The Arrogance of Ignorance: The Decline of Classical Education & The Rise of Wokeness

>> Interviewer: Did a column in the New York Post earlier this month, Victor, the headline ten ways American culture and ways of life is under assault. And the ten of them are, and I'll just blaze these as quickly as I can, one, free expression two, weaponization of justice. Three, the attack on the Supreme Court, four, the Media Democratic fusion.

Five, the destruction of common law, six, the erosion of the military, seven, sexes that sexes is plural, eight, race, not class, nine, debt is a construct, and ten, universities. Let's jump forward to universities, as that's most relevant to our audience here. Here's what you wrote quote, the role of a university is to create a brief, safe space in which graduates can leave with proper training about the terrible history of the United States.

And the ways in which it must be dismantled and then be rebuilt by the properly trained experts from the ground up. Is it really that bad?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I mean, I was a graduate student here in the PhD program in classical languages in 1975. And I think that I was the only center rider conservative student, all the faculty were left wing, but I never knew that.

So when we were talking about Achilles, or we were reading the odyssey, or we were reading Herodotus history in Greek, or Tacitus in Latin, or writing in Latin or Greek. All of these great scholars were men on the left, but they didn't feel that they were gonna be deductive, it was inductive.

We're gonna teach you the skills, we're gonna give you the body of knowledge. We wish, you would probably have our worldview, but if you don't, you at least have an analytical, rational way to come to an inductive, and that seems to be gone. So I would say that today if I went to a classroom in Stanford, and I gave two lectures, one would be the glory of Jesus Christ.

And I want all of you to accept him as your savior, you would be kicked out, and you would be reported. If I said, it is indisputable that climate change is completely man made, we've never seen any heating in the cooling of the planet like it. We have to take drastic action, and you're all gonna, there's not going to be any objection at all.

On the contrary, if you said not just that you were proselytizing christianity, but you said. I don't believe that we are the first generation to heat up the planet, nor do I believe that we have the power to radically cool it. I do believe we can contribute to it, I think you'd be in big trouble, big, big trouble, I can tell you that, from personal experience on things like that, you'd be in big trouble.

>> Interviewer: There is a historian at Princeton, Victor, he's a fellow classicist like yourself. His name is Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and he wants to end the teaching of classics in universities. This seems to be a problem, Victor, if you do not learn about Greece, you do not learn about the roots of democracy.

If you do not learn about Rome, you don't learn about the roots of the republic. You also don't learn how these two rather creative societies, were very openly critical of their leaders. How they lampooned their leadership, in other words, they engaged in free speech. As a classicist, what does the future hold for the teaching of the ancients?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I co authored a book, well, 23 years ago called who killed Homer? And I predicted that on the present trajectory, the classics, classics as a discipline would be destroyed in 50 years. And that was not just the precursors to woke, but also it was a narrow academic.

And people were not trying to expand the field from the right, the philologists were not trying to make their work relevant. But on the left, in those days, three decades ago, people were using a jargon. In those days, it was Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. So instead of studying the cult of Aphrodite in Asia Minor, it was the fallow centric construction of manhood.

And it was all from an ideological point of view that was to be unquestioned. And you could see where this was gonna go in the case of Mister Peralta. I know he was a Stanford undergraduate, I've been a frequent target of his criticism. He got a Princeton Stanford PhD, excuse me, he was a Princeton undergraduate.

But what was disturbing about his attack on classics washington. He was an immigrant student, who was given a scholarship to go to prep school, very well under a meritocratic system. Then he was given a scholarship to go to Princeton, to study classics, and he was trained by some of the great classicists.

One of whom was Joshua Katz, controversial now, but a great classicist, then he went to Stanford on a fluke scholarship. And then he got almost immediately, something unheard of in the classical profession. He got a tenure track job at Princeton, that is unheard of in classics, there's five to six people for every one job.

And so what does he do with that privilege, immediately when he's tenured, and he's got this exalted position, and he has this whole history of people trying to help an immigrant? Then he turns on the whole field and says it needs to be destroyed. And by the way, all of you poor people out there that are $200,000 in debt, they're getting a PhD in classics.

I'm gonna ensure you're never gonna have a job again, because I'm gonna blow up the field now that I'm on top of it. And by the way, I'll just drift over to complit because they'll never fire me, and that was his operating assumptions, and more importantly, it is.

If you destroy the teaching of the Greek language in Latin, by extension. There's no way you're ever going to transmit the classical legacy in its entirety, because you need these experts from time to time, refigure, recalibrate. They find new archaeological remains, they find new inscriptions, they find palimpsests with new texts, and it requires a great degree of Greek.

And this is well beside, the value which we talked about in who killed Homer, that if a person takes Greek and Latin. And they understand the grammar and the syntax, and the composition, they are innately better writers of English. They read better in English, they speak better, and they enjoy literature.

To agree that it's unsurpassed, so it has practical ramifications and value outside of the expertise in classics.

>> Interviewer: I'd like one of these bright people to tell me who Rishi Sunak is? His hand went up first, you can yell it out if you want to.

>> Audience 1: He gave me a call.

>> Audience 1: He's the prime minister.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: What's he that?

>> Audience 1: He's the British prime minister, and he gave me a comb.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: I didn't hear the question.

>> Interviewer: Gave him a comb. And what is Mister Sunak connection to Stanford?

>> Audience 1: I lost my voice forgive me, he got his MBA here, although none of his professors remember him.

>> Interviewer: Doctor Raj, is that true?

>> Dr. Raj: I wasn't here when students do remember him, but my colleagues were asked whether they remembered him, and nobody remembered him until the dean reminded them of who he was.

>> Audience 1: But he sold himself running for prime minister, saying, I'll stand up, I'm sorry that he said, I can make Britain seem like a startup business.

I studied at Stanford, it was brilliant to have these brilliant professors at the GSB. And then financial times went to the GSB, and none of his professors remembered him, but regardless, he's the prime minister.

>> Interviewer: Yes. Isn't it great when you have a smart audience?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: What's that?

>> Interviewer: Isn't it great when you have a smart audience to work with? Okay, I mentioned Rishi Sunak for this reason. About a year ago at this time, Great Britain was going through considerable political turmoil. In the course of about six weeks, they blazed through three prime ministers, Sunak becoming the third prime minister.

Now currently holding the job. He is a Stanford MBA. He's a young guy. I think he's 43 years old as well. Very interesting. He's a Tory. During his campaign, if you wanna call it his advocating, become the prime minister. He was asked about a policy called Greenbelt, which those who are familiar in Great Britain, this is, you have a city, but then you try to build a green area around the city for two reasons.

Number one, so the urbanites kinda feel they're close to the country, but secondly, it cuts down on sprawls you don't have. If you fly in Washington DC and you see ungodly sprawls, you come to Dallas airport. The Brits wanna avoid this. So Sunak was asked about Greenbelt, and here's what he wrote.

What he answered, quote, what's the point in stopping the bulldozers in the green belt if we allow left wing agitators to take a bulldozer to our history, our traditions and our fundamental values. Whether it's pulling down statues of historic figures, replacing the school curriculum with anti British propaganda, or rewriting the English language.

So we can't even use words like man, woman or mother without being told we're offending someone. It's not us who are the aggressors. We have zero interest in fighting a so called culture war, but we are determined to end the brainwashing, the vandalism and the finger pointing. And then you go over to Mister Sunak's Twitter account, excuse me, his ex account, and he wrote the following while he was trying to become prime minister, quote, let's restore trust, rebuild the economy and reunite the country.

So question Victor, how do you deal with wokeism in Britain or the United States without actually having a culture war? He thinks you can do it peacefully, but can you do this peacefully?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: I think you have to have a common agreement that whatever your differences in the present, you don't war in the past.

I mean, there's obviously people in eastern Europe when they were freed from a God awful communism, they had the right to take down the Stalin statue, or same as true of Hitler. In our history, it seems to me that I'll give you one example of living in an Orwellian world.

I came to the Hoover tower, where my office is one day. And I said to somebody, what happened to Junipio Serra Plaza? I thought I was from Mars or something. He said, it's been renamed. And I said, what happened? Who did this? Why there's a Junipio Serra boulevard?

And they said, well, he whipped Indians. I said, he was a missionary, he was in chronic ill health. He walked the length of California. He had sins and he had benefits. He tried in the time to be enlightened, as he saw being enlightened, but he did some very great things.

He was a complex character. But then the thing that was very interesting about woke is it's always selective. So nobody wants to change Hannibal Serra Boulevard. So they virtue signal. They do, yeah, they virtue signal by doing it with a plaza. So if you're gonna go full woke is what I'm saying, we'll get to the questions.

If you wanna go to full woke, it seems to me that why go half heartedly? So here's Stanford University. It's a great university. And Leland Stanford was a railroad tycoon. He was a man of action. He had flaws. Jane Stanford was interesting character. She was devoted to learning.

They spent their fortune and this is what we got. But according to woke, you could say that Leland Stanford wrote letters that were, by present standards, anti Asian. He said it was a peril. We have to take people back after they very racist. So what I'm getting at is that no one ever says we have to rename Stanford University as an indigenous university.

So what woke does is it says to themselves, we are gonna be selective, but we don't want to anger people or do the whole woke trip that would either hurt our self interest or the left. So we're not gonna talk about Yales ancestry, we're not gonna ever rename Yale or not gonna.

But we're gonna go over here and topple this statue and then tell everybody that we're woke. And that's historically in tune with what this selectivity is. It's always used for contemporary political purposes. As to the quotes, what this MP was saying, that no present generation owns the past.

And they don't have wisdom enough to go back in the past and erase the entire cargo and say, this is what we think has to disappear. And you don't know what the value is and what would be valuable for the society. You've set yourself up as judge, jury and executioner of the past.

And the past is not, as I said, it's not melodrama. It's tragedy. So it's a rich tapestry igniting it for the rest of generations. And so there's an arrogance to woke, I think, that people don't talk about. It's a very arrogant idea and it claims the moral high ground.

There's one last wrinkle, I'd say, is that everything in education is a tension between commission and omission. It's a zero sum game. So if you spend a lot of capital and labor time with diversity, equity, inclusion, monitoring and wokeness. It's very similar to the soviet commissariat that you have people that are looking at syllabi to see that it's correct.

You have people that are making sure that on hiring committees, everybody has a woke statement. You're looking at promotion and tenure on basis. There's a whole industry now that is not productive. And what do I mean? Are they teaching languages and philosophy and math? No, they're monitoring and adjudicating.

And it's not productive labor. It's like the Soviet Red army. They had commissars in almost every company sized unit. And their job was to make sure that tactics and strategy were not just based on military efficacy, but they reflected Marxist ideology and they were incompetent. And the first twelve days of the German invasion, they almost lost the war.

And what did Stalin do? He got rid of the commissars. Stalin did his own people. He said, this is too inefficient. And so what we're doing now is not only are we being divisive, but we're spending time and capital. And yet when you look at young students and you meet them and they come, if I speak at a university on any topic.

But say, a military history, they'll say things, well, wasn't this person bad or racist or sexist? And you say, yes, but let's have a conversation where we can relate to each other. Such as, would you please tell me what the battle of Guadalcanal was like? Nothing. Can you please tell me what the difference between a b 29 and a b 17?

Nothing. Can you please tell me who George Patton was? Nothing. Can you tell me what FDR's four freedoms were? Nothing. So it's a whole body of knowledge that's disappeared from the college curriculum, and it has to be replaced by what? By students in their young years adjudicating what is good knowledge and what is bad knowledge.

But they don't have the tools to make those distinctions other than an ideology that's been. Infused into them, so the worst combination is arrogance and ignorance. So it's very tragic that we're losing a whole generation of students that are highly opinionated, highly vocal. And yet they don't even have the tools because they haven't had that classical instruction that their teachers did.

