Dr. Jack Wheeler - Aeschylus and America
Liberalism is thus not a political ideology or set of beliefs. It is an envy-deflection device, a psychological strategy to avoid being envied.
by Dr. Jack Wheeler
August 31, 2004
Aeschylus and Homer
The founding culture of Western Civilization is that of Hellenic Greece — starting with Homer about the time of the first Olympiad in 776 BC to the death of Aristotle in 322 BC (one year after that of his student, Alexander the Great).
The singular invention of the ancient Hellenes that is the foundation upon which Western Civilization has been built, is an idea unique in history: that the individual human being, and not just the tribe to which he or she belongs, has an intrinsic value and thus a legitimate claim to exist for his or her own sake.
No other culture in mankind’s history had ever had the courage to think this before, so suffused as they were with fear of their gods and rulers. We owe our cultural existence to the moral audacity of the Hellenic Greeks.
The Bible of the Hellenes was Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey epics were for them, as one scholar puts it, "the source o…
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