Pathology and the Ivy League | Victor Davis Hanson | EP 325

[Music] I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor's home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80 percent of Scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the Press of Johan Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone, from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all history, and hopefully, people can walk away with at least a sense of that.

If you're looking to facilitate people's ability to make positive changes in their own life, there is nothing you can do that's more helpful to that than to make them literate. If you want to help them understand who they are in the deepest sense, over and above the superficial attractions of tribalism, let's say, you have to educate them deeply in this historical realm that requires the acquisition of explicit knowledge about the central nature of the human being. So that was the proper role of the universities. For years it was, as I envision it, our role was twofold. We were going to teach a method of the inductive method as opposed to the deductive method so that people, when they looked at the human experience via art or literature or history, they would look at exempla and then they would come to a general overriding conclusion that took the evidence rather than say I have an idea and I'm going to cherry-pick the evidence. That was one thing we taught: the Socratic inductive method. The other was we had to give them some kind of arsenal or realm of knowledge or reference points. So that was some of the things that are more pragmatic since the humanities were able to do. They were able to give a person a whole reference of knowledge so that they didn't have to live out and learn something by rote or by experience.

[Music] Hello everyone! I have a guest today that I've wanted to talk to for a long time: Dr. Victor Davis Hansen. He is the Martin and Illy Anderson senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, with his focus in the classics and military history. He's an accomplished academic, professor, and author. He's taught at Stanford, Hillsdale College, the U.S. Naval Academy, and Pepperdine University. His books, many of them 26 I believe, include The Second World Wars, The End of Sparta, The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Culture, and A Case for Trump in 2019. But I think we'll start today with a discussion about citizenship.

I'll just make a couple of comments. You know, one of the things I've noticed over the last, I suppose the span of my life really, is that during my lifetime, the word "citizenship" or "citizen" seem to be replaced by the word "consumer," which I always thought was a bad replacement given that "citizen" has a stalwart and traditional and dignified connotation that the word "consumer" seems to lack entirely. Well, you wrote a whole book about citizenship recently, and so I thought we might weave our way through that. You contrast citizens with pre-citizens. The book, by the way, is called The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalism are Destroying the Idea of America. You start that book off, well first of all decrying that destruction but also contrasting the modern idea of citizenship or citizen with the pre-modern idea of, say, a peasant or resident or tribe. And so let's delve into that a little bit.

Yeah, I mean the idea of citizenship's pretty recent in the long history of civilization. It appeared somewhere around 700 BC in rural Greece and swept pretty quickly. By the fifth century, there were 1500 city-states. What it was was the first time that citizens were self-governing, and that meant that they were pretty clearly defined. They made up their own militias; they adjudicated the circumstances under which they would go to war; they voted for their own officials; and more importantly, they had property rights. They could pass on property. I think that was a catalyst for citizenship: the right of inheritance that the estate couldn't expropriate or own property from the individual.

That long odyssey brought us to, of course, the founding of the United States, and there were clear distinctions between a resident that happened to live in the United States and a citizen. A citizen alone could vote; a citizen alone could hold office; a citizen alone could leave the boundaries and come back into the United States on his own volition; a citizen alone was eligible for federal services, or in most states; and a citizen served in the military.

I don't think any of those still apply, those distinctions between a resident and a citizen, with the exception of holding office, and that's under assault. I know here in California, people who are not just non-citizens but here illegally can vote, say, in a Berkeley school board election. Now, there are efforts to make sure that people can run for office who are not citizens. Non-citizens can serve in the military; non-citizens actually can go across the border with greater facility than you or I could, probably. We are a nation— we've never had this before— of 50 million people in the United States that were born in a foreign country of different statuses. Some were legal residents, some are illegal residents, some are citizens, some come and go as migrants, and that's the highest in actual numbers and in percentages of the population.

Unfortunately, it comes into a time when we, the hosts, have lost confidence in the traditional melting pot of assimilation, integration, and inter-marriage. So we're starting to revert to a pre-civilizational tribalism. I think large swaths of the United States are tribal now.

Okay, so let's start approaching that anthropologically and psychologically. So 600 BC, something like that, you seem to get something like a transformation of the idea of the tribe, which actually wouldn't have been an idea. A tribe isn't an idea; a tribe is a natural offshoot of our primate heritage. That's a good way of thinking about it. A tribe would have been something like an extended kin group, and that was bound together by our primate social biology, somewhat akin to a chimpanzee troop or maybe a bonobo troop. As we became more capable of abstract formalization, that idea of or that reality of tribal membership got transmuted into something that actually had stable properties, and that would be the idea of a citizen.

So you get a layer of abstraction on top of that that starts to lay out technically and explicitly what it means to be a member of a group and then along with that you get a set of rights and responsibilities that are associated with that group but also the possibility of expanded both expanded and limited membership that's also formalized. As the Greeks did with so many things, they took something that was part and parcel of our biological proclivity, so that proclivity for kinship and tribalism, and turned it into an explicit philosophical notion. Out of that, I suppose, develop both the idea of intrinsic human rights and human responsibilities, and that was all tied up in the notion of citizenship.

Even now, when you hear people talk about citizenship, they concentrate a lot more about the rights than on the responsibilities. The big breakthrough was that person replaced their primary allegiance to either someone that had blood ties or looked like them or the same locale, and they transferred that to an abstraction of the state. What that meant was for the first time there was an embryonic sense of meritocracy. You can really see it today.

I've traveled almost, I think, to every Middle Eastern country except Iran, and I'm always curious, when I was in Libya or Egypt or Tunisia, why they don't work even given some countries have enormous natural resources. I would always hear a refrain: well, you know, we hire our first cousin or we hire our second cousin. That there is still a tribal loyalty. What's tragic about the United States is that meritocracy and that multiracial—what became a multiracial, multi-religious body politic— was united by a primary allegiance to the idea of America where people, you know, where they enriched America with their food or their fashion or their art, or their music. That made America culturally rich.

But they didn't import Mexican ideas of constitutional government, such as they were, or they didn't bring in Russian ideas of individual liberty; they didn't touch the core, and that core united us. Now we can see that that's no longer true, that people are re-tribalizing and they're starting to identify with either their kin group or their ethnic group or their religious group. What's scary now in the United States is that we've seen, when you have a geographical force multiplier— and we're starting to see that with red-blue migration— it's sort of analogous to what happened in the 1850s where there was a Mason-Dixon line, so to speak, of a very different culture that bifurcated from the North.

If this continues, I think we're going to see a traditionalist America that claims that it follows the founding principles in red states of limited government, less regulation, small taxation and the idea of a citizen giving up their primary allegiance to the state versus the blue state model—California, Illinois, New York—in which a number of identity politics groups or special interest groups all lobby for influence.

