Make the Death Star Great Again

What happens when a guild, once a model for enlightened progress, threatens to regress into intolerance and irrationality—with the complicity of many of its own citizens? How should that society's stunned and disoriented members reply? Do they appoint in kind, resist, withdraw, even depart? It's a dilemma as onetime as democracy itself.

Twenty-4 centuries agone, Athens was upended past the event of a vote that is worth revisiting today. A war-weary citizenry, raised on democratic exceptionalism but disillusioned past its leaders, wanted to feel great once again—a recipe for unease and raw vindictiveness, then every bit now. The populace had no strongman to turn to, ready with promises that the polis would shortly be winning, winning like never before. But hanging around the agora, volubly engaging residents of every rank, was someone to turn on: Socrates, whose provocative questioning of the city-state'due south sense of moral superiority no longer seemed as entertaining as it had in more than secure times. Athenians were in no mood to have their views shaken up. They had lost patience with the lively, discomfiting debates sparked past the onetime homo. In 399 b.c., accused of impiety and corrupting the young, Socrates stood trial before a jury of his peers—1 of the great pillars of Athenian democracy. That spring day, the 501 denizen-jurors did not practise the institution proud. More of them voted that Socrates should die than voted him guilty in the first place.

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It'southward all too easy to imagine, at this moment in American history, the degree of revulsion and despair Plato must accept felt at the verdict rendered by his beau Athenians on his beloved mentor. How could Plato, grieving over the loss of the "best man of his time," go along to live among the people who had betrayed reason, justice, open-mindedness, goodwill—indeed, every value he upheld? From his perspective, that was the enormity Athenians had committed when they let themselves be swayed by the outrageous lies of Socrates's enemies. Did truth count for zip?

A despondent Plato left the city-state of Athens, whose tradition of proud patriotism and morally confident leadership at dwelling house and abroad had been recently and severely shaken. Whether he was witnessing the end of Athenian exceptionalism or a prelude to the long, hard work of rebuilding it on firmer foundations, he could not have begun to predict.

Plato was in his belatedly 20s when he lost Socrates. Born an blueblood, he boasted a lineage that went back, on his mother's side, all the manner to Solon the Lawgiver, the seventh-century sage ofttimes credited with laying the cornerstone of Athenian democracy. As Plato confessed in the famous Seventh Letter (which, if it wasn't written by Plato himself, was composed by an intimate familiar with the details of his life), he had planned to take an active function in the leadership of his illustrious polis.

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Enshrined in the city-state'southward mythology was the fiction that its inhabitants were autochthonous: They had literally "sprung from the earth," which gave them a special claim to the soil they occupied. The Athenian triumph in the Greco-Farsi Wars in 479 b.c., subsequently a dozen years of on-and-off fighting, had intensified the pride in autochthony. Eligibility for citizenship—already an exclusive privilege denied to women and slaves, of grade, but also to most taxation-paying alien residents (some of them very wealthy)—was tightened. In 451 b.c., the statesman Pericles proposed a police that only those with two Athenian-born parents, rather than just a father, qualified. Still, as Athens asserted dominance throughout the region, presiding every bit the standard for Hellenic greatness, the emerging purple power drew in immigrants. The best and the brightest arrived, hoping to engage in the city-land'southward achievements, its art and its learning, fifty-fifty if they were excluded from its vaunted participatory democracy.

But Plato, born and bred to play a prominent role within "the Hellas of Hellas"—equally Athens had lately been anointed—turned his face away. On a voyage that lasted nigh 12 years, he ventured well across the borders of the Greek-speaking lands. He went s and studied geometry, geography, astronomy, and organized religion in Egypt. He went west to spend time with the Pythagoreans in southern Italia, learning about their otherworldly mixture of mathematics and mysticism, absorbing from them esoteric sources of thaumazein, or ontological wonder. Plato, already primed past Socrates non to take Athenian exceptionalism for granted, was on a path toward metaphysical speculations and ethical and political reflections beyond any entertained by his mentor.

