TRIGGERnometry - The Rise and Fall of Western Civilisation- Professor James Hankins

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00:00:49.320 After four decades of teaching at Harvard,

00:00:51.880 you decided to leave.

00:00:53.300 I was banging my head against the wall

00:00:55.400 for years and years and years,

00:00:57.400 trying to get the university to go on

00:00:59.660 supporting the teaching of Western civilization and we have a treasury of

00:01:04.520 Western civilization that has been preserved through the golden thread of

00:01:08.720 tradition over 2,500 years. It's a story of rise and fall. It's a story of virtue

00:01:16.940 followed by achievement followed by corruption. It's a story of collapse and

00:01:22.940 renaissance. It's a story of corruption and reform. That's what real human

00:01:28.460 history is right. We have to keep it going. It's up to us.

00:01:58.460 Professor James Hankins, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:02:01.440 Thank you for inviting me.

00:02:02.440 Oh, it's a great pleasure to have you.

00:02:03.940 We want to talk about this beautiful book you co-wrote about the history of Western

00:02:07.600 civilization, two volumes, actually.

00:02:09.820 I have both at home.

00:02:11.720 But first of all, I would love to hear a little bit more about you and your background.

00:02:16.340 And of course, there was a pivotal moment where after four decades of teaching at Harvard,

00:02:20.740 you decided to leave, which I imagine is a very difficult decision for someone with tenure

00:02:25.940 at such a prestigious university and such a long history to do, but you did it because you felt

00:02:32.780 that the university was no longer doing the thing that it was supposed to do in your field. Is that

00:02:36.780 right? That's exactly right. I actually decided to retire in 2020, the year of George Floyd,

00:02:44.360 the year of COVID, and I just didn't want to do it anymore because they created such a terrible

00:02:50.340 atmosphere. And they wanted the professors to lecture with masks on, which I refused to do.

00:02:56.920 And I took advantage of the power of the glass of water. Because, you know, when you went,

00:03:01.520 you were wearing a mask during the COVID era, you were allowed to take the mask off when you

00:03:08.740 went to a restaurant and you were served a glass of water. So when I lectured, I brought a glass

00:03:13.220 of water with me and I took the mask off and drank some water and then lectured. Then no one died.

00:03:21.260 Shocking, really.

00:03:22.180 Shocking.

00:03:22.760 But I didn't want to go on doing that.

00:03:24.200 And I decided I would retire.

00:03:25.840 And I got into a retirement rhythm.

00:03:30.620 But the other real reason I was retiring is because I was banging my head against the wall for years and years and years,

00:03:38.720 trying to get the university to go on supporting the teaching of Western civilization,

00:03:45.300 which had been a mainstay of the university from its very beginning.

00:03:49.260 We always taught Greeks and Romans and medieval Christendom and European history, but my department went global in the 1990s, and they basically took the new positions out of the height of Western Civ topics.

00:04:08.960 we last hired someone to teach Western Civ European history in 2008. We lost eight historians after

00:04:18.880 that date. So it was evident to me that someone had made a decision to zero out Western Civ,

00:04:26.800 and certainly to zero out positions that were only concentrated in Western Civ. So you could

00:04:33.520 teach the French empire and all its evils in the 19th century, but you couldn't teach the French 0.89

00:04:39.860 revolution. You couldn't teach the French monarchy. In England, you could teach the British 0.55

00:04:45.020 empire, but you weren't going to teach Magna Carta. You weren't going to teach the Reformation,

00:04:49.980 the English Civil War, you know, all the things that used to be taught as a matter of course.

00:04:54.940 So I was very upset and discouraged, frankly. I just didn't want to go year after year trying to

00:05:01.480 get our topics covered by other professors. So I thought I was going to retire. I'm going to go to

00:05:08.260 Italy, have a good time, live on the winnings. And then later I got an offer from the Hamilton

00:05:13.920 School of Classical and Civic Education, which is a school founded by basically Governor DeSantis

00:05:21.540 and the Florida State Legislature. And it was a great decision for me to join up with them.

00:05:27.820 I'm officially going to be there in August.

00:05:32.000 So I will get to teach the Western Civilization there.

00:05:35.180 We're going to start a program in Western Civilization, an MA.

00:05:38.880 And it's one of these new institutions where you can do things.

00:05:44.480 At Harvard, if I wanted to start an MA in Western Civ,

00:05:48.440 it would be five years of committee work followed by no.

00:05:53.120 At this place, I went in with my buddy Alan Gelso,

00:05:56.200 who wrote this book.

00:05:57.600 We had a two-page summary of what we wanted to do.

00:06:00.120 We talked to Director Kennedy for about 20 minutes.

00:06:03.000 They said, fine, I'll call the president.

00:06:05.160 So we're starting an MA in Western Civ 2027.

00:06:09.060 That being the case, it seems to me you're very well placed to answer the question that

00:06:13.220 Francis and I love asking on the show.

00:06:14.960 First of all, what is civilization?

00:06:17.740 And then the follow-up to that is what is Western civilization and how does it make

00:06:21.580 that different from others?

00:06:22.960 well i think civilization is a uh you know the western the golden thread is the story of four

00:06:32.840 civilizations that are connected by a thread of tradition that's why we call it the western

00:06:36.960 tradition i believe david butterfield made the same point uh in a recent uh interview with you

00:06:43.120 and i said he's taking that from my book he's he's a friend he's a good guy um he's a brilliant

00:06:48.920 guy in his own right. So he may have come up with it by himself.

00:06:53.100 It's possible.

00:06:53.680 You seem skeptical.

00:06:54.820 It's possible. No, he's a friend. He's reviewed the book, actually. But it's a civilization. I

00:07:03.620 think you can look at it as a treasury, as a collection of great achievements. And there can

00:07:11.500 be histories, there can be poetry, philosophy, art, literature. And we have a treasury of Western

00:07:17.580 civilization that has been preserved through tradition, through the golden thread of tradition

00:07:23.240 over 2,500 years. And people have always felt that that stuff is too valuable to let go.

00:07:31.840 Somebody loved it. Somebody said, I want my children to learn this. I want my country to

00:07:37.160 remember these things. They're valuable lessons. So, there's that sort of civilization,

00:07:42.920 civilization, a deposit of great achievement, human achievements. But there's also civilization

00:07:50.420 in the sense of civilizing as a process, as something that happens to you as you get older

00:07:58.040 and you get more educated, right? So, you start in the family. Your family teaches you to

00:08:03.300 treat your brothers and sisters well, respect your parents, respect your elders. Ideally,

00:08:08.860 it doesn't always happen, obviously, to learn how to get out along with neighbors, introduces you

00:08:14.200 maybe to a school or a church where you learn social skills. But at a certain point, you need

00:08:20.120 to mature beyond that. And that means learning how to be a civilized person, learning good manners,

00:08:29.860 but also learning the right things to say and to be enough educated so that you can interact with

00:08:38.680 people at a very high level. So you learn high level communication skills. It's not simply being

00:08:46.120 able to order your meal over Uber Eats. You need to be able to understand how, this is something

00:08:57.000 that strikes me as a real mistake of modern humanistic studies. It's so important to

00:09:04.860 communicate in our world. It's so important to communicate at a very high level. I heard

00:09:11.560 recently someone saying that the language of international scholarship is pidgin English,

00:09:17.640 right? But if you are involved in a tradition, the Greeks had this, the Romans had this,

00:09:24.380 and all the modern European nations had this idea of communication at a very high level,

00:09:28.540 being able to communicate very subtle feelings and intuitions and poetic insights and sublimity

00:09:34.800 all these levels of communication are developed by a civilization. So that's part of educating you

00:09:42.620 to be not just a citizen, but a member of society where you interact with people at a most very

00:09:51.020 profound and subtle level. And then you're able to understand music, right? It's not automatic

00:09:59.980 that people will understand classical music.

00:10:03.400 My wife is from Thailand,

00:10:04.700 doesn't really like classical music very much

00:10:06.900 because she wasn't brought up to understand it.

00:10:09.380 And when I go to China and I listen to Chinese opera,

00:10:13.380 my first instinct is to run screaming from the room.

00:10:17.300 It's an acquired taste.

00:10:19.400 So in order to acquire a taste for classical music

00:10:22.960 or for classical jazz, which I like a lot,

00:10:26.360 you have to be brought up.

00:10:27.580 You have to be educated in that.

00:10:29.340 You have to have people who communicate their love of something to you, teachers or enthusiasts.

00:10:36.460 So, if you want to be able to take advantage of the treasury of civilization, if you want

00:10:42.500 to understand Michelangelo or Beethoven or, you know, medieval drama or something like

00:10:51.640 that, or Dante, I mean, Dante is somebody who requires an education in himself.

00:10:56.220 that is uh that is the civilizing process that is enabling you to take advantage of the riches of

00:11:04.140 civilization and to communicate at a very high level and to participate ultimately if you're

00:11:09.980 being well taught the first thing that happens at least to an ambitious young person is going to be

00:11:15.680 i want to do that too you know man sees michelangelo man says either that's hopeless i'll

00:11:24.320 never be that good, or the person says, I want to be as good as I can be, that's amazing, I want to

00:11:29.720 do that too, right? So, civilization's not just invigilating over the past, it's not just, you

00:11:36.240 know, bowing down before precedent or, you know, pastiche of putting together an element, it's

00:11:43.620 inspiration. It feeds the desire to create and to pass down and to bring your most

00:11:54.000 subtle and your most brilliant and your most profound feelings in different forms, art,

00:12:01.960 music, literature, what have you. So, that's what I think civilization is. A very long answer.

00:12:07.920 It's almost like it's a living thing that reproduces itself in an ideal world.

00:12:12.100 Yes.

