Voices of Freedom - Interview with James Hankins and Allen Guelzo

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

An Interview with James Hankins and Allen Guelzo, Authors of The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is a moment to reflect not only on the founding of the United States, but on the much longer story that made the founding possible. The American experiment did not begin in 1776. Rather, the Founders drew on ideas about law, liberty, faith, and human dignity that reach back centuries, if not millennia. Our guests on this episode of Voices of Freedom have spent their careers tracing that story. James Hankins and Allen Guelzo met as boys, and they have been talking about the Western tradition ever since. Those conversations — and their decades of scholarly work spanning the full arc of the Western experience — have now produced The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, a two-volume history published by Encounter Books that runs more than two thousand pages, with hundreds of maps, works of art, and primary sources set alongside the narrative. James Hankins wrote Volume I, which begins with the ancient Greeks and continues through Rome, Christendom, and the Renaissance. He is Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, taught at Harvard for forty years, and is the founding editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library and the author of the prize-winning Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy. Jim is a 2026 Bradley Prize recipient. Allen Guelzo wrote Volume II, which picks up in 1500 and follows the West through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the age of revolutions, and into our own century. Also a Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School, he is one of the country's leading historians of Lincoln and the Civil War, a three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize, and the author of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion and Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment. Allen is a 2018 Bradley Prize recipient. Topics Discussed on this Episode: How a boyhood friendship grew into a two-volume history of the Western tradition Where the golden thread first emerges in the ancient world, how it carries forward through the Renaissance and into the modern age — and where it came closest to breaking America's place in the arc of Western civilization as the country marks 250 years The character a free society requires, and whether it can still be taught What gives Jim and Allen hope that the Western inheritance will be carried forward by the next generation of students and readers

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it's a moment to reflect not only on the founding of the United States, but on the much longer story that made the founding possible.

The American experiment in many ways really didn't begin in 1776. Rather, the founders drew on ideas about law, liberty, faith, and human dignity that reached back centuries, if not millennia. Our guests today have spent their careers tracing that story. They met as boys, and they've been talking about the Western tradition ever since. Those conversations and their decades of scholarly work spanning the full arc of the Western experience, have now produced the Golden Thread, a history of the Western tradition, an incredible two-volume history published by Encounter books. James Hankins wrote Volume 1, which begins with the ancient Greeks

and works its way through Rome, Christendom, and the Renaissance. Alan Gelzo wrote Volume 2, which picks up in 1500 and follows the West through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolutions, and Into Our Own Century. Together, the volumes run more than 2,000 pages with hundreds of maps, works of art, and primary sources alongside the narrative. James Hankins is Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He taught at Harvard for 40 years and is the founding editor of the Itati Renaissance Library. Jim is the author of the prize-winning virtue politics, soulcraft, and statecraft in Renaissance, Italy, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a winner of the Academy's Serena Medal for Italian History.

Professor Hankins is a 2026 Bradley Prize recipient. Alan Galzo is also a professor of humanities at the Hamilton School. He's one of the country's leading historians of Lincoln. and the Civil War, a free time winner of the Lincoln Prize and the author of Gettysburg, the last invasion in our ancient faith, Lincoln, democracy, and the American experiment. Before joining the Hamilton School, he was the Thomas W. Smith, distinguished research scholar in the James Madison program at Princeton University. Dr. Gelsso is a 2018 Bradley Prize recipient. Jim, welcome to Voices of Freedom and Alan, welcome back.

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to join you. I think we have to start with the friendship between the two of you. The two of you met as boys you've been exploring and debating the Western tradition ever since. And then in 2021, Encounter Books came along and asked that the two of you write this history together. Jim, just how did that come about? And, Alan, what was it like to take on a project of this magnitude along someone you've known most of your life? Well, I did not at first realize the scope of what had to be done. I thought we would spend.

