A rich understanding of history allows us to recognize patterns and the possible trajectory of the present. But sometimes, this analysis provides sobering prophecies. In this episode, renowned classicist and military historian, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson discusses his 2024 book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation. In it, he outlines the common factors in the downfalls of great civilizations. And soberingly, he proposes that America aligns with many of these patterns.
A Quick Note as this episode deals with contemporary politics:
Aiming for the Moon has a diverse audience. I strongly believe that developing your own perspective comes from speaking with people who you both agree with and disagree with. Iron sharpens iron. That’s why this podcast is a platform that hosts interesting and successful people from a variety of worldviews. Gen. Z has the opportunity to trailblaze a culture of conversation. So, let’s go.
Topics:
- Patterns of Civilization Decline and Why We Should Care
- Human Nature and Historical Progress - Why aren't we getting better?
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?"
Bio:
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairs the Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict. He is an American scholar of ancient and modern warfare and has been a commentator on contemporary politics for various media outlets. He is a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno, and the annual Wayne and Marcia Buske Distinguished Visiting Fellow in History at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush and was a recipient of the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. The author of numerous books, his most recent are The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (2017), The Case for Trump (2019), and The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America (2021). His latest book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, was published in May 2024.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
A rich understanding of history allows us to
recognize patterns in thepossible trajectory of the
present, but sometimes thisanalysis provides sobering
prophecies.
This is the Aiming for the Moonpodcast and I'm your host,
taylor Bledsoe.
On this podcast, I interviewinteresting people from a
teenage perspective.
In this episode, renownedclassicist and military
(00:32):
historian, dr Victor DavisHanson, discusses his 2024 book,
the End of Everything how WarsDescend into Annihilation.
In this new book, he outlinesthe common factors in the
downfalls of great civilizationsand, unfortunately, he proposes
that America aligns with manyof these patterns.
Dr Victor Davis Hanson is asenior fellow at the Hoover
(00:54):
Institution and shares theworking group on the role of
military history in contemporaryconflict.
He has also been a politicalcommentator for various media
outlets.
He is a professor emeritus ofclassics at California State
University, fresno and theannual Wayne and Marcia Busk
Distinguished Visiting Fellow atHillsdale College since 2004.
For a full list of Dr Hansen'saccolades, as well as his books,
(01:17):
see the episode notes.
If you like what you hear today, please rate the podcast and
subscribe.
You can follow us at aiming thenumber four moon on all the
socials to stay up to date onpodcast news and episodes.
Check out the episode notes forDr Hansen's full bio, as well
as links to our website,aimingforthemooncom, and our
podcast sub stack.
(01:37):
Lessons from interesting people.
Thanks again to Paxton Page forthis incredible music.
Now, in the silence before theinterview, I want to make a
quick note, because Aiming forthe Moon has a diverse audience,
and this episode deals withsome points in contemporary
politics.
I strongly believe thatdeveloping your own perspective
comes from speaking with peoplewho you both agree with and
(01:59):
disagree with.
Iron sharpens iron.
That's why this podcast is aplatform that hosts interesting
and successful people from avariety of worldviews.
Gen Z has the opportunity totrailblaze a culture of
conversation, so let's go Great,all righty Well.
Welcome, dr Hansen to theinterview.
(02:19):
Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Yes, wonderful.
So to start off, why should wecare about the downfalls of
ancient civilizations and whathappened to them?
We think about our modern worldand we think about our modern
problems and we often kind ofhave this idea that well, that
must have been a terrible thingthat happened, but that was 2000
plus years ago.
So how does that connect to metoday?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
living in Little Rock , arkansas, in high school.
Well, I just finished a bookthe End of Everything about four
civilizations that collapsed.
It's predicated on the ideathat human nature doesn't change
, so all of the stimuli, theappetites, the reactions of
people from 500 BC to 1500 ADare the same as ours.
That's kind of contrary to whatthe university says, that if
(03:11):
you just give us enough moneyand power we can make a new
person.
But they can't.
It's biological and so when youlook at the past you can see it
doesn't repeat itself.
But you can see.
If you cover wide enough areaand chronology, you can see how
certain people reacted tocertain things or certain people
(03:33):
.
When they get to in ingovernment or monarchy or
democracy, they do predictablethings.
And then you can look back andif you're careful and you're not
too influenced by the present,you can say this is what you
can't say, this is going tohappen because it happened in
Athens or Rome.
But you can say we're headed toin a situation where the
(03:54):
following are likely and thatmakes it very useful.
And in the case of these ancientcivilizations we're also
fortunate in the case of Greeceand Rome that well documented.
We don't know much about theNear East.
We know a little bit about theJewish Near East, hivoglyphics
(04:15):
in Egypt or Mycenaean Linear Bthey're not literary tablets,
but we have a whole rich 70, 80million words written about
antiquity and we have verybright people who were writing,
and they wrote empirically, andby that I mean they weren't
coerced by the government.
For the most part, they weren'tpolitically correct or anything
(04:36):
.
So when you look at whathappened to these societies the
ones that they all eventuallyfall, but in various rates of
decline usually four or fivecharacteristics that your
listeners might want to thinkabout One is physical collapse,
in other words, they werespending more money than came in
(04:59):
, and when that happens inhistory, there's usually only
four or five things you can do.
The hardest, and the only onethat works, is to raise more
money and to cut spending andbalance your budget.
It's very important for youguys and your generation,
(05:21):
because we're $36 trillion willbe the ones responsible for
paying that down, which willmean a tougher type of existence
for you.
The other thing that you can dois inflate the currency.
We had a 35% rise in food,gasoline, rent, insurance from
(05:41):
2021 to 2024.
And the currency is not worthanything.
When I was your age.
