End Times by Kenneth Smith   

4. Ancient Civilization

A. Nature as Becoming and as Intrinsic Truth

Ancient Hellenic culture is the regime of the principle of nature. "Nature" is the peculiar logic of dynamic, organic existence, authorized to take care of itself by executing its own self-interpreted instincts. It is a far richer principle than anything moderns understand by mechanistic biology or psychology. It is a system of manifest or intuitively accessible laws, although human beings by reason of their own occlusive natures can make themselves obtuse and inept to grasp its orderliness — even as they nonetheless obey it. Comprehended according to its own intrinsic mode of rationale — how it forms and organizes itself and tends to behave and should be understood — nature makes the specific and coherent kind of sense that the Greeks call physis. That Logos, that logic or mode of order, reigns even over the minds and wills of human beings. Nature is the latent, inward, even cryptic sufficient reason for any creature's being as it is and acting as it does.

That a creature acts "naturally" — intelligible to anyone with the requisite concepts — is axiomatic; that it may act apparently unnaturally or contranaturally is baffling, an anomaly that defies the orderly cosmos of nature. The laws of nature apply more obliquely or ingeniously in such a case. All that is said and done, even among purportedly rational humans, serves a natural telos or purpose; to every act or phenomenon there is an immanental or self-implicit "why." We know how to read the order of nature when we grasp the full diversity of such natural reasons. The Greek system of nature is that regime of instinctive purposes, of naturally ingrained needs and ends, called teleology. Even every word-choice, every nuance in stylistics, expresses the organism of needs and biases which is human personality: as Blake wrote, As a man is, so he sees. Consciousness serves the interests its organism has been endowed with, but it has a notorious egocentric tendency — its own relatively dysfunctional nature — to set itself in opposition to the comprehensive world of nature. All human liability for tragedy and folly grows out of that seed of potential divorce and self-exceptionalism; just as wisdom, freedom, goodness, and truth grow out of a healthy congruence.

Our very consciousness and thinking are organs for the order of nature. Even when we foolishly suppose they are serving only our own abstracted purposes, in actuality we are discharging our own natural potential by them. Nietzsche grasped the utterly connoisseurial ad hominem implicit in this ancient culture, a mode which sophisticated modernity shames its denizens into overlooking — "...that most difficult and captious kind of backward inference...from the work to the maker, from the deed to the doer, from the ideal to him who needs it, from every way of thinking and valuing to the want that prompts it." The entire aristocratic hierarchy of ancient society hinged on the subtlest and surest judgment of quality of motive and purpose, on the very psychological speciation of character-types which in antiquity each had their own natural sphere — private household, marketplace, public forum. All creatures in nature breed true to their kind: so too human words and actions are the signature of the mind that fathered them. Know thyself in such a culture does not signify an objective, distanced kind of cognitive act, but a subtle and laborious intimate familiarity: gnothi seauton expresses a gnosis or intuitive apprehension, not a noiesis or formal-intellectual grasp of a "problem."

Nothing in nature is accidental, fortuitous or gratuitous; all things express and serve some kind of need or immediate imperative, and even though the domain of natural needs has been vastly complicated by human language and culture, the principle of nature has not been refuted but only extenuated by such developments. Nature is the motive impulse that drives every act, including acts of interpretation by which we evaluate our own and others' acts. Nature is the fuel of potentiality which in being actualized is erupting into flame. Every act, said Aristotle, is for the sake of some good: nature is inherently self-diagnostic and self-provident, "a patient that doctors itself." All behavior, no matter how devious or perverse, seeks what seems instinctively satisfying to some perspectival impulse. We have only to see the idiomatic logic of that impulse in order to grasp why it aims itself as it does. Acts may be misconceived, misevaluated, misstrategized, idiotic, foolish, pathetic, tragic — but all of these are merely the variorum of nature, the subjective play it endows animals and humans with. The actual logic and instrumentalities of nature are subtle, its principles never perfectly obvious: Physis philei kryptesthai, said Heraclitus, "Nature loves to hide" — just as humans love to hide their eyes from it and to suppose their own inner ways are hidden from it.

Nature is understood in at least two profound senses, becoming and intrinsic validity, which to the Greeks are equivocally the same. The first sense of nature, as physis — "becoming," "growing," the gerundive or process-form of the verb phuo — describes the domain of relentless, tidal mutation: nature is the realm of all things generated and perishable where nothing can remain simply what it is (we have our word "nature" out of Latin as Cicero's invention, by analogy with physis, from the past participle of the verb nascere, natus = having been born). All natural existence is pregnant with its other, incubating cryptic forms of future order and orientation which are presently unthinkable: to exist in nature is to be variable and subvertible — all that is natural changes, falls prey to the fate of alliosis or "othering." All of natural existence is thus in motion, on the way from one state into another. Heraditus' incisive dictum Panta rhei — All things flow — captures for all time the quintessence of ancient dynamism: the world as "fluxus quo."

As Nietzsche grasped, the premier accomplishment of human culture lay in achieving stability, predictability, the self-regularity that made legal and political order feasible — but how was it possible for man, in spite of turbulent nature, to make himself into "the animal that dared to promise," binding his future self by present determinations of will? The Greeks esteemed the pronoia or far-sighted providence, the "divine fire" that Prometheus ("Forethought") endowed upon man. And it was the premier accomplishment of Greek culture that for the first time in history it grasped the contranatural significance of culture, as a metaphysical war against the volatile natural condition of man: Apollonian forces of intellect versus Dionysian forces of life.

In nature, as the order of generated and evolutionary being, two concepts are in principle ruled out as unthinkable: (1) that anything could simply spontaneously erupt into being, without precedent or precondition — for all that is natural had to grow into being out of seeds of potentiality (for ex nihilo nihil fit, out of nothing nothing can be produced); and (2) that anything could be in an absolute or abstracted way, could have perfect identity or imperturbable self-sameness as an impregnability against corruption. Nothing in nature is immune to the insidious metabolism of life being bound up intimately with life, not an economy or city and not even the exceptional individual's need to rise above raw needs and the conformist herd for the sake of self-rule and aristocratic freedom. This stringent self-order is also another kind of natural need, one specific to aristocratic character, albeit a need rarer and more difficult than the inertia that defines hoi polloi, the Many.

