Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today: Class 1: What is History?

Welcome to Hitler, Stalin, and the present. The class was originally called Hitler, Stalin, and US, but the appropriate authorities thought that the US might be off-putting. But I have to say right from the beginning that the US is the purpose of this class, that the underlying argument about history that I will be trying to communicate today. And I think in fact the underlying purpose of history is to understand the relationship between your own actions, your own thoughts, your own commitments, your own engagements and the things that are going on around you.

The person that you were asked to read for today, Tadeusz Borowski, took a very radical view on all of this. He was a survivor of Auschwitz and his view was that he was co-responsible for Auschwitz. Right? So he was taking this notion that we are all in history to its radical extreme, which is where I think it has to be taken. To say that you're co-responsible for everything around you isn't to say that you're the major player. It's not to say that you're dominant or hegemonic, but it is to say that you are always all the time doing something and that these things that you are doing are related among other things to how you understand your place in the world, which always has to do with how you understand the past, more or less consciously.

So the purpose of this class is to help us to understand more consciously what history is, how history matters, how it can be done better and how it can be done worse. So there are going to be a lot of you young people references in this lecture and I do this with apologies to the auditors. We're slightly in the position, and I say this with love for the dear departed Rob Breiner, but we're slightly in the position of that scene in Spinal Tap where the two band members are talking about their roles in the band and one says he's like fire and one says he's like ice and then like together we're like lukewarm water. So I'm not going to be aiming for the lukewarm water, which would be like the invisible 40-year-old. I'm going to be aiming for the young people and then the rest of you who are less young are going to have to endure.

So the purpose, this is predictable by the way. The older people have a better sense of humor. I'm going to count on them for like this is going to be the laughing gallery and like the rest of you are going to look very serious the entire time and take notes. Okay. So many of you are starting degrees or beginning a university program which has to do with policy and I understand that and policy is something that I'm very interested in myself and in one way or another have taken part in over the years and decades. And so you might be asking, well, why does history matter for policy? Why would I want to be engaged in learning about history if what I really want to do is make a difference in the world?

And the case that I hope can be made over the course of this class and the case that I hope we'll begin with this lecture is that history is probably the single most relevant discipline for policy. It is very difficult to make political change without knowing what has happened before. Indeed, one of the ways that people are systematically disempowered from making political change is by being denied knowledge of what came before. To know what came before is to have a sense of what is possible. And without that sense of what is possible, it's very difficult to make a change in the present that's going to matter for the future.

So I will add to that an anecdote and this might be a little bit subjective because of course people who talk to me know that I'm a historian but I have had the occasion to speak to a number of heads of government, heads of state, a number of people who do matter quite a lot in the political world and they all, and again it's possible they're just humoring me, but when they speak of the books that they are reading or the books that are by their bedside table, these are very often history books. They tend to be history books even in the third decade of the 21st century. They tend to be history books which is something worth keeping in mind that people who have made it just as far as one could possibly make it in the political world are, I would say, more often than the general population, readers of history. Right? So I'm closing the loop there without completely making the argument. But if you are a young person thinking about a career in policy, that is also a data point which is worth keeping in mind.

So history is about what is possible but history is also about what is meaningful, right? So here history departs a little bit from other disciplines. I don't want to speak for colleagues in other disciplines but you'll probably go into other introductory lectures and in the social sciences there is generally less concern for what is meaningful in a human sense. So history is a humanity as well as a science. I'll talk more about what that means later. But history is concerned not just with the what, but also not just with the what and the how, but also with the why. And the why in a human sense. So not just the why in a causal sense, X causes Y or X and Y cause Z, but also the why in a human sense. What things actually mean to people.

Of course, what things mean to people and what actually happens are directly related. It's a premise in some of the social sciences or in some of the methodologies of the social sciences that one can separate out the question of meaning and focus simply on the causation. Most historians would disagree with that. Most historians would think what things mean to people is embedded irretrievably, irrevocably embedded in causation. That if you want to understand what is actually happening in the world, you can't do it by abstracting away from what things mean to people. You have to also have a sense of what things mean to people. And this is very important for how one proceeds with history or if you'll indulge me in this remark, with how you proceed with your education in general.

Because if you understand causation as simply a matter of non-human causes or if you understand humans in such a way that they can be reduced to machines or objects or other fully predictable kinds of entities then you are following one path, right? And that path will lead you to things that are parsimonious, that are elegant, which might seem true, but that path will not be a historical path. If you're trying to do historical work or if you're understanding the world historically that means that you're starting from the axiom that people are not exactly like machines and that efforts to reduce human beings to predictable entities, models, algorithms, what have you, are going to lead in a certain direction and that direction may not be the direction of truth.

Okay. So what can happen, I mean going back to policy now and thinking about the uses of history, what can happen is something that we're all interested in knowing I assume, right? What can happen, what might happen in the future, what is possible is something that we're all interested in. I take for granted if you're interested in policy or if you're interested in taking part in politics in one form or another then the issue of what can happen is very important and this is not as simple as it might appear. There are two approaches to what can happen which history disproves but which are very attractive and in fact attractive to the point of being seductive and indeed can lead you in one way or another to your doom.

One way, and this would be now directed to the young people although I might be out of date. One way is the idea that anything can happen right now, anything can happen. I'm just going to say it right out loud, it's not true. It is just not true that anything can happen. It's an attractive view, right? Like anything is possible. Your world is wide open. You know, you can do whatever you want. Simply not true. Simply not true. Most of the things that could happen are not going to happen. Okay. Then there's the opposite view which history also disproves which is that nothing is possible.

Okay. Nothing is possible is seductive in a different way. Nothing is possible says there are larger forces, divine, mechanistic, whatever it might be. There are larger forces. What you do in the end doesn't matter. You bear no responsibility because the causes are overwhelming. Everything is already always overdetermined. Nothing that you do can matter. Okay, both of those views are equally disempowering and they're related. If you think that anything is possible or that you can do anything, you will unfortunately eventually swing over to the position that nothing is possible very likely. Right? These two things are closely related psychologically because you'll be disappointed. You'll find that everything is not possible, that the future is not wide open because not everything can happen.

On the other hand, if you think that nothing is possible, then you're disempowered from the beginning. There's no reason why you would ever take action. There's no reason why you'd ever take meaningful action. You might join an organization, you might join a company, you might do something, but there's no particular reason why you would think that anything that you do is actually going to matter. History takes the middle position, the lukewarm water position, if you like. History takes the middle position which is incredibly boring but which is actually in the end of the day I hope vivifying and I'm going to try to show how history takes the middle position which is that some things are possible and some things are not. That some futures are possible and some futures are not possible and that the more you know about the past the better your chances are of seeing which futures are possible.

So in this precise way, the more historical knowledge you have, the more empowered you are vis-à-vis the future precisely. And this may seem counterintuitive at the beginning, right? You may think, well, history is just about the past. It's about things that already happened, but there is no such thing as happened. Everything is always happening. Everything which every human being did since the dawn of time is still reverberating outwards in its causation. Everything which everybody did 5,000 years ago or 50,000 years ago still has causal influence now. There are no dead ends in history. Right? So there is no happened. There's only happening. And so the more you know about the past, the more you know about what is happening now. And the more you know about what is happening now, the more you can influence the future.

Another way to think about this is in terms of lines coming from the past. This is just a metaphor. It's imprecise but it might be helpful. History can be thought of in terms of a series of lines coming from the past. So if you think of the present as like a horizon and then there are lines coming from the past towards that horizon. Nothing that happens in the future will be totally unrelated to any of those lines. The only way to have some notion of what can happen in the future and therefore change the future is to be on one of those lines, is to be familiar with one of those lines. If you're not on any of these lines coming from the past, then you can't go towards the future.

Or to give you an even stupider metaphor, imagine that you're in like, I don't know, Alberta. Okay? And now imagine that Alberta had an incredible set of trains, right? Like there were railways running all through Alberta. Then you could... Okay, who's from Alberta? All right. So, like, yay, you've already been called out. Imagine that like you could get on any one of these rails and go across Alberta. That's one situation. Okay. Now, imagine that you've just dropped into the middle of Alberta with a parachute and you're just kind of looking around. That's being without history. That's being without history. Right?

History is like, it doesn't give you everything, but it gives you a line that's headed towards the future. If you're not on one of those lines, then the present is going to seem very confusing indeed. As perhaps it does seem confusing, right? I mean, you don't have to nod your heads now, but the present really is in fact confusing, which is another point about history. Okay? So, I'm going to give away a secret, which is that nobody actually knows what's going on right now. No one knows what's going on right now. No one knows. Okay.

The experience of the present is one of being pounded with a thousand impulses of mutually contradictory certainty, none of which actually describes reality. In 50 or 60 years, if we make it that long, there might be a good historian who writes a good book about what's happening now, which will make sense. But no one actually knows what's happening right now. There's no way to start from the present and understand the future. That is an illusion. It's a comfortable illusion, but it's an illusion. If you're in the present, especially in the internet world, the world of social media, you're bombarded with lots of certainty, much of it, by the way, completely inhuman, about what's going on, right? But that's not the same thing as actually knowing what's going on.

You can have some confidence about things that happened in the past. And the things that happened in the past in turn can give you some grounding in all of the confusion about the present which can in turn give you some kind of confidence about what might happen in the future. So that's a sense of what history can often offer. Okay. Now the next point here is that not everything that purports to be history is in fact history. So, for example, I don't know, I shouldn't, I mean, I don't know what the Canadian curricula are, so I won't make fun of them yet. I'll put that off till next year. But in general, the things that you study in school are not, I'm sorry, history.

The things that politicians say about the past attract the word history, but they're not history. Very rarely are they history. Usually it's some kind of comfortable myth about how we used to be innocent and then bad things came along and now things are terrible as the result of other people. Think of the cliché, and it is a cliché, that history repeats. When I'm in interviews and so on, I'm asked all the time, like the premise of the question is, well, we see that history is repeating. Okay, here comes another big reveal. History doesn't repeat.

It doesn't repeat. And think for a moment about the implications of the notion that history repeats. If history repeats like a stanza in a poem or like the chorus in a song, then we don't matter at all because history is doing the repeating. Right? History doesn't in fact repeat. That's not how history works. You can learn things from the past. You can recognize patterns and those patterns can ground you a little bit in the present, but history doesn't repeat. History is not the actor. Human beings are the actor. Human beings make history. So the whole notion that history repeats, like it seems to enlighten but actually it disempowers.

A similar structure you can find in political nostalgia where whether it's for example Vladimir Putin talking about the Middle Ages or Donald Trump talking about, I'm not sure, the 30s or the 40s maybe of the last century, where politicians pick out some period where everything they think was perfect and human beings were innocent and they say that is where we're going to go back to, right? And this is very attractive as politics, it works very well as politics. And in talking about this kind of politics, politics commentators, journalists very often call it history, which I have to resist most powerfully.

And I want to try to make sure that you don't talk about those things as history. You can call them the politics of memory, you can call them memory politics, you can call them a politics of the past, but it's very important, I think we can discuss this, but it's very important I think to preserve history for a much more critical academic enterprise rather than for a political enterprise which is designed to show that the status quo is the only way that things can possibly be. Okay. So, why do people tell you that the past repeats or why do people give you the goal, for example, of going back to the past? Because those things are completely disempowering.

These things are not just not historical, they're actually anti-historical in the sense that they deprive you of the agency which history is meant to give you. If I tell you that history repeats, it doesn't matter what you do. History is just going to repeat. Or if I tell you that the aim of politics is to get us back to a period a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago, you're also totally disempowered. Not just because that's impossible. I'm not even going to count that as a big reveal, right? Like you know that we can't actually time travel back to the past. It's not just though that it's impossible. It's that if I as the person in power say the goal of politics is to go back to a moment which I define as great or innocent or primordial or whatever.

Then you're giving me the authority to define what is good, what is primordial, what is innocent. Right? So that reference to the past, to that moment of goodness or greatness or innocence or whatever it might be, is an inherently tyrannical claim because it's saying I standing here am going to define when things were good, when things were innocent, to where we all should be going back. And those of course are just some of the ways that history can be used to disempower people. In this class we're going to be talking about National Socialism otherwise known as Nazism. We're going to be talking about Stalinism. These are, and we'll go into much more detail about this, but these are also schemes about the past in which there are very strong views which call themselves history, but which generally have the consequence of denying people that kind of historical agency.

So for example, if there is a Nazi, the Nazi will say we all belong to races. We can't do anything about that. What races do is they struggle with each other for land. That's inevitable. There's nothing more to history than that. Okay. So, if that is true, then that means that none of the individuality of anybody matters. Ultimately, you have a racial essence and your racial essence leads you to struggle. That's it. So, there's no, you don't need any other key to understand the past or the present or the future. As George Orwell said about the Nazis, this is all very boring. It just means that there's endless pointless struggle generation after generation.

Stalinism has a related problem. Stalinism says the way to understand history is in terms of a pretty simple relationship between economic change and changes in culture or politics. If that were true, if changes in the means of production directly affected everything in culture and politics, then it wouldn't really matter whether you're taking notes or not. It wouldn't really matter whether you're going to college or not. It wouldn't really matter whether you go into politics or not. None of these things would actually matter because somewhere there is a change in the means of production which is determining everything.

Now, by the way, I'm not saying that changes in the means of production don't matter. They clearly do, right? The fact that we have now moved into a digital age, which I'll talk about later, clearly does affect our individuality. It's just not the only thing that matters. And our very awareness of our historical position and our awareness of what the changes in the means of production do to us is also part of history. So when we're going to be learning about Nazism and Stalinism in this class, that's part of the point of this class. But we should also be aware that they themselves are views about what the past means. That they themselves claim to be accounts of history.

So one of the things that we're going to be doing and maybe the main thing we're going to be doing in this class is trying to sort out what is possible. And I'm bringing Nazism and Stalinism into this for a very simple reason which is that the period of the 1930s and 1940s which we'll be concentrating on. Okay, this is a big historical argument. It's not as glamorous as some arguments you'll find in philosophy. It's not as sophisticated as some arguments you'll find in the physical sciences, but I nevertheless think it's a pretty good argument. The things that actually happened must have been possible because they happened.

Okay. All right. I'll try it again. The things that actually happened must have been possible because they happened. Right. Okay. Do I have, is the crowd with me on this? I'm just hoping the crowd... Okay. Thank you for the positive feedback. I have to learn how to measure, you know, the sort of Canadian cosmopolitan reactions, right? Because no, because it's different. It's different. Like Americans open their mouths when they don't understand. Like you guys don't do that. And so I have to like, which means I can pick out Americans in the crowd by the way. So also Canadians laugh at American jokes. That's another way to pick out who's who. Okay. Uneasy laughter. Okay, everyone should laugh at American jokes especially Americans.

