The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - History for Tomorrow: Uncovering Future Possibilities from Humanity's Past with Roman Krznaric

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

(Conversation recorded on August 5th, 2024)   While the global crises we face are on a larger scale than anything before, there is rich wisdom to glean from past civilizations who have faced existential challenges and survived – or even thrived. What lessons might we learn from history that could offer guidance for our future? In this episode, Nate is joined by social philosopher Roman Krznaric to discuss ways we might govern or lead during moments of crisis, using the lens of former and current civilizations.  What lessons have we forgotten when it comes to being in community with and listening to each other? How have our ideas and expectations of the future been informed by seeing history as a story of individuals shaping the rise and fall of civilizations, rather than a collective effort? How could learning from the past to create better democracies, wiser natural resource stewardship, and more circular economies help us prioritize human and planetary well-being?    About Roman Krznaric:  Roman Krznaric is a social philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to create change. His internationally bestselling books, including The Good Ancestor, Empathy and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 25 languages. He is Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University's Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing and founder of the world's first Empathy Museum. His new book is History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity. After growing up in Sydney and Hong Kong, Roman studied at the universities of Oxford, London and Essex, where he gained his PhD in political science. His writings have been widely influential amongst political and ecological campaigners, education reformers, social entrepreneurs and designers. An acclaimed public speaker, his talks and workshops have taken him from a London prison to the TED global stage. Roman is a member of the Club of Rome and a Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation. He previously worked as a gardener, a conversation activist and on human rights issues in Guatemala. He is also a top-ranked player of the medieval sport of real tennis. Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube --- Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

I am not claiming that I have any knowledge of the probabilities of what will happen. I'm much more interested in possibilities rather than probabilities. In what we have been capable of doing, but which isn't necessarily easy or likely to happen. We are on a pathway towards ecological and technological self-termination. But I don't think it's a definite route. It's not cast in stone that that will happen because we know that throughout history, we have managed to change systems to recalibrate how our economies and our politics works. And that's why in this book I talk about the idea of radical hope, which is being committed

to making change even if you think the odds are against you, to always act as if change were possible. Because imagine getting to the end of your life regretting the fact you hadn't taken action when it may have been possible to change. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Higgins. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. I am pleased to welcome Roman Kriznarek to the program. Roman is a social philosopher and the author of many books such as The Good Ancester,

Carpe Diem regained and most recently history for tomorrow, inspiration from the past for the future of humanity, which is the subject of today's conversation. Roman is a senior research fellow at the Oxford University Center for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, as well as the founder of the world's first empathy museum. He is a member of the Club of Rome and a research fellow of the Long Now Foundation. He has previously worked as a gardener, a conservation activist, and on human rights issues in Guatemala. Further trivia about Roman is he is the husband of frequent TGS guest, my friend, the renegade economist Kate Rayworth. In this conversation, which I expect will be the first of several because we just scratched the surface, we delved into what we can learn about societies who have succeeded in the face of crises during the last. last few centuries and how we can apply these learnings to the global crises we face. We especially dove into social innovations in the realm of governance and community organization.

And it's a big topic that I want to unpack more in the future. If you are enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our substack letter when you can read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament where my team and I point out special announcements related to the Great Simplification, you can find the link to subscribe in the show description. Also, if you learned and enjoyed from this podcast, I encourage you to send it to a couple people in your community. Ask them to watch it or watch it together and have a conversation about what you learned, the implications for where you live in our world. With that, I am pleased to welcome my new friend, Roman Kriznarik. Roman Krasnarek, welcome to the program.

And it's a great pleasure and privilege to be here, Nate, really looking forward to the adventure of our conversation. What was the quote you just told me off camera? I was just telling you that the great historian, Theodore Zeldon once said to me, A satisfying conversation is one in which you say things you have never said before. And I'm sure this will be one of those. From both our perspectives, perhaps.

So you have written many books. It seems that you read, you write a book every three years or so. I wonder if it takes three years to properly write a book. Among the better known ones, the good ancestor, Carpe Diem regained, but one that's just come out, history for tomorrow, inspiration from the past for the future of humanity will be the main topic of today's conversation. In this book, you cover lots of topics, including water shortages, inequality, AI revolution, genetic engineering. However, I would like to focus the discussion on governance and movement building based on your learnings from looking at the past thousand years ago. So first, though, what inspired you to take this particular take using an applied history approach to the current myriad crises that,

that humans in our planet face. Sure. So for the last 10 years, I've been writing a series of books, like a trilogy, about humanity's relationship with time. So one of the books you mentioned that The Good Ancestor was about our relationship

with the future. Carpe Die and Regain was about our relationship with the present, and this new book history for tomorrow is about humanity's relationship with the past. And these are all explorations of what I think of as temporary, intelligence. So you know that Daniel Goldman concept, you know, from the 1990s emotional intelligence? Well, I think we need to nurture temporal intelligence, by which I mean the human capacity to think on multiple time horizons, different modes of time, linear, cyclical, backwards, forwards. And I think particularly one of those areas where we're lacking temporal intelligence is about thinking about our relationship with the past. And I think we all know that,

our politicians. Our policymakers are so caught in the tyranny of the now. You know, they can barely see beyond the next election. Most of them will be on the latest tweet or opinion poll. Or they are looking to the future. They're crossing their fingers and hoping that the tech bros in Silicon Valley are right in thinking that technology will sort out our problems for us. And here we are in an age of polycrisis or metacrisis, depending how you define these things. Climate. and nature emergency risks from AI and genetic engineering, threats to democracy, growing inequalities. And the one thing I feel our politicians and policymakers, many NGOs and so on, are not looking at and not recognizing is that history is one of our greatest resources for

thinking about the future of humanity. And in a way, you know, it's not a new idea by any means. you can go back to Thucydides, the Islamic thinker Ibn Kuldun, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Gertr, the 18th century, the German writer Gertr said, he who cannot draw on 3,000 years, is living from hand to mouth. So there's an idea that the past, the wisdom of the past, the way we have faced crises and challenges and built cities and civilizations is a source of nourishment, hope of inspiration. And that's what I've tried to do in this book. And of course, one other sort of key aspect of this is that, you know, often we hear that famous George Santayano quote, you know, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, which is an idea about learning from the warnings of history. And there are plenty of great books that look at the warnings of history. Tim Snyder's book on tyranny, for example, great historian looking at interwar fascism, how we shouldn't be repeating what happened between the wars or books about the heritage of colonialism and how we can move beyond that. And what I've tried to do is not just look at the warnings from history, but to look at the moments of possibility, the moments of inspiration, look at what went right as much as what went wrong. And so I found history,

like Gertr, a source of nourishment for seeing where we can find ways to tackle these multiple crises facing humanity this century. I'm really looking forward to getting into some of your learnings. But let me ask you kind of a tangential question. You mentioned the importance of temporal experience, you know, how we relate to time. And for the first generation, perhaps, in our species history, we have the ability to understand and perceive deep time and where we came from and the grand arc of big history that brought us here. But at the same time, with social media and TikTok and supernormal stimuli, our attention spans are less and less able to look at the last thousand years or the last 500 million years. So is the relationship with time

changing because of our social media? At the same time, we have the scientific tools to understand and research what happened in the past. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, it's a great question. the concept of deep time that human beings are just an eye-blinking the cosmic story is a new idea, really. It only comes really from the late 18th century when, you know, geologists started seeing all those layers of rock and realizing that when the Bible said that the Earth was created a few thousand years ago, well, maybe there was a question to be raised about that. But of course, even though we've known about deep time for a couple of hundred years, you know, the geologist's hammer has lost out against the iPhone, and the acceleration of time due to

communication technologies has been far more dominant as a social force than the idea of deep time itself, and hence we have moved from the factory clock of the 19th century to the nanosecond speed share trading of today. Of course, the short-termism of today has even deeper roots going back to how we began measuring time in the 15th, 14th century, the mechanical clock, you know, started slicing up time first into hours and sets of 15 minutes by 1,700. Most clocks had minute hands. By 1800, they had second hands. But I think what's going on today is a recognition that we need to think longer. I mean, this is a big topic in my book, The Good Ancestors, and there's lots of reasons for this. I think the climate emergency itself has helped us think

beyond the here and now and acted somewhat as a counter to the nanosecond speed share trading, you know, just think about all those IPCC reports, you know, doing long-term predictions about sea level rises and temperature rises on a scale looking at 30 years ahead, 100 years ahead, 200 years ahead. And we think back to forecasting as it emerged in the 1960s and 70s in business and other fields like companies like Shell, maybe they were looking 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years ahead, not much more than that. But we're starting to think longer in many ways.

