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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Summary
In this episode of The Sad Truth, Gatsai interviews James H. Hankins and Alan G. Gelso, co-author of The Golden Thread, a mammoth two-volume series on the Italian Renaissance and its immediate environs, The Modern and Contemporary West.
Transcript
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I'm delighted to report that I have joined, as a scholar, the Declaration of Independence Center
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for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.
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The center offers educational opportunities, speakers, internship, and reading groups for
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the University of Mississippi community. It is named in honor of the United States founding
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document, which constitutes the nation as a political community and expresses fundamental
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these principles, the center exists to encourage exploration into the many facets of freedom.
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It will sponsor a speaker series and an interdisciplinary faculty research team.
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If you'd like to learn more about the center, please visit Ole Miss, that's O-L-E-M-I-S-S dot
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Hi everybody, this is Gatsai for The Sad Truth. Today I have the back-to-back punch. I had James
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Hankins about a month and a half ago. Today I have his co-author on this mammoth two-volume
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series, The Golden Thread. Alan Gelso, how are you doing, sir?
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I am doing well. I am doing well indeed, and happy to talk about The Golden Thread.
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I'm looking forward to it. Let me just tell people who you are. You're the Thomas W. Smith
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Distinguished Research Scholar in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at
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Princeton University. You're an expert on American intellectual history. Some of your books include
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Our Ancient Faith, Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, Robert E. Lee, A Life,
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his biography, Gettysburg, The Last Invasion, Faithful Lightning, A New History of the Civil War
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and Reconstruction. And as I said in the introduction, your forthcoming volume two of The Golden Thread,
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The Modern and Contemporary West, will be out in January 2026. Anything you want to add to this,
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Alan, before we dig in? That was almost too much as it is.
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All right. Well, we said offline that both you and Jim are old friends from when you were kids,
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when you both decided that you are historians, that you are going to become historians. And so
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I think this is the first time that I've spoken to friends from childhood who both ended up choosing
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the same profession. So welcome to the show. I don't have a copy of the physical version yet.
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I only received the electronic version. Why don't we start with the synopsis where,
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so Jim ended up till about the Renaissance, or maybe a bit earlier, and then you take over from
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there till about the early 90s. Give us the big synopsis.
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Well, the books themselves, the two volumes, are divided almost equally between myself and Jim
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Hankins. His long suit, of course, is the Italian Renaissance. And I doubt whether there's anyone else
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on planet Earth who has a greater command of that subject than James Hankins. And he has been
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expanding that command for 40 years at Harvard. We have known each other for even longer than that.
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We were in school together long, long ago in Pennsylvania. We were even in marching band together,
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believe it or not. And we have continued to remain in connection for these many decades,
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doing many things in tandem. People sometimes ask, how long did it take to write these books? Because
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the both of them, they are substantial pieces of work.
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The volume one, which is the one first now to appear, is about 1,200 pages. My volume,
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the second volume, is going to weigh in fairly close to that, probably at about 1,100 pages.
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And they are chock-a-block full of not only narrative of the Western tradition, but also of art,
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architecture, music. We strive to cover as broadly as possible the many facets of the Western tradition
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as it's developed over the centuries. And the division of labor pretty much seemed obvious,
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because all of his time and effort has been disposed on the period from, let's say, the Italian
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Renaissance backwards into classical Rome and Greece. Whereas my attention has been focused from
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the Italian Renaissance and its immediate environs onwards to the present with a special concentration
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on the United States. So, it seemed logical to us, given where our interests had developed,
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that he should do volume one, I should do volume two. That said, both of these books are really the
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product of some 50 years' worth of conversation. People, as I said, sometimes ask, how long did it take
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to write these books? Well, all right. In the actual composition, the actual mechanics of it,
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well, perhaps, let's say, four years or so. But in truth, it's really the product of all these many
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years of visits back and forth in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, in other places,
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where whenever we've got together, we've sat down and just talked about what issue comes to mind
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connected with these books. And it's not because we were planning to write them at some distant
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future. It's simply because these are the subjects that motivate us. Hankins and I get together,
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and the conversation is liable to vary from, let's say, Petrarchan sonnets to what is the best
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recording of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. And on one level, that sounds very, very, very geeky.
