Classical History's Relevance
Classical and Medieval History
Submitted by Admin on Thu, 2006-11-16 06:39by Ryan Setliff
The history and literature of the classics of our distant past, both pagan and Christian, are in need of proper reappropriation for our time, as their memory has been obfuscated and dimmed in the popular imagination. The classics offers lessons from history, moral ideas, insights, and examples of the virtues most conducive to good government and the civil society.
Classics is the discipline that studies the language, literature, history, and civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, two cultures that bequeathed to the West the greater part of its intellectual, political, and artistic heritage. For centuries Western education comprised the study of Greek and Latin and their surviving literary monuments. A familiarity with classics provided an understanding of the roots of Western culture, the key ideals, ideas, characters, stories, images, categories, and concepts that in turn made up a liberal education, or the training of the mind to exercise the independent, critical awareness necessary for a free citizen in a free republic. Times of course have changed, and the study of Greek. 1
As
George Carey notes, "Conservatives have long accepted the teachings of
the classics that underscore the need for regimes to cultivate and
perpetuate the virtues appropriate for their character, if they are to
endure." 2
Therefore, the true conservative is very much a student of the
classics. Instinctively, the conservative recognizes that the present
exists in continuity with the past. As Edmund Burke proclaimed, "People
will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their
ancestors." Gary L. Gregg, II, makes this erudite observation:
Cultures are organic. Fed by the humus of many ages and many nations, they grow and develop in ways the human mind can never truly develop. Attempts to do so have often led the philosopher down dangerous paths of abstraction and tyranny. 3
There is no such thing as making a clean break with the past as utopians would have us believe, and schemes to do so have only proven tyrannical.
- 1. Thornton, Bruce. A Student's Guide to Classics. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003,) pp. 1-2
- 2. Freedom and Virtue: The Libertarian-Conservative Debate. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1998,) p. xi.
- 3. Vital Remnants: America's Founding and the Western Tradition. Gary L. Gregg, II, ed., (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), pp. xx.
Don Vito Corleone, Friendship and the American Regime
Submitted by Cato the Younger on Wed, 2008-05-14 20:38Don Vito Corleone, Friendship and the American Regime by Paul Rahe
The opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola's classic film The Godfather is justly famous, but unjustly neglected for what is tell us about the kind of political society in which we live. Connie, the daughter of Mafia Don Vito Corleone, has just been married, and a celebration is taking place in the ample backyard of her parents' Long Island home. Inside the home, her father is doing business, conferring with a series of visitors who have come to ask for his help. They know that a Sicilian can deny no one's request on the day his daughter is married. In any case, Connie's father is known to be a generous man. As Mario Puzo puts it in the book that inspired the film:
