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The rebirth of the West, with Victor Davis Hanson
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Note: We had some minor sound issues in the first 10 minutes, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to edit out anything that Victor said. Stick with it. It’s worth it!
In some respects, the West is exhibiting similar symptoms to past civilizations that decayed, declined, or were completely wiped off the map. At the same time, there are green shoots that may point to a rebirth of the United States, and Western civilization more broadly.
To put our moment in a historical context, Will is joined by the inimitable Victor Davis Hanson. Victor's latest book is titled 'The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation.'
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Buy 'The End of Everything' here.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Fire at Will'
00:00:20
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will from The Spectator Australia, your safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston.
Will's Progressive Upbringing
00:00:30
Speaker
I was born a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was two when Francis Fukuyama penned The End of History. Like most 90s millennials, I grew up with this history marches forward, progress is inevitable mentality.
Historical Events and Civilization's Impermanence
00:00:46
Speaker
And the strange thing is, the big events of my lifetime, 9-11, the GFC, COVID, the ones that should have led me to question that mentality, haven't really done so. Intellectually, I understand that civilizations can fall, but I don't really feel it in my bones.
00:01:06
Speaker
She'll be right mate, as we say in Australia.
Lessons from 'The End of Everything'
00:01:09
Speaker
My returning guest today, Victor Davis Hanson was, I imagine, trying to speak to people like me in his wonderful new book, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation. The book explores how war wiped out for great civilizations, classical Thebes, Punic Carthage, Byzantine Constantinople, and the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan.
00:01:33
Speaker
But it's not just a story about the past. As Victor puts it, the old mentalities and delusions that doomed the Thebans, the Carthaginians, the Byzantines and the Aztecs are also still very much with us, especially the last thoughts of the slaughtered. It cannot happen here.
Ignorance's Danger in History
00:01:53
Speaker
Victor, welcome back to Far at Will.
00:01:56
Speaker
Thank you for having me again. Absolute delight as ever. I've picked out a couple of themes from the book that we can use to bounce between the past and the present. Let's start with that sense of ignorance that I perhaps embody. You start your chapter on Thebes by saying collective naivety can get a vulnerable people killed. What is the West collectively naive about today?
Moral Progress vs. Technological Advances
00:02:22
Speaker
Well, I think they have a self-delusional mentality that with this enormous increase in wealth and technology and the betterment of our material lives, that we have made similar progress morally or intellectually, and we haven't. I mean, there's a long parallel tradition that suggests that with technological or material progress comes moral regress. That was the theme in the classical world.
00:02:48
Speaker
We have all of these agents of destruction that the ancients never dreamed of, from bio to chemical to nuclear and maybe even to AI.
00:02:58
Speaker
And we think the United Nations or our great universities or our alliances or maybe just the intellectual temper of the globalized world would never allow them to be used.
War's Rarity and Denialism
00:03:09
Speaker
In fact, as I said in the blog, there's dozens of people almost monthly throughout the world who are threatening to annihilate their neighbors. Annihilation is very rare as a denouement to war. Additionally, it doesn't end in annihilation.
00:03:25
Speaker
It doesn't mean that it's not going to happen. In the past, one of the reasons it did happen was people deluded themselves into this thinking that no one would ever do that. The destroyers of civilization are not Genghis Khan or Tamerlane.
00:03:42
Speaker
that come through and destroy, they're more philosophical, they're intellectuals, they're people who think about Alexander the Great was the student of Aristotle or Scipio Melianus had Polybius the historian at his side when he destroyed Carthage. Mehmet was bragging that he had the largest library in the Islamic world at what would be Constantinople and what would be the new Islamic Constantinople.
Leadership's Naivety and Overconfidence
00:04:08
Speaker
So my point is that
00:04:10
Speaker
These people don't just belong in the past. They're with us. The situations are with us, and it's not unheard of that it can happen again if the same sequence of events occur.
00:04:22
Speaker
And they're prompted by naivete on the part of the targeted, misplaced belief in allies. The allies are always over the horizon. They wouldn't let this happen. We're too important. We are not in decline. We're still Constantinople of Justinian, or we're thieves of Antigone and Oedipus. So there's a lot of self-delusional mentalities. You can see it today, I think, in a lot of places in the United States, and the world at large, that we're not in decline when in fact we are.
Cultural Decay: Causes and Solutions
00:04:50
Speaker
Let's hone in on that sense of denialism and particularly around I think the cultural element here, the cultural malaise. So both the left and the right I think would acknowledge some level of cultural malaise in the United States, albeit they'd look at different symptoms and potentially different cures. To what extent was a cultural rot evident in the civilizations that eventually got conquered by some of those philosopher leaders that you just mentioned?
Cultural Decline: Past and Present
00:05:21
Speaker
We know that there was a resistance to military service. There were falling fertility rates, for example. And there were leaders who were more demagogic. They didn't apprise the population candidly of what the dangers they were in. They felt that they could get their tenure or their time as a leader would be uneventful the more that they diluted the population.
00:05:51
Speaker
So when you have firebrands and thieves that say that Alexander is probably dead, if he's not dead, he's only 21. He's just one of many claimants to the throne of his assassinated father, Philip. It's 300 miles from Macedon to here. He couldn't possibly be here in 10 days. We have the Spartans and the Athenians, the whole Peloponnese, that type of leadership rather than Alexander is a killer. We saw him at the Battle of Caranea. He will be here in 10 days.
