(This is a bit different in style – it is an unscripted video transcript, so it reflects oral more than written speech.)
What is the use of history when you want to solve a big problem? There are all kinds of big conflicts on the planet. Right now, what’s top of our minds probably is whatever is happening in Israel and Palestine, in Ukraine, maybe Yemen, maybe between China and Taiwan, and there is always the Congo, and there are all kinds of other spaces in the world where we have difficult long-standing conflicts.
History helps us to understand how these conflicts got to be. History helps us to recognize all the dimensions of a conflict, it helps us to explain how we got here, why we are here, but does it help us to solve the problem?
I don’t really know what my opinion on this should be, and as someone who studied history, I should have the belief that history or whatever happens to us – the accumulated events that got us here – may have a blueprint for getting us out of here, but I’m wondering whether that’s true.
You see, history is good for understanding why we are here, but we get in trouble when we use history to predict where we have to be going, so a lot of the biggest problems on the planet come from people having some kind of idea of a history of the future. They say we were there, we are here now, and we need to get there, and sometimes this vision of where we want to go is really so deeply ideological and has an ideological function that it prevents us maybe sometimes from getting where we need to be.
So we may want to be somewhere, but is this the right direction? If we think we know where we need to be, where we want to be, maybe we have to do certain things in order to get there – and this, this kind of thinking, has brought pain and suffering on people time and again. It has also helped us to overcome problems sometimes.
For instance, let’s say you want to build a more Humane Society, you want to build a world where human rights matter, where peace matters, okay, that’s one goal. You could say you create a world then of more respect towards each other, should we respect everyone and everything? We should respect everyone as a person, but should we respect every opinion, every stance? When does tolerance begin tolerating too much? Are we tolerating ideas that are destructive? This is the old problem of tolerance: at which point can you tolerate too much, and you tolerate those that don’t believe in tolerance, and that will then eventually lead to the overcoming of tolerance itself.
I don’t know the solution to that, but we know the question is there: At which point do you know too much about a history of an area and all the injustices that have led to where we are now that you’re no longer free to imagine a future that is able to maybe disentangle itself from that history?
Sometimes the problem that we are facing is that we are thinking too much about history. That history has given us a certain set of parameters within which we should think, but it isn’t leading us anywhere, it is keeping us trapped in this solution.
I’ve mentioned before the benefits of the European Union: There are so many areas within Europe that historically were claimed by countries that currently don’t have control over their territory, but the existence of the European Union makes that whole question irrelevant.
I have family history in Silesia which is now in Poland. It used to be in Germany, it used to be in Austria, there used to be all kinds of historical developments and if you go long enough back in history the Burgundians were there. Who knows who was there before. Now it’s Poland, Poland is in the EU, Germany is in the EU, Austria is in the EU, you can visit, you can live there, you can buy property, it doesn’t matter.
The concrete problems of human life have been solved in Europe, not everywhere maybe, but to a large degree by an institution that has understood that history has informed why there needs to be a European Union, but it has not shackled the European Union to replicate all kinds of historical structures in order to overcome that kind of thinking.
So when history ties you down so much that you say “this is mine,” “this is yours,” “maybe that shouldn’t be yours,” “this was, this is mine now,” “it used to be mine thousands of years ago,” “this was yours thousands of years ago,” “maybe I or you didn’t even exist back then” and all of these kinds of discussions that we are all too familiar with. None of this is helping. It’s helping on an intellectual level, it’s helping keeping people employed to teach history, but it’s not solving concrete problems of now. It is not solving problems of human life right now.
So in order to create a new history, human beings time and again have found out that you need to just let bygones be bygones. You need to ignore history at a certain point in order to be able to move on. It doesn’t help to say “this was how it was and so it should be in perpetuity,” because everybody has different stories or interpretations, or sometimes histories are overlapping. Who gets to say whose history matters more? But what matters is: Are people safe, do they have to feel threatened, can they build lives or can’t they, are their children safe, do their husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, children have to die in a senseless war, where we eventually have to figure out how to live together anyway?
The resources that we need, can we get them to each other through trade rather than conquest? Do you really need to feel you’re part of a big empire to feel good about yourself, or would you rather prefer to live a good life? Do you really need the ego component, do you need to vindicate previous generations but then have current and future generations suffer?
So at which point can we abandon history in order to actually solve problems? When does the past have to step away for there to be a future? I think this is a discussion that is relevant for so many conflicts on the planet, and I’m not saying not to understand history – we need to understand it but we need to understand when to walk away from it and when to build something new that actually makes life possible in the here and now and in the future.
Erratic Attempts 