Alright, sorry to interrupt your cake, but Good evening everyone. Welcome to the the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. My name is Bruno Youn. I'm one of the Athenaeum Fellows this year. I'm gonna start this introduction by throwing shade. Not at anyone in particular, but a specific mentality. There is a certain particularly irritating mentality that with only mild exaggeration, sees only two possible post graduate outcomes for majors that aren't STEM, barista, or unemployed bum, nothing else. I have gotten many reactions along this line of thought when I explained to people that I'm a PPE or Philosophy, Politics and Economics major. The further outside, the small liberal arts college bubble you venture, the more common this view of education becomes. I imagine many of you have extended family members who think like this when you talk to them about what you're studying. I also imagine that many of them, when you tell them that you go the Claremont McKenna College, they asked you, where are you going to transfer for your four year degree? (laughter) But in all honesty, this view of education is a bit disheartening, because even though we need STEM Majors to develop and perfect new technology, we need liberal arts people to deal with its political, economic and social implications, among many other things. And so here to discuss one of the historical proponents of wide education, Winston Churchill, is Larry Arnn, who is President of Hillsdale College in Michigan. He's also a Professor of Politics and History there. He got his Master's and PhD in Government, from what was the Claremont Graduate School. He also studied at Oxford, where he served as Director of Research for Sir Martin Gilbert. He's the official biographer of Winston Churchill. From 1985 to 2000, he was President of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. President Arnn is also on the Board of Directors for the Salvatori Center here at CMC, who by the way, is co-sponsoring this presentation. Before we begin this talk, a couple of things, at head table, we were debating different conceptions of the good, and as conception of the good is that you please silence and put away your cell phones at this time, and that you not record this talk audio or visually. This talk will last about 45 minutes, giving us about 30 minutes for Q&A. Now without further ado, please join me in welcoming Larry Arnn. (applause) Thank you, Bruno. Thank you Hamsa who worked very hard and Priya, who makes this place run. It's good to be with you all. I used to go to the old Athenaeum Jack Stark and Jil Stark built this one and established many of it's patterns. There's so many people here, I've known since I was a kid and that's really long time ago. Ward Elliot, goodness gracious. Mark Blitz, when I wrote my doctoral qualifying exams here, I was given an essay by the young scholar from Harvard, Mark Blitz, I don't know where he was then. I was asked to comment on it, and I attacked it. (laughs) It was something about high degree you wrote, and I thought this is foolish, so I just wrote a real screed against it. Professor Jaffa liked it. (laughs) Later your colleague. So it's fun to be back here. There's actually a building at Hillsdale College that is inspired by this building. I've told them stories about this place a million times and what goes on in it and I'm proud to be here to be part of it. Churchill and Education is an odd topic, because Churchill never really got one. It's important to know for two reasons. They're both unusual reasons. One is Winston Churchill did several things that without any question altered the world in ways that affect us today. The fact that he lived, there's a room in London, and on the 28th of May 1940, he walked in that room. If anybody else had walked in that room with the job that he had written, would have surrendered or made a piece with Hitler at that moment. Everybody else in the room was intending that. It wasn't just that he didn't want that. It's not just that I vote no, he talked them into it. Think of the responsibility of that. Now, that's the first thing and the second thing is education is terribly important, right? Because it comes from a Latin word, it means to lead forth. That means it constitutes an answer to the question which way is forth. Which way should we go? It's the most disinterested answer to the question that we give because it's something we say to the future. All of you in this room, and there's, you know, all the old folks in this room who are friends of mine, they've actually given their lives to serving you. You're young and ignorant, and they are old and learned. Why would they do that? Then they have scruples about what they do. They think that they should say you, to you the thing that's right. So now you see, here's this guy, and he had this enormous consequence in the world, about questions of right and wrong. Questions that by the way, involved the deaths of more people ever killed in a human conflict than any other , and indeed he was at the center of the two things that were like that. Then education which he didn't have. But then the interesting fact arises that he talked about it all the time. Isn't that funny? Hamza is from Bangalore. The most revealing thing that Winston Churchill wrote about his own education is called, Education at Bangalore. Where'd she