Plato at the Googleplex
Page 17
The Ethos of the Extraordinary was in the making long before Socrates came on the scene to stir things up. Its dim beginnings can be found in the Homeric age. The Iliad’s poet gives voice to it most especially in the character of the petulant, self-absorbed boy who spends the bulk of the epic’s action sulking in his tent. This, of course, is Achilles, son of a mortal father and an immortal mother.
Achilles is regarded as Greece’s greatest mytho-historical hero well into the classical age in which Plato wrote. Plato has Socrates explain the choice that he makes when he is on trial for his life by comparing it to the choice of Achilles (Apology 28c–d). And what is this choice? Homer presents it as the choice between a short but extraordinary life or a long and ordinary one. In Book 9 of the Iliad, Achilles explains, “Mother tells me, the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet, that two fates bear me on to the day of death. If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but my glory (kleos) never dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, my pride, my glory (kleos) dies.”8
Here, in the choice of Achilles, the pre-Socratic version of the Ethos of the Extraordinary is laid out in the starkest of terms. Achilles is the greatest of the heroes, the “best of the Achaeans,” not only by virtue of his physical speed and his prowess in war and his godlike beauty, and his metaphysically mixed parentage, even though these characteristics all mark him out as extraordinary. These traits, though necessary for any figure the Greeks would celebrate as the greatest of all the legendary heroes, are not sufficient. The item on his curriculum vitae that puts him over the top is the choice he made: the short but extraordinary life. And the proof of his most extraordinary life is the very work devoted to him, the Iliad, also called The Song (Kleos) of Achilles.
Kleos means both “glory” or “fame” and also “the song that ensures that glory or fame.” The noun is cognate with the Homeric verb kluō, meaning “I hear.” Kleos is sometimes translated as “acoustic renown”—the spreading renown you get from people talking about your exploits. It’s a bit like having a large Twitter following. In the Homeric version of the Ethos of the Extraordinary—the pre-Socratic/pre-Platonic version of the Ethos of the Extraordinary—to live a life worth living was to live a kleos-worthy life, a song-worthy life. Being sung, having one’s life spoken about, your story vivid in others’ heads, is what gives your life an added substance. It’s almost as if, in being vividly apprehended by others, you’re living simultaneously in their representations of you, acquiring additional lives to add to your meager one.
After all, here’s the predicament, no less true for us than for those who gathered round to hear the ancient bards. Your human life is a confounding smallness, bounded at either end by the everlastingness of time that has been emptied of yourself.9 All of that time in which you are not seems a kind of vanquishing of your person, which is, in comparison, such a nothing, even as it is, at least to you, the everything.
This situation can be taken quite to heart. I’m reminded of a neighbor I once had, a pediatrician by training. One day he stood on my front porch and told me how anguished he used to feel when contemplating all of the time in which he won’t exist, until the moment that he realized—and his tone was one of revelation—that, after such a time as he no longer is, there won’t be any more time. My emphatic addition of the words “for you”—as in, “there won’t be any more time for you”—were just as repeatedly and emphatically resisted. No, he kept rejoining, there simply won’t be any more time, full stop. Since he was a doctor whose patients were young children, and also a devoted parent, I wondered whether he had thought through the consequences of the vast annihilation he insisted would succeed him. I asked him whether the cosmic implications of his not existing went backward in time as well: was there a history that preceded him? No, I was told. Time exists just so long as he does. I’ve often thought back to that conversation we had on my front porch and wondered what was going on in my neighbor’s mind. What was he really thinking when he kept repeating those words, “no more time”? Did he mean them as literally as he kept insisting he did? It was at least thirty years ago, and I still find myself wondering what exactly he was thinking. But I do know that his anguish at conceiving time-minus-him must have been quite intense to make him think so hard to reach a conclusion so far-fetched and against which he would entertain no possible objections.
My neighbor might have been unusual in the conclusions he drew to paliate his angst; but he wasn’t unusual in his angst. It’s out of such existential thrashings that the great normative ferment of the ancient world was born, not only in Greece but across wide stretches of the globe. In The Way to Wisdom, the philosopher Karl Jaspers describes the extraordinary conceptualizing that appears to have gripped the ancient world from about 800 to 200 B.C.E. This time period spawned alternative normative viewpoints, both spiritual and secular, offering possible solutions to the kind of question that tried my neighbor’s soul. Many of these visions persist intact into our day, standing ready to contain and shape our confoundment so that most people, unlike my neighbor, don’t need to try to think it all out from scratch for themselves.
