“It Began With a Gigantic Lie” - Harvard Western Civ Professor Resigns

James Henkins, welcome to Dad Saves America.

It's a great pleasure to join you. You left Harvard as a longtime historian. You're a 40-year historian. Been teaching there for decades and decades. America's oldest university, arguably most prestigious.

Certainly. I mean, it's certainly the most prestigious. Whether it's deserved today is arguable. Um, why did you leave?

Well, I actually decided to leave four years ago, five years ago, right after 2020 and the whole uproar about co and the uproar about about the uh about George Floyd and all the uh demonstrations and so on. I just decided at that point I wanted out and I had no thought of taking another job. My my idea was I was going to go off to Italy and and enjoy myself and uh live live cheaply but well.

And then uh I was but then I got involved with uh well I had been involved for quite some time with the classical education movement. I got involved with these civic centers that were being founded all over the country and uh I was invited to be on the board of the school where I am now, the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education. So I was advising them about um people to hire and things like that. And then two or three years ago, I guess it was three years ago now, uh the then head of the Hamilton School said, "Well, Henkins, maybe you'd like to join us after you retire." At that point, I had just been asked by Roger Kimell at Encounter Books to start this big book project, which we eventually called the Golden Thread: History of the Classical Tradition.

That monster next to you.

Yes. This thing. This is a book I, you know, I I often don't get the chance to fully read the books of the guests, although I wish I did. I'm a very slow reader, but but like you could kill a man with this book.

Right?

I can't wait to dig into it.

Textbook. Yeah, you could do that.

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You've got COVID and George Floyd stuff going on at Harvard. Um, uh, what what exactly was the thing?

Yeah. So, then I said, well, I'm working on this book in Western civilization. This is something that I really believe in. And if I go to the Hamilton school, I can I can do that. We're at the place in the history of the school, it's only three or four years old, where you can do anything. You know how it is when you found something new. You founded something new, right?

Emerging lawyer, right? So you when you're founding something, there's a lot of opportunity to have influence and take things in the direction that you want to go. So, uh, my buddy Alan Gellzo, who I've known since middle school, we're very old friends. We had both been invited to do the Golden Thread book. We formed a plot that we were going to go to Gainesville, Florida, join the Hamilton School, and then start to promote our dream, which is to revive the study of Western S. So, that's that's where I ended up here.

Um, sometimes I read some press about my departure from Harvard. Uh, it got a lot of attention on an article that I published. It became really kind of viral to my surprise.

Yeah. Yeah. On Compact Magazine.

They're constant.

Yeah. So they're they're constantly saying um uh I'm this courageous person who is you know abandoning Harvard for a little known school in Florida. So it's it's not really the story. I I'm I'm not exactly courageous but I'm at the age where I don't really care anymore. You know, I've lost most of my uh closest relatives and uh all the people that I knew at Harvard are either dead or left. So, at that point, and I had cancer and all sorts of things. So, a certain point, you don't care anymore. It's not so much courage as uh lack of cowardice, I guess, at a certain point or a lack of concern about the consequences. I would say.

You know, a lot of people in universities don't don't speak out. It's not because of they're cowardly. It's because they have students, graduate students, PhD students, and they don't want them to suffer from any backlash against them. So, uh, I don't have that anymore. I'm free to say what I want and, uh, devil take the hindmost.

So, you know what? You just said something that is almost more damning, which is the idea that a professor who sees the institution going in in a direction that's not great. Being reticent because their students would face retribution for studying under them if they said something reasonable. Like that's like the that's like bankshot cancel culture. It's like, oh, I don't want my brilliant graduate student in history to not be able to work because I say something along the lines of Western civilization is both a real thing and maybe pretty good.

I Yeah, I've had that experience. I have to say I I I had I've had very brilliant students in the last few years and one couldn't get a job. One was off gone off to Hong Kong. He's where he's doing very well. uh and it's uh and I hear I've been told by my current graduate students I still have a couple that the word has gone around among the graduate students don't study with Henkins because you don't want that on your CV uh you'll be suspected of being sympathetic to uh to conservatives if you have that on your CV. So that was another good reason to to leave Harvard, right? If you you can't get our graduate students and you're regarded as uh typhoid Mary around the department, you know, it's it's not a very good situation. And things have reversed themselves though now because all these civic centers are desperate to hire conservative graduate students and PhDs. So they're going to the few identifiable conservatives like me and asking for suggestions. So now I suddenly have former graduate students who have decided I'm a good thing and they're crafting or recrafting their CVs to look more conservative. And so the the wind the wind has shifted a bit let's say in my favor.

You know, it there I think there's a similar thing happening in the entertainment industry which is which is where I came out of and that is that you have this like monoculture of sort of like it didn't used to be quite so l like lunatic actually but increasingly crazy single party rule but the whole business is completely collapsing and so the only people that have anything interesting going on are like the new startups in like Christian and conservative media And Hollywood hollywood's like number of production days is at the level of like peak pandemic as we sit here.

So, wow, I didn't know that.

Yeah. So, it's kind of an you know, who knows? These things eb and flow. What? Let's get into the details though. What exactly was happening at Harvard in the aftermath of 2020 and all of the stuff that went on that felt that you felt like was a last straw?

Well, it was kind of a case of the frog in the boiling water because Harvard in my view started to um down started down a wrong path already in the 1990s because the university was very eager to go global and this was everybody was doing this in 1990s and globalism was coming in from a couple directions. That was coming in from the uh Vietnam war generation who disliked their own country. Hated would be a more correct word. They hated their own country. They had become developed this very negative attitude towards America. So they were going global as part of a multicultural um agenda. They wanted to dilute patriotism by telling people to study something outside of western history. And then there were the globalists uh in in the world of capital who wanted to um by the way I'm not I'm very pro- capitalist so let's not get let's get that straight from from the beginning.

But you'll borrow a little bit of marks for the for this purpose the world of capital like keep yeah keep going.

Well, I'm I'm very pro capitalist and always have been uh but there were people who wanted to globalize on an economic level and they interested in having a generation and was educated for global citizenship as the phrase was back then.

Yeah.

So Harvard started to uh dilute its western civ requirements. Uh actually was responsible in the 1990s for reinstituting a western civ requirement which turned my name to mud. I can tell you right right away. Um so that was uh shelved I think around 2003 2004 but what happened when the university decided to globalize is that traditional subjects were started started to be zeroed out.

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So Harvard for example had a very famous uh course in Dante and they had been had been uh run by su you know generations going back into the 19th century of professors of Italian they always taught Dante of course you're going to teach Dante if you're in an Italian department so at a certain point they stopped teaching Dante right they eventually hired someone a few years back but for a period of 10 15 10 years there was no Dantista right on the faculty. There was one who was sent off to run a villa in Italy but basically there was this gigantic hole uh in in I think one of the essential texts of Western western civilization and then the history department stopped teaching American history survey. How can you have a university that doesn't have an American history survey? But that wasn't important, right? We had to do other things. So even in the fields that were western that had Europeanists uh who were still teaching the older generation they were starting to uh globalize their courses. Uh I did this myself in the early 2000s. I had a course called Care of the Soul where we studied ancient philosophy and ancient Christianity together. uh and I decided I decided well, it would be interesting to compare um care of the soul uh moral self-cultivation in different traditions. So I brought in the Chinese tradition and the Islamic tradition and Buddhist tradition and it was very interesting. Uh but what's hap what happened over time was that the western subjects were really kind of hollowed out. So if you studied French history, you would study French Empire but not the French Revolution or medieval France. And if you study British history, you would study British Empire but not, you know, the British civil wars and British uh revolution, parliaments, Magna Carto, all of that stuff is out the window. And as as the water started to boil, this particular frog realized that we were the water was boiling intentionally to to make people like me jump out of it. And eventually um I think the last person I could really talk to in the department died in 2015. Uh the people who are willing to defend European history uh were um less willing to do so. Uh in the period leading up to the George Floyd exploits, we had the uh we had the Me Too movement. We had uh the growth of DEI. We had, you know, uh I I Are you familiar with what's called the Dear Colleague letter that the Obama administration put out, I believe, in 2013?

Yeah. I mean, if I I remember vaguely that this was the sort of um you know, it's part of this sort of strange dance that the federal government does where they don't te they can avoid saying they compelled institutions that get mass amounts of federal funding by simply saying, well, we just recommend that maybe you set up kangaroo courts to harass your students and violate the rule of law at the most basic level. We're just suggesting it, but we also have all your money. So, just to Am I getting that about right?

That That's about right. Yeah, we're just suggesting it, but you can expect a lawsuit if you don't do what we tell you to do.

Right.

So, this here's the trial lobby who's not suggesting anything and is and and is like holding weapons right behind me.

Exactly. So in response to this, they hired 60 Title 9 coordinators whose job was to pro protect the women at Harvard from being because at that time you might remember that there were these somewhat uh extraordinary well somewhat um ridiculous estimates that women were in the Ivy League schools were being at huge levels 20 30 40%. Which is basically worse than the Red Army invading Berlin in 1945. Right? So, if they really had all these people who were experiencing sexual sexual um violence, they should have brought in the National Guard. They shouldn't have brought in 60 Title 9 coordinators. So, anyway, that was going on. The uh the DEI apparatus was being built up event. And this is completely a fiction as you I'm sure you know I think the FBI statistics for for um you know sexual violence on American campuses is under 1%. And when I was on the faculty council in the 1990s we got a report every year about how much sexual violence there was or charges of it and it was three or four cases a year. So bringing in 60 title 9 coordinators with staff um meant that you're essentially creating an apparatus to do nothing but to uh enforce ideological purity. So that that also changed uh the way I thought about Harvard. I was tremendously proud of going to Harvard when I first got there. Uh I liked the place. It was I liked the way it was run. I liked my colleagues. I admired my colleagues who are very distinguished people. Uh I was very grateful to the school when I got tenure. Uh but over time my attitude to it has really changed. I'm I I kind of mourn for the Harvard that I knew in the 1980s and 90s when I got there. Uh so I I feel um I I feel happy to be leaving. Frankly, I'm sitting here in the sunshine in Florida and and have looking forward to teaching uh very bright and engaged students. So, I I feel that I've uh gone up in the world, frankly.

You know, I want to spend our time, most of our time digging into the actual ideas that have become utterly forgotten in places like Harvard. But I do think it's uh it's always worth coming back to what's happened to these institutions because it it it it's something that this our society needs to understand that these institutions were functionally taken over. It seems like and they were taken over by things that are that amount to just mass lying. It seems to me like it's it's just building entire staffs like you said, okay, like a lie being, oh, there's just a massive rape culture and so we need to build a gigantic multi-million dollar bureaucracy when that's not true.

So that's a lie. Basically, it is to to like enrich a bureaucracy that also gets to be shock troops for other stuff. But there's all these other lies like the notion that Western civilization itself is somehow worse than all the other civilizations in history such that we shouldn't even study it. And if you don't study it, then how do you even know?

How do you even know if it's worse or not? Like the whole thing just doesn't make sense to me. Like how does it pass muster? Did Did everyone same just go like Harvard's the oldest university in the country? like where did all the adults go?

Well, you know, Harvard at that time was considered more conservative about western civ. That was at Berkeley that the whole anti-western civ uh movement got started in 88. But you know, you're speaking of lies. It began with a gigantic lie. And the lie was that Western civilization was a fiction created in the 20th century by American educationalists who wanted to send boys off to war with a uh with their hearts beating for the West, right? That there was a story, I forget the name of the man who published this book. Uh it's been completely exploded by Stanley Curts who wrote a expose of it. Uh he's a member of the National Association of Scholars. So I don't really actually want people to remember his name but nevertheless it was very widely read at the time and and the 60s generation you know the Vietnam generation was disposed to believe this lie that western S was somehow made up for the purpose of encouraging militarism. Right? So this is just nonsense and it's in fact the case that ever since history education became a separate subject in the 16th century people have taught the western tradition they may not have called it western they called it something else up until the mid- 19th century but they were teaching the western tradition so if you learned history studied history in the late Renaissance you're studying Greeks Roman Romans, medieval Christians, Renaissance, and if you're studying history in the 17th century, the 18th century, if you're in an American college in the 18th century, you're studying Greeks, Romans, medieval Christians, early Christianity, Renaissance, you know, or one of the national histories after that. So, the curriculum has actually been remarkably consistent over the entire modern period. We have always taught western civilization. The term western civilization goes back actually to the mid-9th century. But because if you're in Europe, of course, you're teaching European history uh and you begin with uh the antiquity of course. So the most popular textbook in American colleges in the 19th century was a work by the French uh liberal historian named Franis Gizo is pronounced. And that starts with Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and European history. It's an exactly the same thing that has always been taught to young people in Europe and America for their entire history. So when this big lie was told, for some reason, no one called them on it or I I really don't understand. I was just still in graduate school. No, I was in my early years at Harvard when this thing got started. Uh but it was just astonishing that people accepted this lie. And the other lie that was told at the same time is completely inconsistent is that there is no such thing as western civilization.

Right.

Wait, there's there's no such thing as so it's it's both evil and a force of imperialism and destruction and also doesn't exist at all actually.

Yes, that was the position that was being taken. So in addition in addition to lies I can also we can also add to the mix parallelism lack of logic, you know, basic in in capacity to see that two positions are are irreconcilable. So anyway people were aware of this at the time on the conservative side in calling it out but uh it was used as an excuse to uh zero out western topics. Actually I was happier uh when it was still being taught. It went through two phases, right? The first phase was that we're going to teach Western Sid, but we're going to expose its evils.

Okay?

Right? So if you're going to teach, you know, ancient history, you're going to teach about slavery. Uh if you're going to teach American history, you're going to teach about colonialism or sexism or something like that. And there was always a critical line on things. Uh and there was even the people who are not openly criticizing the western tradition. They were in a frame which called for America to be cut down to size. So fairminded people would say yes they had slavery in other places but look how bad our slavery was. And there was this uh there was an obsession with the whole subject of slavery which to me is a is a distortion of American history to start off with. So that that was going on and uh eventually though I think it was really in the in the last 1015 years people started saying don't teach western civ at all because our poor little children will be will be uh tainted by it. Their minds will be tempted to admire something in our past. We have to always keep people focused on the future. Right? We have to keep people focused on that utopian future that we're building through uh the proliferation of government programs and and whatnot. But don't look back, right? Don't look back or if you look back, look back in anger. That that's what Yeah. That's what the American historical profession was saying in from basically 1990 to uh to the present.

I um so you and I I think broadly have you know similar worldviews and it's easy for us to gang up on all this nonsense and call it nonsense for that matter. As we start to dig into the particulars, what is the best case you could make for the people who wanted change in that long history of learning the Greeks, the Romans, the the you know the enlightenment, the Renaissance etc. We have this tension that goes back as I understand it in our country back to you know right back to the even the founders. The founders themselves had these some were more utopian and some were more traditional uh Thomas Payne perhaps being more utopian and John Adams being more traditional these strains right radical change right from the past preserve what's good don't tear up Chesterton's defense and there's health in that so what's the positive case you could make for the people that you're that we're both broadly disgusted by in the in in the Yeah.

Well, the what I hear all the time, the immediate response when I go around the country uh advocating the revival of Western Civ. The first thing it said is what's wrong with global history? Why would you want students to only learn Western civilization uh when they can learn the world? Right? We should learn all civilizations. All civilizations are created equal according to some people. All cultures are equal. It doesn't matter whether you have bones through your nose or or head headphones on your ears. Everyone's everyone's equal. All civilizations uh are morally uh equal. It's a very, you know, radical egalitarian idea. So why wouldn't you want to learn about the rest of the world? Don't we need we're to be global citizens? Uh we have international companies, NOS's. These people need to learn all that. So, I think that's the most most difficult argument to answer, but also um I think one that's very important to answer. So, I'm currently involved in trying to write an article about the teaching of global history. The fact is that you can't teach the all the whole of history, especially when you're starting in the sixth grade, right? So I have nephews in the public teaching teach in public schools and one nephew teaches in a private Christian school and I hear about what goes on in these classes. So in in sixth grade they're teaching global history or seventh grade or eighth grade and so what do they do? Well, they start off with uh Tibetan bat weaving, right? And then the next day they will show some Indian textiles and then the next day it'll be the Roman toga. And the next day it'll be the barbarians wearing trousers and female costume. And so they get a kind of mishmash of of different costumes around the world. But what they're not learning are the narratives. They're not learning any kind of narrative history because when you do frame by frame, when you have a kind of palyptic approach to history where you do a different culture every week or maybe every day or maybe on the same day, uh students doesn't really stick in their minds. Um, it's a lot of, you know, information being thrown at them and they maybe me memorize it for an exam, but it's not the kind of story that young people need to inspire them and to make them feel at home in the world that they live in. Because the fact is that we are western. We have a western system of government that's the fruit of very long tradition going back to the Greeks and the Romans but also includes the middle ages medieval republics and Dutch republic and the English republic if we talk about the republican form of government you can't really understand in the story of h the broader story of history without knowing western history so all those great stories that we need to learn are cut out by this globalization So students need to understand for example why it is we have freedom of religion, why do we have freedom of speech? There were struggles for those things. There were there were battles over them. People died for it. And uh people need to have some kind of sense of what our story is not just as Americans but as Americans part of Western civilization. If they don't learn learn that they're going to be um they won't understand the world they're living in. They won't understand for example the religion of most of the people around them. Um, and they won't uh they're they don't have any heroes and philosophers and statesmen in the future. Right? This is always the line of the progressives that we're going to build a better society, but we're not going to look at the successful societies behind us. Uh we're not going to study especially what's especially bad about this approach is you don't study why things succeeded and why things failed because that's the whole point of historical study or always has been from the time of Herodotus in the fifth century BC that history was written to instruct citizens and statesmen about what worked well in the past what worked badly uh what seemed to be a good idea at the time and turned out not to be a good idea at the time. So the whole uh the whole uh process of teaching practical wisdom uh on the political level and the personal level all that is just uh abandoned in for this kind of um board approach to the study of history and I think it's not successful. So that's that's I think where where if I were trying to to find an argument against what I'm saying that's that's where I would go to the people who say we have to do world history that western history is too exclusive.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean the the the practical concern of you only have so much time in a school in an experience as a teacher and doing this sort of like cursory survey of a bunch of stuff that's like mildly interesting but basically feels like you're walking through a museum you were forced to attend. Um, yeah, that's pretty boring and you're not. So, so the flip side, the one question I have is you talk about a narrative. I mean, I think our brain there's a lot there's a lot of reasons to believe that we only really get to remember things if they're in story form.

Exactly.

Uh, you know, just maybe that's about evolution going back to the campfire. There's something about it inherently. I don't know. But, um,

But, you know, um,

Yeah. Well, help me help me just for a second and help the viewer understand how should how should a how should good history as you see it make use of narrative because I think the challenge with narrative is it goes A then B then C and that suggests causation but history is very complex and there's a lot of moving parts and what caused what is not necessarily even fully knowable looking back the further you look back the harder I imagine it is so So help me understand what good history is supposed to be from your perspective.

Just linking up with our last point. If you want to understand and sympathize with someone, you ask them their story. And sometimes you will be repelled by their story. But most often you will go gain in sympathy for them when you hear what they went through, why they're at where they are now. So if we just want to understand how we got to the point where we are, we need to know the story. Now stories uh I don't know if you ever seen this wonderful podcast called The Rest is History with Tom Holland. That that's fantastic. If anyone doubts that the telling of history can be absolutely fascinating, I I would uh advise them to look at this. But if you hear real historians talking about the narrative of history, it's very exciting actually because especially if you're like me and you don't always remember what the details of samurai history are. I was listening to samurai history today on Holland and um if you don't know quite what the outcome is, it can be very exciting. It's like watching a movie without a spoiler right in your head. So, but it's very interesting even when you know what the outcome is to understand how it happened, right? How did the Roman Empire fall? Yeah.

How did the Roman Republic fall? That is a for example a a story which has been told time and time again, right? I I once had a research project under me as a senior at Harvard who proved to me that all but two US presidents at one point in their political lives had been accused of being Caesar, right? The man who brought down the Roman Republic.

All but two.

All but two. Well, George Washington escaped that charge. And I think the other I forget who the it's one of the more obscure American uh American presidents. But any in any case, Millard Filillmore or something like that. But in any case, it you know it's part of our our our story. And if you look around the US capital, you'll see the places, you know, filled with dignified classical buildings. So why do we think that classical architecture is dignified and suitable to public buildings? Well, because of the Romans and the history of architecture. You can't understand anything about the world you live in if you don't know these histories. And they all have stories attached to them and that's how we remember them. I I tell the story of uh Gothic architecture for example in the second part of my my book and there is a story there. There's a story that has to do with the founder of Gothic architecture whose name was Abbott Sué and how he came to to develop a new form of architecture that emphasized stories and light. So you know if you have that story you and you can connect the building with the story and it's a remarkable story really you know they they built hundreds of cathedrals within the within a hundred years of the invention of the Gothic cathedral. Everybody wanted to have one. You every city in Europe of any size wanted to have a cathedral. They all were building these Gothic uh Gothic buildings competitively uh against the other cities and masons. This is the origin of the Freemasons, right? The Masons are going around spreading the knowledge of how to build a Gothic building uh because it wasn't it's actually pretty advanced statics uh and dynamics to build one of these places. So, it's it's a very I think the stories help to fix something in place and also discuss the function, right? So why did the Gothic architecture get built? Well, because the church was trying to evangelize this urban population. It wanted to have a gigantic monument in the center of the city which people would go to and they could learn the stories from stained glass windows or in Italy they learned them from fresco. But they were teaching tools. They are meant to be spiritual centers, a place where people could go up and silence the world of the city outside them to have a kind of monastic experience in the middle of the city. You know, it's the city churches were not really built before the Goth Gothic um movement. Their the biggest buildings were monasteries uh in the early middle ages. So it's really a remarkable story and I think that if you have that in your education somewhere you uh understand your world because you see the classical building, you see the Gothic building, you see the Baroque building which is a in some ways um an outgrowth of the of the uh classical uh and you can make sense of your surroundings and historical term. You get what I call historians X-ray vision. This is one of my my my favorite terms. So if you go to the city of Rome, for example, and you're have no education whatsoever. It's just uh what William James called a blooming buzzen confusion, right? There's some people woring around you on motorcycles and the cars and buses and you see these old buildings that are falling down. It turned out to be ancient Rome and you know, you have no idea what's going on. But if you are a historian, if you're not necessarily a historian, but if you've had a decent education, you start to see layers, right? You see the straighta, you can see pre- Roman Rome, it Rome, or they haven't trust Rome, but but pre- Roman Rome. You can see the a Greek part of Rome. You can see the Roman part of Rome. You can then see the fall of the Roman Empire. You can see uh the medieval ages and the buildings that are associated with that and how the the whole city kind of changed on its axes because of the ruins, how the ruins were desoiled of all their marble to build medieval palaces. You can build up this the sense of history, the sense of the city uh by having historians x-ray x-ray vision. And I think that's immensely valuable to people uh in general because history is uh the antidote for fanaticism, right? History is what makes conservatives. I was reading some stories lately um about conservative historioggraphy. And there's a connection between the study of history and conservatism. Just because people who know history are not going to be stampeded into some radical movement if they have some counterweight in their mind against it. My my favorite example is CO right because CO when it broke out people were running around like chickens with their head cut off. They had no idea going to happen. Well, I don't have to rehearse that whole story. Uh, but eventually it turned out that onethird of 1% of the population died from COVID which was terrible to have COVID deaths slightly higher than other other uh pneumatic diseases. But if you're a historian, you know that something like 40% of of the population of the Mediterranean died of plague in the 6th century AD and similar number in the 14th century AD. So that there was no call to be to be stampeded the way we were uh and and our civil rights taken completely away from us by these uh by these dictatorial regimes that were put in in in the time of co. But I think if people had had more historical sense uh they would have been more resistant to this. We would have been asking more questions. I mean, you don't even have to go that far back, right? Because all you have to do is go back to the fact that uh during Woodstock in like the late60s, uh there was a there was a what was it the Hong Kong flu? There was an Asian flu that was ripping through the society and killed like half a million people and Woodstock was taking place against that backdrop with everybody covered in mud and on top of each other in all kinds of ways.

So, it's there is a there's this um there's this phrase, right? you know, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. You know, how how true do you you know how much of a truth for trueism is that phrase for you as a historian?

Well, not much frankly. I I think that people do uh that human actions do fall into certain patterns. I think that people who are ignorant of history will make the same mistakes. But that's you know one of the reasons why you study history not to make the same mistakes. Uh history does not have I I'm a believer in human free will right so I don't think that there's an inevitable patterns that and I think very few historians believe that there are kind of mechanical uh patterns of cyclical history that we're all going to go through all the time uh Plato has this view in the republic there a a regular cycle of constitutional change but it doesn't it doesn't stand up to even Greek historical uh uh uh uh information. So, so I'm very critical of this idea that there's going to be a necessary um pattern in history. Uh I don't think that history is a scientific discipline. It's a history that is an art that makes use of use of sciences. So, um people who believe that are making a claim to knowledge that is impossible. Mchaveli in a way tries to do this. He he has overconfidence in his own ability to predict the future. I once went through the works of Mchaveli looking for all the predictions that he made and none of them came true. Right? And he's he's talking this this will give you an example of Mchaveli's ability to predict the future. He's talking in in the prince and he says that ecclesiastical principalities because they are ruled by priests and people believe religion they are completely stable and can never be undermined. He's thinking of the papacy. So he says this in 15 around 1516. In 1517 the reformation breaks out, right? And he he doesn't appear to notice. I I've read through most of the car well I've read through a lot of the correspondence of Makaveli. He doesn't seem to know that there's a reformation going on in Germany which is deposing hundreds of ecclesiastical princes all over Germany and the rest rest of Europe. So I mean that and he's predicting that you know Florence will always be a republic when he's writing to the Medachi. This is right before the Medachi take over Florence and then proceed to rule it for 300 years now. So he's a terrible uh he's a terrible uh prophet, but

He was like the Paul Eric of his day basically decrying things that are instantly disproven.

And uh that's what they get paid the big bucks for, I guess, the the ability to slough off their their mistakes like that. Anyway, um so I I don't really think the history repeats itself. Sometimes said history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. I think that's correct that we find similar situations and that frankly is why history is is valuable because there are similar situations and there's also a uh a sense that many more possibilities are out there than the average person is willing to entertain. So it's sometimes said that the only the only historical event that inter international relations theorists are aware of are 1938 and Munich, right?

That this you know I'm exaggerating somewhat, but you understand that that that 1938 and and Churchill and Chamberlain and Hitler that comes up constantly. Uh and because it's it's a familiar episode, but there's so much more possibility out there uh in in um in all of history. So when you uh learn more about what has happened in the past and all the different ways that things can turn out, you have a much more um you have much more practical wisdom, much more uh prudence as it the old term is. you have a sense of how many ways things can go wrong. So, uh, you know, the progressives are always saying, "We know what's going to happen next. Here's our program. Just give us money and everyone will be happy." And conservatives are always saying, "Haven't we tried that?" You know, didn't we try that in the 1960s? Don't we have programs that already do that on the books? or you know so history I really think the history and conservatism are very closely alied and it's a kind of a mystery to me how so much of the history profession has gone so far to the left uh despite the ethic natural tendency of people with historical knowledge to be conservative now um that's I'm maybe self-refuting myself here but because there are so many historians uh that are on the left today, but that that wasn't the case when I first got got to Harvard. I have to say that we had a generation of people who had fought in the Second World War. They knew what they were fighting for. They were fighting for the West. They weren't just fighting for America. Uh and so it's very hard for me to understand why so many historians are on the left. But of course, they they approach history in a in a different way. and they're much more uh approaching from the point of view of social science and much less uh interested in the stories of history in uh in the the remembered past. Right? So in the golden thread uh book that we Alan Gelso and I wrote together, we call it a history of the western tradition, not a history of western civilization. And what we're trying to emphasize is that it's a history of the remembered past. This history way people remember the Greeks in the Romans and the Middle Ages and the Christian conquest of the Roman Empire and the uh medieval papacy and the emperor empire and the rise of nation states and the rise of republics that that's that has a particular way that it's remembered and it's a way that is very much involved with the development of practical wisdom understanding decision-m that's what history was really written for uh before the time of Hegel. History was there to inform decision makers whether they be citizens or statesmen but mostly statesmen that this is something that's happening to you now. We search the pages of history to see something similar. What were the outcomes then? What were the decisions made? Excuse me. and um you know what are the dangers of taking this course of action uh and what have been the most successful courses of action that's what history was for uh and I think we've really impoverished ourselves by not using that as a approach to history anymore.

What is western civilization? You've alluded to it several times pointing to essentially this sort of sequence of milestones and moments the Greeks, the Romans, uh the Enlightenment, um the great books, but is there what what how should someone that wants to like what what will what is this western tradition when you when you sort of try to synthesize the the telling into a set of principles?

Well, first of all, um, Alan and I think of the western tradition as a succession of civilizations. So, the civilization of the Greeks was the first of the western civilizations. It begins essentially in the 8th century BC. uh and Homer is the first great author and that civilization was superseded by the Romans uh in the 2nd century AD or B BC sorry BC and then the Romans had their civilization which absorbed that of the Greeks. That's an important point that each successive civilization absorbs the previous one and admires the previous one. And then there was the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD. And we approach this Christian Empire as a different civilization. It starts off being continuous with ancient Rome and then gradually becomes more and more of a Christian civilization. And then we talk about the origins of modern European civilization which I take back to uh the late 11th century. So it's a succession of civilizations but it's bound together by this thread of tradition gold thread of tradition. Which because there was always

What is that 11th century just stop at the what what was the 11th century moment that that constitutes the European civilization for you?

Well this is not my invention. There are many historians who take the same view. uh in the 10th century in western christrysendom in the Latin speaking part of Christrysendom not Bzantium but the Latin speaking part there was a general civilizational collapse in the 10th century.

That Western Europe was invaded by Vikings. It was invaded by, uh, Arab Muslim, uh, raiders from the south. It was attacked by the Magyars, uh, from the east, uh, various barbarian tribes, and it just was collapsing. And they lost, uh, any kind of central order in the, in the civilization.

But that started to be rebuilt in the late 11th century, uh, through the papacy, uh, and through the, uh, revival of the, uh, medieval German Empire. So, the High Middle Ages, which is the beginning of European civilization, is a, it's a new civilization in many ways. And, and I won't bore your listeners by listing them all, but, but it's a civilization that draws not only on the Greeks and the Romans, but also on the Germanic peoples, what the ancient Romans would have called the barbarians. So something like, uh, parliaments, for example, is really a Germanic contribution to, uh, Western civilization.

Uh, the Germans were, uh, I, I say Germans to mean pretty much all the, uh, the successors of Charlemagne and his successors, right? These Germans, um, had a different form of government. Uh, they, uh, Charlemagne, for example, would never make a decision without consulting all the, all the lords in his territories. He used to go around these progresses. So, uh, you can say that German monarchy is much more consultative than any previous monarchy. People had the right to be heard and to give counsel.

Uh, so that eventually grew into the parliamentary system, uh, in England in the 13th century. But there are a number of things like this. Uh, the Germans also combined, and eventually the Normans most of all, combined the, uh, military prowess of the Vikings with the Romans. Uh, the Normans, who really dominate the High Middle Ages, are militarily a combination of, uh, Viking, uh, sea-raiding skills, uh, and, and the traditional, uh, formation fighting and horseback that the Normans got from the, uh, French, uh, before them, because they, so you have this very powerful military, um, tradition that's quite different from the Roman tradition, ultimately, which takes over, uh, Western Europe in the, uh, late 11th, 12th century. And that is what, uh, is launched against the Muslims in the Crusade, uh, and, uh, and so forth. So there's, one of the ways you can divide up civilizations is by the type of military system that they have, and the Europeans invented a new one.

So, I, I mentioned parliaments, I mentioned military systems. There's also different social systems, um, which you can talk about. The family, as much, the patriarchal family is much more important, uh, for the Europeans. Uh, I know you're very interested in the family, so I was offering you some, >> some bait to ask me questions. But just get back to the main point, which you asked about, is Western a civilization is, uh, is either you can look at a civilization as a treasury of achievement, right? As great works of art, great political systems, inspiring philosophy, literature, the arts, you name it. As a, as a set of resources in the past that can be learned about, reused, and, uh, and can continue the tradition, and can make, uh, new and original contributions to the tradition. So you have, if you're an artist, you can measure yourself against previous artists.

But it can also be thought of, and this is really what I think is important, uh, right now, is that Western a civilization is something that civilizes, right? So that if you want civilized generations to follow us, >> they have to study our civilization. Uh, if he's studying half a dozen different civilizations on an equal basis and have no particular admiration or knowledge of your own, that type of continuity is going to be very hard.

So, so we call our story the golden thread because these civilizations have been tied together over, you know, 3,000 years by, uh, sometimes very tenuous threads. Can, can I give you an example of this? Um, >> well, we'll give the example, and then I want to ask about, I, I have a question I'll try to remember, but, yeah. What's your, give me an example of this thread?

>> So, the basis of modern legal traditions is Roman civil law. Uh, it was revived in the 12th century, and, uh, it became the basis of legal education. So even today, in some universities, you can study Roman jurisprudence, uh, as examples of how legal problems are solved. How the Romans solved their problems, how they negotiated the statute, the actual case, the needs of, of the common good. Uh, there were brilliant examples of jurist prudence decisions taken, and they were reduced to a single book, okay, which is called the Digest of, of legal opinions. It was made up, but it was created under the authority of the emperor Justinian in the sixth century.

>> So in the 11th century, there is one manuscript of this in the entire world. Okay. So the paces of modern European jurisprudence is reduced to a single manuscript. And the works of Aristotle, right? Aristotle's works, uh, his technical works, which is what we have today, his works on, uh, ethics and, and biology and politics and physics, and all those works were down to a single box of scrolls in the 1st century BC. We almost lost. And Aristotle, if you know anything about the history of Western education, he's the backbone of Western education from the 12th century to the 17th century. When the scientific revolution happens, it's revolting against Aristotle, but Aristotle is still being taught. I teach Aristotle, Aristotle's ethics and politics still today, and they're, they're unsurpassed. But it was a single box of manuscripts. Is it just makes my, my sort of heart beat with, with fear when I read, read the story.

Uh, so there are lots of cases like that, and the, um, we almost lost Latin literature in the 7th century AD when, when after the Muslim invasions, uh, there are people. >> What exactly was that? Was it just because the Muslim conquerors were burning, burning books? Like, what, what was the nature of the, the lo, the losing, the potential losses?

>> Well, the Muslim conquest started in the 7th century. They took away two-thirds of the Roman Empire, uh, the, the Middle East, Egypt, North Africa. They were >> taking over most of Spain until it was reconquered. >> And the West became >> reconquista. Yeah. So the West became extremely poor. Uh, they could barely, uh, keep things going on an economic level. There was no, uh, culture that was there. Culture survived in monasteries, and there are few people copying in monasteries, but there are very few copies of any Western work of literature in the 7th century. We have people have cataloged all, all the surviving manuscripts. In fact, my wife's former employer was the one who cataloged all of these things. So suddenly, uh, in the 8th century, when Charlemagne is advised by Alcuin that he has to refound Latin literature, suddenly we have thousands of manuscripts. So somebody made a decision at some point, Charlemagne and his adviser, that we couldn't simply, uh, copy the Bible and a few of the Church Fathers. We had to recover Roman civilization because the Romans had known how to run a civilization. They had law. They had, uh, they had administrative systems. They had, uh, just basic grammar and, and knowledge of how to speak, which was disappearing at the time. This is the period when the, uh, Latin language was disappearing, and the vernacular languages were just getting started. So Charlemagne said, "We have to bring back Roman literature, Roman philosophy." And that's when it came back. So that was again another moment when things almost died out.

