OPINION:
Back in my college days at American University in the District of Columbia, required reading included the works of Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
Long after I graduated, these books remained on my bookshelf. It was believed for generations that these men, along with philosophers Plato, Cicero and other great minds, could teach us.
At too many of today’s colleges and universities, we find courses in LGBTQ history and, according to Campus Reform, a 2023 Harvard course “aimed to teach students how to prepare for a diversity, equity, and inclusion-filled future.” Harvard is not alone in pushing woke courses.
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Into this intellectual chasm last week came Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Standing at the Pnyx in Athens, in the shadow of the Acropolis, he recalled how the Greeks laid the foundation for democracy. Eighty years ago, this would have sounded so obvious that the speech would have seemed unnecessary. Yet today’s college students seem to know less about the past and get most of their information from social media.
As reflected in test scores, we have discarded the past as one might toss ancient ideas down what George Orwell called the “memory hole.”
Mr. Rubio’s opening lines set the stage for the rest of the speech: “Now time has a tendency to dull the senses: Great victories and catastrophic defeats … seem to shrink to becom[e] like a footnote in a textbook, another fact for our schoolchildren to memorize and forget. But the Greeks of antiquity … seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory. They call us back to them, again and again.”
We in the West used to believe that looking back at what those who came before us had learned was a requirement for moving forward. This was to ensure that their mistakes would not become ours and their triumphs might be replicated in our successes.
What we used to call oratory — back when we had orators, not dull politicians repeating talking points and poll-tested themes — was on full display when Mr. Rubio said: “The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. The city where our Constitution was born, Philadelphia, is itself a Greek name.”
Anyone watching or reading this speech could not help but notice the contrast between President Trump’s name-calling and demeaning of others and Mr. Rubio’s seriousness and statesmanship.
In hearings before House and Senate committees, when Mr. Rubio disagrees with Democrats, he brandishes a rhetorical “sword of truth” without stabbing them.
Mr. Rubio sounded like a professor at a university that used to teach such things when he said: “The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours. They were exceptionally well-read in history — they were vividly aware of their unique place in it — but no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity. Many, many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in ’The Federalist Papers’ was not an Enlightenment philosopher or political theorist. No, the most commonly cited author in ’The Federalist Papers’ was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome’s great men.”
Plenty more in Mr. Rubio’s address should be required reading, especially by young people.
“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote in “The Tempest.” That profound statement is engraved on the base of the “Future” statue outside the National Archives Building.
Mr. Rubio has said that he will not run for president in 2028 if Vice President J.D. Vance runs. He should change his mind.
Mr. Rubio has all the qualities that should be desirable in a president. Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle taught that true leaders must possess arete, a mix of high competence, moral character and active service to the common good. Who, except the most partisan, would disagree that Mr. Rubio has them all?
• Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book, “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (Humanix Books).
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