I recently stumbled on a profile of your humble servant on the Pharos website. Pharos is an academic blog which allows you to “learn about and respond to appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups online.” The blog’s name “refers to the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the first such beacon and the symbol of a city whose location at the crossroads between what we now call Europe and many other cultures made it for centuries the intellectual center of the Greco-Roman world.”

Pharos correctly observes that “[t]he civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome have always been attractive to European nationalist and racist movements.” The publication wishes to “expose the errors, omissions, and distortions” of said groups and “articulate a politically progressive approach to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity.”

Pharos does not explicitly say what it means by a “politically progressive approach.” However, browsing the website, one immediately sees they mean essentially left-wing identity politics, with a strong emphasis on homophilia, feminism, and multiculturalism.



Photo Credit: ©Walter Garschagen/ Vassar College

The website is run by Curtis Dozier, a professor of Greek and Roman history at Vassar College in New York. Pharos and its openly left-wing agenda enjoy “the support of the Vassar College Department of Greek and Roman Studies and the Vassar College Office of Communications.”

This is a refreshing bit of honesty: while it is widely-known that university professors overwhelmingly skew towards leftism and globalism, it is not so common for them to officially declare their political leanings and goals.

This begs questions however: Does Vassar College receive any public funds? If so, what do taxpayers think of the university using their money to promote a left-wing political agenda? And what do the conservative parents paying for their children to go to Vassar Collage think of this? Is this legal and common in the United States?

The editors of Pharos do not believe in dialogue, an ancient Socratic tradition, with those who are beyond the pale. They declare: “Pharos’ responses and essays are not intended to change the minds of those who use antiquity to support their racist ideologies.” Instead, the blog is meant to assuage liberal classicists’ disquiet at their field’s association with the Right:

They are intended, rather, to ensure that someone who turns to the web to learn about antiquity finds something other than the appropriations we are documenting. We hope, too, that our work will nourish those who love antiquity but are uncomfortable with the traditional association of its study with elitist and oppressive politics. You are not alone.

Pharos’ rejection of dialogue and ideological pluralism is such that the website even refuses to link to offending websites, so as to not increase their traffic, preferring to refer the reader to archived pages.

There has been a concerted effort by egalitarians to, however implausibly, ‘reclaim’ a sanitized version of the classics compatible with the various left-wing manias of the current year. Most prominent in this has been Donna Zuckerberg’s effort to preach egalitarianism . . . in another millennium.

As a rule, Pharos’ rebuttals are uneven, a mixture of fair points, qualifications, and non sequiturs. There is a lot of squid ink. For instance, the website objects to an online writer styling himself Hadrian, after the Roman emperor who built a wall on the border with Scotland, observing which “according to some but not all sources, was intended to keep ‘barbarians’ out of Roman territory.” Pray tell, what are ‘walls’ for other than helping to control (and generally, simply impede) who comes in and out of your territory?

This gives me another opportunity to comment on EU President Jean-Claude Juncker’s statement that “borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians.” It’s true that if borders were better controlled in Europe, his native Luxembourg which he headed for two decades, would not be able to thrive to the detriment of its neighbors as a tax haven. But if Juncker had paid more attention to in history class he might have avoided such a thoughtless comment: the word politician comes from polis and the polis, the city-state, was founded first as a kind of religious sanctuary, under particular gods’ protection, precisely with a sacred border between itself and the violence and lawlessness beyond. Thus, borders are in fact the first invention of politicians – symbolically affirmed in the founding myth of Rome, with Remus killing his brother Romulus for jumping over the city wall – and were integral to founding of civilization and all the comforts and advantages flowing therefrom that we so take for granted.

Anyway, back to Pharos. The website maintains a list of writers, and even a humble commenter, using classically-inspired pseudonyms. This is a useful resource. I discovered that the men’s help website Return of Kings (which used to focus on seduction and, I understand, has become some kind of Christian website) has been introducing a new generation of young men to “The Roots of Masculinity in Ancient Rome” as well as ancient Stoic wisdom (which you really must get into).

The list also includes Sargon of Akkad – a civic nationalist who rejects all identity politics, including racial identity, who recently ran as a UKIP candidate in the European elections. Pharos observes that Sargon once interviewed Steve Bannon, calling the latter a “white nationalist,” citing nothing other than an ADL article which itself does not substantiate the claim. Bannon is no more than a vague economic nationalist, who has jumped from one populist bandwagon to the next.

Something rubs me the wrong way when people accuse populists and civic nationalists of being more radical than they are. People on the right get a tremendous amount of flack – really systematic emotional abuse – for publicly affirming their beliefs and I think any honest person, in particular an academic, should really stick to the facts, rather than putting inaccurate labels.

Concerning Pharos’ post dedicated to me, while the framing is extremely inaccurate and stigmatizing, much of the content is fairly balanced. The author is fair enough to write:

Such “biopolitics, racialism, and nationalism,” according to Durocher, were “integral to the Hellenic way of life.” He’s not wrong about this aspect of ancient culture, and when he says it “prefigure[s] Darwin’s later evolutionary theory” he may be claiming “scientific” support for his hateful politics but he’s not misrepresenting the origins of modern pseudo-scientific racism in evolutionary thought. What is wrong is his idealization of racist theories that he complains are “taboo in the West” even though they offer, he claims, the best way to achieve “the ideal being the best as a whole society.” . . . Durocher’s description of citizenship in Athens and Sparta is more or less accurate, hence adding a false sense of legitimacy to his claim that we should imitate ancient eugenic practices. . . . The scholarship he cites may be outdated, but he knows his history and he doesn’t misrepresent the ancient past. His problem is that he assumes that past is admirable and worthy of emulation. It might be worth emulating the ancient Greek city-states’ “collective ideal of being the best as a whole society” but this won’t mean the same thing for us that it meant for them.

I also learned from this post that Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City – a wonderful nineteenth-century work reconstructing the original Indo-European society based on the surviving Greece, Roman, and Indian sources – was first translated into English as Aryan Civilization: Its Origin and Progress (it’s indeed what it says on the tin).

Concerning Pharos’ critique, I will stick to the big picture rather than get bogged down in details.

To try to extract an egalitarian version of Antiquity is simply to destroy the essence of Hellenism. The works of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, etc, etc, speak for themselves on this. Nietzsche’s tireless rantings on this issue are as interminable as they are necessary, given how meekly insensitive to harsh truths modern Westerners have become. I will not waste your time with my inferior paraphrases.

I find a wondrous harmony between the theory of Darwinism and the practice of Hellenism. One observes the Law of Life, the other was born of it, stemming from the Indo-European/Aryan/Yamnaya warrior people which conquered half of Eurasia and established the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, Persia, and India. In Hellenism, I also find an uncompromising and virile love of truth, beauty, and power which is sorely lacking in the modern West.

Most would agree, from Gautama Buddha to the authors of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, that human beings are special, entitled to better treatment than most other creatures. This is, presumably, because human beings are uniquely endowed with an exceptional capacity for reason and consciousness. Furthermore, we all wish to claim, more or less plausibly, the Greco-Roman legacy, whose excellence is self-evident.

I would quite agree that humans beings are entitled to decent treatment insofar as they are rational and social creatures. Any act of unnecessary cruelty betrays either ignorance or lack of self-control on the part of the perpetrator. However, these healthy moral principles have turned into a crazed egalitarianism, motivated by the sum of petty-interests and petty-pride of individuals, rather than any concern for the common good or the good (the excellent) as such. A blanket critique of the past in the name of equality is a kind of hypocrisy, a kind of intergenerational moral parasitism.

One must ask: How have humans beings achieved such an elevated biological state? How did our civilizations, ancient and modern, reach the cultural heights that they did? Try to be honest (with yourself).

Notes

In France, our academic and media elites are mostly found in a rather narrow spectrum, stretching from resentful Marxists (supporting Jean-Luc Mélenchon) to pro-corporate globalists (supporting Emmanuel Macron), with squishy, ineffectual social democrats (supporting Benoît Hamon) stuck in the middle. Virtually none support conservative candidates, let alone nationalists. One finds analogous psychological profiles in the United States, although political expression differs given the more narrow political space there in the two-party system.

To be complete, I think it is probably better for all cultural institutions to officially declare their ideological leanings rather than fraudulently uphold a notion of ‘ideological neutrality,’ which strikes me as a demoliberal conceit. There is no such thing as an ideologically-neutral institution. At most one might have a tenuous political neutrality, maintaining some sort of balance between officially-recognized political parties (and even then, certain parties will be considered beyond the pale and ignored or suppressed). Whatever their pretenses of ‘neutrality’ and ‘pluralism,’ the ideology of every institution is visible according to the particular field of opinions it authorizes or promotes, and that is that. Today, all politically ‘neutral’ media and universities are demoliberal, generally leaning left and globalist. The question is not whether institutions are ideologically-neutral, an impossibility, but whether their ideology, implicit or avowed, is in line with reality and, in particular, biological and ethical reality, whether they promote the survival and flourishing of a society, or rather corrode and destroy it.

It is striking that the American and French revolutionaries as well as the Italian and German fascists claimed the legacy of Antiquity, all quite sincerely. I personally tend to think ancient republicanism is imperfectly represented in all the modern traditions. Ancient republicanism embraced the holistic communitarianism (totalitarianism) of fascism and the adherence to procedure, (direct) representation, and the rule of law that one finds in modern republican regimes. Make of that what you will.