00:12:12.620 And what I take it stopped happening at Harvard and across academia, actually,

00:12:17.400 is that instead of teaching the next generation in that duty of passing down and reproducing

00:12:25.160 civilization, instead there was a focus on tearing apart, destroying, undermining,

00:12:32.400 critiquing, deconstructing, you might say. Yes, I think that's very true. And

00:12:37.480 it began, of course, well, we won't talk about art since that will be a very complicated

00:12:45.500 discussion, but we just talk about the hostility to the West that's come up in the last 40, 50,

00:12:52.040 60 years. That has come out of the multiculturalism and the post-colonial movement where the West is

00:12:59.520 the enemy and all the sufferings of the world are explained because of Western imperialism

00:13:06.000 or colonialism or what have you. And we have this very unbalanced story of what the West is and has

00:13:13.040 been. And it's usually not properly contextualized. It's not properly compared with the achievements

00:13:22.180 of other civilizations. That's how it gets politicized, right? That people have a political

00:13:28.000 goal in their scholarship, which is to show that their civilization is as good as the West,

00:13:34.860 and the West isn't very good at all. There's this kind of hostility to the West,

00:13:41.820 built into global history and to post-colonial history. So that has been highly destructive.

00:13:49.460 And one of the things I'm trying to do with this book is to give a little balance. Yes,

00:13:55.220 we had slavery. No, we were not the worst slave society in history. The Romans were

00:14:00.620 probably the worst slave society of antiquity, but the slave societies of Islam were much worse 1.00

00:14:09.320 in many ways. And, you know, all of the things that the West is blamed for, violence, militarism, 0.99

00:14:16.300 yes, there's an element of truth to that, but there's also people who want to subordinate

00:14:21.320 militarism, military virtue to good purposes, defense of your country, and defense of your

00:14:30.980 people and your goods and so forth. So, it's very simplistic thinking that is behind a lot

00:14:39.060 of the criticisms of the West. So we're trying to show that. And the other thing that's in the book,

00:14:44.040 which isn't quite so obvious, is I'm very interested in Chinese history. I've been

00:14:49.320 studying Chinese history for a long time. And I go to China quite often. And I've taught Chinese

00:14:56.440 students over there who are very interested in the comparison between Western Chinese. And I

00:15:00.880 have great respect for Chinese civilization. But I've really learned a lot about the West

00:15:05.920 from studying China. So, I have in the book, there's a lot of subtle comparisons and maybe

00:15:13.440 not so subtle comparisons with China. Not all of them to the Western West's favor, mind you, but

00:15:19.380 I think that we need more comparative study. So, my current idea is, and we're trying to

00:15:28.480 promote this idea in various contexts in Hamilton School and other places,

00:15:33.860 is that you should learn world history.

00:15:37.080 You should learn comparative history,

00:15:39.220 but you should learn Western history first.

00:15:42.140 You should learn your national history

00:15:44.340 before Western history,

00:15:45.860 and then learn world history.

00:15:47.300 It should be a ladder.

00:15:49.260 Right.

00:15:49.760 You shouldn't just start off with world history

00:15:52.160 and then use that as a whipping tool

00:15:55.640 to show that it's better or worse

00:15:57.940 or has suffered from Western attention.

00:15:59.880 That's a highly politicized version.

00:16:01.980 Well, can I disagree with you there?

00:16:03.260 because you're the expert and I'm not, but I would argue... I will crush you, by the way. 0.84

00:16:08.200 Yeah, please. Our audience will enjoy that very much, me getting crushed. I would argue the 0.97

00:16:15.000 context of global history is incredibly important. And if actually it was taught accurately and

00:16:20.040 properly, it would only serve to emphasize the uniqueness and special nature of Western

00:16:25.900 civilization. The problem I would put to you is we're not taught global history accurately.

00:16:31.920 and instead we're simply taught that global history

00:16:36.480 and other people are good and we are bad.

00:16:38.720 I think that's where the problem is, isn't it?

00:16:41.360 Well, I can't crush you if you agree with me.

00:16:43.340 Yeah.

00:16:45.960 Yes, I agree.

00:16:47.780 But, you know, I have three nephews who teach in secondary school

00:16:51.240 and one of them teaches global history in the sixth grade, right?

00:16:56.200 They haven't had any U.S. history or little stories they have.

00:17:01.140 They haven't had any Western history.

00:17:03.520 So day one, they learn about textiles in Central Asia.

00:17:09.100 And day two, they learn about weaving in India.

00:17:12.120 Okay, but that's not...

00:17:12.800 Day three, they learn about, you know, Roman toga.

00:17:16.040 And that's world history.

00:17:17.600 That's not learning much.

00:17:19.160 No, but that's not...

00:17:20.140 What I mean by global history is like,

00:17:22.560 let's say we're looking at the issue of slavery,

00:17:25.080 which is obviously highly topical, etc.

00:17:27.800 Okay, let's look at where does slavery first appear.

00:17:30.780 which societies practice it, which empires practice it, and in what ways,

00:17:36.320 where, you know, who captures the slaves, and how do people become enslaved. These are all

00:17:42.220 important contextual items to map out the full picture of this issue. And then you eventually,

00:17:47.760 chronologically, arrive at the West's history of slavery. And by this point, you are armed

00:17:52.760 with the understanding that this was a human thing that humans have always done. This is how,

00:17:57.480 you know, European powers did it. Here's why they ended it, unlike pretty much everybody else. 0.55

00:18:03.160 And then that world history of that issue gives you a rounded understanding of slavery. And that

00:18:09.840 the same could be applied to empire, to war, to all sorts of other things. And that context,

00:18:16.560 I would argue, is how you give people a rounded understanding of our history in the context of

00:18:21.920 human history. Yeah. Well, then you're teaching topical history. You're teaching a course. And

00:18:27.000 I think that would be a great university course.

00:18:28.920 I wish there were people who could teach it fairly that way.

00:18:33.420 But you're not teaching the narrative.

00:18:35.860 So in history, we always say there's diachronic versus synchronic.

00:18:39.460 So diachronic is the history in chronological order,

00:18:43.380 and synchronic is where you tell a comparative story.

00:18:46.340 And I've taught comparative history, and I agree entirely.

00:18:48.880 I taught comparative history with a Chinese historian of meritocracy,

00:18:54.000 Chinese versus Western meritocracy.

00:18:56.140 And you're right, absolutely illuminating.

00:18:58.480 You get a much better sense of actually how much better the Chinese were doing meritocracy than we were in the West for a long time.

00:19:07.420 So that came out in Chinese favor.

00:19:09.980 But what we're trying to do in the book, what we think is really primary is tell the story.

00:19:16.300 It's very hard to tell a story over 2,500 years.

00:19:20.180 And that's sort of what I'm proudest of in this book.

00:19:22.420 Not a single reviewer has mentioned this so far, but, you know, I'm trying to counteract the progressive narrative of an inevitable march towards utopia powered by the forces of history.

00:19:36.640 and, you know, the past is corrupt and it's feudalism and it's slavery and it's all the

00:19:44.320 bad things, it's all the Western things. And getting away from the West and becoming

00:19:48.000 more global, more international, more scientific is the way into the future. That's a beautiful

00:19:54.400 story. It's a nice fairy tale. It's science fiction, but it's not history. And the real

00:20:01.640 history of the world, not just the Western civilization, is not a history of inevitable

00:20:06.560 climbing towards an illimitable future powered by science and progressivism and so forth.

00:20:14.000 It's a story of rise and fall. It's a story of virtue followed by achievement followed by

00:20:22.200 corruption. It's a story of collapse and renaissance. It's a story of corruption and

00:20:29.540 reform. That's what real human history is like, and it doesn't fit the progressive model at all.

00:20:37.600 So, and this is something else we're trying to do in this book, is to say, yes, the West has a very

00:20:44.600 long history. It has a very checkered history. It has done some horrible things, especially when we

00:20:51.260 took over the New World. There were some really horrible things that went on, and for very bad

00:20:57.360 reasons. There were some idealists behind the conquest of the New World by Spain, but a lot of

00:21:04.040 it was just simply greed. Okay. But that was overcome, in a sense. When the conquistadores

00:21:11.100 started to oppress the native peoples of Central and South America, someone stopped them, and 0.65

00:21:19.200 that was the Catholic Church and the religious orders. They were not able to go full barbarian

00:21:25.920 on the peoples of the New World. 0.92

00:21:30.460 So there's light and shade.

00:21:33.380 And what we're trying to do is to explain

00:21:35.360 that it is possible to become corrupt

00:21:38.320 and to fall apart and to get fractionalized

00:21:40.780 and to get tyrannized.

00:21:42.140 That has happened many times to us in the past.

00:21:45.100 But it's also possible to stop it.

00:21:47.660 And we have stopped it.

00:21:48.900 And that's what we should be doing now.

00:21:50.840 We should be having a renaissance.

00:21:52.120 We should be having reforms.

00:21:53.540 We should be fighting tyranny,

00:21:54.940 whether it comes from Silicon Valley or from governments, right?

00:22:00.020 So that's my main argument against your synchronic idea,

00:22:07.020 which I agree would be a great college course,

00:22:09.220 is that that's not what we should be doing

00:22:10.940 at the basic level of teaching Western Civ.

00:22:14.760 James, the danger that comes when we're not teaching our history

00:22:19.220 is that if you don't teach the history of a country,

00:22:22.400 then people won't know who they are.

00:22:25.560 Yes, exactly. I mean, that's what's happened to young men, I think, around America and the

00:22:32.600 Western world, that they don't know who they are. They're told a story that they really don't like.

00:22:38.440 You know, they're told that they're oppressors, and they don't have anything in their heads to

00:22:42.960 stop the myths and lies they're being told. You know, you need to have something between your

00:22:50.280 ears if you're going to stop the people who are telling you lies. That's how you know you're being

00:22:54.480 told the lies. You have something between the ears. If you have no history and someone comes along and

00:23:00.200 says, U.S. history is a history of racism, what are you going to say? You're the professor. He's

00:23:06.260 the teacher. He's telling me history of the U.S. and history of racism. What do I know? What do I

00:23:11.520 have between my ears that's going to give me some resistance against that story? I entirely agree

00:23:16.760 with you, friends. I think this is a major problem for a cause of civilizational breakdown,

00:23:22.360 that people just don't know the past.

00:23:25.580 They don't know the great achievements of their country.

00:23:28.440 They're fed a lot of lies.

00:23:30.540 They have politicized history departments

00:23:33.740 and history programs and unions.

00:23:37.720 I don't want to attack unions,

00:23:39.680 but let's say public education,

00:23:41.780 which is heavily politicized by education schools.

00:23:44.880 And they're not given the means to really resist that.

00:23:48.600 I had a friend recently from Cambridge who had a 14-year-old daughter.

00:23:55.380 She loved English already because of her English education.

00:23:59.280 She came to Boston.

00:24:00.480 She wanted to study English literature in high school.

00:24:03.560 There wasn't a single major private school in Boston that taught any English literature before the year 2000.

00:24:14.040 Wow.

00:24:14.600 And the reason was they didn't want to infect the minds of the young with the colonialism that's implicit in the thought of Jane Austen or Christianity or some other thing that was considered bad from the Western past.

00:24:29.000 They wanted to teach young adult novels between 2000 and current date that they considered ideologically sound.

00:24:37.340 Okay, so my friend, who's a professor at Harvard, ended up taking his kid out to a Benedictine school an hour away from Cambridge, just so he could keep his kid out of this stuff.

00:24:52.720 This is the kind of thing that I think is so poisonous.

00:24:56.780 This is one of the reasons I got involved with the classical education movement, is I saw people who really loved our past and who wanted to teach it.

00:25:04.420 They had learned something as parents. They had learned something as students. They wanted to keep it going, and they saw they couldn't do it in the public schools, at least not all public schools. There are lots of good public schools, but especially in sort of wealthy suburban areas, there are lots of very highly performing, good, sound public schools.

00:25:25.740 but in many places they're not. And that's how this classical school movement got started,

00:25:32.400 by people who love our Western past, love our American past, and they want to make sure it's

00:25:37.900 not poisoned by politics. You read the news and think you're informed. You're actually just

00:25:44.560 selectively informed. Modern media doesn't just report the news, it quietly decides which stories

00:25:49.980 you never even hear about. Your blind spots are an accident, they're someone else's decisions.

00:25:55.060 That's why I use Ground News.

00:25:57.020 Every day, they gather thousands of stories

00:25:59.120 from across the political spectrum,

00:26:00.980 compare how different outlets are covering the same story

00:26:03.580 side by side, and contextualize it,

00:26:06.380 including specific differences

00:26:07.820 in how each side is reporting it.

00:26:10.060 That's how you see what whole audiences

00:26:11.820 are not being told.

00:26:13.020 My favorite feature is their blind spot feed.

00:26:15.400 Every day, it flags upwards of 20 stories

00:26:18.040 that are being ignored by either the left or the right.

00:26:20.480 Let's look at some examples.

00:26:21.940 Follow along at ground.news slash trigonometry.

00:26:24.640 Take this story. A Pew Research survey found that 56% of Americans now support banning social media

00:26:31.020 for anyone under 16, with a majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats behind it. Genuine

00:26:37.900 bipartisan agreement is rare enough to be newsworthy on its own. And yet, coverage came

00:26:42.700 almost entirely from the right. The left barely touched on it. On the other hand, look at this.

00:26:47.680 An AP poll found that 66% of Americans now say democracy is central to what it means to be

00:26:53.200 American, down from 80% five years ago. That is a serious story about how the country sees itself,

00:27:00.000 especially on its 250th anniversary. And it got three times more coverage from the left than it

00:27:05.000 did from the right. Ground News puts all of this in one place. Headline comparisons, bias breakdowns,

00:27:11.340 ownership insights, and context so you can actually understand what's going on, not just react to what

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00:27:22.180 episode. Get 40% off their vantage plan, the same one that we use, and stop being managed by the

00:27:27.720 media. In my more conspiratorial moments, James, I see this as a process of demoralization.

00:27:34.520 Do you think that's hyperbolic, or do you think that's actually a pretty fair assessment?

00:27:40.960 Yes. Well, there's demoralization in the sense of interpreting events and natural, well,

00:27:49.500 just to say events and things like laws and legal systems as purely social science phenomenon that

00:27:56.260 are to be understood outside any kind of context of value. And I think that's the way history is

00:28:03.200 largely taught today. In fact, people, the way I was taught when I was studying history is that

00:28:08.680 it's bad to import your moral judgments, right? And you shouldn't write history that way. You

00:28:14.320 should be somewhere above the moon, you know? And you're observing from the moon, you have no

00:28:19.660 attachments, you have no loyalties, you have no things that you think are more important than

00:28:23.600 other things. You're driven by fashion. We won't get into that. But yes, I think that that's a

00:28:30.060 real problem. And I'm afraid that a lot of what I've written in the recent past has been regarded

00:28:36.720 as unprofessional by people because I take sides. I think that some things are good and some things

00:28:42.220 are bad, and some things are morally profitable, and some things are evil. You know, the Western

00:28:48.460 tradition, another metaphor I like for it is a garden, right? It's a garden where we're trying

00:28:54.380 to grow beautiful things, and we have to follow the laws of nature in order to do that. But there

00:29:01.080 are also lots of weeds and parasites and things that get into the garden, and they have to be

00:29:05.640 killed. So, if you have a demoralizing civilization, it's one that's not making any

00:29:13.460 distinction between the parasites and the diseases and the fertilizer and the water.

00:29:20.680 That's the way I would put it. Maybe it's a stretch of illustration. But you have to tend

00:29:29.380 the garden. When you tend the garden, you have to understand what nature wants. You have to

00:29:33.220 which is natural moral principles, which I think everybody has. We won't go into the whole

00:29:39.560 metaphysics of natural law, please, because I'm not very good at that. But I do think that people

00:29:43.620 have natural moral understandings. And you can't be constantly telling people that their natural

00:29:50.160 moral understandings are not scientific. That there are people over in lower Borneo who have

00:30:01.100 different impressions about, you know, polygamy or something. And therefore, you know, there used

00:30:10.800 to be this reference word called the Encyclopedia of Ethics, where they went through all the world

00:30:18.740 ethical systems. And oddly enough, what they found is that most societies don't like stealing

00:30:27.420 or lying, and the more successful societies have been monogamous and not polygamous. 0.83

00:30:34.940 Don't tell that to the Mormons, but I think that's true.

00:30:38.700 That there are certain patterns in moral practice. These were observed by Aristotle,

00:30:43.580 you know, in the 4th century BC. That's how he built up his ethics, by taking a kind of empirical

00:30:51.340 view of what societies actually prefer, right? And I think that you're right that if you try to

00:30:59.340 see things through some kind of scientific lens where all moral principles are equal,

00:31:06.960 all societies are equal, all cultures are equal, you can't possibly give young people a sense of

00:31:16.440 moral direction in their lives. Well, we've talked about teaching the thing and how it's not taught

00:31:23.200 and whatever. Why don't we actually talk about Western civilization itself, or the Western

00:31:27.700 tradition, as I think you prefer to call it? What is the Western tradition? What is its journey?

00:31:33.320 Where does it come from? I was just asked this question about half an hour ago at the conference,

00:31:39.100 and not to mean you're unoriginal, but it's a very good question and needs to be asked.

00:31:43.520 The gentleman was asking me, why didn't I start with the Egyptians or the Babylonians,

00:31:48.820 you know, and why start with the Greeks?

00:31:51.200 And the answer is that we have a tradition which comes from language, and the languages

00:31:58.320 have been learned by later periods.

00:32:01.140 So we start with the Greeks.

00:32:02.740 And if you wanted to be civilized in the ancient world, you had to know Greek.

00:32:06.500 And the Romans, most cultured learned Greek, or they tried to translate Greek things into

00:32:12.020 Atom. And what we have from the past, which is what the book is about, are traditions. We have

00:32:19.060 traditions of philosophy that begin in the 6th century BC, and the same questions are still

00:32:24.940 being debated today. Not because there's no progress, but because they're meaningful questions.

00:32:30.860 We have artistic traditions. All of the genres of literature that we use today are all invented

00:32:36.480 by the Greeks. Naturalistic painting, naturalistic sculpture, science, most of the major scientific

00:32:47.120 principles are invented by the Greeks. You know, the ancient Egyptians had medicine. They have

00:32:53.680 books full of medicine millennia before the Greeks even come on the scene. But it's not scientific

00:33:00.100 medicine. It's medicine that's interwoven with religious beliefs and with the gods, and there's

00:33:07.160 some good remedies that can be found in that, but they didn't have a method, right? What Hippocrates

00:33:12.280 invents is the method. We're going to organize all the symptoms, we're going to describe diseases,

00:33:17.280 we're going to figure out the etiology of diseases, and we're going to find remedies.

00:33:21.740 And we're going to use only empirical evidence. We're not going to talk about what the gods

00:33:25.500 say, and we're not going to have that type of religious medicine.

00:33:30.660 So, and the same thing happens in mathematics.

00:33:32.940 There are other civilizations, early civilizations, the Babylonians who can calculate, the ancient

00:33:38.300 Chinese can calculate, they have all the acetrack multiply divide, they can do all that, but 0.80

00:33:45.440 they don't have proof. 1.00

00:33:46.780 They don't have mathematical proofs.

00:33:48.720 The Greeks invented mathematical proofs, which in a way is an outgrowth of the whole idea

00:33:54.400 of rationality.

00:33:55.500 And that's what comes from, I think, is the real contribution of ancient Greek democracy.

00:34:01.120 Because the ancient Greeks did not have a monarch.

00:34:04.720 There's a famous historian of science, G.E.R. Lloyd, who said that the Greeks did not have a monarch, so they made reason their monarch.

00:34:16.700 And that makes perfect sense in terms of Greek democracy.

00:34:19.840 Because the Greeks, in order to have a pluralistic society, which is not based on violence, you have to persuade people, right?

00:34:29.320 So the Greeks invent logic and rhetoric.

00:34:32.000 Logic, the art of accurate reasoning. 0.98

00:34:35.280 Rhetoric, the art of persuasive reasoning.

00:34:37.220 Because they had a society that demanded that they talk to each other and that they debate with each other and they persuade each other in order to do anything.

00:34:47.220 They couldn't take any decisions.

00:34:48.960 if there's more than one decision-maker, right?

00:34:51.940 In monarchy, the default setting of human society is monarchy, right?

00:34:58.380 There is no other society, and I know people will contest this,

00:35:02.060 they'll say the Phoenicians had this, but it's not true.

00:35:04.860 There's no other society that was ruled pluralistically.

00:35:08.180 I don't mean necessarily democratically, but ruled by, let's say,

00:35:11.980 a small class of the wealthy or a small class of the militarily powerful

00:35:17.580 like the Spartans. And those people had to come up with some type of way of settling quarrels and

00:35:24.460 questions. And that's where rationality really comes from, modern Western style of rationality,

00:35:29.480 which is to make arguments, to advance proof, to allow disagreement so the gaps in your argument

00:35:36.340 can be exposed, and to identify fallacies. All this is systematized by Aristotle. But he was

00:35:43.480 doing it on the basis of the Greek love of arguments.

00:35:48.640 And so this is in contrast with prior human history, which is essentially about a single

00:35:56.480 authority predicated on power.

00:35:58.960 Is that the contrast you're painting?

00:36:01.600 Is that too crude? 0.98

00:36:02.960 Destroy me now or whatever, or crush me, whatever it was. 0.97

00:36:05.700 I'm not really in that business.

00:36:08.100 Well, I think that the earliest societies were based simply on power and on maybe manipulation of religious fear, going back to the earliest records we have in 7 million B.C.

00:36:26.020 But after the axial period, the period of Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, the Jewish prophets, there is an idea that power has to justify itself in terms of some natural principle that's available to everyone.

00:36:47.160 So you have this kind of tripartite structure where you have the moral principle, the source of moral principle, which is above human beings.

00:36:57.160 It's the logos. It's the Dharma. It's the Tao, right?

00:37:02.900 And then you have human beings who feel they have authority, which has to orient itself towards the Tao.

00:37:12.340 And then you have human beings who are trying to improve themselves morally.

00:37:16.660 And those things work together.

00:37:18.740 People who become dissatisfied with their own moral nature.

00:37:24.400 The famous example is Ashoka, right?

00:37:26.260 The founder of Buddhist kingship in India.

00:37:30.360 So he's a man who spent the earlier part of his life 0.99

00:37:32.820 slaughtering large numbers of people, millions of people.

00:37:36.020 And at a certain point, he had a conversion.

00:37:37.880 He just got self-disgust.

00:37:39.880 He couldn't bear himself anymore.

00:37:41.620 He felt the need to make restitution in some way.

00:37:44.620 He found the message of the Buddha, and he decided to create a Buddhist civilization.

00:37:49.720 So, I think the West did not invent that, right?

00:37:52.880 And I think that's a universal human, part of the story of human development as a whole.

00:37:58.460 What the West really invents, I think, is the idea that the authority which is going to establish as law and custom,

00:38:13.280 but more importantly as law, under the authority of the Tao, that comes from human beings

00:38:19.840 in the mass, or at least a large number of human beings. There's something in human nature which

00:38:26.660 in itself authorizes, has the power to authorize a government. Maybe this is a little bit too

00:38:37.140 abstract. I'm not even sure I'm answering your question now.

00:38:40.680 A little. I guess what I'm asking is, you were pointing out that the Greeks come up with a particular framing of power and how it should be administered, and I was curious about what makes that special and differentiates that from what other people had done previously and what other people were doing around the world at that same time.

00:39:03.860 Yes, well, I think the idea of citizenship is key, that the Greeks thought of their societies as kind of a club, a membership.

00:39:14.980 And you had to contribute, and then as a result of your contributions, you received political power.

00:39:22.540 And the fundamental one in Greek society was fighting in the phalanx, right?

00:39:27.140 that you're a male citizen, old enough to defend the city, you should be able to have power, right? 0.65

00:39:36.020 If you're even of a lower class, you might be a rower in the fleet. If you're rowing in the 0.81

00:39:44.960 fleet, even so, even if you're a very poor person, you need to be able to have a voice in the

00:39:50.480 councils of government. And the reason is very simple. If you're in the assembly

00:39:55.480 and you vote for war. Two weeks later, you're standing in a line with 54 pounds of bronze

00:40:02.680 armor holding a shield and a spear, and you're covering the guy next to you, and you depend

00:40:09.080 on each other. And it's a very egalitarian formation, the phalanx, because there are no

00:40:15.900 heroes in the phalanx. Everybody marches together, and sometimes they run together

00:40:19.520 towards the enemy. So, that is, I think, a tremendous force for egalitarianism

00:40:24.720 in Greek society, but also for the idea that people need a voice. The state will,

00:40:31.640 this polis, the state will not be well defended unless people feel that they have a stake in the

00:40:38.660 system in some way. I mean, it's so funny you talk about it because I often think that many

00:40:43.180 of the problems of the modern time, and I'm not original in this thought either,

00:40:46.260 are caused by the fact that people are able to vote on things that they don't answer for

00:40:52.860 and have no consequences of. And so, the Greeks come up with this idea that because you offer a

00:41:00.100 service to the city, the city owes you an opportunity to express your wishes and be

00:41:06.580 heard about what the city should therefore do. So, it's a kind of two-way accountability system,

00:41:11.880 almost. That's for the Greeks. The Roman system is quite different. 0.97

00:41:15.760 How is it different?

00:41:17.160 So the Romans have a different system. 0.99

00:41:19.860 They start out exactly like the Greeks. 0.99

00:41:22.860 You're in the army, you pay taxes, 1.00

00:41:26.100 you show up at the assembly,

00:41:27.660 you have the right to vote.

00:41:29.580 They have a slightly different system

00:41:31.640 in that they give,

00:41:33.420 this is what differs,

00:41:34.580 how a republic differs from a democracy.

00:41:37.860 They give preponderant power,

00:41:39.500 decision-making power,

00:41:40.680 to the experienced generals,

00:41:47.220 the members of the Senate

00:41:48.920 who come, in many cases, from old families.

00:41:51.360 They have more wealth.

00:41:52.720 They have more stake in the system

00:41:54.060 just in economic terms.

00:41:55.940 So they get more decision-making power,

00:41:58.140 which is not true of Greek democracy.

00:42:00.660 But everyone ultimately gets a veto

00:42:02.720 in the form of an assembly.

00:42:04.680 However, the people are kept rather weak as a group.

00:42:08.360 and but what the romans are very good at is recognizing merit you know they did away with

00:42:15.040 the idea that political power should belong to particular families of old residents that's a

00:42:21.780 typical barbarian idea and they decided that if you contribute to the state get more power 0.85

00:42:27.580 if you um and you get more responsibility the more more you spend uh for armor and for

00:42:35.440 weapons and for, this is the so-called Serbian constitution, which was passed under King

00:42:42.500 Servius Tullus. If you have more stake in the system, you have more experience, you've been

00:42:50.140 a general maybe, or been fought in the army, and you've held office, then you deserve to have more

00:42:56.500 weight than the other people. So, Roman Senate consists of former magistrates, which is what we

00:43:02.560 should do in the U.S. Instead of, you know, if you're a billionaire, you can't buy yourself a

00:43:07.100 sentence. It's former magistrates. It's people who have governing and military experience.

00:43:15.900 And the people are protected under law. So, everyone has equality under law,

00:43:23.060 in principle, of course, to many violations in reality, as you would expect. But in principle,

00:43:27.740 The people have equality under the law, but power in the state is proportioned to genitas, dignity.

00:43:37.140 And dignity in the Roman sense means rank, that you enjoy rank because of your contribution to society.

00:43:45.280 You've been a magistrate, you've been a soldier, officer, and so forth.

00:43:49.080 So that's different from the democratic system.

00:43:52.840 and it's the republican system that has really inspired most of the pluralistic governments in

00:43:58.080 the west down to the founders of the american constitution who are founding a republic

00:44:02.600 and not a democracy i just wanted to make that point and so um you were now i've lost the thread

00:44:08.720 again well we were just talking about the greek and roman systems and how they administered power

00:44:13.320 in contrast with purely who is strongest whose tribe is the most powerful etc now that's the

00:44:20.400 barbarian system, which is now being advocated by many people. The head man who runs the tribe

00:44:27.820 has his great generals or heads of the great clans, and he takes all the loot from the battle

00:44:37.680 and distributes it, and he gets power from that. He gets support from the people to whom he

00:44:43.400 distributes, and then all the heads of the clan. It's the spoil system, as we say in America.

00:44:49.680 It's the ethnic spoil system, if you will, or the tribal spoil system.

00:44:53.280 So the Romans started out with something like that.

00:44:56.080 They had a king and they had something like a spoil system.

00:45:00.360 It was never perfectly barbarian among the Romans.

00:45:03.420 But eventually they got the system of recognizing merit.

00:45:07.800 And also the idea of legal equality is tremendously important. 0.95

00:45:12.780 The Greeks were very bad at giving anything to people outside their polis. 0.89

00:45:18.940 They wanted to make a strong distinction between their state and everybody else. 0.62

00:45:24.000 And the Romans were very good at giving citizenship to people who were helping the Roman cause.

00:45:33.660 And it goes right back to Romulus and Remus, or it goes right back to the foundation of the Roman

00:45:37.920 kingdom, the kingship. Before they had the Roman Republic, they had a Roman kingship.

00:45:44.640 That you are defended by, your rights are defended only so far as, you know, I'm not getting very confused.

00:45:59.640 I'll have to scroll on to this.

00:46:01.260 Okay, on down.

00:46:01.980 So the Roman idea that everyone should be protected by the law goes back to the period

00:46:11.940 of extreme violence in Rome at the end of the 2nd century BC and the 1st century when

00:46:18.240 they had four decades of civil war.

00:46:20.700 And people saw powerful generals backed by armies seizing the property and even exile

00:46:29.200 and seaving the property of political enemies.

00:46:35.540 So the idea of rule by law is that the law is above politics.

00:46:40.500 That's the fundamental idea, that no matter what happens,

00:46:43.920 the law will protect you against anyone who tries to take away your property

00:46:49.120 just on sheer power.

00:46:51.840 And this is, I think, articulated best by Cicero in the first century,

00:46:56.060 but it goes back a century earlier.

00:46:58.420 It's a very powerful idea, and it's fundamentally a protection of property,

00:47:04.340 protection of citizen rights against powerful individuals.

00:47:08.300 But ultimately, the Romans, as I said, were very good at sharing legal equality with other groups.

00:47:15.640 First, they shared it with their allies in the area around Rome.

00:47:19.020 Then they shared it with the entire Italian peninsula.

00:47:24.060 Everyone got citizenship towards the end of the second century BC.

00:47:27.700 and the social wars. And ultimately in 212 AD, the entire population of the Roman Empire were

00:47:34.420 considered citizens protected by Roman law. That's really, I think, the fundamental glory of the Roman

00:47:41.300 Empire is the idea of protection of all citizens by law and recourse to a magistrate in cases where

00:47:49.660 you're not protected by law. And that's an ideal. It's an ideal that was often respected and sometimes

00:47:57.260 not respected. And it's unfair to say, look at this case, look at that case where the system

00:48:02.040 didn't work. But it's a tremendous idea, which is very powerful in Western history down to the

00:48:08.680 present day. And the idea that there are some citizens who have more power than others in the

00:48:14.640 legal system, that some people are, you know, legal inequality by procedural means and lawfare

00:48:21.660 and all this kind of thing we have today is a huge violation of the Western tradition of equality

00:48:26.380 under the law, and the law is no respecter of persons. Hope I'm not messing things up.

00:48:34.500 I'm trying not to pound on the table. No, it's good. Shows passion. It's great.

00:48:39.460 James, there is this idea, and shoot it down if you believe it's completely false,

00:48:44.900 but I'd be very interested to hear your opinion on it, that the Greeks were the true innovators.

00:48:49.240 They were the ones who created the ideas. They were the ones who had all the, we talked about

00:48:55.500 rhetoric and logic and everything like this. The Romans weren't the innovators. They took the 0.92

00:48:59.740 ideas, perfected them, and then spread them throughout the global, well, the known world

00:49:05.320 as it was at the time. Is that unfair? If you own gold, you probably bought it for the same reason

00:49:11.340 I did. Because you looked at what central banks are doing to currencies and decided you wanted

00:49:16.440 something they can't print. Good reasoning. But here's the thing nobody talks about after you

00:49:20.980 make that decision. Your gold is just sitting there. It's not doing anything. You're paying

00:49:25.220 to store it you're paying to insure it and in the meantime it earns precisely nothing until now what

00:49:31.300 you're about to hear is not a normal gold advert today's sponsor is monetary metals they've figured

00:49:37.380 out something that once you hear it seems obvious but almost nobody in the gold world is doing it

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00:50:07.380 for it up to four percent annual yield paid in gold if you already own gold this is the logical

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00:50:20.120 See how your gold can stop costing you money and start earning you more gold. That's

00:50:24.700 monetary-metals.com slash trigonometry. The Romans weren't the innovators. They took the ideas, 0.99

00:50:31.580 perfected them, and then spread them throughout the global, well, the known world as it was at

00:50:37.200 the time. Is that unfair? Yes. That's your answer. I think I saw your video with David Butterfield.

00:50:48.440 He was saying if you put all the Greek achievements on one side, the Roman achievements on the other

00:50:52.740 side, the Greeks would just break the scale. I think that that is to privilege innovation over

00:51:01.580 development. And I think it's not necessarily the case that the best, the Greeks are undoubtedly 1.00

00:51:09.480 brilliant. You know, I accept most of David's argument. I think he's right that the Greeks

00:51:13.600 are incredibly brilliant. They're more brilliant than any other ethnic group you can possibly

00:51:18.840 imagine, with the possible exception of the Jews when it comes to law, although that's a

00:51:24.160 clearly separate discussion. And it's, to me, very remarkable that the most talkative peoples

00:51:34.040 of antiquity are the Jews and the Greeks, and the most disputatious peoples of antiquity. 0.97

00:51:38.920 Some things never change. 1.00

00:51:41.040 Some things never change, right? But I think it's true that the Greeks are tremendously 1.00

00:51:45.740 geniuses, tremendous geniuses in things like the arts, and the Romans never quite caught up with

00:51:51.740 them, with the exception of architecture, because the Romans had the advantage of cement.

00:51:58.460 At some time around the time of Augustus, they discovered cement, and it just raised the whole

00:52:07.120 possibilities of architecture tremendously. The Romans had the arch, of course, and

00:52:13.380 if you look at Roman architecture and you look at Greek architecture,

00:52:18.740 Greek architecture is pretty boring.

00:52:20.680 I mean, it's beautiful.

00:52:22.040 But to build a whole city from the three orders of Greek architecture

00:52:26.440 and to have columns and temple fronts and so forth, it's just boring. 0.89

00:52:33.220 I mean, Hitler liked it. 0.99

00:52:34.580 Yeah, as I said. 0.73

00:52:37.640 QED.

00:52:39.520 Yeah, so that's actually quite true that the more uniform,

00:52:43.280 you know, you see all these government buildings today 0.91

00:52:46.240 that looked like they were designed by perverted Greeks, essentially, Greeks, unclothed Greeks. 0.91

00:52:53.160 But the Romans had tremendous infertility of invention. Granted that many of the architects 0.90

00:52:58.140 were of Greek origin, but nevertheless, it occurred in Roman times. The Romans, of course,

00:53:04.100 were, I think, way in advance of the Greeks when it comes to law. And I know my friends who are in

00:53:10.740 history of law will argue with this and say, no, the Greeks invented everything and the Romans just

00:53:15.160 systematized, but it's not true. The Romans developed a system of adjusting the interests

00:53:23.560 of the individual citizen caught in a legal problem with the interest of the state and

00:53:31.100 legal reasoning. Legal reasoning is the Roman invention. You can read, there are books filled

00:53:38.620 with, well, there's small books filled with the stories of Greek cases. And we have, you know,

00:53:45.460 the Greek orators who are often defending legal cases, public law cases, which are property cases.

00:53:52.880 And there's lots of interesting reasoning. They're very clever. But the Romans had this way of

00:53:57.460 developing a case. And they really invented the whole, if you meet someone who really has a legal 0.85

00:54:04.020 mind. That person's a Roman. That's the surest way I can put it. And legal reasoning is different 0.98

00:54:09.260 from logical reasoning. As we all know, it's different from philosophical reasoning. It's

00:54:13.880 different from scientific reasoning. It's its own thing. It's different from historical reasoning,

00:54:17.560 which is also its own thing. And it means weighing interests. And this is why I'm not a lawyer,

00:54:24.080 because I can't describe it well. My mother wanted me to be a lawyer. It means an application

00:54:32.160 of practical wisdom to a case. It's a complex algorithm, a way of applying different law,

00:54:41.180 applying the law, adjusting it to the case, figuring out what the good of the individual

00:54:46.120 is and what the good of the state is. You see it every day being discussed if you follow any of

00:54:53.000 these legal debates in modern America, that lawyers just don't think like the rest of us.

00:54:58.420 But lawyers are thinking in a way that's immensely constructive, I think.

00:55:02.240 It's not all pedophagogy, right?

00:55:03.800 It's not all, you know, trying to get away with things, trying to get people off.

00:55:08.420 That's what we tend to think of as legal reasoning.

00:55:10.620 People are trying to get people off of trying to cheat people in a legal way.

00:55:15.600 But there is a high calling, a noble calling of the law, which the Romans really invented.

00:55:20.680 And they had a series of great jurists in the late second and third century who basically founded Roman law.

00:55:27.700 who systematized Roman legal thinking.

00:55:30.740 And the book in which preserves their thinking,

00:55:35.780 called The Digest of Roman Law,

00:55:38.300 it's a collection of legal opinions by Roman lawyers.

00:55:42.060 That book taught legal reasoning to the West.

00:55:45.200 And it used to be taught even in law schools today.

00:55:49.360 Fewer and fewer law schools teach it,

00:55:51.020 but there are still many law schools that teach Roman law

00:55:53.160 as a way of teaching legal reasoning. 0.98

00:55:56.500 So I think the Romans really should get credit for that. 0.53

00:55:59.640 They are continuators. 0.88

00:56:00.960 The Greeks were not very good at empire, not compared to the Romans. 0.93

00:56:08.480 The longest Greek empire might have lasted 300 years, something like that.

00:56:13.180 Some of the successes of Alexander lasted maybe 300 years.

00:56:17.520 But the Romans, they had a great military tradition.

00:56:20.240 This is something also that the Greeks were not good at.

00:56:22.820 The Greeks invented the phalanx.

00:56:24.440 They invented a military formation that could defeat any other civilization in Central Asia. 1.00

00:56:31.740 Egyptians, forget it. 0.99

00:56:32.980 The Greeks could beat them. 1.00

00:56:35.240 But the Romans could beat the Greeks. 1.00

00:56:36.940 That's fair enough. 0.78

00:56:37.540 So if it came to a battle, what you're saying is that the Romans would basically destroy the Greeks? 1.00

00:56:42.180 Well, they learned how to do it.

00:56:43.700 The Romans were a just amazing military nation.

00:56:48.260 They, first of all, really believed in military virtue.

00:56:51.660 But they beat every kind of army.

00:56:53.380 They could win phalanx armies because they had the Roman legion, which is superior to the phalanx.

00:56:58.860 But they also fought mercenary armies.

00:57:02.560 They fought irregular armies.

00:57:05.000 They fought on land.

00:57:06.040 They fought on sea. 0.86

00:57:06.820 Every possible situation you can think of, the Romans could beat you.

00:57:11.760 They had a tremendous system of supply.

00:57:15.760 They knew everything about making fortresses.

00:57:18.320 They had a military empire, which is, you know, just impregnable if they just had people to defend it.

00:57:26.180 You know, military logistics were a Roman feature.

00:57:30.860 Many armies couldn't stay in the field for very long because they were dependent on ravaging, right?

00:57:36.680 And the Romans had military supply.

00:57:38.720 They had uniform weaponry.

00:57:41.020 It was just an amazing military nation.

00:57:44.080 And there were high ideals behind it. 0.99

00:57:48.320 So, this is a level of military superiority that the Greeks could never master, and that's 0.74

00:57:55.340 really one of the main reasons for the success of the Romans.

00:57:59.280 Over 2,000 years, if you consider Roman history, traditional dates, 753 BC, but the actual

00:58:07.460 date's probably sometime in the 600s, down to the end of the fall of the Roman Empire

00:58:13.420 in 476 AD, the Western Roman Empire, okay, that's 1,000 years.

00:58:18.320 But then, if you consider that the East Roman Empire was the Roman Empire, a continuation of it, that goes on for another 1,000 years, right?

00:58:25.780 That goes down to 1453, the fall of Constantinople.

00:58:29.420 So, really, you're talking about an imperial system that lasts for two millennia.

00:58:34.700 There's no other empire that has lasted that long.

00:58:39.040 The Chinese, if you take all the Chinese dynasties together, you've got 2,000 years.

00:58:42.680 So, those are the most long-lived civilizations that we have.

00:58:46.580 And for good reason, because they had, you know, they had civilizational strengths that other, you know, lesser civilizations never, I say lesser in a sense, less long-lived civilizations never mastered.

00:59:01.140 And we've spoken about the Greeks, we've spoken about the Romans, we touched on the Holy Roman Empire.

00:59:05.940 The Greeks obviously gave us reason and logic, as you said, and the arts and theater and literature and all of that.

00:59:12.940 The Romans with the architecture, their knowledge of war.

00:59:16.200 right the law and then we've got the other component which is of course religion now

00:59:21.620 obviously the greeks and the romans were religious but when we talk about the west

00:59:25.300 immediately what we light upon is christianity so let's talk about the birth of christianity

00:59:31.960 how it was incorporated into the roman empire and then how it came to flourish right the way

00:59:36.580 through the west so we've done what have the romans ever done for us we've done what have

00:59:40.780 the greeks have ever done for us now we're doing what have the christians ever done for us

00:59:45.020 Absolutely, which I'm sure is being taught in Harvard at this point.

00:59:48.340 Yes, well, I have four more days till I retire,

00:59:51.880 and then it's not being taught at Harvard anymore.

00:59:55.340 I'm sorry to say.

00:59:56.900 All right, that's an exaggeration.

00:59:58.520 I'm taking too much.

00:59:59.300 But anyway, we're going from Athens to Rome to now Jerusalem.

01:00:03.080 Okay, good. 0.97

01:00:04.000 So, Christianity is a religion that worships a person executed by the Roman state.

01:00:16.520 It's a prophetic movement.

01:00:19.160 Jesus Christ, in some ways, the last of the Hebrew prophets.

01:00:22.500 He is prophesying a future state of perfection when God's kingdom will come back.

01:00:28.980 and he tells his followers that they have to behave perfectly

01:00:34.180 because only when they behave perfectly will God bring back the kingdom,

01:00:39.800 which is why God hasn't brought back the kingdom

01:00:41.620 because Christians still haven't behaved perfectly. 1.00

01:00:44.040 Anyway, so Christianity is a very small sect within Judaism.

01:00:52.840 There's a very controversial estimate that there are only 8,000 Christians

01:00:57.460 by the end of the first century A.D., which I think is too small, but even if it's off by an

01:01:03.420 order of magnitude and there are 80,000 Christians, you've still got a very, very small group of

01:01:08.900 people. There are two or three million Jews by comparison. And then it's persecuted. Christians

01:01:17.880 refuse to engage in the Roman rites. They can't hold office as magistrates because they have to do 0.96

01:01:26.520 they have to sacrifice to the gods. They can't be full members of society. They tend to be

01:01:32.740 living in small ghettos or communities that are trying to hide from the authorities,

01:01:40.820 and they're persecuted at various times. And then suddenly in the late third century,

01:01:47.720 Christians start becoming really numerous, and it's because of the breakdown of Roman order. 0.97

01:01:53.700 they have this so-called crisis of the 3rd century 0.74

01:02:00.460 when the Romans can't keep an emperor on his throne

01:02:04.460 for more than a few months in many cases

01:02:06.500 and sometimes a few days.

01:02:08.600 I forget how many Roman emperors there are

01:02:10.860 in the late 3rd century, but there are 30 or 40 emperors.

01:02:13.500 They just can't.

01:02:14.460 Sounds like modern Britain.

01:02:17.460 This statement sounds like,

01:02:18.980 it used to sound like Italy,

01:02:20.480 but Italy is now better than modern Britain, I think.

01:02:23.220 more stable. So it's extremely unstable. The empire's unstable. It's hit by terrible plagues.

01:02:30.020 There's an economic collapse because every emperor wants to have an army. Every army has to have

01:02:35.320 money to be paid. The taxes are going up massively. They debase the coinage. The coinage is just

01:02:42.000 completely worthless by the end of the third century. And then finally, Rome pulls itself

01:02:47.040 together. But by this time, the Christians are incredibly numerous, which means that maybe 5% 0.97

01:02:52.140 of the population. That would be a big estimate. So they're in the millions.

01:02:58.060 So, and they've gotten into the army, they've gotten into

01:03:02.300 legislatures, they've gotten into the aristocracy even in some cases, and Domitian comes along.

01:03:11.580 I always do this. The Tetrarchy comes along. Diocletian, sorry, Diocletian. I would get 0.50

01:03:20.460 get to mission Diocletian next up,

01:03:22.100 which shows that I'm not a real Roman historian.

01:03:24.240 Tom Holland would.

01:03:26.080 Okay, so Diocletian comes along, 0.93

01:03:28.400 creates the new Roman system,

01:03:30.640 which lasts for a couple of centuries. 0.99

01:03:34.140 And the Christians are, he thinks, 0.95

01:03:38.580 and his co-emperors and co-caesars think, 0.98

01:03:41.960 is a threat. 0.82

01:03:44.160 So we've got to get rid of them.

01:03:45.400 They try to destroy them.

01:03:46.640 They try to wipe them out.

01:03:48.200 In a series of great persecution.

01:03:50.460 But at a certain point, they've realized that they're creating more—this always happens when you try to persecute a large number of people.

01:03:57.920 It doesn't work, right?

01:03:59.940 And it creates more sympathy for them than was thought. 0.78

01:04:05.340 So the Christians suddenly, from becoming a—from having been a persecuted minority worshiping a Roman criminal, they run the state.

01:04:17.720 Constantine converts Christianity. He declares Christianity the official religion of his dynasty.

01:04:25.160 And so, Christians are suddenly in charge. And so, the first reaction of many Christians is, 0.84

01:04:30.820 great, we're in charge. Kill the other one. Kill the bastards, you know. Lambs into lions, 1.00

01:04:36.280 right? That's the story. So, they want to wipe out the Roman civilization because Roman

01:04:42.340 civilization is bad. It's full of people who have slaves. It's full of people who have, 1.00

01:04:46.560 who are violent military people. They're cruel. They screw their slaves. There's absolutely no

01:04:52.980 punishment for men who take sexual advantage of their slaves. There's all sorts of things

01:05:00.820 morally wrong with Rome. So, some of the early Christians are saying, let's just wipe them out 0.88

01:05:05.200 and take over. The problem is they're 5% of the population, and you can't do that, right? 0.97

01:05:10.000 So, it takes a century for the Christians to really get some kind of legal control over the Roman state, which they finally do in the 390s. 0.94

01:05:21.780 And by that time, there are wiser people in the Christian ranks, like St. Augustine, St. Jerome, the Greek church fathers. 0.82

01:05:29.820 They say, look, we can't get on without being able to write.

01:05:33.360 You know, it would be nice to go on being able to write and to have grammar and to have, you know, we're giving sermons to the people.

01:05:41.060 Well, maybe we should learn some rhetoric, some of the art of public speaking.

01:05:44.820 So, they preserve Roman culture, Greco-Roman culture, you really have to say.

01:05:49.780 And they, you know, they want to have their own version of it, which emphasizes the next life and so forth.

01:05:58.760 But they're basically preserving Greco-Roman culture.

01:06:01.620 But they want to change it, too.

01:06:03.360 So, you have this complex transformation of the Greco-Roman heritage, and it is intertwined

01:06:10.920 with the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that is really the basis of Western civilization

01:06:16.040 right there, right?

01:06:17.540 The splicing together of these two traditions, and, you know, they're quite different, morally

01:06:25.140 speaking, and it's very difficult.

01:06:26.980 It takes, you know, centuries, maybe even going on today in a certain way, for these

01:06:32.360 two, these complex elements in our civilization to figure out who's in charge, what's the best

01:06:38.960 way of ruling. The Romans create the first confessional state. That's what I call it in

01:06:46.040 this book. Confessional state is one that has an official religion, and other religions have

01:06:53.700 disabilities of various kinds. So, they don't do what the Muslims do. They don't, you know, 1.00

01:06:58.780 kill the apostates, they just take away all their money. But, you know, there are second-class 0.78

01:07:07.980 citizens in the Christian confessional state, Jews, pagans. They're usually not persecuted

01:07:14.720 with some few exceptions, but they're usually not persecuted. But they make it very clear that

01:07:19.880 Christians are in charge, that you can't really hold office, you can't. They create an alternative.

01:07:26.120 they create a new power structure

01:07:29.000 let's put it that way

01:07:30.120 and

01:07:31.780 and

01:07:34.700 the process of trying to

01:07:36.980 negotiate between

01:07:38.360 Greco-Roman values

01:07:40.960 which values things

01:07:42.940 like

01:07:43.400 honor and glory

01:07:46.500 and contribution

01:07:48.840 to the country

01:07:50.240 and all these noble

01:07:52.700 Roman values and Greek values

01:07:54.620 come up in, bump up against the Christian idea of humility, right? A Christian's supposed to be 0.73

01:08:03.420 humble. The Romans don't really value humility that much. They, you know, Cicero, who is the

01:08:11.540 most popular Roman author of the Middle Ages, is not a humble guy. He's very vain, in fact. So,

01:08:18.340 but Cicero is a canonical author, and if you have a canonical author, you're supposed to imitate

01:08:23.340 the person, right? There's supposed to be a moral model. So, the long discussion between the

01:08:28.460 Christian and the Greco-Roman is, I think, just part of the civilization. It's never resolved.

01:08:34.820 We finally get rid of confessional states in the 18th century. The idea that a state should have 0.66

01:08:40.740 its own dominant religion doesn't go until the 18th century. So, it's a long period.

01:08:46.660 And the 18th century is still fighting over Greeks and Romans versus Judeo-Christians. A lot of the

01:08:52.420 Enlightenment is about trying to privilege the Greco-Roman heritage, especially the rationalism

01:08:59.740 of Greco-Roman heritage, over dogmatic versions of religion. So, I don't think it's fair to say

01:09:07.720 or correct to say that the Greco-Roman tradition ends and the Judeo-Christian one begins.

01:09:14.180 This is the great mistake, I think, of people like Voltaire and the Enlightenment who wanted

01:09:19.580 to paint the Middle Ages as a period of superstition, ignorance, violence. It's just

01:09:27.060 the Middle Ages is not that way. The Middle Ages, medieval scholasticism, places more value on

01:09:35.140 rationalism than any previous society. They have elements that come, obviously, from faith that

01:09:43.280 are not provable by reason, but there's also a tremendous reliance on law and reason.

01:09:51.680 They have the civil law of the Romans, which they elaborate into grand new structures,

01:09:57.300 and they have the canon law of the church, they have theology, and they're trying to

01:10:02.080 create this gigantic model of order based on reason, authority, reason, weaving together

01:10:08.700 reason and authority. So it's a highly rationalistic age. And the Renaissance, which I get

01:10:15.780 into at the end of this book, is in a way revolting against this sort of hyper-rationalism

01:10:20.740 of scholasticism. They're saying, you know, you scholastics can beat us in argument. You can beat

01:10:26.860 everybody in argument. That's what you do. That's what scholastics do. They argue. You put two

01:10:31.660 scholastics together, they argue. And no one's convinced, really. Some of the time you're

01:10:36.540 defeated. But, you know, they get up the next day and make the same argument. If you want to change

01:10:43.300 society, you have to affect people's imagination. You have to affect their emotions. You have to

01:10:51.520 give them a vision of what a good society would look like. You need to have literary imagination.

01:10:59.720 You need to have eloquence and eloquence in your language. That's how you change people.

01:11:05.900 So that's what the Renaissance is. When the Renaissance tries to bring back classical antiquity and Christian antiquity, that's what they are trying to do.

01:11:16.000 They're trying to, in a way, give truth the weapons of the imagination, give truth the

01:11:24.520 weapons of beauty.

01:11:28.920 And there's the scholastics.

01:11:31.040 You know, you can say that scholastics had beautiful arguments, the way you have beautiful

01:11:37.560 mathematical arguments.

01:11:39.140 You read Aquinas in time, you say, wow, that's really good.

01:11:41.860 I mean, that just affects you as something that's just really brilliant to the point of giving you

01:11:48.500 a sense of beauty. But most of the time, not. Most of the time, not. And the Renaissance is

01:11:56.100 deeply concerned with beauty and with goodness and virtue, all those things which had been

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01:13:25.900 And you mentioned the Judeo-Christian tradition,

01:13:28.840 somewhat a contested term.

01:13:30.080 Some people think it's useful, some not.

01:13:32.660 What role, other than providing Jesus,

01:13:37.840 what role did Jews and Jerusalem play in the history of the Western tradition?

01:13:43.800 Well, Jesus' entire philosophy, well, not all of it,

01:13:47.920 but a good deal of his theology, if you can call it that,

01:13:52.360 his religious reform movement is based on Jewish tradition.

01:13:57.560 I mean, Jesus is constantly citing the Bible, right?

01:14:00.520 you can, I mean, there are people who have gone through all the statements of Jesus and found

01:14:07.060 Old Testament sources for them all. He has new elements. Is that right? I think so. That's

01:14:14.820 really interesting. I've never heard anyone say that. Oh, come on. Genuinely. I'm just

01:14:20.240 showcasing my ignorance, if nothing else. So, you're saying what Jesus was teaching was based

01:14:25.880 on the Old Testament? Yes. Fascinating. But he thinks that the Old Testament is going to be

01:14:32.000 replaced by the kingdom of God. But he says it won't change a jot or a tittle, which means

01:14:39.760 they're not going to change the punctuation of the Old Testament. It's going to be perfectly

01:14:43.120 preserved. But he's predicting a future age when it will be transcended in some way, because he

01:14:50.320 thinks that his message is, in some way, perfects the law, right? So, he'll say that,

01:15:00.880 I give you a new commandment, and you hear the sharp intake of breath from all the Jews present, 1.00

01:15:06.460 a new commandment? Guess where the other 10 came from, guy? So, what, you're God? You know, 1.00

01:15:13.500 I'll give you a new commandment.

01:15:17.160 And he thinks he has at least the authority of the prophets.

01:15:22.120 He's the Messiah, and he has a particular interpretation of that.

01:15:25.040 So he's a radical.

01:15:26.320 He's a theological radical.

01:15:27.820 There's no question about that.

01:15:29.000 But he's a radical within the Jewish tradition. 0.84

01:15:34.600 But all of the, you know, he's always trying to essentialize the Jewish tradition.

01:15:39.160 He says, what's the fundamental thing?

01:15:41.760 is, you know, love God and love your neighbor. Those are the two things you really have to

01:15:45.640 remember. Just, you know, Deuteronomy, all right, it's there, but if you just need like a,

01:15:54.140 you need an instant, short person's guide to being a good Jew, you should just love God and 0.78

01:16:03.800 love God and love your neighbor. That's all you really need to know. And you will naturally do 0.65

01:16:10.000 whatever the law is. So, he's a real radical. But I think it's quite, you start to realize

01:16:16.360 how dependent early Christianity is in Judaism when you look at the sacred books. 1.00

01:16:22.460 The early Christians loved the Psalms, and rightly so. The Psalms are incredibly beautiful. Sometimes 0.99

01:16:27.460 they're incredibly ugly and jarring, but they're often incredibly beautiful, and they survive

01:16:32.160 translation. That's the amazing thing about them. You can read a good translation of the Psalms

01:16:36.940 into English is deeply moving in a way that, you know, literature translated from other languages

01:16:42.060 often is not. And there were people like Marcion who wanted to get rid of Judaism, right? They

01:16:48.840 wanted to have a Christianity. He's a heretic, by the way, just so everyone's clear. He's a heretic. 0.98

01:16:54.240 So Marcion wanted to do away with Judaism and just have a Christianity that was dependent on 0.83

01:16:59.600 Christ's message. And there are other people who wanted to say, let's make the Greco-Roman 0.66

01:17:06.680 philosophy, Greek philosophy part of Christian message. But the Christians, you know, they

01:17:12.140 settled down in the second century A.D. and they said, we are not Jews, we are Christians, but we

01:17:20.060 are based, our New Testament is based on the Old Testament. The old promises of God have been

01:17:26.620 superseded by the new promises of God in the New Testament. So, they have a very strong,

01:17:32.140 it's difficult to say because there's so many, so much friction between Jews and Christians

01:17:41.140 because they are a heretical movement from the point of view of Jews. So, there are lots of

01:17:48.520 nasty things that Christians say about Jews. And Jerome, who's a great defender of studying 0.89

01:17:53.080 the Hebraica Veritas, the truth of the Hebrews, he's really anti-Semitic, you know. So,

01:18:00.360 they have this respect for the Jewish Old Testament without having respect for modern

01:18:07.100 Jews, right? They think modern Jews have not listened to Christ's message. They're people

01:18:13.660 who are stiff-necked, right? That they won't change. They should change. They should hear

01:18:17.240 the truth of Christ. And if they don't change, there's something wrong with them. Maybe there's

01:18:21.300 a demon inside them. Maybe they're just proud or something. They have some kind of moral problem.