But there is still a cultural battle going on between the short and the long. And that then raises the question, well, can we think historically back in time as well as forward in time? And I think what's really interesting, if you even think about your own life, Nate, You know, if you think about the year your grandmother was born, you know, maybe that was, you know, however many years ago, 80 years ago, 100 years ago, you know, people are obsessed with tracing their family lineages, even going back several generations when they can. So we have this capacity to look back. I mean, look at the popularity of history podcasts or history documentary. So even though we are constantly checking our phones and having our,

dopamine stimulated by, you know, the social media barons, we also have a capacity to pause and breathe and think long. I mean, look at the obsession of people, you know, reading historical biographies as well. So I think there's hope for thinking historically. We just need to kind of nurture this part of our temporal intelligence. It's not like we don't have the capacity to do it. I mean, what do you think? Well, what I think is, um, I find it kind of bizarre that it's taken me two years to have you on the program is what I think. Well, I've been listening to your podcast for ages. We are all fans in my household, as I think you know. Well, for viewers that don't know, in your household is also another former guest, the economist Kate Ray Worth is your wife.

So thank you for both of you listening. So in your book, you touch on the idea of moving away from telling history based on the biographies of great men. Can you explain what you mean by that and why that's important? Sure. So in the 19th century, the British historian Thomas Collyle said that, you know, history is but the biography of great men. It was this idea that the way societies change, the way we share. shift is through the role of the exemplary individual, the politicians, the great political leaders, the key religious figures. And that idea has been so powerful. I mean, that is partly why people

today still read biographies of Churchill and Napoleon and Nelson Mandela. But I think one of the benefits of the rise of Marxist history in the mid-20th century, particularly after the Second World War was the recognition that history also changes due to the impact of collective action, organized social groups, class in Marx's sense, but that of course is too narrow because we've also had other ways that people organize themselves around different identities. But since the Second World, we've had the rise of what's sometimes called history from below. The idea that collectivities can shape the past as much as great individuals or as much as new technologies as well. And so in the British tradition, you've got historians like Eric Hobsbom,

who are key Christopher Hill. In the US tradition, think of, I don't know, a book like Howard Zins of People's History of the United States, you know, a multi-million copy bestseller, which tried to recast the story in the US since 1492 from below, looking at the perspective of enslaved people, of workers, of women, of Native Americans. So I think that's important. So what I'm doing in my new book history for tomorrow is I'm focusing as much as I can on that history from below. And the reason to do it really has to do partly with collective agency and a sense of what can I do. You know, I'm a reader of a book.

I'm a citizen of the world. What can I do? And if I'm told a story about the past that it's only the great leaders who can change things, or it's only cataclysmic events like wars and pandemics which change things, things out of my control, then maybe there's nothing I can do about anything. Yet I think there's a very powerful way of thinking about history, that history from below attitude, the idea that social innovation is as important as technological innovation, which tells us that we can,

shape the contours of our times. So kind of how we read history, maybe a microcosm of some of the broader hierarchical social challenges we have today because the winners write history. We've heard about that. And so we look at history from the great, you know, the great, notable biographies of great men that you mentioned earlier. But the reality is,

that there were all kinds of other things underpinning those eras, and we hear less about those in our geography and history classes. It's about Napoleon and things like that. So just out of curiosity for this book, was this mostly things that you had interpolated and figured out on your own over time, or how many books did you actually have to read to get this bottoms up perspective on history to write this one? Oh, God, hundreds of books and articles, you know. Literally hundreds?

Wow. Literally hundreds. Some of them I read during the last four years of writing this book, but a lot of them, like, Howard's in, that people's history of United States has been with me for 20 years. And, you know, it's when writing a book like this, you know, I am not a professional academic historian. I've got a PhD in political science. So my background is very much about thinking about political institutions and governance and some of the sociology of politics as well. But I've always tried to look at the world through the historical lens, at what human civilizations have done and not done. What are we

capable of? So I have had to draw on the work of extraordinary experts. You know, this is a book that's got discussions of witchcraft in Germany in the 16th century. It's got discussions of the circular economy in Japan in the 18th century. It's got discussions of alternative forms of democracy in West Africa in pre-colonial times. Now, I cannot claim to expertise in all of these areas, so I have had to rely on people who have spent years in the archives in a way acting as a kind of ambassador of the past. Because a lot of academic historians, I think, are a little bit afraid about trying to connect their work to the present day, even though a lot of them are doing it because they believe it matters. If you talk to someone who's writing about enslavement in the 18th

century in the United States, most of them, they may not write about its relevance to racial injustice struggles today. They may not directly do that. Some of them do, but most of them are engaged in that issue because they think it speaks to today. So in a way I've tried to draw out some of these stories, some of which I knew, many of which I didn't. I love the surprising things, the stuff I knew nothing about. And those things that have inspired me, I've also put in the book. So other than people reading your book, how can we culturally move away from the biographies of Great Man view of history to the, there were lots of bottoms up responses for social innovation and change. Is it an education thing? Is it a personal

experience thing? How do we get to shift that perspective? Yeah, I'd like to see a world where the idea of applied history, like applied science, is taught in schools, in elementary school, to elementary years. There are university courses increasingly on applied history, but they tend to be quite conservative. So they tend to focus on let's learn from the history of warfare and international diplomacy in Harvard. There's a big center on this. But why not also learn from social movements and collective action more broadly? So I think we need to do all of those things. But I'm a book person, you know, so I tend to write books, not make films. And there are many ways of doing it. Do you read science fiction ever?

I'm totally obsessed with science fiction. I've got more, I mean, for example, the author I've read most of in the last decade is Kim Stanley Robinson. I've got a shelf about three foot long of his books. And he, I mean, just to pick out one science fiction author amongst many, I mean, I think he's completely brilliant and one of the most important political writers in America is someone who thinks about the past as much as he thinks about the future. And you find this amongst some of the great sci-fi writers who, who, might be writing about the 24th century, but they can also tell you about medieval society. Ursula Le Guin was another one of these great sci-fi writers whose knowledge and thinking about history and anthropology were really extraordinary. Why do you ask? Are you a sci-fi person? I am. I am. But the reason I asked is I wondered if the Isaac Asimov Foundation trilogy, where they talk about the concept of psychohistory is akin to what you're talking about, applied history that we can learn kind of some fundamental aspects of what it means to be human and then maybe overlay Marvin Harris superstructure, social structure, infrastructure,

in different cultural milieus to come up with actually categories of interventions based on what our study of the past suggests. Yes and no is my answer to that. I love Asimov. The idea of psychohistory is so enticing, but in Asimov's work, history was the basis for a new statistical science. And I am not claiming that I have any knowledge of the probabilities of what will happen. I'm much more interested in possibilities rather than probabilities, in what we have been capable of doing, but which isn't necessarily easy or likely to happen. Because I think that some of the good stuff that's happened in the past has not been all

pervasive. There are models in the past that we can look to. I mean, if I think about the human future, I mean, I remember once listening to one of your discussions with Daniel Schmachtenberger, and he used a phrase something along the lines of that humanity's on a course of kind of ecological sort of self-termination. You know, we're on that kind of pathway. And I too believe that we are on a pathway towards ecological and technological self-termination. But I don't think it's a definite route. It's not an iron law. It's not car. It's not car. in stone that that will happen because we know that throughout history we have managed to change systems to recalibrate how our economies and our politics works. Again, I'm not saying this is

very likely to happen. And that's why in this book I talk about the idea of radical hope, which is being committed to making change, even if you think the odds are against you, to always act as if change were possible. Because imagine getting to the end of your life and thinking, well, you know, regretting the fact you hadn't taken, you know, action when it may have been possible to change. So, you know, going back to someone like Asimov, I'm not trying to create a science of learning from history. I'm trying to think of history, not as a mode of clairvoyance, but more as history as a kind of, as a suggestion for what might be possible. It's like it's an Overton window of possible social innovations. Yes, that's a really good way to put it. We need examples of how to be altruistic or how to innovate. We want to, but if we don't have examples of what worked in the past, I think it's like

there's a test showing that if people see an altruistic act with their own eyes, they're 300% more likely to do something altruistic. I think that maps on to what you're saying. That's a really fundamental point about being able to witness the altruism, because, again, when I was writing this book, History for tomorrow, some of the most striking examples of learning from history are ones which are examples of history that's still with us today. So just to give you one instance of this, if you go to the Spanish city of Valencia on the east coast, outside the west door of the cathedral, every Thursday at 12 noon, you can witness a ritual known as the Tribunal of Waters, the Tribunal de las Aguas. And this is a water court, a grassroots from below water court, which may be Europe's oldest legal democratic institution. And eight black cloak figures sit in a semicircle outside the door of the apostles, Thursdays at noon, and they wear these black cloaks.

