I continue to learn the most amazing things on Facebook–generally the things I thought I knew in grammar school and had to spend a lifetime unlearning. Today, someone recirculated a meme with the old wheeze that “idiot” comes from a Greek word meaning private citizen who did not take an interest in public affairs, to which a libertarian–very reliable people, libertarians, one knows what they are going to respond before a question is posed–that the polis was everything.
In Chapters 5-8, Machiavelli surveys, without a trace of moral indignation, the various ways by which a prince may gain power and, perhaps more importantly, how his long-term success is at least partly conditioned by the means he used to establish his rule.
Suppose, per impossibile, we were to carry out an even more thoroughgoing plan of reform. You can fill in any impossible details and requirements that suits your fancy. Even if we were to gain the whole world, we would still be left with a population of some 300 million clueless lost souls, without any skill or knowledge that is not technical, with churches that are the enemy of Christ, with a commercial culture that is more morally degrading than heroin and methamphetamines.
Among the many reasons why a regime would wish to eliminate all knowledge of antiquity and the insights ancient writers offer is the desire to shield the subject masses from anything that might make them uneasy. We might view it as a kindness on the part of the ruling class.
If Christianity is difficult to conceive without the Old Testament, then Christendom is an impossibility without the legacy of Greeks and Romans, and the Etruscans made no small contribution to the character and culture of Rome, though very little of the Etruscan legacy is obvious.
Why go to Tuscany in the Winter, when you can go to Sicily, Crete, or Costa Rica? Everyone has read or seen Under the Tuscan Sun, but who wants to endure “Under the Tuscan Wind, Rain, and Flooding?”
It is a main thrust of philosophical Liberalism (and of ancient Stoicism) that human beings have a duty to rise above not only animal but parochial and sectarian passions. Any attempt to justify revenge must therefore represent a step back toward the jungle from which we escaped all too recently.
I’ve just finished reading what is sometimes called Shakespeare’s Ovid because the playwright borrowed from it extensively. The passage below comes in the twelfth of the poem’s fifteen books.
Robert E. Lee, who in so many ways epitomized the highest ideas of Christian civility, summed up the common feeling in his famous statement that, “Duty is the most sublime word in our language,” adding the injunction: “Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less.”
By way of prologue it is important to understand the relation and the difference Civilization and culture, for both are used to describe the complex of ideas and actions that define the life of a particular people in a particular place at a certain time
