WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Hillsdale Interview: John Burtka

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

John Burtka, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, joins WRFH to discuss his new book, "Gateway to Statesmanship: Selections from Xenophon to Churchill." With many in the country asking "What to do?" about unreliable leaders, Burtka compiled excerpts from the writings of influential statesmen to help redirect the future thinkers and leaders of the country. As a Hillsdale alumnus, he talks about how his education influenced the book, how to think about statesmen who made morally questionable decisions by today's standards, and what makes a statesman "great." 

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Julian Parks. With me today is John A. Bertka, the fourth, the president and chief executive officer of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and newly published author of Gateway to Statesmanship, selections from Xenophon to Churchill. Welcome, Mr. Berkka. We're so excited to have you on the Hillsdale radio station today. Thanks for having me on, Jillian. Looking forward to talking with you. Yeah.

So for listeners who may not be familiar or haven't had the chance to attend your book tour yet, give us a run to. down of the content and purpose of your book, Gateway to Statesmanship. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think just to start off, I was a class of 2012, Hillsdale College alum. And actually, a lot of the foundational ideas for this book came from courses that I took at Hillsdale, specifically studying, you know, Erasmus and Thomas Moore and Aristotle and Machiavelli, many of the other classic philosophers and theological. writing about statecraft. So it took me 10 years to put the book together, but the seeds really were planted when I was a student at Hillsdale. And the general idea behind the book is that

we spend a lot of time as a culture complaining about the political leadership class that we have in Washington, D.C. But very few resources are actually spent on educating, mentoring, coming up with a program to equip a new generation of statesmen who can write the ship in Washington, D.C., and in local and state governments throughout the country. So this book is really a greatest hit of this mirrors for princes genre, which really offers both political and moral advice to leaders in politics throughout history, east and west, going back several thousands of years. For people who may not be familiar or may not be Hillsdale students or grads, can you explain a little bit more about the Mirrors for Prince's tradition, please? Yeah, so this tradition, it existed in nearly every civilization. And basically what it was is you had educators or aspiring advisors would, when there was a new political leader, a king, a queen, in the ancient context, in today's context, it would be. a president or a, you know, a senator, when a new leader would come to power, they would

essentially put together a short manual on political leadership. And it, some of it was proverbial wisdom and others, you know, it was just sort of practical stories and advice on, A, how do you effectively lead in terms of politics, or B, what type of character, moral character, does a leader need to have to be a successful leader? And they would present these as gifts. And then if the leader liked what they read, they would hire that person either to be an educator for their children or to serve in their court and offer political advice. So a couple of the most famous ones, Xenophons, the education of Cyrus. This is a text that Julius Caesar never left for battle without carrying copies of scrolls so that he could read it when he was traveling.

And Thomas Jefferson even had two copies of it in his library at Monticello. Another one would be Cicero's on duties. They shaped many of the early Christian church fathers in terms of how they thought about political engagement in public life. And then also Thomas Moore said that have never left the house without a copy of Cicero's on duties in his breast pocket. The tradition really reached a flowering during the Renaissance when you have writers like Machiavelli, Thomas Moore, and Erasmus writing. And then it really disappeared from the public landscape. shortly thereafter. Yeah.

Do you know, do you have any theories or has it been decided like why that tradition started to appear? Maybe what was the impetus of that? Well, I think in terms of it appearing, I think it was this perennial desire to have good political leadership. And there's a belief that that happened first and foremost through education. And so civilizations, you know, thought very seriously about the qualities they wanted to instill in leaders.

The reason that it disappeared is really three years. fold. One, it was the shift from monarchical forms of government to more representative forms of government, but I argue there's no reason we couldn't have this as a mirrors for president's tradition. The second two reasons are there was a shift away from statesmanship, classically understood at the beginning of the progressive era, in favor of management, expertise, bureaucracy, and the social sciences. And then finally, I think it's because our higher education system, except that places like Hillsdale College has largely forgotten that these texts and these authors existed, or if they do know they exist, they don't believe that they should

really bring to bear that much on our contemporary understanding of political leadership. How long did the book take you to research and compile? And then why did you decide that now was the time for a book like this? Yeah, it took me about two years to put it together. I have 20, selections from text. So I really sat down and I read through a large stack of these classic works on statesmanship and then had to sift through what were the most appropriate passages for our own day. And, you know, the main impetus right now is because I think people believe quite profoundly and accurately that we do have a crisis of political leadership in Washington and in America and throughout the West generally. Some have said that we are led by

gerontocracy, which I find both amusing and true to some extent. I think a lot of people are waiting for a new generation of leaders to take the mantle. And I was hoping that this book could serve as inspiration in shaping the character of the next generation of leaders we have in America. When you talk about marking passages that are the most appropriate for our own day, what are some of the qualities of a passage that you thought qualified it as excellent or appropriate for this book? So I wanted to pick passages that did not read as overly philosophical. The beauty of this tradition is that it takes these complex first principles,

and it ties them to very actionable leadership advice that any person, you know, whether or not you're in politics or you're just leading a campus group, or you're the editor of a campus newspaper, or you're running a small business, you can apply these things to be a better person, to be a more effective leader in whatever context that you operate in. And so I really, I emphasize kind of simplicity

in most of the selections. Yeah. As I mentioned earlier in the introduction, you're the president and chief executive officer of Intercollegiate Studies Institute. How does your work on this book relate to the work that you're doing with ISI? Well, the two are very directly related.

So at ISI, our mission is to educate and equip and mentor the next generation of American leaders by helping them to learn the things that they're often not getting in the classroom, especially at Ivy League schools and top state schools. So it's really equipping them with that foundation in Western and American political, cultural, and religious and economic thoughts, and then putting them into a network so that they can, you know, grow into positions of influence in a number of sectors, business, politics, the academy, and journalism. And so really, this thesis, right, that America has a leadership class that is fundamentally corrupt or corroded that needs to be replaced. and part of that replacing requires educating a new and more virtuous elite.

That's really the task of ISI, and that's really the purpose of the book is to bring forth the authors and the ideas that are capable of shaping a great soul leader again today in America. I know I'm interested, and probably our listeners are interested as well, just to hear, like, has that been a successful endeavor? Have you been finding people that are excited and ready to do the work of a great statesman and using the work that you're doing there? The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and it's something that you hope for, obviously, as an author,

but even I have been surprised at how well it resonates, and it's actually connecting both with our young students and with our financial supporters. So it's good to see that. I led a seminar down in Dallas several weeks ago with a group of about 22 students reading deeply through six of the selections from the book. And the questions that they had were amazing. The discussion was super interesting.

And there were all sorts of threads that they were picking out. For example, the similarities and the differences between George Washington's farewell address and Cyrus the Great farewell address that I had not even seen or thought of before. And also really seeing how the students wanted not to just discuss this in a theoretical way, but figure out how do these principles and ideas really concretely apply to their lives? That was very encouraging to me. And then taking the show on the road and going to L.A. and Nashville and Palm Beach and I'm about to head to Rome and to Budapest into really seeing, you know, people from the business world relating to the concepts from the political world,

right? And really longing for better leadership today and really taking inspiration from these historic examples. It's been, I've been very humbled by the response. ISI is an expressly conservative organization. Would you say that your book is also expressly conservative and then talk about that a little bit? And then do you believe that there would be an inherent disconnect that wouldn't allow more progressive leaders to like learn from these selections or do you think that they're, this is a pretty universal type of work? So the book itself, you know, aims at very fundamental universal ideas. that ought to be true in pretty much any place, time, or civilization.

So in that sense, in an intrinsic sense, you could make the case that it's inherently conservative in the sense that it seeks to conserve kind of the best that's been thought and said on statesmanship. But I would put a strong caveat that the 20 different leaders, you know, that I've included, they would, their political views, would certainly scramble the definition of what we would understand today as being, you know, conservatism in our contemporary sense. Obviously, if you're going back to ancient Persia and you're looking at Cyrus the Great, or if you're in ancient China and you're reading Hanfei,

or if you're studying the Islamic statesman al-Farabi, or you're reading Machiavelli, there's going to be all sorts of pieces of advice that may not really apply to our contemporary constitutional context that we have today. And so in that sense, they might not strictly all be conservative. Yeah. I'm curious if your book quotes any work by, quote,

female statesmen. I don't know if that even existed during the time of the Mears for Prince's tradition. If so, who are they? Why did you choose her? If not, I'm interested in why.

And if you believe that there are any differences in your opinion between the way women and men practice good statesmanship? Sure. Yeah, well, there are two women who feature prominently in the collection. There's Judas in ancient Israel. And her story is in what would be considered to be the apocrypha. But it's considered to be canonical in the Orthodox and Catholic tradition. And then also Christine DePizan, who was a Catholic writer who was the first to really write about the Mirrocer princes, the first one. woman. She was Italian and then and then French. Her father was a court minister in France. So these are the two texts that I've included. You know, it's interesting because actually, in some respects, there were actually more female statesmen in the ancient world than in the Middle Ages that appears there are today. There's never been a female president,

but there were several quite prominent female queens and emperors, you know, thinking most recently in the United Kingdom, but also going back to Byzantium and to ancient Russia and some during the Middle Ages as well. So, yeah, so the two that I've included, Judith, you know, it's a very interesting and provocative story about a time in which the Israelites were surrounded by the Assyrians and were about to be under siege. And she believed that God had called her to go behind enemy lines and to seduce the Assyrian general named Halifernays. And eventually, before he was able to seduce her, she beheaded him and returned back to the Israelites with his head, and they ended up being victorious and conquered.

