00:03:52.180the customs that they inhabited within
00:03:55.460spoke to them and commanded them to take certain actions and to think in certain ways.
00:04:02.500And he believed that at some point in the last century BC, you can see emerging an internal voice
00:04:13.720that belongs to the person thinking and speaking.
00:04:18.680However, in his view, the Iliad of Homer was still stuck in the past.
00:04:25.920The characters in the Iliad did not have this inner voice that belongs to them.
00:04:32.340They did not have an introspective consciousness or a monologue within themselves,
00:04:38.920but rather were guided by external spirits, norms, gods, whereas I dispute that argument.
00:04:51.260I believe that the Iliad is already a transition that it worked, and I'm not going to get into the specifics of that,
00:04:58.280but this idea that I expressed in the first chapter, as I said, I had anticipations of that idea in uniqueness,
00:05:05.660But I never really made it the central point of the book, whereas now I start with it and I argue that this has to be the point around which we begin to distinguish the West from the rest.
00:05:19.940And it also has to be the point around which we start to understand why it was that the West was far more creative than the other civilizations of the world.
00:05:30.900I don't accept the argument that it had to do with environmental factors or that it was commerce or trade, a more cosmopolitan view.
00:05:40.220None of those things explain it for me.
00:05:43.160So I began in this book to really concentrate on that and try to understand this phenomenon, this unique consciousness among Europeans, starting with the ancient Greeks.
00:05:57.900their anticipations there with the prehistorical Indo-Europeans, if you read their poetry and so
00:06:03.340on, you can see a sense of the I speaking out. In tribal societies, there is no I. You are part of
00:06:13.420a collective, an expression of that collective. When you see them acting and speaking as groups,
00:06:19.580you almost see them converging together as if no one stands out. They also look alike very much.
00:06:27.500they basically have the same thoughts the same feelings and emotions and you can see this in our
00:06:34.140times as well there being studies of the crowd when people come into crowds they merge into a
00:06:41.580collective and people say that even individuals will do things they will never do on their own
00:06:47.260but once they're part of that dynamic of the crowd this the screams the voices they hear the way
00:06:53.500everybody's behaving they just integrate into it and that primordial collectivism kicks in
00:07:00.060even among white people in that atmosphere and there have been stories of this by psychologists
00:07:06.860including Freud but Europeans and whites eventually do develop a very strong sense of
00:08:11.480They were never able to differentiate the two.
00:08:13.780Whereas you already see among the pre-Socratic differentiation of the mind from the other parts of the body.
00:08:22.860And with Aristotle in his logic, this is very clear cut.
00:08:26.900He knows already that human beings, what differentiates them is they have this sinking mind.
00:08:32.760And then he takes it further and says that the only way that you can arrive at truth, truth claims,
00:08:40.560and that you can really think about all kinds of questions is by letting your mind make those decisions.
00:08:49.000So you can see here already the Greeks differentiating themselves from the kinship group and kinship networks, which happens.
00:08:57.140I mean, the city-state could not have come, could not have been conceived unless the Greeks came up with the concept of civic citizenship.
00:09:06.080Now, the Greeks at that time were still very ethnocentric. They still saw themselves as a people, a Greek people that were different from the Persians and the Libyans and so on.
00:09:17.520But nevertheless, they start developing this notion that if you want to belong to a city state, which consists of people from a variety of clans and tribal groups, then you have to get another type of sense of membership of who belongs in that city.
00:09:37.740It cannot only be, oh, this is my clan, those are my aristocratic leaders, I belong to them, I'm loyal to them, I'm not loyal to Athens.
00:09:47.680So you can see, and I talk about that, how that happens, that sense of citizenship.
00:09:53.140So the point I'm making is that not only in the case of Aristotle, being able to develop his logic, but also mathematics and philosophical thinking and conceptions of civic citizenship are ultimately rooted in that ability of the Greeks to differentiate the mind and thereby differentiate the I, the thinking self, from everything that is around.
00:10:18.300Now, in our times, you know, postmodern philosophy and even before that, pragmatism and so on, they dismiss all of that because they say, oh, well, we're always contextualized, we're always overdetermined by a whole range of factors, society, our historical time and so on.
00:10:37.320But a point I make is that our very awareness that we are contextualized, that we are surrounded by a whole range of forces and norms that do shape us, is itself an indication that we have an eye and we are aware of those things.
00:10:56.000In the case of the Chinese and other civilizations, they're not even aware of that.
00:11:00.440So that, I would say, is what I felt the I and the sinking self had to be emphasised right away.
00:11:09.180yeah and again it's i think it's quite difficult for people again with this kind of like inbuilt
00:11:16.320liberalism that we assume by default and project onto the rest of the world to differentiate what
00:11:22.060you're really describing there because everybody recognizes that there are that what you could
00:11:28.160describe as individual biological beings you know there are people who have to sleep and eat and
00:11:35.560communicate one another. This is more about the way that they internally conceptualize themselves
00:11:41.580in relation to the world around them. And I think that's one of the things that makes it quite a
00:11:47.480difficult thing for many people to wrap their heads around until it's explained to them that
00:11:52.000this is not something that is even historically the norm up until two or three hundred years ago
00:11:57.420for most civilizations outside of Europe. And the thing is that the thesis that you're putting
00:12:02.840forward, does put itself at odds with other ideas that have been put forward for the uniqueness
00:12:09.120of Western success globally. Like, for instance, you mentioned environmental factors. People are
00:12:15.120always trying to pull down European achievements and civilisation through citing environmental
00:12:21.140factors. The most famous thesis regarding this is probably Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel,
00:12:26.760the idea that the only reason that Africans could never be as successful as Europeans was because
00:12:32.820the environment around them did not allow for the kind of success that Europe was able
00:12:38.980to achieve, which examined critically is just absolute nonsense, because Europeans did end
00:12:44.620up going to Africa and ended up turning parts of it into a paradise, like Rhodesia and South
00:12:50.860Africa were, from all accounts, beautiful places to live up until Europeans left. But
00:12:58.420this development of the self and the I, you start to trace it from something like the
00:13:05.600transitional period of the Iliad going through to Homer's Odyssey. You contrast them against
00:13:11.320the Epic of Gilgamesh and make the argument the Epic of Gilgamesh is not indicative of
00:13:16.780this kind of developmental process that you're arguing. But you then talk about, through
00:13:21.880that the Axial Age and the contrasting visions of the Axial Age that have been put forward by
00:13:28.920scholars and again the way that Western European has attempted to be sort of flat-lined with other
00:13:34.980civilizations by contrasting all of these Axial Ages against one another and arguing that they're
00:13:43.480all the same and that Greece and Europe was basically on a similar sort of civilizational
00:13:48.560trend to Persia and to China and India through that time. Would you like to explain to people
00:13:56.600with the Axial Age, with, you know, the, I think it's 800 BC to 200 BC is the typically
00:14:04.300accepted time span that's noted, what really sets Greece apart from somewhere like China
00:14:11.080or somewhere like India? What are the differences in thought that make it, that make Greece so
00:14:15.960unique in that time? Well, the idea of an axial age was postulated by the German philosopher
00:14:25.020Karl Jaspers, and he did so right after World War II. I think his book on the axial age was
00:14:33.480published in 1946, maybe 48, so it came right after the Second World War, and it was in reaction
00:14:43.360to that war. And so Carl Jaspers went back to history and he said he discovered it that around
00:14:52.660that period between 800 BC, 200 BC, something happened in the old world. There was this dramatic
00:15:05.280change in the mindset of peoples, in the consciousness of peoples. And he characterized
00:15:12.700this as the overcoming of all tribalism and the creation of white cosmopolitan civilizations
00:15:22.460which came up with some of them the notion that there is one God and so they articulated in
00:15:32.360religious texts ideas that apply to the whole of the civilization the Persian civilization with
00:15:39.340Soroastrianism, the Jews with their Judaism. And then the Chinese, in this case, it was not
00:15:46.640strictly speaking religious, but it was Confucianism. And so there were a set of ideas
00:15:52.540within the Confucian text that were articulated as universal ideas that apply to all the Chinese.
00:15:59.360So that's an overcoming of the parochialism of the tribal past. And so for Carl Jaspel,
00:16:07.060these signals, a universalism. You see the beginnings of a universalism. The same thing
00:16:14.800with the Greeks, which played on some, you can see an attempt to articulate universal ideals and
00:16:20.760norms that apply to the whole of humanity. The other factor that Carl Jaspers observed here
00:16:27.720is that it's a reflectiveness. In other words, what we were saying before, that human beings
00:16:34.820are beginning to kind of step outside the old tribal norm because all human beings throughout
00:16:42.580history did inhabit kinship groups and the way you would think about marriage, about raising your
00:16:50.180children, what friendship is, how you relate to outsiders, all of that came from that kinship
00:16:57.620group, the norms that were passed down from generation to generation. So here with the Axial
00:17:02.660age, you see the beginnings of a differentiation of the eye, and I recognize that, that there is
00:17:08.740a proto-differentiation of the eye from the prior tribal norms, and they call that
00:17:17.220reflectiveness. You are reflecting back, you're looking at the world and reflecting about it
00:17:22.660rather than accepting it as a given. Another element that they observe in the axial age
00:17:28.980It's a kind of historical awareness that this is a time, it's a new time, there was a past,
00:17:36.200and now we're entering a new world. So the argument I make against this is that, yes,
00:17:41.640this is true. However, they have exaggerated the degree to which these non-Western societies
00:17:50.960really became reflective. And secondly, they really underestimate. And I think it's a willful
00:17:58.640act of underestimation, the degree to which Greece went far ahead of what they saw among the Persians
00:18:07.120with Soroastrianism, among the Chinese with Confucianism. In Greece you only have the
00:18:13.600pre-Socratics and you have many of them and they're not saying the same thing but continuously
00:18:19.520contesting with each other so you see already a marked individualism there that each thinker
00:18:26.080wants to establish himself as the one that knows you know the proper way of thinking about the
00:18:31.680nature of things so like aristotle sets out to differentiate himself from plato his teacher
00:18:39.720rather than simply just going on to promulgate his teachings over and over and over again and
00:18:45.080pass them down in that way there is a continuation but there's a differentiation as well right and
00:18:50.540development, a sophistication of ideas. I'm not saying that Aristotle is superior to Plato per se,
00:18:58.540but there is no question that in Aristotle you will find things that you don't see in Plato.
00:19:05.260You see someone who is already developing a logic that was never developed by the world anywhere
00:19:12.300else in the world. There is no formal logic. China, and I have sections on that in my book,
00:19:18.380has a quasi-logic, but by the standards of what Aristotle achieves, it is a very simple type of
00:19:24.940logic. You also see geometrical thinking with theorems, and I argue that the only way you can
00:19:31.660think in those geometrical, theoretical ways is because you are a conscious being that knows that
00:19:41.180it's not a matter of simply going about doing practical mathematics, but you want to know
00:19:46.780what is that which underlies this mathematical thinking?
00:19:52.140And can I find principles by which it is based on
00:19:57.640or that sustains the deductive reasoning
00:21:04.160Yeah, the Chinese school of logicians and the ones that detected some, you might call them paradoxes, they were kind of pushed aside by the official Confucians in China as being people that are, you know, making too much of vague sentences.
00:21:29.460Whereas in the case of the Europeans, they realize that this paradox is point to very difficult points in the thinking mind, that it reaches certain points at which it just doesn't know where to go.
00:21:51.300Should it go this way or that way? Because either way doesn't overcome or leads to another contradiction and doesn't overcome the contradiction.
00:22:00.560And for Europeans, it was important to find ways to reason through those paradoxes, to find solutions to them, because they wanted to make rational sense of the world.
00:22:11.320Whereas that was not the case with the Chinese.
00:22:13.880Yeah, one of the through lines that you can detect through all of this, with what you just said there as well, is that the kind of restless European mind, you could say the Faustian spirit, is this finding of problems and then choosing to solve them.
00:22:31.020and this can be this can lead to amazing upheavals this can lead to revolutions that create
00:22:37.560prosperity and abundance in the world it can also lead us down the wrong path as we'll go on to
00:22:44.400because if there are no reasonable problems that need to be solved well people do start to make up
00:22:51.320problems whereas with other cultures if they saw those problems but it wasn't enough of a big
00:22:56.540problem who cares yeah yeah that that is something that i started addressing towards the end of the
00:23:04.380book but just to add another point about the axial age so after the pre-socratics come the classical
00:23:11.220greeks and the classical greeks uh it's not just in philosophy that they make major achievements
00:23:17.700but there's a full chapter on this later on they develop a true historical consciousness
00:23:24.040through, I shouldn't say a true historical consciousness,
00:23:28.600but the beginnings of what I might call a proper historical consciousness
00:23:33.120in writing or inquiring about what happened in the past
00:23:39.240and not accepting the hearsay, not simply providing chronicles,
00:23:45.880that is a chronology of what the great rulers have done,
00:23:50.480but simply really inquiring why did that happen in history like to see this famously
00:23:58.320open his the great Peloponnesian war he opened it by saying right up front I want to understand
00:24:06.560why it was that Athens and Sparta went to war what the reasons behind it and I think I have
00:24:14.320an explanation, and he goes about and offers an explanation. You don't see this in other
00:24:21.200historical writings, so when I talk about the historical consciousness of Europeans, I'm saying
00:24:27.120that it is on a high level with the Greeks, even though the Greeks still have a cyclical conception
00:24:34.240of history, but then they absorb the Christian heritage, which has introduced this linear
00:24:44.320conception, and they integrate it with the Greek philosophical conception, and by that
00:24:50.200time, we are moving into Rome, so one of the things that happens and that makes the Christian
00:24:55.740conception on a far higher level of reflectiveness than what the Hebrew Bible had attained is
00:25:03.900that the Christian thinkers who are philosophically trained in Greek philosophy and have gone
00:25:13.860through the experience of Rome, they want to make sense of history as it actually transpired
00:29:03.300particularly Germany with the ultimate evil of Nazism
00:29:06.200presenting the ultimate evil of nationalism, nationalism taken to its furthest extent.
00:29:11.440But the funny thing is, when you examine the history of national socialism,
00:29:16.400it is in itself a post-enlightenment, rationalistic worldview
00:29:21.500that whilst Yes is German supremacist, also has a, let's not say universalist,
00:29:30.340but it does have a sort of like larger abstract identity that you can lay on top of it, that being
00:29:37.280the kind of idea of the Aryan identity. So even in that way, you read about the countries that
00:29:43.140it was occupying, even in the Slavic countries, the Germans were trying to find the Nordic
00:29:49.280phenotypes, the Aryan types, as they were conceptualizing them, and trying to kind of
00:29:54.480Germanize them and in a way kind of bring them into the fold in a kind of civic manner, which is
00:30:01.300quite interesting and somewhat contradictory of this view, this very black and white view
00:30:07.340of the Second World War, without, of course, excusing anything that the National Socialists
00:30:13.260did. But returning to the Axial Age, again, the point that you're making as well is that
00:30:20.960From about 200 BC, the end point of what these scholars identify as the Axial Age, these other societies, these other civilizations and cultures, they reach a point of stasis where they kind of just get stuck where they are.
