Sometimes even historians can have too much history, especially when it is happening today rather than 100 years ago. And, even more so, when one does not know the ending.
“I’m living through the kind of times I studied. It’s fascinating, but I wish I weren’t living through it. It has far too many echoes of pre-1914 or the 1930s, with too many crises overlapping,” says Margaret MacMillan. The historian, author of the bestselling Peacemakers, which traces the decisions of the Versailles Treaty, travels to Ireland for the weekend of August 9th-11th to speak alongside Roy Foster at the West Cork History Festival, near Baltimore.
Ahead of the festival, the eminent historians have gathered on a Saturday afternoon for a conversation – often dark, often funny, sometimes gossipy with pleas for privacy – with The Irish Times to discuss the state of the world. Their take? In short, we are in trouble.
“I’m older than you, Roy, by probably about 10 years, but my generation, and I guess yours as well, were among the luckiest, I think, in the history of humanity,” the 80-year-old Canadian tells the 75-year-old Irishman.
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Born during the second World War, she grew up “in a stable country with an expanding economy”. And, though Canadians worried about the Cuban Missile Crisis, “we mostly took it for granted that there was an odd sort of stability between the superpowers.
“And that life was going to get better. And I think young people now think they will not live as well as their parents. They won’t have the chances their parents had. They may well be right.”
The conversation flips from Donald Trump to the threat posed by social media and the existential challenge of climate change to a reminder that people in earlier times faced a lot worse, even if one of the comparisons made is to the Black Death.
‘Perspective is not only necessary but vital. Yes, humans today may face existential threats but think of living in Europe in the 14th century with the Black Death’
— Margaret MacMillan
In the immediate here and now, however, the prospect of a second term in the White House for Trump dominates, though increasingly populist-dominated politics across much of the rest of the western world concern too.
For the author of Peacemakers, the similarities between the early part of the century and today began to rise in her mind during the Covid-19 pandemic, “when we had lots of time to think about where we are”.
Having resisted comparisons between today and the German Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early ‘30s, she says: “I do find myself more and more thinking about the ways in which Hitler and the Nazis got to power. They got there with a lot of complicity from idiotic businessmen and elites, who thought that they could use these forces. We’re seeing the same thing again today with populism.
“We have different problems. We have a much more interconnected world, But there is still the feeling that things are out of control. We don’t have the leadership that we need. People are very short-sighted,” says MacMillan.
Foster interjects, having just read with disbelief a Financial Times interview with US evangelical leader Franklin Graham, the son of the late Billy, where he defended Christians’ support for Trump. “I think of the US evangelicals who say, ‘Yes, Trump’s a wicked man, but, you know, he’s like the Emperor Cyrus who let the Jews go,” says the author of The Making of Modern Ireland and the biographer of William Butler Yeats.
A second Trump White House term will not be a repeat of the chaotic first one: “I think he’s out for revenge. I think he’s not used to losing. He’s a bad, bad loser. He blames everyone else,” says MacMillan.
In his first term, there were “people around him who tried to keep him under control”, she says, but now “there’ll be people who have bent the knee… who will do what he tells them”.
Politics in the United States has never been for the faint-hearted, she accepts, but “across the aisle” co-operation is now at an all-time low. Even during Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy’s time, “people used to go for a drink”.
‘They look for someone with the gift of the gab and a quick answer and the easily identifiable enemy’
— Roy Foster
The United States has had people with Trump’s instincts before, she says, citing the aviator and America First champion Charles Lindbergh and the Louisianan populist governor Huey Long.
“They now look like flashes in the pan who never got near enough to the centre of power. But Trump did by becoming a television personality. That is new, and we’re not really coping with it,” she goes on.
For a moment, the two contemplate his possible choices for secretary of state. “I hate to think, [hard-right Georgia congresswoman and conspiracy theorist] Marjorie Taylor Greene? I mean anything is possible,” says MacMillan.
“I was almost going to say that!” says Foster, the former University of Oxford Caroll professor of Irish history. “And then I thought that’s, you know…” The sentence trails off. Then, somebody quietly says, “Jesus”. It may have been me.
The rise of populists such as Trump has been fuelled, but not created, by social media’s effect on life over the past two decades, where rancour and disputes travel at warp speed and reasoned argument limps behind.
Looking at Trump’s rallies, MacMillan says, “Half the time the crowds are there just for the entertainment. They don’t realise that if he gets his hands again on the levers of power, he will do whatever he can with them.”
