Roman Krznaric's Reading List

"Well, in 1845 the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau went out to live in the woods of western Massachusetts. He lived two years there, and a few years later he wrote a book about his experiences called Walden; or, Life in the Woods . It’s an account of how he went about the practicalities of simple living. It’s about how he built his house – a log cabin – with his own hands, grew his own food and lived a subsistence lifestyle. And it’s about what he did when he was there, like observing nature and swimming in Walden Pond. I think Thoreau was one of the great masters of the art of simple living. Of course, he didn’t live in complete isolation. Every few days he walked into the town of Concord, to read the papers and have a chat with his mum. He was very open about that. But he wrote extremely eloquently about the advantages of paring down life to its essentials – of doing more than getting caught up in the commercialisation and industrialisation that was going on around him. Even more relevant now, I think. In the era of climate change, there’s increasingly a move to cut back on our carbon emissions. Thoreau would have totally fitted into that. He would have looked around today and said: If you want to live carbon-lite, a less high-consumption lifestyle, you’ll see plenty of ideas in my book for turning away from material culture – not depriving yourself, but embracing the beauties of nature and of free time, the ultimate luxury. Thoreau’s experience in Walden taught him that he could live extremely cheaply and he didn’t have to work very much. In fact, he said that he could work as a part-time surveyor for about six or seven weeks and have enough to live on at Walden Pond for a year. Thoreau was always sceptical of what people called “civilisation” – accumulating material goods, moving into a bigger house. He viewed those things as burdens. He saw that having a massive mortgage was just going to tie you down and limit your freedom. Somewhat romantically, he thought you’d be much better off living in a wigwam, like the indigenous native Americans. Thoreau famously said: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” That was a message that he very much wanted to spread, at least through his own example. He saw the stress faced by farmers around him, who were trying to pay off their mortgages and improve the material quality of their lives. And he thought that it was much more luxurious and enjoyable to sit in the doorway of his cabin and listen to the birds sing, than to try to earn enough money to buy a new sofa. Thoreau was an extraordinarily realistic person. I don’t think he actually thought that everyone should live in the woods. What he was really saying was that wherever we live – even in urban society – we can simplify our lives. And that way, in purely practical terms, we probably don’t have to work as hard to support our lifestyle. And if you don’t have to work as much, you have more free time. Free time, for him, was the ultimate freedom. I think he would say to us now: Even if you are living in a high-rise flat in Paris or Berlin or New York , if you simplify your life then you can learn that it may be more enjoyable to take a walk in the park than to drive an expensive car around. That’s something that everyone can do without having to go and live in the woods. So Thoreau has a very realistic message for us, especially now that a third of people feel time-stressed or time-poor. What they really want is the freedom to not be tied down to jobs they don’t want to do or debts they wish they didn’t have. That’s right, and I think that idea of walking to the beat of your own drummer is a vital lesson for the art of living. What he’s saying there is that we don’t need to conform; in a way we need to break the rules. There have always been inspiring figures in history who have done that, and Thoreau is one of them. Mary Wollstonecraft is another – she became an author in an age [the 18th century] when no women did so, went to revolutionary France, had a child out of wedlock and so on. She was walking to the beat of her own drummer, and I find that personally inspiring. From everyday things like rejecting the culture of watching TV for three hours a day and locking your TV in the cupboard, to maybe leaving your well-paid job to do something which embodies your values more, we need to walk to the beat of our own drummer if we want to live a more experimental and adventurous life."

"I think that Orwell was one of the great travel adventurers of the 20th century. The reason I think that is because in Down and Out in Paris and London he showed that empathy could become an extreme sport and the guideline for the art of living. It’s the second half of the book that I particularly like, in which he describes how he went tramping in east London. He would dress up as a tramp and go into the streets of London, fraternising with beggars and people living on the streets. He was trying to empathise with people who lived on the social margins. One has to remember that Orwell had an incredibly privileged background. He went to Eton, he was an officer in the colonial police in Burma for five years. He realised that he didn’t know how everyday people lived, so his experiments in the late 1920s and 30s of tramping in London were a form of travel really, or experiential adventuring. He was trying to experience how other people lived, to get a taste of their lives. By doing so, he discovered that empathy isn’t something that makes you good but something that is good for you. So for me, Orwell is one of my great empathic heroes. I think we’ve been too obsessed with self-interest over the last century, and that’s limited the way that we pursue the good life. I think that empathy – the ability to try to imagine yourself into someone else’s life, to look through their eyes – can expand our lives enormously. Of course, if you see somebody begging under a bridge you might feel sorry for them or toss them a coin, but that’s not empathy, it’s sympathy or pity. Empathy is when you have a conversation with them, try to understand how they feel about life, what it’s like sleeping outside on a cold winter’s night – try to make a real human connection and see their individuality. The benefit of this is not only that it widens your own moral universe, but that it engages you with other people and other ways of living. It expands your curiosity to new ideas of how to live. That’s what happened to Orwell. He expanded his moral universe by talking to beggars and people sleeping on the streets, but also he met incredible characters. He was energised for his literary work by everything that he saw. It was the great travel adventure of his life, and that’s ultimately what I think empathy can do for us. I think it’s anything but mundane. The traditional way to think about social change is about changing political institutions – new laws, new policies, overthrowing governments and so on. I think social change is actually about creating a revolution of human relationships. About changing the way people treat each other on an everyday basis. That’s what Orwell was learning about. He was talking to individuals – understanding the minutiae of their lives – and after his time living in the streets of London he went on to do journalistic work which was really about trying to connect with human lives. For example, in his book The Road to Wigan Pier there’s a famous essay called “Down the Mine”, when he goes down a coal mine and tries to understand what it’s like to be a coal miner. These coal miners were powering British society at the time – coal created everything. Orwell said if you don’t understand their lives, you understand nothing."

