Does Western Civilisation Exist? James Kierstead on Ancient Greece, Christianity, and the West

Summary

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Quillette Cetera Podcast: "Does Western Civilisation Exist? James Kierstead on Ancient Greece, Christianity, and the West"

Host: Zoe Sankey
Guest: James Kierstead, classicist
Release Date: May 7, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Zoe Sankey interviews classicist James Kierstead to explore big, contentious questions about the existence, nature, and influence of Western civilisation. They discuss where the West comes from, what makes its heritage distinct (from Ancient Greece, through Christianity, to the present), and whether elements like monogamy and guilt are uniquely Western. The conversation is wide-ranging, covering historical myths, cultural comparisons, and even book suggestions for understanding the West’s legacy and future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Does "The West" Really Exist?

[04:07–05:42]

• Kierstead strongly rejects the idea that Western civilisation is a recent, made-up construct designed for imperial purposes:
  • “Yes, the West exists... We can see various strands of a recognizably distinct culture already before the European colonial period. So, yes, I think it's a thing and I think that we can describe it, you know, maybe vaguely, but it's obviously a recognizable current in global cultural history alongside other cultural traditions, like Chinese, Japanese, Islamic civilization.” (B, 04:07)
• Academic skepticism toward the ‘West’ is new and, in Kierstead’s view, unique. Other civilizations are accepted as “real,” but “when it comes to Western civilization, you get this strange nihilism.”

2. Academic Attitudes and Western Self-Critique

[05:42–11:13]

• Kierstead attributes the trend of denying the West to oikophobia (self-dislike), possibly stemming from Protestant guilt and values of cosmopolitanism in academia.
  • “We really like sort of beating ourselves up. We don't really like beating others up... especially in academia, you get points for being cosmopolitan. Right. And for being generous to other cultures.” (B, 06:01)
• This attitude leads to double standards—others’ civilizations are celebrated, while criticism of the West is fashionable.
  • Memorable quote: “For some reason, just the Western one, just the story of Western civilization is some kind of conspiracy, that it was just made up wholesale.” (B, 13:20)

3. Chauvinism, Honesty, and Historical Narratives

[10:28–14:07]

• Sankey and Kierstead clarify that chauvinism is not the same as simple pride, but the distortion of history by ignoring abuses or excessive praise:
  • “For me, when it becomes harmful or when it becomes distorting of history... is when you start to... not actually come to the conclusions that the sources are driving you towards and just basically not be honest about the historical record.” (B, 11:45)
• The importance of nuance—mainstream narratives can alternate between denial and glorification, especially in online or political factions.

4. Civilizational Boundaries & Personal Experience

[15:29–18:52]

• Cultural difference is not bigotry—there are observable, material continuities shared by “Western” nations, such as language, religion, and legal roots traceable to Greece and Rome.
  • “It'd be fairly obvious to an alien who came down and looked at Australia and New Zealand and then looked at Britain, that they were part of the same culture in many ways.” (B, 16:23)
• Sankey’s travel experiences illustrate spontaneous affinity among people with cultural backgrounds shaped by the West, compared to noticeable differences with those from distinct cultural traditions.

5. Modernization and “Becoming Western”

[20:24–24:15]

• The link between modernization and Westernization is complex; the West pioneered many modern institutions, but non-Western countries have successfully adopted these innovations.
  • “A lot of what we think of as modernization is basically to... follow a path that was originally trodden by Western countries.” (B, 22:26)
  • Universal literacy (especially for women) is held up as one of these Western-origin modernizing forces.

6. The Role of Literacy and Religion (Jewish and Protestant)

[24:15–29:25]

• Discussion of Jewish literacy and intellectualism, and comparison to the Protestant tradition of ‘sola scriptura’ (scripture alone).
  • “In Jewish culture... they're very intellectual. And so the most popular boys at school are the smart ones. Maybe in Australian culture, that's not so much the case.” (B, 25:23)
• These cultural patterns are passed through generations, shaping what even irreligious people in the West expect about family, gender, and public morals.

7. Monogamy’s Unusual Role in the West

[29:25–38:07]

• Societal monogamy is a striking Western innovation, traceable to Ancient Greece, and was considered egalitarian (not only for elites).
  • “In the west you don’t get [elites monopolizing women]... You start not getting that in ancient Greek times when a lot of these city states are kind of democratic or moderate oligarchies and they see kings as a foreign thing...” (B, 30:56)
• Modern experiments like polyamory are unusual blips in a long tradition of monogamy. Historically, monogamy has benefited women, allowing them to ‘monopolize’ male resources and attention.
• Christianity later extends the expectation of fidelity to men as well.

— Memorable exchange on monogamy and male power:

• B (30:56): “They monopolize all the shiny metal, they build pointy buildings, they say that they're best friends with the gods and they have sex with about as many women as they possibly can... very, very striking if we look at the record of human history, that in the west you don't get that.”

8. Honor, Guilt, and Dignity Cultures

[47:33–57:32]

• The West is unique for “dignity culture,” focused on internalized moral standards rather than external honor or face, linked to a Protestant ‘guilt complex.’
  • “It's something to do with the internalization of this guilt complex that, you know, whatever you do inside, even if you're the only one who knows it, that's still like God still knows that. I think that's kind of deeply embedded in Western, at least the sort of Anglo psychology at this point.” (B, 52:45)
• Other cultures (e.g., Mediterranean, Asian) are characterized as “honor” or “face” cultures, with shame as an external motivator. Discussion includes historic forms of suicide in Protestant and Japanese societies.

9. The Greek Miracle: Why Greece?

[39:09–44:01]

• Kierstead outlines why classicists once spoke of the “Greek miracle”—a cultural efflorescence arising from unusual social egalitarianism and the breakdown after the Bronze Age.
  • “Ancient classical Greece looks very weird, very different if you compare it to Achaemen and Persia, you know, one of its main rivals... for some reason in the west after Rome falls, you never get a big hegemonic empire again. Whereas Chinese history is basically a recurrence of these big empires.” (B, 41:50)
• The Greek model influenced the later European pattern of city-states and decentralized competition, in contrast to centralized Asian empires.

10. Judeo-Christian Values vs. Greek Influence

[57:32–64:46]

• Debate on whether “Western values” are really “Judeo-Christian” or more profoundly Greek in origin, with Christianity serving as the main channel transmitting older egalitarian and monogamous ideas.
• Christianity’s universalism and exclusivity (intolerance of other gods), as well as its easier process of conversion compared to Judaism, played key roles in its historical spread and influence.

11. Influence of the Mediterranean/Levant

[66:44–68:32]

• The Mediterranean and Levant are presented as disproportionately influential for global history given the spread of Christianity and the Industrial Revolution, but with an asterisk—demographically, Confucian China has had massive influence for its own people.

12. Book Recommendations

[68:32–70:20]

• Tom Holland, Dominion: “More readable and exciting.”
• Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: “More data-driven; changed my thinking about family structure and its role in the West.”
• Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: “Key battles in the Western world—may be called chauvinistic, but worth reading.”
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: “A classic on the role of geography.”
• Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—for Now: “A big-picture history.”

13. What Next for the West?

[70:20–72:44]

• Kierstead wonders if Western values—like democracy and egalitarianism—can survive as secularization and religious decline continue.
  • “The big question for me is will we in the west and other people in the world who've adopted our mores be able to keep up the same dynamism and things that we really like, like democracy and liberalism, while being less Christian than we have been in the past?” (B, 72:27)

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Notable Quotes

• "Yes, the West exists." (B, 04:07)
• “We really like beating ourselves up. We don't really like beating others up.” (B, 06:01)
• “For some reason, just the Western one... just the story of Western civilization is some kind of conspiracy.” (B, 13:20)
• “If you look at Western civilization, which again, I think is a thing, you can see that these two things—egalitarianism and monogamy—actually go hand in hand.” (B, 36:29)
• “Can we remain modern and economically dynamic, et cetera, and egalitarian once people stop believing in Christianity?” (B, 72:27)

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Timestamps by Topic

| Timestamp | Topic | |:-----------:|:------| | 04:07–05:42 | The West: myth or reality? | | 05:42–11:13 | Academic attitudes & Western self-critique | | 10:28–14:07 | Chauvinism and historical honesty | | 15:29–18:52 | Cultural differences & Western identity | | 20:24–24:15 | Modernization vs. Westernization | | 24:15–29:25 | Literacy, Protestantism, and Jewish intellectualism | | 29:25–38:07 | Monogamy & the Greek innovation | | 39:09–44:01 | The Greek miracle; Greece vs. Persia and China | | 47:33–57:32 | Guilt, dignity, honor, shame cultures | | 57:32–64:46 | Judeo-Christian vs. Greek origins of Western values | | 66:44–68:32 | The Levant's global influence | | 68:32–70:20 | Recommended books | | 70:20–72:44 | The West’s future without Christianity |

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Tone & Style Notes

• Friendly, discursive, and at times self-deprecating—Kierstead and Sankey both combine scholarly depth with personal anecdotes.
• Willing to challenge prevailing academic and political orthodoxies while remaining nuanced and open to complexity.

