David Butterfield

speaker

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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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

Not just because reading by definition brings you into a fixed corpus of things that have been deemed worth publishing or printing.

It keeps you within the actual canon of what has been judged worth its place in written form.

But also because the very act of reading where you as an individual

are communing with a page and allowing the long-form argument or narrative of the page to bounce off your brain, there's no external intermediary or interference, that is the safest way that we can ensure that not just the young, but the middle-aged and the old can continue an intellectual process when the rest of the world is trying to destroy it.

There's no question in my mind that in the 21st century, the biggest threat to the human condition is not warfare.

It's not climate change.

It's not disease.

It's not some bizarre innovation that we can't think of.

It's the knock-on effects of AI.

not what AI can do, but the degree to which it erodes the act of being human for AI to take such a dominant role in our lives.

And I think we radically and rapidly need to bring people's attention

back to this completely open treasury of shared wisdom in a fixed written form.

It can't be changed.

And the easiest way to do that is something literally as simple as to find time in your day, pick up a book that interests you and spend alone time with it.

So it's an obvious thing, but we're really not talking about it in a way that takes it seriously.

And it's one of the few genuine protections I think we have against the storm that is about to hit.

And it's exactly this problem with the academics failing to speak to the public and inspire the public on the things that matter to them that led me and a few other academics to found a website called Antigone, which is all about trying to bring the Greeks and the Romans before the public in a way that doesn't patronize the public,

doesn't treat the Greeks and the Romans as problematic and racist and not worthy of our attention, but actually treats the reader as an adult and welcomes them in to a world which, of course, has its challenges, has its absurdities, but is also deeply inspiring if we as individuals care about our place in the world and understanding where we've come from.

So the Antigone team is a free website all about that.

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