Latest / Thinking Class / #138 - Ricardo Duchesne - The Greatness And Ruin Of Western Civilisation

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#138 - Ricardo Duchesne - The Greatness And Ruin Of Western Civilisation · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to Ricardo Duchesne.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Ricardo is a historical sociologist, retired professor from the University of New Brunswick in Canada, and the author of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization and Greatness and Ruin.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Ricardo and I think out loud about what made the West so continuously innovative across thousands of years, from the Indo-European origins through Greece and Rome and on to the modern era, why the Faustian drive, which is the relentless urge to create, to discover, and to push beyond every known boundary, is unique to European civilization, why the very qualities that made the West great rationalism, individualism, and universalism actually contain the seeds of its own unraveling as a civilization.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: How liberal progressivism evolves logically from John Locke through to John Stuart Mill, and to the open borders multiculturalism of today, why capitalism and liberalism together have created a system that structurally resists reform, and whether civilizational recovery is possible, or whether we are witnessing an irreversible decline.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you value serious long-form conversations like this, then subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England, my documentary series retracing H.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: V.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Morton's 1927 journey to find out what is left of the old country and to see the evidence of the new England that has emerged since that time.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Episode one is live now on YouTube.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Ricardo Duchesne.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oswald Spengler wrote that civilizations are born, they flourish, and they die.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if you look around, you can see that the West is dying.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: I've spent many episodes testing that diagnosis with my guests against the historical evidence.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I have arrived at a position that's neither Spengler's fatalist approach nor the optimist's denial that the West is in crisis.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think the crisis is real, but I think civilizations have been built before, rebuilt before, from worse, perhaps by fewer people and from less.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And indeed, King Alfred the Great of England rebuilt Wessex from a marsh and that went on to create the unified nation of England.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: The Benedictines kept the furnace of civilization burning for five centuries.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the question isn't about whether recovery's possible, but whether anyone is willing to pick up the crown and rule accordingly.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Ricardo Duchesne joins me today, and he has written the most ambitious account of what the West achieved and why it is now destroying itself.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And today I want to understand both the greatness and the ruin to use Duchesne's book title of the West.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So Ricardo, what made the West so great?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well that that's a big question to start with.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because most academics are specialized.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: When you ask them that question, usually they take it to mean how did the West become the most powerful nation, or why did the West industrialize first, or why did it develop modern science?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: So there is that tendency to immediately narrow the question.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them don't even think that that makes it great, but um they identify the industrial revolution.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: They say this is the point at which the West diverges from the rest of the world.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you can see it's a very narrow question.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, the industrial revolution itself is a huge topic, it's a big transformation.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And when you start tracing the roots of that big transformation, you're going or have to go back in time through a long historical period.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: So it is, it is by itself a broad question.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that question usually connects to the rise of modern science, which is itself another big question.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't mean to imply that because they are specialized that uh they immediately narrow the question.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: It is still a very broad question.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: But in my case, when I somebody asked me what makes the West great, what makes it different, what makes it unique from early on when I started asking this question, and I did so, I would say, in a very earnest fashion, in a concerted fashion, around the late 1990s, and it was eventually what led me to produce my first book, which took me about 10 years to write, uh called The Uniqueness of Western Civilization.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And in that book, I do say that in my view, uh what makes the West different and unique is not the Industrial Revolution or the rise of modern science.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: These are important transformations, but there have been other major transformations, including the Renaissance, um, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and even smaller movements like Romanticism, um the German philosophical revolution uh of the starting in the 1700s all the way to Heidegger or Nietzsche or Hegel.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I took that very seriously as well.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the more I investigated what made the West great, I started realizing that the West has been on a different divergent path from very early on in its history.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I went all the way back to the Indo-Europeans, the prehistorical Indo-Europeans.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: So once you start thinking in those terms, once you start going so far back in time and asking what made the prehistorical Indo-Europeans such an expansive people, to the point that today most of the languages spoken in the world have Indo-European roots or are Indo-European languages.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um you you really have a big, big historical question that for specialists is something even ridiculous.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, many people, when I tell them, you know, I'm I'm studying the Indo Europeans now, and then after that I say, well, I'm also want to keep abreast of the debatable industrial revolution, the rise of modern science, uh, the Protestant Reformation, because the Protestant Reformation uh is also a major transformation in the sense that it is it is a point in which Christianity becomes very introspective.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it is about personal conscience and the individual deciding for himself uh why he believes what he believes uh as a Christian, so that you don't rely on a predetermined authority or a theologian or priest or hierarchy, church hierarchy to tell you those things.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: So for individuals like Hegel, it marks a point of um intellectual maturity that you're making that decision uh that I wish myself to read the Bible and to come to my own conclusions based on my own inner beliefs, beliefs that I struggled through and thought through.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it is an important transformation in in Western intellectual life.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um so when you're asking like this long-term historical question that goes through many transformations, um you're opening the debate in a very big, gigantic way.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh after the prehistorical in the Europeans, you have Greece, and Greece is a huge topic.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: So many people, when you enter that debate, uh and one of the things I do when I enter debates, um uh topics about which I'm not a specialist, is that I start identifying uh the major authors, the major theories and arguments.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I move into ancient Greece and I'm seeing that the debate there is um how come um geometry emerged in Greece and not in other civilizations?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Or theoretical mathematics?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh why is the concept of logos absent in other civilizations?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um is tragedy unique?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh tragedy as a literary form unique to Greece.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what about the police, the idea of a city-state in which you have a sizable proportion of the population that has citizenship rights?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: The very idea of citizenship is Greek in origins, and it means that you have this group, it was about one-third of the male population in Athens that were able to vote and participate and discuss political issues.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: So, why did that happen in ancient Greece?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: So, as you can see, that we can keep going that way.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Then into Rome.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, how come Rome had what some people call the first rational legal system?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh legal system in which you recognize uh the right of individuals to make contracts as individuals rather than drawing law from a tribal collective background or uh tribal norms and morals.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then of course Rome has other major uh uh achievements, whether it is in engineering, whether it is the fact that in my view it was the greatest empire ever created, um, and uh literature it has the silver age, the golden age of literature, the Latin language becoming one of the uh most sophisticated languages uh that influenced and was uh the language used by the intellectual elites all the way to um the 1600s, 1700s.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh everyone used uh Latin when they communicated the the the operate elites.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so it is a huge question what makes the West great.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: So, what I'm trying to get at is that for me, what makes the Great, I realize in the end, is that it is the one civilization that has a continuous sequence of novelties, big transformations, uh very original thinkers, philosophers, and then you can narrow it down as I did in Greatness and Ring.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, how come most great philosophers come from the European civilization?
