Paul Monk: On Western Civilization
Listen at PodBean here: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-guss5-8ff9e5
Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.
Here, Paul and I discuss Western Civilization through topics as wide-ranging as erotic poetry, stoicism and the ancient world, and the turmoils of the 20th century. From Pericles via Shakespeare to the 21st century, Paul surveys the roots of Western Civilization and defines it geographically and temporally, before reflecting on its most cherished cultural, scientific and political contributions to humanity, and concludes by painting a picture of what the future of Western Civilization may look like in a turbulent world beset by ecological crises.
This interview is but one example of the endlessly rich and varied conversations that Paul has kindly shared with me over the years. I am delighted to be able to count him as a friend.
Dr Paul Monk, 22/04/2018
Paul Monk - Western Civilization
00:00 Paul:
Bath of Dreams
Could I Ramessid luxury provide,
I’d bathe with you, in true Pharaonic style.
You'd be my Isis, my beloved bride,
And I the son of Ra upon the Nile,
Or did I over Caesar's empire rule
Were I, in all, Marc Antony again,
Like him, my Gypsy love, I'd play the fool;
All passions else and power itself disdain,
Alas, such ancient evenings are not ours.
They are but dreams, of which you’re redolent.
Your eyes and limbs are my Nilotic bowers,
My foolishness your breasts, your hair, your scent.
So, bathe me ‘til I get recall to duty.
Intoxicate me! drown me in your beauty!
00:44 Nick: That was Dr Paul Monk, poet and polymath, reading the opening sonnet to Bath of Dreams taken from his collection of poems called Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty, a Homage to the Western Canon.
00:53 You're joining us on Eudaimonia, a podcast about human flourishing. You might remember Paul from my first podcast which was about the life of brother Mark O’Loughlin about whom Paul had written a biography.
01:04 Today, I want to talk to Paul about his life and the wide range of books that he has written. In particular, I want to talk to him about this contentious and complex idea of Western Civilization which is mentioned in the subtitle of Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty.
01:17 So, Paul, thank you for being with me today again on Eudaimonia. It's really wonderful to have you back here in your apartment in Parkville which has become sort of my recording studio for the meantime, but let's pick up from the subtitle of your book as I sort of mentioned before, a Homage to the Western Canon. Can you speak about I guess why you've used the words homage, why Western and why canon when so many people are critical of each three of these words individually? Today, they're very unfashionable words to use and to use them as a collective is another infringement on people's sensibilities. So, yeah, if you want to jump off from there, that would be great.
01:51 Paul: Yeah, I've never been one I might to say as we say politically correct, so it doesn't much concern me that people might shy away from or not align with something I might write. I write what I feel and what I think, but the specific reason that I wrote this particular book is that years ago when I was madly in love, I set about writing sonnets for the woman I was in love with. I'd written sonnets for other women. I think I wrote my best sonnets, if not my best poems, for this woman 25 years ago.
02:27 She said to me one evening after I had read one more of these poems, "You know, you must get these poems published because then in years to come, whatever happens between you and me, I'll be able to hold up your book and say I inspired this." Now, a poet doesn't need very much more inducement but the fact that I was writing sonnets - and I'd learned to write a sonnet simply by reading Shakespeare's famous 154 sonnets; I read every one and I thought okay, I get that idea, and that was at the inducement of some other young woman - was a kind of experiment. Okay, so if Shakespeare is famous for the writing of his sonnets, can I write a sonnet?
03:04 Well, the first one I wrote won a prize and so that addicted me for years to writing sonnets whenever I was in love. In this particular case, I finally ended up doing as that particular woman for whom I wrote this book, urging and turning it into a book. I selected 12 of the best, put them together in a sequence and they tell a story but in telling that story, they go right back through the Western tradition. They go back to pre-classical antiquity all the way up to modern theatre in their elusions.
03:32 As I remark in the preface to that book, I wrote these poems in a way not only to please her and only secondarily to please others but to please myself as an exercise and exploring what it meant to be a literate person, what it meant to play around with the Western canon. I've enjoyed that exercise.
03:52 So, why was it a homage? Because it was an abasing to Shakespeare and the poetry tradition and the mythological tradition of the West which is eluded to richly in the poems. Why the Western canon? Well, I'm a citizen of the West. I'm not a citizen of India or China or some part of Africa. I am from the West. That's just a reality, what everyone might think.
04:11 As for canon, well I think some things are canonical. I mean, Shakespeare, the bible, the Greek classics, some of the great works of political philosophy and theory, some of the other great modern works of literature, these are canonical in the sense that they are the best most powerful things that have been written and for centuries people have been enriched and instructed by them.
04:32 To suggest that one shouldn't be requires a robust defence, and I'd risk that elsewhere but I don't feel in the slightest bit embarrassed by having enjoyed that tradition and written within it to the best of my ability.
04:44 Nick: I really like the way you speak about Western Civilization as being this parameterised, understandable body of knowledge which anyone can access and enrich themselves in with the right education. The image which springs to mind is of a grand palace with multiple rooms contain a scientific, philosophical and cultural riches of the Western tradition such as Shakespearian or Plutarchan sonnets that you've enjoyed. Could you speak a bit about where your interests in Western Civilization come from and how you managed to develop your own skills as a poet to the point that you could write something in the mould of Shakespeare as demonstrated in Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty?
05:18 Paul: Well, that's very generous of you to make that last remark. Let me just say a little facetiously when you talk about Plutarch. Plutarch did not write sonnets. Plutarch wrote the lives of the noble...
05:29 Nick: Petrarchan sonnets, I meant, sorry.
05:30 Paul: Oh, Petrarch, okay.
05:31 Nick: Again, first time nerves. It's my second time nerves again showing through. God.
05:35 Paul: So, for the benefit of your listeners, Plutarch was a 2nd century philosopher who lived in Greece. Petrarch was a 13th century Italian poet who did write sonnets and...
