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Michael Bonner on the Rise and Fall of Civilization (Episode 24)
671 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
Stoics have a contemplative practice called The View From Above – it involves looking down on our life from a larger vantage point. An excellent way to do that is to zoom out and look at history, the rise and fall of civilizations. When we do that, the trivial falls away and what is important remains.
This conversation with Dr Michael Bonner takes that larger perspective. Michael is a classist, civil servant, an expert on the Islamic Golden Age, and the author of In Defense of Civilization, an expert on the Islamic Golden Age.
He and Caleb discuss the nature of civilization, ideas of renewal, beauty, and order, what it means to be civilized, and what it means to be human.
(01:54) Introduction
(05:18) What is Civilization?
(11:38) The Beginning of Civilization
(17:39) Ancient Greece
(22:06) The Role of Philosophy in Civilization
(34:05) The Challenge to Civilization
(46:37) What Should We Do?
***
Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
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Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Are civilizations inherently fragile?
00:00:00
Speaker
The challenge is that the sense of place and purpose in the world that human beings developed a long time ago, which led to that stability and permanence and so forth. First of all, it's all extremely fragile at the best of times. The earliest civilizations were not long lived.
Introduction to Stoic Conversations podcast
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another we'll be in in-depth conversation with and experts.
Stoicism's 'View from Above'
00:00:41
Speaker
Stoics have a contemplative practice called the view from above. It involves looking down on our life from a larger vantage point in space or time.
00:00:49
Speaker
An excellent way to do that is to zoom out and look at history, the rise and fall of civilizations. When we do that, the trivial falls away and what is important remains.
00:01:04
Speaker
This conversation with the historian and civil servant,
Interview with Dr. Michael Bonner on civilization
00:01:08
Speaker
Dr. Michael Bonner, takes that larger perspective. Michael is a classicist, an expert on the Islamic Golden Age, and author of In Defense of Civilization. We discuss ideas of renewal, beauty, and order, what it means to be civilized, and indeed, what it means to be human. Here is Dr. Michael Bonner.
00:01:35
Speaker
My name is Caleb Montaveros, and today I'm going to be speaking with Michael R.J. Bonner. Michael recently wrote In Defense of Civilization, so that's what we will largely be talking about today.
Michael Bonner's academic journey
00:01:50
Speaker
Thanks for joining, Michael. Pleasure. Thanks for having me.
00:01:54
Speaker
Yeah, so I thought it'd be interesting to talk to you because at Stoa, we're involved in the theory and practice of stoicism, of course, which is a project of preserving and to some extent renewing an ancient philosophical tradition.
00:02:10
Speaker
And what you've been thinking about are these questions of preservation, renewal, and decay at an even larger scale, the scale of civilization. But before we jump immediately into that, do you want to say a bit about yourself by way of introduction and what brought you to this project? Nothing more than a lowly political hack, a servant of the government here in Ontario.
Kenneth Clark's influence on Western civilization
00:02:33
Speaker
But in a previous life, I was an academic very briefly. And my
00:02:40
Speaker
My academic formation was originally in Classics, in the Greco-Roman world and literature. And I very gradually got into the history of the Middle East and then more specifically Persia.
00:03:00
Speaker
Iran being the sort of great co-equal superpower to the Roman state in antiquity. I published a couple of books on Iranian history, but the question of what civilization is and
00:03:20
Speaker
where it comes from and what are its features, what are its enemies, how does it come about and how does it go away, that sort of thing. That's always been a kind of, you know, that's been an interest of mine I think ever since, you know, ever since school when we had sort of little introductions to archaeology. But it was that show, this 13-part series by Kenneth Clark,
00:03:48
Speaker
that came out in 1969.
Civilization's vulnerability and COVID-19
00:03:50
Speaker
I saw, you know, in later life, probably in my mid 20s or so, with that, I just found absolutely captivating. And this, this is a man sort of looking back on the, you know, on the two world wars. And taking taking the the masters that fell your as a sort of starting point from looking back on on what made
00:04:14
Speaker
He says civilization, but what he's really referring to is what he used to be called Western civilization. And I thought that that kind of thing was well worth revisiting. It's a sort of theme that you might want to think about more than just once a generation, and certainly more frequently than simply in the aftermath of a huge war, worth revisiting in its own right. And of course, it's
00:04:40
Speaker
I think it should be fairly obvious it's worth expanding the field of view and the range of vision.
Defining civilization beyond technology
00:04:50
Speaker
And there's really no good reason to confine ourselves sort of only to the period after the fall of the Roman state and only look at Western Europe. That's where the idea sort of got going.
00:05:07
Speaker
And it was the experience of COVID and the lockdowns that made me revisit that idea of the fragility of civilized life. Right. Right. And let's start with this, a broad question. When we say civilization or when you say civilization, what do you mean? What are we talking about? Well, exactly. That is a very deep question.
00:05:33
Speaker
When this comes up, I usually start by saying what we don't hate. You know, I'm definitely not trying to lie the flag for some kind of, you know, particular expression of civilization or some sort of local vision. And I'm definitely not trying to say that there's some particular form of it or other that is superior or better. That's really not the point.
00:05:58
Speaker
We have to do something, I think, to come to grips with what that term actually means, whether it's still useful. I mean, people kind of don't, I don't think that they use it as much as
Pre-agricultural settlements and civilization
00:06:10
Speaker
they used to. I think that there's, there's fear of introducing a bias or fear of too many unadmitted assumptions when it comes to using that word. But I mean, the first thing to say is that
00:06:26
Speaker
I wanted to, I wanted to come to grips with what assets of stillness are filled in common by all people who essentially live in a single place and who are not nomadic hunter-gatters. It's that simple.
00:06:44
Speaker
When we move from the period that we call the Upper Paleolithic to the Neolithic and the first permanent settlements arise, what do we mean? And what do we still have in common with this earliest sense? So I wanted to place it on a kind of anthropological
00:07:08
Speaker
So the other thing that I don't mean and that I really want to impress upon the reader is that there is no, in my view, there is no technological, there's no piece of technology or
00:07:24
Speaker
mode of production that gives rise to civilization, or that is required by
Religious sites and early settlements
00:07:32
Speaker
it. So this is very much antithetical to the older idea, which I think is still widely believed, and the idea of the agricultural revolution.
00:07:41
Speaker
The Cultural Revolution is essentially a kind of Marxist vision of a change in the mode of production that forces everybody to settle down and live in one place and to develop states and gardens and forth. For me, what is P is you have evidence of first settlements and the first what we might call towns or cities
00:08:11
Speaker
very least permanent dwelling places for agriculture is fully developed. Now, it was arguably sort of fading out for a long time, but the idea that you have agriculture and then all of a sudden everything, that's not true. What happens is that the settlement comes first.
00:08:32
Speaker
the settlements are formed around what are clearly sort of communal religious sites, public centers of public ritual of some sort in the Near East, and that the old hunter-gatherer economy is still going on.
00:08:54
Speaker
It may be fading out, but fades out over a very, very, very long time. And the settlement itself gives rise to agriculture, not the other way around. So what does this mean? This means, as far as I can tell,
00:09:15
Speaker
You have a change of attitude, or outlook, what you might call, what we now might call, philosophy, or some change of vision of the world that compels people to settle down. So what is that? What does the evidence suggest?
00:09:34
Speaker
I've already mentioned the communal religious sense. They appeared to be devoted to something like a cult of ancestors. There's evidence of like a kind of skull cult, especially at a place, the site of Döbekli Tepe, which is in Turkey, or what is known, it was now Turkey. This is a very, very early, if not the earliest sort of public ritual try.
00:10:01
Speaker
there's evidence of, as I say, a skull cult. Probably, I would say almost certainly a cult of ancestors. You have a sense that there is a community of people who have shared ancestors, and I think they sort of agglomerate around a sign at which they are venerated. In the absence of any
00:10:29
Speaker
future potential discovery that might suggest otherwise, this is a new idea, this idea that people have essentially a shared past, that they are linked through, and that they settle in a common place, that they have a place in common where they belong, where their ancestors lived, and where they continue to live, and where people now living could eventually become
00:10:58
Speaker
ancestors, you know, after they die. There's no evidence that this is what people thought, say, in the upper Paleolithic period.
Çatalhöyük's stable community
00:11:09
Speaker
The art that we have, the material culture left over, you know, doesn't suggest anything like this. Yeah, that's interesting because it's such an idea so many people would take for granted now that you have a family that persists through time or larger groupings of people that persist.
00:11:23
Speaker
through time, but it's an open question whether, you know, that's the sort of thing that just came with human cognitive machinery or whether it's the sort of thing that we needed to develop. And as you're saying, it looked pretty plausible that there was some amount of development into that idea.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah, so it must have had some, I tend to agree that it probably did develop somehow, what that development looked like those entirely. We don't really know what pediatric religion was like, or what people thought of their place in the world. My argument is that
00:11:59
Speaker
to judge by pediolithic material culture, cave paintings and artifacts and so forth. Their picture of a human being's place in the world was uncertain. I think that that makes sense in a world where you're
00:12:21
Speaker
constantly moving around and you're pursuing game and moving with the seasons, having very sort of short, brief interactions with the world and with presumably other peoples. So I think that that makes a time sense. So eventually at the site of... at the site of Pzalikoyuk, also in Turkey, you find was essentially the first town.
00:12:50
Speaker
And the first town had, you know, basically a number of joined houses that are also attached, you know, and it's there that you find the first, you know, not necessarily the first, but a substantial elaboration, significant elaboration of the
00:13:10
Speaker
of the kind of, of the attitude reflected in a place like Bacti. You have individual houses in which the ancestors are buried under the end of the floors for several generations.
Civilization's essence: shared life and past
00:13:24
Speaker
Each house has its own private shrine. It has its own hunting trophies, its own artworks, and so forth.
00:13:34
Speaker
and some hearth, and the evidence of archaeology shows every couple of generations.
00:13:45
Speaker
The houses were dismantled and then rebuilt exactly as they were. The wall art goes back exactly as it was. The shrine goes back in its original place. The hearth goes back in its original place. And this goes on for almost a thousand years. It's extraordinarily
00:14:06
Speaker
stable in society. So what does this mean? This is this is another symbol of continuity, looking back to the past, that you have a group of people who do things exactly or seemingly exactly the way their ancestors did. The house goes back in the same place the ancestors are kept. Wallard looks the same. Ties and a shared, ties and symbols of a shared palace.
00:14:37
Speaker
And as I say, this is an extraordinarily fine, certainly by our standards, it's a very safe civilization or early civilization. And there's no evidence of any kind of, you know, social or political hierarchy, but there's also no evidence of sort of, you know, radical egalitarianism. You just have these interconnected households with their own, with their, with their own personal histories.
00:15:05
Speaker
So this is the sort of fundamental element of civilization as far as I'm concerned. It means settled life made permanence. It means a sense of a shared past and a sense of a common humanity symbolized by shared ancestors that go all the way back. So there's nothing about any kind of particular technology or, you know,
00:15:33
Speaker
thought about money, thought about big buildings or kings or none of that stuff. It is essentially an outlook and arguably a religious one at that forward a little bit and you get what I think of as this sort of maturity of all this of this of this civilized attitude in in dynastic Egypt.
00:16:00
Speaker
in the Old Kingdom, as we call it. And looking at the material culture of the Old Kingdom, I would say that civilization
Ancient Greece as a model civilization
00:16:09
Speaker
has three main outcomes. So the first thing that I notice
00:16:16
Speaker
is that the material culture has a sense of clarity to you. Basically, the world is a coherent whole that we can perceive and understand, and it gives rise to the use of language to describe the world and our experience of it. In the material culture of ancient Egypt, you have this clear and elegant presentation of hieroglyphs
00:16:46
Speaker
that show a sense of recording the passage of time and the names of kings and so forth is a noteworthy contrast to say that the art of the Paleolithic time, which is very beautiful and sort of, but as a kind of
00:17:03
Speaker
it often sort of seems an incoherent jump. The next thing that I claim to notice is the sense of beauty, which is a shorthand for harmonious proportion and sort of mathematical rigor in the arts and architecture of the time.
00:17:24
Speaker
Finally, there's a sense of order, which takes shape. I mean, it's personal. It's the idea that there's some kind of organizational principle to the world, both seen and unseen. I think it would be useful to go through, of course, as Stoics here, our tradition, if you will, emerges from ancient Greece. So how would you say that ancient Greece realized these three ideas?
00:17:54
Speaker
So you have a sense that, you have a sense that the, let's start with something like Plato. Okay. So you have a sense that there is a way of understanding the world through language, through conversation, through mutual understanding of persons. He places a great deal of emphasis on this in the, in the dialogue that he calls the phiobias that
00:18:19
Speaker
There is a mental, Socrates refers to a mental image, an image that takes shape because of there is an internal painter.
00:18:30
Speaker
describing or depicting what the senses perceive and words are expressing that image for another person. You must presuppose that the world can be understood clearly if that is your vision of how to
00:18:51
Speaker
communicate about it and to express it to others. And of course, for a person like Plato, interpersonal communication is what is the right metaphor. That is the most important way of conceiving of the world and expressing it to others as opposed to, I don't know, the image or
00:19:21
Speaker
Yeah, drawing a picture or a message of propaganda carved into a mountainside. It's interpersonal communication.
00:19:32
Speaker
you have the sense of beauty. Architecture is, you know, take an example of the the the parson, it's built according to harmonious ratios and measurements and so forth, and you have the the sculptures of what is this, which are the proportions of them are adjusted in accordance with
00:19:53
Speaker
where the sculptors thought the viewer would be standing. So there's procedures of foreshortening and making sure that the measurements are perceived in such a way that they don't seem stretched or exaggerated and that the viewer is taken into account. This is, you know,
00:20:21
Speaker
different, I would think, from most contemporary visions of what beauty means. But, you know, from at least, there is onward in the in the Greek speaking world, you have vision of beauty that is based on harmonious proportion, not just visually, also, obviously, in music, the sense of order, you have the entire
00:20:49
Speaker
worked of literature like Xenophon is economicus to this idea that household management is a kind of microcosm of sort of a greater sense of cosmic order, even that word cosmic cosmos, it has this sense of an orderly, an orderly universe and world around us that we are a part of.
Stoicism's insights on human nature
00:21:16
Speaker
And it's
00:21:19
Speaker
The work of someone like, you know, Aristotle presupposes that you have an orderly universe that you can understand clearly, you know, obviously to the first point, but it isn't, it's, it's far from being a kind of chaotic jump that you can, you, you have a part in it, it obeys rules, has some kind of organizational principle.
00:21:46
Speaker
And Plato would add the idea that there is also an order that is not necessarily perceptible, but is nevertheless real too. But I don't want to suggest that this is only peculiar to Greece. Yes, of course. Those are examples that you'll see.
00:22:07
Speaker
Yes, of course. A number of civilizations, of course, have these features. All civilizations on your account and they span across many continents, of course. So what is the role of philosophies like Stoicism or in Greece? You have these other schools that emerge around the scene.
00:22:29
Speaker
same time, Epicureanism, the cynics, these groups of people who are doing a mix of intellectual work, but they also have firm accounts of what it is to live a good life. So there's this practical picture.
00:22:46
Speaker
And in any civilization you find these schools, groups of people are merging, trying to make sense of the world and coming up with an account of how best to live in it. What is your picture then, the role that these movements play? That's a good question. I think this is the heart of what Woke is trying to get at. Civilization presupposes
00:23:15
Speaker
there is a proper place in the world for human beings. We belong in a specific place that we have a shared past, is rooted and stable in that particular place and that there is a future for us for exactly the same reason.
00:23:37
Speaker
That leads to, I think, by a natural progression of thought, that just as there is some kind of organizing principle for the rest of the world, ants, bees, flowers, you name it, that there is something like us.
Virtue and the good life in stoicism
00:24:00
Speaker
And that easily leads you to the question of, you know,
00:24:07
Speaker
human nature, what is it like? How do we live in accordance with that nature and how would we, how would we err by failing to do so? And stoicism, as do other schools of law, but I think stoicism is particularly emphatic on the idea that there is a particular human nature
00:24:33
Speaker
we must respect, just as there is a nature out there and sorts of other things, that living in accordance with human nature, and I think especially respecting its limits and, you know, I said respecting its limits, not going beyond what is properly ordained for us by nature, that that is what we must do in order to live a good life.
00:25:01
Speaker
Living the good light, I think, certainly, I mean, feel free to jump in and correct me if I speak. Aristotle leaves open the question as to what the good life is, although he presupposes that there is such a thing. I don't know if the Stoics precisely define
00:25:21
Speaker
exactly what the good life looks like. I think it may be slightly different. But again, the point is that there is that there is such an organizing principle for human beings.
00:25:36
Speaker
which I would suggest civilized life allows us to develop more fully. There must have been an upper paleolithic human nature and may have not been very much different. It's different at all from what it is now. We are still fundamentally the same people, but perhaps we could say that what I'm calling civilization allows
00:26:02
Speaker
allows that nature to develop more fully in accordance with perhaps what Aristotle and company might call the the the tennis the goal of the human nature and you know depending on depending on what school of thought you belong to I think that these these things can be defined differently but again the point is that they are
00:26:28
Speaker
real things that are worthy of our attention and that we should attend to in order to be fully, I would say, you know, fully human in order to be, in order to achieve the proper end of human life. Stoicism presupposes that in order to get to that state is that we have, we must practice virtue, we must avoid vice,
00:26:58
Speaker
I think that certain people would tell you that there might be slightly different, they might give you a different category of what the virtues are, or what the vices are, maybe slightly different here or there. But the point is that these are real things, these are tools.
Philosophy's practical tools for life
00:27:14
Speaker
We can discuss them, you know, endlessly, but they are real tools that can aid us in that development. And I think that that is, you know, that is a mode of taken altogether. This is a mode of thought that is still very useful to us and which, you know, in one context we can identify it as stoicism in another
00:27:41
Speaker
You know, I think many aspects of Confucian thought are very similar. There is much to be said for the, you know, I think slightly simpler vision of Aristotle. I don't think Plato would have been a stranger to this mode of thought also, but he might not have agreed with Seneca.
00:28:02
Speaker
And of course, the Christian vision of virtue ethics is also very similar, although not entirely the same. So I would say that this is a vision of how to live as a human being that has served us well in the past, which can still inform us.
00:28:31
Speaker
Contrary to what I think a lot of people might say about it, it's not important necessarily to agree on what the right outcome is precisely because not everyone would. I mean I don't think Epicureans and Stoics would disagree as to what the good life is, but they would not disagree that there is
00:28:56
Speaker
a good life to be aimed at. That there are principles to adhere to and tools to use to get. I think that is the heart of the matter that I feel seems to be missing from contemporary discussions as to
00:29:18
Speaker
how people ought to live, what they should do, how to choose virtue and how to advise.
Civilization's collapse and rejuvenation
00:29:27
Speaker
There's too much emphasis on this idea that we'll never agree. Well, of course we will never agree. Everybody is slightly different. That's not the point. The point is that we have a shared common nature that can be assisted to
00:29:45
Speaker
to its proper development and conclusion to the practice of virtue. And I would like to think that this has contributed much to our species' success as civilized human beings and that we might need to learn from it. Hi everyone, this is Michael Trombley.
00:30:07
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. We're a new podcast. We're getting started. We're building episode by episode. So I wanted to just give a quick shout out and say that any like, review, or referral that you can provide really goes a long way to helping the show. Thanks again for listening.
00:30:26
Speaker
Right. So even though the Greeks disagreed quite a lot over what the different virtues were or perhaps how important the virtues were in a good life, nearly for all of them virtue was one of the most important things. And nearly all Greek philosophers saw eudaimonia sort of as the purpose of human life.
00:30:46
Speaker
This account had a robust account of happiness and that's what human beings as rational social animals were geared towards. And even if there's quite a lot of disagreement within the picture of how important is virtue relative to other things, what else matters, that is enough to establish a coherent path, if you will, for what people would consider a good life.
00:31:13
Speaker
don't want to appear cliched but you know at least since the enlightenment or what we call enlightenment this idea of a of a human of a distinctly human nature with all its limits and and and so forth that that has a lot of people have rejected that idea what they seem to reject it so of course if you reject that idea you will not be convinced that
00:31:36
Speaker
there's any particular mode of thought or behavior or attitude or anything that you do as a human being in order to live and act in accordance with that nature and to allow it to develop. And you might also be inclined, as many people are now, to think that human beings can be perfected or that they can be somehow changed, that their nature is not
00:32:01
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think that's wrong. And I think that experience proves it is wrong. And it proves to me that there is one
00:32:17
Speaker
If I wanted to say one really good thing about science, it would be that it can now tell us more about human nature, I would argue, than was available to the ancients. And that instead of treating science as the solution to problems with
00:32:40
Speaker
problems with ourselves, or that seeing the limits in human nature that they must be somehow removed by science, then instead, it would be more probable to view it as a tool by which we learn more about ourselves and our limits, and therefore, ideally, more about how to live better and more virtuously. But that doesn't seem to be a popular viewpoint.
00:33:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think one always needs to be careful when making, using science as a tool for this sort of thing to delineate out what sorts of claims are descriptive, you know, just saying this is the way that humans are in particular ways as opposed to which one, the normative claims, you know, these are claims about how humans should be or what their proper function is.
00:33:33
Speaker
But it certainly is the case that when it comes to answers, like what is a good life, you need both a set of an understanding of the descriptive nature of humans, if you will, and then also these normative principles and ideas about how to realize that nature. So it should be, I mean, in theory, it should be a better discussion, or we should be able to address this later now.
00:34:03
Speaker
but it seems that we don't even try. Yeah. So that's been nice transition to the book is of course titled In Defense of Civilization, which suggests that civilization is being challenged perhaps by internal or external forces. What do you want to say or what any parts do you want to highlight about this challenge, existing challenge to civilization?
00:34:29
Speaker
Well, broadly speaking, I want to say something about what I think the challenge is. The challenge is that the sense of place and purpose in the world that human beings developed a long time ago, which led to that stability and permanence and so forth. First of all, it's all extremely fragile at the best of times.
00:34:55
Speaker
earliest civilizations were not long lived. Things like I described very early on, the Egyptian old thing, they must have seemed indestructible at the time, but even they just appeared.
Rebuilding civilizations through history
00:35:14
Speaker
In the case of Egypt, there was a middle kingdom and there was eventually a
00:35:22
Speaker
and you can get going, but there were collapses.
00:35:26
Speaker
In Mesopotamia, there were more frequent collapses. And I don't know what else you would call what happened in Europe in the middle of the 20th century. I mean, it was quite spectacular. There's horrific collapses there. You also have the Bronze Age collapse in 1177 BC. There are many examples that prove this idea of fragility.
00:35:56
Speaker
And we should not consider ourselves now to be somehow beyond that. The idea, the ideas or the attitude, whatever you want to call it, given our civilization, it can go away. And it has vanished.
00:36:13
Speaker
It has also come back, but sometimes it comes back after long Egypt. Sometimes there are, like the collapses are necessarily often horrific. There are plays, there are soil, salmonization, droughts, you know, all kinds of things to contend with. We still contend with, and we should never deceive ourselves into thinking that we are above these problems.
00:36:42
Speaker
Just think about COVID-19. The death toll of plague does not have to be astronomical in order for it to be disrupted and in order for it to produce quite bad dislocations and confusion, not to mention economic troubles or
00:37:04
Speaker
So imagine that compared to something like the Black Death probably killed off a third of the world's population. I mean, that's just like unimaginably worse. So put that into perspective and see that we're contending against really quite difficult things.
00:37:26
Speaker
So it's fragile, it's liable to go away, but it does come back. If it didn't come back, if it didn't have some kind of appeal and staying power, we never would have tried it again after the first collapse. So it does come back. How does it come back? It's essentially
00:37:48
Speaker
Hopefully, this doesn't seem too banal, but I think it does need to be reiterated sometimes. It comes back by imitating what came before. It comes back by re-establishing that link with the pounce that there were things that weren't before. Let's do them again. Let's imitate this other older thing because it were. That should seem fairly straightforward, but again, it is
00:38:16
Speaker
quite antithetical to contemporary notions of innovation and progress.
Challenges in modern Western civilization
00:38:22
Speaker
Innovation and progress did not give us civilization. If anything, they are somewhat liable to threaten it or to be sort of antithetical to it. They are liable to disrupt our sense of what worked in the past.
00:38:40
Speaker
reliable to suggest to us to look into the future for some new thing, rather than to be rooted rooted in the past with our connections to other persons and to place. So
00:39:02
Speaker
Again, I told you earlier, I'm not here to fly the flag for any particular group of people or a particular local expression or anything. But I do think that there is a problem in what we call Western civilization. And I think that the problem has been there for perhaps longer than most people would realize it.
