One Civilization, Many Nations

Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke on October 7 from the Pnyx, the old speaking hill in Athens, with the Acropolis behind him. The State Department posted the full remarks the same day. He was not taking questions. He was making a case about what the West inherited from that hill, and what he thinks it has done with the inheritance.

Watch Rubio's remarks here [VIDEO]

He starts with the ruin that is not a ruin. Other ruins, he says, are places where history exhausted itself. The Acropolis still calls people back. He tells the Persian sack of 480 B.C., the handful who stayed and fought, the burial of the broken stones, and the Parthenon raised under Pericles. From there he walks the debt he says America still owes: columns and domes in Washington, Philadelphia as a Greek name, Plutarch as the author most cited in the Federalist Papers. Athens gave democracy, Plato and Aristotle the philosophy, and the language itself — democracy, tyranny, politics. Under that, he says, is a temperament: individuality, ambition, discovery, risk, glory, and the conviction that the unknown can be known. That confidence, in his telling, became the Western mind — math, science, natural law — and the soil in which Christianity took root in Europe. Civic life was organized around contest. The men who built the Parthenon built upwards. The ideal he says has replaced that is a world of perfect safety, with no glory in winning and no shame in losing, the exceptional held to the average.

The second half is the bill for forgetting it. Nationalism became a dirty word. Monuments came down. Children were taught to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. Borders opened, industry was outsourced, militaries were allowed to wither. He puts the West at a crossroads: the next decade writes the next century, and the choice is to act now or lose the choice to act at all. Under President Trump, he says, the United States has chosen the unapologetic pursuit of national power — supply chains, reindustrialization, defense, the industries of the future. He draws one hard line with Iran’s rulers, a cult of death against heroes who may die for a cause but do not worship death. Allies, he says, should not be shackled by guilt or signed on as caretakers of a managed decline. One civilization, many nations: born in Athens, forged in Rome, baptized in Christendom. The close is that the story is worth defending, and that the West has to win it together.

Not a Given

Many of us take living in the West for granted. That may be part of why the people who run the institutions have done so little about immigration from the third world. There was a hope, often left unstated, that the blessings of the place would remake the people who arrived. It has not worked that way often enough to keep treating it as a given.

The focus right now is on those who come from the Islamic world. The O’Reilly documentary on London is one exhibit. The French lycée unrest is another — budget cuts and the unrest of third-world immigrants meeting in the same schools. Rubio’s speech does not name those streets. It does name the inheritance that is supposed to be worth defending, and the shame that made defending it unfashionable.

We have had it good here. Right or wrong, Western nations have had a large influence on the world. That is not the same as assuming everyone who was not born in the West is glad to be among us, or that the place will remain what it has been if the people who built it stop acting like it is theirs.