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.

[alfa6]

Allow me to see your bump and raise it one.

BTTT for a later read

Regards

alfa6 ;>}

[Fury]

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.

"liberty", etc are not the same words as used in ancient Greek, but your points are well taken and very well put.

[FreedomPoster]

>>It bears little resemblance to the Greek tradition, which is why we need to eliminate public schools.

My hope for the future of this Nation lies with the increasing numbers of home-schooled and privately-schooled kids. They will wield influence far in excess of their numbers.

[VOA]

alfa6,

In case you (or other posters/lurkers) don't know it, Professor Hanson is occassionally
heard on The Hugh Hewitt Show over the Internet (www.krla870.com).
Hewitt's show runs from 3-5PM and 8-9PM PACIFIC Time.

Also, you might get Hewitt on a local station as part of his syndication via
the Salem Radio Networkk. You can also check Hewitt's site (www.hughhewitt.com)

[tet68]

He didn't use the Germans as an example in Carnage and Culture, perhaps because they fit the western example.
He did touch on the fact that war between two cultures
that were of the shock battle mindset tend to be even more
horrific.

Just finished Applebaum's History of the Gulag and in the
closing chapter she touches on a similar theme, that because
the russians and even we americans refuse to remember history, ie the camp/gulag we are putting ourselves and our decendents in a position to allow it to happen again.

"For if we forget the gulag, sooner or later we will find it hard to understand our history too. Why did we fight the cold war, after all? Was it because of crazed right-wing politicians, in cahoots with the military-industrial
complex and the CIA, invented the whole thing and forced two generations of Americans and West Europeans to go along with it? Or was there something more important happening?
Confusion is already rife. In 2002, an article in the conservative Brithish Spectator magaxine opined that the Could War was "one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time." The American writer Gore Vidal has also described the battles of the Cold War as, forty years of mindless wars which created a debt of $5 trillion."

Already we are forgetting what it was that mobilized us, that inspired us, what held the civilization of the"the west" together for so long: we are forgetting what it was
we were fighting against. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is."

[Gritty]

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

And this is from a man who surely ought to know!

Hanson is a treasure. I'd take him over the entire Professorship at Harvard and Cornell combined!

[Wonder Warthog]

"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."

Greek democracy and Roman law get a better press because they have a written history, but as far as ultimate INFLUENCE goes, the practical EFFECTS on form of government owe at least as much to the Vikings--specifically the cultural ideas of the "rights of free men". American common law of course has it roots in British common law--whose direct antecedents can be traced back to the Vikings--NOT Greece and Rome. America's roots of freedom owe as much or more to Magna Carta as Plato and Aristotle.

[aristeides]

Vikings? Not Anglo-Saxons? I'm perfectly willing to believe that our common law owes a lot to common Germanic customs, but I find it kind of surprising if the Vikings in particular are the primary source of it. Got a source?

[krunkygirl]

Thank you, poster, for sharing this. I only recently heard of Mr. Hanson by way of mention on Rush's show. Now I am very intrigued and will actively look for his books. Everyday, just about, you find out just how much you don't know...

BUMP

[caspera]

I wasn't saying that all the words were Greek, but that a Greek scholar from 2,000 (not 2,500) would have understood the word libertas (or lex or res publica), much as a Roman scholar would have understood eleutheria or nomos or demos.

[caspera]

read 2000 [years ago -sic]

[AlbionGirl]

Every civilization will see it's demise, if history is any indicator. I think what Mr. Hanson's analogy applies to is the zenith of Greek hegemony.

All I could think of while watching the war in Iraq unfold, is how very much we are as the Roman Empire was during it's golden era - minus the crucifixtions, of course. The only thing that will stop the US's juggernaut is catastrophe, and I'm not even sure that will fully disable us.

Even with all our problems, we are the most adaptable people on the face of the earth and we're the smartest too. No matter what the Europeans say about the US placing such and such in Math, Science, etc. We are the ones driving technological advance, so whoever is doing that has a handle on Math and Science and 'other' subject matter as well.

In addition, and as importantly, there are still quite a few kids out there who may not now the difference between the Pathogrean Thereom (sp?) and a Proteus switch, but they can take apart an engine and rebuild it at the age of 16 or 17. That takes smarts, it may not be SAT smarts but so what?

Speaking as an FBI (full-blooded Italian) who thinks they're pretty smart; they have nothing on Americans, plain and simple. With the possible exception of food and/or fashion; nice frippery, but not the substance of a powerhouse civilization.

Our greatest assest is that we take 'intellectuals' with a large dose of salt, and we prize commons sense above all. We reign and we rule. That probably will come to an end some day, but not for many, many generations to come.

[curmudgeonII]

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

Amen to that, old buddy.

[Cuttnhorse]

Exactly correct tet, Hanson mentions in Carnage and Culture that when Western Cultures battled with each other, the results were indeed horific.

What a great book is Carnage and Culture...I find myself refering to it often. Having been educated in science, I managed to miss most of what Hanson writes about so well.

[headsonpikes]

Lawsuits were one of the instruments used to kill the Roman Republic, too.

[freedumb2003]

>>"And" is a conjunction, not a disjunction.<<

I meant of the two, which is better?

[Tin-Legions]

The pit gets deeper: when did representative govt. come in Viking form? Representative govt. did not exist at all until the Magna Carta (embyronic of course), several hundred years after the last Viking invasions. Even before, during, and after the Viking King Canute's reign several decades before Hastings, no representative govt. ever existed in Anglo Saxon England. If you are thinking of the "Thing" councils or the Witan councils of AS England-we are far closer to the Greek model than to the Viking.

I'm still not convinced. Keep it coming

[Wonder Warthog]

"Vikings? Not Anglo-Saxons? I'm perfectly willing to believe that our common law owes a lot to common Germanic customs, but I find it kind of surprising if the Vikings in particular are the primary source of it. Got a source?"

The more accurate term might be "peninsular and island Northwest European" (call'em PINEs for short)--NOT "Germanic". When you start talking about Vikings vs. Anglo-Saxon, things get VERY intertwined as to which was the chicken and which the egg. Whether the Vikings were more the originators than the means of transmission and cross-fertilization, I'm not sure we will ever know.

Greece and Rome get "good press" because they HAD "the press" (i.e. a history based on writing rather than oral memory and tradition). I simply feel that the "PINEs" contribution to the Western cultural tradition of individual liberty and representative government is under-appreciated.

In the popular media of today, PINEs are depicted as dirty, bearskin-wearing, barbarians, (kind of the way Southerners are depicted--minus the bearskins) which recent archeological work has shown was most definitely NOT the case.

[Oztrich Boy]

The oldest functioning parliaments on the Earth are the Tynwald in the Isle of Man and the Althingi on Iceland.
Both pure Viking with nada Graeco-Roman influence.

[dread78645]

the great class of the-what did the commies call it, the proletariat or some such?

Uhmm, you have it jumbled up.

The proletariat is the non-propertied class that lives by selling their labor.
The bourgeoisie is the class with property living on trade.

The truly idle classes in Marx-Leninist theory are the capitalist (propertied and living on interest income of wealth) and the priesthood who lived on the donations of others.