The Next Debate with Margaret MacMillan
The Future of the Past
Air date: September 12, 2015
Rudyard:
Margaret MacMillan, welcome to The Next Debate.
Margaret:
Thank you for inviting me.
Rudyard:
Let’s dive right into your new book, History’s People, and I want to
kind of tackle a key argument that you're putting forward, which is,
when we think about the vast sweep of human history, the maybe
seventy five billion people who’ve lived since the invention of
agriculture.
You think the lives and stories of individuals matter. Why is that?
Margaret:
Well, I think it matters for several reasons. I think it matters because it
helps us to connect with the past. I mean, we will never know those
people, but I think if we put individuals in the past, we get a sense of
their worlds and what they possibly were thinking about, where they
lived.
I mean, if you read about millions of people doing this and millions of
people doing that, it somehow isn’t as immediate, if you can get just a
voice from the past. And I think it reminds us that there is something
called a common humanity, and that over the centuries there have been
people who have lived and breathed, and sometimes worried about very
different things and sometimes worried about the same things.
I think, looking at people in the past is also a way to make the past
interesting for people who perhaps don’t think they’d be interested in
history. I mean, [unintelligible 00:01:52] it’s a device and I found that
when I was teaching, that if I could tell my students something about
someone who lived at a particular time, what they felt, what they
thought, what they perhaps said in diaries, it got the students more
interested.
And I think the third reason I did it is just because I’m interested in the
individuals. I’m probably a shameless gossip, but I do like the
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individual stories. I’ve always loved reading diaries and memoirs and
just getting a sense of a different personality.
Rudyard:
So talk to us more about this kind of common humanity that you see
expressed through history, because some historians have hypothesized
that if you or I met an ancient Roman, not only would we not
understand them, we might think in a very different way.
Margaret:
Oh, I think we are different one from the other, just as different as
societies and different groups today are different. I mean, they’re
different cultural values. We’re individuals, but we’re also part of
societies. We inherit ideas and values, we grow up imbibing
assumptions and thoughts without really realizing it.
So yes, of course we’re different one from the other, but I do think
there’s something called a common humanity and I think we can at
least make the attempt to build bridges and try and understand each
other.
And yes, of course an ancient Roman would have very different ideas
for example about what constitutes honour, what constitutes proper
ambition, about family – Roman families were very different from the
families that most of us know.
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t try and make the attempt to
understand, and I hope an ancient Roman might try and understand us,
and an ancient Roman would find us very bizarre indeed.
But there are certain things – we’re born, we live, we die, we have
fears, we have hopes, we have loves, we have hates. I mean, those
things, I think, run right through humanity. How we express them, of
course, is very different – can be very different.
But I do think it is important to remember that we do share a common
humanity. Too often, I think, we have often political leaders,
intellectual leaders who say oh, you know, a Kurd is completely
different from a Bangladeshi; they’ll never be the same. A Canadian is
completely different from whatever – an Australian.
And I think such things are potentially very dangerous. We’ve seen
what the impact of such thinking can be, and so I do like to think that
we can try and identify things that make us human.
But that doesn’t mean that in the great sweep of history we don’t have
to be very aware of very different cultures and very different values.
Rudyard:
Margaret, let’s have you talk more about the role individuals play in
history. Caesar hadn’t crossed the Rubicon, would someone else,
another Roman, have crossed for him? In other words, would history
have produced another Caesar, or do you think that individual made a
difference, he mattered.
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Margaret:
I think individuals make a difference at certain moments, they don’t
make a difference all the time. I mean, you have to take into account the
great currents that dominate human affairs - industrialisation, religion,
ideas of various sorts – I mean, all these things matter. Economic
factors matter, social factors matter.
But you do get moments, I think, in history where it actually matters
that someone has the willingness or the determination or the sheer
ambition to do something that no one else would do. And I think Caesar
– Julius Caesar – when he crossed the Rubicon, was deliberately
challenging the Republic. He knew he was doing it, and I think another
man wouldn’t have done it and wouldn’t perhaps have succeeded.