05:49 Nick: I believe he inspired Shakespeare and formed Shakespeare. Maybe I'm wrong there.
05:51 Paul: Yes, and although the Shakespearean sonnet is different to the Petrarchan sonnet.
05:56 Nick: Yes, it is.
05:56 Paul: That's a point of detail.
05:58 Nick: I'm blushing. Everyone can see I'm blushing.
06:00 Paul: To address your broader question, you used the metaphor or analogy of a palace with many rooms which of course inevitably brings to mind that famous remark of Jesus in the gospel that my father's house has many rooms, you know?
06:17 That's in the imaginary, alright? So, we have this metaphysical vision of heaven as a mansion with many rooms in the gospel. The idea of Western Civilization of a mansion with many rooms taps into that, except that it’s larger again than is specifically Christian tradition.
06:34 How does one get access to that? The answer is two-fold. If as an adventurous and reasonably intelligent individual, you make a deliberate effort to read some of the great books, you can become conversant with them. Abraham Lincoln famously did that. He never went to a university, he didn't have what we would normally call a classical education but he read the King James bible, he read some of the Greek classics in English translation and his speeches, his diction are littered with his knowledge of these texts which he appropriates and uses in the American political context of the mid-19th century.
07:13 So, one approach and in some respects, this has been my approach, is to determinedly go out and say I am going to master this tradition, I wish to be conversant with it. The other more traditional approach, harder to get these days, is a university classical education where you are inducted into it quite deliberately.
07:30 Now, that has some advantages if you have very good teachers and access to first class libraries, but it can be stultifying because you're inducted into it in a very academic way. Lincoln was not academic; Lincoln was a very practical man.
07:43 Nick: Yes, but you both and also Didak like Lincoln, but you were also stepped in the traditions through formal education at the University of Melbourne. Is that correct?
07:50 Paul: Well, to some extent, yes. When I went to university first after leaving school, everybody had said to me you've got the gift of the gab, you're a good debater and public speaker, you'll be a QC - Queen's Council, a great lawyer.
08:06 So, I went off to do law at Monash University but after some months, I thought to myself wait a minute, I don’t know who I am; I don't know how the world works, there's a lot around me that I find baffling in terms of religion, in terms of politics, in terms of world affairs, the Cold War; I'm not prepared to push all that aside, reach glib opinions or accept conventional wisdom and go into law; I've got to figure out what's going on.
So, I left university. I spent 18 months out doing body building and piano lessons and starting to build up a library of my own, but I went back this time to Melbourne University because I wanted to do a liberal arts degree. I wanted to master what Western Civilization in the first instance was. What I discovered was that nobody was really teaching Western Civilization at university anymore. There were lots of different subjects. It was a kind of smorgasbord but what you studied and how it fitted together and when it turned you out as a liberally educated person, that was very dubious from the late seventies. Now, for practical purposes, it simply doesn't exist. It simply does not exist anymore.
09:06 Nick: Why is that?
09:08 Paul: It's been demolished by a number of process which - let’s come back to that in a moment if we may.
09:12 Nick: Sure.
09:13 Paul: Just I persevered with this, choosing subjects and trying to put together a degree that would take me from pre-classical antiquity through the classical world, the rise of Christianity, the reformation, modern revolutions, 20th century history so that I would have a kind of synoptic understanding what Western Civilizations was, what challenges it had faced, where it stood. Then, after that I realised well okay that's been very interesting. I'm more or less literate but I've got to make a living.
09:44 What I ended up doing, I won't go into all the ins and outs of it for the moment but I ended up doing a doctorate in international relations which enabled me to explore why there was a Cold War, what the underlying logic of it was, how it was being thought about.
09:56 When I finished that, I didn't have any money. I was over 30. I desperately needed a job. I ended up working in intelligence with a defence intelligence organisation and they assigned me to work on east Asia. So, for the first time after a determined effort to master Western civ, I must very specifically work on eastern civ, work on China, on Japan, on Korea's; brief serious people, senior bureaucrats, politicians about the future of Hong Kong. This is in the early 90s before the handover. Get your mind around the problem of Taiwan and across straits tensions, right; understand North Korea's nuclear program; understand the Japanese economy, okay?
10:32 So, I was broadened, right? So, to come back to your question how does one get a liberal education, ideally one would have access to very good education, very good tutoring, very good books, a coherent curriculum at universities. By and large today, right now, one doesn't, not in Australia.
10:57 I'm passionate about this but instead of going into university over the last 20 or 30 years and trying to make that happen, I've pursued a living. I've written publicly and my books - the science, the Western, Nacho Quito - are my effort to make publicly available the conclusions that I've arrived at based on my own learning and what others make of them is really up to them.
11:16 Nick: There's a moving section in the prologue of your book, The West in a Nutshell, which describes how as a young boy, you are moved by your teacher's reading of The Lord of the Rings and particular by the character Elrond Half-elven who could look back on thousands of years of history.
11:30 In our time, what is your current definition of Western Civilization and where would you say it began precisely in geographic and temporal terms?
11:38 Paul: Let me just briefly touch on this question of the boyhood inspiration. It's true as you say that The Lord of the Rings was read to my fifth-grade class in 1967 by a young woman who also read us from the Narnia cycle of C.S. Lewis and read us The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham.
11:56 I stayed in touch with her intermittently for many years afterwards and I would often say to her reading those stories were the best thing you did. I can't remember all the routine instruction we got in reading, writing and arithmetic, though I'm sure that happened, but reading is so wonderful. For me at least, The Lord of the Rings made an indelible impression.
12:18 To refer back to what you were paraphrasing about Elrond; for those who don't know The Lord of the Rings, he is Elrond Half-elven who thousands of years before the story begins had been defeated by the dark lord and set up a refuge in the Hidden Valley called Inverness or Rivendell. There when the real story begins, the hobbits arrive in Rivendell and there's this council of Elrond. He's speaking to the council and he's referring back to things that happened thousands and thousands of years ago. One of the hobbits - Frodo of course, who is the central hobbit in the story - says, you know, you say you remember this but didn't it happen a long age ago? Indeed, it did, says Elrond. You know, but I have seen three ages in the rest of the world and many defeats and many fruitless victories.
