The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Dr. Allen Guelzo - The Golden Thread - A History of the Western Tradition Vol. II (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_927)

00:00:00.000 I'm delighted to report that I have joined, as a scholar, the Declaration of Independence Center

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00:01:05.680 Hi everybody, this is Gatsai for The Sad Truth. Today I have the back-to-back punch. I had James

00:01:12.760 Hankins about a month and a half ago. Today I have his co-author on this mammoth two-volume

00:01:18.800 series, The Golden Thread. Alan Gelso, how are you doing, sir?

00:01:24.140 I am doing well. I am doing well indeed, and happy to talk about The Golden Thread.

00:01:28.900 I'm looking forward to it. Let me just tell people who you are. You're the Thomas W. Smith

00:01:34.280 Distinguished Research Scholar in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at

00:01:41.040 Princeton University. You're an expert on American intellectual history. Some of your books include

00:01:46.940 Our Ancient Faith, Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, Robert E. Lee, A Life,

00:01:52.840 his biography, Gettysburg, The Last Invasion, Faithful Lightning, A New History of the Civil War

00:01:58.740 and Reconstruction. And as I said in the introduction, your forthcoming volume two of The Golden Thread,

00:02:05.360 The Modern and Contemporary West, will be out in January 2026. Anything you want to add to this,

00:02:10.380 Alan, before we dig in? That was almost too much as it is.

00:02:13.420 All right. Well, we said offline that both you and Jim are old friends from when you were kids,

00:02:22.580 when you both decided that you are historians, that you are going to become historians. And so

00:02:28.200 I think this is the first time that I've spoken to friends from childhood who both ended up choosing

00:02:34.160 the same profession. So welcome to the show. I don't have a copy of the physical version yet.

00:02:40.100 I only received the electronic version. Why don't we start with the synopsis where,

00:02:44.880 so Jim ended up till about the Renaissance, or maybe a bit earlier, and then you take over from

00:02:51.080 there till about the early 90s. Give us the big synopsis.

00:02:54.760 Well, the books themselves, the two volumes, are divided almost equally between myself and Jim

00:03:01.120 Hankins. His long suit, of course, is the Italian Renaissance. And I doubt whether there's anyone else

00:03:08.060 on planet Earth who has a greater command of that subject than James Hankins. And he has been

00:03:15.400 expanding that command for 40 years at Harvard. We have known each other for even longer than that.

00:03:22.920 We were in school together long, long ago in Pennsylvania. We were even in marching band together,

00:03:29.520 believe it or not. And we have continued to remain in connection for these many decades,

00:03:35.920 doing many things in tandem. People sometimes ask, how long did it take to write these books? Because

00:03:43.060 the both of them, they are substantial pieces of work.

00:03:46.000 They're about five pounds each.

00:03:48.200 The volume one, which is the one first now to appear, is about 1,200 pages. My volume,

00:03:55.780 the second volume, is going to weigh in fairly close to that, probably at about 1,100 pages.

00:04:02.240 And they are chock-a-block full of not only narrative of the Western tradition, but also of art,

00:04:10.040 architecture, music. We strive to cover as broadly as possible the many facets of the Western tradition

00:04:18.960 as it's developed over the centuries. And the division of labor pretty much seemed obvious,

00:04:27.540 because all of his time and effort has been disposed on the period from, let's say, the Italian

00:04:34.280 Renaissance backwards into classical Rome and Greece. Whereas my attention has been focused from

00:04:42.340 the Italian Renaissance and its immediate environs onwards to the present with a special concentration

00:04:49.360 on the United States. So, it seemed logical to us, given where our interests had developed,

00:04:55.420 that he should do volume one, I should do volume two. That said, both of these books are really the

00:05:02.320 product of some 50 years' worth of conversation. People, as I said, sometimes ask, how long did it take

00:05:09.500 to write these books? Well, all right. In the actual composition, the actual mechanics of it,

00:05:15.640 well, perhaps, let's say, four years or so. But in truth, it's really the product of all these many

00:05:22.900 years of visits back and forth in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, in other places,

00:05:32.140 where whenever we've got together, we've sat down and just talked about what issue comes to mind

00:05:38.560 connected with these books. And it's not because we were planning to write them at some distant

00:05:44.200 future. It's simply because these are the subjects that motivate us. Hankins and I get together,

00:05:48.940 and the conversation is liable to vary from, let's say, Petrarchan sonnets to what is the best

00:05:58.080 recording of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. And on one level, that sounds very, very, very geeky.

00:06:07.340 But, okay, so we're very geeky. We'll just have to live with that.

00:06:12.100 That's the kind of stuff.

00:06:13.260 Forgive me for interrupting you. I just want to say something. One of my biggest regrets being an

00:06:17.640 academic now for 32 years is that, and I hate to say this, but it's the truth, I hate the fact that

00:06:23.480 most of my academic colleagues are maybe professional academics, but they're not intellectuals, whereas

00:06:29.400 you strike me as intellectual. So maybe you can invite me to one of those future conversations. But go

00:06:34.320 ahead, continue. Well, that in itself, it's the kind of stuff that gives us mental delight.

00:06:41.620 So we have participated in this kind of discussion for all these years, and in a way, coming to the

00:06:48.780 decision to do the Golden Thread was something remarkably easy, because in a way, we had been

00:06:56.180 doing the Golden Thread for all these years. And in some respects, not all, but in some respects, the Golden

00:07:03.260 Thread is kind of a transcript of all these conversations over the years.

00:07:07.660 Now, if I look at some of the historical figures that I find most compelling, well, I mean, it's difficult to say.

00:07:15.700 I love some of the guys covered in Jim's era, and of course, but I think there might be a greater

00:07:23.280 density of folks that I love. I mean, my favorite guy of all time is Leonardo da Vinci, because he's

00:07:28.100 the ultimate polymath. And I've pretty much lived my life as a consummate polymath. I don't care about

00:07:35.020 disciplinary boundaries. I'm in no way constrained by these kinds of things. I just go in whatever area

00:07:41.080 interests me. You know, I love Descartes. I love Newton. I have a background in mathematics.

00:07:47.140 I love, by the way, I want to show you this. This is what I'm currently reading.

