Farming, Warfare, and a Classical Life | Victor Davis Hanson

all the war is really based on ignorance that everybody in this room if everybody knew how strong each person was physically they wouldn't say certain things to certain people or they wouldn't try things but what happens with among nations the strong Nations sometimes don't advertise how strong they are and they give the wrong signal to a Hitler or a Tojo or a mellini and then they do stupid things and War then is a learning experience it teaches that's what suid that's a harsh Taskmaster harsh School [Music] master I'm a teacher by trade and uh I love to introduce Young People to People they should emulate Victor Hansen is a great man he's a farmer he's a scholar he's one of the top 10 most SED classical scholars in the world today he's a an expert on the the classical world and all its parts about war including Modern War about contemporary politics and the question is how does a fellow get to be like that uh and you know you you'll learn today that uh one of the ways that you get to be like that is you have to have really remarkable abilities we don't all have that but we can all use the abilities that we got and so here's a man who has done that and I'm going to try to get him to explain to you how he did it I'm going to start out with farming yes you grew up on a farm what's the importance of farming well I think it's the the balance between physical and mental and so that if you're farming it's not just rot labor but you're thinking how how much money am I losing today how much money are I'm coming in today what's the value of my labor as far as the year end bottom line or how can I improve uh the pruners and the vineyard with me should this person be working over there so you're thinking all the time but then you're working all the time physical and if you if you're too physical that you become brish and if you're too intellectual you become a feet so it's a perfect balance it was and it's practical very and it it makes you very self-reliant because uh there's nobody else but you you you keep saying am I going to get a paycheck this week depends on the weather it depends on labor it depends on things that you can't calibrate you know you don't know why certain plums ripen at certain times you you think you know but then it surprises you so there's always the unpredictable that kind of creates a humility that you can't control things that you're kind of a trag there's a tragedy there that you cannot control but you have to prepare for it because you never know when you're going to lose a crop or something on Tor will happen uh in my family one generation up everybody was a farmer everybody and by the time they've all died or retired and I think what are there are 14 children in the two families above me one was a farmer yeah and that's what's happened what did that change the country it has when the the founders 1776 95% of the constituents the people living in the united what is then was then going to be the United States were farmers and by the 1920s it was about 45% now it's 1% I think Jefferson said when people are all piled up in the cities it's not going to work anymore and toille seemed to think that the reason In 1832 that things worked with you had all of these autonomous people and they were not like European peasants they weren't sub subservient or they didn't they were not surfs or they were not uh Hard Scrabble indentured uh renters or something but they were autonomous I think that's really that was very important doesn't mean that it can't be transferred that autonomy you can have independent truck drivers you can have small business people but you need a lot of people who are not dependent on the government or a big Corporation and that type of confidence that acrs from that they're they're very good citizens and they're practical in they're Common Sense the the difference with farming was it had a natural component you can really see it with things like climate change or uh scientific research quote unquote or government policy on nature written or directed or promulgated by people who don't have anything to do with nature other than just venture out on the weekends or something and if they're not living with nature they don't really understand it and especially if they don't make their living predicated on harness harnessing nature but not harming nature it's kind of a partnership but they romanticize nature because nature they're they're not dependent on nature uh it uh of course we live better by many measures than we lived when everybody was a farmer uh are you suggesting there's a cost we have to pay in order to live like that I don't know I I as I I turned 70 yesterday and I had a ground father who I live in his bedroom and he lived in the bedroom of his great grandmother so there's six Generations he died in this room when he was um 86 and his wife my grandmother I took care of she died at 93 they had three daughters they died at 49 my mother died at 66 and her sister died at 60 and then um I had a sister-in-law that died at 49 another her sister died at 54 and I had a daughter that died at 26 and they all grew up in this farm and then they went out stressful jobs uh and they my grandparents stayed there and they got up they had a routine and I don't think they ever went more than a 100 miles they went to New Mexico one time in their life but they had a a certain cyclical idea and so you would they would say things today that seem absurd there's a south wind blowing you better be careful the birds are in the trees this is the phase of the moon and they were attuned to they Liv by nature and the cycles and they had Diaries an almanac they kept for 50 years and you could look at the day and they would pretty much tell you what you had to do that day based on what they had done that day 40 years in a row so I think that must have had something to do with longevity but they did pay a price in the sense that they were constantly apprehensive about they had to live one more day they didn't know where the income was was coming in the Razor Edge as far as the margin of profitability and unprofitability but there was something about staying in one place and I think some of the worst times I've had it's getting into this and you is present no better than I do the flying here the flying there and getting detached from being one one place and stationary and I think it's not good for people so uh one piece of advice for young people might be yeah spend some time throughout your life doing something real yeah do something real and cultivate family I I think that's important that don't just say that that's my sister so that we're close or that's my best friend so we're close it's sort of farmers they tend to uh maintain relationships or friendships a long time because everybody knows what they are are what they do where they're going to be and they're not going to move move suddenly and you're going to lose them so that I think that was important uh my uh to me a farm growing up uh my father was the first one to go to college and either family and so we lived in the city that is to say Pocahontas 6,000 people but uh I would go to the farm and to me the farm was a playground to all my aunts and uncles and my parents the farm was work work work work work and uh they missed it and they didn't both yeah but they had something real the connection they'd worked in the fields together as little kids yeah I have an ambiguous relationship because I saw it bankrupt a lot of people in my family but on the other hand I live there and so if I walk out I'll see a horseshoe in the dirt if I'm digging or I'll see a remnant of somebody or I'll see a barn that I remember somebody being there when I was five the exact same place it's kind of haunt you you're in a a house and you can think of every room or every window where somebody from the 19th century they even talked different they had different accents and they had different vocabularies and you can remember all of that and you do kind of dumb things I have eight eight buildings on around my house there's an old shed there's a barn and they should have been all been torn down they were built 1870 to 1880 with eucalyptus poles and so I found myself the last few years flying all over the country to speak to get money than to rebuild these things that there's no purpose for other than my grandfather would say I'd really like to have these buildings in good shape one day well now they're all in good shape but I don't use them thing the place looks beautiful but it's only because I wasn't farming if I was farming they wouldn't be there they would have been bankr sold great so the class iics you have spent a lot of time studying the ancient world and you know the languages well that's hard I've heard you say it takes 2,000 hours to become competent in ancient Greek I I came up with that number because I used to teach a lot of minority kids for 20 years in Classics and I had to make the argument to their parents so I would say you know there's 52 weeks a year and you're going to have to spend if you did 10 hours uh a week it wouldn't be enough it'd be 500 but you can it's going to be 2,000 hours you can do it in 2 years 3 years but ultimately you're going to have to spend that amount of tower uh to learn Latin Greek I I went to an kind of an aifi classical Believe It or Not Stanford was the with Harvard in those days was the classical philology Department it wasn't ancient history it wasn't archaeology it wasn't art history it wasn't comparably it was just pure language and we had to learn how to read and write in Greek and Latin take dictation in Greek and Latin take courses and man it was very narrow I remember my brother was kind of a smart uh smart alec very brilliant guy and I came home and my father said what did you learn and he said he's like Samuel Johnson's dog he can um walk on two legs it's very interesting but we don't know the purpose of it he thought that was what Greek was he said he can write Greek and Latin and then my dad said well that'll do you good I want you to go over and wire a u raisin dehydrator at 220 and rebuild it and I said I'm not sure I can do that he said if you can spend all this time reading Greek you should learn how to do that and he didn't give me the instruction he just said go do it and then I can see your education is valuable that's great so I had to how did the interest in that Dawn in you it was just an accident I was from a farm and I went to University Santa California Santa Cruz it was kind of a hippie it just opened it was supposedly the place everybody wanted to go my father picked it because all three of us got in he thought it would be cheaper and we could all live together in a rental house and I was in a class and there was this wonderful Professor named John Lynch and I did pretty well on a western Civ and he said would you like to study Latin and Greek and I said no my mother had grown up on the farm and she was a lawyer a judge at that time I thought wow I want to be a lawyer and then he said you're doing pretty well why don't you go take Yale uh go to Yale summer school and take Greek after your freshman year and I said I'm only 18 and he said Well everybody's in their late 20s if you survive that intensive Greek program and it was pretty traumatic for me I'd never been out of California so then I started doing pretty well I came back and I it was he that whole Classics group at UC Santa Cruz had come from Yale and they were philologists believe it or not so when I graduated uh he was always tell now you can go to Greece so my parents would come home and said what are you going to do with this and I said I don't know I am pretty good at it and they always give me money so then I applied to graduate school and she said well she was a Stanford chauvinist my grandfather had mortgages his farm and sent two of his girls to Stanford to get Bas and advanced grees and she said well we're a Stanford family I said I'm not going to go there and and then I asked this my my mentor and he said yeah they they have a really good philology department and they'll pay your entire way if you can get in so they had examinations to take and then I was 25 and I looked at the job market and there was no jobs for a white male that knew Latin and Greek so I came home to take care of my grandparent my grandmother for a summer and the next thing I knew I stayed 5 years farming full time and then some point I didn't have any money I wasn't doing too well and there was a campus at Cal State Fresno I'd never really been there 30 miles away and I walked in and asked if I could teach a Latin class and they said they'll think about it for 3 years first day I got there I parked on campus and the secretary said I had tracked mud in because I was irrigating and going back and forth and then the next thing I did I went out to the parking lot and there were the police were there around my pickup said Mr Mr what's your name and I said Hansen he said what are you doing you have a shotgun in the window and that's against the law to have a State campus is the is the firearm loaded I said yeah I shoot things that on the farm I don't remember when a coyote and they didn't believe that I was a faculty member and the very nice guy got to know him really well he said I didn't see any of this put the gun tuck it better down and never bring it on campus again that was my my first day at Clint campus God busted that was 20 years I stayed there so it got better I uh maybe people should know that I've known Victor now for many years more than 20 I think but uh admire him very much but I read your resume and I realized that you had had a special interest in Aristophanes yes what's that about well when you were in this particular program you concentrated on authors that you had to master in Greek for your PhD so my two were you had to have two Latin and mine were tacitus and petronus and Aristophanes and fiddies which means you have to read the whole Corpus in Greek and know the manuscript I like them because uh he wrote probably 100 comedies we have 11 that are extant and they're bitter he he's kind of classicist don't like to be so explicit but if you look at 19th century scholarship pretty they were pretty much in agreement he's an old Kagan and and he's a conservative and he doesn't like the radicalization of democracy but he's too clever to be a partisan so he makes fun of everybody kind of like Saturday Night Live but kind of grotesque and sometimes repulsive but he attacks everybody and he has these comedies where he holds up to ridicule the politicians of the age and they're on different topics sometimes they uh antis Socrates the clouds sometimes the knights anti alides Etc I mean uh clean I should say so I liked it a lot and I and uh I kind of mastered that what is it it's Plato zenfon Aristophanes are people who knew Socrates and wrote about him yes so I think there's only three maybe there's a fourth uh that's uh remarkable and of course it's derisory towards Socrates yes which is interesting yeah Aristophanes did not he I think he would have said what Churchill said of Gandhi was a naked Faker you know yeah that's right something like that uh and uh I've read something interesting lately I'll volunteer that uh uh in his early time Socrates was like a presocratic he was just doing Theory what's what what are the elements how do they work and he changed he he writes about the fact that he did Plato does that uh now he's interested in the things of men and so there's a there's an argument that I've read lately that Aristophanes didn't like that first Socrates he might have liked the second one better I think that's true I he was there's a m the mystical Pythagoras we don't really know as much we have later biographies about him from the helenistic and Roman age but he seems to have been a a mathematical Mystic that numbers have certain relationships that show divinity and you get glimpses of the Pythagorean theorem or something like that and that shows you how the Divinity Works cosmology and he was very much uh influenced by that and then he brought philosophy supposedly down from the clouds Aristophanes thought he never did so that attack you're right in the clouds is sort of well he was always a Mystic and nobody understands what he's saying even though he was a hoplight that fought the Battle of Dum he almost got killed and he led the rear guard and the defeat saved alabi's life probably but he was a he was a man of action as well he was in three battles uh in the pipian war and uh he was one of the few people who would not vote to execute the generals at aranai so he he was a man of action as well so fiddies and Aristophanes are not the same kind of guy uh tell us about this cities I think he's probably the greatest thinker of Classical Greece he was a half thran he was an aristocrat and he was a he probably wrote The pelian War uh somewhere between 420 to 400 BC but it was he was he was writing it because he came 3 days late to amphipolis and he was in charge of a naval squadron and he was on Fair relieved of command ostracized probably by Cleon whom he he describes as a very unpleasant character as did Aristophanes and he took that ostracism to travel over the Greek world and ostensibly he was writing about what he thought would be the greatest war that he didn't quite know how long it was going to last but he did something that we can't really decide about he created virtual truth or narrative truth in other words he has this ambiguous declaration at the beginning book2 he says I wrote down things as they happened and it took me a lot of trouble to find the truth and then you think you know that it's completely factual and he said and in some cases I put into the mouth of people things that they should have said given the situation so you don't know whether Pericles funer relation was dictated probably not or it represents the worldview in part of FUSD that's what makes it so brilliant so there's two fdii there's a very factual helpful account of the war from 431 where he ends in mid-sentence in 411 and then it's a pH philosophy the melean dialect the uh debate over melini the coryan revolution the funeral ration where he's imping his own ideas or he's uh putting it and infusing it into characters that he thinks best reflect in these particular situations what he believes the war was about or human nature was about before you think well he just made it up he's very careful that his views that come out of the mouths of characters fit the narrative environment of that particular time so it's very hard to say Clon didn't say this or Pericles didn't say this because it nobody else in the uh the narrative around those speeches seems to think that they're awkward they fit the narrative pretty well so he was an artist as well as a philosopher and a historian you got Aristophanes and you got through cities you got comedy and you got tragedy yeah it's it's the whole deal the classics generally uh something Charmed you about them and you're giving instances but at some point you decided to be that I'm going to be a scholar of this and that wasn't just cuz I know you pretty well just cuz somebody gave you you some money to study because you never get rich doing that but uh do did you see something in them that could help you live your life better I do uh I've always had a liability of doing something to excess sometimes it's really Boomerang but between the ages of 18 and 25 I think I didn't go on dates I didn't go out to do anything all I did was read Latin and Greek and study Greek literature and Latin literature and then I did that for the next 20 teaching it and in some ways it was an excape to get it was sort of like leading some people do that with Wind in the Willows or Lord of the Rings it was Game of phones it was going into a complete different different world and that was an escape but for me what I liked about it was there was no self-censorship today in the modern world when we say things we predicate them on how they GR to sound as far as our career are they politically correct incorrect or am I going to suffer repercussions human nature being what it is that was always true to some extent but people will just say things empirically in the ancient world and they don't really care whether it sounds incorrect or correct but they do care whether it's accurate and empirical and it's logical that honesty permeates I think a lot of uh when somebody like Socrates uh Pericles says or FUSD puts into his mouth that we cultivate refinement without effeminacy what is that that means that we all understand that people can read books and things without being a feat but you can't say that today because it conjures up all sorts of incorrect ideas about sexuality orientation but that's not what they meant they meant that a person uh that was inside all day and it was just described was missing out on the world and you couldn't count on him he was a feat or a feminine so that they thought that the Athenian was the per the perfect model that that avoided spartanism he wasn't just physical like the Spartans and yet he wasn't just a feat like some other cultures that he was a balanced person so that you you gain all of that knowledge and when I was in graduate school I I'd learned that this was an agrarian society and everywhere I turned there were metaphors from farming but there was almost nothing written on farming or War things at that time the only thing that had been written on war was in German it was very esoteric I had a thesis adviser I don't think was very fond of me but he at least said well you're studying languages and that's great do you really think you're going to be a great philologist and I said not really I don't like it he said well you know all about farming and this is a farming society and here's the names of the books on my one hand that are about about farming you could write about that and if you know something about military history you seem interested combine the two I owe him a great deal so I wrote a dissertation Warfare and agriculture in Classical Greece that it was it was a you know everything in life is an accident somebody mailed it to the mil the military historian John Keegan who was very well known you know him very well and I was farming on the tractor one day and I got this handwritten note from you know you okay and I went out and uh it said Dear Professor I wasn't a professor or anything I was and he said I have read your dissertation should you ever write another book call me and so that day I went in and started writing the Western Way of War about the combat and then I had no contact with the Classico my thes advisor was Longo nobody he was my only tie from the farm so I sent him the manuscript and I didn't hear from him for 3 months I thought I just kept fing I thought that's it and then one day he wrote and said Elizabeth sifton editorinchief of Alfred canop will be contacting you this week and I will be riding the forward and that's great that became almost a bestseller and that changed everything what appeal to you about uh because you're a uh Victor is difficult to characterize uh because he knows so much about and and I want to emphasize something he know so much what I mean is he he's unique in my experience I can't think of anybody else like him he's a top academic scholar cited in the classical uh scholarship among the most in the world and then on the other hand he does a lot of other things too uh but there are concentrations in your work uh war is one of them how does that come to be part of it was uh I grew up in this family of um they were Swedish Americans on my father's side and then Farmers both of them were farmers but they were all veterans from World War II so I would grow up and my father would be talking about flying 40 on 40 missions over Tokyo in a b29 and then he would talk about his first cousin whose mother had died in child birth and they had adopted Victor and aw was named and he had been killed in the six Marine Division on okona on the last day of fighting on Sugarloaf Hill and then I had an uncle who would be at the Christmas dinner and said well I was in the Illusions don't forget the Illusions then my grandmother would pipe up and say my nephew Beldon he got dingy fever in the Philippines it was a terrible you people should remember what happened in the Philippines and then she said and before you do that Hol he got killed at Normandy and then suddenly my grandfather would be there my sweede grandfather in that thick accent he goes well you know I was in the ardan in World War I Bella Wood and I got gassed he he was a from phosphine gas so that period from when I was 7 to 17 when it was just always World War II World War II and I started to read for RAC I think a lot of young kids I don't know if that's healthy or not but I noticed a lot of Hillsdale kids that when I've come here I taught military history and I will see students that are 18 and 19 and they will come up to me and say you mentioned a 20 mm gun and a b29 now you remember they were only there for about 6 week and they know the specifications of the plane it's almost obsessive they know everything more than I do and I remind me when I was that age I had that but I also realized that from those stories how horrific it was so when I wrote the Western Way War nobody had really written what it was like to fight in the fanks and how awful it was so in that book I talked about people getting terrified as they waited to charge and defecating in their armor or shaking or running away or getting killed or what type of wounds they had and that was that was derivative in the ancient world of what John Keegan had done in the face of battle so that was I Tred to always talk about war in the in the sense that it's the Supreme in a way it's necessary sometimes but essentially you're talking about young people killing themselves and and I I wrote four or five books ripples of battle about literature and art that comes out of War Carnage and C so I I I I was fascinated but also the horrors of it what does war teach us about people and things and civilization well it's it warns us uh about pacifism and it it warns us about the therapeutic nature of the tendency to be a therapeutic by that I mean it is so horrific and it makes no sense logically that there's always this movement to think we have transcended human nature and this is barbaric it's Neanderthal and we in Britain in 1935 were not going to do this anymore or in France in 1929 we're not going to do this or the United States after World War II this is insane or during after the Vietnam more and then you must realize that not everybody's on the same page and if you have this idea that you've mastered human nature and there's not going to be anybody in the world unlike you that will think I'm going to take advantage of this nation or I'm going to do something to this group of people and I'm going to do it by force of arms and they're going to get away with it are they going to hurt you or what because you've decided you've transcended then you have a moral culpability on your fa part and so as a church shelling scholar you know what Churchill said about Stanley Baldwin and Neville CH not so much Neville chamber but the French with they get people killed is what I'm saying Yeah by their morality and so you have you have to always realize that deterrence saves lives that is the the expenditure to protect you and your own and and let people know they shouldn't do things I think there was a great scholar in Australia blay was his name I met him once and he said all of war is really based on ignorance that everybody in this room if everybody knew how strong each person was physically they wouldn't say certain things to certain people or they wouldn't try things but what happens with among nations the strong Nations sometimes don't advertise how strong they are and they give the wrong signal to a Hitler or a Tojo or a mellan and then they do stupid things and War then is a learning experience it teaches that's what suid said it's a harsh Taskmaster harsh School Master what it means is that you have to find out something that you should have known from the beginning so at the end of World War II 65 million people are dead September 2nd 1945 guess what we learned the Soviet Union and the United States and the British Empire really did have a lot more wherewithal than Germany fascist Italy and Tojo the US economy was larger than all six belligerent all five other belligerant put together we should have known that in the beginning we wouldn't had to go to war but we didn't we were isolationist British uh you could argue that there were people in the British government that appeased and then there were people in the Soviet government that collaborated and that sent the wrong message that uh these people were weak when they were not inh they were very inherently strong so uh it occurs to me that war is like farming you uh learn a lot about the constraints of nature from both and and uh our way we Americans uh we've been so radically successful more than any Nation ever I mean I know that the claim today is that we're the most horrible Nation on Earth but that's foolish it's not always good for us to be so successful sometimes we have when we in enter that period of ubis we always get hit with Nemesis and we that happened for example in Afghanistan and I always envisioned it I was embedded twice in uh Iraq and I went over there and when you see you say the Iraq War but when you see the entire logistical problem of bringing a whole Army all the way 6,000 miles and then you see these kids 1920 and they're out in0 weather and they're underneath a hum trying to fix it or they're walking you're walking with them in somebody they'll say watch out for the person over there he looks like a little kid he may be is that is what it's all about it's not just a neat clean thing and I think sometimes we think we're going to go to Afghanistan we're going to go to this we're going to do this and because we do things so well it's going to be automatic and war is so unpredictable and we haven't had a very good to be Frank if you look at uh Vietnam and then maybe maybe not the first Gulf War but Iraq and Afghanistan and the bombing in Libya things didn't work out the way we thought they were going to and I think people in the future should realize that when you decide to do something like that be aware of the logistics and the toll it's going to take on the society and if you can unite people behind it because so many things go wrong I I can't get over that picture that we're leaving Kabul in August of 21 and people are hanging on the plane and the Marines are being blown up and then somebody says we have a billion doll Embassy well and then another you hear another report we have $300 million invested in refitting bam and then you see these acres and Acres of equipment I mean it was just stunning brand new Humvees and rifles and machine guns and so and a commentator gets on this is 20 billion we're leaving no it's 40 billion we still don't know and we just and then we have they show pictures of a George Floyd mural or a pride flag on the embassy or you hear that we spent over a hundred million in gender studies so we were trying to in a very imperialistic way implant our popular culture in a traditional Islamic Society but unlike the British who did it pretty successfully they had power coupled with meaningful reform that people could see help them but we were going over there and trying trying to turn traditional Islamic societies into popular culture in America and yet they didn't think we were strong enough to do it so here we are leaving and we're leaving all this behind and they think we're weak but at the same time they think that we're hotty and imperialistic because we have a pride flag which we think is great but they think is contrary to their entire religion so we combined the worst of both criticisms of op imperialistic trying to put our views on a different people and then being weak and ambivalent as as we carried it out I uh I used to help write the tral biography and I work for a man named Martin Gilbert a very very great man and I I got to go to Israel a lot and uh spent a long time there I was just there this summer but I wish I could go and spend a year anyway I I met because he was a famous man I met several of the founders of modern Israel and I remember when it dawned on me they were all soldiers yeah they weren't and and they didn't begin as generals they began in the line and their whole life they'd been doing that off and on and that means the most liberal and the most conservative of them all had a sense of the reality of things they do what is interesting about Israel is that it's sort of the litus test of Western civilization because it's a a purely Western Society it's got a free market economy especially under the Netanyahu government the last 10 or 12 years they have a constitutional system they're Western they're free they're affluent as they've never been before as you know and so do they have the Western disease the postmodern disease that laxity that we complain about or radical veers in fashion or music or all all of these things that we do that can be termed excess but they have unlike us they have no margin of error so can a western affluent free society and their neighborhood still believe in military Readiness patriotism full mobilization against people that they're told constantly they oppress them they shouldn't be there they're NE so they've got all this Western baggage that other societies in Europe the United States deal with but we we have two oceans we have Canada and Mexico Europe is pretty much uh safe they have people who want to destroy them and say they want to destroy them and call them a one bomb State and they have a history of the Holocaust and so they have no margin of err and so it's kind of a very interesting country if I could use that euphemistic terms is can a western Society a postmodern 21st Western century Society survive when people want to destroy it do they can they still have the wherewithal or the desire to be constantly ready in the way that Europe was finally in 1939 or we were in World War II and uh so far they've been able to do it and it's uh it's fun it's very fascinating to watch I'm tempted to a thesis uh we're being ruled by people who haven't farmed haven't fought and haven't read any old books that may be our problem yeah it's uh and one of the things that we didn't talk about I think also there's a shame culture that we've forgotten and we a lot of great classicists talked about that transition from Shame of the early Greek city state to guilt especially in the Christian era but we feel guilty about things but we don't feel any shame and it's it's interesting to see that in past civilization shame was the mod modulator of behavior and I was just thinking that the other day when in my hometown it was a a farming Community when somebody broke into a store they always said Jack Smith aged 16 even though he was a juvenile son of Mr and Mrs John Smith at 21 Birch Avenue was caught in the liquor store today and he will be uh charged with gr and today we would think that was so primitive or so cruel or so mean to identify a juvenile by name or his parents but that society as recent as say 1970 felt that that was one of the ways that Society had to encourage good behavior and I can remember when u a person in my family was smoking in town and my grandfather came back and said can you sit down Mr Jones another farmer said his wife was in town and he saw your blank relative and he had a cigarette dangling from his mouth is that true I said it's not like it's illegal and I said my dad smoked in World War II and he said I know that but this is not a war zone and our family does not smoke in public it wasn't a religious element at all it was just we have a reputation we've been here forever and we don't want people imputing it by suggesting you know he and there was another relative that had a tiny little tattoo and he said what's his name came back from the war he's my nephew but he I thought he was going to say he was wounded or he was killed or was suddenly post-traumatic he said and he was tud and that was something and we and our wisdom said we're going to get beyond that small Scarlet Letter Society so we just abandon that whole Collective pressure on individual behavior and I think as I always say to my wife if I lost my wallet in my hometown in a primitive area of n era 1965 somebody would deliver it to my house when I lost it here my credit card is being used and I find out within 30 minutes that somebody stole it and yet we're supposedly morally Superior and we've Advanced far beyond the Prejudice and biases and parochialism of 1965 when people return people's wallets to each other uh you're famous for thinking that we're in a mess I don't like it my wife also calls me Eeyore yeah yeah so I I uh you can tell from the structure of this interview that uh we don't need to draw that out uh I I myself think I think we're in a terrible mess and famous for thinking that too but it's good to think about the perspective the background that can help us understand the mess and maybe make a plan a plan to get out of it uh do you have suggest questions for us about that well there's two ways you could approach that remedy one is politics and one is culture or Spirit politics I think uh were $32 trillion in debt and we have no way of paying it back and we're running a $2 trillion deficit and the mentality behind that is I guess it's modern monary Theory there's always going to be a postmodern theory that justifies some disastrous action but but we're headed toward a Rendevous with radical Financial correction of somehow whether it's Social Security or Medicare or the budget and there's other things that used to be our Forte the military is I think is in deep trouble they're having problems recruiting they're they're becoming ideological all the things we grew up with this traditionalist that we counted on the doj the FBI the CIA they seem unrecognizable so there are things that have to be addressed and one one of the things I think we've got to do is go back to smaller government less regulation but to do that you just can't say that that means okay Victor how do you do it well you have to elect the house and the Senate and the White House and then you have to be on the same page that's very difficult to do we it's very rare when a party can do that but that that's what the only solution unless you believe that you can do it spiritually or culturally or socially by changing the hearts and minds of people and there's two things that give me hope one's negative one is it can't get worse we're getting to what herbstein said as I said the other night if it can't go on it won't go on when you go down when you walk through downtown San Francisco and you tiptoe through human feces and you see people who are injecting and fornicating and urinating and assaulting people with impunity and you see cars that have placards nothing inside car unlock don't take anything then you see that and 30% of these beautiful buildings are empty that it looks like a a neutron bomb hit it and so that can't function much longer and there are people in San Francisco that defunded the police that said we shouldn't do that and there's people that said the homeless is out of control and there's people saying we've got to stop Smash and grab and unlike you or I these are very strong members of the left and they say are philosophy did not work so that it's too bad we had to get to this point but you're starting to see people recognize that when they got their way and they got control of our institutions the corporate boardroom AK through2 the universities professional sports entertainment the media and they got everything they wanted it doesn't work and then the other thing is that I think a lot of people uh have memories kind of like like uh Romans in the 3rd or 4th Century ad we have memories Collective memories of that things were starting to be better in the past and we're starting there's all these different movements where people are trying to recapture the lion club or the Elks club or they're moving out into communities in the Foothills or sometimes it's a monastery the mine they just say I'm not watching them I was interested this I'm not watching the Tony I'm not watching the Oscars I'm not watching the 's I'm not watching the NBA anymore I'm not watching the halftime show I'm not and when you look at the statistics it's radical it just dropped off so nonparticipation in popular culture is starting to really make an effect a lot of people say I know I should be doing this I know I should watch this stuff I don't go to movies anymore part of it's technology I can watch them at home but I don't want to participate in the popular culture because it's a road to Oblivion and I think half the country is there already and they're starting you know Hillsdale College when you came here um I mean it was still it a very successful college but you've seen in 20 years miraculous growth but more importantly Hillsdale is not a college just anymore it's sort of a I don't want to say a brand name but it's a beacon to say that the world doesn't have to be the way it is you can you can replicate our values both with other colleges but culturally socially economically and that that's hopeful yeah well we we live your presence here on the campus which is an honor to us now going for back I think more than 20 years uh it's a Vindication of the most important thing that I learned in the classics myself and that is everybody loves the good and they love the beautiful the most of all and so one thing I think I was asked myself the other day what do we do about this mess and the answer is everything we can but the other thing is that spiritual thing you talked about it it's very difficult to restore that in against the resistance of the law it is and yet it's also very difficult to fix the law without that it means that the people who think the culture come first and the people they're a little bit too optimistic because Aristotle says the law makes culture well we're in a we have to have a great movement and it has to start with people learning uh uh I'm going to give you a chance to say something else but we'll close this now I just want to say in compliment to you the most important thing you are to the world most important thing you are to your friends and yourself is your great knower of the best things most important thing you are to others is a teacher and that's the way to help cultivate the spiritual re renewal that is necessary thank you I I think a lot of us don't want to argue anymore and everybody misinterprets it that as you're checking out or giving up but what's happened is whether people are moving to different states or they're saying I'm not going to buy anything from this particular corporation anymore or I'm not going to watch this particular National event it's almost like just Mass Civil Disobedience and a lot of people are saying if they're not going to participate we need those people even though we manipulate them and we don't like them we need them as consumers we need them as viewers we need them as attendants and these people are saying we're not going to do it we don't want to have a fight with you we're just not going to do it because your values have led us to Purgatory basically and I think that is becoming a very powerful movement and people are starting to recognize it and people on the left even are saying wow you can't have this Mass resistance without understanding why what it's about and why people are doing that and so it's been one of the strangest things in my life to see Bill Maher Matt taiii or Elon Musk or people like that finally saying this doesn't work what I what I'm doing and it doesn't work because a lot of people are are not participating in it your latest book is great it's called the dying citizen and and uh it's it's it's a moan about the loss of citizenship and a call to restore it and maybe what we're saying is the path to restoring citizenship an urgent need is that we all start learning and thinking again I think so and nothing's more important I think as I get older than civic education yeah teaching people about the customs and traditions of their country absolutely thank you thank you for having me Larry

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 288,468

Keywords: hillsdale, politics, constitution, equality, liberty, freedom, free speech, lecture, learn, america, education, learning

Id: wL-SDxDJ-vk

Length: 51min 7sec (3067 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2024