Will We Ever Learn?

Why history rhymes

Photo by John Cardamone on Unsplash

I had the privilege of interviewing Milton Friedman for EconTalk a few months before he died. I asked him about public demand for price controls and economic literacy and he answered:

…we are now only 20 or 30 years from when we had price controls [on gasoline]. And so a large fraction of the population had personal experience with it. Twenty or 30 years from now, after there’s nobody living who had experience with price controls, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it come back again.

Friedman was channeling his inner George Santayana who said:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Santayana is often misquoted as referring to people who don’t study history but I think that inaccurate version is propagated by history professors eager for higher levels of enrollment in their classes. I want to take Santayana literally in support of Friedman’s claim: only those who are alive with actual memories of the past have a chance of internalizing its lessons. That is, those who cannot remember the past and who have merely read about it, are condemned to repeat it.

It’s a bleak perspective on civilization that seems to contradict the progress the humanity has made over the last few thousand years. But that progress is primarily scientific and technological, the kind of knowledge does not have to be rediscovered. There is a great chain of norms and practices that allows previous scientific discoveries and understandings to be passed along. Newton could stand on the shoulders of giants; he didn’t have to start from scratch.

But history is different. To take an example that is close to home, Most Jews (I was in this group) in America and Europe in the aftermath of the Holocaust foolishly assumed that the systematic murder of 6 millions Jews would inoculate the world against Jew-hatred and violence against. And the mistaken focus on Holocaust education was an attempt to extend that vaccine into the future with every new generation. How wrong we were.

It turns out that studying the Holocaust is nothing like experiencing it or knowing people who experienced it. Once those people become fewer in number, the Holocaust becomes a history lesson outside of direct experience, and I think Santayana (and Milton) were right—book learning does not have the same impact as lived experience.

I’ve been reading The Age of Extremes by Eric Hobsbawm, a history of the 20th century. He mentions in passing the world’s disinterest in free-market economics in the aftermath of the Great Depression and WWII. Unfettered capitalism was blamed for the Great Depression, so once the war was over, it was natural that some version of the central planning of the war effort that had successfully built the arsenal of democracy would be turned toward consumer goods and the economy as a whole.

Ignore whether that indictment of capitalism is correct. Surely Hobsbawm is right that most Americans and Europeans did take that lesson to heart from their bitter experiences of the 1930s. The Mont Pelerin Society—created in 1947 to preserve the ideas of free-market economics—was little more than a few handfuls of economists and intellectuals who felt otherwise. Those people were in the intellectual wilderness, ignored and mocked. Yet somehow, once enough time had passed and enough people who had lived through the Gread Depression passed away, ideas about the power of markets re-entered the policy conversation once it began to become clear that the Soviet Union was not as successful economically as it appeared. Given how vilified capitalism was beforehand a generation or two beforehand, that might have seemed wildly improbable.

And while the world did not get anything like free-market capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, surely the enthusiasm for extensive central planning would never return. The failure of the Soviet Union and the cruelty of the Gulag would surely kill any interest in that model. And yet, when the people who lived through the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall began to age and die, and as young people came along who knew the face of communism only from a textbook (or not at all), the popularity for some alternative to the decentralized decision-making of even the mixed economy, grew. Socialism—government control of economic decisions—has to be better than leaving the economy in the hands of greedy corporations, goes the argument. The worship of socialism is on the rise, especially among the young. Mayor Mamdani’s plan for government-run grocery stores selling food at well below market prices is just one example.

People on both sides of the ideological divide despair over the reality that what they see as bad ideas, never die. I’ve always thought of it as the triumph of hope over experience. This time will be different, says the activist. This time we’ll do it right. But Santayana is saying that it’s the triumph of hope in a world of amnesia. The lessons of experience die out and uninformed optimism carries the day in the policy sphere.

What did we learn from Covid? I think most parents of young children whose schools were closed look back on that decision with deep anger at the serious costs relative to very small benefits. That is part of the reason trust in so-called experts—in this case, public health officials—is so low. But when there is a future pandemic and those parents are no longer alive, I wonder if the lessons of school closings will be remembered.

