The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (5 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read:
 
The Greeks
by H. D. F. Kitto; New York: Penguin, 1950.
 
 
A splendid, genial book written before the culture wars were underway, by a man who loved Greek art and drama and poetry, and who will give you a most friendly and sensible introduction to them. Criticism nowadays will not condescend to clarity or charity—or common sense.
 
 
Do these ideas not sound familiar? Can an American read three pages of a newspaper or listen to a political pundit or a schoolteacher for five minutes without encountering them?
 
I define modern man partly by his scorn for tradition. He cannot see it as the distilled experience of his ancestors, the result of generations of men and women coming to terms with the laws that govern our existence. Yet the sense that traditions are
holy
provided those energetic Greeks with a constant source of moral and religious issues to ponder. They were restless intellectually and politically; yet their sense of the beauty of the cosmos and the deep order of all things gave them salutary boundaries. Such piety, even when not well thought out, helped to protect them from the nonsense that “right” is whatever a majority may wish it to be. It may be seen in Plato’s
Euthyphro
, a savage satire against the self-serving, “intellectual” wordplay of a young man about to testify in court against his own father—and who is proud to do it. Culturally, our schools turn out Euthyphros all the time. If in little else, they succeed in that.
 
That piety reminds men of the natural law they must obey, lest they destroy themselves. Nor does it matter that the law may be hard to apply to the particular case. The tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides enmesh their characters in terrible quandaries. Should you keep your promise to your comrades in arms and cajole the poor Philoctetes to rejoin the Trojan War, even if it means deceiving the man once again—since it was you, Odysseus, who had marooned him on an uninhabited island nine years before? Should you, Prometheus, submit to the overbearing power of Zeus, and let him know of the prophesied threat to his throne? Should you, Eteocles, pay heed to the wailing women of your city and
not
confront your brother with the sword, though he is leading a force of seven armies against your seven gates? Should you, Theseus, slay your son Hippolytus when your wife, Phaedra, claims that he has ravished her? The answer is never easy. And it is never, “act according to your opinion.”
 
Athenian relativists
 
The idea that good and evil are “socially constructed,” mere conventions, is not new to us. For it’s not only truth that is timeless; the more obvious falsehoods are, too. This one emerged from the hotbed of fifth-century Athens. It is, in part, the work of the Sophists, the first professional educators in the West. The Sophists, up for private hire, trained young men in rhetoric, to hold their own in the debates at the Assembly. Soon they acquired the reputation of tonic salesmen. In
The Clouds
, Aristophanes casts Socrates, of all people, as a Sophist who makes money by teaching various forms of slick impiety.
 
His students laugh at the inconsistencies in the stories of the gods. They learn how to argue, to satisfy their greed or their lust, that good is bad and bad is good. Socrates, descending from the clouds, has replaced the gods, substituting verbal trickery for virtue. That’s unfair to Socrates, who was no Sophist. But in that new and utilitarian education, we abandon truth for the willingness to score points; and that, finally, subjects the mind to both worldliness and impracticality. It’s a foul combination. We are worldly because we scorn the truth in favor of what will turn heads in some political arena. We are impractical because the truth is the truth—whether we like it or not.
 
Marx reduced the spirit of man to material desires, and believed that central planning could deliver goods more efficiently than could a free market. He was wrong on both counts. Our feminizing schools reduce male and female to a few minor details of plumbing, and then preach that pills and white balloons will provide a remedy for human lust. Wrong—and soul-destroying—on both counts.
 
But in Athens, as now, there was a market for the sophistical wares. Man
needs
wisdom, but what he needs and what he buys are two different things. Wisdom may cry at the gates, but man is too busy at the mall to hear. He likes to hear Protagoras say that man is the measure of all things, and concludes that the good or the evil or the existence or nonexistence of a thing depends upon how he chooses to consider it. “Justice is the will of the stronger,” says Thrasymachus, lampooned in Plato’s
Republic
.
13
The historian Thucydides suggests that Athens gleefully accepted that “wisdom,” and tried to use it, as I have mentioned, to bludgeon the island of Melos.
 
