Is it amusing that the common acronym for the U. S. Supreme Court, SCOTUS, is Latin for the Greek scotos, meaning original darkness characterizing the god, Erebus?
There is a question of humor in much around us, today, but the humor may not be very funny. Anger and the indifference of self-satisfaction are bad humors. Hubristic pride and covetous insecurity are rotten ones. The upper reaches of society have lost their former community with us. They have lost much in exchange for extreme wealth, the rewards of narrow-eyed Pluto and fat-bellied Mammon. Self-indulgent Dionysus (or Bacchus,) abandoned to lavish intoxication by alcohol, drugs and other addictive pleasures of high living, hollows and unhallows their status.
Many Republicans see themselves in the guise of imperial Romans, upright and strict. Yet Roman culture early grafted itself to that of the Greeks, who were in many ways humanly superior. Republicans today have forgotten about the dangers of hübris. They cast off the values of sophrosyne. They presume upon areté which they no longer fully possess.
Their notions of eudaimonia have evaporated or shrunk, perverted into private, personal havens or jungles where devilish families of smart-nosed dogs battle for domination. Families called corporations, some of them Mafia-like, run rough-shod over people in many places on earth, especially ‘underdeveloped’ countries, where they ruin natural habitat and rape resources with impugnity.
The idea of sophrosyne [sof-ROZ-i-nee] embraces excellence of character and soundness of mind in harmonious balance showing temperance, moderation, prudence and restraint. Such persons modestly exercise self-awareness and avoid excess. They abstain or indulge appetites to the sensible degree without undue effort of will.
Hübris displays the opposite qualities: arrogance, lack of self-awareness and control, excessive conceit and obnoxious behavior with lack of circumspection and foresight. From Theognis we hear: “Many bad men are rich and many good men poor; yet we will not exchange our virtue for wealth seeing that virtue endures while possessions belong now to this man and then to that.” [315-318 p.267. Greek Elegy and Iambus. Loeb. Vol. I. Trans. Giles Laurén in The Stoic’s Bible.]
The idea of areté [AH-ret-tay] is explained by Richard Hooker of WSU: “The man or woman of areté is a person of the highest effectiveness; they use all their faculties: strength, bravery, wit, and deceptiveness, to achieve real results. In the Homeric world, then, areté involves all of the abilities and potentialities available to humans.” Without sophrosyne, areté is little better than hübris. Areté must be directed toward eudaimonia, which means “good-spiritedness,” a blessed or happy state of personal well-being in harmonious community, both its cause and result. Without this goal, humans are doomed to division, conflict and unhappiness. To be sure, life may require some friction, resistance and challenge, but too much on too many fronts yields only chaos and misery.
The fifth century B.C. Greek lyric poet, Pindar, whose famed Odes sang praise to the victorious athletes of his day in complex verse-forms loudly chanted by professional choruses to the music of lyres and systra, commemorated not only the men and their events but revealed the cultural outlook and mental background of his time. Archaic Greeks dwelt loquaciously in sunlight at the edge of darkness deeper than we may comprehend. They were aware how mysterious existence is in this life. They had filled the void of ignorance with gods and unseen powers to explain things in a — forgive me — Rube Goldberg kind of way. They had more stories of supernatural drama and fictive history than knowledge of process and event, so art embroidered where no science yet appeared beyond techniques for making weapons, tools, furnishings, ships and poems.
They understood the tenuousness of life; the vulnerability of plans and intentions to viscissitudes and calamities unforeseen. They understood the elemental need of each for others in tight-knit, peaceful community, their dependence on civic solidarity in spite of the likely conflicts arising between persons and between groups and the polis, The City. They devised many means for promoting concord and amity in public ceremony, ritual events, threatre and especially musical contests and athletic competitions such as the Olympic Games. Even so, a city had to find a Lawgiver from time to time, to set the classes back in order, restrain or punish offenders, reward the heroes and make a future possible, again. They minimized the harm of competition by formalizing it in many ways, incorporating it in a civic religion which worked like a constitution.
Pindar was the most comprehensive and songful exponent of his cultural times. He won many prizes by acclaim in open amphitheatres. His rhetoric drew past and future together in families and their athletes, in hamlets and cities all over Greece. He knew by embodiment the soul of his age. By skill and love he welded crowds and nation together with well-phrased songs voiced by disciplined actors, alone. The Pindaric Ode is an immortal form which few dare try to understand or master, today. Far too few, today, try even to master themselves.
The Japanese are much like archaic Greeks in their intensity of dedication to work and the perfecting of performance in art or craft. Fifty-five years ago, returning from the Far East, I began to sense how lax and sloppy was American relation to life. I resolved to specialize very narrowly and to excel at my writing without making a living from it. You can imagine the rigors of having to write and also make a living in other ways. I put it to you that “the strenuous life” is not only found in Teddy Roosevelt’s great outdoors on the western plains and the jungles of Africa and Brazil. Many members of the wealthiest class I criticize may complain of fourteen hour days and six day weeks. I fault them not for their areté, however often they display hübris, but for their lack of sophrosyne, in disbalanced perception and living: their warped and partial orientation toward eudaimonia in favor too often of civic pandemonium and plain malfeasance!
O Athene, of the thrice-wise, overbearing grey eyes, helmet, shield and spear who once stood erect in the Acropolis; O Apollo of golden brightness and Father Zeus with your Olympian family, come down, invest the City of Washington and our nation with unity of purpose and wisdom of decision? We are sorely stressed and divided. Open the Stoa to us! Make us worthy?
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