Have We Broken the Golden Thread? Why the West’s Future Depends on Remembering Its Past

The West’s greatest peril is forgetfulness, its loss of cultural memory. Without knowing where we came from, how can we know what to defend, or even what to value?

In an age when history itself is contested...when the past is either dismissed or distorted...The Golden Thread reminds us why the study of civilization matters. Drawing on nearly three millennia of art, philosophy, politics, and faith, Hankins weaves the story of how our ideas of law, liberty, and virtue emerged...and why they still matter in the modern world.

In this conversation, James Hankins of Harvard and Michael Fontaine of Cornell delve into the urgent question of understanding our history and inheritance, to determine what traditions of the West should be kept... or discarded.

We ask: Was Alexander Great because he attempted to bridge the West and the East? Should armies have foreign soldiers? What happens when there is a breakdown in trust in the judicial system? How has the Islamic world shaped the western tradition?

And is religion and spirituality necessary to revive Classics? 

You can find James Hankins' book, The Golden Thread, Here.

Michael Fontaine's latest book, How to Have Willpower, can be found here.

This discussion was hosted by Anya Leonard of Classical Wisdom. To learn more about Classical Wisdom and sign up for our free newsletter, please go to: https://classicalwisdom.substack.com/

Transcript

14:02:19 Hello, everyone, and welcome to our newest event from Classical Wisdom.
14:02:25 Uh, for those of you who are new to us, my name is Anya Leonard. I'm the founder and director
14:02:30 Uh, and we aim to bring ancient wisdom to modern minds through events like this, but also through our newsletter, um, our…
14:02:40 magazines, our regular podcasts, so if you haven't checked us out before, please go to ClassicWisdom.com. You can sign up for our free newsletter.
14:02:48 And find out all of the wonderful things the ancient world has to…
14:02:53 offer, and today's event, I think, is going to be…
14:02:56 Perfect, um, both introduction as well as a comprehensive overlook at the classical world.
14:03:03 Um, we're going to be discussing James Hankins' newest book, The Golden Thread, and it's very, very exciting. So, let me introduce
14:03:11 Um, the two of our guests, uh, but in one second, I'm just going to tell you the order of events.
14:03:15 Um, our two guests are going to be discussing the, kind of, overview of both
14:03:22 Western tradition, so no small task.
14:03:25 Ahead of them, um, as well as its continuation both in the past
14:03:30 and to the present. Uh, and then around the hour mark, we're going to switch over to a Q&A, which I will host myself.
14:03:36 So please feel free to put in questions, comments in the chat. Myself and Sean Connie… Sean Kelly, apologies, is our managing editor, and he will be helping
14:03:47 Collect those and curate them in the background, um, and so that we will have really interesting conversations.
14:03:54 With that out of the way, uh, please welcome Michael Fontaine. He's the professor of Classics at Cornell University, celebrated for bringing ancient ideas to life with his
14:04:05 characteristic humor and insight. Uh, Mike is a specialist in Latin literature and classical culture,
14:04:11 And he reveals how timeless wisdom from Greece to Rome can help illuminate leadership, communication, and every life today. Mike is very prolific author.
14:04:20 With so many books, uh, I think we would take up quite a bit of time.
14:04:24 Discussing them all today, but his most recent is How to Have Willpower. Um, is that your most recent, actually? Because I'm thinking… okay.
14:04:32 Because there's so many, um, how to tell a joke, um, but I will list those in our follow-up email so you can check them out yourself.
14:04:40 And we also have with us is James Hankins.
14:04:44 He is the professor of history at Harvard University, and one of the world's foremost authorities on the Renaissance thought and classical tradition, is the author of Virtue Politics and his most recent, The Golden Thread,
14:04:56 In which he brings wisdom of the ancients into a vital conversation with the challenges of the modern world.
14:05:02 So, as I mentioned, we will be delving into the Western tradition
14:05:08 Uh, and with that, I will turn it over to Mike.
14:05:13 And James, thank you both so much for joining me today, and uh…
14:05:17 I look forward to hearing what you both have to say, and I'll come back in around an hour.
14:05:29 If people haven't seen it yet, this is it here, the golden thread. I mean, this is…
14:05:34 a substantial book, right? I mean, books come out all the time.
14:05:37 But not books like this. Uh, so I was extremely excited to see the book, to get a copy of the book, and I've been reading it
14:05:44 voraciously for a while. So I just want to start off by saying, uh, Jim, that I… it's really a tremendous work of narrative. I mean, there's this assured narrative that you're moving us through time.
14:05:54 But, uh, also of compression, where you're compressing years, decades, careers, and everything into just a few sentences.
14:06:02 but also explanation. You're really sort of…
14:06:04 Helping us see the connections as we move from across time and space over and over and over.
14:06:10 So, um, I have some questions for you, if you're game, and I thought we could start off
14:06:15 Uh, so the title is The Golden Thread, A History of the Western Tradition.
14:06:20 But I think when a lot of people hear Western tradition, they also hear Western civilization, almost as an echo.
14:06:25 And so I thought, if you're game, you could just start with a…
14:06:29 premise. What is civilization? What does this word mean? What does it require?
14:05:22 Well, I think that civilization has many definitions, obviously, but…
14:06:41 I prefer the definition that a civilization is something that civilizes.
14:06:49 And I regard it as an extension of…
14:06:53 of the way that one is socialized in other communities. So, we are socialized into our families.
14:06:59 being brought up by parents and having siblings, and we're socialized into
14:07:05 Our schools and into our…
14:07:08 communities, but, um, we become civilized by studying civilization. That's how it's always been done.
14:07:15 And by becoming aware of the history that's all around us,
14:07:20 Becoming aware not just of things like, let's say, Gothic architecture, or…
14:07:26 Classical architecture, and what those signify in our tradition.
14:07:32 classical architecture goes back to the Greek temple structures, and…
14:07:35 Gothic architecture goes back to the 13th century, the 12th and 13th century, and…
14:07:42 represents an effort of the church to teach.
14:07:45 The common people, but the more one studies, of course, the one
14:07:50 More one realizes that the things you take for granted…
14:07:53 Uh, such as democracy, rule of law, freedom, it's many, many definitions of freedom.
14:08:00 That all these have a long history.
14:08:03 And that when you study their history, you understand, uh, not just where they come from,
14:08:10 But also, the pitfalls.
14:08:13 have attended, uh, traditions like the democratic tradition, the Republican tradition.
14:08:19 And if we look back at the founders of our country in
14:08:22 the 18th century, they knew this history very well. I mean, they… we've been studying Western Civ,
14:08:28 If you will, for a long time, and I think going back to the Renaissance, really, they studied Greece, they studied Rome,
14:08:36 They studied the Christian Middle Ages, they studied the Church Fathers, they studied…
14:08:41 Uh, they studied the Renaissance and modern Europe. That was part of the education of everyone, and that's why they were able to reflect so deeply.
14:08:50 on the arts of government and statecraft.
14:08:54 So, uh, that's my definition of civilizing. It's something that civilizes you, that makes you aware of
14:09:02 The world around you, your traditions, the good, the bad.
14:09:05 So, I will make one further distinction, which is in the title of the book.
14:09:12 Al and I, who wrote this book together, and Al and I are very old friends. We go back to middle school together.
14:09:18 Right. We met on the spelling bee when I was in sixth grade, and he was in 8th grade.
14:09:24 So, Alan is the author of the second volume of the book, which is coming out in January, and begins with the Reformation.
14:09:30 And I take the story from the ancient Greeks.
14:09:33 up to the Renaissance.
14:09:36 And we agreed on this division because I'm Catholic, and Alan's Protestant, and we decided we were not going to reenact our
14:09:44 Adolescent debates about theology.
14:09:46 on the pages of our book, so…
14:09:48 Um, so that's… that's going on. But, uh, the idea we had, uh, in starting this is that we were going to revive the study of Western civilization, which has been
14:10:01 As you know, it's been dead for 40 years or so.
14:10:04 Uh, and that's… that's been the goal. But I lost my point now. So my point was that we don't take the, um…
14:10:12 Western civilization to be one thing.
14:10:15 We understand that Western civilization is like a Japanese doll.
14:10:21 Or maybe a Russian doll, I guess is a better…
14:10:23 better term. So, we have Greece.
14:10:26 ancient Greek civilization, which is the most marvelous civilization, I think, in the history of the world, just in terms of creativity and
14:10:34 And curiosity and brilliance on every level of the arts and architecture and
14:10:40 and philosophy, and medicine, and mathematics, which is hard to name another civilization.
14:10:45 That's as great as the Greeks.
14:10:47 So, that civilization was preserved by the Romans.
14:10:51 And the Romans understood, I think, from the 2nd century BC,
14:10:55 that they had conquered Greece.
14:10:58 Well, this is a famous line of Horace, I'm sure you know that the Coptic Reich, yeah,
14:11:02 You know, copper glycia took its ferocious captor captive,
14:11:06 Uh, and the Romans knew that. It's a Roman writing that, it's the poet Horus.
14:11:12 And they welcomed it.
14:11:14 They did not… they had a certain contempt for contemporary Greeks in the realm of government and
14:11:21 And, uh, military strength. They thought they were better than contemporary Greeks.
14:11:25 But they admired the older classical Greeks and Hellenistic Greeks, and they tried to create a Roman civilization
14:11:33 that was based on that.
14:11:35 Uh, so the important thing is that they didn't… they didn't crush the previous civilization.
14:11:40 That happens so often in the history of empires, that an empire will…
14:11:45 conquer another country and then destroy its culture.
14:11:49 Uh, and so, I always think of…
14:11:52 Um, Angor Wa… I went one time to Angor Wat, right, in Cambodia, this marvelous
14:11:58 Marvelous, uh, ruin.
14:12:00 Which sits in the middle of the jungle. There's 100 square miles of ruins around it. It's not just Angor Wat.
14:12:06 So I wanted to know about this before I went. I tried to find out…
14:12:10 And I realized that there are no sources for Angkor Wah aside from…
14:12:16 Inscriptions, which no one really knows what they mean.
14:12:18 Because it was destroyed, and it was not saved. So we have this…
14:12:24 This civilization which was almost the size of the Roman Empire at one time, people don't know that, but I was surprised to hear it.
14:12:30 And the reason we know about it is because a few Chinese historians…
14:12:35 had a record of it. So, the little that we know is Chinese historians and other people writing at a later period,
14:12:43 Uh, never happened in the West.
14:12:45 There was always the golden threat, right? There were always later civilizations that said, we have to keep this.
14:12:52 So, when the Romans, in their turn, became…
14:12:58 under threat from the barbarians and later from the Islamic Arab armies.
14:13:06 they kept that alive, too.
14:13:08 Uh, you almost lost. You'll…
14:13:11 not be happy to hear this, Michael, but I'm sure you'll be familiar with this. We almost lost Latin
14:13:16 literature, uh, in the 5th and 6th centuries.
14:13:21 There weren't many people copying manuscripts back then. There's a famous…
14:13:26 Um, paleographer.
14:13:29 whose name is escaping me at the moment, German paleographer, who did… oh, well, there's E.A. Lowe.
14:13:34 Uh, who my wife worked for, he's a famous paleographer from antiquity. He collected all the manuscripts.
14:13:40 that survived and dated then.
14:13:42 So, uh, in the 7th century, there's about 50 manuscripts that are copied.
