The Rest Is History - 8. The Echo of a Coffee House

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Social media has colonised the world but is it really a new phenomenon? Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook debate the effects of technical innovations from the printing press to Twitter. Do they really make a difference? Or was Swift right when he said: “It is the folly of too many, to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.” 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. Welcome to The Rest Is History. Or should that be hashtag The Rest Is History? Social media has colonised the world in a way the Romans could only have dreamed of. Does it matter? Does it really shape the world? And is it a new phenomenon? Well, I'm with Tom Holland, who's taking a break from his busy schedule of tweeting his latest thoughts about the desecration of Stonehenge.

Social media activism at its best, eh, Tom? Well, I like to think that it is doing some good. The campaign against the Stonehenge tunnel is something that I've been involved with for six years now. And I don't think that I could possibly have done it without social media. It's definitely served to amplify the campaign and to raise the anxieties that we have about the road development. I just don't think it would have happened at all without that. Before you get going, let's get back to the podcast. Can we not just make this entire podcast about the Stonehenge Tunnel? That'll be our 100th podcast. That's something for the listeners to look forward to.

Could I just say, could I just say, anyone who'd like to help crowdfund our appeal against the government's travesty of a decision, check out at Save Stonehenge on Twitter. Oh, dear, oh, dear. Thank you very much. This has just been a gift to Tom. Right, well, let's start the chat with a tweet.

I mean, there's no other way to start it. And it came from Ollie Simpson. And he sent us this suggestion on hearing what we were going to be talking about. He said, there's that swift quote about mistaking the echo of a coffeehouse, the voice of the coffeehouse mob, for the voice of a kingdom.

The 1710 election and explosion of the Tatler, the examiner, the spectator around then seems a candidate for a kind of precedent to what we're going through now. Do you buy that, Tom? I do. And there's not only the Swift quote, there's also a brilliant quote by Burke, who famously said that because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak chew the cud in the silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field. And Dominic, you are a massive kind of Twitter, social media sceptic. Yeah, I'm one of the cattle. I'm one of one of the cattle well you're kind of a great bull

repose the shadow of a british oak that's oh tom you're too kind very very much how i like to think of you whereas i'm a grasshopper with you are like a cricket an annoying cricket um you'd like the cricket going on and on so is this something new you You know, you took to Twitter straight away. You've sent 20 billion tweets. You have a thousand million followers. Do you think it's a new thing or do you, you know, I know you think everything started with the Persians. The Persians didn't invent social media and the what the way in which it has a divisive effect i think can be traced back to the reformation okay and specifically to luther who i think is the kind of the great exemplar the kind of the great origin point for everything today that we would associate with social media. So Twitter spats, internet flame wars. He had every gift that you would require to be effective on social media. He could come up with aphorisms. He could slag people off. He could denounce fake news he could spread fake news um so just to interrupt you for

a second so luther comes to prominence because he nails his sort of according to myth he nails his 95 theses to the door of the church in wittenberg slagging off the catholic church and calling for you know a reformed church and all the rest of it. And is it, all his stuff is about that, right? It's just a sort of continual campaign, a bit like a Stonehenge campaign, actually. He's just like a sort of 16th century Tom Holland, is he? Well, if you think about the 95 written theses, perhaps as the equivalent of a Twitter thread, you start to move into it. And then you think about the way in which, as the Reformation develops, prints, for instance, illustrations play a key role in propagating the reformer's message. And you think of that as being the

equivalent of Instagram. And I think that these aren't entirely tendentious parallels, because in a way, what enables the Reformation is precisely the fact that there is kind of a new medium in the form of printing. And Luther's genius is that he is precisely the fact that there is kind of a new medium in the form of printing. And Luther's genius is that he is able to recognise that and to capitalise on it. But it's not just that Luther kind of comes across a new technology and makes use of it. It's also the fact that it amplifies his core conviction conviction which is that his individual conscience should be the determinant of what he believes rather than the vast edifice of the roman church and so the the the roman church in contrast to the the reformers is kind of ponderous and is slow to wake up to to what is

