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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.

I went through an extraordinarily cool passage from Lucian’s Alexander, or the False Prophet the other day.  To give some context, the essay in question chronicles the career of a religious pretender, the founder of a successful cult whose relics and statuary are still coming out of the ground today; Lucian aims to discredit the titular Alexander, apparently, by airing his dirty laundry and revealing the tricks he employed to convince people that he really was transmitting oracles from Apollo (via a giant snake muppet with Trump-style hair.)  It’s a deeper text than that, as everyone always says, but the surface story is one of the funniest longform anatomies of a con man that has ever been written.

Well, here’s the passage in question, which records the reasoning that leads Alexander and his accomplice to try to establish a fake oracle in the first place:

“As Thucydides would say, the war began then and there.  For, when these two men most evil and daring and eager to do wrong got together, they easily observed how human lives were ruled by these two tyrants, hope and fear, and that anyone who was able to use each of these as necessary would very soon become rich.  For they saw that knowledge of the future was most necessary for both of them – that is, the hopeful man and the coward – and most desired, and that, of old, Delphi and Delos and Klaros and Branchis had all gotten rich and renowned that way, since men frequented temples and begged to know what was to come and sacrificed hecatombs and set up golden statues on account of those tyrants which I mentioned before, hope and fear.”*

The framework, and the hope-fear opposition, is Thucydidean, but Lucian links it to the universal quest for knowledge about the future in what I believe is an original way.  Thucydides takes hope and fear to be what drives human action, supposing that we act either to secure an advantage we hope for or to avoid a harm that we fear – as Athens and Sparta do, respectively, in the opening stages of the Peloponnesian War.  Lucian, by contrast, treats hope and fear as objects of a therapeutic concern, sad passions which humans try to suppress not by acting – since that would only reproduce the conditions under which they first emerged – but by knowing.  Hope and fear thrive on uncertainty; knowledge about the future, says Lucian, will quell them both.

The critical suggestion here, that oracles are a means of dealing with risk and its associated anxiety, is one that has been profitably addressed by Esther Eidinow in a volume on the anthropology of risk among the Greeks.  What struck me about Lucian’s argument, though, was not so much its explanatory value for the history of Greek religion as a certain concinnity with an idea of Lacan which I also recently encountered.  In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis (and maybe at greater length elsewhere), he posits that the conscious mind is in the position of an observer with respect to its own thoughts, which come to it, not as it wishes, but as the subconsscious supplies them – or, better, in a kind of interplay between the conscious and unconscious that mirrors the productive, homeostatic conflict of the pleasure principle and the reality principle.

I wondered, reading Lacan after having read this Lucian, whether this relationship that constitutes our thoughts might founder on the future, a temporal domain where uncertainty renders the claims of the reality principle liable to all kinds of doubt and criticism.  The reason I thought this was because I’m always wrestling with a kind of thought-pattern that you’ll probably recognize.  For instance: I imagine what would happen if I run into a racist at the grocery store, maybe while he’s hassling the checkout person.  Of course, I intervene aggressively, and this fantasy provides a deep libidinal satisfaction.  But what if the reality isn’t like that?  What if, for instance, I get owned by some dumb cracker in the checkout line?  What if I stutter?  What if I faint?  Well, the only solution for that is to rewind the fantasy and run it from the beginning, so that I get to the pleasurable part again.  But then, inevitably, I hit the same log-jam of doubt, which means I have to start again, and meanwhile I’m getting jittery from all the adrenaline.  This cycle can go on for hours.  It’s now the leading cause of insomnia for all members of my household except the cat.

The thing that keeps it going, I think, is an egocentric desire on the part of my conscious mind, the part that identifies as myself, to know what will happen, and more importantly to know what I will do.  In this instant, I’m tyrannized by hope and fear with respect to the thing over which I ought, in theory at least, to have more control than over anything else: namely, how I’m going to turn out to be.

That’s pathetic, but time more or less normal for people living in these stupid, stupid times.  The same mental process would turn pathological if, in the face of this cycle, I took the coward’s way out by positively asserting, aloud or in print, that I would act the way that my libido drove me to imagine myself acting, and that my performance would get results.  You can see people doing this online after any mass shooting; they’ll post saying that they would have stood up to the shooter and stopped him, that they wouldn’t have run or gotten shot.  In saying these things, they’re delivering false oracles about themselves, to themselves, using the public as a kind of masturbatory prop.

* with apologies for the poorly-integrated accents: καὶ κατὰ τὸν Θουκυδίδην ἄρχεται ὁ πόλεμος ἐνθένδε ἤδη. Ὡς γὰρ ἂν δύο κάκιστοι καὶ μεγαλότολμοι καὶ πρὸς τὸ κακουργεῖν προχειρότατοι εἰς τὸ αὐτὸ συνελθόντες͵ ῥᾳδίως κατενόησαν τὸν τῶν ἀνθρώπων βίον ὑπὸ δυοῖν τούτοιν μεγίστοιν τυραννούμενον͵ ἐλπίδος καὶ φόβου͵ καὶ ὅτι ὁ τούτων ἑκατέρῳ εἰς δέον χρήσασθαι δυνάμενος τάχιστα πλουτήσειε ἄν· ἀμφοτέροις γάρ͵ τῷ τε δεδιότι καὶ τῷ ἐλπίζοντι͵ ἑώρων τὴν πρόγνωσιν ἀναγκαιοτάτην τε καὶ ποθεινοτάτην οὖσαν͵ καὶ Δελφοὺς οὕτω πάλαι πλουτῆσαι καὶ ἀοιδίμους γενέσθαι καὶ Δῆλον καὶ Κλάρον καὶ Βραγχίδας͵τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἀεὶ δι΄ οὓς προεῖπον τυράννους͵ τὴν ἐλπίδα καὶ τὸν φόβον͵ φοιτώντων εἰς τὰ ἱερὰ καὶ προμαθεῖν τὰ μέλλοντα δεομένων͵ καὶ δι΄ αὐτὸ ἑκατόμβας θυόντων καὶ χρυσᾶς πλίνθους ἀνατιθέντων.

There are really only two kinds of societies: the ones based in consensus, and the ones based in slavery.  Every other difference is pretty much window-dressing.  Do I need to say which of these needs a heavily-armed and wildly-overstaffed police force, the kind that we have in America, the kind that, if we saw it in a movie, would tell us right away that we were watching dystopian sci-fi?   But nobody would invent a police force like that for no reason.  We have those police because somebody has to defend a wildly-unequal distribution of wealth that is, from a moral or rational point of view, indefensible.  You obviously couldn’t convince anyone with a sense of how big a number 125 billion dollars really is that Jeff Bezos “deserves” that kind of money.  I’m not just talking on a national scale, though: if you live in a city, there’s probably more dramatic inequality of means within a mile of you than there was within the entirety of the Roman Empire.   In American, wealth and poverty rub shoulders: they have to, because wealth in America comes from paying your neighbors starvation wages or gouging them for rent and medical care.  Odds are, you can stand on your roof and see someone whose net worth is a thousand times higher than yours.  Do they deserve it?  If you think they do, you’re a sucker, and if you think they don’t, then the logical next step is to redistribute the wealth.  Thus, cops: they exist to make us submit to a distribution of wealth that we’d never agree to if there weren’t a policeman with a gun on every streetcorner.

A little historical awareness is all you need to see how weird this situation is.  Did Athens have police?  Did Republican Rome?  No, they did not.  The various institutions that some historians have misrecognized as police forces – Scythian Archers at Athens, various adjuncts of the Praetorship at Rome – just kept order in the public square and protected the constitution.  The property-protecting, protective and punitive functions of a modern police force were accomplished by the community at large, defending norms that had the support of consensus behind them.  The same has historically been true of every approximately egalitarian society (and “approximately” has to embrace an awful lot, since Republican Rome was almost as unequal a society as the modern USA).

No, the police are a modern invention – created in England and France in the 18th century to replace the shriveling private justice of the great lords, metastatizing to govern by force the urban masses who could see for themselves how unequally distributed were the benefits of industrialization, and finally so embedded in the fabric of the modern state that most people find it hard to imagine their absence.  Their existence, on the other hand, is an admission on the part of the wealthy that their wealth is indefensible on any other grounds that at gunpoint.

The really difficult question, given this, is why so many people not only accept the inevitability of policing, but identify with and actively support the police officers who serve as our slavedrivers and work at our expense.  It isn’t enough to answer this question by pointing to the heroization of cops in films and other mass media, though this tendency is doubtless poisonous in its own way  and doesn’t exactly produce great entertainment.   Despite that steady diet of indoctrination, people know from experience that most cops are highway bureaucrats, that most police spend their working hours handing out parking or traffic tickets, and certainly nobody thinks that the policemen who get caught on body cams planting evidence or cursing people out before shooting them are heroes.

The “blue lives matter” crowd doesn’t genuinely believe that police are heroes.  They say it, not because they mean it,** but because they feel like the designation “hero” is a token of submission they can give to an authority figure to whom they believe that all obeisance is due.  The imaginary policemen to whom they offer this tribute is not the policeman who does his job scrupulously, who enforces the law, who protects and serves.  For these people, the true policeman is the one who pillages and destroys the community that’s been entrusted to his protection.  They embrace that kind of cruelty, that savage exercise of power, because it’s what they want for themselves but lack the strength, courage or uniform to take.  What’s more, they assume that the rest of us are just like them, and they imagine that the police are the only thing preventing a Hobbesian war of all against all.

