March 2005

Response to Readership

Since you laud Israel and see through Palestinian rhetoric, how is it that you support the creation of an Arab state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza?

Hanson: My main motivation, since there is not yet a true Palestinian democratic and stable state—the only chance for lasting peace—is Israeli self-interest. By withdrawing much needed people back into Israel, the Jewish state will not commit its precious assets defending a rather small number of settlers, who are needed anyway inside Israel to help arrest striking demographic trends that threaten to create an Arab majority by the end of the century.

Sharon is a strategist and came upon a brilliant plan: at the height of the Intifada and gloom and doom in the West, he unilaterally moved to separate the two peoples, by both the fence and the withdrawal from Gaza, hand-in-glove with ostracizing Arafat and decapitating the Hamas leadership. Then behind secure and defensible borders Israel can wait peacefully until the Palestinians wish to become fully democratic and then discuss borders in contexts free of the gunman and bomber. If the Palestinians in the meantime become something like Turkey or India, fine, Israel can negotiate with them. If they do not, then Israel has its people behind a defensible line and can let Palestinians stew in their own juices until they wish to change.

Conservative essayists have been tossing around the idea that America's natural allies are in a cultural alliance known as the Anglosphere: the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (with perhaps India as an honorary member). I have also heard that Margaret Thatcher is somehow involved in the creation of a foundation to promote the idea. What are your thoughts?

Hanson: I’ve read bits and pieces of such doctrines, though not the book by, I think, James Bennett on the topic. At first glance, it makes sense. Australia, the UK, and the United States in the present war against the Islamicists and autocrats have pretty much shared values, reflecting the influence of the British and Scottish Enlightenment that were antithetical to both the French version and much of what later became German determinism and nihilism in Hegel and Nietzsche. British colonies were in much better shape than their French or Italian counterparts, and the stability of both the UK and the United States stands in dire contrast to most countries both in Europe and elsewhere during the 20^th century.

But for some reason both Canada and New Zealand—perhaps because of their proximity to larger and more muscular America and Australia that protect the two and thus give them safe soapboxes to hector without consequences—have become Europhiles, statist, and deeply anti-American. So I don’t know how much we can say that we should prefer a New Zealand to a Poland, Italy, or Holland. And if John Kerry had won, no doubt France would be the new close American friend. In general, I have always trusted the UK and Australia above all other countries, and assume New Zealand and Canada sound crazy in their bitterness and envy. This is a long answer to say I am intrigued by the idea, but am not sure that some former commonwealth countries are really our friends or have much in common with us anymore.

Your understanding of the unchanging (fallen) nature of man comes through in your writing. It seems that liberalism and conservatism part ways at this most fundamental point. How much of this is due to your educational and religious background?

Hanson: I don’t know, but the church found much of prior classical ideas about the innately savage nature of men convincing, one that must be saved or enlightened through either religion, family, education, or reason. Liberals too often think man in his brief sojourn in civilization from the era of ancient Athens, in a mere 2,500 years has evolved into a sort of new man, as his Darwinian moral improvements means that we have overcome war, pride, envy, etc., and with a little more money, government, and education can be completely utopian. Conservatives rightly distrust this “new man” and accept our fallen nature not in pessimism, but in optimism that we have time-honored mechanisms for ameliorating our savagery and know that culture, religion, and education can all warn us about ourselves. Deterrence can prevent war, stiff penalties can deter crime, shame can prevent reckless behavior—now, in the past, and always. Human nature being what it is, it is just as likely that spoiled Michael Moore flies on his capitalist private jet as does Ken Lay—more so in more recent times. I don’t know why liberals don’t accept basic human premises such as entitlements creating dependency, taxes causing shortages while subsidies ensure surfeit, or affirmative action creating opportunism and ethnic tribalism. All that seems logical given our natures.

How is college different from 30 years ago?

