No, Liberals Don’t Hate the Humanities

An op-ed by Itxu Díaz published on the website of the American conservative magazine National Review on 19 September 2020 starts with the headline “Why Does the Left Hate the Humanities?” It’s a rather surprising headline considering the fact that conservatives have spent decades stereotyping the humanities as a useless field dominated by evil leftists.

The headline becomes a bit less surprising, though, when you realize that, by “the humanities,” Díaz is actually talking about something that might be better termed “white male heritage studies.” He isn’t advocating for people to study, say, Native American history, women’s studies, or queer literary theory; he’s advocating for people to study a handful of specific works of ancient Greek and Roman literature that are traditionally regarded as “classics” from a very traditionalist, heritage-focused perspective.

I am a currently a junior at Indiana University Bloomington pursuing a double major in history and classical studies. My main focus is in the study of ancient Greece. This means I have studied exactly the kind of material that Díaz thinks people should be studying. I agree with him that it is important for people to study the ancient Greeks and Romans. Unfortunately, I completely disagree with him about why and how these civilizations should be studied.

I don’t generally consider myself a “leftist.” Instead, I generally tend to think of myself as a liberal and a progressive. Nonetheless, I realize that, when Díaz complains about “leftists” who supposedly “hate the humanities,” he’s talking about people like me. Here is my response to what he has written.

Díaz’s opening remarks

Here is how Díaz’s article begins:

“Now, while everyone is looking towards science to put right all that’s wrong with the world, it is time to call on the Humanities. To be conservative often consists in being a party pooper. It is not that we enjoy being naysayers, it is just that the world insists on conspiring against all that is good and beautiful. Without Greece there is no beauty. Without Rome there is no language.”

Yep. You read that right. Díaz is apparently starting off by declaring that the Greeks invented beauty and the Romans invented language. This is a terrible way to start. Neither of these statements are correct, either literally or figuratively, nor does Díaz himself even try to support them.

In historical reality, people had both a sense of beauty long before the Greeks and the ability to speak eloquently long before the Romans. In fact, there were actually people making works of great art and architecture and people writing works of great literature long before either of these peoples came along.

Some of the earliest surviving poems were written in the Sumerian language in the third millennium BC. The earliest poet whose works have survived and whose name is known today may be the ancient Mesopotamian poet Enheduanna, who lived in around the twenty-third century BC. She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad (ruled c. 2334 – 2284 BC), the founder of the Akkadian Empire, and served as a priestess of the god Nanna and the goddess Inanna in the Sumerian city of Ur.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the “Disk of Enheduanna,” a bas-relief carving bearing a representation of Enheduanna

Díaz goes on to issue this dire warning:

“Humanists have been warning for years that a return to barbarism is in store for Western society if it continues to turn its back on the classical world.”

Díaz is mistaken about who has been warning this. “Humanists” haven’t been warning that “a return to barbarism is in store for western society” if people don’t pay attention to the Greeks and Romans; right-wing reactionaries have. There is real value in studying the Greeks and Romans, but studying them is not a necessary precondition in order for civilization to exist.

Once again, it seems as though Díaz doesn’t even realize that there have been advanced human civilizations outside of Europe—including in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas—since long before the classical Greeks and Romans came onto the scene.

Before the Greeks, there were the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Minoans, and many other civilizations besides. These much older civilizations of the ancient Near East were extremely influential on early Greek civilization. For instance, it is a widely known fact that the ancient Phoenicians, a people who spoke a Semitic language and whose homeland was located in what is now Lebanon, created the first abjad. The Greeks adopted this abjad, adapted it to their own language, and added vowels, creating the first true alphabet.

Likewise, early Greek artists extensively imitated earlier works of art from the Near East. Egyptian sculpture was particularly influential on early Greek sculpture. Some of the best known Greek sculptures from the Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 510 BC) are kouroi—statues of nude young men with stiff posture that are clearly based on earlier Egyptian statues. The Greeks did eventually move beyond imitating Egyptian styles to develop their own style, but the Egyptian influence was undeniably there from the beginning.

ABOVE: Ancient Egyptian colossal statue of Ramesses II dated to the thirteenth century BC in the Grand Egyptian Museum (left) and the New York Kouros, a Greek statue dated to between c. 590 and c. 580 BC (right). Notice the identical poses and the similar artistic styles.

Works of early Greek literature also display many significant parallels with older works of ancient Near Eastern literature. For instance, the Homeric epics display many parallels to the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the standard Akkadian version of which was apparently compiled by a scribe named Sîn-lēqi-unninni sometime between c. 1300 and c. 1000 BC, relying on and incorporating material from various older poems.