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Most scientists, most architects, most painters.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, how come the novel as a literary form was invented in the 1700s in England?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now you can debate that and say no, it goes back uh to Cervantes, and uh and that's a good debate uh as to when exactly the novel emerge and what exactly is the novel.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: Then classical music, then musical instrument.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: I just wrote an article a few months ago uh about that.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: How come most musical instruments emerge in Europe?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you can see it's a big, big debate, and another one that I mention a lot is why is it that I sometimes say all but almost all the fields of knowledge that we now have in the universities.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: We don't need to mention everyone, but the basic ones that people know anthropology, archaeology, uh philosophy, geometry, history, psychology, economics, sociology, all those fields of knowledge originated out of Europe.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: So this is really big because you're really saying that what humanity knows, uh all the books that grew out of these disciplines, all the findings, the discoveries behind archaeology, the very study of Egypt.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: The Egyptians did not study their own history, their own archaeology.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: It was Europeans who went there and traced back that history and began to give it precise dating, precise epochs.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: And they did that for every area of the world.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: So most historians too come from Europe.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, history as a discipline goes back to Herodotus and Thucydides.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I have a long discussion in my book about that, what makes it historical, why is it different from the history you see in the Bible or the analytic history of China?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not as if the question is never either or, it's not as if uh China did not have historians, they had proto-historical works, but they remain very analytic, that is, chronologies.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they were not at the level of to see this even.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: To see this from the very opening pages of his book, The Peloponnesian War, tells you I want to understand why this war started, and I'm gonna attempt an explanation of this war.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the concept of explanation, of analysis of events, is there at a higher level of sophistication than you find it in the case of China.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you see, when you ask me, so what makes the West great, I'm saying, look, we are dealing with a lot of things that to me are unique to the West.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that history, by the way, is being suppressed, it will be eliminated.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Once if the West does become very diverse, and if the civilization is based on the notion that it has to be inclusive, and the students must feel as if they belong and they share and are part of that Western world that is now diverse, you're not gonna have the kind of historical account I gave you.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's just not gonna be allowed.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it isn't allowed anymore.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Western civilization used to be taught in many colleges across the United States, but that's no longer the case.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: It was eliminated by world history, a multicultural world history.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: And when you read accounts as to why that transpired, they said openly, because we need a multicultural history that is inclusive of other cultures and civilizations, we cannot have all our attention on the West.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And not only that, they began to reduce the West, the uniqueness of the West, to the fact that they went about in a very aggressive militaristic way with their gunpowder weapons, conquering and colonizing other peoples.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: So to many people that are not European, in fact, to many Europeans themselves, this is what makes the West unique.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that they were colonize the rest of the world.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: So what makes the West great, I think, is this incredible history of continuous transformations.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: When I say continuous, of course, I mean in relative terms, the acceleration starts in the modern era through the medieval period, you clearly have a slow down.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: But it isn't as if we're talking about dark ages, the moment uh the Roman Empire declines and all the German tribes come in.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's not what happens.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I argue in uniqueness of Western civilization that the Germanic um uh invasions and the way in which they went about uh capturing lands that were formerly part of the Roman Empire, um was itself a good transformation in that it rejuvenated the West.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Rome was already in a state of uh decline, stagnation, and orientalization.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was coming under the heavy influence of Oriental Eastern ideas, uh uh clearly in the case of its depotism, uh, because Rome was from the early on a republic, which is a unique form of government that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the Germanic invasions itself, I I think of them as a good uh transformation that rejuvenated the West and extended Western civilization into uh northern areas of Europe.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: So once you start thinking in those terms, um and realizing that yes, sometimes uh uh we have accelerations, particularly in the modern era, and then slowdowns, um, you're dealing with a very long time span.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it takes a lot of time to understand this.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you cannot become a specialist, you have to identify the big debates, the major authors, uh, read those very carefully, uh, read articles that surround those books and surround various aspects of these debates, and then you get a sense of what the West is.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it has to be a comprehensive look.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because we are so specialized, no one has this comprehensive view anymore, except people that write surveys.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there are some good surveys of Western civilization, but even those, they're not really asking the question what made the West great.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: They're just giving you a survey through a long time of Western history.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's how I would start answering that question.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's fascinating to get into the reasons for the continuous compounding of innovations that the West produced.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you listed a roll call there where you went through Greece and Rome, went through the Reformation, even smaller things like Romanticism.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it does appear, for those of us who are now more well-versed in multicultural history, because of the very social phenomena you've described, which is the more diverse a place becomes and the more we have to learn multicultural history, the more you learn about other other civilizations.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it does appear true that actually, when it comes to social, cultural, civilizational innovations, that the West produces so many.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you also make an interesting point about the rapid demographic diversification of Western societies and how and I'm sure there'll be some people who would disagree with this, that the the more that process continues, the less innovation you'll see, and the less likely Western civilization will reproduce.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: But it to me it appears to be an obvious conclusion, and I think multiculturalists should accept it too, because they themselves promote the very fact that people carry culture, and that's why they spend so much time promoting other cultures.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, they they would tacitly agree, even what it in what it is they promote, they just don't want to say it because there are many egalitarians who wish that everyone is kind of the same, and that really if you just put the same tools in front of people, the same ideas will be will be thought up, the same practical inventions will be created.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the anthropology uh is is often overlooked.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I I suppose besides where we might go with what is re Western civilization going to reproduce in a demographically diverse future, let's continue to think about the things that made the West so or Western people so likely to be so innovative.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you make the case that it was a unique ability for Western people to think about thinking.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: That it's not a it's not just um doing stuff.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just being in a collective, but as you mentioned about the Reformation, though this came up long before, it was the capacity.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: To think about one's own thinking and to interrogate one's own assumptions and to find the ground truth in reason.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh could you explain why?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And this is considering how someone might challenge it you, so an egalitarian who would say there are similar things within China, India, the Middle East, and these are equivalent, would you be able to explain why the West its notion of consciousness and second order thinking and the way it produces things is categorically different from what happened in these civilizations?
