History and Hope
In Praise of Imperfection: Reflections on Timothy Snyder’s “Politics of Responsibility”
Introduction: Fears for the New Year
Amid wars and partisan political campaigns, the year 2024 dawned in an atmosphere of gloom. In the New York Times alone, for example, columnists cited a host of problems: “zero-sum thinking,” “democratic backsliding,” a “crisis of authority,” distrust in democratic institutions and governments, and “existential dread about the very foundations of the American experiment [and] a dramatic sense of inevitable doom.” Analysts also warn of political violence, potential civil war, and the prospect that global democracy is losing ground to populist tyranny. A Financial Times commentary, “Can democracy survive 2024?” summed up these fears: “A historic number of elections will take place this year, but autocracy is spreading, independent institutions are weakening and young people are rejecting the status quo.”
A survey pegged to the January 15-19 2024 World Economic Forum (WEF) meetings in Davos, Switzerland captured that gloom. The poll of 1500 business leaders, academics and politicians found “a predominantly negative outlook for the world over the next two years that is expected to worsen over the next decade”, with 54 per cent braced for “some instability and a moderate risk of global catastrophes” in the short term — and 30 per cent predicting severe upheaval.....”
This anxious mood seems out of proportion to reality; some economic indicators show modest improvement. One possible reason, as the Natto Team has previously pointed out, is that media survive by attracting eyeballs: if it bleeds, it leads.
Another reason for pessimism, according to Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett, is a sense of disappointment: events in recent years have undermined confidence in the rightness and inevitable progress of the international liberal order. “While Davos attendees used to assume that history was going in a straight line towards more globalisation, free-market capitalism, innovation and democracy, all those things are now under attack. ... it seems that ‘progress’ and history are going into reverse.”
Tett tries to counter this pessimism, citing signs of progress such as breakthroughs in renewable energy and medicine, broadening access to information, central bank policies that have so far averted a financial crisis, and elections such as Poland’s that show “the slide to autocracy is not inevitable.” Regardless of these positive developments, it does seem that confidence in progress itself--that the western-led liberal world order will lead to inevitable liberation and improvement in people’s lives—is eroding.
Timothy Snyder: The Politics of Responsibility:
To address anxieties about the erosion of democracy and the threat of tyranny, Yale University professor of Eastern European history Timothy Snyder offers some lessons from a lifetime of study on how societies in that region survived periods of colonial and totalitarian domination. Snyder attributes some of today’s political problems to our mindset, our habits of ignoring, misreading or distorting complex realities. He says we often force reality into narratives, selecting facts to fit our ideas about the broad arc of history. Snyder describes several unfruitful views of history that affect political decision-making: he calls these the Politics of Inevitability, the Politics of Eternity, and the Politics of Catastrophe. In contrast, he offers a different approach: the Politics of Responsibility.
Inevitability
The politics of inevitability predominated in the Western world since World War II and particularly after the fall of Communism and apartheid at the turn of the 1990s. It was the idea that the Western-dominated liberal world order would lead societies inevitably toward greater freedom, “the idea that there are no alternatives, that history is over and that we’re all just kind of on a vector where things are going to turn out OK,” as he phrased it in a 2023 TED talk.
This attitude can lead to complacency, to explaining away facts that do not fit the narrative, and to ignoring contested ideas and values. “You never perform the mental gymnastics of stretching to figure out what a better world might actually be because you think you’re on track to that better world no matter what happens,” said Snyder in a 2022 interview. As Snyder said in his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom, “Life becomes a sleepwalk to a premarked grave in a prepurchased plot.”
Knotty reality falls short of expectations. Ideals of ever-greater European integration and global harmony, for example, faced challenges since at least the 2008 global economic crisis. In a 2023 essay, British historian Timothy Garton Ash described one of the “varieties of hubris” that contributed to Europe’s “downward turn” after 2008 as the “fallacy of extrapolation.” Ash explained,
We saw the way things had gone for nearly two decades after 1989 and somehow assumed they would continue in that direction...We took history with a small h, history as it really happens—always a product of the interaction between deep structures and processes, on the one hand, and contingency, conjuncture, collective will, and individual leadership on the other—and misconstrued it as History with a capital H, a Hegelian process of inevitable progress toward freedom.
