The Rise and Fall of Western Civilisation- Professor James Hankins

19:05James Hankins:That's a beautiful story. It's a nice fairy tale. It's science fiction, but it's not history. And the real history of the world, not just the Western civilization, is not a history of inevitable climbing towards a limitable future, powered by science and progressivism and so forth. It's a story of rise and fall. It's a story of virtue, followed by achievement, followed by corruption. It's a story of collapse and renaissance. It's a story of corruption and reform. That's what real human history is like, and it doesn't fit the progressive model at all. So, and this is something else we're trying to do in this book, is to say, yes, the West has a very long history, has a very checkered history.

19:59James Hankins:It has done some horrible things, especially when we took over the New World. There were some really horrible things that went on and for very bad reasons. There were some idealists behind the conquest of the New World by Spain, but a lot of it was just simple greed. Okay. But that was overcome in a sense. When the conquistadores started to oppress the native peoples of Central and South America, someone stopped them. And that was the Catholic Church and the religious orders. They were not able to go full barbarian on the peoples of the New World. So, there's light and shade. and what we're trying to do is to explain that it is possible to become corrupt and to fall apart and to get fractionalized and to get tyrannized.

20:54James Hankins:That has happened many times to us in the past, but it's also possible to stop it. And we have stopped it, and that's what we should be doing now. We should be having a renaissance. We should be having reforms. We should be fighting tyranny, whether it comes from Silicon Valley or from governments, right? So that's my main argument against your synchronic idea, which I agree would be a great college course, is that that's not what we should be doing at the basic level of teaching Western Civ. James, the danger that comes when we're not teaching our history is that if you don't teach the history of a country, then people won't know who they are.

21:37James Hankins:Yes, exactly. I mean, that's what's happened to young men, I think, around America and the Western world, that they don't know who they are. They're told a story that they really don't like. You know, they're told that they're oppressors, and they don't have anything in their heads to stop the myths and lies they're being told. You know, you need to have something between your ears if you're going to stop the people who are telling you lies. That's how you know you're being told the lies. You have something between the ears. If you have no history and someone comes along and says, U.S. history is a history of racism, what are you going to say?

22:17James Hankins:You're the professor. He's the teacher. He's telling me history of the U.S. and history of racism. What do I know? What do I have between my ears that's going to give me some resistance against that story? I entirely agree with you, friends. I think this is a major problem for cause of civilizational breakdown, that people just don't know the past. They don't know the great achievements of their country. They're fed a lot of lies. They have politicized history departments and history programs and unions. I don't want to attack unions, but let's say public education, which is heavily politicized by education schools.

22:57James Hankins:And they're not given the means to really resist that. I had a friend recently from Cambridge who had a 14-year-old daughter. She loved English already because of her English education. She came to Boston. She wanted to study English literature in high school. There wasn't a single major private school in Boston that taught any English literature before the year 2000. And the reason was they didn't want to infect the minds of the young with the colonialism that's implicit in the thought of Jane Austen or Christianity or some other thing that was considered bad from the Western past. They wanted to teach young adult novels between 2000 and current date that they considered ideologically sound.

23:50James Hankins:So my friend, who's a professor at Harvard, ended up taking his kid out to a Benedictine school an hour away from Cambridge just so he could keep his kid out of this stuff. This is the kind of thing that I think is so poisonous. This is one of the reasons I got involved with the classical education movement, is I saw people who really loved our past and who wanted to teach it. They had learned something as parents. They had learned something as students, they wanted to keep it going. And they saw they couldn't do it in the public schools, at least not all public schools. There are lots of good public schools, but especially in sort of wealthy suburban areas, there are lots of very highly performing, good, sound public schools.

24:38James Hankins:But in many places, there are not. And that's how this classical school movement got started, by people who love our Western past, love our American past, and they want to make sure it's not poisoned by politics.

24:53Francis Foster:You read the news and think you're informed. You're actually just selectively informed. Modern media doesn't just report the news. It quietly decides which stories you never even hear about. Your blind spots aren't accidents. They're someone else's decisions. That's why I use Ground News. Every day they gather thousands of stories from across the political spectrum, compare how different outlets are covering the same story side by side, and contextualize it, including specific differences in how each side is reporting it. That's how you see what whole audiences are not being told. My favorite feature is their blind spot feed.

25:27Francis Foster:Every day, it flags upwards of 20 stories that are being ignored by either the left or the right. Let's look at some examples. Follow along at ground.news slash trigonometry. Take this story. A Pew Research survey found that 56 % of Americans now support banning social media for anyone under 16, with a majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats behind it. Genuine bipartisan agreement is rare enough to be newsworthy on its own. And yet coverage came almost entirely from the right. The left barely touched on it. On the other hand, look at this. An AP poll found that 66 % of Americans now say democracy is central to what it means to be American, down from 80 % five years ago.

26:08Francis Foster:That is a serious story about how the country sees itself, especially on its 250th anniversary. And it got three times more coverage from the left than it did from the right. Ground News puts all of this in one place. Headline comparisons, bias breakdowns, ownership insights, and context, so you can actually understand what's going on, not just react to what you're told. Go to ground.news slash trigonometry or click the link in the description of this episode. Get 40 % off their vantage plan, the same one that we use, and stop being managed by the media. In my more conspiratorial moments, James, I see this as a process of demoralization.

26:46Do you think that's hyperbolic or do you think that's actually a pretty fair assessment?

26:53James Hankins:Yes. Well, there's demoralization in the sense of interpreting events and natural, well, just to say events and things like laws and legal systems as purely social science phenomenon that are to be understood outside any kind of context of value. And I think that's the way history is largely taught today. In fact, people, the way I was taught when I was studying history is that it's bad to import your moral judgments, right? And you shouldn't write history that way. You should be somewhere above the moon, you know? And you're observing from the moon. You have no attachments. You have no loyalties.

27:33James Hankins:You have no things that you think are more important than other things. you're driven by fashion. We won't get into that. But yes, I think that's a real problem. And I'm afraid that a lot of what I've written in the recent past has been regarded as unprofessional by people because I take sides. I think that some things are good and some things are bad and some things are morally profitable and some things are evil. The Western tradition, another metaphor I like for it is a garden. It's a garden where we're trying to grow beautiful things, and we have to follow the laws of nature in order to do that.

28:12James Hankins:But there are also lots of weeds and parasites and things that get into the garden, and they have to be killed. So, if you have a demoralizing civilization, it's one that's not making any distinction between the parasites and the diseases and the fertilizer and the water. That's the way I would Maybe it's a stretch of illustration. But you have to tend to garden. When you tend to garden, you have to understand what nature wants. You have to understand which is natural moral principles, which I think everybody has. We won't go into the whole metaphysics of natural law, please, because I'm not very good at that.

28:54But I do think that people have natural moral understandings.

28:58James Hankins:And you can't be constantly telling people that their natural moral understandings are not scientific, right? That there are people over in lower Borneo who have different moral impressions about polygamy or something. And therefore, there used to be this reference word called the Encyclopedia of Ethics, where they went through all the world ethical systems. And oddly enough, what they found is that most societies don't like stealing or lying. And the more successful societies have been monogamous and not polygamous. Don't tell that to the Mormons, but I think that's true. that there are certain patterns in moral practice.

29:53James Hankins:These were observed by Aristotle, you know, in the fourth century BC. That's how he built up his ethics, by taking a kind of empirical view of what societies actually prefer, right? And I think that you're right that if you try to see things through some kind of scientific lens where all moral principles are equal, all societies are equal, all cultures are equal, you can't possibly give young people a sense of moral direction in their lives.

30:31Francis Foster:Well, we've talked about teaching the thing and how it's not taught and whatever. Why don't we actually talk about Western civilization itself, or the Western tradition, as I think you prefer to call it? What is the Western tradition? What is its journey? where does it come from?

30:47James Hankins:I was just asked this question about half an hour ago at the conference, and not to mean you're unoriginal, but it's a very good question and needs to be asked. The gentleman was asking me, why didn't I start with the Egyptians or the Babylonians, you know, and why would we start with the Greeks? And the answer is that we have a tradition which comes from language, and the languages have been learned by later periods. So we start with the Greeks. And if you wanted to be civilized in the ancient world, you had to know Greek. And the Romans, most cultured, learned Greek, or they tried to translate Greek things into Atom.

31:25James Hankins:And what we have from the past, which is what the book is about, are traditions. We have traditions of philosophy that begin in the 6th century BC, and the same questions are still being debated today. Not because there's no progress, but because they're meaningful questions. And we have artistic traditions. All of the genres of literature that we use today are all invented by the Greeks. Naturalistic painting, naturalistic sculpture, science. Most of the major scientific principles are invented by the Greeks. You know, the ancient Egyptians had medicine. They have books full of medicine millennia before the Greeks even come on the scene.

32:11James Hankins:But it's not scientific medicine. It's medicine that's interwoven with religious beliefs and with the gods. And there's some good remedies that can be found in that, but they didn't have a method, right? What Hippocrates invents is the method. We're going to organize all the symptoms. We're going to describe diseases. We're going to figure out the etiology of diseases. And we're going to find remedies. And we're going to use only empirical evidence. We're not going to talk about what the gods say. and we're not going to have that type of religious medicine. And the same thing happens in mathematics.

32:45James Hankins:There are other civilizations, early civilizations, the Babylonians who can calculate. The ancient Chinese can calculate. They have all the acetylchric multiply divide. They can do all of that. But they don't have proof. They don't have mathematical proofs. The Greeks invented mathematical proofs, which in a way is an outgrowth of the whole idea of rationality. And that's what comes from, I think, is the real contribution of ancient Greek democracy. Because the ancient Greeks did not have a monarch. There's a famous historian of science, G.E.R. Lloyd, who said that the Greeks did not have a monarch, so they made reason their monarch.

33:28James Hankins:okay and that makes perfect sense in terms of greek democracy because the greeks in order to have a pluralistic society which is not based on violence you have to persuade people right so the greeks invent logic and rhetoric logic the art of accurate reasoning rhetoric the art of persuasive reason because they had a society that demanded that they talk to each other and that they debate with each other and they persuade each other in order to do anything. They couldn't take any decisions if there's more than one decision maker, right? In monarchy, the default setting of human society is monarchy, right?

34:10James Hankins:There is no other society, and I know people will contest this, they'll say the Phoenicians had this, but it's not true. There's no other society that was ruled pluralistically. I don't mean necessarily democratically, but ruled by, let's say, a small class of the wealthy or a small class of the militarily powerful like the Spartans. And those people had to come up with some type of way of settling quarrels and questions. And that's where rationality really comes from, modern Western style of rationality, which is to make arguments, to advance proof, to allow disagreement so the gaps in your argument can be exposed and to identify fallacies.

34:52James Hankins:All this is systematized by Aristotle, but he was doing it on the basis of the Greek love of arguments.

35:00Francis Foster:And so this is in contrast with prior human history, which is essentially about a single authority predicated on power. Is that the contrast you're painting? Is that too crude? Destroy me now or whatever, or crush me, whatever it was.

35:17James Hankins:I'm not really in that business. Well, I think that the earliest societies were based simply on power and on maybe manipulation of religious fear. Going back to the earliest records we have in 7 million BC. but after the axial period, the period of Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, the Jewish prophets, there is an idea that power has to justify itself in terms of some natural principle that's available to everyone. So you have this kind of tripartite structure where you have the moral principle, the source of moral principle, which is above human beings. It's the logos. It's the Dharma. It's the Tao, right?

36:15And then you have human beings who feel

36:19James Hankins:they have authority, which has to orient itself towards the Tao. And then you have human beings who are trying to improve themselves morally. And those things work together. People who become dissatisfied with their own moral nature. The famous example is Ashoka, right? The founder of Buddhist kingship in India. So he's a man who spent the earlier part of his life slaughtering large numbers of people, millions of people. And at a certain point, he had a conversion. He just got self-disgust. He couldn't bear himself anymore. He felt the need to make restitution in some way. He found the message of the Buddha, and he decided to create a Buddhist civilization.

37:02James Hankins:So I think the West did not invent that, right? And I think that's a universal human, part of the story of human development as a whole. What the West really invents, I think, is the idea that the authority which is going to establish as law and custom, but more importantly as law, under the authority of the Tao, that comes from human beings. beings in the mass, or at least a large number of human beings. There's something in human nature which in itself authorizes, has the power to authorize a government. Maybe this is a little bit too abstract. I'm not even sure I'm answering your question now.

37:53Francis Foster:A little. I guess what I'm asking is, you were pointing out that the Greeks come up with a particular a framing of power and how it should be administered. And I was curious about what makes that special and differentiates that from what other people had done previously and what other people were doing around the world at that same time.

38:16James Hankins:Yes, well, I think the idea of citizenship is key, that the Greeks thought of their societies as kind of a club, a membership. and you had to contribute. And then as a result of your contributions, you received political power. And the fundamental one in Greek society was fighting in the phalanx, right? That you're a male citizen, old enough to defend the city. You should be able to have power, right? If you're even of a lower class, you might be a rower in the fleet. If you're rowing in the fleet, even so, even if you're a very poor person, you need to be able to have a voice in the councils of government.

39:05James Hankins:And the reason is very simple. If you're in the assembly and you vote for war, two weeks later, you're standing in a line with 54 pounds of bronze armor holding a shield and a spear. And you're covering the guy next to you and you depend on each other. And it's a very egalitarian formation. the phalanx because there are no heroes in the phalanx. Everybody marches together and sometimes they run together towards the enemy. So that is, I think, a tremendous force for egalitarianism in Greek society, but also for the idea that people need a voice. The state will, this polis, the state will not be well defended unless people feel that they have a stake in the system in some way.

39:52Francis Foster:I mean, it's so funny you talk about it because I often think that many of the problems of the modern time, and I'm not original in this thought either, are caused by the fact that people are able to vote on things that they don't answer for and have no consequences of. And so the Greeks come up with this idea that because you offer a service to the city, the city owes you an opportunity to express your wishes and be heard about what the city should therefore do. So it's a kind of two-way accountability system almost.

40:25James Hankins:That's for the Greeks. The Roman system is quite different. How is it different? So the Romans have a different system. They start out exactly like the Greeks. You're in the army, you pay taxes, you show up at the assembly, you have the right to vote. They have a slightly different system in that they give, this is what differs, how a republic differs from a democracy. They give preponderant power, decision-making power to the experienced generals, the members of the Senate who come, in many cases, from old families. They have more wealth. They have more stake in the system, just in economic terms.

41:08James Hankins:So they get more decision-making power, which is not true of Greek democracy. But everyone ultimately gets a veto in the form of an assembly. However, the people are kept rather weak as a group. But what the Romans are very good at is recognizing merit. You know, they did away with the idea that political power should belong to particular families of old residents. That's a typical barbarian idea. And they decided that if you contribute to the state to get more power. And you get more responsibility the more you spend for armor and for weapons and for, this is the so-called Serbian constitution, which was passed under King Servius Tullus.

41:57James Hankins:If you have more stake in the system, you have more experience, you've been a general maybe, or fought in the army, and you've held office, then you deserve to have more weight than the other people. So Roman Senate consists of former magistrates, which is what we should do in the U.S. Instead of, you know, if you're a billionaire, you can't buy yourself a Senate seat, right? As former magistrates, it's people who have governing and military experience. And the people are protected under law. So everyone has equality under law, in principle, of course, to many violations in reality, as you would expect.

42:39James Hankins:But in principle, the people have equality under the law, but power in the state is proportioned to genitas, dignity. And dignity in the Roman sense means rank, that you enjoy rank because of your contribution to society. You've been a magistrate, you've been a soldier, officer, and so forth. So that's different from the democratic system. And it's the republican system that has really inspired most of the pluralistic governments in the West, down to the founders of the American constitution, who are founding a republic and not a democracy. I just wanted to make that point. And so, now I've lost the thread again.

43:21Francis Foster:Well, we were just talking about the Greek and Roman systems and how they administered power in contrast with purely who is strongest, whose tribe is the most powerful, etc.

43:32James Hankins:Now, that's the barbarian system, which is now being advocated by many people. The head man, the head man who runs the tribe has his great generals or his heads of the great clans, and he takes all the loot from the battle and distributes it, and he gets power from that, and he gets support from the people to whom he distributes, and then all the heads of the clan. It's the spoil system, as we say in America. It's the ethnic spoil system, if you will, the tribal spoil system. So, the Romans started out with something like that. They had a king, and they had something like a spoil system. It was never perfectly barbarian among the Romans, but eventually they got the system of recognizing merit.

44:19James Hankins:and also the idea of legal equality is tremendously important. The Greeks were very bad at giving anything to people outside their polis. They wanted to make a strong distinction between their state and everybody else. And the Romans were very good at giving citizenship to people who were helping the Roman cause. And it goes right back to Romulus and Remus, or it goes right back to the foundation of the Roman kingdom, the kingship before they had the Roman Republic, they had a Roman kingship,

45:01James Hankins:that you are defended by, your rights are defended only so far as, I'm not getting very confused, I'll have to scroll on to this. Okay, on down. So the Roman idea that everyone should be protected by the law goes back to the period of extreme violence in Rome at the end of the second century BC and the first century when they had four decades of civil war. And people saw powerful generals backed by armies seizing the property and even exile and seaving the property of political enemies. So the idea of rule by law is that the law is above politics. That's the fundamental idea. That no matter what happens, the law will protect you against anyone who tries to take away your property just on sheer power.

46:03James Hankins:And this is, I think, articulated best by Cicero in the first century, but it goes back a century earlier. It's a very powerful idea, and it's fundamentally a protection of property, protection of citizen rights against powerful individuals. But ultimately, the Romans, as I said, were very good at sharing legal equality with other groups. First, they shared it with their allies in the area around Rome. Then they shared it with the entire Italian peninsula. Everyone got citizenship towards the end of the second century BC. and the social wars. And ultimately, in 212 AD, the entire population of the Roman Empire were considered citizens protected by Roman law.

46:49James Hankins:That's really, I think, the fundamental glory of the Roman Empire is the idea of protection of all citizens by law and recourse to a magistrate in cases where you're not protected by law. And that's an ideal. It's an ideal that was often respected and sometimes not respected, and it's unfair to say, look at this case, look at that case where the system didn't work. But it's a tremendous idea, which is very powerful in Western history down to the present day. And the idea that there are some citizens who have more power than others in the legal system, that some people are, you know, legal inequality by procedural means and lawfare, all this kind of thing we have today, is a huge violation of the Western tradition of equality under the law, and the law is no respecter of persons.

47:44James Hankins:Hope I'm not messing things up. I'm trying not to pound on the table. No, it's good. Shows passion. It's great. James, there is this idea, and shoot it down if you believe it's completely false, but I'd be very interested to hear your opinion on it, that the Greeks were the true innovators. They were the ones who created the ideas. They were the ones who had all the, we talked about rhetoric and logic and everything like this. The Romans weren't the innovators. They took the ideas, perfected them, and then spread them throughout the global, well, the known world as it was at the time. Is that unfair?

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49:36Francis Foster:That's monetary-metals.com slash trigonometry. The Romans weren't the innovators. They took the ideas, perfected them, and then spread them throughout the global, well, the known world as it was at the time. Is that unfair?

49:52James Hankins:Yes. True answer. I think, um, I saw your, your, um, your, uh, video with David Butterfield, he was saying, if you put all the Greek achievements on one side, the Roman achievements on the other side, the Greeks would just break the scale. I think that that is to privilege innovation over development. And I think it's not necessarily the case that the best, the Greeks are undoubtedly brilliant. You know, I accept most of David's argument. I think he's right that the Greeks are incredibly brilliant. They're more brilliant than any other, any other ethnic group you can possibly imagine, with the possible exception of the Jews when it comes to law, although that's a clearly separate discussion.

50:38James Hankins:And it's, to me, very remarkable that the most talkative peoples of antiquity are the Jews and the Greeks, and the most disputatious peoples of antiquity… Some things never change. Some things never change, right? But I think it's true that the Greeks are tremendously geniuses, tremendous geniuses in things like the arts, and the Romans never quite caught up with them, with the exception of architecture, because the Romans had the advantage of cement. At some time around the time of Augustus, they discovered cement, and it just raised the whole possibilities of architecture tremendously. The Romans had the arch, of course, and if you look at Roman architecture and you look at Greek architecture, Greek architecture is pretty boring.

51:32James Hankins:I mean, it's beautiful. But to build a whole city from the three orders of Greek architecture and to have columns and temple fronts and so forth, it's just boring. I mean, Hitler liked it. Yeah, as I said. QED. Yeah, so that's actually quite true that the more uniform, you know, you see all these government buildings today that look like they were designed by perverted Greeks, essentially. Greeks, unclothed Greeks. But the Romans had tremendous infertility of invention. Granted that many of their architects were of Greek origin, but nevertheless, it occurred in Roman times. The Romans, of course, were, I think, way in advance of the Greeks when it comes to law.

52:20James Hankins:And I know my friends who are in history of law will argue with this and say, no, the Greeks invented everything and the Romans just systematized. But it's not true. The Romans developed a system of adjusting the interests of the individual citizen caught in a legal problem with the interest of the state and legal reasoning. legal reasoning is the Roman invention. You can read, there are books filled with, there's small books filled with stories of Greek cases. And we have, you know, the Greek orators who were often defending legal cases, public law cases, which are property cases. And there's lots of interesting reasoning.

53:07James Hankins:They're very clever. But the Romans had this way of developing a case. and they really invented the whole, if you meet someone who really has a legal mind, that person's a Roman. That's the surest way I can put it. And legal reasoning is different from logical reasoning. As we all know, it's different from philosophical reasoning. It's different from scientific reasoning. It's its own thing. It's different from historical reasoning, which is also its own thing. And it means weighing interests. And this is why I'm not a lawyer, because I can't describe it well. My mother wanted me to be a lawyer.

53:40James Hankins:it means an application of practical wisdom to a case uh it's a it's a complex algorithm a way of applying different law applying the law apply adjusting it to the case figuring out what the good of the individualism what the good of the state is it's it's um you see it every day and being discussed if you follow any of these legal debates in modern america that lawyers just don't think like the rest of us. But lawyers are thinking in a way that's immensely constructive, I think. It's not all pedophagogy, right? It's not all, you know, trying to get away with things, trying to get people off. That's what we tend to think of as legal reasoning.

54:23James Hankins:People are trying to get people off of trying to cheat people in a legal way. But there is a high calling, a noble calling of the law, which the Romans really invented. And they had a series of great jurists in the late second and third century who basically founded Roman law, who systematized Roman legal thinking. And the book which preserves their thinking, called The Digest of Roman Law, it's a collection of legal opinions by Roman lawyers. That book taught legal reasoning to the West. And it used to be taught even in law schools today. Fewer and fewer law schools teach it, but there are still many law schools that teach Roman law as a way of teaching legal reasoning.

55:08James Hankins:So I think the Romans really should get credit for that. They are continuators. The Greeks were not very good at empire, not compared to the Romans. The longest Greek empire might have lasted 300 years, something like that. Some of the successes of Alexander lasted maybe 300 years. But the Romans, they had a great military tradition. This is something also that the Greeks were not good at. The Greeks invented the phalanx. They invented a military formation that could defeat any other civilization in Central Asia. Egyptians forget it. The Greeks could beat them. But the Romans could beat the Greeks.

55:49That's fair enough. So if it came to a battle, what you're saying is that the Romans would basically destroy the Greeks?

55:54James Hankins:Well, they learned how to do it. The Romans were a just amazing military nation. They, first of all, really believed in military virtue, but they beat every kind of army. They could win phalanx armies because they had the Roman legion, which is superior to the phalanx. But they also fought mercenary armies. They fought irregular armies. They fought on land. They fought on sea. Every possible situation you can think of, the Romans could beat you. They had a tremendous system of supply. They knew everything about making fortresses. They had a military empire, which is just impregnable if they just had people to defend it.

56:39James Hankins:Military logistics were a Roman feature. Many armies couldn't stay in the field for very long because they were dependent on ravaging. And the Romans had military supply. They had uniform weaponry. It was just an amazing military nation. and there were high ideals behind it. So this is a level of military superiority that the Greeks could never master. And that's really one of the main reasons for the success of the Romans. Over 2 ,000 years, if you consider Roman history, traditional dates, 753 BC, but the actual dates probably sometime in the 600s, down to the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD, the Western Roman Empire.

57:28James Hankins:Okay, that's 1 ,000 years. But then if you consider that the East Roman Empire was the Roman Empire, a continuation of it, that goes on for another 1 ,000 years, right? That goes down to 1453, the fall of Constantinople. So really you're talking about an imperial system that lasts for two millennia. There's no other empire that has lasted that long. The Chinese, if you take all the Chinese dynasties together, you've got 2 ,000 years. So those are the most long-lived civilizations that we have. And for good reason, because they had, you know, they had civilizational strengths that other, you know, lesser civilizations never, I say lesser in a sense, less long-lived civilizations never mastered.

58:13And we've spoken about the Greeks. We've spoken about the Romans. We touched on the Holy Roman Empire. The Greeks obviously gave us reason and logic, as you said, and the arts and theater and literature and all of that. The Romans with the architecture, their knowledge of war, the law. And then we've got the other component, which is, of course, religion. Now, obviously, the Greeks and the Romans were religious. But when we talk about the West, immediately what we light upon is Christianity. So let's talk about the birth of Christianity, how it was incorporated into the Roman Empire, and then how it came to flourish right the way through the West.

58:49James Hankins:So we've done, what have the Romans ever done for us? We've done, what have the Greeks have ever done for us? Now we're doing, what have the Christians ever done for us? Absolutely, which I'm sure is being taught in Harvard at this point. Yes, well, I have four more days till I retire, and then it's not being taught at Harvard. I'm sorry to say. All right, that's an exaggeration. I'm taking too much.

59:11Francis Foster:But anyway, we're going from Athens to Rome to now Jerusalem.

59:15James Hankins:Okay, good. So Christianity is a religion that worships a person executed by the Roman state. It's a prophetic movement. Jesus Christ, in some ways, is the last of the Hebrew prophets. He is prophesying a future state of perfection when God's kingdom will come back. And he tells his followers that they have to behave perfectly because only when they behave perfectly will God bring back the kingdom, which is why God hasn't brought back the kingdom. because Christians still have to play it perfectly. Anyway, so Christianity is a very small sect within Judaism. There's a very controversial estimate that there are only 8 ,000 Christians by the end of the first century AD, which I think is too small.

1:00:13James Hankins:But even if it's off by an order of magnitude and there are 80 ,000 Christians, you've still got a very, very small group of people. There are two or three million Jews by comparison. And then it's persecuted. Christians refuse to engage in the Roman rites. They can't hold office as magistrates because they have to sacrifice to the gods. They can't be full members of society. They tend to be living in small ghettos or communities that are trying to hide from the authorities. And they're persecuted at various times. And then suddenly in the late third century, Christians start becoming really numerous.

1:01:03James Hankins:And it's because of the breakdown of Roman order. there's a number there's they have this so-called crisis of the third century when the Romans can't keep an emperor on his throne for more than a few months in many cases and sometimes a few days I forget how many Roman emperors there are in the late third century but there are 30 or 40 emperors they just can't

1:01:26Francis Foster:Sounds like modern Britain

1:01:29James Hankins:This statement sounds like it used to sound like Italy but Italy is now better than modern Britain I think more stable. So it's extremely unstable. The empire isn't stable. It's hit by terrible plagues. There's an economic collapse because every emperor wants to have an army. Every army has to have money to be paid. The taxes are going up massively. They debase the coinage. The coinage is just completely worthless by the end of the third century. And then finally, Rome pulls itself together. But by this time, the Christians are incredibly numerous, which means maybe 5 % of the population. That would be a big estimate.

1:02:07James Hankins:So they're in the millions. And they've gotten into the army. They've gotten into legislatures. They've gotten into the aristocracy, even in some cases. And Domitian comes along. I always do this. The Tetrarchy comes along. Diocletian, sorry, Diocletian. I would get to mission Diocletian mixed up, which shows that I'm not a real Roman historian. Tom Hollandwood. Okay, so Diocletian comes along, creates the new Roman system, which lasts for a couple of centuries. And the Christians are, he thinks, and his co-emperors and co-caesars think, is a threat. So we've got to get rid of them. They try to destroy them.

1:02:59James Hankins:They try to wipe them out. In a series of great persecution, But at a certain point, they've realized that they're creating more, this always happens when you try to persecute a large number of people, it doesn't work, right? And it creates more sympathy for them than was thought. So the Christians suddenly from becoming a, from having been a persecuted minority worshiping a Roman criminal, they run the state. Constantine converts Christianity. He declares Christianity the official religion of his dynasty. And so, Christians are suddenly in charge. So, the first reaction of many Christians is, great, we're in charge.

1:03:44James Hankins:Kill the other one. Kill the bastards, you know. Lambs into lions, right? That's the story. So, they want to wipe out the Roman civilization because Roman civilization is bad. It's full of people who have slaves. It's full of people who have, who are violent military people. They're cruel. They screw their slaves. There's absolutely no punishment for men who take sexual advantage of their slaves. There's all sorts of things morally wrong with Rome. So some of the early Christians are saying, let's just wipe them out and take over. Problem is they're 5 % of the population and you can't do that, right?

1:04:22James Hankins:So it takes a century for the Christians to really get some kind of legal control over the Roman state, which they finally do in the 390s. And by that time, there are wiser people in the Christian ranks, like St. Augustine, St. Jerome, the Greek church fathers. They say, look, we can't get on without being able to write. It would be nice to go on being able to write and to have grammar and to have, you know, we're giving sermons to the people. Well, maybe we should learn some rhetoric, some of the art of public speaking. So they preserve Roman culture, Greco-Roman culture, you really have to say.

1:05:02James Hankins:And they, you know, they want to have their own version of it, which emphasizes the next life and so forth. But they're basically preserving Greco-Roman culture, but they want to change it too. So you have this complex transformation of the Greco-Roman heritage, and it is intertwined with the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that is really the basis of Western civilization right there, right? The inter, the splicing together of these two traditions, and, you know, they're quite different, morally speaking, and it's very difficult. It takes, you know, centuries maybe, even going on today in a certain way, for these two, these complex elements in our civilization to figure out who's in charge, what's the best way of ruling.

1:05:53James Hankins:The Romans create the first confessional state. That's what I call it in this book. Confessional state is one that has an official religion. And other religions have disabilities of various kinds. So they don't do what the Muslims do. They don't kill the apostates. They just take away all the money. But, you know, there are second-class citizens in the Christian confessional state, Jews, pagans. They're usually not persecuted with some few exceptions, but they're usually not persecuted. But they make it very clear that Christians are in charge, that you can't really hold office, you can't. They create an alternative.

1:06:39James Hankins:They create a new power structure, let's put it that way. And the process of trying to negotiate between Greco-Roman values, which values things like honor and glory and contribution to the country and all these noble Roman values and Greek values, come up in, bump up against the Christian idea of humility. A Christian's supposed to be humble. The Romans don't really value humility that much. They, you know, Cicero, who is the most popular Roman author of the Middle Ages, is not a humble guy. He's very vain, in fact. So, but Cicero is a canonical author, and if you have a canonical author, you're supposed to imitate the person, right?

1:07:36James Hankins:There's supposed to be a moral model. So, the long discussion between the Christian and the Greco-Roman is, I think, just part of the civilization. It's never resolved. We finally get rid of confessional states in the 18th century. The idea that a state should have its own dominant religion doesn't go until the 18th century, so it's a long period. And the 18th century is still fighting over Greeks and Romans versus Judeo-Christians. A lot of the Enlightenment is about trying to privilege the Greco-Roman heritage, especially the rationalism of Greco-Roman heritage, over dogmatic versions of religion.

1:08:16James Hankins:So, I don't think it's fair to say, or correct to say, that the Greco-Roman tradition ends and the Judeo-Christian one begins. This is the great mistake, I think, of people like Voltaire in the Enlightenment, who wanted to paint the Middle Ages as a period of superstition, ignorance, violence. You know, it's just Middle Ages is not that way. Middle Ages, the evil scholasticism places more value on rationalism than any previous society, right? They have elements that come obviously from faith that are not provable by reason, but there's also a tremendous reliance on law and reason. They have the civil law of the Romans, which they elaborate into grand new structures, and they have the canon law of the church, they have theology, and they're trying to create this gigantic model of order based on reason, authority, reason, weaving together their reasoning authority.

1:09:23James Hankins:So it's a highly rationalistic age. And the Renaissance, which I get into at the end of this book, is in a way revolting against this sort of hyper-rationalism of scholasticism. They're saying, you know, you scholastics can beat us in argument. You can beat everybody in argument. That's what you do. That's what scholastics do. They argue. You put two scholastics together, they argue. And no one's convinced, really. Some time you're defeated. but they get up the next day and make the same argument. If you want to change society, you have to affect people's imagination. You have to affect their emotions.

1:10:03James Hankins:You have to give them a vision of what a good society would look like. You need to have literary imagination. You need to have eloquence and eloquence in your language. That's how you change people. So that's what the Renaissance is, when the Renaissance tries to bring back classical antiquity and Christian antiquity, that's what they are trying to do. They're trying to, in a way, give truth the weapons of the imagination, give truth the weapons of beauty. And because the scholastics, You know, you can say that scholastics had beautiful arguments, the way you have beautiful mathematical arguments.

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1:12:38Francis Foster:And you mentioned the Judeo-Christian tradition, somewhat a contested term. Some people think it's useful, some not. What role, other than providing Jesus, what role do Jews and Jerusalem play in the history of the Western tradition?

1:12:55James Hankins:Well, Jesus' entire philosophy, well, not all of it, but a A good deal of his theology, if you can call it that, his religious reform movement is based on Jewish tradition. I mean, Jesus is constantly citing the Bible, right? You can, I mean, there are people who have gone through all the statements of Jesus and found Old Testament sources for them all. He has new elements. Is that right? I think so.

1:13:26Francis Foster:That's really interesting. I never heard anyone say that.

1:13:29James Hankins:Oh, come on. Generally.

1:13:31Francis Foster:I'm just showcasing my ignorance, if nothing else. So, you're saying what Jesus was teaching was based on the Old Testament?

1:13:39James Hankins:Yes.

1:13:41Francis Foster:Fascinating.

1:13:41James Hankins:But he thinks that the Old Testament is going to be replaced by the Kingdom of God. But he says it won't change a jot or a tittle, which means they're not going to change the punctuation of the Old Testament. It's going to be perfectly preserved. But he's predicting a future age when it will be transcended in some way, because he thinks that his message is, in some way, perfects the law. So he'll say that, I give you a new commandment, and you hear the sharp intake of breath from all the Jews present, a new commandment? Guess where the other ten came from, guy? So what, you're God? I give you a new commandment.

1:14:30and he thinks he has at least the authority of the prophets.

1:14:34James Hankins:He's the Messiah, and he has a particular interpretation of that. So he's a radical. He's a theological radical. There's no question about that. But he's a radical within the Jewish tradition.

1:14:48James Hankins:He's always trying to essentialize the Jewish tradition. He says, what's the fundamental thing? Love God and love your neighbor. Those are the two things you really have to remember. And just, you know, Deuteronomy, all right, it's there. But if you just need like a, you need a instant shirt person's guide to being a good Jew, you should just love God and love your neighbor. That's all you really need to know. And you will naturally do whatever it wants. So he's a real radical. but I think it's quite, you start to realize how dependent early Christianity is in Judaism when you look at the sacred books.

1:15:34James Hankins:The early Christians loved the Psalms and rightly so. The Psalms are incredibly beautiful. Sometimes they're incredibly ugly and jarring, but they're often incredibly beautiful and they survive translation. That's the amazing thing about them. You can read a good translation of the Psalms into English. It's deeply moving in a way that, you know, literature translated from other languages, often it's not. And there were people like Marcion who wanted to get rid of Judaism, right? They wanted to have a Christianity. He's a heretic, by the way, just so everyone's clear. He's a heretic. So Marcion wanted to do away with Judaism and just have a Christianity that was dependent on Christ's message.

1:16:13James Hankins:And there are other people who wanted to say, let's make the Greco-Roman philosophy, Greek philosophy part of Christian message. But the Christians, you know, they settled down in the second century A.D. and they said, we are not Jews, we are Christians, but we are based, our New Testament is based on the Old Testament. The old promises of God have been superseded by the new promises of God in the New Testament. So they have a very strong, it's difficult to say because there's so many, so much friction. between Jews and Christians because they are a heretical movement from the point of view of Jews.

1:16:59James Hankins:So, there are lots of nasty things that Christians say about Jews. And Jerome, who's a great defender of studying the Hebraic Ovaritas, the truth of the Hebrews, he's really anti-Semitic. So, they have this respect for the Jewish Old Testament without having respect for modern Jews, right? They think modern Jews have not listened to Christ's message. They're people who are stiff-necked, right? That they won't change. They should change. They should hear the truth of Christ. And if they don't change, there's something wrong with them. Maybe there's a demon inside them. Maybe they're just proud or something.

1:17:36James Hankins:They have some kind of moral problem. So there's that kind of hatred that goes on. But there's also the recognition that, you know, the Jews have had a message from God too. And the fact that they're not listening to our message doesn't take that away.

1:17:51Francis Foster:Okay, and then where do we go from Jerusalem?

1:17:57Francis Foster:Complete the story for us.

1:17:59James Hankins:So I'm trying to understand what you mean by that.

1:18:01Francis Foster:Well, what I mean is you've got Athens, then Rome, then Christianity comes along. How do we get from that to the modern day? and the narrative of the West.

1:18:14James Hankins:And that's in volume two. You'll have to ask Gilzo. I have my views on that too. Well, I think that the Reformation changes everything. The Reformation...

1:18:29Francis Foster:What is the Reformation?

1:18:31James Hankins:Another question that I could answer. Well, the Reformation is briefly a revolt against the ecclesiastical polity of the Middle Ages.

1:18:42Francis Foster:What is ecclesiastical polity?

1:18:44James Hankins:So in the Middle Ages, you develop this very strange form of dual government, where you had one authority over the human soul and one authority over the human body. So the Pope is in charge of the church, which has his own law, has his own tax system, has his own hierarchy. It's a complete government, and it exists in every Christian state. It's the only international institution aside from the empire. And then you have lay society, which governs the body, this life, as opposed to the next life.

1:19:26James Hankins:It has its laws, its government, its hierarchy, its tax system. So it's a parallel government. It's a very strange situation. I have looked in vain for any other part of the world that has the same situation. I'm coming up to a major point, okay? So what happens in the Reformations, they get rid of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Protestant countries, and they make the king or the secular government the authority over religion. Ultimately, religion is privatized, you know, in the 18th century, but in this period, we're talking about 16th, 17th, 18th, early 18th century, the state rules religion.

