Lighting Blades

Knowledge and Nature:
History as the Teacher of Life Revisited


ABSTRACT
This contribution revisits the dictum “history is the teacher of life” (historia
magistra vitae) and shows that modern knowledge-societies are beginning to
use their growing information about natural and human history to address
present-day problems. Starting with Leopold von Ranke’s refusal to investigate
history for the benefit of learning from it, the essay cites two contemporary
attempts at extracting useful knowledge from history: “real-world
experiments” and “natural experiments.” Wolfgang Krohn developed the
former with collaborators in Bielefeld and Jared Diamond features the latter.
KEYWORDS
Begriffsgeschichte, Chernobyl, real-world experiments, natural experiments,
ecocide, tragedy of the commons

The Ciceronian trope historia magistra vitae had reigned for nearly
2,000 years when the epochal upheaval between 1750 and 1850 toppled
history as the “teacher of life.”1 How shall we explain this loss of
hitherto enduring power? Was it the French Revolution? No—the demise
of the past as the container of exemplary experience had started
earlier. Was it the Industrial Revolution? Again, no—the erosion of the
received topos and its authority began before the Industrial Revolution
had serious practical and theoretical consequences. The best answer,
I believe, has come from Bielefeld University via the late Reinhart Koselleck’s
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1972–1993), a monumental
history of key political and social concepts.2
The core point of Koselleck’s historical-theoretical approach to the
study of Begriffsgeschichte (history of terms) was actually quite simple,
and he was not afraid to say so. He recognized two (Western) worlds
and distinguished a temporal watershed between them. On one side
of the divide lies the modern world, which can be grasped without
much interpretive effort,3 while the world of premodern history, which
can no longer be understood intuitively, is lying on the opposite side.
According to Koselleck, the modern world emerged after 1850, whereas
Nature and Culture 2(1), Spring 2007: 1–9 © Berghahn Journals
doi:10.3167/nc.2007.020101
the opaque premodern worlds reach from about 1750 into the past.
His periodization turned the roughly 100 years in between into a time
of profound change. Koselleck termed this period Sattelzeit (saddle
time).4
Koselleck (2004a: 32) characterized the paradigm shift from premodern
to modern history as “a complex process whose course is in
part invisible and gradual, sometimes sudden and abrupt, and which
is ultimately driven forward consciously.” The nature of this process
was predominantly a gray matter affair, deeply ideological and cerebral;
yet as the media of communication externalized this process, it
became a social and cultural development that eventually resulted in
a collective reordering of things. Koselleck’s begriffsgeschichtliche
Methode was a sensitive tool for the documentation and analysis of
this shift. He could not enter the heads of thinking people with it—
what happened in there was one of the “invisible” parts of the historical
process—yet it allowed him to detail carefully and diligently
important sprachgeschichtliche Ereignisse (Koselleck 1979: 54) for the
critical time before and after the French Revolution.5 Finding the significant
quotes was tedious work; he must have been delighted to
hear that Google plans to digitize everything that lies dormant in the
world’s libraries.
Working like a human seismometer, Koselleck registered the shift
of semantic relationships in the breaking up of old continents of meaning
as well as a turn from the prevalence of the past to a preponderance
of the future. He traced how the old worldviews became submerged
under the new horizon of an unprecedented present with an open future
on both sides of the Atlantic. An example of one of the many literary
events that indicated this coming-into-focus of the future was
Tocqueville’s lament in Democracy in America: “I go back from age
to age to the remotest antiquity; but find no parallel to what is occurring
before my eyes: as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the
future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity” (Koselleck, 2004b:
280–281, note 31). Koselleck assembled these semantic instances of
societal disorientation and reorientation to describe the birth of the
neuzeitlich bewegte Geschichte6 as a “newly emergent temporality”
(Koselleck 2004b: 31) of a future-oriented world for which history was
no longer the teacher of choice.
An instant in this momentous change is Leopold von Ranke’s
(1795–1886) famous dictum about the historian’s task as telling only
how it once was. The Ciceronian context of this maxim is worth remembering.
What Ranke actually wrote in his Geschichten der romanischen
und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (1824) demonstrates a
young historian’s plucky irreverence for historia magistra. He says,
“The task of judging the past for the benefit of future generations has
been given to History: the present essay does not aspire to such an elevated
task; it merely seeks to show the past as it once was.”7 Ranke’s
refusal to venture beyond the facts repositions history as a morally neutral
field for quasi-empirical research. Rankean research history no
longer teaches us anything but history, and it is therefore impossible not
to draw this ironic tautological conclusion: Aus Geschichte lernt man
eben nur Geschichte.8 However, learning from history “for the benefit
of future generations” seems to be getting ready for a comeback.
