Victor Davis Hanson - Western Civilization, the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, and Today.

i'd like to speak just for if it's possible for 10 or 15 minutes on the west western civilization and then the crisis why there's a crisis and then what happened and if there's if there's any hope but i'll just preface it i was talking to a friend at hillsdale once not not once just in september and he says you know i can't i i can't watch the nba anymore and i said well i don't watch the end and i haven't watched an nfl game i don't want to that's an escape i don't want to be lectured when i turn on tv and he said major league baseball's gone so we were and then he said have you been to a movie lately i said why would i want to watch a poor remake of a hollywood there's not an idea in that whole city so then he said do you care that whether there's a firewall for the new york times i said i haven't read it in five years he said i haven't read the washington post say have you watched network news i said i don't even know what it is anymore and he said when people come to hillsdale does it make much difference if they have a phd from stanford or harvard i said no i'd rather talk to somebody in fresno so what he was saying is that we we all are having a monastery of the mind we've withdrawn from all of these wonderful institutions and we've we've said to ourselves i can't i can't take part these were created by great people who are dead but they've been corrupted all of them and it's very difficult now because i always say to my wife we get up one morning and we see this chaos on the screen on the internet outside our front door and i say we're augustine and we're living in carthage about 440 a.d and the vandals are outside the walls metaphorically and it's a very difficult time to be alive i have a lot of empathy for people who get up every morning and they go out there and they're undaunted but what is most upsetting is this civilization that gives us such freedom such material bounty security luxury and then it creates such disdain for it it was almost as if well we want all of the bounties of this civilization we want all of these golden eggs and we want to strangle this goose and i'd like to suggest to you in the next 10 minutes that's that's the only reassuring thing that's not new and it's caught up in the contradictions of our very civilization so what we call the west is just why wasn't the east because the greeks had no problem about being ethnocentric seventh and eighth century bc they got up in the morning and they said everything they noticed it seems to set where the sun was everything over there was like them and everything with the sun rises the oriens or the orient was different they decided the world was them versus persia and the oc kedens were the occidentals where the sun set in the west was a different culture they were pretty prescient and so out of nowhere about 800 bc we had these 1500 city-states only about a million and a half people in 50 000 square miles very small place they were trying to be strangled by the persians that had a kingdom of 30 million people and could not and these 1500 city-states started to reject all of the contemporary premises the dynastic civilizations in egypt the birth of civilization and the near east the tribal cultures of europe nothing to do with race my ancestors in sweden were killing each other and doing all sorts of things the greeks would have thought barbaric and out of this culture they started to have a system of law inheritance i think you could say that constitutional government was birthed in greece around 750 not for equality not for freedom but for the protection of property and to be able to hand it down without government interference to your family something we take for granted but that was the spark that made people create these constitutional governments and then the rest followed over the next 150 years consensual government rule of law rather than people free market economies very primitive but still free market and private property rationalism the ability to explain natural phenomenon without resort to superstition or religion didn't mean that they weren't religious they just said there's an element that we can't explain scientifically that's mystery it's a good greek word but the rest of the world why the sun comes up in a certain way and sets in a certain way the stars why what's water and earth and all of that can be explained without superstition and for a country that was very close to starvation it was always one harvest away from annihilation they were very enlightened we say well we're a sexist civilization compared to what compared to egypt compared to the goss i mean if you look at the titles of plays in greece the antigone the helen the andromache the trojan women they're they're heroes lis estrada so they were already talking about the equality of the sexes you say well they had slave every society in the world had slavery nobody at this time had anybody like alcademus who said no man is born a slave and that was a topic of intense debate and then there was this idea of self-criticism we'll get back to that later but you had the right to critique the very system you created without fear of retribution now this was not set in stone there were revolutions there were people who tried to destroy it but that was the contribution to the west from greece when rome took over because they had no word in their vocabulary national equivalent in greek there was no nationhood how can you preserve a civilization when there's 1500 city-states you can do it if you're alexander the great but you have to destroy freedom in the process he didn't destroy all of west but rome took over the mediterranean and they added to this menu this formula and one of the things they did was create a tripart system of government this is very important because our founders did not want an athenian democracy where on any given day the assembly could do whatever they wanted when 51 of the people said let's kill all the middle indians today they've been bad and they said yeah it's a good idea they got up the next morning said that was kind of extreme i'm quoting best basically thucydides so the next morning they got up and said let's not kill them they said well we already sent the ship out hundreds so i said well we'll give volunteers and give them free food and a bonus maybe and we have this great scene in the history where they're all got their necks ready to be cut and somebody comes in says stop just cut 1500 next not everybody and so that's what scared the romans so they had a tripart system two consoles an executive and then they had tribal assemblies a lower house and the senate same as ours senate and then they had tribunals that were a judiciary very influential on montesquieu and the french enlightenment and they codified law and they had basic in other words they took the spirit of the greeks and they said it doesn't work it doesn't apply to every day what happens if you're arrested you you have to have habeas corpus and most of our law today is latinate not greek because the romans were a wonderful codifier and most important they were wonderful assimilators this was the only civilization the world said that you do not have to be italian to be roman by the first century bc and first century ada and by 80 a.d there was not going to be any more italian emperors in other words rome became not what joe biden said but joe biden said the other night america was an idea no it is a reality it's not was an idea it wouldn't be a europe today if it was an idea somebody had to reify that idea and go over in world war one world war ii in the cold war etc but rome was a concept that you could be roman and not have to look italian very radical idea that if you accepted roman nuts so if you were a gaul and you were conquered by the romans they didn't they didn't just say we're going to take over and destroy it or said we will allow your children to wear togas and they can speak loud and then they can become roman that's a pretty radical idea at the time and there was a final component in this menu and of course that was jerusalem and that was the idea that uh by the first century a.d there was a new element that challenged classical morality classical morality was you do you be no better friend there's no better friend and no worse enemy there's no such thing as turn the other cheek there's no such thing as sermon on the mount if you're a good greek or a good roman you punish your enemies and help your friend and that's the definition of your morality and this new idea comes in very revolutionary because it transcended class and hierarchy and status and said blessed are the meek they shall inherit the earth if you're the historian