Learning history or learning from history? A Conversation with Roman Krznaric

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There's been a major reassessment of how we understand the past over the last half century, which is the idea of history from below, that communities, people acting together, have been able to shape the landscape of the past. And if you learn about those things in history, you kind of think like, I can make a difference. I can be an active maker of history.

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the first episode in this new series of the Future Learning Design Podcast. My name is Tim Logan, and you'll find that the podcast now has a lovely new home with Good Impact Labs with my great friend and collaborator, Jennifer Bahrami. You can find us at goodimpactlabs.com. Over the last 4 years, the podcast has become a space to explore a much broader question of the role that education, not just schooling, plays in our currently unfolding ecological and other crises. I really believe that education's role in this is critical as one of the ways that we invite people to explore powerful ideas that can create change. It's for this reason that a fitting first guest in this new series is Roman Krznaric. In his book, The Good Ancestor, Roman challenged us all to consider the rights of future species and future citizens in the face of our current catastrophic obsession with short-term thinking. Now Roman is leading us into the past to ask what can we learn from history in his fantastic new book, History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity. Roman is a social philosopher and international bestselling author. He's also a senior research fellow at Oxford University's Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing and founder of the world's first empathy museum.

Lovely.

Thank you, Roman. Absolute pleasure to meet you and have you here joining me on the podcast today. Thank you so much.

Well, I'm looking forward to the adventure of this conversation, seeing where it takes our minds.

Well, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. So I've, I've loved your, your books and your work for a long time, and I'd love to talk to you about your most recent book, because that's, there's lots of really exciting things in there for history teachers and for those of us thinking about how do we respond to this current moment by learning from history. But maybe I could just start more generally, perhaps you could just kind of give a context setting for the audience. One of the things that struck me in looking at your work and all of your different books that you've written over the years, the through line feels to me to be something around how do we create more generative, life-affirming ways of being in the world, thinking about empathy or fulfilling work or how to be a good ancestor. And then, as I say, how do we learn from history? So there's something there, seems, seems to be a commitment to, to bringing those messages out to a wider audience. So yeah, perhaps if you could just start by just reflecting on that, you know, what's the broader purpose in why you do this work?

Yeah, I think it's very tempting to look back on one's career, like as a writer in my case over the last 20, 25 years, and find a kind of coherence, a golden thread that holds it all together. And so I wouldn't want to be too strict in or too definite in saying that I had a plan to begin with and I have pursued it all the way through. But if I look back at what I've done and try and see connections between the 6 or 7 books I've written and the kind of projects I've been involved in. And then one of the things I definitely see is a desire to shift our cultures from what I think of as introspection to outrospection. So introspection, I think of as that being all about asking ourselves that question, how should I live? And looking for those answers kind of inside ourselves at our own self-interests and desires and things like that. And the opposite of introspection is outrospection in my terminology, which is discovering who we are and how to live by stepping outside ourselves, discovering the lives of other people, other cultures, other species even. And in a way, I think of that journey as a shift from me to we. How do we understand our own lives in a context that's bigger than ourselves? But of course, the we part of that is subject to different kinds of definitions or different ways of looking at it. So I've tried to extend the we out to other people to, I've written a book about empathy, which is about how do we extend our moral circle.

Yeah.

To people in other nations, in other cultures, extending beyond our own families and our communities. So that's my book Empathy. But my book, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World, is about how do we extend that sense of we into the future? How do we connect with future generations and even with other species, the rest of the living world, an even bigger sense of we? And then my new book, History for Tomorrow, extends the we back into the past saying, what can we learn from our ancestors for tackling our problems today? So I think that's definitely a kind of a theme, an enlarging of the we. I mean, Brian Eno, the great musician, once wrote an essay called The Big Here and the Long Now. And his kind of thesis of that essay was that we need to extend our sense of time. So our sense of now is not just this second, this moment, these minutes, but these decades, these centuries, these millennia, but also a sense of a bigger here so that we are not just thinking about our own lives in relation to our immediate communities, but something bigger than that, even on a planetary scale ultimately. And I sometimes look back at that essay and think, Well, Brian Eno said it all, really. It's about a bigger here and a longer now. So that's been very important to me. And I think one other thing that's been really fundamental is recognizing that the meaning of our lives is not around the question, how should I live? But around that question, how should we live? And in answering that, I think there's things we always need to be thinking about, which is one of them is our relationships. So I think of as a kind of a triangle of meaning. Or triangle of how should we live. You know, one is thinking about our relationships and we find meaning through relationships. The second thing is freedom or autonomy. You know, how do we find ways to express ourselves and express our autonomy? And the third thing is having a purpose which is larger than ourselves in some way. And you can find that idea in the writings of Viktor Frankl, the existential psychotherapist and others, that we find meaning by having a purpose that could be bigger than ourselves. It can be defined in many ways. It could be keeping your family business alive. It could be contributing to dealing with the climate emergency, but something bigger than us. So I think these are the kinds of themes I find through my work, but something very much bigger than the individual self, which is a kind of an invented category of Western culture.

Yeah. No, lovely. Yeah, no, I so appreciate that. And it's the stories we've been led to believe are true in, in that like homo economicus or, or this kind of like irrational self-interested individual as this unit. And I really appreciate you taking that and expanding the frame out to the broader. And it's, it's interesting actually, as you recount that triangle, it makes me think the questions that I've picked out to ask you are very much around those categories. It's, it's very interesting, but it, so I think it really comes through very strongly in your work. And, and I, I also just as a side point, really appreciate what you said about the kind of retrospective coherence, right? It's like, how are we moving forward and creating whatever it is, things we care about in our career? And actually, yes, we can make sense of it much more easily looking backwards. But I think that's really, that's a really important insight in itself, is that as we are moving forward, we're building the meaning in the moment, not necessarily following just this plan. And again, I think we've been led to believe that there's a plan that we just need to now go out and enact and, you know, meet these KPIs or whatever. Yeah.

Can I just say something really important about that? Just respect to my own life. In the 1990s, if I looked at what I was doing, I was involved in a lot of human rights activism and research. So I went to Guatemala, I worked with indigenous Mayan communities in a war zone, very much a kind of a humanist project as it were. But then over the years, I've come to realize that we need to ultimately protect the one planet we know that sustains life, a kind of an ecological consciousness has slowly crept up upon me. And so I wasn't thinking about that in the 1990s. I was flying all over the place, for example, even though the Rio Earth Summit should have been enough to make me start thinking about what my carbon emissions were. I gradually started reading works in the field of ecological economics, for example, like the writings of Herman Daly, who told us that our economy is a subsystem of the biosphere. And if we want a long-term sustainable civilization, we can't create more waste than the planet can naturally absorb and can't use more resources than it can naturally reproduce or regenerate. And so that has become a larger frame for all of my thinking, but wasn't there 20 years ago. So if I'd followed a plan of when I left university in 1992, if I'd stuck with that, I would've totally missed out on the greatest pressure on today's world, which is a global ecological crisis.

Yeah, 100%. And I feel the same. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because the possibilities expand with your learning over that time. And if you base it on this plan from 20, 30 years ago, of course the possibilities are far more narrow based on what you knew then. And it's—

that's exactly why things like education curriculum need to change. Exactly. So on, and political systems need to change because they were invented in different eras with different mindsets, not designed for the kind of challenges of our world today. I mean, it's such an obvious point, right? But, you know, we've got the inertia of our institutions, social, educational, political, and so on, to, to deal with.

Yeah. And, and I think that ecological consciousness, I would reflect that the podcast has evolved in exactly that way. It's become over the last 2 years, particularly much more, because those are the questions I feel, right? They're, it's not sufficient anymore to be talking about how do we reform this particular part of a system or how do we get a better curriculum or it's like, I mean, as the subtitle of your book suggests, this is about the future of humanity. I mean, the kind of the scale of the questions have just got significantly larger. And I think that that's, That's why I'm so happy to be having this conversation with people like you to share their work, to help people think in those more ecological ways. So perhaps we can, yeah, then focus in on your latest book, History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity. And as I was obviously thinking about it from an education lens, I was thinking, you know, there's pretty universal agreement that our kids should learn history. But it kind of then struck me, what's the difference between learning history and learning from history, which obviously is, is what your book is about. So maybe we could start there, like, Why do we struggle then with the from?

