Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
Let me know if you want in or out
Posted on 07/06/2005 11:15:42 AM PDT by quidnunc
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Dr. Victor Hanson: Thank you for that nice introduction. I was asked to speak about 25 minutes and I’ll try to weave the ancient and modern worlds together.
Let me just start with a few definitions of this loose and amorphous term “Western.” I’m talking about the culture that predominated in Europe and was a mixture of the classical contributions of Greece and Rome, together with later Christianity, and we could basically define it as an allegiance to individual freedom, consensual government, civic audit of the military, secularism — or at least the distinction between a church theocracy and state — capitalism, free enterprise, open markets, private property, et cetera. We don’t necessarily mean that through 2,500 years, all of this paradigm appeared — obviously not in Nazi Germany, or 9th century Gaul. But there was a likelihood that this general blueprint would reemerge in Florence or Venice or during the Swiss confederation, and there is a continuum.
The other qualifying remark I’d like to point out is when we talk about freedom, there’s some confusion today that we say, well, the Native Americans were free, or the German tribes of the 2nd century B.C. were free. And, yet, there is a certain freedom — “Freiheit” in German — this idea that people have certain prerogatives and choices, but usually it’s a result of demography, one or two people per 100 square miles.
What’s unique about the West, in contrast, is that the idea of freedom can be institutionalized, and can travel across time and space into a variety of environments. So while a traditional tribal Arab society may have a council of elders, or Native Americans point to the Iroquois nation, the idea that you would have constitutional government that would be written down and would provide a blueprint in any geographical context I think is quite unusual and a Western phenomenon.
If we look for the origins of this concept of the West, we can obviously go back in our own country to the 19th century, to the 18th century, to the Founding Fathers. We can push it further and see the Founding Fathers were influenced by both the British and the French Enlightenments. Travel again back through the Renaissance in Italy to the republics of, say, Venice or Florence. We can even see constitutional government with the early Swiss. It’s common to think that the Roman empire was autocratic, but if you look at local councils or regional government, even under the worst excesses of the emperors, the flames of — I should say the fumes of — republican government seemed still to be alive. We know that republican government itself in Rome didn’t go out of fashion until the 1st century B.C. And then we go back to classical Greece.
We often make the mistake, I think, of thinking democracy started in 507 or 506. Technically it did in Athens, but it drew on a prior 200-year prior tradition of consensual government in the 1500 city-states. Sometimes this is called timocracy. The Greeks had a word for it called politia, the idea that landed voting citizens would have their own responsibilities for government.
When we get to the 8th century B.C., we can’t trace that origin any further. This is quite controversial because it would suggest that democracy is primarily a Western phenomenon — and it is. The Greeks created consensual government. Thus, it’s anti-Mediterranean. It’s quite fashionable to talk about Mediterranean studies today, but if you look at what was going on in Persia or in Egypt then, the notion there of the individual and his relationship with government, the notion of the holy man and his relation to government, all that is entirely different among the pharaohs or the great kings than it was in these small city-states in Greece.
We don’t know why civilization exploded onto the scene like it did in the 8th century B.C., where we had a prior dark age and suddenly, over a century or two, we have 1,500 city states. We have constitutional government, we have a paradigm where one man has a slot in a phalanx almost like the seats in this auditorium, equidistant from another, responsible for the defense of his own city-state. He goes into the council hall, he has one vote based on his klêros, or his 10-acre form.
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FYI
BTTT
A real jewel: People who have, either by income or education or sophistication, beaten the game, nature’s old game of getting away from our natural existence, they really do believe the world operates on the premises of the newsroom or an academic meeting. They don’t realize what most people are doing.
Let me know if you want in or out
An excellent, excellent read. Thanks for the post and the heads up.
All of that, together, after 9/11 explains our present policy, not as the first resort - because we have tried realpolitik, we’ve tried bribery, we’ve tried arms sales to particular governments, we’ve tried cash infusion. This...was not the first choice. It was the last choice. It was the last choice of desperation after 9/11, and it was done with some reluctance, because most of the people in the Bush administration came in as realists and realized from a whole body of academic work that democracy is not easily transferred from the West to the non-West, but felt, for the reasons I outlined, that it was (A), their last choice, and (B) there was some optimism in this 21st century that it might just work.
Well, there was always the "nuke the whole area into glass" option. So call me "Mr. Cheerful."
Good read. Thanks.
ping
Great lecture by VDH.
Worth the read.
Did you see where he calls himself a Centrist Democrat? He might be the best liked Demo on FReep!
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