happening and so the reformers in kind of social media terms, you want to put it like that, completely run rings around the Roman church. It takes them a time to start putting out their own memes, their own equivalent of tweets. And the measure of the impact I think that Luther has, and it's a kind of completely staggering statistic, is that over the course of the 1520s which is when luther's really getting going over a fifth of the entire output of pamphlets put out by german presses is is coming from luther wow that's impressive he's completely dominating dominating the airwaves tendentious parallels are something you'll never get in this podcast um but tom i wonder what i wonder what strikes me, right, is that, you know, when you look back at Luther's effusions, they are incredibly aggressive.

I mean, he's calling people, you know, a fool, an idiot. He uses lots of scatological stuff. Yeah, much worse. Very, very aggressive. I mean, actually far more aggressive than a lot of the remarks that sort of supposedly so scandalous that trolls make on Twitter. And I wonder whether the, what you think about the tendency to abuse, which is, you know, is that something ingrained in the technology or is it in human nature or what?

You know, was it in the times? Do you have particular moments when people just like to attack each other? I mean, it's's remarkable isn't it that you know twitter was created and facebook and all these things to bring people together which is this sort of constant human ambition and then straight away people just use them to tell each other people how horrible and stupid they were and in a sense people have always used technology that way haven't they i think that if you look and this is why i think the parallel is is so great and why i think it would be wonderful to kind of do an entire history of the Reformation with tweets. Because what

happens is that Luther obviously dominates the early stages of the Reformation, but very rapidly he generates, his abuse generates abuse in turn. So it comes from Catholics. Thomas More, you know, wrote this incredibly aggressive stuff back at him, didn't he? Yeah, but it also comes from other reformers who start to cast him as a kind of centrist dad and to complain that he's not going far enough. So, I mean, on the scatological theme,

Luther is obviously brilliant at that. He's constantly obsessed with his bowels, with excrement, always talking about that. But this generates further kind of shit throwing from Thomas Munster, who is a far more radical figure than Luther, who in the great kind of the war against the peasants, Munster takes the side of the peasants luther doesn't and so munster is um you know he's he's using phrases like donkey farts scrotum like diarrhea makers um since you clearly like drinking shit i hope you brew beer out of shink out of stinking shit he says priests don't talk enough about that do they today no no and and this and so this is and this is the kind of stuff that he is um starting to direct at luther so luther then starts flinging it back and

so it kind of it builds and builds and builds and you can entirely see that in twitter that people get radicalized because people are taking when you get in trench positions people are inevitably driven to attack each other more and more and more, and so it escalates. So it's reasonable, is it, to call the Reformation, I mean, I think it is reasonable to call it a culture war. There's been lots of stuff recently about culture wars, and people sort of get very hot under the collar, and they say, oh, these absurd, confected culture wars. But it seems to me that culture wars are the stuff of politics, and always have been, that actually culture wars are not irrational, or unreasonable, or or anomalous or sort of aberrations. They are the norm. They are the stuff of history. Do you buy that?

Yes, completely. And I think that the Reformation is absolutely a culture war. And you're right that it's a war because it matters, because for the reformers and indeed for those who are opposing him, this is in a way about more than culture. It's about the destiny of people's souls. It's about the nature of God's plan for humanity. I mean, the stakes couldn't possibly be higher. And so that's why, in a sense, it's driving the abuse. And the same you look at social media today, the most vicious abuse comes from people whose interests and whose values are most under threat. Yes, although there are times, aren't there, where the culture wars seem to die down. So I think about much of, you know, when we were growing up, were culture wars that intense? I don't really think they were. In the sort of 70s, 80s, 90s, they were kind of bubbling along, but they weren't full pelt. I mean, it wasn't something that monopolized people's attention in the same way that the current rows about decolonizing the curriculum or statues or the National Trust or any of these things.

There are sort of moments on that. That's what I think is so interesting. There are sort of moments when the latent divides become intensely embittered. And obviously the 16th century was one, and I don't know, the 18th century, or right now, or the 60s maybe. Yeah, I think it's when a technological change happens that enables people to amplify their voices. So the message that, you know, Luther's message was one that

had been percolating around on the fringes of medieval Christendom for centuries. What Luther was able to do is to make use of the printing press to amplify his voice. And I guess the same, and also because Protestantism puts a premium on reading scripture, therefore it puts a premium on literacy. And the more you have literacy, the more you have people who can read and write. And so that then in turn amplifies the number of people who can kind of join in the culture war. And I guess that in the 18th century, the same thing is happening, that the commercialisation of the press. Right, newspapers and magazines. And coffee houses, as in the famous Swift quote,

kind of, again, a bit like, I suppose, a kind of chat room or something, provide a space in which people can meet and discuss and debate. And so I think that culture wars, you know, to have a culture war, you need a battlefield. Well, you do. That's what's so interesting, though, right? That you need an open battlefield, because you need to be exposed, you need. That's what's so interesting, though, right? That you need an open battlefield because you need to be exposed. You need to get to the other side in order to get cross. That's one of the things that strikes me about the development of social media. So what happens now that wouldn't have happened 50 years ago is that people find things. They go out and they find things they really disagree with.

And then they retweet them to their followers and they say, look at this baboon. What a fool he is writing this article in The Guardian or The Daily Mail or The Telegraph or wherever. And they all pile on in the comments. But people obviously didn't do that in the 1950s. I mean, they didn't get up in the morning and think, I'm extremely left wing. I'm going to go and buy the Daily Express and work myself into a frenzy. People had actually, they were in silos then as much as they are now. And in some ways, it's the fact that the technology allows us to be exposed to the other side that actually inflames people. At least that's my take on it. Yeah. And I think also that it kind of obliges you to have a view on everything. Yeah. So suddenly you'll find that you have very

intemperate views on something that you know absolutely nothing about. Historians are very bad at this, but there's a very nice early edition early edition of question time where they had ajp taylor now ajp taylor was famously opinionated and wrote the inflammatory column for the sunday express and they have him on question time and it gets to about the 10th question and something about housing policy and they ask him ajp taylor what do you think and he says very slowly to be perfectly honest i have no opinion about this at all. And nobody ever says that these days, do they? I mean, most of us do have no opinion about lots of issues, but we feel obliged to confect them, I think partly because social media demands that we confect an opinion,

doesn't it? Although having said that, and here I know that I'm putting words into your mouth, because this is very much the theme of your books on modern British history. It's very much a minority pursuit. Right. And the people who were on Twitter are definitely unrepresentative. I mean, that's what Burke is talking about. That's what Swift is talking about in the context of the 18th century. And your great thesis is that the kind of the cultural revolutions that we associate with the 60s and 70s are minority pursuits. And so

I'm guessing that you would think the same about social media in the 21st century, would you? Well, I do, of course. I mean, it's that classic thing, isn't it, that people sort of say, everybody I know voted for Jeremy Corbyn. Everybody on Twitter voted for Jeremy Corbyn, I don't understand, you know, the polls must be wrong or whatever. And that's, I think, I think that's true in the 16th century too. So most people were not reformers. Most people didn't really give an enormous amount of thought to the position of the altar, or the vestments worn by the priest or any of those things. And they're sort of dragged slightly unwillingly behind the enthusiasts and to some extent i think that's how social and cultural change always works but there's a small group of very impassioned people and most people couldn't give a damn they just want a quiet life and and basically the point at which they're going to be

killed if they don't conform they grudgingly go along with the sort of with the enthusiasts but but change is not driven by the sort of great herd as it were by the cattle in the field it's driven by the by people like you by the grasshoppers yes and the and and the change does happen because no one would deny that the reformation had a kind of seismic impact yeah and all these kind of you know luther and munster's kind of yelling at each other is going to have a cumulative effect that will reverberate out across i mean there's a there's a there's a fantastic comment from calvin who um you know is the in a way as as influential on the course of european history as luther but calvin calvin says about luther would that he worked to curb this restless

uneasy temperament, which is apt to boil over in every direction, which is basic. He's basically saying, I wish he'd stay off Twitter. It's not good. Whereas Calvin's approach is much more, we need to carefully kind of consolidate and seed our ideas. And that, in a way, also proved incredibly effective. Which works, that's the question. Well, they clearly both work.