And each of them is a democratically elected representative of one of the local irrigations. canals, which are part of the Valencia agricultural hinterland, which provide all the Valencia oranges, which can be found over Europe. It's very important. And it is an example of managing scarce water resources. They fine the farmers who maybe violate the rules. And again, there are public hearings for this. And this institution has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, meeting on Thursdays since at least 1,500. It's an institution that goes back even though. It's an example of course of what Eleanor. Ostrom called the Commons, right? It's a living history when people see that. I think that's a way of thinking, okay, if they can do it in Valencia, where else could we do something like this? That will bring me even further afield from your book, maybe, but I think the importance of ritual, especially ritual connected to ecology and nature and the commons, as you say, is something really overlooked in our society of frenetic pace social media just in time delivery of stuff from a six continent supply chain. So that ritual aspect of it, that in Valencia you can go and see that

and it's been going on for centuries, I think a lot of us feel like we miss that. You have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that we need to invent rituals for a ecologically sustainable future. I think it's a really important point because the Tribunal of Waters in Valencia is indeed a ritual. Or think of the Subac water management system in Bali, which I don't write about in the book, but there's some really fine writing on this book by Stephen Lansing called Perfect Order. And in Bali, they have something a bit like the Tribunal of Waters, a kind of a system for managing a scarce resource, but there are rituals around it, kind of there are rituals around worship at water temples in Bali and things like that.

And I think that's something that's missing from people's lives in a hyper-individualistic atomized society. But we need to connect rituals to a kind of different ecological mindset to a kind of biophilic rituals that we need to invent. And I happen to live in the city of Oxford in the UK, not Oxford, Mississippi or any other Oxford. And Oxford has maintained a few pre-Christian festivals of connections with nature which are highly ritualistic. So on May morning, the 1st of May, in the city I live in, people dance on the streets decked out with ivy wrapped around their heads and dressed in green. They are celebrating the fecundity, the nourishment, the rising of the spring and the coming of the summer. It's a kind of harvest festival. And me and my partner Kate and my kids, we all get dressed up and we dance on the streets at 6 in the morning.

and it is a beautiful moment. But then by 8 o'clock, the cars are just coming and going and the buses are back and it's totally disappeared. And I think we need more of that in order to, in a way, embed the kinds of ideas that we're talking about that you've been talking about on this podcast for all of this time. Would you agree with that? I would totally agree with that. But I have a dark asterisk on it as those things happen. And they interrupt the cars and such. Is that going to be a threat to the momentum of the superorganism of fellow British citizen, Roger Hallam, has just been sentenced to prison for making a speech.

That's a more extreme version of what you're talking about. But the ecological rituals at some point may have a very small overlap with business as usual. I hope not. And yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you sentiment-wise. And I think globally, suddenly at this 11th hour, there is a recognition of our kinship with nature and slowing down and reconnecting with others and with natural systems. I feel that, but I feel like I'm also maybe in a minority group that talks about it and champions it. Yeah, well, I completely agree with that. I mean, I certainly don't think that reviving or recreating or inventing new kinds of nature at Chavills is enough to, it's not enough to just go on a pilgrimage to Stonehenge a couple of times a year when you've got that super organism bearing down on you. You know, I think we need a plethora of approaches, including disruptive social action, the kind of thing that Roger Hallam's been doing. We can maybe get onto that.

But I do think that, you know, one of the ways I think about this is I think, you know, we need a biosphere which provides the air that we breathe. But we also need to think about the ethnosphere, what I think of as the ethnosphere, which is the cultural air that we breathe, the sets of assumptions and beliefs and world views, the Veltan Chawong, which shape what we think and don't think, what we do and what we don't do. and the idea of rituals are part of reconstituting the ethnosphere. A book like I've just written is also part of that too. It's in the world of ideas. But of course, the story of history is not just ideas changing things, but it's also about collective action. It's about various kinds of disruption.

So the superorganism is not going to be scared of me dancing with some ivory wrapped around my head. But that is part of a different narrative. still. In conversations around your house, how do you decide who gets to speak for how long? Because both you and Kate have a lot to say. Like, is that ever a problem that you're finishing each other's sentences and such? It's funny. Over the years, our work is growing closer and closer together. I mean, I began in the 1990s really involved in human rights activism and working with indigenous people in Guatemala, writing articles in politics, about measuring the quality of democracy and so on.

And Kate came from the perspective of development economics, working for the Human Development Report, the United Nations Development Program. But over time, our interests have slightly merged. She kind of led the way, really, on learning about the importance of ecological economics, which, of course, is something that you've gone into very deeply. I was a latecomer to that, to reading Herman Daly, for example.

When I read Herman Daly, it blew me. my mind to recognize that economy, society, politics is a subset of the ecosystem. And to get that to go deep into my bones has taken even longer. And another key thing for me was reading Bill McKibbon's The End of Nature, a book he published in 1989. I didn't read it until 2003. But it absolutely shifted my thinking. And in that sense, my own thinking started getting closer together. So when I think of, well, what should the goal of humanity be? Yeah, I think of donut economics. But I'm also interested in, well, what are the mechanisms to get us there? You know, so I'm very much thinking about what are the kinds of political institutions that we need to create a donut-style economy. And I like

drawing on history in doing that exploration. Well, let's get into that. Because one, area, well, all areas so far, but one area I particularly agree with you is that understanding and mitigating global collapse of various systems, there currently is a really large demographic of what shorthand we might call techno-optimists who believe that the energy transition is merely switching out the bad energy with good energy. and that innovation will save us. But in your book, you talk about social innovation. And in my opinion, the energy transition is much more about how we use energy than what kind of energy it is.

So why don't you break it down for us? What is social innovation, the way you talk about it in your new book? And do you have a particular potent example on how it has propelled a civilization in the past towards rapid change? Yes, so I think one of the ways that people often think about how history shifts is through technological innovation. It's the spinning, Jenny, it's the iPhone, it's the combustion engine. But I think that if you look through the annals of the past, the rise and falls of civilizations, the comings and goings of nations and empires, I think we can see that social innovation has been just as an important force. And by social innovation, I mean the human capacity to, to organize themselves in movements, to commonly manage resources, to develop shared ideals for the common good. And these social innovations come in many forms. So you've got the kind of slow burn social innovations, the ones that take a long time to develop. So things like that Valencia Water Tribunal I mentioned, the rules to develop how to manage a common resource like water.

very deeply embedded there as our commons management rules in many other spheres, the kind of things that Eleanor Ostrom wrote about, you know, managing forestry in Switzerland or fisheries in West Africa. So that's one form of social innovation, something like the principles by which we manage common pool resources, you know, who can have access to them, what are the rules for those who violate, and so on. And then we've got other kinds of social innovation. So think, for example, of the rise of social movements and trade unions in the late 18th, 19th century,

a way that workers particularly organizing around the workplace to create change. So the second half of the 19th century in Europe was a time, huge shift because of the rise of the trade union movement. You have all sorts of legislation around limiting the work day, the eight-hour day, the creation of the weekend, work safety, all of that coming out of a form of social organization. And then you've got social movements like the uprisings of enslaved people in Jamaica in 1831, so slave uprisings. All these things have been a form of organization, which didn't necessarily exist in the same way, you know, 2,000 years ago, but have emerged since and have been potent.

And then I think a third really interesting category, and there are many categories of social innovation, innovations in the economic sphere, particularly around mutual aid and the rise of cooperatives. Again, you can think of the 19th century. Go to somewhere like Emilio Romagna, the region in Italy, which today, it's a region of 5 million people. Today, about one third of the economy is based on cooperatives and steward-owned companies, and about one-third of people are employed in cooperatives and steward-owned businesses. And these emerged from the 19th century, even kind of earlier, a different kind of model of organizing how we provision ourselves. So all of these are different kinds of forms of social innovation.

And what they have in common is something that the great Islamic historian from the 14th century Ibn Kaldun recognized, which is the importance of what he called Asabia, Asabia, Asabia, which is an Arabic word meaning, collective solidarity or group feeling. And this historian, one of the first great historians, Ibn Kaldun in the 1370s, he was a famous judge from North Africa and a legal and historical scholar, and he went to spent a few years in Algeria, what is today Algeria, in the early 1370s.

And in a little bit like the British historian Edward Gibbon, in the 18th century, he went to Rome and saw all these crumbling buildings and wondered what explained the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. He wrote a famous book about that, of course, the Klein and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ibn Kaldun did the same thing in the 14th century. He was surrounded by crumbling castles in North Africa

and thought, where have these civilizations gone? What explains their rise and fall? And in his famous book, the Mukadima, his book on history, a cyclical theory of history, He said, well, the reason civilizations tend to rise and fall, the key reason is because of this term Asebia, collective solidarity. He mentions it more than 500 times. And basically he said that civilizations which thrive, which are strong, which have resilience, have a very strong social glue, social trust, modes of collective action and social responsibility. And those

which tend to crumble are ones where that social glue, that Asabia, falls. apart. So he looked at the, you know, the Islamic regime in the south of Spain and the 13th 14th century, began to fall apart partly because of growing wealth inequalities, where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. We know that old story. Very few civilizations can survive for a long time with those kinds of long-term inequalities, very clear finding from the studies of civilizational collapse. And it was about a kind of social solidarity, collective solidarity. So I think when you go to Ibn Kaldun, something so obscure, it seems, that concept of Asabia, I think, captures the importance of social innovation as opposed to other forms of innovation. Does the concept of Asabia, which I would say today broadly has been religion can have a collective purpose and also economic growth globally the last 50s.

years, the rising tide of energy surplus and innovation have lifted all tides, all boats. But can it apply to things that are longer term and distant like an ecological crisis? Because when we look at climate change and species loss and insect loss and declines in sperm count and all that stuff, it's hard to get a collective. a subbia around that. Also in your book you wrote that most turning points in history stem from an externally derived threat like war, disease, or resource shortages or something like that. So how do climate change biodiversity fit into this historical model? Or is this a no-analogue example? Yeah, that's a really great question because I think the

If you read someone like Ibn Kaldun today, you know, a 14th century historian, there's something really missing fundamentally, I think, from his analysis of civilizational rise and fall. So he focuses on that Asabia, that social solidarity or what might call intraspecies solidarity. What's missing is interspecies solidarity. In other words, our relationship with the ecology around. us on which our civilizations depend. So when I think about what are the fundamentals of helping us to bend rather than break, to use some of your terminology, which I think is so fantastic, how do we bend rather than break? Well, I think we need three things. One is we need the asabia,

we need the intraspecies solidarity, we need to have ways of acting collectively and being able to support each other through tough times, but we also need a hyper sense of interdependence with the living world, that kind of biophilia, that interspecies solidarity, if we are going to recognize that we need to create societies which exist within planetary boundaries or exist work with the cycles of the living world. And then the third factor we need is, is we need to have a capacity to respond effectively to crisis. And I've got a model of that. We can maybe talk about that called the disruption nexus.

But I think on the topic of that interspecies, solidarity, interdependence with the living world, one of the things I've tried to emphasize in this book, and I have no easy way around how do we do this, right? It's one of the big and difficult questions. But I do think... If you did, I would be skeptical. But go out. If I look at some of my own writing in the past, like my book The Good Ancestor talked a lot about indigenous cultures and that idea of kind of interdependence, the idea that you can find in many indigenous cultures that the rivers are not a resource, there are relatives, or the idea of seventh generation decision-making, which can be found amongst had no Shorny people and in other cultures. And I'm very inspired by that very much.

But I'm also thinking that it's very important that in Western hypercapitalist culture, we try and find the elements of that biophilic interdependence inside our own cultures, in our own histories. Because it's not that far away. Because I think there's a false story which has been told about humanity's relationship with the living world over the last, say, 500 years. And that story is that we have become increasingly alienated from nature by the Industrial Revolution, basically. And that Christianity has played into that through the idea of the domination of nature. The machines of the Industrial Revolution did that by sending us into the cities and dissoning us from the living world and treating the earth as a resource for exploitation. And that's all true.

But there's a parallel story, which is, and there's an absolutely brilliant book on this. by the British historian Keith Thomas called Man in the Natural World, 1500 to 1800. And he says that there was a parallel story of just as we were becoming alienated from nature. At the same time, at least in parts of Western Europe, there was a sense that we needed to reconnect with this thing that we were losing. So you had the rise of things which might seem trivial, like the rise of recreational gardening, 16th and 17th century, the obsession with tree planting across Germany and England in the same period.

You get people starting to write nature journals like Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne. All of these things. And then at the same time you had the preservation of some of these rituals like I talked about earlier, like May Day connecting with nature. And those rituals are right across Europe in Estonia, in Sweden, in Germany. And so I like sort of thinking, let's try and reconnect with those things that are already in our culture, as well as those things in other cultures which are equally inspiring. But that's only the beginning. And just one final thought on this. You mentioned religion. Religions have been the most powerful force in human history for giving us new values, for creating visions of change.

I'm not a religious person by any means, but what I recognize is that I think the global ecological movement, as it has emerged since the 1960s, is basically a massive decentralized religion without calling itself that. You've got all these different movements to preserve wildlife. Some of them are very conservative. Some of them are more radical, which are about people scaling coal-fired power stations. But all of them have something in common, which is a kind of sense. of the worship of the earth of Gaia. They may not say that on their websites, right? But that's kind of what they're doing. And that's something quite hopeful and interesting that gives me hope for that sense of interconnection, but then trying to mobilize it is another thing. Well, you claim not to be a religious person, Roman, but it sure sounds like you're a devotee of what might be called animism to me.

Actually, I really like animism, actually. But I like coming to animism through science. Right out my window above the screen that I'm looking at are two ash trees. Now, those ash trees provide enough oxygen for eight human beings. So I realize that they are my external lungs. Wow. So we have this kind of mythology that our bodies kind of end with our skin and bone. But when you open your mind to the idea that the trees are my external lungs, or that I'm breathing in argon atoms which were breathed in by the Buddha and Jesus and Cleopatra, David Suzuki, the great Canadian environmentalist, very good at talking about this.

That science for me is a root into the kind of interconnection with the living world, which I didn't get culturally. You know, I happened to grow up in Australia and I did have some exposure to indigenous culture through my grandfather who gave me, in fact, when I was eight years old, I met one of Australia's great indigenous writers, a man called Gubberlathaldon, also known as Dick Rufsey, he wrote a book called The Rainbow Serpent about how human beings were born out of the rocks and the rivers and the desert. But really, that stuff isn't deep in me. So going via science is actually, I think, quite a helpful route for a lot of people. At least that's how, that's what makes me feel connected on a kind of more existential level to a sense that I am not just this body, but a real part of me, the living, breathing part of me, which part of who I am is something bigger than that, a kind of you are, therefore I am. I don't know, how do you feel about your relationship with the living world. Do you feel that kind of culturally? Do you feel that connection with the kind of landscape that you live in or the world that you are part of? The cultural part is brand new. I've

always felt a biophilic camaraderie kinship with nature from when I was three or four years old. nature and hikes in the forest were my cathedral. And I then approached it from a scientific perspective, you know, E.O. Wilson and Bill Plotkin and many other writers. And now only recently

am I looking at the cultural, ecological connections the way you describe. And I do feel like at this 11th hour, our species, our culture, He's starting to remember these things from our ancient past. I just hope it's not too late. And the tsunami of finance and geopolitics and depletion and other things

doesn't snuff out the ember of this awakening because this is a species level conversation. We're at this real critical juncture of, you know, what are the seeds that we plant for archel? and, you know, the unborn children of many other generations and other species. Yeah, I think about it a lot. Well, here's the other thing. I've always loved nature. When I left Wall Street to pursue this path, my dad referred to me as his environmental

wacko son to his friends. I wasn't right. But now, like, we go fishing. I went fishing in Canada. a few weeks ago with 13 of my male relatives. We've done it maybe 40 times since I was young. And we catch some fish and we eat some and we let the rest go. But now I'm starting to like empathize for the fish's suffering and I think about it.

And if we have to dispatch them to eat them, I want to do it as quickly. And like I think about what other species, you know, even worms or chickens or foxes. I empathize from their perspective, which I never did when I was younger, even though I cared about nature. So something is happening in me talking to people like you and other scholars and recognizing the fragility of the biosphere and the safety of the zone of the Holocene that we've all accepted as permanent kind of in our culture. And it's not. And it's at risk. So I'm I'm kind of a maelstrom of different emotions on this. Some days I revel in the beauty of the natural world.

And other days, I view it as a snapshot in the movie. And I anticipate the later scenes that are going to be unpleasant. And that gets me down. So that's my answer to your question. You're like, Kate, I'm going to have to have you back and interview me in the future. Always ready to do that. Always ready to do that. So one of the ideas I got for,

your book is that there's kind of a clearinghouse of ideas from the past that we can apply to our current situation. And the way that I see it is there's this steps of higher height and hurdles to get to where we're going. The first step is understanding the metacrisis and how everything fits together. Just loosely, you squint and see it. And then the next step is caring. And obviously you and I in this discussion are voicing our care for nature and the natural world.

And I think a lot of followers of this show are past those two steps. And then the next hurdle is, what the hell do we do? And as individuals and as a culture, so during the rest of this episode, and I've not even gotten to 90% of the questions that I had planned on asking you. That always happens to you that. You say that in every episode. Do I? Yeah, well, especially the ones I'm interested in.

But I want to take a deeper dive of your learnings from the past that are applicable. And let's start with governance. So you have an entire chapter dedicated to democracy. And as it happens in my country, we have a major election coming out in a couple of months. And you argue that it's actually by design in a reality. representative democracy system that we don't have an electoral option that that we support. So in your opinion, do you think we've over amplified the weight of the representative part of representative democracy?

And what are the most viable open society, democratic alternatives you've studied from the past that we might be able to lean on or learn from with respect to what's coming our way? Yeah, so where I start with thinking about democracy is certainly recognizing that the political systems that we have today, particularly representative democracy, were designed in the 18th and 19th century in a different era to solve different problems. They were a replacement for aristocratic government, monarchical government. And they have seemed to be, as far as I can tell, absolutely hopeless at dealing with the ecological crisis that we face. You know, we know that since the alarm bells about CO2, and that's just thing about CO2, not materials, you know, started to ring with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. What's happened to global carbon emissions? Well, more than doubled.

We clearly have political systems which are dysfunctional when it comes to dealing with crises that are very long term in particular. the sort of slow burn, slow violence of the ecological emergency. And so we need to look for different kinds of systems. And look, you can have all the sustainable development goals and targets or whatever that you like. But if your political system is still caught in short-term cycles, you're not going to get very far. And I find it slightly frustrating a lot of discussions in the ecology sphere, which are not taking the politics seriously enough. So I think it's really important to recognize that the representative democracy that we have invented in the 18th, 19th century was designed to exclude people, not to include them. And what I mean by that is that when the framers of, you know, the U.S. Constitution, the French Revolution, parliamentary democracy in England were doing their thing, they were scared of the demos, the people.

They were scared of direct participation, so they developed a system called representative government where you would have expert politicians who would be the voice of the people because they didn't trust the people. You can see this in the US context, in the writings of Madison, you can see it in a whole load of other writers across Western Europe. So let's just first recognize that the representative system is just one particular way of organizing our governance, which is actually designed to exclude or that functions to exclude people. And then if you start thinking historically, are there other modes? Now, I used to teach in universities in the late 1990s, early 2000s. I used to teach political science, democratic theory and history and all that kind of stuff.

I thought I was an expert in democracy. I wasn't because I didn't even realize that we were basically just pushing one particular mode of democracy, representative democracy, and that there are other forms. forms through history, which have been kind of written out of the story. You know, Winston Churchill famously said, well, democracy is the best form, the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time. But he was blind as well to the other options, because by democracy, he meant representative government.

So where do we look for history in history for other options? Well, the one obvious place to go, of course, is to ancient Greece, which everybody knows that ancient Greek democracy, well, a lot of people know that one of its trait was, it was exclusionary, excluded women, it excluded slaves, it excluded immigrants, but its two key forms of decision-making were really important. One of them was what they had, they had a form of assembly government. In other words, anybody could turn up almost every week to the Pinnix, which was their decision-making body, any male citizen, so that meant about 50,000 people, and they could vote. Sometimes 6,000 people would come and make a decision. So it didn't, they weren't, they didn't have

elected representatives in the way we do today, it was direct participation. That was one aspect of it. The second aspect they had, former government they had, is what's called sortition, which is selection by lottery, selection by lot. So for the 500 key positions of what was basically the legislature, or their Congress, as it were, was effectively chosen randomly by random selection of Greek citizens. And it was a very effective system. It lasted at least a couple of hundred years. And it wasn't the only the ancient Greeks who did this. I mean, if you look in the Renaissance, Republican Florence, before it got taken over by the Medici dynasty, they selected their major political positions through lottery as well, like the ancient Greeks did. Or if you go to Switzerland in the 16th and 17th century, in fact, when I was researching this, book, I discovered this country, in effect, which I'd never heard about. It was called the Free State of R-H-A-E-T-I-A, or the Republic of the Three Leagues. I'd never heard of it. But between 1523 and 1799, a group of a region in Switzerland basically had a form of

grassroots assembly-style democracy, a bit like ancient Greece, what they had, but it was more sophisticated. They had about 250 local neighbourhood assemblies where anyone could participate. Men, yes, but all men, so cow herds as much as merchants. They would make decisions for local issues like local taxes or whose turn it was to clear the Alpine paths. And then for more important decisions, they sent delegates, not elected representatives, but delegates up to the next level of 49 communes. And then they had a federal assembly that met a couple of times. a year. And it was basically what today we would call an anarchist form of government, really. If you look at the writings of Murray Buchan, the social ecologist from the US who died some years ago, he was very

interested in these kinds of alternative democratic models, which were grassroots. And that very model, the one in the free state of Raitia in Switzerland in the 16, 17, 18th century, actually has been replicated today in various parts of the world. The most important, is if you go to northeast Syria today, the area known as Rojava, in the middle of a war zone, basically, the Kurdish people have created a form of assembly government, based in fact bizarrely on the ideas of Murray Bookchin, the great social ecologist, former anarchist thinker, and their leader, Abdullah Ojalan, read Murray Bookchin, read about the ancient Greeks and thought, this is a better way of running a society than by having a revolutionary Marxist overthrow of the state, grassroots politics, functioning for several

million people. It's completely extraordinary. And I know you've got questions now, so I'll just hold back from talking about citizens assemblies, which is another thing. That's where I was going. I mean, we could spend the entire interview on this topic because I have so many questions and insights and constraints. I mean, the first is, I think this fits who we are as an involved social tribal ape. And it makes sense to me, but I think certainly I don't know that this would work with centralized, financialized economic growth for eight billion of us. But I think it could work in some post-growth, more bioregional future sort of thing. but it also depends on the education and understanding of what we face by the people that are

that are chosen in the in the assemblies because if everyone doesn't understand climate change or the fact that two ash trees give enough oxygen for eight people then you know worse decisions will be made um so how do go on it and tell us us about a citizen assembly or follow up with what you're saying. The challenge here, this is the first time we've ever spoken and there's way too much to fit into a 90-minute interview because I love it all and I have questions on it all. Yeah, I will try to be succinct. I think your question is very fundamental and I like your skepticism and I think it's absolutely right to be skeptical about, you know, there's a real danger of cherry-picking examples from history and thinking that we can just

sort of place them in today's world to deal with today's problems. And, you know, this is always a problem of analogical reasoning. We need to look for similarities and differences that every dictator is not another Hitler, every war is not another Vietnam. But when it comes to citizens' assemblies, that ancient Greek tradition, which continued in Europe, has re-emerged amazingly in the last 20 years. So the idea of randomly selecting citizens to talk about issues is under going an extraordinary renaissance. And that renaissance really, in many ways, goes back to Ireland in the 2010s where they started reviving the idea of the Citizens Assembly. And they famously had a Citizens Assembly on the hot topic of abortion, very hot topic in Ireland, that the politicians

