Month: June 2017

Isocrates doesn’t get better the more you read of him, but he doesn’t really get worse, either.  That’s because, more than most Greek orators, Isocrates goes out of his way to say old things in new ways.  Here, for instances, from Panegyricus 24-25, is his fresh spin on Athenian autochthony (Greek from Perseus, not sure why the grave accents don’t integrate):

ταύτην γὰρ οἰκοῦμεν οὐχ ἑτέρους ἐκβαλόντες οὐδ᾽ ἐρήμην καταλαβόντες οὐδ᾽ ἐκ πολλῶν ἐθνῶν μιγάδες συλλεγέντες, ἀλλ᾽ οὕτω καλῶς καὶ γνησίως γεγόναμεν, ὥστ᾽ ἐξ ἧσπερ ἔφυμεν, ταύτην ἔχοντες ἅπαντα τὸν χρόνον διατελοῦμεν, αὐτόχθονες ὄντες καὶ τῶν ὀνομάτων τοῖς αὐτοῖς, οἷσπερ τοὺς οἰκειοτάτους,τὴν πόλιν ἔχοντες προσειπεῖν: μόνοις γὰρ ἡμῖν τῶν Ἑλλήνων τὴν αὐτὴν τροφὸν καὶ πατρίδα καὶ μητέρα καλέσαι προσήκει.

For we inhabit this his [our city], not having thrown others out or seizing an uninhabited place or coming together as a mix of many peoples, but we have come into being in such a noble and genuine [as opposed to bastard or illegitimate] way that we have gone on holding, for all time, the place where we were born, being autochthonous and able to call our city by the same names with which we call those nearest and dearest to us.  For us alone of all the Greeks is it fitting to call the same [feminine] thing “nurse” and “mother” and “fatherland.”

“Fatherland” here is patris, a noun formed in much the same way as patria by the addition of a feminine to the word for “father.”  In English, of course, the gendered connotations are lost, but Isocrates is certainly aware of them – at least as a grammatical problem.

Because most of our kinship terms have straightforward translations into Greek, we tend to think of the Greeks as thinking about kinship in much the same way we do.  This can be sometimes get us into trouble, as for instance with theories of autochthony.  Unlike us, the Greeks didn’t extend their genealogies indefinitely back in time through patterns of sexual reproduction; many of them (not just Athenians, but also Thebans and others) saw themselves as having emerged out of the earth at some point in what was for them a historical past.  Greek ideas of kinship thus included the possibility of a “natural” kin relation to things, not just to people.  To places as well, since what mattered for the Athenians wasn’t just that they’d come out of the earth, but that they’d come out of the earth in Attica – this being just one of many “politicized” forms of kinship through which the polis established solidarity and internal organization.  The phratry, which is the only trace in Greek of the PIE root meaning “brother,” would be another.  Historians have tended to assume that phratries originated as biological kinship groups, then developed their “artificial” civic function later – but why should we assume this?

In important ways, then, the Greek kinship system is closer to that of pre-conquest Hawaii or Mexico than it is to modern family values.  Still, though, there’s something that makes all these systems seem “of a type,” and that’s the presence of words that describe the same “natural” kin relations as English “father,” “mother,” “brother.”  This set of terms is not universal among languages or cultures, but it is widespread.

One obvious explanation for that fact would be that biological kinship is in some sense “natural,” the most widespread and also the original way for humans to conceptualize family life.  This seems to me to be a rather stupid way to approach the problem: calling a social fact “natural” is just a way of avoiding giving an explanation that masquerades as an explanation.  In any case, what matters about kinship vocabulary isn’t what it “is,” but what you can do with it.

From a functional point of view, every word might be thought of as a kind of a shortcut for avoiding circumlocutions.  You can say anything you want in any language, but you might be able to say it more quickly in some than in others.  Some Inuit languages, for example, have a single word for sea ice, but English needs two, and Arabic, which has a single root covering ice, snow, and other frozen things, might need an even more complex expression.