But in a sense, Calvin's, I think, Calvin's approach of, which in a way is also, I mean, it's a kind of the prototype for the revolutionary cell meeting up, full of passionate conviction the sort of bolsheviks of their day yeah yes in a way yes yes but i mean what we what you were saying about um supporters of corbyn on twitter i mean because what what they were doing before twitter was standing outside tube stations selling selling magazines and going to meetings with papers and plastic bags and very much not changing the world. Yeah. But Twitter definitely enabled, you know, that kind of absolutely amplified it.

And I guess that in a sense, you know, what's happening with Calvin, who is, you know, he founds his godly republic in Geneva. It establishes a prototype for how a kind of reformed society can exist. And then having done that, then it gets amplified by figures from across Europe who come to it, who go back to their various homelands and write it up so so in the the 16th century the place where calvin is most published most printed most read is not geneva it's london and we can see the impact of that reverberating through into the 17th century um i mean you know calvinism and reaction to calvin's teachings plays a crucial role in the convulsions that send the whole of Britain and Ireland into civil war in the 17th century. But of course,

it also then gets exported to America. And so, you know, this is seismic stuff. But the funny thing, though, Tom, is that we tell history, we can easily tell history through a series of these culture wars and say, you know, they have long-term repercussions they end up winning you know you can talk I mentioned the Bolsheviks earlier in 1890 in 1900 in 1910 they look like a bunch of cranks who were just sort of talking to each other in sort of dingy rooms above pubs and nobody cares and then they end up winning so we can tell history that way but I suppose there's a more interesting way to tell history which is to write about all those groups in dingy pub history that way. But I suppose there's a more interesting way to tell history, which is to write about all those groups in dingy pubs that don't succeed. I mean, there

are lots of them, right? Not everybody is a Bolshevik or an evangelical reformer who's going to win. And the interesting thing is you don't know. When you embark upon your crusade and you're sort of writing pamphlets or you're tweeting or you're standing outside the tube station with a paper, you may be doomed to utter obscurity and irrelevance so history is not always on your side if you're in the sort of vanguard of change as you see it but it is also the case isn't it and you again will know this better than anyone that it's the people who make the most noise who tend to feature in the history books yeah because historians you know need raw material to put in the book yeah and uh it's very true british cattle you know cattle great cattle beneath the british

oak you know they're chewing the card they're not they're not making the noise that the intemperate grasshoppers are so the grasshoppers tend to go in the history books yes and so absolutely it is very difficult to write about people who themselves are not writing. Yes, that's right. I mean, when I was writing about the 60s, I remember talking to my editor. And he sort of said, well, your thesis is, he said, you know, you're having your cake and eating it. Because your thesis is that basically people just went on caravan holidays and played bingo and visited the local Bernie Inn. But to sustain the book, you can't just have that. So you've got the Beatles in it and you've got people having orgies and going to happenings and talking to Harold Wilson and stuff, which is counter to your thesis.

But you need to have that, otherwise you have no book because you can't have people going for 500 pages on caravan holidays. But Dominic, I mean, looking now at 2020, wouldn't you say that the people, you know, the grasshoppers in the 60s are the people who today have indeed changed the world in a way that people who are going on caravanning holidays in the 60s haven't? Such as? You mean feminism, gay rights, all that sort of stuff? Yeah. And generally that in the culture wars, it's the kind of the people who were the outliers in the 60s who now dominate the battlefield. I find that so depressing, Tom, this conversation.

