Aiming for the Moon
Aiming for the Moon
121. When Civilizations Crumble - Lessons for Today: Dr. Victor Davis Hanson (Renowned Classicist and Military Historian)
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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A rich understanding of history allows us to recognize patterns in the possible trajectory of the present, but sometimes this analysis provides sobering prophecies. This is the Aiming for the Moon podcast and I'm your host, taylor Bledsoe. On this podcast, I interview interesting people from a teenage perspective. 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 this new book, he outlines the common factors in the downfalls of great civilizations and, unfortunately, he proposes that America aligns with many of these patterns. Dr Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and shares the working group on the role of military history in contemporary conflict. He has also been a political commentator for various media outlets. He is a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, fresno and the annual Wayne and Marcia Busk Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hillsdale College since 2004. For a full list of Dr Hansen's accolades, as well as his books, see the episode notes. If you like what you hear today, please rate the podcast and subscribe. You can follow us at aiming the number four moon on all the socials to stay up to date on podcast news and episodes. Check out the episode notes for Dr Hansen's full bio, as well as links to our website, aimingforthemooncom, and our podcast sub stack.
Speaker 1:Lessons from interesting people. Thanks again to Paxton Page for this incredible music. Now, in the silence before the interview, I want to make a quick note, because Aiming for the Moon has a diverse audience, and this episode deals with some points in contemporary politics. 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 Great, all righty Well. Welcome, dr Hansen to the interview. Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Yes, wonderful. So to start off, why should we care about the downfalls of ancient civilizations and what happened to them? We think about our modern world and we think about our modern problems and we often kind of have this idea that well, that must have been a terrible thing that happened, but that was 2000 plus years ago. So how does that connect to me today?
Speaker 2:living in Little Rock, arkansas, in high school. Well, I just finished a book the End of Everything about four civilizations that collapsed. It's predicated on the idea that human nature doesn't change, so all of the stimuli, the appetites, the reactions of people from 500 BC to 1500 AD are the same as ours. That's kind of contrary to what the university says, that if you just give us enough money and power we can make a new person. But they can't. It's biological and so when you look at the past you can see it doesn't repeat itself. But you can see. If you cover wide enough area and chronology, you can see how certain people reacted to certain things or certain people. When they get to in in government or monarchy or democracy, they do predictable things. And then you can look back and if 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 to happen because it happened in Athens or Rome. But you can say we're headed to in a situation where the following are likely and that makes it very useful.
Speaker 2:And in the case of these ancient civilizations we're also fortunate in the case of Greece and Rome that well documented. We don't know much about the Near East. We know a little bit about the Jewish Near East, hivoglyphics in Egypt or Mycenaean Linear B they're not literary tablets, but we have a whole rich 70, 80 million words written about antiquity and we have very bright people who were writing, and they wrote empirically, and by that I mean they weren't coerced by the government. For the most part, they weren't politically correct or anything. So when you look at what happened to these societies the ones that they all eventually fall, but in various rates of decline usually four or five characteristics that your listeners might want to think about One is physical collapse, in other words, they were spending more money than came in, and when that happens in history, there's usually only four or five things you can do. The hardest, and the only one that works, is to raise more money and to cut spending and balance your budget. It's very important for you guys and your generation, because we're $36 trillion will be the ones responsible for paying that down, which will mean a tougher type of existence for you. The other thing that you can do is inflate the currency. We had a 35% rise in food, gasoline, rent, insurance from 2021 to 2024. And the currency is not worth anything. When I was your age. I bought a brand uh, my parents bought a brand new car for 2400. I just looked at some cars or between 770 and 80 000 for pickup, so you can see what inflation does.
Speaker 2:Another way that societies deal with it is they renounce their debts. So where's $35 trillion? The Chinese have about $10 trillion, but most of it is retirees investors who buy federal bonds. And when you start to hear someone on the left say, well, they already have enough money anyway, why do we have to pay back their bond? That's very common in the past. But once you renounce the debt, then you have no trust left and it's very hard to ever issue a bond again. So inflation, cutting spending, raising taxes. Another thing is the appropriation of capital, and I've seen people on the left suggest that maybe all these wealthy people that have 401k should have to give them up to the government and they would get in return years of credit and social security. So that's something to watch out for.
Speaker 2:A military these societies collapse their military lives on past, reputation, not present, and we're 45,000 recruits short. Right now. We have DEI and wokeness in the military. We haven't had a good record in Afghanistan, of course, after the Kabul, humiliation, libya, iraq. We haven't really won a war decisively since World War II. We did all right in Korea, but Vietnam was a fiasco, and so our military is not what it was.
