Juno News - April 15, 2023


Can civilization be saved？

Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Michael Bonner Kenneth Clark T.S. Eliot
Katie Telford testified for over two hours yet said nothing Feds’ caught attempting to suppress article on refugee policy (ft. Lorne Gunter)

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

150.27

Word count

2,360

Sentence count

135

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In defense of civilization, Michael Bonner argues that the past is not something we should run from, but rather, arguably run towards. In this episode of the Andrew Lawton Show, he joins me to discuss his new book, Defense of Civility: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Welcome back to the Andrew Lawton Show. I have become a bit of a history nerd in recent years.
00:00:13.880 I never went to set out to study that in the first place, but I've just become more and more
00:00:19.600 enamored with history. Frankly, the more people in this day and age try to take aim at history
00:00:25.500 or oftentimes just ignore it altogether. So I was very, very pleased when I saw a book that says
00:00:32.620 the past is not something that we should run from, but arguably run towards. Michael Bonner,
00:00:37.740 who I've met a couple of occasions, and he's been quite a prolific figure for reasons that
00:00:43.260 will become apparent very soon. But he's written a fantastic book in defense of civilization,
00:00:48.880 How Our Past Can Renew Our Present. And he joins me now. Michael Bonner, it's good to talk to you.
00:00:54.660 Thanks for coming on today, and congratulations on the book.
00:00:56.980 Thanks for having me, Andrew.
00:00:58.740 Now, I know you've obviously gone through academia, you have a PhD, you're tremendously accomplished.
00:01:04.180 This is not written just for the academic in mind. I mean, this was a very readable read, as they say.
00:01:11.140 Yeah, I mean, I didn't want to get into academic fights or controversies or anything like that.
00:01:16.900 I want to just, you know, to tell the story or to make the argument. And, you know, I'm very relieved that you think I succeeded.
00:01:28.260 Well, let me hear in your words what you think that argument is. What is it that you set out to do with this?
00:01:34.980 Well, I mean, I can sum it up with, you know, there are a couple of quotations that I include at the end of the book.
00:01:42.980 You know, there's that there's that saying from, you know, T.S. Eliot. He says history is now, which is seemingly a paradox.
00:01:52.180 History is now. And then there's the other one. History is ourselves from Kenneth Clark.
00:01:58.180 And the point is that we need to find meaning and purpose.
00:02:04.580 Every generation needs to find meaning and purpose in the past.
00:02:08.260 And that doesn't mean that the past is, you know, uniformly to be, you know, we shouldn't we shouldn't be uncritical.
00:02:15.140 We shouldn't be, you know, partisan or blind to our past failures.
00:02:22.660 But we have to come to terms with it, wrestle with it, make sense of it and find find meaning and purpose in it.
00:02:32.180 One of the challenges politically and I know this book is not an artifact of the culture war.
00:02:37.140 I think you take a much more nuanced and much bigger picture view of things.
00:02:40.740 But I'd say one of the challenges that we do see today is that there are a lot of people who view the past as irreconcilable with the president.
00:02:48.020 They think, as I alluded to a moment ago, that it's something we should run away from, that we should denounce, that we should condemn.
00:02:54.660 And I'd say often that's coming from people that have not undertaken to understand the past entirely.
00:03:00.260 But what is it precisely that you think makes it so that these things are not just reconcilable, but actually that we need to look to the past as we move forward?
00:03:07.860 Well, I mean, the fundamental problem is that there is no break in history.
00:03:14.900 There is no break with the past.
00:03:18.900 It's impossible.
00:03:20.100 And attempts have been made, notably in the 20th century, but it doesn't work.
00:03:26.820 And sort of disconnecting people from the past is extraordinarily disruptive.
00:03:35.460 You can find examples of this from this sort of accidental in the form of, you know, the Industrial Revolution, people, you know, being herded into factories instead of working on their farms and so forth.
00:03:50.820 Extraordinarily disruptive or much more sinister in the case of the Soviet and Nazi tyrannies sort of insisting that, you know, everything that came before is sort of to be repudiated and looking far into the future toward a sort of utopia. 0.76
00:04:09.540 Basically, trying to make that break has not had a good track record and, you know, we shouldn't try, we should try to find, as I say, meaning, we should try to make our peace with the evils or the failures of the past rather than trying to obliterate them.