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But, okay, so we're very geeky. We'll just have to live with that.
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Forgive me for interrupting you. I just want to say something. One of my biggest regrets being an
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academic now for 32 years is that, and I hate to say this, but it's the truth, I hate the fact that
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most of my academic colleagues are maybe professional academics, but they're not intellectuals, whereas
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you strike me as intellectual. So maybe you can invite me to one of those future conversations. But go
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ahead, continue. Well, that in itself, it's the kind of stuff that gives us mental delight.
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So we have participated in this kind of discussion for all these years, and in a way, coming to the
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decision to do the Golden Thread was something remarkably easy, because in a way, we had been
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doing the Golden Thread for all these years. And in some respects, not all, but in some respects, the Golden
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Thread is kind of a transcript of all these conversations over the years.
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Now, if I look at some of the historical figures that I find most compelling, well, I mean, it's difficult to say.
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I love some of the guys covered in Jim's era, and of course, but I think there might be a greater
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density of folks that I love. I mean, my favorite guy of all time is Leonardo da Vinci, because he's
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the ultimate polymath. And I've pretty much lived my life as a consummate polymath. I don't care about
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disciplinary boundaries. I'm in no way constrained by these kinds of things. I just go in whatever area
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interests me. You know, I love Descartes. I love Newton. I have a background in mathematics.
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I love, by the way, I want to show you this. This is what I'm currently reading.
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I know, it's gorgeous. Some of it gets a bit esoteric with some of the contents of some of the
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things that Bacon was musing about, but certainly from a philosophy of science perspective, I love it.
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Now, I had posted a tweet a couple of days ago on idols of the mind, as stated by Francis Bacon. Now,
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my background is in studying the cognitive biases that humans, you know, commit when they are making
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decisions. Well, here comes 400 plus years ago, Bacon already talking about what he calls idols of the
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mind. Today, we would call cognitive irrationality. It's unbelievable.
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Yeah, when Bacon, I mean, the origin of this is as old as Plato. Bacon gives it a new spin as the
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idols of the tribe, but he's really talking about the same kind of closed-mindedness that he would
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like to move people beyond, so that when he writes something like the Novum Organum, he wants to offer an
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entirely new way of not only learning, he wants even more than that, to offer an entire new way of
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proving what is true. Not simply accepting it because Aristotle said so, but whether there is some
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kind of experiential confirmation of what is being asserted. So Bacon, Bacon is one of those remarkable
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figures, especially in the context of this early English Enlightenment, really one of the remarkable
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figures that you find there. Sometimes it's a good question in my mind, does Bacon belong more to
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late English Renaissance or early English Enlightenment? In the most important sense, it doesn't matter.
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He's a figure to take account of just on his own terms. And what an extraordinary career he had in so
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many different ways. So Perez Zaccorin, who wrote wonderful books about 16th and 17th century
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England, that biography of Bacon is, even after many years, eminently worth the reading.
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And you know what's amazing? So I have an incredibly large, I'm very proud of it, personal library.
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And one of the biggest stressors in my life is the fact that there are still hundreds of books in my
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personal library that I've yet to read. So usually when I finish a book, the next stressor
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is, which of all of these beautiful books that I've yet to read is going to be the next one?
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And don't ask me, as someone who specializes in psychology of decision-making, don't ask me why
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I decided that this should be the book that comes up. But I bought this in the early 2000s. So it sat
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in my library for 25 years almost. And so when I started reading it, I knew that he was Professor
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Emeritus when he wrote it. So I almost could predict that he had probably regrettably passed away. But I
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said, if this guy didn't pass away, I'm bringing him on the show. I then find out, regrettably, that he
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passed away in 2009. But that's the beauty of being an intellectual. You live on forever. He literally is
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In Surrounding Yourself with Books, it reminds me of that famous comment of Cicero.