00:06:20
Speaker
And he will wipe us out, so we better decide what we're going to do. If we're going to continue with this revolution and not come to terms, then we're going to have to not count on the help of allies, but make sure they're here. Otherwise, we're going to be wiped out.
Criticism of US Leadership
00:06:35
Speaker
That type of leadership is where, you know, in the United States, if you were to be analytical about it and you look at certain things that have happened the last three years strategically or
00:06:48
Speaker
in foreign affairs or military affairs and compare it to, say, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. I don't think anybody would say, we're going to get out of Afghanistan in 24 hours. We're going to leave our NATO allies there. We're going to abandon
00:07:03
Speaker
5,000 or 6,000 contractors, Americans. We're going to abandon 100,000 Afghans that helped us. We're going to abandon $50 billion into the hands of terrorists of sophisticated weapons. Or we're going to allow a Chinese balloon to conduct espionage over the continental United States and come up with excuse after excuse after excuse for seven days why we won't take it out. Or we're going to, in the Middle East,
00:07:33
Speaker
who appease our enemies, we're going to say the Houthis should not be declared terrorists. We got to get back in the Iran deal. Hamas deserves a resumption of foreign aid, etc. And when you start doing that, and we're doing that, and you combine that with a declining real defense budget adjusted for inflation and 40,000 Americans short,
00:07:57
Speaker
We've never had that before in the volunteer army of the last half century where we can't find 40,000 soldiers. And when you look at the people who are not joining by ethnic or gender or any sexual orientation category, we know who's not joining.
US Military Challenges
00:08:15
Speaker
They're white males of the lower and middle classes. And unfortunately for us, they die at twice their demographics in the population in godawful places like
00:08:26
Speaker
Afghanistan and Iraq. So that's the one demographic that likes combat and they join the military, they go into the Rangers, they go into the Marine Corps, and they die at twice their numbers. And yet those are the people that we target, as Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin did two years ago in congressional testimonies, is white rage, white privilege, white supremacists. We're going to investigate them. We're going to have DEI criteria for retention and promotion in the military.
00:08:55
Speaker
We're going to drum out 8,500 people even though they've had natural immunity if they don't want to get the mRNA double vaccinations and boosters. And then we find out after a quiet investigation that that was all rhetoric. There was no such evidence that such a cabal, but the result was we're now short. And so what are we doing now? We're running commercials all of a sudden the last month where people are jumping out of helicopters and running around with
00:09:22
Speaker
M4s as if they're combat soldiers. There's no more pregnant women in air suits or diversity discussions on our commercials because we're panicking and so we don't realize and then we're spending where the United States is borrowing on one trillion dollars every hundred days and It's
Economic Vulnerabilities
00:09:40
Speaker
really broke. It's sort of like Constantinople It's broke
00:09:44
Speaker
and it doesn't have the money to do a lot of things. We're just borrowing it on the idea that we're the safest place in the world so people will always invest here compared to the alternative and we'll use that money to borrow against it. That has a finite shelf.
00:10:00
Speaker
Yes, Neil Ferguson said something quite astute the other day. He said that any great power that is spending more as a percentage of their GDP on the interest on national debt than they're spending on defense won't be a great power for very long.
US vs. China: Military Perspectives
00:10:17
Speaker
And my understanding is that the interest on debt as a percentage of GDP for the US will overtake defense spending in 2024, which is quite scary. It's about $800 million.
00:10:28
Speaker
Yeah, extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary. The Chinese are building ships at five times rate that we are. And so we should be working with our allies. We should be coordinating more with the Australians, with the Philippines, with Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. All of us should be spending more weapons.
00:10:47
Speaker
on weapons, but the United States instead doesn't really believe, at least this administration doesn't, that China represents an existential threat. But if you think about it, there wouldn't be much to stop China from going into Taiwan or the Philippines, or even leveling ultimatum to your country.
00:11:09
Speaker
which is highly rich in resources but doesn't have a commiserate population of China. And so China looks at areas like that in the world. But I guess the denial is the most important idea.
Leadership Decline in the West
00:11:23
Speaker
We are not talking about this in the United States. Instead, we're doing what you see on television and all these campuses. And it's something that
00:11:31
Speaker
We don't have a leader who will say, I will try to balance the budget. I will increase defense spending. I will cut social spending where I find it's not necessary. I will ensure that we use all of our natural gas, our coal, our oil resources. I will look first. We have enormous precious metals for lithium. We're one of the biggest holders of natural lithium deposits in the world that we don't extract.
00:11:58
Speaker
We're looking for that type of leadership. We haven't found it. Let's go to leadership then, because this is something that I think about a lot. And I think about it in the context, not just of the US, but across the Anglosphere. If you look at Canada, if you look at Australia, if you look at the UK, if you look at the US, I think they all are led by weak leaders at the moment. And if you look at some of the great figures of, say, the not so distant past, the 1980s, the 1990s,
00:12:26
Speaker
In those same countries, you had people like Reagan, you had the Thatcher's, you had Hawke and Keating in Australia. A bit more recently, you had someone like a Stephen Harper in Canada. These are all substantial figures. My question would be, is this just an unfortunate bad truck for leadership across the West or are there systemic reasons that are leading to bad leaders being created and being promoted in these countries? Well, I mean,
00:12:55
Speaker
Because these are constitutional systems and they all share a strong democratic element, these leaders were all elected in supposedly transparent elections, so they must reflect in some part a changed demography.
