Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 135 | Shadi Bartsch on Plato, Vergil, Confucius, and Modernity

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

In our postmodern world, studying the classics of ancient Greece and Rome can seem quaint at best, downright repressive at worst. (We are talking about works by dead white men, after all.) Do we still have things to learn from classical philosophy, drama, and poetry? Shadi Bartsch offers a vigorous affirmative to this question in two new books coming from different directions. First, she has newly translated the Aeneid, Vergil's epic poem about the founding myth of Rome, bringing its themes into conversation with the modern era. Second, in the upcoming Plato Goes to China, she explores how a non-Western society interprets classic works of Western philosophy, and what that tells us about each culture. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer received her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and multiple teaching awards. She has served as the Editor-in-Chief of Classical Philology, and is the Founding Director of the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. She is developing an upcoming podcast. Web site University of Chicago web page Wikipedia Twitter Amazon author page Washington Post Op-Ed

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books available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart audiobook club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And I don't know about you, but I've always been fascinated by the classics, by which I mean the good old classics, the works of ancient Western literature and philosophy and thought that are associated with both Greece and Rome 2,000 years ago and more than that.

And fascinated in a couple different ways. On the one hand, I like them. On the philosophical or scientific side, I'm constantly referring back to Lucretius or

Aristotle or whatever as part of the founding tradition of how we think about the world around us. And I have, on the literary side, great fond memories of listening to

audiobook versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey while taking long cross-country road trips. But on the other hand, And there's also a fascination because it seems weird that those particular works are given such attention in our society, right? I once saw a two-CD collection. Remember there used to be CDs where you could put data on?

So this one CD was all of the works of ancient Greek literature and philosophy. And the other CD was all the works of ancient Latin literature and philosophy. And the point is that literally everything that we have remaining from that era can fit on two CDs. It's not that much. Why are we giving so much attention to so tiny a corpus of work? But I think there is a reason why we do that. I think the classics do have a special role to play. It's not an exclusive role.

I think there's other things we should be thinking about other than the classics. They don't offer all of the answers. But they were, for our particular cultural history, the one that I am embedded in, they were there first in some sense. They set the agenda in a very particular way and we're still responding to them. that doesn't mean we should exclude other classics. I'm a very big multiculturalist in that sense. We should, of course, pay attention to the classic works from other traditions,

but we shouldn't neglect the ones from the Western tradition. So today, in the conversation, we have Shadi Barch, who is a classicist, a leading classicist at the University of Chicago, and she has two books coming out this year, which are very, very different, which is a wonderful book ending to this conversation of the role of the classics and the attention we should be paying them in the modern world. world, one book is a translation of Virgil's Aeneid. She spells Virgil with an E, V-E-R-G-I-L. She admits that other people spell with an eye, that's okay. The Ineid is, in many senses, the founding myth of the Roman Empire, as we talk about in this discussion. It's sort of the Roman version of the

Iliad or the Odyssey, but a sort of a much more purposeful one in many ways. And there are resonances between the in Aeneid and modern politics, modern society, in both obvious ways and less obvious ways. So Shadi has translated the Aeneid into a sort of, not a hipster, valley girl idiom, but a modern way of talking that really maintains the energy and strength and vibrancy of the original text. So we talk about why we should care about the Aeneid, what Virgil had in mind, what it means for us today. And then the other book she has coming out later this year is, called Plato goes to China, and it's about how people in China today think about Plato and other Western classics, Aristotle and the various poems and plays and so forth. The Chinese culture,

Shadi taught herself Mandarin so that you could do this project, among other reasons, the Chinese culture itself sort of pays a lot more attention to its own ancient text, this own classics than we do here, let's say in the modern United States. And so to some extent, they figure if you want to understand the Western mind, you better read Plato and Aristotle, right? So she looks at how we can learn about both China and ourselves by thinking about how this very different culture interprets and makes sense of and itself learns from our classics. So it's a wonderful multicultural sort of give and take, and very much in the spirit of the Mindscape podcast, where we want to bring different things together in a disciplinary way and let the sparks fly. So let's

go. Shady Barge, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Sean Carroll, thank you so much for having me. I want to start by asking a crazy question. Have you ever watched the British TV show Morse, Inspector Morris, or its prequel series Endeavour? Hmm. Now, I've been thinking about how to speak about the Ineat to you, but I didn't realize that watching Inspector Morris might be a prerequisite. I haven't. What are you thinking of? I'll tell you I'm thinking of. It's a... a detective show, but it's set in Oxford, England. And Endeavor, which is the prequel show, is set like in the 60s, so a while ago. And there's a time when there was a guy who was caught by the cops,

and Endeavor Morse, who was the main character, you know, who went to Oxford and was an academic star before he joined the police force, says to the guy, if you're going to choose an alias, don't pick the same pseudonym Odysseus used to fight polyphemous, not in a town filled with classicists. And this made me think, you know, we don't have towns filled with classicists anymore. That's the segue.

See? Isn't that good? Because we're talking about here the relationship of the classics to the modern world. I mean, as a classicist, as a professional card-carrying classicist, how do you think about, like, the very broadest picture, what role the classics have in the modern world? And let's put it this way. Why did you choose to become a classicist rather than all the other academic things you could have done? Hmm. That's two questions. So let me answer the first one first. And it's a very complicated question, and it deserves a complicated answer. Our relationship to the classics in the western half of the world is one that we increasingly don't see as important.

We think of them as texts written by dead white men, and often, especially these days, we are critical of their ability to speak to our values. or indeed to start any kind of interesting conversation with us as their readers. This is sad because it's fundamentally incorrect for many reasons. The classics, these ancient texts that we're talking about, are classics precisely because in their 2,500-year-old history, people have read them differently in every different era. In other words, they've stood the test of time by engaging in conversation with different time periods and different cultures, and they can do the same with us. They don't have to stand for a set of values that we repudiate.

They don't have to stand for racism or sexism. What they do instead is they invite us to enter into conversation around those questions. They invite us to debate each other and to think. They might ask us what is justice, but they will never tell us what justice is. And it's precisely this ability to be pliant, as I said, that speaks to their longevity. And I think we should understand that they're still pliant. We can still do these things with them. So let me just hum in on that.

I mean, is this a claim that you're making that you would say is unique to these particular Western classics, or at least in the Western canon, it's unique? to these particular classics, or is it something that they were there first, so they sort of laid the groundwork, or can we find similar things in all sorts of literature or all sorts of works of philosophy in the humanities? I would say that we can find similar things in all sorts of works, especially those works that have been around for a while. If we look for comparison at, say, young adult novels that speak directly to these issues, we'll find that while they have valuable things to say. They don't invite us to think about or question values. They simply tell us

what the values are. They simply echo our present beliefs. But they don't ask us to engage in discourse around them. The great classics of all cultures, not just Western culture, do sponsor and encourage those kinds of discussions. And just to give you an example of how pliant these classics are to different kinds of discourses and different eras. You can take, for example, the book I've recently translated, Virgil's Inead. At the beginning of its reception, it was thought to be a work in praise of the emperor. By the time the early Christians came along, they thought it represented a very sinful culture in that the classics shouldn't be read at all because there was sex and naughty gods and bad stuff in them.

Not like the Bible. Yes, exactly. Another classic. Then some later Christians came along and said, no, no, you've misunderstood. This is actually an epic that's an allegory for the Christian every man. And they went through Anaeus' life story as being a Christian set of rules for how to behave. And then what else? Following that, you have a lot of imperialists, especially in European history,

who look to the poem and its tale of expansion from Troy to Italy and the start of an empire, you have imperialists who look at this and say, hey, this epic justifies imperialism. And so, for example, Mussolini in the mid-20th century took the Ineid as proof that his new Italian empire should conquer the world and rule, right? Yeah. And then during the Vietnam War, it was seen as violently anti-war. And so today we can engage with it ourselves and have it ask of us questions that we think are relevant, but we don't have to be trapped by its reception history. That's why we don't condemn it.

Yeah, I mean, one of the cool things I think about this conversation is we've been talking about this. You have two books coming out that I think are good because they're sort of two very different ways of encouraging modern engagement with these classics. like you just said, a new translation of the Ineid. Is it Inneid? I'm going to pronounce every single word in this conversation. Ineat is awesome, yes. Inead, good. And the other one is Plato goes to China about how the Greek and Roman classics have been received in China, both recently and before.

And so on the one hand, you have a work of literature and you were translating it. On the other hand, we have works of philosophy and how they have a political impact. So these are both really cool. and they sound different. And I think that the correct answer to sort of how to mix and match them is just to talk about both of them. And we can see from the sort of two ends of the spectrum what lies in between. So let's start with the inaid. Some of us haven't read it in a long time or ever. So tell people how it fits in because it's a Roman thing. It's not a Greek thing. It's a little bit different than the Iliad and the Odyssey, but related to them. Sure. So the Ineat is fundamentally a story of the foundation of a town in Italy that would end up leading to the creation of Rome and the dominance of Rome over the Mediterranean in the Augustine period. It was written by Virgil under the Emperor Augustus, who claimed, Augustus claimed that he was in fact the descendant of the Trojan hero, Innaeus. And the plot of the story is that Enais escapes from the burning ruins of Troy after the Greeks have sacked it. And he takes a few people with him and travels over the Mediterranean.

He knows the gods have a plan for him, but he's not sure at first what the plan is. And eventually it becomes clear that the plan is he's got to go to Italy. He's got to defeat the local Italians in war. And he has to set up an empire there. He eventually invites the Italians to join with him, so it'll be a joint Trojan Italian venture, but that only follows a very brutal war. He's lured along the way by various temptations, the most famous one of these being Queen Dido of North Africa, who falls in love with him and wants him to stay in Carthage and help her build her empire.

And he's having a jolly good time staying with Dido until Jupiter sends him a message and says, get the hell out of Carthage, you're supposed to be founding Rome. And so then he gets very scared and continues on his mission. And so there are moments in the poem like this one, where we see that, in fact, the question of the God's authority and destiny and so forth is a little bit up in the air. Given his druthers, he'd stay in Carthage. And he has to be poked along to do his duty. It's not something that is dear to his heart. And the poem also seems to suggest that there are many possible outcomes, but this one is the one we have to have. It's a weird thing because this is something that we don't have, at least very explicitly

in modern literature, this idea that we are being nudged along by the gods. And I've never quite understood what the relationship is supposed to be in the classics between human volition and what the gods want us to do. Sometimes the heroes resist what the gods want us to do, right? That's true. I'm not going to touch the question of volition versus the God's will because it's way, it's impossible to answer. But I will say that when people were talking about manifest destiny in the mid-19th century in the U.S., some of them did have recourse to the idea of the Aeneid as the earliest version of manifest destiny. Anae is told he has to carry out a divine mission, sorry, Anaeus is told, he has to carry out a divine mission and to go west, literally, and to subdue.

the natives of a land that doesn't belong to him. So it has been, you know, used as a justification for such purposes that we find really distasteful today. And to contextualize it a little bit, this is written by Virgil, a few years BC, right? And so this is when the Roman Empire had just started, right? Augustus is sort of the first real Roman emperor. I don't know. I mean, Julius Caesar, I guess, counts. But Augustus sort of codified things. and consolidated. So this is well after the Greek epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer. And Virgil is a person. And we're not even sure if Homer was a single person. Is that right? That is right.

So what is, what is, tell us about Homer a little bit, just so we are thinking about this as modern up-to-date classicists. Sure. Well, the Homeric epics are essentially epic centered around a heroic figure, right? The Iliad is about the rage of Achilles who's sulking in his tent and won't join the fight. the Odyssey is about the wily Odysseus who makes it home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, but loses most of his men along the way. Those epics are less concerned with things like foundation or civilization or politics or the justification for empire, which is what the ineneid seems to be. So the innaid is very different in that A, it's a political poem. B, it's not written at the start of the civilization.

It's written at the start of an empire, Augustus's empire. But C, it starts to get written by Virgil only two years after Augustus comes to power in 31 BC. And we have to remember that often we look back with hindsight, but Virgil didn't have the benefit of hindsight. So as he was writing his epic, he didn't know if Augustus was going to be the great guy who brought peace, or if Augustus was just going to be another one of these dictators and generals who seized. power briefly and then lost it again. So not only does he not write an epic about Augustus himself, but his epic about Enais includes many hedges to let us know that this is not a simple work of praise. And I'll give you some examples of those hedges, right? Yeah. So for example, he hints often

in the narrative at other versions of the story of Enais so that we're forced to remember them. And those other versions of Eaneus's story say that Enais was in fact the traitor who turned Troy over to the Greeks. I mean, how is that for shocking? That's very strange that Virgil would want to remind us of this here and there, even though he's telling us a different story about Enais. Then there's the violent ending of the epic. Enais has been told by his father to spare the defeated. But when his main Italian enemy is pleading for his life in front of him, with a huge wound in his thigh,

Anaeus loses his temper and kills him instead of sparing him. And that's the absolute last line of the epic. What an ending, right? And the verb in Latin for what he does to turnus, the stabbing of turnus with his sword, is the same verb that opens the epic where it means something very different. It means to found or lay down a city in a place.

The same Latin verb for both things, the idea of fundamentally being you put something into or on top of something else. So the violence at the end recalls the civilizational impulse at the beginning of founding a city. And Virgil seems to be reminding us that you can't have one without the other, that civilization is always predicated upon an act of violence. I find that very striking. And then there are other things. He has his hero, sacrifice, 12 Italians, a lie.

and throw them into the flames. His hero occasionally lies. There are suggestions that when the hero talks about himself, he's making it up. In other words, there are constant pushbacks to the main thread of the narrative. And those pushbacks are there for us to see

and to understand that we are meant to debate the values of this epic and to ask questions about things like empire, indigenous peoples, missions, what we think about, odd, whether or not one can ever justify these acts of aggression and so forth. It's not a story that tells us what values to have. It's a story that asks us what values might one have and why.

