Read the full transcript of social philosopher Roman Krznaric’s talk titled “Lessons From History for a Better Future” at TED Countdown: Overcoming Dilemmas in the Green Transition on October 30, 2024.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction: Learning from Edo Japan’s Circular Economy
ROMAN KRZNARIC: Imagine you’re standing on the old wooden Nihonbashi Bridge in the ancient Japanese city of Edo, now known as Tokyo. It’s around 1750 in the era of the Tokugawa shoguns. People are chatting, labourers are pushing cartloads of rice, seafood traders are rushing across to the fish market. Now Edo wasn’t just remarkable for being a huge city of over a million people, far larger than London or Paris at the time. It also operated what we would today call a circular economy, where almost everything was reused, repaired, repurposed or recycled.
Japan’s policy of not trading with the outside world led to shortages of precious resources like wood and cotton. So a tradition of patchwork developed, known as boro, meaning tattered rags, where fragments of old cloth were sewn together into garments that were then passed on down the generations, just like the one I’m wearing, which is over 100 years old. A kimono might be used until the cloth began to wear out, then turned into pyjamas, then cut up into nappies, then used as cleaning cloth and finally burnt as fuel.
Edo had over a thousand circular businesses, from collecting candle wax strippings to be remoulded, to down-and-out samurai repairing old umbrellas. Traders even paid for human waste, which was then sold as agricultural fertiliser. Strict timber rationing rules were also introduced to restore the nation’s depleted old-growth forests. This was one of the world’s first large-scale examples of a low-waste, low-carbon ecological civilization.
Edo Japan wasn’t a utopia, having feudal and patriarchal inequalities. Yet 300 years on, it offers hope that we can create economies today that are driven not by the chronic wastefulness and ecological blindness of consumer capitalism, but by a deep culture of sustainability. If we were to adopt the circular mindset of Edo-nomics, we’d rapidly phase out the sale of products like standard smartphones, which use over half the elements of the periodic table and are often discarded after less than three years, and instead we’d introduce regenerative standards so that the only phones permitted for sale would use recycled materials and be modular by design, with easily replaceable screens and batteries. I mean, wouldn’t that be great?
And like many other historical examples, such as the ancestral circular economy in pre-colonial Hawaii, Edo shows that it’s possible to combine radical sustainability with cultural flourishing. It gave birth to the artworks of Hiroshige, to the poetry of Basho, and to a thriving culture of sumo wrestling. I mean, what’s not to like?
Why History Matters for Our Future
Now, why am I telling you about the economy of ancient Japan? Because it reveals how history is one of our most undervalued resources for thinking about the future of humanity. And we have vast amounts of the stuff to tap into. I mean, we’re in an age of poly-crisis, from a climate emergency to risks from AI and threats to democracy. And history can help us navigate our way through the turbulence, acting as a counselor rather than as a clairvoyant.
But, with my background as a political scientist, I’ve become increasingly frustrated by the way that our politicians and policymakers remain trapped in the tyranny of the now, driven by the latest opinion poll, or hoping that new technologies will come to our civilizational rescue. They are failing to see that in order to go forwards, we’d be wise to look backwards.
Now, the idea of learning from history, what’s sometimes called applied history, is far from new. 200 years ago, the German writer Goethe declared, he who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living from hand to mouth. Typically, learning from history focuses on warnings, captured in the famous aphorism that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Yet my research on the power of history for tomorrow reveals just how much inspiration can be found in positive examples of what’s gone right, not only in cautionary tales of what’s gone wrong. Time and again, we have acted together, often against the odds, and succeeded to overcome crises and tackle injustices.
Lessons from Cordoba: Cultural Coexistence
If I could travel back to any moment in the past, it would be to the Spanish city of Cordoba, in around the year 1000, which was part of the Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus, which ruled over the southern part of today’s Spain. Now, what made Cordoba so extraordinary was that Muslims, Christians, and Jews managed to live side by side in relative harmony in a period known as the convivencia, literally the coexistence, or the living together.
Although there were everyday tensions and occasional outbreaks of violence, it was generally a time of cultural tolerance. Muslims and Christians played music together. Jews and Muslims might have a game of chess. People mixed together in the public bathhouses and in the marketplaces, creating webs of economic relations. There’s the story of Samuel Hanarid, a Jewish poet whose skills as an Arabic scribe enabled him to rise to become the prime minister of the Muslim ruler of Granada and even lead his military forces.
Convivencia was built not just on the shared language of Arabic and on the freedom of religion permitted by Islamic law, but was crucially due to the daily interactions of urban life. You know, there was this recent study of 29 countries which showed that levels of intercultural tolerance rise rapidly with even small increases in the size of cities, which is precisely what Cordoba, a city of nearly half a million people, proved more than a thousand years ago.
I think there’s a message here for our era of growing xenophobia and far-right nationalism, which is set to increase as the ecological crisis compels more and more people to migrate from their homelands.