On Wednesday, I traveled to the Pnyx, a hillside overlooking the towering columns of the Acropolis in Athens. There, I delivered a simple message: The West is at a crossroads. The decisions we make in the next decade will define the next century â and determine whether our civilization maintains its place at the head of the world, or resigns itself to a future of servitude and decline.
For thousands of years, the Parthenon has stood as a testament to the Western spirit, captivating the imagination of our civilizations artists, philosophers, and statesmen. The American Founding Fathers were fascinated by classical antiquity: The most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Romes greatest men. The legacy of ancient Greece is carved into the architecture of our capital city itself, immediately visible in the famous columns and domes of Washington, D.C.
We all know the familiar history. Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. The Greek city-states shaped our ideas of citizenship, law and republican government.
But our debt to Greece runs deeper than any particular political system or theory.
Ancient Greece was the birthplace of all the essential qualities that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; restless curiosity, creativity, and invention; an insatiable desire for adventure, glory, and exploration, straining to test the limits of what man can know and do.
What the West inherited from classical Greece is not just the ambition to explore the unknown; it is the conviction that the unknown can be known.Â
The Greeks believed the world could be observed, measured, mapped and understood. That conviction became the foundation of Western science, medicine and philosophy. It prepared the fertile soil for Christianity to take root and flourish into European Christendom, and helped form a civilization with a distinctive understanding of truth, virtue, beauty, duty and the natural order â carrying a code that dictates how men ought to live, and objective standards and ideals to strive towards.
THE BEDROCK OF AMERICAN LIBERTY WAS LAID IN JERUSALEM
The ancient Greeks organized their civic life around the pursuit of those ideals. They believed men should strive and compete for excellence in athletics, war, art, philosophy, statecraft and every other field of human endeavor. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves through perpetual contest and struggle â to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to surpass all those that came before.
WHY AMERICAS NEXT 250 YEARS CAN BE GREATER THAN ITS FIRST 250
These are the qualities that shaped the West, pushing its descendants to create and achieve things that others could not â distinguishing us from the many cultures of the world where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life.
But today, too much of the West has come to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. Over time, we began to view our achievements as an embarrassment; our power and prosperity became a source of guilt. So we opened our borders, outsourced our once-great industries, and allowed our militaries to wither and decay. And with every passing year, we transferred more of our sovereignty to global bureaucracies beyond our control.
<a href="https://foxne