"Schweitzer is an almost forgotten figure today, yet for much of the 20th century he was one of the most famous people in the Western world. He was born in 1875 in Alsace-Lorraine, and in his twenties he was a literary and intellectual superstar. He had PhDs in three subjects: in music, philosophy and theology. By his twenties he had written a two-volume biography of the life of Johann Sebastian Bach; a book on the quest for the historical Jesus; he was a professor of theology at the University of Strasbourg, and he was one of the world’s greatest organists to boot. Then at the age of 30 – and this is extraordinary in my view – Schweitzer decided to give all of that up, trained as a doctor and went to work in a leper hospital in the West African jungle. He later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his medical work there. His autobiography traces his transformation from his literary and intellectual work to the way he gave himself to human service. I think we learn two things from Schweitzer. The first is that it’s never too late to change your job, which is one of our great dilemmas. At The School of Life in London I teach a class called “How to find a job you love”. People are always saying, it’s too late to change my job as a banker or doctor or in PR. Schweitzer shows that you can change. When he was 30, he was revered, respected, he had status, yet he gave it all up and went into obscurity by retraining as a doctor. We live in an age where 60% of people want to change their job, but 25% of people are too afraid to make that change – many of them because they think it’s too late, that they can’t re-establish themselves. Schweitzer is telling us that we can. The second thing he’s telling us is that he put his political and ethical values into practice in his work. During his era it was actually quite difficult to find a job where you could express your beliefs. You may have believed in the trade union movement, but there weren’t that many jobs in it. Today, half a million jobs exist in the charity sector in Britain alone. So it’s even more realistic now to think, what are my core values and how can I express them in the work that I do? Because that’s one of the keys to finding fulfilling work. Absolutely. And he kept working as a doctor until the age of 90. He never really stopped. In fact, there’s a lot of contemporary research which shows that if you do a job that engages your ethics, it will give you more satisfaction than prioritising money or status. The way he described it, it sounds like a rather simplistic philosophy – to revere and protect every living thing. But where that really came from – in a way it links back to empathy – is he thought that if we experience suffering ourselves, we can understand the suffering of others, whether of humans rich or poor and animal life as well. He thought that out of that suffering which we experience ourselves, we can connect with others and create human bonds. That is what can empower a more ethical world. Reverence for Life is really an empathic concept in my view."

"Frankl’s time in concentration camps in occupied Europe was enlightening for him, in the sense that he came to understand something very important about human motivation and what gives life meaning. One of the things he noticed amongst his fellow camp inmates was that those who were most likely to survive were not the biggest and strongest or those who could best scramble for bread, but those who had what he called a “will to meaning”. In other words, they had a project in their lives, a future goal which kept them going. He quotes Nietzsche , who said that “he who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how”. That was really the core of what Frankl discovered. For instance, he met a man who, before he was captured, was in the middle of writing a scientific textbook. What kept this man alive all those years in the camp was the fact that he hadn’t yet finished. Because he was the only person who could write this textbook, he wanted to stay alive to complete it. So Frankl is telling us that if you’ve got a great project in life, it can drive you and keep you going through all the pains and sorrows and joys of everyday living. Frankl in fact founded a school of therapy called logotherapy, which he felt could be applied to everybody in their lives. I’ve noticed while teaching in The School of Life that there’s a great hunger among people for finding a vocation or project that can drive their lives. People understand that having some greater goal can give life meaning. You also find this in the work of the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the psychology of “flow”. And of course you find it in Aristotle, who said that to live without a goal in life is a mark of much folly. That’s right. I think there are two great lessons here for the art of living. One is that meaning comes from nurturing relationships, whether it’s with lovers, family or strangers. You can cook yourself the most wonderful gourmet meal night after night, but unless you’re sharing it with someone it’s not going to give you much enjoyment after a while. A second lesson is to practice the art of giving. Pursuing self-interest is a natural part of us, but it isn’t enough. To step outside the boundaries of your own ego by giving to others is incredibly fulfilling. Certainly when I’ve interviewed people about their lives, particularly elderly people, it’s those who have given a lot to others – whether to local communities or by dedicating themselves to some great cause like women’s rights or climate change – who have felt the most satisfied in life. The art of living is as much about changing how we think of life as about changing what we do. Let’s take a very simple example, like being stressed out about time. This is a very common malady in everyday life. But just changing the way that we think about time can liberate ourselves from our high stress, high velocity lifestyle. To think ourselves more into the present. To change our metaphors, for example, talking about our leisure time as “time on” instead of “time off”, to give it more value. It’s about changing the way we think at quite a deep level. Equally, one of the reasons why I emphasise the importance of empathy is because stepping into someone’s shoes and seeing life through their eyes can change our world view, change what we think is important in life, what we think are our priorities and what we think about our options. Much as I like Frankl, I think that conception of love is simplistic. I am an adherent of the Ancient Greek way of thinking about love – that we need to become more sophisticated by thinking about and nurturing the many different varieties of love. Today we have one word for love. We use that same word to sign an email – “lots of love” – yet we whisper “I love you” over a romantic meal. The Ancient Greeks were much more complex in the art of loving. They had one word, eros , for sexual love and sexual passion. They had another word, philia , for deep comradely friendship. Another word, pragma , was about the mature love between long-married couples – about giving love as well as receiving it, and compromise. There was agape , their concept of selfless love, which is where we got our word “charity”, from caritas which was the Latin translation of agape . And there was philautia , which is self-love – the idea that we need to nurture a healthy self-love. And the sixth kind is ludos , playful love. I think that nurturing these varieties of love is the way to lead a much more complex and deep emotional life. The idea of “all we need is love” – whether it’s Frankl or the Beatles or [psychiatrist] M Scott Peck – it’s not enough, it’s too simplistic an analysis. We need to be much more sophisticated in the art of loving, and that’s why we need to look to the past. I love this quote from Goethe: “He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living from hand to mouth.” So we need to go right back to Ancient Greece to find the wisdom for how to live today."

