You’ve spoken a lot recently about the ways that historical analogies are routinely misused, noting that the present crisis is not in fact a sequel to 1914, 1929, or 1941, but rather “something new under the sun.” Given the extreme novelty of our present circumstances, both proximate in terms of the COVID crisis, and general, in terms of the Anthropocene, what is the utility of history? How can historical knowledge be productively brought to bear on the challenges of the present? Or is your vocation a literary project — good for memorialization and remembrance but not as a generator of applicable insights?
I believe we are living in historic times. And so the challenge for me, as a historian — as it is for you, as a journalist, or any wide-awake contemporary — is to figure out what the hell is going on. That’s the quintessential task of the historian. The task is not, you know, knowing a lot about a data set of things that happened in the past so that you can spot the analogies and then tell everyone how it really works. That may be one way of thinking about what history does. But it implies all sorts of weird assumptions about how history works — assumptions that are, to my mind, repeatedly, catastrophically refuted by the protean quality of what we call modern history.
From the moment we decided to call it history with a capital H, history has consisted, more or less, of one unbelievable, intellectually indigestible shock after another. And so the job of the historian is to stick with the project. The job is not to be the antiquarian — not to be the keeper of the data bank that will tell you from the wisdom of all previous experience what will happen now — because the wisdom of our experience should tell us that the relationship between past experience and the present is problematic fundamentally.
I’m with the spirit of your earlier question — I take capitalism to be a fundamental driver of modern history. There are several. One is the interstate power and violence dynamic in history; another is the logic of accumulation. These are profoundly dynamic, explosively expansive vectors. Our job is to stay awake to that fact and to stretch our minds as quickly as we can to encompass what is going on in front of our eyes — not to distract everyone by saying, “Oh, well, this reminds me dimly of something that happened in the early modern period.” My impulse isn’t to tell you that we’ve seen all this before; it’s to say we ain’t seen nothing yet.