And you can see what happens in the L.A. City Council hot mic scene where all of these Latino council people got caught on a hot mic where they were explicitly defining the new idea of a citizen, and that was that their primary identity group was at war with people from Oaxaca. It was at war with blacks; it was at war with gays; and they were angry because their representation was not demographically proportional to their numbers in the population. So they said, and I think that was a future for the country, and it's what's going on in California in the present.

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Yeah, so you worry about what you might describe as a reversion to this more implicit tribalism that's predicated on—well it would be predicated on religious identity or skin color or linguistic identity or perhaps shared philosophical identity, although that would be rarer. And that's the counter-position to this more abstract notion of citizenship. So let's delve into that for a minute because I think we could lay forth the proposition that unless there's a higher order principle that unites people, either psychologically or socially, then they're disunited. If they're disunited, they're anxious and confused and aimless and conflict-laden.

The natural state of human beings in the absence of a unifying principle isn't peace; it's war. And so then we might ask, is there a unifying transcendent principle that's valid that isn't just another narrative? You know, because the postmodern critique is that all unifying narratives are, what would you call it, expressions of arbitrary power and domination, and I don't really think that's true.

I don't think that's true of Western societies. The reason I think that's technically untrue is because there's an idea in Western society that I think is fundamentally what's logos-based. It's partly Greek and it's partly Judeo-Christian that the individual is the proper level of analysis in some real sense and that the individual has intrinsic worth and dignity. But more than that, there's a necessity for that intrinsic dignity and worth of the individual to be recognized and set apart by law. In some sense, honored by law because the individual has something to offer to the group, and that's the uniqueness of their being, let's say.

If you allow people to be free or encourage their freedom, then they can trade that uniqueness with everyone else freely. That in that trade is to be found both peace and, let's say, abundance. I think that principle isn't merely another narrative. I think that is the predicate both of peace and of economic well-being.

Okay, so conservatives—

Okay, okay. I think you can comment on all that, or another way of putting it is the United States was based on an idea of equality of opportunity. Because we're not born equal or we have different life experiences or we inherit or don't inherit, or we're healthy or we're long-lived or not, we don't try to even that out in terms of economic recompense. We just let people follow their own trajectories, and then we have other methods to appeal to their magnanimity. So the philanthropic, the religious, the humanism—we have all these ways that if people do better than other people, we allow them to be creative and to try to give back to the society or at least use their talents.

Even if it's profit-minded, to build a better bridge or a dam rather than the alternate, which is the strain in Western civilization. It starts, actually, the socialist impulse starts with the Greeks. There is a strain of that with the Pythagoreans, but the other idea—and that's what we're, I think, fighting now is the woke equality of result—that we're going to appoint some Platonic guardians and give them untold power, and then, through their infinite wisdom, they're going to do two things: they're going to force people to be equal, what they call equity, and they're never going to be subject to the consequences of their own ideology because they need special exemptions given their enormous responsibilities and their talent.

What we see now is this bi-coastal elite in the United States starting to mandate behaviors and principles and issues and policies that they themselves would never follow and would have no intention of following. It's based on that every single person has an innate right to be the same as another person or, as Aristotle said once, "A man in democracy"—and he feared this— "feels that he's equal in voting with another man; then he feels by extension he should be equal in all other aspects of his life."

That was the philosophical worry about democracy, that it was so it always evolved to a more radical form of equality. I think we're now at the end stage where almost everybody feels they have a grievance against the state, and therefore they are entitled to compensatory or reparatory money or land. Here in California, when we were discussing reparations, suddenly people were bidding in the Oakland City Council and suggesting that they were owed $800,000, and they had a grievance apparently even though they were six generations away from slavery and maybe four from—they were in the fourth generation of the Civil Rights Movement.

They had grievances against people who had never had slaves in California, had, for example, never been a slave state. But it was that mentality. A lot of people warned us about this. Tocqueville said the problem that we would face in the United States is that most people innately would rather be poorer and equal than all better off, but some more better off than others. He felt that if that—well, that would be a very dangerous development. I think we're pretty much there now.

Yeah, well that's, I suppose to some degree why there's an injunction against covetousness in the Ten Commandments. You know, that you're not supposed to covet or envy your neighbor's donkey or his wife or his house. Part of the reason for that is that if no one can have anything more than anyone else, then no one can have anything at all. That's generally been the state of humanity for the longest reaches of human history.

It looks very much like if we're going to allow a rising tide to raise all boats, we have to allow some people to rise faster than others in multiple dimensions. I don't see any way out of that. It's certainly not the case that these hypothetically egalitarian systems of governance like communism ever produced anything that had less of a Pareto distribution or an unequal distribution than capitalist societies.

I mean, everyone was much poorer, but the rich were still much richer than everyone else. There's also something in there you talked about identity, and I've watched this happen. The inevitable consequences of pathological thought fronts, so the leftists who are pushing for equality of outcome insisted that if there were differences in socioeconomic outcome that you could identify by group, then that was prior evidence of systemic oppression, let's say. But they fell astray of a certain peculiarity with regard to group identity, which is that group identity is actually infinitely fragmentable.

Out of the initial identity political theorists, you got the intersectionalists who made the case that, while you were oppressed, let's say, if you were Latino, and you were oppressed, if you were female, but the joint interaction between Latino and female made you even more specially oppressed. Then you could add gay to that or whatever, and what you see happening on multiple fronts in consequence is that the litany of potential ethnic groups increases the number of them, and then the number of interactions increases and that increases exponentially as you add more identity categories.

What that essentially means is that the problem of computing equity starts to become technically impossible because every single person's identity is so complex on the intersectional front that there isn't even a hypothetical way of deciding whether any given socioeconomic outcome is equitable. When I walked through that, I thought, well, Western culture actually solved that problem several thousand years ago by pointing out that the appropriate level of analysis is the individual because the individual has a unique identity that is, in some sense, a consequence of older multiplicitous group identities but singularly, what would you say, singularly representative of each individual.

Then you let individuals compete and cooperate in a fair market, and that's the best possible way of moving towards the right balance between equity and wealth.

That's what it looks like.

I think that's right, and you can see that where this leads to, it's logical that you would end up with a Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren that by needs would fabricate a victimized identity. She was the first quote-unquote Native American professor of law at Harvard on that basis alone. On the other realm, when you start to replace class interest or economic status with race, then the left really hit on something. I think it was really Barack Obama, between 2009 and 2016, he took a rather ossified word, "diversity," and he recalibrated it to mean we're not going to look for victims on the basis of their income anymore because that's mutable.

In fact, Marxism never worked in the United States because of this free market capitalism and a lot of free land in the 19th century was always a movement of upward mobility, and therefore you would never have a continually oppressed class. In fact, today, people go up and down out and in of the middle and the upper middle classes. What I think Obama did was he redefined race in America as not a binary between 88 percent white and 12 percent black, but he came up with this word diversity that replaced class differentiation or class oppressions or class grievances.