The Greek-speakers were part of this normative ferment. Their contributions are almost always represented by their great thinkers—by Pythagoras and Plato, by Aeschylus and Aristotle—but this is not doing justice to the pre-philosophical ethos out of which the great names emerged and which oriented the secular strain of Greek normative reflection. It wasn’t only the philosophers and tragedians whose names we now can recall that confronted the question of what can be done to amplify the thin sliver of the one small life—your own!—amidst all the time that will not know who you were, how you loved and hated and succeeded and failed and feared and longed and won and lost. The concern with doing something to rescue yourself from being blotted out by all that vastness of unknowing and uncaring time was felt long before Socrates and Plato arrived to challenge the ethos that had formed itself around it. What can people do to withstand time’s drowning out the fact that they once had been? The Ethos of the Extraordinary answered that all that a person can do is to enlarge that life by the only means we have, striving to make of it a thing worth the telling, a thing that will have an impact on other minds, so that, being replicated there, it will take on a moreness. Kleos. Live so that others will hear of you. Paltry as it is, it’s the only way we have to beat back uncaring time.10
Our own culture of Facebook’s Likes and Twitter followings should put us in a good position to sympathize with an insistence on the social aspect of life-worthiness. Perhaps it’s a natural direction toward which a culture will drift, once the religious answers lose their grip. The ancient Greeks lived before the monotheistic solution took hold of Western culture, and we—or a great many of us—live after. A major difference between our two cultures is that, for the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve such mass duplication of the details of one’s life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweet away.
The Greek-speakers were not unique in their existential pondering. At roughly the same time that they were developing their own approach to the problem of human mattering, there were other peoples with other distinctive approaches to the same existential concerns. In particular, across the Mediterranean from ancient Athens there was a constellation of tribes also working out a vision that has continued to flourish in our day, in all the multiple iterations and variations offered by the Abrahamic religions. They called themselves the Ivrim, from the Hebrew word for “over,” indicating their location on the other side of the Jordan River. Their sense of separateness was central to their sense of themselves, and it resulted in their keeping so low a profile that not even Herodotus—who, an early ethnographer, was fascinated by the many belief systems flourishing in his day—gave any indication of knowing of their existence. But there they were, slowly evolvi
ng a worldview that eventually transformed one of their regional gods into the singularly awesome Yahweh, a transcendence providing metaphysical grounding for both physical and moral reality, his unquestionable will establishing the rules by which we were to live. This god is sometimes described by the Hebrews as a jealous god, but unlike the Greek gods, he never deigns to be jealous of his devotees, but only of “other gods.” He is too remote for comparisons between himself and humans even to be entertained. He inhabits a sphere of holiness incomprehensible to the human point of view, an inhuman purity so alien that it’s fraught with mortal dangers. He is so unlike us that the very notion of a graven image is an affront to his singularity. Even his name holds fearful possibilities for humans; laws will be enacted as to who can utter the one true Name and under what elaborate circumstances arranged with intricate precautions.11 In fact, the common way in Orthodox Judaism, still, for referring to him is Ha-Shem, the Name. And yet, from his position of remotest transcendence, he is engaged in human concerns and has intentions directed at us, his creations, who embody nothing less than his reasons for going to the trouble of creating the world ex nihilo. He takes us (almost) as seriously as we take us, thus settling, for believers, the question of our mattering
So there were the (pre-philosophical) Greeks, pondering ways of endowing their limp slivers of mortality with a stiffening coating of mattering, and there were the Hebrews, considering a similar project, though they ended up with quite a different approach. The Hebrews offered a transcendent answer in terms of a god; the Greeks offered a secular answer in terms of the possibilities for enlarging a life in strictly human terms; this Greek pre-philosophical answer was incorporated into, and refined by, secular philosophy; and Western culture has been wildly oscillating between these approaches—the Hebrew and the Greek—ever since.
And these Mediterranean peoples weren’t the only ones provoked by an existential confoundment not altogether dissimilar to my former neighbor’s. This was the period not only of the philosophy-creating Greeks, and of the major and minor prophets settled on the other side of the Jordan, but also of Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, of the Buddha and Jainism, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita in India, of Zoroastrianism in Persia. Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha were contemporaries of one another. Jaspers calls this period the Axial Age (Aschenzeit) because, he affirms, all moral and religious thought ever since has revolved around it. “The new element in this age is that man everywhere became aware of being as a whole, of himself and his limits. He experienced the horror of the world and his own helplessness. He raised radical questions, approached the abyss in his drive for liberation and redemption. And in consciously apprehending his limits he set himself the highest aims. He experienced the absolute in the depth of selfhood and in the clarity of transcendence.”12
I would put Jaspers’s point this way: What arose as a major preoccupation during the Axial Age, provoking the emergence of powerful normative responses, is the question of what it is that makes a human life matter—if, in fact, it does. The possibility that it doesn’t matter provides the psychic energy that went into these wide-ranging responses.
Here’s another psychically charged question: If there is mattering, is it differentially distributed? Do some of us matter, while others of us don’t? That’s a galling proposition. I can better tolerate my life’s not mattering if I’m sure that everyone else’s doesn’t ultimately matter either. But if there is an unequal distribution of mattering, are those who matter born into mattering or is mattering a state that must be achieved? And if it is to be achieved, then how are we to do it?
