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Brian Kruger
And welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm Brian Kruger, the producer of the show. Today we have an interesting interview that was recorded just over a year ago. Rich had invited his friend, Dr. Richard Enos, a professor emeritus of rhetoric and composition at Texas Christian University and an associate dean for academic affairs at Carnegie Mellon - among other impressive positions - to talk about societal collapse in antiquity, and more specifically in ancient Greece and Athens.
Now, I'm putting this all into context because on the day this was recorded last year, Vladimir Putin had just invaded the Ukraine. We think that listening to this conversation in retrospect, is pretty interesting. So Rich starts this conversation with those events unfolding at that time, so we join Rich and Dr. Enos in conversation.
Richard Helppie
Welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm sure as we go through this very difficult period in history, we have to wonder has this ever happened before? Today our guest, Dr. Richard Leo Enos, is going to explain some things to us from the ancient world. Dr. Enos, are there parallels between what's happening in the world today and other times in history?
Dr. Richard Enos
Well Rich, first, thank you for having me on. And I want to say an emphatic, yes. In fact, as I watched the news unfold today, I was struck by the issues that we're facing, and the similarities of the things that I study, and hopefully in our discussion today, the lessons we can learn from those past studies.
Richard Helppie
Let's get into that and some of your past studies. Now our audience likes to know a little bit about our guests on the show. So tell us where did you grow up and what were your early days like? You've got a very deep academic background; your entire bio is on our website, RichardHelppie.com and at The Common Bridge on Substack. So please, listeners, viewers, readers, join us there. But tell us a little bit - you grew up in the Bay area of California, I believe?
Dr. Richard Enos
Yes, I did, Rich. I grew up in Oakland, California. And inside Oakland there is an Italian district called the Temescal district. My grandparents came from Italy at the turn of the 20th century and the northern Italians settled in that area. I grew up with my parents and grandmother in her house. We were a working family. My father was a welder. In fact, I was the first one ever to go to college in our family. I was brought up in a very strict Roman Catholic religion. But at the same time, I also learned - especially [from] my mother, my father passed when he was very young - an appreciation for all different religions and an understanding of different ways to use religion to help us. I was able to go to college at what was then called Cal State [in] Hayward - Cal State University East Bay - and then I went to graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington. I taught at the University of Michigan. Then I went to Carnegie Mellon University for several years. I was offered an endowed chair at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and I accepted that. I formally retired from 46 years of teaching in 2019. But I still like to keep active in my research and through this miracle of Zoom, I'm able to give lectures at different universities from time to time.
Richard Helppie
And what's been your area of specialty through your academic preparation and your study?
Dr. Richard Enos
Well, I started off with - and maybe this is because of my family background - I started off with a general interest in communication. I know this will sound odd and it's a phenomenon [that] may never happen again, but when my mother - who was born in America - went to school she couldn't speak English, she could only speak Italian. And I became very interested in communication. But then I became very interested in the history of language in the area of rhetoric and how people are influenced. So as I went on through school I had graduate minors in history and classics. I studied the relationship between how people think and how they express those thoughts through history and those ideas transfer, I think, very well. So for many years, both at Carnegie Mellon, especially in TCU, I taught courses in propaganda analysis, because many of the theories have their origin back in antiquity; although there's been a tremendous body of current research, of course. But I tried to bring those two things together for my students when I teach propaganda analysis, and try to help them - obviously what's in the title of the course - to analyze discourse, but also ultimately, to help them make what they feel are good judgments about the discourse that they hear.
Richard Helppie
That is so appropriate to our times [with] the amount of language and communications flying around on all of these different platforms. And so today, I hope that we can cover in 40 minutes or so, empires that rise, empires fall, history repeating itself. And I know you'll be educating the readers of The Common Bridge with a column that you've written for our first newsletter that comes out on March 7. On the show, we've made parallels with the United States Civil War, as we seem to be pushed into this red and blue camp or [are] being dragged there. We need to look at the parallels with the United States and failed empires. I know there are some markers that you look for, like the devaluation of currency. So to the extent that we can try to fit a graduate level course, or from introduction to grad level, [both chuckling] about the Greek and the Roman and the British Empires, and especially their rise and fall, let's dive into talking about some of the greatest empires of all time. How do we define the greatest empires?
