On October 7th, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a speech at Athens' Pnyx, the ancient meeting place of the Athenian democratic assembly, with the Acropolis and Parthenon rising behind him. I assume that the speech was written by a Claremont Straussian who has read some of Francis Fukuyama's works--such as The End of History and the Last Man (1992) or his most recent In the Realm of the Last Man. I say that for two reasons. First, he puts his most important, and most controversial, idea in the center of the speech, which is one of the features of Straussian "esoteric" writing. Second, that central idea is the Platonic concept of thymos (or thumos)--the Greek word for the spirited, passionate, or proud part of the human soul--which Fukuyama learned about from his Straussian teacher, Allan Bloom, at Cornell.
Fukuyama identified thymos with the natural human desire for recognition as understood by Alexandre Kojeve in his interpretation of Hegel. Thymos is the desire to be recognized as excellent or great in the most challenging competitive endeavors of life--but especially in war and politics--even to the point of risking one's life in competitive struggle for the sake of a glorious fame after death.
Here is how Rubio describes this ancient Greek thymos as the central theme of Western Civilization:
For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence. They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle—to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.
Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat …
The ancient Greek city-states were filled … with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction—from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.
The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it—the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride—is the heart of great civilization. And without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.
Fukuyama has responded to Rubio's speech by saying: "Marco Rubio seems to have quoted my work on recognition," but "he doesn't understand it." Actually, it's hard to understand what Fukuyama has written about the desire for recognition because he's unclear about whether the thymotic desire for recognition can be satisfied in a liberal democracy.
Fukuyama says that Rubio's claim that thymos is the core value of Western Civilization is "correct in some fashion, but Rubio's understanding of the idea is very deficient." Rubio doesn't understand that there are two kinds of thymos--designated by Fukuyama's two neologisms, isothymia and megalothymia--and he doesn't understand that there are both good and bad sides to megalothymia.
Isothymia is the desire for equal recognition, which is the fundamental principle of modern liberal democracy--that all human beings are equal in their dignity as human beings. Fukuyama explains: "Human beings universally feel resentful and angry when they are disrespected, when their fundamental dignity is held to be lower than that of another group or individual. Today's polarized politics is driven by isothymia: left-wing identity politics by the demand of marginalized groups for equal recognition, and an emerging right-wing version based on a narrative of white or Christian victimization."
By contrast, megathymia--the desire to be recognized as greater than other people--is Janus-faced in having both a good and an evil face. It is, as Fukuyama says, a "double-edged sword." So, on the one hand, Rubio is right to see that the striving to be better than other people can be the source of human excellences. But, on the other hand, Rubio is wrong not to recognize that this desire to be better than other people can promote tyrannical and criminal behavior. "George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill were clearly driven by megalothymia--but so were Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot."
Rubio does not see that the problem for megalothymia in a liberal democracy is "first, distinguishing between the good and bad forms of megalothymia, and second, channeling this passion into activities tht benefit the broader society."
Rubio also does not see that the megalothymia of the American Founders was expressed by their ambitious devotion to isothymia. Rubio sees megalothymia expressed in "the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which says, 'We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, or Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." But he is silent about the fact that they were affirming the Declaration's principle of isothymia--"that all men are created equal."
Rubio says that "under President Trump, the United States has made its choice" for reviving the thymos of Western Civilization through "the unapologetic pursuit of national power." Does this imply that Trump himself is expressing his megalothymia in projecting his power over the world?
Fukuyama says: "Trump is a perfect example of unconstrained megalothymia. He cannot distinguish between good and bad attributes that deserve recognition, nor does he care about the quality of judgment of those recognizing him. . . . He recently showed Maggie Haberman a list of history's most powerful rulers, whom he clearly admired and wished to equal. The list included Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Napoleon, Mao, and Stalin, and not a single democratic statesman."
Well, I don't see how Trump can be a perfect example of megalothymia if he doesn't care "about the quality of judgment of those recognizing him." Fukuyama doesn't note that, as reported by Haberman, the list of history's most powerful leaders, and the claim that Trump was more powerful than any of them, came from Gary Player's golf caddie. A man who is satisfied by the recognition coming from the flattery of a golf caddie is displaying not megalothymia but a pathetically shallow narcissism.
In my next post, I will have more to say about Fukuyama's sometimes confusing account of whether liberal democracy allows for thymos, or whether liberal democracy creates "the realm of the Last Man," in which there can be no thymos.
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