Farming, Warfare, and a Classical Life | Victor Davis Hanson

Aristophanes and Fiddies, which means you have to read the entire Corpus in Greek and know the manuscript. I like them because he wrote probably 100 comedies, we have 11 that exist and they are bitter. He is something of a classicist. I wouldn't like to be that explicit, but if you look at 19th century scholarship, they pretty much agreed that he's an old Kagan and he's a conservative and he doesn't like the radicalization of democracy, but he's too smart to be partisan, so he makes fun of everyone, something like Saturday Night Live, but a little grotesque and sometimes repulsive, but he attacks everyone and has these comedies in which he ridicules the politicians of the time and they deal with different topics, sometimes they are anti-Socrates . the clouds sometimes the knights anti alides Etc.

I mean, uh clean, I should say I really liked it and I and uh, I kind of mastered what it is, it's Plato zenfon Aristophanes are people who knew Socrates and wrote about him, yeah , so I think. There's only three, maybe there's a fourth, uh, that's remarkable and of course it's laughable towards Socrates, yeah, which is interesting, yeah, Aristophanes, right? I think he would have said what Churchill said about Gandhi being a naked fraud, you know, yes, that's true, something like that. uh and uh I've read something interesting lately, I'll volunteer it to you, uh uh, in his early days Socrates was like a pre-Socratic, he was just doing theory, what it is, what the elements are, how they work and he changed.

He writes about the fact. that Plato did that uh now he's interested in the things of men and that's why there's an argument that I've read lately that Aristophanes didn't like the first Socrates, maybe he would have liked the second one more. I think it s true. he was there, there is a mystical Pythagoras, we don't really know much, we have later biographies about him from the Hellenistic and Roman times, but he seems to have been a mathematical mystic that numbers have certain relationships that show divinity and you can glimpse the Theorem of Pythagoras or something like that and that shows you how the cosmology of Divinity works and he was very influenced by that and then he brought the philosophy supposedly from the clouds.

Aristophanes thought he never did so that attack, you're right in the clouds is Well, he was always a mystic and no one understands what he says even though he was a hoplight who fought in the Battle of Dum, was almost killed and led The rearguard and defeat probably saved Alabi's

life

, but he was a Man of Action. He was also in three battles, in the Pipián War, and was one of the few people who would not vote to execute the generals in Aranai, so who was also a man of action, which fiddies and Aristophanes are not. the same type of person, tell us about these cities.

I think he is probably the greatest thinker of

classical

Greece. He was half an aristocrat and probably wrote The Pelian War, somewhere between 420 and 400 BC. C., but it was He was writing because he arrived 3 days late to Amphipolis and was in charge of a naval squadron and was relieved of command at Feria, probably ostracized by Cleon, whom he describes as a very unpleasant character like Aristophanes. and he took that ostracism to travel around the Greek world and apparently he was writing about what he thought was going to be the biggest war that he didn't really know how long it was going to last, but he did something that we can't really decide on what he created. virtual truth or narrative truth, in other words, he has this ambiguous statement at the beginning of the book2, he says I wrote things as they happened and it took me a lot of trouble to find the truth and then you think you know it's completely factual and he said and in In some cases I put things in people's mouths that they should have said given the situation, so you don't know if Pericles's funeral relationship was dictated, probably not or represents the worldview in part of FUSD, that's what makes it so bright. so there are two fdii, there is a useful and very factual account of the war of 431 where it ends mid-sentence in 411 and then it is a pH philosophy, the Melean dialect, the Melini debate, the Coryan revolution, the funeral ration where you are hindering your own ideas. or he's putting it in and infusing it into characters that he thinks best reflect in these particular situations what he thinks the war or human nature was about before you think well, he just made it up, he's very careful that his views that come out of the characters' mouths fit the narrative setting of that particular time, so it's very difficult to say that Clone didn't say this or Pericles didn't say this because no one else in the narrative around those speeches seems to think they're awkward. , fit the narrative quite well, so he was an artist as well as a philosopher and a historian.

