Loud at eve he valentines
Good morning, friends, and welcome to February. It’s been a busy start to the year…
The Life of The Life of Greece
In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I took a look at the recent biography of one of my favorite writers, Edith Hamilton (author of The Life of Greece, among other books). The biography itself is something of a disappointment, but it’s always worthwhile to go back through Hamilton’s work. Was she a dispassionate scholar of ancient history? No. She was an advocate for the best within humanity—which she believed came to life in ancient Athens. Here’s an excerpt:
[Hamilton’s] writing is notable for its unusually clear style and her focus on reason and other life-affirming values. These virtues strike one instantly upon opening The Greek Way, which starts with a bold argument that Greek civilization was not an ancient civilization at all, because
that which distinguishes the modern world from the ancient, and that which divides the West from the East, is the supremacy of mind in the affairs of men, and this came to birth in Greece and lived in Greece alone of all the ancient world. The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.
To the Egyptians, Hamilton argued, “the center of interest was the dead”; theirs was a despotism ruled by an all-powerful priestly class who taught that “the enduring world of reality was not the one [a person] walked in along the paths of everyday life but the one he should presently go to by the way of death.” Given that mysticism, it’s little wonder that for the Egyptians—and their cultural heirs today—“human suffering and death . . . was never conceived of as a cost in anything of value” and that their civilization stands as an eternal monument to monkishness and tyranny. The Greeks, by contrast, “rejoiced and turned full-face to life”—creating culture, art, and philosophy fundamentally oriented toward what we now call secular values. “To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before.”
Hamilton drew this distinction—reason versus mysticism, modern versus ancient, life versus death—throughout her examination of Greek culture. In her view, even tragedy (a Greek invention) was fundamentally life-affirming, because a well-written tragedy depicts a protagonist with exalted virtues brought low in a way that leaves the audience with “the poignant joy of heroism” and a “pain changed into, or let us say, charged with, exaltation.”
Economic freedom and “civility”
I spoke recently at ASU about the relationship between “civility” and economic liberty, and Discourse Magazine asked me to adapt my remarks into an essay. They published it a few weeks ago and you can read it here. Excerpt:
We are only civil—and should only be civil—when we are confident that our lives, liberties and properties are not at risk. To paraphrase “The Federalist,” there can be no civility in a society where the stronger faction can unite against the weaker. If a political disagreement can result in you losing your home, your business, your marriage, your control over your own body—a society in which there are no boundaries to protect us against politics—there is no civility. There can at best be only a counterfeit form of civility. That is to say, a reign of terror.
This terror can be masked with layers of politeness and euphemism—courtly flattery and codes of honor—but in the end, these are not civility, because civility arises from a sense of mutual respect and benevolent confidence in our fellow citizens, whereas courtly terror is based on viewing others as threats, who must always be handled like rattlesnakes. One must be polite to a rattlesnake—but never civil. For exactly the same reason, one does not find civility in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, or in the Ayatollah’s Iran, any more than one found it in Stalin’s Russia.
No society can be civil that is not firmly rooted in the principles of classical liberalism—that is, on the principles that all people have a basic right to their own lives, liberties, properties and the right to pursue their own happiness. The breakdown in civility we are witnessing today is a symptom of an increasing breakdown of those classical liberal values—values that protect our individual freedoms against political disagreements. Recall that the purpose of our Constitution is not merely to facilitate democracy—a word which does not even appear in the Constitution—but instead to protect us against democracy. And yet year after year, government takes more control over our lives, meaning that more of our futures depend upon who gets elected to office. That makes it inevitable that the temperature of our political conversations will rise, because so much more is at stake.
Free speech, parents’ rights, homelessness, and other issues before the Court…
At work at the Goldwater Institute, we’ve been defending freedom of speech, the rights of parents, and taking on other vital issues, which you can always read about at the Institute’s blog In Defense of Liberty.
I also joined “Morning in America” to discuss the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court arguments in the homelessness case, Johnson v. Grants Pass (and its predecessor case, Martin v. Boise):
The National Constitution Center at ASU and at home
Also, this evening (Feb. 1) I’ll be speaking on a panel at ASU Law School, in an event sponsored by the National Constitution Center, promoting the project I worked on with several other con-law folks a while back, drafting proposed new constitutions and new constitutional amendments.
And couple weeks ago, I also joined the Center’s podcast We the People to talk about the two Supreme Court “Chevron deference” cases. These are some of the most watched and most interesting cases of the year, and I had an especially good time talking about them with Jeff Rosen and Prof. Christopher Walker. You can listen here. And you can read Goldwater’s brief (which we discuss in the podcast) here.
“Sandefur? Put him in with the other snakes…”
Speaking of ASU, I began teaching my class on the American Dream this month, and was amused to discover that the classroom they found for me is in the Life Sciences building—where the ground-floor hallways are lined with display cases containing live rattlesnakes. How Arizona can you get?
When I posted this fact on Twitter, one follower had the perfect reply:
Coming this month
I’ll be heading to Pennsylvania to speak at the Federalist Society at Penn State in Carlisle on Feb. 15, and to Florida for a conference about free speech. But first I’ll be heading to court in the years-long dispute over Pinal County’s illegal transportation excise tax. Five years after an Arizona judge declared that tax unlawful, neither the County nor the Arizona Department of Revenue has returned a dime of it, so we’re heading back to court tomorrow to ask a judge to force them to do so.
In the meantime…
I’ve been enjoying the jazz album Moods by the Henrik Gunde trio (which consists of Gunde on piano, Jesper Bodilsen on bass, and Morten Lund on drums). Strangely, although it’s got a fine ECM feel, it’s not an ECM record. It’s a collection of standards with a very fine late-night quality. My favorite track is “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” which has a superb restrained swing that’s quite apt for the wintertime: