Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside | Conversations with Tyler

hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm honored to be chatting with Tom Holland I'm a huge fan of Tom he is a historian a public intellectual and author he has numerous books including Millennium Persian fire Dynasty books on Islam his latest is Dominion how the Christian Revolution remade the world which I am a big fan of he does with Dominic sandbrook one of the best known perhaps the best known History podcast called the rest is history he is frequently on radio and television has performed what is the greatest translation of Herodotus ever he is a huge cricket fan and he is fighting to save the Hedgehog in England Tom welcome thank you very much and I'm sure the uh the mention of cricket will induce Farrow brows across America in what way is your interpret of Christianity still influenced by Lord Byron a writer you started your career working on that's a that's a very very good question because I'd never thought of the conjunction although now you mention it so I was raised uh by my mother uh as in the Church of England she was is a a regular churchgoer and so I went to church with her um and so that was very much part of my upbringing but at the same time my mother's elder brother my Uncle David um he was uh an extraordinary man who had um as during the second world war he'd been posted as a very young man out to India he'd fallen in love with India um throughout his uh throughout the 50s he worked as a publisher in Pakistan and then while he was out there he decided that actually he wanted to be an actor so he came back to England um he he got roles he got a role in Doctor Who as a homicidal Tibetan monk um and so he was he he was um he was not a churchgoer it would be fair to say and he took me to new stud Abbey as a very impressionable boy and you said Abby is the home of Lord Byron and it was an Abbey that had been closed down in the Reformation bought by the Byron's the byrons had fought on the side of the king in the Civil War um had been kind of Admirals and nerdy Wells and Byron inherited this title and he I went to this Abbey and was told stories about how Byron and his friends would dress up as monks and they they had Byron had a um a a drinking cup made out of a skull and he and all the lads would would you know do very ungodly things and this seemed to me the height of glamor and sophistication and to my innocent church-going self Byron became a kind of model of swagger and glamor as he was for people throughout the 19th century um and for many people still is and so I I um I became fascinated by Byron and he became I I initially wanted to do a doctorate on him um but then I gave that up because I decided that he was just too fascinating too charismatic and and two basically too hostile to the academic I think that he didn't deserve an academic treatment and so instead I wrote um a novel in which he was a vampire um and so that set me on the course of of writing um so I wrote three novels in which um her various various periods of history in which vampire you know famous people from history were vampires and I I began to realize I wasn't really interested in writing novels I I wasn't ultimately interested in writing vampire stories I wanted to write about history but the link I think with Christianity is that what interested me in writing about the vampire novels and what has interested me in writing all the various volumes of history in various periods of time that I've done since is fascination with how people in different ages understood things that to us today might seem far-fetched implausible impossible so essentially that how they relate to the dimension of the Supernatural and I think it's a real problem for anyone in the 21st century trying to understand the past is that perhaps two academic approach to the study of what say people in Rome or early Medieval Europe or whatever thought about the Divine is that it's a bit like studying a butterfly by sticking a pin through it and two objective two academic two rationalists an approach can risk alienating you from perspective the very perspectives that you're trying to understand and I think that that was something I realized now from from the distance of time from when I was writing the vampire books that is that's what I was kind of exploring in those books and have continued to explore I think and do you feel the power and influence of Catholicism more strongly because you're still a byronite still thinking about vampires um no I don't think so I I found when I was when I came to writing about Christianity and Dominion is a study of of the entire sweep of Christianity I mean it's kind of insanely ambitious book um that it was a kind of privilege for me to immerse myself in all these different periods and read the the great Christian writers and thinkers and polemicists of different periods and I found that I was fascinated in almost all of them and there was very rarely a chapter that I wrote where I didn't think I wish I could stay here and and continue to read about it and absolutely writing about the medieval church I I found I did find it it very very powerful but equally getting to the Reformation I could f i could I felt the power of the Protestant reformers as well um and actually uh we're recording this in in what in London is the afternoon this morning I spent recording three episodes of the rest is history on what what's erroneously called the cathars but were the objects of perhaps the most brutal and bloody of all the uh the Crusades waged not against um Muslim enemies but against Christians themselves in the 13th century and I think it's difficult in that context to look at the Catholic Church of of the Middle Ages as as holy benign Institution if the Book of Revelation were more important in Christian thought would we as a society all be less liberal it doesn't read like a liberal book right no let's look at Jehovah's Witnesses who put a lot of stress on Revelation sitting less classically liberal the the thing about the Book of Revelation is that it it was recognized by Christians themselves in Antiquity as a highly dangerous book so it wasn't included in the the Canon of the New Testament in the Orthodox church so in in the Realms of the Byzantine Empire until the 10th Century they they were nervous of it um and although it was included in the the Canon of the New Testament in the Latin church much earlier again you look at um the church fathers in the Latin church and again they're very very nervous of it and the archetype of you know the the greatest of the Latin Church Father Saint Augustine writing in the um the late 4th and early 5th Century he is very very anxious that um Christians might read the book of Revelation and interpret it too literally and so there's talk about you know a thousand years um in the Book of Revelation as a a key span of time and Augustine is absolutely definite that this is to be seen as a kind of abstraction and so when the first Millennium arrives the year 1000 um the church is not encouraging people to feel kind of apocalyptic anxieties but I think they indisputably do and I think actually ironically um the fact that the church emerges from this Millennial period um and that Christ hasn't come of the reign of antichrist hasn't come um the horrors and the the extraordinary Wars and plagues and Terrors that were seen by um John in in the Book of Revelation have not been manifested opens up for reformers in the 11th century to an idea that um the Christian people can be cleansed can be reformed can be um can be brought closer to God and that precipitates what I think is the first great revolutionary moment in European and therefore Western history What's called the papal Revolution and it's that Revolution I think that stands at The Fountainhead of the entire revolutionary tradition of which we in the 21st century are still heirs and I think that you know liberalism all kinds of things would not have been possible without that revolutionary moment and so perhaps to that extent without the Book of Revelation maybe the papal Revolution wouldn't have been launched and maybe we wouldn't be where we are today which gospel do you view is most foundational for Western liberalism and why um I think that that is a treacherous question to ask because it implies that there would be a coherent line of dissent from any one text that can be traced like that I think that the the line of descent that leads from the gospels and from the New Testament and from the Bible and indeed from the entire Corpus of early Christian texts to Modern liberalism is too confused too too much of a swirl of influences for us to trace it back to a particular uh text if I had to choose any one book from the Bible it wouldn't be a gospel it would probably be um it would probably be Paul's letter to the Galatians um because Paul's letter to the Galatians contains um the famous verse that there is no dual Greek there is no slave or free there is no man or woman in Christ and in a way um that text even if you kind of bracket out and remove the in Christ from it that idea that there should probably that that properly there should be no discrimination between people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds uh based on gender based on class remains pretty foundational for liberalism to this day and I think that liberalism in so many ways is a kind of secularized um rendering of that extraordinary verse but I I I I mean I I think it's almost impossible to avoid metaphor when thinking about what the relationship is to these biblical texts these Biblical verses to the present day and I variously compared Paul in particular in his letters and his writings to um rather unoriginally to an acorn from which a mighty eight Oak grows but I think more actually more appropriately to a depth charge uh released beneath the vast fabric of classical civilization and the ripples the reverberations of it are faint to begin with and then they they become louder and louder and more and more disruptive and those those Echoes from that depth charge continue to reverberate to this day as you know there's the Jacob talbissue that Paul is more anti-roman and in some ways more anti-statist than Jesus revising Jesus politically what is your take on that debate how is Paul revising Jesus politically well I think I think that Jesus is very radically um anti-state and by state I mean specifically the notion that um both in Jerusalem and in Rome uh the power is interfused with those who claim a mandate to interpret the Divine so that this is clearly the case in the in the in the Jerusalem Temple um the the gospel writers and you know we we don't know the sayings of Jesus are mediated through the gospel writers and the degree to which they correspond to what a historical Jesus might have said is obviously hugely contested but insofar as we we have a record of what the historical Jesus might have said in the gospels um he seems hostile to the Jerusalem a temple authorities and I think that what he is hostile to is summed up in that I I [Music] the attempt to uh the attack on um the uh um the money changes um and the idea that in some way what is God's can be implicated in the churn of the Earthly and I think he also feels out about Rome that the Romans also uh you know it's often cast today that the Jews are religious and by Jesus going before Pontius Pilate is somehow being handed over to the secular authorities but the Romans are no less secular than than the Judean authorities the Romans 2 um are absolutely implicated in the sense that their power is interfused with an understanding of the Divine Pontius pilate's main base is in the city of caesarea which is named after Caesar Augustus and Augustus is a God and the Romans also like the Jews have a great temple in their City the capital Line Temple the Temple of capital and Jupiter which ironically will be incinerated um a few months before the the Jerusalem Temple is incinerated by the Romans in ad70 um and I think that that Jesus in that kind of incredibly potent episode where uh people come up to him and they say should we be paying taxes to the Romans and Jesus asked for a coin and he is given a coin and he says whose head is on this and um his the people who are talking to him say the head of Caesar and Jesus famously says will Render unto Caesar what is Caesar doesn't Render unto God what is gods that is again another of these depth charges another of these acorns from which mighty Oaks will grow because it's there that you get the idea actually in the long run of their being kind of something that is secular Jesus I think is all about separating the Divine from the Earthly and that is an incredibly potent insight and it's one that is as hostile to the claims of Caesar as to the claims of um the the temple authorities and I think Paul is completely the heir of that and I think Paul understands that and there's a huge sense in which his letters you know his his his understanding of Jesus the way that he portrays that serves as a kind of parody of the cult of Augustus um so I mentioned the letter to the Galatians um galatia is one of the great centers of the cult of Augustus and so I think that that when Paul is writing to the Galatians he is very very conscious that the God that he is talking about exists in the context of a world in which the fastest growing cult is the cult of Caesar how do you view the Christian foundations of African-American liberalism as being different well I hesitate as as an Englishman to um to kind of in any way pontificate about American history but with that caveat I will well Islamic history right okay America is a pretty close cousin so so my feeling about this is that um the Civil Rights Movement is one of a succession of great Awakenings in American protestantism and indeed in anglo-american protestantism so let that be my sanction for talking about this um this idea that reverberates throughout anglo-american history that people need to be awakened to a sense of their sin and therefore to a sense of the potential for salvation um African-Americans are The Heirs of that as well they inherit the um the protestantism and often the Evangelical protestantism of um of uh the white Americans and the figure of Martin Luther King is emblematic of that um he is the Reverend Martin Luther King he is absolutely situated in the tradition of protesters a radical protestantism which the Baptists are kind of you know he's a Baptist Minister he he is heir to these Traditions that go back to the 17th century and the 16th century and perspectives that are are often incredibly radical and the more radical Fringe of of of Protestants and these are Protestants who who often emigrate from England to the new world because they um their understanding of of of of of what the Bible teaches is seen as being too too rad right too radical too hot to handle back in England and they bring with them this notion that um the Bible has to be can only be understood if mediated by the spirit so it's not what the Bible says in the in in you know in black and white it's it's what the spirit makes you understand and it's this in due course that enables Quakers and evangelicals for instance to argue that slavery as an institution is evil even though notoriously and nowhere in the Bible is that ever said for evangelicals for Quakers for radical Protestants that's an irrelevance the spirit has descended on them and it has enabled them to understand that that sense combines with the incredible power of the Exodus Story the idea that people who've been in bondage can be brought out of slavery and can be brought to a new world a new land that is what kind of powers the pilgrim fathers and other immigrants from England and in due course it's what powers people as they move um from the East Coast Across America and it of course it has an incredibly potent influence on African Americans During the period of their of their servitude and in the wake after it and the failure of reconstruction the fact that particularly in the South there remains so much institutional oppression so much institutional racism means that in the 50s and the 60s when there are uh campaigns starting to develop calling for civil rights calling for um the rejection of of uh repressive laws in the south this inheritance is an obvious one to draw on and that's why Martin Luther King is such a potent spokesman for it because when he tells white American Christians that black American Christians are their brothers and sisters he is going with the grain of everything that American protestantism radical protestantism has been about since the very beginning and he can articulate the the power of the Exodus story and the power of scripture as mediated by people upon whom the spirit has descended and he can do so in a way that reverberates beyond the black churches into the white churches and secularized throughout the 60s it's this great movement I think that you know like the spirit blowing in the wind as it were animates not just the Civil Rights Movement but all kinds of other movements as well so in due course movements that may seem very um opposed to doctrinal Christianity feminism gay rights and so on um so I think that it's the Civil Rights Movement is incomprehensible without that that Heritage it's absolutely animated by it in Genesis and exodus why does the older son so frequently catch it hard well I'm I'm an elder son I know your brother's younger and he's my brother is my brother is younger uh and it's a question on which I've often pondered because I would go to church and what do you expect from your brother and the truth is I I have no idea I don't know I've I've often kind of worried about it um so um you mentioned Byron at the the beginning of the show and Byron wrote a play called Kane um and Cain of course is the first Elder son um and he kills his younger brother um and The Mark of Cain is laid upon him and he becomes a great Wanderer and in Byron's play Cain becomes the the representative of a free thinker someone who who dares to defy the uh the tyrannical almighty um and Satan who appears to him is is you know very much in the tradition of Milton Satan um as mediate as understood by the Romantic Poets Satan is someone who is saying that actually um you know knowledge is found by defying god um and because I think because I was the eldest son that's another reason why I found Byron's poetry when I was you know in my teens so powerful and so effective and it's part of what led me away from kind of Christian belief really a kind of feeling that um all the cool kids were hanging out with Kane and especially all the cool Elder Sons in the book of Exodus why do there seem to be two versions of the Ten Commandments at 20 and then at 34. the first being more legalistic the second being more ritualistic why are there two how do they fit together well I I think this reflects the way in which um what we call today the Bible is um it's an accretion of texts um you know there are often there often seem to be two versions of stories stitched together there are two versions of um of of of the creation of mankind for instance um very obviously you know you have the book of kings and you have the book of Chronicles they're essentially telling the same stories and kind of duplicating each other and I think that the construction of um what comes to be called the pentateuch uh the the first five the the Torah the the first five books of of the Bible because they're so foundational because they're so kind of important um doctrinally to a sense of of Jews and Christian sense of themselves they were the most Rewritten and the most contested um and the idea that um that you you get in the Quran very obviously that that this is literally the word of God it's not being mediated by humans with the Ten Commandments you get that as well you know this isn't being mediated by Isaiah or Saint Matthew or whoever by Moses right the Israelites of God right but Moses is bringing the tablets down and those have been written by God those claims sure sure I mean if you want to go that productive then you know Moses clearly almost certainly didn't exist I mean he seems the most a historical figure but the the claim is and it's clearly believed by the people who are writing these texts or constructing them or stitching them together to form what today we think of as as those um those books for them this is something awesome and holy as the Quran is for for Muslims it's something that that you approach with extreme care extreme uh a nervousness to tamper with the word of