Niall Ferguson: How Civilizations Collapse

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Niall Ferguson is a Scottish-American historian who serves as the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. The author of 16 books, Ferguson writes and lectures on international history, economic history, financial history and the history of the British Empire and American imperialism. #history #politics #interview

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Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians.

00:00 Intro
00:43 Are We in the Last Stages of Civilisation?
08:45 How Do Civilisations Fall?
13:03 The State of the American Project
23:04 Sponsor Message: GiveSendGo
24:40 Why We Judge the Past
27:38 Why Are Young People So Nihilistic?
39:59 Is Totalitarianism Cyclical in History?
43:03 Sponsor Message: EasyDNS
44:05 The Failure of Our Historical Education
48:57 Do Men Think About the Roman Empire?
54:10 Why Are Greek Myths So Compelling?
57:34 Niall’s Thoughts on Trump
1:02:47 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About?

We seem to have lost a moral will here in the west there are many other indicators that we may be trending in the wrong direction would you agree with that or do you are you more optimistic about the future I think we’ve just allowed the educational system to move

Much further to the left than most people realize they don’t pursue their own interests as a generation at all rationally and the new religions of of the secular sphere turned out to be in some ways a good deal worse than the religions they displaced Neil it’s such a pleasure to

Have you back on the show uh at a time when it’s a few things are a pleasure I feel it’s it’s it’s been a difficult time these last few weeks we’re recording this at ARK um there are people who say that we are in the last days of Western Civilization there are

People like R Dal who talk about how there are six stages of the collapse of Empire we’re in five and a half or whatever as a historian what do you make of this um and everything that’s been happening recently well I agree that it’s not a particularly cheerful moment

In world history but in my most recent book Doom the politics of catastrophe I try to argue that cyclical theories of History should be regarded with a great deal of skepticism because history isn’t cyclical we would love it to be because of course that would make it so much

Easier to understand and indeed to predict and we would like it to be cyclical because we as individuals have a life cycle but history doesn’t have a life cycle Empires civilizations great Powers they don’t and and it’s obvious when you actually look at them seriously rather than massaging the data to find a

Cycle uh if you look at historical long run historical data the characteristic feature is a lot of Randomness and that is because disasters upheavals are not normally distributed they’re they’re actually often either completely random like the incidents of major Wars or they are par law driven pandemics earthquakes

That kind of thing so I’m a big skeptic about cyclical theories of History Empires rise and fall yes sure but some Empires rise and fall really fast try Hitler’s Empire which doesn’t really get going until 36 and is done and Rubble by 45 that’s 9 years whereas other Empires think of Rome

You can measure in a millennium so I don’t think it’s plausible to say oh Western Civilization has reached the fifth stage and Decline and fall are just around the corner it’s fun and it sells books and there’s always a market in the United States especially for the

Impending end of the Republic but it just doesn’t seem to me that history is like that okay well interesting let me try from a different angle then because I think a lot of people might say look at where we are uh the West has accumulated huge debts uh the West’s

Authority around the world is being challenged very robustly now to put it mildly um we seem to have lost a moral will uh here in the west there are many other indicators that we may be trending in the wrong direction would you agree with that or do you are you more

Optimistic about the future a lot of what you just said is true but you could also have said that in 1973 so 50 years ago didn’t look great did it because the United States seemed to be losing the Cold War basically had bailed on South Vietnam which 2 years later was gone

Puff and uh it wasn’t exactly going swimmingly in the Middle East uh in October 1973 uh the Soviet Union we know was going to decline and fall with great speed in the 1980s that wasn’t obvious in 1973 the inflation problem of 73 was going to get a lot worse it’s

Plausibly uh not going to be as bad this decade and I could go on uh in 1973 America was already in the early phases of the Watergate disaster which was would bring Richard Nixon to resignation to avoid impeachment if you had asked people 50 years ago how is it going

There would been a lot who’ have agreed uh with the declinist who really thought the game was up there was a huge amount of Vision in the United States and not only in the United States I’m old enough to remember the 70s it wasn’t a particularly good time in the United

Kingdom either in fact the UK was the sort of poster child of stagflation at that time so what am I telling you yeah that’s not a great moment 2023 but I’m not convinced that there’s some great cycle at work here it was pretty bad 50 years ago too and seven

Years later Ronald Reagan’s elected nine years later Berlin Wall comes down and two years after that the Soviet Union is gone so the lesson I would like to draw from history is there’s a lot of nonlinearity and you have to be I think making a more precise argument than you

Just did to get me properly worried so let me try so what is worrying today is not that we feel terribly divided or we’re so polarized it’s not particularly I think that uh there’s uh a major economic problem actually the United States economy is shockingly strong under the circumstances I think the

Things that are concerning to me are number one China Russia Iran North Korea are working with increasing uh cooperation and coordination in ways that are threatening to a number of democracies that the United States and its allies have been backing Ukraine is one Israel is another Taiwan is probably next and

Secondly China’s really much bigger economically it has much greater resources uh technologically too than any previous rival that the United States and its allies faced Soviet Union econom ically was never more than about 42% of GDP relative to the US well China’s a lot bigger than that certainly