You have Aristophanes and you went through cities. You have comedy and tragedy. Yes, that's all. The classics in general. There is something that captivated you about them. and you are giving examples, but at some point you decided that I was going to be a scholar at this and that was not just because I know you quite well, but because someone gave you some money to study because you would never get rich doing that, but did you see something about them that could help you live your

life

better? Yes, I have always had the responsibility to do something excessively, sometimes it really boomerangs, but between the ages of 18 and 25, I think.

I didn't date, I didn't go out and do anything, all I did was read Latin and Greek and study Greek literature and Latin literature and then I did that for the next 20 years teaching it and in some ways it was an escape. Understanding it was like leading some people to do that with The Wind in the Willows or The Lord of the Rings, it was Game of Telephone, I was going to a completely different world and that was an escape, but for me what I liked was There was no self-censorship today in the modern world when we say things, we preach them based on how they sound in regards to our career, are they politically incorrect or am I going to suffer repercussions?

Human nature is what it always was. It's true to some extent, but people just said things empirically in the ancient world and they don't really care if it sounds wrong or right, but they do care if they are accurate and empirical and it stands to reason that honesty permeates. I think a lot about uh when someone like Socrates, uh Pericles, says or FUSD puts it in our mouths that we cultivate refinement without effeminacy, what is that? That means we all understand that people can read books and things like that without it being a feat, but you can't say that today because it conjures up all kinds of incorrect ideas about sexual orientation, but that's not what they meant, they meant that a person who was inside all day and was just described was missing the world and could not be counted on, it was a feat or a feminine one, so they thought that the Athenian was the perfect model, who avoided Spartanism, He wasn't just physical like the Spartans and yet he wasn't just a feat like other cultures, he was a balanced person, so you I acquired all that knowledge and when I was in graduate school I learned that this was an agrarian society and in Everywhere there were metaphors of agriculture, but there was almost nothing written about agriculture or things about the war at that time, the only thing that had been written about the war was in German, it was very esoteric, I had a thesis advisor, I don't think I would like it.

I would like a lot but at least he said well you're studying languages ​​and that's great do you really think you're going to be a great philologist and I said no I don't really like it he said well you know everything about agriculture and this is an agricultural society and here are the names of the books on the one hand that are about agriculture, you could write about that. and if you know anything about military history, you seem interested in combining the two. I owe him a lot, so I wrote a dissertation on War and Agriculture in Classical Greece that was, you know, everything in life is an accident, someone mailed it.

Mil, the military historian John Keegan, who was very well known, you know him very well, and one day I was

farming

on the tractor and I got this handwritten note of "You know you're fine," and I came out and it said, "Dear Professor, I wasn't there." . I was a professor or something like that and he said to me: I have read your dissertation. If you ever write another book, give me a call, so that day I went in and started writing Western Way of War about combat and then I had no contact with the Classico. This advisor was Longo, no one, he was my only link on the farm, so I sent him the manuscript and didn't hear from him for 3 months.

I thought I kept writing. I thought that was it and then one day he wrote and said Elizabeth Sifton. The editor-in-chief of Alfred Canop will be contacting you this week and I will be traveling to the front and that's great, it became almost a bestseller and that changed everything that attracts you because you are a Victor is difficult to characterize because he knows. a lot about and I want to emphasize something that he knows a lot about. What I mean is that he is unique in my experience. I can't think of anyone else like him. He is a leading scholar cited in