I think in the history of the twentieth century what’s so interesting, is
that even those historians who started out dealing with social history –
Ian Kershaw, for example, the great historian of Weimar and Nazi
Germany, ended up writing a biography of Hitler. And I think that’s
because we have to ask ourselves if Hitler had been killed in the First
World War, as he very nearly was, would anyone else on the right in
Germany have done what Hitler did? Would anyone else have had that
determination, if necessary, at the cost of huge numbers of German
lives, if necessary, would the destruction of Germany itself, to do what
Hitler did? And I think highly unlikely.
The same thing with Stalin: Stalin was not going to falter in
collectivization and in the Great Terror. Others, tough as they were, I
think would have faltered.
Rudyard:
Where does the history discipline at, though, regarding the role of men
and women as individuals, versus the sweep of history?
Margaret:
Well, all history is subjective; it depends which facts you choose. You
know, history is all about interpretation; I mean, there’s good history,
which is based on a solid recognition of the facts and takes into account
facts which don’t necessarily bear out a particular thesis, and there’s
bad history, which starts with the conclusion and then tries to find
evidence to support it.
But all history is interpretation. I mean, what things I pick out about the
past are affected by me, by what I find interesting, clearly. I mean, I try
and be as inclusive as possible, but there are certain things I’m going to
be more interested in than others.
And you know, I think it’s unfair to say that nineteenth century history
focused entirely on great men or great people. I think that’s putting a
very simple interpretation of nineteenth century history. During the
nineteenth century historians were as much aware as we are of the
importance of things like social, political and economic factors.
It’s an uneasy balance and what historians do when they're not looking
at the past is, they argue with each other, and that’s actually part of
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what we do. And it’s very difficult to try and get a balance between
what I would call the impersonal forces of history and the personalities
in history.
And we may never get it quite right, but I think if we try and think of
writing, say the history of the twentieth century without taking into
account Stalin, Hitler, Mau, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mackenzie
King, then we don’t really get the history of the twentieth century,
something is missing.
And it doesn’t mean that those men – and there were women too, but
because of society it was mostly men in positions of power – it doesn’t
mean that such people determined the course of history, but they helped
to push it in one direction or another. All sorts of other things play in
and it’s getting that balance.
I mean, I think there’s an uneasy sort of balance there and we’ll
probably never get it entirely correctly, but I think we have to try.
Rudyard:
Let’s delve into these characteristics that you use in the book – virtues
and vices – that explore both individuals and their contributions to
history, but also the moments that they lived in.
And I want to start with hubris, because you see this as a kind of an
Achilles heel across time that explains often the fate of great men and
women in history.
Margaret:
Well, I had to make a list of characteristics I find interesting – I had a
very long list – but I thought hubris is interesting, because you get
people who are often very clever, very powerful, have achieved great
things, and then something goes wrong – they just don’t know when to
stop. And I think it’s something that could happen to almost any of us.
I mean, I think if you or I – perhaps not you, Rudyard, because you're
too sensible – but if I were surrounded by people who told me the
whole time that I was absolutely right, that I was brilliant, that I was
always making the right decisions, I’d probably go a bit crazy. And I
think that’s what happens to people; you know, the more power you
have, the more danger it is that you will only hear what you want to
hear, that you will only be told things that flatter you, and you become
convinced, I think, often that you are right, and you persist in certain
courses of action, even when the costs become very high, perhaps
intolerable.
And so I looked for example in my book at Margaret Thatcher, who had
great accomplishments, took what had been a divided Conservative
Party, led it to power. Her finest moment probably was the Falklands
war, when against all advice, she challenged the junta in Argentina, and
she won.
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But that unfortunately convinced her that she knew better than other
people, and so she persisted in what was in retrospect, a very silly
decision, to try and get rid of household taxes based on the value of the
house or the income of people living in the house, and put a flat poll tax
on so that someone living in a mansion would pay exactly the same as
someone living in a very modest dwelling.
And that was wildly unpopular – people warned her against it, her own
advisors told her not to do it, and she simply persisted and it was the
end of her career.
Rudyard:
And her hubris also, because you wrote about this in the book. It affects
how people look at those around them and how those around them
perceive them, and her downfall in a sense was the alienation of her
own caucus and her own supporters.