Where do people like that come from?  America, I guess – in particular, the America of Reagan and after, where everyone’s a cowboy and no one works together, and additionally, for sure, the America where racism lets crackers with “blue lives matter” bumper stickers feel sure that the people cops taze or kill will always be someone else’s father, mother, son.  That flag – you know the one I mean, the one that drains all the color out of the American flag except for one blue stripe – is the emblem of a probably incurable mental disorder, a fantasy of cruelty that’s just waiting for permission from the proper authorities to play itself out.

Are these people curable?  I think so, but there’s only one way to do it: we have to abolish the police.

*All Cop Fans Are Bastards.  Maybe ACAB too, but that’s a rap for another day.

**or else, without being aware of it, they mean “hero” in something like its original Greek sense: “an asshole who does whatever he wants and kills anyone who gets in his way.”

 

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?

 

Because of brain problems, I can’t stop reading Seneca.  I’m still interested in the same old problem, how Seneca thinks angry people are different than animals.  Yesterday I was looking at the broad sweep of Seneca’s argument, but now I’m going to focus more narrowly on what I take to be a significant detail.

“Feeding” is a term that enters into the human-animal dichotomy of Seneca’s De ira twice.  The first time, it serves to give evidence that animals, mad as some of them may seem, do not experience real anger:

“[animals’] attacks and ruckuses are forceful, but these are not fear or anxiety or sadness or anger, only things similar to these; that’s why they fall away quickly and turn into their opposites and, when they have been raging in the most terrifying fashion, the moment they’re fed (pascuntur), calm and slumber suddenly take the placee of these tremblings and mad runnings-about.” (DI 1.3.8)

The second time, however, it exemplifies a “natural” relationship of gratitude and satisfaction that angry people overturn:

“[angry people] differ from brute beasts in this respect only, namely that these grow tame for their feeders, while the anger of men devours (depascitur) the very people by whom it has been nourished.” (DI 2.8.3)

If we were to reframe each of these sentences as value claims about feeding, we’d come to very different results.  The first one seems to tell us that being satisfied and tamed by feeding is bad, because it marks the non-reality of the “affect” that you (an animal) have been expressing.  The second one basically says, by contrast, that growing tame toward those who feed you is good, because it demonstrates a grateful or at least pragmatic stance (not shared by angry people) toward your source of food.  Well, which is it?  Is mansuetus synonymous with “dope” or “gentleman?”  “Subhuman” or “superman?”

This is not the place to go into detail about the long ancient debate over the rank and status of tame animals.  Aristotle says that the tame ones (hemera) are smarter, as do most natural historians and philosophers after him.  However, mirabilia collections designed to show “that beasts have reason” vel sim. usually focus on wild rather than domestic animals.  The best animals, like elephants, go both ways: they can be tamed, but would, given their druthers, rather not be.

The confusion is only intensified by Seneca’s subsequent discussion of feritas (translating Greek theriodes, “wild-animal-like character”), a vice exemplified by people like Phalaris who kill and maim for pleasure rather than for any practical purpose.  There, it seems as though what’s animal is something untamable, something not even accountable in terms of a search for nutrition: the ferus is not going to be satisfied with any food, qua food.  Or, perhaps, only with food that’s wildly inappropriate, perverse or transgressive.  Aristotle’s examples in the section of book 7 of the EN that seems to have inspired Seneca are mostly cases of cannibalism: Atreus butchering Thyestes’ children, the man who sacrificed his mother, the slave who ate his fellow slave’s liver.

It’s none of my business what people eat.  It’s none of my business what people think about anger, either, but it does seem to me that we can resolve Seneca’s standpoint more clearly if we think of mansuetus as a something that can be predicated of humans and animals alike.  What looks confused as a human-animal dichotomy looks more structural as a tame/untamed opposition.  An untamed animal is ferum, vicious and driven by feritas, whereas a tamed animal that will take food from you is at least an entity with which you can deal.  On the human side, things look a little more complex: there, mansuetus looks like a mean term between two poles, one called feritas and another that goes without a name.  The last of those is where the sapiens sits, guided by ratio.  Tameness is a kind of automatism, better than wildness (especially in people) but utterly lacking in interiority.  Humans, like animals, become tame when they enter into relations of dependency with others; in that case their emotions are all for show, a kind of playacting intended to manipulate the other into providing food.  Rightly or wrongly, Seneca believes that it’s possible to escape that mesh of dependency relationships and have a truly human experience beyond the realm of the wild and the tame.  To that, one might reply as Rameau’s nephew did: “Everyone adopts a pose, except the king.”  And there are no kings anymore.

The ancient obsession with anger has been much-studied and would be hard to overstate.  Of course ancient thinkers, like modern ones, were broadly interested in the emotions and took these as objects of analysis.  Of all the ancient affects, though, by far the largest number of monographs were dedicated to the study of anger.  We can appreciate why this was: anger is a distinctly other-oriented emotion, and in a time before the police state it tended to entail dangerous social consequences.  One also had the sense (then as now, although people don’t like to admit it) that, however dangerous anger could be, it was effective: in war, for instance, where it seemed impossible to some observers that you could fight effectively without being angry at your enemy.

I should say that scholars have come to understand that the words people use to talk about anger in Greek and Latin don’t exactly overlap with the modern terminology.  Latin ira, for instance, seems to have been much more performative than at least a lot of what we’d call anger: “The eyes grow red and glossy,” writes Seneca; “the whole face, filled with blood from the bottom of the heart, turns red; the lips shake, teeth are clenched, hairs stand on end, breathing grows loud and heavy; there’s a sound of limbs twisting, a sigh and a mooing and a broken speech with words hardly articulated; frequent clapping, feet stamping; the whole body stirred upand making great threats of anger.”  Seneca likens the physical performance to that of a madman but also to that of certain animals (the foaming boar, the rutting bull), which raises a question: can animals get angry?

This is a pressing enough concern that Seneca feels the need to address it close to the beginning of the first book of De ira, where he’s giving definitions.  He answers in the negative because he’s already defined anger as standing in opposition to reason, which, as a Stoic, he needs to assert that animals don’t have.  Lacking ratio, they also lack its opposite, so it doesn’t make sense to say that animals get angry.  However, if anger is, as Seneca claims, a momentary loss of reason, then it does make sense to say that an angry person becomes like an animal, perhaps even becomes an animal in the sense that’s meaningful for ancient philosophy.  A particularly salient symptom of this, visible in the passage just quoted, would be the abandonment of semiotically meaningful speech (Pierce’s symbols) in favor of inarticulate sounds that do no more than indicate one’s own emotional state (Pierce’s indices).  That gap was felt by most ancient schools of thought (the cynics excepted) to be one that separated humans and animals.

The conundrum here is obvious: the angry person becomes something incapable of anger, something of which iratum cannot be predicated.  One way to resolve it would be to extend Seneca’s metaphor to a definition: anger is just the state of becoming an animal which, since animals are already animals, can only be attributed to humans.  Seneca probably wouldn’t be satisfied with this definition, which demotes ratio to a secondary status in explaining anger, but it has the advantage of accounting for the physicality of ira in a way that Seneca’s approach does not.

Seneca wants anger to be something you can control.  That’s where all the bullshit about ratio comes in.  The animal subtext that runs throughout book 1 is by way of a confession: Seneca knows there’s no controlling anger, probably knows already that anger – ira Neronis – is going to be what gets him in the end.  Hey, I sympathize.  Anger in myself: I can choke it down every time.  I’m a reasonable man.  Anger in someone else: well, that’s something different, they’re an animal, using reason here would be like trying to distract a lion with a chew toy.  And seeing that reminds me that I’m choking down anger and not refuting it, so we’re back to square one.

The right approach is different: you don’t try to reason with anger, you despise it.  That, actually, is what Seneca’s really trying to teach you, if you can see past the syllogisms.  Everything about anger belongs to a lower order.  You can be violent if you want to, you can punish people and beat your servants, but don’t do it angry like some kind of clown.  Something else about ira that’s hard to get: on stage, the Romans thought it was hilarious.  Plautus is full of people blowing their tops over nothing.  Anger is the pratfall of Roman comedy.

Do we see it that way now?  We do not.  Even in comedies, we take anger very seriously.  It’s the place where earnestness leaks into the script: how you know that the joke’s gone too far, that Adam Sandler’s going to have to make a sincere apology.*  But it’s on stage, it’s not sincere, that’s the point of a comedy.  So why do we pretend it’s real?

There’s a continuity with how we respond to anger offstage, too: as the ultimate token of emotional sincerity.  You can’t fake it, so it must be real, so it deserves to be treasured in a world where every other emotion has been co-opted by the artificial come-on of advertising.  That’s fair enough – yelling at me won’t get me to Drink Coke –   but it’s also insane.  Taking anger seriously removes what should be the biggest check on it, embarrassment.  If you can laugh at anger (and at angry people), that proves you’ve mastered it.

*Trainspotting‘s Begbie is an exception to this high-functioning generalization.  Wikipedia tells me, though, that we’re supposed to laugh at him because he’s a sociopath and not because he’s angry.