The Rest Is History - 21. The History of the Future

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

What is history’s take on the future? Oracles, prophecies, apocalypse, scientific projection. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discuss them all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. oracles prophecies apocalypse scientific projection we're always looking to the future can we tell what the future holds these are questions that have been really very pressing this year um coming up we have in in Glasgow, United Nations Climate Change Conference, focused on the question of where the entire planet is going, what the future of humanity is, whether the world is going to end. And of course, daily at the moment, we are trying to work out what the future of the pandemic is, when the lockdown will be able to end, whether we're going to get back to normality.

With me here is my co-conspirator, Dominic Sandbrook. Dominic, I guess that there is nothing new about looking to the future, is there? I mean, this is pretty much a constant, wanting to know what it holds. It's a sort of constant of human history, isn't it? So it's a slightly odd subject, isn't it, the history of the future? Because you think when you're a historian, you write purely about what happened in the past, but actually how people thought of the future is a really interesting topic. And obviously also, you know, it tells you an enormous amount about the context

because generally when people were looking forward, they project their own anxieties, usually their own fears. And we've always done it, you know, the earliest religious texts, looking to the future, you know, people are fascinated now by what the world will be like, you know, is China going to rule the world? Are we going to all end up in a ball of flame? So it's actually a really interesting way to look back at the sort of imagination of the people who come before us i mean i do you think there's a kind of qualitative difference say between somebody looking um in chicken guts to work out what the future holds and the kind of

the the level uh at the beginning of the pandemic when basically we knew very little and it was clear that people knew very little but people still wanted answers and so people were broadcasting answers it kind of suggests almost that even if even if we don't know we would like to be told something about the future yes i think the sort of fog of uncertainty is often the most frightening thing of all isn't it and actually but in some ways we you know little knowledge is a dangerous thing if you know that you're just looking at a load of old guts, then at least you know where you stand. Whereas, you know, when you're sort of people are tweeting graphs and they've read, you know, they've spent the morning on Wikipedia. So they're an expert in epidemiology.

That, I think, can lead you down some pretty dark rabbit holes. Yeah, but I mean, the people look at look at you know people looking into the guts these were highly skilled definers they yes they thought that they knew what they were doing yeah and in a sense the guy on twitter with a graph i mean he kind of doing the same so i think the big difference is you know if you were living in i mean maybe medieval historians will say i'm talking nonsense but my sense is that if you were living in the sort of 12th century and you, when you look to the past, the past was sort of in the old king's reign or in King so-and-so's reign or something, you know, people will have wings or there will be cars or anything like that because society had been so stable for so long, effectively. But I think once you had the scientific revolution,

then thoughts about change really began to sort of colour the way that people thought of the future. So they thought about it in terms of inventions and technology rather than necessarily the rise and fall of states or of dynasties or something don't you think that's a big a big shift well i i think that actually people in the middle ages did have a sense that the future might be very different and that's because it had been written for them in the bible and i know you will kind of moan at the thought that no no no i knew this was coming but i actually think that um the the idea that in a sense the future is written and that it has a definite end point is something that's quite

distinctive because actually most societies most time across most of the world have tended to assume that time time is circular so that uh know, there are orders of existence and then they end and then they begin again. And it just goes round and round. Yeah. But our civilization, Muslim civilization, both have this very strong idea that there's a point of creation and then there is a point a kind of end of days um and i think that that perhaps continues to structure the way that we think of the future to this day i mean the kind i and i don't know what the answer to this is whether in non-christian non-muslim civilizations whether there is quite the same kind of apocalyptic sense of anxiety about where climate change might lead i mean i'm

not denying that climate change is a monster threat but i think that we are culturally conditioned to expect that we sin and we will then be judged for our sins and the punishment will be visited on the entire world with terrible devastation and plagues and famines and things and i think that that is still kind of part of our our mental furniture we have a sense of the story being finite of the story having an end and if you think about i mean this is a strange example but the way the vikings thought about ragnarok so at the end of ragnarok the earth is then reborn and the sort of story starts again um that that's not what happens in in christian thinking is it or muslim thinking you know the earth dies and then that's it history comes to an end yes but again with

ragnarok it's difficult because we don't know the degree to which that vision of the end of the gods and the end of the world is kind of contaminated by christianity yeah yeah it's written down much later isn't it yeah so it's it's very difficult to tell but i do think that um that the kind of the the idea that time goes forward kind of you know the contrast is time's arrow against time's wheel and we definitely live in a time's arrow civilization and i'm sure that that then you know you talk about the the huge impact that technology has and technological development that that then fuses with that sense that um that you increasingly get with the industrial revolution that yeah the

the future will just be qualitatively different but we can under you know we we can it's not a problem for us to kind of comprehend that because we're so you know civilizationally adjusted to the idea that time is going forward in a single continuous stream but it's sort of the idea of progress isn't it people um we live in a world where the idea of of sort of forward movement is hardwired into our sense of the of the world and actually i guess for people before well my feeling would be be that for people before about 1700, their sense of forward movement was purely a sort of almost a moral one or a theological one. So what's coming is going to be the sort of fifth monarchy and and we'll have, you know, flying horses and carriages or whatever. The expectations become much less morally freighted. I mean, I think that there are kind of moral reawakening.

The idea that Europe is being clothed with a veil of white churches coincides with the fact that people are conscious that, in a sense, life is kind of getting better. But I completely agree that it's the speed and pace of technological change that you get in the modern period that is really different and transformative. And so, I mean, do you think that the kind of scientific visions that we have now, which are often dystopias, how far back do they go, do you think? The sense of the future as being structured by technology and science i think that's really interesting because some of the the i mean a great prediction of the future come from 1733 so the sort of heart of the scientific

revolution is from a fellow called samuel madden who is an anglican clergyman, he wrote a book called Memoirs of the 20th Century, pretty much unreadable now and unread, actually. And even amidst all this change, and you know, the Industrial Revolution is really kicking off, he saw it purely in terms that would appeal to you. So he thought the world was going to have this great confrontation between the Jesuits and the deists. This was a kind of ideological conflict to the future and he was obsessed with the pope and you know the papal forces were were going to take over the world and all this kind of thing you kind of think how wrong can you be you know obviously because we know that the papal power was in you know deep decline um uh in the sort of early modern later early modern period um but you know that's a sign that it's

not just about um technology often morality is a huge part of it so morality is there in kind of brave new world or does huxley's um vision of the future and this sort of sense that um so it's it's not so much the sort of technological accomplishments of science that are interesting but it's their effect on our behavior and on that sort of ethical you know conduct and all that sort of thing i think that's always a big always a huge part of it tom i i know this is slightly going off piste what's just been distracting me during my reply do you have a picture of ian botham just over your shoulder i do yes yes it was given to me but on for our wedding and it's a signed photograph of the great man giving us best wishes.

We're going to have to cut this. No, no, no, I think the listeners will love this. I mean, it's so good that you absolutely conform to the expectations that people would have of you. I mean, they really would think that this is what's going on, and it is. Well, I have to say that when I got it for our wedding, if I looked into the future, I'd be very happy to know that um yeah it was being mentioned on a podcast which of course you know when i got married i had no idea what a podcast was yeah that's the thing okay which

brings us back yeah i that is going off piece but so let me again you know you're a historian of the modern period do you think that our understanding of the future and the way that it changes is speeding up? No, I don't think it's speeding up. I think there are obviously different phases. There are clearly, you know, different phases of our understanding of the future. So at the turn of the 20th century, when people thought about the future, they thought about it in terms of state conflict, actually, didn't they? It was all invasion stories and scare stories about world wars.

And then the visions that people had of the future in the sort of mid 20th century, the really sort of influential ones like 1984, they're about totalitarianism and political ideology. And the ones we've had since that, roughly, I mean, there was obviously the expectations of war three um in the 70s and 80s but that was a massive tradition wasn't it i mean that was gone now hasn't it you don't see it at all now i mean yeah i mean remember that book um we were talking about it before we started uh the third world war by general sir john hackett yes white they wipe out birmingham yeah they drop a nuclear bomb on Birmingham, the Russians. And there was all that stuff, Threads, the war game, all these terrifying visions of nuclear apocalypse. But actually what we've had since then,

I mean, they're almost always about two things. They're either about computers and sort of virtual worlds, so the sort of Neuroman ish or blade runner i suppose which about robots or they're about um environmental catastrophe and that's our big i mean that's our book of revelation isn't it that's our obsession that is i i think yes as to say i think i think climate change definitely is is absolutely running with that i mean, I wrote a book about the year 1000, which, for all kinds of obvious reasons, was apocalyptic anxieties, I think, is debated, but I think it's pretty clear that they were very much part of the climate of the time.