00:07:51.820 Ah, all right. A classic, believe me.

00:07:55.700 I know, it's gorgeous. Some of it gets a bit esoteric with some of the contents of some of the

00:08:02.080 things that Bacon was musing about, but certainly from a philosophy of science perspective, I love it.

00:08:06.280 Now, I had posted a tweet a couple of days ago on idols of the mind, as stated by Francis Bacon. Now,

00:08:15.020 my background is in studying the cognitive biases that humans, you know, commit when they are making

00:08:22.660 decisions. Well, here comes 400 plus years ago, Bacon already talking about what he calls idols of the

00:08:29.860 mind. Today, we would call cognitive irrationality. It's unbelievable.

00:08:33.320 Yeah, when Bacon, I mean, the origin of this is as old as Plato. Bacon gives it a new spin as the

00:08:41.840 idols of the tribe, but he's really talking about the same kind of closed-mindedness that he would

00:08:48.880 like to move people beyond, so that when he writes something like the Novum Organum, he wants to offer an

00:08:55.820 entirely new way of not only learning, he wants even more than that, to offer an entire new way of

00:09:02.340 proving what is true. Not simply accepting it because Aristotle said so, but whether there is some

00:09:09.620 kind of experiential confirmation of what is being asserted. So Bacon, Bacon is one of those remarkable

00:09:18.820 figures, especially in the context of this early English Enlightenment, really one of the remarkable

00:09:28.120 figures that you find there. Sometimes it's a good question in my mind, does Bacon belong more to

00:09:34.380 late English Renaissance or early English Enlightenment? In the most important sense, it doesn't matter.

00:09:42.340 He's a figure to take account of just on his own terms. And what an extraordinary career he had in so

00:09:48.160 many different ways. So Perez Zaccorin, who wrote wonderful books about 16th and 17th century

00:09:54.240 England, that biography of Bacon is, even after many years, eminently worth the reading.

00:10:00.660 And you know what's amazing? So I have an incredibly large, I'm very proud of it, personal library.

00:10:07.340 And one of the biggest stressors in my life is the fact that there are still hundreds of books in my

00:10:13.180 personal library that I've yet to read. So usually when I finish a book, the next stressor

00:10:18.160 is, which of all of these beautiful books that I've yet to read is going to be the next one?

00:10:23.100 And don't ask me, as someone who specializes in psychology of decision-making, don't ask me why

00:10:27.900 I decided that this should be the book that comes up. But I bought this in the early 2000s. So it sat

00:10:33.900 in my library for 25 years almost. And so when I started reading it, I knew that he was Professor

00:10:41.740 Emeritus when he wrote it. So I almost could predict that he had probably regrettably passed away. But I

00:10:47.620 said, if this guy didn't pass away, I'm bringing him on the show. I then find out, regrettably, that he

00:10:52.900 passed away in 2009. But that's the beauty of being an intellectual. You live on forever. He literally is

00:10:59.040 immortal. I'm reading his words right now.

00:11:02.960 In Surrounding Yourself with Books, it reminds me of that famous comment of Cicero.

00:11:09.060 C. Hortum biblioteca habes nihil dirit. If you have a library and a garden, you don't need

00:11:21.480 anything else.

00:11:22.480 Beautiful, beautiful. Look at you throwing that. That was Latin, I presume, right? My Latin is not 1.00

00:11:27.680 very good.

00:11:28.040 Right. It's from a letter he wrote to Volo. He was planning to make a visit to Volo. And Volo

00:11:34.080 had written back to him to say, well, you know, I really don't have a whole lot on the way of

00:11:37.620 accommodations here if you're going to pay a visit. And so Cicero's response to Volo was,

00:11:43.060 well, look, if you've got a library and a garden, that's all we need.

00:11:46.040 Oh, that's beautiful. Now, I don't mean to put you on the spot. But as I was going through,

00:11:50.420 I haven't read volume two yet. But I started looking for, you know, key figures that I'm particularly

00:11:55.500 drawn to. Now, one, that I actually had an expert on this guy a couple of weeks ago. He's a philosopher

00:12:03.180 at University of Wisconsin-Madison. So I saw Dickhaft. I saw Kepler. I saw Newton. I saw Bacon.

00:12:10.140 I saw the whole gang. I didn't see Baruch Spinoza. Explain yourself, Alan.

00:12:17.760 Oh, because I can't fit everybody into the course of these books. I mean, I don't have Spinoza in

00:12:23.400 there. That's true. I plead guilty. I also don't have Gustav Mahler. All right. I plead guilty.

00:12:29.560 There's any number of people that I don't have in there because I've had to be picky and choosy.

00:12:35.660 And being the author of the book gives me a certain tyrannical authority in making that choice.

00:12:41.900 So that in the preface to volume two, which is a short version of the larger introduction that stands

00:12:49.320 at the beginning of volume one. I add this comment that if you're disappointed that you didn't find,

00:12:55.380 well, let's say, Spinoza or Mahler, éclive votre propre livre.

00:13:01.220 Write your whole book.

00:13:03.020 Exactly.

00:13:04.880 So it's a very arbitrary and undemocratic decision on my part. But I wanted to go with the things that

00:13:15.420 hopefully I had something worth saying about. So I will talk a great deal about, for instance,

00:13:20.400 Blaise Pascal. Right.

00:13:22.560 Not Spinoza, but about Pascal. I will talk about some people who usually don't get talked about

00:13:28.760 in the context of a book like this. One of them is Baal Shem Tov. So because Baal Shem Tov has a role 0.85

00:13:37.720 to play in the overall structure of the 18th century Enlightenment. Baal Shem Tov acts in many ways in the

00:13:46.060 same way that Spinoza and Wesley did for Pietism, that Bach did for Lutheranism. And I like to see

00:13:55.000 them as connected this way. As many great differences as there were between the Enlightenment and the

00:14:01.680 figures that I've mentioned of the so-called counter-enlightenment, they did share some

00:14:08.240 fundamental premises. They did share the primacy of experience. And whether you're going to judge

00:14:16.300 it by the experience of, let us say, a Descartes or the experience of John Wesley, it is nevertheless

00:14:25.980 experience, which holds the trump card. And in that respect, they really all are participants

00:14:32.200 in an Enlightenment, including Baal Shem Tov. 0.78

00:14:36.360 So in the same way that, just to go back to Bacon, how he sort of rejected sort of the, you know,

00:14:46.640 being deferential to the ancients, and if Aristotle said it, therefore it must be true. Do you share, 0.97

00:14:52.860 so now you're 500 years or whatever, 400, 400, 500 years ahead of Bacon, do you ever go back and read

00:15:00.400 some of the folks within that time period in their original manuscripts and walk away disappointed by

00:15:09.400 them, not unlike the way Bacon was not very happy with some of the ancient Greeks, or does it always

00:15:17.240 only increase your admiration for them when you read the original, you know, treatise?

