Marco Rubio’s foreign-policy address in Athens on October 7 was magnificent in both setting and substance. The setting? How about the Acropolis just before sunset on a clear day in early autumn? Standing on the Pnyx with the ruins of the Parthenon swaddled in a golden light rising up behind him, the American secretary of state paid homage to the fertile greatness of ancient Greek civilization and its energizing influence on what we have come to call the West. “The civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western world,” Rubio said. “What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man.”
[I]n Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.
Perhaps the word that best captures the tone of Rubio’s speech is “unapologetic.” He spoke frankly as the representative of the world’s preeminent economic and military power. He knew it. So did his audience. He did not bluster. But neither did he indulge in false modesty. He had two major themes, one positive, one negative. The positive theme revolved around a salubrious spur to power, for nation-states as well as for individuals. The Greeks, Rubio noted, called it θυμός—thumos, or spiritedness. Θυμός is the energy behind the virtues of honor, courage, and ambition: the agonistic spirit to strive to be the best. What rescues θυμός from savagery is reason, which guides it to appropriate ends and suitable means.
The danger today, Rubio warned, is that this spirited view of human nature has been mollified and softened by a cramped, rancorous, and leveling impulse. “The ideal of many ideologies in our time,” Rubio pointed out, has
become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.
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