Thucydides wrote after Athens’ great defeat. He loathed such opportunism and relativism. In fact, every one of the great playwrights and thinkers of ancient Greece believed in objective moral truth. They did not believe it was easy to grasp. It must be sought, struggled for, and granted new life from age to age. But it exists, and is universal. When the old and feeble Priam, king of Troy, appears in the tent of his enemy Achilles to plead for his son Hector’s body, the great warrior is astonished. There is nothing impressive about an old man on his knees, but to Achilles at that moment Priam looks like a god. He reminds him of another old man, his father Peleus, far across the Aegean, whom he has not seen in ten years, and whom he knows he will not see again. “Honor then the gods, Achilles,” cries Priam,
 
. . . and take pity upon me remembering your father, yet I am still more pitiful; I have gone through what no other mortal on earth has gone through;
 
I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children. (
Iliad
, 24.503–506)
 
 
Give me back my son, he cries. It simply is the right thing to do. The two men, old and young, Trojan and Greek, enemies in war, sit weeping in the twilight. They are one in their humanity, one in their suffering and loneliness.
 
The Greeks derived their sense of right-dealing from a hardheaded look at man’s frailty. They had the most advanced medicine in the West until the late nineteenth century, they lived in the open air and the sun, they ate a healthy diet, they exercised even as old men; so they lived a long time. But “health care” was something they had to provide for themselves, and eventually all the care in the world will be in vain. Death looms over our glory, and should instruct us against
hubris
, literally “haughtiness” or “uppityness.” So when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, goes round the table at his house, asking for bread from the men who are suing for the hand of his wife Penelope, he approaches the ringleader Antinous, and asks him to consider how the Fates that set a man high can ruin him too:
 
I, too, was once a man of means; my house was rich; I often gave to vagabonds, whoever they might be, who came in need.
 
There I had countless slaves and all those things that grace a man whom men consider blessed.
 
But Zeus, the son of Cronus, then was pleased to ruin me. (
Odyssey
, 17.419–24)
 
 
 
 
Athens’ Athletes II
 
“No Greeks ever shook hands after a fight, no Greek ever was the first to congratulate his conqueror; defeat was felt as a disgrace.”
From
E. Norman Gardiner
,
Athletics in the Ancient World
 
 
Nor were the Greeks unusual in this regard. The only dew to soften the dry, hard heart of man fell from one apparently defeated, upon a cross.
 
 
Antinous replies by requesting the “pest” to get lost, flinging a footstool at him when his back is turned. Fittingly, he will be the first suitor to die when Odysseus begins his avenging slaughter. The drinker and slick talker will take an arrow sunk in his throat up to the feathers, just as he is raising a goblet of wine to his lips.
 
Even a relativist may toss a beggar some bread—especially if, as was the case for Antinous, it is somebody else’s bread. What’s hard is to admit that a whole people, a state, must submit to the right. It’s not politically correct to talk that way, now. It’s not “democratic.” But we should listen to Sophocles. A close friend of Pericles, he was fascinated by the tension between the popular and the eternal, or between political expediency and justice. In
Oedipus at Colonus
, he shows that blessings come to the pious and
not
to those who act from temporary, utilitarian motives. And the primacy of the natural law is at the heart of his brilliant
Antigone
.
 
The play is often read as a protest against the bullying power of government, or against patriarchy. It is actually a conservative warning against radical democracy, and a reminder that reason too can be puffed up with hubris and, like a tyrant, usurp the authority of laws that we intuit rather than deduce.
 
The situation is this: Eteocles and Polynices, sons of the exiled Oedipus and rivals to the throne of Thebes, have slain one another in battle. Creon, the uncle of the two young men, is left in power. His only consideration, so he says, is the welfare of the
polis
:
No man who is his country’s enemy
 
Shall call himself my friend. Of this I am sure—
 
Our country is our life; only when she
 
Rides safely, have we any friends at all.
 
 
 
So he commands that Eteocles be buried with full military honor, while his brother Polynices must lie to rot outside the city walls, his body guarded by sentries. Creon considers only the day’s politics—justice is defined according to the city’s advantage. One brother must be elevated as a hero and the other condemned as a traitor. Morally, though, there is not much to choose between them, as the audience knew. Eteocles had gained the popular allegiance and ousted his elder brother in a coup. Polynices would not sit content, but roused up six other kings to help him attack his own city. Clearly an unnatural act; but then, the younger brother should not have driven the elder into exile, nor should the two now be lying dead, each slain by the other’s hand.
 
Such considerations mean nothing to Creon. But it is the welfare of the city that seems not to enter the mind of the young Antigone, sister to the two dead men. Her world at first glance appears to be narrower than Creon’s: a world of intense loyalty to family and blood. I doubt that it is narrower, but it is a dreadfully real world, more immediately present to the human heart. She knows only that a beloved brother lies unburied. So she steals past the sentries to scatter a little ritual dust upon the body. Caught in the act, she is haled before Creon.

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