The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (3 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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Athenian policy after the death of Pericles took Protagoras at his words. “Do not talk to us of justice,” say the Athenian ambassadors to the rulers of the neutral island of Melos. “You will submit to us, or we will destroy you; justice is merely the will of the powerful.” When the Melians declined, the Athenians slew the men and herded the women and children into slavery.
2
The audience remembers. They see an Athens on stage that calls them back to their better aspirations. And they see a Thebes, mercenary, unnatural Thebes, that reminds them of what they have become. And they weep.
 
It would be interesting to list the reasons why such a dramatic moment could not transpire in another fading democracy, ours. Surely one reason has to do with piety, that forgotten virtue. Those Athenians could still be shamed for not revering the example of their forefathers at Salamis, then united with the Spartans against their common enemy the Persians. They could be shamed by the virtue of their legendary ruler, Theseus. They were still willing to hear hard truths about themselves.
 
 
Nine Politically Incorrect Truths about Greek Homosexuality
 
1. It was a shame to be considered effeminate.
2. Effeminacy included the constant pursuit of sexual pleasure.
3. Grown men who had relations with one another were thought contemptible.
4. The phenomenon cannot be understood apart from those male blood-brotherhoods and friendships which in most cultures do not involve sexual intercourse.
5. Older men sought adolescent (and beardless) boys.
6. It was never accepted by members of every class.
7. It seems to have gone promiscuous after the demise of the free
polis
.
8. It spread venereal disease.
9. At its most spiritual, as in Plato, it directed men toward lives of virtue, of struggle in the battlefield or in the assembly. Athens was not San Francisco.
 
 
 
But shame is not so powerful a weapon now. We live in an effeminate day. We slander our fathers, and hug ourselves for doing it. It costs us nothing but the chance to grow wise.
 
Then let us recall what the Greeks bequeathed to us, which we have squandered. We might discover the errors the Athenians made in the fifth century, those that brought sadness to the last days of Sophocles. I don’t mean errors of political judgment, which in this world are inevitable, but intellectual errors, born of self-satisfaction and nursed by idleness and wealth.
 
Athens: Better than the rest
 
As I write, Buddhist monks are marching through the streets of Burma, denouncing the nation’s military dictatorship and chanting, “Democracy, democracy!” How strange that is! Would Catholic priests, even in secular France, chant for rule by lamas? For better or for worse, when the world thinks of a just and rational system of government dedicated to liberty, it turns to the West. It turns not to ancient Peking or Persepolis, but to Athens. Even when our despots lie, they use the language of democracy. They lie in a vulgar Greek.
 
I’m no idolator of the vote. It’s a tool, and needs to be judged as such, according to how well it secures justice, and encourages a people to live good lives. But our schools teach two contradictory things about our democratic culture, and, marvelous to behold, they get both wrong. First, they teach that the vote is not a tool but the very
object
of justice. Choice is everything, and it doesn’t matter what you choose. Second, they teach that different cultures are all equal, even cultures that do not respect our idol of choice! But this happy lie is impossible to uphold when we look at the legacy Athens has left us in government, science, art, and philosophy. Where do people prosper, enjoy leisure, and reap the benefits of great inventions and discoveries? In lands where the heirs of Athens dwell.
 
Sure, the Greeks were far from perfect. They were sinners just as we. They employed plenty of slaves. The worst-treated of these were those prisoners of war sent down into the silver mines; in a couple of years the toxic fumes would kill them. Sparta survived and thrived by turning all of its free men of fighting age into professional soldiers, to ensure that the enslaved people of the surrounding countryside could not revolt. Greek aristocrats developed a cult of pederasty: if your son had curly hair and a nice physique, you had to watch out. Women did much of the work in and around the house, but were not consistently honored for it; the farmer-poet Hesiod calls them pests sent down by Zeus to punish mankind.
3
 
Nor was Greek politics always a matter of rational argument in open debate. Athens had at times been seized by tyrants, usually supported by the middle class. Pisistratus once tried to win an election by dressing an unusually tall woman as the goddess Athena, and having her cry out from a racing chariot, “Athena for Pisistratus!”
4
That early piece of demagoguery didn’t work, so he took power by a military coup. Then (for he was a benign man, otherwise) he bought the people’s support by means of building projects and elaborate festivals. His sons who succeeded him never mastered that art. One was slain by a rival in a homosexual affair. The other was exiled, traveling to Persia to help the emperor Darius turn the Greek world into a tributary province.
 
So there was good reason why Plato labeled democracy as the most debased form of government.
5
It was democracy that brought Athens to humiliating defeat at the hands of Sparta. It was democracy that sentenced his teacher Socrates to death. It was democracy that handed power to the passions of a rabble. Imagine what Plato would say of our polls and focus groups.
 
