The Dartmouth Review: An Interview With Victor Davis Hanson

The Dartmouth Review ^ | February 11, 2005 | Daniel Linsalata

[quidnunc]

The Dartmouth Review: How do you feel that your background in classicism and military history influences your work as a political commentator? And conversely, what impact has your work in current politics had on how you look at history?

Victor Davis Hanson: I think anybody who studies classics develops a tragic view that seems to be thematic in Homer and other classical authors, in that the nature of mankind remains constant; it's not malleable. And therefore certain things tend to happen, such as wars, peace, and these primordial emotions such as pride, fear, anger. And when you have that constantly embedded in the literature that you study most of your life and you look at the present, you are not shocked at somebody like Saddam Hussein. You are not shocked at military action; you are not shocked at pre-emption. These all have historical precedents.

You get a sense of humility that we all age, we all die. There's not going to be a new man created. Technology is not going to change the nature of our brain. So, in that sense, when I look at the present world, I take a deep breath before I write something and I try to ask myself, "Has this happened before in some other form?"

As far as the ancient world … I think it has been very good, I just finished a book, it's coming out in August, about the Peloponnesian war. And it has made me think that the ancients were not just rural … I had written a lot that they were primarily rural people — local, parochial. But I think that their leaders had a lot more appreciation for the issues that we deal with, between the city-states. For instance: alliances, multilateralism, unilateralism, confederations. It's made me think of the ancient world in a primarily political sense, and I have usually been an economic, agrarian, and military historian. I had never looked at the ancient world, in the nineteenth-century sense, as being political.

-snip-

[quidnunc]

FYI

[reaganaut]

Wow. Even in just a few paragraphs, he's great. I think ancient Greek must make people better writers (not to slight Latin, quidniunc - great tagline!)

[KeyWest]

Great post. A couple of quotes.

-The West has a greater tendency to decentralize and allow people work within groups.- to explain our military superiority but also says a lot about us as a people.

-If John Kerry were elected President, I would imagine that the Chinese, in this unstable world, might use it as an opportunity to see where and when he would cave. If he is going to cave on Iraq, he might cave on Taiwan. If he caves on Taiwan, he might cave on Israel. If he caves on Israel, he might cave on Afghanistan. All of these things are based on perceptions, so it is very important for the United States to be perceived as having not power, but overwhelming power, and not predictable in the way it would use it. That is why George Bush does a good job; nobody in the world knows quite what he will do, and they are not eager to test that.-

[mtntop3]

That of which Hanson speaks - a sense of history, of civilization, of proportion - has been the theme of the classic liberal arts curriculum for centuries in colleges and universities here and abroad.

That curriculum has been savaged, corrupted, and done away with, in probably most instances in the U.S., today. But not all.

The liberalism of today - boasting of not being bound by tradition, disdaining history by arrogantly - and ignorantly - "deconstructing it" (and hence, in the most vanity of vanities, of attempting to rewrite it in the manner of a fiction work) is something else. We have come to know it all too well.

[Tolik]

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