like gibbon you say well this caused the fall of rome because how can you run a country on lot or if you're given in your writing about the fall of constantinople and he says you know the people on the walls are getting penance to ask forgiveness to kill muslims and the muslims below are being challenged uh being promised 72 virgins in heaven for every christian they kill and that's a very asymmetrical incentive so how can you defeat people like that so there was a problem already in classical i'm getting just telling you about the formation because some of these contradictions are coming to the fore and so when we look at the critiques of the west it goes something like this and this goes back to greek critics thucydides is very critical of democracy tacitus petronius the novelist with tonias the biographer they had very tough things to say about roman civilization and they all said you create so much bounty with free market capitalism so much competition and the good envy not just the bad envy but the envy of emulation that makes people want to excel you create excess they call it luxus or word for luxury and you give the people so much protected liberty and freedom they don't always get up in the forum or the agora or the ecclesia and want to talk about a dialogue of plato they want sometimes get up and say he should be executed because i don't like the way he looks free speech and so in a lot of the i call them the nihilistic tradition and you know it really took hold in germany with oswald spangler or nietzsche or hegel they said the problem with the west is when you're very free and you're very wealthy or very successful it's not it's failure i mean after all ask yourself in 480 just 17 city-states were left they had an army no longer bigger than 50 000 people and they defeated 400 000 persians coming from the north at salamis and plateau fast forward 150 years later and now they're much wealthier they have a much larger army and navy in the fourth century and they can't stop thirty mo thirty thousand motley northerners under philip of macedon and that they lost their freedom the enemies that rome faced at canai or at zama compared to the goss and the vandal the goss and the vandals were joke compared to hannibal in in the punic wars but something that happened in that interim and that's something we have to be very careful because the anecdote to it is important so in we're all very wealthy we're the wealthiest generation in civilization's history we're the freest we can do almost anything we want next to technology but how in the west when you have all of those choices and liabilities what prevents people from going out and saying you know fry pigs in a blanket or trying to attack a police thing or throwing a molotov cocktail and a thing or you know putting just the most deplorable pornography on the internet or attacking a christian first what stops a person from doing that in the west it's legal you have the money and the time to do it one of the things that was so striking about all of these blm and antifa demonstrations that everybody would say to them do they have to work how can they do they no they don't there's enough bounty like milton friedman once said yeah the country's going to hell but there's a lot of rot in this country and i think he was channeling something that adam smith said there's a lot of rotten capitalism that when people say it can't go on it does go on more than you think we're a lot more successful than we think and we have a lot of people who died and created a lot of institutions and protocols and histories for us to follow and they're still they're dead but that fumes from their lives are still there so it takes a lot to destroy it we're doing our best but it's taking a lot longer than the destroyers want and so the anecdote to that was traditionally in the west there was an anecdote plato talked about it aristotle talked about it thucydides implied it tacitus was so he very and of course the new testament and the anecdote was you don't really have to do what you're legally able or financially or economically able to do and you don't have to do that because you have pressures you have pressures you don't want to disgrace your parents or your grandparents or your family name or you belong to a religion christianity and christianity says you know what you do in this world you have a soul you may not think you have a soul but you do have a soul and there is going to be a reckon in it hereafter so don't do what you're capable of doing don't harm other people don't harm your soul and there's also a community and you don't want to be disgrace we're talking about a shame culture rather than a guilt culture rather than private guilt alone we had a shame culture in the west and so traditions family religion community all of these things and also public pressures so if you made money and you were very successful people we said we're not going to have the government take it from you there had been efforts to do so in greece and rome and in the middle ages to this this project i talked about went into europe in the middle ages and then we had the renaissance and the enlightenment reformation and then the american french revolution american revolution but through all this period we rejected the idea the government can take what you what you created and say its own that you owe it to someone else there was always an equality of opportunity and not on the quality of result but incumbent on the equality of opportunity that individuals could make better decisions how to help people than the government could and so all of those together restrained human behavior and what's happened now is i think what's we have created so much leisure and so much capital and so much affluence that what we call poor today is richer than any time in the history of the world i was talking to a guy not too long ago at walmart and salma and he was got out of his car in a brand new kia and he was very proud he come from mexico and he was showing me all the things on the key and i said you know everything on that car has more than a mercedes did 15 years ago and then i said i pulled out my iphone i said i have more power over the world or more information about it than a person with a mainframe ibm that was a billionaire and so we don't we forget just how much the individual has at his fingertips and so it's very incumbent that we have these bridles that we don't abuse it and we're losing them and then why are we losing them i'd like to finish maybe with six three three or four maybe six if i have time elements that show you why this western project is at peril and some of them are pre-modern that is they're not sophisticated and some of them are post-modern and they're the cynicism and the nihilism of the elites the first thing is we're becoming let's face it were becoming a lot of us were peasants until donald trump's arrest of middle-class incomes we had stagnant middle income growth we could argue that i think it's it's fair to argue that something went wrong when we piled up 1.6 trillion dollars of student debt we have a whole generation of students that are not marrying in their early 20s or not having children in their early 20s or not buying a home in their early 20s all of the catalyst for conservatism that takes yourself away from the equations that i have to sacrifice for my spouse i have to sacrifice for my children i've got a mortgage to pay i got to buy a car those kids are out there on the street at antifa every time they get arrested i read the arrest records and they pretty much fit a stereotype they're sort of a pajama boy life of julia arrested development and part of it is our society but part of it is they they went to college they got a student loan for a couple hundred thousand the university took no moral hazard they gave them a therapeutic curriculum and it was pretty much worthless remember what aoc was before she was a comp she was a barista and she was an honor student with a master's and she thought she was brilliant she didn't even know what the map of the middle east was she had a master's from boston university and she was very bitter that she had student loans so the university needs to take moral hazard but we have weakened the middle class and i think part of the problem that a lot in the republican party didn't see was a confused cause and effect i'm not trying to excuse the behavior of the lower middle class we know that in terms of divorce and uh illegitimacy drug use it's epidemic but that's not necessarily because one day people in 1965 said i want to take drugs and divorce my wife it also had something to do that we hollowed out the industrial section of the we didn't invest in people the way that we should have but whatever the causes are we have kind of weakened the middle class and without a middle class you have a peasant culture of people that are subsidized on the bottom and very wealthy on the top and in a vibrant vibrant society you have middle class people who are fluid and becoming wealthy and we all love that we don't want to become like europe where we have static classes and most people who are wealthy are inherited classes that are have levers of government at their access the second thing is we're becoming tribal and that means that we feel that our race is essential rather than incidental to who we are once we went down that road i mean america is the only multi-racial democracy that's ever been attempted you could argue that rome was or you could argue the ottoman empire but they had levers of coercion that we don't have we had the melting pot of assimilation integration intermarriage and i know that each population that was closer to the appearance of the founders was a little bit what snooty snobbish about the newcomers irish people there was a discussion in 1848 in the new york tribune whether irish were human or not so each each immigrant group has had to assimilate and integrate and face terrible oppression but the idea was you became american and yes you had you enriched the country with your food your music your fashion but you didn't touch the core you didn't touch the constitution you didn't touch the idea of free speech it didn't touch the idea of free religion but somewhere in the 1960s in this effort to make up for discrimination or racism which were endemic we decided to abandon that project and start to identify by who we are i think when barack obama came into power he did something i don't think anybody recognizes but it was the most deleterious thing in my life that any president's done he took the binary of the unique african-american experience which was no like no other minority and that binary had been something that binary since the civil war and the civil rights movement had been something the united states was working and succeeding in and he said that it's not just black versus white it's everybody who is non-white they're part of a collective and all of a sudden i i noticed that people who were rich farm owners with 10 000 acres from the punjab or a third generation japanese optometrist or a upper middle class professor from brazil was telling me that he was diverse and all of a sudden they were part of this group and we were all going to find some type of edge so we had what elizabeth warren saying she was native american we had rachel dozell saying she was black and it became kind of a parlor game among friends of mine they said you know your children have oklahoma blood in them maybe they're cherokee once you take a dna and they can get a little everybody was trying to find some edge and it shows you how racist we've become because as you know in the old south everybody was doing the opposite everybody was scared stiff that somewhere in the their past they had black blood and they had 1 16 was a rule one drop if you could trace a african-american then you were considered african-american now we've gone back to the confederate idea and just flipped it but it's still racist and so we're becoming a a nation of tribes and i don't know how we're all going to get along if we give our first loyalty to our first cousin or to somebody that looks like us rather than and when i heard joe all joe biden and all of those candidates do welcome to the lgbt community welcome to this community welcome to this they never say welcome to as people and it's not coming from i don't think it comes from people who classify themselves as non-white it comes from very elite white people and i have a theory that the elite liberal is very guilty because they don't feel comfortable with people who don't look like them and are not from their same class so they've created a middle idea of penance i'm going to put my kids in an elite academy i don't want any minorities near me but i don't want charter schools i'm gonna build a big wall around my zuckerberg estate but don't put a wall down that's racist down by the border and you can see what that it's psychologically allows you to be segregated by being abstractly moral and concretely amoral so we are tr we're tribal people now and that's there's no society whether it's the balkans or rwanda we know where that goes we know what we have a destiny with because everybody to survive will start being tribal i go to walmart i live in a community that's 85 percent latino i don't know very many white people anymore they mostly moved away but at walmart for some strange reason before 8 o'clock in the morning it's all white the vestigial population and for the first time in my life i walk in and here's what happens people don't know me hi how are you hey good to see you and what they're doing is they're identifying with a shared whiteness because they feel the whole society is becoming tribal and they're going to die adopt by tribe and i'll say to some i don't know who you are why would i feel closer to that person because he happens to be white than a mexican-american person who's conservative and shares my own view but if that's where we're headed and when history teaches us once we go tribal it's like going nuclear once one nation goes nuclear when one people goes try everybody's gonna go tribal for defense it happens like that the work of a multi-racial unified culture takes centuries the work of a multicultural divisive culture can happen in two or three years read through cities if you don't believe me and then i think it's very important to realize that not only are we becoming peasants and uh tribal people we're becoming residents used to be citizenship meant a lot of things if you ca you were a u.s citizen you were inside the united states you could alone vote you could alone hold office you had a u.s passport that gave you a loan the right to leave the country and come back in on your terms we had secure borders citizenship meant something citizens we have 50 million people here that are residents half of them are legalized i have no problem with green card half of them aren't we have sanctuary cities that have taken up a confederate idea confederate that they can nullify any law that they don't like federal immigration i don't want to doesn't matter under the federal system you can't do that can't do that what's going to stop provo utah from saying you know what i hate those damn three spotted lizards they're on the federal endangered species i'm going to crush everyone in a workplace i don't follow federal environmental law or how about somebody in cody wyoming and says i'm going to start passing an ordinance that says anybody in my town can buy a weapon and walk out the same day maybe it'd be good but it would violate federal law exactly what we're doing with sanctuary cities the left would go crazy if their principles were applied to themselves it's not a sustainable population and then finally on the post-modern side assaults that are every day about tribalism and resident we're just residents rather than citizens and we're we're peasants rather than citizens if you notice on the other side we have all of these elites who don't think they're american at all they think they're citizens of the world michelle obama theater say along with laura bush said we're citizens of the world we're here to raise money for the w.h.o the w.h.o that was basically a megaphone for communist china to lie about the spread of the virus is unaccountable to in no one before i mean i don't want to kneel decorated mortues niecy bonum you know that's don't say anything about the dead unless it's good but come on justice ginsburg said i think we have a lot to learn from the south african constitution we don't have anything to learn from the south african constitution but there are a lot of our elites who feel that on climate change or race relations or taxa they love the european model or they feel that the davos man is their symbol and they have disdain for what they call the deplorables irredeemables the clingers that i think joe biden call them the dregs of society and so our elite is not invested in this country but in cosmopolitanism that's a good greek word for citizens of the world so when you and it does filter down you go to a university i once spoke at uc santa barbara and i said there's not a single course here on the civil war not one of you in this audience can tell me what was shot what happened to shiloh does anybody i said i will get off this stage and leave if one person can tell me what the battle of shiloh was nobody could and then a professor got very angry and interrupted she said we have of course i teach it and i said i can imagine what it's called and she said well it's called racing