Yeah, so that's very compatible with what you said to give the sales pitch for the classics at the beginning and also probably prefigures what we'll be talking about vis-a-vis the Plato and China in a bit. But probably some of our listeners don't know about even the most surface level, much less the deepest level of this. So what would be like the most naive high school level reading of the Aeneid? Is it basically supposed to be a pro-Augustus, pro-Roman empire propaganda piece? Yes. That's actually how it's been taken to be for most of its career as an epic over the past 2,000 years.

And when people complain about the classics, they're often complaining about these kinds of values. like, you know, why should we be pro-Augustin? But the epic, that would be a very crude reading of the epic indeed. It would be completely blind to the nuance of the actual text. Some time, hopefully soon, will be once again going out, traveling for work purposes. And you know what that means, expenses. Expensify is here to help if you, like me, are someone whose time is much more valuable than the time it takes to fill in expense reports.

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That's E-X-P-E-N-S-I-F-Y dot com slash Minescape. It's interesting because we had a podcast a couple years ago, which I keep referring to, it was so good, with Edward Watts, who was a historian, and we talked about the end of the Roman Republic, the founding of the empire and various political machinations that were going on. I don't think we mentioned Virgil, but this is part of any good political movement, right, to have propaganda and things like that. And I guess the case you're making is that Virgil sort of did a little bit of that, but knew he was doing and also resisted what he was doing while he was doing it.

Exactly. And I would add one more sentence. He wanted us to see that his version was one of, many possible versions that weren't getting told, right? So he's not telling the story of Augustus's ancestor as a traitor. He's not telling the story of, he's not telling one of the myths in which Ineus never makes it to Rome, right? He is suggesting that Anaeus was right to leave Dido, even though in the text, that's put into question.

Dido thinks that they're married. Anaeus thinks that they're just having a hot affair. And their two opinions are reflected in the gods. Juno thinks they're married and says they're married, and Venus thinks they're having a hot affair. So again, even something like a woman's perspective on the meaning of a relationship here is raised in book four in the tumultuous days of Carthage. But it's an interesting choice for, on the part of Virgil, right?

I mean, he is in this milieu where Augustus is the emperor. Were they friends? Did Virgil and Augustus hang out? Yes, they were friends. Augustus became Virgil's sponsor, as it were. Yeah. And we know that Virgil read sections of the Inead to Augustus. But here's the thing.

He read sections from books two, four, and six. We don't know what it was. He may have left out the ambiguous parts or the violent parts. And again, Augustus had not been in power that long when he started nudging Virgil to write an epic about him. Right. And I think one of the ways in which Virgil hedged was to go all the way back to Ineus and to pick him as the topic of the epic, not Augustus himself.

Interesting because in a prior work, Virgil promises he'll write about Augustus's military triumphs, and he never does, right? I see. So there's a kind of pushback right there. Yeah. No, actually, that's what I was going to ask about, because, you know, it's an interesting choice when you are pals with the emperor and you want to do things, the emperor. got to keep the emperor happy, I presume.

So writing in epic sounds good, but the Ineus stories were already there, right? Like he was mentioned in the Iliad as a character. He was. He doesn't come off very well in the Iliad, but nevertheless, Julius Caesar and other members of the Julian clan, into which Octavian had been adopted, Octavian being the future Augustus. nevertheless, the Julian's like to claim descent from Venus through Enaeus and through Enais's son, Eulus, and you can see the similarity between Eulis and Eulius, right? So this was part of the Julian myth, and then Virgil just comes along and cleans it up a bit,

and makes a big story out of it. And this is a set of ideas that the people of Rome at the time would have known about? I have no idea how, I guess they weren't literate, but was there still a little bit? sort of an oral poetry tradition telling these stories? They weren't literate. So this would be mostly for the upper classes,

the senators, and the knights and the educated people who support Augustus needed, right? And as his reign continued and as the peace continued, people started believing that in fact he was

the great emperor that he portrays himself to be and others have often portrayed him to be. Right. Right. So there's a question of propaganda and being aware of propaganda. There's also the real good things that Augustus brought with him.

There are also the terrible things Augustus did before he became Augustus, when he was called Octavian and people often called him a butcher for his violence in war. And in some sense, Virgil did not shy away from talking about the violence of war. He did not. and even his own hero, as I said earlier, goes berserk. And do we have any sort of secondary knowledge about Virgil's opinion about what he was doing in the Aenea? Did he say, like, what his goals were or anything like that? Nope. We don't.

Do we have other people who, you know, I mean, there must have been courtiers or whatever. Well, we know that it was used in the classroom very soon after it was. published. Oh, and we also know that Virgil, maybe this is what you were asking for, Virgil on his deathbed asked for the Ineid to be burnt. And a lot of people have scratched their heads over time and said, well, why did he want it to be burnt? One time, for some people, the answer has been, oh, it wasn't fully finished, right? Because there are some half-lines in it. I don't think that's the answer. I think he wanted it to be burnt because he was worried it would seem like pro-Augustin propaganda, and I think history is borne him out. Right, right. And is it,

so it goes back to this beginning point about there is something special about the classics, how there's some inherent ambiguity in them. They're not just didactically telling us what to think. And you think this was intentional on Virgil's part, that he sort of wanted to tell several stories at once and leave it up to the reader? Or did you think that, do you think that he thought that there was a right reading of it? That's an excellent question. I think he just wanted us to be aware that as propaganda, if we were going to take it that way, it would have to be read with a very large grain of salt. And he shows us why that is.

And his meta message maybe is beware of political narratives because political narratives are always ideologically charged, right? And I think we've seen a bit of that over the Trump administration and its political. narratives. But it's also not even even with all this in mind, it's much more than just a political propaganda tract, right? I mean, there's love and emotions and games and things like that. So Virgil was clearly enjoying himself a little bit when he was writing parts of the poem. Absolutely. If you don't have a complicated and rich narrative, you're not going to have a complicated and rich text to engage with, right? Right. So just going back to what I said earlier, if the message is too obvious. It doesn't make for very interesting reading. Was Virgil explicitly trying to be the Roman

version of Homer? His Ineid does respond to the Iliad and the Odyssey in various ways. So the first half of the Inead is about traveling and the second half is about warfare. And he often refers to episodes in the Iliad or makes Anaeus seem like one of the heroes and then like another hero. Or he'll use similes from the earlier poems but changed them. Yes, so he's also very conscious that he's doing a great work of literature and responding to the Greek tradition. How much time had passed between

what we think of as Homer writing the Iliadne Odyssey and Virgil writing the Aeneid? People will debate on that, but let's say roughly 700 years. Okay, so that's like a huge amount of time. Yeah, it kind of is. It was already the ancient world to the Romans of that time.

