War & Human Nature: Hertog Conversations with Victor Davis Hanson

hi everybody um i'm hugh liebert associate professor at the us military academy at west point and a faculty member with the hair talk foundation this summer i'm very pleased to be here this evening to moderate a conversation with victor davis hanson professor hansen is the martin annieli anderson senior fellow at the hoover institution he's a prolific writer on topics as varied as greek history warfare both ancient and modern farming and agriculture and contemporary culture and politics his many many books include the second world wars the savior generals how five great commanders saved wars that were lost and war like no other history of the peloponnesian wars he was awarded the national humanities medal in 2007 and the bradley prize in 2008. in the uh first half of this evening's conversation i'm going to pose a few questions to professor hanson we'll then hear from three political studies fellows who have submitted questions in advance we'll then take questions from our wider audience you can submit these questions via zoom's q a function if your question is selected you'll be recognized to ask your question there's no need to wait you're welcome to begin submitting your questions right now okay professor hansen um i'm really pleased to be able to talk to you this evening i i don't think you know we've met before but i've um read a bunch of your books with with great pleasure um including two in grad school your two first books uh warfare and agriculture in classical greece and um the western way of war and both of them you know had a really significant influence on me um i think what what i found most impressive about them was the way that your experience growing up on a 20th century farm um opened up these wonderful new insights into text that we've been living with for thousands of years so i thought if you'd be willing if you could just start by telling us a little bit about you know your personal background and how you got into classics and and wrote these these early books well i kind of lived in an isolated area in rural uh california in the central valley and i grew up on my grandfather's ranch with my parents and it was sort of a communal living we had all the family there and we were kind of free range as kids we just wandered over 140 acres as we pleased and somebody in the family would bump into us so i learned a farm pretty well in high school and then it was so isolated i wanted to get out so i went away to undergraduate and graduate school for nine years i i lived two years in greece and then in 1980 uh for a variety of reasons i didn't want to teach i didn't like academias but i had finished my thesis on warfare and agriculture and classical greece and i tried to incorporate everybody tries to incorporate things you know and when i would read second secondary sources on the peloponnesian war that the communal opinion was that the spartans came in in a period of depending on the which of the five invasions two weeks ten days five weeks they destroyed all of the agriculture and there was some textual for support for that in thucydides we would say they ravaged attica but when you went and looked at his specific uh more detailed elaborations that's common with him to in a sense to contradict himself he would say they they ravaged all the things they'd missed before they they ravaged the deems that they had skipped and then ice you know i had grown up taking out orchards with chainsaws and bulldozers and tractors and especially vines i mean if you pull out a vine sometimes the roots will go down 15 feet and you've really got to dig them up with a bulldozer i tried to save money once and did it with a chain and a tractor and all i did was have vines come up all over the field in a new orchard so i i didn't quite believe the secondary literature and it's very hard to burn grain unless you do it at a particular time of the year it's only combustible for about two to three weeks and that's the time when it's usually harvested and when you add the olive trees very hard i have olive trees it was very hard to cut them down or to keep them cut down so the long and the short of it was i suggested that the agriculture was not as damaged as one thought that was known in advance probably to the athenians for all of their psychological torment it's seen their homes destroyed and it it does explain why in the aftermath of the peloponnesian war athens did not suffer a you know half century of depression it was pretty much back on its feet within a decade i guess the reason that that struck me is such a great like approach to this is that like if you'd asked me i mean i did not grow up on a farm i know very little about farming i kill everything i plant you know but if you'd asked me like what are among the things that have changed significantly from ancient greece to our time agriculture would have been you know somewhere near the top of my list so i guess the larger question that the way you approach those texts raises is you know how to distinguish between what's kind of timeless in an ancient text and what is more contingent historically or dependent on technology and i get the sense that in a lot of your work that the the kind of range of of what's timeless and what we can learn from and apply in our own world is is broader than it is for a lot of uh classes is that fair to say yeah well i think a lot of us are through citizens and as he says explicitly that given that human nature doesn't change that what he says in 425 or 430 or 415 whenever he's particularly writing given the necessary adjustments it'll be true forever because we in our confidence in the 21st century believe maybe with improved i don't know medicines or diet or genetic i don't know why but we feel that we've changed human nature in a therapeutic sense i don't think we have and then as far as agriculture i think i could make the argument that my great great grandmother and grandfather the implements that they had on my farm some of which are still there had not changed since thucydides time that is they homesteaded in 1871. they had horses they had a wagon the wagon doesn't look too differently than what hesiod talks about or what you see in greek based painting it was horse driven they didn't have organo chloride or organophosphate they used nicotine believe it or not and sulfur sulfur was known in the greeks when you look at theophrastus and other authors on agricultural science are very sophisticated and they talk about how to exterminate birds and using peppers and stringent foods that can burn as kind of primitive pesticides so i found that agriculture changed radically around 1910 1920 but until then i don't think it was much change at all there was some mechanization earlier but what changed it was technology the industrial revolution chemicals petrochemicals and now computers and genomes and things like that but the essence has not changed you still have to put a seed in the ground or you have a plant in the ground and you're it's not like mike bloomberg said you just drop it in and it comes anybody can do it it's it's always going to be an art and i know very sophisticated farmers i talked to one yesterday that for all of their computer knowledge they don't know why one particular field or one particular vineyard or orchard will not produce as well as another there's too many variables about soil many climates agricultural technique but it's an art it remains an art human nature and cultivating human nature is like that too that there are too many variables it's too complicated so we can only approach it as an art and not as a science that we can really master well we're in a thucydides in time so i think when we look at the panic of the covet virus it comes right out of the pages of thucydides that we've had just as much he talked about all of the false knowledge about whether you can get it twice and whether you died didn't die and what were the symptoms it was very scientific but we don't know very much more about this cova than they did about the plague in the sense that we were told not to wear mast wear masks sometimes always wear a mask you have antibodies you have immunity you have antibodies you might have immunity if you get a vaccine it'll be impossible in a year it might be within a year it might need two shots it might not give you a minute you might have t cell immunity if your blood type is o negative you might not get it versus a positive all of this is still up in the air it's the only difference is that we speculate with far more precision in detail because we have more knowledge at our fingers but these things are still beyond our exact knowledge right now they are and so human nature fills that void and we have people if we if we were going into a supermarket anywhere in the united states on april 1st you would not find hand sanitizers you would not find toilet paper and you would not find clorox wipes because everybody felt they had to get them first and because they had to protect their families and they just hoarded and that's that's right out of the pages of thucydides if you look at the lockdown and the paranoia i have people with phds that i know that work at the hoover institution i won't mention names that have not gone outside their homes not once and i know other people who who they they're right out of the pages the fucidities they feel that because they go out and work and they expose themselves and they take care of people that they know and their family have been ill they may get it but they do it anyway and thucydides kind of cynically says well maybe they wanted to show they were virtue and they died but i don't see much i don't think i don't see things changing much at all as far as names change the conditions change but human nature doesn't change what about this element of how facilities talks about the plague where he says everyone lives as though there's there's not going to be a long time ahead of them so they're kind of living for today and doing things in public that they would normally only do in private uh is that true now too well i think so because i mean the mayor of new york said right on the eight go out and live it up before we have a lockdown you know and people did that and they spread the plague but uh i i think that's true when you look at i it was a disconnect for me to be told you have to social distance mass sanitizers don't go out to the store unless you need and then all of a sudden on may 25th after the tragic death of george floyd then we had millions pour into the street and they were doing all the things that you're not supposed to do they were next to each other they were spitting they were singing their that type of vocal activity is very contagious and they felt you know what i want to do this for a variety of good and bad reasons and i don't really care what happens to me and of course a lot of them were young and got infected but not symptomatic and they i think that helped although the media doesn't detail it that helped spread this second wave which is a lesser way but nonetheless the idea was i'm cooped up i'm going to do what i want and i don't really care about getting sick so another way in which we're in a thucydidean moment is um you know this is very uh you know much in the news now for helping us think about china the strategic situation with china the u.s china relationship thanks to graham allison's book and a bunch of other people have taken that up and debated it um i'm just curious what you make of of that book uh does allison basically get it right about how facilities uh you know what he has to teach us about the us china relationship or is there something that he misses well i mean thucydides says that he's trying to explain why the peace broke down and why sparta preempted in the spring of 431 and he says at various places but one place in particular it was the fear of uh athenian power in other words the implicit message that he makes there and also elsewhere is that athens is a more dynamic nation state a city-state and it's going to be more powerful in the future and sparta is going to be less powerful and therefore sparta thought that if they did not preempt and intercede on behalf of various allies perhaps on the goading of the corinth or in anticipation of fiebin help or over uh areas up at patadaya that they would lose influence and the people would go over to the athenian side and people have suggested that that thucydides trap is applicable to us and china that china is sort of on the ascendance and that there's no stopping it and that maybe the united states would like to check it and therefore i don't know if they're going to graham allison said we're going to preempt but that is the nature of this rivalry i have very strong doubts about it because if you read the the first book of thucydides they had been at a they had been at war for about 16 years in the first peloponnesian war and they had been rivals and had a falling out at a time when athens was much weaker so was sparta after the uh coalition to stop a resurgence of persian entrance in the united states and into the united uh city-states of greece they had a falling out and why did they have a falling out and thucydides begins to list existential differences between the two and there are many athens is a cosmopolitan seaport after uh sparta is a sort of parochial somewhat rural although it's agrarianism is very strange but it's 17 miles from giphy and it's port so it's a landlocked traditional bound uh hoplite power athens is a naval power it's a radical democracy sparta is an oligarchy athens has channeled slaves part has a very different system of heritage and when you start categorizing those differences they they appear in pericles funeration as well that funeration is really not just how exceptional athens is and enlightened and liberal it's how unspartan athens is because the comparisons and the illusions are explicit rather than implied and so what i'm getting at is they had enough reasons to go to war at any stage of their development than they did at this moment in 431 because of fear of phobos of athenian power and the value i have in some of what's been written about china is that when sparta goes to war and preempts in 431 they really don't have a plan that is how to neutralize athenian power this is the the presumption is we go into athenian territory and we ravage the farms and they'll come out and we'll defeat them in a hoplite battle and then by convention they'll quit which is just ignorant of their economic power the resources in the empire and a fleet of 300 crimes so that that's valuable to see that countries go to war nations go to war as he says in relation to the athenian empire that you know we keep it for out of fear and pride and perceived self-interest overloads but i think that's very valuable lesson about the the beginning of the war why it took off they really did not think very clearly how one side was going to defeat the other in a way that would ensure victory so i find that part of the text really um i don't know it's confusing in a good way i think because um the spartan strategy in the first year of the war is preceded by this brilliant king arkadamus um who's a you know guest friend of uh pericles and seem to really understand actually the sources of athenian power at least based on his speech in book one you know he says for instance sparta is eventually going to have to raise money and get a navy in order to win this war and he's right about that he has a very long you know long view of how the war's gonna play out but he is also it seems that the uh main thinker behind the spartan strategy early in the war he certainly is leading the spartan forces when they invade attica um how do we understand the difference between his speech where he seems to have a clear sense of how the war is going to be fought and his actions where he seems to have less of an understanding of what athens is all about i think he's a man that knows his limitations in other words he has a vision that a commercial economy with money and sea power gives athenians enormous advantages and yet as a dutiful spartan he knows that his forte is going to be a crack hoplite army and he's going to go in there and he's going to accomplish the mission he doesn't believe necessarily in this changed environment that the mission is going to be uh is going to result in strategic victory i say given their navy but i don't think he has at this point the strategic imagination to come up with a strategy of victory that other spartans do we have these strange spartans that are on the periphery they're either bastards or nothing nothing or they're disreputable and there's two or three of them the brassidas is one and he understands how to hit athens in strategic areas and not necessarily with traditional hoplite armies and then we have this brilliant kind of diabolical gallipas that goes in and saves syracuse and then we have lysonder that understands that the person is going to win the site that's going to win the peloponnesian war is the one that matches the other person's forte so athens is either going to get an army and defeat sparta humiliate it and destroy its alliance or sparta is going to get a navy and then cut it off from its grain and its tribute paying allies and sparta uh kind of ironically figures that out either figures it out first or figures it out best with persian money one thing that is important that you can see how athens could have beat sparta because we know how that happened under the great liberator of pamenondis and the winner of 370. he essentially said to himself i'm tired of the spartans coming up and ravaging every spring and the athenians had the right idea but they didn't pursue it right idea being they had the battle of mantanea had they won and they had greater numbers they could have humiliated spartan prowess had they had the right idea by going down to factoria and pylos and freeing the helots the source of their agricultural labor but they didn't really pursue it very often they had an armistice and they were worried about their own captives so they they stopped that and then more importantly they had an idea of breaking off allies in the peloponnese or at least finding allies like the archives but they didn't pursue that so what a pam anonymous did was he got a huge army not of some twenty thousand but seventy thousand he destroyed the notion of spartan invincibility at lucra and then he went down in a series of skirmishes he went right up to the walls that i shouldn't say the walls the hills of sparta humiliated the army they didn't come out and fight then he fortified it fortified uh megalopolis the new city in mantanea and broke away their allies and then he went over the at the same time or early went over the hill and created this new uh hello kingdom of mantanea at um excuse me uh messina at its capital this beautiful city at messini so he did all the things the athenians had hinted at but didn't have the wherewithal to do and the result was sparta was pretty much