From colonial times through the twentieth century, Western civilization became America’s own cultural heritage, and it was always taught in schools and universities. Then, in the later part of the twentieth century, Americans turned on Western Civ. Why did that happen? What are the consequences for our culture today? What can we do now to recover that heritage? Professor James Hankins joins John Grove, editor of Law & Liberty, to discuss these questions in connection with his new book, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition.

The Golden Thread, by James Hankins and Allen C. Guelzo
“Reviving the Study of Western Civilization,” by James Hankins, Law & Liberty
“The Right Standards for American Schools,” by James Hankins, Law & Liberty
“The Origins of the West,” by Max Skjönsberg, Law & Liberty

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

John Grove (00:39):

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m John Grove, the editor of Law & Liberty. I’m filling in this episode for our regular host, James Patterson. Pleased today to be joined once again by Professor James Hankins. Professor Hankins is professor of history at Harvard University and a senior writer for Law & Liberty. He’ll be joining the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida for the 2026 academic year, and he is the author of several books including Virtue Politics and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy. And most recently he has written with Allen Guelzo, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, and that is what we’re going to be talking about today. Volume one was released last month, and volume two is scheduled to be out by the end of the year. So Jim, thanks a lot for joining me again.

James Hankins (01:28):

It’s a great pleasure to join you.

John Grove (01:30):

So before we get into the book itself, I thought we would talk a little bit about the project and where it came from and a little bit about Western civilization and the study of Western Civilization. So I understand you and Allen Guelzo have a relationship that goes way back, far beyond the writing of this book. So tell us a little bit about how you two know each other and where this project came from.

James Hankins (01:54):

Okay. Well, Allen is my oldest friend in academia. We went to junior high school (middle school, they call it now) and high school together. We were in the marching band together, but we’ve been close friends for about 55 years now. And we always kept up our friendship and met, and we’ve been talking about Western Civ and other topics for many, many years. We didn’t actually come up with the idea of doing Golden Thread. This was a proposal to us by Encounter Books. They knew of our relationship and they were looking for someone to write a Western Civ book. Encounter is involved in a massive project to reform and revive the study of American history and Western history in a way that is appropriate to our time. As you know, people have taught Western history to educated people for hundreds of years in America.

(02:54):

It’s been called Western Civ since, let’s say, the late nineteenth century. But if you went to school in America in the eighteenth century, you would learn about the Greeks and the Romans. You would learn about medieval civilization, you would study history of Europe, all of this. This is standard fare for educated persons in the West since the Renaissance, really. And this stopped rather suddenly about 40 years ago. The educational establishment decided that they wanted to go global. There was discussion of this in an article in Law & Liberty published this week that talked about why it was put down, and how no one gave a thought to what the long-term effects were going to be of not teaching our own tradition. So now we find ourselves in a clash of civilizations—and we do have a clash of civilizations—but the West has unilaterally disarmed itself. We don’t know anything about our own civilization. And believe me, I know this, I teach at Harvard. I teach what are supposed to be the best students in the country and the level of civilizational ignorance is just astonishing.

(04:12):

They’re smart kids and they’ve learned what they can learn in high schools, but high schools simply aren’t teaching Western Civ anymore. That stopped also 40 years ago. K12 education gave it up. I once went through the social studies standards for all 50 states, when I wrote another article for Law & Liberty, and it’s just not there anymore. They’re teaching global history now. Anecdotally, I have three nephews who teach in public school system and what they’re teaching as history these days is just completely disengaged from any narrative of the West. And this is a terrible thing for us. As I said before, we’re unilaterally disarming ourselves in the clash of civilization.

John Grove (04:58):

Before we go on, why is that? What was happening? Obviously, we know about the radicalism of the ’60s, but what was the rationale? Why were so many people convinced to give up the study of Western Civ?

James Hankins (05:11):

Well, it’s partly the Vietnam generation, which didn’t like Western Civ. They thought of it as a Cold War historical phenomenon. This is incorrect, right? Max Skjönsberg published an excellent article recently,

John Grove (05:29):

I was going to mention that too.

