“History is philosophy teaching by example.” – Thucydides

Western Culture in One Lesson, Part I 

Today, let’s talk about this idea of Western Civilization. The idea that America and Western Europe share a common culture that dates back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. And that this culture is the bedrock that has supported the accomplishments of the West for the last 2600 years.

When I was a kid, it was an accepted fact.

Now, it’s debatable. The ties that bound us together have unwound. Our core values are being called into question. We no longer see ourselves as Westerners in the European tradition. Instead, we are members of political or identity groups – each with its own views – that are fighting with one another like warring tribes.

This is destructive. It’s also not true. Even a cursory review of the institutions and conventions we take for granted – government, democracy, liberty, privacy, the sovereign individual, and economics, among other things – would make it clear that we share much more with the rest of the Western world than we don’t. And that more than 90% of what we value can be traced back to a common source: the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome.

All of the following fields of human knowledge are rooted in Greek and Roman thinking.

* Logic and Reason: first, the Milesian School (circa 600 BC), which gave rise to the scientific method; then, and most influentially, Aristotle (384 BC to 322 BC)

* Mathematics: Pythagoras (582 BC to 507 BC) and Euclid (325 BC to 265 BC)

* Physics: Empedocles (495 BC to 435 BC) and Democritus (460 BC to 370 BC); then Aristotle.

* Ethics: Aristotle and Plato (469 BC to 399 BC)

* Individuality and Idealism: Plato

* Astronomy: Aristarchus (325 BC to 250 BC)

* Geography and Paleontology: Xenophanes (570 BC to 475 BC)

* Stoicism: Zeno (340 BC to 226 BC), Epictetus (50 AD to 138 AD), and Marcus Aurelius (121 AD to 180 AD)

* Medicine: Hippocrates (460 BC to 370 BC)

* Skepticism and Relativism: Protagoras (490 BC to 421 BC), the Sophists (5th and 4th centuries BC), and Pyrrho of Elis (365 BC to 275 BC)

* Politics: Aristotle and Plato

There is a good explanation for this. Before Greece and Rome, primitive religions determined the answers to life’s most important questions – everything from how the world works to how one should conduct oneself.

But ancient Greece didn’t have a state religion. It wasn’t even a sovereign nation. It was a collection of city states, each with its own ideas about ethics, politics, and so on. And when Rome conquered Greece, as Herodotus tells us in TheHistories (430 BC), it adopted Greek culture.

As a result, instead of looking to religion for answers to their questions, the citizens of Greece and Rome began to discuss these issues amongst themselves. And by doing so, they developed what could be called the core curriculum of Western Civilization.

By the way, this curriculum includes much more than the scientific and philosophical categories listed above. The ancient Greeks and Romans also initiated and incorporated into their cultures such big ideas as free trade, currency, democracy, anti-tyranny (Cato 95 BC to 46 BC), duty to country, family values, law (“innocent until proven guilty”), and public service, to name a few.

So don’t tell me there is no such thing as Western Civilization or that Americans and Europeans are not connected to one another by a common intellectual history.

There have been significant contributions to philosophy, politics, and science that came from outside the Western cannon. But not many. It seems to me, from the reading I’ve done (see “Worth Reading,” below), that 90% of the best and most useful ideas were figured out at least two thousand years ago.

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