I think there's some truth in that, but I think it only works if they chime with some sort of subterranean instinct of the cattle, as it were. So in other words, no matter how much you shout about a very unpopular idea, if it's genuinely very unpopular, your shouting is pointless. An example of that is in the 70s, there were people who made a huge hullabaloo about, you know, reforming the laws on sexual consent because they believed that society had got it all wrong about paedophilia, the paedophile information exchange, for example. Now, obviously, they made a big fuss um their cause went nowhere because most people regarded it as utterly repellent so there you have some grasshoppers if you like who are chirping away but they're never going to win they're never going to succeed you know gay rights on the other hand

there clearly was a growing public tolerance that wasn't necessarily driven by um the people doing the most campaigning but it was rooted in what you know the latent decency shall we say of of sort of people's live and let live attitudes um so i don't think it's necessarily that the that the the more you shout you'll always win and history belongs to you. No, no, no. But I do think that the transformation in values and ethics and assumptions about, say, sexuality would be an obvious one, but gender as well. It's been as rapid as anything, any period in history anywhere. And I would say that actually that the reformation is really the only parallel that i can think of and i think that that maybe in 100 years time the 60s will be seen as equivalent of the 1520s as a period of of kind of where touch papers are lit that just explode and explode and explode and and transform and um you know, how long does it take

before people realise that they had lived through something called the Reformation? I think that maybe 100 years. I think people were starting to talk about the Reformation by the 1590s. But people were aware at the time, weren't they? People would say, we are living, you know, there's tons of quotes

that people sort of saying quite early on. We're living through very strange times, things that we were told even a year ago. now tell us the king now says um he's changed his mind and actually you know the saints the relics whatever have all been you know people did have a sense of living through as as perhaps people have today anyway um it is long overdue that we took a short break so that tom could check his DMs. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

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 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. Do please remember to rate, review and most importantly,

subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And a reminder to get in touch with us on twitter using at the rest history no there's no is in the twitter handle now oddly enough we've got quite a lot of social media about the subject of social media so let's whiz through some of your observations and questions tom holland um here we go with johnny cahill he says um has cancel culture and the desire to drag skeletons out of closets become more prevalent due to the rise of social media? Or has it always been a big part of the political and social landscape of society? Well, Tom, I think it's I think it's always been there. It won't surprise you to learn that. I think that the specifics of cancel culture, the idea that people have to be silenced because they are a moral

threat, is one that absolutely, in the current form, certainly in Britain and America, I think is imbued with Calvinist undertones. That was very, very important in Calvin's Geneva, the idea that those who were morally offensive should be silenced, should be punished. And there was a kind of organisation called the consistory that existed purely for that purpose. And I think that kind of cancellation culture operates as one immense consistory. But Tom, doesn't it go back further than that? So the Greeks would ostracise you. The Romans had a thing called damnatio something where they... Damnatio Memoria. Yeah. Yes, but cancel culture is you're specifically being cancelled for your moral or ideological values. It basically existed to stop a potential tyrant or to stop fracture lines within the democracy from widening so far that they would threaten the future of the democracy itself. So the way it worked was that every year there would be a vote in the assembly as to whether there should be an ostracism.

And if they decided there should, then two months later, everyone would meet in the agora and every citizen would write down the name of someone that they wanted exiled for 10 years on an ostracon, which was a kind of shard of pottery. So hence the word ostracism. And whoever got the most votes would then be sent into exile. So that's actually reality television, isn't it? That's the ancestor of Big Brother. Yeah, yeah. I'm a celebrity, get me out of here. I'm an Athenian politician, kick me out. Okay, let's have the next question. So the next question is from somebody I know. He produced a series I once did about the uses and abuses of history. His name is Robbie McGuinness. And he says, this is clearly one for you, Tom, because it's about both Rome and Twitter. Was anyone doxxed in ancient Rome?

