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. History offers an antidote to the idea of an inevitable clash of civilizations, showing how it’s possible for us to live together with difference in multicultural communities, forging what the 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun called Asabiya, an Arabic term meaning collective solidarity or group feeling, which he believed was vital to prevent the breakdown of civilizations.
And we can all nurture the invisible threads of Asabiya in our everyday lives. It can be as simple as having a conversation with a stranger once a week or joining a local sports team with players from diverse backgrounds.
The Power of Disruptive Movements: Lessons from Abolition
So, you know, we can see prospects for a different kind of economy in 18th century Edo Japan and for cultural coexistence in medieval Islamic Spain. But what about compelling our governments to take the urgent action required to overcome our continuing addiction to fossil fuels, which is driving us over perilous planetary tipping points? Well, history offers a very clear reason for radical hope. The disruptive movements can change the system.
Let’s journey back to the 1820s, when over 700,000 enslaved people were working on British-owned sugar plantations in the West Indies. Now, at that time, many plantation owners and financiers made remarkably similar arguments to today’s fossil fuel executives to defend their actions. They admitted that slavery, like oil and gas production, was morally questionable. But they claimed that ending it too rapidly could easily lead to economic collapse. So instead, they argued that slavery should be phased out gradually over many decades. Well, it’s an excuse we hear repeatedly today from the fossil energy industry, which displays the very same foot-dragging gradualism.
Now, the British abolition movement was organized in the Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing the State of Slavery. The name said it all. Its reformist strategy of lobbying politicians and publishing pamphlets was making little headway. The turning point came in 1831 in an act of disruption which sent shockwaves through Britain: the Jamaica Slave Revolt.
More than 20,000 enslaved workers rose up in rebellion in Jamaica, setting fire to over 200 plantations. The revolt was brutally crushed. But it sent a wave of panic through the British establishment who concluded that if they didn’t grant emancipation, then the whole colony might be lost. Multiple studies showed that the revolt tipped the scales in favor of abolition, leading to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. In the absence of this disruptive radical right movement, it might have taken decades longer for abolition to enter the statute books than if left in the hands of the reformist white elite.
Modern Climate Activism in Historical Context
Now, many people are quick to criticize today’s radical, non-violent climate movements like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. But let’s remember that they are part of long traditions of successful disruptive movements going back to the Jamaica rebels and to the suffragettes and the Indian independence movement and US civil rights activists whose actions have helped amplify existing crises and catapulted them onto the political agenda. In doing so, they’ve often broken the rules and sometimes the law to create change when all other pathways were blocked.
The great tragedy is that while disruptive figures like Emmeline Pankhurst and Martin Luther King Jr. are now celebrated in our children’s school history textbooks, their modern equivalents in today’s ecological movements are frequently demonized by the press and criminalized by the police. Have we learnt nothing?
Personally, I’m not a natural disruptor and prefer sitting in old libraries reading books. But because of what I’ve discovered in those libraries and the power of disruptive movements, I have found myself lying on the street blocking the road with my teenage daughter in front of London’s parliament exasperated by the government’s pace of action on the climate crisis. I realize that it annoys commuters but our inaction is going to infuriate future generations even more. I can’t think of a better way to be a good ancestor. It’s too late and too reckless to leave this crisis to simmer on the low flame of gradualism.
Developing Temporal Intelligence for Our Future
I’m not optimistic about the prospects for the human species. I believe that humanity is currently on a pathway towards ecological and technological self-termination. But history gives me genuine hope that it doesn’t have to be this way. We are not starting from zero. The past is full of inspiring possibilities so we always act as if change is possible. Because from what I’ve seen it just might be.
If our civilization is going to bend rather than break as we face the turbulence of the coming decades we need to develop what I call temporal intelligence. The capacity to think on multiple time horizons both forwards and backwards.
Now of course history has always been used and abused by those in power so we need to be wary of gross distortions and rosy romanticism and treat the past with care. How might we do so and develop our temporal intelligence? Well if schools taught applied history then children might know how ancient Japanese sustainability practices could help reshape today’s world. Or what if governments created not just foresight units but backsight units which systematically learn from the history of public policy.
And wouldn’t it be fascinating to visit a History for Tomorrow museum which explores how history can help us confront 21st century challenges from the ecological crisis to the risks of AI and genetic engineering.
As we journey towards tomorrow let us be guided by the Maori proverb “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.” In fact I invite you all to repeat it out loud after me in Maori. So here we go as loud as you can, me first. Absolutely brilliant, thank you all so much.