ended as a major power at last so if you're going to defeat sparta you've got to free their hell out you've got to break up their allies fortify them and change their political ideology and then you have to humiliate the spartan army um and get right to the the city of sparta itself yeah so i have one last question for you then we have we have um some questions from from students so um uh plutarch is one of my great loves um you know we don't have his life of menandez but we do have this life of palopidus yes and he you know he holds um these deepen heroes out as best we can tell in the case of epimondis as examples of how uh the right kind of liberal education can inform uh kind of you know statesman's you know view of the world like make a good statement um and this you know this theme of like liberal education and how it influences um you know the kind of development of um you know human beings is one of your great themes so the role of classics in this um i thought maybe we could just end on that i mean why is it the case that the you know classics play a smaller role than they used to in the education of you know talented americans um you know what would be better if they played a more prominent role yeah it's too bad because um i mean plutarch was a school master carania so he was not only a the ocean chauvinist but he was a big advocate i think he says in his life of democracies how hard it is to get to the athenian library but yeah but he was a big advocate of of both traditional history and reverence for the past and education and they're connected so a country like the united states that doesn't know its past then it it exhibits symptoms that we're seeing today two years ago during the charlotte riots they tore down the statue of j.c lee the world war ii general who was a logistician in in paris thinking that was robert e lee's statue sort of like sin of the poet and the shakespeare's julius caesar they tore down the they being whoever antifa they tore down frederick douglass's statue or the great champion of reconstruction ulysses s grant so that ex that reflects a reality that people are going k through 12 and they're not learning history they may take a course called history but it's basically melodrama or psychodrama where you go back to the past you get a thin narrative and then you apply the present standard of ethic ethics or morality and your duty is then to condem certain people as bad and of course one bad act or one bad element cancels the entire personnel george washington because he has slaves is as culpable as a murderer had slaves there's no redeeming characteristic in that in that view of history and then it also lumps people together so you say the entire wagon train going to uh portland oregon in 1850 were all interloping colonial imperialists against noble noble indigenous peoples you don't say that there were very brave people some people who had a ruptured appendix some people had kidney stones some people who were sick with tuberculosis and yet by sheer powers of endurance or imagination or benevolence they did great things but that doesn't matter once you render history this way as just cosmic forces or just people rather than individual persons that's really a bad thing to do to history then finally it's very hypocritical for the most affluent and wealthy generation in the world to here in the year 2021 to say christopher columbus goes down or father sarah nobody knows what it was like for father sarah to walk 800 miles when he was very very ill and try to set in an area that was very wild to set up a series of things that he thought at the time were benevolent and would save souls and bring education and agriculture and none of us could do that none of us could do what columbus did so what what is very aggravating is people who are so reliant on technology and leisure and affluence they sort of just sit around and say this person was not very good this person i don't like what he said i don't like what that person wrote but they have no idea what it would be like to wake up in the morning and not have 20 20 vision and not have glasses for the rest of your life or to get a minor kidney stone and be dead or to have a sore throat and die of diphtheria and yet those people dealt with those physical challenges every day and yet we don't think we don't give them any concessions that they those that that savagery and brutality may have factored into their own ideology and it did and so they didn't have a lot of margin of error to be as liberal as we would like and people is very easy as aristotle said to be moral in your sleep it's very easy to have the world at your fingertips with an iphone and all the information the history of civilization and retrievable in a minute or two or less and then say i wish this person had done this and he doesn't fit my standards that person would come out of the grave and say you know what i'd like to see you on the santa maria on the 58th day out from barcelona and see how you would do and i don't think and if you think that columbus was evil then you could say and you like the aztecs you could say i'd like to see you as an aztec priest at that point in 1521 see how it was but nobody ever puts themselves into the historical framework of somebody else so that disdain for the past or that rejection of the past it explains why we're such a rootless culture that we have no sense of honor or shame we don't owe anything to people who are dead when i see antifa go after these monuments i always say what are they going to replace it with why don't they set up another get rid of the woodville wilson school fine i'm not a big fan of wilson but give me another name find me another name who's perfect not just merely good because that's the standard or if you if you deface the world war ii monument i'd like to tell them what would you do on sugarloaf hill on may 19 1945 in okinawa how well would you perform against an army that had killed 15 million people in china another 6 million in asia what would you do to stop them the students in the sydney seminar that i'm teaching uh noticed today these wonderful details that this gives us and the way they have of just you know putting us immediately into the world that he's describing you know so we can really stand where the characters he's writing about stood and see the world you know the problem challenges