The principle holds for kinship vocabulary as well as for anything else.  “Father,” for instance, is a shortcut that helps us avoid having to say “one who inseminated my mother, leading to my birth” whenever this is what we want to mean.  Since many of us would probably find saying this longer phrase not only cumbersome but actually embarrassing, it’s fair to describe “father” as a euphemism.  Mutatis mutandis, the same holds true for the other basic elements of “biological” kinship vocabulary.  They’re timesavers to be sure, but they also help us avoid saying something gross.

As stated, this isn’t an analysis that can be extended to other languages without substantial argument.  Where an English speaker, for example, would be uncomfortable saying “the one who gave birth to me,” a speaker of ancient Greek has no trouble saying tekousa and a speaker of classical Arabic unproblematically says walida.  Arabic sometimes even uses raham, “womb,” to mean kinship in general, and adelphos, the Greek word for brother, must at some point have been transparently analyzable as “womb-sharer.”  Both Greek and Arabic nonetheless have “shortcut” words that translate English “mother,” “father,” “brother.”  Our own hesitance to speak openly about the “biological” elements of reproduction has obviously not been shared by every historical society.

In another way, though, these words have a euphemistic value that may be more widespread.  What we see as the polite obscuring of our pudenda origo is at a deeper level the covering up of the conditions of possibility of that origo, namely that our parents are (or were) sexually active individuals capable of engendering a child.  From this fact follows the possibility of parent-child incest, something that all the kinship systems so far discussed raise strong prohibitions against.  A circumlocution like “one who inseminated my mother, leading to my birth” is a syntactic chain in which the pronouns can easily switch places.  “My father,” by contrast, is opaque to that kind of inversion.  “Father,” in this case, is a euphemism that protects not its own content, but the mother, from the child’s unwanted attention, and vice versa.

To show that what I’m saying goes for the Greeks as well, it might suffice to look at the end of Oedipus Rex and see how, as Oedipus solves the riddle of his birth, the words “mother” and “father” rupture and spill out into ever more detailed circumlocutions.  Sometimes, not to “know” the meaning of certain words is safer than knowing their meaning too precisely.

“Mother” and “father” have always been subject to what believers in a natural order of kinship would call uses by extension, such that one can have two mothers or two fathers or a mother and/or father to whom one is not biologically related.  Our tendency to see such usages as “inauthentic” is strong enough that people will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce biologically-related offspring in difficult circumstances rather than adopting.  If the functional value of these terms is actually to block certain sexual possibilities, however, then these extensional usages are in that sense no less authentic than the “original” ones, the need for such lexigraphic regulation simply being felt in more circumstances as different types of family units form.

Isocrates’ patris (to get back around to the passage that started this discussion) is one such extensional usage.  As such, and according to the foregoing analysis, we should expect this “fatherland” to do the semantic work of “protecting” the mother.  And indeed we do find something like this going on.

Greek scholars know that one of the Athenians’ favorite metaphors for sex is that of a ploughman (the male) working at his field (the female).  So many nasty things about Greek life are embedded in this figure that I could spend another two posts unpacking it.  All I want to point out, for now, is that Greek thought conventionally associates the land with (potential) mothers, not fathers.  By this logic, the word “fatherland” “protects” the motherland (and the mothers who are analogous to land) from incest much as the word “father” does.  In a patriotic context, why bother?  Is it because Isocrates’ call to arms is trying to motivate people to choose to kalws apothnhskein rather than reproduce and live family lives in the usual way?  In that case, the looming figure of the fatherland would be such as to recharacterize any sexual intercourse as incest.

I’m returning to something I wrote about a couple of days ago, Tolerance as she is Actually Practiced.  This is essentially an American phenomenon in the sense that America has always been a singing, dancing parody of enlightenment thought, but I bet what I’m saying goes for England, too (witness Blur, c. 2003: “Being British isn’t about hate, it’s about disgust.  We’re all….disgusting).