00:15:24.400 That's such a complicated question to answer, because a lot of it depends on with what motive

00:15:32.060 I'm doing the reading. Recently, for instance, I had one of my colleagues ask me to pinch hit for him

00:15:40.700 in a class, where the class had been assigned to read extracts from Locke's second treatise on

00:15:46.580 government, and Polybius's histories. Now, offhandly, I would never have thought of talking about Locke

00:15:57.500 and Polybius within the same discussion hour. But it worked. Oh my goodness, did it work. And did I

00:16:04.640 ever have fun, surprisingly, not so much with Locke, as I did with Polybius? So, yes, you get these

00:16:11.800 surprise encounters. Sometimes you go hunting for something, and yeah, you can be disappointed,

00:16:16.120 because you really expected them to be saying something more profound. But there are other

00:16:19.820 times when the ancients, and when I say the ancients, the ancients, I mean, that could be Mozart,

00:16:26.960 the ancients surprise you over and over again. There are some people who almost consistently

00:16:34.500 and without exception, and surprise me in the best way. One of them is Bach. I devote a whole chapter

00:16:42.200 to Bach, because I have never experienced a moment of disappointment in J.S. Bach. Whenever I am

00:16:52.860 hearing Bach, whenever I am reading Bach, and in those moments when I actually have the presumption

00:16:59.200 to try to play J.S. Bach, you know what I often find myself doing? I find myself laughing. Laughing

00:17:09.780 at the sheer ingenuity. Laughing at the extraordinary simplicity of Bach's musical logic and its complexity

00:17:20.300 at the same time. And yet when I say musical logic, I don't mean to say something that would make Bach

00:17:27.900 seem alien or pulseless, because there are such profound currents of emotion at work in J.S. Bach.

00:17:38.600 Let me give you two examples, and these are the ones that occur most readily to me.

00:17:43.060 In his organ music, which years ago I used to play a whole lot more of than I have time to do anymore,

00:17:49.100 which I say with regret. There are a number of chorale preludes, which are very interesting. He's

00:17:55.700 writing introductory music about Lutheran chorales to be sung in a Lutheran church. One of them is

00:18:03.240 In dir ist Freude. In thee is gladness. And that's a chorale tune, and it starts off with those words,

00:18:10.700 In dir ist Freude. And it goes on like that. When Bach sets this chorale prelude, that's the first thing

00:18:18.140 you hear. Bang. There's the tune. In dir ist Freude. And then sudden interruption. Interruption?

00:18:25.180 No. Eruption. Out of the pedals, you get this motif, this ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.

00:18:33.080 It is the response of joy, of Freude. In dir is gladness. Bach responds musically with gladness.

00:18:40.800 And every time in that chorale prelude, when he tries to start over with the chorale tune,

00:18:46.880 In dir ist Freude, he has to stop. Up comes that theme again. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.

00:18:53.360 Because he cannot contemplate the subject of that chorale without the response of joy.

00:18:59.800 It works musically. You can just listen to it as a piece of music. But then when you see what he's

00:19:06.380 doing, that's when the smile creeps over your face and you figure, yes, he is telling us something

00:19:11.980 about himself. At the other end of that spectrum is the chorale prelude on

00:19:19.000 I cry to you, Lord Jesus Christ, which was a chorale. It was a favorite chorale tune of

00:19:27.040 Philip Jacob Spinner, the great German pietist preacher. And in it, Bach sets it in F minor.

00:19:38.560 And the chorale tune is stated very simply with a kind of arabesque, a filigree of notes around it.

00:19:46.180 And this pulse in the pedal, quarter note pulses.

00:19:50.960 Ich grüß so dear, I cry to you. It's like you're hearing his heartbeat

00:19:56.000 all through it. And it is wrenching to hear until, in the last measure, he turns

00:20:06.180 and brings you into the major key, into A-flat. And it is as though peace breaks out.

00:20:14.300 And all of that tension and sorrow is resolved. And he does that with what seems at first to be

00:20:23.700 the most ridiculous ease. It's like, why didn't I think of that? 0.74

00:20:29.720 Right.

00:20:30.320 And then you realize, no, it's not ridiculous ease. And no, you wouldn't have thought of that.

00:20:34.920 That took J.S. Bach.

00:20:36.920 Well, you know, you talking about something being simple and complex, if I can draw a bridge in a

00:20:44.760 non-musical setting. So whenever I begin lecturing, you know, pretty much any course within the

00:20:50.300 behavioral sciences, I'll talk about some of the most famous experiments conducted in psychology,

00:20:55.380 my favorite of which is an experiment in the early 50s by Solomon Asch.

00:21:00.820 I don't, I don't presume that you might know who he is, but do you or can I?

00:21:07.540 There's the write your own book category.

00:21:10.040 Okay. Well, Solomon Asch was a psychologist who wanted to study the power of group conformity.

00:21:18.160 And so what he did is he created a very simple experiment. Hence, that's why I'm drawing the

00:21:22.820 bridge what you said about simplicity and complexity. So he designed a very simple experiment that you

00:21:29.360 could explain to the average 10 year old, whereby he shows you three lines here, lines ABC, and then

00:21:36.240 there's another line X here. It is very clear to anybody who's not congenitally blind, which of

00:21:41.640 lines ABC is the same length as line X. But what he wants to do is he wants to bring in eight people

00:21:48.540 into the lab. The first seven are fake subjects. They're Confederates. He's going to ask each of them, 0.74

00:21:55.260 which of the lines ABC is the same as line X. And each of the seven is going to give the wrong answer

00:22:03.440 out loud. So let's say A is this long, and then X is this. So it's clearly the wrong answer. But can

00:22:11.260 you get this poor hapless eighth person who doesn't know that all the others are in on the experiment

00:22:16.940 to actually conform against his lying eyes? And the answer is, Alan, that yes, you can, which is a

00:22:23.800 profound phenomenon that was conducted using an experimental design that you could explain to a

00:22:32.220 10 year old. And so the lesson of that to my students is you don't have to develop an incredibly

00:22:39.640 intricate convoluted experiment to demonstrate something profound. So while I may not appreciate the

00:22:46.720 intricacies of the Bach music, I do understand how something could be simple and complex at the

00:22:52.640 same time. Okay, so then let me... You're saying it, and I'm going to say, I'm going to add to it,

00:22:57.060 I have another experimental confirmation of that. Faculty meeting. You know what I mean.

00:23:05.960 I do know what you mean. Now, I don't know how much you're familiar with my work, but I don't even

00:23:12.420 think I should put the qualifier. Arguably, I'm probably the most outspoken and irreverent

00:23:18.340 academic in the world. And part of that stems from the fact that I view most academics as a unique

00:23:26.140 biological species. I call them the invertebrate castrati. They don't have a spine, nor do they have

00:23:35.060 testicular fortitude, which of course is something that upsets me because I, in my romantic ideal of

00:23:41.600 what a bold intellectual should be, you should be a intellectual Navy SEAL, right? We choose Navy SEALs

00:23:50.000 not based on their cowardness and meekness. We want them to be bold and courageous and heroic figures.

00:23:55.900 Well, in the intellectual ecosystem, I want similar folks, but that's not what we choose.

00:24:01.700 Am I right or am I right? I wish I could say you were wrong, but I've seen manifold demonstrations

00:24:10.300 otherwise. Is there something that we can do differently so that as we're training our graduate

00:24:17.660 students who will become our next generations of intellectuals to do something differently to breed 0.98

00:24:24.220 that meekness out of them? Tell them that the most interesting thing they can say

00:24:37.400 is the disagreement with you as their mentor or advisor. How much do you disagree with me?

00:24:44.820 I hear you. Make it clear. You can say this without punishment. There is a vanity of academics. You know

00:24:55.780 this. There is a vanity. The vanity comes from the fact that we all get the same rewards in approximately

00:25:05.260 the same quantities in the same places. The curious thing is that one person who described exactly

00:25:12.400 that problem for academics was no one less than Samuel Johnson.

00:25:16.180 Right.

00:25:16.740 So this is no new development. This didn't happen overnight.

00:25:21.820 How can we stimulate our students

00:25:25.260 to step boldly beyond convention

00:25:30.020 by constantly telling them that they can do it?

00:25:32.660 Because most of the time, the signals we send to them are,

00:25:35.240 don't you dare. Even if we're not articulating it, what we're saying is our sense of our authority is so

00:25:42.320 fragile that you'd better not challenge it or you'll get punished in a way that you'll regret for

00:25:47.480 the rest of your life.

00:25:48.520 And I think if I can add something to what you said, look, there is something about the importance of

00:25:55.120 hyper-specialization, right? And that if I wish to make contributions in a very narrow,

00:26:01.720 specialized area, I need to know everything there is within this very, very tiny sliver

00:26:07.100 before I could add my plus epsilon. But really the biggest thinkers in history

00:26:13.600 and even the biggest scientific breakthroughs today happen at the intersections of disciplines,

00:26:20.560 right? So the fact that I can sit with Alan Gelso, I'm not a professional historian,

00:26:27.920 but I'm sufficiently well-read that I can take his example with Bach and, oh look, I can draw an

00:26:35.860 analogy or a link or a bridge to my own reality in psychological research. But I can also talk to

00:26:42.540 the art historian. I may not know as much as the art historian, but I know enough to be able to have

00:26:48.660 an intellectually stimulated conversation. So I think there is a right balance to strike when we're

00:26:54.440 training our graduate students so that, yes, we have to clear the fact that I have to hyper-specialize

00:27:00.580 train you, but I also want you to be a big, synthetic, consilient thinker. What do you think of that?

00:27:06.900 Because the lives that people lead in the most meaningful way are big lives. They draw in so much.

00:27:14.700 If I were to describe to my students a life that was lived, let's say, in the 19th century,

00:27:21.220 which was only built around the parliamentary utterings of Benjamin Disraeli, all right,

00:27:29.260 they would become great experts on Disraeli, but they would be catastrophes, walking catastrophes,

00:27:34.840 talking about 19th century Britain. My goal would be for them, all right, yes, let's have that mastery

00:27:41.920 of Disraeli in Parliament. Let's also have the mastery of Disraeli, the novelist, who actually

00:27:47.580 said more interesting things as a novelist than he did in Parliament. Let's have a student who

00:27:53.020 derives as much pleasure from walking into a gallery and seeing a work by Turner that he's never seen

00:28:00.880 before. I mean, I had that happen to me over the summer. I was in New Haven, and the Yale Museum for

00:28:09.160 British Art was putting on a special exhibit of all the Turners they had in their collection. 0.74

00:28:14.040 And a friend of mine drove up to see this. I walked into the exhibit, and the very first thing was a

00:28:21.300 Turner I had never seen before. I was transfixed by it. And why? Well, first of all, yes, it's great

00:28:28.900 art, it's great technique. More than that, I'm also immediately situating Turner in the immediate

00:28:36.580 history of art as it's romantic art as it's developing out of this cocoon in the earliest

00:28:46.060 decades of the 19th century. So I'm seeing history in that painting. And then I'm seeing the context of

00:28:53.400 all the other Turner that they have on exhibit. Frankly, that first one was the most interesting

00:28:57.800 of them all, really. It was a good reason why they had it out as the first thing you would encounter

00:29:02.680 coming into the exhibition. But you should be able to go to the gallery and see that. You should be able

00:29:09.640 to go to the concert hall, and you should be able to hear the difference between, let us say, Brahms.

00:29:17.860 Let's take the Brahms Violin Concerto and the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. I love them both.

00:29:22.960 I'm probably going to give an edge to the Tchaikovsky, but that's me. But there is a world of difference

00:29:28.520 between the Brahms and the Tchaikovsky. It's two entirely different ways of understanding what

00:29:34.240 music is supposed to do. Take the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony. Take the Brahms Fourth Symphony.

00:29:40.320 Take their last move, just the last movements. We are in different universes. Why? How? How is that

00:29:47.800 possible in the 19th century? So I'm asking a question about music. I'm asking a question about

00:29:53.120 culture. I'm asking a question about history. And I think the key to all of this is something that

00:29:59.380 you alluded to, and that is a fine and happy disregard for what we erect as disciplinary

00:30:06.600 boundaries. I'm not entirely sure where I acquired this, but I've never seen a disciplinary fence that I

00:30:15.200 didn't dearly want to climb over. Can I give you one? Hopefully you're going to want to climb over.

00:30:21.320 Sure. Absolutely. So my area, Alan, is in applying the evolutionary lens,

00:30:29.100 evolutionary in the Darwinian sense, the evolutionary lens to everything, right? You could apply the

00:30:33.620 evolutionary lens to politics. You could apply it to my areas in the behavioral sciences. You could

00:30:38.440 apply it to architecture. And this is where I talk about the meta framework of evolutionary theory. Now,

00:30:45.920 this may or may not surprise you, and hence why I'm asking you to climb over this fence.

00:30:50.480 There is a few, very few Darwinian historians. Now, let me explain what I mean by that and tell me

00:30:59.700 what you think of it and if it has any potential and so on. So Darwinian historian would be someone who

00:31:06.420 applies the understanding of evolved human nature to study some historical reality. So one example,

00:31:15.160 and then I'll cede the floor to you. So Laura Bedzik is a Darwinian historian who at one point wanted to 1.00

00:31:22.760 do a content analysis of the Old Testament. And I know that you have a religious background,

00:31:28.580 even in your education. And so what she wanted to demonstrate is that, so in evolutionary theory,

00:31:34.460 we know that the more status a man has, the more sexual access he has to women. And that's a universal

00:31:43.680 truth because women choose men based on their social status, right? That's the number one attribute 1.00

00:31:49.600 that irrespective of which culture, irrespective of which time period, women consistently prefer a guy

00:31:55.080 who's ambitious, driven, has fancy Ivy League degrees. Whatever the metric of success, she prefers that

00:32:01.560 over the apathetic idiot who is in mom's basement. So what she wanted to do was demonstrate that 1.00

00:32:08.540 Darwinian mechanism using the Bible or the Old Testament as the test context. So what she did is

00:32:18.240 she took male protagonists in the Old Testament who we can easily assign, ascribe a status to them.

00:32:27.200 They're a prophet, they're a king, they're a general, they're a farmer, they're a slave. And so there's

00:32:32.880 a whole bunch of, you know, status codes that we can ascribe. And then we're going to identify how many

00:32:41.980 women they are linked to. I mean, think about King Solomon with the 700 concubines and so on. And not 0.95

00:32:48.620 surprisingly, she finds that exactly consistent with evolutionary theory, the more status I have in

00:32:54.560 the Old Testament, the more women I have. So that would be an example of applying evolutionary 1.00

00:32:59.440 principles to a real historical document, in this case, arguably the most important document,

00:33:05.460 and certainly in the world. What do you think of that? Are there more Darwinian historians that

00:33:11.780 you're aware of? Is there any promise to that? Or was that a one-off shot?

00:33:15.040 How many women did Goliath have? 0.83

00:33:20.000 A rhetorical question? You know the answer? Or you're... Well, Delilah was the one that was 0.83

00:33:25.480 trying to... No, no, no. Goliath. Goliath.

00:33:27.740 Oh, Goliath. I was thinking Samson for some reason.

00:33:30.480 No, no, no. Oh, David and Goliath. I don't know.

00:33:33.920 How many women did Goliath have? 0.83

00:33:35.520 You tell me.

00:33:36.120 We don't know.

00:33:40.400 Oh, we don't know.

00:33:41.780 Okay. That's the first thing. There's no data.

00:33:44.400 Okay.

00:33:44.560 Secondly, he had status in more ways than one.

00:33:47.520 Right.

00:33:48.600 Status, stature. Okay. You can play with those concepts. Did that make the slightest bit of

00:33:53.620 difference?

00:33:54.860 In terms of his ability to procure women?

00:33:58.040 No. And in terms of his ability to procure his next breath.

00:34:01.700 Right. Okay. I see.

00:34:05.300 So, there are two problems right away. And that is, first of all, what data are you working with?

00:34:13.100 Secondly, what is the substance of that data? Does Solomon have 700 wives? Why? Because he had

00:34:20.960 stature? Because he had status? Or is there some other factor which is trunking 700 women in his 0.68

00:34:29.140 direction? We don't know. How many women does David have? His father. Is there any kind of

00:34:36.540 correlation? Is there any kind of connection? There should be. I mean, it's a father-son relationship.

00:34:41.640 And yet, no, no, we don't see anything quite like that. Are we talking about the movement of a 0.97

00:34:48.140 person or the movement of, let us say, the Davidic kingdom? There are more factors to be taken into

00:34:55.640 account this way. Not the least of which would be the expectations of the monarch himself. Oh,

00:35:02.220 if I am to have status, I must have 700 women. Well, if you're the king, there are ways of acquiring,

00:35:09.740 so to speak, those women. Not all of them are obviously consensual. So, what then becomes the

00:35:17.460 nature of the relationship itself? The complexities that enter into this question

00:35:21.720 are so numerous that the quote-unquote Darwinian solution tends to look like the hammer that always

00:35:33.440 wants to address a nail. Does it really answer anything? I'm not really sure. I'm not really

00:35:39.180 convinced that it does.