Only in the irreal domains of logic or mathematics can there be true eternalist identity, as an idealized fiction of the intellect. Even the Gods must change and vary — they may be exempt from suffering and death (as caused by lower-order beings), but one regime of Gods is overthrown by the next generation like the rotation of seasons. In nature therefore the very copula is must have a weaker, more elastic sense: most of what exists passes away, but the core or natural essence that endures persists in virtue of having the power to triumph over change — for as long as it is competent to do so. The only "identity" in nature is perdurance or perenniality, an agonist existence consisting in having resources for integrity stronger than the disintegrative, permutative forces that are pitched in opposition against that integrity. All of the dynamic, turbulent natural order is antagonistic against any static identity. Forces of natural time erode everything in nature as the tides do the continents — as life itself lives by using up what is living, as Chronos the titanic god of Time consumes his own children.

From this first sense of nature the Greeks took a worldview of radical transience, of risk, of a need to develop the strength to resist dissolution: they grasped humans as incurably mortal — perishable not just at death but indeed all throughout life, at every instant — and the works of humans as fated to decay. We are always liable to become something else, alien to ourselves — we are at risk therefore of taking a moral misstep, evolving by conscious misguidance contrary to our own inward nature. Our utmost liability is our own judgment, and so quality of insight is imperative. Individual life and social order are besieged always by subversive forces of erosion; unsleeping vigilance is needed just to keep oneself well-footed, for all that is living pitches forward in headlong momentum. A profound ethos of striving and contest (agon) must be cultivated. No term is more archetypally Greek than aristeuein, "to strive to be the best," to discriminate between better and worse in our own powers and to drive toward our own inner archetype or most essential character. Judgment is our sole weapon against the dementias of life and it must be razorsharp, connoisseurial, alive to all that is significant. Ultimately quality of judgment is wisdom itself, the clarified grasp of what is truly essential.

The second sense of "nature" by which ancient culture was colored was the power of the order of nature to perdure and to operate on its own: infinite nature — as a whole system — is a self-standing and self-valid order, independent and transcendent over all the acts of finite organisms and humans. Nature's cycles — birth and death, growth and decay, the rise and decline of civilizations no less than of individual lives — are intrinsically valid, unimpeachable, unappealable, ultimate: nature's laws are not like the proximate or humanly accessible laws that communities legislate, which are nothing if no one at all respects them. The order of nature is authoritative whether we act in accordance with it or not, whether we respect or even know what it is; conventional or artificial law can be evaded or deceived — not so with laws superordinate beyond our personal ratification.

Nature, as well as being the domain of mutation (alliosis or becoming other), is also the realm of what is intrinsically valid or true in itself (per se, in its own right — he auto). For the Greeks an acutely critical sense permeates all discussion and thinking, a contrast between things true only by convention or human agreement (artifacts of custom, language, laws) and those true in and of themselves: kata physei, "according to nature" — another phrase of singularly Greek resonance. The authority of nature sets the standard of truth or objectivity.

B: Custom and Nature: Aristocracy and Philosophy

The Greeks realize that all peoples are liable to delude themselves into ethnocentrism, imagining their own invented and customary ways are the very ways of the world. Human beings grow ensnared in their own idiosyncrasies and prejudices, in the order of what is "their own" (idia, idiomata); they sink into a way of thinking circularly conditioned by what they have already taken for granted, as if this were rigorously rational argument or stringently demonstrated evidence. Most humans — as a consequence of what they take for granted and what they believe can be safely ignored or neglected — inhabit envelopes of cultural consensus and private fantasies and preferences as if these constituted truth itself. This idiotism is human nature, a primal psychology, the reason humans are cultural creatures who are the captives of their own customs and words the world over.

Most humans are never challenged in this tacit orthodoxy, not by the ethos of their culture or by other individuals. To those outside the envelope of a culture — whether it be the idea- and value-system specific to a society, or to an organization or a family — it is patent that those encapsulated in that culture are the victims of a warped field of consciousness, a system with a massive blind spot implicitly defining what is unthinkable or incomprehensible. But the victims themselves believe their culture to be all-embracing, infinitely competent to see what is the case and what is right and sane. All cultures like all personalities have such an exclusionary character, repelling whatever is distasteful to their core-assumptions; all cultures, void of controls to the contrary, are states of narcosis. And all human mentality is potential delusion for this same reason; nothing that is thought or believed is proof against the deformations that subjectivity can work on it.

The Greeks came to invent philosophy and science precisely because of their heightened sense of that universally human liability to believe what one already wants to believe, that is to say, the delusional potentiality of thought and culture. They expected a life of constant struggle against the gravity-traps of habituation; that is what philosophy provided, a relentless ethos of self-challenge and of audacity to dispute what was customarily taken for granted. Philosophy was an agon or a contest against the subtlest tides of obtuseness, the inward tendencies toward subjective sloth, self-flattery, loss of discipline and focus. The Greeks intuitively understood how human nature in its most ordinary tendencies militated against truth and objectivity: they sensed that the domain of human self-cultivation — culture — had to be specifically shaped to police the delusions, illusions, and subjectivism that are the normal media human beings exude for themselves by their every act and assumption. Not just Greek philosophy but politics, myth and tragic drama all served the purpose of curbing idiotism and subjectivism.

Out of these two conditioning ways of understanding how the world of nature works, the Greeks formed a culture of stringent self-expectation: as ephemeral as anything ordinary will be, so humans who expect to accomplish what is enduring — what is remarkable and worth memorializing — must indeed strive for what is excellent, the best ever said or done. Against the tidal pathos that engulfs everyday life, those few individuals willing and determined to fight that ordinariness in themselves are the standard-bearers of their civilizational code: they are human embodiments of excellence, aristocrats. Most human beings will not and cannot make the severe commitments, the fidelity to truth or the order of nature; most humans love their delusions — that is indeed what it is to be human-all-too-human, afflicted by a damnable pseudophilia — and are so addicted to them that they cannot make themselves care what the eventual consequences of a life of delusion will be. Before there were high-potency pharmaceuticals, the task of constructing a subjectively gratifying "virtual reality" fell to culture, religion, orthodoxy, ideology, and other intimate pseudotropisms.

Aristocrats are distinguished by an ethos of commitment to intrinsic truth so visceral it must be elusive to the inventive and narcotized minds of ordinary men. The Greeks grasp two profound traits of human nature that most humans indeed will repudiate or want to remain oblivious to: they grasp that mendacity and self-delusion are the conditions naturally preferred by most human beings; and they grasp that, unless there are exceptional individuals willing to pay the social and psychological price of being exceptional, there will be no such thing as truth or acute insight among human beings.