gender and post-civil war america i said that doesn't count sorry but we have an elite that's not invested in our traditions and doesn't see us as exceptional barack obama said we're no more exceptional second exceptional joe biden said it the other day that america was just an idea besides that we have what i would call evolutionaries these are people who feel that the constitution has to be changed because it was created by a bunch of ossified calcified white mediocrities around 1787 and human nature changes that according to them you give people enough money and enlightened leadership they change they metamorphosize so what are we doing right now well after 233 years we don't let's get rid of the electoral college nobody understood what the founder said they said it's the only way to keep a rural population give it some equity with an urban population because rural values are different they always will be and they provide a needed remedy to the mob in town they said if you're going to have election fraud you can't destroy an entire election because you outsource each state through the electoral college and it's absolutely true i don't really care this i think everybody's going to steal elections in california new york i'm very worried about the california congressional district because of that but i am less worried about the national election being stole because we have other states that have electoral college procedures they want to pack the core that's not in the constitution but it's been there for 150 years last time we tied in 1937 remember when they say they're going to create a commission it wasn't just the supreme court it was 200 federal judges that roosevelt wanted to pack and it was very effective everybody said well you know what even as democrats stopped that crazy idea of 15. they did but if you look at a new deal legislation the court folded after that they approved everything because they had a sort of damocles hanging over them even if they don't quite get it the court john roberts will tell the conservative members you better be careful they're going to pack the court that's the point it's a deterrent element it's a deterrent weapon even if you can't get through it but they will because they're going to eliminate the 170-year tradition of the filibuster so that on 51 if they get a senate majority and a presidency they can do whatever they want i think you if we looked at what the second amendment is in the first amendment they're almost unrecognizable what founders intended when i was growing up there was such something called the free speech area remember mario salvia berkeley radical idea you could go out and be actually on a place in the campus where no one could censor you a lot of pornography a lot of people it was it was something we could at least disagree on and now if i go to stanford you can't say anything like that trigger warning safe space is based on race so we've destroyed the first amendment on campuses and i think all of you at work know that if you want to wear your maga hat to work you've been in trouble despite your first amendment rights even if you said you know what i'm not going to go into my private employer who has a right to have certain decorum i'll be in the parking lot that still would be dangerous if you got into a public park and you said you're going to vote for donald trump i don't think you'd be safe in fresno so we're already eroding uh and these evolutionary there's a third elite assault and that's what it's overused word but come on it's the administrative state we have thousands of people who feel that they have the power of government on their side if they're federal prosecutors and they want to go after carter page or scooter liberty or conrad black they have unlimited resources and they target particular people and they run up for the idea that they're going to run up huge legal bills and then they're going to have to plea bargain and there won't be a matter of guilt or innocence and that and they and they do that all the time we have bureaucrats that most of you are businessmen you know more about regulation than i do when i started farming there was one rule in 198 1980 about how you could pack fruit when i quit in 1992 there were 17 of them on the wall and you know regulators better than i do if you're a person who's pretty bright and you want to go into government with a good pension a pretty good salary and you're regulating people who take risk and they're pretty confident and they're type a personalities you know the psychological mechanisms involved you get even with them by saying oh wow you may own this and this and this but i can do this and this to you because i have the power of the government so regulation is another part of this deep state the most scary thing is if you look at the fbi the cia the doj what we've created we've created a whole elite echelon that feel that and i'll include the retired military some of my good friends in it they feel that they're so well connected in new york and washington and they're so much part of the bipartisan spirit of the age that because donald trump is crude they have a moral right to try to undermine him so when you have a general that's a retired general on a pension and direct violation of article 82 of the uniform code of military justice saying as mccaffrey did that our president is mussolini and he should be removed or admiral mcraven the great admiral i was at the naval academy when he would visit says he should be removed sooner than later or you have general hayden saying that the cages on the border or auschwitz or you have my friend jim mata saying trump is using nazi-like tactics and you have an entire retired military in revolt and the greatest irony is who gave us the code of milita uniform military conduct the left and why did they do it because during the korean war they despised who general douglas macarthur and they said we're never going to have a general pontificate like macarthur did and curtis lemay did and george patton did so we're going to say if they are retired even they're subject to this code when i grew up it was always the right wing general remember him in the cartoon with the sunglasses and the epilogues seven days in may all the threat no no that the danger now from the military is much greater because at over the rank of colonel people are very very left-wing and there's no audit or there's no deterrent toward their behavior because the media encourages and sees him now not as villains but his hero and so let me just conclude by saying we had a wonderful civilization we do have a wonderful civilization it had intrinsic weaknesses we all have to be aware of it requires sober and judicious self-restraint and there's always this tendency to take self-criticism to a level that i think we could call nihilism or self-destruction we don't have to be perfect to be good and we surely can't go back and look at our ancestors who women who had to be pregnant about 10 times in the 19th century or 18th century to have about six pregnancies that came to term that have about four deliveries that were successful in many cases to have two or three kids that survived and the idea that they were being oppressed because they had to work by some person who spent 80 to 90 hours a day i mean a week her husband to just produce food when we had 99 of 100 people farming when this country was founded now we have about half of one for one person so we don't ever apply the code of conduct of a postmodern wealthy secure society and go back to society and rather than say it's tragic say it's melodramatic and we're going to pick winners and losers according to how well they are adjudicated to our code of behavior because there is such a thing called hubris and nemesis and as sure as we're here tonight a generation 50 years from now may say you know what those people in 2020 were really hypocritical they were killing fetuses that were they weren't fetuses they were babies and we had they had they knew they were babies and they were killing them and they were so self-righteous about we could say so many things that we do and so with that spirit i think we all each according to our stations have to protect the society and with our own self realize how wonderful but out how fragile it's been through history and we have to be careful when we see people attacking it and we know our vulnerabilities about the society and it's not from weakness it's from its ability to create wealth and freedom and art and music everybody wants to be a part of it but it won't last unless we all protect it and defend it thank you very much victor was actually in in jackson's introduction but he made a comment i'd like you to elaborate on about this distinction between the american revolution and