Door Louis van den Langenberg
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In July 2024, Australian philosopher Roman Krznaric published his eighth book History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the past for the future of humanity. Tackling topics like the climate crisis and the restoring faith in democracy, it takes on the task of analysing how historical solutions to similar problems can help us navigate the future. After giving a lecture on the topic with Radboud Reflects, he sat down with Ex Tempore for an introductory conversation into his new work.1
How is your new book History for Tomorrow different from your work in the past?
History for Tomorrow is part of a loose trilogy of books I’ve been writing over the past decade about humanity’s relationship with time. First came my book Carpe Diem Regained, which is about our relationship with the present moment. I followed this with The Good Ancestor about our relationship with the future. History for Tomorrow explores our relationship with the past, looking at what we can learn from the last 1000 years to help us confront ten urgent 21st century challenges, from the climate crisis to risks from artificial intelligence.
I see all of this as part of a project to develop what I call ‘temporal intelligence’, the human capacity to think on multiple time horizons – short term and long term, forwards and backwards, linear and cyclical.
I’m not a professional historian, and in fact have a background in political science. But I’ve always been drawn to history and its importance for helping us interpret the present. My doctoral dissertation, although done in a political science department, explored the contemporary resonances of Latin American colonial history, particularly in Guatemala. Similarly I wrote a book called The Wonderbox, which was about what history can teach us about the dilemmas of everyday life, such as love, death and finding purposeful work.
So the idea of what is sometimes called ‘applied history’ is a deep part of my intellectual formation and journey. I’ve always loved the Goethe quote ‘he who cannot draw on 3000 years is living from hand to mouth’. Typically the idea of learning from history focuses on warnings, captured in the famous aphorism ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. My four years of research for History for Tomorrow, however, revealed just how much inspiration we can find in positive examples of what has gone right, not only in cautionary tales of what has gone wrong. Time and again human societies have risen up and acted together, often against the odds, to overcome crises and tackle injustices.
You mention American historian Howard Zinn several times in your introduction, what about his work specifically inspired you?
Zinn was a radical American historian, most famous for writing a book called A People’s History of the United States. It first came out in 1980 and has been a million-copy bestseller. What Zinn did in that book was really important in that he retold the story of American history from Columbus to the present through four different lenses: the stories of working-class people, of women, of Native Americans and of African Americans. All the chapters rotate between those four different lenses. So you get a very different story than the American history of famous presidents or the robber baron tycoons of the 19th century, though they’re all in there.
What Zinn was trying to do was really enact the idea of ‘history from below’. This was, of course, an important movement in historiography that emerged after the Second World War – the idea of telling the stories that hadn’t been told, of trade unions and social movements and marginalized groups in society. It developed out of Marxist readings of history, the French Annales school, the oral and public history movements and other traditions challenging the ‘great man’ view of history. In The People’s History of the United States, Zinn writes: ‘Most histories understate revolt, overemphasize statesmanship, and thus encourage impotency among citizens.’ He was very much a historian-activist. He wanted this kind of history to empower people.
Earlier he had written a number of historiographical essays, collected in a fascinating book called On History. In one of them, called ‘Historian as Citizen,’ he talks explicitly about the way we need to think about history as full of possibilities for learning for the present – and learning from the inspirational moments, not just the warnings.
He writes: ‘The leaps that man has made in social evolution come from those who acted as if’. What he means is that they acted from the idea that change was possible. It might look like you can never change the system and that the odds are against you, but whether it was those who were fighting for independence in India or the civil rights movement in the US, they acted as if they might be able to bring about change. And occasionally it actually does happen. That comes out very clearly in his work.
So Zinn was a beacon for me when writing my book. I wanted to write about hope in apocalyptic times, but not in a naive, nostalgic, romanticized way. I’m well aware of the genocides, the wars, the greed displayed by human societies throughout history – my early research involved documenting the genocide of indigenous Mayans in Guatemala. I’m also aware that history has always been used and abused by those in power. So we always need to approach the past critically and with care. That’s why I try to present the historical case studies in my book – from Valencia’s Tribunal of Waters to the circular economy in 18th century Japan – not as utopian examples but as complex cases that should never be seen simply as blueprints for today.
In your book you touch on the modern challenges surrounding cyber-attacks and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Can you tell us more about your view of the future and the possible further developing issues surrounding technology?
A big topic! In the chapter on AI in my new book I make a very clear distinction between what is known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI – the idea of self-conscious machines) and ‘narrow’ Artificial Intelligence (which is what we have today – the big number-crunching algorithms that do things like suggest which book we might like to buy next on Amazon). I think too much of the public discussion has been focused on the fear of AGI – that the machines might take over and destroy humanity, like in Hollywood films such as The Terminator or The Matrix. This effectively functions as a distraction from the very real dangers of narrow AI.
In History for Tomorrow, I focus on the latter, starting with an historical analogy. AI seems so very 21st century and it might appear that history has little to say about it. But I asked myself this historical question: ‘have we ever created large scale systems that could potentially get out of control, which resemble AI in some ways?’ The clearest answer that I could come up with is the invention of financial capitalism in the Netherlands in the early 17th century – when they created the first stock markets, public limited companies, marine insurance and other financial instruments. And of course this system very quickly got out of control of its makers, resulting in events like the Mississippi Bubble in 1720 and then later the Wall Street Crash.
Of course we always need to be careful with historical analogies and look for differences as much as similarities. I don’t think that the global AI system is going to crash in the same way as a financial system. But due to the current exponential spread of fake information – from fake political videos to fake stock reports – the danger we face is not a financial crash but what I think of as a ‘reality crash’. I’m not sure that our political, economic and social institutions will be able to easily handle such a fundamental erosion of public trust. My guess is that this will potentially lead to extreme political turbulence over the coming decades.
In your book you mention the theory of the ‘radical flank’, a more violent group within social movements that tends to have radical goals and violent means of achieving them. They cause the moderate option to seem more reasonable to state power and thus help enact social change. Would you say this radical flank is also applicable in the cases of the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter or groups like Extinction Rebellion? Can these movements or some parts of them be considered a ‘radical flank’ or have these movements had one?
The ’radical flank’ effect emerged in social movement theory in the 1980s. It was initially based particularly around analysis of the US civil rights movement, where scholars pointed out that the success of the mainstream movement around Martin Luther King Junior was actually enabled by the more radical black nationalist movements such as the Black Panthers and figures like Malcolm X. In effect, the radicals made the demands of the moderates look more reasonable to those in power, shifting what is now known as the ‘Overton window’ – the range of policies that are publicly acceptable.
Subsequent research has shown the importance of this radical flank effect. In my new book I document how it operated in the early 1830s, through uprisings of enslaved workers on British-owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean, which helped push forward the movement for the abolition of slavery in British colonial territories.
Radical flanks certainly do not need to be violent. Ecological movements such as Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil are explicitly nonviolent but do operate as radical flanks to the mainstream environmental movement. They are often criticised for being ineffective and actually putting off people from supporting transformative environmental change through their actions such as road blockages. Yet the evidence is very clear that they in fact tend to have a positive impact. A very important research paper was just published in the journal Nature Sustainability, showing how Just Stop Oil protests actually helped increase support for more moderate organisations such as Friends of the Earth and resulted in more than a million people putting environmental issues higher up their political agendas.
We must recognise the importance of the radical flank, especially when it comes to the global ecological crisis. It is too late and too reckless to leave this crisis to simmer on the low flame of gradualism.
What do you think is the role of historians in society? To what extent should they engage in open political debate?
It is not obvious to me why historians should be any less involved in public debate than, say, economists or political scientists. So many of the issues that we face today such as the global water crisis, international conflict, racial injustice or growing wealth inequality, have been experienced in the past in often quite similar ways, and there are important lessons that we might draw. Though as I mentioned above, it is important to draw them with care. (By the way, economists should also be drawing their conclusions with care – they are just as susceptible as historians to the problem of picking and choosing examples or data to suit their arguments!)
Politicians, of course, are notorious for using and manipulating history to justify their policies, such as promoting imaginary histories of national purity in their attempts to keep immigrants at the gate. That is partly why the role of professional historians is so important – to help question those mythological histories.
Historians also have a key role in retelling our narratives of the past, as we have witnessed in the important efforts to decolonise history.
In addition, I would like to see more governments creating not just foresight units but also ‘backsight’ units, which systematically draw on the history of public policy for informing debates today. This is clearly an area where historians might also play an important role.
You have worked on projects focusing on global issues, such as the Empathy Museum. Are there plans to set up new projects in line with this initiative in the coming years? Have recent events perhaps inspired you to get involved?
After writing a book called Empathy, I did indeed end up founding the world’s first Empathy Museum, an art project which travels the world.
I think it would be fascinating to visit something like a History for Tomorrow museum, with exhibits that explored how the past could help inform our understanding of contemporary issues ranging from the ecological crisis to the risks of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, and to do so in a non-romantic and non-nostalgic way.
It would also be great if the subject of Applied History was taught in schools, so children might actually know, for instance, how ancient Japanese sustainability practices might help reshape our world today. It would equally be good if more universities offered courses in Applied History, and ensured that the focus was not just on issues around international diplomacy and warfare (the classic realm of Applied History), but was widened out much further to include issues ranging from public policy to social movements and community history.
I don’t know if I’m the best person to lead such projects but I’ll always be happy to help!
- This lecture is freely available on the Radboud Reflects YouTube channel:
Radboud reflects: History for Tomorrow, Philosopher Roman Krznaric and culture scholar Charley Boerman https://youtu.be/67BrVuVqWDI?si=upA1b_EbaFqdlZZ- ↩︎