Globalization's Impact
00:13:13
Speaker
And what is that? Well, one thing is under the auspices of globalization and all of these Anglosphere, English-speaking countries, there was an
00:13:24
Speaker
imbalance in how globalization affected the population, those that had, I would call them, marketable skills that could be Xeroxed abroad, the media, law, finance, high tech. They woke up and had these huge audiences of seven or eight billion people, and they became fabulously wealthy at a magnitude we'd never seen before.
00:13:48
Speaker
The people that were relying on muscular labor, and they tended to be more conservative. They didn't have advanced breeds. They had not been exposed to the university as much, if at all. Their labor was often Xeroxed, outsourced, offshore. And so there was a great disequilibrium. And then we had a justification that emerged that the chumps or the irredeemables or the clingers or the deplorables
00:14:16
Speaker
are not doing very well because they're not very bright or they're too illiberal, rather than they're necessary to build our buildings, to wire them, to plumb them, and they're vital.
00:14:29
Speaker
And so that was one thing. And then the West in this global utopianism, the wealthier the elites got, the more utopian they opened their borders. And so they didn't believe any longer in the melting pot. The old idea in Australia or Britain or the United States or Canada was if you want to come here to our country and enjoy a superior lifestyle and greater freedom and leave your illiberal homeland, and most of them are illiberal,
00:14:58
Speaker
then we're going to have a melting pot
Immigration Challenges
00:15:00
Speaker
idea. We're not a racist country. We're a multiracial country, but we're a single cultural country. So we're going to teach you civics. We're going to only let you in in numbers that we can fully integrate and assimilate. You're going to have to give up your tribal affiliations of your homeland. That was the idea and it worked. But when you let in people in such numbers,
00:15:22
Speaker
and the host had no confidence in its civilization, then we created in Germany and France, but especially in London and New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, large groups of unassimilated immigrants. And the left in these countries saw this as a good thing because they thought these people are from impoverished places, they'll need social, educational,
00:15:46
Speaker
housing, food supplements, entitlements, bigger government, more of us necessary to administer it. They can be easily addressed as victimized, they're poor, they've been oppressed by certain cosmic forces, and they are our new constituents for agendas that otherwise might not have a 51% constituency. And so there was a deliberate effort to destroy the borders and to change the demographics.
00:16:16
Speaker
globalization that
Universities and Ideological Shifts
00:16:18
Speaker
did a lot. And then I think finally, we got this notion that universities were essential to civilization. And they are in the STEM and sciences and some of the professional schools. But what we saw in the social sciences and humanities was a renunciation of disinterested empiricism and the idea that we in the university are smarter and more moral than everybody. And we're going to train millions of young people
00:16:47
Speaker
half the population and we can be biased and we'll teach them in certain dogmas ideologies because Australia or Canada or Britain or the United States are hopelessly reactionary as far as their churches, their corporations, their family structures and we in the university don't have to be balanced because we're going to offer an antithesis to that and turn out people.
Political Leadership Challenges
00:17:11
Speaker
And so the university created these arrogant and ignorant graduates
00:17:16
Speaker
And I'm speaking at a university like Stanford, where I work, speaking of it. And when you look at the decline in the students just in three or four years, there's no SAT requirement. We've got 1 third of all the students at Columbia are foreign students. We have a million foreign students in the United States. So these are the types of changes that create the types of leaders that you're talking about. And they reflect that. So Joe Biden,
00:17:45
Speaker
will not be a forceful leader because he feels he's going to lose the election unless he can appeal to 250,000 unassimilated Muslim voters in Michigan. Or he feels that if he breaks, if he, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, if he were to send in police earlier to stop this, then his constituents would vote him out of office. And unfortunately, the conservative element or the traditional element has not mastered
00:18:15
Speaker
a mechanism to address these challenges. They either do one of two things. In the United States, they drop out. They don't watch the Oscars. They don't watch the Tonys. They don't go to the NBA. They don't go to movies. They put their kids in charter schools or home schools.
Migration for Governance and Values
00:18:32
Speaker
And second, under our federal system, they move. So we're seeing about two million people to four million a year who are leaving California, Illinois and New York for Texas, Nevada.
00:18:45
Speaker
Florida, Wyoming, Idaho, red states that have traditional systems. But that's not going, and they're abandoning these institutions. So these universities and these blue states get bluer and bluer and bluer and more radical because of the demography. Here in California, we've lost over probably 15 million people in the last 30 years, and these were all the old Reagan, Pete Wilson voters.
00:19:10
Speaker
And they've been replaced mostly by immigrants. 27% of the resident population in California are immigrants. And they're not immigrants from Australia. They're immigrants from the poorest places in the world. And they come with demands that are satisfied by left-wing representatives, that they need massive health care, massive education, housing, legal, food, supplements. And so California is $75 billion short this year, and it's got
00:19:40
Speaker
13% tax rate on top of the federal rate. And it's about 40%, 35% of the people can't pay their power bills. So to address that, what is the state doing? It's saying that in addition to the energy you use, if you make over $150,000, we're going to add surcharges to your power bill. So we're really in a socialist system here in the United States, and we're not even aware of it. It's creeping up so insidiously.
00:20:09
Speaker
That insight that the right has a tendency just to withdraw from the culture is an interesting one.
Cultural Wars in the West
00:20:15
Speaker
It was Andrew Breitbart who famously said that politics is downstream of culture. I think this is something that the progressive or illiberal left understands to a much greater degree than the right.
