In Our Time - History and Understanding the Past

Episode Date: March 30, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what can be learnt from history. Many of us were taught that an understanding of the past was essential to a knowledge of the present and, more excitingly, to a view of the future. Dig deep into the pockets of Greece and Rome, the Medievals and the Enlightened, drink deep at the well of history and from that sacred study, as from the Oracle at Delphi, would come prophecies, predictions, a sense of what is to come, based on a belief in the continuity of history. But in the 1980s reputable historians predicted the end of the American empire and the rise and rise of the Russian empire. And Lord Metroland, the old booby in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Put Out More Flags, was forever reading history wrongly. But the way we read history is a matter of key intellectual significance. The eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm’s book The New Century came out when the 21st century was but a few months old. Is it really possible for history to tell us something about an era which has hardly begun? Can we ever predict the future by understanding the past? Should we seek to understand the past because it holds important lessons for the future - or is history, as Henry Ford would have it, “more or less bunk”?With Richard J Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge; Eric Hobsbawm, eminent historian and author of The New Century.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the 21st century is only a few months old, yet already the first history has been written. The eminent historian Eric Hobbes-Burme's book, The New Century, comes out next week.

But is it really possible for history to tell us something about an era which is hardly begun. Can we ever predict the future by understanding the past, often uses the justification for studying history? Should we seek to understand the past because it holds important lessons for the future? Or its history, as Henry Ford would have it, more or less bunk. With me to discuss the history of the future is Richard J. Evans, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, an author among much else of that clarion call of a book in defence of history, and I'm also delighted to welcome Eric Hobsbsevum himself. Eric Hobsom, in a new century you've written, Let us hope that the 20th

21st century will experience further progress but without the catastrophes. But if there are catastrophes, they'll be different as a result of the 20th century. Has humanity ever really learned from the past and been able to apply the lessons? They've always tried. In the past, of course, people learnt because there was a mechanism by which, in effect, knowledge of the past and how things were done in the past was passed on from one generation to the other, and until the 19th and 20th century,

basically that was a model of how things should happen, at least for most ordinary people. So to that extent, learning from the past was built in, almost wired into human life. The novelty of a situation that we have to discuss is in the 19th and 20th century, when the future simply is not based on the, on the past.

We don't repeat. It's going to be very different and we've got to try and find out how it's going to be different. When you say the future, can you just extrapolate a little more in that before we go on? Well, as put it like this,

for most of the world, say until the middle of the 20th century, the greater part of humanity lived on the land and by agriculture, one way another. Even the big industrial countries with one or two exceptions of England, the United States, Germany,

a very high percentage of the people continue to be on the country. Today this is simply no longer so. It's a purely regional problem. We've got to get used to a future in which only 2, 3%, even less of people live by farming, by agriculture, where the countryside is completely different

from what it ever was before. again in the past education literacy was something which was a minority activity except among certain special groups secondary education was a tiny fraction tertiary education students ridiculous I mean when we talk about the students in the 1848 revolution we're talking about three four thousand people in Europe or at least in Germany Today we are in a completely different ballgame and therefore the past though it gives us some guide only gives us a very very partial guide

Richard Evans can we distinguish different sorts of the past as it were presumably in law we learn from the past common law that case is based on the previous case and so the next case is answered accordingly and that's one way we learn from the past which accretes there are certain ways in which we do learn from the past because of that sort of process.

Can you distinguish ways in which you think we are learning from the past and ways in which we're taking a flyer? Well, even in law, I think judges and people have always been fairly creative in interpreting precedence. I remember there's a legal definition in the Middle Ages in England of custom from time immemorial that says that it's anything that's been going on for more than 21 years, I think. So I don't think one should underestimate the extent to which people in the past have been able to adapt and change. But there's no doubt that things are moving faster, that as Eric says, education, literacy, globalisation of communications, the instantaneous nature virtually of the internet of television radio mean now that people can learn, adapt and change much faster than there were before.

And to that extent, I think, the past and custom and precedent. and becoming less important. So what would you say to people who say, look, it's important to study history because a knowledge of the past informs the present and gives you some idea of the future. Would you, I come to Eric in a minute,

but you're a professor of modern history at Cambridge, these students come up, and that's certainly one of the things they might reasonably think or have been told by their teachers. Well, I would say, first of all, that's not the only reason to learn history, and perhaps not even the most important one.

The most important, I think, the thing about learning history is to study past societies, and they can be as remote as you like. It doesn't really make that much difference. Because even if we go back 100 years into the late 19th, the end of the 19th century, society was so different, values were so different, people were so different, that it takes an enormous effort of the imagination to understand them.

