By Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.
Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? These age-old philosophical questions are as relevant to people collectively as they are individually. Knowing our roots gives us deeper insight into why we think and behave the way we do.
So it is with Western civilization. Those of us who are living in it will better understand who we are and how we have changed over the millennia when we peer into the past. Historian Victor Davis Hanson makes that introspective journey back in time easier in his eight-video lecture series for PJ Media, “The Odyssey of Western Civilization.”
The first episode focuses on the origins of Western civilization – namely in Greece around 700 BC. The Greeks laid the foundation for a legacy of constitutional government, free-market economics, private property and individual liberty that are still evident today. “We look around and we don’t find places outside of Greece where the Western menu began,” Hanson said.
An agricultural revolution built around grapes, olives, barley and wheat fueled a host of societal changes in Greece, giving rise to the small man of the soil. The Greeks adopted vertical farming; they developed a system of labor; they harvested surplus crops, opening the door to marketplaces; they embraced the ideas of autonomy and self-sufficiency; and they created a militia to settle private property disputes.
Greek society reached its zenith in Athens and Sparta, city-states that adopted competing models of democracy. Sparta featured an oligarchic elite supported by serfs, while Athens defined citizenship but often had to deal with a tyrannical majority as a result.
The rivalry between the two led to a debate that has lasted 2,500 years – whether oligarchy works better than democracy. “It’s much more structured; it’s much more stable,” Hanson said in his second lecture. “But it’s also less imaginative; it’s less free.”
As the balance of power in the Western world shifted to Rome, the burgeoning empire borrowed governing ideas from the two preeminent Greek city-states that preceded it. Rome opted for Sparta’s tripartite system of legislative, executive and judicial branches, but combined it with the concepts of mass participation and meritorious advancement of Athens.
“Rome took the Spartan brilliant model of checks and balances for a select few,” Hanson noted, “and they said it’s going to be for everybody.”
The third episode of the series explores the role of the Mediterranean Sea as antiquity’s superhighway. Hanson said the sea was key to the rise of both Judaism and Christianity and to the spread of Islam into North Africa and Europe. It also helped shape the nature and borders of four empires – Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman.
Hanson said the Mediterranean became a “backward lake” when the new world was discovered, opening new pathways for commerce and empire-building, but the Mediterranean is becoming more important now. It is responsible for about 30 percent of the world’s commerce.
In the fourth and fifth lectures, Hanson tackles the fall of Rome and the rise of the Byzantine Empire in the eastern part of Rome’s once-expansive reach. Rome became a massive empire by excelling at the assimilation of the people in the lands it conquered, but its vast size eventually contributed to the empire’s collapse. “It’s like some monster that has to be fed with new land and new people,” Hanson said.
Rome fell in 476 AD, but the eastern empire did not disintegrate then. Byzantium benefited from trade routes to China and India, plus it was more easily defended and its neighbors weren’t as restless. The Byzantine Empire survived separate from Rome for another 1,000 years.
Hanson challenges the prejudiced historical view of the empire. Although it is remembered as an outdated society full of corruption, Hanson argues that the empire helped shape the future. Byzantium preserved Western civilization through the Dark Ages, repelled the onslaught of Islam during the Crusades and paved the way for the Renaissance, he said.
The sixth and seventh episodes cover the shift of Western civilization away from the Mediterranean – first into northern Europe and then across the Atlantic Ocean to the British colonies that became the United States. Hanson discusses the failure of Greece to create the idea of a nation, the emergence and resilience of the “German problem” in Europe, and the bypassing of the troublesome Ottomans by exploring the new world.
Great Britain ultimately became the standard bearer for Western civilization. “It was uniquely positioned to take advantage of the discovery of the new world and the modern industrial revolution,” Hanson said. The United States inherited much from the British, including a language and the concept of parliamentary government (albeit without a monarch), but peered further into history for guidance from Greece and Rome.
“Because of the genius of our founding fathers,” Hanson said, “we were able to create a uniform, coherent system that not only was based on the British model but transcended it.”
He closes the video series by examining a century of transition from World War I to our current postmodern world. Western traditions were weakened by the Industrial Revolution, the rise of Germany and skepticism about religion, among other factors. Men like Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud also undermined Western ideas.