That's a great way of putting the question. I mean, there's a wonderful quote from the great German writer Goethe, who in the early 1800s said, "He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living from hand to mouth." And embedded in that lovely quote is that sense that history is a form of nourishment that is relevant to today, to our lives individually and collectively. And This is an old idea, an idea of applied history, that history is not there so much to help us predict what will happen, but help us navigate. So it's more a counselor rather than a clairvoyant. And this is an idea that goes back to, you know, ancient Greek thinkers like Thucydides, writers like Hobbes and Machiavelli. History, while might be interesting for its own sake, and I think that's often how it's taught in schools, right? It can speak to the challenges of our age. And I think the reality is that lots of professional historians— now, I'm not a professional historian. My background's in political science. That's what I got a PhD in. But I've always been informed by history, read lots of history. My doctoral thesis was kind of about Latin American colonial history and how it's relevant today and why Latin America is so unequal and things like that. And I've become very kind of explicit in my desires to try and learn from history. So my new book, History for Tomorrow, takes 10 major challenges facing society this century: the climate crisis, hyper-consumerism, threats to democracy, risks from artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and asks the question, what can we learn from the last 1,000 years to deal with those issues in more effective ways? And often I think when we're thinking about history, you know, people know that famous quote from the philosopher George Santayana, you know, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. That's the idea of learning from the warnings of history. Yes, we shouldn't repeat colonialism or interwar fascism. Great books have been written about that. What I've tried to focus on in my book is looking at the warnings, but also looking at the inspiration from history. Where can we find the hope? When have we managed to work together to solve problems, build cities and civilizations, deal with crises? And so going back to your question, I think it's really important that we recognize that history is probably our most undervalued resource for tackling the problems facing the world today. We think we need new resources like wind power and solar power. Well, yes, we need those, but there's this other resource. We have vast quantities of the stuff. It's called history. It's the wisdom of past generations. And I think in an educational context, again, I'm not an expert in the design of educational curricula, but I guess what I see is that so much more could be done in the teaching of history itself in whatever you happen to be teaching, whether it is medieval history or environmental history or the history of medicine or Asian 19th century history, whatever it is, history of revolutions. One can always ask oneself or ask a group of kids, how might this be relevant today? What lessons might we learn from this? What warnings or inspirations does it give? And to not look at history in a rose-tinted way, a kind of romanticized version, but to just keep asking our question about relevance. And this is not to say I think people shouldn't go and research obscure things in history because my books are built on that obscure research. People who studied forestry in 18th century Japan, their writing is really important today when thinking about how do we regenerate the living world, what we learn. But I also think that the idea of applied history, which I think could become a part of history curricula. The idea of applied history can also work in other subject areas. So my kids who are 15, who are studying at a British state school doing GCSEs, so 15, 16 years old, in geography, they were recently studying the idea of a circular economy. Now, how do we create an economy that doesn't create waste, a more sustainable economy? And there, there's huge scope for looking historically. Have we ever created economies which have been circular or regenerative. And in fact, yes, we have Japan in the 18th century, the example I just mentioned there in the city of Edo or today's Tokyo where there are over a million people, they didn't waste anything. It was what we would today call a circular economy. If you had a kimono, you would wear it during the day and when it wore out, you'd turn it into pajamas you'd wear at night and then you would chop it up, turn it into nappies, and then you would turn that precious cotton into cleaning cloths and then you would burn it for fuel. 'Cause they didn't trade with the outside world. Yeah. They had a resource scarcity. I don't see why that kind of thing shouldn't be part of what geography teachers are teaching or economics teachers are teaching. And one final thing on this, I think you're starting to see universities offer courses in applied history. So you can go to Harvard and study applied history, or you can go to, in Rotterdam, but those courses are often quite narrow. They're about learning from the history of diplomacy, the history of warfare, very traditional learning from the warnings.

Yeah.

And I think there's much more scope also to learn from things like what's the history of social movements or the history of common management of resources. Much more history from below, let's say.