So okay, where were we? So in this class, so this is a very basic point, right? If one is concerned about what is possible, history gives you a baseline because the things that happened must have been possible because they happened and that may seem like a very simple point but it can also be almost unbearable. So we will be studying concentration camps and death facilities and political systems that are thought of as totalitarian. Those things must have been possible because they happened, right? They must have been possible because they happened. Which doesn't mean that the same things will happen again.

But it does mean that things like mass murder, huge systems of concentration camps, political terror are comfortably within the spectrum of possibility. That these are not marginal but mainstream events and that these things could be helpful in helping us to understand what could be possible in our own century. So the idea that history is empowering can seem positive and it can also seem negative. Right? So it can seem positive in the way that I talked about before. The more you know about history, the better chance you have of understanding the present. The more lines you can follow from the past, the better your chances of following one of those lines into the future.

But it can also seem frightening because if you're aware of all the dreadful things that happened in the past, and the ones in this class are just some examples of dreadful things that happened in the past, then you're also aware that those things were possible. And that can seem very depressing. The way that I would bring these two things together is to say something like this. If one is aware that these terrible things are possible and if one is aware of how they were possible then you can make them less likely to return. Right? Then you have the ability to make things like that less likely to happen in the future.

Okay. So part of the class of course, so that's where the class is going, but part of the class of course is going to be learning about what did happen, right? About what did happen. And when I say what did happen I don't mean in the dead sense that I have absolute knowledge and that I'm just going to give it to you. The things that I'll be teaching to you in this class are things that I once didn't know myself. The things I'm going to be teaching you in this class are not a matter of my finding some book of wisdom and opening the pages and realizing here is the truth. We're chiefly reading my book Bloodlands and like any good history book. Okay, I just said my own book was good. So, sorry that was very un-Canadian. But other violations will follow.

But in any book like that one included that is of any good in history, it will be a result of testing hypotheses and finding out that the hypotheses were wrong. And that is the way that history is like a science. So when I went into Bloodlands, I had a scope, right? I had a laboratory and the laboratory was the 1930s and 1940s in a certain part of Europe. I had certain ideas that I was testing, all of which turned out to be to one degree or another wrong. As I got into the evidence, I tested and tested and tested until I could find formulations which seem to hold up. That's what history is like.

So, I'm going to be lecturing to you, which I understand is very old-fashioned, and I appreciate you're taking part in it. But when I lecture, I just want you to keep in mind that the things that I think I understand aren't a matter of an on-off switch. They're not even a matter of reading one book or not reading one book. They're a matter of testing things, trying them out, trying to figure them out. So part of this class of course will have to involve learning about things that happened. And the very first reading assignment that I gave you, Borowski's story Here in Our Auschwitz, leads you into some of those things that happened.

And here I'm going to have to say something about the relationship between reading and lecture. It is really important to do the reading before you do the lecture. It's really, the lecture is going to stop making sense very quickly or it's going to make a lot less sense if you haven't. Okay, I can see some guilty looks if you haven't done the reading, right? So, please do the reading before lecture. You're welcome to do it after lecture as well. But please do the reading be... the grad students smile at that. Please do the reading before lecture. I'm doing my part by lecturing. You do your part by reading. If we don't both do our parts, then the class doesn't work. Right? This is not a passive exercise. Like I'm not a digital figure. We're both involved in this. So please, sorry, that was a lecture within a lecture, but please do the reading before class. Otherwise, things aren't going to make as much sense.

I'm entering, when I walk up here, I'm entering into a situation where I assume that you have done the reading, right? I can't assume otherwise. If I assume you haven't done the reading, then I'm insulting you. If I assume you haven't done the reading, then I'm not moving through the class. Right? So, we have to do this together. All right. Mini lecture over. So, some of the events that are in the background or in the foreground of the story that you read here in Auschwitz are the events that we'll be covering in this class as historical events.

Tadeusz Borowski is born at around the time of the collapse of world empires which is going to be the subject of the next lecture. The collapse of empire takes the very specific form in Europe of the First World War where the great imperial powers of the world concentrate their accumulated wealth and power against one another for about four years. Particularly the Russian Empire breaks down and Borowski grows up, or Borowski's future is formed by a situation in which a Soviet Union is created and has a boundary with Poland and he and his family, although they're Poles, are on the Soviet side.

He and his brother and his mother and father then experience in one way or another most of the events that we will be describing. The famine in Soviet Ukraine of which they're survivors. The Soviet Great Terror, both his father and his mother are sentenced to the gulag. And then after they return to Poland and Poland is destroyed in the Second World War, the ghetto, Auschwitz, the Holocaust, and concentration camps in general. All of these are in this story or if they're not in the story they're somewhere behind the story. Okay. So if you have read, since you have read, I'll put it that way, Here in Our Auschwitz, I want to then move on to how a story like this can help us to understand history.

So on the one side in this story and in the background of the story are events of tremendous scale. The crackup of world empire, the attempt to recreate empires within Europe. The drastic attempt to destroy states carried out by Nazi Germany. The removal of citizenship of everyone in Eastern Europe under Nazi rule, the creation of a vast set of concentration camps, one of which Borowski chooses to enter. And I say chooses to enter advisedly because it brings to light the other side of what we think we're doing when we do history.

Borowski did choose to enter. He chose to enter Auschwitz. Yes, I can see he chose. Some people did. He chose it. He did it out of love, by the way. So like if you think your love life is interesting, you know, like there's a much higher standard out there. No, I can tell from his laughing who didn't read the story, you know, but his girlfriend, he followed his girlfriend to Auschwitz and his girlfriend in turn went to Auschwitz as a result of loyalty to other people.

And that, you know, that may seem like a minuscule tiny detail in this larger story of the million or so people who were murdered at Auschwitz or the larger number of people who passed through Auschwitz, but if you know that he chose to follow his girlfriend to Auschwitz, that he did it on purpose, then you have in mind an element which you can't actually pull out of the story even in what seems to be as overwhelming or deterministic as something like Auschwitz, which is the element of human choice and human agency. He didn't have to do that.

And when you read his stories, and this is only one of them, and I hope you'll read the others. When you read his stories, you'll realize how perfectly aware he was of this because in the stories, he often writes characters who are based on himself, but who do different things. So, for example, he has a story in which he doesn't follow his girlfriend to Auschwitz, and she's murdered. But in fact he did follow his girlfriend to Auschwitz and in fact they both survived. Right?

And so this is a very broad way of bringing into focus this very important point which is that history has to be about both how something like Auschwitz was possible but also about the individuals who were in any position in Auschwitz. And Borowski is interesting about this and also heartless about this because he refuses to say that anyone was an absolute villain and that anyone was an absolute victim. He insists that no matter who you were at some point you bore some kind of responsibility, however minor, that never actually ended.

And that's a much more difficult point of view. That's a very difficult point of view to accept because a comfortable way of looking at history, very comfortable. And it's a very comfortable way of looking at the events we're about to describe is that there were the good guys and there were the bad guys. That's very comfortable. And of course, one doesn't want to dismiss evil and one doesn't want to drop the language of moral condemnation. Those are also important things. In fact, probably necessary.

