What I Should Have Said to Coleman Hughes

by James Hankins

File this one under l’esprit de l’escalier: the staircase witticism, the clever remark you think of only after the opportunity to say it is past—only once you’ve left madame’s salon and are heading down the stairs. I’m convinced that one reason why so many people love X (née Twitter) is that it gives them sufficient time to formulate clever remarks. The true wit has clever repartee on the tip of his tongue; we mere Twitter-wits get an hour or two to compose our devastating comebacks.

Interviews, however, are another matter. I enjoyed my interview with Coleman Hughes a few weeks ago, but I found myself with a shortage of witty remarks. Maybe it was his low-key manner. I generally enjoy watching him do interviews because he has a real commitment to getting at the truth in a calm and relaxed way. He seems genuinely to want to understand his interlocutors’ way of thinking. He treats them with friendly respect and doesn’t play gotcha games or try to embarrass them. It’s a welcome relief from the head-butting struggles to make political points on social media. But friendly, low-key interviews don’t spark the kind of sharp-pointed wit that invites comparison with the rapier. Anyone who has seen Patrice Leconte’s brilliant 1996 film Ridicule, a biting portrayal of the eighteenth-century French salon with its (literally) murderous bon mots, will know what I mean.

In the warmup discussion before the interview recording began, I was cheered to hear that Coleman’s favorite Columbia course had been the comically misnamed ‘Contemporary Civilization’ sequence. Despite the name, the course is a survey of philosophy and political theory from Plato to the present. “CC” was the first course I ever taught while in graduate school at Columbia. We had an interesting discussion about how Columbia’s flagship survey had changed in the years since I taught it. I was glad to see that Coleman seemed to favor requiring study of the Western canon, though with some reservations that came up later.

The ensuing discussion ranged over a number of topics which Coleman had identified as interesting and possibly controversial: why I had left Harvard to teach at the Hamilton School at the University of Florida, whether monotheism was a precondition for the concept of objective morality (I said ‘no’), whether Christianity was at war with the Enlightenment or the precondition of it (I said ‘both’), why Christianity spread throughout the Roman empire (‘it’s complicated’), whether Islam was spread mostly through conquest (‘yes, at least in the beginning’), and whether China should teach the Western canon or the Chinese canon (I said ‘they should teach preferentially their own classics’).

When we got to the final question (at 1:11:16) Coleman asked me about whether professors who taught the Western canon should be concerned that some students—people of color, perhaps, or the descendants of indigenous peoples, or Muslims—might feel excluded or alienated from courses that were built around the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions. How could it be explained to the parents of such students, as they watched their offspring struggle with Cicero or Shakespeare, why it was a good and necessary thing to master such texts?

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For the progressive left, of course, this is a key criticism of those who want to preserve the Western canon and revive the teaching of Western Civ. A number of religious or ethnic minorities who live in our country feel (or have been taught to feel) that the West is a colonial or imperialist power that imposes its own Euro-centric ideology through the educational system and suppresses “subaltern” cultures. And anyway, children go to school in part to learn how to fit into the world around them. Why make it harder for them by forcing them to study old books written in dead languages by dead white men with dead or dying values?

I’ve been hearing this leftish critique of ‘Great Books’ curricula my entire adult life and wanted to avoid the hackneyed responses I’ve heard so often from fellow conservatives: claims about the superiority of Western values or complaints about how immigrants and minorities should be grateful to live in the West rather than in the third-world hell-holes they’ve escaped. Instead, I defaulted to my standard observation that, however you felt about the relationship between your subculture and the hegemonic culture, you were still living in a Western country and needed to understand its laws and institutions, its moral stances on free speech, religious freedom, and economic freedom, as well as its tolerance for pluralism and its ongoing debates about whether there should be limits to pluralism. You needed to understand Judaism and Christianity to understand the way Westerners think about ethical issues, what is generally admired and what is not. In order to understand the West at a deeper level, you needed to learn about the historical struggles and sacrifices made by earlier generations to preserve the principles of self-government, benign forms of competition, meritocracy, and the rule of law.

I continue to believe that my default argument is valid. It is the standard classical liberal argument, after all. But on the staircase, as it were, after the interview was over, I remembered another argument that is much closer to my current way of thinking. What we in the classical school movement really want to be the result of education in Western history, literature and philosophy, after all, is not simply for students to understand the principles behind Western culture. We want them to love it. We want to share our love of it. We believe that a shared love of our tradition is part of the glue that holds our society together. We want educated people in the rising generations to feel at home in the West; to preserve and cultivate its arts and traditions; and to pass them down to later generations. What we do together as common inheritors of a tradition—very much including criticizing and improving our tradition—is a great part of what gives our lives meaning and purpose. If our civilization dies, all that we have worked for, every part of our lives that lifts us above the mundane tasks of survival, dies too. The inscriptions, the statues, the names of streets and cities that record our gratitude to earlier generations of benefactors will be torn down, their names changed or their significance forgotten. The hope that most people have as they grow older of ‘leaving something behind them’ ebbs away when a civilization slips into decline. The hope of leaving a fair memory is a great motivator, but if the civilizational continuity that allows memory to endure is broken, our higher, spiritual, and philanthropic motives to build for the future will give way to despair.

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So how would I now respond to Coleman’s question? He was asking, in effect, how might it be possible for certain minorities to learn sympathy for the West when they have been taught in schools, or even in their own families, that Western imperialists and settler colonialists were responsible for their present economic misery and low status. Western ‘war capitalists’ killed their grandfathers and enslaved their ancestors—why should they care about a civilization that they can see only through the lens of oppression? My response to them would be: ‘So tell your story. Add your story to ours. Western civilization is not a machine for the destruction of the weak. It is not a set of unchanging, transcendental propositions about freedom, democracy, human dignity, and the rule of law. It is not—or not just—a treasury of artistic and intellectual achievement. It is a conversation—ideally, an open, civil conversation about these and all the other things we value, about whether our actual societies reflect our common values and live up to the best standards of our shared past.

I would say the following:

‘The best conversations require honesty and trust. Tell your story and listen to the stories of those innumerable people who have benefitted from the blessings of Western civilization, not only its wealth and freedom but also its spiritual and cultural blessings. Get a balanced view of the story of the West. Persons of good will with genuine devotion to the Western tradition want it not only to continue, but to improve. Contribute your story, remind us of episodes in our past that we might prefer to forget, and make us all better in the future.’

If we could look into the past of our own families, we would likely find ancestors, even parents, who did shameful and dishonorable things, but we would also like the good and noble things our parents and ancestors did to be remembered. We would want the bad to be balanced with the good. We want and need to be proud of things beyond our own personal accomplishments: our families, our cities, our country, our civilization. That is how we come to feel rooted in our past and responsible for our future. We should want to tell our children both the good and the bad about all these larger relations. We tell the bad as cautionary tales, to help dissuade them from taking the wrong paths in their lives, and the good to assure them that better paths are possible and will be rewarded by the decent people in our society. As the Dutch philosopher-historian Rutger Bregman writes, “Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.”

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My interview with Coleman Hughes aired on March 9, 2026 on his podcast Conversations with Coleman.