Many of the teachers who are rebelling against the system were classically trained in languages, philosophy, science, mathematics. And then they said, you know what? This was all bias, so I'm going to not teach that. So they really shortchanged this generation. It seems to me they didn't as good stewards of knowledge, they didn't pass on all of the value that they got.

They made an arbitrary decision that they were going to pander the students and they destroyed that whole legacy.

>> Interviewer: Final question, Victor, and we'll go to questions, and fear not, you will be first. The question is this, Victor, is the pendulum swinging, is the fever broke to use a Victorism, have we reached peak Wokism?

I note if you look at Netflix, Disney, Warner Brothers, they have all let go of their lead DEI diversity, equity, inclusiveness Executives. If you look at job losses within the corporate sector in America, more DEI officials are being fired than non DEI. Do you think we've hit the high point here?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: I think so, I think we're getting close to peak woe, anything that can't go on, I think Herrnstein said that won't go on, and it's unsustainable. If we want the current lifestyle, prosperity, security of the United States, then it was based on a meritocracy. And if you're gonna destroy that meritocracy, and that can be everything from requiring pilots in training programs for United, that 50% will be admitted to the pilot training based on their superficial appearance.

If you're gonna do things that's across the board, it won't be sustainable. People will start to see the society break down, I think we're already seeing it. If you look at San Francisco, it's a perfect example of what woke can do, whether you look at it in jurisprudence or homelessness or smash and grab or high taxes.

But people who were very left wing said, this can't go on and I can't save it, so I'm leaving, so 30% of the stores are empty. And when you see the popular culture, what I'm worried about is that if people keep pressing and saying, we're going to cancel, de-platform, shadow-bound, dox people that we disagree with.

And we're going to do this often on the basis of race, then other people are gonna say, are we now in a tribal society? So we're going to start identifying by race, well, then it's like nuclear proliferation, if everybody's gonna go nuclear, I'm gonna go nuclear, that's what they think.

And contrary to superficial university orthodoxy, there's great diversity within races. You don't want them to be, there is I mean, when I leave Fresno, California, and I see somebody who's a child of the Oklahoma diaspora, who hasn't had one person in his family ever go to college. And I come over here and see somebody with a PhD or JD who's very wealthy, and they both happen to be white, I can tell you they have zero in common.

They would not like each other, they'd have nothing in common but to lump all these people together. And that's true of every race and to these collectives, it's not sustainable. And you can see people, whether it's the Anheuser Busch pushback or the target pushback or the Disney pushback or the LA Dodgers.

Or all of a sudden we hear a song that is the number one on the charts of every single hip hop, rap, contemporary, classics popular. This Oliver Young, rich men north of Richmond, all of a sudden it's a phenomenon, why? Because it's somebody saying, class is what matters, not race, class.

And we're tired of being told what to do and that, why would anybody want to listen to that? Except people are getting very tired, and I think every once in a while things jump the shark. We saw it at Stanford University with a law school incident. So when that federal judge was shouted down and a administrator hijacked the lecture as if it was spontaneous.

But then produced a text that was pre written with the expectation that the following would happen as scripted, and then joined the students in denying this person an opportunity to speak. People, I mean, people said, this doesn't work anymore, this is chaos and it can't go on like this.

And I think, and I've been here 20 years, I think I've never had more phone calls and email than any other incident than that, that was sort of the epitome. And people said, if we continue with this, we will not have a law school because you won't be able to say anything.

And you're gonna have to have Mao to approve every type of word vocabulary. And then the Stanford, vocabulary list where we were told, you can't use the word immigrant, you can't use the word patriotic, so,

>> Interviewer: I think mother made the list.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, the revolution gets into the Jacobin phase, we are now in the Jacobin phase of 1792 and 3, the reign of terror, and there's going to be a Thermador reaction, it's already happening.

And let's just pray that the reaction is moderate and tries to tamp it down. But if the woke revolution keeps going and going, we're gonna get a backlash, and it's not gonna be pretty. Historically, it's not pretty, and that's gonna be something we should all be worried about.