God is to tamper with God and you don't want to do that because the Bible is full of examples of what happens to people who do that um in a way it's the kind of it's the molten heart of what Christians call the Old Testament it's it's it's literally the word of God are there religious reasons why America is more pro-technology than Europe uh that's a very good question um I think there are generally religious reasons for almost everything in America um I but I I suspect that it's it's more to do with the fact that um it is easy to bring home improvements into a house that's just been built than it is to do home improvements in a house that's 500 years old um European States you know if you imagine them as as kind of houses they're very old they have all kinds of dodgy wiring bodge jobs um and then everyone knows that the worst kind of DIY is when you yourself have have bodged it over many many years it makes it much harder to do it's much easier just to kind of rip everything out and put it back in again and I think that that is the kind of attitude that that people in America tend to have I mean I don't know I have no stats on this but I would guess that it would be easier to um to import wholesale technology into um a house in other on the outskirts of Houston than it would be in downtown Manhattan or in English country home absolutely but but one of the you know when one of the things that always strikes me when I go to New York is actually it's an old city you know we've in in in Europe we're accustomed to thinking of America as you know modern and new but New York is not a modern city Boston not modern cities and I think that they're I remember going to Boston you know I'd go for uh I don't know maybe over 10 years um and every time I'd go there'd be this massive great hole in the middle of Boston and they were kind of trying I think trying to develop a subway system and every time I go it got bigger and a big dig I would guess is much easier to do in a kind you know I I don't know Vegas or or Houston than in Boston because Boston is just a very old city in exactly the way that that um you know uh Manchester is in in Britain or Leo or somewhere I mean they're not quite as old as Leon but um it is it is always easier to develop technology I think in areas where you don't have stuff already there and that's one of the reasons why over the course of the 19th century you know the industrial lead moves from Britain to America into Germany it's doubtless all kinds of sociological reasons that are not qualified to appoint about but one of the reasons must be the Britain enters the industrial revolution first and so it's you know it's industrial infrastructure by definition is older than that that comes to be developed by the Americans or say the Germans are you yourself ultimately a gnostic I'm not a gnostic in any way in any way at all I know I'm not a gnostic in any way um what is your implies today so I remember I remember going to San Francisco um my my she wasn't my wife then she became my wife she got a a one-year um place in at Stanford um and I was very very upset about this that she'd gone and so I went out and it was my first time to America I went to San Francisco I'm so excited to go to San Francisco because for me it was the kind of the city of flower power and and um hippies and everything and so I went to hate Ashbury and and just kind of went toward all the uh all the hippie bookshops and got a whole load of books on the gnostics there and kind of read them up and I was very into all that kind of stuff but I now absolutely repudiate that um I think I I I don't think that the gnostics Were Somehow were hippies were in any way Progressive I think that they were kind of deep dark pessimists and what I like in Christianity actually is is the message of hope that it offers the message of Salvation and the message that um that matter is not evil that our human bodies and the world around us um are not creations of of some malign demiurge but um are created by God and therefore are good I find that a much more positive message than the the kind of gnosticism that um I found so appealing when I was 21 and you know very much in the throes of Love which may have confused the Blurred my my thought patterns what did you learn about modernity by translating Herodotus which I believe was one page a day no it wasn't one page a day so the books of Herodotus there are nine books and each book is divided up into chapters and this this happened um in Antiquity and so I would set myself the challenge of translating one of those kind of chunks every day because otherwise I didn't think I would ever have finished it what I [Music] um learned about modernity from Herodotus is that I think the the the quality about Herodotus that I have always loved he's always been um my favorite writer not just my favorite ancient writer but my favorite writer it was the first classic writer I read I I've I've re-read him I've kind of reinterpreted him I've translated him and I realize as I was writing it what I loved was the infinite curiosity that he has about everything so we his writings are called hysteria which in Greek basically means researchers inquiries it doesn't mean history in the sense that we have and he's not just right you know he is writing about the past he says that this is his aim but he's not exclusively writing about the past he's writing about wild animals he's writing about rivers he's writing about wonders in different lands he's writing um about how um Egyptian men squat to go to the toilet and Egyptian women stand up and how as Gideons get stoned um on bongs and all kinds of extraordinary mad weird fascinating stuff and he was he was called in Antiquity the father of lies because there were lots of people who felt that this was you know he was just making it all up I think that's incredibly harsh often many of the things that he was doubted for his he's been Vindicated and I think that it brings what I found I was I was I was translating her Auditors um and I was able to use the internet as I was as I was doing it if there was kind of subjects you know a name or something I wouldn't have to go to a a a book to look it up I could look it up online and I realized it brought home to me how arrogant it is for us to sit in judgment on him when he was the first person to be doing this he was the first person to be pursuing the infinite curiosity he felt about the vast expanse of everything to its absolute limits and so of course he got things wrong you know we would he didn't have the internet he didn't have an example of Herodotus Herodotus didn't exist there was no Herod status before her Rogers he's doing it for the first time but I think that the the sense of curiosity that the modern world is all about we have access to to more knowledge than is beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations and we can follow it wherever we want and Herodotus for me stands at the head of that tradition the head of that fascination with the fastness the infinitude of the world and the universe that we inhabit um and I look at modernity and Herodotus sharpens for me a sense of how extraordinary and wonderful it is that we can know everything that we do and that we have access to all the sources information that we have and it's a wonderful wonderful thing an incredible privilege of being alive in 2023 are we likely to learn much more about the Persian Empire and if so how will that happen would it be archeology so we know a lot about the about Greece because Herodotus was Greek and he writes about the Persian Wars and so inevitably we see the world through Greek eyes because Herodotus was Greek however one of the wonderful things about Herodotus one of the many wonderful things is that he does try to see the world through personalize and so he tells a remarkable story uh that that I just think is is astonishing so he imagines um uh Darius the Great uh who's the Persian king who sends the expedition to Marathon that gets defeated at Marathon it's a great enemy of the of the Athenians and um Herodotus imagines himself in darius's high-heeled shoes the high-heeled boots that uh that the Persian kings are said to have worn and Darius summons um uh Greeks and an Indian tribe and these are the two people who exist on the Western and Eastern margins of his Empire respectively and he says to the uh to the Greeks um what would it take me to do you know what would I have to pay you to persuade you to eat your parents once they've died and the Greeks who burned their parents when they've died throw their hands up in horror and say that nothing we would never do that and then Darius turns to the to the Indian tribe and these are a people who eat their parents when they've died as a mark of their utmost respect and darya says to them what would I have to do to persuade you to burn your parents when they're dead and likewise the Indian tribesmen throw their hands up in horror and her Rochester says this shows to me that the custom is King you know that that everybody believes that their own Customs are best and he understands that he understands that he gets that and so when he's writing about the Persians he is trying to do his best to kind of portray them as they see themselves and not just to kind of do them down um now of course he does you know it doesn't work and the problem with with the persons is that we don't have a Persian Herodotus nor do we have indeed a person Isaiah the um you know the the the the the Jews also write about the Persians um in uh and so our sense of the Persians has been mediated Through the Bible and through um the Greek historians hugely what's happened over the past few decades however is that um Scholars have basically teamed up to try and go beyond that to try and go beyond the the the kind of the fact that we lack Persian accounts uh to try and see beyond what the Greeks and the Jews wrote and this has required uh basically pooling every conceivable source of information that we have so such Persian inscriptions as we do have archeology um the insights of uh areas of the Persian Empire that perhaps hadn't previously been tapped to be that Egypt or Babylonia or whatever whether again there are sources um trying to put um the Persian Empire as it functioned in the um the sixth the fifth the fourth centuries BC um into some kind of understanding that is true to the functioning of the empire in that period rather than say you know sources that were written much later and this is a really really difficult challenging complicated process and it's been one of the great feats of of the field of ancient history that all these Scholars have I think achieved that they have kind of to a degree performed an act of resurrectionism they have brought us to an understanding of the Persian Empire that is better than anyone's had since the collapse of the Empire itself um and so we yeah sorry no is it possible the Persians might have had a philosophical tradition that was advanced in the manner that the Greeks were maybe not quite as Splendid yeah how did we ruled that out or no it might simply be lost they they completely did and it was one of the most influential um intellectual spiritual Traditions that's ever existed because I'm reluctant to call it Zoroastrianism um it comes to be institutionalized as what today we might call Zoroastrianism um in the the third the fourth the fifth centuries A.D under a new Persian Empire the Empire um that's governed by a family called the sasanians but the sasanian Kings who who are institutionalizing um uh Zoroastrianism rather in the way that Constantine institutionalizes Christianity in the Roman Empire they are clearly drawing on Traditions that were very very current in the pre the earliest Persian Empire the Communist Empire and these Traditions are essentially dualist it's the idea that the world can be moralized that it can be understood um as being divided between rival spheres of Good and Evil of light and dark of truth and the lie and this is what so influential about the persian's Empire is that they moralize their own imperialism and this is hugely influential because when the um when the Persian king save Darius would be the the the person who most um potently expresses this he says that that he is the the chosen one of a huramaster the great God the good Lord um and that truth and Order are embodied in a huramaster and that Darius as his his Deputy therefore the the the realm that he rules also is um the dimension of Truth and Order and the corollary of that is that those who opposed Arias are agents of the lie and of Anarchy and therefore they must be crushed not just as enemies of the person King but as enemies of what is good and when Xerxes leads his campaign against the rebellious cities of of Athens and Sparta he is doing this not just to expand his Empire but because he sees it Athens and Sparta are terrorist States they are states in which um demons have laid Siege to uh you know to the Acropolis and to and to and and and and to the temples of Sparta and taking possession of it and so therefore they must be smoked out um and I I wrote about this in in person Farm I book about the um the Persian Wars and I was writing against the backdrop of the uh NATO attempt to stabilize Afghanistan which you know from the view of the West Was a remote and mountainous Backwater occupied by terrorists and I realized that basically you know if that's how the person saw the Greeks and we in the west have the conceit that we are The Heirs of Athens but we are at least as much The Heirs of the Persian kings as we are of of of of the Athenians and that idea that um that power can be moralized is you know it passes into the bloodstream not just of Zoroastrianism and the