>> Yeah. You know, it, it's one of these things that you, when you think about what got us to where we are today, there's an inevitability that's sort of baked into the fact that we're here, that it feels like it had, it could only have gone this way. And it's just, it is, it's kind of terrifying, frankly, to, to linger on what the other path would have been if Aristotle was lost. If these, I, I, if, if the monasteries had been sacked and raided and, and, >> nothing was left. I mean, um, >> well, >> I know, um, I know there's some people who are critical, look back on, uh, sort of the history of Islam as a conquering force, since all of the Islamic world today was, as I understand it, was actually the dominant force of Christendom at the time, the Byzantine Empire, and, and, and say that actually that Islamic expansion was responsible, at least in part, for the Dark Ages. Is it, sounds like that's what you're talking about at that moment. Is that, is that right? Is that how you understand what precipitates the Dark Ages?

>> Well, the Byzantine Empire preserved Greek literature and Greek civilization, which was always more advanced than Latin. And they preserved it against, you know, the Muslims almost conquered Constantinople in 717. That would have been the end of Western civilization, at least humanly speaking. I think divine providence might have something to say about it. But that humanly speaking, that would have saved Western civil, the Greek part of Western civilization. But yes, I mean, the Islamic invasions were a terrible blow to, to the West, and they impoverished the West. The Byzantines were, were kind of, um, what's the city in, and they're the minus truth of Christendom at the time. Asgile, which is Rome had been destroyed, but minus truth is still there in Constantinople, preserving the Western tradition. And then we have the men of the West who are, who are keeping things alive in, in northern, uh, northwestern Europe. Uh, but yes, it was a terrible setback for, for Christian civilization. And, uh, but one shouldn't get the idea that the Muslims didn't have their own civilization. They did, obviously. They built a great civilization, and they used some of the materials from the ancient West, right? They, they used a lot of, they hated the Romans. The Romans were the, were the bugbears of the Muslims, but they recognized that the, they learned warfare in part from the Romans, in part from the Persians. Uh, so they did create a civilization of their own.

Um, but it's not for a long time. Muslim civilization was really, uh, the enemy of the West. And it's, to me, uh, indicative that when the Muslim, the Islamic threat starts to recede seriously in the 17th century, right? That's when we have liberalism growing up, because the pressure was off. That's what I think. That freedom is something that you enjoy when you have power, and you have, uh, peace, and you have wealth. Uh, but when you're under assault, you have to have a more authoritarian system. That, that's always the case, right? During World War II, the US presidency became much more authoritarian, necessarily. So, uh, so when the pressure lifts up in the 17th century, and Western Europe can breathe, and can enjoy its wealth, enjoy its, its power, that's when you get liberalism, which is a, well, that's a historian's view of liberalism. It's not a political scientist's view, but, uh, that's, that's the way I, I think about liberalism as a, as a luxury good of civilized countries.

What, when, just for the person that hears liberalism and isn't quite sure what you mean by that, define liberalism in, in, in your terms here.

>> Well, I'm thinking of classical liberalism, right? Uh, I mean, uh, Adam Smith and, and Locke, and authors like that, people who believed in economic freedom, intellectual freedom, and, uh, freedom to depart from religious models of, of, uh, of gender relations. Okay. So, um, I, I discovered reading this book that divorce and adoption were extremely rare in, well, they were illegal in France, uh, as late as the late 19th century, early 20th century. So there are many form, many, obviously, definitions of liberalism. I'm giving you a little too much, as is my, uh, fatal habit. Then there's high liberalism, which is essentially the desire of the state to enforce, uh, a certain, the desire of the state to take over more private life, let's put it that way. But the type of liberalism that I admire, classical liberalism, wants to place limits on political power. So the first question in any political philosophy is, how much is going to be political? Right? So I think my most hated phrase in political philosophy is "the personal is political," which was a slogan of the feminist movement in the '80s and '90s, because this sort of feminism, not condemning feminism, to, you know, entirely, but I'm just saying this sort of feminism, >> just, well, >> most of it does, most of it deserves what it gets. Well, you know, >> the sort of feminism that, um, you know, wants every, every part of your life to be invaded by ideology. That's to me the opposite of liberalism. Okay, just to, if I want to clarify what I mean by liberalism. But in America, you know, we have this, uh, odd vocabulary. Um, no one calls, uh, socialism liberalism in other countries, but in America, people don't want to use the term socialism because it's, doesn't win elections, or at least it hasn't won elections until quite recently.

>> Yeah. >> Uh, so they use the term liberalism. It, it's just a mask. It's a mask of, of socialism. >> Yeah. The current, current usage. One of the things I, I wanted to get your take on in broad strokes, because we're cover, you know, it's hard to go, we can pick any one particular moment in a conversation like this, but given the golden thread, this, I think we have to stick to some important big themes. And one of them that I've been thinking a lot about, I read a book by Tom Holland called Dominion. Oh, yeah, great book.

>> And, yeah, and I was curious, you know, he, there's so much in that book that, um, stuck with me, but one of the things he asserts, maybe you, maybe uniquely, it's certainly is this notion that it was actually Christianity and the culture of Christianity and the, the thinking and the thinkers in early Christianity that gives rise to the notion of the secular life. M. Which I'd never really heard before, but, you know, but then when you look at other civilizations, you know, Islamic civilization to the present, um, even Jewish civilization, you know, pre-Christ and, and pre-fall of Israel and destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the, the notion of, of the society, of the tribe, of the leadership, of the governance, and the religion, and the priests, they were all like this. Like, you go to the Aztecs, and it's like this. You go to, you know, Hinduism and the ancient Indian empires, it's like this. Um, do you agree with that? Do you think that's actually an accurate assessment of, of, um, Christianity's contribution to the development of Western liberalism?

>> Well, I would put it a bit later, frankly. Um, I think that the notion of the secular in, in late antiquity is really, um, etymologically, that which belongs to this age as opposed to the eternal. So the opposite of the secular is the eternal. In late antiquity, uh, you have people who are, are trying to limit, were trying to adjust the, uh, boundaries of Christian authority in the fourth century and fifth century, mostly because they're living in a society that's still maybe majority pagan or 40% pagan. We don't really know. Um, there are all sorts of different opinions. But if you're trying to enforce, you cannot force people who are not of your religion to practice your religion. That's, I think, pretty much, um, a historical impossibility. Emperor Justinian tried to do it in a couple of small populations in the sixth century, but he failed miserably. So you have to have some form of of toleration, or at least, uh, in the Middle Ages, the common thing to do, in Islam and Christianity alike, was to, um, have second-class citizenship for people who are not of your religion.

>> So if you're a dhimmi, if you're a Christian living in a Muslim world, you pay higher taxes. You have to defer to good Muslims. You can't hold office. You're not supposed to hold office. Uh, you have to bow down in the street when you meet a Muslim going by. You have to wear a special costume in some places. If a Muslim walks into, if you go to law with a Muslim, you're going to be under Muslim law, not under your own law. So, it's a real disadvantage. The Romans did the same. The Christian Romans did the same thing. So, that, that is not really secularism in, in my way of thinking. I think the real origins of liberalism come in the Middle Ages, in the, uh, late 11th and 12th centuries, when, when the papacy decides it should dominate Christendom. Right? This is under Gregory the VII, so-called, uh, Investiture Controversy, but it was about who the top dog political power in Christendom was going to be. So I think that what Gregory was up to is he wanted to create a kind of Christian caliphate. He was going to be the head of state, and the secular, what we call secular lay rulers, let's say, of Christendom, were going to be under his power. Uh, this was a view of things that was not accepted by the, by the Roman Empire, uh, the, the medieval empire, uh, which started to call itself the Holy Roman Empire in the 1150s, uh, in reaction to the papal claims of superior sanctity.

So what ends up being the case is that you have, by the real late 12th, 13th century, you have two parallel governments in Europe. You have church government, which has got its own laws, its own taxation system, its own hierarchy. You know, Pope, bishops, uh, archbishops, bishops, all the way down the hierarchy. Uh, and they have their own foreign policy, which is the Crusades. The Crusades are essentially the foreign policy of the Pope. And then you have a completely separate, uh, lay hierarchy with, uh, the emperor, the king, uh, the dukes and counts and whatever below them. Uh, the kings and emperors, well, especially the kings, had their own bureaucracy, their own taxation system, their own military. And you had, um, this very strange situation, which I haven't found anywhere else in any other civilization, of two separate parallel authorities, one the authority over the soul, and the other the authority over the body. Okay. So that is the situation against which the Protestant reformers rebelled, and not just the Protestants, but also to some extent Catholic rulers rebelled in the 16th century.

So what is liberalism? It's all of the things in life that are controlled by canon law. Uh, Roman law is not, uh, interested in controlling your daily life. Right? Roman law doesn't tell you that you have to, you, what marriage law is. It doesn't dictate, um, it doesn't dictate behavior the way that medieval Christian and Islamic law do. It's much more free, in a sense, because the number of things it's trying to do. It's basically trying to ensure the preservation of property. There's very little constitutional law. Um, so when the Christians introduce this canon law, in imitation of the Muslims, uh, they are trying to, um, control more aspects of life. They want to cut down the, as we were saying before, they want to have more of life be political, if you will, or, or at least controlled by religion. That's the wrong way. Political is the wrong word, but they want to readjust the border between what the state can control and what the private individual controls.

