Excerpted from Pericles’ Funeral Oration, 4th Century BC (Peloponnesian Wars Book 2.34-46):
“We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality…..while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger….instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all…indeed if I have dwelt at some length upon the character of our country, it has been to show that our stake in the struggle is not the same as theirs who have no such blessings to lose…"
In this 2,400-year-old speech honoring war dead, the leader of Athens is making a point of distinguishing his people, the Athenians, from their adversaries, the Spartans. The main message is that where the Spartans spend almost all of their peacetime preparing for war and honoring their Gods specifically in order to better be prepared for war, the Athenians spend their peacetime running their city as an inclusive, participatory place where the arts, sciences, and the general enjoyment of life are encouraged. The speech is of course given during wartime and the Athenian leader claims that Athenians do well when forced into war because they have so much to lose. The Spartans on the other hand, in his view, have nothing to fight for except the fight itself.
Unfortunately, in the end the Spartans prevail, establish tyrannical rule over Athens, and then it takes 30 years for the Athenians to bring enlightened rule back to their city. But for our purposes, the cultural and scientific importance of ancient Athens on the world today was many times that of Sparta, which produced nobody of the stature of say Socrates, Plato, Solon, and Sophocles. It is additionally interesting to note that the Spartans were much more religious than the Athenians and kept their martial society running mainly by exploiting slave labor to the greatest extent possible. Not to say that the Athenians were saints, just that for the ancient world, they were pretty progressive and especially so when compared with the Spartans who would take boys from their parents at the age of seven to start their 30-40 years of military service and whose mothers would bid their sons farewell when they went to war by saying that they wanted to see them return either in victory or being carried home dead on their shield.
So why is this important to us now? I would argue that this Athenian versus Spartan story can serve as an archetype for a conflict that exists in one form or another within every influential society of our current era. Please note that I am saying that the conflict exists within each society and not as much between the societies.
After 9/11 many Americans and Brits pointed to a book published a few years previously called the “Clash of Civilizations” by Samuel P. Huntington that basically claimed that the defining conflict of our time would be between democratic societies that believed in a mostly secular rule of law and fanatically Islamist countries that were bent upon the subjection or destruction of all who disagreed with their narrow worldview. While there is some truth to this when viewed in a regional context in some parts of the world, I don’t believe that this great inter-societal struggle is the defining one of our time because it suggests that there are a set of thoroughly enlightened societies pitted against a set of thoroughly unenlightened societies. This is far too simplistic and sweeping a view to describe most places in the 21st century. In my view, the truth is that this is a struggle within each society between its own Spartans, i.e. people following some hard and fast ideology or strict religious interpretation or blind loyalty to leaders who see the world as a place defined by threats that you should spend all of your time preparing to fight versus each society’s own Athenians, i.e. more tolerant, outward-looking people whose main concern is creating a just and diverse society, furthering the knowledge in the arts and sciences for the common good, promoting public discourse on matters of state, and having a good time when possible.
Versions of these camps definitely exist in the United States these days. One camp suggests that we should do whatever it takes to protect ourselves even to the point of turning our backs on our own notions of the rule-of-law, freedom of speech, the right to privacy, and freedom of association. That camp believes that the US can do no wrong in its efforts, that God himself watches over the nation, and that anyone that disagrees with it is an enemy. Those would be the Spartans. The other camp believes in understanding cause and effect in a highly complex international and national environment that melds access to resources with sense of identity, varying levels of insecurity with mistrust, and that pits extremely free-acting wealthy elements against poorer elements with little control over their own circumstances. This camp believes more in promoting its own security by reducing the motivation to attack it on the part of potential aggressors all the while maintaining its own standards of conduct even if those standards make it more vulnerable. Those would be the Athenians. These are as I said archetypes that I’m using for the sake of making a point. And sure, there are gradations in these things and gray zones in the thinking and the motivations of people, but as anyone who has attended cocktail parties and dinners over the last four years knows, you really end up having to choose sides these days when it comes to matters of our own governance and security.
And this is where I perceive the real "Clash of Civilizations" to be occurring. Within our own society and within most influential societies in the world there is a very two-sided conflict going on between an almost tribal element that demands fierce loyalty and a simplistic world view versus a globalized element that recognizes complexity, wants to be fully integrated and engaged with the whole world, and has no interest in conquest or subjection.
Unfortunately, in most influential countries now, it is the Spartans that have the power. That definitely applies here in the US, where the President says that you are either with us or against us, and where disagreeing with policy is suddenly not supposed to be in the national character. But is it also true in Russia, where the need for a free press was done away with in the late 90s along with any sense that Russia and the outside world were melding together. This of course, coincided with a war in Chechnya. It’s true in China where there was never a free press and where people who say that they would be proud to die invading Taiwan enjoy relative freedom while those who say that they should have a say in whether toxic waste is dumped on their front yards are beaten and incarcerated. It’s true in India where Hindu Nationalists are busily preparing to begin the long slow process of purging their society of all others. You can even see the beginnings of this in Europe where people have remained remarkably quiet about the issue of having foreign government operatives kidnapping some of their immigrants. The list goes on. This same brand of dichotomy exists in Thailand, Egypt, South Africa, you name it.
Anyone out there want to chime in or disagree?
