History is a data set...

 ... not a claimant's filing.  Let us take several steps back, into the bowels of disciplinary and meta-disciplinary methodology and ask the question, why we study history, for those who bother?  Consider world events, whichever events you have in mind, national conditions, whichever national conditions you have in mind, persistent policy problems, whichever policy problems you have in mind and ask, do you know the history of this thing?  Have you studied the history of this thing?  Do you demand that others study the history of this thing?

Have you observed when a commentator, scholar, bloviator or any other interlocutor claims to have or demands that you study the history, whatever that history may be?  What argument are you given?  What demand is made, not of you, but of the history?  History, therefore what?  What is the syllogism?

History is not my primary discipline, but then, neither is economics, nor literature, nor any of the other fields on which my observations touch, but argument by authority is a fallacy.  One reads, one studies, if one wants to learn.  One studies history, but why?

History is a data set, in social scientific terms.  Social science is concerned with causal questions.  Why does variation in Y happen?  I hypothesize that it is caused by variation in X.  I gather data, from history, that grand data set that it is, and observe whether or not the data set of history provides confirmation or disconfirmation.  Within that data set, do X and Y trend together?  If so, I can begin to construct an argument that X causes Y, with a few more bells and whistles on the argument.  Why do I care?  That depends on X, Y and the nature of the causal claim.  Often, I don't care.  Pick up a journal in many of the social sciences, and mostly you won't care, because the articles ask pointless, stupid, bullshit questions of no consequence to anyone.  The higher the stakes, the more I care.

Particularly if there is some possible intervention.  History is a data set.

What history is not is a claimant's filing in a lawsuit.

In legal filings, civil and criminal actually, there are papers upon papers, explaining how past events justify each side's position.  In a civil case, you have a plaintiff and a defendant.  The plaintiff argues that a wrong was committed, there was a financial cost, and that the defendant owes the plaintiff money because history.

Because history.

Consider that syllogism.

A moral use of history rather than a social scientific use.  History, here, is not a data set, but a weapon.  My position is just, because history.

Quite different.

And now, consider how often you see that syllogism.

Stripped of context or specific usage, do you accept it?

I do not, save for the specific contexts in which it is set aside as the proper argument, and even then, constrained.

History is a data set.

Consider.  You walk by a house, with the curtains open, and through the window, you see the following.  You see a child, restrained, being tortured and mutilated by some adults who look like they walked out of a serial killer movie.  You stop and stare.  They notice you.  (Why is this happening in the living room, with open curtains?  Because I need the example.)  They yell, "you don't know what happened!  You don't know what he did!  You don't know... 'the history!'"

In the strictest of terms, this is true.  You have no idea what that child did in any moment of his life leading up to this horrifying vignette.

Yet unless you are the sickest fuck on the planet, you will acknowledge that nothing he could have done would justify what you are observing.  Even if the child is, himself, a budding serial killer, who first tortured small animals, and then tortured his kid sister to death, that still would not justify what you are observing because the proper response would be for the kid to enter the legal system, not a snuff film set.

What is the best way to respond?  For that, we turn to history, as a data set.  Psychopathy is hard to treat.  Best course, that kid probably needs to be locked up for life.  Let him out at 18, and you will still have problems.  That's not someone who should be walking free, ever.  How do we know?  Data.  History.  History is a data set.  If your goal is to achieve ends, you determine how by consulting that data set.

But everything past is merely part of a data set, to be studied as primary source documentation, quantitative analysis through whichever program and mathematical technique you like, or other analytic process for making a determination based on first principles.

Yet why, then, do we have a legal system in which past is more than a data set?  The courts do more than set broad policy.  They adjudicate specific torts.  You will notice, of course, that your claim disappears if you have a financial claim against your neighbor and you murder his child.  It is a question of who owes whom money, and little more.  If you cost me money, you owe me money.  Nobody else, just you, and only based on what you have done, adjusted for circumstances.

The criminal justice system, separate from the civil system, exists to create the public good of safety, both by deterring crime and removing criminals from society, for at least some period of time.  What you do not observe, even within the legal system, is the "because history" syllogism.  There is a process of balancing the books in civil cases, and the public good of safety in the criminal system.  Never "because history."

Notice what happens when I make this argument divorced from any specific claim to issue or historical wrongs done.  Sensible enough.  If one is prone to appeal to history as justification, though, one recoils without recourse to logic.  Because, yeah, but history.  Yet my point is the syllogism itself.  The syllogism cannot stand on its own.  It is used selectively, and if used selectively, it does not stand.

History is a data set, not a claimant's filing.  Observe, again, what happens when I state this without referencing all of the claimants' filings you see written as, "yeah, but history!"

Will Ray, "That's History," from Invisible Birds.