00:39:26
Speaker
I'm inclined to over-simplify it and say something like, basically everything that your high school history teacher told you about the greatness of people like Galileo and Francis Bacon and companies wrong, that although we should not dismiss the idea that there are individuals of genius who discover new things and that's remarkable everything.
00:39:57
Speaker
the idea of a world that turns its back on the past, so to speak, and that suddenly becomes focused on things like extreme radical individualism, you know, these futuristic visions of future utopias and so forth. This originates with Europeans and
00:40:25
Speaker
It accelerates this, this future orientation, individualism, radical innovation, this sort of complex of ideas takes shape.
00:40:39
Speaker
at the end of the middle ages,
Critique of modern ideologies
00:40:40
Speaker
and there are figures, sort of ambivalent figures like Petrarch who sort of set it off and get this going. Practice Stoicism with Stoa. Stoa combines the ancient philosophy of Stoicism with meditation in a practical meditation app. It includes hundreds of hours of exercises, lessons, and conversations to help you live a happier life.
00:41:07
Speaker
Find it available for a free download in the Play Store and App Store. So there's always so much to talk about and it's hard to cover it all in a short conversation like this, but what I understand from that case is a number of points. One is that civilization is more fragile than we often spend our days going about realizing.
00:41:28
Speaker
all of this is much more contingent than is commonly thought. And they see again and again throughout history people being surprised that their civilization essentially, they, you know, they lived out their day in ordinary life and then one day they realize, oh no, my civilization is in decline or things have fallen apart.
00:41:48
Speaker
And that is one of the key themes that you touch on both just now and in your book. I'm not conciliate with Stoicism. Seneca has this line that you should hold fast to these three rules. Never give into adversity. It's a very common Stoic idea, but also never trust prosperity and treat fortune as if anything which he could will, will eventually come to pass.
00:42:13
Speaker
So this idea, I think, of contingency and not taking things for granted is an important one. And this other aspect that you pull out is this idea of many modern ideologies, philosophies, what have you, focus more on the subjective
00:42:31
Speaker
to the expense of having a whole picture that shared the offer's clarity order, both in the political, religious, and social sense. And that is, if not extremely detrimental, at least puts at risk our social nature in a way that many people are simply underrating.
00:42:52
Speaker
Yeah, that is exactly right. And I don't want to suggest, I mean, it's easy to catastrophize and to think that, you know, that contemporary decline and collapse would take the form of, you know, like,
00:43:08
Speaker
Italian peasants huddled in the ruins of the Forum, in a Roman Forum in 450 AD. I don't think that that's what contemporary collapse would necessarily look like, but I think that
00:43:24
Speaker
the expansion of technology has masked or somehow papered over, I think, a more serious social, intellectual, and philosophical decline, or at the very least, as you say, a growing confusion or disorder about
00:43:54
Speaker
our place in the world and that if we look if we expect you know like think of sort of like post-Roman Britons you know in the in the mythical age of Arthur there's sort of hoping that you know one you know today might be the day when the legions finally return back to Britain or say
00:44:17
Speaker
If that's our attitude to technology, or to the internet, or to somehow, you know, these, some of these technologies are going to tell us who we are, what we should do and where we block, it's not going to work. We have to, you know, we have to look somewhere else.
00:44:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think for a world that I'm somewhat familiar with in companies, you see that success can often lead to new challenges and sometimes end up resulting in a company. If you have it grow too fast, hire too many people, these sorts of things also apply to civilization. So of course, hiring more company growth can be exceptionally beneficial for a company, but it can also be harmful and carries with has its own risks. And I think at the even wider scale, technology comes with a number of benefits, but
00:45:03
Speaker
It comes with a number of costs, risks, of course, as well.
Learning from history to ensure continuity
00:45:08
Speaker
I mentioned this in the book. It's astounding how much people talk about the information age. I think that's kind of a silly word. We should be more specific as to what we mean by information. The proverbial
00:45:26
Speaker
know, the great library, Alexandria, whatever, I mean, it would be preposterous to say that it contained information, since more than we think we can be more specific. Granting that we live still in the information age, I mean, it's an astounding amount of learning from the past, wisdom, you know, whatever you want to call it, it's all available now. And it wasn't
00:45:52
Speaker
before, this should give us access to an astounding amount of intellectual sustenance that could make our lives better, that could make the world more civilized. But we don't tend to do that. There are very few of us do. The internet is
00:46:16
Speaker
other other pieces of technology are used to send videos, whatever it is that people.
00:46:24
Speaker
you know, do with them, which is not to say that nobody uses it for any particularly good purpose. I just think that we all, those of us who lived through the 90s, I think that we expected more than we have got less. Well, let's end on this question. What does one do in a state such as this? Do you have any general thoughts on how to push this sort of issue as an individual? I make a great deal.
00:46:52
Speaker
I put a great deal of emphasis in the book on this idea of sort of reconnecting with others, which is obviously shaped by the experience of lockdown, which is somewhere really quite
00:47:06
Speaker
quite severe and you know if you didn't have a family to live with say friends or something like you've very likely been entirely alone and I think that many of us are still suffering from that and it's you know we ought to bring ourselves together in more social ways rather than confining our interaction to online virtual meetings or
00:47:31
Speaker
shouting at each other on Twitter. I think that that would be a good place to start. Otherwise, the present moment, although I do think it is one of decline, it is also an opportunity
00:47:45
Speaker
I talk about this idea of telling truths, the game that had been forgotten, that there are some things that we got right the first time. There were some principles to life that we are now in a good position to realize that they were right all along. Having lived through the 20th century, which, you know,
00:48:10
Speaker
finally seems like it might be over. There's hardly a mode of sort or an outlook or some kind of revolutionary idea that was not trolling in the recent context. And they have practically all
00:48:28
Speaker
And this is what post-modernists meant when they talked about the skepticism for grand narratives or for meta-narratives. And for that part, they were right.
00:48:50
Speaker
most of the old ideas had failed. They had told us nothing about ourselves except what not to do. They had failed to usher in any kind of new utopia. They ended in murderous failures and horrific disasters and that they've got to go. They must be discarded and taken, if anything, taken as warnings for the future. So now is an opportunity, I think, to
00:49:17
Speaker
revisit what has worked in the past, what has made us civilize, what we have best succeeded at. And I think that there are lots of examples in the book that people might see some inspiration from. I am particularly
00:49:33
Speaker
enamored of what is still conventionally called the Islamic Golden Age. I see that as a great intellect triumph in favor of clarity and water far surpassing anything that I think we are far surpassing what we call the Enlightenment or the contemporary Carolingian.
00:49:56
Speaker
Renaissance, whatever. I think that there are a few movements that are quite as intellectually hefty and inspiring as that one. I'm also very much enamored of Confucianism. There's something akin to a Confucian revival going on in China right now, which is much needed after the upheavals of the 20th century. There's a very critical of China in the book.
00:50:25
Speaker
a China booster by any stretch of the imagination. But I think that there is something that we can learn with our own experience of upheaval and dislocation in the 20th century. If they can do it, so can we. Attending to history, just in a general sense,
00:50:44
Speaker
lot of people want to do this. I think a lot of people want to overemphasize the misery and the failures. There are many. I could not be the kind of person who says that civilization is prone to collapse and it's fragile, and yet also insists that it's only a story of triumph and success. It isn't. It is mostly a story of
00:51:09
Speaker
But we have always managed to pick up the pieces and to continue again so far. And we can do that again. It is also easy to overemphasize it as some kind of imaginary fiction, like Petron.
00:51:33
Speaker
seeing it clearly, looking at looking at as objectively as possible and trying to reorientate ourselves, I think that that is much needed. And I think that, you know, other upheavals are coming as they always have.
00:51:50
Speaker
and that we will need to have that grounding and stability that comes from past orientation if we're going to see our way through. The enemy, I can tell you again, I started this interview with a negative statement about what civilization is known, what I'm not saying, can end with another negative statement. The enemy is amnesia, forgetting the past, trying to bury it, trying to convince ourselves that, you know,
00:52:21
Speaker
Nothing good ever happened before and starting over from year zero. That is the end. You must avoid it. Excellent. On that note, I think we could wrap up the book is in defense of civilization gets only 250 pages. So if you're interested at all in this chat, I'd highly recommend checking it out. It's relatively short with an excellent number of pointers. So if you want to follow up on any of the points made here, there's a very good bibliography as well.
00:52:51
Speaker
Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me.