"I think this book is a watershed in the writing of human history. It is an exploration of the history of emotions, and the way that they relate to everyday life today. Zeldin helps us to understand the big picture that who we are – the way we think about love, fear, death and so on – is partly inherited from the past. The way we think about love is inherited from medieval ideas of courtly love, for instance. We’re products of the past. This was a revolutionary idea, to personalise history and make it relevant – and it inspired my own book The Wonderbox . So Zeldin connects the past with the present, for me like no other historical writer. He’s chosen what he thinks are the 24 most important aspects of emotional life – like love, fear, hate or curiosity – and has dedicated a chapter to each one. He starts each chapter by interviewing someone (in the case of this book a French woman) and then traces how that person’s quandaries in life are reflected in the past. What he leads up to is a core conclusion that conversation, and nurturing the art of conversation, is one of the ways to transform our lives in a mental way. Not only. One of the ways that we nurture empathy is through conversation, yes. Of course you can nurture empathy through experience as well, like George Orwell did. But conversation is important for other areas of life too, for example the way in which we think about death. We live in a culture that barely talks about death, compared to a few hundred years ago. It’s as taboo a subject today as talking about sex was in the Victorian era. Yet we need to nurture the way in which we talk about death if we’re going to have serious conversations in society about issues like euthanasia or Alzheimer’s, or deal with our dilemmas of nursing home culture. We need to learn to talk about death as much as we need to talk about life. One of the discoveries I made in writing The Wonderbox is that in the past people in Western culture were so much closer to death than we are today. That’s partly because mortality rates were much higher – people were dying in their thirties on average until the early Victorian period. So in public culture death was much more around, particularly in the Middle Ages. Children played in cemeteries. People wore death’s head brooches and skull necklaces – memento mori . There were frescos on the walls of the dance of death, with skeletons leading people away to their graves. And many historians stress how when death culture was much more around us, that’s when we lived life with the greatest passion. I think what we need to do today, by developing a more healthy way to talk about death, is to bring death closer to our lives without it making us more fearful of it, so we realise that life is short, that it’s fragile, that it’s precious. I would like every Sunday newspaper to have not just a lifestyle section but a deathstyle section. That is one of my favourite quotes, and is highlighted in my copy of Walden which sits beside my desk. Thoreau understood that we don’t need to waste our time by turning shopping into our favourite leisure activity, or spending three hours a day watching television. By staring the essentials of life in the face, by trying to understand who we are, by engaging with nature, by expanding our creativity and our minds, by using our hands – these are ways in which we can live deeply and, as he said, suck all the marrow out of life. Well, one could sit down and read these five books to begin with. That may give one a certain kind of inspiration. But what really comes out of these books, I think, is to treat life as an experiment. To take chances. To say things you’ve never said before, and to do things you’ve never done before. On some level every culture has come up with the idea that we need to seize the day – carpe diem . As the idea in Judaic thought goes: If not now, when? We need to recognise that life is preciously short and now is the moment to make that change – whether it is talking to your sister whom you haven’t spoken to in a decade, or handing in your resignation letter, or starting a community puppet theatre whether it works or not. Ultimately, if we don’t take those chances, and if we don’t sometimes fall down as well as stand up and thrive, we’re never going to live a life which is both deep and adventurous."

"Howard 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 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. He wanted to put that at the center of the way we told our stories about history. In The People’s History of the United States, he 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. “Can we learn not just from the cautionary tales, but from the more positive examples?” Earlier he had written a number of essays about the writing of history, and the book I’ve chosen On History , is a collection of these essays. 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. I wrote my PhD thesis on the legacies of Latin American colonial history and the genocide of indigenous Mayans in Guatemala. I’ve grown up with that kind of history, in a sense. But I wanted to try and bring out these other stories, which I think can inspire us today to take action on a whole range of issues—including the climate crisis, threats to democracy, risks from AI, genetic engineering, migration issues and a whole gamut of existential risks ."

"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."

"Since the Second World War, the idea of learning lessons from history – which historians sometimes call ‘applied history’ – has been gradually expanding, although it’s hardly mainstream. There’s a famous book called The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant, which was published in the 1960s. There’s also Harvard professors Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, who wrote a book called Thinking in Time , about how politicians and statespeople have made decisions in the past and what we can learn from that today. There’s also an academic Journal of Applied of History . Often, this learning from history idea has been mostly in the field of international relations, diplomacy, and war. How do we prevent wars, or create international cooperation? What John Tosh has done in his book, Why History Matters , is to take that idea of learning from history much further. One of his key points in the book is, ‘Why don’t we learn from the history of public policy when we’re thinking about (say) education reform?’ Or ‘Let’s understand how our health systems have developed in the past: what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, and apply those lessons to today.’ The second really important thing that John Tosh does is emphasize learning from history in terms of the genealogy of our current crises. When we’re looking at something like the war in Iraq or Afghanistan , we should be trying to figure out: ‘What’s the deep story of how we got here?’ That means going back to the history of Western colonialism in the Middle East , because if we don’t understand those earlier episodes, then we’re going to make very poor decisions today. You could do this genealogical tracing for many different realms. For example, why are we obsessed with consumer culture, particularly in the Western world? Why do we have a ‘I shop, therefore I am’ philosophy? That goes back to the history of public relations industry in the 1920s, and the rise of the department store in the 19th century. All of these things have histories, which I write about in my new book. The third thing Tosh writes about is making analogies from history, and how we need to be very careful about doing that. That’s why I like his book, because it’s not just about cherry picking any example from the past. Not every war is another Vietnam, not every dictator is another Hitler and not every financial crisis is like the Great Depression of the 1930s. Let’s not just look for similarities but be well aware of the differences. I learned a lot from Tosh when thinking about my book. For example, I’ve got a chapter on artificial intelligence, which at first glance might seem the kind of thing that you could never really learn about from history, because it’s so modern, so technological, so 21st or even 22nd century. But reading Why History Matters made me think, ‘What is the appropriate analogy here in history, given that we haven’t had anything exactly like AI in the past? Have we ever created large-scale systems which could potentially get out of control, which is one of the potential risks of AI?’ And I reasoned that, yes, we have. We invented the instruments of financial capitalism in the Netherlands in the early 17th century: the first stock exchanges, the first public limited companies, marine insurance. It was a human-created system that very quickly got out of control, with the advent of multiple financial crashes. So, in my book, I draw analogies there. John Tosh’s work has really helped me think about that, and to try and be critical and careful about the way I do it. Yes, but she’s generally talking about it at the level of leadership: the Stalins , the Maos . What I’m trying to say is, ‘No, wait, let’s try and empower social movements, community organizations, people who are trying to reinvent what our economies look like.’ I haven’t written this book for elite political leaders to have in their back pockets. It’s really for all the other changemakers, the educators and activists in every field. I like her skepticism, though. Absolutely right. And that’s what Margaret MacMillan says too. The way I think about is like this: First, let’s recognize that in any subject area – whether it’s history, economics, politics – researchers and writers are cherry picking all the time. We are not getting objective economics from economists. They are choosing what to measure, how to measure it, over what time periods, in which countries, etc. Historians and history are no different from anyone else. Everybody is having to make choices. Then one has to decide, ‘How do I cherry pick systematically?’ The first thing I tried to do is be as open as possible about how I’ve chosen the cases I look at. So I started with ten challenges facing society in the 21st century, which I sourced from the academic literature on civilizational collapse and existential risk. Hence you get things like climate change and threats to democracy and AI. Then I asked myself, ‘Okay, so which episodes in history help inform those issues?’ That cuts out a lot of the past. Also, ‘Which of these episodes are about not just warnings, but possibilities for inspirational change, change for the common good?’ Another layer was, ‘Which of these are about change from below as much as possible, not just change from above?’ By then the number of cherries I could pick were quite radically reduced. I also focused on a particular time period, which is the last 1000 years. My brain could not stretch further than that, but also if you start going back before the year 1000, the quality of the historical evidence, particularly for the ‘from below’ history, starts disappearing. It’s not nearly what one might hope it would be, particularly if you want to have a wide geographical range. So I would call what I’ve done a kind of systematic cherry picking with an honesty and transparency to it. Yes, as someone trained as a political scientist, I partly wrote this book because I didn’t find enough historians writing books about what we could learn for today from all the research they’ve been doing. Occasionally, you do find historians who have explicitly written books about the lessons of history. For example, Tim Snyder wrote a brilliant book called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century . It’s about the warnings of history, especially in relation to interwar fascism and authoritarianism. He’s an expert in that field, and I wish more historians took their learning and tried to apply it to the present. I do understand why it doesn’t happen. You don’t really get a lot of academic points for taking what you’ve studied about medieval Germany and applying it to the present. But when I speak to historians – and I spoke to a lot of them when researching this book – very often they do think that their special subjects have a relevance for today. Experts on witchcraft in 16th century Germany, for example, will frequently look at the persecution of immigrant outsiders today or the role of fake news today and draw parallels. It’s just they don’t tend to write about it in their books, though occasionally they do. What I’ve tried to do is be an ambassador for all these amazing researchers across a range of fields. Obviously, I don’t have expertise in all of these areas. I have certain kinds of expertise, for example, in Latin American colonial history, or the history of consumerism, which I’ve studied a lot over the last 20 or 30 years. But the Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus in southern Spain from the 9th to the 14th centuries—I’ve had to learn about that. And about the history of financial capitalism in the Netherlands in the early 17th century. Simon Schama wrote a very nice book on that, The Embarrassment of Riches . There’s some fascinating stuff in that book, although it has become a bit dated."

