The
Tragic View
Of course we can acquire a sense of man’s predictable
fragilities from religion, the Judeo-Christian view in particular, or from the
school of hard knocks. Losing a grape crop to rain a day before harvest, or
seeing a warehouse full of goods go up in smoke the week before their sale, or
being diagnosed with leukemia on the day of a long-awaited promotion convinces
even the most naïve optimist that the world sort of works in tragic ways that
we must accept, but do not fully understand. Yet classical literature is the one of the oldest and most abstract guides to
us that there are certain parameters that we may seek to overcome, but must
also accept that we ultimately cannot.
You Can’t Stop Aging, Nancy
Take the modern obsession with beauty and aging, two
human facts that all the Viagra and surgery in the world cannot change. I
expect few readers have endured something like the Joe Biden makeover or the
Nancy Pelosi facial fix (I thought those on the Left were more inclined to the
natural way? Something is not very green and egalitarian about spending gads of
money for something so unnatural). Most of you accept wrinkles, creaky joints,
and thinning hair. Oh, we exercise and try to keep in shape and youthful, but a
Clint Eastwood seems preferable looking to us than a stretched and stitched
Sylvester Stallone.
The Greek lyric poets, from Solon to Mimnermus, taught
that there is nothing really “golden” about old age. That did not mean that at
about age 50-70 one is not both wiser than at 20 and less susceptible to the
destructive appetites and passions — only that such mental and emotional
maturity come at the terrible price of a decline in energy and physicality.
When I now mow the lawn or chain saw, in about 10 minutes a knee is sore, an
elbow swollen, a back strained — and from nothing more than a silly wrong
pivot. Biking 100 miles a week seems to make the joints more, not less,
painful. At 30 going up a 30-foot ladder was fun; at near 60 it is a high-wire
act. There is some cruel rule that the more it is necessary at 60 to build
muscle mass, the more the joints and tendons seem to rebel at the necessary
regimen.
The ancients honored old age, as the revered Gerousia
and the Senate attest, but on the concession that with sobriety came far less
exuberance and spontaneity. I suppose old Ike would never had mouthed JFK’s
“pay any price” to intervene and oppose communism. Yet we must try to stay
competitive until the last breath, if not with our bodies, then with our minds
— like old blabbermouth Isocrates railing in his 90s, or Sophocles writing the
Oedipus at Colonus (admittedly not a great play) well after 90. Cicero’s De
Senectute reminds us
that knowledge and learning can bridge some of the vast gap between the age
cohorts. I remember an 80-year-old woman in one of my Greek classes who palled
around with the 20-somethings; apparently when they were all reading Homer,
they all forgot trivial things such as looks and age — at least for the
ephemeral two hours they were reading The Iliad. (One young man
after a class said, “She looks good in jeans.”)
In term of relative power, the Greeks and Romans felt
that youth often trumped wisdom, at least in the sense that the firm 21 year
old held all the cards with her obsessed 50-year-old admirer. When I
sometimes read of the latest harassment suit that involved consensual adult sex
involving an “imbalance in power,” I wonder what a Petronius, who wrote about
crafty youth using their beauty to incite and humiliate the foolish aging,
would think. Was Paula Broadwell really a victim in a “power imbalance”? Over
the decades I have seen a number of adept young graduate students who fooled
silly old goats (often the same nerds that they were in high school) into
consensual relationships that aided their careers, but then, when the benefits
were exhausted, they moved on, only to define themselves as victims as the need
arose. A Greek would laugh at that idea of victims and oppressors.
