The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) Read Online Free PDF Page A

both worldliness and impracticality. It’s a foul combination. We are worldly because we scorn the truth in favor of what will turn heads in some political arena. We are impractical because the truth is the truth—whether we like it or not.
     
    Marx reduced the spirit of man to material desires, and believed that central planning could deliver goods more efficiently than could a free market. He was wrong on both counts. Our feminizing schools reduce male and female to a few minor details of plumbing, and then preach that pills and white balloons will provide a remedy for human lust. Wrong—and soul-destroying—on both counts.
     
    But in Athens, as now, there was a market for the sophistical wares. Man needs wisdom, but what he needs and what he buys are two different things. Wisdom may cry at the gates, but man is too busy at the mall to hear. He likes to hear Protagoras say that man is the measure of all things, and concludes that the good or the evil or the existence or nonexistence of a thing depends upon how he chooses to consider it. “Justice is the will of the stronger,” says Thrasymachus, lampooned in Plato’s Republic . 13 The historian Thucydides suggests that Athens gleefully accepted that “wisdom,” and tried to use it, as I have mentioned, to bludgeon the island of Melos.
     
    Thucydides wrote after Athens’ great defeat. He loathed such opportunism and relativism. In fact, every one of the great playwrights and thinkers of ancient Greece believed in objective moral truth. They did not believe it was easy to grasp. It must be sought, struggled for, and granted new life from age to age. But it exists, and is universal. When the old and feeble Priam, king of Troy, appears in the tent of his enemy Achilles to plead for his son Hector’s body, the great warrior is astonished. There is nothing impressive about an old man on his knees, but to Achilles at that moment Priam looks like a god. He reminds him of another old man, his father Peleus, far across the Aegean, whom he has not seen in ten years, and whom he knows he will not see again. “Honor then the gods, Achilles,” cries Priam,
     
    . . . and take pity upon me remembering your father, yet I am still more pitiful; I have gone through what no other mortal on earth has gone through;
     
    I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children. ( Iliad , 24.503–506)
     
     
    Give me back my son, he cries. It simply is the right thing to do. The two men, old and young, Trojan and Greek, enemies in war, sit weeping in the twilight. They are one in their humanity, one in their suffering and loneliness.
     
    The Greeks derived their sense of right-dealing from a hardheaded look at man’s frailty. They had the most advanced medicine in the West until the late nineteenth century, they lived in the open air and the sun, they ate a healthy diet, they exercised even as old men; so they lived a long time. But “health care” was something they had to provide for themselves, and eventually all the care in the world will be in vain. Death looms over our glory, and should instruct us against hubris , literally “haughtiness” or “uppityness.” So when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, goes round the table at his house, asking for bread from the men who are suing for the hand of his wife Penelope, he approaches the ringleader Antinous, and asks him to consider how the Fates that set a man high can ruin him too:
     
    I, too, was once a man of means; my house was rich; I often gave to vagabonds, whoever they might be, who came in need.
     
    There I had countless slaves and all those things that grace a man whom men consider blessed.
     
    But Zeus, the son of Cronus, then was pleased to ruin me. ( Odyssey , 17.419–24)
     
     
 
     
    Athens’ Athletes II
     
    “No Greeks ever shook hands after a fight, no Greek ever was the first to congratulate his conqueror; defeat was felt as a disgrace.”
    From E. Norman Gardiner , Athletics in the