by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n This is a written transcript of recorded remarks given on June 2, 2005 at the Woodrow Wilson Center and made available to\u00a0<\/i>Private Papers\u00a0by the Center.Click here to read an introduction by John Sitilides,<\/a>\u00a0Chairman, Board of Advisors,\u00a0Southeast Europe\u00a0Project Wilson Council<\/a>. The speech will appear in three parts: Part I is a short history of democracy, Part II is on spreading democracy in the modern world, and Part III is a question-and-answer session following the speech.<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n Part I T<\/span>hank you for that nice introduction.\u00a0 I was asked to speak about 25 minutes and I\u2019ll try to weave the ancient and modern worlds together.<\/p>\n Let me just start with a few definitions of this loose and amorphous term \u201cwestern.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m 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 \u2014 or at least the distinction between a church theocracy and state \u2014 capitalism, free enterprise, open markets, private property,\u00a0et cetera<\/i>.\u00a0 We don\u2019t necessarily mean that through 2,500 years all of this paradigm appeared \u2014obviously not in Nazi Germany, or perhaps in 9th<\/sup>\u00a0century 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.<\/p>\n The other qualifying remark I\u2019d like to point out is when we talk about freedom, there\u2019s some confusion today that we say, well, the Native Americans were free, or the German tribes of the 2nd<\/sup>\u00a0century B.C. were free, and, yet, there is a certain freedom \u2014 \u201cFreiheit\u201d in German \u2014 this idea that people have certain prerogatives and choices, but usually it\u2019s a result of demography, one or two people per 100 square miles.\u00a0 What\u2019s unique about the West, in contrast, is that the idea of freedom can be institutionalized and travels across time and space into a variety of environments.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n If we look for the origins of this concept of the West, we can obviously go back in our own country to the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century, to the 18th<\/sup>\u00a0century, to the Founding Fathers.\u00a0 We can push it further and see the Founding Fathers were influenced by both the British and the French Enlightenments.\u00a0 Travel again back through the Renaissance in Italy to the republics of, say, Venice or Florence.\u00a0 We can even see constitutional government with the early Swiss.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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 \u2014 I should say the fumes of \u2014 republican government seemed still to be alive.\u00a0 We know that republican government itself in Rome didn\u2019t go out of fashion until the 1st<\/sup>\u00a0century B.C.\u00a0 And then we go back to classical Greece.<\/p>\n We often make the mistake, I think, of thinking democracy started in 507\/506.\u00a0 Technically it did in Athens, but it drew on a prior 200-year prior tradition of consensual government in the 1500 city-states.\u00a0 Sometimes this is called timocracy, or the Greeks had a word for it called\u00a0politeia<\/i>, the idea that landed voting citizens would have their own responsibilities for government.<\/p>\n And then at last we get to the 8th<\/sup>\u00a0century B.C. and we can\u2019t trace that origin any further.\u00a0 This is quite controversial because it would suggest that democracy is primarily a Western phenomenon \u2014 and it is.\u00a0 The Greeks created it, consensual government, and it\u2019s thus anti-Mediterranean.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t know why civilization exploded onto the scene like it did in the 8th<\/sup>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.\u00a0 He goes into the council hall, he has one vote based on his\u00a0kl\u00earos<\/i>\u00a0or his 10-acre farm.\u00a0 And then it\u2019s reverberated again when you look at the countryside, when new colonies are produced, what do they do?\u00a0 They divide the land up equally.\u00a0 And then this very radical idea that a citizen, a –polit\u00ea<\/span>s<\/i>\u00a0\u2014 there\u2019s a word in the vocabulary for it in ancient Greek in a way that there\u2019s not in the other Mediterranean languages \u2014 is a person who fights in the militia, the same as each other citizen, a person who votes in the council hall, same as any other citizen, and a person who owns land, and especially can pass it on to his children.\u00a0 That\u2019s a radical new concept and it\u2019s really the basis of this experiment in consensual government. Perhaps it is an agrarian revolution of people who were investing in local communities, planting trees and vines, wanted that property protected from both the poor and the wealthy, and creating this radical concept of a middle class,\u00a0mesoi, ge\u00f4rgoi, hoplitai,\u00a0<\/i>all these Greek words that in some way denote a group of people in the middle.\u00a0 \u201cMiddleness\u201d has been very influential in the West and it\u2019s one of the great wonders of civilization in general how this thing of consensual government started, of all places in rural Greece in the 8th<\/sup>\u00a0century.