So it's really a story about using cunning and courage to defeat the enemies of your people. And then Christine DePizan had an interesting situation where her husband, had passed away, and she had to provide for her family, and she did that by writing, making a living, offering, writing courtly literature, writing ballads, and then eventually advising a queen in France, whose husband ended up being sick and had to retreat to the countryside. She was a political advisor, actually during the lifetime of Joan of Arc. She was a contemporary of Joan of And so, yeah, she offers some very interesting insights. And actually, you know, she too is much more, even Machiavellian in terms of her advice. She's a devout Christian, but she really does put an

emphasis on, you know, the proper role that even fear and that cunning will play in political leadership will still keeping in mind certain bedrock Christian principles. So I do find, especially among the women writers and need, I think, to really use cunning and craftiness directed towards proper ends to achieve their objectives because often they're not necessarily the ones who have the military armies that they're commanding. So they have to use their brains and not just the brawn that many of the male kind of military conquerors would rely upon. Right, right. Do you have any theories personally about why the prevalence of female statesmen may have declined in recent centuries?

Well, I mean, I think it's true that the majority of statesmen, even historically, have been male. You know, we can, we have with the vantage point of history, we can look back and you can name, you know, Theodora in Byzantium or Catherine the Great in Russia or Elizabeth in, you know, England. And that's kind of, we're looking over the period of foul. of years and picking them out. And maybe it's just the fact that America is too, you know, too young. We've only been around for a couple hundred years. So that may have something to do with it. But it's a good question. I would, I could offer some answers, but I think it's something that I'd like to probably think and ponder a bit more before jumping into that conversation.

Not fair enough. You talk a little bit about, you talked earlier about some of the statesmen that maybe we could call the work conservative, but their views certainly weren't. How do we consume the work of popular, successful statesmen that hold views that are counter to the worldviews of the morals that we hold now? So the question is, how do we, how should we think about contemporary statesmen that hold a different viewpoint than we might share as conservatives? More about the ancient statesmen that we may look at and go, oh, I don't know if I agree with that, or he ran an empire that was not within the Christian context of what would be moral. Like, how do we look at statesmen like that that maybe we're successful or able to gain a lot of power or do a lot of good for their state,

but maybe didn't do it in the way that we would prefer? Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a, I think it's important to understand. that the world, for all the similarities, we have, you know, human nature's constant throughout the ages, you know, there are very different political contexts in, in the ancient world that I think we should not neglect. You know, for one, there was no real separation of church and state, right? These things were pretty much wholly fused together in many, in nearly all kind of ancient context. There's a distinction in the Jewish tradition and, you know, Christianity complicates this

picture. But so that's one, one context. Another aspect of it is that, you know, in the ancient world, order was really seen as a precondition for peace and for justice. And so a lot of what these statesmen are trying to bring about is kind of the first business of effective governance, governance, which is kind of establishing order, right? And that requires often force to do so. And so that process can be a very messy one and a morally ambiguous one. And so I think that working towards establishing order, especially if you're looking at more nomadic peoples before kind of agricultural farming and things of that nature took place, it's just really important to understand the fact that that drive to establish.

order was sort of a precondition for lots of the, you know, the peace, the justice, the other things that we would expect from a healthy political regime. And then lastly, I mean, I think it's also very hard to, being a statesman is hard, right? It's hard. There's not a lot of saints who were statesmen because they often have to make decisions, you know, they're resisting internal enemies, external enemies, and they're having to make very quick decisions. decisions that affect the livelihood of many people. And often, you know, it looks or can look in certain contexts like a brutal choice was made. So I tend to give them a little bit of grace, understanding that their historic circumstances and

contexts were different. That certainly doesn't excuse, you know, lots of types of behavior. But I think it's just important to kind of take things with that grain of salt. And really, you know, what I'm looking for is those enduring. either the enduring virtues or the enduring vices that really have stood the test of time when you look at a great leader and seeing what you would like to imitate and what you'd like to avoid in our own day. Interesting. Thank you for that answer. My final question for you is where can people purchase gateway to statesmanship or go to learn more about it? So the best spot to purchase it is to go to Amazon.com and look up

gateway to statesmanship. And the second best place would be to do two things. Follow me on Twitter, on X at at Johnny Berkka where you can see me tweeting about the book or go to isi.org. That's isi.org, short for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and you can see all of the

different programs that we fully fund for undergraduate students and faculty members to really learn more about the fundamentals of Western civilization and America. Thank you so much for coming on today. Our guest has been John A. Burkka, the president and chief executive officer of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and author of Gatesway to Statesmanship.

And I'm Jillian Parks on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.