I think we said it was going to take me a year. It took more like five years. But what I didn't understand was that the presentation of Western civilization over the last 15 years has been so depraved, in my view, has been so twisted against the West. It's marked by oikophobia and globalization and all of these things, that I would really have to reconceive what Western civilization was, and I would have to redo the chronologies and the periodization and understand the Middle Ages entirely different terms. So it was a major rethinking I hadn't anticipated, which meant, of course, that I had to learn a lot more than I expected, because I've taught Western Civil for many years.

I've talked about some courses at Harvard for a long time, and I thought that I would be able to do it. But it was a real challenge. But I also want to say, and this is very important, that I loved every minute of it. I really, really enjoyed writing this book. And the big problem for me was to stop digging. I had to say to myself many times, pretty much every day, I had to say to myself, okay, Hankins, time to write something. It was so much fun learning about these things.

pursuing questions and reimagining situations that had been turned in one direction and trying to reimagine them in different directions. So that was my experience. And of course, the prospect of doing this with Alan, whom, as you said, we've known for each other for what, 55 years, something like that, longer than that. That was a great, a great incentive. Part of because it meant that I didn't have to constantly coordinate with him. You know the scene in in Sherlock Holmes' final problem where he's with Moriarty, and Moriarty's trying to convince him to do something, and he says no. But what he says is something like, you have paid me compliments, you've asked me to do things, you're so intelligent about my own beliefs that you're so understanding of what

I'm about to do, then you've already anticipated everything I'm going to say to you. So with Alan, I kind of knew what he was going to say, and we didn't have to consult that much, because we're On the same page, we're basically both classical liberals and were both Christians, so we didn't have to struggle to find a moj and a vive between the two of us. My role in this is a curious one compared to Jim's. What we have written in the Golden Thread is what we call a history of the Western tradition. And we don't actually use the word civilization in the title because our concept of this thing called the Western Trident. tradition is that it is a composite of layers of civilization, beginning with the Greeks, moving to the Romans, and then on up the ladder, so to speak. And Jim is in the enviable

position of being the one who rolls the ball up to the top of the mountain, the top of the mountain being the Renaissance. The second volume, I have to tend to the ball as it goes down the other side of the mountain toward a crisis in Western civilization. So, we're going to be a crisis in Western civilization. he had the fun part. He was able to write the stuff that it was getting better and better all the time. I'm simplifying when I say that, though, but it's getting better. And I'm writing the one where we're talking about, you know, this is getting a little bit more dicey here. There's a problem here. It's problem is getting bigger. And it assumes crisis proportions by the time we get to the end of volume one, which actually ends only in 1991. Because we both concluded that what we were writing was a history. We were not writing current events. We were not pundits, and we didn't want to write elongated opinion pieces. So we decided, all right, 1991 will be the terminal point. But between 1500, where Volume 2 picks up and 1991, there was still a lot to say. And some of it,

some of it had, yes, it was a way of diagnosing what the long-term roots of a civilizational crisis looked like. So Jim has the privilege of building up, I have to superintend, people who were tearing down in a lot of ways. And at the end of both volumes, what we present to people is a history of the Western tradition and a sense of saying, here are things that we have. lost that we need to give some serious consideration to recovering. In a way, Jim's volume ends with the Renaissance. Well, you might say that the ending of Volume 2 presents a situation in which

the reader could easily conclude, and we would like the reader to conclude, that a new renaissance would be something highly desirable. And in real terms, to promote that renaissance of great learning is the fundamental motivation that has moved us in the writing of these books. Let's dig in. Jim, buying one opens with the Greeks, continues through Rome, Christendom, and the Renaissance. But talk to us about the title. Why the Golden Thread? Where does that concept first emerge in early Western history? And how does it carry through the Renaissance to shape the thinking of pretty much everything that comes after? Well, the title is a reference to the myth of the Minnetower and how Theseus, the great Athenian hero, rescues the

