The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Greatness and Ruin ｜ Interview with Dr Ricardo Duchesne

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this Lotus Eaters interview. I'm Harry, joined today by Dr. Ricardo Duchesne,

00:00:08.200 the author of a number of books on the uniqueness of Western Civilization. In fact, his 2011 book

00:00:15.320 was called The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. He is a former professor at the University of

00:00:21.180 New Brunswick and a historical sociologist. Today we're going to be discussing his latest book,

00:00:27.320 Greatness and Ruin, published by Antelope Hill, which traces the self-reflection and universalism

00:00:33.240 of European civilization, its roots, what it produced, and the implications going to the

00:00:39.780 future. Dr. Duchesne, Ricardo, thank you very much for joining us. How are you doing today?

00:00:45.420 Yes, I'm very pleased talking to you, Lotus Eaters. I heard about it, so I'm very pleased that you

00:00:55.840 asked me to do an interview. Well, I'm very pleased to get the opportunity to speak about it,

00:01:03.180 because when Antelope Hill sent it, I wasn't familiar with your work, but as you can tell

00:01:08.680 from just looking, you are very thorough in this. You trace a whole number of different artistic and

00:01:15.800 civilizational epochs and revolutions through European civilization, and you make what is sure

00:01:22.960 to be, even among, I would imagine, parts of the conservative right, the more civic nationalist

00:01:30.260 oriented and minded right, a very controversial thesis. The thesis of this book essentially being

00:01:37.620 that Europeans, beginning with the Greeks, but you can trace it back to the Indo-European

00:01:44.300 war bands, made a discovery of the self, the idea that I am me, this abstract I that's separate from

00:01:53.780 the group. This was a unique Western discovery, something that can't really be found in any great

00:02:01.160 measure in any other civilization across the world, including China, who you repeatedly refer to as one

00:02:07.480 of the only real civilizational rivals of Europe going back historically. Many people would presumably

00:02:13.940 find this to be quite a controversial idea, given that we have this in-baked liberalism in the way that we view

00:02:19.720 the whole world right now. The world is not made up of groups, it's not made up of competing tribes, it's all

00:02:24.720 made up of individuals. So it would probably shock a lot of people to hear this idea that the idea of the

00:02:30.360 individual itself was discovered and developed and created, you could almost say, by Europeans. Tell me,

00:02:38.200 when did you first begin to find this theory, develop this thesis? What led you to embarking down this

00:02:47.640 strain of thought? Well, when I wrote Uniqueness of Western Civilization, which was published in 2011,

00:02:56.280 European, if you read it, you can see sections there in which I was already aware that there was

00:03:03.400 something different about Europeans that related to a peculiar tendency to think back into themselves

00:03:14.760 and to try and differentiate that which belongs to the human self and that which is outside. If you read

00:03:24.040 Julian James' work, what was the title of that book? I forget. I mean, it's a famous book, a famous

00:03:33.240 The Bikai Made Our Mind. So in that book, he observed that from reading a lot of texts from the ancient world, 1.00

00:03:41.880 he observed that at that time, human beings didn't really have a self. It was as if the norms,

00:03:51.240 the traditions, the customs that they inhabited within spoke to them and commanded them to take certain

00:03:59.960 actions and to think in certain ways. And he believed that at some point in the last century BC, you can see

00:04:10.360 emerging an internal voice that belongs to the person thinking and speaking. However, in his view,

00:04:21.080 the Iliad of Homer was still stuck in the past. The characters in the Iliad did not have this

00:04:29.880 inner voice that belongs to them. They did not have an introspective consciousness or a monologue

00:04:37.640 within themselves, but rather were guided by external

00:04:44.680 spirits, norms, gods.

00:04:48.600 Whereas I dispute that argument, I believe that the Iliad is already a transition that it worked,

00:04:54.920 and I'm not going to get into the specifics of that. But this idea that I expressed in the first

00:05:01.400 chapter, as I said, I had anticipations of that idea in uniqueness, but I never really made it the central

00:05:08.840 point of the book. Whereas now I start with it, and I argue that this has to be the point around which

00:05:16.200 we begin to distinguish the West from the rest. And it also has to be the point around which we start to

00:05:24.360 understand why it was that the West was far more creative than the other civilizations of the world.

00:05:31.160 I don't accept the argument that it had to do with environmental factors, or that it was commerce or

00:05:37.320 trade, a more cosmopolitan view. None of those things explain it for me. So I began in this book to

00:05:46.520 really concentrate on that and try to understand this phenomenon, this unique consciousness among

00:05:55.480 Europeans, starting with the ancient Greeks. There are anticipations there with the prehistorical

00:06:00.520 in Europeans. If you read their poetry and so on, you can see a sense of the I speaking out. In tribal

00:06:07.880 societies, there is no I. You are part of a collective, an expression of that collective.

00:06:16.760 When you see them acting and speaking as groups, you almost see them converging together as if no one

00:06:23.400 stands out. They also look alike very much. They basically have the same thoughts, the same feelings

00:06:31.240 and emotions. And you can see this in our times as well. There have been studies of the crowd. When

00:06:37.960 people come into crowds, they merge into a collective. And people say that even individuals will do things

00:06:45.240 they will never do on their own. But once they're part of that dynamic of the crowd, the screams,

00:06:51.720 the voices they hear, the way everybody's behaving, they just integrate into it. And that primordial

00:06:57.800 their collectivism kicks in even among white people in that atmosphere. And there have been stories of

00:07:04.200 this by psychologists, including Freud. But Europeans and whites eventually do develop a very strong sense

00:07:16.360 sense of their identity of realizing. Philosophers realize this, starting with the Socrates, realizing

00:07:26.840 that there is such a thing as a faculty

00:07:28.920 that is called the mind. It is located in the brain, and it can be distinguished from the other parts of

00:07:35.400 the body. In the past, it may sound strange to us, but human beings did not know where their thinking

00:07:43.480 came from. They thought it was possibly the heart, because the heart is the one thing in your body that

00:07:49.160 is moving and vibrating. And when you get anxious or agitated, it pans more. And when you scream to people

00:07:57.880 and so on, you know, it moves. So people thought that's where it comes from. The Chinese, up until the Europeans

00:08:05.000 taught them otherwise, they held the view of the heart-mind. The mind was in the heart. They were never able to

00:08:12.520 differentiate the two, whereas you already see among the pre-Socratic differentiation of the mind from

00:08:20.760 the other parts of the body. And with Aristotle, in his logic, this is very clear cut. He knows already

00:08:28.360 that human beings, what differentiates them is they have this sinking mind. And then he takes it further

00:08:34.040 and says that the only way that you can arrive at truth, or truth claims, and that you can really

00:08:41.960 think about all kinds of questions is by letting your mind make those decisions. So you can see here

00:08:50.120 already the Greeks differentiating themselves from the kinship group and kinship networks, which happens.

00:08:56.920 I mean, the city-state could not have come, could not have been conceived unless the Greeks came up with

00:09:03.960 the concept of civic citizenship. Now, the Greeks at that time were still very ethnocentric. They still

00:09:11.080 saw themselves as a people, a Greek people that were different from the Persians and the Libyans and so

00:09:17.160 on. But nevertheless, they start developing this notion that if you want to belong to a city-state which

00:09:25.960 consists of people from a variety of clans and tribal groups, then you have to get another type of

00:09:34.920 sense of membership of who belongs in that city. It cannot only be, oh, this is my clan. Those are my

00:09:41.880 aristocratic leaders. I belong to them. I'm loyal to them. I'm not loyal to Athens. So you can see,

00:09:49.320 and I talk about that, how that happens, that sense of citizenship. So the point I'm making is that not only in

00:09:57.400 the case of Aristotle being able to develop his logic, but also mathematics and philosophical thinking

00:10:03.800 and conceptions of civic citizenship are ultimately rooted in that ability of the Greeks to differentiate

00:10:12.920 the mind and thereby differentiate the I, the thinking self from everything that is around. Now, in our times,

00:10:20.120 you know, postmodern philosophy and even before that pragmatism and so on, they dismiss all of that

00:10:27.880 because they say, oh, well, we're always contextualized. We're always over determined by a whole range of

00:10:33.640 factors, society, our historical time and so on. But a point I make is that our very awareness that we are

00:10:41.960 contextualized, that we are surrounded by a whole range of forces and norms that do shape us, is itself

00:10:51.880 an indication that we have an eye and we are aware of those things. In the case of the Chinese and other 0.71

00:10:58.200 civilizations, they're not even aware of that. So that, I would say, is what I felt the I and the 0.71

00:11:06.600 thinking self had to be emphasized right away.