In the 80% range it’s above 100% if you do a purchasing power parity calculation so that’s the second point the third thing that is I think concerning is that the United States feels less able to cope with these geopolitical challenges than it was say 50 years

Ago and I I’ll give you one specific example of that it cannot be right that with the economy more or less full employment there is a deficit of 7% of gross domestic product and that is going to lead very quickly into some nasty fiscal arithmetic in to be specific debt

Service costs are about to overtake defense spending and that trend line is is really not pretty with interest rates rising and the deficits EX in excess of 5% of GDP as far as the I can see so I think the fiscal situation of the US is

A lot worse than it was in 1973 and that means that the US isn’t actually able to cope with three military crises at once uh lastly the military industrial complex ain’t what it was God I miss it I mean there was a time when the US really was the arsenal of democracy I

Made this point some time ago aona in a Bloomberg column it’s quite a bit behind China which is now the Arsenal of autocracy with manufacturing value added roughly 2x that of the United States you don’t have to go back very far for it to be the other way around back in I think

Around 2002 3 4 the US was a a manufacturing power much greater than China so in the space of two decades there’s been a real role reversal in the event of a hot war with China the US would run out of precision missiles in about 5 days more or less that’s a much

Worse situation than anything 50 years ago so there are reason to be worried but I think you have to be quite precise about what you’re worried about and that’s what I’m worried about Neil let’s broaden it this topic out a little bit how does civilizations actually

Fall well that’s a good question I think most people imagine in a toin Basque way some kind of inner crisis of will of morale of self-belief they think of it as a perhaps a sort of aging process or maybe it’s just entropy at work if one looks at the decline and

Fall of the Roman Empire in Gibbon’s telling it’s really a very protracted process so protracted as to have been imperceptible I think for most contemporaries but in more recent tellings uh Brian Ward Perkin for example actually the Roman Empire fell apart fell apart quite fast especially

The Roman Empire in the west and I think it was perceptable that Civilization had sort of come unstuck and I think we can understand similar processes if one looks for example in Chinese history the Ming fell apart in uh the mid 17th century in a way that was very

Perceptible with very meaningful impacts on quality of life so we know what it’s like when a civilization Falls part the infrastructure stops working Public Health gets much worse it can be caused by War it can be caused by plague it can be caused by uh other forces that are

Perhaps less discernable for example uh a civilization can fail fiscally it can fail because its monetary system doesn’t work and it stops being able to uh deliver surpluses to to the the population so I think we understand a little bit how that process works and when you uh look at the work

Of someone like Peter Turin there is an attempt through his cliodynamics to to construct models of civilizational breakdown and and then look for a contemporary uh analogy and and in his most recent book Peter argues that the United States is in this kind of uh of a cycle uh he emphasizes the

Overproduction of Elites too many people with you know University degrees not enough for them to do uh he I thought quite brilliantly forecast a sort of peak in in organized violence in 2020 which I guess he got lucky with the pandemic and and George Floyd and the

Subsequent Mayhem but it kind of looks quite good as a prediction right now I I guess when you look at all his variables however you could make a similar argument about China in fact one of the variables demographics looks worse for China another of the variables overproduction of educated people looks

Worse for China so in my review of his book which I like I mean I respect his work very much I said might be true uh but it might turn out to be true of China more a bit like Paul Kennedy’s Book you you might remember the the rise

And fall of the great Powers which came out in 1987 and said there’s a kind of law of of decline where if you’re spending too much on one thing and not enough on defense then your industrial capacity declines and all of that was supposed to apply to the United States but it turned

Out to be more true of the Soviet Union so we we can look for these signs of uh unraveling but I think we have to be quite careful not to be so sure that it’s a US problem that we miss other worst problems elsewhere I think the US also has a has

A kind of interesting track record of worrying about its own decline I think it’s a feature not a bug of the United States to worry about decline or to worry that the Republic’s somehow going to enter a terminal crisis or that American power is going to Wayne Americans love

Worrying about that it’s one of the things that sells books and gets op-eds printed and then it happens to the other guy and and Americans are like gee we won and then there’s the kind of euphoric decade before it’s it’s time to start worrying about decline again do

You not think as well Neil that one of the signs that a civilization is in collapse is they no longer believe in the shared myth of the Empire and do not worry about that with America where it seems that there doesn’t seem to be as many people particularly in the elites

Who believe in the project anymore well it depends what you mean by the project Americans have never been comfortable with the idea of empire for the Fairly obvious reason reason that their project is an anti-imperial one uh to begin with so when the United States exercises

Power it’s an empire in denial this was the theme of a book I did 20 years ago Colossus and I think that book was right about American power it’s it’s not something that can be exercised in the way that say British power was or in fact the way that most empires have

Exercise power because Americans are in denial about having that kind of power when they go into Mesopotamia or or into you know Afghanistan somehow it’s not Empire but when anybody else does it it is so this is a strange thing it means that the American project doesn’t have

As clear a mandate for Global policing as other past Empires the American project is really about being a shining City on a Hill building a kind of uh Republic which is just the best one and everybody should be filled with with admiration and want to copy it and I

