Why Greece Matters- Victor Davis Hanson

hello and welcome my name is bossy module student body vice president at the University of Utah 2007-2008 you're listening to a podcast developed and produced by the University of Utah for your enjoyment this program when others like it can be found on the web at WWDC as I think the best compliment I've ever received in my life was a very angry aside and the Tehran news last year that I had been hurt this year excuse me that I had praised the three hundred and Hellenism and what the Iranian writer was angry about was that I suggested very politely that twenty five hundred years ago there was an autocratic government part theocratic in Persia and it threatened the West and it represented an entirely antithetical worldview to what was there in Greece and here we were twenty five hundred years and this is before mr. Ahmadinejad spoke and said things such as there are no homosexuals in Iran and Israel will be off the map except except two so the more things change the more they say the same which reminds us that there is a difference oh no that's very difference between what we call the West and the non West and these issues are very important right now because we're in a period of globalization and sort of the second or third actually it's a third globalization remember the Roman world for a period despite what mr. bin Laden says North Africa and the Middle East was Roman and it had been Helena sized before by Alexander great and his successors and now we're once again in a period where the entire world and not by force of arms but by osmosis business practices allegiance to governments we have more democracies in the world today than we've ever had in any peer in the history of human civilization and places like India with China are becoming much more like us if I could use that controversial term then we are like them and in our period here at home the irony of all this changes as it as it expands from the center I think at the same time there's never been a period in the West were people who were Western have so little confidence and what they have to offer the world at the very time that India and China and South Korea Latin America are embracing Western civilization we in the West are questioning so much so that we've created this alternative protocol called multiculturalism it sounds great study all cultures two things to remember about it the Greeks started multiculturalism of people like Xenophon erotic tests that were inquisitive and empirical inductive and their interest in Persia and Egypt and second it doesn't mean study all cultures it means to advance them as equal to Western culture the problem I have no problem with that except it's intellectually dishonest because privately we in the United States and indeed in Europe as well we live two lives we profess a multicultural utopia that all the world and all the cultures and all the history of relatively equal merit even though we see that China and India and all these countries are adopting business practices language practices transparencies like our own but then we don't live this multicultural dog I could be very blunt and controversial if we all want to travel and you have a choice between flying Nigerian Airlines or United you'll take United if you want to go to the beach in your speedos you'll do it maybe in San Francisco or Great Salt Lake that you will not do it in Tehran if you want to say if you happen to be an atheist god forbid in this audience but if you said God is dead you better do it in Salt Lake City Mormon as it is then try to do it in Saudi Arabia where you'll be executed I have a debate coming up with a Palestinian Imam and he was very anti-american a US citizen now that his mosque and I in the preliminary discussions I said you realize if I were to replicate your mosque with its equivalent you taught this new Tando is a fancy word with a necessary changes being made if I were going over to Ramallah and I made a Christian Church and I started to try to convert people I would be killed you understand that he said yes he said something very interesting said yes but that's because our culture is not like your culture I said yes but I'm not in Palestine you're in America that tells you all you need to know we have more immigrants that come the United States and all other countries put together each year so whatever this thing is it's dynamic and we know the difference and they here and now if I said to any of you you would you like to drink the water in Tijuana Mexico or in Salt Lake City you want to drink it here I just got operated for a ruptured appendix in Libya last year believe me you would not want that procedure done in Libya I would prefer done anywhere in a western country is it because of race no is it because of genes no it's because of a particular culture a particular way of looking at the world what is that way of looking at the world primarily it's empirical that a person starts his existence without preconceptions we inherited that from the Socratic tradition we are not deductive we don't start with a premise and make the premise 50 examples we look at the examples what we hear what we see what we smell and then we come up with conclusions about it the scientific method sometimes the conclusions could not only be controversial but they can end with your life as we saw in a case of philosophers and scientists in the Middle Ages what else is this Western idea it's the idea that