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C. Hortum biblioteca habes nihil dirit. If you have a library and a garden, you don't need
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Beautiful, beautiful. Look at you throwing that. That was Latin, I presume, right? My Latin is not
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Right. It's from a letter he wrote to Volo. He was planning to make a visit to Volo. And Volo
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had written back to him to say, well, you know, I really don't have a whole lot on the way of
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accommodations here if you're going to pay a visit. And so Cicero's response to Volo was,
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well, look, if you've got a library and a garden, that's all we need.
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Oh, that's beautiful. Now, I don't mean to put you on the spot. But as I was going through,
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I haven't read volume two yet. But I started looking for, you know, key figures that I'm particularly
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drawn to. Now, one, that I actually had an expert on this guy a couple of weeks ago. He's a philosopher
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at University of Wisconsin-Madison. So I saw Dickhaft. I saw Kepler. I saw Newton. I saw Bacon.
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I saw the whole gang. I didn't see Baruch Spinoza. Explain yourself, Alan.
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Oh, because I can't fit everybody into the course of these books. I mean, I don't have Spinoza in
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there. That's true. I plead guilty. I also don't have Gustav Mahler. All right. I plead guilty.
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There's any number of people that I don't have in there because I've had to be picky and choosy.
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And being the author of the book gives me a certain tyrannical authority in making that choice.
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So that in the preface to volume two, which is a short version of the larger introduction that stands
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at the beginning of volume one. I add this comment that if you're disappointed that you didn't find,
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well, let's say, Spinoza or Mahler, éclive votre propre livre.
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So it's a very arbitrary and undemocratic decision on my part. But I wanted to go with the things that
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hopefully I had something worth saying about. So I will talk a great deal about, for instance,
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Not Spinoza, but about Pascal. I will talk about some people who usually don't get talked about
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in the context of a book like this. One of them is Baal Shem Tov. So because Baal Shem Tov has a role
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to play in the overall structure of the 18th century Enlightenment. Baal Shem Tov acts in many ways in the
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same way that Spinoza and Wesley did for Pietism, that Bach did for Lutheranism. And I like to see
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them as connected this way. As many great differences as there were between the Enlightenment and the
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figures that I've mentioned of the so-called counter-enlightenment, they did share some
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fundamental premises. They did share the primacy of experience. And whether you're going to judge
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it by the experience of, let us say, a Descartes or the experience of John Wesley, it is nevertheless
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experience, which holds the trump card. And in that respect, they really all are participants
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So in the same way that, just to go back to Bacon, how he sort of rejected sort of the, you know,
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being deferential to the ancients, and if Aristotle said it, therefore it must be true. Do you share,
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so now you're 500 years or whatever, 400, 400, 500 years ahead of Bacon, do you ever go back and read
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some of the folks within that time period in their original manuscripts and walk away disappointed by
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them, not unlike the way Bacon was not very happy with some of the ancient Greeks, or does it always
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only increase your admiration for them when you read the original, you know, treatise?
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That's such a complicated question to answer, because a lot of it depends on with what motive
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I'm doing the reading. Recently, for instance, I had one of my colleagues ask me to pinch hit for him
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in a class, where the class had been assigned to read extracts from Locke's second treatise on
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government, and Polybius's histories. Now, offhandly, I would never have thought of talking about Locke
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and Polybius within the same discussion hour. But it worked. Oh my goodness, did it work. And did I
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ever have fun, surprisingly, not so much with Locke, as I did with Polybius? So, yes, you get these
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surprise encounters. Sometimes you go hunting for something, and yeah, you can be disappointed,
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because you really expected them to be saying something more profound. But there are other
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times when the ancients, and when I say the ancients, the ancients, I mean, that could be Mozart,
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the ancients surprise you over and over again. There are some people who almost consistently
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and without exception, and surprise me in the best way. One of them is Bach. I devote a whole chapter
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to Bach, because I have never experienced a moment of disappointment in J.S. Bach. Whenever I am
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hearing Bach, whenever I am reading Bach, and in those moments when I actually have the presumption
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to try to play J.S. Bach, you know what I often find myself doing? I find myself laughing. Laughing
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at the sheer ingenuity. Laughing at the extraordinary simplicity of Bach's musical logic and its complexity
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at the same time. And yet when I say musical logic, I don't mean to say something that would make Bach
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seem alien or pulseless, because there are such profound currents of emotion at work in J.S. Bach.