00:11:10.600 Yeah. And again, I think it's quite difficult for people, again, with this kind of like

00:11:15.560 inbuilt liberalism that we assume by default and project onto the rest of the world to differentiate

00:11:21.720 what you're really describing there. Because everybody recognizes that there are what you

00:11:27.880 could describe as individual biological beings. You know, there are people who have to sleep and

00:11:34.840 eat and communicate to one another. This is more about the way that they internally conceptualize

00:11:40.920 themselves in relation to the world around them. And I think that's one of the things that makes it

00:11:47.000 quite a difficult thing for many people to wrap their heads around until it's explained to them

00:11:51.720 that this is not something that is even historically the norm up until two or three hundred years ago

00:11:57.640 for most civilizations outside of Europe. And the thing is that the thesis that you're putting forward

00:12:03.240 does put itself at odds with other ideas that have been put forward for the uniqueness of Western

00:12:09.880 success globally. Like, for instance, you mentioned environmental factors. People are always trying to

00:12:16.120 pull down European achievements and civilization through citing environmental factors. The most

00:12:22.360 famous thesis regarding this is probably Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. The idea that the

00:12:27.640 only reason that Africans could never be as successful as Europeans was because the environment around

00:12:34.760 them did not allow for the kind of success that Europe was able to achieve, which examined critically is

00:12:41.880 just absolute nonsense because Europeans did end up going to Africa and ended up turning it into a, 0.98

00:12:47.560 like parts of it into a paradise, like Rhodesia and South Africa were by all, from all accounts, 0.98

00:12:53.720 beautiful places to live up until Europeans left. But this development of the self and the eye, 0.90

00:13:03.080 you start to trace it from something like the transitional period of the Iliad going through to Homer's

00:13:09.240 Odyssey. You contrast them against the Epic of Gilgamesh and make the argument that the Epic of Gilgamesh

00:13:14.920 is not indicative of this kind of developmental process that you're arguing. But you then talk

00:13:21.000 about, through that, the Axial Age and the contrasting visions of the Axial Age that have been put forward by

00:13:29.160 scholars. And again, the way that Western European is attempted to be sort of flat-lined with other

00:13:35.000 civilizations by contrasting all of these Axial Ages against one another and arguing that they're all

00:13:43.560 the same and that Greece and Europe was basically on a similar sort of civilizational trend to Persia and

00:13:50.920 to China and India through that time. Would you like to explain to people with the Axial Age, with,

00:13:59.080 you know, the, I think it's 800 BC to 200 BC is the typically accepted time span that's noted. What

00:14:07.560 really sets Greece apart from somewhere like China or somewhere like India? What are the differences

00:14:13.720 in thought that make it, that make Greece so unique in that time? Well, the idea of an Axial Age was

00:14:22.280 postulated by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers and he did so right after World War II. I think his book

00:14:31.800 on the Axial Age was published in 1946, maybe 48, so it came right after the Second World War and it was in

00:14:42.600 reaction to that war. And so Karl Jaspers went back to history and he said he discovered it that around

00:14:52.600 that period between 800 BC, 200 BC, something happened in the old world. There was this dramatic

00:15:05.320 change in the mindset of peoples in the consciousness of peoples and he characterized this as the

00:15:14.120 overcoming of all tribalism and the creation of white cosmopolitan civilizations which came up with some 0.58

00:15:25.160 of them, the notion that there is one God. And so they articulated in religious texts ideas that apply

00:15:35.320 to the whole of the whole of the civilization, the Persian civilization with Soroastrianism, the Jews

00:15:41.800 with their Judaism, and then the Chinese in this case it was not strictly speaking religious but it was 0.99

00:15:48.360 Confucianism and so there were a set of ideas within the Confucian texts that were articulated as universal

00:15:57.000 ideas that apply to all the Chinese. So that's an overcoming of the parochialism of the tribal past.

00:16:05.160 And so for Karl Jaspers these signals a universalism that you see the beginnings of a universalism. The same

00:16:14.520 thing with the Greeks which played on some you can see an attempt to articulate universal ideals and

00:16:20.680 norms that apply to the whole of humanity. The other factor that Karl Jaspers observed here is that it's a

00:16:28.760 reflectiveness. In other words, what we were saying before that human beings are beginning to kind of

00:16:37.720 step outside the old tribal norm because all human beings throughout history did inhabit kinship groups.

00:16:45.480 And the way you would think about marriage, about raising your children, what friendship is, how you

00:16:53.880 relate to outsiders, all of that came from that kinship group, the norms that were passed down from

00:16:59.640 generation to generation. So here with the Axial Age you see the beginnings of a differentiation of the 0.66

00:17:05.880 eye. And I recognize that, that there is a proto-differentiation of the eye from the prior tribal norms and

00:17:16.600 they call that reflectiveness. You are reflecting back, you're looking at the world and reflecting

00:17:22.120 about it rather than accepting it as a given. Another element that they observe in the Axial Age

00:17:29.000 is a kind of historical awareness that this is a time, it's a new time, there was a past and now we're entering

00:17:37.240 a new world. So the argument I make against this is that yes, this is true, however, they have exaggerated

00:17:47.240 the degree to which these non-Western societies really became reflective. And secondly, they really

00:17:56.040 underestimate, and I think it's a willful act of underestimation, the degree to which Greece went

00:18:03.000 far ahead of what they saw among the Persians with Soroastrianism, among the Chinese with Confucianism. 0.94

00:18:11.640 In Greece you only have the pre-Socratics and you have many of them and they're not saying the same 1.00

00:18:18.360 thing but continuously contesting with each other. So you see already a marked individualism there,

00:18:25.000 that each thinker wants to establish himself as the one that knows the proper way of thinking

00:18:31.160 about the nature of things. So Aristotle sets out to differentiate himself from Plato, his teacher,

00:18:40.040 rather than simply just going on to promulgate his teachings over and over and over again and pass

00:18:45.240 them down in that way. There is a continuation but there's a differentiation as well.

00:18:49.400 Right, and a development, a sophistication of ideas. I'm not saying that Aristotle is superior to Plato

00:18:56.840 per se, but there is no question that in Aristotle you will find things that you don't see in Plato.

00:19:05.240 You see someone who is already developing a logic that was never developed by the world anywhere else in

00:19:12.840 the world. There is no formal logic. China, and I have sections on that in my book, has a quasi-logic,

00:19:20.040 but by the standards of what Aristotle achieves, it is a very simple type of logic. You also see geometrical

00:19:27.720 thinking with theorems, and I argue that the only way you can think in those geometrical, theoretical ways

00:19:37.000 is because you are a conscious being that knows that it's not a matter of simply going about doing

00:19:44.280 practical mathematics, but you want to know where, what is that which underlies this mathematical thinking,

00:19:51.880 and can I find principles by which it is based on or that sustains the deductive reasoning of these

00:20:00.760 mathematics and geometry. But in any case... Oh, just one of my favorite ways in which you show

00:20:09.400 the differentiation of Western and European from particularly Chinese thinking is the way in which

00:20:15.800 you discuss, and there's lots of really interesting things in this book like this. You talk about the West

00:20:22.040 conceptualizing paradoxes of the mind versus the Chinese idea of a paradox which doesn't really

00:20:29.720 seem to exist. For instance, like the the liar's paradox which you state here that this sentence is

00:20:35.160 false. It's kind of this... It relies on the fact that you are able to see that it logically doesn't make

00:20:42.040 sense as a sentence, whereas the kinds of Chinese or paradoxes that you find in other contexts

00:20:51.400 and cultures around the world don't have that same kind of logical fluidity to them. And in fact, most of

00:20:58.840 them just seem to be false statements that are just passed down from people to people.

00:21:03.880 Yeah, and the Chinese school of logicians and the ones that detected some, you might call them paradoxes,

00:21:15.000 they were kind of pushed aside by the official Confucians in China as being people that are, you know, making too much of

00:21:27.480 vague sentences. Whereas in the case of the Europeans, they realize that this paradox is point to very difficult

00:21:40.920 points in the thinking mind that it reaches certain points at which it just doesn't know where to go.

00:21:51.240 Should it go this way or that way? Because either way doesn't overcome or leads to another contradiction

00:21:58.280 and doesn't overcome the contradiction. And for Europeans, it was important to find ways to reason

00:22:04.440 through those paradoxes, to find solutions to them, because they wanted to make rational sense of the

00:22:10.840 world, whereas that was not the case with the Chinese. Yeah, one of the through lines that you can

00:22:17.640 detect through all of this, but with what you just said there as well, is that the kind of restless European

00:22:23.000 mind, you could say the Faustian spirit, is that this finding of problems and then choosing to solve

00:22:30.680 them. And this can lead to amazing upheavals, this can lead to revolutions that create prosperity and

00:22:39.000 abundance in the world. It can also lead us down the wrong path, as we'll go on to. Because if there are

00:22:45.640 no reasonable problems that need to be solved, well, people do start to make up problems. Whereas with

00:22:52.120 other cultures, if they saw those problems, but it wasn't enough of a big problem, who cares? 1.00

00:22:58.840 Yeah. Yeah, that's something that I started addressing towards the end of the book. But

00:23:04.600 just to add another point about the axial age. So after the pre-Socratics come the classical Greeks,

00:23:12.200 and the classical Greeks, it's not just in philosophy that they make major achievements, but there's a full

00:23:19.640 chapter on this later on, they develop a true historical consciousness through, I shouldn't say a

00:23:26.920 true historical consciousness, but the beginnings of what I might call a proper historical consciousness

00:23:33.640 in writing or inquiring about what happened in the past and not accepting the hearsay, not simply providing

00:23:44.600 chronicles, chronicles, chronologies of what the great rulers have done, but simply really inquiring,

00:23:52.920 why did that happen in history? Like to see this famously open his, the great Peloponnesian war,

00:24:01.800 he opened it by saying right up front, I want to understand why it was that Athens and Sparta went to

00:24:10.600 war, what the reasons behind it, and I think I have an explanation. And he goes about and offers an

00:24:17.560 explanation. You don't see this in other historical writings. So when I talk about the historical

00:24:24.760 consciousness of Europeans, I'm saying that it is on a high level with the Greeks, even though the Greeks

00:24:32.040 still have a cyclical conception of history, but then they absorb the Christian heritage, which has 0.61

00:24:42.760 introduced us this linear conception, and they integrate it with the Greek philosophical conception,

00:24:49.400 and by that time we are moving into Rome. So one of the things that happens and that makes the Christian 1.00

00:24:55.720 conception on a far higher level of reflectiveness than what the Hebrew Bible had attained, is that the

00:25:06.280 Christian thinkers who are philosophically trained in Greek philosophy and have gone through the 0.50

00:25:14.200 experience of Rome, they want to make sense of history as it actually transpired here on this planet.

