A (3:11)

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about its author, Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, an Italian man who didn't write that much. I mean, he waited till the end of his life to begin writing this novel, Had a difficult publication kind of process. Folks rejected it and this sort of thing. Tell us a little bit about him, about the novel, about his family history and things of that kind.

B (3:35)

Well, Lampedusa came from a decayed Sicilian noble family, very much like the one in the novel. He lived in his great grandfather's palazzo in Palermo, and his great grandfather was an astronomer, just like the protagonist in the novel who's given to musing on the stars. The family money went under before he was born, and it was his job effectively, to manage this decline. And you're right, in the middle 1950s, to keep himself busy, in effect, his wife encouraged him to write and he wrote a couple of short stories. And then this novel, and he sent it to the two biggest publishing houses in Italy, and they rejected it. And then it came across the desk of a man called Giorgio Bassani, who is best known as the author of the Finzi Continis, the Garden of the Finzi Continis, which was also another 60s Italian movie. Sarni got it published in 1958. The author was dead. That producer died in 1957. It's all part of the kind of epic decline and tragedy of this. He didn't live to see it. It was an instant success to the point that five years later it was a huge, big budget movie. And it's never been out of print in numerous languages since then.

A (4:51)

Yeah, it sold millions. I mean, it's just. It was an extraordinarily popular book. Can you tell us a little bit about the time in which it's set, given that you're a historian? Set for us the stage in Italy on which this thing takes place?

B (5:06)

The Novel mostly is set in 1860, just before the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy for the first time since roman times, in 1865, as a single modern state. And it's set in Sicily, which is most Italians would say, the least Italian and least developed part, the most feudal part of Sicily. The sort of place where an aristocratic family is somehow still on top of things in 1860. And it's a society of orders where everyone knows their place. And yet there are all these new things coming in and turning everything upside down. The hero, which is really Lampedusa in sort of fictional form is Don Fabrizio. He has the leopard on his coat of arms. He is the symbol of this old world. And it's his struggle to understand it, to keep up with it, and his failure, as he realizes to keep up with it, that defines his story in it. But there are other characters who realize what's going on and work out how to get on in the new world. And this is one of the things that makes it timeless, because if you live in a society that changes, you have these choices.

A (6:16)

Yeah. So contextualize some of these characters for us. The main character is this Italian, aging Italian prince. But there's a nephew who is ambitious, young, wide eyed. There are several beautiful women who make appearances. There's a member of the church who's constantly present. Give us some sense of the novel and its development and the way these characters interact.

B (6:45)

Well, Don Fabrizio presides, presides over a feudal kingdom, this lovely estate with its own church. He presides over the family's daily prayers. His hopes are resting on his talented nephew, Tancredi, who's played by, I think, Alan Delon in the movie. And Tancredi, Don Fabrizio hopes, will marry Don Fabrizio, one of Don Fabrizio's daughters, Concetta. But instead, Tancredi falls in love with a girl called Angelica. And Angelica is the daughter of the town mayor. And he's one of those people who has seen which way the wind is blowing. And when Prince Fabrizio drops by to talk to the mayor as he goes around the little town, he suddenly realizes the mayor is richer than he is. So just in this snapshot, you see the whole world of industrialization and offstage. Garibaldi, the great hero of the Risorgi, mental, very important figure. He's landed with his red shirts in Sicily. And eventually, of course, they will become the great symbols of the liberal revolution that will bring the modern state in. And Tancredi again, very adroitly realizes or is romantically drawn, perhaps because it's the future, it's exciting. He is drawn and volunteers for Garibaldi when Garibaldi's men land. And it's when he tells his uncle that he's effectively a bat jumping ship that we get perhaps the most famous line in the novel, which has become a catchphrase, and I happen to have my copy here.

A (8:23)

What is the most famous line in the novel?

B (8:25)

Well, if I could read the scene to explain. So the scene is that Tancredi comes to see his uncle, and his uncle has just got up after spending part of the night with his mistress, having seen his personal confessor, Father Pironi, before that. And Tancredi comes in, into this beautiful, you know, baronial salon, dressed in his hunting gear. And the prince says, why are you dressed up like that? What's on a fancy dress ball in the morning? And Tancredi says, I'm leaving, I've come to say goodbye. And so the prince says, is it a duel? And he says, well, it's a big duel. He says, you know, I'm off to the hills, I'm going to join Garibaldi. And the prince imagines Tancredi dead on the ground with his. He says, with his guts hanging out like a poor soldier. And he says, you're mad, my boy, to go with those people. They're all mafia men, all crooks. And he's saying we should be with the king because Sicily had a king. And Tancredi says, yes, but which king? Because there's also a king in northern Italy who we know will eventually become the king of Italy five years later. And then Tancredi says, unless we ourselves take a hand now, they'll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. Do you understand? And he leaves. And Don Fabizio thinks to himself, what a boy, talking rubbish and contradicting it at the same time. So he laughs it off. And this is, of course, a message from history, in effect. This is one of the key, the key political point.

A (10:08)

Tell us the meaning of that line. If we want things to stay the same, things will have to change. Because that captures the essence, in a sense of the book.