It was, yeah. We lose sight of that, don't we? And I guess what I'm getting at is what was the picture of ancient Greece to Romans at that time? Did they respect it? Did they think that they had surpassed it? Or were they continuing it? Aha. Well, you know, there was this little saying by Horace that Greece, after being captured by Rome, captured Rome, which means that the Romans were very much enthralled to Greek literature and Greek culture, but didn't want to admit.

this essentially. So their first works of literature were translations from the Greek before they started writing their own literature. And this left them with a kind of complex about the value of their own works vis-à-vis the Greek works, right? And so there was a competitive angle, definitely, in their relationship to Greek culture and literature, which they would often denigrate as somehow being Eastern or not burly-chested and strong like the Roman if you can say that of literature, but which they competed with nonetheless. I mean, in my mind, there's the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Ineid, and these are the three big epic poems of the ancient world. Were there competitors to Virgil? Were there other epics floating

around that these days we don't give as much attention to? There were some earlier Roman epics, but they exist in fragments. So basically, Virgil came along. won the prize of great epic, the other ones got lost, and now we have Virgil. And it's not just that they happened to get lost. Virgil was so popular, there were many copies of him, so it was more likely that he would survive, right? Precisely. And you hinted at this already, but was the Ineid ever lost in some sense, or was it sort of, for the next 2,000 years, read and used in different senses in European history?

It was read and used in different senses. So we talked a little bit about the medieval view that Ine had represented a Christian everyman. Later in the Middle Ages, the tradition of Anaeus as the traitor came roaring back, and there were novels or texts written that chose to focus on that tradition. And later still, as you know, it was read as an imperial text or an anti-war text, and so forth and so on. So we've always been engaging with it. Yeah, okay. And it is, I mean, you mentioned novels, but something tells me that there weren't really novels back then. I mean, I want to move into the question of you translating the Inead. I mean, it's a, it's a poem, right? It's a huge poem. So in some

sense, you have to be a poet to do this. So is this a kind of intimidating thing? Or have you been deviling your poetry since junior high school? And I made it even harder for myself by laying down a number of rules about what the outcome of my efforts had to look like. So, you know, there are a lot of beautiful translations of the Inead out there. That's undeniable, and I have my own favorites too. But one difficulty with translations of Latin is that Latin is very dense and English is more diffuse. And so these translations of the Ineid would usually be about a third longer than the poem itself, or they'd have much longer lines of verse than the poem itself. And so the whole fast-paced action of reading turned into a much slower activity, changing the whole feeling

of what the epic was about in the first place, right? So Virgil has six beats perverse. I did not allow myself to have more than six, I guess, beats also, although it's a slightly different thing from the Roman beat per line. Virgil has a certain number of lines in the poem. I'm I made myself have exactly the same number of lines so that there be line-to-line correspondence. Ooh, that's tough. It was very tough. Virgil relies a lot on alliteration for a poetic effect. I relied on alliteration.

Virgil uses simple language that sometimes gets very dressed up in the translations because they have to sound poetic. I use very simple language. And I think the outcome of that is a poem that feels very different. It's fast-paced, it's action-packed. You want to keep flipping the pages. Somebody who read it said to me, it felt like watching an episode of 24 on TV. And that's not the way we normally feel about reading the Aeneid. But you want that as a blurb on the back of the book, definitely, when you started selling it.

I haven't thought of that, but I need that as a blurb. You're absolutely right, along with a picture of what's his face. Is it? Jack Bauer, yeah. Jack, something? Jack Bauer, yes. Him, yes. The Ineous.

of our day. Well, you know, but that it was also, and this, I guess, there's another question about how the audience would have felt about this. I mean, Homer's epics were absolutely there to be read out loud, right? It was part of the oral tradition. It was the entertainment of the day. Was the inate also supposed to be like that, or was it already more hoity-to-dy, even when it was being written? It was, I don't know if I'd say hoity-to-dy, but it had a serious purpose. And because it was pressed into educational use immediately, already under Augustus. It never really had a chance to be entertainment. Okay. And did you feel like the differences between being an epic poem and being a novel?

It's not a screenplay, right? It's not quite in the modern vernacular or anything like that. So, I mean, since you come 2,000 years later and are used to reading novels and seeing plays and movies and so forth, did that color how you turn to this poem into something in English? Not really, because there's a sense in which you can see parts of the epic as in and of themselves novelistic. So, for example, in books two and three, Ineus himself is speaking, and he's telling Queen Dido the story of what's been happening to him, you know, the great disaster of his trip over the Mediterranean from Burning Troy. And in the Ineid itself, we have no other corroboration for what he's saying, right? It's just his story.

So there's a sense in which we're invited to treat it as fiction rather than a true accounting to Queen Dido. And the story is designed to be very alluring. It's designed to make Queen Dido want to take care of him. It makes her fall in love with him, along with a few pokes from the gods. Virgil makes us very aware of its status as alluring, possibly fictitious, full of sea monsters and excitement and travel. and crazy disasters and Skila and Carreptus and so forth. So there's a sense in which it's a ripping good yarn, but it's a yarn. But is it too crazy to say that some of the aspects you're attributing it to it sound almost postmodern,

almost sort of meta-fictional? I think it is metafictional. Yeah. It's about itself, right? It's saying, hey, Anae's a story is fiction. It's up for grabs. I've manipulated it in a certain way. and hey, the innate itself is there,

and it can be manipulated in different ways, as we've seen happen to it. So, yeah, I would say it is metafictional, not in a boring theoretical way, but in the way that it invites us to reflect on it. Right. So this stuff that we attribute to, you know, Thomas Pynchon or Charlie Kaufman in movies

is over 2,000 years old, is what you're telling me. Yes, and I think it's not just the in Aid that would back that up. There's a lot of made of theater and ancient theater, too. We're not as sophisticated as we think. We modern. Exactly. I was going to say, every generation thinks it invents all the cool ideas, but in fact, they come from the ancient world.

Totally. I was just going to say I wrote a book once about ideas of selfhood in the first century and how there was a dramatic shift in ideas of selfhood. And then I went to the bookstore and picked up a book and it said, there was a dramatic shift in ideas of selfhood in the 12th century. And then I found the same play I made for basically every century, so I just groaned and gave up, yeah. There's only so many books one can write, I guess. This is true.

But even, okay, so I guess the last question on the DNA before we moved to China, even if there are many different ways you can read it and many different stories, many different implications you can draw out of it, is there one that sticks out as especially meaningful to us here in the beginning of the 21st century, while you were reading it, translate? it? Did you go like, oh my goodness, this particular aspect really resonates with me right now? I think what resonated with me were the constant challenges to authority that are embedded in the poem. So, for example, Anaeus's authority as a narrator of his own life is questioned. The God's authority as dispensers of destiny and of oracles is questioned. the authority of the view expressed in book six that the Romans like to conquer, but afterwards they spare the conquer. That view is questioned with the final violence of the epic.