I don't actually know what doxxing is. Are modern online things like sock puppets and trolling or even swatting, I don't know what swatting is either, are they new or did similar things happen in olden times? Well, doxxing, because I just looked it up in the interval, is apparently putting out malicious information about people. Right, but about people's addresses or something like that. You give people their details and they can...

Well, in that case, probably not, because everyone knew where leading politicians in Rome lived. That was the whole point. You couldn't be a leading politician. That's interesting. Everyone knew where they lived. They had no anonymity at all. Yeah.

No, no. The whole idea about anonymity in Rome was regarded as deviant and suspicious because the only possible reason that any politician could have for wanting to be private was because he was a deviant and a pervert. So you were supposed to live your life entirely in public. OK. So, yeah. So I don't think that would have worked. Yeah.

But trolling, yes. I mean mean the whole of roman roman political discourse was effectively trolling um and cicero the greatest orator was also the greatest troller um his ability to blacken the reputations of those who opposed him was so i mean mean, was astonishing. And he would have been magnificent on Twitter. Right. I mean, so if you think of social media, one of the purposes of social media is to kind of raise your profile. Then Cicero was a guy who wondered whether people would still be talking about him in 1,000 years.

Yeah. But was so effective that we're still talking about him 2,000 years in the future. So he would have been superb, I think. Now, the next question, unbelievably, is also for you. It's from somebody called Pat Roberts. And Pat Roberts says, Ask Tom is very prescriptive, or she's very prescriptive. Ask Tom how Aristides the Just got ostracised, the original trolling of a virtue signaller. And ask how Socrates' views on kids learning to write compare with the disapproval of smartphones. Okay, so Aristides the Just was ostracised. A virtue signaller? Yes, I think so, because the story goes that he was in the marketplace, the ostracism was happening.

Some out-of-town guy who couldn't write came up to him and said, please would you write down Aristides? I want him ostracised, not recognising who Aristides was. And so Aristides understandably said, why do you want him sent into exile? And the guy said, because I'm fed up with everyone going on about how he's the just. So it's a nice story. But of course, if the story is true,

you have to wonder who told it. The only conceivable candidate is aristides himself um so so maybe he was virtue signaling about being ostracized for his own virtue signaling is that what you're yes absolutely yeah words yes that's very and socrates view on kids learning to write well so socrates um it's actually of course plato who is ventriloquising for Socrates. And Socrates tells a story about a pharaoh who is approached by the Egyptian god Thoth who has invented writing. And Thoth comes along to the pharaoh and says, look, isn't this a brilliant invention? And the pharaoh says, no, it's terrible.

We don't want to have this new technology. Basically because it will culminate in Twitter. And that would be just as bad. So the fairy lists all kinds of reasons why writing is a terrible idea and why children shouldn't learn it. But of course, again, there's a kind of paradox there because Plato, who is writing this,

is one of the supreme literary artists of all time and the only reason that we know um this story is because plato wrote it down so there's a kind of moebius strip of complexity there it's so interesting isn't it there's stuff about technology so in my books about post-war britain i've written about two things well three things really about which people had exactly the same reaction. One is television, the next one is home computers, and the other one is more specifically video games. And people said exactly the same thing about all of those things.

Children will get addicted, it saps the morals of the young, they used to grow up and read the books of G.A. Henty, and now they are watching Tizwas or playing Space Invaders. And the stories are the same. The only thing that differs are the names. The columns are exactly the same. But a good example of somebody who campaigned against television was Mary Whitehouse, who you will remember, a big figure in our childhoods campaigning against people watching too much TV and obscenity on TV. And the way that she became popular or she became well known was, of course, through TV. She appeared on the very technology that she was denouncing. So in that sense, you know, the often used comparison between Mary Whitehouse and Plato,

ventriloquizing Socrates, is entirely vindicated. That's what this podcast is all about. Where else would you get comparisons between Plato and Mary Whitehouse? Plato, Whitehouse, Parallel Lives. That's a book waiting to be written. This is from someone called Jonners. The Gettysburg Address has to be the tweet of the day, short and snappy, comparatively.

