I believe Ms. Hamilton summarizes "The Greek Way" quite nicely on pages 255-258. Since we have not evolved much since the time these words were written (1930), her words are as appropriate today as they were then. Any notes in parentheses are my own attempts at providing context.The opposition between the spirit and the mind which we are chiefly conscious of is that between the individual and the community... For nineteen hundred years (again, this was written in 1930) ...we have been in school to the foremost individualist of all time who declared that the very hairs of each man's head were numbered (Christ) .... It is not men's greed, nor their ambition, nor yet their machines, it is not even the removal of their ancient landmarks, that is filling the present world with turmoil and dissension, but our new vision of the individual's claim against the majority's claim.
Things were simple in days of old when the single man had no right at all if a common good conflicted, his life taken for any purpose that served the public welfare, his blood sprinkled over the field to make the harvest (coughoilcough) plentiful. Then a new idea, the most disturbing ever conceived, dawned, that ever human being had rights... The individual had made his appearance and nothing was to be plain and simple again; no clear distinction could be drawn any more between what was just and unjust...
Along with this realization of each unit in the mass has come an over-realization of ourselves. We are burdened with over-realization. Not that we can perceive too clearly the rights and wrongs of every human being, but that we feel too deeply our own, to find in the end that what has meaning only for each one alone has no real meaning at all...
Greek scientists... saw a whole made up of related parts, and with the sweep of their vision the old world of hodge-podge...fell away and a world of order took its place... Greek artists... saw that what is permanent important in a man and unites him to the rest...
(Modern) science has made generalization of greater truths than the Greeks could reach through a greater knowledge of individual facts. If we can follow that method and through our own intense realization of ourselves reach a unity with all men, seeing as deeply as the great tragic poets of old saw, that what is of any importance in us is what we share with all, then there will be a new distribution in the scale and balance held so evenly in those great days of Greece that may be ours as well...
The bitterest conflicts that have divided the minds of men and set family against family, and brother against brother, have not been waged for emperor or king, but for one side of the truth at the suppression of the other side... In our present...adjustment (the beginning of World War II) which not only seems to us, but is, more difficult than any before because we are aware of so much more, it is worth our while to consider the adjustments achieved in the past. Of them all, the Greek was the most complete.