Hanson: I entered college as an undergraduate in 1971 at 18, graduated in 1975 from UC Santa Cruz, immediately entered the PhD program at Stanford and finished in 1980. I spent 2 years of formal study in Greece, 1973-4 at the College Year in Athens, and 1979-80 at the American School of Classical Studies, as well as regular travel to there and surrounding countries. So I had a pretty good cross section of what college was like in the 1970s. Then I taught at CSU Fresno from 1984-2004, with visiting professorships at Stanford in 1991-2 and the US Naval Academy 2002-3, so in turn I saw a good cross section of academia from the other side 20 and 30 years later. A lot changed! And it was tragic.

A few things jump out from that contrast. My teachers did not have to publish as much as my own generation, and were on the whole far better undergraduate teachers. The stupid idea that you write these incomprehensible articles that no one reads to get tenure came of age in the 1980s. It was disastrous, as any can attest by looking at a present-day academic journal, whose bogus "theory" and "gender" topics are like studies of phrenology and "the occult" in the 19th century. In short, I had better classroom teachers than what I saw among my colleagues, who were spending precious hours away from students, in fear of not getting tenure, writing silly ideas that they neither believed in nor were particularly happy about.

When I entered Santa Cruz, the vast majority of my professors were of the counter-culture, just emerging teaching from graduate schools that were afire from the Vietnam War. And while they brought their ideology into the classroom, they had all been superbly trained by a grand generation of humanists who came of age in  the 1940s. At Stanford, I had largely European faculty-mostly from the UK, Austria, or Germany—dry perhaps, but again extraordinarily knowledgeable. They are now long gone and were not replaced

So, especially at UC Santa Cruz, we were in the age of reform where requirements were suddenly being discussed as oppressive (they ended the 2 year Western Civilizatin requirement at Cowell College, UC Santa Cruz, the year I finished it); and at Stanford, the mandatory year-long intensive Latin and Greek composition/philology requirements [4 intensive courses, for 3 consecutive quarters] also ceased shortly after I finished it. In other words, my generation, or perhaps the even earlier  cohort of the baby boomer generation of the 1960s, demanded from their willing profs much more freedom of selection, fewer requirements, more student control, and a curriculum that better reflected contemporary war, racism, gender, etc.

Thus a generation who had been given a top-notch education, caved and in the late 1970s and 1980s gave the generation  following mine a less rigorous, more biased one: my teachers, under attack by my generation who benefited from their wonderful training, bent to our demands—hurting everyone that followed. I was extraordinarily lucky, breathing the last fumes of traditional liberal arts. And how ironic that we who got all the benefits of it helped to destroy it so who followed would not!

Along with the destruction of the old liberal arts curriculum, the rise of co-ed dorms, drug-free  zones, groupthink castigation of ROTC, athletes, conservatives, religion, etc. all helped to create the paradox of a counterculture circus—a place where the affluent would act out a rite of passage angst, aided by perpetually adolescent professors, against their culture—before joining it full blast in their late 20s.

When I first entered college in 1971 race studies, queer studies, gender studies, etc. were all alternative classes, 1 or 2 here and there. When I left academia 33 years later, they were the establishment, whose professors were on all the committees, agitated for change, etc., and whose ideas had warped mainstream departments in all their hires—one now hired an expert on women seamstresses not the colonial army, experts on the underground railroad not the campaigns of the Civil War, on homosexuality in ancient Greece, not Thucydides.

The result was college became as boring as it was easy, turning out the present generation who are highly opinionated, agitated, committed, but embarrassingly ignorant, having been given none of the skills—language, real history, logic, etc.—to make the case even for their radical utopian cause. So we are turning a generation of Michael Moores out, fiery but infantile in their knowledge.

The great question of the 2010-20 is what will we do when the tab for all this sad waste of decades comes due? Will all the fumes of the past have so dissipated, that the United States will have few scholars left, and simply become a nation of loud, angry, highly ideological but ultimately ignorant people? And worse, the thrust of race/class/gender was to demand an equality of result by fiat not an opportunity by free unfettered choices; but if they kill the golden goose, what eggs will be left for them to fight over? To create real wealth in this country, new ideas, and bold thinking, one must by definition be antithetical to the university. Those who now hound out Larry Summers, or the strange case of the pseudo-Ward Churchill are glimpses of what the university has become, and how it promotes mediocrity, and insists on a politically-correct mantra, one that excuses incompetence and fraud and destroys any who question that betrayal.

In short, the university decided not to educate people but to change them, not to give them the tools to think freely, but only the orders not to think freely. In the process we get a man like Churchill who lied about everything he came in contact with, including his very identity, and made a career out of bullying the university, before ending by demanding compensation for being found out as a fraud and a charlatan—40 years ago he would have been summarily fired, and no lawyer would have any illusion that he could have won anything back in court given his paper trail of deceit.

So sad all of this.

Why aren't you investigating a run for office?

Hanson: I have zero interest, and no talent for it—and a paper trail of politically incorrect quotes that spans several books and hundreds of essays. And, remember, the skills of a politician are not those of a writer or professor. I was elected once in high school, and will leave that record of one successful election at that—especially when I proved a mediocre high school vice president.

Have you written a response to John Lynn's critique of your book Carnage and Culture in his Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (Westview Press, 2003)?

Hanson: No, I haven’t. I have turned down an offer to debate with him since I am deeply confused by the book for a variety of reasons: all of the necessary qualifiers and explanations I used in the initial pages of Carnage and Culture to outline the complexity of argument across some 2500 years of time and space for some reason he used as his own reasons to reject the thesis. And, in addition, while I was working on it, he wrote me a warm letter during the gestation of his own book, asking, after hearing a lecture of mine, at the American Historical Association annual meeting, on Western military dynamism, whether he could see some of my own text before publication. As a favor, I sent him electronically the original of the then unpublished long introduction to Carnage and Culture, and the next thing I knew I saw his attacks. He then never acknowledged in his credits or preface that favor or the degree to which one should state to his readers that he was kindly given an advanced unpublished version of part of a book he then subsequently attacked. Nor did I quite get his obsession with John Keegan.

So I simply left it all that. Ultimately, readers can read both books and make their decisions whether there is a long tradition of Western military dynamism that leads to the present—and why—or whether there is in fact not.

What history books would you recommend to enable me to get a good overview of world history?

Hanson: I read those I don’t like—Hegel, Spengler, and Toynbee to learn about, and thus to avoid, the pitfalls of determinism, and then those I do that are empirical: Thucydides, Tacitus, Gibbon, Prescott, Churchill, and modern counterparts like Alistair Horne, Martin Gilbert, John Keegan, Hugh Thomas, Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment.

Could you give a short list of books you think everyone should read before leaving High School?

1. A play of Sophocles

2. Iliad or Odyssey

3. Inferno or Don Quixote

4. A short treatise of either Aristotle or Cicero

5. Plato’s Apology

6. Two or three plays of Shakespeare

7. A long chapter of Gibbon

8. One or two of the Federalist Papers

9. Les Miserables

10. A novel by Conrad. Mark Twain, or Balzac

11. Selections from Keats, Shelly, Wordsworth, Byron

12. Some poems by Kipling, T.S. Elliot,

13. Selections from Churchill’s history of WWII

14. A few action books like Runciman, Siege of Constantinople, Bernal Diaz, Conquest of New Spain, Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory

15. A novel by Steinbeck, Faulkner, Wolfe, or Hemingway

16. Two or three essays by George Orwell

I have a silver tetradrachm from ca. 300 - 262 BC. Obverse is Athena and reverse is an owl. I am curious as to how the owl became associated with the goddess Athena. Would you be so kind to shed some light on this subject?

She was associated with a lot of things—most notably the olive tree. As the “wise” goddess who was sort of genderless, she was supposedly guided, unlike Aphrodite or Hera, by pure reason and a master of crafts and technology. From time immemorial, the owl has been seen as a curious bird, the movement of its head, its low flight, it strange beak and feathers suggesting something quasi- human. And we know it is an especially clever hunter, so it was natural to associate it with Athena. At night I walk on our farm and a great horned owl often follows, flies about three feet above the ground, and seems almost to anticipate my path each evening—very eerie.

At the "Coming of Age in Ancient Greece," at the Cincinnati Art Museum last summer, the catalog proper, with photos, descriptions and bibliographies for each item, was edifying, the essays that formed the bulk of the volume seemed to be shot through with political correctness. One author, for example, went off on a tangent about free market policies and death squads in modern Brazil. For the price, this was frustrating. Here I was reminded of points you and John Heath made in Who Killed Homer? I wonder if you might comment specifically on the extent of political correctness in classical art studies, and how best to view and understand Greek art objects.

I wrote about that art exhibit for the New Criterion when the Onassis Foundation kindly flew me to New York to see it (see the article indexed here on the web site). The problem with classical art studies was the virus of postmodernism that sort of ruined criticism for 20 years or so, and only now is just fading—although to be sure classicists were never quite as deeply affected as others. We all have been bored ad nauseam by warnings about falling captive to realism or idealism, or the apparent bourgeois and dangerous idea that art should capture or improve upon what the eye sees. They would not wish, after all, dunces like you and me to appreciate such artistic skill. Then we had to hear that the artist was incidental, and merely follows the scripted protocols of the viewer. And of course, art was seen to be “legitimizing” and “reifying” “hierarchies of power,” in service to the nation state. When you encounter that nonsense, simply stop, and go back and read the great works of the art historians of Greece—Beazley, Cook, Boardman, and pretty much ignore everyone afterwards who attacked them.

I had a professor at Florida State University, Dr. Jeffrey Tatum, who was fond of comparing attitudes of the Greeks toward the conquering Romans (and vice versa) during the early Republican period to those of Europeans toward the US today. He held that Greeks saw the Romans as overly religious and thuggish, much as Europeans view Americans, and that Romans were inclined to have an inferiority complex when comparing themselves to their more “cultured” Greek counterparts—a pathology that “multi-lateralists” would seem to be experiencing today.

Hanson: That old idea predates your professor and goes back to the 19^th century when some Brits saw their new role in a declining empire to be the Athens that would be the brain to the Roman body of the United States. And now with the latest Blair slur as a poodle, the old image of cultural dependency to the oaf American is back again. The analogy breaks down, ancient and modern. Romans invented brilliant literary genres like satire and the novel, and indeed Juvenal and Petronius are as almost good as anything from the fifth century B.C. A Tacitus or Virgil is first rate as well. Compare 19^th and 20^th century American fiction—Twain, Melville, or later Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Faulkner, Steinbeck—with British novels, and the comparison seems to go the “Roman” way. The Roman republican system was an improvement over radical Athenian democracy and the American constitution was superior in most ways to the British as well. Finally, the inferiority complex and ensuing envy are all European; only a few silly professors to look to France for anything; the days of faking a British accent after going a year or two to Oxford are mostly over. In contrast, the “Athenians” wear jeans, baseball caps, listen to rap, speak English, flock to American universities, want American appointments, and read English language books and papers of the so-call Romans, who are mostly oblivious to their presence.

What should one know about "Black Athena" before beginning postgrad work in ancient history?

Hanson: The two definitive refutations were done by Prof. Mary Lefkowitz; start with her Not Out of Africa, and then her edited volume. Bernal’s philological and historical lapses have been well chronicled. His fatal flaw was taking the rather well-known and pedestrian notion that some 19^th-century European scholars were hung-up on the idea of racial purity and then turning that petit racialism into some overarching conspiracy to silence the “true” story that the Greeks stole their culture from Egypt that itself was essentially Black African. How silly!

Of course, Greeks for centuries had borrowed architectural ideas, arts, and incorporated mythology from African life (read Egyptian) into their own—but the core and key values of classical Greece such as democracy, freedom of the individual, secularism, rationalism, civic militarism, private property, a middle class, and unfettered inquiry were anti-Mediterranean. These ideas were novel and are the exact antithesis to the theocratic or autocratic imperial systems, all pyramidal and statist in nature, in Persia, the Near East, and Egypt.

Finally, and worst of all, Bernal published his work during the 1980s when the gender/class/race industry was at its apex, ensuring that such a mediocre work would find resonance from ideologues on grounds other than its scholarly value. Black nationalists and racial chauvinists were his biggest supporters in this sad spectacle that now seems so hilarious that we forget the acrimony of the times. Presently you can’t find a Bernal believer, but in 1989 or so, he was the guru to every wannabe classicist around. All very sad looking back. So for a few trendy years Black Athena had cult status among the half-educated and political savvy—and now has rightly been relegated to a footnote of classics, much like the gender-studies fad of about the same time; the Foucauldian work of a David Halperin or Jack Winkler are similar cultural artifacts of the strange late 1980s—the hoola hoops or 3D movies of classical studies.

How many languages do you know?

Hanson: I read Greek, Latin, German, French—the former two are required of classicists—and Modern Greek, Spanish.

Speak some Modern Greek and a little Spanish.

I try to keep up by reading foreign newspapers on the Internet and am now rereading Xenophon’s Hellenica in Greek from about the period 377 to 362 BC. My Latin is suffering, however, and I plan to reread Tacitus’ Germania again this spring. For this upcoming book on the Peloponnesian War, I read a lot of Greek and secondary scholarship in different languages, and found it surprising that the postmodern revolution in Classics has meant very little new has been written about the war since Donald Kagan’s magisterial Peloponnesian War of the 1970s and 1980s, and updated in a recent single volume.

I read an article in Esquire by Thomas Barnett, author of The Pentagon´s New Map. I will quote the part of it referring to U.S.-Iran relations and how the US should handle it: “We know you are getting the bomb, and we know isn’t much we can do about it right now unless we are willing to go up-tempo right up the gut. But frankly, there’s other fish we want to fry, so here’s the deal: You can have the bomb, and we’ll take you off the Axis of Evil list, plus we’ll re-establish diplomatic ties and open up trade. But in exchange, not only will you bail us out on Iraq first and foremost by ending your support of the insurgency, you’ll also cut off your sponsorship of Hizbollah and other anti-Israeli terrorist groups, help us bully Syria out of Lebanon, finally recognize Israel, and join us in guaranteeing the deal on a permanent Palestinian state.” Any comments?

Not a chance of that happening. Iran needs anti-Americanism to play to their lunatic base. And thinking we can get along with the Iranian fanatics is like saying we could deal with Hitler; we dealt with Stalin because he had nukes, and the mullahs don’t—yet. Instead, we should be pushing elections in Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria—like taking hammers to a glass ball and tapping all around the surface until one day it unexpectedly shatters.

Given the grassroots Iranian dissident movement, the worst thing we could do is to come to terms with its murderous oppressors. We should turn up the heat now and develop an all-encompassing policy of support for democratic regimes and opposition to autocracies, with differing degrees of hostility given their own ruthlessness. Iran will be one day free, and we have a choice to be on the future or past side of it. We made a mistake once by not pressuring the modernizing Shah to democratize, and a repetition of that realpolitik will only earn another lost two decades. Look at what is happening in Lebanon and ask: why are the Lebanese of all people in the street, looking for support from George Bush to help them banish the Syrians?

On U.S. disaster relief to foreign countries: According to an article, "... over the past four years the United States has provided more such aid than all other nations on the planet combined.” Is this true?

Hanson: Yes, if you don’t do the UN/EU anti-American arithmetic that hinges on us feeling bad and thus upping our cash gifts to be recycled by unaccountable multinational agencies. So count in addition to vast sums of federal monies (who cares about per capita percentages, when aggregate dollars is what really matters), private donations, what religious charities provide, the use of the U.S. military to do things like tsunami relief and keep sea lanes open, pirates down, thugs in line, as well as private companies that spend billions in research for medical products and medicines and do not recapture their investments when dispensing health care abroad. It is complex calculus, but when taken all together American society is the most generous in the world. We would never let 15,000 of our own elderly fry unattended, as the French did in Paris the summer before last.

What are we to make of French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier's statement that "alliance does not mean allegiance"? The remark was made right before Secretary of State Rice said, essentially, that America won in Iraq, get over it and do your part in the democratization of the world. In your opinion, is this typical French face-saving or does it presage more French diplomatic chicanery to preempt American efforts?

Style, panache, eccentricity—this and more is all we see from a cynical, tired, postmodern, smug, and ultimately nihilistic French nation. France is in a dilemma. Its history and culture suggest that it deserves world attention: its present population, economy, ideas, and influence do not warrant world power status—only to be made more clear as India, China, Brazil and others come onto the world scene.

Second, they’re in danger of not only losing our allegiance, but our alliance as well. There is no support here at home for any formal military relationship with France, public opinion being far ahead of ossified state policy. Fools! They preen and prance like children who wish attention, when their former friendship with the U.S. cost them little, but gave them a great deal. Now they’ve thrown much of it away, and won’t find much support from America when they are in yet another crisis. Wait until a rogue Islamic nation threatens them with nukes; a terrorist takes out the Eiffel Tower; the EU begins to show cracks; or a new Russia or China starts to make noise—our attitude will be “See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.” It is no longer childish to say that we should end the old alliance with France, but simple reality. The French are like Swiss or Swedes, not Brits or Aussies, and we should accept the world as it is: friendly neutrals but not real allies.

Do you think the observations about the evolution of societies in Machiavelli's Discourses apply to the spread of democracy? Machiavelli observed that monarchies either evolved into aristocracies or degraded into tyrannies; aristocracies evolved into republics or degraded into oligarchies; and republics always ran the risk of degrading into anarchy, which would most likely be followed by tyranny. Do you feel that the evolution of an autocratic or theocratic society into a democracy can be accelerated to skip the intermediate stages in Machiavelli's schema? Must intermediate steps, such as the emergence of a middle class (with its attendant concerns for property rights and the rule of law), be included in the march to democracy in each nation?

Hanson: Yes, Machiavelli reworked Aristotle’s paradigms found in the Politics; brilliant in theory, but such an evolutionary model does not take in consideration the present globalization, what we have learned in the 500 years since the Italian Renaissance, and how technology has empowered the average citizen. I once wrote a book, The Other Greeks, which argued that the emergence of a Greek middle group (the mesoi) was critical to pre-democratic consensual government. Our problem in the Middle East is that there is very little below the Arab Street and only a small corrupt elite above—so until we foster or encourage a powerful middle class of educated prosperous citizens who have a stake in their own society and who outnumber the poor and the rich, democracy will be a hard thing to jump start. Euripides and Aristotle both saw this almost 2.500 years ago and praised “the middle ones” as the sensible glue that held together the fractious city-state.

Do you sense a different European attitude towards the Administration's foreign policy since Rice has become Secretary of State? While it seems Powell believed in the moral authority of the United States, I don't think he had the passion to sell the long slog necessary to succeed. Do you think that it is now clear to the Europeans, that the United States will complete the mission, and that it is in their interests to join the winning side?

Hanson: Yes, I agree with you. She speaks with presidential authority; she is less likely to leak to D.C. insiders to gain favor as a moderate hounded by neocons; and she is less prone to flattery of American and European elites. Rice believes that democracy will prevail and that Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Israel—not Egypt, Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia—are the future of the Middle East, and, more importantly, that as in the case of Eastern Europe things can change very rapidly. The Europeans are beginning to see the train leaving the station and aren’t stupid; they won’t be left with autocrats while the people begin voting in the Middle East.

This quote, attributed to an 18^th-century Scottish historian named Alexander Tyler, is probably fictitious, but I would like your comments on the merits of its central idea. "A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

Hanson: But what happens to the dictatorship that has no legitimacy and destroys the human desire for freedom? In fact, democracy is cyclical and never dies, going through various stages of weakness and strength. There was a consensual government in Athens from 507 to 338, and something not bad well before that. The Roman Republic lasted for 500 years, and even during the empire there were local elections of sorts. Our own history is no small thing. Critics are right that the logic of democracy is to always expand the notion of equality—to Plato’s dogs as equals to humans—and entitlement; but for all it faults, democracy returns.