I want to be buried like a human.

Pummeled by plum-sized ash.

Treated by scorching desire

Screams of the departed

Styx flows about

roaring waves

parting seas

cremated 

textiles

time

unfurls

monuments

few documents

reincarnate streets

muttering archeologists

Breakthrough Technology

Trumpeting Grace; I am reborn.

I wrote this poem in 2013 after visiting Herculaneum. Herculaneum is the mysterious beautiful younger sister of Pompeii. While Pompeii was covered in ash and soot and pumice stones, pyroclastic flow (lava) destroyed and fossilized Herculaneum. In some respects, the liquid rock preserved it better than the permeable soot layers preserved Pompeii. In one Villa there was a library filled with Epicurean works. These texts were dominantly written by what Cicero called “a most learned man” named Philodemus. While (pulverizing) attempts to unroll and read the burnt crisps have happened on and off since their 18th century discovery, the remaining papyri are now preserved and imaged without damage.

Even then in 2013 when I first went to Herculaneum, it was clear that one day we would be fishing more text out of the library of Philodemus - if only the right resources were thrown at the problem… And it was only this year 2023-2024, that a major prize was awarded for deciphering charred, crispy texts via powerful machine learning tools. Thank you to all those teams - Trumpeting Grace! - who are unraveling mysteries in our world.

Technology and hard application work allowed this resuscitation of words and ideas, and so long as people read them they live still.

This month’s post is a guest essay by Andrew Perlot.

Andrew stumbled on Meditations at age sixteen, and Marcus Aurelius and Socrates took up residence in the back of his brain soon after. He’s a former journalist interested in ancient history, philosophy, and partner acrobatics. You can follow him at his Substack, Socratic State of Mind.

The pile of Roman corpses was immense - 50,000 men butchered by Hanibals’ soldiers at the Battle of Cannae. Battlefield losses of this magnitude often broke a civilization’s will to fight. Even if kings and generals wanted to carry on, the common people might rebel. 

But the Romans refused to surrender. 

After the panic died down, common citizens and Senators closed ranks. They stubbornly kept fighting — and dying — for years. By the time they found a winning commander and defeated Hanibal, the second Punic War had cost them one out of every six adult male citizens.

Many historians consider this resilience and the new heights achieved afterward to be a defining feature of the Roman psyche. This is what Romans did — they endured. The entire history of the Roman Republic and Empire might be summed up as 1,900 years of defiance in the face of setbacks.

But where did Rome’s incredible resilience come from? 

Rome’s Philosophical Culture

Ancient Roman culture was in many respects a philosophical vehicle. 

Everywhere a Roman looked, there it was: reminder after reminder of how to live the good life and overcome life’s challenges, embedded in places everyone — not only the well-educated — would encounter it. Many Roman cultural artifacts deliver psychologically powerful ideas in a palatable, or even enticing form. 

Most Romans had no interest in developing philosophical practices. Yet they couldn’t help encountering “philosophically adjacent,” psychological tools simply by being part of their culture, and it steadied them through their often-turbulent lives. 

Not A Philosopher's Philosophy 

The Cynic philosopher Diogenes claimed that philosophy taught him “to be prepared for every fortune,”1 while the Stoic Seneca described philosophy  as “teachings that bring health and conquer adversity.”2

What did the conquest of adversity look like in practice? Ancient philosophers developed “spiritual exercises,”3 as self-therapy that could be done mentally or as part of the millennia-old Illeism-style journaling practice. These practices reframed practitioners’ inner discourse into something healthier and more resilient. 

A stripped-down shorthand of these reframes crept into Roman culture over time. 

This shorthand conveyed philosophically salient ideas that grounded people without requiring much depth. Continuous exposure injected the ideas into the population’s psychology until they were uttered as comfort for grieving spouses and parents, as salves for misfortune, and as general fortification against life’s travails. 

How Romans Put Philosophy In Plain Sight 

The Poor Man’s Death Consolation

Death seems like the horrible fate we’re all headed toward. Funny thing is, it’s really not that big of a deal. 

Philosophers spilled lots of ink justifying this position, but Rome’s poor could express it succinctly.

The tombstones of Rome’s slaves and uneducated lower classes frequently bear an Epicurean idea: “Non fui, fui, non-sum, non-curo,” or "I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care.” 

It’s a consolation suggesting that before we’re born, we don’t exist and can’t care about anything.  After death, we won't exist and can’t care about dying. Therefore death is nothing to worry about or fear. In any case, it’ll be over quickly. It’s a shortcut to tranquility for a subject usually tinged with anxiety. 

Poetry With A Message:

Poems such as the Iliad and the Aeneid were the bedrock of entertainment in the Greco-Roman world. The illiterate enjoyed public recitations and the educated read verse on expensive papyrus scrolls.

The most popular works often had useful philosophy woven through them. 

Virgil:

Virgil’s Aeneid was the Roman national epic and was recited for all classes. Many Romans memorized long stretches of it. The story of Aeneas’s tumultuous flight from Troy to establish Rome was strewn with Stoic ideas;4 coming into accord with fate is one of the major themes. We see Aeneas struggling as misfortune strikes, but never relinquishing his initiative or letting it break him.  

Goddess-born, wherever

Fate pulls or hauls us, there we have to follow;

Whatever happens, fortune can be beaten

By nothing but endurance.

— Virgil, The Aneid, Book 5, 709ff

The Roman idea that enduring hardship makes us better was popular with philosophers. “A boxer who has never suffered a beating cannot bring bold spirits to the match,” Seneca observed. “It is the one who has seen his own blood — who has heard his teeth crunch under the first…who goes to the contest with vigorous hope.”5

And those who have sailed through life without challenge? “I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune.”6

Horace: 

Horace was the first century’s leading lyric poet with works performed publicly for Rome’s population.7 If you read his Odes and Satires, you’ll stumble upon philosophy in nearly every poem. 

Horace leaned Epicurean, but some of his poems are addressed to a Stoic friend and consider that school’s precepts. Plato’s and Aristotle’s thoughts also make appearances. The major themes are finding inner contentment, enjoying the simple life, and staying grounded in the present. 

His ideas run counter to our keeping up with the Joneses' rat race inclinations. “What you own, owns you,” might have come from the lips of Horace. 

Horace eventually found a rich patron who gave him a house in the countryside and what amounted to a middle-class existence, but Horace’s life wasn’t easy. His father was enslaved, and Horace fought in wars and experienced a great deal of hardship. Elevated by his talent, he looked at those even higher up the totem pole and decided he wanted no part of the strictures and social mores governing their lives.

Listening To Death’s Perspective

Greco-Roman philosophy’s famous Memento Mori idea (remember death) has been artfully depicted for centuries, but it was everywhere in ancient Rome. This mosaic — from a preserved house in Pompei — depicts death balancing on the wheel of fortune. The idea was to keep death always in your mind and use its perspective in every situation.  

• You and everyone you know might die at any time, which makes you appreciate now, the only time that’s guaranteed.

• Everything ends and will be taken from you sooner or later. So while you should appreciate what you have, you should never become so attached to it that its loss breaks you.  

• If this is the last time you see a loved one, should you speak harshly to them if they’re foolish? Would you prefer to have your last encounter filled with arguments?

Philosophical Triumphs

Rome’s leading men were a mix of the moral and the despicable. For every Scipo, Marcus Aurelius, and Cato, there was a Sulla, Nero, and a Cataline. Talented generals were usually also powerful politicians, and there was always the risk that they’d leverage their armies to achieve extra-legal political ends. What kept them in check for so long? 

For centuries, the Republic used competition, enforced compromise, and division of power to keep generals from going off the rails. But Rome recognized that philosophy had a role to play as well. 

When the senate granted successful generals triumphal processions through the streets of Rome, they led captives and carts full of war booty before cheering throngs. But they weren’t alone in their chariot. A slave stood behind them, holding a crown over their head and tasked with whispering a message in their ear over and over.

Tertullian tells us8 that message was, "Look behind you! (for the misfortune that may be rushing toward you) Remember you are a man! (and not a god)." Other authors suggest it was a reminder of mortality. 

Whatever the precise message, it was designed to reign in the hubris and entitlement ancient generals might feel after great victories.  

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus approved of this triumphal tradition and suggests we leverage it in our own lives whenever we’re “winning:” “In the same way, you should remind yourself that what you love is mortal, that what you love is not your own; that it has been granted to you just for the present, not irrevocably, and not forever,”9 he said.

Can you imagine modern presidents and prime ministers being sworn into office with a functionary whispering these ideas in their ears?

A Stage Full of Philosophy

Plays were another cornerstone of popular Roman culture, and many were full of moral lessons the audience couldn’t help but see. But there was a problem — many ancient Greek plays adored by the Romans were full of mixed messages. One might come away thinking an ancient Greek hero’s vices were laudable. 

The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca set out to fix that.  He took popular Greek plays and rewrote them with a distinct style and flare reminiscent of Shakespeare and Quentin Tarantino. But the moral message is what he really shored up. The new takeaway was clear: vice and the passions resulting from faulty reasoning are horrible tragedies.  

Seneca’s bloody spectacles drew Romans in but then acted as philosophical Trojan horses. I’ve written more about his probable intent here, but Seneca framed passions as a salient problem while offering a clear solution.  

Seneca became the most popular playwright of his day. His name is scrawled (misspelled) on the exterior wall of a preserved building in Pompei, as if by an adoring fan. A line from one of his plays is preserved on a separate wall.

The idea of any modern philosopher having adoring fans seems unlikely. No one is spraying Peter Singer graffiti on walls. Yet Seneca’s popular works fit into the Roman psyche, and the Romans embraced him.  

Artists and Their Philosophy

Rome’s philosophically-adjacent culture existed because those creating art were steeped in philosophy. Flip through Arrian’s Discourses and you’ll see Epictetus contending with questions from spoiled playboys and itinerant travelers coming to learn the philosopher’s wisdom. 

In Rome, philosophers lectured in the squares and theaters. Philosophical schools were set up in Athens, Alexandria, and other major cities. Teachers competed to win adherents, and everyone had their own opinion about the best philosophy of life. Although the lower classes engaged with philosophy to some extent (Epictetus was a slave before being freed, and Horace came from a family of poor farmers who struggled to pay for his education), philosophy was often the domain of the wealthy and educated, at least when it was in fashion.   

Since the educated created much of the popular culture, philosophically-adjacent ideas were regurgitated back out as popular art, and filtered into the awareness of those who didn’t care about philosophy.  

The result of this philosophy diffusion wasn’t some utopian population of philosophers akin to Plato’s Republic, but a citizenry better equipped to deal with hardship. 

The Culture That Wouldn’t Die

Constantine XI should have known he was beaten. 

The last Roman emperor stood on the walls of Constantinople with a few thousand men in 1453, watching the vast Ottoman army hauling cannons into place. His opponent, Sultan Mehmed II, sent a message offering to let him and his men live if he surrendered the capital. 

Much had changed in the nearly 2,000 years of Roman history. Christianity had swept away paganism. Long gone were the gladiatorial fights, and there were likely no philosophers debating in those final years. But some things hadn’t changed at all.  

“As to surrendering the city to you,” Constantine wrote back to the sultan, “it is not for me to decide or for anyone else of its citizens; for all of us have reached the mutual decision to die of our own free will, without any regard for our lives.”

It was a response that might been voiced by the Romans who defied Hanibal in the wake of their defeat at Cannae. 

Ottoman artillery reduced Constantinople’s walls to rubble, and Mehmed took thousands of casualties overcoming the stubborn defenders. In the end, the Romans didn’t have a chance. Constantine fell in one of the final waves of attack, sword in hand. 

But though the Roman Empire died that day, its culture remained improbably resilient, much like the resiliency it instilled in those imbibing it. Roman scholars took their books and fled west, sparking a cultural revival. 

The full force of Rome’s philosophically-adjacent ideas resurfaced during the Renaissance and eventually reentered popular culture through Shakespeare’s plays, paintings, novels, sculptures, and ancient books. The United States’s founding fathers idealized virtue and studied Roman and Greek Philosophy, planting the culture on a new continent.  

But there’s been a slow ebb of these ideas from popular culture over the last century. This left a void, and voids tend to be filled. 

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues it was filled by a passively imbibed “reverse therapy.” that does the opposite of what Roman Culture did. Instead of inculcating resilience to hardship, this new culture leaves us fragile.

But Rome’s philosophically-adjacent culture has bounced back before. People struggling through hardship have long found solace in its ideas. If we can learn to see ourselves as standing on the shoulders of giants, it might bounce back again. 

Their lives a mimicry

SBF believes that Shakespeare is not great:

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare…, but really I shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half of the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all of Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate--probably as low as about ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable.

Besides the disgraced crypto-king, the argument has other defenders.

In Are History’s “Greatest Philosophers” All That Great? Gregory Lewis asks us to assume that philosophical greatness is a result of innate talent. If this is so, we should expect philosophical greatness to be a matter of a natural lottery. Now:

The Attican population in the time of Plato is thought to have been 250 to 300 thousand people... The population of modern day Attica…is 3.8 million. If we say Plato was the most philosophically able in Attica, that ‘only’ puts him at the 1 in 300,000 level. Modern Attica should expect to have around thirteen people at this level, and of this group it is statistically unlikely that Plato would be better than all of them. I am sure there are many very able philosophers in modern day Athens, but none enjoy the renown of Plato; were Plato alive today, instead of be [sic] recognized as one of the greatest of all time, perhaps he would be struggling to get tenure instead.

This indicates that we don’t value the philosophy and literature of the past for its intrinsic properties but for some other reason. We can do better today.

There’s something to this argument, but it ultimately doesn’t work.

Most people respond by quoting Shakespeare or citing Plato. That's not sufficient. Those blinded by a priori reasoning rarely regain their sight with a posteriori treatments. 

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Most People are Other People

Ligarius: 

Set on your foot, 

And with a heart new fir’d I follow you 

To do I know not what; but it sufficeth 

That Brutus leads me on. 

Brutus:     

Follow me then.

René Girard reads Shakespeare through mimetic theory. The central idea is that humans are deeply imitative creatures. As such, we learn what to desire only by copying others.

We can clearly see this dynamic in groups. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare depicts the conspiracy to assassinate the tyrant growing with increasing ease. One man joins because he likes the idea that “Caesar is responsible for the bad weather." Another, Ligarius, enters without even knowing the identity of the victim. Girard explains:

[I]n Julius Caesar we watch three individuals in a row join the conspiracy; with each one, we go down one more notch in regard to their ability to think for themselves, to use their reason and behave in a responsible way. It is less a matter of individual psychology than the rapid march of mimetic desire itself. As the conspiracy becomes larger, the job of attracting new members becomes easier.

Theater Of Envy: William Shakespeare

The power of the mob is nothing new. What Girard urges us to recognize, with Shakespeare, is that our urge to imitate goes deeper than external behavior. We copy who other people are: their thoughts, desires, and actions.

The rivalry and conflict of the late republic are the product of men who duplicated others' pursuit for power. Their desires are not their own. Girard captures the paradox this creates when discussing Caesar’s killer Brutus:

To a Roman with political ambition—and Brutus’s ambition is great, being patterned on Caesar’s—Caesar has become an insurmountable obstacle… He is both the hated rival and the beloved model, the incomparable guide, the unsurpassable teacher.

Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare

Brutus is threatened by Caesar, but loves his “majesty and authority.” When Brutus faces the crowd after destroying Caesar, a shout erupts out of the mob: “Let him be Caesar!” They recognize him for what he is – a copy.

Cultural Evolution

Perhaps most surprising of all is that despite our oversized brains, our kind are not that bright, at least not innately smart enough to explain the immense success of our species.

Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success

Cultural evolutionists like Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, and Peter Richerson claim that cultural learning makes humans successful. Humans dominate the planet because we’re the only species that creates culture. 

Any evolutionary process requires mutation, selection, and inheritance. Mutation occurs when some human-animal decides to do something new. Selection occurs when it doesn’t work. Inheritance occurs when that behavior or trait is transmitted to other individuals. 

The classical way to pass traits to future generations is genetic. However, humans are social learners too. We pass on traits by replicating others' behavior. Culture is nothing more than the “practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people.” It's the vehicle by which we inherit knowledge and error. Through imitation, we transmit what works through time.

Cultures mutate, are inherited through imitation, and are selected like anything else.

In this way, the cultures evolve.

This is just a more rigorous way to capture what Girard saw in Shakespeare.

Your Life Is Not Your Own

In many cases it's more accurate to model the world as 500 people than 8 billion.

Nat Friedman

The skeptical argument points out how surprising it is that the great works should appear early in history when so much of humanity has existed in the past 100 or so years.

However, another way to look at the matter a priori is to use centuries as the reference class. Charitably, there have only been about 15 centuries of English-speaking civilization – if we assume equal probability that the greatest English writer is born in any of them, the probability that he arises in the 16th is ~6.66%. 

If we do that, the fact that so many greats are in the past isn’t that surprising – there aren’t that many centuries. 

Of course, this would be stupid, but it’s instructive. 

Given people’s capacity to copy, we should expect most people to be products of their contemporaries. In other words, our reference class shouldn’t be individuals, but larger social units, like cultures. And, we know some cultures are much more productive than others.

The upshot of all this is that when we look at Attica in 428 AD we’re not looking at 300 thousand individuals. Nor should we consider the 3.8 million inhabitants of modern day Attica as potential Platos.

How the exact calculation should be done, I don’t know, but any reasonable way of counting up the relevant social units won’t have the same force as our original argument. As such, it’s not as surprising that so many greater things exist in the past. The “Bayesian priors” may even be favorable.

Cumulative Knowledge

The obvious objection to this is that many of the best performers are contemporary. Richard Hanania writes:

Whenever we have objective measures of something, the best performers are always from the recent past. This holds for running, darts, field goal kicking, weightlifting, memorizing the digits of pi, and chess.

This shows that the mimetic rebuttal is incomplete. If we’ve made massive progress in so many scientific and philosophical fields, why haven’t literature and philosophy seen the same? 

I suggest that the difference between literature and philosophy against darts and field goal kicking is that darts and running have higher fidelity. Dart and field goal kicking culture is easier to inherit.

The best survives and is passed down in physical competition, but that is not so in philosophy. There are multiple reasons for this. The principal one is that it’s difficult for people to reason in the asocial way that’s required for recognizing humanistic innovation (and what created it). It’s easier when the world gives you clear feedback – like the final time of run or strike of a dart.

If I want to test out dart-throwing techniques, I can make serious progress in an afternoon. But if I want to try out philosophical methods that’s going to be difficult to do in a lifetime. Philosophical feedback is mysterious. The Athenians killed Socrates. 

Copying Aristotle, as so many did, isn’t a recipe for philosophical progress. Political, ethical, social, and religious biases blind many who aim to make philosophical contributions.

Similar considerations apply to literature – so much so that many people think whether some piece of art is better than another is completely subjective. Yes, I know some of you say that what’s great literature or not is subjective, but it’s not so. Not in the sense that anyone can just choose to say something is great and that’s that. Check out David Hume, one of the greatest philosophers (born 1711 AD) on how to make sense of aesthetic judgment without the objective. 

How Great Are Our Greats?

The a priori argument has some force, but not enough to dismiss our greats.

Perhaps, we shouldn’t be confident that Shakespeare is one of the best writers in the English language. But he’s certainly in the top 100, likely top 10. We probably haven’t accurately identified what all of the top 100 are. 

Turning to philosophy, this poll of academic philosophers is reasonable but includes names that shouldn’t be there. The historical greats are chosen by the prestigious people of today and the near past. They overlook many great thinkers and schools while overrating others. 

Even if the argument for dismissing past works is unsuccessful there’s still a case for thinking that we overrate the past. But whether or not you’re doing that depends on who you’re imitating.

Caleb’s Newsletter

Stoicism, arguments, and thinking of thinking.

By Caleb Ontiveros

This month’s guest post is an essay by James Binks.

James Binks is an independent scholar based in Canada and Greece. He makes his living conducting museum-based research on Western Canadian history, as a tour guide, and as a scuba divemaster. He seeks to answer the question “How do we know what the ancient Greeks said?” by writing about the material evidence of the long transmission of Greek literature at Culture Cross.

In the ancient Mediterranean world, kings and warriors travelled great distances to consult with the god Apollo. After a perilous journey to his temple perched high and hidden at Delphi in the Parnassian mountains, visitors would need to wait until one of nine annual days in which the god’s intermediary, an oracle known as the Pythia, was available to provide guidance on which direction to take their lives. Even then, only if the sacrificial goat brought to the temple doorstep shivered when doused with water would the day of consultation with the oracle be ushered in.

After the payment of a fee, the visitor would make their way towards the sanctuary. Inside the darkened temple, the consultant likely couldn’t make out the Pythia behind her wall as he framed his question. If the consultant was made aware of the local tradition, he would frame his question as though he were looking for advice: Which path should I take? Which action need I take to ensure my future?

The oracle would then breathe in the ‘pneuma’ – the breath of inspiration – which filled her room with a delightful fragrance. Through her poetic meter, the god Apollo reflected the truth off the jagged walls of fate. This advice was ambiguous but powerful. Visitors often sought further remediation back home – sometimes taking months to sift through the possibilities of the prophecy to reach the true meaning.

Sources of Greek Literature

The future has always been a matter of concern and wonder for all people. At times, people grapple directly with their uncertain futures, whether through prophecies at Delphi, astrological readings, or a local weather forecaster. Although the future is clearly unknown, stories such as the one recounted above – commonly provided by tour guides, guidebooks, and academic texts about the ancient site and its oracle at Delphi – make the past seem misleadingly clear. It is shrouded in the same uncertainty as times to come.

How do we know what happened in Delphi thousands of years ago? How can the alleged deeds, words, and thoughts of ancient Greeks still be heard thousands of years later?

The story recounted above is a pastiche of several short literary texts from Plutarch, a priest of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi around 95AD. Plutarch was one of the most prolific Greek writers of the ancient world, and many of his texts discuss the oracle at Delphi, primarily in a body of work we now call Moralia. Despite living hundreds of years after most of the famous prophecies at Delphi were allegedly given, Plutarch’s texts are the most important source for information on how the oracular process was completed.

However, just as Plutarch’s Delphic stories tell of trepidation and tradition in trying to determine the future, so too are the paths to knowing the past full of debates and traditions of our forebears.

No texts from Plutarch’s own hands (or his scribe’s) – also known as an ‘autograph’ – exist. The earliest surviving material evidence of any part of the story from Plutarch I recounted is a tiny papyrus fragment from at least several decades after his life. The oldest extant – that is, still surviving – material that contains Plutarch’s full Moralia texts concerning Delphi and the oracle is in a manuscript referred to as Parisinus 1672, from the 14^th century, more than 1,200 years after the alleged time of composition of Plutarch’s works.

The lack of Plutarch’s own writings on Delphi are not an exception; we don’t have any autographs of ancient Greek literature. The earliest material evidence of Greek literature is often from centuries or even a millennium after the alleged initial composition of the text in the form of copies, quotations, or approximations of the original text.

To be able to deduce when Plutarch or any ancient Greek lived and to discover what they wrote requires complex layers of deduction, discovery, and comparison of historical textual fragments, manuscripts, and books spanning the centuries between the author’s life and today. This process crisscrosses all the traditions and geographies that received, influenced, and produced those works.

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Verba Volent, Scripta Manent

Spoken words perish, yet writing remains. Unlike some cultures, such as the Vedic tradition that has been able to preserve many texts in South Asia through oral transmission, most societies around the Mediterranean shores have utilized the materiality of writing to help transmit their texts. Through the grinding millennia of their societies’ cultural transformations, ancient Greek texts would have held no chance of surviving until today without writing.

In our future beyond the future of the Delphic oracle’s prophecies, we can peer backward through the layering mists of our past by focusing our lens not just on the ‘texts’ as such, but on the actual surviving (i.e. extant) material remains of those texts – primarily in papyri fragments and parchment manuscripts. Looking at the chronological attestation of the oldest fragments of Greek texts and the oldest manuscripts that contain a complete versions of those texts reveals two patterns: most of the extant oldest fragments were written on papyrus between the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries AD in Egypt, and almost all the extant complete versions of the texts were written in the form of a codex in the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire after the 9^th century AD.

Peeking into the historical processes of the production and preservation of these material remains sheds light on why and how ancient Greek words kept being written down despite the challenges, and explains why many texts didn’t survive. Indeed, the fundamental nature of materiality and decay means that texts are always at risk of not being transmitted into the future. Even today Greek texts are at threat of being lost forever in our own future. After all, written words perish, too.

