How to Save Western Civilization with Allen Guelzo

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0:00:00 – (Allen Guelzo): It means that when you start taking things for granted, that’s when they start to slip away, because that’s when you have ceased to put a value on them. Not because you don’t value them, it’s simply because it hasn’t occurred to you that you need to.

0:00:25 – (Collin Hansen): Is there a fate where worse than condemnation? Yes, say Alan Gelzo and James Hankins in their new textbook, the Golden A History of The Western Tradition, Volume 2, the Modern and Contemporary West. Worse than everyone hating you is actually no one remembering you now, right now, for Western civilization, the former is leading to the latter, the lack of remembering into the hating. Having been widely condemned as oppressive imperialists, colonizing and appropriating Western civilization is sometimes not even taught, let alone celebrated for producing the moral, technological, political, economic and lifestyle achievements that give shape to our world.

0:01:09 – (Collin Hansen): And the golden thread helps in remembering and teaching without ignoring the failures and shortcomings of Western civilization. The textbook collaborators, Gelzo and Hankins, have been acquainted for more than 50 years. Hankins wrote volume one, previously published, and Gelzo has written this volume two. Gelso is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar and Director of the James Madison Program’s Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship at Princeton University.

0:01:37 – (Collin Hansen): Dr. Gelzo is a longtime favorite writer of mine, not least for his work on the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln. You can see him if you’re watching, in the back, over the shoulder, the portrait for which Dr. Gelzo last appeared on this podcast, Gospel Bound, in 2024. And I’m honored to host him again as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, one of the hinge points in Western civilization in that memorable, amazing year of 1776.

0:02:05 – (Collin Hansen): Dr. Galzo, thank you for joining me again on Gospel Mound.

0:02:09 – (Allen Guelzo): Well, it’s good to be back again and to once again open the windows into the subject and the exploration of the golden thread of Western civilization and perhaps a few other things that we’ll have occasion to talk about.

0:02:24 – (Collin Hansen): Absolutely. So if I walked down the street And I asked 10 neighbors, all of whom educated, at least at a college level, if I asked them to define Western civilization, I’m actually not sure I’d get any answers at this point, let alone anything that’s consistent. So I’m wondering, how do we work toward a commonly held and commonly known definition for Western civilization?

0:02:54 – (Allen Guelzo): Part of it is the result of a lack of educational initiative. We don’t teach Western civilization as we once did, within living memory we did. So this is a fairly recent development, but it does mean that in large measure, people can’t give you that definition, can’t talk about Western civilization, because they simply don’t know what it is. The other thing that inhibits people is that they take it for granted.

0:03:26 – (Allen Guelzo): It’s the environment in which they’ve always lived. It is a set of principles and practices. It is a wealth of thinking, of art, of music, that we don’t really ask ourselves a question. Where did this come from? And that in itself, the very fact that you wake up one morning and you realize you’ve been taking something, you’ve been taking your entire atmosphere for granted, that’s always going to be a surprise.

0:03:56 – (Allen Guelzo): But it means that when you start taking things for granted, that’s when they start to slip away, because that’s when you have ceased to put a value on them. Not because you don’t value them, it’s simply because it hasn’t occurred to you that you need to. And I think in large measure, the Golden Thread is an effort to address both of these. First of all, it’s an effort to address the criticism, and I think a remarkably unfair one, that Western civilization somehow represents a negative, a toxic influence in human history.

0:04:31 – (Allen Guelzo): And we also want to address this other question about taking it for granted, just not knowing what’s there or what it is, and never really having been called upon to explore it. So both of those are, you might call them, our targets. In Golden Thread, we want to say that Western civilization, when you take the phenomenon, if we can call it that, when you take the phenomenon to this Western tradition as a whole, it has remarkable.

0:05:03 – (Allen Guelzo): A remarkable wealth of contributions to make. It is a little bit. I mean, the image that comes to my mind is Edmond Dantes in the Count of Monte Cristo, discovering this extraordinary treasure on this island that his friend, the Abbe Feria, had described to him. And suddenly, I mean, this is. He has. It is wealth beyond his imagining, which of course he’s going to use, not always in the best way, but even when he uses it in the worst way, which he does to fund revenge, he comes to the conclusion at the end that in fact he has done wrong.

0:05:47 – (Allen Guelzo): He understands and says in the closing of the Count of Monte Cristo that the two most important pieces of advice he can give to people, weight and hope. He was a person, he admits, who for a moment thought that he had the privilege of making the judgment of God on others. And he has learned otherwise. In a way, the approach we take to Western civilization is a little bit like that, because, yes, we have discovered a treasure.

0:06:18 – (Allen Guelzo): It’s a treasure which has, from time to time, been misused. But even in the misuse of it, we have learned tremendous and valuable lessons about ourselves. Those are not things to be discounted and waved away as of no consequence or of ill consequence. To the contrary, these are things that make us what we are and have done tremendous amounts of good for us and for others. So, like Edmond Dantes, with that treasure, we want to acknowledge, yes, mistakes that are made, but we also want to acknowledge that it is, after all, a treasure.

0:06:56 – (Allen Guelzo): The other aspect of that is we want to remind people who otherwise, if they thought about it, would agree and say, yes, Western civilization, a marvelous thing. The entirety of the Western tradition. This is something that we live and breathe in and we want to value. We’re simply reminding people these are what the elements of it are. It’s almost like having forgotten what the rules are in the baseball game.

