On Roman and modern virtues

On some blogs such as Samizdata, the discussion often has an element of an echo chamber or a circle jerk about it, but occasionally we come across gems. Here’s one, about the difference between the ancient Romans and the modern West:

James Purefoy is playing Mark Anthony in the hit TV series, Rome, and one of the things he said struck me as really rather illuminating. He said that the difference between us and the Romans was that they regarded weakness as a vice and what we would call cruelty as a virtue. […]

The virtue we aspire to is kindness, and in everyday life this usually works pretty well. But the vices of our civilisation are mostly also related to that aspiration, it seems to me, and now more than ever before. Even as Christian theology is now laughed to scorn, by me among many thousands, Christian ethics are triumphant in our civilisation as never before. But the underside of kindness is weakness, meekness, sentimentality, thoughtlessness – niceness as a substitute for competence and for thinking it through. Instead of thoughtful and because of that all the more hideously destructive brutality – the Roman vice – we indulge in impulsive and frivolous orgies of unthinking niceness.

This, if you think about it, is the running argument we have here at Samizdata with the zeitgeist of our time.

When you think about it, this is right. The essential virtue of modern life is niceness and this seeps through into modern attitudes about all sorts of things. Weakness isn’t seen as shameful, it’s seen as OK or even virtuous, which is part of the reason we have a culture of victimhood where people who are victims or a member of an Accredited Victim Group often get given preferential treatment. Consider for example, the Paralympic Games where disabled athletes compete. The ancient Romans would never have done anything like that and would be puzzled as to what modern society does, because being disabled is inherently about not being able to do things, which to a Roman mind is something that’s inherently bad, in the sense that people generally don’t want to be unable to do things.

Or consider the British attitude to nuclear weapons. This is a political issue right now because the government is considering whether to replace Trident and if so what with. There’s considerable antipathy towards nuclear weapons — vapourising millions of people in a second is not nice, you see. I recently heard someone explain that if Britain didn’t have nuclear weapons, we’d be less likely to be a target, since we are only likely to be a target now because people might hate us because of all the nasty nukes we’ve got.

To an ancient Roman this is nonsense. A Roman would say si vis pacem, para bellum — if you want peace, prepare for war — and would urge nations to build up their nuclear forces, particularly their second-strike capabilities, in order to deter anyone from attacking them.

I said above that “we” aspire to the virtue of kindness. Maybe that is a rather European view. Americans may be wondering quite where they fit into this dichotomy.

Robert Kagan wrote a book, Paradise and Power, about this very subject. He concluded that Americans and Europeans do indeed view things in different ways. And while that’s true, the differences can be exaggerated. Americans and Europeans are different in terms of how they think about foreign policy and the use of force to achieve national objectives. But in domestic policy, Americans and modern Europeans are very much like each other, and both very different from the ancient Romans. Both societies have a culture of victimhood, and arguably Americans do more so than Europeans, for example concepts such as “affirmative action” are more prevalent in North America than in Europe.

[Also published in Cabalamat Journal]