Transcriber: Rebecca Rakowitz Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Some months ago, when I first met with the people from TEDxAthens,
I was super happy that I would become a TEDx speaker.
However, when they told me about the topic, I was puzzled
because I actually didn't know what to say about "Ordinary."
What's that?
Of course, when they showed me the stage,
oh boy, there was no barrier between me and that.
You know, I've always wanted to be a famous musician,
and that's the closest I can get since I'm an academic.
So, when I left the meeting, I tried to think in the only way I know:
as a historian.
So I started interpreting, analyzing, exploring
every single angle of the specific topic.
You know, when you're a historian,
you always try to make connections with the past.
It's inevitable; it's your second nature.
Sometimes it's boring, but that's the case.
So I saw, as an educator,
that it's really difficult for people to do that
because they feel disconnected with their past.
They believe that history is not a valuable source of information,
and most of all,
they believe that history is just another course at school,
which it's not.
Hopefully, I'll tell you that during my presentation.
So, come on, let me introduce you to my approach to history,
to my interpretation of ordinary.
When I teach,
I'm trying to say to everybody, to all my students,
that history is just another game:
very demanding, of course,
full of information, of course,
sometimes boring, sometimes not,
but still it's a game.
So, I guess that you've all played the game of connecting the dots, right?
So, come on, this time let's play the game together
and try to connect these dots.
In my game, every dot is just a fragment of history.
So together, we'll try to connect the dots
and find the roots
of some of our difficult, painful, timely problems,
ones that we believe they are ordinary while they shouldn't be there.
In my opinion, we actually have all the information we need if we go back.
So, in a way, we just don't do our homework, right?
So we can find the roots of our problems,
and I hope that after that, we can learn something from history.
So let's do it together.
I'll give you my first super dot -
I call them "super dots"
because they are so big and sometimes vague -
so you can make any connections you can, right?
If you have an imagination and knowledge of the information, you can just do it.
So I give you "money."
Of course we all know, living in the current crisis,
that "no money, no honey"
and, of course, "money moves the world,"
which is really well known.
In my opinion, however, we could have seen it coming.
There's a lot of information
if we go back to the Depression Era of 1929.
What happened back then?
The U.S. stock market underwent a great expansion,
greater than it could hold.
It's like you have a bag full of information
and you just keep filling it.
So eventually, it will explode, right?
And it did.
Simply put, the massive amount of stocks issued,
no regulations, no protection mechanisms,
of course, greed -
which is a very basic element when you deal with money -
and a struggling economy,
and a struggling agricultural and industrial sector,
so led to the collapse of the U.S. economy.
When you are a stockholder,
it's like you have bought a stock today that costs ten euros
and the next day it costs one.
So easily you've lost 90% of your money, right?
So you are broke.
The thing is that we have many bells ringing in this era.
So let's come back to 2008 and give you some hints.
What happened back then?
Housing bubble, predatory lending,
huge loans, easy loans, massive national debts
and, of course, a market so big and unregulated
that the only thing it could do, it was to explode.
And it did, once again.
The problem, and that's why we actually feel it so hard nowadays,
is that the economies are so interconnected
that it took days, even hours, to reach other countries.
So those that weren't that protected or that powerful collapsed.
I mean, we live in Greece, and we know how it works, right?
The problem is that, I believe, that we could have seen it coming,
and one of the main fears I have
is that what revived the U.S. economy back then
was the Second World War.
And I hope that we will not see it happening again, right?
Or will we?
Have you seen any wars around or something like that?
Don't answer, but just have in mind that war is the best business ever.
So it's all about the money, I guess.
So I'll give you my next super dot.
So when the economy has a problem, we go to poverty.
Of course, for those who are a bit older,
you may remember on the screens of your TV seeing people suffering from famine
and voluntary concerts around the world trying to help people survive.
While we believe that we made many steps forward, it's still the case:
poverty is a problem.
