http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=129090687
(snip) interview between terry gross and tony judt.
GROSS: Now, you've written extensively over the years about European history. You've written about the European left. Now that your body is immobile, and your physical world has shrunk, does history matter to you as much?
Mr. JUDT: Yes, I think it does. I know that sounds funny, but it really does. I believe the reason is this - that all I ever wanted to do in life, professionally, occupationally, was teach history and read and write it.
You know, there are times I've thought: My God, you're a dull man, Judt. You know, since the age of 13 you've wanted the same thing, and now you're 62 and you still want it. But the upside of that is that I get as angry at bad history writing, or the abuse of history for political purposes, as I ever did.
I think, however, probably, that I am more also - not instead of but also focused on where we go now than I was 10 years ago. You know, 10 years ago, or whenever it was, I might be criticizing Clinton or Bush or Blair for some ridiculous policy, but it was very much in the sort of, the sense of that I'm doing what I can do, which is to write about politics in the public space.
But I think now I'm more worried about the future. The past is always going to be a mess. It's going to be a mess because it was a mess and because people are going to abuse it, get it wrong and so on. But I'm reasonably confident that with each generation of historians, we keep fighting hard to get it right again. But we could get the future very seriously wrong, and there it's much harder to get it right.
GROSS: Is that why your new book, "Ill Fares the Land," is, in a way, a letter to young people about applying the past to the future?
Mr. JUDT: Well, it's absolutely, deliberately a letter to young people, though it's not written down at all. And I would hope that a young person, aged 16, would want to read it. But it's about not forgetting the past, about having the courage to look at the present and see its faults without walking away in disgust or skepticism.
It's about believing, I think, really, I've been teaching for forty years now -I'm encountering the first generation of young people in colleges and schools who really do not believe in the future, who don't think not just that things will get evidently and permanently better but who feel that something has gone very badly wrong that they can't quite put their finger on, but that is going to spoil the world that they're growing up into.
Whether it's climate change or political cynicism or overreaction or lack of reaction to external challenges, whether it's terrorism or poverty, the sense that it's all got out of control, that they, the politicians and so on, media people, are neither doing anything nor telling us the truth, that sense seems to have pervaded the younger generation in ways that were not true in my experience.
Maybe the last time that might have been true was in the 1920s, where you had the combination of shock and anger from World War I, the beginnings of economic depression and a terrifying realization that there might very well be a World War II. I don't think we're on the edge of World War III or IV. But I do think that we are on the edge of a terrifying world. That's why I wrote the book.
GROSS: You compare that in your book to the attitude of young people in the '60s. You compare this sense of helplessness that you think a lot of young people have today to the '60s. And you say back in the era of self-assured, radical dogma, young people were far from uncertain. The characteristic tone of the '60s was that of overweening confidence. We knew just how to fix the world. It was this note of unmerited arrogance that partly accounts for the reactionary backlash that followed.
Do you feel that you shared in that sense of confidence and arrogance?
Mr. JUDT: Oh, absolutely. I don't think I would have felt comfortable writing that if I had been either born earlier or later because it would have sounded smug and a bit sanctimonious, an outsider, you know, dumping on the '60s and so on.
But in practice, that's my generation. I grew up with the idea that you only had to worry about ideas and change because things like jobs, things like physical security, could all be taken for granted. And that's, I think, a common Western position in those years, so that we had the luxury of sitting in comfortable colleges or with parents who would support us if the time came to it, looking at the world and saying it's terrible, it's terrible, we must change everything and we know how.
There was the residue of Marxism, which was still very much alive, kicking in the '60s, but in the worst possible sense in that Marxists were now young people, with the exception of a few old people, who thought that well, the West was a lost cause, liberalism was a fraud, the proletariat had disappeared. So let's focus on blacks or colonial, minority victims or someone outside ourselves. So we never looked hard at ourselves to ask what was wrong with our own society.
GROSS: So was there a particular dogma or philosophy that you felt you became, that you feel now in retrospect that you were overzealous and overconfident about?
Mr. JUDT: Well, in my case, there were two. I think most of my contemporaries were bound up, to a greater or lesser extent, with what they thought of as Marxism, the revolutionary critique of capitalism, changing the world in China or Cambodia or Africa or wherever it might be. I shared some of that coming out of an East European, self-taught, Jewish-Marxist background - both of my parents left school at 13, my grandfathers as well. But my particular form of ideological overinvestment came with Israel. I went to live on a kibbutz, and I'd idealized the world of collective agrarian work, where everyone was equal, everyone contributed, that all this awful European intellectual stuff just fell away.
