Anti-This and Anti-That

David Gress, the Anglo Americanized son of a Danish actress now back in Copenhagen at the Danish Institute of International Affairs by way of the Hoover Institution and fellowships further east, declares that his subjects in “From Plato to NATO” are “the logic of world history” and the “changing identities of Western civilization.”

Gress does not lack ambition, but inevitably he fails in the first aim, perhaps not seriously meant: history, demonstrably, has no logic, so that none can be uncovered. True, the accepted record of past events often seems logical in retrospect, but that is only because we make sense out of incomplete information by imputing logical motives and presuming rational explanations. As soon as one starts investigating it in depth, “history” dissolves into an untidy mixture of contradictory human impulses and transient circumstances. The researcher who wants to denounce one more time, for instance, the cruelties unleashed on the populations of Central and South America by the blind fanaticism and murderous greed of the Spanish crown discovers that, by 1600, the archives of its Council of the Indies were stuffed with memorandums calling for the recognition of the inherent right of American natives to life, liberty and property.

Next, the researcher discovers from the bitter complaints of angry colonists that those memorandums became actual government policy. Long before Alexis de Tocqueville’s splendidly democratic Americans started the large-scale expulsion of natives from desirable lands with the consequent episodes of starvation and massacre, the deeply reactionary Spanish autocracy (the Inquisition was going full blast) was actively protecting native rights wherever its writ was effective. Autocracy can be liberal; democracy can be illiberal. Likewise, during the imperial centuries of each, the British crown was increasingly democratic at home and firmly autocratic in its colonies, while with the Spanish crown it was the other way around. Each had its reasons, but no universal logic can be extracted from either.

When it comes to charting the changing identities of Western civilization, Gress revisits the familiar tale of how Western civilization could always be construed from any desired admixture of creatively individualistic Greece or systematic, order-inventing Rome, with Jewish, Christian and Germanic elements added. One’s preferences create “history”: Softies adore Greece but Catullus, too; toughies admire Rome but Sparta as well; German nationalists worshiped both classical Greece and Germanic warriors; Christians can include Virgil, if not pornographic Martial; and all can choose between Hobbes and Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Each can have a choice because there never was a Western Civilization comparable to the fixity of, say, Chinese civilization (only experts can tell whether a scroll was painted in AD 200, 900, 1400 or last week), only a protean and dynamic cultural volcano that keeps erupting.

What Gress calls “The Grand Narrative” was the standard authorized version of American college education, much attacked from the 1980s as an elitist white male preserve by eminent “historians” such asJesse Jackson (at least as good a historian as Edward Said or Martin Bernal of Black Athena notoriety: Bernal says the Greeks stole all they knew from black Africans, which implies--as he seemingly does not recognize--that they have been declining for 3,000 years). The results were totally predictable. While college administrators tremble and appease (World History 101 from a strictly black-lesbian-handicapped perspective is no doubt being offered somewhere), those who seek to learn still start with Homer, Thucydides, Cicero and other Western classics. Only those who want teaching jobs in trendy universities read the unlovely outpourings of feminists, Afrocentrists or multi-culturalists as they write their own victimological dissertations.

Actually, lasting harm is not being done. True, many American students are wasting time reading laughably shoddy texts. But it all will pass soon enough, while Homer et al. will be read so long as literacy persists, long after current polemics are utterly forgotten. Who reads now the early Christian writers who wanted to abolish all pagan learning?

Gress does not bother with the latest attack on Western Civ., instead using most of his 560 pages to recall earlier interpretations of Western development--a great many of them. He even goes down the well-worn track of the controverted “Fall of Rome” explanations from Gibbon onward. Like others, he forgets about the Roman Empire of the East which we call Byzantium, whose non-fall suggests that it was not brain-rot from lead water pipes or Germanic vigor that destroyed Rome but educational decline which opened the way for an ever-so-gradual barbarization. Along the way, Gress, a good Dane, has his laugh at Sweden’s expense by recalling the embarrassing Olaus Rudbeck who, in the 17th century, anticipated the Afrocentrists by writing a book that claimed the Swedes were the source of all culture (they came from Atlantis, you see).

“From Plato to NATO” comes off as a sequence of digressions; it includes appraisals of both the Hollywood costume drama “The Fall of the Roman Empire” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in between lots of potted histories and micro-biographies. The reader may therefore think that Gress finally has no message to convey. But he does. He wants to rehabilitate what he grandly calls the “third force of Western identity”: the anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment (of course) Christian traditionalists, including Eliot, but best exemplified in this century by the German professor of jurisprudence, Carl Schmitt, still the supreme icon of the European far right. As did his predecessors from Joseph de Maistre onward, Schmitt argued that pluralist, analytical, open-to-everything cosmopolitan liberalism was lethally corrosive of the tradition, religion, patriotism and stable political order that anchor human identity and give meaning to life. Schmitt, who naturally disliked Jews as the embodiment of modernity, enthusiastically supported Hitler and helped to write the first Nazi constitutional laws, which for a while saved Germany from the liberal-democratic blight. Gress writes: “The problem with 1990s liberal prejudice was not . . . that it raised questions about people who supported or agreed with Hitler . . . [but] that it painted all such with the same broad brush, as though all traditional conservatives who ever said a kind word about National Socialism were thereby corresponsible for killing six million Jews.”

At that point, readers are apt to notice that in 560 pages of text, there is virtually nothing on the Jewish condiments in the Western Civ. minestrone, not even the invention of kingship subject to law or of monotheism, for that matter. But while Gress seeks to defend his hero from the banal charge of anti-Semitism (who cares, when many a lowly American visa officer did more harm than 100 Carl Schmitts), he leaves Schmitt totally exposed to the far graver charge of political stupidity. Only a fool could have mistaken the modernist Hitler for a traditionalist, or thought that his eagerness to have Germans fight his wars was proof of patriotism (by 1944, Hitler concluded that the Russians were racially superior and deserved to win) or that the gangsterish and anti-aristocratic National Socialist Party could guarantee a stable social and political order.

Finally, in “From Plato to NATO,” Gress himself is revealed as a defender of a Western civilization of the kind that does more harm than good. The anti-this and anti-that traditionalists guard only the lower slopes of the volcano against puny enemies while seeking to stop its modernizing eruptions, the very expression of its endless creativity.