Read Online The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson - Free Book Online
Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
Ads: Link
ancient languages of the Mediterranean (and few in the contemporary languages of the non-West as well).
We have forgotten this ancient truth of Western exceptionalism. In the age of cultural studies, Americans have often made the common mistake of assuming that our enemies are simply different from us, rather than far different from us. Perhaps the hesitancy to appreciate the singularity of the West results from guilt over European colonialism. Or it may be laudable humility. Or it could reflect an ignorance of cultures in general and Western civilization in particular. Or we may live in an interconnected global age where all narratives are complementary rather than antithetical—no one “truth” having any absolute currency.
Nonetheless, Athens was a democracy; Sidon was not. Farmers owned property in Greece, voted, and formed the militia of the polis; that was not the case in Persia and Egypt. King Xerxes sat on a throne at Salamis and recorded the names of brave and cowardly subjects battling in the straits below. His counterparts, the Spartan general Eurybiades and the Athenian admiral Themistocles, debated the wisdom of fighting at Salamis, led their own sailors into the sea battle, and heard their rowers shout cries of “freedom” as they rammed the enemy.
Thucydides was able to criticize his mother polis, Greece; Persian clerks who recorded Darius’s res gestae on the walls of Persepolis could not. Such differences were not merely perceived but also real and critical, for they affected the manner in which people conducted their daily lives—whether they lived in fear or in safety, in want or in security.
If the public today would study the classics, they might rediscover the origins of their culture—and in doing so learn that we are not even remotely culturally 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. The point is not that bias, oppression, and subjugation didn’t exist during the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, or the ages of overseas conquest and imperialism in the West. But rather there was also the blueprint of personal freedom and consensual government that survived the darkest moments of Western civilization and resprouted at the most unexpected moments in classical Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Enlightenment Western Europe. It is unwise perhaps in triumphalist fashion to chest-thump in our globally connected world about past Western achievement; but in a transnational war of ideas, it is equally unwise to deny the radically different cultural attitudes toward religiously driven suicide bombing and the relationship between religion and secular government.
Modern cultural anthropology, social linguistics, cross-cultural geography, and sociology in theory could contextualize the Taliban’s desecration of the graves of the infidel, destruction of ancient statues of Buddha, clitoridectomies of infants, torture of the accused, murder of the untried, and hounding out of the non-Islamic as something not quite “evil.” Yet a world run according to the dictates of the Taliban or its supporters, like the satrapy that Xerxes envisioned for a conquered Greece, would mean no cultural anthropology at all. There would be no real voting and scant protection from arbitrary and coercive government. Instead, theocracy, censorship, and brutality would invade every facet of daily life. Such were the stakes at Salamis. And so too is the contest with the radical worldview of Islamic fundamentalists, who are as akin to ancient absolutists as Westerners are to the Greeks.
Such neglect of one’s own past can, I think, ultimately weaken a powerful society such as ours that must project confidence, power, humanity, and hope to those less fortunate abroad. The new species of often upscale and Internet-savvy terrorist hates America for a variety of complex reasons.
We have forgotten this ancient truth of Western exceptionalism. In the age of cultural studies, Americans have often made the common mistake of assuming that our enemies are simply different from us, rather than far different from us. Perhaps the hesitancy to appreciate the singularity of the West results from guilt over European colonialism. Or it may be laudable humility. Or it could reflect an ignorance of cultures in general and Western civilization in particular. Or we may live in an interconnected global age where all narratives are complementary rather than antithetical—no one “truth” having any absolute currency.
Nonetheless, Athens was a democracy; Sidon was not. Farmers owned property in Greece, voted, and formed the militia of the polis; that was not the case in Persia and Egypt. King Xerxes sat on a throne at Salamis and recorded the names of brave and cowardly subjects battling in the straits below. His counterparts, the Spartan general Eurybiades and the Athenian admiral Themistocles, debated the wisdom of fighting at Salamis, led their own sailors into the sea battle, and heard their rowers shout cries of “freedom” as they rammed the enemy.
Thucydides was able to criticize his mother polis, Greece; Persian clerks who recorded Darius’s res gestae on the walls of Persepolis could not. Such differences were not merely perceived but also real and critical, for they affected the manner in which people conducted their daily lives—whether they lived in fear or in safety, in want or in security.
If the public today would study the classics, they might rediscover the origins of their culture—and in doing so learn that we are not even remotely culturally 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. The point is not that bias, oppression, and subjugation didn’t exist during the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, or the ages of overseas conquest and imperialism in the West. But rather there was also the blueprint of personal freedom and consensual government that survived the darkest moments of Western civilization and resprouted at the most unexpected moments in classical Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Enlightenment Western Europe. It is unwise perhaps in triumphalist fashion to chest-thump in our globally connected world about past Western achievement; but in a transnational war of ideas, it is equally unwise to deny the radically different cultural attitudes toward religiously driven suicide bombing and the relationship between religion and secular government.
Modern cultural anthropology, social linguistics, cross-cultural geography, and sociology in theory could contextualize the Taliban’s desecration of the graves of the infidel, destruction of ancient statues of Buddha, clitoridectomies of infants, torture of the accused, murder of the untried, and hounding out of the non-Islamic as something not quite “evil.” Yet a world run according to the dictates of the Taliban or its supporters, like the satrapy that Xerxes envisioned for a conquered Greece, would mean no cultural anthropology at all. There would be no real voting and scant protection from arbitrary and coercive government. Instead, theocracy, censorship, and brutality would invade every facet of daily life. Such were the stakes at Salamis. And so too is the contest with the radical worldview of Islamic fundamentalists, who are as akin to ancient absolutists as Westerners are to the Greeks.
Such neglect of one’s own past can, I think, ultimately weaken a powerful society such as ours that must project confidence, power, humanity, and hope to those less fortunate abroad. The new species of often upscale and Internet-savvy terrorist hates America for a variety of complex reasons.
Similar Books