go? Too bad, she's missing her hometown now. That he was stationed there, as a soldier. He was 22 years old, and he had not gone to college. Indeed, you probably know, he was a very willful person. When he was a young man, he was a very willful young man. That means, it was very hard to get him to study anything he didn't want to study. Now, he was a much better student than he led on, but he was not as good enough student to go to Oxford, for example. He found his fun in his life, in a formal way when he got to the cavalry school and he got to ride horses all day in practice, stabbing and shooting people. He really liked that. Then he says, it was not until my 22nd year that the desire for learning came upon me. It's very charming this thing, Churchill had a gift that most politicians lack today. He could talk at great length about himself and not seem to be bragging. Although if you read carefully, he usually was. So what did he read? He read, he said, he read the classics. The way he puts the point is, he said, he'd heard the phrase many times, the sermon on the mount is the last word in Christian Ethics. Then he asked a really Socratic question. I wondered what are Ethics? What does that mean? What kind of thing is that? You know, the classics in the dialogues, Blitz over there and Charles Kessler knows all about this stuff. Probably several of you do. There is asking the question in Greek, TST. What is a thing? What is that thing? What is the name of that thing? What is the meaning of that name of that thing? And so what is Ethics? He says, I would have paid somebody two pounds, a lot of money there back then, to give me a compendious lecture on the question of Ethics for an hour or an hour and a half. Blitz and Charles Kessler, two pounds in that money, they'd it in a heartbeat. (laughs) They get paid less than that now to do it. But see, it was valuable to him, right? Then he says, I kept hearing about this guy Socrates. Who was that guy? What do you do, he said. He seemed to be like some nuisance who was always causing people trouble and he had a nagging wife. He said he was always giving people to head in their head, in their argument and making them look like fools, and so they killed him. I wanted the Socrates story, he said. Think about the perspective of that? This is sort of like what Bruno said in introducing me. I wanted to know that thing. That's why I wanted it. I didn't want it to sell it. I didn't want to advance myself with it. Churchill, by the way, was very much into personal advancement. His particular method of doing it, was to go on to a battlefield and expose himself to gunfire. He did it once by an armored train. He did many very brave things. It was written about in five wars that he fought in, and including the First World War. He was never on a battlefield if somebody didn't leave a record. Wow, watch that guy. Maybe the brave but spectacular brave thing he did, he wasn't even a soldier, he was a journalist. He saved an armored train in South Africa, and he walked out with gunfire going on around him. All the time for an hour, and everybody would just, you know, like that. When it was over, he walked up to the captain, and remember, he was just a journalist. You know why he was a journalist? He was a journalist, because they'd passed a regulation in the British Army that serving officers could not write for the press. They press that because of him, because in all of the wars in which he fought in, before he got into parliament, when he was 26 years old, he was the most famous commentator on those wars, a Second Lieutenant and he would criticize the generals. They hated that. They passed the regulation, he couldn't do it. What he would do is resign his commission for a few months and write a bunch of articles and then he joined back up. So on this day, he saves this train and he walks up to the captain, his name was Holodenon, they knew each other and he said, thank you for letting me do that. You see the assumption in there. He was sort of assuming everybody wanted to do that. He said the whole Darvish Light Infantry has seen me do that and now I'm going to be elected to Parliament. (laughs) By the way, if he met you guys, he'd also smart and so well placed, so handsome all of you. It's amazing, you got everything. I envy it. Youth too. He would say, how old are you? Whatever you said, he would say, you know, by the time he was a year older than you, Napoleon had done X. You got one year, conquered Italy, taken too long. You know, you gotta a year, go do it. That's how he thought about the youth. I mentioned these aspects of his character because when he starts writing this thing, in this chapter called my book called, My Early Life, is a very charming book. All of a sudden he names something that he's doing without any other motive except to do it. That's a whole disposition. Bruno made a joke. You guys all think this, right? You're here at this fancy college, your prospects are excellent. Most people don't get in here. Most people, by the way, don't even try. Of the ones who try, most don't make it. So you're privileged now and that encourages you to think, I'm doing this so I can get that. Winston Churchill, the guy who couldn't make himself go to college when he was your age, he condemns that. He says, later in his life, he says. I'm gonna read a bit from a very beautiful speech he gave about education. He gave very many, by the way. They all say the same thing, which is interesting. I'm gonna give you a contrast to what we say about it today, but you have heard growing up. He says, let me say a word for the late starters. He was a late starter. In some people, he said, they're not ready to learn the things that are the best to learn. Churchill wrote 50 books. He wrote 1000 articles. He had 16 exhibitions, solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy of his paintings. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He got honorary degrees all over the world. He always said the same thing at them. He said, I was never good when I was a kid at getting a degree like this, examinations were not my thing. But I found the way to get them, he said, don't study, they'll just give them to you. (laughs) It's very self deprecating, right? You should listen to this right here. You should go to work on this today. I tell you, it will take the rest of your life and most of your energy if you do it. Churchill writes. It is time when the want of learning comes upon him. He says, I caught myself using a good many words the meaning of which I could not define precisely. TSD, right? What is that thing? What is it in principle? What does it mean when I use the word he says, I admired these words but was afraid to use them for fear of being absurd. One day before I left England, a friend of mine had said Christ gospel was the last word in Ethics. What is that Ethics? You should start now more than you have, and even if you have a lot and you will have more than most people your age, you should redouble your efforts to learn what things mean. You should do that because you are a human, that's what humans do. Now what do we think about education today? I'm gonna use only Republican examples. The reason is, I'm a Republican and you guys are young and smart, well placed you're probably not. (laughs) But I want you to know, this is a bipartisan thing. We are cooperating in America for this thing. In the George W. Bush administration, there was the No Child Left Behind Act. I was asked to help with that act. The guy they sent to talk to me was an important guy. I was in the college business by then. I said, Ooh, that's a bad title. It's a bad title, that's the greatest title. I said, Really? Have you ever been in a classroom? Don't somebody get left behind every day? Then they gotta work and catch up? The point is, the learning is in the student. Blitz over there is one of the most knowing man I know, right? He worked for that. He had these natural gifts. It doesn't matter that his teacher Harvey Mansfield, also Charles's teacher. It doesn't matter that Harvey Mansfield knew a lot, Mark Blitz had to learn it just like Harvey did. You see, aint that true? Isn't that true in your own case, in every case? I know before I became a teacher, which I resisted doing all my life. I used to always say the reason I know the things, I know the most about, are because I actually had what I believe are the two greatest teacher in the world about those things. Martin Gilbert, about Winston Churchill and Harry Jeff about the American Revolution and the Civil War and Aristotle. I think they're the man and I used to always go around and say, yeah. I had those guys. That's why I know anything. Then later as I started teaching, I started to notice that not everybody learned the same. I was the same person all the time. Then I remembered, you know those guys that I studied with, they had a lot of students. What became of them? Who learned? Who listened? Do you find it exhausting to learn? You get dark circles under your eyes? Don't you dread it when finals come and you've got papers to do? And it's a huge moral test. That's the price. You wanna do it well, that's what it costs. Not everybody pays. Not everybody has the capacity to pay. But at least as important as the capacity is the willingness to pay, and I think it is No Child Left Behind Act. What it gave rise to was a regime that dominates K through 12 education today in which, they're these State standards and the kids are encouraged to pass the test. They've caught several whole school districts, have been prosecuted for giving the kids the answers because they'll get a raise. Whereas what about the joy of it? What about following it wherever it goes? What about running? What about I wanted to know who Socrates was? There is no practical reason to want to know that. That guy's been dead a long time. Worse than the No Child Left Behind Act, is something called the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education run by the Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings. She was Bush's Education Policy aide when he was the Governor in Texas. She and Bush and a man named Clint Miller invented this regime, Republicans all, of National Testing and Standards to dominate K through 12 education. They decided to bring that to the college world. You know, I happen to run a college and it does a lot to try to be independent of the United States Department of Education, where I've been many times, and never bet anybody who could define the term. I said to them, she gave a speech to start it. She said, you know, we need to compete with China. We're getting behind. We've got to have a national effort. Just like after the