Classical Americana

 

Among the many claims about the field of Classics made in the New York Times' lengthy profile of Princeton Classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta was that “Classics as we know it today is a creation of the 18th and 19th centuries.” As has already been pointed out, it's a claim that only holds up if we allow the phrase 'Classics as we know it today' to do a lot of work. Classics as a modern academic field within a modern, research-intensive university system may well owe its origins to the emergence of the modern research university in 19th-century Germany. But Europeans have been turning back to classical cultures of the Greeks and the Romans pretty much since Rome fell.

So much is clear from more or less every stage of European history, from the Dark Ages, when monks kept the classical literary tradition alive by copying Greek and Latin manuscripts; through the Renaissance, when humanists like Politian translated and emulated classical writings; to the Enlightenment, when, as Rachel Poser, the author of the New York Times piece, puts it, “a sort of mania” for Greece and Rome took hold of the intellectual classes. The idea Europeans simply invented the classical tradition out of whole cloth in the Renaissance is, in other words, contradicted by virtually the entire history of European culture before then.

It might be objected at this point, as a last-gasp effort to save Poser from what seems like a fairly obvious clanger, that her focus was on the United States, not Europe. 'How these two old civilizations became central to American intellectual life,' she writes (with my added emphasis) 'is a story that begins not in antiquity, and not even in the Renaissance, but in the Enlightenment.' So perhaps her hypothesis isn't that a relationship with Greco-Roman culture became central to European culture only in the 18th and 19th centuries (after all, that's plainly wrong); but simply that Greece and Rome only became big in American culture during the Enlightenment. 

Now, that's obviously true, but it's true for what should have been a fairly obvious reason. Greco-Roman culture only becomes baked into American culture and institutions during the Enlightenment because that's when the United States developed into an independent nation. In other words, there was no United States of America before 1789, and there weren't even any permanent Anglo settlements in North America until 1607. Depending on where precisely you place the Enlightenment, that makes it inevitable that the Greek and Roman classics won't have a big presence in American life before then.

But still, wouldn't the kind of engagement with Greek and Roman history that is on show in the Federalist Papers have been impossible without the Enlightenment? When colonial Americans did wrestle with the Greco-Romans, didn't they always do so in an Enlightenment vein? Well, no. According to Eric Adler, Greek and Latin formed a large part of the curricula of the colonial colleges. And they were taught in a way that reflected two traditions, humanism and scholasticism, that stretch back well before the Enlightenment. 

They were, in fact, taught largely in a Christian vein. This brings us to a fact about Western cultural history that's so obvious that we are, it would seem, no longer capable of seeing it. The Europeans that settled North America in the Early Modern period were, almost to a man, Christians; and Christianity is a religion with roots in the ancient Mediterranean world. When the British settled North America, their religious and educational elites brought the study of Greek and Latin with them in large part because many of their holy texts (the Gospels; influential translations like the Septuagint and Jerome's Vulgate; the works of the Church Fathers) were written in those languages.

We can, as it happens, actually test the thesis that, had Europeans come to the Americas before the Enlightenment, they would have brought an interest in the Greco-Roman classics with them. We can do this because, as you might be aware, Europeans (mainly Spanish and Portuguese) did actually arrive in the Americas well before anyone's starting-point for the Enlightenment. And, sure enough, if we look at Spanish accounts of their encounters with local people, we find references to Greek and Roman historiography. Many of these accounts were, of course, written by priests of the Christian religion, a religion which, it bears repeating, was a central part of the Europeans' cultural inheritance and which has its origins in the Greco-Roman world. 

The real reason that Greece and Rome play such a significant role in the culture of the nascent United States, then, should be fairly obvious. Early Americans (at least the educated ones) talked about Greece and Rome because they came from Europe, and European culture was rooted in the Greco-Roman past. European settlers in the Americas, from Quebec to Buenos Aires, brought European culture with them, and European culture had a significant classical component. The specifically Enlightenment style of classicising engaged in by men like Georgia founder James Oglethorpe, whose utopian schemes were influenced by Plato, was simply the latest wave of classical influence. That it involved engagement with the classics was, in itself, more of a continuation of pre-existing European cultural habits than anything fundamentally novel.

All of this should, to repeat, be fairly obvious to anyone who knows anything about global cultural history. But the power of the ideology that currently has a stranglehold on US colleges is considerable; so considerable, in fact, that it leads college professors to write statements that any layman can see are plainly false. For Rebecca Futo Kennedy, for example, of Denison College, Ohio, modern Americans ‘are no more or no less the heirs of the ancient Greeks than they are the heirs of ancient China.' 

In fact, Americans are clearly more indebted to ancient Greece than they are to ancient China. Their monumental architecture is Hellenizing in style; banks and state capitols look vaguely like the Parthenon, not the Foguang Temple. Modern Americans' political system was created by men who drew on and discussed Polybius and Plutarch, not Confucius and Shang Yang. The higher registers of their main language, English, is full of borrowings from Greek, not Mandarin. And the holiest text of the dominant religion (the New Testament, Christianity) is written in koine Greek, not Old Chinese.  

Once again, virtually everyone who hasn't spent too much time around a modern American Humanities department knows this, and knows why this is the case. Americans are more indebted to ancient Greece than to ancient China because the United States was created largely by Europeans; and European culture, for stunningly obvious reasons, has always been more indebted to ancient Greece than to ancient China. 

But this simple fact destroys one of the central contentions of the extreme 'social justice' approach to Classics profiled in Poser's New York Times piece. This contention, as Poser describes it, is that ideas about the classical tradition 'cannot be separated from the discourses of nationalism, colorism and progress that were taking shape during the modern colonial period, as Europeans came into contact with other peoples and their traditions.' 'Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below,' she goes on. And she quotes Harvard professor Paul Kosmin: 'That exclusion,' he tells her 'was at the heart of Classics as a project.'

This is wrong-headed in any number of ways. For a start, as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has had to remind historians, the idea that exclusion, inter-group violence, and slavery was a product of the Enlightenment gets things exactly the wrong way round. One of the things that most clearly distinguishes Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment cultures is precisely their relative inclusivity and pacifism, not to mention their distaste for slavery, an eccentricity that in itself sets them apart from virtually all previous civilisations. 

But the simplest way we can see that the radical revisionist view is wrong is by going back to the obvious facts about Western cultural history that I've referred to in this post. The new would-be orthodoxy is that the classical tradition 'cannot be separated' from ideas that took shape in the modern colonial period. In fact it can, as a simple glance at the classical tradition before the modern colonial period makes clear. 

Locked in?

Whence Woke? There are many theories. Though some, like Lindsay and Pluckrose, stress the movement's origins in predominantly French political theory, many point to its striking predominance in English-speaking countries, a.k.a. the Anglosphere - and even Pluckrose and Lindsay acknowledge the origins of certain key concepts, such as intersectionality, in US academia. This is especially interesting - if that is the word - considering the Anglosphere's prominence in the history of liberalism. How did such an illiberal way of thinking grow out what looked like such liberal soil?

One possibility is that Wokeism developed for its own reasons, but was then spread around the world (at least in the first, and hopefully last, phase of the pandemic) by the English language and the networks and lifestyles that go with it - rather as world-beating rates of obesity have spread from Austin to Auckland with the diffusion of car-focused suburbs and fast-food joints. Another possibility is that it's something else in 'Anglo-Saxon' culture that has done most of the work, the most common culprit being not the flaxen moustaches but the residual habits of Protestant Christianity, with its predilection for puritanism and witch-hunts. 

The point of this short post is just to add another idea to the mix - probably a bad one, but, well, that's what blogs are for. Intellectual historians - and intellectuals tout court - have a tendency to over-state the importance of high-faultin' philosophical ideas on world history, and I'm well aware that's a danger here. So I offer this as just one more factor that may have played a role in the deep history of this new form of extremism. 

The hypothesis is just that the philosophical tradition of empiricism, long strong in English-speaking cultures, may have had a hand here. Philosophers like Locke and especially Hume argued that what we know comes overwhelmingly (even, perhaps, entirely) from our senses. This was a tendency in English-speaking philosophy even until the time of A.J.Ayer (a disciple of Hume) and Bertrand Russell. 

Locke and Hume and Berkeley argued, against continental 'rationalists' like Leibniz, that innate faculties (e.g. reason) played a relatively small part in how we came to understand the world. The debate involved famous puzzles like what would happen to a blind man who was suddenly given the ability to see. Would he simply take in knowledge of his surroundings like the rest of us, or would he be somehow cognitively unprepared for all the new information coming his way? (The answer, it turned out, was the latter.)

Part of Kant's contribution, of course, was to try to reconcile these two traditions: we understand the world, he suggested, by taking in evidence according to certain in-built schemas. Though empiricism retained a role in Kant's brand of idealism, the radical empiricism of the likes of Hume had clearly been left behind.

The problem for radical empiricists of various stripes since Kant has been our growing knowledge of human development and psychology. Aristotle and Spinoza had both intuited that different beings have different in-born tendencies, though neither of them quite understood why. Now we have a much better idea: we act in typically human ways (and even in typically male and female ways) to a large extent because of our genetics. (And the same can be said of cats and bears and flies and jellyfish).

Some writers still like to warn about the dangers and wrong-headedness of 'essentialism,' but, of course, essentialism isn't always wrong. We expect humans to act in certain ways (not like rocks, say, or gold- or star-fish) because we attribute (consciously or not) a humanness to them. We think they - we - have some mysterious human essence. And we're right. Except that it's steadily becoming less mysterious.

The later Wittgenstein, who can be read as a kind of born-again fundamentalist empiricist, tended to want to dissolve human tendencies and actions into 'forms of life,' even to the extent of seeming to say that internal mental states could be read off outward actions. What more aggressive empiricist invasion of the private sources of innatism could there be?

Psychological behavioralists followed this lead. Chomsky cut his teeth criticizing them, in particular by pointing out that languages seemed to have an innate aspect to them. Children across the world seemed to have been born with a 'language instinct.'

Since Darwin, Mendel, and the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolutionary theory and genetics, we've had a pretty good idea of how this works (even if the details have turned out to be far more complicated than we expected). Our genes encode certain inherited information, and this includes tendencies towards certain behaviours. We can even estimate the proportion of certain traits that are genetic as opposed to environmental (though lay people tend to underestimate the extent of the genetic influence that scientific studies support). 

One of the most obvious features of the Woke culture on university campuses is the hostility (among many other sorts of hostility) towards ideas about human nature. Most of the current elite are outspoken 'blank-slatists,' preferring to believe that we are born as blank slates for our environments to write on, rather than the largely pre-designed, if highly responsive, robots we more closely resemble. 

The sources of this hostility are multiple and have been written about extensively elsewhere. It's my suggestion here, though, that the Anglo-Saxon tradition of philosophical empiricism may be among the roots of this reactivity. Even if we have plenty of good evidence - overwhelming evidence, at this point - that our behaviours are strongly influenced by our genetic essences, there's a strong tendency among English-speakers to want to treat humans as random streams of sense-perceptions. If this is at all right, it's another way (along Puritanism) in which Wokeism emerges, not as a cosmopolitan revolutionary movement, but as an peculiarly reactionary brand of Anglo-Saxon traditionalism.