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May 29, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
27:44
Rambling About： Classical Education
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So me and a friend of Michael Scott are drunk and we're going to talk to you about being English and we've got 20 minutes to do it before my phone runs out.
So what's wrong with the English?
What don't they know that they used to know?
The English don't know that they are the antithesis of Western civilization, I think.
Wow, that's a heady statement.
Why are they the antithesis of Western civilization?
Well, I think...
No, I'm not saying you're wrong.
No, no, no, no.
Well, it's a very broad statement, but I think we have very...
We've certainly lost our way.
Yeah, we have lost our way.
We have lost our way.
I think it's down to our educational system.
educational system, yes, but I think the values of the common Englishmen, or, you know, are still there.
Yeah, I think they've been preserved.
I was going to say, I think they've been preserved.
But I don't think we're educated in the right way anymore.
No, no.
think we're losing the the path that we once had yeah and it and it was a path to I mean what this is what we were talking about this before we started this video recording And one of the things that almost everyone agrees on is that there was a reason that nobility was called noble.
The British aristocracy did genuinely have a better education than everyone else.
And in a way, it was about leading by example.
And I realise this is going to be a slightly romanticized interpretation of this, but this is what you have to do with the principles that you hold as the highest values.
They are almost romantic ideals.
They really are.
Very few people will ever truly live up to them.
But it's the attempt to live up to these things that's important.
The aristocracy bred the new leaders of society.
That's essentially what they did.
And not from the top level.
They bred leaders for industry and the military.
Yeah, and it was down to their education.
I mean, one of the things I think that's sorely lacking in modern, in just the modern era, is the lack of a classical education.
I mean, and I think this is most exemplified by Monty Python.
And I know that sounds silly, but we're not going to see people like Michael Palin or Eric Idle or Stephen Fry ever again.
You know, we are on the last generation of educated Englishmen who can set a good example for others.
They're old now.
They're very old.
And it worries me deeply.
It really troubles me that we're not going to have another Stephen Fry.
It's not going to happen.
These popularist people that have gone through a classical education, that have been able to have such a wide audience, yeah, we've lost them.
Yeah, and not only that, but it's an understanding of human character and what makes a fair decision a fair decision, you know?
And the fact that these people are so well educated isn't necessarily about the fact that they went to university either.
I mean, this started in school.
They would learn Latin in school, they would go through, and I think it's the exposure to the Latin, like Latin text and Greek text that gave them, I guess it kind of seeped into their psyche without even realizing it, you know what I mean?
I mean, I would rather English students read the Enchyroidon of Epictetus than something else.
I mean, when I was doing the leash, We did loads of a few books, but one of them was a book called Empty World, which was a wonderful novel, but it was fiction.
And it was interesting, but it was fiction.
It wasn't teaching moral lessons.
But if you were to do something that was classical, you would also extract moral lessons from it.
Without even realizing that that's what you were doing.
Just by reading it, even if you were just interpreting the language used, you would still be extracting the lessons.
The moralia that was contained within.
And we don't do that anymore.
It really bothers me.
Did you just use my arm as a claw, as a method of jumping up on my, alright thanks cat.
Thanks.
I'm glad you're that comfortable with me, I think.
But we're trying to talk about higher concepts here, if you don't mind.
But yeah, just the very nature of the things that we're studying doesn't really teach people things.
And it really bothers me because the thing with Monty Python is that they're so well regarded because they were so intelligent.
And it wasn't by accident that they were this intelligent.
It was by their education.
I mean, they all understood Latin to a degree.
They all had a good grasp of history.
They all had a good grasp of philosophy.
And this wasn't necessarily to do with the fact they went to university.
This used to start at a low level in school and was something that was built upon from the beginning.
And now it's not.
And I understand that we're drunk.
And so I'm sure that you all understand that we have been drinking and broadly representing the British educational system.
But it used to be good.
And it used to produce people who were of just a higher moral caliber than what we see now.
People who have definition and purpose to their lives and understood why they were doing what they were doing.
And a lot of people these days simply don't know why they're doing what they're doing.
No.
They don't.
English values, these values are just not instilled in people.
People don't know who Locke or Hobbes were.
They just don't know who they were.
They've never read anything by them.
these should be core English texts you know this is what you're gonna learn English and you can learn You should learn all of this stuff from these people.
