.... Both in the run-up to the film’s release and now as it commands Homeric box office numbers, why and how we delve into the past has become a live topic among academics and cultural commentators of late—and on display in the Musk-Holland dispute are two different approaches to this subject. The Rest Is History Festival was Holland’s approach on the podcast made manifest: a humble curiosity about the past that invites people in. It is a dynamic (and attractive) approach that contrasts mightily with both the chauvinism and sentimental nostalgia that can curdle an enthusiasm for history into something toxic and divisive. ....
...[O]n the Rest Is History podcast, Holland and Sandbrook are not deploying history to take down a rival ideological camp. A typical episode is more of an exploration of the past than a polemical exercise. Their version of history knows its own limits as a discipline, both as a prognosticating tool and as a roadmap. ....
Both at the festival and on their podcast, whether Sandbrook and Holland are talking about the Battle of Little Bighorn, Joan of Arc, or ancient Rome, the focus is on humanity rather than civilization writ large. And no one could accuse them of undervaluing the latter in their work. But they are not interested in arguing that a civilization is good because it is powerful, or that it is powerful because it is good. Holland’s book
Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World sees Western civilization and its intellectual tradition as worth preserving precisely
because a Christian society upholds the human person’s inherent dignity and worth.
For the people who view history as an unerring road map to civilizational glory, the past is a cautionary tale: We have to learn from the great empires’ failures to avoid decline.
But Sandbrook and Holland are pursuing something more interesting than retrofitting the past to suit their ideological priors. ....
The Rest Is History contemplates the past as a different country, but without indulging in the temporal hubris of people who simply happen to be alive, flattering themselves that they are superior to their predecessors. The result is something refreshingly apolitical and convivial. ....
Sandbrook summed it up best: “The past is ultimately unknowable,” he said. And it is because Holland and Sandbrook keep this last part always in mind that they approach the past less as a “how-to” manual and more as a humbling reminder that one day, much of the way we live will be unknowable to future generations. As the popularity of both the podcast and the festival shows,
The Rest Is History has found a winning formula in a study of history that is more interested in understanding the past than proving the present wrong. (
more)
There is an archive of
The Rest is History podcasts
here.