He said 30 percent of the population, we're going to call them non-white and therefore they're diverse. Then where we ended up was this ridiculous situation where— to take a caricature, you have Meghan Markle, the Duchess, who was half black lamenting to Oprah Winfrey, who is a multi-billionaire about their shared grievances as being non-whites. Or LeBron James complaining. That was a very brilliant thing the left did because once they made race the arbiter of oppression and being the oppressed and the victimized, then class didn’t matter anymore. Now we have this elite who say that they're not white in a particular percentage, and all of a sudden we don't really care about the circumstances of their home, their car, their wealth, their income, it doesn't matter anymore.

They're going to be perpetual victims on the basis that they are diverse, and the left really massaged that in such a way that I don't think anybody quite knew what was going on until they sprung it on us.

Well, there's a real attraction to a kind of deep narcissism there. I think I first encountered that probably at Ivy League schools in the U.S. So I'm a Canadian and not that familiar with the more differentiated class structure in the U.S. So when I went down to teach at Harvard, it was an anthropological adventure for me as well as a, let's call it a research-oriented adventure and an intellectual adventure.

I didn't understand as much as I do now how what dynamic the Ivy League schools played in the U.S. in terms of ensuring upward mobility. I knew at Harvard, I believe it was when I was there in the 90s, the estimate was that 40 percent of Harvard undergraduates would be billionaires by the age of 40. That was, you know, that was 30 years ago, and so that was quite a substantial amount of money then. The whole point is, is that if you got into an Ivy League school, as soon as you got in, you were basically a member of the one percent. Now you might have been a junior member, but you were definitely a member.

I thought that was perfectly fine because, in some sense, the Ivy Leagues did a damn fine job of merit-based selection. Now it wasn't perfect; there were legacy students, for example, and you know, there was a bit of play in the system there, but fundamentally Harvard and the other Ivy Leagues had transformed themselves from old boys' clubs in the 1960s into highly elite intellectual institutions by the 1990s. But then what I saw too, and this was so interesting, was that being junior members of the one percent with, you know, almost certain hallmark of long-term success as a consequence of Ivy League admission wasn't enough for many students and their idiot professors.

They had to have the label of oppressed working for them too. You had this strange spectacle, as far as I was concerned, of these unbelievably fortunate Ivy League students who were offered an opportunity that, well, is it really unparalleled in human history, not only benefiting as a consequence of being the beneficiaries of this amazing system but simultaneously claiming the status of the poor and oppressed and claiming at the same time to be avatars and representatives of that oppressed group.

I thought, Jesus, you guys, like being rich and powerful in junior form isn't enough for you? You have to have all the virtues of the rich and all the privileges and opportunities, and you have to have all the virtues of the poor and oppressed at the same time. Like that just seems to me to be a bit much.

You see that reflected in the people that you're describing who have this unbelievable wealth and opportunity and who yet put themselves forward as, you know, canonical victims of an oppressive system. I think we're going to see in our lifetime, though, the end of the Ivy League, Stanford, Berkeley cattle brand as a mark of entry into the one percent.

And by that, we're no longer in a purport when we had proportional representation in admissions and hiring. That was sort of the modus operandi until George Floyd, so 12 percent of the student bodies were African-American even if they had, on average, 200 points less than Asian students on the SAT. Or we had about 65 percent white; Asians were, of course, treated like Jews in the 1930s. They were discriminated against, so their numbers would only be about 20 percent or otherwise they would have been 40 percent and Latinos were about 12 percent.

But after George Floyd, we went into a radical compensatory or reparatory admission. Stanford, where I worked, just announced their new class profile: it's 23 percent white, and out of that, 55, 54 percent are women. So, you have about 12 percent white males on that campus, and so they've deliberately taken a whole demographic.

I think they have—it seems they are interviewing them, and you mentioned that's why I thought it was fascinating that you're interviewing your applicants. They're interviewing 95 percent of the people that are applying, and they have to—now they enforce quite rigorously at Hillsdale—and you know, we're also in discussion with Hillsdale with regard to potential accreditation for these online courses because I really like the Hillsdale model.

Here's something to think about too on the technology front. You know, I spent a lot of time analyzing the relationship between psychological testing and productivity and creativity across the lifespan. One of the things I did learn was that part of the reason the universities have their degrees are valuable is because they were very careful in terms of meritocratic admission, and they also have a hammerlock on accreditation.

Once you have an MBA, obviously, you're accredited as an MBA graduate from a given school, and that means you had a certain peer network and a certain level of intellectual proficiency, even to get into the program, a certain degree of conscientiousness to rigorously pursue the program and pass. The value in the universities in large part is nested inside the accreditation.

Now you could imagine—and I don't think this is technically impossible—you could imagine a system of blockchain-accrediting tests that would be freely available to people. You know, I would do this on a for-profit basis, but so that if you wanted to claim Bachelor of Arts equivalents with regards to your knowledge of the humanities, you could take a set of objective tests that couldn't be mucked about with by administrators and gain your proxy by that manner.

So, imagine this—it's an enterprise that I've envisioned, and we're pursuing at the moment. Imagine I could produce a data set of ten thousand multiple-choice questions, say in American history. You could do that by buying multiple-choice tests from high school and university professors all across the country.

Now we'd have to administer them to several thousand people, and then we could analyze each question with regards to its accuracy as a predictor of general knowledge domain. You can do that; you can rank order them. Then imagine you have a program that can randomly pick equivalent level of difficulty questions from that whole set of ten thousand. You could set up a system that could produce random tests so they couldn't exactly be faked or cheated easily.

You could rank order people in terms of their knowledge domains with regards to those tests, and you could blockchain it so it would be completely impenetrable to administrative interference, and you could steal the accreditation away from the universities.

I think that's—I can't see any reason at all that that's not technically possible, but that has been raised before in the United States, and that's the third rail as far as universities are concerned because I think they suspect that, given the state of education today, higher education, that a person's entering SAT score may be static or actually go down after four years.

The idea that everybody would take an SAT as an exit exam, and it's quite logical because remember what they said about the SAT in the 50s and 60s? This was a merocratic device so that people of different backgrounds, economically deprived or racially, and they didn't go to competitive schools, they wouldn't be punished.

Even though they got A's, Harvard would say, well, you got A's from Fresno, but it's not the same as Saint Paul's. They answered back and said, but we took the SAT test and this student did as well.

But when you get rid of all of that and you say, okay, you introduced the SAT because you said that there were different levels of prior education in high schools; we want to reintroduce it on the back end because we feel that there's different levels of instruction quality at universities.

So, just as you suspected high schools were upon, even quality, we now suspect that colleges, i.e., Stanford, Harvard, Yale, are of uneven quality and we can’t—the BA would mean nothing just like you said the GPA would mean nothing unless it was coupled with its SAT score.