00:30:35.020China in particular is an excellent example with Confucianism has been developed and then even
00:30:41.020because one of the things that you're doing throughout this book is a textual analysis of
00:30:45.200the other scholarly sources the history books the textbooks the philosophical discussions on these
00:30:51.000things even mainstream scholars when they're coming at it from a more universalist egalitarian
00:30:56.460multicultural modern perspective there always comes a point where they have to acknowledge
00:31:01.260yeah everything after Confucianism in China is essentially just a play a variation on a theme
00:31:07.120nothing can drift too far from Confucianism and I just wonder this is just a question on the top
00:31:14.180of my head right now do you see this kind of stasis as being something that if there hadn't
00:31:19.660been contact greater contact like we see with European society from about maybe the 17th 18th
00:31:27.08019th centuries onwards do you do you consider these civilizations these cultures may have just
00:31:34.140stayed perpetually in that stasis because obviously you can say now well china has changed
00:31:39.400but it's changed due to the communist revolution the cultural revolution which is itself a western
00:31:45.400import to them yes i i think people don't realize how exceptional the greek breakthrough was
00:34:11.280So, you know, I think at some point I posed that question in the book. Here is a civilization, it's been around thousands of years, and it is still holding this flat air view. So what makes you think they would on their own have eventually developed another view?
00:34:28.640Another point is, and even people that praise the intellectual achievements of China,
00:34:35.880when you read carefully to what they're saying, like this guy, I have the, yeah, here's the book.
00:34:43.600Like, you know, this guy, he loves China and I go through it and he tries to show,
00:34:51.280and in another book I have of him as well, he wants to show that, you know,
00:34:55.840China was really dynamic intellectually, but then if you keep reading, you realize actually he himself says that whatever came after Confucian were just variations of Confucianism through a bit of mixtures with Taoism and other schools, the Mohist and so on.
00:40:38.460The point is that right after Columbus,
00:40:40.420you see one discoverer after another moving on.
00:40:43.780And this is something that is important to understand about the West. In China, you see someone that kind of invents a printing mechanical press, but they barely improve upon it. The compass is the same, barely improve upon. Whereas, yes, the Europeans did observe, they had curiosity about what other people had achieved, and then they began to tinker and improve those things in a continuous basis.
00:41:13.160So the mapping of the world is very important because it's what really gives you a sense of where you are relative to other people.
00:41:21.220So when I say they discovered the Americas, they realized that the Americas was a whole new continent eventually.
00:41:28.220And not only that, that there were these two big land masses in North America and then South America.
00:41:34.880And then Magellan could navigate the entirety of the Earth.
00:41:40.260Yes, he died at some point, and then somebody else, the second guy in command, finished the trip, but they circumnavigated the whole of the heirs.
00:41:51.480This had never been done before, and to me, that's what it means to have a true cosmopolitan, earthly view, and to know where you're located, and we take that for granted.
00:42:03.680We see a globe like the one I have right here beside me, and think that that's normal.
00:42:08.340nobody knew where they were, nobody knew the shape of the earth. The maps that China had created,
00:42:13.700and they were the best maps at the time in ancient times, the Chinese had very good grids
00:42:20.420and all the things to make things the spatial correlations, accurate distance and so on, but
00:42:29.140it was just about China and then what they put around it is just very vague lines, there's nothing
00:42:36.580there. They never cared to move into the Pacific. When the Chinese navigated with those huge ships
00:42:43.620with Cheng He or Cheng Ho in the 1420s, 1430s, it was really a diplomatic mission through areas of
00:42:53.860the sea and the ocean that had been traveled many times before. They didn't discover anything.
00:43:12.500And so the discovery of the world to me is a very crucial thing.
00:43:17.120And to go back into that question, I sometimes think there could well be planets in the universe where modernity never arrives.
00:43:27.940That can happen. We should not presume that the moment you have humans, you automatically are going to get even rational beings, because even becoming conscious that you have a mind itself didn't happen anywhere else.
00:43:44.240And you need to become conscious that you have this faculty and that that faculty is the only faculty you have that allows you to make truth claims, to verify, validate, and engage with others.
