Classics and War

Imprimis, Hillsdale College ^ | February 2002 | Victor Davis Hanson

[nicmarlo]

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The following is an abridged version of Dr. Hanson's lecture at a seminar on "Liberal Education, Liberty, and Education Today," delivered in Phillips Auditorium at Hillsdale College on November 11, 2001.

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The study of Classics -- of Greece and Rome -- can offer us moral lessons as well as a superb grounding in art, literature, history, and language. In our present crisis after September 11, it also offers practical guidance -- and the absence of familiarity with the foundations of Western culture in part may explain many of the disturbing reactions to the war that we have seen on American campuses.

If more in our universities really understood the Greeks and Romans and their legacy in the West, then they would not see this present conflict through either therapeutic or apologetic lenses. As Classics teaches us, war in classical antiquity -- and for most of the past 2,500 years of Western Civilization -- was seen as a tragedy innate to the human condition -- a time of human plague when, as the historian Herodotus said, fathers bury sons rather than sons fathers. In others words, killing humans over disagreements should not happen among civilized people. But it does happen. So war, the poet Hesiod concluded, was "a curse from Zeus."

Tragically, the Greeks tell us, conflict will always break out -- and very frequently so -- because we are human and thus not always rational. War is "the father, the king of us all," the philosopher Heraclitus lamented. Even the utopian Plato agreed: "War is always existing by nature between every Greek city-state." How galling and hurtful to us moderns that Plato, of all people, once called peace, not war, the real "parenthesis" in human affairs. Warfare could be terrifying -- "a thing of fear," the poet Pindar summed up -- but not therein unnatural or necessarily evil.

No, the rub was particular wars, not war itself. While all tragic, wars could be good or evil depending on their cause, the nature of the fighting, and the ultimate costs and results. The Greek defense against Persian attack in 480 B.C., in the eyes of the playwright Aeschylus (who chose as his epigram mention of his service at the battle of Marathon, not his dramas), was "glorious." Yet the theme of Thucydides' history of the internecine Peloponnesian wars was folly and sometimes senseless butchery. Likewise, there is language of freedom and liberty associated with the Greeks' naval victory at Salamis, but not with the slaughter at the battle of Gaugamela -- Alexander the Great's destruction of the Persian army in Mesopotamia that wrecked Darius III's empire and replaced eastern despots with Macedonian autocrats.

The Roots of War

If war was innate, and its morality defined by particular circumstances, fighting was also not necessarily explained by prior exploitation or legitimate grievance. Nor did aggression have to arise from poverty or inequality. States, like people, the historian Thucydides tells us, can be envious -- and even rude and pushy. And if they can get away with things, they most surely will. Thucydides later says states battle out of "honor, fear, and self-interest." How odd to think that the Japanese and Germans were not starving in 1941, but rather were proud peoples who wanted those whom they deemed inferior and weak to serve them.

To the Greeks, such rotten peoples also fought mostly over tangible things -- more land, more subjects, more loot. Wars were a sort of acquisition, Aristotle said. Bullies, whether out of vanity or a desire for power and recognition, will take things from other people unless they are stopped. And if they are to be stopped, citizens -- among them good, kind and well-read men like Socrates, Sophocles, Thucy-dides, and Demosthenes -- must fight to protect their freedom and the save the innocent.

To a student of the Classics who trusts Thucydides or Plato more than Marx, Freud, or Michel Foucault, the present crisis, I think, looks something like this: The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, invites envy because of the success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets that threaten both theocracy and autocracy alike. That we are often to be hated -- and periodically to be challenged by those who want our power, riches, or influence and yet simultaneously hate their own desire -- is to be often regretted, but always expected. Our past indulgence of Osama bin Laden did not bring us respect, much less sympathy. Rather, human nature being what it is, our forbearance invited ever more contempt and audacity on his part -- and more dead as the bitter wages of our self-righteous morality and tragic miscalculation.

The enemies of free speech and intolerance -- German Nazis, Italian fascists, Japanese militarists, Stalinist communists, or Islamic fundamentalists -- will always attack us for what we are, rather than what we have done, inasmuch as they must innately hate freedom and the liberality which is its twin. Only our moral response -- not our status as belligerents per se -- determines whether our war is just and necessary. If, like the Athenians, we butcher neutral Melians for no good cause, then our battle against the innocent is evil and we may not win. But if we fight to preserve freedom like the Greeks at Thermopylae and the GIs on the beaches of Normandy, then war is the right and indeed the only thing we can do. Caught in such a tragedy, where efforts at reason and humanity fall on the deaf ears of killers, we must go to war for our survival and to prove to our enemies that their defeat will serve as a harsh teacher -- at least for a generation or two -- that it is wrong and very dangerous to use two kilotons of explosives to blow up 5,000 civilians in the streets of our cities.