00:35:39.880 Let me take, okay, so it looks like you haven't yet climbed over the fence to see me on the other

00:35:44.240 side in Evolution World. Let's try another one. Okay. So, your volume two ends, I think,

00:35:50.960 around 1991, right? The fall of the Soviet Union, blah, blah, blah. Correct. E.O. Wilson, who's a well-known

00:35:58.560 Harvard biologist, entomologist, he recently passed away. E.O. Wilson, by specialization,

00:36:08.220 was an expert on social ads. And so, when he was famously asked, although he wasn't the first one

00:36:14.020 to make this quip, but when he was famously asked, Professor Wilson, what are your views on

00:36:20.560 communism slash socialism? He said, great idea, wrong species. Now, meaning what he's saying there,

00:36:31.160 and I think you're going to have a bit of a harder time to deflate this or deflect this one,

00:36:37.400 if I could put it that way. Species have a phylogenetic history whereby there is an evolutionary

00:36:46.960 trajectory for social ants to have evolved communism as their preferred model of social

00:36:54.780 organization. There is a reproductive queen, then there's a bunch of plebs that are indistinguishable 1.00

00:37:00.300 from each other, either worker ants or warrior ants. Therefore, social ants are communistic. Human beings

00:37:06.660 are hierarchical. Some of us are taller, shorter, harder working, less harder working, better good

00:37:11.980 looking, less better good looking. So, when you try to impose a socio-political economic system

00:37:17.580 on human beings that is contrary to their evolutionary history, you end up with the exact same. 1.00

00:37:26.300 You don't need to keep running that experiment over and over again, as a bunch of moronic degenerates 0.99

00:37:31.700 have for the past 100 years. We always know what the answer is going to be. Mamdani, excuse me, 0.98

00:37:37.080 I had something in my throat. So, therefore, what I've done here in exactly a couple of sentences,

00:37:43.740 I've taken an evolutionary insight, and without needing to run the experiment, although we have

00:37:49.460 ran it for 100 years, I can always tell you what the outcome will be. What do you think of this one,

00:37:54.700 Professor? Except that socialism worked for a very, very long time in Western Europe. We just happened

00:38:02.100 to have called it feudalism, because exactly what you described about worker ants and the warrior ants

00:38:09.340 and the structural hierarchy of society is, by and large, what feudalism was all about. And feudalism

00:38:16.420 worked for quite a substantial long period of time. And it was, in fact, a Russian commentator in the 20th

00:38:23.820 century, who said that socialism is the modern version of feudalism. Now, that requires you to

00:38:31.800 take a very interesting view of what you might call modernity and capitalism. We have tended to think,

00:38:41.260 and this is partly, I think, an evolutionary trope. We have tended to think of feudalism as something

00:38:49.520 which yields to capitalism, which, at least in the minds of some people, is one day supposed to result

00:38:55.800 in socialism. Whereas I'm suggesting that perhaps it works the other way, that capitalism is the

00:39:03.860 exception, and that capitalism had this tremendous breakthrough in the 18th and 19th and into the

00:39:11.560 20th centuries. But it now generates exactly the kind of resistance that, let us say, Jewish money 0.98

00:39:19.840 lenders generated in the Middle Ages, which is to say envy, resistance, and then finally violence,

00:39:27.540 so that we can resort to and come back to the more tribal formula of feudalism. Except that now

00:39:36.020 we live in a technocratic age where we're not going to have kings and dukes, what we will instead have

00:39:43.080 will be general secretaries and bureaucrats. But the basic function is still going to be the same as

00:39:49.340 feudalism. So what I'm seeing is not an evolution, I'm seeing a reversion.

00:39:54.300 Got you. Okay, I wanted to ask you next about what are some things, as you were putting together this

00:40:02.260 massive compendium. So totally surprised you. I mean, you, you went into, into this particular

00:40:09.180 20 pages with one idea, and you walked away, completely befuddled that, oh, boy, I did. Oh,

00:40:17.280 is it? Was there any such thing?

00:40:20.280 That's a little hard to chart, because as I said earlier, Hankins and I have really been talking

00:40:24.420 about these ideas for a long time. So in some respects, when we actually came to write the golden thread,

00:40:32.100 it was not a series of moments of surprises. It was a record of slowly working out responses to

00:40:40.520 questions. Let me at least, though, put my finger on one moment that was a surprise for me,

00:40:49.660 substantially in advance of writing this. And of course, it gets recorded in golden thread.

00:40:53.960 But it was a substantial moment of surprise for me. And that was reading a book by the great

00:41:00.520 art historian, Kenneth Clark, called The Romantic Rebellion. Now, I had encountered Clark through

00:41:09.260 his great series, that educational television series on civilization. Back when I was a teen,

00:41:16.140 I mean, Hankins and I are both lapping this up on ETA in those old days.

00:41:21.300 So I was so intrigued by what Clark had to say on this subject, that I looked up this other book

00:41:29.940 he'd written, The Romantic Rebellion, and was really quite shocked to discover his understanding,

00:41:38.980 his opening up of this phenomenon called Romanticism, which really was a rebellion,

00:41:44.880 and how he situated its origins in, of all people in the world, Edmund Burke.

00:41:53.620 Hmm. Now, maybe not origins in the most strict sense of the word, because he talks about,

00:41:58.340 let's say, the drawings of Piranesi. These are all part of this gradual upswelling in the 18th

00:42:03.980 century, this rebellion against the rule of reason, of classical reason in the Enlightenment.

00:42:09.400 But to read, as he laid it out, Burke's 1756, I hope I got the date right, 1756, 1759,

00:42:19.560 Burke's treatise on the sublime, when he asks, you know, what is really beautiful in art? It's not

00:42:26.660 what is reasonable, it's not what is balanced, it's not Mozart and Haydn, okay? It is the sublime,

00:42:33.920 it is that which terrifies, which produces these feelings of fear and anxiety. And immediately what

00:42:41.900 springs to mind is that, I use the word horrible, not because I'm, the quality, horrible because of

00:42:49.660 the impact on the viewer, of Goya, the painting of Saturn devouring his children. And at that moment,

00:42:57.560 it was as though, for the first time, all right, now I understand what's going on in Romanticism.