zoroastrian the Zoroastrianism of the sasanian Empire but the Christian Empire of Constantine um the Muslim caliphate and has absolutely passed into the present we are in that sense completely The Heirs of of the akaimanid empire the ancient Greeks and Persians how technologically advanced do you think they were and how much do we know about that so I'm sure you're familiar with finding astronomical Computing devices you know from the ancient Greeks we don't quite understand what all these things did uh is it possible they were much more advanced than we realize um I I would in no way claim to be a specialist in the history of ancient technology um I think I think the hugely interesting question is is basically um not how advanced were say the Greeks or the Romans but why why did they not industrialize um so moving on from the Greeks of the Persians and looking at the Roman Empire in the second Century A.D um this was an incredibly economically Advanced Society um it it was it had a vast internal Market um it was starting to create it was starting to recognize that the um the scale of the market enable people to become richer and richer um that more and more resources could be brought together um it's been estimated that um people in the the Roman Empire in the second Century A.D were probably no Society was was as Rich until say the Netherlands the Dutch Republic um in the late 16th early 17th century so it's a it's a very very successful economically successful prosperous um society and you know there are brilliant people who can who can uh who are developing all kinds of things but there does also seem to be uh on the part of the Roman Elites um and this is true of the Greeks as well before that a nervousness about pushing Tech allowing technology to go too far so in Alexandria Hellenistic Alexandria famously the steam engine is invented um what do what what do what do the alexandrians use it for they don't use it to develop steam engines so Arnold toynbee and his his kind of panoramic history of the world envisages this counterfactual in which Macedonian soldiers are on steam trains kind of chugging across Mesopotamia taking out parthian Rebels and so on and that doesn't happen instead they use it to um to power uh Temple um kind of gimmicks so that people will go in and you know they'll use Steam and the statue of a God will move or something like that there's there's a um there's a story told of the emperor Tiberius that um somebody approaches him and says look I've made unbreakable glass and Tiberius is very interested but asks for it to be tested it's shown that um this glass is indeed unbreakable and the inventor is delighted and thinks that Tiberius is um is going to reward him oh contraire Tiberius as important to death and the secret buried and the justification for that is that um if a glass is unbreakable then what will that do for glass makers you know it's very bad um there's another story that's told of the emperor of espasia that um somebody approaches him and says uh when they're trying to rebuild the capital Line Temple that's been destroyed in the great fire in 1869 that I mentioned earlier look I've brilliant I've developed This brilliant crane it will it's an excellent labor-saving device and again it is said Vespasian refuses to use it because it will put the common people of Rome out of work so I think that there is I mean I don't think either of these stories are likely to be true but the fact that they are told clearly articulates a suspicion of Technology as being the enemy of basically keeping as the Emperors and the the elites of the of the classical worlds here keeping the lower orders busy and what will happen if they're not kept busy um it's a kind of Luddite perspective perhaps so I you know as I say it's not I I don't want to say imply that I have studied this in any great or specific detail but my sense is that there is a strain of bloodism in ludicism in the classical world that makes them suspicious of anything that might lead to what might seem to be labor saving which of course you see you know in the in the earliest of the Industrial Revolution in Britain as well you know that's where that's where La dates are people breaking Mills and um all kinds of things like that yeah anxiety that continues into the present day doesn't it language models they terrify many historians yes exactly say moving into the present day you're involved in a pro UK Union Think Tank called these islands that wants to keep the United Kingdom together do you feel that the Devolution of so much political power to Scotland and Northern Ireland in retrospect was a mistake no um I'm I'm all in favor of devolution I think that um the Britain before the second world war was a state in which power was devolved to Scotland to to Wales to Northern Ireland but also to the great cities of of England as well to Birmingham so Joseph Chamberlain the mayor of Birmingham absolute kind of embodiment of a a high achieving mayor who shaped and reconfigured the architecture and the industry of his City and I think that the challenge of defeating Hitler Central the British state became so centralized that that we live with the kind of you know we have we have long second world war if you want to put it like that that the the after effects have continued for too long and and it's partly the the second world war it's partly the um the fact that we had um uh a very centralizing labor government um that wanted to concentrate kind of power in its hands so um the health secretary you know he institutionalized the National Health Service um and he famously said that he you know he he he he didn't want a nurse to change a bedpan in any Hospital across the country without him knowing about it um and I think that that we we live with the um the after effects of that and so therefore actually I'm all in favor of devolution I don't think the Devolution is the enemy of um the United Kingdom and the union of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom I think it's it's the best way for the United Kingdom to to function properly and I think that what we're going through at the moment is the kind of process of teasing problems we're we're trying to kind of test and work it out but it's I think it's a creative process um and my hope is that it will you know I'm an optimist I hope that it will it will work out for the best it isn't Irish unification in particular almost inevitable and we should just drip off the Band-Aid and get it over with I think that the complexities of cyphology in Ireland and specifically Northern Ireland is Way Beyond my pay grade it is incredibly complicated and my understanding is that um as sectarian identity so this the the proportion of people in Northern Ireland who identifies either Catholic or Protestant Fades um that doesn't automatically mean that uh it doesn't translate automatically into a