So try all over the world -
Latin America, Asia, the U.S., powerful countries, European countries -
we see it happening.
While we see all the graphs showing
that especially the poor countries grew rapidly,
eventually we see that poor people remain there and become poorer and poorer.
What does it mean
that all the development we can see in our world -
financial, technological, industrial, whatever -
it doesn't mean that it actually supports and helps people.
It doesn't mean that it benefits them.
So I wonder,
where can we find these roots?
Let's take the plane and go back some centuries
and discuss about the colonial powers.
Colonial powers industrialized many parts of the world.
For their own benefit, of course.
Of course, they believed that the locals would be benefited as well,
but it didn't happen.
Most of the time, it was a painful experience.
Let's travel to West Africa.
It is a place that seems very far, but it can give us a good lesson.
So West Africa is West Congo, is Congo, Togo, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon.
In this place, 70% of cocoa, global production, can be found.
That means that the chocolate you eat probably comes from there.
However, people are so poor there
that they haven't even tasted - most of them - chocolate, in their lives.
So that means that - of course, they have bigger problems -
but can you imagine your life without having even tasted chocolate in your life?
Let me focus more.
I'll give you Congo, the Republic of Congo.
I guess you won't be amazed if I tell you
this is one of the poorest countries in the world.
There's a stereotype about that in our mind.
Of course, at the same time, it's one of the richest countries in the world.
Why?
Because in their soil you can find 30% of the world's cobalt,
what we use in our gadgets.
10% of the world's copper
and 17% of diamonds of the world being there.
However, it seems that it's still difficult for them to live
because 71% of the people live under the poverty line.
It's impossible, right?
Are there any roots to that?
Of course there are
if we go back to the 15th century when the Portuguese entered this country.
And what they did - they actually used one of its more powerful and useful tools:
its people.
So these people, millions of them, traveled to the United States
in order to become slaves
and supported the extremely profitable business of Atlantic slave trade.
So we come a bit closer, in the 1870's,
when King Leopold of Belgium acquired land as his own property,
as his own game, actually.
So for about three decades,
people worked as slaves again in the rubber business,
which was extremely profitable -
it always is -
and supported part of Belgium's economy.
Later, when they actually found a way to become independent, their own people,
President Mobutu became a ruthless dictator,
and he actually exploited the country to its core.
So I wonder,
how did we allow that to happen?
Us westerners or customers - because we are all customers after all -
allowing people dying next to diamond fields?
So when we have all these problems,
racism can enter our lives easily,
especially when we have oppression, depression, difficulties
and when the education system
doesn't actually promote good stuff like justice or faith
and it actually promotes mediocrity.
We see it happening during the Second World War with the Nazis,
and hopefully we thought that when they were defeated,
everything would end, but it didn't,
because it seems that it poisoned millions of people,
you know, living in this fake world of purely white nations.
In this continent, as if there was no history,
we see it happening again.
Who would believe that in Poland -
Poland of concentration camps, of people that died in pain there -
that neo-Nazi parties would take over?
It's impossible, isn't it?
Who would even believe that in the United States,
the country that fought so hard with its past
in order to create a better future, and it did,
with the Civil Rights Movement
in the 1960s
and Martin Luther King, a universal symbol,
that while they put African Americans
back to their lawful positions and be U.S. citizens,
that this will happen again
and racism will probably cover parts of the country.
I really wonder as a historian and as a person
how we can really miss that.
Why we don't listen to people that are still alive
when we have their memoirs and their oral history.
Well, they described a dystopian, difficult and painful past.
And we don't listen to them.
Nikos Kazantzakis, an amazing Greek author, said,
and I'll say that in Greek because it's too powerful to translate it:
(Greek) It's our duty to feel all of our ancestors inside us.
It's our duty to give our children the order to become better, to exceed us.
So we owe it to the next generation to give them the tools
to become better and create a better future.
If not now, then when?
When we have all these problems, of course corruption enters.