"Yes, so the next book I’ve chosen is The Ornament of The World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain . It’s by Maria Rosa Menocal, who was a cultural historian. This book is about the period called the ‘Convivencia’ in Spanish – the coexistence or living together – a period when Muslims, Christians and Jews managed to live together in relative, but not total harmony in the south of Spain under a period of Muslim rule. It lasted roughly from the ninth to the 14th and even the 15th centuries in some places in southern Spain. What’s so interesting about this book is that it so clearly speaks to today. The story it’s trying to tell is one of relative coexistence of three very different cultures. It’s an antidote to the ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative, which is still very much around today, and the idea that we are under threat from immigrants at the gate. How are we all going to live together in a world where one in 10 people by 2050 might be migrants of some kind due to climate change and other issues forcing people to leave their homelands? What this book shows is that there are ways that people with very different cultures and religious backgrounds, have managed to get along. One of the reasons I really like this book and the topic is because it’s really complicated. There’s a counter-school of thought that thinks the Convivencia, this idea of Muslims, Christians and Jews all getting on well together, is a bit of a sham, almost an invention of the Spanish tourist board, and overly romanticized. But the vast evidence about daily life suggests differently. For example, in the 11th century, Córdoba, in the south of Spain, was a city of half a million people. It was a much bigger city than London or Paris at the time. There were everyday frictions and occasional outbreaks of violence, but by and large, Christians, Muslims and Jews managed to get on. They got on because they were mixing in the marketplaces and going to the same public baths together. They might play chess or music together. It’s one of those examples that so clearly speaks to today but what’s so interesting is that she does not explicitly make that connection, or at least it’s not central to the narrative of the book. It’s almost up to us as a reader to do that. I like that challenge. She’s not trying to be too didactic about it. Menocal homes in on three factors. One is the shared language, the lingua franca, of Arabic. You can find synagogues built in Spain, even in the 13th century, which have Arabic script carved on them alongside the Hebrew. The second thing is the religious tolerance under Islamic law. Christians and Jews were able to worship their own gods, as long as they paid a tax for it. The third and most fundamental thing was the mixing together of people in cities. It’s about how urban life brought people together and created relative tolerance because of the relationships of mutual dependence – the way that a Muslim shoemaker might need leather from a Christian tanner, for example. So I think those are the things that helped forge it. Many Jews migrated to Al-Andalus because they saw that they could live a reasonable life in its cities and not be persecuted. What happened in Spain after this period was the systematic massacres of Jews by Christians, such as in 1391, and there are many other examples as well. This was happening across Europe, including in England, starting from about the 12th century."

"Ibn Khaldun, the great 14th-century North African historian, was interested in the lessons of history, a little bit like Edward Gibbon . When Gibbon visited Rome and saw the crumbling buildings around him, he wondered what explained the rise and fall of the Roman Empire . Ibn Khaldun did the same thing several hundred years earlier. He noticed these crumbling cities and civilizations in North Africa and wondered what happened to them. He was interested in those big questions of civilizational rise and decline. You could sit down and try to read the Muqaddimah , his famous treatise of historical sociology. But I think it’s much better to start with this great biography by Robert Irwin, which tells the story of Khaldun as a person. You read how he was a famous juror in southern Spain and in North Africa, how his family were killed in a terrible shipwreck, how in the siege of Damascus, he was lowered in a basket outside the city walls to go and speak to the great conqueror, Tamerlane, who wanted to know about his theories of history. Ibn Khaldun was an amazing historical thinker. He had a cyclical theory of history, which was quite common at the time, as it was among the ancient Greeks. He thought there were patterns to the ways civilizations come and go. The key to it all in the Muqaddimah – and Robert Irwin talks about it a lot as well – is a concept called asabiya , which is an Arabic term meaning collective solidarity, or group feeling. Khaldun argued that what makes a civilization thrive is this strong asabiya or group feeling, and when that asabiya is eroded – for example, when civilizations become very unequal in terms of wealth – then the civilizations fall apart, and they are prey to outside invaders like nomadic tribes who become the new conquerors. Khaldun’s questions about what makes civilizations rise and fall are absolutely pertinent today when we are wondering whether we are going to bend or break in the face of the ecological crisis, risks from new technologies and other kinds of turbulence. How do we create asabiya, this social glue or social trust to help us be resilient in the face of change? He’s a really fantastic figure for exploring that. We should be looking to Ibn Khaldun. Though I don’t really believe in his cyclical theory of history. We should take it all with a pinch of salt. Robert Irwin is very good at pointing out some of those problems of Khaldun’s analysis as well."