James Hankins (05:32):

… reviewing a book that shows that Western Civ has always been taught. I knew this already because I do Renaissance history. It’s just not true that Western Civ is an artifact of the Cold War, but that’s how the Vietnam generation saw it. And so they didn’t want to teach it anymore. They had a very negative view, not just of the United States, but the whole west. So there’s that element. But I think even more powerful, in the 1980s and ’90s when this was done, was that the universities and colleges in America aspired to globalize themselves. This was a big project at Harvard in 1980s. Derek Bok wanted to make Harvard an international institution. They wanted to found branches in India and there was going to be a Harvard Law School in India, this center and that center. And they were also taking in lots more foreign students than they used to take in.

(06:32):

So the population of the university changed. There were fewer people who were native speakers of English. There were fewer people who had any background in Western Civ. And those people had to be educated. And also the professors didn’t want to teach it. Professors never want to teach required courses. They want to teach their research, and in places like Harvard and the Ivies that was going on. People were teaching narrower and narrower things; they didn’t want to teach a big narrative anymore. So that’s part of it. It was the globalization project of the 90s. And that wasn’t necessarily coming from the left either. It was coming from conservatives as well who just wanted a university that was more globe spanning.

John Grove (07:18):

It was interesting. Prepping for this, I looked up that phrase, because I knew that phrase, right? “Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go.” And I was surprised to find that they started doing in the ’80s. That was an ’80s slogan. I was expecting to find it in like ‘66 or ‘67, but it was in the ’80s that people did that. And so that’s interesting background about what was going on in the ’80s at that time. How do you respond to that? It sounds like a related issue. How do you respond to that idea that focusing on Western Civ is a sort of cultural chauvinism or western chauvinism or something like that. And how does the focus on Western Civ relate to this idea that, well, we also want to study the world and study other cultures. Other cultures are always represented as good. So how do you respond to that?

James Hankins (08:03):

Well, I think the real problem is not cultural chauvinism—what the left at the time labelled Eurocentrism—but cultural self-hatred right now. I mean, the best taught subject at Harvard is the history of China. And I say this with admiration because the people who teach Chinese history have done a great job of covering the entire spectrum of Chinese history and having somebody to cover every era and teaching a survey course every year and having upper-level courses that people can study after they get interested. They do a fabulous job on that. And they also teach Islamic civilization. But Western civilization, no. Harvard last hired a senior faculty member to teach any Western subject, ancient, medieval, and modern, in 2007. And we have lost eight senior historians through death, departure or retirement or since 2007. So it’s actually neglected. There are so many things you can’t study at Harvard now.

John Grove (09:04):

That includes any faculty member that has just an expertise that happens to be Western, not necessarily somebody that committed to Western Civ as a whole? That’s any faculty member who has a specialty that’s western focused since 2007?

James Hankins (09:18):

Anybody. I’m talking only about the history department, okay? I’m not talking about the other departments, but in our department, there have been no new hires in ancient history, in medieval history, and European history since the Renaissance. That’s the whole of Western Civ. And we haven’t hired anybody. And this year I’m the only person at Harvard University teaching ancient philosophy. So once I retire, who’s going to teach Plato and Aristotle, and the ancient philosophical schools, and Augustine and authors like that? I don’t know. They might be able to get an Augustine course in their religion department, I don’t know. But that philosophy department used to have course called Philosophy 10. It was taught every year since the time of William James. And they introduced people to ancient philosophy because they thought that was important for people to know. And they have a guy they brought in from Munich to teach Stoic ethics or something this year. But that’s really it. And in the gov department, they have a course where they teach a few texts, political philosophy. It’s very sketchy. They’re well-taught courses, but they’re not really survey courses of Western political philosophy.

John Grove (10:35):

Okay. Yeah. So you mentioned this idea of just self-hatred or sort of self-loathing. Roger Scruton always used the phrase oikophobia. And I know at times he sort of presented that as a Western phenomenon, that it’s something that seems to have really taken root in Western countries. And so there’s just an interesting dynamic there. What is it about Western civilization, about the train of Western thought, that somehow led us to that desire to just turn our back on and hate our own tradition and thoughts and ideas? Do you have any thoughts on that?

James Hankins (11:14):

Yes. Well, I spent a lot of time in China, and I studied Chinese history because of a comparative history project that I’m involved in. And China went through this whole period of self-hatred from the time the Marxist took over in ‘49 down to quite recently. But at some point the Chinese decided, oh, we can’t really hate on Imperial China. We can’t suppress the history of it. We have to turn it into something that’s positive. So if you go to China today and study Imperial China, they’re very positive about their own history, but we have not had that turn. I think it’s basically coming out of the post-colonial studies people, a trend that has not been that strong in the US until recently. Post-colonialism dominates historical study in Europe, especially England. We have a very strong strand of it here in the US now, [particularly in indigenous studies and Middle Eastern studies], and I think those are the people who are demanding that

(12:06):

…we hate on the West. They feel that the West has been responsible for the state of post-colonial Africa and post-colonial Middle East. And it’s a way of shifting blame for them. They don’t want to take any responsibility for their own problems. So they blame everything on the West. But that has been picked up: I mean, this is what’s behind the endorsement of the Palestinian cause. And we have to side with the victim. So the West is strong, the West is wealthy, powerful. So we are the victimizers and we should be ashamed of that fact, [they say]. 

And in the US of course, the big issue is slavery. People have been taught nothing about Western civilization except that it had slavery. So we’re supposed to hate on the West because of its history of slavery. But of course, all civilizations have had forms of unfree labor, sometimes chattel slavery, sometimes forced labor regimes that you get in China. It’s just the fact that anytime a society is strong, it attracts labor from foreign countries that are not doing so well. And those people sometimes sell themselves into slavery, or sometimes they’re captured in war, but this happens in all civilizations. And Islamic civilization, I think, had a much more serious slave regime than anything in the recent Western history. But that’s forgotten.

John Grove (13:44):

I’ve often thought there is, to get back to that phrase like Western chauvinism, there’s a kind of Western chauvinism I think that holds Western civilization to this much higher standard. So the things that have happened all throughout the world, well, Western civilization is guilty of them and the others really aren’t. There’s a sort of implicit sense of superiority there, that we are more morally elevated and therefore have responsibility for these things.

James Hankins (14:10):

But John, it’s tunnel vision, right? Because the West has fantastic civilizational achievements, and this super negative history is just totally blind to all the great things that happened in the West, such as the invention of democracy, the invention of experimental science, the invention of theoretical applications to medicine and mathematics. And you can go on. In fact, if you look at our book that we just published, Allen and I published, it’s a kind of treasure trove for all of the achievements of the West. And that is its goal in large part, to remind people of all the wonderful things that the West has produced, not just in political theory, but also in the arts and in music and in architecture. The West has had an extraordinarily rich civilization. And unfortunately, one result of hating on the West is that people don’t learn that anymore. So we have a generation that’s growing up that doesn’t know the names of Michelangelo or J. S. Bach. They don’t know who they are. They don’t know who Thomas Aquinas is. They don’t know anything about anything. And it’s impoverishing. They’ve lost the golden thread, as we call our book. They’ve impoverished themselves with all this hatred. And that’s why we really feel it’s important to start studying Western Civ again, but in a way that’s appropriate for our time.

