Control states disdain but also fear and envy the gaudy, outrageous, ingenious, clamorous mess – part fairground, part farmyard – that is freedom in our open world. Dictatorships move faster under experienced leaders, but violence and control are wired into the closed world. The rigidity and delusions of tyrannies are incorrigible, their virtue-spirals end in executions, not just cancellations, their adventures end in devastation and slaughter. When they fail, autocrats take state and people down too.
The only leaders more buffoonish and lethal than the fairground hucksters elected in our flailing democracies are the omnipotent clowns of the tyranny. The challenge for open states is to channel their freedoms and pluralism creatively, rather than indulging in schisms about small differences. Democracies are built on invisible trust: over and over again, when anomie strikes, trust is lost and so is openness. ‘As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, “What does it matter to me?”’ wrote Rousseau, ‘the state may be given up as lost.’ The lesson of recent years is that the gains that were taken as won – the lessons of 1945, the evil of antisemitism, the crimes of genocide and war-making; the right to abortion and triumphs of the 1960s great liberal reformation – have to be fought for again.
But there is hope too: during the American ascendancy, US-style presidencies and elections became essential for legitimacy in old and new post-colonial states. If Theodore Parker’s fashionable dictum that ‘the arc of the moral universe … bends towards justice’ seems over-optimistic, it says something that since 1945 even the most brazen tyrannies feel obliged to pretend to hold elections and respect laws and legislatures – even when they are ‘cosplay democracies’. The open world is still the happiest and freest place to live.
Open societies are slow, their leaders amateurish, their policies inconsistent, but when they mobilize they are flexible, efficient and creative. Technology undermines democratic solidarity and aids tyranny and conspiracy, yet it also advances openness and justice. Its very facility means atrocities and wars can be instantly recorded and viewed everywhere in our new virtual-arena world. The immediate challenge of technology is to learn to control its addictiveness and surveillance while enjoying its benefits. The unelected, invisible power of the despots of data must be diminished. States and individuals have to work that out.
Population growth and climate change can only be solved by either catastrophic population decline – pandemic, natural disaster or thermonuclear war – or by cooperation on a titanic scale. And here too the tendency towards power blocs might actually be helpfuclass="underline" when the time comes – if it comes – a cabal of potentates could make those decisions.
‘The real problem of humanity,’ said Edward O. Wilson, ‘is we have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.’ Just because we are the smartest ape ever created, just because we have solved many problems so far, it does not mean we will solve everything. Human history is like one of those investment warning clauses: past performance is no guarantee of future results. Yet the harshness of humanity has been constantly rescued by our capacity to create and love: the family is the centre of both. Our limitless ability to destroy is matched only by our ingenious ability to recover.
In this book I have written of the fall of noble cities, the vanishing of kingdoms, the rise and fall of dynasties, cruelty upon cruelty, folly upon folly, eruptions, massacres, famines, pandemics and pollutions, yet again and again in these pages the high spirits and elevated thoughts, the capacity for joy and kindness, the variety and eccentricity of humanity, the faces of love and the devotion of family run through it all, and remind me why I started to write.
Celebrate your joy with us!
Join if in the whole wide world there’s
Just one soul to call your own! …
Be embracéd, all you millions,
Share this kiss with all the world!
Friedrich Schiller
, ‘Ode to Joy’
And you should have been cautious, better educated by the past,
The ancient bamboo books of history
Were there for you to study.
But you didn’t see …
Times change, power passes;
It is the pity of the world.
Li Qingzhao
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.
Vasily Grossman
Rulers, statesmen and nations are often advised to learn the lesson of historical experience. But what experience and history teach is that nations and governments have never learned anything from history.
Hegel
I gazed in every direction and all appeared wonderfully beautiful. There were stars which we never see from earth … all larger than we have ever imagined. The starry spheres were much greater than the earth; indeed the earth seemed so small I was scornful of our empire … If only you look on high and contemplate this eternal home and resting place you will no longer bother with the gossip of the common herd or put your trust in human reward … for what men say dies with them and is blotted out with the forgetfulness of posterity.
Cicero
The wine is heady, make haste!
And time is scarce, take all of it you can.
Who knows if next year’s spring,
So sweet, will find you dust and ash or living man.
Saadi
Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
Anne Frank
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
This is a work of synthesis based on the widest reading and travels over thirty years. In a bid to lighten an already large book, the Select Bibliography is available online at: www.simonsebagmontefiore.com
For the sake of length, I have chosen the key works on which each section is based. Again, for the sake of length, I have not listed every book read on each subject nor annotated every fact and quotation. There is some primary research in this book: in my own lifetime, I have been lucky to talk to some of the characters about their lives. In those cases, I quote them ‘as told to this author’ in the text.
Also by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Catherine the Great and Potemkin
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Young Stalin
Jerusalem: The Biography
The Romanovs: 1613–1918
Written in History: Letters that Changed the World
Voices of History: Speeches that Changed the World
Fiction
Sashenka
One Night in Winter
Red Sky at Noon
Children’s fiction (with Santa Montefiore)
The Royal Rabbits of London series
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson,