We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to the
premium version of our website, The Federalist dot Com as well. Today we're
joined by author Anthony Esslin. He's out with a new book called The Lies
of Our Time, but is prolific also a distinguished professor of Humanities at Tailey's
College, speaking of being prolific more than thirty books, more than thirty books,
and also publishes a web magazine with his wife called Word and Song on
language, poetry, music and classic films, and it aims to reintroduce people
to the good, the true, and the beautiful. Anthony, thank you
for joining the show. Oh, thank you for having me. It's a
great honor, of course. Now, in addition to this new book,
The Lies of Our Time, you actually spend a lot of your time translating
works of classic literature. Could you ask for a little bit about that,
Yeah, translating and actually writing my own poetry too. I've written a wide
variety of things. But yeah, I take for granted that our schools have
have done such a such a terrible job of introducing young people to their own
cultural heritage, that you know, it became incumbent upon me to produce works
and translations, but also additions that college freshman college sophomores would find convenient to
you. So the additions that you can use as teaching tools for people who
my Gosha, they're encountering the divine comedy that they might as well have been
They might as well have been shot to Mars or someplace like that in a
completely different universe. And so it's been my task to in part that's one
of the things that I do, to try to try to keep the fires
lit into light fires where they've gone out. This is really great and wonderful
stuff, and it should belong to every educated person all. It belongs to
all of us in the West, our cultural heritage. How does that work?
And I think for you this is probably very fertile ground. How does
that work? Sort of? How did it inform the work in the lives
of our times? You've written a lot about Western civilization in general, the
translation the attempt to preserve and keep the flame of that kind of literature a
live. How does that how did that work kind of bleed into the work
in the Lives of Our Time? Well, one of the things that is
most harmful for us as a civilization, especially for young people in school,
is this crazy idea. And I write about this in the book The Lives
of Our Time. It's this crazy idea that if you are going to study
the past, you study it with an aim to expose its absurdities, its
mistakes, it's cruelties, and so forth. You don't really have anything in
there to admire unless by happenstance they came upon something that we now do.
But as for things that mark them out as different from us, to the
extent that they are different from us, there to be disdained, ignored,
shelved bypassed, right, we were pasted all that we don't need, don't
need to learn anything from them right now. In the course of my career
as a professor, I've been a professor since nineteen eighty eight. I've had
the privilege, I've had the great joy of teaching literature and philosophy and history
and the arts from around the time of the Gilgamesh Epic, which is over
two thousand years old, two thousand years before Christ two thousand BC up to
the presence. I've been teaching three thousand and four thousand years of literature and
the arts, and philosophy and theology and so on. And I love to
do this. And one of the great things about it is that I show
to I get to show to young people. Look, there are things about
human nature and the the nature of a healthy society that you can learn from
Homer's Odyssey that we have forgotten now that we have either forgotten or we downplay.
But they're there, they're true, and it's very exciting to recover these
things and say, well, you know, how about that. I mean,
it's onto something there. I never thought of it that way. It's
going on a wonderful tour of different worlds. And yet they are in some
important ways your own world, because they're your ancestors, so they do and
they do not speak your language. They do so they're accessible to you.
I mean, you've heard of Odysseus, but they're not. They don't share
your assumptions about the world and about life. And in that way, they
do have They're not always wrong, they're often quite right, and they do
have things to teach us. And when you open young people up to that,
it's very exciting to see what can happen. I see it happen with
my students at day least. I've seen it happen over the course of all
these years, since nineteen eighty eight. And it's a constant in what I
write about, right, I mean the lies of our time. I keep
urging people, you want to get away from the lies of our time.
One of the means is to study other times. Is there a sense in
which people's ignorance is being preyed upon by those who are selling the lies?
Oh? Yeah, I mean absolutely. That's the question that you ask.
It's a cynical question, but it's a powerful question. Who profits from this?
Right? So, for instance, who profits from the insane lie that
no human culture has ever accepted that there are are there are no distinguishing features
other than a couple of little, minor anatomical details between men and women.
Right now, that's just complete not sence. No culture has ever believed it.
We don't really even believe it now. If you watch how people actually
live how they talk to each other and so forth. But we are made
to say that we believe it, we base public policy on it, and
we do so to our harm. Im it's an engagement with unreality. But
somebody benefits from it. Now, the common good doesn't benefit from it,
but some sector of the population, they benefit from it. In general,
we might say that illegitimate rulers or governors benefit by keeping their people tame,
distracted, and ignorant. That's as general rule throughout human history. But I
mean, if you ask in particular who benefits from this lie, well,
and a lot of academic feminists do, I suppose, but people whose job
is predicated upon making sure that uh, I don't know that that some experiment
in indistinguishability between male and female goes on, and that its results are massaged
so that we can say, oh, mostly it's not a big deal.
Those people have whole careers that are devoted to this, uh, to this
falsehood. I mean they have to they have to change their lives. I
hope that that. Yeah. I mean, depending upon the depending upon the
falsehood, we get different groups of people who benefit. But in general,
uh, illegitimate governors benefit from an ignorant populace, And could you talk to
specifically about some of the lies of our time as it pertains to beauty,
especially somebody who spends so much time immersed in again the preservation of and in
the beauty of literature itself. What lies are we being told about beauty?
And what a fact are they having on our civilization? Yeah? Okay,
so you know, the funny thing about some of these is that what people
say is one thing, but what you catch them actually doing maybe quite another.
So, for example, people will say, because they've been taught to
say it, that the the abstract sculptures of Henry Moore, which like enormous
lumps of bronze, that they are just as good as Michaelangelo Donatello and so
on. They're taught to say something like that. But if if you actually
look at what they what they want to surround themselves within their own homes,
it's not going to be vague, shapeless slumps of bronze. But the trouble
is that public policy is beholden to this lie, and we've ended up with
a lot of really bad public architecture and public art, and it has helped
to impoverish our common lives. I noticed that a certain certain very famous television
journalist was recently in Russia and he viewed the subways in I don't know if
it was Moscow, one of the Russian cities, and they were not only
just immaculate, but they were actually quite attractive. They were beautiful, beautiful
subways. And we used to have beautiful train stations and even beautiful subway stations
in the United States, but having bought into the modernists, huha, we
destroyed a lot of that, deliberately destroyed, and replaced it with things that
are disheartening, dispiriting, frankly, sometimes unsettling. They even cause your metabolism
to go creepy. And we had to pretend that they're grand and wonderful,
but nobody actually, I think nobody actually really believes it. It's as if
it's as if the worst of Soviet architecture had taken over in our midst and
for what for what purpose? I mean, because because it's simply said,
well, this sort of thing is just as good as those more traditional forms
of architecture that you love so much, and I defy people to prove it
by living in houses that look like miniature versions of the public architectitecture that we've
defaced our cities with. They don't no matter what side of funding the war
in Ukraine you fall on. Enough is enough. The watch Dot on Wall
Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day Chris helps unpack the connection between politics
and the economy and how it affects your wallet. Conress is taking your tax
dollars, but they don't want to offset it by cutting anything else. They'll
just throw it onto the pile of trillions of more debt. Cut it from
somewhere else in the budget. Whether it's happening in DC or down on Wall
Street, it's affecting you financially. Be informed. Check out the watch Doot
on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you
get your podcasts. I'm curious when people say they see, for example,
modern architecture as beautiful, and it's the sort of kind of going to do
my best version of the devil's advocate argument here a little advocate and say you
know that this is the cis heter Norman of white male perspective of beauty that
excludes Eastern perspectives and is just cherishing, you know, the the Greco Roman
tradition at the expense of others. And it's right this idea that beauty is
subjective fundamentally. Do they think that their architecture is beautiful, that their art
is beautiful, or have they convinced themselves that it's beautiful. Uh? Sometimes
I think they don't care if it's beautiful, or they have rejected beauty as
a category itself, so they they don't intend for it to be beautiful.
They intend for it to be unsettling, so to speak. This is their
word, not mine. Transgressive right. By the way, much modern architecture
is really beautiful, and I might even say that some modernist architecture is pretty
darn impressive. I've got I don't have complaints about the the Art Deco modernism
that produced the Empire State Building, for instance. Okay, I mean there
are there are great things even in even in a tradition that maybe played itself
out a long time ago. There there were things to be said about it.
There were there were great things that were done in it. But the
objection that that this is peculiarly Western, we just will not stand against any
real engagement with For instance, the East Japanese houses are quite beautiful in their
peculiar way, in their particular way, but they aren't like glass and steel
shells that we are made to work in in cities like New York or Chicago.
Uh. I mean, take a look at what the Japanese build for
themselves, or or the culture of India or or China. Okay, you
will find the same principles of beauty, not not the same working out of
those principles, but the same principles in a Chinese pagoda as you will find
in a Gothic cathedral. Not the same working out, They're not going to
look the same, but the same principles are in play. And if you
begin to appreciate what makes the Gothic cathedral beautiful, you will have miles and
miles of a head start and understanding why the Chinese pagoda is beautiful. So
it won't wash. Don't nobody better play that game with me? Because I've
studied too many things? Yeah? Absolutely, another Actually in that vein,
because you have spent so much time mired in history, how did the lies
of our time compare with the lies of previous times? Well, one of
the problems in our time is that I see previous times, you couldn't stray
too far from reality because you're very survival depended on getting fundamental things more or
less right. Right. So if you let's suppose that you in you say,
hey, you know what, here's what we're going to do. We're
going to move out to this territory called Iowa. We're gonna farm it.
But I have this ideological belief that there's no there's no difference between men and
women. Really, So my wife is going to handle the plow exactly the
same number of hours as I handled the plow. In fact, we're going
to do exactly the same things for exactly the same time. There's going to
be absolutely no difference between It's except when maybe she is with childs and childbirth
and so on, then we'll we'll fudge a little bit then, But otherwise
it's back to the plow for her. Okay, well that doesn't work.
Okay, Uh, just a week of it, a few days of it
will show that it's stupid, it's impracticable. It's reality is not obliged,
that that earth is not obliged, that two hundred pounds rock is not obliged.
That big ox that needs to be manhandled is not obliged to respect your
ideology. So people, people in all places, at all times, have
developed folk traditions, ways of living that allow them to survive and to thrive,
to you know, to get married, to have a bunch of kids,
have those kids survive into adulthood, get grandchildren. Get decent food on
the table, a leak free roof over your head, and warm clothes on
your back. They couldn't go too far into madness. We can because we're
wealthy. We can engage in all kinds of experiments because we can get away
with them. We don't have to worry about the hay rotting before we can
get it in, before we can bail it and get it safe in the
hay loft. We don't have to worry about things like that described as do
you think do you agree with people who describe that as decadence? You know
it's well, it can It can lead very quickly to decadence with us.
I mean, I look at the various arts and I don't see any of
them right now that are thriving. There's a variety of reasons why not,
I think, But in one case after another, the decadence is marked by
a forgetting of past forms, a loss of know how that is strange when
it comes along with in some other regards, are very sophisticated development of technology,
but it's been accompanied by a sort of subterranean loss of technology, loss
of know how. I mean technology in the very broadest sense, knowing how
to do certain things, okay, with your hands or with your back,
or with your mind. And if you combine this with this overweening confidence that
just because we have television and radio now that all the other areas of human
knowledge and human wisdom must have advanced along with that, that's just crazy.
But if you take that overconfident and presumptuous attitude, then you're on the road
to being a very stupid, very stupid people. And then you begin to
see a falling off in quality, in quantity and quality and range and variety
in all the arts. And I think I think we're in the middle of
that. Now. I can pick an art, a poetry, and I'll
show you. You know, if you went back one hundred years, you'll
not just find a higher quality, you find that more people are influenced by
more people read it, more people commit these things to heart, and there's
a broader variety of kinds out there, broader scope, broader variety, and
what's popular is of a much higher quality. And I think that that's the
case in one art after another in our time. Yeah, And I'm so
curious as you work with students and you probably we see, you know,
what this has done to the kind of high tech world, has done to
people's even ability to process beauty and truth and all of that. And you
know, as somebody who writes poetry just sits down and participates in the most
primal forms of art. I don't mean that pejoratively. I mean it's one
of the most basically, it's the universal human art. And what is that
like? You know, do you think that it'll be possible or it'll be
common for you know, people like your students' age, as they grow older
and as people in younger generations grow older and their attention spans have been so
captured by technology and truncated, will people be able to write beautiful poetry?
And what's it like for you doing that in such a high tech society as
well? Well, I'll tell you I answered the first part of question.
First, we are in danger of raising generations of people who cannot read it.
I don't mean, of course, that they can't decipher the sounds of
alphabet, letters of the alphabet and pronounce words in the page. I mean,
you know, if you've got the attention span of a flea on math
amphetamines, you're not going to read a novel by Sir Walter Scott. You
don't have the quiet in your mind to permit you to do that. It's
like asking if you can, if you can read a book. If someone
is pinching you with needles at random, on an average of every one and
a half seconds on this or that part of your body at random, Well,
nobody can read a book if that's happening. Okay, Well, mentally
that's what's happening. You're going to produce people who are who are who cannot
read a good book. Okay. That's the first part of the question.