And that's an important point, isn't it? Yeah. It's a very important point. It's got to be short, it's got to be abbreviated and um that's often the case with the most celebrated phrases um yeah and soundbite culture is not new so you know soundbite culture um you always needed i think in the age of literacy you always needed a short snappy phrase that the public could remember i mean the idea that people would sort of go and listen you know people there's all these stories about people going to listen to Gladstone,

for example, hundreds of thousands of people or tens of thousands of people. The truth is, of course, most of those people wouldn't have been able to hear him. They'd have only heard sort of snippets passed back. So getting the snippets right has always mattered. And I think brevity has always been a virtue for sort of politicians and political leaders. You think of Elizabeth I at Tilbury, you know, though I am a woman, I have the sort of stout heart of a man and all that kind of business, all that carry on. That's the line that everybody remembered at the time. And that's the line, well, they remembered.

I mean, that's the invented line put in her mouth that people remembered at the time. And that's the line that's endured. And I think it's always been the case that short and snappy is better than long and windy. Beini vidi vici. There you go. Very good. I saw I conquered. Yep.

Yep. Which was put on a placard that followed Caesar with his triumph so that everyone could read it. And, you know, it went viral. It's viral to this day. Everyone still still knows it. so that everyone could read it and you know it went viral it's viral to this day everyone still still knows it um okay here's here's another from francis stratford please explore anti-popery as a culture war it defined this nation after all okay so that's that's kind of going back to the reformation idea the idea that became very distinctive in um in britain that uh catholicism in Britain that Catholicism was evil,

that Protestantism defines the nation. And I guess we've already done an episode on the 17th century, but that was the idea, you know, anti-popery could fake history. Anti-popery is a culture war, is a culture war. And the funny thing is,

if you think about it that way, Britain is founded on a culture war. I mean, Britain the funny thing is if you think about it that way britain is founded on a culture war i mean britain is the protestant chosen nation isn't it that when england scotland came together after 1707 it was their shared protestantism and their opposition to catholic france that bound them together so a culture war is at the essence of britishness sense of Britishness. Yes, and all the stuff that we would recognise now, kind of fake news, stings, memes, everything is there. Yeah, you think about all the stuff about the 30 Years' War

that circulated in the 17th century. That's classic meme stuff, isn't it? The sort of images of... The types of oats and... Yeah, all that sort of stuff all catholics abroad are murdering protestants and here are some here's a nice woodcut of a massacre i mean that's pure kind of um and also and also blaming disasters on catholics so the great five london great five london uh yeah everything's catholics okay um now here's a good point that

we've alluded to a little bit earlier, but it comes from David Knowles. David Knowles says, yesterday's culture often becomes today's orthodoxy. So what divisive thing do you think from today could become commonly held tomorrow? And what are some surprising culture wars from the past about topics that we wouldn't realise were controversial? So let's take the first point. What divisive thing do we think will become the orthodoxy tomorrow? That is a good question. And I'm glad you asked it. And I think that perhaps you should, as the modern historian, should answer that. OK, well, to me, the obvious thing actually is vegetarianism.

I think I always think that will be the thing that people I mean, I I'm not a vegetarian and I can't imagine ever being one. But I think there will be a point in, let's say, the 27th century when people will look back on us and they will say, God, what awful people. They knew the damage it was doing. They knew the cruelty and the ecological damage and all the rest of it. And yet they still went out and they ate their chicken korma or their fillet steak or whatever it might be. And I suspect that will be the thing that people will judge us for. Yeah, I kind of became vegetarian-ish.

Can you be vegetarian-ish? Five years ago. Well, to the degree that I eat fish, so that doesn't really make me a vegetarian. You don't eat steak? I'm a pescatarian. Do you only eat the roast beef of Old England, Tom? No, I don't. I don't.