Utility and Technology of Greek Texts

Christian Philosophy and the Codex

If one could ask the Delphic oracle today which action they might take to ensure the everlasting life of ancient Greek literature, her response may not be immediately clear, but I suspect it would include the word “utility”. To understand why, let’s follow the trail of extant Greek texts, starting with the oldest surviving complete manuscripts.

At the end of the 1^st century AD, when Plutarch was a priest at the Temple of Apollo, most of the texts of the Christian New Testament were being written down and compiled. The eastern part of the Roman Empire, including the province of Judea where Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples began to spread their word, had Greek as its lingua franca for administration and scholarship. As such, the gospels of Jesus’ life, the letters of his Apostles, and other books that make up the New Testament were first written in Greek in the decades after Jesus’ life.

One of the earliest complete attestations of an ancient Greek text is the Codex Sinaiticus, from the 4^th century AD. The Codex Sinaiticus contains the 27 books that make up the canon of most Christian communities’ Biblical tradition. This manuscript is far older than most other extant complete ancient Greek texts due to the greater number of Bibles copied compared to other literature during that period, and because Christians essentially invented the technology of the codex.

A codex is basically a book as we know it today. It is composed of sheets of papyrus, parchment, or paper that are stacked and then bound together along one edge. The first codices were made with the stem of the papyrus plant, but increasingly parchment – which is made from the skin of animals – was used for its increased durability. The nature of the codex was perfectly suitable for the Christian scripture; not only could it contain far more writing than the previously dominant media, the scroll, but it was far easier to open to a specific reference in the text without needing to unroll and reroll a scroll. Referencing specific verses in the Bible was an important utility in early Christian communities.

The cosmological orientation of the early Christians was not anchored to a location, a set of ritual implements, or a defined set of people. Instead, Biblical codices were their primary religious materials. As the universal, proselytizing Christian faith gained converts along the networks of the Roman Empire, it brought elements of ancient Greek culture with it. Not only was the New Testament a Greek-language text, but the broader Greek culture was the conduit through which poetry, philosophy, medicine, politics, geography, logic, and education had been expressed for centuries. Although there were ways in which the theology of Christianity was at odds with the polytheistic Hellenistic practices, to survive, the nascent Christian religion had no option but to continually remain in dialogue with its own past, be it Greek, Jewish, or otherwise. To make one example, many of Plato’s texts were swept up in Christian theological debates on the relationship between physical and transcendental knowledge (if Jesus is God made flesh, does that mean perfect omniscient knowledge can exist in the physical world?).

In other words, pre-Christian Greek literature was too useful and too embedded to ignore. The same would later become true for Christian literature, and nested inside those texts, a certain element of Greek culture.

Theological debates, which often referenced ancient Greek texts, would continue to hold sway as Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire, which continued on as a theocracy in the Eastern Roman Empire (generally referred to as the Byzantine Empire today) from the time of the Codex Sinaiticus in the 4^th century until the 15^th century.

Within this polity, institutions like libraries and schools which had previously created and nourished Greek texts declined due to economic instability and cultural change from the 5th to 9th centuries AD. Literacy and learning largely moved into Christian monasteries, which is where many manuscripts, both Christian and not, were copied. If it weren’t for the conscious efforts of Christian scribes – effort expended due to the utility of the information encoded within – we would have almost no ancient Greek texts at all.

Greek Ethnicity and Miniscule Script

It wasn’t only in explicitly Christian contexts where the Greek texts were created. The Byzantine Empire was primarily Greek in ethnicity and culture writ large. After all, students learned to read and write not with a basic pedagogical text or a Christian one, but through the already-ancient Iliad! In their capital Constantinople, ancient Greek statues like Herakles adorned their hippodrome well into the second millennium and the people continued to engage with the myths of their ancestors, even if stripped of their explicit religious content. They also continued to treasure many forms of the Greek language in their literature, especially the “Classical” Attic form of Greek writing and speaking, which were esteemed in a culture that highly valued the potent power of rhetoric.

Because the everyday Greek of a Byzantine subject had transformed dramatically in the centuries since the ancient Greek texts they utilized, a significant proportion of classical Greek texts that survive are a result of the Byzantines themselves attempting to understand and pronounce the ancient ways of the Greek language. 

There is a preponderance of extant complete manuscripts from the 9^th century onwards because after theological debates within Christianity were resolved, that energy could be redirected towards copying Greek texts afresh in the new schools, monasteries, and libraries constructed from improving economic fortunes. However, with papyrus increasingly hard to come by after Byzantium lost Egypt, the more expensive parchment needed to be used for new copies. To save time and space during the copying process, a new script called miniscule (roughly a lower-case type) was devised to partially replace the older majuscule (upper-case) script, which also had the benefit of more clearly being able to convey ancient Greek pronunciation due to its additional punctuation. 

The Byzantine parchment manuscripts written with miniscule script, which contain texts that survived the bottleneck of transference from one copy to another due to their theological and cultural utility, are so decisive for the extant canon of ancient Greek texts that when we engage with literature “from ancient Greece” we do so, essentially, via the texts deemed valuable and copied by Byzantine scribes who in most cases are closer in time to us than to the ancient Greeks.

Science and the Printing Press

As the Byzantine Empire was the most important polity through which ancient Greek texts were utilized and preserved, when it was conquered by the Ottomans in the 1400s, bringing an end to a millennium and a half of Roman Emperors, it brought the continuation of ancient Greek texts under duress. In Western Europe, Greek literature was lost after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5^th century AD and the resulting economic ruptures and decline in literacy. The only Greek texts remaining in Western Europe were a few excerpts of Aristotle in a Latin translation.

However, to the east and south, teams of scholars in Baghdad had translated Greek texts into Arabic to help support the new Islamic religion and its caliphates expand as far as Iberia. Arabic-language texts based on the original Greek like Galen’s development of medicine, Euclid’s geometry, and Aristotle’s work on logic were then made accessible to the English, French, Italians, and others after Christians reconquered Iberia in the 13^th century AD. Therefore, just as the Byzantine Empire was in decline, Western Europeans were rediscovering Greek literature. Italians in particular could take advantage of the situation in Byzantium by absorbing incoming Greek manuscripts and scholars fleeing the crumbling Empire.

The knowledge gained from Greek texts and the culture of scholarship in Western Europe resulted in the invention of new technologies, namely, the printing press. The ease of printing led to the explosion in the output of book production, including the first printed edition of Greek texts. Great wisdom and unsurpassed knowledge could be found in ancient Greek literature. With the utility of these works such as Aristotle’s Organon (which translates as “tools”) – a treatise on the production of knowledge through material observation and philosophical introspection – the advancement in knowledge could be turned against Greek thinking itself. The paragons of Greek thinking were slowly pried open, isolated, and picked apart as time went on. Francis Bacon went on to publish the “New Organon” in 1620, and Aristotle was the first casualty. Bacon laid the groundwork for the scientific revolution, which although undeniably influenced by ancient Greek conceptions of knowledge, went far beyond what the ancients were capable of. As the modern age was ushered in, many Greek texts were no longer the best in class, thereby losing one of their key utilities.

Material Transmission of Greek Texts

Threads of Scholarship

We only know ancient Greeks through much less ancient copies of their works, copies that were made not simply for the sake of conservation. Rather, their creation followed a specific, pressing utility involved in the texts. Texts weren’t copied and preserved for the future, or for historiography, but for their own time.

Although manuscripts were created to address and improve some condition of the present, they usually weren’t just ephemeral tools. Manuscripts were important materials and were treated with the utmost respect. Therefore, they stood a chance to last for centuries. However, this still means that during the moments of transference, such as from papyrus scroll to codex, or miniscule to majuscule script, or handmade manuscript to printed book, the texts which didn’t have utility in that moment were copied more sparingly and sometimes lost entirely.

The prospect of lost texts and politics of transference begins to reveal the 2,500 year-long process of Greek textual history as more complicated than the simple chain of transmission I have presented so far. For instance, the oldest extant material of a text isn’t always the most reliable indicator of the initial ‘autograph’ of an ancient author. The oldest extant complete version (aside from 42 omitted lines) of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is the Vaticanus Graecus 1950 manuscript from the 14^th century. However, most modern editions consider the first printed edition of Meditations by Wilhelm Xylander from the 1550s to be more reliable and authentic to Marcus Aurelius’ original. This printed book was based on an older Byzantine manuscript that is now lost because after it was used as a model to be printed from, in the mind of Xylander the manuscript had lost its utility and was discarded.

This discussion introduces the reality that for most of the textual history of ancient Greek texts, there were multiple threads of transmission. Unlike the global scholarly community of today, scholars were disparate throughout the world with less access to texts and little awareness of the texts other scribes possessed. As scribes copied the ‘same’ text independently of one another, they inevitably introduced their own mistakes through editing the texts. These mistakes could be compounded as time went on and the paths of transmission continued to split.

Additionally, just as Christians copied Plato for their theology, Arabs copied Galen for their medicine, and Italians copied Aristotle to support their universities, Greek texts weren’t copied and re-created just for the sake of it. Rather, this textual tradition took place inside different milieus of utility which were produced through debate and therefore most manuscripts contain various notes and commentaries, either from the scribe himself or a completely different text, which help illuminate various meanings of the primary text.

This process of scholarship shows how it’s not immediately clear at what stage a text is complete or when it’s missing sections. Therefore, even when a manuscript of a text is ‘complete’, that doesn’t mean it can simply be read at face value as the whole work as expressed by the ancient author. Different manuscripts, commentaries on texts, notes, fragments of texts, and quotations need to be cross referenced from the thousands of years of scholarship to best understand what was originally written in the past.

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Preservation of Papyri

While scholars were sorting out chaotic threads of textual transmission, ancient papyri were discovered and another major stream of material entered the mix; one that had been cut off from any transmission thread for over 1,500 years.

Perhaps the oldest literary material found in Europe is the Derveni papyrus, which preserves a quote from Homer’s Iliad. The only reason for its unusual preservation is that scraps were found carbonized in a funeral pyre, which is similar to the many scrolls that were found in Herculaneum due to the eruption of Vesuvius.  

The Derveni papyrus was created in the 4^th century BC in Macedonia, the same region and time as Alexander the Great. As Plutarch allegedly wrote, Alexander the Great visited the Oracle at Delphi to receive a prophecy before launching his invasion of the known world. The empires created in the wake of Alexander are the reason for the Greek language’s high status in the Eastern Mediterranean and the foundation of the Library of Alexandria in the 3^rd century BC.

For the first time, the Greeks weren’t contained to numerous small city-states organized by verbal debates in town squares, but ran a multi-continental and multicultural empire that needed massive amounts of intellectual capital and resources to run one of the world’s largest empires. The scholars at the Library amassed scrolls attempting to standardize the bewildering number of variations already apparent in the works of the ancient Greeks. To create the first editions of ancient Greek texts, they compared extant scrolls, debated their merits of authenticity, and produced texts with notes strewn across the page much as modern scholars do today in their efforts to precisely determine what the Greeks who came before them had said.

Centuries later, those Alexandrian editions were copied and some of the resulting post-Alexandrian scrolls were likely part of the transmission thread used for the even later Byzantine codices. Eventually, some scrolls were discarded in a dump in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt during the first few centuries AD. Under the sands, the millions of mostly tiny fragments were preserved simply due to the extremely low level of moisture and humidity in the area.

Most of these texts are administrative documents for the region, but about 10% are literary. The tiny fragments of ancient literature have been painstakingly edited and continue to yield new discoveries that add variations or verses to existing texts. Some texts, however, have their only extant evidence in these remains, such as a fragmentary copy of Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians. This text has survived not through continuous human intervention but survived primarily due to the environmental conditions of Egypt.

Media Materiality

The survival of texts based on the materiality of their media in certain environmental conditions rather than continuous human utility raises the question of the materiality of the media that the world possesses today which contain ancient Greek texts.

The oldest extant Greek literature was written on papyrus, initially as scrolls before being utilized in codex form. Papyrus was the main writing surface for millennia in the Eastern Mediterranean before parchment overtook it around the 5^th century AD. During the period of parchment dominance, the orthographic shift from majuscule to miniscule script took place in the 9^th century. Greek texts were slowly copied onto paper and became the dominant material after the invention of the printing press in the 15^th century. The scrolls, manuscripts, and books could survive for centuries without being used as a model for a future copy, and indeed we still have quite a few of them with us in relatively good condition over a thousand years since their creation. In other words, the refresh cycle needed to maintain those texts was and remains relatively long.

Based on the ancient materials and the resulting centuries of transliterations and scholarly debates, there are now modern critical editions of Greek texts printed on paper in the thousands from collections such as the Oxford Classical Texts and the Bibliotheca Teubneriana. All the material in academic papers alone may be enough to reconstruct a relatively complete corpus of ancient Greek texts. However, unlike the old paper made from hemp and linen rags, the vast majority of paper in use since the 1800s is from lower-quality wood pulp. Wood pulp’s acidity and short cellulose chains make it liable to dissolve in a matter of decades.

In addition to the transference of texts from one medium to another, there is inherent value in the very format of older textual materials like manuscripts, which sometimes preserve information that can’t simply be copied to a new format. Thus, there are facsimiles of specific manuscripts in digital formats like magnetic tape, floppy disks, optical drives, and hard drives. These resources are copied in the millions and their accessibility results in findings that would otherwise be impossible, including by amateurs like myself.

While creating a guide to understanding the layout of a Byzantine manuscript, I utilized the tools and images from The Homer Multitext Project, which is supported by Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies. The Homer Multitext Project carefully photographed manuscripts that contained the Iliad and created digital copies to indirectly assist in the preservation of the manuscripts. The Project also built an impressive suite of tools that empowered users to search for and identify various categories of information in the manuscripts. While using these tools I found to my dismay that many features no longer work. Only one manuscript can still be searched within their software, and only in very limited ways. Many functions don’t work at all and bring the user to an error page. Unfortunately, even top scholars in the field of Classics with support from the wealthiest academic institution in the USA find it too cumbersome and expensive to maintain this kind of digital infrastructure.

Despite the huge number of ancient texts and their modern re-creations scattered throughout the world today, the future existence of ancient Greek texts is far from assured. Digital media is constantly at risk of decay and the infrastructure required to support each item is far more intense than what was required to support Greek texts at the Library of Alexandria or Christian monasteries.

My end-user experience doesn’t necessarily mean the digital storage of the images themselves is at risk. However, the creators of the project themselves hypothesized in their companion book to the Project that the high-end electronic devices holding the digital copies of the manuscripts, which were created in 2008, will likely not be operational in 2018, and that “only a miracle” would allow them to continue functioning by 2028.

Magnetic media is the technology used in hard drives and flash drives to store and transmit data. As a human can’t read directly off those drives, a technological intermediary like a computer is necessary to read the data. These storage units transfer hundreds of millions of bits per second in the forms of “1s” and “0s” to communicate their information. These 1s and 0s aren’t numbers of a screen, however, but the fundamental lowest unit of information structured in a binary relationship. The ‘bits’ are tiny, physical materials that momentarily exist along magnetic bands to be read by the computer which renders the information legible to a human reader, such as a Greek text. The problem is that without regular usage magnetic charges easily dissipate, and even through regular usage a hard drive will quickly decay.

Ultimately, when compared with previous centuries this circumstance of preservation and transmission is merely a difference in degree, not kind. Texts still need to be copied to a new material to preserve them. Furthermore, the timescale of this refresh cycle is mere decades with newer technology, rather than centuries with prior media. With the greater number of available texts in our possession, there is also a greater amount of intellectual labour and expertise required to maintain the infrastructure to support these refresh cycles.

There is one newer material that likely lasts longer: microfilm. Kodak, which introduced polyester-based microfilm in the 1990s, has claimed that in perfect conditions their microfilm can last up to 500 years. Besides the fact that this claim can’t yet be proven, it’s remarkable that even the most promising of modern media will almost certainly not last as long as the extant media from the printing press and before. Although 500 years is a long time, it pales in comparison to the grand life of the transmission of Greek texts.

It is spectacular to have discovered ancient papyri hidden for over a thousand years, but such fortune cannot be taken for granted. It’s extremely unlikely for texts to survive without providing continued utility to secure continual interest in them, the creation of new copies, and, therefore, their future transmission.

Ruins vs Literature

There is one material I haven’t yet discussed: stone. This essay began with a question of how Plutarch’s texts from nearly 2000 years ago can be read today despite none of his autograph copies surviving. Through his texts, we can begin to understand the operation of the Oracle at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. What about the site of Delphi itself; does it not reveal its histories, religiosities, and philosophies? There are copious archaeological remains from Delphi that help reveal aspects of its history, and the site itself is a major tourist attraction. However, that materiality is not the reason for its life in the imaginations and manuscripts of the thousands of years since the alleged historical and mythological prophecies of its Oracle.

Delphi contains more inscriptions than anywhere else in Greece, such as steles noting grand sums of donations to Delphi and inscriptions outlining the number of soldiers who died fighting against the Persians. These provide historiographical information about what occurred, when, and how that information, whether true or not, was displayed to the public. But they are not literature, they don’t explore societal debates or conflicts of the soul.

More importantly, for over a thousand years, Delphi essentially existed in literature only. When the oracle lost her powers over a world that had moved on from Greco-Roman religion, Delphi was abandoned. Buried under dirt over the centuries, a modern village had unknowingly been built right over the old ruins, which were discovered and excavated in the late 1800s. If it weren’t for the hundreds of prophecies that were allegedly uttered at Delphi, preserved and discussed over the millennia, would anyone have cared to move an entire village to excavate a pile of rocks? Would people’s imagination be fired up by a few stones of the Temple of Apollo, or is it not the place of Greece that essentially matters, but the place it occupies in the mind?

Case in point: The most famous inscriptions at Delphi such as “Know Thyself”, “Nothing in Excess”, and the mysterious “E” were never found in the excavations. They are instead known through texts like Plutarch’s that have been passed down the millennia. Indeed, Plutarch’s texts about Delphi aren’t historiographical information written for an unknown, future reader about what happened in Delphi; they’re a philosophical dialogue in the model of Plato between multiple people that ultimately explores the nature of the soul. That modern readers of Plutarch can glean historical information for their visit to Delphi through his text is simply a byproduct of the original intention of Plutarch’s texts, and clear evidence that the same text can be utilized differently by two utterly distant societies.

Utility, not Materiality

While some texts, like Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians, are preserved through environmental preservation, if ancient Greek literature wasn’t still in vogue and in use in the 1800s, would anyone have the care or funding to sort through millions of tiny pieces of papyrus in the middle of the desert? Would anyone even be able to read them and put them together? Environmental preservation and modern technology alone cannot be relied on to preserve ancient Greek texts. They can only continue to be preserved with ever-growing labour and interest.

Unlike the ancient literature preserved in the tombs of ancient Egypt, created for the private purpose of navigating the afterlife, the literature of ancient Greece has always been engaged with through dialogue, often in public. Many texts likely began in venues of exchange, like the Socratic Dialogues and dramas of the Tragedians.

The culture of knowledge production that generated Greek texts in ancient times has continued – re-imagined, reformed, reduced, and often misquoted – in the following millennia as people from vastly different stations and circumstances around the world continued to utilize whatever version of the texts they had at hand for their own inter-relational efforts in religion, statecraft, philosophy, education, science, and historiography. As Greek texts were engaged, their materiality was continually instantiated in slavish copies, paraphrase, translations, and critical editions. These renewed materials allowed Greek voices to continue reverberating and reflecting off the walls of time until heard once again as something fundamentally important, continuing the transmission anew.

Transmission, utility, and ingenuity have been the keys to the creation and subsequent survival of the selection of Greek texts that survive today, not the preservation of their materiality. Given the constant, irreversible decay of the materials that contain Greek texts, only if modern and future societies engage with Greek literature as items of utility will future millennia have a chance to hear the echoes of the words of the ancient Greeks.

For sources researched in the production of this essay, please refer to James Binks' bibliographic post here. It is continually updated with sources as new essays are written.

This month’s guest post is an essay by David Fideler.

David writes about how classical and Renaissance ideas can contribute to today’s world. He’s the author of a book on the Roman philosopher Seneca, published in sixteen languages. You can find him online at Living Ideas Journal. David is also the creator of an immersive, five-day educational program in Florence, Italy, and he’s currently writing a book about the Renaissance.

What does it mean to have a healthy relationship with the past, and how can we weave past, present, and future together in some meaningful way?

Renaissance thinkers have provided us with comprehensive answers. But these ideas have been largely forgotten because, in our modern age, real knowledge of the past has often been disdained and rejected.

This rejection of past knowledge is dangerous, threatening to crush human nature into a flat, sterile, and soulless “present,” lacking in beauty but steeped in dissatisfaction and numbness. It is this dissatisfaction and unrootedness in a real, living world that leads to endless dystopian dreams about the future: colonies on Mars, brain/machine interfaces, transhumanism, and economies run by artificial intelligence.

Yet beneath this chic modernism, our love for the past endures. Consider the allure that ancient cultural centers like Athens, Rome, and Florence hold for millions of visitors each year. In terms of human longing, delight, and appreciation, our inner love for the past never vanishes, and it offers a soothing antidote to mechanistic dreams of the future. Simply put, a part of the human soul revels in the particular, the historical, and the antique.

Our appreciation for classical forms of architecture further amplifies this sense of connectedness. Based on proportion, harmony, and beauty, traditional architecture makes us feel truly at home in the world. This sense of belonging is an effect that sterile steel and glass skyscrapers can never achieve. While skyscrapers might provide a momentary sense of exhilaration, becoming an eyeball hovering above the world as a spectator doesn’t translate into a feeling of being at home.

The Importance of Historical Awareness

Having a sense of history is crucial for several reasons. First, we all originate from somewhere, so learning about our intellectual and historical roots is vital. Additionally, studying history helps us to avoid repeating past mistakes. Aristotle’s introduction to his Politics encapsulates this well:

The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is. Such men bear tyranny easily; for they have nothing with which to compare it.

Cicero took another approach: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by history.”

This idea of being woven into life is compelling. We don’t need to believe in anything special to realize that being woven into human life or bound to those who came before is very important—because if we don’t feel embedded in the world, we sense alienation instead.

While learning the lessons of history is certainly beneficial, feeling woven into the world, in response to historic architecture, can be a tangible experience.

As a former United States resident, I moved to Europe to escape modern architecture and homes clad with aluminum or vinyl siding. Now, I find joy in walking past classically inspired buildings and centuries-old architecture each day. These structures radiate a beauty that most modernist, purely “functional” buildings lack.

Architecture profoundly influences us, even if subconsciously. In my experience, residing in the historical part of a European city enhances my happiness. Much like the impact of the company we keep, buildings radiating harmony, beauty, and good proportion positively influence us. Outer harmony and beauty foster an inner sense of tranquility. By exposure to beautiful environments, we can elevate our minds and deepen our sense of connection with the world.

Recently, while walking through the old part of Perugia, Italy, I repeatedly noticed how newer buildings still incorporated patterns and imprints from the past, like a church with an ancient Gothic opening traced in its brickwork. In Perugia, where countless examples of this can be seen, remnants of the past blend seamlessly with more recent history.

But these organic developments never seem out of place, giving cities like Perugia their unique charm. Walking among these beautiful structures, we feel nestled in the past while joyously living in the present. Unlike modernist design, traditional architecture fosters a profound sense of being rooted and at home in the world. It allows us to embrace modernity and cultivate modern thoughts, but it also allows us to feel happier and more connected with the world in which we live. It gives our lives a depth and rootedness that stretches back into the past. Traditional architecture doesn't make us feel any less modern, but it does make us feel more human.

The Lost Art of Weaving Past, Present, and Future Together

During the Renaissance, the art of intertwining past, present, and future reached its apex. Now largely forgotten, it could be revived today.

Simply put, integrating past, present, and future is vital for our collective and individual well-being. With too much focus on the past, one could become backward-looking. With too much focus on the present, we risk becoming disconnected, trapped in the bubble of the instant, perhaps staring into a cell phone while walking down the street. With too much focus on the future, our minds could leave the Earth behind with dreams of colonizing the stars.

In short, to feel complete as human beings, we need to unite past, present, and future potential, while doing justice to each.

Renaissance thinkers mastered this art of integration, and we can learn valuable lessons by drawing on their insights today.