So what is liberalism? It's the exact same things that the medieval church controlled through its system. So intellectual freedom, that was strictly regulated by the Roman Church through canon law and theology. Right? And if you violated that, you would become a heretic and you would be burned at the stake. Freedom of, of, um, family law. That, one of the main functions of medieval canon law is to control families, uh, conditions for marriage. I shouldn't say control families, but to regulate families, conditions of marriage, conditions of inheritance, who can marry whom. Uh, they, they, um, may were much more restrictive than the Romans had been about who can marry whom. So it's been argued that they basically weakened the family, uh, economically, forcing people to cooperate more, uh, with, uh, create civil society and essentially as a form of cooperation.

>> So that whole area of life that the canon lawyers exercised authority over, that disappears. Uh, in some Protestant countries, they, they bring it back to some extent, but, uh, the level of regulation over personal life was very, uh, little. And the third big area is the economy, because the medieval church develops a law of economic transactions, uh, inheritance, uh, usury. Uh, the medieval church gradually loosens. The medieval church was, I'm not trying to say the medieval church is intolerant of free, economic freedom, uh, what, because that whole concept didn't even exist in the medieval period, but they didn't, they had biblical prohibitions against usury, and they have, of course, the, the system of the ancient, uh, Torah, which was a kind of distributist, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, 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>> Well, I think that the makers of the French Revolution actually were pretty well educated historically. But what they had and the founding fathers did not have was a deep hatred of their own country, their own system. They hated the monarch. They hated monarchy. They hated the court. Uh, they hated, um, the control of economic system and the, and the military system. Uh, they hated that type of aristocracy that sought, uh, glory in great deeds. They really, um, Americans did not hate ourselves. We didn't hate ourselves. If we hated anything, it was maybe some people in England who were trying to tax us at, uh, you know, without our >> I just want to use a stamp for crying out loud. Please leave me alone. >> Yeah. But there was not this hatred towards the tradition. And, you know, Rousseau, I think, is one of the key figures here because he also, um, feeds this idea that every, there's something deeply wrong with our world, >> right? That in his famous first essay on, on, uh, I can't remember the name of it now. Uh, but I should know this because I've taught it many times, but it will come to me. I'm getting old. Uh, anyway, he, he taught that, you know, France is basically deeply corrupt, and that we had to get back to some kind of pure, uh, pure, uh, system and simplify our lives and, and everything had to be as simple and egalitarian and straightforward and rational, and, you know, so there was this impulse towards remaking, as you point out, redoing, reconstructing, building from the ground up, that wasn't really present in the US. The US wanted to have a republic, but they wanted to have a republic that was like, uh, some republics and not like other republics. They were building something new. I'm trying to kind of search, but the thing that stands out in my mind is of the French is that, is the, is the real hatred of the world that they, that they inherit, especially courts and the power of kings and the tendency, uh, especially to ignore the, uh, educated class, because the French Revolution is a revolution of intellectuals. That's, I guess, the second thing I would point to. Uh, the US revolution was not a revolution. It was the US re, uh, revolution was an e, revolution of educated men, and the French Revolution was the revolution of intellectuals, and that's a little bit ahistorical for me to say that, because the whole term

Intellectuals wasn't invented till the late 19th century. Nevertheless, they had this class of people who did nothing but read and talk and write and think and jabber in the salons.

Yeah, it's the Karl Marx types. It's the like sort of parasite class who live off angles and then don't even say I'm sorry about your loss when his love lover dies and then says, "Hey, by the way, can you give me some more?" That is it's it's it's it's the trust fund kids, it's the Mom Donnie voters. I'm not being charitable here, but I mean, the history speaks for itself on this group.

Well, a lot of these people were supported by the church, and it's true that they were, you know, they were they had some kind of income line from, uh, the church, which allowed them to, to, uh, abandon their local, local, uh, churches and go to Paris and and jabber, jabber, jabber. It's a very different sociological system than prevailed in the US. And the other thing, of course, is that the US was already had 13 states with their own constitutions and their own, uh, their own contracts with the with the, uh, British government, and they had to accommodate that, which the French never had to do. And that had a moderating effect, uh, especially, for example, in religion. Right? So the, the French Revolution wants to get rid of the traditional religion or transform it into the, the worship of the supreme being. Uh, in the US, you've got 13 colonies, and some are Puritan, some are Quaker, and some are Catholic, and some are Anglican, and they could, they, they decided, let's not, let's not have an established religion in the First Amendment. Uh, let's let the individual states do what they want. So the effect of of having these individual state governments is to give more freedom. Is is to require a federal government to allow more freedom at the local level. So that was a huge precondition in our, in our favor, I think.

One of the things, by the way, the idea of a federal, sorry, what?

Finish your thought, and then I have, I have a question. I, I was adding something on, but the whole idea of a federal government, which means a fed, a government, a federation of individual states, comes out of ancient Greece. Most people don't realize that because they read Plato and Aristotle, but in the 4th century, uh, there are many examples of Greek city-states that federated together to form a common, uh, military resistance to outsiders, but they had individual state, city-state government. So that was, I think, in the mind of the, uh, of the founding fathers.

I was going to say with, um, that a couple years back, I had the privilege of interviewing Gordon Wood, um, about the American founding. And one of the things he said was that when you look at the, which, when you look at sort of the, the societies of Europe at the time of the founding, you know, you could think of it like in terms of the sort of philosophy of individual liberty, that the state is an imposition, and that the individual should have as much freedom as possible to sort of act without being constrained by the state or the community, or however you want to put that. He, he said that basically the English were the most radical free men of Europe, uh, for a whole host of reasons we can maybe talk about a little bit, but Magna Carta, the Levelers, all kinds of stuff that gave rise to this incredible culture of freedom. And that, and that America had developed to be like, rather, the radical of the radicals when it came to the notions of individual liberty. And you see it in the Declaration of Independence. You see it in sort of Jefferson's, maybe, I think, most famous, even though it's obviously, you know, he's, he, he held slaves, so that's complicated. I don't want to minimize that by any means, but, um, but philosophically, the arguments being made in the Declaration of Independence are pretty radical at the time, right? I mean, how do you think about the radicalism of the revolution, you know, in that way? Do you, would you agree with Gordon's assessment of the sort of lineage there?

Yes. I mean, he, he, that's the title of his book, as you know, "The Radicalism of the American Revolution." And what he says is that there was a social revolution where the old hierarchical, differential, uh, powers that were operative in the new world, inherited from, uh, the old world, were wiped out, and Americans became much more radically egalitarian. Uh, partly that's a matter of religion, uh, because there's no, uh, established church. Uh, there were established churches in some of the states, but most of them were done away with, uh, quickly. The, the both of the American and French revolutions were against something, which is the ownership of power, right? The idea of privilege that some people because they were lords and owned property, uh, they had should exercise some kind of power. Uh, the British had a very mild form of that. The French had a very strong form of it. Uh, but so what takes over after the, uh, apparatus of British government is removed is a more radical egalitarian view. Um, I have my problems with this. I wrote an article about this actually for, for a, I attended a conference in honor of Gordon Wood, and I, uh, argued that it's the "-ism" in egalitarianism that's the problem with the radicalism. Because "-isms" mean process of change. That's the Greek suffix that means a process of change. So if you're liberalizing, you're making more liberal. If you're Hellenizing, you're making more Greek. So the idea that everything has to become more and more equal all the time, uh, I think that's not a sustainable. Hate that word, but sustainable idea for a state that we have to become more and more equal, that any type of of any type of merit, for example, has to be wiped out. Uh, that that's the Rawlsian philosophy that that, uh, merit cannot, uh, trump, uh, the, the egalitarian fundamental egalitarianism of, of a state. Some political theorists will jump on me for putting it that way, but that's, that's my own crude assessment of that. But so the idea that we're, it's like ever closer union in the European Union, that there's no end to that, right? The only end to it is absolute monarchy, uh, of some bureaucrat whose name probably we don't know, that would be ever closer union.

The perfection of democracy in this, in this sort of post-Woodrow Wilson time, the technocrats, is that the public will get some kind of vote, but the people that really matter will, will have like, will be PhDs making all the decisions in some distant bureaucracy.

Yeah. It'll be like the Federal Reserve controls everything.

Yeah. Ever, ever more equality, ever more democracy. But, you know, Aristotle's right that the, the cure for, for democracy is not necessarily more democracy. It might be less democracy. Uh, and the cure for too much egalitarianism is merit. We have to balance the claims of, of merit. Especially in politics, it's to everyone's interest to be ruled by competent, morally good, decent, you know, well-educated people. That's what the system should aim at. That, that's somewhat folded into the American Constitution. But I, I think that that, that one phrase that Jefferson used, that "all men are created equal," and, and, uh, and now we're,

"endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

Non-alienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, by all the thing we had to memorize in

I think "inalienable."

Inalienable rights, which means,

the rights that can't be taken away by government, right? So that is, that is the most radical thing in all of the American founding documents, right? And, uh, and it's the later Constitution dials that back slightly, uh, by creating these intermediate institutions and federalism and the courts and all that. But, um, but that is extremely radical. I think there's very few. What really comes out of it comes out of, um, radical Protestants. This, this is what's been, been shown. Radical, radical Protestantism, uh, of the Anabaptist variety, sort of Anabaptism, things like that. That's where this radical egalitarian comes from. It's, it's kept out of politics, uh, through most of the 16th and 17th century, except in very small experimental communities, but it enters, enters America as, um, as a kind of given of political life.

Yeah. And I want, let's talk about that. Let's talk about, you know, so you and I are both Catholic, um, Northeast Philadelphia boys, and, um, and yet we live in a country that whose birth is entirely Protestant in nature. And some of these sects were particularly sort of like, um, uh, you know, oddballs, right? The Quakers, the Puritans, the, you've got all kinds of sort of folks who, who basically risked life and limb to escape the, uh, the force of the Anglican and Catholic Church and go be wild and make shaker furniture and stuff. So, um, yeah, how important, what, what debt do do we owe to the, to the Protestant formation of the United States, especially, especially you and I as Catholics, let's say, as Catholic Americans?

Yeah. Well, that's very much in the news lately, of course, because of the controversy with between Trump and the Pope. Um, first of all, there's a thousand-year-long history of discussion of church and state issues in the Western tradition, beginning with the 4th century AD. When the, uh, when the Christians take over the Roman Empire, then they have to decide who rules and what, what is the, uh, lay power going to be able to do and what's the, and this is an argument from, from the very beginning.

Well, and you can even say it goes to the Pharisees asking Christ about about things and the, and he says, you know, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's." He draws this distinction right from the start, right?

The Catholic Church has a very long history of dealing with the state or with kings and republics and all forms of government. And it has had times when it, uh, in order to survive, uh, at all, it has had to give into, uh, the power of kings. And the Gallican movement in 17th century France, for example, they, they had to give away a lot of their powers of appointment in order to coexist with the Anglican church. Similar things going on in China right now. Uh, so it's not a single Catholic tradition. That's my point. And the church has tried very hard since it was transplanted to America to be compatible with the Western and, and the American traditions. Uh, there were great controversies when Catholics started coming over in great numbers from, you know, Ireland and Poland, Eastern Europe, and so forth, Italy. Uh, and the church was eventually forced to build its own educational system because in, uh, large cities where the, with large Catholic populations, the, uh, public schools are afraid of being taken over by, by religious, religious people. So, um, but the church is all, but if you go into the, into the parochial schools, you'll see that they're very American. They're very patriotic, or they were up until recently. Maybe things are different now. Um, in any case, I, I think that, uh, they're probably no less patriotic. The, the recent now thing would be that basically all of K through 12 education's been infected by the woke mind virus. And so, you've got,

hating America. You can find, you can find hating America teachers in Catholic schools, private schools, public schools. If you got a degree in education, you were, you were taught about how to hate America in all kinds of different ways. But I, I digress.

You digress. Well, the fact is though that Protestants are always going to feel more comfortable in America because it was founded by Protestants. And even though some of the Protestants were kind of, uh, uh, were, were enlightened as well as being Protestant, they were liberal Protestants. In other words, uh, it's the Catholics were persecuted in many cases when they came to America. I live in Somerville, Mass. My home in Massachusetts is Somerville, which has, uh, had the first anti-Catholic demonstrations in America. There was a convent founded, uh, in the east, east part of the city, which was attacked and burned down by anti-Catholic mobs in the, uh, in the 18th century. Well, I'm not sure. It might be early 19th. I think it's still late 18th century. Okay. So, um, Catholics don't feel as comfortable in America, and, uh, they have to think more about what church-state relations are. But they, uh, I, I don't think that there's anything that's intrinsically un-American about Catholic teaching. The, um, incident with the Pope recently is, if, uh, is illustrative of that. Uh, you know, as soon as the Pope decided to take sides or to appear to take sides in a political struggle in America, there was all sorts of outcry, but also among Catholics. So this is where I think Pope Leo, for all of his many merits, may have been less than prudent, lacking in some practical wisdom. Um, you know, I admire him in many ways, obviously, but, uh, you know, he doesn't have to say anything. This is one of the great lessons of political prudence. You don't often have, often it is the case that you don't have to say something. One of the great quotes from antiquity is, "The man who does not know how to be silent does not know how to speak." So the Pope,

was not saying anything different from what the Catholic hierarchy was saying in this country. He doesn't disagree with it. Obviously, he didn't have to say anything, but nevertheless, he chose to say something, and he didn't have to. And so that would be my, my, people ask me what kind of Catholic I am. And I usually say, bad Catholic. I, I try to be a good Catholic. But, um, but I feel very, uh, uh, uncomfortable saying anything critical of the Pope, who's obviously a very good man. But, but, um, you know, I, I think, I think that Catholics can be, should be able to make themselves comfortable. There's even a kind of Thomistic republicanism. If you want to be a Thomist, there are 10 different schools of Thomism. We can find one that is adaptable to, um, to the American, uh, American government and traditions.

You know, you took this, you took my question to an interesting place in in talking about the notion that of being uncomfortable as a Catholic in America. It is true. It is true that there, you know, I think about how, like JFK, it was a controversy that he was Catholic to, uh, the first Catholic president, if I'm remembering correctly. Um, you know, obviously, like Joe Biden was nominally, nominally Catholic and so,

uh, that's waned, I guess. What I was trying to get at is, um, you have in America this unbelievably successful society, the richest, most powerful country on earth. Yeah.

I think you can reasonably, I think it's not unreasonable to say we are sort of the current empire, even if we're not an empire in the formal sense, but we're, you know, we're Team America, World Police is in full effect right now. And, uh, it does seem like we owe a lot of that to the, to the Protestant work ethic.

It's hard for me not to say that that's absolutely like the, this, the sense in which it's very commonly held that Americans work like crazy, or we did, uh, certainly compared to Europeans. Um, I mean, that's true even today compared to Europeans, but we're like a working, commercial, Protestant people at the roots of it. Is that fair? Is that a fair assessment, do you think?

No, I don't agree with that.

Okay.

Well, this goes back to, um, Marx, Weber, "Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic."

I've never even read this. I'm, like, I'm, I'm, I'm bankshot influenced by this, clearly by others. But,

Yeah. Yeah. Clearly. But this is like the Fontenoy. This is the origin of this argument. And, um, it still has its defenders. But I think the case is that the Middle Ages had a perfectly, uh, vibrant commercial society, which was already imperialistic in the 15th, 14th, 15th centuries. And, uh, you know, the, um, and they had accommodation, the church had accommodation to various commercial enterprises and forms of exchange. I think that there's a, the idea that behind Weber is that you got credit, spiritual credit, for having a big pile of money because it showed that you were hardworking, right? That there was, uh, whereas the Catholic Church teaches and always has taught, and I think this is a correct doctrine, that wealth is, um, wealth can be illicitly acquired and illicitly spent, but it's not a virtue to have wealth, right? Uh, so there's an idea, and there are many Protestant scholars who disagree, by the way, that these Protestant societies that Weber was pointing to, coming out of the Reformation, that they really did put, um, wealth and, uh, wealth ahead of of spiritual welfare, where they did really claim that wealth was a sign of spiritual quality. Uh, that turns out to be based on very few, uh, sources.

So I'm not sure I, I buy this idea. Um, I'm not an expert on the, on this subject, and I haven't read the most recent literature on it. I have read some, uh, literature on late medieval Catholicism, which makes it quite clear that the Catholic Church was happy to, uh, welcome, uh, wealthy people, and was happy that wealthy people could have, they accorded wealthy people a high status in society. So this is very different from the Chinese, for example. Like the Chinese think that traders are the absolute bottom, the cesspool. The classes there in China, I think, are the official classes, the educated official class, the highest class, and then it's the agriculturalists, and then it's, I forget, there are four classes, and the tradesmen are at the bottom, right? So in, in Western Europe, already before the Reformation, you could be wealthy, and you could have be be admired for your wealth. The Catholic Church created the first merchant saint at the end of the 12th century, whose name was Omo Bono of Cremona. I like that name. So Omo Bono was a wealthy man who acquired his wealth in an illicit way. He didn't commit usury, and then he used his wealth to create, um, funds so that paupers could be buried, uh, honorably, in, with Christian burial, right? Instead of just throwing in the ditch, which is what they were doing, uh, earlier. So he, uh, he was a, he was a wealthy man who was a saint, uh, already in the 12th century, and it becomes possible for people of high, uh, wealth to be accepted into the aristocracy already in Catholic times. So it was perfectly okay for a, a nobleman to marry a tradesman. That would be unthinkable in China. It would be unthinkable in the early Middle Ages or even the high Middle Ages that that person who is a member of a military aristocracy or even a lawyerly aristocracy would marry a tradesperson. That would be incredibly, um, you know, uh, infra, as the, as the British say, you know, infra dignitatum, below their dignity to marry someone who made their money, uh, by at the trading tables or, you know, but this is very common if you go, uh, in Europe, beginning in, I would say maybe the late 14th, 15th, 16th century, that wealthy, uh, that the lines, status lines between the, um, the nobility and the knightly classes and the, uh, wealthy classes are, are very blurred already in the late Middle Ages. So I guess I'm saying I don't, I don't buy the idea that, uh, Protestantism is more friendly to great wealth.

Interesting. You know, that's, that's really, that's a pretty interesting. You know, this phrase, "the Protestant work ethic," sort of permeates our popular culture.

Yeah. It's an interesting thing to,

Well, that's Weber. That's the title of your book, "Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic."

