The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (4 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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Man turned a corner in Greece, and this religion was partly responsible. The dramatist Aeschylus recounts it in mythic form.
9
Orestes learns that his father, King Agamemnon, has been butchered. Blood calls for blood; that is the ancient law of vengeance. But the murderer was his own mother, Clytemnestra. How can he kill the woman who bore him and suckled him? The mother’s claim too is primal. What must he do? The traditions, by themselves, offer no escape. When he does kill Clytemnestra, he is pursued by the Furies, ancient and hideous goddesses of the underworld, who avenge those who violate the old taboos of blood. They are also the terrible gnawings of Orestes’ awakening conscience. He cannot endure it; he flies to Athens to stand trial before the gods. There the young goddess of wisdom, Athena, will preside. It is the old against the new, the instinctual against the rational, the Furies against Apollo, Orestes’ protector, with Aeschylus giving the Furies the better of the argument. The jurymen deadlock. Athena casts the deciding vote, for acquittal. Because she was born from the head of Zeus, she says, she always favors the father. Therefore she favors the rights of the city: the king’s murderer must be punished.
 
We mark here a shift from the tribe to the
polis
—free men debating and determining what course to take. The biggest surprise is not how the jurymen vote (and, given the case, their vote is fair), but that there is a jury at all. They are none other than the free men of Athens. Men have the capacity—not the
right
, but the
capacity
, if they set their minds to it—to govern themselves. They can acknowledge the rights of tradition, of the unwritten laws, of mothering nature, and in so doing they can order their affairs rationally. If they have a king, he should be like Sophocles’ Theseus: calm, patriotic, and wise in the glory and the frailty of man’s soul. This self-government of a people is a gift from Zeus. It conforms them to that god enthroned upon Olympus whom they call “father of gods and men” not because of his reproductive habits (which are prodigious), but because of his political strategy and the power of his mind.
 
The Greek Isles Effect
 
The compromise on Olympus reflected the sorts of government the Greeks almost had to invent. Consider the terrain of the Greek lands. It is furrowed with rugged mountains and ravines. There are plenty of splendid harbors, but no long navigable rivers. The weather is excellent for farming, especially for cultivating the grape and the all-purpose olive, but it is hard to find enough flatland for raising huge stores of grain. The Greeks, then, could not be self-sufficient; they had to trade. Nor could any one city establish a vast empire covering the whole area. Before Alexander the Great and his armies, it was impossible.
 
So the Greeks built small outposts of highly advanced civilization: the
polis
, or city-state, from which we derive our word “political.” These city-states studded the Greek peninsula, the Aegean, the Turkish shores, and, eventually, Sicily and southern Italy, with hundreds of self-governing communities. They were not all democratic. Most began as hereditary kingdoms or as aristocracies, governed by the influential men of the oldest and most established families. It was, if you will pardon an anachronism, a kind of federalism, guaranteeing plenty of freedom for the
polis
, and making each into a laboratory for statesmanship, the arts, poetry, philosophy, and almost any other creative endeavor you can name.
 
It’s worthwhile to pause to appreciate this phenomenon, which I’d like to call the Greek Isles Effect. It isn’t peculiar to Greece. We can find it among the Christian monasteries in the Middle Ages, the fledgling states in America, and the Italian republics of the Renaissance. We can find it, though disincarnate, on the Internet now. In all these cases there is some form of unity, more cultural than governmental, coinciding with great freedom to experiment.
 
Let’s look at the unity first. Allowing for dialects, the Greeks were united by a single language. They were united by forms of worship; we see this at the Pan-Hellenic games, the most famous of which were in Olympia. They were united by their mythological and literary heritage. A Greek from Halicarnassus off the coast of Turkey would recall Achilles’ dilemma in the
Iliad
, and would be able to discuss it with a fellow Greek born in Thebes on the mainland but now residing in Acragas, thousands of miles away in Sicily. Precisely because they valued that tradition, they could converse with one another. Unlike the students in our tradition-despising schools, they had something to look at in common. Ask a college senior to recite a short poem by that most American of poets, Robert Frost, and he will look at you blankly. Ask him to name a single general of the Revolutionary War
other than
Washington, and he will ask why you are troubling him with trivia. Even if he has learned to think, he has very little to think
about
or
with
. He is, intellectually, like a peasant without the wheel and the plow. The Greeks did not suffer that deprivation.
 
 
 
Did Plato Foresee Madonna?
 
The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
From Plato’s
Republic
(Book IV, 424c)
 
 
Hardly anything in Plato strikes us as sillier than his caution about music. The typical charge against the philosopher was that he distanced himself too coolly from the demands of the body, but here he acknowledges them frankly, while we are the ones who believe that the pounding, unorganized, relentless beats of hip-hop will have no effect on us at all.
 
 
The shared myths were the fertile soil wherein their imaginations took root.
 