But if we look at the history of the Soviet Union or the history of Nazi Germany or the history of imperialism or whatever it might be and we say, "Well, this happened because some people were good and some people were bad." That's, not only is that wrong and not very helpful, but it's extremely comfortable, right? Because when you think about history that way, you almost always think, well, yes, I was on the good side or I would have been on the good side, right? I would not have been a perpetrator. I would have been a victim. And I'm sad to say it, but that is not likely to have been the case.

And one of the reasons why one studies history is to recognize that of course morality is part of history, but not in the easy way of there were good guys and there were bad guys and you just had to choose the right side and then everything would have been okay. So there's a temptation to read into the past, especially events that are on the scale of things like colonialism or the Holocaust. There's a temptation to say, "Oh yes, I recognize the good side and the bad side and therefore I'm a good person and therefore I always make good choices and that's all I need to know about history." That is not learning from history, right? That is the opposite of learning from history.

And so Borowski's radical position on all this can be very helpful. Okay? So that history has to do with the individual and with larger forces is generally true. The account of Borowski and Auschwitz is an extreme example of this but which helps us to understand the general point. Okay. So now how then do we think about this source, this story in relation to history? What does it mean to lead off a history class with a piece of fiction? Why, again I have to just close my eyes and assume that you have all read this and like, you know, don't hurt my feelings in the future.

So what does it mean to begin reading history with a piece of fiction? How is that helpful? Okay, first of all, there's something very basic to be understood about text and that's, this is where I'm going to start. History is a very imperial discipline. Okay. I once when I took intro to anthropology I was struck by a formulation that the professor used which was that anthropology is imperial and he didn't mean in the banal sense that like people from the West invented ethnography and he didn't mean that. What he meant was, I mean that's all true but that's not so interesting. What he meant was anthropology consumes all other disciplines, right?

So, you know, you think you're a biologist and then I say, well, I'm going to do an ethnography of biology and I'm going to do my year of ethnography in your biolab and I'm going to learn about the habits in your biolab, right? And so, in that way, anthropology consumes biology. Or you know, you think you're a stamp collector. Oh, no, but I'm going to do an anthropology of your philately, right? And thereby I consume everything that you do. History is like that up to a point.

So long as you know it's... Hi there. I'm not going to make the joke you think I'm going to make. I'm just not going to do it. So history is like that too up to a point, right? So, you say, "Okay, I'm a chemistry major." And then I say, "Yes, there's a whole history of chemistry and let me put the periodic table in historical context." Or you say, I'm interested in butterflies and I say, oh yes, like there's a whole historiography of the interest. And there is, there's a historiography of almost everything, right?

So, history is in this sense imperial so long as there are texts. So, that's the first point about what history is and what it isn't, which is very elementary. History is imperial in the sense that, I mean I don't mean this in like a critical sense I just mean it in a kind of definitional sense of what the scope is. History reaches out so far as there are texts and that's why reading any text is relevant to history. A very basic point. History stops though where there isn't text. History is done, history only exists where there is text.

And that might seem like a trivial limitation but in fact it's not so depending on how you reckon what a human is. We've been around for a million years, 100,000 years. We've been around for a long time. And much of what we were doing in that time was arguably more interesting than what we're doing now, right? I mean, what are we doing now? We're like walking down the street and staring at our phones. It's very possible that for the previous 999,000 years of history, or not history, sorry, human existence, we were doing things more interesting than walking down the street looking at our phones. It's possible, right? In fact, I'd say it's probable. But there isn't a written record of it.

And therefore, historians are not competent or they don't deal with the things that happened before the invention of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt before we get those sources on stones about 5,000 years ago. History doesn't really try to understand. That's one end. And then we may be in the other end now. So, history has a problem when there are no written sources.

It also has a problem when there's an infinitude of written sources and when those sources are hard to parse, right? So 50 years from now, I mean a very simple example, there are no longer presidential archives in the United States. There used to be because back in the good old days, if you'll forgive my moment of nostalgia, people type things up. This was like the golden age for historians, okay? People type things up. They typed them out in triplicate with carbon paper and then they forgot about copies second and third. They put them in an archive somewhere. Somebody filed them. Maybe they remembered to burn the first copy, right? But somewhere in some provincial archive somewhere there was a second and third copy and then historians could read that.

From about the time of the Obama administration, there are no longer presidential records on paper, which means that 60 years from now, looking back at the Obama administration, people are going to have a much harder time than they did with the Eisenhower administration or with Roosevelt or whatever, right? And so we may, this is just something to think about, but we may be approaching the other extreme now where of course there's an infinitude of writing but what are historians going to do with like, I don't know, like long heartfelt conversations with Grok, you know? I mean something maybe, who knows, but there's a lot. Like what are we going to do, how are we going to manage an amount of reading which is more than the human can do but which also tends to be deprived of contexts which are at least contexts just going to be easy to understand.

Okay. So, but the point here is that any piece of prose can be dealt with as history, right? It doesn't have to be a history book. It does however have to be writing. Okay. Second reason why, second basic point that I want to make here is the difference between prose and poetry. So, one of the reasons that I chose Borowski is that he is a poet. He was a poet who was forced to write prose. And you know, for all of you literature students out there, this will no doubt be an incredibly primitive point and you will like crumple up your notes and throw them at me. Please don't do it while the camera is running though because that's going to be embarrassing.

But one of the differences between poetry and prose historically is political. So poetry is used and very often has been used, not the poetry you write I know which is like existential and deep and about, you know, that she doesn't love you and so on, but like, or that she does but not the right way or whatever it is. But historically poetry has very often served the political function of glorifying the conqueror, right? So if you were a Viking for example, one of the people who would travel with you would be quite literally your poet and the poet would then write poems about the great things that you did.

And that's a very useful function. It's incredibly interesting. But poetry works differently than prose, right? Poetry is meant to summon up some kind of ineffable moment of understanding like where everything falls into place for a moment of clarity. And it has therefore certain powerful political functions. What I'm trying to say is that history is written in prose for a reason. That history is not, I mean again like in your papers when it comes time to tutorial and like you have an assignment, if you want to write the thing in poetry, I'm not going to stop you. Like you're welcome to try to disprove what I'm saying.

But in general we use prose for the more critical purposes. We use prose when we're actually trying to explain that there's a lot of detail involved, that there are all kinds of ramifications that we don't know, that we have to write at a certain length and so on. So Borowski was a poet who only wrote prose because of Auschwitz. That's the only reason. He hated prose, he didn't want to write prose, he only started because of Auschwitz. And so I'm just trying to draw to your attention this other aspect of history which is very simple but which may be overlooked, which is that it has to do with prose. We generate history in prose. Not in speech, not in poetry, but in written prose.

The next thing though that I want to do with this...

The source is to think about, is to think about what a source actually is. So what, like, what does it mean to talk about history? What is the relationship between history and sources? So in this text, for the purposes of this class and in general, if you're reading a Borowski story or any story about the Second World War, you will be thinking of this as a primary source. So if you're trying to understand what is happening, this is a primary source and not a secondary source. What's the difference between a primary source and a secondary source? The difference between a primary source and a secondary source doesn't have to do with it. It has to do with you. So a primary source is a source that you're reading against itself to try to understand things from it that it didn't necessarily want to yield to you. Right? So a primary source might be a letter written between two people and they have their own purposes for writing. You know, it's Valentine's Day or whatever, but you read the letter because you are trying to understand what was going on in February of 1932, right? So, a primary source is a source that you read because you have your own agenda. It's a source that you read, you read it empathetically because you're trying to understand the people, but you're also reading it against their purposes. You have your own purpose, which is to figure out what was going on, right? So to take a more, a more political example, in, in, in 1938, the, the, the powers of Europe decided that it was fine for Nazi Germany to dismember Czechoslovakia.

