What matters a sense of history

If you are holding out for a hero, Bonnie Tyler advises that “he’s gotta be strong and he’s gotta be fast/And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight”.

The Welsh songbird first offered that counsel 42 years ago. Tyler would be hard-pressed today to select many prospective heroes from candidates on offer. Surely only Volodymyr Zelenskyy qualifies. For other leaders strong, fast, fresh from the fight and, indeed, heroic, we might need to look to the past rather than the present. To do so, we need to be equipped with a sense of history.

Nowadays though, even the notion of historical context, parallels and lessons can prove contentious. The former foreign minister of a middle-ish power was sacked from his estimable job for asking rhetorically, in private and in a third country, whether the President of the United States “really understands history”. Phil Goff from New Zealand deserved better.

What is a sense of history? Is history really bunk (Henry Ford), a nightmare from which we are trying to escape (James Joyce), an abattoir (Seamus Heaney), tragedy succeeded by farce (Marx) or a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing (Shakespeare’s Macbeth)? What, if any, lessons does history teach? Conversely, absent history, how could we ever understand how the world works?

That question is especially pertinent for the young, not because they are pre-occupied with themselves and their screens but because their world keeps changing so rapidly and disruptively. I recall visiting the re-opened national museum in Kuwait, after the Iraqis had looted its treasures and the Kuwaitis had then decided to create a replica of the old Kuwait City souk. They did that well, building twisting alleys crowded with figurines beating copper, cleaning guns, building ships, weaving carpets or making coffee.

I was relishing a whiff of nostalgia when a raucous group of high-school students arrived. They laughed and mocked the exhibits, which, for them, depicted not a sliver of their nation’s traditions and culture but a display from somewhere as distant and alien as the planet Mars. Nothing actually connected with how they lived. Amnesia is not a malady confined to the old alone.

For young and old alike, we need to think harder about how we think about the world. Grand theories will not assist us. The illusion of sustained and sustainable progress (so-called Whig history) will not do. Confecting any fabricated worldview will not actually help predict events or prevent surprises. Drawing lessons from history can simply produce false analogies, over-simplifications and forced patterns. Thinking “history will be the judge” is folly: the winners’ historians will do that.

An easier way into the past would be to return to Bonnie Tyler, not to seek any preposterous “Great Man” explanations of events but to dig out heroes who not only shifted history’s dial but also might adjust our own prisms and perspectives. Here are a few examples.

A Greek warrior rows out to broker a ceasefire, then rows away out of history. A former American slave with a head injury sets up an Underground Railway to free other slaves (Harriet Tubman). A Korean woman grabs the weapon of a soldier blocking access to her parliament, demanding to know whether or not he is ashamed of himself (An Gwi-Ryeong). A Russian submariner refuses to launch a nuclear torpedo, thereby averting another world war (Vasili Arkhipov). A cossetted English woman takes herself off to a war zone where she establishes the framework of modern nursing (Florence Nightingale). A university professor leads a bayonet charge down a hill for the decisive defeat of a pro-slavery army (Joshua Chamberlain). A chemist saves France’s wines then works out some vaccinations and pasteurisation (Louis Pasteur).

So it goes, heroine after hero, century after century. Or, as Samuel Beckett would suggest: “Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better.” In this sense, trying again means seeking to discover the sense of suspense, drama, contingency and daring tucked within a sense of history. Those seven characters all embodied attributes like that. So too do some recent books.

The path to a sense of history does not necessarily lead through the classics of history, works by Thucydides or Tacitus, or even through celebrated analyses of international politics, whether by Hedley Bull or Hans Morgenthau. The signatures of all things can also be found inside a gripping account of a single day during a revolution (The Fall of Robespierre), in the first encounter between two profoundly alien cultures (Courting India), in dogged resistance to State terrorism (Stasiland) or in both the strategic and the scurrilous doings of an Ottoman court (The Lion House).

All those books help give the lie to any mechanistic and determinist view of history. There may well be an end and a bottom to turmoil. In any case, those seven figures and four books encourage us to fail better.