The second part is what have I had to do? Well, I'll tell
you when I wrote in my book length poem one Hundredfold, centered on the
Life of Christ. It's a collection of one hundred poems of three different varieties,
lyrics, hymns, and long dramatic monologues. I had to write an
introduction to it, to enable people, people with goodwill right, to enable
people to read the work, to introduce them to how English poetry works,
to the kinds of things that poets do and why they do them. In
other words, I had to kind of write an introduction to poetry to put
it as an introduction to the work that I wrote. Now, had I
done this one hundred years ago, people would have laughed at me. They
said, what do you think? We are idiots? You don't need to
do this right, What do you do this for? You go back one
hundred and thirty one hundred and forty years to the popular magazines that I collect
from the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties. You would embarrass yourself if you thought that
your readers needed to have French translated for them. So in a popular magazine
where you'd be following along with Mark Twain's selections from Huckleberry Finn or with the
his serialized Connecticut Yankee king Arthur's Court, it's a very popular magazine. If
you have a passage in French, you're writing an article and you're quoting some
French author, you just give the passage in French. Nobody translates it because
it's taken for granted that anybody reading that article will be able to figure out
what French means. Right. That's now to help people read the poem,
I've got to teach them what poetry is and how it works in English.
And I mean, I'm pleased to do that. I'm happy to do that.
I think it's necessary. But it's a shame that it has to be
necessary. And you know, I kind of want to ask about that tension
you were talking about it earlier between living in one of the most high information
societies, well the most high information society technologically that's ever existed, and being
so susceptible to lies. The lives of our time, the lives of our
high tech time, the lives of our high information time. Why are lies
so easily sold in an age where you know, it feels like there's so
much truth at our fingertips. Well, we need to draw a distinction.
That word information is a funny word. Let's back it up and say that
what's at our fingertips is quite a lot of data. Okay, So,
for instance, I have a funny hobby. I want to this is just
what I did yesterday. I want to find out how good a certain picture
was at holding men on base or picking them off. So I go to
a website and I find out I found out that he picked off one hundred
and forty six runners. But it's amazing, And I find out how many
people stole bases against him, how many were caught stealing, and so on
over how many innings I can do that right? Data is at your fingertips.
Information is a little bit different thing because it presumes an intelligible form,
and that that's where the devil lies. Because what people get from clicking here,
clicking there is they get. They get bits and scraps of data or
of people's reaction to data, but they don't get they don't get anything like
an organized form that some intelligent person has carefully, uh put the data into
in order to make best rational sense of them. So it's it's an illusion
of information usually. Uh, I mean, how many people really trust what
what they read in Wikipedia? Uh? Well, maybe they do trust,
but they shouldn't. There there's a there's a mathematician named uh Murray Murray.
I'm not sure I pronounce this. His last name gel man G E L
L, hyphen m A N and and he pointed out something interesting. He
said, when whenever you read an article in a newspaper or magazine, and
now this goes in spades for you read something on on online and it's something
that is in your field of expertise. So let's say I read an article
that I bump into online on some Renaissance English poet. I can tell right
away that the article is full of errors. The person is out to lunch,
they don't know what they're talking about. I can see, I can
see all the mistakes. They're laid bare before me. But then the same
person going to an article on a different field, let's say let's say climate,
the climate of Europe in the Middle Ages, Okay, the same person
will trust what he reads in the same kind of article. When he doesn't,
it's the gel Man effect. He doesn't make that leap that he knows
when he reads articles in his field that they're no they range from uh,
you know, pretty good, down to adequate, down to absolutely full of
nonsense. But when they go to another field, they it's as if they
leave that experience behind and they lend credibility to what they read. But when
somebody who is an expert in medieval history will look at the same articles say
this is after lunch, this is this is crazy. So uh, I
don't know. Maybe maybe it is all the easier to deceive us because things
are presented as the results of experts having done investigation, when in fact it's
not so. It's so some investigation mixed up with rank assumptions that needn't be
true, mixed up with some bad logic, some some sheer mistakes, things
that aren't true at all, just a jumble that that that jumble characterizes pretty
much anything that you will encounter that rises any distance beyond that of hard data.
And I trust Wikipedia to tell me how many miles it is from one
end of Interstate ninety to the other, and what towns goes through, et
cetera. That I can trust Wikipedia for. But something that involves actually,
I mean real intelligence, not so much. Absolutely fascinating. Once again.
The book is called Lies of Our Time, The Lies of Our Time by
Anthony Esslyn. Thank you so much for joining the show, well, thank
you for having me. I hope we can do this again. Absolutely,
it was very very interesting, super super appreciative of your time. I'm a
Kashinski culture editor here at the Federalist movie back soon until then the lovers of
freedom and anxious fool fray earn a faderies, and then it faded away. Mm hmm