Though he only briefly touched on the role of Christianity, Hanson understands that Athens alone cannot account for Western civilization. Jerusalem was also an indispensable element in the rise of the West. It is often argued that the early church fathers, Orthodox and Roman, but especially Augustine, rescued Athens from obscurity and melded it with Jerusalem to, in fact, lay the foundation of the West.

What relevance does all this have to us today? Unless we understand and defend the virtues of the West, we may be only one generation away from a new Dark Age, fears Hanson. "The great wealth and leisure created by modern technology have confused some in the modern age into thinking that history is linear. We expect that each generation will inevitably improve upon the last," wrote Hanson in his NR Online column.

Hanson's concern is that the West has become soft, cynical, fearful and insulated. He fears that the West's intellectual and cultural elites have, at best, lost confidence in the idea of the West or, at worst, are full of self-loathing and hate for the West. These inclinations may well be seeping deeper into the fabric of our culture.

Hanson sees "multiculturalism" (no culture is worse than the West), utopianism (communism, fascism, Nazism), cultural relativism (no rule of law based on Divine Mandate) and moral equivalence (the West is no different than the non-West) as infecting the West.

Another major threat Hanson fears is the cultural amnesia caused by thinking that the West became the West by accident, a consequence of geographic determinism. The best known proponent of this view is Jared Diamond, author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies." Diamond attributes the ascendancy and dominance of the West to the luck of geography and proximity to natural resources. This pernicious notion, Hanson tells us, "cannot explain the differences between North and South Korea, the old East and West Berlin, or Tijuana and San Diego." There is more than luck, resources and geography at work here.

As Hanson notes in "Who Killed Homer," "The billions of the world are rapidly adopting the Western economic and political example that began with the Greeks. ... Proof of this dominance is to be found (in the fact that) 'Western' itself has ceased to be a geographic term (but) now describes the sense of a people."

One scholar, Garry Wills, emblematic of many others, tells us that "concept of a ... core of cultural values at the center of Western civilization is entirely false." (Wills is also wrong about a great many other things.) Hanson responds that "Wills is unaware that everything he now takes for granted in his own life — his freedom, his ability to question, provoke and censure, his education, his safety and security — derive from a Western core of values that are quite different from other cultures and that began with the Greeks."

Hanson's call to the intellectual and physical defense of these core values is ignored by us at our own peril.

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Joseph A. Cannon is editor of the Deseret Morning News.