Learning from the Past

The Renaissance era sprang from the seeds sown by Francesco Petrarca (1304–74), today known simply as Petrarch. Petrarch was a classical scholar living in the 1300s, and he felt totally out of place in his own time. When he read the great classical authors of ancient Rome, Petrarch saw an age of light compared with his own dark era.

Petrarch admired ancient literature but lamented his era’s cultural, political, and spiritual corruption. Petrarch then reached a startling conclusion by comparing his time with the past. He realized that there had been a collapse of civilization between his time and the fall of Rome, and Petrarch invented the idea of “the Dark Ages” to explain it.

In the end, Petrarch concluded that the only way to restore civilization was to recreate the world of ancient Rome and Greece. This project also involved reviving the ancient world’s deepest values and moral philosophy. This idea was the ultimate seed from which the Renaissance arose, which was a conscious effort of Petrarch’s followers—the Renaissance humanists—to foster a genuine rebirth of ancient civilization. It was this effort that made the Renaissance truly a rebirth.

I’ve written elsewhere about how Roman Stoic philosophy inspired Petrarch and other humanists to draw upon ancient philosophy as a way to transform their corrupt society. But here, I want to focus on architecture’s role in this transformation.

As historian James Hankins has explained, in addition to reviving ancient virtue ethics (and what he calls “virtue politics”), Renaissance thinkers sought to create virtuous environments that would be contemplative settings, reminding them of the classical world and its wisdom. What this meant in practice was reviving the architecture of ancient Rome.

This architectural effort started in the birthplace of the Renaissance—Florence, Italy—where thinkers felt a strong kinship with the ancient Romans. Like the humanists, who wanted to recover the lost manuscripts and wisdom of the ancients, architects became obsessed with unlocking the secrets of Roman architecture from the past.

Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), the founder of Renaissance architecture, started this trend. According to his biographer, Brunelleschi traveled to Rome with his friend, the sculptor Donatello, to survey, sketch, and measure the remaining architectural remains of ancient Rome—most of which had been looted for materials and severely damaged over the centuries.

According to this report, Brunelleschi spent years, off and on, studying the buildings of Rome before creating his own masterpieces, including the magnificent dome on the cathedral of Florence (Santa Maria di Fiore).

Brunelleschi’s dome, built with over four million bricks, remains the largest masonry dome in the world today. When constructed, it was larger than the domes of the Pantheon in Rome and Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

Brunelleschi would have studied the Pantheon while in Rome. In fact, the Pantheon was the only masterpiece of Roman architecture that stood fully intact because it had been converted into a church and was preserved by its new Christian guardians.

In any case, Brunelleschi started a trend. Every prominent Renaissance architect to follow him made the same pilgrimage to Rome to study, sketch, and measure the ancient Roman buildings—or what remained of them.

Taking measurements was essential because ancient architecture was based on proportion and harmony—which gives rise to beauty—so having the exact measurements allowed Renaissance architects to reconstruct the correct proportions of ancient architecture. For example, one common proportion used in Renaissance doorways is the ratio of 1:2, the octave, which was rediscovered through the study of ancient specimens.

Surpassing the Ancients and Creating the Best Possible World

Petrarch, the catalyst for Renaissance humanism, had a somewhat pessimistic, backward-looking outlook. He viewed the works of ancient Latin writers like Cicero, Seneca, and Virgil as so exalted they might be impossible to surpass in quality.

But this attitude started to shift after Petrarch’s death, especially in the early 1400s, as the Renaissance began to emerge strongly in Florence. The prominent humanist Collucio Salutati (1331–1406), who followed in Petrarch’s footsteps, wrote, “I have always believed I must imitate antiquity not simply to reproduce it, but in order to produce something new.”

But the greatest spokesperson of Renaissance optimism and human achievement was the extraordinary “Renaissance man” Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), a learned humanist and classical scholar who was also an art theorist, practicing architect, mathematician, and the pioneer in publishing the secrets of linear perspective—the cornerstone of Renaissance painting.

Born into a family exiled from Florence, Alberti crafted the most iconic expression of Renaissance optimism: “Human beings can accomplish whatever they wish, if they have the will.”

If Alberti harbored any pessimism, it dissipated upon his return to Florence in 1434, when he witnessed the near completion of Brunelleschi’s dome, still the tallest structure in the city. Towering above the Florentine skyline and casting its shadow across the town, Brunelleschi’s dome was a profound human achievement, perhaps comparable to landing human beings on the moon today. Nothing like the dome had ever been created before on that scale, and it convinced Alberti and other Florentines that they could achieve anything if they only set their minds to it.

From that point on, Alberti realized it was not only possible to learn from the ancients—it was also possible to surpass them. In a message written to Brunelleschi, Alberti described a continual evolution in the arts and sciences, and he noted that the Florentines of his time had shown that it was possible to exceed the ancients.

This contagious optimism went on to permeate the entire Renaissance. It was manifested in various domains, such as architecture, sculpture, and painting, yielding unprecedented masterpieces like those of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Rafael.

Originally conceived to resurrect past knowledge and wisdom, the Renaissance quickly evolved into an era where anything seemed possible. Even in its original goal, Renaissance humanism aimed to draw upon the past to create a better world—both in the present and future. And as long as the Renaissance lasted, this goal was often achieved.

While Petrarch lamented the idea that he was living in a “Dark Age,” just a few decades later, writers in Florence were celebrating how they were living in a new Golden Age. That is a profound cultural transformation, to say the least, and was a triumph of Renaissance humanism.

We can also see the success of the Renaissance movement tangibly reflected in remarkable buildings, like the Palazzo Medici, since architecture like this didn’t even exist before the Renaissance. As you might recall, only ruins of ancient buildings remained in Rome. The dedicated work of Renaissance architects and scholars, studying the broken remains of Roman buildings, allowed masterpieces like this to be created.

How We Could Apply Renaissance Ideas Today

In the same way that Renaissance thinkers sought to identify and apply the best wisdom of the ancient world in their own time, we could do the same today. But in addition to classical writers, we can also draw upon the wisdom and knowledge of the Renaissance.

Discovering ways to draw on the wisdom of the past is a goal of the Renaissance Program, which doesn’t focus on just learning about past thinkers but on what we might learn from them.

In addition to offering a short course in Florence to introduce participants to the ideas that ignited and shaped the Renaissance, the Renaissance Program also looks at how these ideas were applied.

Exploring how these ideas were put into practice during the Renaissance can inform fields like education and architecture today, offering a way to blend past, present, and future to create a more humane, vibrant, and fulfilling world.

As the philosopher Edmund Burke noted in 1790, human civilization is a timeless partnership in all the arts and sciences. For this reason, he wrote, our human work spans generations, and thus society “becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

We could, for example, significantly apply Renaissance thought to modern architecture today—a field in which many architects gave up on the idea of beauty long ago. But in contrast to many moderns, Renaissance architects realized that beauty was an objective aspect of nature that could be studied, understood, and applied to create beautiful works.

The knowledge of how to create beautiful buildings was never entirely lost to architects—indeed, it still exists today if someone wants to seek it out. Instead, it became ignored, forgotten, and sometimes suppressed, like other forms of historical knowledge.

As scholar and historian Michael R.J. Bonner has pointed out, the Futurist Manifesto (1909) of the Italian poet and art theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti called for the legacy of the past not to be superseded but to be “wholly repudiated and destroyed.” He believed that the relics of the past needed obliteration to pave the way for a glorious future.

Marinetti advocated the eradication of antiquated museums, libraries, and books, seeing them as roadblocks to progress. In one of his most striking declarations, he encouraged his readers to “Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!”

While this is an extreme and insane vision, laced with violence, it’s not that much different from our typical, modern view that the past is worthless, since it has been superseded by “progress.” Of course, this destruction of the past is opposite to the worldview of the Renaissance humanists, who believed we could create a true partnership across time—weaving past, present, and future together—to create a much better world.

In conclusion, we still have much to learn from the Renaissance today, including how we could transform education and create a more beautiful and satisfying world.

The Renaissance reminds us that the past, tradition, and profound innovation are complementary forces rather than opposing ones. By weaving together these elements, we, too, can create lasting works of greatness to benefit our time and future generations.

Further Reading

Living Ideas Journal. An online journal edited by David Fideler on how the humanities can contribute to today’s world and deepen our experience of being alive.

The Renaissance Program in Florence. A five-day immersive course entitled Creating the Best Possible World: The Energizing Ideas of the Italian Renaissance.

In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present. An important book by Michael R.J. Bonner on why having a sense of the past is essential and how it has led to the renewal of civilization on various occasions and in different epochs.

Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy by James Hankins. A massive and comprehensive study by the foremost intellectual historian of the Renaissance about how the revival of classical ethical philosophy helped to inspire the emergence of the Renaissance and its social thought.

Leon Battista Alberti: The Chameleon’s Eye by Caspar Person. An engaging and recent biography of Alberti, the avatar of Renaissance optimism, which beautifully details the impact that Brunelleschi’s dome had on Alberti’s thought about human achievement.

Today’s guest post is by Michael Bonner, a communications and public policy consultant, and senior analyst at Mandeville Strategy. He holds a doctorate in Iranian history from the University of Oxford, and is also an author. His latest book, In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present, can be ordered on Amazon.

In the summer of 2007, I was travelling in East Africa. It was the end of undergrad and, as I supposed, the last moment of leisure before going overseas to do a Master’s. I had brought a copy of the Aeneid to keep my Latin up to snuff: I was insecure and fearful of being outdone by more competent graduates, and carried the book everywhere with me. Somewhere in Kenya at a tourist stop overlooking the Rift Valley, my tour group and I stopped for a break. I sat down to read, and a man approached me. He asked me about my book and what I was doing with it. He listened respectfully, as I described the plot, told him a little about Vergil, the Latin language, and the age of the Aeneid. He was visibly shocked, and spoke to the effect that so ancient a work of literature could only be a work of genius, well worth reading by everyone. We continued speaking, and the man confessed that he had had little education and could read only a little.

I too was shocked. Explaining the value of classical literature to strangers in the ‘Global North’ had never worked. I had had few colleagues in classics and Near and Middle Eastern languages, and people outside those tiny departments were invariably baffled by ancient literature. Many of my companions, tourists from Europe and America, were likewise puzzled. ‘Why bother?’, ‘What will you do with that?’ were always the incredulous questions, as though the only measure of learning was its application to the labour market. More alarming, though, was the implication that whatever was old could not possibly hold any interest or value for a ‘modern’ person. In contrast, a poor, semi-literate stranger in sub-Saharan Africa instantly recognised the high worth of a 2,000-year old Latin poem.

But my surprise was misleading. It was not the Kenyan stranger who was the odd one out. By historical and international standards, he represents the normal, human instinct to venerate the past and to look there for knowledge and wisdom. It is we Westerners who stand out with our aberrant assumption that the heritage of the past is worthless.

The (re)discovery of the past

About 12,000 years ago, when human beings first began to settle down, we came to see ourselves as having a particular place and purpose in the world. This new outlook was occasioned by the awareness of a shared past which seemed relevant to both the present moment and to the future. The earliest signs of this attitude take shape in Neolithic ancestor worship and the use of public ritual sites over many generations — the best studied of these being the megalithic, Stonehenge-like structure at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey. This discovery of a shared past and the veneration of ancestors happened long before the development of agriculture, writing, statecraft, and empires.

With that discovery of the past, our ancient ancestors were no longer confined within the narrow limits of the present moment. Concern and interest began to extend beyond the immediate group of living relatives, and far into the past and into the future. An idea of permanence took shape, and this remained, as I argue, the impetus for the earliest civilisations in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

All subsequent civilisations have found meaning and purpose in the past — a past which they tried to live up to and imitate. And amidst degradation or collapse, it was in the past that the impetus for renewal was found.

Consider the following words, written during what we still refer to as the European Dark Ages:

Our ancestors…loved wisdom, and through it they obtained wealth and passed it on to us. Here one can still see their track, but we cannot follow it. Therefore we have now lost the wealth as well as the wisdom, because we did not wish to set our minds to the track.

Those are the worlds of Alfred the Great, king of Wessex in the late 9th century. He was reflecting upon the sorry state of Britain after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century and destruction brought by the Norsemen closer to his own time. Worst of all, in Alfred’s view, his countrymen had long ago failed to maintain the learning needed to understand the huge amount of Latin literature amassed during what we call the early Middle Ages. Knowledge of Latin had been confined to an ever-narrowing circle of learned elites, and the sort of intellectual curiosity required for the management of the church and proper functioning of the state had not yet been cultivated. 

Alfred wanted to do something about this problem. So he sponsored a movement whereby, as he said, ‘certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know’ would be translated from Latin into Old English, so that everyone would be able to understand them. Naturally, this also meant training up a class of hyper-literate youths to do all the required translating and copying in both languages.

As Alfred himself says, he was aware that ancient knowledge had been transmitted through translation. The one example he cites is the Bible, placing his own efforts at the end of a long migration from Hebrew into Greek and from Greek into Latin. And he notes that other Christian peoples had done the same thing in their own languages also. But there was surely another motivation, though Alfred conceals it. The so-called Carolingian Renaissance had begun in the late 8th century in Continental Europe under the patronage of the Frankish king Charlemagne and his adviser Alcuin of York. This was a movement to reassemble, copy, and disseminate the surviving relics of classical Latin literature, and to reinforce a high standard of written and spoken classical Latin in Charlemagne’s kingdom. It seems probable that this example loomed large in Alfred’s mind.

But what was the impetus for the Carolingian revival? The inspiration must be sought in yet another, earlier rebirth that began in the 8th century, far away in the political, intellectual, and cultural capital of western Eurasia: Baghdad.

Civilizational renewal in the Caliphate

What we conventionally call the Islamic Golden Age began when the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur (r. 754–775 AD) sponsored the translation of scientific, medical, and philosophical texts from various languages, including Middle Persian, Sanskrit, and especially Greek, into Arabic. His successors followed his example, and the so-called Abbasid Translation Movement took shape on a gigantic scale, dwarfing the near-contemporary, and derivative, efforts of Alcuin and Alfred.

Translators in service to the Caliphs got their Hellenic texts from two sources: translations into Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic) of the original Greek works, and Greek manuscripts direct from the Eastern Roman Empire, or what we call Byzantium. Getting texts direct from Byzantium meant that the entire corpus of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen, and so on, became accessible to scholars throughout the Iranian world and beyond. So it is no surprise that so many extraordinary polymaths, such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Averroes, Avicenna, and others, flourished for some two centuries as a direct result of Abbasid interest in ancient learning. And the by-products of this interest included the revival of ancient scholarship in Byzantium itself, as well as the intellectual transformations overseen by Charlemagne and Alfred.

The Islamic Golden Age was distinguished by confidence in all branches of knowledge. While scientists and philosophers assimilated the Greek heritage, historians and raconteurs rummaged through Byzantine, Iranian, Indian, and Chinese literature and historiography. This huge array of material might have amounted to an inchoate mass of anecdotes or disjointed aphorisms encumbered by long chains of witnesses and authorities, or isnads are they are called in Arabic. Earlier Arabic historiography was like this before writers developed confidence in their powers of narrative unity and synthesis.  But the writers of the 9th and 10th centuries had that confidence, and were models of clarity. Al-Jahiz, the greatest stylist of that age, described good prose as brief, clear, and free of mannerism and affectation. The works of Ya’qubi, Ibn Mu’tazz, Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih, Mas’udi, and so on, adhere to the same principles. Their vivid and elegant histories and other works may still be read for pleasure.

Apart from elegance and clarity, what those writers have in common is an interest in reconnecting their own time with the very remote past. This interest began with Abu Hanifah al-Dinawari. He was an Iranian scholar of the 9th century, and a near contemporary of Alfred the Great. It was Dinawari who inaugurated the genre of universal history within an Islamic context. He places his country at the centre of human history, and weaves the rise of Islam and the Arab conquests into the larger tapestry of the biblical and mythical past. The result is, so to speak, a genealogy of Iranian and Islamic civilization going back both to the Hebrew patriarchs all the way to Adam and to the ancient heroes and kings of Zoroastrian scripture. Subsequent Muslim historians (most famously Tabari and Mas’udi) followed Dinawari’s example.

Similarly, at the close of the 9th century, when the Welsh bishop Asser came to write the history of the kingdom of Wessex, he approached the subject in exactly the same spirit and gave Alfred’s dynasty a genealogy through a line of Germanic pagan heroes, to Noah’s son Seth, and back to Adam. Of course, this trend was more imaginative than factual. But it was, it seems to me, meant to be serious by stretching the link between the present and the past as far as it could go.

I chose those examples from the 9th century, since that epoch was a difficult one for much of humanity. The old world of the Roman and Persian binary order had long been defunct, but the unitary Caliphate that had replaced most of it was beginning to fall apart. Matters were far worse in western Europe, where the regrowth of sub-Roman civilisation and a fragile political order were under constant threat from Viking marauders. Amidst so much uncertainty, rooting your dynasty in the remote past might have been the only thing you could have done to shore it up against a world of vicissitude and chaos. Dinawari and company had much the same motivation to emphasise continuity with the very ancient Zoroastrian and Judaeo-Christian past. The power of the Abbasid Caliphate had begun to wane, as local Iranian dynasties asserted their prestige and independence, and as the Caliphs themselves fell under the sway of their own ‘praetorian guard’ of Turkic military officers whom they had recruited. The 9th century saw several intervals of anarchy; and toward its end, the infamous Zanj Revolt was perhaps the largest slave uprising of all time. And yet, civilization pulled through in the Abbasid Caliphate, and took root and grew in the West where it was sorely needed.

But the story of rebirth is not limited to the 9th century, of course. Many in the West will probably associate revival in Europe more readily with the Italian Renaissance than with Charlemagne and Alfred. The story is incomplete either way, though, and the field of view too narrow. What we conventionally call ‘the’ Renaissance would never have happened without those earlier revivals under Charlemagne, at Byzantium, and in the Abbasid Caliphate. Moreover, the story of the ebb and flow of civilisation is a universal one — whether the rise and collapse of Mesopotamian city-states, the waxing and waning of the ancient Egyptian state and civilisation together, the ebb and flow of Chinese dynastic power, or the survival of Iranian culture and statecraft despite repeated foreign conquest.

Rebirth today

What would rebirth mean in our own time?

I wonder whether it is even possible. One of the central doctrines of liberal ideology — now triumphant throughout the West — is that the past is nothing but a record of error and ignorance best forgotten. Moreover, liberalism promises a break with the past by freeing the individual from all ancestral and institutional ties. The inner logic to this process was, as John Stuart Mill (1808–1873) put it, derived from a view of history as a perpetual ‘struggle between liberty and authority’. The idea here is that progress, both moral and technological, was an irresistible law of history. Here, Mill was building on some of the more extreme ideas of the French Enlightenment, such as that of François-Jean de Chastellux (1734–1788) who thought that all history was nothing but a record of unhappiness. Mankind, thought Chastellux, had greater need of forgetting than of remembering; and contemporary westerners, such as my East African travelling companions, seem to agree.

The problem is that it has always been easy for liberals to sweep away not only demonstrable injustices and evils but also anything that just happened to be old. The process of abolition did not stop at the repudiation of aristocratic privileges, slavery, the autonomy of the church, local self-government, seemingly irrational mediaeval legal practices, and so on. Innumerable beneficial things, such as small, local institutions and family bonds, have also been eroded or destroyed in the quest for individual freedom. And liberalism has failed to replace them, leaving behind either a sense of benign indifference or, worse, outright nihilism.

This is why the richest and best-educated Westerners sneer at Vergil, but a semi-literate peasant from Kenya does not.

Until we in the West can once again persuade ourselves that the past matters, that it is a source of meaning and purpose, there will be no recovery now or in the future. But perhaps reflection on the past is the wrong place to start. Maybe we should begin with the present moment in which contemporary life has fallen far short of the fin-de-siècle optimism of the 1990s. I like to joke that the ‘whole new world’ promised us by both Francis Fukuyama and Disney’s Aladdin is much like the old world, only worse.

Less facetiously, we can note that a kind of loneliness grew over the course of the twentieth century in the West, and worsened towards its end. Participation in clubs or civic societies declined. The number of men with no close friends at all has increased fivefold since 1990. Suicides have been increasing in America since the end of the twentieth century, and in 2016 Europe was found to be the most suicidal region in the world by gross rate. Average life expectancy in America has begun to decline. Now hopelessness, despondency, and a sort of ‘flatness’ have been invoked to describe the dominant feeling of our time. 

Declinism no longer elicits scoffing as it once did. Peter Frankopan’s New Silk Roads, for instance, appeared in 2018, and it is a tale of Western decline and the rise of Asia. Canadian academic Andrew Potter’s 2021 book On Decline determines that 2016 was the year that decline set in for good. Books with such titles as Disorder and The End of the World is Just the Beginning, and Doom have begun to appear, predicting — without hyperbole — looming catastrophes comparable to the Bronze Age Collapse. And, of course, Donald Trump still speaks incessantly of American decay and Western stagnation, while Greta Thunberg prophesies imminent and irreversible calamity. Many agree with them, and we will hear more such talk for some time, I am sure.

However these predictions turn out, the failure of the optimism of the 1990s should be cause for humility, and the realization that we are no better than our ancestors. Our technological achievements are surely impressive, and in some ways life has become easier, but we have not become more virtuous, more civilized, or more humane. The same questions about what makes us human that we have always had to confront are still with us. They are arguably more pressing now because of the dislocations and alienations caused by technology. But to judge by contemporary nihilism and unhappiness, the 21st century has not yielded any good answers so far, and no amount of innovation will help.

‘Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us’ (Eccl. 1.10). Those are the famous words of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher in the Hebrew Bible who ‘communed with [his] own heart’, and realised that ‘there is no new thing under the sun’ (Eccl. 1.16; 9).

Somewhat more comforting words on the same theme were written by Marcus Aurelius in the same spirit of private reflection. The rational soul, Marcus said,

goes over the whole universe and the surrounding void and surveys its shape, reaches out into the boundless extent of time, embraces and ponders the periodic rebirth of the whole and understands that those who come after us will behold nothing new nor did those who came before us behold anything greater, but in a way the man of forty years, if he have any understanding at all, has seen all that has been and that will be… (Meditations, 11.1)

Perhaps we are finally ready to hear this again.

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death.

– Nassim Taleb

In ancient times, how one died determined how well one lived. The good life required a good death.

When Croesus asked Solon, “Have you ever known a happier man than me?” Solon replied by naming three dead nobodies. Croesus was shocked. He was a wealthy and powerful king. Surely that’s sufficient for the top 3? It wasn't, at least for the Athenian poet and statesman. Happy people live full lives, die well, and receive honorable burials. Croesus had yet to die and he was unaware that his wealth and power were about to vanish.

Do we think dying well is a part of living well? To some extent. Euthanasia bills, like Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying, force conversations about the end-of-life. Though the modern West can hardly say that the idea of a good death is as central as it was for the ancients, we’re arguably moving in a classical direction. The argument that one should be able to “die with dignity” suggests that a good life must end well.

Though our liberty to die well may be expanding, the chance of a meaningful memorial is vanishing. That renders our existence less socially significant. The classical view that it matters how we enter the grave and how we’re treated once we’re laid to rest is the correct one.

Dying Well

Imagine the value of one’s life could be compressed into a simple graph. If you’re a utilitarian, that’s easy (at least in theory). Utilitarians maximize the good. Classically, utilitarians are hedonists and understand the good to be happiness.

When the value of a life is a function of how much happiness it includes, the value of a life can be graphed like this:

This graph compresses the rollercoaster of life. It gives it a sense of direction.

If you’re not a utilitarian, the exercise is more difficult. Nonetheless, even if welfare is the result of a complex function or can’t be mathematically modeled, we have the sense that some parts of our lives are better than others. When we combine our evaluations of the parts of life into a story, a direction emerges. Our life can improve over time (or the opposite).

Consider these two graphs:

Even if these have the same amount of happiness in total, they are not the same. Most prefer the second story. This shows, to the extent that it can be shown, that there’s value in the story of a life. We prefer a comeback to a disgraceful fall from glory. A life’s significance depends on more than the value of its parts.

After Solon left, Croesus’s kingdom was annihilated by Cyrus the Great. So much for Croesus’s “happiness”. As Cyrus’s men put Croesus to death he yells “Oh Solon!” Dying well matters because it is a part of the narrative structure of one’s life. Terrible endings ruin books, movies, and lives. Excellent endings may redeem them.

