'Man is born free and everywhere is in chains.' So wrote Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1762, 27 years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. Now, he would write 'man is born in chains and stays that way', so intrusive has the modern state become.
I once heard an anarchist, speaking from a soap box at Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, say that a truth spoken to one person is still a truth but spoken to a million it becomes a lie. I have been trying to work out what he meant ever since. The simple version is (I think): there are simply too many of us to be free. There is a longer version, however ...
In the 5th century BC, Athens was a thriving city state with a substantial empire. It was locked in a war with Sparta that would last 30 years and end in crushing defeat. It's not unreasonable to liken Athens, democratic, commercial, open and creative, to the modern US, and Sparta, a despotic monarchy, with its own empire of subject city-states, to the old USSR.
Athenian democracy was a bit weird: it involved annual selection of the assembly by lot among the citizenry, consisting of 100,000 or so propertied males. So anybody (within this class) could find themselves pitched into government at any time. When elected, they served for one year and then returned to their estates, the shipyards or whatever.
In 428-427 BC one of Athens' subject city states revolted. A naval force subdued the city and sent back to Athens for instructions as to what to do with the populace. The question, one of profound military, political and diplomatic importance, was debated by the assembly which resolved to put the male population to death and enslave the women and children (they played for keeps in those days). A ship was despatched with this instruction. However, the debate continued and the decision was reversed. A second ship was sent the next day to overtake the first with orders to execute some ringleaders but not further to punish the city, so long as it remained within the Athenian league.
Thucydides gives the speeches in the assembly, purportedly verbatim (not everyone agrees that he rendered a faithful account). It would be very wrong to imagine they had anything at all to do with the morality of slaughtering an entire city and also wrong to suppose the sophistication and force of the arguments, on both sides, could be bettered by anything today. This was a life and death matter directly affecting every Athenian citizen intimately, not something to read about in the papers or watch on TV. It was decided by argument of the highest order by free men who knew the potential consequences of a false move.
I argue that the Athenians were, at that moment, free. Freer than anybody had ever been before and freer by far than we are now. They were free in the true, terrifying sense, of being fully responsible as men for their own fate in all matters pertaining thereto. The freedoms we claim to hold so dear are a pale shadow by comparison and can never be otherwise. None of us, unless elected president (and I would argue not even then) could ever remotely approach such an intoxicating and heady state and, properly understood, I suspect many would not wish to.
We are born in chains, infantilised and brainwashed into a false notion of the state of things. Not by some malevolent elite but as the result of the inexorable processes of modern life and the state. We get worked up into a froth about the paltry collection of so-called freedoms that remains to us and deluded into accepting them as the real thing. We can speak freely but nothing will change as a result, or the causal chain between speech and action is too long and complicated (as must be so) and our individual voices too weak ever to even know whether we, as individuals, played a part in the outcome. We are either denied the information we need to make informed decisions (often for good reason) or too bound up with the minutiae of life to have the time required to keep abreast of the thousands of micro-actions performed in our names every hour of every day that add up to the workings of the almighty state, which functions as some kind of God.
There is nothing to do about this. Maybe in a thousand years the population will have returned to something of sensible proportions (10 million for the whole planet? Or 1 million?) and we can review the situation then :)
I once heard an anarchist, speaking from a soap box at Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, say that a truth spoken to one person is still a truth but spoken to a million it becomes a lie. I have been trying to work out what he meant ever since. The simple version is (I think): there are simply too many of us to be free. There is a longer version, however ...
In the 5th century BC, Athens was a thriving city state with a substantial empire. It was locked in a war with Sparta that would last 30 years and end in crushing defeat. It's not unreasonable to liken Athens, democratic, commercial, open and creative, to the modern US, and Sparta, a despotic monarchy, with its own empire of subject city-states, to the old USSR.
Athenian democracy was a bit weird: it involved annual selection of the assembly by lot among the citizenry, consisting of 100,000 or so propertied males. So anybody (within this class) could find themselves pitched into government at any time. When elected, they served for one year and then returned to their estates, the shipyards or whatever.
In 428-427 BC one of Athens' subject city states revolted. A naval force subdued the city and sent back to Athens for instructions as to what to do with the populace. The question, one of profound military, political and diplomatic importance, was debated by the assembly which resolved to put the male population to death and enslave the women and children (they played for keeps in those days). A ship was despatched with this instruction. However, the debate continued and the decision was reversed. A second ship was sent the next day to overtake the first with orders to execute some ringleaders but not further to punish the city, so long as it remained within the Athenian league.
Thucydides gives the speeches in the assembly, purportedly verbatim (not everyone agrees that he rendered a faithful account). It would be very wrong to imagine they had anything at all to do with the morality of slaughtering an entire city and also wrong to suppose the sophistication and force of the arguments, on both sides, could be bettered by anything today. This was a life and death matter directly affecting every Athenian citizen intimately, not something to read about in the papers or watch on TV. It was decided by argument of the highest order by free men who knew the potential consequences of a false move.
I argue that the Athenians were, at that moment, free. Freer than anybody had ever been before and freer by far than we are now. They were free in the true, terrifying sense, of being fully responsible as men for their own fate in all matters pertaining thereto. The freedoms we claim to hold so dear are a pale shadow by comparison and can never be otherwise. None of us, unless elected president (and I would argue not even then) could ever remotely approach such an intoxicating and heady state and, properly understood, I suspect many would not wish to.
We are born in chains, infantilised and brainwashed into a false notion of the state of things. Not by some malevolent elite but as the result of the inexorable processes of modern life and the state. We get worked up into a froth about the paltry collection of so-called freedoms that remains to us and deluded into accepting them as the real thing. We can speak freely but nothing will change as a result, or the causal chain between speech and action is too long and complicated (as must be so) and our individual voices too weak ever to even know whether we, as individuals, played a part in the outcome. We are either denied the information we need to make informed decisions (often for good reason) or too bound up with the minutiae of life to have the time required to keep abreast of the thousands of micro-actions performed in our names every hour of every day that add up to the workings of the almighty state, which functions as some kind of God.
There is nothing to do about this. Maybe in a thousand years the population will have returned to something of sensible proportions (10 million for the whole planet? Or 1 million?) and we can review the situation then :)
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1ykhJpS
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire