TED Talks Daily - Lessons from history for a better future | Roman Krznaric

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

How can the lessons of the past help us navigate the turbulence of the present and future? Social philosopher Roman Krznaric explores why history isn’t just a record of what’s gone wrong — it’s also full of solutions, resilience and radical hope. From Edo Japan’s circular economy to the peaceful coexistence of cultures in medieval Spain, he reveals why looking backward can actually help us move forward. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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But what if we dug deep into our past for answers, too? History teacher and political scientist Roman Kersnorek believes that understanding our history is crucial to the survival of humanity. In his talk, he shares a call to action and to go to the library, unlike any I've heard before. Imagine you're standing on the old wooden Nihonbashi Bridge in the ancient Japanese city of Edo, now known as Tokyo. It's around 1750, in the era of the Togagawa Shoguns. People are chatting, laborers are pushing cartloads of rice,

seafood traders are rushing across to the fish market. Now, Edo wasn't just remarkable for being a huge city of over a million people, far larger than London or Paris at the time. It also operated what we would today call a circular economy, where almost everything was reused, repaired, repurposed or recycled. So Japan's policy of not trading with the outside world led to shortages of precious resources like wood and cotton.

So a tradition of patchwork developed, known as boro, meaning tattered rags, where fragments of old cloth were sewn together into garments that were then passed on down the generations, just like the one I'm wearing, which is over 100 years old. A kimono might be used until a cloth began to wear out, then turned into pajamas, then cut up into nappies, then used as cleaning cloths and finally burnt as fuel.

Edo had over a thousand circular businesses, from collecting candle wax strippings to be remolded to down-and-out samurai repairing old umbrellas. Traders even paid for human waste, which was then sold as agricultural fertilizer. Strict timber rationing rules were also introduced to restore the nation's depleted old-growth forests. This was one of the world's first large-scale examples

of a low-waste, low-carbon ecological civilization. Now, Edo Japan wasn't a ut utopia having feudal and patriarchal inequalities. Yet 300 years on, it offers hope that we can create economies today that are driven not by the chronic wastefulness and ecological blindness of consumer capitalism, but by a deep culture of sustainability. I mean, if we were to adopt the circular mindset of edonomics,

we'd rapidly phase out the sale of products like standard smartphones, which use over half the elements of the periodic table and are often discarded after less than three years. And instead, we'd introduce regenerative standards so that the only phones permitted for sale would use recycled materials and be modular by design, like with easily replaceable screens and batteries.

I mean, wouldn't that be great? And like many other historical examples, such as the ancestral circular economy in pre-colonial Hawaii, Edo shows that it's possible to combine radical sustainability with cultural flourishing. It gave birth to the artworks of Hiroshige, to the poetry of Basho, and to a thriving culture of sumo wrestling. I mean, what's not to like?

Now, why am I telling you about the economy of ancient Japan? Because it reveals how history is one of our most undervalued resources for thinking about the future of humanity. And we have vast amounts of the stuff to tap into. I mean, we're in an age of polycrisis, from a climate emergency to risks from AI and threats to democracy. And history can help us navigate our way through the turbulence, acting as a counselor rather than as a clairvoyant.

But, you know, with my background as a political scientist, I've become increasingly frustrated by the way that our politicians and policymakers remain trapped in the tyranny of the now, driven by the latest opinion poll or hoping that new technologies will come to our civilizational rescue. They are failing to see that in order to go forwards, we'd be wise to look backwards.

Now, the idea of learning from history, what's sometimes called applied history, is far from new. Two hundred years ago, the German writer Goethe declared, he who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living from hand to mouth. Now, typically, learning from history focuses on warnings, captured in the famous aphorism that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Yet my research on the power of history for tomorrow reveals just how much inspiration can be found in positive examples of what's gone right, not only in cautionary tales of what's gone wrong. Time and again, we have acted together, often against the odds and succeeded, to overcome crises and tackle injustices. So let me just offer you a couple more examples

of where we can find hope in history out of the dozens I've explored by looking across the last millennia, which speak to the ecological dilemmas of our time. Now if I could travel back to any moment in the past, it would be to the Spanish city of Córdoba in around the year 1000, which was part of the Islamic kingdom of Al Andaluz, which ruled over the southern part of today's Spain. Now what made Córdoba so extraordinary was that Muslims, Christians and Jews managed to live side by side in relative harmony in a period known as the convivencia, literally the coexistence or the living together.

