We meet the lanky and bespectacled Brit in his town house in Brixton, South London. He leads us up a steep staircase to his study where row upon row of books line the walls, stretching skywards like stained glass windows in a gothic cathedral.
On his desk sits his “pet.” “It’s a Psittacosaurus,” Holland explains, a herbivorous dinosaur the size of a turkey with a turtle-like head, a hooked beak, and punky spikes. He acquired the 100 million-year-old fossil at his first ever auction. “There's a splendor and a terror about dinosaurs that appeal to me – much like the empires of antiquity.”
Right now, the champion of the historical anecdote is worried about making it down to the pub in time. The top-of-the-table clash of the Premier League kicks off at 6pm. “Aston Villa, which is my team, against Arsenal,” Holland tells me with excitement.
This leaves us exactly one hour to appraise the year that was.
Weltwoche: How would you characterize the year 2023 in a few sentences?
Holland: There seems to have been frenetic, often violent, and convulsive activity, but nothing seems to have happened. The impression I have of this year is of someone whose legs have been going round and round and not going anywhere. The question is: Is this person treading water in a pool? Will things be fine? Or is it like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon where he's run off the cliff and his legs are going round and he might at any minute plummet?
Weltwoche: “Nothing seems to have happened,” you say. After the war in Ukraine, another brutal war has broken out in Gaza. That's not entirely nothing is it?
Holland: Nothing has changed in Ukraine. Nothing has changed in Palestine. Has anything changed with political crises in the China Sea? Has anything changed with climate change? Has anything changed in the big hot-button issues? There's frenetic activity, but nothing has changed. Even those things that obviously have stood out, of which the war in Gaza would be the obvious thing, are merely an intensification of crises that have already existed.
Weltwoche: At the moment, 110 armed conflicts are waging on the planet, according the Academy of International Human Law in Geneva. Nevertheless, the media is overwhelmingly focussed on one single conflict -- the Gaza war. For decades, we have witnessed a remarkable pattern. Whenever Israel is involved in a conflict, all spots are on. Why is this?
Holland: Of course, it's also known as the Holy Land. It's a land that is holy to Jews, to Christians, to Muslims. That's always been the problem. By and large, Christians don't have a dog in this particular fight. Insofar as there are religious entities, it's obviously Jews and Muslims. For people in the West, in Europe, and in North America, and indeed Australia, residual Christianity means that Israel and Palestine have a significance that is greater, probably, than any other part of the world that is outside of Europe or our own lands; and the sense that what happens there matters and is hugely amplified by the historical, theological, cultural resonances that that particular plot of land has.
That's why it is a focus of people's energies and attention in a way that other fracture points aren't.
Weltwoche: It's an age old, deeply entrenched conflict. Nevertheless, emotions are boiling over across Europe and the US. Why is that?
Holland: On the most basic level, that the snarl of moral complexities in the Holy Land, in Palestine, in Israel, is possibly greater than anywhere else. One of the reasons why it retains a residual power to fascinate post-Christian Europe is that it does tap into what has become one of the great themes of post-Christianity, which is the sense that virtue lies in victimhood. This clearly derives from Christian culture.
This question of who is the victim in the current war is almost impossible to answer. It's why there's such moral anguish on both sides, that people who are supporting Israel are saying, "But look at the rapes. Look at the sufferings inflicted." It's absolutely true. It's horrendous, it's awful, it's appalling. Likewise, people who are looking at the sufferings of Palestinian babies, Palestinian families, likewise, are saying, "How can you not see that this is wrong?" Both are right. Both sides have justice on their side. I can't really think of a conflict where that is so transparently true. It's an obvious contrast with Ukraine, say.
Weltwoche: The Gaza war caused strong echoes on the streets of Europe, mostly pro-Palestinian. The chant echoed through the streets was “Free Palestine.” In reality, "Palestine" does not exist. Such a political and geographical entity has not existed since antiquity.
Holland: Ultimately, the name Palestine derives from the Philistines. That's where it comes from. It's in the Bible. If you think of Samson and Delilah, or David and Goliath, these are wars between the Israelites and the Philistines. These have a deep, deep resonance. The image of David and Goliath: It's the small boy with the pebble against the giant in the armor. In this conflict, who is David? Who is Goliath? In a sense, that's what the whole moral debate around it is. It's a competition to see who is going to be David and who's going to be Goliath. Of course, that is happening 3000 years ago, if it happened at all. But the history then bleeds through into the Roman period.
Weltwoche: If anyone can utter a claim for “Palestine,” it might be the Jews. As you point out in “Pax,” the name “Palestine” was introduced during the reign of Emperor Hadrian as a punishment. After the Jewish revolt against the invading Romans, they changed the name of the Jewish homeland, “Judaea,” to “Palestine.”
Holland: Yes, I was writing about the two terrible Judean rebellions that happened under the Romans and which saw the Judean home state effectively destroyed. The Romans see the Judeans as being one among many, many people. There's nothing predestined about this war, but through a cataclysmic series of contingencies and eventualities, the Judeans end up locked in a bloody battle against the Romans who wipe out Jerusalem.
Weltwoche: In 70 A.D., the Romans under the command of Titus captured the holiest building in the Jewish world, the Temple of Jerusalem, and put it to the torch. But the Jews do not give up. What parallels to today do you see in the Jews' resistance against the Romans, then?
Holland: With the destruction of Jerusalem -- the metropolis, the mother city of the Judeans -- the Romans assume, basically, that the Judeans will fade away. The Judeans, meanwhile, are waiting for Jerusalem to be refounded so they can rebuild their temple and renew their cult. They wait, and they wait, and they wait, and then it becomes evident that the Romans are not going to allow them to reclaim the cities and the lands that were theirs.
So, they start to prepare for an insurgency -- an "intifada," you might say, to translate it into Arabic. They start digging tunnels. They start expanding caves. They start hoarding weapons. And they're aiming to catch the Romans by surprise because, of course, the Romans have overwhelming military superiority. It's only by launching unexpected terrorist attacks that the Judeans have any prospect of winning back their land.
They do this, they launch a blood-curdling series of atrocities and, suddenly, this rumbling insurgency has become a full-blown rebellion. The Romans feel that they have no choice but to utterly defeat them. They're not exterminated, but their defeat is so total that they effectively abandon their identity as Judeans. Hadrian symbolizes this by renaming Judea "Palestine."
Weltwoche: Three times the Jews rose in revolt. Three times the Romans crushed them. For 2000 years, they became a people without a land in exile.
Holland: If there is an echo in the Judean despair that leads them to throw themselves as terrorists against the overwhelming might of Roman military power in what Hamas did in their attack on Israel, then that is just one of the multiple ironies that shades the history of this region.
Weltwoche: In a series of elections this year, Europe has swung right. First, it was Italy. Then came Finland and Greece. Spain was next, then Slovakia and the Netherlands. Across Europe, governments are shifting right. In some places, far-right leaders are taking power. All politics are local, and there are various reasons for the surge of the right. Do you see a common issue that brought the right populists to victory?
Holland: What seems to be driving it is immigration and anxieties about immigration. This has been a rumbling grumble at the back of the continent's politics for, well, for the whole of this century, really. The problem is that it's very difficult for any Western government quite to know what to do about it. Partly, that's for ideological reasons. Because we live in the shadow of the Holocaust and of the Third Reich in which governments in the '30s closed their doors to refugees, the guilt of that hangs very profoundly over Europe.
A sense of being open to refugees is an incredibly important part of Europe's cultural identity as it has evolved in the aftermath of the Second World War. A general Western European guilt about imperialism has made it almost impossible for mainstream political opinion to really pull up the drawbridge. What you're starting to get, now, are governments or right-wing parties where you have people who are prepared to say, "I don't care about any of that."
Weltwoche: In September, there was a giant wave of migrant boat landings on Italy’s island, Lampedusa. In total, a record number of 150,000 migrants have arrived in Italy, alone. Across Europe, people express a growing urgency that the borders must be secured with fences and walls. States and empires have secured themselves with fences and walls since time immemorial. The Romans built a boundary from northern England across Germany and around the entire Mediterranean. Would this be an option for modern Europe? Did the Roman boundary serve its purpose?
Holland: I don't think that the fortifications built by Hadrian in northern England, or the emperors in the heyday of the empire in the second century, were about defending the empire. It wasn't. They were statements of power. They were statements to the people in Caledonia, or in Germany, or in the Sahara, that they are not worthy of conquest. The Romans believed that the gods had given them imperium sine fine, "empire without limit." What Hadrian was doing was, basically, the equivalent of a billionaire putting up very, very expensive and showy electric gates to keep the poor out. That's effectively what he was doing.
Weltwoche: But it didn’t take long until those people beyond the fences became stronger and, indeed, stormed across Europe.
Holland: What follows over the course of the centuries beyond the boundaries, the limits of Roman power, is due to the influence of Rome's example. You start to get state formation among what had previously been very fractured tribal entities. They're starting to arm themselves with Roman weaponry and to get a comprehension of Roman warfare. They become ever more formidable. What happens in the fifth century, certainly in the western half, is that a process of fracture happens, and the barbarians, as the Romans call them, are so formidable by now that they're able to move in and take advantage. There's no possibility of reconstituting the fractured empire.
Weltwoche: There is a growing feeling that native cultures need to be protected. Hungary, for instance, had fortified its border already, in 2015, when the migrant wave from the east hit Europe.
Holland: Hungary was invaded by Muslim power, the Ottomans, and spent centuries trying to liberate itself of its Muslim rulers and is obviously scarred by that in the way that the Germans are scarred by memory of what they did in the war under the Third Reich. What happened in 2015 reflects the way that different countries are influenced by their understanding of history.
Weltwoche: While the Hungarians feverishly built fences, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the gates, claiming, “Wir schaffen das." ["We can manage this."]
Holland: Merkel grew up in a country with borders, with the Iron Curtain, with the Berlin Wall. She was on the wrong side of that. Also, she grew up with the guilt that came from being German after the Third Reich. She is the daughter of a pastor. So, she's grown up with the story of the Good Samaritan, the idea that you should love your enemies and care for them and all that kind of thing. When vast numbers of Muslims come flooding into Eastern Europe, she's going to say, "Let them in."
Conversely, for the Hungarians, for Orban, the great cultural memory for them is invasion by the Ottomans, and the folk memories of large numbers of Muslims advancing on their borders are very different. People's responses to these crises are massively informed by their history.
Weltwoche: In August, the BRICS – a loose association of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – held a summit that made plenty of waves. The five BRICS nations now have a combined GDP larger than that of the G7, in purchasing power parity terms. Some people say that the heyday of the West is over. Like all empires, western dominance led by the USA seems in decline. Thinking back to the Roman Empire, what are signs that indicate decline?
Holland: Let's look at the two greatest powers on the face of the earth. There's the United States, and there's China. China is an example of an ancient empire that never really fell. There've been, obviously, different dynasties. There've been periods when China's been occupied by outsiders. The borders of the Chinese empire have waxed and waned. China's president, Xi Jinping, recognizably stands in a line of descent from the first emperor of China in a way that Joe Biden does not stand in the line of descent from the first emperor of Rome. That's because the Roman Empire disintegrated completely, whereas, we do not live in a state called "Romania."
The consequence of that, for people in the West, is that we assume that empires must and will decline and fall. We always assume this. We're always looking around for signs of decline and fall. China suggests that it's not inevitable. Empires going on for 2,000 years, 2,500 years -- China has done. Xi Jinping, at the moment, is commissioning histories of the previous dynasty, the imperial dynasty, which is exactly what imperial dynasties have always done. It's almost like his regime is acknowledging the sense of continuity with the imperial dynasty that preceded it.
Weltwoche: Will the US empire gather enough strength to avoid its fall?
Holland: Now, with the United States, it's absolutely true that people have been predicting its fall forever. When Benjamin Franklin comes out of the Congress and they're writing the Constitution, and he's asked, "What's it going to be?" He says, "A republic, if you can keep it." He's so imbued with familiarity with Roman history that he takes for granted the republic will fall and that maybe the United States itself will fall. But it hasn't done.
Even though American politics seems in a terrible way with two appalling candidates in the next presidential election; it's fractured; it's divided ideologically. But I don't think that America, in any way, looks in decline, actually. It's culturally and economically more overweening than it's ever been. Twenty years ago, the GDP of Europe and the United States was equivalent. Now, America has blazed ahead. In the industries of the future, Europe has nothing to compare to America and its culture. American culture is as dominant as it's ever been.
Weltwoche: The United States are fractured. Both camps are led by old men. Biden is 80. Trump is 76. Why has the US turned into a gerontocracy?
Holland: It is a structural problem to do with the funding. Because of the way that political campaigns are funded, the longer you have been an operator, the more financial contacts you have that enable you to raise the money that then enables you to run for president. That is something that has gotten worse over the past decade. Obama was young and charismatic. Bush was young. Clinton was young. There seems to be a log jam in the political system, at the moment, in the United States.
But the political culture in the United States always seems to be pretty self-correcting. The election after this, we definitely won't see Trump against Biden. I imagine that there will be a premium on youth, again, or relative youth, at least.
Weltwoche: In Europe, leaders might not be exactly as old as in the US, but there is a lack of youthful dynamism and enthusiasm.
In Europe, it's to do with the intractable nature of the problems that European states are currently facing. It's very difficult in a period of economic decline, and Europe is clearly declining economically relative to the rest of the world. It's very difficult to see the stuff that Obama did.
Weltwoche: The “Yes, we can” mentality?
Holland: It's very difficult to do that, isn't it? The slightly depressing lesson of history is that it's people who successfully preach a sense of pessimism and that radical change will be required -- people who rip the plaster off -- who tend to emerge to power. People like Geert Wilders [in Holland] or Giorgia Meloni [in Italy]. Meloni, by the way, is pretty young.
Weltwoche: Not far from where we are sitting, there is the famous Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park -- the symbolic place of freedom of speech. Back in October, journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics from left, right, and center came back to London to sign the “Westminster Declaration,” warning of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries old democratic norms. How bad is the state of freedom of speech?
Holland: I don't think there's ever been absolute freedom of speech. Every society is hedged about by taboos and proprieties and a sense of what is acceptable and what isn't. In this country, up until the '50s, there were all kinds of things that you couldn't say. You couldn't be rude about the royal family. Homosexuality was punished by imprisonment. The Lord Chancellor censored plays. There was lots of censorship going on, but it reflected a distinctive moral order that was effectively destroyed in the '60s.
In one hundred years' time, when people look back, the '60s will come to seem a convulsion of an order of the 1520s. It took until the 17th century for people to realize that they'd lived through something called "The Reformation."
We are living through something analogous to that. What happened in the '60s was basically that the frameworks of traditional Christian morality were replaced with a sense that what mattered was "the vibe." All you need is love. Let it all hang out. A sense came that there should be absolute freedom, freedom for people to do what they want sexually, culturally, in terms of free speech. The effects of that lingered for maybe two, three decades, but societies cannot live with absolute freedom of speech.
Weltwoche: The woke brigade imposing new laws on how we think, speak, and behave is something natural then?
Holland: Morality reimposes itself. And we remain, in our cultural instincts, very, very Christian. The fact that a familiarity with the Bible and church teachings and the habit of going to church has gone doesn't mean that those instincts don't remain. What's happened is that those Christian instincts have started to coalesce around new taboos and new frameworks of morality. That's basically what we're seeing.
Universities, publishing, the media are increasingly adopting frameworks of morality that determine what you can and can't say in exactly the way that they operated in the '50s. From the '60s, there was this thirty year period where the value lay with saying whatever you wanted and being shocking. It was a golden age of satire and free speech. But that's gone because, now, the contours of this new reformation are starting to emerge, a new Geneva. We're starting to live in a new Geneva, a global Geneva.
Weltwoche: Time Magazine traditionally declares a “Person of the Year."