they faced all of that um all right well we have a few uh student questions now that i have to turn to so um we're gonna hear from ben schwabe of michigan state university james beckwith of st john's college uh in annapolis and natasha de virgilio of hillsdale college maybe we can start with uh ben ben schwabe from michigan state hi uh dr hansen thank you for coming to speak with us um i was struck in your article why is everyone suddenly quoting thucydides that you lauded the trump administration for their adherence to the city's insights um but his work is also perennially misunderstood and simplified for instance we hear a lot about athenian the athenian argument that fear honor and interest are the crucial motivators of action but we hear much less about how justice and piety affect deliberation as in the case of nikkius given this widespread failure of interpretation should we not also be wary of invocations of the cities well i mean every if you read corn forged thucydides or you read dover's comments i'm through city everybody has a different thucydides so i wish when i was in graduate school everybody said thucydides was the scientific reporter and he was to be contrasted with herodotus who spun tails and then by the time i be became a professor it was thucydides said in book 121 that he was a scientific reporter but he did that as disinformation and we know all of the events of the peloponnesian war and he picked and choose some events that wouldn't have been very important to other people and he magnified them because they reflected a preconceived view of the world and versus herodotus who just threw it all out there and reported what people said and therefore it was much more honest so one get what i'm getting at is that everybody has a there's no consensus really on what uh thucydides is except we have to ask ourselves why did he take particular passages in the history that we know from theodorus and plutarch may not have been as important or as he says they are or in a dis disinterested fashion might not have warranted so uh so much emphasis and what am i talking about i'm talking about the uh incident in midalina midalini in the middle indian debate and the murder or the execution i should say of the uh insurrectionaries on lesbos or why did he give us such a graphic description of a pretty minor incident at corsair the stasis of course ira i don't think the million debate really warrants much the fate of milos is a pretty small island they did that to a lot of people and yet that become that looms large and then why that very graphic description of the athenians at the isopus river fighting each other to have a muddy drink of water and i think the answer is and then of course the plague he he's fascinated about human nature and why pretension civilization assumptions of moral superiority progress even they can be stripped away very very easily either by a natural event like a plague or through a uh sort of a jacobin revolution as we saw at corfu corsaira or the volatile athenian democracy just trying to outbid each other and cheer bragadicho so they ordered the middle ends to be executed 24 hours later not executed etc etc so i think the one commonality that we can glean from all this is that i think the word realist is accurate and i feel that he has a very suspect view of human nature not he's not critical of it he just assumes that without the bridles of tradition family community he's not religious himself but he believes there's a role as a deist i suppose we could call it use that anachronistic term he believes there's a role for religion but all of these are efforts not to allow people to reveal their inner their inner self their in their innate humanness now it doesn't mean that it's not necessarily bad all the time he just says that under stress civilization's thin veneer will be peeled away in what happens at midlaney or milos or in sicily or during the plagues not going to be very pretty and i think that's about as much as we can say about his world view and he also has one one final qualifier he has this idea of these dichotomies he makes logon aragon logos ergo what people say and what they do are two different things the prophasis the alleged reason and the idea the real reason and so he believes that human nature being what it is people say all sorts of things and profess all sorts of nice things but unfortunately you have to judge them what by what they actually do and what the actual cause or the motivator is not what the pretense is what they s what they say they're motivated by and so that is a you could say that was a cynical view of human nature as well all right thank you ben james beckwith of st john's college in annapolis uh thank you so much for your time today um i want to ask in your article on thucydides you draw a reference to periclean figures who are able to transcend the party politics between elites and common crowds without resorting to the demagoguery of cleon or the fecklessness of niches alcibiades seems to be the most direct continuation of the periclean tradition in athenian politics balancing both oratory flourish with a long training in philosophy and statesmanship yet you name his yet you name him as a figure who should not be followed i'm curious what about alcibiades given his demonstrated effectiveness throughout the war precludes him from consideration as a figure able to embody the dynamism and daring of the democratic deimos yeah well of course we have a portrait of alisa bodies we probably know more about him than any athenian of his generation because we not only have the the portrait in thucydides but we have the portrait in plato symposium we have some in aristophanes and uh we have plutarch and i think the way we're to look at him is that he is uh excessive that he is doesn't believe in thomas saw and the mean that but he has enormously great gifts and if you're going to incorporate him within the strategic framework and you make that decision what's really a fatal i think in the city's view is if you entrust him to be one of the three architects of the sicilian expedition he would probably give the best advice but don't we call him right in the middle of this endeavor or if you're going to bring him back from exile and he's very good in the first three naval engagements and you're having some ascendance then don't recall him on a minor technicality and so i think aristophanes compared him like we we raised a lion and you don't you don't raise a lion and turn him loose and then be upset that he causes trouble and so there is a little bit of trumpian in him that you know i find some of the presidents tweeting a little bit too much but you don't have a guy like president then say you know what don't tweet it's inseparable from who he is and i think that's the uh i think the objective analysis or summation of alcibiades is probably the most talented man of his generation and he's also the least controllable and the least control of his own passions and appetites that's the way contemporaries saw him that means that he was a tragic figure because you know there's nothing more tragic at that scene in xenophon's history at igos part of me when he he he comes out of exile and he says to the commanders of the athenian fleet you'll just move your boats and your camp you're very exposed they're gonna you're gonna this is silly and they say you know we don't listen to you anymore and then the entire fleet is destroyed so it's very hard to find out where he gives uh advice that's flawed the mantinean uh gambit of 418 that was pretty smart idea the problem was the athenians didn't really support it but it was a way to destroy the army without having your footprints handprints all over breaking the peace so he's a very gifted person but due to his character flaws he's not able in a way that pericles was or maybe even the mysticals was to win people over to his side because of his personal flamboyance and excess so there is something trump trumping about him trump has enormous animal cunning and abilities but he's not able for a variety of reasons that are tied up with his own success it's kind of like a tragic i think i wrote an article about the tragic hero in sophocles and john ford's westerns other westerns as well and trump is that you bring in somebody like that that has the skills to deal with the cattle barons or the the bandits but in the process of dealing with that existential threat that the community can't deal with you see elements of his character or modalities or that are not uh commiserate with what a civilization should do they're not compatible and so when the existential threat is gone you want to get rid of him so every western whether it's chain or the wild bunch or a magnificent they got to get out they've done the job they got to get out and so i think alcibiades is sort of that way he can't live in the society that he helped save thanks james um up next we have natasha de virgilio of hillsdale college natasha hi professor hanson um in your scholarship you bring together a wide range of disciplines with the focus on politics and classics and history um i think your answer to this question has been coming through today but i'd like to ask directly why is it that you remain interested in studying these subjects and can you speak specifically to how your education and scholarship continue to inform your understanding of contemporary political questions yeah well i think one thing is that too often people combine ignorance with arrogance and ig arrogance is a re the result of ignorance and that is the more you read from the past the more uh i think it's a humbling experience that you feel there's nothing new under the sun so when you see what we're going through now you might want to read procopius on the plague or you might want to be thucydides on the plague and they can be or you could read picasso on the play if you look at what antifa is doing or blm is doing you know mutatus mutandus you could say well there's a lot of things that robespierre and the jacobins did and counter revolutionaries revolutionaries the thermadors etcetera all the way to napoleon and you can understand the cycles the iterations of a cultural revolution or look at mao's red guards everybody's going to find examples that may be that may substantiate preconceived ideas but once they use those examples they're open to refutation so if you do that then people are going to criticize you so what i'm getting at is it gives a humble it gives also a reassuring humbleness to people that i'm not here alone i other people have dealt with this same situation i used to have a a very brilliant young woman who was just exasperated that she felt at the very we were working class university i taught at that she didn't get the laurels that were commiserate with her ability and i'd always say go read antigone and see how that feels and when some other person was in a situation i might i had another guy who was a athlete and all he did was say that i should have been in vp and mvp and i said you sound like old ajax whining about why you didn't get the armor of achilles and i said that's your role you're the you're the bulwark of the line you're the best linebacker but you're not flashy so you're not gonna you're not gonna be excited but you have to find a heroism out of that dilemma so the past will allow you to do that it gives you a reverence for for people who are dead we're all going to die and i think it also gives you a sense of measurement so you don't when you see some tragic figure who made mistakes and maybe endanger their legacy you don't cancel them out you try to you it doesn't mean you lessen your criticism of them but you try to put them in a context during these uh demonstrations everybody's looking again at the civil war and they've rejected the narrative that grew up over the last 50 years that ken burns actually i don't know if he would do it again but he that narrative was thematic in his civil war iconic documentary and it was the civil war was a tragedy because six or seven percent of the nation's household in the in the border states and in the south owned slaves and there was really no middle class because of slavery in the south and there were a lot of very poor white people who hated the plantation class and yet that war could not have gone on unless those people took up arms against the plantation class which was not their own and they took up arms for what they said was the sanctity of their soil whatever misplaced idea in 2021 it seems that was the tragedy that 700 000 people died because about a half million southerners fought for an institution that wasn't in their own interests but which they felt was not the central issue it was their pride