The Ancient Greeks and Western Civilization: Then and Now, pt 1

let me finish with a couple of critiques on the left and the right of this gift of the Greeks to us that we call Western civilization both domestic and foreign if you're a leftist today if you are leftist in the past if you were a leftist in this 2,500 year period and by leftist I just mean that you you think that equality is more important than freedom for example clumsy what would be your critique of this and the first is that when you let people engage freely in economic activity they're going to make more money if they're gonna get more money they're gonna have more opportunity and life is very short and who is to say that someone who digs a dish ditch or put Swift tiles on the Parthenon why does he get a Drock Monday and someone else like Nikia so owns the mines of Laurium it's a 100 drunkness a day doesn't it's not fair you can't quantify those and when you try to explain the economics or the lack of birth you have problems so very early on in the West this leftist critique has tried to bridle this system the Greeks were wonderful at it the system started with property owners everybody had to have an equal size property we when the Greeks form colonies you look we can tell archaeologically and epigraphic aliy they're all are looked like clones they have a checkerboard each man one hoplite in the filings one voter in the assembly one 10-acre farmer and that was the ideal and then suddenly the Greek philosopher said wait a minute one guy might be stupid or he might not be educated or he might be lazy and he loses farmer feet well how do we do to keep him on his farm when they're not fair and then people said we'll make it socially unacceptable to sell can't do or will make fun of you or will pass laws but they understood from the beginning that that was going to be hampered economic activity because if somebody had 20 or 40 acres who was really good at he could produce more food for everybody else who didn't have before and so very early on there were this this war from the left to try to find a system to control it and it worked pretty well in places like Athens well there's not one record of a farm that ever got larger than a hundred and twenty acres in the Classical period and yet we know that same demon hell mystic times and then later especially under Rome one Dean the entire team of Marathon was almost owned by one man who roadies Atticus so well there had to only been 120 acres as the largest farm we've probably had a farm of over 40,000 acres so we go back and forth and if you look at there's not never been anything like Athenian democracy never anything quite so radical think of it it's election to office by sortition random lot taking pick the most of us in this audience would probably like to pick your senators or representatives our president by law but that's the Athenians trust in the common man or the idea that when you leave office you have to go our to take on office these crazy ideas of antidotes and youth in a you have to exchange property if somebody's corrupt you make an allegation and he's wrong and you're right you take his money or you can ostracize someone for no reason other than he's popular if he's popular you must be doing something wrong to power these were things that from the very beginning and they're with us today and you can see it in our red blue state Democratic Republic intention we want to free up the economy and as soon as we free up the economy somebody says they CEOs are making too much money so now we're gonna clamp down on this as we clamp down on we say you know all the money fled to London now it's the financial capital the world we got to open up on when we go back and forth I mean this is a country after all it elected Hoover then Rosabelle then after Rosa then went from you know Reagan Clinton we go back and forth radically so because we there's no answer to it what that perfect that perfect balance is between liberty and freedom that enriches us all letting the strong go out and make the money and then without sharing us the weak and we don't know the answer to that and that was with us at the beginning the second thing is and we look at foreign policy how do you how do you call this thing off this Western dynamism and the Greeks the Athenians had the idea that although they attacked Democratic Sicily themselves there was a larger there's a tendency that consensual governments are slightly to attack one another now and some of you were gonna say wait a minute hath UNS fought somebody three out of every four years they did so did Venice America seems like it's getting up there and but the answer is they rarely attack constitutional government so it was always a dream in the hope of Western civilization that if you could create consensual governments and democracies you can see this neoconservative idea it's not new at all it's old but then you would have a utopia of like-minded consensual societies and the dream of the Enlightenment would finally be realized that sober people could adjudicate the differences to the auspices of constitutional government that was also a critique from the left that you have to have some mechanism you have to promote democracy let the people decide because then they won't unleash this military prowess on the right well you know what Plato said remember ball-headed little tinker the very idea that somebody could be in a sweaty little shop making a pot or putting a soul in a shoe and he could have the same vote as a man who owned a hundred acres and three ponies it didn't make any sense and yet that's what democracy does and the critique that Plato articulates not wholly accepted by Aristotle but afterwards it seems to be very common in Western civilization other than the Greek playwrights it's hard to find a philosopher who thinks democracy is that great of an idea and the right critique is that all people aren't born as I said equal and when you try to do it artificially you go against something they call natural law you have to increasingly face contradictions if you're in Russia then you have to have members of the polar borough or the Soviet secretary-general he has to have a bigger dacha in somebody else you have to hide it or he has seven phones on his desk and how do you say that he has seven phones or you have an apparatchik that gets more because that's a human desire and a human characteristic to get what you can and so the right says that when you artificially express it suppress it then it doesn't you become absurd and that seems to be quite common as a critique of democracy and I think in the last 20 years we've tried to argue that we don't want to take the state and make an equality of result but we want a quality of opportunity the rights argument has always been you can get an equality of result but you have to have corpses pile up to do it the left side you can have a quality of result if we improve the nature of mankind I haven't talked about religion but the right would also say the government should let people do what they please let the strong lead the weak and then there's a role of the Christian religion in this Sermon on the Mount to remind people that it's easier for a camel to get through I have a needle than a rich man to go to heaven there'll be a reckoning in the next world this is also a critique of the lab we don't want to wait for the next one but this again the point is the right has always had this critique of the West that it was not free enough that it was too radically egalitarian then too much state control there was been another critique like you really saw this break that goes back to the Greeks on 9/11 on 9/12 I picked up and read something I think it was nine fourteen that Susan Sontag the late Susan Sontag the liberal essayist wrote said it was all our fault that we all call an eyes and kill abroad and then you turn to the right and Jerry Falwell says you know it's all our fault we deserved it because we're decadent we had gays and abortion and then I just reviewed this book last week by Dinesh D'Souza basically it said the same thing Britney Spears smears Brokeback Mountain rap music Muslim traditional Muslims got offended our natural allies or traditional Muslims you conservatives have nothing to do with the America and left they're the enemy they're like bin Laden we need to transcend our American s and have an ideological affinity with conservative I found it quite frightening but nevertheless that's been a right wing dinesh d'souza didn't concoct that out of X Neill well that was been an old criticism that excuse me the combination of capitalism or free markets personal freedom of expression creates decadence luksus that's the theme in Petronius a satiric on juvenile set tires the biographer Suetonius Tacitus that the Roman elite had too much that was Fukuyama's Hegelian thesis Nietzsche Oswald Spengler that the West was decadent this is exactly what Dinesh D'Souza says that most people are not mature enough or wise enough or educated are religious enough to handle the benefits that a capitalist free democracy gives to them and therefore they become decadent they sit all day on entitlements and watch Oprah are they getting a big SUV to go down get an ice-cream cone they're fat they're lazy and they're dangerous this is kind of the right wing they're men without chest that's a very old critique and it came to us in 9/11 it was almost amazing how Susan Sontag myriam h jerry falwell or how oliver stone sounds almost like Dinesh D'Souza again but they're not unique they go back to this inherent contradiction in the Greeks request of Western civilization let me just finish about some thoughts about the future I said that 2500 years wasn't such a long time there's no law written in granite that says the West has to begin in 2500 years ago and you know what date we use the county and Olympic Games or if you some of you Democrat tick advocates could say didn't start till 507 or the city state we have inscriptions around 700 whatever date we use there was no reason it had to start there just as there was no reason how to start there's no reason it has to continued ad infinitum there's no reason that we have to have Western civilization there's there other paradigms the Muslim world is trying to talk about the Sharia the restoration of a Caliphate we see people in China Asian values have suggests that autocracy could be married to capitalism you get the best of the Western world's without its decadence just seems to me though we should realize that why these why Western civilization has not been extinguished because it appeals to the innate freedom or a critics called greed of people to express themselves and to enrich themselves and to pass on their property to their children and to critique the very system in which they live nevertheless there's been periods where it was it was almost extinguished and let me just end with three examples that I don't understand as a historian I don't understand how an ancient Athens like that had fought the Persians and defeated them and there may have been four hundred thousand of them 480 under Xerxes a little tiny city-state like Athens that did that then it fought Sparta for 27 years but then after building the Parthenon restoring its walls being more wealthy and more practice at democracy after 150 years suddenly in the three 40s and three 30s it decides that it can't stop a one-eyed lamp thug like Philip of Macedon guy only has 30,000 troops he's got 1/10 of forces that Xerxes and Athens is much more prosperous in numerous it's recovered why can't it do that why does it have to give up its freedom to this guy well the answer I think is in demas considerations i don't understand how the roman republic that only let's say between 219 that awful three year period where the roman republic probably lost a hundred thousand men killed at places like tres cemani and Trebbia and canine 300 400 a minute at canine where that army probably had the highest level of conscription of any per capita of any society we know of except say germany about 1945 or israel 1973 but nevertheless i don't see how that small portion of italy was stood Hannibal losing those kinds of losses while it was in a de facto war with philip v of Macedon and the whole legacy of Macedonian warfare and it yet it prevailed and yet if you fast-forward to the 5th century AD when it's now not just a portion