You can very easily go into the library and read the main historical documents of all of the great powers at that time, and you can, this would take you an afternoon. Okay, I'm just like fantasizing that one of you is going to go do this. All right, fantasy's over. So you could do this in an afternoon, but if you did that, if you were reading the Polish documents and the Soviet documents and the German documents, the French ones, the British ones, the Austrian ones, because, sorry, not the Austrian ones, there was no Austria. But if you, if you, the Czechoslovak ones, if you read those documents, you can do something that people at the time couldn't do because they weren't reading each other's documents. I mean, except insofar as they had spies, which is another story. You can take your time and you can read those documents against the purposes of the people who are writing them. They're doing something, right? They're trying to protect their own country's interests. They're trying to take advantage of the situation. Whatever it is, you're trying to understand the overall meaning of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, right? So, you're doing something which is against the grain of what the sources are, and thereby those sources become primary sources. So if you read Borowski's story, you can read it as a story, as I hope you did, but you can also read it as a primary source. You can say, okay, this is one source which can help me understand what Auschwitz is like, but the nature of a primary source is not that it reveals the truth on its own. This is very important. This is part of what I mean by reading against.

One of my favorite moments as a historian was when I was taking part in actually a very important gathering of Polish and Ukrainian historians. It had to do with events between 1943 and 1948 when there was ethnic cleansing in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, and Poles and Ukrainians, and this is actually a very wise and fruitful project. Polish and Ukrainian historians got together and wrote a series of papers about the major topics, where each of them wrote a paper under the same title, right? Which forced them to confront each other, and that was very helpful and interesting. But there were, but not every historian is a great historian, and historians are not always sober. So there was, and they had beer at lunch, and so it was a late lunch, and one of the historians in particular had several beers, and at the end of it, like, so, like, and then the first afternoon panel, one of the, the, the speaker who shall remain anonymous picked up a document and said, you know, this is true, and I have a document to prove it. Okay, that is not how history works. There is no one document which reveals the truth. Documents always exist in context, and when you're a historian, you're always trying to, like, you're going from this document to this document, and this reminds you of some other place you could look, and you just keep circling, circling, circling for as long as you can, right? There is no one document which tells you the truth.

So to give you an example, a very simple example from Borowski himself, not so much in this story, but in his stories in general, he presents himself in Auschwitz. He uses names which are much like his name. He calls himself Tadush or Tadzio or Tadek. And in his stories, he is generally cruel and heartless and exploits other people. In the stories, that's how he presents himself. And if all you knew was the stories, you would think, okay, this fellow Borowski, he really did survive Auschwitz because he was a horrible human being. However, that is not what the preponderance of the documents actually reveals. The other people who were in Auschwitz with him present him as unusually energetic and empathetic, and as having been responsible for other people's lives being saved, the other documents. Now, so if you think, okay, Borowski's stories are true about everything, and if also you have a very simple assumption like people always boast about themselves as opposed to the opposite, then you would think, okay, well, I know, I know about this guy Borowski, he was this terrible person, he just, you know, maybe, maybe he, maybe, you know, he was somewhat rescued by the quality of his prose, but he was a terrible human being. However, if you know the other sources around Borowski, you realize actually he presented himself as being a much worse person than he in fact was, maybe to make this point about responsibility, about how everyone bears responsibility, but as a matter of fact he wasn't, he wasn't the person that he presented himself as being. So every primary source is that... How much time is left, or is that okay?

Oh, okay. Wow. All right. I encourage other people to bring signs because I will, like, I'll react to them and, like, you know, we can have a discussion back and forth. You could hold up, like, signs in different languages and see if I can read them. It'll be lots of fun. Okay. So, okay. So, where was I? Okay. So, so, so, so that's one thing. That's one thing to think about with primary sources is that they're interesting, they're fun, you're reading them against the grain, and you always need more of them. A secondary source, on the other hand, is a source that you're reading with the grain. So again, it's up to you, right? It has to do with your purposes. So in this class, my book Bloodlands is a secondary source because you're meant to be reading it to understand these historical events. However, let's say later on you were doing a project about what do professors at the Munk School or at the U of T assign, right? And what does that have to say, what does it have to do with them? Then that could be, then the same book could become a primary source, right? So, because you're reading it against the grain. So that's, that's the difference between primary sources and secondary sources. Or to give, give another example, like if you're reading, let's say you're reading Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, and you're reading it to understand the 20th century, then it's a secondary source. But let's say you're trying to understand Hannah Arendt's relationship with Martin Heidegger, which if you don't know about it, I'll just leave that there for you, then you could be reading it as a primary source because you're not reading it for its own purposes, you're reading it for your own purposes, and that's what turns it into a primary source.

The next issue that reading a story raises about history, which is very important, is the problem of narrative. So narrative is the way that we generally write history, but narrative is also a temptation, right? So what's the temptation of narrative? What's a narrative which is very tempting? Do you have, you have, you have an answer?

Yeah. Okay. So, that's a good example. Not everybody can hear, but I'll just repeat. So, so good guy, bad guy is a very good narrative. I mean, the most familiar narrative, or one very familiar one, would be the happy ending. It's probably so familiar that one doesn't even think of it as a narrative. But you might have noticed that not all films, I understand it's a very sophisticated genre, but many, many popular films operate by raising tension, by creating a sense that everything's going to go wrong, and then by some miraculous constellation of friendship, love, and high technology at the end everything turns out okay. Right? That's an, that's a certain kind of narrative structure, and historians have to, have to write within the language such that everyone can understand them, and so a certain amount of narrative is inevitable, right? Like if I'm writing a history of something, I have to speak about it in a way that you'll understand, I have to follow a certain convention up to a point. On the other hand, I have to avoid the temptation of making a narrative very neat in a way which is persuasive but maybe not true. So here, Borowski gives us another example of a kind of narrative temptation which I just want to share with you. So in July of 1951, Borowski killed himself with gas from a stove.

