Hello everybody,
This week we’re looking at the beauty and limitations of historical analogies with the classicist Mary Beard and author Charlotte Higgins.
You can find the companion article here: One of the most quoted lines in philosophy is completely misused and misunderstood
I’d met his type before.
I was at a kid’s birthday party a few weekends ago, and my eldest started wrestling another child in what young kids like to call “play.” In between the “Not the neck!” and “No kicking!” I got to talk with the other kid’s dad. And within five minutes, I knew his type.
The first clue came when he asked me what I did for a living. Then he asked me where I grew up. Then he asked me what school I went to. None of these questions, on their own, are especially harmful. But they can often be a kind of social scorecard. Five points if you work in London. Five points if you grew up in the home counties. Only two points if you went to that kind of school. This was the type of man who wanted to judge me. He wanted to know if I had earned enough cache points to talk to for more than a moment.
In other words, I was talking to The Snob — an archetype belonging to a long list of archetypes.
It’s a common human tendency to sort the world — including the people in it — into categories. It’s an essential heuristic that allows us to make sense of things a bit quicker.
“Oh, that’s a snake category. Stay clear until further inspection.”
“This is a form of table. I can put things on it.”
“This bloke is a snob; move away as quickly as possible.”
The problem is that almost all heuristics can mutate into biases or fallacies if you aren’t careful. Generalizations become over-generalizations. Shortcuts become lazy thinking.
In my case, labeling and dismissing The Snob as a snob is, ironically, a kind of snobbery. I was writing off a complex, unique human being with the wafty insouciance of a Sorting Hat. Who’s to say The Snob isn’t an insecure, nervous act he puts on? How do I know that if I give it a chance, this dad might turn into something far more likable — a friend, perhaps?
This week, we look at the power and limitations of analogy.
The U.S. is not the Roman Empire
An analogy in philosophy is a kind of argument where we say that if X is like Y in some respects, it’s likely that it will be alike in other respects too. If this fruit looks and feels like an apple, it may taste like one too. If this dog nuzzles my hand, it’s probably safe to pet. If this person talks like The Snob, he might think like one too.
Analogies will never be necessarily or indubitably true. Unless two things are identical to each other, those two things will have to differ in some respects. I might bite into my maybe-apple and end up in the emergency room after having bitten a glass ornament. The Snob might be a lovely, accepting kind of guy. But analogies are both practical in that they underpin our everyday quick-thinking judgments, and philosophical in that they can be better or worse.
In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume argued that analogies can be better or worse depending on the degree of overlap between them. If you know that X and Y are identical in lots of ways, there’s a strong chance they’ll be identical in others too. A human has more in common with a chimpanzee than a sea turtle, and so will likely demonstrate more chimpanzee behaviors than a sea turtle.
In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins about how far we can push historical analogies. How far can we say “The war in Ukraine is another Vietnam” or “the economy is just like 1929”?
One example Beard and Higgins talk about is whether we can see Donald Trump as a kind of Roman Emperor. This is what they had to say:
“Which Roman emperor is Donald Trump most like? There’s no straightforward answer to this, because it’s really problematic to decide that Donald Trump, a 21st-century elected leader of a modern nation-state, could be mapped onto Nero, who ruled in a totally different society with a different polity, constitution, and setup in every conceivable way. And yet the very fact that this question is asked is quite interesting. There’s a lot of connective tissue between ancient Rome and America: the Senate and the Capitol, a playbook for power that has shaped the West almost ever since.”
I’m sure I’m not the only one a bit tired of hearing how the U.S. is like late 1930s Germany or how we’re witnessing the fall of the Roman Empire all over again. It doesn’t take a philosopher to say that it can’t be both. The rise of Nazism and the fall of the Western Roman Empire are more different than the same. But it’s also fair to say that the comparison with either is a weak analogy. They have so few commonalities that it’s neither good history nor philosophy to say, “Trump is just like Hitler” or “The United States is falling like the Roman Empire.”
Like Hitler, Trump is a “strongman” leader who demands total loyalty, absolute obedience, and possesses a degree of thin-skinned vanity. But Hitler was a poor, struggling war vet who failed at an art career. Trump is a wealthy real estate heir and reality TV personality. The Weimar Republic was a place of obscene inflation, huge unemployment, wandering armed militias, and a weak, underpaid central army. The United States is the world’s largest economy, with a 4% unemployment rate. It also has no paramilitary organizations operational and spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined.
