Historical Complexity & The Need for Nuance

>> Interviewer: Please go to questions, and since you had your hand up, we'll start over here.

>> Audience 1: Thank you, so I had a question in regards to when you were talking about communism. Well, I should start with I'm Abrielle, I'm a Public Policy student and Philosophy student at Rollins College in Florida.

In regards to the communism discussion, you said that it was acceptable for people to tear down the statues of people, of course, fascists from those times, presumably Hitler as well. Because those symbolized terrible actions historically for those people specifically. So my question to you is, when we see instances of slavery in the United States and other statues that have symbol representative value to cultures and peoples who were affected by those things, is it similarly acceptable?

And then if that's acceptable, where is the bright line where we can draw and say it's no longer acceptable to do this? Because that's something we see on both sides.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: There's two qualifications.

>> Audience 1: Thank you.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: First of all, all of this, there's a degree of relativism.

So if a person kills in the industrial way, 6 million people, as Hitler did, or Stalin murdered 20 million people, then that's a magnitude that James Wrongstreet didn't do. James Wrongstreet was a Virginian who fought for the Confederacy. He didn't own slaves, he felt that he had an allegiance to it, it was a wrong cause, he fought for a wrong cause.

After the war was over, he renounced the Confederacy. He worked for the federal government, and he was hated by his fellow Virginians to the degree they still blame him for the loss it Gettysburg. And yet they tore his statue down. They not only tore his statue down, but there was a World War II general, JC Lee, and the mob went after his statue thinking he was Robert E Lee.

So they were just anybody that with the name Lee, they tore his statue down. So that's one thing, is that you have to be selective cuz there's magnitudes of crime. And I'm ambiguous about Robert E Lee, I don't think he was the great saint that everybody said he was, I think he was culpable.

So if it's the federal government and it has authorized statues, I can see why you wouldn't want Robert E Lee's statue there, or you might wanna remove it. But we have a federalist system, so if people in Virginia wanna have a statue and it's a majority vote. And my biggest criticism of how these statues were torn down was often in the dead of night and without even a city or county provision.

But if a county in Virginia says, we don't want Robert E Lee, because he represents to a large majority of our population the institution of slavery. Even though it was 160 years ago, still we feel it has baleful consequences, then we're gonna ask our elected officials. And if the elected officials and the board of supervisors have a majority vote and they wanna remove it, I think that's perfectly fine.

They want to, but they don't do that, people they get angry, they go to a statue, they throw stuff on it, they went after Cervantes statue. And so they should read about iconoclasm and what happens when you do that. And you just get into a mass frenzy and you start tearing down things of the past.

In the case of Eastern Europe, and most of those governments said, after we have freed ourselves from Stalin, we do not want Stalin's statue here. And so the governments removed those. Sometimes a mob might have got out of control and they preempted the government, but mostly those were done legally.

But on our iconoclastic movement, they weren't, they were spontaneous. And most of the people who were tearing down the statues didn't calibrate exactly which crimes or which crimes they committed or didn't commit. They were just, he has a southern uniform on, we're gonna get rid of him. But the civil war was 700,000 people got killed, and there were some good people.

I know Donald Trump, was criticized for saying this side and that side. But there were people that did not own slaves and oppose slavery, not a lot of them, but they had no choice to fight for the Confederacy. And the idea they were all evil and all mention of them is crazy, and, I mean, we don't do this with everything.

So there's no bigger fan of mine than of Martin Luther King Junior than I am, I think he was a great American. But if you read David Gerald's biography or you read Ralph Abernathy memoirs, it's very clear that he was a womanizer and he was a plagiarist. Is that important?

Do we tear down his statues because of that? I don't think so. I think we look at the totality of Martin Luther King's work and then we say he was human and he was fragile like the rest of us. He was under enormous stress, but in the tale of history, the grand summation of history, his pluses vastly outnumbered his minuses.

So we don't tear a statue down, but people don't use that calibration, when it's ideological, they just say, he had one sin, therefore he's a sinner. Get rid of him, but they don't want any complexity. And yet when you look at their side, there's all sorts of complexities, and yet people don't.

I mean, one of the great icons of the left is Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. If you go back and read what she actually wrote about eugenics, Planned Parenthood started, as I did, to selectively sterilize particular people that she felt were genetically inferior. Now, you could also argue that she did a lot of good for women that were raped or had incest and they had access to it.

But does the left say that? Does the left go. Or Earl Warren was a great man, I didn't agree with any of his decisions, but he was a great man. But he also signed the order as attorney general for the forced relocation of Japanese Americans. Who not one Japanese American or not one Japanese national that was in California was ever found guilty of espionage, and yet he signed the order.

So UC Berkeley then removed his name. Is that the totality of Earl Warren, that one in the frenzy of World War II? He gave into the emotions. No, he did a lot of great things, especially if you're, and yet he's canceled. And so that's my criticism, that there's no introspection or calculation of what people are doing, it's either evil or good.

>> Interviewer: A question down here in the front row, you're gonna get your steps in.

>> Audience 2: Hi, thank you both for coming. My name is Kevin from Georgetown University, and my question is one argument made by Professor Patrick Deneen points that the current state. There's a decline in religion, decline in patriotism, a rampant wokeism, and decline of civil religion, that access to consciousness that binds democracy together.

If the way that we got to the current state today is through freedom, unrestrained freedom, right, and I think people shouldn't expect liberalism to solve this problem. And therefore, we should use government to curb some of the people's freedom. And I think Professor Kotkin, who spoke yesterday, says no.

