TRIGGERnometry: w/ David Butterfield on How Civilisations Die (Transcript)

I much prefer the term Western tradition. The reason is twofold. Civilization as a word, like any word that ends in -tion, T-I-O-N, all such words are processes in origin. They come from Latin words which are about a process. So even a word like nation, which sounds like a static thing, actually in origin means birth, coming into being. So civilisation, when it was used, was conceived of as a progression, a civilising movement from not having the characteristics I mentioned, following some sort of linear progress, and then reaching the goal. What was the goal? When the term was used, it was mostly something looking like Western democratic society.

But I, perhaps you too, I’m extremely pessimistic about the notion of linear progress, about the fact that there’s a clear telos or endpoint in our society. So I think that’s the wrong way of conceiving of what a civilization is. We’re not necessarily heading somewhere better tomorrow.

Tradition’s better because, as another word ending in -tion, it’s about the act of handing on. Latin tradere, traditio, is the handing over. And the reason why that’s such a good metaphor to think of the history of the West is that it involves two kinds of people, and you need both. One is someone in a position actually to pass on, actively to stretch the arm out and give to another, the thing deemed worth preserving. But crucially, that baton is going to be dropped if there isn’t also the second person who is willing to receive it and sees the value in picking it up. And that is really the metaphor we should use when we think of the West.

If you read modern books, modern op-eds criticising the term Western civilisation, generally the arguments adduced are a series of childish, and really not very logically powerful counterclaims. So someone will say, ‘Well, how can it be the West, because some of the countries that are part of the Western civilization movement are in the East?’ Or, ‘How can it be truly Western if some parts of the West don’t have these features?’ Or, ‘How can it be a meaningful civilization if I can point to you periods in the last 3,000 years where these ideals have not obtained in a given place or time in the West?’ All of that’s just noise. It’s just not meaningful to understand the world we’re in as we are.

Fundamentally, the West would look nothing like it does. And there is no way we would be having this conversation without the intertwined threads of the Greco-Roman intellectual, philosophical, artistic tradition, and the core thread of Christianity, which itself emerges from Judaism, but it’s Christianity intertwined with the Greco-Roman legacy that leads us to where we are now. And that’s just indisputable fact.

The Greco-Roman Intellectual and Philosophical Tradition

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So that being indisputable fact, let’s talk about the Greco-Roman intellectual and philosophical tradition. What is it? How is it different from what people in other places believed around the same time and to this day?

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: That’s a very big topic.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We’ll ask all the big questions here.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: You do, you do. And there are few bigger questions than that. So if I can set out some sort of core elements in my answer before we get to particulars.

So Rome is extremely important and also not important in this tale. It’s extremely important because most of the Greek ideas that matter to the tradition of the West end up surviving and being catalysed and being refined through Roman conquest of Greece. Without the Romans, it’s a really open question what the fate of the Greek world and what the fate of the West would have been. So the Romans preserve and propagate a lot of the Greek ideas.

But it’s also unimportant because, if we had a weighing scale of the intellectual contribution of the Greeks versus the intellectual contribution of the Romans, the scale would break in the Greeks’ favour. There is comparatively very, very little innovative intellectual thought among the Romans compared to the Greeks. And that is not because the Romans weren’t innovative or original. No, they were really sharp, curious, clever people, broadly speaking. It’s that the Greeks were operating at a level of originality, ingenuity, energy, and joy in discovery that, to my knowledge, is utterly unparalleled in the world. So that’s one important part of the story.

Another is that a lot of the things that in the modern West really matter to us in our values, have retrospectively been picked up again. So we talk about democracy being a natural good, even though it’s a very complex thing. For most of the history of the West, democracy was not obviously a good thing. In fact, through the Roman period, through the early, late medieval period, even after the Renaissance in the early modern period, no one is celebrating democracy. It’s not a continuous virtue in that Western tradition I’m talking about.

However, come the 18th century, come the Enlightenment, come the growth of the nation-state and various revolutions which try to put the people ahead of the vested interests of monarchs and despots, then suddenly democracy is the thing to investigate. And at that point, thanks to the preservation of these ideals in both Greek and Latin literature, there’s a conscious look back to the very specific period of 5th century Athens. And it’s beyond doubt, the innovations made in this very experimental mode of government in classical Athens were not only unlike anything the world had ever seen, but they’ve never been tried again at anything like the degree they were. The ultra-direct democracy that the Athenians pioneered and thrived with before ultimately having a tragic downfall, much like the Tragicians would depict on stage, is a unique phenomenon.

So democracy’s a major part of the answer to your question, but also philosophy. We assume that philosophy is asking the big questions. And humans the world over, presumably, have always been asking the big questions. But it’s not so. There are genuinely turns, intellectual turns that happen in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, in Greece, not just in Athens, but in various Greek city-states, which as far as we can tell, and we have a lot of cross-cultural evidence, are entirely new.

So the word philosopher is invented actually by Pythagoras on the island we met in, in Samos. But a few generations before him, in a place called Miletus, which is just across the water, now in western Turkey, someone called Thales starts to ask questions which break from the tradition of seeing the world around us as divinely controlled and ultimately intertwined with myth. He starts to ask what we would now call scientific questions, cosmological questions, questions about physics and biology. And he is able to use inherited mathematics and astronomical knowledge to predict a solar eclipse in 585, and that day is regarded by some as the day science began. Not because a calculation could be made of that kind, but because the very fact an eclipse could be predicted, showed that there were rational principles underpinning these amazing cosmic events, which hitherto had been seen as divine.

And within 100 years of Thales, half a dozen, 10 very individual philosophers emerge around the Greek-speaking world, each tackling problems not just of cosmology, but of how we know things, epistemology, of what existence is, ontology. And when it comes to 5th century Athens, questions about how we should live, ethics. And that’s when we get to Socrates and his legacy. So another major part is that the sense of self and our place in the world is suddenly rationalized in the 6th and 5th centuries by this series of philosophical developments.

One more thing worth mentioning before we take up any of these particular threads is on the artistic and literary side. There is almost no kind, no genre of artistic production that we could think of now in 2026, which was not live and thriving in Classical Greece. And again, they didn’t inherit that from other parts of the world, be it tragedy, comedy, historiography. Instead, they innovated these ways of enacting with the world around them, in poetry, in drama, in written texts, now that they had the technology of writing. And it’s unparalleled both in its innovation and in its enduring legacy. Everything of that kind goes back to the Greeks.

The Story of Athens

FRANCIS FOSTER: It’s a really profound point because I don’t think people are aware of the legacy that the ancient Greeks give us. How much of that is ancient Greece and how much of that is ancient Athens?

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Hmm, ancient Athens is doubly important. One, because its democratic experiments happens to combine with an unparalleled flowering, blossoming surge of cultural activity in Athens. However, that meant that Athens was a great draw of people in the Greek-speaking world. So a lot of the philosophers I mentioned were not Athenians, but they came to Athens. Epicurus came to Athens, Protagoras, Democritus came to Athens. These figures were drawn there because it was the place to be. It was the genuine literally marketplace in the agora of ideas.

So yes and no, Athens is at the heart. But fundamentally, Athens comes later than a lot of these revolutionary moments. Athens is not really important until the late 6th century BC. And a lot of these major turns in how the Greeks view themselves and their place in the world are happening in the century before that.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because I think we should talk about Athens a little bit. Because the story of Athens is fascinating. Because it started off like relatively every city civilisation, and then it transformed into something quite different, didn’t it?

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: It did. So the geography of Greece is something always worth thinking about, because I think it’s a genuine causal factor in what we might call the Greek miracle, this period of unparalleled innovation. In that part of the Mediterranean, everything is post-volcanic, it’s craggy, it’s rocky, it’s broken up, it’s fragmented. And what that means is the Greeks living around all of these hundreds of islands, these various inlets, are divided from one another.

They are small city-states, what we call polis, and by virtue of that, although they’re united by a shared language, they are each operating almost like a control experiment, separate from the rest in terms of how they structure their society, and what ideas seem to work and what don’t. And because they’re so interconnected by trade and by travel by sea, what works spreads and what doesn’t, doesn’t. So it’s a really sort of organic community of different things being tried.

And it so happens that this Athenian experiment kicked off by Cleisthenes, really, in the late 6th century BC, not only works, but proves to be utterly revolutionary for the people of Athens, until it didn’t work.

From Tyranny to Democracy

FRANCIS FOSTER: And let’s, before we come to Cleisthenes, let’s talk about what actually precipitated Cleisthenes and those changes. Because Athens was pretty much, from what I read, it was ruled by authoritarian leaders. I mean, the most notorious example is Draco.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Yep. Draco is there about a century before the major democratic reforms. Our English word draconian is all about over-the-top and harsh laws. Draco set up a legal code where punishments were extreme for minor, minor peccadillos. And as such, it was very, very rigid and oppressive, but deemed suitable to the time. That didn’t last so long. A guy called Solon comes in and starts to set in train some of these evolutions which lead to democracy.

But we should be clear about a particular word that comes up a lot, which is the word tyrant, the Greek tyrannos. A lot of rulers in a lot of these city-states were tyrants. But that doesn’t mean they were tyrannical in the modern sense of the word. There were good tyrants, and there were bad tyrants. What it fundamentally meant was that it was a single ruler who had taken up power outside a bloodline of a monarchy handing on to natural descendant. And yes, Athens had its tyrants, most famously Peisistratus and his family. But it wouldn’t be true to say that that was a despotic tyrannical time where the Athenians were completely oppressed. It was simply power ultimately lay with one man rather than with a larger group.

Democracy emerges from that kind of picture. And as far as we can tell, Cleisthenes was thinking on his feet and inventing something as he progressed. Presumably had no confidence it would work, but he did some extremely ingenious things to reset the power balance.

What Athenian Democracy Actually Looked Like

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And since we’re talking about democracy, one of the things I found really interesting was the word’s the same, but the way they practiced democracy was not exactly the same as we do today. Can you talk about what the roots of democracy, what it looked like on the ground, et cetera?

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Of course. So as we know, democracy, ‘demokratia’, is giving the power, the strength, the ‘kratos’, to the ‘demos’, the people. The people have the power. And by ‘the people’, we don’t just mean people in general, we mean the people beneath the typical ranks of the aristocracy. So it’s not an oligarchy, it’s not a meritocracy, it’s actually allowing all people to have power.

Big caveat here, which is a big one, but actually it’s not an interesting one. And you could, I can explain why. The big caveat is when we say the people have power, we mean citizens in Athens. That means males over the age of 20 who’ve done their 2 years military service and people who have Athenian parents. Initially just fathers, but then father and mother citizenship was restricted. And therefore it doesn’t mean children, doesn’t mean slaves. It doesn’t mean visiting foreigners. So when we talk about the people in classical Athens, we mean all of the males over 20 who are full Athenian citizens.

However, not allowing slaves, not allowing women, not allowing children to have political power is the norm cross-culturally, in almost all of the world, in all of world history.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So it is in 6th century BC, they weren’t as woke as we might want them to be.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Exactly. The Greek for woke is not known as yet. So within that scale, which is maybe 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 Athenian citizens, power was not only made available to citizens, but they were compelled to be part of it.

Cleisthenes and the Reinvention of Power

So just to go back to Cleisthenes, who, if you’re interested, is 508-507, that’s when this suddenly happens. He realises that although Athens is a city, it’s surrounded by lots of villages which are part of broader Athens. And these people have very different interests in the world. Some live on the coast, and they’re interested in maritime affairs. Some are landholders who live in the countryside, and some are urban traders. And he treats those three categories as separate blocs.

Before that period, there had been four different tribes which Athenians belonged to. But those tribes had their own political, sort of ethnographic links. They were voting blocs, really, they were ghettoised. So out of nowhere, Cleisthenes decides he’s going to make up 10 new tribes, the four are gone, it’s going to make up 10 new tribes, they’re going to be named just after Athenian heroes. And each of those tribes is going to have a mixture of coastal, urban, and rural people within it. Random mixture, which means no emerging tribe is tied to any historic power block. It’s like you’re randomly put in a new team, a new set of football teams are invented, and you’re told that you’re now a lifelong supporter of this one. So people had to rub shoulders with people who historically might have been their enemies, and people whose interests did not exactly align with their own. So there was a fundamental reset of how Athenians viewed one another, and how they voted.

But it gets more extreme than that. Any citizen was liable to be part of the workings of government. So the Assembly ultimately decided what should be laws, whether people should go to war, and the Assembly needed 6,000 people to gather together. If you were in Athens doing your thing as a male citizen, wandering around, talking to Socrates, whatever it may have been, on the day of the Assembly, a group starts to approach you with a long rope, and that rope is covered in wet red paint. And the rope comes closer and closer towards you, and it starts to surround you. And you’re being corralled to head towards the Pnyx to engage in the Assembly and do your duty of democratic voting. If the rope touches you and you have red paint on you, you were trying to flee your democratic duty, and you will be punished. So male citizens were corralled literally into the act of pursuing democracy.

Removing the Obstacles to Participation

The really ingenious thing Cleisthenes did was not just to force citizens to be engaged in democracy. It was slowly and by gradation to remove the obstacles for normal citizens to have power. They were twofold.

One was wealth. It’s all well and good saying, ‘We’ve got to spend our day voting on the future of Athens.’ But if that means you can’t do your actual job, where you’re earning money to feed your family, well, it’s not very attractive. And in fact, you need some leisure to be democratically active. Well, over the course of the 5th century, various reformers introduced pay, first to those who attend the Council of 500, then to those who do jury duty, and then finally to people who attend the Assembly. You get a good day’s pay by the end of the 5th century for doing your democratic duty. So that breaks the aristocratic stronghold over democracy. Anyone, regardless of their means, could spend their days as a democratic citizen.

The second, and this is really shocking, was to remove elections. You would think that asking the people their democratic will as to who would be best placed to decide what we should do is a good system. You could look at the merit of what people have done. You could judge on that basis. You could choose people who are known to you for their skillset and elect them. The problem was, the problem that Cleisthenes wanted to combat was that money would corrupt elections. People would campaign, they would bribe, and people who really wanted the office and had the pockets to pay for it would get it.

So what do you do if you want to get rid of elections? You go for random lot. Your name will be picked out of the hat. And that may mean you end up on the council. You may say, okay, there’s 500 people on the council, I can probably keep my head down. No. The 500 people on the council, over the 10 months of the Athenian year, each group of 50 from each of the 10 tribes for 1 month have to live together in a special building, and they’re in charge. Worse than that, each day, a random name of those 50 is chosen, and whoever’s name is chosen is the epistates. And that guy is running the whole show. If war is declared, that guy has the responsibility. If suddenly some ambassador comes, this guy, who ultimately is a random citizen, has to play host and to handle scenarios, has to handle what happens in the assembly. So there is no keeping of your head down in a world of random sortition, that is selection by lots.

So democracy is not just inclusive of all male citizens, it actively requires engagement, but delegates power to anyone who’s prepared to step forward. The only caveat to this, which makes it only a slightly mad system, is that there were two areas where elections were kept. For military generals, ten were elected and they could be reelected. And for those accounting roles that involve dealing with big budgets, they were also elected. Generally, they wanted wealthy people to have those positions so that they didn’t embezzle money. Or if they did embezzle money, they had the wealth to pay it back.

Final thing to say, if a random citizen has one of these positions of power, and things go wrong in the year that they have power, you could be executed. The assembly could decide that you so egregiously failed in your political duty, that death is the best response. And that happened.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, the jokes write themselves, don’t they? You can see what— these boys knew what they were doing, you know what I’m saying?

Ostracism in Ancient Athens

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: They did. They did. So yeah, talk about accountability. One other thing, you’ll be aware of the word ostracism, which we generally mean these days of someone who’s just banished from society. They become a pariah. Actually, this process of ostracism was really elegant and in some way quite merciful in the Greek system, Athenian system in particular.

What was it? Well, clearly in this sort of hothouse of democracy we are describing, things do go wrong. Different parties emerge, different people are able to rouse up the Assembly as demagogues and fall out with other groups. It’s not as though party politics disappears. And at times, the Assembly will be extremely angry with an individual. But rather than deciding that the death penalty is the best way of handling that person, they could collectively vote as to whether they wanted to ostracise a given person.

And what that meant was banishing someone from Athens for 10 years, but not confiscating his property, not giving him any legal stigma once he returned, but effectively removing him from the hothouse and giving him an enforced decade-long cooldown period. And there are plenty of cases of people being ostracised and coming back, and sort of getting their head down, learning from their lessons and continuing.

What’s particularly nice about it is, the Assembly couldn’t just get angry one day and say, “Let’s ostracise this person.” It’s a two-stage process. The Assembly had to decide whether it wanted to do an ostracism. And then there was a month or two-month gap. And you would write a name on a pot shard, an ostrakon, which is where we get the name. And that would be voted on anonymously. The votes would be counted and the top names, whatever they be, would be ostracised.

Unfortunately, the system is hackable. All you need is a bit of money and you pay someone to smash up some shards, write the same name on a lot of ostraca, and then you give it to people and say, “Could you vote on this?” And then you can get someone you want ostracised, gone for at least 10 years. We know that happened. We found in Athens places where whole hordes of one name written again and again and again have been found, which were abandoned before being used in the vote. So it’s an elegant system, as I say, but like most things politically, open to hacking and abuse.

Free Speech and Ostracism

FRANCIS FOSTER: But isn’t the problem with ostracization, David, that— look, what we talk about on the show a lot are unpleasant truths, because sometimes the truth is unpleasant. And if you have somebody who’s brave enough and has integrity and goes, look, we’re not addressing the real issue here, in many ways, that’s not in everyone’s best interest. And if you want this person gone because it’s an unpleasant truth, then that is a way of dealing with— how can— and silencing free speech.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: I agree entirely with what you say there, Francis, but it wouldn’t be true to say that ostracism was used to get rid of someone who was saying awkward things. In fact, quite the contrary. One of the things that really allowed classical Athens to flourish was its unbelievable commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

So there are two concepts which are at the heart of Athenian society, and indeed Athenian politics. One’s isēgoría, and one’s parēsía. The first is the equality of everyone to speak. Anyone could stand up in that assembly. If they had something to say, they would be heard out. And people could act on it or reject it as they saw. Everyone had the right to speak among the male citizens. Then there was parrhesia, which is the freedom to say whatever you want. And this wasn’t, you know, standing on awkward eggshells about this or that particular issue. It was the freedom to be as offensive and as extreme in your criticism of your fellow people as you wished. And on the stage, especially in comedy, we see full-blown parrhesia.

So the kind of people being ostracised were not those saying awkward things or things that were offensive. Instead, they were people whom the Athenian demos felt were on the trajectory that was going to cause Athens problems. So maybe they were gathering power to such a degree that they might attempt a tyrannical coup, and overthrow democracy. Or maybe they were showing an allegiance to Persia or to Sparta, which was not in Athens’ interest. And they just needed to be out of the system.

So please don’t get me wrong, ostracism was not used to shut down free speech or cancel people in the way one might think it was. On the contrary, it was political dangers rather than intellectual challenges. Socrates is a classic case in point. Socrates spends his whole life doing nothing more than asking awkward questions of people who should know better. He ended up being killed for that, ultimately.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But not ostracised.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Not ostracised. He stayed in Athens.

The Fragility of Athenian Democracy

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, David, let me try and have a go at the ancient Greeks from a different perspective. I mean, the system you’re describing sounds pretty wild, very chaotic. I mean, I remember, I think we discussed this, I remember reading something about a huge battle the Romans fought and finding out to my shock that they had a system where generals would alternate on days. So like Tuesday, you know, David’s in charge and Wednesday Francis is in charge of the same army. Running a whole city like that, with this constant alternation. That’s— is that really a good recipe for government?

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: And they were very explicit about this. That council I mentioned, which sort of frames things for the assembly to vote on, a powerful place to set the agenda, literally. You could only serve on that twice in your life. And in all of these randomly chosen by lot positions, you couldn’t serve consecutively. So you had your one year’s term and then you were out. So the continuity was almost nil. There was almost a full change of government with each year.

The strength of that was it meant no one could arrogate power or push a particular agenda against the will of the people more broadly. The downside is that people were literally learning on the job every year, and a lot of people simply didn’t have the merit or the skill to do the job well.

What the consequence of that emerges to be was tragic, which is that those who really did want to make something happen had to do it either behind the scenes in a way which undermined democracy, or they had to do it through their military prowess as a general. You could keep getting reelected as a general. And that was a place to wield power. So Pericles, probably the most famous statesman of 5th century Athens, was able to remain dominant because he keeps being reelected as general.

So the tragedy is, because there couldn’t be a clear handing over of power in a way that built to something, it meant the democracy was always fragile. And when that big war happened, at the end of the 5th century between Athens and Sparta, the big Peloponnesian War, which lasted 27 years, twice, Athenian democracy completely pivots, both times to an oligarchy or a tyranny, depending on what term you want. So although it seemed as though it was baked into the very system and in the bloodstream of Athens to be democratic, its fragility was very real. If the frustrations were high enough, the people would pivot and look for a strong man, strong group who seemed to have better ideas, and the whole dream could die.

Athens, Sparta, and the Persian Threat

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because what is so interesting about the Greek states is that sometimes they’re at war with one another, Athens and Sparta, and then sometimes when you have the Persian Empire looking to invade, they became allies. It’s really quite bizarre in many ways, because that’s not how you saw states within a country behave.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: No. But it is quite a human response. I mean, where I’m from in Cumbria, two villages are rivals and they might play a derby. But they would very much band together if Lancashire, the county next door, were fighting them. And Cumbria and Lancashire against each other. But Cumbria and Lancashire would band together if it was north versus south. And north and south would be against each other, would band together if it’s England against France. So this sort of scaling up of where the enemy is, and where allegiances make sense and don’t make sense is a dynamic one.

So city-states were against one another for the most part. But in the 5th century, after this incredible and unexpected victory over the Persian invasion, Athens starts to form a bigger band of allies, which it ends up running as an empire. But is prepared to work with its Greek enemies when the external threat becomes real.

FRANCIS FOSTER: So could we actually just talk about the Persian War briefly?

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Please.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yes, let’s get into it because the Greeks and the Athenians, they were the underdogs. Persia had a huge army, they had what many people believe was a superior navy, and there were 3 major battles. And one which, if you don’t know anything about ancient Greek history, is a word that we use all the time now, which is marathon.

The Battle of Marathon

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Exactly. So although the Greeks are doing their things around the Greek-speaking world, there is no Greek nation. There’s no Greek Empire in the late 6th century BC. The Persians are growing and growing and growing. Darius is in charge by the early 5th century BC of not just the largest empire in the world, but the largest empire the world had ever known. Perhaps having towards half of the world’s population within it, within 2 million square miles.

And because various Greek states, including Athens, had come across the Aegean and defended their Greek colonies when Persia tried to take them, Persia decided that mainland Greece, and Athens in particular, needed punishing. So Darius drew up an army and a navy of immense size. Persia at the time had northern Greece, had western Turkey, Asia Minor, had North Africa, and almost had surrounded mainland Greece. And both the navy and the army headed down towards Athens. And on paper, on papyrus, it was beyond doubt that this was going to be not just the temporary, but the permanent crushing of Greece.

Sparta, down in the Peloponnese, got wind of this and wanted to help. But factually, they arrived too late. And so in 490, at the Battle of Marathon, it’s just the Athenians in their full armour as hoplites, with a band from the town of Plataea. And incredibly, that force was able to defend and defeat a huge part of the Persian army. The figures we’re given—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The Persian army.

The Battle of Salamis and the Fate of Greece

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Sorry, the Persian army, of course. The figures we’re given are astounding: 6,000 to 7,000 Persians killed, 192 Greeks. And it was so shocking to the Persian force that they effectively left to lick their wounds. Meanwhile, Egypt revolts against Persia, Darius dies, and it falls to his son Xerxes to approach unfinished business. And that’s where, exactly right, Francis, we get to 480, and the attack is renewed.

In 480, it’s primarily a sea battle at Salamis, but the context of that is again stunning. J.S. Mill, by the way, the great 19th century philosopher and statesman, he says the Battle of Marathon and the Persian Wars in general, are even in British history, a more important moment than the Battle of Hastings. The reason being, it is not hard to see at all that if the Persians do have victory in 490 or 480, Greece is over. And as I said earlier, if Greece is over, Rome looks nothing like the Rome we know, which means the Western world looks nothing like we could identify as Western. Be a different world entirely.

So there we are. King Xerxes is sitting on a mountain overlooking the strait next to the island of Salamis. Athens has been ruined. The Parthenon has been destroyed, the Temple of Athena pulled to the ground. It’s occupied by the men of Mardonius, the general of Xerxes. Women, children, the old, the young, have fled to Salamis. And it all comes down to this naval battle.

Between 490 and 480, a miracle happened for the Athenians. And that was the discovery, quite by chance, east of Athens, of an extremely rich seam of silver. It’s a bit like Norway discovering oil. There’s this sudden windfall of massive amounts of money. And there’s a debate among the Athenians in the 480s. What do we do with this sudden windfall of immense wealth? The majority of people said, let’s just all take a dividend. We’ll all have a piece of the pie and job’s a good ‘un.

