Sir Simon Schama on becoming ‘weirdly fearless’ as America pivots

It has often been the case that just when our brains are feeling contorted by a political or historical conundrum, Simon Schama has been there to help us untangle it.

What was the source of the collective energy behind the French Revolution, exactly? And what sort of horrors did doctors who fought previous pandemics have to contend with? (The answers, from his books Citizens and Foreign Bodies, respectively: violence itself; dodging dead monkeys that dropped from the trees in stricken streets of South India in the 1890s.)

Then there were the 2.4 million people who tuned into the first episode of his landmark BBC documentary series about the history of the Jewish people, The Story of The Jews, in 2013.

Sir Simon Schama having lunch at the MCA’s Canvas restaurant.Credit: Sam Mooy

And now here he is – when we are, perhaps, most in knots about the state of the world – in the flesh, strolling into the Canvas restaurant, perched high above Sydney’s Circular Quay, looking like a man of leisure, in a grey and white striped linen shirt and leather Converse.

We’re just above the spot where the fateful Ruby Princess cruise ship sparked a COVID-19 disaster in 2020 after dozens of infected passengers streamed into the city.

But that was yesterday’s public health disaster.

Today, he’s off and running about the latest one.

“So this is absolutely the first big test [of Donald Trump’s health department],” says Schama, referring to a recent measles outbreak in Texas and the response to it, by Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, that people consider imbibing cod liver oil and vitamin A as a treatment.

“It’s appalling,” says Schama.

Still, he is not tearing his hair out in shock, as so many of us are – some 229 years after the invention of the first vaccine – by the sight of a federal health minister touting folksy nutritional aids to combat infectious disease.

The reciept for our lunch with meal at Canva with Sir Simon.

Because, as the British historian points out, Kennedy Jr is not an anomaly but rather a part of a long American tradition of a near cultish prioritisation of the “rapturous mysteries of cults” over rational thought.

“America was founded in this sort of state of ecstasy by Calvinists and methodists and non-conformists, and at the time of the great awakening,” says Schama. “And there’s almost never been a period in American history, or seldom, when Americans haven’t thought that a gush of revealed belief ultimately was more important than a cerebral, rational argument. Rational argument has always had a fight on its hands [in the United States]. And it still does.” (No wonder Schama was knighted in 2019 for his services to history.)

Then Schama pauses. “Is there anything you’d recommend?” he says, pointing to the menu. Its dishes include “Chicken, smoked corn, cognac”, and “Wagyu, dashi, turnip, wasabi”.

“I mean, it’s a list of ingredients,” he drawls in an accent that smacks of the rich family in Saltburn. “There was a time on menus where they were overrun by verbs. Like: ‘Rinsed in the morning dew’, ‘lightly braised’, ‘accompanied by’. Now, you have no idea what’s been done to them. Do you think we should ask for a verb?” he says, looking up at me. “Verbs for two?”

On the menu but no verbs: chicken with smoked corn and cognac.Credit: Sam Mooy

He decides on the chicken, with a verbless entrée to start. (“Salmon, apple, creme fraiche, verbena”.) I opt for the wagyu and an entrée of tuna, accompanied by other tasty nouns. (Fermented chilli, avocado and cos.)

Storytelling and standing up to coercive power are in Schama’s blood.

Growing up in Central London in the 1940s and 1950s, he spent Saturday mornings attending synagogue with his family and Sundays being read to by his father from the pages of Balzac and Dickens. His father, Arthur, was beaten up on numerous occasions by followers of the British fascist Oswald Mosley in the streets of London.

“He said that a Jew’s best weapon is always his mouth,” Schama once said of his father.

Wagyu with dashi and turnip at the MCA’s Canvas restaurant.Credit: Sam Mooy

And so, after spending some time as a teenager on a kibbutz in the north of Israel, Schama studied at Cambridge before teaching there and then moving on to teaching at Oxford and Harvard before switching to Columbia University in New York in 1993. (He remains a professor of history and art history there.)

But now, having just turned 80, Schama has a new goal: to run his mouth in public in a way he previously didn’t.

“When you are really old, you either, you know, go on cruises and take to golf, or you become a kind of reckless teenager again, really, you become slightly, weirdly, fearless,” he says. “That’s why I’m talking now, speaking out loud. I feel more of an obligation to.”

