 Ymlaenwch, ddweudon, ymlaenwch i ddweud ymlaenwch hanes ac gurachyn yn ei ddwyllio'r hositaleidol, ac mae'n ddweud y bwysig o'r hoteil yna wrth y cyfrifiadau lleolol mae'n gweithio'n mynd i ddweud a'r cyflos o'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r Llyfriddur ac ymlaenwch cymdeithasol â'r Cyfrifolio Symposiom, Cymysatio'n ei ddechrau. I'm going to speak about a subject that seems to me strangely neglected, namely the effect of people's ideas or conception of history on what might be called their way of being in the world. And I'll start with a very obvious example. If you truly believe that Jesus Christ was tried, crucified and was resurrected on the third day, you are likely to have a very different approach to life from that which you will have if you believe no such thing. The claim is an historical one for either it happened or it didn't happen. In fact, all major religions make historical claims. If you believe that the Quran was dictated directly by God, for example, which is to say that it is the very word of God, you will have a very different view of life from that which you will have if you believe no such thing. And even Buddhism and Confucianism, which might be considered philosophies of life rather than religions in the strictest sense, make historical claims about their founders. And also, if you believe those claims, you will act very differently from how you will act if you don't believe those claims. Well, man is a political animal, as Aristotle said, and that means he's also an historical animal. And there are people in the world who have no historical knowledge, whatever. History affects them, but they have no idea of how history affects them. And I will tell you about my experience in the hospital in which I worked, which was in a poor hospital, a hospital for poor people, I should say, not a poor hospital. There is a slight difference. Who I used to ask about their historical knowledge. And these were people aged between 16 and 25. And many of them could not give me a single historical date, not one. They had no idea of any history whatsoever. And I thought really one of my patients was exceptionally clever because he deduced, when I asked him for the days of the Second World War, he deduced that there must have been a First World War. But until then he hadn't suspected it. Well, if you think about the way people are in the world, if they have no historical knowledge, whatever, you'll realize that they live in an eternal present moment. And this is not a good way, in my view, to live. They are prey to unrealistic comparisons. They compare their state with some kind of utopian state that has never existed and can never exist. And they cannot compare their discontents with any other discontents. They have no historical knowledge. They would not know, for example, that the infant mortality rate in their country has declined from, shall we say, 90 in 100 years, 90 to 3. They would have no idea of that. And they don't think biographically. It's not only that they don't think historically. They don't think biographically. For example, I was asked to do medical reports, people who were involved in a class action of drugs which they claimed had ruined their lives. And it was claimed that the drug companies had misled doctors by not telling them about the addictive properties of these drugs. And this was a claim, this was a part of their claim that was probably true. What was not true was that this had ruined their lives, the taking of these drugs had ruined their lives. And when you went through their lives biographically, they realized that their lives were ruined very early on and often by the decisions that they themselves had made. And they found the whole process very distressing. And they did not think biographically. And this is unfortunately in Britain, and I don't know about other countries, this is very common. Historical truth claims can have profound effects even on history itself, irrespective of their truth. But what of recent history? Here I'd like to mention an example of someone of whom you will not have heard. At least I hope you won't have heard of her. Her name is Alice Bouillet. And before I tell her story, I should like to conduct a brief poll on a historical matter. I want you to put up your hands saying yes to one of two propositions. The first proposition is that the First World War was fought over matters of deep principle. And the second is that the First World War was not fought over any matters of deep principle. So how many of you would say that it was fought over matters of deep principle? And how many would say that it was not fought over matters of deep principle? Well, the knows have it. And my guess is that the majority of the population of all countries that participated in it, that is the present populations, would have the same opinion as you on that matter. And I'm again, I'm not concerned with who is right on this, because I'm just saying that is what people think. That's what people believe. It's not a question of whether they're right or not. Now I turn to Alice Bouillet of whom you have not heard. And the reason I hope that you have not heard of her is that I've just written a book not yet published about unknown or forgotten writers who are interned in Pellasher's cemetery in Paris amongst whom was Alice Bouillet. And of course the premise of the book is that you haven't heard of them. So I would be very alarmed if you had heard of them. Well, she was the wife of a military doctor called René Brouillet who died in the course of the war. The doctor died. And she had been married to him for only a few months when he died. And most of those few months he'd been away at the front. As far as I know, she never married again after the war and died 44 years after his death. Her position would have been that of hundreds of thousands of French women after the end of the war who could not remarry because there were no unmarried men of roughly their age to marry. Now I think it's probably fair to say that Alice Bouillet when she married her husband had wanted what was then a normal married life. That is to say she would have wanted to have children and to remain with her husband for the rest of her life. Neither of these things was possible for her, of course. And though I think she was religious, there's very little information actually that I've been able to find about her life. And though after the war she became a novelist and travel writer with no great success but which implies that in some sense she recovered from the loss of her husband and found a purpose in life, yet I think it is reasonable to surmise that she carried within her a permanent and ineradicable sense of tragedy, not theoretical but lived through personally and experienced personally. Now in 1927 she published a remarkable book titled Heroes Without Glory that I'm translating from the French title. In this book she memorialised the 1,600 French doctors who had lost their lives in the war, quoting their letters and diaries written during the war, including those of her husband. And they make the most remarkable and I must say moving reading. They speak without any hint of boasting of the most incredible heroism and self-sacrifice of a kind which we would not find possible to reproduce and possibly it was a good thing that we couldn't reproduce it, but nevertheless we couldn't. Let me give you an instance of the heroism of which I have just spoken. Heroism that was a general cultural phenomenon, not matter of individuals. It wasn't just individual heroism, it was the heroism of an entire population. In 1915 there was a severe epidemic of typhus in Serbia which killed half of the medical profession in Serbia at the time. So half of all the doctors in Serbia died during that epidemic. The French decided, of course Serbia was an ally of France and the French decided to send a medical commission to try and eradicate the typhus. And they asked for 100 volunteer doctors to join this commission. A very dangerous commission because half of doctors of Serbia had died during this epidemic. And so it was a very hazardous thing. Instead of 100 doctors volunteering, they had 3,000. So 3,000 people volunteered to go to perform a duty from which half of them might have died. In fact it wasn't anything like half, but that's what they might have thought the situation was. Well, the commission succeeded in eliminating typhus from Serbia but then had to escape when the Austrian army invaded. The sufferings during their retreat from starvation or from freezing to death are described without complaint in the letters of the doctors who underwent this purgatory. And one of them who suffered absolutely amazingly was later killed by a shell in Calais almost at the end of the war. There is no hint of resentment in anything that any of these doctors wrote or any reference to the futility of their sacrifices or those of other people or the sacrifice that they, many of them, were themselves soon to make. Well, how was this state of mind possible? First, most of the witness cited in the book seemed to have had religious belief. That is to say that life for them had a transcendent purpose independent of or over and above their lives themselves. Thus their deaths did not deprive them of all that they believed that they had, all that made life worth living. Note that I'm not saying that they are right, that they were right in their beliefs. I'm just saying that's what their beliefs actually were. Second, they were deeply patriotic. They believed, and again I do not say whether they were right to do so. Most of them would, most of us would probably now say that they were mistaken, that they were fighting and risking their lives for their country and for something more than their country. They thought that they were fighting for civilisation itself. Though most of us now probably think that the war had the most disastrous effect on European civilisation as a whole and was the catastrophe of catastrophes. Now, of course, it could be objected and it would be a perfectly reasonable objection that we do not know how Alice Weyer selected her evidence or edited the letters and journals that she quoted in her book. There is thus the problem of representation. How far are her quotations representative of the real and lasting opinions and feelings of her subjects? The problem is even greater if we try to extrapolate her selections to the French army or to the population as a whole. The doctors are clearly of a certain social class, if not of a class in themselves, of course a highly superior one. What function did the book that she wrote serve in Alice Weyer's life and mind? I'm now surmising because I don't have any documentary evidence to fall back on, but I think my surmise is a reasonable one. The labour involved in her book was immense. It was absolutely vast labour, which is probably why it was published only nine years after the end of the war. But in focusing on the patriotism of her subjects, without in any way lessening their sufferings, on the contrary, she's very clear about their sufferings, she was in effect persuading herself that her husband's sacrifice, which was also her own, was neither meaningless nor futile. But on the contrary, was noble and full of meaning, for to think otherwise that it was meaningless and futile would have been unbearable for her and for hundreds of thousands of other people like her, perhaps even millions, not only in France but in Britain. The enormous number of war memorials in France to this war might be