Niall Ferguson on Why We Study History

Conversations with Tyler

Podcast Notes Key Take Aways People are haunted by doomsday scenarios because they’re seared in their subconscious by religion“We’ve created a whole bunch of technologies that have actually increased the probability rather than reduced the probability of an extinction-level event.” – Niall FergusonHumans are interested in history’s implications, in the light that it sheds on their own predicamentNaill likes Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History, because it emphasizes Hitler’s messianic political-religious side and explains his terrifying star quality“The redeeming feature of Keynes’s life is the heroic effort he made to keep Britain from going under in World War II – he had to fight to prevent Roosevelt and his advisers dismantling the British Empire in 1945.” – Niall FergusonNaill’s view is that the benefits of the British Empire outweighed the costs and believes it was a benign empire compared with other available empiresThe great defect of British investment in India was that there was a serious shortfall in investment in basic educationDoctor Who was Naill’s favorite science fictional character because he was the only superhero who used his brain, not his muscles

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While the modern historical ethos can be obsessed with condescending to the past based on our current value system, Scottish-born historian Niall Ferguson has aimed to set himself apart with his willingness to examine the past in its own context. The result is some wildly unpopular opinions such as “The British Empire was good, actually” and several wildly popular books, such as his latest Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.

Niall joined Tyler to discuss the difference between English and Scottish pessimism, his surprise encounter with Sean Connery, what James Bond and Doctor Who have in common, how religion fosters the cultural imagination to produce doomsday scenarios, which side of the Glorious Revolution he would have been on, the extraordinary historical trajectory of Scotland from the 17th century through the 18th century, why historians seem to have an excessive occupation with leadership, what he learned from R.G. Collingwood and A.J.P. Taylor, why American bands could never quite get punk music right, Tocqueville’s insights on liberalism, the unfortunate iconoclasm of John Maynard Keynes, the dystopian novel he finds most plausible, what he learned about right and left populism on his latest trip to Latin America, the importance of intellectual succession and building institutions, what he’ll do next, and more.

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Thumbnail photo credit: Zoe Law