Dr. James Hankins - The Golden Thread： A History of the Western Tradition (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_900)
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Summary
James Hankins is a Harvard Professor of History and the author of The Golden Thread: A History of Western Civilization, a mammoth work on Renaissance political thinking. He is also the co-author of the mammoth book, "The Golden Thread," a history of Western civilization. In this episode of The Sad Truth, Dr. James Hankins talks about how he got started in his career as a historian, why he became interested in the Renaissance, and why he decided to write a mammoth book about it.
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. The center offers
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educational opportunities, speakers, internship, and reading groups for the University of Mississippi
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community. It is named in honor of the United States founding document which constitutes the
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nation as a political community and expresses fundamental principles of American freedom
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including in the recognition of the importance of Judeo-Christian values in shaping American
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exceptionalism. Dedicated to the academic and open-minded exploration of these principles
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the center exists to encourage exploration into the many facets of freedom. It will sponsor a
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speaker series and an interdisciplinary faculty research team. If you'd like to learn more
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about the center please visit Ole Miss that's O-L-E-M-I-S-S dot E-D-U slash independence slash
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Hi everybody this is Gad Saad for the Sad Truth. Today I have a very special guest an esteemed
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historian from Harvard James Hankins. Jim how are you doing sir? I'm doing well thank you. How are you
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going? I'm doing great thank you so much. I just want to mention a few things about you beyond that
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you're a professor of history at Harvard. We're here today and feel free to put up the book to discuss
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your mammoth book. I did receive a copy but it's at my office. The Golden Thread A History of Western
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Civilization. Now you did the first part and then there is a volume two coming which I'm hoping to have
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your co-author on the show. Your co-author is, tell me if I'm pronouncing it right, Alan Guelzo.
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That's correct. Okay perfect. He's a historian at Princeton. You're also a specialist on Renaissance
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political thinking. Anything else you want to add about your glorious bio before we get going?
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Well I will say that Alan and I have been friends since middle school, since high school and we've
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been friends for decades and decades so this is really a cooperative work. I wrote the first volume
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and Alan wrote the second volume but we have largely agreement about its content and direction and so forth.
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Now going to your earliest memories of when you first became friends, was there any inkling that
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either of you would become historians or just the serendipity of life led two children friends to
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both become historians at Ivy League schools? No, no. We were both history addicts from very early age,
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from our early teens. We both loved history so that's what we talked about throughout our adolescence
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and our friendship together. That's amazing. Okay so let's maybe start first with your own
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you know specialty which is Renaissance political thinking and then we can sort of segue into the
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I don't I mean there's so much to talk about in this mammoth book but you know we'll find a way to
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make it interesting hopefully for our viewers and listeners what led you out of all possible
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things that a historian could focus their career on what led you to this particular topic as the topic
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of your interest? Well I did classics as a in high school and also in undergraduate work at Duke. I went to Duke
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and did Latin Greek there. So I was fascinated by the Renaissance early on already as an undergraduate because
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it was the period when the study of Latin and Greek was at its height. It was the most important cultural
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activity of that age because they were trying to have a rebirth of classical civilization. So I guess it was a kind of
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a kind of pride in my subject that led me to the Renaissance. And I had some great teachers. It's the usual
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reason why people pursue subjects is I had great teachers in that subject. And then when I went to
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Columbia for graduate school I worked with a man named Paul Oskar Christeller who was one of that generation of
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German-Jewish emigres who came over during the Nazi Zeit in the Hitler period. And he was a professor at Columbia in 1940 and he was still a professor at Columbia when I was there in the 1980s.
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So I kind of attached myself to him. I became his research assistant for eight years and generally absorbed his love of the Renaissance as well.
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He was a great lover. He's probably the greatest expert on the Renaissance of the 20th century.
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Amazing. You know, when I often, well not often, but I've played the game, if you could invite any 10 historical figures throughout history to your, you know, ultimate dinner
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party, who would they be? And it may hopefully make you happy to hear that of the 10 people that I would invite,
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the number one person would be Leonardo da Vinci for several reasons. Number one,
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well, I mean, I guess they're kind of related because he was the ultimate Renaissance man. He was
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the true polymath. And I very much lived my academic career, contrary to what people tell you you should
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do in academia, which is to be a hyper specialist. I've done exactly the opposite, which is I publish
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in innumerable fields that many times are completely unrelated, other than in my case that they have
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some sort of evolutionary psychology thread in them. So I can publish in medicine or politics or
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consumer behavior or economics. I don't care about the discipline boundaries. So would you put that guy as
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your number one guy? If yes, great. Tell us why. If not, who would be your top guy at that dinner party?
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Well, he's, he's definitely up there. And Leonardo was famous for being a great courtier,
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among other things. He was a very entertaining person. People used to go to his studio for,
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he would invite people to his studios, they would be astonished by all the stuff that he's doing. He was,
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he was a great entertainer or intellectual entertainer. He also played the lute very well. He sang and had all
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sorts of different skills. So yes, he would be up there, at least for the dinner party, I would think.
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I've never really gotten much outside the field of history and philosophy. I'm really an historian
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of philosophy, like my teacher. But I have, I can say that I'm not confined to any one historical period,
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even though I publish mostly, up till now, I publish mostly in Renaissance studies. I teach
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everything. I've taught everything from the Greeks to, to, to the modern period, at one time or another
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in my career. I'm now teaching a course in ancient philosophy. I've taught courses on medieval
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Renaissance, early modern philosophy. I've taught courses on the history of liberty, going up to
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Hayek. And so, you know, I don't believe in confining myself to a specialty either.
