I was reading a history of ancient philosophy last night and was kept thinking about how it compares to our times.

One metaphor that occurred to me is the old analogy of Greece-to-Rome and Europe-to-America. Carneades, the head of the Academy (founded by Plato) in the second century BC went to Rome and gave some lectures which appealed to Roman youth but made the stern old Roman gentleman Cato mad. Carneades was in the skeptical tradition, and it's easy to see how his doctrines would erode the morals of the young. Cato was a supporter of old-time religion and traditional morality.

There seems to a parallel with Europe and America today. Religion is weak in Europe, and the young are perhaps similar in their anything-goes spirit to the ancient skeptics. Meanwhile, old-time religion remains strong in America. However, American youths are not so easily seduced by European sophistries as the Roman youths were. Religion in the US seems to be more robust than it was in ancient Rome. In fact, I think the Greece-Rome/Europe-America analogy may be more broadly failing to hold. For I don't think that America is the philosophical inferior of Europe the way Rome was of Greece. Europe's old ideas, the leftist, post-Marxist strain of Sartre, Derrida, and so on seems discredited to me. America has emancipated itself from the spell of Europe as Rome never did from that of Greece.

Indeed, you can make the opposite analogy, with America as Greece, Europe as Rome. For two generations already, American popular culture, the English language, and the American model of democratic capitalism have swept Europe. It is the Europeans who feel the creeping inferiority complex, who (some of them) are obsessed with America in their anxiety to reject everything it stands for.

To get past historical analogies a bit, it was amazing to realize the power of ideas, the long long shadow of that intellectual dynamic time that gave rise to Plato, Aristotle, and so many others. Free thought is glorious, albeit, oftentimes, tragically glorious, because plenty of dangerous ideas can be spawned. Despite that, it made me wish that America was charged with a love of ideas as passionate and innocent, an intellectual curiosity as bold and imaginative, as that of the fifth-century Athenians. I wonder: is that kind of dynamism emerging? We've been held back for a while, I think, by a sort of pious relativistic torpor imposed by the left, binding us in bogus guilt for post-colonial errors and the supposed injustices of our own society; as well as the evils of academic specialization. Now perhaps that fog is beginning to lift, and we have the confidence and the optimism, as well as the intelligence and the will, to chase after truth and proclaim it like the ancient philosophers, to plunge into an intellectual golden age that will reverberate for centuries...

No, we're not quite there yet. And I think all the twisted sophistries, the bad faith, the snobbery, the paralysing and incoherent relativism, the false guilt that lingers on and keeps up stupid finds its crossroads, its nexus in Bush-hatred. If the intelligentsia can outgrow Bush-hatred I have very high hopes for the near future of intellectual life.