0:07:21 – (Allen Guelzo): And what we’re doing is reminding people, all right, this is what baseball is like. This is. This is a bat. This is a ball, what you swing at. This is how you move from base to base. And suddenly the whole game becomes fun, fun and more fun. We are reminding people, get out there and play the game. Get out the thing that we call Western civilization. Plunge into its literature, to its art, to its history.

0:07:47 – (Allen Guelzo): Because what you will do when you find there, you’re going to find the same amount of pleasure and the same amount of character building that you get from the practice of a great sport like baseball. So it’s an analogy. It’s only an analogy.

0:08:02 – (Collin Hansen): I like, communicates how much of the decline of interest or certainly education in Western civilization is ironically connected to its success, especially vis a vis the fall of communism.

0:08:19 – (Allen Guelzo): Success is what we all wish that we had until we get it and realize that there are prices to be paid for it. And in a sense, we have discovered something of that with Western civilization. We celebrated, I remember very clearly celebrating what seemed to me at that moment between 1989 and 1991, like a dream come true. I can so clearly remember the news reports I was hearing over the car radio driving to and from school.

0:08:57 – (Allen Guelzo): The Berlin Wall coming down, the opening of the Warsaw Pact. All of that seemed like it was impossible. They could never. I had no expectation I would ever live to see anything like that. And then it all crumbled almost overnight. And then went from there, finally even to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And we thought, all right, we have arrived, as Francis Fukuyama said, we have arrived at the end at the terminal point at the solution of history.

0:09:35 – (Allen Guelzo): And of course, we hadn’t. We had to listen to another voice, and that was Samuel Huntington’s reminding us that in fact, there was another struggle that we had to face, an even larger one. The question that was posed during the Cold War years was within Western civilization. Suddenly we realized that there was now a challenge looming up over the horizon from outside the Western tradition and which aimed to destroy that Western tradition.

0:10:08 – (Allen Guelzo): And this was the clash of civilizations described by Samuel Huntington, who ironically, had been Francis Fukuyama’s mentor. And now we. We find ourselves immersed in what really is a great civilizational conflict. Are. Are we handling all the aspects of it properly and perfectly? No, we never have. That’s not a surprise. What is surprising is we have suddenly had to reach around, to feel around, to grope around, to try to find what are the principles that set us apart as a civilization.

0:10:46 – (Allen Guelzo): And these principles, are we prepared really to defend them in a meaningful way? That has suddenly become the question of the hour. So if anything, the study, the reappropriation, the revitalization of Western civilization has now become more empirical even than it was before 1989. And in a sense, I would like to see the golden thread be part of a revitalization, a reappropriation of what the Western tradition has to water.

0:11:23 – (Collin Hansen): Talking here with Alan Gelzo, author of the Golden A History of The Western Tradition, Volume 2, the Modern and Contemporary West. Also, you can check out brand new the Golden Thread. You can get more updates and applications of what we’re talking about here as well. Dr. Gilzo, that question prompts. Or that comment prompts another question, which is why do you think the ongoing clash of civilization, specifically with Communist China as well as with radical Islam?

0:11:56 – (Collin Hansen): I think probably the two major threats that have supplanted the Soviet Union, though Putin’s Russia is still there and allied in ways with both of those. Why do you think those conflicts have not engendered the same kind of rallying around Western civilization as perhaps the Cold War did, at least in terms of, and I want to be clear, anybody staying in Cold War history knows there were plenty of voices from within the west who were on the Communist side saying they’re the ones who are really right and they’re going to be the successors, is part of why it was so surprising to us, our own.

0:12:35 – (Collin Hansen): I mean, in the academy, there was a lot of triumphalism about the Soviet Union and our own intelligence services. There was a lot of triumphalism around the Soviet Union. So it really was A shock. They’re not both systems.

0:12:47 – (Allen Guelzo): One of the principal features of this thing that Hankins and I call the Western tradition has been a self criticism, a mechanism for self criticism, an introspection that asks us and interrogates us about the purity of our motives and the propriety of our results. Other civilizations don’t have that mechanism. At least if they have it, it’s in a very attenuated fashion. But in the Western tradition, from the very beginning, from the Old Testament, from the Greeks, from the Romans, there has always been this lively sense of self criticism, of self examination, of asking are we really functioning according to the pattern that we aspire to?

0:13:38 – (Allen Guelzo): And the good part of that is that self criticism has always been an internal correcting mechanism. When we have been tempted by circumstances or by misunderstanding of our own principles to behave in a fashion for which there’s no excuse, that self correcting mechanism within Western civilization has been there to remind us that no, you’re not living up to what you’re doing. No, this particular policy, this particular initiative, this particular direction is a contradiction of the very things that you profess to hold as important to your lives.

0:14:19 – (Allen Guelzo): That mechanism within the Western tradition has been a healthy one in time after time and situation after situation. But it can also act in some very negative ways of ways for sure. It can be fixation. It can become the source of an almost suicidal embrace of the negative. And it happens that way not because the criticisms themselves have a standing of their own, because something has gone wrong in the structure of the way we think on an everyday basis.

0:15:02 – (Allen Guelzo): It is so, so to speak, a kind of psychological that, that we struggle with. And when we convert the self criticism mechanism into this kind of obsession, then not only are we actually doing something that is psychologically unhealthy, but we’re doing something which turns out in the long run to be potentially lethal to the survival of the civilization that we otherwise, that we otherwise not only participate in, but actually require in order to be self criticizing in the first place.