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Oh, beautiful. I actually love Hayek. Last year, I was a visiting professor at Northwood University.
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And this is a university that's largely a business school in Michigan. And their whole
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motto, if you'd like, is, it's the free enterprise university. So you might imagine that the Austrian
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economists from the, you know, school of, you know, the Viennese school are all steeped in freedom.
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And actually, this current year, I'm a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the
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Study of American Freedom at Ole Miss, and hence, again, freedom. And I did mention to the director
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of the center that I was going to be speaking with you guys, and he was actually very excited. So,
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I don't know. Do you know, do you know anything, any, any of the people at Ole Miss?
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But I mean, I suspect that, you know, the study for American freedom is going to,
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is the culmination of your entire curses of your book. So why don't we just drill down? How do you
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decide which parts to include in the book or not include? You're trying to cover 3,000 years of
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brilliant thinking. Walk us through that process. Okay. Well, we decided from the beginning that we
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weren't going to do a Western Civ book in the normal sense. We were going to do a history of the
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tradition. So our conception of the tradition is that we have today a fourth-order civilization based on
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the study of Greece, Rome, the Christian Middle Ages, Christendom, and Europe since the 12th century.
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So we have four civilizations that are connected by this golden thread of tradition. So part of
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the question, what this principle of choice, I guess, was what is important in the tradition,
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not necessarily at the present moment, but in modern times, what survived into modern times.
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So that would be decried as teleological. But in fact, I picture the Western tradition as a tree
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that's going out from roots and putting off more and more branches. So you can't understand the later
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traditions without the early ones, beginning with language, right? So that's the principle of selection.
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But we also felt we needed a narrative. We needed a narrative thread as well. The history of the West can
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be told as a story. And too often, it's not. You know, Western history has been largely replaced in
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history departments by global history, or world history, or international history. So that is
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inimical, inimical to narratives. If you're, I have nephews who teach in public schools, and I just hear
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about the way that history is taught. And it's kind of flipping through different scenes in different
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periods. And you don't really, it's the, you know, it's Tibetan monasticism on one page, and it's,
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you know, Hindu religion on the next page, you don't get a sense of the story. So we wanted people to get
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a sense of the story of the West, and it's very exciting and interesting. One of the things that
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is exciting and interesting about it is how often it almost died, right? That there's real crises
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throughout Western history. You know, the Romans just go through crisis after crisis, and very often
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people thought they were done for. You know, the Gauls conquered them in the 4th century BC, and
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Hannibal comes close to wiping them out. And then Mithridates comes close to wiping them out. And then
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their civil wars come close to wiping them out. And they keep coming back. The Romans, you know, they
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don't give up. They really believe in themselves. They believe that the gods are on their side. So they
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keep it going for a long time. It's one of the longest live civilizations in the history of the
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world. It is maybe, depending on how you figure it, it's the longest live civilization. Because
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after it gets Christianized in the 4th century AD, it then continues for another thousand years.
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And only really is the Roman Empire is only really comes to an end with the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
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So you can say that the Chinese history of imperial China is longer, but then you have to
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assume that all the different dynasties are part of the same empire, which I think is a legitimate way.
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But it's really China and the West that have the longest live, largest geographical empires in history.
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Interesting. So you're talking about the different times that the Roman Empire
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was facing existential threats. So let's take that, you know, dark reality and link it to the
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contemporary West, where one could certainly argue that we are facing some unique threats to our
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Western civilizations. And I, if I may say, I've contributed to that dialogue. I'm not sure how
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familiar you are with my work, but in this book right here, in the yellow book, in the parasitic mind,
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I basically argue that there are certain parasitic ideas that have infected the minds of,
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you know, certainly the Western leaders, if not the greater Western populace that are truly detrimental to
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our survival. And then in a book that I'm, that is forthcoming, I then complete that story by arguing that in the
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same way that our brains can be hijacked, our cognitive processes, our emotional systems can
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also be hijacked. In this case, I call the book suicidal empathy. When empathy misfires in ways that
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are not evolutionarily optimal, you then end up with the perfect confluence of factors that could bring down
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a civilization from within. As a historian who has certainly studied how and why previous civilizations
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either survived or died. What are your thoughts about our current reality in the West? Are we going
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to get out of the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy? Or are we in 500 years, we're going to have the
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next James Hankins talking about the West that no longer exists? Well, that's the big question. I'm also,
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I'm in agreement with you that the civilization is really threatened right now. And what seems to me to
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threaten it the most is self hatred. This terrible pall that's hanging over not just the Western
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civilization, but also in America, over American history, this very negative attitude towards the
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past, which is ignorant. And it's, if it's not ignorant, it's at least highly selective. And it's,
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maybe I should think of it in terms of the disease, because it does seem to appear everywhere
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in the culture. And it's hard to understand why we should be so negative. And so, one reason why
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we're writing this book, Al and I, is that we think that just knowing more about the West will give
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people a much more balanced view. And that's what will help fight against this black and white thinking,
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and catastrophism, and the sense that the end is nigh. And that our civilization is corrupt and should
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fail. Many people think it should fail. We should replace our civilization with some kind of global
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civilization. And that's just nonsense, as far as I'm concerned. I think the civilizations have to renew
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themselves. But I will say, you know, you asked at the end the question whether we can renew ourselves.
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And one good thing about the Western civilizations, plural, is that they do renew themselves. There are
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many renaissances. I studied what we like to call the renaissance of the 14th, 15th, 16th century. But there
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have been many renaissances in Western history, starting with, I think, you can go back to the Roman Empire.
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The first renaissance was the Romans borrowing from the Greeks. The Romans, one of the great things about
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the Romans is that they had enough confidence in their military might and their approval of the gods that
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they could borrow from other civilizations. And that's something that's been a feature of the West throughout
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history is borrowing from other civilizations. But also there's this power of renewal, which you see many, many times.
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We talk about Theodosian Renaissance in the time of Theoderic in the 5th century AD. We talk about a Justinianic
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renaissance in the time of the time of Justinian and there's the Carolingian renaissance and the
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Altonian renaissance and the 12th century renaissance and the Italian renaissance. So it's a feature of our
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system that it renews itself. And I don't know if you've ever seen this book by Remy Braga. I happen
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to be working on it right now. It's called Eccentric.
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Yeah. Well, he's a French intellectual. We call it theory of Western civilization. He thinks one of
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the key distinguishing marks of Western civilization is that it has renaissance. It has reform. It has
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renaissance. So reform is religion reforming itself and renaissance is culture renewing itself.
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So interesting. What do you think about, so earlier I was talking about parasitic ideas and so on.
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Do you see, so whether it be in philosophy or literature or actually, and even the natural
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sciences, right? You often hear now sort of the die called diversity, inclusion, equity,
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where we need to decolonize and your smile says it all, probably what you think of it,
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you know, decolonize and indigenize and so on. Have you, and I hate to say it, I mean, I'm from Cornell,
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so it's not as though I'm, I'm poo-pooing on Harvard. I'm also from the Ivy League. Regrettably,
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Harvard and many of the other schools have really, you know, taken a big bite out of all that nonsense.
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So in your long career as a pedagogue, are you seeing the students markedly different from say,
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you know, when Alan Bloom wrote, you know, the closing of the American mind and so on.
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Have you seen it in the classroom where you walk in to talk about Epictetus and some intrepid,
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if not obnoxious student tells you, oh, Professor, why are we only talking about dead white people? What
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about the indigenous, whatever? Do you see that? Or have you been inoculated at least within the
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ecosystem of your classroom from all that nonsense? Well, most of my students are rather
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conservative type of students. And I teach things like Western intellectual history so that anything
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with the word Western in the title will be automatically avoided by anyone who is of the
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professor ideology. And it's a shame, because I think that those are the people who really should
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learn from it. But what I mostly notice is the very deep ignorance of the students. We have brilliant
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students, and some of them know a lot. And some of them know a lot about history, usually a very narrow
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band of history that they may have studied in high school. There's not too many people who have a
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comprehensive sense of Western history in my classroom. What I miss is being able to refer to
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or quote Shakespeare, which no one will recognize anymore. They probably have heard of Homer and Plato,
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but maybe not of more minor figures. They don't really, you know, I often lecture on history of
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Christianity. So I get students saying, what's the Trinity, right? And it just never occurred to me that
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people wouldn't know what the Trinity was. And the Bible is a complete mystery. Judaism, you know,
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is hated more than known about, right? It was a huge anti-Israel sentiment. It's not so much among
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the faculty, but among the graduate students, maybe the younger faculty. But it's enough to really,
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I think, deaden intellectual life, because people are afraid to talk about
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any subject related to that. It's not that they are lacking in courage. It's just that people have
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only so much bandwidth and you have things to do and you don't really want to spend a lot of time
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in shouting matches with fanatical students. But one reason I think history is so important is that
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history is the antidote to phenylacism. It is. And, you know, when we had the COVID lockdowns,
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which just infuriated me, I have to say, I wrote an article about the COVID pandemic, as I like to call
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it. And it's compared it to the Black Death and the Sixth Century plague, which wiped out 40% of the
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population. You know, and people resented that because they thought I was downplaying the
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Lacking in empathy. That's right. I didn't care about the people who are dying. And
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so, you know, trying to get any sort of historical perspective on things is suspicious because you
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might be trying to undermine the sentiments of majority in some way, which is exactly what I was
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trying to do to get people to be a little more reasonable about COVID restrictions. You know,
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Harvard wanted us to lecture with masks on. And, of course, you've lectured, you know,
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that this is deadly. You need your face to express all of your emotions, and you can't do it. So I
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took advantage of the belief that when you drink a glass of water in a restaurant, you can take your
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mask off, right? That was allowed. So I brought a bottle of water with me, put out some glass.
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I took off my mask and drank a little water. And then the students, of course, realized it was all
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idiocy. But one concern could sit a few rows back and put their masks on. But most people...
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Actually, they had to put their masks on. But I thought that was just complete idiocy and
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lacking any sense of proportion, which is something else that one can learn from history.
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Well, not to one-up you, but Quebec, where I'm currently... I'm doing this conversation from
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Montreal. Of all of the draconian states that instituted all sorts of haphazard COVID policies,
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I dare say that Quebec might have been the worst, the most woke, the most idiotic. So late into the so-called
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pandemic, we had our government, our government, meaning the Quebec government, the provincial
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government, institute a curfew, whereby you couldn't get out of the house after 8pm. So if your dog,
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Fido, got diarrhea at 9pm, and you had to... Now, this is in the middle of winter, where it's minus 25,
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where if you take out your dog, Fido, for a walk, the likelihood of you running into another human
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being is very, very small. And it's only because that was sort of the straw that broke the camel's
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back, and then they sort of rescinded it. But the fact that they even had the reflex to say,
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after 8pm, you can't walk your dog outside, speaks to exactly what you're talking about.
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I wanted to go back quickly to the ancient Greeks. In my last book, I wrote a book on happiness. And of
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course, it's very, very difficult to talk about the good life and happiness without mentioning the
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ancient Greeks, because they certainly have written a lot about that. And I tell the story in the book
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of, there's a fellow Lebanese author named Nassim Talib, who, I don't know, do you know who he is?
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And if you don't... No, that's fine. Anyways, one time he was teasing me, and he said to me,
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you know, I don't know what you guys study in psychology. Haven't the ancient Greeks already
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said everything there is to be said about human nature? I mean, he was just ribbing me on me.
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But as I started doing the deep dive into, you know, Epictetus and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and all
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the rest who have written about how to live the good life, I started thinking, you know,
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I think Nassim Talib might be right here, because these guys, I mean, they didn't have
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the empiricism that we had, right? I mean, they were going on, you know, philosophizing sort of
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first principles, logic, reason, and a lot of their insights. So for example, I remember I had at one
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point an insight about, you know, cognitive behavior therapy and how it could relate to Stoicism.
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Well, Epictetus has already said that. And I'm like, ah, damn, I can't claim that as my own idea.
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So I've got the historian who could tell us about this. What was in the water
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that the ancient Greeks were drinking, that they were able to be who they were? That's different
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from all the other periods. I think we can agree. I don't think there's been as great a density of
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ridiculously bright people as in that period. What was in the magic sauce?
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Well, there are these periods in history when there's more cultural flourishing than other times.
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Renaissance is one. Augustine Rome is another one. In the case of the Greeks, I think it's a society
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that is egalitarian, and it's democratic, and it has a lot to do with it. Because in a democracy,
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you have to defend your opinions. People get up and have to give speeches, and they have to persuade.
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In a monarchy, the problem is getting the monarch to be virtuous and care about the people.
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In a democracy or a republic also, you have to persuade people because it's a collective
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governing mechanism. So the alternative to persuasion is violence. And if that's your choice,
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you learn to persuade. So one of the famous historians of science, G.E.R. Lloyd, says that
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the Greeks didn't have a monarch, so they made reason their monarch.
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So logic was their monarch, and they agreed to obey reason. And the Romans make law their monarch,
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right? It's a different system. And that has a lot to do with it. The Greeks developed these
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sciences of logic, which no one had ever developed before. The ancients, going back to the Egyptians and
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the Babylonians, they all had medicine. But nobody had the kind of medical arguments and analysis that
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Hippocrates of Kos invented in the 5th century, that you have to collect all the symptoms. You have
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to analyze the symptoms. You have to classify them. You have to figure out the etiology. What's the cause
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of each of these symptoms? Then you name the diseases, and then you come up with the cures,
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and you test the cures, see which ones work. That kind of experimental empirical approach to medicine
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is unknown before the 5th century B.C. Greeks. And you find in the Babylonians and Egyptians,
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there's mathematical calculation. They know how to identify. They know when the eclipses are going to
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come. They have developed calendars and ways of measuring the day. What they don't have is
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mathematical argument. They don't have proofs from axioms to conclusions. That was invented,
00:29:13.840
by the way, by another man named Hippocrates, but he was Hippocrates of Kios, right? There are two
00:29:19.760
Hippocrates. Both did their work in Athens. And so it's somewhat confusing that there are two of them,
00:29:27.280
but they both had this idea that we're not going to look to the gods for explanation. We can do this
00:29:34.240
ourselves, and we have to do it ourselves. And so Hippocrates of Kios develops the first axiomatic
00:29:41.840
system where you can prove conclusions based on a logical progression of ideas from axioms. And that's
00:29:50.640
that is absolutely key to understanding the Greek mind, this idea of argument. We have to have
00:29:57.120
convincing argument. We have to be able to defeat our opponents. You know, even in juries, right,
00:30:07.120
in trials, they had 500,000, 2,000 people on the jury. Those people, and they had such large juries,
00:30:15.120
because they wanted to avoid bribery. You know, the rich people in Athens could pay off a couple
00:30:22.080
hundred jurors, perhaps, but 2,000 was a tough call. So, but if you're not able to bribe anyone,
00:30:30.880
you're not able to terrorize anybody into following your opinion, you've got to persuade them. And I
00:30:36.720
think that is really at the root of this Greek achievement, which then continues. Even when the
00:30:45.680
Greeks turned to monarchy in the period after Alexander the Great, they still have these traditions
00:30:50.960
alive of empirical study. Can I add another possible mechanism? You tell me how much you think it's true.
00:30:58.880
So you might remember the sociologist Thornstein Veblen, who wrote the theory of the leisure class,
00:31:06.000
right? And so in order for me to be able to pursue things beyond my immediate survival needs,
00:31:14.640
the society has to have a certain standard that allows me to pursue leisure. Now, not to imply that
00:31:20.960
intellectual pursuits are leisurely, although I would argue that's the highest and most noble form of
00:31:25.920
leisure. Could it also be the case that the society had sufficient, you know, macro riches
00:31:35.680
that it was feasible to have a bunch of thinkers go off in their togas and walk around and think and
00:31:44.080
pontificate? Whereas if you are in the Ethiopian famines, I can't really think about coming up with
00:31:50.880
mathematical syllogisms when I'm worried about where my next meal is coming from. So could that have also
00:31:56.880
contributed to the fact that we have the possibility and the leisure to allow our big thinkers to do
00:32:05.840
Well, you'll be disappointed to know that Aristotle said the same thing in the opening chapter.
00:32:11.120
Here I thought I have another. There you go. He beat me to it.
00:32:15.120
That's what he says, that we have a certain issue now, and we can address these issues more. He's
00:32:22.000
trying to defend the idea of science for its own sake, right? And he says that all the subordinate
00:32:28.400
sciences are necessary for life, but our science is something that can be done for its own sake,
00:32:34.480
and we can only do it because we're living at a time when people have the leisure.
00:32:39.680
So the Greeks also were wealthy. That's something we have to keep in mind. The Greeks were wealthy,
00:32:45.440
and the wealth went down the social pyramid quite far. So it wasn't just the people at the top.
00:32:53.920
It was the people who were trading and having businesses. The Greeks took advantage of the invention
00:33:01.680
of money, which was done in Libya by Croesus and the Lydians. They created the first international
00:33:12.160
currency, which is the Athenian silver dollar. Well, it's not the dollar. I've forgotten the name
00:33:20.720
for it offhand. They developed a kind of primitive economics, a kind of primitive financial system.
00:33:27.840
There's a lot of wealth in Greece, and it's not all at the top. So that's an important consideration,
00:33:34.320
that you have people who can aspire, a middle class, that can aspire to a leisured life of the
00:33:41.440
aristocrat. And the other thing I think is very important about the Greeks is that they didn't have
00:33:47.920
professional priesthoods. So if you go to Babylon or Egypt, the intellectual class
00:33:56.080
is coextensive with the priesthood. The people who do science, mathematics, medicine,
00:34:02.640
astronomy, they're all priests. And they're trying to uphold a religion, which is that they're not
00:34:10.160
dogmatic religions, but they are religions that respect the gods. So all of their explanations are
00:34:17.600
involved with religious presuppositions. Your recipe for a medical cure in Egypt in the third
00:34:30.000
kingdom will be to make the following mixture and pray to the god. Or maybe if it's really bad,
00:34:38.880
you go to the temple of the god and you sleep there and you pray all night. But the religious
00:34:43.600
explanations are mixed up with what we would regard as rational explanations. So the Greeks did not have
00:34:50.240
professional priests. They had temporary priesthoods, people who had an ordinary life. They were businessmen
00:34:57.120
or they were statesmen or generals. And then a few days, every once in a while, they would go and they
00:35:05.200
would fast and they wouldn't have sex for a couple days. And then they could become purified enough to
00:35:11.280
do the priestly rights. And then they went back to normal life. So they didn't have, they weren't invested
00:35:18.000
in defending a priesthood and its relationship. They respected the gods, they loved the gods, you know,
00:35:28.720
they were doing their duty, but they didn't think, their whole thinking mechanism was not theological.
00:35:36.400
In fact, I tried to get away from the superstitions of ordinary people.
00:35:43.360
You mentioned Aristotle, and then you spoke a bit about religion. And so, you know, my mind is
00:35:49.440
very synergistic. I was always trying to find bridges to link up different segments of our conversation.
00:35:55.760
Did you ever see, Jim, the movie, The Name of the Rose?
00:36:01.280
So I don't know if you know where I'm going with this. I actually mentioned this in
00:36:04.880
The Parasitic Mind in one of my earlier books. The spoiler alert to anyone who wishes to see the
00:36:11.360
movie, I'm about to spoil the entire, you know, storyline. If you remember in the movie, Jim,
00:36:18.320
the monks are falling dead. And there is sort of a black ink on their tongues. And they bring in this,
00:36:29.360
I think, I don't know if he was Franciscan or Benedictine monk, played by Sean Connery,
00:36:33.840
to try to resolve this mystery. And it turns out that, do you remember what the punchline is?
00:36:41.440
You don't remember? Okay. Well, it's going to actually link up to some of this stuff that we're
00:36:46.800
talking about. There was sort of a forbidden library where Aristotle's lost book. I don't
00:36:57.840
Exactly. Where they talk about, you know, humor and so on. And that's viewed as sacrilegious. And so
00:37:05.760
the head monk, who, if you like, has the key to the forbidden knowledge, made sure that if anybody were
00:37:12.960
to get into that library in order to read that forbidden book, he laced the pages where you turn
00:37:20.400
it with the poison so that the monks who read that would be dead. And I use that story as a perfect
00:37:29.520
example of the grotesque reflex to erect, you know, edifices of forbidden knowledge, right? You
00:37:39.280
shouldn't do, you shouldn't study sex differences because then that will promote antiquated patriarchal
00:37:46.240
theories. Don't study group differences because that might hurt the feelings of marginalized groups
00:37:51.520
and so on, which I also pick up this theme in suicidal empathy. I call this epistemological empathy. Rather
00:37:57.200
than actually pursuing truth for the sake of truth, you're actually modulating what is true as a function
00:38:04.880
of some, you know, grotesque empathy calculus. So I'm sure it's found throughout the period that you cover
00:38:14.720
in the book. But have there been periods within that sort of 3000 year chunk where the concept of
00:38:22.160
forbidden knowledge was more likely to be on hyperactive drive than others, or it's just a reflex
00:38:28.720
of human nature that the bosses are always trying to keep the rest of us rubes quiet?
00:38:34.160
In the same passage of Aristotle's metaphysics I mentioned earlier, he addresses the concern of some of
00:38:42.960
his listeners that to seek knowledge is to challenge the position of the gods. And he has a very elaborate
00:38:52.000
argument for why that is not that we should try to be like the gods, but we are not gods.
00:39:01.520
And he wants to say that there is no piece of knowledge that is denied to us by the gods. But then you have
00:39:08.960
other periods of history where certain types of knowledge are regarded as useless or as a distraction
00:39:18.160
from the more important types of knowledge. And, you know, the word curiositas in Latin is originally
00:39:25.760
the name of a vice. In Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, he discusses all the virtues and vices,
00:39:35.120
and one of the vices is curiositas, which means that you're getting involved in things you don't need
00:39:41.600
to know. And the word curiositas only changes its valence in the end of the 16th century. It becomes,
00:39:48.400
in the 17th century, really, people decide that curiosity is good for you, it is good for the culture,
00:39:55.120
it's good for the kingdom. So there's that sort of reservation. One of the things that happens that's
00:40:02.160
absolutely vital for the Western tradition, and it distinguishes the Western tradition from the
00:40:08.080
Islamic tradition, is that in the 4th century there were Christians who wanted to shut down
00:40:15.280
classical culture entirely. They thought it was corrupt, it's evil, that we Christians are better,
00:40:21.600
we have better morality, we're in touch with the one true God, and the classic should be suppressed.
00:40:28.480
They wanted to make the canon to be just the Bible. The Bible is enough. We don't need any of these
00:40:35.280
classical poets or encyclopedists or historians or what have you. And they lost. There was a number of
00:40:45.120
Christian thinkers who had been trained to the classics, as it happens, who said, no, we need
00:40:51.520
classical culture. And we need, at least, to be able to read and write and understand our texts,
00:40:59.200
and we need to know history. We can't really understand, that was the argument, we can't
00:41:05.920
understand the Bible without the pagan grammatical and rhetorical sciences and so forth. But, you know,
00:41:14.800
the foot was in the door, so that later on, in the Latin West, during the early Middle Ages,
00:41:24.960
the monks would study classical antiquity. So every single work of classical antiquity we have written
00:41:32.240
in Latin at some point was copied by a monk. And so, you know, it's one thing to have an official dogma,
00:41:42.080
doctrine, and St. Augustine had a very elaborate explanation for what you should study and what
00:41:46.960
you can't study. Eventually, people ignore it and do what they want. They follow their interests.
00:41:54.400
So, I have a nephew who teaches in the public schools, and he tells me that, yes, we do get
00:42:02.800
UCASs from the State Department of Education that tells us what we should be teaching and tries to
00:42:10.800
enforce all of their political agendas. But people can ignore them. They don't have to teach what the
00:42:17.600
state tells them. And as long as nobody complains, no one cares. The principles don't want to rock the
00:42:26.800
boat. And even the DEI people are not really, they don't know enough really to see us, to oversee what
00:42:36.800
we're doing. So, there's one thing, it's official doctrine, and there's another thing to what people
00:42:43.200
Got you. And so, you've been a professor now four decades, roughly. Does that sound right?
00:42:51.120
40 years. If I were to ask you what has been your biggest disappointment as an academic of four decades,
00:43:03.040
what would it be? And in a sense, I'm asking you the question, because I have an answer myself to
00:43:10.080
that question, which I'd like to share with you. But let's hear your answer first, and I'll give you
00:43:16.160
Well, what I miss the most is the desire to be excellent, the desire for the best people. So,
00:43:25.120
when I got to Harvard, I came to Harvard from Columbia. It was my first job after graduate
00:43:30.400
school. And Columbia is a very good university. It has many distinguished faculty. But I didn't
00:43:38.800
ever pick up the vibe, which I got immediately at Harvard, that we have to be the best.
00:43:46.640
You know, every appointment that we make, we're going to go through the top 10 people in the world
00:43:53.440
and start at number one and go down to number 10. But we're not going to even go down to number 10.
00:43:58.640
If we don't get one, two, and three, forget it, we'll have a different search. There was this great
00:44:03.440
sense that of, and you know, you can say it's arrogance. And of course, Harvard is an arrogant
00:44:09.600
place. But on the other hand, it was, at one time, it was, I think, justified arrogance, because they
00:44:16.160
did make a real effort to hire the best people. And the president of the university, Derek Bach,
00:44:22.640
you know, had a brain trust to search the world of academe for the best people. And if the departments
00:44:31.280
weren't interested in hiring those best people, well, he'd go do it. You know, Peter Brown, who is
00:44:37.040
this very great ancient historian, used to joke he couldn't come, he didn't want to accept a lecture
00:44:44.960
invitation from Harvard, because he'd have to listen to the hiring spiel from Derek Bach, right?
00:44:50.720
But we lost that at some point. In the 1990s, we had a new idea of what a good history department
00:45:00.320
looked like. And it would have so many women, so many minorities.
00:45:07.760
Peter Robinson, Jr.: Oh, we don't get transgender. I don't know if anyone's ever, well, there's one
00:45:12.560
transgender graduate student now. But that was never a, transgenderism never came into it.
00:45:21.600
But there's now this overlay of concern with having, you know, Bill Clinton used to say he wanted to
00:45:32.400
have a cabinet that looked like America. And that's what my colleagues want. They want a history
00:45:38.320
department that looks like America, that has all the minorities in the correct proportions. And that
00:45:45.600
ended up trumping all the desire for outstanding colleagues.
00:45:53.680
Peter Robinson, Jr.: Yeah. So that's, and, you know, that the standards for hiring were lowered because
00:46:06.720
Peter Robinson, Jr.: Well, if I may share, well, two personal stories about Harvard. First one,
00:46:14.000
very much personal, the second one less so. I came close to getting my first professorship at Harvard
00:46:20.720
business school, which is not an easy job to get. It was down to a few people I was invited. You know,
00:46:27.280
I went through the rounds and I got to the final round, which is a campus visit. I delivered a lecture
00:46:33.120
and this is 1993. And I heard through inside sources that I ended up not getting that job because I don't
00:46:41.920
ovulate. So it turns out that even in 1993, you were already walking away from the meritocratic
00:46:49.040
ethos. Imagine how much more glorious Harvard would have been had you had me as a professor for
00:46:55.040
the past 32 years. The second story I was going to say, one of my personal intellectual heroes is
00:47:04.880
actually a Harvard colleague of yours. And I'm so excited to find out if you've actually ever met him.
00:47:11.040
He passed away now. E. O. Wilson from the biology department. Do you have any E. O. Wilson stories?
00:47:17.360
Peter Robinson, Jr.: No, I didn't know him. Sorry. But I know about his work. He's a very famous colleague, yes.
00:47:22.960
Peter Robinson, Jr.: Yeah. I mean, even from a historical perspective, as a historian,
00:47:28.400
you know, he had a lot to say about how you apply sociobiology to human affairs, which, oh my God,
00:47:35.120
that was so controversial. Who would have thought that humans are driven by biological forces? Oh,
00:47:39.760
my God, he must have been a Nazi. But in any case, he talked about even sociopolitical systems.
00:47:46.160
Maybe my viewers are going to be tired of me quoting the ensuing quote. But when he was famously
00:47:52.000
asked what he thought about communism and slash socialism, he studied, as his professional field,
00:47:59.120
he studied social ants. And in social ants, they are communistic. There is a reproductive queen,
00:48:04.480
and then there is an indistinguishable mass of worker ants and warrior ants. And so when he was
00:48:10.480
asked, what do you think about socialism, communism, the greatest pithy answer of all time, great idea,
00:48:16.880
wrong species, which basically, there you go. I finally got Jim to crack up. So in those few words,
00:48:26.960
I mean, that's a mic drop moment, right? If you build sociopolitical economic systems that are
00:48:33.280
incongruent with human nature, you don't have to run the study, it's going to fail. Now we ran it for
00:48:39.280
the past 100 years, it has failed everywhere it's been tried. But you know what, maybe Ocasio-Cortez will
00:48:45.360
try it better, maybe Mamdani will try it. And now this time around, we'll be super successful.
00:48:50.960
So, exactly. But is there a way from your perspective, to take a lot of the principles
00:48:59.040
that I spend my time thinking about, you know, evolutionary principles, how they affect human
00:49:03.600
nature, and incorporate them within an accurate study of historical patterns?
00:49:10.560
Well, I've been very taken recently with Ian McGilchrist's model of left hemispheric and
00:49:17.120
right hemispheric brain and his application of that to periods of human history. I'm not sure
00:49:26.320
his history is as fine-grained enough as it needs to be. And I would like to explore, actually,
00:49:34.160
reconstructing intellectual history along McGilchristian lines. At a much lower level of
00:49:42.160
intellectual achievement, I've often found the idea behind Dawkins' memes, and I understand that
00:49:52.640
memes are not really his sense of meme, not the journalistic sense of meme, but I've often found
00:49:59.120
that the idea of a recessive gene and a dominant gene, or meme, works in intellectual history because
00:50:06.800
you have these steward ideas that are in the tradition, and at certain points they come out.
00:50:14.000
The environment is such that a belief in popular government comes out. So, for example, you know,
00:50:26.800
after the fall of the Roman Republic, the Republic is essentially dead by the end of the first century AD,
00:50:33.760
and there is no more Republican government for a thousand years. And then suddenly, in the late
00:50:44.240
11th, early 12th century, republics start appearing again. It's a complex process, but no one's had a
00:50:51.920
republic for a thousand years, and suddenly the Italians of Northern Italy are having, you know,
00:50:59.440
senates. They have two consuls. They have the magistrates with all the same names as the Roman
00:51:04.320
magistrates. They have assemblies. It looks like the Roman Republic. So, where does that come from?
00:51:09.520
Well, it's a recessive meme, I call recessive meme, of republicanism, which has been preserved in a few
00:51:16.880
texts in Livy and in Cicero and Sallust, and people kept reading those. They were there present in the
00:51:24.160
tradition. And at a certain point, they suddenly made sense. Oh, this is the way we should organize our
00:51:34.320
Sorry, you tell me whether... I've understood... I'm not anything close to a biologist, but I understand that
00:51:45.520
Well, I love your incorporation of sort of the recessive versus dominant genes to intellectual
00:51:53.120
thought. I've certainly seen Darwinian approaches to the study of how ideas proliferate, but not
00:52:02.080
necessarily using the terminology of recessive versus dominant. So, I like that. By the way, you may or may
00:52:07.760
not know this, Jim, but there's a field called evolutionary epistemology, and Donald Campbell would
00:52:14.240
be a classic example. It specifically applies the Darwinian process of selection to ideas. And here,
00:52:24.640
the idea being that in the same way that the currency of evolution is that there is a random mutation
00:52:33.200
which arises out of the combination of genes through sex. And if that random mutation confers a
00:52:40.320
reproductive or mating advantage to the animal that has that random mutation, then there are selection
00:52:46.160
pressures for that mutation to be retained. And then eventually, it becomes part of the
00:52:52.000
phenotype of the species. Well, ideas are akin to a random mutation, right? And so, whatever the
00:52:59.840
example that you mentioned in Northern Italy, something led to the fact that there was a kind of
00:53:04.720
a rebirth or a repackaging or a new arising of this idea, and then there are selection pressures to select
00:53:14.000
it. So, if this is a general ecosystem that you're interested in, I would implore you to look at the
00:53:19.360
work in evolutionary epistemology. It'd be right in line with what you're talking about.
00:53:25.440
You know, that's interesting. I should look at that. Are you aware of McGill
00:53:29.120
Christ's work? I am not. As you mentioned that I was about to take a note because I've never heard
00:53:34.080
of it. So, maybe you could text me or email me the stuff because I'd love to delve into it.
00:53:39.040
I think you would love it, actually. And the main book that I'm working on with is called The Master
00:53:45.760
and His Emissary about the relationship between left hemispheric thought and right hemispheric
00:53:51.760
thought. He's a doctor, a medical doctor, and a clinician, and someone also who's deeply involved
00:53:58.880
in the science of the mind. So, he speaks from a place of authority. He's not a philosopher,
00:54:06.400
like most philosophers who don't have an expertise in science.
00:54:10.720
So, you're collaborating with him on this project?
00:54:12.800
No, no, no. That would be a dream, actually. But I have been trying. I have a little correspondence with
00:54:19.360
him, but I need a little more time off to get into that in any serious way.
00:54:25.200
Got you. Okay, a couple of more questions. I want to be mindful of your time.
00:54:30.400
So, of course, right now we're trying to promote your book. Let me mention it again,
00:54:34.240
The Golden Thread, A History of the Western Tradition. Volume 1 is by Jim. Volume 2 coming
00:54:41.760
out, I think, in December 2025, correct? Does that sound right?
00:54:45.520
By Alan Guelzo. Other than this mammoth undertaking that you were courageous enough to tackle,
00:54:54.080
are there any projects in the short-term pipeline that we should expect from Jim Hankins?
00:55:03.280
Well, we're going to spend a lot of time promoting this book, and we hope that we will... It's not just a
00:55:10.480
book that we wrote. We're trying really to found a new Western Civ tradition in mostly classical schools,
00:55:18.800
homeschoolers. We don't expect the public schools that are run by teachers unions to pick it up,
00:55:24.960
but there are so many people now leaving the public schools. I think it used to be 95% of people went to
00:55:32.400
public schools in America because they were free up until about 10, 12 years ago, and now it's more like
00:55:39.920
83%. There's so many people who have pulled out of public schools, so the book is really for them,
00:55:46.480
because we think that that's where we're going to be able to re-found Western Civ.
00:55:52.960
The next project actually I'm working on is an international relations project. It will sound
00:56:02.080
idealistic and silly, but it's about a virtue-based international relations theory, and it goes out
00:56:09.280
of another book that I wrote in 2019, which is called Virtue Politics.
00:56:13.520
Ah, nice. And this talked about the attempt of the Italian humanists of the Renaissance to reform
00:56:23.040
politics by reforming the educational system and creating a state that would promote merit over
00:56:31.120
heredity. So I'm trying to apply virtue politics to a global theory of civilizational interaction.
00:56:44.320
I'm against certain types of globalism, but I think that civilization-based
00:56:52.720
global relations that get into competition in virtue and competition in cultural achievements,
00:57:04.480
that that is the way to try to create a harmonious international relations system.
00:57:10.960
And it doesn't sound very convincing, I know, because most people are instinctively Machiavellian.
00:57:17.120
Ah! So when it comes to international relations, but I'm trying to make the argument against the
00:57:24.320
Machiavellian impulses of IR to say that there are motives for cooperation and for noble rivalry.
00:57:34.160
That's a renaissance term, noble rivalry is what should be encouraged.
00:57:40.320
Well, when you finish that book, please come back and let's discuss it, and let's get your
00:57:46.080
co-collaborator on this two-volume series to come on The Sad Truth. I look forward to that. What a pleasure
00:57:52.560
it was to talk to you. Please stay on the line for us to say goodbye offline, and best of luck with this
00:57:58.720
incredible project that you're working on. Can you put it up again for us so that people can
00:58:05.360
Thank you so much, Jim. Please stay on the line. Take care.