UNS siloed podcast is produced by University FM elevating the stories of your institution hello this is Greg LeBlanc and I'm here today with Victor Davis Hansen who is a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University also um ameritus professor at um Cal State Fresno also uh teaching at Hillsdale College um and the author of I guess what 24 books I mean I've lost count yeah so that's about right the latest one is called um the dying citizen um how Progressive Elites tribalism and globalization or destroying the idea of America and then I think maybe your second book it's the oldest one I have here is called um the Western uh way of War infantry battle in Classical Greece which I remember reading gosh maybe 25 years ago or so yeah um at least and um this one here I've got I've only got a couple with me uh who killed Homer MH co-authored the demise of classical education recovery of Greek wisdom and then a couple Classics like soul of battle and uh Carnage and culture uh welcome Victor thank you for having me great now I look I think this this latest book I mean over the years I think you have um your writing has um evolved uh from a primary emphasis on on History to uh perhaps a bit more emphasis on current affairs and and the temporary state of of America but but I don't think that you know the latter has been missing from your writing at any point because even in the early days right you were emphasizing the the importance of classical learning classical education and um familiarity with the ideas of the Greeks to um what it means to be an American and what it means to be a citizen so um Do You See uh your this book The the dying citizen I mean as drawing together those those strands because when you talk about sort of the the death of the citizenry in America you know a lot of it is um connected to uh the the education yeah that people receive in our culture well I had a general rule um that for every three books I wrote on history I would write one on the AL app ation of History to contemporary Affairs so in the early days that entailed books on farming Fields without dreams the land is everything and then later it was about the problems in Classics so I core offered the bonfire of the humanities or who killed Homer and then more recently it's been how can Classics uh impact I wrote a book on trump it was called actually how Trump won but the the basic book editors felt that that was too um what's the word conditional they wanted a more muscular even though it wasn't a track necessarily for Trump uh but they were right it's it was a bestseller so I can't complain but and then I wrote uh a big book on World War II for B I had a four book contract with Basics so I did World War II and I just finished a book called the end of everything it's about the demise of societies through War throughout history utter annihilation of culture and then I did the dying citizen but so that was just a general principle I had but on the dying citizen I wanted to emphasize that citizenship is very rare in history it's usually either the the person ruled or is either a member of a tribal organization or they're a mere resident or they a subject or a surf or a slave but the idea that a citizen is empowered to self-govern and to create the conditions under which government exists by the consent of the government really doesn't exist anywhere outside the Mediterranean or before the 7th Century 8th to 7th Century in Greece and then with fits and starts that tradition is carried on to the Roman Republic it doesn't really die at the local level in the Roman Empire although it does surely in the national government it's continued in the uh East for a thousand years under the byzantines and then by that time with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the Renaissance is in full starting and the enlightenment follows and it's a European or Western idea and then in the great achievement of the 20th century especially in the post World War II was the westernization that is the application of citizenship to cultures that embraced it whether through the coercion of defeat or willingly and that so I wanted to stress that point that it's a very fragile concept and it's it's very tenuous because it it requires some knowledge on the part of the citizenry they have to be empowered both economically they have to be economically viable they can't um they they lack the romance or the dependency of the poor and yet the In classical times they were praised because they don't have the desire to have inside private agreements or coer people in government through their wealth so it was always considered the most stable and should be the largest segment of society and I wanted to to iterate that and then if that precondition exists or if it's s simultaneously then you have a functional uh consensual Society if it doesn't and the middle class starts to erode or gets smaller or the the underclass that's dependent gets larger or the the overclass gets more powerful whether in numbers are defined by wealth and then the middle class disappears and that happened during Alexander's the Macedonian helenistic regnum it happened at the national level and in the Roman Empire it's happened in Europe as we know during World War I World War II and before that and it can happen again it's there's a lot of uh Latin America and South South America seems to be losing confidence as parts of Asia are but it it does depend on an economically and I wanted to reiterate that in the dying citizen that that's why some of the chapters were you know peasants rather than a middle class or residents rather than fully developed citizens so if few Americans wages until 2017 had been stagnant as you know as a business professor for 12 years the age at which people buy homes has been delayed the age at which they get married the age at which they have children the number of children and all of this I think reflect some economic uncertainty um the the peculiar I guess you'd call it the singular or the exceptional prerogatives of citizenship have been adulterated or weakened it used to be that you could clearly Define a citizen from a non-citizen but both in numbers uh and in responsibilities and rights but we have the largest number of people living in the United States both as a percentage and in sheer numbers that are not citizens whether they're green card legal green card holders or illegal there's about 50 million of them California 27% of the state was not born in California so it's an enormous uh Challenge and then it's hard to know what a citizen can do and what a non-citizen can't do or can do they they they Blended together so a non-citizen now can serve in the military a non-citizen can obviously go back and forth across the southern border without a passport a non-citizen can receive Federal benefits a non-citizen in some places in Massachusetts and the Bay Area can actually run and hold office and Schoolboard elections and as you know there's a movement now to let residents who are not citizens to vote even and that's the the only thing that I can see that distinguishes a citizen from a noncitizen are two or three things one is holding office one is openly and and transparently voting in a national election and the other is uh to go back and forth from the United States through an authorized legal fashion to another country that's but that's even that is uh I know a lot of people here illegally in where I live that fly to Mexico all the time or fly to Canada and they have no problem you know they're here illegally they have special uh driver's license that facilitates that or they use Mexican passports even though they're here illegally so it's hard to know and I think that it's it's eroding further the concept of exclusivity and citizenship well you divide the threats to citizenship into two major groupings one you call kind of the the