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, so once I unify the question of what makes the West different, and I realized that it is something that includes uh many fields, uh many types of achievements, uh great philosophical works, scientists, literary works, paintings, music.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: Once I started thinking along those lines, and that it happened across a long time span, um, I then asked myself, so what could be the common principle that runs through all these things?
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And um I came to the conclusion and I started sort of reaching this idea a few years ago, but in my book, Greatness and Ruin, is what I articulated in the very first chapter in a more precise, developed way.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I started uh realizing that what made the West different and allowed for this immense creativity, um, of course, there there are precedents, anticipations, and I do get into that among the prehistorical Indian Europeans, but I'm sort of gonna give uh uh uh an explanation that identifies this aspect of Western difference as it existed around ancient Greece.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think around ancient Greek times, um what you see is what someone like Brunos Neil identifies as the discovery of the mind, uh, and what others identify as uh the emergence of a self-conscious human being as Hegel would put it.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: So there were people who were saying these things, they just don't you tied up all the dots together.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so what do they mean by that?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um it means that around ancient Greek times you can see a growing awareness that human beings have a mind, uh, that it is located in the brain, and that that mind is the agent of our thoughts, and that we can think through it, and by thinking through it and relying on it as we think, we can create values, concepts, theorems, ideas that come from that mind.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: So to me, you see there um um an awareness that we human beings, the eye can be the agent of his own norms and thoughts.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: In the past, if you look at kinship societies which dominated humanity for thousands of years, uh their values, their norms were predetermined by um kinship relationships.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they were taken as given as granted as part of the way things are, so that uh you marry this person, um this is mandated from our forefathers, this is the way they acted, these are the thoughts they had.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the mind was very mythological at that point.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, people didn't even identify the mind as a faculty that is unique in itself and separate from other things.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: The Chinese, throughout their history, had no concept of the mind that was separate from the heart.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: They couldn't quite separate the one from the other.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: You can see it in Homer's epics in the Iliad, that although I argue in chapter 2 that it is in Homer's Ilya that you see an incipient emergence of this eye that begins to deliberate and to kind of be aware that there is a kind of a capacity to think and deliberate.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: In the case of Adiya, it's still kind of mesh with other attributes of the body, so that's it.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um your body and and how the body gets all emotional and agitated when things happen, and they think that that's the source of our thoughts, uh the psyche, is the pulsating body, uh, or uh the anger and agitation that you have, uh, and you sweat and you you breathe hard and your heart pounds, and they start thinking that that's sort of what the mind or where the thoughts come from.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so but when you get to the Odyssey, you have a character in Odysseus who is more deliberative, more sought for than Achilles, and is someone who is beginning to differentiate uh the passions and the instincts uh from his thinking self.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so this this it develops with greater sophistication with the presocratics, the presocratics distinctively identified logos and news, and those things are mental products.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: And they in the case of Heraclitus, for example, he sees um logos both within himself in the ability to reason, and then that there is a logos in the world, a kind of um a rational order and patterns that your thinking mind can apprehend.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: And this is something that I spent considerable time going through various pre-Socratic thinkers, and then by the time you get to Aristotle, you have a very clear self-awareness of the thinking mind to the point that he develops a full logic on that basis.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: That is the the basic methodology that he offers for rightful thinking and correct thinking are those things that the mind approves of and that are non-contradictory, that are logically consistent, so that they are consistent with the demands of reason.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so to me, and and there's also the the discovery of selfhood, a sense that you're an eye that can be distinguished from the collective body of your tribe, that can be distinguished from, as I was just saying before, from your body as an external thing that has instincts and appetitive drives and that may overwhelm you and control you, but the eye can sort of start separating itself from that.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so um you can find this in literature as well, uh, where you see creativity is associated with your sense that you can become a poet that can think about what is valuable for you and as a poet, how you would like to express yourself in an original way rather than just simply repeating the poetical forms of the past, and you see it in architecture, and then you see it in sculpture among the Greeks.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the sculpture of the Greeks, um, you have a very idealized but also individualized human being uh that they cherish and value uh as being um of having immense potentiality for perfection.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and this is something the the word humanitas comes from that the idea that the human being is not created or pre-given, but is full of potentialities that may be developed through a proper education, uh through that development of your inner self and your inner talents, you can achieve higher perfection.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: This is there in Plato uh of rising upwards and upwards.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh all of these things is very complicated.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: You really have to go carefully.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: So, another point too that I emphasize is that if you look at Darwinian theory and evolutionary theory, they have this presumption that our ability to think and to have an eye and sense of selfhood are rooted in our evolutionary history.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I reject that.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: I do say of course you have this as a necessary precondition, but um human beings were not self-aware of themselves the moment they become Homo sapiens, uh say 200,000 years ago, a hundred thousand years ago, and I carefully go through various stages in the evolution of human beings showing that yes, you can see an increasing sensory sophistication, primates have a higher order of instinctive reactions uh than do uh uh uh lesser evolved mammals or reptiles and uh among human beings from Australopithecins to Homo sapiens, uh you have increasing sophistication uh in the making of tools, in ability to think and all of that, but that doesn't mean that once even once you get to civilizations, it doesn't mean that once you have a full-blown civilization like Egypt and Mesopotamia, that you have um human beings that are equally self-conscious.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that of course uh brings to another topic, which is the axial age, which I don't need to get into right now, but um, yeah, so I would say that in my argument, the development of a sinking eye uh that is introspective and consciously so sinks back into himself and knows that the origins of his thoughts, his feelings can be determined by that sinking feeling self rather than coming from the outside and influencing the person.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to press a little on the definition, I suppose, of the West.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: So when we're talking about it, I think we're largely talking about it with regards to the European nations and then the new world in which they they populated.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's probably the fairest way to describe the West.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: I know some people throw Japan and South Korea and others that we are aligned with on the uh international stage into that definition as well, but that's not what we're working with today.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: So is the West in the European sense of the word one thing?
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: So for example, within North and South Europe you see differences within those civilizations.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, the English common law is very different from Roman law, Napoleonic Code.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose you've got Scandinavian social democracy and Mediterranean clientelism.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the Protestant work ethic is different from the Catholic sacramental imagination.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the Industrial Revolution, at least this might be my mind, uh shaped by all of the Professor Alan McFarlane work on English anthropology that I've done, but the Industrial Revolution was something that was downstream of an English culture that had been around for a long time and that was expressed in property laws and various cultural outputs.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I suppose when you're speaking of Western exceptionalism, like the self-reflective individualism, the aristocratic egalitarian ethos, the Faustian drive, even, is this Europe equally, do you think?
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you think this is a phenomena that is more concentrated in the the northwest?
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a a north-south gradient within Western civilization itself?
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Is the question.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, if you read Charles Murray's uh human achievement or accomplishments, um he concentrates primarily primarily on the northwest part of Europe, and he also concentrates because he concentrates on human or European achievements uh after about 1400 in the mod of the modern era.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: So in the modern era there is a chief uh uh uh in the European map of achievement or geography of achievements, uh so that it is really France, North France, or just France generally, uh the Netherlands, England, um Belgium, possibly the Switzerland, and then Germany, uh the Western side of Germany.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that region uh forges ahead as as the center of modern Western civilization, and then the United States, of course, begins to take off uh in the mid-18th century.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so but I don't accept that narrowing of achievements to the modern era.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Charles Miller also concentrates a lot on science.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: To him, achievements are primarily scientific, even though he mentions painting and art, his main preoccupation is on science and technology.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um the other thing about Charles Muir is that he's a psychologist, so he he individuates, individualizes these achievements.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: He thinks that just mentioning names is good enough to understand what is happening.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: He wants to rank uh uh uh scientists and things like that.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, whereas I I I of course psychologists have something to contribute, but from what I said in my first answer to your question, um to me, the West, the greatness of the West is is can only be understood in a multidisciplinary way, going way back to prehistorical times.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: So you're not gonna be able to just take a psychological approach to understand the West.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: You need an archaeological, anthropological, historical, sociological approach and other approaches to fully capture this greatness across time.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, no, the northwestern Europe is not the center of Western civilization because it was at one point it was Greece.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: And Greece held that torch for the longest time.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: People don't realize that ancient Greece uh is with let's say we start with the pre-Socratics.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you're talking about 1600, not 1600, I mean uh 600 uh B uh BC, uh uh 500, 400, 300, and then already we're saying 200, you're moving into the Hellenistic era, and the Hellenistic era is an era of major scientific achievements.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh this is where you see uh people like Archimedes, Ptolemy, um, and other scientists.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I mentioned there, uh that some people think that um theoretical science began with the Hellenistic Greeks.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is Euclid, the era of Euclid, and you have great other great uh mathematicians uh and engineers, uh people that engage in theoretical engineering.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then the Greeks were also responsible for transforming Christianity into a theology, and Byzantium played a big role here because it was the Greeks in Byzantium.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: Then the Greeks also educated the Romans.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: So you can see this incredible background history that someone like Charles Murray just completely ignores, in part because he's thinking of science, modern science and technology, and that's where his focus is, and in terms of individuals.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: So then comes Rome, a long epoch.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the another thing that Charles Murray misses is that he concentrates just purely on intellectual achievements or artistic achievements that are peaceful, that are bookish, and that you can look at in a library, and and you know, uh academic thing they tend to think that the achievements of humans are invariably peaceful achievements.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're about books, about paintings and architecture.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas I think they're also about conquests and conquerors, and expansionary drives.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you cannot ignore the incredible expansion of the Roman Empire.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: Without the Roman Empire, unifying the Greek world because they get educated by the Greeks, but then they themselves take off and have an identity of their own and develop their own Latin language, which acquires increasing sophistication, and they pass that on to Europe.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: And uh by uh with Julius Caesar conquering the um Celtic world fully and transmitting then the Roman Greek achievements onto that world, they elevate them.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and and then he moves slightly into the Germanic world or other uh uh Roman uh uh conquerors.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: So to me that's also part of the achievement and the medieval era as well.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: This is where you see invention of universities, the scholastic method, uh new theories of motion are emerging that anticipate Galileo, um and in architecture, Romanesque architecture, and then Gothic architecture, uh totally noble ways of doing architecture.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and universities are an incredible invention uh of the Europeans that and that happens in the Middle Ages.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: So um, and this is France is playing a big role here in Italy too.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I say, well, Greece was very important, uh uh, but so was uh Rome, but then Italy, through the the Renaissance and not the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, but Italy is at the forefront right up until the Renaissance.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost like a second epoch of achievements.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: But France is beginning to become the center in the high Middle Ages, uh playing a very big role.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: And once you get into France, you're moving into northern Europe.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: And England at this point also begins to show signs of high in uh high culture.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh, but they're interconnected, they are now beginning to learn from each other.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of traveling among intellectuals or book exchanges or the exchanges of manuscripts.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we see emerging a common culture, and Christianity plays a big role in holding this together.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: The concept of Christendom holds it all together.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: Christianity is also a very important aspect of the European uniqueness, it plays a big role.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and this when we were talking before about the notion of an I, uh, Christianity's idea of a personal conscious is connected to that.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: This is where it is the only religion that really begins to emphasize that uh what a person inwardly accepts to be true and true for themselves is crucial to being religious.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ has this idea, this is why he rejects.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: What he calls the Judaic rule-oriented religion, in which it's just rules that you follow.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: He's looking inwardly to make the religion a more inward experience.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: But you need the Protestant Reformation to let this come into full bloom.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: And liberalism, the concept of freedom of conscience, is rooted in Protestantism.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: So the liberalism, which plays a central role in European history, and as you were mentioning, it has deep roots in the northern western side of Europe.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's still very deeply rooted in Christianity and then in Protestantism.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: But prior to that, Germany had forced uh forward.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: In the 1700s, um uh Germany begins to be the center of philosophical reflection, and then by the time you get into the 1800s, I mean you have uh musicians of the highest order coming from Germany.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh then you have uh scientists in whatever field you want to mention.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: The Germans are very prominent.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: Then the British, of course, as you said, they're at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so in that regard, they're at the forefront in engineering, in the application of science to to making tools, they're at the forefront.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: But that that they begin to be superseded by the Germans after about the 1850s, uh you start seeing the Germans becoming, and uh the German, many of them migrate into the United States and they play a big role there in making also the United States a center of scientific investigations.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then you say, well, what about uh say Spain, for example, where they sort of left out, and well, no, Spain had a golden age um that lasted from around let us say roughly very early 1500s, uh uh towards mid-1600s.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there is the golden age of Spain, incredible writers, Cervantes, Calderon de la Barca, uh, and others.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so these um and architects and musicians and conquerors, incredible men, Pizarro, Hernando Cortes, who go about uh uh conquering large areas of the world.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: To me, these are achievements.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: When you look at these personalities, these characters, you're examining great men, and then also there were great discoverers.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: Most of the discoverers of the 1500s are Portuguese and Spaniards, and the Portuguese themselves were the ones who rounded Africa, so they play a big role at that point in time, rounding the whole of Africa.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody knew what was in the southern tip of Africa, it was called Terra Incognita, and they as they're going down, they're not just in a half-hazard, happy go rocky just going down, they are systematic, they are systematically going down and mapping the areas, and then they move into the Indian Ocean and they create their own empire.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: So the age of glory of Portugal is that age, and they produce many great explorers.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then once the the Dutch and the French uh and the English and others see what the Spaniards and the Portuguese have done, they jump in right away and they produce many great discoveries.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: And when you're talking about discoveries, not just uh the typical conquistador discoveries of the 15th and 1600s, eventually you have people like um uh Captain Cook or the British guy who some think as the really greatest discoverer of all.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then you have people that move into Antarctica and begin to move in there and on the Arctic region, and then people who climb the highest mountains, who cross the longest deserts, uh so they're discoveries in all directions and of all types.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: All the civilizations are not doing this, they're just not discovering anything.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: A bit around there.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: The whole world was mapped by the Europeans.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: Cartography is a creation of Europeans.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, they are untested.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: The Chinese, they're always the Chinese are always there, but it's kind of very um uh it remains undeveloped and very parochial in many ways.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: They just kind of map China and a bit around, but they were not interested.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: Potelemy's worldly conception remained of a higher level than that of the Chinese in the modern era, before the Europeans come in and show them a world map.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: So this is what I mean.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's happening in so many directions, and you have to be aware of all of this.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that sometimes I speak in generality, some people might say, and if I want to be more specific, I I need to slow down and have the notes because I am all over the place.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I have to keep up.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I do keep up, like even after I wrote Greatness and Green, I started reading about the Arctic Explorers more.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, because I think it it is fascinating to read about the uh Robert Scott, what happened to him, and uh Mundsen, and the drive to who gets to the center of Antarctica.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I have excellent documentaries you can find on YouTube about this.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so yeah, so there are many, many dimensions.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's a non-stop intellectual experience, really.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: The Faustian drive, which we've spoken about, this idea to always create, to push more, to break boundaries.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: As you've mentioned, it was very closely tethered to the Christian religion, and it led us to create some of the greatest architectural glories, hence all the lovely cathedrals, magnificent and awesome in their presence all over Europe and indeed the New World, once European populations are planted there.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm wondering whether we turn the conversation towards the ruin that the West is facing, and whether the ruin comes from the same seeds as its success, which is that Faustian drive, which now is becoming um untethered from the very uh cultural products and artifacts and people even that that made it great and made great things.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: And now that some of the uh products of not necessarily just the Christian faith, but the Western mind, self-criticism, universalism, the uh dalliance with pluralism that came out of liberalism, uh which is morphing into moral relativism, which is kind of morphing into nihilism, but this overly self-reflective mind thinking that we cannot in the modern world talk about anything superior, that anything the West might as have achieved has been achieved through uh ill means.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm wondering whether the West is now becoming destroyed by its own highest quality, that of thinking about thinking self-criticism, universalism, and have it having been untethered from all of the things, all of the ideas, all of the people even that made the West great.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: So d do you think that this is a this is what we are seeing, um, that it's structural, it's almost built into the civilizational DNA, or do you think it's something else?
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's why uh the title of the book is Greatness and Ruin, and the two are connected.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the greatness of the West laid the conditions for excluding uh ethnocidal tendencies.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it's hard for people to understand that because the the inclination of people is to think something is great and it's great in and of itself, and then you have the opposite as not being great.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: So how can they be intimately connected?
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: How could I have connected the two?
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I do this right from the opening paragraph or opening introduction, it's all about that of the book.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but in the very opening paragraph, I said that the explanation I have here as to what made the West um so unique is also the explanation what leads the West eventually to this security society of the past.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: Now you have to be historical in the way you comprehend this.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and this is something that people also have a hard time understanding.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um so rationalism, uh the idea that reason must be the basis for your claims to truth, and that you can both use deductive reasoning and or mathematical reasoning and also empirical, evidence-based reasoning, and that when you do that, uh you have a proper methodology and you can make claims to truth.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not as if the moment you have this, you have the ruin of the West.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't work that way.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, rationalism has a history, and so does individualism.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: So the individualism you see in Renaissance Italy is not the individualism that you're gonna see among the Romantics, and it's not the individualism that you see articulated in the Roman, in not the Roman, the American Declaration of Independence, or that you see in John Locke.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_01: These things are evolving through time and their meanings are changing.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so um so if the individualism that you see in Renaissance times, you can say that what you see is an incredible uh um flowering of very creative artistic individuals who are consciously competing with each other.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: Leonardo, da Vinci, you know, is aware of what Rafael is accomplishing, and they're aware of what others are accomplishing, and so on, Michelangelo, and they compete, and they're in that sense they're quite individualistic, and they're aware of themselves as the originators of their art, uh, and they want to be original.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it isn't as if that individualism is responsible for the ruin that individualism per se.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: Individualism takes many uh uh uh characteristics depending on what discipline you're approaching it from and at what point in history are you looking at it.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: So today we have an individualism that is not the same that John Locke was talking about, but nevertheless, uh in in John Locke, as I argued in the last chapter of the book, you can see uh uh the beginnings of um uh pluralism, and actually once you have pluralism, you have multiculturalism coming out of that.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um so what do I mean by that?
