He Wanted to Teach Western Civilization. So He Quit Harvard.

27:59James Hankins:Well, I don't want to echo the kind of right-wing threat machine. And I agree with you. And it's a very good observation about Hollywood movies. I hadn't thought about it that way. I was thinking in terms of the audience for classical music, which is always declining. And it's something about the humanities that they always claim to be under threat. I wrote an article one time about the history of humanities, claiming that they were about to die out. And it starts at the beginning of the humanities in the 14th century and continues. They're always talking about how they're going to die out. You know, Petrarch, the founder of the studio Humanitatis, the humanities, he says it's all under threat.

28:42James Hankins:And one of the great philologists living in the absolute apogee of knowledge of Latin says, my generation is the last generation that's going to know Latin. It's the 16th century. So, yeah, there's a tendency to exaggerate. And I don't believe that revealed, I think revealed preferences are very important. As far as classical music is concerned, I'm not so worried about that. I am worried about who teaches Western Civ. Now, if you don't have people trained to teach it who are historians and literary people and who have some kind of understanding, the space gets filled up. And I'm less worried about the bad actors who go around saying that the West is contaminated by racism and sexism and colonialism and all that stuff because those people often know very little and they can be refuted by the facts.

29:43James Hankins:I'm more worried about video games, actually. You know, in America, the most important source of information about Western Civ is a video game that's known as Civ. And it is enormous. It's a huge footprint. A huge number of gamers watch this. So last year, I found out about this from a former student of mine, teachers at the University of Chicago named Ada Palmer, who follows this stuff. And she told me that last year there was discussion of historical periodization. And on Civ, it involved over 800 ,000 people who were talking about the periodization of history. But they were talking about it in terms that they derived from this very, I would say, biased presentation of Western history.

30:45James Hankins:So this is a deeply progressive, I don't mean in the political sense, it's a deeply modernizing game that you score points by overcoming the past, right? And you're heading towards the singularity. So at the beginning, you overcome the past by leaving behind feudalism and religious superstition. And it's the old story of the rise of the West that goes back to the 1950s. And gradually, as you approach the modern world, you get accelerationism, right? That the historical periods are happening more and more frequently.

31:25Coleman Hughes:Can I stop you for a second? So when you're playing this game, you are a single protagonist? Are you a single character? Or are you somehow playing the whole civilization?

31:36James Hankins:Well, I haven't played it myself. But you're playing against other characters who are trying to move towards the modern world, right? So the whole presumption is that there's nothing of permanent value in the past. It's just that there's the modern world and there's the obstacles to modernity. And apparently, I had the figure somewhere my student gave me her research, but there are millions of people who are playing this game online. Many more who are taking Western Civ classes. So I'm worried about a certain bias. We had a bias in teaching Western civilization for a long time. I once studied the previous works, Western Civ textbooks, which are very triumphalist, The Triumph of the West, and The West and the Rest.

32:26James Hankins:The West is better than the West. I don't buy any of that stuff myself. But these books were basically inspired by the Enlightenment, right? That they regarded everything before the Enlightenment as possibly valuable. but what they admired in the past most of all was the Enlightenment. And I admire many things in the Enlightenment myself, but what they tend to admire was the most radical parts of the Enlightenment. Now, most people who are Enlightenment philosophers were not atheists, right? It's a small minority. Most of them were people trying to reform Christianity in one way or another. So it's a false Enlightenment.

33:09James Hankins:But also, there's a kind of modernizing, built-in modernizing tendency, not to video games, to Western civ books. I read recently an article by a high executive in MasterCard who was talking about how you do things in industry to get attention. and you always have to couch it in this language of disruptive innovation. So if you want to fix the toilet, you've got to tell people that you're going to open up a new age in toilet technology, which will disrupt all previous technologies. I'm satirizing this, right? But we have this bias in our civilization towards modernization, especially in America.

33:59James Hankins:America, more than any other country I think is devoted to innovation, progress. And one reason I think that we should be studying Western civilization, and that will ultimately help us to civilize ourselves, is to be aware of the things that we shouldn't be leaving behind. The traditions of tolerance, for example, and liberalism in a certain sense. I guess I call myself an urdo-liberal these days, but I still am a liberal. A what liberal? Have you heard this term? Ordo-liberalism? Is that when you're a liberal

34:38Coleman Hughes:but you speak Ordo as well?

34:40James Hankins:No, it's a kind of cult position. It's people who are trying to create a middle ground between post-liberalism and classical liberalism. But they want to, instead of making GDP the ultimate goal of liberal, the liberal right, want to make a good society the ultimate goal and then build free institutions and free economies around an ideal good society. But anyway, maybe we shouldn't pursue that particular rabbit. I think I've unleashed about 50 rabbits so far in this conversation.

35:20Coleman Hughes:I mean, there are many potential questions to ask. Let me start with this one. What is the relationship between the Judeo-Christian tradition of the West? That is to say, the religion of the Old Testament, the religion of the New Testament, its variations from Judaism to Catholicism to Protestantism. What's the relationship between all of that and the secular liberal society that we have today? And I'll give you two models as potential answers that are in people's heads already. One is the outgrowth model, which is to say, secular, humanistic, liberal values of tolerance, separation of church and state, democracy, all of those things are a kind of natural outgrowth of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

36:22Coleman Hughes:tradition, even though they're not, certainly not prescribed in the Bible and in our certain way, in certain ways are antithetical to, um, to, to religious precepts. Uh, at least not all of them are prescribed in the Bible, let's say. Um, they kind of could only have come from a ground that was fertile. It only could have grown out of the fertile soils of Judeo-Christianity, even if they don't perfectly resemble them. They couldn't have grown out of a different belief system or radically different belief system. And then there's the backlash model. The backlash model would say, well, actually, a lot of the things that we prize in America and the secular government and so forth were a backlash to a Judeo-Christian, an oppressive Judeo-Christian world.

37:26Coleman Hughes:It was precisely rejection of that hyper-religiosity that gave us the tolerance and the small L liberalism that we so much value today. So what is your view on the relationship between the Judeo-Christian tradition and modern civilization?

37:47James Hankins:Okay, well, I'm going to frustrate you by saying both can be true. And part of the purpose of my book is to show how things like separation of church and state are very deeply rooted in our civilization. They go really back to the 11th century. There is no other world civilization, as far as I know, that has rejected its religion or tried to reject its religion as thoroughly as the Europeans have. But that's in part because church and state were separate powers and competing powers in the Middle Ages. And eventually, the universal empire of the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy by trying to destroy each other, discredited each other, and they brought about a system of competing states that emerged from the high Middle Ages.

38:47James Hankins:But the premise that religious authority and political authority are completely separate and have completely different origins is something that has only happened in the West because of our peculiar history. So if you think of the things that constitute liberalism in the modern world, free thinking, free attitudes to sex and family, and freedom of trade, free markets. All of those things were rigorously regulated by the Catholic Church through its canon law in the Middle Ages. So when the Protestant countries get rid of the Catholic Church, they also get rid of Catholic canon law and the regulation of thought, the regulation of the economy, the regulation of family law.

39:49James Hankins:They try to struggle against those losses for a couple of centuries, but ultimately liberalism comes from the rejection of Catholic moral authority. And the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages tried to be like the Islamic world and have a Sharia-type law, which is going to regulate not just questions of crime and punishment, but also try to regulate individual persons' lives, right? And that, I think, is what is at the foundation of liberalism, is to rejection of any attempt by a government or a church to regulate the individual life, or at least to have as few regulations of individual life as possible.

40:36James Hankins:So, but these things are part of our tradition. You don't find them in China. You don't find them in Islamic civilization. because they don't have this. The religious authorities never had the position in China that they have in America. Okay, so I'm already off in one of my historian's tangents. But the point I'm trying to make is that many things, both are true. So the rejection of the authority of the churches, which starts with the Catholic Church and ultimately passes to the Protestant churches in the 18th, 19th centuries, and America's system of denominationalism, where no church has any political authority or should have any political authority.

41:22James Hankins:That has been a long time coming. It comes out of a unique structure of church-state relations that set in in the 11th century. However, as you point out, Tom Holland has been writing about this for a long time and speaking about it on his podcast. There's so many things that we regard as unquestionably modern and liberal and pluralistic that actually come out of the Catholic and Christian tradition of antiquity. And I'll give you one example, which is equality. Many people think that equality is a creation of Marxism or possibly a Rousseau, but equality is deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition.

42:10James Hankins:If you look at the Pentateuch, the Pentateuch requires the society of the Jews to equalize incomes every few years, 10 -year intervals and 50-year intervals. You're supposed to go out and take away from the richest people and give to the poorest people. That's a very extraordinary ruling. And the ultimate idea is that everything belongs to God. We only have it in trust for our families and our country and for Israel. And the Christians, of course, have the idea of spiritual equality, which comes out of the religious tradition sometime in the 16th century and 17th centuries and enters into politics.

43:03James Hankins:So the concept we have of egalitarianism today is an importation into political theory from radical Christianity, especially in Socinians in the 17th century. And the idea that equality is a process that must continue, right? It's an ism. Liberalization is something that has a direction to it. And equalization is something that has a direction to it. That is also a Christian, I think, an impulse that comes from the Christian tradition. The ancients who wrote about political equality in the Greco-Roman tradition were not concerned with, they did not consider equality to be an ideal in itself, right?

43:52James Hankins:So when Aristotle talks about equality, what he says is it's dangerous to have too unequal a society. You shouldn't have huge gaps between the rich and the poor because the society is going to fall apart. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, you say that all men are created equal in sight of God. And then that gets transferred over into natural equality or the idea that everyone is naturally equal or is at least legally equal to everyone else. So I think that you cannot simply, our civilization has created a certain DNA in everybody who participates in it, whether they want to recognize it or not.

44:39James Hankins:And the idea that they have in Silicon Valley that some singularity is going to come and the old ways will simply die out and we're going to have a new society built on ideals of the future that we make for ourselves, that's simply, it's impossible. It's not going to happen. Something else will happen that's be based in some way on traditions, like trying to be an individual in fashion, right? that if you try to be an individual in fashion, you always end up imitating someone else. The future does not have models of conduct for us because it hasn't happened yet. Maybe science fiction characters are taken as models, but the most important models for human behavior, both good and bad, are in the past, and we can learn from them, and that's how we become civilized, is learning from examples of human beings who have achieved great things, incredible things, but who also done horrible things as well.

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47:10Coleman Hughes:Tuesdays, it's the premiere of ABC's hottest new crime show. R.J. freaking Decker as I live and breathe. He's a private eye. It's not a standard murder. It's someone bigger. And a public mess.

47:21James Hankins:Trying to get someone back to prison today?

47:23Coleman Hughes:You go to prison one time and suddenly it's all the jokes. RJ Decker series premiere Tuesdays on ABC and stream on Hulu. So another big picture question. I sometimes hear people say that monotheisms, starting with Judaism, but, but others as well, monotheisms brought the concept of morality to a world, a pagan world, that previously didn't have a concept of morality. To what extent is that true? I don't think it's true at all, just to be frank.

48:05James Hankins:I just wrote a very interesting essay on this by Peter Turkin, who talks about what you really need is a source of morality that doesn't necessarily depend on monarchy. He has quite a lot of interesting evidence showing that Chinese civilization, it's often said, for example, that Chinese civilization doesn't have a god, a monotheistic god, and has built a civilization without god. But what Turkin says is that civilization, if you're talking about a standard, a permanent standard of morality, you don't really need a god for that. And the pagans, if you go back to the pre-Socratics and the Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, they did not believe in, well, I have to back up, at least the pre-Socratics did not believe in a single god usually.