Just to give one specific parallel, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, there is a scene in which the main hero of the epic, who is still alive, speaks to the ghost of his beloved fallen comrade, who tells him about the underworld. Gilgamesh talks to the ghost of Enkidu in Tablet Twelve of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Achilles talks to the ghost of Patroklos in Book Twenty-Three of the Iliad, and Odysseus talks to the ghost of Achilles in Book Eleven of the Odyssey. In all three instances, similar ideas are brought up.

Likewise, the Theogonia, a Greek poem in dactylic hexameter by the poet Hesiod of Askre that was most likely composed in the early seventh century BC, tells a story about how the cosmos and all the deities came to be that is almost certainly related to a very similar story found in Kingship in Heaven or the Song of Kumarbi, a Hittite adaptation of a Hurrian myth dating to around the fourteenth or thirteenth century BC. Both stories have fundamentally the same narrative structure.

In both tales, a god whose name means “Sky” (Anu in the Song of Kumarbi, Ouranos in the Theogonia) is the ruler of the deities until another deity (Kumarbi in the Song of Kumarbi, Kronos in the Theogonia) overthrows him and castrates him. This other deity becomes the new king of the gods, but, somehow or another, he winds up with his own offspring in his belly and somehow ends up disgorging them, leading him to be overthrown by his son, a storm god (Teshub in the Song of Kumarbi, Zeus in the Theogonia), who becomes the current ruler of the deities.

This doesn’t mean that the ancient Greeks just plagiarized their stories off earlier cultures; the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Theogonia all have significant features not attested in earlier works of literature. Nonetheless, it does show that Greek poets were not working in a vacuum and they were influenced by older works of literature produced by cultures that came before them.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem that influenced the Iliad and the Odyssey

Of course, none of this deters Díaz from declaring:

“Without the Greco-Roman legacy, the whole world would be like Antifa: a collective incapable of connecting without the help of a brick.”

From the way conservative media outlets talk about “Antifa” all the time, you would get the impression that they are a massive, highly-organized militant group with a mission to terrorize conservatives and that most progressives either sympathize with this organization or are a part of it.

In reality, Antifa is a decentralized movement of various loosely-affiliated groups, some of which are militant, others of which are not. These various groups have no clear set of universally agreed-upon goals and basically the only thing they all agree on is that fascism is bad. The term “Antifa” is so vague and poorly defined that, in many cases, it is hard to say exactly who it even refers to.

Broadly speaking, anyone who is actively opposed to fascism could reasonably be considered an Anti-Fascist. This is part of why it is so worrying that President Donald Trump keeps trying to declare Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” since, if he does this, he could potentially exploit the vague definition of “Antifa” as a pretext to essentially declare anyone who protests his policies a terrorist.

In any case, the idea that peaceful human connections are only possible because of the Greeks and Romans is absurd. The ability to connect peacefully with other human beings is universal. Does Díaz seriously think that the ancient Egyptians who came before the classical Greeks were “a collective incapable of connecting without the help of a brick”? If he does, then I’m afraid he is woefully ignorant of the Egyptian civilization and its achievements. It takes a lot of “connecting” in order to build a pyramid.

ABOVE: Photograph of militant anti-fascist counter-protesters dressed in black, bearing helmets and shields adorned with red flags, protesting at a rally for the white supremacist group Patriot Prayer in Portland, Oregon on 4 August 2018

The Romans and their language

Díaz continues:

“It is possible that many schoolchildren intellectually kidnapped by progressive pedagogues believe pizza to be the greatest cultural inheritance from Rome.”

It is possible that some schoolchildren believe this. If they do believe it, though, it has nothing to do with them being “intellectually kidnapped by progressive pedagogues” and everything to do with the fact that schoolchildren are generally ignorant about everything. That’s the whole reason why they are in schools and not writing op-eds for widely-read national magazines.

“But believe it or not, even before the whole world spoke Shakespeare’s language, the great imperial language of the West was Latin.”

First of all, the “whole world” does not speak English. The most widely spoken language on earth is Mandarin Chinese, which has approximately 918 million native speakers, who make up roughly 12% of the total population of the planet.

The second most widely spoken language is Spanish—which, depending how loosely you want to define the words “language” and “dialect,” is arguably a dialect of the Latin language. Altogether, Spanish has approximately 480 million native speakers, who make up around 6% of the world’s population. Díaz himself is a native Spanish speaker and a note at the bottom of his article states that it was “translated by Joel Dalmau,” which I am interpreting to mean that the article was originally written in Spanish and translated into English by someone other than Díaz.

English is only the third most widely spoken language, with approximately 379 million native speakers, who make up only around 5% of the total population of the planet. If 5% of people on earth somehow qualify as “the whole world,” then it seems to me that Díaz is defining “the whole world” very restrictively.

As for Latin being “the great imperial language of West,” I’m pretty sure that every educated adult already knows this.