B (10:16)

Well, I have always read it as if we want to keep the good things, we have to be prepared to shift the frameworks that sustain them. And that, I believe, is Tancredi's point. Tancredi doesn't want a socialist republic or something, he wants a constitutional monarchy. Which at the time was considered the best recipe for stability, and in fact, is what's created. And Tancredi goes on to become a senator and one of the heroes of the Republic. And this is something which occurs at every moment of drastic political change. And we see the similar awareness in the debates between 1776 and 87 in the U.S. the creation of a constitutional order. We see it throughout the 19th century in all the European states as they are transformed into some kind of democracies or other. And really, it keeps on recurring, because if you live in an evolving historical situation, and the alternative to that is, of course, feudal tedium, which is the world of the leopard, in effect, if you live in that, you're perennially confronted with it. And in our era, the economic, technological, social changes have been so significant that it's something which is quoted almost daily. There are a handful of poems and novels that people refer to when they're talking about how to manage these changes. One of them is WB Yates line, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, you know. Another is. Is Cavafy's line about waiting for the barbarians. And a third is Lampedusa's line that if we want to save what we value the most in our way of life, we're going to have to change how we go about it.

A (12:04)

So, I mean, given the fact that you see this novel as a novel about kind of the perils, maybe the promise of change, would you say that this is a novel of decay? In other words, is this a novel about the last gasps of a regime and a man of the tradition coming to terms with the death of what he thinks is good? Or would you see it as a novel about, in a way, the promise and sunlight of the future? I mean, the novel, there's some controversy about how to read it and exactly what Lampedusa's message was. Was it a lament of the dissolution of the old ways, or a kind of cautious, cautiously celebratory heralding of a kind of new dawn? How do you read it?

B (12:51)

I read it as an obituary for the old order, the ancien regime, the old way of life. And I would put it on the same shelf as Joseph Roth's Radetzky March, which, like the leopard, ends with a ball, and in a ball, you know which sequence the dances are coming in, you know who you're dancing with and what the steps are. It's. It's. It's one way of mixing socially, and it defines the old world. And I will put it also with, say, brideshead Revisited, which is also a novel about the aesthetic pleasures that you get from the decay of the ruling class. That. That's the scenario in Brideshead, when Charles Ryder goes to Sebastian Flight's family house. He's not admiring, you know, what they might do next. He's not admiring their vitality. He's admiring the kind of beautiful decay that's all around him. And if you look at the leopard, there are these wonderful passages where wealth has, you know, been transmuted into. Into art and then into dust. And, in fact, Don Fabrizio's most faithful companion, his Great Dane in the epilogue to the novel. Yeah, he's stuffed. You know, he's literally dead alive. The dog's body is stuffed and it's full of moths and spiders. And at the end, one of Don Fabrizio's surviving daughters, who's a spinster, never married, Concetta, you know, tells the servant to just get rid of it. The servant flings it out the window and you have a last moment of apparent animation before it hits the ground and goes into a cloud of dust.

A (14:25)

Yeah, I want to talk more about that decay and that really, the exhaustion of the prince. But prior to that, let's get a little bit deeper into the new meeting the old. This is embodied by the character of Angelica and her family. So if I understand correctly, Angelica's family, her father in particular, made a lot of money through business. He's a merchant. And this is seen by Fabrizio as a kind of vulgar way to make money. And yet Fabrizio understands that given the perilous financial state of his house and the decline of the aristocracy in general, it might be good for his nephew Tancredi, who's the sympathizer with Garibaldi, to marry this new money woman. And so you get these beautiful scenes where she comes over to the palace and she's a very beautiful woman, and yet she is sort of looking at this palace like it's a museum and running down the hallways and going into all the bedrooms, sort of like it's Disney World, you know, or something like that. Those scenes really strike me as the new money meeting the old. I don't know if you have a reflection on the way the novel develops that theme, but it seems pretty important to me.

B (15:39)

It is very important. And it's one of the significant changes that happens in this period. It's Henry James novels. It's the infusion of new money into old families that produces Winston Churchill, the daughter of Jenny Jerome. Yes, we even See it in Downton Abbey. So it must have happened. It is a way, and it happens in our time, and we call it by different names. It is the way in which a ruling class, or we would call it the elites, sustains its position by marrying the more promising members of the middle class, or as we call it, meritocracy. And this is one of the defining mechanisms by which things somehow stay the same, even if they do change. Because there's no more quintessentially aristocratic English figure in the 20th century, perhaps, than Winston Churchill. Except, of course, his mother was not conventionally aristocratic. She was Jenny Jerome from Brooklyn.

A (16:36)

Yeah, yeah. Isn't there a history? I was touring. I love Churchill, and I was touring Blenheim palace, and there are these portraits of Consuelo Vanderbilt in Blenheim. And you're like, wow, the Vanderbilts had their hands in this thing.

B (16:48)

Absolutely. These are the people who are painted by John Singer Sargent and described by Henry James. And Sargent and James are pretty much contemporaries of Lampedusa's great grandfather, the man that he's writing about, as he effectively loses the control of the reins because. And it is very hard. This is one thing which is a little hard for us to understand, I think, which is the idea that commerce is so vulgar that you can't do it, even though your palace is crumbling and the land no longer generates the income that it's supposed to, even though that your world is disintegrating. It's, as they would say, common to roll your sleeves up. So to us, that's almost incomprehensible. And that in itself says something because it shows that we are after that great shift in values and orders.

A (17:36)

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about some of the themes of the decline of the aristocracy. So we've said the prince is having to come to terms with this new money world, which he sees as sort of distasteful but necessary, and has kind of resigned himself to it. But the other part of his character, and you've touched on this already, that strikes me, is there's a certain kind of aristocratic vice that is really, really salient in the book I have in mind. You know, I was rereading Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America recently. One of the things Tocqueville says about aristocracy is that when it slides into vice, the vices are much more virulent than democratic vice. Like democracy, the vices are typically middling. Like, maybe you drink too much. I mean, I don't mean to make small people.

B (18:28)

But yes, yeah.

A (18:29)

Or you. Yes. Maybe you drink too. Or maybe, you know, you have some. You spend too much on this. Or there's a. You eat too much food or something. You know, these are. But when aristocracy slides into decay and vice, it's like there are people tortured and like it's just. And what's going on in the. And so I was struck by this because there's a moment in the book when Tancredi and Angelica wander into the center of the palace and find a pink door. And behind that door which they open, there's a kind of sexual dungeon full of, I don't know, you know, bondage things and aphrodisiacs, medieval bondage equipment. And he sort of closes the door. This innocent young, you know, sort of new money woman, he sort of closes the door and ushers her out of there. And for the rest of the day you can tell that he himself can't believe what he's just seen. And so I wondered what that scene is meant to indicate about the depths of kind of corruption and vice. And again, you've alluded to this, that the aristocracy has fallen to. And why this has happened.

B (19:30)

Well, those kind of what we would now call sex toys, they're actually very serious. Are all about power and exploitation and managed cruelty. And if you want to describe the social relations of feudal Italy or most feudal European societies, managed cruelty would do it very well. The extraction of resources and pleasure from an exploitative system is what we're seeing. And the necessity of also maintaining a social front in order to maintain that position means it literally has to be hidden in a dungeon. The implication is that Don Fabrizio's family have been running their kind of private Epstein island in their basement for centuries. And this question about aristocratic decadence, it's a matter of scale, in effect, and budgets and the exploitation of privacy. And you're right, in the middle class society there's a very high degree of mutual regulation. The Scandinavians still do it and the Puritans in the Massachusetts Commonwealth did it. You didn't pull the curtains or close the shutters because you had nothing to hide from your neighbors.

A (20:41)

If the aristocracy or the elites don't have a noble purpose to which to turn their time, which I think is the kind of classically positive view of the aristocracy, they're there to be people of charity and benefit. If they don't have a noble purpose to which to turn themselves, they will turn themselves to pleasure seeking advice.

B (21:01)

Yeah, a marginal race. People are looking well, they're looking for two things. As you know, aristocracy comes from the Greek word aristo, meaning the best. So they are supposed to be, incredible as it may sound, the best by, by the act of being born, because people naturally actually want to have someone to, to look up to as much as to despise. Playing the role of being the best and wanting the, the, the peasants to think of them as the best is, is in a sort of dance with the peasants generally wanting it too. In one of his philosophical musings, Don Fabrizio says, you know, the old order is run by lions and leopards, which is this romantic view of the being paternalists and having noblesse oblige and managing things in the common interest. And he says, you know, the ordinary people, they're like sheep. Which is funny, it struck me because online people will say, oh, you know, the unenlightened those who are not noticing, they're sheeple. Well, Don Fabrizio is saying basically they're sheeple and we have to look after them. And he looks at the rising middle class Democratic party as he says, they're wolves and jackals. And I don't entirely agree, actually. I think that the distribution of wolves and jackals and leopards and lions appears to be pretty equal across the classes, actually. And that for the vast majority of the people who used to be peasants, middle class liberal democracy has been a much, much better time than scratching turnips out of the ground under feudalism.

A (22:40)

In our conversation today about the leopard, Dom and I talk about the decline of the nobles in Italy. And in the context of our conversation, one of the words that he used was noblesse oblige, which is a term that I just love, the obligations of the noble. What it means is that a nobleman is not noble just by virtue of privilege, wealth, class and status, but that noble people and what it means to be noble is to have obligations to others who don't have the wealth, privilege, class and status, such that your nobility is partnered with and accompanied by responsibility. You're not just rich and having fun. You are someone who serves in the military to protect those who have less than you. You're someone who engages in charity. You're someone who ensures that people who have less than you are provided for. You have privilege, but you also have obligation. And this means that you're a person of virtue. You're a person whose nobility is derived from your desire to be understood as an honorable person, a person who does things that are not good just for yourself, but that you sacrifice things that would Be good for yourself, for the good of others. It's that in which your nobility consists.

B (24:16)

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A (24:32)

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Learn more at jpmorganchase.comimpact do you find this novel to be a kind of wholesale critique of modernity? Fabrizio is a student of the stars, in a way, a kind of Enlightenment aristocrat. It's sort of bizarre. I wanted to ask you about the significance of that. The novel is full of modern things like Garibaldi and the revolution. Like you have this kind of scientific aristocrat who's an astronomer, prince or something of this kind. And so I'm trying to understand what the novel is saying, whether he's passing judgment in the 19th century on the legacy of the Enlightenment and what that means for human beings in Europe in general going forward. Do you have any sense for what this novel, its position is on what we would call today modernity and kind of the post Enlightenment after effects?

B (25:30)

There's only one moment in the story where the chronological arc is broken, and that is in the ball sequence. Everyone is going into this amazing crumbly palace for what feels like, you know, the last night of revels. And Don Fabrizio looks up at these amazing mythological scenes on the ceiling that look like the gods have been there forever and the gods themselves feel like they are. And then the author says, but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania would solve that in 1943. So suddenly this literally thing lands like a bomb from 80 odd years ahead of where the story is. And even in its epilogue, the story only goes up to 1910 to tie a few, doesn't go to 19, the European blow up. And that really tells you everything. I think that Lampedusa thinks ultimately about modernity, that it came down like a bomb, demolished, literally. His family home, which was hit by their palazzo, was blown up in 1943. And as far as he's concerned, it's a bad deal. And in fact, as Don Fabrizio lies dying, he kind of attempts an accounting, a reckoning, and he actually does have living sons who could carry on, but they're not interested. They've long gone. They've gone to England to try and gone into business. And he says, you Know, he has a kind of shiver of disgust even when he's dying, that this is just an unacceptable betrayal of his values. So, no, it is very polarized in that way. But often in these polarized works, you see an image very clearly. It doesn't have to be the historical truth, but it is the truth of it, of a historical experience that. That is not just restricted to that, to the 1860s in Italy.