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well John Locke um says that the state should not enforce religion upon its citizens, uh that there should be tolerance, and that's part of what I was saying before, that it is for the individual to decide on such crucial questions what it is that they wish to believe.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_01: You can't not mandate religious beliefs.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: Nevertheless, he he still doesn't want the Catholics to be given religious freedom because he he he isn't fully pluralistic, but he laid the principles there.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then this is articulated in the 1688 uh uh British Revolution, the Glorious Revolution.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it is also connected to uh political liberty that uh the state should allow for um individuals who educate, have property, all kinds of qualifications to elect representatives and to participate in politics and express themselves and choose the government they wish to have.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is part of maturity in thinking.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um but this begins to this individualism uh progressively develops.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: So uh first of all, they start extending who can participate in politics.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's first there are all kinds of property qualifications, and eventually they say, well, really, if if you're gonna follow through with John Locke's principle of equality of liberty, liberty for individuals as individuals because they have dignity and they're human beings and they should make their own decisions.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: Why are you excluding so many other human beings?
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh why not allow the working class as well to have the vote?
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is the argument.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then from there, why not women?
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then from there, why not those who are different from us, the minorities who have a different ethnicity or race?
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then eventually, why should the state mandate a culture?
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: This is the argument of multiculturalists in the mid-20th century into the 60s and 70s.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: They're basically saying, why should the state say that Canada or the United States is a Christian nation, or that it is a nation rooted in Anglo-Protestantism, or that it is a Western culture.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: It should be multicultural.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: Let the individuals decide what they wish their culture to be, what customs, norms they should follow.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: And since we want immigrants, we are here, capitalism is another factor that has to be taken into account.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: Capitalism and liberalism are intertwined, you know, private property rights, the right to engage in contracts, the right to be a business person and to earn what you earn from those business activities, right?
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the state controlling and taking your wealth.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: So at that point, then they're talking about bringing immigrants and so on.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now that leads into a whole other debate.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, something that I'm investigating in more detail right now.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um like I have another slightly different theory from the one that I expressed in the last chapter.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: In the last chapter of the book, my focus is primarily on liberalism and is progressivism, with some references to capitalism.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_01: But now I'm looking deeper into capitalism and making a distinction between Fordism and post-Fordism.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I believe that post-Fordism is a type of capitalism highly globalized, looks for flexible labor.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and in itself, I mean, capitalism has uh it does it it if you see it in economic theory, it is not interested in ethnicities and cultural identity.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: It only looks at producers and consumers in abstract, and human beings are interchangeable.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is why in societies like China and Japan, the the state tries to put a tight lead on this capitalist to tell them that's how you think, but no, we don't think that way.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_01: The state, the political realm, is in charge of sustaining the Japanese national identity or the Chinese identity.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we're not gonna allow you to just globalize the nation the way the West has, but the West is very liberal.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so uh this increasing progressivism of liberalism um and uh combined with capitalism, moving from forgiven to post forism has led us to this uh ruin-like situation.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you can also talk about universalism.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um to think in universal terms is inherent to science.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_01: So this is why science was accepted by other civilizations.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: They said, yes, this is a method that either you follow it as it is prescribed in these books, or you you don't follow it, and you cannot create the technology we want.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it is irrespective of any culture, of any race.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: It is the method, it's a universal method.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: There is one mathematics, there is one geometry, there is one empirical way of gathering data.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um so they accepted that, but even liberalism is also very universal in its principles.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_01: It always talks about uh uh equality of rights for the individual as an individual.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_01: In England, at first, and this is something that Edmund Burgh brings out, at first, it is the liberties of the British people as a British people.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_01: But once you start talking about equality and liberty and of individuals as contract theory does, because in contract theory is these individuals, as human beings reach a consensus that they wish to be ruled by this government and they wish these rights to be protected as individuals, you move into the realm of universalism.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you know, this brings the debate that people keep debating over the United States.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_01: Was the United States founded as a propositional nation, as a nation based on universal propositions that apply to all human beings equally?
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: Was it not a nation created by a specific ethnic group with a specific religion who happened to have been racist by our standard?
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that behind the United States, or is it these abstract propositional values?
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: And my view is that these two views you can hold them, they're compatible.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_01: When at X they keep going back and forth, they just don't realize they're compatible because it is true, yes, they were British primarily, they were Christians, they were their education was rooted in Roman republicanism and Greek philosophy.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and they were, you know, as I said, Christian, Protestant primarily.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_01: So uh these are the people that founded the United States.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_01: Nevertheless, there's no question that what they laid down, they laid it down in universal terms, as applying to human beings as human beings, and that eventually, as you look at the constitutional history of the United States, you're gonna find that they're gonna appear continuously to those universities principles to justify further uh improvements to the constitution and the extension of both the blacks.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_01: When you look at Coolidge, the president of the United States, or uh Coolidge is his name, uh I think what when was he president in 1910, 15, 20?
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um he's already saying that no, in the United States blacks have the same rights, even though they didn't vote yet.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_01: He's kind of realizing, well, yeah, they're they are citizens.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is what the the the Civil War was fought about.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh slavery was deemed to be unconstitutional and inconsistent with American principles, and once you acknowledge that blacks are citizens, it's about the next step to say that they should have the exact same rights to vote, the exact same rights to be part of society, that segregation has to go.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_01: And once you accept these things, you're gonna have to ask yourself how can you have exclusionary immigration laws?
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: How can you say that?
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, we don't want people from this land because they're not Christian and they're not white.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: You can't do that.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: So across the board in Australia, New Zealand, in Canada, in the United States, in the UK, they start abolishing white-only immigration policies.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_01: And capitalism, of course, is playing a role here because you're moving into postfordism as well.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_01: And postfordism is to break away from the nine to five jobs which are secure wage that is inflexible in the sense that you hire this number of workers and you have them at a specific time of the day.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_01: And with Keynesian economics and all kinds of minimum wage loss and so on, they have rising wages and they are good consumers and they're able to buy cars and houses and all of that.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the glory age of the 1950s into the 60s.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_01: But then by the 1970s, that system reaches a crisis, and this is what leads to Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and Moroni in the United States and all the conservative movements, is that reaction against increasing socialistic tendencies of liberalism.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think socialism is built into liberalism.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I so you shouldn't have these strict norms that preclude this type of sexuality or exclude women.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_01: Then when you start thinking along those lines, um you're going to believe that it has to be.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_01: I quite lost the thought here.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know exactly how I get to John Stuart Mills, but um if you can remind me, but he's talking about uh a line for full individual self-expression.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: Once you open up that, you're you're into full sexual expression.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the other day I posted on X that even Paul Hope uses these ideas.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Why should you exclude transsexual sex?
