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Thus spoke the Oracle

This weekend’s annual Greek Festival, this year at the World’s Fair Park, is always a good time to meditate on all the wonderful contributions that Greek culture has made to western civilization. And with the 2004 Olympic games also reaching their conclusion this weekend in Athens, we are doubly mindful of them.

Like many, we were skeptical eight years ago when the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2004 Summer Games to Athens. Not because we felt that Greece was too small or poor a country to host the world’s greatest celebration of youth and sport, but specifically because of the threat of terrorism. Greece’s proximity to the notoriously volatile Middle East seemed cause for concern, even in a pre-9/11 world. And with both the ’72 Munich and ’96 Atlanta Games having been marred by terrorist acts, was the nostalgia for returning the Games to their birthplace enough to run the risk of a repeat of such tragic events?

In hindsight, however, the award of the ’04 Games to Athens seems particularly appropriate, and not just because these Games have not (at least not yet) fallen prey to extremist violence. Certainly much has been made of the billion-dollar price tag that the Greeks have paid for security for the athletes and fans this summer, and it’s true that many of the venues have remained relatively vacant in spite of all the effort and expense, but that is missing the much larger point.

Will Durant in his epic ten-volume tome, The Story of Civilization, rightly acknowledges that: “Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture that does not come from Greece. Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene, therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, theology, agnosticism, skepticism, stoicism, Epicureanism, ethics, politics, idealism, philanthropy, cynicism, tyranny, plutocracy, democracy: these are all Greek words for cultural forms seldom originated, but in many cases first matured for good or evil by the abounding energy of the Greeks.”

Contrast that impressive list to proclamations of radical Islamists who wish to wipe away the whole of western civilization and replace it with their dark vision of religious piety. In their now infamous declaration of war entitled Jihad against Jews and Crusaders issued on February 23, 1998, the World Islamic Statement, a front for Osama bin Laden and his first lieutenant Ayman al-Zawarhi, declared that: “In compliance with God’s order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

Unfortunately, this attitude of hatred and intolerance toward the west is growing among many today and, whether we believe our efforts in the so-called “War on Terror” are helping to quash or to inflame this disposition, the fact remains that the problem of dealing with it has manifested itself into a new reality for us all. In his recent book, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History, Lee Harris asks, “How do we fight an ideological epidemic... that is being spread through schools and through the media, through mosques and through the demagoguery of the Arab street?”

One answer, it occurs to us, is by example.

As Durant points out, “Religion failed to unify Greece, but athletics—periodically—succeeded. Men went to Olympia, Delphi, Corinth, and Nemea not so much to honor the gods—for these could be honored anywhere—as to witness the heroic contests of chosen athletes, and the ecumenical assemblage of varied Greeks.”

It is this vein of ecumenism and the principles of promoting cooperation and better understanding among differing peoples and religious faiths that have been the promise of each of the modern Olympiads. But perhaps the fact that the Games have found their way back to Greece this year should make these Olympics more illuminating than most. From Homer, Socrates and Aristotle to Christ and the Roman Empire, to Shakespeare, Voltaire and Rousseau, to Jefferson, Lincoln, and today, western civilization has been the greatest of emancipators—for mind as well as for body. And it has been at its best when it leads by the examples of tolerance, respect, and understanding.

Of course, it sometimes becomes necessary to take up arms to fight for the liberties that we hold dear, but we should never lose sight of the fact that there is often a more subtle and more effective way to persuade our adversaries that our way of life is best. Thankfully, many of our leaders during the Cold War recognized this and, ultimately, instead of many millions of lives being lost, many millions were freed.

Today, America and, by extension, all of western civilization finds itself besieged by an enemy that would turn back the clock and, indeed, erase our entire history (just as the former Taliban government erased the Buddhist shrines in Afghanistan), in order to inflict their fanatically regressive ideology on the world. But it will not happen, and, for proof of this, we need only to look to ancient Greece.

“All the problems that disturb us today,” writes Durant, “the struggle between democracy and dictatorship, between science and religion, between individualism and communism, between the East and the West—all these agitated, as if for our instruction, the brilliant and turbulent life of ancient Hellas. There is nothing in Greek civilization that does not illuminate our own.”

And that is precisely why the choice of Athens to host the 2004 Summer Olympic Games now seems as wise as if it had been pronounced by the Oracle of Delphi.

August 26, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 35 © 2004 Metro Pulse