a person an individual has an alien right we see that best epitomized in our own constitution but it goes back to Greece go back to Constitutional History in classical Greece we see that individuals have names called polite a citizens that word does not exist in the Egyptian dialect any Egyptian dialect the Egyptian language the Persian language there's no sense for poly ki Constitution there's no word equivalent of a Luthor eeeh anywhere in ancient Persian anywhere in Turkey's anywhere in the Arab world today that's why when the controversial idea of bringing democracy to the ancient world notice that the Arabs use the word democracy it's not because they like the West or Greece in particular but there's no other equivalent because there's nothing in their experience that would need a word for besides this commitment to individuality there's a notion of private property holding I wish I could tell you the constitutional government emerged in Greece to promote equality but it didn't it was the protection of an individual's private property in the 7th century and the ability to pass it on to an heir without coercion or confiscation from the state which was pretty much the norm in Persia every single person by definition was a slave of an eminent king he could confiscate property when and where he wanted in contrast I Socrates said even though Hellenism means speaking Greek anybody can be an helene by his mind as hard as spirit you can become a westerner any of you today wants to become a Chinese citizen I don't think you'll ever fully be accepted because you do not look Chinese or you don't you can't say that you were born in China but in this room tonight we have people whose native language was not English and they were not born the United States and they can become if they choose more Western or more American than anybody in this country because Western ISM is an idea and that idea had its roots albeit with a particular race and a particular language in Greece we also know that there's a free market and the Greeks were very aware of that that people could buy and sell things without government coercion there was a notion that the civilian government controlled the military rather than vice versa Greek generals look like civilians they did not go into the Agora by the DeCastro Rhian or they did not go into the Assembly Dec lazier with a uniform they were civilians first and they were audited and as I said earlier today in a speech like I can't think of whether we talk about Lysander or Pericles or Nicky s or Alcibiades or even a Spartan King who was subject to constitutional audit who was not at one time brought before the court or executed or tried because the civilians control the military that's a very important Western legacy that distinguishes us today we don't see for all your criticism to George Bush we do not see him with epaulets and sunglasses as we do in Pakistan for example are as we do in Syria today or we saw in Iraq that notion of civilian control of militaries of uniquely Western idea as is religious tolerance the Greeks had their traditional gods but in 5th century Athens they had everybody from pythagorean's the or phix to later stoas Stoics and Epicureans people were free to philosophize if you will in the way that was absolutely unknown during the time and it's absolutely unknown in most the places today as I said of the 1 billion people in the Muslim world if you were to set up a church and try to convert people to Christianity you'd probably be killed I can't think of a Muslim country that would allow you to go into that country today and do what Muslims do in a western country there's an asymmetry in other words that's uniquely Western this idea of constitutional government so controversial today can you by force of arms as we did in Italy or South Korea or Germany can you by force of arms or persuasion or coercion make people be Western as we're trying to do in some cases to cases in the Middle East in Afghanistan and Iraq but the idea that democracy our constitutional government I should say is preferable for most people that it appeals to the innate desires and aspirations of people that is a Greek idea best summed up in the second book of the acidities by Pericles in his famous oration at Athens and most importantly this idea of self critique the idea that you take something and tear it apart and you're constantly criticizing the status quo did you notice it when bin Laden gave his tape not long ago he quoted Noam Chomsky and Michael Shure and when he gave his speech at Columbia he made a very silly mistake because being a non-western he thought Westerners could criticize their government more than I do and I'll just take their talking points so immediately started out with a very liberal audience and said Abu Ghraib Guantanamo Katrina all the talking points everybody's sort of cloud then he got onto gays he said but there's no we don't like homeless and stopped what he didn't realize is he didn't understand the complexity of the Western experience he just was copying people who critique it but just because you critique Guantanamo Katrina does not mean that you believe in theocracy and Iran is he seemed to think and bin Laden seems to think when he quotes us so well let me just ask everybody what is hellenism mean what is Greeks the Western tradition we use this term Western very loosely I know when I was a young academic I was thirty I've been farming for a number of years I came