The Modern View of War

This depressing view of human nature and conflict is rarely any longer with us. It was not the advent of Christianity that ended it; Christian philosophers and theologians long ago developed the doctrine of "just war," having realized that nonresistance meant suicide. More likely, the 20th Century and the horror of the two World Wars -- Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima -- put an end to the tragic view of war. Yet out of such numbing losses -- and our arrogance -- we missed the lesson of the World Wars. The calamity of 60 million dead was not only because we went to war, but rather because we were naive and deemed weak by our enemies well before 1914 and 1939 -- at a time when real resolve could have stopped Prussian militarism and Nazism before millions of blameless perished.

The deviant offspring of the Enlightenment -- Marxists and Freudians -- gave birth to even more pernicious social sciences that sought to 'prove' to us that war was always evil and therefore -- with help from Ph.D.s -- surely preventable. Indeed, during the International Year of Peace in 1986, a global commission of experts concluded that war was unnatural and humans themselves unwarlike! Unfortunately, innocent people get killed because of that kind of thinking. Many, especially in our universities, now are convinced that war always results from real, rather than perceived, grievances, such as the poverty arising out of the usual list of sins: colonialism, imperialism, racism and sexism. In response, dialogue and mediation have been elevated to the grand science of "conflict resolution theory," a sort of marriage counseling or small claims court taken to the global level.

Rich and conceited Westerners simply could not accept the idea that more people in the twentieth century were killed by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao off the battlefield than on it. How depressing to suggest that the Khmer Rouge, the Hutus, and the Serbians went on killing when left alone -- and quit only when either satiated or stopped!

In the new moral calculus of the American university, bin Laden figures to be no Xerxes or Tojo. He is not even an inherently evil man who hates us for our clout and our influence. Far too few in the university understand that bin Laden wishes to strut over a united Middle Eastern caliphate under his brand of Medieval Islam, and to make decadent Westerners cower in fear. Instead, they insist that he is either confused (call in Freud) or has legitimate grievances (read Marx), and so we must find answers within us for what he does. Western importation of Arab oil? Stolen land from the Palestinians? Decadent democracy and capitalism? Jewish-American women walking in the land of Mecca? Puppet Arab governments? Take your pick -- bin Laden has cited them all.

To stop the evil of Islamic fundamentalism, the tragic Greeks would make ready the 101st Airborne and the Rangers, while too many in academia would rather that we chit-chat with him, fathom him, or accommodate him as did the Clinton State Department. Seeing war as "Zeus's curse" in this age of our greatest learning and wealth -- and pride -- is to descend into "savagery," when our sophisticated elite promise that prayer, talk, or money can yet prevail. But if we deem ourselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop killers, then -- as Socrates and Pericles alike remind us -- we have become real accomplices to evil through inaction. Generations slaughtered in Europe, incinerated Jews, massacred Russians and Chinese, and the bleached bones of Cambodians are proof enough of what the Greeks once warned us.

Western Exceptionalism

Finally, Classics teaches how unique the Greeks and Romans were among the peoples of the ancient world; theirs was an anti-Mediterranean culture whose approach to politics, culture, literature, and religion was antithetical to almost every state in Africa, Asia, and the tribal confines of northern Europe. In our ignorance, too many Americans have made the fatal mistake of assuming that our enemies are simply different from us, rather than far worse than us -- as if the current war in the Middle East is largely due to a misunderstanding among equals, rather than reflective of a vast faultline that goes back to the very origins of our civilization. Athens was a democracy; Sidon was not. Farmers owned their own property in Greece, voted, and formed the militia of the polis; not so in Persia and Egypt. Thucydides was able to criticize his mother country, Greece; Persian clerks who recorded Darius's res gestae on the walls of Persepolis were not. The Greek language and its European descendants have a rich vocabulary of words for "constitution," "citizen," "freedom," and "democracy"; this is true of neither old Persian nor modern Arabic. Such differences are not perceived, but real and critical, for they affect the manner in which people conduct their daily lives -- whether they live in fear or in safety, in want or in security.