When problems arise in the liberal international order—whether income inequality, failures to take decisive measures against climate change, or racial gerrymandering—people can lose faith in institutions and governments.
Eternity
Disillusioned with the shortcomings in the Western-led liberal world order that was supposed to lead to progress, people in many countries have sought refuge in other visions of history. The “Politics of Eternity” is one of these. Snyder sees this mentality in some US politicians’ slogans about making a country “great again.” He also sees it in Vladimir Putin’s appeal to “traditional values” and insistence that Ukraine has been part of Russia from time immemorial. Snyder notes, “eternity places one nation at the centre of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past ... Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.”
Catastrophe
While some try to escape from current crises by returning to an idealized past, others critique the liberal establishment for failures to address injustice, stop wars, or effectively combat climate change. Many marginalized voters do not bother to vote, thinking it will not improve anything. In the 2023 TED talk Snyder said,
…people are so worried about the future that it's hard for them to imagine that...counting votes and representation and these basic things are really what matters. .... almost everyone is afraid of the future, whether you’re afraid of climate change, which I think is reasonable, or whether you're afraid of demography [i.e. immigrants], which I think is not reasonable. It's all part of one big sense that the future is crashing down. And if you think the future's crashing down, then democracy becomes a kind of secondary concern.
In the “On Ukraine” section of his 2022 audiobook On Tyranny and On Ukraine (Lesson 4: “The Politics of Time,” from minute 22:21) he ties the Politics of Catastrophe to the climate crisis. He defines the Politics of Catastrophe as “the thing that comes next when you ignore or deny....climate change, when you do not find alternative energy sources, when you get used to the wars and refugee crises that become ever more frequent...The underlying catastrophe here is the ecological one....but that natural catastrophe is interpreted by humans in various ways,” including through fear that one’s own population will be overwhelmed by refugees, migrants or other racial groups. Snyder interprets Russia’s war on Ukraine as a perverse response to Russia’s own demographic decline and global food scarcity by claiming Ukraine’s land and people for itself. He see that war as a “foretaste of what the politics of catastrophe will be like.” Catastrophic thinking in the face of crises can lead to panic, paralysis, or violence, Snyder implies.
Responsibility
In his 2022 audiobook, Snyder identifies the main problem in the worldviews underlying the politics of eternity, inevitability and catastrophe:
it’s as if we don’t have agency...larger forces are taking care of us, or there’s no future at all, or the future is coming for us. But in none of these modes is there any...freedom....we need to avoid not just catastrophe but also...the sense of catastrophe...we have to find a way to claim back the future so it doesn’t seem like the only thing which is coming for us is catastrophic....
Instead, Snyder argues for what he calls the “politics of responsibility.” This stems from a view of history as contingent and unpredictable, in which individuals can make a difference and in which values, ideas and individual choices matter. He urges adherents of this view of history to help create a better future by working together, thrashing out competing values and ideas to seek solutions to practical problems of the present.
The mentality behind Snyder’s Politics of Responsibility already exists in Western civilization, opines Yegor Gran, the France-based son of famous Soviet-era dissident Andrey Sinyavskiy. Gran has said,
the colossal difference between the mentalities of the West and of Russia today is that Western civilization draws its strength from the present. People improve that present in small steps: the door doesn’t close; I’ll fix it. An elderly woman cannot get across the road, I’ll help her. In Russia, however, it’s the other way around: The door doesn’t close but we have Peter the Great and compared to him, a door that doesn’t close is irrelevant.
Note added January 19 2024: Gran’s statement broadly over-generalizes: people in “the West” are not uniformly public-spirited, and ordinary Russians are quite capable of resourcefulness and generous volunteerism. One could write volumes discussing this. Suffice it to say that Russian government policy tends to crush or coopt civic volunteer initiatives, and it cultivates an image of historical greatness while neglecting decrepit provincial roads and hospitals.