Freud tells us that love is actually the last thing anyone should expect us to feel for our neighbors.  This isn’t really a psychoanalytic insight so much as a “home truth” that belongs to the body of faux-sage folk anthropology (so ably analyzed by Sahlins in The Western Illusion of Human Nature) that makes man out to be a wolf who needs to be saved from himself (really, from his other) by the state.  But the fact that this version of human nature is socially constructed doesn’t mean you can’t build a society around it.

We’re living that dream, pretty much, except that in this mediated world of ours we can pick from any number of neighbors to hate.  When Nina Simone sang “you don’t have to live next to me, just give me my equality,” these words still made sense; now, everybody lives next to everybody, and everyone hates his neighbor.  I don’t think this is something that anybody wanted, but spend five minutes on Twitter or near a television set and you’ll know that it’s true.  Hate links us together and helps us imagine our community, which, in the American case, is always an “us” that includes a “them.”  Hate, too, is a social glue.

But is “hate” the right word to describe these arrangements?  Almost nobody self-describes as a hater, after all, not even actual nazis.  People usually frame their relationship to a hated other in terms of injustice, particularly in terms of an unjust distribution: the other is getting more than his fair share of something of which we, ourselves, have been unjustly deprived.  Another name for the animus that drives such claims is envy.  You can recognize envy at work whenever a justice-claim of the sort just described doesn’t respond to factual arguments about the good whose distribution is in question.

An example: rural whites think that they can’t get a job because all the jobs have gone to inner-city blacks.  You can remind people who think this that urban blacks have been unemployed at a higher rate than rural whites for the past forty years, and that the disparity is growing, as much as you want.  You can show them a piece of paper with numbers on it.  None of that will change their mind.

That’s because what they really are is envious.  Envy, when you come down to it, is all about pleasure: you envy someone because you think that they’re having a better time than you are.  That claim is by nature irrefutable, but it’s also one we’re inclined to regard as morally vicious.  All this nonsense about unemployment is only a cover to hide the envy that lies at the heart of rural white “economic anxieties,” not just from the rest of us, but from rural whites themselves.  When envy comes out in the open, we call it hate.

In America, “tolerance” mostly means the cultivation of this state of affairs by people who benefit from the appearance of political engagement that envy generates.  Almost nobody fights for anymore for the essential things, true equality and the cancellation of “free-market” economics that this would entail.  Neither major political party even aims at anything worth calling a common good.  Both of them thrive on, and take their cues from, a groundswell of invidious sentiment.  Envy animates a body politic that we would otherwise have to recognize as a corpse.

What, then?  An end to tolerance?  Of course not, if the alternative is a return to the killing fields of the Jim Crow South or (following Michea’s line of argument) of the 17th-century wars of religion.  But suppose we can get past tolerance going in the other direction?

Since Isocrates gives a lot of unsolicited advice, his speeches often start with a kind of sales pitch that explains why the addressee – who might never even have heard of Isocrates before! – should still pay attention to what he’s got to say.  This is one of my favorites:

“There are many things that educate private citizens, most of all that they do not live in luxury but have to take council every day about how to stay alive. Then there are the laws under which they happen to live, and finally the forthrightness and openness with which their friends may rebuke them and their enemies attack them over any wrong action.  In addition to all these things, certain of the poets have left them treasuries of advice about how one should live.  It’s reasonable that common people should turn out for the better through all these factors.  None of them are available to tyrants, though, and these men – who ought more than anyone else to be educated – turn out, as soon as they take the throne, to be utterly brainless.” (Isocrates, To Nicocles 4)

The point is that Nicocles, who is himself a tyrant – tyrannos, not apparently a word that always carries negative connotations outside Athens – may have missed his chance at a moral education that everyone else gets for free.  This is a lack that Isocrates promises to fill.

