The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Dr. James Hankins - The Golden Thread： A History of the Western Tradition (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_900)

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

00:00:06.120 for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. The center offers

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00:01:05.240 Hi everybody this is Gad Saad for the Sad Truth. Today I have a very special guest an esteemed

00:01:12.220 historian from Harvard James Hankins. Jim how are you doing sir? I'm doing well thank you. How are you

00:01:19.740 going? I'm doing great thank you so much. I just want to mention a few things about you beyond that

00:01:24.760 you're a professor of history at Harvard. We're here today and feel free to put up the book to discuss

00:01:29.620 your mammoth book. I did receive a copy but it's at my office. The Golden Thread A History of Western

00:01:37.180 Civilization. Now you did the first part and then there is a volume two coming which I'm hoping to have

00:01:44.400 your co-author on the show. Your co-author is, tell me if I'm pronouncing it right, Alan Guelzo.

00:01:51.500 That's correct. Okay perfect. He's a historian at Princeton. You're also a specialist on Renaissance

00:01:59.360 political thinking. Anything else you want to add about your glorious bio before we get going?

00:02:05.900 Well I will say that Alan and I have been friends since middle school, since high school and we've

00:02:14.440 been friends for decades and decades so this is really a cooperative work. I wrote the first volume

00:02:21.460 and Alan wrote the second volume but we have largely agreement about its content and direction and so forth.

00:02:32.960 Now going to your earliest memories of when you first became friends, was there any inkling that

00:02:41.440 either of you would become historians or just the serendipity of life led two children friends to

00:02:49.000 both become historians at Ivy League schools? No, no. We were both history addicts from very early age,

00:02:56.420 from our early teens. We both loved history so that's what we talked about throughout our adolescence

00:03:03.120 and our friendship together. That's amazing. Okay so let's maybe start first with your own

00:03:11.940 you know specialty which is Renaissance political thinking and then we can sort of segue into the

00:03:19.100 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

00:03:24.420 make it interesting hopefully for our viewers and listeners what led you out of all possible

00:03:29.060 things that a historian could focus their career on what led you to this particular topic as the topic

00:03:35.180 of your interest? Well I did classics as a in high school and also in undergraduate work at Duke. I went to Duke

00:03:45.120 and did Latin Greek there. So I was fascinated by the Renaissance early on already as an undergraduate because

00:03:54.960 it was the period when the study of Latin and Greek was at its height. It was the most important cultural

00:04:03.920 activity of that age because they were trying to have a rebirth of classical civilization. So I guess it was a kind of

00:04:14.080 a kind of pride in my subject that led me to the Renaissance. And I had some great teachers. It's the usual

00:04:23.760 reason why people pursue subjects is I had great teachers in that subject. And then when I went to

00:04:30.800 Columbia for graduate school I worked with a man named Paul Oskar Christeller who was one of that generation of

00:04:39.520 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.

00:04:55.520 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.

00:05:07.520 He was a great lover. He's probably the greatest expert on the Renaissance of the 20th century.

00:05:15.520 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

00:05:31.520 party, who would they be? And it may hopefully make you happy to hear that of the 10 people that I would invite,

00:05:39.520 the number one person would be Leonardo da Vinci for several reasons. Number one,

00:05:46.720 well, I mean, I guess they're kind of related because he was the ultimate Renaissance man. He was

00:05:51.680 the true polymath. And I very much lived my academic career, contrary to what people tell you you should

00:06:00.640 do in academia, which is to be a hyper specialist. I've done exactly the opposite, which is I publish

00:06:06.720 in innumerable fields that many times are completely unrelated, other than in my case that they have

00:06:12.480 some sort of evolutionary psychology thread in them. So I can publish in medicine or politics or

00:06:19.440 consumer behavior or economics. I don't care about the discipline boundaries. So would you put that guy as

00:06:27.600 your number one guy? If yes, great. Tell us why. If not, who would be your top guy at that dinner party?

00:06:32.720 Well, he's, he's definitely up there. And Leonardo was famous for being a great courtier,

00:06:38.640 among other things. He was a very entertaining person. People used to go to his studio for,

00:06:45.280 he would invite people to his studios, they would be astonished by all the stuff that he's doing. He was,

00:06:51.360 he was a great entertainer or intellectual entertainer. He also played the lute very well. He sang and had all

00:06:57.840 sorts of different skills. So yes, he would be up there, at least for the dinner party, I would think.

00:07:05.360 I've never really gotten much outside the field of history and philosophy. I'm really an historian

00:07:10.640 of philosophy, like my teacher. But I have, I can say that I'm not confined to any one historical period,

00:07:18.640 even though I publish mostly, up till now, I publish mostly in Renaissance studies. I teach

00:07:25.520 everything. I've taught everything from the Greeks to, to, to the modern period, at one time or another

00:07:35.360 in my career. I'm now teaching a course in ancient philosophy. I've taught courses on medieval

00:07:40.320 Renaissance, early modern philosophy. I've taught courses on the history of liberty, going up to

00:07:46.800 Hayek. And so, you know, I don't believe in confining myself to a specialty either.

00:07:53.520 Oh, beautiful. I actually love Hayek. Last year, I was a visiting professor at Northwood University.

00:08:01.840 And this is a university that's largely a business school in Michigan. And their whole

00:08:06.880 motto, if you'd like, is, it's the free enterprise university. So you might imagine that the Austrian

00:08:12.320 economists from the, you know, school of, you know, the Viennese school are all steeped in freedom.

00:08:18.720 And actually, this current year, I'm a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the

00:08:25.600 Study of American Freedom at Ole Miss, and hence, again, freedom. And I did mention to the director

00:08:32.480 of the center that I was going to be speaking with you guys, and he was actually very excited. So,

00:08:39.920 I don't know. Do you know, do you know anything, any, any of the people at Ole Miss?

00:08:43.920 Not really. No, I'm sorry.

00:08:45.280 No, no, that's fine.

00:08:46.480 Yeah.

00:08:47.120 But I mean, I suspect that, you know, the study for American freedom is going to,

00:08:53.680 is the culmination of your entire curses of your book. So why don't we just drill down? How do you

00:09:00.720 decide which parts to include in the book or not include? You're trying to cover 3,000 years of

00:09:07.440 brilliant thinking. Walk us through that process. Okay. Well, we decided from the beginning that we

00:09:14.480 weren't going to do a Western Civ book in the normal sense. We were going to do a history of the

00:09:20.240 tradition. So our conception of the tradition is that we have today a fourth-order civilization based on

00:09:30.640 the study of Greece, Rome, the Christian Middle Ages, Christendom, and Europe since the 12th century.

00:09:38.800 So we have four civilizations that are connected by this golden thread of tradition. So part of

00:09:45.440 the question, what this principle of choice, I guess, was what is important in the tradition,

00:09:52.800 not necessarily at the present moment, but in modern times, what survived into modern times.

00:09:58.800 So that would be decried as teleological. But in fact, I picture the Western tradition as a tree

00:10:06.240 that's going out from roots and putting off more and more branches. So you can't understand the later

00:10:12.720 traditions without the early ones, beginning with language, right? So that's the principle of selection.

00:10:20.880 But we also felt we needed a narrative. We needed a narrative thread as well. The history of the West can

00:10:29.360 be told as a story. And too often, it's not. You know, Western history has been largely replaced in

00:10:36.640 history departments by global history, or world history, or international history. So that is

00:10:44.320 inimical, inimical to narratives. If you're, I have nephews who teach in public schools, and I just hear

00:10:56.720 about the way that history is taught. And it's kind of flipping through different scenes in different

00:11:02.880 periods. And you don't really, it's the, you know, it's Tibetan monasticism on one page, and it's,

00:11:09.920 you know, Hindu religion on the next page, you don't get a sense of the story. So we wanted people to get

00:11:16.880 a sense of the story of the West, and it's very exciting and interesting. One of the things that

00:11:23.440 is exciting and interesting about it is how often it almost died, right? That there's real crises

00:11:31.280 throughout Western history. You know, the Romans just go through crisis after crisis, and very often

00:11:37.280 people thought they were done for. You know, the Gauls conquered them in the 4th century BC, and

00:11:46.560 Hannibal comes close to wiping them out. And then Mithridates comes close to wiping them out. And then

00:11:52.880 their civil wars come close to wiping them out. And they keep coming back. The Romans, you know, they 1.00

00:11:57.520 don't give up. They really believe in themselves. They believe that the gods are on their side. So they

00:12:04.160 keep it going for a long time. It's one of the longest live civilizations in the history of the

00:12:08.880 world. It is maybe, depending on how you figure it, it's the longest live civilization. Because

00:12:16.320 after it gets Christianized in the 4th century AD, it then continues for another thousand years.

00:12:23.920 And only really is the Roman Empire is only really comes to an end with the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

00:12:34.160 So you can say that the Chinese history of imperial China is longer, but then you have to

00:12:40.880 assume that all the different dynasties are part of the same empire, which I think is a legitimate way.

00:12:47.280 But it's really China and the West that have the longest live, largest geographical empires in history.

00:12:57.120 Interesting. So you're talking about the different times that the Roman Empire

00:13:01.760 was facing existential threats. So let's take that, you know, dark reality and link it to the

00:13:09.200 contemporary West, where one could certainly argue that we are facing some unique threats to our

00:13:16.560 Western civilizations. And I, if I may say, I've contributed to that dialogue. I'm not sure how

00:13:23.360 familiar you are with my work, but in this book right here, in the yellow book, in the parasitic mind,

00:13:28.720 I basically argue that there are certain parasitic ideas that have infected the minds of,

00:13:36.240 you know, certainly the Western leaders, if not the greater Western populace that are truly detrimental to

00:13:42.640 our survival. And then in a book that I'm, that is forthcoming, I then complete that story by arguing that in the

00:13:49.280 same way that our brains can be hijacked, our cognitive processes, our emotional systems can

00:13:55.680 also be hijacked. In this case, I call the book suicidal empathy. When empathy misfires in ways that

00:14:02.240 are not evolutionarily optimal, you then end up with the perfect confluence of factors that could bring down

00:14:10.320 a civilization from within. As a historian who has certainly studied how and why previous civilizations

00:14:18.000 either survived or died. What are your thoughts about our current reality in the West? Are we going

00:14:24.480 to get out of the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy? Or are we in 500 years, we're going to have the

00:14:30.960 next James Hankins talking about the West that no longer exists? Well, that's the big question. I'm also,

00:14:38.800 I'm in agreement with you that the civilization is really threatened right now. And what seems to me to

00:14:45.520 threaten it the most is self hatred. This terrible pall that's hanging over not just the Western

00:14:53.760 civilization, but also in America, over American history, this very negative attitude towards the 0.98

00:15:00.640 past, which is ignorant. And it's, if it's not ignorant, it's at least highly selective. And it's, 0.96

00:15:07.840 maybe I should think of it in terms of the disease, because it does seem to appear everywhere

00:15:13.200 in the culture. And it's hard to understand why we should be so negative. And so, one reason why

00:15:21.040 we're writing this book, Al and I, is that we think that just knowing more about the West will give

00:15:29.680 people a much more balanced view. And that's what will help fight against this black and white thinking, 0.88

00:15:36.720 and catastrophism, and the sense that the end is nigh. And that our civilization is corrupt and should

00:15:47.120 fail. Many people think it should fail. We should replace our civilization with some kind of global

00:15:53.520 civilization. And that's just nonsense, as far as I'm concerned. I think the civilizations have to renew

00:16:01.520 themselves. But I will say, you know, you asked at the end the question whether we can renew ourselves.

00:16:09.520 And one good thing about the Western civilizations, plural, is that they do renew themselves. There are

00:16:17.520 many renaissances. I studied what we like to call the renaissance of the 14th, 15th, 16th century. But there

00:16:25.760 have been many renaissances in Western history, starting with, I think, you can go back to the Roman Empire.

00:16:33.360 The first renaissance was the Romans borrowing from the Greeks. The Romans, one of the great things about 1.00

00:16:41.280 the Romans is that they had enough confidence in their military might and their approval of the gods that

00:16:50.240 they could borrow from other civilizations. And that's something that's been a feature of the West throughout

00:16:56.080 history is borrowing from other civilizations. But also there's this power of renewal, which you see many, many times.

00:17:03.440 We talk about Theodosian Renaissance in the time of Theoderic in the 5th century AD. We talk about a Justinianic

00:17:13.680 renaissance in the time of the time of Justinian and there's the Carolingian renaissance and the

00:17:18.080 Altonian renaissance and the 12th century renaissance and the Italian renaissance. So it's a feature of our

00:17:25.520 system that it renews itself. And I don't know if you've ever seen this book by Remy Braga. I happen

00:17:32.240 to be working on it right now. It's called Eccentric.

00:17:35.280 I don't think I know it, no.

00:17:37.120 Yeah. Well, he's a French intellectual. We call it theory of Western civilization. He thinks one of

00:17:44.400 the key distinguishing marks of Western civilization is that it has renaissance. It has reform. It has

00:17:52.320 renaissance. So reform is religion reforming itself and renaissance is culture renewing itself.

00:17:59.760 So interesting. What do you think about, so earlier I was talking about parasitic ideas and so on.

00:18:07.760 Do you see, so whether it be in philosophy or literature or actually, and even the natural

00:18:13.360 sciences, right? You often hear now sort of the die called diversity, inclusion, equity,

00:18:18.640 where we need to decolonize and your smile says it all, probably what you think of it,

00:18:26.000 you know, decolonize and indigenize and so on. Have you, and I hate to say it, I mean, I'm from Cornell,

00:18:34.000 so it's not as though I'm, I'm poo-pooing on Harvard. I'm also from the Ivy League. Regrettably,

00:18:40.400 Harvard and many of the other schools have really, you know, taken a big bite out of all that nonsense.

00:18:46.080 So in your long career as a pedagogue, are you seeing the students markedly different from say,

00:18:54.480 you know, when Alan Bloom wrote, you know, the closing of the American mind and so on.

00:18:58.720 Have you seen it in the classroom where you walk in to talk about Epictetus and some intrepid,

00:19:07.120 if not obnoxious student tells you, oh, Professor, why are we only talking about dead white people? What

00:19:13.040 about the indigenous, whatever? Do you see that? Or have you been inoculated at least within the

00:19:18.480 ecosystem of your classroom from all that nonsense? Well, most of my students are rather

00:19:25.360 conservative type of students. And I teach things like Western intellectual history so that anything

00:19:31.360 with the word Western in the title will be automatically avoided by anyone who is of the

00:19:36.960 professor ideology. And it's a shame, because I think that those are the people who really should

00:19:45.200 learn from it. But what I mostly notice is the very deep ignorance of the students. We have brilliant

00:19:55.600 students, and some of them know a lot. And some of them know a lot about history, usually a very narrow

00:20:02.960 band of history that they may have studied in high school. There's not too many people who have a

00:20:07.760 comprehensive sense of Western history in my classroom. What I miss is being able to refer to

00:20:15.760 or quote Shakespeare, which no one will recognize anymore. They probably have heard of Homer and Plato,

00:20:23.840 but maybe not of more minor figures. They don't really, you know, I often lecture on history of

00:20:34.320 Christianity. So I get students saying, what's the Trinity, right? And it just never occurred to me that

00:20:41.760 people wouldn't know what the Trinity was. And the Bible is a complete mystery. Judaism, you know, 1.00

00:20:48.560 is hated more than known about, right? It was a huge anti-Israel sentiment. It's not so much among

00:21:00.160 the faculty, but among the graduate students, maybe the younger faculty. But it's enough to really,

00:21:07.520 I think, deaden intellectual life, because people are afraid to talk about

00:21:13.280 any subject related to that. It's not that they are lacking in courage. It's just that people have

00:21:21.760 only so much bandwidth and you have things to do and you don't really want to spend a lot of time

00:21:27.760 in shouting matches with fanatical students. But one reason I think history is so important is that

00:21:35.680 history is the antidote to phenylacism. It is. And, you know, when we had the COVID lockdowns,

00:21:45.840 which just infuriated me, I have to say, I wrote an article about the COVID pandemic, as I like to call

00:21:58.400 it. And it's compared it to the Black Death and the Sixth Century plague, which wiped out 40% of the

00:22:06.560 population. You know, and people resented that because they thought I was downplaying the

00:22:12.960 dangers of...

00:22:13.440 You were not being empathetic.

00:22:14.880 Lacking in empathy. That's right. I didn't care about the people who are dying. And

00:22:20.000 so, you know, trying to get any sort of historical perspective on things is suspicious because you

00:22:31.760 might be trying to undermine the sentiments of majority in some way, which is exactly what I was

00:22:39.760 trying to do to get people to be a little more reasonable about COVID restrictions. You know,

00:22:45.040 Harvard wanted us to lecture with masks on. And, of course, you've lectured, you know,

00:22:52.320 that this is deadly. You need your face to express all of your emotions, and you can't do it. So I

00:23:00.560 took advantage of the belief that when you drink a glass of water in a restaurant, you can take your

00:23:08.240 mask off, right? That was allowed. So I brought a bottle of water with me, put out some glass.

00:23:14.800 I took off my mask and drank a little water. And then the students, of course, realized it was all

00:23:20.400 idiocy. But one concern could sit a few rows back and put their masks on. But most people... 1.00

00:23:26.320 Actually, they had to put their masks on. But I thought that was just complete idiocy and 1.00

00:23:33.440 lacking any sense of proportion, which is something else that one can learn from history. 0.99

00:23:38.240 Well, not to one-up you, but Quebec, where I'm currently... I'm doing this conversation from

00:23:47.280 Montreal. Of all of the draconian states that instituted all sorts of haphazard COVID policies,

00:23:55.440 I dare say that Quebec might have been the worst, the most woke, the most idiotic. So late into the so-called 1.00

00:24:02.400 pandemic, we had our government, our government, meaning the Quebec government, the provincial

00:24:07.920 government, institute a curfew, whereby you couldn't get out of the house after 8pm. So if your dog,

00:24:19.360 Fido, got diarrhea at 9pm, and you had to... Now, this is in the middle of winter, where it's minus 25,

00:24:29.120 where if you take out your dog, Fido, for a walk, the likelihood of you running into another human

00:24:35.360 being is very, very small. And it's only because that was sort of the straw that broke the camel's

00:24:41.440 back, and then they sort of rescinded it. But the fact that they even had the reflex to say,

00:24:46.400 after 8pm, you can't walk your dog outside, speaks to exactly what you're talking about.

00:24:52.960 I wanted to go back quickly to the ancient Greeks. In my last book, I wrote a book on happiness. And of

00:25:00.240 course, it's very, very difficult to talk about the good life and happiness without mentioning the

00:25:05.040 ancient Greeks, because they certainly have written a lot about that. And I tell the story in the book

00:25:12.320 of, there's a fellow Lebanese author named Nassim Talib, who, I don't know, do you know who he is?

00:25:19.760 And if you don't... No, that's fine. Anyways, one time he was teasing me, and he said to me,

00:25:26.160 you know, I don't know what you guys study in psychology. Haven't the ancient Greeks already 0.95

00:25:32.160 said everything there is to be said about human nature? I mean, he was just ribbing me on me.

00:25:37.120 But as I started doing the deep dive into, you know, Epictetus and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and all

00:25:43.680 the rest who have written about how to live the good life, I started thinking, you know,

00:25:47.680 I think Nassim Talib might be right here, because these guys, I mean, they didn't have

00:25:52.400 the empiricism that we had, right? I mean, they were going on, you know, philosophizing sort of

00:25:57.280 first principles, logic, reason, and a lot of their insights. So for example, I remember I had at one

00:26:02.560 point an insight about, you know, cognitive behavior therapy and how it could relate to Stoicism.

00:26:10.400 Well, Epictetus has already said that. And I'm like, ah, damn, I can't claim that as my own idea. 0.94

00:26:15.600 So I've got the historian who could tell us about this. What was in the water 0.97

00:26:22.080 that the ancient Greeks were drinking, that they were able to be who they were? That's different 0.80

00:26:28.000 from all the other periods. I think we can agree. I don't think there's been as great a density of

00:26:33.360 ridiculously bright people as in that period. What was in the magic sauce?