0:15:38 – (Collin Hansen): Well, in the book you list several reasons for an evaporation of confidence in Western civilization. World wars, Darwin’s theory of evolution, communism, Freudian psychology. I used to debate this question with my professors in seminary and I’m wondering, do you see any of these factors standing above the rest?

0:16:00 – (Allen Guelzo): I think that there has been a flux in the sense of, which has had a predominant role. And some of that is simply a response to circumstances worldwide. I can’t fix on any particular one of those and say this is the tail that is Wagging the dog. Certainly the impact of each of these kinds of questions has been enormous. When you stand back, for instance, and you look at the cost imposed by two world wars, world wars which first of all involved this stupendous loss of life, destruction of property, of societies, of political structures.

0:16:50 – (Allen Guelzo): I mean, the First World War swept away empires and nations that had been on the map for century after century after century that interjected a destabilization, people’s expectations that had a powerful downwards effect. And that was just the First World War. The other thing about the First World War that was a confidence killer was the notion that here were civilized peoples, all right, the Germans. This is in this case the German Empire, Kaiser Wilhelm ii, all right, but still it’s Germany. It’s the Germany of Beethoven, of Bach, of Schopenhauer, of Hegel, the great philosophers goes to war with France, the nation of the ideals of the French Revolution, and to war with England, this great empire girdling the world.

0:17:47 – (Allen Guelzo): And instead of these European civilized Western nations finding some way to cooperate and resolve their differences, they blunder into, on the most ridiculous terms, they blunder into a four year conflict that nobody really knows how to turn off. I mean, after the first year of the war, actually less than a year of the war, most of the nations involved in the First World War are fighting to avoid losing rather than aiming to win. Because at that point they realize there is not going to be any such thing as victory.

0:18:24 – (Allen Guelzo): When you have four years of behavior of that sort, what kind of conclusion are you supposed to draw? What conclusion would you draw from your neighbors in your neighborhood behaving like that on the ministry? You’d think they’re all out of their minds. Well, it’s no surprise then that after the First World War, collectively speaking, that’s the conclusion that a number of people came to. And then on top of it, having gone through the trauma of that war, then we create a post war environment which only makes things worse and then leads to the trigger that gets pulled for a Second World War, which again destabilizes the nations.

0:19:05 – (Allen Guelzo): The wonder is that there is still something for Hankins and I to write about 1945. The wonder is that it didn’t in fact just simply all fold its tent and collapse in on itself. Well, there was more resilience in the Western tradition than even two world wars could do to it. But the intellectual damage, when Ezra Pound says at the end of World War I, what was it worth? This was a war fought for a few dozen statues, for some old Books, he says, really, what is Western civilization?

0:19:49 – (Allen Guelzo): This is his phrase, it’s an old bitch gone in the teeth. That’s after the First World War. After the Second World War, Teodor Adorno says, after Auschwitz, nobody can write poetry. So just on those terms, two world wars, that is a tremendous blow to confidence, the self confidence of the Western tradition. Then you add these other factors that move in too.

0:20:16 – (Collin Hansen): The atomic age. How about.

0:20:18 – (Allen Guelzo): Well, the atomic age sense is ushered in.

0:20:21 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, exactly.

0:20:23 – (Allen Guelzo): By the second World War and the use of atomic weaponry. Because what is one of the more depressing aspects of this is we have these great advances in physics in the 20th century and we move from through the close of the 19th and into the beginning of the 20th century. We have these remarkable achievements in physics and in chemistry. And what is the first use we put them there, the killing of 10 million people.

0:21:01 – (Allen Guelzo): What is the first use we put atomic energy. Do we build nuclear plants to power societies? No. Now the first use that we are going to take, that we are going to, the first use we’re going to make of these is to create a weapon that is going to kill tens of thousands of people and cast a shadow over all the lives we have led since still today.

0:21:27 – (Collin Hansen): Absolutely.

0:21:28 – (Allen Guelzo): And you look, if this is what, if this is what our vaunted science in the west is giving us, well, so much the worse for science that that is not an illogical conclusion. And we have to confront the fact that in many respects the problems that we deal with, the questioning, the criticism of Western civilization, in many ways these are things we have done to ourselves. So we balance that again, that self correcting mechanism and what we see emerging out of it is something of a struggle in our minds.

0:22:09 – (Allen Guelzo): We, we’ve seen terrible things happen within this Western tradition. Is our self correcting mechanism up to the task of absorbing, answering and moving ahead beyond that. And right now we are at a moment of civilization, civilizational self questioning, civilizational crisis. And what Hankins and I in very realistic terms are attempting to do is to say, yes, the resilience is there. Yes, we’ve made these dreadful mistakes, but the resilience is there. And the ideas the resilience serves are worth promoting. And therefore we want to speak in the defense of these things.

0:22:57 – (Allen Guelzo): So in a way we are a little, a little bit like the criminal in the DOC who indeed is guilty of some crimes. But we are also going to say that there are reasons behind this. There are motivations, there are possibilities, there are circumstances. And we are going to plead with the judge which is to say people today, and we’re going to plead with the judge and say, can we not move forward? Is there not a constructive way to do things?