A (27:22)

Right. Can you talk a little bit? I mean, we've talked about the critique of modernity. We've talked about. And I think we'll return to the question of what happens to a regime when its elites are in decay. But let's talk about the role of the Church in the book. So, you know, there are a couple things that really stand out to me. One is there's a character, Father Peroni, and who, I might ask you to give us an account of his role in the family and his relationship to the prince. But the second place, the Church seems to me to be prominent. It's beautiful in the book is at the end when Concetta, the spinsterous daughter of the prince, contacts some officials to come into the palace to assess some of the relics, the holy relics, supposedly holy relics that are there. And they come and they look at these things and they say, these have been. You know, these have been. She says, these have been in our family for generations, and we consider them holy and all these sorts of things. And they have a chapel in the palace and these kinds of things, and they assess these relics and they're determined to be forgeries. And just like the bones of an. And like, just utterly worthless. And then there's a painting in the chapel which they believe is of the Virgin Mary. And it turns out this is just like some random painting or something of this kind of some woman on a beach. And so at the end of the novel, the holiest things, the things the household gods, the things that the family has thought were its most prized possessions, turn out to be forgeries fit for sale at a flea market or something of this kind. And so those two aspects of the church sort of come in. Father Per Perroni, and then this sort of stunning scene at the end. Make sense of that for me. What is he saying about religion?

B (29:02)

Well, he's saying that in that time, and perhaps we can broaden it historically, the Catholic Church is functioning as the partner, often the junior partner, of aristocratic or royal power. And Don Fabrizio is a man who ponders a great deal on the spiritual aspects of life and the long view and so on. And there are hints here or there that he is aware of, of this massive hypocrisy, that he'll go from talking to the priest to seeing his mistress and then is up early to say his prayers again. And the priests, of course, could have come and checked out the relics at any point, and they were seeing them, you know, all the time, but they're not going to ask that either. So it's like, as often happens in European literature, it's a scathing, the usually more scathing about the church than the aristocracy, even though the two of them clearly are acting hand in glove together to hoard the power, wealth, authority and the definition even of what the purpose of the society is.

A (30:15)

Hello, Free Press listeners. I'm Ruby Love, and I'm delighted to introduce you to Classics Read Aloud, a new substash celebrating great literature and reclaiming the dignity of entertainment. Each week, enjoy getting a new reading from a curated stream of short stories and the occasional novel read by yours truly. I only select stories I love. Sign up for free at classicsreadaloud.substack.com because you're never too young or too old to enjoy being read to. You know, you've already read the passage with the famous line, I'm curious, is there a passage that you'd like to highlight for us?

B (31:02)

Yes, this is a description of the baroque palace at Donna Fugata. And if you can imagine, I mean, this, you know, an idyllic Sicilian town on a hillside with all the peasants in the fields, and it's a hot, sunny day. In reality, apparently, Donna Fogarta is very ugly and conquering, and people go there clutching their copy of the Leopard and are disappointed. But in a way, I think that that's entirely fitting, given the novel, given that it's stripping away of all the kind of dusty velvet and fake relics and an empty folder roll that this family's status is being propped up by. Look, he's going through the gallery, the picture gallery. And there it is, the leopard, grinning between long whiskers, you know, up on all of them. And each picture illustrates the enlightened of the house of Selina, you know, their family. And this is the passage the wealth of centuries had been transmuted into ornament, luxury, pleasure no more. The abolition of feudal rights had swept away duties with privileges. Wealth, like old wine, had let the dregs of greed, even of care and prudence, fall to the bottom of the barrel, preserving only verve and color. And thus, eventually it canceled itself out. This wealth which had achieved its own object, was now composed only of essential oils, and, like essential oils, soon evaporated. In other words, the pictures themselves are fading away. And this is the huge slow glacier, like progress that we don't even often notice by which a ruling class forms. It's very rare, like in the emergence of the Internet. We were able to witness one of those very rapid moments where you could see a new class or a sector of the ruling class forming. Same happened in the late 19th century with the sudden advent of a Carnegie or the industrial titans of the period. But usually it happens by this slow accumulation of possessions, status, the stuff that makes you look like you deserve the status, and it feeds itself and feeds itself and so on.

A (33:16)

We live in a period in which people shout regime decay, regime decline from the rooftops. This is true in the United States, this is true in Britain. How can this novel help us see more clearly what's going on in our own time? What lessons does it teach us and how does it situate our own apparent decline?