There were two kinds of paradigmatic good endings for the classical man. The first is to die serving their city. This is the fate of the Solon’s happiest of men, Tellus:

When the Athenians had a war against their neighbors in Eleusis, coming to the rescue and making a rout of the enemy he died most beautifully, and the Athenians had buried him publicly right where he fell and honored him greatly.

– Herodotus,  Histories

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. What joy, to die for one’s country.

The other good death was the autonomously chosen one. Deciding to go could be an honorable thing. The Roman philosopher, Seneca wrote:

​​It is not a question of dying earlier or later, but of dying well or ill. And dying well means escape from the danger of living ill.

It is better to die than live in dishonor, pointless suffering, or vice. In the same letter, Seneca ends:

Reason, too, advises us to die, if we may, according to our taste; if this cannot be, she advises us to die according to our ability, and to seize upon whatever means shall offer itself for doing violence to ourselves.

These were the ideal forms of death so we shouldn’t overestimate their dominance in the ancient world. Roman emperors did not commit suicide unless they were essentially forced to.

Nonetheless, the idea of a good death was central. It provided a target that many ancients aimed for, even if they fell short of it. They understood that it was good to die for a cause, especially for one’s city or country. If no such cause was available, it would be better to die by one’s own hand than leave death to fortune, which could prolong life for no reason and result in a disgraceful death.

The Freedom to Die Well

To die for one’s country is no longer as honorable as it once was, at least in most circles. Wilfred Owen calls Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori “the old lie” in his striking poem. Whether or not it is a lie, honorably dying for one’s homeland is not usually a viable option.

Nonetheless, in the second kind of good death, suicide, the modern and classical view of death is converging.

Several countries support active euthanasia. Such policies offer “death with dignity.” Instead of choosing the story where one death is left to fortune in an unaesthetic hospital, one may compose an end of one’s choosing. Legally sanctioning some forms of suicide allows people to die in a more classical fashion. 

The typical arguments against such policies are explicitly Christian or borrowed from Christian inheritance. But ancient Romans and Greeks would not see anything wrong with allowing people to poison themselves. Famously, the sage Socrates chose death by hemlock over exile.

The acceptance of active euthanasia brings the modern view of death closer to the classical one. The reason is simple: both worlds recognize that a good death is crucial for a good life. 

However, there is a central difference between passing away today and then. Dying today is a bureaucratic business. Not so, in ancient Greece and Rome. Does this refute the suggestion that the modern and ancient views of the end of life are coming together?

Let’s press the point. Doctors tried to stop the most exemplary suicides of the Romans. Cato the Younger killed himself despite his medics’ attempts at dissuasion. Similarly, Socrates chose hemlock over his friends' suggestion that he flee Athens. Dishonorable suicides, like the emperor Nero’s, explicitly involve the idea that the person to die lacks the courage to do it on their own. Involving the medical establishment is neither necessary nor sufficient for a good suicide. Why involve it by way of legal sanction at all?

In Words to the Wise, The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz puts the argument forcefully:

I support the right to suicide but not the right to physician-assisted suicide. Physician-assisted suicide gives a right to physicians that belongs to patients; it fosters medical-statist tutelage, not self-determination and self-responsibility.

To be explicit, for Szasz, physician-assisted suicide is not a good death because it shuffles responsibility away from the individual and to the state.

People will go to great lengths to seek medical aid in dying. Several traveled hundreds of miles to see Dr. Kevorkian – a doctor who illegally offered euthanasia services in the 90s. Why?

Szasz answers:

[Kvorkian’s] clients traveled, sometimes thousands of miles, to secure his services. If they could do that, they could have killed themselves by other means, for example by architect-assisted suicide, a.k.a. as jumping off a tall building.

What we seek is recognition, in addition to more aesthetic methods of death. This is what Dr. Kvorkian offered. He met the need for an aesthetically satisfying death and social approval. 

Suicide outside of the medical context does not usually possess either of these factors. This is likely a good thing. The typical suicide is a tragic mistake. 

These points suggest a response to Szasz’s autonomy argument. Medically sanctioned suicide provides the possibility of social validation. At its best, it is communal. At its worst, and this is a serious risk, it is bureaucratic and isolating. Perhaps one can draw analogies to marriage or birth. Such events require social and legal recognition. This is true of the classical and modern world.

So, I insist that the acceptance of active euthanasia renders the modern world more classical. However, our loss of an earthly afterlife and neglect of burial does not.

The Earthly Afterlife

Solon’s happiest men would not have been so if they had not received worthy burials.

Solon first named Tellus, a man honored in life and death. Next came Cleobis and Biton, two individuals tied in second place for the happiest of men. Herodotus writes that after driving their mother to a Delphic religious festival:

The youths then lay down in the temple and went to sleep and never rose again; death held them there. The Argives made and dedicated at Delphi statues of them as being the best of men.

For Solon and most ancients, the story of our life extends beyond our organism’s lifespan. One can call this time many things: a period of mourning, a time of memorial, or an earthly afterlife. The chosen term is immaterial, what’s important is understanding that a good burial, lasting legacy, and sense of memorial mattered.

Ideally, the classical person would prefer a life with a good existence and excellent burial to a “better life” and a “worse earthly afterlife.” Consider these representations of different lives:

The pink gradient is the earthly afterlife – appropriately colored I hope. I claim that, ideally, the view that takes the quality of an afterlife seriously would prefer the first life to the following one, even though the “living” part includes more happiness:

Euripides’ Hecuba is a play of the dead. Their demands for recognition, sacrifice, and revenge animate the plot.

The first conflict concerns the desires of a dead man – Achilles. After death, his ghost sought ritual sacrifice. In an attempt to justify sacrificing the daughter of the queen of Troy, Polyxena, Odysseus says:

Tell me, what conduct could be worse than to give your friend a lifetime of honor and respect but neglect him when he dies?

It’s an incredible statement. Today, philosophers debate whether the wishes of the dead matter at all, let alone whether they could justify the sacrifice.

Later in the play, Polyxena dies with grace. She is promised an excellent funeral. The villain’s children are not. There’s justice in that. Such stories portray at least how the idealized ancients wished to die and be treated in death. 

I think it’s fair to say that the wishes of the dead are not as important, at least in the modern West.

Weak evidence for this claim is economic. Over the past 10 years rising funeral costs have failed to outpace inflation. The median funeral isn’t as expensive as it once was.

More striking evidence for this claim was revealed during the pandemic. During covid, people could not attend funerals. I know someone whose mother became exceptionally sick (not from Covid). She attempted to visit but was repeatedly turned away at the Canadian border. Her mother died. She tried to visit again, only to be turned away, again. There are other stories like this.

The Italian philosopher Agamben asked:

How could we have accepted, in the name of a risk that we couldn’t even quantify, not only that the people who are dear to us, and human beings more generally, should have to die alone but also — and this is something that had never happened before in all of history from Antigone to today — that their corpses should be burned without a funeral?

In Antigone, of course, Antigone dies to bury her brother, Polynices. In myth, life is worth risking for the dead. Consider King Priam, endangering himself in the Iliad for the sake of burying his son, Hector.

This is not to say that people should trespass into foreign lands to bury their relatives – that’s an absurd request. Unlike King Priam, they would not meet a persuadable Achilles, but an unfeeling bureaucratic behemoth. There’s a real tragedy in that fact.

Living Well

It’s been written that to philosophize is to learn how to die. I propose that for many of us, that means dying well and being laid to rest with dignity. 

The meaning of our life depends, to some extent, on whether there are people after us. In his book Death and the Afterlife, the philosopher Scheffler argued that our sense of meaning and purpose is deeply tied to our confidence that life will continue after we are gone. The significance of projects like raising a family, contributing to culture, pursuing knowledge, conserving art, and improving the polis all depend on humanity continuing. Why raise a family if the world will end tomorrow? Why conserve, transmit, or improve if everything will be annihilated in one year? 

One way to interpret his view is that meaning is completely contingent on future generations. If there are no descendants, then our lives are meaningless. This interpretation is too strong. A weaker, more plausible interpretation, is that the significance of our lives is impacted by our descendants. A life at the end of time, with no descendants, would have an entirely different meaning than one where life went on. Our lives are significant now. The most meaningful lives, however, extend beyond the grave and impact future generations. Raising a family matters more when your descendants enjoy lives of their own.

What this means, if it is true, is that we shape the meaning of our ancestors’ lives. 

This is not news to traditional cultures. Yet, for those who forsake funerals for speculative benefits for the living, it may be. It is in memorials that we consecrate fallen friends' or relatives' stories. When we forget such acts or devalue them, we may reduce the social meaning of their lives. Of course, there is significant cultural variation when it comes to realizing a funeral. A public display is not always necessary. But, in the words of Odysseus, we should not neglect a friend in death. They make demands of us still. 

This month’s guest post is by Sebastian Garren. Sebastian founded a hybrid classical school, teaches ancient history, Latin, chemistry and economics, designed a game theory board game, runs a yearly logic tournament, and is creating a humanistically inflected career guide for students.

America and the Classics

The Founding Fathers of the United States looked to the texts of Greece and Rome for models of virtue. Such models would instruct one how to behave in the adversity of personal and political life. This study went beyond mere moralizing for the schoolroom. The founders looked to the ancients seeking practical wisdom. 

By practical wisdom, I mean neither technical expertise nor some philosophical theories of life deduced from axioms and definitions, but rather something harder to grasp: the wisdom that comes from dealing with the messiness of reality. The classics might be an indispensable primer for this lifelong task.

John Adams’s most famous quote about education catches the vibe of the expansiveness of practical wisdom:

The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

To John Adams, the classics were the “science of government” and “the arts of legislation” and thus they were not arcane. He was studying questions that Greek and Roman authors also were trying to answer. How to negotiate with political opponents in times of external threat, like Pericles; what incentives keep politicians like Pompey in check; what exactly broke down the negotiations between Caesar and the Senate.

The American ethos is deeply pragmatic; nonetheless, practical lawyer-statesmen, like Adams, saw themselves as students of Greece and Rome. The Founding Fathers believed that by studying the political, historical, and philosophical works of antiquity, light could be shed upon their own situation. Through these models from the past, they could remake the present. Their purpose was not merely to understand history, but to intervene in it.

There was one notable exception, among the founders, to this trend: Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was sui generis. He shared some of the scrappy, hard-bitten, rebellious drive of many Boston Calvinists, and then, springing for Philadelphia, rebelled against them.

Franklin was the prototypical American, a self-made man, wily, inventive, entrepreneurial, public-spirited and practical. Despite not being “educated”, he, too, brimmed over with practical wisdom. And with that practicality came an educational philosophy which put Benjamin Franklin at odds with the other founders and framers of the United States. This apprentice and autodidact lacked any classical bent. His mode of operation was more unmoored from historical precedent and more excited by the exploration of the world of today and tomorrow than of yesteryear. 

In his Autobiography he makes an argument not only against Greek, but against Latin too. Why study these onerous languages when the modern languages can be more immediately and usefully deployed? Many students slave over Latin, never gaining enough proficiency to use it, and thus gaining little for years of effort. When classicists argued that learning Latin is a gateway to other languages, Ben countered with, Why not learn current commercial and diplomatic languages and those students still interested can then run off to stuff their nose into a dusty tome of Virgil?

Nonetheless, Benjamin Franklin wasn’t an iconoclast against ancient learning. The library he founded contained all the available classical works. Furthermore, the establishment of his Philadelphian Academy in 1749 included a rector who taught Greek and Latin. Franklin was fairly conciliatory and broad-minded. While he was ambivalent about the ancient flame, he was electrified by the 18th century’s leap in producing useful knowledge.

Franklin’s ambivalence provokes a question: is the study of the classics a mere display of cultural refinement? Or did Benjamin Franklin, the outlier, overlook something in his rejection of the classics? 

The heart of the question for us is, can practical wisdom be usefully and reliably gained from the classics? 

History in the time of Rome’s Triumph

Perhaps only experience is the only teacher of wisdom. Academia be damned. But if any field of study is going to be useful for acquiring practical wisdom without lifetimes of personal experience, it is history. The Greek and Romans saw in history the case-study approach to practical wisdom.

“From history one can find every model of behavior,” wrote Livy. “Works of the intellect outstrip those of the body (and from it one can learn) how to excel in peace as well as war," we hear from Sallust, whose concern was the preservation of a peaceful government. Polybius makes the case that “the soundest education and training for a life of active politics is the study of history.” 

Polybius was the historian most devoted to understanding the big question of 150 BC: All nations jockey and grow and compete, but why, out of them all, did Rome triumph? 

Who is so worthless or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and under what system of polity the Romans in less than fifty-three years have succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government — a thing unique in history? Or who again is there so passionately devoted to other spectacles or studies as to regard anything as of greater moment than the acquisition of this knowledge?

Polybius surveyed the Roman constitution in detail. He wanted to find the general lesson for how good governance progresses. And unlike Aristotle who based his analysis in Politics on successful city-states of 180 years prior, Polybius had a solid example of a constitutional order which managed to dominate Greece and, soon enough, the Mediterranean.

In his Histories, Polybius suggests an explanation for the great success of Rome: the balance of the various forms of government contained in one structure.

Polybius defined the elements of the Roman constitution compared to the constitutions of Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Crete, and Carthage. Its mixed form of government, its military habits and incentives, and its religious customs all gave Rome advantages missing in the other poleis. Briefly, the consulship of two controlled all administrative practices. Although a powerful duarchy, it could make no great expenditures or declare military action without a decree of the Senate. The Senate independently dealt with matters of foreign policy, heard the case of all high crimes, and disbursed funds for the construction and maintenance of buildings. The people’s assembly decided punishments, passed and repealed laws, and voted for or against declarations of war. Thus elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy were combined.

In every aspect of affairs of state (domestic, foreign, judicial, and executive) each of the three elements had a role to play. Each could support or trouble the other elements, limiting or coordinating activity without too much miscommunication.

The idea that one needs to create a system which balances the interests of individual coalitions and the whole is also found in Aristotle’s Politics: 

The two principles of democracy and virtue temper each other… In a well attempted polity there should appear to be both elements [the democratic and the aristocratic] and yet neither… Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant.

The Romans found their way to a more fine-grained version of Aristotle’s solution without the benefit of deep historical study or academic political theory. It was historical circumstances and pragmatic governance that cast them into their winning configuration, not the study of Aristotle. The Americans who knew the great successes and failures of the Greeks and Romans wrestled with the herculean task of applying those lessons to their own circumstances. They were consumed by the same issues that the Greek and Roman historians were trying to puzzle through. They were trying to be wise, not merely lucky. 

Classical Civilization as a Sandbox for Practical Wisdom

The classics come from a world that is smaller than our own.

Can studying a small world be more useful than a more complex one? Isn’t complexity and navigating an information rich society the task before us? Though human nature remains unchanged, our world is bigger. As a litmus test of this complexity, consider the number of careers which exist today. The staggering number of possibilities should overwhelm us. 

The weight of so much history, philosophy, science, technology, and politics since 1800 has crowded out the classics in many ways. And accordingly, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, and even Cicero are now only discussed by specialists. And yet, this is not a cause to mourn the classics. Nor a reason to bury them. Out of our classical foundations, we have built a clearly better world, a world built on literacy, numeracy, and creativity. These tools have led to education, fertility, and electricity, and that trifecta of accomplishments has led to creative destruction and economic growth across the globe.

But what can the 50,000-person city-states of the Greeks teach nations numbered in the millions, or even billions? The sea of complexity produced by a world at our scale floods us with difficulties perhaps unimaginable to the ancient sages.

The answer is that when it comes to understanding how society operates, a smaller society which is relatively similar may be of great use.

I have written before that classical civilization is the perfect sandbox for students to play around with questions concerning civilization. It is of a manageable complexity, distant yet familiar, something we can both approach with impartiality and yet make our own. And more than this, understanding the rise and fall of the classical world teaches us valuable lessons about the hard work of building, preserving, and extending civilization.

One of the amazing things about studying classics is the immersive quality of the pedagogical approach. When a person studies classics, they become immersed in languages, philosophy, politics, economics, mathematics, rhetoric, art, architecture, religions, cults, and the lives of great and awful men and women. Students who climb this stair come to see how many individual decisions, cultural norms, and aesthetic preferences create both the big landscape and the subtle contours of an era.

Essentially, the classics provide a self-contained simulation of manageable size. That is how they can teach practical wisdom, despite being ancient works. More than other parts of history, the classics may even be uniquely suited to that task, covering the right topics in the right ways, ways that allow practical wisdom to be drawn out of them.

The early Americans fostered their own practical wisdom with study of the recent British civil war, personal experiences with law and mercantilism, and the classics. When I imagine Alexander Hamilton reading The Wealth of Nations sitting in the cold trenches and forts of the Continental Army, his mind is actively building and refining models of political economy. In those models, he creates counterfactuals and runs simulations, and from those counterfactual scenarios, he creates a view about what features of the economy and government matter most. Alexander is trying to build out a framework that then can be used to identify and weigh relevant facts.

Neoclassical Synthesis

Let us go back to Benjamin Franklin as the model critic of the classics. Recall that Franklin suggested that modern languages and culture were more useful to the average person because they were alive and present. Only select eggheads understand Greek and Latin enough to derive value. 

Three kinds of challenges to the classics exist today, and all can be derived from Franklin’s ethos: cultural agnosticism about the classics, progressivism about all sciences, and preference for the contemporary social science toolset over raw historical study.

First objection: cultural agnosticism

It may not be the Greek and Romans per se that make the difference in gaining practical wisdom, but rather the people who studied them. The smartest and most prestige-seeking people were attracted to studying the classics because of the challenge and signal of intelligence it provided, rather than its utility. The interdisciplinary approach and close reading of texts in original languages could be applied to any culture, resulting in deep insights and useful lessons.

However, one issue with this view is that primary sources frame what types of readings are available. While some historians may offer complex arguments for consideration, others may not. Our views of history are crafted by the mental maps of the authors. Classical authors are generally keen commentators on human affairs and not all eras and geographies are so fortunate. The medieval “mirror of princes” historical genre is enjoyable for enthusiasts and useful for historians, but the authors are addressing different questions about kingship than the classical authors are about politics. That different orientation to the world decreases their sensitivity to the issues salient for republican governance.

A second issue with the culturally agnostic view is that there is typically more to learn from someone you wish to emulate than someone you don’t. For example, chess grandmasters are better teachers of chess than amateurs. Similarly, Greece and Rome were perceived as worthy teachers of  enlightened government and a rational approach to the world. By 200 BC, they were at the forefront of military history, architecture, geometry, biology, ethics, and political theory. While all cultures are worth studying, when it comes to gaining practical wisdom one has to make judgment calls about whose institutions are worth emulating.

As a side note, I would like to to see a study of the US founders’ engagement or lack thereof with medieval and early modern republics like Venice, Florence, and the Netherlands. Would these have been examples of interest to them or not?

Second objection: progressivism in science and technology

Perhaps we have surpassed the Greeks and Romans in science and technology, and so their philosophy and historiography are obsolete.

Times change and with them the skills that make one free to live a flourishing life. While law, theology, and medicine used to be the only possible professions for educated free people, today we have viable careers in science, engineering, and technical arts. These disciplines attract the smartest people and provide better reasoning ability through complex problems. While studying classics may be an option for leisure time, it is not considered useful. So the argument runs.

However, to effectively tackle the intricacies of our world, one must have not only technical skills but also a vision of how those skills fit into the bigger picture.

When I look out at the world, it seems to me that the best people in STEM integrate broad-based scientific knowledge with political and business acumen and understanding of human nature animating their work. They have the synthesizing habits of the classical approach.

For example, teams must be led by generalists who possess a set of skills required to communicate across different fields of expertise. Virtue, context, perspective, and human understanding are necessary for their work. Technical skills and social skills are important at the micro-level, but incomplete. The narrow skills are deployed best by people who understand some history of social and political frameworks. The combination skills and mental models of history makes people more free and creates a more flourishing society.

Third objection: modern social science

The classics provided the seeds of social theory, but today we do better than theory. We have the science, data collection, and empirical tools that Lucretius never dreamed of. Social scientists study all the questions that the Americans were interested in: politics, law, institutions, economics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. And they do it with more robust methods than any historian or philosopher of 200 AD.

Consider economics. We have a sophisticated theory of price and price movements that take advantage of calculus, laws of supply and demand, and total factor productivity. In behavioral science and psychology, we do much better empirical work about how experts make decisions under uncertainty. Gary Klein’s psychological research on how experts make decisions helps firms and individuals learn how to build the intuitions to become masters of sensemaking within their area of expertise. In political science, we don’t merely have six different forms of government to analyze, but a nearly continuous number of constitutional structures based on hundreds of nations and many thousands of institutions.

Some might hope to replace classical studies, and history generally, with social science. The models of the social sciences rely upon abstraction. It is not obvious from reading the result of a social science paper whether it will generalize or not, whether it will replicate or not, or whether it is relevant or not. A zealous reliance on social science theories pulls beautiful theories out of the sense data, yet is dangerous. The danger, of course, is that in the process of abstraction some essential context is lost. Depending on what part of the social science sphere one inhabits, one can wind up in an intellectual straightjacket, living in a world of theory without history, models without contingency, contingency without humanity, humanity without choice, choice without individuals.

What classics offer to the social sciences is another type of model, one which should have a seat at the table, despite being less quantitative and despite the theories of the authors being less robust. The classics offer models of society based upon individuals, institutions, and philosophy: Cato, Pompey, Caesar. It’s a model (or set of models) taken from a different, original, yet very powerful worldview. Just as the bible is not systematic theology, the classics are not systematic arts and sciences. Both are filled with arguments, contradictions, confusions, poetry, philosophy, narrative, and beauty – those softer things which influence humanity in more subtle ways than the statistically significant incentives we study in economics. It would be a very sorry scholar who never returned ad fontes for the primordial cultural brew from which his own estate was born.

These three challenges go to excess when they are not tempered by other models of engaging the world. What they have in common is a narrowing of experience and epistemic expectations into more precise expressions. This is great progress for generating expertise, but insufficient for relating different fields of expertise to one another.

We must be careful, however. Excessive classicism is not the proper response. The classical model, at its best, offers a balance between history and abstractions without turning into navel-gazing classicism. C.S. Lewis argued that the obsessive Ciceronian formalism of the Renaissance killed Latin as a living language. We don’t want a return to deep linguistic classicism, to a rarefied aestheticization of everything. Aesthetics, philology, and philosophy can be the delight and aim of our minds, but aiming at only the transcendent things exclusively does violence to nature and to the opportunity to use our minds to partake in the creation of value. Training in only the abstractions of Plato is insufficient for actually serving the Good.

To put it in old Ben Franklin’s jovial pithiness, “I find the best way to serve God is by serving my fellow man.” This was the attitude of a man whose contributions to civilizational progress included everything from a written guide on how to swim, to roasting turkeys with electricity, to organizing a fire brigade, to building a library, and even hosting a constitutional convention. Franklin was no scholar, no philosopher, not a scientist, nor even a politician; he became all these as time and circumstance allowed. As a generalist, he grew into the free classical ideal of the man of practical wisdom.

The works of Greeks and Romans have been a Schelling point for intellectual generalists for two millennia. Like parents who cease parenting when the child grows up, the classics have switched from godlike parents into a council of advisors. As they become more distant, we become more capable of engaging them as equals. This trend will continue for as long as we find ways to draw inspiration from them. 

What is the good life? Many philosophers have pondered this question over the ages. But if we had to focus on only one of them, it would be, of course, Nezahualcoyotl, the polymath and ruler of the city of Texcoco, who is known for his alliance with Tenochtitlan, the construction of an aqueduct, his patronage of the arts, and his philosophical poetry: 

Is it true that we are happy,
that we live on earth?
It is not certain that we live
and have come on earth to be happy.
We are all sorely lacking.
Is there any who does not suffer
here, next to the people?

The good life, in the culture where Nezahualcoyotl grew, could be summarized by the word neltilitzli. As often happens with classical languages, there is no single English equivalent: neltilitzli is typically translated as “truth,” but more literally means “rootedness.” The Earth, according to the dominant view of the time, is slippery: there is always a danger of losing one’s balance and falling into moral wrongdoing. To live a virtuous life is to keep the balance, to remain well-grounded, well-rooted. 

This was the best that one could hope for in what was seen as a constantly changing world. For the Earth in the cosmogony of the time was coterminous with teotl, a single force that permeates everything and constantly generates and regenerates itself. How could one remain rooted in the sacred, in teotl? As Nezahualcoyotl wrote:

Take your chocolate,
flower of the cacao tree,
may you drink all of it!
Do the dance,
do the song!
Not here is our house,
not here do we live,
you also will have to go away.

Dance and sing, for the Earth is slippery and tomorrow we are all dead. This was the heart of Aztec philosophy.1

The Fate of Aztec Thought

Perhaps you were expecting someone else. In a land called Greece, others pondered the same questions as Nezahualcoyotl did. For example, Aristotle wrote about eudaimonia, the highest form of happiness in his thinking. It was a powerful idea, and hundreds of other Greeks and Romans later painted their own pictures of what an eudaimonic life looks like.

Why is Aristotle better known than Nezuahalcoyotl? This is not a difficult question, but let’s answer it seriously nonetheless. First, of course, Aristotle and his brethren came much earlier than the likes of Nezahualcoyotl, who lived from 1402 to 1472. More importantly, the ideas of the Greek philosophers happened to be preserved and remained influential within the various powers that dominated their area — the West — after them: Rome, the Islamic caliphate, and then the European nations such as Spain, which would go on to discover, conquer, and colonize Mesoamerica, where Aztec philosophy was flourishing until that point. 

The conquest of the Aztec Triple Alliance by the Spanish conquistadors was so utterly complete that many parts of the indigenous Nahua culture were annihilated. In some cases this was a morally good thing, for example because it eliminated the infamous practice of human sacrifice, and the related practice of decorating cities with rows upon rows of human skulls. 

In other cases, however, the loss of culture deprived us of most of what was probably an original, interesting view of what it means to be a human, as well as a rare example of a philosophical tradition that emerged independently of Greece. 

Fortunately, some of this philosophical tradition has survived, which is why we know about Nezahualcoyotl at all. A few pre-conquest codices — illustrated books — still exist, including the Codex Borgia. In the decades after the conquest, Spanish chroniclers, such as Bernardo de Sahagún, and descendents of Aztec nobility, such as ​​Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl (a direct descendent of Nezahualcoyotl) compiled histories and ethnographies of the Nahua people. Together with reports from the original conquistadors, archaeological evidence, and contemporary oral history — there are still about 1.7 million Nahuatl speakers in Mexico — we have just enough data to understand the more subtle aspects of Aztec thought. 

This is not a lot, but it is not nothing. We know that the Nahua tlamatini, the wise man (or sometimes woman), played an important reflective role in Aztec society: “he puts a mirror before others; he makes them prudent, cautious,” as Sahagún wrote in his Universal History of the Things of New Spain. We know that these tlamatinime (“me” marks the plural) sometimes questioned the dominant views of their day. For example, we think of the Aztec as deeply religious, and they were, yet Nezahualcoyotl openly expressed doubt about the afterlife:

I am sad, I grieve
I, lord Nezahualcoyotl
With flowers and with songs
I remember the princes,
Those who went away,
Tezozomoctzin, and that one Cuacuahtzin.
Do they truly live,
There Where-in-Someway-One-Exists?2

However, despite a few academic papers here and there, Aztec philosophy is still an oddity in serious study. At best, it is used to compare and contrast with other traditions, such as with Aristotle or Confucius. One guesses that there simply isn’t enough surviving Aztec philosophy to make it worth developing new concepts on top of it. Also, whatever did survive is not cutting-edge. We can agree with León-Portilla that Nahuatl philosophy was remarkable, even comparable to the ancient Greeks, and still rely on the more advanced sources from the Western world when we actually want to push philosophy forward. 

What could have saved Aztec philosophy is Mexico itself, where the vast majority of people are at least some degree of indigenous. But the Mexicans, who speak a Romance language and are mostly Catholic, are now fully integrated into the West, though of course with their own cultural particularities. When visiting Mexico City recently, I saw monuments to Aztec emperors, but just as many statues of Greek gods and mythological figures.

Why, in summary, is Aztec philosophy far less known than Greek philosophy? Because it came later; because it has been forgotten to a larger extent; and because it was replaced by Western thought in its own homeland. These causes all have the same root cause: belonging to a civilization that didn’t draw a strong hand in the game of history. As I said, this is not a deep question. 

But there is another reason — and a more interesting one, perhaps. 

Is There Philosophy Outside the West?

The first formal study of Aztec philosophy as philosophy, rather than as an ethnographic description of Nahua thoughts and beliefs, was done by the Mexican scholar Miguel León-Portilla in his 1956 book La filosofía nahuatl. According to James Maffie, who wrote a book on the same topic more recently, in 2014,

León-Portilla argued that Nahua culture included individuals who were every bit as philosophical as Socrates and the Sophists. Nezahualcoyotl, Tochihuitzin Coyolchiuhqui, Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, and other Nahuas reflected self-consciously, critically, and generally upon the nature of existence, truth, knowledge, and the reigning mythical-religious views of their day. 

But this was not well-received:

By attacking the dominant orthodoxy among Western academic philosophers and their epigones regarding the West’s monopoly on philosophical activity, León-Portilla brought upon himself a firestorm of calumny and condemnation. 

Some felt that León-Portilla was insulting the “climactic intellectual achievements” of the ancient Greeks by comparing them to “Upper Stone Age people.”3 When La filosofía nahuatl was translated into English, it was under the title Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, replacing the word “filosofía” with “thought and culture,” a more benign phrasing that would avoid stirring the controversy. 

Today it is accepted that the pre-conquest Nahuas did have philosophy in a meaningful sense, and you will find, for example, a great entry on Aztec philosophy on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, also written by James Maffie. There is an active, if small, community of scholars that studies the topic. 

But the initial reaction to León-Portilla’s work is telling. Maffie points out that philosophy plays a special role in Western culture. “What is at stake here,” he writes in perhaps overly dramatic fashion, “is nothing less than the modern West’s self-image as rational, self-conscious, civilized, cultured, human, disciplined, modern, and masculine in contrast with the non-West as irrational, appetitive, emotional, instinctive, uncivilized, savage, primitive, nonhuman, undisciplined, backward, feminine, and closer to nature.” Philosophy, then, is something only Westerners did; other cultures may have had practices of critical thinking and reflection too, but those are philosophy only to the extent that they resemble the West’s.

I’m guessing this view is more or less discredited now, at least compared to the 1950s. (It’s also possible that Maffie’s claims on the topic are somewhat exaggerated as a way to defend Aztec philosophy.) It seems absurd to suggest that non-Western cultures like classical China or India didn’t have philosophical traditions.

Yet, if we don’t want to lean too far in the opposite direction — where the merest hint of thinking or mythologizing in a culture is “philosophy,” in which case the word itself loses all meaning — then we have to consider that some cultures did philosophy and some didn’t. Where do we draw the line? Too often, would say León-Portilla and Maffie, we draw it in a way that excludes the Nahua tlamatinime; and too bad if their thinking gets lost into the mists of time, or, at best, into the pages of ethnography textbooks that almost no one reads.

The Meaning of the Classics

Part of why I’m writing about the Aztecs here, in a publication that is usually about Greece and Rome, is that I’m letting my old fascination with pre-Columbian cultures run loose after having visited la Ciudad de México a few weeks ago. 

But another part of the reason is that we want to expand the meaning of the word “classical” in The Classical Futurist. 

What does the phrase “the classics” mean? Usually, the great works of literature and philosophy from Ancient Greece and Rome, at least in a Western context. We also hear of “the Chinese classics” or, say, “classical Sanskrit literature” from India. What do these works have in common? 

One commonality is that they are relatively ancient. In the West, works of literature from the medieval and modern eras are rarely called classical. This is context-dependent, of course — works in “classical” Arabic are from the Quranic era until the end of the Islamic golden age in the 13th century. 

A second, related common point is that the “classics” provide a cultural foundation for what came later. They are used as a point of reference by the cultures that inherited them, like all of Europe for Aristotle, or all of East Asia in the case of Confucius. 

A third common point among cultures with a “classical” tradition is that they reached a high level of civilizational sophistication. They “did” philosophy; they devoted some of their resources to poetry or theater in a way that went beyond myth and religion. They recorded these works in writing, which for better or for worse excludes cultures like the Incas of South America, who despite their complex society weren’t literate. 

Do the Aztecs fit these three aspects? They’re a gray area. Their civilization really got going only in the 15th century, but they were on their own timeline, isolated from the Old World until Columbus. And they did not give birth to a very strong literary and philosophical tradition for their descendants, the indigenous and mestizo population of Mexico. On the other hand, it does seem like they reached a sufficient level of sophistication, as the records of people like Nezahualcoyotl and his contemporaries show. 

Besides, had a few events in the past played slightly differently — a question I asked previously in another context, when I examined another civilization that did not become classical, Carthage — then we might very well consider Aztec philosophy an essential chapter in the history of human thought. 

I believe it’s useful to ask these what-if questions, and look at the various paths that human thought took or could have taken. This is relevant when trying to think about the future, too: what happens tomorrow depends in part on which of today’s works become future classics.

That’s why we’ll probably explore more classical traditions outside of Greece and Rome in the future. We’ll be careful; we don’t want to expand the theme of this publication into meaninglessness. The Great Works of the ancient Mediterranean will always constitute the core of what we do here. But when the opportunity arises to think about classical China, or India, or Mesoamerica, we’ll take it. 

That seems like a good way to make sure our own views are well-rooted, so that we can keep our balance as we walk upon the slippery surface of the Earth, of teotl, of truth.

This month’s post is a guest essay by Andrew Perlot.

Andrew stumbled on Meditations at age sixteen, and Marcus Aurelius and Socrates took up residence in the back of his brain soon after. He’s a former journalist interested in ancient history, philosophy, and partner acrobatics. You can follow him on Twitter or at his Substack.

Your car pulls up to the red light, and there he is — barefoot and shirtless by the central median, standing in slushy ice deposited by last night's storm. Is the man homeless? His cardboard sign doesn't ask for money, food, or a job, but is merely adorned with the crude outline of a dog. 

He takes a step toward your car, makes eye contact, and stands with a smile on his face, head cocked quizzically to the side. 

You pause, uncertain, as his breath puffs in the cold air. After a moment, you roll down the window despite yourself. 

“Do you need help?” you ask. 

“I have everything I need, friend,” the man says with convincing certainty. “But I have to ask, do you? Do you really?” 

The Return of the Cynics

Modern Western cities have plenty of homeless people driven to the streets by addiction, mental illness, and astronomical housing costs. But drivers aren’t likely to encounter someone who wants to be homeless approaching cars in an attempt to lead people to happiness and excellence. 

Yet this is the way of Cynicism, a philosophy that spread rapidly in the 1st century A.D. at the time its cousins, Stoicism and Epicureanism, were making their mark on the ancient world. 

The common reasoning is that the loss of Greek independence — first to the Macedonians under Phillip and Alexander, and then to the longer-lasting Roman Empire — left many Greeks feeling disempowered and frustrated. Their discontent opened a space for philosophies emphasizing self-sufficiency and inner happiness to gain a foothold. 

The ancient Cynics lived on the streets of Greece's city-states. They hectored their neighbors about their faults and urged them to do better with satyric mockery, brazen disregard for the mores of the day, and occasionally, grandfatherly warmth. They were famous for pillorying the powerful and the rich without regard for the consequences and gained a reputation for upstanding virtue and for being incredibly annoying. 

When Rome devoured Greece, it caught Cynicism like a predator picking up intestinal parasites from tainted meat. An unwanted plague of itinerant beggar-philosophers spread to every major city in the empire, disturbing, infuriating, and occasionally impressing the Romans. Cynicism had staying power, and even after Christianity drove Stoicism and Epicureanism into decline, the Cynics remained at work. The last recorded Cynic of classical antiquity was Sallustius of Emesa in the late 5th century A.D. 

The modern western world seems ripe for a wave of practical philosophies of life similar to what Greece saw during the Hellenistic period. The ideologically-rich cold war is long over, the bedrock of Christianity that supplanted ancient philosophies is giving way, democratic norms are under strain as perceived economic disparity grows, and interest in ancient Greco-Roman eudaimonic philosophies is on the rise. 

Books related to Stoicism, such as Ryan Holiday’s Discipline Is Destiny, regularly top best-seller lists, and videos and podcasts discussing it get millions of streams a day. Epicurean philosophy has a few less popular book-length treatments, but we see many of its outward ideals — if not its exact philosophical underpinnings — at play in the popular F.I.R.E and minimalism movements.

But there’s no new groundswell of people embracing idealistic poverty and Cynic street lecturing. Celebrities and best-selling authors aren’t promoting Cynic ideals, or suggesting Cynic life hacks for our problems. So where are the modern Cynics?

There’s rarely a definitive answer for why something isn’t happening, but we can come to some reasonable inferences by examining how Cynics got along in the ancient world, what their philosophical cousins thought of them, and by observing how our cities and societies work differently than those of the ancient world. 

What Cynics Do

Cynics believe they can thrive on the meagerest of provisions — a threadbare cloak to wear, a rucksack to carry their few belongings, and perhaps some beans and grains to eat — so long as they have one critical thing: virtue. 

Luckily, Cynic virtue is achieved by means entirely within one’s control. Virtue can’t be retarded by the vagaries of genetics or fortune. It's achieved by voluntary choice, namely how we speak, think, and act. Cynics aim to be courageous, wise, and just, and model their lives around these ideals.

Cynics also believe many norms and our sense of propriety are socially-imposed falsehoods used to hide and distort our true nature. They view human beings as naturally good, but corrupted by civilization and its strictures.  

Many Cynics, such as Diogenes of Sinope, thought public masturbation, urination, and sex were perfectly acceptable. After all, animals make no attempt to hide these activities. The Cynics considered criticism of their lack of shame hypocritical; everyone does these things, but Cynics are honest enough to do them openly because they consider them perfectly virtuous. Cynics were thus considered dog-like for their shamelessness. The dog became the unofficial mascot of the Cynics, and they embraced the comparison, seeking to hound their countrymen into better living. 

The ancient Cynics clearly leaned into the derision they faced. They found unorthodox behavior and unbridled speech could shock the masses out of complacency. Anything that made people rethink their acceptance of traditional social values such as wealth-seeking, religion, pleasure-seeking, family duty, and reputation were welcome tools. 

Cynics also believe in hardening themselves against discomfort so the body can serve the reasoning mind. They walked barefoot in the snow, hugged cold bronze statues in winter, and rolled in the scalding summer sand.

Perhaps the best overall summation of Cynicism’s aims is a surviving prayer from Crates of Thebes, a 3rd century B.C. Athenian Cynic philosopher who gave up a great fortune to live a life of poverty on the streets:

Pierian Muses, hearken to my prayer!
Grant me food without fail for my belly,
Which has ever made my life simple and unenslaved…
Make me useful rather than sweet to my friends.
Glorious goods I do not wish to gather, as one
Who yearns for the wealth of a beetle or riches of an ant;
No, I wish to possess righteousness and collect riches
Which are easily borne, easily gained, and conducive to virtue.
If these I win, I will propitiate Hermes and the holy Muses
Not with costly offering but with pious virtues.

So Crates wanted simple food and enough shelter to survive, virtue, and to improve people rather than please them with agreeable company. 

Crates’s austere lifestyle and virtuous behavior earned him the respect of his Athenian neighbors. They gave him the nickname “door opener,” because he entered houses uninvited, seeking family members at war with each other. Once ensconced inside, he listened to everyone without casting blame, gently reconciling siblings and parents and guiding them toward virtuous behavior.

This was Cynicism at its most gentle and palatable, though ancient sources described a far more antagonistic side of Cynicism as well. Cynics weren’t afraid to loudly admonish those they saw as wasting their lives in vice. 

Diogenes was once battling a fever on the streets as fans streamed past on their way to an athletic event. “Idiots!” he yelled at them, “where are you going in such a hurry? You are going a great distance to see those damned athletes compete; why not stop a bit to see a man do combat with illness?”

During the Roman period, Cynics criticized even the emperors. 

Demetrius, a well-regarded Cynic who eschewed all wealth and possessions, was once offered 200,000 sesterces by the emperor Nero. This was a vast sum — about half of what was required to become an equite, or Roman knight — and enough for him to spend the rest of his life in modest luxury. 

He turned down the gift and laughed. No amount of money was enough to silence his criticism of the emperor. When Nero proceeded to threaten his life, Demetrius said, "you threaten me with death, but nature threatens you."

Demetrius would, at various times, be publicly beaten and eventually exiled by Nero’s praetorian prefect because he wouldn’t shut up. For Cynics, staying silent in the face of such behavior isn’t really an option, because they’re on a mission.

An Evangelical Philosophy Without an End Game

Historical Cynics weren’t anti-social curmudgeons, as the modern word cynic suggests. Many were endearingly eccentric individuals with great wit and many friends. They distrusted pleasure, not people, though they certainly considered the masses wanting in many ways. 

Cynics refuse to abandon the rest of society as a hopeless cause. They believe their examples and exhortations can “save” individuals from themselves. Most Greco-Roman philosophical teachings had to be sought out, but Cynics seek others out, badgering them to do better, even if they prefer to do worse. 

Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher who spoke highly of Cynicism, said a Cynic “must know that he is sent as a messenger from Zeus to people concerning good and bad things, to show them that they have wandered…It is his duty then to be able to say with a loud voice… like blind people you are wandering up and down: you are going by another road, and have left the true road: you seek for prosperity and happiness where they are not, and if another shows you where they are, you do not believe him. Why do you seek it without?”

But this raises the question — what did the Cynics actually hope to achieve with their evangelism?

Clearly, they believed that virtue was enough for a good life, but part of living virtuously was helping their countrymen see the light. 

But did they really want everyone to live like them? What would that look like, given their parasitic — or the Cynics would argue, symbiotic — relationship with their host cities?

After all, ancient Cynics expected food handouts as the price for their moral teachings, and often slept under the porticos of grand public buildings that wouldn’t have existed without the underpinning economic systems and wealth the Cynics lambasted.

We have stories of a few Cynics living in the wilds between city-states, foraging for food and living like hermits, but it doesn’t seem that most Cynics had this end game in mind.   

Our best hint comes from a poem Crates wrote describing his ideal Cynic utopia, which he called Pera:

There is a city Pera in the midst of wine-dark Tuphos,
Fair and fruitful, filthy all about, possessing nothing,
Into which no foolish parasite ever sails,
Nor any playboy who delights in a whore's ass,
But it produces thyme, garlic, figs, and bread,
For which the citizens do not war with each other,
Nor do they possess arms, to get cash or fame.

At first glance, it sounds like he’s describing an undeveloped land of poverty, devoid of vice and war, full of virtuous people and enough simple food to satisfy everyone — some sort of hunter-gatherer society in the wilds, perhaps. 

But the word “pera” in Greek refers to the beggar’s bag every Cynic carried, and the word “tuphos” means smoke or mist, and was used by the Cynics to describe the mental confusion most people are fogged by.  

So an argument can be made that the paradise the Cynics sought wasn’t a separate utopian place at all, but simply the state of having enough — in their beggar bags — while living on the margins of societies created by their deluded countrymen. A kind of refuge of virtue amid the madness. 

It’s probable the Cynics never believed they would get society at large to live like them.

Diogenes Laertius, an ancient biographer of Greek philosophers, wrote that Diogenes of Sinope “used to say that he followed the example of the trainers of choruses; for they too set the note a little high, to ensure that the rest should hit the right note”.

In other words, the Cynics may well have believed they were setting an unrealistically high standard that wasn’t achievable by society as a whole, and that they would always be a small, isolated, virtuous elite urging their countrymen to be better.

Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, was of the opinion that Cynicism wouldn’t be a popular philosophy in a world where men lived more moderate and virtuous lives. 

“If…you grant me a city of wise men,” he said, “it might very well be that no one will lightly adopt the Cynic's profession. For in whose interest would he take on this style of life?”

Even in Hellenistic times there were too many humans for a return to hunter-gatherer living arrangements to be realistic. Today, that’s even more so. So while Cynics might lambast the modern economy and the materialism and hedonism that drives it, it’s unclear that they have anything to offer mankind as an alternative. If everyone adopted the Cynic way of life, humanity wouldn’t even have enough of the simple lentils and grains Cynics prized to stave off famine.

Cynicism’s Penetration Problem

Stoic and Epicurean ideas filtered down through society during antiquity, penetrating beyond the narrow educated elite who had the time and resources to pursue philosophical training. 

For instance, if you look at ancient Roman gravestones for slaves, freedmen, and the presumably unphilosophical lower classes, you’ll find the term, “Non fui, fui, non-sum, non-curo,” etched on a surprising number of them. It translates to, "I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care", an Epicurean consolation suggesting that before we’re born, we don’t exist and can’t care about anything, and after death, we won't exist and can’t care about dying. Therefore there is nothing to worry about. 

Even if this represented just a surface-level understanding of Epicurius’s teachings, it shows that his ideas penetrated society. 

On the other hand, there’s little indication that Cynic ideas had much clout in society at large. City dwellers often encountered Cynics on the street, and probably heard their harangues. But there’s no evidence that a wide swath of society bought into elements of the philosophy, perhaps because it always seemed to have the whiff of the ridiculous about it.

The satirist Lucian, who wrote a straightforward defense of Cynicism, had no qualms about also satirizing ridiculous Cynic philosophers and pointing out that many of them fell far short of Cynic ideals. In Lucian’s “The Passing of Peregrinus,” the Cynic Peregrinus is shown to be playacting at Cynic beliefs to gain followers, avoid work, and accumulate wealth. The true diehards who follow Peregrinus are fanatics devoid of reason.

Lucian wrote that "every city is filled with such upstarts, particularly with those who enter the names of Diogenes, Antisthenes, and Crates as their patrons and enlist in the Army of the Dog.”

While a number of ancient writers praised the virtue of men like Crates, Diogenes, and Demetrius, the overwhelming consensus seemed to be that most Cynics were cranks and opportunists who preached about virtue while failing to live up to those values. 

“I fear we don’t appreciate [Cynicism’s] grandeur,” Epictetus said, “nor do we have a fair idea of Diogenes’ character. We are influenced by the sad spectacle of today’s Cynics, these dogs who beg at the table and hang about the gate who have nothing in common with the Cynics of old except maybe for farting in public, not much else.”

Aelius Aristides, a Greek Orator, observed that Cynics “frequent the doorways, talking more to the doorkeepers than to the masters, making up for their lowly condition by using impudence."

The majority of antiquity’s Cynics seem to have been marginal figures who were often ignored, even when they were being outrageous. Powerful men concluded they were loud but impotent, and didn’t have enough support to affect meaningful change. 

It’s telling that the before-mentioned Cynic Demetrius embarrassed Nero on a number of occasions, yet the emperor never bothered to kill him.

Once, when Nero was being carried through the streets of Rome, the Cynic Isidorus passed by, calling out, "You sing the misfortunes of Nauplius well (Nero shocked Roman society by performing on stage), but behave badly yourself." Nero promptly banished Isodorus from Italy, but didn’t bother to kill him.  

On the other hand, Nero quickly executed Stoic philosophers who posed a threat to him, even when their condemnation was subtle. 

Thrasea Paetus, a Roman Stoic and senator, refused to swear oaths of loyalty to Nero, ignored orders to attend senate meetings, and wouldn’t vote divine honors upon Nero’s wife or attend her funeral. For this, Nero had him killed.

Other Stoics who held high positions within society, such as Rubellius Plautus and Barea Soranus, were also executed by Nero when they refused to toe the line, even when their defiance was relatively quiet. 

The emperor Vespasian executed a Stoic senator named Helvidius Priscus for opposing imperial power, denouncing kingship and hereditary succession, and championing the restoration of the Roman Republic.

His successor, Domitian, executed a half dozen more Stoics, often for simply eulogizing the Stoics Domitian had killed earlier. 

These Stoic philosopher-statesmen were actually part of society, and had the respect of many of its leading men and the lower classes. Their condemnation threatened the emperors, and so they had to be killed before their grousing could spread and threaten imperial power.

When a Cynic named Diogenes (not of Sinope, mentioned above) stood up in a packed Roman theater and yelled insults down at the Emperor Titus and his mistress for their misdeeds, Titus must have felt humiliated. But the emperor merely had Diogenes flogged, and then let him go. 

Titus likely knew that Diogenes and the other Cynics were too otherly to really be part of society and capable of rallying much support for their views.  They’d walked away from society, and were outside of it, and so had almost no power. No one was going to follow Diogenes into rebellion, loud and annoying as he was. 

Modern Cynics would likewise be marginal figures at best, not a part of society, and probably unable to shake it up unless they compromised on some of their stances. 

The Siloed City Problem

The modern world doesn’t lack public scolds. Walk around the downtown core of any major American city and you’ll soon find someone haranguing passersby with bible verses, promising fire, and brimstone. The drug-addled and mentally unhinged join them, barking out threats.

Almost universally, pedestrians walk past these people without a second glance. The number of people they manage to “save,” and the effect they have on society, is marginal at best.

It’s not implausible to imagine Cynics joining this crowd, perhaps rounding out their diatribes for virtue with performative humor and irony. Some might be really good at it. Given the number of panhandlers on the street and the existence of food pantries and soup kitchens, it seems likely that Cynics could find enough handouts to live on. 

But by and large, modern Cynics are likely to reach even fewer people than their antique predecessors seemed to because the nature of our public life has changed dramatically.

Ancient Athens — considered a large city — was 0.7 square miles, and could be traversed in fifteen minutes. At its height, Ancient Rome was 5.25 square miles and had a population of at least a million. You could walk across it in about an hour. The island of Manhattan, one of the densest places in the United States, has 1.69 million people spread across its 33 square miles. Most cities are far less dense — Houston’s 2.3 million people are scattered across 599 square miles. Modern Americans don’t go about their lives beside other people so much as siloed off in metal boxes which deliver them from one enclosed area Cynic homeless people wouldn’t be able to access to another. 

An Athenian archon heading to work or the Assembly would walk the same streets as slaves, freedmen, and philosophical hectors. A busy householder seeking provisions would trek to the outdoor agora like everyone else, and if a philosopher wanted to confront him while he was buying olive oil and figs, there wasn’t much he could do about it.

People aren’t eager to be confronted about their vices, and if modern Cynics tried to preach in the supermarket or the mall, security would throw them back on the street. 

It seems unbelievable today, but Roman Emperors and Senators were regularly accosted by opinionated subjects displeased with their work. The previously-mentioned Demetrius managed to crash at least two separate opening ceremonies for Nero’s public work projects.

Can you imagine the secret service letting a disheveled street dweller get that close to a modern US president during a public function? Even a city’s mayor will shuttle from his gated home to City Hall in an SUV, giving Cynics little opportunity to accost him. 

Sure, a Cynic can sign up to give a three-minute diatribe during public comment periods at city council meetings like everyone else, but if he doesn’t stop talking, the police will show him the door.

Overall, the changing nature of cities and civic life has dramatically reduced the friction points through which Cynics traditionally reached society. Modern Cynics would end up far more marginalized, preaching more to fellow homeless people than society at large. That might be acceptable for people who recognize virtue to be the sole good, but it does make it a lot harder for them to spread their philosophy and impact the people who need it most. 

The Modern Cynic Opportunity

Given what Cynicism asks people to give up, and how hard it is for public scolds to make an impact on the modern world, there’s no obvious groundswell of traditional Cynic philosophers on the horizon.

Those inclined to virtue ethics have Stoicism, which many find more palatable. But that doesn’t mean Cynic ideas have lost their relevance. In antiquity, the Cynics who made the most impact (on society as a whole rather than on the narrow philosophical elite) were probably not the Crates and Diogenes-style philosophers who lived on the streets, but rather fringe Cynics who moderated some of their stances so they could reach a wider audience.

The most impactful of these was likely Menippus of Gadara, a Greek slave and Cynic philosopher who earned his freedom, moved to Thebes, and created an entirely new satirical literary genre adopted by generations of subsequent writers. Though Cynic, he was apparently flexible enough to acquire papyrus, pens, and inks, and presumably, a humble but secure place to live where he could store his writing as he worked on them.

The purpose of Menippean satire, according to literary theorist Eric McLuhan, was the creation of stories that do what a Cynic would, were he or she physically present — to shake the reader out of complacency.  

Menippean satires break with the classical tradition of attacking specific individuals and instead satirize mental attitudes — the very ones the Cynics thought were so damaging. This hybrid model built on what the Cynics were already doing best. The “traditional” street-dwelling Cynics were already noted for their wit and for thinking quickly on their feet.

They had nothing but scorn for the pen-and-ink theoretical philosophers of their day who created brilliant theories of little utility. When Diogenes of Sinope sat in on one of Plato’s lectures and heard him define humans as, “featherless bipeds,” he knew he had a great opportunity on his hands. He rushed out, plucked a chicken, and hurled it into the meeting. 

“Here’s Plato’s Man!” he cackled as the chicken ran about.

Plato, perhaps not finding this particularly funny, revised his definition of humans as “featherless bipeds with flat nails.”

Diogenes also brilliantly mocked Alexander the Great, who went out of his way to greet and praise him. Rather than bowing down to the great king, Diogenes wanted to remind him what he really was, and how unimpressive kings were to a man who was truly free. When Alexander first came upon Diogenes, the philosopher was relaxing in the morning sun. Alexander asked him if there was any favor or boon he might grant Diogenes. 

 "Yes,” Diogenes said. “Stand out of my sunlight.” 

Alexander apparently took this magnanimously, declaring, "If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes." 

“Diogenes eyed the king, replying, "If I were not Diogenes, I would still wish to be Diogenes".

The modern world has no lack of patently ridiculous follies. There are plenty of immoral politicians to lambast, over-the-top materialism to skewer, and harmful societal norms to call into question. But the place to highlight these follies is probably no longer the town square.

We may be asking the wrong sort of question when we wonder why there aren’t any Cynic philosophers downtown or breaking into homes and reconciling families. A better one might be — what might a modern Cynic with a fierce wit and enough flexibility to own a laptop and a camera be able to accomplish on Youtube?

The strength of Cynicism has always been its humor and mockery. If Cynics can find a way to lean into that legacy and amplify it, just as Menippus did, the army of the dog may yet have a second act. 

Julius Caesar wept.

The tears were brought on by an account of Alexander the Great. When his friends asked why he cried, Plutarch wrote that Caesar answered:

Do you not think…it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?

Eventually, Caesar did earn honors and display supreme skill. He achieved one of the most impressive battle records in his conquests. In Rome, he demonstrated extraordinary political and bureaucratic competence. He cleaned swamps (of both kinds) and extended the empire.

However, it’s debatable whether he attained the glory he yearned for.

Throughout history, Julius Caesar has been a controversial figure. He can be seen as the liberator of Rome or her tyrannical destroyer.

Yet the very name Caesar has become associated with royalty, power, and prestige in multiple languages: czar, kaiser. Summarizing the common view of Caesar, Shakespeare gave the following words to Cassius: “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world. Like a Colossus, and we petty men.” The classist and biographer Adrian Goldsworthy continued this assessment: Julius Caesar lived the life of a colossus. Even as some see him as complicated, many see him as great.

This attitude is mistaken.

Why Caesar Isn’t Great

At some point, vicious character and worthless acts remove the possibility of greatness. 

The sense of greatness here isn’t domain-specific, but general. We can call people great in a relative way, such as “he’s a great strategist” or “he’s a great baseball player.” That is not what we’re concerned with here. When used in a general way greatness is a property of the whole person, their character, and history. Other terms can be used in a similar way. A good poker player isn’t a good person and so on.

When greatness is meant in this general way, evaluative questions, such as the meaningfulness of a person’s life and the wisdom of their actions must come into play.

For some acts, it doesn’t matter how competent the person was cruelty, creepiness, or waste remove any claim to greatness.

The case against Julius Caesar being great is straightforward. He was a power-hungry murderer. Such people are not great.

Let’s consider two episodes from Caesar’s life: the Gallic and Civil wars.

Plutarch says that the Gallic wars resulted in the death of one million and enslavement of another million people. Hundreds of cities were destroyed and hundreds of tribes eliminated. Modern historians question these figures, but regardless, the scale of death and destruction was immense for the time.

Greatness, the kind worth weeping for, demands that we do the right thing, for the right reasons. The Gallic wars fail on both accounts.

Consider how these wars began. As Caesar was serving governor, Gallic tribes requested passage through Transalpine Gaul. He denied the request. In response, they decided to move around Roman lands. While they were in the midst of doing so, Caesar simply declared war and attacked them.

In general, these wars were not waged as matters of self-defense, but as wars of expansion. So, by and large, the wars were unjust.

Moreover, Julius Caesar’s intentions were base. He pursued the wars out of ambition and concern for his social position.

Roman aristocrats engaged in military conquest for the same reason some students found useless nonprofits – resume building. The Roman aristocrat built their prestige for the sake of power and honor. Roman culture lusted after political and military glory, a cultural feature that in some sense “worked” but in another was gratuitous. One doesn’t need to be a moral saint in order to know that killing people for the sake of increasing prestige is erroneous and contemptible. 

These wars were brutal. 

Take the famous case of the Siege of Alesia. In 52 BC, Caesar and his men pinned Gauls in the well-fortified Alesia in order to starve them to death. At one point the Gauls pushed out their starving women and children, in a gambit to save food and in hope that their noncombatants would be fed. It’s better to be enslaved than starved. However, the Romans did not accept the dying women and children. Many of them simply starved in the no man's land between Roman and Gallic warriors. 

To get a better sense of what this actually entails, we should reference modern sieges, like the siege of Changchun. In 1948 the communist Chinese laid siege to the nationalist stronghold of Changchun in Manchuria. Like the Romans, the communists did not accept or aid any fleeing civilians. One communist general, Lin Biao, described the fleeing refugees, saying they:

[K]nelt in front of our troops in large groups and begged us to let them through. Some left their babies and small children with us and absconded, others hanged themselves in front of sentry posts. The soldiers who saw this misery lost their resolve, some even falling on their knees to weep with the starving people, saying, ‘We are only following orders.’ Others covertly allowed some of them through. After we corrected this, another tendency was discovered, namely the beating, tying up and shooting of refugees by soldiers, some to death.

In The Tragedy of Liberation, Frank Dikötter reports that the besieged ate everything from pets, belts, bark, and even other humans. We cannot be certain that the siege of Alesia resulted in the same travesties. Yet this is the reality of siege warfare. Men, women, and children are slowly tortured and obliterated.

After the Gallic wars, Caesar moved on to another conflict, now known as Caesar’s civil war. Instead of deciding to give up his legions, as the Senate had asked, he marched them across the Rubicon and murdered people. 

He could have simply complied with the request. There was precedent for such a thing: Pompey the Great showed that it is possible to give up one’s legions while retaining Roman honor. 

Yes, those of you familiar with this affair will know that there’s a sense in which Pompey dismissing his legions was a strategic misstep. If he wanted to be a dictator, he should not have done that. Further, the move wasn't only harmful to Pompey's ambitions. It hurt his men. Pompey was forced to scramble to do right by them without the leverage of an army parked outside Rome. It’s equally true that failing to march on Rome would have assigned a less than ideal fate to Caesar’s soldiers.

Nonetheless, such considerations clearly do not justify civil war.

It really can’t be overstated that the reason so many people died during the fall of the Republic is due to pointless power struggles. If the participants were smarter or less keen on killing people in order to maintain their auctoritas then regime change could have been much more peaceful. 

None of this is to say that Caesar had no impressive attributes. He was exceptionally energetic and intelligent. He may not have been exceptionally virtuous, but he was competent in a way one wishes many politicians alive today were. That competency paid off not just for him but for many around him.

Nor is this to condemn Julius Caesar as a tyrant who destroyed a virtuous republic. The Roman Republic had been in death throes for at least fifty years before Caesar entered the stage. Though one may hope that it would have come to a more peaceful and dignified end.

The case against Caesar isn’t the case for Cato and Cicero (let alone Brutus). Many of the senators suffered from the same vicious ambition as Caesar did, without possessing the same brilliance. They were just as guilty as supporting, intentionally or not, a pointless civil war. 

Why Defenses of Caesar Fail

There are many defenses of the idea that Caesar is great. I’ll consider four, what I’ll call the just war, anachronism, excellence, and tragedy defenses.

The first is just the idea that the wars that Caesar engaged in were just. This must involve a case-by-case evaluation of both wars. 

It’s easy to get lost in the historical weeds here. The quick case against the Gallic wars being permissible is that they don’t meet the standard principles of just war theory:

• Just cause – war must be waged for virtuous causes.

• Just authority – war should be engaged in by legitimate authorities. 

• Success – war should only be fought if there’s a reasonable chance of success.

• Proportionality – war should be proportional to the cause.

• Last resort – war should be used as a last resort.

Arguably, Caesar’s exploits meet the criteria of just authority and success. He represented the Roman empire and won the wars. There are libertarian, religious, and liberal criticism of the idea that the Roman empire was a just authority, but set those aside. 

It’s more difficult to make the case that they meet the criteria of a just cause. There were several wars, of course, and some are easier to justify than others. It’s worth stating some general points. The Roman empire likely didn’t face an existential threat from Gallic tribes in the 50s BC. However, perhaps one can forgive the Romans for their paranoia. The threat was real at many points in the empire’s life.

More persuasively, as far as the case against Caesar goes, the Gallic wars did not begin in self-defense. Nor can it be said that the war was used as a last resort. Economic, political, and diplomatic measures to reduce conflict in Gaul were not taken seriously.

If we look at wars of expansion that are similar to the Gallic wars today, we don’t find them great. Even so, it’s not entirely implausible to attempt to excuse, if not justify, the Gallic wars.

However, Caesar's war is indefensible. The case for it being just can't really be made in self-defense. Self-defense for Caesar, maybe, but the defense of one man does not make for a just war. The Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero was correct when he wrote that Julius Caesar’s actions in the civil war:

[Overturned] all the laws of gods and men for the sake of the preeminence that he had imagined for himself in his mistaken fancy.

This episode of his life was simply a serious failure in action and intention.

The second defense claims that applying our standards of behavior is simply anachronistic. Caesar’s behavior is similar to the behavior of many, even if not all, Roman aristocrats of the day. The dynamics of civil strife, Gallic politics and the ancient Roman world rendered the moral landscape totally different from today’s ethical world. When we accuse others of failing to live up to our standards we simply aren’t taking into account their reality.

One understanding of this defense is just moral relativism. The problem with moral relativism is that it’s false! It’s an unmotivated philosophical theory. There aren’t principled reasons for privileging a culture as the ground of ethical reality, as opposed to an individual, subgroups within a culture, or even groups of cultures.

Even if moral relativism is true, then Caesar is still nothing more than a power-hungry ruler. According to our culture, Caesar is not great. The claim is made from the standpoint of our culture and should be evaluated from that position. We’re not ancient Romans evaluating his actions.

One is reminded of the story of the British response to Sati in India. Sati was a cultural practice of a widow immolating herself after the death of her husband, not always willingly. The British didn’t like this, because they believed (correctly) that it was wrong to burn people to death. In response to their attempts to repress the practice, it’s reported that several Indians asked a British official to respect their cultural traditions and refrain from punishing people partaking in the practice. The official responded that he would respect their culture and asked in return that the Indians do the same – in British culture, when someone burns another person to death, they are treated as a criminal and placed in prison.

In a similar fashion, we should say that even if moral relativism is true, we’ll proceed as if it were false. It makes little difference.

The third defense leans into Caesar’s apparent vices and construes them as virtues. It’s a Nietzschean argument. What made Caesar great was that he dominated others and impressed his will upon the world. The case against Julius Caesar is one that derives from slave morality, while master morality leaves room for a positive appraisal of his behavior. 

Slave morality revolves around the victim. It’s a Christian morality focused on reducing harm and oppression. However, it’s not grounded in compassion, but in resentment of the powerful. In contrast, master morality revolves around excellence and domination. The master isn’t concerned with moral rules for they are nothing more than weapons the weak use to manipulate the strong. 

Of course, there’s much to say about this kind of defense. There’s an argument that a kind of Nietzschean excellence is underrated today. But as it’s used here, the argument isn’t that plausible. It’s essentially the thought that “might makes right”. The problem with this view is that actions must be judged relative to a principle or value, if they are to be judged at all. There’s nothing to merely “impressing one’s will on the world.” In the words of G. K. Chesterton:

The worship of will is the negation of will. To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose.

To worship domination as such is empty. Instead, one must explicitly commit to some set of values or principles and then evaluate actions accordingly. I submit that not engaging in unjust wars and killing innocent people are good principles.

The final defense of Caesar refers to tragedy. Nature is red in tooth and claw. It’s the story of mothers and their children consuming other mothers and children. Human society is not much different. History is the story of gang warfare. Before Caesar entered Gaul, the Gallic tribes were busy killing and enslaving one another. Indeed, part of his explicit strategy took advantage of this dynamic and involved using tribes against one another. If Caesar hadn’t murdered people, then others would have filled the vacuum. If Spartans hadn’t enslaved Helots, then the Helots would have enslaved someone else. The ancient world was nasty and its inhabitants were not smart enough to transcend their lot. 

On this line, our judgment of Caesar is too harsh. He lived in a tragic world that had made little philosophical, cultural, and technological progress. We can see this as an improved version of the earlier three defenses. Caesar’s actions are more understandable in the ancient world and his traits are more admirable because they’re what was needed to survive and help others.

Yet if we take this argument seriously, we’re not left with the conclusion that Caesar was great. Instead, he’s more of a tragic figure. Not tragic in the classical Greek sense – he’s not doomed to a necessary fate, but tragic in the sense that he is a paragon of the imperfect ancient world.

Truly great and heroic figures are the few who managed to transcend their time or wield the imperfections of their time well. The ancient Greek Epaminondas engaged in pointless city-state wars, but at least he freed the enslaved Messenians. Philosophers like Diogenes the cynic are impressive because they exited the game altogether. Though he may not have liberated the enslaved, he rejected the world of gang warfare. Exit can be admirable.

By chasing after martial honor, so many allegedly great figures simply spent themselves in a foolish way. War can be heroic, but usually, it is for losers. 

Nonetheless, this final defense of Caesar is the one that I find most plausible. It’s true that the Roman world was tragic and that was no fault of any individual Roman. We should not take sanctimonious pleasure at their vices. 

Moreover, one can argue that the Romans, unlike others, built state capacity. It was, typically, better to be conquered by them than by less civilized people. For many, Roman culture, markets, and competence improved their lives. We should reject cultural relativism – Roman culture really was better than others in some ways. Julius Caesar can take credit for being an effective ambassador. But this judgment is a relative one, not an absolute one. We have absolutely better heroes today – ones who didn’t kill thousands of others for pride. Moreover, the Roman generals to some extent took advantage of moral luck. Perhaps Caesar would have been a Vercingetorix or Arminius in another world. 

Concluding the Case

Sometimes we admire people because they’re excellent along a single dimension, even if not all. For example, we admire political or entrepreneurial figures because “they get stuff done.” Such attitudes are mistaken. The details of what gets done actually matter.

In general, military excellence, power, and aggression are overrated. They’re indicative of a tragic situation and lack of intelligence, rather than the presence of virtue.

Often, the people who are invisible are underrated. They managed to exit pointless prestige competitions. 

This isn’t a case for overturning statues of Julius Caesar or similar figures. There are many reasons not to do that. Nor is it a case for the idea that we are morally superior today. Modern civilization is clearly better in many regards, but to justify the judgment that it is better overall requires further argumentation.

One suspects that engaging in that argumentative project may itself be indicative of vice. We shouldn’t think so well of ourselves.

Politicians today are largely driven by ignoble intentions. Like many ancient aristocrats, they would rather remain in power than resign in old age even to ideological allies and even when staying in power harms their political project. Arguably, many ordinary citizens are not so different. Instead of exiting political games, we fuel them. When we do exit political games, for most of us, the way we choose to spend our time instead just isn’t that virtuous. A subset of people, Caesar-like, commit sins of domination, while most choose sins of submission.

Our world is tragic too. Though we don’t live in the ancient world of constant competition and warfare, that reality isn’t so far away. 

We should be vigilant that such a world is not brought about again. This requires applying high standards to who we praise.

Julius Caesar wasn’t great and, for that matter, neither was Alexander.

With a single exception, all 26 letters of the English version of the Latin alphabet plausibly descend from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Latin letter A/a comes from the Etruscan 𐌀, itself adapted from an archaic form of the Greek letter alpha (modern: Α/α), which was a version of the Phoenician aleph (𐤀), which not coincidentally looks like an ox head on its side and likely comes from the Egyptian hieroglyph 𓃾, by way of the Proto-Sinaitic script from the Sinai peninsula.

Similarly, N may ultimately come from the snake glyph 𓆓, M from the water symbol 𓈖, E from a man praising the gods 𓀠, and O, unsurprisingly, from the eye 𓁹. The one exception is X, which was directly invented by the Greeks as the letter chi (Χ/χ).

But the Ancient Egyptian script is the progenitor of far more than the Latin and Greek alphabets. The Cyrillic alphabet, used in the Slavic cultural area, is a direct adaptation of Greek. The Arabic and Hebrew writing systems descend from Aramaic, which evolved from the Proto-Sinaitic alongside with Phoenician. So did the Geʽez script, used in Ethiopia. Eastward, in South and Southeast Asia, things get a bit muddled, but it seems likely that the Brahmi script, from which are descended the scripts used to write Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Thai, Khmer, and many other languages of that region, also ultimately come from Aramaic and Proto-Sinaitic. Even the exotic Mongolian alphabet, written vertically, is part of the family through the Iranian-related Sogdians of Central Asia.

What does not come from Egyptian usually comes from Chinese. In addition to China itself, Chinese characters have been used and adapted in some of the neighboring cultures: Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, although the latter two eventually replaced them with other systems (Latin for Vietnamese, and the artificially constructed Hangul for Korean).

Besides Egypt and China, only two other places are widely considered to have invented writing independently from foreign cultures.

The first was Sumer, in Mesopotamia, and its cuneiform script. Cuneiform was adapted to write other languages of the area, most notably Akkadian, spoken in Babylon and Assyria. It may have inspired the idea of writing to Egypt, if not its symbols. Now cuneiform is completely gone from Mesopotamia, replaced by the Egyptian-based Arabic and Syriac scripts.

The other was on another continent: Mesoamerica, where civilizations like the Olmecs and the Maya developed their own writing systems. Their symbols gave way to Latin letters in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest.

Thus human history contains four independent origins of writing. This suggests that we can, if we want, divide the literate cultures of the world into that many civilizational blocs on the sole basis of their writing systems:

• The Sinosphere: China, Japan, Korea (and formerly Vietnam)

• Mesopotamia (now extinct)

• Mesoamerica (now extinct)

• Everything else, which I’ll call the Greater West.

On defining civilizations

Writing systems are only one way to divide the world into civilizations, and certainly not the most useful. It’s more common to go with broader cultural traits, such as religions.

A common model is the one from the book Clash of Civilizations, by Samuel Huntington, which identifies nine great civilizations. Four are defined by religion directly: the Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian Orthodox spheres. The Sinosphere, a complex blend of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and various folk beliefs, is another — although it is distinct from Shinto/Buddhist Japan, which is its own civilization. The remaining three blocs are a mix of Catholicism and Protestantism: Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Western World.

“The West” in this model is a very different affair from the Greater West I defined above. It also much more closely matches common usage of the term.

When people talk of the West, they usually mean, first of all, Western Europe, the region at the extreme western end of the Eurasian continent. Where Western Europe starts isn’t perfectly defined, but everyone at least agrees on its core large members — the UK, France, Germany, Italy. The West is also the United States and Canada, as well as Australia and New Zealand. These are rich countries, mostly Christian, mostly English-speaking. Their populations mostly descend from Western European settlers, with very limited input from indigenous populations, which distinguishes them from large parts of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

It felt silly, didn’t it, to lump the cultures of the United States and France together with those of Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Russia and Thailand, just because they use somewhat related writing symbols. When you take into account the whole spectrum of culture, Huntington’s model of “the West” seems to make far more intuitive sense.

But when we probe the boundaries of that categorization, things get murky. Why is Latin America distinct? It’s Catholic, and descended from cultures — Spain and Portugal — that are decidedly Western. Sure, Mexico and Peru, once the seats of the Aztec and Inca empires, absorbed a lot of indigenous culture. But Argentina didn’t, for instance. Most people in Latin America are of European descent, biologically and culturally.1

What about Sub-Saharan Africa? There are parts of it, like much of South Africa, that are inhabited by people of Western European descent; and Western European colonialism has Westernized much of the rest, religiously, linguistically, and administratively. For that matter, what about the Western colonial influence in places like India or the Philippines?

What about Israel, which is Western in many ways but isn’t Christian? Or Russia, which today feels very distant from the US and Western Europe for geopolitical reasons, but tried many times in its history to Westernize?

And what about Greece, the country from which Westerners draw their philosophy, early literature, and democratic ideal?

Phylogenetics of culture

These questions point to a problem of taxonomy.

Nobody worries about taxonomy more than biologists, so let’s see what they think. The idea of categorizing living beings as “species” has occupied philosophers and scientists at least since Aristotle. The current consensus is that there is no single definition of species that covers all cases, but that doesn’t prevent biologists from using the imperfect concept of species to make sense of the living world.

Similarly, we will never be able to trace perfect boundaries between human cultures. Still, it’s worthwhile to come up with a taxonomy, because it helps making sense of the social and political world. There are meaningful things to be said about “the West,” but to say them, you need at least a working definition of it, whether it’s my very broad Greater West, Huntington’s smaller Catholic-and-Protestant-but-not-Latin-America-or-Africa West, or something else.

Biologists resolve some of the ambiguities around species by thinking in terms of trees. A phylogenetic tree groups together organisms that share a common ancestor. All currently living humans share an ancestor, so we are a meaningful phylogenetic group. We share an ancestor with chimpanzees, so [humans + chimpanzees] is a meaningful group, formally called the Hominini tribe. [Humans + chimpanzees + gorillas] is another meaningful group, Homininae, but [humans + gorillas, excluding chimpanzees] is not: humans and gorillas don’t share a common ancestor that isn’t also the ancestor of chimpanzees.

Phylogenetic trees are typically inferred from two kinds of information: morphology and genetics. Classically, evolutionary biologists would look at various living and fossil specimens, figure out which traits are shared across organisms (e.g. breastfeeding, warm-bloodedness, having five fingers) and declare, after careful analysis of many traits, that this and that species are part of a coherent phylogenetic group (e.g. the mammals). More recently, the study of genetic markers have allowed the methods to become more precise.

The result is that even though we can’t fully agree on what a species is, we have a pretty good idea of the relationships between groups. Phylogenetic trees add a useful dimension — a historical, temporal one — to the taxonomy.

Many attempts have been made at using phylogenetic trees for human societies. Cultures don’t have morphology or genetics, but they do have various traits that evolve in ways that are analogous enough. One of these traits, of course, is writing systems.

To illustrate the use of trees for cultures, let’s recast the discussion about alphabets and scripts from earlier into the shape of a tree.2 (It's only meant to give you an idea, so feel free to just skim it.)

• Egyptian hieroglyphs (𓌏𓌃𓏪) † ← this symbol means “extinct”

  • Proto-Sinaitic script †

    • Geʽez script (ግዕዝ or ፊደል)

    • Phoenician alphabet (𐤀𐤁𐤂𐤃𐤄) †

      • Tifinagh (ⵜⴼⵉⵏⵗ), used to write Berber languages

      • Archaic Greek alphabet †

        • Modern Greek alphabet (Ελληνικό αλφάβητο)

        • Etruscan alphabet (𐌀𐌁𐌂𐌃𐌄) †

          • Latin alphabet (ABCDE)

            • English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Welsh, Polish, etc. (all very similar alphabets with slight variations around diacritics, e.g. ê, ö, å, ú, ç, ł)

            • Later adoptions: Vietnamese (chữ Quốc ngữ), Turkish (Türk alfabesi), Malay/Indonesian (Tulisan Rumi or Aksara Latin), etc.

        • Cyrillic alphabets such as Russian (ру́сский алфави́т), Ukrainian (абе́тка), etc.

        • Runes (ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ), formerly used for Germanic languages †

        • Coptic alphabet (ⲀⲂⲄⲆⲈ)

        • Armenian alphabet (Հայոց գրեր)

        • possibly, Georgian scripts (e.g. Mkhedruli, მხედრული)

      • Aramaic alphabet (𐡀𐡁𐡂𐡃𐡄)‎ †

        • Hebrew alphabet (אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי)

        • Arabic alphabet (الْحُرُوف الْعَرَبِيَّة) and its variations for Persian, Urdu, Ottoman Turkish (before it was replaced by the Latin-based Turkish alphabet), etc.

        • Brahmi script (𑀩𑁆𑀭𑀸𑀳𑁆𑀫𑀻) †

          • Northern Brahmic scripts such as Devanagari (देवनागरी), Bengali (বাংলা বর্ণমালা), Gujarati (ગુજરાતી લિપિ), Tibetan (དབུ་ཅན་), and many others

          • Southern Brahmic scripts such as Tamil (தமிழ் அரிச்சுவடி), Malayalam (മലയാളലിപി), Thai (อักษร), Khmer ( អក្សរខ្មែរ), Javanese (ꦲꦏ꧀ꦱꦫꦗꦮ), and many others

        • Syriac alphabet (ܐܠܦ ܒܝܬ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ)

          • Sogdian alphabet †

            • Old Uyghur alphabet †

              • Mongolian script (ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ)

                • Manchu alphabet (ᠮᠠᠨᠵᡠ ᡥᡝᡵᡤᡝᠨ)

Another totally independent branch of the tree starts in China:

• Oracle bone script †

  • Chinese characters, traditional (漢字)

    • Chinese characters, simplified (汉字)

    • Japanese kanji (漢字), hiragana (ひらがな), and katakana (カタカナ)

    • Korean hanja (漢字), now superseded by hangul (한글) which was invented from scratch in 1443, though certainly with inspiration from hanja3

    • Vietnamese chữ Hán (𡨸漢) † and chữ Nôm (𡨸喃) †

And finally, the two other branches:

• Sumerian cuneiform (𒅴𒂠) †

  • Elamite cuneiform †

  • Old Persian cuneiform †

• Mesoamerican scripts: Epi-Olmec, Maya, Mixtec, Aztec, etc. †

Great. We now have a pretty clear representation of the relationships between writing systems and, by extension, the cultures that use them.

We can experiment with defining “the West” in various ways based on this tree. If we take the entire branch that starts from Egyptian hieroglyphs, then we get my broad Greater West concept from earlier. At the other extreme, we could define the West as just the subgroup that uses the Latin alphabet and its variations. Geographically, it would correspond to the teal areas on this map:

This is not actually far from Huntington’s model of the West to which we add Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. But there are differences. For example, Turkey, Vietnam, and Indonesia are included, and yet we know — thanks to other cultural traits, such as language, religion, or the writing systems they historically used — that these countries are unlikely to be considered Western.

Also, this excludes Greece! Suppose we want to include Greece into our concept, because we really care about Socrates, Alexander the Great, and the Iliad being Western. We could start with the Latin branch, and climb to the larger branch that also includes Greek. But then note that we have to also include everything that is descended from Greek, including the Cyrillic alphabets, ancient Germanic runes, the Armenian and (maybe) Georgian alphabets, etc. If we care about the tree structure — and we do, because it’s the closest thing we have to an objective categorization — then either all of these are Western, or none are.

Of course, we don’t have to build our tree out of writing systems. We could do it with languages, which are related to scripts but evolve distinctly. Notably, not all cultures developed writing, but all have language. Phylogenetic trees are often made for large language families such as Indo-European (which includes most languages spoken in Europe, Iran, and South Asia). For example:

Using this tree, we could easily define the West as the groups that speak Germanic (red), Romance (orange), and Celtic (light green) languages, i.e. the large subtree at the bottom. If we want to include Greek speakers, though, then we’ll have to cast a much wider net that also catches speakers of Persian, Hindi, Russian, and Armenian. (And note that speakers of non-Indo-European languages, like the Basques, the Hungarians, or the Finns, are totally left out.)

We could build a tree out of religions. Simplifying a whole lot of religion history, we could say that the Baháʼí faith branched from Shia Islam, which branched from early Islam (most of which became Sunni Islam), which branched from Christianity, which branched from Judaism, which evolved out of the mythologies of the Canaanite people. The real story is of course much more complicated, but there is a pattern of common ancestry here too.

Writing, language, and religion are ideal for phylogenetics because they tend to change slowly and conservatively. They have limited “horizontal transmission,” which could mean an alphabet that borrows symbols from another, or religions that merge into a syncretic faith. Horizontal transmission also refers to people acquiring traits from a culture unrelated to their own. For language and religion, spread remains rare, relatively speaking.

Other cultural traits are more easily borrowed. This includes almost anything you can think of: domesticated plants and animals, laws, art genres, clothing, architectural styles, myths and stories, tool designs, cooking recipes, technologies, and myriads of others, all of which we sometimes collectively call “memes.” When a type of meme is readily loaned between cultures, the resulting phylogenetic tree looks less like a tree and more like an interweaved net.

Yet we can imagine the ultimate phylogenetic tree (or net) of culture, one that would incorporate writing, language, religion, as well as all of the other society-wide memes. We will never see this ideal, all-encompassing tree, of course. We can only approximate it.

If we did somehow manage to create it, we would almost certainly see a branch that looks quite close to what Huntington meant by “the West.” And there would be a variety of Greater Wests, depending on which common ancestor we were singling out — Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Greek alphabet, the proto-Indo-European language, Catholicism, or the use of wheat as a staple.

Why think about the Greater West?

In zoology, there are groups we think about a lot, such as mammals and birds. There are others that we think about far less, such as tetrapods or amniotes, as well as even more obscure groupings such as reptiliomorpha and synapsids. A phylogenetic tree can have virtually infinite branching, and therefore infinitely many groups. This is overwhelming, so we usually ignore it all except for the few that we know well.

But sometimes, the group of interest for a particular question really is the wider, more obscure one. Tetrapods are the group of vertebrates whose defining characteristic is having four limbs. It includes all mammals, reptiles, birds, and amphibians, as well as some extinct groups. If you were making an argument about limbs, and you used only mammalian examples, you might make mistakes or miss interesting insights.

Likewise, it is sometimes worth talking of the West in a broader sense than just Western Europe plus North America and Oceania. Some of the wider groups are well-defined, like Christendom. But most aren’t, and that’s why I’m coining this phrase, “Greater West,” to refer to them in general terms. It’s not meant to replace the usual concept of the West. Rather, the point is simply to draw attention to the various possible groupings, and in so doing, help us understand certain aspects of the world.

Which aspects? I see at least four: the proximity between cultures; the value of particularly unique societies; Chinese civilization; and the history of the West itself.

I. Cultural proximity

A classic psychology study, the Robbers Cave experiment, divided 22 similar boys into two equal groups and tried to see what could spark conflict. It turned out that not much needed to be done beyond just the dividing. The mere existence of categories seems to suffice to create conflicts among humans, even when there is virtually no difference between the categories.

The obvious extension of this is to nation-states, but I wonder if it also applies to large civilizational blocs. By defining the West as not Eastern Europe or Latin America, do we increase the chance of conflict and misunderstanding between them? I don’t know, but it seems plausible. A title like Clash of Civilization might be self-fulfilling: define a bunch of civilizations, and they will clash.

By contrast, a Greater West concept, however defined, explicitly groups cultures together. It would certainly be naïve to hope for world peace just because we realized that almost everyone writes in altered Egyptian hieroglyphs, but it’s at least an example of non-obvious shared cultural heritage. For someone in North America like me, the Middle East seems distant, exotic, maybe even scary, but it can help to consider that much of my culture ultimately comes from there. People in Christian societies are sometimes surprised to learn that Jesus is a prophet in Islam. It’s one of many signs that the religions aren’t that different from each other.

When comparing countries, it is often useful to estimate those cultural distances. For instance, the government of, say, Denmark might consider adopting a policy used in, say, Uruguay, but differences between Danish and Uruguayan culture might make this difficult. If you can quantify those differences, then you can make a more enlightened choice.

Some researchers do just that. The World Values Survey, for example, periodically asks people from across the world about their values, from which we can calculate distances and look at them in a big table or even as a cool visualization:

We can think of cultural distances as the length of the branches on a phylogenetic tree. If we could look at the idealized tree of all culture, the branches linking Denmark and Uruguay would probably be much shorter than the branches linking, say, Denmark and Myanmar.

In practice, we can’t measure those lengths, nor can we calculate cultural distances in any way that isn’t a gross oversimplification, as are those “traditional vs. secular” and “survival vs. self-expression” axes. But having a concept of the Greater West, or better yet, multiple such concepts, is a good way to maintain an intuitive understanding of the proximity between cultures. Denmark and Uruguay have to be somewhat close if you see the West and Latin America as a single civilization.

This way of thinking creates opportunities for more fruitful comparisons and predictions, and removes opportunities for misunderstanding. It can remind us that despite the distance created by the islamist revolution, Iranian people are not that different from Europeans; or that the economic instability in a place like Argentina, which used to be rich, is a plausible scenario in the “northern” Western countries; or that Palestinians and Israelis share far more cultural baggage than their ongoing conflict would suggest.

II. Unique cultures

In some cases, the cultural distances are vast. There are places that lie entirely outside the great civilizations, doing things their own way with little influence from the dominant cultures. A concept like the Greater West can, by providing contrast, help us recognize them and their value.

Let’s go back to writing systems for a moment. It’s controversial, but a few cultures may have developed writing independently from the four cradles of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica. An example is Easter Island and its Rongorongo script, a forgotten set of glyphs that may or may not be true writing representing the Rapa Nui language. It is undeciphered.

Easter Island is an extremely remote place that was settled by Polynesians after thousands of years of spreading throughout the Pacific Ocean. It is about as far from Egypt or Western Europe as it gets, both geographically and culturally. If it turns out to be one of the five or so places that independently invented writing, this is a useful data point to understand human history.

In a sense, the Rongorongo script — assuming it is a true writing system — contributes more to the global diversity of scripts than any single script in the Greater West, precisely because it is independent of them.

Besides species, another thing biologists argue about is how to define biodiversity. The basic method is just to count species in an area (and pretend we know what a species is). But species are not independent of one another! A forest with 4 kinds of maple has more species than a forest with 2 maples and 1 pine, but because all the maples are closely related, there’s a sense in which the second forest is more diverse.

Again, the solution is to use trees (phylogenetic ones, to be clear). The concept of phylogenetic diversity says that a species contributes more to biodiversity when it is distantly related to the others — in other words, when it is more unique. For example, the ginkgo is a living fossil, only very distantly related to any other extant plants. If it disappeared, the plant kingdom would be poorer than if one of the many maple species did.

So it goes with cultures. The linguistic tapestry of Europe is richer thanks to the non-Indo-European Basque and Finnish speakers. The religious tapestry of Asia is richer thanks to Zoroastrianism, once the state religion of the mighty Persian Empire, but now practiced by only a very small number of people of Iranian descent. The culinary tapestry of the world is richer thanks to the crops that were domesticated outside the Greater West and Sinosphere by the Mesoamericans — maize, vanilla, cacao, tomatoes, and chili peppers.

This is especially important when we consider that cultural diversity is declining under the force of globalized communication. The Rapa Nui people, just like the Mesopotamians and the indigenous Mexicans, have forgotten the script of their ancestors. In its broadest formulation, and across many cultural traits, the Greater West has conquered almost everything else. To the extent that we value cultural diversity — perhaps due to its capacity to show us alternative cultural paths — it’s more worthwhile than ever to notice what still survives outside.

III. China

And among the cultures that have resisted the influence of the Greater West, none has done it more than the other great civilization of the world: China.

It hasn’t fully resisted. In many ways, China is now Westernized. If we built a phylogenetic tree of fashions in clothing, we would probably conclude that China is a full-fledged member of the Greater West: even its most powerful figure, during a major political event, dresses in completely Western fashion.

For comparison, the most powerful in China towards the end of the imperial era dressed like this:

In other ways, however, China is still very distinct from even the broadest concepts of the Greater West. The writing system is a particularly visible trait, but there are more subtle ones. China has its own philosophical and religious traditions, for instance, which are very distinct from the Greco-Roman and Middle Eastern systems of thought. Its social structure is founded on a complex kinship system. Less than 1% of Chinese people are reportedly left-handed, compared to 10% in the rest of the world, perhaps indicating a higher level of conformity.

The concept of the Greater West is therefore helpful to recognize the extent to which China is not the West. Of all cradles of civilization, China is the one that has remained the most distinct from the Egyptian and Mesopotamian ones. It’s not a country like any other. My understanding is that the Chinese are keenly aware of this — and in a world where China’s power and influence are growing, it’s probably important for Westerners to realize it, too.

IV. The history of the West

Lastly, thinking about the Greater West is a good way to understand how Western civilization itself evolved.

As I mentioned, phylogenetic trees add a temporal dimension to taxonomies. That allows us to think better about the categories that currently exist, which is what we did in the last three sections. But we can also use the temporal dimension directly, to dive deeper into the past.

I initially conceived of this essay when wondering what “the West” could even mean before Rome, Greece, and Christianity were a thing. The answer soon became clear: for most of our memes, the West 3,000-5,000 years ago was the two westernmost cradles of civilization: the valleys of the Nile and of the Tigris and Euphrates. Egypt gave us our writing; the Fertile Crescent gave us most of our crops; some mix of them, in a Bronze Age world that also included the Hittites, the Canaanites, and the Minoans, gave us our myths, religions, political systems, early art, and almost every other feature of complex civilization. All of these memes would later be adopted by the Indo-European-speaking people who inhabited what is now Europe.

Between then and now, there have been countless branching moments in the tree of culture, such as when Orthodox and Catholic Christianity split in 1054, or when Latin gave birth to dozens of child languages.

There have been extinction events, such the disappearance of the cuneiform script, or of Cathar Christians, or of most Celtic tongues.

There have been mergers of culture due to horizontal transfer, like the adoption of liberal ideology in many countries after the fall of the USSR, or the syncretism of Greek and Buddhist art and religion after the conquests of Alexander the Great.

When you trim the tips of the great tree of culture, you are necessarily left with one of the many concepts of the Greater West — which are nothing more than snapshots of what “the West” was a some earlier point in time.

I know of no better way to make sense of that complex, enormous, and multidimensional monster that we call history.

For inscrutable reasons, the gods called for the death of the innocent.

Not just any animal would do for the ritual of buphonia. The Athenian rite specifically called for the killing of man’s working companion, the yoked ox. The animals that tilled the field. The very title of the ceremony,  the murder of the ox, communicated vice, but that did not prevent its occurrence. After the animal was slain, Apollo, speaking through the Pythian oracle, demanded that the community consume the victim's flesh. 

Sacrifice was a fact of life in antiquity. The religion of the age required offering and killing other beings for the sake of gods, heroes, or even men. Sometimes the sacrificers destroyed mere materials, but more often they slew animals and sometimes even people.

In the Iliad, religious sacrifice is frequent. After the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, Agamemnon immediately resumes his role as divine king:

The son of Atreus bade the people purify themselves. And they purified themselves, and cast the defilement into the sea, and offered to Apollo perfect hecatombs of bulls and goats by the shore of the barren sea; and the savour thereof went up to heaven, eddying amid the smoke.

After Troy has been sacked, in many versions, the youngest daughter of Priam is sacrificed at Achilles's tomb.

Today, we speak of sacrifice in many ways. Parents work for their children, soldiers die for their nation, and ascetics forgo their pleasure for purity. We must be clear about what they are talking about. In this piece, sacrifice means the act of consecrating an offering by destruction. This act is committed for the sake of a religious entity. The paradigmatic case of sacrifice is the killing of an animal during a ritual. 

Sacrifice involves the sacrificer, sacrificed, witnesses, and the spiritual being for which it is performed. The owner of the ox is the sacrificer, the animal is the sacrificed, and the community serves as active witnesses. The ritual is done for the sake of Zeus (or some other god) – he’s the immediate religious object. The act consecrates the offering, that is, it destroys and renders it sacred. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, the writer and publisher Roberto Calasso describes the paradoxical way in which sacrificial victims were treated:

They throw leaves over Polyxena, as if she had won an event at the games: for this was the way they congratulated the winners.

Shortly after this scene, Polyxena is killed. Today such a “sacred killing” appears pointless and cruel. Indeed, we should discard moral nihilism and just say that it is pointless and cruel.

Happily, Zeus does not receive the victims he once did in ancient times. These days the roles of the sacrificer, sacrificed, witness, and religious object are left vacant. 

But we must ask, what was the nature of such practices? Why did we sacrifice so often and what did it mean then? And finally, what does sacrifice mean today?

Let’s answer these questions using three models as guides.

The Religious Bond

One of the most common explanations for sacrifice is what I’ll call the communal signaling model. 

The first part of this model is the signaling aspect. Talk is cheap. People’s motives and beliefs are revealed through their actions.

The hunter who shares his catch shows his loyalty to the community by giving up what he could consume. The official who takes the time to attend every social gathering and ceremony communicates that he cares by their presence. People who pay such costs for the group make much better allies. It is by their works that you know them; words are not enough. Neither neighbors nor gods appreciate cheap signaling. In buphonia, the healthy working ox is offered as tribute to the gods – and by extension the community – because that offering means much more than the killing of a useless animal.

The second piece of this model is the communal aspect. Sacrifice is not a purely individual act. Crucially it involves the entire community. Yes, an individual can communicate their prosocial nature by offering expensive sacrifices, but to only describe such an act as a matter of an individual communicating their traits misses its intrinsic religious and group nature.

Sacrifice is an act performed and witnessed by a community, not only individuals.

Religion ritualized sacrificial behaviors that strengthen group feeling. The rites were performed when individuals entered the group and when they left it. Fustel de Coulanges describes this experience:

A sort of initiation was also required for the son, as we have seen it was for the daughter. This took place a short time after birth—the ninth day at Rome, the tenth in Greece, the tenth or twelfth in India. On that day the father assembled the family, assembled witnesses, and offered a sacrifice to his fire. The child was presented to the domestic gods; a female carried him in her arms, and ran, carrying him, several times round the sacred fire.

Sacrifice, through regular religious events, communicated group membership in life and death. It was an act for the entire family, community, or city. Many were implicated as they watched, sacrificed, or consumed the offerings.

The communal signaling explanation of sacrifice is a functional one. Sacrifice occurs because it binds together communities. Individuals that prove their worth to the group are more likely to survive. Communities that are unified are more likely to persist than those who do not. Sacrifice is therefore the result of cultural evolutionary pressure.

Yet this theory leaves aspects of the phenomenon unexplained.

What it predicts are ritualized and conspicuous “sacrifices.” It does not predict that the act has the sacred character it does. This isn’t to say that the theory is false, but it may be too general to explain the fundamentally religious nature of the act. Sacrifice is performed for the sake of a religious object.

In buphonia, Athenians killed the ox for the sake of the mythical Apollo. What is the son of Zeus doing here? Sacrifices could have simply involved giving to the community without religious garb.

There are already many real examples of “secular sacrifice.” For example, recall the hunter who slays the largest animal and shares his killing.  This is a conspicuous act that undoubtedly proves the hunter’s value as an ally. When all hunters share their successes, the act is transformed into a communal one and the group bond strengthens. Such acts do not require any notion of the sacred. Ordinary norms suffice. Why couldn’t group feeling be regularly proved via nonreligious means?

The Sacred Cleanses 

Before the battle of Salamis, Themistocles is called to scapegoat Persian prisoners:

[The seer] clasped Themistocles by the hand and bade him consecrate the youths, and sacrifice them all to Dionysus Carnivorous, with prayers of supplication… the multitude… invoked the god with one voice, dragged the prisoners to the altar, and compelled the fulfillment of the sacrifice, as the seer commanded.

In some sense, it is enough to kill your enemies without bringing religion into it. Yet the ritual “justifies” the killing. But why does religion have a cleansing power at all? Sacrifice is still cruel and the spiritual rationale is blatant rationalization.

A version of René Girard’s theory may be useful here. Let’s call it the scapegoat model. 

Human competition is a pressure cooker building up to violence. Girard proposes that this conflict emerges from mimetic behavior. Humans are fundamentally imitative creatures. We copy not only others’ behavior, but their very desires. The nature of desire is not a simple two-part relation between the unsatisfied and the object of desire, it’s a tripartite one, with the unsatisfied, the object of desire, and the model of desire. The model is what is imitated. The unsatisfied desires through the other. 

However, this means we desire the very same things. This results in competition and conflict. This is the pressure cooker. Whatever one thinks of Girard’s story, there certainly is a question here: what prevents the communal pressure cooker from exploding? Why isn’t man stuck in the realm of nature?

Here is where the ability for religious rites to justify violence enters. The religious object provides the ideology of the scapegoat, which justified the killing of innocents.

Instead of spiraling out of control, competition is managed by blaming and purging the scapegoat.

In I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard offers the example of the healer Apollonius.

