🇺🇸 Tim Austin, PE 🤔

🔘 What Values Are We Talking About? When President Donald Trump spoke in Warsaw’s Krasiński Square on July 6, 2017, one of his central themes was the values of the West. The setting mattered: he stood beside the Warsaw Uprising Monument, commemorating the Polish resistance’s 1944 revolt against Nazi occupation, and spoke at length about Poland’s resistance to both Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. The debate over those values goes back much further. Among its major twentieth-century voices were the Polish historian Feliks Koneczny, author of O wielości cywilizacyj (On the Plurality of Civilizations, 1935), Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee. More recently, Samuel Huntington brought it to a wider audience with The Clash of Civilizations. Koneczny (1862–1949), a historian from Kraków, defined civilization as “a method of organizing collective life.” He distinguished several civilizations—Latin, Byzantine, Turanian, Jewish, Brahmin, Chinese, and Arab—and argued that a society could not consistently organize itself according to two incompatible civilizational systems at once. He saw Poland as an eastern outpost of Latin civilization, caught between what he described as German Byzantinism and Muscovite Turanianism. These were categories in his own theory: “Byzantine” referred to a state-dominated social order, while “Turanian” evoked a military-command model of political life. Toynbee recognized the significance of his work and wrote a preface to its English edition, published in London in 1962 as On the Plurality of Civilisations. Under Communist rule in Poland, Koneczny’s work on civilization was largely excluded from official circulation, though it appeared in underground editions. Some of his writings were first published in London by Polish émigrés. Near the end of his Warsaw address, Trump declared: “Our values will prevail.” Earlier, he had described what distinguishes the West: faith and family, symphonies, innovation, respect for heroes and tradition, the exploration of new frontiers, rewards for talent, works of art, the rule of law, freedom of speech and expression, the dignity of every human life, women as pillars of society, individual liberty, and sovereignty. Nationhood and civilization were recurring themes. The civilizational ties between Poles and Americans have a concrete history. Tadeusz Kościuszko and Casimir Pulaski fought for American independence. Poland’s Constitution of May 3, 1791, is widely regarded as Europe’s first modern constitution and the world’s second, after the United States Constitution of 1787. Trump’s list covers a great deal, but a list is not yet a coherent framework. What follows is my own attempt to build one: an account of our civilization’s values, inspired in part by Koneczny’s concept of Latin civilization. Here, “Latin” refers to a tradition shaped by Greece, Rome, and Western Christianity—not to Latin America. I am describing ideals that different generations have lived up to in different degrees, sometimes betraying them outright. This account has the same layers as the civilization itself: Greek, Roman, Christian, and modern, including the Enlightenment. I have grouped the values by their principal intellectual roots. Those traditions have intertwined for centuries, so these are overlapping categories, not a precise timeline of when each idea first appeared. 🔘 The Greek Heritage Truth, goodness, and beauty. These philosophical ideals came down to us from the Greeks and were later taken up by medieval Scholastic thinkers. Koneczny placed them within a broader framework of five categories, which he called the quincunx: goodness and truth in the spiritual realm, health and prosperity in the material realm, and beauty connecting the two. In his account, each civilization orders these goods differently, while Latin civilization places spiritual goods above material ones. Poland has contributed to this conversation. In his philosophical poem Promethidion (1851), the Polish poet Cyprian Norwid wrote that beauty exists to inspire us to work, and work exists so that we may rise again (my translation). In 1933, the Polish logician Alfred Tarski gave a rigorous definition of truth for formalized languages, developing Aristotle’s classical conception. It was one of the landmark achievements of twentieth-century logic. Science. The Greeks developed a tradition of rational inquiry into causes, formal logic, and mathematical proof. Their science relied heavily on deduction, although Aristotle also conducted observational research. Experimental methods developed further in the Middle Ages, with figures such as Roger Bacon, and during the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Galileo and Francis Bacon. Science has methodological standards: claims must be supported by reasons and evidence, exposed to criticism, and open to verification through methods appropriate to the field. Yet science also remains open to new methods. Freedom of inquiry is a value in its own right, and its limits should be grounded in moral principles and the protection of human beings. Poland has been part of this story since the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century, the Silesian scholar Witelo wrote Perspectiva, a treatise on optics whose influence was still reflected in the title of a work Johannes Kepler published in 1604. In 1364, King Casimir the Great founded the university in Kraków, now known as Jagiellonian University. Nicolaus Copernicus studied there before writing On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), which helped launch the Scientific Revolution. And Marie Skłodowska-Curie, born in Warsaw and later working in France, became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes: Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911. 🔘 The Roman Heritage Law. Rome left us a systematic body of legal concepts and a tradition of legal reasoning. Much of it survives in familiar Latin maxims. Some of these are Roman in origin; others were added to the tradition later by medieval canon law: ➡️ Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi — Justice is the constant and enduring will to give each person their due. ➡️ Vim vi repellere licet — Force may lawfully be met with force. ➡️ Vanae voces populi non sunt audiendae — The empty clamor of the crowd should not be heeded. ➡️ Volenti non fit iniuria — No legal wrong is done to one who consents. ➡️ Consuetudo pro lege servatur — Custom is observed as law. ➡️ Lex retro non agit — A law does not operate retroactively. ➡️ Nemo tenetur se ipsum accusare — No one is bound to incriminate themselves. Polish nobles encountered this tradition at the university in Kraków and while studying in Padua and Bologna. Poland also added chapters of its own. The fourteenth-century Statutes of Casimir the Great organized the law governing the landed nobility in the historic regions of Lesser Poland and Greater Poland, marking an important step toward codification and greater legal uniformity. The royal privileges issued at Jedlnia and Kraków in 1430–1433 established a safeguard for the nobility known as neminem captivabimus nisi iure victum: no imprisonment without a court judgment, subject to specified exceptions, including being caught in the act of certain crimes. That was nearly 250 years before England’s Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, although the English tradition of protection against arbitrary imprisonment reaches back to Magna Carta in 1215 and its famous Clause 39. Legal dualism. The distinction between public and private law is fundamental. Public authority should not swallow up private life, and the state is not the ruler’s personal property. In Koneczny’s account of Latin civilization, enacted law is subject to ethics, rather than ethics being dictated by enacted law. Passing a statute does not make it morally right. A related distinction separates ownership (dominium) from public authority (imperium): a government’s jurisdiction over a territory does not make it the owner of everything within its borders. Property. Ownership, particularly of land and real estate, is a basic right, protected even against government power. Roman dominium gave ownership a developed legal form, while the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 described property as an inviolable and sacred right. Koneczny assessed civilizations through what he called trójprawo, a threefold system of law: family law, property law, and inheritance law. In his view, the clearest way to understand a civilization is to examine how it treats the family, ownership, and inheritance. In the Latin model, all three rest on ethical foundations and protect the person against an all-powerful state. 🔘 The Christian Heritage The Ten Commandments. Christian morality provides a foundation for both personal and public ethics. Poland entered this world with the baptism of its ruler, Mieszko I, in 966. In Koneczny’s interpretation, Poland’s reception of Christianity in the Latin tradition of Rome, rather than the Byzantine tradition of Constantinople, determined its civilizational orientation. Universalism. Everyone is subject to moral judgment; ancestry and social standing provide no exemption from ethics. The Stoics helped prepare the idea of a universal human community, and Christianity spread the conviction that all people possess equal dignity before God. Universal equality before the law took much longer to develop. Poles advanced that cause in their own way. At the Council of Constance (1414–1418), the Polish scholar Paweł Włodkowic—known in Latin as Paulus Vladimiri—defended the right of non-Christian peoples to have states of their own and rejected conversion by the sword. His argument challenged the Teutonic Knights, a religious military order whose claims to wage war against pagans had become a major issue in Poland’s conflict with the order. In the sixteenth century, the Polish political thinker Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski argued that killing a peasant should carry the same punishment as killing a nobleman. Personalism. Koneczny contrasted the personalism of Latin civilization with what he called gromadność in Byzantine civilization: a herd-like social ethos that subordinates the person to the collective. Each person bears responsibility for their own actions. Independence and economic self-reliance are valued, while collective guilt is rejected. Poland also has a philosophical tradition of personalism associated with Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II, and his work at the Catholic University of Lublin. His 1969 book Person and Act explores the human person as a conscious, responsible agent. Free will and human dignity. Every human being possesses inherent dignity, regardless of age, health, or intellectual ability. The Christian understanding of the person affirms free will and moral responsibility, while recognizing that the capacity for conscious, voluntary action may be impaired or not yet developed. Human dignity does not depend on that capacity. John Paul II made the dignity of the person a central theme of his teaching. The family. Monogamous marriage between a man and a woman. The immediate family—parents and children—takes precedence over the extended clan. For Koneczny, freeing the family from the authority of the clan was one of Latin civilization’s great achievements. Time. Time is a good to be respected, used wisely, and not squandered. There is also a bond between generations: historical consciousness, a responsibility to reckon with the past and care for the future, and a shared sense of where we come from. Koneczny regarded a society’s relationship to time as one of the distinguishing features of its civilization. Poles have cultivated that memory with particular intensity, from the medieval chronicles of Gallus Anonymus and Jan Długosz to commemorations of the uprisings fought to regain national freedom. Public authority and self-government. Society can organize itself, solve problems, and act from the bottom up. Public authority has a hierarchy, but leaves substantial room for self-government, and rulers and ruled are bound by the same moral standards. In Poland, this tradition found expression in the sejmiki, regional assemblies of the nobility, and in the Nihil novi statute of 1505, which required parliamentary consent for new general legislation. Its spirit is often captured in the phrase “Nothing about us without us.” In nineteenth-century Greater Poland, then under Prussian rule, Karol Marcinkowski and Hipolit Cegielski pursued what Poles called “organic work”: strengthening society through education, enterprise, and civic institutions while Poland had no independent state. In 1980–1981, nearly ten million people organized from the ground up in Solidarity, the independent trade union that became a nationwide civic movement challenging Communist rule. Defense is a responsibility of citizens, not merely a job for hired soldiers or a ruler’s standing army. In old Poland, this principle found expression in the pospolite ruszenie, the military levy through which the nobility was obligated to serve in arms. Subsidiarity. Each level of government should take on only those responsibilities that individuals, local communities, and lower levels of authority cannot effectively handle themselves. The principle has roots in Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Johannes Althusius, and received explicit formulation in the papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1931). Poland incorporated it into the preamble to its 1997 Constitution as the principle of subsidiarity, and local-government reforms in 1990 and 1999 put it into practice. American readers will recognize an affinity with local self-government and limits on centralized power, though subsidiarity also concerns the autonomy of families and voluntary institutions. The nation. A naturally developed spiritual, cultural, and civilizational community sustained by voluntary allegiance. In this understanding, a nation transcends shared ethnic ancestry. Koneczny went so far as to argue that nations in this sense emerge only within Latin civilization. Polish history offers examples of political community that crossed lines of ancestry. The Union of Lublin in 1569 joined the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, although the agreement was preceded by bitter disputes and political pressure. The sixteenth-century writer Stanisław Orzechowski described himself as gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus: Ruthenian by origin, Polish by national belonging. Here, “Ruthenian” refers to the region’s East Slavic heritage, not simply to a modern Russian identity. 🔘 The Modern Layer Liberty. Each person’s liberty extends to the point where it would violate another person’s rights. Article 4 of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 gives a classic formulation of that principle. Poles have had a distinctive attachment to liberty, from the “Golden Liberty” of the nobility—a system of political privileges and checks on royal power—through the Constitution of May 3, to the independence fighters’ motto “For our freedom and yours.” Freedom of speech. Full freedom of expression. This is an achievement of the modern era, won in part through struggles against censorship of the printed word in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Poles fought for it under Communism as well. Against the state censorship office on Warsaw’s Mysia Street stood the Paris-based Polish émigré journal Kultura, edited by Jerzy Giedroyc, and Poland’s underground publishing networks. Religious toleration. Freedom of conscience and religion means that government does not impose a faith on its citizens. The distinction between spiritual and temporal authority reaches back to Pope Gelasius I in 494, although that distinction alone did not establish toleration. An important step came with the Warsaw Confederation of 1573. In this agreement, the nobility pledged to maintain peace among those differing in religion—dissidentes de religione—which in practice chiefly concerned Christian denominations. It did not yet establish full religious liberty for every resident in the modern sense, but it was an extraordinary achievement for its time. As religious wars ravaged Europe, the Commonwealth stood out for the breadth of its toleration. The historian Janusz Tazbir captured this in the title of his book A State Without Stakes, referring to the burning of religious dissenters. King Sigismund II Augustus is credited with saying, “I am not the king of your consciences.” This is compatible with treating the Ten Commandments as a moral foundation. We must distinguish the moral order—what a person is bound to do in conscience—from the legal order—what government may compel a person to do. The state does not enforce the commandments concerning religious belief and worship. Pluralism. Different beliefs, communities, and ways of life coexist under a common legal framework. The old Commonwealth was home to Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Jews, Armenians, and Muslim Tatars. The pursuit of excellence. A value with ancient and Christian roots, further developed in the modern era. It should not be confused with pluralism: it is the ambition to aim higher and learn from those who excel in prosperity, wisdom, and achievement. Pluralism says that different people can live alongside one another; the pursuit of excellence says that we should learn from the best. A Polish symbol of that ambition is the Commission of National Education, established in 1773 and often regarded as Europe’s first ministry of education. Only when we know what these values are and where they come from can we have a serious discussion about them. Are they good and sound? Do they form a coherent whole, or a set of overlapping traditions that sometimes pull in different directions? Are they worth defending—and will this system of values prevail?