October 21, 2023 - 7:00pm
Jonathan Sumption is a difficult man to define: revered historian, esteemed lawyer and one of Britain’s greatest public intellectuals. He came to greatest popular prominence during the Covid pandemic as one of the most lucid opponents of the Government’s lockdown policies. But as that era came to a close, he returned to a lifelong project — his acclaimed history of the Hundred Years’ War, now completed with the publication of the fifth volume.
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SubscribeThanks for this excellent piece. Jonathan Sumption is exactly the sort of intellect we need more of here. I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s said with such insight and authority that I have to listen and at least consider changing my views. Without people like this we’re all stuck in our echo chambers.
He is also a reminder that we do not need to freeze our views after an early judgement of a particular issue and the dangers of prematurely declaring contentious issues to be “settled”. We seem determined not to learn what the potential lessons from Covid have been – there’s a curious lack of curiosity.
There is a fundamental problem about saying ‘This is what happened in the past so this is what we can expect in the future.’ Humans might be the same, but the world is not. We will need stricter ‘lockdowns’ if we are to survive future pandemics, We have to think about the best (global) decison to be made in Jan 2020 based on what could have happened at the time not on the quality of the decisions made from July 2020 onwards (which in many cases seem to have been very poor). On this point Lord Sumption’s views (or perhaps a parody of his views) worried me (i.e. we’ve survived past pandemics so we’ll survive the next one). On this I’m with Jared Diamond’s book Collapse.