Victor Davis Hanson: Classics and War

Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno, received his B.A. at the University of California at Santa Cruz and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. In 1991 he was given the Award for Teaching Excellence by the American Philological Association—an annual citation given to the top undergraduate teachers of Classics. He is the author or editor of several books on military and ancient history, including The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (Cassell, 1999), The Soul of Battle (Free Press, 1999), and Carnage and Culture (Doubleday, 2001). He has also written about traditional agrarian and rural life and contemporary culture wars. His books History Book Club and Book of the Month Club selections and have been translated into several foreign languages. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Times, American Heritage, The Weekly Standard, and The Wilson Quarterly, and has been featured on National Public Radio and the Jim Lehrer News Hour. He currently writes a bi-weekly column on the war against terrorism for National Review Online. Dr. Hanson lives with his wife and three children on the farm where he was born in Selma, California.

The following is an abridged version of Dr. Hanson's lecture at a seminar on "Liberal Education, Liberty, and Education Today," delivered in Phillips Auditorium at Hillsdale College on November 11, 2001.

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The study of Classics—of Greece and Rome—can offer us moral lessons as well as a superb grounding in art, literature, history, and language. In our present crisis after September 11, it also offers practical guidance—and the absence of familiarity with the foundations of Western culture in part may explain many of the disturbing reactions to the war that we have seen on American campuses.

If more in our universities really understood the Greeks and Romans and their legacy in the West, then they would not see this present conflict through either therapeutic or apologetic lenses. As Classics teaches us, war in classical antiquity—and for most of the past 2,500 years of Western Civilization—was seen as a tragedy innate to the human condition—a time of human plague when, as the historian Herodotus said, fathers bury sons rather than sons fathers. In others words, killing humans over disagreements should not happen among civilized people. But it does happen. So war, the poet Hesiod concluded, was "a curse from Zeus."

Tragically, the Greeks tell us, conflict will always break out—and very frequently so—because we are human and thus not always rational. War is "the father, the king of us all," the philosopher Heraclitus lamented. Even the utopian Plato agreed: "War is always existing by nature between every Greek city-state." How galling and hurtful to us moderns that Plato, of all people, once called peace, not war, the real "parenthesis" in human affairs. Warfare could be terrifying—"a thing of fear," the poet Pindar summed up—but not therein unnatural or necessarily evil.

No, the rub was particular wars, not war itself. While all tragic, wars could be good or evil depending on their cause, the nature of the fighting, and the ultimate costs and results. The Greek defense against Persian attack in 480 B.C., in the eyes of the playwright Aeschylus (who chose as his epigram mention of his service at the battle of Marathon, not his dramas), was "glorious." Yet the theme of Thucydides' history of the internecine Peloponnesian wars was folly and sometimes senseless butchery. Likewise, there is language of freedom and liberty associated with the Greeks' naval victory at Salamis, but not with the slaughter at the battle of Gaugamela—Alexander the Great's destruction of the Persian army in Mesopotamia that wrecked Darius III's empire and replaced eastern despots with Macedonian autocrats.

The Roots of War

If war was innate, and its morality defined by particular circumstances, fighting was also not necessarily explained by prior exploitation or legitimate grievance. Nor did aggression have to arise from poverty or inequality. States, like people, the historian Thucydides tells us, can be envious—and even rude and pushy. And if they can get away with things, they most surely will. Thucydides later says states battle out of "honor, fear, and self-interest." How odd to think that the Japanese and Germans were not starving in 1941, but rather were proud peoples who wanted those whom they deemed inferior and weak to serve them.

To the Greeks, such rotten peoples also fought mostly over tangible things—more land, more subjects, more loot. Wars were a sort of acquisition, Aristotle said. Bullies, whether out of vanity or a desire for power and recognition, will take things from other people unless they are stopped. And if they are to be stopped, citizens—among them good, kind and well-read men like Socrates, Sophocles, Thucy-dides, and Demosthenes—must fight to protect their freedom and the save the innocent.