And along the way, the values that they were trying to promote, the things that the ideas that they were trying to promote will also seep into the people reading about them.
It's not just the values of the individual for the society that they were in.
It's the values of the individual to another individual as well.
Yeah.
No, yeah, absolutely.
It's understanding that you have a duty to others in your own well-being, in your own intellectual and moral and, I mean, I don't want to use the word spiritual, but...
Well, yeah, no, I mean, it used to be.
It did used to be.
Yeah, yeah.
I think you can't.
I don't think you can strike that off.
But yeah, you have an obligation to be a good person.
And then if everyone takes the obligation to be a good person, you have a good society.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which is fed in from the spiritual, the church institution.
I mean, yeah.
To be a good person.
But these aren't necessarily spiritual concepts.
No, no, no, no, no.
It's just a concept that is fed into the culture of it's just the thing you try to attain.
And that's not to suggest that everyone was like this.
No, no.
You know, you had plenty of bad people who did plenty of bad things.
But at the end of the day, if you don't know what the good thing is, then you don't know what you're failing to achieve.
You know, if you don't think, if you think that what you're doing, even if it's wrong, is okay because you don't have anything greater to aspire to, then you will never try to aspire to something greater.
You don't know any better.
And one thing that I think we've really lost is the sort of obligations of the aristocracy to lead the way in this example.
Because that's genuinely what they did for a lot of British history.
They were supposed to be an exemplar.
They were supposed to be an example to follow.
They were supposed to be a leader.
They were supposed to be leadership.
I appreciate how much you like me.
No, I definitely think that is lost.
I think it's trying to be carried on in modern society, but in a very kind of blasé way.
I don't even think they know.
I mean, how much Latin do you think David Cameron speaks?
How many Greek texts do you think he's read?
No, I genuinely think he probably has read a fair few.
Maybe, but I've just seen it.
Maybe when he was like 14, 13.
Maybe, but I've seen stuff that comes out of Eton that's basically teaching people to be politicians.
And it's just like, man, that's not what we need.
We need statesmen.
We need a statesman.
We need someone for the people that understand that doesn't have a degree of journalism and is in charge of the treasury.
Yes.
Yes, without a doubt.
I mean, this is.
I mean, what do you think George Osborne knows of classical history?
What do you think George Osborne knows of philosophy?
Yeah.
Do you think George Osborne knows anything about being a decent, moral human being?
It's just such a waste.
And you've got people like Boris Johnson who seem to be the last.
Stephen Fry, we're never going to see people like this again.
And that really bothers me.
The institutions that crafted people like this, excellent people.
And I hate to say that.
And these are beautiful, beautiful people.
These have fantastic ideas.
Yeah, exactly.
And they understand why they hold these ideas.
And I don't want to use Boris Johnson as an example of this, but he's the last of the politicians that I would say even understands the value of classical culture.
Just why it was good.
The sort of obligation to become better than what you are.
And again, I know I'm romanticizing all of this, but it's just one of those things where we're losing something.
And we need to understand that if you don't uphold the institutions that created these things, these people, then you will lose the kind of people you want to see.
It's ground level.
It's ground level.
It's from the beginning, you teach these intrinsic British values, which are being lost.
They are genuinely being lost.
And they are deeply ingrained in Western European philosophy.
And everyone admires these British values for the last, what, 200 years?
150 years?
Like, people still scream about it.
There is a reason that Britain was responsible for ending the slave trade.
It wasn't financial.
Britain made a lot of money for the slave trade.
Liverpool and Bristol have, like, you know, the reason why they're probably still going.
Yeah, no, but they have guilt over their profiteering of the slave trade.
And yet Britain spent 100 years wiping out the slave trade.
So that slavery is now immoral across the globe.
But no one could be a slave if they were set foot in England.
So, I mean... You can't deny this!
And this isn't to denigrate French people or German people or anything like that, because there are many great French and German philosophers.
But there's individualism is almost uniquely English.
It's very rare to see this outside of England.
And it's one of the greatest exports that England has ever had, and people don't seem to understand why it's so great.
Individualistic values.
Universal values.
Individualistic values.
Universal values.
Yeah, they are universal.
Universal to the individual.
Exactly.
Every individual.
And the education that produced people who understood this has been eroded.
