One of the worst reasons to study history is because you don't want to repeat it. You can't step in the same river twice and history doesn't actually repeat itself. There are themes. In general, religious extremism leads to barbarism, death and destruction. But then there are exceptions. The Quakers are plenty extreme and they've gone the opposite route. In general, hedonists don't accomplish much. But, there are whole lot of authors, artists and poets who accomplished things precisely by being hedonists.
The best thing you can get from history is a sense of human possibility and the wonderful way that life will confound any theory. History teaches subtlety. But history makes a poor basis for any argument--maybe because it is subtle. And interestingly, arguments from history seem to be used to justify holding women back more than any other group.
Picture a florid sort of guy clearing his throat. ahem ahem. Since time immemorial, women have taken care of children, men have had affairs, and women have never been any good at science. Just look at history.
And then how do you argue against that? The only real argument is that history is not determinative and history is not that simple. But that's not an argument that's easy to explain--especially to people who apparently haven't gotten much from their reading of history.
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Science can only give you one kind of knowledge--about things that fit within the confines of the scientific method.
So first,this is an apples and oranges comparison.
Second, history gives those who study it an appreciation for human limitations, for subtlety, and for complex causation. To me that is infinately more valuable than whatever freshman get from their chemistry classes.
Finally, my point was simply that those simplistic arguments from history (i.e. by talking heads and politicians) are wrong. In part this is because they've taken the language of science and transfered it to history--as if caustion worked in the same way in both places and as if historical facts could determine present reality or a state of nature or some such thing.
So, the moral of the story isn't that science is better or that historians should start experiments. It is just that arguing from history is tricky and dangerous business.
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