didn't want to touch. But they randomly selected about 100 citizens using a kind of algorithm to make sure that you had a mixture of old and young and people from different ethnic backgrounds and different ages and different parts of the country. And they discussed this issue and they recommended that there should be a referendum to change the constitution to make abortion legal. And that referendum was passed. And that Irish example then kick started a wave of what's called deliberative democracy, which is direct participation through random selection across European countries. There have been more than 250 citizens assemblies in the last decade. A lot of them have been on the climate issue. Some of them have been on AI or on aging populations. And they're really fascinating because,

you know, if I'm trying to think about them in a positive sense, I do believe they're the most exciting innovation in democracy since the extension of the franchise to women in the early 20th century. Fabulously interesting and exciting. The fact that there had been hundreds of them, But, and you know, you know this as well as I, they are highly problematic in many ways. So the way that they tend to be structured at the moment is that politicians set up the assemblies, invite citizens to have a discussion about something. The citizens come up with a bunch of recommendations, and then the politicians basically often ignore those recommendations because it's not binding. What's interesting about citizens' assemblies is they tend to come up with much more radical and transformative policy proposals,

than regular politicians. So that, you know, the French Climate Assembly and one in Spain, they put forward the proposal that ecocide, you know, the violation of the living world, should be a crime, right, in national and international law. And, you know, one of the reasons I got interested in this was thinking about long-term decision-making when I was writing my last book, because there's very strong evidence that citizens' assemblies tend to take a longer view than the politicians caught up in short-term cycles. And so, So what we're facing now is a question about how can we bring citizens' assemblies into a more institutional place in politics and so that they're not ignored by the politicians. So, you know, in East Belgium now, they have a permanent citizens' assembly.

Brussels now has a permanent citizens' assembly on the climate. In Gerdansk, in Poland, the mayor has said that any citizens' assembly, which has more than 80% of people voting for a proposal, they will put it into practice. These are baby steps in a large change of politics. Let's see how far we get with Citizens' Assemblies. What do you think? Here's what I think. I've always said that I am a fan of local currencies

because not that they're going to replace the U.S. dollar or the British pound, but because of the social capital they create. And I think the same thing applies to citizen assemblies is ostensibly the proximate reason for them is to have better decisions made with the politicians. But ultimately, especially in the times that we face, you are organizing and getting to know other people where you live and talking about the issues of the day. And that may be the ultimate benefit of scaling citizen assemblies, I think. So how does someone listening to this in Topeka, Kansas, or Grand Marais, Minnesota, wow, let's try to start a citizen assembly where we are. Is there a checklist or a way for people to start that?

Yeah, I think it's an absolutely great point that the purpose of a lot of this is to sow the seeds of Asabia of social trust that glue. I think that's partly what's going on. It's about building a new society in the shell of the old that maybe when particular moments of crisis happen, we are ready in terms of social solidarity, in terms of new economic and political visions, having an ecosystem of currencies rather than a monoculture of currencies. And anyone can set up a citizens' assembly in their own town. In fact, lots of towns are doing this, even when the politicians are not doing it. Extinction Rebellion, the direct action movement in the UK, has started trying to say, well, let's just set up our own citizens assemblies and have public hearings. And in fact, you know, I talked about that Valencia Tribunal of Waters. Well, partly inspired by that in Latin America, a body's been set up called the Latin American Tribunal of Waters, where they hold, it's not an official government body, but it's a kind of a community-based organization, an NGO in effect, which holds public.

hearings, for example, when a big corporation wants to build a dam in Honduras that will wipe out the traditional lands of indigenous people or something like that, they hold these public hearings which get enormous media attention and which help build the social capital to create change. So I think you're absolutely right that we can, I think there's enormous possibility for this, but also, and this is going to sound a little bit way off, but you may not know, but when I left academia, I started working with this historian called Theodore Zeldon, who I quoted at the beginning of the conversation. He set up an organization called the Oxford Muse, spelled M-U-S-E. And it was invented to create conversations between strangers and to overcome social divides, to overcome the

hyper-individualism of neoliberal consumer capitalism. And what I did for several years when I left academia was I used to organize these things called conversation meals where we would invite strangers from a city, maybe a hundred people, sometimes a thousand people in a public park. We'd invite them for a meal, rich and poor, black and white, you know, different religions. And instead of giving them a menu of food, we gave them a menu of conversation with questions about life on it, like, what have you learned about the different varieties of love in your life, or in what ways would you like to be more courageous, or how have your priorities changed over the years. And it was like the opposite of speed dating. People would talk for an

hour, not for a minute. But the purpose of it, a fun activity of community building was a deeper one about recognizing how social change happens, which is that if you and I sit down and have a conversation and I see the world from your point of view, if only for a moment and you see it from mind, we create a microcosmic little bit of equality. And this is a mode of change and a mode of holding societies together in difficult times. So anyone can put on a conversation meal. In fact, there's brilliant projects around the world which do exactly this. Yeah, that is brilliant. I was going to ask whatever happened to that, that Oxford Muse, because that's sorely needed in today's world, things like that.

Yeah, I mean, the Oxford News, I mean, I left it after three or four years. It still puts on some of these conversation meals, but there have been lots of other ones which have been spawned since then. So the big ecological project in the UK called the Eden Project, which is a kind of like a biosphere that you can go and visit as an ecotourist, they set up something called the big lunch where hundreds of thousands of people and a particular day in the UK each year in their local communities put out chairs and tables in the streets and they simply have lunch together. It's totally brilliant. I think it could be improved with putting menus of conversation on

the table. That's what I'm into. And in fact, historically, in a sense, this is what we did. If you go back to the coffee houses of the 18th century, and I write about this in my new book history for tomorrow, the coffee houses of the 18th century, which exploded in popularity in London, there were over 2,000 of them, you know, in the early 1700s, when 50 years, before there'd been none, one of the things that they had was a communal table. And on that communal table, you would sit with a stranger, and the communal table would have on it periodicals and pamphlets, so the printing revolution helped with this. But these were places where strangers, not of very different social backgrounds, but of relatively different social backgrounds,

mostly men, so it had its limitations, they would discuss the big ideas of the day, republicanism, anti-slavery. That's where Daniel Defoe and Tom Paine were doing their thing. If you just think of, again, I'm thinking of the UK, but in the UK, there are 30,000 coffee shops right today. Imagine if they were using, imagine if you put in communal tables in each of them and there were just 10 conversations between strangers a day that would make over 100 million conversations a year. I think that's actually quite interesting and as important and serious as thinking how we're going to, you know, tax carbon. There's 30,000 coffee shops. How How many pubs do you know offhand? Probably more than 30,000. Yeah. I mean, the question is whether

we can convert the pubs into conversational hubs. In fact, you could probably change churches which are dying out in this country, sort of traditional Anglican, you know, Church of England. But there's all these social spaces that we need to reclaim, I think, for building Asabia, for building resilience, for having conversations for sharing, you know, communal food. Because again, as you say, this is about actions which don't necessarily change the system right now, but they start eroding it at the edges, and so that when the time comes, we have enough of that social capital to rebuild, reform, but it's part of bending, not breaking, for sure. Speaking of bending, not breaking, does your applied history and the hundreds of books

and such that you read on the last thousand years, offer you any vantage or speculation on what's going on right now in the UK with the immigrant murders and the chaos in the streets over this past weekend. Today's Monday, August 5th. Is there any lens from history that you can apply to that situation? Yeah, I think there are lots of lenses from history. I mean, I've got a whole chapter in my book on the history of migration. Because as we know, you know, by 2050, it's possible that there will be one billion people who are migrants, one in ten people that's partly due to climate change.