Margaret:
Yeah, she felt those who disagreed with her – she called them the wets
– she thought they were foolish, they were weak, they were silly, what
do they know. And so she disregarded what turned out to be very good
advice, and because she was the leader of a democratic party in a
democratic country, in the end that told against her and her party rallied
against her and that was the end of her as a leader.
Rudyard:
But hubris in totalitarian regimes, as you write, leads to much darker
places, because there isn’t that check. It leads to the excesses of the
Hitlers, the Stalins, the Maus.
Margaret:
Yeah, I mean, Hitler was convinced, and became more convinced as
time went on – and so was Stalin – that he was the man of destiny. You
know, the very fact that he’d survived a couple of assassination
attempts made him feel that Providence had laid its hand on him and
that what he was doing was right. And he had this hideous mission to,
as he thought, make the Aryan race triumphant and remove all those he
felt were unfit or inferior, including of course the Jews of Europe and of
the world, and nothing would deter him.
And he was prepared to see Germany destroyed and of course prepared
to see millions of non-Germans killed in the pursuit of this goal. At the
very end, in 1945 when it was clear even to Hitler that Germany was
about to be defeated, he gave orders for all the remaining German
infrastructure to be destroyed. And when someone said but how will the
German people survive, he said they don’t deserve to survive, they’ve
let me down.
I mean, that’s what hubris can lead to if it’s unchecked.
Rudyard:
Let’s switch to, in this case, a virtue that you identify, and that being
curiosity. I think many people will find it interesting that in that portion
of the book, you really focus on the stories of women; you think that
there is something unique about women’s experiences in history that
opens up for us a perspective on curiosity itself. Unpack that for us.
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Margaret:
Well, I didn’t intend to do nothing but women. I mean, I thought
curiosity is a great quality and it leads people to investigate, to have
open minds, to ask interesting questions. And some of the people I dealt
with in other chapters such as Samuel de Champlain was very curious
about the world in which he found himself.
But when I came to focus on people who had sort of followed their
noses and followed their curiosities, the list I came up with was women.
And I think it’s probably because for women, being curious perhaps
was even more difficult in many generations than men. And so these
were particularly determined people; I mean, these people were
prepared to understand other cultures, prepared to live in strange
cultures, prepared often to go off by themselves in areas – strange areas.
So in a way I think because of the constraints on women in the societies
from which they came – and that was true really up until the twentieth
century for most societies – the fact that they followed their curiosity I
think showed a particular sort of determination.
And so without meaning to, I found myself looking at the sorts of
things that women had done and I found some very interesting
examples of women who had ridden on horseback really by themselves
through the mountains in Albania for example, who had ridden through
the deserts in the Middle East, who collected stories, who taught
themselves languages.
And I found their quests very interesting ones, perhaps because I’m a
woman myself.
Rudyard:
One of the examples in this book that I found fascinating, and a
character I didn’t know – I hadn't heard the name – Count Harry
Kessler. Tell us his story and why you believe that he represents in a
sense the best of the tradition of the observer in history?
Margaret:
Well, Kessler was fascinating. I mean, he kept a diary for most of his
life, for over fifty years – and when he died they thought they’d
disappeared. He’d put them for safekeeping into a safe deposit box in
Majorca, where he was in refuge from the Nazis, and nobody knew
what had happened to them.
In the 1980s the lease on the safety deposit box ran out and someone
opened it and there were the diaries. I mean, it’s a miracle they
survived. And they are the most extraordinary accounts of Europe,
some about the 1880s, up until the 1930s, partly of who he was. He
moved in a number of circles, he was very well connected in German
aristocratic circles, but also very well connected in Britain and in
France, and knew a lot of artists as well, because he was very interested
in the arts.
And so if you have someone who moved among different worlds and
knew so many people – I mean, he had something like ten thousand
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names in his address book. And I sort of played a game with myself; I
went to the index of the now two volumes of his diaries in English, and
I went to the indexes, and thought well, who didn’t he know?
