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

affirms with rational clarity our duty to revere eternal laws which we have not deduced by reason and cannot alter by civic assembly:
     
    That order did not come from God. Justice,
     
    That dwells with the gods below, knows no such law.
     
    I did not think your edicts strong enough
     
    To overrule the unwritten unalterable laws
     
    Of God and heaven, you being only a man.
     
    They are not of yesterday or to-day, but everlasting,
     
    Though where they came from, none of us can tell.
     
     
    Creon will not be budged. He condemns Antigone to go down to the underworld gods—to be buried alive in a tomb: “Go then, and share your love among the dead.” In doing so he asserts a radical democratic claim: the old gods may be ignored. Tradition be damned. We can pass laws as we wish. Family rights mean nothing. But the people of Thebes begin to turn in sympathy to Antigone, whom they do not like, but who appeals for a justice beyond self-interest. Even Creon’s son Haemon, Antigone’s betrothed, warns the king that disaster hangs over him. At that, Creon calls upon the same natural law he has been abrogating. For the young should revere their elders: “Am I to take lessons at my time of life,” he scoffs, “from a fellow of his age?” Haemon’s reply cuts to the heart: “It isn’t a question of age, but of right and wrong.”
     
    Not until his niece Antigone, his son Haemon, and his wife Eurydice have all committed suicide does Creon see that his wickedness, clothed in the garb of civic virtue, has destroyed him. In denying the fundamental rights of family and blood relation, he condemns his own family to death, and becomes a man accursed, unfit for rule of the city. “I am nothing,” he weeps. “I have no life.”
     
    Creon’s mistake is not that he is male. He happens to be male, prone to boastfulness, aggressiveness, and a love of power. He clearly also treats women with contempt. Haemon’s love for Antigone he dismisses coarsely: “Oh, there are other fields for him to plough.” Those are character flaws, and they play a part in his downfall. But the mistake, the trigger, is his abrogation of the natural law. He might have been female, prone to touchiness, guile, timidity, and hatred of men. The Nanny of today’s American politics comes to mind. Make the same mistake, suffer the same fate. The trigger cannot tell whose finger squeezes it.
     
 
     
    When Patriotism Was Real
     
    “When [the Spartans] fight singly, they are as good men as any in the world, and when they fight in a body, they are the bravest of all. For though they be freemen, they are not in all respects free; Law is the master whom they own; and this master they fear more than thy subjects fear thee.”
    From Herodotus , The Persian Wars (7.104)
     
     
    So said a Spartan to the king of Persia, Darius, as he prepared to invade Greece. The Spartans did not produce much poetry or art, and they knew little ease in their lives. But it is not only by poetry and art that a culture can make its impression on the world. For more than two thousand years—until our own slack, effete age—we have had the example before us of that small polis and its men who were free because they acknowledged the law and feared disgrace more than death.
     
 

Beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder
     
    We cannot understand the Greek desire to discover the moral and physical laws that govern the world unless we entertain a few claims that our schools ignore or reject:
     
    The world is a cosmos , an ordered whole of surpassing loveliness, wherein man, surpassingly beautiful, occupies an especially interesting place. The most inter esting thing about the world is that it is a world , not a chaotic soup.
    Beauty is not merely a matter of opinion or social convention.
    Love, inspired by beauty, possesses a spark of the divine. Love is more than appetite.
    Our study of the physical world and of the moral world are not to be severed from one another.