Such preoccupations are still our preoccupations, so it’s not so surprising that the normative viewpoints that arose as responses to such preoccupations still resonate with us. Mattering is a state devoutly to be wished for. We no sooner know that we are, than we want that which we are to matter. In one of my earlier books I dubbed this the “will to matter” and also proposed something I dubbed “the mattering map” to explain how the will to matter functions within us.13 I’ve been pleased to see the idea of the mattering map adapted to various explanatory purposes—even, to my delight, made use of in behavioral economics to explain the inadequacy of the rational-actor model.14 But nowadays, I’m most interested in the will to matter as it illuminates both the persistence of religion and the emergence in ancient Greece of secular philosophy. The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe, if we’re to understand the continuing force of the normative systems that emerged during the Axial Age.
Why did preoccupations with mattering emerge at just this period in history over large swaths of the world—from China and India and Persia, all around the Mediterranean, and into Europe? This is a question that lies far beyond the scope of this book. All that I would like to maintain here is that the pre-philosophical Greek ethos, out of which arose the genius of Greek philosophy and Greek tragedy, is of a piece with the wider existential activism of the Axial Age.
Nevertheless, I’ll toss out some recent ideas that social scientists have proposed as possible hypotheses for the Axial Age’s normative activity. The first thing that one notices is that the affected regions all saw the emergence of large societal formations, organized around urban centers. These polities all introduced a level of anonymity and impersonality into human life, so different from tribal village life, where all relations were determinately personal—oftentimes borderline incestuous. With such a thickness in human relations, existential ponderings may have been stifled.15 Could the move toward larger polities have been a nudge in the direction of the kind of existential confoundment that I was fortunate enough to witness that day on my front porch?
But as social scientists have also pointed out, the emergence of larger polities can’t offer a sufficient explanation in itself, since there are regions that saw large-scale societies without these same developments, for example Egypt. Some social scientists, most notably David Graeber, have pointed out that the core period of Jaspers’s Axial Age corresponds almost exactly to the period and places in which coinage materialized, with minting overseen by governments which then used the wealth on military ventures that often resulted in large captures of people who were converted into slave labor—often sent to mine the ore that would be turned into coins. He calls this the “military-coinage-slavery complex.” Here, too, the changes are in the direction of impersonalization: “To understand what had changed we have to look, again, at the particular kind of markets that were emerging at the beginning of the Axial Age: impersonal markets, born of war, in which it was possible to treat even neighbors as if they were strangers.16 Perhaps (although this is not exactly Graeber’s conclusion) the introduction of markets and of money—providing an impersonal measure of worth—intensified the impersonalization inherent in the emergence of the large polities, again coaxing forth poignantly existential questions.
Another line of approach derives from data revealing that all the regions affected by the Axial Age’s normative ferment were unusually well fed:
Studies indicate a sharp increase in energy capture (how much energy people extract from the environment) that occurred at the same time in three distinct regions of Eurasia, the Yellow–Yangzi rivers, the Ganga valley, and the eastern part of the Mediterranean. At the end of the first millennium B.C.E. these regions reached a production level (25,000 kcal per capita per day) that largely surpassed that of previous societies, which ranged from 4,000 kcal for hunter-gatherer societies to 15,000 kcal for states such as Egypt and Uruk.… This suggests a tentative scenario in which the spread of moral religions followed a sharp increase in the standard of living in some Eurasian populations.
What would be the connection between these two developments? Empirical studies on the impact of economic development on individual preferences, in a variety of different cultural contexts, suggest that material prosperity allows people to detach themselves from material needs (food, protection, affiliation).17
In other words
, once the basic material supports for life have been established you’re free to start wondering what it all means. But of course this elevated “energy capture” would presumably occur just exactly in areas in which urbanization and the military-coinage-slavery condition were satisfied, so it’s difficult to determine which is the causally significant factor.
Fortunately, sorting all this out isn’t my problem to solve. The point I’d like to make is simply that what happened in the Greek city-states was part of something larger, a confrontation with existential dilemmas that involves a certain abstraction from the daily grind of life, an ability to remove yourself sufficiently from the midst of your own life in order to ask whether your brief sojourn here amounts to anything. Such musings don’t necessarily start out on a plane of moral and spiritual sophistication and transcendence. It would be surprising if they did. They more than likely begin with questions put emphatically in the first person and accompanied with agitated emotion: Do I matter? So many have come before me, with no record of their having existed at all. Why shouldn’t I assume that the exact same thing will happen to me? But that makes death—already a terrifying proposition—infinitely worse. The annihilation of death is so complete that it seems to spread its cold terror into life even as it’s lived. These are powerfully unsettling thoughts and powerful responses emerged. Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism, Hebraic monotheism: all had (and still have) widespread appeal because this starkly personal question was being asked, and is still being asked, by vast numbers of people, perhaps everyone with a filled belly and the relative safety and leisure to ponder and agonize.