the pre-modern or the you know pre pre citizen threats and the other are sort of this the more recent kind of postmodern or post citizen uh threats and you know as an historian I found the the first ones um you know particularly interesting right because you you highlight that kind of the the default condition of of humanity right is one of uh peasantry and and tribalism and uh and what what what I found particularly fascinating is that the this notion of of tribalism which for most of our history was considered to be um something you know primitive something that we wanted to get away from is sort of reappeared in sort of progressive guys um so you know how is is it is it because we we don't understand the the contrast between these things and the other things that we value um you know or I mean is is it is it because we fail to understand this this threat or is it that you know people do do understand it but they're not particularly worried about it I think it's a mixture I know that doesn't sound sound like a a muscular answer but I think it's a mixture of a lot of things and one of them surely is people are not aware of how a racially or tribally or ethnically or sexually blind mertic system has resulted in the wealth and security and success in North America Visa other places I was in libia um in 2007 and as I was I had two minders in the Gaddafi and every Mile in this oil exporting country we would hit a pothole and we'd have to get out and move the they were 2 or 3 feet deep and I'd always ask my Libyan minders why how can this happen that you got you're just fleshing oil and oil revenues and yet you can't fix the roads and they they said something that was remarkable but I've never forgotten and that is we hire our first cousins and what he meant was that we have a lot of tribal affiliations despite being libyans and we don't hire the best person to run the Department of Public Works we and and what they were trying to say is that you and America don't do that and so that's one thing we don't understand the uh we're starting to when you see for just to take one example the recent Titan tragedy of the undersea Explorer and when the CEO in that Prem morem interview they ask him what was unique about he mentioned that he used a new carbon fiber metall likee replacement for the traditional harden steel but he said we don't hire old white guys with military experience from the Navy we don't want submariners we want young diverse exciting people and what he was really saying was I have excluded a traditional font of knowledge people 30 40 years who deal with undersea exploration and the dangers of it and I don't want them and I don't want them based on their their gender and their race and so when you start to do that then it can you can get good people but you it's it's there's no meritocracy yet left and there's going to be consequences from that and it can I think what's happening in our society now it's not the English Department it's starting to be United pilot training programs it's starting to do medical school admissions it's starting to do surgery teams we're not using mraic and why are we doing it more gerly to your question is I think there's two or three reasons the most obvious is that we're into a reparatory stage so the the the the Martin Luther King Jr idea was that we were going to hold responsible the majority population who drafted the Declaration in the Constitution to their word they said all men are created equal under God in the Declaration and the Constitution doesn't mention race it has one part about 3- fifths Clause with former slaves but even there it didn't mention black slaves but it's and that was a a technical bargain to stop that an early Civil War where the South wanted representation for slaves but not freedom for them the north said we're not going to give you full representation and they conceded that point but the point I'm making is that once we had the Civil Rights Movement from say 65 to 75 and then from 75 we had it earlier but full-fledged half century of affirmative action we had we had pretty much legally and de facto created equality of opportunity and I think at the next stage people said well we don't have parody and then we started to get into very controversial territory because we started to get into culture human nature individual and we said the fact that particular groups do not are not represented in desirable salaries or positions is an indictment of de facto racism or it's disp portional we didn't apply it across the board obviously if somebody looked at the NBA or the NFL or the post office they would see uh people of color marginalized people over represented but that was considered okay because because these had been bastions of Prior discrimination and so that led I think after the George Floyd and the lockdowns and all of that trauma to what we are now in Repertory that it's okay to practice systematic racial discrimination not just to make up for prior discrimination but to ensure a parity or what we call Equity equality of res and that means if it's separate dorms at stord predicated by race if it's choosing your future Roommate by race if it's a workshop by race if it's a safe space or it's a separate graduation ceremony that is okay because the the aim is so Noble to create us to create parody and then the final thing is who who promotes this who promotes the new tribalism is it the working class in East Palestine Ohio is it my town of 95% mexican-americans or first no it tends to be primarily a CL class uh phenomenon of wealthy by Coastal not that I'm picking on the coast but that's where the universities and the money tend to predominate V to be the middle and wealthy and privileged minorities and I don't know what the motivation is you can say that the former sees it as a job enhancement or or it's affirmative action to somebody like a Don Lemon or I don't know that is something that he has to support on Al Sharpton or on the other hand if you're a very very affluent white liberal and you feel terrible about racial relations especially the laress and manificent that you've achieved in your life then it becomes a psychological mechanism to support affirmative action for Elites or reparatory admissions at Stanford as long as you can navigate it around it so there's no empathy for people people of the middle or lower classes that don't have that ability it's primarily an elite idea that I'm going to use race as a barometer uh to select people and subconsciously I have ways for my children and myself and my friends to to get around that and the people who can't are going to pay for it and I've and that's what I found is the is a great driver of it and is as long as you didn't why it's being endangered now is the woke is kind of like a Franken sadian monster that is turning on its creators so if you're a very liberal person in the Bay Area let's say you make $500,000 a year you supported all of this but you had the money or the influence or sat camp or prep or you knew a Dean at Stanford you could get around affirmative action but not reparatory admission so if they're letting 20% of the incoming class of 202 6 n that identify as white I don't know how many are white that identify as mix but according to their own statistics about 20% and out of that comes legacies and athletes and the children of Administrators just to take one example and there's about 9% white males of the incoming class then there's not enough openings you can eliminate the entire white working class that is amra that got into Stanford I'm just taking Stanford as example with straight and perfect SAT scores but if you eliminate the SAT which they have done as a requirement and they de facto eliminated the comparative value of individual GPA from high school so my high school where I graduate Selma High School's 4.0 was considered not nearly as competitive as po