anything goes with emma chamberlain - what history can teach us, a talk with michael bess [video]

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

[video available on spotify] today we're going to be talking to michael bess. michael bess is chancellor's professor of history at vanderbilt university, where he has been teaching for the past 34 years. he's the author of five books, and a specialist in 20th and 21st century europe with a particular interest in the interactions between social and cultural processes and technological change. today i want to discuss with him how technology has impacted our quality of life over the past few centuries. i also want to discuss the ways that we might romanticize the past. and last but not least, i want to discuss how the internet impacts our perception of our current times, and how that's possibly very damaging. just sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with the incredible michael bess. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today we're going to be talking to Michael Bess. Let me just read off my clipboard. All of this man's incredible accolades. Michael Bess is Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he's been teaching for the past 34 years. This man has been teaching for longer than I've been alive. He's the author of five books.

Michael Bess is a specialist in 20th and 21st century Europe with a particular interest in the interactions between social and cultural processes and technological change. So, today I want to discuss with him how technology is impacted

our quality of life over the past few centuries? I also want to discuss the way that we romanticize the past. You know, a lot of us look at the 80s and say, I should have been born then. But instead I was born in the 2000s where there's just too many iPads everywhere and last but at least I want to discuss how the internet impacts our perception of our current times and How that's possibly very damaging and much more to sit back

Relax and enjoy my conversation with the incredible Michael Bass. I want to first start by discussing sort of the quality of life over the past 100 years, because I think a lot of us look at the past and see it with rose colored glasses, and we don't really think about what it was actually like to live even just a hundred years ago. But I'm curious, what's like a realistic sort of description of what it was like to live say a hundred years ago?

Well, if you were rich a hundred years ago, you could live pretty well. Of course, back then, they were facing really big challenges. You go back to 1920, they just lived through World War I. When I lecture on World War I in my class, I look around the room, I say, well, if this were in 1920, most of the young men would not be in this room, because they'd been decimated during that war.

When you look at sort of objective measures of quality of life, they've just been getting better and better over the past 300 years. And with a special acceleration in the past 100, and even faster acceleration after World War II, is because of science and medicine and also new kinds of social programs and things that were not even dreamed of back then or were dreamed by a few, but we're very far from reality.

Would you say the point in which things really started to get more comfortable for humans in a way that was significant was maybe around the 1920s or what do you think that point was? It was about around the year 1800 when you sort of put a graph on some of these basic quality of life measures like longevity and famines and infant mortality that's the beginning of the agricultural revolution in the beginning of the measures like longevity and famines and infant mortality. That's the beginning of the agricultural revolution in the beginning of the industrial revolution in Europe.

And the graph just starts going up like this. And then in the 20th century, it starts going up more. And then after World War II, it almost goes straight up. It's pretty dramatic, the level of improvement, wealth production, availability of different kinds of energy. Right away you get steam engines and factories, and so people start moving from the countryside and coming to the cities and factories.

In each of these innovations, wave of innovations, there's pluses and minuses. So it's all kind of a mixed bag. It's a mixed bag back then, and it's a different kind of mixed bag today. But of the two, I'll take today's bag overall because we have a million different offerings that were not available to most people in earlier centuries for how to live a better life, for how to flourish. I think if you were to look at every, every time of being alive, even before the wheel was created, there were probably things about that experience that was somewhat fulfilling

and exciting in a way. And then, you look at now, there are so many things that are fulfilling and exciting, but there are also so many things that are incredibly painful. So, many things that are incredibly painful. So even though the trajectory of quality of life has gone up over the years, do you think that it's almost something that goes beyond a graph in a way? That sort of quality of life is there's no way to even put it on a graph? I think it's a good point that you're making. It's an important one. Because there are things you can measure and then there are things that are intangible.