classical

scholarship, among the most prominent in the world. world and then on the other hand he also does a lot of other things, uh, but there are concentrations in your work, uh, war is one of them, how does that come to be a part of this, uh, I grew up in this family from um, they were Swedish-Americans on my father's side and then farmers, they were both farmers, but they were all World War II veterans, so I was growing up and my father was talking about flying 40 on 40 missions over Tokyo in a b29 and then he spoke. about his first cousin whose mother had died in childbirth and they had adopted Victor and his name was aw and he had been killed in the 6th Marine Division at Okona on the last day of fighting at Sugarloaf Hill and then he had an uncle who would be at Christmas dinner and I said, well, I was in the Illusions, don't forget the Illusions, then my grandmother was talking and saying that my nephew Beldon had dirty fever in the Philippines, it was terrible, you should remember what happened in the Philippines and then he said and before you do that, Hol was killed in Normandy and suddenly my grandfather was there, my Swedish grandfather with that thick accent, he says well, you know, I was in the ardan in the First World War Bella Wood and they gassed me. he was affected by phosphine gas, so in that period, when I was between 7 and 17, when it was always the Second World War, the Second World War and I started reading for RAC, I think a lot of little kids I don't know if Is that healthy or not, but I noticed a lot of kids from Hillsdale when I came here I taught military history and I see 18 and 19 year old students and they come up to me and say you mentioned a 20mm pistol and a b29.

I remember they were only there for about 6 weeks and they know the specs of the plane, it's almost obsessive, they know everything more than I do and I remember when I was that age I had that, but I also realized from those stories how horrible it is. . So when I wrote Western Way War no one had really written what it was like to fight in the fanks and how horrible it was, so in that book I talked about people being terrified while waiting to charge and defecating in their armor or shaking or running away or being killed or what kind of wounds they had and that was derived in the ancient world from what John Keegan had done in battle, so Tred always talked about war in the sense that being the Supreme in a way is necessary sometimes , but essentially you're talking about young people committing suicide and I wrote four or five books about battle waves about literature and art that come out of War Carnage and C, so I was fascinated by it, but also the horrors.

From that, what does war teach us about people, things and civilization? Well, it warns us about pacifism and it warns us about the therapeutic nature of the tendency to be therapeutic. By that I mean it's so horrible and doesn't make sense. Logically, there is always this movement to think that we have transcended human nature and this is barbaric, we are Neanderthals and we in Great Britain in 1935 were no longer going to do this or in France in 1929 we are not going to do this or in the United States later. This is crazy during World War II or after Vietnam and then you have to realize that not everyone is on the same page and if you have the idea that you have mastered human nature and there will be no one in the world different from you who They'll think I'm going to take advantage of this nation or do something to this group of people and I'll do it by force of arms and they'll get away with it. to hurt you or what, because you have decided that you have transcended, then there is moral culpability on your part and therefore, as a scholar of church bombings, you know what Churchill said about Stanley Baldwin and Neville CH, not so much Neville Chamber but the French.

What I'm saying is that they get people killed. Yes, because of its morality, so you must always realize that deterrence saves lives, that is, the expense of protecting yourself and your loved ones and letting people know that they should not do things. I think there was a great scholar in Australia. Blay was his name. I met him once and he said that all war is really based on ignorance. That everyone in this room, if everyone knew how physically strong each person was, they wouldn't say certain things. certain people or they wouldn't try things, but what happens between nations?

Strong nations sometimes don't announce how strong they are and give the wrong signal to a Hitler or a Tojo or a Mellan and thenThey do stupid things and war is a learning experience that teaches that's what he said Suid is a tough tough taskmaster Schoolmaster what it means is that you have to discover something that you should have known from the beginning so at the end of World War II killed 65 million people on September 2, 1945. Guess what we learned? The Soviet Union, the United States and the British Empire actually had many more resources than Germany, Fascist Italy and Tojo, the US economy was larger than the six belligerents, the other five belligerents combined, we should have We knew that at first we wouldn't have to go to war, but we weren't British isolationists?

You could argue that there were people in the British government who appeased and then there were people in the Soviet government who collaborated and who sent the wrong message that these people were weak when they were not. very intrinsically strong, so it occurs to me that war is like

farming

, you learn a lot about the limitations of nature of both and in our own way we Americans have been radically more successful than any nation. I mean, I know. that nowadays it is claimed that we are the most horrible nation on Earth, but that is nonsense, it is not always good for us to be so successful.

Sometimes when we enter that ubis period, we always get hit by Nemesis and that happened during example in Afghanistan and I always imagined it. I was embedded twice in Iraq and I went there and when you see you say the Iraq war, but when you see all the logistical problem of taking an entire army up to 6,000 miles and then Look at these kids from 1920 and they are outside in bad weather and they are under a buzz trying to fix it or they're walking, you're walking with them, someone will tell you, watch out for the person over there, he looks like a It might be a little boy, that's what it's about, it's not just something clean and tidy and I think that sometimes we think we're going to go to Afghanistan, we're going to go to this, we're going to do this and because we do things so well it will be automatic and war is so unpredictable and we haven't had a very good opportunity to be Frank if we We looked at Vietnam and then maybe not at the first Gulf War, but at Iraq and Afghanistan and the bombings in Libya.

Things in Libya didn't turn out the way we thought and I think people in the future should realize that when you decide to do something like that , you have to be aware of the logistics and the cost that this will have on society and if you can unite people behind this because a lot of things go wrong. I can't forget that image that we are leaving Kabul on August 21 and people are hanging from the plane and the marines are being exploited and then someone says we have an embassy of a billion dolls, well, and then another, you hear another report , we've invested $300 million in overhauling bam and then you see these acres and acres of equipment, I mean, they were impressive new Humvees, rifles and machine guns, and so on, and one commentator says in this it's 20 billion, we're leaving, no, it's 40 billion, we don't know yet and we just and then we have, they show pictures of a George Floyd mural or a pride flag at the embassy or you hear that we spent over a hundred. million in gender studies, so we were trying to very imperialistically implant our popular culture in a traditional Islamic society, but unlike the British, who did it quite successfully, they had power along with significant reforms that people I could see that they were helping them, but we were going further. there and trying to turn traditional Islamic societies into popular culture in America and yet they didn't think we were strong enough to do it so here we go and we're leaving all this behind and they think we're weak but at least at the same time they think we are sexy and imperialist because we have a pride flag that we think is cool but they think it is contrary to their entire religion, so we combine the worst of both criticisms of opimperialist trying to put our views in a different people and then being weak and ambivalent while doing it.

I used to help write the central biography and I work for a man called Martin Gilbert, a great man, and I got to go to Israel a lot and spent a lot of time. It's been a long time since I was there just this summer, but I wish I could go and spend a year anyway. I knew him because he was a famous man. I met several of the founders of modern Israel and remember realizing that they were all soldiers. yeah, they weren't and they didn't start out as generals, they started out on the line and all their lives they had been doing that off and on and that means that the most liberal and the most conservative of them all had a sense of the reality of the things that make it interesting about Israel is that it is a kind of litmus test of Western civilization because it is a purely Western society, it has a free market economy, especially under the Netanyahu government, over the last 10 or 12 years, they have a constitutional system.

They are Western, they are free, they are rich as they have never been before, as you know, and they also have the Western disease, the postmodern disease, that laxity that we complain about or the radical changes in fashion or music or all those things. things we do that can be described as excess, but unlike us have no margin for error, which is why a free and prosperous Western society and its neighborhood still believe in military preparation, patriotism, total mobilization against the people to those who constantly tell them that they oppress them. It shouldn't be there, they're in the NE, so they have all this Western baggage that other societies in Europe, the US, deal with, but we, we have two oceans, we have Canada and Mexico.

Europe is quite safe, they have people who love it. destroy them and say they want to destroy them and call them a one-bomb state and they have a history of the Holocaust and so they have no margin for error and it is a very interesting country if I could use those euphemistic terms. Can a Western society, a 21st century postmodern society, survive when people want to destroy it? Can they still have the means or the desire to be constantly prepared like Europe finally was in 1939 or we were in World War II and huh? so far they've been able to do it and it's fun, it's very fascinating to watch.