Dr. Richard Enos
I was thinking a great deal about this. I think often, and maybe always, behind every great empire there is a powerful figure, sometimes they are called "dynasts", they are these larger than life personalities. Their impact does a great deal toward facilitating and extending, in some cases, empires. Now this could be used, this could be abused. We all know that individuals...such as Adolf Hitler [who] was a very powerful individual, in fact, even formally, in Germany, as I tell my students, the power that he received to become the Fuehrer - which meant he was both in charge as equivalent of a prime minister and in charge of all the military - was freely given by the Germans. He didn't take it. He didn't...it wasn't forced upon [them]. That illustrates the dynamics of his capacity, but of course, that capacity can be abused. One of the things we need to ask very fundamental questions about is, can we actually teach responsible leadership? Can we teach people to become leaders? There was a great deal of interest in this, of course, after World War II, and since then, but really, it's an historical question. Some people are surprised to learn that universities such as Oxford and Cambridge were founded, not to provide their students with jobs, their universities were founded to create the leaders of the British Empire; these would be the people who would guide the Empire. There was an effort to try to do that. And we know great leaders can have great impact. The examples are obvious - Winston Churchill could unite a people against tyranny; Martin Luther King, Jr. could try to have a peaceful nonviolent resolution; two very strong social issues. Of course, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King, Jr. was, for his efforts. But my point is that we can look at powerful individuals and see how they can influence people, even to the extent of empires.
Richard Helppie
So when we look at empires, I think about the Greek Empire and the Roman Empire. In preparing for this talk today, looking up the greatest empires of all time, I'm surprised they weren't in the top 20. There's more about the Mongol and the Russian Empire, the Persian Empire, and the concept of empires like Greece and India hadn't happened yet. When you think, as a someone with your deep background, [of] the greatest empires of all time, what do they have in common? [What] about the commonality of their rise and what about the elements of decline? Any examples that you can share with us would be great as well.
Dr. Richard Enos
I think one of the things that will obviously beg the question [that] I get in classes is, well, what do we mean by great? Is it just an emotive term, we're saying we should strongly approve of it, we strongly like it, can it be unpacked? Can it be defined in some ways? And of course, if we look at large empires that were militarily oriented and coercive and judge their greatness by the amount of land they were able to conquer, the number of people they were able to control, we can look at it that way. What we have to do is take a step back and to say, are there any other measurements, any other determinants of greatness? Now to take one of the examples, Rich, that you mentioned. When I studied in Greece, I had the opportunity to actually go to the site of Marathon where principally - there were a few other city states that helped - but principally it was the citizens of the city of Athens versus the Persian Empire's army. There is absolutely no way that you would think that the Athenians could have won, but Herodotus, the great historian, teaches us a valuable lesson. He said, the reason why the Athenians won is that they had a collective sense, a communal sense, of what the best way to fight the Persians was. Their collective genius enabled this small - insignificant in the eyes of the Persians - city-state, kind of a backwater city in the view of the Persians, to actually conquer the Persians. And there's a great lesson there, Herodotus says, and he argues the value of democracy, the collective wisdom, is better than the tyranny of a single person. And doing just the will of the king, or the emperor, or the fuehrer, is not as good as having an environment where the best ideas take precedent, not just who says the idea.
Richard Helppie
That's fascinating, because...and I've spent just a few days in Russia. Of course, I got out and talked to as many people as I could being that's just what I do when I go. It was a time when Russia was a little bit rudderless. I drew the impression that they liked having a strong leader. So it's, and of course, we're recording this on the morning that Russia invaded the Ukraine, and with a person at the helm of Russia, Vladimir Putin, who's been there since 1999; including re-working their constitutional processes in order to remain in power that long. If I heard you correctly, empires sometimes have a very strong personality leading but that ultimately becomes their Achilles heel. Does the Russian Empire embody that or do they stand out as something different?
Dr. Richard Enos
Well, one of the things that impresses me about the dynamics of what's going on today is to look at the various leaderships and how they're structured. I'll say up front, that I need to know much more about Putin and the entire delicate workings that go on today. But I do believe that Putin has been in power for about 20 years. And I think that one of the advantages that America has is that we have a process where the transfer of power is a procedure. (Richard Helppie: Supposed to be.) It's supposed to be, and I realize that it's being challenged. Regardless of what view you have, we have a system in place to transfer power and to resolve problems through our court system. And I don't know the particulars of the Russian system, I'll be the first one to say that, but it seems to be quite different than what we have. And when you have such a strong person who remains in power for so long, then I think it brings - maybe they think stability - but also a set of problems about changing and adapting to meet the responses of the times and the wills of the people. I think that that is a primary concern. We just really have two different paradigms. I think the difficulty that we see with Russia is the continual presence of Putin [which] has really not shown how we can resolve problems by looking at different people who provide different perspectives from within Russia. We seem to hear his voice and his voice alone. And then with America, there's a cacophony of voices, which can be frustrating, but it's part of a democracy. It goes back to what we said about the Athenians; rival views, making strong arguments, trying to find the best course of action.
Richard Helppie
Just going to comment that this is why I think we have so much agitation and heightened concern around the issues relative to the electoral vote counts last January. And similarly, so many billions of people using a product - Facebook by name - whose business model is to take your private information and then censor what you can say. It's not the public square. And of course, they're not the only ones, but can those voices be heard? Soviet era Russia was very adept at blocking any transmission of information. But I was curious, when I think about the commonalities of empires that rise, one of them is moral leadership. Did Russia ever enjoy moral leadership in their time or economic advancement? Or science and technology - they've been pretty good about that over the years. Or just the strongest military to impose their will? How did they become strong in ancient times? And how are they viewed today in terms of those elements of a strong empire?
Dr. Richard Enos
Aristotle once said, that educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. And part of what should be inherent in the development of leadership is how to develop strong ethical standards. There is a reason why the patron of all educators, who was the Roman rhetorician named Quintilian, was the teacher of the imperial families of Rome, because they saw that inherent in leadership was a moral obligation. Sometimes my students will say, well, isn't every value just your own and why is yours any better or worse than anyone else? And that's where we can adjudicate and argue questions of value and preference. In other words - I give them what sounds like a ridiculous example - suppose I said, well, suppose Hitler said, this is just how I feel and this is just my point of view and this is how I feel about different races and that; but behind him stands, at its time, the most sophisticated army in the world and he can, through coercion, impose that will. That's not a good system. A system that says make your strongest argument, we'll give you a fair hearing, it will be adjudicated by normal, rational people who can contest it, question it, doubt it, debate it, and then hopefully, through non-violent ways, come to a resolution for a course of action [is better]. And we've had, in the 20th century - and we don't have to get into this - there was a very serious study on how to evaluate ethical arguments. How can we do this? Can we make a serious study of it? There was tremendous work done in trying to do that. So part of the education of leadership is the moral responsibility of learning how to make ethical propositions. At some universities - and I probably shouldn't mention these names - I was called into the president's office and essentially, some entities - I'll be as vague as possible - have a lot of money. And they would say, if you do X, Y, and Z, have this kind of research, here's the amount of money we'll give you. One of the questions we have to ask is - not just accepting the money, no matter how much they wave at you - but ought we to do this? Is this in harmony with the mission, the values, the vision of the university? I give them an example - and I hope this isn't off the point but it's a really powerful example for me when I was young. Wilhelm Rankin, who was a German who, essentially - I'll make it short - developed the x-ray. An American company - and I believe it was at the time, this is at the turn of the 20th century, a little bit after the turn of the 20th century - an American company, I believe it was General Electric, offered Rankin at the time, a million dollars if they could have exclusive patent rights. Which means they would be the only ones to develop the x-ray, or what it was called in Germany, the Rankin Ray - it's still called that. Rankin made a statement, he said that the object of our research is the betterment of humanity. So Rankin declared an open patent and gave all of the plans of doing x-rays free to everyone. Now, I believe for that - and I hope I'm right - he received the first Nobel Prize. I think it's a Nobel Prize, obviously, in science, but I think it should also be a Nobel Prize in morality.
Richard Helppie
He developed something for the betterment of mankind, and instead of hoarding it for a profit or power, made sure it was available (Dr. Eno: Yes.) to many people. I think that was [in] some of your opening comments about needing to have moral leadership in order to justify the power that goes with some of these empires. Now, you've studied empires that decline; they rise, they prosper, they flourish, and then they begin to decline. Are there common elements that mark the end of an era for a particular empire?
Dr. Richard Enos
Clearly in the ones that you and I have been talking about, when you have very powerful personality and that person just ages, the very qualities that brought them to contribute to whatever they did wane. And if you don't have a structure in place, then the foundation is going to be at risk because it's so based upon an individual. Suppose, for example, you had a department that was just not careful in planning, but just had tremendous individual scholars. Well, after those scholars retire, you don't have anything left. Now think of an empire. If you don't have a structure in place to bring out the best in the next generation, then it's more likely, if not inevitable, that it's going to be less than it was unless you're fortunate enough just to have another person. In other words, sometimes the daughter or the son or someone else, will inherit the traits and pass them on. But that's a very poor plan for success and endurance.
Richard Helppie
And I recall at the end of the Soviet Union, there was one very elderly person after another; Chernenko and Andropov, there are at least two more, they would get into power, and they'd be dead within months. But there was no system backing them up. It was just a succession of individuals. Then after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they seemed rather directionless. Perhaps Putin is tapping into that desire - spoken or unspoken - on behalf of the Russian people, for a strong leader that will make Russia a strong country. But I just wonder how much popular support he really has? Or is their moral compass just pointing in a different direction?
Dr. Richard Enos
Well, I wish I knew more about Russia, I'm openly making it clear that I'm not an expert in Russian politics or Russian culture, but it seems to me that this country has enormous resources and enormous potential and could do wonderful things. It just needs to have the structure in place to make sure that those goals can be continued. And if that happens, then they have to have an environment where they can challenge leadership openly and freely. And right now, as just an outsider, that seems to be not the case. I don't know what the collective will of the Russian people is.
Richard Helppie
Let's come back to something a little closer to home then. You've taught hundreds and hundreds of students, if not thousands. You've been with some of the top academics in the world, you've done research on behalf of some of the most prestigious universities and other NGOs around the world, certainly you think about parallels and differences. If you were going to step back and look at the United States, where we've been the dominant country in the world for some time, do you ever think about where the United States is today relative to some of the other civilizations that you've studied; pro/con, lessons to be learned, inevitabilities? Where do we sit when someone with your background thinks about that?
