Donald Kagan on War and Human Nature

[Music] welcome back to conversations I'm bill kristol and I'm very pleased to be have with me today Donald Kagan a distinguished longtime professor I guess now professor emeritus at Yale University thanks for thanks for being here pleasure to be here that's great to have you so I told someone in Washington I was coming down to coming up to New Haven's do a conversation with you and Donald Kagan and he said oh I love Don Kagan he's the war guy ah so you're a great professor distinguished ancient historian yet in Washington you known as the war guy I think that's mostly because of your book the origin terrific both the origins of war but talk about the book and about war well the book is called on the origins of war and the preservation of peace yet people drop the second death they didn't out the second part nice but I think that the connection is very crucial and too infrequently attended to and the other rest of the title a little bit of it is owed to closets who wrote his famous essay on war right well I'm concerned particularly with the origins how wars come about not how you fight them but the other thing is I think there's an inherent important linkage between thinking about how wars come and then since most of us find it unfortunate when wars come most of the time how in fact wars don't come about and some in some one sense how wars can be prevented that sounds like a bit of a more active and hopeful way of looking at things or how you can avoid going to war which is a different thing but has the same outcome so talking about the Omni on the origin of war and the preservation well I well why did you write it what prompted you to do it you I've always been interested in the general subject and my my own life's work about lucida teas and the Peloponnesian War naturally leads me to think about war in general and of course the problem lucidity is certainly was the first person ever to make a very serious careful analysis of why a war came about with a kind of a modern degree of sophistication beyond the modern degree of education I think and which made it a both of historically serious and worthy of your attention and with philosophical implications having to do with its place in human events in general so that the question of why the war came about this always sees me and I thought about it many times and of course before I undertook the book on the origins of war I had written for volume history of the Peloponnesian War so you can see why those thoughts would come together but the rest of the story is that I didn't begin my interest in history in the ancient world I didn't really know there was an ancient world in any serious way until I was a sophomore in college it really came quite late to me but I had always been interested in modern European history and modern European history of course is full of war yes and it's always an incredibly dramatic thing but it's also appeals to my feeling that history is most interesting when you try to figure out what any sensible person gets interested in when he studies history which is why do things happen as they do and and did they have to happen that way and very very few things are as helpful for that kind of thinking as the outbreak of a war or on rare occasions the avoidance of a war that seemed to be highly likely so I was very interested already I had a hobby almost and reading about the First World War and particularly the origins and of course that's a good one because no war has ever been argued about as much as that one and it is one of the more interesting and difficult and complicated questions compared to many other wars anybody who has trouble understanding why the Second World War came about needs a little but the first world war it's really worth only argument that there's been about it so that had interested me quite a lot but then again having lived through the Second World War me I was enormous ly interested in that and and as I read about the ancient world and continue to read about the modern world I I was constantly struck with my dissatisfaction about the way these were treated typically by other historians and my feeling that he although each was different uh there were important similarities but even the differences were very instructive and so I thought about the idea of making a comparative study and the another thing that attracted me was that and people have done some kinds of that sort of stuff before but they usually have a social science deformation which was spoken like a historian or quiet dish which which produces whatever it produces but not what I was looking for what does it produce that was its history that's one of the distinctive things for me as a political sort of trained in political science you've been finding anti-political well that's true anti political science kind of a science it's the best kind yeah but I'm very strict by your historic I mean yeah explain that I mean I want maybe this will help I think a in the introduction to that book I speak about what I think I'm doing I describe it as comparative narrative history and I think my own opinion is the best way to grasp the past at least for a very long time before you reach a high degree of sophistication is by telling the story the the discipline that comes from having to tell the story and essentially defend your understanding of what really happened I think is necessarily prior to any attempt to explain why anything so I I thought I would write a of narratives whose purpose would be first of all to establish what I think happened and then to go at the question of why did they happen did they need to happen if they didn't whose fault wasn't that they did all the questions that your average person who has a general interest in these questions is interested from a political science in point of view I would say what struck me reading the book is that you don't you know dot this eye across the stay or hit the reader over the head with it but the contingency in when you look at it in this narrative way and without a presumption or prejudice ahead of time as to this must be the cause or that must be the way Wars happened because some social sciences decided it it's the contingency of events it seems to me that leaps out from your it's absolutely true you know even through Sid ities who was the first end was really very very sophisticated in his attempt to grasp how these things are connected and who tends more than much more than I do to think that there are sort of broad general rules of human behavior which help explain or maybe thoroughly explain why people do what they do even he and what made him so great was he understood perfectly well but these are not hard and fast scientific rule right and the events and the individuals involved in the events can be critical in what happens so I noted what five or six Wars I did Wars like I did I did five I did five I I should say this idea came to me before I ever thought about writing the book I taught a course for God in a couple of decades called historical studies in the origins of war and I studied the five cases that ultimately your colleagues let you teach outside of your own little part of the department there they let you teach modern history even though you're an ancient historian that was broad why did it do what do you have so much clout you just none of those things because I started doing that in in the second semester that I was Yale is that right so that no Yale's history department Elise is absolutely splendid if to a fault I I mean as most history departments on the way what I mean by that is that they essentially let you teach what you want you don't have a crazy it's good and bad I guess yeah the bad thing good is your case though the bad thing is too often people teach what they know which turns out to be the material of a very recondite as what do you call the little classes that we teach seminar seminars but rarely lead to anything broader than that