I mean, I remember when I was in school, I would listen to interviews with the Monty Python guys.
And they would talk to me about how they understood Latin and stuff like this.
And how they hated doing Latin in school.
I'm sure every school child hated doing Latin.
And I was sitting there going, shit, I wish I had the opportunity to learn Latin.
There was no Latin class when I was in school.
There was no opportunity to learn anything by Cicero or Caesar or any of the great men of history.
You're learning the origins of Western civilization.
Exactly.
And it's completely dismissed as if it doesn't matter.
It's like, yeah, but I mean, the Romans didn't speak Roman.
They spoke Greek.
Well, they spoke Latin.
No, Latin.
They spoke Latin.
But they also had lots of Greeks and a lot of them spoke Greek.
Yeah, because that was the language of the educated.
The language of the educated.
That was the language of philosophy.
Yeah, exactly.
That's where they learned all their philosophy.
There was a reason that the Renaissance was so important when all of this was rediscovered after the fall of Constantinople.
And the people, scholars from Constantinople went to Italy and said, hey, look, we've got all this stuff.
And the Italians were like, holy shit.
This is amazing, you know, this is, I mean, just the ancient Greek Moralia is just one of the most beautiful things anyone can read ever in all of history.
And we don't teach it in school.
And it breaks my heart.
It's just like people are missing out.
Oh, what they learn.
Algebra.
Fuck algebra.
Just fuck it.
If you want to be an educator.
Yeah.
Learn algebra.
Yeah, you don't need it.
As a 15, 14, you don't need it.
As a normal human being, you don't need it.
But what you need is to know why you do things.
Brush past that maths.
This is the concept of algebra.
Go on.
Yeah, algebra exists.
You can learn about it in the university.
If you want to learn more about maths, take this course.
There you go.
Go on.
Yeah, and it's just one of those.
It's a tragic thing because people are the products of their environment.
They're a product of their upbringing.
Everyone is.
And if you teach someone Hobbes and Locke and fucking Rousseau and all of these things that just instill a sense of understanding of the world around you, then you end up with better people fundamentally.
You end up with people who understand why they are good people, why they need to be good people to other people.
And then people who reciprocate those values.
You know, it grows people the spine.
They have something to stand for.
And I think the growth of that education will be so much more exponential nowadays than it was, well, you know, 150 years ago, because it was in the hands of the elite.
You know.
Well, that's why the poor people looked up to them.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, so there are reasons for it.
That's why obviously had a good reputation.
If you can have that education now in the hands of everyone, they understand the reasons for everything.
The world is your oyster.
When everyone is in agreement about how the world is, how the outcome, you know, how the class structures are, power.
I mean, it's, yeah.
How to interact with your fellow man towards virtue.
You know, that's what all the Greek moralists are trying to teach people ultimately, is virtue.
And it's something that should be taught.
It sounds archaic these days.
Teaching people about virtue, what do people need to know about virtue?
Well, clearly they need to learn a lot about virtue because, you know, there's no denying how well these people lived.
You know, like, Even if they failed, you know, that's the thing.
I don't want to say, well, if you're not living to it, then you shouldn't even try.
No one is perfect, you know, but it's the knowledge that you're not achieving the standards you should be achieving that is the problem.
You know, people don't think these standards are worth anything anymore.
That really bothers me.
It's something that is just, it needs to return.
We need to understand that standards matter.
These values matter.
You know, there's a reason that we taught them so fastidiously to young people.
The reason the aristocracy taught themselves that.
They were like, Christ, this is really important stuff and it makes us better people.
And it shows from the results of their fruits.
What did the British Empire do?
Exactly.
But not only that, intellectually, when are we going to have another Lord Byron?
When are we going to have another Oscar Wilde?
When are we going to have these people?
We are not producing the same calibre of people.
Winston Churchill or George Orwell.
Exactly.
Exactly.
When are we going to produce these people again?
And the society they came from molded who they are.
Even if almost everyone in society failed all of these standards, the standards were understood and respected.
Their actions and them as a being, I think, were a direct result of their education.
Absolutely.
And another Rodger Kipling.
You know, tremendous sympathy for the savages.
You know, the very concept of the people.
They've had opportunity.
When had anyone ever questioned how good imperialism was?