One of my little rules of thumb with technology, it kind of under it underlies the question that you're asking. Here comes innovation X, whatever it is. Oh, this is going to make, it allows us to do the following things ABC that we couldn't do before. Great. So then the thing to do is to have a yardstick, like a moral or a quality of life yardstick that you hold up to it and you say, that's great. Now I can do these other things that I couldn't do before. But how does it fit in? It's not just what is it letting me do that I couldn't do before. How does it fit in? How is it

going to change my life? How is it going to fit into the the wholeness, the totality of my quality of life? And what's it going to be like when everybody is doing it? How is the world going to change because I'm in that world and that's going gonna have a big impact on my quality of life. And so you take something like the automobile, which, oh yeah, great, now we can drive around. That's fun. We can go far, it changes the whole nature of time and space. But the unanticipated effects

where people moved out of the cities and went out to the suburbs, and pollution happened, and suddenly, highways were all over the suburbs and pollution happened and suddenly highways were all over the place and people were suddenly far apart and a whole sense of community got shattered. We became dependent on foreign oil to fuel the cars and little did we know it was emitting the CO2 which is now threatened to fry our planet.

All this in one technology, which you kind of go awesome car, I can go drive my car, it gives me this freedom, it's fun to drive. You try to adapt these technologies so that they do actually less harm so that they're making a net gain to quality of life rather than than taking it away. And if there it's too much like social certain kinds of social media, I just cut them off. Yeah. And that's just when I sort of tally what it allows me to do and the costs, the costs end up being not worth it. Do you think we're at a point now where technology has possibly advanced too far in some directions, leading us to more unhappiness and danger than good.

So, you know, I mentioned that graph with all the quality of life, health and longevity and, you know, famines and how all that has gotten so much better. We're also living in a world that we're so powerful now with technology that our impact is threatening to fry our planet with climate change. We have nuclear weapons, which, okay, we've reduced them since the end of the Cold War by 85 percent, but we still have 13,000 nuclear weapons, and AI is going to be another one of these game-changing technologies that is going to have powerful beneficial effects, but could also become very dangerous.

And nations are competing with each other now to get ever more powerful AIs. And when you have that kind of competition, it's sort of like an arms race. And then safety kind of falls by the wayside. So I spend a lot of time in my book, looking at these, what I call mega dangers. These are things we have to live with. Now, does nuclear war degrade my quality of life? It's an interesting question.

It could end every one I know and cared for, and the whole planet that I love. But it hasn't, moment by moment. But I can't help but think about it. Of course. And I remember as a kid, I mean, nuclear, we were doing, you know, do this anymore to our kids. But when I was a kid, we would have exercises where everyone had to dive under their desks because there was a nuclear attack coming. And somehow, back then, it was thought that a desk was going to protect you from, you know, thermonuclear bomb. Interesting. Yeah. I don't think the desk was going to protect you from thermonuclear bomb.

Interesting. Yeah. I don't think the desk was going to do much. Especially with a nuclear attack. That's for sure. Do you think romanticizing past decades does more harm than good, possibly because it's inaccurate and maybe takes you away from looking at now, which is its own new mixed bag of problems. Like, because I think people like to say, oh, I was born in the wrong decade or I'm living

in the wrong time or whatever it might be, do you think romanticizing the past is just sort of a waste of energy because in a lot of ways it's kind of inaccurate? Well, it's not a waste of energy. I mean, when they're saying, I'm born at the wrong time, what they're doing is they're picking out one particular aspect of a moment in the past. And they've maybe read a novel or seen a movie or they read a book about what that was like. And they like that one thing. And they say, oh, well, that was my kind of world

because they did the following things. Maybe a, like horses, everyone was on horseback. Oh, see, I want to be, I was bored at the wrong time. Now I have to be in these damn cars. Okay, so they picked out that one thing. What, it's not necessarily harmful if what you do is, what am I romanticizing? What was it that I'm finding so appealing about that? Can I bring that into my life today since it seems to have gone away?