13:05 I remember thinking as a youngster wow, imagine. We can only emulate that by reading a great deal. None of us lived as he did for thousands of years but in fact, if one did - if you only had personal memory - it would be much less accurate than it can be through the uses of good scholarship.
13:26 So, by reading seriously, we can understand what happened thousands of years ago, and I've made a very deliberate effort, at least of the first past, to do that.
13:38 Now, to answer your second question. So, where if anywhere could one see that Western Civilization begins?
13:45 Nick: Geographically and temporarily.
13:46 Paul: Yes, and the first point one needs to make is that there isn't a precise answer because all of the terminology we use is somewhat indeterminate. It's an approximation but I think it would be reasonable to say that what we normally think of as Western Civilization is identified with classical grease, to a less extent with pre-classical grease, a known civilisation in the Aegean, but the defining moment comes when the Persian empire, the great king in the east, says to the Greeks in his states, including Athens and Sparta, you must send earth and water in homage to me as the great king because you are just little Greek city states.
14:26 These Greek city states see themselves as very independent and though a number of them out of fear counter when they do send homage to the great king, famously the Athenians and Spartans and I might add the Macedonians say no, no, we're free men, we don't do this; in fact, in Sparta, the Persian envoys were thrown down a well and the Spartan said to the minister, "Enough earth and water down there for you?"
14:53 Very famously for anyone who knows even a glimmering of ancient history, the Persians then launched a massive invasion of Greece and they were routed, they were thoroughly defeated by these little Greek city states. That's in a sense symbolically at least where Western Civilization begins, with free city states and most notably the Athean city state which embodied a form of democracy. That is to say public deliberative politics as distinct from onagargular monarchy, defeating the great empire of the east. From that time forward, the West has been broadly defined as Greek-Roman civilisation which later absorbed a version of Judaism which became Christianity. It has been defined over against barbarians or eastern empires, non-Western Civilizations. The Persians later, the German invaders, the Huns, China, right.
15:51 Now, that's an approximate definition. The borders geographically have varied a little over time but the image is not difficult to grasp. I might add of course that this fed into my love of Tolkien stuff because of course his story is about the West and a threat coming from the east, it's about a higher order of culture embodied in elven culture but instantiated also among men and dwarves and to a lesser extent hobbits, threatened by the imperial realm led by the dark lord. It's a history that goes back thousands of years so the overlay was pretty clear.
16:30 To answer your third question, where do we stand now? Well, we're at a very unusual point because the West famously and in the eyes of many people, notoriously, overran most of the rest of the world from the 16th century forward and until the mid-20th century, Western powers ruled on a colonial basis much of the rest of the world.
16:53 In the second half of the 20th century, that came to an end. Now, what we see is a number of those other cultures, most obviously at the moment the Chinese culture, ascended or at least resurrected if you might say.
17:08 If many people are thinking the West is on the back foot, we're talking about the rest of the West. We talk about the Asian century. That's a good time to be asking ourselves very searching and honest questions about so what does define the West? What is valuable about Western Civilization? What would we want to sustain, to renew, to defend if need be and how do we differentiate ourselves from Chinese civilisation, from Islamic civilisation? These are very live questions right now.
17:36 Nick: Two things struck me about your reflections just now. The first is that if we are to achieve Elrond's perspective in terms of fully grasping history, our history, then we need to have engaging and readily accessible educational resources at our disposal and I don't think this is the case at secondary or tertiary institutions today.
17:53 Secondly, I think some of the language around discussing Western Civilization, even with reference to Elrond and Lord of the Rings as a metaphor, can become quite binary or reductive which leads to another ring of people and civilisations which I think people actually tend to recoil from.
18:08 In my mind, this dichotomy between the West and the rest leads to the whole notion of Western Civilization being tarnished and controversial. Could you reflect on that?
18:19 Paul: Yes, there are a number of themes here of course. Let me say, I think first off that it's very important to distinguish between two things here. One is this idea of a Western Civilization that as a citizen of a Western country, that is one which has inherited institutions from the West in the sense that I have defined it broadly, but the second is this idea that there are human truth and realities that have been developed in some distinctive way in the West, that have more universal application.
19:03 This is what's become more controversial at the moment, the idea that the West has something uniquely valuable to offer because that seems like an imposition on others and its associated with colonialism and the domination of others.
19:16 Nick: Exceptionalism basically at the expense of...
19:18 Paul: Western exceptionalism...
19:19 Nick: Not exceptional or need to be given the light of the torch of humanity as the Conrad's sort of famous thing from Heart of Darkness about the spirit of the torch of humanity when it was.
19:30 Paul: Exactly. The French used to call their colonial endeavours a mission civilisatrice
19:39 Nick: Civilisational… mission
19:41 Paul: Kipling famously talked about the white man's burden and the lesser breeds.
19:44 Nick: Indeed.
19:47 Paul: This unsurprisingly rankles with a lot of people. Not only people in those countries, but actually many people in the West who have an egalitarian sense of that.
19:55 Nick: Of course.
19:56 Paul: So, there’s no mystery as to why that would be something that needs to be grappled with honestly. The second thing is in the 20th century, a series of catastrophes erupted primarily in the West. So, starting with the great war which disrupted what had apparently been an onward and upward trajectory, at least from a Western point of view of technological and economic progress.
20:20 It was followed by the Great Depression which tended to bring discredit on the idea that market economics was the way forward. Followed by the second world war which was far more horrendous than the first, absolutely devastating and at its epicentre was Germany in particular espousing a form of totalitarianism and of racism and practicing genocide on an industrial scale. This came out of a country that had given us Gerter and Beethoven and Cant.
20:53 This was a deep shock I think to many people in the West and to many people outside the West who were in colonial states so that well in so far as we've been told to admire and look up to the West and essentially Westernise, we're looking at this and thinking I'm not so sure about that.
21:06 Nick: It's totally savage and uncivilised and inhumane in many ways, right?
21:10 Paul: Indeed, it was. It was in that context that Muhammad Gandhi at one point was asked, you know, what do you think of Western Civilization and he quipped I think it would be a very good idea.
21:23 That really was a point of entry into the mood of a lot of people in the West itself and around the world after the second world war, that okay you talk about Western Civilization but when it comes right down to it, there's colossal war, there's massive depression, there's colonial exploitation, there's genocide and nothing that you talk about in the Western tradition seems to have inhibited that to any great extent. You fought it, you defeated the Nazi's by massive war, but that included strategic bombing which was itself criminal in a way.
21:54 Nick: Dresden and so on.
21:56 Paul: So, let's not misunderstand one another here. I don't for a moment suggest that there's something called Western Civilization which is unblemished and pristine and everybody should adopt it forthwith.
22:07 Nick: We do seem to deify and apotheosize, if that's the right word, this idea of the West.
22:12 Paul: We do. Let's go back therefore even to its classical roots, and one could step forward to a history forward in time and do this again and again in different contexts. So, Athens defies the Persian empire. Athens says an empirically famous funeral speech in 430 BCE, he says to the Athenians we are the school of Helios, we are an open society, we welcome people to come and look and learn and we're not paranoid about foreigners visiting. We are a democracy; that is, to say we have public assemblies where we debate policy. It's not made up by leaders who aggregate power to themselves. We believe in participation in public life. We believe in a career open to merit. This is in so many ways, though it was said 2,400 years ago, almost a prospect for what we talk about as a liberal or open or perhaps social democratics in society. It's quite remarkable, but Athenian democracy failed. It ended up unable and unwilling to defend itself internally. The Greek city states fought one another until they were overrun by the Macedonians and monarchy was established.
23:12 Alexander the first great Western colonials went down and conquered the Persian empire. He tends to be glorified but there have been a lot of debates then and since about whether it was right for him to do what he did, about some of the atrocities he's committed.
23:26 So, these debates, these failures are every bit as much a part of Western Civilization and our inheritance as the glories, and we need to learn from this as to what can go wrong. To quickly add, when the Roman public arises and what does it do? It conquers the known world, the Mediterranean world. It crushes its opponents and sometimes ruthlessly and then the republic fails and is replaced by tyranny, by an empire. Many of the emperors are to say the very least not ideal rulers. This is part of Western Civilization.
24:02 Other civilisations have had the same issues without ever establishing democracy or republics. There's never been in the Chinese civilisation until the 20th century a republic at all. It's always been monarchy.
24:17 What I'm emphasising here is that we learn from both the aspirations and achievements and also the failures and debacles from Western Civilization as citizens of the West. The real strengths, the real riches of Western Civilization are those figures who stand up for ideals, who pioneer enquiry, who criticise abuses, who reflect, who write things that even though others around them don't live up to them, still inspire us.
24:45 When we talk about Western Civilization if I want to suggest, at the core of it are those thoughts, those aspirations and in some measure those achievements. So, we go back to why Shakespeare? Not because Shakespeare was an apologist for Elizabethan monarchy, not because he was Tudor, not because he was male and white but because he wrote extraordinary drama, extraordinary comedy, extraordinary poetry which is humanly inspiring. That doesn't mean no other civilisation produced wonders, but if we're talking Western Civilization, we look at those heights and say that's still inspiring.
25:19 Nick: I think a lot of the discussion about Western Civilization in academia and public discourse is very deficit focused and at times unbalanced and distorted. Without discounting the negatives of Western Civilization such as imperialism, patriarchy and slavery which are not unique to the West either, could you dwell on some positive examples of the riches of Western Civilization which are worth celebrating and studying?
25:40 Paul: Well, let's take a simple example. I suggested earlier that Athens and more broadly the Greek city states defied the Persian great king and defied the idea of being subordinate to an empire and to monarchy and said no, we are free men. Let it be said, men. So, yes, it was a male dominated society and yes, by the way, it was a society that practiced slavery. So, the free citizens of those societies were male property owners, but they weren't defined by being patriarchal slave owners because all other societies around them, certainly including the Persian empire, did much the same.
26:21 That Athens pioneered among other things what we still recognise as path breaking comedy; brilliant comedy, Aristotles; rival comedy, one still finds side splittingly funny today. Tragic drama which was profound in its human reach and its appreciation of the stark dilemmas that can confront human beings; sceptical and critical philosophy which we associate in some simple sense with, you know, Socrates play to Aristotle, here were many other philosophers and other strands of philosophy; the beginnings of scientific enquiry happened with the Ionian philosophers and then the Hellenistic scientists in the 3rd century BC.
27:06 If we ask ourselves how did many even Western Civilizations emerge, broadly speaking it's Athens and Jerusalem you might say; well, Athens, Rome and Jerusalem. What do we owe to Athens? We owe these things: sceptical philosophy, scientific enquiry, tragic drama, representative government, freedom of speech. You know, these things we still identify broadly speaking with what Western Civilization is. What do we owe to Christianity and more precisely to Judaism, to Jerusalem? Well, a concept of divine law, an insistence that justice and compassion are more important than the powers that be or mere temple ritual, and a sense of faith which is to say that history has a meaning, that it's heading somewhere and that somewhere has to do with justice and compassion.
28:03 Nick: Telos, the idea that...
28:04 Paul: Telos. There is a providence in some sense. Now, you combine these things and broadly speaking, you get what we think of I suggest as Western Civilization. The human beings who live in the countries that at least ostensibly value those things by no means always live up to those ideals, by no means.
28:27 Nick: There are the countries which are not considered to be Western which do live up to those means. You know, the people within them who do as well.
28:32 Paul: Well, individuals and pockets certainly of human decency and creativity, absolutely, but let's take - not least because it's so often used as a parallel these days and sometimes seen as now rising to displace Western descendancy - let's take Chinese culture. People can often idealise Chinese culture and say oh it's confusion, it's wise, it's far seeing, it's pacifist. Most of this is myth.
28:56 You can read the classics of Chinese literature or thought and find yes, these in their own way, very different from the Western canon...
29:06 Nick: Mencius and Confucius and Laozi and so on...
29:08 Paul: Laozi, right and the poets of the Tung era and so on, Li Bo, Du Fu. You know, these are great human achievements. Chinese porcelain, Chinese sculpture, etc., these are things of beauty. There's a real culture in China. It is different to the West but let's not for a moment imagine that whereas the West gave rise to wars and atrocities in colonialism, that somehow Chinese culture has not exhibited those things. It absolutely has and all the way back through Chinese history, there has been in Tunisian war, there's been abuse power, there's been corruption, there's been famine, there's been the conquest of other peoples or attempted conquests.
29:50 Nick: Human rights abuses and shocking things.
29:53 Paul: Absolutely, torture or - all those things because these are broadly speaking human universals. A Christian would say - and it's a myth but, you know, for a long time it's been seen as importantly true, whether dogmatically or existentially - that humanity was created and fell into sin and we are fallen beings in need of redemption.
30:14 If you simply naturalise that a little, it's a way of saying human beings are imperfect or as Kant would say, made of crooked timber. That is a human universal. You can go all over the world and if you're not blinded and overly romantic, you find human beings do much the same things.
30:32 What's extraordinary is those pockets of humanity, those individuals or those periods that rise above that to any extent at all. That's what's remarkable. You can look at that in different fields of endeavour. If you look at it in terms of music for example, there are cultures and Islam programmatically for example has been one of them that deprecate music and dancing and a lot of painting, the image of the human form or even of animals, as being an offence to god. Unsurprisingly then, in large parts of the Muslim world, these things have not developed.
31:05 In the West, you have out of the monastic tradition for example developed plain song, monastic chant; Gregorian chant as we often call it, polyphonic music, eventually orchestral music, opera. In terms of painting, there is wonderful depictions of the human form, of religious belief and aspiration, of last judgements; these are part of Western Civilization. They're not Islamic, they're not Chinese and they are extraordinary. By the time you get to composers like Mozart and Beethoven, all around the world whatever their cultural background, we know people find these extraordinary. That's part of Western Civilization and that doesn't mean nobody else is a civilisation.
31:49 Nick: That's right. I think it's an important thing to note as well.
31:51 Paul: Yeah, and Shakespeare, one should add - coming back almost to our point of departure - Shakespeare tends to have the same kind of impact around the world as do Beethoven and Mozart. People recognise that there's something in Shakespeare's extraordinary richness of language and his dramatisation and his depiction of humanity up and down class barriers, across genders that is deeply humane and immensely perceptive.
32:16 Nick: So, why do you think there is that kind of - and this is well cited at the universities and the academic circles as well - but this idea of a cultural or academic imperialism whereby there's not as much bi-directional influence of other civilisations on what we have defined in this conversation as Western Civilization. Why is it that I'm not able to - and I'm an educated person, I've done a degree at university and so on - why am I not able to speak to, you know, like the Shakespeare equivalent in China or...?
32:45 Paul: Well, I think there are two reasons for that. One is that as we remarked earlier, it's very difficult these days to get a coherent liberal education; to get an introduction, never mind a mastery, to the fullness of human accomplishment and get one's bearings. It's very challenging.
33:05 I set out myself to achieve that and I devoted you might say my life to it. I might add that's often been very challenging in various ways but a profoundly enriching experience, but there's a second reason for that problem. That is that so much has been happening, so much has been changing, so much has been discovered in the last 100 years that we have to rethink almost everything in terms of inherited stories, religious doctrines, political assumptions, ways of thinking about and relating to other cultures and states.
33:50 The best way to encapsulate that I think is to say that until essentially the 20th century, there were different cultures around the world largely locked into their own stories. We didn't know about the natural world in anything like the way we now do. Let's remind ourselves that as recently as the period of the first world war, the best astronomist was still trying to figure out whether the Milky Way was the Cosmos or not. In 1916, the leading astronomist of the time was saying it is, there are no other galaxies; the Milky Way is the Cosmos. It took a decade until Edmund Hubble pointed out based on data that persuaded the others because it was good science actually, no, there are many other galaxies...
34:39 Nick: Multiplicities, a multiplicity of galaxies, of worlds.
34:41 Paul: A multiplicity of galaxies, an indefinite number of them in fact and the Cosmos is expanding. This is mind-blowing, but this is the 1920's. This is less than 100 years ago. At the same time, you had Alfred Wagoner saying I think continents move and even his geologist colleague said you're barking mad, of course they don't. It took until the 1970's for the best geologists to say actually he right, you know. Technomic plates exist and continents move and over time, they move dramatically and we can now reconstruct the way in which there were ages in the past where the world was utterly different.
35:14 Take biological evolution. We know that Darwin wrote the Origin of Species or published it in the late 1850's but most people never absorbed that. Over the 100 years that followed or the 150 years since let's say, enormous strides have been taken in reconstructing the evolution of life on earth, the genetic basis of life, the taxonomy of lifeforms and the interrelationship between different kinds of life; these are enormous developments. So, cosmology, biology, geology.
35:44 At the same time, the archaeology of the human presence on the planet has taken enormous leaps forward. We now know far more about the patterns of human settlement and migration, the nature of linguistics and the different language families on the planet than we did before.
36:01 We - that is to say anybody that takes the trouble to inform themselves - have this in common, but where has this mode of enquiry come from? Not exclusively, let it be said, from the West but substantially so.
