Q: What do you love about the Italian Renaissance? Why did you want to study it?
A: I was a classics major as an undergraduate, and when I was taking courses it became clear to me that the classics were the difference between civilization and barbarism. The classics were the most important thing in the culture of the Renaissance. The whole reforming zeal of the Renaissance came out of classical studies — the idea that we have to recover the greatness of the past, the nobility and the magnanimity and all the great qualities of the ancients. The way we get to that is by studying the great works of ancient authors, because many people in the Renaissance felt that their world was morally impoverished, as some of us feel about the modern world. We’ve lost contact with these high human traditions and we’ve got to get them back. This is more than a pleasant thing to study. This is a central cultural project of Western culture at a key period in our history, which is the Renaissance.
Q: What languages do you speak and how have they changed your worldview?
A: I read Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and German, I can read Spanish with a dictionary, and I can get through simple Dutch because it’s so like German. My best languages are Latin and Italian. I’ve lived seven years of my life in Italy so I acquired some Italian that way. My wife was even better at languages — she was a southern lady from Louisiana, so everything she said in all languages had a slight southern accent. It was very charming. We traveled around Italy a lot together.
Q: Can a humanist education be effective on its own?
A: Not at all. This is not modern humanism, which is trying to build a moral system around limited human nature. This is Renaissance humanism, which is Christian humanism. And people in the Renaissance very much understood that the family is the building block of the state. In that sense they’re Aristotelians — they understood that you can’t have a good state without a good family. They understood the concept of pietas. Societies are held together by a sense of gratitude and loyalty to families and to benefactors and to the state and to God. These are all interconnecting sources of moral cohesion.
Q: What would you change about modern education?
A: The human mind is extremely absorbent during the ages of 5 to 10, and during that period you can learn languages extremely quickly. And that’s really what I wish I’d had as a humanistic education. I wish someone had started teaching me languages young because you can really pick them up at that age. In American schools, what we’re teaching kids is critical thinking at the age of 10. What critical thinking is at the age of 10 is repeating what your teachers’ ideas are. My view is that we really should exploit the years 5-10 and get a lot of stuff inside people’s heads.
Q: What makes good government?
A: I think educated moral leadership combined with constitutionalism is a good thing, because you have the formal structures of society — the institutions, the magistracies, the congress, and the executive branch, you have these kinds of structures. But in order for those to work well, these institutions need to be inhabited by good people. If you have good institutions but bad people running them, you’re going to have bad government. What the ancients in the West always talked about was combining good institutions with good people. In the modern world we pay much more attention to institutions and not so much to the quality of the people. This is relatively new, because if you go back to the founding fathers of the United States, for example, they’re all very much aware, because they inherited the tradition of virtue politics from the Renaissance. They’re very much aware that you need to have moral leadership, well-educated people of high character with the practical wisdom to run these institutions. After he exited from the constitutional convention, Ben Franklin was asked “what kind of government have you given us, Mr. Franklin?” and he said “a republic, if you can keep it.” And what he means by that is that institutions are one thing but keeping the institutions alive requires individual character, intelligence, education, and practical wisdom.