00:20:28
Speaker
These sorts of culture wars that we're seeing in the US today, seeing across the West today, would someone in ancient Thebes or potentially ancient Rome, for example, recognize these types of culture wars or are they something which are quite unique to our times? No, they're not unique. The Romans had a word for it because they had a much greater degree of wealth because they had globalized what was then the known world from the Persian Gulf to Britain and all the way from
00:20:57
Speaker
basically northern Europe to the Atlas Mountains of Africa. 70 million people, a million square miles, all under one paradigm for 400 years of the empire.
00:21:10
Speaker
And they created enormous amounts of wealth. And with that, they had these words they use. One of them was luxus, which is, as we get luxury from it, but it's really an excess or surfeit of money. And they had these writers that did one of two things. They described it, Petronius' novel, the Saturicon, Artacidus, or Swetonius' historical descriptions of what luxus and money does to people, but generally, and Horace the poet as well.
Modern Decadence vs. Roman Luxus
00:21:39
Speaker
It's a very common theme. The emperor Augustus tried to stop it, but using autocratic methods. But the general idea was in the ancient world that once people have more money and more material possessions than they need, then a sort of decadence follows. And what are the symptoms of that decadence? And it's very strange. It's things like over emphasis on food or exotic food, exotic clothing,
00:22:09
Speaker
promiscuity, a decline in fertility, the importation of foreign cults and foreign gods, sexual ambiguity, transgenderism, all of that's in the satirical. And the idea that traditional values or inherited Roman values are something to be suspect. Another great theme is that people do not want to defend their country, so they hire out mercenaries. The Roman army
00:22:36
Speaker
should have been about 500,000, but it shrunk. It stayed pretty constant at 250,000. But increasingly, the people in it didn't speak Latin by the second century AD. So they were aware of what we're going through. And it's very hard to keep traditional Western values when the population is becoming wealthier and wealthier through technology and the exploitation of natural wealth.
00:23:04
Speaker
and especially when religion disappears. Or at least, I guess we'd call it deism. Even if you do not believe in a God, there used to be people who believed that religion was valuable for society.
00:23:17
Speaker
as you were speaking there and calling out some of the symptoms. I was just ticking them off in my mind, thinking, yes, I can see that. Yes, I can see that. I want to pick out one specifically, and that was declining fertility.
Fertility Rate Declines
00:23:29
Speaker
So there's been some stories lately of the declining birth rate in the West. It's now below the replacement rate. I've also seen stories about separate, well, related stories, I suppose, that Gen Z are having less sex than generations above them. What do you put down the
00:23:45
Speaker
declining fertility and those statistics down to in the US today. Yeah, well, we were as late as 2000. We were 2.1 of the native born population. Now we're 1.7. So we dropped precipitously. And that I think when you look at, you break down the demographics, it's across all income levels to some degree, but it's mostly the elite and mostly in blue states.
00:24:14
Speaker
And that is a result, I think, of greater attendance at the university and greater emphasis on alternatives to the traditional nuclear family. In other words, women have been told 55% of the university populations are women now, and some of the universities are 60%. And a lot of, when you get a highly educated female population and you have less educated males,
00:24:43
Speaker
And you have ideologies that suggest to the students that global warming, just to take one example, we're doomed anyway. As AOC said, I don't want to have children because of global warming. Or you're told that this is a pernicious society, it's exploitive, and all of your energies must be devoted to your own career or your material happiness or social change.
00:25:10
Speaker
But the idea at this state that you're highly educated or at least your degree, I'm not sure they're educated, but they've gone to university and they're going to stay up all night with two children and change diapers, the male and the female in a partnership. And then there's another element as well. We in the United States came up with this crazy idea that everybody should go to college and half the population does now. And we have a $2 trillion student loan program
00:25:40
Speaker
30% of which was in arrears. But my point is we have people who don't know what they want to do. And we're short millions of high paying employees in things like electricians, plumbers, drywall, construction, truck drivers. And they pay now much better than somebody with a BA in sociology. But the point I'm making is half of all the students
00:26:08
Speaker
who are on student loans do not graduate, and those who do do not graduate in four years. It takes six to seven on average. So what I'm saying is half the population has bought into this idea that they're going to go take these fuzzy majors and they're going to go into debt. And the result of it, it creates a prolonged adolescence in the West. So they put off getting married. The age of marriage has gone from 23 to 27.
00:26:37
Speaker
The age of childbearing for a first child has gone from about 26 to 31. The age of buying a home has gone from about 24, three decades ago, to over 35. They don't have the wherewithal. They owe student loans. They don't marry early. They don't have children. They don't buy homes.
Role of Religion in Society
00:26:58
Speaker
And yet we know that those are all the catalysts for stability and conservative traditional values in society, marriage, children, homeownership.
00:27:07
Speaker
But a whole generation, this whatever we call it, Gen Z, they're not doing that. And I think that explains a lot of the anger and frustrations. They're very unhappy people. We're seeing that on our campuses today. Let's pick out the religious element here because the decline in organized religion across the West has coincided with those trends that you just mentioned.
00:27:36
Speaker
Do you think you can have Judeo-Christian values and the types of conservative beliefs that you would advocate for without the actual deity, without the actual religions themselves? Or do you think that the actual religions of monotheistic religions are central to actually having the values that you think are important to a functioning society? Well, I don't think, I think there's lots of people
00:28:06
Speaker
who believe, let's just take the dominant, the once dominant, Christendom.