John Grove (15:41):

That’s a great segue. So let’s get more, talk more specifically about the book. I’ll note, first off, that it is a beautiful book. It reminded me, going back to when I was in college, how you went to the bookstore and got your books, and you could tell which courses were going to grab you and which ones weren’t. And this was the sort of textbook that says, yeah, this is going to going to be a good course. It’s beautiful, it’s well designed. It’s also very large. So anybody who’s picking it up outside of a course better prepare yourself. You’re going to want to plan accordingly. That’ll take a while. So looking at the substance of the book though, I’m going to do something that’s a red flag, and that’s if you have a 1000 page book and you quote the first page of it. That’s what I’m going to do, though. I’m going to quote this very opening of the introduction, and just let you elaborate a little bit. It says, “A civilization is a space, so to speak, in which people may breathe.” What does that mean? And we’ve already been talking about Western civilization, we’re talking about the importance of studying civilization, but what is civilization?

James Hankins (16:46):

Well, that first paragraph is written by Allen, and he was trying to make the point that civilization is a flower of a culture, one might say. It’s not enough simply to survive, and to have wealth, stability, and all the basic necessities of any society. The society also has to flourish. It has to give reasons to people why they love their civilization, why they love the countries that have inherited that civilization. And it gives them a space to perform music and to cultivate the arts. And it gives them a space to think about deep philosophical questions and to enjoy literature. And this, I think, is really behind a lot of our motivations in writing the book. We’re afraid that these great civilizational achievements will be lost. People have to understand that a civilization is something that has to be cultivated; it has to be practiced. We don’t only need to have people performing in symphony orchestras, we need to have people in high schools playing music that will enable them to keep alive these great musical traditions.

(18:09):

We need to have the works of classical civilization taught. So I have a friend on the faculty at Harvard who came from England and he’s looking for a school for his daughter, a 14-year-old daughter. She wants to study English literature. They went around to all the fancy private schools in Boston area, and they couldn’t find anybody teaching anything older than the year 2000. This girl wanted to read Jane Austen. She wanted to read George Elliott, but she couldn’t read them because the schools considered older English literature to be white supremacist. They worried that the students might pick up some colonial or racist ideas by reading older authors. So they’re being made to read young adult literature written by woke writers, mostly since the year 2000. It’s tremendously impoverishing. 

I have my own definition of civilization, slightly different from Allen’s. And my definition is a civilization is something that civilizes. That makes us more civilized people.

(19:17):

And this extends from developing all the human capacities, human flourishing, the ability to reason, the ability to speak, the ability to appreciate the arts, but also extends to things like good manners and treating other people well. Western civilizations have always had books, from the Greeks onwards, telling you how to treat other people, what’s polite, how to shave down the rough edges of society. And this is something we obviously need to be doing in our society today because we’re so much at each other’s throats and angry and shouting. Teaching the arts of civility is part of what a civilization does. It teaches the arts and civility. And in order to do that, you need to have examples. All of the great moralists of antiquity talk about precept and example. You had to teach “little morals,” etiquette is little morals, and you had to teach morals alongside that. But what you really needed is examples. An example is so much more powerful than precept. You can tell people the rules, but if you see somebody who’s really good, you want to be like that person.

(20:41):

Our civilization preserves examples of great heroism, great conduct, great artistic achievement. And if people are unaware of these possibilities, the chances that they will meet an inspiring example go down dramatically. Because most of us in our daily experience, we occasionally meet outstanding people, people of extreme goodness or holiness or heroic people, but it’s just not very common. If you read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (this is his own book that he wrote for himself, for his own edification), he starts with all of the people that he had met in his life who encouraged him to be a good person and to live a Stoic philosophical life. And that example is so important, but we’re stripping out all the examples of goodness and human achievement from our educational system.

John Grove (21:38):

And it seems like there’s something to it being shared, too. Somebody gets a good example from their father or somebody in their life, or just a book they happen to read. But there’s something about having this, the examples that we all recognize and share. And then we can talk to one another about that example or with that example in the back of our mind without even recognizing it. Today, even when we do have good examples, it’s sort of like it’s your own personal example and it doesn’t provide us something to…

James Hankins (22:10):

It’s just good luck. And I’m very grateful that my father was a great man. I mean, man of high moral principle, and I’m so glad for that. Not too many people these days have that; there are many people who don’t. But your point about the shared culture, I think is absolutely on target. And one reason why we have such partisanship and fragmentation in our public life today is there is no shared story. There is a shared story of America, of course, but America is a product of Western civilization. And it was created by people, the Founding Fathers, who knew Western civilization very well. Just read the Federalist papers and you’ll see that they’re very well informed about history, but they know they’re very interested in founding a republic. So Madison and Adams, above all, and others as well, had libraries. And they were looking for all examples of history of successful republics that they could find. And this is a shared discourse of the Founding Fathers, which we don’t have anymore, but they knew about the ancient Greeks. They knew about the Roman Republic and the medieval city Republics and Dutch Republic, and they were using that to inform their practical wisdom.

John Grove (23:33):

This is actually leading directly to my next question. So why don’t I go and pose it? When we’re thinking about Americans looking back at ancient Greece, and the Romans and the Dutch, I asked previously, what is civilization? My next question was, what is a civilization? So when you think of Americans and the ancient Greek polis and the America we live in today, quite different. There’s huge gulfs there. You’ve got Christianity in the middle, you’ve got modern commerce. So across time and also across space, what makes a civilization such that it’s not exactly a cultural unity, but there’s something there. So another way of saying this might be, what is this golden thread that you’re talking about? What is the thread that binds these things together that we can speak of it as maybe not a complete unity, but something that’s together?

James Hankins (24:26):

So in this book, we’re following Sam Huntington’s idea that the modern West is a third or fourth order of civilization that embraces earlier civilizations, which is itself an achievement, by the way. So Greek civilization was a self-standing civilization, its own heroes, its own stories, its own historical experience, its own arts and music. And the Romans, when they conquered the Greeks in the second century BC were wise enough to say, we need the Greeks. We want to be civilized like the Greeks. We want Romans to be civilized too. We want our own literature, we want our own architecture, but we want to stand in that tradition. So the Romans absorb the Greek tradition, and when Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the Christians were tempted to be abolitionists if you will. They were tempted to stamp out the earlier civilization,

(25:28):

because they had a lot of problems with the morality of the Greeks and the Romans. But they didn’t end up, like Islam, being completely secessionist. They didn’t crush Roman civilization the way that the Islamic civilization crushed Persian culture. They decided that they needed it and that it was valuable for Christianized Romans to remember the Greeks and the Romans. And so they kept it going. They kept teaching the same authorities, the same philosophy, the same literary monuments, and they kept building buildings in the classical style. Romanesque style is a version of the classical style. So they kept it going, and they adapted it to Christianity. In the 4th century Christianity itself changes and the Romans change at the same time, but they kept the golden thread going. 

And when the Roman Empire fell in 476, it’s the Benedictine order that decides it has to preserve civilization.

(26:37):

So they are copying manuscripts. Every single work of a classical text in Latin that we have today was copied at some point by a Benedictine monk in the early Middle Ages. So they kept it alive, and they fought for it too. I mean, there were many key battles that kept the Western civilization alive. 

European civilization emerges in my account in the eleventh century, and it also inherits the classical Christian past as well as the Greek and Roman past. But European civilization is something new, and one of the things that it includes is the cultural practices of the barbarians who had conquered the West. So it’s not true that the West has always destroyed barbarians. It’s in fact the case that Europe actually picked up from the German tradition an idea of consultation, that rulers have to consult with people and have the permission or acquiescence of the people before they can proceed with any policies that they’re going to do.

(27:44):

So the modern West is a fourth order civilization, which inherits from the past a very, very rich civilization. This is why people sometimes ask me, do you think Western civilization is better than Chinese civilization? I get this question in China, right? So the answer is: it’s not a fair comparison because Chinese civilization has a great unity to it from the time of the Han dynasty, or even before that, down to the early twentieth century. It’s really one civilization in a way that ours is not. So it’s not fair to compare four civilizations to one, and it’s an unanswerable question anyway, and not fruitful to pursue. But we want people to understand that we have an enormous cultural heritage, 3000 years of it that we need to preserve. And we in our generation have the same responsibilities as the Benedictine monks and the European intellectuals who founded the university. We have to keep it going. It’s up to us or we’re going to lose it all. And you can lose it.

