A Breath of Fresh Air!
Commentary on the Intro of "The Ancient Regime in Classical Greece", by Dr. Paul Rahe
Contents
The Tyranny of the Familiar
One of the brilliant things Dr. Paul Rahe achieved across all his books was reintroducing the ancient regime to modern man. Modern man's perspective of politics, morality, and civilization in general is fundamentally damaged — so much so that it would be regarded comical if it were not so disastrous. Liberal Democracy, in America at least, has had tremendous success: a heroic founding, glorious conquests, enduring a Civil War, leading the industrial age, and coming out on top in two World Wars. Rahe notes that a consequence of this success has resulted in the narrowing of our perspective. The ancient regime is now completely unknown to us and it makes it incredibly difficult to think outside the boxes Liberal Democracy has defined.
Since the publication of his three-part epic Republics Ancient & Modern in 1994, the grand narratives provided by Liberal Democracy have been falling apart. The need to broaden our perspective and escape the tyranny of the familiar has never been more urgent. Behind whatever may be deemed as its success, there are still “unsatisfied longings that lurk just below the surface within modern bourgeois societies.” In volume one, The Ancient Regime In Classical Greece, Rahe’s presentation of the ancient regime is a breath of fresh air and can help this subterranean energy, this noble Dorian spirit, descend down and find meaningful expression against the decaying remains of Liberal Democracy.
There is, then, reason to ask what has gone wrong, what accounts for the modern republic's long period of vulnerability in the international sphere, and what explains the malaise now besetting it at home, for one must wonder whether modern republicanism suffers somehow from a debilitating, genetic disorder. These are, however, questions that it is far easier to pose than to answer, for the very character of modern republicanism is cast into the shadows by its brilliant, initial success when pitted against the old order.
The men who made the American Revolution were arguably the most self-conscious legislators in human history. They claimed that they were initiating "a new order of the ages," and subsequent events in France and throughout the world suggest that they knew whereof they spoke. One consequence of their remarkable accomplishment is that the ancient régime is no longer with us, and that makes it extremely hard for us to adequately understand the political options that were open to them and the reasoned choices that they made.
If we honestly survey the globe today, it’s either some form of Liberal Democracy or ugly tyrannies all around. Yes, there are small pockets where you will find something marginally different, but ancient history is truly the only portal we have to escape the tyranny of the familiar and catch a glimpse of alternatives to our status quo.
In past ages, one could gain perspective on one's own regime and come to discern its peculiarities by traveling, as Herodotus, Machiavelli, and James Harrington did, and thereby one could attain an awareness of the very considerable range of human possibilities. But when we travel today, we encounter polities by and large constructed in our own image and peoples uncannily eager to imitate our ways. Those polities which are not like ours are with the rarest of exceptions decidedly, if to our way of thinking, strangely, modern; and they are, in nearly every instance, tyrannies. For the comparative study of republicanism, historical inquiry is our only recourse. In no other way can we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of the familiar. In no other way can we come to see our own world with the discerning eye of a visitor from abroad.
Without a solid understanding of the ancient regime, we are limiting the range of possible reactions against Liberal Democracy and closing our eyes to a whole range of future possibilities.
In sum, our status as children of the Enlightenment provides us with an elaborate and highly plausible rationalization of our own way of life--which tends to prevent us from seeing the polities of the past as their citizens saw them, and which in turn virtually rules out our seeing ourselves and our own regime as they would have seen us.
The Primacy of Economics & Its Consequences
I recall Montesquieu said somewhere, “There is no word that admits more various significations, and has made more varied impressions on the human mind, that that of liberty.” Ancient and modern regimes had very different ideas when it came to liberty. The chief consequence resulting from the abovementioned tyranny of the familiar is a view of liberty that regards economics and materialism as supreme. On the other hand, the ancient regime’s understanding of liberty valued the primacy of politics and civic virtue. Rahe gives us a quote from the eighteenth-century Swiss republican Benjamin Constant to lay out this difference between the modern and ancient views of liberty in the clearest of terms:
“We are no longer able to enjoy the liberty of the ancients, which consisted in an active and constant participation in the collective power. Our liberty, for us, consists in the peaceful enjoyment of private independence. The share which, in antiquity, each had in the national sovereignty was not, as with us, an abstract supposition. The will of each had real influence: the exercise of that will was a pleasure intense and often repeated. In consequence, the ancients were disposed to make many sacrifices for the preservation of their political rights and their share in the administration of the state. Each, sensing with pride all that his suffrage was worth, found in this consciousness of his own personal importance an ample recompense.
This compensation no longer exists today for us. Lost in the multitude, the individual hardly ever perceives the influence he exercises. Never does his will leave any impression on the whole; nothing establishes in his own eyes his cooperation. The exercise of political rights, then, offers us no more than a part of the enjoyment which the ancients found there; and, at the same time, the progress of civilization, the commercial tendency of the epoch, and the communication of the various peoples among themselves have multiplied and have given an infinite variety to the means of personal happiness. It follows that we ought to be more attached than the ancients to our individual independence.
For the ancients, when they sacrificed that independence for political rights, sacrificed less to obtain more — while we, in making the same sacrifice, would give more to obtain less. The purpose of the ancients was the sharing of the social power among all the citizens of the same fatherland. It is this to which they gave the name liberty. The purpose of the moderns is security in private enjoyment; and they give the name liberty to the guarantees accorded by the institutions to that enjoyment.”
Rahe also provides a quote from Montesquieu to emphasize the point:
“The Greek political writers (politiques), who lived under popular government, acknowledged no other force able to sustain them except that of virtue. Those of our own day speak of nothing else but of manufactures, of commerce, of finance, of wealth, and of luxury itself."
The consequences of liberal democracy and the primacy of economics have been nothing short of devastating and demoralizing. GDP is king, the morality of mutual consent towers over every old law and custom, vapid individualism and droning on about “just wanting to be left alone” has reduced civic life to much ugliness and boredom. I can go on and on, but one of the very real consequences of this has been the decision to offshore American manufacturing to China. The result has been catastrophic for the nation, and it will take some sort of Herculean act of statesmanship to reverse course on this front. We were told that if we manufactured abroad and invested in global supply chains, things would be cheaper, the lives of the average citizen would be better, and China would even become a liberal democracy too. None of this has happened, and nobody has been held accountable. Instead we have hollowed out our heartland, put the average citizen in a worse economic position than their parents, and turned China into a peer competitor and an existential geopolitical threat.
The China situation alone should be enough for people to throw Liberal Democracy into the garbage can of history. Judge liberal democracy by its results, not the platitudes regurgitated by regime mouthpieces! Look at where we are at today and be honest with yourself. Never has there been a greater act of national self-harm; never has a ruling elite abused and demoralized a “free” citizenry in such a totalizing way. Now is the time to reconsider the primacy of politics and reinvigorate the depressed population with the fire and noble spirit of the ancient regime.
The Priestcraft of Our Modern Clerks
Accessing what the ancient regime has to offer is often difficult because modern academia has done so much work to defile it. Contemporary social “scientists” are nothing more than resentful midwits that project their own perversions and infirmities onto the past. Ancient man would either subjugate or drive spear through such people:
But from the homogenized products of contemporary social science, they are quite unlikely to be able to derive what they need most. Indeed, to the extent that they succumb to the reductionist project that animates the various social science disciplines, their history will be little more than a pack of tricks played on the dead. The method systematically applied by all but a few modern students of these subjects deconstructs and reduces the phenomena in a fashion that disarms the past and obscures its true character. These disciplines, which pretend to be impartial, are in their very impartiality profoundly partisan. Behind their studied neutrality lies an arrogance unchecked because unremarked.
The contemporary social “scientist” are bugmen through and through. They are an excellent reflection of Nietzche’s Last Man They would never submit to the idea that people in the past are in fact nobler than they. Perspective is so shallow and wretched.
The one thing that contemporary researchers are taught to take for granted and never to question is that the men and women whom they study were wrong, and deeply wrong, above all else because these individuals were unaware of their own ethnocentricity-unaware, that is, that the beliefs for which they claimed to live and for which they were sometimes willing to die were arbitrary and nonsensical, if not self-serving. Almost never are well-trained modern researchers open to the possibility that the moral and political visions guiding the communities they study are, in fact, superior to those which inspire their own research. Almost never are they willing to apply to their own disciplines, to the presuppositions of those disciplines, and to the aspirations of social scientists like themselves the reductionist method to which they subject the opinions of those on whom they do their research. To do so would be to unmask the prejudices and the ambitions which inspire the project in which they are engaged. To do so would be to debunk the priestcraft of our modern clerks.
Rahe’s work again is so important becasue we can help us get past the modern view. Open Ancient Greece up to us again. New vistas of possibilities. Distance between the classical citizen of a polis and the bugman of modern bourgeois society. Its about shattering perspective. Modern clerks reinforce a very toxic perspective. Knowledge of ancient regime shatters it.
In the process of domesticating the past and rendering what was once thought noble and sublime familiar and banal, this scholarship deprives that past of anything but antiquarian interest. If, for example, "the fundamental vectors of Athenian society" were simply "the needs for food, shelter, security, and conflict resolution," as one distinguished classical scholar has recently argued, classical Athens would be a proper subject for idle and self-congratulatory curiosity alone, for not much more than the accident of circumstance would distinguish the ancient Greek citizen from the modern bourgeois, and the latter could justifiably take considerable pleasure and pride in contemplating the remarkable advances that have been made in the course of the intervening centuries in meeting those fundamental needs.
I‘m very excited to see the direction of this series! Please write more!