And there are all these kind of anxieties and terrors and dread. And while I was writing that, I read James Lovelock, who wrote a particularly terrifying kind of jeremiad about what was going to happen. And essentially saying that, you know, the world would be uninhabitable by 2030. And the language that he was using was eerily reminiscent. Plagues, famines. And for us in. I mean, that's I think is the crucial thing. Whereas I agree that in a sense, the computers and online particularly is something that would be absolutely unimaginable to i mean even even to someone in 1970 i guess yeah well maybe philip k dick who i have a shame to say

i've never read but i mean he kind of when's he writing 50s is he yeah i mean he's kind of starting to to pick up on that but it's uh you know william gibson and and people like that are kind of just ahead of the curve and and now um you know it's all about computers yeah it's interesting isn't it because i mean i've written as you know these sort of books about post-war britain and and the computers and technology are always there in the background right from the beginning so my book starts in the early 50s mid-50s and in 1955 the daily mirror did a big um huge series um called the robot revolution about how you know robots as they called them were going to change the world and the expectation for a long time was that computers would just would make everything so

great and you just have so much leisure um and jetpacks yeah well obviously you've got the 60s sort of utopianism i mean that has completely been lost and you saw that everywhere in the 60s in in fashion and design in the in the design of cities you know the sort of local busier look that became very popular in the 60s um and then in the 70s that died and you had i mean obviously star wars's vision of the i mean i know it's a long long time ago but this vision of the future is a bit dirtier um than 2001s and then you have blade runner which is obviously an adaptation of philip k dick where it's all driving rain and misery and

pollution and and and you know this sort of this sort of pure dystopia and that and we've remained there ever since and if anything when we talked about the road i think in a cormac mccarthy's um book in a previous podcast you know that's become that sort of vision has now become all enveloping you never see an optimistic prediction of the future now it's all about either a withdrawal into technological escapism because your jobs have been destroyed by computers and robots or it's you know just sort of living in a apocalyptic wasteland uh because your your and your climate has been completely ravaged but i wonder going back to the book of revelation whether that's simply because it's it's kind of easier and more fun in a way to portray a disaster

than it is yeah so you've got, you know, the horsemen of the apocalypse and plagues and everything. And then you've got, you know, quite short passage about how great it's going to be when the New Jerusalem descends. But then it ends. It's actually very hard to describe what the New Jerusalem is going to be. Yes. Quite boring.

That's basically like Marxism, isn't it? I mean, it spends a lot of time talking about the struggles to bring, you know, the new world. But then the new world itself is never actually described because who cares? You know, it's just looking at pot plants and strolling in country walks. And that's not very interesting. Right. Well, Dominic, I'm going to give a prophecy. And the prophecy is we're going to go for a break in a minute.

And when we come back, we're going to look at people's uh questions and try and answer them so that's my prophecy let's see if it comes true i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Two episodes again this week. On Thursday, we will be discussing our top 10 weird wars. We've

got some fantastically bizarre ones lined up to discuss. But for now, let's move on to your questions. Dominic, do we have any questions? We do, Tom. This first one is an absolute gift for you. So it's from Joel Coppersmith. And he says, did the ancients believe in the Delphic Oracle? Now, just before you answer that, I will just say this. In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, you find out that the woman who is the Oracle is actually... The Pythia. She's working for the cult of Cosmos, who are the villains,

and she knows she's giving false prophecies. So that's my answer. Oh, really? Yeah. You've steered clear of this, haven't you? Because you think you'll be addicted but um yes for the same reason i haven't taken up heroin i'm sure it's great but it kind of has bad bad side effects since i have a nine-year-old in the house we we haven't