To get a BA, everybody has to take the test that you outlined whether you went to school or not. Another thing you talked about accreditation: if we could just give every student graduating in the United States the choice, you can go through the school of education—you know, that's really the catalyst for wokeness because it trains all of our K-12 public education.

But you have the alternative of going and getting a master's degree for one year in an academic subject—in chemistry, biology, English. I think the vast majority of BAs would prefer to go get a master's degree in an academic subject.

Let’s talk about that for a minute. I’ve talked to Larry Arn about this, who’s the president of Hillsdale. From what I understand at the moment, about 50 percent of American state budgets are dedicated to education broadly speaking, so that’s an awful lot of money.

Interestingly enough—and let’s say pathologically enough—the faculties of education have a hammerlock on teacher accreditation, and that strikes me as absolutely preposterous. It’s a form of monopoly; that’s the—and there’s no excuse whatsoever for it.

Now I’ve watched faculties of education for 60 years, and they are not credible. The faculties of education are not credible academic institutions by and large. They have been responsible for some of the worst frauds ever perpetrated on the buying public.

So whole word reading is a good example of that. The whole bloody self-esteem movement, which was a complete catastrophe; the ideas of different learning styles; the idea of multiple intelligences, etc. We can lay it out all at the foot of the faculties of education.

Generally, they attract pretty damn bad students, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that their so-called education training produces better teachers. They have been 100 percent, not only derelict in their duties for like 60 years, but they’ve actually been—what they’ve done has been antithetical to the general research tradition, very very low-quality research, most of it irreproducible, most of it based on idiot ideology and definitely not in the public interest.

Here’s an idea: how about every governor in the United States just scraps the requirement to have a teaching certificate to be able to teach? You wouldn’t even need a master’s degree. You could say we will open up the teaching profession to anybody who graduated in the top 20 percent of their class.

Poof! You don’t have faculties of education anymore, and you don’t have these institutions. If you think about the idea of the Long March through the institutions, the place where that’s being focused most intently and with most efficiency with regards to the propagation of woke ideology is definitely through the faculties of education. The only reason they have a single cent of dollar value is because they have a monopolistic hammerlock on teacher certification, and that should be scrapped.

There’s a teacher shortage in the U.S. anyways, and there’s no bloody evidence at all that the faculties of education have produced teachers who know how to teach. We have this Orwellian system in the United States in which you can be 18 years old in May in a high school graduating, and your teacher has to have a credential.

Then over the summer, you will enroll for the fall in a community college, supposedly at a higher level of instruction, and the community college teacher does not need a credential. They need the master’s rate; in some cases, they can get exemptions.

So there’s no logic to it other than than the self-interest of the teachers' union. But I guess what I’m getting at is that whether it was the COVID lockdown or the George Floyd ignition of the inter- or the acceleration of the woke movement, we’re in really revolutionary times as far as higher education, and the economy is given the smaller pool of applicants and people not choosing to go to college.

There’s no economic rationale to support these universities and their present course. I think there’s going to be a radical change, radical change. I used to talk to people in Silicon Valley, and they’d say, Victor, we know that Stanford doesn’t teach very well, but they do one priceless bit of research for us. When we hire a Stanford graduate, we know that they had to be very, very bright on test scores and GPA.

Now if you take that away, they have no reason to tap their graduates since they’re not going to learn very much, and their admissions are no longer meritocratic. So I don’t know.

Well, that’s—and then the other thing that they sold was—they said to the employer, we will train people and you will like them. But even if we don’t, we’re so stringent and careful in our admissions; you’re going to get somebody that’s naturally talented. But then they also, with a wink and a nod, said this to the parent— we’re going to get the scions and the children of the elite and we’re going to have them all here.

So you mentioned the social interaction of a campus experience. They can’t even offer that anymore because if you were making your criteria based on gender and race and sexual orientation and not merit for whatever reason, then the chances are that people are not going to—at Harvard or Yale or Princeton—have a roommate whose father had a corporation that he wanted to work in, or a coder. All of those ties that they, with a wink and a nod, sell the parent because they’re not even a clearinghouse for the elite anymore where they make these relationships that last throughout their entire life to their own right benefit and advantage. They can’t even sell that.

So, in a very—just disinterested fashion, I don’t see what they have to offer anymore to anybody. Well, let’s—I don’t really agree with that. Let's pursue that a little bit farther because there are other points of failure on the university front that we could concentrate on too. As I progressed through the ranks at Harvard and then at the University of Toronto, I also watched the multiplication of adjunct faculty, and so just so everyone who's listening knows. Most departments, abetted by their administrators but also pursuing a very narrow and foolish self-interest, have farmed out a lot of their teaching to so-called adjuncts, and so at some places, that’s 50 percent of the teaching population.

Now, if you’re a full professor at a heavy-duty research institution, you have to conduct research. So you need a lab. You have to have graduate students who are pursuing original research, and you have to teach; you have to do a certain amount of administrative work, and you're evaluated on the basis of your research, your teaching, and your administrative work, basically in that order.

Now, if you are a full professor, you’re in the 10-year stream, and you’re guaranteed a certain degree of job security after putting in your apprenticeship. But if you’re an adjunct professor—so that’s a part-time professor—and that's 50 percent of the professors now, you don’t have a research enterprise; you don’t have any graduate students; you don’t have a permanent office; you don’t get paid anything; you get just paid an absolute pittance, nowhere near enough to live on, and you do 50 percent of the teaching at the universities now.

This is very convenient for the administrators because the adjunct faculty has zero political power, like zero or less than zero even, and they can be fired or dealt with in any manner whatsoever at a moment’s notice with no problem. And as there are more and more adjuncts, there are fewer and fewer full-time faculty. Not only are the universities failing to assess the students properly and then group them together in peer groups that would be of some economic utility across time and elevating the tuition fees completely beyond comprehension, but at the same time, they're also radically decreasing the quality and the influence of the professoriate at precisely the same time, as well as not hiring enough of them because administrators have multiplied like rabbits and faculty numbers have remained relatively constant.

So they’re whittling away the quality of the students on the one hand as fast as they possibly can, but they’re doing exactly the same thing to the faculty on at least two fronts: the DEI front plus the adjunct faculty front. You know, I complained about this at the University of Toronto for years. I used to tell my colleagues, it’s like why don’t we require that the administration set a cap to adjuncts, like 20 percent of the faculty—force them to hire more full-time faculty equivalent because that’s who should be hired to serve the students properly.

And the response from my colleagues was always something like, well, you know, it’s pretty convenient for us to have these adjuncts pick up the excess teaching load; we don’t want to put too much pressure on the administration. I thought, that’s fine guys, that’s a hell of a good long-term strategy. Good luck with that over 20 years, and so here we are now. The universities are making, I would say, 10 fatal errors on the business front, not just one. They’re just—there are so many errors that it’s almost a miracle of incompetence, and I do think it's going to produce a precipitous collapse.

I do too, and I think just in conclusion that this is all done by egalitarians. These are people who are very critical of Walmart and the gradations in pay, but in fact, there are far greater degrees of inequality and exploitation in the university by so-called liberal people than there are in the American workplace. That’s what’s so ironic about it. I’m speaking as a person who was farming and then was an adjunct faculty for two years, and suddenly they made me a tenure-track professor, and I just noticed I was teaching the same teaching load, but I made three times, four times the amount of money, and I had benefits, and all of a sudden I was allowed to use the Xerox machine, which I hadn’t been allowed to before—and all of a sudden I hadn’t changed anything. But for the rest of my teaching career, I was very sympathetic to these people who lived in their cars and went from one community college to state college, and they were exploited.

This was all done by very, very left-wing enlightened people, so to speak, and that’s another story. Well, you said so many things wrong. You said something very interesting there, and I just want to call this out.

So you just said that after you were promoted from peasant adjunct professor living in your car, so to speak, to a reasonable tenure-stream faculty member, you got to use the photocopy machine. This is the level of petty tyranny that these people, what would you say, encounter in the university system. You’re an adjunct faculty; you’re so far down the bloody social totem pole that it’s almost incomprehensible.

For someone to implement a rule like— just imagine the mindset that it requires to implement a rule which is, well, our adjunct faculty are of so little use that it’s perfectly reasonable for the administrators to forbid them from using the photocopier because, you know, how often people just do that for fun? They wouldn’t be photocopying, like, handouts for their students or anything like that. They’d just be sitting in their, I don’t know, what, playing with the photocopy machine, which is exactly what adjuncts do if you don’t supervise them 100 percent of the time.

That’s a good snapshot of exactly how universities treat their adjunct faculty, man. It is beyond pathetic, and the fact that it is these hypothetical egalitarians doing it indicates to me that what we're seeing is much more a war on the idea of competence and quality itself than it is any push forward for some hypothetical bloody egalitarian utopia.

It’s like we’ll destroy the universities in the name of egalitarianism, and the universities are participating en masse in their own destruction. You know, it’s hard not to sit outside and think you people, so to speak, are going to get exactly what you’re aiming at. And isn’t that going to be something?

Yeah, I think not that they were—I mean, I was a big—at a point in my life, I started a classical languages program at a state college for mostly minority students, and I felt that it gave an enormous advantage to people who had been disadvantaged to master languages, archeology, history, and literature. But I don’t—that was a different era, and I can’t see that the university is a positive force in society anymore. It’s pathological. Almost every bad idea that is reified in the United States has its origins in the university, whether it’s critical legal theory or critical race theory or critical penal theory or you name it.

It came from the university. I was watching a clip of a break-smash and grab in San Francisco that was on YouTube, and I remember a conversation I had with a professor 20 years ago when he was trying to explain critical legal theory. He said, “You know what? We’re going to change the legal system because the only reason it’s against the law to take a candy bar out of a store is because rich white male heterosexual Christians don’t need to steal candy bars, so they made a law.” I said, “No, no, no, no. Theft is innate to the human species; that’s pathological. You can’t have a civilization with theft of any sort.”

But that idea, that was common, has filtered down to the street. That’s why the universities are—they’re a drag on the economy; they’re a drag on the culture; they’re a drag on the collective morality. They either have to be radically changed or destroyed. Those ideas are so pathological that only a half-rate intellectual could possibly believe them.

So, I studied the development of antisocial behavior in children, criminal behavior for a long time. One of the things we found—so antisocial behavior is extremely stable, and once it’s manifested, say, it’s very, very difficult to do anything about it to ameliorate it. There’s virtually no evidence on the psychological front of any successful programs in relationship to the amelioration of antisocial personality. So my research team, I didn’t run it, but it was a research team I was associated with at McGill and at the University of Montreal, kept pushing back into childhood development to find the origins of antisocial behavior because you see childhood conduct disorder in children as a precursor to adult criminality, and we could push it back—we being the broader research community—two years of age.

So at two years of age, there’s a subset of children—there are almost all male—about 5 percent of males who are temperamentally quite predatory in their aggression, and so they kick, hit, bite, and steal. If you group kids together in age-matched groups, the most violent offenders are two years old, and the violent two-year-olds are a subset of the two-year-olds. What happens to those kids is they fall farther and farther behind in their social development because they don’t get into the peer networks, and they retain their primordial predatory aggression as their central means of adaptation.

It turns out that the vast majority of those two-year-olds are socialized by the age of four, but some of them aren’t. The ones that aren’t get rejected by their peers because who the hell wants to play with someone who kicks, hits, bites, and steals, and then maybe also has tantrums if they don’t get their way? That doesn’t make you popular; it doesn’t give you friends.

What happens to those kids is they fall farther and farther behind in their social development because they don’t get into the peer networks, and they retain their primordial predatory aggression as their central means of adaptation. The idea that theft and criminality are a secondary consequence of a pathological social system seems to be—well, I imagine there are cases where that’s true, but fundamentally it seems to be flawed. There is a proclivity to predatory aggression that’s part and parcel of the panoply of human possibility.

Most people are socialized out of that, so the reverse is a kind of bizarre resilience that proclaims that every single human being is innately good, and it’s only the corrupt social system that introduces any pathology into reality at all. That, you know, only an idiot French intellectual could believe that—and although they’re American acolytes.

I think what’s worrisome about all of what we’re talking about is that it’s not abstract; it has real consequences that filter down. By that, I mean it’s so ubiquitous. The U.S. military now has lowered physical standards in combat and special forces units to accommodate women that have, innately on average—not in every case, but less physical rigor and strength. They feel there will be no downside.

They have spent about five million hours going through the ranks collectively to search out what Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin in their congressional testimonies characterize as white rage and white supremacy and white privilege, and the funny thing about it is they have not met their recruitment standards. Suddenly, none of the three branches, and they haven’t met their enrollment targets this year. The reason probably—and there’s no scientific data—but I think most people agree is that, for one reason or another, the military almost like the British, who relied on the Gurkhas or the Indian army, relied on Sikhs.

You could argue that the U.S. army relied on rural Americans, mostly white males and south of the Mason-Dixon line. In fact, if you look at fatality records in Iraq and Afghanistan, they died at about 75 percent of all combat deaths were white males, and yet they only made up 35 percent of the population. Here were Milley and Austin suggesting that they were going to be proportional on every aspect of the military or a reparatory effect.

In fact, except they never mentioned the data on the combat dead, and so they essentially have done in the space of just about a year and a half. They’ve told all of these families, even though you sent your—even though you went to Vietnam, and even though your son went to the first Gulf War, and even though it’s a family tradition that you fought, your grandson fought in Afghanistan—now your great-grandson is going to turn 18.

We still suspect that you suffer from white rage. Even though you died at double the numbers of your Rubik, we’re not going to count that, and so they’ve just said we’re done; we’re not going to join; go get somebody else from one of these. That’s happening everywhere in this country right now.