1:20:12James Hankins:So what happens? This is one of the big messages of the book. Okay. So what does the medieval ecclesiastical hierarchy have charge of in the Middle Ages? Thought. That means doctrine. What is taught in universities, what's taught in school about religion is the part, it's the job of the church to oversee that. Family, sex, religion, inheritance, all those laws having to do with the regulation of human sexuality and marriage and adoption and inheritance, all those rules are controlled by the church.

1:20:57Francis Foster:Third thing, economic life. Right?

1:21:02James Hankins:How you conduct moral transactions, what's considered usury, what's not considered usury, how you can lend money to people without committing the sin of usury, how you can pass down money between generations, the organization of financial institutions, the church has charged over early banking, for example. the banking system, both the commercial banking system and the private banking system, that's all under control of the church. So what happens in Protestant lands when you take all those authorities away? Liberalism, right? Intellectual freedom, freedom of sexuality family, economic freedom.

1:21:57James Hankins:So that's my big contribution to the origins of modernism. The Reformation has a lot to do with liberalism, which precedes the revival of democracy in the late 18th century. So the modern world is shaking off the bonds of religious law and making religious law for itself. First, that falls under the power of the secular state. But the secular state is, of course, deeply involved with private interests and is really unable to come up with universal rules of conduct in things like usury, and it's highly penetrable by the influence of wealthy people and so forth. So the economic freedom of the modern world, the sexual and family law of the modern world, and the intellectual freedom of the modern world come out of the Reformation ultimately, which is then radicalized by the Enlightenment.

1:23:01James Hankins:I was astonished recently when I was investigating this stuff with my class, and I discovered that adoption was only legally permitted in the 19th century in France, or early 20th century. I forget the exact date. But I thought adoption, everybody has adoption. Romans had adoption, but the medieval law prohibits adoption. So that has a huge impact on the way society is organized, right? And it means that they prohibit cousin marriage and all sorts of things that has a huge impact on And I don't know if you've seen this book called The Weirdest People in the World. I forget the name of the author.

1:23:44Francis Foster:Joseph Heinrich, is it?

1:23:45James Hankins:That's right. He's a colleague of mine in, I think, one of the other schools. And he says that you can't, the origin of civil society is the church's prohibition of cousin marriage and the ability to inherit wealth and to get help from your family. If you can't get help from your family, you've got to get help from social, from civil society in some way. And I would add the church, right? Because if you're a family trying to preserve its wealth and you can't marry your cousin or you can't have your brother marry your dead brother's wife, which the Romans also did, that's also prohibited by canon law.

1:24:30James Hankins:Then you have to find some other way to preserve your wealth. one way to do it is to turn the church into, you know, get one of your kids into the church so how power can help you, right? So, it's a very interesting social transformation that takes place as a result of medieval Christianity. But I'm not really an expert on that. I know enough to write a textbook about it, but there's a bibliography that people are interested in to go further, but anyway. But that's where I put the origins of the modern world. And of course, the radicalization of politics, egalitarianism is also a Christian thing because the ancient West, egalitarianism basically comes from Jewish thought, right?

1:25:17James Hankins:From the Jewish, from Deuteronomy, where there's an equaling of, it's kind of more distributivist than egalitarian. There's a redistribution every few years, every Sabbath, and then every 50 years, every 49 years of property within the Jewish people. So, and there's, of course, the early Christian ideas of equality. It's in the Bible.

1:25:47James Hankins:But that stays within radical Christian communities. That type of egalitarianism, as applied to social life, stays within radical Christian communities. The equality that the Romans have and the Greeks have is equality of citizenship, equality under the law. It's a different type of equality altogether. So what happens in the 17th century is that some of the radical Protestant groups adopt a social system based on egalitarianism. and that feeds its way, you know, through Locke and some other people into the Western system of this radical egalitarianism where everything has to be more and more and more and more equal.

1:26:26James Hankins:It becomes a process of making equal. So that, I think, is also Christian in origin.

1:26:32Francis Foster:And that's how we've got to where we are. James, I wish we had another three hours to talk about it, but our time is up. Thank you so much for coming on. Final question, as always, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

1:26:45James Hankins:The fragility of the golden thread. It's absolutely amazing how close we got to losing major parts of our tradition. The works of Aristotle that we read today survived in a single box of scrolls down till the first century BC. If that had burned up, no Aristotle. and it was only because some people figured out that it was valuable that they started copying it again. I mentioned before the digest of Roman law, okay? That's the most important source for our knowledge of legal thinking in the Roman Empire, the basis of all Western legal thinking. That was down to one manuscript in the 11th century.

1:27:35And it became the basis of legal

1:27:38James Hankins:education in the 12th century. It was rediscovered, studied, copied, but it almost was lost. There are many works like this. There are three copies of Plato left and complete works of Plato left in the 14th century. There's one copy of Catullus left in the 14th century. What happens is that somebody realized they were valuable and wanted to save them. There were scholars out there who said that this is something we need to keep going. This is something which will help us to revive our civilization, something that will help us to have a renaissance or a reformation. We need this thing now. And there were scholars and people of goodwill who said, the tradition's valuable.

1:28:23James Hankins:We have to keep it going. Let's copy the manuscript. Let's teach it. Let's teach people to love these texts again. Let's teach people to love, you know, Catullus and Horus and Virgil again, because if we don't, we'll lose it. It's not just the text itself. It's the love of the text and the ability to read the text and understand the text. So, that's what I think I would like to end on, is the idea that we have to keep it going. It's up to us.

1:28:49Francis Foster:James, thank you so much for coming on the show.

1:28:51James Hankins:It's been a pleasure.