There is an overwhelming narrative temptation there. And the overwhelming narrative temptation is this man saw a million people die at Auschwitz, almost a million. That was his term, but it was in the high hundreds of thousands. This man saw hundreds of thousands of people die at Auschwitz. They were being killed by gas. In the end, he couldn't take it anymore. And so he killed himself. And he killed himself by gas in order to demonstrate his solidarity or something. That is an irresistible narrative temptation. And I say irresistible because as a matter of fact, it has not been resisted like that. That way of putting those facts together is incredibly tempting. However, it may not be correct. It may not be correct. So, but you, you feel the temptation of this, right? Like there's a fact, is like if you're, if you're writing, if you're writing a play and you had that set of facts, you would very likely be using that fact as the way to bring Act Three to a very clean close. But history isn't necessarily like that, right? And one has to beware of narratives which are too satisfying, too easy, where the arc is too clean. So in the case of Borowski, July 1951 and his death by gas, there are multiple possibilities of what could actually have happened. And I think the possibility that he killed himself out of despair as a result of Auschwitz is, is not very likely. So to, to, to make them, to make matters more real, I will call upon a couple of witnesses or a couple of people who had informed opinions, namely his wife and his girlfriend. So his, his wife Maria, who's the same person who figures in the story, her name was Maria Rondo, and as in the story, she was sent to Auschwitz, and as in the story, the two of them were there at the same time, as in the story, she survives, and eventually the two of them end up married in Stalinist Poland in the 1940s and into the early 1950s. She has just given birth to his child at the time that he kills himself. Her view, which one takes to be an informed view, is that Borowski was manic depressive, that he was always manic depressive, and that the only time when he was really at his best was during the two years at Auschwitz, and that before that and after that he was unable to control his manic depression, that he had tried to kill himself a number of times with drugs and with gas, and that he finally succeeded by using both drugs and gas. That is, that is her version, right? His girlfriend's version is he didn't actually kill himself at all. It was an accident. He wasn't in despair about Auschwitz or anything else at the time. He just had, he had an article due the next day. He stayed up late to write it. He turned on the stove to make tea. He left the stove on, and it was all an accident. Okay. Now, one, if one takes a step back and is critical, one can see how those two parties would have their own interests in those two versions. Naturally, the wife would want to make the story make sense within a larger scope of his life, which she understood. Naturally, the girlfriend would want to think that he was looking forward to a happy future, presumably with her, right? And so no primary source is unmotivated. But when you have those two primary sources, they probably do make the attractive narrative implausible. And that's what, that's, that's my point, that you, the, the, the more powerful the event, something like Auschwitz, for example, the more tempted we are to make it make sense in a way which is comfortable. And that is what happened to Borowski. I, I tend to think that he killed himself, but not so much for political reasons having to do with Auschwitz, but however it might be, it's very unlikely to be the version which we find comfortable. And this is always true in history, and it's so in general. If you read a history book and, and, and you read it and you say, wow, like, this is what I always thought, and I'm feeling great now, that was a terrible history book that you just read. If you read a history book and you, and you think, 'Ha, this made me a little bit uncomfortable, and now I can see some things I didn't see before,' that might have been a good history book that you just read, right? So again, the example of Borowski is extreme, but, but it reveals the general truth. It is very tempting to make extreme events like Stalinist terror or like death camps. It's very tempting to make them make sense. It's very tempting to jump to some kind of conclusion which makes them make sense. That's very tempting. It's just not history. And so one has to be careful that one is resisting those kinds of things. Okay. So, and this is, I'm just, I mean, to just, to make the, to bring the point home politically, these events, the history of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union matter in politics in ways which have to do precisely with oversimple narratives or with narratives that are not true. So, for example, people say, not so much in this country, but in the US, people say, well, the problem with both National Socialism and the Soviet Union was that they had a welfare state. And, and that just shows how, you know, if the government does anything to help people, you'll eventually have totalitarianism and camps. All right, that, I mean, for a hundred reasons, that's ridiculous. But it's a narrative which, which allows people to confirm the things they already believe on the basis of powerful historical events. And this is a really fundamental temptation, and it's one to be watchful for. It is rare for people to learn of a powerful historical event and then to say, 'Aha, this changes the way I see the world.' All too often what people do is they say, 'Okay, I just learned about this important historical event,' and that confirms my worldview, whatever my worldview was before. And what I'm trying to say is that history can free you from that. If you're thinking historically, when you learn about something in the past, it will alter your worldview. It will alter your sense of what's possible and what's not possible. And, and just along the way, it will help you to recognize how these other comfortable narratives are probably not true. Okay. So, the next thing that I wanted to say about history, which is bound up in the story a little bit, is that, is that history is about the mystery of human motivation. The mystery of human motivation. So human motivation being something mysterious, and, and in this way history situates itself, so to speak, between the, the inspirational sciences and, and, you know, the, the more deterministic sciences. In, in some of the social sciences, the, the assumption, or in some methods in some social sciences, the assumption is that you're all rational. I mean, as somebody who's taught for like more than twenty years, I just, I know that's not true. But, but I mean, as somebody who's alive, right, I know that's not true. But the, it's a very comfortable assumption to say we're all governed by, we're all rational. We know what we want. We, we know what we value, and that our actions are predictable in the pursuit of those values or whatever they might be. Right? That's, that's one. And then there's, and then as you move over to this side into the more, you know, inspirational world of poetry and literature, it will be something like we're not really so concerned with motivation. We're concerned with feeling. We're concerned with the moment. Right? And that's, that's valid, too. But I'm just trying to say that history is somewhere in the middle where we are interested in motivation, but we take for granted that it might not be an obvious motivation. Right? And this, you know, should be intuitive on the basis of your own life.