"Colin Ward was one of Britain’s most famous anarchist writers from the last century – this year is the 100th anniversary of his birth. He was a social historian and an anarchist theorist. What he was very keen to point out is that there are two basic traditions of anarchism. One is the Molotov-cocktail-throwing protester with a balaclava, or a 19th-century young Russian trying to blow up a tsar. That’s not the tradition he’s interested in or supports. The other, the tradition he’s interested in, is anarchy as a form of social organization. In other words, the way that human communities have managed to organize their lives together, often in local, voluntary, non-hierarchical ways, without the big state, big business or big religion. One of his favorite examples of this – and this was also a favorite example of the 19th-century anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin in his book, Mutual Aid – was Britain’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which still exists today in multiple towns on the coasts of Britain. Its members will go and save people who are being swept out to sea. It’s a voluntary, local organization, linked together into a relatively flat, non-hierarchical federation. For Colin Ward, that was anarchism in its best form. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Ward’s writings have really influenced the way I think about politics, society and economics, especially through a book he wrote called Anarchy in Action , which tries to bring out all these examples in the present and in the past of where we’ve managed to cooperate. So, for example, he wrote a lot about the history of workers’ cooperatives as they emerged in the 19th century in Italy and in Spain. He wrote about the history of tenant-run housing, of cooperative housing movements. He wrote about lots of forms of political organizing, for example, during the Spanish Civil War when anarchist workers took over factories and ran them themselves, or ran the tram system in Barcelona. What he’s telling us that’s really relevant today is a story of social cooperation and our incredible capacity for it. As we move into an age where we need to leave behind the hyper-individualism of the 20th century – inherited from neoliberal capitalism and self-help culture – we need to be finding more local and communal solutions to our problems. Ward wrote, for example, about that Valencia Tribunal of Waters, which I mentioned earlier. That’s how I first discovered it, years and years ago. I didn’t clock it at the time, but I’ve now gone back to it and realized that he was thinking about the commons. You can see a lot of economic thinkers today, including my partner Kate Raworth, who works on Doughnut Economics , looking at, ‘How do we create a commons’? How do we expand that part of the economy where we share resources, we communicate, we cooperate together to manage forests or fisheries or waterways?’ There’s also a new emerging movement of cooperative businesses and steward-owned companies that are held in public trust, with a legal duty to look after their workers and the planet – like the clothing company Patagonia. Colin Ward has been writing about this kind of thing for 50 years, and so I found huge inspiration in his work. I realize that the title of his book, Anarchy in Action, is a bit scary to some people, but it’s all about redefining anarchism as the gentle art of social cooperation. Asabiya, in a way. Ibn Khaldun would have loved Colin Ward. You do hear that. There’s the great podcast, The Rest is History . One of the hosts, Dominic Sandbrook, has often pointed out that there are no clear lessons from history because it’s different each time. Contexts are different and history never repeats itself. But if you look at what social scientists have been doing for the last century, they’ve been looking for patterns in history – and finding them. Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize-winning theorist of ‘the commons’, came up with eight principles that seem to recur when you look at how communities have sustainably managed their resources, such as having penalties for those who break the agreed rules. There are patterns, even if they’re not patterns that hold across all space and all time. They hold for some periods of history, in some places, rather than the kinds of universal laws of history that Karl Marx thought he had discovered. One book we didn’t talk about is How to Blow up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm , who looks at the radical flank effect in social movements – the way that successful movements often have a more radical organization operating alongside them that helps to make the mainstream movement look more moderate and reasonable by comparison. Think of the US civil rights movement around Martin Luther King Jr, in comparison to the more radical Black Power Movement involving Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. The radical flank effect is a powerful historical insight but it isn’t a universal theory because mass social movements only really emerged in the 18th century with the centralization of state power in the nation-state. But we can look at the patterns since then. That’s what political scientists and sociologists are doing all the time. They usually don’t call it ‘learning the lessons of history’, but they are trying to find patterns. In effect, they are challenging the idea that all history is contingent. Ultimately, I think it’s time to take history more seriously as a useful guide to help us navigate the crises of our times. You wouldn’t drive a car without looking in the rearview mirror. Let’s be guided by the Maori proverb Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua – ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.’"

"Science fiction has been at the forefront of long-term thinking in Western culture for at least a century. It goes back to the likes of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Before that, dystopian or utopian novels were typically set in a distant place, like the island in More’s U topia , not a distant tomorrow. H.G. Wells blew that away in The Time Machine by setting his story thousands of years in the future. And then came Olaf Stapledon with books like Last and First Men , which tells the history of humankind over a two billion year timespan. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series also extended our time horizons thousands of years into the future. And for me one of the most important writers in this tradition is Kim Stanley Robinson. I consider him the greatest contemporary long-term thinker in SF. He is grappling with the kinds of topics I’m trying to grapple with in my book, such as how do we think long-term about biodiversity loss, the climate crisis, artificial intelligence and so on? Over the last couple of years I’ve read more books by Kim Stanley Robinson than by any other writer. At first sight it’s a classic generation starship story, but it is actually the best exploration of ecological economics and its importance that I’ve ever read. You have a giant spacecraft travelling for 200 years with 2000 people on board to colonise a distant planet. The spacecraft has 24 biomes in it—so there’s a desert, a savannah, a wet tropical zone and so on—and the people are living and dying for several generations, trying to survive in a closed system. They’re trying not to use more resources than they can produce and regenerate on their farms and spaceship, and not to create more waste than they can deal with. In other words, it’s about trying to keep the system in balance. That is the essence of ecological economics as expressed by people like Herman Daly in the 1970s. Aurora looks like it’s a book about space, but it’s really a depiction of the dilemmas we face on Earth—about how to survive on the only planet we know that can sustain human life. I’m sorry to give a spoiler, but this is exactly what the people on the spaceship realise: upon reaching their destination, they realise that humankind cannot survive in a place it has not evolved to adapt to, and so they decide to come back to Earth. “Science fiction has been at the forefront of long-term thinking in Western culture for at least a century” And that’s the trick of Kim Stanley Robinson. What looks like SF is in fact contemporary political analysis. He is telling us that if we want to survive and thrive for the long term as a species, we need to live within the carrying capacity of the planet. We need to follow the rules of ecological economics, and not be obsessed with unending GDP growth . Reading the book made me think about mountain climbing. If you want to climb Everest and stay alive the first and most important thing is to make sure your base camp is in good order and can continue to support you if things go wrong. People like Elon Musk say, ‘let’s go to Mars!’. But actually, before we go to Mars, let’s work out how to look after our base camp—planet Earth. Once we’ve learned how to do that, go on all the trips to Mars that you like."

