Tony Judt on Forgetting the Twentieth Century

Tony Judt, who died in 2010 of ALS, was one of my favorite historians of the last century. I am reading a collection of his essays now (Reappraisals, 2008), to which he wrote an introduction that sums up some of his main themes:

The twentieth century is hardly behind us, but already its quarrels and its dogmas, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory. Incessantly invoked as “lessons,” they are in reality ignored and untaught. 

You might think that since the political and moral mistakes of the twentieth century were so awful, we would be thinking seriously about what they were and how to avoid making them again. I agree with Judt, though, that this is not so. Certain people and events have been made into symbols that are resolutely brought up again and again whether they are relevant or not, especially Hitler and the Holocaust. Every bad guy is Hitler, every compromise a Munich, every threat of war a new Holocaust. Real discussion of questions like how Hitler came to power and what sort of thinking lies behind the Holocaust is relegated to academic journals, or the sorts of conferences where liberal theologians and celebrity psychiatrists debate the human condition. I think these questions are real and urgent and ought to be part of our everyday politics.

When it comes to international affairs, I think much of the world has the lesson backward.  Have the Chinese, Japanese and American politicians rattling their sabres over a bunch of stupid rocks in the Pacific given no thought to World War I? Have we so quickly forgotten what war between great powers is like? Or consider the notion that to prevent another Holocaust, Israel, which is militarily much stronger than any of its neighbors, should wage unprovoked war against them, killing however many Arabs or Iranians in has to in order to insure its security. Is that really the lesson of World War II?

Judt offers this thought as one reason why we are so uninterested in the past:

But of all our contemporary illusions, the most dangerous is the one that underpins and accounts for all the others. And that is the idea that we live in a time without precedent: that what is happening to us is new and irreversible and that the past has nothing to teach us.

This is especially true in economic affairs, where talk of how this or that has "changed everything" is rampant. To Tony Judt, the economy of the early twenty-first century seems, not new, but eerily like the economy of the early twentieth. Have people already forgotten the sour fruits of inequality and "every man for himself" economics? Are we ready for a resurgence of economic anger, of Marxism, of the politics of insecurity?

Few democratic governments can resist the temptation to turn this sentiment of fear to political advantage. Some have already done so. In which case we should not be surprised to see the revival of pressure groups, political parties, and political programs based upon fear: fear of foreigners; fear of change; fear of open frontiers and open communications; fear of the free exchange of unwelcome opinions. In recent years such people and parties have done well in a number of impeccably democratic countries – Belgium, Switzerland, and Israel, as well as more vulnerable republics like Russia, Poland, and Venezuela – and the challenge they present has tempted mainstream parties in the U.S., Denmark, Holland, France, and the United Kingdom to take a harsher line with visitors, “aliens,” illegal immigrants, and cultural or religious minorities. We can expect more along these lines in years to come, probably aimed at restricting the flow of “threatening” goods and ideas as well as people. The politics of insecurity are contagious.

But if our problems are not new, we can always look back and see how some countries passed through them successfully while others fell apart:

In that case we might do well to take a second glance at the way our twentieth-century predecessors responded to what were, in many respects, comparable dilemmas. We may discover, as they did, that the collective provision of social services and some restriction upon inequalities of income and wealth are important economic variables in themselves, furnishing the necessary public cohesion and political confidence for a sustained prosperity – and that only the state has the resources and the authority actively to underwrite those services and provisions and limitations in our collective name.

We may find that a healthy democracy, far from being threatened by the regulatory state, actually depends upon it: that in a world increasingly polarized between isolated, insecure individuals and unregulated global forces, the legitimate authority of the democratic state may be the best kind of intermediate institution we can devise. What, after all, is the alternative? Our contemporary cult of economic freedom, combined with a heightened sense of fear and insecurity, could lead to reduced social provision and minimal economic regulation, but accompanied by extensive governmental oversight of communication, movement, and opinion. “Chinese” capitalism, western style.

I look back over the twentieth century and see a nightmare born of fear, anger, hate, and extremism for its own sake that slowly gave way to a better world dominated by moderation, compromise, and acceptance of limits. Why are some people so quick to throw that triumph away?