I bought a brand uh, my parentsbought a brand new car for 2400
.
I just looked at some cars orbetween 770 and 80 000 for
pickup, so you can see whatinflation does.
Another way that societies dealwith it is they renounce their
(06:06):
debts.
So where's $35 trillion?
The Chinese have about $10trillion, but most of it is
retirees investors who buyfederal bonds.
And when you start to hearsomeone on the left say, well,
they already have enough moneyanyway, why do we have to pay
back their bond?
That's very common in the past.
(06:28):
But once you renounce the debt,then you have no trust left and
it's very hard to ever issue abond again.
So inflation, cutting spending,raising taxes.
Another thing is theappropriation of capital, and
I've seen people on the leftsuggest that maybe all these
(06:49):
wealthy people that have 401kshould have to give them up to
the government and they wouldget in return years of credit
and social security.
So that's something to watchout for.
A military these societiescollapse their military lives on
past, reputation, not present,and we're 45,000 recruits short.
Right now.
We have DEI and wokeness in themilitary.
(07:12):
We haven't had a good record inAfghanistan, of course, after
the Kabul, humiliation, libya,iraq.
We haven't really won a wardecisively since World War II.
We did all right in Korea, butVietnam was a fiasco, and so our
military is not what it was.
(07:33):
We don't have a border.
All these Rome had peopleflowing across the Danube and
the Rhine River and theycouldn't stop or they welcomed
them in.
They did not assimilate orintegrate.
We've had 10 million peoplecome across in the last three
years.
That was deliberate.
We could have easily stopped it, but we chose not to.
So border security, financial uhstability, a good military, and
(07:58):
you have to have the rule oflaw, and that was what made rome
so powerful for so long.
It was equality under the law,and if you said Kiwi sum Romanus
I am a Roman citizen then youwere considered to have habeas
corpus and equality under Romanlaw, but that broke down in the
second.
It's very worrisome right nowthat for a whole array of crimes
(08:21):
looting, smash and grab wedon't seem to prosecute the
offenders and then we're usingthe law to go after.
In the case of Donald Trump,five different civil and
criminal indictments, none ofwhich I think even the
prosecutors would say would havebeen filed had he not run for
president again or will not befiled about anybody in the
(08:44):
future.
They've never been used in thiscontext against someone with
trying to avoid the statute oflimitations or saying he
overvalued a real estate loanthat was paid back on time to
the benefit of the bank.
So those are the some of thethings that studying history can
tell us.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
I want to go back to something that you touched on.
That's the premise of your book, the End of Everything, how
Wars Descend into Annihilation,which is almost a rebuttal or an
antithesis to thisenlightenment understanding of
history that says we're alwaysprogressing.
So we went from this barbarianstate and are now becoming more
(09:23):
morally superior, maybe moretechnologically advanced and
always increasing and alwaysevolving in this area.
And I've been reading a lot ofDostoevsky, particularly
Brothers Karamazov and Notesfrom Underground, and he also
has a lot to say about thatthesis in general, and I'd love
to get your thoughts on thatidea with your book in mind as
(09:46):
well.
What do you think about thisenlightenment notion of history
always progressing?
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, we often call it the Whig notion of history,
that you're going from point Ato point Z.
It was very popular when I wasin my 30s, before you were born.
Probably a colleague atStanford, francis Fukuyama,
wrote the End of History and histhesis was, with the fall of
(10:11):
the Berlin Wall, that the wholeworld now realized that the only
system that worked was consumercapitalism and constitutional,
democratic and republicangovernment and therefore they
were all on the same page.
And yet history had been mademade or it was the stuff of wars
and fights over economy andgovernment.
(10:33):
And now you wouldn't have any,you would kind of have a one
world, globalist sameness.
And of course that was crazy.
That came out right beforesaddam hussein and radical islam
and 9, 11 and all that.
So, and most people, I think itdivides down left and right.
(10:55):
The Marxist theory of history isthat there's going to be a new
Soviet man, a new communist man,and if the government has all
power, they can mold a personfrom earliest education to think
in a particular way.
You see this with the wokemovement, the DEI movement.
So they feel that if you hire ateacher or a faculty member
(11:18):
they have to sign a DEIstatement and students have to
follow this orthodoxy and peoplewill be punished.
And the result is you're goingto create this one government,
one civic body that all thinksalike, and it's going to be
wonderful because they're somuch more morally advanced.
But the methods, the problemwith all of this the methods to
(11:41):
achieve that.
They're always justified by theends, but they're usually
authoritarian and totalitarian,usually to force people to do
that.
And so I don't see to get backand, as I mentioned in the
epilogue of my book, afterlooking at these four examples
in Thebes, carthage,constantinople and the Aztecs of
(12:02):
Mexico City, tenochtitlan, Ididn't see any moral progress
whatsoever.
There's some.
I mean we don't have slaverycommon, although there's still
slavery in parts of the Islamicand African worlds.
But it doesn't mean that youcan't learn from the past and
technology gets better.
(12:23):
I'm not saying there's notprogress, but the idea that the
stuff of history war, plague,all of these are going to be
eliminated and people are goingto react differently.
That's not going to happen.
And as you look today, I thinkyou could say that more people
have been killed since World WarII than the 70 million in war,
(12:47):
70 million that were killed.
We had a plague.
We thought our technology wasso sophisticated We'd never lose
50 million people worldwide,maybe 70 million, 1 million
Americans.
And yet the methods to combatthat virus social distancing,
masking, national lockdowndidn't work.
(13:09):
And the idea that we had amagic bullet and said that we've
got our generation is sobrilliant that we are the first
in the world to conquer acoronavirus that mutates very
rapidly and we're going to havea vaccination.