Yeah, well, exactly. And I loved that quote that you bring in from Howard Zinn about, because I really wanted to ask you about that, which is his book, The People's History of the US. Because one of the things I'm interested in is, I mean, this is broadly for education, not just learning of history, but How can we create educational environments that inspire more sense of agency or allow young people to experience that sense of agency and potency? And he, I mean, the quote, let me find it. Most histories overemphasize statesmanship and thus encourage impotency among citizens. So the very idea of just the stories we get told from history are all about the big leaders who apparently made everything happen. But actually this idea of history from below of the people who are involved in these things is a very undertold story in many different cultures and periods. But maybe that would inspire a bit more of a sense of agency in the young people who are then learning it. Because it's like these people, you know, the Roosevelts or whoever, are kind of out of reach, right?

I think that's absolutely right. That, you know, the, the way we tend to learn history still is quite traditional, partly stuck in a 19th century idea that history is the biography of great men as the 19th century historian Thomas Carlyle said it. So we're still studying the Napoleons and the Churchills and the Mandelas, good and bad figures as it were. And also I think there's a tendency to look at the history of technology as well, for example. So these things which are not about what can I do or what have we done, as you say, about agency, which I think is so vital because there's been a major reassessment of how we understand the past over the last half century, which is the idea of as you mentioned there, history from below, that communities, people acting together have been able to shape the landscape of the past. And I sometimes think, why don't we know more about this stuff? So just for example, when I was writing my book, I love these examples that I came across. I thought, how come I didn't know that? So for example, in the Spanish city of Valencia, every Thursday at noon outside the west door of the cathedral, there is a ritual that takes place and it's actually Europe's oldest legal institution. It's called the Tribunal de las Aguas, the Tribunal of Waters. And so these 8 black cloaked figures come out and they sit down in a semicircle. You all tourists can come and watch it. And what it is, is this water court. And each of those black cloaked figures are democratically elected representatives of the local irrigation canals in the Valencia agricultural hinterland where people get their Valencia oranges from and things like that. And they've developed a system of managing their scarce water resources. And if a farmer has been taking more than his or her fair share or hasn't looked after their canal, there's a public hearing every Thursday at noon and they might get fined. And this system is hundreds of years old. There, there's records going back of meeting outside the cathedral going back to the 16th century. And actually, in fact, it goes back even earlier than that. And it's an example of what we now call the commons or common pool resource management. Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics, made this idea famous that in fact, if you look at indigenous cultures and other cultures throughout history, they haven't simply scrabbled after resources in a self-interested way and overfished and overfarmed and, and so on. Yes, that sometimes happened, but sometimes they developed really good systems for managing resources like waterways or fisheries or forests by developing rules of of fines for those who overuse the resource or rules for who's a member and who isn't. And this is a really important historical story because just think about where I live in the UK at the moment, you've, there's these scandals about the privately owned water monopoly companies that manage our water, reaping off super profits and dumping sewage in the rivers. But why don't we think creatively about alternative ways of owning and running those resources, like based on that Valencia model? Community stakeholder ownership of things. And going back to your point, which I think is so vital, is if you learn about those things in history, you kind of think like, I can make a difference. Yeah. As a citizen, I don't just put my X on a ballot sheet every 4 years and that's my only role as a citizen. But in fact, I can be an active maker of history. And I think that's a tremendously exciting idea. And education has to feel relevant. I mean, my kids constantly coming home from school just sort of saying like, why are we learning this stuff? You know, this isn't speaking to us. I mean, they are learning a lot of really relevant and interesting things and their teachers are hugely committed, but the teachers are often stuck with national curricula, which, you know, as you know, you know, a lot of it's about just how to answer the exam questions properly and not about how to think about who are we at this moment in time.

