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Young Heretics

Ep. 9: The Beginning of the End

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Education, Society & Culture

4.94.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2020

⏱️ 72 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

To prevent our own republic from failing, we must look to the wisdom of Western history and find insights from moments similar to our own. If only our elite professors would pay attention! In this episode of Young Heretics, Spencer Klavan explores the "Gracchan disturbance," a turbulent and dramatic period in Roman history, to find wisdom for our own unsettled times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome to the Young Heretics episode in which I explain absolutely everything that is happening to you right now.

0:11.3

What is happening right now is the new country is falling apart. America where I am filming this and recording this and probably where you are, if you're listening to me,

0:19.1

America is in a profound moment of civil unrest and turmoil.

0:25.0

I don't think that anybody will be surprised to hear you say this.

0:28.4

There is, going on, there has been, looting and riding going on. People are tearing down statues. People are having convulsions over whether or not they should have a town named Columbus because Christopher Columbus, they feel was evil or they're tearing down statues of Lincoln and the founding fathers were all evil and so forth.

0:46.2

This is not a small or minor thing. This is a tremendous and kind of terrifying moment.

0:55.1

If you're a conservative like me, you have a very specific sort of outlook on this, which is basically that it is all terrible.

1:03.6

But even if you're not a conservative and you're listening to me, you have to look at this and think, well, we're not in a good state.

1:11.3

You can take whatever political view that you want on the present moment, but nobody can look at this and think like, yes, this is a healthy America.

1:20.8

This is America where everything is fine and we're all happy.

1:24.4

That is actually the point of this episode because it occurred to me as I was watching this unfolding American catastrophe that if we had an academy in this country,

1:40.0

if there were healthy universities and colleges out there teaching, this would be the academy's moment to shine because this is the perfect time when you want to take a step back out of the headlines and think, well, it's a momentous time in our history.

1:57.3

What wisdom can we draw from the past, from similar moments in our history that might sort of help us to understand and to whether this moment.

2:04.9

That would be the job of actual academics and actual professors if we had them.

2:10.9

Instead, in Cambridge, there are professors literally tweeting things like, white lives don't matter.

2:18.8

Part of the premise of this show is the academy is the bad guys.

2:23.8

The academy is part of the problem.

2:27.4

One of the things that we are doing here is we are offering one another.

2:31.7

I am offering you and we are sharing the classical education that we all should have had, but a lot of us got denied because things are breaking down.

2:42.3

So, utterly in the academy.

2:45.8

That's what we're going to do.

2:47.4

We're going to do what academics should be doing right now, which is looking out at the turmoil in America and trying to understand it,

...

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