David Gress: Plato and NATO 25 years later

Today Razib talks to David  Gress, a Danish historian. The son of an American literary scholar and a Danish writer, he grew up in Denmark, read Classics at Cambridge, and then earned a Ph.D. in medieval history from Bryn Mawr College in the US in 1981. During a fellowship form 1982-1992 at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, he published on Cold‑War strategy, German political culture, and Nordic security. He has been a visiting fellow and lecturer at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, fellow at the Danish Institute of International Affairs, an assistant professor of Classics at Aarhus University, and professor of the history of civilization at Boston University. He co‑directed the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and remains a senior fellow of the Danish free‑market think tank CEPOS while writing a regular column for Jyllands‑Posten. His breakthrough book, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (1998), argues that Western success sprang from a hard‑edged fusion of Roman order, Germanic liberty, Christian morality, and Smithian economics, rather than being a single disgraceful arc from Greco‑Roman‐paganism to secular Enlightenment that bypassed the Middle Ages.

Razib asks Gress how he would have written Plato to NATO today, more than 25 years later, and he says he would have emphasized Christianity’s role in creating a unified Western culture out of Greco-Roman and Germanic diversity more. Gress also reiterates that he does not deny the Greek foundation of Western Civilization, but rather, his work was a corrective to a very thin and excessively motivated and partisan narrative that stripped out vast periods of European history. They also discuss Gress’ own own peculiar identity, the son of an American, born to a Danish mother, raised in Denmark who converted to Catholicism as an adult, and how that all fits into a broader European identity. They also discuss the impact of mass immigration on the national identities of Europe in the last generation, and Gress’ opinions as to the European future. Razib also asks Gress about the role that evolutionary ideas may have in shaping human history, and how his own views may have changed since From Plato to NATO. They also discuss when it is plausible to say that the West was a coherent idea, and whether the Protestant Reformation was the beginning of the end for the unitary civilization that was Latin Christendom.