When had anyone ever questioned it?
Oh, no, it takes a poet in India to look at it and go, you know what, this isn't fair.
This is not right.
Same as slavery.
Who had ever fucking...
No one had ever questioned slavery.
They spent state resources trying to end everyone had given us education.
For four or five thousand years.
Yeah, I don't know how long you can go back.
It was just I mean What did you need to get something done?
You had human power.
Aristotle.
Therefore, you had slaves.
Aristotle went out of his way in politics to establish that slavery was actually morally just because some people should be ruled.
And it's like, well, no, these people should only be ruled.
You know, this is one of the rare times I disagree with Aristotle when he's like, some people should be ruled.
And it's like, well, that's only because they were raised to be ruled.
If you raise them not to be ruled, if you raise them to understand that they are sovereign people with their own fucking thoughts and feelings, then you don't need a slave class.
No, I think it's more of an economic or manufacturing basis.
I don't think it's anything to do with morality.
I think it's to do with functionality or economics.
Probably even if it was.
Probably even if it was.
You need to get something done.
This is the best form, the quickest form, the most economic form to get it done.
You need slaves to farm your land.
You need slaves to build your ships.
You need slaves.
With the advent of modern technology, you don't need people to create your industry.
So where did we live off before the mumbled a little bit?
Basically, go on, tell us about Fogel and the product for his environment.
Our friend Fogel is a Jew and he's lived in Israel.
How does he feel about the Palestinians?
Well, he has a lot of animosity towards them.
And he wants to, like, people generally want to have the same kind of British values.
They want to appreciate the common man, but they don't want to hate people.
Don't want to hate people.
Like people, you know, individuals do not want to have an in hate hatred of another individual, and yet he does carry this innate hatred.
It's not, it's not.
It's not a hatred.
It's not a hatred but a bias.
Yeah, it's a bias, that's what I want to characterize as.
But nobody wants that.
No, but it's a product of the upbringing.
So, as a child, you know he had to.
You know he was in school.
He had to wear a gas mask.
A gas mask.
You know he was bombed.
You know these kind of aspects of his life has engineered his perspective on life to have a genuine, to have an aversion, an aversion to a particular type of people or a particular, you know, geographical individual.
But nobody wants that.
You know he wouldn't, he doesn't.
He has the option.
He doesn't want to have that, of course, you know he's ingrained in his psyche.
Now he can't avoid it.
Yeah, it's so hard to get over and I'm not, you know, I don't blame anyone for no, you can't blame anyone for it and but I do think all of these things can be overcome with education.
Yeah, exactly so, if there was a different type of education that you kind of sandboxed an individual in.
Yeah, if you will um uh, that they have more scope of the?
Uh, the world, the interactions of uh, different countries, the world understanding, understanding why people are bombing him exactly, why have really helped?
Yeah yeah, you know, that would probably really help.
Is it a hatred of the Jews or is it a hatred of the fact that someone encroached on the land?
What the history of that you know, and a lot of times these things get conflated.
Yeah, they do, but I'm sure the Palestinian doesn't want to hate the Jews.
No, they don't want to hate anyone.
You know, no individual wants to hate another individual.
Exactly, it's just pointless.
Yeah, you know, this is why people, when people go on about the EDL and say yeah, but you don't know what's happened to them.
You know they're a product of their environment.
You know, if they were, if they were taught, like in a, in a different way, and if they didn't have to experience the things they experienced, they probably wouldn't hate.
You know it's, they probably wouldn't hate.
And this goes for everyone.
Yeah, the?
Uh disagreements that they have the, the aggravation, is just a product of their individual, albeit sometimes collectival collective, individual sometimes.
Yeah um uh uh, uh experience uh, which you know, manifests sometimes on a very global and political scale.
You know often, in fact yeah, often.
And this is where like, national bigotry comes into it and it's like, I love nationalism ironically, because it's hilarious but it's silly, you know it's silly fundamentally, you know, to be innately proud of your nation.
I mean the only I'm going off on a tangent no no no, I.
I was very, I know I had, I had the same same experience growing up.
You know, very nationalistic yeah, but I mean there's nothing wrong with being proud of your nation because the nation you like said, everyone gave you every, everyone's a product of their environment.
