On Oct. 7, against the stunning backdrop of the Acropolis, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a rousing speech that illuminated Western civilization's and America's roots in classical Greece.
Rubio's unusual effort as secretary of state to educate European friends and fellow Americans about their shared ancient heritage elicited widespread praise from American conservatives. And rightly so: Citizens' ignorance of, and frequently scorn for, their civilization weakens the West and America from within.
Yet Rubio's account of the West oddly demoted virtue and liberty. By failing to so much as mention justice and moderation, he distorted classical Greece. And three months after his country celebrated the Declaration of Independence's 250th anniversary and with the world watching, Rubio omitted from his discussion of American greatness the universal rights on which the nation was founded. Consequently, he missed an opportunity to clarify the blending of virtue and liberty that is a hallmark of the West and of America and crucial to reinvigorating both.
The core of Rubio's speech consists in an unacknowledged revaluation of Greek values. He saluted Athens for launching philosophy, introducing democracy, and shaping key elements of politics – law, virtue, citizenship, and the variety of regimes. "But the things we owe to this place – as Americans, and as Westerners – are actually far far deeper," he said. "These institutions and ideas – these institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks – qualities that can't be reduced to any particular political system or theory."
The most fundamental qualities, in Rubio's estimation, were not the four virtues that, according to Socrates in Plato's "Republic," enable cities to flourish: wisdom and courage along with moderation and justice. Nor do the qualities that Rubio singles out as forming the deepest stratum of the West's Greek inheritance overlap much with Aristotle's account in the "Nicomachean Ethics" of the 11 moral virtues, an account that describes justice as "the practice of complete virtue."
Rather, Rubio embraced the reinterpretation of classical Greece pioneered by Friedrich Nietzsche. Before Nietzsche – who, among great philosophers, happens to have advanced the most thoroughgoing and vehement denunciation of individual freedom and equality under law – the classical Greeks were cherished within the West for the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of their culture. In 1872 in "Homer's Contest," Nietzsche rejected the standard assessment, contending instead that classical Greece, not least their artists and philosophers, exemplified the quest to prevail in competition for honor, status, and power.
Rubio agreed with Nietzsche:
Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.
Even the classical Greek aspiration to grasp the world through art and philosophy, Rubio explained, was motivated, at bottom, by the determination to win recognition for great achievements:
For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man's existence. They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle – to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.
Whereas Nietzsche admired the "tiger-like pleasure in destruction" essential to the "Greek way," Rubio hedged, acknowledging that championing "perpetual struggle" as the good life "may sound odd" and "may even sound cruel." But from the Greeks' "intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict" and their "constant struggle for distinction," advised the secretary of state, emerged "the greatest civilization in the world."
Driving the classical Greek struggle for distinction, according to Rubio, is "thumos" – in his words "the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride." A mark of the contemporary West's lack of thumos, he asserted, is that "'nationalism' became a dirty word."
The West can avoid descent into "atrophy and servitude and decline," Rubio maintained, by following the Trump administration and embracing "the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future."
Those are worthy goals for the United States. At the same time, American power must honor American principles.
Unperturbed by the tension that Plato and Aristotle highlighted between human excellence and civic excellence, Rubio insisted that the classical Greeks "knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else." The Greek's pursuit of excellence, Rubio contended, exemplified devotion to "duty – an unbreakable loyalty to one's code, one's cause, one's country." But classical Greek political philosophy teaches that one's code, cause, and country can issue conflicting demands and all can clash with justice. American citizens, for example, have a right and duty to judge government action in accordance with the universal principles to which the nation is dedicated.
Prominent figures on the right promptly lauded Rubio's Athens speech. Ben Shapiro characterized it as "pretty amazing" and "great for America." Roger Kimball effused: "Let me toss my vote in with the overwhelming majority and affirm that Rubio's speech was simply splendid: robust, heartfelt, honest, masculine, and true." And The Wall Street Journal editorial page commended Rubio's remarks as "a bracing and timely antidote" to the "crisis of confidence, moral and political" that afflicts the West, "eroding its prosperity and the will to defend its principles."
Six days later, the Journal published two important dissents – one partial, one emphatic – from the celebration of Rubio's remarks.
While praising Rubio's "truly masterful speech," Hillsdale College history professor Wilfred McClay argued that Rubio fundamentally misrepresented Western civilization by depicting it as essentially the product of classical Greece. The West is better understood "as a long conversation whose most important constituent elements are called by the names 'Athens' and 'Jerusalem'": Athens stands above all for unfettered rational inquiry and Jerusalem denotes living in accordance with God's revelation.
Journal columnist and Brookings Institution fellow William Galston also faulted Rubio for displacing biblical virtues – starting with humility – in his account of Western civilization. In this displacement, Galston saw evidence of a sinister shift in the Republican Party from a conservatism anchored in religious faith to one "that embraces national self-assertion over any form of universalism, including Christianity."
Indeed, absent from Rubio's Athens speech were the universal principles that distinguish the American experiment. Yet in 1776 in breaking from Great Britain based on the unalienable rights inherent in all human beings, America also broke with classical Greece, where democracy did not recognize that human beings are by nature free and equal. Dedication to individual rights – and not the perpetual struggle for preeminence – made America exceptional. This is not to slight the role of Americans' "rugged individualism" in building the country. Yet as Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria rightly observed, Genghis Khan, the Persian emperors, the Russian czars, and the rulers of imperial China abundantly exhibited the love of victory that Rubio insisted was the hallmark of classical Athens.
Secretary Rubio rightly worried that the spirited self-assertion woven into human nature is on the wane in the West. However, spirited self-assertion can take many shapes. Thumos, in the form of contempt for law and resort to violence to achieve political ends, is on the rise as demonstrated recently by the masked young men dressed in black, rioting across France and in the UK.
Contrary to the U.S. secretary of state, classical Greek civilization does not glorify thumos as the supreme ingredient of a well-lived life and of civilizational greatness. Nor should we.
The critique of thumos belongs to the West's classical Greek heritage at least as much as does praise of it. As Harvard professor emeritus Harvey Mansfield argued in his entertaining, learned, and bold book, "Manliness" (2006), thumos is both essential and dangerous. When rooted in the moral virtues and well-educated, thumos issues in courage, the disposition to take responsibility, the pursuit of worthy honors, and the dedication to duty. But left on its own, thumos bristles at constraints. It spawns an inflated sense of competence, self-sufficiency, and righteousness. It disdains caution and deliberation. It fuels rashness. And it inclines to obstinacy, arrogance, bullying, violence, and tyranny.
America's distinctive achievements do not reflect thumos unbridled. They are rooted in moral virtues stemming from Jerusalem as well as Athens and in an education in the principles and practices of freedom and democratic self-government. Those moral virtues and that education discipline and elevate thumos, harnessing it to the patriotic task of sustaining the American experiment.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
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