Holland: Taylor Swift got the honor this year.
Weltwoche: Who is your "Person of the Year"?
Holland: I'm not really the kind of person who has a "Person of the Year." The fact that Taylor Swift is Times' choice suits my perception of this year as … She embodies an endless and fruitless recycling of ideas and trends and currents that have no real sense of novelty about them.
Weltwoche: Recycling older and other trends.
Holland: In that sense, she's the perfect embodiment of my "Person of the Year." Taylor Swift is re-recording her own albums that she did, however many years ago. No one else has suggested any powerful solution to our problems that would justify him or her having that status.
Weltwoche: Times's person of last year, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, looks like the loser of this year. Despite all the aid from the West, it seems impossible that Ukraine can win back its territory. Will Ukraine have to surrender?
Holland: I don't know.
Weltwoche: And let President Vladimir Putin get away with his bullying?
Holland: Six months ago, everyone was saying Putin is finished. In June, there was the Wagner mutiny. For a moment, it looked like it was all over for Putin.
Weltwoche: That mutiny was over before it had properly started. Weeks later, the Wagner strongman, Yevgeny Prigozhin, fell miraculously from the sky.
Holland: If there's not an immediate resolution to wars, they tend to grind on for a very long time. Iran-Iraq or the First World War are classic examples. I suspect that is the brutal state of play for Ukraine. The West cannot afford to allow Ukraine to collapse, but it's unwilling to fund, to give Ukraine what it needs to win.
The same is true for Putin. He can't afford not to have Russia basically become a complete war economy. That should be enough to keep him in the game. Is it enough to win in victory? Probably not, because he's downgrading everything that makes Russia an effective power. Again, it's a sense of legs going round and round and nobody moving, those nightmares where you're stuck in sand and you're just running round and round and never moving anywhere. Both Putin and Zelensky seem in that nightmarish situation.
Weltwoche: The widespread perception in the West is: If we let Putin take Ukraine, he will not stop. He will try to expand his territory further to the west. But is this view not over-exaggerated? Isn't Ukraine Putin's red line where he stops?
Holland: I don't think it's exaggerated. If the West gives up on Ukraine and Russia swallows the whole of Ukraine, that is clearly a terrible danger. It's a danger because the West will have shown that it's unwilling to defend a sovereign democratic state. Of course, then, in that situation, the Baltic states and Poland are going to be very nervous because it suggests that the West lacks the appetite, the resolve, the sense of self-sacrifice to maintain it.
That's so obvious that I cannot imagine the West allowing it to happen. Even if the worst happens, from the European point of view, and Trump gets elected and he pulls the United States out of NATO (which I think is unlikely, but suppose he does), the European powers will have no choice but, to a degree, pauperize their economies in the way that Russia is doing, now. Democratic Europe cannot afford to allow democracy to be swallowed up. I don't think it will happen.
Weltwoche: What event of 2023 will go down in history? What will remembered in one hundred years' time?
Holland: I suspect Artificial Intelligence (AI). Yes, developments in the field of technology are what this year will be remembered for. The Reformation would have been impossible without the printing press. The process of technological change with the printing press was obviously much slower than the development of AI.
Weltwoche: Hollywood actors joined the biggest work stoppage in Tinseltown since the 1960s, warning AI could be used to clone their voices and likenesses. Is this a first sign of a change of times where robots and machines are taking over?
Holland: I don't know. Leading figures in the world of artificial intelligence don't know.
Weltwoche: Let me ask in another way. Even if computers are taking over a lot of our work, of our lives, what is the human core that remains that can't be copied or reproduced by AI?
Holland: The honest answer to that, I suspect, is the ability to be a bit shit. Artificial intelligence is programmed to be as good as it possibly can be. That's why its exponential improvement is so alarming. It's both exciting and alarming because it exists to get better and better and better. Humans, sometimes, we lie in bed because we can't be asked, or we feel a bit tired and our work's a bit shit. I would say that not always striving to be our very best is what humans are about. That may be why artificial intelligence in the long, or maybe even the short, term is so threatening to us.
Urs Gehriger