He uses a historical lens to look at throughout history, people who use argument of doom and gloom to use the government to self interest is actually incredibly dangerous. So how would you respond?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: If you look at what our system is based really on two central principles. Free market economics that I think, over time and space produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

And constitutional government that gives people security and freedom of expression. But if you look at what people had said about that combination Plato, example, going all the way Machiavelli, or then going to Tocqueville, democracy in America. Or you look at the German nihilist, what Nietzsche said about it, what Hegel said about it, what Oswald Spindler said.

They all came to a consensus, that it put an enormous responsibility on certain institutions, religion, family, traditions. Because otherwise people would become so wealthy and so prosperous and so free. That they would descend in what the Romans called luxus license, they would be a rabble, they would break into stores and loot.

Or they would just have no respect for traditions, or they wouldn't go to work, they would be lotus eaters, so to speak. And so all of these philosophical traditions, and I was always when I read them, I was always very angry at them and critical. I never thought they had any wisdom, but as you get older, you can see what they were warning about.

That you need people to be told, you're free to do this, and you have the wherewithal to do it. But please don't do it, please don't do it. You can have sexual intercourse with all the women or all the men you want, but it wouldn't be good for your soul.

Or as Bill Clinton said, abortion should be legal, but rare was what he was trying to say. And so what they were trying to say is they were looking for other institutions that were not government or not economic to create a moral culture that would repress the appetites.

Because the appetites in a capitalist free society are unlimited. So when you see people that are smashing and grabbing and going into stores, they're not taking beans, they're not taking rice, or not taking steaks. They're taking high end Gucci bags and electronics. And so you get the impression that our problem is not poverty, it's, in fact, our problem is obesity.

We have so much material and we have so much freedom, it requires a discipline to not descend into chaos. And there's a lot of ways you can repress the appetites, religion is one, the nuclear family is one, tradition for the ancestors, knowledge of your past. If you're in the United States, you said, my God, I'm an inheritor of Guadalcanal and Bella Wood and Gettysburg and Saratoga.

And I have a duty for the past to continue that great chain of being, then you repress yourself. But if you're just completely unfettered, then it leads to anarchy and chaos. And that's what that philosophical tradition, which is a pessimistic tradition, was warning us about.

>> Interviewer: Question, let's go over here to the left, the young lady with her right hand up.

>> Audience 3: Thank you for your time today. I think this talk was really insightful and provided all of us to think about these issues in different way.

>> Interviewer: Who are you?

>> Audience 3: Sorry, my name is Raina, rising junior here at Stanford. And my question for you is just, well, looking as you can tell, I'm not from this country.

Culture of this country baffles me a little bit at times. But just looking at, from what I understand of how history is taught in schools today. Looking at the fact that a lot of American kids are not really taught much about America's failings in Vietnam, for example, or the debate about black history being taught in schools.

So my question is, do you think that there has been a sort of, like, counter culture movement, for the lack of a better phrase, that has risen against woke, quote unquote? And, yeah, just do you think that could cause further polarization?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Do I think what now?

>> Interviewer: Is there been a countercultural movement against woke within teaching?

Is that what you're asking?

>> Audience 3: Yeah, just looking at these-

>> Victor Davis Hanson: I don't think, well, it depends on how you define woke, there's been a movement against deductive reasoning. And what I mean by that is if you take a history class and the premise is that we're going to go back through history.

And we're gonna divide people up into the bad guy oppressors and the good guy oppressed, then yes, there's a reaction against that. But one of my criticisms of woke is that prior to woke, everything was wrong and nobody taught these things. And yet if you go back and look at classical history books of the 1970s, 1980s, you can even go back and read things written in the 19th century.

They're not as un-woke as you think they are. There was a, I can remember when I was in fourth grade at a rural school when I was told to read up from slavery by Booker T Washington. And it was a very motivational, and the next thing I said, I want to read another one.

So I read Uncle Tom's cabin, and the teachers taught to that, but according to the woke ideology, I never got that experience. I can remember in 1963 on a little rural farm, my mother and father saying, Martin Luther King is gonna speak at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

So we're all gonna get into the station wagon and go up to Grace Cathedral to hear him. And then when we got there, an American woman, said, I have my sister, and she didn't have a ride. Would you go pick her up? So we picked her up and then it was crowded, nobody could get in, and my mother pushed me in and I fell under their and they closed the door.

I was the only one to get to hear him. But according to woke that wouldn't have happened, I was a white guy in rural California. I was an oppressor, that's how it reduces everything. So when people say, we're not gonna do that anymore, people say, you're suppressing things.

No, you're suppressing the approach and the not the content. And it's also very controversial to say that woke race is not the totality of the United States, it's not the totality. So there were certain people who landed on the beach at D-Day and they were mowed down the first 2500 of them, that's a reality.

There was 40,000 Americans that went off from all sorts of life at 18, they had wonderful lives ahead of them. And they volunteered to join the army air force and they put them in decrepit B 17s with no fighter escort during daylight bombing. And they all got wiped out until they learned by death how to defeat this awful Nazi war machine.

Nobody talks about those 40,000 people because it's not a racial issue and there's thousands of issues like this. And there's no good people or bad people, there's just complex people and there's no melodrama, there's tragedy. Until we understand that as a people we're never going to make it in a multiracial democracy.

And if people want tribalism before they go and vote for tribalism they should go back through history and look at tribalist paradigms. And I can guarantee you every single one does not end well.