Marci Shore: How to Improve the World Amidst Evil?

How My View Grew

In a Soviet-era bunker in an undisclosed location in Ukraine, a Ukrainian soldier reads books by the late historian Tony Judt and wonders: Is it possible to make the world better amidst evil? Not long after, Yale historian Marci Shore, a former peacenik, finds herself pleading to the German government to send lethal weapons to Ukraine.

What's happening here? How does one historian's words support a courageous defense of democracy that, in turn, inspires another historian to step outside of her comfort zone and into a debate about war?

In this week's episode of How My View Grew, the second-to-last of season one, Marci Shore joins me to explore these questions. The story she shares is about choosing to take moral responsibility rather than ignoring evil or rationalizing it away, even if this means risking friendship, status, or your own sense of identity. Her story is also about tapping the lessons of history to see future scenarios you otherwise might miss or consider impossible. And it's about postmodernism—both the new capacities it offers and, when stretched to an extreme, the disasters it produces.

The episode draws from Shore's book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, as well as Judt's books, Thinking the Twentieth Century, written with Timothy Snyder, and Past Imperfect.

**Key takeaways**

• 6:00 Judt's harsh critique of French intellectuals' silence about the show trials and other Soviet terror
• 17:00 The alternative to silence and rationalization: taking moral responsibility
• 20:00 There is a difference between good and evil, and between truth and lies
• 25:00 A Ukrainian soldier reading Judt's books in a bunker
• 30:00 Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump, and the evasion of responsibility
• 33:30 Why liberals struggle to grasp nihilism and mass murder
• 40:00 World War I was, before it occurred, unimaginable
• 46:00 Historians can't predict the future, but they describe what can happen
• 50:00 Amiel's reflections

**Resources**

• "Reading Tony Judt in Wartime Ukraine," Marci Shore's essay in The New Yorker.
• Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder
• Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944-1956 by Tony Judt
• The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution

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