Athenian ewes who are given as tribute to the Minotaur in Crete every few years. So he has to go into the labyrinth, which is built by a corrupt technology, and he has to bring out the Athenian youths, male and female, who had been taken as tribute by the king of Crete, and are going to be devoured by the Minotaur, who's himself the creation of a perverted technology. And thanks to Ariadne, Thysius is able to get back out of the labyrinth by respooling the thread. He unspools the golden thread, or sometimes called the white thread, as he enters the labyrinth. In order to get out of the labyrinth, he has to spool up again. So the idea of a thread is that something that helps us to escape a civilization,

or in this case a form of barbarism, or techno-barbarism, that's been created by defeat of the Athenians by the Cretians. And the idea is that the golden thread is that which will enable us to escape the threats to our civilization, some of which are technological, some of which are moral, some of which are a matter of forgetting, not remembering what it is that made us great and hopelessness. Theseus is hopeless. Well, he's never quite hopeless himself, but many people in the time of, this is all mythical time, of course, it's not, we're not talking history, you're talking about myth. But in the mythical time, there are a lot of people in Athens who are hopeless about escaping from the demands of the King of Crete, the monarch of, and getting control of their fate again, becoming free again.

So I think there are many points of contact between the method and our own civilizational situation today. And the golden thread idea is that it's going to help us to escape from this situation of despair and defeat by barbarian and barbarous technology. Some of the technology is very good. I'm not so positive about technology at this moment, having struggled with it earlier today. But no, I'm a great believer in the value of good technology. But the point is that the golden thread is the memory we have of the past and its guidance to us that we don't need to despair. Alan was just saying before we need a Renaissance. We don't need to wring our hands and say, keep talking about how bad things are.

In fact, Western civilization has great resources of Renaissance. It is a civilization that constantly reforms and gives rebirth to a rebirth to. principles. We talk about the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation in the 15th and 16th century, but in fact, built into the West, and especially since the mingling of the West, Greco-Roman civilization with Christian civilization, this idea of rebirth of Renaissance, of resurrection, of reform, these are constantly available options to us. We talk about the Renaissance, but you can talk about Augustus is having started a Renaissance in Rome. You can talk about the Theodosian Renaissance, the Atoonian Renaissance, the Carolingian Renaissance, the 12th century Renaissance. These are all valid

historical terms, and they should give us hope that we can have our own renaissance if we have good hope. If we draw upon our traditions and are inspired by our traditions and the wisdom and prudence that come from studying history, it is absolutely possible for us to revive our civilization. We could have, I suppose, have used as a title, something from the Brother's Grimm, with Hansel and Gretel and the Breadcrumbs. But we decided that, you know, titling these books, The Breadcrumbs, A History of the Western Tradition, just would not have the right impact. We decided to go back to the golden thread, because look, both of us, both of us had

the same Latin teacher in high school. We both had the same stories laid out for us. We both had to translate Caesar. That was our first exposure to serious. translation. So we drew on the deep well of that experience, and it was the golden thread, not the bread drops. The point, nevertheless, is well taken. Within these letter of tradition, what Western thought has managed to demonstrate is a tremendous degree of resilience. There have been serious moments of civilizational failure in the West. We are collaborating in a

substack that is connected to the golden thread. And in this substack, we pick up a number of issues, a number of topics, number of personalities that there just was not room in the books to go into a narrow depth. Well, you know, 2,000 pages. That's really quite enough. 2001, too much. So we're using the substack to go a little bit deeper into some of the other issues. Well, one of the things I'm writing about right now is, says the Black Death, the Bubonic Plague of 1348 to 49. And it's a horrifying story, purely in its own terms. But it is a moment when Western civilization really looked like it was teetering on the brink, like it was going to go over the edge, not only in terms of the demographic catastrophe of this pandemic,

but the impact it had on intellectual life and the direction of culture in Western Europe in the 14th century. And we recovered from that. We recovered from a similar attack this way in the form of a 30 years war in the 17th century. We are still, in many respects, in recovery from a similar attack in the 20th century. But that resilience has time and time again brought this thing we call the Western tradition back from a brink because the Western tradition has within it such deep and rich resources of insight, of debate, of argument, of law, of a dedication to curiosity and the freedom to be curious. And all of those things, constantly, when they've been brought to great moments,

a terrible challenge, have been the ingredients that have rejuvenated this notion of the Western tradition and its history. Yes, I would underline the points. we have to remember that there were people who saved the Western civilization, saved Western civilization at various points by their devotion to its tradition. You know, in the period right before the Carolingian Renaissance, when Charlemagne revives the culture of Western Mediterranean, they almost lost all of Latin literature. They're just a handful of manuscripts that survived.

from the 7th century in the early 8th century. But when the Carolusans get going under the gardens of the great scholar Alquim, they said, well, we can't really do without the Greeks and the Romans. We understand that civilization needs to have certain skills and disciplines. We need to be able to read, we need to be able to write Latin. We need to be at the seven liberal arts. We can't do anything without the memory of the past. And we need the inspiration in the past.

So it was truly shocking to me. to learn how close many times the thread was almost snapped. So suddenly in the late 8th century, in the 9th century, the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, you had scholars saying, let's revive antiquity. Let's get all the treasures of Roman civilization. The non-Christian literature, the pre-Christian literature, was revived and survived because of the devotion of scholars and the memory that people had of the value of these things. You have to have love to keep a civilization alive. You have to have people who love and value the things that they've inherited in the past, they have a sense of gratitude for all the things that we've received. We talk about this,

I think, in connection with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, because it's very clear to both of us that our founding fathers were people who were deeply imbricated in the Western tradition. They knew it. They knew their history. They knew not just, you know, a few political theorists, but they were deeply instructed in history. If you read the Federal's papers, if you read the debates on the Constitution, you can see that they're constantly have it in the forefront of their minds the experience in other republics of the past and other other attempts to reform government. And they're going to these historical memories that they have.

The Congress used Benjamin Franklin's library in Philadelphia as essentially the Library of Congress. And they were using it a whole lot. People were running over there to see, you know, what happened when they had federations, confederations in four-century Greece, something people tend to forget about. What was the history of confederations? What's the history of confederations? What's the history of Democratic republics, aristocratic republics?

You know, how do you, what's the fate? What happens if you adopt this or that solution to a governing problem? They really knew their history. This is something Alan and I are both very strong. The need we have today of relearning our history, remembering our history. We need to know what the founders knew. That's my bottom line.

The founders had tremendous knowledge of the past. We have very sketchy knowledge of the past. Yes. Fascinating. Alan, your thoughts on where America fits in this much bigger story. The founders of the American Republic were very conscious of what they owed through the history of republics. You see this in the writings of member after member of the Continental Congress, of the Constitutional Convention. Madison comes to the Constitutional Convention, having already drafted a series of reflections on past forms of governments, and the problems that they had to encounter and the solutions that they proposed.

John Adams wrote extensively, drawing on historic examples from the past. The founders themselves understood their revolution as standing in the chain of revolutions, stretching back to the past, stretching back to Rome, and articulated by writers like Polybius. Polybius is not a household name today. I don't think he's ever been used at Thanksgiving dinner recently. But nevertheless, Polybius frames. This is how revolutions take place. This is the process.

Polybius himself is borrowing from Aristotle. And then this is brought forward into the experience of 1776. And then beyond 1776, Americans themselves keep coming back to what was brought forward in 1776 so that when Abraham Lincoln comes to Gettysburg in November of 1863 to dedicate the cemetery at Gettysburg. What he speaks of is conviction and dedication to ideas that will bring forth a new birth of freedom. Notice the wording. Not a birth of new freedom, not we're going to start all over again and we're going to ignore everything that happened in the past. What we are going to experience is a rebirth, literally a renaissance of what the republic was founded on. And time and time

again in moments of crisis in American politics. This is how we have dealt with these questions. We want to know what did the founders intend. This, in fact, becomes an issue almost literally whenever there's a major case before the Supreme Court. What did the founders have in mind? What did they believe should best serve the interests and the structure of this Democratic Republic that we call the United States of America? If I may, and it's directly relevant to what you're saying, I'm sorry to interrupt the golden flow of your eloquence, which is how Cicero's eloquence. Put a spell in mind here, I go. But I think it's important to realize that what the founders were doing, they knew was revolutionary in terms of the tradition.

They were going to create a republic that was the freest republic that had created since the ancient Greeks. They knew about the republican tradition. They studied Venice. They studied popular communes in New Ages. they studied, you know, Florence, they studied Great Britain, obviously. And what they were doing was a much more popular, much freer republic than had ever been done in the last thousand years. Most of the republics that were put on their feet in Holland and Italy and Holy Roman Empire, these were aristocratic republics.

They were led by a small group of wealthy, influential, long-standing citizens. and the people were consoled for that was it. What the founding fathers were doing was greeting, as you said, a novice ordo a cichlorum, a new birth of freedom. The same thing that Lincoln is talking about. They knew that what they were doing was giving more power, more self-governance, more freedom to their people, the people of America that had ever been tried before.

And frankly, I think they were scared. I think they were terrified that they were going to repeat the mistakes of the ancient Athenian democracy, and they wanted to be sure they would get it right. And that's why they kept studying all the history. And I think if they were to come back today and see what had been the result of their wager on freedom, on the wager of the power of self-governance of ordinary people,

that they would be astonished. They would be so pleased that their experiment had actually worked. And I think Lincoln is, of course, also very aware of the gentleness of this whole rebirth of freedom. You've talked to me about this many times. I was very impressed by it. I remember years ago we talked about this and you pointed out that monarchy was far from a dead dog at the time of the American Civil War. I'm giving you a lead announcement. You can pick up the thread and explain why the gets expressed. In Lincoln's time, it appeared as a very important.

of democracy had burned itself out, that democracy had demonstrated all the flaws that the founders had been aware of and feared, and that now those flaws were about to take it apart. And every monarch in Europe rejoiced at the prospect of what was happening to the United States, because we were doing it to ourselves in the Civil War. We weren't being invaded. We were actually destroying our own structure. And what we do in the American Civil War is not only do we survive it, But we survive it on the same terms that the founders had intended, that what we have still

is the Constitution as it was written in 1787 and that subsequently amended. But still, it is the Constitution of 1787. So this continuity that goes through there, what we have in the American Civil War, at terrible cost of life and property and destruction and suffering. But we have at the close of the American Civil War, we have a kind of renaissance. Again, there's this resilience in these ideas that even under the terrible stress of civil war, they prove that they are connected to human nature itself. And one of the great things that the classical philosophers wanted to realize was,

how can a political order reflect the natural propensities of humanity and the natural laws that govern nature? Jefferson, of course, puts that right at the very beginning of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln will, 80-odd years later, he will put it right at the beginning of the Gettysburg Address. We still put it at the very head of what we do. So interesting. Well, I mean, let's build on this a little bit and talk about character, which is something that it's a little hard to get your arms around, but really important. A free society depends not only on how the institutions are designed, but the, the,

character the people who govern and the people who are governed. I mean, Jim, it's really the, that's the argument at the heart of virtue politics. Alan, it runs through everything you've written about Lincoln. What does the tradition teach us about the character that a free society requires? And do you think character can be taught? This is the whole question I was teaching yesterday, actually, in my seminar, we were talking about whether virtue can be taught. That's the 15 Greek philosophy.

