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First Things Podcast

The End of Civilization?

First Things Podcast

First Things

Religion & Spirituality

4.6699 Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode, Tracy Lee Simmons joins Mark Bauerlein to discuss his book “Being Civilized: A Few Lines Amid the Breakage.” Music by Jack Bauerlein.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Tracy Lee Simmons is a long-time contributor to National Review, the Weekly Standard, and many other periodicals.

0:17.4

He is the author, too, of Climbing Parnassus, a new Apologia for Greek and Latin.

0:25.0

We now have a compilation of his writings with the title on Being Civilized, A Few Lines Amid the Breakage.

0:31.0

That's our topic today. Welcome, Mr. Simmons.

0:33.8

Thank you so much, Mark.

0:35.9

All right. Now, you begin with a question about what makes a civilized person.

0:40.3

Now, that isn't really a frequent inquiry we hear here in the 21st century in the digital social media age.

0:48.3

Is that sort of a lost notion for many people at least?

0:52.3

Well, probably. It's also the age of these campus protests and so

0:57.3

forth, where the whole idea of civilization is probably being called into question anyway.

1:03.8

Some people don't want to be civilized and they say so. But there's an advantage to that,

1:10.1

which is that the camps can at least separate and we can clarify what everyone believes more easily and decide which way we want to go.

1:20.6

Civilization seems like a boring idea to a lot of people, but that's because they've had the luxury to take it for granted.

1:30.0

I have. Everyone has. But now we're seeing the effects of anti-civilization or non-civilization,

1:39.2

and they're not pretty in their earlier forms.

1:44.8

So it's a good time, probably a propitious time, to think about what the nature of civilization really is, how it's built.

1:53.8

It's not something that is simply taught.

1:56.2

It's a set of habits.

1:58.0

It's dispositions that are encouraged. It's a much broader thing. You simply can't

2:04.5

take a course in Civ 101 and come out a civilized man or woman. You know what? I remember

2:12.3

when the term civilization would often appear on college catalogs and syllabi and courses in Western civilization were frequent.

2:25.3

And you know, there was a terminological change that happened. I think over the course of the 80s, maybe it was, maybe by 1990 it was complete where we talk about culture, not civilization.

...

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