the french revolution and i wonder if i'm being over if i'm oversimplifying to say that perhaps the great tension that we face right now is not just for the west but it is to for the which revolution is going to win are we dealing in the social unrest with the principles of rousseau and voltaire versus those of us who are sons and daughters of the american revolution i think there's a historical context of the question an ideological one i wonder if you'd comment on that we have to remember that our revolution there had never been a revolution like it before since it was not a holistic revolution as we usually determine it was a political revolution to allow people to have consensual government taxation without representation but the the operative word was liberty and freedom limited government nobody had ever done that before the french revolution that occurred roughly a decade later was very different in two ways it was an equality of result not of opportunity not liberty remember in the french egalitarianism fraternity liberty egalitarianism so the french thought that they were going to remake society now the problem with that is if you go to that next step as our founder said throughout the federalist papers if you go to that next step and say i'm not just going to make people have equal opportunity but damn it i'm going to make them equal the way the bolsheviks thought or mao thought or the french revolution then people are not equal everybody in this room has different health conditions everybody has different pursuits different inheritances different luck and if i want to make you all evil equal i have to do it on the back end with a level of coercion and i have to say i'm going to take your you you're worth 100 million and i god i can't see how you can not miss 10 million of that and i'm going to take 10 million and i'm give it to you but i'm gonna and you're gonna say i'm not gonna let you do that and i'm gonna say i'm morally superior to you and and i'm gonna have the force to do it and we know what the effect of giving me 10 million would do would probably wreck my life so the point i'm getting at is that the french revolution was holistic they even remain i mean they tried to really do every aspect of it 1787 became 1791 became year zero the days of the month were changed the days of the week were lengthened from seven to ten days they destroyed the monastery they killed over forty thousand nuns and monks the jacob and the the jacobins the idea they were they put a statue and they worshipped what the god reason the supreme deity was not religious in nature it was the intellect supposedly so it was an effort 360 degrees does this sound familiar what we're trying to do now it's we're going to change every single length we're going to tear down monument this is exactly what the french did tear down monuments change and i'm i'm at stanford and i think father sarah was a heroic individual if you read actually read about his life given the conditions of founding missions so i looked out of my window one day and i saw a guy taking down the sarah plaza right out they named it and then they just took david jordan first president renamed the hall and i said to a student well why don't you go the full thing and get rid of stanford he said more things that you would call racist about asians than any than father oh no we can't do that see so it's opportunistic nobody wants to graduate from chumash university so it all becomes iconic and symbolic and so the french revolution was holistic and it was a quality of resolve there's a couple questions i'm going to sort of merge together that i think have a similar theme um but obviously it being a largely faith-based audience in our high school being very rooted not only in western civilization but specifically the christian tradition and a distinctly view of christian philosophy do you believe that the west can be preserved without a uniquely christian orientation you know i don't because i know i think i understand human nature and human nature being what it is when you worship only the god reason and you're highly educated and you become quite rhetorical you're always going to find a way to outsmart yourself and to offer an apology for your behavior or apology for an idea whereas as aquinas or augustine reminded us that once you have an absolute that all and the founders knew that then there's a there's a limit there it stops and uh if you don't if you believe you can explain all natural phenomenon by science you're in for a sad life i i can tell you that i can science will tell us why when we get out in that parking lot our car will start and why it works but it won't tell us why one of us might not make it home if we get in an accident and why it was me and not you and not you and not you so there's a mystery there somewhere we haven't figured it out but it requires faith in something larger than ourselves so along those lines i wonder um with all of your study vast study of of how the west has gone astray over the years and we we talk about this faith element it sounded in your talk as if you're somewhat resistant to maybe charles murray's argument that kind of post-1960s humanism that a lot of white america in particular abandoned morality abandoned certain traditions and norms and that you and that you feel that there's been more of an economic cause and effect de-industrialization globalization but the moral relativism had to come from somewhere first they created both the cultural problem and some of the economic problems where did that come from and how do we put that genie back in the bottle well i think what happened was in the 1960s in particular uh and it happened it happened in britain right after world war one with the modernist and and france people look toward the elite for guidance whether they should or not and we can define elite by merocratic achievement or wealth or whatever way but once the elite adapts a quota behavior that starts to filter down what the reason that people like downington navi i mean it's kind of a corny thing but the one reason people liked it they didn't say to themselves these people are snobbish they had concern and empathy for their employees they were always engaged in good works they wanted to be clean they wanted to look not they had a code that was destroyed after world war one and when that code is destroyed and it filters down to the lower classes that have no margin of error it becomes absolutely destructive if you've got a trust fund or you have a nice home or you live in a nice area you have a nice job title and you have a couple kids out of wedlock and you take drugs you might be able to get by but when that model is adopted by people with no more it's absolutely destructive and so i i think the norms were destroyed in the 60s and that generation did okay but the people who emulated them didn't and and so it's a it's a cat taking chasing its tail is cause and effect i don't believe that everybody was uh living in trailers shooting up with drugs and therefore uh a steel company just said i'm not gonna i'm not going to hire these people i think there were other incentives as well but yeah so hard to chart which caused which because they worked in tandem a negative feedback loop to some degree yeah um let's talk something optimistic and promising if we can do this do you believe that there's a pendulum that is at risk and i use rescue risk here in a right tail sense upside risk pendulum swinging the other way has the left gone too far yeah i think it has it's contrary to nature it's contrary to human nature so we know that we all know it deep down our heart and when lebron james for example who lives in a 42 million home and has eight security guards when he lectures how unfair this country is or when he says we need more diversity and there's 75 percent african-american and the most non-diverse employment agency in the world the nba we don't or when jane fonda says thank god for covet it really gave liberalism a second win so we know that this bankrupt media so what i'm what i'm optimistic about is take this election whatever your your feelings about trump are there are millions of people who feel the country is toxic and they want to save it and they have no allies they don't have the media they don't have hollywood they don't have entertainment they don't have professional sports they don't have academic they don't have k through 12. tell me they don't have the paul who do they have they only have themselves and yet they're this close from destroying this whole progressive 16-year idea and if you listen to what obama and clinton were saying there said there's 16 years we can solve the problem and give us you know pretty much state socialism so i don't know how they did it but it's remarkable