Month: August 2018

Agias and Dercylus are twins, in the sense that you can’t have one without the other.  Though they lived in the early fourth century, these two have suffered the fate of most early mythographers – to be forgotten, or remembered only in fragments.  That, and a matter of chance, are why their names are now glued together forever.

Thanks to them, we know some of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Nestor’s father by Heracles.  They, unlike the mainline tradition, say that Neleus had it coming because he stole the cattle of Geryon, which Heracles had himself stolen after killing their owner.  That’s the moral calculus of myth.  Likymnios, on the other hand – illegitimate brother of Alcmene and therefore Heracles’ uncle – was murdered involuntarily.

Their further contributions: Harmony was the daughter of a dragon.  The Eresides wash their beds for reasons that are hard to understand.  Androgeos set the custom of sacrificing unwreathed to the Graces, which the Parians still follow to this day, because he heard news of his son’s death during the ritual.  Fans of Gustave Moreau will be interested to know that Zeus Herkeios enjoyed the use of three eyes.

 

Acusilas is arguably the oldest mythographer.  He is supposed to have written on bronze tablets, which, if true, would have limited the circulation and survivability of his many works.  True enough: these (on the subject of mythic genealogies) survive only in fragments quoted and referenced by later writers.

Acusilas says that the first man (after the cataclysm) was Phoroneus.  Plato may have built the story of Atlantis around this fragment or the larger narrative from which it has survived.  Never mind people: the first of all things, says Acusilas, was Chaos.  Love came into the world a little later.

Speaking of love, Acusilas gives an interesting variant on one of Greek myth’s big romances.  Aphrodite fell for a mortal, Anchises, and gave birth to Aeneas.  That’s what they want you to think, anyhow: the sinister truth is that Aphrodite had a prophecy that Anchises’ descendents would take over Troy after the death of Priam.  Romancing Anchises (already an old man, says Acusilas) was just her way of getting into the game.  That done, she spurred Paris to kidnap Helen and then prevented thr Trojans from giving her back when they still might have saved their city.  Troy fell, Priam died, and (as Acusilas could not possibly have known) the Romans, descended from Aphrodite via Aeneas, took over the Troad.  Love plays the long game.

There were three Kabeiroi, Acusilas says, with their wives the Kabeirides.  Argus Panoptes was earth-born.  Actaeon had to die because he disputed with Zeus over Semele, not because he saw Artemis bathing.

Caine, turned Caineus by Poseidon and given rule over the Lapiths, died fighting the centaurs.  Zeus spurred the centaurs to kill him for reasons that have fallen into a lacuna.

Conventional wisdom about Endymion is that Selene, the moon, asked Zeus to make him sleep all the time and in this way keep him young forever.  Acusilas says that Zeus granted Endymion a different boon, which was that he could choose the time of his own death.  This, one supposes, would have put Selene in a much more difficult position.  Watching over a sleeping boy is easy; making  sure that a boy wants to stay alive forever is a full-time job.

I was reading something written for me by a graduate student the other day about the problem of labor in Livy’s first decade.  I took the author’s points about debt, recognition, and Livy’s depiction of a strangely fiscal state under the last Roman kings.  I was surprised, however, to encounter here – in a text I thought I knew pretty well – echoes of a different conception of labor that I’d thought was the special province of ancient Greek thinkers, in particular Xenophon and Aristotle.  Usually, we think of labor as something productive; we evaluate organizations of labor, in large part, by their ability to manage efficient production of stuff (thus, even in 20th-century debates over American plantation slavery, one major point of disagreement has been whether slave labor was economically efficient or a developmental dead end, doomed to be driven out of business by the factories of the free North).  Hegel and Marx also perceived that labor could produce people, in the sense that some labor structures can lead to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a rich few but also in the sense that one’s functional place within an organization of productive forces also becomes, whether one likes it or not, the baseline of one’s identity.  Subtract the dialectical progressive whiggism that underlies both thinkers’ views (something my graduate student did quite well) and you have a flexible, critical theory of labor as (part of) the infrastructure of social forms.

In The Mental and the Material, Maurice Godelier develops an analysis of Classical Athens along these lines that I’ve always found pretty compelling.  There, he says, politics is also part of the order of productive forces, since it generates and protects the citizen/slave division on the basis of which surplus value was produced, accumulated and consumed at Athens through most of its ancient history.  On this account, being an Athenian citizen is all about not having to work – which seems sensible enough.  On the other hand, Athenian citizens did not generally regard themselves as idle.  They thought they were working too, although obviously they didn’t have to do the really hard labor (and any citizen who did was, per Plato and Aristotle and Xenophon, only dubiously entitled to citizen status).  What kind of work, exactly, did Athenian citizens think they were doing?

This is a complicated question; I’ve been working on an answer for a while, and I’ll probably publish it in book form someday.  The problem with Athens, of course, is that you have so many answers from so many different perspectives.  A general response would amount to characterizing a discourse, which is a lot harder to do perspicaciously than, say, summarizing what Plato said.

