I liked your post, and I’m probably the sort of person predisposed to like it (for context: history has been my favorite subject since I was 11; it was my first degree at university; I’ve read widely both in historical scholarship and in the meta-justifications for studying it). I’ve also been deeply steeped in the broader humanities, and that background has shaped how I see the world and what my preferences and the things I care about are. Still, statements like “the humanities exist to improve our minds” and “history improves us” strike me as mostly normative aspirations rather than accurate descriptions of how interaction with those fields typically functions.
The core difficulty with the “history as context” argument is not merely that context is selected, but that the criteria of selection are instrumentally shaped. In actual educational practice, the organizing framework is almost always the nation-state; history becomes a kind of secular civic religion that presents the polity as an inevitable, self-evident, and temporally continuous subject. That isn’t arbitrary so much as ideological: the selections are optimized for legitimacy, cohesion, and identity formation, not for epistemic clarity. The same issue appears in “history as memory,” where decisions about what is worth remembering—and how to interpret what is remembered—follow political, cultural, and institutional imperatives. Textbook committees and curricula do not behave like disinterested archivists; they behave like legitimacy-producing institutions.
I also have to admit that I don’t have strong evidence that history has “improved” me in any of the virtues usually invoked. I’ve enjoyed reading it, and learning about the actions, thoughts, constraints, and delusions of past humans. But I don’t think it has given me superior judgment, foresight, epistemic humility, or civic virtue relative to STEM peers. People often claim that the humanities make one more open, curious, or empathetic toward other societies; that they illuminate institutional dynamics or the grammar of civilizations. Maybe that can happen, but I’m not confident it did in my case. It is extremely easy to adopt a single interpretive lens—in my case for many years it was Marxism—and read everything through that filter, which produces narrative satisfaction without necessarily producing accurate models of reality.
This isn’t an argument against history or the humanities. It’s an argument against a certain idealized story we tell about them. If history improves people, the mechanism seems non-trivial: it requires meta-reflective skills, comparative reasoning, and some capacity for model-building. Those are not reliably taught within the discipline, and are often actively undermined by curriculum structures designed for identity formation rather than truth-seeking.
I liked your post, and I’m probably the sort of person predisposed to like it (for context: history has been my favorite subject since I was 11; it was my first degree at university; I’ve read widely both in historical scholarship and in the meta-justifications for studying it). I’ve also been deeply steeped in the broader humanities, and that background has shaped how I see the world and what my preferences and the things I care about are. Still, statements like “the humanities exist to improve our minds” and “history improves us” strike me as mostly normative aspirations rather than accurate descriptions of how interaction with those fields typically functions.
The core difficulty with the “history as context” argument is not merely that context is selected, but that the criteria of selection are instrumentally shaped. In actual educational practice, the organizing framework is almost always the nation-state; history becomes a kind of secular civic religion that presents the polity as an inevitable, self-evident, and temporally continuous subject. That isn’t arbitrary so much as ideological: the selections are optimized for legitimacy, cohesion, and identity formation, not for epistemic clarity. The same issue appears in “history as memory,” where decisions about what is worth remembering—and how to interpret what is remembered—follow political, cultural, and institutional imperatives. Textbook committees and curricula do not behave like disinterested archivists; they behave like legitimacy-producing institutions.
I also have to admit that I don’t have strong evidence that history has “improved” me in any of the virtues usually invoked. I’ve enjoyed reading it, and learning about the actions, thoughts, constraints, and delusions of past humans. But I don’t think it has given me superior judgment, foresight, epistemic humility, or civic virtue relative to STEM peers. People often claim that the humanities make one more open, curious, or empathetic toward other societies; that they illuminate institutional dynamics or the grammar of civilizations. Maybe that can happen, but I’m not confident it did in my case. It is extremely easy to adopt a single interpretive lens—in my case for many years it was Marxism—and read everything through that filter, which produces narrative satisfaction without necessarily producing accurate models of reality.
This isn’t an argument against history or the humanities. It’s an argument against a certain idealized story we tell about them. If history improves people, the mechanism seems non-trivial: it requires meta-reflective skills, comparative reasoning, and some capacity for model-building. Those are not reliably taught within the discipline, and are often actively undermined by curriculum structures designed for identity formation rather than truth-seeking.