that the uh the innovativeness of the human spirit and they we had no resources at all look at the fortune 400 and look at the great wealth in america they're all on the left now and yet these people cannot they they can't be stopped and so i'm very optimistic and what are they what do they want they want to be left alone they want to they want to follow the constitution they want to better their own lives they want to have property they want to have the second amendment they want to have the first amendment they want to treat people on based on their character they don't want to they don't want to have the state interfere in their lives and if they do well they want to help somebody who didn't do well and they think they can do that a lot better than the government and they can so it's a it's a i'm very optimistic about that that that dna of the american idea you believe is still there and we have to fight to preserve it but you don't feel that it's lost i am i one of the things we live in a community that's about 85 mexican-american and it's been uh ground zero of the lat the most late uh immigration from oaxaca mexico so it's a very different immigration than the earlier migrations but i'm always struck by mexican-american people i went to high school with and i still live in this community and they're saying to me when are we going to close the border because my my my nephew is married to a white guy my cousin's married to a black guy what this is this is what we're supposed to do why do we just let one group come illegally across the border and then they say things that just astound me if they come here why don't they like america i said they do like america but they're told by wealthy white people not to like them that's right exactly but what i'm getting at is there's there's i think there's a conservative uh renaissance that's happening among non-traditional conservatives it's very small now i don't think donald trump is going to get a large i think he's if he got 20 percent of the africa that would be stunning if he got 35 percent of the so-called latino vote but he's going to get a larger and this is what i'll leave you with on this question he's going to get a larger percentage than john mccain or mitt romney and both of them the late mccain and romney would say he's a racist and he's not and the reason that he's going to get a larger percentage is mitt romney couldn't could never say to people our farmers our workers use the first person possessive pronoun i never heard him say that hour hour i think he wanted to say it but how odd that a crass crude billionaire from the manhattan real estate world could go out into all of these communities and appeal to people it's very strange so there's a couple questions on the on the college front and they're they're sort of separate but i'm going to combine them just because i'm trying to get as many people's questions covered um the student debt crisis you talked about i think it's an economic 1.6 trillion crisis but it's also a moral crisis how we got here the hubris of university presidents to allow it what is the solution of student debt that is not in the elizabeth warren playbook but in the dr hansen playbook and then more specifically we talk about hillsdale but for the parents in the room thinking about colleges for their children to the extent that there are some parents that still do care about what gets taught in the classrooms at college besides hillsdale what would be another example of a college you might recommend out there very hard to get to hillsdale yeah i mean there's not very many is there there's st thomas aquinas sometimes st john i think pepperdine's gone to the left but you have a you have a great problem because the way yours is everybody wants the best for their child and universities are like cattle brands now so when you send your kid to stanford or harvard or yale you know they're not they're going to be indoctrinated they're going to be educated less well than in hillsdale but they're going to get a brand on them just like a double bar x or something and that's called a harvard or so you can't tell your child i don't want you indoctrinated and i don't want you poorly taught at stanford when you know that he'll be poorly taught and indoctrinated but he'll have a pathway that he wouldn't have somewhere else so there's two solutions to this one is if your child goes to a prestigious school that will enhance his whatever his particular ideas about his future are then you have to be very careful he has to pick and every one of these universities sanford i can tell you because i know most about it five percent of the faculty are wonderful and five percent who are left-wing don't indoctrinate so there's 10 percent and a person can find them and there's students there and they can find they can have an oasis but uh other than that hillsdale and you know st john's or any school that has a traditional curriculum as far as the we know the sad thing about higher education we know how to fix it because we know what it used to be like and we know that in the 50s and 60s it was entirely liberal but it wasn't hard left i don't think i had one conservative professor undergraduate or graduate but i had a lot i think i only had one that i would call unprofessional they were all liberals but they never indoctrinated us they would kid you if you were conservative but it didn't matter to your grade they let people come on campus of all different types and when people disrupted during the 1970s they were appalled by it and that's gone so how do we get it back very quickly i think one thing is the universities if they want these student loans and they want to hire all these administrators of inclusion and diversity and equity and rock climbing walls and let them pay for it and they can do that by two they have to guarantee their own loans and once they did that and the federal government got out of it they would be really cost conscious they couldn't afford what they're doing because they assume that the government's going to pick up the default and second well they'd have to compete over price they would and then why in the world after let's say a certain ratio but why why if stanford's got 34 billion dollars endowment why can't we just say the first 2 billion is is tax a deductible or not subject to income tax on the revenue but why isn't the other and that would uh if you uh and that there was some movement as you know in the tax reform bill of 2018 so i think we could look at that why in the world when you graduate and you want to be a high school teacher do we do you have to be credentialed you don't have to be credentialed to go to junior college so suddenly at 17 everybody has to have somebody to go these awful school of education and be credentialed then they go to jc and all of a sudden they have an m.a so why not give every kid that graduates a choice if they want to be a high school teacher you can go through that awful education indoctrination to get a credential and get an m.a one year and learn history or english or science and i think most students would take the m.a in a second and that would shut down that's where the problem at k-12 is and finally i thought about this and this gets the most anger if i had this conversation have you noticed that well now we're going to get rid of acnt act and sat eventually because it's considered discriminatory remember where it started the s.a.t tests started to end discrimination mostly against jews because they were discriminated we wanted to find a blind method of assessing knowledge that didn't have the old boy system but the university today says we can't trust you guys from selma high school i know that i had a straight a average when i wanted to go to university and somebody from palo alto high had a straight a average and that was considered better it probably was so then we corrected for that with the s.a.t the idea was we don't trust the high schools that's what the colleges were telling us so we have our own standard why don't we say we don't trust the colleges and so when you graduate you all have to take the s.a.t again and let's say you're going to have to have a minimum grade school yeah and you know what would happen hillsdale's students would all pass and i think stanford would flunk so and that would it would cut out a lot so i think they should do that as well i i was going to try to avoid the topic primarily because i'm i'm making sure that everything i ask you are things i know we're fully aligned on you and me and and this and this big tech issue is a tough one for you mentioned milton friedman you're talking kind of free markets here like myself but it's a real problem i hear you on with tucker frequently talk about it um but because i got a second question on