Comedian Pete Lee: “I never want to offend anybody…I hate conflict…unless you guys like it; then I love it.”
Two Types of Strife
Didn’t Hesiod make strife a central theme of Theogony? He was probably motivated to do so by his contentious relationship with his brother over family property. In his work he mentions Eris, goddess of strife who was born of Night and who gave birth to Hardship, Forgetfulness, Starvation,Pains, Battles, Wars, Murders, Quarrels, Lies, Disputes, Anarchy, and Ruin. Can’t imagine conversations around that table on Thanksgiving, but I can imagine a massive food fight with everyone throwing food except Starvation, who might sit with mouth open.
I was looking at headlines online again, and I couldn’t help but notice that there really seem to be two kinds of strife, one caused by Nature and the other caused by—am I allowed to say?—Man, Mankind. I guess the current PC language doesn’t accept the encompassing “man” in an age that has almost completely abandoned Standard Formal English. So, strife caused by people or humans in all their practices and identities versus strife caused by any nonhuman entity or process: Heck! the heck with PC, I’m going with “Unconscious Nature” and “Conscious Man.” Yes, therein lie the sources of both types of strife.
Examples?
Well, for Nature, it’s storms of all kinds, eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, landslides and avalanches, sinkholes, floods, and even rust that weakens bridges. We mind our own business, and suddenly, we’re at war with Nature, including attacks by insects, alligators, sharks, bears, and poison ivy. All of that comes from non-human and pretty much unconscious entities, or barely conscious entities, certainly not self-conscious entities.
And then there’s everything else coming from the human side, from petty arguments to murders to all out war—that’s the conscious stuff, the strife we impose on ourselves, the dominant type of strife. For every animal attack or volcanic eruption, there are literally millions to billions of human actions that bring strife into our lives. Take a look at any newspaper’s headlines. Although there might be a hurricane report on occasion, human caused strife dominates the headlines daily.
Even in southwestern Pennsylvania, where the population of the region’s largest city ranks a lowly 68th among American cities, morning news shows open every day with reports of a shooting or two, often a murder. Strife? I’d say it’s all around us. Not that western Pennsylvania is another eastern Ukraine or Sudan or the West Bank, but, yeah, strife dominates. Did I mention Chicago?
Place
We have to live somewhere.
Unless we are gluttons either for doing evil or receiving it, when given a choice of where to live, we generally choose some place that seems stable and peaceful. From our choice of an ancient rock shelter like the 16,000 year-old encampment at Meadowcroft near Avella, Pennsylvania, or a large hole in the ground like Lascaux near Montignac, France, or Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, we choose the appearance of peace over strife.
But “natural strife” does intrude even in seemingly safe places. Rocks do fall from the ceilings of shelters and caves, and places like the open plains force us to contend with winds, droughts, and wild animals. No place on the planet is free from “natural strife,” as Mammoth Cave’s Lost John mummy reveals. Even the most serene places occupied by ostensibly the most peaceful people are subject to some disturbance by natural phenomena. No one lives outside potential danger. Archbishop Serge Miot was killed when the Haitian earthquake destroyed his office and the cathedral Port-au-Prince in 2010.
Any Conclusions Here?
We live the the midst of strife. But some places are safer than others for a while, and some humans are less contentious than others. Not all is bad news it seems, and even when bad appears to prevail over good, some thrive because of or in spite of strife. In defining his two categories of strife, Hesiod acknowledges that it presents a motive to excel and achieve: Competition does drive many of us to perform well, to be a better singer, athlete, student, manager, leader…
The ubiquity of strife in the “real world” probably explains why more movies and TV shows are centered on mayhem and murder than are centered on inspirational stories of success, that is, stories about the downtrodden rising to positions of respect, authority, wealth, and power. Consider, also, how audiences respond to dramatizations of mayhem as opposed to how they respond to stories of benignity. In watching a tale of murder, the audience gets an intellectual satisfaction when the detectives solve the crime; in watching a tale of compassion, the audience gets an emotional satisfaction, as tearjerkers reveal publicly in every theater. Tragedies, from those of the ancient Greek playwrights to modern authors that detail a fall from prestige, authority, wealth, and power elicit an often unemotional “I knew he was the murderer,” clearly an intellectual response. Agatha Christie made her living by writing about such strife; the most popular computer games center on it; just about every blockbuster movie is rife with strife, which is the stuff of crime stories. On TV the Law & Order franchise has lasted for more than two decades with numerous spinoffs: Special Victims Unit, Criminal Intent, Trial by Jury, LA, True Crime, Organized Crime and a number of video games and foreign adaptations, including Law & Order UK, and popular Russian TV series. Should we add another category of strife to Hesiod’s two? How about “fictional strife”? Living in a sea of strife, we ask rivers to give us more water.
