← Conversations with Coleman
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is James Hankins. James is an intellectual historian who's taught at Harvard for the past 20 years and focuses on the Renaissance period. He's also the author of the Golden A History of the Western Tradition. In this episode, we talk about why James recently left Harvard. We talk about the importance of learning the Western canon. We talk about whether monotheisms invented the concept of objective morality. We talk about the relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment. We talk about why Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire. We talk about whether Islam was spread mostly through conquest or voluntary conversion. And finally, I asked James if he believes China should teach the Western canon or the Chinese canon. Without further ado, James Hankins. James Hankins, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [01:03]
B
It's a pleasure. I'm a great admirer of yours.
- [01:06]
A
Oh, thank you very much. Likewise. So we're here today to discuss this tome, this doorstopper of a book called the Golden A History of the Western Tradition. But before we do, we were chatting just briefly, but we didn't get to finish a conversation. You play trombone? In fact, we both play trombone.
- [01:28]
B
That's right. But I played orchestral trombone, although I did play in dance bands, a great American songbook, that kind of thing. But I was studying to be for an orchestral trombonist and composer one time. But I reached the limits of my ability, so I went back to classics, which is where I had started.
- [01:53]
A
Oh, that's interesting, because when I was 12 and 13, starting out on trombone, I was also into classical orchestral trombone. That was my initial obsession. And then I pivoted to jazz around age 14, 15 and ended up going to the Juilliard Jazz Program for less than a year. But while I was there, I got to hang out with the classical trombone players as well, and we were kind of all friendly. And I got to know Joseph Alessi, the lead of the New York Philharmonic, who is a big hero of mine.
- [02:28]
B
He's best friends with my high school buddy Carl Lenfy, who taught, who was in Bavarian Staatsoper for a long time. I think they've recorded together. I'm a big admirer of Lessi, too. In fact, I studied for a while with Glenn Dodson, who is the head of Philadelphia Orchestra. Lee, Trombone. Wow.
- [02:51]
A
So how did you go from orchestral trombone to classics?
- [02:56]
B
Well, I started out in classics and our high school. I went to a public high school outside of Philadelphia, and we had a pretty excellent musical program. I got sucked into that. I spent a lot of time blowing air Through a piece of metal in my high school years and I wanted to go to Duke to be a composition person, and I spent a couple years there. But eventually I discovered that I couldn't write the kind of music that I wanted to write. So I went back to classics and ended up in Renaissance History in graduate school at Columbia. And I taught a course I'm sure you must have taken at Columbia, namely contemporary civilization CC for three years before I got my job at Harvard in 1985.
- [03:57]
A
So that dovetails nicely into what I want to talk about with you, because Contemporary Civilizations is part of the famous Columbia core curriculum. Unlike most colleges in its class, Columbia has maintained a requirement that every student study the Western canon. And so I did in my four years there. And CC Contemporary Civilizations was my favorite class within the core curriculum. But the core curriculum is perennially under attack. At least, you know, since the 60s or 70s at minimum, has been consistently under attack as a proverbial list of dead white men. Why are we reading all of these dead white men? Is the essence of the critique, though points of emphasis have. Have shifted. At some points it's more about the whiteness. At some points it's more about the maleness. But this was a constant source of controversy when I was there. And to some extent the core curriculum has changed as a result of that. So we don't only read things that are classically in the Western canon. Part of what we read in Contemporary Civilization, or rather in lit, hum, another class in the core, there'll be like two or three books in the curriculum that are from a black female author like Toni Morrison or something like that. But for the most part it still is the same books that would have been seen as western canon, you know, 50 to 100 years ago. So it has survived the critiques, it's changed somewhat. But I think this gets exactly at your recent letter explaining why it is that you left Harvard. So can you. You can react to anything I said about the core as well, but please explain why it is that you left Harvard.
- [06:08]
B
Okay, if I could deal with the first set of your remarks about cc. I've kept in touch a bit with the later, later fortunes of CC because I've been to several conferences at the Morningside Institute. The last one, I think, was with Roosevelt Montas, who is defending CC very effectively. And I remember they had those controversies when I was teaching the course in 1982-1985. And at that point the great pressure was to have more women scholars or women great books. And I remember distinctly I suggested they should read Elizabeth Anscombe, who is the founder essentially of virtue ethics and probably the most important in terms of her influence, female philosopher of the modern times. But they didn't want to do Elizabeth Anscombe for some reason, which had to do with, I think, that she was Catholic. But they did want to replace. At one point there was a proposal to replace, I think it was either Plato or Aristotle, with a book on women in the Western philosophy by Susan Okun, which I didn't think was a good idea. I think we read great books because they're. Because they're written by people who challenge us to higher intellectual standards. And you're going to find out about what the life of the mind is when you read Plato and Plato's accounts of Socrates. And you're not going to find that out when you read a textbook on Western women. That was an exaggeration. No one took that really seriously except the people who are proposing it. But I think it's important that we don't, you know, we don't decide these questions on. On. On gender or on rates that we decided on what are the most stimulating and important books that really help us to become better intellectually, better to have the intellectual virtues. I simply don't believe that. That we can always have a, you know, have a curriculum that looks like America. You're probably too young to remember that that's what Bill Clinton want when he became wanted. When he became president. He wanted a cabinet that looked like America. But it doesn't work that way. You know, there's many proposals now that we replace Western civ. Or has actually happened that Western Civ be replaced by global civilization. And the people who propose these things will say, well, why aren't we reading more Central Asian authors? And the fact is that there's simply not that many of them. If you walk into Widener Library at Harvard, I would say that. Well, I don't know. I'm talking on the basis of some surveys we did a few years ago. But most of the surviving works of civilizations older than the present time are. Are in the West. The Chinese have the largest surviving literary record of any civilization except for the West. But the West's surviving literary record is 10, 20 times. Somewhere between 10 and 20 times what survives from China. So you have to study what there is. In some cases, there isn't anything. I wish there were women philosophers. We know that there were women philosophers in antiquity, but their works don't survive. If they had survived, we would read them anyway. Coming back to the question of why I left Harvard. I was a little bit taken aback by the reaction that that article in Compact Magazine had. I had no expectation that it was going to become so viral as to end up in the New York Post, in the Daily Mail and some other places like that. I was trying to. Actually. My original title was why we need to Still Study Western Civilization. But that wasn't exciting enough for the editor, so they changed it into why I'm Leaving Harvard. The real reason I'm leaving Harvard and moving to Hamilton School is because I really believe very strongly that we need to be teaching the history of Western civilization. Now, it was abolished essentially in American high schools and universities about 40 years ago, and it hangs on in a few places. But if you go back to the 1960s, everyone was teaching it. And the reason people will say is that it's a Cold War subject. It was invented after the Second World War, and it was in order to. This is a Vietnam generation mark, right? That it's designed to turn Americans into militarists and to align themselves with foreign wars and so on. It doesn't happen to be true, but it's still widely believed that that's the case. So we need to be teaching Western civic end for all sorts of reasons. One reason is that if you don't teach civilization, people become uncivilized. And you have people learn about what civilized conduct is by learning the stories of their own civilization and good and the bad stories. And also I think they learn about tolerance and they learn not to be fanatical by studying history in general and learning what people's stories are. That, for me, has always been the major way that I understand people who are unlike myself. I try to find out what their story is, right? So I'm married to a Thai woman who is an economic refugee from Thailand. And one reason I have never gone in for the hostility to immigration from many people on the right is because I am married to an immigrant. I know her story, I know why she came, and I know there are many stories of people in the Thai community and other communities who come into the country. So that kind of a story needs to be told about the west going back to the creeks. And people need to know where, not simply what the beliefs of the west are. I read this all the time. People defending the west, right? We have to defend democracy, we have to defend rule of law, we have to defend tolerance. All these things that are associated with. With Western civilization. But if you just say that, you're not offering really a Reason why those things are valuable. If you tell the history of democracy, you tell the history of how democracy broke down and was largely replaced by republican system, which is a mixed constitution. If you tell the story of how democracy was completely wiped out in the ancient world, more or less by the 4th century B.C. and how it was revived again in the 12th century A.D. that's a pretty remarkable story. Most people don't realize that Western civilization was not democratic from the time of the ancient Greeks onward. It was a very. Those were very brief episodes of democracy. The Founding Fathers did not of the United States, did not want to found a democracy. They founded a republic, a rather populous republic by comparison with the Roman republic. But they found a republic. They knew what we don't know anymore, which is the history of the West. So I used to teach a course with Harvey Mansfield called Republics and Republicanism. And what we discovered was that the Founding Fathers, of course, began with Aristotle. So it wasn't just from Founding Fathers and ended with Tocqueville. The Founding Fathers actually knew this history very well, history of the west very well. And they had this very prudential sense of how the history of republics had developed over time. The threats that had brought them down, the corruptions, the drifts into tyranny, the various ways that republics became tyrannous. They had a very sensitive historical antennae. I once went through the Federalist Papers partly to poke a bit at my colleagues who are political theorists. And I discovered that the Founding Fathers quoted many more works of history than they did of political. Political theory. Right. So you know, this is this. When you talk to people in great books programs or people in history of political theory today, they'll want you to read a canon of books. And it will be, you know, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, maybe Aquinas, if you're lucky, Machiavelli and so on. But they don't read history very much, and they need to. This is one of the themes that I've been pushing for a long time with great books programs. In fact, when I came up to Morningside to talk to the tutors in cc, my main emphasis was how you have to study great books. Yes, you should study great books books, but you should also study the history that surrounds those great books if you want to understand why they were written and what they were responding to and how they imagined that their theories would solve contemporary problems.
- [16:36]
A
So you said that when people stop studying civilization, they become uncivilized. What do you mean by that? And how can you. Can you paint a picture with evidence that that's true.
- [16:51]
B
Well, I think one can look at civilization either as a treasure house or as a way of transforming people. So the treasure house approach is, I think, perfectly valid. We have many treasures in the history of the Western tradition from Homer and Greek drama and Greek comedy and all the genres of literature, poetry and philosophy and science, all these things that the Greeks were uniquely creative in producing. And of course the Romans, their literature, their law, the medieval period and the works of philosophy from the medieval period and so forth down to the Renaissance, great art. So it is a treasure house. And one of the things that really, I think, motivates me most strongly is the idea that these things will be lost, that people will not listen to classical music anymore because it's white supremacist or I've heard that argument. Or people won't read Shakespeare anymore because he's a white male. So I'm very concerned about preserving not just the treasures of the past which are not in danger of disappearing, but preserving the love of those things which I grew up with and I learned to love in high school and in college. And they've been with me my entire life. I'm 71 years old. I can still remember poetry that I memorized in sixth and seventh grade. And I think to me, they're formative. So that is the treasure trove idea of civilization. And we do have a Western tradition. I wouldn't say we have one civilization. We have number of interlocking civilizations. Greece, Rome, medieval Christendom and Europe, and then American phases in the history of the Western tradition. But there's also the civilizing process that comes when you study civilization. And it begins in the family, obviously, when, when your parents tell you how to get along with your brothers and sisters and how to treat adults. You learn a certain number of forms of human interaction. You go to school, you have to learn to live with your. Your, your. Your fellow students. But. But you also have to learn ultimately how to live in your civilization and how to understand other people. So one of the things that comes from very strongly from the Western tradition is the importance of language and communication. If you study the history of classical education from the 4th century BC onwards, they were most interested in. In speaking a language with great precision and also being able to speak language with persuasiveness. The whole history of freedom depends on persuasive speech, because the alternative to persuading someone is to force them. And this is something the Greeks discovered very early on. They invented the art of rhetoric along with so many other arts. The art of persuasive speech. But they understood that if you couldn't communicate with people and there were not common language, a common set of understandings, that you're going to fall apart the way we have done in America in the last 25 years. We don't have any common prepossessions anymore, things that are taken for granted. So I think that that is a form of civilization understanding the importance of persuading each other through reason, through evidence. The Greeks, you know, they had these law courts with huge numbers of people in them. 500,000, 2,000 people in law courts. So they couldn't. It wasn't like today, where you just pay for the most expensive lawyer and you can win or you have a strong advantage. I don't want to exaggerate. So the Greeks, you know, there's a famous historian of science called Ger Lloyd. He's a British scientist who. Historian of ancient science. And he said one time, the Greeks. The Greeks did not have a monarch, so they made reason. They're a monarch, in other words. So one of the reasons why the west has this worship of reason is because of democracy. These are interlocking things. And something you learn from Western civilization is the connection between things like free speech, freedom, institutions and aspirations, and how aspirations are communicated from generation to generation via great books and by the understanding of great, deep understanding of great books. You can't get without history. I'm not making. Coleman, I'm not making a. I understand. I'm not making a logical argument. I know you're a philosopher and you probably want premises and a conclusion from me, but I'm a poor old historian and we're not used to making arguments. So my arguments are arguments about having common sentiments, having common things that we love in our past that we think are worth defending. And we know why they're worth defending that when we praise free speech, which many people oppose today, people who are educated in the Western tradition know how we got to that point, how we had for so many years, hundreds of years, in fact, attempts to control speech and why they didn't work. And it's partly the new technology of printing that broke down attempt to control thought, but also the history of persecution, in the wars of religion, the history of coercion, and the desire to have the ability to believe what you believe and not be forced to believe something. And that requires free speech, freedom to press. But unless you know that story, you're not going to be able to understand the value. That's one thing you can get from stories, because Stories have heroes and they have villains, they have anti heroes, they have heroes who are not so perfect and they have villains who are not so bad. And these are the people that we encounter in early life. But if you want to understand freedom of religion, you have to understand the history of religious conversion. If you want to understand the rule of law, you really have to go back to the ancients, because the rule of law was invented basically to put the rights and property of individuals above that of politics. Was invented in the Roman Empire in the couple generations before Cicero. And Cicero is the one who was really popularizing idea of the rule of law. But in everyone's mind at the time that Cicero promoted this idea that the law is our ruler, not men, but laws rule us. Fresh in everyone's mind was a episode in the Roman history when Sulla the great, well, the great military leader and tyrant, took away that ability that people's property was confiscated from them. They were. They lost every kind of legal right that they had under Roman, Roman common, common law. And so Cicero was elevating this concept of law and using Stoic philosophy to identify Roman law with natural law, partly in order to save people from the effects of partisan politics. If you understand all that history, I think you are much better able to make practical decisions and to form your character because you understand not only some teacher up there telling you to be virtuous and to practice justice and temperance and courage and wisdom. What does that mean? You need to illustrate what that means, and you need to say why that's important and what's gone wrong when we haven't upheld our own principles. So I'm sorry, I can't make you a proper philosophical argument. I'm making an argument such as an historian would make.
- [26:12]
A
That's okay. I mean, one thought I have is, is the Western tradition and the love of classical music, of classical texts, is it in as much danger as you think? I mean, one thing I've noticed is though people claim, you know, though the people you're thinking of will claim, you know, I won't listen to classical music because it's white music. Actually, every single major Hollywood movie that needs to reach for music that actually moves an audience in a tense moment is reaching for classical music. They're replicating basically the romantic style of orchestration in Hollywood scores. And so we actually get that all the time, whether we realize it or not. And the. The persistence of that style in movie scoring is a testament to how powerfully audiences are still moved by that kind of music. I mean, I Think of the movie that's coming out later this summer, Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey. Very likely to attract massive crowds all over America and Europe and indeed the world. And hopefully it's a very good film. I'm very much looking forward to it. But at some level, people revealed preferences, right? People talk is cheap, behavior means a lot more. Are these traditions actually under as much threat as you suppose they are?
- [27:59]
B
Well, I don't want to echo the kind of right wing threat machine. And I agree with you and it's very good observation about Hollywood movies. I hadn't thought about that way. I was thinking in terms of the audience for classical music, which is always declining. And it's something about the humanities that they always claim to be under threat. I wrote an article one time about the history of humanities, claiming that they were about to die out. And it starts at the beginning of the humanities in the 14th century and continues. They're always talking about how they're going to die out. You know, Petrarch, the founder of the studio Humanitatis, the humanities, he says it's all under threat. We're going to. And one of the great philologists living in the absolute apogee of knowledge of Latin says my generation is the last generation that's going to know Latin since 16th century. So yeah, there's a tendency to exaggerate. And I don't believe that revealed. I think revealed preferences are very important as far as classical music is concerned. I'm not so worried about that. I am worried about who teaches Western Civ. Now, if you don't have people trained to teach it, who are historians and literary people and who have some kind of understanding, the space gets filled up. And I'm less worried about the bad actors who go around saying that the west is contaminated by racism and sexism and colonialism and all that stuff, because those people often know very little and they can be refuted by the facts. I'm more worried about video games, actually, in America, video games. The most important source of information about Western Civ is a video game that's known as Civ. And it is enormous. It's a huge footprint there. A huge number of gamers watch this. So last year I found out about this from a former student of mine, teaches at the University of Chicago, named Ada Palmer, who follows this stuff. And she told me that last year there was discussion of historical periodization, right? And on Civ it involved over 800,000 people who were talking about the periodization of history, but they were talking about it in terms that they derived from this very, I would say, biased presentation of Western history. So this is a deeply progressive. I don't mean in the political sense. It's a deeply modernizing game that you score points by overcoming the past, right. And you're heading towards the singularity. So at the beginning you overcome the past by leaving behind feudalism and religious superstition. And it's the old story of the rise of the west goes back to the 1950s. And gradually as you approach the modern world, you get accelerationism that the historical periods are happening more and more frequently.
- [31:26]
A
Can I stop you for a second? So when you're playing this game, you are a single protagonist, Are you a single character? Or are you somehow playing the whole civilization?
- [31:37]
B
Well, I haven't played it myself. But you're playing against other characters who are trying to move towards the modern world. Right. So the whole presumption is that there's nothing of permanent value in the past. It's just that there's the modern world and there's the obstacles to modernity. And apparently I have the figure somewhere. My student gave me her research, but there are millions of people who are playing this game online, many more who are taking Western Civ classes. So I'm worried about a certain bias. We had a bias in teaching Western civilization for a long time. I went, studied the previous works, Western civ textbooks, which I very triumphalist. Triumph of the west and the west and the rest. The west is better than the West. I don't buy any of that stuff myself. But these books were basically inspired by the Enlightenment, right? That they regarded everything before the Enlightenment as possibly valuable. But they're. But what they, what they. What they admired in the past most of all was the Enlightenment. And I admire many things in the Enlightenment myself. But what they tend to admire was the most radical parts of the Enlightenment. Now, most people who are Enlightenment philosophers were not atheists. It's a small minority. Most of them were people trying to reform Christianity in one way or another. So it's a false enlightenment. But also there's a kind of modernizing built in modernizing tendency not to video games, to Western civic books. I read recently an article by High Executive and mastercard who was talking about how you do things in industry to get attention and you always have to couch it in this language of disruptive innovation. So if you want to fix the toilet, you've got to tell people that you're going to open up a new age in toilet technology which will disrupt all previous technologies. I'm satirizing this right. But there we have this bias in our civilization towards modernization, especially in America. America more than any other country, I think is devoted to innovation, progress. And one reason I think that we should be studying Western civilization and that will ultimately help us to civilize ourselves is to be aware of the things that we shouldn't be leaving behind. The traditions of tolerance, for example, and liberalism in a certain sense, I guess I call myself an ordo liberal these days, but I still am a liberal or what liberal. Have you heard this term ordo liberalism?
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A
Is that when you're a liberal but you speak Urdu as well?
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B
No, it's a kind of cult position on. It's people who are trying to create a middle ground between post liberalism and classical liberalism. But they want to, you know, instead of making GDP ultimate goal of liberal, the liberal right, they want to make a good society the ultimate goal and then build free institutions and free economies around the ideal of good society. But anyway, maybe we shouldn't pursue that particular rabbit. I think I've unleashed about 50 rabbits so far.
- [35:21]
A
I mean, there are many potential questions to ask. Let me start with this one. What is the relationship between the Judeo Christian tradition of the west, that is to say the religion of the Old Testament, the religion of the New Testament and its variations from Judaism to Catholicism to Protestantism? What's the relationship between all of that and the secular liberal society that we have today? And I'll give you two models as potential answers that are in people's heads already. One is the outgrowth model, which is to say secular humanistic liberal values of tolerance, separation of church and state, democracy, all of those things are a kind of natural outgrowth of the Judeo Christian tradition, even though they're not, certainly not prescribed in the Bible and in our certain way, in certain ways are antithetical to religious precepts. At least not all of them are prescribed in the Bible. Let's say they kind of could only have come from a ground that was, that was fertile. It only could have grown out of, out of the fertile soils of Judeo Christianity. Even if they don't perfectly resemble them, they couldn't have grown out of a different belief system or a radically different belief system. And then there's the backlash model. The backlash model would say, well, actually a lot of the things that we prize in America and this secular government and so forth were a backlash to a Judeo Christian, an oppressive Judeo Christian world. It was precisely rejection of that hyper religiosity that gave us the tolerance and the small L liberalism that we so much value today. So what is your view on the relationship between the Judeo Christian tradition and modern civilization?
