{"id":9767,"date":"2017-01-19T15:03:43","date_gmt":"2017-01-19T23:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9767"},"modified":"2017-01-19T15:03:43","modified_gmt":"2017-01-19T23:03:43","slug":"9767-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/9767-2\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

From An Angry Reader:<\/h3>\n

The Angry Blogger<\/strong><\/p>\n

How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor,\u201d<\/p>\n

by Donna Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley-based Classics scholar, Editor of Eidolon, November 21, 2016<\/p>\n

A specter is haunting the Internet\u200a\u2014\u200athe specter of the \u201calt-right.\u201d The forces of white supremacy and toxic masculinity, fueled by a sense of entitlement dwarfed only by their inflated estimation of their own intelligence, have entered into an unholy alliance to remove feminism, political correctness, and multiculturalism from America. And on November 8th, 2016, after enduring years of mockery, months of being told that the arc of the moral universe would never let it win, the Alt-Right scored its first significant political victory: the election of Donald Trump to the highest office of the most powerful country in the world.<\/p>\n

Who are these people? They are part of a group of a few hundred thousand men who have \u201cswallowed the red pill\u201d and belong to a few allied online movements: not just the Alt-Right, but also men\u2019s rights activists, the manosphere, and GamerGate. At times these groups seem more clearly defined by what they oppose than what they support, but they\u2019ve also mobilized to fight for men\u2019s rights in a \u201cgynocentric\u201d society, harass women on Twitter, and redefine Pepe the Frog. They are younger than the typical conservative establishment, white, and male. They are antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic. Some are self-described Neo-Nazis.<\/p>\n

They also love the classics.<\/p>\n

This is at once surprising\u200a\u2014\u200amost classicists I know consider themselves politically liberal\u200a\u2014\u200aand not, because when we\u2019re truly honest, we see that for many the study of Classics is the study of one elite white man after another. The same texts that are for us sources of beauty and brutality, subjects of commentary and critique, are for these men (and they really are almost exclusively men) proof of the intellectual and cultural superiority of white maleness.<\/p>\n

The Alt-Right is hungry to learn more about the ancient world. It believes that the classics are integral to education. It is utterly convinced that classical antiquity is relevant to the world we live in today, a comfort to classicists who have spent decades worrying that the field may be sliding into irrelevance in the eyes of the public.<\/p>\n

The next four years are going to be a very difficult time for many people. But if we\u2019re not careful, it could be a dangerously easy<\/em> time for those who study ancient Greece and Rome. Classics, supported by the worst men on the Internet, could experience a renaissance and be propelled to a position of ultimate prestige within the humanities during the Trump administration, as it was in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Classics made great again.<\/p>\n

This is my call to arms for all classicists. No matter how white and male Classics once was, we are not that anymore. In spite of the numerous obstacles that remain, our field is now more diverse than ever, and that is something to be proud of.<\/p>\n

These men are positioning themselves as the defenders of Western Civilization. Classicists, when you see this rhetoric, fight back. We must not allow the Alt-Right to define what Classics will mean in Trump\u2019s America.<\/p>\n

Just how interested is the Alt-Right in Classics? On the one hand, it is very<\/em> interested in the cultural capital of antiquity. An article published yesterday in the New York Times<\/em> shows how freely they use classical references\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201ccrossing the Rubicon,\u201d \u201cascending to Olympus.\u201d On the other, the movement appears to have little interest in understanding the ancient world in any way other than the most superficial one.<\/p>\n

I know about this interest from personal experience\u200a\u2014\u200athat is, from Twitter trolls and comments on Eidolon<\/em> articles. (In a sublime manifestation of Red Pill iconography, one troll\u2019s Facebook cover photo was a Photoshopped image from the Matrix with Hitler, not Neo, stopping a wall of bullets.) But rather than discuss anecdotes from my own experience, I\u2019m going to share their declarations.<\/p>\n

Steve Bannon, former Breitbart News executive chairman and newly appointed Chief Strategist to President-Elect Donald Trump, told Mother Jones this August that Breitbart is \u201cthe platform for the alt-right.\u201d In recent weeks, Breitbart editors have backtracked on that claim, and they now argue that their site has only one piece of explicitly Alt-Right content: \u201cAn Establishment Conservative\u2019s Guide to the Alt-Right\u201d by Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos (who, incidentally, was using the Twitter handle \u201c@nero\u201d when he was banned from the platform this summer). In that article, they write that the preservation of Western Culture is of monumental importance to the audiences for Alt-Right content:<\/p>\n

