The Harvest Of Western Civilization's Amnesia

In the concluding chapter of his magisterial book Early Greece (2nd edition 1993), Oswyn Murray noted that "myth and reality" combined in the aftermath of the Persian Wars of the 5th century BCE. "Politically," he noted, the Greek victory "created a new race of heroes, who had surpassed the achievements of their ancestors before Troy." The positive reality is that the Greeks gained both political independence and a new sense of cultural self-confidence. This would seem to be all to the good--were it not for the fact that, as Murray also noted, "Greek culture had been created from the fruitful interchange between east and west" and "that debt was now forgotten." He continues:

An iron curtain had descended: east against west, despotism against liberty--the dichotomies created in the Persian Wars echo through world history, and seem ever more likely to continue, as man revives old ways and discovers new ones for tormenting his soul. (page 301).

Such dichotomies, reified in ethnocentric histories and passed down from generation to generation, form a political mythology that is harnessed repeatedly by demagogues posing as historians or political scientists (witness the writings of the late Samuel P. Huntington).

What result? Now, Murray wrote in 1993, "like the Greeks, it is we the victors who are the new persecutors of a once proud empire; and, like the Greeks, we shall in due course reap our reward." (ibid.)

A quarter of a century later, nothing has changed. In fact, matters have only worsened. Refusing to learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.

(And, yes, the above map ought to put apocalyptic thoughts in the reader's mind).