0:23:30 – (Allen Guelzo): And that is what these books are. We’re not, we’re not throwing a party, understand this. We’re not throwing a party for the Western tradition. We’re not saying that all the brothers were valiant and all the sisters were virtuous. Oh no, no, no, no. Because that would be to interject an element of untruth that would compromise still more the story of Western civilization. What we are asking people is to exercise that self correcting mechanism.

0:24:01 – (Allen Guelzo): But to exercise, first of all to exercise it properly, but secondly, to realize that the very existence of that self correcting and self criticizing mechanism is an aspect, is a gift of the Western tradition.

0:24:14 – (Collin Hansen): I’m currently in the process of writing my third book on this question, just to give a, to go straight to my answer. I’m partial toward the world war answer to that question, not to the exclusion of others, because we can clearly see how, for example, Darwin’s theories led straight into so much of what happened in both world wars. And of course we’ll see how Freud’s influence played out in both world wars. So that’s not to exclude others. And also the role that communism played in obviously in both. Well, both of them in their own ways as well. So it’s not to exclusion of others. But I did one book on theodicy, the problem of evil, related to Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust, and then a second one on cultural apologetics, saying that basically the trauma narrative of the Holocaust, our inability to cope with what we were capable of doing to each other, we’ve simply never been able to overcome.

0:25:13 – (Collin Hansen): And I think only what’s happening in Ukraine and Israel and Iran, it’s all still downstream from that. And then the current book that I’m writing is on two of the greatest recoverers of the Western tradition of the 20th century, Winston Churchill and C.S. lewis. And looking at them both through the crisis of both world wars, but especially their rise to particular prominence in the Second World War.

0:25:38 – (Collin Hansen): Now your textbook is necessarily selective but very substantial. You devote a two page spread to Winston Churchill. I don’t think he, you know, in the grand Western tradition, I don’t think he’s the most influential figure. I think, I mean, he’s only a politician. Yeah, exactly, politician. Ultimately you’ve got Jesus. I think the guy that you build the calendar around probably plays the big role in there, but at least in modern history, I Am not sure who could be regarded as more consequential than Churchill.

0:26:12 – (Collin Hansen): You can disagree with that. But I’m wondering, is that why he’s become the focus of so much revisionist history lately on both the right and left, as the arch villain of the 20th century?

0:26:25 – (Allen Guelzo): Oh, I think so.

0:26:26 – (Collin Hansen): Okay.

0:26:27 – (Allen Guelzo): I think Churchill is a great stumbling block for the traumatized, so to speak. And if you think of it in psychological terms that way you can understand that someone who has been traumatized, let’s say by an ugly childhood, an abusive parent, when they first meet someone else who is busy praising their parents, the response is incredulity. How can that possibly be? My experience was entirely this other way.

0:27:00 – (Allen Guelzo): And for many people today, the experience of the 20th century in particular was exactly that kind of trauma. So that when you hear a voice like that of Churchill saying no, no, no, we are going to defend this thing, we are going to defend our island. We will fight them in the hills, we will fight them on the landing places, we will fight them on the beaches.

0:27:25 – (Collin Hansen): We will never surrender for the sake of Christian civilization.

0:27:30 – (Allen Guelzo): For that, for that. People today regard that with that same incredulity. Don’t you realize what has happened? Don’t you realize what we have gone through? Yeah, that’s true, except that here the trauma has taken over. The trauma has become the substitute for the self correcting mechanism. Curiously, Churchill himself was not unaware of the problems and failures he himself responsible

0:28:00 – (Collin Hansen): for that contributed to plenty of them.

0:28:03 – (Allen Guelzo): Clementine, Churchill once said that she had been afraid after the Dardanelles that everything that happened in the Dardanelles was going to kill him, that he just couldn’t go on. And it probably was one of the most severe experiences that he had to deal with in his life. It pretty well wrecked his political future. And it was only because of what happened in 1939 and 1940 that he’s actually brought back into a government position of some significance as First Lord of the Admiralty and then of course becomes Prime Minister.

0:28:40 – (Allen Guelzo): And even then people didn’t want to particularly want to trust him.

0:28:43 – (Collin Hansen): No.

0:28:45 – (Allen Guelzo): So Churchill in many ways is the person that people will respond to out of trauma to say, how can you possibly have any kind of confidence in defending this system? Because isn’t Hitler more normative of this Western civilization? Well, no, of course, no, Hitler is not. And Churchill did a great deal of work in making that clear to people in speech after speech. But look at the sources Churchill draws upon. Churchill draws upon the Bible, Churchill draws upon Shakespeare, he draws upon a sense of English Identity, as if to say, all right, no matter how many times we have been beaten in battlefields, no matter even we’ve gone through this evacuation at Dunkirk, nevertheless there is something here that we will rise up and fight for. And not only fight for, but we will succeed.

0:29:40 – (Allen Guelzo): And at the end of that great speech In June of 1940, people listened to that on the radio and even in the pubs. And the response, I remember reading of one person who. This was an evacuee from Dunkirk who was so depressed at the prospect of what had happened, but who heard this speech, and his response was, we’re going to win. We are going to win. We’re going to last our way through this thing, but we’re going to win.

0:30:15 – (Allen Guelzo): The Churchill could call that forth from people. And there have been a number of voices in the 20th century who, even out of the wreckage of a thing called civilization, are able to call us back to it. Because I think not only of Churchill, and I devote one section that way to Churchill, because still to this day, the most easily recognizable name, but I have to think also of someone like Conrad, Adenauer.

