Chuck Klosterman X. Chuck Klosterman. Oliver Sacks. Story Genius. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Neil Postman. The Best Medicine. Theodore Dalrymple. Having and Being Had. The Right to Write. Julia Cameron. Because Internet. Gretchen McCulloch. The Sense of Style. Steven Pinker. Where Is the Mango Princess? Cathy Crimmins. Reclaiming Conversation.
Sherry Turkle. The Working Poor. David K. The Nolan Variations. Camilla Pang PhD. Robert M. Everybody Loves Our Town. The Age of Insight. Jonathan Haidt. The War for Kindness. The Second Mountain. David Brooks. The Personality Brokers. Related Articles. How do I even research it? How can anyone reach any solid conclusion about God? Was the truth even knowable? I needed to find them for myself. Instead, he posed: Could I have been created at all?
I took the bait and wandered off to do a little pondering on my own. Could I have been created? Where did that come from? My teachers offered me what I considered a sound explanation of where things started outside of a Creator, and no one told me anything else. But were those conclusions and beliefs correct? I started with the likelihood of a Big Bang. Was it possible that matter in space collided in some catastrophic way to create the universe?
On the flip side, could I buy into the idea that an intelligent being spoke this universe into existence? In truth, both options sounded equally unlikely. I understand science. I like science. Because I was already treading into uncharted waters, I hoped scientific discovery would offer me a way to fully grasp these ideas.
First, it is important to remember that history is more than a simple grab bag of examples and analogies you can ransack to fit your current question. The past is vast enough, if used indiscriminately, to provide whatever evidence you are looking for. The truth is that most people exploit history to validate their long-held theories and assumptions about how the world works.
If you worry about the dangers that may emerge by not challenging a rising authoritarian state, a visit to the s will provide ammunition for your argument. One of the best ways to use history is not only to identify how the present is similar to the past, but also how it is differen t.
Likening the current and future U. How can we best determine how our present and future are different from the past? In his book An Introduction to Contemporary History, Geoffrey Barraclough reminded his readers that there were still people alive while he was writing who had met Bismarck, yet the worlds of the Iron Chancellor and that of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B.
Johnson could not be more different or incomparable. The same is true today. Why does this matter? There will be many elements of international relations that may appear, on the surface, much like the past. In terms of American national security policy, how will these powerful if murky forces shape who America is, if and how it fights, and for what purposes? Some of the answers will look similar to the past, while many others profoundly different.
Another way we can deploy history more effectively is to think about perspective. What will our choices today look like in ? There is rarely a correct, a priori answer.
It all depends on what happens between now and then. My friend Janice Stein always says that when crafting policies, decision-makers should start with what they most want not to happen and work backwards from there. While that seems easy enough, the policy choices for the top two catastrophes decision-makers seek to avoid — a global war between China and the United States and a deepening climate cataclysm — may pull in different directions.
Historical perspective is also shaped by place. In the ensuing email exchanges, I saw how my views might have appeared less objective and derived more from the outlook of my own time, place, and view of history.
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