But Themistocles, a general, had a longer perspective, and he knew that the Persians were not going to stay away for good. And he said, no, let’s actually do something we’ve never really tried to do, which is to build a good navy. Let’s build hundreds upon hundreds of triremes with 170 rowers and a crew of 30. And let’s make those war machines. And he does that in the 480s, which means come the Battle of Salamis, the Athenians are not only well-equipped, but they’re well-trained in attack. And they’re able to outmanoeuvre and defeat the Persian navy, despite the skill of the Phoenicians within that battle, and they rout the naval force entirely.

It then flees back to the east, where it’s destroyed off Samos, next to Mycale. And in the following year, the land troops, the infantry, are destroyed at the Battle of Plataea, again, with a huge force of Greek strength. The Spartans are involved in this time round, and their heroic defence of Thermopylae, the 300 who held back the force for a while, is an important moment. But fundamentally, this is one of those crux points, one of those forks in the road of history. And by the skin of their teeth, the Greeks defended against the Persians for good. The Persians never came back for a full-scale attack on Greece.

The Decline of Athens

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And how does Athens and Greece more broadly end up declining and being replaced and taken over by Rome eventually?

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Like the Greek tragic heroes on stage, they become victims of their own hubris, their own overweening pride, their arrogance that they will endure, and that manifests itself quite particularly in an episode in the Peloponnesian War against the Spartans. That war spiralled out all across the Greek-speaking world, because Athens and Sparta got into a bit of a standoff where they didn’t fight. Athens had become a naval superpower. Sparta was landlocked, so couldn’t really be attacked. And Sparta was a superpower on land. And the Athenians just retreated behind their walls. So there wasn’t a lot going on. Instead, it was through proxy wars elsewhere.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What were they fighting over, David?

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Sparta instigated this war, and it did so because Athenian supremacy was becoming too great. Like a lot of European wars, the wars are not over a matter of principle. They’re over a way of reining in and clipping the wings of a particular state or empire or person that is growing beyond the bounds that are going to be sustainable. So they’re preventative.

And it’s true, the Athenians by this point were breaking a lot of their own rules. They’d set up this alleged league, this amalgam of allies. But most of the money coming in from that was being siphoned off to Athens. They were spending it on huge sculptural, architectural, artistic undertakings. And they actually moved the treasury from the island of Delos to the Parthenon, and basically were embezzling the money of others.

The reason why that’s an important detail, by the way, is it’s hard to see the Athenian miracle of the 5th century working without there being so much external income. It doesn’t look as though there could have been that amount of philosophical, artistic, literary leisure without actually relying upon, not a slave populace, which was there in Athens, but subservient other Greeks whose money was ultimately bankrolling the experiment.

So Sparta and Athens are at war over broader supremacy in the Greek world. And in 415, the Athenians decide that they’re going to attack the second largest Greek city of them all, Syracuse, over in Sicily, on the east coast of Sicily. As you’ll know, Sicily, southern Italy in modern terms, were Greek lands in this period. And unfortunately, everything goes wrong for the Athenians. Alcibiades, this charismatic playboy figure who bounces around the world in his allegiances, is recalled. His tactical brilliance isn’t in play. The Syracusans are a very serious force, and they utterly annihilate the Athenians over in Sicily. And as such, the money, the confidence, the momentum of the Athenians is entirely broken.

As a result of that, the democracy is overthrown in 411. A group come in of oligarchs and say, no, let’s just row it back a bit. Let’s go back to the good old days when the people with a bit of money, with a bit of class to them, could run the system. And the Athenian people are just saying, okay. That doesn’t last long, back to democracy. But then at the end of the war, the Spartans win. The Spartans win partly because the Persians are helping them behind the scenes. And one of the terms of the treaties at the end is that Athens has to have a tyranny. So 30 tyrants are installed, just like as happens in the Spartan government, where there’s 30 old men running the show alongside the two ceremonial kings. And an attempt is made to make Athens Sparta.

Again, it doesn’t last, but thousands of people are killed. It’s a bit like the latter days of the French Revolution when the expectation is it will be so easy just to have a new system, but the new system rapidly collapses and ends in bloodshed.

As to your question, how does Athens decline? It has another 60 or 70 years of independence after 404. But ultimately, the sense of self has gone, the confidence in the project is over, the innovation declines outside the philosophical schools. And with the rise of Philip, and then Alexander in Macedon, ultimately Athens is conquered and never rears its head again, politically in the history of the world.

Athens vs. Sparta: Decadence and Military Excellence

FRANCIS FOSTER: And what you’re talking about actually has resonance with nowadays, because to me it seems that Athens was a victim of its own success. It became lost in its sense of decadence and arrogance. And you look at the Spartans, they were anything but. Now, they may not have been as technologically advanced or as philosophically sophisticated, but when it comes to the messy business of war, they were streets ahead, weren’t they?

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: They were. The Spartans are a very interesting case study, and they’re almost unique, not just in the Greek world, but cross-culturally. They are a populace that decided early on that their thing was going to be military excellence. And it doesn’t seem as though they ever really stepped back to interrogate why that’s the goal. They just remain wedded to it.

And they operated in a different way from the Athenians, even from the get-go. Because whereas all of these Greek city-states had slaves, generally slaves were non-Greeks. They were captured or purchased somehow from outside the Greek world. And for Greeks of this period, if you don’t speak Greek, you just speak ‘ba ba ba’, you’re a barbaros, a barbarian. And therefore, liable to enslavement. But the Spartans conquered other Greeks on the Peloponnese and made them effectively their serfs. These are called the helots, the captives. And as such, Sparta decided at an early stage that other Greeks were going to be subservient to them.

That had problems because these helots shared Greek and could work together and overthrow the government in a way that the typical slave in the typical Greek city-state couldn’t and wouldn’t. So almost to defend against its own choices, Sparta had to become heavily militarised, and it put everything into that. So from literally from birth, males would be tested, they would be put through an extreme form of military testing, then sent out in their latter teenage years for 2 years, not to find themselves, but actually to prove that they’re a real man in the world. And the rest of their life would be surrounded by military activity.

But here’s the thing. Sparta didn’t really want an empire. It wasn’t acquisitive in the hope of gaining overseas colonies and the Spartan culture spreading. It simply wanted to be left to its own thing. But its own thing, paradoxically, was warfare. So Thucydides was very puzzled by Sparta. He couldn’t understand why a culture that was so self-confident did so little of those things I said at the start about civilization. It wasn’t really memorialising itself. It wasn’t thinking of its long-term future. It wasn’t spending time on culture. It wasn’t concerned with that. It was concerned with being a number one military machine.