And by, as a way, visiting and understanding societies are removed from us in time, I think we can learn more about what it is to be human, the human condition, the possibilities of human behaviour. learning directly from the past has often been done. The French Revolution, for example, was full of parallels with the fall of the Roman Republic in ancient Rome, many institutions which had established. Did they learn from that, or did they reach out and grasp them as justification of what they were doing? Well, of course, they thought they were learning,

and the problem is that it's a very, very tricky thing to do. people have often learned the wrong lessons. Take the Russian Revolution in 1917. Everybody, when Lenin was departing from the scene, thought that, as with the French Revolution, a Napoleon figure would come up and turn it into a dictatorship, and they all identified Trotsky, who was the leading figure in the Red Army, and so they conspired against him and got rid of him. And of course, they neglected the real threat, which was Stalin, the quiet bureaucrat. And there are plenty of examples of people learning the wrong lessons. So I think one has to be very cautious about this in terms of politics, at least.

Can you see some situations in the 20th century from which we can learn for the 21st century? Maybe the Russian Revolution is an example. Any big event or... Well, to some extent, we need to learn from the past because the other ways of predicting the future have turned out to be no good at all. if you actually look at the amount of resources which are devoted by governments, by economists, by corporations to predicting the future, and the net result has been pretty negative. In fact, I would have thought probably over the past 40, 50 years, it's become worse than it used to be, partly for the reasons that we were discussing earlier on. So the only way that you can really do is to find out how things got to be the way they are now and to see whether or the way they are now and to see whether the problem.

conceivably this gives you a guide to where they're going to go. For instance, a case of globalization, you see, which is not something which happens suddenly even when it accelerates tremendously as it has recently done. What actually has been happening to globalize the world over the past, let's say, 150 years, that I'm sure does give us a guide. There are a number of other things, namely, that we in our trade are supposed to remember what other people forget or have never known. And that's a very useful thing.

You know, people have been saying things about the Balkans, which have been the basis of policy, which most historians who knew about it, knew were nonsense. They knew the Balkans weren't like that at all. And so it does help to know what happened last time. It helps, for instance, very much to know what mistakes were made after 1918 after the First World War, because an enormous amount of the political problems today

are still, as it were, the chickens of the Treaty of Versailles coming home to roost. While agreeing that one can learn, from the past in that way, perhaps learn what happened, certainly. Say the Treaty of Versailles is a very good example. Do you think that that learning is ever applied, or do you think that events and circumstances

change so quickly that by the time you've learned the Treaty of Versailles, the Second World War is on you? Well, it certainly is applied, whether it's usefully applied is another matter. The big lesson that many states and politicians in Western Europe learned of the Treaty of Versailles

was appeasement, was that it was essentially wrong. It was repudiated and criticized almost as soon as it was signed and everybody thought that you should give in to Hitler's demands in 1930s

because the Treaty of Versaid per perpetration and injustice in Germany and I think the skewed people's perceptions of what Hitler and Hitler's foreign policy were was actually about. Another very good example is the current West German, the original West German now the German constitution

which is based to quite a large extent on a theory of why the Weimar Republic collapsed. For example, the excessive power of the president, so you have a president who has no power, and the proliferation of small fringe parties, so you now have to get 5% of the vote in Germany in order to be represented in Parliament and so on. And on the whole, that seems to have worked,

though whether the historical theory in which it's based is a correct one is another matter. So certainly people do look to the past and do actually apply its lessons in policymaking. Because the question looking to the past begs the other question of whose past is it and what past you're looking to, doesn't it? Yes, what do you mean exactly about that? Well, I mean, there's different ways to interpret the Treaty of Versailles.

There's different ways to interpret what happened in the Thuris in Germany. I mean, from different perspectives, different historians in different countries at different ages, we'll say this is what really happened, and these are the lessons we draw then, these are lessons we draw, then in a sense you go on, different lessons are drawn. Absolutely. Everybody, of course, politicians, historians themselves, argue about the past, and in order to apply the lessons of the past,

you have to have some theory about the past which is going to be disputed by someone else. Well, let's say the Russian Revolution, which you brought up, the 1917 Revolution, Eric Hobbesbaum. I mean, there are different lessons that can be drawn from that, aren't there, wouldn't you say? Certainly, there's always different lessons to be drawn. but that depends to some extent on what you want to find out about.

What is it you want us to draw lessons about? Exactly, but I mean that means that the historian is in the position of being as much as sort of a commentator and a biased figure as a person who is sort of monkishly devoted to finding out the real, as it were, in inverted commas truth. I mean, given that monks were often writing on the side of the victorious anyway. to some extent by the rules of our game, you might say. You know, there are some things you can establish

and some things you can't establish on the basis. It's a little bit like courts of law, you know. There are rules of evidence, there are rules of logic and so on. So consequently, I mean, Richard there has got a lot more experience of this in practice than I have, you see. When somebody puts forward a proposition about the past, you can sometimes say this is simply not so. In other cases, you have to argue.

