by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n We all know the usual reasons why we are prodded to read the classics \u2014 moving characters, seminal ideas, blueprints of our culture, and paradigms of sterling prose and poetry. Then we nod and snooze.<\/p>\n But there are practical reasons as well that might better appeal to the iPhone generation that is minute-by-minute wired into a collective hive of celebrity titillation, the cool, cooler, and coolest recent rapper, or the grunting of \u201cya know,\u201d \u201cdah,\u201d and \u201clike.\u201d After all, no one can quite be happy with all that.<\/p>\n Classics are more than books of virtues. Homer and Sophocles certainly remind us of the value of courage, without which Aristotle lectures us there can be no other great qualities. Instead, the Greeks and Romans might better remind this generation of the\u00a0ironic<\/em>\u00a0truths, the paradoxes of human behavior and groupthink. Let me give but three examples of old and ironic wisdom.<\/p>\n The Race Goes Not to the Swift.<\/strong><\/p>\n The problem with\u00a0Homer\u2019s Achilles<\/a>\u00a0[1]<\/sup>\u00a0or\u00a0Sophocles\u2019 Ajax<\/a>\u00a0[2]<\/sup>\u00a0was not that they were found wanting in heroic virtue. Rather they were too good at what they did, and so made the fatal mistake of assuming that there must be some correlation between great deeds and great rewards.<\/p>\n How many times has the natural hitter on the bench sulked at the novelty that the cousin of the coach is batting cleanup? How often has the talented poet suddenly turned to drink because the toast of the salon got rich with his drivel? He should read his Homer: the self-destructive Achilles should have enjoyed more influence among the dense Achaeans than did the university president Agamemnon. By any just heroic standard, Ajax, not Odysseus, the Solyndra lobbyist, should have won the armor of the dead Achilles.<\/p>\n In the tragic world, thousands of personal agendas, governed by predictable human nature, ensure that things do not always quite work the way they should. We can learn from classics that most of us are more likely to resent superiority than to reward it, to distrust talent than to develop it. With classical training, our impatient youth might at least gain some perspective that the world is one where the better man is often passed over \u2014 precisely because he is the better man. Classics remind us that our disappointments are not unique to our modern selves. While we do not passively have to accept that unfairness (indeed Achilles and Ajax implode over it), we must struggle against it\u00a0with the acceptance that the odds are against us<\/em>.<\/p>\n Again, think of the great Westerns that so carefully emulated ancient epic: what exactly does Shane win (other than a wound and a ride off into the sunset)? Or\u00a0Tom Doniphon<\/a>\u00a0[3]<\/sup>\u00a0(other than a burned-down shack)? Or the laconic Chris of\u00a0The Magnificent Seven<\/a>\u00a0[4]<\/sup><\/em>\u00a0(\u201cThe old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.\u201d)? Did he even collect his $20?<\/p>\n Or what about\u00a0Will Kane<\/a>\u00a0[5]<\/sup>\u00a0(yes, I know, but a buckboard ride with young Grace Kelly to where exactly?)? OrEthan Edwards<\/a>\u00a0[6]<\/sup>\u00a0(a walk to where after going through that swinging cabin door?)? Medals, money, badges? The lasting admiration of Hadleyville? Hidden gold from the Mexican peasant village? The mayorship of Shinbone? An hour with Jean Arthur?<\/p>\n Society is as in need of better men as it is suspicious of them when it no longer needs them. Most of\u00a0Sophocles\u2019 plays<\/a>\u00a0[7]<\/sup>\u00a0are about those too noble to change \u2014 Antigone or Philoctetes \u2014 who cannot fit in a lesser society not of their own making. Read E. B. Sledge\u2019s\u00a0With the Old Breed<\/a>\u00a0[8]<\/sup><\/em>\u00a0and cry over the great Marines who were ground up in the Pacific. So often they were like Lieutenant Hillbilly Jones and Captain Haldane who saved the U.S. and are now\u00a0all but forgotten<\/a>\u00a0[9]<\/sup>. In today\u2019s collective history, they are simply the anonymous cardboard cut-out race and class villains who needlessly decimated the Japanese out of racially driven animus and thereby bequeathed to us the abundance that we take for granted and that allows us such self-indulgent second thoughts.<\/p>\n Thucydides\u2019 Pericles warned us that orators had to be careful when speaking of the dead lest they so emphasize the gifts of the deceased that such praise invoke envy in the listeners, who in anger realize that their own lives fall short of the fallen.<\/p>\n Becoming Affluent and Breaking Bad<\/strong><\/p>\n Another classical downer: with material progress often comes moral regress.