So he said, although Sparta and Athens are these two great dominant entities in the Greek world, when a future generation looks at the ruins of these two cities, they will imagine Athenian prowess to have been double what it actually was, such is the splendour of what they’ve left to us. But the ruins of Sparta will be so meagre that no one could imagine how big a role Sparta played in world history.

So they are an enigma. And they wrote very little, which adds to their mystique. But by the time of the Roman conquest, rather sadly, Sparta had become a sort of Disneyland. It was a theme park where people would go visit and sort of marvel at this absurdly militarised form of life. And the Spartans were sort of putting on a show, because they had no power. They were conquered by the Romans at this point. They were simply living out the only thing they knew how to do, which was to live with a view to war.

Lessons from the Fall of Ancient Greece

FRANCIS FOSTER: And what can the West learn from the fall of Athens and ancient Greece in particular? What lessons can we take from it?

Lessons from Athens: Hubris and Democratic Failure

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: It’s hard to take a lesson from the fall of ancient Greece, because that is more complicated and is really down to Rome’s growth rather than Greece’s failure. But Athens in particular is a very important episode to study. I do think hubris needs to be a recurrent word. The Athenians did become too confident in their own principles and in their own futurity. And by virtue of that, they didn’t allow themselves to innovate and to rethink.

Socrates’ whole goal when wandering around the agora, and buttonholing people and interrogating them about their supposed expertise, is that people don’t really know how much they don’t know. They’re ignorant of their ignorance. He, of course, famously said, “The one thing that I know is that I know nothing.” This was allegedly the root of his wisdom.

But what the Athenians, despite having Socrates really badgering them with these questions, never did, is to interrogate whether the democratic process in its ultra extreme form really was working. And because they didn’t do that, and the political system didn’t really allow them to do that, they left themselves vulnerable to completely ridiculous decisions, such as attempting to take down Syracuse mid-war, and vulnerable to complete political 180s, such as a tyranny stepping in and initially being welcomed by the people.

So the lesson is, if you want stable government, you need to have broad extension of power, but also genuinely self-reflective modes of interrogating how the power works. You need education, you need to take the process of your own governance seriously. Merit matters. Merit is not equally apportioned between everyone. And you need to be able to have grown-up conversations about who can do what better, and who is not doing things well.

So, although obviously all of those are rather banal things to say, one of the striking things about Athenian democracy is how little at the time it interrogated its principles.

Alarm Bells: Are We Repeating Athens’ Mistakes?

FRANCIS FOSTER: And you’re talking about having grown-up conversations about apportioning merit. Are we doing that in the West? Because a lot of what you are saying about the downfall of Athens, I mean, I’m going to be honest with you, David, there’s a few alarm bells ringing in my head.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, we are in a much worse place than late-day Athens. Late-day Athens had still a system of delegated trust in your fellow Athenians that they knew enough to be involved in the shared conversation. And ultimately there was a shared goal, which for Athens was the survival of the city-state. That ended up getting hacked and pulled apart in various ways. But fundamentally, education was tied in with citizens having a clear sense of what’s happening. There was a high level of transparency and trust. And the system in principle was able to work.

As to where we are now, so many things are eroding the very bedrock of the kind of democracy we celebrate. Even democracy is something we don’t interrogate. We assume that democracy is not just a good thing, but the good thing. We don’t step back and think, well, hang on, if there’s some genocidal dictatorship sitting around a table and they have a vote on what the next genocide should be, and the majority wins in that democratic vote, we don’t wonder about whether that’s good or bad democracy. Democracy only means something if it’s tied into the broader aims and goals of the people using it. It’s a process, not an unalloyed good in itself.

And it depends where we’re talking about in the world, but if we talk about our shared country of Britain, the democratic deficit is the widest I’ve ever known it. That’s to say in my lifetime. On paper, everything should work. We have not a direct but a representative democracy. Anyone over a certain age can vote. If 10% of people in a constituency don’t like what their representative is doing, that person can be recalled and you can have a by-election and you can change them. And inside the House of Commons, if a majority decide they don’t like the direction of travel, literally on the day, you can pull the government down and there’ll be an election as soon as possible.

That all sounds great. But it only works if your MPs, your representatives, are of a calibre and of a character that means they spend their time carrying out ultimately the broad will of the people. And I’ve never known a more selfish, myopic, frankly, Philistine and uneducated class of politicians than we have now. The saddest thing about that is less the lack of quality in Parliament. It’s how high the hurdles are for the ordinary good British citizen, which I really do believe the great majority of people are, how high the hurdle is for people to get over if they want to be involved in that.

Party politics is much more an obstacle to good government than it is a help. So I really worry about our own democratic process and the fact that the House of Lords is slowly losing all of its powers as a genuinely scrutinising body that can block poorly made laws. But in education more broadly, we’re simply not leading our young people who will become voters to a level of understanding of our history and our values that makes them sufficiently well-informed voters.

Right now we have this perverse scenario where a Labour government has lowered the voting age to 16, but at the selfsame time is making changes to education and indeed to the freedoms of 16-year-olds that don’t give them the information on which to make a considered vote as a notional adult in the nation. So there’s very little joined-up thinking going on as to how we can improve in Britain, our own democratic process. And we’ve become scared of merit, of excellence, and of exclusion where it’s necessary. And that takes me back to where I began with one of the problems in higher education.

Leaving Cambridge: A Rational Decision

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, that was one of the things I actually found most shocking, because I guess at the level of the normal person, which is what we are, who is not involved in education, you go, look, the university of wherever and whatever, yeah, of course it’s a woke madrasa, blah blah blah. Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard. And suddenly when you talk to people who are actually involved in all these great institutions, Cambridge, Oxford, great institutions. I mean, these are the pillars of British history, of British society. It’s given us prime ministers on days on end, etc.

For someone of your caliber, of your intellect, of your sharpness, of your brilliance, to give up— and people need to understand this— you had tenure at Cambridge, which means you had a job for life. You can be there, you can say whatever you want, you can do whatever you want. Look, some of your colleagues might look at you as a scum, but you can stay there, nobody can do anything. For you to give up that job and to go to what’s effectively a startup at Ralston College, which is brilliant but a startup, that’s got to be— there’s got to be something seriously wrong.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Exactly right.