00:43:57.180and so even that didn't happen all across the world. Yeah and it's interesting when you point
00:44:05.160to that book on Chinese history how they're trying to almost superimpose the achievements
00:44:12.680of western civilization onto other cultures as well because I don't think these people realize
00:44:18.680they're doing it because it's like the fish that swims in water doesn't realize that it's
00:44:22.600in water or what water is that they are in fact actually trying to europeanize those other
00:44:28.680cultures in the first place by applying their own standards it's the same way that we through the
00:44:34.780global perspective that you're taking on uh that we've taken on and the globalization of the world
00:44:41.440the only reason that these foreign cultures and civilizations even care about these things or
00:44:47.180even want to lay claim to them is because their own standards of minds have been so thoroughly
00:44:52.940westernized on the global stage that they feel inadequate as a result. But they're actually,
00:44:59.880you know, from an ancient Chinese perspective, surely that solidarity, that ability to remain
00:45:06.120steady and stay in place against the winds of change would potentially historically have been
00:45:11.160seen as a positive virtue. Whereas in the West, the idea of development and continual change has
00:45:17.780been the virtue. They're diametrically opposed to one another. So it's interesting that we feel the
00:45:22.620need to try and show that, no, China was doing exactly what we were doing and even better,
00:45:27.660went to an ancient Chinese perspective. That would be a horrifying thing.
00:45:31.440yes they the western academics play it both ways and there is a chapter there on the chinese
00:45:40.380mentality that i address this uh there is a school that says that china had its own enlightenment
00:45:49.360it reaches its own universal values in law in morality in the conceptualization of the world
00:45:57.320in their science. Then there is another school that says, no, actually, you know, China was more
00:46:02.240profound than the West, because it could see the limitations of this rationalistic view of the
00:46:09.480world. They had a more pragmatic, hermeneutic conception of the world whereby they knew that
00:46:17.260all things should be contextualized. So my argument is that both those schools are fundamentally wrong.
00:46:24.860the Chinese were contextualized in an unconscious way.
00:46:30.560They did not know how to transcend their time and their context.
00:46:37.080Therefore, their thinking remained contextualized.
00:46:39.880When Europeans began to contextualize their thinking,
00:46:43.440they did so because they had experienced this differentiation
00:46:49.900And only then could they contextualize things
00:46:53.480and see the limitations of reason, because I'm not the kind of person that believes that the
00:46:58.880scientific rational view is the way to absolute truth, and is the only way to knowledge, and is
00:47:06.360the culmination of all things. I think many critics, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and so on,
00:47:12.820make incredibly valuable points. In the case of Nietzsche, for example, I think he is correct
00:47:19.420That reason per se is not going to give you access to many things that, you know, that are important in life and that shape us as human beings.
00:47:33.180That's not a very good explanation. But one way to put it is this way, that it's not that Nietzsche denies reasoning, is that he rejects the notion that reasoning needs to be based on a rationalistic foundation for it to be proper reasoning.
00:47:54.040So you can engage in reasoning like even Carl Jung did. If you examine his books and the way his ideas develop, there is a lot of reasoning going there, but he doesn't have a rationalistic foundation to get into the archetypes.
00:48:12.540he uses another way of reasoning of thinking that recognizes the mythological the the dream
00:48:20.560side of human beings and that knows that many of our many things in our minds still carry
00:48:26.940uh things from the past that were pre-rational we still carry that within us this is the kind
00:48:33.120of intuitive thinking rather than purely rationalistic yes uh uh uh so anyway that's
00:48:40.920another i guess another line of thinking but uh just just to return uh to the thought that i was
00:48:47.300pursuing a moment ago um so what i was what i was discussing was kind of like the way that for
00:48:52.720instance um egyptians who when we got there had treasures that had been buried for hundreds or
00:48:59.580even thousands of years and didn't care about them until we got there and then we attach value to them
00:49:06.020and because they have been westernized or perhaps if you want to be more cynical because they want
00:49:10.820to take advantage of our way of thinking for their own gain. We've got some of their artifacts,
00:49:18.040we've got mummies, we've got sarcophagi in our museums, and they say, no, you stole that from
00:49:23.420us and we want that back because it's part of our national heritage. Well, you didn't actually
00:49:27.120conceptualize it as your national heritage or as having any value at all. It was just buried in
00:49:35.280the dirt until we got there. So it's interesting to question, is it just cynicism or have they
00:49:41.140already been so westernized in our own image? We've been so successful at colonizing, globalizing,
00:49:48.300westernizing these places that they suddenly do have more of a value system that's closer to ours
00:49:55.240than it would be their own ancestors. Yes, one of the amazing differences between the West and the
00:50:03.320rest is that the West develop a historical consciousness. When you examine the major
00:50:10.460contenders on the rise of the West or the great divergence, what makes the West different,
00:50:16.440their focus is on why did the West industrialize first and then modern science and they restrict
00:50:23.040themselves to that. Really, they don't see much and they don't want to see much. I have debates
00:50:28.660with a lot of these people and they kind of sense i'm saying something that yeah it makes sense but
00:50:33.740they don't want to go there and they get afraid and they pull back and they say how could you
00:50:37.660possibly say they didn't have a historical consciousness and i say things like well find me
00:50:43.000a book written by an indian that has a sense of time and is dedicated to him through historical
00:50:50.360inquiry documentation developing a proper method by by so that you're able to go back to
00:50:58.640the past and know what really transpired and and critically analyzing the documentation and uh and
00:51:04.880and the sort of reports that we have from people eyewitnesses and search yes and develop eventually
00:51:10.960a periodization this is unique to europeans all the periodizations we have in history are all
00:51:19.420when we talk about you know simply ancient and middle ages and modern and then there are many
00:51:25.420other more specific periodizations, but also in geology, in biology, in the way we periodize
00:51:32.820the history of the universe, their names, the first three seconds have a name, the next
00:51:39.240one have a name, all that is done by the Europeans, that's part of a sense of history, of historical
00:51:45.060consciousness, that's why I always say you cannot understand anything that happened in
00:51:51.020Europe unless you have a historical consciousness yourself. You approach everything from a historical
00:51:57.680perspective. So when somebody asks you, what is capitalism? What is liberalism? You must always
00:52:03.580be aware that those things have a history. They unfolded and developed in time and their meaning
00:52:09.180changes through time. So you cannot pick and say, you know, this is something like a poor Godfrey,
00:52:15.800For example, when he talks about liberalism, he says, oh, liberalism is what classical liberalism was, and many others do that.