Still, we owe those Greeks an incalculable debt. They gave us the defining epics of the West, Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
. Out of an old religious festival to the wine god Dionysus they developed that heady form of art we call drama. They sculpted the human form with a beauty and scientific precision that would not be equaled until the Renaissance. They erected human-scale temples and courts of such incomparable beauty and convenience that even now, 2,500 years later, our homes and offices in the West echo their porticoes and pediments and colonnades. They learned all the mathematics the Babylonians had to teach, and incorporated it into a systematic geometry. Breaking free of the bonds of practical utility and bookkeeping, they invented the notion of
proof
, and added astonishing discoveries of their own,
without the assistance of numerals
. Archimedes estimated the number of grains of sand on earth, and in the midst of this
jeu d’esprit
came within a hair of inventing calculus.
6
When he wasn’t playing with number theory, Archimedes was more practically employed: inventing fancy catapults, for instance, to defend his city, Syracuse, against Roman invaders.
 
The Greeks invented rational analysis of modes of government—what we call political science. Herodotus journeyed across Asia Minor and into Egypt to learn what he could about local life, and to pick up information from eyewitnesses of the Persian War. He is called the father of history, but he might as well be called the father of geography and the father of ethnography. The Greeks began man’s quest to discover the unseen unity and order underlying the wild variety presented by physical nature. Democritus coined the term
atom
, meaning a particle that cannot be split.
7
 
But when they turned their attention to man, and the good that man longs to possess, the Greeks burst into a flowering of creativity that puts our schools to shame. They invented philosophy and all its branches: linguistic, metaphysical, moral, political, and epistemological. Seldom has a poet written with more sensitivity to beauty than did the philosopher Plato, and among poets only Shakespeare and Dante can rival Sophocles for philosophical acuity. Only a philosopher at heart could have written
Oedipus at Colonus
, but only a philosophical people could have fully appreciated it.
 
The Greeks weren’t naturally more intelligent than anybody else. Then why did these things happen
there
? The answers will entangle us in political
incorrectness
at every step.
 
Father, not mother
 
At the dawn of historical records, the people who lived in Greece, like other people near the Mediterranean Sea, worshipped fertility gods.
8
They sacrificed to Mother Earth, the womb and the tomb for us all, blindly ever-generating and ever-destroying nature. But around 1500 BC, nomads from the steppes of central Asia, the so-called Dorians, swept into Asia Minor and Greece. These Dorians spoke an Indo-European language, related to Germanic, Latin, Celtic, and Sanskrit. As they were not farmers, they did not adore the earth. Rather they worshipped the gods of the vast sky they saw all about them on the plains.
 
These sky gods were also, naturally enough, gods of light and the things we associate with light: freedom, beauty, laughter, and intelligence. Their chief god was Father Zeus (Germanic
Tiw
, as in “Tuesday,” and Roman
Deus pater
, which became
Deuspiter
or
Jupiter
). He was endowed with the glory and cunning and might that make one
divus
(Lat.) or
dios
(Gk.). He was bathed in light.
 
Now an odd thing happened: Just as the invading Dorians did not wipe out the natives, so their religion did not wipe out the old fertility cults. It only suppressed them, and that made for a rich system of incompatible gods. The story is told in Hesiod’s
Theogony
as a battle between the generations. The old gods ruled by brute force, or tried to: Ouranos, god of the heavens, hated the children of his wife Gaia, the earth, and stuffed them back into her belly. Then Gaia, showing the first glint of intelligence in the cosmos, gave her son Cronus an iron sickle and told him to wait in ambush the next time Ouranos made love to her. When night fell, Ouranos “covered” Gaia, but Cronus sliced off his father’s testicles and cast them into the sea. No testicles, no throne.
 
Cronus then ruled by force. His trick was to swallow his children whole. But his wife Rhea, aided now by Ouranos and Gaia both, slipped him a rock in a blanket while spiriting her baby away to be raised in hiding. That baby’s name was Zeus. He in turn overthrew his father, but—and here is the point—
by intelligent alliances
, and not by force alone. He gave powerful positions to some of the older gods. Hecate was made goddess of the underworld and patron of warriors. The Styx, dread river of the underworld, gained the honor of being invoked whenever the gods swore an oath. The horrible Titans of the hundred arms, Briareus, Cottus, and Gyes, were allowed to eat and drink with the young gods on Olympus. They proved indispensible when the other Titans tried to dethrone Zeus. It was no small advantage to have creatures who could hurl a hundred spears at once.
 
It’s a strange concoction. The “old” gods, associated with earth and blood and lust and vengeance, still exist, and claim their due.
But they must be governed
. They submit to Zeus, the cunning and mighty. He is cunning, but he can be tricked; he is strong, but not strong enough to ignore the rest. It’s a system that invites the mind to probe the riddles of human life. How can the passions be governed by reason? Should they always be? What is the relationship between authority and goodness? Can the old traditions be violated at will? Is there a law to which even the gods must submit—a law which Ouranos and Cronus violated, and perhaps Zeus too? Is there such a thing as progress or moral evolution, and if so, where is it going? What remains changeless?
 
 
 
Hippocrates Was Pro-life
 
“I swear by Apollo the healer . . .
“I will not give a fatal draught to anyone if I am asked, nor will I suggest any such thing. Neither will I give a woman means to procure an abortion.
“I will be chaste and religious in my life and in my practice.”
From
the Hippocratic Oath
 
 

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