00:25:21.000 It's not a linear conception that you look to a world beyond the world that you're living now. You're

00:25:28.520 looking for a messiah, you're looking for a future overcoming of the conflicts that you're living

00:25:35.800 through. No, the Europeans are saying, how do we make sense of the pre-Greek history, Greek history,

00:25:43.960 and the meaning of the Roman Empire? What was it all about? So this becomes where you start seeing the

00:25:50.600 beginnings of a linear conception. The Romans don't have it yet, but Rome produces many great historians.

00:25:58.040 Tacitus is one, Levy is another one, and many others that I discussed there. So in regards to the Axial

00:26:05.960 Age, I'm trying to argue that the reflectiveness of the Europeans doesn't end in 200 BC. That's just the

00:26:16.120 beginning, and the beginning, and the beginning is already on a higher level than that of any other

00:26:19.960 civilization. Carl Jaspers and subsequent scholars that embraced this idea of an Axial Age were guided,

00:26:30.520 motivated politically by the need to think in terms of a common humanity, because they naively thought,

00:26:38.840 oh, the reason World War II happened is that we have these nationalistic, ethnocentric Europeans, 1.00

00:26:47.080 each one thinking they're better than the other. If only we think of a common humanity and we hold hands

00:26:52.600 and embrace each other, we're just going to have a wonderful world. But you know, you are actually

00:26:59.240 really misinterpreting what happened among the Europeans, and it almost became something you don't

00:27:06.920 do anymore. You cannot in a classroom in a Western university do what I was doing, that is to say to

00:27:16.760 students that something dramatically different happened in Europe, that white people did achieve

00:27:25.640 a lot of greatness, they discovered the world, they accomplished most of the mathematics,

00:27:31.160 the history of painting is far more creative, the history of literature, and so on and so on.

00:27:36.520 You can't do that, you have to sort of think in terms of a common humanity, and Confucianism is,

00:27:42.760 you know, it's kind of similar, and all of them in their own way, because the reality is they themselves,

00:27:51.000 the Chinese and these other supposedly universal people, remain far more ethnocentric. Yes, it is 0.97

00:27:58.280 true that they broke away from the old tribalism to create these civilizations and have norms that

00:28:04.520 apply to everyone inside China or Persia. That's true, but they didn't go beyond that. They still remain

00:28:13.320 very ethnocentric, and in my view, they never really developed universal concepts. I have a whole chapter on

00:28:19.240 that as well, that a big debate. Did China come up with universal concepts? And I argue, no, that it did not.

00:28:26.600 We don't need to get into that now, but I just wanted to make that point that the Axial Age, the fundamental

00:28:34.840 error is that it simply refuses to recognize that that period identified as the Axial Age was just the

00:28:42.120 beginning of European reflectiveness and historical consciousness and universalism.

00:28:48.200 Yeah, and it's interesting how you talk about how this has developed following the Second World War,

00:28:53.080 because the mass assumption with the Second World War comes from the idea that, oh, well,

00:28:58.920 it was ethnocentric European countries going to war with one another, particularly Germany,

00:29:04.200 with the ultimate evil of Nazism presenting the ultimate evil of nationalism, nationalism taken to its 0.94

00:29:10.440 furthest extent. But the funny thing is, when you examine the history of

00:29:14.040 of national socialism, it is in itself a post-enlightenment, rationalistic worldview that,

00:29:22.120 whilst yes, is German supremacist, also has a, let's not say universalist, but it does have a sort of

00:29:31.320 like larger abstract identity that you can lay on top of it, that being the kind of idea of the Aryan

00:29:38.760 identity. So even in that way you read about the countries that it was occupying, even in the Slavic

00:29:45.160 countries, the Germans were trying to find the Nordic phenotypes, the Aryan types as they were 0.66

00:29:51.640 conceptualizing them, and trying to kind of Germanize them and in a way kind of bring them into the fold

00:29:58.760 in a kind of civic manner, which is quite interesting and somewhat contradictory of this view,

00:30:05.480 this very black and white view of the Second World War, without of course excusing anything that

00:30:11.800 the National Socialists did. But returning to the Axial Age, again, like the point that you're making

00:30:19.960 as well is that from about 200 BC, the end point of what these scholars identify as the Axial Age,

00:30:27.560 these other societies, these other civilizations and cultures, they reach a point of stasis where they

00:30:33.080 kind of just get stuck where they are. China in particular is an excellent example with Confucianism 0.89

00:30:38.680 has been developed, and then even because one of the things that you're doing throughout this book

00:30:43.560 is a textual analysis of the other scholarly sources, the history books, the textbooks, the

00:30:49.080 philosophical discussions on these things. Even mainstream scholars, when they're coming at it from

00:30:54.200 a more universalist, egalitarian, multicultural modern perspective, there always comes a point where they

00:31:00.440 have to acknowledge, yeah, everything after Confucianism in China is essentially just a play,

00:31:05.800 a variation on a theme. Nothing can drift too far from Confucianism. And I just wonder,

00:31:12.520 this is just a question on the top of my head right now, do you see this kind of stasis as being

00:31:17.640 something that if there hadn't been contact, greater contact like we see with European society

00:31:24.440 from about maybe the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries onwards? Do you consider that these civilizations,

00:31:32.760 these cultures may have just stayed perpetually in that stasis? Because obviously you can say now, 0.82

00:31:37.880 well, China has changed, but it's changed due to the communist revolution, the cultural revolution,

00:31:43.960 which is itself a Western import to them. Yes, I think people don't realize how exceptional

00:31:53.480 the Greek breakthrough was and subsequent breakthroughs, because it's important to

00:31:58.680 understand that just because something originates somewhere in the case of the Greeks, it was a major

00:32:05.000 breakthrough, but they were themselves preceded by the Indo-European aristocratic culture, where you see

00:32:11.480 already elements of individualism. And the Indo-Europeans themselves were quite dynamic and creative.

00:32:20.600 They shook the old world with their expansion and spreading out of Indo-European languages, which are

00:32:27.960 now the most spoken languages in the world. But after the Greeks, then you have the Romans, and then you have

00:32:34.760 the Middle Ages. So there is this continuous series of epochs in the West. I just missed exactly what

00:32:44.920 was your question about, was it China that... I was wondering your thoughts on these countries

00:32:50.920 after they had reached the stasis at the end of their own cultural development, at the end of the

00:32:55.880 Axial Age. Had it not been for greater European concepts and the introduction of European concepts,

00:33:02.200 would they have stayed in place? And it's a question I think a lot about because it's a really

00:33:07.080 interesting question. Even China, the Chinese, I don't think that they too would have industrialized. 1.00

00:33:15.640 There are some people that say, oh, there were signs of a steam engine, but I just don't see the signs.

00:33:20.920 I don't see the Newtonian science that would have... Now, it is true, the steam engine

00:33:26.200 was more of a practical instrument, and the degree to which modern science came into it is disputed,

00:33:33.560 but some people say not too much, but let's say not even very anything. You're not going to get the

00:33:40.120 subsequent changes in industrial economies of the West, or what some people call the second

00:33:46.520 industrial revolution that starts 1850, 1870, which is associated with electricity, chemistry, and so on,

00:33:52.920 then eventually nuclear power. You're not going to get that without science. And China had no signs

00:33:58.600 whatsoever of modern Newtonian science, Galilean science at all. In fact, science had a flat Earth's 0.97

00:34:05.320 view right up until the Europeans taught them otherwise. They believed the Earth was flat. So, 0.83

00:34:13.320 you know, I think at some point I posed that question in the book. Here is a civilization,

00:34:19.400 it's been around thousands of years, and it is still holding this flat Earth view. So,

00:34:23.800 what makes you think they would on their own have eventually developed another view?

00:34:28.520 Another point is, and even people that praise the intellectual achievements of China, when you read

00:34:36.680 carefully to what they're saying, like this guy, I have the, yeah, here is the book. Like, you know, this guy,

00:34:44.680 he loves China, and I go through it, and he tries to show, and in another book I have of him as well,

00:34:54.280 he wants to show that, you know, China was really dynamic intellectually, but then if you keep reading,

00:35:00.280 you realize, actually, he himself says that whatever came after Confucian were just variations of

00:35:09.080 Confucianism through a bit of mixtures with Taoism and other schools, the Mohist and so on, they just did

00:35:19.320 different combinations. And then something that happened a lot in China, you see it in painting and other

00:35:26.760 cultural endeavors that what, so they say they developed a particular

00:35:35.800 variation on the style of painting or variation on the style of thinking about Confucianism.

00:35:43.000 Then a new generation comes, and they are noble and new because they say, oh, I'm going to go back to

00:35:49.080 this century, and I think they got it right. So, they revive a type of Confucianism that existed a few

00:35:57.560 centuries before, and then that becomes the new Confucianism of the Ming era, stuff like that. So,

00:36:03.560 that's what you see in China. You don't have this incredible variety of thinkers like Descartes and

00:36:12.920 then Pascal and Spinoza and Liepnes and then Kant and then Hegel and then Nietzsche and then Heidegger.

00:36:20.120 And even in the Middle Ages, it's not a complete homogeneous consensus. There's a lot of debate and

00:36:27.640 thinking as to the nature of God and the nature of many things. In Paris, in the high Middle Ages, there

00:36:35.080 was a lot of intellectual vitality. Speaking of which, universities were invented by Europeans,

00:36:43.240 not in China and not by the Muslims either. And they're a reflection as well of this continuing 0.67

00:36:50.600 emphasis on creating an atmosphere, an institution whereby human beings can pursue knowledge free from

00:37:00.920 any other constraint or any other obligation. In the Middle Ages, yes, you were not really

00:37:09.320 allowed to challenge the fundamentals of Christianity, but there was a lot of room for debate as to how

00:37:21.320 you interpret Christianity and what is the place of philosophy in a society that has a strong faith

00:37:28.760 foundation. There were a lot of debates about that. And eventually, yes, people began to question

00:37:34.920 Christianity itself. And once you move past the Middle Ages and you're getting into the Renaissance,

00:37:42.680 it's not just a rediscovery of the achievements of the Greeks. There is also a lot of novelty in

00:37:50.120 perspective painting. There is new developments in mathematics, in architecture, and then they discovered

00:37:57.800 the world. The discovery of the world and the mapping of the world, again, is not a simple thing.

00:38:05.240 China. So many people would, like a lot of people who are on the political left, 0.98

00:38:13.560 would find it very contentious that you're saying the discovery of the world, we hear this all the time

00:38:17.560 now, nobody discovered America because there were already people there. So when you say discovery of

00:38:23.080 the world and the mapping out of the world, what do you mean?

00:38:28.680 Well, and I have said this at X and people get upset or they think it's funny, but I say things

00:38:35.800 like the Africans did not even know where they were and neither the Amerindians in Amerindia. Of course,

00:38:42.600 they knew the immediate surrounding environment. And they knew it very well. They had to live in a

00:38:49.560 very close relationship with nature. They knew it a lot better than we do. We live in this

00:38:56.120 environment today. We're not trying to make a living from the nature that's out there anymore.

00:39:01.720 So what I mean when I say discover is that you have a globalized in perspective.

00:39:10.600 You can see the entirety of the earth. And one of the greatest achievements of Europeans was the

00:39:16.840 mapping of the world. It's not just the discovery. It's the associated mapping of the world as they're

00:39:24.920 discovering the world. The Portuguese did that right away when nobody knew where Africa ended. And the

00:39:31.240 Portuguese in a very conscious, programmatic way said, we got to get down to the tip of Africa because

00:39:41.240 somehow some weather has to end and then we might be able to move into the Indian Ocean and get access

00:39:47.080 to the spice trade. And so they developed a scientific center and began a slow navigation down the

00:39:57.800 West African coast. And it took them decades and decades. And finally, by the end of the 1400s, 1492 or

00:40:06.040 something, they hit the tip and then they began to move. And this was a scientific exploration. They began

00:40:12.200 mapping all those coastlines. And you can see the map of them mapping it to know because they would come

00:40:18.360 back and they want to tell the other people that are coming back, look, this is how far we got and this is

00:40:23.000 what you're going to see. So that started with the Portuguese. Then once Columbus moved, you know,

00:40:29.240 they had to say, oh, Columbus stumbled into the Americas to his deathbed. He said he had, he was

00:40:35.480 just near China. And so it doesn't matter. The point is that right after Columbus, you see one

00:40:41.240 discoverer after another moving on. And this is something that is important to understand about the

00:40:47.000 West. In China, you see someone that kind of invents a printing mechanical press, but they barely

00:40:55.000 improve upon it. The compass is the same, barely improve upon. Whereas, yes, the Europeans did observe,

00:41:04.680 they had curiosity about what other people had achieved. And then they began to tinker and improve

00:41:10.200 those things in a continuous basis. So the mapping of the world is very important because it's what really

00:41:16.840 gives you a sense of where you are relative to other people. So when I say they discovered the Americas,

00:41:24.200 they realized that the America was a whole new continent, eventually. And not only that,

00:41:28.920 that there were these two big land masses in North America, and then South America. And then

00:41:36.440 Magellan could navigate the entirety of the earth. Yes, he died at some point, and then somebody else,

00:41:44.200 the second guy in command finished the trip. But they circumnavigated the whole of the earth. This had

00:41:51.800 never been done before. And to me, that's what it means to have a true cosmopolitan earthly view, and to

00:41:59.960 know where you're located. And we take that for granted. We see a globe like the one I have right here

00:42:05.960 beside me, and think that that's normal. No, nobody knew where they were. Nobody knew the shape of the

00:42:11.320 earth. The maps that China had created, and they were the best maps at the time in ancient times. The

00:42:17.960 Chinese had very good grids and all the things to make things the spatial correlations, accurate

00:42:26.040 distance and so on. But it was just about China. And then what they put around it is just very vague

00:42:34.520 lines. There's nothing there. They never cared to move into the Pacific. When the Chinese navigated 1.00

00:42:41.960 with those huge ships with Cheng He or Cheng Ho in the 1420s, 1430s, it was really a diplomatic mission

00:42:52.040 through areas of the sea and the ocean that had been traveled many times before. They didn't

00:42:57.720 discover anything. The Portuguese discovered a lot more. And as I said, then the Spaniards came,

00:43:06.200 and then the Italians, and then the French, and then the English, and it was one after another.

00:43:12.280 And so the discovery of the world to me is a very crucial thing. And to go back into that question,

00:43:19.240 I sometimes think there could well be planets in the universe where modernity never arrives.

00:43:28.200 That can happen. We should not presume that the moment you have humans, you automatically are going

00:43:34.600 to get even rational beings. Because even becoming conscious that you have a mind itself didn't happen

00:43:43.000 anywhere else. And you need to become conscious that you have this faculty and that that faculty is the

00:43:49.320 only faculty you have that allows you to make truth claims, to verify, validate, and engage with others.

00:43:57.720 And so even that didn't happen all across the world.

00:44:02.520 Yeah. And it's interesting when you point to that book on Chinese history,

00:44:07.480 how they're trying to almost superimpose the achievements of Western civilization onto other

00:44:15.400 cultures as well. Because I don't think these people realize they're doing it because it's like

00:44:19.720 the fish that swims in water doesn't realize that it's in water or what water is. That they are in fact

00:44:25.880 actually trying to Europeanize those other cultures in the first place by applying their own standards.

00:44:31.960 It's the same way that through the global perspective that we've taken on and the globalization of the

00:44:41.000 world, the only reason that these foreign cultures and civilizations even care about these things or

00:44:47.080 even want to lay claim to them is because their own standards of minds have been so thoroughly

00:44:53.000 westernized on the global stage that they feel inadequate as a result. But they're actually,

00:44:59.640 you know, from an ancient Chinese perspective, surely that solidarity, that ability to remain

00:45:06.120 steady and stay in place against the winds of change would potentially historically have been

00:45:11.080 seen as a positive virtue. Whereas in the West, the idea of development and continual change has been

00:45:17.880 the virtue. They're diametrically opposed to one another. So it's interesting that we feel the need to

00:45:22.920 try and show that, no, China was doing exactly what we were doing and even better when, 0.70

00:45:28.040 to an ancient Chinese perspective, that would be a horrifying thing. 1.00

00:45:33.000 Yes. Western academics play it both ways. And there's a chapter there on the Chinese

00:45:41.000 mentality that I address this. There is a school that says that China had its own enlightenment.

00:45:49.560 It reached its own universal values in law, in morality, in the conceptualization of the world,

00:45:57.400 in their science. Then there is another school that says, no, actually, you know, China was more profound

00:46:02.680 than the West because it could see the limitations of this rationalistic view of the world. They had a more

00:46:10.840 pragmatic, hermeneutic conception of the world whereby they knew that all things should be contextualized.

00:46:19.640 So my argument is that both those schools are fundamentally wrong. The Chinese were contextualized

00:46:28.120 in an unconscious way. They did not know how to transcend their time and their context. Therefore,

00:46:37.480 their thinking remained contextualized. When Europeans began to contextualize their thinking,

00:46:43.240 they did so because they had experienced this differentiation of the I from the rest of the known

00:46:49.480 I. And only then could they contextualize things and see the limitations of reason. Because I'm not the

00:46:56.760 kind of person that believes that the scientific rational view is the way to absolute truths and is the only

00:47:04.920 way to knowledge and is the culmination of all things. I think many critics, Schopenhauer, Heidegger,

00:47:11.560 Nische and so on, make incredibly valuable points. In the case of Nische, for example, I think he is correct

00:47:19.400 that reason per se is not going to give you access to many things that, you know, that are important in life

00:47:30.680 and that shape us as human beings. That's not a very good explanation. But one way to put it is this way,

00:47:37.480 that it's not that Nische denies reasoning, is that he rejects the notion that reasoning needs to be based on

00:47:49.080 on a rationalistic foundation for it to be proper reasoning. So you can engage in reasoning like even

00:47:58.520 Carl Jung did. If you examine his books and the way his ideas develop, there is a lot of reasoning going

00:48:06.760 there. But he doesn't have a rationalistic foundation to get into the archetypes. He uses another way of

00:48:14.840 reasoning, of thinking that recognizes the mythological, the dream side of human beings,

00:48:22.200 and that knows that many of our, many things in our minds still carry things from the past that were

00:48:29.880 pre-rational. We still carry that within us. This is the kind of intuitive thinking rather than purely

00:48:35.800 rationalistic. Yes. So anyway, that's another, I guess, another line of thinking.

