David Butterfield

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739 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 May

David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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TRIGGERnometry · How Civilisations Die - Ancient Greece Expert David Butterfield · 20 May 2026 podcast

You can be there, you can say whatever you want, you can do whatever you want, like some of your colleagues might look at you as scum, but you can stay there, nobody can do anything.

For you to give up that job and to go towards effectively a startup at Ralston College, which is brilliant, but a startup, that's gotta be, there's gotta be something seriously wrong.

Exactly.

When I made the decision a couple of years ago, most people, friends, family, colleagues thought I was mad, but actually it was one of the most rational decisions I've ever made and certainly don't regret it at all as things stand.

And the calculus was really down to the direction of travel of the university.

What I'm about to say is all true, but it's tied in particular to the humanities and the social sciences.

broadly speaking, the STEM subjects, those that are based in tangible, measurable reality and in proofs, they're upstream from this decline and they may hold on.

So I'm really talking about the humanities in particular.

Fundamentally, at Cambridge and indeed at all the other universities I'm aware of in the Western anglophone world,

a rupture has been building and has almost fully manifested itself between the fundamental commitments of what it is to study the humanities, to ask the questions about the human condition, and to range over as widely as possible the products of human civilizations.

There's been a rupture between that and the actual exercise of what it is to be an academic in the humanities.

That's manifested itself in all sorts of ways.

In some cases, the hyper politicization of what it is to study a different culture.

Certain academics feeling that their role in the world is more that of enacting social justice outside the campus rather than pursuing truth within it.

There's been a radical rejection indeed of the very concept of truth.

Many of my colleagues, indeed, probably most people in the humanities, don't believe in an objective truth.

They don't believe in a genuine external reality which hard work and scholarship can uncover.

And once that rupture has happened, both from why we think the humanities matter and whether we think there's a concrete outcome we can get through that study,

Decline is not only inevitable, it is rapid.

So consider, if we're in a system where how one responds to a particular Greek philosopher does not itself lead to a true and a false response, it therefore follows that there aren't really better and worse answers in that intellectual inquiry.

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