We come to find out what he fills it with over fifty more pages of prose that contain a few but not many surprises.   I’m rather more interested the content of the “private citizen’s” education that Isocrates says is unavailable to tyrants.  It’s not hard to understand how necessity, the laws, the poets and sharp-tongued friends could turn out to be teachers.  But what is it – in a Greek or a modern context – that they teach?  Will they teach the same, or complementary, or even incompatible lessons?  Will their students turn out “good” in the same sense that the tyrant is good, or “good” in some other sense, one that makes them useful or noxious to the tyrant?

If, to make a long story short, we find the poets (e.g. Hesiod in the Works and Days) and the sharp-tongued friends (e.g. the anonymous praisers and blamers of the Nicomachean Ethics) saying more or less the same things as the laws – “live quietly and don’t seek profit unjustly” – then necessity, which makes men take council about preserving their own life, seems to speak against this chorus.  The Greeks never invoke necessity except as an excuse or an explanation for an action that would otherwise have seemed just bad.  Necessity teaches people to be strategic, but not scrupulous, in their pursuit of a living.

It’s difficult to square this with the lessons of Isocrates’ other “teachers of the masses,” unless we take Isocrates to have a thought in mind here that he articulates more clearly elsewhere – that a man should appear to behave justly, not through weakness and because he cannot do otherwise, but only out of respect for justice itself.  In that case, necessity would be teaching a capacity to act strategically against justice, a capacity that then remains latent in good men but that renders their goodness meaningful by marking it as a choice.  Socrates makes a similar argument in the Hippias Minor and in Xenophon’s Memorabilia – that the man who knows how to lie is “better” than someone who can only tell the truth.

His capacity for evil is, as we know, what makes man a dangerous animal, but it’s also what makes humans more than livestock.  Supposing that such a capacity really is valuable, even necessary for validating good behavior as more than a confession of weakness, ethicists face their own version of the metaphysical question as to how a potential can be said to exist if it’s never realized.  That is, a really good man has to have the capacity for evil; but, if he’s really good, he’ll never do evil, and so the very capacity that makes us call him good in the first place remains a mere postulation.

Isocrates has an interesting solution to this conundrum, one that in some ways seems characteristic of a shallow thinker but that in other ways accesses a truth about Athenian social life that has no place in the ethics of Plato or Aristotle.  As far as I know, Isocrates is the only Athenian ethical writer – in a culture that gave us Phaedra and Oedipus! – who takes seriously the question of secrets.  He almost seems to take it for granted that those who receive his advice will, nonetheless, keep on doing bad things.  They should hide this, he says, if they can; but, if they need a friend’s advice about an evil deed, they should ask as though they were talking about some third party.  We need only glance at one of Plato’s discussions of the relationship between being and seeming good to see the distinctiveness of Isocrates’ position, which I take to be this: that a man should indeed try to seem good, but that a certain amount of evil done in private is the only thing that can make this seeming worthwhile.

Since before last year’s election, there’s been an argument going on about whether the third of Americs that’s die-hard for Trump is driven by racial animus or something closer to economic self-interest (and, in the latter case, also dumb enough to fall for an obvious con).  The conclusion I came to pretty early on was that both of these things are, to some extent, true.  Much if not most of white America is no less racist now than it was in the fifties, even if people know that you can’t say certain words in public.  Racism can’t be the whole story, though, since plenty of plainly racist white people voted for Obama, some of them twice.  Racism in America is an attitude, and not every attitude is politically salient all the time.

When voters think they have something meaningful to gain from voting for one party or another – when they see that they have an interest in the issues of civil rights, economics or what have you that are at play in a given election – they’ll vote according to that interest.  The rule in American politics has been that interests trump attitudes; as long as genuine interests seem to be at stake, racism can remain widespread without any electoral consequences following from this. What seems to me to have happened in the last few years is that lots of people, especially but not exclusively lower-class whites, have lost any sense that the centrist economic consensus according to which our country has been governed for the last three decades has anything to offer them.  When people believe that nothing the government does will ever help them, the only way left for them to choose a side will be to follow their attitudinal commitments – commitments that can grow to be quite passionate in the absence of other, more meaningful forms of political engagement.

None of this is to discount the palpable effects of gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement – both forms of institutional rather than attitudinal racism – on the outcome of last year’s election and others before it.  I’m only offering a theory as to how things got so bad that these factors, which swung maybe one or two percent of the vote in key states, were enough to put a liar, a scam artist, and a probable rapist in the White House.

The theory I’m working with is, to sum up, that politics as usual in the United States works by a system of collective bribery that leads us to tolerate whatever we hate about our neighbors in exchange for the palpable benefits of peace and prosperity.  Whatever those benefits may once have been, they’re no longer accruing to most Americans – one point on which Black Lives Matter activists and rural Trump voters might even agree.  This has been the state of things for a while – maybe ten or twenty years – but we’re only now starting to realize it.  The consequences of this are difficult to predict.

I find all this much more eloquently put in Jean-Claude Michea’s The Realm of Lesser Evil, a series of lectures in which the author (who teaches Philosophy at the University of Montpellier) reconstructs liberalism’s original sin as its co-dependence with a market economy that undoes many of its egalitarian promises.  Michea argues that liberalism, which emerged in 17th-century Europe in the wake of brutal civil wars, aspires to depoliticize every moral judgment so that our deep ethical commitments can no longer organize political (and therefore potentially violent) conflict.  Since an amoral state no longer has any grounds on which to claim the allegiance of its citizens, it offers the market economy instead: a circulation of goods built on principles of non-judgment and non-interference that, as the liberal promise goes, will guarantee endless growth.

The residue of Michea’s depoliticized judgments would be what I’ve been characterizing as “attitudes;” the market’s promise of prosperity would organize what I’ve been calling “interests.”  Trump’s America is what happens when the market’s promise, which is the central pole around which all interests are supposed to circulate, turns out to have been a texture of lies.

Since the French edition of Michea’s book came out in 2007, it takes no account of that year’s economic collapse and the period of secular stagnation which followed upon it.  I think that the Michea of 2007 would not have been at all surprised to see this course of events issue in the presidency of someone like Trump.  What would’ve surprised him was Marine Le Pen’s defeat in the recent French elections – especially since the French are, if anything, much more cynical than us Americans about the purported benevolence of the invisible hand.

The difference between France and America may just come down to an equivocation that runs throughout Michea’s treatment of tolerance, which he frames as the chief ideological instrument of depoliticization in modern liberalism.  By and large, Michea is opposed to a tolerance which he sees as merely the silencing, by increasingly draconian means (and, since he’s an aging white guy, these means for Michea include “political correctness” – more on this later) of hateful attitudes that survive and even thrive beneath this blanket of repression.  He proposes to replace it with something resembling the Stoic oikeiosis – an ever expanding circle of concern, within which we come to love our neighbors, and their idiosyncrasies, as we love ourselves.

In practice, it would be difficult for an outside observer to tell which of these two tendencies was operating in a given social formation.  They might look almost identical, especially if a society came to cultivate oikeiosis as a virtue that it enforced upon in various non-liberal ways.  Under those circumstances, what Michea derides as political correctness might better be understood as a society’s means of enforcing its own norms as to virtue in a manner that goes beyond the impotent liberal consensus.

The practices of a given, apparently liberal, social formation are thus subject to a kind of anamorphosis: depending on where we stand, what looks at one moment like Michea’s “bad” tolerance can look at another moment like Michea’s “good” brotherly love.  The proof, though, is in the electoral pudding.  White Americans look at their non-white countrymen with barely-repressed hate and envy; they vote for Trump.  The French, on the other hand, still cherish – and are willing to enforce, if necessary – the old-time virtues of liberty, equality, and especially fraternity.