John Grove (28:57):

Right. And it is nice to remember that there were other times where it seemed like things were on their way out, and things changed, but something was still handed down. So, I want now to just get more into the substance in the book. So volume one—and I understand you are primarily responsible for Volume One, and Allen Guelzo primarily responsible for Volume Two—Volume One, takes us basically from classical antiquity up to the Renaissance. So there’s a lot there. I’m not even going to try to cover the scope of that. But just to give a sense for how you approach some of these things, I thought I would just ask a few big picture questions about the development of Western civilization. So you’ve already kind of hinted at one of these, but one of the huge dividing lines in that period from antiquity to the Renaissance, obviously, is the rise of Christianity. And so we were talking about handing down, and how Christianity rose in this pagan world. They kept some things, they changed other things. What do you think is the most important thing to take from this massive movement?

James Hankins (30:05):

Well, Tom Holland wrote a wonderful book about this. I’m sure you read Dominion, and he talks about the fact that we’re all Christians, whether we believe in Christianity or not. The moral world that we inhabit today is a post-Christian world, at least for people like Tom Holland (I’m a Christian, so I don’t consider myself post-Christian), and even if you’re hostile to Christianity, you still have Christian morals. We still privilege the suffering victim. We consider that a suffering victim is someone who deserves our help. They didn’t have that attitude in pre-Christian Roman Empire or among the Greeks. And suffering was a shameful thing. So I have a section in the book, I think it’s chapter six, about the moral revolution of Christianity. The Christians, they’ve been alienated from the Roman Empire for centuries. The Book of Revelation is a gigantic denunciation of the Roman Empire, and they had been persecuted by the Roman Empire for centuries.

(31:12):

They worshiped a criminal who had been executed by the Roman state. That’s about as in your face as you can get. They were not persecuted continuously, there were outbursts of persecution, but they were determined to change the Roman state when they took over at the time of Constantine. They hated its violence. They hated its militarism. The early Christian military saints were all people who were sainted or martyred because they refused to fight under certain circumstances. St. George and St. Maurice and all these early military saints were saints who refuse to fight for the wrong reason, against the wrong people. They were determined also to do away with blood sports. Tom Holland starts off by talking about crucifixions, right? The crucifixions that were done by Crassus, I believe; in the first century—he wanted to put down a slave revolt, and he wanted to remind people that they shouldn’t rise up against the Roman state.

(32:22):

So they lined the Via Appia for hundreds and hundreds of miles with crucified slaves. And this was a message, a very strong message, do not revolt against the Roman Empire. But what Tom doesn’t talk about, or maybe he does and I just missed it, is that the Romans used to have beast fights. They would slaughter thousands and thousands of animals in the Circus Maximus or the arena, the Colosseum, for the entertainment of people. So people could enjoy seeing the blood spurting out of the animal and watch them die in agony. They would applaud at a particularly large animal being killed by a gladiator. It’s just sickening, but that’s what people liked to do in ancient Rome. And so the Christians did away with that. No more blood sports, no more gladiator sports. It took awhile to get rid of them, but they got rid of them. And so if you go to the Christian capital of Rome, which is Constantinople, now Istanbul, there are no gladiatorial games.

(33:26):

They have horse races. That’s the big public entertainment put on by the emperors. 

But there are many things like that. And one of the things that has been written about is the attitude to sex. In the ’60s, the Romans and the Greeks were admired for their open attitude to sex, but nowadays it looks a little different. The Christianized Romans decided that slave masters who forced their slaves to have sex with them were doing something wrong, and that should not be allowed. And the first expressions of the concept of human dignity emerged, right? St. Paul prohibits porneia, which is sex outside of marriage. And husbands—there was as a double standard as there usually is, that the males could do whatever they wanted for sex, with their slaves or with other women. And the women had to observe sexual purity, although they didn’t.