As far as beauty goes, what is so attractive about
either the perfect Stepford wives’ look
or the starved model appearance? From red-figure vase painting to Rubens, Western tastes have
appreciated curves, not lines. Where did the new beauty profile come from that
is abnormal and usually achieved only through surgery: 5’ 10” females, weighing
120 lbs., with micro-waists and huge breasts and rears, as if more than 1% of
the population is born that way? Ovid also reminds us that, on occasion, a
blemish can mesmerize the beholder, in the way perhaps Cleopatra’s ample nose
incited Caesar and Antony. I used to find the actress Sandy Dennis’s uncorrected
overbite appealing in the way I don’t find today’s oversized, bleached,
spot-lighted, and perfectly capped choppers inviting. A mole for the Greeks
should not be removed. The classics remind us that a small defect is no defect
at all. Forty years ago, I once knew an undergraduate with a scar running
across her chin, maybe six inches in length, and a few millimeters wide. It was
hypnotic. And what happened to the classical emphases on voice, comportment,
grace, and gesture as ingredients of beauty? Have they simply fallen by the
wayside in our boobs/butt obsessed popular culture? Are there voice or posture
classes anymore, or has it become all liposuction and implants?
Hoi Aristoi/Polloi
Admittedly, classical literature is aristocratic, at
least in the sense that the well-read and learned had more money than those
whom they often wrote about. But that said, it is striking how frequently over
a thousand years of Greek and Latin masterpieces arise words like “mob” (ochlos) and “throng” (turba) to describe the
herd-like desire for entitlements without worry as to how they were to be
funded. Virgil (vulgus vult
decipi, ergo decipiatur) and Horace (Odi
profanum vulgus et arceo) would
assume that even the Wall Street Journal is not read at Super Wal-Mart. (But be
careful: at a local electric motor shop, the two Hispanic mechanics/owners once
asked me how I would rate Peter Green’s Alexander the Great —
and then cited four other biographies — while I was waiting to have a motor
rewound.)
Alexis de Tocqueville put forth a thesis that American
democracy had a chance because the small-scale entrepreneur (see above) and
autonomous, self-reliant agrarian were not so prone to the Siren-calls of the
European mob. He felt that we in American would not perhaps follow the model of
the fourth-century Athenian dêmos or imperial Roman vulgus that flocked
to the cities for the dole, and hated the wealthy the more they taxed them
(don’t think Obama will be happy with just raising rates on “millionaires”) —
as if the ability to pay high taxes was always proof of the ability to pay even
more. Tocqueville derived that pessimistic view from Aristotle whose best
democracy was a politeia — rule by owners of some property, who
were largely agrarian and self-reliant, and did not expect subsidies from
others. Classics, then, teach us to beware a situation when 47% of the population
do not pay income taxes and nearly half of us receive federal and state
subsidies. Perhaps we should go over the cliff so that the 53% all understand
the burdens of higher taxes to subsidize the 47% who pay no income taxes. If we
hike taxes on those who make over $1 million a year, then cannot we not insist
that everyone pays at least $500 per year in federal income taxes — to
appreciate that April 15 is not Christmas?
In that regard I now often think of Solon’s seisachtheia,
the “shaking off” of debts by those small farmers of Attica burdened from
having to pay 1/6th (or
so scholars still believe) of their produce to their creditors — or the
Messenian helots who were obligated to give ¼ to ½ of everything they produced
to their Spartan overlord. Yet at this point, with a looming 40% federal tax
rate, 12% California tax, returning payroll and higher Medicare taxes, and the new Obamacare
hit, millions would prefer the oppressive take of classical serfdom to the
present 55-60% of their income grabbed by the state. The new American helots,
after all, will fork over sixty percent of their almond crops to the IRS, build
six out of ten houses for their government, drive their trucks until July for
Washington — and write thirty PJ weekly columns a year for Obama. The Tea Party
might have been better named the Helot Party.
Stasis
I was thinking of the class strife in Sallust’s
Conspiracy of Cataline the other day as well; I used to teach it and the
Jugurthine War in third-year Latin. In my thirties I never quite understood the
standard hackneyed redistributionist call of the late Roman republic for
“cancellation of debts and redistribution of property!” But recently I reread
Sallust with a new awareness — in the context of all the talk of mortgage
forgiveness, credit card forgiveness, student loan forgiveness, wealth taxes,
and new estates taxes. The subtext of those Catalinian platforms, of course, is
that someone else was culpable for having enough money in the first place
(rather than prudence, character, dutifulness, etc.) to pay what he had
borrowed — and therefore as atonement should pay for others who were defrauded
by the system.