into my first class and some people wanted to help me so they said well we're going to have a lecture a formal lecture at noon on the Western tradition for you so I came in 1720 AG students came in from Fresno State big AG department and I started to speak and they all walked out and some of them said I thought this was going to be on high noon and Shan and it was thought it was the Western experience but they had no idea what the West was because we use that term loosely but we never take the trouble to define it do we we never do and as I said earlier it's not something that's shared by most people that's the most controversial thing today to say in America that most people in the world still even though globalization and westernization are spreading find the Western experience antithetical and they have different traditions they have different traditions but we loosely find this define this Western experience as a commitment to individual rights expression self-critique constitutional government free economic activities secular government religious tolerance now where did this come from I think all everybody here can say well the United States had a wonderful Constitution we had a original group of thinkers Hamilton Jefferson Franklin people like that and they got their ideas of course from people like Locke and Montesquieu and Rousseau and David Hume and people in the British Scottish French enlightenment these people of course were working on an earlier tradition that was formed in the Reformation the Renaissance and that was a basis of some great scholastic thinking we had the Magna Carta very early in the Middle Ages they the Middle Ages rediscovered after the Dark Ages the Roman Republic Roman Republic's ideas look at Cicero he was a great mass disseminator of Greek thought we can go through the Hellenistic period and we go to classical Greece of the fifth century and a little bit in the sixth set and it stops why that stops I mean there is no Mycenaean text that we know of there is no Assyrian somebody said well Gilgamesh well that's an epic but it's very different than the Iliad there's no character portrayal there's no values that are discussed they say well Hammurabi have a law code no it's not a law code it's not something that was adjudicated by a judiciary and approved by a majority vote it's handed down on high by Hammurabi very different these values that we're talking about were created in this Greek city-states how that happened I once wrote a book the other Greeks to try to explain how it happened but it's one of the great mysteries of human experience that in a little country of 50 or 60,000 square miles 2,700 years ago with a population of probably a million to a million and a half suddenly had this explosion in intellectual energy it's at roughly within a hundred years they created the idea of philosophy the idea that you could speculate about natural phenomenon without it being tied in or embedded with religion that there was something called a Sun and there was water and these were not just Poseidon and Helios that these were natural phenomenon they had characteristics you can investigate them and you could do so freely and this would evolve into the Socratic the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition they created the idea of history history did not exist until the Greeks with it it was not inquiry or discussion it was just record-keeping if you go to Persepolis you see i giris did the following I kill the following people like enslaved you pick up Herodotus and said why did the Greeks do this how do they do it and you discuss and you attack other who's stalking it's a it's a whole different process they created the idea of oratory the idea of public speaking and how you address people and how you try to persuade the art of persuasion sometimes called sophistry they invented the idea of drama dramatic presentation and comedy the idea you could make fun of fellow citizens you can't have comedy where you don't have freedom we know that in the Muslim world today you don't have anything like Saturday Night Live you wouldn't have Saturday Night Live in Tehran you'd be executed bill maher makes fun of the United States all the time if you tried it in the West Bank he'd be killed he knows that everybody knows that you can't do that even today but you could do that 2700 years ago so it was it was a very unique idea that all of these genres were created and most importantly embedded within the core of it was a self critiquing idea because as some of the opponents of this system and there were many Plato among them suggest that there's no end to it remember what he said the dogs and the donkeys are going to be voting because if you believe people are free quote unquote hungry then why not women why not slaves why not animals why not anything there's no end to it so this was a radical evolutionary process that we're still in the middle of today after all of these evolutions were still arguing who should be a citizen I went to a conference not long ago and someone said well man of the left said you know problem with voting is that you're free to vote and then people who register have more money in capital maybe maybe not then the people who turn out to vote on register on Election Day tend to have more capital and we are not very representative so I suggest that we give people who make less than $30,000 3 votes and I said you know you remind me of something of Aristotle's