36:16 You go back to the whole idea which the Ionian philosophers and even more, the Hellenistic scientists - so the Grecian world BC - began this effort to understand naturalistically in reality how does the world work. Not in terms of myth, not in terms of story, not in terms of just so fabled but in fact, how demonstrably does it work as a physical system and how do you reason well? It's all very well to have a strong opinion and say well that's mine and I'm entitled to my opinion as many people still do, but if you're trying to think clearly and critically, what are the rules that govern that? The Greek philosophers are the first ones in the world let it be said to systematically set that out.
36:56 This is part of our Western tradition but it's now just as much as Beethoven or Shakespeare, something it can be and by and large is appreciated globally. If you say that of Albert Einstein - if you say Einstein's physics are universal, almost nobody will disagree. Nazi's talked about Jewish physics and they were stupid to do so. They were wrong. Everybody pretty much agrees on that now.
37:18 When it comes to physics or mathematics, people don't have much trouble agreeing that this is universal. When it comes to cosmology now, all but dunderheads say well there is this vast cosmos and it is expanding and we're now told there's dark matter and dark energy and it's mysterious but we're told this, we tend to say well I guess that's the case.
37:38 When it comes to fundamental principles of curiosity, of critical thinking, of scientific enquiry, where did they start? Well, human beings have been curious for a long time but if you want the classics, if you want to really identify where that got going as a systematic enterprise, it was in the Greek world.
37:54 Nick: I think it's a bold thesis to say that the tradition of Western thought as you have outlined it provides the most comprehensive understanding of reality as well as the best conditions for human flourishing. Many would criticise this as being biased or Western centric or, as the academics say, problematic and not considerate of the multiplicity of cultures and histories that make up human kind. Can you reflect on this?
38:16 Paul: Yeah, perhaps the best way to encapsulate it is to begin by saying as an illustration of my remark about Greek philosophy and science being pioneering and ground breaking. So, in the third century BC, a chief librarian at the library of Alexandria, Aristotles, conducted an experiment to try and figure out whether the earth was curved and if so, what was its circumference and using what we would still recognise today as sound experimental method and good mathematics, he deduced yes it's curved and that the earth is round. Secondly, he calculated its circumference mathematically to within 200 kilometres of the actual circumference. Now, he couldn't empirically test that, it was a mathematical deduction based on his establishment of what the curitory was between Sahine and Sangit in Alexandria where he was.
39:09 This was a remarkable experiment and deduction. That's what we tend to think of as science and the inheritance from that point goes all the way to Edmund Hubble, not because everybody in the West were scientific. Most were not, most still aren't, but the scientists were. That methodology is what has enabled us globally as human beings learning by that method whether we're white, male, Western or anything else to be scientific. That's what we mean by being scientific.
39:37 Now, has that led to problems? Well, some people would argue that it has; that our technologies, our tendency as its perceived to try and dominate nature has led to and in a sense enabled through weaponry and through the attitudes that it has at least allegedly fostered to a situation where we are wrecking the biosphere, where we destroy other species, where we're polluting the seas, the ocean, we're ripping up minerals and we have lost the capacity to be in a world phenomenologically as an integral part of what we used to call creation.
40:20 In Australia for example, there are people who say we need to learn from the indigenous Australians who lived in harmony with the landscape tens of thousands of years and they didn't wreck the place.
40:31 Now, let it be said that this is not by any means an unintelligible point of view. We do face massive challenges in the world today, but let's also remind ourselves that while people might criticise the scientific method and technology and Western imperialism and all these grounds, never the less all over the world wherever they've had an opportunity other cultures have said we want that science, we want that technology, we want that standard of living.
41:03 What is it that China has been doing recently? They might talk about Confucianism and the Chinese dream is if it's orthotonus and indigenous but in reality is they have adopted market economics - by and large though in a mercantilist variation - they've adopted as much technology as they can and try to innovate in it. They want a high standard of living materially and they're achieving it. They've bought the whole package except democracy and free speech.
41:28 We collectively therefore have this challenge. Now, to bring the two together, what was it that Greek thinkers were doing in the 5th and 4th and 3rd centuries BC? They were starting to ask very fundamental questions, not for the most part and not at their best certainly; how does Greece get to dominate the world but what are fundamental truths which are true not because we're Greek, not because we're white, not because we're male, they simply are true.
41:56 Says Aristotle, what are the laws of thought? How would we know? How do you make what's actually a warranted deduction instead of a confused superstitious irrational one?
42:05 Nick: Yep, uncoupled from ideas of nations or ethnicity or language, whatever it might be.
42:11 Paul: Precisely so.
42:11 Nick: It's a very important point to make.
42:12 Paul: Yeah, and we are now in a situation in the 21st century whereas humanity, we face challenges in understanding, communicating, coordinating, innovating, managing and it would be quite fatuous of course to say that you can only find your answers by reading Western writers. No, it's modes of enquiry and principles of thought that we need to pay attention to and we can communicate across cultures and we can arrive at agreed truths just to extent that we follow laws of good reasoning, of good enquiry, of good experiment and in significant measure, we're doing it.
42:58 If we want to understand the ecological system, it won't do to fall back on the dream time. We have to understand what is actually the case. If we want to arrive at stable sustainable standards of living, we have to understand the impact we're having. We have to understand how markets work, how good governance works, etc. We have to be able to agree on these things and implement them. What was it that the Greek city states started to do? They said rather than have tyranny and greed dominating, we want public accountability, we want freedom of speech, we want public debate, we want to arrive at policies collectively.
43:35 Nick: This goes back to Pericles’ speech in 430 BC, right?
43:39 Paul: Precisely. Did they get it right perfectly? No, they didn't. Did they establish ideals and principles that we still aspire to? Well, pretty much yes.