desire necessarily to remain in the union or to um to join a United Island but that there is a solid core nevertheless that uh prefers remaining in the UK to um to joining Ireland and I think that that is further Complicated by the fact that in Ireland Northern Ireland is now much poorer than Island itself um I think they would I I think that you know I'd as I say I'm not an expert on the psyphology of this but my hunch is that they would be nervousness on the part of photos in Ireland as well as in Northern Ireland about the the costs the challenges the problems of doing it I agree I mean it might seem kind of it there it's often cast as though there's a kind of inevitability and if that is what people in Northern Ireland want then that is absolutely what people in Northern Ireland must have but I think it's less inevitable than the kind of the the way in which the Protestant population is in Decline the Catholic population is is growing I don't think it necessarily follows quite to the degree that uh I would say that anything about it is inevitable the Church of England so suffuses your government is it stable in the long run to have five percent or fewer of the population attend that church and in some ways have Islam is the most influential religion in say Britain how does it how's that going to work out yeah okay so first of all is I mean Islam is in no way the most influential religion in Britain Islam is being radically christianized um in Britain Muslims like Jews Like Hindus like Christians indeed have freedom of religion uh but what that means is that they um are essentially obliged to see themselves as belonging to a religion um in the case of Muslims is belonging to a religion called Islam classically that is not how Muslims understood what Islam was Islam was an entire way of life Islam was not something to be kind of siphoned off from something called the secular and kind of ghetto-ized in that way um oh contraire was something that that saturated everything but this is this is um this is the legacy of that Little Acorn that I was talking about when I said you know I was talking about Jesus saying um Render unto Caesar this idea that there are two Dimensions that I mentioned that today we call the secular and the religious this is a legacy specifically of Christianity and so Muslims living in Britain to that extent are secularized of course there are Muslims who resent this um you know these are Muslims who tend to be categorized as extremists as people who who reject this idea that Islam should be just a religion who want to see the whole of Britain become subject to an Islamic State but these are a tiny minority most Muslims have internalized the idea of the secular in exactly the way that that Jews have done or Hindus have done or indeed Catholics have done or Protestants have done this is and so to that extent I think that that Muslims have been radically protestantized now it may be that this is a huge you know this is precisely the problem for the Church of England that everything that made it distinctive um everything that um kind of made it uh the uh the foundation stone of the English and then British state that it became no longer necessary you don't need the Church of England for it and I think you could say more largely that this is a problem for Christians in Britain and maybe in America as well that um in a way they've won two comprehensively people don't need Christianity anymore to do all kinds of things by and large you know it was the Church of England that was responsible for Education often for Health Care often for the provision of Charity um in Britain all those have basically be nationalized you know we have the state now organizes education Healthcare uh benefits so what's the church for and that's a huge you know that's a existential problem for for the church however I think that again you know it's if you imagine I mean I I kind of it's kind of clarified for me by the experience of the Queen's death and funeral and the morning period for her that I think suddenly people in not everyone there were lots of people who were very annoyed by it but but lots of people were surprised by how moved they were by that whole those whole two strange weeks and actually quite liked it they quite liked the sense of the weird that those two weeks opened up you know the the body of a queen who's a lineal descendant of Alfred the Great and Odin and Adam if her line of descent is is to be trusted lying in state you know in a parliament you know in the Great Hall built by the son of William the Conqueror um the great ceremony in Westminster Abbey built by Edward the Confessor um the transfer of the body laid a state in the uh the the The Chapel at Windsor where Henry VII and Charles the first bodies lie that this sense of communion with the Christian past the Royal past even even Republicans quite enjoyed it um and I think the fact that that only saved I don't know I don't even know if it's five percent I mean you're quoting me probably I'm sure you got the figure right I'm surprised it's actually that high it's an estimate yeah I I think I think because people don't feel strongly about the Church of England either way by and large people are happy for it to stay where it is um rather in the way that that people don't particularly want to you know people may not be going to a large Church in the middle of a town but that doesn't mean that they want to remove it and build a supermarket there now as a historian surely you value British Heritage the wonderfully manicured look of the English Countryside and for that matter the Hedgehog yet my friends my Economist friends tell me we need Millions more of homes in Southern England because the cost of living is too high living standards are falling or stagnating rent is an enormous problem should we just build more in Southern England what's your view well I'm not an economist you are so you will have a much more informed view on this I don't and I'm aware I'm aware of the argument I think I I mean I find it intriguing that the two areas of of Europe that that have the highest uh population density are also the two areas that were most um that first became capitalist so the Netherlands and Southeast England um in a way these are the kind of the motor of of the history of capitalism and clearly I guess the the sense of critical mass was very important to that but I think now both the Netherlands and England in a way are too small if we had the space that you have in America um growth might be much easier than it's proving to be and so that sets up for us a very painful decision about what matters more uh economic growth economic success the the wealth the employment that that gives people or the sustaining of the countryside and all those creatures that depend on the countryside and my feeling is and it's an entirely romantic one that I would not