If our students and professors today would study the Classics, they might rediscover the origins of their culture -- and in doing so learn that we are not even remotely akin to the Taliban or the Saudis, but are in fact profoundly different in the manner we craft our government, treat our women, earn our living, and set the parameters of our religion. Modern cultural anthropology, social linguistics, cross-cultural geography, sociology, and nearly any discipline with the suffix "studies" would lecture us that the Taliban's desecration of the graves of the infidel, clitorectomies of infants, torture of the accused, murder of the untried, and destruction of the non-Islamic is merely "different" or "problematic" -- almost anything other than "evil." Yet a world under the Taliban or its supporters, like the satrapy that Xerxes envisioned for a conquered Greece, would mean no free expression, no voting, no protection from arbitrary and coercive government, but instead theocracy, censorship, and brutality in every facet of daily life. Such were the stakes at Salamis, and so too is the contest now with the Islamic fundamentalists, who are as akin to ancient absolutists as we are to the Greeks.

Such ignorance of one's own past can weaken a powerful society such as ours that must project confidence, power, humanity -- and hope -- to those less fortunate abroad. This new species of upscale and pampered terrorist hates America for a variety of complex reasons. He despises, of course, his own attraction toward our ease and liberality. He recognizes that our freedom and affluence spur on his appetites more than Islam can repress them. But just as importantly, he realizes that there is an aristocratic guilt within many comfortable Americans, who are too often ashamed of, or apologetic about, their culture. And in this hesitance, our enemies sense not merely our ignorance of our own foundations, but also both decadence and weakness. Rather than appreciating Americans' self-confidence or simple manners when we accept rebuke so politely, our enemies despise us all the more, simply because they can -- and can so easily, and without rejoinder.

Classics, then, can teach us who we once were -- and thus who we are now in the present war. The ancients not only teach us that life is spirited and tragic, but also that what was created in and followed from Greece and Rome was, and is, man's last and greatest hope on earth.

[nicmarlo]

Bio:

Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno, received his B.A. at the University of California at Santa Cruz and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. In 1991 he was given the Award for Teaching Excellence by the American Philological Association -- an annual citation given to the top undergraduate teachers of Classics. He is the author or editor of several books on military and ancient history, including The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (Cassell, 1999), The Soul of Battle (Free Press, 1999), and Carnage and Culture (Doubleday, 2001). He has also written about traditional agrarian and rural life and contemporary culture wars. His books History Book Club and Book of the Month Club selections and have been translated into several foreign languages. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Times, American Heritage, The Weekly Standard, and The Wilson Quarterly, and has been featured on National Public Radio and the Jim Lehrer News Hour. He currently writes a bi-weekly column on the war against terrorism for National Review Online. Dr. Hanson lives with his wife and three children on the farm where he was born in Selma, California.

I thought this was an interesting read. My boss went to this college and gave me the article. I thought it worthwhile finding and posting. Hope you enjoy. (I was an English major, and probably appreciate what he says about the importance of reading the Classics, more than some folks).

[nicmarlo]

FYI ping.

[sistergoldenhair]

for a later read

[mlmr]

Cute!

[nopardons]

Well, I appreciate what he wrote, and thank you for posting this. He is, of course, completely correct. The dumbing down of education, in this country is so many fold, that it's difficult to know where to begin the condemnations.

Rome based so much of its culture on the Greeks'. Combined, it was what the elite , well educated European ( especially the English ) were force fed, in school, from the early Middle Ages through the early 1960's ! Copying the English system, American elite education on down, nurished generation after generation with the study of Latin, ancient history, logic, and classical litterature.

When did this all come to a full stop ? In the 1960's, with the KGB funded and led student insurrections. Yes, there had been lefty / Communist / Socialist teachers in the system before that; however , no , they did NOT have all that much influence. For those of you who lay blame on the NEA, and the NTA, that is only of late . The REAL blame must be laid at the feet of those who didn't fight back, when there was still time; the parents , the alumi of man colleges and universities, and the stupid students, who were useful fools ... who followed unthinkungly. The silent majority, whose voices remained silent when it would have done some good.

All isn't lost, though. FR is alive and well, and WE are the shock forces for change. : - )

READ ; READ ON YOUR OWN, AND ENCOURAGE OTHERS TO READ THIS CATALOGE OF INSPIRATION AND INTELLECT !

Yes, the Bible played a large part in the Founding Father's lives and education. Yet, as important, was their knowledge of ancient Roman and ancient Greek writing .

[HockeyPop]

Bumping fellow Victor Hanson fan

[RJayneJ]

Noteworthy post.

Click icon for: September 11 -- Six Months Later

[HockeyPop]

ping

[mrsmith]

History frames and enlightens our discussion of "news".

[nicmarlo]

The REAL blame must be laid at the feet of those who didn't fight back, when there was still time; the parents , the alumi of man colleges and universities, and the stupid students, who were useful fools ... who followed unthinkungly.

Thanks for your thoughtful post. I agree with all your comments, especially the above. It is ironic that the colleges, which "encourage critical thinking skills," have lost the ability (intentionally, most likely) to have their students actually use these skills.

[nicmarlo]

I never heard of Victor Hanson before, but I am very impressed with what he wrote and his style--he's definitely now on my list of authors to read.

[d14truth]

Thank you. I get 'Imprimus' at home. I, too, enjoyed reading this article. I think Tony Snow was the featured writer in the March issue.

[Southern Federalist]

Thanks for the bump. He has made more sense out of what's going on in the world than almost any other commentator. The whole campaign in Afghanistan was like a laboratory demonstration of the thesis of Carnage and Culture.

[Southern Federalist]

Hanson's book Carnage and Culture is the most impressive and insightful analysis I've seen of the kind of east-west confrontation we are now involved in. Highly recommended.

[nicmarlo]

History frames and enlightens our discussion of "news".

That is why it's so important to keep history as truthful and accurate as possible. Not doing so reminds me of Orwell's 1984.....quite scary.

[nicmarlo]

Thanks for your recommendation. I will definitely purchase the book and read with interest. It's refreshing to read someone who write's intelligently and can make it understandable.

[nicmarlo]

I think Tony Snow was the featured writer in the March issue.

That should be a another great article. I will look for it. Thanks d14!

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks nicmarlo. Note: this topic is from 3/12/2002. Blast from the Past. Adding to the catalog, *and* sending a general distribution. This Victor Davis Hanson piece is a "Longer Perspectives" topic from the FRchives, as are most of these (from the newly expanded "Thucydides" keyword): Pericles' Ideal of Democracy Robert Kaplan on Applying the Wisdom of the Ages to the Twenty-First Century The great Victor Davis Hanson now has a blog Vast and Deadly Fleets May Yield Secrets at Last (Freedom Over Tyranny Alert) The Journalism of Warfare The past as politics - (VDH on critics of Bush and the War on Terror) "Welcome to hell, gentlemen!" A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Thucydides and Us Why Did Athens Lose? (Victor Davis Hanson on Peloponnesian War) Secret Of Ancient Athens Plague Is Being Unraveled "College-prep" for Navy SEALs? An Ancient Colony Of Andros Uncovered Typhoid May Have Caused Fall Of Athens, Study Finds Achaemenid Inscription Names Uncle Of Darius In Old Persian For First Time U.S. Has Gone Hog-Wild Like Athens Of Old The Classical Education of the Founding Fathers History for Dollars (Humanities) Black death DNA unravelled (Genetic code of 'mother' of deadly bubonic plague reassembled) To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[bert]

War is the natural human condition.

Peace is the interval between wars.

Peace is briefly achieved by winning a war.

Then there is Islam..... and pseudo war, sanctions

Sanctions, effective sanctions that cause severe pain and real suffering will bring the war. If the Iranian leaders are resolute, rather than surrender, they will continue and actually increase the attack.

If you back up and take a wide view of nations and events it becomes obvious we are living at the time of a historical cusp. There is an intense desire among radical Islamic fundamentalists to stop the flow of events leading to a modernized future. They long for the purity and sanctity of the not to distant past. They see as anathema the societal changes that have taken hold in Europe and the United States. They see the spread and acceptance of this change to all of Islam as damnation.

What will be the tipping point? What event or series of events will tip on a course that can be deemed favorable. A course that will stop or at least severely retard the progress of modernization events must be plotted and implemented.

Although Iran might not be the centroid of the planning and implementation, Iran is strongly sympathetic. The devolution that was conducted by Ayatollah Homeni involved locking all the doors of a movie theater in Bandar Shapur and then setting it on fire. The movie goers were sacrificed to the cause, to the devolution. The same reasoning produced the sacrifice of thousands in the twin towers.

The tipping point will not come. Iran is on defense, the assertion of principle of death and destruction has been stymied. Over most of Islam, adherents go about their daily business of living well and working toward continued improvement. The course amounts to Islamic evolution. That is change that allows going to the mosque while living an increasingly better life.

The Renaissance is in progress in Islamic lands. The Reformation is following. Rising from the sands of the Arabian desert and from the jungles of Indonesia are rich and populous societies that enjoy their wealth and their Islam.

Osama is dead. The mullahs are in a box. The devolution is withering. The people didn’t want it. The coming war of defense will end the devolution.

[BroJoeK]

nicmarlo: "I never heard of Victor Hanson before, but I am very impressed with what he wrote "

Someone used to regularly post Hanson's articles here on Free Republic, but this is the first one I've seen in, how long -- two years?
And it's over 10 years old!

For whatever my opinion is worth, Hanson is the best there is at this kind of analysis, always worth the read.

It would be interesting to learn someday why we don't see more of him these days on Free Republic.