From Chernobyl to Real-World Experiments
The concept of “real-world experiments” is another important contribution
from Bielefeld and a case in point for a new approach to historical
learning. Between 2002 and 2005, Wolfgang Krohn and his collaborators,
Matthias Gross and Holger Hoffmann-Riem, conducted a research
project on real-world experiments at Bielefeld’s Institute for
Science and Technology Studies. Real-world experiments, they postulated,
are executed to attack “socially relevant environmental problems
under uncontrolled conditions.”9 Both the subtitle of the project—
“strategies for robust ecological design”—and the explanation that
“these experiments are associated with recursive learning processes
that result in better understanding and increased control of environmental
and social systems,” underscored that real-world experiments
are an attempt to learn from contemporary environmental history from
within the framework of contemporary environmental history. Historical
actors are thus empowered to learn from a history within a history.
And this is rather exciting. What seems to be happening here is
not a return to, or of, the historia magistra vitae topos but a novel way
of societal learning that aligns our recognition of uncontrolled, outof-
the-laboratory experimentation with the “as it once was” stance of
factual historiography developed by the Ranke school. The Bielefeld
model of real-world experiments makes room for learning from contemporary
history.
The fire that sparked the idea of real-world experiments was the
nuclear conflagration on 26 April 1986 at Chernobyl, some 20 years
ago. In the fall of that year, Wolfgang Krohn and Peter Weingart interpreted
Chernobyl in an article in the Kursbuch10 as an “implicit exper-
iment” (Krohn and Weingart 1986: 1). The title of their paper, “Tschernobyl—
das grösste anzunehmende Experiment,” was a pun on the
acronym GAU (Grösster Anzunehmender Unfall), which featured
prominently in the rallying cries of the Greens and the German antinuclear
movement.11 Krohn and Weingart argued that Chernobyl was
an implicit macroexperiment, tested in the real world by fatal accident.12
The transition from “implicit experiment” to “real-world experiment”
was the next step. It led to the Bielefeld model of Realexperiment, which
makes the illegitimate, unethical, and irresponsible conduct of implicit
experiments explicit and thus a matter of public discourse and recursive
societal learning.
The progression from the accident at Chernobyl to the Kursbuch
article and the later research project leaves the positivistic framework
of the neuzeitlich bewegte Geschichte behind. Ranke’s “factualization”
of history in the Sattelzeit must be seen in this wider epistemological
context. His anti-Ciceronianism was concurrent with the passage
from alchemy to chemistry and similar to the transition from astrology
to astronomy two centuries earlier. Lavoisier’s method of weighing things
and Ranke’s turn from venerable literature to mundane documents
were kindred moves. The relativity of historical events, which the demise
of historia magistra engendered and the historical-critical method reinforced,
followed Galileo’s earlier anti-Aristotelian insistence that moon
matter is not different from earth matter. The now dated positivism of
the historical-critical method was history’s way of scientificization.
The Realexperiment, as defined by Krohn and his collaborators,
eclipses this modern tradition; it goes beyond the laboratories of
physics and chemistry and extends scientific and social-scientific research
practices into areas where nature and society interact, as in waste
management, landscape design, and ecological restoration projects.
Real-world experiments reach out to non-experts, local knowledge, and
political constituencies. They track the results of complex socionatural
interactions and conscious interventions and generate uncertain but
reasonable learning loops. Historia magistra vitae may have lost its classical
appeal but vita magistra historiae might take its place—life’s strategically
calibrated progress could become the teacher of human history.
Learning from Global History for Global History
As the ban on historical experience as the teacher of life is lifted in realworld
experiments, other kinds of experiments are explored and learn-
ing from history, especially environmental history, is propagated anew,
yet, ironically, by a scientist. Brushing aside that historians have learned
not to learn from history, Jared Diamond (1999, 2005), a physiologist,
has written two best-selling books that use history’s “natural experiments”
13 as learning tools.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Diamond’s
last book, is squarely about learning from history for history. Guns,
Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, his earlier book, tried
to answer the question, “Why is it that you white people developed
so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people
had little cargo of our own?” (Diamond 1999: 14). The two books have
different objectives but are similar in terms of methodology. Guns,
Germs, and Steel tries to explain societal success, whereas Collapse
focuses on societal failure; both books employ comparisons and investigations
into natural experiments.
Extending experimental learning to all of history, Diamond proposes
to develop learning units for global history. He reinstates the
Ciceronian precept implicitly in his belief that “the past offers us a
rich database from which we can learn, in order to keep on succeeding”
(Diamond 2005: 3). The ambivalent “we” in this statement could
mean “we Californians” (Diamond lives in Los Angeles), or “we Americans,”
or “we in developed countries,” or “we as a species.” Diamond
implies all of it. Knowing that “globalization makes it impossible for
modern societies to collapse in isolation” (23), he mines the databases
of global history as both a scientist and a concerned citizen, who fears
that not only success, but also catastrophic failure, is within our reach.
He searches for mechanisms of historical change like a scientist, and
from the understanding of such mechanisms, he wants to learn how
to solve the world’s looming global and local problems. To do so is
very ambitious, but Diamond’s work seems to ask, “What is the alternative?”