<\/p>\n B<\/span>ut more germanely, there were obviously contradictions in democracy, and I think the Greeks were aware of them and they have a lot of relevance today, that warn us in ways not so confined to the 24-hour news cycle.\u00a0 The first thing that immediately came up is that we\u2019re all not born equal into the world.\u00a0 If the Greek city-states said each person will have an equal slot in the countryside, what happens if somebody\u2019s a better farmer and someone is a worse farmer?\u00a0 What if somebody\u2019s more talented, what if somebody\u2019s less talented?\u00a0 So immediately in a consensual government we were confronted as Westerners with this issue \u2014 is freedom the same thing as equality?\u00a0 In fact, the Greeks understood, unlike ourselves, that they\u2019re not only not the same but sometimes they\u2019re in opposition to one another.\u00a0 That if you want to promote equality among the citizens you might have to then promote an equality of result, and that\u2019s very, very different than an equality of opportunity.<\/p>\n We see that paradox from the very beginning with radical Athens that did things beyond our comprehension today to promote equality.\u00a0 Whether that was paying people to go to the assembly in the 4th<\/sup>\u00a0century, paying people to go the theater in the 5th<\/sup>\u00a0century, choosing officers, except for the generals, by lot, by sortition, and the idea of liturgies among the wealthy to redistribute income.\u00a0 It was very different than, say, right across the mountains in Thebes, which was an oligarchy, or later a broad-based oligarchy, where people were given entitlement based on their merit.\u00a0 At least the Greeks call it their merit, when in fact it was usually land.\u00a0 And this divide kept on when we look at the Roman republican model versus the Greek democratic model.\u00a0 We see it today between the Republican Party, that tends to promote individual liberty, and the Democratic Party, that seems to think that equality and egalitarianism are puts a of a higher premium.\u00a0 We see it in Europe and America today, the same age-old fault line.\u00a0 The Americans tend to promote freedom at the expense of equality.\u00a0 The Europeans want equality of result at the expense of freedom.\u00a0 And it\u2019s a tension that people in the West have to live with in democracy and never quite resolve.<\/p>\n The second crisis in democracy, which we saw in the ancient world, was that there\u2019s something strange about the mixture of open markets and personal freedom that accrues under constitutional government.\u00a0 By that I mean, once the Greeks figured out that a person had a right to private property and there would be an open market, and there\u2019s a word,\u00a0-kerdos,\u00a0<\/i>profit, and a person was able to profit from his work and toil in this free environment, then obviously there were to emerge people who had leisure and freedom in a way that had not been seen under tribalism, under monarchies, under autocratic governments in Egypt.\u00a0 And there\u2019s a literature that reflects the problems with that: the decadence.\u00a0 We see it in 4th<\/sup>\u00a0century Athenian oratory.\u00a0 We see it in the great Roman literature of the empire \u2014 Juvenal, Tacitus, Petronius, Suetonius \u2014 that a particular Westerner has become so successful, so affluent, so free that he\u2019s become insulated from the very physical, brutal nature that often is a foe of civilization.\u00a0 And of course in its most extreme forms we see it in Plato, who talks about bald-headed little tinkers in the\u00a0agora<\/i>\u00a0who have the same rights as natural aristocrats.\u00a0 Or Hegel, or Nietzsche or Spengler, who felt there was a decadence in the West.\u00a0 Or in bin Laden\u2019s critique of the West, that the United States or the West itself can\u2019t lose troops, or it\u2019s too refined or it\u2019s too privileged, too sophisticated to think that the world operates on premises other than the Enlightenment, that everything has to be explicable by reason rather than by emotion or religion or superstition.<\/p>\n Along with this divide between equality and freedom, we also have this age-old pathology in the West: how do you keep people devoted to Western government and committed to the idea that civilization is fragile, when it\u2019s so successful and so many of us are insulated from the alternative?\u00a0 I don\u2019t think any of us in this room have seen in our own livelihood a bin Laden or a Saddam Hussein.\u00a0 We see an angry Dean, we see a nasty journalist editor, perhaps we have a librarian in a carrel that kicks us out, but a man who wants to kill you or bring you back to the 8th<\/sup>\u00a0century? This is hard to conceive for us.\u00a0 And it was hard for the Greeks to conceive that the Persians were that way, it was hard for the Romans to conceive that the\u00a0Germani\u00a0<\/i>across the Rhine were that way.\u00a0 It\u2019s just something that the West deals with.