politics where he said that democracy was really power of the people who didn't have cash capital or silver in those days but the point I'm making is there was a critique and there was a way an evolutionary process that how do you make people more and more equal you can do it by law but then it doesn't work by reality sometimes we're not born into the world equal these are issues that the Greeks struggle with all the time what I like to do is to offer you two or three critiques of the hellenic system very important as I said earlier that if globalization is westernization is westernization is a combination of the Enlightenment the Reformation the founding fathers of Renaissance Roman culture the blending and merging with Christianity all of that starts with Greece in some ways globalization is the embodiment the reification of Hellenism what's the usual take on it why are what are the people who are critics of Hellenism and the west what do they say well most obvious is in our experience in our lifetime in our generation our is the left and they've said that the United States Europe the colonial powers were inherently racist and sexist now how do they come that conclusion well what they do is they look at contemporary society you're a professor say writing in the University of Utah let's say you're an English professor and you have a pretty good life you have lifetime employment maybe you make 120,000 I want to put words no I get a lot of nose but if you're been there a while you might and you have a nice car and suburban life is pretty good and you look back in antiquity and you look at the Greeks you say oh my gosh women could vote they had slave they're terrible people I would have never done that and it there's two things to keep in mind number one they didn't have vacuum cleaners and stoves so that most people were one harvest away from oblivion but so everybody else in the ancient world but second is they were aware of these contradictions and they asked themselves really pointed pointed questions they didn't always have answers for so we look at Sophocles for example look at the plays with the names of women and tikani or look at your Ripa teased Helen or look at Aristophanes Lysistrata so in all of these plays the heroines are women who are smarter than duds like Creon our Lysistrata hasn't answered in the Peloponnesian War if you're al Qaeda miss the famous four century reparation you say that why no man is born a slave or if you're Aristotle and you start the politics you say unlike my critics I believe there is a natural slave somebody who's genetically inferior but he says unlike my critics meaning most people who are writing philosophy are taking the other tack that people should not be slaves and we have this idea of the poor we have so many words for the lower-class of the theta it's the Pinet taste that they taste and the Pinet days are the people who don't have capital and athens they are trying always to agitate for social justice and this is a philosophical question not about compensation but why does somebody have two ways a smart man behind the plow and getting almost nothing on his farm and a very dull man who inherited money is riding around on a horse it's not equal and so the Greeks tried to discuss this either with political reform and sometimes it was quite wild and I don't think the world has ever seen a socialist system like classical Athenian democracy where all the offices were held except for the generals by lot and there were liturgies that confiscated the wealthiest money and redistributed it it's very radically a gala terian that was a system that was one way of dealing with these contradictions and human experience the other was to create a philosophical and a religious critique of that it's the basis of Christianity pre-christian but the idea is that life is not fair and just because you don't get enough compensation and somebody else does doesn't mean that they're going to be happy are they going to go to a better place when they die and we're all going to die so there were these discussions that were going on all the time so when somebody today says well I don't like the West because it's colonial and racist and sexist what they really mean is that because the West empowers individual both economically and politically that individual will have more influence than a subject or a serve in the Chinese tradition in the African tradition in the Native American tradition I mean influence he will be able to go outside his Shores and build things like galleons or create advanced weapons an 18th 17th century are sophisticated navigation because he will draw on the whole menu of the Greek tradition and he will have influence global Institute for in influence it's not definable by the small territory of Europe or the small number of people relatively and therefore whatever he does wrong will and will impact more people but what we forget in this equation is that the sins of the west of the sins of mankind the Arab world had more slaves in the Western world and when the Western world exported 11 slave 11 million slaves to the new world the Arab world took 11 million slaves from Africa to the call and other Muslim countries but the difference is that not only was there a Western tradition going back to the Greeks it's questioned slavery but the British Empire put an end to it and finally we fought a war in lost 600,000 America there was slavery until 1920 in the Arab world and people