As I never tire to point out, historians are not prophets. They look into the past, not the future. And their sad conclusion is that people do not learn from history. What we can do is point out what happened and sometimes why, and point out possible options for the way foreward: if you follow this path, this might happen, if another, that. But the trajectory is not deterministic, and contingency must always be accounted for. In History, it is never the impossible that happens, but always the unexpected. Look at the Berlin Wall: historians cannot be blamed for not predicting its falling, but political scientists who are always happy to predict, did not predict it either. History can at most tell you why we are where we stand now, not where we will go (maybe where we should try to go???)

In former days history was used to handle present day state problems. Good philosphers can from the present ways of thinking deduce its consequenses in the future like H Spencer who in the 1880s could deduce Stalisn terror from Marx writings

Jozef Saers They were philosophers or economists. Marx of course predicted the course of capitalism correctly, but he expected a much shorter time than actually took place, and in some points he was woefully wrong. Predictive models can be right in general, but not in details. And Marx's remedy of course did not work. Terror of the left or right can easily be predicted from any radical implementation of theoretical ideas, that does not need any clairvoyance. But history deals with the events you cannot deduce from models or predictive theories. And there we cannot follow any model or scheme but have to think for ourselves. Take the US: the right is trying what the right tried in Weimar 100 years ago. They did not learn from history, in fact I think they have not learned anything. Luckily the methods to prevent them from doing damage were there. They were not in Weimar. But whether that is learning from history, I doubt very much.

History is contemporary practice. It doesn't exist as a stable object. There are too many subjective positions built into recorded accounts. For example why are some events given more weight than others in a constructed collective memory? Chance and accident play a greater role than we give credence to. Events from the past are constantly under review as we try to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. Different theoretical approaches become fashionable then fall out of favour. Overlaying this are the epistemological underpinnings of the particular society in which we live, at this moment in time. And then we get to forgetting and forgiveness. Imagine if we couldn't forget anything that has ever happened to us as individuals or as a society. We would become overwhelmed by the good, bad and mundane. Then we come to forgiveness, a moral philosophical question to be sure, along with politically motivated apologies for past atrocities, by actors usually not present, to victims long dead.

To a very resonable level

Harry Freemantle You are right: history is shape-changing, because the past, as E.H. Carr said is a foreign country, and we do not have a passport or visa. Means that we always interpret the past according to our contemporary understanding and interests. That is why history cannot repeat itself, though events might look similar. But certain events and personages do of course remain, though even they might be reinterpreted. Thus, I should reformulate my statement: no, we do not learn from history, we only reinterpret it an sometimes try to apply some ideas to our times. Sometimes the options work, sometimes not. On the whole, I prefer looking back to trying to predict the future, even though Walter Benjamin and his interpretation of Angelus novus was quite on the spot.

Thankyou Dagmar and for the reference to Benjamin. A quick search and I found

The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness by Stuart Jeffries. He writes,

In 1921, Walter Benjamin bought Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, an oil transfer drawing with watercolour, for 1,000 marks in Munich. His friend Charlotte Wolf then recalled how this “gauche and inhibited man” had “behaved as if something marvellous had been given to him." What was so marvellous to Benjamin about this goofy, eternally hovering angel with hair that looks like paper scrolls, aerodynamically hopeless wings and googly if rather melancholy eyes? “This,” he wrote in one of his greatest essays, “is how one pictures the angel of history.”

Benjamin wrote in his last, posthumously published essay;

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back his turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.

Harry Freemantle Yes, that is both the drawing and Benjamin's writing. Klee had a whole cycle of angels, some fairly strange and weird. I used often to start my lectures for first years in history with this text, and it often did surprise students. But Benjamin's rather dark interpretation (remember, he committed suicide while waiting for a visa to Spain while running from the Nazis) is quite apt and explains why historians should never try to predict the future or talk about the lessons of history. We are standing with the back to the future. What we can do is tell how we came to where we are and maybe show ways of where we might go. But there are no certainties. The present is always, as Koselleck said, future past and future not happened.

Historians might be akin to weather forecasters. They gather the data, analyse it, compare it to past events, and then make their best prediction. It might not be accurate or it might be close. They are making the best prediction they can with the available data.

Also, Mark Twain is reputed to have said "history never repeats itself, but it does rhyme". I tend to think that whether or not he said it, this is a good indicator of the ability to draw conclusions from past events and apply them to the here and now.

Nobody has a crystal ball to predict the near future, in tens, hundreds, or thousand years. The way to deal with that is to find an objective direction in which humankind is moving during its history and, then, analyze which events could deviate humanity from that course. That would give us some probabilistic answers about the near future.

History is not a precise science, and you need to use math (precise science) to calculate or graph direction.

I specialize in analyzing humankind and its history from complex systems (which is a precise science) viewpoint. The found direction in which humankind is moving is in my articles and my book "Subsurface History of Humanity: Direction of History." In the last chapter of the book, I pointed out events, which could derail us from the course.