Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [238]
Here age helps. In itself, it makes me a statistical rarity, since in 1998 the number of human beings in the world aged eighty or above was estimated at 66 millions, which is roughly 1 per cent of the global population. Merely by virtue of long life, the history that belongs to books for others is part of the lives and memories of this tiny minority. For a potential reader just about to enter the age of higher education, that is to say born in the early or middle 1980s, most of the twentieth century belongs to a remote past from which little has survived into actual consciousness except historic costume dramas on film and videotape, and mental images of bits and pieces from the century which, for one reason or another, have become part of collective myth as episodes from the Second World War have become in Britain. Most of it belongs not to life but to the preparation of school examinations. The cold winter day when Adolf Hitler came to power in Berlin, which I remember vividly, is immeasurably distant for twenty-year-olds. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, during which I married, can have no human meaning in their lives, nor indeed in the lives of many of their parents, since no human being aged forty or less was even born when it occurred. These things are not, as they are for those of my age, part of a chronological succession of events that defines the shape of our private life in a public world, but at best a subject for intellectual understanding, at worst part of an indiscriminate set of things that happened ‘before my time’.
Historians of my age are guides to a crucial patch of the past, that other country where they did things differently, because we have lived there. We may not know more about the history of the period than younger colleagues who write about our lifetime in the light of sources not then available to us or, in practice, to anybody. Least of all can we rely on memory, even when age has not eroded it. Unaided by written documentation, it is almost certain to get the facts wrong. On the other hand, we were there, and we know what it felt like, and this gives us a natural immunity to the anachronisms of those who were not.
Living for over eighty years of the twentieth century has been a natural lesson in the mutability of political power, empires and institutions. I have seen the total disappearance of the European colonial empires, not least the greatest of all, the British Empire, never larger and more powerful than in my childhood, when it pioneered the strategy of keeping order in places like Kurdistan and Afghanistan by aerial bombardment. I have seen great world powers relegated to the minor divisions, the end of a German Empire that expected to last for a thousand years, and of a revolutionary power that expected to last for ever. I am unlikely to see the end of the ‘American century’, but it is a safe bet that some readers of this book will.
What is more, those who are old have seen the fashions come and go. Since the end of the USSR it has become political orthodoxy and conventional wisdom that there is no alternative to a society of individualist capitalism, and political systems of liberal democracy, which are believed to be organically associated with it, have become the standard form of government almost everywhere. Before 1914 this was also widely believed, though not as widely as today. However, for most of the twentieth century any of these assumptions seemed quite implausible. Capitalism itself seemed on the edge of the abyss. Bizarre as it may seem today, between 1930 and 1960 level-headed observers assumed that the state-commanded economic system of the USSR under the Five-Year Plans, primitive and inefficient as even the most sympathetic