Recently, a friend of mine, very fond of ancient history, while lying in the sun of southern France, posed a rather disquieting question: “how reliable are recounts of ancient historical events?”.

Her question was probably biased by the leisurely reading of many contradictory daily newspapers’ news, contradictory not only among newspapers but on the same newspaper, too.

Furthermore, her question, though apparently deserving a superficial analysis and therefore an obvious answer only, raises a knowledge tsunami.  The principles of “learning by mistake” and “lessons learned” are very common and, in view of this child-like question, are now challenged.

As a matter of fact, what if the historical mistakes or lessons to be learned were recounted to us wrongly?

We would never know, so we could keep adding mistake to mistake, making a single mistake recur over and over.

Certainly if we had a – let me say, magic – sieve to separate reliable from non reliable recounts, our lives would be much easier.  We would discard unreliable teachings from the very beginning, we wouldn’t waste time in expensive and time consuming deep investigations.

Because this is what dedicated historians do, every now and then a historian comes up with new data showing that this or that event never happened or happened differently from what we thought we knew until the day before.

Some historians take their work seriously and do their best to produce reliable recounts.  An index of these high quality recounts can be the frequency of its reviews by the historian himself.

But, more and more history professionals are allured by visibility to become media super stars.  The latter don’t look for truth, therefore, but for possibly bright, money-bringing opportunities to burnish their image.

According to some psycho-experts whose works I’ve read, a basic principle to learning is rehearsal.  Yet there’s an even more basic one: the soundness of the things to be rehearsed.

Especially in the military business, which is probably one of the best documented, their history is crowded with rehearsed mistakes, which means that the military didn’t learn – and is probably still not learning – from their own mistakes.

Why?

Are historical recounts unreliable or is Man so arrogant to deeply believe that “everybody will be hit by it but me”?

It seems that – under some circumstances – Man’s unwillingness to learn from history or from his past mistakes could even be assessed.  Such is the case of european wars over  the course of centuries.  They’ve been fought for a greed for change that they’re still very far from satisfying.

More advanced views, based on better known and understood historical events, are often rejected by “those in the power”, because they contradict their vision of how things should be.

This is true and effective leadership.  True leaders must review whatever comes bottom-up, digest it and develop it into a top down enhanced ruling.

Carefully observing our children and pets, we can learn a lot on how they learn.  They dare to confront themselves with new experiences, too, it cannot be questioned.

But it seems to me that, though daring, they still keep a margin on the safe side, they may like risking but not too crazily.

On the contrary, it seems that are the adults that like risk for risk’s sake alone.

Though brief children’s experience and non intellectual, the pets’ knowledge might be, in their own way that both show to behave in such manners as to benefit of their acquired knowledge – or history – to predict and therefore prevent risk.

I personally underwent many a test on risk management.  They all focused on solving the risky situation but none of them asked the candidates to record and analyze the historical bases on which the test solution would be based.

This is quite a shortcoming because the examiner(s) will never know how the candidate links the present situation to his or her past history so that even if the answer is correct, it might be wrong under different circumstances.

I’d rather be prone to assess risk assessors in quasi-real conditions as much as possible  when they don’t know what risk reality is or have just a faint idea of it.  They have to study beforehand how the risky conditions came to be as they find them and how they can develop further.

We must not forget what the ancient, sage Greeks used to say: “Future is behind us, Past is in front of us”.

We in the West have reversed this very basic principle.

By granting to Historians a credibility that’s not based on sound historical facts, we transfer the same shadowy credibility to the whole of History, as well, making it some kind of legendary romantic bunch of literature.

The study of historical events and of their meanings require a top down spiraling, that is, the historian starts from a given event and digs further to look for inter-connecting, intersecting events that he knows, understands and can therefore relate to the event he’s studying.

It’s very much like analyzing risk conditions or assessing risk: we’ve “as is” conditions but there’s a whole history before and behind them and that must not be ignored.

Lest we want to parcel our “risk assessment diet” into something that’s not going to be holistic at all.

History, as any tool, is double sided.  It can offend the foe, it can protect the friend.

It has to be used very carefully, it can easily turn into propaganda: let’s use wisely instead, and learn from it.