Roman Krznaric on why the history of human solidarity offers us radical hope, even now

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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Australia's alliance with the United States has been the linchpin of our country's foreign policy for decades.

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We value the unbroken friendship between the Australian and the American peoples.

**Hamish McDonald** (0:18)
But between the wars and the tariffs and the unpredictability, are we growing apart?

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You know who else didn't help us?

**Hamish McDonald** (0:24)
Australia. Join me, Hamish McDonald.

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And me, Geraldine Doug, as we ask, do we still need the alliance? Search for Global Roaming on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

**Natasha Mitchell** (0:46)
Natasha Mitchell, joining you today from Bundjalung Country in New South Wales with a big thinker who is here to help you find inspiration in our past and to think deeply about the future. You'll get the picture from his books, which include The Good Ancestor, A Radical Prescription for Long Term Thinking, The Wonder Box, Curious Histories of How to Live, and Empathy, Why It Matters and How to Get It. He was the founder of the world's first empathy museum. Political scientist and social philosopher, Dr. Roman Krznaric is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, and today he joins you and me with a crowd at this year's wonderful Byron Writers Festival to explore the stories he discovered for his new book. It's called History for Tomorrow, Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity.
Yes, get ready for an hour ripe with possibility.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:51)
It's great to have you here.

**Natasha Mitchell** (1:52)
Welcome.

**Roman Krznaric** (1:53)
Hello. Hello to you, Natasha. Hello to everybody as well. I'm looking forward to the adventure of the conversation. Let's see where we go.

**Natasha Mitchell** (1:58)
This is a hopeful book.
It's about the radical hope that history can give us, isn't it? I'm interested in why this book, why now?

**Roman Krznaric** (2:09)
This book came out of a sense of frustration, to be honest, a frustration with our politicians and policy makers who are caught in the tyranny of the now as you were talking about it, who can't see beyond the next election or the latest opinion poll. So not only trapped in the now, but also thinking that new technologies are going to solve all our problems for us, always looking to the future, and I kind of think, why not draw on the wisdom of the past? Why not look at how human beings have tried to deal with problems ranging from water shortages to how to organize their politics and their economies? And there's just so much there to draw on, and I think we, they, we all fail to look into the rear view mirror of history. Now, sometimes we do, but normally when we look at history, we are looking at the warnings from the past captured in that famous aphorism that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
And of course, we need to look at what's gone wrong. We need to look at genocides and colonialism and all those things. But in this book, I've tried to look at in a way, what's gone right. When have we managed to work together to solve problems? And I've been very much inspired by that. There's a lovely quote from the German writer Goethe, who in the sort of early 19th century said, he who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living from hand to mouth. And we need to draw on that history, not just 3,000 years, but the 60,000 years, you know, and see if that can open our imaginations to a different way of solving the great problems of our polycrisis.

**Natasha Mitchell** (3:48)
There's another quote that I love in the book, a Maori quote, I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past. But we also think of the past as a foreign country, don't we? And I'm interested in why we think that previous humans are somehow less sophisticated than us, or the problems weren't as complex as what we face now, that we have nothing to learn from the past.

**Roman Krznaric** (4:13)
I think there's a kind of a memory loss where we forget that things used to be done differently, or we don't even realize how we got to where we are today. So take the example of democracy, okay? We tend to think that, well, what's democracy? It's this thing where you go and fill out a ballot paper every few years, and you have these professional elected representatives who represent your views for you. But that's quite a modern invention. I mean, that really only goes back to the 18th or 19th century, that way of organizing our politics. And of course, that idea of representative democracy was invented to try and prevent the participation of people, direct participation in the political process.