Right. Yeah. And who do we need to become, to quote a previous recent podcast guest. It's exactly right. And I think that's what you've you raised there about this institution rebuilding is so interesting because it's like this feeling of, yes, I can make a difference, but I also don't have to reinvent the wheel because there are these examples from very locally contextually specific places that have kind of, they've developed their own institutions. There's a lot of talk about how do we often, and I think necessarily radically reform the institutions that we've inherited from modernity, et cetera. But, you know, And a previous podcast guest, Ray Ison, talks about them as social technologies, which I really like, because then there's a sense of, okay, we could create new social technologies. But I think there's something there about learning from those examples, that amazing story from Valencia, but that idea that you could just take inspiration from those examples in your local context.

Yeah, absolutely right. And of course, drawing historical analogies or cherry-picking examples from history can be dangerous too. Things don't always necessarily speak to today. But the point is, I mean, as you say, we're not starting from zero here. There are societies that have managed their waters or dealt with floods. There are societies that have survived longer than other societies. What made that possible? There's so much to learn, and then we can adapt to our discussions today, or at least have public discussions. I mean, think, for example, of an issue like rationing of resources. Now, politically, this is a taboo topic. No politician wants to talk about rationing carbon or rationing red meat. Now, I think that we're probably going in this direction, particularly in the Western world, and we should go in this direction. Now, to have that public conversation, I think we can look to history. Of course, the standard place to look is in Western cultures to look at the Second World War and rationing there because this is one of the great examples of it. There were all sorts of problems with it. There were black markets. It was also very successful in many countries like Britain, in the United States. It helped equalize societies, but lots of other cultures have historically had rationing too, like the rationing of timber in Japan in the 18th century. China has a whole history of rationing resources going back hundreds of years. So I think history can help us in a way recognize the possibilities that it doesn't have to be this way, that we have done things differently in the past, in a sense, help us begin a public conversation about topics. And yeah, of course rationing would look very different today than it did in the Second World War, or it's technologically, it might look different. I mean, the French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about how we need to have personal carbon allowances. So yes, we might use an app to how we use carbon. And you know, human beings are pretty good at adapting to anything. They, we would adapt to that kind of thing and find our freedoms in other places. Even, right, we might curtail our freedom somewhat in what we can buy off the shelves. I mean, there are already curtailments of so-called freedom. Even where I live, there's rationing of parking permits. You can't park as many cars as you want, as long as you want on the street outside my house. It's true.

Because that's exactly what I was thinking as you were speaking, because as you recounted the triangle at the beginning, sometimes those things are in tension, right? The relationality of how do we live together is in tension with my own freedom and autonomy. And I really like what you just said about finding your freedom in other places, because I think often it's like a zero-sum conversation about, well, rationing by the state would just limit my freedom. And frankly, I'm never going to agree to that because I have some sovereign right to my own freedom and autonomy.

That's right. And I think there's a larger sort of point here. Well, maybe that is what you've said is the larger point, which is that all societies have to operate within boundaries. I mean, the ultimate boundary we need to operate within now are the planetary boundaries of not going over dangerous thresholds of CO2 emissions and Ocean acidification, biodiversity loss. I mean, my partner Kate Raworth, ecological economist, developed this model called Doughnut Economics, which is based around that kind of idea. And as she explains it, boundaries can unleash creativity in economies, in societies that Mozart composed on a 5-octave piano, Jimi Hendrix played on a 6-string guitar, that limits healthy for any kind of system. And we work within them and we find our creativity and autonomy within those.

And I would actually say more broadly, we've always done that. We just cherry-pick what we choose to look at, because I think that's a really profound point is that we've always worked within constraints. And I think that's a really critical insight for young people to kind of be brought into as well, is that how do you work with those boundaries, constraints, whatever the language you want to put on them, in order to move forward in a way that you make choices, but you're not making choices in a vacuum.

That's right. You know, I mean, in the 18th century or early 19th century, many countries took away a very fundamental freedom, which is the freedom to own another human being to do your work for you.

Exactly.

And then in the 1970s, lots of countries introduced wearing seatbelts, another limitation on freedom. But liberty, I think as you're saying there, has always been defined and at any moment, certain kinds of limitations are important. So one of the ways one might think about it today is that the classic 19th century idea of liberty and John Stuart Mill and this kind of thing is that I should be free to the extent that I'm not limiting the freedom of other people. So it's kind of the idea that if you're— imagine you're waving your hand around and you knock over a glass, you're affecting something else. But today, particularly because of the impacts of our economies on planetary health, we are knocking over a lot more glasses. Our arms are sort of flapping around further. We need to not do that. We need to limit our freedom in certain area for ultimately for the common good for today's and tomorrow's generations.

And interestingly as well, I think there's a history itself is a constraint because it's like, because of what's happened before, we have certain responses to what's happening now. Like, as you say, maybe with rationing, maybe we'd be more anti that kind of idea because of that history, or maybe more pro based on our understanding of how it played out in the Second World War or whatever. But just history is also a constraint that we're working with in the present. It's kind of with us. Here, isn't it?

Yeah. And of course, it is a kind of constraint. I mean, my last book, The Good Ancestor, was premised on the idea that our political systems are caught in very short-term electoral cycles, which are an inheritance of the development of representative government or representative democracy in the 18th, 19th century. And the political systems that we've inherited historically have not been designed to deal with long-term problems like the ecological crisis, which of course is here today, but there's a slow violence behind it because it's getting worse and worse year on year, decade on decade. But our institutions aren't calibrated for doing that. And that's why we need to, in a way, shake off that particular historical inheritance and look, I think, look to other ways of organizing our politics. So the idea of citizens' assemblies, for example, where we randomly select citizens to discuss an issue like climate crisis or the artificial intelligence or aging populations or abortion, famously in Ireland, they've done about a decade ago, get members of the public to discussion issue, not the politicians, because citizens' assemblies tend to have a longer-term view of things. They have a longer vision. But of course, those alternative forms of government themselves have histories. Of course, sortition or random selection citizens' assemblies famously goes back in Western culture to ancient Athens and the idea of the random selection of male citizens in that case for basically for their legislature, effectively for their Congress. And there's also citizens' assembly or random selection in the history of the Chinese civil service, in indigenous cultures in India. I mean, it's a whole load of this stuff. So there's sort of the history itself is a constraint, but it is also a kind of a source of mental liberation.

Yeah. If I can just ask you about, because just bringing it back to education more explicitly, there was in, and very early on in the book, you quote Abby Hoffman, the founder of the Yippies, about democracy. And he says, "Kids must be educated to disrespect authority or else democracy is a farce." And that I think throws up a whole bunch of questions and tensions for me as an educator and for people listening. That idea that we would educate young people to disrespect authority is itself full of all sorts of, yeah, interesting tensions. So I wonder, what would you say about that in relation to, yeah, the history of that, but also how would you feel about that now in the way our educational institution responds.

I'm very much with Abby Hoffman on this actually, but for historical reasons. I mean, if you go up to my kids' school, just up the street from where I am in Oxford in the UK, there is a painting on one of the walls, a kind of mural of the early 20th century British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, who was campaigning for women's voting rights, being arrested, being literally lifted up by a policeman. Because as you know, at the time the suffragettes were radical disruptors, breakers of rules. They were chaining themselves to fences and breaking windows and being in jail and refusing to be force-fed, going on hunger strikes, all kinds of things. Now today, the equivalent actors who are the climate protesters in Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Ende Gelände in Germany and others, they're being arrested and we're being told that they are violent, almost terrorists sometimes, the language we sometimes hear from today's politicians. Yet historically, It's precisely those kinds of movements who've been responsible for the kind of democratic and other freedoms that we have today.

Yeah.

Right. Gandhi breaking the rules for Indian independence. Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement, breaking the rules to try and challenge segregation. Yeah. The uprisings of enslaved people in Jamaican sugar plantations in Britain in the early 1831, leading to the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act. So there's a whole history which really tells us that disruptive movements can change system. And we have to recognize there are just laws and there are unjust laws. So I know those things can make people feel uncomfortable. The idea of disruption makes me feel uncomfortable too. I mean, I'm not a natural kind of direct action agitator. I like spending my time in old libraries writing books. Yet I have found myself with my teenage daughter lying on the roads in front of the Houses of Parliament in London, blocking the roads with Extinction Rebellion. Because the government under which I live is systematically failing to deal with an ecological emergency. And I know the commuters honking their horns find me and my daughter annoying, but I think not taking action is more annoying to future generations. That's right.

