The Shocking Lessons Of History Everyone Has Forgotten - Niall Ferguson - #675

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Niall Ferguson. He's a historian, senior fellow at Stanford University, and an author. We often hear that history tends to repeat itself, but if you're a professional historian, just how accurate is that statement? What are the big lessons that we keep missing, and how doomed is our future if we don't learn from the past? Expect to learn Niall's opinion on the quote, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes, why everyone should read more history, the biggest lessons most people keep ignoring, why the modern abandonment of formal education for smart people is actually a good thing, just how big of a threat China is to the West, what Niall thinks will happen in America in 2024, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Niall Ferguson. Just how accurate do you think the quote is? History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes?

**Niall Ferguson** (1:15)
It's doubly inaccurate, because first of all, it wasn't what Mark twain said. People usually attribute it to Mark twain of Huckleberry thin fame, but actually twain didn't say that. He said something much more complex about history being like a kaleidoscope. Remember those kaleidoscopes he used to have as kids and the pattern shifts, but there's a kind of regularity to it. That's what twain actually said. Not that it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And it's inaccurate also because history doesn't repeat itself in the way that we would like it to be. Very nice if it had that kind of predictable pattern. But in truth, it doesn't.
And you can try to look for patterns, but you'll frequently be disappointed. And that, I think, is one of the most important lessons that I've learned. History is not regular and cyclical and predictable. It's actually pretty noisy and volatile and unpredictable. And that's what makes my life interesting. I can't tell you with any certainty what's going to happen in the next seven days, never mind the next 10 years.

**Chris Williamson** (2:33)
Does that limit the lessons that we can learn from history then, given that, as you've said, it's not as cyclical, it's not got this sort of recurrent theme?

**Niall Ferguson** (2:42)
I think it means that we've got to learn rather different lessons from the ones we want to learn. We want cookie-cutter lessons, as in, if a dictator is elected, there will be World War II. We love those simple lessons. We hate being told, actually, there were dictators who didn't start wars, they're not all Hitler. We have to look for a different approach to learning lessons. Instead of wanting cookie-cutter lessons, we should realize that the most important lesson of history is that it is as unpredictable and non-linear as sport. It's not a story, the kind that you read to your kids with a beginning, a middle, and a happy ending.
It's as unpredictable as a game, but it's more open-ended. It's like a game of football that never stops, or a game of chess that never ends where the board is so large, that there never can be a conclusive winner. If one recognizes that that's the lesson, that there's lots of contingency and chaos, and that even small decisions can have massive consequences and big decisions can have no consequences, learning that about the historical process will lead us, I think, to make better decisions in the present, because it will get us away from what I would call bad lesson learning. So bad lesson learning takes the form of, just to give you one example, the United States deciding to invade Iraq, and believing that it would be quite easy to establish democracy there, because American troops would be welcomed in Baghdad, like the liberators of Paris, towards the end of World War II. That was a terrible, bad lesson of history. The right lesson was, it's extremely difficult if you topple a dictator to establish a stable government in the ruins of the dictator's regime. It can be done, but it's really expensive and it takes ages. So I think there are lessons to be learned from history, but we tend to try to learn simple ones, and that's where we go wrong.

**Chris Williamson** (5:06)
Is part of this due to the fact that you identified the neatness of a story, the beginning, the middle, the end, this nice closure, it's something that's sufficiently familiar that it feels like an old pair of leather shoes, but it is the job of historians, a lot of popular modern historians, to make stories compelling. They need to be able to captivate the reader. So is this problem in some part laid at the feet of you and your colleagues for making history so compelling and familiar to us in a narrative sense somehow?