0:30:44 – (Allen Guelzo): And Adenauer. Adenauer does in 1945 and the years after 1945 what we could only wish had been done in the years after 1918. Because Adenauer says any. And this is an explicitly Christian appeal by Adenauer, Germany must admit what it has done. We must take the burden of our crimes into ourselves, because otherwise we will never be a fit companion to the other nations. And Adenauer is able to do that in ways it would almost be unimaginable for any other German to have done after 1945.

0:31:22 – (Allen Guelzo): But, you know, something of the same thing is true of Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle today still reminds everyone of 1962 and 1968, when he is this almost geriatric figure and France is in an uproar about him. But the DE goal of 1945 is the man who is able to put back together a nation that shouldn’t have been put back together, had been so deeply embarrassed, Destroyed, divided. And De Go manages to do that.

0:31:59 – (Allen Guelzo): It is a marvelous, marvelous moment. So I would. I would add to the list there, I would add after Churchill, yeah, add an hour, De Go. And sorry to say, these are names that likewise almost seem to be erased, Almost lost. Just lost. Today, Churchill is still there, but De Goal and Adenauer part partly. I think it’s because. All right, De Goal speaks French. Adenauer speaks German. Yeah. Not as easily accessible for English speakers.

0:32:29 – (Allen Guelzo): Nevertheless, that sense of what they rebuilt has almost been effaced. And I think it’s great loss.

0:32:38 – (Collin Hansen): I was blessed to study European history as an undergraduate and had great teachers so many different ways. And one of the books that I had to read in my Second World War in Europe class was Marc Bloesch’s book Strange Defeat. Anybody who would be familiar with the conditions of France in 1940 to see what happened with de Gaulle afterward would just be shocked. A nation that in victory lost its soul after 1918.

0:33:08 – (Allen Guelzo): And I add to Adenauer, if you want to take a measure of how Germans had to try to cope with what had happened, you have to go to WG Seboltz writings, especially Zebel’s last book, which was about German memory in the years right after 1945. It’s a searing account of the struggle Germans had to cope with what they had done. The figure, of course, in my mind that floats above it all is the figure of Adenauer, who is, in a self consciously Christian way, is trying to lead Germans back to something that they had lost almost a century before.

0:33:57 – (Allen Guelzo): He’s, in a way, he is cranking the clock back before Bismarck.

0:34:02 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, yeah, you need to.

0:34:04 – (Allen Guelzo): And calling Germans to be something very different. And the German nation as we see it today, the now reunited German nation is in large measure a kind of a Germany that picked up from 1848, which almost said everything, everything from 1848 to 1945, we are going to try to walk away from. We’re going to go back to the fork in the road we took in 1848 and we’re going to take the other fork. And I think I can almost imagine Adenauer as the Pulizei at the fork on the road, saying, okay, now we’re going on that fork of the road.

0:34:44 – (Collin Hansen): What’s so hard, I find about studying and teaching history is helping people to see the contingency, to understand it didn’t have to go that way. Without Adenauer, what would have happened? And I think we actually have an interesting look at the alternative with Svetlana Alexievich’s book Secondhand Time, about the fall of the Soviet Union. And you can see that the shock of the rapid fall, her thesis that the only way the Soviet Union ever could have collapsed is if the man at the center of it all had lost faith.

0:35:19 – (Collin Hansen): And of course, that’s Gorbachev that she’s talking about there. The system was designed to endure anything except for that. And that’s the one thing that happened but the sense of shock everybody feels, the sense that how could we have lost our great empire without killing everyone. At least if we’re going to lose it, we needed to kill everybody in the process. And now you can see how that period of democracy ended up so short and why Russia reverted back to so much.

0:35:46 – (Allen Guelzo): In a way, you can say that after the collapse of the Soviet union, especially after 1993, the best thing that Russia could have done would have been to ask, where did we lose our path? We lose it in 1917. Did we lose it? Did we lose it in 1690?

0:36:15 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. Go back to Dostoevsky. At least he’ll tell you.

0:36:18 – (Allen Guelzo): Oh, yeah, I’m sure. Did we, where did we lose our way? And if we did, how can we pick up the way again? And that would, if we had asked that kind of question, I think we would have had a very different Russia than the one we have today. I think that we would have had a Russia undergoing a self examination not dissimilar to the one undertaken in Germany and in France and elsewhere too. In Japan after the end of World War II, I think we could have seen the undertaking of a self examination that would have dispelled a number of the illusions that presently dominate Russian thinking and Russian culture.

0:37:06 – (Allen Guelzo): And we, we might have seen a very different Russia on the world stage. But, but that did not happen because there was, There were not those voices exactly that could take us back to that. Instead they were the clamor of voices that wish to address. Address Russia, define Russia in this remarkably different and, and utterly ahistorical way. And that’s what we’re dealing with now with Putin. If there was a fork in the road there too. Yeah. Oh, and if the voices had been there, if there had been a Dostoevsky, if there had been a Tolstoy, even if there had been a Turgenev, I’d

0:37:47 – (Collin Hansen): settle for a Turgenev.

0:37:50 – (Allen Guelzo): Even if they’ve been a Turgeniev. They’re like, wag that finger. Don’t think of yourself more than you should.

0:37:55 – (Collin Hansen): There was a Grossman and there was a Solzhenitsyn, though didn’t listen.

0:38:00 – (Allen Guelzo): No, didn’t listen.