14:13:48 And there are not many classics that are copied. There's this whole… there's this period where it almost…
14:13:52 dies out. And then…
14:13:55 Along comes, you know, Charlemagne, and Charlemagne decides that
14:14:00 He wants to revive the Roman Empire.
14:14:03 And they have to go back to Greek literature.
14:14:06 So by the time you get to the 9th century, you have
14:14:11 Thousands of manuscripts being copied all over the Carolingian world, so it was a close-run thing.
14:14:17 And I… an analogy I like to use is, um…
14:14:21 If you stop teaching how to play classical violin or classical…
14:14:26 piano for two or three civil… uh, two or three generations.
14:14:30 you wouldn't be able to revive it.
14:14:32 Because there's a living tradition which keeps…
14:14:36 that those skills alive, and you just… this is my fear for Western, so I guess we're going to get to this topic.
14:14:43 Later on. My fear is that we might be… have broken the golden thread and made certain things anyway.
14:14:50 difficult to recover.
14:14:51 So, getting back to the point I've been trying to make for the last 10 minutes,
14:14:55 Uh, we… we think of Western
14:14:59 Civilizations, plural, as being nested inside of each other. So the Greeks were…
14:15:05 Adopted by the Romans, and the Romans were adopted by Christianity. There was an attempt to get rid of
14:15:11 a lot of elements of Roman civilization in…
14:15:15 the, uh, 4th century, when the Christians took over, but…
14:15:19 Wiser heads prevailed, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, they said, no, no, no, we have to keep some things.
14:15:25 from the past.
14:15:27 And then later on, when the Romans…
14:15:33 disappear in the West. The barbarians decide that they need classical civilization, too.
14:15:39 Right? And they have their own legal codes, but they're copying the Romans, and they…
14:15:44 have a few books in Gothic.
14:15:48 language, like the Bible and a few other things, but they realized that if they're going to build a permanent
14:15:54 kingdom, uh, they're gonna have to do… they're gonna have to get back in touch.
14:15:59 with the Roman tradition. So… and the same thing happens in the 12th century, when there's this terrible fall-off in civilization, 10th century,
14:16:09 Western Europe decides that we have to take on…
14:16:12 Uh, they have to recover the connection with the Romans and the Greeks.
14:16:17 So, and we had it again in the Renaissance, so we have a Renaissance civilization. It's not just the Renaissance that I study in the 15th century.
14:16:26 But we have kept a golden thread alive through Renaissance and through
14:16:32 appreciating the value of the past.
14:16:35 And that's what I'm afraid about, but…
14:16:37 I'll let you lead me into that, into that element of the discussion.
14:16:42 Well, I was going to ask a couple things about the West, but if you don't mind me just following up on that. You give me a bunch of thoughts here. You know, when I first thought… I saw the title, The Golden Thread, I was thinking of, like, a red thread, right? You know, a leitmotif.
14:16:52 But it sounds much more like you're thinking of this in terms of fragility.
14:16:56 a delicate, uh, treasure that's, you know, being suspended by not very much. So, I guess, let me just sort of jump ahead.
14:17:05 What would you say to somebody who says, oh, we already know everything about Greece and Rome, we don't need that stuff anymore. We have microscopes and telescopes and iPads and so forth.
14:17:15 What difference does it make?
14:17:17 Well, this is a tendency in modern…
14:17:21 Especially American civilization.
14:17:23 is to, uh, constantly focus on the future, on innovation,
14:17:27 I don't know if you read that really interesting article on…
14:17:32 Well, I can't remember websites anymore, but there was a woman who was a…
14:17:36 a, uh, upper-level executive with MasterCard, and she was describing the
14:17:41 pressure in every major
14:17:45 company, big company, to constantly innovate, innovate, innovate. In the past was worthless, we have
14:17:50 creative destruction, that's fine for many people.
14:17:53 Um, in… in the world of capitalism and science and universities are so focused on the future.
14:17:59 And when you have the competition with China,
14:18:02 They're even more focused on the future because they're afraid that the Chinese will beat us to
14:18:08 some innovation in AI or in military technology, or…
14:18:14 or what have you, and that keeps people focused on the future. And so I understand that impulse.
14:18:20 Uh, but I think all successful civilizations have balanced the past and the future.
14:18:27 Right? If they become entirely focused on the past, which is possible too, right? We have civilizations that never…
14:18:34 think about changing anything, and it's evil to…
14:18:37 for them to change things. The word…
14:18:40 Innovation, as you know, Michael, Reznovi is a… means revolution, right? It means it's always a bad thing.
14:18:48 Until, uh, the 17th century, I think, changes that. And curiosity is another word that's bad.
14:18:54 in the lexicuriositas means, you know, paying attention to things you have no business paying attention to.
14:19:00 device, it's an Aquinas's suma, right? It's advice.
14:19:03 And not only changes in the 17th century,
14:19:05 But it's very important, though, to keep, um…
14:19:10 keep your feet on the ground through, and keep your…
14:19:16 your connections with the past. Otherwise, you just become…
14:19:19 Bewildered, right? And I think many people will feel, as I do, I'm 70 years old, so…
14:19:25 Uh, the pace of innovation is a little bit too fast for me. You know, every time I walk into the
14:19:31 The Harvard Health Center, they've got some new process.
14:19:34 Because somebody is getting credit for it somewhere, and it's not necessarily going to be a better
14:19:39 You know, we're constantly innovating all the time, and we don't really need to have all that innovation.
14:19:45 Uh, but this isn't just an old man grousing. I think that many people feel that the pace of innovation is so fast that they get totally bewildered.
14:19:55 I've heard this from many, many people, that in the last 10 years in particular,
14:19:59 So many things are changing at such a speed.
14:20:02 And, um, one of the reasons why we're bewildered, and we're
14:20:07 anxious and very concerned about where we fit in the world is because we don't have any sense of where we fit in the world.
14:20:16 And when we have these new ideologies, successor ideology, whatever you want to call it, radical progressivism,
14:20:23 that, uh, want to change everything. They want to change language, they want to change, you know, wipe out the past. Don't teach the Western past anymore.
14:20:30 Don't teach, you know, because it's white supremacist or something.
14:20:32 You know, don't do this, don't do that, because you're going to impede the future in some way. I think that's a formula for…
14:20:40 really, um, making a lot of misery.
14:20:44 Uh, and you have to… you have to innovate. There's absolutely no question, we have to innovate, we have to criticize our past.
14:20:51 We have to understand
14:20:53 you know, what we've done wrong and how to do things better.
14:20:57 But you can't have contempt for the past, and that's
14:21:01 That's where we're heading. Contempt for the past, and hatred of our own past.
14:21:06 And that is very, very dangerous, is what I… the way I would put that.
14:21:11 Let me… so, uh, one thought I had when I was reading the book was this is, uh, the work, and I said this to someone, this is the work of a mature scholar, and I mean that in two senses. One is that it takes a lifetime, I assume it's going to take a lifetime,
14:21:24 to be able to write a book like this. Uh, this is not something a junior…
14:21:30 scholars ever going to be able to do. But it's also a work of maturity in the sense that, uh…
14:21:35 What I just heard you saying about, you know, the condemnation of the past, or the forgetting, you don't do this. I didn't see any celebrations of particular this or that. I didn't see any condemnations of this or that. I saw a real… I see a real effort.
14:21:47 On your part to understand these different people on their own terms. I think one of the most interesting parts is where you're talking about the rise of the confessional state.
14:21:55 And this is a term I don't think I'd seen until your book, right? But the idea that we're going to have, uh, state Christianity, or later on, state Islam, or something.
14:22:03 And you talk about the distinction, you say, well, you know, maybe coercing people's thoughts is not such a good idea, but then you try and take the opposite point of view, say, if these are people's…
14:22:12 Souls. Immortal souls on the mind. This is a matter of public health, so to speak. That's not your phrase, but something like that.
14:22:18 Yeah.
14:22:19 So let me, um… but I want to get… circle back to something here, um…
14:22:23 When we talk about innovation, I hear a lot of people often… we hear innovation, and we think technology.
14:22:29 Uh, but you write a very great deal, especially in the first few chapters, about…
14:22:34 traditions and institutions and, uh, representative government and that sort of thing. You also talk about alphabets, which I would
14:22:41 take to be sort of a technology. And so I wonder, uh, as we think about the West and the Western tradition,
14:22:48 Are there… what concepts would you say are sort of central to the West as we define
14:22:53 this term.
14:22:55 Well, one of the things I'm doing with this book is trying to give a somewhat richer account of what
14:23:01 the West has meant in the past, because…
14:23:03 If you talk to Silicon Valley, they say they're saving the West. Well, what does that mean?
14:23:09 I hear this constantly, Silicon Valley, you know,
14:23:11 Elon Musk or, you know, Marc Andreessen were saving the West.
14:23:14 Well, what this means is we're not going to be taken over by the Chinese.
14:23:18 And we have certain traditions, we believe in freedom of thought, we believe in freedom of speech.
14:23:23 Um, we believe in rule of law, we believe in…
14:23:27 you know, democracy, constitutional government, what have you. We believe in those things, but those things are fairly shallowly
14:23:34 Well, they're very deeply based in the tradition, but people are not aware of the intervening
14:23:40 They're not aware, for example, there's quite a big difference between a republic and a democracy.
14:23:46 Right, I had a grad… I had a graduate student say to me,
14:23:50 No, sorry, it was an answer on a test, so we had a, um…
14:23:54 a test, and in this course I was giving, graduate course,
14:23:58 And he says, Republic is just an old name for democracy.
14:24:04 I don't know.
14:24:06 This is a guy from Princeton, by the way.
14:24:08 So, um, I was very taken aback by that, but then I said, well, this… how would they know, right? Because they don't…
14:24:13 They don't study these things anymore. They don't know how different the Roman Republic was from Greek democracy.
14:24:20 And they don't know that, um, you know, the Founding Fathers
14:24:24 Uh, as I still like to call them.
14:24:26 Uh, we're very aware of that difference, and they were all firm that they did not want to be a democracy because their tradition taught them that democracies were unstable and…
14:24:37 likely to collapse, and…
14:24:40 that they were given to mob rule, and they wanted to have a republic, like the Romans.
14:24:47 But again, they didn't like every aspect of the Roman Republic.
14:24:52 Uh, they didn't like the violence, for one thing.
14:24:56 Uh, they were very well aware of that.
14:24:58 Uh, but they also didn't like the predominance of the Rit in the Roman Republic.
14:25:03 So, if you look at…
14:25:05 What the founders did in founding our republic.
14:25:08 They knew so many things that people just don't know anymore. They knew Greece and Rome.
14:25:13 But they also knew about the Venetian Republic and the British Commonwealth, which is the English translation of the Republic.
14:25:20 And they knew about the… they knew about the medieval,
14:25:22 Italian city-states, and…
14:25:25 They knew about Machiavelli, so it was really kind of remarkable.
14:25:28 that they, um…
14:25:30 They knew this tradition, and they wanted to move it in a different direction. So what they did is they made it more popular.
14:25:37 Uh, so if you look at what the Founding Fathers did, as opposed to the way the Romans ran their state,
14:25:43 or the Venetians ran their state.
14:25:45 It's a much more popular republic.
14:25:48 than those earlier systems. But this is the kind of thing that you can't really talk about with students anymore.
14:25:56 I guess I'm now losing the thread of kind of what I'm supposed to…
14:26:00 Yeah.