In the Roman state, those who borrowed unwisely
periodically needed a clean slate — paid for by those who mostly did not,
albeit always dressed up in the sense of the noble poor and the rapacious rich.
“Pay your fair share,” “fat cat,” “you didn’t build that,” “at some point
you’ve made enough money,” etc. are right out of the demagoguery so brilliantly
chronicled by Aristophanes, Plutarch, and Sallust. Debt relief and
redistribution were not quaint classical topoi, but inherent in the
human condition. For now our would-be Gracchus in the White House seems a lot
more like a Publius Claudius Pulcher (author of the expansion of the grain
dole), an upscale elite who chose demagoguery as the best route to power, fame,
influence, and riches — and who can’t finish a sentence without blasting
“millionaires and billionaires” as the source of all our woes. How did it
happen that those in government, with higher than private sector salaries, with
access to free perks, with better than normal pensions and benefits, so often
talk about the need for higher taxes without anyone replying that they were
selfish in asking the worse off to subsidize the better off?
The Golden Mean
One theme sort of resonates through classical
literature. Character consists of moderation, of avoiding hubris and thereby
escaping nemesis. Character is formed through balanced behavior, from the
trivial of not overeating, oversleeping, and overdrinking (“glutton,” “sloth,”
and “drunk” have disappeared from the American vocabulary, though they were
ubiquitous in Western languages for the last 2500 years), to being humble in
success and resilient in humiliation and defeat as well. But here is the
warning: the good man — whether Ajax or Socrates — should expect — perhaps even
welcome? — the disdain of the crowd, and usually will not win acclaim or
receive what he deserves in this life. (Achilles finally came to accept that.)
Once upon a time in Hollywood, great directors grasped
that, and so in their versions of The Iliad or the Sophoclean play — think Shane,
Ride the High Country, High Noon, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance — the man
with character, if not killed, rides off into the sunset alone, glad to be free
of those he saved. We don’t like our George S. Pattons and Curtis Lemays,
at least until we are faced with the Waffen SS and the Japanese imperial military.
Today, Marshal Will Kane might be dubbed a “loser,” or Ethan Edwards as
“obsessed.”
Whatever character is, it was not Susan Rice’s recent
letter/op-ed bowing out of consideration for nomination to the office of
Secretary of State. Instead it was Euripidean projection, Pentheus-style, as
she alleged politicization and cheap partisan distraction on the part of her
critics, even as she unleashed a pattern of obfuscation of her own and
race/gender pandering from her supporters.
Ave
atque Salve
I was given a great gift to have been a student of
classics, to have lived on a farm, and to have had a father who was nobly
self-destructive in the Ajaxan sense (on his Selma gravestone reads Sophocles’
chiastic aphorism, “live nobly, or nobly die”). He practiced an archaic code
that won him admiration, but made his job, his career, and his life almost impossible,
whether over Tokyo in a B-29, or on a tractor, or in the Byzantine labyrinth of
junior college administration, at which he excelled with his colleagues and
students, but was deemed too eccentric by his administrative superiors. When I
came home at 26 puffed up with a PhD, he met me in the driveway and said “The
shed needs new shingles,” a not too subtle reminder right out of Hesiod that
with intellectual progress can come moral regress.
One of the great, though inadvertent gifts of the
Obama administration has been to remind us that the Rhodes Scholarship, the
Harvard Law degree, the Stanford PhD, the Princeton BA mean, well, nothing much
at all, if not perhaps a suspicion that a lot of intellectual branding and
grandstanding came at the expense of two years on a tuna boat, or a year
picking apples, or four summers at Starbucks, or of anything to remind the
young genius that he was not so smart after all, and that character is not
created by getting an award or being stamped by an unworldly elite institution.
In this age of Obama and a corrupting equality of
result, we must continue to speak out, with dash and style, with the knowledge
that most of our peers prefer sameness and mandated equality to freedom and
liberty, if the latter result in inequality. But at least we are not alone; the
best of the ancient world nods with us.
And that is the point, is it not — to keep the ancient
faith and so welcome rather than fear the popular anger of the age?
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