There seems to be an inherent drive in any population of humans to produce strife where there is no natural strife, resulting in the proliferation of those fictional tales as well as actual incidents of strife. We’re just little kids squabbling over an unshared toy, teens squabbling over cheerleading or team positions, and adults squabbling over property lines, religious differences, and political views. Give me two humans, and I’ll give you a potential for strife. Heck, give me one human, and I’ll do the same: Self-strife.
Should We Be Pessimists?
Hesiod did seem to suggest that our lot in life is strife. I wish I could think of some circumstances where no strife occurs. Even a cursory look at religious communities through history reveals the persistence and intrusiveness of strife. One might think that any community with a common morality would engender little strife. But it hasn’t happened, and religious strife still happens. Think of the schisms that separated Christians into Catholics, Orthodox Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Baptists, and sundry other denominations, or the divisions between Sunni and Shia, and then there are Buddhists’ divisions into Theravāda, Mantrayāna, and Mahāyāna. If St. Francis, the eponym of the current Pope were alive today, he might be appalled by his original order’s division into multiple versions of Franciscans that are now divided into multiple “orders,” each with its own offshoots.
If even religions undergo strife, there’s little chance the rest of humanity’s social constructs can be free from it. Schisms abound, some on large scales: That latest one has separated Methodists over sexual orientation as about 1,800 Methodist congregations, (6 % of the total) have broken from the main American affiliation. But I guess that Methodist breakup was inevitable, given the number of Methodists who live in rather conservative—religiously conservative—areas like Texas, North Carolina, and Indiana. Is geography to blame? I see there’s a similar problem among Catholics, Episcopalians, and Evangelicals. Not that any of this gives us new insights into Hesiod’s categories, but all of it reveals the pervasiveness of the goddess Eris in human life: Strife appears to be the way of the world.
Peace
Under the threat of ubiquitous strife, peace becomes the most sought after condition. But it’s a rarity, and when it occurs, it’s temporary at best. Almost everyone agrees that a peaceful life is better than a life lived in strife, but in every generation someone comes along to stir the hornets. And both the peaceful and the peacemakers are those who suffer the imposition.
As Vlad Putin has recently discovered, trying to impose one’s peace on another by eliminating the other actually makes peace on one’s terms more complicated and more difficult to achieve. Infighting among Russians, overt and subtle, has made Vlad’s version of “peace” less viable than he originally planned in his takeover of Ukraine. Obviously, Vlad didn’t learn any lessons from Hitler’s failure to achieve “peace” by destruction. And his arrogant TV defenders who laughed over nuking England and the US merely showed themselves to be fools: Those who were once peaceful can also turn to strife as a mechanism for restoring their peace. The Russians who would favor nuking seem not to recognize that they, too, can be nuked. Strife, as we all learn, breeds more strife—evidence lying in more than two millennia of strife in the Middle East, for example.
Unfortunately, peace cannot be continuous over generations. In Hesiod’s Theogony Harmonia counterbalances Eris. In one version of the myth, Harmonia is the daughter of Aphrodite whose name derives from aphrós (ἀφρός) “sea-foam,” a term most appropriate for the ephemeral nature of her peaceful offspring. Harmonia in some accounts represents balance or symmetry in the universe, and that’s fitting because that account of her mother makes her father Ares, the god of war. Ironically, in tales of her marriage to Cadmus lies the story of her involvement in war and her eventual transformation into a snake—not the animal typically associated in our times with peace unless it lies intertwined with another snake on the medical profession’s caduceus. Vlad, by the way, seems to have gotten himself entwined with the Wagner Group’s leader much like the image of warring snakes that led to the Greek god Hermes’ caduceus.
Lesson from myth? If even the goddess of harmony eventually became a snake, what chance do we ordinary mortals have of remaining in a peaceful state? We spend much of our lives trying to avoid Eris—all time well spent. If we can live harmoniously in this world of strife, we can achieve what so many of our predecessors failed to achieve. But everyone who accomplishes that task lives a far more rewarding existence than those who succumb to the detrimental effects of Eris.