Snyder’s Twenty Lessons on Tyranny: A Roadmap for a Politics of Responsibility
In his 2017 book On Tyranny, Snyder outlined 20 recommendations for protecting against a slide to totalitarianism, based on his long study of Eastern European societies. He has said that these lessons can constitute a road map for living out the Politics of Responsibility.
Timothy Snyder’s Twenty Lessons for Resisting Tyranny (for a brief explanation of each, see Snyder’s January 6, 2024 Substack post)
Do not obey in advance
Defend institutions
Beware the one-party state
Take responsibility for the face of the world
Remember professional ethics
Be wary of paramilitaries
Be reflective if you must be armed
Stand out
Be kind to our language
Believe in truth
Investigate
Make eye contact and small talk
Practice corporeal politics
Establish a private life
Contribute to good causes
Learn from peers in other countries
Listen for dangerous words
Be calm when the unthinkable arrives
Be a patriot
Be as courageous as you can
The Value of History
Snyder points to the value of a clear-eyed view of history in navigating the present. History has given us institutions, some of which are conducive to human freedom and flourishing. It also offers lessons in how people in the past have tried to solve problems similar to what we encounter today, and it invites us to hope that we can move past current crises just as our predecessors survived the crises of their day.
Institutions:
One of Snyder’s lessons was “defend institutions,” referring to things like the free press, judicial systems, law and functioning democracy: “choose an institution you care about -- a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union -- and take its side.” Such institutions, often worked out by trial and error and political debate over many years, offer mutually understood rules and protection against arbitrariness.
In response to declining trust in democracy itself, Snyder draws on his long study of very undemocratic systems that brought havoc to Eastern Europe over the years. At the 2023 TED talk, an audience member asked "Why should democracy survive? Democracies have proved to be unstable, corrupt, filled with voter ignorance and finally, do not prevent wars or violence. Why should we hold on to this imperfect ideal and not instead make room for a new system that might emerge?" Snyder responds,
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the new systems that are emerging are all just a hell of a lot worse on all those criteria which were just mentioned, whether it was corruption, ignorance or disinterest of voters, .... I’m looking at the really existing alternatives like China and Russia and so on, which are pushing themselves as a kind of model in the world that we actually live in. And on all the criteria that were just mentioned, they do worse.
The reason why I think democracy is a better kind of system is not because it's perfect, obviously. It's because I think that it, as the conceptual and ethical framework, gives us a place to aim for where we then can end up with better things than we have….democracies are flawed, but they can be made better or worse. And if you say, ‘Oh, they're all just doomed,’ or they're not really any better than ... dying young in a prison in Russia ... or they're not really any better than being observed your entire life from cradle to grave and being homogenized like in China--If you start from that premise, then you're not going to get anywhere.…democracy is the idea that the people will rule. And I think that's a better idea than that the people will not rule.... I believe there’s something special about humans where we prosper and thrive and add something to the universe when we're free. I think democracy is the best framework for that....The fact that things are imperfect doesn't mean that you toss them away.
Lessons:
In the 2023 TED talk Snyder explained, “We need the past so that we can reckon with ourselves and self-correct because self-correction is what democratic decision-making is all about.....” As the Natto Team has pointed out, conscientious historical research can help understand the present and navigate the future by illustrating the range of possible choices and outcomes, the ways human societies have faced challenges in the past, and the ingrained habits of mind and other intangible factors that could constrain the choices decisionmakers make. In a 2019 talk in Germany Snyder noted that exercising the Politics of Responsibility requires “actually producing the facts” through local media and investigative reporting, and exercising human discernment and learning rather than “ceding so much ground to the machines in our public life.” Snyder commented, “So much of what goes wrong in politics these days has to do with the fact that algorithms which don't care about us one way or the other are pretty good at figuring out what makes us angry and what makes us anxious and what makes us afraid.” Such emotions of anger, anxiety and fear make us susceptible to disinformation, as the Natto Team has noted.