When you— it’s not just the military; you can see it with the airline’s pilot training. You can see it with medical school admissions. We used to make a joke in the United States, well, they’re never going to do this where nuclear plant operators are pilots.

They are! Yeah, right? I think we’re getting to—we’re going to get—we’re seeing a civilization’s—I mean it’s like that line in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when he asks about bankruptcy. He said, “How did you become bankrupt, Mike?” and he said, “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

Then suddenly, I think, yeah, right, yes, right. That’s what’s happening with the United States. We’ve gone with this woke diversity stuff, and now it was gradual, and now it’s just accelerated to the point of suddenly, and we’re not seeing basic competency in our grid, in our transportation system, and our education, and so I think—and the data support that.

When people measure the United States’ quality of freedom or business environment vis-a-vis other countries, we’ve really, we’ve really fallen down. Let’s look at the military issue for a minute. The American military is a very interesting institution because it was staggeringly meritocratically based.

That started more or less in World War I when the U.S. military started to use tests of general cognitive ability to select for officer training, and the American military were pioneers in meritocratic assessment for decades. They did a lot of the basic research on general cognitive ability, and they’re a strictly meritocratic.

There are some really cool things about that because one of the things it meant was so black Americans are disproportionately likely to serve in the armed forces as well, which is quite interesting. The U.S. has set up its military system not only to be available in wartime but also to be a means of social progress in peacetime, and that's been part of explicit policy.

It’s quite remarkable to see that, and you know, I know a lot of military people, and especially at the higher end of the performance spectrum, they’re a very singular type of person.

I mean, one guy I know, for example, a Texas Ranger, I talked to him about when he decided he wanted to be a Texas Ranger. He said he was like five years old when he knew he wanted to do something that was military and specialized, and he was one of these people who he was only interested in training if it was almost impossible, insanely rigorous, and strictly meritocratic.

It’s actually what he was looking for, right? And so one of the problems with producing, let’s say, a military apparatus where you dispense with meritocracy is you cease to attract the very people who you absolutely want to attract, who are unbelievably ambitious with regards to stringent attainment.

That’s especially true for the special forces. You can imagine that you just decimate the military by excluding the very people who would be likely to thrive temperamentally and practically. It’s a real catastrophe.

You’ve lost the Reagan Foundation just did a poll last year, and traditionally 75 percent of Americans had polled—they had great confidence in the military. Now it’s down to 45.

And the same is true when we see this weaponization. I don’t need to get into that big topic of the FBI, the CIA. We’re starting to see that these institutions that we all have revered, especially on the conservative side, they’ve completely lost all of their conservative traditional support, and they’ve become almost Stasi-like in their—they’ve been weaponized.

I feel like we’re starting to see in the private and the public sector everything that worked and made the United States singular and exceptional. Suddenly, I mean we can chart the genesis of it goes way back decades, but suddenly it’s accelerated to such a point.

Whether we’re talking about district attorneys in Chicago or Baltimore or San Francisco or Los Angeles laying criminals out the day that they commit a violent offense, we’re starting to see society unwind.

What we don’t realize is this happens a lot. In Rome, there was no reason why the Western Empire had to fall in the late 5th century in the way that the Byzantine Eastern house survived for a thousand years. But once you lose confidence in these institutions, and once they’re no longer bureaucratic, and once people’s primary allegiances is not any longer to the state, everything we’ve talked about this morning than use the—the end result is an implosion very quickly.

I think we haven’t—I think, well this puts—this is a real conundrum for conservatives, say, maybe we can start to talk about Mr. Trump here a little bit because of this.

Here’s the dilemma that I see with regards to conservatives, especially on the populist front. Trump was very good at speaking to disaffected working-class Americans, and certainly the Democrats abandoned them completely in the hill in the Clinton campaign and had been preparing to do that for years, like the idiot champagne socialists have at the universities.

But in any case, Trump was pretty good at talking to working-class Americans. But here’s the danger, as far as I’m concerned, on the classically conservative front, and I don’t really know what to do about this.

It’s like the radical leftists have this fundamental proposition which is all institutions are corrupt and predicated on dominance and power, and so that’s kind of their leap motif. But now you have people like Trump who come in as outsiders and say, you know, on the populist front, “Hey everyone on the right, on the conservative side, let’s say. We’re working class side.”

Now, all your institutions are corrupt, and basically predicated on dominance and power. I think, well, this is a big problem because the conservatives are objecting to the corruption, the corruption of the institutions in the manner that you just described. They’re captured by the woke ideology. But the underlying message to people is kind of the same, which is our fundamental institutions can no longer be trusted.

The problem with beating that drum on the conservative side, as far as I can tell, is that you add fuel to the fire on the left side. And so then you’re in the position—we can talk about the role of the humanities and education there—you’re in the position of asking yourself, well if you are a conservative and you’re traditionally based but you believe that the institutions have been corrupt, how the hell can you plot a pathway forward without falling prey to exaggeration of exactly the concerns that the radical leftists are putting forward?

Because they say the same thing: the institutions can’t be trusted. It’s like the spirit of the institutions can be trusted like that. I would maybe differ just in two regards. One is I think they used to say the institutions can’t be trusted, but it was the left that egged on the Russian collusion hoax, the laptop hoax, the Ping and the Alpha Bank hoax.

And it was a left who said that James Clapper, who lied under oath once, and John Brennan, who lied under oath twice, and James Comey, who famed amnesia 245 times under oath and Andrew McCabe, who lied four times under oath, and Anthony Fauci, whose latest interrogatory was just a mishmash of “I can’t remember, I don’t recall.”

They’re all iconic in the left. So the left has basically said these institutions got so unwieldy—two million people working for the federal government—and the regulators who were not elected alone had the expertise of this huge Byzantine complex because elected officials come and go, but the EPA guy is always there, and he knows every judge, jury, executioner, legislative, judicial, executive power all in one person’s mode of operating that the conservatives said we’ve got to break this up; we’ve got to take the FBI office and put it in Kansas City; we’ve got to cut 10 percent of the workforce.

We’ve got to make sure that HHS shouldn’t even be in Washington; we’ve got to get rid of the Department of Energy. I remember when Mr. Perry, the Texas governor, said, “I’m going to get rid of three agencies.” Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember which ones they were on the debate stage. But that’s what conservatives were doing.

But the left is saying, “Well, you know, just as you have lost confidence because they’re regulatory and they’re intrusive and they are anti-constitutional, and they go after the individual, we find them now for the first time quite attractive because in our Davos agenda or our great reset agenda, whether it’s mandating green energy or mandating equity or mandating vaccinations, we find these institutions suddenly, for the first time in our lives, very, very attractive.”

And so they’ve been—they’ve inherited them and adopted them now, and it’s okay, okay. All right, so it is uncanny to watch that. I mean, one of the most miraculous things I’ve seen in my lifetime is the insistence by people on the left side of the spectrum that pharmaceutical companies can be trusted. So that’s just like, you know? Everything is absolutely upside down when that happens.

Okay, but now you’re pulling out something that’s very paradoxical because on the one hand, we’ve already established the case that this fundamental critique that’s emerged from the universities is a critique of institutional reliability. The basic doctrine is one of powers, that all institutions are predicated on the expression of arbitrary power, and they can’t be trusted, especially if you’re not in the power elite.

But then you say there’s a paradoxical side of that, which is that at the same time, the same people—at least with regards to their political and philosophical orientation—are increasingly willing to utilize large-scale social institutions to put forward a given agenda. I suppose maybe the difference there is that the left is perfectly willing to trust large-scale institutions if the institutions operate under the rubric of their ideological theory.

Absolutely, right. So you could make in that case, or you can get rid of all this. Yeah, absolutely! They get rid of all the Sturm and Drag of discussion and the Congress when they take the military over. They worship the chain of command because, whether it’s transgendered subsidized surgeries or women in combat units, they can affect social change in an authoritarian chain of command fiat.

So everything that makes these institutions skeptical or suspicious to the traditional supporters, they become—they’ve taken away the power of the individual. They are commissar-like; they’re ideologically weaponized by the left. All of those things make it attractive to the left.

It’s one of the strangest things, I think, in the history of the country how the right has backed away from all of these investigatory agencies—military. They don’t trust them anymore because they’ve been— I guess their DNA is like a virus has been recalibrated against the individual in traditional America.

The left comes in and says we like what they’re doing. We like their overreach of civil liberties because that’s the only way that we can affect these changes that 51 percent of the people don’t want. They are too stupid. But when you control Silicon Valley and K-12, Hollywood, now the military, and the FBI and the CIA and the DOJ, now we can finally enact change without public support.

So I don’t know where it’s all going to end, but the conservatives have backed off. In that vacuum, the left has moved in. You know, one of the things I really appreciated about reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was his insistence that what happened in the Soviet Union was not an aberration in relationship to the set of ideas that made up the Communist utopian vision but a fulfillment of what would you call it of the core content that was implicit in the original doctrines.

Because the apologists on the left constantly—and still do to this day—say, well, real communism has never been tried, which I think is one of the world’s most appalling excuses, by the way. But independent of that, the real notion was, well, a system of ideas had been produced; it had a certain degree of internal coherence. If you launch that system into the world, it would run algorithmically and produce certain outcomes, and it did that in country after country.

The problem, in some sense, with the discussion we’re having now is that we’re not making a distinction between the they that are putting forward these ideas and the algorithmic, yes, what would you say, impetus of the system of ideas itself, right? Because it’s not exactly a shadowy cabal of conspiracists operating behind the scenes to bring this about. What it is, is a set of ideas, most of which emerged in France and Germany, then were adopted in the United States, that have a certain ethos built into them.

The ethos is partly group identity, predicated—the fundamental predicate is that the most important distinction between people is some element of their group identity, and then there are ideas associated with that, like all outcomes should be equal, or that’s evidence of the dominance of something like arbitrary power.

Another ethos would be the fundamental motivating principle of the human race is power and domination, and so those ideas have an ethos that makes itself known across time, and then it elaborates, and then it becomes a system of ideas that possesses individuals, and then they act in concert with the ideas.

But you don’t need a formal conspiracy. No, I think, you know, I think just about—I think I agree in a similar way. I think what we’re witnessing now is the end stage of what was Wilsonian progressivism, parts of the New Deal, the Great Society program, all of which could be justified by the left to address the needs of the day and maybe to rectify some of the rigidity of the American system.

But ultimately it was built into them that eventually it would appear in this latest manifestation because it always—on the horizon, there was the idea that we’re marching toward radical egalitarianism by fiat, and that requires a level of coercion that’s antithetical to a democratic society. It’s—Plato’s gorgeous, I think Socrates won at one point says, “Well, in Athens they will not be happy until the dogs and the donkeys can vote.”

What he’s trying to say is that each element of expanding the franchise, justified as it was, ultimately is going to end in the absurd because there’s always going to be somebody who says that he doesn’t have the same franchise as someone else. I think it’s very similar. Well, that’s always the same case.

I think it’s built into this mindset or ideology. Once you throw out the Bourbons, that was justified, then you had the constitutional republic. Yes, and you can see that was—then you had Danton, but ultimately, you—whether you knew it or not, you had a rendezvous with the Jacobins just like them. You had a rendezvous with the Maoists, right. Just like Kerensky and the Mensheviks had a rendezvous with the Bolsheviks. It was headed that way until somebody didn’t derail it, and I think that’s where we are today.

Okay, so this allows us to return to a theme we didn’t develop enough, which is part of the purpose of a true humanities education is to transmit the difficult-to-acquire knowledge that actually allows people to become wise enough to forestall that inevitable deterioration toward an idiot and vengeful egalitarianism.

Yes, right. It takes a lot of training. Now, you know, you said you had taught ancient languages, for example, to minority students, and people listening might think, well, what the hell good is that? Let me make a case for what good that is very briefly because it’s a case for the humanities, and you can comment on that.

Well, first of all, there isn’t anything you can do to empower people, which is a word I hate, more effectively than to teach them how to be deeply literate and historically knowledgeable. If you’re looking to facilitate people’s ability to make positive changes in their own life, there is nothing you can do that’s more helpful to that than to make them literate.

If you want to help them understand who they are in the deepest sense, over and above the superficial attractions of tribalism, let’s say, you have to educate them deeply in this historical realm that requires the acquisition of explicit knowledge about the central nature of the human being and that would be the distinguished citizen. Let's say someone capable of upholding the responsibilities of a citizen and someone worthy of the rights that are part and parcel of that.

Without a deep humanities education, all of that disappears because it has to be transmitted explicitly. That was the proper role of the universities for years. It was, as I envision it, our role was twofold: that we were going to teach a method, the inductive method as opposed to the deductive method, so that people, when they looked at the human experience via art or literature or history, they would look at exempla, and then they would come to a general overriding conclusion that took it—the evidence rather than say, I have an idea, and I'm going to cherry-pick the evidence. That was one thing that we taught: the Socratic inductive method.

The other was we had to give them some kind of arsenal or realm of knowledge or reference points. I used to Xerox maybe 500 terms: ionic order, non-composed mentos, anything I could give as an architecture. Everybody made fun of multiplex; we had mostly essay tests, but I always thought there was value in a multi-choice test, and key dates—generals, I would always say to the student, when you leave—when you leave here, I want you to know how far Sparta is from Athens.

I want you to give me three reasons quickly why the Mycenaean Empire collapsed. It was funny because some of our students would sit in on interviews from Ivy League professors, and they would ask these questions, and these professors, I should say, ABDs didn’t have any answers for them. They had no practical knowledge.