00:52:24.320And that's the true liberalism. That's what I want, and that's what I'm going back to.
00:52:28.800Well, no, that's the liberalism of a particular time in a place in Western history that no longer exists.
00:52:35.960And we're now in another type of liberalism.
00:52:39.500So you have to do that with everything that happens in the West.
00:52:43.520If you study painting, what you see in the Renaissance is not the painting of the West.
00:52:51.120It's just a moment in the history of painting.
00:52:53.520So you're taking a kind of historicist approach to your thinking of this?
00:52:59.480Yes, I have a chapter there where I do embrace a historicist perspective of things that in regards to understanding what happened in the West,
00:54:20.060And that's part of the historical consciousness.
00:54:22.380So they didn't have an archaeological mind.
00:54:24.720I have a chapter, I think it's five or six, six,
00:54:30.020which is about the development of all these disciplines,
00:54:34.160geology, chemistry, cartography, and all the disciplines.
00:54:38.820Europeans develop all the disciplines of knowledge.
00:54:41.360And so these people here who are, you know, they're big stars in academia, you know, he has a theory of why Europe industrialized first, and I'm like, you know, that's just the industrial revolution.
00:54:53.000And they're industrializing now, in a way, they're saying, oh, yeah, now China's surpassing it, and Europe, you know, achieved its own thing for a few centuries, but now they're being displaced and surpassed, and China's far more advanced industrially,
00:55:09.440Because they missed so many other things that all these disciplines of knowledge, yes, there was religious thinking among the Zoroastrians, there were religious texts, and among the Muslims, there is a theology going on, but never to the degree to which you see it among Catholics in medieval Europe.
00:55:30.520So, and also before the Muslims, it was the Greeks in Byzantium who transformed Christianity into a theology because they integrated with Greek philosophy.
00:56:22.060The climate too was made it more difficult.
00:56:24.920I don't deny these other explanations. They're always part of the dynamic, but you have to focus on that which makes the difference and that which allows for all of this coming of new disciplinary fields of knowledge.
00:56:41.760um so um it doesn't come directly from environmental conditions uh uh so
00:56:50.440these these things are you know the the debate on on what makes the west different is is being
00:56:58.380constrained delimited as we get more multicultural and our classrooms become more diverse
00:57:06.960it's almost as if you're prohibited you're prohibited from understanding your own history
00:57:12.840because if you do you will realize these things and you're not supposed to and of course you
00:57:18.920mentioned joseph heinrich and his work um on the the weirdness as he deems it of um of europe and
00:57:25.520western people even in a situation where it's somebody like joseph heinrich who is acknowledging
00:57:31.320what separates us from the rest of the world. He's still framing it in the perspective of it was all
00:57:37.660an accident. The Catholic Church just decided on a whim, because of a random interpretation of
00:57:44.940theology, to ban cousin marriage, which just happened to accidentally promote conditions
00:57:51.320that would end up leading to a liberalized secular West that ends up modernizing and
00:57:56.760creating the Industrial Revolution. Whereas you put forward the argument that no, this was not
00:58:01.700an accident. The Europeans were not just accidentally stumbling through history,
00:58:06.500developing all of the major fields of the academy. They weren't just stumbling through history,
00:58:11.940like they make the argument with Columbus, where he just accidentally stumbled across America and
00:58:16.880discovers the rest of the world. That this was intentional. To a large degree, most of these
00:58:22.180developments were a conscious thing that Europeans were pursuing. And I do find it unfortunate that
00:58:30.040even when people acknowledge, like the book is called Greatness and Ruin, even when they
00:58:35.160acknowledge the greatness of European civilization, they still have to pull it down so that other
00:58:40.140peoples, on the standards that we set for them, won't feel bad. Yes, Joseph Henrich, yes, that's
00:58:49.360one of the major flaws and it's not a small flaw is that in his view the catholic church decided
00:58:57.440to impose monogamy and prohibit polygamy which in he says encouraged europeans uh to develop civic
00:59:07.360associations and institutions because in the past the kingship network was itself the institutional
00:59:14.320framework within which you acted. But once the big polygamous networks are eliminated,
00:59:23.520and you have smaller monogamous families, they have to decide how do we connect with each other
00:59:31.280since we no longer belong to these kinship networks that are being prohibited. Of course,
00:59:36.240ethnocentricism remains, extended families remain for a while, you know, nothing happens overnight.