C: Form and Matter: Organicism and Arete

All of nature shows to the Greeks some kind of being ruled or determined: in every kind of entity there is an active element — forming, ordering, organizing, defining, determining, limiting — and another element which is passive, governed, shaped, subjected. In animals a head, the central concentrate of intelligence, has command over a body which is obedient and coordinated: form governs matter.

But everything in the order of nature is such a formed or self-forming matter, that is, organisms manifesting specific strategies for holding a specific kind of something together: wood has its own kind of fibrous integrity, granite its own interlocking cohesion, even water has its subtle surface-tension and self-absorption, particle into whole. Over millennia even granite erodes; water evaporates far sooner — and gases such as clouds or breath dissipate even faster, having only minimal forces of form. All natural existence has its own distinctive tenure on existence, its way of resisting dissolution pro tempore.

Everything is what it is in virtue of characteristic defining forces: a family of Italians and a family of Norwegians are not bound together by the same culture or psychology. A horse cannot be trained by the same methods as a child or a cat. An actor or a musician cannot sustain morale and virtuosity by the kinds of routine that accountants or soldiers take for granted. Nature works an idiosyncratic chemistry on every being or creature: nothing simply is — existence is a variable kind of task or challenge, even a mystery, of orchestrating specific resources toward specific ends. Life calls for an intelligence more like art than science. What binding powers enable an individual to hold his life together, to master tendencies toward chaos and concentrate his full resources of talent and insight? The Greeks do not expect that generic answers are possible except insofar as most humans prove slavish and conformist, pathetically relying on solutions that most other people have come to rely on. Most people, said Oscar Wilde, are other people: they have no more personality than a mirror. That inauthentic existence is indeed what being one of the Many means to the Greeks, an atrophy of the higher functions that define humans as truly human.

Form must be intimately correlative to its specific matter: as Aristotle advised his conquering pupil Alexander, do not expect to rule democracy-loving Athenians as you might barbarians. The fit of form to matter is decisive: the laws a people formulates must be appropriate to their character and quality of community; the way a parent, a teacher, or a religious leader appeals to his charges must be harmonious with their specific characters. Humans are not utter exceptions within the entangled order of nature but indeed suffer its dilemmas in acute ways: we must make ourselves conscious of the forms that are appropriate in our communal and individual lives, and we must cultivate those forms according to their own intrinsic needs.

Shaw wrote, "Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does": truly, consciousness in our case must resist the temptation to impose its own extraneous preconceptions of what it needs, which are merely what it thinks it wants. Compared with animals or plants that have their instinctive automatisms and tropisms, humans have a wild card in the deck, a factor of self-determination by an ill-constrained ego and will. The potential for self-chaotizing or self-delusion is incalculably higher because of this distinctively human privilege — which is thus a potential curse, a disease of willful consciousness making man into a "sick animal."

Our lives can always go far more wrong than any animal's course of existence. We have a wholly uncontrolled factor of subjectivizing will that has to be tamed and harnessed, brought around to a sobered and disillusioned condition of insight into what is true about itself. No other force is as powerful in most humans as their protonic attraction to addictive delusions. It is with gravest difficulty that human beings are educated, usually against their will and in spite of the massive resistance put up by their despotic delusions.

The Greeks were aristocratic precisely because they were pessimistic about the intrinsic love for truth among most humans and their profound or characterological educability. The prospect of human communities — social, legal, political orders — ever becoming anything other than self-delusive and self-destructive they regarded as slim and precarious: are human beings in general even competent to tell who is most fit to rule, to make critical decisions that bear on the justice and longevity of their societies? Is not that individual most advantaged in politics who caters to popular delusion, who feeds people the sucrose lies they are already determined to believe? Is there in any form of society a sufficient quorum of human beings fit to face the truth disinterestedly? Does the human condition not tilt toward predation and mendacity, generation after generation? And is the historical life of a society anything other than the generationally compounded narcoses and irrealities of issues not tolerated or confronted, the unpaid balance to the account of corporate delusions?

Democracy will indeed be universal and healthy in any society where a mass of human beings are morally steeled to confront the most unpleasant truths, to gain control over their own narcotizing beliefs, and to live lives of philosophical austerity. The Greeks find nothing paradoxical in their own practice of finite democracy, that is, self-rule restricted to characterologically qualified aristocrats among whom autarkia or self-determination is an intuitive virtue: indeed, the Greeks see their own character as a people as anomalous for having such an ample body of aristocrats, perhaps a third of the whole people. Normally such personalities are swamped by the culturally and politically depressive ocean of those who lack both insight and values.

D: Arete or Natural Excellence

Every natural organism is endowed with a repertory of active, organizing powers: these are instincts, intuitive forms of intelligence that evaluate what is good, essential, healthy, and nutritious for a specific creature. Every creature confronts the world resourced with its own private armamentarium of resources — talents, gifts, skills, the actions at which it is singularly good. The Greeks take arete or "natural excellence" — talent developable into virtuosity — as fundamental in making sense of nature, that is, a factor all life has in common.

It is the genius of animals that they spontaneously cultivate the abilities that are good for them: they do not need to become conscious or articulate about it, they do not need the exhortations of teachers and fellow citizens. Any animal is a more self-sufficient practical organism than any human; we are communal creatures, interdependent on others, on language, education, culture, politics, technology, religion, etc., for the morale that animals naturally secrete within themselves. Human life and action can go errant in incalculably many more ways than any animal's; we are thus liable not just to self-delusion but also to the misdirection of others' malformed opinions and dogmatisms.

But now...the most of men lie sick, as it were of a pestilence, in their false beliefs about the world, and the tale of them increases; for by imitation they take the disease from one another, like sheep.

— Diogenes the Epicurean, c. 200 A.D.

We are susceptible to dysformations in language, values, social sanctions, all of which make the vices of a society as contagious as a plague. Most of the media in which we live — speech, culture, law, market, etc. — actively discourage independent thinking in order to replicate some form of rule extrinsic to intelligence and conscience.

It is the genius of the human order, by contrast, that we are gifted with specific aretai that can help us in the right ordering of life — or that can play more treacherously than any animal's instincts. Our powers of reasoning, speaking, arguing or questioning with one another, all potentially enable us to reach the distinctively human arete, the right orchestration of our self-formative resources. The Greeks understand the proper matrix for human self-cultivation to be the mobilized domain of communication and insight, the realm of human praxis where we can reason together in behalf of higher insights. Far more vital to the cohesion of communities than any physical goods we make are the verbal transactions which are what we do in order to keep ourselves sane, wise, balanced, and properly concerned. Economic gratification may be necessary but this vision is essential, the teleological compass without which a people deranges itself and perishes. The class of policy-debating, decision-making aristoi or aristocrats takes its very name from the superlative form of arete, "the most excellent." Not all citizens, much less all humans, are so competent to think or rule.

Greek polytheistic myth and religion, like tragic drama and epic poetry, reminded citizens of the vital importance of well-rounded intelligence, that is, cultivating a mind conscious of its own narrow one-sidedness and eager to combat its blindness and self-fracturing. There were as many Greek gods as there were values and virtues in human existence; the diversity of divinities like the richness of myth and literature kept humans morally isotropic — having equal value and orderliness no matter in what direction they may be turned — that is, multifarious in their insights and disciplined against their own biases. Tragic drama showed archetypal lives suffering the covert consequences of one-sided or exclusionary mentality. Humans are privileged to take an active hand in their own self-direction; but therefore culture, politics, morality, philosophy, and religion are inestimably more vital for humans to keep sane control over their countless self-seductive tendencies, their infatuations and favoritisms.

To the ancients even religion has a radically different value and function from what moderns preconceive it to have: religere, related to diligere, means to take proper care about the most important matters — in utter opposition to negligere or unconcern about them. As anciently understood, religion does not foster fanaticism, self-righteousness, dogmatism, persecution of deviant beliefs — on the contrary: true piety is meant to temper these vices. Religion is concern about the ultimate foundations one's conscience and intelligence rest on: it is practical resources for life, not hypocritical self-deceit or self-flattering conceit.

E: Daimon and Eudaimonia

What instincts are to animals daimones are to human beings: the lowest order of gods is the obscure soul-companions who are the source of our impulses to see or to want things as we do. Each of us has from birth a godling intimately attached to us, prompting a certain quality of insight and subtly nudging our lives in a certain direction. Each daimon is according to legend situated behind the head of its human subject, steering him as a rider does a horse. We cannot consciously detect the bias of our individual enthusiasms and aversions, but others, looking at the indirect evidence of our patterns of preference and blindness, can infer what sort of daimon we are liable to. In Socrates' trial this notion of a "spiritual guide" entered the corpus of world literature, but his daimon is anomalous or atypical.

Each individual owes to his daimon the quality of his ultimate judgments and assumptions. He may be led toward a fulfilling life or toward one that is stunted or frustrated; he may advance from clarity to clarity, from keen insight to matured wisdom, or he may stumble from fiasco to fiasco never gleaning how he himself prepared such a miscarriage of purposes. Daimones like all else in life may be benign or malignant, they may enhance and empower, or shrivel and cripple our inner powers for self-conduct. Since all humans are effects generated within the natural order, all are indebted to forces and conditions outside their own influence for what they have been shaped to be. With regard to our ultimate resources for cultivating our insights and abilities, we must be passive recipients of obscure endowments: no one architects or originates his own resources of insight but at best we can cultivate judiciously what we have. Retrospectively we can impose quality-controls and moral desiderata (are they indeed the right ones?) on our subjective inheritance of appetites and impulses. Are we correct to suppose we have struggled enough, have truly "hammered our thoughts into unity"? Why were we content to halt just here...?

Nothing in human life is more decisive than this primal impulse toward certain values, toward virtues that make us stronger or vices that make us weaker; and yet nothing is less subject to most people's conscious governance. The primal drives behind our judgment and our presuppositions make us subjects of an enigmatic force-field of fatedness, the larger weave of history, culture, and nature; in spite of our superficial powers of self-consciousness and arbitrarial will, from the heart of darkness within our utmost self-obscurity we are driven by what is subconscious and subvoluntary. Our acts may be freely determinable, but not so the ultimate energies from which we are made to be what we are in the first place: the concatenation of laws to which human beings are subject is so arranged that our lives must be mysteries to us, necessarily obscure logics — mythoi — that unfold in their own good time and can only be read retrospectively. To be human is to be inserted in nature's dark processes of self-direction; we are not artifacts of the intellect — like figments of geometry or algebra which are nothing other than what they are by rational rules defined to be — but are to ourselves gratuities from forces most cannot comprehend. We will have no more illumination than we have struggled or fought for.

We do not "deserve" ultimately to be made as we are, but by the same token we have no rational grounds for complaint: life is under no intrinsic obligation to satisfy our whimsical demands, and for that matter we have in abstracto no substantial wisdom that would entitle us to know how we ought to have been designed. As the ultimate reservoir from which we draw our profoundest insights, our daimones will necessarily bias every judgment or insight we try to muster to evaluate or understand them. No mortal is competent to be judge in his own case; it is the very perversity of a malignant daimon that it generates illusory clarity, smug self-complacency, a sense of perfect superiority, just where they are least merited. The Greek concept of a daimon argues that, ironically, human beings in every case are complicitous with their own seductive and subliminal inner fate. Fate is not coercion; it is instead self-oppression, self-blindness, self-deception. We are fated to collaborate in that conspiracy which is our fate.

Only from the whole shape of an individual's life can we ascertain whether the ultimate force architecting that life was for the best or for the worst: we discover only ex post facto whether a dysdaimonic (working an ill-tending destiny) or a eudaimonic (working a well-tending destiny) principle made that life the organic whole it grew into. For humans, to be subject to fate is to be such a pawn, a single thread rammed into place in the warp and woof of a design not visible to the mere materials. As moderns we naïvely imagine that fate crushes individual resistance from without; the Greeks understood the issues far more subtly. Fate works on us precisely by our incapacity to recognize and resist it: it works on us through what we want and cannot self-criticize to dissociate ourselves from. Fate works the innermost forces within us, the drives and presuppositions which we mistakenly assume are our own purest self — but which we understand least of all and are most readily betrayed by.

The same archaic philosopher who grasped the irony and treachery of human desires also made the most decisive statement of ancient fatalism. Heraclitus said it would not be better for men if they got what they wanted; and also that character is fate. What we are inwardly most determined to be and the very mindless biases through which we believe we are advancing our self-interests — those are merely the mask behind which fate advances its patterns, its interlocking weave of unintended consequences. Nature is the superior order that owns the will and reason of man, and its authority rules him in spite of and through his very will and ego. To all things in nature there is such a double facet: everything is on the one hand the controlling energy of its distinctive form, and yet everything is also the vulnerable blind matter out of which it is constituted. We believe we govern and direct ourselves, we know ourselves, via our inner forces and order; yet these are all far more than the familiar face they show to us. The germs of fate are inhaled just through those taken-for-granted habits.

