History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity

"So one example is that we have a global water crisis on the horizon, and wars between states and within states over water have been escalating rapidly since the year 2000. We know that there are going to be huge water shortages in the big cities of the world: Los Angeles, Cairo, Melbourne, São Paulo, Beijing. How are we going to deal with that? In the chapter of the book about water, I look at something called the ‘Tribunal de las Aguas’ (the ‘tribunal of waters’) in the Spanish city of Valencia. It’s Europe’s oldest legal institution and it’s a water court. There are these eight black-cloaked figures who come out every Thursday at 12 noon and meet outside the west door of the cathedral in Valencia and hold public hearings. They are democratically elected representatives, in charge of the local irrigation canals of the Valencia agricultural hinterland, where we get our juicy Valencia oranges from. They are elected by local farmers. And if a farmer has been taking more than their fair share of water or not looking after their section of the canal, they might get fined in one of these public hearings, and tourists can watch them. I’ve been there and seen it. The interesting thing about the Tribunal of Waters is that it’s been meeting outside the cathedral every Thursday at noon for hundreds of years. This is an ancient institution. It’s a piece of living history. In fact, some people say it dates to before the Christian reconquest of Valencia in the mid-13th century. So it’s got deep, deep roots. I think it’s a wonderful example of questioning the way we look at water today. Take the United Kingdom, where water is controlled by private monopolies. If you were thinking about it from the Valencia perspective, why don’t we have more community ownership of our water? Why don’t we have elected community members on the boards of water companies? How could that Valencia model be used to deal with water conflicts? And, in fact, other places have drawn on the Valencia model. There is a Latin American tribunal of waters. It’s one example of what’s sometimes called ‘the commons.’ It’s about how we manage common resources and the ways human communities have developed rules to do that, whether in relation to waterways, forests or fisheries. The Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom wrote a lot about this, and Valencia is a historical example that she herself drew upon. So that’s one kind of example. I could give you lots and lots of others. So one of the things we often think about today is the problem of social media and polarization : pro-Trump/anti-Trump, climate change activist/climate change denier, pro-abortion/anti-abortion. We live in an age of polarization where the algorithms online are feeding us the same kind of news stories over and over again and pushing us apart and fragmenting us. There is a parallel historical story here, which is the story of another communications technology, which emerged about 500 years ago – the printing press. It was picked up by Protestant reformers like Martin Luther, who used it effectively to spread critiques of official Catholic church authority. While it empowered Protestants to challenge the papal hierarchy, it also inflamed and accelerated the wars of religion. Over the next two centuries, tens of millions of people died. There was also the persecution of women for the alleged crime of witchcraft in Germany in the 16th century, spread by the new printing presses. This was an early instance of fake news. There were clickbait stories of women who had flown on a broomstick along with the devil to burn down a town. This stuff sold like hotcakes. In Britain, around 500 people – mostly women – were murdered for witchcraft between about 1530 and 1680. In Germany, where print culture was more established, it was 25,000. “I didn’t find enough historians writing books about what we could learn for today from all the research they’ve been doing” So that is a warning from history. But one of the things that the printing press also did – and this is the more positive example – is that it started spreading new ideals around individual rights and democratic politics. It did that in tandem with the coffee houses that emerged in London in the late 17th and early 18th century. There were thousands of them in London alone. You would walk in, buy yourself a bowl of coffee for a penny, and sit down at one of the communal tables which were covered with the periodicals and pamphlets the printing presses had produced. And you wouldn’t just read but also talk to strangers sitting at the table with you. You might talk about the arts or science or business, but these were above all political talking shops. You might talk about republicanism, about antislavery. This is where Daniel Defoe and Tom Paine spent their time. The coffee houses of London gave birth to what the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas called the ‘public sphere’. In effect, they acted as schools of democracy and citizenship for the emerging (male) bourgeoisie. That raises a question for today. How do we revive that coffee house culture? Britain has 30,000 coffee shops. Imagine if we reintroduced the communal tables, like in Georgian Britain. If you had just ten conversations between strangers a day in those coffee shops in one year, that would be 100 million conversations. This actually links back to my earlier work. For three years, I worked with a historian of conversation, Theodore Zeldin , running projects at the Oxford Muse foundation focused on how we could revive conversational culture across social divides. We used to put on Conversation Meals , inviting strangers from different walks of life to talk with each other using a specially designed Menu of Conversation . The important role of dialogue in reducing polarisation has of course been recognised far more widely, for instance in grass-roots peace building. I’m hugely inspired by an organization called the Parent’s Circle , which brings together Israelis and Palestinians who share something in common – they have all had family members killed in the conflict – to share their stories and their grief."