00:59:42.560But slowly and gradually, Europeans, in his view, began to develop civic associations whereby you allow strangers to become part of it, not just members of your tribe, strangers, and then you develop rules that apply to all of them, regardless of where they came from.
01:00:01.380and the university is a case in point.
01:00:04.140The university is a corporate institution
01:00:37.020And Joseph Henry just comes up with this weird, speaking of weird, he calls it weird, there's people.
01:00:43.880But it's kind of a weird explanation where he says, you know, they abolished polygamy because they were uptight about sex.
01:00:53.420They didn't like people having so much sex or men having so many wives, stuff like that.
01:00:58.560And I'm like, well, first of all, and this is something that Kevin MacDonald, by the way, did the research on this, monogamy already had, it was already there among the pre-Catholic peoples.
01:01:13.340It wasn't completely to the degree to which the Catholic Church wanted it,
01:01:19.280and very wealthy powerful men still were polygamous,
01:01:23.340but there was a monogamous atmosphere because of the nature of the climate.
01:01:29.080You couldn't really have many wives, and people tended to disperse more
01:01:35.500because a particular land could not sustain extended kingship groups.
01:01:41.060Yeah, I think McDonald in individualism in the Western tradition also argues that because of that difficulty of the climate, you end up having to develop trade networks based on reputation, which ends up developing this kind of more disconnected community where people are able to better view themselves as smaller kinship networks, which can eventually develop into individuals.
01:02:08.640because like you say you can't actually survive is this huge family on so few resources and then
01:02:16.480you end up having smaller monogamous families with fewer children where you put more resources
01:02:21.460into those individual children as opposed to say I think this is R versus K selection in the sort
01:02:29.140of like what's his name Rushton in his conception whereas Africans have I think it's the R selection
01:02:36.300where because there is an abundance in the environment around them,
01:02:41.140they can have children and not really look after them.
01:02:43.620The fathers can go from one woman to the next impregnating them.
01:02:47.540And there is enough abundance in the environment around them
01:03:32.400And they felt that with polygamous families, you're going to get these aristocratic clans with leaders continuously bickering with each other.
01:03:42.200So that had to be broken up, create a civic identity, and then that's sustained through monogamous relationships.
01:03:54.160And so to me, this was a conscious decision.
01:03:58.060And then the Catholic Church understood that and Christianity itself opposed polygamy, opposed marriage among cousins for moral reasons, but also because they knew it harmed from their perspective, it was not the proper way to raise children.
01:04:20.320In other words, if you have multiple wives, the children start competing with each other as to who's going to get the inheritance.
01:04:27.740And there were vicious civil wars within the extended families.
01:04:32.900And they understood that and thought about it.
01:04:36.120It's not like suddenly out of nowhere they were uptight about the sexual habits of polygamous men.
01:05:54.980I realized, you know, when I left the left,
01:05:59.340And I realized that you cannot really arrive at the truth with that mindset that Nietzsche was right about many things, that knowledge, there's an element of struggle, there is power involved here, there is character.
01:06:14.480You have to have character to be able to just say it outright.
01:06:19.080I mean, when I would go to conference in Canada and I started saying things about what the West achieved, they'd go crazy shouting.
01:06:26.980like you know it was like I come off well well how dare you well well I mean on on this subject
01:06:33.680then so the book is called greatness and ruin and I think we've been talking a lot about the
01:06:37.200greatness of western civilization up until this point let's let's talk about the ruin that it
01:06:43.880could be leading us into this sort of like logical end point of this abstract individualistic
01:06:51.040egalitarian strain of thought which as we have been discussing was kind of developing throughout
01:06:56.820those 2,000 plus years from the Greek discovery of the self. We've already mentioned how in the
01:07:04.120discovery of the world and maps and map creation itself, you start to globalize your own thinking
01:07:13.040and you discover these other people. And yes, back then you have slightly more ethnocentric
01:07:20.120views of your own community. You see things in a more divisive conflict way when you're in
01:07:26.640America and you're having to fight off these tribes but now we've got to the point where the
01:07:30.600strain of thought has come to inviting these people in with modern liberalism like just to
01:07:37.600give it my own example I mean you talk about music in this and you talk about the different
01:07:42.040epochs of classical music but I which you can't really easily hand over to foreign cultures
01:07:50.820Classical music is one of those things that is so uniquely European and so tied into European patronage and aristocratic culture that it can't really be easily handed over to foreign cultures.
01:08:04.600But I, playing rock and heavy metal music, have heard it my entire life that the only reason that white people play rock music is because they stole it off of black people.
