The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (2 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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ANCIENT GREECE: LOVE OF WISDOM AND BEAUTY
Guess What?At hens’ culture was, simply, superior.
Philosophy was born in a men’s club.
Moral relativism brought down Ancient Greece.
A
blind old man, led by his daughter, has stopped to take his rest, perhaps his final rest, in the shade of a cool grotto. The water of a spring mutters nearby; the spice of grapevines and the olive is in the air. A chorus of local villagers sings of its holiness and beauty, where the
blind old man, led by his daughter, has stopped to take his rest, perhaps his final rest, in the shade of a cool grotto. The water of a spring mutters nearby; the spice of grapevines and the olive is in the air. A chorus of local villagers sings of its holiness and beauty, where the
. . . golden crocus gleamsAlong Cephisus’ slow meandering streams,Whose fountains never fail. (
Oedipus at Colonus
)
These villages had attempted, halfheartedly, to drive the poor man away. For that blind man has been cursed: he is Oedipus, the wretch who fulfilled a terrible oracle in attempting to evade it, fleeing what he believed was his native Corinth, lest he kill his father and marry his mother, and arriving at Thebes, whose king had recently been slain on the highway, and whose queen was ripe for marrying.
Oedipus is an emblem of the crushing malice of the gods. Call no man happy, says Sophocles, the poet who portrays this scene for us on stage, “until that day when he carries his happiness down to the grave in peace.” When Oedipus, compelled by his quest to uncover the truth, finally learned of his unnatural parricide and unnatural plowing of the field that gave him birth, he put out his eyes in a rage of self-loathing. It is years later now. Suffering has instructed him. He is still not gentle towards blind and foolish mankind. But he is humble, and he insists, calmly, upon his innocence. His reason has recovered. He accepts his suffering, and dimly understands—it is a wisp of a hope in the pagan twilight—that his suffering has a purpose, that the man accursed may be a blessing to others. So a later oracle has declared: the city that welcomes Oedipus will be blessed by the gods.
What does this mean? Why do I begin with this story?
In all of drama there has, I think, never been a moment as poignant as this. I don’t mean within the play, but between the play and the audience. It is Athens, 402 BC. The playwright, the beloved Sophocles, has died. The people are watching a posthumous production, reverently put on by his son. They hear a wise man’s last lyrical judgments, after ninety-two years, on life and death, good and evil, justice and mercy.
Maybe it was a good thing that the old poet had died. It spared him the sight of Athens’ final agony. Athens, richest and most powerful of the Greek city states, had established herself as the head of an empire. Other states paid tribute to her for their common protection. Her might had threatened the security of her chief military rival, Sparta, and her trade on the seas, from Sicily all the way to south Russia on the Black Sea, threatened her chief naval rival, Corinth. It had come to war. The democratic leader of Athens, the general Pericles, had adopted a strategy of endurance. Athens could not muster an army half as large or as effective as the Spartan infantry; but Sparta, for her part, could not muster from her small population an army sufficient to bring the whole city under. So, while the Spartans razed the Athenian countryside, burning farms and villages, the people retreated inside the city walls, waiting, while their navy sailed forth to harass the ports near Sparta and her allies. Pericles, in other words, required his people to be patient, to see ahead, and to sacrifice.
He was probably the only man in Athens who could have succeeded at it, just as Washington was the only man in the colonies who could have held together the rag-end of the Continental Army at Valley Forge. But a plague arrived by rats aboard trading ships from the East. Many thousands of ill-housed people were crowded into Athens; and many thousands of them died, including Pericles himself. No more preaching of patience then. The demagogues prevailed—men who played to the passions of the mob. Athens, increasingly arrogant and unscrupulous, given to wild swings in strategy, was on her way to self-destruction. Finally in 405 BC, its sailors demoralized, possibly betrayed by their officers, the Athenian fleet, of all things, was surprised by the Spartans, and four thousand citizens aboard were put to death. In 404 the Athenians fell to the final Spartan siege, and they knew they must now suffer the cruelties they had caused others to suffer in the days when they were filled with insolence and pride:
That night no one slept. They wept for the dead, but far more bitterly for themselves, when they reflected what things they had done to the people of Melos, when taken by siege, to the people of Histiaea, and Skione and Torone and Aegina, and many more of the Hellenes. (Xenophon,
Hellenica
II. 2, 3)
Athens’ AthletesNo citizen has any right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training: it is part of his profession as a citizen to keep himself in good condition, ready to serve his state at a moment’s notice.From
Xenophon
,
Memorabilia
(3.12)That was before sports were turned into mass entertainment. The Greek citizen understood that he had better keep himself prepared for war—which meant hand-to-hand combat—at any time. It would have made as much sense to him to give voting rights to women as to throw armor on them to be mowed down on the battlefield.