Religious Values in Daily Life
00:28:11
Speaker
They do believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. They have read the Bible, but they don't go to organized religious services. And yet, their lives are guided by that code as they see it. It doesn't mean that they're arrogant or narcissistic, that they can find their religion on their own, because they consult with people, but they don't
00:28:32
Speaker
So there's a lot of those people that come onto the radar that we don't count as devout. And then there's the people who go to church. And it does seem that, I know there's hypocrisies and the left points that out all the time. But when you look at stability, and what do I mean by stability? How could I define that? If you look at what Florida is doing versus California, and we had a debate between the two governors not long ago, on every single index,
00:29:02
Speaker
debt indebtedness, crime, test scores in college, ability to buy homes. Florida was way ahead. And then when you look at people's religion, I think you would argue that the government in Florida does not discourage religion or its local state in the way that California does. And California is much wealthier naturally. It has more gas, it has more oil, it has more farmland.
00:29:32
Speaker
It has a better climate than Florida, in the sense of growing things. It's the richest state in the union, yet it's now the most insolvent. And so why is that? I think a lot of it is this failure of the Enlightenment, this idea that if you go to college, you're going to acquire superior wisdom, and that's going to make you a better person. And that depends, A, on that you're really going to be taught the Enlightenment, which is not really
00:30:01
Speaker
taught anymore in universities, and the enlightenment that is taught is usually one that's antithetical to religious belief when not all enlightenment was. So I guess that's a windy answer to say I don't think it's really possible to have a moral code unless you have some sense of transcendence. I'm not going to tell you that Christianity is the only avenue to that transcendence, but when you have populations that believe that
00:30:28
Speaker
They're the only one, there's no duality that this is all I have and I'm going to enjoy myself right now and the behavior I have during my lifetime has nothing to do with what comes afterwards because there is nothing that comes afterwards. Not all people, but for many, some people find it liberating and they're wonderful people, but for the majority of people, there's a tendency to think this is all I have and I'm going to enjoy it as much as I can.
00:30:57
Speaker
And you lose that tragic sense. When you're saying that you're talking on a societal level, I would argue there are individuals that can certainly live by moral code in absence of religion. Yes, I do believe that. But I believe that for most people, religion is a very important auxiliary. And I think our founders that reflects a view of Hamilton and Jefferson and Washington and the rest, they believe
00:31:27
Speaker
Some of them were non-observant deists, and I meant that they did believe in God, but they weren't observant. But more importantly, they thought that the belief in a God was very important, but they did not want to mandate that. They did not want to require that. They wanted to have religious freedom because they'd seen the excesses in Europe. But what they came up with was a brilliant compromise where they encouraged, they used the word God in the Declaration,
00:31:56
Speaker
It's on our coinage. It's in our pledge of allegiance that came later. But they didn't require that. And they didn't, even though we're a Judeo-Christian country, they didn't require that. They welcomed religious freedom and they encouraged it. But they didn't demonize people who didn't believe in a hereafter or the divinity of Jesus Christ, for example. And they felt that there were so few people who could find that
00:32:24
Speaker
moral compass without religious observance or belief, but not very many. That was their conclusion. When people like us have this conversation, we generally default to Judaism or Christianity, the warm and comfortable Judeo-Christian values. To throw a spanner in the works, let's look at Islam and Islamism. Does the way that you approach this answer change through the lens of Islam relative to Christianity or Judaism?
Religious Incentives and Behavior
00:32:54
Speaker
Well, Christianity has, I mean, since when I read, when I was writing about Constantinople's last days, there was a myriad of sources in Byzantine Greek, Italian. I can't read Turkish, so I had to use translations, but it was, the incentives were very different because of the different religious experience. The Janissaries were offered virgins in heaven.
00:33:20
Speaker
if they could breach the wall and kill people. The Byzantines were offered penance that if they killed some person, then they promised to take a year or two of atonement for that. Those are very different incentives. Forget about whether the religious code or belief. And so Christianity has this, I don't want to call it a burden, but it has this idea of the Sermon on the Mount.
00:33:46
Speaker
Blessed are the poor, turn the other cheek, all of that. And that makes it a little bit hard when you're dealing with religions who don't believe in the Sermon on the Mount. And we can see that in the modern world with Islam and Christianity. And by that I mean, there's such an asymmetry.
Western Double Standards on Religion
00:34:05
Speaker
I'm not going to get into the dogma, but if somebody in New York burns a Bible, there's no danger. If somebody burns
00:34:16
Speaker
a quorum, he's endangered. And that's quite an astounding thing to think when the majority of people who are religious are Christian, much greater numbers in the United States than Muslim. But yet they will be much more in danger from a small minority than they would be from a majority.
00:34:34
Speaker
The same thing is true when you see, we had not too long ago in San Francisco, Gay Liberation Day, and I noticed that it was anti-religious. So there were mock crucifixions, there were Jesus Christ actors naked, they were on the cross, they were simulating sex acts. But I noticed that there was none at all of no such caricatures of Islam, maybe because they don't feel Islam's
00:34:59
Speaker
in their daily life, but I don't quite believe that. I don't know of a Christian author that suffered like Solomon Rushdie did. And so that's the problem. Everybody say, well, that's radical Islam. But when I look at the protest, for the most part here, when I see from the river to the sea and go back to Poland and death to America and on my campus, there are Jewish protests,
00:35:28
Speaker
They're not breaking the law. They're not screaming, I want to kill everybody in Gaza. So there's an asymmetry even there in the expression that I think reflects somewhat differences in religious attitudes.
