Straight, No Chaser
Understanding Freedom through Money, Technology, Economics and Philosophy
Straight, No Chaser
Gerhard Wolmarans - If It’s Not 200 Years Old, I'm not Interested
The news cycle says crisis; history says pattern. We sit down with political philosopher and lecturer Gerhard Wolmarans to test whether our moment is truly exceptional or simply another liminal passage where the old order fades and the new hasn’t yet taken shape. From Rome to Mali, the Glorious to the French Revolution, Gerhard traces how change arrives—sometimes as a flood, sometimes as a slow thaw—and why the health of politics often decides whether societies reform or fracture.
We dig into the mechanics that keep a country steady: a capable state that can actually deliver, the rule of law that binds even rulers, and real democratic accountability that keeps power from curdling. Along the way, we wrestle with Aristotle’s timeless challenge: people want the good life, but cooperation at scale is hard—especially in diverse, mobile, secular societies where shared moral anchors are less obvious. Gerhard argues that wise leadership starts with reading context accurately, learning from the past without chronological snobbery, and prioritising with moral clarity.
Then we zoom out to the big board: shifting demographics, the staying power of the US, the ascent of China and India, a growing Africa, and a likely future that’s plural rather than dominated by a single hegemon. Layer on AI and robotics—threatening both specialised cognitive work and manual labour—and the stakes sharpen. Gerhard's bottom line is simple and demanding: centre human dignity, acknowledge human complexity, and build institutions that tame power and enable flourishing. If we get that right, a liminal age becomes a launchpad, not a cliff.
Enjoyed the conversation? Follow and share the show, leave a review, and tell us: which historical lesson do we most need to relearn today?
Reach out to Gerhard Wolmarans on the University of Pretoria staff page.
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Hello everybody and welcome to the show. This is the Straight No Chaser podcast where we talk about human freedom through money, technology, economics, and philosophy. Today we have an amazing guest, my friend Harold Wolmer. Harrod is a university lecturer that lectures on politics. Now I know what you're gonna say. Oh heaven, please help me, not another talk about politics. Well, in Harold's world, he simply says if it's not at least 200 years old, I'm not interested. And that is an amazing way to view it. So he looks at rise and fall of empires and political changes over hundreds and thousands of years. This is not a current affairs party political talk. It's just a fascinating look back over time, what we can learn from history, and how we can use that to possibly help us going into the future. Such a great chat. I know you're gonna love this one. Today we have my good friend Harott Volmerans joining us. Um it's been an absolute pleasure, and uh I'm glad that you have been able to find time on your busy schedule. Harrod, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Gavin, uh it's it's an absolute privilege, right? Great to be with you today.
SPEAKER_00:Uh Harott, um for people that may not know you, uh you are the first-time guest on the show. Could you um just give us a little bit about your your sort of background?
SPEAKER_01:All right. Well, uh currently I um I teach uh uh political science at the uh at university. I've been uh almost 30 years I've been in academia teaching in the uh political sciences, and um I've uh actually my field in political sciences isn't necessarily the day-to-day politics, but it's a sub-field of uh the political sciences. Uh, we call the history of political thought or um political theory or political philosophy if you want to. So um I teach uh some of the bigger ideas behind the political and how we live together as human beings. So I love teaching, I teach um students from first year level to PhD level. Uh uh, and um I've been doing this for about three decades, as I mentioned, and I and I really enjoy doing this.
SPEAKER_00:That is amazing. Um, so Herrt, I must say, um, your your favorite uh well, uh a comment that you once made to me, which is stuck in my head and it's one of my favorite all-time comments, was um, you said to me, as far as history goes, if it's not at least 200 years old, I'm not interested. And uh I think it's such a brilliant line, and I'm certainly going to make that the title of the show. So my question to you is just to kick the conversation off, um, I guess every every generation seems to have a crisis, or there's something going on, there's some big hot international global issue of the day. Um, my question to you is looking at history over such a long time frame as you do, um do you think that our current generation, what we are experiencing right now, is any different from uh uh history in the past? Or are we actually at some kind of intersection of big shift um globally, internationally, you know, rise and fall of empires kind of thing? Um how do you see it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, I I think um we we always recognize that we as humans we have a a lifespan of 80, 90 years, right? And um life is very intense as we experience it in our in our direct circumstances around us, but um uh so there is a sense that we uh experience our daily reality very intensely and as very actual. And um, but if one looks at the longer uh uh uh time frames, right, we we recognize that uh uh our our global situation, our lives here on this planet are always to some extent in flux. It is very seldom stagnant. So so change is definitely a constant, always, right? Change is a constant as to how we experience life as individuals, as we age, as we go through different stages of lives, but also then as as uh communities and societies, right? Things aren't stagnant. We we are learning creatures, we grow in in how we engage with life around us. So so there's change is is constant, right? And I know that um we have this sense of at our present juncture in time, right here in 2025, there's a lot of things happening, right? There's there's definitely a lot of things happening, and on the one hand, I can say, well, there's always things happening, and societies are always changing. Um, but we are right at a time where a lot of things are actually um seemingly we're experiencing a situation where the old is receding and that we're entering new phases uh uh of life, and we don't quite yet know what this new is gonna be like, right? But we we seem to have a sense in which global balances of power are shifting, right? We've uh we uh went through a time, especially after World War II, where we've had a very dominant superpower. For a time there was the Soviet Union as well as well, that was a second like in superpower, but we've had this era of American dominance, and gradually we are seeing new actors also arising on the world stage, like China and India and US to a certain extent, um, not necessarily economically yet, but politically retreating from the world a little bit, right? And um, so things are changing politically, right? We could, of course, in the realm of technology, right? We we we we're aware of all these changes, most notably now with AI entering into the scene, and we don't quite know how it's going to impact us. So these are definite uh that there are definite signs of shifts and changes coming, right? Um, but um whether it is the most unstable time ever in world history, I don't necessarily think uh that, right? So um there uh uh we are at a time where where a lot of things change, but I don't uh I wouldn't necessarily uh say that it is a a full-on crisis, right? It is definitely what we call a liminal space, an in-between space where the old is passing away and the new is coming, but we don't know yet how it's going to manifest. So there's a uh it is a liminal space, I would say, in terms of our history.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Um so could you give one or two examples uh in the past where this has happened at uh a big scale um and how things panned out? Um, you know, I'm sort of thinking, uh, you know, I suppose the fall of the Roman Empire was pretty horrendous for the Romans, but maybe um not so much for the rest of the Europeans at the time, and maybe some people didn't even know that the Roman Empire even existed and it had collapsed and they just carried on life as normal.
SPEAKER_01:Um so it's quite yeah. No, so it's interesting. Yeah, there's always these these changes. We we we we we definitely have uh things where empires come and empires fall, right? We even have civilization civilizations that arise and then collapse, and throughout history, there's been various such civilizations that have arisen and collapsed, right? Um uh uh things that uh uh for a period of time seem to dominate the landscape, but then it disintegrates and fall away. We can think of uh uh on almost every continent, right? We had, for example, in the Mesoamericas, there's been the Incas and the Aztecs, right? We've had um in Africa, there was the Shongai and the Mali empires, just to mention two, right? And um uh uh of course in the Middle East, right? You had Sumerian, the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the the Medes and the Persians, right, and all come and go, right in Asia. There's been also uh uh the Khmer's in uh and Cambodia, right? And um uh these empires that arise that are so prominent and then collapse and disappear um to the point where people don't even remember that it existed, right? So we've uh uh you mentioned the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire, of course, was a very dominant uh for about a thousand years, right? From the 700 uh BCE to about, depending on where you you put the final fall, whether it is in the 400s or in 1453 in the fall of Constantinople, right? It was this uh uh very influential empire that then collapsed. And there was a time of um change when uh uh a new reality started to emerge, and um so change are definite, right? That that you get these major shifts that happen. I think one of the prominent revolutions that one can mention in the world in a revolution is basically uh where there's been such a rapid change in a short period of time. We can refer to things such as, I think very influentially, the industrial revolution, right? The industrial revolution, where um in a in a short period of time humanity has uh changed the way it produces, the way it changed its techniques of production, and that has had huge impacts on how societies function. It had a huge impact on ideas, for example, right? And um, so these revolutions are definitely um uh uh we can identify a number of them. Politically, we we can talk about um things such as the the British Glor Glorious Revolution, we can talk about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the American Revolutions, where uh some of those were more focused on specific societies that had uh big changes in them. But um, so it is part of this dynamic of society changing. So it is it is quite interesting if you look at our own context, our own time, in the light of some of these significant shifts, right? Then we realize it is part of the human condition to live through change. And we maybe at this point in time, um, someone of my age, we would we were we were very fortunate, both in South Africa and in um in globally, to have lived actually in times of significant peace, right? In the sense that um in South Africa since 1994, there's been uh a lot of stability and not war or fighting, right? There um globally, we've had this long peace since World War II, right, where there was globally not any major wars between the dominant players of the world. Yes, there's been uh uh various wars and conflicts, but it's actually been a period of of tremendous stability, right, uh uh in the world uh uh at a large scale. And um, but now we are starting to realize, but hang on, there's there's quite some changes on the horizons. How will the rise of China impact the world? How will uh technological shifts impact the world, demographic shifts and uh people movements, how will that impact the world? So um we we realize we're in for some changes going forward.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so you said so much there, and there's so much I want to ask you about that. Um the the first thing is you mentioned revolution, uh, which you know, something a change that happens quickly, I suppose might be a way to mention that. Um how would uh the rise and fall of empires is I'm guessing something that happens slowly over time? Uh revolution happens quickly, but are there any similarities between the two? So maybe another way of asking the question is what causes empires to rise and fall? And then what causes revolution? And are they the same things? Uh maybe the revolution just happens faster. And if it does, why does a revolution happen faster?