F: Mythos and Logos

Moderns have identified with the Greeks precisely as prefigurations of the kind of rationalizing revolution that Hegel, Marx, Weber and others have seen carried out by modern science, law, bureaucracy, and capitalism. The Greeks seem to reflect our own modernly rationalized perspective back to us, across the ages. But in truth that impulse to rationality is nested in an utterly different kind of matrix, in the case of the Greeks. As a high-energy and acutely creative culture, the Greeks ran through millennia of cultural evolution in centuries, if not in generations. Just because they were a people culturally predisposed to seek fundamental principles or archai, the Greeks in every phase of their development sought the most radical forms of explanation. They present in archetypal and concentrated form the dynamic of cultural evolution, vigorously and concisely expressed.

The Greeks understood the natural world to have evolved out of chaos into a more harmonic cosmos. The divine epoch or eon of their own archaic prehistory they comprehended as the regime of titanic Gods who were the embodiment of the tidal forces of nature: Ocean, Sun, Justice, Time or Harvests, and so on. The race of Titans was the offspring of Ouranos (heaven) and Gaia (earth), and the war among these irrational powers was cataclysmic. Civilized order was not possible until this race of colossi was overthrown by Zeus and his colleagues, the anthropomorphic and beautiful Olympians. Instead of open warfare the Olympians practiced the exquisite Greek persuasion, the art of dialectically seducing others out of their resistance by the subtleties of language and strategies of perspective. Among the Olympians dissension, deceit, collusion, and all the civilized cunning of manipulated appearances persisted. But most importantly, the enmity and malice among the Gods were now sublimated, tempered by the beguiling virtues of language.

The Olympians sat in a council presided over by Zeus as "first among equals," the Father of Gods and of Men. His rule is less by dictation than by inducing consensus. The Olympians' culture and quality of interaction is emblematic of the rise of reason, of a new social syntax of philosophy and politics. But Homer never permits his listeners to forget that the disputes and resolutions of the Olympians are little more than a rational veneer over the true and ultimate powers that ordain the way of the world: Zeus ever so often turns aside from the byplay of argument among his fellows to consult with the Moirai or Fates, the Weird Sisters who dispense men's allotted portions (moira). Even the Olympians cannot command events contrary to what is woven in the logic of Fate. Necessity or Anangke is the ultimate authority over this world, and just as the Greek Gods are not supernatural so too they are not exempt from the skein of Fate.

Greek myth was the confluence of many folktales and the assimilation of one deity to another, nearly the same. "Myth" is itself a Greek term describing a story or account that attempts to explain a subliminal kind of order which even after this formulation will remain mysterious and dark. In myth, men accommodate their intuitive minds to forms of order that nature itself imposes on them. Myths reveal oblique and difficult truths about human nature, and about the peculiar warpage that specific appetites and ambitions lay upon human intelligence. Myths are maps of the covert currents of the implicit world, the subjective forces to which human beings are liable. Emotions and passions are ultimately manias or states of possession in which human beings lose their customary powers of self-rule; myths tell the naïve about the ways of those fantastic and obscure inner teleologies that comprise human nature. The characters in myth name some urge or liability which a prudent human being will have to learn how to navigate around. Myth is a condensed or metaphoric presentation of primal psychology, and thus a nomenclature or taxonomy for human vices and virtues: the latent powers to which humans are subject are made palpable to intuitive minds in the form of allegories or symbolic stories. For those literate in the myths, it becomes possible to see and articulate the arcane subterranean issues of human life: one rises by virtue of the formatting metaphors of myths to a second-order or more Olympian perspective on the changes in one's psychological weather.

Myth was indeed the ingenious precursor to philosophical culture in this way. Long before rationalist philosophers such as Socrates perceived how nearly impossible it was for humans to achieve knowledge of themselves, myths had already devised oblique ways of insinuating a powerful sense of self-insight, and of disarming conscious ego's resistance against wisdom and criticism of its own illusions and delusions. Although it portrayed a cosmos of peculiar forms of irrational infatuation and insidious obsessions, myth predigested that cosmos for humans to make story-like sense of it, and to sustain their autarkia or self-command by keeping their distance from naïve preoccupations and perspectives. Myth made the Greeks conscious of their own narcotic perspectivisms; it described a logic of the irrational. Like Aesop's fables, it taught the logic of character or perspectival bias, via the specific prerogatives of the Gods and defining traits of humans.

Like a prehensile organ, myth gathered into coherent handfuls the psychically colorful issues of human existence. It made it possible to think in terms of principles and concepts, to modulate one's way out of merely "personal" or phenomenal ways of experiencing. Instead of merely feeling, the mythic mind was prepared for seeing the order of its world and its own self; instead of being blindly vulnerable to psychic forces, the mythic mind discovered the logic of the psychic, the psychological. Hegel saw all human life and cultural history as marked by a teleological insurgency, the rise of consciousness from a state of merely implicit self-apprehension to explicit comprehension of self: as ineluctably as air rises in water, so human spirit struggles for light, air, clarity, freedom, for knowledge of its own bound-in self. Myth is the most pivotal and vital step in any culture's learning to encompass the order that encompasses its feeling psyche. Through myth humans digest the ineffable to gain a waking knowledge of their own dreamlife.

Like the slow wheeling of the constellations, Greek culture modulated from the archaic and poetic genius of myth into the rich panoply of philosophical concepts and systems. Among the Greeks philosophy indeed did not become an arid figment of the intellect but retained the voice of a distinctive individual. This revolution in which critical reason apparently deposed more flamboyant, allusive myths — displacing one kind of story, mythos, by another, logos — would never have been possible without the subliminal and intuitive preordination of Greek intelligence by myth. But once a more stringent sense of logic and rationality consolidated itself, the Greek philosophers found themselves looking back across a chasm of unthinkable transitions to the ways of archaic imaginations. How could such crudely fantastic things ever have seemed credible? How could their predecessors have been so naïve? As moderns look on the mindways of primitives, so the Greeks of the ancient Enlightenment looked back on their credulous forebears. For myths are not arguments and do not say explicitly or literally what they are about, but only allude in a murky way. Viewed from an intellectualizing standpoint, myths seem a way of trafficking in pseudoknowledge, an obscurantism the formative purpose and accultural effect of which is unthinkable to the more sophisticated mind.

Yet the age of myths fed the moral, religious and political sanity of the whole person; and the new logos-culture appealed to the intellect only and its narrow vocabulary of forms and definitions. Myth animated an organic culture with heroic or symbolic personalities — presenting individuals who symptomatize moods, appetites, and states of mind — whereas logic nourishes nothing in the will or conscience but only chastens thinking against formal fallacies. Like a parable, myth as a mode of culture attuned an entire people to roughly the same issues and perspectives in the form of existential imperatives, whereas logos-culture leaves each thinker an isolated monad, void of help or support in grasping any essential principles. Myth is a rich world in itself, charged with the pregnancy and dynamism of nature: it is evocative and spurs the mind into a concrete art of thinking. "Logic" constricts the mind to its own conscious and solitary agenda, a skeletal schema abstracted from the richness of life — making thinking a more scientific but also a more straitjacketed and rulebound activity.

Logos-culture has a greatly reduced regimen of authority, as the core-principle of a form of social order in which humans become more calculating and yet far less rational, more manipulative and yet far less masterful over their own selves. The outcome of this highly accelerated revolution was that the philosophers who had earlier been the very genius of Greek culture now became radically alienated from it, their narrowed mode of reason now bereft of any authority over the drift of public affairs into vicious dementia and degeneracy. Diogenes expressed his contempt for the corruption of aristocratic principles by renouncing all comforts and confronting the obtuseness of a people no longer fit to see itself as it was. If moderns know the Greeks at all it is as fellow-intelligences in the reduction of the world to regularized, scientized order. The Greeks did indeed precede us in the cult of rational intellect: from the beautiful illusions of Dionysian myth the Greek rationalists — Parmenides, Socrates, Plato — ran eagerly to the austere delusions of the Apollonian logicist mind that naïvely confuses laws of logical validity for principles of actual existence.

It was this cult of abstracted thinking, not Heraclitus or Aristotle's far subtler philosophizing, that became millennially influential on Christianity and on modern science. Plato believed that the science of philosophy (stringent episteme), if installed in the seat of political authority, could doctor the vices and pathologies of a sick, sophistic society. But in truth Greek society was culturally coherent because glued together by myth and aristocratic values, and Plato's critical rationalism was dissolving both just as surely as predatory subjectivism ever did. To comprehend the orbital decay of ancient culture however we need some further exposition.

G: Character and Class

The Greeks' most prodigious contribution to civilization may be the very insight that medieval and modern world-orders have so scrupulously eradicated or buried. For the Greeks realized that human personality and intelligence cannot be taken for granted as being all of the same quality and tendency. Such a "preconception" or "faith" in uniformity is an a priori bias radically contrary to the diversity typical of all things natural, as Aristotle already grasped. To conceive of human personality not as divinely derived spirit or as self-originated rational will but as primally natural psyche is to comprehend that the essence of what we are is differential, multiplex, variable, perspectivally polyglot.

At the core of every individual self is a heterogeneous character, the logic of its own potential energies which may not even be coherent with itself much less structurally congruent with other personalities. Different as they may be by nature, characters may be comprehended intelligently and rationally according to their inherent predispositions and liabilities — not simply treated preconceptually as if they had to be fundamentally alike, or categorized prejudicially as if some inessential trait such as race, age, gender, or ethnic derivation prescribed a law for ways of thinking and behaving. Subtle laws bind character to be of the kind it is; but these laws are internal to the will and judgment of a character, and they express themselves just through the moral confines of what such a type of personality can and cannot make itself desire, do, understand, etc. We only become what we already are, says ancient fatalism; only the potential an individual is actually pregnant with can be realized. No human being becomes something ex nihilo.

Just as a posteriori empirical study and critical scrutiny enable us to understand the speciation of natural creatures, so we can also see in a rational way why human beings gravitate to certain limited ways of behaving and thinking rather than others: why they are contented with one milieu, one set of friends, one religion or ideology, rather than another. By the working out of their own "free" (i.e. inwardly fated) preferences, humans today still express the kind of teleological ordination the Greeks observed: but today it is with far less likelihood of self-fulfillment, thanks to a morally chaotizing and philosophically stupefying culture, and an economy with more insidiously totalitarian forms of control over motivation and reinforcement. We all see of course what our culture does not permit us to comprehend in depth, that even children within the same family may have radically clashing interests, perspectives, and appetites. Even culled for their specialized abilities, students will show a spectrum of ways of thinking and interpreting, a pluralist organon even of logics. It is the suffocating and depressive effect of a homogenizing "educational" culture that regiments the minds and wills of students, not nature. A culture that does not respect, much less rise to, the inherently aristocratizing task of helping to individuate students cannot be expected to comprehend the vicious effect it is having by policing an orthodoxy of mediocrity.

As creatures of the natural order humans cannot escape the palette of subjective resources they have been endowed with: ultimately we think as we have habituated ourselves to live. Kafka's Amerika offered the notion that anyone could be an artist as the apparent singular lunacy of the New World; for in order to be an artist, poet, author or musician, one first has to live a life ordained to the end of creativity. Most cannot stand such discipline or self-sacrifice, and cannot comprehend how deeper than ordinary verbiage and opinion are the principles on which spiritual creation draws. In the modern culture of licentiousness, no shame accrues to the shallowpate who wants to paint or write in ways that only rearrange the surface detritus of the cultural world: such is the "art" of the mechanical mentality. The universalist or egalitarian perspective on talent is as archetypally modern as the nouveau-academic contempt for genius. A culture whose gospel is slavish mediocritism is conducting psychological class-warfare against depth, spirit, philosophy, genius, aristocratic ethos and authentic values — just as Nietzsche realized. Reputation, image, is all; art is swallowed whole by a culture that values nothing but extrinsics.

What the ancient world conceived as the "centric" character of the cosmos — that the densest materials (earth) gravitate to the lowest stratum, the next-densest (water) above that, the less dense (air) in the zone above that, and the subtlest or finest (fire, i.e. the sun, moon and stars) above all else — describes a physical world-order confirmable by the simplest practical tests. All these elements rise or fall with respect to one another, ascending or sinking according to their inherent hyle or kind of matter. The four elements anatomize different modes or states of matter. Nature itself thus presents a hierarchic order, with one element — fire, as Heraclitus so perspicuously saw — serving as the very aristocracy of nature, a patent expression of the passionate, questing and metamorphic character that marks aristoi. And we may also comprehend from this the mythic significance of the celestial realm or heavens, that made them seem a divine authority over men's souls in the enduring Hellenistic cult of astrology.

