Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom

By Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath

 

Lately I had been obsessed with ancient Greece.  Maybe it started with hearing the phrase, “the good, the true and the beautiful,” and wondering where it came from.  Maybe it was because I read somewhere that the Catholic cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, prudence and fortitude originated with the Greeks, which Catholics don’t exactly advertise, and I wondered if that was true.  Maybe it was from trying to explain why I felt compelled to have my children and myself study Latin.  Maybe it was from my resistance to the widely promoted concepts and practices of constructivism and cooperative learning, and conversely my attraction to classical education.  Maybe it was from my continually cogitating on how to reach the hearts and minds of punky kids, when it seems only religion would do it, but that being outlawed in public schools.

Even with my sketchy knowledge of history, I started suspecting that the Greeks held the answers to the secrets of life.  Then I found this book through a search of Amazon.com for books on classical education.  It was purported to explain the importance of the Greeks to our culture.  It certainly delivered.

I started reading this book and thought – aha!  This is a way to center education around values, without their being associated with any modern religions!

The book had three main points: 1) our debt to the Greeks, why we should all desire to learn about the Greeks, and how thinking and acting like the Greeks could save our society; 2) The folly of multiculturalism and postmodernism, or how Classicists have killed off their own profession, to the detriment of the world; 3) Corruption in universities.

Reviewing or summarizing this book is very difficult for me because I really don’t have the background knowledge or intellectual capacity.  This was one of the most fascinating and informative books I’ve ever read but it’s hard for me to retain or even encompass it.  Also it goes counter to everything in the present educational world.  So even if I had been a history or philosophy major, I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to much of this.  Plus my own education was dominated by political correctness.

Legacy of the Greeks

The first major point is how virtually everything in our society hails from the Greeks.  This is a list the authors gave of the essence of Greek thought:

• Science, research and the acquisition of knowledge itself are to remain apart from both religious and political authority.
• Military power operates under and is checked by civilian control.
• Constitutional, consensual government.
• Religion is separate from and subordinate to political authority.
• Faith in the average citizen (middle class); distrust or rich and aristocracy
• Private property and free economic activity are immune from government interference.  Primitive “free market” eroded inherited privilege, encouraged social status on the basis of merit
• Dissent and open criticism of government, religion and military is allowed.

This is how I would categorize our legacy from the Greeks:

1)    Mindsets – spirit of inquiry, self-criticism, and pursuing knowledge for its own sake.  Many of these mindsets came from the Greek philosophers and were embodied in Greek literature and drama.  I had never before realized that the words “cynicism,” “stoicism,” “sophistry” and “skepticism” all represent schools of philosophy founded by the Greeks.  The Greek mindset embodied a passion for knowledge, the freedom to seek and create knowledge, and freedom to discourse or argue.

2)    Culture – The Illiad and Odyssey, Greek comedies and tragedies, the Olympic games, Greek philosophy.  The ballads of Homer were like the Bible for Greeks, and were one of their main sources of moral guidance.  I came to see the Illiad as a long anger management fable – anger and its repercussions – one of the most relevant themes for many of us.  The Odyssey is a tale of heroism, faithfulness and attachment to home.  The terms “satire” and “parody” come from the Greeks.

3)    Political forms – democracy, constitutional government, private property, a middle class.  Open debate, free speech, free dissent.  Separation of church and state.  Military and religious leadership subordinate to the government, which is controlled by the people.  This amounts to freedom from tyranny.  Most tyranny is based on military might, or religious or ideological domination.  I had to really think about this one.  I think the typical American completely takes our form of government for granted, and blocks out the misery of the rest of the world, which is substantially controlled by military, ideological or religious dictatorships.  Of course there is endless self-serving discussion of this fact by politicians and some teachers.  However, I mentally block out all such discussion, because it’s so abhorrent to me that it is self-congratulatory, with no hint of self-criticism.

4)    Scientific achievement – scientific discoveries, scientific method, empiricism, rational enquiry.  The Greeks developed scientific knowledge, methods and ways of thinking that have been central to science achievement ever since.  We owe our material comforts to the scientific advances begun by the Greeks.

5)    Lost wisdom – I think I have to create an entire category for this.  We have retained certain portions of Greek thought, the part related to our “rights.”  But we have abandoned the large portion of Greek thought related to rigor, sacrifice, obligations, and absolute standards.  The Greeks had almost a worship of the law.  And it was a much harsher law, an absolute law.  The authors talk quite a bit about “the Greek tragic view of life.”  To sum this up, from the first section of the book:

In examining who killed Homer, we hope to demonstrate that this ignorance of Greek wisdom should be of crucial interest – not because the West is dying, but because, on the contrary, its institutions and material culture are now overwhelming the world.  A free market, democracy, military dynamism, technology, free speech, and individualism, for better or worse, are what most on this earth desire.  And what they desire started with the Greeks and the Greeks alone.  But it is foolish – and dangerous – to embrace these conventions of the West without understanding that such energy was to be monitored and restrained by an entire host of cultural protocols ranging from civic responsibility, philanthropy and communitarianism to a world view that is rather absolute and tragic – not relative, not therapeutic, not sweet.

The loss of Greek wisdom even as its material legacy is sweeping the planet is a tragic development – a story of corruption filled with irony.  The Greeks gave us the tools to improve our material world, but also the courage and insight to monitor and critique that often scary dynamism; we have embraced the former but ignored the latter.  Classics, the repository of both Greek traditions, opted for the first and ignored the second, and so became materialistic and careerist but no longer Hellenic.  (Hanson & Heath 2001 p. XXIV)

The Greek view of moral absolutes was that the guilty must pay, regardless of excuses.

To the Greeks, a society that cannot punish but only forgive and rationalize is as culpable, as amoral, as the criminal himself.  The Greeks attributed their laws and constitution to ancestral citizens who had lived and fought for the polis: Draco and Solon of Athens, Lycurgus of Sparta, the Seven Sages.  The Greeks saw man as capable of great evil, and the laws of the polis were necessary to minimize potential harm.

And what is this “tragic viewpoint”?  Maybe it’s acceptance of suffering and destiny, rather than trying to change or mitigate it.  The fickleness of the gods … Social sciences are antithetical in spirit to the Classical and tragic view of the human condition …

The Hellenistic view of the world is, for the most part, independent and agrarian, isolated and self-reliant – a specific manner of understanding man in the physical universe, and one increasingly different (we fear) from the dominant drift of American thought in the late twentieth century.  Constitutional government, the chauvinism of the middle class, individualism, dissent, self-criticism, freedom of expression, an open economy and militia warfare were only the concrete manifestations of more fundamental values, of a hard-headed logic spawned by the self-reliant way of life of the agrarian demos, which rested on 1) seeing the world in more absolute terms; 2) understanding the bleak, tragic nature of human existence, 3) seeking harmony between word and deed, and 4) having no illusions about the role culture plays in human history.  (p 36)

6)    Military – I feel I have to put in a category for this.  Our present “peacenik” society is really missing something.  Although actual war is a terrible thing, the “spirit of the warrior” is noble and central to virtue, I think.  I’ve always been fascinated by military strategy.  I think our emphasis on “peace” has led to softness, corruption, appeasement of misguidedness of all sorts, and may ultimately kill us.  Maybe the issue is that the enemy is within.  Our society is certainly being killed by enemies within.  The left has improperly identified this enemy in terms of political correctness and fabricated victims, which I think is the biggest problem we face at this point.  The right has improperly identified the enemy as anything that foils its selfishness.  The real enemy is our own character flaws.                                                                                   Back to the Greeks, the two unchanging central features of Greek life were farming and war.  Greeks saw virtue as intimately connected to fighting for the country.  War was central in all of Greek drama and literature.  They saw war as an inescapable, necessary and noble part of life.  The Greeks did not hire mercenary soldiers, as the rest of the world did, but every Greek soldier was expected to fight in the militia when there was a need.                                                                          Greeks also originated all the principles of modern warfare:

• Advanced technology – their armor and weapons were far superior than those of East or North
• Superior discipline – this made the difference in the frequent situations where the Greeks were vastly outnumbered but still prevailed.  Military discipline was an outgrowth of supreme respect for civilian law.
• Ingenuity in response – whatever tactics were used by attackers, the Greeks and Romans either copied or designed superior responses to.  This was possible due to the freedom and flexibility afforded by their form of government.
• Citizen militias – There was no forced military service.  Military service was considered the duty of all.  Generals were popularly elected, and subject to censure and removal.  Wars were voted on by the assembly.
• Choice of decisive engagement – frontal assault rather than ambush and prolonged battles.
• Dominance of infantry over archers and cavalry.  These were usually marauding plunderers from the East or North.  They could not conquer people and annex turf.
• Application of capital to warmaking – war is ultimately a contest of money.  Abilities to collect, deposit and lend money was vital.
• Moral opposition to militarism – this was promoted by writers and others, and promoted tradition of dissent.

 

Demise of classical study

According to the authors, the demise of the study of the classics is a tale of misguided educational reform, a hypocritical cult of multiculturalism, and foolish, short-sighted, self-serving Classics professors.

To begin with, throughout history until recently, mastery of the classics has been the hallmark and definition of education.  As recently as 1930, at the height of the Classical study in the US, nearly a million high schoolers took Latin each year.

But it has never been a smooth road.  Students have always been conflicted over the immense amount of work involved in learning Greek and Latin and reading the classics.  The role of teachers has always been to inspire, goad and lead students to do the work, and to find new ways to meet the ever present charge that the classics aren’t relevant.  Teachers and professors have always risen to the challenge and met it, until quite recently.

Our generation of Classicists, faced with the rise of Western culture beyond the borders of the West, was challenged to explain the relevance of Greek thought and values in a critical age of electronic information and entertainment.  Here they failed utterly, failed to such a degree that the Greeks now play almost no part in discussions of how the West is to evolve in the next millennium.  (p. XXVI)

The first serious threat to the Classics was the ‘60’s and “educational reform” which led to the “feel good curriculum.”  “Absolutes, standards, memorization and traditional values had no place on a campus where modernity, relevance and ideology were the new mantras …”  The great Greek sermons on virtue were seen as hokey.  Core classes which passed on the Western culture were abandoned.

The seeds of the ‘feed good’ curriculum were planted, the crop of which we are harvesting in today’s pressing concern for institutionally imposed self-esteem.  This new, ultrasensitive curriculum and its appendages – diversity training, journal writing, gender and racial sensitivity, multiculturalism, situational ethics, personal growth and self-indulgence, and the politics of commitment – ran directly counter to Greek wisdom.

The second strand of the same threat, really, is “multiculturalism.”  The authors begin by making the point that Greece was multiracial but not multicultural.  The Greek culture was utterly unique, and at complete odds with the cultures that surrounded it; all of which were dominated and subjugated by rulers with absolute control, militaries and/or religious leaders.  The Greeks were immensely proud of their culture, and although there were other races present in Greek – usually slaves taken in wars – the Greeks would never have voluntarily diluting their culture by making it “multicultural.”

The authors present wide-ranging arguments and examples that demonstrate the fact that all cultures are not created equal.  It wasn’t true in past times, and isn’t true today.  In ancient times, while the Greeks were constructing gymnasia, theaters, courts of law, markets and places of assembly for their citizens, the Egyptian pharaohs were using massive coerced labor to build pyramids; the Persian king was building palaces for himself and temples into which commoners could not enter; the Carthiginians were burning children alive, and numerous other barbarous practices were flourishing in other cultures.  In later times, Latin America has traditionally been dominated by military dictatorships, the East by totalitarian rulers, and Africa and the Middle East by tyrants.

Fast forward to contemporary multiculturalism.  Hanson and Heath say that:

Multiculturalists generally belong to one of two camps.  Some believe that all cultures are equal – the West no better or worse than any other.  But others more dour are convinced that all cultures are equal except the West, which is uniquely imperialistic, hegemonic, nationalistic, sexist, and patriarchal and therefore to be studied only as an exemplar of what is wrong with the present world.  Either way, the Greeks lose …

What is needed, however, if for us to stop apologizing for our Western culture, and value and promote it as the force behind everything good in our country.