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, sure. Gavin, you ask easy questions, right? And they're wonderful questions. Um, but there's so much involved that it's it's really a very pertinent question because um one of the reasons why we try to understand why uh revolutions happen or why change or collapse or decay in systems happen is because we want to try and avoid it, right? Um, because often these changes um they can be very destabilizing and come with a lot of conflict, right? And I'm not necessarily saying that we should avoid change, because sometimes change is absolutely necessary, because change can also be some change towards something better. But what one wants to avoid is um is collapse and decay and anarchy setting into a system, right? Where um uh because uh often if you have a civilization or or or a or an empire or some kind of ruling mechanism over a bunch of people, right, it creates a way of life and a settled manner of doing things and a form of stability. And often, if it collapses, there will be a time of disorder before a new order emerges out of it. And and um so at a minimum, you you don't want to to uh uh go into a revolution or or a major change in your society um just for the sake of changing things, because it can often cause a lot of disorder, right? And and and people suffering, right? But change isn't necessarily bad. I just put that as a as a footnote there, right? So, but why do changes happen, right? So let me say two things. On the one hand, there can be internal things in a system, in a in an empire, in a civilization that causes change, or there can be external uh uh uh aspects that cause change. A lot of societies or a lot of civilizations in the world have often collapsed because of simple environmental change, right? If we want things at a very small scale, the story of Easter Island, where they destroyed the vegetation on the island and the whole civilization there collapsed. Um, if you think of some of the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations like Sumeria, right, it was changes in the in the uh um environmental patterns in what we we call Turkey today that caused a change in in the flow of water down the Tigris and Euphrates River, right? That eventually led to greater drought and instability in the society, right? That also had a that that were one of served as one of the triggers for the collapse of that uh society, right? So internal and external. So external is often things that you can't control. It can be outside invaders that came in, but internal is the interesting one, right? Because here it may be helpful, and I'm gonna position the debate a bit more in our uh more recent context, so not the very old civilizations, right? Is and that is that we have to understand the nature of politics. I want to make a distinction between politics and government, right? Um, every civilization, no matter how far you go back in history, any people grouping or grouping of people from kinship groups to tribes to chieftains to states, empires, kingdoms, they all have a form of ruling. There's some kind of leadership structure or ruling authority in the in the society, whether it's patriarchal or representative or whatever, right? But um not every society had politics, right? So um government and and politics is not synonymous. Today it may be, but not throughout history. Politics is simply a process that a society follows to try to resolve conflicts or resolve disagreements without resorting to violence. I'm sure you've heard of the saying where uh where you say, let's find a political solution to this problem, because we don't want a military solution. It's as though those are the two options. So a political solution is let's talk about it, let's see if we can come to some compromise, the different factions in the society, let's see if we can come to some compromise and um so that we don't have to fight. And um, so a political solution is a way of dealing with internal disagreements in a society, right? Where um if there's different factions that have different interests or different ways, uh things they want to do, they go into this process of a battle of ideas or a battle of policies as to how to attend to these problems. If they don't find a solution, if they don't come together and there's a complete breakdown of trust then between them, it can often result in violence then, where the different factions become so separated that they end up fighting with one another, because you know, how else will you have your interest asserted if there's no way of finding a compromise or some kind of consensus? So um, one of the things that often cause breakdown in systems is that if the political process fails, right? I remember um when the Syrian civil war broke out, you know, more than a decade ago, right? Um uh one commentator said that all the fighting that broke out there in Syria was not the result of ancient hatreds, it was a result of a failure of politics. Because in every society, we're always going to have differences and different groups of people that have different interests or different ways they want to do things, and it's politics is about finding ways for them to get together and find a solution to their problems, right? So um, but um so if one looks at collapse or decay in a system, yes, there's a whole bunch of external factors, global economics, uh global um environmental realities, population movements. There's so many factors that we can take into consideration. But one thing that is very important is that the internal role players in a society in a society, or you always there's always a level of agency. There's always some choices that can be made. So um we have to find ways of making good choices or appropriate choices in how to address these problems, right? Coming together, getting everybody on board, or sufficient people on board to how to address these challenges. If that process fails, then it makes the stability of the system uh much more in doubt, right? And you will be more susceptible to all these external challenges that will face your society.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:So so I mean that makes a lot of sense to me. Um, you know, uh sharing ideas, uh, people with conflicting ideas coming together and trying to find a resolution. Um there's a great uh saying. Um I'm not sure who coined the phrase, and it's not mine. I I've just heard it and I liked it. Um and the the phrase goes, uh freedom of speech is important, so our words can go to war and die, so our bodies don't have to. Uh and I think that's the political versus you know military example there. Um so then uh if politics plays such an important role, um would you be able to comment on empires that seem to last longer than others? Uh did their politics work better? Or how did some empires last longer than others? I suppose is probably the short question. And is there something we can learn from that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, no, look, it's always uh it's always uh so many variables that play in to a large part, it can just be luck, right? That you live in a time of great environmental stability, right? Um uh or it can be um uh and it but but it can be also sensible engagement with the realities that confront you as a society and managing it wisely, right? So, as I always say, that uh a very good shorthand definition of wisdom is uh a competence in dealing with the complexities of life, right? So you want ideally you want wise leaders and um wise people that could that can make the necessary decisions as to how to confront with the challenges society poses uh to you. And um the um the Renaissance political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli, right, um he he thought a lot about what would be what what are the characteristics of a good statesman, right? That can make wise decisions or good decisions and that can navigate uh his republic or his principality as it was during his times through difficult times. And he he said that um uh political uh leaders, uh statesmen, as in his time, right, um were always confronted by um fortune, right? Uh fortune in the sense of um you didn't know you you had you you couldn't predict always how what's going to happen. He said it's like running a state is like living next to a river, right? You never know what's going to happen. One year the river may be very dry, right? And you you might almost have no water and you have to adapt to that circumstances. The next year, suddenly here comes this flood down the river, right? And um now you have to manage that. So you have to be able to deal with whatever thing uh uh fortune throws across your path, right? So it's that practical, just think on your feet type of competency in dealing with uh challenges, right? Whatever challenges arise in your uh situation. So it's interesting that in the the history of political ideas, there was a long period of time where the focus was on trying to cultivate and educate wise princes or wise kings or or rulers, right, to make them virtuous, right? And um uh so a lot of thought went into what type of education they should receive, what type of exposure they should receive. Because in those days, if you had a good king, things would really go well in your society. A benevolent king that was wise, that made good decisions, that was a good military leader, right, could defeat all his enemies and were kind to his people, that was a wonderful thing. Then life would be well with everyone. But the problem was if the next king, if the good king dies and the next king comes in his place, right, that guy may be a rogue and uh everybody suffers then. So people realize hang on, we gotta you know think carefully how we can cultivate or nurture our our aristocracy so that they can be good leaders, right, for us. But gradually over time, we we we saw a shift, moving away from what was called the virtuous prince literature, right? And probably in European thought it was roughly around about the 1600s, right? Maybe with someone like Machiavelli, but also someone like Thomas Hobbes, where um they seem to realize that you're never going to be able to fully control the king or predict the quality of the how virtuous your next ruler will be. So let's not focus on the ruler, let's focus on the institutions in which he functions. Let's try and create stable institutions, proper processes and procedures in a society that can uh ring fence a bad leader and be enabling enough for a good leader to effectively use to fulfill his functions. So we see a shift in focus to the building of strong institutions. And that was one of the key things in creating uh a stability in societies is strong institutions, right? Institutions that can channel uh political power in constructive things into constructive things. So uh let me uh maybe mention some of the three big institutions, right, that were created globally, right, to try and entrench uh uh uh good governance, right? Ensure a stable, prosperous state in which people can live a free life to live out the opportunities, right? Um you know, such a wonderful place, right? It sounds so great. But the three institutions were, and and one can go into incredible depth in each of these, the three institutions were you need a strong centralized state, right? You need a good state, right? Um, that can effectively govern, provide good services, right, provide uh provide safety, right, uh, for its people. But the problem with uh a state is that it and by state I really mean government, a strong central government, right? A strong uh ruler, be it a king or a prince or a whoever, right, uh, or a chief or a sultan, right? Um that elite uh uh can often start to abuse their power, right? So you have a great king that does well, but eventually power corrupts. And we all remember Lord Acton's famous statement where he says power tends to corrupt, but absolute power corrupts absolutely, inevitably that power is gonna corrupt. And if you want to, we can we can address the question, but why does power corrupt people? Right. But then so you but so you need a good state, but then quickly it was realized that you need to also ensure that that power is not used for selfish uh for selfish purposes uh by the ruler. So they developed things such as the first thing was the idea of the rule of law, that was the second major institution that was created, right? And the rule of law doesn't necessarily mean a gov uh a society governed by laws, there's always been that, right? What you mean by the rule of law is that law is the highest uh uh uh uh instrument in the society, that even the king, even the most politically powerful rulers in a society need to be subject to the law, right? That if that is the case, then you have rule of law, then the law rules in your society. And um that gradually emerged uh over time. Most of the roots of the idea of rule of law is to be found in religion, right? Where this idea, yes, the king is is important, but there's even a higher authority above the king, which is God, right? So um we saw it emerge in Europe during the uh uh uh we saw it emerge in Europe and also in India, right, which had a separate priestly class above the military class or then the ruling class. And um, so that's the second mechanism that was developed. The first one was you need a strong, capable, effective, central state. Secondly, you need rule of law, and that places a bit of a fence around the power of the elite so that they don't abuse it. And then the third instrument that was created in order to aid the rule of law was the idea of representative government, or we would say democracy, where the where the rulers are held accountable by the populace, uh by the people. So those three institutions, centralized state, um uh the rule of law, and the um uh democratic governance or democratic accountability mechanisms, those three institutions, right, coming together in an effective, well-balanced way, is probably currently one of our best answers uh from a political development perspective as to how to create a stable society. Please note I haven't touched on economics, right? That is also a vital part, right, is that, but just from a political development perspective, Uh uh angle. Um those three things, those three institutions appear to be one of the uh uh clearest or or most helpful mechanisms that one can have in place to ensure longer-term stability in a society, not just for a couple of years, not just for one generation, but if you can get this compound effect of stability over time from one generation to a next to a next, then you that stability just uh uh creates uh just such fertile ground for human flourishing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's um I mean what you're saying uh uh it just sounds I I've heard it said uh in a similar way, and maybe it's sort of repeating what you've said. But uh a guy I listened to a while ago, he said uh he himself wasn't a Christian or a Christian believer, but he said there can be no doubt that the West, Western civilization was built on Christian principles. Um and I mean you look at Europe, I suppose, and the old colonized countries, the USA, uh Canada, Australia, all that sort of thing. Um so it does sound like there was some kind of a common culture, common uh hierarchy as to how people thought and uh the way people behaved. Um but now it seems, and this is maybe more recent times, uh those sort of structures don't seem to be performing that well. Is that a fair statement?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that um um we have always uh uh let me put it this way, right? And um one of the one of the greatest philosophers that contributed to the development of political thought was the Greek guy by the name of Aristotle, right? And Aristotle was actually the one that came up with the concept politics, right? And um, but he said that um you can understand uh political thinking by three three realities or three realizations, right? The first is that people want the good life, right? People don't want it to go bad with them, they want a good life. It seems that life can go in one or two directions and go horribly wrong, but ideally it would go wonderfully well. People want the good life. But the second realization uh uh Aristotle had was that in order to have the good life, you need to cooperate on a relatively large scale with one another. You can't just have the good life here in your own little neck of the woods, right? Part of the good life are things such as security, living in a stable society, right? Living in a well-structured environment, right? And for those things, you need to cooperate on a relatively large scale, especially if you also then start to look at things such as economic production. To develop goods at a sufficiently high level that it can impact the quality of people's lives, you need to cooperate. You need to specialize. Some need to specialize in different things, right? So people need to cooperate. That's the second insight Aristotle had, right? Um, you need to cooperate on a relatively large scale in order to achieve the good life. And then the third insight he had was to do this is very difficult, right? To cooperate, to get people to work together, to cooperate on a sufficiently large scale, that you can generate the good life is difficult, right? It is very difficult. So politics in itself is always challenging, right? But um in order to understand what the good life is, even if we just go back to that first uh realization of his people want the good life. Yes, people want the good life, but people have very different understandings of the good life as well, right? What entails the good, right? So you can break it down to bare bones, right? And just say that people want uh uh to they want to have food to eat, they want to have shelter, they don't want to feel an imminent threat of death, right, by some foreign invader or some criminal, right? And people want to uh uh just survive. You can have a survival definition of the good life, but uh uh humans aren't satisfied with just that. We have higher ideals as well. We want to live out our creative potential, we have talents, we have dreams that we want to live out, and that for us becomes a very integral part of what we mean with a good life, right? Now, the interesting thing is that um for a long time in in history, people didn't move around so much throughout the globe, right? People basically stayed in the place where they were born and grew up, right? They stayed in the in the very small uh horizon of active uh uh movement, right? That they stayed. But uh, and and one of the results of that is that people developed common ways of life, right? It was everybody around you basically had the same value system, the same uh appreciation of what makes a good life, right? Yes, people have different dreams and so on, but but basically everybody had the same moral framework largely. But as societies become more mobile, right, and we become exposed through communication technologies to very different ways of life, then all that stability becomes a bit more problematic. Um, and um so it becomes uh contested spaces, right? What is the good life? And if you want to fast forward to our time today where we our societies are increasingly very diverse, right? Uh people from different ethnic groups, different religious persuasions, right, um, different um uh uh cultural linguistic backgrounds, right, increasingly sharing uh space together, right? So um that consensus that societies often relied on now becomes challenged. And that creates a lot of stability. There was a long time in human history that we uh anchored our moral certainties in universal principles such as it that's how God created things, or there was an agreement as to what is the normative order in which we found ourselves. It that the world was a given, right? The world was given this is the way the world is, this is the way God made it, this is what it means to live a good life. Yes, you have a choice, but if you defect from this way, you it life is not going to go well with you. So there was an agreement, right? But as we've become secularized more as societies have started to push God further and further away, a lot of those certainties started to disappear. And we try to anchor it in ideas such as natural law or um or uh just human utility, and and these days it is uh largely a lot of our moral engagement of the world in general is simply what feels right, right? Because we have nothing more to anchor uh uh these normative standards in our moral certainties in than in sentiment, right, as um was said. So um so it it creates a lot of those certainties of the world, right, are no longer the the the the default assumption pattern of so many people. So how do we create some form of uh uh cohesion? How do we create some form of commonality that a society can function together? That becomes a uh a big further question uh uh to to maybe consider.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. So um, I mean that got me thinking about something you said earlier, and that is uh wisdom. Uh and you used the example of you know um being next to a river and you have no guarantee one year to the next, what the situation may be, but whatever it is, you have to deal with it. Uh talk to me a little bit more about this word wisdom. I mean, what does it actually mean? Um and yeah, how does it how does it show up in leaders uh that seem to do well for their people uh versus leaders that don't seem to do well? Um is it does it come down to a wisdom issue or or does it become a selfish issue? Uh I know you mentioned earlier that you know you have the uh the benevolent king, uh that's wonderful if you have that. Uh if you don't have that, not so wonderful at all. Uh, but it does seem to revolve around this wisdom issue. So maybe you can talk a bit more about that. What do you mean by wisdom?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yes. As my my my go-to definition of wisdom is is competence in dealing with the complexities of life, right? So so you there uh wisdom. One of the things that uh uh uh and I'm thinking, of course, in terms of uh of uh uh leaders of of societies, right? One of the things that a wise leader will uh uh have within him or her is this ability to understand the situation they find themselves in, that they have an accurate understanding of what is going on. What is the challenge that you need to respond to, right? Um, and and usually it's not just one challenge, that's it's one of the it's one of the wonderful things of a national leader is you have multiple challenges that you have to to deal with and you have to prioritize which is the most important thing. So so one thing I would say that is always uh uh evident within uh uh great leaders, leaders that have the uh almost this capacity to continually make the right choice, right? Um, is this ability that they accurately understand the situations in which they find themselves, right? It doesn't help you respond to a fictitious situation, right? Um uh uh something that uh uh a misunderstanding, right, of a situation. So I would say one of the the key things that you need is an accurate awareness of what's going on and understanding. So one of the one of the important things that we in the humanities, political sciences is part of the humanities, right? One of the key things of the humanities, right, um, disciplines such as history and sociology and philosophy and anthropology and the languages and so forth, right? One of the key things that we always emphasize is that context matters, right? You have to understand the context in which you find yourself. And um, one of the things of context is that context is not just um the now, right, and all the variables that play into a situation now, right? It is also you have to understand where something comes from, right? You have to understand the the history of something, uh of why things develop the way they are currently and why the situation is as it is. So you have to have an appreciation of history, and that is where um uh in my field, which is the history of ideas, right, we always go back to try and understand, but where does this problem come from? How does it manifest? How did it manifest in pr in other societies or in earlier societies? And how did they deal with that, right? So so context matters, so uh um uh often you will find in great leaders that they are um uh vociferous consumers of information to find out the the society in which they live to understand their context, and that includes also uh uh historical awareness, right? Because in the humanities, right, we don't have like in the natural sciences where you have a laboratory, you have a theory and then you test it in a lab, right? We can't do that. People don't want to play along with our experiment to test things on that, right? So um your our laboratory is often the past, right? To see, yes, it was a different time, but often things were tried and it had certain results, right? That um the um uh uh uh that that we can learn from, we can take lessons from it, and it is surprising how rich human history is, right? And we we should be careful not to underestimate um people of the past, right? Sometimes thinking that we are so clever today, we've got it figured out, we are now smart, right? And all the people in the in the past were a bit naive, they were not so well educated, they didn't quite know, right? But no, no, no. The same level of brilliance we find in the world today also existed in previous generations. There is this position uh position that C.S. Lewis calls chronological snobbery, right? Uh, which simply is that we think that because we chronologically live in the now, we are much smarter. We are snobs about being so much smarter than all those poor sods of the past, right? So um wise leaders, to get back to your question, wise leaders will also learn from the past, they will study what previous leaders did, what did they do in whatever context, right? And to learn from that. Now, of course, I recognize, right, that um Augustine and Machiavelli and Locke didn't know anything about AI, right? That is a very specific challenge that we faced. But AI has the potential to create inordinate concentrations of power in certain centers in the world, right? And that is not something new in the world. And how have we dealt with it in the past? That can give us some guidance, right, about the dangers of over concentration of power into too few hands, whether it is technological power, whether it is financial power, right? And um, so uh uh there's some things that there's always something we can learn from the past.
SPEAKER_00:So I'm so glad you mentioned that because it really got me thinking about um lessons from the past. Now, the there's another uh saying which are also one of my favorites. I have a long list of favorites. Don't ask me to pick which is the favorites, it depends on what the topic is. Um, but it goes something along the lines of um hard hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, and the circle sort of goes around, yes. Um, which sort of makes makes sense, and I think we can often see that. Um, you know, when things are too good, too comfortable, then people start getting up to mischief, and then you know things don't go so well. Um, but yet you also mentioned that history is full of examples of how issues were dealt with and handled, and yes, maybe they were not exactly the same issues, but you could probably categorize them into some sort of fairly similar categories. Um, my question to you is why do we not learn from the past?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think one of the the two two just quickfire reasons. The one is that we we think we're smarter, right? Or we're simply unaware, right? And um, I don't think we're gonna get you uh hubris out of us always, right? We will always think, hey, but we can do it, right? Um but one of the things we can do something about is that we can um uh uh expose people more to to uh historical understanding. Exactly how, right? Um you know that that's that's a difficult conversation, right? Making people aware because there's so much going on in the world today, right, already uh our our our information feeds are so full already, right, that to to now cram in a whole bunch of historical knowledge is is not something that's going to automatically happen, right? But I think that um uh uh we have to find uh uh just ways of of exposing people. But why, you know, Santa Yana said um uh uh if if you're not aware of history, right, you're just gonna repeat the same mistakes, right, again and again and again. Where we get to a position where a society says, all right, we're gonna place all our trust in that leader, right, to solve things for us, right? And we will give as much power to that leader as he or she wants, right, and that will solve all our problems, right? And again, it usually works for a little bit, but then you start to pay the price eventually, right? And um, the reality is also right that um uh uh uh we think we have such free agency, right, such freedom to choose, right, whatever's going to go on in our society. We have to recognize, right, that um uh uh yes, we have agency, we agency meaning the capacity to choose to do this rather than that, right? But so often our choosing is restrained by various circumstances, right? And a lot of it has to do not just with formal restrictions, such as a law against certain people voting or certain types of information being published or not, right? Um, which are formal restrictions on information. But we as humans, we are deeply shaped by our culture. We think we have freedom of choice, but we are often so shaped also by the culture in which we find ourselves. We like to mimic, right? We like to mimic others around us and and go along with a crowd. And um, so um, yes, we might have an awareness that, yeah, history tells me this is not a good idea to do this, but hey, everybody's going, so you know uh it sounds silly to say it like this, but this is such a uh a reality. So um uh uh we um we are unfortunately slow learners at time, right? Because a lot of uh a lot wouldn't it wouldn't it have been wonderful if all the lessons of the past gets coded into our DNA when we're born, we don't have to learn those lessons again, right? And so we get carry the accumulated wisdom of the past in our DNA, right? We don't we can just learn new stuff now, right? But that's unfortunately not the case. Each one has to from the word go relearn a lot of those basic lessons, right? And that's why we end up in the same errors again and again and again.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's you know, it's it seems to me that we can um write down our technology each generation, and it gets codified into books or you know, YouTube or whatever you want to call it, and the next generation picks up, and there's always someone working on the technology of the past to update it, discover new things, and we can pass that along, but we can't seem to pass along human experience. I mean, that's impossible. Um, so each person is you know born into this world, has to figure things out for themselves, look around, try and see that it it's a new uh it's a new story each and every single time for each person. Um so I I yeah, I I personally think that that something has something to do with it as well. Um that we we are new, uh our kids will go through uh our kids will do the things we tell them not to do because we can tell them how it's gonna end up, and they won't listen, and then they'll do it, and then they will tell their kids, our grandkids, not to do the same thing, and of course the grandkids will ignore them because what does mom and dad know? Um, and so we go around. Um I just uh Karen, I've got one one more question for you. Um, we were talking about you know, collapse of empires and how that happens. Um if we swing it around the other way, you know, for when one empire collapses, another one rises normally. Um is there something, is there a way to predict the next empire that's rising? You know, at the moment we talk about China and we all go, oh yes, China is, you know, the dragon in the east here, dragon is rising. Um would it have been possible to predict this 100 years ago that China is on the up, or could we have predicted it 50 years ago? I mean, 10 years ago is probably uh not much of a prediction. I mean, that would have been fairly obvious. But is it possible to see an ascendant nation or an ascendant culture uh from far out before they actually become obvious to everybody else?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it often has to do well, that will be what is your measure of success? Is it um is it the GDP of the country? Is it the military influence of the country or of the civilization? Is it its population numbers, the one where the most people win, right? What would be the measure? So it's probably has something to do with power and influence, right? To what extent can you assert or control, right? And um uh uh so um if one looks at um, you know, one of the trends very popular these days is to look at demography, right? Population numbers, right? But uh population numbers, right, where you where you have China is at a peak now and will probably start to decline its numbers. I think it already has, and then um the next major uh demographic uh uh uh uh uh you know dominant society will be India, right? Um up until about the end of the century, right? And um then it'll probably be Africa, right? From about 2050, we'll see, we'll start to see uh big growth. But that doesn't necessarily mean um the the problem is uh that doesn't necessarily mean uh uh a specific culture will then has the have such a dominant influence over the world because people move, right? And we're gonna see a lot of migration from Africa and this uh and maybe also from India, right, into the rest of the world. So um uh I would say just my short answer to your question, it depends on what measure you want to use for what makes a dominant society or a dominant