Challenges of Integrating Islamic Immigrants
00:35:40
Speaker
And the West has a big problem because when you say that you believe in religious freedom and tolerance, and yet you have large numbers of people coming into your country in this very paradoxical fashion that they don't want to stay in their own country where there are
00:35:57
Speaker
their religion is dominant and they want to come somewhere where free market capitalism gives them greater prosperity and constitutional freedoms give them much more avenues of free expression and religion. And yet they bring a religious attitude that's contrary or antithetical to the very homeland that they arrive in. And then they arrive here and they say,
00:36:24
Speaker
You can't do this and you can't do that, and these are the ultimatum we're giving you about our religion. And then you ask, or they start to glorify their religion and their homeland, as we see in the United States the last three weeks. And you want to say to them, as I have said when I walk across campus and people come up and confront you, the Gaza camp was on my way to my office.
00:36:47
Speaker
You're yelling death to America. You're yelling from the river to the sea. If you're yelling all of these eliminationist chants, why are you here? I mean, we have almost 300,000 people from the Middle East. I said, you're all very affluent.
00:37:02
Speaker
because of Gulf money and you're on state scholarship. But if the United States is so bad and it's so decadent and it's so pro-Israel to take that, why don't you just go back to Jordan or Gaza or the West Bank? And when you say that, and that shows you how far we've gone in the West, they get very angry. They're not angry about the logic which they confess is
00:37:22
Speaker
condemns them to be irrational, but they're angry that any Westerner would dare say that because they're so acculturated to, I guess, whatever term you use, traditional Westerners, Christian Westerners, Westerners in general would never say that to them because either afraid of them or they feel it's passe to defend their civilization. But every time I've had a conversation with somebody from the Middle East in the last four or five months,
00:37:46
Speaker
and they've been very anti-American or anti-Israel, and you try to politely suggest you obviously wanted to leave Jordan, or you obviously wanted to leave Egypt, or you obviously wanted to leave Jericho to enjoy a paradigm here at Stanford. But once you got here, you're attacking the very paradigm that you want. So what do you want? And I guess the answer is we want all of the material
00:38:12
Speaker
benefits of the West and we want the freedoms for us as we define it, but we want to be intolerant and create enclaves of our homeland in the West. And that's, I know Westerners think, well, that's crazy because if they created a big enough enclave, it wouldn't be anything they'd want to immigrate to. And that's the point, isn't it? It's not just true of Islam. It's true. I live in a town that's 85% Mexican American.
00:38:39
Speaker
But it's not all Mexican-American. We're part of the dumping ground for busing from the border. So we have tens of thousands of people in Fresno County who have just come across illegally from Mexico. And they want to come here for a different paradigm economically, culturally, socially. I guess you would call it equality under the law.
00:39:01
Speaker
the end of racial prejudice of indigenous people they face in Mexico, free market capitalism, freedom of speech, freedom from the cartel. But when they don't integrate and they come in such numbers, they start to reproduce the very culture that they left. And so we have terrible gang violence in my hometown. I mean, my family's been here for 150 years, same house.
00:39:28
Speaker
And never in our lifetime did we hear gunshots every night as we hear now. And never did we have to go out with a pickup and pick up trash that people just come out in the country and throw trash on your property. Or never do we have problems with people who just drive into your orchard and say, we're going to have a picnic here or we're going to fornicate or we're going to inject.
00:39:52
Speaker
The West has this crisis where they can't establish any parameters of behavior for immigrants. They can't say, you came here. We don't want to go to your country. You want to come to ours. If you want to come to ours, these are the rules.
Assimilation Rules for Immigrants
00:40:05
Speaker
If you don't like the rules, then go back home. If I were to say that publicly at Stanford University, I would probably have to go before the academics.
00:40:15
Speaker
And I've already gone once with Neil and Scott Atlas. I don't want to go again. And that's the point. So I don't know. It's a paralysis of the West. I think it's not just in the United States. I've been to Australia and I've been all over Europe. I've been to every English-speaking country except South Africa and New Zealand. And from my experience, they all suffer in various degrees this Western Malay's.
00:40:40
Speaker
It's funny that you say that because what you've just said is a more eloquent and probably a more considered version of what a senator called Pauline Hanson, who probably is the equivalent of our Marjorie Taylor Greene, what she said to a far left politician a couple of years ago. She basically said in response to the far left senator,
00:41:02
Speaker
going on a rant about colonialism after the Queen died and saying, I'm not going to celebrate a racist colonialist Queen's death. The Senator said something along the lines of, if you don't like it here, why don't you piss off and pack your bags and go back to Pakistan, which is where she's from initially, which is a much more lewd framing of this point. These are sentiments which I shared and I go back to more and more these days, the paradox of tolerance and how
00:41:31
Speaker
The worst elements of a passive liberalism in a society like ours is that we are tolerating these intolerant behaviors.
Liberalism's Impact on Decline
00:41:40
Speaker
When I read the book, I was trying to think about those four civilizations that you go through
00:41:46
Speaker
and our civilization today, the Western civilization. And I was thinking about differences. And the obvious difference for me initially was nuclear weapons is a very big difference. But the second, and I actually thought by the end, the bigger difference arguably is liberalism. This is a liberal society compared to those civilizations. This is a difficult question, but do you think liberalism net on balance
00:42:11
Speaker
makes the decline of civilization for, say, the United States more or less likely? It's hard to know because there are two elements that are unique to the West.