And the women whose voices appear to be discredited in the epic are actually more places where we are invited to think about why their voices are suppressed. So just to give you one example, when Anaeus is told by the Jupiter that he has to get the hell out of Carthage, he goes to Dido and he's sorry, he goes to his men and he says, let's, let's start getting ready to leave, but don't say anything to Dido because it's not time yet. I don't want her to be upset. Dido finds out and she comes to him and she says, Anaeus, you're preparing to leave Carthage and you never told me. You lied to me. You told me you were going to stay here. And he says, I never lied to you. I always told you I was going to leave. But that's not

true. And in fact, when Jupiter sends the warning to Ineus, he says, you know what? Anaeus is planning on staying in Carthage. This is not going to be allowed. So we have to go down to Earth and warn him. So Virgil makes it clear, in other words, that what Daito is saying, even though she's rebuffed by Enais, is true. The woman says, hey, you lied to me and you said you'd stay with me and you said he wouldn't leave me. And the man says, don't make up this crap. I never said any of that. But the poem shows us that actually she's right, right, even though it doesn't allow Anaeus to say she's right. Gaslighting. Yeah. Gaslighting, an ancient, very ancient case of gaslighting. Yeah. When you hire a new person, you might pick someone brilliant who elevates your company to

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free $75 credit to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com slash mindscape. This is Indeed's best offer available anywhere. Get a free $75 credit at Indeed.com slash Mindscape. Offer valid through March 31, Terms and Conditions Apply. It is amazing, as you say all these things, how many ideas we think of as more or less modern are prefigured in things like this. Is this because, is this a reflection of the fact that the classics have had this enormous impact on us? Or is it really just a rediscovery? I mean, are we sort of seeped in the ideas that were set down by the ancient creeks and Romans? You know, Sean, that's an excellent question.

And I think that, yes, Western civilization, whether or not. or not we realize it has been very much shaped by the ideas in our literary and philosophical past. And I didn't realize this as well until I started looking at the Chinese reception of the classics. And in fact, the reason I turned my gaze on China was because I said what you just said. Let's say we've been, as it were, sitting in a bathtub with these texts for 2,000 years. And we're so familiar with them that we are interpreting within a, a kind of closed box. What would happen if I looked outside the West

to see what the classics looks like there? And I learned some very interesting things. So, for example, often in the West, we think of the citizen, for example, as a natural category. Of course, there are citizens. We have been told by Plato and Aristotle that rationality is what separates humans from animals.

And so we think, okay, man is rational and that's what separates him from animals. we have a whole bunch of inherited assumptions that we don't see as assumptions until we compare them with other traditions. So just to give a few examples, the Chinese word for citizen wasn't actually developed until 1898. Why? Because the Chinese dynasty had no citizens, and the concept of citizen was completely alien to them. In Confucian thought, the empire was like a large family. It was the family writ large.

You don't have a citizen in a family. you wouldn't have a citizen in an empire, right? Or you might read the Analects, Confucius as Analects, and see that there the highest value that man is supposed to attain is something called benevolence in Mandarin, Ren. And nobody there talks about rationality is the most important thing separating humans from animals or making humans better or unique.

And I started thinking to myself, well, why did we pick rationality? I much prefer benevolence. I like benevolence. Those kinds of things. It just opens your eyes to things you've taken for granted that are not taken for granted elsewhere. I mean, anyone who has a puppy knows that you cannot give humans unique access to benevolence, right? I mean, you might argue for rationality. That is so true. Or to rationality, for that matter. I think animals can reason. But that's a whole other question. Very much, right.

Another thing that's really different about China that struck me vis-o-vis the West goes back to one of your early questions, Sean, and that's that the Chinese have huge respect for their own philosophical tradition or their own ethical tradition, which is more than 2,600 years old. So much so that when Xi Jinping delivers speeches in public, he will often quote Confucius or Mencius or another one of the elderly sages. And there's even a book in China called something like Xi Jinping's quotations from Confucius. And in fact, there's two volumes of it because he quotes Confucius and Menchus and the others a lot. And that boggled my mind. It boggles nobody's mind in China. It seems normal. Of course, you would look to the past for value, right? But can you imagine Donald Trump quoting Aristotle in his speeches?

No. And leaving Trump aside, we just don't have that kind of attitude towards. words our own antiquity. We think of it as dated and distant, not present and valuable. Now, the interesting thing is that the Chinese don't only feel that way about their own classics. And by the way, when I say the Chinese, I mean politically oriented Chinese intellectuals. I'm not talking about the whole country. So not only do they feel the same way about their own tradition, they feel the same way about the Western classical tradition. They think it must be a locus of value because it's old and has stood the test of time in various ways. So even as many people in the West try to distance themselves

from that, the Chinese have embraced it. And they embraced it already at the end of the Qing dynasty, and they embrace it today. They just embrace it differently. So what my book, Plato goes to China, is about is how the Chinese appropriation of our texts, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, the Constitution of Athens, et cetera, has changed repeatedly based on the political situation in China at the time. Yeah, it's a little bit, there's a famous thought experiment where you say, like, if anthropologists from Mars came down and tried to look at humanity, and, you know, we try to do the best we can to take a view from nowhere and think about human behavior and so forth. But it's very hard to do because we're embedded in human behavior. But in some sense, when we're looking at how Chinese people, just to take the example that you're concentrating on, think about the ancient Greece and Roman cultures, it is sort of a reminder to us that there are different ways you can think about these things. They're not logically necessary. They're very, very specific and contingent to their time and place, and we've adapted them in certain ways, but those adaptations are contingent too.

Here, here, I'll give you a great example. That's Plato's Noble Lie. So what's Plato's noble lie? It's part of Socrates's vision of the ideal city in the Republic. And in this ideal city to ensure the loyalty of the citizens and to make sure that everybody stays in their own hierarchical place, right, from the leaders to the janitors, Socrates says that one has to practice a lie. A lie has to come down from above to convince the people that they need to stay loyal and to stay in their own social classes. And the lie is that they were all born from the earth,

representing already different standards of humanness. There were the gold humans, the silver humans, and the bronze humans. And you have to be whatever kind of human you were, right? So this has disturbed many thinkers in the West, obviously, who see it as a blueprint for eugenics and a blueprint for a totalitarian society and a blueprint for a lot of pretty creepy stuff, right? And the response in the West has been either to condemn it the noble lie or to try to reread it in a way that it's harmless, like, you know, the story about George Washington and the cherry tree, or to try to read it. read it ironically as Plato showing us what we should not do, right? But in any case, we've struggled with it, right? We don't like the noble lie. Fast forward to China under Xi Jinping and the articles I've read about the noble lie over the past 20, 30 years in Mandarin. They think the noble lie

is obvious, right? The articles I've read about the noble lie say, yeah, of course people are different. Of course, society was hierarchical. Why would anybody think this is a book big deal? Of course the ruler needs to keep the people happy. Of course that's going to necessitate some lying. Duh, right? That's a Chinese response. So my first reaction was, wow, they think the noble lie is okay. And then my second response was, wow, maybe they're saying that about the noble lie to expose the Chinese noble lie that the government expounds. And at that point, my brain exploded, right? Right. Right. There are too many layers. Too many levels of thinking. Yeah, many levels of thought, but the interesting thing is that they're embracing these ideas and they're doing with them whatever it is they need to do. And this is so different from what was going on in China after the fall of the Qing dynasty and also during the 1980s when they turned to Western ancient texts to support the idea that democracy was a good. Or they looked to ancient Athens for that same reason, right? When Liang Chi Chao coined the word for citizen in 1898, he'd been doing a lot of reading of Aristotle in Japanese translation, and he got from Aristotle the idea that man is a political animal, not just a member of an empire, like a villager, right?

