Chapter Two, Excerpt 1 of 3
The Power of Ideas

The Phoenicians . . . effected a hook-up of an energy circuit which their political mechanism could not accommodate. As a nation, the Phoenicians disintegrated from the impact of a new idea. The fame of Greece usually identified with art and letters; but the lasting influence of Greece derives from neither. The art of Greece was self-contained and static. Their divinities enjoined no moral order, representing rather the indifferent caprice of nature toward man.

Democracy is pure process, consisting of a series of pragmatical expedients, arrived at by majority vote, the verdict of numbers. It works on the strength of custom and is therefore inoperable except within a small community of a fairly homogenous culture. Democracy inevitably lapses into tyranny. What is everybody’s business is nobody’s business. With the Greeks, the hopeless instability of democracy allowed no security of the individual against the mass nor the nation against external attack.

The Athenians, being open to commerce, for a time took license to think. The Greeks had the idea of science. By discerning the causation of events, an abstraction will move a mountain; nothing can withstand an idea. The Greeks had found the lever. While they philosophized, the mountain moved of itself in an avalanche; Rome overpowered them. Rome had evolved an abstraction, a political concept, which was likewise among the universals. Rome had the idea of law.