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B
Okay, well, I'm going to frustrate you by saying both can be true. And part of the purpose of my book is to show how things like separation of church and state are very deeply rooted in our civilization that go really back to the 11th century. There is no other world civilization, as far as I know, that has rejected its religion or tried to reject its religion as thoroughly as the Europeans have. But that's in part because church and state were separate powers and competing powers in the Middle Ages. And eventually the universal empire of Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy by trying to destroy each other, discredited each other, and they brought about the system of cities, a system of competing states that emerged from the high Middle Ages. But the premise that religious authority and political authority are completely separate and have completely different origins is something that has only happened in the west because of our peculiar history. So if you think of the things that constitute liberalism in the modern world, free thinking, free attitudes to sex and family and freedom of trade, free markets, all those things were rigorously regulated by the Catholic Church through its canon law in the Middle Ages. So when the Protestant countries get rid of the Catholic Church, they also get rid of Catholic canon law and the regulation of thought, the regulation of the economy, the regulation of family law. They try to struggle against those losses for a couple of centuries. But ultimately liberalism comes from the rejection of Catholic moral authority. And the Catholic Church in Middle Ages tried to be like the Islamic world and have a Sharia type law which is going to regulate not just questions of crime and punishment, but also try to regulate individual persons lives. Right. And that I think is what is at the foundation of liberalism is to rejection of any attempt by government or church to regulate the individual life, or at least to have as few regulations of individual life as possible. But these things are part of our tradition. You don't find them in China, you don't find them in Islamic civilization because they don't have this. The Islamic religious authorities never had the position in China that they have in America. Okay, so I'm already often one of my historian, but the point I'm trying to make is that many things that both are true. So the rejection of the authority of the churches, which starts with the Catholic Church and ultimately passes to the Protestant churches in the 18th, 19th centuries and America's system of denominationalism, where no church has any political authority or should have any political authority, that has been a long time coming. It comes out of unique structure of church state relations that set in in the 11th century. However, as you point out, and Tom Holland has been writing about this for a long time and speaking about it on his podcast, there's so many things that we regard as unquestionably modern and liberal and pluralistic that actually come out of the Catholic and Christian tradition of antiquity. And I'll give you one example, which is equality. Many people think that equality is a creation of Marxism or possibly a Rousseau. But. But equality is deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition. If you look at the Pentateuch, the Pentateuch requires this society of the Jews to equalize incomes. Every few years, 10 year intervals and 50 year intervals. You're supposed to go out and take away from the richest people and give to the poorest people. That's a very extraordinary ruling. And the ultimate idea is that everything belongs to God. We only have it in trust for our families in our country and for Israel. And the Christians, of course, have the idea of spiritual equality, which comes out of the religious tradition sometime in the 16th century and 17th centuries and enters into politics. So the concept we have of egalitarianism today is a importation into political theory from radical Christianity, especially Socinians in 17th century. And the idea that equality is a process that must continue. Right. It's an ism. Liberalization is something that has a direction to it and equalization is something that has direction to it that is also a Christian, I think, an impulse that comes from the Christian tradition. The ancients who wrote about political equality in the Greco Roman tradition were not concerned with. They did not consider equality to be an ideal in itself. Right. So when Aristotle talks about equality, what he says is it's dangerous to have two unequal society. You shouldn't have too many, you know, you shouldn't have huge gaps between the rich and the poor because the society is going to fall apart. In the Judeo Christian tradition, you say that all men are created equal in sight of God and then that gets transferred over into natural equality, or the idea that everyone is naturally equal, or at least legally equal to everyone else. So I think that you cannot simply. Our civilization has created a certain DNA and everybody who participates in it, whether they want to recognize it or not. The idea that they have in Silicon Valley that some singularity is going to come and the old ways will simply die out and we're going to have a new society built on ideals of the future that we make for ourselves, that's simply it's impossible. It's not going to happen. Something else will happen that's be based in some way on traditions like trying to be an individual in fashion, right? That if you try to be an individual in fashion, you always end up imitating someone else. The future does not have models of conduct for us because it hasn't happened yet. Maybe science fiction characters are taking those models. But the most important models for human behavior, both good and bad, are in the past. And we can learn from them. And that's how we become civilized is learning from examples of human beings who have achieved great things, incredible things, but who also done horrible things as well.
- [45:48]
A
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- [47:31]
B
I don't think it's true at all. Just to be frank, I just read a very interesting essay on this by Peter Turkin who talks about what you really need is a source of morality that doesn't necessarily depend on monarchy. He has quite a lot of interesting evidence showing that Chinese civilization. It's often said, for example, that Chinese civilization doesn't have a God. A monotheistic God has built a civilization without God. God. But what Turkin says is that civilization, if you're talking about a standard, a permanent standard of morality, you don't really need a God for that. And the pagans, you know, if you go back to the Presocratics and the Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, they did not believe in. Well, I have to back up. At least the pre Socratics did not believe in a single God usually. And the Epicureans believed in a God, but it didn't affect us at all. Plato believed in a God, but not a God who was interested in our lives. Right. That we can say about ancient philosophical gods is that they were essentially ontological sources of being and maybe sources of values and epistemological fixed points, but they didn't try, they weren't commanding us to act in particular ways. I'm not sure I'm answering your question. I'm got a lot of brain noise going on in my head when you ask very simple questions and I try to make them complicated. No, that's okay, but I hope I'm answering your question. I really don't think that you need monotheism for moral enforcement. Maybe that's not the question you're asking.
- [49:35]
A
No, it is. It is. Okay, another one. Is it, is it an accident of history that Christianity became so prominent and so popular? In other words, for some people, the spread and virality of, of Christianity from basically a very small, if you want to call it a cult or a small group of Jesus's disciples into at some point the most popular religion in the world and now maybe the second most popular. I'm not actually not sure where Christianity and Islam exactly rank population wise, but the virality of the idea is for some people, proof of the value of the idea. Christianity, that set of beliefs must have been inherently more appealing to humanity than the other various, you know, Iron Age philosophies and religions that existed or else it wouldn't have spread so far. And then there's another school of thought which says basically it's an accident of history and Constantine and a few particular choices that were made. You know, we could all, we could all be Zoroastrians right now with a few things changed. And you shouldn't read too much into the popularity of Christianity as it relates to the value and the utility and the wisdom of Christian principles.
- [51:06]
B
Well, I have to say on the whole I prefer Spinoza's standard of a good religion, which is a good religion is one that makes people good and that's much difficult. That's an impossible thing to measure historically, you know, the history of Christianity is I think in part dependent on what we would take to be accidents. If you don't believe in divine providence, I happen to believe in divine Providence. But if you look at why Christianity spread in, in Judea, it was partly because it has spread to a certain extent. And there are estimates now that are very deflationary. There's a British historian who thinks that There were only 9,000 Christians in the 90s AD which is very small number, can't be right, actually. But the reason why Christians were able to gain popularity over Judaism, for example, and there were more Jews than Christians well into the second century A.D. is because the Jews capital, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. And the Jews were told, you cannot go back there. They would not allow any Jews. So from the point of view of many Jewish people, this disaster had happened with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. And then the Romans continued to persecute the Jews for another 50 years. It was very dangerous to be a Jewish and it wasn't so dangerous to be a Christian. Although Christianity was an illegal sect, right, they worshiped a criminal executed by the Roman state. So they were under suspicion and they could not be easily punished just because underground movements in that period, they didn't have the capacity to do that. And the Roman time being so the Romans had, the Christians had a favorable soil in Judea. But most Christian missions were spreading in the Greek world in the early periods, first few centuries, and part of that was owing to people. A lot of the Christian audience came from persons of mixed ancestry like Timothy, who had a pagan mother and a Christian father. Maybe it's the other way around, I've forgotten. But there are people who couldn't be Jewish because of who they were, but were nevertheless married to Jews or descended from Jews or, you know, one parent was Jewish, the other parent wasn't. So Paul used to go into these, into these synagogues around the Hellenistic Jewish world and appealed all sorts of people who couldn't, who literally could not be Jews because of the law, the Judaic law. I think though that the evidence seems to be that the great spread of Christianity occurred quite late in the late third century. And one reason for this was, I mean the human reason for this is that the state broke down in the crisis of the third century. They were having a new emperor every, every couple of years. The currency was worthless. All of the endowments that had been given to pagan temples, pagan institutions, they all were worthless. So the pagan religion didn't have religious cults, did not have the economic wherewithal to defend themselves. And there were all sorts of plagues as well. There's a third century plague. And the Christians came to the fore because they were a group that strongly believed in helping people on the margins. They helped the poor, the weak, the elderly, the sick. And people were surprised, deeply surprised, that when someone lay sick of plague, the Christians would go and try to take care of that person despite the dangers of infection. So the Christian, the great Christian, burst into Christian churches, became highly populous in the late third century because there was a period when the Romans decided not to persecute them and they were providing all these social services for people. Society was under extreme stress of various kind from disease and poverty and so on. And the Christians offered help so that when in the early 4th century the pagan emperors got around to trying to destroy Christianity, they couldn't do it. It's too big. I think that the sociologists say once a minority gets above 5%, you cannot destroy it anymore. It has to be either you have, you have to find some way to accommodate it. So the Christians got to the point and they of course publish publicly punishing these people. Every Christian was reduced in status. They were sent to the mines and to row ships and they were killed in the arena. They had wild beast fights that they set the, the beasts on the Christians in the early 4th century. And some people enjoyed that, as today, they like cruelty. But other people were horrified by it. And eventually, by the time that Constantine converted, sometime in the first century, the first decade of the fourth century, the Christians were a force to be reckoned with. So the human explanation of why Constantine succeeds is because he converts to Christianity and aligns himself with the Christian cult, which is rather small in the western Latin speaking part of the Roman Empire where he came from. But the Christians were very, very big in the cities of Eastern Roman Empire, the Greek speaking part of the Roman Empire. And so he created a kind of fifth column of Christians. His enemies in the Roman state were all in the Greek part. So again, there are these accidents of history. What you're asking about is the accents of history that allows Christianity to grow, but it's also the virtues of the Christians. I think that you have to offer something attractive. The Zoroastrians whom you mentioned, they didn't want to have a lot of people in their religion. It was an exclusive religion for the elites of Persia. And they were very tolerant of other religions in the Persian Empire, but they did not want any elite persons to participate in those religions. But they had no problem With Christians and any minority sect, really, but they did not. The Zoroastrian religion was an elite religion, something like Confucian. Confucianism. It's an elite religion. Christianity is open to everybody. It's a universal religion. And it also offers all sorts of benefits to people. What really people observed at the time, in the 4th century, when Christianity makes its great advance, is that it appeared to be making people better. This is what Augustine says in Athanasius, the great Greek bishop, says in the 4th century. He says he's writing to the philosophers, right? He says to the philosophers. For centuries, you philosophers have told us that you make people better through the study of philosophy. You have this way of life. Philosophy is a way of life which makes people better. Yes, you're right. It has made some very small number of people better. It hasn't changed society as a whole. The world that we live in is still evil, has not changed that world. But now Christianity is going to make a huge difference, right? So Augustine says, look around you. The world Christianity is sweeping through the empire. They're not relying on these little local gods anymore. It's a universal God, a monotheistic God. And Jesus was his manifestation through the Logos on earth. So Augustine at this period, they're very, very, you know, high on Christianity. They think that Christianity is really going to change the world. And then, of course, Christianity does change the world, but it's, it's not a linear, it's not a linear, linear thing by any means. And Christians, like every other human, human thing, become corrupted and, and so forth. But I think that's why Christianity spreads. It's a combination of push and pull. You might say that Christians offer something that other religions don't offer, the universality and also the personal God, right? Because the Greek gods of Greek religion, sorry, the gods of Greek philosophy are not personal gods. There's no one to forgive you. Aristotle wants you to become better by a process of refining the character as an adolescent, making the right decisions, building a habit of virtue or just virtuous disposition over time. But suppose you get to the age of 30, right, and you're still, you're still vicious, right? You still have bad habits you can't overcome. You have addictions. You have, you know, you have habits of lying and stealing and doing bad things. And you're past the age when you can form your character. What Christianity offers is conversion, right? And other religions too. But Christianity in particular says you can convert, you can change your life dramatically. You can get God's help in doing this. God will forgive you, God will give you light, God will give you the strength and the grace to continue. Right? So that is a very powerful message to non elite people in particular who are aspirational in a spiritual sense. They are aspirational to have better lives, morally better lives. Because you do get to this point in your life, right, when you start to say, am I a good person? Are we the baddies? Am I a good person and can I accept my own life the way it is or should I do something about that? Where can I get help to become a better person? I think that's the big appeal of Christianity antiquity and also today. I would say.