All the educators, of course, all the philosophers say, of course it can. Otherwise, we'd be out of business. I mean, that's our job. I'm being flippant. But in fact, they deeply believed that it was important to teach character and that states would not survive without it. And I think, you know, I'm a historian of the Italian Renaissance. I think that's where the Renaissance gets started.

Because people have got, at this point, you know, after two centuries of scholasticism, they've got laws. They have systems of government, but they don't have people who are able to make those systems of government benefit the people. And they're asking the question, how can we get people to obey the laws? When the laws are written by bad people who are self-interested, when the judges who are judging cases are bad people, when there is no overall ethic of eye behavior, which you need for any kind of legal system to function correctly. And we see this constantly every day with the abuse of our legal system to achieve partisan goals. So the Renaissance is basically, in my understanding of my interpretation of it, is the pursuit of virtue. It's as much the Enlightenment is sometimes called the Age of Reason. I would call the Renaissance the Age of Virtues. People realize that we need to get back the ex-executive.

When we talk about virtue, we're talking about human excellence, right? It's moral excellence, there's all kinds of excellence. And when they started reading their histories in the Renaissance about antiquity, the Greeks and the Romans, they were aware that the Greeks and Romans had bad people in them. They had failures and disasters of all kinds. But they saw something in the antiquity, which they missed among their contemporaries, this love of excellence, love of competition and cooperation in the goal of achieving personal excellence, and a personal excellence that also benefits other people.

That's the key point in humanistic education and antiquity, which you find in 4th century Greece, you find in Cicero, you find a contillion, a great educator of Romans, that societies can't survive without the cultivation of excellence, which means people who really care about being good, good at all kinds of things. And there are certain periods in Western history where that desire has been overwhelming. I think in 5th and 4th century Greece, there was this tremendous desire to shine, to be excellent, to be good.

But it coexisted with the desire to benefit their city state or their civilization. And I think this is the key to these great moments in Western history, where virtue has and human excellence have appeared. as goals of many prominent individuals who are also public-spirited and want their virtues to benefit the res publica. So you find this in the time of Augustus, the time of Cicero, the late first century BC, and the first century AD. There's this incredible outburst of Roman excellence, Roman virtue, Roman literary and artistic excellence. Because people have focused on this, on we want to be good, we want to be excellent, and we want those qualities of mind and character to benefit our state. And the Romans are saying, we want to be as good as the Greeks. You find this

throughout Western civilization at certain key points when people say, there's a chance here to distinguish myself, and by so distinguishing myself, to help my society. You know, you find it an artist, you find literary people, you find philosophers. And that's what we have a renaissance. You have people who really care about their personal ability to achieve greatness and goodness and virtue, but also connect that with the society around them and have a society around them that appreciates people who value excellence in themselves and others. This is something else you often find that's missing in our society is you have excellence which is not appreciated, which is not valued. Anyway, that's a philosophical issue.

I don't want to get into that. But what do you think about that, I don't know, what's your take on the virtue issue? Virtue stands at the core of civilization itself and the practice and the atmosphere, the environment of civilization. In contrast to that is barbarism. And I use the word advisedly because when I say barbarism, the first image that springs into people's minds is a lot of people living in caves and wearing skins and running around carrying spears. Yeah, that can be pretty barbaric. That's true. Although that is not really what the essence of barbarism is. At its foundation, barbarism is the worship of power. Barbarism believes that nothing exists in this world except relationships based on power. And therefore, the kind of virtue, the kind of excellence of behavior that Jim was describing is merely a facade. It is merely a window dressing, that what is really motivating people is this barbaric lost after power, control over others. And that is the real poison of civilization, because barbarism has no use

whatsoever for, let us call it skill, for art, for perception. No, because those are all written off as examples merely of the exercise of power. What you find at the core of civilization is this understanding that, yes, there is power, and no, we're not going to try to erase power completely. You have to have some, but it's a little like polonium as an element. Get too much of it in a room, and it'll poison everybody in it. But look at the kind of things that it can accomplish. All right, you need power in a system. Virtue politics, so to speak, is how do you use power, but use it in the right proportions

so that it is constantly managed by virtue. And when you can do that, when you have that formula, where virtue manages power, where power does not, in fact, wear the uniform and give everybody the orders. That's when you create the environment of civilization. When you have power that merely stomps and marches and footsteps, then that is when civilization dies.

