Earlier this week in Athens, Greece, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered an incredible speech in defense of the Western values upon which America was founded. Marco Rubio’s growth as a thinker and advocate for the centrality of the United States to a peaceful and prosperous world order continues to amaze those of us who first knew him as a seemingly unremarkable local politician and state legislator in Florida.
Naturally, Secretary Rubio’s remarks began with the expected nod to the place Greece, and especially Athens, holds in the foundation of Western democratic political thought and organization – nothing that hasn’t been said a thousand times before.
But then he pivoted to an ancient Greek influence that today doesn’t get the attention that it deserves, indeed it is often denounced and disparaged by today’s Left leaning thinkers, academics and social commentators: ambition, and the drive for excellence in all things.
As Secretary Rubio framed it:
Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown…
Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new. It was this trait – it was this trait that would push the West to create and build things that others could not, marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life…
…Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue; of destiny and fate; of truth, goodness, and beauty; of a code that dictates how men ought to live; of objective standards and ideals to strive towards…
For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence. They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle – to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection…
The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things.
Or as coaches Vince Lombardi and Red Sanders put it: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” an idea the ancient Greeks accepted without question.
There were no participation trophies in ancient Greece. In our view the decline of the West, and the United States in particular, began when excellence and winning began to be held in disrepute, and that being a graceful loser was more important than being the best.
Worse yet is the notion that excellence and being the best are somehow “white” traits that in this age of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion must be expunged from education and the workplace in order to make non-whites feel included – an amusing bit of academic hypocrisy and mental gymnastics given the central place sports and winning play in contemporary African-American culture.
Some commentators on the Right have quibbled with Secretary Rubio’s citation of Pericles, suggesting that the Trump administration’s preemptive military action against Iran is somehow contrary to the great Athenian statesman’s allegedly prudent conduct of the Peloponnesian War.
Our friends at The Spectator were not pleased with Rubio’s celebration of the American “continental empire” and preemptive military action, writing:
It was the best speech a western statesman has given in years, and its diagnosis is right. Europe did spend decades outsourcing its defense and much of its self-respect, and Rubio’s hymn to thumos – “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” – is a serious idea, not a slogan. But listen to the virtues he chose. The Greeks, he said, prized “relentless ambition,” “risk and glory” and “an impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits.” His roll call of heirs ran from Alexander to Caesar to Cortés, and ended with America as “a continental empire.”
That is not the creed of Pericles, the one Athenian statesman Rubio named. It is the creed of Alcibiades. Pericles led Athens into war with Sparta, but his strategy was famously cautious: stay behind the walls, trust the fleet and, as Thucydides records, do not try to enlarge the empire while the war lasts. Conservatives once had a word for that: prudence.
We think they missed the point of Secretary Rubio’s reference to Pericles, and should reread the Athenian’s great funeral oration to honor those who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War, specifically:
Nor are these the only points in which our city is worthy of admiration. We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it. Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and, instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. Again, in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation, each carried to its highest point, and both united in the same persons; although usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of reflection. But the palm of courage will surely be adjudged most justly to those, who best know the difference between hardship and pleasure and yet are never tempted to shrink from danger. In generosity we are equally singular, acquiring our friends by conferring, not by receiving, favours. Yet, of course, the doer of the favour is the firmer friend of the two, in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in his debt; while the debtor feels less keenly from the very consciousness that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift. And it is only the Athenians, who, fearless of consequences, confer their benefits not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.
In short, I say that as a city we are the school of Hellas, while I doubt if the world can produce a man who, where he has only himself to depend upon, is equal to so many emergencies, and graced by so happy a versatility, as the Athenian. And that this is no mere boast thrown out for the occasion, but plain matter of fact, the power of the state acquired by these habits proves. For Athens alone of her contemporaries is found when tested to be greater than her reputation, and alone gives no occasion to her assailants to blush at the antagonist by whom they have been worsted, or to her subjects to question her title by merit to rule. Rather, the admiration of the present and succeeding ages will be ours, since we have not left our power without witness, but have shown it by mighty proofs; and far from needing a Homer for our panegyrist, or other of his craft whose verses might charm for the moment only for the impression which they gave to melt at the touch of fact, we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us. Such is the Athens for which these men, in the assertion of their resolve not to lose her, nobly fought and died; and well may every one of their survivors be ready to suffer in her cause.
Secretary Rubio concluded his remarks with this truth: “The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man. And it began here, with the first men and women of the West.” Men and women whose most important contribution to that civilization, we believe, was that their highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, and to strive to be the best in all things.