I am tempted to write a thesis. We are being governed by people who have not farmed, have not fought and have not read anything. old books that can be our problem, yes, it is, and one of the things we don't talk about, I think there is also a culture of shame that we have forgotten and we, many great classicists, talk about that transition of shame from the early times. The Greek city state feels guilty, especially in the Christian era, but we feel guilty about things, but we don't feel any shame and it's interesting to see that in past civilization shame was the mod modulator of behavior and I was thinking about that the another day.

When my hometown was a farming community, when someone broke into a store, they always said that Jack Smith was 16 years old, although he was a younger son of Mr. and Mrs. John Smith at 21 Birch Avenue, he was caught in the liquor store today and he will be uh accused of gr and today we would think that it was so primitive or so cruel or so mean to identify a minor by his name or by his parents, but that society as recent as let's say 1970 felt that that was one of the ways it had society to promote good. behavior and I can remember when someone in my family was smoking in town and my grandfather came back and said, can you sit down, Mr.

Jones? Another farmer said his wife was in town and saw his relative in white and had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth it's that true I said it's not illegal and I said my dad smoked in World War II and he said he did. I know, but this is not a war zone and our family doesn't smoke in public, there was a religious element at all it was just that we have a reputation of having been here forever and we don't want people to impute it by suggesting that you know that him and that there was another relative who had a small tattoo and said that what was his name came back from the war. he's my nephew but I thought he was going to say that he was injured or that he was killed or that he suddenly suffered from PTSD, he said and he was crazy and that was something and we and our wisdom said we're going to move beyond that little Scarlet Letter Society, so we just dropped all that collective pressure on individual behavior and I think, as I always tell my wife, if I lost my wallet in my hometown in a primitive 1965-era area, someone would deliver it to my house when I lost her. here my credit card is being used and within 30 minutes I find out that someone stole it and yet we are supposedly morally superior and have moved far beyond the prejudices, prejudices and parochialism of 1965, when people returned their wallets with each other.

Uh, you're famous for thinking we're in trouble. I don't like it, my wife also calls me Eeyore, yeah, yeah, so I, uh, you can see from the structure of this interview that we don't need to draw that. I myself believe that we are in a terrible mess and we are famous for thinking that too, but it is good to think about the perspective, the background that can help us understand the mess and maybe make a plan, a plan to get out of it. Do you have any suggestions for us on that? Well, there are two ways you could approach that remedy, one is politics and the other is culture or spiritual politics.

I think we were $32 trillion in debt and we have no way to pay it and we're running. a $2 trillion deficit and the mentality behind that is: I guess it's a modern monetary theory. There will always be a postmodern theory that justifies some disastrous action, but we are headed toward a date with a radical financial fix in some form, whether it be Social Security or Medicare. or the budget and there are other things that used to be our forte, the military I think is in serious trouble, they are having problems recruiting, they are becoming ideological, all the things that we grew up with this traditionalist that we had The Department of Justice, the FBI and the CIA seem unrecognizable, so there are things that need to be addressed and one of the things I think we have to do is go back to a smaller government with less regulation, but to do that you can't say that.