And we have seen in the 20th century, all too many examples of exactly that. So we would contrast the notions of virtue and civilization with the notions of power and barbarism. Wilt into power and barbarism is cynicism. Because when you believe that there are no relationships except the relationships of power, then it makes you cynical in the most corrosive and destructive sense of anything that can be called virtue. Virtue becomes nothing but. And as soon as I hear words or vocabulary that embrace that nothing but, then I know that I'm getting a strong whiff in my nostrils of barbarism, not dressed in skins, not living in a cave.

And sometimes it's power worshipping technology. But it still comes down to the question of all I'm really interested in is power. All that I want to see are power relationships. Virtue speaks to the exact opposite of them. Yes. Sadly, we're nearing the end of our time together. So one final question for both of you. You've each been recognized with the Bradley Prize, Allen in 2018,

Jim, just this past year. You've both spent your lifetimes making the case for the Western inheritance. As you look ahead to the next generation of students and readers, what gives you hope that this inheritance can and indeed will be carried forward? There are so many variables in that, Rick. And sometimes the prospect can seem enormously dormant. There are moments when I use the example of Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, where civilization is being erased.

Books are literally being burnt. And what happens is the main character runs off into the woods and finds a group of people who are memorizing the great books to preserve them. so that when a time comes later on that the books can once again see the light of day, they have been preserved. And there's a sense in which that is the kind of task that we have immediately before us. And that is a kind of Ray Bradbury situation. That's how I see things when I'm, so to speak, at my bleakest. But at the same time, I also, in a happier moment,

I see the beginnings of Renaissance. and sometimes it's in very small proportions, but look, every time there has been a renaissance, it has begun with one or two or three people. It has begun with Petrach on top of Mount Vontu. It has involved a handful of people in Florence. It has gone on time and time again so that you start with the small numbers and then the impact of it expands. So there's also a moment of confidence that you can find in looking to past examples of Renaissance and see that, yes, you can overcome that, that the evil eye will wilt, and that in the face of truth and virtue, a new appropriation of what is real and conduces to human flourishing can rise up yet again.

So my grounds for hope basically come from teaching young people today. I think that the academy has been in the grips of this cynical barbarism that Alan was speaking of a few moments ago. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, right? It's emanating from people like Nietzsche and Foucault. It's the hermeneurice of suspicion where any statement of high value, high belief is immediately cut down to size. And I think the younger generation is sick at this. That's all they get from the professors. Professors cynically saying, well, the Pericles funeral ration is really about a military rivalry with Sparta,

and he's just telling lies to buck the people up. No, he can't possibly believe all these great democratic values that he's talking about. It must be some kind of rhetorical ploy. And I think the younger generation is sick at this. I think you see this in parents, too. I think you see this in the classical education movement. in K-12, the parents and children saying, we don't want to, we don't want to learn empty techniques or spend our time in front of computers learning how to code. We want to find out

about what is valuable and good in our civilization. You see the success of the classical learning test, classical education, K-12, and also the civic centers that Alan and I both joined. We're all trying to bring our civilization past this poison of the cynicism that we've been suffering, I think for at least a half a century now in the academy and saying, no, the job of a university, the job of a school is to give people something that they can believe in and they can have beliefs that they are justified by reason and by experiences. And these are things that have been neglected. We have to revise them again. So that is what gives me the greatest hope. Fantastic. James Hankins, Alan Galzo, thanks so much for spending time.

with us today. Thanks for your incredible scholarship. Thanks for bringing this incredibly important history to life for so many people. You're both national treasures. We appreciate it very much. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.