Month: December 2018

In my last discussion of Lucian’s Alexander, I characterized it as an early instance of a journalistic genre that’s now common enough: the longform treatment/exposure of a con job.  People write those articles now for polemic reasons, but mostly because there’s money in it.  Nothing makes us feel smarter than seeing a fraud laid bare, and that’s a feeling we’ll pay for.  The journalist’s job is to give us that feeling by telling us about all the dopes that fell for a scam which we, thanks to inside information that the journalist herself has helpfully provided, recognize at once for what it is.

We would like to believe we’re that smart.  The journalist’s perspective is kind of a prosthetic in this regard, and not only because it gives us the information that keeps us from being fooled.  It also provides an apparently objective judgment that the thing in question really is a con, which is a level of certainty we practically never get in daily life, where so many of our friends, acquaintances and coworkers might well be defrauding us in ways we’d never pick up on (or probably acknowledge if someone else dumped the evidence in our laps).  That’s the condition of modern capitalism, Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees brought to life: cheat thy neighbor shall be the whole of the law.  Journalistic exposures of con men are at least a symptomatic cure for the thoroughgoing paranoia generated by this state of affairs.

For all these reasons, the work of bringing scams to light strikes us as a far more titillating quest after truth than, say, research into the proper taxonomy of earthworms.  The truth about long cons is an operative truth: unlike the earthworm family tree, it makes us happier in all sorts of ways.  It provides a direct and immediate ego satisfaction.

It occured to me that this couldn’t be the explanation for what Lucian does in Alexander and also in De morte Peregrini.  For one thing, the genre just wasn’t a popular one in the ancient world.  Where texts reveal the truth about a con, they almost always do so as part of a larger religious polemic; the uncloaking isn’t its own goal, as in Lucian’s work and in its modern successors.  For another thing, what it meant to be “intelligent” in the Roman Empire was also a little different from what it means to be “intelligent” nowadays.  To be smart meant to know a lot of stuff, much of it marvelous and possibly untrue; that one should have a critical sense about these things always seems to have been a minority position.  Finally, people were worried about getting swindled, but not so pervasively as nowadays.  Back then, at least, if someone got caught running a scam they’d be punished – not held up as a model capitalist, and certainly not elected president.

This is why, at the beginning of the Alexander, Lucian does something that modern journalists almost never do: he apologizes for the sordid character of his subject matter.  “αἰδοῦμαι μὲν οὖν ὑπὲρ ἀμφοῖν,” he says: I’m ashamed of you, Celsus, for asking me to write about this fellow, and of myself, Lucian, for taking your request seriously.  Alexander doesn’t so much deserve to be the subject of a learned disquisition as to be torn to pieces in the amphitheatre by apes and foxes.

Yet Alexander attains to a certain majesty of evil just insofar as he’s managed to infest the whole world, not just Asia Minor, with his thefts and his piracies.  In this respect, he resembles his famous namesake, Alexander the Great, who conquered the world using more straightforward means some 500 years earlier.  Alexander of Abonouteichos merits remembrance as the kind of world-conqueror that it’s possible for a Greek to be under the domination of Rome – as a Greek virus that returns to infect the space of the Empire.

That’s one way of justifying Lucian’s interest in this so discreditable figure.  Another, also pursued by Lucian, is to treat Alexander as a monument of shit, an Augean Stables from which Lucian, being no Heracles himself, can only bring out a bucket or two of dung.  That’s an early invention of what you might call the sleazy sublime.  Alexander doesn’t really need Lucian’s help to be remembered: he’s already a monumental structure on the Greek cultural landscape.  Lucian’s interest is only in showing what’s inside.

To be aware of the nature of Lucian’s interest in this project should also, of course, be to read the essay differently.  Would we, for instance, have noticed otherwise that Lucian even talks up Alexander’s capacities above our own?  What else is the enargeic staging of the snake-god Glykon’s debut (Alexander 15-17) but an account of how we ourselves would probably have been fooled if we’d been exposed to Alexander’s magic without Lucian’s mediation?  Even an Epicurus or a Democritus, Lucian coyly concludes, would probably not have been able to see through the scam if he had been standing in the place of Alexander’s Paphlagonian audience.

From this point of view, Lucian is not so much interested in exposing the truth as he is in demonstrating the power of the lie.  That the essay still ends up reflecting poorly on Alexander is owing to another set of Lucianic interests entirely, which I’ll discuss in my next post.

I read an article today about the problem of Egon Schiele, sex abuser.  I wasn’t expecting it to be very good, but I was pleasantly surprised.  What the article poses is a choice between Schiele and our most cherished (or at least anxiously-defended) taboo, “thou shalt not sexualize a child.” After a certain amount of hand-wringing, the author chooses Schiele – which is obviously the right choice to make.

In the event, one can choose Schiele because, as one might say, “it was a different time.”  The modernist revolution meant the liberation of youth of all kinds from the clutches of the old, from the dead hand of tradition.  Children were getting to choose their own identity for once, and they wanted to be sexualized.  From that point of view – from the standpoint of a lost Vienna – Schiele was a liberator.  If you want to condemn him, you have to do so alongside the Nazis.