And this deeply influenced his thought. It's why he came up with a new word for citizen. It's why he wrote all this stuff about how the Chinese had to learn to become citizens of a nation. as opposed to being members of the emperor's family. Everybody was, yay, Aristotle, democracy. And in fact, Aristotle doesn't think that democracy is the best form of government, but they just ignored that. And they borrowed Aristotle's authority to say democracy was the ideal government and that they should have democracy.

Of course, that didn't work out. There was civil war. Then Mao Zedong came along. Certainly no democracy, no democracy there. But in the 1980s, when people started pushing back against the government, once again, these Western texts became popular as representing democratic values. Now look at the present after the squashing of the protests at Tianan Unman Square. And now we have these same classical texts being read and being valued, but they're being read totally differently.

So I mentioned the noble lie, thumbs up on the noble lie. when they look back to Athens now they find ways of criticizing Athenian democracy either they criticize it for relying on slaves which is true it did but they weren't talking about this earlier or they say the Athenian citizens were themselves slaves they were slaves to the idea of the city and they had to serve the city politically interesting twist or they say that Athens lasted less than 200 years Athenian democracy, and they say, ha, American democracy isn't even 200 years old.

I mean, democracy in its fullest form. And before it gets to 200 years old, it's going to go down the toilet, right? That's another Chinese prediction. Or there's actually a Chinese author called Hexin, who has argued that the West, during the Renaissance, invented the ancient world, and all the Renaissance intellectuals quickly wrote up

all the Western classics from antiquity to pretend that the West had its own noble past just as China did. So get this. And the Renaissance, all these intellectuals are running around, creating antiquity, quickly writing up the Aeneid and the Iliad and the Odyssey and Aristotle and all this other stuff, because they're jealous of China. I know. That was my favorite part of your book. The whole idea that all of the ancient world is fake news, that it was just invented by Fabulous in the Renaissance. And I presume this is not a very popular their opinion in China, even though it was put forward by somebody? It doesn't have a wide following in

China. No, a lot of people think this is a little bit excessive. But the other critiques of Athenian democracy are very broadly spread around. And a final tactic that you'll see being used in these texts on ancient democracy is to say that the West has stolen the word democracy and is hogging it. And that democracy is actually a much broader concept than the Western treatment. of the word. And on this telling, China is the world's biggest democracy, right? Not the U.S. And this argument is made because at the lowest levels of the Chinese bureaucratic system, the Chinese villagers do vote for local village heads. There's voting at the lowest level, and then there's exams later, and there's choice by meritocracy, or so they claim.

We had a very interesting podcast with Davis DeSavage about the history of democracy in the world, And China, I mean, there are relationships between the ancient Chinese systems and what we think of as democracy, but they're not very good ones. And he has a whole theory about why China and the Islamic world did not become democratic, and mostly because their institutions were too strong that the people couldn't sort of take over, whereas in Europe the institutions were so weak that people could eventually just demand power and get it. That's really interesting. And I think that must be part of the explanation. I would add other things such as cultural values that have been passed down from generation to generation that people don't really question. Like the Confucian ethic that the good of the state or the well-being of the state is more important

than the well-being of the individual, which not many Westerners would necessarily agree with, right? We say lower our taxes. They say, let's make China strong, right? Two different things. Exactly. Let me just back up a little bit because I want to also put this in context. I want to get back to the noble law and democracy and things like that. But we just talked about how you translated the Ineid from Latin to modern English.

And now you're reading text in Mandarin. So you basically had to learn Mandarin to do this. Was learning Mandarin first and then you decided to undertake this project? Or did you learn Mandarin to learn about how the Chinese think about the classics? It was a mixture, Sean. So maybe 15 years ago, I went to China for the first time. And so I, you know, took a little guidebook with me with some phrases so that I'd get along. And I learned the phrase for, excuse me, but I didn't know much about Chinese tones. And so when I said, excuse me, excuse me in large crowds as I was trying to get through, everybody would jump and look at me oddly. And I explained this to myself as, wow, you know, the more rural Chinese in the West have never heard Westerners speaking such. perfect Mandarin and naturally they're astonished by this. And then I came back to the U.S. and took Chinese and I said to my Chinese professor in Chinese 101, excuse me, and he started laughing. And I said, what's wrong? And he said, you just said, please smell me. So I went

in China saying, please smell me. And they thought these Americans are so obsessed with hygiene. And rather than run away, you said, I got to dig into this further. Exactly. So then I became really interested in tonal languages. And I also wanted at the same time to see how the Chinese were reading the classics. So these two interests came together. And I started the long and arduous road of trying to learn Mandarin. I'll tell you this, I took Mandarin for straight eight years at the University of Chicago. And although as an actual undergraduate, I had been a fairly good undergraduate, I was now the class dunce. I had to repeat, oh, it was so hard. And maybe my brain is just too old. But I had to repeat every year. I repeated year one twice, year two twice,

year three twice, and year four twice. And I think I ended up getting a C for the last exam. So I am no Mandarin genius. Let's put it that way. This is Jacob Goldstein from what's your problem. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the cost add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odu solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odu is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odu at ODO.com.

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And I think you made a case, I don't want to use the word exceptionalism unironically, but you did try to say that there is something specific that those classics give us. So is there something about the Chinese reaction to those Western classics that is specifically interesting, or is it just an example of another culture reacting to the Western classics? It's a great question. I'm going to push back a little bit on the term exceptionalism, because I think that many cultures have classics that, reward close and thoughtful readings.

I'm sorry, just to be super clear. I was using exceptionalism in terms of the role of those texts within our tradition, not vis-a-vis other traditions, if you know what I mean. Oh, okay, I see. Got it. It's different than Harry Potter. Yeah. Can you repeat your original question? Right. So I'm wondering, so if we think that, you know, there's something about the ancient Greek and Latin text that makes them a little bit different

than modern young adult novels. And you asked this very interesting question. How are they being received in China? Could you have asked the same question about how they're being received in Japan or India or whatever? Or is there some specific reason to think about the Chinese reaction?

I think every country would be different. China interests me because its main internal debate is really about the value of democracy or the lack of value of democracy. That is a thing upon which the leadership is very focused. And many of the classical texts we talk about, at least superficially, seem to endorse values that are actually full of meaning for the Chinese, like the example of a hierarchical society, right, in Plato's Republic. or the idea that the country is more important than the citizen. I'm trying to think if that's really an idea in antiquity and maybe not.

But in Pericles' funeral oration, certainly Athens is more important than the individual Athenian. So I think there's a sense in which China is primed to have an interesting discussion with Western classical texts because of that point. political circumstance. That makes sense. And also maybe it makes sense that China has this very long quasi-continuous history where they have their classics, Confucius being sort of the Plato of China, if we want to really vulgarize things a little bit. And so there is a natural comparison to be drawn. Absolutely. And I was reading another contemporary Chinese article. Actually, this was a book by a Chinese intellectual called Baetong and it's called Against Political Equality, the Confucian case, just came out, and the author's name is Tongdong Bai, or in Chinese we put the last name first, by Tong Dong. And it's a very interesting book. One of the claims it makes at the end, which is a claim that I think many Americans would feel absolute horror at is that early American democracy,

as envisioned by the founding fathers was actually somewhat like a Confucian state, only not as good as a Confucian state. And it was a flawed Confucian state. But unfortunately, instead of getting closer to a Confucian state, the Americans have continued to fall away from those early ideals, and now we're stuck with this modern form of democracy, which, I would argue, actually does not work as well

as the Confucian state. And I'm not here to endorse that or to argue with it. I'm just here to say, gosh, what an interesting claim. Well, and look at what he's basing it on. He's basing it on a reading of Plato. He takes Plato as the ideal, and then he shows that the Confucian ideal is better than the Platonic ideal, and he bases his argument partially on that. We might say, well, why on earth is he arguing with Plato? Right? Plato is 2,500 years old. Why isn't he arguing with examples of modern democracy? does that too, but I think it's quintessentially revealing of how the Chinese value antiquity that a chapter of his book against political equality would be devoted to Plato. Is there, I mean, presumably Westerners have commented on Confuciists and Lao Tzu and other

ancient Chinese thinkers, but is it comparable? Like, do we get a similar amount of comparison, or are the Chinese more fascinated by Plato and Aristotle than we are by ancient Chinese thinkers? The former. The Chinese are more fascinated by our ancient thinkers than we are with theirs. Because the people who work on Confucius and Lao Tzu and these intellectual figures from early China, they are academics, right? And they write books and they talk to their students and they are very deeply enmeshed in this material, but material doesn't really leave the ivory tower, right?

So the man in the street does not read articles. in the newspaper in the New York Times about the problem with Confucius, say, right? But in China, our classical texts are considered worthy of interest at the public level, especially when they've been appropriated to purvey Chinese thoughts or ideologies. And so you will see articles in Chinese daily newspapers about the Western classics. Yeah. You will not get that in USA today. commentary on Confucius, as far as I can tell. No commentary on Confucius in USA today. I've looked

long and hard, but have yet to find it. And it's interesting that you highlight democracy as an issue that was there in ancient Athens and the Chinese care about. That makes perfect sense, right, for modern political reasons. But when you mention this sort of individual versus state thing, I recently did a podcast with Joe Henrik. I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He's anthropologist, psychologist, who studies what are called weird societies and weird psychology, weird being the acronym

for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. I've heard that, yeah. Yeah, so he tries to make the point that not only are these weird societies different, but they're, or not only are all of our psychology studies

done on them, but we are outliers. We are not, you know, in the middle of the distribution of whatever set of characteristics. You want, you want to put people under. And this, so to me, rather than democracy versus, you know, a more centralized state, this idea that you have brought up of individuals versus communities seems to be the more central difference to me. Like the thing that is different, as far as I can tell in my very, very limited knowledge of these things, about the Western tradition is centering it on

individual people. And if you go back to Confucius, et cetera, that's just not there. Is that a a fair reading, you think? Well, Confucius has individual disciples with whom he talks and so forth. But the idea that the best political system is focused upon the individual and the individual's right to vote and the individual's right to liberty and so forth, so forth, those just really aren't embedded in Confucian thought, as you might expect. I was just going to say that there was an interesting editorial piece published in the New York Times by a Chinese venture capitalist several years ago. And it argued that contemporary America was subject to exactly the same flaws that Facilities had pointed to in classical Athens,

mainly that we were too quick to listen to demagogues who were promising us what we wanted, rather than thinking about the good of the state as a whole and looking to the future and what we were leaving to later generations. And according to this author, Eric Lee, this is what brought down Athens, what ruined Athens. That's also what Thucydides says, and it's what Eric Lee says is happening to the contemporary U.S. And this actually got published in the New York Times. So that's just another example of looking to the Western classics to pull.

point a finger at the people whose Western classics they are in a way. Do you think that given the fact that the Chinese have what we would consider a pretty intimate ongoing relationship with their classics, do you think that makes them exaggerate the extent to which a typical westerner cares about our classics? Absolutely. This is something I may clear right at the beginning of Plato goes to China, which is that because they have that intimate connection to their own past, they think we do. And several Chinese intellectuals have said, if you want to understand the West, you have to read their classics

first. Otherwise, you won't understand them because their classics have shaped who they are. And meanwhile, here in the West, we're going, oh, you know, the classics not so relevant to us. So they're taking the opposite view. If you look at a Chinese textbook, it'll even say something like American democracy came from Athenian democracy. No further explanation, right? So they are very sure that there's a value, a political and diplomatic value to studying our ancient texts, precisely because they think we are shaped by them as much as they are shaped by theirs. Maybe it's true and we just don't see it. I don't know.

Right. Yeah. So maybe like we alluded to earlier, it's the influence of our classics are so much in the background of the air we breathe that we really are being influenced by them in ways that we don't know ourselves. Exactly. It's like that old joke about the fish. Do you know this one? Yeah, I do, but tell it anyway. Okay. So it's not my joke. It's the joke of a novelist speaking, who since passed away, speaking at a college convocation. I'm trying to remember his name. He's very well known. David Foster Wallace. Yes, David Foster Wallace. So David Foster Wallace tells this joke that I just find incredibly meaningful. He says these two young fish are swimming along. and an older fish passes them going in the opposite direction.

And the older fish says, hey, boys, how's the water? And the two fish say, it's great, sir, and they keep on swimming. And then one of them turns to the other after the big fish has swum away and says, what the hell is water? And that's how I feel about, you know, culture. It's very hard to separate oneself from it. Well, yeah, and as we said, like if we think that Westerners have this, have ideals of, you know, the individual and maybe democracy or at least the idea that some authority for the state comes in some way, directly or indirectly from people.

Those are values that maybe arguably we get from the classics. I mean, not in a straight line path, but we got them from there and they might not be shared everywhere. Exactly. I would really agree with that. And so how, so given that you and I are largely Westerners, I'm more Westerner than you are. I've never lived anywhere other than the United States, and you've lived all over. But have you learned about what water is by studying the opinions of these people who did not grow up swimming in water? Yes. I feel like I have been plopped into different waters at different times of my life. When I was a child, I spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia.

My mother is Iranian. My first language was not English, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I came to the U.S. as an adult already, kind of fully forced. But even so, I do have those same kind of inherited from the Western Classics values, maybe because I've studied the classics for so long. Yeah, I think it is possible to stand outside your water, but it's hard. And being immersed in all things Chinese has really been helpful to me in that regard. I've found it an education, a very interesting and valuable education.