0:38:02 – (Collin Hansen): Which is. I don’t see it as an opportunity to just wag the finger at them, but it becomes a challenge for ourselves of listening to our own prophets in our midst who are calling us back.

0:38:13 – (Allen Guelzo): I wish, if I can pull one name at all out of the hat, I wish there had been a Pasternac. Yeah. In the 1990s, I think that maybe we could have been called Russia, could have been called in a different direction, but that did not happen. That’s the contingency.

0:38:30 – (Collin Hansen): They had a Yeltsin. They did not have an Adenauer there. And then they got a Putin.

0:38:35 – (Allen Guelzo): Oh, I know.

0:38:37 – (Collin Hansen): Now, given the work I alluded to earlier in Cultural Apologetics, I flipped to your section, God in the dock in the 20th century. You draw out abolition of man from C.S. lewis and kind of connect that in the broader tradition of natural law. Pope John Paul ii, then coming later, another significant figure of somebody who did step forward in that moment and made a huge difference, not only the Catholic Church, Western civilization, but of course, his native Poland.

0:39:05 – (Collin Hansen): Now, you mentioned these two, Louis and John Paul ii, as the exception and not the rule in what’s become an overwhelmingly skeptical age in the West. I’m wondering, do you see signs and forms of historic or orthodox Christianity that can endure the dramatic changes laid out in your textbook and no doubt ongoing changes even as we speak?

0:39:28 – (Allen Guelzo): Well, I’m a historian and not a prophet. I have no crystal ball. I cannot tell you what is going to be the result of this or what is going to be the result of that. I can express some preferences, but they’re no more than preferences. So I have no claim to a map. I have no claim to a supernal wisdom that could tell people this is how it’s going to happen and this is what you should do. This is what you must do.

0:39:59 – (Allen Guelzo): I simply don’t know. The role of contingency warns me that many times history is like an accordion, that there are long, long moments when the accordion is stretched out and things happen at a very slow pace. But then there are other moments when the accordion gets compressed and then every moment counts, every decision at every point becomes a critical. Oh, and if I did have the prophetic gift, I would be able to say this is where those moments are. I don’t know.

0:40:40 – (Allen Guelzo): I do know that when those compressed moments occur, every minute really does count. Every decision counts. And that may be simply exhorting people to that consciousness is one thing which the golden thread can do. Be aware of the fact that your decisions matter. Be aware that what you do, even on a daily basis, can have an impact so much greater than you think. If you go the way of ease, if you go the way of cheapness, if you go the way of self delusion, then it won’t simply be you at that moment who suffers from it.

0:41:21 – (Allen Guelzo): It will have wide ranging impacts and in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. Whereas if you concentrate, as T.S. eliot once said, on making perfect, your will to do the right thing to think the right ideas, to pursue the right course in that way. If you are always conscious of that, then my sense is that the likelihood of making those right contingent decisions is greatly, much more greatly heightened. It requires a degree of self awareness of yourself personally and of your environment.

0:42:03 – (Allen Guelzo): But in real terms, that’s what the golden thread is there to provide that consciousness of our cultural environment where the riches are really stored and sometimes where the body is really buried. True.

0:42:24 – (Collin Hansen): There. Let’s look back then and try to approach it from the question from a different angle here. How do you figure out where to place the role of Christianity in Western civilization? It’s a massive question, but here’s what I mean. Is Christianity the evolutionary transition from the origins in Greece and Rome to a sort of post war global secularism? Or is it the real heartbeat of what separates the west from those pagan origins on the one hand, and modern attempts to universalize distinctively Christian values as secular?

0:43:05 – (Collin Hansen): This has become a big debate with Tom Holland’s book Dominion, things like that.

0:43:09 – (Allen Guelzo): So I have to mention Tom Holland. All right. Yeah, okay. Holland. Holland tends to present us with more of the dichotomy that classical civilization was, was full of violence, it was full of destruction. And Christianity has to come and gentle that down. Well, yes, that is to a certain extent true. But what Hankins and I have talked about is viewing these moments, these civilizational moments, less as evolutions, by which I mean the change of something into something different, less as evolutions and more as the creation of a stack.

0:44:03 – (Collin Hansen): Okay.

0:44:04 – (Allen Guelzo): In this case, almost like a cake, a layer cake. And in, in some, in, in some ways we weed out from the, from, from the layer that we call Christian civilization, we weed out the incompatible elements from the previous.

0:44:27 – (Collin Hansen): I see.

0:44:30 – (Allen Guelzo): That is not an evolution though, because we also absorb from Greece and from Rome and from the Old Testament, we absorb a host of ideas. If we go for instance, to the New Testament, you don’t get a very clear idea of what political society is supposed to be. You simply don’t. I mean, the Roman Empire is there and that, and no one questions it. If anything, even the earliest Christians find a way to maneuver in the interstices of Roman politics and Roman political societies. And Paul is able to appeal to being a Roman citizen and that’s a potent appeal. If you’ve ever read the second Catiline oration. You know what I mean?

0:45:15 – (Allen Guelzo): That’s potent. But he’s within that he’s quoting Greek philosophers on the Areopagus and some of the, some of them are fairly Obscure, obscured. To us, of course, they’re much more well known in those times. St. Paul is quite adept at doing that. Picking this and picking them. What is he doing? He’s not saying everything that went before us is wrong. Everything went before us is a mistake. We’re starting all over again from beginning line.