High on the list of presumptions that Socrates had aimed to unsettle was his swain citizens' certainty that their metropolis-state brooked no comparing when it came to outstanding virtue. To exist an Athenian, ran a core ideology of the polis, was to partake in its aura of moral superiority. Socrates dedicated his life to challenging a confidence that he felt had get overweening.

Athens was undeniably extraordinary, and the patriotic self-assurance and democratic energy that fueled its vast achievements did stand out. Only the Greek quest for an overarching ethos to guide human endeavor hadn't happened in isolation. It was part of a normative explosion nether way in many centers of civilization—wherever a class of people enjoyed plenty of a respite from the daily grind of life to ponder the signal of it all.

How to make one's brief time on Earth matter? That was the essential question at the heart of ambitious inquiries into human purpose and significant. Every major religious framework that still operates, the philosopher Karl Jaspers pointed out, can be traced back to a specific period: from 800 to 200 b.c.—the Axial Age, he called it. The sixth century (roughly a century before Socrates's prime number) was the nigh fertile interlude, when not only Pythagoras but the Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tzu, and several Hebrew prophets including Ezekiel lived and worked. From Greece emerged Western secular philosophy, which brought reasoned statement to bear on the human predicament and the reflections it inspired. Those reflections, no less urgent now than they were then, can be roughly summed up this mode:

Untold multitudes have come earlier us who have brought all the same passions to living their lives as we do, and yet nix of them remains to evidence that they'd ever been. Nosotros know, each one of u.s.a., or at to the lowest degree we fear, that the same volition happen to us. The oceans of fourth dimension volition cover the states over, like waves closing over the head of a crewman, leaving not a ripple, to utilise an image that inspired abject terror in the seafaring Greeks. Really, why do any of united states fifty-fifty bother to bear witness upward for our own being (as if we take a choice), for all the deviation we ultimately make? Driven to pursue our lives with single-minded passion, we are nevertheless, as the Greek poet Pindar put information technology in the fifth century b.c., merely "creatures of a twenty-four hours."

The Athenians' conviction that they mattered uniquely—the entitled spirit that prevailed by Plato's time—had long been in the making. For several generations of ancient Greeks earlier him, a less bodacious proposition had served as a guide: We aren't born into lives that matter just take to achieve them. Such an endeavor demands a great deal of individual striving, because what counts is nothing less than outstanding accomplishments. Theirs was an ethos of the extraordinary, and its pitiless corollary was that most lives don't affair. The deeper, and humbler, sources of the ethos dated back fifty-fifty further, to a time of anomie and illiteracy—the Greek Night Ages, scholars used to call the period that followed the mysterious destruction of the slap-up palace kingdoms of the Bronze Age around 1100 b.c. The wondrous ruins left behind—the massive bridges and beehive tombs, the towering edifices inscribed with indecipherable lettering—spoke of daunting feats of applied science. "Cyclopean," the awestruck successors chosen the remains, for how could mere humans accept wrought such marvels without the collaboration of the i-eyed giants?

Clearly there had been a previous age when mortals had realized possibilities all but unthinkable to bottom specimens. Those people had mingled so closely with immortals every bit to assume an altogether new, heroic category of existence, historic in tales sung past ordinary Greeks. The reverence is embedded in The Iliad, which extols Achilles as the greatest of all the legendary Greek heroes—the man who, given the choice, opted for a brief but exceptional life over a long and undistinguished one. "Two fates bear me on to the day of the expiry," he proclaims. "If I concur out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey abode is gone, simply my celebrity never dies. If I voyage dorsum to the fatherland I dearest, my pride, my glory dies." Existence song-worthy is the whole point of being extraordinary. Information technology's in kleos, in glory and fame, that the existential task of attaining a life that matters is fulfilled. Living then that others will call back you is your solace in the face up of the erasure you know awaits.