To a student of the Classics who trusts Thucydides or Plato more than Marx, Freud, or Michel Foucault, the present crisis, I think, looks something like this: The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, invites envy because of the success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets that threaten both theocracy and autocracy alike. That we are often to be hated—and periodically to be challenged by those who want our power, riches, or influence and yet simultaneously hate their own desire—is to be often regretted, but always expected. Our past indulgence of Osama bin Laden did not bring us respect, much less sympathy. Rather, human nature being what it is, our forbearance invited ever more contempt and audacity on his part—and more dead as the bitter wages of our self-righteous morality and tragic miscalculation.

The enemies of free speech and intolerance—German Nazis, Italian fascists, Japanese militarists, Stalinist communists, or Islamic fundamentalists—will always attack us for what we are, rather than what we have done, inasmuch as they must innately hate freedom and the liberality which is its twin. Only our moral response—not our status as belligerents per se—determines whether our war is just and necessary. If, like the Athenians, we butcher neutral Melians for no good cause, then our battle against the innocent is evil and we may not win. But if we fight to preserve freedom like the Greeks at Thermopylae and the GIs on the beaches of Normandy, then war is the right and indeed the only thing we can do. Caught in such a tragedy, where efforts at reason and humanity fall on the deaf ears of killers, we must go to war for our survival and to prove to our enemies that their defeat will serve as a harsh teacher—at least for a generation or two—that it is wrong and very dangerous to use two kilotons of explosives to blow up 5,000 civilians in the streets of our cities.

The Modern View of War

This depressing view of human nature and conflict is rarely any longer with us. It was not the advent of Christianity that ended it; Christian philosophers and theologians long ago developed the doctrine of "just war," having realized that nonresistance meant suicide. More likely, the 20th Century and the horror of the two World Wars—Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima—put an end to the tragic view of war. Yet out of such numbing losses—and our arrogance—we missed the lesson of the World Wars. The calamity of 60 million dead was not only because we went to war, but rather because we were naive and deemed weak by our enemies well before 1914 and 1939—at a time when real resolve could have stopped Prussian militarism and Nazism before millions of blameless perished.

The deviant offspring of the Enlightenment—Marxists and Freudians—gave birth to even more pernicious social sciences that sought to 'prove' to us that war was always evil and therefore—with help from Ph.D.s—surely preventable. Indeed, during the International Year of Peace in 1986, a global commission of experts concluded that war was unnatural and humans themselves unwarlike! Unfortunately, innocent people get killed because of that kind of thinking. Many, especially in our universities, now are convinced that war always results from real, rather than perceived, grievances, such as the poverty arising out of the usual list of sins: colonialism, imperialism, racism and sexism. In response, dialogue and mediation have been elevated to the grand science of "conflict resolution theory," a sort of marriage counseling or small claims court taken to the global level.

Rich and conceited Westerners simply could not accept the idea that more people in the twentieth century were killed by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao off the battlefield than on it. How depressing to suggest that the Khmer Rouge, the Hutus, and the Serbians went on killing when left alone—and quit only when either satiated or stopped!

In the new moral calculus of the American university, bin Laden figures to be no Xerxes or Tojo. He is not even an inherently evil man who hates us for our clout and our influence. Far too few in the university understand that bin Laden wishes to strut over a united Middle Eastern caliphate under his brand of Medieval Islam, and to make decadent Westerners cower in fear. Instead, they insist that he is either confused (call in Freud) or has legitimate grievances (read Marx), and so we must find answers within us for what he does. Western importation of Arab oil? Stolen land from the Palestinians? Decadent democracy and capitalism? Jewish-American women walking in the land of Mecca? Puppet Arab governments? Take your pick—bin Laden has cited them all.

To stop the evil of Islamic fundamentalism, the tragic Greeks would make ready the 101st Airborne and the Rangers, while too many in academia would rather that we chit-chat with him, fathom him, or accommodate him as did the Clinton State Department. Seeing war as "Zeus's curse" in this age of our greatest learning and wealth—and pride—is to descend into "savagery," when our sophisticated elite promise that prayer, talk, or money can yet prevail. But if we deem ourselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop killers, then—as Socrates and Pericles alike remind us—we have become real accomplices to evil through inaction. Generations slaughtered in Europe, incinerated Jews, massacred Russians and Chinese, and the bleached bones of Cambodians are proof enough of what the Greeks once warned us.

Western Exceptionalism

Finally, Classics teaches how unique the Greeks and Romans were among the peoples of the ancient world; theirs was an anti-Mediterranean culture whose approach to politics, culture, literature, and religion was antithetical to almost every state in Africa, Asia, and the tribal confines of northern Europe. In our ignorance, too many Americans have made the fatal mistake of assuming that our enemies are simply different from us, rather than far worse than us—as if the current war in the Middle East is largely due to a misunderstanding among equals, rather than reflective of a vast faultline that goes back to the very origins of our civilization. Athens was a democracy; Sidon was not. Farmers owned their own property in Greece, voted, and formed the militia of the polis; not so in Persia and Egypt. Thucydides was able to criticize his mother country, Greece; Persian clerks who recorded Darius's res gestae on the walls of Persepolis were not. The Greek language and its European descendants have a rich vocabulary of words for "constitution," "citizen," "freedom," and "democracy"; this is true of neither old Persian nor modern Arabic. Such differences are not perceived, but real and critical, for they affect the manner in which people conduct their daily lives—whether they live in fear or in safety, in want or in security.

If our students and professors today would study the Classics, they might rediscover the origins of their culture—and in doing so learn that we are not even remotely akin to the Taliban or the Saudis, but are in fact profoundly different in the manner we craft our government, treat our women, earn our living, and set the parameters of our religion. Modern cultural anthropology, social linguistics, cross-cultural geography, sociology, and nearly any discipline with the suffix "studies" would lecture us that the Taliban's desecration of the graves of the infidel, clitorectomies of infants, torture of the accused, murder of the untried, and destruction of the non-Islamic is merely "different" or "problematic"—almost anything other than "evil." Yet a world under the Taliban or its supporters, like the satrapy that Xerxes envisioned for a conquered Greece, would mean no free expression, no voting, no protection from arbitrary and coercive government, but instead theocracy, censorship, and brutality in every facet of daily life. Such were the stakes at Salamis, and so too is the contest now with the Islamic fundamentalists, who are as akin to ancient absolutists as we are to the Greeks.

Such ignorance of one's own past can weaken a powerful society such as ours that must project confidence, power, humanity—and hope—to those less fortunate abroad. This new species of upscale and pampered terrorist hates America for a variety of complex reasons. He despises, of course, his own attraction toward our ease and liberality. He recognizes that our freedom and affluence spur on his appetites more than Islam can repress them. But just as importantly, he realizes that there is an aristocratic guilt within many comfortable Americans, who are too often ashamed of, or apologetic about, their culture. And in this hesitance, our enemies sense not merely our ignorance of our own foundations, but also both decadence and weakness. Rather than appreciating Americans' self-confidence or simple manners when we accept rebuke so politely, our enemies despise us all the more, simply because they can—and can so easily, and without rejoinder.

Classics, then, can teach us who we once were—and thus who we are now in the present war. The ancients not only teach us that life is spirited and tragic, but also that what was created in and followed from Greece and Rome was, and is, man's last and greatest hope on earth.

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

Seven Wonders of Ancient Greece

This Discovery Channel documentary on ancient Greece explores how and why the seven wonders of this incredible civilisation still retain the power to amaze the world today.

Advanced Imaging Reveals a Computer 1,500 Years Ahead of Its Time

From i09
By Ed Grabianowski

X-rays and advanced photography have uncovered the true complexity of the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a device so astonishing that its discovery is like finding a functional Buick in medieval Europe.

In 1900, some divers found the wreck of a Roman vessel off the Greek island of Antikythera. Among the other treasures remanded to the Greek government was an unassuming corroded lump. Some time later, the lump fell apart, revealing a damaged machine of unknown purpose, with some large gears and many smaller cogs, plus a few engraved words in Greek. Early studies suggested it was some type of astronomical time-keeping device – researcher Derek J. de Solla Price laid the groundwork by establishing initial tooth counts and suggesting that the device followed the Metonic cycle, a 235-month pattern commonly used to predict eclipses in the ancient world.