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This episode is an accessible but deeply informed overview of the live debates around the nature and origins of Western civilisation, with particular focus on Ancient Greece, Christianity, modernization, and the enduring—and sometimes paradoxical—features of the “West.”

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Welcome back to another episode of the Quill Etc. Podcast. You're with me, Zoe Booth. Now, technically, Zoe Sanke. I got married last month, two months ago now. And yeah, that explains why I haven't podcasted in a while. I went on my honeymoon for about a month and then got sick, which you might be able to hear in my voice. So I apologize. It's been a long time between drinks, but I'm back now with a really, really good episode, I believe. I think you're gonna love it too. It's with the classicist James Kierstead. James holds a BA in Classics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Political Science from Stanford. His research focused on democracy and civil life in classical Athens. James has written extensively for Colette, contributing, I believe, seven major essays on Western civilization, Classics, Monogamy. That was a great one. Free Speech and Cultural Identity. We don't really go into this in the podcast, but I just want to let you know because I think it's really important. Until the end of 2023, James was a Senior Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. This is all public information. I'm not sharing anything that James hasn't talked about on his own substack here, but at the end of 2023, there was a restructuring there which led James to lose his job. And James is actively pursuing a legal case against the University of Victoria. Through an official Information OIA request, he obtained documents, including recollections from the former Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences about the key redundancy meeting. And one of the things that was mentioned in that redundancy meeting was that his teaching insufficiently incorporated Maori and Pacifica, that is Indigenous perspectives, into his courses on Ancient Greece. James understandably has questioned how such perspectives, indigenous perspectives, would meaningfully apply to Classics, and argues that this reflects a broader erosion of academic freedom, which we at Quillet would agree with. And we have been covering these types of issues for a decade now. So if you're interested in James's case or you'd like to reach out to him or help him, you can do so. I will link his Twitter account and his substack in the description. But as I was saying, we don't discuss much of that today because it is a current active legal case. But what we do talk about is just as interesting in today's conversation. We ask some huge questions. For example, does the west actually exist? It's controversial now to say that it does. What is the Greek miracle? What made ancient Greece so unique and have such an influence on today's culture? How did monogamy influence Western civilization? We also talk about Protestant guilt. And I also get James's top book recommendations when it comes to learning about Western civilization. And yes, Tom Holland's Dominion is in there, but there are many more. Okay, without much further ado, let's get into this conversation with James Kierstead. I hope you really like it. I definitely did. If you did like it, please share it. It would really help me out and it will help more people to find Quillet which which can only benefit them and benefit the world. I hope you enjoy this conversation with James Kierstead. A lot of post modern thinkers today, academics say that the west doesn't exist. It's all a big myth. It was created to, you know, promote all these terrible ideas of white supremacy and misogyny, etc. What do you think about that? Does the west exist?

[B]

Yes, the west exists. I mean, I think the particular theory nowadays is that it was created to help out imperialism. I mean, that's what Nisha McSweeney says in her book, that it's really something. The concept of Western civilization is something that emerges in the early modern period or the 18th and 19th centuries. So just as sort of European colonialism is going big. And I think that that's really hard to support because if we look at the Middle Ages, if you look at the Renaissance, you can see that these cultures in Europe are intimately bound up with the cultures of Greek and Roman antiquity. They're drawing on the poetry and the philosophy, the architecture, their influence in so many ways. So I think it's pretty obvious actually that we can see various strands of a recognizably distinct culture already before the European colonial period. So yes, I think it's a thing and I think that we can describe it, you know, maybe vaguely, but it's obviously a recognizable current in global cultural history alongside other cultural traditions like Chinese or Chinese and Japanese civilization, because their literature is influence one another or Islamic civilization. And of course we're used to talking about these civilizations and academics seem to have no trouble recognizing that these are civilizations and traditions that go through history. But for some reason, when it comes to Western civilization, you get this strange nihilism that really has only taken the form it has now in the last few years that not only is Western civilization something that we should doubt or condemn, but it doesn't exist at all.

[A]

Yeah, well, why, why the double standard when it comes to our own civilization? Is it just. Is it a typically Western thing? Is It a sort of oikophobic thing of just being, you know, highly critical of your own culture because it's part of your culture and your civilization or what is it?

[B]

Yeah, I think the oikophobia idea is a good one. I also think there's something to be said for sort of Judeo Christian or actually a particularly Protestant, I think guilt comple that we really like sort of beating ourselves up. We don't really like beating others up. And I think that the fact that this has emerged out of academia is no coincidence because I think especially in academia, you get points for being cosmopolitan. Right. And for being generous to other cultures. So if you're an academia and you say, oh, the Persian Empire was so sophisticated, the Assyrian Empire was so complex and sophisticated, that sounds good. If you say the Assyrian Empire was brutal and impaled people, if you stress that stuff too much, you start sounding a little bit xenophobic. That's associated with kind of lower class discourse. And so I think there's this drive to sort of compete with one another within academia to say that, you know, to just disavow Western civilization, to say that you don't like it, you don't want to think about it, or maybe again in this latest wave, Western civilization doesn't exist and it never existed in the first place.

[A]

So does that really happen? Is, is there no terms of. What's the term? I'm looking for limitation on how far back you can go. Like if you criticize an ancient civilization that's not yours, can you really still get called a racist or get in trouble for criticizing them? Is there a. How far back can you go?

[B]

I'm exaggerating slightly. I'm sure lots of academics do describe Syrian impalements and so on and so forth, but I definitely think that if you look for the word sophisticated, you know, the Achaemenid Persian Empire is often said to be, you know, sophisticated, complex empire. And it's not that you're going to be condemned for saying anything else or kicked out of the academy, but I just think it's, it's very fashionable, it'll help you. You'll sound sophisticated, you'll sound cosmopolitan and that'll help you in the academy. And yeah, and you won't sound particularly sophisticated or cosmopolitan if you go on too much about the negative aspects of these other civilizations. I mean, in New Zealand there are quite strong taboos, for example, against talking about Maori cannibalism. Historian Paul Moon actually wrote a book about that which just deals with the historical evidence. And there was a huge hullabaloo. And of course, he wasn't doing it to sort of beat up on people who are descended from Maori or modern Maori people. He was just trying to say that this is something that happened in the past and that's not the only civilization that was involved in that practice. But of course that's, that's.

[A]

Yeah, it's. It's the same in Australia. I mean, we've published pieces and podcasts, a podcast in particular with Mungomanic. I'm not sure if you follow him on X. He's sort of. He's not a. An academic per se, but he's just a guy who's very, very, very interested in Aboriginal history and knows a lot more about ancient Aboriginals than most Australians do, actually. And he, you know, we. We published a podcast with him and it was talking about some of those things. Not cannibalism per se, but, you know, ancient circumcision, circumcision rituals, or, you know, the eating of dogs or other things like this that they are not okay to talk about now. And, you know, and also we did have some comments from people who claim to be Aboriginal and said that we were spreading, you know, secret sacred men's. Men's business, they call it, which I know New Zealand has. Has had its own, you know, issues with that. What knowledge is sacred? What knowledge isn't sacred? That doesn't really fit in with the Western view of the world, which is that knowledge should be for everyone. Right?

[B]

That's right. I mean, ideally, everyone should be able to take part in it. And the heritage of the world civilizations is available to everybody. I mean, I think the great Bengali intellectual Rabindranath Tagore made that exact point. So, you know, it hasn't just been people in the west who appreciated that, but that also means, by the same token, that, you know, you should be able to read the great books of other civilizations and not think they're very good. Or you should be able to look at the historical records of other civilizations and say that they're not particularly inspiring. And I think people can come to their own conclusions about that. But as historians and academics, we should be trying to. To be even handed. And I think actually this whole idea that the west doesn't exist, I think originally it comes out of an attempt to be more even handed because the perception was that in the past people in the west were too chauvinistic. And there was a lot of chauvinism in the past in the imperial period, but now I think We've gone too far the other way.

[A]

How would you define chauvinism or Western chauvinism?

[B]

Well, I mean, I suppose that it's kind of the equal and opposite tendency in the other direction. I mean, this current tendency is to say that, you know, there's nothing good about the west. In fact, it didn't even exist and it sort of distorts the historical record. And so chauvinism is when you distort the historical record by, you know, excessively praising the west and refusing to look at the bad things that did happen, you know, refusing to look at actual abuses that happened during the British Empire or other Western empires. So I think actually that that's something which was a big fixture of the imperial period in Britain and France. But I think now actually you can see it coming back a little bit on, on the far right online you get this tendency of like, you know, screw the wokes. We're going to say that everything that the British Empire did was perfect. And that's also obviously not true.

[A]

Definitely. It's this sort of idea that it didn't happen, but if it did, it was good.

[B]

Yes, that's, that's the curious thing about this current theory. It sort of says the west is both the best has in history been both extremely harmful and also non existent.

[A]

So chauvinism isn't. Or Western chauvinism isn't simply thinking that the west is great and one of the greatest civilizations or histories to be part of?

[B]

Yeah, I think that's part of it. But I think that for me, when it becomes harmful or when it becomes distorting of history, which is really my interest is when you start to, you know, put things under the carpet or not actually come to the conclusions that the sources are driving you towards and just basically not be honest about, about the histor record. And as I say, that's equally distorting whether you're trying to heap preys on people of the past or whether you're trying to denigrate them. So the answer is to just look at how things really happen. And in this case, I think if we look at the way that global history, global cultural history really played out, it is, as I say, fairly obvious that there were these distinct strands and that Westerners in the Middle Ages were looking back to the Greeks and the Romans, Japanese people in their history, greatest authors, intellectuals were often looking back to China. Persian authors were deeply enmeshed with the Arabic and Muslim traditions. And these are just facts of history. And I think that the Current intellectual elite wants to tell you that for some reason, just the Western one, that just the story of Western civilization is some kind of conspiracy, that it was just made up wholesale. And at that point you have to kind of. I don't mean to sound sort of arrogant or whatever, but I think I always feel like I'm trying to explain to very sophisticated and intelligent people some really kind of obvious facts. And I think that's one of the problems that within academia, if you've trained your whole life in Greek or Greek or Latin, it. It doesn't sound very clever just to start pointing out obvious things like, well, Aquinas was very indebted to Aristotle and he called Aristotle the philosopher because everybody kind of knows that. So they kind of overlooked that. And then there's this tendency to focus, for example, on. On the Silk Roads, you know, on Gandhara, when you have this very fascinating fusion of Greek culture and Buddhism. And I agree that those, those things are fascinating, but I think the academics are drawn towards them and then they come to sort of take these as typical where really they are exceptions. They're things that happen, happen on the edge of these great civilizational realms. But the main story is actually that Aquinas doesn't know about Lao Tzu. Aquinas doesn't know about Confucius. Right. Because that's not the way the technology worked in the time they didn't have the Internet. It's not that he's being a bigot by not quoting Confucius. He's just in a different cultural tradition. And what he has to draw on is Greek philosophy and what there was of Roman philosophy. It's not Chinese philosophy, it's not anything else.

[A]

But this going back to this idea of, or this technique tactic that critics use of sort of erasing history. That's, you know, many cultures do that, don't they? Like, for example, I'm, you know, half Greek and was just. Whatever that means. That's an interesting question. But I was just in Greece. Every time I go to Greece, I realize I'm reminded, yep, I'm definitely not Greek, I'm very Australian. But you know, like, then, then for some reason, I guess due to the algorithm, when I use Twitter there, I get served a lot of great content, great tweets. And the Greek Turkish debate is still raging and is quite tongue in cheek often. It's sort of just for fun meme wars. But, you know, there is genuinely a lot of, on the, well, especially on the Turkish side, you know, erasure of Greek and Armenian history and probably on the Greek side as well, you know, like this idea. Turkey doesn't even exist. Like this idea. What is a Turk? What is the. You know, like you're all just Greeks who got, you know, converted to Islam. So I don't know where I'm going with this question, but I guess it's kind of interesting.

[B]

Well, one question I have for you then is sort of, you said that I know what you're saying when you say you're Australian and not Greek. I know exactly what you're saying. By the same token, though, and I don't mean this to be inflammatory. I mean this just to be sort of a question. Are there not things that you see in Greek culture, modern Greek culture, which are more similar to Australian culture than, for example, conservative Turkish culture?

[A]

100%. 100%, right.

[B]

So you have this sense that you probably don't hate Turks or anything. You just have the sense that their culture is more different. And for whatever reason, it might be that some of the women wear veils. I mean, not as much as in other Muslim countries. It may be that Muslim culture historically has not been strictly monogamous. It could be that you look at the architecture of their holy sites and they look different to the churches that you're used to in Australia, mainstream Australian culture, majority Australian culture, I should say, and Greece. So I think all of these things are things that everybody kind of recognizes or picks up on. And that's what I mean by sort of. You sort of have to re. Explain these things to academics because they're looking at these details of, you know, stress, details of history. When I think all I'm trying to say, really, by saying that Western civilization is a thing, is that it'd be fairly obvious to an alien who came down and looked at Australia and New Zealand and then looked at Britain, that they were part of the same culture in many ways. Not in all ways. Right. But, you know, you can look at the sports they're playing. They're playing cricket and rugby, different types of rugby, maybe. You can look at the prominent religion. You can look at the language and how they speak the same language and also how a lot of these things ultimately go back to Europe, go back to Greece and Rome. So the predominant religion being Christianity, it's ultimately a sort of Greco Jewish religion. And the English language has a lot of Latin and Greek words in it. So really, I guess that's all I'm trying to do is kind of restore basic sense to this conversation. And most people will pick up on These cultural differences and sometimes they're exaggerated in the meme wars and distorted, but a lot of them actually do reflect historical fact and the way that history happened to unfold. And you can recognize these things without becoming an extreme bigot.

[A]

Definitely, definitely. Noticing or picking up on differences is part of, I think, just, you know, traveling. I was just traveling for a month on my honeymoon and I went to, well, we went to. But I chose the destination because I always really wanted to go to Georgia. Right. So we started off in Georgia and then we went to Azerbaijan and then Armenia, which was an issue at both borders. And then Greece, we wanted to go to Israel, but ended up just spending a bit more time in Greece. And you know, it was fascinating in general, but even just being with tourists, being on these tour groups and you naturally have an affinity. I, as an Australian, naturally have an affinity and can strike up a conversation very easily with an American, a, you know, Kiwi, obviously a Brit, and then next level, you know, the Belgian guy. Belgian, Flemish guy, you know, and then, you know, the other cultures after that usually. Like the Japanese lady, not so much, no. You know, very interested to learn about her culture and everything. Very interested. And it doesn't mean we can't be friends. It just means that we're starting off at. We're not starting off at that shared sort of foundation.

[B]

Can I ask, what do you think it was about the Japanese lady? I mean, maybe this is controversial territory, but did you have a sense of how it was different talking to her?

[A]

Well, she's an interesting one actually, because where were we? Azerbaijan. So firstly, not many tourists in Azerbaijan. We're on a small tour group. She's a sort of middle aged Japanese woman traveling solo, which is in and of itself quite interesting. Her English was not that good, so that made things difficult. And then the Azerbaijani Rezeri tour guide did not have very good English either. So even for a native English speaker, it was difficult for me to understand, let alone for her. And she was very quiet. And about halfway through the day, it was a long tour, I could see she was having a sort of difficult conversation and complaining to the tour guide and pretty much saying that she was very upset that she couldn't understand much about, you know, she couldn't understand what he was saying and that they should have tour guides in Japanese and blah, blah, blah. But she kept this very private and she didn't make it obvious to the group that, you know, she had this issue or I think for me, I'm not sure if it's cultural Thing or just personal. But I would have said straight up within the first five minutes, dude, I can't understand what you're saying. How can we change this? How can we make this better? I would have been a bit more assertive, maybe. I'm not sure. And then we just couldn't really have much of a conversation.

[B]

Yeah, so that's super interesting. I mean, obviously you gotta be careful in some of these cases because it's one person and it's one country and you can't draw firm conclusions. And I think, you know, we're rightly reminded of these things. But I do think Japan is a particularly interesting case in terms of global cultural history, because it was the country that the great civilization, I should say that most successfully westernized with the Magi Restoration. Yeah, and Turkey is an interesting case too, because they also westernized very aggressively after the First World War with the revolution of Ataturk, even changing their script from Arabic script and a lot of other reforms as well. But the Japanese were amazingly successful at modernizing to the extent. And of course, all these countries were doing it. The leadership of these countries were doing this because the west was humiliating them militarily and, you know, almost literally taking over the world. So they knew they had to do something. And I think that in the Japanese case, what seems particularly interesting to me is that they were very successful at imitating Western technology and other aspects of the West. Western clothing, for example.

