If someone were to ask me why I read history, my reply would be in three words:  solace, advice, and examples for our edification.  Let me explain further.

There is so much that lies outside of our control.  If we are honest with ourselves, we would be forced to admit that nearly everything in our lives remains outside our control.  We do not influence the course of political events.  We have no steerage over economic policy.  At any moment, the hand of Fate may intervene in our lives with startling suddenness.  Confined aboard a ship piloted by a stranger of dubious integrity, we can do nothing to stop our captain’s headlong rush to ruin, even if we see it happening before our eyes.  These realities can be crushing to the spirits of those raised to trust in their own independence and autonomy.  Independence and autonomy, we discover to our dismay, have limits that are circumscribed with extreme narrowness. 

Within this whirlwind of uncertainty, this tornado of murky probabilities, the human soul seeks solace.  It hunts for refuge. We may find this shelter in different places; but no other source of solace resonates quite so compellingly as the study of history.  To observe how others have endured despite great hardships; to follow noble personalities as they triumph in desperate odds; and to bear witness to the resilience of the oppressed in the midst of terrible adversity:  are these not sources of continuing and meaningful solace?  Do they not offer some degree of comfort? 

Advice is another reason to study the past.  Everyone needs reliable counsel.  Is there any more reliable source of counsel than to examine the trajectory and resolution of a problem that has occurred again and again?  It is axiomatic that human nature does not change; and if we accept this premise, it follows that the same situations, and the same crises, repeat themselves.  To know how someone else mastered an analogous situation is the most durable advice obtainable. 

Finally, when I say examples to follow, I am referring to exemplars.  Tacitus believed that the historian’s primary duty was to make a record of virtue, and to indict the wicked and their foul deeds before the bar of posterity.  This is not, of course, a view shared by most historians today, for as Will Durant commented, it transforms history into a trial and the historian into judge and jury.  Yet even Herodotus wrote to ensure that the “great deeds” of the Greeks would not be forgotten.  Perhaps Tacitus was just being more honest than most chroniclers.  Is objectivity an illusion?  Or should it be seen as a spectrum, in which we should expect the historian not to be a robotic spewer of facts, but to maintain a balanced middle ground while avoiding extremities of passion? 

I would argue that most of the great historians—Tacitus, Sallust, Thucydides, Gibbon, Macaulay, etc.—were not “objective” in the modern sense of that term.  They all had specific motives behind their works.  No one imbued with passion for a project can, or should, be described as objective.  The word almost feels derogatory, as if the composer were lacking in spine.  We cannot use the phrase “axes to grind,” for that probably goes too far; but the great historians had specific philosophies, molded by their experiences and training, that pulsed like electric currents through their pages.  And because of this, they offered us examples to follow:  historical exemplars of thought and action.  If you wish to model yourself on something, choose a shining example from the pages of history.  

What history offers us is a secure basement as the tornado roars across the landscape over our heads.  It offers us constancy and stability.  And this is what Herman Melville captured in his short poem, “Lone Founts,” which I will reproduce in full:

Though fast youth’s glorious fable flies,

View not the world with worldling’s eyes;

Nor turn with weather of the time.

Foreclose the coming of surprise:

Stand where Posterity shall stand;

Stand where the Ancients stood before,

And, dipping in lone founts thy hand,

Drink of the never-varying lore:

Wise once, and wise thence evermore.

It is from these venerable lone founts that we must draw our sustenance.  Stand where posterity has stood; stand where the ancients stood before. Never will these guides betray us.  

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