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Let me give you two examples, and these are the ones that occur most readily to me.
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In his organ music, which years ago I used to play a whole lot more of than I have time to do anymore,
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which I say with regret. There are a number of chorale preludes, which are very interesting. He's
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writing introductory music about Lutheran chorales to be sung in a Lutheran church. One of them is
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In dir ist Freude. In thee is gladness. And that's a chorale tune, and it starts off with those words,
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In dir ist Freude. And it goes on like that. When Bach sets this chorale prelude, that's the first thing
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you hear. Bang. There's the tune. In dir ist Freude. And then sudden interruption. Interruption?
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No. Eruption. Out of the pedals, you get this motif, this ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.
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It is the response of joy, of Freude. In dir is gladness. Bach responds musically with gladness.
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And every time in that chorale prelude, when he tries to start over with the chorale tune,
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In dir ist Freude, he has to stop. Up comes that theme again. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.
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Because he cannot contemplate the subject of that chorale without the response of joy.
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It works musically. You can just listen to it as a piece of music. But then when you see what he's
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doing, that's when the smile creeps over your face and you figure, yes, he is telling us something
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about himself. At the other end of that spectrum is the chorale prelude on
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I cry to you, Lord Jesus Christ, which was a chorale. It was a favorite chorale tune of
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Philip Jacob Spinner, the great German pietist preacher. And in it, Bach sets it in F minor.
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And the chorale tune is stated very simply with a kind of arabesque, a filigree of notes around it.
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And this pulse in the pedal, quarter note pulses.
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Ich grüß so dear, I cry to you. It's like you're hearing his heartbeat
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all through it. And it is wrenching to hear until, in the last measure, he turns
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and brings you into the major key, into A-flat. And it is as though peace breaks out.
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And all of that tension and sorrow is resolved. And he does that with what seems at first to be
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the most ridiculous ease. It's like, why didn't I think of that?
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And then you realize, no, it's not ridiculous ease. And no, you wouldn't have thought of that.
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Well, you know, you talking about something being simple and complex, if I can draw a bridge in a
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non-musical setting. So whenever I begin lecturing, you know, pretty much any course within the
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behavioral sciences, I'll talk about some of the most famous experiments conducted in psychology,
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my favorite of which is an experiment in the early 50s by Solomon Asch.
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I don't, I don't presume that you might know who he is, but do you or can I?
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Okay. Well, Solomon Asch was a psychologist who wanted to study the power of group conformity.
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And so what he did is he created a very simple experiment. Hence, that's why I'm drawing the
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bridge what you said about simplicity and complexity. So he designed a very simple experiment that you
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could explain to the average 10 year old, whereby he shows you three lines here, lines ABC, and then
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there's another line X here. It is very clear to anybody who's not congenitally blind, which of
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lines ABC is the same length as line X. But what he wants to do is he wants to bring in eight people
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into the lab. The first seven are fake subjects. They're Confederates. He's going to ask each of them,
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which of the lines ABC is the same as line X. And each of the seven is going to give the wrong answer
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out loud. So let's say A is this long, and then X is this. So it's clearly the wrong answer. But can
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you get this poor hapless eighth person who doesn't know that all the others are in on the experiment
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to actually conform against his lying eyes? And the answer is, Alan, that yes, you can, which is a
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profound phenomenon that was conducted using an experimental design that you could explain to a
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10 year old. And so the lesson of that to my students is you don't have to develop an incredibly
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intricate convoluted experiment to demonstrate something profound. So while I may not appreciate the
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intricacies of the Bach music, I do understand how something could be simple and complex at the
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same time. Okay, so then let me... You're saying it, and I'm going to say, I'm going to add to it,
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I have another experimental confirmation of that. Faculty meeting. You know what I mean.
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I do know what you mean. Now, I don't know how much you're familiar with my work, but I don't even
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think I should put the qualifier. Arguably, I'm probably the most outspoken and irreverent
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academic in the world. And part of that stems from the fact that I view most academics as a unique
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biological species. I call them the invertebrate castrati. They don't have a spine, nor do they have
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testicular fortitude, which of course is something that upsets me because I, in my romantic ideal of
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what a bold intellectual should be, you should be a intellectual Navy SEAL, right? We choose Navy SEALs
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not based on their cowardness and meekness. We want them to be bold and courageous and heroic figures.