[A]

Pull you up on something or question. You said modernizing and then you said becoming more Western too, sort of in the same, so.

[B]

Well, yeah, go ahead.

[A]

Well, no, is. Is why. Why is it inherently. Why, why is the country inherently becoming more modern if it's becoming more Western?

[B]

Well, this is the question now, right? In our current time. I. I think that if we were having this conversation in the 90s, I could have told you very confidently, or maybe, maybe 60s or 70s, let's say. I could have said very confidently, look, all the modern countries, with the exception of Japan, are Western. So the Western must be. Being Western must be the secret sauce to modernization. And I think that's what all the, all of the competitors of the west thought when they started Westernizing. Now, it's kind of interesting because you see that these other civilizations like China, Japan to some extent has fallen off, but definitely China to some extent. Even Arab states like the UAE are really getting ahead. They're building all these skyscrapers.

[A]

The question is, so what is modern?

[B]

Well, that's the thing. I mean, so even with these countries, though, it's Arguable that China, for example, it's modernized in the last 20 years because it's become more capitalist, basically, it's become more neoliberal, to use a phrase that people harp on about in the academy quite a lot. But the fact is that they've pulled millions of people, hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by modernizing in that sense, by having freer markets. So to some extent that was Western. Of course, the previous Marxism was also imported from the West. So it's a little, a bit, a complex picture, but it still seems to be the case, as it was, I think, in the 19th and 18th centuries, that a lot of what we think of as modernization is basically to. To recapitulate, to follow a path that was originally trodden by Western countries. First of all, of course, England, because the Industrial Revolution happened first in England. But of course, every time somebody does it, it gets a bit easier for others to do it because they can see how the others did it. So, for example, in the west, literacy, mass literacy, is really, first of all a Protestant thing. You can see this very clearly in the historical data that Protestant areas of Germany have much higher literacy rates in the 18th century. But then other parts of the west started to get literacy and other countries then started to look at the west who was again taking over the world and thinking, gee, these guys have got something going for them. I wonder what it is. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that so many people are literate. And then they start copying that and you get to the point where nowadays any kind of policy advisor worth their salt in whatever country you go to, China or African countries, underdeveloped Asian countries, they all know it's axiomatic that in order to develop a country you have to up literacy rates. And ideally not just for men, but for women too. Of course, some countries resist that because they're fanatical about Islam or whatever, but basically it's very clear now that literacy is part of the package of modernization that's so fascinating.

[A]

And I mean, you know, the Jews are good at that too, right? Like there's a lot of. A lot of talk about that. You know that. Yeah, like. Well, I'd like to hear your thoughts. But you know, Jews being such a successful minority, you know, I've heard it explained partly. I've heard it explained in a few ways, actually, but partly the literacy thing, but also a sort of self selection in that my Jewish friend explained it like this, that his theory, at least I'm not sure if he Came up with it. But sort of that, you know, a man would have multiple children, and one of those boys at least, would go to study the Talmud, maybe the smartest one. So he'd be spending all his days studying, studying, studying, learning. And then that prized boy would marry a prized, you know, the best girl from the other family, and they'd sort of just go on to have these, like, I don't know, smarter kids. That's how he explains it. I'm not sure if that's true.

[B]

I mean, that's really the kind of Thomas Sowell story about cultures. You know, he says certain cultures are just good at certain things and they develop traditions in certain things. So for a long time, Sowell talks a lot about this, that, you know, Germans dominated piano making just because they had these sort of lineages of piano making, people were encouraged to be good at making pianos. Maybe it's true that in Jewish culture, you know, they have. They're very intellectual. And so the most popular boys at school are the smart ones. Maybe in Australian culture, that's not so much the case. I mean, I think that intelligence tends to be attractive in lots of cultures, but it may be that in Jewish cultures, especially strong. And I definitely think that there's something in the fact that even if you grow up in Australia, you have to engage with, you know, an ancient Hebrew text. And I've tried to learn the Hebrew writing system, and it's not easy. So you're basically doing a kind of classics course when you're a child, and that might help out in various ways.

[A]

Well, the rules in Judaism are extremely complicated. I mean, I'm not a religious person. I didn't grow up really with organized religion. I grew up, I guess, culturally Christian, but I didn't go to church or really, I didn't even have scripture study, which I sort of regret now. My parents were, I don't know, progressive in that way. I suppose I went and watched movies or. I don't know what I did during scripture class. They opted me out of that.

[B]

Never too late to learn some classical Greek. I could tell you the.

[A]

That's true.

[B]

The Greek of the New Testament is the easiest sort of ancient Greeks.

[A]

Okay, thank you for the tip. But it does seem that, you know, modern, at least the Christians that I grew up with in, you know, Newcastle, Australia, which were mostly sort of. What's the name for them? The happy clappy sort of event. Not evangelical. Yeah, I don't know, sort of branch. It was a lot easier to be a Christian there. Like, you didn't need to know that much, it seemed, compared to, you know, living an Orthodox Jewish life in Sydney. I live in a very Jewish area, and I know what. How Orthodox Jews live. And, you know, there's different levels to observance, but it's pretty. Can be pretty complicated. And, you know, that's to think about Jews carrying this throughout history and not, you know, having to. To know a lot of these things off by heart. I guess they were written in a book as well, but it's very complicated.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, historically, as I. As I say, you know, Protestant Christianity was fairly intellectual because the idea was, you know, that there's an emphasis on sola scriptura, this Latin phrase meaning scripture alone. So that really was what decided disputes about what God wanted. And so historically, Protestants did have a big emphasis on that. But I just want to pan out here and just notice what we're talking about, which is super interesting and in a way kind of obvious, but I just want to draw it out. You're basically talking about how in Australia, whether you're Christian or Jew or probably other cultures as well. Definitely other cultures as well. There are these traditions that affect your life. Maybe they only affect your life when you're a kid, but they affect your life in some way. Right. And they go back to the ancient world. And I think what academics want to tell us nowadays is that it's all too complicated. You know, there's no way that you can have a golden nugget. This is the way they kind of dismiss the idea of Western civilization. There's no single golden nugget of knowledge which is passed down through time. And that is kind of true because it's kind of a caricature of. Of the real theory. And the real theory is just that there are texts which remain sacred to people, and there are cultural traditions that may not determine people's actions 100% in the modern day, but they influence them. They influence the religions. They influence what we do on Sunday or Saturday, and they also influence things like family structure. So even people who aren't necessarily religious in the west, the way we think about mating and dating and families is very weird, to use a term that's become a technical term in the literature. We might have seen this acronym, Weird with capital letters. Western, educated, industrialized, rich and Democratic.

[A]

Heinrich, Right?

[B]

Yeah. So this is a lot of this I get from Joseph Henrik's work. And as he points out, a lot of the things we do, just this incredible, incredibly strong stress on monogamy, for one thing, where the man has to be faithful as well as the woman. That actually is a very strange thing in history. And that's something which I think nowadays, maybe in the elites in the west, there's talk of polyamory, but for most of Western history, that's been a very solid thing. And I think even when belief in Christianity started to Wane in the 60s and 70s, people still have a sense that it's kind of the decent moral thing to do not to kind of have two girlfriends at once. And that's strange. And also things like, you know, when you get married, you move to a separate house which just focuses on the nuclear family. See, all of those things are strange. And those things have been practiced by Christian communities through the centuries and arguably started in ancient Greece, in classical Greece, where monogamy was seen as an egalitarian commitment. So again, we see that and I

[A]

highly recommend everyone read James's piece on that in Quillet. It's fascinating. I learn a lot from your piece on monogamy. What did we title it? How Monogamy Built the West or something?

[B]

Something like that.

[A]

Yeah, fascinating. I never knew that. I never knew that it was an egalitarian thing that. Yeah, both elites and the everyday man should have, you know, one wife, not that one elite man, you know, get greedy and have control of all of the women, which inevitably happens.

[B]

Yeah. I'm sorry to say this for kind of the insight it gives us into male human nature, but it seems to be very common, let's say, in human history, that the guy gets all the power and becomes the king or the emperor or whatever they do. They do a large number of very predictable things. They monopolize all the shiny metal, they build pointy buildings, they say that they're best friends with the gods and they have sex with about as many women as they possibly can. And often you have this dual strategy where they have a harem which produces illegitimate children, and then they have a wife or several wives, where you have the kind of high end strategy where you can actually invest more in your offspring. But anyway, they're, they're having lots and lots of sexual partners and that. So it's very, very striking if we look at the record of human history, that in the west you don't get that. And you start not getting that in ancient Greek times when a lot of these city states are kind of democratic or moderate oligarchies and they see kings as a foreign thing, at least in the classical period. And so the only sort of exceptions to ancient Greek monogamy Are these figures who were kind of on the fringes of the Greek world, like some of the tyrants of Syracuse or ultimately the Macedonians. So people like Philip, Alexander's father, had multiple wives.

[A]

And it's seen as barbaric, right, to have multiple wives. It's seen as.

[B]

That's right. And I would argue that that's something that's very strikingly interesting. As I say, like, just now we're getting this polyamory thing in the west, but for most of Western history, even until like five years ago, I would say when I was in college, for example, like, some people slept around, but basically, if you're in a relationship with a girl, you weren't meant to cheat on her. That was just like that. That's how it would be seen. Even if you sort of said, oh, we have an arrangement. For most people, the normative culture was, you know, one partner. And then there is still, I think, an emphasis, more of an emphasis on marriage. By the way, I'm not necessarily kind of preaching or advocating for any of these things. I'm just trying to describe, like a sociologist, how Western society is different. I think that's one of the main ways in which it's been. It's been different for a long time.

[A]

Yeah, that's. No, it's. It's fascinating. And don't worry, I definitely don't get a preachy, preachy vibe. I think, you know, I'm very interested in. In women. I have that in common with men. You know, I'm very interested in women. And, you know, I've just also finished watching this Netflix series on that. The lds. No flds. So the fundamentalist Latter Day Saints who broke off from the. The Mormons because they wanted to practice, continue practicing polygamy. And it's exactly what you said. One guy, Warren Jeffs, got a little bit of power. His dad died. He took over. He said, boom, I'm the new prophet. And what did he do straight away? He started collecting women. Just collecting and collecting. I think he had about 72 wives. Maybe 24 of them were underage. There's, you know, he was. He's essentially a pedophile, really, like these women. I have, I have some opinions actually on, like, pedophilia. That's a bad way to start a sentence, but, you know, the word pedophile gets thrown around a lot. But these girls were really young, like prepubescent 12, right on the cusp. That's definitely pedophilia. It's not like they were all, you know, 16, 17 year olds, which is a bit more, you know, at least historically, makes more sense, or biologically, which is an interesting topic too. We could get into maybe, if you wanted to. But I did want to talk about women and how monogamy would affect women. I know it's traditionally what's been quite a very good thing for women. And if you look at women who live in monogamous societies and cultures, we do a lot better than women who live in polygynous.

[B]

Yeah, I think that that is the case. I mean, I said in my article at the end, like, I think now it's seen. I think within the polyamorous community, there are definitely a lot of feminists who say, like, it's my right to have multiple boyfriends, but in. In human history, it's over. There's this overwhelming kind of polygamous skew within polyamory or polygamy. So most. Most marriages, some have been multiple. Most sort of multiple spouse marriages have been multiple women with one man rather than one woman with multiple men. It's very, very rare that that happens.

[A]

Are there any cases?

[B]

I think that there's some cases among the Inuit or some kind of northern country. I think you only. Pretty much you only get it. Well, you get it sort of in the rich west, in these sort of elite communities, university communities, and you get it with the kind of the complete opposite of places where there's oliganthropy or like there's so few humans that you just kind of need. Everyone needs to get together and keep warm during the winter, I think. I think that's right.

[A]

Interesting. But, you know, it's hard. You can only be pregnant really once a year. So, you know, it's sort of hard to have multiple husbands. I mean, you can obviously have sex and whatever, but to really, like, have a husband figure, a father figure, you don't have much choice, really. Like, you get one choice a year, really.

[B]

Yeah. So, I mean.

[A]

And you'd want to keep the same one, probably.

[B]

Yeah. So going back to this idea that it's better for women, like, I think that historically it probably has been because basically the woman gets to monopolize all the resources of the man. I mean, that's the kind of rational, economic way of looking at it. You could also say that, you know, it's easier to have a loving relationship when you're not competing for attention.

[A]

Definitely.

[B]

But I think that definitely if you look at Western civilization, which, again, I think is a thing, you can see that these two things actually go hand in hand. And maybe we don't even understand exactly why that has been the case. But the society which pioneered rights for women, even extending to voting rights, that

[A]

society even extending to men who identify as women.

[B]

Well, exactly. Maybe we've gone too far in some ways now. But, but actually, no, I mean it's in a way like it's not coincidental that we have those ideas too because Western civilization has been, at least in the past few centuries, so thoroughly egalitarian that the whole WOKE movement is sort of extreme progressivism in a way. It's very much a child of Western civilization too. I mean, if you read Tom Holland's book Dominion, he thinks that WOKE is kind of like an offshoot of Christianity. And I can see why he thinks that. But I think actually in a way like both it and Christianity, both wokism Christianity are offshoots of Western egalitarianism which we can actually trace back to ancient Greece. Some of the things that we get out of that we seem to get out of Christianity, like monogamy. I mean, Joseph Henrik, this is one point in which I might agree, disagree with him that he says that monogamy comes out of Christianity. And I think that actually you can see stronger monogamous norms already in ancient Greece. So this universal monogamy that applies to elites as well as ordinary citizens, you get that already in classical Athens. The only thing you don't get in classical Athens is the idea that the husbands have to be faithful, as faithful as the wives. So men in classical Athens can, they only can have one wife, they can only have one producer homosexuality, but they can have fun with flute girls and younger guys and prostitutes, etc.

[A]

Well, that must be a key difference too in that Christianity came in and said yeah, no to the guy on boy thing either, although they're pretty good at that in the church as well.

[B]

Yeah, I think that that was the way it was, it was interpreted in the early church. And as things went on, the few passages in the Bible like in Romans that mention that seem to see, I think there's 1 in Leviticus 2 that presents it as an abomination. And so I think for me, I mean as looking back at this as a modern liberal, I think that's a bad thing. I think, you know, it's a good thing that gay people can do what they want nowadays. And that again is maybe I'm thinking that because I'm a Western egalitarian.

[A]

So what was it about Greece, ancient Greece, that made it such an produce such an influential culture? Why there and why not? I know you, you've written, studied a lot, the connection between ancient Greece and ancient Egypt. Like, why was Greece more influential? Or is it just that Greece is more influential in our culture and our history?

[B]

Yeah, so this is another thing that's really interesting right now in Classics, because I think people are trying, like progressive academics are trying to say Greece actually wasn't so special. You know, people used to talk of the Greek miracle D, capital M. And I think if you wrote that on a job application nowadays, they would instantly throw it out. At least they seem to be throwing out a lot of my job applications these days, so. And I actually believe in the Greek miracle in the sense that I think that Greece was an example of what some historians have called an efflorescence. You know, a period in human history when you actually have economic growth, albeit at kind of a low level. And you get also a huge cultural efflorescence of basically the inauguration of the Western traditions of philosophy and political thought and music and drama, tragedy and comedy, architecture, all the rest. So, you know, Athens, obviously a hotbed of intellectual activity. And I think that's a measurable effect, that it was actually really interesting and special. And I think that one of the ways in which it was interesting and special, besides the sort of obvious things we can see at the surface, is that it was astoundingly egalitarian. And again, like here, it's kind of weird how nowadays in the field I think I've seen as some kind of a right wing weirdo, because actually when I think about Greek history at my most left wing, and I think that Greek civilization and the Western civilization that came after it and inherited a lot of its mores and tropes, both of these civilizations are actually very egalitarian. So what happens at the end of the Bronze age, so around 1200 BC, so before that you have all these great Near Eastern civilizations and then there's this huge collapse and nobody really knows why. There's a mention of these sea peoples that sweep across the place, but the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket. And then when the Near Eastern civilizations, so for example, the Assyrians, when they get back up and running, they basically do the same thing as before, get a big guy, big guy gets to monopolize all the metals, you know, build pointy buildings, stab everybody, impale everybody, monopolize all the women. And that's what most civilizations do for most of human history. And the Greeks don't do that. They start building these city states where sometimes they're oligarchs and sometimes they're democrats, but basically they're much more egalitarian and they have laws and they start competing against each other and they're autonomous. And so ancient classical Greece looks very weird, very different if you compare it to Achaemen and Persia, you know, one of its main rivals. So I think that in some ways, like what made Greece special was very similar to, in some ways to what made early modern Europe special. Because again, in early modern Europe you have a lot of these different policies, different states competing with one another. They're independent, they have lots of institutions which limit power.

[A]

Remind me. I'm sorry, sorry, Remind me which polities. Give me some names for.

[B]

Okay, so I mean, I'm thinking of like, you know, the Italian city states like Flores and Venice and Genoa, and also you look at the Holy Roman Empire, like up into Germany, Hamburg, and eventually you get the hanseatic lead league. But Germany's like a patchwork of little states, some of which are city states, some of which are kind of dukedoms, and they're Spain. Yeah. And then you have these bigger states. Right. In the west especially. So you get. Spain's a big state, France is a big state, it's a big state, England is a reasonably big state, eventually becomes Britain. Compare that with what's going on for most of Chinese history. Walter Scheidel has a very good recent book called Escape From Rome, which is all about this. Basically that for some reason in the west after Rome falls, you never get a big hegemonic empire again. Whereas Chinese history is basically a recurrence of these big empires. So you have centralized power and you have much less competition. So Europe is about competition, so is Greece and.

[A]

Sorry, there must be a bit of a lag. I said that. That would explain modern China in many ways. Right. You said lack of, what did you say? Centralized power and. Yeah, that's sort of modern China. Is it not like the culture is still so similar to that?

[B]

Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I suppose that it is very top down still and they're being more successful now. So of course people are going to say, oh, this disproves your theory that it's all about democracy and autonomy. But I do think that, like, to the extent that they've opened their market, I mean, what markets are, it's basically a system to produce or hold or make possible competition between economic actors. And so in opening up, I think China became more top down and hence it's been more successful at modernizing.

[A]

Yeah. So Just to go back to Greece, the Greek miracle. What are some explanations for why Greece started this new thing? Why, How'd they get that idea? Why it's so radical to just think, okay, let's not do the whole like being led by some tyrant who builds pointy buildings. Let's do it a bit more peacefully.

[B]

Yeah, I mean I probably shouldn't have said like they, they thought let's do this because of course they didn't have like a meeting and say let's change history. People just started doing these things.

[A]

But did they not need to? Like, was it just the inevitable?

[B]

Well, one, one theory that I've read about is the so called bronze shortage hypothesis that it's really hard to get this metal which had been really bound up with the old elite, because you need tin from Anatolia. And so once the trade networks go down, you can't get the flashy metal anymore and instead you have to turn to iron. And iron is actually reasonably plentiful in Greece and it's kind of much easier to get without being an elite person with access to distant trade networks. And so the egalitarian culture grows up hand in hand with that. I think a better theory is just again, this is probably based on Walter Scheidel's work that the times in human history when you get very egalitarian societies are basically always when everything goes to hell in a handbasket. When you get these huge collapses of civilization and families are no longer able to pass wealth down to their descendants, everything is just chaotic. And one of the reasons you get more wealth egalitarianism is in these situations is actually because everybody's wealth basically goes to zero or, you know, just a little bit above zero. So one of the reasons I think Greece becomes more egalitarian after the Bronze Age collapse is because Greece wasn't that developed before the Bronze Age collapse. It was kind of like a fringe area of the civilized region and they, they fell particularly hard. So we can see this in the archaeological record that people are basically putting walls around their towns and heaping up stones so they can throw at their enemies. And they're moving their towns up high in the mountains because they're scared of raiders coming in from the sea. Oddly enough, that is really the origin of the Greek miracle that happens later that they have to build up in a, in a very different way and in the way that they end up building up, you know, within a few short centuries produces this amazing civilization that we still talk about all time now and also enables them to do things like defeat the keyman in Persia, which is like the biggest and meanest state the world has seen up to that point.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Okay. I have so many questions, but I've just forgotten.

[B]

Well, I tell you what, like your Greek background is feeling proud, I can

[A]

tell, but I am.

[B]

One thing I kind of want to add in is actually with the Henrik theory, I think it's particularly interesting because I think he identified. I mean, he's relying on other people's work too. He's identifying things that are interesting about Western family structure. But what he also does is he links this to a broader theory about economic growth and institutional change. So the idea is that most civilizations are very clannish. They depend on these lineages. And there's very little limitation on marrying within your own kin. Sometimes there is, there's clan exogamy or whatever, but often people are able to build up these big clan networks because you're able to marry your cousin and things like that. And with the Christian church, this is Henrik's story, you get these severe limitations on who you can sleep with, basically including who you can marry. And so that makes these kind of building up these kinds of complicated clan networks very difficult. And so what happens in the west is that instead of focusing on sociality within your kin, within these big kin relationships, you have to turn to civil society. You have to build up civil society and as a result you get universities and guilds and all these structures.

[A]

It reduces violence.

[B]

Yeah, they allow us to kind of. They allow us to engage in impersonal pro sociality which is outside the family, and then you get the mark. Well, is going big, but according to Henrik, at least you get the market and you get economic growth off the back of that.

[A]

Yeah. Are you interested in these like honor cultures versus dignity culture? Like, do you put much?

[B]

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, does that. Why do you mention that? Have you been reading about that or is that.

[A]

Well, they, you know, it comes up a bit. I was wondering if you put much stock in those, those terms. But whether or not you do, I suppose I, I just see. I see it coming out in different cultures within Australia, you know, and like that in particular with men, the way men act. And this is going back, I suppose, to what we were saying about pro social behavior and maybe not having to fight for women so much because we live in monogamous societies where you're sort of guaranteed, not guaranteed a woman, but like you don't have to fight over having a harem. And I don't know if I'm being racist or whatever or like jumping to conclusions here, but Muslim men, you know, from cultures where they do have multiple wives. And even my. My husband said when he was in Egypt, he was with a taxi driver, and they sort of got into this topic of having multiple wives. And my fiance, you know, joking husband, jokingly said, you know, one wife is enough, you know, stress. And the guy slammed on the brakes, turned around and said, not if you are a real man. If you are a real man, you can handle multiple wives. So he got very offended. So, you know, I can imagine if you do grow up in a culture like that, or your. Or your parents did or your grandparents did, and that's sort of what you grew up with at home, like the way you interact with other men in particular men from another, you know, subculture or culture, it's a lot more. There's more to fight for.

[B]

Well, this is kind of the polygamous and the polygamous nightmare, isn't it? In these societies that, like. I mean, I guess the flip side of it is the kind of polygonist dream which, you know, I'm sure a lot of guys have of, you know, you get the harem or whatever. It's kind of what people say about the American dream. Everyone wants to be the millionaire, but maybe it's actually harder than people appreciate to work your way up. So in these polygonous societies, typically what you get is really like one big man who has a harem and lots of wives. But then, of course, in Islamic society, traditionally, I think they interpret the Quran as meaning you can have up to four wives if you can afford them. But even if you have the top, I think I worked at some of the numbers in my article, but even if you have the top 10 or 20 guys with four wives and imagine there's equal numbers of men and women in the society, you very quickly develop a situation in which the bottom, I don't know, 10 or 20% of men just have no wives at all. And so historically now, it doesn't necessarily mean they don't have any sexual activity because there's things like porn or whatever. But in the past, it basically means they have no. Well, they have much less sexual activity and they have basically no ability to start a family. And so then that's a recipe for instability.

[A]

Jihad.

[B]

Jihad. Yeah. Well, exactly. I mean, these energies that the men have in them.

[A]

No pussy makes a man very angry. It's true.

[B]

What was this?

[A]

No. Will turn a man crazy. Yes. It's like in the Shining. No work no, too much work, no play, makes Jack crazy. Whatever. I don't know, It's. It's just a fact.

[B]

Well, it seems to be the case that. And this is something that scientists have studied men, when they have. When they settle down and when they start having kids. This sounds like a kind of Internet meme or something. I'm not disparaging them at all, but it seems to be the case that testosterone drops. Yeah, the testosterone goes down. Right. And that has advantages in terms of, you know, you're trying to look at help looking after the baby and you're trying to be nice to your family, et cetera. Hopefully you're not too much raging against your family or beating them up or something.

[A]

Yeah, or going out and trying to find other mates as it wants.

[B]

Yeah, that too. That too. You probably don't need to do that so much anymore. Right. So the societies which have the most testosterone erotically are probably the more unstable ones. And that's why I put in the article, like, I think there's this stuff online about how we need to be like the Romans and be manly again and be a high T society. But actually there I kind of. Well, in a lot of ways, I should point out, disagree with the sort of online. Right. But it's arguable that the Greeks and the Romans were able to be so successful, including militarily, not because they were all tough guys, but because they were able to cooperate with each other more effectively because each of them had a wife and they didn't need to sort of struggle to try and get one.

[A]

Yeah, well, and I think this is how, at least modern sociologists describe dignity culture. Right. Which is that it's more individual, focused on the individual, about living to your standards and not if, you know, if another man slights you, your ego or whatever. It's not about getting back at him through violence, which people from men from honor cultures do, but it's about just living. Living by your morals, I suppose, and your values.