00:04:31.540 Does the view that Western nations have, the Western world has to civilization, align in your view with how other cultures are dealing with this and other cultures are doing this?
00:04:45.000 Because, I mean, even if you take a strictly Canadian context on this, whatever people think of Quebec politics, Quebec as a society is much more emphatic about protecting its culture and asserting its culture.
00:04:55.660 And I think in a lot of the Western world, we see really this idea that we're not allowed to have a culture.
00:05:01.140 We're not allowed to celebrate our civilization.
00:05:03.580 I know you've studied Iran extensively.
00:05:06.260 I know you talk about China extensively in the book.
00:05:08.480 And it strikes me that a lot of these other parts of the world, for whatever their faults politically, have actually done a better job of trying to preserve their civilization.
00:05:18.880 Yeah, I mean, I think that what I would say is that the Western view of history as a story of progress, that is extremely unusual.
00:05:32.120 And I don't think that it's correct.
00:05:34.600 First of all, that that's that's simply an assumption, it seems to be borne out by, you know, the facts of the sort of mid 20th century onward, if you lived in most of North America, life looked like it was getting better and better and better.
00:05:52.340 And that, you know, you know, you might have concluded that nothing would get in the way of continuous improvement.
00:06:00.740 But that that's a very unusual view historically.
00:06:05.760 And I think now we're beginning to understand or realize that that is not correct.
00:06:13.840 It can't be taken for granted, you know, the the continuous evolution of technology is not a reliable measure of, you know, of a civilization or of this, the success of a culture.
00:06:32.120 And an older view, which I think is borne out by human experience is something more like a cycle of of the the rise and then the eventual collapse of societies or of civilizations.
00:06:52.120 And we should take this to heart, I think, no, no civilization is immune from collapse, however long of you, you take, you know, sometimes tempting to think of a constant evolution and change and so forth.
00:07:07.520 But the longer a view you take, the more you are forced to admit that eventually, you know, human societies do die out and are where do you think we are at in that cycle now?
00:07:19.600 Well, I can't say for sure. I mean, this is this is this is I mean, it depends who you ask.
00:07:27.200 I mean, there are people who might say that with the Continental Reformation, everything went to pot in 1517.
00:07:32.900 And it's been, you know, it's all been downhill since then.
00:07:36.620 Yeah, well, I mean, from from one perspective, that would be true from the perspective of the the sort of closely knit, tightly integrated society of the Western Western European Middle Ages, that that society is no more.
00:07:56.280 It's it's it's it's it's gone.
00:07:57.280 It's gone. I mean, you might find sort of relics of it in sort of agricultural areas of of of Europe, but that's sort of that's sort of mostly mostly gone.
00:08:08.280 And, you know, if you think of if you think of how much has how should I put this, you think of as useful as the Internet is and so forth.
00:08:20.280 You think how how different life is, you know, people are somewhat less likely to gather in the so-called third place or the you know, there's the famous there's the famous study called Bowling Alone.
00:08:36.280 Bowling Alone in the study of sort of fraternal and volunteer organizations in America, you know, that that that sort of lifestyle where, you know, a whole sort of town gets together to, you know, join in a musical performance or, you know, there are various sort of layers of clubs and church organizations or volunteer groups.
00:08:58.280 You know, that has some it's not totally gone, but it has somewhat faded away.
00:09:03.280 And I think that the the spread of, you know, Internet technology and so forth has somewhat accelerated that depending on who you ask, you know, I think I'm more on the side of that represents a decline rather than an evolution.
00:09:22.280 But the the point for me is not necessarily to pinpoint exactly where we might be on some sort of trajectory, but rather to remind people that what I'm calling civilization is fragile, that it needs to be protected and nurtured and that we do that.
00:09:43.280 Or historically, we have always done that as a species by looking to the past, finding meaning there and imitating what what worked before.
00:09:56.280 One of the things that you touch on in the book that I find very interesting is how contentment or satisfaction, satisfaction do not correlate with what a lot of people characterize as progress.
00:10:09.280 I mean, we have, as you've noted in our discussion now and in the book, we have technological innovations that, you know, were just completely unimaginable.