Think that project is definitely a project that is losing the confidence especially of Young Americans fast and they’ve been aided and ab bettered in losing confidence by the education system which is absolutely full of people from the elite of Harvard down to the lowliest uh kindergarten saying that

The American project was bad it was founded on white supremacist see in generally speaking most of American history as a tale of Woe that kind of argument is really quite widely believed by young people so I think if if the project is The Shining City on a Hill

The model for all democracies that project has lost a lot of uh belief particularly amongst young people whether they continue to feel that way as they get older is an interesting question by and large people are quite inclined to stick with the views they form in their student years

It’s surprising how untrue it is that people are kind of lefties when they’re young and then they’re sort of mugged by reality and become conservatives that actually tends not to be true there’s quite a lot of continuity in the way people think about the world and your

Views are often formed by some major event that occurred when you were in University um I I worry a little bit about Generation Z As Americans say their views are on a whole range of issues very very different from the views of older Americans and I suspect they won’t radically change their

Worldview as they become more influential turn up and vote more regularly become a larger share of the population as the 65s and older die off and that could be a big issue this fundamental skepticism about the American project that’s been inculcated in in this Young Generation can you

Flesh that out for us what do gen edas believe that we don’t well if you I mean let’s just take an example that I’ve been looking at recently if you ask Americans about the crisis in Israel uh about the attacks from Gaza and and the Israeli response the general public is pro-israel older

Americans are very pro-israel but if you ask Generation Z they’re strongly Pro Palestinian like 11% of them are with with Israel and I don’t know 37 % are are actually with Palestinians that’s a huge shift there are other shifts too if you ask Generation Z uh what’s your preference Socialism or capitalism close

To you know 51 52% will say actually we Pro socialism [ __ ] me sorry somebody who has experienced socialism we both have yeah well I mean I I grew up in the west of Scotland which had the nearest thing to socialism that was on offer in the UK

But then spent time in the 1980s in the Soviet Union and in East Germany yeah I mean I share your exploitive deleting that’s what’s going on and and and and I I could go on it’s interesting that on issues of the environment Young Americans and young Europeans are willing to contemplate quite

Authoritarian Solutions because they feel that the planet is dying and we’ve only got 10 more years to save it and therefore drastic measures are warranted so and yasham monka has been making the argument for some time that there’s a lot of illiberalism amongst the young and and that that I think is is

Concerning it’s not surprising though because if one actually looks at the ways in which they’re educated there’s a real predominance of content that is more indoctrination than education people uh underestimate the extent to which even quite young children are being taught to believe that the United States was founded on white supremacy or

That the planet has is being killed and the only way to stop it dying is zero growth I mean these ideas are quite widespread and so one can’t sort of say there something terribly wrong with Generation Z I think we’ve just allowed the educational system to move much

Further to the left than most people realize I had lunch today with a uh an old friend who uh is a little older than me me and and went to Princeton I suppose he he must have been there in the in the 1970s and I found it quite hard to

Persuade him that his son won’t have the same experience that he had there’s a lot of denial about how far Princeton or Yale or Harvard have swung to the left amongst people who haven’t had that much to do with you know University life since they they graduated so I think

There’s something going on here which is pretty worrying if you if you tell Young Americans or for that matter uh young British kids as happens you know your your history your country’s history is is actually quite bad I mean the United States founded on white supremacy Britain basically slavery Industrial

Revolution slavery if you tell those stories unsurprisingly impressionable uh school children think Li me that’s that’s that’s history and we should you know we should really feel quite bad about that that’s H that’s happening and it it it happens with parents not quite noticing a lot of people noticed during

The pandemic because they they kind of overhearing the zoom classes and thinking a minute what did what did he just say and I’ll I’ll give you an illustration of of what goes on that this is of course something that I pay a lot of attention

To and I’m sure a few parents do but at the school that my uh Sons were attending in California there was a proposal to to have a a a module on slavery kind of part of uh civics or whatever social studies and I said good I think it’s

Important that you should teach this part of American and indeed world history but I’d be curious to know what teaching materials you will use and the teacher very obligingly sent me them and I did a little bit of research and looked at these teaching materials and tried to trace their Providence and

It turned out that they in fact originated with the Southern Poverty Law Center which is one of the most crooked despicable rackets that ever emanated from the civil rights movement and it has made uh a business for itself in recent years by compiling lists of uh of islamophobes and white supremacists and

They really set themselves up as witch finders general for the dreaded right and and one of their lists actually included my wife aan hery Ali she was in the list of of islamophobes there wasn’t there wasn’t a comparable list of Islamic extremists mind you that they

Didn’t have a list anyway so I looked a little more closely at the materials thinking this is a this is a strange source for teaching materials for children and sure enough uh when I got to the takeaways cuz you always have takeaways in the teaching plan the takeaways included the United States was

Founded on white supremacy and the situation of African-Americans today is a little different from their situation under Jim Crow now I wrote to the teacher and I said I don’t think these are appropriate teaching materials at all this is not history this is this is political uh activism and to her credit

