Cultural Suicide and Classical Greece

An interesting piece by Benedict Beckeld in Quillette. 

Once they have left their mythical past behind, and scored successes against neighboring peoples, they become aware of their own power, knowledge, and uniqueness. 

Well before then, actually: the sympathetic view of the enemy he assigns to Aeschylus is also present in  Homer's Iliad. Simone Weil called the play a "miracle" just for that reason.

And self-analysis requires a distancing of the self from itself, in order to view the object of study in its entirety.

That is the very process of the creation of the world according to Plotinus, who discusses it at length in Ennead V.II-III. A problem is that it is both necessary and apparently impossible. In separating the thinker from the thought-about, the thinker divides itself into parts. These parts have different characters: one active, the other passive. The thought-about parts of the self are frozen, in effect, while the thinker actively thinks about them. But being frozen, they are no longer part of the active mind: and thus, it is not possible to think about 'the object of study in its entirety.' 

As a consequence of this, as well as Plato's deduction that everything must be in some way ultimately One (see the commentary on the Parmenides, sidebar), Plotinus worked out a theory of multiple levels of intellect, including a higher Mind that could perceive the forms (themselves activities by nature), and thus do the thinking and being-thought-about all at once. 

As an act- and one whose very being is an act- it must be undistinguishably identical with its act: but Being and the Intellectual object are also identical with that act; therefore the Intellectual-Principle, its exercise of intellection and the object of intellection all are identical. Given its intellection identical with intellectual object and the object identical with the Principle itself, it cannot but have self-knowledge: its intellection operates by the intellectual act which is itself upon the intellectual object which similarly is itself. It possesses self-knowing, thus, on every count; the act is itself; and the object seen in that act- self, is itself.

6. Thus we have shown that there exists that which in the strictest sense possesses self-knowing.

[If anyone wants to try to follow Plotinus' explanation, let me know. He's notoriously difficult to read and understand.]

In any case, after exploring this Greek fascination with self-knowledge, he notes that Classical Athens was nevertheless patriotic:

Herodotus, for his part, is happy to travel but thinks the Greek world best, especially Athens, which he seems to prefer (Histories 5.78) to his native Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, which is under tyrannical Persian sway. Thucydides has Pericles utter some of the most patriotically beautiful words imaginable on the greatness of Athens and the indomitable Athenian spirit (History of the Peloponnesian War 2.35–46). Aristotle considers it quite clear, in many different passages of his works, that his Greek compatriots are culturally superior to other peoples. So these men, and others, are able to analyze and even question their own traditions without thereby slipping into oikophobia.

What happened? Class warfare.

The crushing naval victory at Salamis, won by poor and simple oarsmen rather than by comparatively wealthy, landed hoplites, leads the poor to demand more rights. This is why the conservative Plato views that battle in a negative light (Laws 707a–c), even though it was a Greek victory. He feels that it caused a more assertive citizenry of individuals who believe more in themselves than in the community, and he is echoed by Aristotle at Politics 1274a and 1304a.

You can find my commentary on that part of the Laws here.

Increasingly, the rich and the poor, the democrats and the oligarchists, come to hate each other more than either group hates the Persians. Since the common civilizational enemy has been successfully repulsed, it can no longer serve as an effective target for (and outlet of) the people’s wrath. Human psychology generally requires an adversary for the purpose of self-identification, and so a new adversary is crafted: other Greeks, and other Athenians.

For us, I suppose, the end of the Cold War and the intellectual transformation of China into a trading partner rather than an enemy (although it still smells and looks a lot like an enemy at times...) began this spiral. Yet no: it must have happened earlier. All of the 'woke' hatreds of America and her history have roots at least to the 1970s, and indeed those are only radical and intellectual versions of movements that date to the 50s and 60s. Certainly the successes of the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society did not tame these complaints -- they have sharpened and deepened as criticisms since the days of Dr. King's soaring rhetoric. Beckeld suggests that the Great Society may be particularly at fault, though he does not mention it by name here:  he is discussing a similar program in ancient Greece. 

[D]ependence makes people resentful and miserly, and the more they receive from the state, the less they will respect it. This is why there is often a dynamic of mutual strengthening between oikophobia and government largesse, and oikophobia and the entitlement mentality go hand in hand.... Once this sense of entitlement becomes the predominant outlook, the citizens of a state begin to compete more with each other, while the external enemy recedes into the background. 

At this point your culture is largely at war with itself, and a sort of suicide threatens. Certainly other powers beyond your vision, growing stronger while you focus on the threat inside, may suddenly appear on your borders or well inside of them.