The Decline of the Humanities and the Rejection of Truth

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: When I made the decision a couple of years ago, most people— friends, family, colleagues— thought I was mad. But actually, it was one of the most rational decisions I’ve ever made, and certainly don’t regret it at all as things stand. And the calculus was really down to the direction of travel of the university.

What I’m about to say is all true, but it’s tied in particular to the humanities and the social sciences. Broadly speaking, the STEM subjects, those that are based in tangible, measurable reality and in proofs, they’re upstream from this decline and they may hold on. So I’m really talking about the humanities in particular.

Fundamentally, at Cambridge, and indeed at all the other universities I’m aware of in the Western Anglophone world, a rupture has been building and has almost fully manifested itself between the fundamental commitments of what it is to study the humanities, to ask the questions about the human condition, and to range over as widely as possible the products of human civilizations. There’s been a rupture between that and the actual exercise of what it is to be an academic in the humanities.

That’s manifested itself in all sorts of ways, in some cases, the hyper-politicization of what it is to study a different culture. Certain academics feeling that their role in the world is more that of enacting social justice outside the campus, rather than pursuing truth within it. There’s been a radical rejection indeed of the very concept of truth. Many of my colleagues, indeed, probably most people in the humanities, don’t believe in an objective truth. They don’t believe in a genuine external reality which hard work and scholarship can uncover. And once that rupture has happened, both from why we think the humanities matter, and whether we think there’s a concrete outcome we can get through that study, decline is not only inevitable, it is rapid.

So consider, if we’re in a system where how one responds to a particular Greek philosopher does not itself lead to a true and a false response, it therefore follows that there aren’t really better and worse answers in that intellectual inquiry. That then follows that the examination system, which literally is meant to grade by degree, that’s why we use these terms, doesn’t have a sufficient ground to stand on. Which means the very act of going to a university to learn things which can then be tested and you can tell your future employer the degree to which you did well in that exercise, actually no longer is fit for purpose.

And this is the main reason that grade inflation has become rampant. The main reason that it’s almost impossible to get lower than a 2:1. In the British system, of course, there’s a first, then a 2:1. But historically, there was a 2:2, a lower second, then a third, then a pass, and then a fail. All of that category beneath 2:1 has almost entirely been eroded. So long as you’ve done something, you really will get a 2:1. Why is that happening so quickly? Because there is a complete lack of faith in merit and excellence when it comes to examination.

So I looked around at what was happening within the subject, how every change to the syllabus, to admissions criteria, to examination methods was in the direction of travel away from identifying excellence and rewarding it. Even appointments at the academic level were starting to be made much less on the ground of academic excellence than either about the socio-political advantage of having such a person there, or even about the external optics of being able to have such a person. And I could see that just as one of a few people who were really sticking our heads above the parapet and complaining, the internal governance of the university was not going to change course in the near or indeed middle-term future.

A New Beginning: Ralston College and the Return to First Principles

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: And so I decided, as you say, although I could just bury my head in the sand, get in a corner of a library, enjoy my own academic work and be undisturbed until I’m 70, it wasn’t a noble or an honest way to live. I love the subject of the classics. I love research and I love teaching. And what I wanted to do was to go back to first principles, to search for what truth we can find in the world, and to teach alongside and with academics and students who really have joy in their eyes about the intellectual journey and the curiosity that motivates it.

And so Ralston College, where I am now, is genuinely unique in the world. Not only do we start in Greece, which is where we were, but we teach Ancient Greek in Ancient Greek from scratch on day one, which means not only are the students immersed in the place where the Western tradition emerged, but they are forced to learn it through hearing, through speaking, through private conversations, and through classes to make the language their own, and therefore to internalise the very thought processes that made this Greek rational turn happen.

After that, we pursue the rest of the Western tradition back in Savannah, Georgia, but we operate with a rigor and a commitment to objective truth, and indeed to transcendent qualities such as the good, the beautiful, that was not something I could get at Cambridge. And I feel liberated as an academic intellectually to be able to have a smile on my face when I teach and research now.

The Death of Meritocracy

FRANCIS FOSTER: I was going to say, because what you’re really talking about here, David, and what we saw in the comedy industry and a lot of other industries have seen, and it’s a tragedy, is the death of meritocracy. And what people don’t realize is that once you get rid of meritocracy, everything else is doomed. It will eventually crumble.

That’s why so many people love sport. You go and watch a Premier League or the NBA or UFC or a heavyweight boxing championship, when you buy your ticket, what you’re getting, what you’re buying is access to the elite level athlete doing things that you couldn’t possibly dream of at the highest level. But if diversity comes into, for instance, football or basketball, then it’s over. And this is what people don’t seem to understand. Cambridge is only Cambridge because it’s meant to be the best of the very best.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Correct. But people have worked themselves into a corner that they intellectually cannot escape. They know on the one hand that Cambridge has existed for its academic excellence, and that there’s merit behind that. But equally, it has to follow from that, that that means it is exclusionary to certain types. Now, in part, that is worth interrogating because our school system really is not what it’s meant to be. And certain schools will educate to a much better level than others. That holistically needs looking at because we are all fair-minded and we all believe that potential should get as far as it’s able to.

However, the very idea of Cambridge being elite and selective — these are the same words, elite and selective are the same word — is deemed problematic because it’s therefore not for everyone. And some sort of political, almost virus in their worldview has forced them into a conclusion which is actually destructive of the job they hold. They cannot allow themselves to believe that some people are not allowed to come to Cambridge because of their lack of intellectual merit. As such, they’re faced with an irresolvable paradox, and the only way they aim to respond to it is to turn down the meritocratic dial, to celebrate excellence less, and to include those who in some cases really should not be included in terms of the principles of what Cambridge stands for.

So I’m fully with you. And what really encourages me, Francis, is that as a people, as a nation, perhaps as a species, we are inherently meritocratic, and we naturally celebrate excellence. We love athletic prowess. We love art that is beyond our own individual powers. We love music and song that we could never make ourselves. We celebrate excellence. But in certain political climates, excellence gets in the way of the necessary change that some people want to bring in.

