Reading Thucydides or Dante
for the comfort that we are not alone
By
Victor Davis Hanson
We all
know the usual reasons why we are prodded to read the classics — moving
characters, seminal ideas, blueprints of our culture, and paradigms of sterling
prose and poetry. Then we nod and snooze.
But there
are practical reasons as well that might better appeal to the iPhone generation
that is minute-by-minute wired into a collective hive of celebrity titillation,
the cool, cooler, and coolest recent rapper, or the grunting of “ya know,”
“dah,” and “like.” After all, no one can quite be happy with all that.
Classics are
more than books of virtues. Homer and Sophocles certainly remind us of the
value of courage, without which Aristotle lectures us there can be no other
great qualities. Instead, the Greeks and Romans might better remind this
generation of the ironic truths, the paradoxes of human
behavior and groupthink. Let me give but three examples of old and ironic
wisdom.
The
Race Goes Not to the Swift.
The problem
with Homer’s Achilles [1] or Sophocles’ Ajax [2] was not that they were found wanting in
heroic virtue. Rather they were too good at what they did, and so made the
fatal mistake of assuming that there must be some correlation between great
deeds and great rewards.
How many times
has the natural hitter on the bench sulked at the novelty that the cousin of
the coach is batting cleanup? How often has the talented poet suddenly turned
to drink because the toast of the salon got rich with his drivel? He should
read his Homer: the self-destructive Achilles should have enjoyed more
influence among the dense Achaeans than did the university president Agamemnon.
By any just heroic standard, Ajax, not Odysseus, the Solyndra lobbyist, should
have won the armor of the dead Achilles.
In the
tragic world, thousands of personal agendas, governed by predictable human
nature, ensure that things do not always quite work the way they should. We can
learn from classics that most of us are more likely to resent superiority than
to reward it, to distrust talent than to develop it. With classical training,
our impatient youth might at least gain some perspective that the world is one
where the better man is often passed over — precisely because he is the better
man. Classics remind us that our disappointments are not unique to our modern
selves. While we do not passively have to accept that unfairness (indeed
Achilles and Ajax implode over it), we must struggle against it with the acceptance that the odds are against us.
Again, think
of the great Westerns that so carefully emulated ancient epic: what exactly
does Shane win (other than a wound and a ride off into the sunset)? Or Tom Doniphon [3] (other than a burned-down shack)? Or the
laconic Chris of The Magnificent Seven [4] (“The old man was right. Only the farmers
won. We lost. We always lose.”)? Did he even collect his $20?
Or what
about Will Kane [5] (yes, I know, but a buckboard ride with
young Grace Kelly to where exactly?)? Or Ethan Edwards [6] (a walk to where after going through that
swinging cabin door?)? Medals, money, badges? The lasting admiration of
Hadleyville? Hidden gold from the Mexican peasant village? The mayorship of
Shinbone? An hour with Jean Arthur?
Society is
as in need of better men as it is suspicious of them when it no longer needs
them. Most of Sophocles’ plays [7] are about those too noble to change —
Antigone or Philoctetes — who cannot fit in a lesser society not of their own
making. Read E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed [8] and cry over the great Marines who were
ground up in the Pacific. So often they were like Lieutenant Hillbilly Jones
and Captain Haldane who saved the U.S. and are now all but forgotten [9]. In
today’s collective history, they are simply the anonymous cardboard cut-out
race and class villains who needlessly decimated the Japanese out of racially
driven animus and thereby bequeathed to us the abundance that we take for
granted and that allows us such self-indulgent second thoughts.
Thucydides’
Pericles warned us that orators had to be careful when speaking of the dead
lest they so emphasize the gifts of the deceased that such praise invoke envy
in the listeners, who in anger realize that their own lives fall short of the
fallen.
Becoming
Affluent and Breaking Bad
Another
classical downer: with material progress often comes moral regress.
Cranky Hesiod [10] saw
that in the fading tough world of early 7th-century Boeotia, as the
advent of the city-state led to more claim jumpers, oath breakers, and crooked
judges. The idea of the need for a daily struggle to survive to keep moral
balance is best explored in the great tetrad of Roman imperial pessimists —
Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius, and Tacitus. If late republicans like Horace and
Livy had hinted that a rich, globalized Roman Mediterranean was destroying the
old rural Italian virtue, then the later four chronicled in graphic detail just
how — and how fun it was to squander what others far better for seven centuries
had bequeathed. The White House Correspondents’
Dinner [11]might as well take place in the House of
the Tragic Poet in Pompeii.