Sputnik, which got us to the moon. I pointed out to her, I said, the Sputnik was launched in 1958. The first Federal Aid Education started flying in 1961-62. We landed on the moon in 1969. It takes four years to get a college education and at least five to get an engineer, advanced engineering degree or a PhD. That means that no one who benefited from that act had anything to do with the moon landing. They were all a bunch of old guys. It's a simple point of chronology. She was very angry with me about that. Then they they did this report and the report leaves out some subjects Bruno said about scam, right? That's all this in there. They don't mention History or Literature or Philosophy. They don't mention happiness or goodness. They don't mention religion or morality. They don't mention government. It's a government thing, right? They don't mention the Constitution of the United States, they don't mention anything. Do you know what that word constitution means? Big word, fundamental word. Look it up. You see, they don't mention any of that. I pointed that out to them. They said, well, let's just up to our own selves, each family and each school and each person should make up their mind about that. Whereas in science, there are facts. I said, do you see what you said? You have just said that everything that is not quantifiable in mathematics is just a value and the next thing you know you're gonna run out of arguments for opposing Adolf Hitler. Terrible things to float from that. When's the last time you guys were accredited here? We just were in April. Second time, it's not that hard to get accredited cause they're are 2,500 colleges and most of them are not very good. So you should be able to pass the bank standard. But the process, I've done it twice now, every 10 years, is completely revolutionized now. Now it's all filling in boxes and the accreditors who are highly educated in my experience, always very fine people, show up and ask only the prepared questions for them. Now for the first time after these very distinguished people come and take out part of their lives. It's been five people, it's been five days on your campus and a month reading everything about it, and you have spent a year and a half writing up the story of your campus. That means, all of a sudden these experts show up and they look at you with a new eye. They can tell you things. Now that the process is falling completely under the control of the Department of Education, they are forbidden to tell you what they think. That means the people who know the best, who've seen the most, they actually have to leave and not tell you anything. It's like automatons. I said, because I'm an indiscreet person. I said, do you like that? They all just looked at each other. You see? One of them said to me, I've been paid high compliments by a couple of them because Hillsdale College, not the greatest college in the world, but it might be the most focused. We get up in the morning on what we're supposed to do, and what we're supposed to do was written in a document in 1844 by friends of Abraham Lincoln. We never forget that. So they come and they admire that. One woman said, you know you don't charge much here. I said, we don't. She said, do you have a lot of applications? I said, we do. She said, you could charge more. I said we could. She said, you don't? I said, No. She said, Why? I said, because we want the ones we want. We want you guys. People like you. People who can think. People who will get those dark circles in their eyes and be committed. And see, you can't quantify that. I promise you, you will discover later you're not doing that for money. Especially when you figure out how to make a living, which you will, then you'll find that, that falls away as a concern. Now back to Winston Churchill, because here's the amazing thing, this man who made speeches all over the world about how he was a poor student and never learned and exaggerates that cause we have a school records. We know what, he was good. He just wasn't great, and it wasn't great cause he was inconsistent. He was inconsistent because he wanted to be. He wanted to do a bunch of other stuff, like cavalry charges and stuff. Even when he was a kid. Do you know when he was 16 years old, he said to a friend, I am going to save London. It's gonna be attacked, and I'm going to save it. A bunch of 16 year old boys, generally talking about what they're going, I'm gonna be a lawyer, I'm going to be an astronaut, whatever they're gonna be. I'm gonna save London. I'm going to lead my country in a desperate struggle and save it. They laughed at him and he'd... You mean it? You mustn't be serious. You see, that guy? Let me show you what he wrote about education. At the University of Miami in February the 26, 1946. That's seven days before he gave the Fulton address in Fulton, Missouri that opened the Cold War. One of the greatest speeches he ever gave, and I think one of the greatest ever. But he goes to University of Miami and they give him an honorary degree, of course. Here's how he ends his speech, he says, this is an age of machinery and specialization. But I hope nonetheless, indeed, all the more that the purely vocational aspect of university study will not be allowed to dominate or monopolize the attention of the returning servicemen. In other words, the largest group of men and women ever assembled to fight a war are coming home and they've been through that trauma. And of course, what everybody says today especially, but back then to us, we have to retrain them so they can find their job and be of service to society and then Heck, we can compete with China or whatever the point is. Not dominate the attention of the returning servicemen, engines were made for man, not man for engines. Mr. Gladstone said many years ago that it ought to be a part of a man's religion, to see that his country as well governed. Knowledge of the past is the only foundation we have from which to peer into and try to measure the future. Expert knowledge, however, indispensable. Do you know that one of Winston Churchill's closest friends, was one of the premier Oxford physicist of his day? Professor Lindemann, and they were close. Of course, Churchill helped to invent the tank, thought of the idea himself first, how to invent the military airplane. One of the first to think of the idea, helped to invent the nuclear bomb. He knew the power of technology. He knew you'd never beat Hitler without it, and yet he says, expert knowledge how... And Lindemann, it was a great man. Churchill made him a barren or Chartwell. Lindemann do this too. That's they were friends he said. However indispensable, is no substitute for a generous and comprehending outlook upon the human story with all its sadness and all its unquenchable hope. People are not to be deployed as tools, instead they are ins, and they must know the things that things that are in snow, they must know ins. Here's what he said, I'll read two more quotes. In 1953, he's Prime Minister again, and he appoints this very nice lady, Horsburgh to be the Education Secretary. She starts doing this huge thing on Adult Education. That's the fancy now, isn't it? Teach them square dancing or something to amuse their time or retrain them something getting into the job. Churchill says, he held the thing up, he wouldn't let her go forward with her bill until she got it the way he wanted. Then he carried it in the House of Commons. By now, by the way, he's the greatest man alive. That's what everybody thinks. People who hated him for it, they still hate him, and the people who loved him before, they still love him. But then y'all loved and hated the greatest man alive. That's what everybody thought about it. There is perhaps, no branch of our vast educational system which it would attract more within its particular sphere, the aid encouragement of the state than adult education. How many must have been in Britain, after the disturbance of the two destructive wars, who thirst in later life to learn about the humanities, the history of their country, the philosophies of the human race and the Arts and Letters which sustain and are born forward by the ever conquering English language. That'll sound like bigotry to the modern in here, but remember what he means by that. Human beings have the gift of speech and no other beings do, and we get along by the language and talking or else we fight. Churchill always knew that, this ranks he says, in my opinion, far above science and technical instruction, which are well sustained and not without their rewards in the present system. The mental and moral outlook of free people studying the past with free minds in order to discern the future, demands the highest measures of which our hard press finances can sustain. Remember, he's a statesman. He makes laws, and he enforces them and what he's telling us, we have to teach people to think these things through for themselves. It isn't one of the most important things he ever wrote, after he wrote about how the Bolshevik society has adopted the principles of the white ant, not bees, they can't make any honey. It's like the termite. But he says, human nature is more intractable than ant nature. It is the glory and the safeguard of mankind, that it is easy to lead and hard to drive. Memorize that, I have. It means, like if you run a business, I do. Just remember that about people. If you let them do their jobs and agree with them, how they're going to do it. There is no reason for conflict and they love you for it because they get to do their jobs just like you and every class you take. I'll read the last thing because what I'm saying is, in the subject of education, we discovered the reason that Winston Churchill recognized Adolf Hitler for the animal that he was, but worse than animal, much more terrible. In one of his very greatest speeches, Churchill in the 36. He says, who are his enemies? Not just Jews, scientists, philosophers, people who write and think. He says, what are they afraid of? Words, they terrify them. You see, unnatural and wrong. Here's the precise plate where to put the point. I'm almost done. I wrote a book the other day with trace the history of mankind from the birth of the solar system towards extinction. This is in an essay called 50 Years Hands. It's one of the greatest things he ever wrote. There were 15 or 16 races of men, which in succession rose and fell over periods measured by tens of millions of years. In the end, a race of beings was evolved which had mastered nature. Do you have to do that? You hope sometimes, young and enthusiastic and full of passion and love. You hope that you can live a life where you can have anything that you want. He describes his life. He says, they could live as long as they chose. They enjoyed pleasures and sympathies, incomparably wider than our own, navigated the interplanetary spaces, could recall the panorama of the past and foresee the future. In other words, their gods. What was the good of all that to them? What did they know more than we know about the answers to the simple questions which man has asked since the earliest dawn of reason? Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Where are we going? No material progress even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive or however it may expand the faculties of man can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that science can reveal which gives the best hope that all will be well. You see in a question, if under certainty. In that question, you can find the meaning of your lives, and you won't find it anywhere else. There isn't any other thing to know. What is it to be a human and to repeat our table conversation and that means a good one. That's the message of Winston Churchill. Thank you. (applause) Alright, we have actually, 40 whole minutes for Q&A. Please raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question, to stand up when you ask your question. Please in the interest of time, try to keep them reasonably brief and priority off to go to students. Hey, thank you so much for your talk. I was just curious for yourself, what are the three most influential books that you've read throughout your life? I was advised by Harry Jaffa. He was making probably a particular comment on me. He said, life is too short to read 100 books. I have a list of the three greatest books he said. And I can repeat word for it. It's actually the first thing I ever heard in a graduate course, right over there in Baward Hall, Nickel McKeon Ethics. He said, his three greatest books were, Plato's Republic would have to be on any list. He said Aristotle, Politics would require some revision for the modern world. He seemed to be excluding it. The Bible is a different kind of thing. He said Shakespeare. Socrates said a poet would come, who could do tragedy and comedy equally well. Then he said, held up the neck and it takes to said, this is a perfect book and we are going to read this book. So that's one of my three. Then I've read a couple of books by Winston Churchill that it meant a lot to me, not like Shakespeare. The Bible is a different kind of thing, but also very important. You should take the advice cause you understand now, you must be interested in your goodness and then your greatness. That means, you should pick the most worthy thing and you should think, I'm gonna be the most persistent person in history, no matter what I do for a living, I'm gonna be really good at those things. Pick a book, learn it, you'll have to read it 50 times. You'll have to read it in my experience, 45 years. And if you do, all of a sudden it's arguments will be with you all the time. That's what Churchill did. He went to see Macbeth. Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln's favorite plays were Macbeth. Richard Burton records that he was playing Macbeth, and the great Prime Minister was sitting in the front row, already the greatest man in the world, and he was talking, and Richard Burton was unnerved. He said it was in the second act that he realized that Churchill was reciting the lines from memory. Hi, thank you for the talk. So in the spirit of Plato's Republic, what do you think about the tendency of many American colleges like CMC and Palomar college, to spend lavishly on luxuries that are not relevant to a education? I know a promoter is going to build a $50 million gym, which is completely ridiculous. So that's clever question. Let me just condemn Jack Stark start for the fool that he is. (laughter) No, I think the basic subjects in Plato's Republic might be music and gymnastic? Do I recall that correctly? I do have a general criticism of colleges. It's just exactly like Churchill's and I don't apply it to this one. Because I have a lot of friends who teach here and they're still happy here. It must not be bad. What are most of them like? I was explaining to my table mates here, we swim in the sea today that things gain their importance from what we think. Any claim of objectivity about any moral or principal thing is suspect and can lead to despotism and we don't wanna do that. So that's something we have to liberate ourselves from. We'll find out if we do it seriously that it's not easy to do that. Hard to know, but of course important to know. Then the worst colleges, which have some correlation to the most elite, what they have is kind of a police state running on them now. Where you get a thwart of the cause and you're shut up and silenced. And, mustn't give the way that of that here. Because remember, the word college means partnership. It's something we come together to do. We're supposed to love each other. We need each other to talk and opine and read together and think together, and we have to cultivate our friendship. The only real agreement you have to make is, we're going to seek the truth and be good to each other. And you follow that road, I think you say anything you want to. So I would encourage colleges to do that, and if they're rich, I've never spent $50 million on a gym, but I spent $35 million dollars on a chapel. (laughs) Yeah, yes, ma'am. I was wondering, given that Churchill was quite unique in the way that he wrote himself into history and spent the majority of his life marketing himself to the world, how much do you think that was true and correlates to the reality of his own life? You mean his fame or his reputation? Yeah, and what he achieved and how his life went? Well, I think he was a very great man. I think he learned a lot and he made a lot of mistakes, by his own account, but also some that he didn't give an account of. But I think, it just so happened that he was put in places and he sought those places. He became Prime Minister on the ninth of May, tenth of May, the evening of the ninth of May 1940. He'd always wanted that job. But by the time he got it, he was 65 years old. The situation was desperate. He says, I felt as if I were walking with destiny. I went to sleep, and that all my life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial, I went to sleep and slept soundly. Sometimes facts are better than dreams. In other words, in that terrible spot where he made that judgment that affected hundreds of millions of people, he wanted to be there. He thought he was made for that. So that's an enormous moral burden for somebody to take upon themselves. That means that has to be vindicated by... You know what makes up a moral act? The virtue of the act is in the doer not the deed and it becomes moral if it wishes for the right thing and if it exercises the necessary practical wisdom, which is never infallible toward getting it. Did Churchill do that because he wanted to be the big dog? Cause if he did, that's wrong. Did he do it because he thought he was made to do some act of justice that other people were not able to do and he was prepared to sacrifice for that? Cause he did expose himself to gunfire all his life. I think that the reason it's important to study somebody, you should pick apart from picking a book, pick a person or an event. This is also Harry Jeffa's advice. Jack Stark asked Harry Jaffa 400 years ago to write a sample honors program for Claremont McKenna. Jaffa did write one, and he gave a lecture over and Bauer forum for it. You still have all that over here? Is that all still down there, Jack? I remember this really great night. It was a brilliant lecture. He repeated the advice I'd heard him give in class, which was, pick three books or for an honors thesis, if you want to graduate with honors, demonstrate mastery of some important book and also of some important person or event. The reason you study people like Churchill, is that you're just like him. You have to live your life, and you have these appetites, and you have these fears, and you have these wishes, and then you have something outside them. Some sense of good or right. How do you navigate between those things? Cause we're the only beings like that, right? Aristotle says that the sum of the virtues in this regard is practical wisdom, and it combines the right moral intention with good judgment. He says, If you wanna learn how to do that, that's hard, takes experience. But the quickest way would be, study people who seem to be really good at it, especially statesmen. Churchill's life by the way, is a long string of failure and disappointment. In 1901, he forecast, he's 26 years old, and he'd been on these battlefields and he fought in Sudan and he saw this battle, it was a battle of British soldiers against the first Islamic Republic, and he was in it. He was in a cavalry charge. He didn't like those radical Muslims, but on the other hand, he watched the British mow them down across an open field with automatic weapons and artillery. That was a glory, everybody in Britain was rejoicing at that because this guy, the Mahdi, had destroyed a British hero, a guy named Chinese Gordon, General Gordon. What kind of picturesque, go around the empire kind of guy. Churchill was there, so that he could perform and write a book and get elected to Parliament. He watched that slaughter and he hated that day. You should read in the river work, called the Battle of Bonderman. He describes how the dervishes, that's what they called back then, come over the hill. They had no idea of the impending tragedy. The white flags fluttered, but then they began to fall and then more and row upon row and it seemed, he writes, unfair because they had not yet heard us at all. In the middle of the same paragraph, he shifted the British line, he said the infantry filed fired steadily and stolidly. After a while, it became boring, but they were tedious, but they remained interested in the work. After a while, their barrels began to melt, and people were carrying ammunition and water jackets. He's describing a factory. He said, and after each folly, there seemed to be fewer of them over the site. 35,000 dervishes charged across about a mile, about 20,000 British and the one that got the closest to the British line got within 150 yards. That means a football field and a half they could still hardly see it. Churchill hated that. In 1901, he forecast that's what war is going to be for both sides, and we have to stop that. Before both world wars, he fought like a man. He just flew all over the place trying to sail all over the place in the first one, trying to find a way to prevent the war. He failed. You see, a failure. That's what he was. Then his other great cause was, he thought that modern society, we are producing through modern science powers that can eventually overwhelm us. Administrative powers, not just war powers, is most impressive essay about the danger of wars called, Shall We All Commit Suicide, which he wrote in time of peace, cause he didn't write things like that. Remember, this is the man, who didn't just say, no we will not make a peace with Hitler, he talked the rest of them out of it. How do you do it? He said, I've been thinking... So first of all, the war cabinet was gonna quit and if Halifax or Chamberlain, either Halifax look close to it, had resigned, then the Churchill government would have fallen. That means you couldn't stop it. So what he did was, he just called cabinet meeting. The war cabinet was five people. The cabinet was 24 people. He got them in a room, and he gave a speech. The speech is not written down, which is rare for him, but two guys wrote down in detail what he said. They agree pretty much. He gets to the end of it, he describes the situation, he says it's desperate. There's gonna be a great battle for the channel. It'll be mostly an air battle, if they land, I remind you he says, that there are towns in Southern England that have towns of the same name in North America, and will they come to help us? You see responsibility over the United States of America? And he said, I've been thinking in these last few days whether it is part of my duty to open negotiation with that man. I believe that if I were for a moment to consider parlay or surrender, every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place. If this island story is to end at last, let it end when each of us was choking in his own blood upon the ground. They rushed up and they celebrated. That's how he persuaded them. Then you have to see, he's the last man in the world to have wanted to do that. He argued against it all his life, and then he didn't, he invented the social safety net with David Lloyd George mostly, and he did it in part because he wanted everybody to have a stake in the society. There would be insurance schemes and that would give stability and constitutional stability to the government. He wanted everybody to vote. He helped overturn the power of the House of Lords. The point is, he thought socialism would lead to barbarism. Finally, well, in 1945, they beat him, devastated him. What does that mean? That means that you're looking at a spectacular series of failures, and yet still a tremendous thing from which one can learn. Is there another lesson for our own lives in that? We're not gonna get our way very often. Can we do the right thing anyway? Being such an expert on Winston Churchill's writings and words. If you could just boil down what you think are the most important lessons he teaches for communication and persuasion? What would you say those are? Well, so first of all, it helps to start out as a genius. Second, he worked at that. Leaves a record of how he worked at that. To write, he wrote and rewrote. He wrote everything he published, he wrote it ten times or more. He got really fast at it, but then over and over, cause he started dictating. He lived his life really determined human being. He was broke most of his life, and yet he had a household establishment that always included at least seven or eight secretaries, who would be around to take dictation from him from about eight in the morning until about two in the morning. So he worked at it. Then he studied the classical things, right? His teacher, the headmaster of Herald school was one of the great 19th century translators of Aristotle, especially if Aristotle's rhetoric whose translation of the rhetoric was the standard thing for about 50 years. So he knew about all that. The first essay he ever wrote is about the scaffolding of rhetoric. Then about writing. He was really good about writing. You guys are good writers? Probably not, learn to be. Here's the thing. He says, a sentence, a word, first of all, that's the thing with an integrity, a dignity. It means something, pick the right one. He says in Education at Bangalore. I loved the sound of words falling into place, like pennies in a slot. Pick the right word. Then the second thing is, a sentence is something. There's just one thought in it. Do you guys write run-on sentences? Manage them. They're ugly. They're awful, right? Don't don't use the passive voice. Mostly some, but it's action. This does this, this does this. It makes it punchy and clear. Then a paragraph is something and it's got it and then you know, a chapter in a book. So the point is, everything is coherent when you write, and that means you got to think it through again and again. Then if you get good at it, you'll become persuasive to people. That's an enormous force for good or you could be Hitler and use it for evil. He cultivated that, but he was a gifted individual, not like most of us. Okay, is that enough? Thank you all. I don't know, I'm not in charge here. All right. Well, it does look like is enough because we seem to have exhausted our question supply, but before we end, President Arnn, we do allow speakers to give closing remarks, if they have any. So do you any? I've been blowing off all time. Good for you guys, study hard. The most important thing, be good and learn what that means. All right thank you President Arnn. (applause)