<\/p>\n The third thing to remember about this experiment in democracy is it makes war very well because these same traits and characteristics and protocols that produce capital and produce security and freedom also produce lethal methods of war-making that are not explicable by the small territory and population of Europe.\u00a0 Specifically, a capitalist economy gives logistical alternatives in a way that the old enemy doesn\u2019t \u2014 can\u2019t match.\u00a0 Hernan Cortes is in Veracruz and he has more Spanish ships supplying him gunpowder and flints and crossbows than the Aztecs\u2019s weapons, who have 4 million people in a very rich environment.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because people want to make a profit and they know if they go to Veracruz and supply the conquistadores, they will make money.\u00a0 That\u2019s been proven all the way back to Alexander the Great and the people who flocked behind him to profit and thus supply an army in ways the Persians could not envision.<\/p>\n Discipline is very different.\u00a0 A Westerner defines military discipline as working in context with a group: retreat, advance, prompt attention to orders, in a manner that personal bravery is defined by loyalty to the group and to order and to a system, rather than defined by personal performance\u00a0per se<\/i>.\u00a0 Aristotle points out that Greek soldiers don\u2019t count the number killed, or people are not awarded valor or medals after a Greek battle because they ranged out in front of the phalanx.\u00a0 In fact, they\u2019re punished.\u00a0 So the idea of discipline is very different.<\/p>\n The idea of civic audit of the military is unique, where the civilians actually participate in the government of the army.\u00a0 I can\u2019t think of one general in the ancient world who at one time was not ostracized, executed, or had his property confiscated or at least tried \u2014 every single one of them, from Miltiades to Epaminondas. Even in Sparta, a Lysander or Gylippus found themselves in trouble.<\/p>\n T<\/span>here is a very different method of making war in the West. \u00a0It was started by the Greeks, and it invites a lot of alternative ways to combat that conventional military strength.\u00a0 So people who are confronted with these consensual armies that are supplied and organized differently first have to think about encouraging dissension among the West.\u00a0 I mean, the Ottoman fleet that was at Lepanto had wintered earlier in the port of Toulon in France, and the Greeks themselves were squabbling right before the battle of Salamis, just in the same way in the Security Council Russia and France were opposed to the United States and vice vers<\/p>\n Within consensual societies enemies have also tried to create internal dissension, because in consensual society, to make war, you have to have a 51 percent majority.\u00a0 And opponents realize that once a democracy votes to go to war, while they\u2019re slow to arouse, once democracy is committed to war-making, there\u2019s no other appeal, that you can\u2019t say that the dictator made us do it, or the king made us do it.\u00a0 No, the people did it and it\u2019s a very lethal way of mobilizing people to go fight to the bitter end.\u00a0 And so one of the ways you discourage that resolve is to create issues about the morality or efficacy of the endeavor.\u00a0 The British army was in Zululand and Bishop Colenso was trying to appeal to the humanitarian principles of Victorian society to call off that army and not seek victory over the Zulus.<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s also what we call now asymmetry.\u00a0 Because the West seems to be free and affluent, we can redefine relative losses.\u00a0 A Greek- or Macedonian-speaker who is fighting with Alexander in a small army of 50,000 is supposedly not as expendable as the 350,000 who are opposing him.\u00a0 The same was true of the British army in Zululand, or when fighting the great Mahdi, or the 1,500 conquistadores who were in Tenochtitl\u00e1n.\u00a0 Westerners tend to be fighting battles outside Europe and the United States, and they\u2019re often fighting people who have superior numbers or geographical advantages and they bear very heavily the loss of an individual, not just because they\u2019re in smaller numbers, but because they come from societies where capital, affluence, leisure is more plentiful, so life is considered dear.\u00a0 Not that it is really more dear, but that the perception arises so.\u00a0 And so if an adversary can make an American or a European or a Greek or a Roman army feel that they\u2019ve lost too many people, even though in exact numbers Western forces have a favorable ratio of losses versus kills, then they can call off this awesome machine.\u00a0 So these are traditional characteristics of opposing the West, rarely remarked upon military strengths and weaknesses within this democratic experiment that we see in the West.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Speech Given to the Woodrow Wilson Center on Democracy by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers This is a written transcript of recorded remarks given on June 2, 2005 at the Woodrow Wilson Center and made available to\u00a0Private Papers\u00a0by the Center.Click here to read an introduction by John Sitilides,\u00a0Chairman, Board of Advisors,\u00a0Southeast Europe\u00a0Project Wilson Council. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[787],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-184","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3144,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/where-does-republican-foreign-policy-go-from-here\/","url_meta":{"origin":4344,"position":0},"title":"Where Does Republican Foreign Policy Go From Here?","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 24, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage The GOP\u2019s continuing analysis of last November\u2019s debacle has now sparked a debate about foreign policy. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul\u2019s 16-hour filibuster and his speeches at the Heritage Foundation and CPAC have reignited the perennial conflict between isolationists and interventionists of various stripes. As the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4342,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-world-wonder-part-ii\/","url_meta":{"origin":4344,"position":1},"title":"A World Wonder: Part II","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 7, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"A Speech Given to the Woodrow Wilson Center on Democracy by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers Part II: Spreading Democracy in the Modern World Now coming to more germane questions, what in the world would the United States think they\u2019re doing trying to promote democracy in areas in southeastern Europe,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2005"","block_context":{"text":"July 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/july-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8196,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/are-we-smart-enough-for-democracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":4344,"position":2},"title":"Are We Smart Enough for Democracy?","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 8, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"By Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ Defining Ideas In December, MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, had to explain to Congress several remarks he had made about the \u201cstupidity of the American voter,\u201d as he put it in one speech. Conservative radio host Rush\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Defining Ideas"","block_context":{"text":"Defining Ideas","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/defining-ideas\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4492,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-democracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":4344,"position":3},"title":"Why Democracy?","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 11, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Ten reasons to support democracy in the Middle East by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Neoconservatives hope that a democratic Iraq and Afghanistan can usher in a new age of Middle Eastern consensual government that will cool down a century-old cauldron of hatred. Realists counter that democratic roots will\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2005"","block_context":{"text":"February 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/february-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4334,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-world-wonder-a-speech-given-to-the-woodrow-wilson-center-on-democracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":4344,"position":4},"title":"A World Wonder: A Speech Given to the Woodrow Wilson Center on Democracy","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 13, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers Part III: Question and Answer MR. SITILIDES:\u00a0 Thank you very much, Dr. Hanson.\u00a0 We appreciate the historical sweep of your presentation.\u00a0 I would like to just open the Q&A with twin democracy questions. The first one regards democratization in Iraq and the Middle East,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2005"","block_context":{"text":"July 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/july-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6721,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-political-debate-we-need-to-have\/","url_meta":{"origin":4344,"position":5},"title":"The Political Debate We Need to Have","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 8, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Today, we treat politics as a sport, but it's really a conflict of ideologies between federalists and technocrats. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0Defining Ideas\u00a0 The media and pundits treat politics like a sport. The significance of the recent agreement to postpone the debt crisis until January, for instance, is really\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. 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\nThe Short History of Democracy<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n