Alto that's out the window then there's not enough room for all of these supporters and what's happened the last two years you just get when you speak to groups in the Bay Area you get inundated with private conversations afterwards my child did not get into Princeton my child did not get into Stanford they had a perfect sat they had a perfect and you always try to tell them well under these new systems they're not ever going to get in again and that changes their whole it's remarkable I've met maybe 50 people and they're very angry about it it's almost as if it's the academic counterpart part to the homeless problem or Inner City crime in San Francisco they never thought that homeless people would camp out in in very good neighborhoods or they never felt that they could go down to Union Square and have their car broken into and call the police with no response because of defunding the police or or different and so that's a long windy explanation but it's primarily driven by Elites and it's a response I think it accelerated in the last 2 or 3 years from uh proportional representation to a tribal idea that it's going to be Repertory and one final thing it it's very funny how we took we used to talk about in the University race class gender race class gender but classes disappeared when you hear that Mantra it's usually race and gender and this was very brilliant on the part of the left because uh class is a mobile fluid Concept in a a very successful capitalist Society one generation does not guaranteed necessarily that they're all going to be in the class of their parents I can tell you from my own family that's true both positively and negatively but race is permanent if you fixate on it so if you say race is the the entire definition of deprivation bias racism uh and not class then it's it's immutable it's forever and you can say that LeBron James is a victim op is a Vic Megan marle is a victim because they are dealing with you don't have if you can't identify a a particular phenomenon you put an adjective in front of it systemic Insidious racism and they're dealing with that even though they're very very wealthy and then they become a permanent constituency of this Mo tribal movement in a way that I to go back to the East Palestine a guy on a forklift in East Palestine that's might be white who's never gone to college who's gone to Afghanistan or whose father died in u the first Gulf War whatever he's not a victim on the basis of his race and that means that you don't have to worry about whether you're going to lose a constituency to Upward mobility and that that's really radical change in this country to just fixate on Race rather than class especially from the Democratic party but the these two things you talk about right the inequality that results in the bulk of the population being potentially described as as peasants or the peasantry and then this other move towards tribalism I mean they don't it seems like those two things are unique to the to the modern experience right because you know you talk about when Alexander um built out the Macedonian Empire and sort of the you know the post Augustine Empire right I mean those both resulted in this stratification of society right but they didn't seem to result in the same type of of tribalism right so it it doesn't seem like there's an iron logic here well what's I think there is but what's really disturbing about it is if you say read the first introduction to ucd's history he talks about about a pre- citystate society and what he describes as a tribal society when you read tacitus or hero they're all talking about Societies in which a person's primary Allegiance is not to the state or not to Citizens but to people who look like themselves or who talk like themselves and so it was a great discovery of Athens under Solon for example around 600 BC that people gave up their Regional and tribal allegiances and they mixed the they call them the trites but they mixed how people voted on how people uh organize politically so you would have uh an affinity for someone who didn't like look like you but maybe wouldn't even live with you would be in the same political group as far as your representation went they were deliberately trying to break down tribal TI and that had been the mark of civilization that you that other people outside the West didn't even conceive of this but people in the west were trying to not so much racially in Europe that that was a accomplishment of the United States I think much more successfully but they were trying to break down ties that were natural and therefore almost pernicious and they were to trying to evolve into the nation state so that I think you can pretty much say that until recently in in the west that was the ideal and then I I think for a variety of reasons I just discussed people decided that that was not an effective remedy that no matter how much people gave up their tribal affiliations there was always going to be racism it was Insidious it was systemic you had to have special people with special training to spot it to remind society that it existed it would never end it was Perpetual when Sandra de o Connell say we're going to have affirmative action and obviously in 20 years we won't need it it when she supported it she never in her right mind thought that it would intensify so it is intensifying now and it's tribalism is very scary because we're starting to get a geographical Force multiplier as people sort of sort out by regions red States blue States and where 4 million people are moving per year and that has some anous ramifications we saw during the Civil War if you if you create a large white and maybe Asian South and Far West other than the Pacific Coast or Midwest Visa a blue Eastern Corridor and a blue Western Corridor maybe around the great lakes and around you know Austin or somewhere but and they are mostly the white population is a minority population and this culture is very different that that's not going to end well in the United States and you can already see see when people talk well there's never been more hatred there's never been more po po part of it is this emphasis on geography and race that were separating and I don't see any good coming out of it I don't know very many people who are talking like Martin Luther King about the content of their character anymore to do that earns you a lot of riew I know that two closest people the last 20 years that I would eat with weekly were Shelby steel and Tom Soul at Hoover institution and most of our conversations were about how they were ostracized or cancelled by the the liberal Community especially the white liberal Community but also the black community because they were ecumenical ists that believed in the American idea that even people who had been descended from slaves were going to reach on their own ability and equality of opportunity and that's all they needed when the when the founders were discussing the American project I mean they you know held up this idea of Athenian democracy and citizenship as the you know as the the the ultimate goal but they they were worried that this could not survive in you know a large country and indeed you know it hadn't really survived hither to in in a large country no I mean you're absolutely right they wrote so was it I mean did we just outlive I mean is it just a miracle that it it you know was able to has been able to last as long as it has I mean is is it sort of ultimately it doomed is it unrealistic I I don't know but if you read what say Jefferson and teville said teville writing In 1832 democracy in American and uh Jefferson writing on his daybook or letters he said it won't work when you pile everybody up into a city and teville said that there it was kind of pre Frederick Jackson Turner there was a safety valve and that was this huge continent where people went West or they had 40 acres in a mule or they were there were ways to be self- sustaining and economically viable for a large number of people there was no primogenitor there was no surom as they been in Europe and so when people were disenchanted or they were unable to participate and the body politic they could always have a mechanism to be self-sufficient autonomous and Rural and and of course Aristotle in the politics talks about why the rural democracy or the idea that people have a physical component and they don't he calls them a agura loungers they're not just sitting in the city and and absorb the politics it becomes incidental rather than essential to who they are and that's a a very powerful strain and when you look at the United States today and you look at the number of people who live in a rural environment are much less I think 1% of the population is involved in farming and in addition to that I uh the number of people who are self-employed which is very important is shrinking I I think one out of three people works for some sort of government so when you get a dependent class an urban class uh it's much more volatile and it's much less skeptical and it's much more divorced from nature and these were things that classical authors from cisero and KO to earlier to fuses and Aristotle said were essential so and uh this you can see it with social media what they were worried about is this heraus said uh at one point it's easier to get 30,000 Athenians to vote for a risky operation than it is a few oligarchs in Sparta and what he meant was these waves that we see with hysteria whether you know we we get in these fads that we saw it with a lockdown and the wokeism and but we also see it with canceling people or sudden phenomenon that all we suddenly uh Embrace nobody really if we had this conversation 10 years ago nobody even though there was artificial intelligence it wasn't the big thing or the transgendered movement was an old ancient idea that was valid that there were people that had various calibrations of transvestism transsexual but it was never suggested that3 of% of the population that was clinically diagnosed would leap up to you know 5% claiming 10% in some some surveys so there there's that and this bothered people in Antiquity that an urban radically Democratic Society with check without real checks on popular expression could be very Mercurial and dangerous and and not sustainable we're the world's largest Dem uh the longest surviving democracy and there's no guarantee that that we're Contin that we are to continue and yeah we're we're not going to go back to having more than you know one or two% of the population working the land right we're not going to have citizen soldiers who fight you know all the you know periodically all the way through old old age and and we're not you know we're not going to have a world where our legislature can vote on every single you know every single piece of of governmental action but I think there were things we could do uh for example during the lockdowns why in the world when I went into my local town and Mr Mister I'm taking a name so I won't identify people Mr and Mrs Lopez's flower shop or Mr and Mrs Garcia's shoe store were shut down and they went broke or their restaurant but I could go to Walmart and buy shoes and flowers with impunity or Target or Home Depot and so I understand the idea that they're more efficient but we really enacted policies that were punitive to middle class uh autonomous citizens and then we don't have any Civics program you know I I grew up I think in I think I could say that the the schools I went to high school before high school were about 10% Mexican am uh White and 90% Mexican Amer but we did things that would get a person fired we we all had to Every Morning Call on another student to challenge them this is first second third grade God Bless America America the Beautiful I say that you we're going to read uh Sing America beautiful and we all had to sing We had a repertoire all of us of about 30 songs and then we had red letter dates every every day we'd have to the teacher would have on the board today is the day of D-Day today is the day of Lexington and con nobody I as a teacher of 40 years if I said Lexington and Concord or I said Shiloh nobody knows what they are but people actually had a rudimentary knowledge of the elements of citizenship and their history and their protocols and their songs and their Traditions uh nobody ever thought John you know nobody ever thought that uh beautiful dreamer or or any of these songs were necessarily utopian or perfect but nobody in when we would read or study music nobody said well who was the oppressor and who was the oppressed and art is not for art and so a lot of the reference of civic education that can substitute for the earlier deao rural autonomy and cohes eess are gone and they're gone by a construct we just don't we're so hypercritical and we're so bifurcated and we've kind of adopted a Marxist view of History where it's It's Not Tragedy it's melodrama where it has to be 50% victims and I guess 80% victims and 20% victimizers and we all have to fit those categories and so we're kind of a fossilized aifi um as far as education goes and the people who really advocate for civic education are usually attacked very and the universities have I I think they're in their last manifestation they're they're not working and um you have a 1.8 trillion in student debt and the universities have no moral hazard as far as backing their own loans which might give them some fiscal responsibility to get students out in four years with a streamlined curriculum the students are paying a large amount of money for Majors that are not valuable or competitive so the number the percentage of students uh 18y olds that are going to college is gradually starting to level off and Decline and the debt is going up and the Public's view of universities has gone way down well I think some of the critics would say that one of those uh useless degrees might be one in in class although there aren't whole large there aren't a whole lot of them coming out of the universities now you know and and you you in the book uh who killed Homer you you did say that K through 12 education is probably you know more important than University education but but in the book um you focus on University education and you offer up a very different vision of what university education uh could look like and it's it's almost unrecognizable really um and and uh in particular you know you also talk about the the discipline of of Classics and and you say that you know um that uh just just like um was it aso's Eagle right uh the profession basically is killed by an arrow made from its own feather um do do you think that the the decline of Classics and the decline of liberal arts education are the same things I mean are they is that the same story basically two different chapters in the same story absolutely Classics is an INT intensification of a history or literature major but it's the foundation of it and it had a a much greater burden because it required her centered on two difficult languages which you can become an English major or a history major without that as an undergraduate but there same thing there they were the idea that you had a reverence for the past you saw it as I said earlier tragedy you didn't go back and try to use the standards of the present to judge people in the past necessarily you made moral judgments but that wasn't the intent of History per se uh in addition through the use of literature and historical examples and writing and discussing and debating you develop oral fluency you learn how to write grammatically correct English and stylistically engaging English you thought you were inductive you didn't didn't go into a class where the professor said you know if you say this particular gender is evil that the subtext