About what?

“The monstrosity of much of what Donald Trump does,” he says, among other public ills. “It’s a kind of life or death of a certain kind of America, both in foreign policy and in social policy,” he says, referring not just to Trump’s cozying up to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, but to what many are foreseeing: Trump cutting Medicaid, the program that provides medical and health-related services to low-income Americans.

“We are at that moment of really profound momentousness. I would say this is no time to shrink from hyperbole.” He bangs on the table. “Run the hyperbole up the f--king mast!”

So, I have to ask a scholar of the French Revolution: is Trump a revolutionary? And is the United States turning into revolutionary France, as some publications have recently posited?

“Trump is a profound reaction, not a revolution,” he says, tucking into his chicken. (“Gently verbed”, he says, by way of approving of his roasted chook.)

“Trump is a creature of main chance grudges, impulses, and all the rest of that.”

As for the American people who voted for him rising up, as the French citizens did in the late 1700s, to protest the monarchy’s resistance to change?

Schama’s latest book.

“No, that’s absurd,” says Schama. “If anything, it’s turning into ... a sort of techno-elitist oligarchy. Elon Musk is just the sort of person the revolutionaries would have sent to the guillotine – at high speed. He’s ultimately going to be responsible for doing damage to Medicaid, to people’s health. So, that’s not going to make people cheerful ... The techno-bros are really anarchist libertarians. They don’t believe in government of any kind. [They] believe in the superiority of their own particular tribe.”

He also decries the widespread inability of many people now to hold two thoughts at once, in particular, that one can feel horror about both the slaughtered in Gaza and those who were massacred and kidnapped in Israel on October 7. It is, he says, a symptom of our increasingly polarised societies.

“But I do NOT want to hear about Israel as a settler colonial state,” he says.

Why? I ask. (Scholars, including Noam Chomsky, have argued this case.)

“It’s an historical absurdity,” says Schama. “Because all [citizens of] actual colonial states, like Canada and Australia, have another place to go. They have a home to go to. Jews were desperately persecuted; have no other home to go to.” (As for Trump’s “Gaza-Lago” plan? “It’s crazed”.)

So, is there a historical precedent for a figure like Trump? No, says Schama.

“Of course, there is craziness, and there is wickedness, but they come in a multitude of different costumes,” he says, referring, generally, to power-hungry rulers throughout history. “[Trump’s] is loaded with destructiveness of vulgarity and stupidity and narcissism.”

But surely that’s not unique?

“It’s unique in its consequences; the consequences of someone that seems personally petty and trivial; the knock-on effects are globally catastrophic.”

It’s enough to make one wonder about Schama’s sense of optimism.

On the eve of the 2020 American presidential election, he wrote in the Financial Times that, though the citizens of the United States were radically politically polarised, he still succumbed to “optimism” about his adopted country, home to many of his favourite authors and poets, like Edgar Allen Poe and E.E Cummings. “I still want it to work out well for this country and for that shrinking part of the world that looks to it, in spite of the evidence of its decadence and near-collapse, for inspiration and renewal,” he wrote. “And in spite of everything my head knows, my heart says it just might.”

So, does he still feel that optimism?

“Um, no, not really,” he says almost shyly. “You know, I will do my best to. But we’re in a very [tough] spot, not least because the opposition leadership has been so sideswiped and winded and has not found his voice. So we’re absent a crucial kind of leadership to kind of reinstate those, you know, values of social connection and government responsibility.”

So, how are we to live? Are we to just reconcile ourselves to a new reality? That we’ve enjoyed 80 years of peace, and now we are heading into an era of turmoil, marked by the decline of democracy and basic civil rights? Or do we fight for them, wherever we are, in any way we can?

We have to fight, says Schama. For one thing, this part of history has not been written yet. “We’re not at a stage of anything. We’re at a turning point, for sure, but that’s because a particular government has produced an election that has decided to make that turn. And if you’re living in a democracy, especially in one that has major elections every two years, you’d be crazed to think that you’re flat on your back, and you’ll accept the age of authoritarianism. There is no such thing.”

Sir Simon Schama is in Australia courtesy of Adelaide Writer’s Week.