<\/p>\n Cranky\u00a0Hesiod<\/a>\u00a0[10]<\/sup>\u00a0saw that in the fading tough world of early 7th<\/sup>-century Boeotia, as the advent of the city-state led to more claim jumpers, oath breakers, and crooked judges. The idea of the need for a daily struggle to survive to keep moral balance is best explored in the great tetrad of Roman imperial pessimists \u2014 Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius, and Tacitus. If late republicans like Horace and Livy had hinted that a rich, globalized Roman Mediterranean was destroying the old rural Italian virtue, then the later four chronicled in graphic detail just how \u2014 and how fun it was to squander what others far better for seven centuries had bequeathed.\u00a0The White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner<\/a>\u00a0[11]<\/sup>\u00a0might as well take place in the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii.<\/p>\n It is not just that plenty of slaves, purple dye, marble, forced vomiting, and piped-in water mean that we don\u2019t have to rise at dawn to hoe the vineyard and bathe in ice-cold streams and therefore become lazy, corpulent, and decadent. Rather, material progress is usually accompanied by moral regress largely because of the leisure to master a critical consciousness and intellectual gymnastics well apart from the fears of religion: if we can explain, in a sophisticated and convincing manner, why something bankrupt is true, then it surely must be true:\u00a0Vero possumus!<\/em>\u00a0Who is to say that Lindsay Lohan is not more interesting than Gen. Mattis?<\/p>\n Language in the postmodern world becomes more layered \u2014 and fluid \u2014 (compare \u201coverseas contingency operations<\/a>\u00a0[12]<\/sup>\u201c\u00a0for terrorism or \u201cinvestments\u201d for deficit spending). The sophistic citizen has the leisure and training to third-guess ancient protocols. Without a soul, the good life here is it. Sarcasm, cynicism, skepticism, and nihilism so abound that there must always be a third and fourth meaning. The in-the-know smirk of\u00a0Jon Stewart<\/a>[13]<\/sup>\u00a0or\u00a0David Letterman<\/a>\u00a0[14]<\/sup>\u00a0and\u00a0the gobbledygook mush that pours out the mouths of our talking head analysts conspire\u00a0to make us incapable<\/a>\u00a0[15]<\/sup>\u00a0of saying any of the following: \u2018The Tsarnaevs are repulsive and evil. Their mother is unhinged. Fire those who let in these repellent people. Something has gone terribly wrong with the FBI.\u201d Say that and you are guilty of a thought crime greater than the mayhem committed on the street.<\/p>\n Major Hasan kills 13 and wounds 29, yelling out\u00a0Allahu Akbar<\/em>\u00a0as he shoots. In response, the head of the Army joins the Obama Borg (of Brennan, Clapper, Holder, and Napolitano) to lecture us that the greater tragedy in this\u201cworkplace violence\u201d<\/a>\u00a0[16]<\/sup>\u00a0would be the loss of the Army\u2019s diversity program. Next thing, the head of NASA\u00a0might be lecturing us<\/a>\u00a0[17]<\/sup>\u00a0that his foremost aim is reaching out to aggrieved Muslims.<\/p>\n It is not just that Juvenal\u2019s Sejanus, Petronius\u2019s Trimalchio, Suetonius\u2019s Caligula, and Tacitus\u2019s Nero are evil, but that they are products of a society in which the more clever it sounds, the more clothes it has, and the larger the house it inhabits, the more amoral it becomes. If Rome did not have a Caligula, it would have had to invent one.<\/p>\n Thus the weird backlash romance that arises for Ovid\u2019s Philemon and Baucis with their simple beech wood cups and daily material grind. From Virgil\u2019s mythical Arcadia to Poussin\u2019s\u00a0Et in Arcadia ego<\/em>, there grows always this wish of the metrosexual to give up the world of Justin Bieber, Facebook, and the Upper West Side\u00a0for something simple and true<\/a>\u00a0[18]<\/sup>\u00a0\u2014 but perceived as gone forever.<\/p>\n How odd that these guys are not even happy\u00a0when they win what they sought<\/a>\u00a0[19]<\/sup>. By hook or crook they win Obamacare and now those who wrote the bill wish themselves and their staffs to be exempt from it, as if ol\u2019 Doc\u2019 is still around to practice folksy medicine\u00a0out of his office at home<\/a>\u00a0[20]<\/sup>. They want the dwindling rivers to run freely to the Bay deltas to allow mythical salmon to swim to the Sierra, but count on the awful man-caused reservoirs alone to give them the water to waste.<\/p>\n Palo Alto and Menlo Park got everything they ever dreamed up: Obama, diversity, vast cash redistributions, a left-wing governor and legislature, a new race\/class\/gender school curriculum, unionized state employees, a blue political class, vast riches from a green Silicon Valley \u2026 and what? The young millionaires scramble to get their children into one of the growing number of private academies so they will not have to study the curricula with the \u201cother\u201d and join the poorly prepared students who are the logical ramifications of their own ideology. If they had a drawl, it might be the South\u2019s 1965-era academies\u00a0all over again<\/a>\u00a0[21]<\/sup>.