What's an education in the humanities worth?Robert D. Kaplan for the NYT writes a wonderful essay about the life of Patrick Leigh Fermor who died last week at 96 at his home in England. According to Kaplan, Fermor had a broad humanist perspective that is sorely lacking today among strategists.
"In today’s world of overly specialized foreign-policy knowledge, in which military men, politicians and academics inhabit disconnected intellectual universes, we need more generalists like Fermor."
Fermor helped to undermine the German occupation of Crete during World War II, and went "one to become one of the greatest travel writers of his era."
He was once described by the BBC as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene."
"He did not simply glorify king and country; rather, he combined the traits of a soldier, linguist and humanist, and he appreciated history and culture for their own sake even as he used that wisdom to defend civilization. In today’s world of overly specialized foreign-policy knowledge, in which military men, politicians and academics inhabit disconnected intellectual universes, we need more generalists like Fermor.
Following the Nazi occupation of Crete, Fermor, fluent in both classical and modern Greek, infiltrated the island to help organize the resistance. He and a small band of British agents spent years in the mountains disguised as Cretan shepherds, complete with black turbans and sashes and armed with silver-and-ivory daggers. Fermor organized and carried out the daring 1944 kidnapping of Gen. Werner Kreipe, the German commander in Crete, whom Fermor’s group marched to a boat that spirited them to Egypt."
Kaplan, who met Fermor personally at his home amidst his extensive library, concludes, "The British Empire lasted as long as it did partly because it produced soldier-aesthetes like Fermor, who could talk about medieval Greece as easily as he could the Italian Renaissance, for comparison is necessary for all serious scholarship. America needs men and women like Fermor if it is to maintain its current position in the world."