She saw my point and they didn’t use them but unless I had been unless I’d bothered to do that I might not have noticed and I think most parents actually aren’t aware of what kind of thing gets done as history now they just assume it’s pretty much what it was like

When they were at school history was boring and you in Britain you did kings and queens if you’re in the United States you did uh Lincoln or George Washington it’s not like that anymore that’s all been changed in the same way that history at the major universities

Has greatly changed in in the nature of its its content so we have a generation that I don’t think has the same relationship to history as as even you I mean you’re much younger than me even you did cuz this is all of relative relatively recent Providence things have

Moved quite fast in the last 10 years we’ll be back with our guest in a minute but first we want to take a moment to talk about our partners give send go if you need to raise funds online but don’t want to hand over your money to fais Big

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Go.com today that’s give send go.com to start raising money for whatever’s important to you and now back to the interview it’s a really profound point because I went to an exhibition at the British museum about Divinity and uh the the female in Divinity and they were describing this

One I think it was a Hindu goddess from 3,000 years ago as being gender fluid yeah and I was going being transphobic and I was I I just couldn’t believe it because this is the British museum well I didn’t go to that exhibition uh and I I suppose I suppose

It’s conceivable that that that that that’s true I I I’m not going to get drawn into a bitter argument about gender fluidity uh in Hindu iconography what I think goes on a lot is anachronistic labeling by which I mean our approach to the past has shifted

From what I believe it should be which is that we should understand the past in its own terms try to understand how people thought in the past to understand it uh to a a judgmental mode in which we go to the Past in order to look down on

Uh previous generations for their racism or uh for for their sexism or whatever it is and this desire to use terminology from the 21st century in framing uh historic objects or indeed historical narratives I think is extremely negative and and it’s actually contrary to the spirit of true historical scholarship

The mission of the historian RG Collingwood made this argument many years ago in the 1930s is to try to reconstitute past thought the mental experience of past Generations as best we can from what they’ve left behind and by kind of process of imagination as well as careful reconstruction and and

Then to juxtapose that past experience with our own not to say how much worse that past experience was not to say TTT how Wicked 18th century people were for their Notions of uh of of race or their their willingness to use unfree labor but to understand it to try to see the

Way the world was seen by those now long dead people it might also help us to realize that that there is a great deal of unfree labor in the world today but very little of it in say uh the British ISS of North America so this process

Where we regard the role of the history teacher as being essentially to pass judgment on the values of the past I think is completely conceived and uh it’s the condescension towards posterity that I thought we were trying to get away from as historians uh Neil uh you

Talk about gen Z and their education uh I grew up in a crumbling Empire uh in the Soviet Union which also attempted to indoctrinate his children uh but I don’t remember I remember my parents warning me you know you’re going to go to school and you’re going to be taught all this

Crazy stuff so get ready they’re going to tell you about pavic maros and they’re going to tell you about this and that and whatever and by the time I arrived at school I was rather inoculated and and many young people were and as comedians we know that uh I

Think ideas are like jokes and that in order for them to really land with the listener there has to be something about their experience that matches what they’re being told and I wonder if you think that the economic circumstances facing young people the extraordinary price of housing for example the

Inability therefore to pair up have families um the sense that many people now have that they’re almost certainly not going to benefit from the the sort of liberal Democratic capitalistic promise which is that we will live better than our parents is that why these ideas are as persuasive as they

Are to young people today it’s possible though I think one has to be a bit careful about about inferring that that young people are are protesting uh in support of Hamas because they can’t get onto the housing ladder in London I mean it’s possible you made my argument sound ridiculous which I think

Is slightly unfair no I didn’t I didn’t mean to do that what I meant to say was that that the radicalism of the young extends along quite a broad front what’s interesting is that it doesn’t really focus terribly much on the economic issue that you mentioned if if young

People really were concerned about uh the cost of housing in say the southeast of England uh then you’d have thought that they’d spend a lot of time researching housing policy and campaigning for reductions in the green belt and the construction of War housing but they do the exact

Opposite they oppose that because their radical support for environmental uh movements Extinction Rebellion Etc uh actually points them in the opposite direction and you’ll find young people tying themselves to trees to stop further development in the green belt so I I don’t think if if these economic issues are are what’s at work

That that young people are are pursuing their own interest very competently no they’re not but let me make the the connection that I was trying to make and perhaps you can address where the nihilism is therefore coming from because uh the argument I would make is

If you don’t have a bright future as you perceive it it is quite natural to retreat into some kind of cope as people now say on the internet yeah and the cope might be that we care about things that we can’t control because we can’t control the things that we care about

I.E housing I mean I can tell you even for Our Generation the housing issue is massive and no amount of researching greenbell policies going to get someone my age on the housing ladder if they’re not already at this point and we know obviously as you do and I do that

Becoming a parum for example massively changes how you see the world so there’s actually getting on a property ladder Young people who to whom that’s not available are quite likely to uh tend towards nihilism I would argue you disagree perhaps so where is denialism coming from if not from there well I

Think there is a a couple of points that are worth making first is if if young people are suffering from the consequences of policies that have essentially rigged uh the property Market or the economy more broadly in favor of old Generations uh then they ought to be attracted to the more radical proposals

Uh not just to reform the housing uh situation but also to reform the welfare state because the the main problem that young people face is that the intergenerational uh balance is simply not being maintained the liabilities of welfare states in most Western countries uh hugely skewed in favor of the elderly

It’s the young who will pick up the tab for the very generous forms of welfare that the Baby Boomers essentially voted for themselves and so if we’re about economics you’d have thought that more young people would be as haek wrongly predicted uh arguing for radical reform of entitlements I mean Hayak even says

In the constitution of Liberty that the young will finally get so impatient with the elderly that they’ll kind of her them into camps none of that has happened the young defer unwittingly I think but they defer to the logic of the welfare state young are overwhelming on

The left they support uh labor of the conservatives Democrats of Republicans massively but that’s bizarre because actually labor and the Democrats are the people most committed to preserving the welfare state with its current transfers from the relatively young to the elderly so I don’t think young people understand

Their economic interests at all well now you may be right that faced with this uh problem they Retreat into nalism because they can’t bring themselves to do what would be rational which would be to support uh the center for policy studies position on housing or you know the

Position of Republicans or older uh position of Republicans for entitlement reform they may justat into nihilism because embracing those conservative Solutions is just too odious to them there is another possibility though which is that they are as I was trying to argue drawn into a series of ideological positions through their

Education and these ideological positions lead to what used to be called on the left false consciousness they think the problem is uh Big Oil they think the problem is capitalism uh they think the problem is uh settler colonialism because they get given these phrases from school and in University

And and the net effect is that they don’t pursue their own interests as a generation at all rationally and I made this I made this point in the great degeneration back in 2012 that if the young really understood their self-interest in the US they would all

Have been in favor of Paul Ryan’s uh program of entitlement reform but almost no young people voted for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan Neil do you think part of the problem is as well is that these narratives that they’re fed particularly when it comes to history are so incredibly powerful and they’re so

Simplistic that they’re far easier to ingest than actually what is a very unpleasant truth is as my dad always likes to tell me there’s no black and white lad there’s only a murky shade of gray well I do think I can see why you came out the way

Didn’t it’s a good point my soul is from Wigan yeah I mean the think having grown up in in Glasgow I was receptive to that kind of argument too when the entire city is gray uh it seems quite plausible and there aren’t that many moments in history when you can say

Unequivocally Good Guys bad guys I made this point in the war of the world that we end up winning World War II with Stalin doing a huge amount of the fighting and hardly need to tell you this but the Soviet Union is as brutal as a totalitarian regime as Nazi Germany

And so even that’s a tainted victory that and that’s one of the things that an older generation have long clung to is the one thing we did that was absolutely right except from the vantage point of people in Eastern Europe it was anything but that so I think it’s partly

That the stories are attractive the story of the imminent end of the world is one of the most attractive there is uh that that’s been a part of of the great monotheistic religions people are drawn to disastrous outcomes it’s why science fiction is a prop popular genre

And so if you tell people that there is this imminent Extinction of end and the day after tomorrow everything’s just going to be on fire and it be dying from climate change it very people are very receptive to that kind of argument and it’s it’s quite hard to argue against it

Because it’s it’s approached in quasi religious spirit so if you offer any kind of criticism you’re a denier heretic a blasphemer so people are drawn into what is in fact a kind of secular religion of the impending end of days and we must prepare for it how should we

Prepare for it by fasting so we become vegans we should be celibates we shouldn’t have children and so you essentially have a kind of secular religion and this is something that vline and others saw as a problem in the 20th century that in in the wake of the predominance of

Christianity people didn’t believe in nothing they believed in anything and and the new religions of of the secular sphere turned out to be in some ways a good deal worse than the religions they displac well we’re here again with the kind of strange religion of the

Impending end of the world and I think it’s just it is much more appealing than it’s complicated which is you know the least exciting combination of words and and the thing that historians are compulsively driven to say at the beginning of almost any answer they give

To a question I I do think there is black and white though and here I’m going to come back at Wigan I think there is a very profound difference between a free society in which one can speak freely and write uh what one thinks and meet and form

Associations with whomever one likes and an unfree society in which those things are highly dangerous and indeed prohibited and may lead you into uh a jail even a labor camp that’s a really big difference what is wrong with kids today I know I do sound like the old uh

Fart that I’ve become is that they have no very clear idea of what an unfree Society is like hence queers for Palestine you know when radical funder by the way we’re going to send them all over we’ve got a t-shirt for you now it’s um it’s kind of bizarre and I’ve

Always said it was bizarre I mean I I remember saying to to my wife when we lived in Cambridge Massachusetts wouldn’t it be funny if all the people who hate me and all the people who you simultaneously protested outside our house and the islamists found themselves

Right next to the you know the trans activist how would that go we’d be able to sneak out the back as they fell on one another uh it’s it’s a curious thing that that the people don’t understand what it’s like to live under Hamas and they don’t really understand what the

Iranian Revolution aspires to do they don’t understand what it was like to live in Stalin Soviet Union or in M China if they understood that then they might be more reluctant to do the kind of things that many students are tempted to do these days like write letters of