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Well, in the intellectual ecosystem, I want similar folks, but that's not what we choose.
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Am I right or am I right? I wish I could say you were wrong, but I've seen manifold demonstrations
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otherwise. Is there something that we can do differently so that as we're training our graduate
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students who will become our next generations of intellectuals to do something differently to breed
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that meekness out of them? Tell them that the most interesting thing they can say
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is the disagreement with you as their mentor or advisor. How much do you disagree with me?
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I hear you. Make it clear. You can say this without punishment. There is a vanity of academics. You know
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this. There is a vanity. The vanity comes from the fact that we all get the same rewards in approximately
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the same quantities in the same places. The curious thing is that one person who described exactly
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that problem for academics was no one less than Samuel Johnson.
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So this is no new development. This didn't happen overnight.
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by constantly telling them that they can do it?
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Because most of the time, the signals we send to them are,
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don't you dare. Even if we're not articulating it, what we're saying is our sense of our authority is so
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fragile that you'd better not challenge it or you'll get punished in a way that you'll regret for
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And I think if I can add something to what you said, look, there is something about the importance of
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hyper-specialization, right? And that if I wish to make contributions in a very narrow,
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specialized area, I need to know everything there is within this very, very tiny sliver
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before I could add my plus epsilon. But really the biggest thinkers in history
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and even the biggest scientific breakthroughs today happen at the intersections of disciplines,
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right? So the fact that I can sit with Alan Gelso, I'm not a professional historian,
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but I'm sufficiently well-read that I can take his example with Bach and, oh look, I can draw an
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analogy or a link or a bridge to my own reality in psychological research. But I can also talk to
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the art historian. I may not know as much as the art historian, but I know enough to be able to have
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an intellectually stimulated conversation. So I think there is a right balance to strike when we're
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training our graduate students so that, yes, we have to clear the fact that I have to hyper-specialize
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train you, but I also want you to be a big, synthetic, consilient thinker. What do you think of that?
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Because the lives that people lead in the most meaningful way are big lives. They draw in so much.
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If I were to describe to my students a life that was lived, let's say, in the 19th century,
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which was only built around the parliamentary utterings of Benjamin Disraeli, all right,
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they would become great experts on Disraeli, but they would be catastrophes, walking catastrophes,
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talking about 19th century Britain. My goal would be for them, all right, yes, let's have that mastery
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of Disraeli in Parliament. Let's also have the mastery of Disraeli, the novelist, who actually
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said more interesting things as a novelist than he did in Parliament. Let's have a student who
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derives as much pleasure from walking into a gallery and seeing a work by Turner that he's never seen
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before. I mean, I had that happen to me over the summer. I was in New Haven, and the Yale Museum for
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British Art was putting on a special exhibit of all the Turners they had in their collection.
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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
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
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
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
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
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?
00:33:20.000
A rhetorical question? You know the answer? Or you're... Well, Delilah was the one that was
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.
00:33:48.600
Status, stature. Okay. You can play with those concepts. Did that make the slightest bit of
00:33:58.040
No. And in terms of his ability to procure his next breath.
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
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
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
00:35:39.880
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
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.
00:37:26.300
You don't need to keep running that experiment over and over again, as a bunch of moronic degenerates
00:37:31.700
have for the past 100 years. We always know what the answer is going to be. Mamdani, excuse me,
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
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,
00:40:20.280
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
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
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?
00:46:17.200
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
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
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
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
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
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the police, in Mandarin, but shouted at the police, give me liberty or give me death. And when I heard that,
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I thought, at that moment, the American Revolution is not over. So, we want the Western tradition.
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We want to say the same thing. The Western tradition is not over.
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When is the Volume 2 of the Golden Thread going to be released?
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Wonderful. Thank you so much, Alan. Stay on the line so we can say goodbye offline. A real pleasure to
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speak with you and say hello to Jim on my behalf.