Crisis and history

The economy is not doing well. The bad decision of allowing a small elite to make poor decisions has led to unemployment and a reduction in spending. The government plans to spend more money than it makes to end this recession, and hopefully it will do so without costing the taxpayers too much. Similar economic crises have occurred before and will likely happen again. If we are as optimistic as our president is, we can rest assured that a new regulatory system, along with new logic and a new intellectual framework, will lift us from this crisis—that is, until the next downturn.

What does history have to offer to this cycle of political and economic decision making? History looks at the past and provides us with insight that becomes obvious with time. As the cliché goes, those who ignore history are bound to repeat failures. In fact, outcomes of decision making would surely be less detrimental if historical expertise was valued more in the chambers of power. But is the primary role of the historian to simply remind us of past mistakes? I don’t believe this is the only purpose that history has.

Tomorrow, some of the finest historians at this institution and in the nation will provide their historical insights into the ongoing discussion of the current financial crisis. The speakers at this event, titled “Capitalism, Crisis, & Politics”, include Eric Foner, Alan Brinkley, and Carl Wennerlind as well as economist Joseph Stiglitz and historian Robin Blackburn of The New School. The discussion will likely focus on the mistakes in the past that were instrumental in bringing about previous depressions. But I suspect much more illuminating material will come to light, namely, how to best react to the current economic crisis.

Foner and Brinkley are experts on two crises from American history. Foner is a leading intellectual of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, a period in which the relationship between citizens and the state was radically re-imagined and reconstituted. Similarly, Professor Brinkley is an expert on the age of FDR, the Great Depression, and the New Deal—also an era in which the social contract of the United States was fundamentally altered. What it meant to be an American prior to the Civil War and the Depression was very different than what it meant after these major historical occurrences.

It is very likely that we too are at a turning point in American history such that extant orthodoxies require major revisions and perhaps even a complete overhaul. As in the above-mentioned eras, right now, the U.S. faces such a dilemma that our values demand refurbishing and refinement. With unemployment reaching double digits and whole communities blighted by foreclosure, norms such as a free market and unaccountable decision making demand revisiting. Many commentators are quick to defend the existing hierarchy, arguing that the current malaise is an aberrant glitch of an otherwise effective capitalist system. In the face of such orthodoxy, it is the defunct historians who—with their knowledge of social arrangements and how American life was reconstituted—will have something interesting and, more importantly, efficacious to say about the country’s current social climate.

Historians, then, play a crucial role in the current discourse on what is to be done about the economy. They have the unique perspective and knowledge of the points in a nation’s past that changed what it meant to be part of that country. They remind us of what was flawed and what was just of times past. But, more importantly, they force us to probe the most basic questions of our current lives and wonder whether or not full human potential is being achieved in the current arrangement of things. I predict that on Tuesday night, in our discussion of capitalism, the crisis, and politics, such questions will come to the surface. In an age of massive gaps between wealth and poverty, often rigid social stratification, and the painful shift out of a manufacturing economy, it is historians who can best offer insight into what social transformations are necessary. On behalf of the Columbia Undergraduate History Council, I invite the entire Columbia community to join the dialogue this Tuesday, March 31 at 7:30 p.m. in 309 Havemeyer. As future historians look back on the current economic crisis, they, too, will tell us what we did right and wrong. But hopefully they will also say that Americans emerged as a new and wiser people because they, in this moment, chose to tackle serious questions important to every person in the country. These questions become most evident through the historian’s lens, and if we include this crucial perspective in the contemporary discourse, then we are all the more likely to emerge as a fairer and wiser people.

The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in history and political science.