Totally. Once again, it's a question of choices. That romanticizing can be useful if you're not just sitting there saying, I'm born at the wrong time, Oh, tough. So I just kind of get along with the wretched life that I have now. What do you think from the past? I mean, this can come from as long as humans have existed. What do you, what do you think are things that people should consider

reintroducing into their lives? Even if it's sort of unpopular today, you know? Well, the big advantage that we have is, we don't have just one pass that we would look at. We can draw on other cultures in a way that I think, and so many of us have been afforded this now because of the internet and smartphones. So we have access, I think, to life tools and choices, maybe more than at any other time

in history. And so you ask me which ones specifically, precisely because our pace is so frenetic, I personally have found a daily meditation practice to be the single most powerful tool for increasing my quality of life of anything I've ever done. And it's only like I've done it in periods of my life when I did it very intensively an hour every day and I went to retreats. That was when I was in my 20s. Nowadays, I just meditate 10 minutes every day, every morning, but I try to do it every morning because I notice when I haven't done it, in that day, I'm scattered. Totally. It makes you more able to be there with the things that are happening. And that's an example for me is a powerful example

of how we can take aspects that we're not part of, for example, American culture. Yeah, totally. They really were brought here in the 70s and they've really only become widespread since you were born. Yeah. I think they've really now become, everyone's talking about meditation.

So I actually have my students in my class on human flourishing. I have my students do a four week exercise of a daily meditation practice 10 minutes a day. And it's very interesting because some of the students say, it's driving me crazy to sit and do nothing for 10 minutes a day. I said, well, that's fascinating. That's, you know, why? Oh, well, because I have. That's, you know, why? Oh, well, because I have to be doing something. Yes. Well, yeah, we've been conditioned to bombard ourselves with these

these stimuli. And so, you know, try meditating for one minute. And then your baby steps and then two minutes and see what happens and become more accustomed to that silence. what happens and become more accustomed to that silence. I think that honestly might be the most important thing that we've lost is silence. And speaking of that, you know, now we're constantly being exposed to terrifying, I mean, great and terrifying information on the internet and on social media and on the news. And whether we want to see it or not, it's shown to us, it seems like could be a pop-up on your computer, could be a pop-up on your explore page, on whatever. Do you think that that has caused us to view the world in an inaccurate way? Because don't get me wrong.

We have our shit now, okay? We know that. But at the same time, I notice instead of being maybe sort of grateful at times even for the quality of life we have now. It seems to be all negative. And I see a lot of people falling into a routine where they just see the world as all negative doomed. There is no chance of saving anything, everything is ruined.

And you know, when you actually take a step back and look at the bigger picture, I actually don't see it that way. I think that there's a lot of great happening now, and there's a lot of room to fix the things that aren't going right. And I don't see it in this completely nihilistic way, right? I'm curious if you think there is an incorrect perception of what's going on in reality. I couldn't agree with you more. I'm Every morning just to sort of find out what's happening in the world like has the world blown up yet

So I go to the New York Times and I go to the Wall Street Journal and I skim their front pages quickly to see what the headlines are What has blown up what has up, what bad thing has happened. And inevitably I come out of that kind of, what now, there's a huge bias toward bad news. Absolutely. Huge. You don't see headlines in the Wall Street Journal that say, you know, bread successfully delivered to supermarket.

You do not see that. And so I think what you're saying is absolutely right. You have to remind yourself actively that all this conflict and strife and hate that gets reported is like the tip of an iceberg. Literally, I think that's a good metaphor. And below the surface is this dense, amazing fabric of cooperation that we just take for granted. But that makes everything possible.

It's really cooperation. It's not in many cases, it okay people pursuing their own interests, but in many cases it's highly cooperative. We have to trust each other. We have to find ways to work around our differences. And we have to teach our children how to negotiate with that aspect of the world. And that's so much bigger than the little fireworks that get our attention and make it into the news. And if you remind yourself of that, you have a much better, I think, a more realistic grasp of what's happening in the world around you and you won't be.

So I have to remind myself all the time because I'll read the headlines in the morning and it's like, oh man, it's a downer. What do you think is the right way to consume the news? I'm curious. I mean, there's no right way. I don't think there's, yeah, I don't think, I know what works for me because if I'm not careful, I'll go down a rabbit hole. But I kind of careful, I'll go down a rabbit hole, but I kind of try to limit it to half an hour and just sort of get the lay of the land. I'm kind of blaming it on the media bias toward negative things happening and reporting the bad stuff, but I remember there was, it might have been the Huffington Post at some point had a special section called Good News.

I used to go and look at it. And I have to admit to my embarrassment, it got boring. Totally, by the way, totally. Like the thing is, it's not stimulating enough. And I mean, to be honest, I think, I mean, I'm curious looking back throughout history, have we always been more inclined to bad news?

Like, I feel like we've always had this inclination to sort of gossip in a way. And I think, you know, when you look back, I mean, I've read an article or two about how, you know, gossip and sort of drama was, it was kind of like a form of protection in a way. It was how the word spread about, oh, this person is not good, this is not good, this food is not good, this person, this community, whatever. And so, you know, and I think that that's probably why we're so drawn to things that are negative because it is, you know, listen, I'm not a doctor, but I think that this is correct. It's sort of like a, we're like inclined to do this. It's in us, you know,

it's in us. It's a human universal. Yeah. That anthropologists have observed gossip in every culture. Yeah. And so that's interesting, right? There you're saying, despite all our differences, different times in history, every culture has gossip. And I think the field of evolutionary psychology has gotten some good reasons for why we gossip and it's what you pointed to. People need, it's important for you to have a sense of people's reputations. Because you need to know, if I trust this person, are they going to rip me off? The gossip network Establishes no no you don't trust that person because they've ripped off so and so and so and so and so and so and so It has to have a mechanism for punishing

the free writers and the the people who don't play by the rules and gossip plays that role and So there is and there's probably a negativity bias there. You're more, you're get more pay off by being told what to avoid rather than, you know, where the good places to go. If there's, the information is, you know, there's a saber tooth tiger lurking behind the boulder, that's more important than, well, I could go and, you know, get this nice little bit of food over there. One has life-ending consequences. The other one is just like, I'm going to get a meal. So there's a deep psychological reason why, like you said, it's protective. You want to find out the bad things that are happening so you can avoid them or you can prepare for them and they

won't affect you so much. We're shifting over to back to history again, a little bit, but also to today. So, you know, there's, I think the first quote I ever heard about history, it was that history always repeats itself, of course. It was like, I think the first thing my first history teacher ever said, it's like, this is why you need to care about this.

You know, right now we're sort of... We can't see the bigger picture right now when we look at our current circumstances because it's like we're in it, right? We're in it. It's very hard to see everything in perspective. Do you see history repeating itself right now? One of the jokes among historians is, no, you know, history, every moment is unique. So history never repeats itself. Absolutely. But then, but they say, yeah, it doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

Absolutely. So true. And that's kind of what you're saying. Yeah. Which is, yeah, this is not totally the same, but it's sort of the same. And look at what happened. Here's a pattern. And you have the following ingredients,

you're probably going to get the same outcome or a similar outcome to what we saw in a previous iteration. And because human nature hasn't changed that much over the 3,000, 4,000 years of recorded history in the 1930s in France. What you see happening is steady worsening of the polarization between left and right. To the point where they literally hated each other's guts. Yeah. The center sort of hollowed out.

Yeah. And extreme left and extreme right started becoming much bigger. And it was very hard to the people who are the few in between trying to keep the place going together. We're having an increasingly difficult time. So the rhyme for me with that is America today with the hollowing out of the center and the increasing stride and see and passion

of left and right in, and the middle ground seems to be gone. And, oh, well, you're demons. We don't compromise with demons. Yeah. So there was a saying among the right wingers in France, they hated the left winger so much. There was a left wing prime minister in 1936, a Jewish prime minister, France's first Jewish prime minister,