In the hours after the failed assassination attempt on Trump, one could “within about two clicks be in this horrible world of plots, where it was all about George Soros being behind it, or even being behind the gun himself…
“The algorithms the big platforms have, and they keep them very secret, promote the most outrageous statements, the most outrageous memes, the most outrageous attitudes, because that gets the most hits,” she says.
The hours spent scrolling have consequences for the quality of education and public debate, argues Foster, even if he is reluctant to adopt the role of the older academic lecturing the young.
Saying that it is “impossible not to be worried”, he cites the experience of a US-based academic who recently said he could no longer recommend a book-length text “to the brightest” Harvard undergraduate: “That shocked me very deeply, honestly.”
Such trends have consequences, he warns: “They’ll be more vulnerable to simplistic answers. They’ll be less intellectually confident. If you use words that they don’t recognise, a barrier immediately develops. They feel got at.
“They feel uncertain. They feel defensive. Essentially, they stop listening. It ends with people going out into the world with a defensive, simplified, almost nervous approach to knowledge,” says the Waterford-born academic.
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The effect of social media on young people’s ability to connect with others came home to MacMillan during the protests on university campuses in the US and Canada against Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
“What really struck me about a lot of the students here in Toronto and in New York was they said things like, ‘It’s really fun. We sit around and we sing songs together, we’re holding hands, we’re all in this camp.’
“It struck me that they haven’t had this type of social interaction before. This is very sad, actually. But will they go back to isolation and communicating through texts and TikTok and WhatsApp?”
Looking back, Foster remembers a glorious scholarship year to the Episcopalian St Andrew’s school in Delaware in 1966, backed by a $5,000 grant and offers of hospitality across states.
The school, founded by the Dupont family, was home to the 1989 film, Dead Poets Society, where the minds of young conservative students are opened to beauty through poetry by a teacher played by Robin Williams.
Foster reflects on when he went back to St Andrew’s to give a lecture to today’s 17 year olds earlier this year.
“I went through the things that we were sure and certain about in 1966-1967: that nationalism was finished, that religion was on the way out, that race relations would get better and better. In all of this, we were completely, definitively wrong.
“What struck me was how worried and depressed and uncertain they were. I was struck by the feeling of foreboding they shared. Many were pretty well convinced that they would see another war in their lifetime,” he says, left glum by the memory.
Faced with such a world, Foster fears people will search for “Messiahs. I’m afraid that’s what happens. That’s why I think of the 1930s again. They look for someone with the gift of the gab and a quick answer and the easily identifiable enemy.”
Nevertheless, people make history “Neither of us would think that anything is inevitably doomed,” Foster says. “There is room for manoeuvre. Margaret’s work has shown that people and personal, individual decisions can make all the difference.”
Politicians, MacMillan agrees, must avoid thinking that they can make only one decision, as happened before the first and second World Wars. “I’m afraid it’s happening now” where people assume that “they know what the other side is doing.”
Last year, she gave a lecture to mid-career US military where one talked about “when” the US would fight China, while Foster cites the senior British officer who warned that the UK had three years to prepare for war against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
‘Hitler and the Nazis got to power with a lot of complicity from idiotic businessmen and elites, who thought that they could use these forces. We’re seeing the same thing again today with populism’
— Margaret MacMillan
Saying she was “really chilled” by the US officer’s perspective, MacMillan said: “That’s very dangerous when you start thinking you’re bound to fight China, especially where there are people in Beijing thinking the same thing.”
Citing Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s quote about “pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the spirit”, the Canadian academic says: “I think I have that right. That’s not a bad way to approach things.”
(It is perhaps not time to remind anyone in the conversation that Gramsci ended up dying in jail in Mussolini’s Italy where, malnourished and ill, he often beat his head off the cell walls because the headaches caused by his illness were so dreadful.)
“We shouldn’t be Pollyannaish about the world and say, ‘It’s all wonderful and the sun is shining all the time and isn’t it lovely.’ We should look at the world and see what’s wrong, but not think that everything is disastrous.
“Perspective is not only necessary, but vital. That’s what history offers. Yes, humans today may face existential threats but think of living in Europe in the 14th century with the Black Death.
“You can’t give way to despair because you ruin the only life you have. We have a tremendous capacity as a species to survive adversity, not always well. We can and sometimes do build something better.
Turning to the example that shaped her own life, she says: “The world that emerged after the second World War was a better world with more hope than anyone might have imagined at the beginning of the war.”
Prof Roy Foster and Prof Margaret MacMillan will speak at opening of the West Cork History Festival, which takes place over the weekend of August 9th-11th at Inish Beg estate