I'm hoping so. Do you understand yourselves? Right? Do you really know why you do the things that you do? Good job not reacting. Do you really understand why you do the things that you do? Do you really know why you're taking this class? Do you really know why you're at the U of, you know? Do you really know why you did that thing you did on Friday? Okay. Now I know I have to wait three seconds after the joke. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Thank you. I will now wait three seconds after the joke. So, so the, the point is that if, so let's say you wanted to understand yourself, what would you do, right? I mean, for all of you who think you understand yourselves, you can just take a little break right now. But if you wanted to understand yourselves, what would you do? Well, you might talk to your friend, right? You might talk to somebody who spent a lot of time around you. You, you might talk to somebody you're related to. If you keep a diary, you might read your diary and see if the things you're doing now are in some way part of a pattern, right? If you wanted to understand yourself, you would look beyond yourself, right? So, and, and you wouldn't, and if you think like, well, what I did right now was just rational because I always know what I'm doing and like I'm always in, I'm always in pursuit of my own rational self-interests. Okay, that's fine. You can also take a break for the next few minutes. But, but if you, if you, if you, if you were serious about understanding what you were doing, you would recognize that you're a little bit behind a veil all the time, even with respect to yourself. And the more so with respect to other people, like there are various, there are veils that have to be removed or pushed aside for a moment. And how does one do that? And of course, when you push aside four veils, there might be more veils that remain, right? There could be more veils. You could be getting closer to something and you never actually reach it. And in fact, you never do actually reach it. But you might, you might remove more veils than someone else. And so when I say motivation is mysterious, I mean that it's very often surprising, right? Again, I mean, I'm going to stay with your own lives, but in a very general way. Like the moment we understand why you did something, it's often surprising because it, like the moment when you really understand why you did something, you recognize, okay, this isn't actually in accord with how I thought I behaved or how, what kind of person I think I am, right? It's, it's often when you really understand why you've done something, it's often a surprise. And the same holds for historical moments. When you actually put something together, it's not what you thought. And it's maybe not even what the people thought. It's something that you put together which is plausible. So, I'll now give you an example of this which may help to illustrate some other points too. Not in this story, but in probably the second most famous of Borowski's stories, which is called, um, uh, 'Please Come to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen' or 'This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.' Borowski begins with, um, himself at the platform, and there's a train arriving from, as it happens, from Bełżec in Poland, and the people are being offloaded, and, uh, the, the, the camp, the, the inmates of the camp are there to help separate them into those who are going to be laboring and those who are going to be killed immediately. But the real reason in the story Borowski is there is that this is a time when inmates can steal things from the people who are about to die. And, uh, so that's the first-person perspective he leads you into the story with. And one of the things that happens at the beginning of the story is that he's with a friend who is a former Soviet prisoner of war, a Russian. And, uh, as, as the train doors open, a mother, um, a mother tries to separate herself from her own child, thinking that if she does this, she will survive, right? She'll have a chance to be chosen for labor and she'll survive. She's sacrificing the child or trying to. Russian prisoner of war sees what she's doing, um, beats her with a shovel and sends her back into the column where she's going to be gassed immediately. Okay, so that anecdote or something like it probably happened. He probably witnessed something like that. But the, the question here is the mystery of the motivation. Why did the, why did the Russian prisoner of war behave like this? And I say prisoner of war, by the way, as we'll get into this, we'll learn more about it, but the inmates at Auschwitz came from various, came from various places and were there for various reasons. And some of the earliest prisoners were Soviet prisoners of war. And that's something that's accurately reflected in the texts. So, Borowski has an explanation, and the explanation emerges later in conversations, and the explanation is something like this, that the way the camp works, um, everyone is, everyone involved, whatever their position might be, from the, the very top to the very bottom, everyone involved is obviously furious about the situation. But the only way that that fury can be released is on people who are lower than you. It can't be released on people who are above you. And so hence, whatever your status in the camp is, you are going to be releasing your anger on people who are lower than you. So, for example, if you're an inmate, you can release it on people who are about to be sent off to their deaths. One might not like that to be a plausible explanation, but I'm afraid it is in fact a plausible explanation of what was happening there. It wasn't just an anecdote. What, what Borowski is doing is he's providing a plausible sociology of how a camp system can work because of course there are never really enough personnel in a concentration camp wherever it might be. Right, in the US today or in, in, in Germany or in occupied Poland in 1944, there are never enough personnel to go one for one on all the prisoners. There's always a system in which some of the responsibility for enforcement is exported downwards to the prisoners themselves. That's part of how it works. And like many things, if you understand this, then you're in a position to make it less likely. So, so what Borowski is doing in that anecdote is that he's showing you something more or less as it happened, but he's also giving you an explanation, an uncomfortable one, but an explanation. And it's an explanation, by the way, which is very helpful in a historical sense because it helps you to understand, at least it gives you one thread to help you understand the connection between the large structures and the individuals. So it's, it allows you to avoid the problem which is that you say, okay, there's Auschwitz, there's totalitarianism, there are camps, there's this huge structure, and then, then the individuals are just meaningless numbers or whatever, they're, they're, they're mutually exchangeable dots. It allows you to see that, well, in fact, those big structures are only possible because of the way that humans behave. Not just because there are terrible sadists at the top, and of course there were, not just because of that though, but because of the way humans can be induced to behave inside those structures. And the political lesson that one draws from this is that, of course, it's not enough to be a good person or a bad person. That Soviet prisoner of war was not necessarily, right, painful to say it, not necessarily a bad person in every respect. In other parts of the story, he seems like a perfectly decent person. But the structure is such that it leads him to do this thing which, as a, as a tableau, is absolutely horrifying. And so the political lesson that one learns from that is that it's not enough to be a good person. One has to know what sorts of structures are likely to lead us to behave in one way rather than another, right? Because if your defense is, 'I'm a good person,' you will eventually find yourself in a structure where unfortunately it's very, it's not impossible, but it's very unlikely that you will be. And so Borowski here is also making a point which is very helpful for us in this first lecture where we're trying to understand what history is because history is about the individual and the larger structure. But it's not about the individual being completely alienated and separated from the larger structure. It's also about how the individual enlightens us so we can see the larger structure, but also about how the individual enables or doesn't enable the larger structure in ways that are comfortable for us, but also in ways that are chiefly uncomfortable for us. And in this class, it's going to be, it's going to be mainly the latter things that are, that are uncomfortable for us. Okay. So the mystery of motivation is something that historians are also after.

Connected to this is, is the issue of morality, right? Because in this, if, if it's true that we are capable of apprehending history, then that puts us in a position where we are a little bit more responsible than we were before. So if you don't know anything about history, that is, I mean, it may seem uncomfortable because you're full of anxiety and you don't understand the present, but there is a kind of comfort in it. There's a comfort in helplessness. If you don't understand history at all, if you have no grounding in history at all, then it's, you can say, okay, I don't have much responsibility for the future because what are you going to do about it? You don't know where you are. You're not on any of those trains. You're not on any of those lines. You don't have anywhere to stand. But the more that you know about history, the more in fact you are responsible, or perhaps the more you realize you are responsible. Because every bit of knowledge that you have about the past is also a little tiny bit of power, at least a little tiny bit of power, which directs towards the future. And so insofar as there is a little bit more power, there's also a little bit more responsibility. And so the related point that I'm trying to make is that within history there is always already and inextricably the question of human ethics. You can't really do history without human ethics. And I mean that not just in a sociological sense that you, that you see people's moral motivations as one historical factor along with other historical factors. I mean that the very effort to understand the past is itself an ethical endeavor and has to be. If you, it's not just again that your toolbox is ethical, although it is. You can't do history well unless you empathetically try to understand people who are very different from you on the basis of the sources they left behind. Without that, you can't do history. And in that sense, history is ethical. But that's not what I mean. What I mean is that insofar as you are trying to do history well and to understand history correctly, you're also positioning yourself in a certain way with respect to the present and the future, which is that you are now somebody who understands some things. And it's comfortable not to understand things. And the second level to this is that the understanding that humans have something to do, unpredictable, difficult, humans have something to do with the overall shape of things is, is, is liberating, but because it's liberating, it's also difficult, right? And this is a point which is particularly relevant for the world that we're in now. So without being too much of a Cassandra about this, I just want to point out that this is not a great moment for history in the world. It's not a great moment for the humanities in general in the world. All of these arguments that I've been trying to make, which in one way or another connect to what it means to be a human, it is a difficult time to make these sorts of arguments because in general the way that we are being swept along by changes in the means of production or at least changes in the means of profit, the way we're being swept along is towards a world in which the urge is to make us less human in the sense of more predictable. Right? I don't have to explain to you how social media works. You know how social media works. I don't have to explain to you how large language models work. You know these things. You live with them. But the general thrust is in a very precise way dehumanizing in that they are meant to make you more predictable on behalf of the people who are making money from the algorithms. And that general urge towards predictability is very hard on history, right? Because insofar as we allow ourselves to become more predictable, insofar as we become creatures who are just, you know, who are, who operate according to addiction models or pleasure and pain models, insofar as we are creatures who are always sure that we're right because everything online is always telling us that we're right, we're not only politically very easy to manipulate, but we're not going to be interested in history as a source of knowledge or personal authority or personal agency because we just won't see the point. We just won't see the point. We won't imagine that there's a useful realm of difference back there. We won't imagine that there's a reservoir of human imagination and possibility back there. That simply won't occur to us, right? And so, and so this is, this is one reason why the ethical point is so significant because what the predictability engines do is they kill that sense that ethics is part of anything, right? They, the, the goal is to turn you into creatures, I don't want to overstate this, I mean, but it's, the goal is to turn you into creatures who are more mechanical than you might be otherwise. And certainly the goal, and it's been largely successful, unfortunately, is to push ethical considerations to the side, to make them seem laughable, to make them seem not real, to make them seem like things that don't matter. And of course, if you were successful in an attempt to push ethical concerns to the side and say they don't matter, then you really have done something which matters, right? Then you really have changed the course of, of history. And, and history, I'm trying to suggest, can also make us more aware of something like that.