49:08James Hankins:And the Epicureans believed in a god, but it didn't affect us at all. Plato believed in a god, but not a god who was interested in our lives, right? That thing we can say about ancient philosophical gods is that they were essentially ontological sources of being and maybe sources of values and epistemological fixed points. but they didn't try, they weren't commanding us to act in particular ways. I'm not sure I'm answering your question. I've got a lot of brain noise going on in my head when you ask very simple questions and I try to make them complicated. No, that's okay. But I hope I'm answering your question.

49:55James Hankins:I really don't think that you need monotheism for moral enforcement. Maybe that's not the question you're asking.

50:04Coleman Hughes:No, it is. It is. Okay, another one. Is it an accident of history that Christianity became so prominent and so popular? In other words, for some people, the spread and virality of Christianity from basically a very small, you want to call it a cult or a small group of Jesus' disciples into, at some point, the most popular religion in the world and now maybe the second most popular. I'm actually not sure where Christianity and Islam exactly rank population-wise. But the virality of the idea is, for some people, proof of the value of the idea, right? Like Christianity, that set of beliefs must have been inherently more appealing to humanity than the other various, you know, Iron Age philosophies and religions that existed, or else it wouldn't have spread so far.

51:06Coleman Hughes:And then there's another school of thought which says, basically, it's an accident of history and Constantine and a few particular choices that were made. You know, we could all be Zoroastrians right now with a few things changed. And you shouldn't read too much into the popularity of Christianity as it relates to the value and the utility and the wisdom of Christian principles. Well, I have to say, on the whole, I prefer Spinoza's standard of a good religion, which is a good religion is one that makes people good.

51:49James Hankins:And that's much difficult, that's an impossible thing to measure historically. You know, the history of Christianity is, I think, in part dependent on what we would take to be accidents if you don't believe in divine providence. I happen to believe in divine providence. But if you look at why Christianity spread in Judea, it was partly because it has spread to a certain extent. And there are estimates now that are very deflationary. There's a British historian who thinks that there were only 9 ,000 Christians in the 90s AD, which is a very small number. Can't be right, actually. But the reason why Christians were able to gain popularity over Judaism, for example, and there were more Jews than Christians well into the second century AD, is because the Jews' capital, Jerusalem, was destroyed by the Romans.

52:53James Hankins:And the Jews were told, you cannot go back there. They would not allow any Jews. So from the point of view of many Jewish people, this disaster had happened with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. And then the Romans continued to persecute the Jews for another 50 years. It was very dangerous to be a Jew, and it wasn't so dangerous to be a Christian. Although Christianity was an illegal sect, right? They worshipped a criminal executed by the Roman state. So they were under suspicion. and they could not be easily punished just because underground movements in that period, they didn't have the capacity to do that, the Romans, I mean.

53:37James Hankins:So the Romans had, the Christians had a favorable soil in Judea, but most Christian missions were spreading in the Greek world in the early periods, first few centuries. And part of that was owing to people. A lot of the Christian audience came from persons of mixed ancestry, like Timothy, who had a pagan mother and a Christian father. Maybe it's the other way around. I've forgotten. But there are people who couldn't be Jewish because of who they were, but were nevertheless married to Jews or descended from Jews or, you know, one parent was Jewish, the other parent wasn't. So Paul used to go into these synagogues around the Hellenistic Jewish world and appealed to all sorts of people who literally could not be Jews because of the law, the Judaic law.

54:38James Hankins:I think, though, that the evidence seems to be that the great spread of Christianity occurred quite late in the late third century. And one reason for this was, I mean, the human reason for this is that the state broke down in the crisis of the third century. They were having a new emperor every couple of years. The currency was worthless. All of the endowments that had been given to pagan temples, pagan institutions, they all were worthless. So the pagan religion didn't have religious cults, did not have the economic wherewithal to defend themselves. And there were all sorts of plagues as well.

55:22James Hankins:There's a third century plague. And the Christians came to the fore because they were a group that strongly believed in helping people on the margins. They helped the poor, the weak, the elderly, the sick, and people were surprised, deeply surprised, that when someone lay sick of plague, the Christians would go and try to take care of that person despite the dangers of infection. So the great Christian churches became highly populous in the late third century because there was a period when the Romans decided not to persecute them, and they were providing all these social services for people. They were, society was under extreme stress of various kinds from disease and poverty and so on.

56:21James Hankins:And the Christians offered help so that when in the early 4th century, the pagan emperors got around to trying to destroy Christianity, they couldn't do it. It's too big. I think that the sociologists say once a minority gets above 5%, you cannot destroy it anymore. It has to be either, you have to find some way to accommodate it. So the Christians got to the point, and they were, of course, publicly punishing these people. Every Christian was reduced in status. They were sent to the mines and to row ships, and they were killed in the arena. They had wild beast fights that they set the beasts on the Christians in the early 4th century.

57:17And some people enjoyed that.

57:20James Hankins:As today, they like cruelty, but other people were horrified by it. And eventually, by the time that Constantine converted, sometime in the first century, the first decade of the fourth century, the Christians were a force to be reckoned with. So the human explanation of why Constantine succeeds is because he aligns, he converts to Christianity and aligns himself with the Christian cult, which is rather small in the Western Latin speaking part of the Roman Empire where he came from. But the Christians were very, very big in the cities of Eastern Roman Empire, the Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire.

58:03James Hankins:And so he created a kind of fifth column of Christians. His enemies in the Roman state were all in the Greek part. So again, there are these accidents of history. What you're asking about is the accidents of history that allows Christianity to grow. But it's also the virtues of the Christians. I think that you have to offer something attractive. You know, the Zoroastrians whom you mentioned, they didn't want to have a lot of people in their religion. It was an exclusive religion for the elites of Persia. And they were very tolerant of other religions in the Persian Empire, but they did not want any elite persons to participate in those religions.

58:45James Hankins:But they had no problem with Christians and any minority sect, really. But they did not, the Zoroastrian religion was an elite religion, something like Confucianism. It's an elite religion. Christianity is open to everybody. It's a universal religion. And it also offers all sorts of benefits to people. What really people observed at the time, in the fourth century, when Christianity makes its great advance, is that it appeared to be making people better. This is what Augustine says, an Athanasius, the great Greek bishop says in the fourth century. He says, he's writing to the philosophers, right?

59:30James Hankins:He says to the philosophers, for centuries, you philosophers have told us that you make people better through the study of philosophy. You have this way of life. Philosophy is a way of life which makes people better. Yes, you're right. It has made some very small number of people better. It hasn't changed society as a whole. The world that we live in is still evil, has not changed that world. But now Christianity is going to make a huge difference, right? So Augustine says, look around you. The world, Christianity is sweeping through the empire. They're not relying on these little local gods anymore.

1:00:09James Hankins:It's a universal god, a monotheistic god, and Jesus, who is his manifestation through the Logos on earth. So Augustine, at this period, they're very, very high on Christianity. They think that Christianity is really going to change the world. And then, of course, Christianity does change the world, but it's not a linear thing by any means. And Christians, like every other human thing, become corrupted and so forth. But I think that's why Christianity spreads. It's a combination of push and pull, you might say, that Christians offer something that other religions don't offer, the universality and also the personal God, right?

1:00:55James Hankins:Because the gods of Greek philosophy are not personal gods. There's no one to forgive you. So Aristotle wants you to become better by a process of refining the character as an adolescent, making the right decisions, building a habit of virtue or virtuous disposition over time. But suppose you get to the age of 30, right? And you're still vicious, right? You still have bad habits. You can't overcome. You have addictions. You have habits of lying and stealing and doing bad things. And you're past the age when you conform your character. What Christianity offers is conversion, right? And other religions too.

1:01:48James Hankins:But Christianity in particular says you can convert. You can change your life dramatically. You can get God's help in doing this. God will forgive you. God will give you light. God will give you the strength and the grace to continue. So that is a very powerful message to non-elite people in particular who are aspirational in a spiritual sense. They are aspirational to have better lives, morally better lives. Because you do get to this point in your life, right, when you start to say, am I a good person? You know, are we the baddies, right? Am I a good person? and can I accept my own life the way it is?

1:02:33James Hankins:Or should I do something about that? Where can I get help to become a better person? I think that's the big appeal of Christianity, antiquity, and also today, I would say.

1:02:45Coleman Hughes:Okay, now a question about the spread of Islam. Was Islam spread mostly by the sword or mostly by voluntary conversion?

1:02:55James Hankins:Well, Islam was initially spread by the sword. The Arabs were trained by the Romans and the Persians in high-level military skills. They were essentially mercenaries for the Roman and Persian armies. And the Persians and the Romans basically destroyed each other in the early 7th century by this long and exhausting war. And at the end of it, they had no money. They had a lot of dead Romans and dead Persians. And that's the point when the Arab armies, powered by, in some way, by Muhammad's message, burst out of the Arabian Peninsula. And they swept across the whole southern eastern Mediterranean in the space of a century.

1:03:44James Hankins:So they were initially a military religion. One thing that people forget is that there are very small numbers of Arabians, of Muslims. They were a conquest elite. They were, there's a special historical term I'm forgetting for this. They were a tributary empire. Okay, so they conquered the countries whose military they overran. They demanded tribute. They demanded control of those societies, but they didn't have much ability initially to convert large numbers of people. They couldn't say to the population of Egypt, which is 90 % Christian, they can't say you have to convert to Islam. They would do that to soldiers and people that they admired, but it was too big a task.

1:04:36James Hankins:And the Christians had the same problem when they took over Spain during the Reconquista. If you have a large population of people who belong to one religion and you try to, you can't just say you must convert. So the Muslim technique was over the long term to make it unpleasant to be a Christian. Higher taxes, you had to be deferential. You could never hold office. You weren't supposed to hold office. You were defenseless basically in the Muslim world. You were under Muslim law. If you went to law with a Muslim, you were under Muslim law, you could have your own private laws in your communities.

1:05:17So over time, the Muslims, the native populations of places like Egypt and Syria, Palestine, and Spain and North Africa, they became predominantly Muslim.

1:05:31James Hankins:So it's a combination of force in the beginning, but also social institutions that ultimately made it untenable to continue to be a Christian or a Jew. And the same thing happens when the Christians take over the Roman Empire. They say they don't try to wipe out paganism. They don't try to destroy the pagans or forcibly convert them because they can't. They're too numerous. The estimates are very soft, but at least somewhere around half, 40%, half of the Roman Empire is still pagan by the time that Theodosius in the late 4th century makes Christianity the official religion. So they allow those people to practice their religion, but they have to do it in private.

1:06:21James Hankins:They can't publicly try to spread their religion. They can't, in many cases, show the signs of religion outwardly on a building. The same thing happens in China, by the way, today, to unapproved cults in China. They can practice their religion privately, but publicly they can't proselytize. So it's a type of doctrine you find in a state, what I call confessional state, a state that has an official religion. They can be very tolerant of minority groups. They can also be very intolerant. And there are times in both Islam and in Christianity when the dominant religion decides it wants to be intolerant.

1:07:09Such as in the time of Justinian in the 6th century, the Roman emperor says, I can't put up with these Samaritans any longer.

1:07:21James Hankins:The Samaritans all have to convert to Christianity. Just announces that. He sends an army in to enforce it. And of course it doesn't work. People pretend to be converted. They're like the Muslims in Spain. They pretend to be converted, but they don't really believe. That just creates more trouble. It's a very stupid thing to do, actually, from the point of view of craftsmanship. Statesmanship, sorry, statesmanship. And the Spanish monarchs try to do it in Spain, too. Most times when you have a dominant religion which is confessional, they are relatively tolerant. Now, in the case of Islam, Islam is always initially spread by the sword.

1:08:07James Hankins:up until about the 15th and 16th centuries. And then they have a shift in their technique, which actually anticipates the ones in Christian lands, that the traitors of Islam, going around the world of the Indian world and Indonesian world, they begin to spread Islam without an army. when they get to the point of majority rule, they can then call in the army or establish a confessional state in some areas. But initially, it's spread by missionaries. Christianity is usually spread by missionaries first, and then the state comes in second. So, Muslims become more like Christians in the 16th century in their technique of conversion.

1:09:01okay question about China now you mentioned that outside of the West China has the most

1:09:08Coleman Hughes:well-documented written history going back thousands of years do you think that China should teach Chinese civilization or global civilization well I've spent a lot of time in

1:09:22James Hankins:China in recent years, and I emphatically believe in civilizational teaching, that the Chinese have a very great tradition of government. I think that the Chinese tradition of government is superior to the Western tradition of government for most of the imperial period. And it's partly because of the nature of their adversaries and their allies. It's not necessarily a Chinese virtue. No, but I don't believe there is such a thing as global civilization. Civilizations have to have some historical depth and has to have literature and artistic traditions and moral traditions and philosophical traditions, which globalism does not have yet.

1:10:13James Hankins:Globalism has brands. It doesn't have traditions, serious traditions. I'm not really, I don't think, well, I think at least for the present is that, by the present, I mean the next couple hundred years. Historians thinking again. For the present, we have to learn, our civilizations have to learn to have harmony among them. And I think that what I've been doing in China in the last few years is trying to support Confucianism as a civilizational tradition in ways that I can. I mean, tiny, tiny different ways, giving lectures and seminars and things like that. And I have a lot of sympathy for modern political Confucianism, which is not simply a propaganda arm of the Chinese government, which many people accuse it of being.

1:11:14James Hankins:It's actually trying very hard to change China and move it in a more civilized direction. And I think that we simply can't go on this collision path that we're on now. One of the things I'm threatening to turn into a saying is that nation states fight and civilizations cooperate. I think we need a lot more mutual understanding between civilizations so we understand why we're different. And we don't automatically interpret China in Western terms. They have a single head of state, so he must be a tyrant. That's not what anyone believed in. Christian and pagan antiquity in our Western tradition, but many people seem to think that any individual who's not a constitutional monarch has got to be a tyrant.

1:12:06James Hankins:And that's not the case. So I really think that civilizational cooperation can in some way counteract the effect of, and should try to counteract the effect of colliding interests of nation states. and I'm very, very disturbed by the people in both China and the United States who are cruising for a bruising. They want to mix it up. They want to just kill a few hundred million people and see who wins. And that's not what any person should really want. But I think we have to – this is something I'm trying to write about. I'm trying to write a book about virtue-based international relations to get away from the false alternatives of globalization versus nationalism.

1:13:02James Hankins:But that's another long discussion.

1:13:05Coleman Hughes:Okay, final question for now. Is it inevitable that non-whites or people of color or whichever term you prefer will feel left out of a civilization course that focuses on the Judeo-Christian tradition? or is there a manner of teaching that course which allows for all groups of people that live in the United States to feel included?

1:13:42James Hankins:Well, it's a rule of logic that the more things denote, the fewer they connote, right? So, the more universal something is, the less it's going to satisfy individuals. I think that if we go by individual populations, the Hispanic element in the U.S. ought to feel very much included in Western civilization since the Spanish peoples have a long history in North and South America. and they're part of my story. I have a lot of discussion of the role of Spain in the Roman Empire and the medieval period and modern period. Alan, my co-author, has a lot of information about that. So it's easy for people in Spanish-speaking lands with the Spanish culture, Catholic culture, to feel part of Western civilization.