It's going to ensure 96 percentimmunity and you will not be
infected, nor can you infectanybody.
That lasted about eight months,and and so history does not get
(13:36):
to a utopia.
Technology advances because ofthe some experiences and
knowledge each generation buildson that, but it doesn't mean
that that technology will beused in a morally superior
fashion.
So we have AI, we have atomicweapons, we have bioweapons,
nerve these are all things thatthe past didn't have, but we're
(13:58):
still humans and we're stilljust as likely to use them.
But they're going to be muchmore dangerous because while
technology evolves, human naturedoesn't.
So you put into hands of very,very volatile people scientific
opportunities that can entailwholesale destruction.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I'm curious so why doesn't like our decisions?
Why don't our decisions andkind of our cultures, why don't
they evolve or progress at thesame rate like scientific or
technological revolutions?
Evolve or progress at the samerate like scientific or
technological revolutions?
You'd think like, well, we havethousands and thousands of
years of history, we've seenpeople make these decisions
(14:41):
before and you think, just liketechnology advances, well, you
try that, that didn't work, solet's do something else.
And we have this now.
Artificial intelligence is oneof the most cutting edge
technologies.
Why aren't we progressing Imean, if you wanted to say
morally or culturally at thatsame rate, like what about the
two different studies makes thathappen?
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Because there is such a thing as absolute truth with
science.
I mean, we know there is aprime number and there's not a
prime number.
We know the atomic weight ofparticular elements.
They don't change.
We know that physics has laws.
We know that there's three,five, seven on a triangle, the
(15:23):
relationship.
That doesn't change.
But so science worksdifferently.
It works with finding outthrough a theory and then the
scientific method brings enoughdata in.
That's on it.
Not that you, you know science,everybody always argues over
theories, but eventually thereis evidence in the physical
world.
But in the world of politics andideology there is no scientific
(15:49):
proof, because they're part ofthe human experience.
Scientific proof becausethey're part of the human
experience and humans they don'tnecessarily act or talk or
speak in scientific, rationalways.
When I was a young person therewas that original Star Trek and
everybody thought that Dr Spockwas so different because he was
not human and he replied onlyin terms of scientific reality
(16:13):
and that was supposed tohighlight that he was kind of
cool or he didn't understandthings or he was smarter.
He was different is the pointI'm making.
So people are, they haveappetites.
They have appetites forenjoyment, for ego, for
narcissistic, they are envious,they're jealous, they do things
(16:34):
to their bodies with alcohol,drugs, sex that they shouldn't
do.
They're mercurial, they'reunpredictable, and so when they
form families or when they formgovernments, it's very volatile.
So the family today.
One thing about human nature italways looks back at the past
(16:56):
and criticizes it as not assophisticated or as stable as
the present because oftechnology, and they confuse
that.
So they say, well, all thoseguys that went out on the Oregon
Trail in 1860 and coveredwagons, they were racist or they
didn't even know aboutantibiotics or they didn't know
(17:17):
about gasoline what a bunch ofidiots.
But if you actually look atthem and say, yeah, but they had
to drink foul water, they hadto deal with tuberculosis and
smallpox, they didn't havepsychiatrists, they didn't have
counseling, their families hadto stick together.
In many ways they had moreadmirable traits than we do.
(17:38):
And so human nature means thatoutside the realm of science,
everything is theoretical orputative or under constant
discussion.
We were told that by FrancisFukuyama that we would soon have
the 180 nations that constitutethe world body at the United
(18:03):
Nations would all be democratic.
In fact, we have fewerdemocratic nations now.
We don't even have half.
A lot of people have said well,we wanted to be democratic, but
then we looked at the UnitedStates and we thought, wow,
they've got lawfare, they've gotthis crazy idea that you can
operate on a 15-year-old andremove their sexual organs or
(18:24):
give them dangerous hormones.
And then we wanted to be freelike the United States.
But the media seems to censorpeople and they put political
people in jail, and so we don'tlike what democracy is.
And then it goes back and forthlike that.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
I'd love to dive into so many of those different
topics.
I mean, I'm thinking right nowof Underground man and
Dostoevsky a particular passage,in fact that's been referenced
throughout many psychologicaland political talks, but
unfortunately we don't have thetime to go there, and so I want
to kind of wrap up the interviewwith the last two questions we
ask all of our guests.
(19:00):
The first one is what bookshave had an impact on you.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Well, I'm a little prejudicial because I spent 50
years of my life I'm 70, inacademia and I was a classical
scholar.
So I'd say, of all the books ofthe ancient world, it was
Thucydides' history of thePeloponnesian War, because it's
not just a history of the31-year war between Athens and
Sparta, but it's a philosophicalinvestigation of human nature.
(19:28):
So he has the Melian Dialogueor the Stasis of Corsaira, and
he takes characters out of thathistory and he uses them to
reflect truth.
Just to take one example, theMelian dialogue, the Athenians
are supposedly culturallysuperior and they tell the
Melians we're going to conqueryou.
And the Melians say but thatwouldn't be consistent with your
(19:49):
view of yourself.
And they said I know it, butstrong dictate to the weak.
And they said, yes, but you'llbe hated because you'll act out
of character and you'll oppressus.
And then everybody will revoltagainst you.
And they said well, we wishthat were true, but human nature
being what it is, they'llprobably be afraid of us.
And then they'll say but youwouldn't respect us because we
would just hand over our freedomto you.
(20:11):
And they said, yes, we wouldjust hand over our freedom to
you.
And they said, yes, we wouldrespect you because you know
we're stronger and we're goingto wipe you out and therefore
you made the raps.
So that kind of dialogue is inthe entire history.
I also as a historian.
Tacitus is Thucydidean.
I think all young people shouldread a novel written around 60
(20:33):
AD by a Roman aristocrat calledPetronius and it's called the
satiricon and it's a satire onwhat Roman society is like and
the theme of it is we have hadso much wealth and so much
leisure, we are utterly decadentand almost every modern uh uh
(20:54):
affectation is in that novel.
People are not having children,they're not marrying, people
are openly bisexual, there's alot of transgendered people,
they have an emphasis on foodluxury.
They make fun of less educatedpeople.
They despise hardworking,middle-class entrepreneurs that
(21:18):
don't have.
They're not sophisticated.
They make fun of soldiers andthis writer is trying to tell
you that Rome of the old iscollapsing and the more modern.
I think everybody should take alook at Dante's Inferno too.
It was especially the firstthird of the of the trilogy.
(21:38):
Purgatorio and Paradise aregood, but the Inferno is really
interesting about how the earlyRenaissance looked back at
antiquity In the more modernperiod.
I think it's good for youngpeople to read nonfiction.
Gibbon's History of the Declineand Fall of Rome is one of the
most beautiful things writtenjust for the prose alone.
(22:00):
More modernly, I would suggestthey all look at the work of
Andrew Roberts.
He's the British biographer,historian.
He wrote a wonderful biographyof Napoleon.
He wrote a biography of WinstonChurchill.
He wrote a biography of GeorgeIII.
If you're interested in militaryhistory, I'll just end with
this.
The most gripping thing writtenduring World War II was by a
(22:24):
veteran, eb Sledge, and he was21 and he got drafted and he
fought in the US 1st MarineDivision and he unfortunately
had to fight at Okinawa and Ithink it would be very good for
your generation to read thatmemoir.
And it's almost impossible tocontinue it.
(22:46):
It's so horrific what the USMarines had to do.
I mean fighting the Japanese tosee what the Japanese did, for
(23:06):
example and he's not apropagandist.
But when you're fighting peoplewho torture and mutilate you
and force civilians to killthemselves and they're very
fierce what do you do?
How do you fight them?
So those are some.
If you're interested in areally good novel.
(23:29):
I think Conrad's Victory is oneof the best novels that I've
read.
It's about a person who'salienated.
In all those novels they'realienated but they come back and
they feel there's a great causethat they need.
In this case he wants to save aperson from some evil people
and yet he knows in the tragicsense, once he gets involved
he's going to be destroyed.
Kind of like a John FordWestern where you know the
searchers, or George Stevens,shane or High Noon, where the
(23:55):
tragic hero knows that he alonehas the skills to save the small
town or the settlers.
But the methodology that heuses using a gun or he's crude
or crass will work.
But in the process, once hebrings salvation to them, they
have the luxury or the margin oferror.
They start to say well, you'revery crude, you've got to ride
(24:18):
off in the sunset.
Your work is over.
We don't want people like youliving among us, even though we
wouldn't have been able to saveourselves, and we have no
gratitude toward you.
Get out.
And that's a very popular themein classical literature too
Sophocles and Homer.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
And then our last question is what advice do you
have for teenagers?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
My advice to teenagers would be to ignore
what people are calling todaywisdom when you're on your way
to college.
I would avoid any course thathas the word a dash with studies
, peace studies, leisure studies, gender studies, race studies,
asian studies, environmentalstudies those didn't exist until
(24:59):
about 30 years ago.
Those are therapeutic coursesand they're deductive.
In other words, they start witha premise and then you enroll
in them and then you're supposedto get in line with that
ideology.
Literature, history as well asscience that give you a broad
(25:22):
knowledge in the generaleducation and as a general rule,
the older the writing is, thebetter.
Especially anything writtenafter 1980 is kind of suspect.
The other thing is, in myexperience with young people
your age I taught a lot of youngpeople for 50 years.
(25:44):
They have no idea that peopleput a high premium on a person's
vocabulary and their ability toexpress themselves both orally
and in writing.
Both orally and in writing.
And when students read widelyand they try to emulate great
stylists like Gibbon orThucydides or a good novel and
(26:06):
they can express themselves,that is so rare today because of
social media and people ontheir phones that they almost
have a missile-like trajectoryof success.
And when people meet them, theysay, oh my gosh, that person
knows grammar and they expressthemselves very well.
They don't use four-letterwords, they don't just say like,
(26:30):
like, like, uh, uh, uh, uh, andthey write well and that's a
lost art.
So those are very good skillsto develop and the only way you
can develop them is reading goodliterature and writing and then
having professors that willcorrect you and teach you that.
And the other thing is be veryhumble about the past.
(26:53):
Don't fall into thiscontemporary trap of saying
we're going to tear down thisstatue because this person
didn't meet our elevated rulesof what's good and bad, because
you have no idea what they'regoing to say about my generation
or your generation.
But I think, maybe 50 years, asmy generation tore down statues
(27:14):
of heroes or religious people,and I'm just.
We tore down a statue inCalifornia of Junipio Serra, who
founded the missions, becausehe didn't fit our idea of a
humane person.
He was a very good person, infact.
But what is a generation goingto say, say, 50 years?
(27:35):
They're going to look back onus and say, oh my God, they had
a million people defecating,injecting, urinating,
fornicating in the sidewalks oftheir major streets.
We thought they were very well.
They couldn't handle thatproblem.
Oh my God, they had no border.
They let in 10 million peoplein three years.
Oh my gosh, you couldn't walkin.
(27:57):
I mean, all these cities thatwere safe were like medieval
Paris or medieval London, whereyou could get stabbed, and it's
not safe to walk at night.
Oh my God, look at this society.
They abort a million people ayear and 10,000 are killed in
the birth canal, and they thinknothing of it.
And so, oh my God, they injectthese terrible drugs.
(28:20):
100,000 of them die of over it.
So we keep thinking that we'reso much better because we're not
as racist, we're not as sexist,we're not as homophobic, but we
do things that, by classical orhistorical standards, future
generations are going to find usvery wanting, and so it's very
good to be modest about yourgeneration.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Well, Dr Hansen, thank you so much for joining me
on the podcast.
We've discussed manyfascinating ideas the downfalls
of civilizations, as well as howsome of these same problems are
in our present society, andkind of that myth of the ever
progressing moral superiority ofeach new generation.
Thank you so much for coming onthe show.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Thank you for having me.
A rich understanding of history allows us to
recognize patterns in thepossible trajectory of the
present, but sometimes thisanalysis provides sobering
prophecies.
This is the Aiming for the Moonpodcast and I'm your host,
taylor Bledsoe.
On this podcast, I interviewinteresting people from a
teenage perspective.
In this episode, renownedclassicist and military
(00:32):
historian, dr Victor DavisHanson, discusses his 2024 book,
the End of Everything how WarsDescend into Annihilation.
In this new book, he outlinesthe common factors in the
downfalls of great civilizationsand, unfortunately, he proposes
that America aligns with manyof these patterns.
Dr Victor Davis Hanson is asenior fellow at the Hoover
(00:54):
Institution and shares theworking group on the role of
military history in contemporaryconflict.
He has also been a politicalcommentator for various media
outlets.
He is a professor emeritus ofclassics at California State
University, fresno and theannual Wayne and Marcia Busk
Distinguished Visiting Fellow atHillsdale College since 2004.
For a full list of Dr Hansen'saccolades, as well as his books,
(01:17):
see the episode notes.
If you like what you hear today, please rate the podcast and
subscribe.
You can follow us at aiming thenumber four moon on all the
socials to stay up to date onpodcast news and episodes.
Check out the episode notes forDr Hansen's full bio, as well
as links to our website,aimingforthemooncom, and our
podcast sub stack.
(01:37):
Lessons from interesting people.
Thanks again to Paxton Page forthis incredible music.
Now, in the silence before theinterview, I want to make a
quick note, because Aiming forthe Moon has a diverse audience,
and this episode deals withsome points in contemporary
politics.
I strongly believe thatdeveloping your own perspective
comes from speaking with peoplewho you both agree with and
(01:59):
disagree with.
Iron sharpens iron.
That's why this podcast is aplatform that hosts interesting
and successful people from avariety of worldviews.
Gen Z has the opportunity totrailblaze a culture of
conversation, so let's go Great,all righty Well.
Welcome, dr Hansen to theinterview.
(02:19):
Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Yes, wonderful.
So to start off, why should wecare about the downfalls of
ancient civilizations and whathappened to them?
We think about our modern worldand we think about our modern
problems and we often kind ofhave this idea that well, that
must have been a terrible thingthat happened, but that was 2000
plus years ago.
So how does that connect to metoday?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
living in Little Rock , arkansas, in high school.
Well, I just finished a bookthe End of Everything about four
civilizations that collapsed.
It's predicated on the ideathat human nature doesn't change
, so all of the stimuli, theappetites, the reactions of
people from 500 BC to 1500 ADare the same as ours.
That's kind of contrary to whatthe university says, that if
(03:11):
you just give us enough moneyand power we can make a new
person.
But they can't.
It's biological and so when youlook at the past you can see it
doesn't repeat itself.
But you can see.
If you cover wide enough areaand chronology, you can see how
certain people reacted tocertain things or certain people
(03:33):
.
When they get to in ingovernment or monarchy or
democracy, they do predictablethings.
And then you can look back andif you're careful and you're not
too influenced by the present,you can say this is what you
can't say, this is going tohappen because it happened in
Athens or Rome.
But you can say we're headed toin a situation where the
(03:54):
following are likely and thatmakes it very useful.
And in the case of these ancientcivilizations we're also
fortunate in the case of Greeceand Rome that well documented.
We don't know much about theNear East.
We know a little bit about theJewish Near East, hivoglyphics
(04:15):
in Egypt or Mycenaean Linear Bthey're not literary tablets,
but we have a whole rich 70, 80million words written about
antiquity and we have verybright people who were writing,
and they wrote empirically, andby that I mean they weren't
coerced by the government.
For the most part, they weren'tpolitically correct or anything
(04:36):
.
So when you look at whathappened to these societies the
ones that they all eventuallyfall, but in various rates of
decline usually four or fivecharacteristics that your
listeners might want to thinkabout One is physical collapse,
in other words, they werespending more money than came in
(04:59):
, and when that happens inhistory, there's usually only
four or five things you can do.
The hardest, and the only onethat works, is to raise more
money and to cut spending andbalance your budget.
It's very important for youguys and your generation,
(05:21):
because we're $36 trillion willbe the ones responsible for
paying that down, which willmean a tougher type of existence
for you.
The other thing that you can dois inflate the currency.
We had a 35% rise in food,gasoline, rent, insurance from
(05:41):
2021 to 2024.
And the currency is not worthanything.
When I was your age.
I bought a brand uh, my parentsbought a brand new car for 2400
.
I just looked at some cars orbetween 770 and 80 000 for
pickup, so you can see whatinflation does.
Another way that societies dealwith it is they renounce their
(06:06):
debts.
So where's $35 trillion?
The Chinese have about $10trillion, but most of it is
retirees investors who buyfederal bonds.
And when you start to hearsomeone on the left say, well,
they already have enough moneyanyway, why do we have to pay
back their bond?
That's very common in the past.
(06:28):
But once you renounce the debt,then you have no trust left and
it's very hard to ever issue abond again.
So inflation, cutting spending,raising taxes.
Another thing is theappropriation of capital, and
I've seen people on the leftsuggest that maybe all these
(06:49):
wealthy people that have 401kshould have to give them up to
the government and they wouldget in return years of credit
and social security.
So that's something to watchout for.
A military these societiescollapse their military lives on
past, reputation, not present,and we're 45,000 recruits short.
Right now.
We have DEI and wokeness in themilitary.
(07:12):
We haven't had a good record inAfghanistan, of course, after
the Kabul, humiliation, libya,iraq.
We haven't really won a wardecisively since World War II.
We did all right in Korea, butVietnam was a fiasco, and so our
military is not what it was.
(07:33):
We don't have a border.
All these Rome had peopleflowing across the Danube and
the Rhine River and theycouldn't stop or they welcomed
them in.
They did not assimilate orintegrate.
We've had 10 million peoplecome across in the last three
years.
That was deliberate.
We could have easily stopped it, but we chose not to.
So border security, financial uhstability, a good military, and
(07:58):
you have to have the rule oflaw, and that was what made rome
so powerful for so long.
It was equality under the law,and if you said Kiwi sum Romanus
I am a Roman citizen then youwere considered to have habeas
corpus and equality under Romanlaw, but that broke down in the
second.
It's very worrisome right nowthat for a whole array of crimes
(08:21):
looting, smash and grab wedon't seem to prosecute the
offenders and then we're usingthe law to go after.
In the case of Donald Trump,five different civil and
criminal indictments, none ofwhich I think even the
prosecutors would say would havebeen filed had he not run for
president again or will not befiled about anybody in the
(08:44):
future.
They've never been used in thiscontext against someone with
trying to avoid the statute oflimitations or saying he
overvalued a real estate loanthat was paid back on time to
the benefit of the bank.
So those are the some of thethings that studying history can
tell us.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
I want to go back to something that you touched on.
That's the premise of your book, the End of Everything, how
Wars Descend into Annihilation,which is almost a rebuttal or an
antithesis to thisenlightenment understanding of
history that says we're alwaysprogressing.
So we went from this barbarianstate and are now becoming more
(09:23):
morally superior, maybe moretechnologically advanced and
always increasing and alwaysevolving in this area.
And I've been reading a lot ofDostoevsky, particularly
Brothers Karamazov and Notesfrom Underground, and he also
has a lot to say about thatthesis in general, and I'd love
to get your thoughts on thatidea with your book in mind as
(09:46):
well.
What do you think about thisenlightenment notion of history
always progressing?
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, we often call it the Whig notion of history,
that you're going from point Ato point Z.
It was very popular when I wasin my 30s, before you were born.
Probably a colleague atStanford, francis Fukuyama,
wrote the End of History and histhesis was, with the fall of
(10:11):
the Berlin Wall, that the wholeworld now realized that the only
system that worked was consumercapitalism and constitutional,
democratic and republicangovernment and therefore they
were all on the same page.
And yet history had been mademade or it was the stuff of wars
and fights over economy andgovernment.
(10:33):
And now you wouldn't have any,you would kind of have a one
world, globalist sameness.
And of course that was crazy.
That came out right beforesaddam hussein and radical islam
and 9, 11 and all that.
So, and most people, I think itdivides down left and right.
(10:55):
The Marxist theory of history isthat there's going to be a new
Soviet man, a new communist man,and if the government has all
power, they can mold a personfrom earliest education to think
in a particular way.
You see this with the wokemovement, the DEI movement.
So they feel that if you hire ateacher or a faculty member
(11:18):
they have to sign a DEIstatement and students have to
follow this orthodoxy and peoplewill be punished.
And the result is you're goingto create this one government,
one civic body that all thinksalike, and it's going to be
wonderful because they're somuch more morally advanced.
But the methods, the problemwith all of this the methods to
(11:41):
achieve that.
They're always justified by theends, but they're usually
authoritarian and totalitarian,usually to force people to do
that.
And so I don't see to get backand, as I mentioned in the
epilogue of my book, afterlooking at these four examples
in Thebes, carthage,constantinople and the Aztecs of
(12:02):
Mexico City, tenochtitlan, Ididn't see any moral progress
whatsoever.
There's some.
I mean we don't have slaverycommon, although there's still
slavery in parts of the Islamicand African worlds.
But it doesn't mean that youcan't learn from the past and
technology gets better.
(12:23):
I'm not saying there's notprogress, but the idea that the
stuff of history war, plague,all of these are going to be
eliminated and people are goingto react differently.
That's not going to happen.
And as you look today, I thinkyou could say that more people
have been killed since World WarII than the 70 million in war,
(12:47):
70 million that were killed.
We had a plague.
We thought our technology wasso sophisticated We'd never lose
50 million people worldwide,maybe 70 million, 1 million
Americans.
And yet the methods to combatthat virus social distancing,
masking, national lockdowndidn't work.
(13:09):
And the idea that we had amagic bullet and said that we've
got our generation is sobrilliant that we are the first
in the world to conquer acoronavirus that mutates very
rapidly and we're going to havea vaccination.
It's going to ensure 96 percentimmunity and you will not be
infected, nor can you infectanybody.
That lasted about eight months,and and so history does not get
(13:36):
to a utopia.
Technology advances because ofthe some experiences and
knowledge each generation buildson that, but it doesn't mean
that that technology will beused in a morally superior
fashion.
So we have AI, we have atomicweapons, we have bioweapons,
nerve these are all things thatthe past didn't have, but we're
(13:58):
still humans and we're stilljust as likely to use them.
But they're going to be muchmore dangerous because while
technology evolves, human naturedoesn't.