0:45:48 – (Allen Guelzo): Now. He’s saying, all right, these things are true. Not only are they true, but the people who have discovered them know that they’re true as well. I mean, they try to suppress aspects of it, but they know that it’s true. In that respect, St. Paul is a natural law, right theologian, and he does not see us evolving into something entirely different. That is what evolution assumes. What he is seeing is the building up towards a goal.

0:46:20 – (Allen Guelzo): And for him, that particular goal is the revelation of God in Christ. So each one of these layers is not something to be tossed aside, but rather something to be built upon. We look to the Greeks and we learn important things. We learn important things about political society that the New Testament doesn’t teach us. The New Testament does not talk about democracy, it doesn’t talk about imperial rule. It simply takes as a given the Romans are there. We’ve got to live with them, we’ve got to play by their rules, because if we don’t, our heads go off our shoulders.

0:46:54 – (Allen Guelzo): Well, that’s not exactly what I call profound political philosophy. It’s not for the stones of the road. Well, we, of course, have to live in an environment that reckons with political society. So where do we get. Where do we get ideas that are consonant with. With Christianity? Well, we’re going to go to our friends the Greeks, we’re going to go to our friends the Romans. We’re going. We’re going to read Pericles oration, we’re going to read Herodotus and get very excited, and we’re going to read Thucydides and get very depressed.

0:47:26 – (Allen Guelzo): That was happening even then, all right, and likewise with the Romans. So we’re going to read them. We’re going to learn about a number of things that we can’t simply get as a matter of Christian revelation or even Christian natural theology. So it’s a building, and I think it has to be a building stacked one on top of another. Now, what that invites is the question, is there going to be another layer

0:47:58 – (Collin Hansen): and what are we still weeding and what are we still absorbing? Because I think that’s the question with Christianity. We’ve clearly absorbed it. Can we now weed it out and move on?

0:48:09 – (Allen Guelzo): And this is a challenge for Christian Thinkers, in fact, always has been. Take this back to the 12th century. You have Christian thinkers who are very eager to absorb Aristotelian dialectic, and you have other Christian thinkers who recoil from that with horror. You’re playing with fire. They’re warning. Well, in the long run, it is dialectic which, which wins the day. And I, and I don’t think that we’re the losers for that.

0:48:39 – (Allen Guelzo): But there it was a question then, and there will be questions today. And we will look to see how does our Christianity confront novel situations where we understand the role of contingency. The fact that we have built these stacks on Greece, on Rome, on the era of Christendom and the Middle Ages and now a modern age. I don’t think that’s something to be frightened of, because at each level something marvelous has happened.

0:49:16 – (Allen Guelzo): I mean, for St. Paul, it’s very obvious that the Roman world is there as a deliberate preparation for the Gospel. Rome is not something simply to be regretted. It was not a gigantic mistake. It paves the way. And you look at the early Christian apology, literally. Yeah. You look at your two, all right, you look at a number of the other Christian apologists. They’re, some of them are actually excessively complementary of Rome because Rome made it.

0:49:48 – (Allen Guelzo): Roman communications, Roman roads, Roman government. They make it possible for the easy spread of the gospel through the empire. So we perhaps will be on a voyage of discovery ourselves. And it doesn’t mean that we are going to abandon any more than we’ve abandoned Rome. We love Rome. I love Rome. I wish I loved it more because I would have done better in Latin class, of course. Did much better. We both had the same Latin.

0:50:20 – (Allen Guelzo): Believe it. This was a public school, really. Four years of Latin.

0:50:25 – (Collin Hansen): That’s amazing.

0:50:26 – (Allen Guelzo): And we were translating Caesar by year two. But I’m, I’m sorry, I’m, I’m not a, I’m not a linguist. Jim is so much better at this. I, I’m sorry. I just bow the neck and spread when he pitches into Latin. I, I have only, I have only the barest components. But, but we don’t, we don’t get rid of that. We don’t want to get rid of up a classical learning because it informs so much of what we are. We don’t want to get rid of Greece.

0:50:56 – (Allen Guelzo): He’s better at Greek than I am, too. It’s been adorable. I, I’m, I’m, I’m happy just to limp through English. We, we don’t, we don’t want to set those aside because they’re great things. And, and in a sense, if we really have a consistently Christian providential view of things, we realize that Greece and Rome were not simply accidents to be regretted, that there are wonderful things that are laid out for us there that we can enjoy and enjoy in the best Christian sense. So we absorb these things up through the layers.

0:51:33 – (Allen Guelzo): Will there be another layer? Yeah, but it’ll be a layer that does not wipe away the previous layers. It will still be a Greek, a Roman, a Christian layer, even if it is a new layer that we can discern as such. So I, I am not a pessimist. I am not expecting Christianity somehow to be vacuumed out of the civilizational picture because it doesn’t happen that way. To the contrary, the question is going to be, all right, what are we going to see moving into a new age which has been so dramatically transformed by technology?

0:52:11 – (Allen Guelzo): What is that going to do? It is going to be interesting. That’s not always a complimentary word, but it is going to be interesting to see what stands before us. To my mind, that makes all the more important appropriating and understanding the civilizations which have gone before us and which we are built on. Because having a self consciousness of those is what is going to make the future a much more habitable and decent future.