want to you know argue before professor of Economics but I'm going to is that for me I feel that the humans who live on the island that I live on we're not the only species that inhabit this island that there are lots of animals and and birds and insects and plants and trees that are bread of this island too and that we have a kind of responsibility for them and I hate the impoverishment of our wildlife of our biodiversity I I if I particularly campaign for the Hedgehogs it's it's partly because they are a an inherently appealing animal they're kind of snuffling the way that they when they they they run it looks as if they're lifting up skirts to do so but it's also because I remember the garden of my childhood where they would be hedgehogs you know you'd see hedgehogs all the time I don't think my children have ever seen a hedgehog ice I I was driving through the country um in late summer last year and I ahead of me on the road I saw a hedgehog and it was the first time I'd seen Hedgehog for a long time and it really paints me and I feel we have a responsibility not to allow an animal like the Hedgehog too to go extinct and I think more than that if you want to talk in terms of human self-interest a world in which biodiversity collapses and one of the reasons why hedgehogs are going extinct is because there aren't enough insects for them to eat and insects of course are much less charismatic than hedgehogs and so people tend not to get upset about them but if we don't have insects if we don't have the things that animals would depend upon then that's not good for humans either the Cascade effect you know we never know when it might suddenly Ripple through three final questions first what is your most unusual successful work habit my most unusual successful work habit so when I uh when I when I write history um I will go to libraries I will immerse myself in academic text academic study I will um read texts and books that are often kind of very demanding very uh uh written in very academic prose uh but I write for the general audience um and so there are times where I feel that I have to emancipate myself from that and I remember when I was writing my first book Rubicon which is about the collapse of the Roman Republic the great kind of the Warlords of the late Republic uh Pompey Caesar Crassus um I I would come back from the library and I'd sometimes feel covered in the dust of the the libraries in which I'd been sitting and before starting work I would play any americani's music from The Good the Bad and the Ugly as I was making myself a cup of tea um and I would particularly play two tracks one um is uh the kind of the Lust For Gold where two Co the ugly is running round the cemetery trying to find a grave where supposedly a gold has been buried um and I would always play that when I was writing about Crassus who is the you know the great the great billionaire um and then when I was writing about the triumvirate um the kind of the the the standoff between the great Warlords I would play the brilliant music at the end of The Good the Bad and the Ugly when there's a kind of seven minute shoot off between um the The Good the Bad and the Ugly and I would always feel better uh going up to work having listened to that and from that point on I've always tried to find pieces of music that will get me it will keep me in the mood of the world in which I'm writing about but will also remind me that this is for I'm writing for people who may know nothing about it and I have to make it interesting and accessible next what is your favorite movie my favorite movie is I think Jurassic Park I I was havering over The Good the Bad and the Ugly which I have actually watched It's a Wonderful millions of times um but I'll tell you why I love Jurassic Park so I as a child before I got into the Romans before I got into the Greeks I was obsessed by dinosaurs I was one of those kind of boys and um and I was a child at an age where there wasn't very much about dinosaurs yeah it weren't on the television very often I remember there was an open University course on paleontology um you know done by professors so not at all aimed at children and they had one about dinosaurs and it was the most exciting program that I watched through the entertainment of my childhood anything about dinosaurs I would I was obsessed by and the films that were shown then were kind of the the dinosaurs in them were not very good they were kind of slow ponderous you could see that they'd be you know that kind of Ray harryhausen type uh models so when CGI enabled Spielberg to recreate dinosaurs in the way that he did in Jurassic Park for me it was a wonderful wonderful moment and you may remember in Jurassic Park um the two paleontologists are in the Jeep they're being taken by Richard Attenborough um and suddenly they they they kind of hear a Bellow and they look round and there's a kind of famous sequence where Sam Neal takes his hat off and kind of goes like that and I hadn't yet seen any of the CGI dinosaurs and when they showed the brachiosaur coming up out of the lake and kind of leaning up and feeding from the tree the sense of wonder that Sam Neal was of the Carrick Sam Neil's character was obviously feeling I felt that sense of wonder I was so moved I was moved almost to tears um and I I think you know as a film I've just watched it over and over and over again because I I never that that sense of wonder has never entirely left me I will again remind our audience members of Tom's current book Dominion have the Christian Revolution remade the world but the final question is after that what will you do next well uh I am carrying on with my own podcast the the rest is history as I said we've just done um uh three episodes on the cathars we have uh various episodes coming up some with a definitely an American event so we're doing some episodes on Raw Reagan we've got the fall of Saigon to come say all kinds of things like that uh and I'm able to do that and to devote myself to that because um I've just finished um a third book in the series of books that I've written on Roman history so the first Rubicon was about the fall of the Roman Republic mentioned that the second dynasty was Dynasty I guess I should say uh was about the uh the family of Augustus ending with the death of Nero and this new book Pax is about the Heyday of the Roman Empire so it runs from the death of Nero up to the time of Hadrian so it covers uh the year of the four Emperors the sack of Jerusalem Pompeii the Colosseum Asians War say lots of great stuff um and that is out in America in October Tom Holland thank you very much thank you so much for having me great honor

Channel: Mercatus Center

Views: 26,644

Keywords: economics, podcast, religion, literature, education, culture, society

Id: VLmVCa3zDeI

Length: 66min 41sec (4001 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023