Hometown Alert - Victor Davis Hanson


[Via Penner] Boston Globe has a solid article on Victor Davis Hanson. One thing that you get from reading VDH is his rootedness in the Valley. His first book, The Western Way of War, had its genesis in his reflections on the difficulties that classical armies must have had in destroying grape vines, which reflection came from growing up on a Valley farm where he had had to uproot a few vines. So, the article's title - The Farmer - seems very appropriate.

One thing the article slights is Hanson as a war gamer. I know from a high school classmate of mine - who come to think of it was a scion of one of the big West side farming dynasties - that Hanson used to war game with him. I don't war game, but having hung out with those folks, and played Empires in Arms with them, you can't discount the encyclopedic knowledge they develop along with an unembarrassed and unhesitating belief in the correctness of their conclusions, something which can only be developed in "armchair generals." If you've ever known any war gamers, and if you look at VDH and Glenn Reynold's writings, you can see some of that characteristic. [This isn't a criticism. Not suffering fools is occasionally a virtue.]

I found the following passage in the article particularly pertinent to the Jihad I have been on for the last week:

For Hanson, it can seem like everything is at stake in these battles. The Greeks are not just a subject of academic research to the 49-year-old farmer, but the purveyors of a living legacy. That legacy lies at the core of all that's best about Western civilization, and disrespectful left-wing academics, in his view, risk squandering it.

Hanson is hardly the only scholar to think in such terms. But many contemporary classicists ask whether it is really possible to trace the Greek legacy like a single thread over the millennia. Were there really such impermeable fences between East and West in antiquity? After all, ''One of the great lessons of the ancient world was a genius for cultural synthesis,'' says Gregory Nagy, director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. What we call Western civilization incorporates Egyptian influences, for example, along with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam-all of which originate in the Middle East. Nagy adds that during the medieval second caliphate, ''the intellectual world of Aristotle was preserved in Baghdad and Basra in a way it wasn't further west.''

Hanson is unimpressed. Plato and Aristotle ultimately had no impact on Arab society, he claims, because ideas that challenged Islam were uniformly rejected by theocracies. In the West, by contrast, rational inquiry opened the way toward progress and prosperity. (emphasis added.)

Exactly right.