And I think it's also enabled me maybe to look, with a little bit more distance on how we're currently talking about our classics. As you know, the classics have become kind of a bone of political contention in many educational contexts where people wonder if they should be taught at all. When I say classics, I don't just mean, you know, Plato and Aristotle or the Aeneid. I also mean Shakespeare and, you know, Chaucer and the members of the white elite canon, as it were. And the debate tends to get binarized in that there's a presentist side that thinks we should read texts that reflect our own values and that solidify those values, such as our values are today, right? And then there's this kind of maybe, I don't want to say elitist, but maybe more traditional group that says these are great and complex and rich texts and we should learn from them.

but I would prefer to tread a middle ground and not so much discuss whether we should only read texts that reflect our values or only re texts that are in the Western tradition. I think we should use these texts to discuss our values and to discuss any set of values, and they enable us to do this because they don't come out and just boldly endorse something. they're way more complex and beautiful and deep and value questioning than that. Right. It's an invitation to converse and dialogue and think about things rather than people handing us the answers. Right. And I think it's not people handing us the ethically correct answers of the present day. It's not people handing us the more elitist values of era's past. It's a place for reflection. And I think the task of a good teacher is to bring that out. And I think many, if not, most teachers do do that.

I mean, I can't imagine somebody who would only read The Merchant of Venice to say that Shakespeare was an anti-semit. I mean, that's not the most interesting thing about that text. And it's also, frankly, I'm not sure if it's even defendable. Is there anything specific that you would say that now that you've been reading all these Chinese scholars about the Western. classics, which you've been an expert on for many years. Is there anything specific that you said, like, oh, my goodness, I've been wrong about the classics for all this time, or at least I, maybe I have a different perspective now? Great question. No, that's not what I got. What I got was, oh, my goodness, I and everybody else, including prior generations and the Chinese, and everybody,

tends to see in these texts what they go looking for. And so the texts are almost a mirror. And if the Chinese find their values in the text and we find our values in the text and prior generations to found their values in the text, maybe we need to be self-conscious about all those differences and how they're possible. I did want to mention you have a little interlude in your book, a Straussian interlude, which resonated with me. Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who spent a lot of time at the University of Chicago, but I got to to know him long before most people did because when I was an undergraduate in the 80s, one of my political science professors was a died in the world in the world Straussian. And that was before Straussians had sort of, you know, popped up into the popular conversation as much as they have. So I was just very amused to see that there are Chinese

Straussians of all things. And maybe why don't you try to explain to us what that means in this context to be a Straussian and how it has to do with reading the classics? Absolutely. So the Chinese Straussians, it's mostly two prominent people and their pupils, seem to like Strauss for the following reasons. One, he values antiquities values, not the values of modernity. Two, he claims that philosophical texts need to be read for a secret message that is not available to the ordinary person. And three, his position on democracy is very much up for grad. it's unclear if he's pro or anti. And because of these three features, Chinese Straussians can basically interpret our philosophical texts as Straussians saying they see a message that's not evident to everybody.

And the message that they see is usually a message that ends up supporting in one way or another the Chinese state in its current manifestation. Wow. Yeah. amazing so you could actually read Virgil and come out the other end seeing that Virgil was in favor of Xi Jinping, right? The other thing that this lets them do is it lets them adopt one of Strauss's main points or main arguments, which is that it's dangerous to be a philosopher because philosophers are interested in truth and not political affiliations. And therefore, the philosopher cannot speak openly and he's always in danger. That's another rationale for reading esoterically, reading for the hidden message.

And the Chinese philosophers who read this like this, not because they're in danger, they're not, but because they like to think of themselves, I think, as having a really important voice in the state, one that should be listened to and one that can guide the state, even if the state is a little bit wary of it. So unlike the Strauss, the real Straussian philosophers, they're not hiding away and speaking esoterically. They're speaking openly, but they're saying that they got what they're saying out of esoteric readings of Western classics. Well, it's fascinating to me because, you know, you put forward this idea that there are many different ways to read and to get things out of the classics, whether they're in the Western tradition or Chinese tradition or whatever, which sort of bears a superficial similarity to this particular Straussian point. of esoteric readings, but there's a crucial difference that if I understand correctly, the Straussians want to say there is a sort of surface exoteric reading, and then there's a

deeper esoteric reading, and the esoteric reading is the right one. There is only one right reading, but it's only available to us really deep Straussian thinkers. To us Straussians, that's right. So is that what the, is that the attitude that the Chinese Straussians are taking on, that they have seen things in these texts that the naive readers don't get? Definitely, definitely. In their case, the naive readers are the Western readers, though. And the question always is, where do you stop, right? I mean, I don't know how self-reflective the Straussians are about this, but what you tend to see is people reading meanings into text that they want to find there and saying, aha, this is the esoteric meaning. And I don't know what

the criteria are for saying, like, when am I right and when am I wrong about that? It's a really complicated question. The Chinese Straussians, actually reject the idea that they represent a school. They say Strauss is not an ism. Strauss is just the way things are, right? So they would deny that they're distorting the texts at all. There's is simply the correct reading. I would say one difference in this issue of the malleability of these texts, Sean,

is that the Straussians basically always get the same reading, no matter what the text is that they read. And the reading, at least on the Chinese side, is not only that the philosopher and the policy, politician can't speak to each other because the politician needs to shut out certain truths and to represent things to the public in a way that the philosophers might not agree with. But also, they get out of these texts a political justification for the way things are in China, right? And so it's a very narrow form of reading, whereas the malibality, the whole point

about the malleability of these texts is that they lend themselves to all sorts of different readings. So I would push back against a school that says there's only one possible reading. Yeah, exactly. And it sort of brings us back. This is a good sort of way to wrap up because we started with the noble lie, right? And I help me out here with the noble lie a little bit because here's Plato saying that on the one hand, we should tell people that there are categories of humanity, gold, silver, bronze or whatever, and they're built in. But he's saying that we should tell people that. Like, it's very clear that it's a lie. And so what is... Exactly. He's exposing the lie by saying, let's tell a lie. Right? It's the stupid way to tell a lie ever. It's like saying, by the way, the following is propaganda and then saying it. And then you should believe it. I mean, but Plato's not a dummy.

You know, was he expecting that only the philosopher kings would read his book or what was going on? Or was he just having fun with us? Sean, there were thousands and thousands of philosophers who will give you thousands of different. different answers. But I do think it's interesting how parallel that is to the Chinese articles that say, of course we need a noble lie. Nob lies are good. We want the government to lie to us. So they're effectively saying we see the government lying to us.

And the whole point of the noble lie is you're not supposed to know. It's a lie. You're supposed to think it's the truth about the way things are. So on the Chinese side, too, it has that extremely bizarre self-exposing value. And this is, it's very much in keeping with this theme of metafiction and works that are commenting on themselves in some way, right? And so, I mean, you're persuading me, I'm a soft target here, but you're persuading me that the way to approach these texts is more as a dynamical engagement in conversation rather than searching for the one fixed meaning at some layer that's going to win out over all the others. Oh, my God, yes. Well, that is the perfect place to end.

It never happened before that a podcast guest has listened to something I said and said, oh, my God, yes. So I think I'm going to declare victory with that. Shadi Barge, thank you so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you, Sean. I've enjoyed it. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals? At LPL Financial, we offer more ways for advisors and their clients to thrive.

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