Hope
History can show us patterns and allow us to learn from past mistakes. We can also draw inspiration from the way people survived and overcame past crises. In his 2023 TED talk, Snyder, citing dates associated with the rise of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, said we can learn from them without being bound by them:
So things aren't exactly like 1933. Things aren't exactly like 1917 or 1939. But when we have that history, we can at least look for some patterns….there were moments where it seemed like the larger forces were definitely pushing away from democracy.... economic inequality mattered a huge amount in the 1930s.... The sense that there was no future mattered a huge amount in the 1930s. That made it very tough for democracies. But we can also see that democracies came back from that, right?….Countries which were at the very bottom, like Germany, within a few decades were at the very top, if we're considering how well their democracies work.... the past gives us this terrific possibility to say, OK, things can go very, very, very wrong. They can go so wrong that it seems hopeless. And yet, recoveries can be staged.
Cultivating Hope
Much of the advice that commentators give for cultivating hope in our communities lines up with Snyder’s Politics of Responsibility. Washington Post columnist Amanda Ripley wrote in March 2023 that the media traditionally focused on negative stories and “....underplayed storylines and dimensions that humans need to thrive in the modern world — with the three most notable elements being hope, agency and dignity...Hope is more like a muscle than an emotion. It’s a cognitive skill, one that helps people reject the status quo and visualize a better way. If it were an equation, it would look something like: hope = goals + road map + willpower....”
Prescriptions for cultivating hope usually boil down to some of these factors:
Take time to live in the present and cultivate joy and awe
Seek out the quiet signs of progress and the people who are working to make things better. Amanda Ripley’s March 2023 op/ed urged fellow journalists to focus not just on social problems but on people who are looking for solutions: “What are realistic goals, in the face of a wicked problem? What are some of the ways other communities have tried to get there? And how did they manage to press on, even when things didn’t go as planned?”
Seek out community and avoid isolation. In the words of civic activist Eric Liu, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, “build that muscle of being in association with other people....in trying to make something happen for some common purpose — it could be a civic purpose, it could be a hobby like building a book club...Hope dies fastest when you are alone, when you are isolated and cut off from other people.”
“Multiply Picnics”
In the 1830s, French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on the vibrant local associations he found in the young US republic. Twentieth-century US social scientist Robert Putnam saw community bonds such as clubs, churches, neighborhoods, and even bowling clubs as contributing to a strong “civil society” and “social capital” that help democracies flourish; Putnam chose the memorable title “Bowling Alone” for an essay lamenting what he saw as a decline in such bonds. Putnam concluded, “Henry Ward Beecher's advice a century ago to 'multiply picnics' is not entirely ridiculous today. We should do this, ironically, not because it will be good for America -- though it will be -- but because it will be good for us.'' So-called “weak ties” – everyday friendly relationships with a variety of people in the community, whether neighbors, fellow church-goers, club members or local merchants – help strengthen the sense of belonging to a larger community transcending political differences.
In the 2020s, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned of an epidemic of loneliness, aggravated by COVID-era isolation, that is eating away at Americans’ mental and physical health and US social capital. Commentators have argued that cultivating “weak ties” can improve the well-being of individuals, communities , and the body politic.
Eric Liu, the former Clinton advisor and a co-founder of an NGO called Citizen University, ties together the virtue of hope with the politics of responsibility. Even heated partisanship can be a positive sign, he says. It shows the kind of vital civic engagement that can bolster hope. Liu has written,
American history is a record of small groups of people who keep remaking this country over and over, and who reveal to us all that the perpetual remaking is the greatest statement of fidelity to our creed and our national purpose, which is not to be like Russia, white and stagnant and oligarchic, or like China, monoethnic and authoritarian and centralized, but to be more like America, hybrid and dynamic and democratic and free to be remade.
To those who see American democracy as “imploding,” Liu cautioned against self-fulfilling cynicism. He told CNN,
I would say when you succumb to cynicism you give it power. What we are doing is hard because it is unprecedented. We are trying to be planet Earth’s first multiracial, multicultural, and multifaith democratic republic at scale. That hasn’t existed before.... The only way to determine whether this project is possible is to act as if it’s possible — that is, to commit over and over again to become that country we’d like to see. ... vote, read the news, pay attention—but the most important thing you can do is join a club.....