From Arab scholars to hippy mothers, can history offer forgotten answers to modern problems?
e need lessons from history now more than ever. Mothers with young children sit isolated in their own homes, oblivious to 1970s experiments in communal child-rearing. Broadcasters justify populist content on the grounds that it’s what “ordinary people” want, despite the rich 19th-century tradition of working-class intellectualism. The current Labour leadership’s adherence to strict “fiscal rules” disregards past successes of borrowing to invest and taxing the highest incomes at 90%.
Populist politicians like to associate anti-immigration sentiment with tradition rather than racism ; calling for more tolerance looks like an attack on established communities. Krznaric cites the counter-tradition of multiculturalism in medieval Andalusia, where Jews, Muslims and Christians rubbed along pretty well . The forced proximity of city life facilitates conviviality: a phenomenon known as “contact theory”.
There are cautionary tales here too, such as the eugenics movement that haunts the development of commercial gene editing technology. Better to look to the development of the polio vaccine and its proto-crowdfunding initiative that raised enough cash to fund the largest medical field trial in American history, led by the virologist. After his discovery of the vaccine in 1955, Salk was interviewed on TV by Ed Murrow, who asked him who owned the patent.
Against the dystopian ravages of platform capitalism – Google, Microsoft, Uber and the rest – Krznaric pits the cooperative tradition that has long flourished in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region: the University of Bologna was run by its students for its first three centuries. Or we can remember the American farmers who formed electricity cooperatives during the Great Depression with help from government loans under the New Deal .
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