The full function and beauty of the Antikythera device remained hidden until recent studies subjected it to more advanced imaging techniques. First, it was photographed using a technique that exposed the surfaces to varying lighting patterns. This created different levels of contrast that allowed the researchers to read far more of the inscribed Greek text than was previously possible. Then, x-ray imaging was used to create full 3-D computer models of the mechanism, which revealed for the first time some of the more complex and detailed gear interactions. The Greek National Archaeological Museum's discovery of some boxes filled with 82 additional mechanism fragments added new information as well.

The findings, published in Nature, are probably best described as "mind blowing." Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism's compactness actually bests the later designs. Probably built around 150 B.C., the Antikythera mechanism can perform a number of functions just by turning a crank on the side.

Using nothing but an ingenious system of gears, the mechanism could be used to predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, and even accounted for leap years. It could also predict the positions of the sun and moon against the zodiac, and has a gear train that turns a black and white stone to show the moon's phase on a given date. It is possible that it could also show the astronomical positions of the planets known to the ancients: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

The Antikythera mechanism wasn't just a scientific tool – it also had a social purpose. The Greeks held major athletic competitions (such as the Olympics) every two or four years. A small dial within the Metonic dial showed the dates of these important events.

The true genius of the mechanism goes beyond even the complex calculations and craftsmanship of a mechanical calendar. For example, the ancients didn't know that the moon has an elliptical orbit, so they didn't know why it sometimes slowed or sped up as it moved through the zodiac. The mechanism's creator used epicyclic gears, also known as planetary gears, with a "pin-and-slot" mechanism that mimicked this apparent shifting in the moon's movement. This use of epicyclic gears is far ahead of what anyone suspected ancient technology was capable of. Scientific American has a two-part video about the mechanism and the imaging techniques used in the research.

The mystery of who built the Antikythera mechanism remains. It has been linked to renowned ancient inventor Archimedes by the writings of Cicero, but this particular device was built after Archimedes' death. Still, the engraved words revealed by the new photos pinpoint the device's origin to Corinth, or possibly Corinthian colonies. Sicily was such a colony, and the Sicilian city of Syracuse was Archimedes' headquarters. The researchers theorize that the Antikythera mechanism is based on an Archimedian design, and might even have been built by a workshop carrying on his technological tradition. But if the design has been "industrialized" in such a way, why have we never found another one like it? Mysteries remain.

The complexity of the mechanism shows that ancient humans were capable of intellectual and engineering feats that boggle our modern minds (and it puts the lie to all those "ancient astronaut" theories). The upheavals of war and natural disasters over 2,000 years have probably caused us to lose many more works and wonders that will never be found.

Decoding an Ancient Computer: Greek Technology Tracked the Heavens [Scientific American].

America's Public School System: Brutal and Spartan

"Education in Sparta" by Luigi Mussini

From NewsWithViews
By Joel Turtel

The public school system in America has become a dismal failure. But education in many other times and cultures has been quite successful. The ancient Greeks, whose civilization was at its height around 550 B.C., founded Western civilization as we know it. The Athenian Greeks invented or perfected logic, drama, science, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, literature, and much more. Yet ancient Greece had no compulsory schools.

Other than requiring two years of military training for young men that began at age eighteen, Athens let parents educate their children as they saw fit. Parents either taught their children at home or sent them to voluntary schools where teachers and philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle gave lectures to all who wanted to learn. These great teacher-philosophers did not need a license to teach, nor did they have tenure. The ancient Athenians had a free-market education system. The thought of compulsory, state-run schools and compulsory teacher licensing would have been repulsive to them. The Athenians respected a parent's natural right to direct the education of their children.

In contrast, Sparta, Athens's mortal enemy, created the first truly state-run, compulsory education system on record. Individual Spartans lived and died for the State, and had to serve the State from birth until sixty years of age. Their society was a brutal military dictatorship in which male children literally belonged to the city rulers, not to their parents.

The Spartan military government took boys from their homes and parents at the age of seven and forced them to live in military-style barracks for the rest of their lives. Spartan men were life-long soldiers whose highest duty was to obey the commands of their leaders. It is no coincidence that Sparta had compulsory, state-run education. If a society believes that children belong not to parents, but to the State, then the State must control children's education by compulsion.

Are our public schools any different than the brutal Spartan society in the way they treat parents and children? Today, school compulsory-attendance laws force parents to hand over their children to government employees called teachers for eight to twelve years. In effect, our local and state governments claim that they, like the Spartans, own our children's minds and bodies for twelve years. Parents who refuse to hand over their children to the public schools can be, and have been, locked in jail for disobeying the compulsory-attendance laws.

In this respect, our public schools today are just as brutal as the Spartans. The difference is only in degree. Where the Spartans stole children from their parents to serve a lifetime in their military, our local governments create laws that let them, in effect, legally kidnap our children to serve twelve years in their education boot camps called public schools. The brutality of the principal is the same.

Both the Spartans and our public-school officials think they own our children, and have utter contempt for parents' rights.

Ignoble Lies, or Socrates Was Not Black

From The Dartmouth Review

A Book Review by A. S. Erikson

History Lesson: A Race Odyssey

Mary Lefkowitz

Yale University Press, 2008

I recently heard in passing that Aristotle stole all of his philosophical teachings from the library in Alexandria. Being not completely ignorant in matters of antiquity—and something of a contrarian by nature—I was intrigued partly by this claim, but even more by the fact that I had never heard this view of history before. I was so intrigued that I googled ‘Aristotle’, ‘stolen’, and ‘Alexandria’ in the hopes of finding out more. This led me to find Mary Lefkowitz’s newly published book History Lesson: A Race Odyssey.

Lefkowitz is an Emerita Professor of Classics at Wellesley College. The book recounts the 1990s face-off between herself and a member of the Africana movement: Tony Martin, a professor in the Africana Studies department at Wellesley. The Africana movement was in the business, beginning in the late eighties and continuing through the nineties, of advancing not only the Aristotle fallacy but of claiming that Western Civilization itself came from Africa. The argument advanced was one of cultural, not biological, history. The Greeks had stolen all of their ideas of note from Africa.

For proponents of the Africana movement, Aristotle is a fraud and Socrates was a black man. Lefkowitz, upon learning of “The Stolen Legacy” theory, was, in turns, dumbfounded and appalled. In 1992, she penned a review of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena for The New Republic entitled “Not out of Africa: The Origins of Greece and the Illusions of Afrocentrists.” The event marked the beginning of Lefkowitz’s Long Road. History Lesson is the story of her ugly confrontation with Martin and his movement; yet, it is also about—paradoxically—the future of history.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. What exactly was the Africana movement, and what was the agenda they were pushing? The movement was concerned with revising history. The confrontation described in the book is primarily concerned with the proper way to study history. On the one hand, Lefkowitz maintained that history must be backed up with relevant facts, but her opponents saw history as an area perfect for the sowing of the ‘noble lie.’ This is the sort of lie that would make whole races feel better about their own history. The movement was composed of pseudo-intellectuals and academics (e.g. Bernal was tenured at Cornell University).

This movement was not interested in scrutinizing past scholarship, like how past scholarship downplayed Greek sexism or xenophobia. No, unlike modern scholars who try to “set the record straight,” the Africana movement was creating its own past; they were attempting to causally project themselves back into the past. The project was not merely about propping up their own insecurities, though: “In the introduction to Volume 1 of Black Athena, Bernal admitted that his project had a political purpose, which was, ‘of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance.’”

The writers of the Africana movement stand in stark contrast to Lefkowitz, who is consistently—and perhaps a bit frustratingly—non-confrontational in her writing. In the New Republic review that started it all she objected to Bernal’s view of history, putting forth her own: “All these civilizations . . . like everything else in the past, belong equally to all of us.” Instead of rebuffing the Africana movement’s claim outright, she welcomed them to the fold, claiming no one had a special claim to ancient Greek civilization.

