Western Culture

Culture and Nationhood in the World of Herodotus: An Evolutionary Analysis, Part 2

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“King Nomos”: The Power of Culture and the Universality of Cultural Chauvinism

Herodotus had traveled far and wide across the Mediterranean, thus coming across nations with often radically different cultural assumptions and ways of life. Accounting for this astonishing diversity, he is much impressed by the social power of culture. As noted above, the historian remarks that “custom [nomos] is king of all” and that every people tends to think that its own customs are the best:

If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group regards its own as being by far the best. . . . There is plenty of other evidence to support the idea that this opinion of one’s own customs is universal . . . Pindar was right to have said in his poem that custom is king of all. (3.38)

Herodotus writes this in the context of the Persian king Cambyses killing a sacred bull during his stay in Egypt, a bull which the Egyptians had considered to be their god Apis. The historian considers Cambyses’ sacrilegious contempt for local Egyptian custom as proof of his madness, an infamy on a par with his murder of his own brother and sister. (Cambyses dies shortly thereafter as a result of his actions.) Herodotus also takes the example of how Greeks and Indians treat corpses differently: Greeks burn their corpses, while Indians (allegedly) eat them, the practice of each being equally repulsive to the other. Hence, by giving societies radically different norms, taboos, and assumptions, cultural drift tends to polarize humanity into different, mutually-uncomprehending groups.[1]

The supremacy of “King Nomos,” or custom, in every society reflects the power of culture to shape that society’s behavior. If genes and physique are the hardware of humanity, culture and ideas are our software. The world-view, assumptions, values, and taboos of a society have a powerful effect on human behavior, even if this can never eliminate our in-born proclivities. Herodotus makes clear that the power of a society’s culture is necessarily paired with a sense of superiority over foreign customs. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? If the members a society thought foreign customs superior, would they not seek to make them their own? A corollary however is that if peoples with starkly different cultures and values must live in close proximity, they are liable to come into conflict. Among foreign cultures, the wise man will tread carefully.

All this does not mean that national cultures are completely closed-off and autarkic memetic units.  On the contrary, Herodotus is quite cognizant of cultural porosity and mutual influence between nations. He freely admits the barbarians’ superior achievements, such as the Egyptians’ calendar and their monumental pyramids, as well as their influence on Greek culture. The Greeks, he says, owe their alphabet to the Phoenicians and much of their religion and basic geometry to the Egyptians. It is furthermore striking that the first great philosophical flourishing of the Greek world, the so-called “Ionian Renaissance,” occurred in the Persian-occupied Greek cities of Asia Minor (today’s western Turkey). The Persians themselves were apparently the most culturally open-minded people in the world, for they “adopt more foreign customs than anyone else” (1.135). Read more

Culture and Nationhood in the World of Herodotus: An Evolutionary Analysis, Part 1

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Herodotus by Jean-Guillaume Moitte, 1806. Relief on the west façade of the Cour Carrée in the Louvre Palace, Paris.

Herodotus (trans. Robin Waterfield), The Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

In defense of history, the Roman orator Cicero once said: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain forever a child.” In history, we can find the past trajectory of human events and insights into the nature of human existence in other circumstances, two powerful guides for the future. The first historian was Herodotus, a Greek who lived some 2,500 years ago. His massive Histories are an encyclopedic snapshot of that epoch, an enormous collection of stories on all the nations of the known world which he had gathered during his travels.

Herodotus is a perceptive observer of human nature. His humans are indeed riven with contradictions and subject to extreme pressures, torn between often-conflicting personal, familial, and political loyalties. Herodotus’ is a world of sex and violence, of tribes and cultures. Reading Herodotus remains a rewarding experience, for our human nature has not changed much over the past 2,500 years. I propose an evolutionary analysis of the Histories, highlighting in particular the complex and dynamic relationship between environment, culture, and ethnicity. As we shall see, national identity, ethnocentrism, and the condemnation of decadence — what we would call maladaptive culture — are major themes in Herodotus’ work.

The known world of Herodotus can be seen as a kind of enormous grid centered upon the eastern Mediterranean, where most of the Greeks lived, and the Persian empire, by far the largest and most powerful state of the time. In this vast world, the Greeks were a young people scattered across the Mediterranean “like frogs around a pond” (Plato, Phaedo, 109b). The Greeks were well aware of the other great and often mysterious peoples around them: the Semitic trading-nation of Phoenicia in the Levant, the wild nomadic Scythians in the north, the mysterious Ethiopians in the south and Indians in the east, the massive city of Babylon in Mesopotamia, and the venerable Egyptians, among others.

Herodotus’ world certainly featured peaceful commerce, cultural exchange, and ethnic intermarriage among these peoples — the historian is quite broad-minded and free of chauvinism in this respect.[1] But, as Herodotus makes clear, this was also a world of extreme ethnocentrism and brutal wars. The highly diverse material of the Histories, which features myths, stories, and ethnographic portraits of the many peoples of the known world, is united around the rise and decline of the Persian empire: each people is described when they encounter the Persians, the latter being invariably bent on conquest. The work climaxes with the great struggle of an unlikely coalition of Greek city-states led by Athens and Sparta and their ultimate triumph over the Persian invaders. Meditation on war and commemoration of Greek unity and freedom are thus at the center of Herodotus’ narrative. (Incidentally, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that many of the most iconic lines and scenes in the otherwise unrealistic film 300 are actually directly drawn from Herodotus.) Read more

Western Greatness and Its Enemies  

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Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age
by Ricardo Duchesne
London: Arktos, 2017

Prof. Ricardo Duchesne’s first book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (reviewed by Kevin MacDonald in TOQ 11:3, Fall 2011) argued that the West was already a uniquely creative culture several millennia before the industrial revolution led to today’s vast differences in wealth and living standards between it and most of the rest of the world. The West’s uniqueness lay not in institutions such as democracy and representative government, nor in great books and abundant artistic production, nor in free markets and a ‘work ethic’—but in a more primordial Faustian drive to overcome obstacles and achieve great things. The original historical expression of this drive is the heroic ethos which informs Homer’s Iliad and Germanic heroic poetry: the overriding ambition of the aristocratic warrior to achieve immortal fame by engaging in battles for prestige in contempt of his own mortality. This ethos the author traces back to the Proto-Indo-European pastoralists of the Pontic steppes.

Following publication of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, the author turned his attention to the decline of the West. He notes the prescience of Oswald Spengler, the major theorist of civilizational decline of the past century, who anticipated

the eventual exhaustion of the West’s energies in the rise of internationalism, quasi-pacifism, declining birth rates, hedonistic lifestyles, coupled with the spread of Western technology in the non-Western world and the rise of ‘deadly competition’ from Asia.

All this is, of course, right on target. But Duchesne sensed something missing from Spengler’s account. There is one major factor at work in the contemporary West which goes well beyond the spiritual, political, economic or geopolitical exhaustion that was the fate of Rome, China and other ‘old’ civilizations: the massive immigration of cultural and racial aliens. As he remarks, this is “a new variable with truly permanent implications.” Read more

Wagner Reclaimed: A Review of “The Ring of Truth” by Roger Scruton, Part 2

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A scene from Neil Armfield’s 2016 Melbourne production of The Ring

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“Sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage”

Productions of The Ring in the modern era have invariably sought to satirize the drama to subvert the message Wagner attempts to convey. Scruton observes that, notwithstanding the increasingly tiresome preoccupation with dissecting the tetralogy for anti-Jewish and proto-fascistic themes and images (and counteracting them), The Ring is also, on a more basic level, problematic for opera producers because its “world of sacred passions and heroic actions offends against the sceptical and cynical temper of our times. The fault, however, lies not in Wagner’s tetralogy, but in the closed imagination of those who are so often invited to produce it.”[1]

The template for modern productions was set with the Bayreuth production of 1976, when Pierre Boulez sanitized the music, and Patrice Chereau satirized the text. Scruton notes that:

Since that ground-breaking venture, The Ring has been regarded as an opportunity to deconstruct not only Wagner but the whole conception of the human condition that glows so warmly in his music. The Ring is deliberately stripped of its legendary atmosphere and primordial setting, and everything is brought down to the quotidian level, jettisoning the mythical aspect of the story, so as to give us only half of what it means. The symbols of cosmic agency — spear, sword, ring — when wielded by scruffy humans on abandoned city lots, appear like toys in the hands of lunatics. The opera-goer will therefore very seldom be granted the full experience of Wagner’s masterpiece.[2]

This certainly describes the Ring I attended in Melbourne in 2016. While the soloists and the orchestra were excellent, Neil Armfield’s postmodernist, Eurotrash-inspired production detracted from the power of the music and drama. Following established precedent, Armfield set much of the action in a space akin to an industrial wasteland. He lampooned the heroic forging scene by setting it in a tawdry apartment replete with fluorescent lighting, microwave, bar fridge and bunk beds. Fafner (meant to have transformed himself into a dragon) was depicted as a transvestite-like figure smearing make-up on his face and later appearing naked on the stage (see the lead photograph).

Productions like these deliberately sabotage Wagner’s attempt to engage his audiences at the emotional level of religion. They let “sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage, not because they have anything to prove or say in the shadow of this unsurpassably noble music, but because nobility has become intolerable. The producer strives to distract the audience from Wagner’s message, and to mock every heroic gesture, lest the point of the drama should finally come home.”[3] Read more

Wagner Reclaimed: A Review of “The Ring of Truth” by Roger Scruton, Part 1

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Roger Scruton is Britain’s (many would say the world’s) leading conservative philosopher and intellectual. His prolific output includes books on philosophy, politics, art, architecture, music and aesthetics. Scruton, who was knighted in 2016, writes with unusual clarity and fluency and is a model for how to combine analytical rigor with lucidity and accessibility. His critiques of leftist thought are, however, ultimately hamstrung by his unwillingness to stray outside the bounds of acceptable thought. Scruton has assiduously avoided straying into the forbidden fields of race realism or an honest discussion of the Jewish Question.

Despite his timid and ultimately ineffectual brand of intellectual conservatism, Scruton has much to offer readers on the Alt-Right. He has a profound knowledge of European high culture and particularly the Western musical tradition. His analyses of the German composer Richard Wagner are always insightful, and his 2016 book The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung is no exception. It offers readers a rich account of Wagner’s masterpiece though an examination of its drama, music, symbolism and philosophy. Scruton’s goal is to interpret one of the supreme works of the European imagination to “show its relevance to the world in which we live.”

Wagner’s Ring cycle is enormous in every way. Performed over four evenings, and made up of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, it lasts some fifteen hours. Its composition began in 1848, a year when Europe was torn by nationalist and democratic revolutions, but not finished until 26 years later. The final product is widely considered the finest piece of musical theatre ever written, and even critics of Wagner grudgingly acknowledge the magnitude and importance  of his achievement, agreeing with Tchaikovsky’s assessment that: “Whatever one might think of Wagner’s titanic work, no one can deny the monumental nature of the task he set himself, and which he has fulfilled; nor the heroic inner strength needed to complete the task. It was truly one of the greatest artistic endeavors which the human mind has ever conceived.”[1] The German critic Wilhelm Mohr, who had originally dismissed Bayreuth as “cloud-cuckoo land,” left the 1876 premiere of The Ring comparing Wagner to the “two masters of all masters, Shakespeare and Beethoven.”[2]

The Ring began life as a single drama, devoted to the story of Siegfried’s death as Wagner had extracted and embellished it from his reading of the old German Nibelungenlied and the Icelandic Völsunga saga. The original is a far cry from the masterpiece that Wagner eventually composed from its useable fragments. He looked for a subject that would provide a suitably large-scale vehicle for his vision of contemporary German society and destiny. The result, notes Scruton, while “far from authentic as an account of Viking theology,” is nevertheless “a remarkable attempt to give coherence and meaning to the pagan narratives.”[3] The final product, which Wagner intended to “involve all life” encompasses an emotional spectrum wider than any other opera, from superhuman rage and self-annihilating heroism to the meanest of base emotions. Read more

The Laws: Plato’s Sacred Ethnostate, Part 4: Greek Unity and the Federation against Barbarians

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Greeks vs. Persians

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Greek Unity: Federation against Barbarians

Beyond the family and city-state, the third concentric circle of kinship and loyalty is that of the league of cities or indeed the Greek nation itself. In the Republic, Plato had argued that Greeks should be gentle with one another on account of their shared blood, limiting their engagement in all-out warfare and enslavement to conflicts with barbarians. In the Laws, Plato returns to this theme, praising the federation of Greek city-states against foreign invasion.

After the family, the collection of families, and the city-state “being founded in succession over a vast period,” finally “we discover this fourth state” (683a), the generally loose and fractious leagues or confederations of Greek city-states as a potentially even higher form of social organization.

Plato discusses the mythical history of three city-states founded by the descendants of Hercules — Sparta, Argos, and Messene — which had together formed the Dorian League. The confederation was meant to protect not just themselves but the Greek nation itself:

Well then, it’s pretty obvious that they intended the arrangements they made to protect adequately not only the Peloponnese but the Greeks in general against any possible attack by non-Greeks — as for example occurred when those who then lived in the territory of Ilium trusted to the power of the Assyrian empire, which Ninos had founded, and provoked the war against Troy by their arrogance. You see, a good deal of the splendor of the Assyrian empire still remained, and the dread of its united organization was the counterpart in that age of our fear of the Great King of Persia today. Troy, which was part of the Assyrian empire, had been captured a second time [as recounted in the Iliad]. To meet such dangers the Dorian army formed a single unified body, although at that period it was distributed among the three states under the command of the kings (who were brothers, being sons of Hercules). (685b–d)

Plato laments however that the Dorian League was short-lived, despite the fact that all three cities were ruled by brothers: “if they had done as they intended and had agreed a common policy, their power would have been irresistible, militarily speaking” (686b). Read more

The Laws: Plato’s Sacred Ethnostate, Part 2: Social Cohesion and Just Inegalitarianism

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Artist’s impression of Spartan wrestling.

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A Holistic Rule of Law Aiming at Inculcating Virtue and Social Cohesion

Plato’s main innovation in the Laws is to have pioneered the notion of the “rule of law.” He constrains the Magnesian regime in a complex system of laws and courts of appeal, guaranteed by the so-called Guardians of the Laws, by which all officials were liable for prosecution for misdeeds. In the Laws Plato asserts boldly: “any state without duly established courts simply ceases to be a state” (766d). Plato the “totalitarian” is also the forerunner of the very notion of the rule of law and checks and balances, which would prove so influential for Montesquieu and the American Founding Fathers.

Another innovation: the laws are to have preambles, meant to persuade the citizens by rational argument of the necessity of a given action, with coercion to be used only if that fails. Thus the laws use two methods: “compulsion and persuasion (subject to the limitations imposed by the uneducated masses)” (722b). The law, devised by reason, is to be a “golden and holy” cord, pulling upon the souls of the citizens, towards virtue. Plato advocates a reformative penology aiming to improve criminals rather than harm them (854a). He expects citizens to “exact the vengeance of his fatherland” against those who would subvert the laws (856b).

While aware of the disadvantages of an inflexible and overly general law, Plato hopes nonetheless to escape the rule of men and establish the rule of reason embodied in law. The Greek word nomos means both “custom” and “law,” and indeed Plato’s notion of law sometimes explicitly extends to a society’s culture and traditions as a whole. He observes, as many have since, that the constitution and laws ultimately depend on “unwritten customs” and “ancestral law,” which “are the bonds of the entire social framework, linking all written and established laws with those yet to be passed. They act in the same way as ancestral customs from time immemorial, by virtue of being soundly established and instinctively observed, shielding and protecting existing written law” (793b–c). For Plato, politics and lawmaking are not merely matters of administration or management, but of education and customs. This is to say that, for Plato, respecting traditional culture is at the center of the statesman’s work.

Plato’s high ambition is again evident: his Laws do not aim to create a perfect legal text, but rather to imagine a society whose traditions, customs, basic law, and regime are all working to make the citizens tend towards virtue. This notion of law and custom obviously rejects the modern notion of a “private sphere” supposedly outside the domain of politics. Plato points out that “the state’s general code of laws will never rest on a firm foundation as long as private life is badly regulated, and it’s silly to expect otherwise” (790b). In this, Plato is not being uniquely authoritarian, but shares a view in common with Aristotle and Greek legislators in general. Read more