And so I thought well, he couldn’t have known Gertrude Stein. Well, he
did. I thought well, he couldn’t have known, you know, Picasso – well
yes, he had, I think, at one point met Picasso. He couldn’t have known
Stravinsky – oh yes, there he was a the first night of The Rite of Spring
in 1913.
He went out on the town with Nijinsky after a performance. I mean, he
seems to have known so many people and he writes so wonderfully
about them. It’s the most wonderful account of a very complicated and
a very troubled time in the end in European history.
But without Kessler, I think we would just know so much less.
Rudyard:
And tell us what he does for you as a historian in terms of his own
journey through the currents of nationalism that are sweeping over
Europe in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.
Margaret:
Well, of course when you read the diaries, we know the ending of the
story in a way, and perhaps not his ending, but we know how Europe is
going to turn out in the period after 1919. We know that the promise of
the 1920s isn’t going to be kept, that the 1930s are going to be a
dreadful and dark period in European history, leading towards the
second world war.
But what I think we do gain from reading his diaries is how he as a
person was affected by some of these things. And you know, he’s no
angel; I mean, he was swept up in German nationalism when the first
world war broke out, and for a time became really a rather horrid
Prussian nationalist, talking about the inferior peoples in the East and
how it was the duty and the responsibility of Germany to rule much of
the rest of Europe.
And so you get a sense of just how powerful these currents are when
they can take someone as cosmopolitan and as worldly, and in many
ways as tolerant as Kessler, and temporarily at least, turn him into a
raving nationalist.
Rudyard:
I want to spend another time with another personality that you excavate
for us in your section on observers, and that’s Babur, the first Mughal
emperor of India. What do we get from this man, and why again is it so
remarkable for us to be able to access his past, his history, that moment
in time, through the diaries that he left?
Margaret:
Well, the very fact that he left diaries. I mean, here is someone who is
nomadic and spent the first part of his life moving from place to place,
often without much to eat. Came out of Central Asia – he’s a
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descendant both of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, and that someone
like that kept a diary is absolutely extraordinary.
And in fact, the fact that any ruler kept such an intimate diary, I mean, I
can’t think of any other ruler really, in the history of monarchies, who
has kept such a document. And you get this wonderful sense of
someone who is a very vivid personality and in some ways very
different from us. I mean, he will casually throw off, you know, so and
so annoyed me, so I had him trampled by elephants, which I think
probably you and I wouldn’t do, Rudyard.
But what you also get is someone who talks about his being in love,
talks about being married to a woman he doesn’t really love, is devoted
to his oldest son and sends him some anxious letters saying, you know,
why don’t you ever answer my letters and you know, you really need to
behave in a better way. Someone who loved gardens – I mean, he will
conquer another place and one of the first things he does is make a
beautiful garden.
And who was interested; I mean, he writes – in the end he conquered
India and set up what became the Mughal dynasty, and he wrote
wonderful descriptions of India, of the people, of the customs and the
birds and the plants. And so it just gives you an extraordinary insight
into that world, and gives you a sense of this very vivid personality.
Rudyard:
I want to end this portion of our discussion about virtues and vices with
an important topic, leadership, and as you rightly say, you know, reams
of books have been dedicated to this subject. What is leadership, how
should people lead or seize the opportunities and responsibilities of
leadership?
You came up with some, I thought, quite clear and simple insights,
looking at a number of important personalities in history and what
persuasive leadership in fact involves. So just unpack that for us.
Margaret:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t really think leadership can be taught, for all the
courses that are offered and all the institutes of leadership, but you can
look for certain characteristics, and I think what good leaders do is have
an ability to bring good people along with them.
I mean, what really struck me about Mackenzie King for example, was
that he had strong and good people in his cabinet and that says
something about his confidence, about his ability to pick people and his
ability to let them not have their heads, but manage their own areas of
responsibility without him interfering.
I think good leaders also know when not to go too far ahead of those
they're leading, and if a leader goes down a path that is really not
supported by those around him or by those who vote for him, then I
think he or she is going to get into trouble.
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And again, I think if you look at people like Roosevelt – Franklin
Delano Roosevelt – although Teddy Roosevelt was pretty good too; if
you look at people like Mackenzie King, if you look at people in the
second world war like Winston Churchill, they have an ability to bring
people with them. And they have an ability to sense when a policy they
might be about to promote perhaps isn't the right thing.
