Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [239]
For someone of my age living through the twentieth century was an absolutely unique lesson in the impact of genuine historical forces. In the thirty years after the Second World War the world and what it was like to live in it changed more rapidly and fundamentally than in any other period of comparable length in human history. Those as old as I in a few countries of the northern hemisphere are the first generation of humans to have actually lived as adults before this extraordinary launch of the spacecraft of collective humanity into orbits of unprecedented social and cultural upheaval, which the world is experiencing today. We are the first generation to have lived through the historic moment when the rules and conventions that had hitherto bound human beings together in families, communities and societies ceased to operate. If you want to know what it was like, only we can tell you. If you think you can go back, we can tell you, it can’t be done.
II
Age produces one kind of historical perspective, but I hope my life has helped me to project another: distance. The crucial difference between the historiography of the Cold War – let alone the snake-oil salesmen of the ‘war against terrorism’ – and that of the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century is that (except in Belfast) we are no longer expected to take sides as Catholics or Protestants, or even to take their ideas as seriously as they did. But history needs distance, not only from the passions, emotions, ideologies and fears of our own wars of religion, but from the even more dangerous temptations of ‘identity’. History needs mobility and the ability to survey and explore a large territory, that is to say the ability to move beyond one’s roots. That is why we cannot be plants, unable to leave their native soil and habitat, because no single habitat or environmental niche can exhaust our subject. Our ideal cannot be the oak or redwood, however majestic, but the migrant bird, at home in arctic and tropic, overflying half the globe. Anachronism and provincialism are two of the deadly sins of history, both equally due to a sheer ignorance of what things are like elsewhere, which even limitless reading and the power of imagination can only rarely overcome. The past remains another country. Its borders can be crossed only by travellers. But (except for those whose way of life is nomadic) travellers are, by definition, people away from their community.
Fortunately, as readers who have followed me so far know, all my life I have belonged to untypical minorities, starting with the enormous advantage of a background in the old Habsburg Empire. Of all the great multi-lingual and multi-territorial empires that collapsed in the course of the twentieth century, the decline and fall of the Emperor Franz Josef’s, being both long expected and observed by sophisticated minds, has left us by far the most powerful literary or narrative chronicle. Austrian minds had time to reflect on the death and disintegration of their empire, while it struck all the other empires suddenly, at least by the measure of the historical clock, even those in visibly declining health, like the Soviet Union. But perhaps the perceived and accepted multi-linguality, multi-confessionality and multi-culturality of the monarchy helped them to a more complex sense of historical perspective. Its subjects lived simultaneously in different social universes and different historical epochs. Moravia at the end of the nineteenth century was the background to Gregor Mendel’s genetics, Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Leoš Janáček’s Jenufa. I recall the occasion, some time in the 1970s, when I found myself