It is not
just that plenty of slaves, purple dye, marble, forced vomiting, and piped-in
water mean that we don’t have to rise at dawn to hoe the vineyard and bathe in
ice-cold streams and therefore become lazy, corpulent, and decadent. Rather,
material progress is usually accompanied by moral regress largely because of
the leisure to master a critical consciousness and intellectual gymnastics well
apart from the fears of religion: if we can explain, in a sophisticated and
convincing manner, why something bankrupt is true, then it surely must be true: Vero
possumus! Who is to
say that Lindsay Lohan is not more interesting than Gen. Mattis?
Language in
the postmodern world becomes more layered — and fluid — (compare “overseas contingency operations [12]“ for
terrorism or “investments” for deficit spending). The sophistic citizen has the
leisure and training to third-guess ancient protocols. Without a soul, the good
life here is it. Sarcasm, cynicism, skepticism, and nihilism so abound that
there must always be a third and fourth meaning. The in-the-know smirk of Jon Stewart [13] or David Letterman [14] and the
gobbledygook mush that pours out the mouths of our talking head analysts
conspire to make us incapable [15] of saying any of the following: ‘The
Tsarnaevs are repulsive and evil. Their mother is unhinged. Fire those who let
in these repellent people. Something has gone terribly wrong with the FBI.” Say
that and you are guilty of a thought crime greater than the mayhem committed on
the street.
Major Hasan
kills 13 and wounds 29, yelling out Allahu Akbar as he shoots. In response, the head of
the Army joins the Obama Borg (of Brennan, Clapper, Holder, and Napolitano) to
lecture us that the greater tragedy in this “workplace violence” [16] would be the loss of the Army’s diversity
program. Next thing, the head of NASA might be lecturing us [17] that his foremost aim is reaching out to
aggrieved Muslims.
It is not
just that Juvenal’s Sejanus, Petronius’s Trimalchio, Suetonius’s Caligula, and
Tacitus’s Nero are evil, but that they are products of a society in which the
more clever it sounds, the more clothes it has, and the larger the house it
inhabits, the more amoral it becomes. If Rome did not have a Caligula, it would
have had to invent one.
Thus the
weird backlash romance that arises for Ovid’s Philemon and Baucis with their
simple beech wood cups and daily material grind. From Virgil’s mythical Arcadia
to Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego, there
grows always this wish of the metrosexual to give up the world of Justin
Bieber, Facebook, and the Upper West Side for something simple and true [18] — but perceived as gone forever.
How odd that
these guys are not even happy when they win what they sought [19]. By
hook or crook they win Obamacare and now those who wrote the bill wish
themselves and their staffs to be exempt from it, as if ol’ Doc’ is still
around to practice folksy medicine out of his office at home [20]. They
want the dwindling rivers to run freely to the Bay deltas to allow mythical
salmon to swim to the Sierra, but count on the awful man-caused reservoirs
alone to give them the water to waste.
Palo Alto
and Menlo Park got everything they ever dreamed up: Obama, diversity, vast cash
redistributions, a left-wing governor and legislature, a new race/class/gender
school curriculum, unionized state employees, a blue political class, vast
riches from a green Silicon Valley … and what? The young millionaires scramble
to get their children into one of the growing number of private academies so
they will not have to study the curricula with the “other” and join the poorly
prepared students who are the logical ramifications of their own ideology. If
they had a drawl, it might be the South’s 1965-era academies all over again [21].
When I see the contemporary CSU campus [22] — larger than ever, more administrators
than at any time in its past, greatest enrollments in history, students on
generous subsidies with an array of electronic gadgetry and new Camrys and
Accords in the brand-new solar-roofed parking lots — and I hear of “crippling
budget cuts,” “shorting the students,” and “a campus in crisis,” I assume that
most of those who graduated in 1960 would find the current curricula a bad
joke, and that today’s students would flunk most of the classes offered fifty
years ago — iPads and Twitter notwithstanding. If the choice for today’s
serious student with ear phones is either to text an earth-shattering “I just
walked into the Student Center” or to memorize “amo, amas, amat,” then it is no mystery where
the never-to-be regained minute goes, in this zero-sum game of 24 hours in a
vanishing day.