“More than half of our modern English language comes from Latin.”

Whether or not this assertion is true depends on how loosely you define the term “our modern English language” and the term “Latin.” There is an extremely large number of words derived from Latin that are listed in English dictionaries, but many of these are words that most people either don’t know or don’t use on a regular basis.

Furthermore, a lot of the words in English that have passed into English through Latin don’t actually originate from Latin, but rather passed into Latin from other languages. For instance, as I discuss in this article from June 2020, there are a lot of very common words that have passed from Latin into English that originally came from Greek, including chair, lamp, olive, idiot, butter, school, priest, sock, and squirrel. The word person comes from Latin, but it originally entered Latin through Etruscan, a language spoken by a people in northern Italy that went extinct during the Roman era.

“Some Latin words prove very useful in election campaigns. ‘Fool,’ for example, is as old a term as human stupidity: It comes from Old French and ultimately from the Latin follis, which alludes to a bellows, a small swollen leather bag.”

Everyone knows what the word fool means, including people who don’t speak a word of Latin, and I don’t see how knowing the word’s etymology is “useful in election campaigns” at all—other than as an incredibly superficial way of convincing people that one is erudite.

The use of Latin in contemporary western conservative politics is more about hollow posturing and virtue-signaling than about anything productive or meaningful. To give an example of this, Sean Hannity’s recent book Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink initially featured a Latin motto on the front cover that supposedly meant “Live free or America dies.”

As I pointed out in this article from May 2020, however, this motto was nothing but garbled nonsense that someone had clearly just gotten off Google Translate and put straight onto the front cover of the book without even bothering to consult with anyone who knows anything about Latin. The purpose of the motto wasn’t to convey any meaningful point, but rather to convince potential buyers that Hannity was a lover of tradition.

ABOVE: Image of the original cover of Sean Hannity’s book, bearing the original unintelligible Latin motto that someone clearly just got off Google Translate

Other Roman achievements

Díaz continues:

“Beyond Latin, as Dave Barry wrote, ‘The Romans spent the next 200 years using their great engineering skill to construct ruins all over Europe.’”

The “Dave Barry” who is cited here is presumably the American humorist known for profoundly erudite historiographic works such as ”The Greatest Invention in the History Of Mankind Is Beer” And Other Manly Insights From Dave Barry (2001) and Boogers Are My Beat (2003). It is unclear to me why Díaz thinks it is necessary to cite such an author who clearly has no expertise or background in classical history to support such a mind-numbingly obvious statement that the Romans built some stuff.

Moreover, the statement that Díaz quotes here from Barry is actually wrong in several significant ways. For one thing, the Roman Empire was primarily centered around the Mediterranean Sea, not Europe; the Romans never conquered any lands north of Germany, but they did conquer all of North Africa and large parts of the Middle East.

Indeed, some of the most famous Roman monuments are actually in North Africa, the Levant, and Asia Minor. The city of Leptis Magna in northern Libya, for instance, has some of the most impressive Roman ruins anywhere—thanks in part to the fact that, as I discuss in this article from September 2019, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus (ruled 193 – 211 AD) was born there and heavily sponsored the construction of monuments in the city after he became emperor.

The Romans were also building things for a whole lot longer than just two hundred years. The Romans first became the dominant power in the Mediterranean through their victory over the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars (lasted 264 – 146 BC) and they retained at least nominal control over most of the Mediterranean world until the Arab conquests of the Levant and North Africa in the seventh century AD.

Finally, the Romans weren’t building “ruins”; they built various structures, including temples, marketplaces, monuments, libraries, tombs, aqueducts, bridges, and so on. Most of these structures have now fallen into ruins, but they weren’t built as ruins. They were built for ancient people to use, not for modern people to admire.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the colossal Arch of Septimius Severus in the city of Leptis Magna in Libya

Díaz continues:

“Thanks to their efforts, we have inherited from them Roman law, the best architecture, the arts, the calendar, and the Christian religion. In the political arena, Rome left us institutions such as the Senate — something for which we are still waiting for an apology.”

It’s true that modern western legal systems are heavily influenced by Roman law, that most western countries still use the Roman calendar, and that the United States Senate is loosely modeled on the Senate of the Roman Republic. These are all fair points.

On the other hand, Díaz’s claim about the Romans giving us “the best architecture” is extremely dubious. For one thing, Roman architecture was heavily influenced by earlier Greek architecture. The Romans did make extensive and innovative use of new architectural elements, such as vaults, arches, and domes, but Roman architecture still fundamentally couldn’t have existed without Greek architecture having existed first and the two architectural styles are inherently tied together.