14:25:59 Well, I mean, let me ask you, I'm just gonna agree with you a little while. I think the use of the word Democracy in the contemporary American political context causes more problems.
14:26:10 No.
14:26:10 then you could possibly… everybody… I say, we have a democracy as well. Not really, not if you know these things, but um…
14:26:16 I was going to ask you about the concept of barbarians, but I think I'd rather ask you now about the golden thread. How, then, is it preserved?
14:26:23 Between civilizations. You already quoted Horace earlier, you know, the captive Greece captured her…
14:26:29 Uh, I took her captor captive. So, how is it that the American founders were able to study these things, including Machiavelli, including the Republic of Venice and so forth?
14:26:40 Well, uh, a lot of it has to do with people like us, Mike, that we, we, we…
14:26:46 copy manuscripts, and we, uh, we were interested in the past.
14:26:50 Uh, you know, as I'm sure you're aware, there are many major works of classical antiquity which really hung by a thread.
14:26:59 Uh, you know, the works of Aristotle, this famous story about how, after Aristotle
14:27:05 dye his manuscript was given to some member of his family, and they took it into a basement somewhere and put it in a box.
14:27:12 And it was… the later Aristotelians did not have access to Aristotle's works until the 1st century.
14:27:19 BC, when Sulliv takes them to Rome, and…
14:27:22 They decide to start copying them again, but all the works that we think of as the Aristotelian corpus were almost lost.
14:27:30 They were down to the single box of… I'm not sure this is really true. There are three sources that told us that it's true.
14:27:36 Um, but it's… it has the ring of truth to me.
14:27:40 And the other thing that's incredibly striking to me, and I only found this out recently because I was on a PhD exam,
14:27:47 Uh, but the… the…
14:27:50 The entire tradition of Roman jurisprudence, as you probably know, is
14:27:56 Preserved in the digest.
14:27:58 Uh, the Corpus Uros
14:28:00 revealis, the Roman civil law, which was compiled by Justinian in the 6th century.
14:28:05 It has a textbook, the Institute has several legal codes and updates to the legal codes, but the heart of it is this…
14:28:13 text called The Digest, where Trebonian and the advisors of Justinian decided they were going to
14:28:21 They're going to excerpt all of the great jurists of the past, the ones who are still most useful, and edit them.
14:28:28 And that's where you get…
14:28:30 to grips with the way the Romans thought about law.
14:28:35 Now, how they went about trying to solve
14:28:37 bureaucratic, administrative, and governmental problems in general through the application of law and reason.
14:28:45 And prudence, like jurisprudence.
14:28:47 So that was down, believe it or not.
14:28:49 This was down to a single manuscript.
14:28:53 In the 11th century, there was one manuscript, and we still have it, it's in Florence, you can go look at it, well, if you have
14:29:00 proper introductions. I don't think I've ever seen it.
14:29:02 I might have seen it on a display.
14:29:05 So, it was taken to Amalfi and then to Pisa, and then the Florentines conquered Pisa, and they took it back to…
14:29:11 But it was known only in the 11th century.
14:29:15 And some people decide to copy it.
14:29:18 So, when the Emperor forever…
14:29:20 Barbarossa said, we want to study Roman civil law again.
14:29:24 That manuscript, of course, was multiplied hundreds and thousands of times, and it became the basis of
14:29:31 Western legal education up until the present.
14:29:34 I mean, that's an incredible story for me, and I…
14:29:37 I checked it out 4 or 5 times, because I couldn't believe the Byzantines didn't have a copy somewhere.
14:29:42 Uh, we have no evidence of that, that the Byzantines, they had their own legal codes, of course, by…
14:29:47 the 11th century. So…
14:29:49 Um, they started teaching in the universities in Bologna and Padu and all these places that taught Roman law.
14:29:56 And even in places that had common law, like the English,
14:29:59 They used the digest, this digest of how Romans solve their legal problems,
14:30:05 to teach, uh, jurisprudence to, you know, British legal students, even though they weren't
14:30:12 Enforcing Roman law, they still wanted to have the exposure to…
14:30:18 Uh, this veryilliant tradition of…
14:30:21 of law. So that, to me, is just an extraordinary…
14:30:26 story… a demonstration of how fragile the golden thread is.
14:30:30 You know, and…
14:30:30 Well, may I ask you on that note, then, um, because we're talking a lot about Greece and Rome, and obviously someone… I guess most of us at this seminar, we think a lot about Greece and Rome, but it's almost starting to sound a little bit like
14:30:43 Uh, Greece, Rome,
14:30:46 the U.S. founders, and some parallel developments in Europe, but… so I wanted to ask, what role do the institutions
14:30:53 of Christianity and Judaism play in the golden thread.
14:30:57 Uh, because I think that's something that very often, uh, is not even mentioned in, uh, say, a typical Classics seminar at a university.
14:31:06 Was it large? I mean, do you tell the story in the book? Why don't you tell us a little bit about, you know…
14:31:10 how you address that?
14:31:12 Yes, um, well, I just gave my last lecture at Harvard yesterday, and the theme of the lecture… it was a course in ancient philosophy.
14:31:20 us up to Augustine. So the theme of the course was…
14:31:23 The confluence of Greek philosophy with the Judeo-Christian tradition.
14:31:27 And we used the works of Augustine, who is the most
14:31:31 influential, one of the most influential…
14:31:34 Catholic theologians, um, for the last 2,000 years, or 15, what is it, uh, 1,500 years.
14:31:42 Uh, as an example of how a Christian…
14:31:48 reshaped the classical tradition in order to serve Christianity.
14:31:52 But I really… in the book, I start much earlier, I start with Abraham.
14:31:57 And I've told the story of ancient…
14:32:00 Judaism, as they themselves understood it, because I didn't want to get into all these questions of
14:32:08 of archaeology, and what do we know, what don't we know. So I decided to tell the story of the Bible, basically, the way the Bible…
14:32:17 presents the history of the Jews.
14:32:19 So, uh, and then I spend a lot of time on Second Temple Judaism.
14:32:24 I have to say, before… this is one of the things I knew least about when I began the book, and I…
14:32:30 I have some colleagues here at Harvard, uh, Shay Cohen and John Levinson and other people who helped me a bit with that.
14:32:37 More than a bit. Um, so, uh, I began to realize, which I really hadn't…
14:32:43 I'm ashamed, you know, as a Christian, I'm kind of ashamed how little I knew about this, but…
14:32:48 So much of Christianity comes straight out of
14:32:51 Judaism, right? Much more so.
14:32:54 You know, the doctor of resurrection, for example, which I always thought was a Christian doctrine. No, no, no, this is…
14:33:00 well-established in the Jewish tradition.
14:33:03 The early Christians saw themselves as continuing
14:33:06 God's… God's dealings with the… with the Jewish people, but universalizing it to all people, right?
14:33:13 And it's a very… I think it's fully justified to say the Judeo-Christian tradition
14:33:20 Nowadays, you hear many people saying, oh, you shouldn't use that term, it was invented in the 1950s.
14:33:26 My view is, if it was invented in the 1950s, that was a very good idea.
14:33:31 Right. But anyway, so I discuss the evolution of monotheism, and especially the idea of exclusive monotheism, which comes out of the Jews.
14:33:41 And, uh, also the idea of a society that is regulated
14:33:47 closely regulated in its personal behavior.
14:33:50 Uh, by a legal code.
14:33:51 Is that something the Romans never did? They didn't try to control, uh, maybe Augustus did it a little bit with his family legislation, but most of the time, the Romans
14:34:01 We're not trying to get into people's personal lives and to change the way they behave.
14:34:08 Maybe we would disagree with that. That's my general take, that the Romans
14:34:14 left a lot of freedom. They were insistent on some things, but they left… they were rather moderate in their attitude to
14:34:21 people's personal behavior. They regulated marriage law and things like that.
14:34:26 But… yeah.
14:34:26 Well, I would agree with you. Obviously, I would agree with you, because one of the great points that you make in the book, it really impressed me, is that, uh, you know, there's no charity in Rome. The state doesn't help you out in ancient Rome.
14:34:37 If you're sick, if you're widowed, if you're poor, if you're lame, whatever it's gonna be, uh, I assume it's the way it is in some societies today. If you don't work, you don't eat.
14:34:47 And so, one of the appeals of Christianity, and you make this point as well in the book, is that it's not just spreading in the Roman Empire, it's spreading all around the Roman Empire as well.
14:34:56 Across the borders, and you tell a terrific story, the narrative of, you know, why Constantine decided to
14:35:04 legalize, and I was talking to a class about this yesterday, I said, can anybody think of a parallel where you have something that's criminalized,
14:35:10 And then they legalize it, and then 50 years later, it's mandatory.
14:35:14 I couldn't think of anything like… I think it's the only example in world history. First, you can't do it, then you can't, now you have to.
14:35:20 And… but you make the point that this is already all spreading around the borders.
14:35:26 Uh…
14:35:25 The suppression of Confucianism.
14:35:28 Because the Qin Dynasty suppressed Confucianism, made it illegal, they burned all the books, they killed all the Confucian scholars that they could find.
14:35:35 And they lasted for about 30 years, and after they disappeared, uh, the Han Dynasty decided everybody had to learn Confucianisms.
14:35:44 Wow, wow.
14:35:45 So that's maybe the closest thing I can think of as a…
14:35:48 as a parallel. But it's not… it's not a perfect parallel.
14:35:52 At all. But, I kind of interrupted the flow of your eloquence.
14:35:59 Yeah.
14:35:57 No, no, that's actually… that's a… I'm probably gonna go read up on that right after this. I think it's fantastic.
14:36:03 But, you know, it does touch a little bit on one of the other themes that I think is important in the book.
14:36:09 That impressed me, because we don't see it that much anymore. Nowadays, when I talk to historians, I hear a lot about forces.
14:36:16 Yeah.
14:36:15 social forces. The individual doesn't really control events. And, uh, you rather unapologetically, uh, you describe Alexander the Great, for example, as a great man.
14:36:26 Greatness. And so you have this concept that I think we…
14:36:30 Uh, you might find, uh, in earlier generations, it seems a little out of fashion at universities today. So, you know, what does it mean, greatness? Why would somebody say Alexander the Great
14:36:40 was a great man.
14:36:42 Well, I've had to think a lot about that one, because my colleague here at Harvard for many years
14:36:48 was a great historian named Ernst Bagian, and…
14:36:52 Ernst spent his entire career studying Alexander the Great, and he was convinced he was a monster, he was a Hitler.
14:36:57 Alexander themselves… uh, sorry, Ernst himself was an escapee. His family escaped from
14:37:04 Nazism, so it's understandable that he sees his own history.
14:37:08 And this. And I read Ernst's book, and…
14:37:12 He was going to write the great book on Alexander the Great, that's why he was hard at Harvard.
14:37:16 Uh, and after he got done,
14:37:20 tearing all the sources apart, he decided he couldn't do it anymore because he didn't believe any of the sources.
14:37:26 So, it was written by Peter Green instead, with great…
14:37:29 And thanks to Ernst Billion,
14:37:31 So, I hear Ernst's voice ringing in my ear whenever I try to say something good about
14:37:38 Alexander, but my attitude is that…
14:37:41 You know, if you go push target's the one who really has the most positive view of Alexander.
14:37:47 And Plutarch had access to many sources we don't have today.
14:37:51 Uh, and I went through… actually, I was so interested in this question, I read all the surviving, you know, Aryan, all these surviving, you know,
14:37:58 Of course, there's Rufus and all these surviving, uh,
14:38:02 things. And I decided that they… he wasn't… Alexander was not getting a fair shake, and I think that Alexander really did have a grand vision
14:38:13 of how to unite East and West.
14:38:16 Right? That he, uh, because you could… how… no one denies that he tried to get his…
14:38:22 top, uh, staff to intermarry with Persian girls, right? And he himself married.
14:38:28 You know, someone from Sukhdiana that he married… he married a Bactrian princess, right?
14:38:35 And there's all sorts of legislation which shows he tries to incorporate Greco-Roman laws with
14:38:43 gods, I mean, with, um…
14:38:45 with the Persian gods.
14:38:47 So, it seems to me that this
14:38:50 Sharp division in world culture that Herodotus.
14:38:55 picked up that the Greeks and the Persians are just different parts of the world. They do things differently.
14:39:01 And of course, Herodotus had a lot of admiration for the Persians. He wasn't, by any means, a nativist.
14:39:06 In fact, he was accused of being Philo-Persian,
14:39:09 by later historians, but he perceived this cultural gap between Greeks and Persians,
14:39:15 I think that… that Alexander wanted to heal… bridge that gap.
14:39:21 And that's what his great imperial
14:39:24 system was about the common coinage, and
14:39:26 And the, uh, the worship of the gods, and so forth. I think he was doing that, and…
14:39:32 In fact, he was a kind of model for the Romans later on.
14:39:36 When the Romans had to create a world empire which was not based on a single ethnicity.
14:39:42 In the sense of sort of a civilizing mission, I suppose you might say. We don't hear that without
14:39:46 Yeah.
14:39:47 irony nowadays. Okay, let me… actually, that… that…
14:39:50 I just had one more thing, because in order, really, to make…
14:39:54 to challenge people, I…
14:39:56 gave them the ancient idea of what Alexander the Great was, and the ancients thought he was a hero, right? He was a… someone who was superhuman in some way.
14:40:07 that the gods had smiled on him, and he had some element of the divine in him.
14:40:12 And that, of course, is deeply unpopular today, that, you know, you could have a superhuman person…
14:40:19 Uh, but I think it does make sense that some people in history
14:40:23 have the opportunity
14:40:25 Uh, to, um, to do great things, and they do them.
14:40:30 That's what I ever said. Alexander had the opportunity to do great things, and he did them.
14:40:35 And had he lived longer, who knows?
14:40:39 Let me ask you, then, on that note as well, um…
14:40:42 when I read history, it often happens, and in your book, it happened a number of times, that
14:40:47 I sort of see ironies to our own times.
14:40:50 And I wonder if you, uh…
14:40:52 I want to comment, do you do that on purpose? I have a quote I pulled out, I just… I thought might be kind of interesting. It's about Theodosius.
14:40:59 Uh, and I don't know if you intend to comment on our own times or not, but here's what you write. You say, in the time of Theodosius II,
14:41:06 The drawbacks of non-military emperors.
14:41:10 A foreign-born officer corps, and an urban population eager to avoid war at all costs,
14:41:15 Became evident. Rome grew used to sponsoring proxy boards, deploying its wealth in the lives of other people to protect its soft
14:41:22 civilian populations.
14:41:24 Now, when I read that, and I, of course, it sparks all kinds of thoughts about, you know,
14:41:29 volunteer armies, or, you know, taking foreigners into the United States Army as a means of getting citizenship and so forth.
14:41:36 Uh, is that just happening by virtue of the topic, or is this something you were trying to get people like me thinking about?
14:41:43 Well, first of all, the Romans had always taken in foreigners into their army. That's one of the great ways that they
14:41:51 They civilized, but they also made Romans by taking them… the best way to make a barbarian into a Roman is to take them into the army.
14:42:00 And the Romans knew that already in the 2nd century AD. They were doing it.
14:42:05 Uh, you know, in the early republic, you had to be a Roman citizen to be in the legions. You could be an auxiliary forces if you were, uh, if you were an allied one of the Sokie'i.
14:42:15 But to be in the legions, you had to be a Roman, uh, Roman citizen, and they softened that in the first century BC.
14:42:22 And by the 2nd century, the…
14:42:25 BC… or AG, excuse me, they have, um…
14:42:28 They have, uh, you know, many barbarian peoples in the armies, and Theodosius I, who was
14:42:36 A far greater figure than Theodosius II.
14:42:39 I tried to do that, even with Alrich was going to be, uh,
14:42:44 a Roman legionary, or a Roman general at one time.
14:42:46 But what I was worried about, I was not trying to say that we should be, um…
14:42:53 nativist in some… in the Army only have Americans in the Army. I wasn't really…
14:42:58 I guess I must have thought about what happened to the U.S. Army.
14:43:03 Uh, it's a question of loyalties.
14:43:07 I also, um…
14:43:10 you know, Synazius has this speech where he absolutely excoriates the Roman emperor emperors for taking in all these barbarians into the army, and
14:43:19 He sounds prophetic later on.
14:43:22 If you realize what's happened. But the barbarians actually fought very loyally for Rome.
14:43:28 The ones that were on Rome's side.
14:43:30 Uh, and, uh, you know, they wouldn't have won the great battle against Attila the Hun without barbarian allies there.
14:43:37 So, I think that I would be actually pretty cautious about…
14:43:42 drawing… drawing modern analogies there.
14:43:44 I'm not a fan of nativism. I think it's absurd in America to have nativists.
14:43:51 thinking. Um…
14:43:53 It's, uh, well…
14:43:55 But I'm not going to get into any political comments, but I do… I do intend to offer a mirror, right? This is what they say, a mirror.
14:44:04 Uh, to the democracy.
14:44:07 One of the things I'm most, uh…
14:44:11 It became clear to me when I was studying for this.
14:44:14 book was The Breakdown of the Roman legal system in the First Century BC.
14:44:21 Where nobody trusted
14:44:23 the jury courts to give…
14:44:26 an honest answer, especially when they're under senatorial control.
14:44:30 Uh, if you read this wonderful book called Lawless Republic.
14:44:34 I wish I could remember the name of the… Josiah Osgoode, right, who wrote this book, wonderful book.
14:44:39 Uh, because it goes through all the trials of Cicero, and it becomes evident that
14:44:46 people just didn't trust courts to be neutral.
14:44:50 And it reminds me of today, where you can… you can tell the outcome of a judicial proceeding by knowing which president appointed which of the judges, right?
14:44:59 People's… that's the way they read this, that, well, no, it's going to happen because we have six justices for that,
14:45:04 Or we only have three justices for this.
14:45:07 And that's the way the Romans, uh…
14:45:10 That's one of the main reasons why the Roman Republic collapsed.
14:45:13 In my opinion.
14:45:15 Well, then does the golden thread give us a way out of that? Is there a way to…
14:45:19 Is there a better precedent somewhere in Western history, as you were studying these things?
14:45:23 Well, one of my fears is that people will take what I wrote about Augustus as a call for
14:45:31 monarchy.
14:45:32 Oh,
14:45:32 Uh, because it, uh, but I tried to make very clear that Augustus did save the Roman Empire, and I think he…
14:45:40 He tried to save as much of the Republic as he could.
14:45:45 could, consistent with him controlling everything,
14:45:48 We're controlling as much… as much as he needed to control, and this ego trip he's on in the…
14:45:54 It looks like a total ego trip to modern readers.
14:45:58 But the way I read that is that, because he lists… for viewers who are not familiar, he lists all of his honors and all of his victories, and everything he built, and…
14:46:08 All the temples that he built.
14:46:10 Uh, and you get really kind of sick of this. This guy's a total egomaniac.
14:46:14 But I think the purpose of this is to say, I… I… no one's ever going to equal me in terms of honor.
14:46:23 Any senator who thinks he's going to come to my level is not going to make it, right?
14:46:29 He doesn't claim divine qualities, he claims that for his father, or adoptive father.
14:46:36 Uh, but he does explain that for himself. It's a remarkable, um…
14:46:41 So, but I don't think that Augustus is a solution for us. I don't think we're as far gone as the Romans, for one thing.
14:46:49 Uh, you know, everyone expected the Roman Empire to be collapsing in the time of Caesar, just because they couldn't… they had 40 years of civil war, they…
14:46:58 they… people were revolting against the Romans all over the empire, and…
14:47:03 You know, see how far they could get with thumbing their nose at the Romans. And Augustus stopped all that.
14:47:09 Augustus built a system which looks like a republic,
14:47:13 Uh, which is controlled by him.
14:47:15 Uh, through various means, the tribunition power and so forth. And he controls enough of the army so that he's like the Supreme Commander-in-Chief.
14:47:25 But it doesn't… he always claims that he doesn't change anything. He doesn't have any, uh, you know, even the title of print caps is something that he borrows from Skippy Africanus, or something like that.
14:47:36 So, I think that Augustus is one of the great, wise leaders of
14:47:41 of all time, actually. But I don't necessarily think that's… that's what our solution
14:47:47 is, especially since we don't have anybody like Augustus, as far as I can see, who has that level of wisdom.
14:47:53 Yeah, I hope we can find a lot more productive ways to resolve differences than that kind of civil war, or even August. I mean, he holed up all these people who know their history, he holed up a whole group of people in Perugia,
14:48:05 Yeah.
14:48:04 Killed them all, and then he settled down, and so forth.
14:48:08 For people who don't know the Res Guest I, by the way, I often read that with students here, Cornell students.
14:48:13 Uh, because the very first sentence, he says, at the age of 19,
14:48:17 with my own money and my own initiative, I got together an army that freed my country from the factions that were oppressing it. And then I would say to the students, how old are you? And I… some of who are 19 will raise their hands and say, well, this is your time, go ahead and do it.
14:48:28 And it kind of really hits home. How young this guy… I mean, 19 years old, to do these things.
14:48:34 Um, I wanted to get back to something, uh, that you… I think you… it's very refreshing in the book, where you talk about barbarians.
14:48:43 And I think most people's skin is gonna crawl when they hear the word barbarian today. And you do some nice distinctions between, say, the Goths
14:48:51 and the Huns. And so, uh, what would you say about barbarians, especially as we think about the golden thread, I mean, within the West?
14:48:59 Is this something accessible to everybody, or are certain people just barbarians, or how do you assess that today?
14:49:06 Well, I don't pull any punches with people who really are barbarians. It seems to me that if you have no culture whatsoever, you have no written language, you…
14:49:15 are oppressing your womenfolk and your destroying cities and burning them down and killing everybody inside them.
14:49:22 That's barbarism, I'm sorry.
14:49:25 That is not civilization.
14:49:26 However, I think it's possible… I try to make a distinction between Goths and Huns.
14:49:31 Uh, the Goths, I think, at one point could… well, for a long time, they were actually assimilated into the Roman order.
14:49:38 You know, as allies,
14:49:40 Uh, and they… they… Rome had a kind of penumbra of allies and…
14:49:45 Subject kingdoms and, uh, and peoples who accepted Roman…
14:49:51 authority, or accepted Roman civilizational authority.
14:49:54 Uh, but then the Goss, uh, and I think it has…
14:49:59 Funnily enough, a lot to do with taxes.
14:50:02 I think the Gothics… the Goths did not want to be Romans.
