Historian Simon Schama wants to make truth sexy again

Life and Art from FT Weekend

Forhecz Topher

Tv & Film, Arts, Society & Culture

4.6 • 601 Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Historian Sir Simon Schama is one of the most influential public intellectuals of our time. So when he replied to our invitation to come on the show ahead of the US presidential election by saying he wanted to talk about “the unprecedented collapse of truth”, we immediately said yes. It’s been a disorienting presidential campaign. For many Americans, it’s hard to understand how statements which are so clearly untrue – such as the government controls the weather, and sent hurricanes to Republican-leaning states – are working on voters. On today’s show, Simon tells us why the current state of misinformation is unprecedented in American history, and what he thinks can be done to reverse it.

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Links (all FT links get you past the paywall):

– Simon’s latest piece in the FT on the fight over American patriotism, written in September: https://on.ft.com/48iEHSd

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Life and Art from F.T. Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos. We are about a week out from the
0:08.3	American presidential election. We're not a politics show. We're a culture show. But here in New York,
0:13.6	the anxiety is palpable. It's right on the surface. Probably the weirdest part of this campaign
0:20.0	season has been this feeling that we're living in different realities.
0:23.6	That even us journalists are having trouble giving weight to the news that we're getting.
0:28.6	It's a bizarre dissonance when things that are clearly next level false are also very good at mobilizing people.
0:36.6	For example, our former president alleged that immigrants are eating their neighbors' cats and dogs in Ohio.
0:43.3	And the race is neck and neck.
0:46.0	When I recently wrote to the esteemed historian Sir Simon Shama to ask him to join me ahead of this upcoming election,
0:52.7	the thing he most wanted to talk about was basically this, the unprecedented collapse of truth in America.
0:59.6	Simon is a professor of history and art history at Columbia University.
1:03.9	He is the host of multiple documentaries and documentary series and one of the most influential living thinkers and scholars. He's also lucky for us,
1:12.9	a regular contributor to the FT, so he has kindly joined me today to talk about why he's so
1:17.9	worried about misinformation now. Simon, hi. Welcome to the show. Hi. Hello, hello.
1:24.3	So you and I emailed last week, and I know as we get closer to the election, there's more
1:29.4	you're thinking about, but I wonder if you can start by telling me why disinformation and what
1:33.8	you called in your email, the ruins of reality are top of mind for you days before the vote.
1:39.3	Well, being an old geeseer and a historian, and someone who constantly is going back to
1:46.6	Hannah Arendt, not actually to her most famous book, Eichmann and Jerusalem at her essays,
1:52.8	she wrote an extraordinarily influential, at least to me, essay in the 1970s called
1:58.1	Truth in Politics, which was actually about lying as well as truth. And the basic
2:02.8	takeaway, well, there were two interesting takeaways. The major one was that democracy actually
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