(34:29):

But the Romans, Christianized Romans, decided that forcing sex on your female slave was wrong. Historians today forget things like this. And I think that that’s something that we need to recognize again. Christianity has had a huge moral effect on Western civilization, going right back really to the Jews. I wrote a whole chapter on ancient Judaism and early Christianity, partly because I wanted to make the point which became ever stronger in my mind as I wrote about it, that Christianity is really descended from Judaism. It tries to distinguish itself from Judaism, especially in the second century when Jews are being persecuted. But it really grows out of the Jewish religion and its values, like equality, for example, the value of equality among members of the state—that really comes out of ancient Judaism. And so that’s something I’ve discovered. 

John Grove (35:36):

You mentioned tradition and a handing down or passing down. And one of the things that so many people today don’t realize is—even people who are anti traditional—they’re clinging onto these ideas that emerged from this or that tradition, so part of the divide is just: do you realize that you are traditional or not? And are you grateful for that tradition that gave you the ideas that you have or not? Other than the rise of Christianity, the other topic I was going to have you say a little bit about is the Renaissance. So you chose to end this section at the Renaissance, presumably, I’m guessing Volume Two is going to start right up with the Reformation. What’s interesting about the Renaissance for us today? I know you’ve written in some other things for us that you think various elements of our life are sort of ripe for a renaissance, and I thought there was a sort of interesting unity in ending Volume One with the Renaissance. What is interesting for somebody in the twenty-first century looking back on the Renaissance? What sort of example does that period give to us?

James Hankins (36:44):

Well, first of all, Allen and I decided to divide the book there because I’m Catholic and he’s Protestant. We spent our adolescence arguing over Catholicism versus Protestantism. So we decided we would not reenact our adolescent debates in The Golden Thread. But I personally believe that the Renaissance is a tremendously important period for us today because we need a renaissance. Our civilization has gotten rotten. We have forgotten our past, to start off with, but we also have tremendous partisanship. We have an educational system which doesn’t improve our human nature anymore. It doesn’t aim to improve our human nature. And the Renaissance is a period where suddenly in the mid-fourteenth century, people realized that things were falling apart and they had to renew the sources of civilization. 

So in the mid-fourteenth century, you have the failure of the crusades. All the soldiers come back, they start wars in Europe, and there’s continuous warfare.

(37:53):

The longest war in human history, the hundred years war, which is actually more like 150 years of war, starts with the end of the Crusades and it doesn’t let up. Europe is destroying itself, and the soldiers come down to Italy and they maraud and shake down towns. The town of Siena was surrounded by soldiers, I think it was 27 times, and they had to pay huge amounts of money and everything was destroyed. So they had that problem. They had just discovered deficit financing. Governments had discovered deficit financing for public funds using banks. So it wasn’t long before the King of England had bankrupted his entire country with debts to Italian bankers because the Italians were the bankers for Europe at the time. So the result of that was that the banks all collapsed. So this is gigantic financial collapse in 1342.

(38:55):

And then you have famines, and then you have the Black Death, which wipes out at least 40% of the European population. So things are looking pretty bad in the middle of the fourteenth century. And Petrarch, who’s the great leader of the humanist movement, he thinks God’s punishing us, obviously, but what can we do about it? And his idea is that we have to renew humanity, and we’re going to renew humanity through education, through reviving the ancient education. Because he lives in Italy. He’s surrounded by the ruins of the Roman Empire. He knows there was a great empire there at one time. And he’s a man of letters. He has the best library of his time, a private library. He’s read Roman history; he’s read Greek history. He reads the great writers of the past, Virgil and Seneca, and he says, where is the virtue? Where is the human excellence? The ancients had it.