01:18:25.700 So, there's that kind of hatred that goes on. But there's also the recognition that,

01:18:29.600 You know, the Jews have had a message from God, too.

01:18:34.900 And the fact that they're not listening to our message doesn't take that away.

01:18:38.640 Okay. And then where do we go from Jerusalem?

01:18:44.920 Complete the story for us.

01:18:46.860 So I'm trying to understand what you mean by that.

01:18:49.340 Well, what I mean is you've got Athens, then Rome, then Christianity comes along.

01:18:55.320 How do we get from that to the modern day and, you know, the narrative of the West?

01:19:02.540 And that's in volume two.

01:19:03.740 You don't have to ask Gilso.

01:19:07.220 I have my views on that, too.

01:19:09.460 Well, I think that the Reformation changes everything. 0.66

01:19:14.480 Reformation. 0.74

01:19:16.940 What is the Reformation?

01:19:19.120 Another question that I could answer.

01:19:22.460 Well, the Reformation is, briefly, a revolt against the ecclesiastical polity of the Middle Ages.

01:19:29.700 What is ecclesiastical polity?

01:19:31.700 So, in the Middle Ages, you develop this very strange form of dual government,

01:19:36.780 where you had one authority over the human soul and one authority over the human body.

01:19:43.420 So, the Pope is in charge of the Church, which has his own law, has his own tax system,

01:19:48.120 his own hierarchy. It's a complete government, and it exists in every Christian state.

01:19:55.980 It's the only international institution aside from the empire. And then you have

01:20:02.200 lay society, which governs the body, this life, as opposed to the next life.

01:20:09.120 um it it um it has its laws its government its hierarchy its tax system no so it's a parallel

01:20:22.280 government it's a very strange situation i i have looked in vain for any other part of the world

01:20:27.580 that has the same situation i'm coming up to a to a major point okay so what happens in the

01:20:36.260 Reformations, they get rid of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Protestant countries, and they make

01:20:41.120 the king or the secular government the authority over religion. Ultimately, religion is privatized

01:20:50.940 in the 18th century, but in this period, we're talking about 16th, 17th, 18th century, early 18th

01:20:56.720 century, the state rules religion. So what happens? This is one of the big messages of the book.

01:21:03.660 Okay, so what does the medieval ecclesiastical hierarchy

01:21:08.480 have charge of in the Middle Ages?

01:21:11.300 Thought.

01:21:12.680 That means doctrine.

01:21:14.700 What is taught in universities, what's taught in school about religion

01:21:17.740 is the job of the church to oversee that.

01:21:26.580 Family, sex, religion, inheritance,

01:21:29.680 All those laws having to do with the regulation of human sexuality and marriage and adoption and inheritance.

01:21:42.480 All those rules are controlled by the church.

01:21:45.960 Third thing, economic life, right?

01:21:50.520 How you conduct moral transactions, what's considered usury, what's not considered usury.

01:21:57.040 how you can lend money to people without committing the sin of usury

01:22:03.240 how you can pass down money between generations

01:22:08.240 the organization of financial institutions

01:22:11.680 the church has charge over early banking for example

01:22:15.920 the banking system both the commercial banking system

01:22:21.520 and the private banking system.

01:22:31.000 That's all under control of the church. 0.87

01:22:32.940 So what happens in Protestant lands

01:22:34.480 when you take all those authorities away?

01:22:38.040 Liberalism, right?

01:22:39.620 Intellectual freedom,

01:22:41.300 freedom of sexuality and family,

01:22:43.620 economic freedom.

01:22:45.240 So that's my big contribution

01:22:47.680 to the origins of modernism.

01:22:50.840 Reformation has a lot to do with liberalism, which precedes the revival of democracy in the late 18th century.

01:23:00.240 So the modern world is shaking off the bonds of religious law and making religious law for itself.

01:23:07.520 First, that falls under the power of the secular state.

01:23:11.660 But the secular state is, of course, deeply involved with private interests and is really unable to come up with universal rules of conduct in things like usury, and it's highly penetrable by the influence of wealthy people and so forth.

01:23:31.680 So the economic freedom of the modern world, the sexual and family law of the modern world,

01:23:41.360 and the intellectual freedom of the modern world come out of the Reformation ultimately,

01:23:46.900 which is then radicalized by the Enlightenment.

01:23:49.480 I was astonished recently when I was investigating this stuff with my class,

01:23:54.520 and I discovered that adoption was only legally permitted in the 19th century in France,

01:24:00.820 or early 20th century.

01:24:01.860 I forget the exact name.

01:24:03.500 But I thought adoption.

01:24:04.540 Everybody has adoption.

01:24:05.900 Romans had adoption.

01:24:07.060 But the medieval law prohibits adoption.

01:24:12.440 So that has a huge impact on the way society is organized, right?

01:24:19.740 And it means that they prohibit cousin marriage

01:24:23.140 and all sorts of things that has a huge impact on this.

01:24:26.720 I don't know if you've seen this book called

01:24:27.940 The Weirdest People in the World.

01:24:30.460 I forget the name of the author.

01:24:32.000 Joseph Heinrich, is it?

01:24:33.080 That's right.

01:24:33.480 He's a colleague of mine in, I think, one of the other schools.

01:24:38.300 And he says that you can't, the origin of civil society is the church's prohibition of cousin marriage and the ability to inherit wealth and to get help from your family.

01:24:53.660 If you can't get help from your family, you've got to get help from social, from civil society in some way.

01:24:59.300 And I would add the church, right? Because if you're a family trying to preserve its wealth

01:25:04.880 and you can't marry your cousin or you can't have your brother marry your dead brother's wife,

01:25:13.480 which the Romans also did, that's also prohibited by canon law. Then you have to find some other

01:25:19.760 way to preserve your wealth. One way to do it is to turn the church into, you know, get one of your

01:25:25.540 kids into the church so how power can help you, right? So it's a very interesting social

01:25:31.580 transformation that takes place as a result of medieval Christianity. But I'm not really an

01:25:38.420 expert on that. I know enough to write a textbook about it, but there's a bibliography that people

01:25:44.040 are interested in to go further. But anyway, but that's where I put the origins of the modern

01:25:50.840 world. And, of course, the radicalization of politics, egalitarianism, is also a Christian 0.52

01:25:56.780 thing because the ancient West, egalitarianism basically comes from Jewish thought, right,

01:26:05.280 from the Jewish, from Deuteronomy, where there's an equaling of, it's kind of more

01:26:13.380 distributivist than egalitarian. There's a redistribution every few years, every Sabbath, 0.67

01:26:20.380 and then every 50 years, every 49 years of property within the Jewish people. 0.89

01:26:26.900 So, and there's, of course, the early Christian ideas of equality. 0.79

01:26:30.460 It's in the Bible.

01:26:33.620 But that stays within radical Christian communities.

01:26:38.720 That type of egalitarianism, as applied to social life,

01:26:41.720 stays within radical Christian communities.

01:26:44.460 The equality that the Romans have and the Greeks have

01:26:46.600 is equality of citizenship, equality under the law. 0.76

01:26:50.020 It's a different type of equality altogether.

01:26:52.580 So what happens in the 17th century is that some of the radical Protestant groups adopt a social system based on egalitarianism.

01:27:03.440 And that feeds its way, you know, through Locke and some other people into the Western system of this radical egalitarianism where everything has to be more and more and more and more equal.

01:27:13.820 It becomes a process of making equal.

01:27:17.180 So that, I think, is also Christian in origin.

01:27:20.440 And that's how we've got to where we are.

01:27:22.680 James, I wish we had another three hours to talk about it, but our time is up.

01:27:26.520 Thank you so much for coming on.

01:27:28.180 Final question, as always, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

01:27:33.040 The fragility of the golden thread.

01:27:36.160 It's absolutely amazing how close we got to losing major parts of our tradition.

01:27:41.700 The works of Aristotle that we read today survived in a single box of scrolls down until

01:27:49.920 the first century B.C.

01:27:53.340 If that had burned up, no Aristotle.

01:27:56.980 And it was only because some people figured out that it was valuable that they started

01:28:02.540 copying it again.

01:28:04.200 I mentioned before the Digest of Roman Law.

01:28:07.620 okay that's the most important source for our knowledge of legal thinking in the roman empire

01:28:15.760 the basis of all western legal thinking that was down to one manuscript in the 11th century

01:28:22.000 and it became the basis of legal education in the 12th century was just rediscovered studied

01:28:28.680 copied uh but it almost was lost there are many works like this there are three copies of plato

01:28:34.780 left and complete works of Plato left in the 14th century. There's one copy of Catullus left

01:28:39.780 in the 14th century. What happens is that somebody realized they were valuable and wanted to save

01:28:45.600 them. There were scholars out there who said that this is something we need to keep going.

01:28:54.360 This is something which will help us to revive our civilization, something that will help us

01:28:58.560 to have a Renaissance or a Reformation. We need this thing now. And there were scholars who,

01:29:05.960 and people of goodwill who said, the tradition's valuable. We have to keep it going. Let's copy

01:29:12.760 the manuscript. Let's teach it. Let's teach people to love these texts again. Let's teach people to

01:29:17.560 love Catullus and Horus and Virgil again, because if we don't, we'll lose it. It's not just the

01:29:25.020 text itself, it's the love of the text and the ability to read the text and understand the text.

01:29:30.180 So that's what I think I would like to end on, is the idea that we have to keep it going. It's up to

01:29:35.060 us. James, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure.

01:29:55.020 You

TRIGGERnometry - August 12, 2026

The Rise and Fall of Western Civilisation- Professor James Hankins

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