00:43:03.940 Now I understand the impact of the opening measures of Beethoven's Fifth, that jagged figure. Now I

00:43:15.240 understand that. Now I understand what William Blake is trying to communicate when he makes

00:43:23.280 these marginal comments in Sir Joshua Reynolds' lectures on art, that if reason is the only 0.98

00:43:29.680 thing we follow, then it's a damn fool thing to be a poet. All right? Go ahead, go ahead. Finish your 0.99

00:43:35.720 part. So that was one of those moments where it was just like, that was a click moment. Suddenly,

00:43:42.560 the light comes on. Finally, I'm understanding, I'm understanding, at least as I understand I can

00:43:49.200 understand, Romanticism and all that it implied. It's serendipitous that you mentioned Goya, because

00:43:58.360 in, so I have a forthcoming book coming out titled Suicidal Empathy, and hopefully you can understand

00:44:05.580 what that means. And in the last chapter, I reference his sketch, or I can't remember the exact term for

00:44:15.660 it. Equiprint, is that what they call it? What is it called? I can't remember the term for it. But it's

00:44:21.600 when, when, when. Is it from the war? Is it from the war series? I can't remember, but it's when,

00:44:29.180 when, when reason, the sleep of reason produces monsters. Oh, yes, yes. The sleep of reason produces

00:44:34.880 demons. And so, and so I actually use that because I'm trying to, to analogize what happens when the human

00:44:42.520 mind is either parasitized by bad ideas, which is a topic of one of my previous books, the parasitic

00:44:48.340 mind, or when our emotional system, including our virtue of empathy, is also hijacked and parasitized.

00:44:55.880 And so, I reference Goya, and here you are talking about Goya. Okay, what I want to do is take all of

00:45:01.480 the stuff that you cover in this massive, gorgeous compendium, and then link it to where we are today,

00:45:11.320 Alan. How are we feeling about the West? How are we feeling about the United States? Do you think that

00:45:19.120 we, we are on a, I think, frankly, I don't know how familiar you are with my work, but I'll summarize

00:45:25.800 it for you very quickly. As I hinted a few minutes ago, a few seconds ago, I argue that in the same way

00:45:33.600 that a wide range of animals can have their brains parasitized by actual neuroparasites, human beings could

00:45:40.000 also be parasitized by ideological idea pathogens. That could then lead us to be like the wood cricket,

00:45:47.800 who typically abhors water, but when it is parasitized by a hairworm, it actually jumps and

00:45:53.840 merrily commits suicide in the service of the hairworm, which needs to be in water in order to complete its

00:46:00.580 reproductive cycle. I regrettably say, although I hope that we can turn it around, that the West is truly

00:46:07.860 in a death spiral. Am I being too pessimistic, or am I right on, give it to us?

00:46:14.040 I think you may be too pessimistic.

00:46:16.360 Okay, good.

00:46:17.200 I won't say that pessimism is unjustified, but I will not push it too far, and this is my reason

00:46:27.980 for thinking this. We are, I think, facing a kind of civilizational crisis, and it's especially

00:46:36.160 apparent in higher education. Higher education should be the place where, if anywhere, this thing

00:46:43.500 Hankins and I call the Western tradition, this layering of civilizations, the civilization of

00:46:48.860 Greece, of Rome, of Christendom, of the Enlightenment, it should be the place where that is particularly

00:46:55.080 protected and handed on. And if you look at the curriculum offerings in place after place,

00:47:02.060 starting with the most elite institutions, it's as though it has been erased. Hankins will tell you,

00:47:08.040 if he hasn't already, very clearly his disappointment in his own home institution of Harvard,

00:47:14.160 where, in fact, it's become almost impossible, he says, to find someone who is actually going in

00:47:19.820 the history department to teach you about classical history. He is, so to speak, the last stand

00:47:27.300 of the Renaissance in that department, when he has finally retired, and it'll only be really a

00:47:36.140 retirement from Harvard. He and I have some other plans in store. He's, when he got, there's not going

00:47:43.720 to be anyone to replace him to do that. And you think, this is Harvard, but it's not any different.

00:47:50.620 I mean, Princeton, my experience has been, in looking at the history catalog, I had suggested very early

00:47:57.100 on. We really need to have a course on historiography. We need to have a course that says,

00:48:02.220 all right, here's how history has been written about. Here's how history has been taught. Here

00:48:06.380 are the theories of history. But I was told, oh, no, no, we have too few students as it is. That's

00:48:12.360 only going to water down the number of students who sign up for each of our other course offerings.

00:48:16.260 What? What? Yeah. So, in place after place, there is this evacuation, which has happened,

00:48:25.060 sometimes silently, sometimes not so. But the places where Western Civ should be most prominent

00:48:31.140 are now the most absent. I think there's some reasons for this. Sometimes it's simply indifference.

00:48:37.900 We've learned how big the world is. So, we feel we have to accommodate all of it to do it justice.

00:48:45.140 Sometimes we're indifferent to civilization because we buy the story that says that, well,

00:48:49.940 culture and civilization are just purely superstructural. And the real driving force

00:48:55.860 in history is economic. So, since it's superstructural, all right, we won't pay any

00:49:01.080 attention to it. But sometimes it really is hostility. It's hostility that accuses the West

00:49:07.220 of genocide, of colonialism, of imperialism, of slavery, as though these were not present in other

00:49:14.800 places, as though the Chinese emperors hadn't done the same thing, as though a variety of peoples all

00:49:22.960 across the globe had not done similar things to each other. But we take this into ourselves.

00:49:28.120 And I guess there's also a sense in which we've asked for it. We pockmarked the 20th century with

00:49:34.720 two catastrophic world wars that made the word civilization fail on the lips. How can we talk

00:49:41.200 about civilization again? And Adorno asked the question. He said, how can we write poetry after

00:49:46.140 Auschwitz? Well, yes, we can write poetry after Auschwitz, but we also have to accommodate the fact 0.62

00:49:52.400 that Auschwitz happened. That is shameful. It's shameful. So, all right, we acknowledge that. Yet,

00:49:58.920 still, having said that, we are still not at the thing which says, all right, this excuses us from

00:50:05.400 ignoring or overthrowing Western civilization completely. And why? Because Western civilization

00:50:11.700 has some very unique and precious components. Too precious and too unique to be abandoned wholesale,

00:50:20.020 even with all the mistakes and oversights we can catalog. There is the great tradition of language

00:50:26.380 and literature. There is the great tradition of debate and philosophy, of argument for the sake of

00:50:32.680 heaven. There is the great tradition of theism. I mean, all of these things and how they have

00:50:44.040 manifested themselves, not only in political life, but in works of art, of the plastic arts, of music,

00:50:53.400 of literature. These things are not to be tossed aside lightly by any stretch of the imagination or

00:50:59.320 dismissed because they're merely the products of some strange satanic kink in the Western brain. No,

00:51:06.080 it's nothing of the sort. So, in a sense, these books are being written as a way of saying,

00:51:13.380 wait a minute, think this over again. Look at the patrimony that we are liable to throw away needlessly.

00:51:21.840 And that is why these books are not just a narrative history, but they're also chock-a-blot full of the 0.98

00:51:29.920 art, of the music, of the texts, of great works. Because we want, in a sense, for people to have

00:51:36.540 through these two books, almost as ready reference and introduction to the traditions of the West as you

00:51:44.080 can find within the confines of two volumes. Now, here's where the question of pessimism

00:51:50.620 enters in. Because are we in a position, as you have said, that in fact we really are on the brink

00:51:56.840 of throwing it all away? I could feel more pessimistic were it not for the fact that one

00:52:04.060 of the great features of the Western tradition is its resilience. We have, in fact, been at moments

00:52:12.620 not unlike this. We were at moments like this after the fall of Rome, when the dark ages began,

00:52:22.780 and they really were dark. Dark, sometimes in the most terrible ways, and only tiny shafts of light

00:52:30.580 seemed to pierce the darkness. There was a moment after the fall of Byzantium, when what had been

00:52:38.740 the great civilization of the East now just seemed to be ready to vanish into thin air? Of course,

00:52:45.460 what happens is so many of the scholars of the Eastern Mediterranean migrate to the West,

00:52:52.440 and they reintroduce the West to the great texts of the Greek past. So there's a recovery that takes

00:52:59.380 place. And this story of resilience and recovery happens over and over again in the history of the

00:53:04.380 Western tradition. Another example is what happens after the great plague of the 14th century.

00:53:10.500 I mean, this is a pandemic in every sense of the word, a pandemic that takes the life of something

00:53:17.020 like two-thirds of the European population. And we could easily have gone into the worst

00:53:23.640 imaginable tales. We went into a pretty pessimistic tailspin as it was, but we came out of it.

00:53:28.900 And what follows on that? The Renaissance. What follows on that? Petrarch, Ficino, Pomponazzi,

00:53:36.480 Erasmus, Thomas More, John Collett. We could have done the same thing with the 30 Years' War and the

00:53:43.960 devastation that that wrought in Europe, in Central Europe in the 17th century. And yet in each of these

00:53:51.480 cases, when it appeared that we were about to tip over into the abyss, that resilience within the

00:54:00.460 Western tradition reasserted itself. We recovered. We were revitalized. We were revitalized by a

00:54:06.560 Petrarch telling us to climb Mount Ventoux and to be impressed by the distance between people admiring

00:54:16.500 the beauty of nature, but failing to understand human nature. A voice like those calling us back

00:54:24.680 to a recovery of what is really our property. It's like someone who had been sent into exile

00:54:34.020 for many years, returning to their homeland and reacquainting themselves with their landscape.

00:54:40.720 That has happened over and over again. It can happen again today. And Hankins and I very much

00:54:48.720 want these books to be part of that. That's why we call them the golden thread.

00:54:52.800 I was going to say, from your lips to God's ear, I was just going to add one small part.

00:54:58.700 So I'm an immigrant in two layers, if you'd like, in that we escaped the Lebanese Civil War,

00:55:04.500 were Lebanese Jews and came to Canada. And so I often tell people, including my American friends,

00:55:12.280 that it often takes immigrants who have sampled from the larger swath of buffets of societies 0.97

00:55:20.380 to actually remind Americans and Westerners how incredibly anomalous and magical and magisterial

00:55:29.140 the Western tradition is. Whereas if you're born into it, you think it's the default value of how

00:55:34.940 all societies are organized and nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, I'm currently

00:55:39.420 at the, and I'm not saying this just to plug it, I'm at Ole Miss right now at the Declaration of

00:55:46.220 Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom. And it takes a Canadian to be the scholar 0.83

00:55:53.800 of American freedom, because to your point, most Americans and history departments are self-flagellating

00:56:01.000 about how evil we are, and we're all slave owners, and we're all transphobic. And here comes the

00:56:06.320 Lebanese Jew Canadian saying, no, no, wait a minute, you're really great, America, and I want to be part

00:56:11.520 of you. So I think if we could fix our immigration system, so that we bring in more people that share

00:56:17.900 this ethos, and fewer people who go death to America, then I think we'll be able to have the

00:56:23.680 alter correction that you're talking about. I hope with all my heart that we understand the

00:56:32.660 complexity of human nature, that a Thomas Jefferson, a man who owned slaves and sold slaves so that he

00:56:38.800 could finance his wine cellar from France, is also the same man who can say that all men are created

00:56:47.720 equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life,

00:56:53.280 liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That man, for whatever his contradictions, took the entire

00:56:58.940 political philosophy of the Enlightenment and compressed it into a single paragraph. And it is a paragraph

00:57:05.620 which has gone round the world. The American Revolution, as an example, has gone round the world, and

00:57:13.800 it wasn't just because of Emerson's poem either. I remember, what, two or three years ago, I was watching

00:57:18.700 a video that was being made of Chinese students who were revolting against the restrictions being

00:57:27.020 imposed upon them by the CCP about COVID. And one student stood up at the barricades and shouted at

00:57:37.080 the police, in Mandarin, but shouted at the police, give me liberty or give me death. And when I heard that,

00:57:45.360 I thought, at that moment, the American Revolution is not over. So, we want the Western tradition.

00:57:54.960 We want to say the same thing. The Western tradition is not over.

00:57:58.560 When is the Volume 2 of the Golden Thread going to be released?

00:58:03.760 January.

00:58:04.960 Wonderful. Thank you so much, Alan. Stay on the line so we can say goodbye offline. A real pleasure to

00:58:10.060 speak with you and say hello to Jim on my behalf.

00:58:13.820 I will do so.

00:58:14.940 Cheers. Take care.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - December 03, 2025

Dr. Allen Guelzo - The Golden Thread - A History of the Western Tradition Vol. II (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_927)

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