I'm going to have to read that book. I'm going to have to dig into that. You know, this, and so maybe this is maybe a great place for us to sort of just come back to this idea of what the role of history, right? So, you have ideas that permeate the culture. They come from somewhere. And unless you can actually look back and and understand where they came from and why, you, you just go off the rails pretty quick. So, what, what, as a, as a parent, um, should my viewer who's trying to grapple with educational choices? What should we do? Because it's very hard to figure out how to set up our kids to get an education that would that can rightly be understood to be an actual education. It's, it's gotten quite hard. So, you know, do you have any, uh, you know, you've, you left Harvard to, um, you know, after being a teacher for 40 years, and you, you have a vision for what history can be. We've talked about this in a lot of different ways. Um, what's your advice to parents for for trying to set up our kids to know history and put, put who they are and the society they're a part of in a, in a, in a reasonable context?

Well, I'm a great fan, as I told you, of the classical school movement. And, uh, my co-author, Alan Gelzo, homeschooled all of his children precisely because he didn't want to subject them to the, uh, the public school system with all of its, um, fads and, uh, and faults. I, I would, you know, I think it's important for students growing up to have some vision of of what the good, beautiful, and the true are, right? That they, that they would have, uh, I think learning mathematics is very important, as Plato said, because it teaches you what certainty is, what real, you know, certain reasoning is. I think that these schools, the classical schools, I'm very, uh, it's the only thing in American education that makes me really happy right now is the classical school movement. There's maybe a million people involved in it. There are 55 million kids in K-12 education in America in a year. In any given year, the public schools have been losing market share.

Yeah. Uh, I think they're down to 48 million, but they still have the, the vast majority of students are still going to public school. But I think, uh, with school choice, um, spreading everywhere, that there's a chance for American education to recover. I think parents should think about what sort of child, uh, is coming out of the educational system. What they, what do they want their child to be like, right? Do they, many parents, um, seem to care only about how much money they're going to make, and that, I think, I can't, I can't really talk to a parent like that who only cares about how much money the kid makes. I think that you want a child who first of all will respect you, and who will perhaps forgive you for any of your faults, but also might ideally admire you for your virtues. The family is tremendously important. I, I didn't somehow realize this growing up how lucky I was to have good family, good parents. I had a father who was in the Navy Air Corps during the Second World War. He was a chemical engineer. He was a later on, uh, rose through the ranks at an oil company, which is one reason why I'm a conservative. But he, he was an admiral. He was a Christian gentleman. That was his ideal, to be a Christian gentleman. And that's the first duty of a parent, I think, is to try to offer an example to children. But also get them to help them to understand what good character is, what nobility of character is. Nobility is a word that we've lost, but it should be still in our vocabulary. That there are higher things in human life to which we can aspire, and there are things that should be honored. There are things for which we should be grateful. One of the things that distresses me about the sort of woke world is the total lack of gratitude. That's why I put in this book sections on gratitude to the Greeks, gratitude to the Romans, gratitude to Christendom, so people would understand where they acquired some of the basic civilized values that we still have. So I think it's important for students to grow up knowing their own history, especially American history. Even though I'm, you know, out there ringing the bells for Western Civ, I think American history ultimately should be the more important thing. But they need to learn a balanced account, uh, of American history, not have, uh, this sort of self-hating account. They need to be very careful about teachers. And this is an old counsel that the ancient Romans used to give to parents, that you have to be careful about your teachers. They should be people of good character. You have to be careful about companions. Do you want your children, uh, to hang out with bad people? And of course, that now extends to social media. So, um, it's a very tough thing to be a parent today, uh, but it's something that, that, and it's a tremendous responsibility, but also, uh, but parents need to take it seriously. And, uh, I admire people who raise large families and take the financial, you know, uh, cost of that, but I think that they are, you know, I never had any children myself because my wife was 13 years older than me when, when I got married in my late 20s. So that wasn't a possibility. Uh, but I admire people with large families who are willing to take that sacrifice. But it, it, it is a difficult thing. And I, I can't recommend classical schools. They're not all equal. I mean, some classical schools are, are, you know, are just starting out and may not have the resources and manpower and womanpower that they need. But some of the established charter schools like the Hillsdale, Hillsdale, uh, schools, and Great Hearts schools, and Phalen's, uh, these are really outstanding schools. I think you can really get a fine education for your children, which will make them, uh, which will give them standards of virtue and, and, uh, and the excellent use of language and be able to communicate. A lot of skills that we were told that children had to learn are now, uh, already proving obsolete. When I was a little, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, all Harvard students were told they had to learn to code, right?

Yeah. Working out, that's great.

Computer science was the most popular major, or there was a course in computer science that was the most popular course at Harvard. So now, you know, those, they have nothing left really, but people who have spent their time improving their humanity, that's what we're talking about with civilization, not just good character, but but developing, uh, human, human abilities at a very high level. That's what virtue is, is excellence, right? It's excellence. Human, all human beings are, are born with a range of abilities that they can cultivate, and the best educational system, the best parents, uh, are, are the ones that allow those, those, um, those abilities to, to reach their highest level. That should be the goal of the educational system, is to make our human capacities, and even our spiritual capacities, um, uh, give them scope for, for, for flourishing. You know, one of the things when you read, when you read in history, you will encounter complaints about the young, about the corruption of the young,

about the degeneracy of this, of the upcoming generation. You see it basically in every writing you can find. There's a, "Oh, kids these days are the worst. Our society is doomed because the the young generation that's coming up is a bunch of loser degenerates like that, like X newfangled thing."

As a historian,

um, like there's a lot to feel worried about in American culture, youth culture, Gen Z right now, around mental health, around rising support for murderous ideologies like communism, that are entirely debunked by all of history on every continent. Um, but, you know, do you take solace in that common complaint? How do you think about worries of the young as a historian today?

Well, you're right that it's an old theme. It goes back to the Greeks. They were worried about, you know, the, the Athenians were convinced that their, their parents were much more virtuous than they were. And the Romans always did this thing constantly. And somehow the Roman Empire went on for about six centuries after Salis decided everything was going downhill in the first century BC.

It was a slow decline.

Yeah, it's normal for for older people, well, I'm much older than you are, 71, to think about. And I do think about this, and I do believe that people in my youth were more polite, and they had learned at least a level of decency that I, I, I see fleeting, especially in public life. However, I'm an optimist. I, I, because the alternative is to be a pessimist, and you know, I, I really think that it's America has the capacity for renewal. And I also think our Western civilization has a capacity for renewal. I'm a Renaissance scholar. My, the center of my interest is the Italian Renaissance. But the Italian Renaissance is only one of many renaissances we've had in the Western tradition since antiquity. I think it's something built into Christianity and Judaism, the idea of rebirth and renaissance. But if you go through my book, you'll see that there's a renaissance after the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD. The Western Roman Latin Empire falls in 476. They start having renaissances in the early fifth century. They have the Theodosian Renaissance and the Justinianic, Justinianic Renaissance, and the Carolingian Renaissance, and the Ottonian Renaissance, and the 12th century Renaissance. You know, renaissance is us. That's, that's what we do in the West. And I think it's possible to do that. I think even in modern times, we, we, it's possible to, uh, bring us back and restore, uh, what we were. And there's great rewards for doing that. Uh, we are, Machiavelli says, you never know when you're in a period of decline because it could get much worse. And the, and getting better is totally unpredictable. So I don't really know if we're in a period of decline and the renaissance is the green shoots are, are, are starting to shoot up. But I, I have hope for that. I think it's something that our civilization is capable of doing, and especially in America, where we are such an optimistic people and such an energetic people, uh, despite the efforts to to destroy, uh, the, the will and the spirit of the American people. I think it's still there and will, will be coming around.

I ask this question of every guest on their first appearance on the show. Um, the show's called Dad Saves America because, uh, well, because I'm a dad, and because I think that that role of father is one that, you know, I strongly recommend. I think it has this outward effect, starting with the family, but rippling out to the whole society. How do you think about your role in the American story? My personal role?

Well, I have, uh, in the earlier part of my life, I was very much inspired by the ideal of scholarship. And I loved doing, uh, scholarship. I used to travel around with my wife in Italy, going from small town to small town, knocking on the doors of monasteries, trying to find new documents and reading manuscripts. I enjoyed that tremendously, and I thought I was serving, uh, a worthy, uh, enterprise, one that would ultimately help, uh, our civilization to stay alive. But now I've decided I need a more active role. So, I wrote this book with my friend Alan, which took a long time, took four years, but in fact, I've been writing it my entire life. While I was writing it, I had this sense, very strong sense, that this is what I should be doing, that this is something I can, I can help with. And that's really what I'm dedicated to doing down here in the, uh, Hamilton School, is to try to revive the study of Western Civ. Alan and I are going to start an MA program. We got the go-ahead on that, which will be professional formation for classical school teachers in, in Western tradition. So at least until, uh, I'm struck down by the gods for hubris, uh, which may happen at any moment, I am going to, um, I'm going to work on that, on that project.

Well, I think that is indeed, in a time where nobility is not on every tongue, that is a noble project. And James Henkins, thanks for being on Dad Saves America. This has been, um, an intellectual romp together. I appreciate it.

All right. Thank you very much. Talking to you.