And, you know, I do feel morally purer than you as a result. Well, I knew that. I mean, that was pretty obvious. Yes, I do look down on you. That's been obvious from the very beginning of this podcast i think yes i well i i'd agree with that um and i think not least because technology again is clearly coming to the rescue so this week we've had um story about um people in singapore basically inventing meat chicken yeah nuggets um yeah so

the thought that i might be able to go back to eating chicken you see chicken chicken i couldn't possibly eat a chicken now because they are the closest living relatives to tyrannosaurs and anything more disrespectful than eating a tyrannosaur you wouldn't eat a dino that's madness right i couldn't eat a dinosaur we've got one more yeah and then but then david also asks what is some surprising culture wars from the past about topics that we wouldn't realize were controversial i guess i mean i guess for um looking at my my children and the things that they take for granted that were still controversial when i was young i guess i mean i guess homosexuality would be the i was going to say that's the obvious one isn't it i mean when mean, when we were growing up, you know, it was a very hotly contested issue.

When was it decriminalised? So 1967, I think. 1967, so I was born in 1968. So I was born one year after, you know, a year before I was born. It was still illegal. And, of course, the stigma, as it were, the sort of the, it remained reasonably contentious and for, you know, 10, 20 years, didn't it? Yes. Yeah. But I mean, the idea that, that, that, um, a year before I was born, homosexuality was illegal. And now essentially it's illegal to be

opposed to homosexuality. I mean, that is an astonishing process of change. Yeah. I mean, there are people now, there are lots of people now who were brought up to believe, who believed for long periods of their life that it was sinful or sort of some way medically wrong, that you needed medical help or you should be judged. And that has now become, I mean, that's a hate but you see i think that's why that's why the parallel with the reformation is an interesting one because a similar process of change happened in in england yeah um over the course of a century things that had been completely taken for granted by everyone in england became utterly criminalized you know we just talked about anti-popery in england was a famously

pro-papal nation um it was it was uh it had a particular the english were famed for their devotion to the virgin mary we were you were talking earlier about telling the story you know you can tell the story from the perspective of the grasshoppers or you can tell it from the perspective of the cattle but there's another group of people you can tell history through which whom we almost never look at, which are those people who have been left behind. So those people who are sitting there bewildered and are sort of saying, well, I haven't changed.

But the world has gone mad. Everything I've been told when I was a child, that my parents and grandparents taught me, has been turned on its head. What's happened? And at any moment in history, there are always people who think like that aren't there and again i think that technology has speeded that up because i think that that you know that is a process that you can trace through the middle ages so often

people who are condemned by um people in the commanding heights of the church in the middle ages as as heretics are simply holding to beliefs and practices that were the orthodoxy maybe a century before. You know, they live in the kind of, you know, in the sticks away from the universities or Rome. And so they have no idea that actually they've now become branded as herit... well, deplorables, I suppose you could say. And the more technology speeds up, so the quicker they become branded as deplorables. Yeah, they're the equivalent of the people who use the wrong word now, the wrong word that they thought was reasonable 20 years ago, and they haven't noticed. And everyone's haranguing

them and saying, why haven't you educated yourself? And all this kind of thing. Yes. And I think also that what that shows is that very rapid change tends to be driven by the educated. Education is a marker of status and wealth. And so almost invariably not to be educated. You know, people say educate yourself. If you're saying that, you are assuming that you yourself are educated. Yeah. So education has always been a marker of status and that's true of of clerks in the middle ages of um reformers based in london and the university towns in

in reformation england it's true now again it's people based in london and university towns who are kind of at the forefront of social media and condemning people for using the wrong language having the wrong views yeah all right tom we've gone on for far too long. There is no doubt that social media is one of the great talking points of our time. So if you can't beat them, join them. Send us your thoughts using our Twitter handle at TheRestHistory or to me at DCSanbrook or to Tom at Holland underscore Tom. Thank you for listening. See you next time. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access,

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