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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2972 thread views

History Classes Are Mostly Useless

parrhesia.substack.com

SS: Americans are rather ignorant about history. Moral reasoning by historical analogy is bad. Historical examples can be misleading for making predictions. These facts suggest that the utility of history courses is overestimated. In fact, they are mostly useless.

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These classes impress upon children the idealistic, shallow notion that individuals - not geopolitical trends and perpetual power imbalances - are responsible for shaping the course of history.

Of course they do. No society can survive when its children are taught from the outset that their society is not worth surviving. Children need to learn ideals toward which to strive, and be given a reason for participating positively as part of a larger society.

Independent students may later dig into the more complicated realities, but it's societal suicide to breed cynicism and self-loathing in kids, as we are possibly seeing now in the U.S., where kids have been taught eco doomerism and self-hating history since the 1990s.

eco doomerism

Was it really that? I feel like it was actually optimistic, the doomerism came later.

The famous quote has been going around because he got Ratioed recently, but:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate

It always seemed pretty doomery.

As someone who was around for Captain Planet, I must reiterate that I remember the messaging around environmental issues being generally optimistic, or at least saying that there were solutions. Population crash/mass die-off is something that has only recently re-entered the Overton window.

The 70s (Ehrlich's "Population Bomb") were the doom-and-disaster era where we were going to run out of oil, run out of room because of all the people, possibly freeze/possibly boil to death depending on whether it was the New Ice Age or Greenhouse Earth was in vogue, we might have Nuclear Winter due to World War III and generally civilisation would crash and take us all with it.

The 90s rebounded with optimism: sure, things are not great, but we can fix them if we do this now! "Captain Planet" and recycling and all the rest of it. Everything was green and ecological.

I suppose we're back in the trough now, after the peak. Maybe there's a new peak to follow, like the 90s followed the 70s.

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