Strengths of Western Critique and Morality
00:42:22
Speaker
One is the Judeo-Christian religious tradition of forgiveness, turn the cheek, blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor, non-violence. It's easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle for a rich man to go to heaven. All of that elevated morality
00:42:41
Speaker
that says whatever happens to you in this world is not as important as the next world, and not in the sense of don't smoke or drink or insult someone, profit or someone. It's how you conduct yourself in a kind of a forgiving manner. And when you combine that with the classical Roman and Greek tradition of self-criticism, I'm talking about the Socratic tradition, I'm talking about Euripides, I'm talking about Tacitus,
00:43:11
Speaker
where they were very hard. And that explains the beauty of the West, that it's so self-critical that it can adopt and change. It's the first society in history that ever eliminated slavery. When a person comes from Pakistan, there's still slaves in the Islamic world in certain places. But the British Empire outlawed it and outlawed the traffic in it. Nobody had ever done that before. So it's self-critical.
00:43:38
Speaker
And it has this unique religious background or foundation. But at the same time, when you combine free market capitalism, which creates enormous amounts of wealth with complete freedom of expression, freedom of activity, freedom of belief, and you remove the speed bumps or the blinders or the blink of family shame, community shame, religious shame,
00:44:06
Speaker
and you take those away, then you unleash this empowered, wealthy, free society, and they've always been subject to excess, and they implode.
Greek City-States Decline
00:44:17
Speaker
The Greek city-states implode. It does not have an answer for the autocracy of Alexander the Great, not because they have more Greeks and Macedonians. They created the phalanx, but he understood something that you're talking about that was prevalent in the Greek city-states.
00:44:35
Speaker
that they didn't believe anymore. And they've been very successful stopping a quarter million Persians in 480 BC when they believed. And yet 130 years later, they can't stop 30,000 Macedonian. And so that's the problem in the West. It's how do you enjoy freedom and prosperity without becoming
00:45:00
Speaker
self-hating, or idle, or suffering from lukesis. And the Romans and the Byzantines were able, through the use of religion, and they were a garrison state and hostile territory to survive for 1100 years. Pretty amazing, a thousand years after almost the fall of the Western Empire. And Rome Empire lasted 400 years beyond the 700 of the Republic, but they keep
00:45:29
Speaker
They dissolve and then they were reborn. They dissolve and they're reborn. They're dissolved and they're born. I think right now in the West, there's a dissolution, but there's also a recombination and rebirth.
Cultural Divide: Red vs. Blue States
00:45:41
Speaker
And I can see it when I travel to Texas or Idaho or Florida. And I'm not talking about a racial sense because they're increasingly multiracial, but I know a lot of Hispanics that are going to Texas. They're leaving California.
00:45:59
Speaker
I know a lot of black people that are leaving California for Florida. I even know some that are going to Idaho and Utah because they feel that these systems are, they're going back to an era before this enormous amount of wealth and decadence and license. So I don't know what the result of it is. I'm a little scared that we're creating two countries.
00:46:23
Speaker
If you from Australia were to come and you were to spend a month in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, and then you were to spend a month in Illinois, California, and New York, at least the cities, or blue cities, you would think you were in two different worlds. And that's probably true in parts of Sydney or Melbourne compared to the suburbs of rural Australia. It is. It's a trend that's playing out across
00:46:51
Speaker
the West, you have, and I think it is most pronounced in the US, but if you compare London to the rest of the UK, particularly the North, I think you'd see the same thing. Compare the coastal areas of Australia to the inland areas, again, you'd see the same thing. And that's why I was struggling a bit with the term
00:47:09
Speaker
rebirth because it's a rebirth in some areas, but it's also in some respects leading to the type of internal fissures, which you point to as a trend in the preconditions for the civilizations that end up getting destroyed in warfare. In the case studies you've looked at, they almost always are riven with internal fissures before that warfare happens. Yeah, absolutely.
00:47:33
Speaker
I'm very pessimistic for the blue model of the United States and therefore the United States in total because whatever's going on in Minneapolis or Chicago or Baltimore or San Francisco is not sustainable. They're letting criminals out without bail. They're broke. There's a million homeless people largely in these cities and they're not safe. They're not clean.
Pessimism on Blue States' Policies
00:48:00
Speaker
But when I look at the
00:48:02
Speaker
paradigm in rural areas or small town America are ironically south of the Mason-Dixon line, which we were always told was racist and illiberal. And yet you see a huge migration of black people away from Chicago back to the South. There's an article yesterday in the New York Post that said that Jews should all go to southern universities because there's no instance they know of of white spread anti-Semitism.
00:48:30
Speaker
In Vanderbilt, they stopped it pretty quickly. At University of Texas, when there were Middle Eastern students, they brought in the police the first day. And so I'm not pessimistic about red America. I'm pessimistic about blue America, but I'm also pessimistic how you reconcile the two. And I don't know where that's going to happen in the West, because I think there's going to be a lot of people in Europe and Britain and Australia and the United States and Canada are going to say, we're not going to go down that path. I'm sorry.
00:48:58
Speaker
Open borders will destroy this country. No bail will destroy this country. Racial tribalism, rather than content of our character, rather than the color of our skin, will destroy this country. See it. Huge, huge government mandates of outlawing combustible engines immediate. That will destroy the country. And the culture that you're promulgating will destroy it. You can't have men beating up women in volleyball and basketball as women. It doesn't work.