of Italy and not just four million people it seems to me it's somewhere between 60 and 70 million with a million square miles of territory and it can't stop a two-bit thug like Attila the Hun or can't keep people across the danube by any classical definition proportionately represented no challenged much less than Hannibal due to just four or five million Italians six hundred years earlier I don't understand France I really don't I I don't understand World War one but I mean think about it this was a culture rightly or wrongly if you go to the ossuary today and we're done and see the terrible sacrifices when the German army came into Belgium and France 1914 the world had never seen an army like that if you look at the logistics of the depression army if you look at the way that the officer corps was organized if you look at the standardization of technology there had never been given the constraints of an age an army like that and there was no reason the Germans the French should have won for the English and yet they they not only stopped that army they kept France basically a lot until the American manpower came and the British Weis dubbing improved their tactics they had masks conscription but still it's almost inexplicable that if people could suffer so much and be against so many odds and show such valor and spirit and yet if you fast forward not in the case of Athens 150 a case of Rome 600 but just go about 20 years if you look at the German army that invaded Poland 1939 we say that they had Panzers this is the very marked I went and looked at a Tank Museum about two months ago and I looked at the Panzer Mark 1 and Mark 2 that went into Poland and I look at the fringe of Shark Tank believe you know what they look like they look like a Volkswagen with a little armor on the guns about this long it's the most pathetic tank you can imagine this is not Panthers or Tigers and when you look at the numbers of the ver mark that were occupied going into Poland and you look at the numbers of the French army which was good 250,000 people they could have gone right into Berlin and even in as late as May 1940 with British air support French numerical parody almost superiority in many aspects of French Navy French armor was as good French 88 they had just as good technology in many ways and yet they lost what their ancestors had not lost in four years they lost it seven weeks and the answer to me it seems to me about Western civilization what keeps it going as people have to understand what it is that it's not perfect that it is good without being perfect and it's a better than the alternative and when they do not think their culture is exceptional and I don't think the 4th century Athenians did are the Romans of the fifth century I don't think the French in the 1930s thought that it was exceptional or far better than alternative then history says to it I give you no exemption and it doesn't and they disappear thank you very much we'll be happy to take any questions there we go so we're we're recording this for webcasting so I need to give you a microphone I figured out how to turn it on here we go and I was going to say let's try and limit it to the whole question of Western civilization in higher education but given the lecture that would be unwed CERN to limit the restrict or anything discussion anyway so I guess I'll have to allow any question whatsoever there you go thank you dr. Hanson there's a piece that ran several weeks ago that you may well have seen by charles murray in the Wall Street Journal entitled Aztecs and Greeks where apropos of your talking so we have a perhaps a little bit to learn from the Aztecs and a great deal from the Greeks and he talked about Western civilization and in particularly the duty of those at the upper end of the bell curve which probably everyone in this room to educate and the institution's to educate for the good and for the moral and not just to educate bright people to be bright people I would be very interested in your comments on that in light of your talk and the nature of this talk this evening I think people have to realize that there's this tension that holds Western civilization together and I didn't give it enough attention this talk is is a lot of its moral now it can be you can be a secular humanist and think that your gods are Rousseau or you could be a Christian or it can be any religion but there has to be some sense and it has been inculcated in the West that those who have more advantages and there's a lot of reasons I don't agree with Charles Murray's racial explanation sometimes not at all but nevertheless whether it's birth or education or hard work or culture whatever the particular catalyst is that lets some people excel and others and there has to be some way to remind everybody the system won't work if two things happen one you abrogate your responsibility to help those less fortunate by lending your brother who's banged up some money or helping a child that's gone bad even your own child if it has to be doing something that allows you to bring somebody some notion of parity and - if you don't do that and the state has to do it entirely then the system won't work and how you remind people who have enormous talents that they have to offer their services to others without patronizing them but in a real sense of Western egalitarianism is very hard I'm very worried about people today with this psychological manifestation and I see that a lot of people have a cosmic worldview that they are very very generous or they're very critical of their own culture they're very ashamed of their own well through but yet the world right in front of it there's there's ways to help that people don't do it I was talking to a professor not long ago I was mentioned this before five or six offers for one hundred and fifty hundred eighty thousand dollar and down professorship market capitalism great and damming the United States have created the system that's going to enrich him with lifetime employment in summers off with a culture of a CEO but I said to me why not just teach some kids or why not just be a mentor to somebody or might not just be on a thesis committee for someone not saying that he wasn't but that