Now, historians are limited by this. The real problem, it seems to me, for them, is when we deal with the 20th century, my own time, where we are both operating by the rules of our own game and by, you might say, our beliefs, our deepest passions, and the two may not always run side by side. We've just come through a century,

which is essentially a century of wars of secular religions, and it's often extraordinarily difficult to forget, to treat our own time as though we were talking about let's say the 17th century. In some cases we are simply too close to it, to be able to do it. The case of Russian Revolution is a case in point. There is nobody, for instance, at the moment, virtually everything that is written about the Russian Revolution

is either still denunciation or not so much exculpation today, mostly it's denunciation, but in other words, it is not a proper historical approach to it. You can chase this up, for instance, recently, a major life of Lenin has been written by a man who has genuinely tried to do it as a balanced Robert's service. The reception of this book has been purely Lenin as the ancestor of Stalin. This is not what the author wanted, but this is way inevitably under the circumstances. The book is read, including by the specialist reviewers. it's terribly difficult to get clear,

even for things that were 50 years back, like the Nazis. It is still terribly difficult to emancipate yourself from the strongest feelings which we all have. That was I was seeking to clarify earlier. Would you agree with that, Richard? Yes, I do think that's the case, that just in simple terms of the documentary evidence that becomes available,

The fall of communism, for example, has released an enormous flood of documents in the former Soviet Union in Moscow, the KGB archives full of German, even French material that we knew nothing about before. And new documents continue to become available. And that does, of course, change our knowledge of an improve and increase our knowledge of the fairly recent past. And also, of course, in terms of perspective, the more we know about what happened after the events that we're studying, the more we can put them in a balanced perspective. Can I talk about a specific notion here? What's your view?

Do you think that the, have you detected a decline in the nation state? Do you think the nation state, given Eric Hobsbman brought up earlier about globalization being gathering pace over the last 150 years, is as a consequence of that that the nation state will diminish in force? What's your view on that? Because a lot of people think it will and is indeed.

When people have been predicting the decline of the nation state for much of the 20th century, and in a way one of the most surprising things about it is the resilience of the nation state. Even institutions which at first sight you might think look as if they're superseding the nation state like the European Union turn out on closer inspection to really be run by nation states in the interests of nation states. It's the council of ministers that calls the shots in the last analysis. That having been said, I think the globalisation of the... of big industry and big business is undermining the nation state

in a more profound way probably than multinational institutions are doing. But even there, one can detect, even in terms of international institutions, one can detect, I think, increasing international intervention in the affairs of the nation state. In terms of justice, for example, the notion of war crimes trials for Bosnia something that goes back to the Nuremberg trials, but itself, I think, is an important step towards international intervention in national affairs. So that the boundaries between nation states and the rest of the world

are becoming more porous. It's now very difficult for a nation state to conceal from the rest of the world what it's doing. We can know almost instantaneously if some serious atrocities or injustices are being perpetrated. Eric Cobbzorm, do you see that the globalisation, which you spoke of at the beginning, beginning of the program. You see that as an inexorable process, and what consequences flow from that, in your view?

It's inexorable in certain respects. Clearly, technology, science, the economy, communications, in all these respects, it can't be stopped. On the other hand, the idea that everything is being globalized is plainly mistaken. There is no equivalent tendency in politics for globalizing. And consequently, you have states, politics, if you like, coexisting in a period of globalization. The idea that the state will somehow or other wither away, there is no justification for. Nevertheless, the peculiarity of the situation is that we are living with both at the the same time. Let me give you the example which is some way is

most typical of globalization today and that's football. Football today represents both the mass identification with a particular nation or state

and the extremes of globalization. After all, probably the one way in which most people try and envisage what it means to be English, Scots, Welsh, Nigerian, Benin or something, is through their team. And at the same time, as we know, economically speaking, the football industry is absolutely typical of the modern development of global capitalism, you see,

in which in fact teams, particular teams, which are in fact. some extent in conflict with the national aspect of football, are recruited from people anywhere in the world, moving around the world anywhere, developing exactly the same extraordinarily inequalities of power and wealth. Now, in effect, this seems to me typical of the situation of globalization. We have both at the same time. We have both international competition and through mechanisms which are purely global, which have nothing to do, which to some extent even undermine it. That seems to me to be the essence of the problem.

There's a fear, Richard Evans, that I enjoyed that football analogy. A lot of people did. There's a fear, Richard Evans, that the globalisation is simply out of control. It's not only accelerating, it's accelerating recklessly. and that how do you regulate it, how do you stop things going from one nation or another work, huge businesses suddenly flitting away to Asia and flitting away to Far East and so on. Do you see it as, what's your view about that? Do you think it's out of control?

