Professor Jiang

What was the Viking worldview? What was their value system? Why did they venture out into the world? Unfortunately, the Vikings maintained an oral tradition, most of which was lost after they converted to Christianity. What we do know about the Vikings comes from archaeology and the Norse mythology that was written down in the Poetic and Prose Edda. In this talk to his Chinese high school students...

The Abbasid Caliphate was considered the Golden Age of Islam. Before the Mongolian conquest, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad was the global center of learning and literacy. Muslim scientists and mathematicians were respected and influential even in Europe. Why did the Islamic world enter its Golden Age, while Europe was stuck in its Dark Ages? Why did this Golden Age come to an end? Why did Christi...

Why did China stop being creative after the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE)? In this talk to his Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that it's because the Ming and Qing dynasties achieved a level of national unity that was not possible in the past. While this national unity ensured the longevity of the emperor and his imperial bureaucracy, it made the nation insular and stagnant. Th...

Genghis Khan is considered the world's greatest conquerer. Why was he so successful? In this talk to his Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin argues that Genghis Khan had the same characteristics as other great conquerors, such as Sargon of Akkad, Philip of Macedon, and Julius Caesar. Genghis Khan believed that he had a divine mission to re-make the world. In overcoming hardship and defe...

What were the Crusades? Why did they start? Why did they end? In this talk to his Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin explores the history of Europe's late middle ages. He shows that while the Roman Catholic Church was dominant, there were still challenges to its authority. Muslims controlled the Holy Land, Muslim Iberia was more wealthy and innovative, and the Orthodox Church claimed s...

The Renaissance was a re-imagining of Classical Greece in a Christian European context, a spirit that would birth modernity. How did it start? Scholars argued that the Renaissance came about due to a perfect storm of structural factors. The build-up of commercial trade, the re-discovery of Greco-Roman thinkers, and the development of intellectual centers (such as universities and monasteries) were...

In this talk to his Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains how the Protestant Reformation birthed capitalism. Martin Luther and John Calvin saw the Catholic Church as inherently and irredeemably corrupt. Martin Luther proposed "justification by faith," which argued that Christians can only be redeemed by their unwavering faith in God (regardless of how much money they donate...

What is the Scientific Revolution, and how did it happen? Why did it happen in Europe, and not anywhere else? In this talk to his Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that the Scientific Revolution happened because of a change in focus from asking "What is Truth?" to asking "How can we know Truth?". To resolve the geocentric vs. heliocentric debate, Europeans pio...

How did a few thousand Spanish Conquistadors subdue and conquer millions of Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans. Most scholars believe it's a combination of superior Spanish military technology, spreading of deadly infectious diseases, and internal tribal conflict that led to the demise of once powerful empires. In this talk to his Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin argues that it was the religi...

The Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, and Chinese were the first four gunpowder empires. So how did Europe come to conquer the world? In this talk to his Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that it's because Europe adopted a whole society approach to warfare. Because of open co-operative competition within Europe, nations were forced to transition from feudalism to the nation-state,...

This video begins a three-part series on the French Revolution. The over-arching thesis is that the French Revolution was a religious crusade, and it was made successful by the contributions of three geniuses. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the Poet of the Revolution who dreamed of a better world based on Reason. Maximilien De Robespierre was the Prophet who had the courage and conviction to lead his p...

The French Revolution allowed for the meteoric rise of an idealistic provincial lawyer. During the Reign of Terror, Robespierre could have been king, but ultimately fell to the guillotine, like thousands of his victims. What explains his spectacular rise and fall? In this talk to his Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin argues that Robespierre saw himself as the Prophet of the French Revolut...

How did a young Corsican become Emperor of France in 1804?In this talk to his Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin argues that it was Napoleon's myth-making genius that seduced the French people, and killed the fledging French Republic. In this way, Napoleon was like Caesar and Hitler. Will Trump take America down the same path?

Professor explains how the Dutch Golden Age gave birth to the Middle Class. With the transition from feudalism to market economics and from Catholicism to Calvinism, people changed their focus from accumulating status to accumulating wealth. This created the concept of "class." This concept brought with it certain pathologies (fears of disorder, failure, and germs) that expressed themsel...

How did England -- a poor and divided island -- become the world's greatest empire? In this talk to his Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that England succeeded because it was a poor and divided island. Throughout most of its history, the different peoples of Britain were engaged in open co-operative competition. Their division meant that foreign invaders could come and conqu...

How did Shakespeare father the British empire? In this talk to his Beijing high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that it was Shakespeare's innovations in syntax and diction that transformed English into the linguistic Internet. Cultures, ideologies, and peoples could now meet on this Internet, and have their ideas and values pollinate and cross-breed within the framework of British civil...

Oscar Wilde once quipped: "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between."What did he mean by this? In this talk to his Beijing high school students, Jiang Xueqin argues that America in its attempt to become an "enlightened" civilization ultimately became an anti-civilization. Civilizations have history, culture, and values, a...

Why did Putin invade Ukraine? In this lecture to his Beijing high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that the war in Ukraine is a clash of civilizations. In his novels "Crime and Punishment" and "Brothers Karamazov" Fyodor Dostoevsky captures and expresses the Russian soul. As a Christian Orthodox people, the Russians believe the meaning of life is to accept the mystery, mi...

What explains the rise of Adolf Hitler? In this talk to his Beijing high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that Hitler was a manifestation of the German obsession with the unity of will. After the humiliating defeat of World War I and amidst the economic turmoil of the Weimar Republic, Germans sought salvation and redemption in their civilization, especially the music of Richard Wagner and th...

What is the legacy of Immanuel Kant, considered our greatest philosopher? In this talk to his Beijing high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that Kant's insights had a tremendous impact on the development of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and quantum mechanics. Kant's philosophical revolution was equivalent to that of the Copernican revolution in astronomy. With his precise lo...

Why was Karl Marx -- who believed that industrial capitalism would evolve into a worker's paradise -- wrong? In this talk to his Beijing high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that while Marx understood the ills of capitalism he failed to appreciate the psychology of people. People strive for religious community, not economic equality. We want to connect with God, and we seek status. That...

Freud proposed the theory of the Oedipal Complex. Where did he get the idea? Why did it become so popular? In this talk to his Beijing high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that Freud developed his psychological theories in order to protect the interests of the powerful. His protege Carl Jung would take Freud's theory of the unconscious, and turn it into a systemic model of human psychol...

Nationalism is the main cause of World War One. How and why did it originate? In this talk to his Beijing high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that nationalism was a response to religious, economic, and cultural challenges in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Protestant Reformation produced a crisis of faith in people, and many made the nation-state into their new religion. The Ind...

How did a poor Georgian high school drop-out help lead a fringe and fanatical political party (the Bolsheviks) into absolute power in Russia? How was Stalin able to eliminate his competitors? How did he defeat Hitler in World War II? In this talk to his Beijing high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that Stalin was the "ubermensch," the man of steel who willed a new reality into bei...

In this final talk of the "Civilization" course, Jiang Xueqin explains the rise and fall of the American empire. At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, America proposed that the dollar should be the world's reserve currency. In return for this "exorbitant privilege," America pledged that its currency could be exchanged for gold. But with America spending exorbitantly to fund...