I was sitting around a table in an Italian restaurant with some of the brightest, best people in my field discussing the electoral history of Missouri, when I suffered a sudden attack of self-awareness. 'Is my subject of any quantifiable value to mankind?' I asked myself amid all the discussion of the politics of downtown St. Louis in the Roaring Twenties. 'Or is it really an expression of extreme intellectual autism - a kind of socially acceptable geekiness with only the thin wall of prizes, scholarships and publishing contracts between me and the average Star Trek fan?' Why do I care about dead people and the odd things they did in places that I have never even visited? Why have I devoted my life to preserving the memory of an alien race separated from me by vast swathes of time and tide? My specialism - American history - is a particularly perverse one because I am not, nor have ever been, an American. For my last book I accepted a visiting scholarship to work at a women's college in Massachusetts (I am not a woman), I have done detailed research on the Civil Rights movement in the 1970s (I am so white that I look ill) and I am about to deliver a paper on race racial politics in the Nixon administration (I am not a racist nor, coincidentally, a Republican). Bad fiction writers with few ideas are often encouraged to 'write what you know about'. Historians make it a life's mission to write about things of which they know next-to-nothing. Indeed we actually praise objectivity and distance and give out double-starred-firsts for it. We call first-hand-ignorance, professionalism.

The Americans take the interest of foreigners in their country in their stride. They are, after all, the greatest nation in the world and they are quite comfortable with the curiosity of their inferiors. Americans are a very outwardly expressive in their inward focus - in short, they are self obsessed and narcissistic but perfectly charming about it. Therefore it comes as no surprise that someone should want to travel several thousand miles to trawl through their archives and interview their union leaders in the hope of better understanding the 1978 Democratic Party Midterm Convention's debate on 'common situs' labour reform. The British are less understanding. The British are very self effacing and reluctant to talk about their own history beyond licking Hitler and winning the world cup. That said, they understand even less why a British person should show an interest in a foreigner's history. My mother, who would prefer me to run something like Lloyds into the ground, is worried that I am already 'going native'. I now refer to lavatories as bathrooms and cry whenever I hear 'Dixie' playing on the radio. I tell people that 'I voted for Bob Barr' as if I really had a vote at all - and I do it often just to see the look of shock on their faces. But far from all of this being incidental, I have come to the conclusion that 'going native' is really what writing history is all about. It is not the search for contemporary comparison that so many people mistake it for, but rather a wallowing in the alien and a confrontation with the strange. I have exotic friends who vote Liberal in Britain and Republican in America. It's no different from wearing a pin stripe suit in the City and a kaftan in Kathmandu.

1

We are often encouraged to believe that history is useful, or at least that usefulness is important. I do not wish to discuss at any length the age-old debates between empiricists, idealists, determinists and postmodernists - but the ongoing dialogue about whether or not an objective, 'truthful' historical narrative can ever be written implies that such a endeavour justifies the discipline. Most historians are obsessed with the creation of models of human behaviour and the layering of them over the morass of human experience. Those who say that such a thing cannot be done typically invent counter models to explain why one's (inevitable) personal fascisms render the task impossible. Probably the most famous exponent of history's usefulness was EH Carr, who argued that history was a social science precisely because it could be used to explain the present or even determine the future. Like a scientist, the historian seeks patterns from a mass of data that explain why things happen the way they do. Lessons can be sought and derived from history in the same manner that penicillin can be created from the colourful behaviour of fungi in a petri dish and then replicated a million times over in tablet form. Carr also believed that historians, like scientists, were morally neutral and that therefore one can trust their judgements and learn from them. Of course this is nonsense. Carr himself made some politically naïve, highly immoral statements about Joseph Stalin's 'usefulness' in the economic development of the Soviet Union. There is detachment and then there is wilfully naïve prigishness.

Yet the idea of the importance of justifying one's interest in the past in terms of the practicalities of the present remains. At its best, history teaches us critical faculties that can help us get a well paid job as a lawyer. At worst it teaches us all sorts of inconsequential things about ourselves that can be horribly misused. I shall examine these fallacies in no particular order.