00:48:44.520 Just to return to the thought that I was pursuing a moment ago. So what I was discussing was kind of

00:48:51.880 like the way that, for instance, Egyptians who, when we got there, had treasures that had been buried for

00:48:58.600 hundreds or even thousands of years and didn't care about them until we got there. And then we

00:49:04.520 attach value to them. And because they have been westernized, or perhaps if you want to be more

00:49:09.480 cynical, because they want to take advantage of our way of thinking for their own gain,

00:49:15.960 we've got some of their artifacts, we've got mummies, we've got sarcophagi in our museums,

00:49:21.560 and they say, no, you stole that from us and we want that back because it's part of our national

00:49:25.560 heritage. Well, you didn't actually conceptualize it as your national heritage or as having any value at

00:49:34.120 all. It was just buried in the dirt until we got there. So it's interesting to question,

00:49:39.080 is it just cynicism or have they already been so westernized in our own image? We've been so

00:49:45.160 successful at colonizing and globalizing and westernizing these places that they suddenly do

00:49:51.000 have more of a value system that's closer to ours than it would be their own ancestors.

00:49:57.480 Yes, one of the amazing differences between the West and the rest is that the West develop a historical

00:50:06.520 consciousness. When you examine the major contenders on the rise of the West or the great divergence,

00:50:14.520 what makes the West different, their focus is on why did the West industrialize first and then

00:50:21.240 modern science and they restrict themselves to that. Really, they don't see much and they don't want to see

00:50:27.080 much. I have debates with a lot of these people and they kind of sense I'm saying something that,

00:50:32.760 yeah, it makes sense, but they don't want to go there and they get afraid and they pull back and

00:50:36.840 they say, how could you possibly say they didn't have a historical consciousness? And I say things like,

00:50:42.120 well, find me a book written by an Indian that has a sense of time and is dedicated to true historical

00:50:50.360 inquiry. Documentation, developing a proper method so that you're able to go back to the past and know

00:50:59.480 what really transpired in the past. And critically analyzing the documentation and the sort of reports

00:51:05.880 that we have from people, eyewitnesses and such. Yes, and develop eventually a periodization. This is

00:51:13.000 unique to Europeans. All the periodizations we have in history are all when we talk about, you know,

00:51:21.160 simply ancient and middle ages and modern and then there are many other more specific periodizations,

00:51:28.120 but also in geology, in biology, in the way we periodize the history of the universe. Their names,

00:51:37.000 the first three seconds have a name, the next one have a name. All that is done by the Europeans. That's

00:51:42.360 part of a sense of history, of historical consciousness. That's why I always say you

00:51:47.400 cannot understand anything that happened in Europe unless you have a historical consciousness yourself.

00:51:55.320 You approach everything from a historical perspective. So when somebody asks you,

00:51:59.800 what is capitalism? What is liberalism? You must always be aware that those things have a history.

00:52:06.200 They unfolded and developed in time and their meaning changes through time. So you cannot pick

00:52:12.120 and say, you know, this is something like a poor Godfrey, for example, when he talks about liberalism,

00:52:18.600 he says, oh, liberalism is what classical liberalism was. And many others do that. And that's the true

00:52:25.000 liberalism. That's what I want. And that's where I'm going back to. Well, no, that's the liberalism of a

00:52:30.520 particular time in a place in Western history that is no longer exists. And that we're not in another type of

00:52:38.040 liberalism. So you have to do that with everything that happens in the West. If you study painting,

00:52:45.880 what you see in the Renaissance is not the painting of the West. It's just a moment in the history.

00:52:52.920 So you're taking a kind of historicist approach to your thinking of this.

00:52:59.480 Yes. I have a chapter there where I do embrace a historicist perspective

00:53:06.200 of things that in regards to understanding what happened in the West, it's very important to embrace

00:53:12.760 that. But you said something else that I wanted to address. I can't...

00:53:17.800 Was it about the potential Westernization of other cultures?

00:53:23.000 Yes. That we take it for granted, right? That we take it for granted that the Chinese today and Egypt,

00:53:29.000 that's what I want to get about. The Egyptians... 0.96

00:53:34.360 That's right. They didn't have a historical consciousness. They knew those pyramids and that

00:53:39.480 there were burials there and things there that had happened back, back way in time.

00:53:46.440 But they didn't have the curiosity, the sense of, let's investigate that. They didn't even know how

00:53:51.960 to investigate that. What do you do if you look at that? You can't trace it here. So Europeans developed

00:53:58.600 archaeology. And then they developed a method by which they could establish with incredible precision

00:54:06.040 How old is that? And that requires chemistry and geology to be able to date things that are from a long time ago.

00:54:16.440 So now they can date anything. It's amazing. They date everything. And that's part of the historical consciousness.

00:54:22.280 So they didn't have an archaeological mind. I have a chapter, I think it's five or six, six,

00:54:30.280 which is about the development of all these disciplines. Geology, chemistry, cartography,

00:54:37.000 and all the disciplines. Europeans develop all the disciplines of knowledge. And so these people here

00:54:43.960 who are, you know, they're big stars in academia. You know, he has a theory of why Europe industrialized

00:54:49.320 affairs. And I'm like, you know, that's just the industrial revolution. And they're industrializing

00:54:54.440 now. In a way, they're saying, oh yeah, now China is surpassing it. And Europe, you know, achieved its

00:55:00.280 own thing for a few centuries. But now they're being displaced and surpassed. And China is far more

00:55:08.280 advanced industrially. Because they missed so many other things. That all these disciplines of knowledge,

00:55:15.480 yes, there was religious thinking among the Zoroastrians, there were religious texts. And

00:55:22.360 among the Muslims, there is a theology going on, but never to the degree to which you see it among

00:55:28.280 Catholics in medieval Europe. So, and also before the Muslims, it was the Greeks in Byzantium who

00:55:36.840 transformed Christianity into a theology, because they integrated with Greek philosophy.

00:55:44.440 So, they developed that too. They developed history, chemistry, botany, biology, astronomy,

00:55:52.120 geometry. I mean, it goes on. So, that has to be explained. And you can't do it through the

00:55:59.640 Jared Damon way. Because Jared Damon, he does make some good points. I do think that if you are the

00:56:08.200 Eskimos, you're going to have a hard time modernizing. If you are in Africa too, because there were not

00:56:15.000 that many animals to domesticate. Very, very few, if any, to domesticate. So, that puts you at a

00:56:20.520 disadvantage. And the climate too was made it more difficult. I don't deny these other explanations.

00:56:27.880 They're always part of the dynamic. But you have to focus on that which makes the difference. And that

00:56:34.520 which allows for all of these coming of new disciplinary fields of knowledge.

00:56:41.640 So, it doesn't come directly from environmental conditions.

00:56:48.600 So, these things are, you know, the debate on what makes the West different is being

00:56:59.480 constrained, delimited, as we get more multicultural, and our classrooms become more diverse. 1.00

00:57:06.920 It's almost as if you're prohibited. You're prohibited from understanding your own history.

00:57:13.560 Because if you do, you will realize these things, and you're not supposed to.

00:57:17.480 And of course, you mentioned Joseph Heinrich and his work on the weirdness, as he deems it, of Europe and

00:57:25.400 Western people. Even in the situation where it's somebody like Joseph Heinrich, who is acknowledging

00:57:31.400 what separates us from the rest of the world, he's still framing it in the perspective of it was all

00:57:37.640 an accident. The Catholic Church just decided on a whim, because of a random interpretation of

00:57:45.480 theology, to ban cousin marriage, which just happened to accidentally promote conditions

00:57:51.240 that would end up leading to a liberalized secular West that ends up modernizing and creating the

00:57:57.080 Industrial Revolution. Whereas you put forward the argument that, no, this was not an accident.

00:58:02.520 The Europeans were not just accidentally stumbling through history, developing all of the major fields

00:58:08.120 of the academy. They weren't just stumbling through history like they make the argument with

00:58:13.880 Columbus, where he just accidentally stumbled across America and discovers the rest of the world.

00:58:18.360 This was intentional. To a large degree, most of these developments were a conscious thing that

00:58:25.480 Europeans were pursuing. And I do find it unfortunate that even when people acknowledge 0.84

00:58:33.320 the book is called Greatness and Ruin, even when they acknowledge the greatness of European 0.98

00:58:36.600 civilization, they still have to pull it down so that other peoples, on the standards that we set 0.98

00:58:42.920 for them, won't feel bad. Yes. Joseph Heinrich, yes, that's one of the major flaws. And it's not a small

00:58:52.440 flaw. It's that, in his view, the Catholic Church decided to impose monogamy and prohibit polygamy,

00:59:00.440 which he says, encourage Europeans to develop civic associations and institutions. Because in the past,

00:59:10.040 the kinship network was itself the institutional framework within which you acted. But once the big

00:59:18.840 polygamy networks are eliminated and you have smaller monogamy families, they have to decide how do we

00:59:29.560 connect with each other since we no longer belong to these kinship networks that are being prohibited.