or their traditions or being southern and that was a terrible tragedy and it marred the country but now we've gotten rid of that entire theme and we've said if you're james longstreet and you fought for the south you're evil tear down your statue if your great-great-grandfather fought at gettysburg on the wrong side then your family is culpable and i just don't think history works that way in this black and white um cookie-cutter way because you can see that in these revolutionary times that we're living we don't have substitutions we don't have when i was in the 60s when i was on a campus and they went and destroyed something they always said we don't like the name of adelaide adelaide stevenson college we want malcolm x college or they would say we got to do this we want this but i don't see that even i just see that let's tear everything down but who are the people that they want to resurrect in their place and partly the reason is that once you're in a revolutionary fervor and you make these rules that one mistake cancels you out forever there's no statute of limitations on sin then it's very hard to find anybody left that would qualify under those stringent prerequisites so history i think tells us all that you know it i said an interview not long ago somebody was talking about a statue he said so sad they were so artistically formed why don't they cut off the head i said they should learn from the romans damnatio memorial when you had an emperor who was unpopular and you got rid of him you kind of decapitated him and you kind of didn't really have to do the whole nine yards because the body was elegantly crafted and you put a new head on i think maybe they could do that it would save everybody a lot of grief but they don't have any heads to replace them with that's the problem all right we have uh two at least two more student questions um we have nico donahue of american university and cameron vega of arizona state university uh we'll start with nico yes thank you so much for uh giving us the opportunity to ask these questions uh so you raised the possibility of the fused eating boosted siddidian excuse me lesson of war involving the and i quote value of mavericks who do not adhere to athenian populist or spartan oligarchic stereotypes end quote and it prompted me to question the relationship among war and a cohesive civil society so i'm wondering if you could speak on this relationship uh if this is one of the many lessons to take away from thucydides history is there a tension between the stability and cohesion of a civil society and the necessity of mavericks for success and war there is but they square that circle pretty well and by that i mean i'll give you one example of what i'm talking about so before the war there was this maverick named curtis lemay and he went to ohio state he dropped out but he was probably the most brilliant aviator we had he flew all the way down to buenos aires and back in the b-17 in 1937. he got bell's palsy during the flight if you can imagine a mini stroke he put a cigar in his mouth he had a cigar there the rest of his life he flew 25 missions as a two-star general over europe and then when the b-29 program came in to fruition in 1944 it was a bigger investment than the manhattan atomic bomb and it was going nowhere the planes were not reliable they couldn't get up to 30 000 feet as designed it was over designed it had been rushed in it was going to be a two billion dollar flop so what did they do they fired general hansel and they brought this crazy lamean the guy who you know actually got in the lead plane to bomb uh the oil factories in romania as a b-17 when they told him not and what did he do he took this beautiful plane he took it down to 6 000 feet he took a lot of the armament off the plane he loaded it up with a new thing called napalm he figured out that the jet stream that blew the bombs off course would be an ally not a detriment they would fan the flames and the rest is history he burned 75 percent of the urban core of japan out killed over 400 000 people civilians among them primarily civilians and he basically ended the war the bombs may have been the final kude you know the coup but we would we didn't need to drop the bombs if you had let curtis so may continue from newly acquired okinawa he would have burned down the whole country with bombers coming from now uh the european theater that was over it might so what do we do we made put him on time magazine lemay the hero the may sage b29 program lemay destroy and then the war is over and we say to ourselves oh my god look at this look what we did we burned people and then we have this thing called strategic air command that he's taken over and he's dr strangelove is a character of curtis lemay two of the characters are composite he's he's a madman during the cuban we don't want him he ran for vice president with george wallace 1968 he's a nut get rid of him and that's what we do same thing with george patton he's he's crazy we don't want anything to do with him he said this he said that he slapped a soldier put george patton in the right place at the right time with third army in july 28th and there's no other person that can get 500 miles into german territory and end the war in 1944. you could have done it had they supported him and then after that if he's in trouble with the bulge do not count on money do not count on eisenhower do not count on hodges there's only one man that can turn three divisions on a 90 degree angle in 24 hours and go to best on and save it and yet he did that and now what is he considered a crank a nut a romantic he slept with his step knees he mouthed off so we have these people that come out of the woodwork in times of peril and we have they're gunslingers that come in as i said to save the little community from the cattle barns that bully everybody kind of like shane and that movie if you've ever seen it but you don't really want them around because the modalities that they're you forced to use are anti-civilizational they're not conducive to calm and peace and everybody when he died omar bradley who was a mediocre general said it's kind of good that georgie died when he did because there was no place for him and that seemed very cruel but there was a certain truth to it so we have people who do things in time of war that save us but they remind us that we really