has to be it's not a political phenomenon be to left to right but if people don't do that the system doesn't work and if the state has to step in and do it then we know what happens there has to be a balance I guess yes yes well the state always in Greece Greeks the state helped orphans but when the state has the entire responsibility and individuals don't um don't own up to their own moral authority then all you're asking for is a continual increase in the state's control over the individual and then you're going to be bits very hard and democracy for people not to vote themselves greater entitlement the money has to come from somewhere and then you get social tension and factionalism and that's the story of Greek history it really is trying to find a balance between harnessing the talent of elites or the luck of elites of the Greeks the Athenians did it pretty well I mean liturgies they said you guys have to build triremes and put on plays and you know what we'll let you be a Trier Ark and have a big robe and you can go out in your own ship and everybody claps for you in some way and we try to do it to wealthy people give the university is in a wonderful way and give scholarships to people who attend I was talking to European he was trashing the United States about that we don't support higher education but I saw statistic at 60% of those students at private schools 60% of them are having their tuition room and board paid by some type of fellowship or scholarship so that's what it's the success of the West yes attack you know I'll get to he's no no wait excuse me no cut no I'll have I promise you'll be next I'll promise should be next but you interrupted him he was right in the middle of a question yeah he did he has a microphone all answered next just pulled on follows their Greek rules here and actually I had a hand in the back of it you'll be right after him that's all right go ahead I'm a question on our concept of private property yeah if I own my land yes but I have to pay taxes on that yes and if I don't the government will take it and also when I die I cannot choose if I'm very wealthy choose to whom I want to leave my property to the government claims that they have a right to my property or my wealth and they take it no why would they take it because what you didn't pay out here in its tag yes and death if you want to call it a death pact if you will is the notion of our private property is it fair well the question of government control over our private property we don't live in a we don't live in a natural state there has to be a government and that's my point that I was trying to emphasize that thin line between government responsibilities and individual freedom and they're not mutually inclusive I mean they're exclusive somehow so the government has tried to suggest and that you gave a good example of something called inheritance tax it reminds me of a lot of the methodology of the ancient Athenian state to say that somebody got lucky somebody was brilliant somebody did something illegal whatever term you use and got a lot of money and that generation so now we're going to try to read level the playing field a little bit for the next generation and then they we do that and then the people come along and say well if you're gonna do that I'm not gonna make any money cuz I'm gonna lose it all for my kids so then we in Bali's the property - we did in California and we're trying to do it in the state and then we're gonna do that we're gonna see the 19th century greater estates greater wealth and then we're gonna go back and do it again it's this constant yin and yang as we try to find the perfect solution for a problem that's in us as humans that were quiz ative that we're not equal and yet we try to find it within the parameters of Western culture so we go back and forth and the main thing to remember is as long as you're within these parameters where you don't let people just create wealth and not be accountable with the state and you don't have the state taking everything within these parameters people reasonable people disagree all the time yeah question well I let me take this question first and then he'll be next that's all right almost him the next one well I'm I've got an idea I promised in the very next question and also one more thing this is actually quite important if you if you parked in the San Jacinto garage and you need the parking cards I've got those so see me after a discussion so even how is a civilization expect to survive that basically regards children as irrelevant which is really the case in western you know I have a bad ear and what how does this society survive when they don't when people basically consider having children to be irrelevant now yes I mean well you know altering civilization is is you know really in the midst of an if I was going to be reductionist I would say that Western civilization took off in the 7th century in Greece when the population probably do a 3% per annum and it really started to fall in the second century when we probably had a negative population group growth at least among Italian citizens of the Empire and as I understand now in Greece it's got the lowest population replacement rave about 1.2 and we were projected in Europe to lose about 40 to 50 million people the next 60 years and you can already see it in parts of German East Germany and you can also see it in Greece rural Greece where Europe is really going to suffer this depopulation that's going to have enormous economic and cultural ramifications and white where does it come from it comes in the history of the West when life is good and after all who would want to change diapers when you can go out and party at 3:00 in the morning or why would you want to have a van that stinks with with children spilling their food when you Rossetti's that's the issue that life is so good and life is so wonderful in the West that you don't want to share it with anybody and more importantly you've lost the sense of transcendence if you're an atheist you still don't believe that this you're pessimistic about the environment or you're pessimistic about yourself whatever pessimism it is you don't feel life's that good to pass it on or if you're you've lost your god you don't think that there's going to be a life in the next world no transcendence you're not gonna be judged on anything you do you might as well enjoy it so Greeks have a long discussion of this and it's in the Roman agricultural writers that people plant pear trees that take 20 years to come into full production like olive trees little s for their grandchildren and there's people planting olive trees and pear trees when they're 80 and that seem to be a very very important barometer as you pointed out of a healthy society now you had a question yeah well just a clarification really when you talk about the Black Hawk helicopter incident yes I thought you said that the the Western civilization that produced the helicopter those people would be sadder for the loss of the pilot oh and the people they I said that that loss will represent a greater investment in time and education and will be perceived as greater and so if you lose one Black Hawk helicopter that will be a much greater argument for a variety of reasons for the West but not to do what they're doing then for the people who they're trying to blow up because of the relative perception of the good life and it's always been true in the West in both the the real term and then Africa to have point of that out I'm just curious of your thoughts on the role of the state of Turkey right now turkey or do they want to be part of the West are they we want them to be a second Turkey I've been to Turkey a lot and I was there last fall I think that they're I mean Turkey is used by neoconservative say we'll look Islam is not incompatible danisha look at the Muslims in India look at Malaysia look at Turkey they don't mention Arab Muslim countries yet but Turkey has a little bit strange history because of Ataturk a level of coercion and secularism that's not found in the 19th and 20th century anywhere else in Middle East what's happening now I think is that there's the natural Islamic backlash at modernisation globalization and in Turkey rural people poor people people who felt they didn't get in on globalization are resenting urban elites who or European orientated and that's always been true of Turkey I mean as soon as they remember before after May 1453 they put slap on the minarets and suddenly the Grand Vizier and that got they got the Italians doing business again they invite Jews in and there's a reason why they moved their capital on the window in the West the cannons had knocked down the walls of Constantinople were built by a German so there's always been people in Turkey where Western so I think what's happening now is we are kind of being a little bit fiendish because we're telling the Europeans hey you guys talk about multiculturalism being nothing would be better for you to show a sign of bridging civilizations by letting Turkey and the EU and the Europeans are saying don't take it seriously that means anybody in Ankara our rural Anatolia could buy property anywhere in Europe and travel without a passport those Americans just want us to do the heavy lifting to bring Islam into the West so I think that we're both using turkey and then we have the Cyprus problem I think I think I would hedge that Turkey's gonna make it and become more Western than not but boy I could show you the things I've been reading out of the Turkish press if you look at certain anti Western anti-semitic anti-israel they're they're just as virulence anything that comes out of Cairo Victor - to raise an entirely different subject the whole series here is taking place against the backdrop of curricular reform yes all what passes for it and we you know we had previous lectures the scene are talking about curriculum reform at Harvard ba-ba-ba-ba and all this kind of stuff but what are you what are your thoughts about western civilization in the curriculum is that a free market out there should we just say anyone can take what they want since it's good for the soul and all the things you've mentioned should there be a requirement should the curriculum be segmented into certain areas where Western civilization is taught I mean your first not just to what what are your thoughts in I come down as a traditionalist I mean there is a reason that the United States a takes more immigrants than all other countries put together people are voting and the West in general sees this one-way phenomenon where people are migrating to the West so why we have are the nadir of our confidence our institutions people seem not to be able to define what we are but other people seem to see what we are and want it so it seems to me that Westerners have to renew this culture by finding out what the West is understanding that the sins of the west racism genocide or the sins of mankind shared by all other cultures but only in the West is there this ability to speak freely about it after all I mean I don't think the Chinese after killing 70 million people should get a pass because they wear a gala tarrying little collars and go to Saudi Arabia and say unlike the Americans we're not gonna pressure democracy just pump oil and we in the West don't say a word about it I mean we have to know what this culture is and the only way to do that is have some common experience and what's happened since the 60s to be very its particular we said we don't want to pick and choose we're gonna have a broad menu we're gonna have this course this course this course this course and we forgot that we're and you know better than I that line from Petronius sumos hominis nan dei we're just people were not men and there's I mean gods there's not a hundred hours in the day every time you add another course you take away attention from one so it seems to me that we have to bite the bullet and say we're gonna have a core course that everybody has to take and it will be primarily about the west and won't be taught us and I don't really see this age the danger people teaching it in a triumphalist fashion I say that a very so-called conservative school California State University of Fresno and I was involved in the Western civilization core class on the day after 9/11 that twelve faculty members all met and they said we need to immediately teach everybody why it was our fault so I don't think there's I don't think there's any danger of triumphalism at this point so I think there is a dam I think there is a danger if you take today's undergraduate and you say to him or her what is the Battle of Shiloh what was 1453 what's Dave's x-mas you know they're not going to know they're not gonna have any commonality of experience or any knowledge of what the ionic order is or what the inferno is or what Leviathan is all of these elements of this richness that we've completely thrown out and nothing is more embarrassing that that sad combination of arrogance and ignorance so when you see young kids that want to theorize and they they won't talk theory and they want to talk oppression but they have no nuts and bolts to back up it's very sad so we owe it to them I think my son just pick one elastic skirt he's taking a Civil War class I mentioned that seriously he's a senior history major I said well what do you think about grant being surprised in the first days Shiloh Shiloh what Shiloh if you're taking a class in the Civil War huh aren't you he said yeah and I said okay well did Lee really lose his right arm Jackson well that made a difference at Gettysburg had he had Stonewall Stonewall who and I said what do you think is shared in Campaign remember in Sherman said he's gonna make Georgia howl and Reed won the election for Lincoln on September 2nd he was no we haven't had any of that I said what's the Civil War well I look at the curriculum and there was not one battle and Civil War you know I don't need to caricature what there were in this syllabus but it had nothing to do with a major component of civil war which is fighting Oh Victor Victor 1:1 back here first okay what we're doing on time yeah yeah how do we explain the the fascination with epistemology and and philosophy that you see arise in the Greeks that by the time of Plato writing is allegory about the cave is already so sophisticated how do we explain this civilization going in that direction where they're putting time and energy into these kinds of pursuits you know that's a very good question and I have I have thought about that a lot I I I think there's you know think of the level of sophisticated thought that you just briefly outlined had it been applied to the mechanical or the investment why is it in our society that our so-called brilliant people who are investment bankers and corporate lawyers or CEOs or our people why aren't they turning to philosophy or why aren't they turning to abstract speculation and it's something about the cultural ethic of that city-state that came out was rattling egalitarian it was punitive of ostentatious displays of wealth and it had certain cultural social maybe even religious mechanisms to turn people and they did pay the price I mean hero made the steam engine that's a beautiful little model but it wouldn't take much practicality to say you could put a piston on that thing and they could have been driving Stanley steamers 200 years before Christ so that there's a disconnect that the Greeks have what I think is in my Finlay called these impediments or blockages to practical pragmatic uses of capital and intelligence because there's a social premium put on philosophy and speculation and the philosopher like Socrates for all his complaints and whining he is a man of respect and the man the BAL nastic person who engages in commerce and you know from the history the roman senate has looked on with suspicion and it's no accident that when that breaks down the roman empire becomes much more sophisticated and wealthy and prosperous once those old ideas of what constitutes success are changed and they favor more practical money-making I think we would be good too I'm not one who thinks that we should pay professors a lot more money but I think we should try to extend speculation and thinking outside the university and reward it that's all I would like to see a CEO try to engage a professor on an abstract intellectual issue instead of just arguing over CEO compensation they could talk in the philosophical realm about whether it's good or bad or how did what's the message that sent but I think what happens is we've compartmentalized we've made a professional class of academic and the funny thing about the professional class of academic now he's aping the the value system of a CEO and he's getting away with it because he says that he's cosmically not that he's so sensitive all these issues and then he's he's he's trying to to ape that lifestyle so it's a moral it's a moral ethical dilemma so I think I'm an undergraduate right now and I can't say that I see the importance of a core curriculum maybe you can help me and it seems like if you just help students yeah you know the difference between oligarchy and democracy vaguely what is it well oligarchy as I remember is kind of an it's an elite group who run society and democracy is and if they have strengths or weaknesses which one oligarchy well it has strengths and weaknesses well I think that's good you picked it up somewhere in your core curriculum well I think a lot of it can be figured out just from common sense I don't think yeah I mean it seems like a lot of people can if you just get the facts out in front of them and say there's an elite group and you don't have too much freedom because for you know I'm talking about is the average student that I taught and I taught working-class kids at California State University many whose first language was not English and we're not getting that reinforcement or didn't have a level of affluence they didn't find that to be true and I I found that from basic grammar to basic science to basic logic and I I want to be offensive but I did find that the objections to the common curriculum were from people who thought they didn't need it and sometimes didn't need it but the people who really did need it they wanted it because they understood something that the be able the ability to think logically and to speak fluently and to have a large vocabulary other than you know whatever which is what I hear mostly that ability translates into the good life commercially financially not ballistically is that what we should be seeking what is that what we should be seeking well you and I don't need to because we've got it but if you're a first in first generation immigrant from Oaxaca you might want to try to get tired of it by getting that and the way you get tired of it and the way that they come common and you have a common experience there are these courses because there's really only one way to speak and write and think logically and that is to take courses where you write essays and there's only one way to understand what's good and bad about Iraq and that is to understand the history of the United States at war the history of the West at war there's only one way to understand what's good about John Kerry and what's good about George Bush or what's bad about each as look at the history of the system and the contradictions in it and what I find is because we haven't had this common experience what are we doing just get these bloviating people on TV and they say worst mistake in history biggest blunder blunder compared to what yeah I mean we they don't know the blunders of the past so we don't have where we wake up each generation with amnesia so I think the core curriculum especially a place like University of Texas is absolutely essential for first-generation Americans and non-traditional students that's their way of catching up quickly I guess I would agree with you if I found that the core curriculum taught that but I don't what I would agree with you if I found that the core curriculum gave me answers to some of those questions but this is my third year and I haven't found that the core curriculum gives me the answers to those questions what gives you answers to question well I've had to go on my own and read books and I had nothing to do with them there's been an autodidact it's got a wonderful tradition Western civilization Socrates never went to school so neither did Jesus so I mean there's nothing wrong with just dropping out of school and reading I think that's the best homeschooling and it seems to me the kids I had in school over homeschool but when you say you're reading core curriculum I think we're talking about the same thing because when you read something they read particular text and for particular reasons and that's what the core curriculum not everybody can do that on their own that's that's the role University and in addition in the future we'll have the Western Civ Program as a model of the core curriculum dr. Hansen there's been a lot of talk about an impending Clash of Civilizations or possible of coming upcoming World War 3 and if that happens who will win and play out you know what I taught when Samuel Huntington's book came out I was teaching that and Francis Fukuyama's book and I said to the class this is ridiculous look at page 120 says there's 19 Wars going on in the world today an eighty number involving Muslims what are you dreaming this thing up and then 9/11 came about six months later so there was something to that book and I think what he was trying to articulate maybe Bernard Bernard Lewis does it is that with about four things have happened one is the enormous petrol reserves of the Middle East half the world's fossil fuels and petroleum former there when the price went up just say from $20 to 60 and then 500 billion dollars are floating around there and they're not being recycled of Saudi House of Saud has 800 billion dollars invested overseas and until the recent rice I get a 22 percent unemployment there are autocratic regimes some of them are theocratic there tolerant and people that's one thing the second thing is people for the first time through DVDs and cell phones and computers parasitic on the West that bring the men they have a knowledge now they don't need this government the government can't stop it they can see that life is material you're better and so they say well wait a minute you buy our oil you've got the good life and if you try to reason and say now wait a minute we're paying $60 a barrel the money's there and they said yes but our rulers have it we say well and have a revolution like we did where's your Patrick Henry then we get into this argument so how does that anger translate the anger is the I think it is true that the holy alliance between the autocratic regimes says you know if you're bin Laden and you're Musharraf you go up in Waziristan that's fine because Saudi royal family you say you know what we'll give you twenty billion dollars for Wahhabi madrasas if you're Iran then you do this and it's sort of an unholy alliance so then that anger is channeled at us so if you talk to somebody in the Middle East you say well nine states is no better no worse than Russia or China as far as the Islamic world you know we didn't kill eighty thousand Muslims in Chechnya and we don't make it against the law United States to have public prayers from my minaret as it is in China and we did try to save Muslims in Albania and Somalia and Kuwait and Afghanistan we're no better no worse well it doesn't register because they have been told that we are this symbol of a world that they're denied because of certain things that we do and doesn't do you any argument to argue what those things are or not it's an emotional deep-seated anger and that was I think unless it is I know that there's not a person in the room other than myself who thinks constitutional government is the ultimate answer for the Middle East but unless you have some mechanism to alleviate these angers and to discuss them in a public realm with a transparency it seems to me that these autocratic regimes are going to play that up and then we're going to we're going to be into a really dangerous situation because we're getting to an interconnected globalized world where Capital can purchase weaponry and when you have somebody in Iran who says basically that the whole idea of the Holocaust has now turned upside down a it doesn't exist and be the sanctuary for the victims of the Holocaust was not to preserve one place in the world where a government couldn't send people to Auschwitz but to ensure and I'm quoting directly that it's a one bomb state you're asking a an Israeli Prime Minister 60 years after the Holocaust to go down in history as the Prime Minister who was told a this country is gonna wipe out his country and be there trying to get the weapons to do it and see he didn't do anything and yet we know if he does something we'll be into a big mess so we have bad and worse choices and I'm a little worried that this idea that you know that we're the doppelganger worthy just the mirror image I saw Newsweek picture of um on a jar and here's Bush and they had two sides the same face just like they said Chiron was the same as Arafat just like they said Reagan was the same forget the personality is one system a bush or a sharone aura Reagan has to deal with a free press and it has to deal with a nonviolent opposition and that's a qualitative historically different phenomenon than somebody who is a product of an autocratic regime and doesn't face that censure I think we in the West don't make that distinction because as getting back to Karl's question we're not educated I don't feel any more timers have time for one more question or this would be us yeah I see it as a historical phenomenon that came out of the fact that the United States was 90 percent white in 1960 and 10 percent african-american and there was historic real grievances and there was a way to address those grievances but the problem with it is it's an aging process now in the United States as I said earlier is six to seven percent I'll just give you two examples of what I think I encountered at a public university where the so-called white population I say so-called cuz I have two brothers who are married to mexican-american people and I don't know what their kids are called when they want to hang out with yuppie friends they say they're white when they want some type of mystique they put a little accent mark I'm not being cynical they do and when I point that out to them they get very angry but the point I'm making is we had a chancellor from Toronto come to UC Berkeley and he said I'm shocked at the California populated think about being anti-democratic he said they voted for prop 209 and says we couldn't use race at consideration and I'm gonna change that I'm gonna find new ways and he is trying to find new ways but the problem he didn't understand being a Canadian a when the head and be not having the melting pot when you look at Quebec and Canada Theory as we do he walked into a minefield because the first thing people said was boom California is 36% white it's 40% Latino it's 10% Asian it's 10% black look at UC Berkeley the flagship campus and what's the enrollment it's about four percent underrepresented african-american about eight percent Latino way under represented white is 33% underrepresented so everybody said well we'll do it and they said this to him and he just about drop dead well you can just do what you do with the Jews and Princeton Harvard Yale in the thirties just tell the Asians you know what if you're Asian and your SAT score and GPA does not count we're gonna look for things like basketball football and we're gonna get that number down to their proportion of weapons to mostly Latinos but also as a few whites and more blacks and do we really want to do that and the answer is why aren't those proportionally represented the biggest overachieving class are Sikhs in California I had a student who came in and she was to be frank jet-black I had another student who was a Latino who was pure white the Latino got a McNair fellowship and she was from an upper-middle class I'm not saying that these are typical but the secret was the first-generation didn't get anything he wasn't a target murmur and he said to me don't you think people think I'm black if you're black can't you make it you can't make it right and I said you go talk to them and the explanation he got was right off the podium of a May Day Parade about 1970 in the Soviet Union and it was so Byzantine and complicated and the person who gave it did not believe it so we are such a multi racially interconnected situation I have somebody from a different country was watching the Superbowl and he said to me not knowing how absurd he sounded everybody in both teams are black I said yes but it's the man well both coaches are black I said yes because the announcers are black he goes I thought that people didn't have access to people get paid well they get exploited I said yeah so things are changing and I think that we're it's going to have to go back to a merit-based system of colorblind society and then people who do succeed in it have a obligation to try to tutor people to try to teach them how the system how they can get ahead I also think that there's one mistake is that we also have to go back there's a certain dignity in physical labor and part of the problem is that we have all of our kids and we put into Sat camp and we put them and say if you're not a brain surgeon a lawyer or psychiatrist you're a failure when there's something to be said for people who are well-rounded I mean that was what the Greek lesson was Socrates almost got killed at three battles and he was a stonemason and there wasn't there's a dignity in physical labor that we have to rediscover in this country and I think that would solve a lot of our problems from race to illegal immigration if Americans can rediscover the dignity of physical labor and children should at least have an apprenticeship rather than going I think would be so much better for mayor and youth to go out and lay cement in the summer or pick peaches than to go to another SAT camp or summer year abroad or something that's enough of that thank you once again thanks for coming parking cards and appreciate it yes Fuller's we're in yeah you told me about yeah to validate that's what the card I gave him when he showed up a Baghdad yeah I was the big base there

Channel: CTI @ UT Austin

Views: 100,956

Rating: 4.8051715 out of 5

Keywords: Victor Hanson, CTI, UT, Thomas Jefferson Center, Government, Great Books, Greeks

Id: raTWhL4jtgU

Length: 53min 48sec (3228 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Mynameis__--__]

How is this relevant to Basic Income?

[u/KyoPin]

I don't know, this felt frankly like an opinion, no a lecture based on facts. He says something about college that in hindsight turned out to be false.