Before that let me give you some hint of what we do in history.
Historians have to deal with everything.
Sometimes it's nice;
sometimes it's too vague that you cannot help it.
One of the main things that we do is deal with numbers,
which I can tell you is rather boring
because you become a historian because you don't like maths, right?
Of course, in maths,
maybe the numbers tell the truth, but in history doesn't.
You have to interpret them.
Let me give you an example, and you'll understand.
So in this wonderful world, we have 192 countries.
123 of them are democracies.
So, come on, people, come on, cheer up:
we live in the most democratic era ever.
I don't know about you, but it doesn't feel like this,
because I always wonder if this is what democracy should be.
I hope not.
I'll give you an example.
We're in Athens, but I won't do that.
It's so obvious.
Let's get on board and travel to South Africa.
This is a concise history of the world, in my opinion.
So we do have race and segregation there.
This is a country, the rainbow country because of the so many cultures they have,
and, of course, this is the country of 11 recognized languages.
It's impressive, right?
Because there are so many cultures living there.
So in 1948, the National Party, the white National Party, did what?
Established apartheid.
Apartheid was their version of racial segregation.
So black people were completely alienated,
they suffered a lot,
and it was black or white.
There was nothing else.
The black leader, Nelson Mandela,
an amazing symbol that actually will remain in history books forever,
he was captured
and remained in prison for 30 years, most of them in isolation.
Actually, I have to say that Nelson Mandela was a fan of history
and he was affected deeply by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King
and their non-violent strategies.
So this is how powerful history can be:
it can actually shape even great leaders like Mandela.
When finally he was released
and lawfully he became a president in this country,
the first thing he didn't do was to seek revenge,
because for him it wasn't black or white, it was South Africans.
People have to find their identity, their political identity.
He didn't actually manage to do it.
However, in a very ironic turn of history,
it happened later, years after him,
when black governments suffered from massive corruption scandals.
It was then that black people and white people
understood that they are South Africans and there's no color between them.
Then they understood that the politicians, the fake ones and the liars,
created this barrier between them all these years.
So what happened in this country
probably followed, partially at least, the curse of Africa.
De jure, by law, it is a democracy;
however, de facto, at least in some parts, it is an autocracy.
So you may ask me, will we know what will happen?
Let's say we read history, we knew how to survive all these things.
I don't. Maybe, maybe not.
But how can you actually know if you don't know the rules of the game,
how you're playing their game without knowing all the perspectives?
In my opinion, it is the time to do that.
Confucius said that we have to study the past if we want to define the future.
And I actually believe that this is the time
that we should all go back and find the roots
and see what happened, why, how.
This is the time
that we could actually understand
that history, it is as important as technology and science
because it really is about our civilization.
It can really help it survive.
It's the time for us
to create clusters of information in order to share it with each other.
We should embrace our history, love oral history, open some books.
You know, books are not dead things.
People have worked a lot to create them
and put a lot of knowledge there for some reason.
So we have to go there.
We have to create strong roots,
strong enough to actually hold
a better, brighter, more innovative and groundbreaking future.
This is the time that we should all connect together
and understand that it is in our hands to create a better future,
one that it actually deserves,
to our past.
There are generations to come,
and we owe it to them to make something better.
In my opinion, in a game I fixed, we all have the dots.
We all should remember that history is made here, every single day.
Every single day, every one of you makes global history,
maybe a line, maybe a paragraph,
depending on what you're doing,
but still you are part of this global history.
So it's finally the time to be active and no more being apathetic
in order to connect all these wonderful dots
and make the picture we all want.
Let me give you my last rule of my game.
And I hope that actually this will remain in your minds.
It's not historians - this is our job, our passion - but it's not historians.
It's people - everybody, you and I, all of us -
that make history every single day.
Like today, we're making history.
Every one of use can make history.
So, what do you say?
Will you play the game?
Thank you.
(Applause)