First, there is the fallacy that history helps us to understand how we got here. Understanding how we arrived at a present situation can be useful, but we have to contextualise and place certain time restraints. An appreciation of Etruscan earthenware does not explain how we got to the moon. We are divided from certain points in history by time and space and they have absolutely no relevance to our present circumstance (unless one believes in a kind of trans-dimensional chaos theory). Whole civilisations have risen and fallen and it means not a jot to a milkman living in Bury St. Edmunds. There is no obvious connections between the Aztecs and latter day suburbia - or for that, the Sumerians, the Amazonian warrior women or even the Vikings. I would go so far as to argue that much of British history to roughly 1945 has had no influence upon the milkman's station in life whatsoever. Our society and economy has changed so rapidly since then (and so often) that he can gain no better insights from appreciating its evolution. So what if there's a plague pit beneath his house, or a Roman bath beneath his garden? He probably comes from Persia originally anyway.

If we are being truly practical, then we can only use very contemporary history to understand 'how we got here'. For instance, to appreciate the credit crunch it is not necessary (in fact it would be misleading) to begin with a discussion of Mercantilism, feudalism or the enclosure of common land in the 16th century. It would be wiser to start with the invention of the credit card. Even then, the possible answers are too varied and contradictory to be useful. The credit crunch could be blamed on Bush, Blair, Enron, Thatcher, Callaghan, Jack Abramov or the price of milk. If history is to be simply a listing of factors, or the subjective creation of an artificial model of cause and effect then it tells us not 'how we got here' but rather what happened along the way. That is a description, not an explanation, and it is useless.

Second, we are often told that history allows us to predict what might happen and avoid mistakes in the future. This has never happened yet - or perhaps historians saw that paradox coming. The problem with this approach is twofold. One, it once again uses artificial models to group disparate events and ideas together and then calls it a process. For instance, one might say that it requires certain ingredients to spark revolution - high prices, unemployment and authoritarianism. From this model of cause and effect the historian can derive a revolutionary process - 'the people cannot buy food because they have no jobs and the reckless tyranny of the government creates a spiral of protest and violence that leads to mass insurrection against the state.' But this model is hopelessly artificial. Every revolution is unique and a simplistic model inevitably excludes other dynamic factors that shape, speed, slow or even halt revolt. These include, the character of the people, the generosity of the welfare system, the weather or the sharpness of the army's bayonets. There have been several moments in history when all of those factors above have converged and no revolution has followed. Historical models are inadequate and typically inaccurate.

Two, the idea that 'history allows us to predict what will happen' presupposes that if you recreate the precise conditions of a certain event then it will be repeated. In fact, human behaviour defies prediction. To stick with the analogy - revolutions rarely end the same way, despite Buchner's claim to Saturnalian cannibalism being its defining feature. The English puritan 'revolution' ended in the restoration of a decadent king whose successor was a Catholic. The French revolution ended in an empire, the American revolution in a republic and the Soviet revolution in a braindead gerontocracy. I find the idea that because something has failed in the past that it will fail again in the future frightening and cowardly. I feel strongly that mankind will someday embrace communism as an expression of its highest and noblest aspects - regardless of how awful its application was in the past - on sheer genetic impulse of goodliness. This 'use' of history is fraudulent, selective of the contextual facts and prone to misuse. It certainly doesn't explain trend-defying mysteries like stagflation, the Iranian revolution or the re-election of George Bush.

Thirdly, there is a new approach to the uses of history that borrows from postmodernism and the New Age - the idea that history can enlighten us and improve us as individuals. Womanist history can explain women's relationship with men, black history can explain one's ethnic and familial origins and queer theory can explain why America still hates the gays. To a certain extent, I can empathise with and see the personal value of this approach to history. It is selfish, yet honest. It is history as therapy and its application in recent public policy debates has not been entirely unhelpful. A good example was the dialogue over whether or not the West should apologise for slavery and the sense of identity that it engendered on both sides of the issue. I am attracted to this kind of history because it gets closest to the effective uselessness that I admire among pure practitioners. If a student tells me that they are doing a particular course because they are black, gay or female then I reply that I admire their self-awareness and their honesty.

But I must also remind them that their search for historical empathy is in vain. We cannot improve ourselves or like ourselves more by studying the past because we do not live in it. An out gay man living in modern day San Francisco has nothing in common with Oscar Wilde but his predilection for sexual intercourse with men. Even that is probably not the same: Wilde enjoyed intercrural relations most of all and no one bothers with that anymore outside of Saudi Arabia. The contemporary homosexual faces none of the cultural pressures or legal restraints that Wilde faced. Moreover, the social, economic and political context is entirely different too. Wilde was not just a homosexual, he was also a lower-middle class Irishman trying to integrate into Victorian, bourgeois English society. His sexual tastes and history cannot be separated from that story and, as such, have nothing in common with that of someone living with his Mexican partner in a plush basement flat in the Castro district. We cannot truly empathise with slaves, suffragettes or Navaho Indians anymore than we can the fish in the sea.

II

Before we consider the divine uselessness of history, it is first worth asking ourselves - does all this uselessness matter? The answer depends upon what one studies history for and whether one approaches it as a scientist or an artist. The scientist might baulk at the idea of devoting time to something that will have no practical application - although much of scientific inquiry does not. But the artist should not worry at all. In fact there are many artistic disciplines that increase our sum of useless knowledge, be they musicology, Latin or something as decadent as Egyptology. What they all fulfil is a sense of wonder and delight at obtaining a glimpse of the exotic and extraordinary. Of course these things are valued precisely for their absurdity and are funded as curios for the goggle eyed public to stare at in awe. In contrast, historians feel much more defensive about their subject and are determined to draw a line between empirical analysis and pleasurable observation. This is despite the fact that the line is extremely thin and that our discipline uses many of the tools and models involved in the antiquities or leisure-based arts. Often scientific historians cherry-pick from the antiquities in such a manner that debases them or reduces excellent secondary analysis to colourful primary evidence. But we cannot run away from the fact that popularity, money and seriousness is all that separates us from the pursuit of less useful knowledge. Ergo usefulness is surely not why we do it.

History is a journey into a foreign land. While some make a beeline for the warmer, busier climbs of the Third Reich, others ventures into the dark forests of the Medieval Westerphalia. But wherever we end up, it is the exotic strangeness of the past that attracts us. Crucially, this is not simply a matter of place but also of time. Britain in the 1950s is as different to us as was the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century. What attracts people to family and contemporary history is the mixture of the familiar and the alien: familiar names and faces, yet totally different clothes, attitudes, beliefs and social roles. We lose ourselves in all of this strangeness and we are helpless within it. The historian is our guide - although he is superior to us only because he has spent more time there and learned the language. We take souvenirs back with us in the form of books and artefacts and we treasure memories of pointless wars, beheaded kings, glittering balls and forgotten gods. But we cannot transfer this alien culture to our own, nor answer our pressing questions about the future through it. We can never understand its people because the human race evolves at too fast and outrageous a rate to maintain parity within generations of different thought processes. At best we can novelise, fictionalise and wallow in what we have learnt - but anything more is precocious and absurd. History is a luxury product.

Let me close on an ideological point. To try to make use of the past- to try to place a framework upon it - is to look in the wrong direction for answers. As Plato observed, the truth lies upwards in the heavens. We are better off imagining our future and carving it out of the ether than trying to mould it out of the misleading physical realities of the past. We see our past, as we see all falsehoods, through a glass darkly. The past is obscured by our cultural context and our search for the answers we already expect to find. We cannot learn from humanity's mistakes because we cannot comprehend them and because humanity is too stained by sin and ineptitude to be worth taking any lessons from. Why conceive of utopia through a reading of the grubby realities of the French, Russian or Velvet revolutions? Why bother factoring in to our projects of social change the petty problems of dead people - with their silly flights to Varennes, their refusals to sack Washington, their untimely deaths, their squalid assassinations, their plots and counterplots and hairbrained schemes that landed them in the thick of it again - all historical accidents that are worth a laugh or a tear and nothing much more? The past is no use to us at all and that is fine. It is still worth a visit. But the future must be imagined and created afresh - again and again until no mistakes are undertaken at all. That is when history will finally stop and we will stop wasting our time looking for our answers within it.