[A]ttempts to scrub western history of its great figures are particularly galling to the alt-right, who in addition to the preservation of western culture, care deeply about heroes and heroic virtues. This follows decades in which left-wingers on campus sought to remove the study of \u201cdead white males\u201d from the focus of western history and literature curricula\u2026 to a natural conservative, such cultural vandalism may just be their highest priority.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yiannopoulos\u200a\u2014\u200awhose most recent work on Breitbart includes \u201cHow To Make Women Happy: Uninvent The Washing Machine And The Pill\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200ais drawing on a recurring theme in Red Pill Classics: these men will defend antiquity against the ravaging hordes of liberal activist students attempting to scrub the canon of all triggering material. In his book Thirty Seven<\/em>, a manosphere writer who goes by the name Quintus Curtius imagines a dystopian world where feminists have rewritten the canon and erased the classics (143\u20134):<\/p>\n

One can even imagine a future where classical knowledge will be driven underground, purged from schools, or bowdlerized, as not being in tune with modern feminism and political correctness. The degradation of humanistic learning has come as a direct result of the feminization of American society. We cannot permit this to happen. The commissars of modern culture don\u2019t want you to know too much about history, or about how things were like in previous eras.<\/em><\/p>\n

Predictably, Quintus Curtius has an extremely limited understanding of \u201chow things were like in previous eras.\u201d His stated goal is \u201cto remind readers of the glories of leadership, character, and masculine virtue that can change their lives\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aso of course, his understanding of antiquity is of a world inhabited by only a few extremely elite men. He has no sense of or interest in social history, cultural history, women, slaves, children, and broad historical trends. The ancient world is reduced to a textbook model for leadership, character, and masculine virtue.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I have met a few professional classicists who would prefer that the entire discipline embraced the model Quintus Curtius espouses for \u201cclassical knowledge.\u201d Victor Davis Hanson explicitly trumpeted the same views in Who Killed Homer<\/em><\/a>: \u201cThis new, ultrasensitive curriculum and its appendages\u200a\u2014\u200adiversity training, journal writing, gender and racial sensitivity, multiculturalism, situational ethics, personal growth and self-indulgence, and the politics of commitment\u200a\u2014\u200aran directly counter to Greek wisdom\u201d (118). For all that he is beloved by the Right, most classicists have little time for VDH these days\u200a\u2014\u200abut many nevertheless agree, quietly, that as a field we\u2019ve lost something in our increasing focus on race, class and gender in the ancient world. Our field is still, in many ways, in thrall to the Great Men model of history. And others may disagree, but still feel that Daryush \u201cRoosh V\u201d Valizadeh has a point when he writes of the moral vacuum that would exist without an understanding of historical precedent in his article \u201cWhat is a Social Justice Warrior (SJW)?\u201d \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:<\/h3>\n

Dear Angry Blogger Donna Zuckerberg,<\/p>\n

I have never heard either of Eidolon <\/em>or of you until this was sent to me. So excuse the tardy reply.<\/p>\n

I took the liberty of excerpting a relevant portion from your longer and rather monotonous rambling. Is your self-identification as a \u201cSilicon Valley-based Classics scholar\u201d to remind us that you may well be the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, the third or so richest man in the United States? While I have criticized him in print on occasions\u2014exclusively for disparaging the need to enforce immigration laws and specifically the construction of a fence\/wall at the southern border, while also seeking to fence in, or otherwise use his security details and capital to privilege his own residences with various borders, walls, or guards\u2014nonetheless, I have no personal animus toward him or you, and admire anyone who can provide a useful product for the enjoyment and advantage of over a billion consumers.<\/p>\n

If you are indeed related, I hope you can apply some of those boundless resources to promoting classics\u2014first\u2014and professionally\u2014to advocate for freshly minted PhDs and help them find jobs that offer financial sustenance and some dignity without the humiliations of poverty and exploitation that so often are the wages of young classics scholars in part-time and lecturer positions, and second\u2014and more broadly\u2014to introduce the teaching of Greek and Latin to non-traditional communities, minorities, impoverished whites, the underclass, and the middle classes in general.<\/p>\n

You talk breezily of being on the classics barricades in \u201cTrump\u2019s America\u201d and seem to suggest an interest in promoting classics. A more pressing worry then might be why did so many who were destitute and without avenues of upward mobility vote for a multi-billionaire New York grandee? If you could ponder that incongruity, I think you might get closer to the central problem of an unsustainable contemporary classics\u2014namely that people such as yourself (fairly or not) do not resonate with the less fortunate, who do not share your privilege and see elite classicists (admittedly, perhaps unfairly) as reflective of dilettantism. They are the logical constituents of any project to expand classics. I wish you well if that is your interest.<\/p>\n

I spent over two decades of my life, teaching 8 to 10 semester\u00a0classes per year, trying at CSU, Fresno to introduce Greek and Latin to those without opportunities or much hope of upward mobility; we were not in \u201cthrall to the Great Men model of history,\u201d but rather to improving the linguistic, grammatical, and composition skills of first-generation college students as part of a larger appreciation of the beauty and power of Latin and Greek. And yet again I confess we were also pragmatists, with idealist hopes of preparing mostly poor, white, Hispanic, and Southeast Asian students to compete in the wider world with those who had had the benefits of traditional education that so often only capital and influence can ensure. I think we called that in Who Killed Homer?<\/em> \u201cacademic populism,\u201d an admittedly failed attempt to redirect the field towards undergraduate teaching and broadening the scope of research to ensure it was accessible to non-traditional audiences.<\/p>\n

So why not lobby for or indeed fund a position or two in Latin instruction at Cal State Bakersfield or at Turlock or Merced? I am sure with good teaching and empathy toward non-traditional students, the investment would help the field in a more cost-effective manner than in regurgitating tired and redundant race\/class\/gender angsts of a tiny elite. I think the effort would surprise you and pay real dividends.<\/p>\n

As for your more specific cast-off criticisms. I am included in your strange rant against something called the \u201calt-Right\u201d\u2014a term that has no real meaning other to conjure up all sorts of race\/class\/gender bogeymen. It seems to me analogous to something the Right calls the \u201calt-Left,\u201d a purported motley group of social justice warriors of the Michael Moore stamp. Such labels on either side mean nothing. I live in the same house where I was born, in the poorest section of California where the minority population elsewhere is the vast majority here. I put all my children in the public schools, have an extended multiracial family, and farmed and worked side by side with people for over thirty years who never finished high school. The idea that I would be associated with a racially exclusive group or wish to exclude groups in my research is absurd and little more than Silicon Valley or faculty lounge talk.<\/p>\n

More to the point, it is obvious you have never read at all Who Killed Homer?<\/em> We discussed at length the unusual Hellenic focus on women, from the Antigone <\/em>to Sappho to powerful females in Euripides\u2019 plays and the morally superior heroines that inhabit classical literature from Homer to Plutarch. We discussed at length poverty, slavery, and the so-called Other, but not from the position of cheap 20-century elite disdain that indicts an ancient, rural, and impoverished people for not living up to our sophisticated standards of probity some 2,400 years later. Tragedy, not melodrama, is the proper mindset to explore the contradictions of the classical world.<\/p>\n

Your cookie-cutter take on the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s is, I must confess, puerile. Deconstruction, Foucault, Derrida, Black Athena, the gender obsession movement\u2014all that prevailed and is now, as we predicted, the status quo\u2014with disastrous results for undergraduate enrollments. It is surely not some edgy dangerous way of looking at the world\u2014as young PhD students accept when they chart the parameters of their own careers. The outsider, the revolutionary, the insurrectionist is the young scholar without a job or tenure who dares to see universal liberal and positive truths in the classical achievement and hopes to become a superb Greek 1A teacher and is not shy of voicing those aspirations. I fear for those who try, because their futures are nonexistent in the field and as back-up they do not have access to the privileges which you and many in Silicon Valley enjoy.<\/p>\n

To take one example, Camille Paglia nearly thirty years ago made headlines not because she was some sort of right-wing traditionalist, but because as a Leftist feminist, she saw a disturbing new sort of classicist, who, ignorant of what she thought were the great works of the past\u2014Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, etc.\u2014were narrowly trained and often poorly so, and were utterly careerist (\u201cJunk-bond\u201d traders and salesmen, she called them), whose jargon-ridden, opaquely written work brought few real insights to oppression and victimology, but served in cult-like fashion to launch careers that valued conferences, release time, grants, and esoterica at the expense of teaching an increasingly poorly educated generation the value, tragedy, paradoxes, and exceptional beauty of classical literature. You can read an account of the crisis in classics in the recent survey by Prof. Eric Alder who is often critical of Who Killed Homer?<\/em>, but in disinterested fashion lays out the arguments of the book as he sees them in explaining why it often evoked such furor in the field.<\/p>\n