But it did not take root in the same way in all places. Why should it have? We now preach a superficial diversity, but there’s more variety in the polar ice cap than among the regimens of our public schools. The Greeks enjoyed real diversity. In a way, they had to. I’ve mentioned Greek unity; no less important was their separateness. They could feast one another, and they could fight one another. Since their cities were relatively small, they had to train their boys both for self-government and for war.
 
The Greeks found that infantry made up of the “hoplite” warriors, men disciplined to fight as a team, each shielding the man to his left, could withstand noblemen on horse or the slave armies of Persia. But citizens who fight demand a say in government. So the Greek boy, at the age of reason, was taken to the open-air
palaestra
to be educated to be a self-disciplined fighter and citizen. He would learn music, to train his soul—the songs, that is, of Homer and the poets; and he would train his body in strength and agility, by regular competition.
10
 
The gymnasia (literally, “places to be nude in”) were at the heart of Greek political and cultural life. They did not treat the boys as babies. Far from it. Consider what the boys must have overheard. Every adult man who could spare the time from his occupation was expected to keep his body fit at the gymnasion, in part because his city might need him in war, but also because it was the right and beautiful thing to do. There, as men always do when they are free, they engaged in ceaseless conversation about city life, money, sport, the gods, truth and illusion, good and evil. Philosophy was born in a men’s club, in the sweat of a wrestling ring.
 
So then, each city developed its own ways, as each trained its own fighters. Some, like Sparta, had kings; and some kings were genuine rulers, while others were cultic figureheads. Some cities were governed by wealth. Some marched towards democracy, with Athens the most daring among them. By the middle of the fifth century BC, all Athenian offices but the few requiring special expertise (the generalship, for example) were filled by lottery. Every free man had an equal chance of sitting in the legislative council of five hundred, and almost everyone would, at some time in his life, serve the city in some important capacity. No election campaigns, then, and no empty promises. Better yet, no
sincere
campaign promises to reward the idle at the expense of the industrious, or the restless at the expense of the contented. So long as there were leaders who were intelligent and patriotic, who could resist equality’s tendency to slouch towards mediocrity and envy, the system worked.
 
Each city was known for a skill or a virtue or a habit that set it apart from the rest. Mytilene had the best masons. Corinth made the finest pottery. Thebes enjoyed a fertile plain. People were proud of their home-lands, in a way we find hard to understand, because we lack the vitality of their local civic life. It explains why Socrates, condemned to death unjustly for “corrupting the youth of Athens,” would not try to escape. The law of the city, though unjustly applied, commanded his respect, even his love. So Socrates imagines the Laws of Athens speaking to him:
Are you so wise as to have forgotten that compared with your mother and father and all the rest of your ancestors your country is something far more precious, more venerable, more sacred, and held in greater honor both among gods and among all reasonable men? Do you not realize that you are even more bound to respect and placate the anger of your country than your father’s anger? (
Crito
, 51a-b)
 
 
 
The notes of that same love, fierce and noble, without self-pity or sentimentality, can be heard too in the epitaph to the Spartan three hundred who gave their lives blocking the pass against Persian invaders at Thermopylae: “Stranger, go tell at Sparta that we lie here in obedience to her command.”
11
 
The Greeks believed so strongly that the free
polis
provided man the best chance for enjoying the good life, that when their cities grew too crowded they sent people away to form new cities elsewhere. These would maintain commercial and military alliances with the mother city, but they were not colonies in our sense. They governed themselves. When Aristotle said, “Man is a political animal,” he didn’t mean “Man loves to meddle in the affairs of others,” but “Man by his nature best thrives in a
polis
”—a small, self-governing city-state, whose citizens would know one another by sight or family or reputation, and would take an active and regular part in the city’s direction.
12
 
Anything else is “barbarian” and to be pitied. It could mean suffering rule by imperial bureaucrats sent from a capital far away, or immersion in a state so large that almost no one is intimately involved in governing. It could mean a life like that of the Cyclops in Homer’s
Odyssey
:
 
Nor do they meet in council, those Cyclops,
 
Nor hand down laws; they live on mountaintops,
 
In deep caves; each one rules his wife and children,
 
And every family ignores its neighbors. (9.112–15)
 
 
All such conditions cramp the arena for intellectual and practical virtue. For all practical purposes and despite ceaseless electioneering, they also characterize life in the technocratic welfare states of contemporary America and most of Western Europe.
 
Tradition and the natural law
 
What happened, then? What brought the Athenians to mourn their lost integrity, as they sat silently under the sky and heard the songs of
Oedipus at Colonus
as of a voice from the dead? What happened to Athens has, in great measure, happened to the West all over again. Pride and stupidity explain much; rapacity explains more. But also deeply implicated in the Athenian fall were a few destructive ideas: there is no such thing as what is objectively good or bad. The “wisdom” of the past is mere social convention. It grows obsolete with the setting sun. It marks no hard-won victory for a people, demanding reverence. It should be left to the dustheap.

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