(39:53):

We don’t have it. Our leaders are all tyrants. Our leaders are military thugs, or they’re very rich men without good morals. So his goal is to bring back the virtue of the ancients. And obviously it’s idealized. I think he was aware that the ancients were not morally perfect; he’s fully aware of ancient vices and disasters of different peoples, but he also recognizes that the ancients had something that no longer exists, which is this high level of human excellence, which only comes from a civilization. So he’s trying to refound European civilization through education and through trying, especially, to convert the elites—the princely elites and the republican elites of his day—to classical civilization. He wants them to bring back the virtue of the ancients, which includes wisdom and prudence, as well as the ordinary virtues of justice, temperance, and courage, which are not so ordinary.

(41:05):

So that’s his project: to bring back virtue. And the Renaissance is an age that seeks virtue, that seeks excellence, and that fact has been somewhat obscured by the modern historiography on the Renaissance. That’s what I was writing about in Virtue Politics, trying to correct the negative view of the Renaissance that you find in Hollywood. The view that the Renaissance is Machiavellian, for example, or that the sins of the corrupt Popes define the era. But the Popes are actually part of the humanist movement. They’re part of the Christian humanist movement that was founded by Petrarch. Many of them were, not all. So I’m trying to build a more positive image of the Renaissance itself, because it’s a resource for us. They pulled off a renaissance, and this is what the classical schools are trying to do right now in the US. They’re trying to create an alternative educational system inspired by the past.

John Grove (42:05):

Well, on that point then, you talk about refounding Western civilization in part through education. Obviously this book is part of that. It’s also part of a broader initiative, the Golden Thread imprint, that Encounter is going to do. Why don’t you just tell us a little bit more about that broader project?

James Hankins (42:21):

Well, it started with Bill McClay’s, Land of Hope, Wilfred McClay. It’s a wonderful book. It’s been very successful, and that was designed to give a balanced account of United States history. It wasn’t a celebratory account. It does celebrate, but it also points out the failings and the attempts of Americans to overcome their various failings. But it does describe the positive side of the US, and it does try to give people a sense of loyalty and love for their country. So then the Encounter people came to us with this project. They said, well, we have to do this for the civilization as a whole. We need a second volume, which is going to be like Land of Hope, a volume that will tell the story of the West in a balanced way, that will not deny the failures of the West, but will also celebrate its achievements. Keep the thread of our civilization going, or reconnect it, really, before it’s too late.

(43:23):

So that’s how this project got organized. And now Encounter has an entire publishing project built around the Golden, I think it’s called The Golden Thread Initiative. And they’re going to try to supply teaching materials and teacher training and all sorts of things that will be connected with both books, Land of Hope and Golden Thread, to renew education in America. And while I hope that there will be some public schools interested in doing this, we’re really directing these projects at the new educational alternatives, homeschoolers, Christian classical, classical charters. One of the things about our book and Bill’s book is that we’re trying to write a book that’s not hostile to Christianity. And many of the older Western Civ books are implicitly hostile to Christian societies, and they present the modern world as something that’s escaping superstition or dogmatism. And we don’t take that line. It’s not a sectarian book, it’s not a Christian book. It’s written for everybody to read. But we’re trying to write a book that’s not going to be hostile to Christians, or Jews for that matter. And so they can use it without the fear that their whole worldview is going to be subtly undermined.

John Grove (44:43):

Well, as somebody who has two kids in classical schools, it’s always reassuring when I hear that you have an involvement in that classical school movement. That’s obviously a really fast-growing movement, and hopefully this initiative will give a lot of clarity to that movement and give it even more momentum. So James Hankins, thanks so much for joining us here. You’ve been a guest on our podcast several times, three or four times. Always a great pleasure to talk with you. This is a great and worthy endeavor that you’re undertaking, and glad it’s finally out. We’ve been hearing about it for a while. It’s been much talked about, so it’s great to finally see it and to be able to dive into it. Thanks so much for joining us here again.

James Hankins:

It’s been a pleasure, and thank you for having me on.

James Patterson (45:29):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.