This story matters to me because it parallels a problem I face all the time in teaching: how to address the Ancient Greek culture of pedophilia.  In probably every Greek city-state – certainly in Athens, Sparta and Thebes, the big three – sexual relationships between men and adolescent boys were somewhere between tolerated and encouraged.  As you can imagine, pretty much no one now looks on such relationships sympathetically (and those few who do – I’ll get to them in a minute – are pretty deranged in their own ways).  That makes for a difficult teaching experience, not because I have to deal with student revulsion – students at my university are generally too cool to moralize – but precisely because students can’t admit or openly address their feelings of revulsion.  To them, therefore, Ancient Greek pedophilia can only ever be a kind of transgressive joke..  It opens up a field of immorality while safely enclosing this within a bubble of historical fiction.  In this respect, it’s exactly like (for instance) the katzenklavier: we’d never build one today, but it’s funny that they did it in the past (so much so that popular accounts tend to treat this instrument, which for all we know was never built, as something real).

That attitude, the treatment of ancient pedophilia as a joke, is actually harder to overcome than self-righteous revulsion, because it wraps the latter in a layer of irony while preserving all its smug sense of superiority over the past.  The unavoidable legacy of the enlightenment, this sense that we know better blocks many avenues of historical inquiry that might lead us to understand, and criticize, the present.  In a more academic register, one recognizes the same basic indifference to history in the relativistic claim that “they did things differently then.”*  Well, they sure did.  But why?

We have to take it for granted that the Greeks weren’t simply more evil than we are, that they didn’t just enjoy “hurting children.”  As Plato was the first to observe, no society can survive a plurality of evil members.  They were doing something different: they might not even have been doing it to children if, as we reasonably suspect, children themselves are a bit of a modern invention.

If I say that the Greeks didn’t need laws or norms to protect their children because there weren’t any children around to protect, I’m accountable for saying what that means.  What it means, in my view, is this: that we, as a society, have chosen** to turn our young people into weaklings, into mental deficiencies, into creatures that, as Lucian puts it, “differ from animals in form alone.”  If you’re going to keep something like that around the house, of course it’s going to need to be protected.

How did we get here?  Cody Delistraty, the author of the piece on Schiele, points out Freud’s status as flagbearer of a revolution in our understanding of child sexuality.  This has to be squared with the claim, advanced by Lacan and others, that Freud was basically a social conservative.  The key to the puzzle is that childhood expressions of sexuality were basically understood to be normal prior to Freud, but that one tried to think about them as little as possible.  Freud turned what had been a matter of universal, private knowledge into a piece of shared public knowledge.  Some people were embarrassed; the mass of the people, who didn’t (and don’t) know how to imagine that someone else could desire something without desiring it themselves and hating that desire in themselves, were scandalized.

Ever since, a campaign of protection has been unrolling – not to protect children from us, since as they were then they didn’t particularly need protection, but to protect us from them, from the threat posed by their desire.  What we’ve done is to neuter children, to make them the object of an intense gaze and surveillance that ostentatiously appreciates them as cute, like kittens.  Like dogs, they do tricks for their owners and perform for guests.  When Midas Dekkers claims that pets are substitute children, he’s got the right idea backwards: over the past hundred years, children have actually been remade in the image of pets.***

We began by turning young people into children, something we didn’t need to be afraid of.  We did this at a tremendous cost to ourselves, in money and time: maintaining the social and material environment in which such a delicate creature can thrive is no small endeavor.  Finally, though, we found we had made youth into a vulnerable thing that also needed the protection of laws.  Among which, the first commandment: thou shalt make no graven image of a naked child, which is the rule that Egon Schiele is now being found, retroactively, to have violated.

We see all this because we accept, for a moment, the idea that the Greeks might have behaved as they did not out of ignorance or malice, but because it was right to do so in the order of things, human and otherwise, that then held.  What makes pedophilia wrong now (and more or less justifies the taboos against it) isn’t a change on the level of words or knowledge, but a transformation in the things themselves.  Whether or not to endorse that transformation is a choice we can only make after we’ve become aware of it.

That brings me to the truly weird world of modern pedophilia advocates.  These people exist, and unfortunately Classics as a field hosts more than its share of them.  Their mistake is to think that Greek norms could be used to justify – or even construed with reference to – modern children, which are, as I’ve said, an altogether different kind of animal.  That would be one thing, a mistake that covers a perversion; to present those arguments in public, as they sometimes do, and then to expect them to be taken seriously is an index of some kind of mental illness.  There’s an elementary error here, a confusion of discourses that takes scholarship to be identical with practical reason – when even everyday speech isn’t identical with practical reason!  As though justifying an act in one set of circumstances were enough to ground a general maxim: this would be like taking the trolley problem as an endorsement of running people over with trains.

 

* It’s even to some extent true of Ian Hacking’s more sophisticated treatment, based on Anscombe, of premodern pedophilia as actions taken (by their agents) under other descriptions than that, since the negative modern evaluation of pedophilia is a nineteenth- or twentieth-century invention.  That’s as much as to say that they “didn’t know it was wrong,” while we, from the privileged position of modernity, do.  I know this is a bit of a caricature of Hacking’s position, but at the same time he’s liable to be read this way – as arguing or presuming that contemporary knowledge is best.  I intent to come back to this question in a later post.

**no one actually chose this, but we all let it happen and keep on happening – which, when it comes to the logic of societies, amounts to choosing.

***We can all see how true this is if we think back to the horrors of our own early adolescence, another invention of modernity.  We felt like we had to build ourselves up as people without an instruction manual because that’s exactly what we had to do, since we’d all been retarded and animalized by modern childrearing practices.  From another point of view, the teenage years are a way for human creatures to take revenge on the parents that have worked so hard to prevent them from coming into being.