Epilogism

What They Call Knowledge

History is like a museum where one can go to see the repository of the past, and taste the charm of olden days. It is a wonderful mirror in which we can see our own narratives. You can even track the past using DNA analyses. I am fond of literary history. Ancient history satisfies my desire to build my own self-narrative, my identity, to connect with my (complicated) Eastern Mediterranean roots. I even prefer the accounts of older, patently less accurate books to modern ones. Among the authors I’ve reread (the ultimate test of whether you like an author is if you’ve reread him) the following come to mind: Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius, Diodorus Siculus, Gibbon, Carlyle, Renan, and Michelet. These accounts are patently substandard, compared to today’s works; they are largely anecdotal, and full of myths. But I know this.

History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narrative (indeed), provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help in the future, without some caution. We can get negative confirmation from history, which is invaluable, but we get plenty of illusions of knowledge along with it.

Menodotus, an empirical doctor, approached the problem of induction by seeking to know history without theorizing from it. Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much—but if you do, do not make big scientific claims. Remember that the empirical skeptics had respect for custom: they used it as a default, a basis for action, but not for more than that. This clean approach to the past they called epilogism.[^46]

But most historians have another opinion. Consider the representative introspection What Is History? by Edward Hallett Carr. You will catch him explicitly pursuing causation as a central aspect of his job. You can even go higher up: Herodotus, deemed to be the father of the subject, defined his purpose in the opening of his work:

To preserve a memory of the deeds of the Greeks and barbarians, “and in particular, beyond everything else, to give a cause [emphasis mine] to their fighting one another.”

You see the same with all theoreticians of history, whether Ibn Khaldoun, Marx, or Hegel. The more we try to turn history into anything other than an enumeration of accounts to be enjoyed with minimal theorizing, the more we get into trouble. Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?[^47]

We may have to wait for a generation of skeptical-empiricist historians capable of understanding the difference between a forward process and a reverse one.

Just as Popper attacked the historicists in their making claims about the future, I have just presented the weakness of the historical approach in knowing the past itself.

[^46]: Yogi Berra might have a theory of epilogism with his saying, “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

[^47]: While looking at the past it would be a good idea to resist naïve analogies. Many people have compared the United States today to Ancient Rome, both from a military standpoint (the destruction of Carthage was often invoked as an incentive for the destruction of enemy regimes) and from a social one (the endless platitudinous warnings of the upcoming decline and fall). Alas, we need to be extremely careful in transposing knowledge from a simple environment that is closer to type 1, like the one we had in antiquity, to today’s type 2, complex system, with its intricate webs of causal links. Another error is to draw causal conclusions from the absence of nuclear war, since, invoking the Casanova argument of Chapter 8, the observers must have survived the history they are analyzing, and it is not a good idea for us to derive a “cause” when our survival is conditioned on that cause.