But isn't that the point? I mean, you say that in the book that the convenience of those commuters trying to get to work versus the convenience or the inconvenience to the future generations who will be much more radically impacted by these these decisions now. And so it's almost a clash of timeframes, as you said, about the long now, right?

Right. I think that's really interesting and really important because what I think we're lacking today, in schools, one of the great revolutions, I think, in modern education is the idea of emotional intelligence. Goes back to Daniel Goleman's famous book on that topic written in the 1990s. And that idea of social and emotional learning has been spreading sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully through educational curriculum over the last 20, 30 years. So alongside emotional intelligence, I believe we need to learn about temporal intelligence. So, and by temporal intelligence, I mean our capacity to think on different time horizons, short-term, long-term, forwards in time, backwards in time, linear time, cyclical time, indigenous concepts of time. We need to develop a better kind of cognitive capacity around time. So exactly, we can understand this issues that you are raising there. So I would love the study of time. Anyone like myself who writes books would like their topics to become educational subjects, which would just stuff the curriculum with all sorts of new things.

But let's add another one.

Yeah, let's add another one and make the life of teachers even harder. So I'm not saying that the study of time should be a subject like the study of geography or history. I mean, I'm not against that. In fact, I would like to see, at least at the university level, for there to be departments of let's say, time studies or interdisciplinary research units and that kind of thing. But I think it is something a little bit like introducing thinking around gender identity or race across subject areas. I think time and how we relate to it is so fundamental that it's something that can actually— is actually relevant for almost everything that is studied. It raises different kinds of questions. And I think it's a kind of a really fundamental cognitive capacity particularly in an age when every headteacher is dealing with kids on phones, social media, the domination of the present tense.

Exactly.

So if the schools are dealing with that, well, why aren't they also trying to embed thinking about time, how we relate to it historically, culturally, economically, scientifically as well? I think that's part of a deeper way of dealing with our addiction to the present moment.

Yeah. I completely agree because I think that, I mean, in a way it's a kind of deeply educational point, right? Because for me, education is about helping young people to be able to read their context, their environment, their world, right? Critically. And one of the organizing principles of that is time, right? But it's somehow, it's a philosophical concept or it's something, it's only, it's reserved for the theory of knowledge class in the IB curriculum, or it's, you know, it's the philosophy geeks who might want to engage in what time, but it's a fundamentally organizing principle that it's so assumed that everybody agrees about what it is and how we should operate within it that it's not even a topic of conversation. But, you know, you raised a point about your Latin American PhD. I mean, Walter Mignolo, the decolonial theorist philosopher, I heard him talking about time in relation to a kind of Western universal that we've all, we've almost kind of just, again, it's just like a colonial construct that's been shipped around the world and Now everybody, of course, everybody understands time as this linear thing. And actually there are many other conceptions, for example, from an indigenous perspective, completely different framing concepts of how the world unfolds that is not just one thing after another.

That's right. I think our assumptions about time, like linear time, are very much like the assumption of rational economic man, for example.

Precisely. Right.

And it's taken half a century for us to start seriously questioning that idea. And luckily that is happening. And you know, the whole now fields of psychology and economics, of course, challenging the idea of rational economic man. But around time, I think we're still at an earlier stage, particularly in Western culture of— it's sort of like the air around us that we can't see or the water that the fish swims in. You know, our conceptions of time need a serious rethink. I think temporal intelligence is really important. In fact, I was recently talking about it to my son who's 15. He loves sort of thinking about philosophy and Buddhism and stuff. He's saying, you know, Dad, you shouldn't call it temporal intelligence, you should call it temporal wisdom. And I think that's an interesting thing to think about as well because I think, again, you mentioned their indigenous cultures. So ideas like 7th generation decision-making found in many indigenous cultures and the idea of making decisions looking multi-generations ahead, which is deeply at the center of social relations and ecological stewardship, that's a kind of deep wisdom which we, I think, should be learning about today. And in many ways, it is seeping into our minds slowly. I mean, for example, I think the climate emergency itself has got us to start thinking on longer time horizons. So look at the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC. It's making predictions about temperature rises and sea level rises 50 years ahead, 100 years ahead, maybe 200 years ahead. It's starting to make us think on different horizons, but that is not yet part of the, I think, the way that our learning is designed in the broader sense.

