42 43 History The discourse remains one of radical activism. «We celebrate figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Junior, who broke the rules and the law, but we put the environmental protesters in jail for doing the same thing. I think they have a really important role to play in society, and when I stand back and look at it, I am not that optimistic about the prospects for the human species. We are heading towards ecological and technological self-destruction. But when I look at history, I think I can see hope. I can see the fact that movements, often disruptive movements, have always risen up to create change, to challenge injustice, to move societies in new directions. That gives me a real hope that, as a civilisation, we can bend rather than break. That's what this is really about. Are we going to bend, or are we going to break? I think these movements are going to help us bend». For Roman Krznaric, history is not so much an archive of solutions, but rather a repository of ways to confront fate, of positive examples that can also serve as a source of solace. His book History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity is a compendium of such testimonies. «One of the things about writing this book was how surprising it was, and how shocked I was, to keep coming across examples of how human beings have managed to overcome crises and challenges and build cities and civilisations, because I think so often, when we look at history, we look at everything that's gone wrong. You know, the history of colonialism and slavery and fascism are all phenomena we need to look at, as captured in that famous aphorism: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it». «But I have also looked at when things have gone right. Just to give you an example, I remember there's a chapter in the book about migration – a hot topic in Italy, in Germany, in Britain. Migration, the borders. And we live in a culture where we think that the clash of civilisations is inevitable, and living together is impossible; but actually, if you look at history, you can see amazing examples where people from different cultures have managed to live together. One great example that really surprised me and did something to my brain was the Spanish city of Cordoba in the year 1000, which was part of the Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus at the time. That period, between about the 9th and 12th centuries, is sometimes called the Convivencia, the coexistence, where Muslims, Christians and Jews managed to live together in relative harmony. Of course, it wasn't an idyll. There were everyday tensions, there were occasional outbreaks of violence, but in general you had Muslim and Christian people playing music together. Jews and Muslims playing chess. People mixed in the marketplaces and in the public bathhouses. There's the story of the famous Jewish poet Samuel ha-Nagid, whose skills as an Arabic scribe enabled him to become prime minister of the Muslim ruler of Grenada, and even to lead his armed forces. This is not about utopia. It is just saying that we have managed to live side by side on a large scale, and that the past is not a perfect blueprint for the present, but rather a kind of inspiration, like: “Oh my God, why didn't I know about this?”». «In Renaissance Italy, in the early Florentine Republic, there was a way of selecting citizens for public office by drawing names from a hat. It was called sortition – mostly limited to men, obviously aristocrats – but it was directly inspired by the ancient Greek form of democracy, where you had random selection. And I think it’s a really interesting idea that we should use today, when there's such a loss of faith in democratic politics, which is why everyone votes for the far right, of course. The common sense is that the current system is unfit to give people secure jobs, or to deal with the energy crisis and the housing crisis, and so on. And actually there's been a recent revival of this early European and ancient Greek idea of randomly selecting citizens to discuss issues like climate change, or the dangers of artificial intelligence, citizens’ assemblies where they randomly select about a hundred people to discuss something. This is one of the most amazing developments in the history of democracy since the extension of the vote to women, more or less a hundred years ago».
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