00:49:26
Speaker
I am pessimistic. I don't know how the two systems that are becoming more and more antithetical will be reconciled. It's almost as if we're back to 1855 in the United States. I hope that's not true. It's not a prognosis, but a fear. There are some cultural preconditions and economic and military preconditions that
00:49:49
Speaker
are prevalent in the US today, which were also prevalent in some of the civilizations, which were then conquered and wiped off the map. There are some differences as well. This leads me to my final question. It's a question I've been thinking a lot of recently. It's a question I first asked Dan Carlin when he was on this podcast, and it's lifted from his book. It went through my mind a bit when I was reading yours, and it is, do you think our civilization will ever fall and our cities will ever lie in ruins?
Urban Decline: Los Angeles
00:50:16
Speaker
And by that question, you mean not by annihilation, but just by slow erosion, so they're sort of abandoned?
00:50:26
Speaker
I think we're seeing that already. There are areas. I was in Los Angeles about four months ago, and 10 years ago, it was a renaissance downtown. Everybody made fun of Los Angeles because it was spread out. But over the last 50 years, they had actually built skyscrapers. It was vibrant. And so I said to someone, I have to go give a lecture in downtown Los Angeles at 3 o'clock. I hadn't been there in three years.
00:50:53
Speaker
And am I going to be able to drive? And they said, there's no traffic, Victor. What are you talking about? So I went in at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I just drove right in. I was valet parked. The person explained to me that if I parked on the side of the street, there's a good chance I'd be broken into. And that could either unlock my car and roll down the windows or go into a secure parking. It would cost a little bit more. And I did the latter.
00:51:23
Speaker
There were at least 10,000 homeless people up and down the boulevards. And there were people, most of the people, there were canteens or mobile people from different countries selling things. They had blankets on the sidewalk, but that was vibrant.
00:51:42
Speaker
All of these beautiful buildings, and the same is true, by the way, in San Francisco, they're vacant. And I guess the term we use here, you guys are aware of it, it's called a doom loop, where the more people that leave, the higher the taxes have to be to make up for the lost revenue, and then the more people leave. And the more homeless people you put, the more you have to tax, and the more that come, the more you give,
00:52:11
Speaker
free food and you excuse injection or defecation or urination, the more people come. And it requires a radical leader to stop that loop and we don't have them. And so, because everybody knows that if you're a politician, a Gavin Newsom or London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, and you were to do what you know is necessary, it would be kind of a sacrificial career you would have. They would call you such names that you would implode, even though
00:52:40
Speaker
He would probably be recognized decades later as a very great person, but nobody wants to do that. They're not tragic heroes. They just don't want to do that. And until we have them, I think that a lot of these cities are not going to recover, and they haven't recovered. And it's very depressing to see it happen.
00:53:03
Speaker
beautiful cities, and I think the same thing is happening with the universities that Stanford and Harvard and Yale and Princeton, they're going the way of Disney and Bud Light and CNN. A lot of people are saying if Stanford University has a racial quota of 20% white, and they do the last three years, and they don't require the SAT, and they don't comparatively judge your grade point average from high school by the quality of your high school,
00:53:31
Speaker
They're letting in students that by their own admission and prior protocol said wouldn't be able to do their work. And therefore, if you do it for three years and 75% of your student body was let in under these auspices, then you either have to inflate the grades, 80% are A's at Yale, 60% at Stanford, or you have to introduce new courses that are not
00:53:55
Speaker
demanding or you have to require far less work.
Decline in Elite Universities
00:53:58
Speaker
And the result is the employers now for the first time are starting to see Stanford graduates that they don't want to hire. The Wall Street Journal and others have had a new ranking of what they call the new Ivy League came out this week. And there are things like the University of Tennessee or state universities or Vanderbilt.
00:54:21
Speaker
But they tend to be in the South or they are their conservative state-run universities. And so getting back to your question, it's not at all impossible to see that even with a $60 billion endowment, you wouldn't want your child in five years to say they graduated from Harvard. Or as I was talking to a Stanford professor not too long ago, he said, you know,
00:54:44
Speaker
I talk to people in Silicon Valley that are hiring. If you hire a Stanford graduate, you get two things, mediocrity, and they go right to human resources and complain the day they come. And I much rather have a coder from Georgia Tech or Texas A&M because they're traditional, they come to work on time, they don't complain, and they're better trained and educated. That was an astounding admission.
00:55:08
Speaker
And so, yes, our downtowns and our major elite universities are eroding and they're in a doom loop. And I don't see how they're going to get out of it. And that's happening in blue state America and a lot of our institutions.
Stability of Red States
00:55:22
Speaker
But at the same time, what I meant by rebooting or vibrant, half the country is still the same. And the irony is that's the half the country that the rest of the world depends on.
00:55:34
Speaker
The rest of the world likes to talk about Blue State America's liberal and progressive and cosmopolitan. It's the place you want to go to eat, go to the theater in Hollywood, the corporate boardroom, academia. But that's not the part of America that when you get in trouble, somebody in America is going to say, you know what? If China threatens Australia again, we're going to ensure they're under the American nuclear umbrella. That is coming from Red State America, and that's what
00:56:04
Speaker
That's the irony, I think, about the Trump phenomenon, that he's so widely despised because of his crudity that people can't peel back and see that forcing NATO to rearm and telling people that he believes in Western civilization is actually what will save them if they're in extremis, even though they hate him for that very stance.
00:56:28
Speaker
Yes. Well, that's another timeless lesson that you need to have effective deterrence. And that is something for all his crudity that Trump does do. And it also speaks to what I think you do as a historian better than any other historian in the world, Victor. And that is you manage to connect the lessons of the past with what we see today. And your most recent book is a wonderful example of that. Thank you very much for writing it. And thank you again for taking the time to come on the show today. Well, thank you for having me, Will.