but nonetheless so that accounts why nobody nobody cared I suppose they would have they wouldn't have cared much of very few people showed up but it turns out so if you if you order a course that says historical study it since it also says war the whole universe turns out yeah you know I might just say worried about that how you can be wrong about these things it was a 1970 Vietnam War everybody knows war is evil everybody knows you mustn't pay any attention to you must just stop it and any time anybody ever gave a course on war or military history and all my time at Yale filled with students who want to know about their right then you could be a sure thing anybody well it's important in history you know see I think so yeah the outcome does matter yeah so you did world war one world war two and then I did the Second Punic War because I thought it was again a very interesting example but I had a couple of pairs in my mind the it seemed to me that the second Punic War had some interesting elements in common with World War two and I had always been struck by what seemed to me to be enormous ly great similarities between events of the Peloponnesian War and World War one and then of course I was enormous ly interested in a war that didn't happen that's not too many of these things where you can say there was going to be a war but it didn't happen but I had lived through it and so I was much taken with it and that was the Cuban Missile Crisis and that was attractive because also it was alive subject documents was still being turned out or made available I should say that weren't available so it that rarely happens to a guy does ancient history and so I thought that was attractive but it turned out that that also was very illuminating and so I did him for different reasons but they turned out to be the five I would have chosen if I had to choose and what about the similarities between the Peloponnesian War will go wide on the one hand and Punic War and World War two on the other well in the case of the First World War the excuse me the Peloponnesian War you have a a situation in which there is a great power which is has been the dominant power about and that is sparta and then you have a newly emergent power which is a tremendous in fact looks like it's practically passing the first one and is a great threat to its standing in its position in the in the Peloponnesian War in this first world war you have a great power that has been the force for peace and the order in that world in the case of Great Britain and then you have this newly emerging bumptious power threatening those kinds of things so that on a very large level seemed to me to be an interesting similarity and the other thing about it was that it seemed to me that in the case of the Peloponnesian War it was a war that came about without either side wanting it to come about and my feeling there was so was World War one that nobody really wanted that war when the whole game got rolling but that various kinds of errors of judgment and conflicts of values produced a way and I felt that was a nice match for that one in the case of the Romans and the Carthaginians in the second Punic War you have that what struck me there was okay one side beats the other side and beats them quite nicely in the First Punic War and then they are sufficiently comfortable and sufficiently distracted that they really don't pay attention any longer adequately to what's happening to their former opponent carthage in africa and they tend to think i think they tend to think well we can handle those guys and they're not so stupid as to tackle us again and that's that that reminded me of the stretch leading up to World War two where the victors did everything they could to make believe there was no problem and the defeated country came on with a tremendously potent political figure as their leader and tremendous ambitions and so on so again that seemed to me to be in a fairly gross way but in a way that thought was helpful how do you how does it work come about into those circumstances where somebody surely wasn't averse to war at all which was Hannibal who was certainly nothing could have pleased him more than ocean by the way I think what we ought to do is invade Europe Italy and destroy those Romans nothing was more appealing than that on every ground and the Romans were they were not keen to have it and they were unduly confident - I think they just felt believe they're not going to be so crazy as to come at us again and we will learn something about how crazy people can be many individuals you came away admiring especially or even more than when you started or surprises on the upside or downside in terms of statesmen especially I guess in the modern cases were yes I I didn't I didn't get much of a change in the ancient saying there's not enough but I came away with a greater appreciation of the positive sides of Bismarck plenty of negatives with bhisma but he he did have a really good capacity to evaluate what were the pros and cons from a practical point of view in international relations and war and so on and so forth and so he really did work to prevent war and in my opinion with extraordinary success I mean it's really very interesting he he he knew that the the trouble if it arose was going to happen in the Balkans and he knew that it was going to be a war between Austria and Russia if it happened and it would be very hard for Germany to stay out one way or another if that happened and so he conducted a very complicated foreign policy that few people understood and really could grasp what he was up to in which is his determination was to see that those two states did not come into conflict and one of the ways he did that was by throwing Germany's weight around but not in order to increase Germany's power or whatever but in order to see to it that nobody got to be too ambitious in that territory and I and he succeeded until he was fired in 1890 Germany was the force not formally allied to Britain but informally working with Britain because the British wanted the same thing it was a sustainable it was a mistakes that didn't continue that policy or was that somehow it just couldn't have been continued once I know I I am a hunka lefty I am among probably a minority who think the war was not inevitable when the trouble started this trouble starts when he gets fired okay maybe another way to put it is the trouble starts when william ii feet gets rid of the guy who's been restraining him right and really starts running german policy and it becomes a really hard to defend policy from any rational perspective because he wasn't rational about what he wanted and Thucydides would have understood that better than most you know through cities as this great insight again I wish I get people to pay attention very short he has one of the speakers at the beginning of the war say why do people go to war out of fear honor and interest well everybody knows interest right that's right and fear is very credible nobody takes honor seriously and one of the things that the thing I suppose was the biggest surprise to me in writing that book was how potent honor was and is in the conduct of Foreign Affairs which often leads to war that if and people they honor who cares about on it's something that's another translate honors in ways that we would understand it today use a word like prestige yeah use a word like shame which is it's the negative that's most important in the honor issue it's not so much if you want to acquire honor by victory it's that you want to avoid the disgrace and the shame that comes if you feel like you lost and you can lose in negotiating and you can lose in war and so people and we I quote the passages that demonstrate this right down to the last minute people are infinitely more concerned in what they're talking about inside their private circles with the disgrace with the honor with the the besmirching of honor for their country then the nobody is talking about economics yeah that's interesting it's it's and they don't even really talk about power more than anything that you then you would imagine they are concerned with this other thing I guess national pride is one way we try to capture it a little bit sure but it doesn't quite get it right it doesn't quite get it it that sounds like you got needs that kind of pride but shame disgrace they will think we are weak they will think we are cowardly and not only is that inherently bad but all the people we rule will think when they can push us around and that so they're up they always are thinking about practical consequences of these impressions that are made so that's good about Bismarck and Edward or what I do think yeah I think majority I don't follow this closely but my sense is a majority of historians probably influenced by social science perhaps or by I don't know certain trends and historiography I do want to say that that was a war that individual decisions didn't you know somehow didn't make that much difference it was once Germany was rising and Britain was there and totally the evidence is totally against it as I say Bismarck decided no and he was successful in preventing it William it's on the other hand was as concerned about those kinds of things as anything in the world all he cared about was prestige all he cared and he particularly was felt odd shamed and disgraced personally by Britain's role in the world because you know they were all they're all related the Kings are authorized and the the the British were Germans and the German said British William's mother was British she was a princess the British princess so he he was personally worked to put it very mildly by the fact the way the British treated him they did not treat him with the respect he thought he personally should have and he certainly he identified it himself with Germany and Germany with himself and they certainly he felt did not treat Germany with the respect that it deserved and it focused very interestingly why could the British do that there was so few compared to the Germans and the Austrians and the the German army was infinitely more potent they thought than the British Army it was the fleet it was the British fleet and it indeed at that moment in history when Western Europe when the Western European countries were spreading all over the world and most particularly Great Britain and so and their power was enabled and their prestige was enabled and so william decided germany had to have the fleet at the very least able to challenge the British and he hoped one that would be even greater than the bridge and that was the single activity that was I would argue of the many that drove the British into the position where they became the people not cooperating with Germany as they had done so much in the past and with bhisma but rather the number number one stumbling block for the Germans that's interesting and World War two any revisionist views of that or my view is there are very conventional but those conventional views are in every day becoming less popular at the people who count and I must say as I observe American behavior now in facing the problems it does face in the world i I cannot believe that the people were involved in those decisions ever took a decent history course because we know so much about how you go wrong in these kinds of circumstances this story seems to me to be as clear as it can be and by the way to most historians who have written about the subject and they're going to guess it what I'm what I'm getting at is this and this is a characteristic problem of modern liberal societies starting with the British in their biggest days and then of course the United States coming in later to be the major successor to and and that is the notion that because you are protected by water from the same dangers that confront most other nations namely an army is going to come marching in so you have to be alert to that they imagine that they have a degree of security which is simply an imaginary situation you can you can really wonder about the British or how few miles is it across the channel practically well the people do swim it right so there's that but they they acted as though the fact that they had that water and they had a fleet that was the best fleet and that ought to be successful in a war that that would take care of all their problems and of course after the the First World War the United States with this great ocean and always not they never considered the possibility since the British went away of European power coming here so that and they had a they didn't even think they needed a big Navy much of the time they were so confident throughout this situation so what they did was to make believe that these things that were so troubling in Europe were not their problem and they didn't need to worry about it and they made up a story which had been made up by originally by British pacifists that in fact there was no need to fight the First World War right and that was simply a wicked action taken by people with wicked motives and that shion's makers and munitions makers and all that stuff so that the thing to do if you want to avoid war is do not become involved with anything outside the Western Hemisphere they usually didn't worry about Asia never seemed didn't seem to occur to them that the Japanese were a problem but so is all about that well and of course the world simply didn't work that way anymore the United States had become a world power the United States economy it's security were all tied up chiefly in the European area so it would make a very considerable difference to the United States if Europe went into the wrong direction but Americans just didn't want to know about that was it was they didn't want to know or how much was that and then the wishful thinking was just to kind of the utopianism about world peace and modern commercial yes that means wouldn't go to war is that just a kind of rationalization for the yeah I think they're different people different stories for some people it was ignorance and foolishness never underestimate the enormous power and extent of ignorance and foolishness and most people didn't know how the First World War came about and they were immediately fed a thoroughly false picture of it which whose message really was it came about by people not minding their own business right and so the average man who didn't know better thought fine because then we don't need an army and then we don't need to pay for it and we really don't need as much of a Navy as we thought so let's reduce it and so on and I think so we shouldn't we shouldn't fail to appreciate the sort of mental and cultural elements that shapes what's going on and I don't think our national leaders are necessarily free from those things they're usually not as ignorant as the average man but they're not so terribly far away in many cases and I think that the educational system insofar as it plays any role in anything I really have never had a clear idea of how people are affected in their ideas about the world in which they live by what they learn in school courses I really don't know how important that is something I think it's become more important because we are more schooled now than we used to be we are schooled longer than we use and never has there been so much agreement on a absurd on absurd grounds about history and so far as history is taught at all in our schools but there is a very common widespread message sent out which I believe was there was also very pretty widespread common point of view after the first world war which was the anti-war view the view that wars come about by evil or by mistake and you shouldn't get involved in them whereas you know a careful study the start of the First World War might well have been a warning signal about what was happening in Europe I mean just too little too short final questions on this I like like to quote Churchill was I admire Churchill I don't think it's I think it is somewhat analogous to the 30s now but of course friends of mine on the Left say oh there you go quoting churchill again it's not the 30's the more relevant less is vietnam or maybe iraq war if you want to be really contemporary and there we overreached we got involved so that we didn't have to get involved in the problem is american over-ambition not American withdrawal or wishful this about not having to get involved in the war so yeah well I mean people you do hear people saying that all the time and every day they sound more and more foolish because I mean it seems like all you have to do is say the Iraq war and that means well you don't go to war because that war was a failure and was a mistake and the only thing was wrong was that we got involved in it well the fact of the matter is we succeeded in the Iraq war the the people who were I mean the guy who was running the dictator who was running the place was gone there was a government that was popularly elected there was nobody was getting shot and nobody was getting killed and that the hard part of the fighting was over we are in the spot we're in now this I say this with no hesitation at all as a consequence of the president united states subsequently saying we're not going to have anything more to do with it after you win the war you decide to lose it in that way so I mean I think there's no excuse this is just think this is just special pleading by people who have a particular picture of the world and are not interested in the facts which are very simple and obvious to see and in it Afghanistan is more complicated and someone but they're not talking about Afghanistan yet so much it just it's clear enough we lost some troops so it was a terrible thing but the fact of the matter is that that area which was threatening to become very very dangerous as it is again now becoming was cooled down by the American intervention where and the 21st century is not going to be I take it based on your reading of history a century of Perpetual peace or where we leave behind these 20th century you secretary Kerry likes this formulation you know this isn't appropriate for again how does he said this isn't appropriate or tolerable in the 21st century is if these terrible things happen in past centuries but we're going to the world is going to change once we do first every day he looks even more foolish than he was when he made that statement because we have war all over the place real hard fighting wars in places that matter enormous ly to us even the people who run our policy repeatedly talk about the importance of these areas and then act as though they're not important but in general you I think you're a disbeliever and Kant's perpetual peace or in any kind of conk was a disbeliever in well that's interesting that's the D point actually yeah forget that yeah but of course anybody who has examined the history of the world but let's keep let's pay our attention chiefly to the world of the modern world knows that war is perpetual so far at and and that war right now is more prominent an element in our lives in this world than it has been since World War two I think now that's amazing and so only if you are determined to ignore the I've evidence can you come to that conclusion there is war right now is every reason to think it will spread everything I see but also in any study of the past suggests that it will not stop being that way until something big happens to stop it these things don't just go away when they are this prominent and not just a mere local skirmish then something serious has to be done to stop the forces that require war but you're not but you're the book also shows that peace can be preserved or achieved and that's the other thing that is so discouraging to me we've just had such a fascinating course in this subject you could you should begin the course in my opinion in let's say 1890 when the Kaiser comes to the to his own power in Germany and then Germany becomes the stormy petrel that stirs up all this blatant stuff that's World War one next everybody goes to sleep again into our 19th century mode ok and the consequence of that is Hitler and the Japanese Empire and World War two the worst war the world has ever seen certainly the two of them I can't think of any match for them in terms of loss of life in all of history we just order I mean we know what some of us have lived through part of it so that that is what's before it but and then most particularly and this is hardest to get across because there's so much propaganda flying around about it but start in 1945 and go down seventy years and you have an extraordinary stretch of time in which there are not really any great Wars at all there is an enormous outburst of prosperity in the world as a whole there is a what was it oh yes if you think this is a good thing and I do a tremendous growth in popular government such as the world has never seen and not only this time in the West so that you would I would have to regard it as the most positive fruitful period of international relations and internal positive developments that I can think of in the history of the human race now was that just luck dumb luck if you ask you know what are the characteristics of the world in which that arose and would and was permitted to grow and the answer was it was the victory in the Second World War first of all of the anti-fascist and anti imperialist forces who were themselves I mean you have to be careful because a big chunk of them with the Soviet Union and you have to face the fact they were critical in that victory but they were not the state that after the war especially had the greatest impact on what was happening the world they had a very serious impact but was largely negative its tendency was very old-fashioned territorial imperialism and it would not have it would not have ever sort of calmly gone away either they would have made their empire firm and we would have old-fashioned despotism that the world is used to or they would have what what did happen which is they would fall apart and and then for a brief period of time then popular government would be the force that was coming on well that came about because the United States chiefly and its allies undertook to handle a world a different they judged that all of the things that matter to us were necessarily connected to what happened to the rest of the world and that if we wanted those things to move in a positive direction rather than a negative one we had to be engaged and that one form of our engagement has to be overwhelming military strength I always like to use this because I much my foreign policy formula you guys have all been in places where you see a sign up there it says don't even think of parking here right I think the policy we had during the successful phase of it was don't even think of using force to bring about your desires and it worked because people believed they knew we had the force and they believed we would use it and both of those elements are critical in my view to preserving a piece that exists so why don't you become an agent historian why why the classics wife acidities well it's a it's a purely biographical story with no deep philosophical context I was I'd always liked history and when I was a kid I just read history for fun and but I knew nothing at all about the ancient world we would never somehow we were never taught it in school and so I just never had anything to do with it most of my historical interests strangely no strange never not but not so much in America I was very interested in modern European history which has always stayed with me but that was that's what I read that's the fun I had and so now I next moment in my earthly life isn't in high school I want to give a plug to Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn in New York where I had the good fortune to have a wonderful history teacher the only wonderful history teacher I ever had up until was I write college and where's Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn East New York he's near maybe the worst neighborhood in Brooklyn now still you know every other day burr hood and Brooklyn has been gentrified East New York is hang in there oh yes it's bad but it was it was actually I I actually grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn which was below he's New York in those days but New York is pretty sad now however it was a very nice local high school and he was a remarkably good teacher and what was remarkable he was the first real sort of spoke like a historian the first one I ever met you just didn't tell you stories and ask you to remember what was in the clauses and stuff like that okay he asked questions and he undertook to answer them or to have you participate in the answering of them and that really sharpened up my sense that what I wanted to be me was a history teacher he never occurred to me to be a professor because I didn't even know what that was nobody in my family had ever been to college and so it just wasn't a world that existed for me right but when I graduated and went to Brooklyn College it was with the intention of becoming a history major and there was certain lot in those days still required courses don't you believe so most of the first year was spent with required course of one kind or another a couple of them were history courses but they were pretty routine mmm and now I had to make it for the first time I had to choose courses for myself in the sophomore year what he called my electives are elected and so I I thought oh yes I ought to be a school teacher high school history teacher in New York in those days I don't know what it's like now but you they had this very quaint idea that you want to know a lot of history and so they had a a set of courses that you needed to take to qualify for a license if you ever got there and so the first one was ancient history and then there but you didn't have to take him in sequence but being unimaginative about it all I thought why not start at the beginning so I asked my savvy senior friends and says that all right and he said Oh ancient history is fine but wait until you are a senior because she will have retired by then and they were referring to the only ancient history teacher there was at Brooklyn College in those days meta Elisabeth shoots a maiden lady from the state of Maine and I never saw anything like her and she totally changed my life it was like there a little bit about absolutely ginger so when are we when is this this is in 1950 51 so it wasn't a lecture and it was not a seminar I guess what you would have called it was a recitation there might have been anywhere from depending on how many kids turned up ten to twenty five students sitting in their chairs and Rose and the professor up sitting at her desk and she would give us an assignment for the day to read and then she would come in and she would ask questions but she never asked questions generally of the class she would say mr. Kristol and then she would ask you a question and you fairly nervous would give her an answer now she would correct any factual error you made she would correct any error of pronunciation that you engaged in or any conceivable shortcoming of perfection whatsoever and not in a particularly pleasant way so I thought Jesus what is this well as it turned out she went through the class for I think it must have been almost two weeks and she never got to me but every day I was angrier and angrier and what she was doing and I've said she is not going to get me and I prepared for that course like for no other course in my life and finally she got around to me and she said Skagen and she asked me a question I don't member what the question but I know I spat out the answer in the shortest possible manner possible I mean the fewest words conceivable and I was as certain as I could be that it simply had no flaws and she said yes and she moved on to the next guy oh wow and then it all sort of dawned on me that all she wanted for us to get it right but she insisted that we do and of course what what was behind it all but something eyebrow I believe is really very nice you know Brooklyn College in those days was of very much a poor man's College probably still is it was a New York City College the the the tuition fee was exactly the amount I could afford nothing and the we had to pay a $10 a semester library feat that was the totality but that's what most of us could afford the other thing about it was that most of us were working class children or petty bourgeoisie but nothing much about that and for us we and it was very hard to get in I don't know if this is totally true but they were telling us this story in those days it was more difficult to be admitted in terms of academic qualifications to Brooklyn College and to Harvard I do believe it because those were the days of the gentleman see at Yale and are in places like that was nothing like that at Brooklyn College so here we are all these kids many of them by the way either foreign-born or their parents were foreign-born so that English wasn't necessarily the language that was spoken at home but they were all really quite bright and tremendously motivated this this was the the biggest thing in their world but more than that from the time their talents were discovered which would have been when they were very young in their families they were lionized we all thought whether we said so or not that we were pretty nifty because everybody always told us how nifty we were and she knew how we were in that respect but she also knew all the ways in which we fell short all the imperfections of our language the all right all our habits our interests and so she was determined to make us aware of all of them and to see to it that we ceased to be inadequate in those ways so I made such a story of it because I thought it was educational II one of the most amazing experiences ever and I often wondered what if she had been an expert in African history would I be an African historian today I don't know that's a video so presumably decided the subject matter was pretty fascinating well that's the rest of it I really became hybrid I was just as interested as the room in the Romans as I was in the Greeks in those days but over a pretty short time the Greeks began to fascinate me a lot and so now it I think it was not just accidental I think what I saw in the story of the ancient Greeks really appealed to me and you then studied obviously Greek itself but so you didn't have the languages at this point when you ahead cause the only language I had was that I had the two-year French medal in high school that was it that you took Greek and Latin it but though there's a story that goes with that too because i'm so pleased to have a chance to pass on the amazing place that brooklyn college and I'm sure city college and the others were like in those days here I was in the middle of my sophomore year never took Latin never took Greek but if you want to be admitted to graduate school in ancient history you needed to have Latin and Greek and I only had five four and a half semesters to go what to do well the classics department at Brooklyn College in those days was very friendly to any students that were interested in them and so I went to see a professor who had taught me a course in my freshman year she didn't know who I was she wasn't really great teacher she's the only one I knew in classics she was a must have been in her 60s and she was not very well physically but I went I asked her I said can you tell me how how can I make the greatest progress as quickly as I can in these ways and she said after a little while she said she had an apartment right next to Brooklyn College and she said to me if you will come to my apartment at 8:00 a.m. every weekday I will teach you land and there was a course that they had for beginning Latin one year and then you would be presumably ready to go into Latin texts of the literary kind and so on and we completed that one year in the remaining months or that year thanks to she didn't get a nickel she didn't get paid for this nothing she just did it out of the commit or it just an amazing story and then the next semester I began Greek and Latin courses and the rest is history and you went to grad school went to grad school at Brown for a master's degree I I would have liked to stay but they didn't have a PhD in ancient history so from there I went to Ohio State and and that was stupid because I didn't know anything about Ohio State I didn't know anything about the teachers there or anything but in those days nobody told you right they offered you a scholarship or something and well sure but other folks army scholarships too but anyway of course it's so much better to be lucky even smart and it turned out that there was a wonderful feature of ancient history they're magnificent and there were some very very good teachers in other fields of history and I really feel very indebted to my education at Ohio State which I really think was better than I deserved the enth acidities who was became your great object of study in the subject of your four-volume work and how did you always love him or did you remember I first encountered a board it was he a late you know stir you you start reading a facilities and even in the freshman year you read chunks of him in the classical civilization course that was required didn't mean much to me and then I had a course in Greek history with Professor Shutts and we certainly read some facilities there and I developed pretty good appreciation of him but I was still pretty raw I'm pretty ignorant and was it was no great thing but I and then I went to Ohio State I didn't oh yes I I must have done some cities in Greek at Brown but I was mostly reading Greek is what I was really doing okay so when I go to Ohio State and professor McDonald was my man at Ohio State a wonderful teacher a person of great education and learning and and a warm human being um I we were required to read the whole of acidities and we talked about him some and I now became really quite interested in him but not committed in any way and then so now I'm in graduate still school and I have to write at this station and I was hunting around for it a topic and it wouldn't have occurred to me to write on one that was through cytidine because I figured like everybody else forget it's all been done it's all been said you got to go looking for something more recondite okay so I finally ended up I but I thought I'd do in my simple-minded ways I start with acidities quit and the next narrative history available after facilities runs out is Xenophon a very unexcited Athenian military historian and other things and so you see if anything turns up so I read through Xenophon and finally I came to a story that interested and puzzled me the in the town of Corinth in 395 well the war started in 395 there's something called a Corinthian war and it was all around car by I think in the Year 392 there was a civil war that broke out in Corinth and it involved oligarchs on one side Democrats on the other which was characteristic of the time but there was some other bunch of folks running around that it was I couldn't identify so I read all these secondary sources I could and every they all had it different they had some people had Democrats here and oligarchs there and some people had but there only two there were always only two they were oligarchs and Democrats had to decide who was so and it still left something not working and so one day it just hit me I don't know how I realized oh what the problem is there aren't two there were three and so finally I ended up arguing that there was indeed an democratic faction and it was indeed an old oligarchic faction but there was also something that had sprung up in more recent times that was something between the two and they had a different angle and so on so I thought great I think I'm going to write a history of Corinthian politics me from the first time we can do that which is 421 BC down to where it runs out so that was my dissertation but for 21 that's lucidity stellar and so I began to now have to wrestle with acidities with the intention of understanding what happened and what acidity say about what happened and I I suppose the peculiar thing I would say peculiar but the characteristic thing about my dealings with acidities that make me slightly different from most people have dealt with him is that me I have I have the greatest admiration for him and boots can't possibly say enough things that suggests how wonderful his reign II was but he was a human being and what people have not sufficiently noticed was that not only was he a contemporary and the war was taking place in and around his city but he was an important player he wasn't general and he played a very significant role he got one particular assignment he tell he writes about that and it was determined he failed to do what he was supposed to do his job was to provoke a man durab there he was to protect me the Athenian Ally was up the river from where he was and when the Spartans sent an invading force in there he wasn't there and the Athenian people found in guilty and they exiled him from the city thank God because he could not have written the history he wrote that's amazing if here in Athens because he went off and he was able to talk to people on both sides and Paul that was true but my my point was people were treating Thucydides as though he were God's truth you find out what sue said he says and now you stop concerning yourself with other things and I realized wait a minute it's as though all we had as a history of the First World War were Winston Churchill's account of that war now Winston Churchill is a great great man and fundamentally truthful but he was deep into everything and there's plenty of argument about whether Churchill was right about this that the other thing and what his angle was I said it's got to be the same with acidities and so that's when my my deep interest in coming to understand facilities in the worid wrote about did you conceive your four-volume work at an early age let's no no I did I graduated and went off and lucky enough well I went often won a Fulbright which was a tremendously valuable because then I could spend a year in Greece and see the place for the first time made a big difference me but I was Oliver you'd never been I had never been to Greece yes so and then I got very lucky and I got a job and I began teaching at Penn State for a year and then before you I was there for a few months I was offered a job at Cornell and spent the next nine years there uh and I don't remember happy let's see when did I do this nineteen I guess I started in 1966 when I had been at Cornell for five or six years and I thought it was time for me to try to tackle a new kind of a book and I decided I wanted to get at the question this takes us back to the beginning of our conversation on the origins of the Peloponnesian War and by this time I had really begun to suspect that there was a great deal to be learned by the comparative thinking about the origins of World War one and the Peloponnesian War and I and I just remembered this there was a summer program at Cornell in those days I don't know it was called the Telluride and I know many people who went through it again and each summer they get a couple of faculty guys to teach a seminar to these extremely bright juniors from people around the country so they asked me in a colleague to do it and I thought here's a chance I can paint I can try out this stuff so that seminar was on the origins Wars and meanwhile I was writing my history of the tip of the large of the Peloponnesian War so I did that that was published in 69 and I realized when I had finished that that I wasn't going to be satisfied until I had done the same thing for the rest of the war well and then you I remember the four volumes came out and then there was this one volume abridgement that you did which was a hugely surprising maybe I shouldn't say was surprising but I thought I was surprised that's a lot right that was it sold very very well yeah there was a wonderful day amazing day the the Washington Post like uh some other papers runs sort of ranks best-selling books each week right I think I've got the numbers right one day the city the Peloponnesian War book was number seven and my son Bob's book was number five and you were you were okay with that I was at better than okay that's good I mean generous and he was a funny but but I mean I never would have imagined a million years of fantastic I wrote would be that's a tribute to the American public I guess that they enough of them care about the only an elephant Asian war or item it turns out it's that tree you told the story so well of course I'm you know but it turns out it's amazing how many people around the world are interested in that subject I know that I some of it was a reaction to the books but more strikingly at Yale I taught this course that was televised my Greek survey course and it's unbelievable the amount of mail I get from all parts of the world and very often they talk about Thucydides in the Peloponnesian War even within that context there's something about I'm that the warrior she was interesting but maybe there's there's nothing about the Greeks that people sense a kind of just the amazing character of Greek civilization yeah and then greatness of Greece and that it can't help but appeal to people you know what I think I see something of it maybe I don't know and no I think that's true but I also think that we've did focus in on some synergies I think he has some kind of a special appeal that people get very the ones who are get very taken with him and they see the the relevance of it I mean it's it's worth noting because when I first learned this I was prized lucidity ziz studied as a required part of the study at all the military academies in West Point Annapolis several others and you constantly I would say constantly repeatedly hearing important figures who deal with war and politics asserting the central importance of facilities general Marshall has a very famous quotation which I can't repeat cause I can remember it but in which he says you you got it you got in other cities if you let George the worship well yeah that's good and he's not the only one of that level who has said that and I've had occasions to lecture sometimes at the military academies West Point and Annapolis especially and this there's never never a shortage of real interest in response from the cadets they study it's in there work and it it live-ins them up they they really become curious about it no that's great you were a professor at Yale for forty five years I think and hugely popular and successful one give us your judgment on the sort of fate of the higher education of the university over those over that period how has it changed is it change for better as a change for worse well I think it's it's um it's a hard story complicated story to tell because I don't it hasn't sort of gone the way of disaster which is the way I see so much of American higher education having gone it has not sort of evidently and on the surface abandon its old ways and so forth and also I suppose the reality also is a slower change but if I look at what the situation seemed to me to be like when I arrived and what I what happens now it's it really does seem very very different even strangely enough as it remains the same right that the differences are the ones that I think common across the country the subjects that are studied the subjects that are popular the the way subjects in the humanities and in the social sciences are taught have gone much more sharply in a direction they were already going in those days and one of the some up some of the difference is very clear numerically when I tells you a story when I arrived at Yale the number one major in Yale College was history and the number two was English and I think you know that tells you a lot about what kind of a place it really is because it means that a very large percentage of the student body you can count on to have read many of the same books to have considered some of the same experience and so on so there was a considerable piece of common culture and it was not difficult common culture these were serious books that had been studied for centuries in many cases and and yeah the approach to them was still I would have said deferential and respectful to the great writers to the great subjects and to the the body of knowledge that had been thought to be this the starting point for educated people that hadn't really changed an enormous amount a traditional liberal a traditional liberal education and a very good one because the faculty in my opinion I believe everybody's opinion in those days was really quite extraordinary and everybody seemed must have been exceptions but everybody seemed to be committed to the value of what they are up to the notion that what they were doing was very inherently worthwhile and the morale of everybody was that and you know I mean one of the things I'm struck by is nobody seemed to be worried about convincing anybody that they should be studying this subject whereas people are seem to be constantly aware of what do we have to do not just in these fields by the way in all fields why we have to do to interest students in this kind of stuff and it reflects the fact that in a way the university doesn't really know what it's doing anymore I assume history and English are no longer the two largest they are not majors some some of the social sciences I think probably I don't know that I'm dead right on this but I would have expected the trio of economics psychology and sociology and political science because they a lot of Lodi aliens know they're going to go to law school so political science is part of it they I would guess I can't be sure but I would guess they would be the top three in any case they're the ones who seem to be the most upfront now part of that has to do with a lot of things that have nothing to do with the educational thinking of the university but but I think some of it does it seems to me that the trouble that the humanities are in is largely a self created illness for the longest time the faculties have pursued the interest they learned about in graduate school and these are not the interests by and large shared by innocence who come to us from the best high schools in America they just don't they don't care about most of those things and to the degree you know on that now I be obviously I reflect an older way of looking at things and maybe that's the whole story but the the issues in even in courses like history but which have been turned into forms of social science in many cases but also in a kind of an advocacy mode the notion that somehow the studying politics society its we all know what the answers are all right the only question is to ask what's the most effective way to move society towards where we enlightened ones know now in my day it could be that all the faculty agreed about all these things but they didn't talk about that they talked about the books that you read and the subjects they studied and the different points of view that were held by different people and why how one makes judgments among them and we are all human and we all have our preferences no doubt we said why way I look at the world is particularly attractive but we didn't feel that it was proper for us to try to convince them to do it and we didn't think that it was in any way proper not to give the contrary and other points of view but and to indicate what were the strengths and weaknesses of them I my feelings and mostly I learned this from students who tell me about it that's because I don't hear my colleagues very much I mean and that's just that the way it's done it's as I say the thing that stuns me the most is everybody knows what the answers are and you just have to work your way towards them and let your colleagues you know and the students do you think they're fairly similar or this is the amazing thing I have lived I think in a personal bubble I find the students I teach today I can't tell the difference between them and the students I talked 45 years ago and I think there's a reason for it when you were around that long people get to know what the common story is about you some part of that is factual they'll tell you what the work is like what the requirements are like what the demands are like and of course they know from the syllabus what the subject is going to be about and on top of that the students give you if they're telling somebody about their course their own personal view of it but the first thing that happens is nobody is going to take a course in facilities in the Peloponnesian War taught by me and be surprised by what he runs into so I I have the feeling I'm getting the same students because I'm attracting the same kind of pseudo selection less rosy and so I don't know the difference but we were asked were you a master I was a master of college so you did deal with oh I know what the rest of the universe is like but in my class sixth right when when this class selects itself then I can't tell the difference but as master of a college and you were also a senior administrator I was 18 in 15 of the college I mean do you have the sense some people complain for example and I'm myself I'm sort of not certain what to think of this students know much less when they come to college when they're 17 than they did 3040 years ago their part of me thinks I don't know they'd ever really do much from there were 17 and it's the FISMA to change it's the faculty that's changed the way they teach not the students then in their preparation but it could be either I mean I don't know I have no reason to believe it could be true but I don't know that it's true that the students are any more ignorant than they were before or particularly different in any significant way the students I teach but now when I rented students in my other capacities I really wouldn't know because the kinds of issues that come up have nothing to do with that right so that's what I say I've been living in a bubble I've been living in the the bubble of Yale 1969 now all these years he's created a bubble by having an excellent class and attracting great students of liberal education supposed to be a bubble there way isn't it I mean separated from the rest of society and cushioned from the yeah but it is a bit they as you know you know the students are asked to write evaluations of their courses and teachers each semester and most of them do and I read them avidly and what I find that's very interesting is when they when they want to say you know something nice it's the personal stuff is not important it's what they say about how the course works what it does how its structured what is required of them and so on and you get what I so often get the thing I never had a course like this which wasn't just what it's wonderful but I never had a course that had this structure that had this set of expectations that was conducted in the way that this one is and that tells me that but you know what I mean one of the things that well let me just say worried about that so you gets an idea what exactly so I will this is a seminar we're talking about the lectures a lecture I just give a lecture but in the seminar there'll be something between 15 and 20 students in the seminar the entire class has a very specific reading assignment that it has to do for that day and it includes many many original sources and secondary sources to get at the arguments and so on and so forth on any particular day there might be as many as 4 students who have been chosen that day to have written a paper on a particular topic about five typewritten pages which they distribute a week in advance so that the class has read their papers as well then when we start I begin to add question the people who have delivered the papers and asked them to answer the I pull of shoots on them and have them answer the questions and we then allow the conversation to take its course because then I will recognize people who want to comment on them and and soon if things go well you've got yourself a conversation sometimes a debate and that kind of a thing and in the course of that exercise if we do it right there is no way the students can fail to know the range of opinions interpretations that are available and what arguments might be adduced for them but better yet they get attached to them by chance and now they have to defend themselves so I might say one of the things I think is good about that method is of all the things I was surprised by a meeting these very very bright students I had a chance to teach at Yale I was surprised to discover very complaints about students writing most of students can write very well is that but I find you can help them but they mostly didn't get there without being able to write well but what I found was they don't talk well I mean they they are not skilled at a serious conversation and how to get the most of it they've had no practice at it and so this is practice that's fast lady and they and that they they know and because I'm engaged it's never going to go off on on the moon and it's never going to be anything but what I want it to be and that means they have to talk on the level I want them to talk at so if it has to be elevated it is by virtue of that experience so it's that kind of thing that I don't know how widespread that ever was but the students like that kind of sounds like a great seminar to shower which I've been in that seminar but and your lectures just as close with the they're online and they're they're fantastically popular they we will pop your lecture over now lecture at Yale and they've been very popular online any advice before watching the wipies thinking of becoming professors how do you give a good lecture well first thing is to talk about something that interests you yeah that's good that is good advice that's regard to the sky is the lack of interest and secondly I think you should be aware that it is debate controversy arguments that catch the attention of most intelligent people when they are at a subject that's new to them and so don't ever just lay down the law and tell them this is how it was right you need to help to help them see how you get at two things one is deciding what's worth talking about and secondly how you can go about trying to make up your mind about what's important about that and somehow in your lectures you want to be constantly indicating to them these are things that people argue about and here's why they do and here's what some saying is with some others say and here's why maybe you'd like to think of this point of view but the point is I think it's got to be the way things really are when you're interested into something you need to know what there is be concerned about and you need to know what the possibilities are and you need to have some idea of the virtues of this in the virtues of that if you're doing that it's hard to defeat education entirely well that's great so I think that's a good the good notes the data and on and I think in this conversation people might have gotten a sense of why you were one of the great teachers of the American Academy in the last half century and so Don thanks so much for taking the time today and thank you for joining us on conversations

Channel: Conversations with Bill Kristol

Views: 37,565

Rating: 4.7293868 out of 5

Keywords: Donald Kagan (Author), Ancient Greece (Literature Subject), World War I (Military Conflict), World War II (Military Conflict), Yale University (College/University), Thucydides (Author), Brooklyn College (College/University), William Kristol (Politician)

Id: v7i1X4jh7oQ

Length: 80min 25sec (4825 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 21 2015