And if you are a good person and you do good things and you try to be wise as as wise as you can in your actions, then you can justly credit that to your nation your, your environment, you were raised in and I was happily to do that, and that's that.
That's surely the basis of nationalism as a source of pride yeah, you know.
But conversely, if you're brought up in a nate, you know, in a, in a situation where you're taught to hate, or it's not even taught necessarily, but it's insane, it's just a byproduct of whether you like the situation then you're going to be like that, even if you don't want to be like that, you know.
And this, this is why I hate the sort of oh you're, you're a racist.
Therefore, I don't have to listen to anything.
You say, god damn, that's still a human being you're talking to.
Yeah, this is fundamentally.
This is still individual.
How do you know they could be better?
They could be better, even if they are a diagnosal racist.
They probably don't want to be.
Yeah, you know they could be better.
And if and it's just about the right education yeah, that could solve all this, but it could nip it all in the bud.
You know where you could still address issues, genuine issues like I hate Islamism, I hate the fact there are Sharia courts in breakthrough.
I hate it, but I don't hate Muslims.
Yeah exactly, you know I don't hate Muslims.
It's not necessarily Muslims.
The problem, it's a lot of factors, it's not hating a spectrum.
Exactly, you know you're hating uh, an experience.
You know, a lot of these people are literally raised to think this and we should be incredibly imperious in saying, no, you're going to have a classical British education, whether you like it or not, but at the end of it, you will thank us and this will instill I would thank us for this yeah, this will instill British values, British stoicism, British logical thinking.
This will an empathy, empathy.
Empathy is a critical, critical factor, critical factor, yeah it.
Well honestly, I remember I literally I remember, like listening to, like an interview with, like a dude from Monty Python.
He was talking about how he learned Latin in school and he hated it.
I'm thinking I didn't have the opportunity to learn Latin.
I would love to have learned Latin, but those classes didn't exist.
I didn't get to read.
Now I would like to learn Latin, Latin back when I was a kid.
Would I would have hated it?
Yeah, I would have hated it.
But you know, in my mid-20s, i'm like you know what, i'm actually kind of glad I did that.
Yeah, you know, i'm glad.
It was kind of, you know, impressed upon me because it made me a better person.
Now I know the origin of a lot of the words.
I use the language.
I was forced to read Cicero.
Oh, you know, I understood.
Yeah, I understood a lot of, a lot of the Greek texts.
Yeah, you can, as they were, as they were, as they were literally written.
Yeah, and you are, you are forced to engage with ideas that just seep into your psyche without even realizing that they're doing it, just for the fact of reading it in a foreign language.
Yeah, and and even if it was, even if it was just translated into English and the the lessons were taught, I would be happy with that, you know, but there is so much that people are just not taught about, and i'm sure it all does come down to some some sort of innate thing where it's like well, we just want teachers to be good workers.
We don't want them to think for themselves.
I'm sure there is a factor of that, but it's just okay, that's fine.
Let's just, you know, rally to stop that.
We don't have to teach people how to be drones.
We can teach people that there is actually a lot more to learn and we should teach now.
We are surely ethically obliged to create the smartest people we can through our educational system, and we don't and we, I mean we teach them superfluous stuff.
That is just nonsense and boring and i'm just like wow, that's sad, it's fucking sad, and it's not, it's not conducive to well initially uh, an inherent place in society.
It doesn't make good people, it doesn't make people and it doesn't make good workers?
No, it's well, it makes both, both.
It makes workers who are jaded and They're not even workers, though, are they, really?
They're actually the drones.
Yeah, exactly.
So it doesn't make your people, it doesn't make your workers.
And as a society, and as a statesman, you should be addressing that.
No, no, you should.
No, no, no.
It should be addressed.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And just, like, I want to see a return to classical education.
I want to see, like, what were the aristocracy in, like, 1920 learning?
I want to know.
I want that taught.
Even if it's just, like, one single lesson throughout the week.
You know, this lesson, you know, like, you know, one period on fucking Monday, one period on Wednesday, one period on Friday.
What do you do?
Oh, we go through Greek Moravia.
Oh, my God, it's so boring.
Plutarch's teaching us how to be good people and to relate to God.
Yeah, okay.
In 20 years' time, you'll be fucking thankful.
You will be fucking thankful you did that.
And if you didn't do it, you wouldn't know it.
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