1:14:44Coleman Hughes:Although the wrinkle there is if you're a Spanish-speaking Argentinian and most of your ancestry is from Spain, maybe that's easier than if you live in central Mexico and you largely have an indigenous identity and you view Spanish as kind of the language of the conquerors.

1:15:05James Hankins:Yes. I don't think that Western civilization should be taught in a triumphalist way. We're the best and the rest are all inferior. was they have to, this is the whole idea behind Cold War Western Civ, that everybody has to recapitulate the exact same stages by which the Western peoples arrived at their current level of supremacy over the rest of the world. This is what Civ teaches, by the way, that video game I was talking about, that in order to modernize, you have to do everything the West did. No, No, that's wrong. I think that the way I would defend it is that if you're going to live in the United States, you need to know what the traditions of that country are.

1:15:54James Hankins:Many people who come to the United States want to be part of that tradition. They admire the U.S. They were in countries that they didn't like very much. Either they're dangerous or they felt unincluded in those countries. And they come to the U.S. precisely because the U.S. is inclusive. The U.S. says anybody can be an American. And this is the great difference between China and America is not everyone can be Chinese. It's very hard to become Chinese. I have a friend who's been teaching in China for 25 years. He dresses like a Chinese. He teaches political Confucianism. He dyes his hair the way that Chinese Communist Party leaders dye their hair.

1:16:35James Hankins:But he's never going to be Chinese. And he admits he wrote an article in Wall Street Journal about how he's not Chinese. People can become American, but they have to learn about our government, right? Our government is a republic. It has the Senate, Roman term, House of Representatives, British term. You know, if they want to understand their country, its legal system, its Christian values, and we still have lots of Christian values even among people who are not converted to Christianity or not practicing Christians, they have to learn about Western civilization. It's part of their education. I'm also not saying that people who are not from Judeo-Christian backgrounds or not from a Western background have nothing to contribute because that's also not true.

1:17:27James Hankins:Western civilization has constantly been enriched and informed by other civilizations with which it's come into contact. The contact of the West with the indigenous peoples of South America were disastrous for those people. But it's quite different from the interaction that Western civilizations had with China because they could never really dominate China the way they could and conquer it the way they did others. other civilizations. One thing one can say about the West, and I think it's almost unique to the West, is that the West has always been very interested in learning about other civilizations.

1:18:15And in part because we're traitors and conquerors and colonists, all those bad things.

1:18:21James Hankins:But there is a tremendous interest in other civilizations, going back to the Greeks, So if you wanted to find out about ancient Egypt and you're living in an ancient world, you have to read Greek. If you want to find out about ancient Mesopotamia or ancient India, you read Greek. Because the Greeks wrote 30 different works on the history of Mesopotamia and more on Egypt. They were just tremendously curious. And that has been a feature of Western civilization that the Greeks have passed on. And so I think it's by no means the case that people who come from Asia, for example, to the United States, many of whom, as I say, admire the United States already and want to have a better life in the U.S., it's by no means that they are not going to offer something of great value to us.

1:19:19James Hankins:And they have already for centuries. We have, it's not just chinoiserie, right? It's not just Chinese bric-a-brac. We have learned a lot from the Chinese. And you learn also through rivalries and through competition with the Japanese, which we had in the 70s and 80s. There's a deep competition with the Japanese, which had a huge influence on the way Americans did business in that period. So I'm not saying that we should indoctrinate people into a Western view of things. I'm saying that people who come to this country should understand the country and should want to participate in the country. And they should maybe wait a generation or two before deciding to tear the whole thing down.

1:20:09James Hankins:They should try to understand it first and see what the strengths and weaknesses are. But I think we should be open to immigrants who want to be part of our way of life. And those people should learn about the origins of our way of life.

1:20:27Coleman Hughes:Okay, James Hankins, thank you so much. The book is called The Golden Thread. I highly recommend it. And good luck in your new institution.

1:20:38James Hankins:Thank you very much. I appreciate it talking with you today.