- [62:15]
A
Okay, now question about the spread of Islam. Was Islam spread mostly by the sword or mostly by voluntary conversion?
- [62:26]
B
Well, Islam was initially spread by the sword. The Arabs were trained by the Romans and the Persians in high level military skills. They were essentially mercenaries for the Roman and Persian armies. And the Persians and the Romans basically destroyed each other in the early 7th century by this long and exhausting war. And at the end of it, they had no money, they had no, a lot of dead Romans and dead Persians. And that's the point when the Arab armies, powered by in some way by Muhammad's message, burst out of the Arabian peninsula and they swept across the whole southern eastern Mediterranean in the space of a century. So they were initially a military religion. One thing that people forget is that there are very small numbers of Arabians of Muslims. They were a conquest elite. They were, what's this special historical term I'm forgetting for this? They were a tributary empire. So they conquered the countries whose military they overran. They demanded tribute, they demanded control of those societies. But they didn't have much ability initially to convert large numbers of people. They couldn't say to the population of Egypt, which is 90% Christian, they can't say, you have to convert to Islam. They would do that to soldiers and people that they admired, but it was too big a task. And the Christians had the same problem when they took over Spain during the Reconquista. If you have a large population of people who belong to one religion and you can't just say you must convert. So the Muslim technique was over the long term to make it unpleasant to be a Christian, higher taxes, you had to be deferential. You could never hold office. You weren't supposed to hold office. You were defenseless. Basically. In the Muslim world you were under Muslim law. If you went to law with a Muslim, you were under Muslim law. You could have your own private laws in Your communities. So over time, the Muslims, the native populations of places like Egypt and Syria, Palestine and Spain and North Africa, they became predominantly Muslim. So it's a combination of force in the beginning, but also social institutions that ultimately made it un tenable to continue to be a Christian or a Jew. And the same thing happens when the Christians take over the Roman Empire. They say they don't try to wipe out paganism. They don't try to destroy the pagans or forcibly convert them, because they can't. They're too numerous. The estimates are very soft, but at least somewhere around half, 40%, half of the Roman Empire is still pagan by the time that Theodosius in the late 4th century, makes Christianity the official religion. So they allow those people to practice their religion, but they have to do it in private. They can't publicly try to spread their religion. They can't in many cases show the signs of religion outwardly on a building. The same thing happens in China, by the way, today to unapproved cults in China. They can practice their religion privately, but publicly they can't proselytize. So it's the type of doctrine you find in a state, what I call confessional state, a state that has an official religion, that they can be very tolerant of minority groups. They can also be very intolerant. And there are times in both Islam and in Christianity when the dominant religion decides it wants to be intolerant, such as in the time of Justinian in the 6th century, the Roman Emperor says, I can't put up with these Samaritans any longer. The Samaritans all have to convert to Christianity, just announces that he sends an army in to enforce it. And of course, it doesn't work. People pretend to be converted. They're like the. Like the Muslims in Spain. They pretend to be converted, but they don't really believe. That just creates more trouble. It's a very stupid thing to do, actually, from the point of that view of craftsmanship. Statesmanship, sorry, statesmanship. And the Spanish monarchs try to do it in Spain, too. Most times when you have a dominant religion which is confessional, they are relatively tolerant. Now, in the case of Islam, Islam is always initially spread by the sword up until about the 15th and 16th centuries. And then they have a shift in their technique which actually anticipates the ones in Christian lands that the traders of Islam going around the world, of the Indian world and Indonesian world, they begin to spread Islam without. Without an army. When they get to the point of majority rule, they can then call in the army or establish a confessional state in some areas. But initially it's spread by missionaries. Christianity is usually spread by missionaries first, and then the state comes in second. Second. So Muslims become more like Christians in the 16th century in their technique of conversion.
- [68:32]
A
Okay, question about China. Now, you mentioned that outside of the West, China has the most well documented written history going back thousands of years. Do you think that China should teach Chinese civilization or global civilization?
- [68:51]
B
Well, I've spent a lot of time in China in recent years, and I emphatically believe in civilizational teaching, that the Chinese have a very great tradition and of government. I think that the Chinese tradition of government is superior to the Western tradition of government through most of the imperial period. And it's partly because of the nature of their adversaries and their allies. It's not necessarily a Chinese virtue. No, but I don't believe there is such a thing as global civilization. Civilizations have to have some historical depth and has to have literature and artistic traditions and moral traditions and philosophical traditions, traditions which globalism does not have yet. Globalism has brands. It doesn't have traditions, serious traditions. I'm not really. I don't think. Well, I think at least for the present, is that by the present I mean the next couple hundred years. Historians thinking again for the present. We have to learn for our civilizations, have to learn to. To have harmony among them. I think that what I've been doing in China in the last few years is trying to support Confucianism as a civilizational tradition in ways that I can. Tiny, tiny different ways, giving lectures and seminars and things like that. I have a lot of sympathy for modern political Confucianism, which is not simply a propaganda arm of the Chinese government, which many people accuse it of being. It's actually trying very hard to change China and move it in a more civilized direction. And I think that we simply can't go on this collision path that we're on now. One of the things I'm threatening to turn into a saying is that nation states fight and civilizations cooperate. I think we need a lot more mutual understanding between civilizations so we understand why we're different. And we don't automatically interpret China in Western terms. They have a single head of state, so he must be a tyrant. That's not what anyone believed in Christian and pagan antiquity in our Western tradition. But many people seem to think that any individual who's not a constitutional monarch has got to be a tyrant, and that's not the case. So I really think that civilizational cooperation can in some way counteract the effect of, and should try to counteract the effect of colliding interests of nation states. And I'm very, very disturbed by the people in both China and the United States who are cruising for a bruise. And as we. They want, they want to mix it up, they want to just kill a few, you know, 100 million people and see who wins. And that's not, you know, what any, any person should really, any person should really want. But they're, but I, I think we have to. This is something I'm trying to write about. I'm trying to write a book about virtue based international relations to get away from the false alternatives of globalization versus nationalism. But that's another, another long discussion.
- [72:36]
A
Okay, final question for now. Is it inevitable that non whites or people of color or whichever term you prefer will feel left out of a civilization course that focuses on the Judeo Christian tradition? Or is there a manner of teaching that course which allows for all groups of people that live in the United States to feel included?
- [73:11]
B
Well, it's a rule of logic that the more things denote, the fewer they connote. The more universal something is, the less it's going to satisfy individuals. I think that if we go by individual populations, the Spanish Hispanic element in the US ought to feel very much included in Western civilization. Since the Spanish peoples have a long history in north and South America and they're part of my story. I have a lot of discussion of the role of Spain in the Roman Empire and medieval period and modern period. Alan has, my co author has a lot of information about that. So it's easy for people in Spanish speaking lands with the Spanish culture, Catholic culture, to feel part of Western civilization.
- [74:15]
A
Although the wrinkle there is if you're, if you're a Spanish speaking Argentinian and you're mostly, most of your ancestry is from Spain. Maybe that's easier than if you live in Central Mexico and you're largely, you largely have an indigenous identity and you view Spanish as kind of the language of the conquerors.
- [74:36]
B
Yes. I don't think that Western civilization should be taught in a triumphalist way that we're the best, the rest are all inferior to us. This is the whole idea behind Cold War Western Civ that everybody has to recapitulate the exact same stages by which the Western peoples arrived at their current level of supremacy over the rest of the world. This is what Civ teaches. By the way, that video game I was talking about, in order to modernize, you have to do everything the west did no, that's wrong. I think that the way I would defend it is that if you are going to live in the United States, you need to know what the traditions of that country are. Many people who come to the United States want to be part of that tradition. They don't. They admire the US they were in countries that they didn't like very much. Either they're dangerous or they felt unincluded in those countries. And they come to the U.S. precisely because the U.S. is inclusive. The U.S. says anybody can be an American. And this is the great difference between China and America is not everyone can be Chinese. It's very hard to become Chinese. I have a friend who's been teaching in China for 25 years. He dresses like a Chinese. He teaches political Confucianism, he dyes his hair the way that Chinese Communist Party leaders dye their hair. But he's never going to be Chinese. And he admits he wrote an article in Wall Street Journal about how he's not Chinese people can become American, but they have to learn about our government, right? Our government is a republic. It has a Senate, Roman term, House of Representatives, British term. If they want to understand their country, it's legal system, it's Christian values, and we still have lots of Christian values. Even among people who don't are not converted to Christianity or not practicing Christians, they have to learn about Western civilization. It's part of their education. And I am also not saying that people who are not from Judeo Christian backgrounds or not from a Western background have nothing to contribute, because that's also not true. Western civilization has constantly been enriched and informed by other. Civilizations with which it's come into contact. The contact of the west with the indigenous peoples of South America were disastrous for those people. But it's quite different from the interaction that Western civilizations had with China because they could never really dominate China the way they could and conquer it the way they did other civilizations. One thing one can say about the west, and I think it's almost unique to the west, is that the west has always been very interested in learning about other civilizations. And in part because we're traitors and conquerors and colonialists, all those bad things. But there is a tremendous interest in other civilizations going back to the Greeks, right? So if you wanted to find out about ancient Egypt and you're living in an ancient world, you have to read Greek. If you want to find out about ancient Mesopotamia or ancient India, you read Greek. Because the Greeks wrote, you know, 30 books on the history of Mesopotamia, 30 different works on the history of Mesopotamia and more on Egypt. They were just tremendously curious. And that has been a feature of Western civilization that the Greeks have passed on. So I think this. But it's by no means the case that people who come from Asia, for example, to the United States, many of whom is there, are, admire the United States already and want to have a better life in the US it's by no means that they are not going to offer something of great value to us. And they have already for centuries. It's not just chinoiserie, right? It's not just Chinese bric a brac. We have learned a lot from the Chinese. And you learn also through rivalries and through competition with the Japanese, which we had in the 70s and 80s. There's deep competition with the Japanese, which had a huge influence on American way Americans did business in that period. So I'm not saying that we should indoctrinate people into a Western view of things. I'm saying people who come to this country should understand the country and should want to participate in the country. And not they should maybe wait a generation or two before deciding to tear the whole thing down. They should try to understand it first and see what the strengths and weaknesses are. But I think we should be open to immigrants who want to be part of our way of life. And those people should learn about the origins of our way of life.
- [79:58]
A
Okay. James Hankins, thank you so much. The book is called the Golden Thread. I highly recommend it. And good luck in your new institution.
- [80:09]
B
Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Talking with you today.