00:10:17.280 Even a generation ago, let alone countless generations ago, you have medical innovations, you have longer lifespans.
00:10:24.280 Now, that is a little bit more dubious now, but all of this has for a lot of people not made the world a better place and it's not made their life better.
00:10:35.280 And I'm curious where you think that comes from.
00:10:38.280 Is it a decline in faith?
00:10:40.280 Is it a decline in moral grounding or is it something else entirely?
00:10:44.280 Well, yeah, that's a very important question.
00:10:48.280 I think that the first thing we should observe, I mean, I'm not a Luddite.
00:10:52.280 I'm not opposed to technologies.
00:10:54.280 No, you don't view modernity as the enemy as exclusively as some of your contemporaries might.
00:10:59.280 Yeah.
00:11:00.280 And of course, again, there's no there's no break in history going either forward or back.
00:11:08.280 Right.
00:11:09.280 So, you know, we are where we are and we're not going to change that.
00:11:13.280 But the the fundamental point is that the I think in a society in which you would not have had the comforts that you describe or the benefits of science and especially medicine and so forth that you would have.
00:11:33.280 It would have been easier to maintain a view whereby, you know, the world requires much more input from you, much more work from you and your family to sort of hold together to keep the forces of chaos at bay or to sort of reverse decline and so forth.
00:11:58.280 Now it's easier to coast.
00:12:00.280 And I think that a better I think a better approach would be to say, well, let's, you know, let's keep our technology.
00:12:11.280 Let's improve it.
00:12:12.280 Let's improve it, but let's use it to connect ourselves better to provide more leisure for ourselves to to work at our culture to form societies to form families to, you know, ensure that the conditions under which we ourselves grew up and flourished are still there for, you know, for our children and that sort of thing.
00:12:41.280 And I think, I think we've lost sight of that.
00:12:44.280 I think that there was a sense at the end of the 20th century that sort of, you know, triumphant Western liberal order had no enemies left and it was just time to, you know, relax and take it easy.
00:13:00.280 And so, you know, sort of caricature of the of the of the Fukuyama end of history sort of thing.
00:13:06.280 But I think we now realize that that was mistaken and that, you know, our institutions and our our civilization need significantly more work than we've put into them.
00:13:20.280 Well, one of the challenges, too, is that we often pretend that some things are a lot more enduring than they are.
00:13:27.280 And I mean, I know you've worked in politics.
00:13:29.280 I've been immersed in that world, unfortunately, as well.
00:13:32.280 And the reality is people put so much emphasis on things that will not last and we know will not last.
00:13:39.280 And you see that in manufacturing.
00:13:41.280 We build things that do not last.
00:13:43.280 And there is this.
00:13:45.280 I don't know if it's an indifference to history or if it's just not understanding what will withstand the test of time.
00:13:53.280 I'm curious your take on that.
00:13:54.280 Yeah.
00:13:55.280 Well, I mean, I do think that you're right.
00:13:57.280 But what has stood the test of time, I think, is actually so obvious that it's easy to miss.
00:14:04.280 I mean, if you think about it, like civilization or, you know, what I'm calling civilization is only really about 5000 years old.
00:14:18.280 If you if you consider the the say the old kingdom Egypt or Mesopotamia, it's it's about that.
00:14:28.280 It has it has some earlier origins, which I talk about in the book, but, you know, it's fully formed about 5000 years ago.
00:14:35.280 That is a blip in the history of the human species.
00:14:40.280 That's like a nanosecond in our full existence.
00:14:45.280 Right.
00:14:46.280 And if you think about how many of these societies and empires and, you know, city states or whatever that have come and gone over time,
00:14:57.280 some of them we didn't even know about until they were dug out of the ground and in the in the 19th century.
00:15:03.280 That's how thorough the collapse and obliteration can be.
00:15:11.280 And for all we know, I mean, it's it's it's not impossible, but.
00:15:16.280 So, there's当然sche reason why.
00:15:17.280 I mean, I mean, there's no secret.
00:15:18.280 There, people who know where I'm having that back perhaps than not to teach欸 dónde.
00:15:20.280 I mean, it's almost impossible.
00:15:22.280 Now coś we have to know and have to tell you about that.
00:15:24.280 Okay?
00:15:25.280 Maybe that, so...
00:15:26.280 Let's see in the next slide.
00:15:36.280 Sure.
00:15:37.280 I mean, go near the large mansion and wait.
00:15:38.280 I mean, what I believe is haltク zou! 1.00
00:15:40.280 So, let's explore εκab开買叙 maximus!