00:59:35.720 Of course, ethnocentrism remains, extended families remain for a while, you know, nothing happens overnight.

00:59:42.600 But slowly and gradually, Europeans, in his view, began to develop civic associations whereby

00:59:49.960 you allow strangers to become part of it, not just members of your tribe, strangers, and then you

00:59:56.760 develop rules that apply to all of them, regardless of where they came from. And the university is a

01:00:02.760 case in point. The university is a corporate institution that is free from any kinship group,

01:00:09.080 is free from any monarchy per se, and is kind of autonomous and self-contained and has its own rules.

01:00:16.040 And students from all parts of Europe could go to a university in Bologna or in Paris. They would come

01:00:24.200 and they were allowed in. That wouldn't happen in other societies or there were other factors that

01:00:32.040 made it different. So this happened in Europe and Joseph Henry just comes up with this weird, speaking of

01:00:41.480 weird. He calls it the weirdest people. But it's kind of a weird explanation when he says, you know,

01:00:47.720 they abolished polygamy because they were uptight about sex. They didn't like people having so much sex

01:00:55.160 or men having so many wives, stuff like that. And I'm like, well, first of all, and this is something

01:01:01.240 that Kevin MacDonald, by the way, did the research on this. Monogamy already had, it was already there

01:01:11.080 among the pre-Catholic peoples. There was, it wasn't completely to the degree to which the Catholic

01:01:17.560 Church wanted it. And very wealthy powerful men still were polygamous, but there was a monogamous atmosphere

01:01:26.840 because of the nature of the climate. You couldn't really have extend many wives and people tended to

01:01:34.120 disperse more because a particular land could not sustain extended kinship groups.

01:01:41.000 Yeah, I think MacDonald in individualism in the Western tradition is also argues that because of

01:01:47.560 that difficulty of the climate, you end up having to develop trade networks based on reputation,

01:01:53.480 which ends up developing this kind of more, um, more disconnected community where people are

01:02:00.680 able to better view themselves as, uh, smaller kinship networks, which can eventually develop

01:02:07.720 into individuals. Uh, because like you say, you can't actually survive is this huge family

01:02:14.280 on so few resources. And then you end up having smaller monogamous families with fewer children,

01:02:20.120 where you put more resources into, um, into those individual children, as opposed to say,

01:02:25.960 I think this is R versus K selection in the sort of like Joe, uh, what's his name? Rushton 1.00

01:02:31.160 in his, in his conception. Whereas Africans have, I think it's the R selection where, because there is 1.00

01:02:37.640 an abundance in the, um, in the environment around them, they can have children and not really look

01:02:43.080 after them. The fathers can go from one woman to the next impregnating them. And there is enough

01:02:48.360 abundance in the environment around them to be able to sustain them. Yes. And I think that's

01:02:55.320 those kinds of explanations have to be integrated into what, uh, Joseph Henry is arguing.

01:03:03.320 The other thing is, and where I try to add another angle is that the Romans and the Greeks, uh, also

01:03:13.560 practice monogamy to some degree. Now they were not living in cold climates or anything like that.

01:03:21.960 So to me, this is part of the higher degree of consciousness that they had

01:03:28.280 away from tribalism and creating a civic identity. And they felt that, uh, with polygamous families,

01:03:36.840 you're going to get these aristocratic clans with leaders continuously bickering with each other.

01:03:42.520 So that had to be broken up, uh, create, uh, uh, civic identity, and then that's sustained through 1.00

01:03:51.080 monogamous relationships. Uh, and so to me, this was a conscious decision. Uh, and, and, and then the

01:04:00.600 Catholic church understood that and Christianity itself opposed polygamy, opposed marriage among

01:04:09.480 cousins and for more reasons, but also because they knew it, it harmed from their perspective.

01:04:17.480 It was not the proper way to raise children. In other words, if you have multiple wives,

01:04:23.240 the children start competing with each other as to who's going to get the inheritance. And there were

01:04:28.040 vicious civil wars within the extended families. And they understood that and thought about it.

01:04:35.960 It's not like suddenly out of nowhere, they were uptight about the sexual habits of polygamous men.

01:04:42.920 It's not that. Um, but Joseph Enbridge, you know, his work, I spent a lot of time on it because it is a

01:04:51.160 great piece of work. Um, but he, he's a typical liberal, uh, uh, no sooner was his book published.

01:04:59.240 He wrote an article, which I mentioned, uh, uh, saying that immigration is great and beautiful.

01:05:06.120 Anyway, I'm not going to get into that now, but he inhabits an academic world in which, yes, 0.99

01:05:11.880 you're not allowed. Whites are not allowed to celebrate their history. You can condemn it,

01:05:19.000 talk about the dark past and try and say, oh, but we abolished slavery. They let you do that. Like, 0.98

01:05:24.520 okay, you became good later. That's good for you. You did something good. So that's what some of the 0.98

01:05:30.120 conservatives do. They want to be good people. And they, they say the good things they did after all

01:05:35.320 the nasty stuff, uh, or we decolonize, you know, yes. Okay. We colonized you, but we became good people.

01:05:41.720 Now they're, they're never going to forgive you on the contrary. Um, the, if you give them a bit of

01:05:46.840 rope, they're going to grab more and more because they're sensing these people are weak. They're for

01:05:51.080 the taking. So yeah, he inhabits that world. Uh, I realized, um, you know, when I left the left and,

01:05:59.480 uh, uh, I, I, I realized that you cannot really arrive at the truth with that mindset that, uh, that

01:06:06.360 Nietzsche was right about many things that, that, that knowledge, there's an element of struggle.

01:06:10.840 There is power involved here. Uh, there is character. You have to have character to be

01:06:16.120 able to just say it outright. I mean, when I would go to conference in Canada and I started saying

01:06:22.680 things about what the West achieved, they'd go crazy shouting. Like, you know, it was like,

01:06:27.880 I come off. Well, well, well, well, I mean on, on this subject then, so the book is called greatness

01:06:35.080 and ruin. And I think we've been talking a lot about the greatness of Western civilization

01:06:39.880 up until this point, let's, let's talk about the ruin that it could be leading us into this sort of

01:06:46.120 like logical end point of this abstract individualistic egalitarian strain of thought,

01:06:53.000 which as we have been discussing was kind of developing throughout those 2000 plus years

01:06:59.080 from when the, from the Greek discovery of the self, we've already mentioned how in the discovery

01:07:04.760 of the world and maps and, and map creation itself, um, like you start to globalize your own thinking

01:07:13.560 and you discover these other people. And yes, back then you have a slightly, uh, like more ethnocentric

01:07:20.120 views of your own community. You see things in a more divisive conflict way when you're in America

01:07:27.240 and you're having to fight off these tribes. But now we've got to the point where the strain of thought 0.97

01:07:31.480 has come to inviting these people in with modern liberalism. Like I've just to give it my own example.

01:07:38.600 I mean, you talk about music in this and you talk about the different, uh, epochs of classical music,

01:07:44.840 uh, but I, which you can't really easily hand over to foreign cultures. Classical music is one of those

01:07:52.440 things that is so uniquely European and so tied into European patronage and aristocratic culture

01:08:01.240 that it can't really be easily handed over to foreign cultures. But I playing rock and heavy metal music

01:08:07.960 have heard it my entire life that the only reason that white people play rock music is because they 0.98

01:08:14.360 stole it off of black people. Chuck Berry was the first person to ever play an electric guitar 0.99

01:08:19.960 and then white people like Elvis heard that and they needed to steal it. Despite the fact, of course,

01:08:25.880 that you can make the argument, as I have done many times, that the music, the instruments they were

01:08:31.240 playing were all made in Europe. Uh, the scales that they were playing, the diatonic scales,

01:08:35.800 were all developed in Europe. The formations of the groups that they were playing in, that being

01:08:40.280 a drummer, bassist, guitarist, vocalist, is basically a European folk in a folk band formation.

01:08:48.920 So there are all of these different things, but no, because of the fact that, uh, there's a tweet that

01:08:53.240 goes around, you may have seen sometimes where they say, oh, you know, Led Zeppelin were great,

01:08:57.160 but they'd have been nothing if old Jigaboo Jackson hadn't put a string on a stick one time in the 1930s.

01:09:02.920 And as well as that, you know, I'm sorry to go on a little bit of a tangent here with the music,

01:09:09.320 like the blues scale, which is basically just an adapted, like a chromatic pentatonic scale,

01:09:15.320 they pretend like Africans invented the pentatonic scale despite the fact even within European

01:09:20.600 classical music, the composers would from time to time use the pentatonic scale because it's just a

01:09:26.200 five note scale. This weird idea that diminishing Europeans means insinuating that by themselves,

01:09:33.400 Europeans would never have figured out to take two notes out of the minor scale. It's, it's...