Peace be with you. Harmony all around.
Two Types of Strife
Didn’t Hesiod make strife a central theme of Theogony? He was probably motivated to do so by his contentious relationship with his brother over family property. In his work he mentions Eris, goddess of strife who was born of Night and who gave birth to Hardship, Forgetfulness, Starvation,Pains, Battles, Wars, Murders, Quarrels, Lies, Disputes, Anarchy, and Ruin. Can’t imagine conversations around that table on Thanksgiving, but I can imagine a massive food fight with everyone throwing food except Starvation, who might sit with mouth open.
I was looking at headlines online again, and I couldn’t help but notice that there really seem to be two kinds of strife, one caused by Nature and the other caused by—am I allowed to say?—Man, Mankind. I guess the current PC language doesn’t accept the encompassing “man” in an age that has almost completely abandoned Standard Formal English. So, strife caused by people or humans in all their practices and identities versus strife caused by any nonhuman entity or process: Heck! the heck with PC, I’m going with “Unconscious Nature” and “Conscious Man.” Yes, therein lie the sources of both types of strife.
Examples?
Well, for Nature, it’s storms of all kinds, eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, landslides and avalanches, sinkholes, floods, and even rust that weakens bridges. We mind our own business, and suddenly, we’re at war with Nature, including attacks by insects, alligators, sharks, bears, and poison ivy. All of that comes from non-human and pretty much unconscious entities, or barely conscious entities, certainly not self-conscious entities.
And then there’s everything else coming from the human side, from petty arguments to murders to all out war—that’s the conscious stuff, the strife we impose on ourselves, the dominant type of strife. For every animal attack or volcanic eruption, there are literally millions to billions of human actions that bring strife into our lives. Take a look at any newspaper’s headlines. Although there might be a hurricane report on occasion, human caused strife dominates the headlines daily.
Even in southwestern Pennsylvania, where the population of the region’s largest city ranks a lowly 68th among American cities, morning news shows open every day with reports of a shooting or two, often a murder. Strife? I’d say it’s all around us. Not that western Pennsylvania is another eastern Ukraine or Sudan or the West Bank, but, yeah, strife dominates. Did I mention Chicago?
Place
We have to live somewhere.
Unless we are gluttons either for doing evil or receiving it, when given a choice of where to live, we generally choose some place that seems stable and peaceful. From our choice of an ancient rock shelter like the 16,000 year-old encampment at Meadowcroft near Avella, Pennsylvania, or a large hole in the ground like Lascaux near Montignac, France, or Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, we choose the appearance of peace over strife.
But “natural strife” does intrude even in seemingly safe places. Rocks do fall from the ceilings of shelters and caves, and places like the open plains force us to contend with winds, droughts, and wild animals. No place on the planet is free from “natural strife,” as Mammoth Cave’s Lost John mummy reveals. Even the most serene places occupied by ostensibly the most peaceful people are subject to some disturbance by natural phenomena. No one lives outside potential danger. Archbishop Serge Miot was killed when the Haitian earthquake destroyed his office and the cathedral Port-au-Prince in 2010.
Any Conclusions Here?
We live the the midst of strife. But some places are safer than others for a while, and some humans are less contentious than others. Not all is bad news it seems, and even when bad appears to prevail over good, some thrive because of or in spite of strife. In defining his two categories of strife, Hesiod acknowledges that it presents a motive to excel and achieve: Competition does drive many of us to perform well, to be a better singer, athlete, student, manager, leader…
The ubiquity of strife in the “real world” probably explains why more movies and TV shows are centered on mayhem and murder than are centered on inspirational stories of success, that is, stories about the downtrodden rising to positions of respect, authority, wealth, and power. Consider, also, how audiences respond to dramatizations of mayhem as opposed to how they respond to stories of benignity. In watching a tale of murder, the audience gets an intellectual satisfaction when the detectives solve the crime; in watching a tale of compassion, the audience gets an emotional satisfaction, as tearjerkers reveal publicly in every theater. Tragedies, from those of the ancient Greek playwrights to modern authors that detail a fall from prestige, authority, wealth, and power elicit an often unemotional “I knew he was the murderer,” clearly an intellectual response. Agatha Christie made her living by writing about such strife; the most popular computer games center on it; just about every blockbuster movie is rife with strife, which is the stuff of crime stories. On TV the Law & Order franchise has lasted for more than two decades with numerous spinoffs: Special Victims Unit, Criminal Intent, Trial by Jury, LA, True Crime, Organized Crime and a number of video games and foreign adaptations, including Law & Order UK, and popular Russian TV series. Should we add another category of strife to Hesiod’s two? How about “fictional strife”? Living in a sea of strife, we ask rivers to give us more water.
