← Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
Kathleen O'Toole & James Hankins: The Golden Thread & Teaching the Western Tradition
00:57:01
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Narrator
Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being and we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Paw podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale.edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio.
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Scott Bertram
Welcome to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula and teacher led classrooms. Now your host, Scott Bertram.
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Podcast Host (Scott Bertram)
Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12hillsdale.edu. Today we hear a conversation between Dr. Kathleen O', Toole, Associate Vice President for K12 Education at Hillsdale College, and James Hankins, co author of a two volume book on Western Civilization. It's called the Golden A History of the Western Tradition. James Hankins has written the first volume, the Ancient World and Christendom Alan gelzo writes the second volume. Here's Dr. O' Toole and James Hankins.
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Scott Bertram
Well, I'm so pleased to be joined by Professor James Hankins, eminent Professor of History and the author of the Golden Thread, the first volume of which has come out and which is sitting in front of me, and the second volume of which is coming out soon. These books are the answer to a problem that high school history teachers have had for a long time. There is not an excellent textbook to assign to 9th, 10th and 11th and 12th graders who are interested in studying the Western world. Our prayers have been answered. The golden thread has arrived and I'm so pleased to be speaking with you about it. Professor Hankins, thanks for joining me today.
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James Hankins
Well, thank you very much for the opportunity to come on and speak to your audience of teachers, which I'm very eager to interact with, frankly, because they're the ones we hope that will take up this, take up the golden thread and spool it for another few generations at least.
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Scott Bertram
Excellent. Excellent. Well, at Hillsdale, when we started our work in K through 12 schools, we came up with a list of 10 things that we thought all of the schools needed to do with excellence in order to be good stewards of the students that they serve and of this classical mission that we all serve. And one of them is that the study of the Western tradition must be central to the. To the curriculum of the school, to the culture of the school. Who better to talk with about that than you? Tell me about the Western tradition. Why should it be a focus of our study?
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James Hankins
Well, Alan and I decided that we would write a book about the Western tradition and not about civilization. Because, in fact, the west is a number of nested civilizations. It's a bit like a Russian doll that the Greeks created this civilization, which I still think, and I think it's really undeniable. It's the greatest civilization that ever existed in terms of its cultural and intellectual importance. They invented all sorts of different forms of government, democracy, citizenship, but they also invent the philosophy that we use, and they improve mathematics tremendously. They're unparalleled in the arts, in literature and theater. There are just so many parts of the Western tradition that really, really go back to the Greeks. But the great thing that happened after the Greeks lost their political independence is that the nation that conquered them, the empire that conquered them, the Romans, recognized the value of Greek civilization. And it was very explicit. The end of the second century B.C. the leaders of Roman society, the senatorial class, said, we don't really like the Greeks of modern times because they're weak, and we just defeated them in battle. But they had tremendous respect for classical Greek culture and Hellenistic culture, Greek culture. And they wanted to do it in Rome. They wanted to keep the Greek culture alive since, you know, half of the Roman Empire speaks Greek or more than half speaks Greek. But they also wanted to have a Roman equivalent. So they created a Roman, Greco Roman culture. And it was one of the great cultures of the ancient world, especially from the time of Cicero down to the first century, second century A.D. they created a marvelous Latinated culture which is modeled on the Greeks. But then it goes on. And when the Greek Roman Empire in the west falls in the 5th century to barbarians, and we can talk about the term barbarians. It's not very fashionable now to use that term. I think it has a real purpose. So the barbarian kingships that displaced the Roman Empire in the west, they were mostly Goths. They also, in the end, realized that they needed Roman culture. Even after they destroyed the Roman institutions, they realized that they're going to rule a people that is mostly Catholic. They were Arians mostly Catholic, that had been ruled by the Roman Empire for centuries, that had a legal system which the Goths never had, and had a, you know, had forms of government that were necessary to run a kingdom. They just decided they needed Rome, they needed Greece and Rome too. So Charlemagne, when Charlemagne comes along, he's a Germanic king, he's not a Roman. He decides that the Carolingian Empire, that he. That begins in the 8th century and is formally introduced into the west as an Empire in 800 A.D. they also absorb Roman culture. They keep Roman culture alive. It's about to die in the seventh century. There are very few manuscripts of the Latin classics that have been copied. And if they'd gone on for another century, it would have been lost. So the Germanic kingdoms take up Greco Roman inheritance, and then the Germanic kingdoms are crushed by the 10th century. And then there's a revival in the 11th century and the 12th century. They said we have to go back to Greece and Rome, Rome. So they have another Renaissance. And then when the late Christendom, that civilization which they created around Greco Roman culture, Aristotle, Islamic elements and the Crusades and all that failed really, it was on its last legs Anyway, in the 14th century, there's another wave of Renaissance which has started, what I call my Renaissance of the Italian Renaissance, which also says we have to go back to the ancients. We've lost something here. We've lost a sense of honor, we've lost a sense of nobility. We've lost the greatness of the ancients. We have to bring that back. So the history of Western culture is a history of civilizations that have been, let's say, wise enough to recognize the value of the nations that they conquer. This doesn't always happen. Right. I went one time to Angkor Wat. I don't know if you've ever been. It's in Cambodia.
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Scott Bertram
No.
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James Hankins
Well, it's a very famous tourist site, the most famous tourist site in Cambodia. So it's this massive temple structure and what most people don't. Lots of people know what Angkor Wat is, but it's actually in 100 square miles of ruins, which is the only thing we really know about the Khmer Empire. So the Khmer Empire is a medieval empire, is almost as big as the Roman Empire, but we know nothing about it. Nothing. And when I went there, I tried to find out, you know, something about, you know, I'm historian, so I want to know what I'm looking at. And I tried to find contemporary sources for the Khmer Empire, things written by the Khmers themselves. And there's nothing. Nothing survives. There's some inscriptions that nobody know what they mean. But the reason we know about the Khmer Empire is because Chinese historians wrote about it, so that never happened in the West. In the west, people, the subsequent civilizations, were wise and they said, we need Greece, we need Rome, we need Christianity. We are Christian. Most of them were Christians up until quite recently. We are Christian peoples. We don't agree with all the moral behavior of the Romans. We are highly critical of Roman violence and cruelty and slavery. But nevertheless, there's something there which we have to preserve. It's infinitely valuable and it's part of us. They recognize that the ancient world is still alive in our hearts. Right. And in the way we conduct our society, our moral values, our governments, our legal system. And so that's what I think of as Al and I have both agreed on this as our approach that we are not a one civilization. We are a tradition, and the tradition, we belong to a tradition, and the tradition is immensely valuable. And we should not be the generation that breaks the golden thread, which is my fear. And that's why I so love the classical education movement. When I found out about it about eight years ago, I immediately recognized that this is the most hopeful thing in American education that I'd seen for a long time. So I'm grateful to you and Hillsdale and all the other classical charter schools, networks, and other forms of classical education around the country, because I think this is what I wrote this book for. Al and I both wrote the book for classical educators. Alan home schools, his children. He's very aware of the problems of homeschooling. And, you know, his wife is a teacher, and Alan, of course, is an historian. So those. His three children, one of whom is a Marine, his three children speak like a book. They have acquired Alan's eloquence, and they were very well raised. But Alan recognizes, as I do as well, that, you know, history teaching has to be there in order for people to understand the value of what they're studying.
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Scott Bertram
Yes. Yeah, that's beautifully put. We think often in Hillsdale schools about the importance of studying history. And I think that's a very. I think that's a very true and very succinct way of putting it. You referred to barbarism earlier, and at the beginning of the. The beginning of the book, you have an introduction in which you define civilization and you define barbarism. Tell us what you say about those two terms.
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James Hankins
Well, you can look at civilization a number of ways. There's. There's a Kind of, let's say, substantive definition, which is Roger Scruton's, the secure possession of good things and the ability to pass them down to our children. Okay, I prefer. I like that definition, but I prefer the version of civilization as something that civilizes. Barbarism is something that makes us less civilized and worse. So, in fact, the historical barbarians, some of them were good and some of them were bad. I don't make barbarian. I'm talking about historical barbarians like Goths and the Vandals and the Huns. They had better and worse elements among the barbarians. But barbarism as a concept, I think is something that tears down the bonds of love and loyalty that should bind a civilization together and makes people behave worse than they did. And I think it's undeniable. You know, people my age are very well aware that people behaved better when we were young than they do now, that they are more decent, that they dressed more, just dressed more carefully, and they were careful what they said to their children. One of the things that absolutely drives me crazy in the modern world is people have absolutely no fillers on their what they say. They haven't learned about temperance of speech and moderation of speech, which you would learn about in the class classical education. Right. My favorite quotes is the man who does not know how to be silent does not know how to speak. Right. And there are a lot of people who don't know how to be silent right now. But that's something you would learn in a classical, classical education. So I'm losing the thread of your question about barbarism. I think that their barbarism comes in all shapes. We have many barbarians among us, people who are trying to make us worse, who usually for political gain or for wealth of some kind or not, they don't care what they create or they don't think about what the effects of what they create. I'm thinking of technology here in particular. As long as they can make a buck, as long as they can be a success and win the admiration of other venture capitalists and technologists, and they can have an impact on the world and be transformative. The word they really like in tech in the west coast is disruptive.
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Scott Bertram
Yeah.
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James Hankins
You know, and they think that is a positive term. It's completely changed in its valence. You know, one time the word curiosity was a sin. Right. In Aquinas, curiositas is in the list of vices. Then it means being curious about things. You have no business learning about wasting your time intellectually. And that changes only in the 17th century, when curiosity becomes a positive value. So what's happening with this word disruptive? I think most people would think disruptive is bad in California. Absolutely. Think disruptive is good. Silicon Valley. I'm working right now with a tech entrepreneur named Arthur Cruz, and he is one of the funders of the Benedictine order. He's faithful Catholic. He's on the Pope's advisory council about AI. So he has bona fide as a Catholic. But when I talk to him, he's absolutely unwilling to admit that there might be something wrong with disrupting traditions. And I'm working with him. He's on a path to wisdom, I hope, of some kind. But this is very worrisome because the lust for innovation and for the new and the distrust of tradition, I think that could be classed as barbarism.
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Scott Bertram
Yeah, this idea that change is good simply because it introduces something different.
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James Hankins
Yeah. We have this orientation to the future and not to the past. And it's a feature of American civilization. We've always had this to some extent, that we're starting afresh in America and we don't have to. We can leave behind all the problems of the old world. So that's, I think, built into American civilization. But the wiser elements in Western civilization, beginning with the Founding Fathers or even the Puritans, you might say. But I think the Founding Fathers are a great example. They understood that if you want to do something new, you have to be anchored in the old. If you want to do something good that's new, if you want to really reform and not just change, you have to pay attention to the past. And I read the founding bodies and teach a course with Harvey Mansfield on republics. And we read the Republican tradition before the American foundings. And we get to the Founding Fathers and we realize that they knew all what we've been teaching to our students. They knew all about Greece and Rome and about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the early European history. They were very, very well educated in the Western tradition. And I think that's why they came up as such a marvelous constitution that we, that we have. And if you go down really to quite Recently, I think 1960s, you know, John F. Kennedy was a student of history. And even if his profiles encouraged were partly ghostwritten, he actually was very interested in history. You know, Nixon was interested in history. He knew a lot about history. This has become very scarce among our are statesmen today and politicians and it's, it's showing. And we stopped teaching Western Civ about 40 years ago in this country. It was just a gigantic move away from Western Civ into. Into global history. That's what kids are in school. I. I have three nephews who teach in the public schools in Pennsylvania, and they're all Christians, and they're often at loggerheads with the administrations and the state, but they have great difficulty interesting students in history because of the way it's presented. I've been looking recently at the two major books in global history that are used in high school, and they are so superficial and they're so politicized. They're so, you know, there's no narrative voice in them. There's no story that they can follow from the West. And I think that it's high time that we restore the study of Western civilizations, plural and Western tradition. And that's what we're trying to do with this book. And we're so grateful to Hillsdale for its help with operationalizing, as they say in the military, what we've done in the book. And as you, you'll look at the book, you'll see there's a page where we thank Hillsdale for all of its help with curricular development.
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Scott Bertram
Well, it's been such a pleasure to work on it. And just for our listeners, Hillsdale is preparing to accompany volumes one and two of the Golden Thread, a teacher's guide, a very robust teacher's guide that any teacher of Western Civ or any portion of Western history can use to prepare their lessons. The guide has been written to be adaptable to any type of teaching situation. It will work for public schools and private schools. It can work for middle school students or high school students. And I think it will also be useful for homeschooling families who are interested in providing their students with a serious history education that will be available on Hillsdale's website starting in 2026. The site is K12 hillsdale.edu. professor Hankins, you write in the book that we must learn to be civilized. That's the antidote to barbarism. And you say that the process of becoming civilized starts in the family and maybe could continue within the family if the child is homeschooled. But I think in that passage, you're saying something about what schools must do to help students become civilized adults. Can you comment on that?
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James Hankins
Yes. Well, continuing my line of thought that a civilization is what civilizes it starts in the home. Absolutely. And you cannot civilize children unless the parents start with very simple things. You know, respecting elders, sharing with siblings, and learning how to behave with other people. But when the next step is the school, right? When you go into the school, you have another opportunity to socialize children. And if you don't immediately take up the challenge from the parents, you will lose a lot. So I think of civilizing process as something that is absolutely dependent on schooling. What you're trying to do is to create young citizens of a country that value the country's traditions. And it may be critical of some things in the country's past, but that should just. That should just incentivize them to create a better nation. Men by every flaw, right? And we need to think of high school education in that way. Too often we're thinking of high school education as preparation for the workforce. And that's a noble goal too. People have to be prepared for the workforce. They have to be able to use math and speak and to read and all those things and to learn about the government. Sometimes they do that even in the most union terrorized schools in the country. But they need a higher form of civilization. Also in high schools they ought to learn about the traditions of Western art, Western sculpture and painting. And this really goes back to the Greeks. You can't do it without. You can't understand Western cultural forms, literary forms without going back to the Greeks who invented most of them. They have to understand the history of architecture, I think, is a wonderful thing to teach children. It's one really. It's one great way of activating people's curiosity about the path is when you go into a city or a small town and you just look at the architecture around you. So they'll see a Gothic church. Well, what does Gothic come from? Well, Gothic comes from the 12th and 13th centuries when the Catholic church was trying to speak to the common people. The Catholic Church had been very oriented towards the clergy and in monasteries. And in the 12th and 13th century, they decided that they had to teach Christianity to the people. And the Gothic cathedral was really designed for that purpose. The purpose of Gothic is, first of all, it's an incredibly inspiring. If you see one of the great examples of the Gothic cathedral, everybody knows this. You walk in and it takes your breath away when you see an interior Gothic space because it soars up into the heavens. And it's just. But the second thing about it, and it was really built for this reason. When Gothic was Invented in the 12th century, they explicitly said this, that we want to have walls that are very light and so that we can have windows that teach the gospel, right? We can have windows that. Stained glass windows, what we call them today, which transformed the light from the exterior into the stories of Christianity. So you can go into the Gothic cathedral and you can see all the stories of Christianity around you in beautiful colors. Right. That's what they were really after was the teaching. And, of course, the Gothic cathedrals were. They built hundreds of them in the 12th and 13th centuries. A real movement. Every city was competing with every other city, and. And they were cooperating with their local bishop or whatever to create these spaces. And so one thing was the stained glass windows, which were a teaching tool, but they also introduced statuary and beautiful floor tiles, and all sorts of arts were deployed in these cathedrals because they became symbols of the local culture and its excellence. So it's a wonderful thing to teach students about it. When they see a work of Gothic architecture, you can explain, where did that come from? Why do they have such beautiful stained glass windows? It's a tradition in Italy. They had painted a fresco, and they used that to teach the people. And the Gothic architecture is intended for that. And you can teach the classical architecture, too. Where does the classical architecture come from? What do those different orders of the columns mean? So when I teach Renaissance Florence, one of the things I do is I show images of the two biggest monuments in Harvard Yard. So one is Memorial Church, and across from it is Widener Library. And Memorial Church is Dork and wider library is Corinthian. So I say, why? And they immediately get out their AI, you know, and their. And their search engines, and they can figure it out because Doric is a war memorial. Doric is a. Is a order that's associated with military strength, Spartans. And when you build a war memorial, you want to communicate that strength. So dark is this very kind of massive masculine order. And the Corinthian order, which, beloved of the Romans, was associated with culture and with. With education. So Corinthian is from Corinth, which was the wealthiest city in Greece for a long time. It had the highest culture. So that was the associations there. And when you learn things like that, you know, you're. You're. You're able to look with different eyes. You can appreciate beauty.
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Scott Bertram
Yes. My sister is a classical architect. Yeah. And so through. She went to this Notre Dame program, classical architecture program, where, you know, they. They have to do it by hand, and their watercolors are by hand. We're not going to use any computer programs to do our renderings. You know, we got to develop the skill. And so she's now a part of this, you know, small but I think kind of growing number of architects across the country that are trying to do for architecture what we're trying to do for education. Remember, the classical roots bring back beauty and order and goodness and doing it the proper way without shortcuts. It's an encouraging thing to see.
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James Hankins
Yeah, I guess you stay with Duncan Strike, right?
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Scott Bertram
Yep, yep.
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James Hankins
So, yeah, they have a marvelous program there. But you're right, I mean, there are many now classical teaching programs ringing up. There's even a couple of courses in it in Harvard Design School, which I thought would never graduate School of design. I thought I would never see that. But. And it's being embraced by the federal government of course too, so that makes a big difference. But I agree with you. This is really, I think, a way to get over the poison of the modern architectural, you know, glass boxes that we disfigure our campuses everywhere.
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Scott Bertram
Yeah. You feel different when you are entering a building that was designed according to classical principles, human scale. Yes.
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James Hankins
And you know, I'm going to the Hamilton School for classical and civic education next year. I'm retiring from Harvard and going to Gainesville. And one of the reasons I really wanted to go and this is not. Is that we're going to have a very beautiful classical space. I was just down to the groundbreaking ceremony for. They have an existing building in collegiate Gothic called the old infirmary which has been sitting empty for a while. They're going to redo that as a classical space. So they're going to have to create some kind of harmony between the gothic exterior and the classic classical interior. So that's going to be a wonderful teaching tool in itself. But the spaces, they have architectural drawings you can look at. It looks like it's going to be wonderful and an inspiring place to enter and to feel the past, you know, feel the influence of the past.
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Scott Bertram
Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful. You write in the introduction to the book that if we want to be a civilized people, we must learn to be proud of the right things, the right ways. And you draw a distinction between proper pride and the kind of pride that has resulted in the downfall of various civilizations over the course of Western history. Sometimes we students of American history are accused of being overly proud or overly looking at our own past through rose colored classes. Talk to me about the appropriate pride that a civilization should take in itself in order to be healthy and true.
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James Hankins
Well, I have in the book many sections where. A number of sections where I talk about gratitude to the Greeks and gratitude to the. To the Romans and gratitude to Christendom. These are concluding session sections of the major portions of the book. So proper pride goes together with gratitude, loyalty, and love that you. You. If you are grateful for something that still exists in your present, you should have a love for those things and love for the people who made them possible. Our calendar is still littered with public calendar is still littered with Memorial Day and fourth of July, all these occasions. And we have public statuary where we remember the good things that were done for us. And I think it's legitimate to be proud of those things. Of course, Christians are always urged to be humble as individuals, but I think collective pride is not out of place for great achievements. And indeed, collective pride in our civilization's accomplishments are necessary to preserve them. Right. Because pride motivates you to defend the good. You realize that this is something that is great. We should be proud of it, but we should not be. We should always be able to distinguish between the good and the bad. One of my favorite essayists. Well, my favorite essay in the classical tradition, in the Western tradition, is Montaigne in the 16th century, who was someone. I think it sets a good standard for being able to criticize what's good, what's. What's bad in the civilization and try to reform it, because we have to do that, too. So I would say an improper pride would be to be proud of slavery, you know, or to be proud of. Of, you know, of bad things that were done by some US Soldiers in a foreign war where there were some kind of atrocities. That would be a bad thing to be proud of. And it's hard sometimes to distinguish. You need a firm moral basis to understand what's good and what's bad. And that comes from parents, obviously, and religion, your church. But the school should contribute, too. The school should give you a higher understanding of what it is we should be proud of and what are the things we should try to make better. Yeah, I'm not referring to any contemporary events, by the way, but unfortunately the case, I think the US and the British have conducted themselves much better as empires and hegemonic institutions, world institutions, institutions, than any previous civilization. So I think we should be proud of that. But we still have to be critical. We have to be willing to face the times that we have failed to live up to our own standards. And that's a little tricky, too, because there are always people out there who want to exaggerate them tremendously and lie about them in order to drive the country apart, use it for political gain. But one thing about history that I really appreciate and I think is important is history, for me is the Antidote to fanaticism, that to be a fanatic you have to be closed off to anything outside the message of your. Of your own sect, whatever that happens to be right. You want to destroy everything outside your own sect, or you want to at least close your ears to the message of other civilizations in the past. And you want to just focus on those few fanatical beliefs that you have. But you can't do that if you have an historical education. A good historical education will give you a sense of proportion. It will cure black and white thinking. It cures catastrophism. You know, this terrible. I guess you're. Do you follow Jonathan Haidt at all?
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Scott Bertram
Yes.
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James Hankins
Yeah, so he talks about this a lot. And I used to teach one of his books where he was talking about creating virtuous. One of his first books, the Happiness Hypothesis, where he talks about the value of classical civilizations to making people psychologically strong. At that time, he was part of the positive psychology movement and he was trying to work out all of the positive cultural things and social. Cultural patterns that create mental health. And then he started reading the ancient philosophers and he discovered that they had already thought of this. And he and his collaborators. Had I forgotten the name. I used to teach this. But years ago, they created rules for kind of preventive medicine for mental health. That was the form of positive psychology movement, that instead of waiting for people to have mental breakdowns and develop horrible complexes, you try to keep mental health. And he basically said that the classical tradition did a good job of this. The classical philosophers did a good job of this, that many of the patterns that they recognized as dangerous or harmful, the classical philosophers were concerned to correct. So too much emphasis on making money, on status that has to be controlled. I think that's harmonious with Augustine's message too, that for Christians anyway, you can control false desires by putting God and Christ in the place of your desires. You measure everything by the rule of Christ, basically. But the Greek philosophers had a version of this where you had reason and virtue at the center of your education. And those things created mental health. That's what they wanted. They thought that the people around them, many of the ancient philosophers were disgusted by the moral depravity of Greek philosophy. And they worked out these methods for keeping mental health and tranquility and what would be called baseness. Maybe that's not the best word. Integrity, I think, is the better word. That you had to have an understanding, a comprehensive understanding of your place in the universe and your place in time to have integrity, to hold yourself Together. Otherwise you'd be pulled apart by all the desires that are constantly. And, you know, the social media in particular are a great example of that. They're constantly getting at us and trying to ruin our centeredness. I'm sorry for the California term, but the integrity and the focus on what you believe and what you hold most dear and what you're proud of and what you're loyal to, those things have to guide your life and not be pulled apart by 100 different desires coming at you from every direction in social media and Internet and so forth.
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Scott Bertram
The introduction concludes with some comments about modernity. And you say that modernity is the greatest achievement of the west, but you also caution against the progressive view of history. How do those two things fit together?
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James Hankins
Well, I'm really taking this from a French philosopher named Remy Bragg, who wrote a book on how to be moderate modernity. And we have to, I think, accept that modernity has given us many gifts. I'm a natural praiser of the past, laudator, Temperis octi. And I think I picked this up from CS Lewis when I was a very young man. He was the first thinker I really engaged with seriously. Lewis warned against worshipful attitude towards ourselves and our own present. And I'm trying to think of the word. He calls it chronological snobbery.
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Scott Bertram
Yeah.
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James Hankins
So we have to. Though I've come to a slightly different position since I was young, I'm more favorable towards the innovations of the recent years. And you have to acknowledge that modernity in the form of scientific advancement has made people's lives much better that they are. You know, we people were basically living. Most people in the world living at the poverty level, you know, two or three dollars a day in the 18th century. And most people in the world are no longer in that situation. And it's the result of economic freedom and scientific advancement. And these are all traditions of the West. And I think that they're good traditions. The ancients would not have approved, I'm sorry to say, of the kind of economic liberties that we have today that was not in part of the ancient. An ancient value system at all. Insofar as they flourished in antiquity, they did so because the governments were too weak to prevent them from doing so. But obviously, what happens with this great success, and in the case of the west, it's combined with military success in building empires around the world in the 19th and 20th century is tremendous arrogance. And tremendous arrogance to the point where we think we don't need God anymore. Right. That we can replace God in antiquity, God was identified with reason. The Stoics say that the Logos is God, that the power controlling nature is God. And we think that we could control nature and make ourselves the God. And this is the real problem. And it makes us arrogant not just towards religion, but it makes us arrogant towards the past. Past did everything wrong. You find this idea in Hegel, who's one of the philosophers of history that's had the worst influence, as far as I'm concerned, in the French Revolution. All the French revolutionaries were saying, we're reviving the Roman Republic. And Hegel comes along and says, well, that's not what you're doing. There is nothing we can learn from the past, really, except that we are superior to the past. That the French revolutionaries, insofar as they were successful, they were not reinstituting the Roman Empire, Roman Republic, I'm sorry, because they couldn't do it. So Hegel is the one who establishes this idea, and Marx as well, that we can't model ourselves in the past in any way. Right. The past is evil. And it's now come to the point where people don't even want to teach the Western tradition because this is a real view in public schools. They don't want to teach the past because people might become infected by the moral evil of Western civilization. They'll be white supremacists, will be racist, they'll be sexist. If they just go, you know, if you read Jane Austen, you'll become a colonialist. Which is absurd. I mean, to anyone who's an educated person, it's completely absurd. But unfortunately, a lot of people believe things like that. So that is what I would call the type of modernity that comes from arrogance and ignorance combined and which. Which we have to fight against that tooth and nail. But the way you do that is to have a balance between tradition and innovation. That's what all the most successful societies, civilizations of the past have had, a balance between innovation and civilization. You can see that in the Italian Renaissance and in the 18th century, all through the modern Western period, they've had that idea even in the Enlightenment. You know, the Enlightenment was very, you know, modern, focused on modernity and reform and getting rid of especially the power of dogmatic religions. But they also, they never forgot about the classical tradition. And one reason the classical tradition is so valuable for us is that it preserves a lot of the same values as Christianity does. So that if there are people who are in the majority now who have no Christian faith, they can have some common principles with others in Our civilization through study of the classics. I'm not sure whether Hillsdale has an official position on that. I know that charter schools are not meant to be religious schools, and I understand that. But I think that charter schools do a great service in that they preserve the classical tradition. They're interested in civics and citizenship. And I think that provides enough common. If it were to really take over our educational system, as it should, it would provide a lot of common ground for our citizenry, even those who are not Christian or come from very different traditions. One of the things that I think helpful about studying the deeper past, studying not just Americans history, but also Western history, is that it can be an instrument of assimilation. Because we have a problem in our country with, you know, millions of people coming into the country and they don't assimilate in past generations. You know, my grandparents were Irish. You know, they all assimilated. Maybe the first generation didn't, but the second generation did. And people who came from Poland or from Italy or from Europe in some way, they came into the country. The parents remained. Parents had difficulty assimilating, but the children didn't. And one reason why is because they had public schools that were interested in assimilation. So you study a huge proportion of the people coming into our country are of Hispanic origin from South America, and even some from Spain. We have lots of Portuguese immigrants here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And the golden thread has a lot on the contribution of Spain to Western civilization. And I think that that would be a way that people who come in to the country from Hispanic origins would be able to identify with their new country and assimilate more rapidly. That's just an example. But I think that we have to do a better job of assimilation because the problem we have today is so many people who come into the country do not accept its values. And the old forms of assimilation we used to have in the public schools are no longer operative. But I think the classical schools can do a much better job on this because they have, first of all, a firmer faith in America, a firmer understanding of its institutions than we often get. They're somewhat critical. We have, I hope, in the classical school movement a proper sense of what is good about America. And we are not hypercritical the way many people are in the progressive education.
- [47:16]
Scott Bertram
Yes.
- [47:16]
James Hankins
And we also have this broader historical suite that people can come into. I mean, Christianity spread to China already in, let's see, it was in the medieval period. I forget the exact dates. So there are Christian traditions in China. There are Christian traditions all over Asia, sometimes brought by colonialists. But it provides a basis for inclusion of people. And I use the word inclusion with certain trepidation because it's so often been abused, the idea of inclusion in my university. But I think that learning, having a civilizational view of the west is something that's going to include a lot more people. They'll be able to relate to it in some way. And we forget that many people who come to the United States are coming because they want, they want freedom and security. And if they understand where those things come from, how they were fought for, and they are proud of those things and they're, and they, they're grateful for those things, that we can make a much better country than we have now.
- [48:31]
Scott Bertram
Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of reason for common ground if you become knowledgeable about the Western tradition. On the note about.
- [48:39]
James Hankins
You said it much more succinctly.
- [48:42]
Scott Bertram
Well, the. On the note about the post that we take toward history, I think it strikes me it's very easy to sort of adopt this distant critical posture toward those who have come before. And it seems like the progressive outlook, the progressive view, because we are the most recent, we are the superior. It's very easy. It's very sloppy, it's very arrogant. But if you humble yourself to actually having to learn what it was like to live in the past, how we got all of these wonderful things that we have now, it's very good for the character, I think, too, and for the intellect.
- [49:20]
James Hankins
Yes. And I think that we, we need to recover this tradition and to teach it. Exactly for those reasons, that you're going to be able to create a more, a more sane society than we have today. And anyway, so you'll have to remind me, I had my attention shattered by this machine next to me.
- [49:48]
Scott Bertram
That's okay. Machines have a way of doing that.
- [49:50]
James Hankins
Yes. And this is one reason why I like the golden thread, because we're trying to do this on paper. I don't know about you, but nowadays I look on the opportunity to sit in a nice chair like the one behind me with a bright light and read a book. And that for me is recreation. Because I spend so much time sitting behind a screen and trying to write and to letters of recommendation, reading all this stuff that I need to inform myself of, and it's, I find that tiring, frankly. Eventually it's, it's addictive, but it's also tiring.
- [50:22]
Scott Bertram
Yes.
- [50:22]
James Hankins
And I sit and read a book. Yeah. It's not without the phone going off. Without any, you know, updates or reminders or notifications. And that is like peace, tranquility. It's so. And you can think, you can keep a train of thought. You can go deep into what you're reading, you can go back and reread, you can go back and meditate. And you have to have that stage. I'm afraid when I'm online, my immediate reaction when I don't understand something is to go to Grok, you know, or I can't remember something. Right. I know the book is sitting in my. On my shelves behind me. I've got like 10,000 books on the shelves behind me, and I don't want to go to trouble to find it. So I just ask Grok. Okay, that's fine. That's a useful way to spend your time. But the temptation to constantly distract yourself.
- [51:19]
Scott Bertram
Yes.
- [51:20]
James Hankins
When you're online is not going to develop the kind of contemplative depth that we need in order to find out what we ourselves really believe and can value.
- [51:31]
Scott Bertram
Yes.
- [51:32]
James Hankins
Right. We're pulled. You lose that integrity with the ancients talked about and focus and the sense that you should know yourself. Right. The fundamental precept of Western civilization, know yourself, which does not mean individualism, it doesn't mean selfishness. It means knowing what you believe and knowing really being firmly based in what you believe so that you are not distracted and you're not disrupted. You're not doing all those things that modern civilization is trying to do with us. It's desperately needed for people to have some center. And you get that from reading. I don't think you get that from. I think it's difficult to get it online. I'm constantly informed by everything I do online. I love, I love, you know, looking at certain websites and listening to people talk. I think that's great, but you have to at some point pull back from the screen and say, do I agree with this?
- [52:32]
Scott Bertram
Yes.
- [52:32]
James Hankins
Is this the best thing for us as a civilization, as a people, as a family, you know? And that, I think, is much more nourished by reading books on paper. I know that sounds extremely retro probably to many people in your audience, but maybe some other people will think, yes. That's what we value in education, too. We want children, our students, to be able to be thoughtful and to have their opinions that are correctable. They're going to have opinions which they'll find out are false. But if you don't have opinions, you're not going to find out that they're false. If you don't make Some effort to decide what you believe. You're never going to be able to revise that when it becomes necessary, as it often does. I think I've revised my basic point of view in my life maybe three or four times, and I hope it's always been for the better. Sometimes it's been in response to events and things that I believe turned out not to be true. But you need to have some focus for your character. Some, you know, some. Some steel in your character. Right?
- [53:48]
Scott Bertram
Yes.
- [53:50]
James Hankins
And the Internet makes you rubbery.
- [53:52]
Scott Bertram
Yeah. Yeah. One of the things we say in. In Hillsdale schools is there aren't any shortcuts when it comes to becoming educated. There appear to be a lot of shortcuts. A lot of things present themselves as shortcuts, but they aren't actually the real thing. Education is not just delivering content into the mind of a student, just like learning isn't just acquiring information. You can do that very efficiently through Grok, as you said. But if you don't. If you don't have the minute to sit and think about what it really means and how it fits with everything else, you understand and really evaluate it, you haven't really done everything that would need to be done.
- [54:33]
James Hankins
Yes. Yes. One of my great teachers, who is one of the German Jewish refugees, the greatest Renaissance scholar of the 20th century country named Paul Oscar Christeller. So he used to say, information is not fact, and fact is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. But you can't have wisdom without information, facts, and knowledge. So it's a lot of work to get to wisdom. Right. And I would never claim that I'm a wise person, but we can all be philosophers in love with wisdom, and we can all aspire to be wise, and we have to aspire to be wise if we want to have a properly organized education.
- [55:25]
Scott Bertram
Yeah. Beautiful. Well, you spoke about the importance of sitting down in a good chair with a bright light and a good book. And let me suggest to our listeners that that good book is the golden thread. It's beautifully bound, it's beautifully printed. It's accompanied by stunning illustrations and maps and images of artifacts from the past. And by immersing yourself in this work and its sequel, Volume 2, you will become a better person than you are today, I suggest. Professor Hankins, thank you for this conversation and for the book itself.
- [56:05]
James Hankins
Thank you so much for having me on. And I'm really, again, deeply appreciative of all that Hillsdale has done to help the project.
- [56:13]
Scott Bertram
It is such a pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [56:16]
Podcast Host (Scott Bertram)
That's James Hankins and Dr. Kathleen O'. Toole. James Hankins co author of a new two volume history book on Western Civilization called the Golden A History of the Western tradition. He wrote volume one, the Ancient World and Alan Gelzo writes volume two. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast. I'm Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook search for Hillsdale College K12 classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram hillsdalek12. That's hillsdalek12 on Instagram. Thank you for for listening to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio.
- [57:24]
James Hankins
It.