No, I completely agree. And I actually, a previous episode, and I think you may maybe know her, Homer Tavengar, we talked about education for the long now. Like what does that actually mean if you were educating people for the long now? So an important question. Yeah. Beautiful. And just maybe just then to finish off, you mentioned there are reasons for hope in the book and you end the book talking about your 5 reasons, I think, for, for radical hope. So perhaps, you know, just to kind of round out the conversation, you could just talk a bit, a little bit about maybe one or two of those that you think are kind of important things to think about when we're learning from history.

Yeah, I certainly don't think that history has got sort of iron laws, universal rules that defy space and time in that kind of Marxist sense that it's always a certain kind of clash of classes which lead to historical change. I look back at history and see it more in terms of these kind of reasons for radical hope. I do think we are a civilization with business as usual heading towards self-termination basically because of our ecological and technological impacts. But I think we always have to recognize we have to act as if change were possible because change has happened. And so I find radical hope in all sorts of areas. So for example, go back to Southern Spain under Islamic rule in the 10th, 11th, 12th centuries. This was a time sometimes called the Convivencia, the coexistence or living together when Jews, Muslims, and Christians managed pretty much to create a culture of tolerance. Of course, there were clashes and conflicts and occasional massacres, It's one of these examples of coexistence, which I think should give us hope for today when we are thinking about a world where by 2050 there may be 1 billion migrants in the world, partly due to climate change and automation and other reasons, 1 in 10 of the human population. How are we going to live together? Of course, this is partly what international schools are embedded in this very thing of how do you, you've got these kids from all these different cultures all together. How do we all live together? But this is a larger societal and planetary question. But we can look to history of moments of tolerance. What was it that enabled Islamic Spain to be a reasonable culture of tolerance? Not in a utopian sense, but what was going on there? And I write about that in my book. So I think we can find hope in history in the sense that we can prevail over me.

Can I just respond to that? Because I mean, just listening to the news this morning, that is a very, very real issue right now. I mean, in the country you're sitting in, there are people going out of their houses to demonstrate maybe violently against people coming into their country, these migrants coming into their country. And again, that has its own history. It speaks to what you were talking about, about the right to disrupt. But, you know, there's some horrific scenes happening in the UK right now based on that anti-immigrant sentiment, which is incredibly complex, right? So I just wanted to kind of bring that in. It's a, it's now, right?

Absolutely. It's now. And that's why, you know, of course the history of intolerance is as important as the history of tolerance. I mean, in my book I've got a whole section about Chinese immigration to the United States in the 19th century when Chinese workers started coming to work on the railroads and in the gold fields. But as soon as the economic downturns of the 1870s came in California, people turned against these so-called outsiders and there were lynchings and massacres of Chinese workers, burning down of the Chinese quarters. There was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal piece of legislation which banned new immigration based on a particular ethnic group, Chinese people. Now, what is going on today, I think very much is in that historical tradition. And it takes a long time to create cultures of tolerance. I think there's a big lesson from history there, but I absolutely, you know, I look at the race riots going on. Literally, there may be one around the corner from my street tonight. Where far-right thugs are basically go— are gonna go and gather around a refugee organization, literally on 200 meters from where I'm sitting now. Yeah. And you know, it's so reminiscent of the past. Also in Germany in the 16th century, they burned tens of thousands of women for so-called witchcraft, a demonization of outsiders, which again, very much parallels what's going on today. So all the more reason to look for the lessons of history, to look for what went wrong, but also let's look for what went right. When have we been able to create tolerance? And I think there are reasons for hope as well as reasons for despair for sure. But at least let's educate ourselves in applied history.

Love it. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Roman. Important book, important for history teachers. I would recommend for everyone, should be required reading. But no, thank you so much for sharing and all of your writing up to this point. And yeah, amazing.

Well, it's been a pleasure and a privilege. Thanks very much, Tim Logan. Cheers.

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