01:09:39.080 Yeah, yeah, it's absurd, yes. Uh, I, I happen to be writing a few posts about classical musical instruments,

01:09:49.960 and I just say a little bit as to when they were invented and the kinds of changes that we're introducing

01:09:57.720 to them to make them better and how composers themselves, uh, would instigate changes because

01:10:06.200 their, their, their musical minds would say this is not good enough. And, uh, the instrument makers who were

01:10:12.680 themselves musicians and understood music knew you, you got to improve this in the piano in order to

01:10:19.560 make the music, music come out. So, uh, one of the things that surprises me is that, yes, I mean,

01:10:28.520 the book that I'm, happen to be reading, uh, is quite good in the sense that it doesn't say,

01:10:34.440 oh, there were these precedents, you know, like we had a guy with a stick and a few strings. They don't

01:10:40.200 even consider that. They understand that these musical instruments, most of the musical instruments

01:10:48.760 you see in the world, uh, really came into their own as proper musical instruments during the,

01:10:57.400 starting in the Renaissance, really in the Baroque period, and later, even, even in the 1800s,

01:11:04.520 they were still refining them, making them, the sound come to its fullest because musicians were

01:11:11.720 inspiring these changes. They would compose and then another composer comes up and it's envisioning

01:11:18.840 other sounds and things. So, uh, so it's, it's a kind of dialectic that is going on here that is just

01:11:25.640 simply absent outside. Um, so yes, all, almost, I say, almost all musical instruments were invented,

01:11:34.520 by white, including rock and roll. It's really a white thing. It's a part of the peculiar white

01:11:39.880 spirit of rebelliousness and individualism and kind of just transcending what's around you or 1.00

01:11:47.640 longing for something that's not here and doesn't exist. I mean, when we talk, when we talk about the

01:11:52.680 individualism, a lot of the kind of, um, developments that we're discussing are really, like,

01:11:58.920 individual white men deciding they want to be better than the next guy over. They know what the

01:12:05.880 best guy is. They want to be better than that. And as, as an electric guitarist who plays solo lead

01:12:12.200 guitar for, for the songs that I write, I can see that tracing even up to this day. You still see

01:12:19.640 on the internet, all sorts of people playing the instrument. The guitar has been around for a long

01:12:25.560 time, but you still see developments made to the electric guitar. Now add strings, subtract strings,

01:12:30.680 you add this trinket to it, you add this to it so that we can make new sounds and approach the

01:12:35.160 instrument in a whole new way. Rock music can't just be a variation of what was done in the 1960s

01:12:41.640 because then you're derivative. So you have to be doing new things. You can't be as good as the

01:12:45.720 guitarists were in the eighties because that's just not good enough anymore. It's this constant

01:12:50.600 striving and striving and striving. I know you have a part of a Marxist background and you've

01:12:57.560 mentioned capitalism there. And I wonder your thoughts on the role of modern capitalism mixed

01:13:05.640 with this. You've mentioned your historicist perspective, modern liberalism, how those two

01:13:10.920 are completely intertwined together. So in recent developments, just this past weekend when we're

01:13:15.720 recording this, America has gone to war with Iran. And one of the things that we see, one of the 0.94

01:13:23.080 justifications that we see for the reason that we need to be bombing Iran, we need to be bombing their 1.00

01:13:29.640 schools, going to war in the Middle East again, this time we swear it'll be different, is that you have 1.00

01:13:36.120 this large chunk of supposedly Iranian diaspora women on social media posting about how, well in Iran 0.99

01:13:44.760 I would have had to cover my tits up. And I don't want to have to do that. I want to be able to get 0.99

01:13:50.360 my OnlyFans started and I want to be an independent whammon. So I wonder how much of this modern liberalism,

01:13:58.840 this development that we've taken down obviously is different, as you mentioned, from the classical

01:14:04.440 Lockean liberalism and is even to a certain extent different from the Millsian liberalism of on utility.

01:14:10.440 And is actually a development of essentially PR firms and capitalist corporations pushed by the kind

01:14:17.080 of PR thinking and propaganda of Edward Bernays. This opening up of the worldwide market so that

01:14:24.600 everything is consumable, everything has a price and a monetary value attached to it. I wonder your thoughts on

01:14:32.200 on that part of capitalism mixed with modern liberalism and how connected the two are.

01:14:37.640 I think coming from my Marxist background, this is something that you can see it in my book,

01:14:43.720 Canada in Decay, that I started writing about the role of capitalism in pushing through multiculturalism

01:14:52.440 in Canada, something that would be beneficiary to the economy. But I gone beyond that and gone deeper

01:14:59.560 into trying to understand first that liberalism in the West emerge in close alignment and association

01:15:07.880 with capitalism. They really get along with each other and you can't separate them in the West. In China,

01:15:16.600 they decided to go with capitalism, but not liberalism. So they have an authoritarian form of capitalism.

01:15:23.880 And that's very different. And even in Japan, you don't have the liberal capitalism that you have

01:15:31.960 in the West, even though you have former liberal institutions, the Chinese psychologically are not a liberal 0.95

01:15:37.160 people. But capitalism carries elements of liberalism within it, even when it is authoritarian because of the

01:15:47.080 fluidity of markets, the movements of peoples looking online and the comfort of consumerism and all the rest.

01:15:57.240 But in the West, they came very tightly together and they're still tightly together. And you cannot understand

01:16:05.720 liberalism as it exists today is in a woke form. That's the latest version of liberalism. It's not a new

01:16:13.880 ideology. It's not cultural Marxism. It's not communism. When Americans keep saying, oh, we're ruled by

01:16:20.200 communists, they don't understand. Communism collapsed. It only exists in North Korea and poor Cuba. But

01:16:25.960 uh, so what we have is woke liberalism and capitalism is aligned with it. Well, well,

01:16:34.840 I suggested, I suggested for, um, for a few years now that you invite all of these people in off of the

01:16:42.440 back of their ability to raise GDP, the beneficial, the benefits that they bring to broadening the consumer

01:16:50.680 class and for depressing wages. You know, they're very useful for breaking up unions and such. They're brought in,

01:16:58.680 but then being displaced. These are a tribal people. These are people who do not think in the sort of Western ways in which we've 1.00

01:17:05.240 been discussing the whole time. They're displaced and this causes a lot of problems. They look around

01:17:10.600 at the world that they now inhabit and they don't recognize it and they see nothing that attaches

01:17:15.320 them to this place. And so I saw wokeness as an ideology, offshoot, uh, development of liberalism

01:17:24.120 as a way of creating like a fully inclusive intersectional ideology that would accept and

01:17:31.720 integrate all of these foreign peoples who've been brought in without asking them to change much.

01:17:37.080 They're not the ones that are asked to change. We, the ones who are most susceptible to this kind of

01:17:41.880 subversion are the ones who are told, you just need to accept that your history is their history.

01:17:46.680 Now your achievements were their achievements all along.

01:17:50.920 The thing with capitalism is that one has to understand that it is not interested in ethnic

01:17:58.360 cultural identities. They view you as an individual consumer and they measure you and judge you in terms

01:18:06.680 of your market activities. So any person from anywhere in the world is as good as anyone else, uh, as long as

01:18:15.960 they're participants in that market network. When people at X, uh, just to, because we don't have much

01:18:25.160 time when people at X, for example, point images, videos of how England look in the thirties, forties, sixties,

01:18:34.280 and it all looks so pleasant. And, you know, it was clean and people had an identity and they were worldwide. 0.91

01:18:41.640 One of the things I think is capitalism doesn't want that anymore. That's not a world that would allow it to

01:18:49.960 maximize itself. It much rather prefers the chaos that you see in London today. It much rather prefers the

01:18:57.560 intermixion, intermixing of peoples. It doesn't want to see cute families with father, mother, and 1.00

01:19:07.880 children carefully allocating their resources and spending and so on. No, it was a chaos, uh, uh, uh, uh,

01:19:17.080 dissolution, uh, ruthless peoples continuously consuming. And now capitalism is no longer into a stage of

01:19:26.280 just production. We know that it moved into the service sector, but it has gone beyond the service

01:19:32.440 sector into what I call limbic capitalism, which is a type of capitalism, uh, whereby it directly goes

01:19:41.240 into that part of your brain that can make you addictive. Uh, uh, the way you become addicted to drugs,

01:19:50.280 to pornography, to social online, to X, uh, scrolling all day long, uh, to seeing views,

01:19:58.760 uh, to going to, uh, all far, far fans. What is that? You far fans were

01:20:06.760 only fans, the, the online pornography site, which basically advertises itself as your 18 door,

01:20:15.320 18 year old daughter. The second she hits her 18th birthday can go online and become a poor, uh,

01:20:20.120 become a whore. Right. That's limbic capitalism. Uh, it was that type of person. They don't want 1.00

01:20:27.880 a daughter that's carefully spending her income and wears a dress and it's not chopping that much. 0.87

01:20:36.200 They want one that's constantly buying, shopping, uh, has emotional instability, needs this

01:20:43.240 little drug here and that little entertainment and that little thing and there and there and 0.99

01:20:47.160 it's continuously in a state of consumption. Um, I think that it prefers that it is a complicated

01:20:54.360 discussion that, you know, we would have to develop it slowly, step by step to clearly understand why

01:21:01.880 it is that capitalism, as I think I'm beginning to believe, um, uh, laws, this multirational,

01:21:11.560 slightly chaotic world that we're witnessing across all the major cities of the West. So people say,

01:21:19.240 oh, well, but that's not the case in China or Japan. No, it's not because they don't have the

01:21:23.560 liberal side. So you have to see the twin combination, uh, uh, and liberalism has its own roles.