Societies
of Chaos
Most
classical literature, let us admit it, is anti-democratic, moralistic in a
reactionary sense, and deeply pessimistic — and therefore if not a corrective,
at least a balance to today’s trajectory. Would you not wish to see in advance
where zero-sum interest, $1 trillion deficits, 50 million on food stamps, $17
trillion in debt, and the quality of today’s BA degree all end up?
The world of
fourth-century Athens is one of constant squabbling over a shrinking pie:
“Don’t dare raid the free theater fund to build a warship. Pay me to vote. Give
me a pension for my bad leg. The rich should pay their fair share. You didn’t
build that. That’s my inheritance, not yours. Exile, confiscate, even kill
those who have too much power of influence.” It is not that the Athenians
cannot grow their economy as in the past, but that they despise those among
them who think they still can.
The message
reminds us that the health of the commonwealth hinges not on material
resources, but always on the status of the collective mind. Usually the man who
sees this — a Socrates in 399 BC, a Demosthenes in the shadow of Philip, even a
shrill Isocrates — is branded a nut, ignored, or done away with.
In Roman
times, the same “bread and circuses” themes arise. Let us be honest: to the
ancient mind, the most dangerous thing is the empowered mob that wants to be
lied to (vulgus vult decipi).
Travel with Petronius to Croton, and you might as well be in Washington.
Examine
today’s headlines: as I write this, the Pigford farming settlement [23] is shown to have been simply a way to
grant hundreds of millions of dollars of somebody else’s money to political
constituencies on the idea of “fairness.” Reparations, not legitimacy or
legality, is the issue. The number of disability insurance recipients has
reached an all-time high. We may be living longer, with superb health care and
fewer physically dangerous and exhaustive jobs, but apparently we are less able
to work. The government is advertising in Spanish to encourage people to spot
those in need in of food stamps — fifty million with EBT cards are too few. The
attorney general of the United States swears that those who entered the United
States illegally will be deprived of their “civil
rights,” [24] if not
granted amnesty and eventually citizenship. So old, so boring, so ‘”we’ve seen
this all before” and where all this leads — to the New World Order of
Alexander, to the banquet at the House of Trimalchio, to the crumbling estates
in North Africa where aging grandees hide behind gated estates terrified of
what they helped to create.
Classical literature
really does remind us that the problem is usually caused by doing the opposite,
once we have arrived, of what we once did to get there. Our ancestors built
Hetch Hetchy to give us drinking water, irrigated agriculture, flood control,
and cheap electricity; once we enjoy all that, we have the luxury to scheme how to blow it all up [25].
In this
regard, the Tsarnaev monsters were valuable symptoms of the present age, or
perhaps pseudo-Romanized tribesmen right out of Caesar’s Gallic Wars: The
endangered “refugees” freely revisiting the supposed deadly environment they
escaped; the shop-lifting mother damning the country that took her in and
cheaply resonating jihadist themes; the “domestic abuse” charge lodged against
the “beautiful” boxer Tamerlan; the abject failure of the repeatedly warned
FBI; the self-righteous Mirandizing to stop inquiry about other possible
threats; the immediate liberal effort to blame the U.S. (e.g., as if the
liberal Boston world of our first Native-American senator [26] and up-from-the-bootstraps Secretary of State John Kerry [27] must be an especially harsh, cruel
society, where help is rarely afforded the needy and redneck prejudice is
ubiquitous).
If there are
500 murders a year in gun-restricted Chicago [28], or
Sandy Hook still takes place in idyllic gun-regulated Connecticut, or pampered
“refugees” slaughter their most generous hosts in postmodern, tolerant Boston,
there must be a message of some sort of enduring good and evil here.
Be Not
Afraid
Great
literature and a knowledge of history serve as friends that reassure us that we
are neither crazy nor alone. We can anticipate disasters rather than always
having to learn through them. We expect paradoxes, given human nature, and so
we do not need to weep over what happens to us, as if it is unique and
unprecedented.
One day in
April 2008 I went to sleep and now I woke up to April 2013. The new normal is
zero interest, 7.5% unemployment, no ammunition on the shelves of America’s
stores, a new debate over using the words “terror” and “Islamist” 12 years
after 9/11, laying off air-traffic controllers amid a $3.8 trillion budget, and
the thug Vladimir Putin doing more than the FBI to protect us from the
terrorists among us.
But all that
is up on the shelf. And so I think I’ll pull down Thucydides or Dante for
comfort that we are not alone.
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