The core values of Classical Greece are unique, unchanging and non-multicultural, and thus explain both the duration and dynamism of Western culture itself – culture that we as Western intellectuals must stop apologizing for but rather come to grips with, as the sole paradigm which will either save or destroy the planet.  (p. XXIV)

Against this backdrop, the study of classics is being annihilated from within.  Classics departments are literally disappearing from universities in great numbers.  The number of students studying Latin in high schools has drastically declined, and today there are fewer than 200 college students, nationwide, that graduate with a major in classics.  Those who do compete for practically non-existent teaching jobs.

The first cause of this self-destruction by university Classics departments is that, while publishing articles on the Classics is at an all-time zenith, with over 16,000 published per year, almost none of it is read.  Scholars are disdainful of “popularizing,” or the exact thing that might resuscitate an interest in the classics.  Instead, they revel in how esoteric their topic is, how academic and unreadable their language.  Most articles and books are read either by other academics, or more commonly, by nobody at all except the author and his or her publisher.

The second cause of the destruction from within is the huge body of publishing that centers on the imagined evils of the Greeks.  Hanson and Heath make the point that while the Greeks are accused of imperialism, cultural hegemony, slavery, sexism, being warlike, and so on, these are the crimes of every culture in history.  The truth is that war, raiding and gratuitous killing were more prevalent in pre and non-Western cultures than in Greece.  Additionally, Greeks may have subjugated women, but their literature and mythology were full of strong female characters and heroines.  Slaves were not seen as “inferior,” but more as victims of fate, and a fate that could easily befall the Greeks themselves, if they were bested in war.

The authors comment extensively on the utter hypocrisy inherent in these attacks.  Those who slander the West do it from the safety of their Western homes, countries and easy chairs.  Such dissent is not tolerated in communist, Islamic, and other countries.

But not one of the multiculturalist Classicists (despite the fashionable rhetoric) really wishes to adulterate our Greek core so as to live under indigenous pre-Columbian ideas of government, Haitian religious practices, Arabic protocols for female behavior, Chinese canons of medical ethics, Islamic traditions of church and state, African approaches to science, Japanese ideals of race, Indian social castes, or Native American notions of private property.

Intercontinental migration is largely a one-way affair.  Few Westerners, even the most vociferous critics, flee the structures of their government, law, economy, and culture for pristine paradises beyond the borders where the Greeks’ legacy has sway.  The world, past and present, has always voted with its feet, and the only check on the great migration toward the West has been for other cultures to reinvent themselves in its image. (p. 94)

Sadly, “The last generation of Classics wishes to survive and be loved – by fellow academics – by guaranteeing to their anti-Hellenic colleagues that there will be few other Classicists to follow.”  (p. 87)

The larger issue is that everybody talks and writes about how the Greeks said what they did, but not what the Greeks said.  Greek wisdom, the main point, has somehow come to be ignored and avoided entirely.  Greek wisdom could be the cure for our ailing society.  The essential message of book is that we’ve forgotten our roots, and it may well lead to our destruction.  If professors would work not on bashing classics, but on propounding Greek thought, a lot of light would be shed on our country’s and world’s problems.

What is needed

Students need to be taught to value what we have, but not in the utterly misguided manner that it’s been done.  Maybe “comparative politics” is needed rather than simply a fixation on American history, with no effective analysis of what’s of value.  Maybe the US needs to be viewed as compared to the Greeks and Romans (to which we fall way short, ethically) and the rest of the world (which we’re head and shoulders above, at least in some ways).  It’s got to be valuing the potential in our system of government and economics, while simultaneously looking at where we are going wrong.  Our problem is in not being Greek enough; not being too Greek.

Universities have had the wrong kind of elitism.  They have been too elite to popularize Greek wisdom, but not elite enough to stick up for the Classics.  What we have now are “multicultural elitists” and “esoterica elitists.”

Conclusion

This book is an interface of many of the themes that are most important to me – wisdom, ethics, classical education and absolutes.  It represents “Greek thought” as the antithesis of postmodernist and constructivist thought.  Many times I read or learn about something, and know it’s of key importance, but I can’t “use” it for years, until other parts of my life have caught up.  I suspect this topic will hold some key for me in the future.