ROMAN CULTURAL MAGNANIMITY AND MODERN AMERICAN LITTLENESS

The whole First Book of Marcus Aurelius is giving credit to different persons for good contributions to his education, upbringing and character building. Credit is given both to his fellow Romans, which is of course natural, but also, and to a much larger extent of gratitude, to the Greeks, particularly, to his tutors (who, as a matter of fact, must all have been slaves, or at least recent slaves, magnanimously granted freedom by their Roman masters). The Romans must have been astoundingly munificent, to recognize, and non-grudgingly accept, the cultural and intellectual superiority of the Greeks without any feeling of inferiority on their own part, without a ressentiment, to use Nietzsche’s famous word. They had, probably, managed to compensate for that little shortcoming of theirs by the pride in their military prowess and political superiority, neither of which qualities had been among the strengths of the Greeks, or, as a matter of fact, of anybody else besides them at that time. After all, it was Rome who ruled a colossal Empire, and the Greeks, their prodigious brain capacity notwithstanding, could not even manage their tiny city-states, and ended up in the abject misery of the Roman slavery.

As we can see, Rome could well afford to be fair to the foreigners. But does the United States, another great power of history, possess a similar benign attitude toward the foreigners? If so, she is in no hurry to exhibit it. I even wonder sometimes, if the notorious dumbing-down of the American culture proceeds (among other factors mentioned elsewhere) from a misplaced sense of its cultural inferiority. No, I am not suggesting that the great American culture, culminating in the Declaration of Independence, and maintaining its historical umbilical cord to its mother-culture, known as Western Civilization, for yet another two centuries, could be inferior to any other culture on the face of the earth. What I am suggesting is that a cultural rebellion of sorts has taken place in America against her own culture, turning modern American society, sorely ignorant, uneducated, and actually proud of it (success in America is now measured not by how much a person has learned, but by how much money he or she is making, so who should care about culture at all?!), into some kind of cultural Luddites! Say, watch the quality of today's most popular television programs and tell me I am wrong!
 In that case, it would be a real tragedy, both for this country and for the rest of the world, where people, no matter what, are still looking up to America and watching what is going on in this country as though it were a personal concern of theirs.
Anyway, no matter what, I myself still wish this country well, and grieve over her sad shortcomings…