B (33:43)

Well, the term regime is usually used to translate what Aristotle calls politeia, which is both the values of the system and how it operates. In other words, it's both the constitution and the bureaucracy and the elected representatives and the courts, and perhaps I would add to that, obviously, the media, which is the main way that this is explained to our societies. So a regime is meant to be a value neutral term. We often have used it also as a negative to delegitimize regimes that often need delegitimizing, for instance, dictatorships, autocracies, and so on. But if we can look at it as a value neutral thing, the regime, just the package of rules, people, systems under which you live, or as people call it, the blob or uniparty, we have these terms to describe how the common interest between all these elements fuses into what we can see is a clearly mappable system of interests and operations. And I am of kind of basically sort of Marxist understanding in a way that a lot of the layout of the regime reflects the layout of material matters, not so much in our time anyway, the spiritual matters which preoccupy Don Fabrizio as he's gazing at the stars. But the simple question of where the money is at, where business is going, who's doing what for whom, how that is affecting the law and electoral politics, for instance. And again, we can look at the rise of Silicon Valley as a political force, and you see that decay is very naturally built into this. We are. I mean, this one actually was a little bit old. It was an 18th century idea. Vico, another Italian, Southern Italian as well. Naples, I believe we think of Naples as pizza and kind of chaos and decay. But actually Naples was a major center of Enlightenment thought. It was one of the cities most closely connected to Edinburgh at the time that the Scottish Enlightenment was going on. And Giambattista Vico came up with this theory which now to us seems blindingly obvious that human societies are organic in the sense that they, you know, there's a cyclical process of they rise, they're strong, they weaken, they decay. And in our time, the consensus is that we appear to be on the back end of that cycle. Symptoms of decay are everywhere. There are.

A (36:07)

What are the symptoms?

B (36:08)

Symptoms of decay in our time? Yes, the decline of the birth rate is the kind of thing which should worry people a lot more than it does. I'm old enough to remember when we were told that overpopulation was going to end us. And now the demographers are actually saying the opposite. So in like 40 years, there's been a complete flip on this. No one really knows why, because the birth rate is declining across most societies, with the exception of sub Saharan Africa, the birth rate and India. Birth rate is already starting to slow in the Middle east where there's been a big youth bulge, demographic bulge. So that, for instance, is not a society which cannot sustain itself, literally won't last. The other thing is a over regulation, high taxation, and a suspicion of change in the core of the regime. In other words, if you look at the states that we have, the software they're using to use our imagery is almost obsolescent. There are some parts of our states which have, as we already have, adopted digital communications, which have changed how we do business. They've changed our social lives. They have clearly changed people's sexual political lives as well, in ways that the dungeons in. In Donna Fogarta would, you know, wouldn't surprise us. And yet in government, they really haven't, with the exception of the military and intelligence sectors, which have had a sort of creative working relationship, shall we say, with the development of the new technologies. From, from the beginning in. In Calif. Most government is still structured on lines that Don Fabrizio would recognize from the 1860s of massive powerful bureaucracies. And indeed, when you go into Washington D.C. what you see is effectively a series of 19th century bureaucracies. That's what the federal government is.

A (38:14)

Who are our elites and in what does their particular corruption consist? I ask this question because you said a moment ago, that regime decay, if you understand it in a kind of Aristotelian value neutral sense, you said it's almost in your view, Marxist. It's caused by material conditions and the changes in material conditions. I would challenge that a bit and say there might be a deeper cause. There's no doubt that that's a cause, of course, but there might be some deeper cause. And this would be even truer to Aristotle, which is, and you see this in the Leopard, a change in what the regime understands virtue and excellence to be. That the virtuous man or woman is this thing, say at the American founding. And we stand up George Washington as a paragon of virtue, whereas by the end of the regime, the virtuous human being is, I don't know, someone who, a Silicon Valley tech founder who we all envy and want there, but who is, you know, in terms of character, an old fashioned word, not a George Washington in any sense.

B (39:22)

We can go to other Italians on this. You know, the Romans, when they took talks of virtus, they, they meant what we would understand as, as upstanding civic behavior.

A (39:31)

Yes.

B (39:32)

And, and the word comes from Veer man. It literally meant being a man, being a mensch. And Machiavelli, Northern Italian, but still Machiavelli, virtu means something different. Virtu means being a hustler, it means being a games player. It literally means winning at all costs. And that is that kind of, you know, modern virtuous. The amoral virtue that's the one that we most admire in our world of business and its effects on people's souls, on their inner lives is of course, something we do sometimes recognize. In other words, nothing gratifies the hard working members of the middle class than the evidence that those who have done well enough not to work have been corrupted by their success. But success, like power, does have a corrupting effect. It's undoubtedly.

A (40:20)

Yeah.

B (40:20)

And we have had trouble defining what virtue is for the individual and what public virtue is for. If you want to go to the deeper reasons, and I think we should, we're looking back at the period of the Leopard. There's a lovely aside where Don Fabrizio says, you know, this modern politics basically comes down to Proudhon, who was an early theorist of anarchism and someone who says some German Jew whose name no one can remember. And of course, in 1860, hardly anyone had read Karl Marx. In fact, if you had read Karl Marx, you're probably an American because Marx was the Europe correspondent for the Herald Tribune at the time of the European revolutions in 1848 and afterwards, but in 1860, you know, he's just some obscure theorist. This entire new world of understanding the material day to day exchanges, I hate to use the C word of capitalist life, was only just really becoming common among readers. And the same time you're looking at, meanwhile in Switzerland, Nietzsche is doing his homework and will effectively do for Christianity what the novel here is doing for the aristocracy, which is saying that it's a sham and people don't believe in it, they just act like they believe in it. And by being false to themselves, they are putting themselves on the real path to perdition in the here and now. And of course Nietzsche called it far more than Karl Marx did or Proudhon did.

A (41:50)

But aren't there more everyday examples of the corruption of our elites? And I have in mind just the fact that a man with, I don't know, 13 children or whatever, and you know, by however many women who I've been given to understand brain has been deranged by doing ketamine or something like this, can stand next to the President of the United States, who was apparently engaged in liaisons with a porn star and has drawn a naked woman in the books of Jeffrey Epstein, that they can stand up together in front of the country and pretend, or at least have pretensions to being men of substance who know what they're doing and are in charge of. And I have in mind that in contrast to the dignity of holders of that office over the past hundred years, let's say just an extraordinary change and that no one really has a problem with that anymore. Or I have in mind, to take examples from the left, that one can simply tell people what's good for them as an elite. And one can refer to people who are from, say, the backwoods of America, where I'm from, as deplorables, or that these sorts of pretensions that have come out over the past 10, 15 years in American politics, that's a corruption of our elites. How does the leopard give us some insight into what's happening in our own time with respect to the decay of those people who are supposed to be excellent, who we've entrusted with the keys to our kingdom?

B (43:34)

Well, I would say that it delivers a very short warning which is that if you do not recognize the symptoms of decay amongst yourselves, then you will be overthrown, you will be swept away. And all the things which seem so endowed with transcendental significance, you know, the relics in the chapel or the Constitution, you know, which people carry in their pockets, all those things will be exposed as empty if you allow that to happen. Yeah. And that, I think, I'm afraid, is exactly the situation the United States is in. And it's not for the first time. The United States in particular is remarkable in many ways, but particularly because the founders were very aware that they wanted a republic with the powers of an empire, but without the oligarchy and elite rule of an empire. And the result is we see the symptoms simultaneously of the Roman republic in its greatest vigor, simultaneously with the empire in its greatest depravity. And at different points in American history, one party or another has managed to claim the monopoly on virtue in that struggle. And part of the turbulence of recent years is that the monopoly of virtue appears to have switched. The state that FDR built, that LBJ and Obama extended, appears to have lost its monopoly on virtue, or the mandate of heaven, as students of Chinese history like to call it. And the other side, as you're saying, they don't seem to be entirely worthy of picking it up. But that's what happens. I mean, that's how Richard iii, you know, Henry finds Richard's crown on a bush and puts it on his head and becomes the grandfather of Elizabeth, you know, the great monarch. And in democracies it happens in much the same way. You'll find the crown lie on a bus, grab it. And that, of course, is what Donald Trump has done by his intuitive, very business minded grasp of where the value and the opportunity and the margin lay, was able to exploit that.

A (45:33)

Yeah, and it's true. And I don't want to be too hard on current people because after all, there's no doubt that, how should I say, previous presidents have engaged in liaisons of corrupt kinds. However, it occurs to me that there was reason to at least lie about and hide it so that one maintained some shred of dignity, whereas now it just seems as though these things aren't even worth lying about. No one's appalled. We just all acknowledge that we live in a world where, you know, character, virtue as Aristotle would understand it, excellence as the leopard, the Prince Fabrizio might understand it even though he's suffering from self delusion. Just, we just don't even care about that anymore. We just don't even.

B (46:16)

Well, it's very hard to aim for it. We don't even allow it out. No, no, it's true. The point of what at which I think the shift occurred is the, and this is not an original observation, it's the 1960 elections where you have the young Good looking candidate whose doctors are hiding his troubles, you know, beats out the less good looking older candidate who actually has a solid record. And the degree of mediation has reached a kind of absolute state where you're no longer turning your television on and off, you're in the same thin screen of matter between you and the rest of the world all the time. And to separate yourself from that and say, no, I would like to be excellent, that is extremely difficult.

A (47:02)

Do you think that we should fight decline, or do you think that it's inevitable and we should just sort of say, well, this is the way of all things. The only perpetual regime known to man, the only one that's existed forever, is the kingdom of heaven, which is not on this earth. And so no regime, the Romans, the ancient Chinese, there's never been one that's been perpetual. And so since we have no example of one that's lasted forever, we must come to the conclusion that none of them will last forever and that the political problem, solving the problem of perpetual peace and the perpetual satisfaction of man and just rule is impossible. Should we say that or should we say, no, we can fight this thing, we can keep this thing going. What should be my response to the decliners who are telling me, you know, the end is nigh?

B (47:50)

I think we would be far better off to make like Tancredy, even if it means taking to the hills, that we should, you know, put our gear on and prepare for a struggle in which we will have to remake ourselves if we are to survive as the kind of people we knew in the kind of civilization that we want. Yeah, and I think we should call it the liberal civilization because it is based on this 18th century idea of the liberal. Liberal individual is possessed of autonomous reason and therefore capable of self regulation in virtue and also social regulation in dealing with other people. And that. But when we say enlightenment, that's really what we mean. We mean acting individually in economics or in relation to the law or in any other social interaction. The United States is the Enlightenment civilization. It has had far more positive effects on the world than the bomb which goes through Don Fabrizio's roof in 1943. You know, in that regard, the novel is unnecessarily sour. You can understand why, if it was your own home. But still, when we say, you know, people say we are post liberal. Well, if we are, this is not a good symptom because all we know is that particularly American civilization, there is no prior in the way of Europe's feudalism. The American civilization is born out of a small colonial population, which then adopts this rationalized Enlightenment constitutional order that is the foundation. If you equate the two, and then you say we're post liberal, as lots of people on the right in particular do, then they're basically saying it's over and we should therefore roll the dice and see what kind of people we become. And as you're saying, Plato would tell you what kind of person you become, you'll become a member of the mob, and one of you might be lucky and become a tyrant, but that leaves everybody else back among the turnips. And this is one of the fundamental challenges we now face. We built effectively a middle class, liberal democratic society. The distribution of reward and opportunity has misfired to the extent that the classes have split apart. Since about 1980 in the US and also in Britain, the rich have pulled away massively from the poor. Roughly 80, 20 is now the distribution, the comfortable middle, or the middle that Tocqueville would have had it, who feel like things are getting better is contracting and contracting. And that is a recipe in any society for disorder, dissatisfaction, violence and the breakdown of society. So all of us have a massive personal and communal interest in fixing this.

A (50:31)

Yeah, it seems to me. So you say tune up. A tune up is what's required, not an embrace of the inevitability of the decay.

B (50:41)

I would seriously. I mean tune up in the sense that you're building a hot rod in an old banger. That we need to put the engine of the information revolution into the heart of our government, just as we've put it in the heart of every other exchange, just through market forces and cause. It's fun. Right? If we do that, then we may find that with the right legal constraints. This is the other thing, and that's a big if. We may actually find that there is more than enough mileage that it's not the end of the world.

A (51:11)

I guess you have to ask yourself the question, if you put that new engine in, is the government or the regime, to use that term, still the same thing or is it a different thing? In which case what you've done is really just change regimes and then give me a euphemism about how you're just tuning things up.

B (51:27)

Yeah, this is a big difference between the Anglo civilizations and the rest. In fact, all the European societies had violent turnovers from one phase to the next. France is on its Fifth Republic. It's had seven or eight regimes since 1789. In other words, it's permanently unstable. But if you look Where France has ended up since 1789, and you look where Britain and the United States have ended up, it's actually not so different. The difference is that in Britain and the United States, there were tremendous changes of regime. Planters rose and fell, Puritans came and went, elites, all to this, you know, and yet it's all done under the same constitutional stamp. If you talk to someone in Britain, they'll say, well, you know, the found of our regime haven't shifted really since 1688. And before that there was Magna Carta and the rule of all the customs we had. So it's basically the same regime as it's ever been. And obviously in the United States, you've had multiple different orders, but all of them have claimed and even produced a passable impersonation of the authority of that original regime. So Anglo societies, it seems, because of the nature of common law and various cultural factors, are able to manage these drastic changes and come out the other side and say, no, we're basically the same thing. In other words, they're able to pull off the challenge that Tancredy identifies in the Leopard, which is they want it to change. You know, these are dynamic individual forces. People want change. They want to have the maximum life they can.

A (52:59)

Yeah.

B (53:00)

And they want the things that they know and like that make them who they are. And the liberal constitutional order so far has allowed that. And that order, we know, was built on print culture. And this is what I meant about the legal constraints. Can we sustain that order with a different way of organizing information, which is the digital. The cloud.

A (53:21)

Right.

B (53:22)

Are we going to dissipate the authority into a cloud as well, rather than a single printed document when you can point to it, say, no, these are my rights. You can't. Can't tell me, can't lock me up, can't put me in the dungeon, can't make me do anything.

A (53:35)

Yeah.

B (53:36)

If authority is dissipated into a technological function, can we still claim that kind of personal autonomy? And that's the great if that is emerging in our time?

A (53:46)

Well, I suspect not, but.

B (53:48)

Yeah, I'm not particularly optimistic either, but.

A (53:53)

Put this book on a university syllabus about this topic. Topic. What's that course called for people who are concerned with it, Because I think this is a pretty important topic. People who are concerned with the phenomenon of decay that we've been discussing, people who pick up this book and see the light that it sheds on that phenomenon and want more. Give me a syllabus of maybe four or five books that you would teach In a course that these folks can go read that would all be on this topic and come at it from different angles.

B (54:23)

Well, I mean, firstly, I mean, you're right, it's. If you read history and you're not a pessimist, you haven't been paying attention. Yes, there is that. So I would say you gotta start off with Civilization and Its Discontents by Freud, which is late depressed Freud, which is a brilliant pessimistic reading of literally, I mean, what he calls a death drive, which you don't have to agree with that part of it, just to see. This is the culture of decay and decline. There are people who make their peace with systemic underachievement, we could call it, who basically say, yeah, I've done my bit and. And can't be bothered. So I would start with Freud and then I would look at Stefan Zweig's World of Yesterday. And the World of Yesterday, I think is particularly good for people in our time. Because if you were born in 2008, we're now applying, you know, thinking, applying to college, approaching you're in your junior year somewhere abouts, you will not have known a world that wasn't financially unstable, politically unstable, an era of low growth, of maximum dissatisfaction. In other words, you will not have known a failing order. And you'll also be aware that things seem better beforehand. And the World of Yesterday is about growing up in the Austro Hungarian Empire before 1914. And it sounds like a dreamland. And that's often the sort of phrase which is used to describe the world in Europe before 1914. And I would say in my own lifetime we had something very close to that after 1990, the era between, let's say, 1990 and the 911 attacks. So it was a decade of dreamland. And in that period, the foundations of much of what is blocking, I think, the healthy development of our societies politically, socially, those foundations had kind of concrete tipped on them in that period. So that's a book, the World of Yesterday, which is one of the absolute masterpieces. And then I would recommend reading Bridesheed Revisited, which is the English one. Cause it's the English version of this story. The class stuff is particularly sharply drawn out because I always say that as races to America classes to Britain. It's the problem, the historical legacy that cannot be overcome. And Bridesheed Revisited again is a perfect parallel and a bit sharper in some ways because Evelyn Moore is not talking about his great grandfather's time. And he's not really looking at the stars either. He's talking about the time he lived with. It's an amazing thing to think that Evelyn War was given time off from the commando unit in which he was serving with Churchill's sign off in order to go and write a novel effectively because he felt he needed to do it. And his government decided this was probably a greater contribution to his country's struggle. And so War is describing his own experience, literally his generation's experience. And that is going from a time of hedonism to a time of catastrophe. And that experience, I think people in my generation will recognize a hedonistic era of the 1990s and then a feel of a sort of slide into disaster in a way which I don't think is anywhere near being slowed. Now. If I had to think of another, I would try and think of a book which brings it up to date. Perhaps Bonfire. The Vanities would be a good place to look. Tom Wall's book, a recent novel by an English writer, Thomas Per Mohammed Lambert, called Shibboleth. It's very good about the educational system and so on, but these are still coming. I wish someone would write it. We need art to describe these things.

