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So go and get some books. They had a kind of culture that produced a sort of creativity that led to many of the things that we think of as Western, and that have driven much of world history over the past 5,000 years. I'm sure this book will be controversial. I found it extraordinarily thought-provoking.
It truly made me question many of the things that I believed. And I hope that it receives a wide readership. So without further ado, here's the interview. Hi Ricardo.
Hi, Marcia. How are you today? I'm doing good. Good.
I'm glad to hear that today we're talking to Ricardo Duchain about his terrific new book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. This book, as I was telling Ricardo in the pre-interview, is a monumental achievement. It is obviously the result of many, many years of very deep thought and study. It is not likely that one arrives at a conclusion or a set of conclusions like the ones that Ricardo has arrived at.
They are, to put it mildly controversial, I would say. And as someone who has, on occasion, not many occasions, found himself in a situation where he had discovered something that did not conform to the conventional wisdom. I respect Ricardo very much for speaking out about this. It's the data are what they are and not as we, it might please us to imagine them.
And so it takes a brave person in addition to a great scholar, I think, to forward these arguments that he makes in the book. So I think he deserves our respect. First of all, in that, this is an important part of democratic discourse. I think it was John Stuart Mill that said you have to get all the ideas out there if you're going to find the right ones.
So, so, Kudos to Ricardo. Ricardo, why don't you begin the interview before we talk about the book by telling us a little bit about yourself? Well, as you can see from the accent, my mother tongue is Spanish. I was born in Puerto Rico, which is a small island in the Caribbean.
And I came to Canada in my late teens and completed the last years of high school in Montreal, Canada. And so I completed also my university education in Montreal, except the PhD, which I did in Toronto. And now I'm here in New Brunswick, which is in the Atlantic side of Canada. And so in many ways, I was in the American area and I have been living here now for over 30 years or so, I think.
And that's what my life has been here essentially since the mid or late teens. And so about the book, how I came to write it. Why don't you tell us the origins of the book? Well, I had always wanted to do a book on Europe, on the West, but I wasn't sure how to approach it.
When I did my PhD dissertation, I did it on the famous Marxist debate on the transition to capitalism, the quality, transition from field of this into capitalism. So that's why I wrote the PhD on. And I probably saw articles from it, but I wasn't really satisfied with what I had done. One of the reasons was that I was increasingly moving away from Marxist view of history and reading Max Weber and reading some other thinkers like Charles Thierry, Michael Mann and so on.
And I felt that the transition, that whole way of approaching Europe was inadequate in complete, that it tended to restrict our understanding of Europe in terms of class, relationships, and to build a state in terms of which class dominated it. And so I started reading and reading more and became, if you like, increasingly ververian. At the same time, I was also always taken by Hager, and there's lots of Hager, which I saw quite seriously while I was doing my PhD. I started with H.S.
Paris, who is a very renowned authority on Hager in the English speaking world. And I think that I would say that Hager too came to play a big role in what I was thinking about European history. If I could just very briefly say what was his importance. It was that he allowed me to see that Europe was not just about economic development, about technology, about the spread of power around the world, but that there was something related to the development of ideas, the way he connected, what happened in ancient Greece, what happened in Rome to live up Europe, early modern Europe, all the way to the 19th century.
He thought this connection, that the rumor, attention, that this intellectual development was not for teachers disconnected, but it was something that was at work here. And that to understand Europe, you have to see this entire intellectual history. It wasn't simply a matter of looking at the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. And anyone who reads the book will notice right away that for me, Europe was, can never be reduced to one epical, one phenomenon, be it a reformation, or the industrial revolution, but it is that sequence, that connection between major events and intellectual development.
So I would say that this is the way in which Hager began to influence my thinking. But it took me a long time to really think how I would write a book on Western civilization. I think one of the amazing elements was that I couldn't comprehend what started this. There was no answer in Hager, at least at that time I couldn't find an answer that he would give me that was a disactor, as to how this dialectic of the mind evolved in Western Europe.
And about five years ago, I would say that Nietzsche began to influence me. I began to see him possibly a thinker that kind of saw that behind intellectual movements, behind ideas, this subterranean irrational passion that forces. And there is something of this inherent, as you can see from the book, but with Nietzsche, I got a sense that he, what D1 thinker who best articulated what I now call the Istocratic character of Western civilization. And so what I did next was to historicize Nietzsche to try and find this artistocratic element.
