In this Forum interview, Professor of History Bradley Birzer sat down with Leon Rapoport to discuss the great thinkers of history, what our past means for our present, and what we can learn from history.
1. What is the biggest lesson that we can learn from history?
I think there are so many things we can learn. We learn most particularly and immediately that human nature never changes.
It is constant in all times and all places. And it doesn’t matter if we’re black or white or male or female or Jew or Gentile. Human history is the story of human excellence and human foibles. I try very hard not to judge people in the past, except by their own standards. For example, I’ll hear people say “well, they were slaveholders, but they were just men of their time.” And I think one of the responses we can say is that slaveholding has been suspect for a very, very long time. As much as I love Thomas Jefferson, when he owned slaves, we can’t just dismiss that he was a man of his times because there were many men of his times who rejected slavery as well, and so even by the moral standards of his day, it was a very questionable practice.
But I do think that we have to recognize that our ancestors often tried to do the right thing. From a Judeo-Christian perspective, we are both fallen and we’re endowed by God with certain excellences. It’s incumbent upon us never to forget the fall, but we don’t live in the fall; we try to live against it. We don’t acquiesce to it. We use the gifts that God has given us, for the community, for His love, and so we fight that as much as we can. That’s why God gave us the virtues. The virtues exist for us to do what we can to attenuate the fall. And so there’s always that duality of the human person. We’re both good and bad. We’re not one or the other. We’re not totally depraved, and we’re not totally good. We’re mostly depraved with some really good things about us. And I think we need to struggle through grace and will to do what’s right.
But there are other things that we can guarantee about the human person as well. We’re higher than the animals, but we’re lower than the angels. And that puts us in a really weird spot because it means that like God, we’re spirit, but like the animals, we’re flesh. And so we’re the only creatures that are both spirit and flesh. We have to wrestle with that. In the same way that we’re both good and bad, we’re also material and non material at the same time. And so we’re always in this kind of beautiful but precarious position as human beings.
Think about the human person: each one of us comes into the world armed with certain gifts, fallen, but armed with certain gifts, and we use those talents in the best way we can for ourselves, for our community, and for God. But that community itself also tempers what we do. If it’s a good, functioning community, it promotes our excellences and hides our foibles. If it’s a bad community, it exaggerates our foibles and tamps down our excellences.
You come into the world and you have a certain religion, a certain ethnicity, a certain language, a certain set of parents, a certain community, and that shapes who you are, and there’s no getting around that. But you then have free will. And so you can escape, but even by escaping those things, you’re acknowledging their importance too. If I suddenly move to Germany because I’m disgusted with America—which is not true, but just as an example—I am giving credence to America because I’m basically saying it shaped me and now I don’t want that anymore. Even in that rejection, you’re recognizing how important your community was.
And so I take this from Friedrich Hayek. Hayek says that we’re extremely limited human beings. We can only know a little bit, but I can know a little bit and you can know a little bit, and all my colleagues can know a little bit. And the world together knows a lot, but we can only do so when we’re together. And it’s not just our immediate generation. It means I have to look to my ancestors and say, okay, we’re going to act as though they did the best they could. And so let’s think about how they did something. How did they prepare this food? What ritual mattered for them? What holiday mattered for them? Why did they get married at that age? What did family mean for them? I feel that I have the very strong duty of passing that on to my children, and hopefully they will pass it on to their children as well. So when we’re talking about human knowledge, it’s not just you and I talking right now. It’s all people: past, present, and future, too.
2. People often say, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” What is a historical “rhyme” occurring right now in the modern world?
One of the most difficult things that we have failed as Americans is that we keep calling ourselves a democracy—and of course, we’re not a democracy.
We’re a republic with a strong democratic element. This lie about America really started around the War of 1812, and we’ve never escaped from it, and it causes serious problems. A democracy, by its own understanding, is always expansive. It’s always imperialist. It can often be extremely racist because it thinks about the greater good rather than the common good. So there are always winners and losers in it. But it also tries to politicize everything, because it’s under the impression that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
If I could stand up and give a 20-minute speech to the American people, I would say that we must return to the ideals of the Republic. We must return to virtue and not to this idea of politicization and power that democracy brings. Democracy can be very healthy, but only when it’s in the context of the larger republic. We’re not really repeating ourselves here, but we are rhyming. Though most people in the Western Tradition knew that democracy was dangerous, everything changed with the War of 1812. And we’ve had to deal with the consequences of that for almost 200 years now, and I don’t think they’ve been good ones.
3. Shifting focus to the Classical Era—Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and the many great thinkers in that time period are still studied extensively in today’s age. How is it that although humanity has changed incredibly throughout the past two thousand years, we continue to study these philosophers and the history surrounding them? What can they teach us?
Socrates dies for his beliefs. Cicero did the same thing. Jesus does the same thing. We see it throughout early Christian history—so many martyrs all the way up to Thomas Moore. We’re just immediately attracted to that. We love Plato and Aristotle, but there’s a deep respect for Socrates for dying for his convictions. Same thing for Cicero.
Socrates gives us a very hard teaching, that we can never, under any circumstances, do wrong in the name of a good. That’s the beginning of Western ethics. We remember these people because so much of what we believe in parallels our Judaism and parallels our Christianity, but it comes from the pagan culture as well. It means if I go out to a non religious audience, I can appeal to Socrates and say that what’s in Judaism and Christianity was already in Socrates. I can confront them with a religious attitude without being evangelical. I think that’s important for a secular culture.
4. Following up on that, what is the biggest myth that modern people believe about daily life in the Ancient World?
People tend to think that life was nasty, brutish, and short. And yet, when we look at someone like Socrates, he was 69 when he was executed. So, the old story is this: before the modern world, if a woman got pregnant, the baby had a 50/50 chance of making it to birth. Once the baby makes it to birth, it has a 50/50 chance to make it to age two. Once it makes it to age two, it has a 50/50 chance of making it to age 15. And once it makes it to 15, it has a 50/50 chance of making it to 30. Once you make it to 30, you can easily live to 80 or 90. We often think that these people died at age 40 or something, and that’s just not true. There was an extremely high child mortality, so lots of people died early. But if you made it to 30, you had a good shot.
5. Finally, what does it mean for us, in theory and in practice, to inherit the Judeo-Christian Tradition, embody the history of Western Civilization, and step into our American Heritage?
Take Abraham or Moses. Take Aristotle, Plato, or Socrates. Take Cicero. They all call us to excellence. Always. They always call us to be our highest self. They never denigrate us. They all understood, in their own way, that we are made in the image of God. Think about Aristotle in book 10 of the Ethics. “Why do I pursue excellence?” Because God has gifted me, and my thanks to him is using the gifts that he’s given me. We call that the pursuit of happiness.
The Western tradition is not sexist. It’s not imperialist. It’s not racist. It’s not colonialist. It’s about the dignity of the human person, and it’s about striving for the highest things.