A (58:01)

That's right.

B (58:02)

It's one of the things that the leopard makes very clear is that the image of your past and present is there. There should be there all around you. Part of the malfunctioning of the systems which have served us so well is that the arts are not sending their best and brightest. They're not giving us a coherent picture of our society and our situation in all its difficulty and ugliness and complexity and beauty. If we turn the arts into a form of propaganda, then, you know, they're no use whatsoever because there are much more effective ways of forcing people to do things. And on that regard, perhaps in the meantime, while we're waiting for a novel that really captures. Now you should probably put in the reliable double act of Brave new world in 1985.

A (58:47)

Oh, that's good.

B (58:47)

Which between them, if you read those mid 20th century writers, Huxley, Orwell, and I would combine them with Marshall McLuhan actually, then I think the three of them and between them give you a pretty sharp picture of where we are now, I would say. So that's a little more than five.

A (59:08)

No, that's good. That's good. That's a good.

B (59:10)

That's my leopard reading this. And all of it interesting, I've realized, is after the leopard.

A (59:14)

Yeah.

B (59:14)

So I think the Leopard is a book you can read without knowing anything about 19th century Italy. Everything that's in it goes forward into our time.

A (59:22)

Right. No, that's good. You got time for a lightning round? Absolutely. One word answer, questions or short answer. Tell me the last book that's changed your mind.

B (59:31)

The last book that changed my mind was the. I believe it's the official history of the British Secret Service in Italy during the Second World War. The British have this, and there is a certain truth to it of thinking they're very good at this stuff. You know, the James Bond bit and so on. This book is full of tragic stories in which they. Every single agent they dropped into Italy was immediately discovered and shot. And it was a story that I didn't know about at all. And I was shocked to realize the scope of incompetence that it reflected.

A (60:01)

Who's the greatest historian of all time?

B (60:03)

Oh, it's gonna be Thucydides, all right. I mean, it always comes down to Herodotus and Thucydides.

A (60:07)

Yeah, that's a good one.

B (60:08)

And, you know, with Herodotus, you're getting the scenic view, and Thucydides, you're getting this analytical view of how things happened. You know, how literally what we would now call elites and institutions and the people. Thucydides invented that school of history. And his account of the Peloponnesian War is, you know, it is the book of books when it comes to history. I know that's a predictable answer, but.

A (60:31)

Do you have a book that you aspire to read and you just haven't got there yet? Like the one that's there and, you know you need to do it, and I just can't. I just haven't done it.

B (60:41)

I keep trying to read Middlemarch.

A (60:43)

Oh, we did a podcast on that recently.

B (60:45)

Exactly. I mean, it's one. This is one of those things that, you know, you shouldn't admit. Right. But I must have tried it 10 times. I can get 30, 40, 50 pages in and I lose the will to live. It's just not for me. I don't understand why, but I will keep trying. In the way of Tancredy. I know that I have to get with it.

A (61:04)

It's a beautiful book. It's a beautiful book. Listen to our podcast we did on it. It's really a wonderful book. What do Brits do better than Americans?

B (61:11)

Tea.

A (61:12)

What do Americans do better than Brits?

B (61:14)

Coffee.

A (61:15)

And do you have.

B (61:15)

No, come on. They do democracy better.

A (61:17)

Oh, well, that's flattering.

B (61:18)

I was saying. It's true.

A (61:21)

And do you have thoughts on the current prime minister?

B (61:25)

I try not to think about the Current prime minister because he is a symptom of a regime which can no longer sustain itself and which is in the terminal phase when it is starting to turn against the people and use the powers of the state to stop the people from legitimately criticizing what's going on. Especially given that they have raised taxation to the Highest point since 1948. When you're giving them half your money, you're at least allowed to an opinion half the time. And we are witnessing and it is a regime effect. This guy just happens to be holding the baby when the music stops or whatever the thing is. Cause the music has stopped. You know, I mentioned, you know those novels which had a Ball as their kind of climactic sequence. You know, there's Vanity Fair and you know, lots and lots. Jane Austen uses it. Yeah, the music has stopped. The dancers have no idea what's on the card or even who's in the room.

A (62:15)

Right.

B (62:15)

And this is happening across western societies to varying degrees. It's happening very intensely in Britain due to long term mismanagement and due to the class structures that almost Sicilian feudal life continues in some ways in Britain. And it's also cause it's a small country. England is about as big as New York State, but it has a dynamic top 10 economy somehow. Therefore it is a laboratory both for rapid positive change, but it can also be a laboratory for disastrous experiments which go wrong. And we have seen in Britain a leopard like refusal to accept how things are changing. And we've also seen responses which are designed to sustain the regime at the expense of the people. And this is a tragedy. I don't believe that it's all over, but it's very, very bad and in some ways worse than it was in the 1970s when the country went bankrupt and there was strikes and a lot of violence and extremism. It is a real, real mess. But I will say this. There are a lot of people in Britain who know it and are determined not to go down, who actually realize that there is a cycle and that if you grit your teeth and do it, you can come up the other side with these things.

A (63:31)

Dominic Green, thank you for sharing the leopard with us today on Old School.

B (63:35)

Thank you.

A (63:36)

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B (63:58)

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