01:21:30.920 And sometimes what liberalism calls for, it's something that, that, um, contradicts what

01:21:37.960 capitalism wants. So for example, when liberalism persists, we need more affirmative action. Uh, we need

01:21:44.600 that black guy to, to be leading the space program or leading this new technology and engineering.

01:21:52.520 Some capitalist business. I'm going to say, hold on here. You know, we either produce that product

01:21:57.480 and we need people with the most talent and best education to get it out. Oh, we're not going to do

01:22:04.360 it with that, but it finds ways because in the service sector, you can integrate all kinds of people

01:22:10.520 in universities. You have so many programs that are just very average. You don't really need to

01:22:15.240 with the development of AI. You can hire countless Indians who don't know how to code, but just use AI 1.00

01:22:22.200 to do it. Exactly. Yes. So, uh, I think we, we have to think about that and it puts me in a dilemma

01:22:31.160 because I'm not a communist. Uh, and yes, we are all to some degree socialistic. I think in one way or

01:22:38.280 another, we kind of agree that maybe public schools were all right and you need public transportation

01:22:43.880 and that kind of thing. Um, but I understand that capitalism is a very rational, efficient system for

01:22:53.560 the allocation of scarce resources and it's unbearable. Uh, that's why the Chinese adopted it.

01:22:59.800 They know you can't compete with a society unless you have markets. Well, uh, that's been a really,

01:23:08.200 really interesting discussion. I have really found a lot to think about. I hope the audience has

01:23:14.040 found a lot to think about. Just, just one last thing. Do you, a big, big question, but let's try and,

01:23:21.240 let's try and sum it all up. Do you think that there is hope for the European peoples and the West

01:23:27.320 going forward or are we caught in a downward spiral?

01:23:32.920 We are not getting out through a peaceful, legitimate party process. We're not getting out of this.

01:23:45.480 The reason Trump back off in Minnesota, he came a little bit hard, but back off is because

01:23:52.920 the system, the woke system came in and really stopped him. And I think he knows he cannot deport

01:24:05.880 the millions. He seemed to imply he was going to deport. I don't know what the numbers are. So

01:24:12.600 maybe what 1 million, 1.5 self deported, although these are numbers people throw out without really

01:24:18.680 knowing. I think the number that I saw was, I think 2 million. I spoke to Cyan from the White

01:24:24.200 Papers Policy Institute recently. She'd be able to cite the numbers. I know that last year it was

01:24:28.680 reported that my, uh, like more people self deported than came into the country for the first time in

01:24:34.520 decades are the figures that the government and some of its associated think tanks were throwing out.

01:24:39.480 Yes. Uh, but he himself in terms of deporting people directly is no more than 200,000 is it?

01:24:48.360 I don't know the exact numbers.

01:24:50.600 Yeah, but there is nowhere near the, the big numbers people expected. And in a sense, just think

01:24:57.400 him trying to do that, train, trying to actually deport the leaders who now have jobs,

01:25:04.920 and have children, dragging them out. He can say, I'm going to deport the criminals. And that's what

01:25:11.000 he did. Just the ones who committed crimes. But even if they're illegal, but now they have a job,

01:25:16.840 he's not going to deport them. Um, so the reason for that is that the constitutional order almost

01:25:25.160 basically prohibits you from doing that because that person has rights. And the same thing is,

01:25:32.040 now think of the legal immigrants in England. There are millions of them. How can you think of a

01:25:37.720 party grabbing citizens? And if you're a citizen, you're as much British as somebody who has ancestry

01:25:47.080 there for generations, because that's what the constitution says. All the laws say that. So,

01:25:54.280 well, it is, it is a bit different in Britain because our constitution is more informal than in America.

01:26:00.760 And we have parliamentary sovereignty. So, for instance, in Britain, we've just had a party

01:26:05.480 startup that we're all very supportive of, uh, called Restore, headed by Rupert Lowe, which does

01:26:10.520 seem to be, uh, articulating, um, these kinds of ideas that we do need to return to a British. 0.98

01:26:17.960 Britain, one of the guys who's associated with them, who's associated with us, Charlie Downs,

01:26:22.440 has explicitly said that having the passport does not necessarily make you British. So,

01:26:27.320 we're excited about them for the sorts of, um, points that they're pushing. And with a system

01:26:33.880 like Britain with parliamentary sovereignty, if you have a majority within parliament and they all

01:26:39.080 vote for a bit of legislation, if, for instance, tomorrow a piece of legislation was put through

01:26:43.960 parliament that said, um, if it was literally an ethno-nationalist law that said you have to be

01:26:50.360 white with Anglo-Saxon ancestry to be considered British. And if you not, if you're not, we will

01:26:56.600 deport you. If, if they all voted on it with a parliamentary majority, that would be law and it

01:27:01.960 would override the pieces of legislation that came before. You could also vote to repeal on all of these

01:27:08.040 different laws that have been put in place previously as well. So, there is a bit of a difference

01:27:13.720 with the British system. But I do understand that it's easy enough to pass those laws, but then when

01:27:18.760 it comes to the practical reality of implementing them, this is something I said the other day, like,

01:27:24.600 liberalism, modern capitalistic liberalism, kind of dirties you and gets you to buy in by,

01:27:31.320 you can't deport all of these people. My sister is married to a foreigner. My best friend is a foreigner. 1.00

01:27:37.560 You can't ban pornography. I watch it. You can't get rid of Chinese takeaways. I love eating Chinese

01:27:45.240 takeaway. There are all of these different little ways to dirty yourself so you feel personally invested

01:27:50.840 in the system as it currently exists right now, because we all are, to a certain extent, individualistic consumers.

01:28:00.280 Well, that, that's a good thing to hear about the parliamentary autonomy in that regard.

01:28:05.960 But either way, we're, we're not getting out, even if, let's say we get the, what are they called,

01:28:18.120 Restore Britain? Restore Britain is the party here, yes.

01:28:21.800 Yeah, let's say that they become the majority in 10 years and they get elected,

01:28:28.520 and they go about it. It's not going to happen peacefully. They created a really nasty situation

01:28:40.040 that, so my, what I want to get to is this point, that my hope is that

01:28:46.840 we are getting out of this, except for an incredibly difficult, quite a civil-like situation. And my other hope is that I do think liberalism has reached a dead end,

01:29:04.520 that it no longer carries the persuasive power it did, that people are beginning to see that it, it has reached a point that it is an irrational ideology. It's also totalitarian that seeks to control how people think, so it has abandoned it, that middle view of liberty.

01:29:21.560 It is at a stage at which it is at a stage at which it wants to shape and control you, so you become internally a woke person.

01:29:31.560 And that there is gonna, there is reaction, and there is gonna be a reaction against that, and for a whole host of other reasons, racial tensions and so on,

01:29:45.560 the system is gonna disintegrate ever more into chaotic zones here and there, even though the technology and innovations go on. 0.94

01:29:57.560 So that's where the opening lies for me. It's not gonna be a peaceful, calm thing. And history has always been that way. All the revolutions were bloody revolutions, including the glorious war.

01:30:13.560 I mean, by the standards of the civil war, the glorious war was peaceful, but it was preceded by a really nasty civil war in the 1640s.

01:30:23.560 And the same thing with the French Revolution, and the Bolshevik Revolution, and all of them, they're always messy affairs.

01:30:32.560 And this is the most radical transformation that they have imposed on the West, and getting out of it is, has gonna be the most radical overcoming that we have ever seen around.

01:30:47.560 Because we have millions of aliens in our lands. And as you just said, you know, they're, they're the friends of many people, you're married to them.

01:30:56.560 That's why they promote race mixing. So incessantly, they know race mixing is a final solution. Once you race mix them is finished. 1.00

01:31:04.560 So that's why ads keep insisting on this. So, yeah, we, we, we, we, it's gonna be a lot of stuff happening.

01:31:13.560 Well, on that cheery note, thank you very much for joining us. I hope you found this discussion enlightening and revealing at home.

01:31:21.560 And I hope that you take the time to go out and purchase a copy of Dr. Ricardo Duchesne's book, Greatness and Ruin.

01:31:29.560 I really got a lot out of this. And even though it's a massive tome, it really was an engaging read all the way through.

01:31:36.560 You will get a lot of value out of this. So please support Dr. Duchesne. Thank you again for joining us for this discussion today.

01:31:45.560 Is there anything you'd like to say? Where can people find you?

01:31:48.560 Yes, where I'm at X, you can find me there. I just noticed if I just, I don't know if I just said, but Moss reposted something I posted.

01:31:59.560 So anyway, I'm in X at X and that's where I am. That's where you can find me.

01:32:07.560 And I have a link to the book there. I used to have a blog, but I stopped it. I had it for, for, for 11 years or more than that. Yeah.

01:32:17.560 But that's, that's all I can say. Yeah. And it was a great discussion and yes, good talking to you.

01:32:25.560 Thank you very much. Well, we'll see you next time, folks, and take care.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - March 18, 2026

Greatness and Ruin ｜ Interview with Dr Ricardo Duchesne

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript