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

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00:00:49 After four decades of teaching at Harvard,

00:00:51 you decided to leave.

00:00:53 I was banging my head against the wall

00:00:55 for years and years and years,

00:00:57 trying to get the university to go on

00:00:59 supporting the teaching of Western civilization and we have a treasury of

00:01:04 Western civilization that has been preserved through the golden thread of

00:01:08 tradition over 2,500 years. It's a story of rise and fall. It's a story of virtue

00:01:16 followed by achievement followed by corruption. It's a story of collapse and

00:01:22 renaissance. It's a story of corruption and reform. That's what real human

00:01:28 history is right. We have to keep it going. It's up to us.

00:01:58 Professor James Hankins, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:02:01 Thank you for inviting me.

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

00:02:03 We want to talk about this beautiful book you co-wrote about the history of Western

00:02:07 civilization, two volumes, actually.

00:02:09 I have both at home.

00:02:11 But first of all, I would love to hear a little bit more about you and your background.

00:02:16 And of course, there was a pivotal moment where after four decades of teaching at Harvard,

00:02:20 you decided to leave, which I imagine is a very difficult decision for someone with tenure

00:02:25 at such a prestigious university and such a long history to do, but you did it because you felt

00:02:32 that the university was no longer doing the thing that it was supposed to do in your field. Is that

00:02:36 right? That's exactly right. I actually decided to retire in 2020, the year of George Floyd,

00:02:44 the year of COVID, and I just didn't want to do it anymore because they created such a terrible

00:02:50 atmosphere. And they wanted the professors to lecture with masks on, which I refused to do.

00:02:56 And I took advantage of the power of the glass of water. Because, you know, when you went,

00:03:01 you were wearing a mask during the COVID era, you were allowed to take the mask off when you

00:03:08 went to a restaurant and you were served a glass of water. So when I lectured, I brought a glass

00:03:13 of water with me and I took the mask off and drank some water and then lectured. Then no one died.

00:03:21 Shocking, really.

00:03:22 Shocking.

00:03:22 But I didn't want to go on doing that.

00:03:24 And I decided I would retire.

00:03:25 And I got into a retirement rhythm.

00:03:30 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 trying to get the university to go on supporting the teaching of Western civilization,

00:03:45 which had been a mainstay of the university from its very beginning.

00:03:49 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 we last hired someone to teach Western Civ European history in 2008. We lost eight historians after

00:04:18 that date. So it was evident to me that someone had made a decision to zero out Western Civ,

00:04:26 and certainly to zero out positions that were only concentrated in Western Civ. So you could

00:04:33 teach the French empire and all its evils in the 19th century, but you couldn't teach the French 0.89

00:04:39 revolution. You couldn't teach the French monarchy. In England, you could teach the British 0.55

00:04:45 empire, but you weren't going to teach Magna Carta. You weren't going to teach the Reformation,

00:04:49 the English Civil War, you know, all the things that used to be taught as a matter of course.

00:04:54 So I was very upset and discouraged, frankly. I just didn't want to go year after year trying to

00:05:01 get our topics covered by other professors. So I thought I was going to retire. I'm going to go to

00:05:08 Italy, have a good time, live on the winnings. And then later I got an offer from the Hamilton

00:05:13 School of Classical and Civic Education, which is a school founded by basically Governor DeSantis

00:05:21 and the Florida State Legislature. And it was a great decision for me to join up with them.

00:05:27 I'm officially going to be there in August.

00:05:32 So I will get to teach the Western Civilization there.

00:05:35 We're going to start a program in Western Civilization, an MA.

00:05:38 And it's one of these new institutions where you can do things.

00:05:44 At Harvard, if I wanted to start an MA in Western Civ,

00:05:48 it would be five years of committee work followed by no.

00:05:53 At this place, I went in with my buddy Alan Gelso,

00:05:56 who wrote this book.

00:05:57 We had a two-page summary of what we wanted to do.

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

00:06:03 They said, fine, I'll call the president.

00:06:05 So we're starting an MA in Western Civ 2027.

00:06:09 That being the case, it seems to me you're very well placed to answer the question that

00:06:13 Francis and I love asking on the show.

00:06:14 First of all, what is civilization?

00:06:17 And then the follow-up to that is what is Western civilization and how does it make

00:06:21 that different from others?

00:06:22 well i think civilization is a uh you know the western the golden thread is the story of four

00:06:32 civilizations that are connected by a thread of tradition that's why we call it the western

00:06:36 tradition i believe david butterfield made the same point uh in a recent uh interview with you

00:06:43 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 guy in his own right. So he may have come up with it by himself.

00:06:53 It's possible.

00:06:53 You seem skeptical.

00:06:54 It's possible. No, he's a friend. He's reviewed the book, actually. But it's a civilization. I

00:07:03 think you can look at it as a treasury, as a collection of great achievements. And there can

00:07:11 be histories, there can be poetry, philosophy, art, literature. And we have a treasury of Western

00:07:17 civilization that has been preserved through tradition, through the golden thread of tradition

00:07:23 over 2,500 years. And people have always felt that that stuff is too valuable to let go.

00:07:31 Somebody loved it. Somebody said, I want my children to learn this. I want my country to

00:07:37 remember these things. They're valuable lessons. So, there's that sort of civilization,

00:07:42 civilization, a deposit of great achievement, human achievements. But there's also civilization

00:07:50 in the sense of civilizing as a process, as something that happens to you as you get older

00:07:58 and you get more educated, right? So, you start in the family. Your family teaches you to

00:08:03 treat your brothers and sisters well, respect your parents, respect your elders. Ideally,

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

00:08:14 maybe to a school or a church where you learn social skills. But at a certain point, you need

00:08:20 to mature beyond that. And that means learning how to be a civilized person, learning good manners,

00:08:29 but also learning the right things to say and to be enough educated so that you can interact with

00:08:38 people at a very high level. So you learn high level communication skills. It's not simply being

00:08:46 able to order your meal over Uber Eats. You need to be able to understand how, this is something

00:08:57 that strikes me as a real mistake of modern humanistic studies. It's so important to

00:09:04 communicate in our world. It's so important to communicate at a very high level. I heard

00:09:11 recently someone saying that the language of international scholarship is pidgin English,

00:09:17 right? But if you are involved in a tradition, the Greeks had this, the Romans had this,

00:09:24 and all the modern European nations had this idea of communication at a very high level,

00:09:28 being able to communicate very subtle feelings and intuitions and poetic insights and sublimity

00:09:34 all these levels of communication are developed by a civilization. So that's part of educating you

00:09:42 to be not just a citizen, but a member of society where you interact with people at a most very

00:09:51 profound and subtle level. And then you're able to understand music, right? It's not automatic

00:09:59 that people will understand classical music.

00:10:03 My wife is from Thailand,

00:10:04 doesn't really like classical music very much

00:10:06 because she wasn't brought up to understand it.

00:10:09 And when I go to China and I listen to Chinese opera,

00:10:13 my first instinct is to run screaming from the room.

00:10:17 It's an acquired taste.

00:10:19 So in order to acquire a taste for classical music

00:10:22 or for classical jazz, which I like a lot,

00:10:26 you have to be brought up.

00:10:27 You have to be educated in that.

00:10:29 You have to have people who communicate their love of something to you, teachers or enthusiasts.

00:10:36 So, if you want to be able to take advantage of the treasury of civilization, if you want

00:10:42 to understand Michelangelo or Beethoven or, you know, medieval drama or something like

00:10:51 that, or Dante, I mean, Dante is somebody who requires an education in himself.

00:10:56 that is uh that is the civilizing process that is enabling you to take advantage of the riches of

00:11:04 civilization and to communicate at a very high level and to participate ultimately if you're

00:11:09 being well taught the first thing that happens at least to an ambitious young person is going to be

00:11:15 i want to do that too you know man sees michelangelo man says either that's hopeless i'll

00:11:24 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 do that too, right? So, civilization's not just invigilating over the past, it's not just, you

00:11:36 know, bowing down before precedent or, you know, pastiche of putting together an element, it's

00:11:43 inspiration. It feeds the desire to create and to pass down and to bring your most

00:11:54 subtle and your most brilliant and your most profound feelings in different forms, art,

00:12:01 music, literature, what have you. So, that's what I think civilization is. A very long answer.

00:12:07 It's almost like it's a living thing that reproduces itself in an ideal world.

00:12:12 Yes.

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

00:12:17 is that instead of teaching the next generation in that duty of passing down and reproducing

00:12:25 civilization, instead there was a focus on tearing apart, destroying, undermining,

00:12:32 critiquing, deconstructing, you might say. Yes, I think that's very true. And

00:12:37 it began, of course, well, we won't talk about art since that will be a very complicated

00:12:45 discussion, but we just talk about the hostility to the West that's come up in the last 40, 50,

00:12:52 60 years. That has come out of the multiculturalism and the post-colonial movement where the West is

00:12:59 the enemy and all the sufferings of the world are explained because of Western imperialism

00:13:06 or colonialism or what have you. And we have this very unbalanced story of what the West is and has

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

00:13:22 of other civilizations. That's how it gets politicized, right? That people have a political

00:13:28 goal in their scholarship, which is to show that their civilization is as good as the West,

00:13:34 and the West isn't very good at all. There's this kind of hostility to the West,

00:13:41 built into global history and to post-colonial history. So that has been highly destructive.

00:13:49 And one of the things I'm trying to do with this book is to give a little balance. Yes,

00:13:55 we had slavery. No, we were not the worst slave society in history. The Romans were

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

00:14:09 in many ways. And, you know, all of the things that the West is blamed for, violence, militarism, 0.99

00:14:16 yes, there's an element of truth to that, but there's also people who want to subordinate

00:14:21 militarism, military virtue to good purposes, defense of your country, and defense of your

00:14:30 people and your goods and so forth. So, it's very simplistic thinking that is behind a lot

00:14:39 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 which isn't quite so obvious, is I'm very interested in Chinese history. I've been

00:14:49 studying Chinese history for a long time. And I go to China quite often. And I've taught Chinese

00:14:56 students over there who are very interested in the comparison between Western Chinese. And I

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

00:15:05 from studying China. So, I have in the book, there's a lot of subtle comparisons and maybe

00:15:13 not so subtle comparisons with China. Not all of them to the Western West's favor, mind you, but

00:15:19 I think that we need more comparative study. So, my current idea is, and we're trying to

00:15:28 promote this idea in various contexts in Hamilton School and other places,

00:15:33 is that you should learn world history.

00:15:37 You should learn comparative history,

00:15:39 but you should learn Western history first.

00:15:42 You should learn your national history

00:15:44 before Western history,

00:15:45 and then learn world history.

00:15:47 It should be a ladder.

00:15:49 Right.

00:15:49 You shouldn't just start off with world history

00:15:52 and then use that as a whipping tool

00:15:55 to show that it's better or worse

00:15:57 or has suffered from Western attention.

00:15:59 That's a highly politicized version.

00:16:01 Well, can I disagree with you there?

00:16:03 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 Yeah, please. Our audience will enjoy that very much, me getting crushed. I would argue the 0.97

00:16:15 context of global history is incredibly important. And if actually it was taught accurately and

00:16:20 properly, it would only serve to emphasize the uniqueness and special nature of Western

00:16:25 civilization. The problem I would put to you is we're not taught global history accurately.

00:16:31 and instead we're simply taught that global history

00:16:36 and other people are good and we are bad.

00:16:38 I think that's where the problem is, isn't it?

00:16:41 Well, I can't crush you if you agree with me.

00:16:43 Yeah.

00:16:45 Yes, I agree.

00:16:47 But, you know, I have three nephews who teach in secondary school

00:16:51 and one of them teaches global history in the sixth grade, right?

00:16:56 They haven't had any U.S. history or little stories they have.

00:17:01 They haven't had any Western history.

00:17:03 So day one, they learn about textiles in Central Asia.

00:17:09 And day two, they learn about weaving in India.

00:17:12 Okay, but that's not...

00:17:12 Day three, they learn about, you know, Roman toga.

00:17:16 And that's world history.

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

00:17:19 No, but that's not...

00:17:20 What I mean by global history is like,

00:17:22 let's say we're looking at the issue of slavery,

00:17:25 which is obviously highly topical, etc.

00:17:27 Okay, let's look at where does slavery first appear.

00:17:30 which societies practice it, which empires practice it, and in what ways,

00:17:36 where, you know, who captures the slaves, and how do people become enslaved. These are all

00:17:42 important contextual items to map out the full picture of this issue. And then you eventually,

00:17:47 chronologically, arrive at the West's history of slavery. And by this point, you are armed

00:17:52 with the understanding that this was a human thing that humans have always done. This is how,

00:17:57 you know, European powers did it. Here's why they ended it, unlike pretty much everybody else. 0.55

00:18:03 And then that world history of that issue gives you a rounded understanding of slavery. And that

00:18:09 the same could be applied to empire, to war, to all sorts of other things. And that context,

00:18:16 I would argue, is how you give people a rounded understanding of our history in the context of

00:18:21 human history. Yeah. Well, then you're teaching topical history. You're teaching a course. And

00:18:27 I think that would be a great university course.

00:18:28 I wish there were people who could teach it fairly that way.

00:18:33 But you're not teaching the narrative.

00:18:35 So in history, we always say there's diachronic versus synchronic.

00:18:39 So diachronic is the history in chronological order,

00:18:43 and synchronic is where you tell a comparative story.

00:18:46 And I've taught comparative history, and I agree entirely.

00:18:48 I taught comparative history with a Chinese historian of meritocracy,

00:18:54 Chinese versus Western meritocracy.

00:18:56 And you're right, absolutely illuminating.

00:18:58 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 So that came out in Chinese favor.

00:19:09 But what we're trying to do in the book, what we think is really primary is tell the story.

00:19:16 It's very hard to tell a story over 2,500 years.

00:19:20 And that's sort of what I'm proudest of in this book.

00:19:22 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 and, you know, the past is corrupt and it's feudalism and it's slavery and it's all the

00:19:44 bad things, it's all the Western things. And getting away from the West and becoming

00:19:48 more global, more international, more scientific is the way into the future. That's a beautiful

00:19:54 story. It's a nice fairy tale. It's science fiction, but it's not history. And the real

00:20:01 history of the world, not just the Western civilization, is not a history of inevitable

00:20:06 climbing towards an illimitable future powered by science and progressivism and so forth.

00:20:14 It's a story of rise and fall. It's a story of virtue followed by achievement followed by

00:20:22 corruption. It's a story of collapse and renaissance. It's a story of corruption and

00:20:29 reform. That's what real human history is like, and it doesn't fit the progressive model at all.

00:20:37 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 long history. It has a very checkered history. It has done some horrible things, especially when we

00:20:51 took over the New World. There were some really horrible things that went on, and for very bad

00:20:57 reasons. There were some idealists behind the conquest of the New World by Spain, but a lot of

00:21:04 it was just simply greed. Okay. But that was overcome, in a sense. When the conquistadores

00:21:11 started to oppress the native peoples of Central and South America, someone stopped them, and 0.65

00:21:19 that was the Catholic Church and the religious orders. They were not able to go full barbarian

00:21:25 on the peoples of the New World. 0.92

00:21:30 So there's light and shade.

00:21:33 And what we're trying to do is to explain

00:21:35 that it is possible to become corrupt

00:21:38 and to fall apart and to get fractionalized

00:21:40 and to get tyrannized.

00:21:42 That has happened many times to us in the past.

00:21:45 But it's also possible to stop it.

00:21:47 And we have stopped it.

00:21:48 And that's what we should be doing now.

00:21:50 We should be having a renaissance.

00:21:52 We should be having reforms.

00:21:53 We should be fighting tyranny,

00:21:54 whether it comes from Silicon Valley or from governments, right?

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

00:22:07 which I agree would be a great college course,

00:22:09 is that that's not what we should be doing

00:22:10 at the basic level of teaching Western Civ.

00:22:14 James, the danger that comes when we're not teaching our history

00:22:19 is that if you don't teach the history of a country,

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

00:22:25 Yes, exactly. I mean, that's what's happened to young men, I think, around America and the

00:22:32 Western world, that they don't know who they are. They're told a story that they really don't like.

00:22:38 You know, they're told that they're oppressors, and they don't have anything in their heads to

00:22:42 stop the myths and lies they're being told. You know, you need to have something between your

00:22:50 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 told the lies. You have something between the ears. If you have no history and someone comes along and

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

00:23:06 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 have between my ears that's going to give me some resistance against that story? I entirely agree

00:23:16 with you, friends. I think this is a major problem for a cause of civilizational breakdown,

00:23:22 that people just don't know the past.

00:23:25 They don't know the great achievements of their country.

00:23:28 They're fed a lot of lies.

00:23:30 They have politicized history departments

00:23:33 and history programs and unions.

00:23:37 I don't want to attack unions,

00:23:39 but let's say public education,

00:23:41 which is heavily politicized by education schools.

00:23:44 And they're not given the means to really resist that.

00:23:48 I had a friend recently from Cambridge who had a 14-year-old daughter.

00:23:55 She loved English already because of her English education.

00:23:59 She came to Boston.

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

00:24:03 There wasn't a single major private school in Boston that taught any English literature before the year 2000.

00:24:14 Wow.

00:24:14 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 They wanted to teach young adult novels between 2000 and current date that they considered ideologically sound.

00:24:37 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 This is the kind of thing that I think is so poisonous.

00:24:56 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 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 but in many places they're not. And that's how this classical school movement got started,

00:25:32 by people who love our Western past, love our American past, and they want to make sure it's

00:25:37 not poisoned by politics. You read the news and think you're informed. You're actually just

00:25:44 selectively informed. Modern media doesn't just report the news, it quietly decides which stories

00:25:49 you never even hear about. Your blind spots are an accident, they're someone else's decisions.

00:25:55 That's why I use Ground News.

00:25:57 Every day, they gather thousands of stories

00:25:59 from across the political spectrum,

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

00:26:03 side by side, and contextualize it,

00:26:06 including specific differences

00:26:07 in how each side is reporting it.

00:26:10 That's how you see what whole audiences

00:26:11 are not being told.

00:26:13 My favorite feature is their blind spot feed.

00:26:15 Every day, it flags upwards of 20 stories

00:26:18 that are being ignored by either the left or the right.

00:26:20 Let's look at some examples.

00:26:21 Follow along at ground.news slash trigonometry.

00:26:24 Take this story. A Pew Research survey found that 56% of Americans now support banning social media

00:26:31 for anyone under 16, with a majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats behind it. Genuine

00:26:37 bipartisan agreement is rare enough to be newsworthy on its own. And yet, coverage came

00:26:42 almost entirely from the right. The left barely touched on it. On the other hand, look at this.

00:26:47 An AP poll found that 66% of Americans now say democracy is central to what it means to be

00:26:53 American, down from 80% five years ago. That is a serious story about how the country sees itself,

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

00:27:05 did from the right. Ground News puts all of this in one place. Headline comparisons, bias breakdowns,

00:27:11 ownership insights, and context so you can actually understand what's going on, not just react to what

00:27:17 you're told. Go to ground.news slash trigonometry or click the link in the description of this

00:27:22 episode. Get 40% off their vantage plan, the same one that we use, and stop being managed by the

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

00:27:34 Do you think that's hyperbolic, or do you think that's actually a pretty fair assessment?

00:27:40 Yes. Well, there's demoralization in the sense of interpreting events and natural, well,

00:27:49 just to say events and things like laws and legal systems as purely social science phenomenon that

00:27:56 are to be understood outside any kind of context of value. And I think that's the way history is

00:28:03 largely taught today. In fact, people, the way I was taught when I was studying history is that

00:28:08 it's bad to import your moral judgments, right? And you shouldn't write history that way. You

00:28:14 should be somewhere above the moon, you know? And you're observing from the moon, you have no

00:28:19 attachments, you have no loyalties, you have no things that you think are more important than

00:28:23 other things. You're driven by fashion. We won't get into that. But yes, I think that that's a

00:28:30 real problem. And I'm afraid that a lot of what I've written in the recent past has been regarded

00:28:36 as unprofessional by people because I take sides. I think that some things are good and some things

00:28:42 are bad, and some things are morally profitable, and some things are evil. You know, the Western

00:28:48 tradition, another metaphor I like for it is a garden, right? It's a garden where we're trying

00:28:54 to grow beautiful things, and we have to follow the laws of nature in order to do that. But there

00:29:01 are also lots of weeds and parasites and things that get into the garden, and they have to be

00:29:05 killed. So, if you have a demoralizing civilization, it's one that's not making any

00:29:13 distinction between the parasites and the diseases and the fertilizer and the water.

00:29:20 That's the way I would put it. Maybe it's a stretch of illustration. But you have to tend

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

00:29:33 which is natural moral principles, which I think everybody has. We won't go into the whole

00:29:39 metaphysics of natural law, please, because I'm not very good at that. But I do think that people

00:29:43 have natural moral understandings. And you can't be constantly telling people that their natural

00:29:50 moral understandings are not scientific. That there are people over in lower Borneo who have

00:30:01 different impressions about, you know, polygamy or something. And therefore, you know, there used

00:30:10 to be this reference word called the Encyclopedia of Ethics, where they went through all the world

00:30:18 ethical systems. And oddly enough, what they found is that most societies don't like stealing

00:30:27 or lying, and the more successful societies have been monogamous and not polygamous. 0.83

00:30:34 Don't tell that to the Mormons, but I think that's true.

00:30:38 That there are certain patterns in moral practice. These were observed by Aristotle,

00:30:43 you know, in the 4th century BC. That's how he built up his ethics, by taking a kind of empirical

00:30:51 view of what societies actually prefer, right? And I think that you're right that if you try to

00:30:59 see things through some kind of scientific lens where all moral principles are equal,

00:31:06 all societies are equal, all cultures are equal, you can't possibly give young people a sense of

00:31:16 moral direction in their lives. Well, we've talked about teaching the thing and how it's not taught

00:31:23 and whatever. Why don't we actually talk about Western civilization itself, or the Western

00:31:27 tradition, as I think you prefer to call it? What is the Western tradition? What is its journey?

00:31:33 Where does it come from? I was just asked this question about half an hour ago at the conference,

00:31:39 and not to mean you're unoriginal, but it's a very good question and needs to be asked.

00:31:43 The gentleman was asking me, why didn't I start with the Egyptians or the Babylonians,

00:31:48 you know, and why start with the Greeks?

00:31:51 And the answer is that we have a tradition which comes from language, and the languages

00:31:58 have been learned by later periods.

00:32:01 So we start with the Greeks.

00:32:02 And if you wanted to be civilized in the ancient world, you had to know Greek.

00:32:06 And the Romans, most cultured learned Greek, or they tried to translate Greek things into

00:32:12 Atom. And what we have from the past, which is what the book is about, are traditions. We have

00:32:19 traditions of philosophy that begin in the 6th century BC, and the same questions are still

00:32:24 being debated today. Not because there's no progress, but because they're meaningful questions.

00:32:30 We have artistic traditions. All of the genres of literature that we use today are all invented

00:32:36 by the Greeks. Naturalistic painting, naturalistic sculpture, science, most of the major scientific

00:32:47 principles are invented by the Greeks. You know, the ancient Egyptians had medicine. They have

00:32:53 books full of medicine millennia before the Greeks even come on the scene. But it's not scientific

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

00:33:07 some good remedies that can be found in that, but they didn't have a method, right? What Hippocrates

00:33:12 invents is the method. We're going to organize all the symptoms, we're going to describe diseases,

00:33:17 we're going to figure out the etiology of diseases, and we're going to find remedies.

00:33:21 And we're going to use only empirical evidence. We're not going to talk about what the gods

00:33:25 say, and we're not going to have that type of religious medicine.

00:33:30 So, and the same thing happens in mathematics.

00:33:32 There are other civilizations, early civilizations, the Babylonians who can calculate, the ancient

00:33:38 Chinese can calculate, they have all the acetrack multiply divide, they can do all that, but 0.80

00:33:45 they don't have proof. 1.00

00:33:46 They don't have mathematical proofs.

00:33:48 The Greeks invented mathematical proofs, which in a way is an outgrowth of the whole idea

00:33:54 of rationality.

00:33:55 And that's what comes from, I think, is the real contribution of ancient Greek democracy.

00:34:01 Because the ancient Greeks did not have a monarch.

00:34:04 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 And that makes perfect sense in terms of Greek democracy.

00:34:19 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 So the Greeks invent logic and rhetoric.

00:34:32 Logic, the art of accurate reasoning. 0.98

00:34:35 Rhetoric, the art of persuasive reasoning.

00:34:37 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 They couldn't take any decisions.

00:34:48 if there's more than one decision-maker, right?

00:34:51 In monarchy, the default setting of human society is monarchy, right?

00:34:58 There is no other society, and I know people will contest this,

00:35:02 they'll say the Phoenicians had this, but it's not true.

00:35:04 There's no other society that was ruled pluralistically.

00:35:08 I don't mean necessarily democratically, but ruled by, let's say,

00:35:11 a small class of the wealthy or a small class of the militarily powerful

00:35:17 like the Spartans. And those people had to come up with some type of way of settling quarrels and

00:35:24 questions. And that's where rationality really comes from, modern Western style of rationality,

00:35:29 which is to make arguments, to advance proof, to allow disagreement so the gaps in your argument

00:35:36 can be exposed, and to identify fallacies. All this is systematized by Aristotle. But he was

00:35:43 doing it on the basis of the Greek love of arguments.

00:35:48 And so this is in contrast with prior human history, which is essentially about a single

00:35:56 authority predicated on power.

00:35:58 Is that the contrast you're painting?

00:36:01 Is that too crude? 0.98

00:36:02 Destroy me now or whatever, or crush me, whatever it was. 0.97

00:36:05 I'm not really in that business.

00:36:08 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 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 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 It's the logos. It's the Dharma. It's the Tao, right?

00:37:02 And then you have human beings who feel they have authority, which has to orient itself towards the Tao.

00:37:12 And then you have human beings who are trying to improve themselves morally.

00:37:16 And those things work together.

00:37:18 People who become dissatisfied with their own moral nature.

00:37:24 The famous example is Ashoka, right?

00:37:26 The founder of Buddhist kingship in India.

00:37:30 So he's a man who spent the earlier part of his life 0.99

00:37:32 slaughtering large numbers of people, millions of people.

00:37:36 And at a certain point, he had a conversion.

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

00:37:39 He couldn't bear himself anymore.

00:37:41 He felt the need to make restitution in some way.

00:37:44 He found the message of the Buddha, and he decided to create a Buddhist civilization.

00:37:49 So, I think the West did not invent that, right?

00:37:52 And I think that's a universal human, part of the story of human development as a whole.

00:37:58 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 but more importantly as law, under the authority of the Tao, that comes from human beings

00:38:19 in the mass, or at least a large number of human beings. There's something in human nature which

00:38:26 in itself authorizes, has the power to authorize a government. Maybe this is a little bit too

00:38:37 abstract. I'm not even sure I'm answering your question now.

00:38:40 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 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 And you had to contribute, and then as a result of your contributions, you received political power.

00:39:22 And the fundamental one in Greek society was fighting in the phalanx, right?

00:39:27 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 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 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 councils of government. And the reason is very simple. If you're in the assembly

00:39:55 and you vote for war. Two weeks later, you're standing in a line with 54 pounds of bronze

00:40:02 armor holding a shield and a spear, and you're covering the guy next to you, and you depend

00:40:09 on each other. And it's a very egalitarian formation, the phalanx, because there are no

00:40:15 heroes in the phalanx. Everybody marches together, and sometimes they run together

00:40:19 towards the enemy. So, that is, I think, a tremendous force for egalitarianism

00:40:24 in Greek society, but also for the idea that people need a voice. The state will,

00:40:31 this polis, the state will not be well defended unless people feel that they have a stake in the

00:40:38 system in some way. I mean, it's so funny you talk about it because I often think that many

00:40:43 of the problems of the modern time, and I'm not original in this thought either,

00:40:46 are caused by the fact that people are able to vote on things that they don't answer for

00:40:52 and have no consequences of. And so, the Greeks come up with this idea that because you offer a

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

00:41:06 heard about what the city should therefore do. So, it's a kind of two-way accountability system,

00:41:11 almost. That's for the Greeks. The Roman system is quite different. 0.97

00:41:15 How is it different?

00:41:17 So the Romans have a different system. 0.99

00:41:19 They start out exactly like the Greeks. 0.99

00:41:22 You're in the army, you pay taxes, 1.00

00:41:26 you show up at the assembly,

00:41:27 you have the right to vote.

00:41:29 They have a slightly different system

00:41:31 in that they give,

00:41:33 this is what differs,

00:41:34 how a republic differs from a democracy.

00:41:37 They give preponderant power,

00:41:39 decision-making power,

00:41:40 to the experienced generals,

00:41:47 the members of the Senate

00:41:48 who come, in many cases, from old families.

00:41:51 They have more wealth.

00:41:52 They have more stake in the system

00:41:54 just in economic terms.

00:41:55 So they get more decision-making power,

00:41:58 which is not true of Greek democracy.

00:42:00 But everyone ultimately gets a veto

00:42:02 in the form of an assembly.

00:42:04 However, the people are kept rather weak as a group.

00:42:08 and but what the romans are very good at is recognizing merit you know they did away with

00:42:15 the idea that political power should belong to particular families of old residents that's a

00:42:21 typical barbarian idea and they decided that if you contribute to the state get more power 0.85

00:42:27 if you um and you get more responsibility the more more you spend uh for armor and for

00:42:35 weapons and for, this is the so-called Serbian constitution, which was passed under King

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

00:42:50 a general maybe, or been fought in the army, and you've held office, then you deserve to have more

00:42:56 weight than the other people. So, Roman Senate consists of former magistrates, which is what we

00:43:02 should do in the U.S. Instead of, you know, if you're a billionaire, you can't buy yourself a

00:43:07 sentence. It's former magistrates. It's people who have governing and military experience.

00:43:15 And the people are protected under law. So, everyone has equality under law,

00:43:23 in principle, of course, to many violations in reality, as you would expect. But in principle,

00:43:27 The people have equality under the law, but power in the state is proportioned to genitas, dignity.

00:43:37 And dignity in the Roman sense means rank, that you enjoy rank because of your contribution to society.

00:43:45 You've been a magistrate, you've been a soldier, officer, and so forth.

00:43:49 So that's different from the democratic system.

00:43:52 and it's the republican system that has really inspired most of the pluralistic governments in

00:43:58 the west down to the founders of the american constitution who are founding a republic

00:44:02 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 again well we were just talking about the greek and roman systems and how they administered power

00:44:13 in contrast with purely who is strongest whose tribe is the most powerful etc now that's the

00:44:20 barbarian system, which is now being advocated by many people. The head man who runs the tribe

00:44:27 has his great generals or heads of the great clans, and he takes all the loot from the battle

00:44:37 and distributes it, and he gets power from that. He gets support from the people to whom he

00:44:43 distributes, and then all the heads of the clan. It's the spoil system, as we say in America.

00:44:49 It's the ethnic spoil system, if you will, or the tribal spoil system.

00:44:53 So the Romans started out with something like that.

00:44:56 They had a king and they had something like a spoil system.

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

00:45:03 But eventually they got the system of recognizing merit.

00:45:07 And also the idea of legal equality is tremendously important. 0.95

00:45:12 The Greeks were very bad at giving anything to people outside their polis. 0.89

00:45:18 They wanted to make a strong distinction between their state and everybody else. 0.62

00:45:24 And the Romans were very good at giving citizenship to people who were helping the Roman cause.

00:45:33 And it goes right back to Romulus and Remus, or it goes right back to the foundation of the Roman

00:45:37 kingdom, the kingship. Before they had the Roman Republic, they had a Roman kingship.

00:45:44 That you are defended by, your rights are defended only so far as, you know, I'm not getting very confused.

00:45:59 I'll have to scroll on to this.

00:46:01 Okay, on down.

00:46:01 So the Roman idea that everyone should be protected by the law goes back to the period

00:46:11 of extreme violence in Rome at the end of the 2nd century BC and the 1st century when

00:46:18 they had four decades of civil war.