Sophocles had died just before the end. He had been a fine lad back in the old time of Athenian glory—chosen to lead a band of boys to celebrate the great Athenian victory over the Persians at Salamis. All his life he had praised Athens, rejoicing in the freedom of mind that a democratic constitution can foster. Yet he also warned against believing that civic laws need pay no attention to laws that are older than the city, laws as old as man.
Note that well: some laws are as old as man. Today, our elites and social planners will have none of it. In the infamous case
Planned Parenthood v. Casey
, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, declared that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (505, US, 851). Do not be seduced by such airy talk. When we detach ourselves from our heritage, our traditions, our most deeply held beliefs about the world and our place in it, we gain alienation, not freedom. It may be that
my concept of existence
includes redistribution of wealth, at gunpoint. The chaos that Kennedy’s nonsense invites would be intolerable. So the State steps in—and what prevails is not the culture of a free people, living and celebrating and, yes, sometimes worshiping together, coming to compromises that will respect their way of life and the nature of man. What prevails are the whims of judges such as Anthony Kennedy. And we “progress,” like lemmings.
Planned Parenthood v. Casey
, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, declared that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (505, US, 851). Do not be seduced by such airy talk. When we detach ourselves from our heritage, our traditions, our most deeply held beliefs about the world and our place in it, we gain alienation, not freedom. It may be that
my concept of existence
includes redistribution of wealth, at gunpoint. The chaos that Kennedy’s nonsense invites would be intolerable. So the State steps in—and what prevails is not the culture of a free people, living and celebrating and, yes, sometimes worshiping together, coming to compromises that will respect their way of life and the nature of man. What prevails are the whims of judges such as Anthony Kennedy. And we “progress,” like lemmings.
Sophocles had warned against such separation of the laws we pass from the laws of our being. Now he bids farewell to his beloved Athens, and to the little rural Athenian village of Colonus where he was a boy. Colonus is where old Oedipus has arrived—Colonus, lovely as of old, not trampled and charred. And the Athens on stage will be blessed for welcoming Oedipus, not for gain, but for right. Those Athenians of old were pious, and knew the laws that our common suffering teaches. Says the governor Theseus to the blind man in the grotto:
I do not forget my own upbringing in exile,Like yours, and how many times I battled, alone,With dangers to my life, in foreign lands.I could not turn from any fellow-man,Coming as you come, or deny him help.I know that I am man; in the day to comeMy portion will be as yours, no more, no less.
So the old Athens, now no more.
The new Athens, once brash, now humiliated, never again to rise to the same glory, was losing her moral bearings even before she swaggered into war with Sparta. “Man is the measure of all things,” said the sophist Protagoras, preaching a moral relativism that democracies find hard to ignore.
1
It’s easy to see why: it flatters the people and gives them leave to choose what laws they please, or what wars they please. Tradition helps to bind us to our duty, but relativism brushes duty aside with a lazy sweep of the hand. If I’m the one who chooses what is “good” and “bad,” then I might as well call “good” the things I like—voting myself shares of other people’s money, or shacking up with a whore from Crete—and call “bad” the things my enemy likes. The result is not tolerance but, again, alienation. But somebody has to prevail, unless we’re going to suffer looting in the streets for fun and profit. The somebodies, in our day, are the policymaking elites. They will tell us that an unmarried woman with a child is as good as a family, or that a man attracted to other males should be a scoutmaster. Then if we try to tell them they are “wrong,” they will hurl our relativism back in our teeth. “Wrong? There is no such thing as wrong,” they smile. “And if there is, we’ll be the first to let you know.”
1
It’s easy to see why: it flatters the people and gives them leave to choose what laws they please, or what wars they please. Tradition helps to bind us to our duty, but relativism brushes duty aside with a lazy sweep of the hand. If I’m the one who chooses what is “good” and “bad,” then I might as well call “good” the things I like—voting myself shares of other people’s money, or shacking up with a whore from Crete—and call “bad” the things my enemy likes. The result is not tolerance but, again, alienation. But somebody has to prevail, unless we’re going to suffer looting in the streets for fun and profit. The somebodies, in our day, are the policymaking elites. They will tell us that an unmarried woman with a child is as good as a family, or that a man attracted to other males should be a scoutmaster. Then if we try to tell them they are “wrong,” they will hurl our relativism back in our teeth. “Wrong? There is no such thing as wrong,” they smile. “And if there is, we’ll be the first to let you know.”
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