Outside Athens, the question takes on different contours – especially in places where the line between ruler and ruled is better-defined.  Aristotle and Xenophon agree that tyrants face a labor problem, not because they need to organize their subjects to produce a surplus – most tyrants take over an infrastructure that already does this work – but because they need to keep their subjects busy.  For Aristotle at least, the tyrant’s fear would seem to be that if his subjects had leisure (a relative term for the Greeks: schole pros ti), they would use it to undertake the sort of work with which Athenians busy themselves, namely politics.  Under a tyrant, political activity of any sort can’t help but be seditious.  Conversely, tyrannicidal conspiracies require free time, which you don’t have if you’re off fighting wars or laboring on distant farms.

From the standpoint of a strongly hierarchical society, then, labor is not so much a productive force as a barrier against social change.  Hierarchy survives by maintaining the status quo, but its ability to do this directly, by force, is usually rather limited by comparison with the magnitude of the population that needs to be governed.  To the extent that labor to produce things can be made to take the place of labor to produce change, a population can be induced to govern itself in ways that obviate the need for force.  The result is not exactly consent; it’s more like indifference to the fundamental issues of politics, which seem trivial by comparison with the exigencies of laboring life in much the same way that the sun, because of its distance, seems smaller than the coin you hold close to your face.

Marxism, with its exclusive concern for labor as production, imposes a kind of myopia to which hierachy’s more uninhibited modern defenders and detractors have not been subject.  On the right, take Samuel Huntington’s notorious white paper for the Nixon administration arguing that cuts to the social safety net would, by forcing people to work more for less money, curtail participation in progressive politics; on the left, consider David Graeber’s recent attack on “bullshit jobs” as a combination social bribe and social pacifier.  If Marx was right to think that the conditions of work could produce revolutionary solidarity, his contribution seems to have been all-too-well understood by reactionary forces that have transformed those conditions in order to produce distraction and negative solidarity.  Now, what needs to be attacked is work itself.

Capitalism completes its dominion by making leisure impossible.  The twentieth century saw leisure time colonized by consumption, which the attention economy has supplemented in the twenty-first.  Our leisure time produces angst, not relaxation, because we’ve filled it with activities – button-pressing in pursuit of various ephemeral pleasures – that resemble nothing so much as less infrastructure-intensive factory work.  That work is, of course, productive of nothing, but it does keep us too busy to do the kind of work that would transform our basic conditions of life, either individually or collectively.

Marshall Sahlins, in an essay titled “The Original Affluent Society,” observed that people who subsist by hunting and gathering only have to work a few hours each day.  This observation was original and transformative at a time when most anthropologists still thought, like everybody else, that “civilization” had enriched us while freeing us from the constant struggle for survival that was supposed to characterize “primitive” cultures.  If Sahlins’ “affluent” means “rich in time” – the one sense of the word in which nobody has been able to challenge Sahlins’ argument – then a better title for his essay might have been “The Only Affluent Society.”  Only in a situation broadly free of hierarchy can people really be allowed to have “free time.”  Otherwise, it’s always in the interests of whoever happens to be at the top of the hierarchy to fill this time, either with more work or with “leisure” activities that resemble work.

 

One of the things that make ancient theories of anger management unpalatable to the modern reader is their single-minded focus on the mind of the master.  Seneca is no exception to the rule: like other writers in the genre, he draws the better part of his historical examples from the annals of master-slave interactions.  Seneca takes it for granted that one of the obligations of mastery is to discipline slaves, in many cases by corporal punishment.  Most or all situations that call for such punishment are also likely to provoke the master to an anger which, as Seneca sees it, threatens to undermine the whole disciplinary project.  The reason why is probably that, according to an Aristotelian dictum that Seneca also accepts, anger arises primarily between equals.  To punish while angry is to erase the status distinction separating master from slave, and thus to convert what should appear as a disciplinary action imposed legitimately on a subaltern into an act of “mere” violence.

The same logic dictates that you should never try to discipline an angry friend (“castigare irascentem,” De ira 3.40), because this attempt to impose your authority over a notional equal would come as a slight bound to intensify the ira that you want to quash.  For the Romans, anger is a privilege among equals, in other words the unpleasant cost of a class solidarity that maintains itself by distinction from, and as superior to, an underclass with whom one simply cannot get angry.

An interesting permutation on this scenario is the office of the principate, notionally primus inter pares but, as early imperial writers were prepared to admit in their darker moments, really standing in relation to “free” Roman citizens as these stood in relaation to their slaves.  Seneca highlights this new wrinkle in his account of Vedius Pollio, an arriviste who threatens to have a clumsy slave fed to the eels in Augustus’ presence.  Augustus saves the slave, then punishes Pollio by having his eel ponds filled in.  This, says Seneca, is an instance in which you can “castigare irascentem:” “[si] forte tanta persona eris ut possis iram comminuere.”

For Greek and Roman writers alike, anger is all about power relations.  Anger marks out a certain domain of equality and measures deviations from that equality, whether negative (slave) or positive (emperor).  Its function thus seems static and, as we would think, rather different from the kind of anger that has accompanied transformative social movements from the French Revolution on.

Here is the rare place, though, where we should be cautious about assuming too much distance between present and past.  The anger that brought Trump into office (and, more generally, the whole phenomenon chronicled by Pankaj Mishra in The Age of Anger) is fundamentally an anger of the ancient, static kind, one that lays claim on the part of one group to mastery over an opposing group that “should” be an underclass.  In this sense, even the economically-distressed and mobility-troubled voters described by Arlie Hochschild are really white supremacists, though they may not be aware of it: they claim the right to be angry at others for having the temerity to act as their equals.  The only advice that Seneca would have for voters like these is that their anger, as such, is counterproductive, that they should exercise their dominion calmly so as to achieve a greater disciplinary power.

In a world of “negative solidarity” where hostility is the only universally comprehensible form of political engagement, that advice no longer makes much sense.  The script has flipped: anger creates media presence, voter turnout, and (in a feedback loop of which we are yet to see the worst consequences) profits for social media sites like Twitter and Facebook which thus have an incentive to stoke anger higher.  George W.S. Trow said we should be suspicious of anyone who invites us to an event the whole “event” status of which consists in our being there.  That was a perceptive warning against the modern anger culture, but Trow (having had the luck to die before the internet came along) never told us what to do if an event like that came to us, if we couldn’t escape it.

The enlightenment and the French Revolution show us one way forward.  Both drew their motivating force from anger, on the part of those lately disillusioned, at social structures and cultural institutions that had aimed to keep them dumb and in bondage.  The anger of a Rousseau was totalizing and, as such, did not spare Rousseau himself.  A total anger, including hatred of what we are (and hope soon not to be) has revolutionary potential.  It’s not spectacular, it’s badly-suited for radio call-in shows, and that’s what differentiates it from ira.  In that sense at least, Seneca’s advice – noli irascere – may still have something to it.

Like everyone, I was born without a soul.  That I never developed one is a generational pathology.  In the 1980’s, much of America was pretty well-off.  Afluence brought comfort, so we were denied truly character-building experiences in childhood.  Those of us who were smart enough to make it through high school and college without failing a class never ran into obstacles when it would have mattered.  So, we ended up without a soul.  My sense of what “soul” means may be controversial, but I don’t care.  This is the soul as Gothic cathedral: beautiful because it raises itself up against constraints.

This is not, per se, a racial pathology, although by far the majority of people who suffer from it are white.  We grew up in the suburbs, boring.  The Arcade Fire made an album to cheer us up, which worked for a while.

It’s hard to live without a soul.  A major virtue of Pankaj Mishra’s The Age of Anger is that is recognizes this.  A failure of the book (aside from its constant and I think against the author’s conscience red-baiting)  is that it doesn’t acknowledge how many more people are truly soulless now than a century (or even a decade) ago.

Mishra highlights something basic about modernity, which is that we gave up our gods in favor of the state but the state hasn’t delivered.  Imagine the kind of drive the idea of an Italian nation must have aroused in the carborari: a new Rome, a state to which one could belong and which would be not only recognized but dominant on the world stage.  Obviously it didn’t work out that way, in the 19th century or now.  No wonder they gas-bombed Ethiopians; nationalism is a delusional psychosis.  People who suffer from it ought to be locked up in wards.

Mihra says we’re now living through the bitter harvest of these broken promises.  They told us the truth would make us free, which is true, but it turns out that being free doesn’t satisfy our ego demands.  Enlightenment and nationhood only force us to confront the sourced of our oppression without any religious or imperial veils.  We still don’t have the power to overthrow them.

I think that’s right, but I think it’s wrong to read what’s happened over the last couple years as a continuation of these trends.  In fact, it’s an intensification.  Sayyid Qutb (to take one of Mishra’s examples) was looking at modernity from the other side of the window; it was something he aspired to, as the dozens of pages of Milestones devoted to “the right use of technology” surely show.  We, on the other hand, are on the other side of modernization and can’t delude ourselves that technology is going to fix our problems.  Apple promises to give us a soul, but we know that’s not going to happen.

The soulless masses are vulnerable in the same sense that the clay that makes the golem is vulnerable.  We’re eager to be manipulated.  In the nineties, for instance – when this generation of automata came of age – you could watch Homer Simpson on TV.  A lot of (fucking stupid) people have said that Homer Simpson is a figure for how white men are the last people you can racially/sexually stereotype.  They think that Homer Simpson is a slur against white men.  In fact, the opposite is true.  Homer Simpson is the representation that white men wanted to see back then and, as the election of Trump shows, still want to see.  They want to see someone as dumb and boring as they are succeed.  They want to believe that an empty white skin can achieve whatever it wants.

Meanwhile, a lot of us don’t have souls but do have consciences.  Some of us even have taste.  What are we supposed to do?