43:52 Let's remind ourselves, in China in 1919, students demonstrated - and this was after the revolution of [unclear 43:59] monarch, not before - demonstrated, and they said what do we want in China? We want science and we want democracy; Mr Science, Mr Democracy. Where were these ideas coming from? Not from Confucius and certainly not from the Chinese imperial tradition. These were coming ultimately from Greek civilisation.
44:16 Nick: In your mind, Paul, what is the future of Western Civilization, given that we are witnessing crises of democracy in the West, the emergence of a multi-polar and often hostile geopolitical order and that we are facing major ecological challenges? Perhaps you can link this in with a reflection on your book, Credo and Twelve Poems, which is your attempt at envisioning a future which is both humane and ethical for the 21st century.
44:35 Paul: Yes, indeed it was. You know, we've touched on this glancingly but there have been radical feminists who have been saying for some decades now or rather deconstructionists as they are sometimes called, we've got to get away from this so-called Western canon because it's overwhelmingly the work of dead, white males.
44:56 I wrote Credo and Twelve Poems as a white male at a time when I thought I might be soon dead because I had metastatic melanoma and it wasn't all clear that I would be alive very much longer. So, I thought well I might be white and I might be male but there it is; let me just try and distil what I believe after a lifetime of questing and reading. It's not a big book and it's written in a form of poems and aphorisms rather than extended abstract discursive argument.
45:27 Nick: It's almost Aurelian, Marcus Aurelias, in terms of like the meditations...
45:29 Paul: The meditations...
45:31 Nick: Yeah, indeed.
45:31 Paul: Yeah, to some extent. For those of your listeners who don't know who Marcus Aurelius was, he was one of the better emperors of Rome in the second century, one of those whom given referred to as the five good emperors. You know, he famously wrote The Decline Fall of the Roman Empire that from Nerva Marcus Aurelius, Rome and indeed the Western world were probably governed better than at any time before or since. One could debate that but that was the perception and certainly those five emperors in their time were all responsible characters, all rulers one could still regard with respect. Whereas many of those before and after were not by any measure such rulers.
46:14 Be that as it may, Marcus Aurelius was historic. He subscribed to the Greek school of philosophy known as stoicism which was very different from Christianity. He wrote these meditations by way of trying to distil what he believed and thought and what gave him a sense of coherence, meaning, principle, etc.
46:34 So, in my own way, I was writing Credo and Twelve Poems to try to distil not of course being anything remotely like a Roman emperor, what did I think after all this time.
46:45 To go to your larger question which the book in its own way attempts to address, where are headed in the 21st century? I think that one can say, perhaps even should say, that since the moon landings in 1969, there has been a growing sense that we are all in this together on planet Earth; that we have this shimmering blue sphere in the middle of this vast cosmos which we're only beginning to get our minds around and if we mess this up, there's nowhere else to go. Elon Musk might talk about putting a settlement on Mars. That's a brave venture but is in no way and cannot ever be a substitute for sustaining this planet as an environment. It is incomparably more attractive and habitable for life, including our life, than Mars could ever be. Mars is a desert, you know?
47:38 Nick: The idea of living there revulses me frankly.
47:40 Paul: Yes, it would...
47:42 Nick: I don't get this whole obsession.
47:43 Paul: It would be wholly dependent on advanced technologies and a home base here. We have to look after planet Earth. For all that we've been talking about Western Civilization, I can't emphasise too much that what I admire most about the West is exactly those elements of it which aspire to and in important measures reach a transcendent understanding or level of creativity that as human beings, we can by and large all feel moved and instructed by.
48:13 Given that we do need to wrap up, I suppose I would perhaps end with these three brief remarks. We need to consider that at various points over its history, Western Civilization has faltered, most famously, in the 5th and 6th centuries of the common area we often call AD or used to call anno domino, the year of the lord, the Roman Empire fell; at least the empire in the West fell, overrun by German barbarians.
48:42 What some people think of as Western Civilization actually began after that with the Christian civilising of the barbarian West. My own view is that Western Civilization probably understood began as I said in a classical world and that the civilising involved in the middle ages was to some extent hanging onto elements of that and then trying to create something which included that Judaic thing of religious faith, telos, compassionate justice with, as we said, mixed results but some extraordinary results.
49:18 I mention all this because it could be that in the 21st century, we have a variation on that; that the West as we've known it in the modern role, certainly it's colonial power and ascendency, has pretty much come to an end.
49:30 Many of us like St Augustine from looking at the Roman empire in the 5th century might say perhaps that's not such a bad thing, after all Augustine famously wrote in The City of God again the pagans empires come and go; we have our eyes on the main prize, the city of god, standards of justice and humanity and salvation which the empire did not by and large live up to.
49:52 We can set high standards in the 21st century and try to live up to them but we may suffer along the way as the West did in that era setbacks and catastrophes which one wouldn't wish on anybody. They may be ecological; they may be because other civilisations feel vengeful about what they suffered at Western hands in centuries gone by and it may be that we won't always be able to fend off that blowback as some people call it.
50:21 How should we think about that as any given individual? My submission is that we do our best if we say at every instance we're not only trying to remember and freeze some old tradition, much less a purely territorial one, but as I mentioned in the case of St Augustine who was of course Catholic, what are the principles, what are the visions, what are the genuine insights that we would live by in the hope and belief that they will regenerate civilisation?
50:53 In the 21st century, how do we make that happen on a cosmopolitan basis so that substitute some other phrase for city of god, but human civilisation can in fact not only survive but rise to a whole new level? That becomes a universal vision in the same way that principles of philosophy and science do which at least the biblical tradition aspired to, and it has been problematic. It has often led to sectarianism, intolerance, hierarchy, etc.
51:25 We have our work cut out but we have very great riches in writing and creativity upon which to draw. When I talk about Western Civilization, it's those riches and that tradition to which I a chief referring.
51:37 Nick: Finally, Paul, coming back to you, what has it all meant for you as a thinking, feeling, loving human being on this beautiful blue sphere; this marble spinning in our cosmos? How has I guess your readings and your writing and your I guess more than infatuation, your love of Western Civilization and it's endless riches behind each of those palatial doors which of course you can't explore what's behind every single door; how has that kind of, you know, moved or shaped you as a sentient being on this planet for your, you know, brief window between two great eternities, before birth and after death, and how do you sort of see that continuing to shape you in the next couple of years and decades?
52:33 Paul: That's a small question of course.
52:37 Nick: Sorry, a nice glib one to end on, wasn't it? Yeah, sorry.
52:41 Paul: You know, we do I suppose individually as well as collectively have to ask ourselves those questions because we can so easily beaver away the years and summon, appoint a task at a profession, at academic enquiry, at scientific enquiry, without thinking sufficiently about at the end of the day what does all this mean? Why am I doing this? Why would I do this rather than something else? Have I wasted my time? What really makes for human fulfilment?
53:11 These I've certainly asked myself those questions over time but I've come to the view that though there are many ways to live a fulfilling human life and the last thing I'd want to suggest is that in order to live a fulfilling life, everybody should do what I have done. Never the less, the kinds of things I have done have enabled me to move - as I said with regard to the sonnets - within this extraordinary realm, this palace as you call it of writing and music and art.
53:48 In recent years particularly when I've written my own books, I feel I'm participating in my own way, in that extraordinary tradition. I'm part of it in a way that if you're only an observer, you can't. You know, that has been a source of wonderment to me.
54:06 I should add I suppose that after a while if you're combining learning which many people think of as academic and somewhat arid and bookish with living which I have certainly endeavoured to do, then the two interweave in a kind of dance.
54:23 We can close perhaps with reference back to the sonnets as one instance and perhaps the earliest instance of my doing this because they were poems where I was endeavouring the capture the meaning and significance of a profound and heartbreaking love affair that I had.
54:40 Over the years, what I'd been doing in each of my books is trying to give expression to what do I think I understand, what is meaningful to me. One of the things that's happened along the way is that I have ended up to my great, good fortune in a relationship with a woman who is quite remarkable in her own right, who loves me very much and for whom I've certainly written my best poetry.
55:12 I have this sense that however much longer I might live, whether it's two years or 22 or 30, I now have meaning and connection in the world; that there are many other things I might do and write, many other people I might meet, but after 40 years and more of questing...
55:33 Nick: ... in the desert.
55:33 Paul: It sometimes felt like a desert experience; you know? In fact, in a talk at my old school a few years ago, I said this. It was exactly 40 years since I'd left school. During that time, I'd been in search of truth and meaning and it had often felt like the Hebrew sojourn in the desert, that I now felt as though I had perhaps not arrived in the promised land but in a manner of speaking, I was on Mount Nebo looking into it.
55:59 For those again of your listeners to whom that would be an obscure allusion, I'm talking about Moses on Mount Nebo looking into dare I say it, Palestine.
56:08 Nick: It was obscure for me as well. I laughed out of politeness. I had no idea what Mount Nebo was, sorry.
56:13 Paul: Because Moses didn't get to the promised land. He died outside on the far side of the Jordan, right? When I said this in 2015, it was because I knew that I was ill. I knew that I might die sometime quite soon but because of what I'd already written and experienced by then, I thought but I haven't wasted those 40 years.
56:37 It seems to me - perhaps this is the best note in which to end - that for all of us, we have these enormous challenges that face us in the 21st century and whatever cultural tradition we come from, it can only ever be a source of promptings and hints about what we might do, and it's up to us then to blaze a trail and create something that has real value.
56:56 We can't be certain in the end that it will work. This is where the whole idea of a promised land and perhaps seeing it and not really getting there yourself is Germain, but we can contribute to the best of our ability to the possibility of a higher level of civilisation and a better world.
57:15 In fact, if I may - this didn't occur to me until just now. One of my more recent poems which is the poem that begins Credo and Twelve Poems is a kind of whimsical poem, almost like Ogden Nash rather than Shakespeare. It's called We Carry It and it pivots on this fanciful conceit that we are cellular organisms. So, just to give a little bit of background to that...
57:42 Nick: I quite like this poem actually.
57:42 Paul: In the world of long ago, from the beginning of life on earth, for the better part of 3 billion years, there were only single celled or slightly more complex cellular organisms. There were no what we call microdata, no large life forms. The elementary biology is that the first single cell organisms, bacteria, were what we call prokaryotes. They replicated, they reproduced by what we would call cloning; by simply splitting and multiplying themselves. They didn't have any sexual interaction or genetic transmission.
58:21 After this colossal period of 2 billion years, they mutated into what we call eukaryotic cells, some of them did, and eukaryotic cells exchange genetic information and that gave rise to this whole extraordinary world of plants and animals and ultimately human beings which consist of masses of these eukaryotic cells and bacterium symbionts that make complex lifeforms a reality.
58:49 This is life on earth. This is the real story of creation if you will. So, I posed to myself the question in the poem what difference does it make being eukaryotic rather than prokaryotic? I think given that the background explanation of the poem is more or less self-explanatory - as I said, it's whimsical - and it goes like this.
59:06
We Karyotes
"How would life be?
Would it still be erotic?
Had it made you and me
Simply prokaryotic?
Not very, I'd say –
Endless self-replication;
No cellular play
To exchange information.
So, second my motion
As life bobs and floats
On the Archaean Ocean,
“We’re eukaryotes!”
Will you carry oats,
If they come from me,
As we play wild motes
On a billion year spree?
I'd love some from eu,
If eu sent them my way,
To refresh and renew
My own DNA."
59:34 Nick: On that note, thank you very much for your time again, Paul. It's been an absolutely pleasure and a privilege to discuss life, earth and the universe and so on with you. So, thank you very much for your time.
59:46 Paul: You're most welcome, Nick. It's been a pleasure.