THE EAST AND THE IRRATIONAL
Anthony Pagden, a British historian who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, has no doubts about the superiority of the "Western" way of life, according to the Economist.1 It is hardly a coincidence, he suggests, that ancient Athens found itself doing battle with the Persian tyranny of Xerxes, while the modern Western world faces a stand-off with the mullahs' Iran. In his view of history, these are simply related chapters in a single narrative: the contest between liberal and enlightened societies whose locus is Europe (or at least European culture) and different forms of Oriental theocracy and authoritarianism.
Although the learned historian dislikes religion in all its variety, he has a soft corner for Christianity because "in refreshing contrast with Islam, its adherents were willing progressively (in two senses) to let go of their irrational beliefs; and to let go of any desire to mingle spiritual and political authority."
Further, the civilisational conflict between East and West has been going on for 2,500 years. "Even where the enlightened West did bad things, these were aberrations from a broadly virtuous trajectory; where the tyrannical east (from Darius to Osama bin Laden) committed sins, they were no better than anybody could expect...."
Firstly, why only 2,500 years? Human history is 10,000 years old, and only a quarter of that seems to have been devoted by the East to bashing the West; what happened before that? Well, it would seem that before that there was no West — and no East either. These extremes existed on the compass, of course, (not yet invented by the irrational and tyrannous Chinese), but they had no psychological counterpart.
The reason, as I have argued elsewhere,2 was that it took the destruction of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilisation (irrational and tyrannous, of course) by the second Greek invasion to usher in a Dark Age that gave rise finally around 750 BC to the Greek city-states, where the political authority of kings was necessarily circumscribed by the assembly and the council as depicted in Homer's Iliad. Thus, Greece traveled in one direction, the East in another.
Second, Greek democracy rested solidly on slavery — the very meaning of freedom derived from the unfree status of the slaves. "...possession of slaves made active political life, and so eventually democracy, easier (it would be too strong to say that it made it possible) by giving the citizen elite the leisure for political discussion and office-holding."3 However, the very meaning of freedom was deduced from its opposite, slavery, not only in Greece, but in Republican Rome, and the modern western world;4 moreover, whenever a participatory form of government disappeared and gave way to a "tyrannous" form, slavery tended to disappear — even in Europe, as during the Hellenistic Empire and the Roman Empire.
Third, the classical thinkers produced by Greek democracy themselves felt democracy to be a dangerous and violent form of government; Thucydides glorified the tyrants, and deplored the demos. "Indeed, generally their government was not grievous to the multitude, or in any way odious in practice; and these tyrants cultivated wisdom and virtue as much as any, and without exacting from the Athenians more than a twentieth of their income, splendidly adorned their city, and carried on their wars, and provided sacrifices for the temples. For the rest, the city was left in full enjoyment of its existing laws, except that care was always taken to have the offices in the hands of some one of the family."5 Of the Athenian demos, he held a very low opinion: " Pericles, indeed, by his rank, ability and known integrity was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude —in short, to lead them instead of being led by them;...what was nominally a democracy became in his hands government by the first citizen. With his successors it was different. More on a level with one another, and each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude."6
It is small wonder that 2,000 years later, Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides to convey to his compatriots the horrors of democracy.
Socrates' horror of Athenian politics was so intense that he stayed away from every political function: in Plato's Gorgias, he is accused by the others of shirking his duty as a man, and hobnobbing with kids in a quiet corner, avoiding the agora. In reply, Socrates distinguishes between two kinds of politics: one that makes people virtuous, and one that resorts to mere flattery, that is, demagoguery. He says that every Athenian statesman practiced the latter kind, finally creating an empire they didn't know what to do with.7
Indeed, Simon Hornblower, in the article referred to above, observes that after the Persian Wars (490 — 479 BC), the tribute collected by Athens from her 'allies', enabled her democracy to pay for political participation and so radicalized democracy: "This link between radicalism and imperialism is uncomfortable but undeniable."8
Plato's horror of democracy has become proverbial — he has been branded one of the enemies of the open society, by Sir Karl Popper. That he was a father — if not the father — of totalitarianism, can hardly be denied. Again, this is one of the 'rational' ideas to have come out of Western civilisation. For Plato, the Platonic Forms, or Ideas, were more important than any living and breathing human being. People are to be valued only to the extent that they embody those Forms. Since few people are perfect, love of Forms must be greater than love of people.9 Time and again, we shall see this malign philosophy at work — in the French Revolution and in democracy (below), in nationalism and in Marxism. However, we must not overlook Plato's source of inspiration: it was the sheer disorder of the Greek polis that led him to dream of Utopia:
"And those who have been of this little company and have tasted the sweetness and blessedness of this possession and who have also come to understand the madness of the multitude sufficiently and have seen that there is nothing, if I may say so, sound or right in any present politics, and that there is no ally with whose aid the champion of justice could escape destruction, but that he would be as a man who has fallen among wild beasts, unwilling to share their misdeeds and unable to hold out singly against the savagery of all, and that he would thus, before he could in any way benefit his friends or the state, come to an untimely end without doing any good to himself or others — for all these reasons I say the philosopher remains quiet, minds his own affair, and, as it were, standing aside under shelter of a wall in a storm and blast of dust and sleet and seeing others filled full of lawlessness, is content if in any way he may keep himself free from iniquity and unholy deeds through his life and take his departure with fair hope, serene and well content when the end comes."10
Now, it is remarkable that three Greek thinkers — Thucydides, Socrates and Plato — felt similarly about Greek democracy. And Aristotle, in the fifth book of the Politics, repeatedly mentions the demagogue as the destabilizing factor in society: he considered democracy to be the perverted form of "rule by the many".11
So, even when the enlightened west did terrible things — such as the small matters of slavery, colonialism, racism, the Holocaust, the two world wars, the Vietnam War, the Iraq war — these were mere deviations! Essentially, western civilisation is rational and liberal.
Notes:
1 See http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10875595&fsrc=nwlehfree.
2 See "The Epic of Gilgamesh" at here at Unlikely 2.0.
3 Simon Hornblower, "Democratic Institutions in Ancient Greece", from Democracy: The Unfinished Journey,, ed. John Dunn, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 4
4 See my article "Freedom and Freedom" at http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~acsrrrm/entertext/5_3/ET53SayeedEd.doc.
5 The History of the Peloponnesian War, Chapter XIX, available from Project Gutenberg
6 The History of the Peloponnesian War, Chapter VII
7 See my article "On Plato's Gorgias" at http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_iftekhar_080125_on_plato_s_gorgias.htm.
8 Simon Hornblower, "Democratic Institutions in Ancient Greece", p. 9
9 Gregory Vlastos, "The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato", Platonic Studies, Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 152-3
10 Republic, from Plato: The Collected Dialogues, trans. Paul Shorey, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton University Press, 1996, 496c-e
11 "democracy." Encyclopędia Britannica, 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite.