Is it not to try “to learn from the mistakes of distant peoples
and past peoples” (525)?
The epilogue to Guns, Germs, and Steel was entitled “The Future
of Human History as a Science.”14 Virtually no living historian would
dare to promote the scientific potential of history today; this idea is
too unconventional and has to come from a disciplinary outsider.
However, undaunted by the critique and dismissal from professional
historians, Diamond opened his last book with the question, “How
can one study the collapses of societies ‘scientifically’?” His argument
is epistemological. He takes issue with the unnecessarily narrow misunderstanding
of what constitutes science: “Science is often misrep-
resented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated
controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is
something much broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about
the world” (Diamond 2005: 17). After a lifetime of experimental laboratory
work in physiology at Harvard and UCLA (from 1955 to 2002),
Diamond is presumably well versed in the justification of the conventional
hierarchy between controlled and uncontrolled experiments.
However, his field experience as a hobby-ornithologist taught him
about alternative pathways to reliable knowledge:
When I began studying birds in New Guinea rainforest in 1964, I was immediately
confronted with the problem of acquiring reliable knowledge
without being able to resort to replicated controlled experiments, whether
in the laboratory or outdoors. It’s usually neither feasible, legal, nor ethical
to gain knowledge about birds by experimentally exterminating or manipulating
their populations at one site while maintaining their populations at
another site as unmanipulated controls. I had to use different methods. Similar
methodological problems arise in many other areas of population biology,
as well as in astronomy, epidemiology, geology, and paleontology. A
frequent solution is to apply what is termed the “comparative method” or
the “natural experiment”—i.e., to compare natural situations with respect to
the variable of interest. (Diamond 2005: 17)
The details of Diamond’s study of past failures and successes include
the environmental destruction of Easter Island’s Polynesian society,
the Native American Anasazi, the Maya, and the Norse in Greenland.15
Norse Greenland provided Diamond with an “approximation to a
controlled experiment in collapses: two societies (Norse and Inuit) sharing
the same island, but with very different cultures, such that one of
those societies survived while the other was dying” (Diamond 2005:
21). Presently, the Dominican Republic and Haiti face a similar outcome
on the once richly forested island of Hispaniola. Both countries
are poor but Haiti, which used to be the richer place, has become the
poorest country in the New World. Only 1 percent of Haiti is still forested
compared to 28 percent of the Dominican Republic. The future
looks definitely grim for Haiti but less so for its neighbor (329–357).
Success stories include Iceland, the highlands of New Guinea, and
Japan. China “lurches” between “accelerating environmental damage
and … protection” (377).
Diamond found three things that modern “knowledge societies”
(Böhme and Stehr 1986) may want to consider. First, “unintended ecological
suicide—ecocide” (6) was common throughout history. Second,
five sets of factors could either prevent ecocide or contribute to
it, namely climate change, environmental damage, hostile neighbors,
friendly trade partners, and societal response to environmental problems
(11–15). Third, and most importantly, he also found that a society’s
political and cultural response was always highly significant, with two
crucial factors: “long-term planning, and willingness to reconsider
core values” (522).
In conclusion, I would say that modern knowledge-societies are
in a position to analyze themselves historically but are far away from
being guided “scientifically.” Carefully analyzed scenarios from the past
can extend our event horizon and alert us to critical circumstances
we might otherwise overlook. Therefore, real-world experiments with
a “mutually agreed upon strategy of experimental learning” (Gross
and Krohn 2004: 48) should be employed widely and more often, and
useful knowledge about societal performance in the past extracted in
greater detail and from more cases to enrich and calibrate contemporary
decision making. The reading public is willing to entertain global
lessons from history. Overcoming dated epistemological concepts
about what constitutes science in order to develop the project of science
in the social sciences and humanities may not be enough to
avoid ecocide or any other terminal disaster born out of ignorance and
political mal- or in-action, but it certainly is a step in the right direction.
The person in charge of the scientific side of the Manhattan project,
James Bryant Conant (1893–1978), realized after Hiroshima and
Nagasaki that science had become much too important to be left to
the scientists.16 The risk of a global environmental “tragedy of the commons”
17 may well be calling for a similar conclusion: global history is
too important to be left to historians that think ill of judging the past
for the benefit of future generations.
Acknowledgment
The original paper was read at the retirement colloquium for Professor
Wolfgang Krohn at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies
(IWT) at Bielefeld University, 30 June 2006.

Wolf Schäfer is Professor of History at Stony Brook University. As founding
Director of the Stony Brook Center for Global History and founding Editor
of Globality Studies Journal—Global History, Society, Civilization, he tries
to foster historical and interdisciplinary research that focuses on the relations
between local cultures and world regions as well as the global technoscientific
civilization and its natural environment.
The greeks were right. History is a "teacher of life"!