Denunciation call for people to be fired for things that they’ve said it’s amazing how totalitarian behaviors can creep into a free society and I think we’ve just failed to communicate unfreedom as a phenomenon to this generation and and maybe that’s just uh our bad as a generation that we didn’t

Get across to the Generation Z kids what it was like and I I kind of used to toy with the idea of you know trips to North Korea cuz I don’t think you ever feel quite the same about Freedom once you’ve been in an unfree unfree Society exactly

And this is I think why we started trigonometry and been talking to so many people about it because we both know what that’s like from our various experiences I was going to ask you as you were talking right at the end about this because do you think this maybe is

A cyclical element of History it seems that these ideas um mutated as they are are essentially what we had in the Soviet Union but along slightly different lines and it just takes a couple of generations for for us to forget and then we’re back to square one and then

The power of these ideas is they sound so good good all things to all men equality blah blah blah blah blah is it just you know three generations and bam we’re back to square one well I think the kind of Amnesia cycle of history that you know you you your your

Grandfather actually fought my grandfather’s fought in the world wars uh and my father and my mother very clearly remembered being children in that time and I uh grew up in the 1960s and 1970s with the war as this sort of uh ubiquitous uh Collective memory which even constructed how we played in the

Playground and and after a certain point it just sort of wears off and you know I’ll give you an example I don’t think anybody watches black and white movies anymore whereas I did I can’t get my children to watch them but if you don’t watch black and white movies it’s really

Quite hard to properly to connect with the second world war because so much of the great World War II movies are are black and white so that may be true I think the role of the historian the role as as I understand it is to counter that Amnesia by as vividly as possible

Conveying what the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath were like and I think those of us who do the job seriously I’m thinking here of Frank dutta’s work on China under Mao or Orlando FES and for him Richard pipes on the Russian Revolution the people who do

The job well can transcend the Amnesia of the fourth generation by saying yeah I know it’s a long time ago and you don’t even you never even met your great-grandfather who was fighting the Germans or fighting the Japanese but you need to know this I don’t know quite why we failed so

Miserably when for a time it felt as if Hitler and Henry VII were what kids in British schools were taught somehow all that teaching about the Holocaust has failed if there are Generation Z students chanting from The River To The Sea Palestine will be free apparently oblivious to the fact that

That implies a second Holocaust so you kind of find yourself asking where did all that Holocaust history get us we we clearly didn’t get the message across about why Hitler was bad that that that somehow got Lost in Translation do you have a website or do

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You everything you need to know about technology privacy and censorship you think part of the problem is is that we get talk about the Nazis but we just associate anti-Semitism with the Nazis and that’s it so we so as a result of that young people only see anti-Semitism through

That particular lens and then they can’t make the connections elsewhere that may be rise uh that that in a sense we’ve compartmentalized it so that well that was that was the Nazis and it somehow doesn’t apply to Palestinian Islamic Jihad uh I I guess that’s possible but I

Do feel as if collectively there’s been a huge failure in historical education and if we’ done a better job there would be a greater allergy to symptoms of totalitarian ISM such as calls for uh Israel to be wiped from the map or the kind of uh the kind of propaganda the

Emonics from Iran we should be young people should be much more allergic to that than they seem to be and that I think may be because in in teaching the history of the Third Reich we failed not just to make clear that it had a general relevance I mean

I’ve always felt that a really important feature of uh historiography to counter is the notion of a German special way that somehow it could only really have happened in Germany and a lot of my early work was designed to to make uh the exact opposite point that there was

Nothing really that different about Germany and uh it could have happened elsewhere that that’s a central theme of The War of the world that the ideas that Hitler uh bundled together are not made in Germany the ideas about misation come from the United States the ideas about hereditary disease requiring to be

Controlled by sterilization that had actually been put into action in the United States before Hitler came to power so we need I think we failed to convey that there was a general problem which Hitler exemplified we turned it into a German problem which Hitler exemplified and the second thing I think

That we fail to do is to come up with a explanation of Hitler’s rise that was really compelling and convincing there are lots of theories about the rise of Hitler and they get toed to uh children at least at least in some schools still today and it’s usually well there was

This terrible economic crisis and unemployment went up very high and then then the Nazis came to power uh that’s a kind of standard school textbook version It’s really unconvincing because unemployment went Skyhigh in the United States as well and they got Roosevelt I don’t think that the explanations for

The rise of Hitler have worked at all well the conventional mainstream explanations that we used to teach uh children because the truth of this the story is that the viar Republic had this very perfect Constitution it was very an impressive intellectual achievement it was designed to be the leading welfare

State uh of the world and it it failed disastrously it produced first hyperinflation and then a crashing depression this alienated many middle class Germans from the whole project of democracy and it made them highly susceptible to a charismatic leader whose critical feature was that he was the most gifted de demagogue of of

Modern times not enough of the recent scholarship on Hitler emphasizes that point the Demonic power of His oratory uh and the personality cult that quickly formed around him that’s the really interesting thing there were lots of fascist parties Europe had fascist parties just about in every country none