suggest today in places like the Sudan and Somalia they're still slavery you talk about sexism yes all countries have this tradition because women are responsible for childbearing are not as strong physically as a role and their lives are centered around children there was less opportunity for education and this was known to the Greeks and they had laws that reflected that bias but they also as I said had this dissonant critique and so it's no accident that that evolutionary period would see women more empowered today so with today we are worried that in this constant questioning that women are worried about the glass ceiling or whether we have income parity across gender lines but nobody in the United State is agitating against forced female circumcision 500 500 thousand women were circumcised it's a little different than male circumcision by the way you know in the Sudan last year nobody's talking about polygamy now I shouldn't say that you talk but the point is that the west of all the places in the world is empowering women we talk about class strife Marx was a westerner the idea that people should have egalitarian ISM in the economic system even if the political system gives you freedom but it doesn't insure gala tere we're still GM went on strikes this week so these issues are still here and we're still critiquing our system and it's not happening in the Muslim world or the Chinese world it's no accident today it was a time bomb it was waiting to go off that our paint our pharmaceuticals our pet food or a toys coming from China would be defective and dangerous because they do not have an independent Food and Drug Administration and they do not have an open press they don't have investigative journalism they don't have university research centers as we do and it's no accident today that in the Muslim world that people are trying to assassinate reform and it's no accident today that the one country whatever your views are the Middle East Israel that has adopted a Linux system open judiciary transparency free press market driven capitalism creates more goods and services without oil than Egypt Libya Tunisia Algeria Morocco put together and has twice the gross domestic product excuse me the per capita income twice what Saudi Arabia has with six million barrels exported at $80 a barrel that's what Hellenism does in the real here in our so the critique that it summed how illiberal is just simply that like all of us we have these innate prejudices but when you westerner and you have these innate prejudice two things happen one you're able to do things other people can't there's no restrictions on political economic activity envy you have a system that questions so we air our dirty linen we're harder on our cell and we are others and then we're the people who change the world so naturally the most visible sign of Hellenism phase the united states that's why it's both hated and loved more than any other Society United States it can change things it can change things in the Middle East it can change things in the environment it can do great evil good whatever your perception is and it's constantly critiquing itself and that's why as I say most people are dying to get the United States even though they say that they don't like it and it's a typical it's what we are what Athens was in the ancient world hated and loved because it was the most dynamic and the most self-critical and gave the most ammunition to its enemy and felt but that was positive for its own evolutionary course there's also a critique and it's on the right not that we are colonialist or were sexist or exploitative or racist or we had slavery but that there is so much well and so much leisure that we basically have no life we have no culture we have no value as we turn on Oprah then we go to Domino's Pizza and then we come back and we watch the Shopping Channel and we're overweight and we have this lifestyle that we we don't appreciate we don't go for high culture this was the critique of a whole series of German knee list I could use that term loosely Oswald Spengler great decline of the West Frederick Nietzsche's work Hegel's work and the idea and the Germanic tradition was we Germans were never really colonized we were on the other side of the Ryan we are evoke a racially pure group Western society as it came into being in Rome was racially mixed genes are important we have a essence to us Chinese believe this do you saw it in World War two the Japanese believe it and that if you look at what Mussolini said what Hitler said what Japan said what the Muslim world says about us today is that we are spoiled pampered decadent we can't take casualties slaves to consumerism because our freedoms is what a comedian job doctor is all we hear he had a great rant about the bomb see that it innervates people makes them weak it turns over all responsibility for their life to their appetites slaves to their appetites the 19th hijackers after spending some nice nights in Las Vegas will saying that they hated what the America was because of the temptations of the flesh and this critique has been quite strong throughout the history of Western civilization if you were to read Roman critiques great one is Petronius to Satyricon great novel so our Tacitus is annulled swift own EEOC's biography and all those critiques the idea is that the West has so much money that they've created what the Romans called luksus luxury that people do not know how to handle their bounty