Leon Blum. And he was a centrist, but center left. And on the right, the saying was, it would be better to have Hitler in charge of France than Blum. That's the level of hate. So you get to the end of the 1930s and World War II arrives. And France was a military superpower in that era. And they had put all this money into, you know, fortifications to protect themselves from the Germans. And Hitler, just the German army just comes in and mose them down. It's a terrible

military defeat. And part of the whole reason for it is, I think, French citizens had come to distrust and hate each other so much. Yeah. That they had lost any faith in their government. They just kind of collapsed. Yeah. So, yeah, the Germans invaded and the Germans had some superior military tactics, but that doesn't really explain how easily and quickly French society just collapsed. And I think we may be on a similar rhyming path to be weakening ourselves vis-à-vis the rest of the world if we're paralyzed by this. It's been really disheartening for me as a young person, you know, sort of coming into this time where it's like,

okay, now this is something I'm supposed to be, and I should be, by the way, involved in. But what I've found is that it's really hard to participate in any type of constructive conversation about politics in America at all. Because I feel like politics have become not even politics anymore. It's like a religion now for everyone. It doesn't, I don't care. Everyone's like, I think it's across the board. And if you just take everything that your side says

as fact, then what happens if your side has a bad idea? I mean, how is this something that we can fix? I mean, what do you think got us to this point? Because it is fascinating to me and incredibly terrifying to me. Some of this polarization predates modern social media and even, I think, the internet. But if you go back 30 or 40 years, Republicans and Democrats could work together. They understood where they differed, but compromised. They didn't demonize each other the way they do today. There was a sort of basic trust or understanding that ultimately we all want, we love our country.

We want our communities to flourish. Most of our values are shared. We just have deep differences about what are the best ways to make those valuable things come about. But you're still, you know, I may disagree with you, but you're still a good person. And I respect you. I see this. I volunteer two hours in the winter months at a homeless shelter in Nashville.

And I'm in there with people who come from all walks of life. So I know that there are people in there who I know. Really, I'm fairly liberal. And I know that they're conservative or very conservative, but we have something in common. We want to do something for the homeless people in our community. So for two hours there we are working and putting the people onto the buses and if you, we're friends, we're working together, If you were friends, we're working together, we don't talk politics, but it's very clear that we share a lot of the same values I've come to respect and appreciate these people. If you gave us an assignment, like make something happen in our city of Nashville and work together as a team, I think we could, because we've grown to know each other and trust each other and not see each other as beasts.

But when it's across the internet, and these are just names, and they're now part of the other team, like you say, because it's like an extreme sport. Yeah. Oh, you're a member of the opposing team. Well, I have to oppose everything that you stand for because you guys are the devil incarnate.

When that happens, no compromise is possible. Well, that's the issue. Someone can be wrong. Somebody can be terrible even. But nothing is fixed when you can't communicate with them properly. You can't do anything. I think that that's why, yeah, it's just been so confusing for me as a young person, is the whole sort of way that the conversations are happening.

I think a lot of people are like I don't really feel comfortable involving myself in this because it's not empathetic like it's not it's not real. Do you know what I'm saying like it has lost humanity entirely and become something that's all on here. It's all about scoring points. It's, yes, it doesn't feel like it's actually about people anymore. That's what's so, you know, I mean, I don't think we know exactly what's going on or how it's going to be fixed, but I think, you know, that's the thing that's been really interesting to me is when like, sort of society builds teams and then everybody's saying that it's because they have to, but

what's it really about? Yeah. So the only way out that I can see is for young people like you to start saying, not going to play by these rules. Because if you ask me, what's the biggest danger, the biggest threat from, you know, the Republicans say it's the Democrats, the Democrats say it's the Republicans.

To me, the biggest threat, one of the biggest threats facing our country today, the polarization that's paralyzing and turning us into a bunch of people who hate each other's guts and don't wanna have anything to do with each other. And like you say, don't see the humanity on the other side. Oh, we're the ones who want all these good things for families and people and lives, you know, quality of life.

And you guys don't. You guys are evil and some, your goals are just completely different from mine. That was, that did not used to be the case. So the only way out of that is to refuse to hate. And that's tough when you're dealing with people who are calling you names and labeling you and belittling your, you know, saying that your motives are dastardly. and it really is that demonization is happening now in both directions, the only way that I can think of, that this is gonna, we're gonna get out of this mess, is for more and more people to say, nope,

not gonna play the hate game, not gonna support politicians who feed off of that, and I'm gonna start looking to support politicians who feed off of that. And I'm gonna start looking to support politicians who are actually talking about humanizing the other side, working together, compromise. The America's worst enemies are the people who are teaching Americans to hate each other's guts. That's the biggest enemy.