And yes, like the Roman Empire, the U.S. has the biggest and wealthiest “empire” in the world. It has the most efficient and unrivaled military, too. But America has no land colonies to speak of, whereas Rome forcibly occupied dozens of variously unruly territories. Rome was an unambiguous dictatorship; America still has a whole heap of checks, balances, and due process to hold a president back.
This isn’t to say that we cannot learn anything from historical analogies. In fact, holding a table of “Rome vs. USA” and “Trump vs. Hitler” up is good to measure how far along the analogy is. The point is to recognize that history does not “repeat itself.” Just as The Snob I met at the party is different from every other snob I’ve ever met, the present day is different from every historical period that’s gone before.
It’s fun to ask historical questions, and it’s useful to an extent, but we shouldn’t prejudge the current world by presuming it’s identical to what happened before. In fact, “I’ve seen it before” can be exactly the kind of lazy, complacent thinking that prevents us from seeing the real dangers when they appear.
IN YOUR OPINION
This week, I asked which historical time and place you would have liked to dip in on. A lot of respondents noted how today is probably the best it’s ever been, and in many ways, I agree. But that wasn’t quite the spirit of the question. So, here are the top “I wish I was there” times and places people noted:
Recent Past (20th Century)
This category includes specific years like 1981, 1969, and 1996, as well as decades such as the '80s, '90s, and 2000s. It also includes personal timeframes like “the last year of high school” or “when my parents were children.”
The Future
This category covers a wide range of future dates, from the near future like 2050 to the distant future, such as the 41st millennium. Reasons for visiting include witnessing technological advancement, seeing if humanity gets “out of this mess,” and general curiosity.
Ancient Civilizations
This includes the Roman and Greek Empires, Ancient India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. The appeal is to witness great engineering, debate with philosophers, or experience life in a less complex, pre-state society.
Other Historical Eras
This category encompasses a variety of pre-20th-century periods, from the Middle Ages and the Age of Discovery to specific events like the Russian era of Catherine the Great or the Belle Époque in Paris.
Philosophical or Abstract
These responses focus on concepts rather than specific times, such as “a time before Nature was ruined by human hands,” “a time with no war,” or the idea that “the only reality is this present moment.”
Renaissance & Enlightenment
This category includes periods of great artistic and intellectual growth, with mentions of the 15th-century Renaissance, the 17th and 18th centuries in England and Edinburgh, and the 19th century in Vienna.
Specific People or Events
These are unique responses centered around meeting a specific person or witnessing a particular event, such as meeting Aristotle, joining Alexander von Humboldt's expeditions, or witnessing Shakespeare's Globe.
Jesus & Biblical Times
Responses in this group express a desire to witness or meet Jesus, or explore the region during the first century AD.
To Fix the Past
These responses are driven by a desire to change a specific historical event, with mentions of wanting to “redo 2020” or prevent the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Next week, we’re exploring the life and work of Albert Camus with the writer and philosopher Laura Kennedy. And so I’m asking:
What, if anything, gives your life “meaning”?
Send me your thoughts via email or comment below.
MINI READING LIST
RESOURCES
This newsletter contains my reflection on the topic at hand. Here is a list of the material shared in this email, as well as extra content about the topic that I've shared on my other social platforms:
The companion article inspired by my conversation with Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins.
My short video examining the most important technology in history, featured on Mini Philosophy's Instagram page
The full, unedited audio interview with Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins:
Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.
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I agree that asking about someone’s profession, where they grew up and which school they attended could be considered snobbish. However, I do think some people are more comfortable with such conversations due to the reasonably predictable and straightforward paths in which the conversation can go.
To answer the question on what gives my life meaning, it is my kid first and foremost. I also care about the wellbeing of my siblings and keep in contact with them daily.
The statement that history never repeats itself has some validity for me. But I recall from many moons ago Polybius' Theory of Anacyclosis, that each form of government goes from a good/beneficial to a corrupt version. Maybe his sequence of forms of government isn’t correct but looking at how democracies across the world are slowly(?) decaying makes me think that he had a point. Maybe history isn’t cyclical but more like a spiral staircase.
I am also irritated by the focus on Trump as a person and his importance. There is not enough public analysis and debate about the organisational structures that have evolved around him since 2020. We need to understand the economic and sociological forces that drive all of this. Just as in 1930 there were next to Hitler Mussolini, Franco and Stalin there are many other autocrats next to Trump. He’s not a singularity.