is and then you you deduced examples that prove that I know the left says that well that was it was biased in the past but I don't think it was to the same degree it is now it was inductive and I can remember being at Stanford University with a faculty of left-wing professors in graduate school all of them were and yet if you ask me today to go back to those 10 or 12 many of them were Europeans at stand for professors of Greek and Latin in ancient history and literature and asked me what their particular politics were I wouldn't really know I had an idea they were vaguely left but they didn't bring it into the classroom and as someone from a rural who' never really been very much um and was not as sophisticated as they were in terms of music and opera or going to Symphony in San Francisco or speaking fluent French and I was treated very well and they we were we were probably not aligned politically but it was not an issue there was no political message it was the message was you signed up for this we didn't forc you to get a PhD in Classics half of you are going to FL flunk out the other half only half of that half is going to get a job but we guarantee you that if you do the work you will be able to read and write and master for the rest of your life you will be an empirical thinker and you will have skills that no one else has that was their mission statement basically and we we we charactered that in who killed Homer that on the one hand there were Phil philologists that weakened them because they were not committed undergraduate education they were sort of esot in the carols all day but the reaction to that was way overboard from the fuk odans in those days it was Da Doan Fuko that were postmodern post structural but what I'm getting at is I look at people that came out of that system today people especially I don't agree with politically and I admire them a great deal because they're it's kind of an age difference if I see somebody over the age of 50 with a PhD or ba I I assume they have certain skill sets that was not transmitted to the Next Generation and and I think that's pretty much and now of course in Classics a lot of departments like Princeton have have have abolished the Greek language requirement you can major in Classics without knowing Greek or Latin on the idea that it was too exclusionary well you talk about the PHD programs as essentially you know squeezing out any big thinkers yeah they did um and you know I mean that seems like that's not that's not a critique that would be limited to to Classics I mean that's something that would apply to a lot of different disciplines right yeah I think that was a problem with the university we just mentioned the obvious ones in passing but this American emphasis at least in the humanities on this narrow narrow specialization as if the humanities and history and the social sciences were like science you know that you could get narrower and narrower and narrower and because the narrower you got it wasn't like science or computer engineering although those trines obviously exist it wasn't that I'm going to get so narrow that I'm going to advance this very important topic that's going to change lives you know particular subset of coding or something that you are the world's expert on it was more nobody is ever going to know more about the use of the Optive in xenophon helenica than I do and therefore I'm I'm going to have on question authority and I can write on this narrow topic and get tenure on it and be the world's expert without any idea but what does it mean to these students or or what what's the value of that and the greater if you ask that Professor that just mentioned how far is Athens from Sparta he might not know in fact he wouldn't know or if you ask him can you please tell me why Greek sculpture was painted or why the paron parthan parthan On's metopes uh had a level of detail that you could not see from the ground why was it so important important that they had you know wrinkles on the back of the ear that nobody could see those are issues that people in the public would like to know about for contemporary value but they didn't have the skills or the interest in doing it and that's why they they rendered the society the classical Society very vulnerable to the hard left that came in and said look at these people they're privileged they're Aristocrats they're out of touch we're going to be relevant we're going to remake this into a revolutionary sort of discipline and some of them I mean we have people uh at Princeton who on record that they want to destroy that they think the only way to save Classics is destroy it it's white male aristocratic Anglo pedigree and they are destroying it as as we knew it but they're not they don't have know what to replace it with now you describe in the book you're teaching at uh CSU right uh you were teaching Classics and yes um you said that in that in that classroom right all the the tribalism and differences sort of went away um I was wonder if you could just describe that a bit I mean because that seems to be in a microcosm your vision for what uh good teaching is all about yeah well uh I guess what I'm saying is I was in a unique position because CSU who did not have a Classics part in 1984 they didn't have any Greek they had one Latin class and I was farming with PhD in Classics it was the closest campus so finally I they answered a letter I wrote and said you can teach a Latin class and I I discovered that all the students almost all of them were of the lower middle class Cal State Fresno and 70 60% were Mexican-American 10 or 20% were Mong maybe 4 or 5% were black but we had a lot of Bakersfield toer what we would call the Oklahoma diaspora very poor people that were second or third generation the parents came in the 40s or 30s so how do you sell that cuz I had to have a 100 students or I wouldn't have a job in four classes 25 FTE full-time equivalent and so we we when I started in 21 years we had we got up to uh six positions and we sent over 50 people to League not just Classics law school and then a whole Cadre of people to Business Schools teaching credentials and these were all people first generation college and the way we did it was we constantly were trying to relate this we would say things like it's not easy to learn Latin you have to give 2,000 hours of your time let's think about how many hours you have a year 40 Hour Week times 52 it's almost your whole time Greek is even more more so how are we going to get around this and we have to make special exceptions for all of us and that means if somebody comes up to me and says hey professor Hansen I'm moving my apartment can I borrow your truck yes take it or that means uh would you go to my sister's 16th birthday party and deleno 6 yes I'll go and that was kind of exhausting but we all did that the result was it was very very successful and I can guarantee you that those students who graduated with a Classics degree our Classics minor probably had 20 minors a year and maybe three or to four or five Majors but we had we did have our FTE equivalent so in a Greek mythology or introduction to Humanities of the western world we would get more than 25 in every class so the administration kept fueling and supporting it because it was booming but the to get to your question specifically the result was that there was almost no tribalism everybody had a common interest in the ancient world uh people actually married of different races different tribes different economic levels and uh we had a lot of older people usually older white people maybe 70 and 80 that heard about it and a 4 million person population from Sacramento to Bakersfield they would drive down and take these classes in Greek and Latin especially and they would teach they were very learned they would teach younger people and they got I would see you know an 18-year-old Mexican guy who'd been in a gang walking out with a 90-year-old Jewish woman and moving her in her her wheelchair and talking about the antigon so it was a really wonderful experience the only problem that I had was that if you were going to you you needed somebody to publish and publish a lot of books otherwise these students would not have a reference to get out of Fresno cuz I would speak a lot and I'd always say hey you guys what what would it take to get a kid from Fresno State into Harvard Yale even if he wasn't a minority if he was white male for example and they'd always say well your ba is not competitive you need an MA so I'd have to have them stay an extra year or two and learn French and German or uh we we've got to look at the GRE so I would I I must have spent hours coaching kids in GRE or trying to get them into GRE camps it was a full-time fullservice job but and it kind of got at the age of 49 after 21 years I just couldn't do it anymore it was kind of burnt but it's still in existence and it's very successful that a lot of our former students got phds and now are involved in it now how important is it that you learn the languages I mean you know I studied Greek and Latin and it was it was pretty hard you know I I I could get through either you know 10 pages of zenfon in Greek or I could get through you know 200 pages in Translation and uh and I found that translation was a I could I could I could learn a lot more so you know what is what's the special advantage of reading in in the primary uh language well uh if you take and I guess is there a trade-off I mean in most undergraduate institutions you're probably going to wind up teaching most classes in Translation right yeah now that that's a very good question and I that was something that I never saw so I think what you're talking about is something that I had to make a decision about when I had a student that like Classics would I give them an independent study because I was giving eight or 10 a semester plus four classes would I take a student and say you know what there are seven plays of es seven of Sophocles and 19 ues 19 of Ides and 11 of Aristophanes let's rapid read all of them in English so you have reference of all of them and you can understand the playright their importance or would I take that same student said I'm going to read the antigon and the edifice in Greek with you for the whole year and and and obviously you want both but you pay a price for all the time you and what is what are the benefits the benefits are that you really can't understand the antigon because when you see the vocabulary in Greek you immediately can compare it to other playw writes are using the same vocabulary or the same grammatical uh structure or syntax you can see how hard it is to write uh in say daic hexameter if you're epic poem or I Amic pentameter if you're playright or troes and the the words can suggest nuances of meaning that some impossible to pick up that's true of any language the other thing is the way we teach English today the way I learned it I never learned it properly so when I was 18 I wanted to learn Greek I went to the Yale summer Language Institute and I didn't know what a direct object was I out of Selma High School I didn't know what a u subject and predicate were at least and so how would you know what an accusative or nominative is if you don't know their English equivalents but once I started taking Latin or Greek I just realized how English worked and I I noticed something I notice you don't repeat vocabulary you mix up poly silabico with anglosaxon monosyllabic for variety and you do all of these really rich things in your spoken and written language that you're not aware of I had nobody had ever told me and and so when you try to write like Cicero and that's what we were taught in undergraduate and graduate school um uh it has an effect on English and I know that whatever success I've had in writing I think it's almost all attributable to Classics the ability to organize ideas to write to bring up metaphors or simil sometimes I overdo it but and I think I we trained a lot of people to be very conversent both orally and in uh writing and pro style because of Classics and I don't know where you quite get that but you pay a high price we had a lot of people that were stressed out their parents would come to me and say Professor Hansen my son has to work at night at the service station youve taken a salary away what is this Greek stuff what's what can he do with it I have a welding shop that was a constant and out of that conundrum we count of John Heath who was a brilliant guy at the Santa clar University and he had the same challenges a little a little bit higher socioeconomic group at Santa Clara but that's why we wrote who killed Homer we were trying to remind the profession that it would die if more people didn't uh get interest in it both the general public and the types of books that were being published we would go just for the research for that book we would go to Barnes & Noble and we would look at ancient history if they had it and we would look at all the names and then we would ask ourselves how many of those have phds are working at universities and we noticed that fewer and fewer phds were writing books that people would buy at bar just and they they were journalist or they were Bas in Classics or engl but it was sad because they had just given up on that aspect of their profession that advocacy and now the idea the final irony I guess is that very left-wing people who were supposedly men and women of the people created even even a more esoteric and narrow vocabulary and exclusionary vocabulary by getting rid of Greek and getting uh making fun of Western Civ or not thinking it's important and the way they talk and write is like this nobody can understand it it's almost like hieroglyphics the new academic ease so I don't know where all this leads to but I think part of it you have to be careful as you get older you know you don't Horus said that you know we're we a bad generation are about to we a bad generation worse than our grandparents are going to produce a generation worse than us and there's a whole right warning warning about that in Classics but I do think that by quantitative measures you probably know better as a professor of business or finance that you can measure the decline and knowledge of one generation and it does it doesn't seem to be going up as it had been in the 40s 30s 40s and 50s and that's really worrisome because we have competitors and business and things that they don't they don't adopt our methodology especially in the non-west they're not we have a kind of a commissar system where're we're investing a lot of C Capital time Labor uh income in monitoring or or regulating the university Dei ESG but we're not in productivity which is in the university parland is education better educated students that that you can quantifiably confirm and that's I'm really worried about that I don't know what the one of the things that you I mean one of the the advantages that I think you talk about in the who killed Homer book of a broad liberal arts education is that you know it does help us to appreciate the broader Humanity that we all share um but but you also are cons quite concerned about this trend towards uh globalism so I was wondering if if I mean it seems like the the the tribalism and the globalism are somewhat in ttention right because globalism is is about dissolving the boundaries between countries and and uh tribalism is about you know creating schisms within countries yeah well I've been trying to not fall into a kind of a L and all globalism is bad obviously if somebody in the Amazon basin has access to antibiotics or you can call your sister in Vietnam that's a wonderful thing interconnectivity and in theory it will break down National or racial or tribal barriers through this Greater Community but unfortunately there's there's a long history that in constitutional systems that at the core that expand rapidly out and try if you have D Kinzie and London why the British armies in India or you have uh United States in total chaos in the 1960s and a cultural revolution and then we're in Vietnam or uh we're creating a uh singular there I do believe that in terms of fashion and food that and individual parochial cultures and civilizations have a lot of value and we are creating an American Le everybody's going to talk the same if I go to Greece into a village I I lived there for 3 years but when I first went there in 73 nobody really used the FW nobody wore jeans nobody had a t-shirt that said Stanford University on it you can go to the most remote and some you'll hear a Greek break into English and say the F word or I will be in the peloponese and I'll hear Greek with rap music and not traditional Greek music anymore and everybody's and there's some there's something good about that sameness but is also drab There's no distinction or to use that overwork diversity and so we're drowning out and the question is what is drowning out globalism is a I think it's a synonym for American popular culture in many ways we have the most dynamic uh culture that has very few prerequisites to participate in as Europe does but the more Sinister I think is it's an elite driven phenomenon I know everybody uses Doos but when you read CLA Schwab in the great Co in the great reset or you read ESG or we're going to go after Ireland because they're giving too many breaks to Google to attract capital and we're going to have an international standard of investment that we decide are John KY going around this week he said we've got to focus on agriculture because 33% of carbon emissions come from agriculture so we're going to focus on what they're doing in the Netherlands for example trying to shut down ancestrial farms and I have no problem with that as long as he addresses the three three new coal plants a month proverbially that are being opened in China which he doesn't do so what I'm saying is there's a lot of self-appointed utopians that feel that the masses are too stupid and now globalism in their version is this is the first chance that we can kind of what Orwell warned about 1984 you have East o you have oceanana and East Asia you have just three three massive groups of of people organized that you you know there was a book by Ian Morris of Stanford historian that wrote War what good is it and his ideal was you could get to a utopian State when you had just conglomerates Imperial two or three big that wouldn't fight anymore because internally they'd solved all differences but they never tell you how they did it internally and that's usually through what we're starting to see with social media or symbiosis biosis between the FBI and Twitter or whatever it is so that is what's scary and when you get artificial intelligence and the electronic fuel to it in social media and the Internet it's we have the ability not just to give antibiotics to somebody the Amazon but to control people's thought in a particular prescribed fashion that's centralizing power and uniformity and free speech is is really I grew up in a democratic household and my mom always said who was a judge that the ACLU was a sacred institution I didn't I came not to think so but today's ACLU does not look like the it's not for free speech as the way it used to be and so we're we're the trend in the United States I think fueled by globalization is that free speech is hate speech uh diversity does not apply diversity of thought uniformity is good uh any objection is misinformation or disinformation or hate speech and has to be Stamped Out and that has Global Tendencies um and we're we're the Bastion of Freedom if we fall then there's no other there's no other strength or Focus or locus of that we're if United States is the freest country in the world if we're not going to serve that role I think a lot of people will be sorely disappointed well we never got to spend any time talking about military history which is it represents the bulk of your work but I guess I'd end with this this last question and I have not a chance to read your book on on Trump but it does seem a little odd that you know of the various trends that you have um mentioned as as potential concerns uh it seems like all of them were raised by by Trump uh and were incorporated into his his platform and and yet you know Trump is by no means someone that we would characterize as as an educated person right and certainly not someone that you know we would hold up as as as an ideal uh of of a you know someone coming through liberal arts education so do you find that a little bit paradoxical that the person who is raising these concerns is is is not someone who seems well-versed in the understanding of of democracy and and and citizenship and obligation yeah the way I put it and you're absolutely correct he wasn't and so I tried to explain that Paradox just as a way of illustration before I do very quickly I talked to a foreign a very high government official once in Israel and he said to me could you explain to me that we have been trying to explain to the most sophisticated diplomats in the world in the United States why whether you agree or not he was saying why we would like and we think the embassy should be in Jerusalem or why you should not Channel money to all these sophisticated questions and then they explained it to Donald Trump and with everybody else that got nowhere even though they're whether whatever you feel about their position they got When Donald Trump they could not believe it he just looked at it and he cut through it and the person said I've never I've never met anybody who was more ignorant about the intricacies and the nuances but more correct about the solution and they asked me why and I said I don't know if that's because he had to deal with all sorts of constituencies in New York you know environmentalist social uh minority groups Mafia unions and he got to but I the way I tried to to solve that Paradox is I I went back and looked at the tragic heroine Sophocles of all the play rights and he has a great play the the Philip tities and the Ajax and then it's also homeric theme with Achilles but also in John Ford movies I went back and I actually looked at all of those movies again especially the Searchers and then I went into the Western genre of magnificent 7 or Wild Bunch especially high noon and it's a really continuance there's been a lot of literature actually I didn't realize that written about John Ford in the Greek tragic hero and what they say is that when you are in the west and you have a as Athens became more sophisticated and more leisured and more affluent given the combinations of free markets private property and constitutional government the success formula and as the same was true with the United States then people became not overeducated but more nuan and less capable of making decisions that were 51% correct they had to be just perfect which is impossible and they became Paralyzed by their own success and started and this a common theme in Greek oratory the for how decadent we are compared to our but and they define decadent is unable to make decisions or unable to solve problem and then in these plays there's some throwback and we can see it in our own military you mentioned military history a perfect tragic hero is Curtis L and George padon and what the tragic heral then does is his methodologies and his uncivilized aspects are so uncouth that in normal times nobody wants anything to do with him because his speech his diction his prejudices they offend people of a polite Society but when that polite Society is up against an existential threat if you're in the Searchers and you want to find Natalie Wood or you're in Ajax and you need somebody after the death of Achilles to go and fight the Trojans or you know if you're a bandit in Mexico and you need the magnificence then you call on a particular skill set and that person will solve the problem he may not solve it in the way that you want but he will solve it but the very process of solving it creates the cognitions of tragedy Aristotle talks about this in the Poetics that his methodology at a certain opportune time when the the existential threat is over than the attention of the beneficiaries focuses on the methodology and they get offended that they ever were in extrem is at least enough to call in such a a person so at the end of the Searcher the problem is solved but where just John Wayne he walks out the door or the Magnificent Seven you have that great exchange with the old man of the village that they say uh you are like the wind you come in and and you could stay here and I think Steve McQueen or you winers as well I think they wanted to leave it's or you know Gary Cooper and High Noon throws down his badge after he's killed the bad guy he's got to get out Shane solves the problem of the cattle Barons and then he rides off because they they're no longer acceptable and polite Society because uh they're no longer needed a good example is Curtis l i mean the guy was a character with his cigar that was actually because of Bell's policy but he sawed the B17 Squadron they put him in front of the b29 and he completely revolutionized it saved the program bomb Japan destroyed 75% of the urban core with Napal probably shorten the war by a year and that was really precluded invading if they hadn't dropped the bomb they wouldn't have made it anyway given what lame was up to but he was so onc and then he took over sack that JFK said about him once in the Cuban don't make fun of a guy like that because he came in during the Cuban Missile Crisis in Bobby Kennedy and Dean they were just shocked by him I'll make the Cinders glow and all that talk and he said there's a certain role for that person and he's useful in times we need a person like Curtis may we need a George Patton but the war's over then Patton I think Bradley said it was better for Patton to have died when he did because there was no appreciation for him and a a a post-war society and that's what Donald Trump was I think he given the corruption of both parties and the inability nobody before him was talking about the asymmetrical trade with China nobody was talking about the need to have a secure border nobody was talking about the shrinking middle class nobody was talking about on the Republican side you've got to support Social Security before you deregulate and cut tax that was all new but to get in there he was you know I mean nobody had ever seen anybody that could cut through thing the first debate I was shocked my wife who who really didn't like him at all and I I wasn't form him in the primary ran Paul it was a very signature moment when ran Paul said don't I'm not quoting literally but by figuratively he said something to the effect you represent the worst in politics you combine money with political influence and I'm here to call you out on it and he said you know you're right and when you came up to the top floor of trump TOs and you wanted 10 grand I gave you 10 grand and you've been subservient helpful ever since and who would have ever said something like that but the point was making is that you represent the hypocrisy all of you people do and I'm I'm truth and the raw and you can't and then he introduced another thing to the Republican party uh they had lost six out of the last seven elections popular vote they hadn't got 51% not that he did but they were very successful on the local level and the state level they gained 1,500 offices under Obama but they could not win and by that I mean Bob Dole couldn't win and George HW Bush couldn't win a second term and McCain couldn't win and Romney uh couldn't win and George W bush didn't get the popular vote in 2000 the only time they really excelled the last time they ever got 51 they had kind of a tragic girl kind of a monstrous Guy Lee Outwater if you remember him in 1988 and he just took apart Michael dakus Boston Harbor was polluted the tank commercial Willie Horton and they came up with the idea they never wanted to win ugly again they'd rather lose no basically and they did and Trump came along and said I can win ugly and I'm going to be for the middle class and when he succeeded he he succeeded economically and militarily I mean my God the Abraham Accord uh he North Korea Iran Putin's the only time he didn't invade he invaded under Obama he invaded under George W bush he invaded under Joe Biden he didn't go into Ukraine but we but when he started to become successful especially during the lockdown when there was time to reflect people said you know he tweets too much he's kind of garish with the hair and the skin color the Queen's accent starting to grade on me and he's he has no constituency and they they turned on him and uh so he was a tragic figure and I think he still is uh there it's very asymmetric what they're doing to him in this indictments but I have a feeling that he's not going to get the commiserate sympathy that he deserves and he's not going to be as viable as he thinks he is as a candidate and that's partly because of this tragic Paradox so so he's our Ajax he's a useless ful o to some degree uh o would imply that uh he's not smart maybe that would apply a little bit more he's kind of like the antigon who's in the same mold very clever very smart person but uh exuberant to a degree of being self-destructive and not cautious but really brings the issue to the Head this it's aoral not to bury uh a a citizen of thieves Poes and you people are are hypocrites and I'm going to call you out on it but I'm going to be so extreme in doing it and I'm going to be so obnoxious that I'm going to have to exit in that case she gets she dies but uh he's not an oath but he's considered oish by his his mannerisms and and yeah you're right about that that's what you mean absolutely that if you told Donald Trump just have regular hair let's work on the addiction don't repeat your vocabulary don't go don't call Stormy Daniels horse face don't say even in private that Haiti is a hole he would say to you well listen that's part of the package you get with me and so you like the way that I just broke through with Putin or I took on China but the the skill sets are not limited to that you get get the whole package what makes me effective and why people in the midwest will come out in the snow at 30,000 is because I will say things that no one says that needs to be said but I will do so in a very vulgar manner sometimes and get with get used to it I'm not going to be apologetic and at some critical point 50% of the people who were always skeptical became 55% of the people and so basically in the form of these brag and Fanny Willis and Jack Smith and letita James I think her name is in New York that establishment said we'll take care of him for you and that's what they're doing and he get and he's tragic because it's very unfair what they're doing and many not all but many of the the charges are baseless but he's not going to get the sufficient Reservoir sympathy because of the methodology he uses to solve problem I don't think we're going to see person like that in a long time Victor thank you so much for joining me um the latest book is called uh the dying citizen um but there's plenty of other books that I mentioned including Western Way of War be sure to uh check those out they're still in print I believe and uh maybe some other time we'll talk about grap growing yes yeah uh and what it's like out there on the farm yeah be happy too thank you for having me Greg unsoed podcast is produced by University FM elevating the stories of your Institution