Yeah, it's so sad because even I understand, you know, not agreeing with somebody and feeling like, oh, well then I hate them. You know, I had to unlearn that because I weirdly I felt like I was just that sort of was a part of The general discourse, you know, let's say around school or whatever it was just kind of like There was just this sort of even on social media whatever it was like I grew up around this narrative that if somebody sort of Disagrees with you you hate them and they're evil and as they got older I was like Who is this helping so this this is not, I'm done. And I was like, I'm not doing this anymore. If you approach each other with kindness and open-mindedness and respect, a lot of times, a lot of times, there will be a middle ground found. You know, the difficulty is going to be going back down to that.

You're confronting someone who completely, you know, disagrees with you and vilifies you and makes you and demonizes you. So if you can both agree that that's a bad, a bad situation to be in, without talking about who's right and who's wrong. Yeah. So can we sit down together and find something that we do agree about? Let's go down to more basic levels and basic principles. Are you in favor of people being healthy? Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of behind that.

We obviously have different ways to try to promote public health, right? Already, that's starting to break down the abstraction of the other team. Yeah. And that label, which is so easy to just then turn them into just a demon. And suddenly you're seeing, well, probably there will be a better outcome if we can find a compromise because probably there are smart elements on both sides. Sure. And, you know, both types of left and right ideologies have are based on sound intuitions in some respects about how the world works.

They're complementary in certain ways. We'll probably have better policies when we can try to find ways to work together and in some ways temper each other's extremes. Absolutely. I do have one more question. Okay. Obviously, you have a class on flourishing. Yeah. What would you say the foundation is for flourishing in life? You know, based on all you know about history, all you know about your own personal life. What is the foundation of that?

I've been most happy for the most part. Most of those times have been when I was living toward other people. When my thoughts, what I cared about was how can I make things better for this other person or how can I you know do something nice for that person that they wouldn't expect or It's not just that person, but it could be also a broader cause like the trees the environment How can I do something for something outside of myself bigger bigger than myself. And the other side was equally striking. I've been most wretched when I was preoccupied about this little self, the self that, you know, this individual. And what's interesting is there's now a field called positive psychology that studies, you know, what makes people happy.

So this is actually now, this is a subject of interesting academic research that's been going on for about 25 years. And what they find is most people have a baseline. And when something good happens, whoo, it goes up and then over the next few days, it just kind of goes back, it habituates back down. And oh, I won the Nobel Prize, I won the lottery.

But three days later, you just kind of back to that set point that you were after four. So the word that the psychologists use for that is hedonic treadmill. We're on this treadmill. We're constantly looking for things to gratify us and provide us with those ups, those up moments. And for me, what when I kind of did this little tally for myself, what it made me realize

is I'm really operating simultaneously with two different conceptions of who am I. One is this little territory that I'm having to defend or I'm trying to aggrandize and get things for. And the other one is this more expansive vision of, I'm not just this individual, I'm part of a family, I'm part of a community, I'm part of a city, I'm part of a planet, and even bigger. What was powerful for me was seeing it graphically like an experiment, like an empirical thing jumping out from my own life. Yes. And I think it's helpful if people do that, and I encourage that in my class when we talk about, what does it mean? What does flourishing mean. You know, we're constantly thinking happiness is something you get.

Yeah. But no, it's more something that happens to you when you're thinking, behaving, being in certain ways. Absolutely. And being toward others, being toward this bigger self, I think the consensus now seems to be pretty clear. It's not just my experience. I'm listening.

My students say the same thing. The literature say the same thing. That's been a very fundamental aspect of my experience and the way I've changed my life. And so I'm putting it in as a big part of this class as well. Absolutely. What an amazing talk. Thank you so, so much for coming on. And just

filling my mind with so much great info. It's my pleasure.