That means, okay, Victor, how do you do it right? You have to elect the House, the Senate and the White House and then you have to get on the same page, that's very difficult to do, it's very rare that a party can do that, but that. That's the only solution unless you believe you can do it spiritually, culturally or socially by changing people's hearts and minds and there are two things that give me hope. The negative is that it can't get any worse. We're getting to what Herbstein said like I said the other night, if this can't go on, it won't go on when you go down, when you walk through downtown San Francisco and you tiptoe around human feces and you see people injecting themselves, fornicating, urinating, and attacking people with impunity and you see cars that have signs, there is nothing inside to unlock the car, don't take anything, then you see that and 30% of these beautiful buildings are empty, they look like they were hit by a neutron bomb and that can't work much. longer and there are people in San Francisco who defunded the police who said we shouldn't do that and there are people who said homelessness is out of control and there are people who say we have to stop Smash and grab and, unlike you or me, these There are very strong members of the left and they say that the philosophy didn't work, so it's a shame that we had to get to this point, but we are starting to see that people recognize that when they went out with theirs and they got control of our institutions, AK corporate boardroom through the universities professional sports entertainment the media and they got everything they wanted it doesn't work and then the other thing is I think a lot of people have memories like the Romans in the 3rd or 4th century.

And we have memories, collective memories that things were starting to get better in the past and we're starting to have all these different movements where people are trying to bring back the Lions Club or the Elks Club or they're moving into communities in the Foothills or sometimes it's a monastery mine they just say I'm not watching I was interested in this I'm not watching the Tonys I'm not watching the Oscars I'm not watching the 's I'm not watching the NBA I'm not watching the halftime show anymore. I'm not doing it and when you look at the statistics, it's radical, it just decreased, so non-participation in popular culture is starting to have a real effect.

A lot of people say, I know I should be doing this. I know I should see these things. I don't go to the movies anymore. Because of their technology, I can watch them at home, but I don't want to participate in popular culture because it's a path to oblivion and I think half the country is. They're already there and they're starting, you know, Hillsdale College, when you got here, um, I mean, it was still a very successful college, but you've seen in 20 years miraculous growth, but itMore importantly, Hillsdale is no longer a university, it is a kind of I don't want to say a brand, but it is a beacon to say that the world doesn't have to be the way it is.

You can replicate our values ​​both with other universities and culturally, socially and economically, and that is hopeful, yes, well. We experience his presence here on campus, which is an honor for us now that we return, I think more than 20 years, it is a vindication of the most important thing that I learned in the classics myself and that is that everyone loves the good and loves the beautiful thing more than anything, so one thing I think they asked me the other day what we do with this disaster and the answer is everything we can, but the other thing is that the spiritual thing you talked about is very difficult to restore, that it's against the resistance of the law and yet it's also very difficult to fix the law without it meaning that people who think culture comes first and the people they're with. a little too optimistic because Aristotle says that law makes culture well, we are in a great movement and it has to start with people learning uh uh, I'm going to give you the opportunity to say something else, but I'll close this now, I just want to tell you as a compliment the most important thing you are to the world, the most important thing you are to your friends and yourself is your great connoisseur of the best things, the most important thing you are to others is a teacher and that is the way to help cultivate the spiritual renewal that is necessary.

Thank you. I think a lot of us don't want to argue anymore and everyone misinterprets it as you're quitting or giving up, but what's happened is if people move to different states or say I'm not going to buy anything from this particular corporation anymore or that I'm not going to watch this particular national event, it's almost like a massive civil disobedience and a lot of people say that if they're not going to participate we need those people even though we manipulate them and we don't like them we need them as consumers we need them as spectators we need them as assistants and these people are saying we're not going to do it If we don't want to fight you, we're just not going to do it because your values ​​have basically taken us to Purgatory and I think it's becoming a very powerful movement and people are starting to recognize it and people on The Left even say, "You can't have this massive resistance without understanding what it is and why people do that, and that's why it's been one of the strangest things in my life to see Bill Maher, Matt Taiiii or Elon Musk or people like finally saying this doesn't work what I'm doing and it doesn't work because a lot of people don't participate in it your last book is great it's called The Dying Citizen and and uh it's it's a moan about the loss of citizenship and a call to restore it and perhaps what we are saying is the way to restore citizenship, an urgent need is for us all to start learning and thinking again.

I think so and nothing is more important. I think as I get older. civic education, yes, teaching people about the customs and traditions of their country, absolutely thank you, thank you for having me, Larry.