There seems to be an inherent drive in any population of humans to produce strife where there is no natural strife, resulting in the proliferation of those fictional tales as well as actual incidents of strife. We’re just little kids squabbling over an unshared toy, teens squabbling over cheerleading or team positions, and adults squabbling over property lines, religious differences, and political views. Give me two humans, and I’ll give you a potential for strife. Heck, give me one human, and I’ll do the same: Self-strife.
Should We Be Pessimists?
Hesiod did seem to suggest that our lot in life is strife. I wish I could think of some circumstances where no strife occurs. Even a cursory look at religious communities through history reveals the persistence and intrusiveness of strife. One might think that any community with a common morality would engender little strife. But it hasn’t happened, and religious strife still happens. Think of the schisms that separated Christians into Catholics, Orthodox Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Baptists, and sundry other denominations, or the divisions between Sunni and Shia, and then there are Buddhists’ divisions into Theravāda, Mantrayāna, and Mahāyāna. If St. Francis, the eponym of the current Pope were alive today, he might be appalled by his original order’s division into multiple versions of Franciscans that are now divided into multiple “orders,” each with its own offshoots.
If even religions undergo strife, there’s little chance the rest of humanity’s social constructs can be free from it. Schisms abound, some on large scales: That latest one has separated Methodists over sexual orientation as about 1,800 Methodist congregations, (6 % of the total) have broken from the main American affiliation. But I guess that Methodist breakup was inevitable, given the number of Methodists who live in rather conservative—religiously conservative—areas like Texas, North Carolina, and Indiana. Is geography to blame? I see there’s a similar problem among Catholics, Episcopalians, and Evangelicals. Not that any of this gives us new insights into Hesiod’s categories, but all of it reveals the pervasiveness of the goddess Eris in human life: Strife appears to be the way of the world.
Peace
Under the threat of ubiquitous strife, peace becomes the most sought after condition. But it’s a rarity, and when it occurs, it’s temporary at best. Almost everyone agrees that a peaceful life is better than a life lived in strife, but in every generation someone comes along to stir the hornets. And both the peaceful and the peacemakers are those who suffer the imposition.
As Vlad Putin has recently discovered, trying to impose one’s peace on another by eliminating the other actually makes peace on one’s terms more complicated and more difficult to achieve. Infighting among Russians, overt and subtle, has made Vlad’s version of “peace” less viable than he originally planned in his takeover of Ukraine. Obviously, Vlad didn’t learn any lessons from Hitler’s failure to achieve “peace” by destruction. And his arrogant TV defenders who laughed over nuking England and the US merely showed themselves to be fools: Those who were once peaceful can also turn to strife as a mechanism for restoring their peace. The Russians who would favor nuking seem not to recognize that they, too, can be nuked. Strife, as we all learn, breeds more strife—evidence lying in more than two millennia of strife in the Middle East, for example.
Unfortunately, peace cannot be continuous over generations. In Hesiod’s Theogony Harmonia counterbalances Eris. In one version of the myth, Harmonia is the daughter of Aphrodite whose name derives from aphrós (ἀφρός) “sea-foam,” a term most appropriate for the ephemeral nature of her peaceful offspring. Harmonia in some accounts represents balance or symmetry in the universe, and that’s fitting because that account of her mother makes her father Ares, the god of war. Ironically, in tales of her marriage to Cadmus lies the story of her involvement in war and her eventual transformation into a snake—not the animal typically associated in our times with peace unless it lies intertwined with another snake on the medical profession’s caduceus. Vlad, by the way, seems to have gotten himself entwined with the Wagner Group’s leader much like the image of warring snakes that led to the Greek god Hermes’ caduceus.
Lesson from myth? If even the goddess of harmony eventually became a snake, what chance do we ordinary mortals have of remaining in a peaceful state? We spend much of our lives trying to avoid Eris—all time well spent. If we can live harmoniously in this world of strife, we can achieve what so many of our predecessors failed to achieve. But everyone who accomplishes that task lives a far more rewarding existence than those who succumb to the detrimental effects of Eris.
Peace be with you. Harmony all around.
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