Conclusion

Looking down the road, how would you advise students to prepare for the future? You're describing a world where the lessons of the Greeks can help us understand, where virtues like character and courage matter. How should they prepare for that world?

They should realize that the skills that make one successful in 500 BC may be the same today. It's not just adapting to a new technology or a new lifestyle. It's realizing that a new lifestyle or a new technology or a new computer is simply a manifestation of the human experience. If you know language, you know history, you know argumentation, you can write well, then you can function in any new environment. That's the only constant that can prepare you.

And the same thing: if you come to class on time, if you turn a paper in on time, if you don't plagiarize, if you play by a particular convention or rule or law, then whatever change -- a situation puts you in China, puts you in Hong Kong -- the same principles of success and well-being will apply.

What I'm worried about is what I call the "sirens of presentism," that because you have five hundred channels, or have you have a new desktop, you've faked yourself into believing that you don't have to write anymore, computers will do it; or there's a situational ethics that is a new morality, or there's a moral equivalence. You see it in Afghanistan, where deliberately trying to blow somebody up in New York in a time of peace is the same as somebody dying when you're deliberately trying to avoid killing civilians and killing the people who kill people in Afghanistan. So we've got to watch that, this utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, multiculturalism, no appreciation for the uniqueness of your culture. And broad, general education is what I would advise students.

On that note, Victor, I want to thank you for coming to the campus to lecture today, and to be with us today, and sharing with us this very fascinating intellectual journey. Thank you.

Well, thank you for having me.

And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

To the Conversations page

To the Globetrotter research galleries: The Conservative Movement and U.S. Foreign Policy after 9/11