civilization. In terms of um my view is in terms of cultural dominance, right? We're probably uh not going to be in a in a situation where you're gonna have one culture dominate over others, right? We're gonna probably go to a much more fragmentary uh uh uh reality, right? Where um it's not going to be one dominant and uh and a bunch, just one superpower and a bunch of middle powers, right? It'll be probably a bunch of uh uh, yes, there'll be differences, but it'll be a much more fragmented uh uh world that we go go into, right? And um because there's such a sensitivity or awareness, not sensitivity, but an awareness these days of the globe as so multifarious, right? You're not gonna have a situation where just one culture or one language, be it English or Mandarin or whatever, uh will dominate the the world. We will probably be aware of the whole world recognizing its heterogeneity, the right uh of the world. So um, but just the short term, as you said, the candidates are probably right, um uh China, then India. The US will always be there, right? For a long time still, one what one tends to forget how strong the US economy is. It's still very strong. The US is a is a society uh uh uh that as a state has controlled a third of the global economy for the past hundred years, right? So um so they're still gonna be a prominent role player, right? It demographically it's also still pretty strong. So um, but Europe is definitely declining in terms of numbers and global influence, although it'll its political stability, I think, is still very much the case, right? Politically, it'll remains uh pretty stable, right? But um uh uh there's so much going on in in the world. So I would I would rather go for a pluralist uh uh understanding of our future.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, um yeah, I think it's a it's a great way to phrase it. Uh, you know, we spoke earlier about um movement of people, uh where one culture comes in contact with another culture, and yeah, at the moment we are seeing it in in sort of larger waves of of cultural, call it cultural clashing, I suppose. Uh if you want to. Um, you also, you know, one of the reasons that people move is uh for opportunity elsewhere. Absolutely. Obviously, conflict is a bit of a problem. Um, but you know, opportunity is uh highly educated people, uh specialists in their field getting employed by big tech or wherever it may be around the world. But then we also have this issue of um manual labor, you know, populations declining, manual labor still needs to be done. I think what is really amazing is that we now have AI, which potentially could tackle the highly specialized intellectual angle, uh, and we have robotics which is coming up. Um, and robotics will handle the bottom end, which is the the manual labor side of things. So uh you rightly mentioned for the first time in human history, we now have this uh thing uh between AI and robotics, uh, and who knows how that's going to play out. Uh, it's a fascinating uh thing, I mean, a little angle. Um uh final thoughts from your side um in terms of this new world, AI robotics, um people moving across the globe, um cultures coming into contact with each other. Um the wise leader. Where what words would you have for the wise leader that has to deal with this lot?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so so so it's it's really this um it's these uh there's a whole bunch of unknowns. And for the first time, there's a possibility that we might be facing a future where uh uh we're not at the cognitive pinnacle, right, of uh uh uh of the globe, right? There may be AI, although it is artificial, right, will be able to be cognitively more productive than we are, right, in in many fields, right? So I would think two things that will always, if one wants to continue in a future in which there can be human flourishing, right, we have to do two things, right? The first thing is we have to, as leaders and as citizens, fellow citizens of one another, we always have to recognize human value, right? That humans are inherently valuable and worthy, right, of our attention and time and to enable their flourishing. We have to recognize human flourish, uh, sorry, human value, right? That there's inherent dignity to being human, right? That humans aren't just a meat sack, right, uh with some cognitive abilities, that uh a robotic agent now with uh an AI enabled cognitive ability can do better than than humans can, but to recognize that there is something inherently valuable in humans, right? And that brings us back, uh I would think, to the idea of the imago day, right? That the that humans are the carriers of the image of God, right? So so that's you have to recognize human dignity, right? And secondly, is to at the same time recognize human complexity, right? But and that humans are, despite our uh uh uh singular dignity that we carry, right, we are manifesting in so different many different ways, right? There are different cultures, there are different abilities, there are different aspirations and dreams, and that those things are valuable to uh uh to um to try and and uh uh you know uh uh help people to live lives uh uh that are flourishing. So so my uh uh call we have to recognize there has to be an uh a singular focus on human identity again. What does it mean to be human? Right. What is it? And then commensurate to that will be the idea of what what will human what is human flourishing? What does that entail? Right. So it is, and this is of course uh the main purpose of the humanities is to always center that the human identity. Yes, we are very different social and cultural identities, but there is a core human identity. And that question of what does it mean to be human? We think, you know, that sounds so philosophical and abstract, right? But it's one of the core things that's uh uh front and center again uh uh in our discourses to say, what does it mean to be human? What is it what is a flourishing human life look like, and how do we attain that? Is that something worthy to pursue, right? Or is it just productivity, bottom lines, or efficiency or dominance? But what is human identity, right? And uh uh to to to continually ask and dig into those questions. And as we try to understand that, right, we have to remember that this has been such a central question throughout the history of humankind, right? So let's not forget the the the knowledge of the past as well, as we try to answer this question.
SPEAKER_00:Well, what an excellent uh statement there, and I think an excellent place um to wrap up for today. Um, Howard, if um people want to reach out to you or or keep in touch with your work, what is the best way that they can be in contact?
SPEAKER_01:Uh uh well they can uh uh I I I uh work at the University of Pretoria. They're welcome to go to the staff page there and they will find me there and um uh in the Department of Politics, and uh all my contact details are there.
SPEAKER_00:Excellent. Um thank you so much for that. I'm gonna put all that information in the show notes, and um I really appreciate your time. It's been amazing to hear about history and our part that we can play in it, even though we may feel small, we all have significant contributions to make. So I think that was the message I got from what you had to say. Really appreciate that. Thank you, Gerat. Um have a great day further. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Cheers, bye.