Nonetheless, Lefkowitz was concerned with the claims being advanced by Bernal and others:

As I saw it, Bernal’s book presented a serious challenge, both to the basic narrative of ancient history and to the whole purpose of studying the past. If I read him correctly, he was saying that one shouldn’t study history to learn what had happened—because—it was impossible to discover all the facts, especially in the case of the remote past—rather, the best one could do was to offer a “plausible” account. The role of the historian
was to assess the various “competitive plausibilities” and pick the one that was most persuasive.

But how to decide which was the most plausible? Bernal seemed to be saying that the most persuasive narrative was the one with the most desirable result. In effect, he was preaching a kind of affirmative action program for the rewriting of history, a project to revamp the past in order to bring about social change in the present. To Bernal, the Egyptian pharaohs could “usefully” be called black, because, presumably, today a lot of people wanted them to be black.

With her characteristic understated way of putting her concerns, she continues:

I was uncomfortable about Bernal’s competitive plausibility method, because it
was fundamentally subjective. If Bernal or I could simply rewrite history to
bring about the social changes we desired (and I felt sure that I hated the
racism in American society just as much as he did), then what was to stop the Ku
Klux Klan from rewriting the history to suit their nefarious purposes?

At Wellesley the movement’s representative was Tony Martin, whose class “Africans in Greece and Rome” was the beachhead at the college for Bernal’s and others’ writings. When some classics majors were upset by the lies being spread by Martin, they took their complaints to the President Nan Keohane, who “advised them to consider Tony Martin’s feelings. “He was on his own,” Lefkowitz said, while Lefkowitz herself had the support of tradition and the classics profession. The events are completely surreal; the college President tells students to beware a faculty member’s feelings because he practiced poor scholarship. Lefkowitz wryly writes, “I couldn’t help wondering why we were talking about feelings instead of historical values.” Martin was repeatedly coddled by the college’s administration.

As Keohane demonstrated by her fear of confrontation, one of interest-group-intellectualism’s unintended consequences is the utter stifling of intellectual debate and the installment of a constant fear: fear of what one says, fear of what one writes, even fear of what one thinks. It is the fear that anyone—even a liberal professor—can be branded as a racist reactionary.

All of this sounds a bit odd maybe—hardly innocent—but, after all, it’s a debate about ancient history. Yet, there was an even darker side to the movement, a side steeped in and stained by anti-Semitism.

The attacks from the Africana studies establishment were appalling to read about. At a debate Lefkowitz participated in at the University of San Diego, her counterpart, Dr. Khallid Muhammad, called her “Dikeda Left-o-witch.” She was a “homosexual . . . imposter man . . . imposter Jew” and a “hook-nosed, lox-eating, bagel-eating . . . something . . . something . . . so called Jew.”

Another disturbing element to emerge in Lefkowitz’s narrative is the students’ (and others’ as well) inability to tell a work of scholarship from a thinly veiled polemic. At first I chuckled aloud when she recounted how a student pointed to the number of footnotes as proof that The Secret Relationship Between the Blacks and Jews was not anti-Semitic. This is a book claiming that Jews dominated the slave trade and were the predominant slaveholders in the American South, all of this and more at a time when they were mostly confined to ghettoes in Europe. The laughter subsided as this tactic was used again and again to defend the above work—anonymously authored and published by the Nation of Islam—and others.

The Africana movement was perhaps the logical endpoint after several decades of multiculturalism occupying the apex of university chic. The establishment can tell everyone how special their culture is for only so long before people start reflecting on the fact for themselves. All cultures were not created equal, and to claim so downplays the incredible achievements of ancient Greece or Arabia during the Middle Ages.

Lefkowitz recounts all of these events from her past deftly and clearly. The tone throughout is neither one of sentimentality nor one of outrage, but one of bafflement. Her narrative easily keeps the reader’s attention, but the book is about more than Lefkowitz’s encounter with the Africana movement. This book is about two issues: first, the balance between political correctness and intellectual inquiry, i.e. how to keep campus debates both intellectual and civil; second, the extent to which the long-time virtues of history (clear argument, evidence, and attempting to recount reality rather than fantasy) are under attack in the academy.