So you put into hands of very,very volatile people scientific
opportunities that can entailwholesale destruction.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I'm curious so why doesn't like our decisions?
Why don't our decisions andkind of our cultures, why don't
they evolve or progress at thesame rate like scientific or
technological revolutions?
Evolve or progress at the samerate like scientific or
technological revolutions?
You'd think like, well, we havethousands and thousands of
years of history, we've seenpeople make these decisions
(14:41):
before and you think, just liketechnology advances, well, you
try that, that didn't work, solet's do something else.
And we have this now.
Artificial intelligence is oneof the most cutting edge
technologies.
Why aren't we progressing Imean, if you wanted to say
morally or culturally at thatsame rate, like what about the
two different studies makes thathappen?
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Because there is such a thing as absolute truth with
science.
I mean, we know there is aprime number and there's not a
prime number.
We know the atomic weight ofparticular elements.
They don't change.
We know that physics has laws.
We know that there's three,five, seven on a triangle, the
(15:23):
relationship.
That doesn't change.
But so science worksdifferently.
It works with finding outthrough a theory and then the
scientific method brings enoughdata in.
That's on it.
Not that you, you know science,everybody always argues over
theories, but eventually thereis evidence in the physical
world.
But in the world of politics andideology there is no scientific
(15:49):
proof, because they're part ofthe human experience.
Scientific proof becausethey're part of the human
experience and humans they don'tnecessarily act or talk or
speak in scientific, rationalways.
When I was a young person therewas that original Star Trek and
everybody thought that Dr Spockwas so different because he was
not human and he replied onlyin terms of scientific reality
(16:13):
and that was supposed tohighlight that he was kind of
cool or he didn't understandthings or he was smarter.
He was different is the pointI'm making.
So people are, they haveappetites.
They have appetites forenjoyment, for ego, for
narcissistic, they are envious,they're jealous, they do things
(16:34):
to their bodies with alcohol,drugs, sex that they shouldn't
do.
They're mercurial, they'reunpredictable, and so when they
form families or when they formgovernments, it's very volatile.
So the family today.
One thing about human nature italways looks back at the past
(16:56):
and criticizes it as not assophisticated or as stable as
the present because oftechnology, and they confuse
that.
So they say, well, all thoseguys that went out on the Oregon
Trail in 1860 and coveredwagons, they were racist or they
didn't even know aboutantibiotics or they didn't know
(17:17):
about gasoline what a bunch ofidiots.
But if you actually look atthem and say, yeah, but they had
to drink foul water, they hadto deal with tuberculosis and
smallpox, they didn't havepsychiatrists, they didn't have
counseling, their families hadto stick together.
In many ways they had moreadmirable traits than we do.
(17:38):
And so human nature means thatoutside the realm of science,
everything is theoretical orputative or under constant
discussion.
We were told that by FrancisFukuyama that we would soon have
the 180 nations that constitutethe world body at the United
(18:03):
Nations would all be democratic.
In fact, we have fewerdemocratic nations now.
We don't even have half.
A lot of people have said well,we wanted to be democratic, but
then we looked at the UnitedStates and we thought, wow,
they've got lawfare, they've gotthis crazy idea that you can
operate on a 15-year-old andremove their sexual organs or
(18:24):
give them dangerous hormones.
And then we wanted to be freelike the United States.
But the media seems to censorpeople and they put political
people in jail, and so we don'tlike what democracy is.
And then it goes back and forthlike that.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
I'd love to dive into so many of those different
topics.
I mean, I'm thinking right nowof Underground man and
Dostoevsky a particular passage,in fact that's been referenced
throughout many psychologicaland political talks, but
unfortunately we don't have thetime to go there, and so I want
to kind of wrap up the interviewwith the last two questions we
ask all of our guests.
(19:00):
The first one is what bookshave had an impact on you.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Well, I'm a little prejudicial because I spent 50
years of my life I'm 70, inacademia and I was a classical
scholar.
So I'd say, of all the books ofthe ancient world, it was
Thucydides' history of thePeloponnesian War, because it's
not just a history of the31-year war between Athens and
Sparta, but it's a philosophicalinvestigation of human nature.
(19:28):
So he has the Melian Dialogueor the Stasis of Corsaira, and
he takes characters out of thathistory and he uses them to
reflect truth.
Just to take one example, theMelian dialogue, the Athenians
are supposedly culturallysuperior and they tell the
Melians we're going to conqueryou.
And the Melians say but thatwouldn't be consistent with your
(19:49):
view of yourself.
And they said I know it, butstrong dictate to the weak.
And they said, yes, but you'llbe hated because you'll act out
of character and you'll oppressus.
And then everybody will revoltagainst you.
And they said well, we wishthat were true, but human nature
being what it is, they'llprobably be afraid of us.
And then they'll say but youwouldn't respect us because we
would just hand over our freedomto you.
(20:11):
And they said, yes, we wouldjust hand over our freedom to
you.
And they said, yes, we wouldrespect you because you know
we're stronger and we're goingto wipe you out and therefore
you made the raps.
So that kind of dialogue is inthe entire history.
I also as a historian.
Tacitus is Thucydidean.
I think all young people shouldread a novel written around 60
(20:33):
AD by a Roman aristocrat calledPetronius and it's called the
satiricon and it's a satire onwhat Roman society is like and
the theme of it is we have hadso much wealth and so much
leisure, we are utterly decadentand almost every modern uh uh
(20:54):
affectation is in that novel.
People are not having children,they're not marrying, people
are openly bisexual, there's alot of transgendered people,
they have an emphasis on foodluxury.
They make fun of less educatedpeople.
They despise hardworking,middle-class entrepreneurs that
(21:18):
don't have.
They're not sophisticated.