Of them other than Germany had Hitler and so the real sort of story is not that Germany had very high employment it the story is that it had the most charismatic demonic of all the fascist leaders and we ought to therefore be really worried about Charisma as a force

In politics because it can so easily lead even a highly educated people which the Germans certainly were in the 19 early 1930s down a path that goes really fast from uh an election Victory to aitz that’s the lesson that I don’t think we properly conveyed Thomas H makes the

Very same point I think in Black rednecks and white liberals has a whole chapter on the Germans yeah excuse me and he makes the same point I want to ask you a couple of um unrelated things to the end of the world uh or the everything is related to the end of well

Not everything uh I’m curious I don’t know if you saw this I don’t know how much you use social media there has been a meme going around of women asking their Partners male Partners how often they think about the Roman Empire and it turns out that the average man allegedly

Thinks about it about 73 times a day wasn’t quite as often as that I’m exaggerating for comedic purposes uh but uh why do you think we care so much about the Roman Empire why is it such an interest to us here at least in the west well first of all I highly doubt

That men think about the Roman Empire that frequently and I’m deeply skeptical about whatever research produced this meme uh because it implies that that men think at all about anything Ferguson’s a feminist now I’m not sure that that there’s all that much thinking going on about about

Any Empire or indeed about anything much beyond the football no to be serious in the case of the United States uh which I think is where the research came from Rome is this implicit point of comparison and it’s there in in the architecture the project was in in some

Ways uh as much a Roman as an Athenian want to create a a republic and so Americans have this uneasy feeling that might be Rome and there’s lots of books and articles that feed that theory not to mention movies from uh Kirk Douglas to Russell Crow it’s quite surprising

How much Roman content Hollywood produced over the decades so I think that’s why in the United States the Roman Empire keeps coming up you only need to go to Washington to see what is it about this architecture that seems familiar that’s probably why I I doubt

Very much that i’ be very skeptical that the average Englishman thinks about the Roman Empire once a day or even once a year and why is it that it’s a Roman Empire we tend to talk about and not the Greek Empire because pretty Cogan argument can be made that these are

Where these ideas originated from well I think uh you only need to look at the Hollywood uh list of books about ancient Greece to see why there aren’t many uh Rome has uh I think a more straightforward uh storyline I mean the pipian war there

Must be a reason it’s not been a big Hollywood hit I think part of what’s straightforward about the Roman story is that the Republic flips to Empire once and the Empire then produces a fantastic Rogues gallery of monstrous and memorably monstrous emperors and so the I Claudius factors there in a way that

It just isn’t with uh the Greek demagogues so I think the Greeks just lost out when it came to villains I mean they just where where is the Nero where is the cular uh so it’s a more straightforward moral story uh it’s more recent and also I mean Athens Rome I mean with all due respect to my Greek friends Rome Just wins as a tourist destination it’s got It’s got just the most staggering things and I don’t think the Acropolis can can match the Coliseum I took my younger Sons to Rome last year for a mini Grand Tour and the Coliseum

Just blew them away as it should it’s a truly astonishing thing all the baths of carala or Trent forum and wandering around Rome one has a very strong sense of the durability of the Roman Empire I mean the buildings are still there and they’re they’re really really striking

For their scale and and the duration of of the achievement one doesn’t I don’t get quite that same feeling uh from going to Athens well ironically it is the Greek colonies in what is now Italy in Sicily that are much more impressive I mean if you go to agento the Valley of

The temples is true you get a scale experience there but yes I mean when you walk out of the metro and see the Coliseum yes that is it’s an unforgettable experience um and Carthage why do we not talk about Carthage at all is it because the Romans essentially

Flattened and destroyed it yeah that was that was a win they set out to do that and they they they did achieve it I think that’s the pro probably the most the archetypal example of History being written uh by the winners and the one thing that has endured well not

The one thing many things have endured about the the Greek the GRE the ancient Greek Empire which I I love reading about and when I was a teacher I used to teach the kids and you could see that they had a magic to it which was the

Myths yeah it’s something that speaks to us why why do you think that is why why is Greek mythology even now so incredibly powerful I remember as a school boy thinking well hang on a second the Romans just took all the Greek gods and named them and so the

Greek gods were the real gods and and Rome was just engaged in rebranding and I think that’s that’s probably part of it the first school book I ever won as a prize was the Greek uh myths and so there is something uh compelling about that and it wasn’t where the Romans were

At all Innovative uh the Greeks of course left this great literary Legacy which again the Romans could only kind of copy cuz the need it’s really just a knockoff uh so I think in cultural terms if you think at all about the ancient world you

Have to sort of take your hat off uh to the Greeks for being the true innovators but of course if if what you’re interested in is is is power then somehow Rome’s has this greater uh range definitely territorially ranged further and more enduring more enduring monuments I wasn’t an ancient historian

I I hasten to add I in in my time modern history of Oxford just meant not ancient so I did a lot more medieval in early modern history than than ancient history which I I suppose I now I now regret uh but I I I think I think that’s that’s

The real story I do wish that we did more to teach today’s students about the ancient world because one of the things that’s most impressive to me is that the Greek and Roman political philosophy provide very important building blocks for understanding what we mean when we talk about western

Civilization and and the idea that there are these inherent problems with Republican government that may likely lead to tyranny it’s such a fundamental idea the Renea saurce is about sort of taking that idea and dusting it down breathing new life into it then it becomes absolutely fundamental to

Enlightenment thinking I that’s such an important idea and it’s one that I keep reminding my American friends about because it’s quite plausible that the Republic won’t last indefinitely and it’s going down a path that seems familiar to any student of classical Western political philosophy where uh the the Republic becomes corrupt it

Benefits the elite ordinary plebs become disillusioned and a demagogue comes along and says look the whole thing is a racket but if you give all the power to me I’ll put things right I mean that’s what’s going to play out next year in the United States Americans should be

Worried about that whether they’re conservatives or or liberals they should understand that the most obvious threat to the Republic apart from defeating War by a foreign power the most obvious threat is the demagogue who says I alone can fix this and clearly has no regard for the Constitution at all I mean

That’s what Trump is he is ex exactly what the founding father’s worried about and he’s here why do you say that Neil that you are on the right I I would I think a lot of people would say and yet um Donald Trump is a creature of the right as it is

Now there are a lot of people who think genuinely he’s the only person who can fix the problems of America because he comes from outside of the political realm uh because he’s not beholden to donors um I mean your argument about his disregard for the Constitution I think I

Think after his comments about the election last time is strong people would argue Hillary Clinton said the same thing Donald Trump is an illegitimate president they invented the Russia collusion hoax and ran with it for years both sides are denying elections why is Donald Trump special is it because he’s more

Charismatic I think there are a couple of points to make one I entirely agree that the delegitimation of election results was not something that Trump began it was it was was used against him in 2016 2017 uh and I think that the Democrats and and they’ve done it again I think uh

Have brought this upon themselves by their almost complete disregard for the the concerns of of so many ordinary Americans about illegal immigration uh and crime they they’ played into Trump’s hands and in some ways the first Trump Administration was a successful Administration that addressed a great many of the problems that ordinary

Americans had had been frustrated by I’ll give you one simple example if you look at real median household earnings they completely flatlined from 1999 right the way through until 2016 they did not move at all and under Trump they Rose 9% in real terms just in three

Years and even the pandemic could not undo that gain the problem with a second Trump term is that on January the 6 I think he revealed himself to be a real enemy of constitutional government in ways that ought really to have disqualified him for future office I said that at the

Time I urged friends who were in the administration to resign immediately I still think it was a catastrophic but revealing moments in American history and to reelect a man who’s acted in that way is is an almost suicidal step for anyone who believes in in constitutional government I do I

Think the Constitution is sacred and and the president’s role is to uphold it I don’t think Donald Trump can be trusted to uphold the Constitution or indeed any contract that he’s ever signed so I don’t think that’s an unconservative position I think it’s a truly conservative position uh it’s tragic

That American voters are going to be confronted with the same choice that they were confronted uh with in 2020 Joe Biden is a even less credible uh candidate because of his age and mistakes that the Biden Administration has made at the moment I feel as if events are are playing into Trump’s

Hands and I think the lesson of history is that republics that go down that path are dicing with death I mean there’s we could always get Gavin Newman you’d be happy with that that wouldn’t you KN well I wouldn’t be happy with this but I think if I were a Democrat

That’s what I would do I mean I really would and I’ve said this to my Democratic friends that if you’re really serious about stopping Trump you can’t possibly think that Joe Biden and camela Harris Can Do it a second time and so you really ought to try uh to to lead

The old man off stage and and clear the way for somebody uh as utterly cynical and unprincipled as Gavin yum who’s probably capable of beating Trump but I don’t think that’s going to happen at least it’s it’s very late in the day for it to happen now so yeah I think I think

Coming back to our doleful start if there’s one thing that worries me about Western Civilization it’s the possibility that its most important component today the United States commits a sort of political suicide uh it it certainly would be in line with much of classical and Renaissance an Enlightenment political theory that that

Would happen and here I think I agree with with Peter Turin I think we are approaching a crisis in the United States but I think it’s more a crisis of Republican constitutional order and its legitimacy than a crisis of the overproduction of Elites or demography

Or any of that kind of stuff I just think this is the classical problem that that republics run into after a certain point when the legitimacy of the Constitution is no longer Sac uh well we finished where we started sadness and misery so Francis will be happy anded I don’t know what light

Relief I can offer you AI will solve all problems says it it must be true Everything is Awesome techn optimists yay I think that’s that’s the current the co that’s the cope yeah not very persuasive uh Neil as you know we always end the show with the same question

We’ll do a couple of quick questions from our supporters on locals but before we go there what’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we should be I think China’s nuclear program the fact that China is building a vast nuclear Arsenal is a much bigger deal and it gets very little

Coverage you’ve opened up a can of worms that I really want to get into but we have to let you go so head on over to locals we’ll maybe see if we can get a couple of questions in about that Neil Ferguson thank you very much it’s been my

Pleasure do you think it’s hyperbole to say that if Israel Falls the whole idea of Western Civilization Falls with It