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_01: Why should you exclude treasons?
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_01: Why should you exclude all these varieties of sexual predilections and inclinations if you really believe in individual self-expression?
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, it goes back to that question.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do we get from this greatness?
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because liberalism is part of that greatness, how do we get to where we are now?
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's kind of it's it's there is a connection there.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now there are other explanations.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_01: People say, oh no, it is just communists taking power.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_01: It is the walk.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_01: Walk has nothing to do with liberalism.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_01: I disagree with that idea.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: Then there you look at X, it's just personalities conflicting, which is others, thinking that they're going to change things because this guy is that, that guy is that, the other guy doesn't know what he's doing.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just ongoing.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: But there are structural institutional forces that are bigger than anybody, uh, that are shaping the course of Western history.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll ask this as a penultimate question, and it links back to my opening statement about whether we are looking at Spengler's analysis that Western civilization is following the same path as all other civilizations, is that it is destined for ruin, that it will not rise again, that it will exhaust itself, that it has exhausted itself.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_00: And there was my contention within that, taking inspiration from uh our very own King Alfred the Great here in England, that recovery is possible, but it requires action, it requires a moral vision, it requires demands of the people that are being ruled.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so my question, I suppose, is do you think recovery is possible, or has the West exhausted its creative energies?
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I'm writing up this something I'm thinking about right now, and the conclusion is not yet finished, but I do conclude that it's gonna take some major structural ruptures in the whole system for us to get away from this.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because as I say, we are in a past-dependent trap.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_01: The West has trapped itself and it has trapped itself because liberal progressivism which is inscribed in its laws and its constitutions, simply disallow, prohibit whites from ethnic particularism from being ethnocentric, from from from creating an ethnic nationalism just by law provision.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot get a job.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_01: You will be fired from your job.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot run for politics and look at what happened to Restore Britain, the leader law, his name just law, uh Rupert Lowe, yeah.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Rupert Law.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_01: He had to distance himself from ethnic nationalism.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_01: And in fairness to him, it's because he knows he will be marginalized even more than he already is.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_01: So if he's gonna make some kind of breakthrough into people like Joe Rogan, who is, you know, is it's kind of still within operating within the system.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_01: If he's gonna make a breakthrough, then start appealing to wider segments of the population, he knows he has to break away with ethnic nationalism or openly declare that he's not an ethnic nationalist.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_01: So he's basically saying we just want to buy or we want to um uh employ the law and go after people who break the law with these goming guns or commit crimes.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_01: We want to enforce the law and we don't want illegal immigrants, and we want to repatriate some people.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't think he's he he's he's I don't know exactly what he has said, but he has used the term remigration, he has played up with it, but I don't think if he ever gets to power, he's gonna bow all out remigration.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's no way he's gonna remigrate uh Africans born in Britain or Muslims born in Britain.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_01: The system is not gonna allow him to do that.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_01: It would be a monumental constitutional crisis.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then you have the whole capitalist order.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's not just woke people that are pushing these things, businesses in this article that I'm uh I'm improving.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_01: I identify all kinds of business organizations in the United States, in Britain, in Italy, in France, in Germany.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there are associations that represent many businesses.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_01: They speak for them, they push policies for them, they're pro-immigration.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_01: So these are conservative, right-wing people.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's not woke communists, all this nonsense about communists being controlled.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Communism was defeated with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's just in tiny Cuba and North Korea, just have communists.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's irrelevant.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I feel that there is a thing in which we create a system within which we are trapped.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_01: We are trapped with the fact that we brought so many immigrants who are here already, who have citizenship, then the legal system prohibits you from being an ethnic nationalist, from being a racist, and it's the worst thing.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um young people know they can't get careers openly, if they're openly identified as racist, as technophobic, it's very hard.
• 1:14:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it incentivizes those who are who are multicultural, who are for diversity, it incentivizes those people.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_01: They are the ones that get the grants, the jobs, and so on.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um and as I said, the system, the capitalist, the business order is for it.
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_01: So how do you get out of that?
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's a very it's a long discussion, so I it's not like I have an answer right now, but uh it's gonna require major ruptures.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I talk about um a geopolitical rupture.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh the whole liberal interventionism that you see in Ukraine, which is about extending the Western model into the Ukraine and then using it to penetrate into Russia and breaking it apart.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um if if that fails, and then now in Iran, if Trump fails, and I want them, I want Trump to fail in Iran, and I want the whole Ukrainian thing to fail.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, because I want a rupture in the geopolitical order so that it creates possibilities for changes.
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because look at history, we have seen that many times revolutions came after major defeats and wars.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um but that alone is sometimes I think it's not gonna do it.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um you have um you can have a major economic crisis.
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_01: Although the 2008 financial crisis, you know, it was big and yet it didn't break apart the system.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it may have to be bigger than that.
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the the crisis has to be at the level of legitimacy.
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_01: There is a widespread legitimation crisis, there is a growing sense and it starts spreading among the elites.
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_01: It cannot be just X people.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_01: People, you're in X, you're inside a bubble.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Many people think, wow, we're changing things.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm writing I've just got a bunch of followers here, I have 300,000 things.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_01: No, they're not.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_01: The system can take that.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_01: I use Nicholas Nicholas Luman's theory.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's just an irritation to the system.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_01: It irritates it, but it doesn't threaten it.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_01: The grooming guns and the reactions against them are irritations still to the system.
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, when that young man died, what was it, the young man that the police uh came down?
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there have been many incidents like that, and people say this will do it, this will finally do it.
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's not going to do it.
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_01: The system goes on.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now everybody's talking about the soccer.
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_01: And if if England wins against Argentina and goes further, wow, you know, people will forget all about it.
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is so um, so but you'd still have to have this.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that they're irrelevant.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you have continuous irritations and they intensify, you can start getting a legitimation crisis.
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and but it has to spread into the elites.
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_01: You have to have members of the elites, educated elites, academics, lawyers, politicians, kind of just realizing something amiss, something has deeply gone wrong.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_01: We really took the wrong turn here.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_01: We are really gonna lose everything.
• 1:18:07
  SPEAKER_01: Britain is just gonna become like some like New York, just a city like New York.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's all it is gonna be.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the same with Berlin and Frankfurt and all those cities.