Even if you accept the premise that classical Roman architecture is distinct from and superior to earlier Greek architecture, the claim that classical Roman architecture is “the best” is subjective and dubious. I’m quite an admirer of classical Roman architecture, but I wouldn’t call it “the best” architecture ever, since, even if we confine ourselves strictly to the European architectural tradition, there’s no denying that the Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque architectural styles are all pretty great too.

To be sure, all of these styles are influenced by earlier Roman architecture, but they all took new directions and incorporate features not found in classical Roman architecture.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the exterior of the Hagia Sophia in İstanbul, built in the Byzantine architectural style

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the nave of Canterbury Cathedral in England, built in the Gothic architectural style

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the west façade of the Notre-Dame de Paris, another great Gothic cathedral

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the interior of the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola at Campus Martius in the city of Rome, built in the Baroque architectural style

If you move outside of Europe, there are all kinds of other amazing architectural styles to explore, many of which are very different from classical Roman architecture. For instance, ancient Egyptian architecture is definitely very impressive.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of what remains of the Great Hypostyle at Karnak

I’m also quite an admirer of Islamic mosque architecture.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the iwan on the south side of the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan in Iran

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a portion of the interior of the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the interior of the north dome of the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan

Hindu temple architecture is quite impressive as well.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Virupaksha, a seventh-century AD Hindu temple in Bangalore in southern India

Traditional Chinese architecture is also rather hard not to admire.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda, a Buddhist pagoda in the Tang capital of Chang’an, built in 652 AD during China’s Tang Dynasty

Oh, and who can forget Ethiopian architecture, with its impressive monolithic churches?

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the rock-hewn Church of Saint George at Lalibela in Ethiopia

Oh, and there’s also Maya architecture for that matter!

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Temple of Kukulcan, a Maya pyramid at Chichen Itza

I think you guys get my point. There are lots of works of great and impressive architecture all over the world and I don’t think it is fair to say that any one architectural style is “the best.”

Moving on, the claim that the Romans gave us “the arts” is certainly not accurate, considering that, even if you take a very strict definition of the word “arts,” the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians were practicing “arts” thousands of years before the legendary date of the founding of Rome.

It’s true that Christianity originated and first rose to prominence in the Roman Empire, but it was not a Roman invention; it originated among Jewish people who were living under Roman rule and, for the first few centuries of its existence, it was perceived by most Roman citizens as a bizarre eastern cult. It was in only the fourth century AD after the conversion of the emperor Constantine I that Christianity started to become mainstream. (For more on that, you can read this article I wrote in April 2020.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the colossal head of the emperor Constantine I in the Capitoline Museums

An empire built through “love”?

Unfortunately, Díaz’s claims just keep getting sillier:

“If we are able to admire our immense classical heritage nowadays, it is not because of the old empire’s charm, but because of the way it was built. Chesterton once shed light on this, saying: ‘Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.’”

The Romans did some great things. As I think I’ve said several times already, I’m quite a fan of Roman literature, art, and architecture. On the other hand, I’m not sure I would describe the Roman Empire itself as “great.” It was not built through love, but rather through centuries of warfare, bloodshed, enslavement, and oppression of native peoples throughout the Mediterranean world.

The Roman conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, which lasted from 58 to 50 BC, is estimated to have resulted in at least 1,460,000 people dying in combat, at least eight hundred Gallic towns being destroyed, and at least a million Gauls being enslaved. And that was just one of the many wars Rome fought to expand and maintain control.

I’m not saying that everything related to the Roman Empire is evil. There are some upsides to the Roman Empire. For instance, it brought several hundred years of relative peace and stability and it allowed the exchange of ideas and cultures throughout the Mediterranean world.

That being said, war, imperialism, conquest, and enslavement are evil. I don’t see how anyone in their right mind can say that the killing of the millions of people in the name of empire was justified just because we got some neat art and poetry out of it. Whatever good the Romans may have done, the way they built their empire is certainly nothing to celebrate.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a marble relief carving from the Greek city of Smyrna in Asia Minor dated to c. 200 AD showing a Roman soldier leading two captives who are likely destined for enslavement

The glory that was Greece…

Next Díaz moves on to talk about Greece, which is a bit unusual, since the Greeks actually came before the Romans. Unfortunately, he can’t seem to think of a single specific idea the ancient Greeks thought of that he actually likes, so he merely praises the Greeks for the fact that they had ideas at all:

“As for Greece, without a doubt, their greatest contribution was the ideas. Yes, there were good ones and bad ones; but the Greeks imbued them with an important novelty: They made it fashionable to reflect upon which ideas were good and which were bad.”

People in every part of the world during every period of history have thought about which ideas are good and which ideas are bad. The Greeks didn’t make this any more fashionable than, say, the Egyptians did or the Hebrews or the Indians or the Chinese.

If you’re going to praise Greek ideas, you should at least be able to name a few right away that you think are good. At the very least, say something about Platonism, Peripateticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cyrenaicism, or some other specific Greek philosophical school.

ABOVE: Mosaic of Plato’s Akademia from the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in the Roman city of Pompeii

The Greeks and “gender ideology”

Seemingly unable to find a specific Greek idea he actually likes, Díaz decides to praise the Greeks for supposedly not having an idea that he doesn’t like:

“Gender ideology would never have prospered in Greece.”

By “gender ideology,” Díaz is, of course, referring to any ideology that seeks to promote the interests of people who are not straight, cisgender men. He is right that there were no organized movements in ancient Greece that were devoted to promoting the rights of women or LGBTQ+ people. Nevertheless, in many ways, the roots of modern gender-related social movements do extend all the way back to distant antiquity.

For instance, as I discuss in this article from September 2020, we don’t have much record of what women in ancient Greece thought about their status, but we can safely assume that at least some of them believed that they were equal to men. Even works by famous male authors aren’t totally devoid of concern for the rights of women. For instance, the Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BC) includes a speech by the character Medeia in his tragedy Medeia in which she calls attention to the issues women at the time faced.

The philosopher Plato (lived c. 427 – c. 347 BC) was certainly not a feminist in the modern sense, but he did argue that there is no essential difference between men and women when it comes to the practice of virtue and he even reportedly allowed women to study at his school on the Akademia in Athens.

Meanwhile, as I discuss in this article from June 2019, homosexual activity was considered normal in ancient Greece within certain parameters. Pederasty was ingrained in elite male culture. Throughout the classical period, it was widely accepted among Greek male authors that the characters Achilles and Patroklos in the Iliad were what we would consider gay lovers. Even Alexander the Great is rumored to have had a gay relationship with his general Hephaistion.

The female poet Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BC) famously wrote poems in which the female speaker describes her sexual desire for other women in vivid terms. Sappho’s poems were widely read and performed and she remained widely revered throughout the Greek-speaking world, even after the rise of Christianity. (The popular story that medieval Christians rounded up as many of her poems as they could find and burned them is a convenient modern fiction.)

Finally, as I discuss in this article from August 2020, there were people in the ancient Greek world whom we would consider transgender and intersex. Greek mythology is replete with tales of gender-bending. The Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 AD) includes a dialogue about a fictional trans man in his Dialogues of the Courtesans. According to multiple contemporary sources, the famous orator Favorinus of Arelate (lived c. 80 – c. 160 AD), who lived in Roman-occupied Greece for part of his life, was intersex.

The only reason why Díaz doesn’t see this stuff is because he doesn’t want to.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to c. 480 BC depicting an erastes and an eromenos kissing

More vagueness and nonsense about the Greeks

Díaz continues:

“Greek philosophers tended to position themselves with opposing points of view and debate for as many hours as necessary with the aim of perfecting an idea.”

So what? People debate things all the time in all sorts of different cultures. The mere fact that the Greeks debated stuff says nothing if you don’t care about the particular things they debated.

“You would never find a Greek conservative cowering before a controversial issue and saying, ‘Well, as long as I pay less in taxes, I don’t mind if a transvestite visits my children in class to talk about sexual diversity.’”

Everything about this scenario Díaz imagines is anachronistic. There were no public primary schools in the modern sense in classical Greece. Formal education was largely reserved for the well-to-do and it primarily took place through private instruction given to a single student or small group of students by a tutor.

While what we consider “sexual diversity” certainly existed in the ancient world, the term itself did not exist. It is therefore silly to imagine what an anonymous, ahistorical “Greek conservative” would say about a political question that he certainly never would have encountered.

The Greeks and “political correctness”

Now, of course, as a disgruntled conservative, Díaz feels the need to complain about modern “political correctness”:

“In the classical world, hesitant and complacent politically correct attitudes were not considered a sign of a good education but of a very deficient one.”

In case you’re unfamiliar with conservative lingo, “political correctness” is code for “any vaguely progressive idea that I personally happen to dislike.” Saying that a view is “politically correct” is just a way of delegitimizing it without discussion. Ironically, when conservatives dismiss progressive ideas as “politically correct,” they are doing precisely the same thing they accuse progressives of doing.

In any case, while the ancient Greeks would not be familiar with modern political issues, they certainly had plenty of unwritten rules of social and political decorum. The philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BC) wrote a treatise titled On Rhetoric in which he talks extensively about how every speech should be carefully tailored to the particular occasion and audience for which it is intended and how speakers should try to avoid offending their audiences whenever possible.

It’s true that the ancient Greeks valued the idea of παρρησία (parrhēsía), which means “bold or candid speech,” but παρρησία didn’t mean that anyone could say anything they liked whenever they liked to whomever they liked without consequences. The word παρρησία generally connotes the idea of speaking one’s honest opinion to people with power and authority—not the idea of belittling and insulting disempowered minorities.

ABOVE: Roman marble statue of the famous Athenian orator Demosthenes, based on a Greek original from around 280 BC or thereabouts

Stereotyping liberals

Díaz carries on, presenting a wildly inaccurate stereotype of liberals as lazy, good-for-nothing, humanities-hating elites who pretend to embrace Marxism as an excuse for not working:

“Whatever the case may be, if today Humanities spark contempt from the Left, it is because they often refute their latest occurrences backed by immutable ideas that have matured for almost 30 centuries. That and because of what Hesiod wrote about the dignity of work, perhaps with future limousine liberals wearing Marxist masks in mind: ‘Work is not a disgrace, idleness is a disgrace.’”

Wow. There’s a lot to unpack here. First of all, the humanities don’t “spark contempt from the Left”; what sparks “contempt from the Left” are the efforts that Díaz and conservatives like him keep pushing to turn the humanities into white male heritage studies.

Moreover, his attempt to portray liberals as elite, lazy ne’er-do-wells who despise labor is comically inaccurate. I don’t know of any liberal who has ever thought that labor is a “disgrace.” All the liberals who I know personally are either gainfully employed or have intention to be gainfully employed some day.

Likewise, the idea that liberals are ultra-wealthy elitist snobs who drive around in limousines is also very inaccurate. I’m sure there are probably a few liberals out there somewhere who are like that, but the vast majority of us are not. Indeed, I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever met a person who I knew was liberal who owned a limousine.

Moving beyond his egregiously inaccurate stereotyping of liberals, Díaz also gets Marxism totally, fantastically wrong. For one thing, very few liberals are actually committed Marxists; most liberals are fairly moderate people who just believe that the government needs to protect ordinary people from predatory business practices and who don’t necessarily support a full-on socialist revolution. Meanwhile, the idea that Marxism is just an excuse used by elitists for not doing any kind of labor is silly, considering that the whole idea behind Marxism is empowering the working class.

Finally, even though Díaz tries to quote Hesiod as some kind of moral authority, it’s worth remembering that not everything Hesiod wrote about morals is necessarily true. For instance, Hesiod believed that women were created by Zeus as a punishment for men, that all women are inherently evil, and that no woman can ever be trusted under any circumstances. Here is what he says in his poem Theogonia, as rendered in Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s prose translation:

“For from her [i.e. Pandora] is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth. And as in thatched hives bees feed the drones whose nature is to do mischief — by day and throughout the day until the sun goes down the bees are busy and lay the white combs, while the drones stay at home in the covered skeps and reap the toil of others into their own bellies — even so Zeus who thunders on high made women to be an evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil.”

“And he gave them a second evil to be the price for the good they had: whoever avoids marriage and the sorrows that women cause, and will not wed, reaches deadly old age without anyone to tend his years, and though he at least has no lack of livelihood while he lives, yet, when he is dead, his kinsfolk divide his possessions amongst them. And as for the man who chooses the lot of marriage and takes a good wife suited to his mind, evil continually contends with good; for whoever happens to have mischievous children, lives always with unceasing grief in his spirit and heart within him; and this evil cannot be healed.”

I may be naïve here, but I doubt that even a conservative like Díaz would be willing to publicly endorse Hesiod’s view that women are the cause of all evil in the universe.

Again, just because some revered ancient writer wrote something, that doesn’t automatically make it true.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the so-called “Pseudo-Seneca,” a bronze portrait head dating to the late first century AD discovered in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, believed to be an imaginative representation of Hesiod. (No one knows what Hesiod really looked like.)

Sophokles’s Antigone: a pro-life polemic?

Next, Díaz writes:

“In Sophocles, when Antigone rebels against unjust laws, she does not do it because she wants to confront the king of Thebes, but because she recognizes the existence of a natural moral law, the same one that today we could turn to, even without religion, to reject the murder of babies in their mothers’ wombs.”

For those who are not aware, Sophokles’s Antigone is a tragedy that was first performed in Athens in around 441 BC. The eponymous character is Antigone, the daughter of Oidipous and Iokaste. Before the beginning of the play, Antigone’s brother Polyneikes led an army against the city of Thebes, seeking to take the throne from his brother Eteokles. Eteokles and Polyneikes, however, both killed each other in single combat, resulting in Antigone’s uncle Kreon becoming the new king of Thebes.

By the time the play begins, Kreon has issued a decree that Polyneikes’s corpse must remain unburied because he led armies against the city of Thebes. Antigone defies this decree because she is convinced that it is her moral duty to perform the proper funerary rites for her brother’s corpse. Kreon finds out what she has done and orders for her to be sealed inside an underground cell where she will starve to death.

At the urging of his son Haimon, who is in love with Antigone, Kreon changes his mind and decides to release her from her cell, but it is discovered that she has already hanged herself. In despair, Haimon commits suicide, which leads his mother—Kreon’s wife—to commit suicide as well. In the end, Kreon is left a childless and broken man and he admits that Antigone was right all along.

Somehow, Díaz manages to interpret Antigone as a play about why people should be opposed to abortion, but I think the play is actually far more applicable to instances where people have broken the laws of the state because they felt a moral imperative to do so.

I won’t say that Edward Snowden is a modern-day Antigone, but the moral dilemma he faced when deciding whether or not to disclose the highly classified information that he ultimately ended up disclosing is similar to the one faced by Antigone in the play: a dilemma between following the law and following one’s conscience.

ABOVE: Antigone in Front of the Dead Polyneikes, painted in 1865 by the Greek painter Nikiforos Lytras

Next Díaz gives us a quote:

“By and large, it was Greece that gave the philosopher Leo Strauss grounds to pass the most beautiful and savage judgment on liberal education ever written: ‘Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for ‘vulgarity’; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful.’”

This makes for fine rhetoric, but it is essentially hollow. Díaz is once again resorting to the most superficial possible explanation for why the classics are important. If the only purpose of the classics was to be “beautiful” or pleasing, they would not be nearly as consequential as they are in reality. There are many beautiful and pleasing things in this world that are not worthy of intense, lifelong study. If pleasantness alone were enough to make something worthy of intense study, we’d all be studying flowers, sunsets, and puppy dogs.

“Although, of all the classical world, I suppose that if anything really torments the apostles of modernity it is reading the works of Titus Livius — and in no way am I suggesting that they do. The old historian wrote that the greatness of Rome came about through virtue, and he spoke of the stereotype of the ancient Roman with the epic qualities with which we might speak today of someone such as John Wayne: hardworking, heroic, constant, and a lover of justice. Titus Livius compared this ideal with the customs of his time, becoming a prophet of Roman decadence. If he were our peer, with his ideas, it is likely that he would have had to seek refuge within the pages of National Review, while receiving daily attacks from CNN, the New York Times, and other mass media, raised in mass captivity.”

Of course Díaz makes a comparison to John Wayne. I don’t know why, but, for some reason, conservative American classicists have this bizarre obsession with portraying the ancient Greeks and Romans as tough, manly cowboys standing up against outlaws and injustice while shooting off terse one-liners.

As documented in this post on the classics blog Sententiae Antiquae, this is a portrayal that is especially prominent in the 1998 book Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath.

There’s really nothing in the classical texts themselves to suggest the cowboy image, but conservative scholars just keep returning to it because this image is so ingrained in their particular subculture that they can’t seem to imagine the Greeks and Romans any other way.

If we want to take the Greeks and Romans seriously, though, we have to be able to see them on their own terms as real people within their own cultural and historical context, rather than through the idealized lens of modern cowboy epics.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the actor John Wayne, who is, believe it or not, not a representative of the ancient Greeks and Romans

Science and ethics

Díaz goes on:

“I do not know if it is too bold a statement to claim that Roger Scruton was the Titus Livius of our day, but in any case, he was the most important defender of the Humanities in the worst conditions. Scruton’s reasoning, always elegant, remains effective, as he exposes the limitations that the scientific and the material will always have: ‘that world [material] can be understood completely in another way which also has its truths which are not translatable into the truths of science.’”

“In the 2017 presentation of On Human Nature, Scruton was even more explicit: ‘Science does not know what man is.’ Therefore, science alone cannot make decisions about whether or not it would be right to remove the organs from 50 children if that helped manufacture a vaccine against the present pandemic. For science, obviously, the end always justifies the means. In fact, that is its only reason for being. It is philosophy, ethics, and morals, the immense legacy of classicism, that raise their voices against injustice or against an affront to human dignity.”

I disagree with Díaz’s whole argument about Roger Scruton being the “Titus Livius of our day.” Nonetheless, I do actually partly agree with him here. I believe that, although scientific evidence can certainly inform our moral decisions, science alone cannot tell us what is moral and what is not. Only through philosophy and reason can we determine what is moral.

Nonetheless, I think that most scientists are actually reasonably well aware of this and I think that probably very few scientists would agree with the sentiment that “the end always justifies the means.” Díaz is presenting an egregiously inaccurate stereotype of scientists that seems to be based more on fictional portrayals of scientists in books like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and movies like Jurassic Park than on conversations with real-life scientists.

The benefits and “dangers” of philosophy

Alas, Díaz feels the need to turn around and blame everything on those evil Democrats:

“This is why the Democrats have become suspicious of the Humanities. Philosophy is a very dangerous discipline because it could teach schoolchildren how to think for themselves.”

I agree with Díaz that philosophy can teach schoolchildren to think for themselves—but only when it is taught correctly. When philosophy as taught as a field of human inquiry that is open to change, new ideas, and new arguments and, as part of studying it, students are taught how to make their own arguments, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for liberation and human betterment.

On the other hand, when philosophy is reduced to nothing more than the study of old books written by dead white men, it ceases to be empowering. I think it is important for students to study the works of old philosophers, but it is oppressive for anyone to argue that students must admire or agree with those philosophers. Such a curriculum would be stifling and oppressive.

Moreover, Díaz only seems interested in making students study the works of canonical so-called “western philosophers” like Plato, Aristotle, Seneca the Younger, and Augustine of Hippo. There is so much more to philosophy, though, than just these particular authors.

For one thing, there are plenty of extremely influential “western” philosophers—such as Epikouros of Samos, Arete of Kyrene, Hipparchia of Maroneia, Titus Lucretius Carus, Klemes of Alexandria, Origenes of Alexandria, Plotinos of Lykopolis, Porphyrios of Tyre, Hypatia of Alexandria, Héloïse d’Argenteuil, Hildegard of Bingen, Mary Astell, and Mary Wollstonecraft—who have never really become part of the western canon, even though substantial writings from most of them have survived.

There are also tons of important and influential philosophers from cultures that are not traditionally regarded as “western” whose ideas are worth studying—such as Ptahhotep, Zarathustra, Confucius, Sun Tzu, Mengzi, Asaṅga, Nāgārjuna, Ioannes Philoponos, Al-Kindi, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Zhu Xi, Georgios Gemistos Plethon, and plenty of others. If you confine yourself to only study canonical “western” philosophers, then you are only studying an extremely tiny sliver of all the great philosophers there are to study.

ABOVE: Medieval manuscript illustration of a debate between the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd and the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyrios of Tyre, neither whom is likely to appear on Díaz’s personal reading list

In any case, Díaz persists in his accusation that liberal academics are the ones who are destroying the humanities. He writes:

“Again, it was Scruton who saw it coming, pointing out that hatred for the classical world is not to be sought in the laboratories, but ‘in the universities and cultural institutions, where a kind of morose antipathy to the Western inheritance accompanies a deep suspicion of all those who wish to teach it and to build on it.’ From there, the ideological battleground has shifted. In the end, all those who fail to win in the field of ideas end up declaring war on grammar, but savagely, as if instead of a university it were a Democratic Congress.”

Once again, generally speaking, liberal academics are not opposed to the study of ancient Greece and Rome, but rather opposed to studying Greece and Rome from the particular perspective from which Díaz and many other conservatives want them to be studied.

Many conservatives want the Greeks and Romans to be studied with a strong focus on the ideas of “heritage,” “western civilization,” and “great men” and little or no discussion of the people on the margins of ancient society (e.g. women, slaves, the poor, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, etc.).

Academics, however, generally recognize—or at least try to recognize—that the view conservatives like Díaz keep promoting is a distorted and exclusionary view of history. If your view of history is primarily or exclusively focused on a handful of specific elite men (most of whom come from western Europe), you aren’t really telling the whole story.

Conclusion

I won’t bother responding to the rest of Díaz’s article, since he spends most of it talking about how people who pursue degrees in the humanities can, in fact, find well-paying jobs, which I think is all well and good.

Some people may wonder why I have chosen to respond to Díaz’s article at all, so I’ll tell you the answer: It’s because his article repeats so many of the tired refrains that conservatives have been saying about classical studies for years and his article has thus provided a convenient opportunity for me to debunk some of these refrains. (I talk about some other popular claims made by conservatives about the classics in this article from February 2020, which is written primarily to address the modern conservative fantasy that there is a single, unique “western civilization” with a single set of unique and coherent values.)

Díaz claims that liberal academics are the greatest threat to the study of the classics in the United States in the twenty-first century, but I think this is very wrong. There are two great threats to the classics in this age. The first and greatest is the corporatization of higher education combined with the growing inaccurate perception among students that the humanities are useless and that it is impossible to get a job with a humanities degree. These two factors taken together are resulting in the reduction of humanities departments as colleges and universities relentlessly pursue profit.

The second threat, however, are the persistent efforts by conservatives to co-opt the serious study of classical history and literature and replace it with the kind of distorted, old-fashioned, exclusionary narrative that conservatives like the ones who write for the National Review prefer. We live in an age where the president himself is pushing to replace real history with a feel-good fantasy of American triumphalism. I think it is important to push back against this narrative to hopefully prevent it from becoming even more entrenched.