When I was asked to do this, I think Jonathan and a couple others wondered what I would do.

And I wondered what I would do as well.

I believe that this is about the most important topic that we can get into in our time, intellectually,

culturally. I think that the idea of human nature is key to this. I brought up the phrase of human consciousness. I think the developments

in the morning newspapers indicate that war is at the core of everything. It seems to me throughout

history, Barry Strauss knows about this better than anyone.

War makes things happen. War generates ideas. Ideas come out of war. And it's ideas that create wars.

Why are there wars?

You can find that dealt with in Herodotus,

very amusingly in many ways, but profoundly.

So trying to get at that is what I'd like to talk about today.

A broad long little book by Marshall Siles, if you know of him, University of Chicago, anthropologist. The title of this is called The Western Illusion of Human Nature.

There isn't any such thing as human nature in silence.

I would go at it, I am going to go at it from a point of view of rhetoric, as in

if there's a human nature that is fundamental, it's

we are the

language animal.

And you can

see

across

antiquity and into our time,

the rhetoric of a

...