It'll be due to the impacts of AI, automation, all sorts of things like that. And we're going to have to find ways of living together on a scale which, you know, people are going to be moving on a scale which we have not seen since the shift from the countryside to the city in the 18th, 19th century in the Industrial Revolution. So partly, and if you look at the history of that, well, look at the history of Chinese immigration in the United States, for example. When you had Chinese migrants started coming in in the 1840s and 50s, fleeing the Tai Ping rebellion and civil war in China, coming to the gold mines, coming to build the railroads. Well, as soon as the economic crises hit, like in the 1870s in California, boom, you start getting lynchings of Chinese immigrants, right? And

the burning of Chinese quarters. You've got the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, I think, the first piece of federal legislation to exclude a particular ethnic or cultural group. So what we're seeing partly today is something similar, is that when, you know, you have moments of economic instability, when people can't pay their mortgages, when food and energy prices are going up, well, the first targets are the outsiders, of course. And you see this, you know, replicates. You know, replicate made it through history. But I think that's partly what's going on today, that you target the outsider who isn't actually the cause of your fundamental problems, because we know that migrants, fantastic economic data on this tend to be net beneficiaries to in terms of government budgets,

because migrants tend to pay more taxes than the average person. They take less from the social system in terms of social security, education and health. so that they're net contributors to budgets, but that's not how the issues that are framed. But I think there's something really important here about this particular moment, what's happening in the UK, but more generally about the importance of crises for creating change in history. And I really love to just say something about this for a moment, because if you think about how civilizations change, what makes them survive and thrive. One thing, as I mentioned, you need, is that social glue of Asabia. The second thing you need, I think, is the interdependence of biophilia of the living world. But the third thing you need is a capacity to respond to crisis.

And, you know, I've been so frustrated over the last 15 years, 20 years, thinking of all these ecological crises going on in the world. The wildfires in California, floods in Bangladesh, melting ice sheets, record temperatures in the Arctic. And yet our government still don't act. Well, why not? Well, of course, if you look at history, governments tend to act on certain kinds of crises like wars or pandemics, these sort of very big ones. But most crises, there are too many reasons not to act. So I became really interested in what is it? That what are the context in which you get rapid transformative change to deal with an urgent issue? What is needed? And I think what's needed is what I call in my book that the model I've developed is called the disruption nexus. So imagine a triangle with three corners. In one corner, you've got some kind of crisis, like the 2008 financial crash or, you know, the heat waves across Europe last year, a climate-induced one. And then in a second corner of the triangle,

you've got disruptive movements that can amplify the sense of crisis which push the politicians to change. And then the third corner, you've got new ideas. or visionary ideas in society, which can inspire the movements which become relevant at the moment of crisis. You know, I don't quote Milton Friedman very often, but as you know, he famously said, you know, a crisis is an opportunity for change, but the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. So if you get those three things together, that is when I think you're most likely to get changed. You think of just one example. Berlin, 1989. Why did that wall come down? Well, because they've been protesting.

test for years and years and years, right, from movements from below. And it hadn't brought about change. It's because you had this conjunction of three things. You had the crisis in the East German leadership. They were fighting each other, partly through internal power struggles and how they were going to respond to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet premiers, reforms of Glasnos and Perestroika. You had the ideas lying around in terms of ideas around democratic freedoms, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, partly spread by Buttslav Havill in essays like The Power of the Powerless. And then you had the disruptive movements taking to the streets, the big uprisings in Leipzig in October 1989, and finally the big shifts in the big mobilizations in Berlin in early November 1989, which tipped the system.

And so there's a kind of conjunction going on. And so the question, let me just say one more point about this, is that, at a moment of crisis, a society can go in multiple directions. So in the Depression in the 1930s, you know, after the Wall Street crash, some countries like Scandinavia responded to that crisis with social democracy, welfare states, in other places that accelerated the shift towards fascism, Italy, Germany. So here we are at a moment of crisis. being expressed in riots in the UK right now,

being expressed in the capital attack in 2021 with the proud boys and Q and on, which direction we're going to go. We've got to be ready for the change. So if people are interested in this concept of a disruption nexus and this triangle that you just described, and if they believe that your speculation and framing there is onto something,

Given an unknown timeline from one month to 10 years before the next mega crisis, what would we do now as individuals or as community mayors and local leaders or nationally, given what you've learned, what could you advise people do now under that disruption nexus framework? I think the historical message is very clear that you don't get the rapid transformative change unless we act collectively in disruptive movements. That's the history of the slave uprisings in Britain in the 1830s, which accelerated the change towards the abolition of slavery act in 1833. That's the story of the suffragettes taking to the streets in Finland and Britain in the early 19th century. That's the story of the civil rights movement in the U.S. in the 1960s of rule baking disruptive movements. And I think that's the story of where we need to be today.

I mean, on this very podcast, I remember hearing Bill McKibben saying, you know, the best thing to do as an individual is to be less of an individual. And I think that's pretty much, I mean, that's a rough quote, let's say. I think it's about collective action. It's about asking yourself, what can I do with others to be part of this new story? And you might act in very different ways. It doesn't mean you have to be doing what me and my daughter have sometimes done, which is lie on the street in the front of the houses of Parliament and block the roads with Extinction Rebellion, taking direct action on the ecological crisis.

I don't do that naturally. I like staying in old libraries in Oxford and writing books, but I found that the best way to be a good ancestor is to join those disruptive movements as well as writing the books. But that's not for everybody. You know, for some people, it's saying, let's join the parent-teacher association at the local school and get solar panels on the roof. Let's be part of a collective reading circle. You know, there's all sorts of things we can do.

But I think together to we rather than me is the way we're going to create change. It is too late to leave the problems of our time to simmer on the low flame of gradualism. to quote how it's in. It is too late for that stuff. And of course, one other thing is we also need not just movements, but we need the new ideas. We need the podcasts like this.

We need the books. We need the films. We need to change the ethnosphere so that we are ready. Is there anything that surprised you in your research? Like, here's a book I'm going to write looking at the past to inform.

And is there anything like, whoa, I never would have expected that. studying the past, either in a positive or a negative light. Yeah, there were so many examples, but one of the ones that really struck me was that, you know, people today, they're so often talking about the circular economy. How do we create a circular economy where we're reusing, refurbishing materials and things like that? And I'd always thought that, well, yeah, past societies did that, but often on a really small scale,

you know, sort of indigenous cultures where, you know, they would live within the means of the resources that they had with them. But one of the things I found was Japan in the 18th century, in the city of Edo, today's Tokyo. That was a society with a million people living in it. So large scale. And they had basically what we would today call a circular regenerative economy. So partly because of resource scarcity. They weren't trading with the outside world. So they had scarcity of things like cotton, timber. So if you had a kimono, you might wear it during the day and when it wore out, you would turn it into pyjamas, you'd wear it night, then you would chop it up and turn it into nappies for your baby, after that you'd turn it into cleaning

cloths, and then you would burn it for fuel. There were thousands of recycling and refurbishing, repurposing businesses in Edo in the 18th century. People collecting used candle wax and reforming them into candles, down and out samurai repairing umbrellas. People would pay you for your human waste and sell it on as agricultural fertilizers. So I look back at that and think, God, they had a kind of a no waste society back then and at scale. And what a thing. Why didn't I know that? Why hadn't anybody told me about that? I love those examples, which kind of surprised me. Well, and with a million people and not that long ago, really. So it goes to show you how the benefits and the largesse from the carbon pulse have blinded us to simple.

things like that. Things have been so cheap that we just, all this breaks, I'd go buy a new one and I think that's going to change in the not too distant future. Can I say one other thing about Japan in the 18th century? You may. You know, just that, you know people often say, oh, environmentalists,

you just want to go back and live in caves. Well, in 18th century Japan, they weren't living in caves. This was a time of cultural flourishing of the artworks of Hiroshima and the poetry of Basho of Ichabana, you know, flower ranging and street theater, sumo wrestling, you know, I think that we can have cultural thriving within

the boundaries of an ecological civilization. I don't see that it's one or the other. Do you take any herbal supplements or anything? Because you have so many facts, figures, names, dates on the tip of your tongue. I don't think my brain fires that way. How do you manage that? Or is that just all your life you've been that way? I don't know, I know people who do it a lot more than me, but I think it's actually when you write a book like this, it's just so fascinating. You know, to recognize that it doesn't have to be this way, the kind of world that we have. And so these examples just kind of stick in my mind. And in a way, I've been slowly educating myself in the possibilities of a different kind of world. It's a little bit like, you know, that idea of shifting baseline syndrome in ecology, you know, the way that the researchers take as their baseline, their kind of childhood levels of forest cover or fisheries, and then the baseline shifts up and we forget what the abundance that there was in the past. That's what I think that history is like, that there's this abundance of possibilities,

and we need to break through the baseline of our own imaginations. And I've tried to fill my head and my latest book with these examples. And there are so many others as well. I mean, one tiny example. So I was telling, we had a visitor to our home the other day, the great native Hawaiian scholar, a guy called Kamana Beamer, brilliant thinker, think about indigenous knowledge in Hawaii. And I was telling him about, hey, Kamana, did you know about that Japan in the 18th century, they had this incredible circular economy? And he said, well, we had that in Hawaii too, before 1810, before the colonial period. We had what he calls the ancestral circular economy.

at scale, Hawaiian islands, over a million people. So I didn't write about that in my book. I wish I'd known about it, right? Let us, let us, you know, in Maori culture, they say, I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past. Kia, Fakotomuri, Tahari, Fakamua. Let's do a little bit of that walking backwards. And most of these cultures that you studied in the past, on average, had a fraction of the material throughput that our modern culture does. So this has been my point all along. That's why I call the podcast the Great Simplification. Yes, I think our current civilization and the trappings and expectations and footprints

has an expiry date, but that doesn't mean that something wonderful still can't come out the backside. We don't know what it's going to look like, but thank you for your work in describing some of these things. And let's move on to some closing questions, and you know what's coming since you listen to the podcast. But in addition to becoming less of an individual, as you recommended, echoing Bill McKibben's sentiments, what sort of personal advice to the viewers of this program do you have who are aware of the metacrisis and all that it entails?

Well, yes, I think there is the aspect of acting collectively. I think I'd like to send a message of radical hope or draw a distinction between optimism and hope rather. I think optimism is a kind of glass, half-full attitude that everything's going to be okay. As I said at the beginning, I don't think everything's going to be okay. I mean, we are heading down that curve towards civilizational breakdown. But I think always remember to have hope

to act as if change were possible because changes have happened in the past. You know, nothing in history is inevitable until it happens. Take that thought with you in your mental back pocket. What can someone listening to this episode right now do today, this week, this month, to help address some of the broader challenges that we discussed and they're learning about on this podcast? Or is it all up to politicians and leaders? I think it's the opposite of that. I think politics is what happens in between elections. You know, it's how we reconstitute our communities, I think, that is going to be the bedrock of a different kind of civilization. It's that Asebia point once again.

So think about what can you do in your neighborhood to, with other people. In any field, it could be running a football team, you know, a soccer team. It could be setting up a conversation meal. It could be taking part in an ecological protest. Actually, it doesn't matter because the great challenge we face as society today, I think, is to shift from the 20th century age of individualism to a 21st century age of more collective values, to shift from what I've sometimes called introspection to altrospection. You know, the age of introspection we inherited from neoliberal ill.

individualism from Zigmund Freud and Oprah Winfrey, where we are said to ourselves, the way to answer the question of what should I do with my life is to look inside ourselves. Well, our introspection is about saying, the way I'm going to live my life is by discovering other people, other cultures, stepping outside of who I am, be an outrospective adventurer. I love that. And how would you change your general advice for young humans? You used to teach college. You have children. What do you say to a young 20-something listening to this show? I would say, that's such a difficult question. What would I say to a young person? I mean, I know what I say to my own young people. You know, I have kids, which is, I don't tell them too much in a way. I try not to ram my politics down their

throat. And so I wouldn't like to do that to a young person. But I would say to a young person, to carry around with you a question. You know, Steve Jobs gave this very famous, I think, Stanford address, college address, where it was all about Carpe Diem, seizing the day, and he said, you know, ask yourself every day, you know, if this is the last day of my life, what should I do with my life?

And I think that's such a limited way of thinking about the world. I would say ask yourself a different question, if you're a young person, which is this. At the end of every day, ask yourself this. question. What have I done today to be a good ancestor? What have I done today to be remembered well by the generations to come? I think the philosophy of being a good ancestor or a better ancestor is a pretty good one for driving your life. I'm not telling you where you should stand particularly in the political spectrum. I'm not telling you who you should talk to, who you should not talk to.

But think about your legacy, how you be remembered. And what do you want? your grandchildren in 90 years' time to say about who you were and what you left to the world. That's a good framing. What do you care most about in the world, Roman? And in your particular case, among all my guests, you're the only one that the answer, Kate Rayworth, would be acceptable. What I care about most of the world. You know, my thinking about what I care about has changed so much over the last 20 or 30 years.

You know, in the 1990s, when I was sort of involved in developing my, I guess, intellectual apparatus, as it were, doing a PhD and becoming a university professor and all this stuff, I look back at that time and, you know, think about how. how narrow my thinking was, and the way it was really narrow was the lack of recognition of that we only have this one planet on which to survive and thrive. And all my fundamental thinking now is framed by that question of how do we create a world? You know, you know this. This is like bread and butter stuff to you. But it's new to me really in the last 10 years. How do we create all our institutions, political, economic, social, so that they are at least consistent with the idea of not using more resources than we can naturally regenerate and not creating more waste than we can naturally be absorbed. How do we really put that giant circle of the biosphere

around all that we do so that it is so deep in us, we don't even have to think about it. It is literally like the air that we breathe. And I know I'm not there yet. I'm still on this journey, because part of that journey requires something that I think your podcast is so important for, which is systems thinking, getting us to think on the system level, to escape from the linearity of Stephen Pinkeresque, you know, continuous progress kind of thinking. We need to be thinking in terms of systems, and without that, we ain't getting anywhere. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what's one thing you would do to improve human and planetary futures, hypothetical example?

On that one, rather than talking big, let me just talk small or practical. Over the last year or so, I've become really interested in the idea of steward-ownership companies. So companies which are not necessarily cooperatives, but they're owned basically by a trust, which has a fiduciary duty to look after the planet or to care about a community. So you've got companies like Patagonia, you know, which basically they now say, you know, the Earth is our one shareholder. They basically become a stewardown company. Mautzilla, you know, the people who own Firefox, that's a stewardown company.

Lots of examples of this. So I would, if I could wave my magic wand, I would turn every, you know, Futsi 100, every Fortune 500, immediately from a shareholder driven company into a steward-owned company. And that's never going to happen because, in fact, we need to grow those companies, right? Shell, Exxon, Mobile, whatever, they're never going to go down that route, right? We need to grow those new companies, and that's why I need the magic wand to turn those ones into the kinds of companies that can help us negotiate a bend rather than a break. Well, that's why I asked the question, because your answer acts as an Overton window in a

directionally desirable way, and then you never know what the individuals collectively listening to this show come up with. I think that's a really novel idea. So clearly, we just scratched the surface of your work here today, Roman. If you were to come back and do a follow-up conversation on any topic, something that may be in one of your books or not, that is that you're really passionate about and you think is relevant to our future. What is one topic that you would like to take a deep dive on? Oh, that is such a good question.

The one that pops into my head is that concept I mentioned earlier, the idea of temporal intelligence. How do we, or what might call it temporal wisdom, my son thinks I should call it temporal wisdom, not temporal intelligence. He thinks I'm too analytic. He's only 15, but, you know, to rethink. He's wise for 15. Yeah, but, and I think this is something that I see very much in your work to the importance of taking a different time perspective. We've partly talked about that, but I think we could take that conversation in many other directions. How do we cognitively and culturally

rethink that fourth dimension of time? Because I think if we are not able to do that, we are missing something that humans are good at, the temporal pirouette. We are good at dancing across time, but our institutions don't match that capacity. It is

hugely underdeveloped. How we're going to do it? How does it link to the kind of issues that you're thinking about? How we reconstitute ourselves as we wean ourselves off the carbon pulse and shift to new energy systems. How can time be part of creating a new post-material culture as well as a post-carbon culture? All of these issues, time, I think, is something that we need to learn to play with and dance with and think about.

I agree. It's a great topic. Thank you so much, Roman. And this is our first conversation, and I expect to not our last. And I appreciate all your work on being a good ancestor and passing that baton to other humans. Thank you very much, Nate. And look, there's so much that I wanted to ask you as well. I only asked you a couple of questions, but I have so many more written down on my little piece of paper here.

So let us continue the journey sooner rather than later. So thank you very much. To be continued, my friend. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit ThegreatSimplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty. Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyan, and Lizzie Siriani.