What is history for?

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 609 Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2024

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Well, Camden Council for a start, who’ve put a QR code on her statue in Bloomsbury explaining that some of views and actions of the prototype feminist, widely regarded as one of the leading modernist writers of the 20th century, are now considered “offensive” and “unacceptable”. Funny how we look back for drama and moral clarity, not just judging the past by the prejudices of the present, but affecting to see in its messiness either inevitable progress, or relentless decline. More and more, it seems, history is a weapon with which to fight today’s battles. What should history teach us?

Witnesses: Professor Ada Palmer Professor Kehinde Andrews Dr Amanda Foreman Professor Robert Tombs

Panellists: Anne McElvoy Ash Sarkar Tim Stanley Matthew Taylor

Presenter: Michael Buerk

Producers: Catherine Murray & Peter Everett Assistant Producer: Ruth Purser Editor: Tim Pemberton

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:04.7	Russia's war in Ukraine has not just been fought in the present, but in the past.
0:09.7	It started, you'll remember, with President Putin's questionable history lecture,
0:14.0	claiming the two countries had always been indivisible.
0:17.6	Ukraine sees its history very differently, as a constant struggle for for independence and has just joined a European project whose stated aim is to use history teaching to promote the cause of democracy.
0:31.1	History has become a weapon, not just for competing nationalisms, but for the culture wars of the present. Only this week, Camden Council
0:39.1	labelled the work of one of its most famous former residents, the modernist writer Virginia
0:43.8	Wolf, as offensive and unacceptable. Strange how we look to the past for moral clarity,
0:51.4	how we affect to see in its messiness a pattern of either inevitable progress or
0:55.5	relentless decline, how increasingly we judge the past by the prejudices of the present.
1:01.9	How should we look back on what our ancestors did? What should history teach us? That's our moral
1:08.2	maze tonight. The panel, Anne McElvoy, executive editor of the
1:12.4	Politics and Commentary Site Politico, Ash Sarko from the Navarra Media Group, the chief executive of
1:19.2	the NHS Confederation, Matthew Taylor, and the historian Tim Stanley. Well, you certainly taught
1:25.2	history, Tim. What did you actually think you were doing?
1:29.0	I was trying to keep 200 undergraduates from falling asleep. I was actually trying to impart some
1:34.7	information and some analysis, of course, but also, dare I say, to entertain. Because history is
1:40.2	violent, sexy, tragic and funny. And had I tried to sell my students on my politics, not only would my classes have been inaccurate, they'd have been boring, which is the greatest crime of all. Ash? Violent, sexy, tragic and funny. That's just my type. He's not talking about himself. Yeah, it's my Tinder profile. I think when we're talking about history, we should distinguish between two things, all right?
2:03.6	There's a study of history which isn't particularly political and it's driven by curiosity
2:07.4	and it's fascination with that which is different.
2:09.6	And then there's a kind of history where it's all about framing what's politically possible
2:15.0	through a contestation of what happened in the past.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.