14:50:06 That was, uh, clear, that they were proud of their own traditions, and then, of course, they become Aryan Christians,
14:50:14 Uh, before they are retrospectively heretics because their missionized by, uh,
14:50:22 Alpha losses it, I forgot the name of the great missionary. He was an Aryan, but of course, he didn't know he was a heretic, because the…
14:50:28 Council of Nicaea had not yet met, right, in 325. So, all these Goths were Aryans, and it turns into…
14:50:36 A national religion for the Goths, right? Many of these Goths today. And it's a… it's a way of saying, we don't accept the authority of the…
14:50:46 Patriarch of Constantinople.
14:50:48 We don't accept the authority of the Christian church.
14:50:51 Because they understand that
14:50:54 that the authority of the church is interlocked with the authority of the emperor, right?
14:50:58 So, it's a kind of national religion.
14:51:01 But they are, you know, they're more civilized. When the, um, when the golf…
14:51:07 sacked Rome in 410.
14:51:09 Uh, I think, uh…
14:51:11 I'm trying to think of the name of the British historian who said it was the most civilized sack.
14:51:16 In the history of the world, right? Because they didn't, you know, they burned down a few buildings, and…
14:51:21 And they stole things, and they, uh, you know, but there's that famous story in Jerome where…
14:51:27 One of the Holy Roman women
14:51:30 you know, faces down a Goth soldier.
14:51:33 Uh, who… who's about to…
14:51:35 carry off one of her nuns,
14:51:38 And she says, don't do that! You know, Jesus told me not to do that. I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but she brought
14:51:45 the authority of the Christian religion on the Scott soldier, and he said, okay.
14:51:49 I'll back off, and the stories told by Jerome. It's a very… I find it a very instructive story.
14:51:57 Okay.
14:51:54 Um, Peter Heather. Peter Heather wrote this account of…
14:52:00 He calls the sack of Roman 410 the most civilized sack in…
14:52:03 history. The Huns did not sack that way. The Huns were never, as far as I can tell, they had no advanced religions at all.
14:52:13 Uh, they worship the sky, or…
14:52:15 whatever, and it makes a difference. I don't see any, any, uh…
14:52:21 If you're trying to draw modern analyses, I think it makes sense to…
14:52:26 Uh, if you want immigration, you know, to have immigration from people who are assimilable and not those who are not assimilable.
14:52:35 You know, but…
14:52:35 Well, so let me ask you about, uh, there's another thing you do in the book, sort of along those same lines. It's not so much, you know, recommendations for now, but you have these sections on gratitude.
14:52:46 Hmm.
14:52:46 Which is not something I've seen in a book like this before. Can you tell us, you know, here on the call,
14:52:51 what these sections are, and why you've included them.
14:52:55 Well, I… when I started doing that in the Greek section, I…
14:53:01 I felt that one of the things our civilization lacks a lot…
14:53:07 And especially its most extreme members.
14:53:11 is a sense of gratitude towards the past, and… and…
14:53:15 Gratitude is what creates love, right? We want to… it's appropriate to love the past, to love our past,
14:53:22 And to be grateful for people who sacrificed for it.
14:53:27 And we used to do this all the time. We have all these patriotic holidays where we… we remember the people who fought for the country, and
14:53:36 We have statues of people who are great statesmen, we have
14:53:39 Statutes of people who weren't such great statesmen, but the Romans had that problem too.
14:53:43 Uh, and I think that the way you hold a country together and a civilization together is by…
14:53:50 As Augustine says, a common agreement about the sources of things that you love.
14:53:56 Right, that's a more profound statement than the…
14:54:00 Ciceronian slash Scipionic version of that, where you're… you hold to… a civilization is held…
14:54:05 Together by a common agreement about
14:54:09 about reuse, right? About what is right.
14:54:13 And that's a very important thing to have, but Augustine says, civilization's held together, I'm paraphrasing.
14:54:20 by the objects, by having the same objects of love.
14:54:24 And that's why he says the City of God is different from the city of… the Kibitas Terena.
14:54:30 Um, his politics, as far as I'm concerned, is extreme in the other direction, but I think he's right about that.
14:54:38 Right? But he's right about that we need common objects of love and admiration, and we should be grateful for what the Greeks did. You know, the Greeks…
14:54:46 I think it was, um…
14:54:49 Who's the… who is the, uh…
14:54:51 There's a famous historian of science who just died a few years ago.
14:54:55 Who says that, um, the Greeks could not
14:55:00 agree on a monarch, so they may reason their monarch.
14:55:04 Right. And there's something to that. He's talking about the democratic period.
14:55:11 And he was arguing that the reason why reason is so prominent in the Western tradition
14:55:17 is because of democratic…
14:55:19 Discourse, right? That if you're in a market, you give monarchy, you take counsel and give orders.
14:55:26 If you're in a…
14:55:29 democracy, you have to persuade people.
14:55:31 And you have to have…
14:55:34 Yeah.
14:55:32 That's exactly it, yes. I mean, the truth is up to us. That's the burden and the blessing of liberty, right? I mean, uh, there's no final authority other than each other.
14:55:42 Um, I want to ask you one more question along these lines.
14:55:46 based on what you were just saying, and I think at that point, Anya, we'll open it up for the Q&A. Um, for the audience, but you say, uh, you talk about love.
14:55:54 for the past, and I actually… I do agree with you, but I could already tell, if I were to walk around Cornell University into my classes, start talking about love for the past,
14:56:03 I can… I don't know if I would get formal complaints. I think I might. I would certainly get all kinds of antsy looks, and people getting squeamish and saying, what's going on here? So, the question for you is…
14:56:14 If a serious renewal of the Western tradition
14:56:18 is going to begin in the next 50 years. Where would it or should it start? Do you think universities, churches, families, political institutions?
14:56:26 something different.
14:56:27 Well, it's already started at the, uh,
14:56:30 K-12 level with classical education and…
14:56:34 And, uh, classical charters, and the ability… and just people who are rebelling against the direction of education in the last
14:56:41 10, 15 years.
14:56:43 liberal arts, uh, classical education, for many people just means the way that
14:56:48 Schools used to teach in 1960.
14:56:52 There are lots of parents who look at what's happening in schools, and they just don't…
14:56:56 like it, the kind of reactions you're talking about.
14:56:59 I would say, you know, it's good to love the past, but there's also things about our past you should hate.
14:57:05 I mean, I think hate is appropriate for, um, certain types…
14:57:09 for, uh, shuttle slavery.
14:57:12 And hate is appropriate for, uh, violence. The Romans are very violent people, and…
14:57:18 If you look at China, the Chinese don't have this idea that, um…
14:57:23 that, you know…
14:57:26 They think of violence as a last resort. They always have the military
14:57:33 generals under the command of the civil magistrate.
14:57:35 They don't have a glorification of military glory the way we do.
14:57:40 And it's because we have different civilizations, right? The West has always been threatened by…
14:57:45 by Persians and barbarians in the Islamic world, so the military gene, if you will, has always been prominent in the West.
14:57:53 But it sometimes turned bad, and then you enter with, uh, you know, bad forms of colonialism.
14:58:00 For example, and so I'm not entirely insensitive to the critique of Western civilization, but…
14:58:06 There is so much more in Western civilization that is good than is bad. That's my view.
14:58:12 And it is possible to improve it.
14:58:15 We should improve our tradition.
14:58:19 Uh, I guess I'm once again losing the thread that you're…
14:58:22 That's your offering me to, um…
14:58:25 To answer this, but I do think that sources of renewal have to come from education, and we've been conducting this
14:58:32 Social experiment for the last 40 years, where…
14:58:36 We decided we're not going to teach Western Civ anymore. We're going to teach global history.
14:58:41 Right, the West has taught its own history since the Renaissance. Greeks, Romans…
14:58:48 Crusaders, Middle Ages, and European history for countries, and they just decided, rather lightly, under the influence of globalism,
14:58:58 In the 80s and 90s, and it happened here at Harvard, too.
14:59:02 Uh, the university wanted to globalize itself.
14:59:05 So I conducted this radical social experiment on our students, taking away their
14:59:11 studies of the Western past.
14:59:15 In my history department, we last hired a senior professor in European
14:59:19 medieval Ancient History in 2007.
14:59:24 And we've lost 8 people. They haven't been replaced. The Europeanists have been emptied out to serve these other parts of the world.
14:59:32 And that's been a bad thing, I think. And so we're trying to revive… Alan Gelswe and I are part of a movement to try to revive the study of
14:59:41 Uh, the Western tradition, including the classical tradition.
14:59:47 Uh, and I think it is possible to revive it. One good thing about the West is that
14:59:53 always does revive things. We have this Renaissance tradition.
14:59:57 I'm sure we've lost huge parts of the past. Every classist knows that.
15:00:03 We have only a tiny fraction of what was great in the ancient world, but…
15:00:09 Um, it's enough to revive our civilization. I truly believe that people will ultimately say, we cannot lose this.
15:00:17 No, we don't want to lose children who can understand
15:00:21 The works of Bach and Mozart. We don't want to have children
15:00:25 who, uh, don't walk into the European…
15:00:29 art department… art branch of the university and feel they can't understand it enough, they see pictures of…
15:00:36 got Greek gods or Christian saints, and it doesn't…
15:00:40 speak to them at all. They have no interest in…
15:00:43 And the great artists and sculptors of the past, because they understand the subjects.
15:00:47 Um, so that… we don't want that.
15:00:50 We want our civilization to survive. We want it to continue to civilize.
15:00:55 And we… I think there will be enough people around, there already are a huge number of people in classical education, over a million.
15:01:03 And you don't need very many.
15:01:05 to revive a civilization.
15:01:08 All right, thank you so much. Anya, do you have questions from the audience?
15:01:13 I do indeed, quite a few, and I just want to say thank you, Mike, for
15:01:19 presenting excellent questions in this discussion, and James as well, for your…
15:01:22 Thank you.
15:01:23 Eloquent responses, um, I could not agree more about
15:01:27 The importance of bringing education to the next generation.
15:01:33 and familiarizing them, because
15:01:35 So much of what we find enjoyable starts with familiarity, really. Um, and it's very…
15:01:41 fun. It just is a very positive anecdote. Like, I take my daughter to an art museum, and she's so excited when she goes, oh, that's the judgment of Paris!
15:01:48 Um, because it… and it's…
15:01:51 It's beautiful because there are so many great stories, and they are so child-friendly. I mean, some of them, not so much, I mean, there's a bit of…
15:01:58 And let's be honest, there's got to be an adult version. But, uh, I do think we can start with the youth. But I do want to get into so many great questions that we have.
15:02:09 Um, available, uh, and this is one, I think, that everybody sort of thinks of initially. This is one of the first questions that came up when we began is from Bill, is why start with Greece?
15:02:20 Um, didn't the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures precede the maturity of the Greek contribution to Western civilization?
15:02:27 Indeed, anybody who wanders around the city of Rome will see
15:02:32 quite a few, um, obelisks scattered about, illustrating how the Romans themselves
15:02:37 you know, look to Egypt, and we know that the Greeks, we hear the story of Solon going to Egypt, so many of the great
15:02:45 um, philosophers and thinkers
15:02:48 are said to have found inspiration from beyond the Greek Isles, so…
15:02:53 Um, why, why Greece? Why not?
15:02:56 Egypt.
15:02:57 Well, the Greeks in one way were ethnocentric, but in another way, they were the least ethnocentric. They were interested in everything.
15:03:05 If he goes through Jacobi's, you know, fragments of the Greek historians, you see they wrote something like 30 histories of Babylon,
15:03:14 You know, dozens of histories of Egypt. They were fascinated by these, and they even wrote the, um…
15:03:21 History of India is one of the earliest histories of India, which survives in fragments by magazines.
15:03:27 That's what we know about India in that period. There's… Indians don't write history, they don't write history until the 12th century AD.
15:03:33 You know, so we have, um…
15:03:36 We have the Greeks to thank for our knowledge of the ancient Near East.
15:03:40 I will say that I meant this to be a history of the tradition,
15:03:43 Not a history of Western Civilization.
15:03:46 If you're writing a history of Western civilization, you will start with Babylon and Egypt.
15:03:51 And the Sumerians and the Babylonians and the Akkadians especially, in fact, and the Persians.
15:04:00 the Empire, Persian Empire of the 6th century will be as important a part of your story.
15:04:06 Uh, but I'm writing a history of the Western Tradition, and the Western tradition is based, uh, ultimately in language.
15:04:12 Right? In Greek and Latin. That's one reason why it survives, because you can learn those language.
15:04:18 And the other thing is…
15:04:20 I constantly… I have a… I have a nephew who teaches world history, and he asked me these questions also.
15:04:27 And, uh, one of the differences in studying
15:04:31 other civilizations is you don't have that much to read.
15:04:35 You know, there's an immense amount that survives from ancient Greece.
15:04:40 Uh, even though it's a tiny fraction of what once existed.
15:04:44 But if you want to read the history of ancient India, for example, you can't really do it with contemporary sources.
15:04:52 You can read all sorts of things about nests and religion and philosophy and so forth. It's a rich civilization, but they're not historically minded.
15:05:00 You can study Chinese civilization the way you study the West, because the sources are not quite as numerous, but they're plentiful enough.
15:05:09 Uh, but, so, the idea that… one of the versions of global history is the four civilizations approach, right?
15:05:16 Where you have, uh, Babylon…
15:05:21 Egypt, the ancient part is Babylon, Egypt, China, and pre-Columbian.
15:05:27 civilizations in North and South America, so…
15:05:30 You only have sources you can read for two of those, the Chinese and the Western. You'll have sources, you know, actual contemporary sources you can read for the other two.
15:05:38 And if you're a student in a class, you might not realize that.
15:05:41 But that's my basic idea, is that our civilization does, in fact, and I fully recognize this, that
15:05:50 They borrow a lot from the Egyptians, and they go on borrowing a lot from the Egyptians. I just wrote a book about a
15:05:58 15th century political theorist, who is as interested in what he finds out about Egypt
15:06:03 And Babylon, and…
15:06:06 India supplied to him by Greek historians, as he is in ancient Greece, so I don't exclude those things, but I'm talking about a tradition, which means
15:06:16 language, it means, uh…
15:06:19 It means genres, you know, we don't… we have a genre of theater which is invented by the Greeks, you know, comedy and tragedy, and…
15:06:30 And we have the new comedy. We have… I guess Mike is an expert on this, you've been teaching about the history of…
15:06:36 comedy. Uh, but it's not easy to find such things in
15:06:41 ancient sources, uh, uh, outside of the West. And it's important for us to understand the history of comedy, history of tragedy, history of history.
15:06:50 You know, we have a great historiographical tradition coming out of
15:06:54 of Greece.
15:06:55 Uh, there are courses on grand strategy, even today. Most courses in grad strategy today.
15:07:02 Uh, which are courses in statesmanship.
15:07:05 Start with Thucydides.
15:07:07 Right, because Thucydides teaches you such a great deal about that. I don't think…
15:07:12 Uh, well, I shouldn't go on about this, but that's my basic answer, that we do have a… the tradition's real.
15:07:19 Right? There are people out there saying that Western tradition is an invented tradition, it never existed before the First World War.
15:07:28 And that's just wrong. I'm sorry, it's just wrong.
15:07:31 We've studied the Western tradition, meaning we study preferentially the Greeks and Romans and early Christianity and Europe. We've studied that preferentially for centuries.
15:07:44 Um, as an extension, I suppose, of seeing outside of the specific threat of the West and its involvement with
15:07:51 with those beyond the borders. Um, this is another question from Douglas. What role did the Islamic Ottoman Caliphates
15:07:59 play in helping preserve and pass on the great books of the Greeks and Romans. Did they have great schools of translation?
15:08:06 Yes, they did. Well, the Muslim world preserved a lot of stuff that didn't.
15:08:12 wouldn't otherwise have made it.
15:08:14 Uh, the Islamic role, I think, is responsible for the prominence of Aristotle in medieval
15:08:20 Christian philosophy, because in the ancient world, Plato was the number one philosophy philosopher.
15:08:27 And Aristotle was kind of an assistant to Plato for the natural world.
15:08:33 He wasn't studied for his own philosophy. He studied as a… as a…
15:08:38 As a casting light on Platonism.
15:08:40 But it's the Muslim world which translated tons of classical works in the 9th century.
15:08:47 A lot of translations were done by Christians, by the way.
15:08:50 Um, and they were, uh, and they, they had a civilization which created a bridge.
15:08:57 between the Roman Empire…
15:09:00 Because, you know, the Byzantines actually didn't pay a lot of attention to their traditions.
15:09:04 Uh, until, you know, quite late. Uh, the 11th century, they had a great revival, they had a great revival in the 10th century.
15:09:12 Um, so Islamic civilization deserves a lot of credit for keeping Western things
15:09:18 alive. Um, as there have been many studies of Aristotle translations
15:09:25 Uh, in the middle medieval period, there are some that come from
15:09:30 Muslim sources, but most come from the Greeks.
15:09:33 But what does come from Muslim sources is commentary tradition.
15:09:39 And there's comments, you know, Avicenna and Al-Farabi and some of these Arabic philosophers,
15:09:47 Uh, really are guiding the West in its understanding of Aristotle and Platonism, too.
15:09:52 for a couple centuries, so they deserve a lot of credit.
15:09:55 I don't think they belong to the Western tradition, just because Arabic…
15:10:00 Uh, it was a specialist language, only a few people knew it.
15:10:03 Uh, it wasn't… there wasn't educational tradition in Arabic.
15:10:07 Uh, it starts to be better known in the 17th century, but it's still… it's all… even today, it's… it's a very…
15:10:14 a small tradition. The classics have been getting smaller, and the realm of the classics have been getting smaller, the realm of Arabic's be getting bigger.
15:10:22 Uh, but educated people in the 17th century, we all know Latin. Most of them would know some Greek.
15:10:29 a tiny, tiny group would know Arabic.
15:10:31 So that's the main reason. And those texts are not read, they don't become part of
15:10:36 the canon. In the medieval university, there are some Arabic texts which are canonical.
15:10:42 Because they're used to understand Aristotle.
15:10:44 But that disappears, really, after the 14th century, except for Avaroese, who used as a commentator, and Aristotle.
15:10:51 There's not much help that the West gets from the Arabic tradition.
15:10:57 Um, going back to, sort of, the beginning of the sort of Western tradition,
15:11:02 And this was one that I thought myself when reading through the book, which I thought was excellent, but you begin with Marathon as a sort of symbolic birth of Western liberty. Uh, is that
15:11:15 battle do you believe best understood as a real, civilizing turning point, or did it act more like a powerful myth?
15:11:22 Uh, and maybe by extension, what is the role of myth in this Western tradition?
15:11:28 Well, it is a myth. It's a myth created by Herodotus in the 5th century.
15:11:32 Um, but it's a real battle, too.
15:11:35 And it was a real battle for something that counted in the Western tradition, which is democracy.
15:11:41 Because, uh…
15:11:44 the… the…
15:11:47 the Persians wanted to conquer Greece, right? And they've been working… they've been expanding into the West.
15:11:52 for several decades before the Battle of Marathon.
15:11:57 They had gotten angry at the Athenians, because the Athenians had tried to help the people, the Greek peoples of Asia Minor.
15:12:05 So they're determined to wipe them out.
15:12:08 But it would not be unique for the Persians.
15:12:13 To defeat Greeks. In fact, they mostly defeated Greeks until the Battle of Marathon.
15:12:19 Um, and when they defeated the Greeks, what they did is they put in an oligarchy
15:12:26 with a Persian governor sometimes, or at least a Persian representative to control the city-state.
15:12:33 So, when the Battle of Marathon occurred, Greek democracy… Athenian democracy was about two decades old.
15:12:40 And the people who fought that battle were fighting, in part, the Persians, who were trying to…
15:12:47 expanded their empire into the West.
15:12:49 And they were also fighting for democracy, because they knew if the Persians won, they would come into Athens and they would appoint
15:12:57 They actually had in their army the person they were going to appoint as the… as their governor.
15:13:03 In Athens, right? So it was a fight for freedom, too. Democratic freedom.
15:13:09 Uh, and of course, um…
15:13:12 Herodotus thinks there's these fundamental differences between East and West, but if that battle had not been won,
15:13:18 I say this in the book. There's every chance that…
15:13:22 Persia would have spread into the Mediterranean.
15:13:25 And kept going, and maybe Italy, because there was no other military machine that could stand up to them at that time.
15:13:34 And the Greeks, this is the third great thing about the Battle of Marathon, is the Greeks won.
15:13:39 With a very tiny force.
15:13:41 Uh, the Greeks, it was a kind of a…
15:13:44 they were lucky. If it had been a different situation, they might easily have lost, but they were in a situation where they won.
15:13:52 And that perked everybody up.
15:13:54 Uh, the Athenians did it by themselves without the Spartans, which was also surprising.
15:13:59 And, uh, so…
15:14:02 It showed the Greeks that they could beat the Persians.
15:14:05 And they, you know, if they… and they knew that. They were being hired by the Persians as mercenary soldiers, among other things, because they were great
15:14:13 They were great infantry.
15:14:15 And they remembered that down to the time of Alexander. They knew in the time of…
15:14:19 Philip of Macedon, Alexander, if they took a good Greek army into Asia Minor,
15:14:23 They could… they could defeat anything that the Persians are gonna throw against them.
15:14:28 So they became aware of their own military power, I think, at the Battle of Marathon, and that was…
15:14:36 They didn't really trust, I think, till the defeat at Platea.
15:14:40 and Salamis later in the century.
15:14:42 But they, um, they knew that if they were united…
15:14:46 Right? As Greeks, they could defeat the Persians. So I think it really was a key moment in the history of the West.
15:14:54 Um, we've actually done a really interesting podcast once, specifically on the Battle of Marathon, so if people are
15:15:00 keen on delving deeply into this specific battle, because it is very fascinating, both the battle itself
15:15:07 and sort of the myth, and I wanted to…
15:15:10 What role it played in the, kind of,
15:15:12 cultural identity of the ancient Greeks.
15:15:15 Um, I've got a whole podcast dedicated to that just for you. Um, but I'm going to turn back to the… to the reader questions. This one's from David.
15:15:23 Um, and I think this is, um, one that will actually, um, I'd like to ask both you, Jim, and Mike.
15:15:30 Um, in the Renaissance, educated people knew classical mythology so they could look at Renaissance art,
15:15:35 And understand classically-inspired paintings, as Jim, you've been discussing.
15:15:39 Because they shared a common language, a lingua franca, and of course that goes for Christian art, too.
15:15:44 If we lose our knowledge of classical writings, philosophy, art, and so on,
15:15:48 wouldn't we lose the common language of Western civilization? And then, what kind of world would be left in? A world of headlines about AI and the stock market?
15:15:56 pop songs and TV shows, a dystopia, I imagine, for all of us that we're imagining.
15:16:01 Do we need a common base of knowledge to be a real civilization? And I guess the extension of that
15:16:07 Um, for you both is…
15:16:10 Um, what do you… we need to have this common knowledge. What do you see as the biggest obstacle
15:16:16 to renewing interest in the Greek and Roman
15:16:19 wisdom? Is it students' lack of
15:16:21 background knowledge, the cultural climate, or the way antiquity is presented.
15:16:27 I'll let you ask… answer that first, Mike.
15:16:31 Well, so, a lot to think about. I would say we don't need a common language to do it, because we're already doing it.
15:16:37 The Western tradition survives in many countries all around the world, and it's certainly a lot more work to learn all those languages. We have to do it for a classics PhD.
15:16:46 It'd be easier if it were all in Latin.
15:16:47 Uh, but so I think the language is okay, but the huge problem really is the fragmentation of students' backgrounds.
15:16:55 And I can give you a crystal clear example.
15:16:57 I've been at Cornell for 22 years. When I first started teaching, uh, courses on ancient Rome,
15:17:02 You don't have to mention anything about the Bible. All the students, they already knew everything in it, whether they believe it or they don't believe it.
15:17:09 Uh, starting about 10 or 12 years ago, I started realizing a lot of students were coming that didn't know much about the Bible.
15:17:16 Uh, so I start now in this course I do on Ancient Rome. We read parts of the Gospel of Luke, and we read parts of Acts of the Apostles.
15:17:23 The last couple years, not only do we do that, but I have students who don't know even the bare-bones basics about Jesus at all.
15:17:31 I mentioned the resurrection, and I was getting blank stares just last week, and this is not an exaggeration.
15:17:36 These are people that are, like, they're dimly aware, they've heard of this guy, Jesus, and so forth.
15:17:40 Um, you mentioned, uh, NOAA and the flood, it means nothing.
15:17:44 You mentioned Moses and the tablets, it means nothing.
15:17:48 So, if we're gonna renew, we got a lot of elementary work to do here.
15:17:52 Um, it's the same thing we're seeing with music and cinema and every other art form we've got, right?
15:17:57 I came of age before the internet, so it was a big story in the New York Times today about the Gen Xers my age, right? Uh, you watch what's on TV, because there's only 3 channels.
15:18:06 Now there's infinite channels and infinite entertainment, so…
15:18:09 How are we gonna do it? That's where, maybe, Jim, you could talk about… I'm interested very much in your idea of K-12,
15:18:15 I wonder if you think it's possible in the public schools to renew some of this as well, or if we're going to have to just do it through
15:18:21 private schools.
15:18:23 Well, um, my three nephews all teach in a public school, and they, um…
15:18:30 inform me that whatever the state tells them they have to teach,
15:18:33 Now, the state social studies…
15:18:37 curriculum is not necessarily what they teach.
15:18:41 And sometimes they're required, sometimes they're advised to teach these things by the State Department of Education, but they teach what they want, and there actually are many students, uh, or teachers, young teachers in
15:18:54 In public schools, especially in these wealthy suburbs,
15:18:58 Uh, that want to teach the classical tradition, and their parents want the students to learn it. I don't… I mean, classical tradition in the larger sense of European civiliz… European civilization and its
15:19:12 predecessors. So I wouldn't, for once… I would not say that the Classical Revival, which is going on,
15:19:20 is not going to be conf…
15:19:22 will be confined to only classical schools or schools that are…
15:19:26 outside the public system, I hope the public system can be reformed.
15:19:31 too. But I think it is important for people to feel they have a common
15:19:35 Civilization. They have a civilization that they value and are grateful to.
15:19:41 And also, it's a civilization that provides a key
15:19:46 to understanding many things that are extremely beautiful and valuable. And I always think of going into museums. I had…
15:19:53 Some… a reporter from the Harvard Crimson asked me one time,
15:19:57 What I hoped students would retain from them…
15:20:00 Retained from my classes, which were on Time Renaissance, 10 years after they graduated, and what I said is, I would like my students to go to
15:20:09 go frequently to museums and understand what they see.
15:20:13 Uh, because some of this stuff is extremely beautiful and extremely moving. You know, when I go into the…
15:20:19 museum in… in the Sculpture Museum in Florence, and I see Michelangelo's bust.
15:20:25 of Brutus.
15:20:27 And, you know, take care of these famous figures, you can see that
15:20:32 Michelangelo himself is soaked in these sources, and he's got an interpretation of what this guy was like.
15:20:38 And it's so powerful, if you know the history behind it, um, if you don't know any history of the Roman Empire, you'd look at it and say, it's Brutus, right?
15:20:47 You would just say, who's that angry guy?
15:20:50 Or who's that guy who looks very determined and…
15:20:52 And, uh, angry, and, you know, it doesn't make any… but it's also… it's a very profound stature, because you see nobility, too, right? And you tell an art historian that you can read nobility in a…
15:21:05 In a sculpture. I wonder how many would be sympathetic to that, but maybe the only reason I'm finding nobility in the sculpture is because I know the nobility of the story.
15:21:15 Right. And Michelangelo allows us to connect
15:21:19 with the stories of Rome in this visual way.
15:21:24 And, you know, when we read of it as one of the great
15:21:27 keys to understanding mythological paintings and sculptures, right, because most of them have some kind of connection with Ovid, and anybody who had been… studied Ovid, and Avid was the most popular text.
15:21:40 In the late Middle Ages and early modern period, because they…
15:21:44 felt they had to know the mythology.
15:21:47 So, when they went into a museum, they would see the stuff, they would understand, they would understand what each individual artist made of this.
15:21:55 The lessons they were trying to teach, or possibly the emotional…
15:21:59 how the legend affected them emotionally, maybe they were making lessons for modern times.
15:22:04 So, I think that is one real reason why we should revive.
15:22:10 The classical tradition, and why it will be, because people do not want to lose that, or at least there are enough people who don't want to lose that.
15:22:18 I have another question for both of you, and this might be a bit more of a contentious one.
15:22:23 Um, but that makes things interesting, right? Uh, with regards to both how we can approach
15:22:29 Um, a revival, and…
15:22:31 Maybe, perhaps, how it's looking at the moment.
15:22:34 Um, but the question is, is the Western tradition something, um,
15:22:38 That should be saved. I think we can assume that, but if… if it's going to be saved, can it be done through education alone?
15:22:45 Or does it require a deeper spiritual or religious renewal? And of course, this is interesting,
15:22:52 When witnessing how, sort of, the classics
15:22:55 Revival is taking shape in America versus perhaps other countries, but I would like to, um, hear from both of you. Do you think it needs dress education, or does it need to be sort of another dynamic of
15:23:07 Religion or spirituality for it.
15:23:12 Yeah, so, um, about two-thirds of the classical education movement is
15:23:18 is, uh, comes from religious sources, some… a small amount from Jewish.
15:23:23 schools, and maybe two-thirds of the other Christian schools, and then one-third is public charter schools.
15:23:29 Uh, so, I think, as a point of fact, that the classical school movement is closely connected with
15:23:38 Christian, uh,
15:23:40 Parents, above all, who are afraid of what their children are learning in public schools. That's the real driver of it.
15:23:47 Uh, as a practical thing, I think that in the Western tradition,
15:23:52 Christianity has been…
15:23:55 the companion of…
15:23:56 classical tradition for a long time.
15:23:59 Uh, going back to the, uh, ancient…
15:24:02 Romans to late antiquity, where the typical education of a…
15:24:07 of a senator or someone in the leadership class would be Roman law,
15:24:12 Greco-Roman literature, Christianity,
15:24:15 and military training. That would be…
15:24:18 the education. I think, um, and so those people felt they had to know those things in order to be leaders in society.
15:24:26 Um, one reason for the study of Latin was to hold these many worlds together.
15:24:32 Because people spoke different native languages, but when the Romans met,
15:24:37 I don't know, a Roman emperor would send out his governor with a staff to Bithynia, or something like that, the language they had in common was Latin, so Latin had this functionality to it.
15:24:49 Uh, Christianity, I think, has always had a kind of love-hate relationship of the classical tradition, and…
15:24:57 Fortunately, the haters were stopped.
15:24:59 Uh, and there are still haters, though. People who think the classics are dangerous.
15:25:04 for… for children.
15:25:06 Uh, but I, you know, I studied the Renaissance, and the Renaissance is a period that deeply believes
15:25:12 that the classical tradition
15:25:15 is going to save Christianity.
15:25:18 from becoming too, um…
15:25:21 fanatical and too, uh…
15:25:23 exclusive.
15:25:25 And Christians like Petrarch and Erasmus,
15:25:28 thought that Christianity needed the classics, right? Christianity needed the classics to civilize the, uh, the uncivilized impulses that lie inside of any religion.
15:25:39 in all religions can go bad, even Buddhism. People think that Buddhism is some kind of, uh,
15:25:47 of holy religion that never does… inspires anyone to do bad things, but that's simply not the case, right? My wife is a Buddhist, and I'm about to leave for Thailand, and if you go to Burma,
15:25:59 You know, you find Buddhists doing bad things, and um…
15:26:03 they're not being… they need to have some other kind of corroborative
15:26:09 Um, uh, tradition that helps keep them in line. I think that the classical tradition with its…
15:26:15 It's, uh, you know, reverence for virtue and for pietas and…
15:26:21 You know, the Piatas word to God is something that's continuous between pagan and Christian religion.
15:26:30 I think that that has always been… has always supported Christianity, and Christianity supported classical, in its most healthy forms.
15:26:38 That's what I would say, that those two traditions ought to go together in terms of their…
15:26:44 keeping each other honest, as it were.
15:26:46 Mike, would you have something to add to that?
15:26:49 Well, I'll disagree a little bit. That is to say, I don't think anything said is wrong, but there is plenty of opportunity for non-believers to
15:26:57 avail themselves and participate in the Western tradition.
15:27:00 In part because the great
15:27:02 atheistic texts are already in Latin. Lucretius is a foundational text
15:27:08 that we bring into classes, people cannot believe, you know, it's 2100 years old, and the guy is describing atomic motion, he's saying that the gods, if they exist, they don't really intervene in the world, they take no interest in us.
15:27:19 There's evolution, death is the end, and so forth. At the same time, you get thinkers like Cicero grappling with these different interpretations of spirituality and religion.
15:27:28 And he sort of comes… he writes a big treat, he's called On the Nature of the Gods,
15:27:32 And he sort of ends up with this deist point of view, like the founders of the United States, where he says, yeah, they're…
15:27:38 There does seem to be, you know, evidence of life and creation, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence of a guiding
15:27:44 individual spirit. And so, I think, um, many people, if they knew about these texts, would find great comfort.
15:27:50 There, um, all these ideas that were having have been had before, and so I would say instead of spirituality, what people really need is maturity.
15:27:59 You know, if we read these texts and try to approach them,
15:28:03 as if these people are speaking things that they earnestly believe and they want us to understand along with them.
15:28:08 So that's my pitch.
15:28:10 I think, also, you think of Epicurus, I mean, there's quite a few philosophers
15:28:16 Um, that are framing the ideas of morality and virtue outside of a religious
15:28:22 framework that I think is very important.
15:28:24 for people to be able to draw upon for finding a shared sense of what is virtue that isn't within the confines of specific religion.
15:28:32 And perhaps, while we see the classical education for children, um,
15:28:37 in the Christian realm more so, um,
15:28:40 maybe the renewal of Stoicism and other ancient philosophies seems to be broader than
15:28:50 Yeah,
15:28:46 Um, sort of the Christian culture. So perhaps, I mean, the one thing I like to think of is we've got billions of people now, so we can all do different ways to sort of pitch in.
15:28:55 Yeah, it's important for Christianity to have these connections with the non-Christian sources. They were reading Lucretius, right, in the 15th century, 16th century,
15:29:05 They tried to make Christianized versions of Lucretius in the 17th century, which is, I think, pretty crazy.
15:29:12 I'm pretty hopeless.
15:29:13 But, um, it's important for Christianity to have these, not to become a silo, another silo.
15:29:22 And being educated in the classical tradition makes this
15:29:28 That kind of creates a kind of two-way traffic between…
15:29:32 The non-Christian, the Christian world enables people to understand… have common conversations that we don't.
15:29:39 You know, this is one thing the Leibniz wanted to do in the 17th century, to make
15:29:45 The classics, a civil wisdom that were shared by all the warring religions, because they were having religious wars in this period, so…
15:29:53 Lipeness says, well, we need a common culture somehow, so let's not start teaching
15:29:58 Let's not have mandatory religious instruction.
15:30:02 In the Netherlands.
15:30:03 Let's have mandatory classical instruction in the Netherlands, so people will have some common
15:30:08 ideas about virtue and wisdom and good government and so forth.
15:30:13 So, I think I agree that the classical tradition should serve as…
15:30:21 all populations.
15:30:22 I absolutely love that idea of, you know, the classics potentially being the bridge between so many different, um…
15:30:29 Cultural perspectives, and I think, you know, even just speaking from my perspective of running classical wisdom, you know, we've
15:30:36 We're over 100,000 people in 200 countries, and I can tell you from first-hand experience, when we write about, um… I try to bring, you know, popular topics of modern-day issues and relate them to the classics,
15:30:49 And the responses tell me that our audience readership is very, very broad with regards to being on the right, on the left, religious, atheist, you know, in every country in the world.
15:31:02 Um, so, yeah, I love the idea of maybe the classics
15:31:06 can help us heal. Um, but to bring… I've got just maybe two more questions, because I realize you both have been very generous with your time already.
15:31:13 But I do like bringing, sort of, these ideas into our modern era, as I was just saying, to sort of show and highlight the relevance of these ideas and concepts.
15:31:22 So this one, again, might be a little bit of a contentious one, um, that you sort of hinted at earlier.
15:31:28 With regards to the legal system.
15:31:31 Um, and the Roman concept of the rule of law was sort of treated as a sacred inheritance.
15:31:36 Do you think the modern legal system still embody that spirit, or have they become politicized to the point
15:31:43 of losing legitimacy.
15:31:47 Um, I think that, historically speaking,
15:31:52 The IGF, the rule of law, emerges in the late 2nd century BC and is
15:31:58 I think, essentially, popularized by Cicero.
15:32:02 He's a beneficiary of it. And what appealed at the time
15:32:07 was the idea that there was something above politics.
15:32:12 And Cicero wanted to root the rule of law in the Stoic concept of law of nature.
15:32:17 and Law of Nations. The Roman claimed to be an empire
15:32:22 reflected their belief that
15:32:25 the Roman law was the law of nations, that the Romans…
15:32:29 accepted the rules of moral nations.
15:32:31 So, um, I think that…
15:32:35 we might have a different…
15:32:37 theological underpinning, or lack of theological underpinning.
15:32:41 I happen to think the Starks are right about the law of nature, although I don't…
15:32:45 I'm not… I… I love Stoicism, but I'm not a star. That's a good way.
15:32:51 way of putting it. Um…
15:32:53 And I think it's a tremendously important concept for us today to have a legal…
15:33:00 legal truth that's above political party, because we have this terrible tendency to…
15:33:06 twist the law into whatever
15:33:08 Um, politicals into the service of politics, and it's important for…
15:33:14 judges and… and lawmakers and university teachers to teach the supremacy of law. We might not call it
15:33:23 The supremacy of law over politics. I guess that's what… I think that's the most important thing that we have to preserve.
15:33:30 that law is something not… that is not politics. It's about…
15:33:34 It's about… I call it bono, it's establishing what is good and fair.
15:33:39 And you cannot establish what is good and fair if you're using the law to serve your political ends.
15:33:47 partisan ends.
15:33:49 Hear, hear. Uh, yeah, and to the question I thought was, has it, uh, is it still here? My experience with the law has been, sort of,
15:33:56 Not that much, but it certainly seems to be working well. You know, there are obviously… there are going to be famous exceptions on TV or something like that at the ultra-high level, but in everyday life, we have thousands of judges
15:34:08 Uh, who seem to be doing a wonderful job.
15:34:11 So, no, I think that's actually something we should not take for granted whatsoever. Just as you said, that, you know,
15:34:17 that the law is above politics.
15:34:19 That's a great way to put it.
15:34:21 Um, I've got a quote that I want to read out, um, was maintaining the thread and transmission of culture is essential and needs renewal in each generation.
15:34:31 Her culture is born only when the unity has been discovered never before. Before this, there are separate groups in tremendous territorial fight and nothing more from Oscar is Chaozo. Uh, I hadn't heard that quote before, but I really liked it.
15:34:43 Um, it was…
15:34:44 Wait, what is that? I didn't hear that, Anya. What was the quote?
15:34:47 Um, it was a culture is born only when the unity has been discovered, never before.
15:34:52 Before this, there are separate groups in a tremendous territorial fight, and nothing more, from Oscar Kachauzzo, um…
15:34:58 I could put that… that was, uh…
15:35:01 Submitted by… I can't…
15:35:03 Let me say that. Um…
15:35:06 Burton wrote that one, so thank you.
15:35:09 Um, for submitting that one. So I'm gonna do one last question, and again, this can go both to you, and I think this is kind of at the heart
15:35:17 of the entire conversation of how we take this information from the past
15:35:22 use it in our present.
15:35:24 kind of find that balance. So, how can we find a balance between tradition and innovation to modernize with moderation, without losing the inheritance
15:35:33 of the immeasurable value that we call the Western tradition. How do we
15:35:37 do that.
15:35:42 It's your turn to go first, Mike.
15:35:44 Well, I would say… I would say it's what you did in the book, to be honest. What do we do? We have this huge number of case studies.
15:35:51 Virtually every scenario we are going to encounter in social life
15:35:56 has been encountered before, and we had this tremendous record of how people
15:36:01 dealt with it before, and sometimes they hit a home run.
15:36:05 And sometimes they really whiffed it, and it's pretty bad. And so we can look and see how they did it. We can often see multiple case studies of the same thing.
15:36:13 And so, uh, I would say we want to keep referring back to the sources. Yeah, I mean, if you talk about total upheaval, the French Revolution tried that, you know, we're gonna overthrow everything that ever came before,
15:36:24 That didn't end so well, but okay, now that's a case study we can go with.
15:36:28 So, uh, the American Revolution, that worked out much better. Uh, so…
15:36:32 I would say incremental with whatever we do. That's the great Greek wisdom, right? Maiden agon, don't do anything in excess. Nothing too much.
15:36:40 So, um, that's what I would say. Read the… but we gotta read the sources and know what people have dealt with before.
15:36:47 Right. Um, modernizing with moderation is a…
15:36:52 There's a phrase I got from a…
15:36:55 French philosopher named Remy Bragg.
15:36:57 Uh, who, uh, accuses the modern world of
15:37:01 not paying enough respect for the past.
15:37:04 But I think, you know, in our tradition, we've had this idea in
15:37:09 historical writing for a long time.
15:37:12 that…
15:37:13 Uh, going back, I think, to Thucydides, above all, that you have to tell the truth.
15:37:19 You have to tell the truth.
15:37:21 And if you don't tell the truth, bad actors will step in.
15:37:26 And start telling lies, and people who don't know
15:37:30 The truth about the classical past, or the Christian, or the European past.
15:37:35 are not able to fight against the…
15:37:38 Delusions and seditious impulses and the, you know, the constant lies that we have around us.
15:37:47 We need to have an education for that.
15:37:50 But I think that if you are honest, if we are honest about ourselves,
15:37:55 You know, we keep saying, oh, the Romans were so terrible, you know, Julius Caesar killed 6 people… 6 million people in Gaul.
15:38:02 So we shouldn't be like the Romans.
15:38:04 But we should remember that, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities and killed lots of…
15:38:11 Very… of civilians. So, one reason to study the past is to give us a little more humility and self-consciousness about the present. And I think if we have humility about the
15:38:25 present. We will honor the past all the more.
15:38:28 Beautifully said.
15:38:30 There's a great quote, uh, David Feiler just put in, that is what Leon Bertati Alberti said about the Renaissance. It's possible to learn from the past.
15:38:39 but also surpass it. And he was thinking of Brunesky dome. So, um…
15:38:43 To kind of bring us full circle. I can just say, even anecdotally, I spent the weekend seeing an Eric Satie performance of Socrates.
15:38:51 And, um, it just is a… is an individual experience. Um, you know, it's the story of, um…
15:38:57 The background of which is an American heiress of the singer fortune, commissioned Eric Sati to
15:39:04 Create music for which she could read philosophical texts with her girlfriends.
15:39:08 Um, and it's absolutely fantastic, because Satya originally was like, that's too melodramatic.
15:39:14 Um, but so it's done with a female voice singing these arias, uh, no, it's not arias, almost like recitations of the, the, um…
15:39:23 Platonic dialogues, and it's one of those amazing experiences, because it's literally taking the original text and extremely modernizing it
15:39:33 for late… early 1900s time period. Um, and you could just see this sort of fun interplay between the originality of the ideas,
15:39:41 And expressing them and understanding them and appreciating them in a modern sense. And so here's this, you know, rich woman who's like, I want…
15:39:47 I want music, so I can read my ancient Greek in the salon with my friends.
15:39:53 I'm here for that. Um, so, just as a light final note, um, but I want to say thank you both so much, uh, James and Mike.
15:40:03 for joining me today, and our audience, um, for your excellent questions. I will be putting links to your excellent books, especially
15:40:12 The golden thread, but as well, to Mike, your how to have willpower, how to grieve, um…
15:40:17 You've also been so prolific, and you both, I feel, are contributing to the very mission of which we are speaking.
15:40:25 Um, which is showing the importance of these ancient ideas and, um,
15:40:29 Interacting with them in a way that can make them real and present for modern readers, because
15:40:36 So you say, if we don't engage with them now, uh, they can be lost, and it is…
15:40:40 very much our duty and pleasure
15:40:44 to have this experience of engaging with these texts. So, um, thank you so much, and thank you as well to Sean Kelly, who's helping us in the background.
15:40:53 And again, thank you for everybody who took the time out to join us today.
15:40:59 Thank you also, Anya, for the opportunity to talk about these things, which are so important to us right now.
15:41:05 And I cannot recommend your book enough. It is a beautiful… it's a tome, yes. Um, you will get a bit of a workout picking it up.
15:41:14 Um, it is definitely true, but it… to have in one spot, um, something that encapsulates
15:41:20 so much of the ancient world and onwards is nothing less than remarkable. So…
15:41:26 Thank you again, uh, and everyone have a lovely, lovely day, and happy holidays!