construed as attempts to persuade the grieving nation that the sacrifice of a generation was not just a meaningless slaughter, but was a war of principles. Of course, Germany lost even more people or men than France, though a shade fewer disproportionately. But to have died for defeat is very different psychologically in its consequences from having died for victory. Be that as it may, I don't think many of us, if we'd been around in 1927, would have tried to persuade Alice Breyer that her husband had died in vain 12 years earlier, even if we thought that this was true. To have done so would have been cruel and unfeeling. The truth, it has said, will set you free, but it can also make you miserable without any prospect of consolation. Now Alice Breyer was reflecting on very recent history, which had affected her in a very immediate and personal way. However, at the time she wrote, the attitude to that recent past was changing or had changed. Her heroic vision, which must have comforted many thousands of widows like herself, was soon to be superseded almost completely by a total revulsion against the war and its slaughter, at least in Britain and France. What is interesting about this, perhaps, is that this revulsion occurred ten years after the end of the war, not immediately after the end of the war. In Britain, for example, there was a sudden spate of often brilliantly written anti-war memoirs by those young men who had participated in the war and had survived it. Three very strongly anti-war plays were produced in London in quick succession. They were very good players and they had great success. One by a man called R.C. Sheriff, who had been severely injured in the war himself. And another two, one by Somerset Maugham, who had served as a British intelligence officer in Petrograd, trying to prevent Bolshevism from getting off the ground and who was not personally involved in any fighting. And Noel Coward, not a playwright normally associated with political gloom or political subjects of any kind and who had played no part directly in the war. And it was because of this revision of attitude to the recent past that the Oxford Union passed its famous motion this house would not fight for king and country. Well, many of us read history, of course, that is more remote from us than was the First World War from Alice of Wui. And yet, I think it's fair to say, when we delve into history, we are often seeking meaning or lessons for the present. The past is fascinating in itself and yet we seem unable to prevent ourselves from seeking analogies and guidance from it in the present. As I said, man is not only a political animal, he's an historical animal. And I'll give an example that I came across recently, another French book called 1938 by a philosopher at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. In this book, the author has gone through the press, the entire press, he says, of 1938, which has actually been digitised and you can find all French newspapers on the internet straight away. From his searches, he draws conclusions about the state of what might be called the French condition of its soul today, this year. Actually, he wrote the book in 2018, so it will be 80 years later exactly. His conclusions might be wrong or they might be right. The question of how much may be concluded from the press, even assuming that he's read all of it, doesn't bother him at all. And as a bookworm myself, I'm probably inclined to overestimate the importance and influence of both books and the written word in general. My life revolves around the written word now. But if I were writing about the year 1938 in France in an attempt to understand Zeitgeist, I would probably do the same as this author did, or something very similar. The use to which he put his findings was what most interested me, however. He suggested that France in 1938 was in a situation not very dissimilar from the one in which it finds itself today, namely one of increasing authoritarianism, but also a proto-fashism. One of the pieces of evidence in favour of the latter assertion is the increasing hostility towards refugees and illegal migrants, both in 1938 and 2018. And there's clearly some kind of analogy, the constant being the enormous hostility to a very large influx of migrants. But for the author's analogy to whole, there have to be no very significant differences in the nature of the migration in the two periods. And this reveals an underlying assumption that a migrant is just a human unit, that one is much the same as another, or that it matters not at all what cultural baggage the migrant brings with him. All that matters is how the receiving country receives the migrant. Well, it's true that the hostility in 1938, assuming that the newspapers reflected it correctly, was often fuelled by some very nasty political ideas that no one would wish to be associated with now. But the fear of being associated with them is so great that it prevents many people from looking at the current problem of immigration in the face. Of course, one may question whether the attitude to the present determines the kind of history one finds, or whether the kind of history that one finds determines one's attitude to the present, or some combination of the two that are mutually reinforcing. But the fact surely is that attitudes to the past have a powerful influence on how one sees the world. That is why the dispute over the meaning of history in the United States is both so important and so bitter. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of the country and who is to rule it. The study of history for young people, after all, escapes indoctrination only with very great difficulty. In this matter, children are as near to blank slates as it is possible for humans to be. And it is possible to make them believe almost anything. On the one hand, the traditional account of the origin of the United States is heroic, a struggle of a people to free itself of an oppressive royal government. It scarcely matters that by the standards of any existing government today, almost anywhere in the world, the colonists were very lightly governed. History moves forwards, not backwards, and the colonists, those who took part in the revolution, were not to know that they were extremely lightly governed by future historical experiences. Like most people, they compared their lot with an ideal. Those who imbibe this historiography are likely to retain a basic faith in their country, which whatever its blemishes retains a large measure of good. Opposing this version is a narrative that the founding of the United States was a bit like an original sin in the Bible. It was founded on and in slavery, much as the expulsion of the Garden of Eden was brought about by the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. And the revolution was an attempt to preserve slavery. How is it, asked Dr. Johnson, a conservative thinker who was genuinely and profoundly non-racist, that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of negroes? All American history can be read with this mark of cane in mind and is little other than the continuation of oppression, racial, sexual class and so forth ever since. My point is not to adjudicate which version of history is correct, rather to point out the very different attitudes to present day reality and even to life itself that those who hold to one or to the other will have. And here it is important to note that since most of us are not historians, we shall be inclined to hold the view of history that we were taught as when we were young before we move on to things other than history. In my case, for example, I had no historical education after the age of 15. Perhaps that shows. Thus, the struggle over the teaching of history in the schools is a modern tribute to Ignatius Loyola's dictum that if he were given a child till he was seven, he would show you the man, albeit that the modern indoctrinators require to keep control of the child for longer than certain years. Let us suppose for the sake of argument that these two schools of history or two attitudes to history are equally well founded. There are few narratives of history that you cannot support by finding data in support of them, confirmation bias in short. After all, history is compounded of glory and shame, triumph and disaster, advance and regress. And I could give an example from medical history. Medical history used to be written by retired doctors as a form of ancestor worship in which they recounted the biographies of great doctors who advanced medical knowledge. But then the sociologists got control of medical history and then it became more or less a history of the idiocies and the crimes of doctors. Now, both of these things are true, but it's very difficult to look down two ends of a telescope at the same time. Now, suppose you belong to the school which emphasises the achievement or achievements of your country, you will have a very different outlook on life from that which you will have if you belong to that which emphasises misery and crime. In the first case, you will have pride in your country and you will try to contribute something constructive to it, or at least you may do so. Many reforms that you suggest will not be utopian. Your aim will be modest improvement. In the second case, you will have a penchant to disparage, destroy and undermine. Your reforms will be according to some distant mental blueprint. They will seek the chimera of perfection. You will have a tendency to resentment that is the most beguiling of all emotions. It's almost the only emotion that can last a lifetime that is almost never constructive, but confers certain satisfaction and you keep it going. It allows you to feel a certain moral superiority to the world. You will probably be in search of political power, perhaps believing that it is the only thing worth having. I think increasingly we live in a kind of niche world in which power is worshipped to a degree that I don't remember it having been worshipped. This is not to say that the first attitude does not have its pathologies. It can make people complacent, foster ignorance of or contempt for other country's achievements and so forth. But if I had to choose between the two pathologies I suppose I would choose the first. Of course I would prefer that there were no history-induced pathology at all, but it seems to me that those with the first attitude are probably better able to incorporate or absorb countervailing evidence into their history and thereby avoid disastrous ideological schematisation than those with the second in which you may disagree with that. Of course your personal history effects or at least can affect your historical outlook. If you have been the victim of some gross injustice, you are likely to project that injustice onto the whole of history irrespective of how representative or unrepresentative your experience was. And then that history will reinforce your sense of grievance in a kind of infernal feedback loop. As Amelia says in Othello, trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmation strong as proofs of holy writ. The same might be said of people who resent. Trifles light as air are to the resentful confirmation strong as proofs of holy writ. What history, in my view, ideally should teach is a sense of proportion, which is perhaps the most important to all intellectual qualities and virtues. But alas, it seems mainly now to be taught to encourage monomanias of various stamps and we live in a regime of vulcanised monomanias. Thank you very much.