00:26:39.840 Well, there are these periods in history when there's more cultural flourishing than other times.

00:26:45.120 Renaissance is one. Augustine Rome is another one. In the case of the Greeks, I think it's a society

00:26:53.440 that is egalitarian, and it's democratic, and it has a lot to do with it. Because in a democracy,

00:27:00.800 you have to defend your opinions. People get up and have to give speeches, and they have to persuade.

00:27:09.840 In a monarchy, the problem is getting the monarch to be virtuous and care about the people.

00:27:15.680 In a democracy or a republic also, you have to persuade people because it's a collective

00:27:24.000 governing mechanism. So the alternative to persuasion is violence. And if that's your choice,

00:27:31.520 you learn to persuade. So one of the famous historians of science, G.E.R. Lloyd, says that

00:27:40.240 the Greeks didn't have a monarch, so they made reason their monarch.

00:27:44.960 Nice.

00:27:45.520 So logic was their monarch, and they agreed to obey reason. And the Romans make law their monarch,

00:27:52.560 right? It's a different system. And that has a lot to do with it. The Greeks developed these

00:27:59.440 sciences of logic, which no one had ever developed before. The ancients, going back to the Egyptians and 0.95

00:28:07.040 the Babylonians, they all had medicine. But nobody had the kind of medical arguments and analysis that

00:28:17.600 Hippocrates of Kos invented in the 5th century, that you have to collect all the symptoms. You have

00:28:25.600 to analyze the symptoms. You have to classify them. You have to figure out the etiology. What's the cause

00:28:32.080 of each of these symptoms? Then you name the diseases, and then you come up with the cures,

00:28:37.040 and you test the cures, see which ones work. That kind of experimental empirical approach to medicine

00:28:44.240 is unknown before the 5th century B.C. Greeks. And you find in the Babylonians and Egyptians,

00:28:53.360 there's mathematical calculation. They know how to identify. They know when the eclipses are going to

00:28:59.680 come. They have developed calendars and ways of measuring the day. What they don't have is

00:29:06.640 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 1.00

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

00:32:04.320 nothing but think?

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 1.00

00:33:01.680 of money, which was done in Libya by Croesus and the Lydians. They created the first international 0.91

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 0.91

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 0.93

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 1.00

00:34:43.600 explanations are mixed up with what we would regard as rational explanations. So the Greeks did not have 0.99

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?

00:36:00.240 Oh, yes.

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?

00:36:41.120 No.

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

00:36:55.280 know if it's poetics or it's a...

00:36:56.800 It's a poetics book too, yeah.

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 1.00

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 1.00

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

00:42:42.560 actually do.

00:42:43.200 Got you. And so, you've been a professor now four decades, roughly. Does that sound right?

00:42:49.920 40 years, yeah.

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

00:43:13.920 mine after.

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 0.98

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. 1.00

00:45:05.680 Peter Robinson, Jr.: Transgender, transgender.

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 1.00

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 0.94

00:45:45.600 ended up trumping all the desire for outstanding colleagues.

00:45:52.480 Peter Robinson, Jr.: Indeed.

00:45:53.680 Peter Robinson, Jr.: Yeah. So that's, and, you know, that the standards for hiring were lowered because

00:46:04.800 we had to have so many of each kind.

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. 0.81

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, 0.70

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

00:51:30.640 political system.

00:51:32.000 Oh, I love...

00:51:33.440 Sorry, go ahead.

00:51:34.320 Sorry, you tell me whether... I've understood... I'm not anything close to a biologist, but I understand that

00:51:41.840 Dawkins' idea of memes is not accepted by...

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?

00:54:44.720 That's correct.

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

00:58:02.960 hopefully get out and buy this?

00:58:05.360 Thank you so much, Jim. Please stay on the line. Take care.

00:58:15.200 Thank you.

00:58:16.000 Thank you.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - October 20, 2025

Dr. James Hankins - The Golden Thread： A History of the Western Tradition (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_900)

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