Profile: Victor Davis Hanson. USA needs a dose of ancient Greece's warrior culture

The Boston Globe ^ | 5/25/2003 | Laura Secor

[TheWillardHotel]

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON leads a double life. A fifth-generation raisin farmer in California's fertile Central Valley, Hanson is also a historian of ancient Greece, a lyrical defender of American agrarianism, and a prolific contributor to conservative opinion magazines. His columns so caught the fancy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that he has enjoyed audiences with both. It's hard to say which is stranger: that a raisin farmer should exert such influence, or that a classics scholar should.

[FreedomPoster]

"And" is a conjunction, not a disjunction.

[Wonder Warthog]

"Western culture, in his view, emanates from ancient Greece and prizes consensual government, private markets, self-criticism, and rational inquiry."

"Western culture" probably owes as much or more to the Vikings as to the Greeks.

[Tin-Legions]

They may not be in charge, but their ideas are: Thomas Jefferson was a great believer in the "citizen-farmer" class. It was also this same class of people that helped Rome gain the power that it did. This was the equivalent to a modern middle class-it had a stake in what goes on in big government. Of course everyday we drift farther and farther from that mold-we become more and more like the Roman empire, and not the republic. Lifetime politicians who serve only the mob, (the great class of the-what did the commies call it, the proletariat or some such?)of idle non workers living off the govt. dole. ect and so forth....

And what finally did in Greek power-democracy man, pure democracy=the tyranny of the majority.

[Tin-Legions]

A bold statement that I believe is undefendable-the Vikings usually melted into the general culture where they settled within a few generations. See England, France, and Russia during the "Dark Ages".
Please defend this line, Im interested in your thought process.....

TL

[rellimpank]

--since you are being facieous, my comment is "No, but if they want a winning sports program , they need to hire him as Athletic Director"--

[Wonder Warthog]

Representative government in Britain and the US owes far more to the Vikings than to Greece.

[aristeides]

''To be honest with you,'' Hanson had said earnestly in his garden just that morning, ''the university is a really rotten institution.''

The Other Greeks is a great book. A thinker of genius like Friedrich Nietzsche -- who also started out as a classics professor -- inevitably arouses the envy and resentment of plodders in the academy.

[bert]

....he argues that the values of classical civilization originated not among the urban elites of fifth-century Athens but among the communities of middling farmer-soldiers who dominated Greece's pre-classical era.....

Here he is describing Greek fly over country..... a RED ZONE.

[VOA]

Victor Davis Hanson bump!

[bert]

.....[And ancient Greece had a number of them.] .....

Modern America also has tyranny. We currently suffer from the tyranny of the lawyers.

[caspera]

Because, typically, a civilization passes through phases of virtue, ascendance, dominance, then decadence so it cannot dominate forever.

The Romans took the ideas of the Greeks and made their own special addition, lex, i.e. the rule of law. This proved to be a culture superior to even that of the Greeks, which had become somewhat decadent by the time of Rome's ascendance. Rome eventually pacified and incorporated Greece, which then became a client state of Rome, a nice place to send the kids for college. Still, Rome's victory at its core was a Greek victory because Rome's dominance over Greece was born out of how well they incorporated the ideas of the Greeks and improved upon them. In essence, they had become bigger believers in the Greek approach than the Greeks themselves.

For a variety of reasons, Rome in its time fell, in part because of decadence.

Hanson is not really talking about Greece as a place as much as a state of mind and an approach to knowledge, and the Americans are the most successful society because they have most successfully adopted and adapted this approach in modern times, because it was transmitted to us through the classical culture of the British Empire. (Think of the lyrics of "Modern Major General" by Gilbert and Sullivan. If you were going to be an officer in the British military, it was assumed that you could read Latin and Greek.)

Think of it this way. If a modern day American scholar went back in time to Greece and used the words drama, comedy, democracy, tyranny, legal, idiot, senate, republic, empire, liberty, science, etc., the ancient speaker would understand because they would not be just understood concepts, but the words themselves are if fact the exact same words as 2,000 years ago. However, if you use these words in a "modern" Islamic society, they really won't know what you're talking about although they sometimes do a good job of pretending they do.

[StriperSniper]

Bump for later.

[tet68]

Thanks, just finished Carnage and Culture, I think it
does give an interesting insight into the way war is fought,
and why Islam or other non-representative states do not
learn to win.

In this article, he is right again, we ARE on the edge of losing this most valuable asset.
One only has to imagine President Gore, or remember Ex-president Clinton to see how even people raised in the
western mindset can be able to deny this heritage, to
the disadvantage of us all.

[aristeides]

I haven't read Hanson's recent books on military history. Where does he fit Germany into his scheme of things? Germany seems to combine the Western individualistic tradition, military success, and recent militaristic authoritarianism degenerating into totalitarianism.

[Skywalk]

I don't doubt that the specific forms of local governance and custom were greatly influenced by a variety of Northern European tribes, esp. Norse and Anglo-Saxon. However, the Greek democracy and the law as enshrined in the time of the Roman Republic/early Empire are the strongest threads we can locate. And the idea of the citizen definitely comes from those two sources, NOT N. European.

IN fact, much of our civic tradition's roots can be found in Greece and Rome. Something that tends to annoy the "Judeo-Christian" screamers on this forum, though I respect the debt the West owes to that intellectual tradition as well.

[Skywalk]

Ah but somewhere in there is the anti-individualist strain of fascism which didn't start in Germany with Hitler but with the Kaiser. If I'm not mistaken it is Prussia's school system which was the model for the American public educational system. That system was empowered to create a loyal and pliable labor and cultural force in service to the State. It bears little resemblance to the Greek tradition, which is why we need to eliminate public schools.

[Skywalk]

Caspera,

Excellent addition of the concept of lex as the contribution of the Romans to Western Civ.

[ccmay]

Representative government in Britain and the US owes far more to the Vikings than to Greece.

I would go further and suggest that we can thank our Saxon forefathers for our form of government. The Shiremoot and Witan were republican -- not democratic -- assemblies of the best men, selected by the inhabitants of the various marks and hundreds.

-ccm

[Eric in the Ozarks]

When I saw your screen name, the theme from "Ben Casey," ran through my mind...

[redrock]

I have read most of Hansen's works.

..and his assessment of WHY Western Culture is FAR superior to the Eastern type is correct.

redrock