Once again, shots ring out, people fall, bleeding, injured, dying. Once again a lone gunman, or a group of persons acting in concert, rain destruction and death on innocents who have neither the passion or the interest to be involved in the war brought to them by the evil-doer. Once again, in the aftermath we hear the same questions; “Why would he/she do such a thing?” or; “We had no idea, we never saw this coming.” or; “He was just a regular guy that snapped.”
Once again we will see a human tragedy exploited by opposing political talking heads; “It’s those right-wing Nazi gun nuts.”; “It’s those commie-pinkos trying to destroy our way of life”; “It’s the radical Islamo-Facists who hate our democracy.” ad infinitum.
Once again we will see postings on Facebook and the ever present memes; “Pray for Las Vegas”; “Pray for the families and the victims”; …and all the rest, for about two or three days and then it will be back to normal arguing over the political opinions of grown men making millions of dollars playing a child’s game or the societal philosophies of play actor or singers who, for some strange reason, invests these modern day court jesters with what the peasants see as gravitas to where their utterances on subjects of which they have no knowledge take on the weight of pronouncements from the Delphian Oracle. And, once again the questions are asked; “Why does this keep happening and what can be done to stop it?”
Scholars look to the ancient Greeks as a model for a righteous and orderly society, (I have lost count of the times I have heard political pundits decry the loss of “regular order” in the way our Federal legislators do business today). Yet, as with many things, some Greeks got it right and some didn’t.
The Greeks invented rational analysis of modes of government that we now call political science. Herodotus travelled the ancient world to learn what he could about local life and to gain personal testimonies from eyewitnesses of the Persian War. He is called the father of history but could also rightfully be called the father of geography and the father of what we now call ethnic studies.
The Greeks began man’s quest to discover the unseen unity and order underlying the seeming chaos presented by physical nature. When they turned their attention to man and the “good” man longs to possess, they invented philosophy and all it’s branches; linguistic; moral; political. They asked, (and attempted to answer), the questions; “How can passions be governed by reason?” “Should they always be?”; “What is the relationship between authority and goodness?”; “Can the old traditions be violated at will?”; “Is there a law to which even the gods must submit?”; “Is there such a thing as progress or moral evolution, and, if so, where is it going?”; “What, if anything remains changeless?”
Aristotle said; “Man is a political animal.” He didn’t mean; “Man loves to meddle in the affairs of others,” but “Man, by his nature best thrives in a “polis”, (a small, self-governing city-state, whose citizens would know one another by sight or by family reputation and would take an active and regular part in the city’s direction. Anything else, posits Aristotle, is barbarian and to be pitied. It could mean suffering rule by imperial bureaucrats sent from a capital far away, or immersion is a state so large that almost no one is intimately involved in governing.
It means a life like those of the Cyclops described in Homer’s Odyssey:
“Nor do they meet in council, those Cyclops,
Nor hand down laws; they live on mountaintops, in deep caves; each one rules his wife and children, And every family ignores it’s neighbors.”
Life in this mode cramps both intellectual and practical virtue. For all practical purposes this characterizes our current life in the technocratic welfare states of contemporary America and most of western Europe.
Why did Athens fall? “Man is the measure of all things,” said the sophist Protagoras, preaching a moral relativism that even today many find hard to ignore. It is easy to see why; it flatters people and gives them leave to choose to obey what laws they please, support what wars they please, pay homage to what idols they please. Tradition helps to bind us to our duty but relativism brushes tradition and duty aside. If I am the one who chooses what is “good” or “bad”, then I call the things I like or afford me pleasure “good”, (like voting myself money from the public till or “hooking up” with as many partners as I possibly can) – and call things “bad” that which is approved by people who disagree with my opinions.
The result is not tolerance but alienation. Somebody has to prevail and in our day it is the policymaking elites. They will tell us that an unmarried woman with a child is equivalently moral as a family or a man attracted sexually to other men is qualified to be and should be a leader of young male youth. If we try to tell them that they are “wrong” they will scoff and hurl their relativism back into our face with; “Wrong? There is no such thing as wrong,” they smirk, “and if there is we will be the first to let you know.”
What happened to Athens has, in great measure, happened to the west and particularly to the United States. Pride and stupidity explain much but rapacity and moral relativism explains much more. We have been indoctrinated through our institutes of learning that there is no such thing as objectively “good” or “bad”. We are taught that the “wisdom” of the past is mere social convention which grows obsolete with each setting sun. We are told in movies, on TV and, in some instances from the pulpit that it is no hard-won victory for a people and deserves no reverence. “Right”, “morals”, religion”, traditions are all, old-fashioned, obsolete, passé’ and should be consigned to the garbage dump of history.
Yet “wisdom”, “right”, “morals”, “religion” and “tradition” are the distilled experience of our ancestors. They are a result of generations of men and women coming to terms with the universal laws that govern our existence. The deep order of things give us useful boundaries and protect us from the nonsense that “right” is whatever a majority of people may wish it to be.
We have been given free will and choice, and we have the ability to ignore and degrade the natural law. But just as gravity is there and operates in spite of whether or not you believe in it, natural law still operates. We can choose to obey the natural law or face destruction. We have turned away from the old ways and the old truths and have become worldly. We are worldly because we scorn the truth in favor of what will win political contests or popularity contests. But, in our worldliness we are impractical because the truth is the truth, whether we like it, or honor it, or obey it or not.