yes absolutely the uh the greeks of course because otherwise they wouldn't have gone and consulted it otherwise it would have been a kind of wasted effort but um what's distinctive i think about the uh the way that the greeks view their oracles and perhaps apollo's oracle specifically is that they expect it to be tricksy they they expect it to be elliptical so um Herodotus in his great work, translated by me, describes how the Ethiopians, when they consult the oracle, they will get an answer and they will do exactly what the oracle tells them. And Herodotus obviously sees this as being kind of slightly unusual and odd. And the reason that he sees it odd is that it's taken for granted by the Greeks that Apollo's answers will be hard to understand. So he's called Loxias, which essentially means the oblique one. And again and again,

the famous example is Croesus, the king of Lydia, who is preparing to go to war with Cyrus, king of the Persians, who's very much the rising power, not sure whether he should launch a preemptive attack. So goes to Delphi rather in the way that a government now might go to a kind of think tank or perhaps a spy agency or something and says you know should i attack the persians and the delphic oracle replies um if you cross uh the river that marks the frontier between you and cyrus's kingdom um a great empire will fall and croesus assumes that this means that it's cyrus's empire that will fall but course, it's Croesus's empire that falls. And the genius of that is, of course, that it's an unfalsifiable argument because one of the two empires is going to fall.

But that happened all the time, didn't it? I mean, so Philip of Macedon, when he was about to launch his attack on Persia, he went to the Oracle of Delphi and he got this message that said, wreathed is the bull, the hour is near or something, the one who will kill him is at hand. And he thought, great, I'm going to kill the King of Persia and become ruler of the world. And then he died about, he was killed himself, assassinated, you know, a couple of months later. So this was

obviously a theme of consulting the Delphic Oracle. You think, you know, basically you end up being stabbed in the back by your own prophecy. I think the art was either to give, rather like Nostradamus, who I'm sure we'll come on to later, to frame things in such a way that they're sufficiently vague that you can kind of pattern events, you know, whatever happens. I think on top of that, there is a degree to which the priests at Delphi are, they're the only professional priesthood that the Greeks have. And people are coming from across not just the Greek world, but beyond the Greek world as well, and therefore bringing information with them. And so the priests, to that extent, are probably the best informed people in Greece about what is going on internationally. And so that gives them perhaps a kind of broader perspective on events than anyone

else has. So that's maybe something that they can feed into their prophecies. I think also, there's a famous example, when the Persians invade Greece in 480 and the odds look overwhelming and the Athenians go to Delphi and say, you know, what's going to happen? And the first oracle is basically run for your lives. You're going to get crushed. You have no hope. Athens is going to burn. And the Athenians are devastated. And then a priest comes out and says, well, go and ask again. So they go in and they get a famous second prophecy where the Athenians are told that, yeah, Athens is going to burn, I'm afraid. There's no way around that. But the wooden wall will hold. And then it kind of ends with a reference to Salamis, the island of Salamis. And sure enough, Athens does burn. The wooden wall, i.e. the Greek fleet, the Athenian fleet, does hold. And this battle is fought at Salamis.

And it's pretty clear. I think, I mean, I think that this oracle is an authentic one. I don't think it's a back projection. And so in a way, it's the most, you know, it's the most impressive oracle that we get. I mean, it's, you know, but I think that the Delphic priests, if they were thinking of a way in which the Greeks could survive, they would be aware that the Athenian strategy was to abandon Athens, to take to their fleet. And if there was going to be a naval battle that the Greeks were going to win, it was going to be by the Greeks luring the Persians into the Straits of Salamis. That was their only chance of victory. So I think there, again, you can see that they're kind of taking a punt. So they're delivering one oracle that says you're doomed, and then they're

delivering another one which gives up the only chance the Greeks had a victory. So I think that's kind of how it works. But I'm sure that, you know, I mean, of course people believed it, because otherwise you wouldn't go and consult it. Just one last thought on oracles before we move on to the other questions. They were pretty weird, weren't they? So I think I'm right in saying the oracle at the Temple of Ammon in Siwa um when you went and consulted that the oracle was this big stone that was on a sort of tray that the priests held above their heads and you asked it questions on a piece of paper and and the priests put answers on other bits of paper on the floor and then they sort of shuffled around as the stone directed them towards the piece of paper that had the appropriate answer have you heard this story

