It’s easy for us to think the world began with our own births. The present is always more important than the past. And thinking as we do that the world of Now is all that really is important, we think of our problems as “original.” But we know from the immediate past generation’s telling us and from our study of history that little that occurs in our societies differs from what happened in past societies. Let me give you a sample:
In The Rise of the Greeks, Michael Grant writes:
“…most other cities of the Greek world, while not returning to dictatorships…were and remained all too liable to internal political troubles of their own: between oligarchs and democrats, between privileged and unprivileged, between rich and poor. The Greek word is stasis, faction, which means anything between legitimate differences of opinion on public affairs to savage inter-party violence—which all too often occurred. It was especially frequent in colonies where the families of original and later settlers, for example came into conflict… The city-state was a brilliant idea, and full of brilliant ideas, but it was destined eventually to fail because of the lethal combination of stasis within and constant hostilities with its Greek neighbors without” (22). *
Is there a better example of stasis than the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century, some 2,500 to 3,000 years after the periods covered by Grant in his history? I’ll answer for you: “NO.” We’re reliving what the ancient Greeks lived. And that gives us both joy and sadness, or optimism and pessimism.
Joy because in spite of their problems with stasis, the Greeks are still Greeks today. As a people they survived all the squabbles—petty and violent—of their history. Sadness because they in their society and we in our society have not progressed in our abilities to function internally in harmony. Every generation from ages before the Greeks arose as a culture to the American Civil War and into our own times, has replayed the world in stasis, the world of squabbling factions. And we can’t see a future that exists without stasis.
About the only differences between then and now are the dangers posed by factions that have access to weapons that far exceed the killing power of swords and the ability to quash by censorship, threat, or harm not just individuals but whole populations (Think Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorable” and Biden’s attack on anyone associated with “Make America Great Again,” or think of social media’s nationwide, nay worldwide, censorship of conservative voices coupled with the mainstream media’s compliance with one party in its disputes over another—an enhancement of stasis because it places great power in the hands of one faction over another) These are times when forces unknown to the ancient Greeks can exacerbate factional disputes and enhance the power of one supposed “democratic” social unit over another in a substitute form of oligarchy or dictatorship.
So, joy and sadness. Our culture will probably survive in some form beyond today’s factional disputes, but it won’t survive precisely as is. We live the Now as if there were no past to know. Our descendants will live their Nows as if our Now didn't exist. The status quo will always lie in stasis.
*1987. And 2005 reprint for Barnes and Noble (where I bought it for $6.98, a bargain to me because I appreciate the effort Grant had to put into a detailed history of more than 600 years of ancient Greece and surrounding kingdoms and empires—more than 300 pages of text)
In The Rise of the Greeks, Michael Grant writes:
“…most other cities of the Greek world, while not returning to dictatorships…were and remained all too liable to internal political troubles of their own: between oligarchs and democrats, between privileged and unprivileged, between rich and poor. The Greek word is stasis, faction, which means anything between legitimate differences of opinion on public affairs to savage inter-party violence—which all too often occurred. It was especially frequent in colonies where the families of original and later settlers, for example came into conflict… The city-state was a brilliant idea, and full of brilliant ideas, but it was destined eventually to fail because of the lethal combination of stasis within and constant hostilities with its Greek neighbors without” (22). *
Is there a better example of stasis than the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century, some 2,500 to 3,000 years after the periods covered by Grant in his history? I’ll answer for you: “NO.” We’re reliving what the ancient Greeks lived. And that gives us both joy and sadness, or optimism and pessimism.
Joy because in spite of their problems with stasis, the Greeks are still Greeks today. As a people they survived all the squabbles—petty and violent—of their history. Sadness because they in their society and we in our society have not progressed in our abilities to function internally in harmony. Every generation from ages before the Greeks arose as a culture to the American Civil War and into our own times, has replayed the world in stasis, the world of squabbling factions. And we can’t see a future that exists without stasis.
About the only differences between then and now are the dangers posed by factions that have access to weapons that far exceed the killing power of swords and the ability to quash by censorship, threat, or harm not just individuals but whole populations (Think Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorable” and Biden’s attack on anyone associated with “Make America Great Again,” or think of social media’s nationwide, nay worldwide, censorship of conservative voices coupled with the mainstream media’s compliance with one party in its disputes over another—an enhancement of stasis because it places great power in the hands of one faction over another) These are times when forces unknown to the ancient Greeks can exacerbate factional disputes and enhance the power of one supposed “democratic” social unit over another in a substitute form of oligarchy or dictatorship.
So, joy and sadness. Our culture will probably survive in some form beyond today’s factional disputes, but it won’t survive precisely as is. We live the Now as if there were no past to know. Our descendants will live their Nows as if our Now didn't exist. The status quo will always lie in stasis.
*1987. And 2005 reprint for Barnes and Noble (where I bought it for $6.98, a bargain to me because I appreciate the effort Grant had to put into a detailed history of more than 600 years of ancient Greece and surrounding kingdoms and empires—more than 300 pages of text)
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