I mean, I see that it is a product mentality in Nietzsche, but I don't see the sociology. I don't see the history. He does go back to the piece of product and he does give us many insights on the piece of product. But it was only when I began to think about Hindu-Rukians and the possibilities of this group that scholars generally were not too keen to write about, speak about, which is why practically most of the books on Hindu-Rukians are in the linguistic section and they're not in the pre-history section.
So I started then about four or five years I was thinking about the Indoor-Rukians, and from there it was like, yes, this is the, if you like, the starting point of the word. It became more and more obvious to me. And this is what I tried to do in one of the chapters, there were the last two chapters I concentrate on that. So when that came together, that last piece that is the Indoor-Rukians, I felt comfortable to start seriously thinking about writing this book.
So that's how I would say I came together. I want to direct the discussion initially toward two things. One is the book doesn't actually begin with the Indoor-Rukians, as you just pointed out. It begins with the political context within which I guess world history and the West's place in it now resides.
And it is both a scholarly and a political context which the findings of your book quite disagree with. Yes. And so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about what has happened to the 19th century notion that the West or particularly Western Europe was really quite different than the rest of the world. Yes.
You were to make reference to the first chapter, which is I think possibly the longest chapter. And it is an effort to trace the ideological roots of what I call multicultural world history and move away from the idea that the West was a unique civilization. In some ways this was also what drove me to write this book. I wasn't aware of it, but around the late 1990s and early 2000s and 2001 I started realizing that people had by and large with academic world put out or seriously challenged the all Eurocentric model which I took for granted even in my dissertation.
The Marxist debate on the origins of capitalism is in many ways that Eurocentric model is said that something in Europe was different and that was the fact that capitalism emerged in Europe first. And I took it for granted that Europe was different at all. And the same thing when I moved into the Bavarian scholarship. But after realizing by the late 1990s that new group had emerged, which had seriously challenged this and I call it a multicultural or revisionist historians.
And so in a series of articles that preceded this book, I took on their work, the work of Kenneth Comedance, Hop Song, Heji Frank, Patrick Manning and others. And I realized that they were very, very influential and all and all that that multiculturalism had become almost Eurofacial policy across academia and that it was being really pushed out and misinterpreted. So one of the things that I did first was to examine this literature to take it seriously, to look at their evidence some months every day, just looking at every factor of statement they made. I decided that it was necessary to refute their arguments.
That I did more and more research. I couldn't believe that people were accepting this argument because however well they were constructed, the evidence really was not there to support their arguments. So yet in the first chapter, I addressed the right of multiple travel history. And in subsequent chapters, I go about refuting the arguments of A.D.
Frank Bowman and others. I'm on all of the things that I do in that first chapter where I anticipate some of the things I'm going to say later. And another thing I do as well is that I also observe that these phenomena of multiculturalism have deep roots in the academic and intellectual history of the West. And I trace this back to anthropologies to the critical school of Aborno and Holchheimer and others.
I look into a whole range of older, but you might say, well, it's not really a fact. It's a very influential movement. And feminism, anthropological relativism, both modernism and I could see all the connections there. And so this is one of the things I also addressed in the first chapter.
All these things came together and could be viewed as an assault on the identity of West end civilization. I want to ask the following question or make the following clarification just in fairness to you and the people who will read the book. The points that you make are really two. One is that this historiography has a political context.
That is, it is associated with a partier set of ideas that were seeking power and gained power. But even more than that, I think, and importantly for the listeners of the show, you say that, I guess what I would call the people who claimed the West early on was not very different. And you mentioned Pomerans and a bunch of other folks are simply wrong on the facts that they have empirically, as historians, regardless of our political stripe, that they are simply wrong about this. Could you talk a little bit about what they say and why they're wrong?
Well, you're right. I mean, I tell that I didn't want to challenge them strictly from an ideological perspective. And also I didn't want to read today what had been said before they came along. Pomerans take on Eric Young's famous book, The European Miracle.
He uses a book as a model of what the Eurocentric consensus is. And I challenged that as well. I say that you cannot take one book and say this is a model. If only because there are many historians on Euro, on the Renaissance, they're a formation of the enlightenment that might be part of that model as well.