that's a great critique today if I thought I want to answer that critique before I came tonight I was looking on the internet for matter and Britney Spears came across a picture of her in her little bikini overweight and she was dancing that some awards ceremony she had no talent I didn't think she was crass she had too much money and she was an embodiment of sort of our elite in some cases that whether it's Snoop Dogg or rap music that the world sees there's much to be said for the crasus of popular culture but what the West says is that people are people and then under democracy and economic freedom you can be what the people are and it's uncommon upon us to make us better than we can be and not slave to our appetites so what do we do in the West we look toward religion not government religion to improve our souls we look toward literature we look towards secular ethics asst sometimes we look to the family we look to our past we have all of these institutions that we rely on to fill the void because we have decided that government should not adjudicate morality and we are your people so sometimes when these institutions fail us or we fail or each other we can be we have a system in place and it's no accident today that all the critiques from the right whether it's fascism or Japanese militarism German Nazism they all like the critiques on the left that faded and they're in the ash heap of history there's been another critique of Western civilization its most insidious it is popularized by Jared Diamond Guns Germs and Steel you go to recent book called collapse and run something like this ok the world is globalized and maybe it is Western but it's only an accident the Greeks didn't do anything they just happened to be born in Greece and Greece was simply located in the crossroads of the Mediterranean had a pretty good climate they couldn't have those outdoor assemblies where they argued could they up in Stockholm wouldn't been possible and they had iron ores so they had iron couldn't do that in many places but when you start to make this argument of geographical determinism then you have to eliminate every other climate like Greece and there happens to be unfortunately for mr. diamond a lot of them in China and in India in fact if you're going to look at empires I might think that the Persian Gulf was better located because then you had water access to India and China that were massive ancient cultures in a way that Portland Greece didn't landlocked in the Mediterranean and seems to me that when I go to Spain or southern France the agricultural landscape seems to be almost the same as its Greece and more importantly within Greece we can use a laboratory to test this thesis out the Mycenaean Greeks at palatial civilization between 3000 and 1200 BC they grew all web trees they had days over 90 they had very snow and ice in the winter they were just as close as the Egyptians and they fell they left almost no record as the classical city-states so much so that if you were a Greek living in 500 BC you could walk like this right through the stones of Mycenae you wouldn't know who they were you might see some linear beat carved on a big you know a lentil you wouldn't know who wrote it you would say these were the walls of the Cyclops there was somebody named Agamemnon and Atreus that lived here they were answered but you wouldn't know anything it was completely a discontinuity of culture what I'm trying to say to you that the city-state grew up in the same place in the same climate same crops and did something completely different than the Mycenaean I could go to run this argument ad nauseam but I'd say to you the same as two of Egypt Egypt collapses 7th century BC the Nile starts to silt up various places the irrigation systems not attended by the Pharaohs the land becomes solemnized and Egyptian culture becomes stagnant it's top-heavy it's palatial its government's centric if I could use that term there's no free citizen Egypt's through Jared Diamond's at sea Egypt was dependent on the Nile and reefs had a different type not quite because Alexander comes into Egypt he dies the ptolemies come over and they become the beneficiaries of a long tradition of Greek science empirical inductive inquisitive and people started to ask questions why don't we irrigate in this manner why don't we look at crop rotation why don't we see why crops which crops work better how much does to experiments with how much water we need let's see where we should let the Nile drain where we should dam and pretty soon wheat production is higher under column 8 Greeks in Egypt and it ever was an affair Oh same climate same landscape same geography what's the missing link same missing link that explains why San Diego is different than Tijuana but North Korea is different than South Korea that old East Berlin was very different than West Berlin it's very different you should ask ourselves some very tough questions when you get onto this third rail of Western ISM why do we have 850,000 people from Mexico coming north and almost nobody coming from Canada Sal I look for the immigration records today 750 to 850 thousand people came illegally from Mexico plus another 160 thousand legally 25,000 came in Canada 25,000 Americans went to Canada you ask me I better live in Mexico the weather is much more like California they've got a lot of oil they've got a lot of natural resources along coastlines a tourist Haven what's the difference is there some