And although there were everyday tensions and occasional outbreaks of violence, it was generally a time of cultural tolerance. Muslims and Christians played music together. Jews and Muslims might have a game of chess. People mixed together in the public bathhouses and in the marketplaces, creating webs of economic relations. There's the story of Samuel Hanarid, a Jewish poet whose skills as an Arabic scribe enabled him to rise to become the prime minister of the Muslim ruler of Granada

and even lead his military forces. Our Convivencia was built not just on the shared language of the Muslim ruler of Granada, and even lead his military forces. Now, Convivencia was built not just on the shared language of Arabic and on the freedom of religion permitted by Islamic law, but was crucially due to the daily interactions of urban life. You know, there was this recent study of 29 countries which showed that levels of intercultural tolerance rise rapidly with even small increases in the size of cities, which is precisely what Córdoba, a city of nearly half a million people, proved more than a thousand years

ago. I think there's a message here for our era of growing xenophobia and far-right nationalism, which is set to increase as the ecological crisis compels more and more people to migrate from their homelands. History offers an antidote to the idea of an inevitable clash of civilizations, showing how it's possible for us to live together with difference in multicultural communities, forging what the 14th-century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun called As-Sabiya,

an Arabic term meaning collective solidarity or group feeling, which he believed was vital to prevent the breakdown of civilizations. And we can all nurture the invisible threads of As-sabiya in our everyday lives. It can be as simple as having a conversation with a stranger once a week or joining a local sports team with players from diverse backgrounds. So, you know, we can see prospects for a different kind of economy in 18th-century Edo Japan

and for cultural coexistence in medieval Islamic Spain. But what about compelling our governments to take the urgent action required to overcome our continuing addiction to fossil fuels, which is driving us over perilous planetary tipping points? Well, history offers a very clear reason for radical hope. That disruptive movements can change the system. Let's journey back to the 1820s,

when over 700,000 enslaved people were working on British-owned sugar plantations in the West Indies. Now, at that time, many plantation owners and financiers made remarkably similar arguments to today's fossil fuel executives to defend their actions. They admitted that slavery, like oil and gas production, was morally questionable,

but they claimed that ending it too rapidly could easily lead to economic collapse. So instead, they argued that slavery should be phased out gradually, over many decades. Well, it's an excuse we hear repeatedly today from the fossil energy industry, which displays the very same foot-dragging gradualism. Now, the British abolition movement was organized in the Society

for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing the State of Slavery. The name said it all. Its reformist strategy of lobbying politicians and publishing pamphlets was making little headway. The turning point came in 1831, in an act of disruption which sent shockwaves through Britain, the Jamaica Slave Revolt. More than 20,000 enslaved workers rose up in rebellion in Jamaica,

setting fire to over 200 plantations. The revolt was brutally crushed, but it sent a wave of panic through the British establishment, who concluded that if they didn't grant emancipation, then the whole colony might be lost. Multiple studies showed that the revolt tipped the scales in favor of abolition, leading to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

In the absence of this disruptive radical flank movement, it might have taken decades longer for abolition to enter the statute books than if left in the hands of the reformist white elite. Now, many people are quick to criticize today's radical, nonviolent climate movements like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. But let's remember that they are part of long traditions of successful disruptive movements going back to the Jamaica rebels and to the suffragettes and the Indian independence movement and U.S. civil rights activists whose actions have helped amplify existing crises and catapulted them

onto the political agenda. In doing so, they've often broken the rules and sometimes the law to create change when all other pathways were blocked. The great tragedy is that while disruptive figures like Emmeline Pankhurst and Martin Luther King Jr. are now celebrated in our children's school history textbooks. Their modern equivalents in today's ecological movements are frequently demonized by the press and criminalized by the police. I mean, have we learned nothing?