In any case, he uses Eric Young's book and tries to refute it. And Pomeran is quite effective. And this is one reason he became famous after he wrote his book, The Great Divergence, in the year 2000. And challenging him took me a long time.
I had to go through all the claims that he made and I had to find other sources. I felt he did not consult that questioned his arguments. And I would say that really when it all comes down to it, the basic difference is that I think that by the 1700s, in one particular, about some other regions in Europe as well, it's showing clear signs that it is moving towards a part of the industrial society. Whereas Pomeran's age friend, including that ghost on their flight differences between them, they argue that it is only after the 1750s and perhaps as late as 1828 in 30s, that we can see definite signs that Europe is breaking away from the Macucian path.
So they argue that Europe up until then was moving along the same economic trajectory as many other regions in Asia were. And they do bring effective arguments to show that there were similar trajectories in these two areas of the world. So what I try to do, and this is what I spent most of my empirical effort, is to show that in England, Europe was clearly moving away from the Macucian world. And when we say Macucian, we mean a world in which the pre-industrial economy was reached limits to growth because output could not outpace the growth of population.
And they would be declining returns in productivity and so on. So this gets into a lot of details about how we could put up productivity, labor productivity, innovations and so on. But as you add all these things up, it seems to me that England is moving away in 1700s. It is doing so an accelerating pace by the third quarter of the 18th century and clearly so by the 19th century.
Now the next thing that I do in this is in chapter 2 and 3, but I also show that this movement away from the president in the past, that it is very difficult to be linked the scientific revolution and what Joao Mokir calls industrial enlightenment. The industrial enlightenment is a term that Joao Mokir uses to link the industrial revolution of the 19th century with the scientific revolution of roughly 17th century. And what it means essentially is that Europeans are using some of these ideas, these ideas on mechanical motion and so on to think of new ways to create instruments, to find new sources of energy and so on. And they are doing this before the 1700s.
Now when you look at the economic indicators, the total output in the economy in general, did it really increase right away? Well, no, it didn't. It was a long drawn out movement. And it is only by the 19th century that you see a sort of a normal indicator that are also decisive, divergent from the rest of the world.
You see a few of these in the 1700s and you may not see any of these before the 1700s. But you do see many things. You see the exploration of the world, navigation, and you can use all the indicators such as how many European ships navigated to Asia. What rate were they increasing in the number of trips they took to Asia and you look at the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, and you see an acceleration in the number of coming from Europe to other areas of the world.
So this is sort of the kind of thing I do to counter a moment. Yeah. Yeah, let's move to what I think is the next step in your argument against the revisionists, or the multiculturalists, or I'm not quite sure what to call them. I don't want to call them names or anything like that.
Many of them are great scholars and in fairness to them and in fairness to you, you do acknowledge that. You acknowledge their contributions to this. So this is a, I think, a pretty friendly scholarly debate. Yeah.
You say that they are wrong that Europe was not or did not show signs of being quite different as early as 1700 that you believe that they did and that they believe that they didn't, but they are wrong. And then you begin tracing the origins of this. And I think really this gets to the nub of your, what I think is really quite radical argument. And that is that what is behind this obvious divergence in your mind in the West is in fact a set of ideas and a way of being rather than material, I guess what we might generally call material forces.
Yeah, I do that. There's a series of steps. The first one is that I meet them in their own terrain, the derivationist. I look at the economics of Europe's difference and I show that just looking at it in economic terms, there is no question as I just said that by the 1700 Europe is on a different path.
Then after that, I not only connect that economic divergence to this scientific revolution and certain other aspects of European history in the early modern era, but I also start arguing that the industrial revolution should not be the focal point and I wish we start distinguishing Europe from the rest of the world, that we should consider all the developments. And for example, I would say that the scientific revolution taking bites without having to connect that to industrial revolution is at a very, at a very, at a very, very, there is no scientific revolution elsewhere in the world. It is a whole new way of looking at the cosmos, of looking at the loss of nature and so on. So we kind of just look at Galileo, Newton, and a large number of all the individuals that participated in this series of modern ways of thinking about nature and just judge these in terms of whether they contributed to the industrial revolution, but we have to judge them in their own terms and think of it as a whole new way of thinking about the universe.
And so I do this with a reformation. I do this with the Renaissance. I look at the printing revolution. I look at the paper revolution of the medieval era.
I trace the paper revolution, you think, a major work by what is his name here, Arro Berman, law and revolution. Yeah. Yeah. So he connects the paper revolution to the right of the modern state, modern law, the separation of church and state.
So I open up the whole debate and having opened up the whole debate, having looked up what Ron did that was also very important, the invention of law, to use a very general expression, then what Greece did, then it becomes a big, big question. And from that way of thinking, I start asking, well, how did all these things happen? Why did Europe experience all these discontinuities and why were they so persistent happening throughout history? Because I mean, if you read the history of Europe and not just economics, politics, or even just science, but read the history of literature, of poetry, of architecture, of philosophy, you have to read the history of philosophy, you know, at work like Bertrand Ross of the history of Western philosophy to me, it's just as important as any economic history of Europe.
From that work, you will learn a lot about a cultural civilization that produces this sequence of thinkers. One after the other, each thing sounds indifferent from what they once said before. And depending on who you read, some will say where litness was so revolutionary, introduce a whole new way of thinking in terms of nomads. And then comes Pinosa around the same time, and then you have Kant, and he's the one who really invented the notion of a moral individual agent.
And then the hey-guentess was there was no, Hager is just as revolutionary, and then you go backwards to Luther, and you can go within literature itself. There are many literary movements, just looking at the history of England, you have, you know, volume after volume, all about the literature of the Victorian age, of the restoration in England, the Middle Ages, and within each of these periods, they're different writers, and they're also themselves quite original and unique, which music is the same. In fact, when you come to classical music, that's a phenomenon that you only see in Europe, there is a classical music elsewhere in the world. And you can say, well, okay, but you know, everybody has their own differences, and they have their own music.
But even if you're set down and you look at the history of classical music in Europe, well, again, it is quite innovative, it is quite creative, not always not in every ever, but again, it has that pattern of persisting creativity. Some centuries show a lot more of it, like the 18th, 19th century, some show less, but you can open a book on the history of Western music and what strikes the reader. If you're thinking of what makes the world different, it's this ongoing history. It has a history, there is a literary history, there is a history of poetry, and I don't find that in all areas of the world, not as much, at least, if I could say that minimum, you don't find that much in all areas of the world.
Yeah, I wanted to ask a question before we move on to your explanation of this continuous creativity, which itself is radical, and I think people will find fascinating, and that is that one of the things that you say about modern historical, and I guess also sociological and political, scholarship is that it is really very materialist in its orientation, that it I almost want to say, and these are not your words, that many of these people are crypto-Marxists, and they don't even know it. Oh yeah, yeah. That they think of, they think of humans as very reactive, that the only time a human will do something is when it is forced to do it by material circumstances, that there is no creative spark. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, that's one of the other things I do in the first chapter, that I know that for all the differences that you may find within Jaya Taimon and Michael Mann, and even people who, one called the variants, and some of the people who are in the against the revision, people like Eric Jones, Paul Menace, and all of them, including the anthropologies that I mentioned, and many of them, they have strong tendency to view human beings as reactive creatures. And more so now than ever, we, or the history of humans, is fundamentally shaped by external forces, and someone like them always take geographic forces, someone else would say biology, someone would say economic structures, the world they spent, and they did very well, by and large, they don't want to really focus on individuals themselves. And they do occasionally hear and they are an technology, that's not really their preoccupation. And especially when they're thinking of big long-term transformations, they think well, those things are big things that have not been brought about by individuals.
And one of the things I do in the book, I go way back to the study audience of agriculture, and I argue that one of the main agents, the persona that was quite critical in bringing about agricultural farming were the so-called aggrandizers, these individuals who wanted more, that wanted to gain more prestige within the village, that wanted more attention on themselves. And this is an important agent, and they're active, they are energetic, and they may have attributes that we dislike, like greediness and self-interest. Yes, so you're right, there is that in the book, I do this. I also argue there that these individuals are more noticeable in European history.
And I trace that back to the aristocratic culture of Indians. In the people who are trying to find new ways, struggling to make a name, to think in a different way, you go back to ancient Greece and you will see the pre-socratics. A sales will say this water, an axiom and this will say it is some other element, it will be at earth, and somebody else comes along and says, no, this air, and petal, it is all those four together, and then he has to say it's becoming, but many of these things are being, and it's quite interesting how they are arguing with each other. And as they're doing that, they're offering us with new ways of thinking.
And in my view, we're really devoting our abilities and understanding. Because one doesn't have to be a weak historian or one doesn't have to think that development is not what I'm trying to find to happen, to realize that there is here in the history of the way, some kind of sequence, some kind of dialogue that is going on, that when Aquinas comes along, he's not just putting forth a view that's one more, and you can take it or leave it, depending on what your standpoint is, but rather he's thinking through prior thinkers, he's thinking through what he thought of it and trying to absorb the significance of Christianity and to make sense of it. So then Aquinas can be seen in life of what preceded him, and then people come later, they can also be thinking in that life. Like even nominally, they reject the universe, or the people who believe in the universe, so they reject them, but in a state of dialogue with those people that preceded them, and then they intend to have an influence on what happens later.
And so this is something that a simulator will learn from Hager, because it's how he views the history of the positive human mind. But one of the arguments I make in that chapter on Hager is that we should think of Hager's phenomenon of the spirit of being held a book on the phenomenology of this and stated it, to the attention of it, that it is, you cannot write a phenomenon of any other culture. Now Hager, in the end of the day, have become so multicultural themselves that all day, you want to talk about the phenomenology of all the culture of Hager and so on, but no one has to read it and no one will, because you can't do it, because you have to have that developmental pattern that energy and dialectic have to be there for one to write such a phenomenology. I have to say that, well, let me ask you a question, you may not be prepared for it, but it strikes me that it is a great irony that we, and I think I would include Canada here, we here in the United States and Canada in the Western world in general live in a culture that worships creativity, we love creativity, the way that we teach our kids, I mean, I've studied and I've lived in other countries where they do not teach children to be creative, we actively, and I have children myself, actively teach them to do new things, things that other people did not do, we highly prize that, yet our entire explanation of how we got to this point seems to be materialist, that it had nothing to do with creativity, that it was forced on us in some way.
How do you explain that, exactly? It's a long, long, it will require a long explanation and you will see not be able to fully answer it, and this is what we can talk about that later, but I will try to do the next book, and I think it's something that it sells the marriage out of the West, because we have to understand that multiple children are living in East Western creation, this obsession with diversity, this ongoing effort to downplay, to minimize, to neglect the Western achievement, it's easy to serve Western phenomenon that came out of the West, and I say that an element here is that we became increasingly uncomfortable with the notion that our culture, the Western culture, could have been so much more creative than others, that that idea went against much of a egalitarianism of democracy, it also went against welcome ideas about showing understanding and appreciation for other cultures, which is that it's a Western phenomenon, and to all you are created by Westerners themselves, the story of the history of other cultures is several Western phenomenon, so it is as if we don't want to acknowledge and admit something that we did, because we think it is fair, it is a goistical, we tend to have a short memory historically, we sometimes think that it really was a European creation, that racism was created by Europeans, and that we forget therefore the way all the societies also participated in empire creation, all of them, in the book I do say that Westerners were all half exhibited, a more expansionally temporary, throughout history, they have been more aggressive than other people, so that's part of individualism, and that brings me to the next point, which is that, and this is not in niche at all, there is a dark side to creativity, there is a dark side to individualism, and it is that it doesn't come in a state of harmony and balance, but it presupposes, imbalances, and it seeks to create a pension, and it is an animal of strife there, of moving against something, of challenging it and bringing something else, a chumpeter when he spoke about capitalism, he came up with his idea of creative destruction, well that is, it is a reminder, continuation of that temperament that you, I actually back to the European, this early 19th century entrepreneurial, and the rubber baron in the United States, were of that type, in basically creative, ambitious individuals, and we feel comfortable with them, here in Canada we have someone like Condoch Black, who exhibited certain tendencies that were too self-absorbed, there are amenities and subsets, they seem too affluent, the way they walk and handle themselves, and people like that sometimes will do things that get them into trouble, because they may have too much energy, they cannot be controlled by all these rules of regulations that modern, liberal societies have created, and all the blue rockers have continuously, they are still there, they have to do the next thing, and the next thing, so we walk them up, so you can see it that way, I see it everywhere, I see it in motorcycle gangs, the fact that West Tenors have these health angels and all their gangs, and they want to do their own thing, and there is an enemy of re-values, and they are, they are in conflict with each other a lot, so I say that makes us uncomfortable, we are academics, we are very sort of serene, calm, not always, but it is an enemy of identity, for one, our incomes are assured, we get tenure, so we start projecting that on to history, and we want history to be that way. I am laughing, but there is something to do with that, I will wax autobiographical here, but there is something to do with that, there is an easy Nietzsche interpretation of this conflict in western civilization between incredible creativity and the desire to tamp it down, and that is that the western society is Christian, predominantly, and that Christianity is the religion of slaves. Yeah, that is the initiative of that, I mean I don't, like I raised that question, when Nietzsche says that with Socrates and after a repeat, and what he called the Alexander civilization of the Hellenistic era, he sees a war in the dark of the creative energy in the Greek world, a little quite explain how he did that wrong, then rises up and so on, but in any case, in Christianity, he really sees a re-value, a revolt by the slaves against aristocratic individuals, but I think that Christianity started to accommodate itself to that creativity, it began to appreciate it, and not only that, we also see new infusions of pagan aristocratic lands coming into Europe and Rome, start to decline, this barbarian, people filled with energy, take auger, so it's not that it's from all the west comes to an end with Rome, many people today, when they talk about western civilization, they say well, that we want to face a situation like Rome, that Rome declined, and the barbarians took over, I don't agree with that, I think Rome had already lost its vitality, that it was a good thing for the barbarians to come in, and that revitalized the west, and Christianity played a critical role in submitting these pagan impulses and re-directing them into more educational or civilised efforts, you see this in England, with Alfred the Great, with Charles the Great, with the Carolinian Empire, to meet his efforts to, you know, to some degree the excesses, the barbarism of these pagans and make it more civilised, and we then eventually get all this creativity coming out of Christendom, with the invention of universities, philosophy, cathedral, great work that really connect to the scientific revolution, new ideas of modern emotion, from Christendom, the rise of towns, and so on, so yes, I wouldn't say that Christianity brought all that down, as nations seem to say, the creativity is still there, I think we are now finally really experiencing the real, you know, if you like, decline, that there is this generation more than any other, Spangler was right in the 19th century to see that it is there evident in the 19th century, with democracy or modern liberalism, it is there on socialism, but I would say that after the Second World War, when all the elements that go against Western energy and creativity come up, come together and give us the world we have now.
I do find it striking that, you know, on the one hand I will tell my son, you know, to go out there and to compete and to do well and to be creative and to really make something of himself, and then I tell him, by the way, the meat shall inherit the earth. I can put these things in my mind together, you know. No, I understand, you feel guilty, you don't want him to be too aggressive, you think that might do him harm, but you know, I struggle with that, I have my son, I have him boxing now, just to learn to walk, and I think, well the reason I'm pretty damn familiar with him is that I think he is part of this effort to subdue and downplay the male side of Western civilization, because it is as if they feel well, this is their last obstacle, if only we emasculate males, then we'll finally get these harmonious where we want, but that, there is no reaction that is growing, all of our whole topic there, but you will have noise that I do bring up the male component in the right of the way. Yeah, no, I did notice that.
Yeah, so let's go actually in the closing minutes of the interview to really the empirical nub of the book, and that is that the origins of this continuous creativity that you claim exists can be found actually in the invasion of the European continent by a group of people, a kind of mysterious group of people as you say yourself, called the Indo-European, so you could talk a little bit about that. Yes, I didn't know the Indo-Pians five years ago, I heard about them and so on, like everybody did, but when you go back to ancient Greece, and you're there in classical Greece, and you look at what people are saying about classical Greece, how did this happen? They call it a Greek miracle. Now, remember what I said earlier, that I had come to the conclusion that it was not just every other industrial revolution on the island, but it was a sequence of immensely creative epochs in Western history.
Now the first epoch is classical Greece, so it would stand to reason that to go back there to trade the origins is important. So when I saw the various books as to how it came about that Greece produced this miracle, there were really no answers, many of them were similar to the ones that were being offered for the rise of modern Europe, that is they argue that Greece was divided into small city states that they were very competitive with each other, and that this competition engendered this kind of creativity. So there are problems here for one, the notion that this kind of division by itself will engender philosophical and literary creativity is not one that you can support because you find it in other areas of the earth as well, or other areas in the world. And at other times, like India, you'll find there were certain divisions between different territories in China, there was a period of the war in states, there was a lot of competition between different states.
And it's also the case that just because of this competition per se, you're not going to get creativity, we're just talking about strife and so on, but that is a major ingredient, but one has to understand the nature of that competition. Anything just decales or deviolines that produces creativity, there has to be a mindset of psychological disposition. And when I started studying this more, I began to think about the people who preceded the classical Greeks. As you know, there is a dark age there in Greece that runs from around 1200 to around 800 BC, but before 1200 you have my senior civilization.
And when you study the Mycenaeans and you study their culture, it became transparent to me that there were quite a list of cryo-charys, they have spread themselves to the Mediterranean and what I thought was an aristocratic culture. And by aristocratic culture, I mean that there is an elite that rules the society, even if there is an individual that has more authority and more power, that individual rules together with this other powerful aristocrats. By aristocratic, I mean an attitude, I think that I'm not going to be allowed to be mistreated as an inferior and that's something that I observe that's happening all the civilizations. In Chinese, Indian, Azte, and so the aristocracy, even when you call it aristocracy, they didn't have this temperament of rebelliousness and evangelism or seeking adventure and challenging things.
So, you know, I started reading books on the Europeans and I felt that there was something there and I'll just put it this way. First of all, they have a different economy. When you look at farming, farming arrives in Greece around 6500 BC and then by around 5,800, you see herding and farming aging in that area of the Pontic, Cascian, and it is on the Pontic, Cascian, and it is in the Europeans came. There is still something very, some people think they came out of where Mina is today, but I think it's this stronger consensus which is that they came from where Ukraine is today on the Pontic, Cascian state.
Then by around 5200 and 4,800, you see the spread of cattle, farming, and shit and essentially you see a bastora herding economy there. So although farming has come into Greece in the 7th millennium and from there it's spread into the Balkans and also west was into Eulogradoli. In the Pontic states, you see farming coming in, but there it takes on a herding, pastora catar, there as well. Essentially it means that animals play a bigger role there in that area.
Now the next important phenomenon is that we have an animal there that today we call the horse that was found in the Pontic Cascian state. And this animal is domesticated after 4,800 BC that about. I'm going quickly over these days because we don't have much time. By 4,200 BC, Lady Anthony has made the argument and others are agreeing that riding could be detected by 4,200 BC and certainly by 3,700 BC.
Then you have will the equals by 3,500 BC or 3,000 BC. As you take this together, the pastoral economy, riding of horses and will vehicles by 3,500 BC, 3,000, all these things are put together. Then you have a whole new economy that is quite mobile and this economy does start moving into the Balkans and westwards into Europe. Initially there are inclusions as sporadic but nevertheless for sure there were regular interactions.
But by 3,800 into 3,000 BC, you see a whole horizon, they call it the Janna horizon between 3,300 and 25,500 BC of this pastoral economy in the Balkan region, built into central Europe. Then later on you see the cold that we are cultural which is the pre-Germanic cultural and is the ground out of which the Bronze Age Europe comes. These cultures are very dynamic. They have horses, they ride them, they are covered in history.
And eventually later on we will see the rise of challenge in the early days in the States and we said to have been there before 2,000 BC. There are a lot of the days in the near years, but some people say that the earliest can be seen in the States before 2,000 BC, whereas in the near years they were all known before 1800 BC. So I think I agree with those who think that it was invented or at least made proper for riding and waterfares by people from the States. So when you put this package together, you have a very formidable expansion of cultural.
And this is one of the things I tried to do in that chapter to show this, how they expand it and to show that continuously when you read the source, it's not me, but you read it Anthony, when you read Marley, you really disagree about where they came from and when you read Marley had him voodoo as a feminist scholar and she used this into the pence as a word like pastoral people. And you read all of these sources, they all think to agree that it was a aristocratic culture very well, very mobile, very aggressive. And I started asking myself, why do they keep saying aristocratic? And they say the same thing about the might and ears of the aristocratic.
And they say the same about the Homeric colleagues. They are aristocrats there. One of the things about Homer's area is that you can actually identify people by their names, which is not to be found elsewhere. It's not just one name, the name of the names, the name of many, many people.
And they have a lineage, they have places that they have wives with names and sons with names. And they seem to be like Asians. And if you go earlier back to, you know, these styles and BCE, you already see many of all the aristocratic fish. If I have a section of there, I think I raised about five major points that's constituting an aristocratic culture.
Having to do with the weight they dress, having to do with the weight they really reach older when they form where they are banned. That they see themselves as a group of comrades, as a war ban of men that are each seeking some glory and each lawyer to the other. And although there is one who pulls together, this men together and he is a leader, the other ones are also quite individualistic, inspirational, glorying, having a reputation of a name. And I connect this to the heroic leader, actually, very interesting that only you can introduce a heroic leader, actually.
The idiot is one, but we have others, as of getting with the style, the human people. And so I try to look at all these common patterns. And I call it for that we feel like a precaution with a long discussion that you can sum up quickly. Let me ask you, we're almost out of time, but I'm really finding this very interesting.
It seems to me that your position rests on three points. That is relative to the contribution of the Indo-European to a unique Western civilization. The first one is that they're worthy of the Europeans and that they are of the character you say they were. Let's leave that one aside as we talk about it a little bit.
The second is that these Indo-Europeans, if they are as you say they are, were in fact different from other contemporaneous or later or earlier, I suppose, a warrior elite that we find scattered around the globe. They were truly were had a different character. And then the third thing, and I also want you to hear you speak about this briefly, is that there's a mechanism of transmission of the values, aristocratic values that they held, that basically comes down to our day. So I guess the questions I have are two.
One is, were these Indo-Europeans truly unique and two, is there an identifiable mechanism of transmission across the generations? Yeah, one of the more difficult questions is how do I get from a barbaric, militaristic, aristocratic culture to the Greek miracle? How do we make that transition? And I spend time handling that.
And I get into philosophical discussions. I even talk about the readings of genuine personalities. I even argue that self-conscious that emerged with the Indo-PS. What I mean by that is the ability for us to be able to make distinctions between those things within ourselves are mental or conscious things and those things that relate to our body or appetite.
And I tend to get to play, you know, there's a clear, tight part, a division of the soul. And I think that you go back to the, you know, the pre-socratic and the hometic characters for sure. It isn't clear how they distinguish things that we have to see with the mind or things we have to see with the body. So I do trace that to the Indo-PS.
And that's a complicated long discussion that I go to, co-chief and using Nisha as well, the summation of willpower. And so, you know, I would, we would have to have a specific question and I could go point by point. I'm afraid that if I make a generous statement, it sounds a bit outlandish. But I'm persuaded by the fact that there is something about taking personal renewal, about distinguishing oneself in the world, away from a group, away from a collective that is associated with a more intense awareness of oneself.
And that this intense awareness is associated with creativity and differentiation. And as I mentioned before, you see it in Homer, the fact that he's identifying characters with names. And this is not there in any other culture. It's not just one king who does everything, who accomplishes everything.
When you read and I've read quite a few of the announcements statements that the kings of Mesopotamia made throughout their history, their cations and so on. It's very much focused on one individual doing everything. This is not the case in the Homeric Greeks and it is not the case in the Celtic and Germanic and Norwegian myths. You see a number of characters with names.
And so I don't want to say that automatically there's going to be a point at which we differentiate the mind and then we become aware of reasoning as something that is distinctive to ourselves and that that develops philosophy. I don't want to say that it's bound to happen, but I cannot see how you could disconnect it too. But he's always a very skeptical of this kind of argument and I want to say you have to read the book and see what's there and make your own judgment about this. Well, I hope that a lot of people read the book.
Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it back as we're out of time. It's really interesting talking to you. I want to close with our final question on New Books and History. What is your next project?
What are you working on now, Ricardo? Well, what I want to do next, I think it's going to be about the decline of the Western question again. And I already started reading and there's a big debate as you know about this. And it also relates to the question you asked earlier.
Why do Westerners know that creativity is good and yet somehow feel comfortable with acknowledging their own historical creativity? I think I would try to answer questions like that. Actually, I can't wait to read the answer because then I'll know how to raise my son. Yeah, it's hard.
So anyway, Ricardo D'Shane, thank you very much for being on the show today. I really enjoyed talking to you. All right, thanks. All right, bye-bye.
Okay. You've been listening to an interview with Ricardo D'Shane about his book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. I'm Marshall Poe, the host of New Books and History. I hope you have a great week.