"Brand wrote it in 1999. It came out of his Long Now Foundation which has at its core the idea of expanding our time horizons. For Brand and the Foundation, ‘long-term’ means 10,000 years in the future. One of their main projects is the clock you mentioned. And yes, it is an actual clock being built inside a mountain in the Texas desert as we speak. It is being designed to last 10,000 years, but it’s probably going to be a decade or more before it’s finished because the engineering to make it stay accurate for 10 millennia is very challenging. When you go to visit the clock you will hike through the desert and walk up steps cut into the mountain which each represent a million years of geological time. And the clock itself will be like a secular altarpiece for a civilisation that embraces long-term thinking. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the reasons that Brand’s book is important is because it’s very different from many of the books about futurology and forecasting that had been around since at least the 1960s, when people like Herman Kahn were writing books on scenario planning for things like thermonuclear war. Brand is saying, ‘look, I’m not interested in predicting the future; rather, we need to care about the future, we need to expand our time horizons.’ His book is the first I know to explicitly explore what long-term thinking really is, or could be. He takes it as a concept and pulls it apart to examine it. That’s a real intellectual shift in the history of long-term thinking. And he does it so well: he’s an amazing, pithy prose stylist. Yes. It was in Stewart Brand’s book that I first came across Brian Eno’s concept of the long now. Later, I went back to read Eno’s original essay, “The Big Here and Long Now.” It was absolutely electrifying for me, and it’s been on my desk for the last three years as I’ve been working on this book. Eno coined the phrase in 1979, so he was way ahead of the curve—although there is an interesting precursor in an essay that H.G. Wells wrote back in 1902 called “The Discovery of the Future.” Eno’s point is that our sense of ‘now’ is getting shorter and shorter and if we are going to connect with future generations and deal with crises like weapons proliferation and our destruction of the living world we need a longer sense of now. He says we’re not very good at empathising with future generations and challenges us to do better. There is undoubtedly a tension in the project, in that the principal funder is the person who’s basically responsible for inventing the ‘Buy Now’ button—the essence of our culture of instant consumer gratification, short-term desires and rewards. But I don’t think it’s a vanity project, actually. Yes, it’s true that the Clock of the Long Now is not as practical as the Svalbard Seed Vault, which is protecting plant biodiversity with millions of seeds from 6000 species and is designed to last for at least a millennium. But I think that, like great sites of pilgrimage in the past such as the cathedrals of mediaeval Europe, there is value in cultural objects and symbolic artworks."

"I don’t believe in the pursuit of happiness, and in my books I try never to mention that word. What I find most valuable in Daniel Gilbert’s book is the first part, where he writes about the comparatively new subject of ‘prospective psychology.’ The key idea is that what makes humans unique is our highly-developed capacity to think about the future. We tend to see ourselves as not unlike rats, creatures driven by the short-term reward centres in our brains. But what Gilbert does fantastically well is to argue that, actually, humans are better at long-term thinking than almost any other animal. A chimpanzee may strip off the leaves from a branch to make a tool to poke into a termite hole, but that chimp will never make a dozen of those tools and put them aside for next week. Yet this is exactly what humans do. So although we’re familiar with what I call the ‘marshmallow brain’, which focuses our attention on short-term rewards and makes it hard to resist treats for any length of time, there is also what I like to think of as the ‘acorn brain,’ which focuses our attention on long-term thinking, planning and strategising. We do plant seeds for posterity. That is how people built the pyramids, or the Great Wall of China. It’s how Joseph Bazalgette built the sewers of Victorian London. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Humans clearly have an extraordinary capacity to think long-term. We just don’t focus on it a lot and the message of Gilbert’s book for me is that we need to tell a new story about human nature. In the same way that, over the last 30 years, there’s been a shift in our understanding of human nature to acknowledge that we’re not just driven by individual egoism but are also cooperative and empathic creatures, so there’s another narrative which needs to be challenged. We’re not just short term marshmallow-snatchers; we are long term acorn planters! We’ve got this long-term part of our brain in our frontal lobe, particularly in the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex of our brains. We’ve got to learn how to switch this thing on and use it!"