Speaker 2:We don't have a border. All these Rome had people flowing across the Danube and the Rhine River and they couldn't stop or they welcomed them in. They did not assimilate or integrate. We've had 10 million people come across in the last three years. That was deliberate. We could have easily stopped it, but we chose not to.
Speaker 2:So border security, financial uh stability, a good military, and you have to have the rule of law, 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 you were considered to have habeas corpus and equality under Roman law, but that broke down in the second. It's very worrisome right now that for a whole array of crimes looting, smash and grab we don't seem to prosecute the offenders and then we're using the law to go after. In the case of Donald Trump, five different civil and criminal indictments, none of which I think even the prosecutors would say would have been filed had he not run for president again or will not be filed about anybody in the future. They've never been used in this context against someone with trying to avoid the statute of limitations or saying he overvalued a real estate loan that was paid back on time to the benefit of the bank. So those are the some of the things that studying history can tell us.
Speaker 1: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 this enlightenment understanding of history that says we're always progressing. So we went from this barbarian state and are now becoming more morally superior, maybe more technologically advanced and always increasing and always evolving in this area. And I've been reading a lot of Dostoevsky, particularly Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground, and he also has a lot to say about that thesis in general, and I'd love to get your thoughts on that idea with your book in mind as well. What do you think about this enlightenment notion of history always progressing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we often call it the Whig notion of history, that you're going from point A to point Z. It was very popular when I was in my 30s, before you were born. Probably a colleague at Stanford, francis Fukuyama, wrote the End of History and his thesis was, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the whole world now realized that the only system that worked was consumer capitalism and constitutional, democratic and republican government and therefore they were all on the same page. And yet history had been made made or it was the stuff of wars and fights over economy and government. 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 before saddam hussein and radical islam and 9, 11 and all that. So, and most people, I think it divides down left and right.
Speaker 2:The Marxist theory of history is that there's going to be a new Soviet man, a new communist man, and if the government has all power, they can mold a person from earliest education to think in a particular way. You see this with the woke movement, the DEI movement. So they feel that if you hire a teacher or a faculty member they have to sign a DEI statement and students have to follow this orthodoxy and people will be punished. And the result is you're going to create this one government, one civic body that all thinks alike, and it's going to be wonderful because they're so much more morally advanced. But the methods, the problem with all of this the methods to achieve that. They're always justified by the ends, but they're usually authoritarian and totalitarian, usually to force people to do that. And so I don't see to get back and, as I mentioned in the epilogue of my book, after looking at these four examples in Thebes, carthage, constantinople and the Aztecs of Mexico City, tenochtitlan, I didn't see any moral progress whatsoever. There's some. I mean we don't have slavery common, although there's still slavery in parts of the Islamic and African worlds. But it doesn't mean that you can't learn from the past and technology gets better.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying there's not progress, but the idea that the stuff of history war, plague, all of these are going to be eliminated and people are going to react differently. That's not going to happen. And as you look today, I think you could say that more people have been killed since World War II than the 70 million in war, 70 million that were killed. We had a plague. We thought our technology was so sophisticated We'd never lose 50 million people worldwide, maybe 70 million, 1 million Americans.
Speaker 2:And yet the methods to combat that virus social distancing, masking, national lockdown didn't work. And the idea that we had a magic bullet and said that we've got our generation is so brilliant that we are the first in the world to conquer a coronavirus that mutates very rapidly and we're going to have a vaccination. It's going to ensure 96 percent immunity and you will not be infected, nor can you infect anybody. That lasted about eight months, and and so history does not get to a utopia. Technology advances because of the some experiences and knowledge each generation builds on that, but it doesn't mean that that technology will be used in a morally superior fashion. So we have AI, we have atomic weapons, we have bioweapons, nerve these are all things that the past didn't have, but we're still humans and we're still just as likely to use them. But they're going to be much more dangerous because while technology evolves, human nature doesn't. So you put into hands of very, very volatile people scientific opportunities that can entail wholesale destruction.
Speaker 1:I'm curious so why doesn't like our decisions? Why don't our decisions and kind of our cultures, why don't they evolve or progress at the same rate like scientific or technological revolutions? Evolve or progress at the same rate like scientific or technological revolutions? You'd think like, well, we have thousands and thousands of years of history, we've seen people make these decisions before and you think, just like technology advances, well, you try that, that didn't work, so let's do something else. And we have this now. Artificial intelligence is one of the most cutting edge technologies. Why aren't we progressing I mean, if you wanted to say morally or culturally at that same rate, like what about the two different studies makes that happen?
Speaker 2:Because there is such a thing as absolute truth with science. I mean, we know there is a prime number and there's not a prime number. We know the atomic weight of particular elements. They don't change. We know that physics has laws. We know that there's three, five, seven on a triangle, the relationship. That doesn't change. But so science works differently. It works with finding out through a theory and then the scientific method brings enough data in. That's on it. Not that you, you know science, everybody always argues over theories, but eventually there is evidence in the physical world.
Speaker 2:But in the world of politics and ideology there is no scientific proof, because they're part of the human experience. Scientific proof because they're part of the human experience and humans they don't necessarily act or talk or speak in scientific, rational ways. When I was a young person there was that original Star Trek and everybody thought that Dr Spock was so different because he was not human and he replied only in terms of scientific reality and that was supposed to highlight that he was kind of cool or he didn't understand things or he was smarter. He was different is the point I'm making. So people are, they have appetites. They have appetites for enjoyment, for ego, for narcissistic, they are envious, they're jealous, they do things to their bodies with alcohol, drugs, sex that they shouldn't do. They're mercurial, they're unpredictable, and so when they form families or when they form governments, it's very volatile. So the family today.
Speaker 2:One thing about human nature it always looks back at the past and criticizes it as not as sophisticated or as stable as the present because of technology, and they confuse that. So they say, well, all those guys that went out on the Oregon Trail in 1860 and covered wagons, they were racist or they didn't even know about antibiotics or they didn't know about gasoline what a bunch of idiots. But if you actually look at them and say, yeah, but they had to drink foul water, they had to deal with tuberculosis and smallpox, they didn't have psychiatrists, they didn't have counseling, their families had to stick together. In many ways they had more admirable traits than we do. And so human nature means that outside the realm of science, everything is theoretical or putative or under constant discussion.
Speaker 2:We were told that by Francis Fukuyama that we would soon have the 180 nations that constitute the world body at the United Nations would all be democratic. In fact, we have fewer democratic 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 United States and we thought, wow, they've got lawfare, they've got this crazy idea that you can operate on a 15-year-old and remove their sexual organs or give them dangerous hormones. And then we wanted to be free like the United States. But the media seems to censor people and they put political people in jail, and so we don't like what democracy is. And then it goes back and forth like that.
Speaker 1:I'd love to dive into so many of those different topics. I mean, I'm thinking right now of Underground man and Dostoevsky a particular passage, in fact that's been referenced throughout many psychological and political talks, but unfortunately we don't have the time to go there, and so I want to kind of wrap up the interview with the last two questions we ask all of our guests. The first one is what books have had an impact on you.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm a little prejudicial because I spent 50 years of my life I'm 70, in academia and I was a classical scholar. So I'd say, of all the books of the ancient world, it was Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, because it's not just a history of the 31-year war between Athens and Sparta, but it's a philosophical investigation of human nature. So he has the Melian Dialogue or the Stasis of Corsaira, and he takes characters out of that history and he uses them to reflect truth. Just to take one example, the Melian dialogue, the Athenians are supposedly culturally superior and they tell the Melians we're going to conquer you. And the Melians say but that wouldn't be consistent with your view of yourself. And they said I know it, but strong dictate to the weak. And they said, yes, but you'll be hated because you'll act out of character and you'll oppress us. And then everybody will revolt against you. And they said well, we wish that were true, but human nature being what it is, they'll probably be afraid of us. And then they'll say but you wouldn't respect us because we would just hand over our freedom to you. And they said, yes, we would just hand over our freedom to you. And they said, yes, we would respect you because you know we're stronger and we're going to wipe you out and therefore you made the raps. So that kind of dialogue is in the entire history.
Speaker 2:I also as a historian. Tacitus is Thucydidean. I think all young people should read a novel written around 60 AD by a Roman aristocrat called Petronius and it's called the satiricon and it's a satire on what Roman society is like and the theme of it is we have had so much wealth and so much leisure, we are utterly decadent and almost every modern uh uh affectation is in that novel. People are not having children, they're not marrying, people are openly bisexual, there's a lot of transgendered people, they have an emphasis on food luxury. They make fun of less educated people. They despise hardworking, middle-class entrepreneurs that don't have. They're not sophisticated. They make fun of soldiers and this writer is trying to tell you that Rome of the old is collapsing and the more modern. I think everybody should take a look at Dante's Inferno too. It was especially the first third of the of the trilogy. Purgatorio and Paradise are good, but the Inferno is really interesting about how the early Renaissance looked back at antiquity In the more modern period.
Speaker 2:I think it's good for young people to read nonfiction. Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of Rome is one of the most beautiful things written just for the prose alone. More modernly, I would suggest they all look at the work of Andrew Roberts. He's the British biographer, historian. He wrote a wonderful biography of Napoleon. He wrote a biography of Winston Churchill. He wrote a biography of George III.
Speaker 2:If you're interested in military history, I'll just end with this. The most gripping thing written during World War II was by a veteran, eb Sledge, and he was 21 and he got drafted and he fought in the US 1st Marine Division and he unfortunately had to fight at Okinawa and I think it would be very good for your generation to read that memoir. And it's almost impossible to continue it. It's so horrific what the US Marines had to do. I mean fighting the Japanese to see what the Japanese did, for example and he's not a propagandist. But when you're fighting people who torture and mutilate you and force civilians to kill themselves and they're very fierce what do you do? How do you fight them? So those are some. If you're interested in a really good novel.
Speaker 2:I think Conrad's Victory is one of the best novels that I've read.
Speaker 2:It's about a person who's alienated. In all those novels they're alienated but they come back and they feel there's a great cause that they need. In this case he wants to save a person from some evil people and yet he knows in the tragic sense, once he gets involved he's going to be destroyed. Kind of like a John Ford Western where you know the searchers, or George Stevens, shane or High Noon, where the tragic hero knows that he alone has the skills to save the small town or the settlers. But the methodology that he uses using a gun or he's crude or crass will work. But in the process, once he brings salvation to them, they have the luxury or the margin of error. They start to say well, you're very crude, you've got to ride off in the sunset. Your work is over. We don't want people like you living among us, even though we wouldn't have been able to save ourselves, and we have no gratitude toward you. Get out. And that's a very popular theme in classical literature too Sophocles and Homer.
Speaker 1:And then our last question is what advice do you have for teenagers?
Speaker 2:My advice to teenagers would be to ignore what people are calling today wisdom when you're on your way to college. I would avoid any course that has the word a dash with studies, peace studies, leisure studies, gender studies, race studies, asian studies, environmental studies those didn't exist until about 30 years ago. Those are therapeutic courses and they're deductive. In other words, they start with a premise and then you enroll in them and then you're supposed to get in line with that ideology. Literature, history as well as science that give you a broad knowledge in the general education and as a general rule, the older the writing is, the better. Especially anything written after 1980 is kind of suspect. The other thing is, in my experience with young people your age I taught a lot of young people for 50 years. They have no idea that people put a high premium on a person's vocabulary and their ability to express themselves both orally and in writing. Both orally and in writing. And when students read widely and they try to emulate great stylists like Gibbon or Thucydides or a good novel and they can express themselves, that is so rare today because of social media and people on their phones that they almost have a missile-like trajectory of success. And when people meet them, they say, oh my gosh, that person knows grammar and they express themselves very well. They don't use four-letter words, they don't just say like, like, like, uh, uh, uh, uh, and they write well and that's a lost art. So those are very good skills to develop and the only way you can develop them is reading good literature and writing and then having professors that will correct you and teach you that. And the other thing is be very humble about the past. Don't fall into this contemporary trap of saying we're going to tear down this statue because this person didn't meet our elevated rules of what's good and bad, because you have no idea what they're going to say about my generation or your generation. But I think, maybe 50 years, as my generation tore down statues of heroes or religious people, and I'm just. We tore down a statue in California of Junipio Serra, who founded the missions, because he didn't fit our idea of a humane person. He was a very good person, in fact.
Speaker 2:But what is a generation going to say, say, 50 years? They're going to look back on us and say, oh my God, they had a million people defecating, injecting, urinating, fornicating in the sidewalks of their major streets. We thought they were very well. They couldn't handle that problem. Oh my God, they had no border. They let in 10 million people in three years. Oh my gosh, you couldn't walk in. I mean, all these cities that were safe were like medieval Paris or medieval London, where you could get stabbed, and it's not safe to walk at night. Oh my God, look at this society. They abort a million people a year and 10,000 are killed in the birth canal, and they think nothing of it. And so, oh my God, they inject these terrible drugs. 100,000 of them die of over it. So we keep thinking that we're so 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 or historical standards, future generations are going to find us very wanting, and so it's very good to be modest about your generation.
Speaker 1:Well, Dr Hansen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. We've discussed many fascinating ideas the downfalls of civilizations, as well as how some of these same problems are in our present society, and kind of that myth of the ever progressing moral superiority of each new generation. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