Greek society was also articulated into such a natural hierarchy, that is, its class-strata were castes or a system of rank grounded in the natural character of each individual's personality-type. Humans inherently tend to gravitate by their own free preference toward certain kinds of actions, work, concerns, and levels of competence and understanding, taking on responsibilities that feel right and shunning others. The Greeks looked a posteriori at the aggregate results of human preference and self-limitation and saw remarkable patterns of natural arete that ought to be respected and reinforced but also hybrist or idiotist self-misevaluations needing to be held in check for the sake of higher structures of order. To the Greeks society and economy must not commit violence against natural potential, coercing some by artificial dominion and protecting others by a naturally illegitimate system of privilege. Human society does not produce the ultimate matter or resources of form that define character; it merely plays the hand that nature deals it, generation after generation. Education and culture can feed or enhance the competence of each type, but they cannot endow primal drives or the talent or genius of arete.

To the Greeks all acts, all living and all knowing, are undertaken for the sake of some good. To know what is best for men to do is the entire rationale for humans organizing themselves into poleis or political communities. And all that exists in organic nature is laden with potential value, for better or for worse, just as every organism bears the instinctive resource to evaluate for itself, thus to live a self-provident life. Humans must develop resources however — culture and reason — that enable them to act and live fully for the sake of what is good for them. The Greeks called these resources paideia, which is, "matters for children": everything that makes the difference between a merely potential human being and a fully actual or mature human is what a child ought to be concerned with.

These include the norms of the culture, the riches of language and literature, the subtle and acute perspectives of philosophy and politics, and most especially the powers of formal insight that enable one to rise above the psychological morass of emotions to see how others and oneself are thinking and what they are taking for granted. What distinguishes humans from animals is this higher order of insight, and the orchestrated resources of form to organize words into insightful or revelatory theses (apophansis or "proposing" is literally to make appear far off or away, i.e. to gain distance or perspective on a subject), and to organize actions and policies into a coherent political holon or organism — ultimately the very political sanity of a polis. The same talents or genius of perspectival mobility that make an individual philosophical also make that person political. To live for the sake of augmenting and challenging one's powers of insight, to act together on one another within the shared world of praxis or communication for the sake of moral and political enlightenment — this is the quest for always-superior vision that distinguishes aristoi as exemplary or fulfilled humans.

Clearly, not all have such abilities of variable perspective or the capacity to appreciate what others are taking for granted. Not all humans care or can muster the discipline to overcome their own base lethargy and apathy, their contentment to wallow in their own most passive or pathetic proclivities. Most humans are indeed trapped within the preconceptions and perspectives that rule them: they live in a dream-world of idiotia or the obsessions and familiarities that dominate them. They lack reflectivity on themselves and live and think merely simpliciter, enclosed within the pathos of an impoverished self which they take as the laws of the world itself. Certainly all humans as infants and children are liable to such idiotia, but some — according to their character and the resources of the culture that draws them out of themselves — learn how imperative it is to struggle against those irrationalities. It must be possible for at least a few to overcome this gravitational field of biases, or else we could not even know of it.

But for the majority of humans, even in ancient culture whose very sense of nature illumined how vital philosophical virtues are, there will be no ascent to the kind of paideia that defines distinctively human excellence. Most are slaves to the dominant forces of their own psyche: either their self-centered appetites or their extravertive materialism binds them to a low estate, a subpolitical and subcultural existence as slaves or economic animals (human means) who are merely under an illusion they are not slaves. For these appetite-driven souls indeed "luxury is more ruthless than war," as Juvenal remarks. The Greeks deem anyone self-absorbed in his own private concerns and self-interest — an idiotes for whom the larger worlds of nature and culture do not count — to be the human type closest to the animal; but even the animal has its instinctively programed course of maturation. An idiotes is self-doomed to a retardate life and mentality, dominated by his circumstances and the very means of living, and the problem is not biological but moral — a deficiency in values and character, lack of drive to rise to the active-agonist inner life where the full repertory of powers of self-mastery can unfold. In sum, dysdaimonia: a mind and life in thralldom to forces that vitiate freedom, insight, clarity, values.

What the Greeks grasped is a severe insight that Christian and modern cultures cannot bear to confront: if there can be for humans such an accomplishment as self-mastery, then so also must there be such a liability as self-slavery. Any human being has the perverse potential to set his face impiously against all the tasks of natural, psychic and rational maturation: against the tasks of learning to swim in the flow of life. Although others — parents, teachers, exemplars — can describe the conflicts and illustrate some solutions, no one can muster the inward resources or resolve the issues in higher perspectives but oneself. The Greeks see the mass of human lives becalmed in complacency and obtuseness, witlessly losing the inward war against pathos because they have neither strategy nor discipline to defeat that vicious state. Folly and the comedy of self-delusion encompass malformed judgments in every direction these turn because they themselves generate this noxious miasma. The Greeks understood how much of this profound malady of dysformed character is incurable, is fated. Human beings will live their lives according to their own preferred concerns, and most cannot detach themselves from those preoccupations to criticize and reform them. "The good," as the Romans understood, "is the enemy of the best" — indeed, the mortal, patricidal enemy. What is ultimately idiotist in human beings demands the same right of autonomy that aristoi wield, the right to pursue freely what seems important to oneself: but in the case of the mass of idiotes that freedom would prove catastrophic to human order or nomos. Neither law nor quality would be possible in the economy, and "democracy" would devolve into political Babel.

The Greek worldview of naturalism or organicism demands a fit of form to matter virtually as good as nature itself has shown in living creatures or in the fit of organs to their tasks. For every natural type of personality there should be a domain of social or economic function, and indeed the genius of Greek civilization was most profoundly expressed by an organic disposition of social order that is modally so integrated, part into whole, that moderns have accepted it as if it were nature itself (at the same time that our mutated sense of personality has corrupted the rationale and harmony of that order).

That Greek scheme defines three realms appropriate for three kinds of life or activity: (1) the first is the oikos or private household, the place in antiquity not only of consumption and reproduction — tending to the needs of the species — but of production or manufacture as well; here laboring is done with the whole body to satisfy primal needs in metabolism with nature. (2) The second domain is the agora or gathering-place of the market, where commerce or exchange is carried out; the household being as a rule agriculturally self-sufficient, what is exchanged in the market is not things grown but things made, which are the product of manual work rather than labor; unlike the products of labor which are for consumption, the artifacts of work are for use, that is, not biological metabolism but technique, convenience and stability. (3) The third domain is the res publica or the political world for matters of common concern, for the sake of the life of the polis: this realm is a public place not to tend to private needs (like the market) but a public place for the sake of public goods and principles.

Biological life — the sustenance of vital needs — has its own sphere, the household; artifice and commerce, the making of commodities and profits, have their place in the market; and the tasks of culture and politics, which are the architecting of policies for the good of the whole polis, are carried out in the open space of the political forum. To each sphere corresponds not just the sort of activity naturally appropriate for it — laboring, making, acting — but also the type of personality for whom that activity represents the ultimate ceiling on its concerns and competence. Those inept for the exacting and calculating methods of the market — douloi or slaves — are confined to the metabolic domain of life-necessities; and those philosophically and perspectivally impaired for the adjudication of conflicting policies — banausoi or utility-minded — are confined to the mercenary-materialist zone of the market.

The ultimate coherence and longevity of the polis, its suitability as a matrix for cultivating a human quality of culture and values, depend of course not on the limited functions and virtues of domestics nor on the myopic self-interest of the commercial classes, but on the priorities of laws and the enduring curricula of institutions that shape the riverbed of that society's life of values. The life of a culture cannot be assured by any mechanical or institutional means, but must be symptomatic of its dominant or authoritative form of character and the amplitude of their ethos. The values of the aristoi have seldom been more lucidly argued than in Shaw's Man and Superman:

...As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life's incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding.

Greek culture was the beneficiary of a true ethos, a higher code of values whose authority was rooted in aristic striving, self-discipline and self-sacrifice. All men may comprehend what it is to act with practical reason in order to achieve a finite and useful result; but only aristoi truly grasp what it is to act for the sake of what is higher than one's own ego and its narcotic narrow interests. Values and principles ultimately mean something substantive only to those few who can rise above cloying egocentric mentality. Under the Christian worldview such exceptions are deemed saints; under the modern, they have become statistically inconsiderable, invisible and futile paradigms.

H: Sophism and Corruption

The Greeks realized from time immemorial that the liability of any aristocratic order had to consist in the hybris or arrogance to which masterly egos were susceptible. To this end their culture counterposed myths, fables, epics and tragic dramas — tales not just of Icarus and Prometheus but of the hare, Achilles, and Oedipus — that cautioned against self-infatuation. But such a moral regimen was only of value where indeed true aristoi sought to constrain themselves by means of piety and reason. The two lower castes, douloi and banausoi, lived and thought everyday of their lives in pursuit of hybristic forces — natural and psychic appetites, acquisitive materialism and aggrandizing profiteering, none of which respects the sanctity of inherent limits ("Nothing to excess"). Only aristoi appreciate the import of the Greek virtue that equates "wisdom" with "moderation" — sophrosyne. All other castes require to be moderated from some source outside themselves.

The ultimate stress upon an aristocratic order is the discontent of those excluded from its highest privileges: for the principles that explain its system of order are truly esoteric matters, comprehensible in a complete degree only to those aristoi whose business it is to secure the polis' foundations. Douloi are slaves in such ways and for such reasons as militate against their fully grasping why they are slaves, that is, what prerequisites of free citizenry and philosophical individuality they lack by nature. Philosophical virtuosity is required for anyone to be able to diagnose the concrete evidence of subjective and perspectival limitations; even though this evidence can be seen, its significance cannot be apparent to just any and every mind. Not all are fit to be parents, doctors, judges, or presidents; and indeed the worst instances of incompetence are those furthest from being able to appreciate their deficiency. So it is with being a qualified citizen, a participant in the formation of laws and selection of leaders. Any human could be slavish in the sense of being pathetically addicted to his own appetites, dogmas or prejudices; and any could be driven by ulterior motives of greed or domination, a lust for self-aggrandizement. As with any vice, these cancers could be masked behind a facade of respectability and impersonality. As thoroughly as the Greeks understood the primal mimetic mania of human beings — their affinity for lying, deceiving, seeming, their pseudophilia — they well appreciated the need to develop acute powers of discrimination, to tell spurious from genuine motives.

It was not the lower but the middle class, the banausoi or utility- and money-minded personalities who evolved opportunistic methods for triumphing over the critical intelligence of the aristoi. As rapacious as the appetites of this mercenary class were, there were fortunes to be made training them in the rhetoric that would enable them to seem cultured and conceptually adept aristocrats. Mechanical verbal facility and shrewd understanding of popular psychology were far easier to develop than sagacity and culture; indeed these manipulative skills could literally be had on the market. Language in the hands of devious and amoral mentalities is the perfect narcotic: as Gorgias the Sophist remarked, "The power of speech over the disposition of the soul is comparable with the effect of drugs on the disposition of the body." Those who respected nothing but saw all things as means for their rapacity degraded not just the polity and its citizens and laws but also language, philosophy and reason to mere instruments for the private appropriation of wealth and power. The political community that was the mother of the highest forms of culture and intelligence was reduced to a slave for the appetites of tyrannoi, that is, individuals by character unfit to rule, abusive and illegitimate despots.

Sophocles reconceived the ancient myth of Oedipus to form a warning for his fellow citizens against mistaking the facile thinking and glib speech of the sophists for true wisdom. The tragedy of Oedipus is a calamity not just for his own dark self but also for the entire city of Thebes that elevated and honored him, only to be forever blackened by his execrable horrors. And Euripides likewise sought to draw the wisdom of the past to bear on present crises: the Cyclops had been portrayed by Homer as the very quintessence of amoral, predatory subhumanity — a cannibal devoid of piety, respect and justice. Euripides put into the mouth of his Cyclops the words of contemporary sophists — "the greatest God of all... my gut."

The Greeks initially lacked a term to distinguish the cleverness of the predatory sophists from the wisdom of the sublime philosophers, but came to realize the difference in spades. Greek political culture, framed by Solon and Pericles to rein in feral self-interest, and Greek philosophical culture, inspired by Heraclitus and Socrates to transcend idiotist self-bias, both proved permeable to the sophistic viruses that presaged the tenor of modern subjectivist dysorder. The corruptibility and rapine that Christianity sought to vanquish were not the condition of natural humans but the predation that the amoralist or nihilist sophistic revolution fueled — and that had been customary in Rome since its founding by legendary brigands. What revolutionary Christianity knew of humanity was not antiquity in its authoritative glory, but a dissolute and desperate caricature, a social order whose rationality and character — whose humanizing form and values — had been spent. "Those abuses and corruptions which in time destroy a government are sown along with the very seeds of it" (Polybius).