it i have to go there thoughts on big tech as an antithesis to liberty the orwellian reality but how we want to think about that from a distinctly western standpoint and the complexity of technology and what's happening well we were talking about this my wife and i so i said let's just play a little game this week so i said let's text hunter biden and russia and i read the search order how many searches did you have to go to the word scandal came it was five pages until i saw the word scandal it was russian disinformation used by republicans every single one of these searches and then it was funny you finally got to the point where nobody ever heard of these platforms they weren't new york time so you know that they're using logarithms to adjudicate these searches you know they're canceling people they're deep platforming and uh i know that when i'm at stanford university and i write something i won't mention i can't get too detailed because of professional considerations but i will get calls from people at stanford or hoover and say we got a call victor and that means ding somebody in big tech is saying i'm going to yank money if you let that sob write another column they have enormous power and they're very brilliant i know a lot of them i talk to them a lot not the high but the mid level and what they've done is brilliant they've navigated the political the political uh mail storms perfectly on the one hand they've told the conservatives you guys believe in free market economics were your thomas edison you were your alexander graham bell were your carnegies where are the guys that are you know up from our book straps we're the robber barons we're the guys that make stuff you don't want to kill us regulate us to death and then they go over to the left and they say we're giving all the money to you we're warping these companies to give you uh political and these stupid conservatives are giving us the rope to hang themselves and that's why they do it and so i guess it depends on whether you think it's a public utility or not how essential to your life when you turn on the lights public utilities commission has some say i don't think they do a very good job when you hear a radio and you hear that bleep or on tv that fcc doesn't like people to say certain words they feel those public airways belong to everybody and when you take a truck and you go between one state and another the tires and everything is regulated and whether you think you're i think an internet search is pretty essential to your existence and so i was i've changed 180 degrees on this subject i got to the point where i feel that they are well in and when i go on and buy something on amazon and i've forgotten what i buy and then for the next 10 days on a google search these things pop up you know you bought tennis shoes and here's six ten tennis shoes and here's tennis shoes and it's crazy the power they have and the intrusiveness so i think they need to be re reeled in a little bit so victor um how do we reel him in without giving more power to the administrative state it's a very hard question it's a very i just wanted to make sure i wasn't crazy it's a very hard question i think you have to have some type of public you know a board that's public but they will have regulators working for them and uh they brought it on themselves and they knew it was coming and they thought you know what when we when we had market capitalization of of half a billion dollars or a billion or 10 billion we were scared but now we have 4 trillion in silica and we don't we don't think anybody be stupid enough to take us on and so they they become arrogant and dangerous i think and i don't have it we go back and forth on uh these public utilities i think it was really good to deregulate the airlines in one sense and then on the other there were there were downsides to it cheaper fares for everybody but service and certain things so we do we do regulate the air lanes in some ways you know there are certain times a plane cannot stand on the tarmac without getting fined and there are certain rules about the ticketing but there are no rules they have a lot of rules in orange county to protect the sleepy heads yeah but we don't really unfair to those of us who actually travel for business i don't know why all of a sudden i woke up one morning and i did a a political prager university korean war and it was deep platform i don't know why all of a sudden uh i did an uncommon knowledge not long ago and it was de-platformed and i don't know why all of a sudden a bunch of techie people said that i should be fired from the hoover because i questioned anthony fauci in an op-ed but that's what they do they do it every day and they don't do it by what we think they do they do it by calling people up at your employer and then telling them that they have so much money and influence and they love stanford university but they have these you know that's that's what they do so there's a certain sense of injustice in what many of us who love the american idea are facing now and i bring up the word justice i'm going to use it as our last question tonight and actually i don't think he wrote his name on the card so i don't think he minds me saying it comes from mayor o'neill if our state senator john morock had a question tonight he didn't write his name on the card so if i didn't get to yours i apologize but uh i'm thank you john for being here and hi hi trina but but mayor o'neal has a question and i think it ties into this issue that has really become a major um 2020 item for discussion and i think it does stem out of the great progress over the wet of the west in the couple millennia you're talking about and that's the issue of justice and like many concepts and ideas when it gets defined wrongly the application seemed to me to be borderline tragic and this summer i i saw things that struck me as really unjust that were being done in the name of justice and it just seemed to me to be a total bastardization of the moral virtue of justice is justice what the west is about and can we reclaim not just the word but the concept for those of us who not only believe in a free and virtuous society but a distinctly christian one who is talking about justice in a way that would pass metal for those of our worldview you know the idea of just dk in greek it was a deity with a blindfold in the justia in rome and the idea was you had to apply that was what made rome different than all of its rivals it applied justice blindly and it worshipped you know and the byzantine empire was the same way it worshipped the justinian law code not individual and that's what our country was founded we've we haven't been just always on the basis of sex and race but we've always understood that when we weren't there were enough people here that said that was wrong what's i find right now the most dangerous threat to justice is the substitution of the law for a perceived moral good or a moral superiority whether it's a supreme court ruling or the unwillingness to prosecute the law based on your sense of own individual morality and what that means is that you don't have a law so if you're a shop i i went to seattle three weeks ago and i drove through the chop area that was declared an independent autonomous state there was no law there and now it's gone and all of these stores have been destroyed and i get all these photos and emails from people in minneapolis and all the people say the same thing the police did not enforce the law the the district attorneys do not enforce the law and not long ago the state of california said we're going to have an amnesty i think it was 100 million dollars for traffic anybody has traffic tickets can get amnestied and we did and now we have i think it's we're back up to 100 million dollars and people not paying and so there's a sense of one that the law is not applied to crimes in the way it should be and more importantly it's not applied equally and we are the most i'll give you example what i mean to finish california is the most hyper-regulated and hypo-regulated by that i mean if i go to palo alto i've talked to people where the state will come in the city will actually make them tear down a mailbox in atherton if it's two inches too short i was going in to stanford one day and a car a landscaper ahead of me had a smoky tailpipe something i see every day in salma i was laughing about i got to my office and my assistant said were you on sarah drive and i said yes did you hear that smell that car and i said what car it's every day in selma he said well i called in to report and i was number 17. the police said well that was the palo alto society reacting to that and they find that guy but where i live there is no law there is no law the person across the street has seven winnebagos they're all illegal romex watches uh lomex wire goes to them there's 40 dogs i got bit by one i called the sheriff they didn't come i called the spca and they said did you go to the owner i said yes they said what'd he do i said he slammed the door and then second dog bit me and worse than the first and so i called the sheriff back and i said well are you ever going it's against the law and i said what would happen if my dog who's licensed and would went out in the street and bit somebody they would find me and he said yeah we'd find it and so i called my physician he said well the good news is only six people got rabies out of a million dog bites last year and we think they were mostly bats and not dogs but in mexico there were 40. so if the dog came from mexico i'd get a rabies shot but it might make you sick but he said on the other hand if you get rabies you're dead but i would suggest don't get the shot and so that's how the law is applied i spend most of my time picking up wet garbage out in front of my yard and finding somebody stupid enough to put the power bill in it right so i i go to the person's address and i throw the garbage back and i'm they call the police so what i'm getting at is that this country now has decided to be to use social justice as a criterion to enforce the law so we'd say a da's not going to arrest 450 people that caused destruction in portland because they were doing a particular good to society or what 1 000 health care workers doctors nurses signed a petition that said if you went out in protest and shouted and spitted and didn't have a mask and didn't social that was good for the health of you and you should be exempt from protocol but if you're a small owner you have no money and you have a hamburger stand they're going to arrest you and so that unequal application of a law based on an enlightened progressives idea of social justice is what's going to destroy the law and it's it's scary because all of us think you know what i mean i the conversation we have in rural california is there's so much crime here i talk to neighbors and people what would be the pros and cons of shooting somebody who breaks into your home and everybody said well if you shot them you probably get sued and lose everything on the other hand maybe if you shot them in the leg they wouldn't get too mad or they are they going to kill you but maybe they just stab you and you could live that's what people talk about and it's it's scary it really is and i think all of you who have done well and feel that you're not victims then you're by definition victimizers you have a target on your back if you're an employee you're going to get sued or you're going to do something and that's really scary because you see the law will be it's relative it's not absolute anymore and the courts have done a lot of it but the progressives have done a lot the non-enforcement of the law whether it's immigration law or other crime laws is destroying it the sanctity of the law but is that political or is it is it philosophical is that bastardized view of justice and application that you're talking about some of the stories are almost borderline humorous if they weren't so tragic but that application that we can all agree is prima facie unjust is that a byproduct of progressive political progressivism or is there some sort of lacking foundation in better understanding the concept of justice yeah i think it's hard to know but i i think part of it is it's psychological and by that i mean what's happened in america is we have been so lacked in the application of the law because we felt in some ways we were illiberal in the past we had an ism or an ology we were sexist or homophobic or racist and now we want to atone we don't want to atone and suffer ourselves we want to atone collectively but make you suffer and that's the problem mark zuckerberg is really angry about illegal immigration and poor people who are sent back to mexico but he's got one of the nicest walls around his home in palo alto you could build so what i'm getting at is what's happened is psychologically we've adopted this what is it medieval penance so if you want to build if you're a sinner or you're an urcer in 15th century rome and you want to go to heaven then you write out a contract and you put one block in the dome of the saint peters then you can go to heaven well we do it in a different way we we're abstractly moral and then we can be concretely amor or the in the law enforcement we feel good about enforcing the misdemeanor but we neglect the felony i got pulled over going uh five eight miles over the sp out in the middle of nowhere in the west side and highway patrolman pulled me over i said i'm only going eight miles right not i said well you're going eight miles over and as we were talking a person went 120 miles and he said i've got would you stay right here [Laughter] off the record and i said well no it's he said please stay right there so he went and came back 20 minutes later and i was there and he said i'm going to reduce that by three miles you're fine but my point is i could go on but i we put solar panels on a barn that was built in 18 a shed that was part of it had been an older structure and it took us six months and they kept coming where's the map i said there was it was ag exempt well show me that was ag exempt so i had to dig up all of these old documents this went on for six months before they would and then the the thing had been brought up to code i said is there anything wrong with the buildings it's a beautiful building it's all up to code but we want the the the permit i said there was no law that you had to have a permit when it was built and he said well we got to bring it up i said it's up to we went through this and i said could you just walk out to the road look across the street i said there's chickens in the middle of the street there's 40 porta potties all over that five acres with the whole cut out of the porta potty so people are defecating in the ground that we haven't had that in 40 years there's no mosquito abatement there's all this stagnant water there's no electricity is being stolen off the pga knee pole i said the whole thing is a complete disaster you know what he said to me where would i start when i went over there and he said nobody has any money nobody nobody would communicate and next thing i know i would be in the fresno b he said i'd be in the fresno be as someone who was causing trouble for poor people so i said so you come over here and i'm gonna nod make you feel good and i'm gonna follow every little rule and you can go back and say you regulated a guy and i'll pay that he said yeah and i did and i got even more cynical and bitter just like you do i've hosted i i think i've hosted at least three or four q a's with dr hanson over the years and and i've just learned what category did not bring up to try to wrap things up um to to bid us to do this evening i'm going to invite up to the stage the president of the board of trustees at pacifica and one of my very closest friends and one of the only two bruins in my life keith carlson [Applause]

Channel: Pacifica Christian High School Orange County

Views: 1,108,848

Rating: 4.8139095 out of 5

Keywords: Pacifica Christian, High School, Orange County, Christian School, Newport Beach, Victor Davis Hanson, Classics, Democracy, Stanford University, Hoover Institute, Dr. Hanson, VDH, Liberalism, Freedom, Constitutionalism, Constituion, Government, Civics, Rome, History, Hanson, Victor Davis, Victor, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson

Id: _CURrMzrvSw

Length: 76min 43sec (4603 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Environmental-Tax211]

Co2, Covid and blm are lies built upon INCONVENIENT truths.

Covid being the Baby BOOMERS who were born enmass 75 years ago are starting to die from the usual suspects of seasonal FLU and old age.

The Galactic Milankovitch cycles cause our Climate Cycles. OBLIQUITY magnetic north is causing global warming ECCENTRICITY Perihelion Aphelion with the galactic bulge regulates intensity. Precession of the north star causes our solar system to cross the Galaxies double torus electromagnetic equatorial plane once every 13 thousand years causing plasma bursts from the reconnection of the Sun's magnetosphere, asteroid impacts from crossing the galaxies Kuipers belt, and E-w Global tsunami's due to the increased EM gravitational pull along the Galactic plane.

The Climate Cycles of our water planet are continental glaciers with lower sea levels Dwarka atlantis's brought on by E-W Global tsunami's Gobekli Tepe washington Scablands.

Jesus loved all races because there is only one race the HUMAN race.

Humanity is being divided distracted to be conquered again. Blm, alm, MvsF etc