It's certainly proving very difficult for governments to control their own economies. We've seen that in the current case of BMW and Rover. It's simply impossible for the British government, apparently to have any control over what BMW has been doing with Rover. And on a much larger scale, of course, the, as you said, the relocation of industries to areas where there's cheap labor in the world is something that looks as if it's set to continue. The only thing I would say about that, as a kind of caveat,

is to do with automation, that automation is something that we don't know how far that is going to go, We don't know when the age of robots is going to migrate from the car factories to the home and so on. And that may be some kind of break on the mobility of labour. But globalisation, I think, is one of the big themes of the next century, which is going to require a lot of discussion, a lot of debate. It's also the case, of course, globalisation of culture is another thing. The global homogenisation of culture, the very rapid spread of English as the world language.

to the extent now that the learning of foreign languages in this country is in a state of collapse in the schools and increasingly so in the universities because it no longer seems necessary for people to learn foreign languages. And everywhere now people are speaking English, and that, I think, looks as if it's set to continue. As we've come up for the final five minutes and the final half-hour program, because we're three-quarters of an hour next week,

Harry Holsom, can I ask you, do you talk at the very beginning about the 20-year-old, century being a century of secular religions. Do you see that, do you think that in the 20th century we were so burned by ideology that the great ideologies, he was great, ironically, might be nothing, might be a thing of the past? No, obviously not, because, I mean, having ideas about the world is, you might say, part of being human.

We may not have the same ideas about the world, and they may not have the same. mobilizing functions as they had in the 19th and 20th century, but that doesn't mean that there won't be secular ideologies and that they won't have a mobilizing function, but exactly how is a different matter. In the 20th century, if you like, the great mobilizing mechanism was politics. People thought these things would be done,

any major changes through people getting together in organizations, and movements and aiming through the control of states to do it. In the 21st centuries, it doesn't follow that it's going to be in quite the same way. But how it's going to be is, by no means,

so clear. You were a member of the Communist Party. Do you see that that ideology has completely spent, or do you think that around the basic ideas inside that, there will be movements and ideologies which will regenerate?

An ideology of social justice, if you like equality, is bound to remain simply because inequality is increasing at such an extraordinary extent, far faster than before. It's mitigated by the fact that fewer people actually die of starvation, which was the thing which always used in the past,

which was the bottom line. Well, it's less of a bottom line now, except in a few places. but while the world is getting visibly more unequal, it seems to me ideologies for equality and for justice cannot fail to appeal. What's your view on this, Richard Oven? Do you think that we have been through the age of ideology, just like we went through the age of religious wars, and that is now past us?

Something else may surface, but that particular sort of secular ideology is past. I think you have to remember what we mean by the 20th century, and Eric, I think, in his books, is very well delimited the 20th century, as a word from the First World War to the fall of communism. It doesn't coincide with the years 1900 and 2000. And it's really that age from the First World War up to 1945 or so that's the real, I think, age of extreme ideologies

which mobilise people in a fanatical sense in Europe that hasn't been the case since. But on the other hand, of course, when communism fell, an American political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicted that everybody would become liberal Democrats in the world. And this hasn't happened. What we have seen, among other things, is the rise of religious fundamentalism and not just Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism, but also Christian fundamentalism in parts of the USA. And Jewish fundamentalism.

In Israel, indeed. And America. So that, I think, does show that ideologies which demand a kind of very powerful extreme commitment are by no means dead. You come in your book, there are a personal line in it as well, but can I just ask finally, Eric Hobswam, you've written about the disappearance of the notion of delayed gratification as one of the things that will affect the future of capitalism.

Is it possible briskly just to explain that a little further? It seems to me that capitalism, everything today, has been based, to some extent, it's operated on the heritage of the property, past, often quite a remote past. Rules among these things, having long horizons, family solidities, communal solidities and so on,

are things which have made it work. These things, in my view, have been disappearing in the past 30, 40 years, particularly since the 1960s. And in doing so, have made even the operation of the very economic system more difficult, more unpredictable,

more fluctuating, and to some extent, more pathological. The idea that, for instance, we should have, the economy should depend on the short-term fluctuations of share prices is completely novel in the history of modern capitalism. Do you agree that there's this sea change there, Richard Lange? I think that's part of the kind of increasing pace of, modern life and the more that we get into instantaneous global communications and so on the more I think that is the more short-termism there's going to be about the way we see things than

simply in terms of employment. There's an increasing insecurity of jobs. People are more and more likely to shift quickly from one job to the other. The notion that someone is going to stay 40 years in the same job as Eric did at Birkbeck College in London, I think it's becoming increasingly outdated. Well, thank you both very much. Thanks, Eric Homsman. Thanks to Richard Evans.

Thanks for listening. back next week at 45 minutes. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio 4.