I mean, personally, I'm not a natural disruptor and prefer sitting in old libraries reading books. But because of what I've discovered in those libraries about the power of disruptive movements, I have found myself lying on the street, blocking the road with my teenage daughter in front of London's parliament, exasperated by the government's

glacial pace of action on the climate crisis. I realize that it annoys commuters, but our inaction is going to infuriate future generations even more. I can't think of a better way to be a good ancestor. And it's too late and too reckless to leave this crisis to simmer on the low flame of gradualism. I'm not optimistic about the prospects for the human species. I believe that humanity is currently on a pathway

towards ecological and technological self-termination. But history gives me genuine hope that it doesn't have to be this way. We are not starting from zero. The past is full of inspiring possibilities that must guide us today, so we always act as if change is possible. Because from what I've seen, it just might be.

If our civilization is going to bend rather than break as we face the turbulence of the coming decades, we need to develop what I call temporal intelligence, the capacity to think on multiple time horizons, both forwards and backwards. Now, of course, history has always been used and abused by those in power, so we need to be wary of gross distortions and rosy romanticism and treat the past with care.

How might we do so and develop our temporal intelligence? Well, if schools taught applied history, then children might know how ancient Japanese sustainability practices could help reshape today's world. Or what if governments created not just foresight units, but backsight units, which systematically learn from the history of public policy?

And wouldn't it be fascinating to visit a History for Tomorrow museum which explores how history can help us confront 21st century challenges, from the ecological crisis to the risks of AI and genetic engineering. As we journey towards tomorrow, let us be guided by the Maori proverb, I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.

In fact, I invite you all to repeat it out loud after me, in Maori. So here we go, as loud as you can, me first. Kia Whakatōmuri. Taheire Whakamua. Absolutely brilliant. Thank you all so much. Applause. Thank you all so much. That was Roman Kersnarik at TED Countdown's 2024 Dilemma Event in Brussels. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.

And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan, additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Huw. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.

Thanks for listening. Health care is a right or a privilege, right? I'm reminded how my privilege of knowing my rights saved my life. This is Maya Williams. She is a chief operating officer at a research hospital. In a slam poem shared at the TED and Nova Nordisk salon event, Maya advocates for everyone to recognize health care as a fundamental right that must be delivered equitably. Maya has lived with obesity, survived two heart

attacks, and an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Today, we sat down with Maya to hear more about her story. I was hosting Friendsgiving. It was a girls and kids only Friendsgiving, so I kicked my husband out. I got up that morning like I normally do. I worked out and then I started prepping. I like to call myself the charcuterie queen, so I prepped the charcuterie board.

So everybody started coming and then out of nowhere. Gosh, my stomach, I was having this severe abdominal pain. The pain just kept getting progressively worse. I've never experienced this type of pain before in my life. So we get to the emergency room and I asked the attending at the time, I said, you know, can you give me this medication please and stabilize me and then get a CAT scan. I assumed at the time that they thought I was drug seeking and that they were like, no, we're not going to help you. You're going to wait. And I was like, oh no, no, no, no.

I can't wait because in my head I'm like, I've already had two heart attacks. Me waiting is killing me. Since the staff dismissed her, she wound up having to call a colleague in order to get the care that she needed. It turns out, Maya was having an abdominal aortic aneurysm, or triple A, a life-threatening condition. Come to find out what has caused all of the heart attacks and the AAA is that I have this genetic disorder called FMD. My talk focused on healthcare as a right and not a privilege, but the fact that I had to use my privilege in that moment

in order to access my right to health care. If something doesn't feel good, advocate for your own health, tell your doctor, you know, you're not feeling good, ask for help. You should feel empowered when you are in the emergency room, when you are with your health care provider to speak up about what you need and what your rights are. Here's Maya back on the TED stage.

This privilege I have as a health care provider, not known to most people that look like me, right, reminds me why I advocate for health equity to eliminate health disparities. This lived experience reminds me that these disparities, based on race, ethnicity, social economic status, still exists, right, in 2024. Right, healthcare is a right. And everyone should feel that they are being heard regardless of where they live, what

they look like, or how they can pay for it, right? To listen to Maya's TED Talk and learn more about her story, go to ted.com slash Novo. That's ted.com slash novo. From fleet management to flexible truck rentals to technology solutions. At Enterprise Mobility, we help businesses find the right mobility solutions so they can find new opportunities. Because if your business is on the road, we want to make sure it's on the road to success. Enterprise Mobility, moving you moves the world.