Why Classics Matters

The Cultural Relay: Pericles, JFK and why The Classics Matter

And then we ourselves, assembled here today, who are mostly in the prime of life, have, in most directions, added to the power of our empire and have organised our state in such a way that it is perfectly well able to look after itself both in peace and in war.

For Pericles self-sacrifice was, perhaps, the noblest of pursuits. An Athenian does not feel badly for the parents of a fallen solider, he says, for the soldier's was the greatest fortune—to die for the noble ideals of the Athenian state.

Pericles' Funeral Oration is a magnificent creation. Whether we credit it to the man himself, or to the brilliance of the historian Thucydides, the oration stands, along with many other literary creations of that golden century, as perhaps the most unmovable of monuments to the greatness of the first democracy.

Upon revisiting Pericles' oration today, I was struck by the ease with which I identified with many of his most important notions. This is a discourse of state that we of the twenty-first century are familiar with. Twenty minutes on google, and several interesting digressions later, I came upon John F. Kennedy's inaugural address …

... the torch has been passed to a new generation—born this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage … Let every nation know that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

The torch has been passed, indeed. For JFK, as it was for Pericles 2,500 years before, it is self-sacrifice that is the mark of a good citizen and the mortar of a good state; Kennedy is, after all, imploring his fellow Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Such parallels must have us wondering, have we travelled so very far?

The dangers here are well known. In many ways it is our differences that define us. One can't help, for example, but feel a twinge of trepidation, when we turn to the Funeral Orations' finale: “perhaps I should say a word or two on the duties of women”; if the reduction of women to the status of an after-thought is disagreeable, what follows is down-right objectionable: “the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men”.

However this may be, we must acknowledge our debt to the ancients. Even if we wish to reject the torch metaphor—the dark ages were, after all, one leg of that relay—and argue, for instance, that no two ages can or do have anything in common, we must still be struck by the synergy between Pericles and Kennedy.

Of course, Pericles didn't invent the notion of self-sacrifice any more than Kennedy did. And Kennedy just as likely picked it up from any of a number of sources. But even if Kennedy had never read the oration, what are the chances that every one of the thinkers, writers and leaders that were his formative influences had missed it?

All of this should not be seen as an attempt to push the connection too far. Rather, the aim here is to point out that we have shared ideals, and that the creative and thoughtful minds of our times are continually connecting us to that lost age. The classical world is not a tail bone. It is a very real and functional part of who we are.

To this I would add that there are important lessons to be drawn from their experience. When Pericles died, Athens had just entered the war that would, in less than three decades, reduce them from a place of undisputed leadership to a position of subjugation. Pericles' Funeral Oration was, in fact, a swan song. The Athenians were soon to overstretch their capabilities in engaging in a disastrous naval campaign. While this may seem as far remote to, say, the war with Isis, or the Ebola outbreak, as can be imagined, we do well to remember that the Athenians were facing a battle-hardened and warrior people, and that it was the plague that killed Pericles. The interest, as well as the obvious limitations, of such parallels is clear.

Perhaps, in concluding, and in finally declaring my position, I can go back to Thucydides. In the opening to his histories Thucydides tentatively writes:

... if he who desires to have before his eyes a true picture of the events which have happened, and of the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things, shall pronounce what I have written to be useful, then I shall be satisfied.

At the very least, I can say that Thucydides should be satisfied; if to no one else, the Classics are useful—and important—to me.

The Required Change Of Climate

The Required Change of Climate

There is a clear sense of frustration in the community, at least in those of us who reject the ostrich life, towards our complete inability to even attempt a serious response to climate change. Now, I am no scientist. What little I know of the world and of these matters in particular I have garnered from a range of sources, reputable through dubious, forming the opinion that climate change is real and that it will affect my life sometime in the not too distant future. I speak of the future, but in reality it is affecting me now. For the chronically neurotic, the Michael Jordan or Donald Bradman of the anxious condition, it takes little more than the occasional shock and awe news campaign to shake the timbers of my existence, and to have me reaching for the nearest bottle and retreating into a darkly lit room. However that may be, I believe that in many more moderate cases, the threat, the apprehension, the sheer sense of the unknown, regarding this subject is unsettling, and that each summer, as the temperatures grow hotter, and the fires  more wild, and the floods more savage, we all bear an increasing burden of knowing. Knowing that this is happening, that we are—each of us—to blame, and that, and this is by far the most frightening part, it is only going to get worse.

Worse. The term seems like a banality really when speaking of matters that amount to impending catastrophe. And make no mistake that is what this is. Forget for a moment the notion of the complete collapse of our fragile ecosystem, which is of course, on some current projections, not an outlandish scenario. Instead, imagine if ten or twenty percent of the inhabitable earth today was no longer such in twenty or fifty years’ time. Where would those humans who would be displaced go? What refuge will there be when water supplies and arable land are drying up--barren? As a nation, Australia devotes a sizable portion of our wealth towards keeping people from shores; people who have attempted to come here to escape conflicts that, often enough, we have had a hand in initiating. We are talking here of a tiny percentage of people, most of whom are genuine refugees, who have paid vast sums of money (at least in the contexts of their own lives) to make a perilous journey across the ocean in search of a better life. We struggle with this phenomenon politically, ethically, logistically. Now imagine tens of millions of people arriving on our shores, desperate because their homes no longer exist. Because their food stuffs have run out, because the only water they have access to is the ever increasingly acidic, rising tide of the ocean. What means would we have for coping with such a situation? I look at the current discourse—I shudder to think.

And what do people do when resources are scarce and there are only enough for some—they fight. Conflict is the natural condition for humans, be that intellectual or sporting or dramatic or rhetorical. But when food and water resources become scarce, conflict takes on a new dimension. It is survival. And it is war. This is the future we face. This is the world we leave to those who are to follow us. And as much as we don’t talk about it, as much as we search for the obscure and the eccentric, scientists on the fringes (or in the pockets of those who would have it otherwise) for those mitigating claims about temperature reductions, about gaps between carbon emissions and temperature rises, about false reporting and lefty conspiracies, as much as even this humble neurotic takes solace in this, it is still nothing but mere, and pernicious, delusion. Go out this summer; go out into the 45 degree heat and breathe. Breathe deep. Breathe deep and think hard. Ask yourself, was the air this thick twenty years ago? When I was a child, or a young man, or middle age woman, all those years ago, did the sun burn quite so hot? I defy those with their heads up here where the air is hot and the reality stark—I defy them to continue to ignore the science, to seek the safety of ignorance, to bury their heads once more in the cooling sands of delusion.

But fear not. The repressed inevitably returns. Consider popular culture of late. Cinema is replete with apocalyptic visions of mass unrest and ecumenical destruction. Who could watch World War Z, for instance, a rather mediocre attempt at the depiction of mass displacement and unrest, and not think about the changing situation of our world? Who cannot see in the imaginative abstractedness of the popular vision an escapism from the cold—or perhaps hot—realities of our plight; why does Games of Thrones appeal so strongly, to so many? Why is it that Manhattan, the crowning edifice of our consumerist paradise, is being destroyed on an almost movie by movie basis, and that the only hope for its (and our) redemption are the heroic and fundamentally inhuman Avengers? These are perhaps loose connections, but the recurrent theme of threat to our civilization and mass, uncontrollable unsettlement certainly has resonance to me, and judging by the audiences that these movies and shows are pulling, to many others as well. Fear is infecting the collective psyche, and it is not movie heroes and abstracted visions of overcoming that we require. It is action, action in the real, action in the public sphere, that is what we crave.

This is, of course, invective in the highest degree. If I slip into hyperbole, I do so with the passion of a Shelley, and with a shared and perhaps misguided belief in the power of the word. In this, I would end with a plea. It is not to the politicians or voters or judges or even scientists. These are abstractions and instruments of institutions, whose value is clear, but not to my purposes. No, my plea is to each and every human being on Earth. Each subject, as a perceiving, thinking, feeling entity. This is a plea on a psychological level, a level that sets aside the need (for now) for collective thought and action, and goes to the heart, to the stem, to the very beginnings of all action; that deep element within ourselves that drives us to do. And it is simple: Engage. Read. Think. Act.

I owe no small measure of the formation of these ideas to Cormac McCarthy. It is not so much to his ideas, brilliant as they may be, to which I refer here. But rather to his utilization of fiction in capturing the sense of my own feeling, and in creating a vision of the world I cannot accept as our future. Anyone who has the mind, and perhaps the inclination, and needs that final push into the realm of reality, should read his The Road. It will shake you, it will move you, and perhaps even frighten you. But it will show you a vision of the world that we may soon be facing. Perhaps, sooner than you think.

Algis Vabolis,

Undergraduate Student at the University of Adelaide, South Australia.