So this connects, of course, to what we're trying to do and to what the purpose of a class is. We are in, I mean, there's a, so one, one way that we are in history right now is that none of us built this building, right? None of us built this university, none of us built this city. I mean, probably in some way some of you contributed to it a little bit, but we, we're walking into a structure, a university, me included, which we didn't actually create. It's already there. And if we think historically, we can ask, okay, why are there things like lecture halls? Why is a campus separated from a city? Okay, this one not so much, but why in general are campuses separated from cities? Why are these structures designed the way that they are designed in order to maximize human attention? And this achievement, which was, which, which was remarkable for a couple of centuries, has now basically been broken by one extremely simple and stupid technology, which is Wi-Fi. So, you know, the whole effort, which is based upon literally two thousand years of human experience to build physical spaces in which human bodies and human minds can concentrate, has been broken by an incredibly stupid, idiotic technology which any child can understand, which is Wi-Fi. Okay. But this is why I try to avoid, like, phrases like high technology because, like, so much of the stuff which is in our lives is actually incredibly simple. And we just turn out to be simpler, and it's important not to be. And so I'm, I'm making, I'm making all these points because I'm trying to bring into connection, I'm trying to bring, I'm trying to make the class policy of not using gadgets in class comprehensible to you. Right? There is really no point of taking a history class or being at university in general if you're just going to continue a kind of algorithmic pattern of life. The whole point of going to university and especially just in studying the humanities is to exit the algorithmic pattern of life and to do something else. History can be very helpful this way because, like literature, like philosophy, like a lot of other things, it pushes you into the realm of unpredictability and into the realm of, of things that are mysterious and then become less mysterious. But I'm saying this because, and I appreciate that you guys do have pencil and paper. That's really, I'm really impressed by that. Usually when I do this the first time, it's like people come with like, what is this? Like, you know, do you use all five fingers? And like, I'm noticing that everybody in the front row at least knows how to write, which is cool. But there's, there is a coherence to this policy, and it's something which I have, it's something which I have learned as a teacher, like that if we're going to be, if we're going to try to do the humanities, we really do have to do it as human beings. And the moment that we say, oh, this is kind of a joke, or I'm not really paying attention, or whatever, you might as well not be doing it at all. Right? I'm not saying this class is going to be perfect or even good. But what I am saying is that if you don't treat the class as being something different from everyday, like, Wi-Fi-driven existence, then there's really no point in doing it. And so I'm trying with these rules to open up a space for you where, where you can, where you can do it. Okay. So, mini lecture, mini lecture complete. Fine. We're getting to the end of this now. So the, the, the, the final place I want to go with this is, has to do with, with, with this responsibility point, which I'm going to close with.

A lot of the language, let me just move out from the predictability digital area. A lot of the language that you're confronted with when you're online is completely irresponsible in the sense that there is no human being back there at all taking responsibility for what is in front of your eyes. And that's a, I think, a very significant fact about the way that we live now, that we're not, it's not that we're illiterate exactly, but for the first time in human existence, most of the words with which we're confronted are not generated in a palpable sense by fellow human beings. There is no other person at the other end who could take responsibility, with whom you could have a conversation about what happened when you ask a large language model something, for example. Borowski makes a very simple point. I think it's in this story where, where he says that it's, it's, it's, I just want to quote to make sure I get this right, that he says that we should, we should call things by their proper names as courageous people do. And so the point about ethics, the point about co-responsibility for things goes into the production of your own writing as well. Part of the, part of what makes history history is the idea that there are proper names, that the words do matter, that language isn't just incidental. Of course, it's impossible to get some kind of pure relationship between the word and the thing, but the notion of calling something by its proper name is meant to be in opposition to calling things by the names that seem to be convenient or calling things by the names which are going to not offend those who are powerful, which means that good history, and not all history is good, but good history will tend to always be in some kind of dissident position because if you're, if you're calling things by their proper names, you're not calling them by the names that they're usually called. You're calling them by some other name. And this does have an implication for you in your, in your writing assignments, right? The implication is that you should be very thoughtful, or as thoughtful as you can, about how you use the language. You should be thoughtful and respectful of how you treat the other people who you are reading. You should be trying to call things, you should be aspiring to call things by their proper names and not just what you think, you know, the TA wants to hear or what I want to hear or, you know, what's most comfortable to you or to people who are around you, but the call to make the best kinds of arguments you can using the language, using the language creatively. And I don't have to say, and so I'm not going to say that this involves, you know, never using anything except your own minds and your own hands, right? But that's an essential part of it, like to think of yourself as having the capacity to try to call things by, by their proper names. Okay. And this, this, this dissident point is the one I'm going to close on and leave some time for, for, for questions. But this, this dissident point is also going to be an undercurrent of the entire class. Throughout the class we will be reading people who, having experienced one system, the Nazi system, or the other system, the Stalinist system, or both, come to the conclusion that at a minimum what they can do is to try to call things by their right names, to try to record things as they actually were, to work against the climate of lies which surrounds them. And, and, and that is that effort to get things right, that effort to, to take responsibility, that effort to write in a way which reaches some kind of reality is the challenge of doing history. And it's a challenge because otherwise, and this is a kind of tragic thing, if we all write things in a way which make us, us comfortable, if we write things in a way which make the world comfortable, if we write things that are in accordance with power in a direct way or an indirect way, then we are reproducing things as they already are. Right? And this is Borowski's big challenge, and this I think is in this story, and I'm going to quote him. He has a very radical view about what the humanities can do for ill. He says, and the context of this is he's talking about Auschwitz. He's saying that in the future Auschwitz is going to be seen as something incredibly positive. And of course he's not right about that. At least generally not right. There are sadly some people who think that it was incredibly positive. But, but, but his, what he's trying to say is that the winner, to, to use the cliché version, the winner is the one who writes the history. But he pushes this point all the way to the end, all the way down to the level of values. He writes about, he says, the poets, lawyers, philosophers, priests will drown out our voices. They will create goodness, beauty, and truth. Now, this is an incredibly radical challenge to history and to the humanities in general. Because what Borowski is saying is that whatever we think we are drawing from our educations, whatever it is, what we're actually drawing from is past relationships of violent power which have left behind a residue which we find morally attractive, and that the reasons we find it morally attractive have to do with violent interactions in the past. And Borowski tries to push this to the, to, to the extreme to make it impossible to miss. And that, of course, is the challenge for everyone doing history. Whether it's in a first history class or whether it's a personal historian or whether it might be that the, we, there is nothing that we have in the present which is not touched by the past. And it is certainly true that the, that the relationship between power in the past and what seems normal and good in the present is hard to penetrate. The counterargument, of course, is that proper history, that, that, that whether it's a priest or a poet or a philosopher or a lawyer or a historian, that if we know that what Borowski says is true, right? If we recognize that there is a weight of horrible violence over everything that we take for granted, then we've taken a first step towards actually understanding those relations of power. And that then if we bury into the sources with the understanding that we can, that we can be both critical and empathetic, if we, if we read with the knowledge that we're the kind of person who did this sort of thing and our only advantage is that we know we're the kind of person who did this sort of thing, then we might end up somewhere else. Then we might end up doing history.