[B]

Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, there's a lot of work recently by sort of experimental sort of anthropologists and sociologists where they do these sort of cooperation games, and they get sort of deep into the way people think about morality. And even when they think nobody's watching them, you know, you can sort of see what they're doing in these games, who they're giving money to, et cetera, and they actually find that, again, it's like Protestants who tend to have this massive guilt complex. We seem to think of Catholics as having more of a guilt complex. But it's something to do with the internalization of this guilt complex that, you know, whatever you do inside, even if you're the only one who knows it, that's still like God still knows that. I think that's kind of deeply embedded in Western, at least the sort of Anglo psychology at this point and other cultures with the shame, you know, it's more of an external process. And so you obviously still get some effects, but they're just not as strong. And actually, I mean, this again is a point where not everything about Western civilization is good. And so some of the ways in which Western cultures are different from other cultures are bad. For example, with that guilt complex and Protestantism comes a higher rate of suicide for Protestants across the world. Even in countries like Australia and Canada where it's not. They're not like the same, exactly the same historical populations as in Europe, but there's still this effect from their inherited culture.

[A]

What about in Japanese culture?

[B]

Yeah, so actually, I'm glad we come back to Japan. I don't have any kind of easy answers.

[A]

I know you were just there.

[B]

Well, that's the thing. Yeah, no, I was there. And actually the last podcast I did on Western Civilization.

[A]

Yeah, I listened, I listened.

[B]

Oh, you did. Okay, good. So Cody Ellingham has a great podcast, mostly about bitcoin, now more about Christianity. But anyway, it was good, good guy, good podcast. I was with him in Kamakura. And it's super interesting to me that, as I say, like, Japan is a society that's very successfully westernized. But there's, I think you maybe gleaned with your interaction with the Japanese tourists. There are ways in which the Japanese are still quite different to Westerners. I think I said in the podcast with Cody, there's this book by Felipe Fernandez, Ermesto Civilizations. He talks about some early modern texts where the Japanese guy says, we're going to modernize Japan. We're going to do all the things that the west does with one exception. We're going to still revere our ancestors. And Fernandez or Mestre kind of says, well, that's kind of the one that you need to get rid of. So, you know, in a sense, I think they've done. And that was really the danger of Japanese history is that they modernized technologically. But then once you get to the imperial period in World War II, it's still incredibly top down and it's still a very kind of a shame culture. And I think that can. That can present dangerous.

[A]

Yeah, I think. I don't know who came up with this sort of taxonomy of face, honor and dignity culture, but they say that, yeah, most Asian cultures are face cultures, so. Yeah, and I wanted to talk about that concept of suicide. You said Protestants. There's a high level of suicide in Protestant cultures. Yeah. What about, I guess, face cultures and Japanese culture? They famously have seppuku.

[B]

That's true. That is true. Yeah, I guess. I mean, from what I read. I can't remember when I read about the Protestant suicide rates being higher, whether that was comparing to other cultures that you tend to find in the west, or whether that was in comparison with Japan, too. But you're quite right that. That. That was a very extreme form of suicide culture also, obviously extending into World War II with kamikaze pilots. So they obviously have it there, too. I mean, it's interesting because also, like, if you go back to ancient Greece, you go like, right to the beginnings of Greek, of the sort of ancient Greek civilization that we know and love. In Homer, those guys are these great warriors and they have a lot of. I mean, and academics used to argue about this, whether it's a shame culture or guilt culture, but it seems to be kind of more like an honor culture of this sort of stereotypical kind of like what Northern Europeans and sort of Austrians, Australian Protestant Australians and Canadians used to think about Greeks and Mediterranean people, that they were all kind of full of braggadocio and, you know, so that kind of thing. So people. Some scholars used to think, well, that's. That's what Homeric culture is. Is like. And maybe that's like an emanation of this sort of Mediterranean mind. But I think it's. It's more likely that that's one phase of Greek civilization. And then once you get a lot of these more galatarian mores kicking in, things change to the extent that the classical Greeks kind of look like modern Europeans in some strange ways. I mean, they're more monogamous than average, they're more literate than average, they're more competitive economically than average, but the societies are more stable. So I kind of see ancient Greece, the Greek miracle, is kind of the first run at the big economic miracle of the industrial revolution coming out of early modern European growth. Interestingly, like Henrik's story about that is how it all depends on Christianity sociologically, not sort of theologically. But I actually think that you can see the Greeks were sort of on the same path, but they did it completely without Christianity. And I think it was just through their egalitarianism.

[A]

So I guess this brings us to this question of Judeo Christian values. How I get it sounds like you would argue that it's not necessarily like a lot of the values we have today aren't necessarily Judeo Christian. They're maybe Greek. Ancient Greek.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, that's my sense. I would also say that Henrik is mostly right that a lot of this stuff came to the west via Christianity. But I would just sort of note that. And this is again, a very obvious thing that I think sophisticated classes have forgotten. Christianity is basically an ancient religion and it emerges out of this kind of joint Greek and Jewish context. But also during the Roman Empire. I mean, that's obvious if you even just go to church on Christmas Day and they read or Christmas Eve and they read a bit about, you know, sent us Caesar Augustus, all that stuff. Right. That's the context. So I think that Christianity was basically the vehicle through which egalitarian Moors from ancient Greece and the Roman world were transmitted to modern Europeans.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And also, I have to say as well, Christianity did tighten things a lot, sometimes again, in ways which weren't ultimately that nice, like with being down on gays. So with the. With the monogamy thing, Greek, classical, Greek, male, you can only have one wife, but you can pretty much do what you want with partners of either sex out of the household. And then, you know, a few centuries later, you have to be completely faithful. And then you get to the point where, you know, the Christian ideal is like, you know, Jimmy Carter said that thing in his interview with Playboy. They said, have you ever cheated? And he said, in my. In my thoughts, many times, you know, he was beating himself up against thinking about it. That's Protestantism.

[A]

Can you go into the, like, Greek Jewish history, I suppose, of like, Well, I guess First Temple Judaism and like, how the tension there.

[B]

I'm not. I don't actually know my Jewish history that well, but what were you trying to get at with this?

[A]

Well, I guess like how. I mean, that Christianity came from the early Israelites, the first Jews. And I heard you talking briefly about, you know, how. Well, this is more Roman Empire, I suppose, but like, how, you know, the Roman Empire was trying to impose certain things on the Jews. Like, for example, you know, just put up a statue of whatever emperor, like, no big deal. And the Jews were like, no, no, no, no, no, we're not doing that. And you were talking about orthopraxia versus Orthodox doxia, I believe.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, that's basically. So that, again, is, I think, a negative aspect of Christianity. I have to say it's one of the reasons that Christianity has been so successful. And I also think it's one of the reasons that Judaism has survived so impressively despite kind of waves of. Waves of prosecution. So both Judaism and Christianity just in a descriptive or technical sense, are kind of intolerant. You know, in the Ten Commandments, it says your God is a jealous God. You're not meant to put up raven icons of other gods. Old Testament tells the story again and again. These kings in Judea or Israel started worshiping BAAL or some other God, and then things didn't go well for them. So as a Jew or Christian, you just can't do something else as well. There was none of this sort of modern syncretism where you can be like a Christian or even a Buddhist. So in the ancient world, I mean, that was not chill. I mean, because everyone else in the ancient world was super chill about religion because they had this thing that used to be called Interpretatio Romana, where basically, like, if I go to your region and you have a sky God that throws thunder and you have a temple, the done thing there is you go to the bloody temple and you sacrifice to the sky God. And if you want, you can call it tomato Tomato. If you're Greece, you can call it. If you're Greek, you can call it Zeus. If you're Roman, you can call it Jupiter. But it's basically the. I mean, it's actually kind of technically the same because it's all sort of one Eastern European tradition anyway. But even if it's kind of looks a bit of a weird thunder or sky God, you just sacrifice to it anyway, because who cares? And it's kind of probably one of probably the weird barbarians that you sort of live in this area. That's probably what they think Zeus is. So just go with it. And then, as I say, like, once you get. You get the Romans interacting with the Jews, then you get this sort of request of can you pay cult to the emperor like everybody else? And suddenly it's like, no, we won't do that. And then, you know, there's a series of Jewish revolts and the Romans crushed the Jews. So. But then Christianity, I mean, what about before?

[A]

Yeah, okay.

[B]

No, no, just. I was going to say, I mean, the story afterwards is, you know, Christianity is severely kind of persecuted in the early Empire, and then ultimately it sort of takes over. And I do think that in a way, part of the. Part of the. Part of the secret of his success, people admired Christians for Sort of holding onto their face and holding onto their faith in the face of prosecution. But I also think that in terms of like the survival of Christianity as a meme, as a sort of cultural idea, it really helps that, like, once you're in, you're in, you know, And Islam kind of does this even more strongly. Like you can't be an apostate, otherwise, you know, you're in deep trouble. So these things help these.

[A]

And it's easy to get in.

[B]

It's what?

[A]

It's easy to get in. Unlike Judaism.

[B]

Christianity, you mean, Or Islam.

[A]

Christianity. And Islam. Islam. Even easier. You say the Shahada a few times.

[B]

Yeah. What the Shahada is that the Allah is the true God and Muhammad is his prophet.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Essentially that.

[B]

I probably just converted to Islam without realizing it.

[A]

Exactly. Whoops. Take it back, take it back.

[B]

But yeah, no, you're right. And there's a. I think. I don't know much about Judaism, to be honest. People can correct me, but I understand that like, you know, Orthodox Judaism, you still basically can't convert into it. And there's like more liberal styles of Judaism, you can. But I think like among the sort of learned rabbis, there's still a debate, you know, whether it's. Whether it's kosher.

[A]

You can definitely, definitely convert, but it takes years. Yeah, that's super hard and it's difficult. And I know from Tom Holland's book, Christianity seemed like a good option to many Jews at the time because it was. Or other. Other people's. It was easier. Look, you don't have to get circumcised. You can eat pork, you can do this, you can do that. It was a better option. I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than that.

[B]

Yeah. And I should say, to balance out what I said about Christian intolerance, it's also like a universal religion. So I think that's the point at which it's able. And Tom Holland stresses this. There's that passage in Paul where he says, like, henceforth there shall be no Jew or Greek. Just, I can't remember, just Christian or something. But anyway, the point is, like, it's not about these tribal affiliations or national affiliations, it's like a universal religion.

[A]

Yeah, but you did mention before Greco, Jewish, I don't know, civilization or something like that. Like, my interest is, you know, these Judeo Christian values, for example, like a lot of the main. The Ten Commandments, for example. Right. That comes from the First Testament. How are those essentially at first Jewish values? How do Those entwine with the Greek values of the time. Were they very similar? Were they compatible with each other?

[B]

Yeah, that's. That's a very complicated thing. I mean, it'd have to be a lot more learned in sort of early Christianity to really answer this in a satisfactory way. But I would say that. I would say, like, you know, if you really just look at the Bible and what Jesus is talking about, it doesn't really support my thesis that, well, that there's a blend of Greek egalitarianism. I think maybe the Greek egalitarianism gets in. Like, once Christianity starts to spread in the Greek sort of oikumene, the habited sphere, where they're Greek city states, then I think you get more of this blend between city state values and Christianity. But so it's also disputed. You know, it's been disputed for centuries. People have been burned at the stake for this. Probably to what extent Christ was a Jew or to what extent he was there to kind of fulfill the Jewish prophecies and sort of carry on Judaism, or to what extent he was there to kind of revolutionize Judaism. And he says contradictory things. I think he says at one point, I'm not here to change the law one jot. It's all the same. But then of course, they ask him what the most important bit of the law is, and he basically says, love your neighbor. That's by far the most important thing. And it's hard to see that as at least a change, as not at least a change in emphasis. So it's very complicated. But yeah, I would definitely say that after a certain point, you get this sort of city state, egalitarian culture blending with this really this new kind of mystery religion from the. What the Romans would have seen as kind of the distant east, the fringe of their empire. And that kind of goes. It doesn't quite go global. It just takes over the Mediterranean in Europe. And this is again, if you want to come Back to Nisha McSweeney's book about the west, she kind of says, oh, Western culture, you know, Greco Roman culture just sprays. I think she has a phrase where she says Greco Roman influence sprays in all directions chaotically. And I'm like, no, not quite sprayed in different, interesting directions in some ways. But the main river of influence was clearly from Greece and Rome to medieval Europe to Renaissance Europe to modern Europe.

[A]

Yeah. Do you think it's right to say that this part of the world, the Levant and the nearest, like Eastern Europe or the Mediterranean, that sort of region produced the most or has had the most influence on modern global culture in the world as we know it. Is that the most influential region or is it just the most influential to me because I live in the West?

[B]

This is a interesting question. I mean, it's kind of hard to quantify it, I guess. I mean, I suppose I have to think about demography here. I mean, I think, you know, so many of the people alive at present have probably been more influenced by Confucius because they live in China. Although, you know, Christianity is making great straight strides in China at the moment. I think, I think that it was more. I think the Western tradition which came out of Judaism and Christianity has been more influential on world history. Just in the sense that once you get into this phase of human history, you know, the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution happens in England starts to spread, that is arguably one of the. It's arguably the most important thing that's ever happened because the differences in living standards between post industrial revolution world and the pre industrial revolution world, just so dramatic. And to the extent that Christianity contributed to that, you know, it's been hugely influential. Of course other things contributed to that too, including skepticism about Christianity and about classics and things like that and empirical research. But yeah, I mean, I think. And that's why there's been so many books written about, you know, how did England get to the Industrial Revolution first? Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Europe rather than Asia? But I do think that a non negligible part of that is the religion that had been building for centuries.

[A]

Okay, a few final questions. I want to know your top book recommendations. I feel like maybe you'd recommend Dominion. I know a lot of people recommend Dominion.

[B]

I like this is my book recommendations about the west. Right. Not just in general.

[A]

Yeah, no, no, like about this topic.

[B]

Yeah, about this topic. Okay. Because otherwise I'd give you a whole classics course. But you know, reading this but. Or your, your viewers, I think, yeah. Tom Holland's Dominion I actually read a couple few years ago, I read Tom Holland's Dominion and Joseph Hendrix, the Weirdest People in the World around the same time. Yes, and, and I was already thinking I'd written my Colette series about the four part series about Western Suit before that and that was focused more on high culture and traditions. And I don't sort of repudiate any of that. But those two books really kind of changed my thinking and led me to think about family structure as one of the main drivers. I think Tom Holland's book is more readable and exciting and I think Joseph Henriks has more data in it. So it's up to you which one you go for first.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

There's a ton of good books. I mean, I think that. So there's a lot of old style, kind of, some people would now say chauvinistic, but I don't necessarily agree. Books about Western civilization, like Victor Davis Hanson, who's the rare example of a right wing classicist, even though he's retired now. But those books are still really worth reading. Carnage and Culture about, you know, key battles in the Western world. You might not agree with everything he says, but very, very well written. Excite, you know, very engagingly written. I'd say that a couple of classics on the sort of view that it's all about geography. The difference we haven't even talked about, but it has been a big view. Tierra Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel. Real classic. You have to read that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And along along the same lines. Ian Morris, why the West, Why the West Rules for now. It's also like a really big picture history. So those should. Yeah, those should keep you busy. Cause they're all big tomes of like, you know, several hundred pages, but. Yep.

[A]

Nice. Okay, that covers the next five years of reading at the rate I read it. Thank you so much. I. Yeah. Last question I wanted to ask was, after all, you know, everything we've talked about, everything we've learned from this fascinating conversation, if I do say so myself. Where does this lead us from? What you know about. You probably get tired of getting asked this question, but everything you know about history, about empires, the rise and fall of empires, you know, about how empires go to hell in a handbasket and then from it comes, you know, egalitarian societies. What's. Where are we now and what do we think might be coming?

[B]

I mean, actually, if you read the first few chapters of Ian Morris's book that I just recommended, he kind of points out that, yeah, you know, in history you have these big growth periods and then there's a collapse. There's a big growth period and there's a collapse and you look at the species, the same thing happens and they grow in population, they collapse and eventually they all go extinct. And so then you think, oh dear, because this might be the huge last surge upward in human prosperity and then we're all going to blow ourselves up with nuclear bombs or something. I don't know. I don't think so. I think that, you know, the systems that we've built up are pretty good. And I think that we're going to endure, you know, as a global civilization. I think with regard to the West, I think it's going to be really interesting. The main question that's really interesting for me is basically if you agree with Henrik and others that a lot of this came out of Christianity, a lot of what made the west unique and what made the west successful and powerful came out of Christianity, to what extent can we keep that going? Can we remain sort of modern and economically dynamic, et cetera, and egalitarian once people stop believing in Christianity? Because that does seem to be happening. Some Christians and others will tell you religious people have higher birth rates, but basically in the modern Western countries, just faith has been declining for decades. And so the big question for me is will we in the west and other people in the world who've adopted our mores be able to keep up the same dynamism and things that we really like? I really like, like democracy and liberalism while being less Christian than we have been in the past.

[A]

Fascinating. Yep. Something I've thought about as well as a. As a non religious person myself. Okay, well, thank you so much, James. I know it's late for you and I've got to get into some work, but thank you so much.

[B]

Thank you so much.

[A]

I think we should do it again. We've got so much more to discuss.

[B]

Indeed. Indeed.

[A]

Okay, thank you.