Your essay is also quite sloppy: \u201cVictor Davis Hanson explicitly trumpeted the same views in Who Killed Homer?<\/em>\u201d. Where to begin with such nonsense? First, Victor Davis Hanson co-authored Who Killed Homer? <\/em>with John Heath. I did not write anything myself; it was a 50\/50 effort. Why did you single out one author and not another, if not to find some easy contemporary political resonance?<\/p>\n

We did just the opposite from your notion that we were ignoring cultural history, women, slaves, and broad historical trends. Instead by intent we focused upon them, noting both bias, oppression, and prejudice among the Greeks and Romans, but also the irony, tragedy, and paradoxes of Greek liberal values that clashed with traditional and often rural inspired norms\u2014suggesting that the plight of women, slaves, and the underclass was under discussion in classical culture in a way not true of the wider Mediterranean, or in fact anywhere else at that time (or at any time later). Well over two decades ago in The Other Greeks<\/em> I wrote of the culture of the agrarian mesoi<\/em> and their creation of the polis, often in the context of class and slavery; that book had nothing to do with the \u201cGreat Man\u201d platitudes you refer to. I wrote a novel, The End of Sparta,<\/em> whose two heroes are a slave and a young woman, who are the moral superiors of all the men in the book, a fictional account of Epaminondas\u2019s liberation of the Messenian helots. Reciting boilerplate phobias without nuance or context is virtue-signaling at best, at worse a window into an impoverished mind.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, you cannot seem to get things right even when offering a cast-off line about my career: \u201cFor all that he is beloved by the Right, most classicists have little time for VDH these days\u200a.\u201d I am not \u201cbeloved\u201d by the \u201cRight;\u201d I often have as many detractors there as among the Left. And I don\u2019t believe classicists ever had any \u201ctime\u201d for me, so I am confused about your qualifier \u201cthese days.\u201d<\/p>\n

All \u201cthese days\u201d have been about the same.<\/p>\n

Sincerely,<\/p>\n

Victor Davis Hanson, San Joaquin-Valley-based Classics scholar<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From An Angry Reader: The Angry Blogger How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor,\u201d by Donna Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley-based Classics scholar, Editor of Eidolon, November 21, 2016 A specter is haunting the Internet\u200a\u2014\u200athe specter of the \u201calt-right.\u201d The forces of white supremacy and toxic masculinity, fueled by a sense of entitlement dwarfed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2xx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9501,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/angry-reader-7\/","url_meta":{"origin":9767,"position":0},"title":"Angry Reader","author":"Megan Ring","date":"October 13, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Comment from a Reader: Dear Mr. Hanson; I left the Republican Party soon after watching eight years of ineffective \"leadership\" by Mitch McConnell, John Bohner, and now Paul Ryan. 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You will be shown just as treasonous, and obviously racist, as the Putin puppet....For memory,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12002,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/09-25-2019-angry-reader\/","url_meta":{"origin":9767,"position":3},"title":"09-25-2019 Angry Reader","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 25, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"From An Angry Reader: Subject: Inciting ignorant violence \u201cIgnorance is bliss\u201d until your\/his followers are inspired to act violently due to to your\/ his misinformation\/lies Hiding your vitriol hate behind well written words does not excuse from inciting\/ propagating hate and discord John Lowery \u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013 Dear Angry Reader John Lowery,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":144,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/angry-reader-5\/","url_meta":{"origin":9767,"position":4},"title":"Angry Reader #5","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 9, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers Angry Reader #5 wrote: Don't mean to troll here, but for the nth time, what is it about Obama or his agenda that wasn't conservative mainstream thought even a few years ago?? He's lowered taxes, been tough on defense, adopted a healthcare plan proposed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12129,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/angry-reader-01-08-2020\/","url_meta":{"origin":9767,"position":5},"title":"Angry Reader 01-08-2020","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 8, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"From An Angry Reader: You are doing the same thing you claim Maddow is doing. Aren\u2019t you an elite grouper, just on the other side of Maddow? You left out many facts in your article. You need to look in the mirror. You are old enough to know better. America\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9767"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9767"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9768,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9767\/revisions\/9768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}