They make fun of soldiers andthis writer is trying to tell
you that Rome of the old iscollapsing and the more modern.
I think everybody should take alook at Dante's Inferno too.
It was especially the firstthird of the of the trilogy.
(21:38):
Purgatorio and Paradise aregood, but the Inferno is really
interesting about how the earlyRenaissance looked back at
antiquity In the more modernperiod.
I think it's good for youngpeople to read nonfiction.
Gibbon's History of the Declineand Fall of Rome is one of the
most beautiful things writtenjust for the prose alone.
(22:00):
More modernly, I would suggestthey all look at the work of
Andrew Roberts.
He's the British biographer,historian.
He wrote a wonderful biographyof Napoleon.
He wrote a biography of WinstonChurchill.
He wrote a biography of GeorgeIII.
If you're interested in militaryhistory, I'll just end with
this.
The most gripping thing writtenduring World War II was by a
(22:24):
veteran, eb Sledge, and he was21 and he got drafted and he
fought in the US 1st MarineDivision and he unfortunately
had to fight at Okinawa and Ithink it would be very good for
your generation to read thatmemoir.
And it's almost impossible tocontinue it.
(22:46):
It's so horrific what the USMarines had to do.
I mean fighting the Japanese tosee what the Japanese did, for
(23:06):
example and he's not apropagandist.
But when you're fighting peoplewho torture and mutilate you
and force civilians to killthemselves and they're very
fierce what do you do?
How do you fight them?
So those are some.
If you're interested in areally good novel.
(23:29):
I think Conrad's Victory is oneof the best novels that I've
read.
It's about a person who'salienated.
In all those novels they'realienated but they come back and
they feel there's a great causethat they need.
In this case he wants to save aperson from some evil people
and yet he knows in the tragicsense, once he gets involved
he's going to be destroyed.
Kind of like a John FordWestern where you know the
searchers, or George Stevens,shane or High Noon, where the
(23:55):
tragic hero knows that he alonehas the skills to save the small
town or the settlers.
But the methodology that heuses using a gun or he's crude
or crass will work.
But in the process, once hebrings salvation to them, they
have the luxury or the margin oferror.
They start to say well, you'revery crude, you've got to ride
(24:18):
off in the sunset.
Your work is over.
We don't want people like youliving among us, even though we
wouldn't have been able to saveourselves, and we have no
gratitude toward you.
Get out.
And that's a very popular themein classical literature too
Sophocles and Homer.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
And then our last question is what advice do you
have for teenagers?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
My advice to teenagers would be to ignore
what people are calling todaywisdom when you're on your way
to college.
I would avoid any course thathas the word a dash with studies
, peace studies, leisure studies, gender studies, race studies,
asian studies, environmentalstudies those didn't exist until
(24:59):
about 30 years ago.
Those are therapeutic coursesand they're deductive.
In other words, they start witha premise and then you enroll
in them and then you're supposedto get in line with that
ideology.
Literature, history as well asscience that give you a broad
(25:22):
knowledge in the generaleducation and as a general rule,
the older the writing is, thebetter.
Especially anything writtenafter 1980 is kind of suspect.
The other thing is, in myexperience with young people
your age I taught a lot of youngpeople for 50 years.
(25:44):
They have no idea that peopleput a high premium on a person's
vocabulary and their ability toexpress themselves both orally
and in writing.
Both orally and in writing.
And when students read widelyand they try to emulate great
stylists like Gibbon orThucydides or a good novel and
(26:06):
they can express themselves,that is so rare today because of
social media and people ontheir phones that they almost
have a missile-like trajectoryof success.
And when people meet them, theysay, oh my gosh, that person
knows grammar and they expressthemselves very well.
They don't use four-letterwords, they don't just say like,
(26:30):
like, like, uh, uh, uh, uh, andthey write well and that's a
lost art.
So those are very good skillsto develop and the only way you
can develop them is reading goodliterature and writing and then
having professors that willcorrect you and teach you that.
And the other thing is be veryhumble about the past.
(26:53):
Don't fall into thiscontemporary trap of saying
we're going to tear down thisstatue because this person
didn't meet our elevated rulesof what's good and bad, because
you have no idea what they'regoing to say about my generation
or your generation.
But I think, maybe 50 years, asmy generation tore down statues
(27:14):
of heroes or religious people,and I'm just.
We tore down a statue inCalifornia of Junipio Serra, who
founded the missions, becausehe didn't fit our idea of a
humane person.
He was a very good person, infact.
But what is a generation goingto say, say, 50 years?
(27:35):
They're going to look back onus and say, oh my God, they had
a million people defecating,injecting, urinating,
fornicating in the sidewalks oftheir major streets.
We thought they were very well.
They couldn't handle thatproblem.
Oh my God, they had no border.
They let in 10 million peoplein three years.
Oh my gosh, you couldn't walkin.
(27:57):
I mean, all these cities thatwere safe were like medieval
Paris or medieval London, whereyou could get stabbed, and it's
not safe to walk at night.
Oh my God, look at this society.
They abort a million people ayear and 10,000 are killed in
the birth canal, and they thinknothing of it.
And so, oh my God, they injectthese terrible drugs.
(28:20):
100,000 of them die of over it.
So we keep thinking that we'reso much better because we're not
as racist, we're not as sexist,we're not as homophobic, but we
do things that, by classical orhistorical standards, future
generations are going to find usvery wanting, and so it's very
good to be modest about yourgeneration.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Well, Dr Hansen, thank you so much for joining me
on the podcast.
We've discussed manyfascinating ideas the downfalls
of civilizations, as well as howsome of these same problems are
in our present society, andkind of that myth of the ever
progressing moral superiority ofeach new generation.
Thank you so much for coming onthe show.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Thank you for having me.
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