The West at a Crossroads: Excellence or Mediocrity?

American Greatness ^ | 11 )ct. 2026 | Roger Kimball

[MtnClimber]

It would have been hard to improve the backdrop for Marco Rubio’s foreign policy address on October 7 in Athens, Greece. Standing on the Pnyx with the ruins of the Parthenon rising up behind him, the Secretary of State delivered a speech that won almost universal plaudits. Let me toss my vote in with the overwhelming majority and affirm that Rubio’s speech was simply splendid: robust, heartfelt, honest, masculine, and true.

Is it still permissible to praise such a public performance for being “masculine”? It was part of Rubio’s accomplishment to render that question moot. His speech was statesmanlike but also steely: confident both in manner and substance. Rubio was speaking on behalf of the greatest military and economic power on earth. He knew it. So did his audience. He did not swagger. But neither did he make any apologies for the potency he represented. Rather, he issued a series of clear-eyed affirmations. What he affirmed were the struggles—political, intellectual, martial—that defined Western civilization and made it a world-conquering and world-enriching force. That history made the spot upon which Rubio stood a sacred space. The Acropolis: that “high place” in whose shadow political liberty made its fledgling steps, where Plato and Aristotle taught, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes wrote their plays, where Pericles presided and Phidias built and sculpted.

Rubio is right: “The civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western world. Generations of our statesmen, artists, and philosophers have looked to it—they’ve looked to it with wonder, and they’ve looked to it with awe.” Most great historical events—the battles, the revolutions, the abdications, the conquests—tend to live on as historical data, facts, and figures to be read about and docketed. But the ancient Greeks, as Rubio says, “seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory.” They were an essential part of the foundation of the West: our laws and political institutions, our science, our literature, our art. “The history of America,” Rubio said, “is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. The city where our Constitution was born—Philadelphia—is itself a Greek name.”

The influence of Athens goes far beyond civic architecture or even the rudiments of our political arrangements. “These institutions and ideas,” Rubio noted, were but the “outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks—qualities that can’t be reduced to any particular political system or theory.”

[I]n Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.

These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy. They were the characteristic of a people—expressed in their traditions, their stories, their imagination; in the qualities they demanded of their citizens; in the things they lived and fought and died for.

In short, “What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man.”

Rubio went on to observe that Athens bequeathed to us not just a common culture but also a “common anthropology—a common view of man and his place in the universe. Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue; of destiny and fate; of truth, goodness, and beauty; of a code that dictates how men ought to live; of objective standards and ideals to strive towards.” It was not so long ago that this “common view of man and his place in the universe” was part of the common mental furniture of most Americans. Such a view stands behind the competitiveness that powers the free market and the general ambition to excel. “The classical Greek city,” Rubio reminded us, “was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle—to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.”

In recent years, however, this energetic, competitive view of human nature has given way to the culture Lewis Carroll evoked in his description of the Dodo race in Through the Looking-Glass. “Everybody has won and all must have prizes.” What goes along with this attenuated view of life is the ethic of what has come to be called “safetyism.” “The ideal of many ideologies in our time,” Rubio pointed out, has

become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.

This loss of spiritedness—what the Greeks called θυμός—has had a far-reaching and depressive effect on the civilizations of the West. Rubio’s diagnosis will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to what has happened to our schools and to our culture at large. The rise of political correctness and cancel culture goes hand in hand with the spiritual timidity that Nietzsche described in his portrait of “the Last Man.” “Over time,” Rubio noted, “we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.”

Remember when, just a few years ago, our cultural commissars celebrated the career criminal George Floyd and The 1619 Project? The unhappy anti-American beneficiaries of America took to the streets to desecrate our monuments and defile our heritage. It was in this context, Rubio observed, that “‘nationalism’ became a dirty word. . . . [W]e taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.” At the same time, we began to outsource not only our industry but also our sovereignty, “transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.”

It is here that Rubio’s speech reaches its denouement. Both the United States and Europe are at a crossroads. Do we endeavor to recover the values we have inherited from the Greeks or do we go quietly into the not-so-good night of spiritual flaccidness? Rubio’s answer caused panic among the low-testosterone denizens of academia and the media. “Under President Trump,” he said, “the United States has made its choice.”

We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.

We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility. To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.

Has any modern statesman had the courage to be so politically incorrect? To note that statecraft requires not only “prudence and diplomacy” but also “the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail,” and to recognize that power requires “not only having the means to defend yourself” but also “the credibility that you are willing to use it”?

There is only one that I can think of: President Donald Trump. In 2017, in a rousing speech in Warsaw, Trump mounted a defense of the West very similar to Rubio’s speech in Athens. Writing about that speech in American Greatness, I argued that a plausible model for the speech was the Funeral Oration Pericles delivered near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. “There is nothing like our community of nations,” Trump said at the time. “The world has never known anything like our community of nations.”

We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.

This is exactly the spirit that Marco Rubio celebrated in front of the Acropolis on October 7. We are, as Rubio warned, at a crossroads. Do we pursue excellence and take justified pride in the great things our civilization has accomplished? Or do we retreat to the tenebrous mediocrity and querulous ressentiment of the Last Man? C. S. Lewis drew a frightening portrait of “men without chests,” spiritually timid creatures who lack gumption (a plausible English equivalent of the Greek word θυμός). Marco Rubio, continuing in the president’s rhetorical footsteps, has called us to reaffirm the better, more spirited angels of our nature. I like to think that this rousing tocsin will help awaken a salutary and clear-eyed spiritual revival.

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TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: athens; greece; leftism; marcorubio; rogerkimball

[MtnClimber]

Socialism/communism drains ambition from a nation. That is what is happening to Europe.

[rlmorel]

Great article, thanks for posting it.

There was a passage that caught my eye:

"...In recent years, however, this energetic, competitive view of human nature has given way to the culture Lewis Carroll evoked in his description of the Dodo race in Through the Looking-Glass. “Everybody has won and all must have prizes.” What goes along with this attenuated view of life is the ethic of what has come to be called “safetyism.” “The ideal of many ideologies in our time,” Rubio pointed out, has become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre...."

'Safetyism".

This is a pet peeve of mine. Granted, even I subscribe to a piece of it when I see someone doing something that is both dangerous and foolhardy, and when it results in expected injury, I lament the mindset that drove it.

But what I see in society is an aversion to all risk, and I see that as detrimental.

We see it in everything ranging from parents who refuse to leave open any opportunity for their children to explore a risky word in which a finger can be cut, a knee skinned, or possibly even a bone broken, to government at local, state, or federal levels that dig their fingers so deeply into a culture of nanny-statism that it not only stifles and confines every aspect of our lives, but drives up the costs of things like automobiles because every single thing that could possibly be protective is now mandatory and must be paid for by consumers.

I understand some of this is driven both by litigation and/or good intentions, but I detest the mindset nonetheless.

Even worse is the mindset of protecting kids from all manner of failure. Failure is an integral part of the learning process of life. And if someone is so obsessed with trying to avoid failure, they not only fail to build up the toughness needed in life to withstand failure and overcome it, but condemn themselves to never having any conception of what the boundaries of their personal possibilities are, and will never reach their full potential.

I think it is a terrible thing...to settle for "safety".

[rlmorel]

I saw this passage as well, and it had echoes for me:

"...We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.

We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility. To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space...."

It reminded me so much of this:

"...We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too..."

I am sure that the reference was not unintentional. Of course, for me, when I hear that, this is what I think of these days:

And that is good, too...:)

[drwoof]

In an admittedly defeated mood of late, I will say Mediocrity.

In fact, will go even farther, and say Serfdom, as the (very) few come to dominate, using technology of all sorts to erase the value of human interaction from society and instead direct it to their bank accounts.