These pre-monotheists' mode of thinking almost how to make the most of our lives is one that we, steeped in social media and glory culture, are in a fine position to empathise. What is most startling about their existential response is its clear-eyed rejection of transcendence. The creation is indifferent, and only human terms apply: Perform infrequent deeds so as to earn the praise of others whose existence is as brief as your own. That's the best we can do, Pindar said, in the quest for significance:

And two things simply
tend life's sweetest moment: when in the blossom of wealth
a man enjoys both triumph and skillful fame.
Seek not to become Zeus.
All is yours
if the allocation of these two gifts
has fallen to you lot.
Mortal thoughts
befit a mortal man.

But an ethos of the extraordinary poses a practical trouble. Most people are, by definition, perfectly ordinary, the aboriginal Greeks included. Ultimately, they found a solution to this trouble in propounding a kind of participatory exceptionalism, encouraging a shared sense of identity that as well fabricated them highly competitive. Merely to be Greek was to be extraordinary. Their word for all those whose native language wasn't Greek was barbarians, because not-Greek languages sounded to them like so much bar-bar—Greek for "blah, blah, apathetic."

No commonage experience transformed the Greeks' perception of themselves more than their unlikely victory over the Persians. In vanquishing the vastly superior forces of this world empire, the Greeks had given their poets a contemporary feat to sing most. Herodotus initiated his Histories—which is to say, initiated the do of history itself—with these words:

These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the promise of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.

The Greco-Persian Wars helped convert the ethos of the extraordinary from antecedent reverence into a motivational agenda. Aristotle, writing his Politics a century after the end of the wars, observed the spillover into the life of the mind: "Proud of their achievements, men pushed farther afield after the Farsi wars; they took all knowledge for their province, and sought ever wider studies."

And nowhere were this pride and this pushing more assertively on display than in 5th-century Athens, where concern was conducted within sight of the Acropolis. At that place the monuments emblematic of Athens's newly gained imperialist glory were on display, including the exquisitely proportioned Parthenon, which, despite its immensity, seems to bladder—an idealized form of materiality. The architectural splendors, proof of undaunted genius and vitality, had arisen out of the ruins to which the older shrines of the Acropolis had been reduced in 480 b.c. past the invading Persians.

The democracy that had gradually adult in Athens added considerably to the ethos of supreme distinction. The contrast to the oligarchic, tyrannical, and monarchical systems elsewhere couldn't have been starker: Every citizen was expected to partake in decision making directly, not through representatives. And just in example there were any Athenian citizens who didn't fully capeesh the uniqueness of Athens and what information technology conferred on them, Pericles—whose very name means "surrounded by celebrity"—articulated it for them.

"In sum, I say that our city every bit a whole is a lesson for Greece," he declared in his famous Funeral Oration in 431 b.c., "and that each of us presents himself as a self-sufficient individual, disposed to the widest possible diversity of actions, with every grace and slap-up versatility." 1 of the outset battles of the Peloponnesian State of war had only taken place, the start of what turned into a 27-year struggle, and Pericles called upon Athenian exceptionalism for inspiration. Elevation in the minds of others, at present and in the time to come, went hand and hand with demonstrations of ability:

This is non just a boast in words for the occasion, but the truth in fact, as the power of this city, which we have obtained past having this character, makes evident. For Athens is the only power at present that is greater than its fame when information technology comes to the test … We are proving our power with strong evidence, and we are not without witnesses: nosotros shall be the admiration of people now and in the future.

But navigating the line between patriotic pride and arrogance wasn't piece of cake. In extolling the greater glory of Athens, its leaders didn't only aim to pump up ordinary citizens. They likewise hoped to tamp downwards individual hubris—to keep the city-state'south ambitious upstarts committed to the collective cause, rather than to the lawless pursuit of their own personal celebrity. If that meant stoking political hubris, Pericles was more than ready. He went on to say, "We practise non need Homer, or anyone else, to praise our power with words that please for a moment," only he was non advising modesty. Quite the contrary, he celebrated the existent-life deeds of majestic Athens equally indelible proof of superiority:

For we have compelled all seas and all lands to be open up to us by our daring; and we have set up eternal monuments on all sides, of our setbacks likewise as of our accomplishments.