well i think that um one of the key things in in antiquity is that just having a bloke who who gives answers was seen as being too easy unreliable so so at delphi it's fumes coming up at sea where you have um as you've described uh at dodona in northern greece it's the rustling of um the sacred oak the leaves so essentially it's it's all about um interpretation yeah so that you so so that you can give the answer that that you think is is likeliest to come true and in many cases what the person who's coming wants to hear. But people never come and ask for their money back or they never come and say you told me to plough this field or to marry so and so or whatever

and they're burning with rage. There's always a way that you can show that the God came to you. Well, because Croesus complains to Apollo and says, you know, you shafted me here. And Apollo comes and rescues him from being burnt alive on a pyre and says, well, actually, you know, I told you, right, you didn't interpret correctly. And anyway, because you were so good to me, I managed to give you a few years extra because necessity doomed you.

But I managed to get you a few years extra ruling as king before you got toppled. So stop moaning. And Croesus accepts the justice of what Apollo says. And that's him. That's him schooled. Do we have another? Yes, let's whiz on a bit because we've done Apocalypse. We've done oracles joey

mccarthy um wants to know what you think of nostradamus he says hit the great fire of london nagasaki jfk he's been on the money every time are you a nostradamus fan tom uh well obviously when i was about 12 i read them obsessively and it was full of prophecies about i think the third world war happening in 1999 wasn't it there was a kind of um the great god of fire will descend from the sky so i was pretty terrified by that but it didn't happen and i think that nostradamus's prophecies are um exactly like the delphic ones but yeah they're incredibly they're laughably vague aren't they i mean i used to live in nostradamus' hometown in Salon de Provence in the south of France. Yeah, I spent a year as a language assistant.

And, you know, they had a terrible waxwork museum of Nostradamus, which I went round one rainy afternoon. I was the only person and felt, I just felt displeased with the way my life had turned out, that this was how I was at the age of 21, spending my time. Anyway, that's by the by. As I remember, there was one prophecy that he gave.

Wasn't it about the death of Henry II in a joust? And the lance goes through his visor and kills him. And Nostradamus had apparently prophesied this. He got that right so that established his reputation but it's a bit like um there's another one a tweet by tom from 2019 um about mother shipton who back in the first half of the 16th century literally prophesied the internet around the world men's thoughts will fly quick as the twinkling of an eye that's not that's not literally the prediction.

Are you a fan of Mothership, Tim? Are you familiar with her oeuvre? Has she got a cave somewhere? Is that where I got that right? She's got a cave in Knaresborough. I know because I did a radio programme about it. I think I've been to that cave. Yeah.

Well, yes, it turns things to stone. So it's quite an eerie and atmospheric place. It's one of Britain's oldest tourist attractions. But predictably, she seems to have lived in the early 16th century. The earliest mention to her prophecies comes up in the 1640s. So you can see why people might start to be interested in it around that time um when the when the great fire of london happens peeps says that he has overheard people saying that mother shipton had prophesied that it was going to happen so she's clearly kind of big news in in the um in the 17th century and i guess it's a bit like you know a graph on twitter it's amid the chaos of the times people grasping after mother shipton's

prophecy to explain what's happened. But the one about the men's thoughts were fly quick as the twinkling of an eye. There's another brilliant one, which is even better, which prophesies feminism. For in those wondrous far-off days, the women shall adopt a craze

to dress like men and trousers wear and cut off their locks of hair. My word. I think you'd agree, Dominic, is, I mean, it's spooky, isn't it? It's the 1970s. Yeah, incredible. And then an even better one. The world to an end shall come in 1881.

Okay, that's not literally true. That's not so good. But all of these were written by a guy in the mid-19th century. Were they? They're falsified. Oh, how depressing. They're completely falsified. Yeah. So all those ones are completely bogus.

