is therefore a matter of nationhood, freedom, sacrifice, suffering, repression, personal grievances and so much more. It is a recognition of present problems as symptomatic of deeper causes stemming from long traditions, a caution against naivety in seeking quick, simple fixes, and an open mind to the possibilities of change. And in authoritarian regimes, no self-respecting historians would take pride in being an instrument of the state through their history-making. There are plenty of such activities by the eager professors who crave for attention and favouritism of the high court and readily present their intellectual support to the project of state legitimation. The state frequently coopts elites for its own ends. But through its constant investment, the state also keeps the subject of history - and archaeology, classics, philosophy, literature and many other subjects useful to state legitimation - alive.

And none of the above was reflected in Gavin’s talk today about ‘thinking historically’. So as I look back to the book talk today, I find myself wondering about my feeling of offense. I find it completely acceptable that the youthful political geography of America of a couple of centuries old should produce historians of world significance, for history as a subject is a rational enterprise, not a background check. But for American historians such as Gavin to speak in a universalist voice that defines ‘thinking historically’ in terms of his DC-centric consciousness, and to proclaim not only that this is the ‘American’ way but ‘the’ way of ‘thinking historically’, history is relegated to a degenerate place of servitude, an instrument for the political elites to wield at will and to their benefits. This is a view on history that I cannot begin to accept.

Of course, not all American history professors think alike. Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny also recommends thinking historically, with 20 bullet points on resisting political tyranny. And I very much doubt today’s moderator Steve Kotkin agrees much with Gavin, since Kotkin clearly understands the importance of history for Russia and China, the view of dissident intellectuals, and is an incredibly thoughtful and eloquent communicator of public history. I should be fair to historians other than Gavin, though, seeing the nods in the room as Gavin spoke, he was certainly not alone.

It is a blessing that the country of the United States of America (barring indigenous Indians) has not suffered domestic political violence to the extent many other parts of the world have. In fact, America is precisely made up of people running away from those events - dictatorships, famines, genocide, civil wars, and invasions. But the memory of suffering is quickly lost as immigrants focus on their new American dream. Families often bury their painful stories to the deepest abyss of their consciousness, leaving their offsprings born on American soil oblivious to their own histories. Every American citizen is a new citizen. They start afresh, waving an eager bye-bye to the past and an optimistic hello to the future.

A shared history is a cultural technology. It defines a collective origin, a path, and a destiny. It is a story that peoples study, debate, contest, bond and ever wage wars over. If I were an American, thinking historically would mean thinking revolution, slavery, civil war, Wild West, gold rush, Chinese immigrants, tycoons, prohibition, WW1, equal suffrage, the Great Depression, New Deal, WW2, nuclear power, Marshall Plan, Korean War, Vietnam War, space race, arms race, detente, end of USSR, war on drugs, wars in Iraq, 911, Financial Crisis, Obama and Trump. It is an invitation for conversation and reckoning at the deepest sources of disagreement, with the highest stakes, and an opportunity to observe the web of meaning-making through a common history. To think historically in this sense applies equally to politicians, researchers, citizens, and even foreigners. Just as history is existential for China, it is for America too.

When I told ChatGPT to ‘give me a Chinese person instead’