Or consider the financial crisis of 2008. I think the most important lesson to be learned from the financial crisis is that bailing out creditors and thereby creating an expectation of future bailouts of creditors, removes the most important incentive for prudence in our financial system. Despite my best efforts to spread this idea (only $1.99 on your Kindle!), I have to concede that it is not widely appreciated. Rather, people learned a different lesson from their experience—seemingly sure things like housing appreciation may not always be a sure thing. Or deregulation is bad even though it was government intervention (those bailouts) that helped light the fire that ultimately consumed the housing market. I think “we” (whatever that actually means) learned the wrong lesson. But even the narrow lesson which is undoubtedly true, that not all assets will always appreciate in value, was probably only learned by those who were burned personally. Here in Jerusalem, people who did not live in say, Las Vegas or Phoenix in the first decade of the 21st century, think housing prices in Jerusalem can only go up.

Here in Israel, perhaps the most important lesson from October 7th is that we were wildly over-reliant on technology to keep our borders secure and that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. But eternal is a very long time. I worry that we will forgot this lesson sooner than later. I wrote an essay on it—Eternal Vigilance Never Lasts. Those who have lived through this moment will understand its lessons without having to read it. I worry that reading it sometime in the future when we have had a quiet few decades (let me dream) will not be sufficient to internalize its lessons.

All of this is an application of Adam Mastroianni’s deep insight that you cannot reach the brain through the ears. Being told something, reading something in a book, hearing a lecture, is nothing like what happens to our understanding when we experience it in our own lives. Of course, we often misinterpret our experience. My dad, born in 1930 with a Great Depression childhood never invested in the stock market. I think that was the wrong lesson to learn from the 1930s but that was my dad’s experience as a boy and all my economic erudition about the power of indexed mutual funds could not deter him from buying bonds. And instead of buying stocks to boost his overall return, he bought junk bonds. I think he was wrong (a rare misstep—he was a very wise man.) But he learned from experience and that experience was burned into his intuitive consciousness and was seemingly unalterable.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m a big fan of history and the study of history. I like book learning. But the standard model of lecturing and taking notes as a form of education, is, I believe, mostly a terrible way to become wiser. It’s good mostly for giving exams, not making students smarter. As someone (the actual origins of the quote are murky) once described it:

Lecturing is that mysterious process by means of which the contents of the notebook of the professor are transferred to the notebook of the student without passing through the brains of either.

Which is just a longer and more amusing version of Mastroianni’s insight: the brain is not connected to the ears.

I think there’s a sort of exception, but then again I would think that, given how we do education here at Shalem College: seminars with 25 or fewer people sitting around a table grappling with what a text or an idea means for their lives. That process can produce a transformative experience, especially if they are reading Homer in the wake of fighting in a war.

But that transformative experience is something quite different from a standard take-away that might show up on an exam or that might be remembered down the road. Reading a great book, especially in a seminar devoted to fearless inquiry and great moderator of the conversation, can change you and who you aspire to become. It can stay with you in a way that no lecture can. As one student said after her first-year seminar on Aristotle, “I think of Aristotle almost every day.” That may suggest the format is too successful but suffice it to say that few lecture classes on Aristotle yield such a result. Or the student who wrote that a history class (yes, a history class!) was “the melody that all the other courses are the lyrics to.”

Great teaching can change you, focus you, or help you see connections you otherwise would miss. What we aim for at Shalem is not the mere acquisition of knowledge or a lesson to be remembered some time in the future. At Shalem we stand with Plutarch—the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. With a great teacher, the fire can burn for a lifetime. This is a different process and set of goals than internalizing new knowledge in a way that can be applied in the future, what I’m talking about with reference to public policy lessons.

For public policy, what I’d like you to consider is that any consensus about what we imagine we have learned even as thoughtful, well-intentioned individuals is hard to sustain over time. Our knowledge or what we think of as knowledge, decays. It’s not that it’s literally forgotten (although it can be.) Its salience fades and is less at hand when its application is needed. And yes, you’re reading this claim in an essay, and you might even remember it a week or a month from now. But I suspect you will struggle to remember its importance in your own life if a time comes when you need to apply it. Although they say that telling others about it will help you remember it more effectively…