All right, let's do Tom Watts. Tom Watts says he wants to know who was right orwell huxley or both is 1984 still to come is it here already do you have an answer to that tom i don't really uh you're you know that's much more your field uh so i think um well all well went slightly out of fashion at the end of the cold war because obviously he had been writing about you know basically a thinly veiled portrait of the Soviet Union. But now Orwell has sort of come back again with all the double think kind of talk and the sort of fascination with controlling language and controlling thought crime.

So in that sense, Orwell was, you could argue, pretty prescient. He also has the TVs that watch you and listen to you, which, you know, if you've got an Alexa, it's a little bit worrying actually it's more all about biology isn't it it's years since i read brave new world i don't really remember that much about it but isn't it it's also about people kind of being blissed out and therefore not worrying about stuff yeah it's assassin's creed you know if you're playing assassin's creed you don't need to worry about well but that's not really true though is it because of course people you know we are we do live long comfortable lives and we just spend our time you know getting very frenzied and angry and

slacking each other off on twitter so yeah i mean people don't strike me as tremendously blissed out do you think the world is best out i don't do you Do you think, I mean, do you think on the, in 1984, the three divisions of the world? Oh, East Asia. And does it, you know, if the European Union, China and Britain as a kind of unsinkable aircraft carrier for America. Yeah, that's a good one. Maybe, so maybe that's where we're heading. Maybe.

I don't know. Yes, who knows. I don't know. Here's a good one from Ollie Simpson. In the end, Halley's Comet was an omen for a big event in 1066. So that's the appearance of Halley's Comet featured in the Bay of Tapestry, prophesying the tumultuous year to come. To what extent did it actually influence events,

and are there other examples of this happening so um i'm sure that that what what happened in 1066 would have happened whether halley's comet happened or not but are there examples of um natural phenomena impacting the way that people understand the world um maybe a question more for me than you. That's maybe unfair for you. Well, you're clearly asking it to yourself. No, I wasn't. I honestly wasn't. Unusually, I wasn't. You forgot that there was somebody else there.

I think the 6th century in the Mediterranean is an example because that was a time of uh extraordinary celestial phenomena uh a darkening of the skies um terrible climactic events and that had a knock-on effect in terms of global cooling um which in turn i think definitely had a knock-on effect in fostering apocalyptic expectation um and i'm sure that what becomes Islam initially begins as a kind of apocalyptic attempt to prepare the world for the wrath of God to appease his anger. So I think that that would be probably my answer, that the kind of reverberations from that. Yeah, these things do reverberate, don't they? So the 17th century, which we talked about, I mean, the Little Ice yeah and the sort of global cooling and the famines and the rain and and all that that that clearly did encourage people's sense of the the apocalyptic and the coming of christ these are

the end times i mean you do think that when the world that's what we think people think now i mean that yes i mean that's yes exactly what people think now yes yes and we're being punished for our sins yeah so i can't believe you you missed this question because this is an absolute i mean you probably wrote this yourself chet archbold if he if he exists it was just your sock puppet he what he's got he he or you have written a question about the sibylline books um it was not me so the sibylline books are roman and they're these well tell us what the sibiline books are uh so the sibiline books are what i begin rubicon with uh my book about the fall of the roman republic so yes perhaps it was me who knows um uh the sibiline books were um supposedly so the

sibyls were um women who were had gift of prophecy and a sibyl came to Tarquin, the king of Rome, and she carried nine books of prophecy, books written in Greek, and she offers them for an extortionate price. Tarquin laughs in the face and tells her to go away. She then comes back and offers him six. He does the same thing. She then comes back back offers him three and at this point he's kind of slightly nervous that he might be missing out on something important so he pays gets the sibiline books um chet is asking um do do we think they actually date back to the regal period i i don't know the answer to that i don't think anyone i think it's possible to know but it's certain that the romans thought that they did and that they were very ancient and i think they probably

were very ancient and the s they probably were very ancient and the sibiline books were um what kind of again it's a bit like in moments of extreme crisis who you're going to ask you know some think tank some specialists some you know people who can guide you i guess our equivalent now would be sage um right it's it you know in moments of extreme crisis you need your specialists and the sibiline books provided kind of divine guidance now it by and large what the sibiline books do is in so far as we can tell from the historical records is not to provide prophecies but to tell you what you have to do if something weird has happened so if some terrible convulsion has occurred some strange

phenomena has happened um portending the anger ofulsion has occurred, some strange phenomena has happened, portending the anger of the gods, you go to the Sibylline books and it tells you what you do to appease the gods. But I think that doesn't necessarily mean that there were no prophecies. It's just that we're not told that. And you do get the sense over the course of Roman history

that the Sibylline books contain prophecies saying what the fate of the Roman people is going to be. So that's the Sibylline books. Okay, so that's very nice for me. Is there one for, oh, no, here's one for you. Tom of Bedlam. Do you think Oswald Spengler will be proved right? Well, that's not a name you hear very much. So Oswald Spengler is this sort of early 20th century German writer who thinks, his big idea is the decline of the West. So he thinks history is divided into the rise and fall of different civilizations. I can't remember whether it was eight or nine, kind of Babylonian, Roman, Persian, and Western sort of

what you would call Western Christendom is the last one. And he thinks it's doomed and we're living in the sort of end times of our own civilization. And he's writing this after the First World War or before? Yeah, around about the First World War. I think maybe during. My memory of it is kind of hazy. But I think it's clearly against that backdrop. You know, a backdrop where, I mean, actually, we talked about the origins of the First World War before. I've been writing a children's book about the First World War in the last few weeks. And it's just astounding when you think about how that world, that late

Victorian world, just collapsed, just disintegrated. So, you know, if you weren't living in Germany or Austria, Hungary or Russia, and you were a sort of middle class, prosperous person, your world has just completely disintegrated. So Spengler was writing against that background. He thought the West was going to go the way of the Incas, that our world was going to be destroyed. And of course, that idea, Spengler has now been rejected. But actually, that idea is still very widespread, isn't it? I mean, you see it now in all the sort of talk of the democratic model has failed, China the future all that sort of stuff he was also i mean so so if he's talking about civilizations yeah that's i mean that's the theme of um huntingdon's book which i think he wrote in

the 90s the classic civilizations which was um and it came out the same time as fukuyama's um yeah end of history and those are the two kind of great prophetic books. Yeah, they're the post-Cold War prophecies of the future, aren't they? I mean, the Clash of Civilizations thesis is, I mean, in a way, it's not been disproved over the... Well, it hasn't been disproved, but I mean, I think it's a very controversial, it's a very controversial topic, isn't it? But the theme of civilizations has come back as part of the kind of geopolitical conversation

in a way that it wasn't in the 90s. Although what the civilizations are that are clashing has changed. So in the 90s, when Huntington was writing that, I mean, the big fault line was the Balkans. And people at Huntington, American sort of think tankers were sort of saying, there's this huge fault line between Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Islam, and it's all Bosnia and the sort of the dividing line between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Well, now we're not so interested in that, because basically the Balkans is all going to end up in the EU. And actually, even the one that was really interesting for the last 20 years,

which is Christianity versus Islam, doesn't seem quite as resonant now. Now it's China and the West, isn't it? But there's been quite a lot over the pandemic of the Confucian values of, yeah, exactly, that have enabled Korea and so on to do much better than us. So the idea of civilisations obviously is not going to go away. I mean, the idea of a clash of civilisations. What about Fukuyama, Tom? Do you have Fukuyama, end of history? I mean, he looks a bit of a...

That thesis is not worn terribly well, shall we say. Well, my hot take on Fukuyama is that he didn't actually predict what people think he did. But because I haven't read it since the 90s I couldn't possibly elaborate on what that is, but I know what the hot take is. I think he thinks he's been maligned, doesn't he? He sort of says he's been

grossly maligned, but in a sense he has to say that. Yes, yes. Well, I think that we have looked into the future enough. And, you know, frankly, this is a history podcast, so next time we are going to go definitely back to the past. Dominic, we are going to do our top ten kind of...

Weird wars is the wrong phrase. Weird wars is the right... No, it's a good phrase. I've got some very weird wars lined up. OK, so I'm choosing five and you're choosing five and we will be um we'll be back with them um thanks so much for all your questions so do look out for uh the next um one coming out on thursday bye for now bye Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

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