Then one student said to me, “Well, why are we doing this?” And I said, “Well, it’s so that you don’t have to repeat every life experience that you have. You’re going to learn what is wise and stupid by experience, and often that experience is going to be deleterious to your character and fortune, but you don’t have to—you’re fatal...”

Yeah, you don’t have to do that all the time. If you think that sometimes, people who are right or punished, the more moral a person is, the more that he’s hated, it’s not you alone that experiences that. You can find comfort in Antigone, or you can say the ratio is not to the swift.

Then why and how? The students came in, and he said, “You know what? I’m the best tackle on the team, but I never get a chance to play because I don’t kiss up.” And I said, “Then you’re old Ajax. What are you going to do about it?”

But that’s the dilemma of Ajax and the Sophoclean play. So that was some of the things that are more pragmatic since the humanities were able to do. They were able to give a person a whole reference of knowledge so that they didn’t have to live out and learn something by rote or they had an example. The other thing is it gave them a sense of—not beauty, that’s not optional.

That’s not optional for human beings. I mean, we are linguistic creatures and we require an awful lot of cultural programs, I think, and every culture knows that. You were definitely in this situation where if we don’t inculcate the wisdom of the past into our young people, then they are forced to regenerate that wisdom through painful and often fatal experience.

Those are the options, and to study history in the humanities is to arm yourself against the sea of troubles and to become literate, and that is the core of the universities. The universities have definitely gently abandoned that in the favor of this idiot narrative.

You know, here’s something you might find interesting. So I did a research study with one of my students just before I was basically, you know, kicked out of the university for being persona non grata.

We investigated two mysteries. The first was, was there a coherent set of beliefs that you could describe as politically correct? The way we investigated that was to produce a very large body of political statements and then to find out the degree to which people agreed with them and then to analyze them statistically to see if there were patterns of belief.

We found two patterns of belief that were obviously commensurate with the notion of a politically correct set of beliefs, and one of them was like a politically correct liberalism, and the other was politically correct authoritarianism. There’s been quite a bit of research on the psychological front with regards to politically correct authoritarianism in recent years.

So first of all, there is such a thing as politically correct beliefs, and there’s an authoritarian version. But then you might also ask yourself, what predicts whether or not people will believe these theories? You know what the biggest predictor was? This is so horrible.

It was low verbal intelligence. It was more—it was a bigger predictor than verbal intelligence is a predictor of grades or socioeconomic outcome. It was 0.45, a correlation whose magnitude you never get in the social science study: a walloping effect. Then the subsidiary predictors were well-being, female was one of them, being agreeable in temperament, which is a feminine personality temperament, and then having taken any courses that were essentially propagandistic in nature.

Part of the reason that people fall for these simplistic set of ideas is because, well, they are simple, and they’re very attractive to people who want or require a uni-dimensional view of the world in light of both of its simplicity, let’s say, but also its underlying proclivity also to identify a convenient enemy.

I think that’s true. I had a student—I mentioned it in The Dying Citizen—but I had a student who once said to me, “Well, you know, this country is very unfair because Wyoming has one Senator, I think at the time it was for two hundred thousand, 400,000 residents. California, at that time, we were 30 million, now it’s 41, but we have to have 15 million people; we only get one senator.”

I said, “Now, why would that be?” And he said, “Because the founders were not democratic.” I said, “Yes, but why weren’t they fully democratic? Do you have the House was going to be elected every— the whole House flips every two years. It represents 750,000 people, so it is democratic but it’s balanced by the Senate that flips every three years. I mean, one-third only flips every two years. You have to be older and it represents states. It’s the America as defined by the individual 50 states, not by the people. That’s the House and the Senate, and they’re balanced by the executive.”

This person was so arrogant because he was so ignorant, but he had gotten this catchphrase in his mind that America is a democracy and therefore the Senate is not democratic. Then so I was very interested in this, and so I went— when I was doing the—I didn’t realize there was a whole body of scholarly literature attacking the Senate from law schools and from political science departments.

The Senate is sort of the last target of the left. They’re trying to change it. There’s a whole body of research showing just how toxic and conservative and anti-liberal it is because it doesn’t represent people; it represents states.

And that the representatives in some states, senators in some states, have larger constituencies in the Senate than in the other, and the Supreme Court has already ruled one man, one vote as it pertains to House districts, and therefore it must rule that the Senate, each senator must be proportionally equal.

Yeah, well, you know, it’s not that—look, you can see that the idea of a distributed democracy has an instantaneous intuitive appeal. It takes a lot of sophisticated thinking before you can understand that there have to be intermediary institutions, right?

Part of the purpose of a humanities education was to give people that wisdom—say, “Look, the problem with radical democracy is that it can degenerate into rule by the mob, like impulsive rule by the mob, and that’s the danger of populism, for example, of an untrammeled mob rule.” You need intermediary institutions. You can kill Socrates—they have to be set up—vote to kill Socrates by a majority vote in the court, or you can vote to kill all the middle Indians on Monday and then decide the next day you don’t want to do it and send a ship after the first trim because the entire assembly is flipped in 24 hours from being murderous to similarly murderous.

That was what our founders knew—that it was very dangerous. But that knowledge is completely absent in this younger generation because the sources of that transmission in history departments or political science departments or government are not there anymore, and it’s not there at K-12.

There is no civic education anymore; there’s no body of music and art and tradition and literature and poetry that each do their part to make a citizen aware of how unique the system was. So that’s what I find really frightening is this collective amnesia in this generation, especially.

It’s—it took a long time, but this generation is the first that I’ve been aware of that is completely amnesiac about the past. It hates the past; it feels that history is melodrama.

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and so that was the role of the university. So look, we’ve used up our 90 minutes of time here on YouTube. We didn’t get to talk about Donald Trump too much, but maybe we’ll have an opportunity to do that again in the future.

We did cover a fair bit of territory in relationship to the idea of citizenship and the role of the universities, and so I think that was useful and apt. I do believe that, you know, there are stellar opportunities on the educational front at the moment as the responsibility for proper education is abdicated by the universities.

There’s an economic opportunity and a conceptual opportunity, and you know, the U.S. is a pretty damn dynamic place on the entrepreneurial front, and it certainly might be the case that new institutions will arise to fill the void that’s left by the universities as they collapse. It might be that places like Hillsdale are on the forefront of that.

We’ll see if that happens. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. And to all of you who are watching and listening on YouTube and associated podcasts, I'm going to talk to Dr. Hansen for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform. I like to delve into people's biographies to see how their career got its start and how it developed across time, and so we’ll delve into that.

It’s a pleasure meeting you, sir, and thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me and to everyone else today, and Happy New Year to you. We’ll flip over to the Daily Wire Plus side. Goodbye, everybody who’s watching and listening.

Hello, everyone! I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.