00:00:58.740Now, I know you've obviously gone through academia, you have a PhD, you're tremendously accomplished.
00:01:04.180This is not written just for the academic in mind. I mean, this was a very readable read, as they say.
00:01:11.140Yeah, I mean, I didn't want to get into academic fights or controversies or anything like that.
00:01:16.900I 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.
00:01:28.260Well, let me hear in your words what you think that argument is. What is it that you set out to do with this?
00:01:34.980Well, 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.
00:01:42.980You know, there's that there's that saying from, you know, T.S. Eliot. He says history is now, which is seemingly a paradox.
00:01:52.180History is now. And then there's the other one. History is ourselves from Kenneth Clark.
00:01:58.180And the point is that we need to find meaning and purpose.
00:02:04.580Every generation needs to find meaning and purpose in the past.
00:02:08.260And that doesn't mean that the past is, you know, uniformly to be, you know, we shouldn't we shouldn't be uncritical.
00:02:15.140We shouldn't be, you know, partisan or blind to our past failures.
00:02:22.660But we have to come to terms with it, wrestle with it, make sense of it and find find meaning and purpose in it.
00:02:32.180One of the challenges politically and I know this book is not an artifact of the culture war.
00:02:37.140I think you take a much more nuanced and much bigger picture view of things.
00:02:40.740But 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.
00:02:48.020They 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.
00:02:54.660And I'd say often that's coming from people that have not undertaken to understand the past entirely.
00:03:00.260But 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?
00:03:07.860Well, I mean, the fundamental problem is that there is no break in history.
00:03:20.100And attempts have been made, notably in the 20th century, but it doesn't work.
00:03:26.820And sort of disconnecting people from the past is extraordinarily disruptive.
00:03:35.460You 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.
00:03:50.820Extraordinarily 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.
00:04:09.540Basically, 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.
00:04:31.540Does 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?
00:04:45.000Because, 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.
00:04:55.660And I think in a lot of the Western world, we see really this idea that we're not allowed to have a culture.
00:05:01.140We're not allowed to celebrate our civilization.
00:05:06.260I know you talk about China extensively in the book.
00:05:08.480And 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.
00:05:18.880Yeah, 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.
00:05:34.600First 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.
00:05:52.340And that, you know, you know, you might have concluded that nothing would get in the way of continuous improvement.
00:06:00.740But that that's a very unusual view historically.
00:06:05.760And I think now we're beginning to understand or realize that that is not correct.
00:06:13.840It 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.
00:06:32.120And 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.
00:06:52.120And 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.
00:07:07.520But 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?
00:07:19.600Well, I can't say for sure. I mean, this is this is this is I mean, it depends who you ask.
00:07:27.200I mean, there are people who might say that with the Continental Reformation, everything went to pot in 1517.
00:07:32.900And it's been, you know, it's all been downhill since then.
00:07:36.620Yeah, 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.
00:07:57.280It'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.
00:08:08.280And, 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.
00:08:20.280You 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.
00:08:36.280Bowling 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.
00:08:58.280You know, that has some it's not totally gone, but it has somewhat faded away.
00:09:03.280And 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.
00:09:22.280But 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.
00:09:43.280Or historically, we have always done that as a species by looking to the past, finding meaning there and imitating what what worked before.
00:09:56.280One 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.
00:10:09.280I 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.
00:10:17.280Even a generation ago, let alone countless generations ago, you have medical innovations, you have longer lifespans.
00:10:24.280Now, 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.
00:10:35.280And I'm curious where you think that comes from.
00:11:09.280So, you know, we are where we are and we're not going to change that.
00:11:13.280But 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.
00:11:33.280It 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.
00:12:12.280Let'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.
00:12:41.280And I think, I think we've lost sight of that.
00:12:44.280I 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.
00:13:00.280And so, you know, sort of caricature of the of the of the Fukuyama end of history sort of thing.
00:13:06.280But 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.
00:13:20.280Well, one of the challenges, too, is that we often pretend that some things are a lot more enduring than they are.
00:13:27.280And I mean, I know you've worked in politics.
00:13:29.280I've been immersed in that world, unfortunately, as well.
00:13:32.280And the reality is people put so much emphasis on things that will not last and we know will not last.