Dr. Richard Enos
Well, one of the things that I've been very fortunate - incredibly lucky - is that I have been able to be near truly great minds. When I was at Carnegie Mellon, a person who lived on my same street and had his office one floor above me, won the Nobel Prize: Herb Simon. And when I was at Michigan, I was in the same department, briefly, with Arthur Miller, who wrote Death of a Salesman. And there's a wonderful thing about not only exposing the students, but the faculty, to these obviously talented and very amazingly gifted people. You can learn from them, you can learn about what to do. What struck me, as being this kind of spectator, is [that] part of their greatness and part of their academic leadership was they asked - and didn't hesitate to ask - questions that seem so basic. Like for example, can you actually teach people to be smarter, not just give them facts? Like if I said - I'll make one up - the height of the Eiffel Tower is about 990 feet. Now you know that, does that make you any smarter? Well, you know a fact but what do you do with it and how do you connect facts and how do you problem solve? Sometimes we were involved in this, especially at Carnegie Mellon, because we are trying to help create machines that think and to enable them to take massive amounts of the sort of "Eiffel Tower facts" and put them together in ways that saw connections, problems, observations that would be very difficult for any one person to do. It was an exciting time for me. There's a wonderful book called The Mind's Best Work by Perkins, which is an old book, but it talks about this dynamic period, I'm really happy that I was able to see these things. But the implications are far beyond just artificial intelligence, because it shows that in education today we can teach students to be smarter. I guess if I wanted to do a metaphor; you're not just wired when you're born, you can be rewired or the wiring can be super-conducted and you have all sorts of potential. We've all heard that before, about how we just tap into barely what we can do. The idea is that if we put these things to use we can do tremendous good, we can really...I have been, as an outsider, I'm just amazed at this minor miracle of how - maybe it's not minor - of how we developed a vaccine for COVID so quickly. It was incredible when the world pulled together and said, look, this is a world problem, we're going to get our best minds, we're pouring resources in to do everything we can to save lives. And they used, I think it was a Star Trek phrase, of at warp speed, I think is what they used to say. It was incredible what we could do when our education was directed toward goals that were shared in common. I'm excited about education that can do that for the betterment of everyone, not just a few.
Richard Helppie
I like that as an example because when we look at the commonality of an empire rising, it's a scientific or technology breakthrough; the space race, the 60s with the Russian empire and the American empire, fueled by a great education system. Then when we look at the elements of decline, something you and I have talked about in the past, it's the complacency of the populace; the Romans going to the Colosseum to be entertained versus putting in the hard work to learn. Today, we have a lot of people doing video games and we don't really want to do standardized tests because they're very difficult, maybe math is something we need to back away from because everybody's not good at it. It's like, okay, we're not going to teach math anymore, the very thing that lets us develop vaccines and lets us do space travel. You can kind of see the rise and the fall of these. Then another item you and I have talked about is the role of the military and how the most powerful armies in the world could impose their will and then what happens at the end of an empire where the militaries are spread around the world and they just can't be supported. Didn't the Romans experienced that? And today, the United States with the military operations in, I want to say, 95 countries, something in that order? Is that germane?
Dr. Richard Enos
Well, when the British historian Gibben wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he explained it as a stupendous fabric whose own weight crushed itself; that they kept extending and so essentially - as my Roman history professor tried to impress upon me - Rome had a city management model for an empire. An empire is not a city. It's not just a big city, it has all kinds of unique things. The vision to change that, to really recognize the differences that are always going [on], it's called the Queen of Hearts effect. It goes like this - I think paleontologists use this analogy - they'll say, the herbivores don't want to get eaten by the carnivores o they have to learn how to run faster and get away. But the carnivores have to eat so they have to get faster and trickier. So you're always running as fast as you can to stay in the same place. And what's happening is that some of the empires decayed because they didn't run fast enough, they stayed with the old model. One of the dangerous things people could say is, well, we've always done it this way. That would be good if things always stayed the same way. But they don't. They're constantly the Queen of Hearts; changing and dynamic and we have to be able to do this. But to get back to your other point, which I thought was a very telling one. This is my opinion, is that one of the problems that was inevitable is that we had to have distance learning in school, we had to have everything done for safety. That's all understandable but Plato argued that the best education is direct oral communication. I think one of the things that happened with at-home education is not only did parents learn how hard it is to teach when they had to do it for themselves, but that apathy can come in. Students can literally distance away, that they could turn off their screen and do all sorts of other things and pretend that they're listening. I think it's the engagement and passion and interest...there was a body of research done by a brilliant scholar named John R. Hayes, who asked a very simple question; what do geniuses have in common? And there was a tremendous body of powerful work that came out. They were different in all different areas: math, music, chess, humanities. They're all different in every way but one, but the one [way] has some weight to unpack. They were all incredibly hard workers, which meant they were tolerating failure, they were able to pick up - if they didn't succeed - they would pick up and try again. I tell my students; sometimes some scientists brag about their failures, they'll say, I did this experiment 130 times before I got things right, they brag about it. That's the mark of a contributor. But I'm not sure if the phenomenon that we went through in the last two and a half years really helped to teach that component.
Richard Helppie
Where I think it showed that we didn't learn - and I've talked about it on my program - is that we've put leadership in a position of [not being able to] say, I don't know, or you know what, I went down a wrong path. Today, you look at the shifting COVID policies and instead of saying, look, we made a decision based on the information we had at the time and conditions changed so now we're saying this; it's more akin to no, I never said that. Well, you did, it's been recorded. So we haven't given our leadership an opportunity to say that they tried some things, found it wasn't the right path and made an adjustment. Professor Enos, as we move to the latter stages of our talk today, when you think about the United States of America, what does our future look like? And if you could advise the president of the United States or the leadership of the Fed, or the chief justices of the Supreme Court, what counsel would you give them about these are things the country needs to do? These are things the country needs to avoid based on a study of history, what should we be doing as a country right now?
Dr. Richard Enos
Well, I think there's two phases that we should address. One is a short term - what can we do right now. One of the things that we have to do is to embrace and be tolerant of opposition and to not feel that you can't make a mistake, especially when it's done in the best interest, and yet go on because usually success comes through tolerance for failure, and keep trying - not quitting. I think we have to convey that. I knew of this wonderful woman who was the survivor of a labor camp in Poland that was run by the Nazis. Her name was Sophia Pollak, escaped came to America, and she used to tell me, Richard, the only perfect people are in insane asylums. We have to be tolerant, we have to embrace rival views, we have to be able to work together. The long term solution - and I'm really showing my bias - is education. But it's not just education, it's education on how to become...not only learning facts, but teaching people how to recognize that there is an ethical component to every decision, there is an "ought" to almost everything we do; ought we to do this? And to really understand that education should help people to learn how to make good judgments, which is what Aristotle talked about. He said, the Greek word "crisis" - which is just like the word we use - means judgment; we make a judgment and we try to have good reasons to support it. So if we couple our scientific education with humanistic studies of values, preferences, arguments, deliberation, I think we'll realize our educational dream for the long term solutions that we value, and are going to be a tremendous benefit to make an already great country an even greater one.
Richard Helppie
That is such profound wisdom and sage advice that hopefully we can pivot from what appears to me and others, that we're on the precipice of a civil war. We need to get to civil discussion. This notion that we have a country filled with red people and blue people is ridiculous. We should be talking and trying to solve problems. This has been a really grand conversation and one that we could dive into for several hours. But as we wrap up on today's Common Bridge, are there any closing thoughts you'd like to leave our audience with?
Dr. Richard Enos
Well, I want to say the obvious, that I'm honored and flattered to be asked, I took it very seriously. I tried to say things that I hope would be helpful for people to think about. I believe that the country has done so much. It has such a wonderful history, we need to fight the temptation or allow people to think that we're going to give up on this American dream. I think earlier generations have been challenged; certainly our grandparents were challenged by World War II, and look how they responded. They literally laid down their lives to continue and we should not hesitate to remember how valuable that was, and not to sacrifice that just because we have disagreement. There are alternatives to coercion or ambivalence, and the alternative is fruitful, social deliberation. I believe that, as quaint as that may sound to some cynical listeners, I truly believe that's what I tried to get across today as the best course of action.
Richard Helppie
Eloquently stated. With our special guest, Dr. Richard Leo Enos, this is Rich Helppie signing off on The Common Bridge.
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Transcribed by Cynthia Silveri
(Watch, Listen or Read) The Rise and Fall of Civilizations: Today vs Antiquity.