racial theory no because when people come from Mexico and they become westernized they become among our most productive citizens what's different is that Canada is part of the British Commonwealth the anglo-saxon British tradition that inherited the European tradition inherited the classical tradition organises its economy its politics and social life in a very different way that translates down to very basic facts if you live in Tijuana you get strep throat you're in bad trouble here in San Diego you're not you drink the water out of tap in San Diego you're okay if you do it in Tijuana or not somebody pulls you over off the road and you're police you're in bad trouble from Tijuana you're not in San Diego if you want to vote in a machine in Tijuana machines probably not going to work as much as in San Diego I could go on and on but that is the fact of life let me just conclude by saying that wherever Hellenism in its evolutionary process reaches the world then the individual has advantages and that creates great burdens at each opportunity we've had dangerous Westerners who attacked us as I said by Hitler or Mussolini from the right we've had people in the left when the Communist tradition that came out of the West we have it today with the dogma of multicultural but it seems to me if we look at the greatest danger to the West and conclusion it's not been poverty plague dearth but a lack of confidence in this tradition that we have become so enriched by this unique system of empowering the individual politically and economically and culturally that we've created a society that has so many opportunities they forgot why they had opportunities what were the institutions that created those opportunities and when that happens in history you have to be careful you have to be careful I'll leave you with an anecdote in 219 to 216 as a military historian I'll leave you with a military anecdote the Roman Republic was threatened not only but with an invasion by Hannibal as you remember coming from Spain across the Ebro River but they were also at war with Greece under the successors of hilt the fifth Macedonian region in Greece so it was not a very good time this time remember Italy was only one what we call Rome was only one quarter to a third of Italy population was probably not more than 4 million and a series of devastating defeats the Trebbia River at try Kinney is at Lake Trust cemani and Cana they lost over a hundred thousand Roman Legionnaire dead the poor Republic only had 200 thousand and arms now we have a million point seven in our military it would be as if we lost 700 thousand dead men and women in Iraq in a country of 300 million you want to carry the parallel much greater because it was only 4 million then it would probably be as if we lost 5 or 6 or 10 million people in Iraq what happened constitutional government jumped into operation there were mass levies there were constitutional conventions there were audits of the generals pretty soon that Roland Romans drafted an army sixteen years later at Zama they defeated them and we know the rest of the evolution of Roman period fast forward to the fifth century AD is this a Roman Republic one quarter of Italy know it now encompasses 70 million people from Mesopotamia in the East the Atlantic Ocean and the West to above Hadrian's Wall North to the Sahara Desert nacelle 1 million square model and they're attacked not by formidable power inheritor classical military science i cannibal but a thug like Attila and some Huns and viscosity by any measure the threat was almost nothing compared to what Roman faced when it was much much smaller but why in the world would a state that encompass 70 million miles and a million 70 million people in million square miles why couldn't I may not defend themselves in a way the little tiny one third the size of Italy could against much more formidable odds and just hold that for a second and ask yourself in the same case of Greece why could little Greece and for 84-79 turned back 400 thousand Persians and yet in 338 it could not stop 30,000 Macedonians who came from the north I think the answer is this is what I want to conclude with it in 216 BC a Roman knew what it was to be a Roma and they were under no illusions that they had to be perfect to be good all they believed in they had a they had a illustrious tradition that was better than the alternative and could be better even more than the alternative and 450 ad I don't think the average person who lived under the Roman Empire could define what it meant to be soon Romanowski we didn't know what it was to be a Roman citizen he did not believe that it was any better than the alternative and when that happens in history history is cruel it gives nobody a pass if you ceased to believe that your country is exceptional and has a notable tradition and that is good without being perfect and it's better than the alternative and you cease to believe that there's no reason for you to continue in history says you won't and you don't you will listen to a podcast developed and produced by the University of Utah additional programs can be found on the web at WTI podcasts

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Views: 99,295

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Keywords: Why Greece Matters, Victor Davis Hanson, Ancient Greece, Hellenism, The West, Western tradition, Democracy, Islam

Id: r-pOwv6ZIbM

Length: 41min 40sec (2500 seconds)

Published: Sat May 07 2011