"My background in political science was all about linear, causal thinking, and the discovery of systems thinking was absolutely mind-blowing for me. Meadows’s book is the best comprehensive primer on it. It’s not a particularly easy book to read but it’s essential. I think every child should be learning systems thinking—about feedback loops, tipping points and exponential functions—because it’s fundamental to so many things. It helps us understand how the human body works—how our body controls its temperature, for example: when we get too hot we sweat, when we get too cold we shiver. It also enables us to better understand our economies and ecology. Thinking in Systems raises some really basic questions like how do you create an economic system which is self-regulating and can sustain itself over the long term? Well, the answers are in things like the circular economy movement and Doughnut Economics . It also raises questions about political systems: there’s a failure of feedback, I realised. We’re not getting the politicians we need for long-term thinking because we don’t get any feedback information from future generations. That’s part of the design failure I mentioned before. Systems thinking helps you see that. One the other things about Donella Meadows’s book that I particularly love is the section about leverage points. What does it take to change a system? She argues that the best way is not by tinkering with, say, the tax rates or subsidies or regulations and standards. Rather, the main level you want to influence is the level of paradigm change. Now you could get a similar message from reading Thomas Kuhn or Karl Mannheim or Pierre Bourdieu, who all recognised the importance of worldviews and the ways they shape society, but I think Donella Meadows gets this point across really well and clearly. “I think every child should be learning systems thinking” So when it comes to the question I want to tackle—the pathological short-termism of our economic systems and political systems—we need new ideas to help reconfigure our worldviews. We need long-term thinking itself to become a matter of public discussion and public debate: it needs to enter the ‘ethnosphere’—a word coined by the anthropologist Wade Davis to describe the swirl of ideas, beliefs, myths and attitudes that prevail in society. I expand on this in the chapter on culture in The Good Ancestor . We need to reinvent the ‘ethnosphere’, which constitutes the cultural air that we breathe. Another thing regarding Donella Meadows and leverage points. If you’re going to change a system you need to change its goal. There are plenty of people in the corporate world interested in the long view: how do you create companies that prosper for decades and beyond? As a former head of Goldman Sachs once said, ‘we’re greedy, but long-term greedy not short-term greedy’. That’s long-term thinking of a kind, but it is not the kind I promote in my book, because the goal for almost all companies remains profits and growth and maximizing shareholder value. For me, however, the ultimate goal should be to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. That’s ecological economics again – learning to live within the biocapacity of the living world. It’s a fundamental telos or goal to guide long-term thinking for the welfare of future generations, the universal strangers of the future."

"Jonas Salk was the great immunologist who developed the first polio vaccine in 1955 . But later, in the 1970s, he came to believe deeply that we humans need to expand our time horizons if we’re going to deal with the problems of our age. He said that the great question for our civilisation over the next century is this: are we being good ancestors? That’s where the title of my book comes from. The focus of A New Reality , which he co-wrote with his son Jonathan (and which was published in an updated edition in 2018) is on the most profound shape of the modern social sciences: the S, or sigmoid curve. The whole book is just page after page of sigmoid curves. Salk’s point is a very simple but profound one, which is that almost everything in human and natural systems follows this curve, whether it’s the growth of cancer cells in your body, your children’s feet or the growth of a forest. All these things have an accelerating growth rate to start with, but then they hit an inflection point at which growth starts to slow down and then evens off and then maybe declines. Salk points out this is what happens to whole civilisations too. “We’re not just short-term marshmallow-snatchers; we are long-term acorn planters!” Salk argues that we need to understand where we are on the curve. He splits it into two parts, what he calls Epoch A, which is the lower, accelerating part, and Epoch B, which is the upper, decelerating part—the top of the S, as it were. He says that for the last few thousand years we’ve been in Epoch A: our population has been growing and we’ve been using more and more resources, but the earth has basically been able to absorb our impact. However, as we now approach ten billion people and the ecological impacts of our fossil-fuel economies become pervasive, the Earth can no longer sustain our civilisation as we have built it to date. We have to shift our focus from the individualism and short-term growth of Epoch A to the more collective values and long-range thinking appropriate for Epoch B. He would say, ‘yes, of course we need to find a vaccine and focus on confronting the immediate threat of the virus. But actually, if we hope to deal with the long-term crises we are going to face over the next century – whether from future pandemics or technological threats or ecological breakdown – we will to need to make a profound shift as a species towards forging a more cooperative society based on long-term thinking.’ He was interested in the idea of cultural evolution (what he called ‘metabiological evolution’) and recognised that the next stage in our evolution as a species would be towards developing new values and institutions that embody ideals such as long-term thinking, interdependence and balance, rather than growth. In fact, his son Jonathan made pretty much this point in a recent article about his father’s likely response to COVID-19. I think the value of thinking long is becoming apparent in several ways. First, it’s clear that those countries which have been dealing most effectively with the virus have been ones that have had long-term planning for pandemics in place. South Korea and Taiwan are good examples. By contrast you’ve got the United States, where in 2018 Trump dissolved the National Security Council’s pandemic response unit. So we know that there’s an obvious kind of long-term thinking that matters at times like this. Second, it’s becoming clearer that this is not the only crisis we’re going to face, and if we are going to tackle these future ones, from climate risks to technological risks, we need to be thinking long, beyond the ups and downs of the stock market, beyond the next quarterly report and the next election. We need to be thinking, planning and budgeting decades ahead, beyond our own lifetimes. Third, the current situation makes me think a lot about the nature of crises. Crises are opportunities for change. As Milton Friedman said, only a crisis – real or perceived – produces real change. I don’t agree with Friedman on most things, but he’s right about this. Remember, though, that at any moment of crisis you can go in a number of directions. Out of the depression of the 1930s , some countries moved in the direction of social democracy whereas others went towards fascism . We are at an analogous moment in history, and we need to ask, ‘are we going to move towards more authoritarianism, or is this a moment for grassroots organizing, mutual aid and democratic renewal?’ Similarly, ‘are we going to simply reproduce and bolster the existing economic system of growth-addicted market capitalism, or are we going to shift in a more transformative direction towards a regenerative economy based on some kind of Green New Deal?’ Something else Milton Friedman said was people’s response to a crisis depends on the ideas that are lying around. What I would like to see is that the ideas of long-term thinking are the ones that are picked up as we move beyond this crisis—ideas like citizen assemblies and legal rights for future generations, circular economies, all these things which are part of the emerging movement of time rebels committed to the interests and welfare of tomorrow’s generations. We have a chance to do that now."