0:52:44 – (Allen Guelzo): If we lose that sense of what we’ve had in the past, then we will be, we will almost be like, like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies set on a desert island with no precedents, with no restraint. And what is the result? The result is horror. That and I, I don’t mention Golding in, in the second volume because I can’t, I can’t do everything. I mean, my goodness, it’s 900 pages as it is. I have to tote around.

0:53:19 – (Allen Guelzo): So I, yeah, there’s, there has to be a selection process. I will plead guilty for anyone who doesn’t like what I have selected. They might like Brancusi. I write about Picasso. All right, fine. My advice, as you’ve read in the preface to it, and I put it in French to make it mild. Write your own book.

0:53:39 – (Collin Hansen): Your own book. I appreciate that. Now, just as we’re wrapping up here, we mentioned all these other different people who did. They were raised up, they stepped forward in those moments. We looked at other times when nobody did. I look back on American history and of course to the great recoverers, Lincoln and King, both very self conscious in their appropriating the Western tradition in the self correction mode.

0:54:11 – (Collin Hansen): And I think that’s so clearly the path to be able to take not to pretend like there are no problems. Neither one of them did not to pretend like we need to go somewhere else for all the answers, they found it within the tradition and very specifically within Christianity or at least those. I mean King as a preacher, Lincoln as not necessarily an observant Christian, but one who was clearly steeped in that tradition. As you’ve written about so eloquently many different, different places.

0:54:38 – (Collin Hansen): It makes me wonder, and this is the premise of our work at the Keller center for Cultural Apologetics. Our belief is that in this Western civilizational transition, what we need is. Need an Augustine, we need a 5th century Augustine.

0:54:53 – (Allen Guelzo): And we may get that. Here’s the optimistic part. The optimistic part is illustrated by Lincoln because we come in 1860 to the most tremendous crisis of this whole idea of a democratic republic. People had been prophesying for decades that this thing was, was a self contradiction. It was going to run off the rails and destroy itself. And it looked in 1860 as though all those prophets, those negative prophets were right. Yeah, right.

0:55:25 – (Allen Guelzo): Because who. And who were the presidents prior?

0:55:27 – (Collin Hansen): Terrible, terrible string of presidents?

0:55:30 – (Allen Guelzo): Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan. This is what a democracy produces. That’s was the argument that people used then. What did we get when we needed him the most? We get an Abraham Lincoln. And the most unlikely, the most unlikely source of, of any kind of deliverance here was some of you never went to college, had probably less than a year of formal schooling. And when he was elected, he was such a dark horse candidate that a lot of the campaign posters didn’t even spell his name correctly.

0:56:10 – (Allen Guelzo): There was one news. I love this story. There was one newspaper editor in Illinois who after Lincoln’s election was so disgusted that he. And he editorialized. Who will write this ignorant man’s state papers for him?

0:56:23 – (Collin Hansen): Oh boy.

0:56:24 – (Allen Guelzo): Wow. Talk about, talk about Casey at the bat. All right, really big whiff. But that illustrates one thing, and that is contingency can sometimes turn in a negative direction, but can also turn in a positive direction. You can get a link up. All right, are we cultivating Lincoln’s. How did we get Lincoln? He didn’t drop down from the clouds. This was a man whose intellectual curiosity was ravenous. He read anything he lay his hands on and he continued doing that all through his life. And you get surprised when you read through Lincoln’s speeches. They are studded with material that is clearly he is brought from reading in a vast array of things.

0:57:15 – (Allen Guelzo): Most obviously the Bible, most obviously Shakespeare. But look, there are big traces of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, of. Of the political economists of his day. Here’s a man who had read a tremendous amount and people who spent any kind. If you spent five minutes with Lincoln, you would think he was somebody from the backwoods because he talked, which he was, of course. Yeah. Sat and talked with them for half an hour.

0:57:41 – (Collin Hansen): There you go.

0:57:42 – (Allen Guelzo): Came away impressed by what this man knew, had thought about and had read. That’s what we got. Unexpected, unlooked for. I think we have to have some patience with ourselves. This can happen, but only if we are willing to be ready for it to happen. To prepare ourselves to think and to read. And like Edmond Dantes, to plunge our hands into that treasure chest on the island of Monte Cristo.

0:58:17 – (Collin Hansen): Two greatest political speech writers, Churchill and Lincoln, both autodidacts, both of them. And I’m optimistic like you, and I actually am so optimistic I’m going to be spending the rest of my day today editing a book on artificial intelligence. But to believe that artificial intelligence might actually provoke a revival of classical education in the liberal arts to expose the weaknesses. Go ahead.

0:58:45 – (Allen Guelzo): And wouldn’t that be the surprise of the year? Oh, wouldn’t it?

0:58:49 – (Collin Hansen): But by exposing the problems of focusing only on a practical or technical outcomes. But understand that the way you prepare for what you can’t see is by storing up those riches of the past, just like you cited there. So that’s my hope. And thanks for helping to inspire that and to equip us with this book, the Golden Thread, A History of The Western Tradition, Volume 2, the Modern and Contemporary West.

0:59:15 – (Collin Hansen): And for the Golden Thread substack that you guys have just started. I’m gonna go make sure I subscribe to that right now. Glad to hear about it. Dr. Gelzo, always an honor. Thank you so much for joining me on Gospel Boundaries.

0:59:28 – (Allen Guelzo): Oh, you’re very welcome. And it was good to talk.

0:59:37 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound Rate and review Gospel Bound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time. Remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.