Books like Factfulness (2018) and Enlightenment now (2018) were very favourably received, partly because high-profile people were writing about the right things at the right time. More specifically, I suspect that these books largely owe their success to their feelgood component. Recall 2018: we had the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Thunberg climate strikes, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Who wouldn’t have wanted to hear an grandpa-like professor saying that everything would be alright?

I recently discovered a wellbeing hack: reminding oneself of positive historical events, or positive psychology for rationalists. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I often think about the fall of the Berlin Wall – not just because history is important, but also because it makes me happy. Here are other pieces of historical trivia which similarly fill me with a sense of awe and wonder:

• Convivencia happened, at least a bit: Around 800-1500 AD, Muslims, Jews and Christian communities peacefully coexisted in medieval Spain. This period is usually referred to as the ‘convivencia’ (Spanish for ’living together’ or ‘coexistence’). It wasn’t just that they didn’t kill people with other religious beliefs – there even appeared to be significant cultural exchange¹. After listening to the In Our Time episode about Muslim Spain, I came away feeling very optimistic about human nature.
• Dissolution of Soviet Union: One could argue that the USSR dissolved without bloodshed: the USSR didn’t end after a treaty following a bloody third world war. Though you might object that the Cold War wasn’t bloodless, we could have had a nuclear war. Gorbachev was rather friendly, at least in comparison with the current Russian ruler, and he could readily have chosen to start a war when realising that the union was collapsing² – this would have been his most straightforward way of achieving immortality through history.
• Queen Christina doing her thing: I’ve always been fascinated by Queen Christina of Sweden. Today, she has become something of a queer icon: she was a tomboy, preferring masculine hobbies and wearing men’s clothes, and declared at 22 she’d never marry³⁴. Five years later, the daughter of Gustav II Adolf, the king who died defending Protestantism in the Thirty Years’ War, abdicated, converted to Catholicism and moved to Rome. A queer queen, indeed.
• Abolition of slavery: Just appreciate that slavery was abolished, since the abolition of slavery wasn’t inevitable. More broadly, the abolition of slavery represents the first step big moral circle expansion.
• Eradication of smallpox: Big triumph – infectious diseases have played a major role in history. Eradicating an infectious disease is notoriously hard, requiring both scientific advances and international coordination; in fact, only two diseases have been completely eradicated to date (smallpox in 1980 and rinderpest in 2011). Smallpox killed approximately 300 million people in the 20th century alone – and now, no more deaths to smallpox.

The poster for the Leipzig ‘89 - Revolution Reloaded exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum hangs on my wall. And in my hallway, there’s a poem which (among other things) lists a number of noteworthy historical events, such as the glasnost. We must not forget history – not just to prevent atrocities from repeating themselves – but also to appreciate the present.