The Shocking Lessons Of History Everyone Has Forgotten - Niall Ferguson

Just how accurate do you think the quote is, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes"?

(smacks lips) It's doubly inaccurate, uh, because first of all, it, it wasn't what Mark Twain said. People usually attribute it to Mark Twain of Huckleberry Finn fame. But actually, Twain didn't say that. He said something much more complex about history being like a, a kaleidoscope. Remember those kaleidoscopes we used to have as kids? And, and the pattern shifts, but there's a kind of regularity to it. That's what Twain actually said. Not, uh, that it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And it's inaccurate also because history doesn't repeat itself in the way that we would like it to. Be very nice if it had that kind of, uh, predictable pattern. But in truth, uh, it, it doesn't. And you can try to, to look for patterns, uh, but you'll frequently be disappointed. And that, that I think is one of the most important lessons that I've learned. History is, is not regular or uncyclical and predictable. It's actually pretty noisy and, and, and volatile and unpredictable, and that's, that's what makes my life interesting. I, I can't tell you with any certainty what's gonna happen in the next seven days, nevermind the next 10 years.

Does that limit the lessons that we can learn from history then? Given that, as you've said, it's not as cyclical, it's not got this sort of recurrent theme?

I, I think it means that we've got to learn rather different lessons from the ones we want to learn. We want cookie-cutter lessons as in if a dictator is elected, there will be World War II. That, that kind, we love those simple lessons, and we hate being told, "Actually, there were dictators who didn't start wars. They're not all Hitler." So we have to look for a different approach to learning lessons. Instead of wanting cookie-cutter lessons, we should realize that the most important lesson of history is that it is as unpredictable and nonlinear as sport. It's not a story, the kind that you read to your kids with a beginning, a middle, and a happy ending. It's, it's as unpredictable, uh, as a, as a game, but, but it's more open-ended. It's like a game of, of football that never stops, or a game of chess that never ends, where the board is so large that there never can be a conclusive winner. And if one recognizes that that's the lesson, that there's lots of contingency and chaos, and that even small decisions can have massive consequences, and big decisions can have no consequences, learning that about the historical process will lead us, I think, to make better decisions in the present, because it will get us away from what I would call bad lesson learning. So bad lesson learning takes the form of, uh, just to give you one example, uh, the United States deciding to invade Iraq, uh, and believing that it would be quite easy to establish democracy there, because American troops would be welcomed in Baghdad like the liberators of Paris, uh, towards the end of World War II. That was a terrible bad lesson of history. Uh, the right lesson was it's extremely difficult if you topple a dictator to establish a stable government in the ruins of the dictator's regime. It can be done, but it's really expensive and it takes ages. So, I, I think there are lessons to be learned from history, but we tend to, we tend to try to learn simple ones, and that's where we go wrong.