<\/p>\n When I see\u00a0the contemporary CSU campus<\/a>\u00a0[22]<\/sup>\u00a0\u2014 larger than ever, more administrators than at any time in its past, greatest enrollments in history, students on generous subsidies with an array of electronic gadgetry and new Camrys and Accords in the brand-new solar-roofed parking lots \u2014 and I hear of \u201ccrippling budget cuts,\u201d \u201cshorting the students,\u201d and \u201ca campus in crisis,\u201d I assume that most of those who graduated in 1960 would find the current curricula a bad joke, and that today\u2019s students would flunk most of the classes offered fifty years ago \u2014 iPads and Twitter notwithstanding. If the choice for today\u2019s serious student with ear phones is either to text an earth-shattering \u201cI just walked into the Student Center\u201d or to memorize \u201camo, amas, amat<\/em>,\u201d then it is no mystery where the never-to-be regained minute goes, in this zero-sum game of 24 hours in a vanishing day.<\/p>\n Societies of Chaos<\/strong><\/p>\n Most classical literature, let us admit it, is anti-democratic, moralistic in a reactionary sense, and deeply pessimistic \u2014 and therefore if not a corrective, at least a balance to today\u2019s trajectory. Would you not wish to see in advance where zero-sum interest, $1 trillion deficits, 50 million on food stamps, $17 trillion in debt, and the quality of today\u2019s BA degree all end up?<\/p>\n The world of fourth-century Athens is one of constant squabbling over a shrinking pie: \u201cDon\u2019t dare raid the free theater fund to build a warship. Pay me to vote. Give me a pension for my bad leg. The rich should pay their fair share. You didn\u2019t build that. That\u2019s my inheritance, not yours. Exile, confiscate, even kill those who have too much power of influence.\u201d It is not that the Athenians cannot grow their economy as in the past, but that they despise those among them who think they still can.<\/p>\n The message reminds us that the health of the commonwealth hinges not on material resources, but always on the status of the collective mind. Usually the man who sees this \u2014 a Socrates in 399 BC, a Demosthenes in the shadow of Philip, even a shrill Isocrates \u2014 is branded a nut, ignored, or done away with.<\/p>\n In Roman times, the same \u201cbread and circuses\u201d themes arise. Let us be honest: to the ancient mind, the most dangerous thing is the empowered mob that wants to be lied to (vulgus vult decipi<\/em>). Travel with Petronius to Croton, and you might as well be in Washington.<\/p>\n Examine today\u2019s headlines: as I write this, the\u00a0Pigford farming settlement<\/a>\u00a0[23]<\/sup>\u00a0is shown to have been simply a way to grant hundreds of millions of dollars of somebody else\u2019s money to political constituencies on the idea of \u201cfairness.\u201d Reparations, not legitimacy or legality, is the issue. The number of disability insurance recipients has reached an all-time high. We may be living longer, with superb health care and fewer physically dangerous and exhaustive jobs, but apparently we are less able to work. The government is advertising in Spanish to encourage people to spot those in need in of food stamps \u2014 fifty million with EBT cards are too few. The attorney general of the United States swears that those who entered the United States illegally\u00a0will be deprived of their \u201ccivil rights,\u201d<\/a>[24]<\/sup>\u00a0if not granted amnesty and eventually citizenship. So old, so boring, so \u2018\u201dwe\u2019ve seen this all before\u201d and where all this leads \u2014 to the New World Order of Alexander, to the banquet at the House of Trimalchio, to the crumbling estates in North Africa where aging grandees hide behind gated estates terrified of what they helped to create.<\/p>\n Classical literature really does remind us that the problem is usually caused by doing the opposite, once we have arrived, of what we once did to get there. Our ancestors built Hetch Hetchy to give us drinking water, irrigated agriculture, flood control, and cheap electricity; once we enjoy all that, we have the luxury to scheme\u00a0how to blow it all up<\/a>\u00a0[25]<\/sup>.<\/p>\n In this regard, the Tsarnaev monsters were valuable symptoms of the present age, or perhaps pseudo-Romanized tribesmen right out of Caesar\u2019s Gallic Wars: The endangered \u201crefugees\u201d freely revisiting the supposed deadly environment they escaped; the shop-lifting mother damning the country that took her in and cheaply resonating jihadist themes; the \u201cdomestic abuse\u201d charge lodged against the \u201cbeautiful\u201d boxer Tamerlan; the abject failure of the repeatedly warned FBI; the self-righteous Mirandizing to stop inquiry about other possible threats; the immediate liberal effort to blame the U.S. (e.g., as if the liberal Boston world of our first\u00a0Native-American senator<\/a>[26]<\/sup>\u00a0and up-from-the-bootstraps\u00a0Secretary of State John Kerry<\/a>\u00a0[27]<\/sup>\u00a0must be an especially harsh, cruel society, where help is rarely afforded the needy and redneck prejudice is ubiquitous).<\/p>\n