Posted by
Rogue Historian on Wednesday, September 06, 2006 8:59:15 PM
History, properly understood, may solve one of the most enduring conundrums of human existence, that of useless knowledge. Modern man has stumbled into an anti-Smithian universe. The invisible hand, which Smith viewed as a source of wealth, is today increasingly less relied upon. The "man" whose hand urges society in this or that direction is no longer blind- in the noble sense of unassuming- but more like a creature with perfect vision whose limbs defy every command, wreaking havoc but powerless to stop himself. Convinced of the usefulness of all knowledge, government has yet to find a problem it cannot solve.
It is power, and more specifically the official government's monopoly over means of physical coercion, that makes the entire universe of ideas compatible with the invisible hand, in the former sense, useless. Yet history, once divorced from any historicist precept, that history obeys certain laws or deeper human impulses, illuminates a paradox: the importance of knowledge may be inversely proportional to its usefulness.
Historiographies that overstate's man's capacity to construct a reality reflective of an ideal justify increasingly ineffective yet wholly unjudgeable attempts to micromanage people's lives. It is up to historians to open men and women's eyes to the truly staggering dimensions of human ignorance, to which no amount of power, whether divine or democratically channeled, is equal.
History may, in other words, illuminate the essential hubris of constructivist thinking, whatever its intended results. In this sense then the US Constitution is no less a failure of constructivist rationale then the Wilson's League or the UN Charter. This despite- and perhaps moreso because- that the latter was meant to limit power.
Socrates's failure was not that he was ignorant but that he was not an historian, in whom ignorance is a virtue.