01:08:15.880Chuck Berry was the first person to ever play an electric guitar and then white people like Elvis
01:08:21.820heard that and they needed to steal it despite the fact of course that you can make the argument as
01:08:27.160I have done many times that the music the instruments they were playing were all made in
01:08:32.420Europe the scales that they were playing the diatonic scales were all developed in Europe
01:08:37.300the formations of the groups that they were playing in that being a drummer bassist guitarist
01:08:43.000vocalist is basically a european folk in a folk band formation so there are all of these different
01:08:50.180things but no because of the fact that uh that there's a tweet that goes around you may have
01:08:54.180seen sometimes where they say oh you know led zeppelin were great but they'd have been nothing
01:08:58.040if old jigaboo jackson hadn't put a string on a stick one time in the 1930s and as well as that
01:09:06.340you know i'm sorry to go on a little bit of a tangent here with the music like the blues scale
01:09:10.900which is basically just an adapted like a chromatic pentatonic scale they pretend like
01:09:16.220africans invented the pentatonic scale despite the fact even within european classical music
01:09:21.620the composers would from time to time use the pentatonic scale because it's just a five note
01:09:26.820scale this weird idea that diminishing europeans means insinuating that by themselves europeans
01:09:34.140would never have figured out to take two notes out of the minor scale it's it's yeah yeah it's
01:09:40.300absurd, yes. I happen to be writing a few posts about classical musical instruments and I just
01:09:51.420say a little bit as to when they were invented and the kinds of changes that we're introducing
01:09:57.740to them to make them better and how composers themselves would instigate changes because
01:10:06.220their musical minds would say, this is not good enough.
01:10:10.680And the instrument makers who were themselves musicians
01:10:14.900and understood music knew you got to improve this
01:10:18.260in the piano in order to make the music come out.
01:10:22.000So one of the things that surprises me is that, yes,
01:10:27.000I mean, the book that I'm happy to be reading
01:10:31.600is quite good in the sense that it doesn't say,
01:10:34.460oh, there were these precedents, you know,
01:10:36.920like we had a guy with a stick and a few strings.
01:11:28.840So, yes, almost, I say, almost all musical instruments were invented by white,
01:11:35.340including rock and roll is really a white thing.
01:11:37.740It's a part of the peculiar white spirit of rebelliousness and individualism
01:11:43.080and kind of just transcending what's around you
01:11:47.420or longing for something that's not here and doesn't exist.
01:11:51.240I mean, when we talk about the individualism,
01:11:53.620a lot of the kind of developments that we're discussing are really,
01:11:58.020individual white men deciding they want to be better than the next guy over. They know what
01:12:05.820the best guy is, they want to be better than that. And as an electric guitarist who plays solo lead
01:12:12.280guitar for the songs that I write, I can see that tracing even up to this day. You still see
01:12:19.100on the internet all sorts of people playing the instrument. The guitar has been around for a long
01:12:25.600time but you still see developments made to the electric guitar now add strings subtract strings
01:12:30.740you add this trinket to it you add this to it so that we can make new sounds and approach the
01:12:35.300instrument in a whole new way rock music can't just be a variation of what was done in the 1960s
01:12:41.740because then you're derivative so you have to be doing new things you can't be as good as the
01:12:45.880guitarists were in the 80s because that's just not good enough anymore it's this constant striving
01:12:51.240and striving and striving. I know you have part of a Marxist background, and you've mentioned
01:12:58.140capitalism there. And I wonder your thoughts on the role of modern capitalism mixed with this,
01:13:06.160you've mentioned your historicist perspective, modern liberalism, how those two are completely
01:13:11.980intertwined together. So in recent developments, just this past weekend when we're recording this,
01:13:16.420America has gone to war with Iran. And one of the things that we see, one of the justifications
01:13:23.980that we see for the reason that we need to be bombing Iran, we need to be bombing their schools,
01:13:30.660going to war in the Middle East again, this time we swear it'll be different,
01:13:35.080is that you have this large chunk of supposedly Iranian diaspora women on social media posting
01:13:42.300about how well in Iran I would I would have had to cover my tits up and I don't want to have to
01:13:48.720do that I want to be able to get my only fans started and I want to be a independent whammon
01:13:53.720so I wonder how much of this modern modern liberalism this development that we've taken
01:14:00.500down obviously is different for as you mentioned from the classical Lockean liberalism and is even
01:14:06.260to a certain extent different from the Millsian liberalism of on utility and is actually a
01:14:11.360development of essentially PR firms and capitalist corporations pushed by the kind of PR thinking and
01:14:18.500propaganda of Edward Bernays. This opening up of the worldwide market so that everything is
01:14:25.420consumable, everything has a price and a monetary value attached to it. I wonder your thoughts on
01:14:32.400that part of capitalism mixed with modern liberalism and how connected the two are.
01:14:37.360I think coming from my Marxist background, this is something that you can see in my book, Canada in Decay, that I started writing about the role of capitalism in pushing through multiculturalism in Canada, something that would be beneficiary to the economy.
01:14:56.700But I've gone beyond that and gone deeper into trying to understand first that liberalism in the West emerged in close alignment and association with capitalism.
01:15:09.500They really get along with each other, and you can't separate them in the West.
01:15:15.420In China, they decided to go with capitalism, but not liberalism.
01:15:21.040So they have an authoritarian form of capitalism.