Cataloging Athenian achievements, from the uniqueness of the city-state's democracy to its magnanimity, Pericles suggested that its vanquished enemies should take pride in having been bettered by such unparalleled specimens of humanity. "Simply in the instance of Athens can enemies never be upset over the quality of those who defeat them when they invade; merely in our empire tin subject field states never complain that their rulers are unworthy."

Here, in the attitude underlying Pericles'south Funeral Oration, lies the meaning of Socrates's life, as well as the significant of his death—and of Plato's response, which was non, in the end, a retreat. Even, or specially, a autonomous social club with an exceptionalist heritage—every bit Plato and his swain Athenians were hardly the last to notice—may prove unprepared to answer wisely when airs takes over and expectations go amiss.

Neither Socrates nor Plato ever challenged the Greek conviction that achieving a life that matters requires boggling effort and results in an extraordinary state. But Socrates was determined to interrogate what being exceptional means. Personal fame, he contended, counts for aught if your life isn't, in itself, a life of virtue. Simply that kind of extraordinary achievement matters—and the same could exist said for urban center-states. Power and the glory it brings are no measure of their stature. The virtuous citizen, indeed, is inseparable from the virtuous polis, his merits to significance rooted in his commitment to the common good. What counts, Socrates taught, is the quest for a better agreement of what virtue is, what justice and wisdom are. The goal is a moral vision and so compelling that every citizen, no matter his position, will feel its force and be guided by it. A autonomous state that fosters the continuous self-scrutiny demanded past such a vision can hope for greatness. Mere kleos is for losers.

Only an infrequent homo would have dared to challenge such a fundamental presumption of his gild. Simply if Socrates was then boggling, how did Athenians—who took pride in citizens of distinction and had long been fondly tolerant of their exuberantly eccentric philosopher—come to turn against him? Socrates'south confidence and execution are even more puzzling given that his trial was a complete farce, at to the lowest degree as Plato presented information technology in the Apology. The philosopher ran rings around Meletus, the man put up to exist the prosecutor. Socrates exposed him as ill-informed and perchance something of an opportunist, ready to declare 1 thing ane moment and and then contradict himself the side by side.

But the appointment of the trial reveals a polis whose exceptionalist identity had been challenged and whose citizens had been caught off-balance: How keen were they, actually? Where was their moral compass? Athens was still reeling from defeat in the Peloponnesian War 5 years before—and at the hands of those uncultivated Spartans, who had no high culture to speak of, no playwrights or Parthenon. They could barely string three words together, much less lucifer the rhetorical brilliance on which the Athenians congratulated themselves. It surely didn't assist that the Spartans had behaved far more than magnanimously in their final victory than the Athenians had behaved during the long and brutal disharmonize. (The Spartans didn't fire Athens to the ground. They didn't slaughter its males and cart off its females as booty. Sparta'south nobility in declaring that it would treat the vanquished city as befit the great imperial power information technology in one case had been must have felt particularly galling.)

Aided by a Spartan garrison, an oligarchic regime rose to power, equanimous of aristocratic Athenians (including one of Plato's relatives) who disapproved of commonwealth. The Thirty, equally they were called, employed hush-hush informers and terrorist tactics, drawing many Athenians into ignominious bunco. When, in 403, the oligarchic collaborators were driven out after less than a twelvemonth, Athenian democracy was restored—nether quite unusual conditions. The customary bloodbath never happened. No fell rounds of retribution and counter-retribution ensued. A declaration of general amnesty, granted to all but a notorious few at the height, eased the style toward an ameliorating fiction that the Athenians, with the exception of the Thirty and a coterie of their conspirators, had been victims. Information technology was a collective deed of willful forgetting. In fact, the citizens were subject to an oath, me mnesikakein, which means "not to remember past wrongs."

The amnesty was an act of political brilliance, and the Athenians, predictably, couldn't finish praising themselves for it. The rhetorician Isocrates joined in:

For whereas many cities might be found which take waged war gloriously, in dealing with civil discord at that place is none which could be shown to have taken wiser measures than ours. Furthermore, the great majority of all those achievements that accept been achieved past fighting may be attributed to Fortune; only for the moderation we showed towards one another no i could discover whatever other cause than our good judgement. Consequently information technology is non fitting that nosotros should evidence false to this glorious reputation.

Just the plaudits they bestowed on themselves couldn't hibernate the fact that Athenian exceptionalism had taken a hit since the celebrity days of Pericles, when the statesman had alleged that any enemy would be proud to be vanquished by so superior a people. Moral shame accompanied military shame. The grueling war had driven the Athenians to atrocities against fellow Greeks, virtually which the historian Thucydides was heartrendingly vivid. Along with the amnesty's me mnesikakein, the citizens and their leaders might very well accept wished to legislate a forgetting of the fell enslavement and extermination of enemies at Athenian hands.

At a juncture like this, as Athenians strived to shore up their vision of themselves, perhaps it shouldn't come as such a surprise that they lost their tolerance for Socrates'southward hectoring. His fellow citizens could afford to appreciate a genuine Athenian original in the days when their worthiness was and then manifest, every bit Pericles had declaimed, that no Homer needed to spread word of it. But not at present, when their famous rhetoricians had been reduced to extolling how uniquely brilliant they were at handling defeat. And so at the start opportunity, with the Spartan forces withdrawn and democratic government stabilized, the gadfly of the agora was indicted.

Socrates'southward compatriots wanted to make Athens great over again. They wanted to restore the civilization of kleos that had once fabricated them experience and so terrific well-nigh themselves. It's non hard to understand why Plato fled a citizenry that, in struggling to recover from its sense of diminishment, was prepared to destroy what had been all-time virtually the polis—the extraordinary human whose destructive challenges to blinkered opinion and cocky-righteous patriotism held the key to resurrecting any exceptionalism worth aspiring to.

And even so eventually, afterwards his years of self-imposed exile, Plato came back to Athens, bringing his newly gathered learning along with him, to take up where Socrates had left off. Except Plato didn't philosophize where Socrates had. He abased the agora and created the Academy, the kickoff European university, which attracted thinkers—purportedly fifty-fifty a couple of women—from across greater Hellas, including, at the age of 17 or 18, Aristotle. Foremost amid the problems they pondered was how to create a society in which a person like Socrates would flourish, issuing stringent calls to self-scrutiny, every bit relevant at present every bit ever.

Athens may never again have presided every bit the imperial center it was before the state of war. Instead, information technology staked what has proved to be a far more enduring claim to extraordinariness in becoming a center of intellectual and moral progress. Empires have risen and fallen. Merely the bedrock of Western civilisation has lasted, built upon by, among many others, America's Founders—students of Plato determined to create a democracy that could avert the flaws Plato observed in his ain.

In establishing the Academy, Plato didn't abdicate the people of the agora, who, as citizens, had to deliberate responsibly near issues of moral and political import. It was with these issues in mind that he wrote his dialogues—great works of literature as well as of philosophy. The dialogues may not correspond his true philosophy (in the 7th Letter, he explained that he had never committed his teachings to writing), but for more than than 2,400 years they've been good enough for us, as inspiring and exasperating as Socrates himself must have been.

In 25 out of Plato's 26 dialogues—and nosotros have them all—Socrates is present, often as the leading spokesperson for the ideas that Plato is exploring, though sometimes, in the subsequently dialogues, equally a silent bystander. It's as if Plato wants to take Socrates forth with him on the intellectual quest he pursues during the course of his long life. It'southward as if he wants us, also, to accept Socrates along as nosotros return once again and again to the Herculean endeavor of applying reason to our most fervently held assumptions. Socrates's message could not exist more timely. The mantle of glorified greatness belongs to no society by correct or by might, or past revered tradition, he taught. It belongs to no private who, ignoring the claims of justice, strives to brand a proper noun that might outlast him. Exceptionalism has to exist earned again and again, generation after generation, by citizens committed, together, to the incessantly hard piece of work of sustaining a polity that strives to serve the skillful of all.

Subsequently his love mentor was put to decease, condemned by his beau citizens, a despairing Plato left the urban center-state of Athens.

Simply he returned.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/making-athens-great-again/517791/

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