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, in New Zealand, we really are gonna become a minority.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_01: The Asians and the Indians are gonna dominate our politics, and they are ethnocentric.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_01: They don't play the individualist game, they use that.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_01: They use uh liberal universal values to advance their own in-group ethnic interests.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so so my sense is that that has to happen.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, a profound, continuous crisis of of of a realization that this is really we are our backs are against the wall, and the elite is realizing this.
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just people X.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just a populist party, it has to go beyond that.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_01: The AFD is growing, but still is under 30%, it's competing with many other parties.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_01: So this has to grow wider.
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_01: My fear is that they purposely have inundated these nations with a lot of immigrants because no immigrants are not gonna they're gonna go the way they want.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Muslims actually vote for even leftist parties, knowing that for the time being it is an interest to be with them, even though we don't agree with their gender politics.
• 1:19:36
  SPEAKER_01: So um, you know, and that's what we can hope for, uh uh uh um persistent crisis rhythm breakdown of the system.
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_01: You're not making a smooth transition out of this.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_01: So, like these guys, Richard Hanania and all these people, oh, if you just twinkle a little bit with civil rights law, and if you get rid of DEI, you oh well, yeah, let's get rid of all it's not gonna happen.
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's not gonna be anything like that.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a long, prolonged systemic series of ruptures and well, strap in, I think, is the response to that.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Just before I let you go, Ricardo, the question I ask all of my guests what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life, and what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so um, you know, some people say what red pill you?
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_01: They use that that phrase, red pill you.
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say that it wasn't one moment.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_01: I used to be on the left, I was a Marxist for a long time, and I remained on the left through the 1990s, although by the late 1990s, I was uh sinking away from it.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a long progression uh that built up into my book, Uniqueness of Western Civilization.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_01: It was just about appreciating the cultural achievements of the West.
• 1:21:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I still accepted the universalist idea that uh Western values can include all races as part of it.
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_01: I started rejecting that as soon as I published um Uniqueness and then uh uh wrote Faustian Mann.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it is a long sequence of steps.
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and at the same time, there are also uh intellectual changes.
• 1:21:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this has been going on forever.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_01: Even now, the way I think the last few months, it's not the same way I used to think three years ago.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's slight variations and changes.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_01: I had a then I had uh a sense that if we articulate these ideas and announce them and express them to other people, eventually we will win and we'll turn the system around.
• 1:22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas I don't believe that is possible for the reasons I gave you just before.
• 1:22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um you might say that made me a pessimistic.
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yes, in some degree, yes.
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but I'm not despondent, completely despondent, because history has seen major ruptural breaks.
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um But I I'm not naive to think that writing at X is gonna change things.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think our system can tolerate us and keep us in a marginalized state.
• 1:22:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we live after all in a process.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_01: You can operate, you have that freedom.
• 1:22:48
  SPEAKER_01: They'll put limits, restrictions, and things like that, but they are still there.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_01: And others like that.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um so they they they they you can exist within this society.
• 1:23:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I don't have that sense that you might call it 2015 optimist, and that Trump is gonna I see now Trump as he seems he he's not it's not simply that he's co-opted, it's that he could not but act within the framework of the system institutional order.
• 1:23:22
  SPEAKER_01: The notion that he's gonna get out of the deep state, that he's gonna be able to take on the deep state is incredibly naive.
• 1:23:32
  SPEAKER_01: He can't he doesn't have the power to do that.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't have the mind, the thinking to do that.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_01: He's he is up to here in the deep state and will forever be part of that deep state, whether it is his businesses, because businesses by the very nature are globalists, are diverse and do not take account of ethnic identities.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_01: And also the American political legal system is liberal by its very nation, and he can't get away from that, and there are all kinds of administrative structures that are there that he operates within.
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_01: So now he's stuck in a war in Iran.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean look where he is at George Bush or the Song, what was his um the second Bush in a similar situation after all the criticisms he made of him, he found exactly in the same situation.
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_01: So he could not break the system.
• 1:24:32
  SPEAKER_01: So that 2015 optimism is gone from me.
• 1:24:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have that anymore.
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I still have some of it even when he was elected.
• 1:24:42
  SPEAKER_01: He can, you know, his second term, he does nothing to lose.
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_01: He'll bring about a major remigration, but he didn't.
• 1:24:51
  SPEAKER_01: He did a little bit, he took some of the criminals out, and even just taking those criminals out, it was so much opposition to them.
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_01: He had to back down.
• 1:25:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so um yeah, uh that's kind of and in in in in many other respects, you know, I'm always reading and this and reading there and reading there.
• 1:25:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it I've been to the whole intellectual spectrum uh of ideas and that changing and rethinking things and yeah, it is remarkable where you can go from one book and checking some of the footnotes, and before you know it, you've bought four more and you've ended up on an intellectual journey you never could have anticipated.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Ricardo, you've been extraordinarily generous with your time.
• 1:25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Before I let you know, let you go.
• 1:25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Where can people find you in the dark corners of the internet so they can follow your work?
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_01: You can go to X, I'm at X, and you can find me.
• 1:25:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, some people say when they type my name, it uh my my account doesn't show up.
• 1:26:02
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it should if you kind of keep trying, it should show up.
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um I don't have the blog anymore, it's still there.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you type, you know, you may still find it there.
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but um yeah, that I would say that X right now is the best place to find me and to find about uh my book.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_01: I have it here, so this is the book.
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if I have it upside down, usually that's what happens.
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_01: So so this is the book, and you can find this book in um with the publisher or in Amazon.
• 1:26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and you can find my other books as well.
• 1:26:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I do post articles at X.
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_01: I figure why not?
• 1:26:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, I I I'll try and post them later on if I develop them more, some of them.
• 1:26:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's where they can find me.
• 1:26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks, Ricardo.
• 1:26:54
  SPEAKER_00: I hope people check you out.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure they will.
• 1:26:56
  SPEAKER_00: You've given the viewers and listeners much to think about and chew on.
• 1:27:01
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of your day, and thanks for joining me.
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_00: Hope to speak again.
• 1:27:06
  SPEAKER_00: All right, it was a great conversation.
• 1:27:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm happy that we did this interview.
• 1:27:11
  SPEAKER_01: It was very good.
• 1:27:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Ricardo, all the best.
• 1:27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, bye.