By Kurt Johnson
IDEAS
History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity
Roman Krznaric
Ebury, $36.99
In the early 19th century, opposition to slavery grew among British public opinion to overwhelming proportions. In an attempt to stem the tide, the powerful vested interests consisting of plantation owners, and politicians opposed abolition on the basis that it would be too jarring for the economic system and even for the slaves themselves. If slavery was not stopped, then change was to be delayed as long as possible.
In Johannes Gutenberg’s day, governments wanted to regulate the printing press too.Credit: Alamy
At a TED Talk on climate change, Sydney-born social philosopher and historian Roman Krznaric listens to the chief executive of oil company Shell utter similar arguments to undermine emissions reduction. Fossil fuels are integral to our current energy system and the radical change, demanded by science, would be too economically disruptive.
Mark Twain wrote, “History does not repeat but it rhymes”, and so by scouring the record we can uncover solutions to today’s most intractable problems – or so claims Krznaric in History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity.
Historical analogies make for comfort reading in History for Tomorrow, by Roman Krznaric.
He explores 10 impressively diverse “social innovations” relevant to today, covering issues that range from water conservation, the state of representative democracy, AI to inequality and even excessive consumerism.
Historical analogies make for comfort reading. It’s easy to find consolation through plights shared with previous civilisations. Some analogies strain credibility at the outset to become forcefully convincing by chapter’s end.
Was the printing press as socially and politically disruptive as social media today? On the surface, a sensational claim, yet it broke the clergy’s stranglehold on religious doctrine, bringing about the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War. Mass printing seeded hysterical conspiracy theories leading to the witch trials.
Krznaric goes further to argue that the printing press reshaped thought itself. The proliferation of the printed word made thinking less collective and circular, more solitary and linear. Compare this to our modern attention spans shredded by social media, and Krznaric might have a point.
His most robust chapter demands we reassess representative democracy that is today impossibly compromised by slick career politicians representing lobby groups. No argument there. Krznaric proposes a return to democracy’s roots – invoking The Rhaetian Free State, “the most participatory form of democracy Europe had ever known”. For 300 years, 227 neighbourhoods in present-day Switzerland ruled without a regent, according to a flat system of assemblies.
Krznaric pre-empts criticism that such a model would be unwieldy at scale or during a crisis with another fascinating example: Rojava, an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria encompassing 4 million people that began to govern according to the ideas of American social ecologist Murray Bookchin, after a Kurdish leader found a battered copy of his work in a prison library. On such a narrow fulcrum does history tip.
Roman Krznaric proposes a return to democracy’s roots, invoking The Rhaetian Free State.Credit: Kate Raworth
Still, the problems of scale and complexity linger, threatening the premise that past social innovations could be readily deployed today. For example, Krznaric identifies two paragons of ethnic tolerance: modern Singapore, or the Spanish city of Córdoba when part of Islamic Al-Andalus from the eighth century to 1492. Both involved imposed tolerance regulations within an urban melting pot, where street-level interactions eased friction between ethnic groups. Yet Córdoba and Singapore lean toward the authoritarian.
Communalism at a larger scale is far more difficult to achieve. Attempts in the early multi-ethnic Soviet Union led to factions and competing interest groups that opened the door to totalitarianism. What’s more, the USSR, Córdoba and Singapore were all ruled by an elite dominated by a particular ethnicity.
One may be sceptical about the applicability of History for Tomorrow’s focus on more tenuous social innovations without ignoring the deeper lessons unearthed throughout the chapters.
The author points to our supercharged social alienation as the root cause of our modern crises. Krznaric unearths powerful ideals such as the “common good”, the need for sacrifice, being a “good ancestor” and a radical solution to the tragedy of the commons (when a resource is used without discrimination and therefore overused and possibly destroyed). These are more versatile than the social innovations, as they don’t rely on complex historical idiosyncrasies that may be impossible to reproduce.
The author saves for the finale his most compelling chapter, “Averting Civilisational Breakdown”, which dispenses with social innovation and proposes a deeper framework for change. Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun’s analysis in the 14th century of how empires rise and fall based on asabiyya, came as a particular epiphany.
The term ‘asabiyya’ broadly means social cohesion that increases when societies face external crises, but drops as elites use accumulated wealth and power to insulate themselves from internal issues, heralding decline. It’s impossible not to apply this to the present United States.
History for Tomorrow’s sheer erudition is impressive even if one senses the demands of marketing pushed the author towards a solution-based framing. What will make this book live on is its radical rejection of our separateness, our alienation from nature and each other, and the historically justified case that alternative worlds are possible as they have been in the past.
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