Truth, Relativism, and the Sophists

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And which is one of the reasons that they have to erode the concept of truth. And I found what you were saying about truth so powerful because it’s permeated everything now. I did this interview with The Telegraph and the journalist was great and he did a great profile, no qualms. But even in that sort of conversation where I think people are on a similar page, he said, “Well, Konstantin talks about something he calls the truth.” And I went, no, it’s not that I call it the truth. There is a truth. And that’s not to say that I have access to it or David has access to it or Francis has access to it. But I thought the point of inquiry or debate or discussion is we all sit down, we all go, “Well, I think this is what the truth is. You think that? Okay.” And we get closer to that objective reality. But the moment you say there is no truth and it’s my truth and your truth, then like you said, the entire foundation of this building is not there and the building collapses.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Exactly. And it’s interesting that you put it that way, because that really does bring us back to one of the challenges that 5th century Athens faced. So at this time, when everything rests upon what the assembly decides, clearly rhetoric, words, oratory have immense power. And a new kind of intellectual or guru literally turns up in Athens called the Sophist. And the Sophist is built entirely around rhetorical tricks, which will make the worst argument sound the better.

And one of the leading Sophists was a guy called Protagoras. And the reason he’s important is he is the guy who opened the door to relativism. Protagoras, as a Sophist, said, “Man is the measure of all things.” But what he meant specifically by that is you, as an individual man, Francis, you can decide how the world around you is. You make your own truth. Everything is unstable and subjective. Words can mean one thing and another. There’s no better or worse course, we’ll just frame it in a certain way. And the Sophists were regarded as a toxic presence in Athenian society, because they, as you say, took the foundations away from the democratic principles of wanting to do the actually best thing.

So I’m with you entirely. As soon as one believes, not only that there isn’t an objective truth, but that we each have our own meaningful truths, the whole academic game is over. We may as well all pack up and go home. It’s basically then a sort of vanity project, an art installation, saying what we like about the world around us. What’s really shocking, and maybe the viewers don’t know how widespread this is, is that in the humanities and the social sciences, it is a majority view that there is no objective truth.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. Well, look, let’s not be fake about it. Why are you pulling that face? We know this. You can see it all. The world around you is governed by that principle. You can see it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Look, I think the fact is that there was still part of me holding on to the fact that it was a vocal minority and that the rest of them were cowed into silence and that it was cowardice effectively. But the fact that the majority of them believe that, to me, that has completely changed the way I see this discussion because I didn’t think the majority of them actually believed this nonsense.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, but the only reason I’m interjecting here is everything you’re talking about, the inability to exclude people who ought to be excluded. Well, look at our government policy. Look at the borders of Western countries.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: That is one is a direct consequence of the other because it’s the same phenomenon, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s the same thing in government policy.

The Long March Through the Institutions

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Exactly. But frankly, Francis, the wheels have just kept turning. So what initially sounded like a conspiracy actually was a conspiracy, but what’s surprising is that it was completely successful. So this goes back to Rudi Dutschke, the long march through the institutions, the cultural turn of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, fundamentally realising that in order to set the conditions for a wholesale revolution of society to a particular set of political principles, the culture is what needs the erosion.

And since the late ’60s, a certain particular kind of left-wing academic has not only found access, but actually been much the most successful in terms of propagating their own school and bringing in colleagues. And so what really would have been a minority view when I entered Cambridge, early 2000s, has simply replicated in such a way and become standard among those educated there who are now academics, that it really is the majority view. And things that I would say to a normal Brit, and would be completely acceptable as basic views of how we understand the world around us, would either raise eyebrows or cause genuine objections in academic discussions.

It’s that divorced from civic reality in both Britain and America that you can understand why some people say it just needs a fundamental reset back to day one. And that’s why academics have the lowest trust in the history of the academy. Plato founded the academy back in the 5th century BC, but at no time that I’m aware of have the actual experts been regarded so poorly by the public. That trust has been eroded. Why? Because they have seen academics pursue goals and agendas, which are not ultimately part of the project of the pursuance of truth and the celebration of excellence.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And we’re not learning the lessons from ancient Greece and ancient Athens, which is — you mentioned that word, hubris, an excess of pride. And you’re looking at the universities, I mean, if that’s not an excess of pride to go on TV and go, “You know what, you can turn from a man into a woman,” I don’t know what is.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, it’s a collective act of self-harm for universities to have allowed themselves to be political agents, especially for those which are known to be not true.

Reading as Protection Against the Coming Storm

KONSTANTIN KISIN: David, it’s great to have you on. It’s a great honor for us to be able to share your thoughts and your expertise with so many people who watch us and listen to this. Really appreciate coming on. I’m sure we’ll be delighted to have you back. Before we head over to Substack where our audience get to ask you their questions, what’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we really should be?

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: Reading. It sounds simple, it sounds basic, it maybe even sounds boring, but I genuinely believe the only way we as a society, as the Western tradition, as the world, whatever we want to call it, the only way we’re going to keep ourselves sane and safe in the coming decades is to bring back reading. Not just because reading, by definition, brings you into a fixed corpus of things that have been deemed worth publishing or printing. It keeps you within the actual canon of what has been judged worth its place in written form, but also because the very act of reading, where you as an individual are communing with a page and allowing the long-form argument or narrative of the page to bounce off your brain, there’s no external intermediary or interference. That is the safest way that we can ensure that not just the young, but the middle-aged and the old, can continue an intellectual process when the rest of the world is trying to destroy it.

There’s no question in my mind that in the 21st century, the biggest threat to the human condition is not warfare. It’s not climate change. It’s not disease. It’s not some bizarre innovation that we can’t think of. It’s the knock-on effects of AI — not what AI can do, but the degree to which it erodes the act of being human for AI to take such a dominant role in our lives. And I think we radically and rapidly need to bring people’s attention back to this completely open treasury of shared wisdom in a fixed written form. It can’t be changed. And the easiest way to do that is something literally as simple as to find time in your day, pick up a book that interests you and spend alone time with it. So it’s an obvious thing, but we are really not talking about it in a way that takes it seriously. And it’s one of the few genuine protections I think we have against the storm that is about to hit.

And it’s exactly this problem with the academics failing to speak to the public and inspire the public on the things that matter to them, that led me and a few other academics to found a website called Antigone, which is all about trying to bring the Greeks and the Romans before the public in a way that doesn’t patronise the public, doesn’t treat the Greeks and the Romans as problematic and racist and not worthy of our attention, but actually treats the reader as an adult, and welcomes them in to a world which of course has its challenges, has its absurdities, but is also deeply inspiring if we as individuals care about our place in the world and understanding where we’ve come from. So the Antigone Team is a free website all about that.

FRANCIS FOSTER: David, what a pleasure.

DR. DAVID BUTTERFIELD: A joy.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Make sure to head over to our Substack where we carry on the conversation. Is the West actually a Roman misunderstanding of Greece? Did Rome preserve Greek thought, distort it, or weaponize it?

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