I mean, it’s being able to pull back as well, and being able to recognise
your own limitations, I think is very important.
Rudyard:
You know, and in our kind of age of the selfie, I was struck by hard
work – just how persevering these people were, how dogged. Simply
the hours that they put in to advance often these very kind of heady and
great goals that would seem so far from their immediate grasp or their
immediate present that they lived in.
Margaret:
No, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, they had an ability for great
hard work, an ability to rebound after defeats as well. I mean, I think
that’s another sign, I suppose, or something that successful leaders learn
to do, is that they don’t get easily discouraged. I mean, they are driven
of course often by ambition, but they do pick themselves up and say
okay, it didn’t work this time, I’m going to try again.
And certainly Winston Churchill again as an example of that. I mean,
his career was a series of failures, many of them spectacular, but he
kept going. And I think you see the same thing with someone like
David Lloyd George who was the prime minister of Britain during the
First World War, or with Roosevelt, later on with Harry Truman. I
mean, these are people who learned to deal with failure, can learn from
it and continue. They don’t just give up in despair.
Rudyard:
You know, as you write in your section on leadership, great leaders also
had great goals. Very, you know, ambitious programs and ideas. I guess
my personal feeling is that we again have so little of that in the political
discourse that is offered up to us to participate in.
Margaret:
Well, you don’t see much big ideas. And you know, I think that’s one
of the reasons for Angela Merkel’s success in Germany, is that she has
not been afraid to make clear stands of what she thinks, to lay out
clearly what she thinks and to take clear stands.
And I think you can say at the moment, I mean, she is taking a very
clear position on the refugee crisis, and I think people respond to that. I
mean, you don’t have to agree with her, but I think in a way it’s a relief
to have someone who says look, I’m a leader, this is what I’m going to
do. And I do agree with you, I mean, I think we’ve become almost too
clever at slicing and dicing up the electorate.
And you know, it’s one thing to sort of take polls, but another thing to
get a sense of what people really think. I mean, if I’m asked by a
pollster, you know, what are your views on this and that, well, I might
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say yes, no, yes, no, I think this or that, but I may not hold any of those
views very strongly. And I think that’s the difficult thing to get at, that
the polls perhaps don’t always pick up, that people may not be as
committed to particular views as they sometimes say they are.
And I don’t actually want to be appealed to just on the basis of my selfinterest; I mean, I don’t want a political leader who says to me, you
know, I really care only about old-age pensioners; I want to make sure
that, you know, you get free medical care, I want to make sure that this
happens, I want to make sure you get free eye-glasses, I want to make
sure your pension’s okay.
I don’t want someone who appeals just to my self-interests; I want
someone who can actually think in a broader sense about society.
Rudyard:
Hear, hear. I want to end by going to the end of the book, which you
offer up a somewhat cautious analysis of the benefits of history.
Margaret:
I’ve always thought that history should open our minds rather than
close them, and so history which makes us aware of the complexities of
the world with which we’re dealing, makes us aware of the questions
that we might be asking about current events and where we seem to be
going, and that sort of history seems to me good.
The history I don’t like is the history that says, you know, we are
people who have always been like this, or you know, we’ve always
suffered because our neighbours have been against us. That sort of
history closes minds and doesn’t allow for what I think history can do.
I mean, history should make us aware that human affairs are very
complicated. It’s not going to offer us clear lessons, but it may help us
ask questions, and even asking questions is better than nothing. I mean,
what is going to happen to the relationship between say China and the
United States? Is there anything in history which might help us ask the
sorts of questions we want?
And I think history is also good, because it can give us a sense of
humility. We’re not as clever as we think we are, we haven't invented
everything for the first time. Lots of people in the past have done very
good things or have done very stupid things, and I think a sense of
humility is not a bad thing to have.
Rudyard:
Well Margaret MacMillan, always insightful, always provocative.
Congratulations on History’s People.
Margaret:
Thank you so much, Rudyard. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Rudyard:
Likewise.
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