00:46:20 And people saw powerful generals backed by armies seizing the property and even exile

00:46:29 and seaving the property of political enemies.

00:46:35 So the idea of rule by law is that the law is above politics.

00:46:40 That's the fundamental idea, that no matter what happens,

00:46:43 the law will protect you against anyone who tries to take away your property

00:46:49 just on sheer power.

00:46:51 And this is, I think, articulated best by Cicero in the first century,

00:46:56 but it goes back a century earlier.

00:46:58 It's a very powerful idea, and it's fundamentally a protection of property,

00:47:04 protection of citizen rights against powerful individuals.

00:47:08 But ultimately, the Romans, as I said, were very good at sharing legal equality with other groups.

00:47:15 First, they shared it with their allies in the area around Rome.

00:47:19 Then they shared it with the entire Italian peninsula.

00:47:24 Everyone got citizenship towards the end of the second century BC.

00:47:27 and the social wars. And ultimately in 212 AD, the entire population of the Roman Empire were

00:47:34 considered citizens protected by Roman law. That's really, I think, the fundamental glory of the Roman

00:47:41 Empire is the idea of protection of all citizens by law and recourse to a magistrate in cases where

00:47:49 you're not protected by law. And that's an ideal. It's an ideal that was often respected and sometimes

00:47:57 not respected. And it's unfair to say, look at this case, look at that case where the system

00:48:02 didn't work. But it's a tremendous idea, which is very powerful in Western history down to the

00:48:08 present day. And the idea that there are some citizens who have more power than others in the

00:48:14 legal system, that some people are, you know, legal inequality by procedural means and lawfare

00:48:21 and all this kind of thing we have today is a huge violation of the Western tradition of equality

00:48:26 under the law, and the law is no respecter of persons. Hope I'm not messing things up.

00:48:34 I'm trying not to pound on the table. No, it's good. Shows passion. It's great.

00:48:39 James, there is this idea, and shoot it down if you believe it's completely false,

00:48:44 but I'd be very interested to hear your opinion on it, that the Greeks were the true innovators.

00:48:49 They were the ones who created the ideas. They were the ones who had all the, we talked about

00:48:55 rhetoric and logic and everything like this. The Romans weren't the innovators. They took the 0.92

00:48:59 ideas, perfected them, and then spread them throughout the global, well, the known world

00:49:05 as it was at the time. Is that unfair? If you own gold, you probably bought it for the same reason

00:49:11 I did. Because you looked at what central banks are doing to currencies and decided you wanted

00:49:16 something they can't print. Good reasoning. But here's the thing nobody talks about after you

00:49:20 make that decision. Your gold is just sitting there. It's not doing anything. You're paying

00:49:25 to store it you're paying to insure it and in the meantime it earns precisely nothing until now what

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00:49:37 out something that once you hear it seems obvious but almost nobody in the gold world is doing it

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00:50:13 next step. Visit monetary-metals.com slash trigonometry or click the link in the description.

00:50:20 See how your gold can stop costing you money and start earning you more gold. That's

00:50:24 monetary-metals.com slash trigonometry. The Romans weren't the innovators. They took the ideas, 0.99

00:50:31 perfected them, and then spread them throughout the global, well, the known world as it was at

00:50:37 the time. Is that unfair? Yes. That's your answer. I think I saw your video with David Butterfield.

00:50:48 He was saying if you put all the Greek achievements on one side, the Roman achievements on the other

00:50:52 side, the Greeks would just break the scale. I think that that is to privilege innovation over

00:51:01 development. And I think it's not necessarily the case that the best, the Greeks are undoubtedly 1.00

00:51:09 brilliant. You know, I accept most of David's argument. I think he's right that the Greeks

00:51:13 are incredibly brilliant. They're more brilliant than any other ethnic group you can possibly

00:51:18 imagine, with the possible exception of the Jews when it comes to law, although that's a

00:51:24 clearly separate discussion. And it's, to me, very remarkable that the most talkative peoples

00:51:34 of antiquity are the Jews and the Greeks, and the most disputatious peoples of antiquity. 0.97

00:51:38 Some things never change. 1.00

00:51:41 Some things never change, right? But I think it's true that the Greeks are tremendously 1.00

00:51:45 geniuses, tremendous geniuses in things like the arts, and the Romans never quite caught up with

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

00:51:58 At some time around the time of Augustus, they discovered cement, and it just raised the whole

00:52:07 possibilities of architecture tremendously. The Romans had the arch, of course, and

00:52:13 if you look at Roman architecture and you look at Greek architecture,

00:52:18 Greek architecture is pretty boring.

00:52:20 I mean, it's beautiful.

00:52:22 But to build a whole city from the three orders of Greek architecture

00:52:26 and to have columns and temple fronts and so forth, it's just boring. 0.89

00:52:33 I mean, Hitler liked it. 0.99

00:52:34 Yeah, as I said. 0.73

00:52:37 QED.

00:52:39 Yeah, so that's actually quite true that the more uniform,

00:52:43 you know, you see all these government buildings today 0.91

00:52:46 that looked like they were designed by perverted Greeks, essentially, Greeks, unclothed Greeks. 0.91

00:52:53 But the Romans had tremendous infertility of invention. Granted that many of the architects 0.90

00:52:58 were of Greek origin, but nevertheless, it occurred in Roman times. The Romans, of course,

00:53:04 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 history of law will argue with this and say, no, the Greeks invented everything and the Romans just

00:53:15 systematized, but it's not true. The Romans developed a system of adjusting the interests

00:53:23 of the individual citizen caught in a legal problem with the interest of the state and

00:53:31 legal reasoning. Legal reasoning is the Roman invention. You can read, there are books filled

00:53:38 with, well, there's small books filled with the stories of Greek cases. And we have, you know,

00:53:45 the Greek orators who are often defending legal cases, public law cases, which are property cases.

00:53:52 And there's lots of interesting reasoning. They're very clever. But the Romans had this way of

00:53:57 developing a case. And they really invented the whole, if you meet someone who really has a legal 0.85

00:54:04 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 from logical reasoning. As we all know, it's different from philosophical reasoning. It's

00:54:13 different from scientific reasoning. It's its own thing. It's different from historical reasoning,

00:54:17 which is also its own thing. And it means weighing interests. And this is why I'm not a lawyer,

00:54:24 because I can't describe it well. My mother wanted me to be a lawyer. It means an application

00:54:32 of practical wisdom to a case. It's a complex algorithm, a way of applying different law,

00:54:41 applying the law, adjusting it to the case, figuring out what the good of the individual

00:54:46 is and what the good of the state is. You see it every day being discussed if you follow any of

00:54:53 these legal debates in modern America, that lawyers just don't think like the rest of us.

00:54:58 But lawyers are thinking in a way that's immensely constructive, I think.

00:55:02 It's not all pedophagogy, right?

00:55:03 It's not all, you know, trying to get away with things, trying to get people off.

00:55:08 That's what we tend to think of as legal reasoning.

00:55:10 People are trying to get people off of trying to cheat people in a legal way.

00:55:15 But there is a high calling, a noble calling of the law, which the Romans really invented.

00:55:20 And they had a series of great jurists in the late second and third century who basically founded Roman law.

00:55:27 who systematized Roman legal thinking.

00:55:30 And the book in which preserves their thinking,

00:55:35 called The Digest of Roman Law,

00:55:38 it's a collection of legal opinions by Roman lawyers.

00:55:42 That book taught legal reasoning to the West.

00:55:45 And it used to be taught even in law schools today.

00:55:49 Fewer and fewer law schools teach it,

00:55:51 but there are still many law schools that teach Roman law

00:55:53 as a way of teaching legal reasoning. 0.98

00:55:56 So I think the Romans really should get credit for that. 0.53

00:55:59 They are continuators. 0.88

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

00:56:08 The longest Greek empire might have lasted 300 years, something like that.

00:56:13 Some of the successes of Alexander lasted maybe 300 years.

00:56:17 But the Romans, they had a great military tradition.

00:56:20 This is something also that the Greeks were not good at.

00:56:22 The Greeks invented the phalanx.

00:56:24 They invented a military formation that could defeat any other civilization in Central Asia. 1.00

00:56:31 Egyptians, forget it. 0.99

00:56:32 The Greeks could beat them. 1.00

00:56:35 But the Romans could beat the Greeks. 1.00

00:56:36 That's fair enough. 0.78

00:56:37 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 Well, they learned how to do it.

00:56:43 The Romans were a just amazing military nation.

00:56:48 They, first of all, really believed in military virtue.

00:56:51 But they beat every kind of army.

00:56:53 They could win phalanx armies because they had the Roman legion, which is superior to the phalanx.

00:56:58 But they also fought mercenary armies.

00:57:02 They fought irregular armies.

00:57:05 They fought on land.

00:57:06 They fought on sea. 0.86

00:57:06 Every possible situation you can think of, the Romans could beat you.

00:57:11 They had a tremendous system of supply.

00:57:15 They knew everything about making fortresses.

00:57:18 They had a military empire, which is, you know, just impregnable if they just had people to defend it.

00:57:26 You know, military logistics were a Roman feature.

00:57:30 Many armies couldn't stay in the field for very long because they were dependent on ravaging, right?

00:57:36 And the Romans had military supply.

00:57:38 They had uniform weaponry.

00:57:41 It was just an amazing military nation.

00:57:44 And there were high ideals behind it. 0.99

00:57:48 So, this is a level of military superiority that the Greeks could never master, and that's 0.74

00:57:55 really one of the main reasons for the success of the Romans.

00:57:59 Over 2,000 years, if you consider Roman history, traditional dates, 753 BC, but the actual

00:58:07 date's probably sometime in the 600s, down to the end of the fall of the Roman Empire

00:58:13 in 476 AD, the Western Roman Empire, okay, that's 1,000 years.

00:58:18 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 That goes down to 1453, the fall of Constantinople.

00:58:29 So, really, you're talking about an imperial system that lasts for two millennia.

00:58:34 There's no other empire that has lasted that long.

00:58:39 The Chinese, if you take all the Chinese dynasties together, you've got 2,000 years.

00:58:42 So, those are the most long-lived civilizations that we have.

00:58:46 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 And we've spoken about the Greeks, we've spoken about the Romans, we touched on the Holy Roman Empire.

00:59:05 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 The Romans with the architecture, their knowledge of war.

00:59:16 right the law and then we've got the other component which is of course religion now

00:59:21 obviously the greeks and the romans were religious but when we talk about the west

00:59:25 immediately what we light upon is christianity so let's talk about the birth of christianity

00:59:31 how it was incorporated into the roman empire and then how it came to flourish right the way

00:59:36 through the west so we've done what have the romans ever done for us we've done what have

00:59:40 the greeks have ever done for us now we're doing what have the christians ever done for us

00:59:45 Absolutely, which I'm sure is being taught in Harvard at this point.

00:59:48 Yes, well, I have four more days till I retire,

00:59:51 and then it's not being taught at Harvard anymore.

00:59:55 I'm sorry to say.

00:59:56 All right, that's an exaggeration.

00:59:58 I'm taking too much.

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

01:00:03 Okay, good. 0.97

01:00:04 So, Christianity is a religion that worships a person executed by the Roman state.

01:00:16 It's a prophetic movement.

01:00:19 Jesus Christ, in some ways, the last of the Hebrew prophets.

01:00:22 He is prophesying a future state of perfection when God's kingdom will come back.

01:00:28 and he tells his followers that they have to behave perfectly

01:00:34 because only when they behave perfectly will God bring back the kingdom,

01:00:39 which is why God hasn't brought back the kingdom

01:00:41 because Christians still haven't behaved perfectly. 1.00

01:00:44 Anyway, so Christianity is a very small sect within Judaism.

01:00:52 There's a very controversial estimate that there are only 8,000 Christians

01:00:57 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 order of magnitude and there are 80,000 Christians, you've still got a very, very small group of

01:01:08 people. There are two or three million Jews by comparison. And then it's persecuted. Christians

01:01:17 refuse to engage in the Roman rites. They can't hold office as magistrates because they have to do 0.96

01:01:26 they have to sacrifice to the gods. They can't be full members of society. They tend to be

01:01:32 living in small ghettos or communities that are trying to hide from the authorities,

01:01:40 and they're persecuted at various times. And then suddenly in the late third century,

01:01:47 Christians start becoming really numerous, and it's because of the breakdown of Roman order. 0.97

01:01:53 they have this so-called crisis of the 3rd century 0.74

01:02:00 when the Romans can't keep an emperor on his throne

01:02:04 for more than a few months in many cases

01:02:06 and sometimes a few days.

01:02:08 I forget how many Roman emperors there are

01:02:10 in the late 3rd century, but there are 30 or 40 emperors.

01:02:13 They just can't.

01:02:14 Sounds like modern Britain.

01:02:17 This statement sounds like,

01:02:18 it used to sound like Italy,

01:02:20 but Italy is now better than modern Britain, I think.

01:02:23 more stable. So it's extremely unstable. The empire's unstable. It's hit by terrible plagues.

01:02:30 There's an economic collapse because every emperor wants to have an army. Every army has to have

01:02:35 money to be paid. The taxes are going up massively. They debase the coinage. The coinage is just

01:02:42 completely worthless by the end of the third century. And then finally, Rome pulls itself

01:02:47 together. But by this time, the Christians are incredibly numerous, which means that maybe 5% 0.97

01:02:52 of the population. That would be a big estimate. So they're in the millions.

01:02:58 So, and they've gotten into the army, they've gotten into

01:03:02 legislatures, they've gotten into the aristocracy even in some cases, and Domitian comes along.

01:03:11 I always do this. The Tetrarchy comes along. Diocletian, sorry, Diocletian. I would get 0.50

01:03:20 get to mission Diocletian next up,

01:03:22 which shows that I'm not a real Roman historian.

01:03:24 Tom Holland would.

01:03:26 Okay, so Diocletian comes along, 0.93

01:03:28 creates the new Roman system,

01:03:30 which lasts for a couple of centuries. 0.99

01:03:34 And the Christians are, he thinks, 0.95

01:03:38 and his co-emperors and co-caesars think, 0.98

01:03:41 is a threat. 0.82

01:03:44 So we've got to get rid of them.

01:03:45 They try to destroy them.

01:03:46 They try to wipe them out.

01:03:48 In a series of great persecution.

01:03:50 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 It doesn't work, right?

01:03:59 And it creates more sympathy for them than was thought. 0.78

01:04:05 So the Christians suddenly, from becoming a—from having been a persecuted minority worshiping a Roman criminal, they run the state.

01:04:17 Constantine converts Christianity. He declares Christianity the official religion of his dynasty.

01:04:25 And so, Christians are suddenly in charge. And so, the first reaction of many Christians is, 0.84

01:04:30 great, we're in charge. Kill the other one. Kill the bastards, you know. Lambs into lions, 1.00

01:04:36 right? That's the story. So, they want to wipe out the Roman civilization because Roman

01:04:42 civilization is bad. It's full of people who have slaves. It's full of people who have, 1.00

01:04:46 who are violent military people. They're cruel. They screw their slaves. There's absolutely no

01:04:52 punishment for men who take sexual advantage of their slaves. There's all sorts of things

01:05:00 morally wrong with Rome. So, some of the early Christians are saying, let's just wipe them out 0.88

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

01:05:10 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 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 They say, look, we can't get on without being able to write.

01:05:33 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 Well, maybe we should learn some rhetoric, some of the art of public speaking.

01:05:44 So, they preserve Roman culture, Greco-Roman culture, you really have to say.

01:05:49 And they, you know, they want to have their own version of it, which emphasizes the next life and so forth.

01:05:58 But they're basically preserving Greco-Roman culture.

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

01:06:03 So, you have this complex transformation of the Greco-Roman heritage, and it is intertwined

01:06:10 with the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that is really the basis of Western civilization

01:06:16 right there, right?

01:06:17 The splicing together of these two traditions, and, you know, they're quite different, morally

01:06:25 speaking, and it's very difficult.

01:06:26 It takes, you know, centuries, maybe even going on today in a certain way, for these

01:06:32 two, these complex elements in our civilization to figure out who's in charge, what's the best

01:06:38 way of ruling. The Romans create the first confessional state. That's what I call it in

01:06:46 this book. Confessional state is one that has an official religion, and other religions have

01:06:53 disabilities of various kinds. So, they don't do what the Muslims do. They don't, you know, 1.00

01:06:58 kill the apostates, they just take away all their money. But, you know, there are second-class 0.78

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

01:07:14 with some few exceptions, but they're usually not persecuted. But they make it very clear that

01:07:19 Christians are in charge, that you can't really hold office, you can't. They create an alternative.

01:07:26 they create a new power structure

01:07:29 let's put it that way

01:07:30 and

01:07:31 and

01:07:34 the process of trying to

01:07:36 negotiate between

01:07:38 Greco-Roman values

01:07:40 which values things

01:07:42 like

01:07:43 honor and glory

01:07:46 and contribution

01:07:48 to the country

01:07:50 and all these noble

01:07:52 Roman values and Greek values

01:07:54 come up in, bump up against the Christian idea of humility, right? A Christian's supposed to be 0.73

01:08:03 humble. The Romans don't really value humility that much. They, you know, Cicero, who is the

01:08:11 most popular Roman author of the Middle Ages, is not a humble guy. He's very vain, in fact. So,

01:08:18 but Cicero is a canonical author, and if you have a canonical author, you're supposed to imitate

01:08:23 the person, right? There's supposed to be a moral model. So, the long discussion between the

01:08:28 Christian and the Greco-Roman is, I think, just part of the civilization. It's never resolved.

01:08:34 We finally get rid of confessional states in the 18th century. The idea that a state should have 0.66

01:08:40 its own dominant religion doesn't go until the 18th century. So, it's a long period.

01:08:46 And the 18th century is still fighting over Greeks and Romans versus Judeo-Christians. A lot of the

01:08:52 Enlightenment is about trying to privilege the Greco-Roman heritage, especially the rationalism

01:08:59 of Greco-Roman heritage, over dogmatic versions of religion. So, I don't think it's fair to say

01:09:07 or correct to say that the Greco-Roman tradition ends and the Judeo-Christian one begins.

01:09:14 This is the great mistake, I think, of people like Voltaire and the Enlightenment who wanted

01:09:19 to paint the Middle Ages as a period of superstition, ignorance, violence. It's just

01:09:27 the Middle Ages is not that way. The Middle Ages, medieval scholasticism, places more value on

01:09:35 rationalism than any previous society. They have elements that come, obviously, from faith that

01:09:43 are not provable by reason, but there's also a tremendous reliance on law and reason.

01:09:51 They have the civil law of the Romans, which they elaborate into grand new structures,

01:09:57 and they have the canon law of the church, they have theology, and they're trying to

01:10:02 create this gigantic model of order based on reason, authority, reason, weaving together

01:10:08 reason and authority. So it's a highly rationalistic age. And the Renaissance, which I get

01:10:15 into at the end of this book, is in a way revolting against this sort of hyper-rationalism

01:10:20 of scholasticism. They're saying, you know, you scholastics can beat us in argument. You can beat

01:10:26 everybody in argument. That's what you do. That's what scholastics do. They argue. You put two

01:10:31 scholastics together, they argue. And no one's convinced, really. Some of the time you're

01:10:36 defeated. But, you know, they get up the next day and make the same argument. If you want to change

01:10:43 society, you have to affect people's imagination. You have to affect their emotions. You have to

01:10:51 give them a vision of what a good society would look like. You need to have literary imagination.

01:10:59 You need to have eloquence and eloquence in your language. That's how you change people.

01:11:05 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 They're trying to, in a way, give truth the weapons of the imagination, give truth the

01:11:24 weapons of beauty.

01:11:28 And there's the scholastics.

01:11:31 You know, you can say that scholastics had beautiful arguments, the way you have beautiful

01:11:37 mathematical arguments.

01:11:39 You read Aquinas in time, you say, wow, that's really good.

01:11:41 I mean, that just affects you as something that's just really brilliant to the point of giving you

01:11:48 a sense of beauty. But most of the time, not. Most of the time, not. And the Renaissance is

01:11:56 deeply concerned with beauty and with goodness and virtue, all those things which had been

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01:13:25 And you mentioned the Judeo-Christian tradition,

01:13:28 somewhat a contested term.

01:13:30 Some people think it's useful, some not.

01:13:32 What role, other than providing Jesus,

01:13:37 what role did Jews and Jerusalem play in the history of the Western tradition?

01:13:43 Well, Jesus' entire philosophy, well, not all of it,

01:13:47 but a good deal of his theology, if you can call it that,

01:13:52 his religious reform movement is based on Jewish tradition.

01:13:57 I mean, Jesus is constantly citing the Bible, right?

01:14:00 you can, I mean, there are people who have gone through all the statements of Jesus and found

01:14:07 Old Testament sources for them all. He has new elements. Is that right? I think so. That's

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

01:14:20 showcasing my ignorance, if nothing else. So, you're saying what Jesus was teaching was based

01:14:25 on the Old Testament? Yes. Fascinating. But he thinks that the Old Testament is going to be

01:14:32 replaced by the kingdom of God. But he says it won't change a jot or a tittle, which means

01:14:39 they're not going to change the punctuation of the Old Testament. It's going to be perfectly

01:14:43 preserved. But he's predicting a future age when it will be transcended in some way, because he

01:14:50 thinks that his message is, in some way, perfects the law, right? So, he'll say that,

01:15:00 I give you a new commandment, and you hear the sharp intake of breath from all the Jews present, 1.00

01:15:06 a new commandment? Guess where the other 10 came from, guy? So, what, you're God? You know, 1.00

01:15:13 I'll give you a new commandment.

01:15:17 And he thinks he has at least the authority of the prophets.

01:15:22 He's the Messiah, and he has a particular interpretation of that.

01:15:25 So he's a radical.

01:15:26 He's a theological radical.

01:15:27 There's no question about that.

01:15:29 But he's a radical within the Jewish tradition. 0.84

01:15:34 But all of the, you know, he's always trying to essentialize the Jewish tradition.

01:15:39 He says, what's the fundamental thing?

01:15:41 is, you know, love God and love your neighbor. Those are the two things you really have to

01:15:45 remember. Just, you know, Deuteronomy, all right, it's there, but if you just need like a,

01:15:54 you need an instant, short person's guide to being a good Jew, you should just love God and 0.78

01:16:03 love God and love your neighbor. That's all you really need to know. And you will naturally do 0.65

01:16:10 whatever the law is. So, he's a real radical. But I think it's quite, you start to realize

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

01:16:22 The early Christians loved the Psalms, and rightly so. The Psalms are incredibly beautiful. Sometimes 0.99

01:16:27 they're incredibly ugly and jarring, but they're often incredibly beautiful, and they survive

01:16:32 translation. That's the amazing thing about them. You can read a good translation of the Psalms

01:16:36 into English is deeply moving in a way that, you know, literature translated from other languages

01:16:42 often is not. And there were people like Marcion who wanted to get rid of Judaism, right? They

01:16:48 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 So Marcion wanted to do away with Judaism and just have a Christianity that was dependent on 0.83

01:16:59 Christ's message. And there are other people who wanted to say, let's make the Greco-Roman 0.66

01:17:06 philosophy, Greek philosophy part of Christian message. But the Christians, you know, they

01:17:12 settled down in the second century A.D. and they said, we are not Jews, we are Christians, but we

01:17:20 are based, our New Testament is based on the Old Testament. The old promises of God have been

01:17:26 superseded by the new promises of God in the New Testament. So, they have a very strong,

01:17:32 it's difficult to say because there's so many, so much friction between Jews and Christians

01:17:41 because they are a heretical movement from the point of view of Jews. So, there are lots of

01:17:48 nasty things that Christians say about Jews. And Jerome, who's a great defender of studying 0.89

01:17:53 the Hebraica Veritas, the truth of the Hebrews, he's really anti-Semitic, you know. So,

01:18:00 they have this respect for the Jewish Old Testament without having respect for modern

01:18:07 Jews, right? They think modern Jews have not listened to Christ's message. They're people

01:18:13 who are stiff-necked, right? That they won't change. They should change. They should hear

01:18:17 the truth of Christ. And if they don't change, there's something wrong with them. Maybe there's

01:18:21 a demon inside them. Maybe they're just proud or something. They have some kind of moral problem.

01:18:25 So, there's that kind of hatred that goes on. But there's also the recognition that,

01:18:29 You know, the Jews have had a message from God, too.

01:18:34 And the fact that they're not listening to our message doesn't take that away.

01:18:38 Okay. And then where do we go from Jerusalem?

01:18:44 Complete the story for us.

01:18:46 So I'm trying to understand what you mean by that.

01:18:49 Well, what I mean is you've got Athens, then Rome, then Christianity comes along.

01:18:55 How do we get from that to the modern day and, you know, the narrative of the West?

01:19:02 And that's in volume two.

01:19:03 You don't have to ask Gilso.

01:19:07 I have my views on that, too.

01:19:09 Well, I think that the Reformation changes everything. 0.66

01:19:14 Reformation. 0.74

01:19:16 What is the Reformation?

01:19:19 Another question that I could answer.

01:19:22 Well, the Reformation is, briefly, a revolt against the ecclesiastical polity of the Middle Ages.

01:19:29 What is ecclesiastical polity?

01:19:31 So, in the Middle Ages, you develop this very strange form of dual government,

01:19:36 where you had one authority over the human soul and one authority over the human body.

01:19:43 So, the Pope is in charge of the Church, which has his own law, has his own tax system,

01:19:48 his own hierarchy. It's a complete government, and it exists in every Christian state.

01:19:55 It's the only international institution aside from the empire. And then you have

01:20:02 lay society, which governs the body, this life, as opposed to the next life.

01:20:09 um it it um it has its laws its government its hierarchy its tax system no so it's a parallel

01:20:22 government it's a very strange situation i i have looked in vain for any other part of the world

01:20:27 that has the same situation i'm coming up to a to a major point okay so what happens in the

01:20:36 Reformations, they get rid of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Protestant countries, and they make

01:20:41 the king or the secular government the authority over religion. Ultimately, religion is privatized

01:20:50 in the 18th century, but in this period, we're talking about 16th, 17th, 18th century, early 18th

01:20:56 century, the state rules religion. So what happens? This is one of the big messages of the book.

01:21:03 Okay, so what does the medieval ecclesiastical hierarchy

01:21:08 have charge of in the Middle Ages?

01:21:11 Thought.

01:21:12 That means doctrine.

01:21:14 What is taught in universities, what's taught in school about religion

01:21:17 is the job of the church to oversee that.

01:21:26 Family, sex, religion, inheritance,

01:21:29 All those laws having to do with the regulation of human sexuality and marriage and adoption and inheritance.

01:21:42 All those rules are controlled by the church.

01:21:45 Third thing, economic life, right?

01:21:50 How you conduct moral transactions, what's considered usury, what's not considered usury.

01:21:57 how you can lend money to people without committing the sin of usury

01:22:03 how you can pass down money between generations

01:22:08 the organization of financial institutions

01:22:11 the church has charge over early banking for example

01:22:15 the banking system both the commercial banking system

01:22:21 and the private banking system.

01:22:31 That's all under control of the church. 0.87

01:22:32 So what happens in Protestant lands

01:22:34 when you take all those authorities away?

01:22:38 Liberalism, right?

01:22:39 Intellectual freedom,

01:22:41 freedom of sexuality and family,

01:22:43 economic freedom.

01:22:45 So that's my big contribution

01:22:47 to the origins of modernism.

01:22:50 Reformation has a lot to do with liberalism, which precedes the revival of democracy in the late 18th century.

01:23:00 So the modern world is shaking off the bonds of religious law and making religious law for itself.

01:23:07 First, that falls under the power of the secular state.

01:23:11 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 So the economic freedom of the modern world, the sexual and family law of the modern world,

01:23:41 and the intellectual freedom of the modern world come out of the Reformation ultimately,

01:23:46 which is then radicalized by the Enlightenment.

01:23:49 I was astonished recently when I was investigating this stuff with my class,

01:23:54 and I discovered that adoption was only legally permitted in the 19th century in France,

01:24:00 or early 20th century.

01:24:01 I forget the exact name.

01:24:03 But I thought adoption.

01:24:04 Everybody has adoption.

01:24:05 Romans had adoption.

01:24:07 But the medieval law prohibits adoption.

01:24:12 So that has a huge impact on the way society is organized, right?

01:24:19 And it means that they prohibit cousin marriage

01:24:23 and all sorts of things that has a huge impact on this.

01:24:26 I don't know if you've seen this book called

01:24:27 The Weirdest People in the World.

01:24:30 I forget the name of the author.

01:24:32 Joseph Heinrich, is it?

01:24:33 That's right.

01:24:33 He's a colleague of mine in, I think, one of the other schools.

01:24:38 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 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 And I would add the church, right? Because if you're a family trying to preserve its wealth

01:25:04 and you can't marry your cousin or you can't have your brother marry your dead brother's wife,

01:25:13 which the Romans also did, that's also prohibited by canon law. Then you have to find some other

01:25:19 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 kids into the church so how power can help you, right? So it's a very interesting social

01:25:31 transformation that takes place as a result of medieval Christianity. But I'm not really an

01:25:38 expert on that. I know enough to write a textbook about it, but there's a bibliography that people

01:25:44 are interested in to go further. But anyway, but that's where I put the origins of the modern

01:25:50 world. And, of course, the radicalization of politics, egalitarianism, is also a Christian 0.52

01:25:56 thing because the ancient West, egalitarianism basically comes from Jewish thought, right,

01:26:05 from the Jewish, from Deuteronomy, where there's an equaling of, it's kind of more

01:26:13 distributivist than egalitarian. There's a redistribution every few years, every Sabbath, 0.67

01:26:20 and then every 50 years, every 49 years of property within the Jewish people. 0.89

01:26:26 So, and there's, of course, the early Christian ideas of equality. 0.79

01:26:30 It's in the Bible.

01:26:33 But that stays within radical Christian communities.

01:26:38 That type of egalitarianism, as applied to social life,

01:26:41 stays within radical Christian communities.

01:26:44 The equality that the Romans have and the Greeks have

01:26:46 is equality of citizenship, equality under the law. 0.76

01:26:50 It's a different type of equality altogether.

01:26:52 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 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 It becomes a process of making equal.

01:27:17 So that, I think, is also Christian in origin.

01:27:20 And that's how we've got to where we are.

01:27:22 James, I wish we had another three hours to talk about it, but our time is up.

01:27:26 Thank you so much for coming on.

01:27:28 Final question, as always, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

01:27:33 The fragility of the golden thread.

01:27:36 It's absolutely amazing how close we got to losing major parts of our tradition.

01:27:41 The works of Aristotle that we read today survived in a single box of scrolls down until

01:27:49 the first century B.C.

01:27:53 If that had burned up, no Aristotle.

01:27:56 And it was only because some people figured out that it was valuable that they started

01:28:02 copying it again.

01:28:04 I mentioned before the Digest of Roman Law.

01:28:07 okay that's the most important source for our knowledge of legal thinking in the roman empire

01:28:15 the basis of all western legal thinking that was down to one manuscript in the 11th century

01:28:22 and it became the basis of legal education in the 12th century was just rediscovered studied

01:28:28 copied uh but it almost was lost there are many works like this there are three copies of plato

01:28:34 left and complete works of Plato left in the 14th century. There's one copy of Catullus left

01:28:39 in the 14th century. What happens is that somebody realized they were valuable and wanted to save

01:28:45 them. There were scholars out there who said that this is something we need to keep going.

01:28:54 This is something which will help us to revive our civilization, something that will help us

01:28:58 to have a Renaissance or a Reformation. We need this thing now. And there were scholars who,

01:29:05 and people of goodwill who said, the tradition's valuable. We have to keep it going. Let's copy

01:29:12 the manuscript. Let's teach it. Let's teach people to love these texts again. Let's teach people to

01:29:17 love Catullus and Horus and Virgil again, because if we don't, we'll lose it. It's not just the

01:29:25 text itself, it's the love of the text and the ability to read the text and understand the text.

01:29:30 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 us. James, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure.

01:29:55 You

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TRIGGERnometry - August 12, 2026

The Rise and Fall of Western Civilisation- Professor James Hankins

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Transcript