shouldn't have done it when we enjoy the the luxuries of peace and it's hard for us to admit that but war is something that's not civilization and when we get very nice men that are really wonderful people like courtney hodges or you know omar bradley wonderful man or uh and you or ira eaker a wonderful man and you put them in charge of hundreds of thousands they will get a lot of people killed because they're nice men when you put somebody who may not be i'm not saying you have to be a bad guy to be a good general but i'm saying sometimes bad guys are good generals and sometimes nice people are bad general and if you if you make the conduct of war predicated on citizenship values which you should in the abstract but on the individual citizen you said that guy's a drunk he smokes too much he's an adulterer he lied that time you're never going to have that type of talent come forward it takes a long time i mean i think i could make an argument if i had time to say william tecumseh sherman was bipolar and he was a complete failure before the war and i think ulysses s grant did drink too much probably drunk it shiloh without those two men lincoln wouldn't have won the war at least not by 1865 but they were not the type of people that we would want to have a conversation with so we have two more questions uh but but only about five minutes so i think i'll let uh both of these students ask their questions and then you can respond to both of them that's okay professor hanson so we'll start with cameron vega from arizona state university and then we'll go right to weston boardman from hillsdale go ahead cameron hello dr hanson thank you for your time uh my question is relating to thucydides do innovative societies that take no rest and give them to others naturally drift towards impiety and hubris and does the answer this question offer any insights into human nature and athenian-like regimes can you repeat that just to speak a little louder just the first part yes uh do innovative societies that take no rest and give them to others naturally drift towards impiety and hubris weston do you want to go ahead yes can i can you hear me dr hansen yes great um i wanted to ask that given the present challenges of domestic unrest and the commercial slavery we have to china right now what should aspiring statesmen be considering and studying right now in preparation for the republic that we hopefully will still have in 20 to 30 years that way you know we can lead it better than our forefathers did most of unfortunately most of uh classical history polybius and uh plutarch to some degree but especially that the roman neolis if i could use that term swatonius petronius tacitus they all talk about decline as if a civilization is like a human body it ages it has stages of adolescence adulthood aging personality death and so so the republic or the the city-state does all nations do that but that being said throughout all of these classical paradigms there's this idea of virtue that cities states nations as they get wealthier and they get more successful there the appetites of the citizens are more easily satisfied and sometimes the criteria by which you adjudicate that are pretty crude people sleep longer they eat more they have more sex the divorce rate's high these are ancient concepts and the diet gets richer but from alkyl's banquet but what i'm getting at is that if a society cannot retain virtue and virtues usually defined in the ancient world is some sense of transcendence maybe if it's not religion that you have a soul now borrowing a little bit from plato if you have a soul that lives beyond you that's transcendence or if you plant an olive tree when you're 90 years old you're never going to see it come to fruition but you do it for your great grandkids so that's important that a person has an idea that he's living for somebody in the future and so he makes investments rather than satisfies his own appetites and then the other thing is that moderation that pretty much everything in the ancient world that's excessive is bad so whatever you want to do whether it's eat don't eat too much don't have too many girlfriends don't drink too much don't brag too much that's i i think one of the things and that sort of answers the prior question about athens and the cities is not necessarily complementary of radical athenian democracy given its demagogic uh propensities of the arc loss but he does give it his due he says after the disaster in sicily that the democracy became very very sophisticated in restoration and he says that's what democracies do they have all of these assets and imagination and they can gear up sort of like the united states producing more gdp than every every country in world war ii by 1945 or having a fleet by january 1945 that had more ships in every navy in the world when we didn't we were not even close in 1941. that being said that same utility and that same uh rambunctiousness and aggressiveness can also be if it's not tamed or controlled or bridled devastating so after argan nucia uh were told by xenophon that pretty much they could they could have had a negotiated victory going back to the status before the war which would have been an athenian victory and what did they do they rejected it on the principle that well the spartans wouldn't be asking for an armistice unless they thought we were going to win so let's keep going and rub their nose in it and by the way let's execute all the generals that gave us the victory and that's a trait of athenian democracy so volatile rambunctious not steady but somebody brilliant like you cities has enough disinterested acumen to see that that's a very dangerous enemy because they have a lot more imagination than the spartans and the spartans just have to do the same old same all and hope that they'll be excessive and that's what happened but of course that took 27 years i don't know if we have time for another question from the audience no i i don't think i think we're out of time but i also think that's a wonderful note to end on that you know when we think about what to study and learn uh focus on virtue uh avoid access and this is the thing to do um thank you so much uh professor you all careful conversation uh thanks everyone who uh is in the audience tonight too thanks thank you

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Published: Wed Aug 12 2020