Ephesus was suffering from a plague. Knowing of the healer and his power they asked for his help. Apollonius accepted and led them to the city’s theater where images of the Herculean god had been arranged. In this theater sat a single beggar. He offered a single instruction:

Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods.

With Apollonius’s urging, the crowd stoned him: 

And as soon as some of them began to take shots and hit him with their stones, the beggar who had seemed to blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a demon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones were heaped into a great cairn around him.

Social order is restored by the killing of the innocent. The communal signaling model explains how sacrifice can serve as a way to bond a community together, yet arguably leaves the sacred unexplained. The scapegoat model proposes that the sacred just is what justifies the killing of innocents. The beggar was “revealed” as a demon. That’s what justified the act.

Jean-Pierre Vernant expands on this aspect of Girard’s theory:

If the act of slaying lies at the heart of the thusia, it resides there like a subversive threat that is repeatedly conjured away. It is a defect against which care is taken to construct and organize the delicate balance of a rite which embeds life in death. It admits that we must slaughter animals in order to eat, yet at the same time it aims to banish acts of murder and savagery from what is human.

Both the communal signaling and scapegoat models explain many real and mythical cases of sacrifice, but not all.

The Master as the Most Willing Sacrificer

Returning to the Trojan war, consider the case of Agamemnon and Iphigenia.

Agamemnon and the rest of the Greeks are stranded in Aulis. The Achaeans are not happy about this state of affairs. The king promised them the riches of Troy but gave them the poverty of a lowly port.

The seer Calcis tells Agamemnon that he has offended Artemis and must sacrifice his eldest daughter, Iphigenia.

So, Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia to still Artemis’s fury. Such an act appeased the goddess and Agamemnon’s Achaeans. 

This ritual has a religious object, Artemis. But Agamemnon does not kill for the sake of Artemis alone. He also kills to satisfy his men. 

The scapegoat model is of use here. The impiety of the house of Atreus explains why the men are stuck on a hot, boring island with nothing to show for themselves. Hence, they must be sacrificed.

After the sacrifice, the victim is deified. Iphigenia is given a more glorious death than her father, who later bleeds out in a bath.

The communal signaling model is of less use. The sacrifice is not primarily a communal act.

Agamemnon does not only kill for his men but to conquer Troy. Behind that goal, is a deep desire to be recognized by others. Recall how he risks victory over Troy to avoid losing any kind of face when facing off against Achilles.

The sacrifice of Iphigenia is tragic, but necessary to retain power. Artemis tests how far Agamemnon will go and is given the answer: far. 

We admire those that are willing to risk much for the sake of achievement. It would be nice if that attitude evaporated when ambitious types began destroying innocent victims in their quest for glory, but it does not. It often remains as long as we are not the innocent victims. 

Hence those who are willing to risk their own lives and the lives of others often win.

This suggests another aspect of sacrifice not yet made explicit: through it, one may gain and retain power.

An interpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is useful here. Individuals deeply desire recognition – to be seen as equals or betters. 

If recognition is the most desired object, then earning it demands playing at the highest stakes. Hence, history is driven by a life-or-death struggle for prestige. Fukuyama summarizes in his often-cited, but not often-read book, The End of History and the Last Man:

The outcome of this battle was a division of human society into a class of masters, who were willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves, who gave in to their natural fear of death.

Agamemnon is a master. As is the rest of the central cast of the Iliad. 

They earn that title because of what they are willing to risk and pay. Some die for glory, and all sacrifice in some way or another. In this fashion, later elites would host games and sacrifices to proclaim their greatness.

Contrast this master model with the communal signaling model. Both involve signaling, but the primary locus of the master model is the individual. High status derives from domination or prestige. A strong bully may derive their status from physical prowess that allows them to dominate. An emancipated seer however derives their status from prestigious celestial and spiritual knowledge. The master combines both. Agamemnon dominated others, but he also led the sacrifices.

Nestor tried to calm Achilles by reminding him of that fact:

And you, Son of Peleus, never hope to fight it out with your king, pitting force against his force: no one can match the honors dealt a king, you know, a sceptered king to whom Zeus gives glory.

One can extend the difference in Hegelian terms by noting that the master model involves striving to be seen as greater than others, while communal sacrifice is a more egalitarian affair. Amplifying this difference, the connection between divinity and Agamemnon is made explicit by Nestor. 

These are two key aspects of sacrifice. It binds together the community. Yet it also provides a route for the individual to rise. We’ve found a thesis and antithesis.

What is the synthesis?

Sacrificing to Society

Fewer of us sacrifice to gods today. There are other means to prove our loyalty than the altar.

Sacrificers and the sacrificed still exist, but take on different forms. As mentioned earlier, we sacrifice for our family, friends, tribe, and nation. But the religious object no longer has the place it once does.

The communal signaling model predicts some of this. Religious rituals provided a regular way to signal loyalty. Today legal, cultural, and social institutions have substituted for the religious scheme. We can assess others in a multitude of ways, knowing they were present at a sacred ceremony is no longer necessary.

So does the scapegoat model. With new institutions come new stories and ideologies to justify purging the scapegoat. Judges declare sentences where seers and divinely appointed kings used to.

With a decline in religious sacrifice comes the loss of the sacred. That, at least, is what the argument above would suggest.

And what is sacred today? For many, perhaps relatively little. For others, religious objects are now political or cultural ones. It is for entities like the world, humanity, and society that one can sacrifice for now.

The writer and publisher, Roberto Calasso once wrote:

Society takes a step toward becoming the last horizon for society itself. Society is now the invisible entity to which the sacrifice is offered. No other invisible entity is permitted: there is one single god, or many gods, or nature, or even the unknown. But the point is that it is still necessary to talk about “sacrifices.”

Religious sacrifice was used to bind local communities together. It was also a way to build and maintain dominance. In both cases, the individual and clan are sublimated to the religious object. With the loss of an explicitly religious object, sacrifice threatens to crush the individual for the sake of the universal.

Yet one still wonders why the innocent are and will continue to be punished for the gods, secular or religious, at all.

Imagine that Carthage had won. Imagine that the North African city-state, with its armies of mercenaries and its sacred bands of citizens, with its war galleys and its elephants, with its brilliant commanders such as Hamilcar Barca and his son Hannibal, had beaten the Roman Republic over the course of the Punic Wars in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Imagine that it had established its domination on the Italian peninsula and the entire Mediterranean, building a durable, wide-ranging empire, like Rome did in real life. This empire would have been founded primarily upon commerce, and rooted in Semitic Phoenician culture and religion. And now the Latin tribes of Italy would be but a footnote in history.

Many authors have imagined just that, and written alternative histories — see here and here and here and here. I do not presume to do the same. Alt history is fun, but it is also something of a fool’s errand. Real events are chaotic: a small accident of fate can trigger vastly unpredictable outcomes. In the absence of a parallel universe to verify, we cannot know for sure whether a seemingly logical trend would have happened at all, had the initial conditions been slightly different. 

So instead of painting a plausible picture of a world in which Punic seafarers and merchants are at the origin of our civilization, let’s just assume that everything would be about the same, except for one change. But let that be an important change. Something that concerns our deeply cherished values. Something that would make that parallel world feel extremely alien. 

Imagine that Carthage had won, and had made everyone today believe that it was a great good, even a thing of beauty, to perform ritual sacrifices of children to Moloch.

Life under the reign of Moloch

I want to be extra clear that I don’t mean this metaphorically. I am not asking you to imagine a world in which Moloch is an abstract entity representing industrial capitalism or coordination problems. In our imagined alternative world, the devouring of young children is not a literary device, but a reality, involving furnaces in the shape of a bull, built on the altars of every temple and church and mosque. (Imagine — regardless of how plausible it feels — that Christianity and Islam did take over their respective regions, but somehow absorbed the practice of child sacrifice and made it a core part of their rites.) 

In this world, a family that does not offer one of its sons or daughters as a holocaust to Moloch is considered to be at best (in liberal times) somewhat deviant, and at worst (in times of religious fervor) heretical. Even in countries that have turned officially secular, child sacrifice remains a common practice as an “important cultural heritage.” There are people whose job it is to man the furnaces and maintain them; there is an entire economic niche built around the sacrifices. 

When the leader of a large organization makes a big blunder, it is expected that he offers one of his own children to atone for it. No child is completely safe from the possibility of being ritually consumed by fire until they turn 18. When the scion of a prominent family reaches majority, it is not uncommon to hold a large celebration, in which, of course, one of their younger brothers or sisters is thrown into the furnace to ensure future successes. 

You might think that all of this is horrendous, and I agree. But let’s add a twist to our scenario: I want you to imagine that almost everyone in that world, including yourself, thinks that this is Good and Virtuous and Beautiful. 

Artists depict dazzling sacrificial rituals in their paintings, in their operas, in their films. Cities erect glorious monuments to Moloch. To a newly married couple, it is customary to wish them a large family from which they shall be able to make multiple sacrificial offerings. Children who are to be sacrificed are treated with the highest honors, and dressed richly before they are brought to the altars for magnificent ceremonies. The elite sacrifices of royals, billionaires, and actors are commonly streamed online, where they draw viewers by the millions.

Conversely, to suggest that someone would interrupt a sacrifice is to insult them. Even worse is to be a past offering who has somehow escaped: such people are pariahs and criminals, the lowest of the low. They are the villains of Disney and Pixar movies, keeping with a long tradition of folk tales about wicked escapees, meant to scare children — and convince them to comply happily, should they be selected to feed the bronze bull-shaped god.

There is, of course, a minority of people who question the practice, and some philosophers who write papers in which they consider a strange, hypothetical world where child sacrifice is banned. In democratic countries these people are tolerated but seen as morally problematic or even disgusting. You, a person who lost a young sister to Moloch, and intends to likewise sacrifice your firstborn, certainly agree with the prevailing opinion. 

It is not unheard of for people to lose their jobs for having expressed anti-sacrifice opinions on social media. You think this is somewhat extreme, but also no one forced them to write those tweets, did they?

Considerations on the historical Carthage

If you’re anything like me, you probably failed to perceive the world I have been describing as beautiful. To me the opposite happened — I made myself feel bad even as I was writing it. Widespread child sacrifice feels wrong to me on a visceral level. It is bleak. It is foul. 

It also feels unfair to Punic civilization to suggest that its main legacy would have been something this abhorrent. Carthage, a powerful republic with an interesting political system and a sophisticated economy, was surely admirable in many respects. Considering that much of what we know comes from foreigners — Greeks and Romans who wrote about it with various degrees of hostility — it seems especially important to strive for nuance. Just like in the case of Sparta, we have access to almost nothing written by the Carthaginians about the Carthaginians, though the blame here lies not with themselves but with Rome.

So let’s set the record straight. In reality, we don’t actually know for sure whether the Carthaginians did sacrifice their children as part of their religion. We don’t even know if Moloch was actually worshiped in Carthage, or indeed if Moloch was a god at all. The reports by ancient writers don’t all agree with each other, and they may have taken some liberties with the facts in order to paint a disparaging picture. 

It’s possible that the question will never be settled. The only new hints we can get come from archeology, and they are subject to contradictory interpretations. Juvenile human skeletal remains have been found in a Punic-era cemetery, but were these children ritually sacrificed? In 2010, that idea was “debunked”; however, by 2014, the evidence in favor of child sacrifice was “overwhelming.” The topic has been controversial among historians for at least a century. 

But even if child sacrifice didn’t happen, or happened only to a limited extent, it seems clear that the wealthy republic of Carthage had its own unique, advanced culture. It certainly had different values from Rome and Athens, and yet in greatness it was on par with either. The only reason it feels foreign, mysterious, and degenerate, is that it found itself on the side of the losers. 

Allow me to insist on this point: if Carthage had won, or even just survived as a worthy rival to Rome, it would have become one of the great cities of the Western classical canon (or whatever would have existed in its place). Just like we trace our precious ideal of democracy to Ancient Greece, and the foundations of our ethics to Ancient Judea, and the basis of our legal system to Ancient Rome, there would be fundamental aspects of our civilization that originated in Ancient Carthage and that we would cherish. Perhaps that would have been child sacrifice; perhaps something else. 

And it’s really hard to accept that! Imagining my society — or myself — with anything but my current values is, by definition, contrary to my values. It is difficult to simultaneously hold as true the two statements that child sacrifice is bad, and that by a small accident of historical fate I could have fully agreed that child sacrifice is awesome.

Moral progress and evolution won’t save us

It may be tempting to defend our present values by claiming that they are, in some sense, inevitable. That they are the necessary outcome of moral progress.

Even if Carthage had spread the meme of child sacrifice far and wide across Africa and Europe (and America, after its experienced seafarers had colonized it), perhaps we would eventually have realized the moral mistake. Maybe new ideas — from Christianity, or Islam, or Renaissance humanism, or Enlightenment rationalism — would have allowed us to fix it. After all, in real life, the Romans had several questionable customs that we did away with. Slavery and violence as sport come to mind. 

But moral progress is hardly ever straightforward. Consider meat-eating, a practice not altogether that different from child sacrifice, when you think about it: many people think it will be seen as utterly unacceptable in the future, but that’s far from unanimous today. (And it may never be. I can totally imagine a future in which carnivory has become morally hegemonic again, and the vegan movement of today is seen as a folly.) Slavery was ultimately banned, yes, but only after a lengthy and painful process that involved a lot of political back-and-forth and multiple wars.

Even if we assume that moral progress does happen through the actions of people trying to fix the status quo, there is no guarantee that it will ever ban any given cultural practice. And so it’s not inconceivable that child sacrifice could endure for millennia after the fall of a hypothetical Carthaginian Empire.

What about cultural evolution? If slavery and carnivory have persisted, it might be because they “make sense,” evolutionarily. It’s economically advantageous to subjugate a foreign people and force them to do your labor. We are biologically able to eat other animals, and meat can be, in certain situations, the best available source of calories. So slavery and carnivory are at least understandable, even if we consider them to be morally wrong. But surely child sacrifice is plainly self-defeating? Surely it is, at the very least, a waste of human resources? A family that sacrifices its children will have a harder time passing its memes to the next generation; a society that does will weaken itself in comparison to its neighbors. We would expect such a maladaptive practice to vanish under evolutionary pressure.

That may be true, and that may be why child sacrifice is historically rarer than both adult human sacrifice and animal sacrifice. It may even have contributed to Rome’s final victory over Carthage, though we’ll never know for sure.

Yet again I am not convinced that this teaches us much. After all, child sacrifice did evolve at least a few times. It is documented in pre-Columbian America and the ancient Near East. I assume it made more sense at a time when both birth rates and child mortality were higher than today. It might not have been that maladaptive, if for instance it helped a society enter fewer conflicts.

Besides, parasitic memes can spread even if they are harmful to their hosts. Antinatalist ideas, for example, are self-defeating in that they prevent their own passing to children, in addition to hindering the passing of other values that a person cares about — but antinatalist ideas can still thrive within a culture, as they did among the Shakers. That isn’t sufficient to conclude that antinatalism is right or wrong, either. Evolution explains, but does not justify. 

Child sacrifice did not make it past the filters of moral progress and cultural evolution, but it could have. And some of our own values that did pass those filters could be as wrong as child sacrifice seems to be.

On the fortuitousness of values

We are left with the idea that our values feel… almost arbitrary. Fortuitous. A small accident of fate — Hannibal winning a crucial battle, perhaps — could have made us attached to wildly different customs, even ones that feel repugnant to us in this world. 

From here to moral relativism, the chasm seems narrow. If some of our values are determined by the random, chaotic development of civilization and culture, is all of ethics also? 

This is the question at the heart of moral philosophy, and I won’t try to answer it here. I do suspect that there are actual moral truths, but also a lot of space open for diverse yet equally valid ethical positions on many issues. To me, culture is what happens in that space.

Whenever a specific civilization such as Rome or Carthage (or the modern West, or China) spreads its values, either through conquest or soft power, there is no surefire way to know if those values are objective moral truths or just cultural norms. 

Of course, from the inside, it always feels that our own values are correct. Otherwise we would switch to other values. As a result, it’s difficult to properly imagine alternative worlds, for example when trying to predict the future course of our societies. But this is important: it’s almost certain that the values of your current society — no matter how correct they seem at the moment! — will not endure forever. Unless there is some weird lock-in scenario (a hypothetical future technology that stabilizes values to a degree never seen before), there will be a lot of moral progress in the years to come. 

At least, it will feel like progress from the point of view of the future people with those values. From the point of view of us, today, it would instinctively feel like moral degeneracy — since their values will be different from ours! Yet if we care about the future, then we need to understand this process. This means that we must simultaneously hold as true the two statements that our values are the best, and that they may not be. Even the ones that feel the most fundamental, like proscriptions against infanticide. 

This is, of course, insanely difficult, but we can get better at it by studying cultural diversity. We can notice where fundamental values differ between cultures, and determine when it’s fine and when it’s not. That can be done by comparing the various societies of the current world, as so many civilizations that may or may not clash. Or it can be done by comparing a civilization across time. Alternative history then becomes not only fun speculation, but a productive thought experiment. 

Imagine that Carthage had won, and ask yourself: How much of what you care about do you owe to small accidents of fate?

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Our Biggest Lessons of the Year

Sachin

What sticks with me most from my research for The Classical Futurist this year is the incredible degree to which Americans of the revolutionary period were steeped in the classics. As I wrote in The Founders of the United States Were Classical Futurists, Jefferson’s classmates claimed that he studied Latin and Greek fifteen hours a day in his early years, and John Adams’ father was so dead-set on him learning Latin (because of what it meant for his prospects of class mobility) that he had him dig ditches for two days of back-breaking manual labor just to prove that the mental labor involved would be worth it. 

For me, these facts just reaffirm the degree to which the United States’ civilizational roots can be traced in a straight line back to classical antiquity, and the American Republic is best understood as a self-conscious imitator of the Roman Republic, with architects who were deeply influenced by the history of their progenitor and the political philosophy of the Greeks who preceded them.

Étienne

It’s strange to think of myself as having some sort of authority in writing about classical antiquity. When I started contributing to The Classical Futurist, I felt like an impostor: I’m an amateur student of history, sure, but I’ve never studied it formally, and haven’t read most of the classics. It’s common to read historians complain about bad amateur history, and that has made me hesitant, even fearful, to claim anything strongly. 

But I was wrong to be afraid, and now that worry has mostly dissipated. As long as you have what me might call epistemic hygiene — and I certainly try to say only true things, or else state my confidence in the truth of what I say — then you can write about anything. Moreover, the project of classical futurism isn’t really to advance scholarship in the classics, but to use antiquity to find interesting truths about the present and future. I think my co-authors and I have succeeded in that. My essays on aesthetics, on cultural dynamics, and on golden ages, among others, have examined ideas that I consider valuable for our understanding of the 21st century. 

I am not an authority on reading ancient authors in the original text, or on writing scholarly papers on the Spartan political system or the Roman military strategy during the Punic Wars; but I am certainly qualified to draw from ancient history in order to figure out the modern world, and I’m happy I learned that about myself.

Caleb

Noticing the extent of difference between antiquity and now is unavoidable. The ancients’ values, religion, and politics are radically distinct from ours. This is to say nothing of the differences between our and the ancient's ordinary lives. Such differences bring to mind the prospect of radical discontinuity between us and our descendants. How will our descendants transform their values, religion, and politics? In 2000 years, it's likely that the differences between us and future beings will be even greater than those between us and the ancients. 

Nonetheless, a key role of a classical futurist is to find values, heuristics, or principles that persist through the ages. To that end, going more deeply into the work of Josiah Ober and others was enlightening. Ober brings contemporary theories of economic and political development to bear on antiquity. It's useful and upsets a commonly held belief about ancient Greece – most importantly the idea that it was so poor. The application of these ideas to the future is suggestive. 

I'd like to continue applying ideas like these to illuminate our past, future, and present. Let’s make them as concrete and specific as possible. This matters both for the smaller scale of our own individual lives and the larger scale of society. 

Our Top 3 Essays of the Year

Virtual Violence, Real Peace by Caleb Ontiveros

Virtual violence, real peace is an examination of how Roman attitudes towards violent entertainment were different from our own — not only because they lacked the technology to simulate violence that we now have, but because their very morality around death and violence was so different from the post-Christian West. 

To modern eyes (and some ancients, like Seneca), blood sport appears barbaric and cruel — a waste of human life. But for the Romans, courage in the face of death and suffering was a higher value than empathy. Their ethical system meant that people who put their lives on the line in violent combat, regardless of the context (military campaign or bloody spectacle), were seen as doing something admirable. 

This essay considers the decline of violence over time, and the causes of this decline from both a materialist and cultural perspective. — SM

Let’s Build Cities of Marble, Not Metal by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Let’s Build Cities of Marble, Not Metal is a paradigmatic classical futurist post. Too many of today's cities are aesthetic dumps. This is, in part, due to the decline of architectural innovation. The most beautiful buildings of San Francisco, where I live, such as the Palace of Fine Arts and Legion of Honor were built one hundred years ago. Grace Cathedral was built 50 years ago. The Salesforce Building does not compete – it's not even the same kind of thing. Many other major cities are much the same.

We should "expect something better from our future." We cannot go back to classical architecture, but we can go forward and build better. — CO

Meditation on the Ides of March by Sachin Maini

It’s no coincidence that Sachin’s Meditation on the Ides of March has been one of our most popular posts. Julius Caesar remains one of the most iconic historical figures, and alternative history — asking “what might have been,” in this case, if Caesar hadn’t been assassinated — is both fun and useful as a thought experiment.

But there is an additional reason to be impressed by that essay: Sachin’s steadfast commitment to look for valuable insight in ancient Roman civilization. In a world where history is more often examined suspiciously, and in which we tend to view powerful empires as the bringers of various evils, it’s refreshing to discuss what the Romans, two thousand years ago, did right. This attitude is more productive than to focus on what they did wrong in order to condemn everything from the past. — ÉFD

To Our Audience

We’d love to hear from you as a Classical Futurist reader. 

• Which essays would you choose as your favorites from the past year, and why?

• What topics or collaborations would you like to see over the next year?

• What is one piece of feedback do you have for us?

Leave a comment on the post, or reach out on Twitter @citiesofmarble (or contact us individually @sachinmaini, @etiennefd, and @calebmontiveros). You can also email at classicalfuturist@gmail.com.

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We thank you for following our writing so far. We’re excited to push our Janus-faced, in the best sense of the term, project into Year II.

See you in the next issue.

For now, human organisms rule the earth. Tomorrow, human cyborgs may order the world. Further in the future, the citizens of the cosmos may not be human at all.

There are many reasons to think that our descendants will not be of our species. Such an age would be transhuman, posthuman, or superhuman.

Each of these words – I’ll use them interchangeably – describes a “philosophy and a project of technological transcendence that aims to make us more than human.”

The transhuman is someone who has at least one ability that vastly exceeds those of biological humans. In his paper “Why I want to be a posthuman when I grow up,” Nick Bostrom describes a posthuman as a being who lives much longer than a human, experiences the world more deeply, or is incomprehensibly smarter. The posthuman is to an ordinary human as an adult human is to a toddler or chimp.

Almost all of us have begun to merge with technology already. Humans have used physical prostheses for thousands of years. We fashion artificial limbs to stay mobile longer, use horses and cars to move around faster, and offload our thinking to machines daily. Neuroprostheses, nascent today, shall follow. Spinal cord stimulators manage pain through electrical impulses. Cochlear implants improve hearing by channeling electrical energy to auditory nerves. The Argus II retinal prosthesis restores vision and even made it past the barriers of the FDA, although its builders recently abandoned it to avoid bankruptcy. The project to improve the quality of life and stave off the effects of senescence through technology continues.

At this rate, advances in biology and computing suggest that we, or more likely our descendants, will eventually surpass human limits.

The posthuman world is close enough that it’s worth thinking about how valuable (or not) such a world would be. Our societies still have some role to play as to how it will (or will not) come about. One way to approach these issues is through argument. Taking such a route is necessary, but also important is thinking about such matters through narrative and myth. This piece will take the latter path, considering a plurality of tales, ancient and new.

Transhumanist Eschatology

Transhumanism has a eschatological character. It offers the promise of a nearly salvific future.

Ordinary life as a posthuman would constantly eclipse our best moments. Nick Bostrom imagines a Letter from Utopia where the author, call him the Utopian, writes to us:

My mind is wide and deep. I have read all your libraries, in the blink of an eye. I have experienced human life in many forms and places… You could say I am happy, that I feel good. That I feel surpassing bliss and delight. Yes, but these are words to describe human experience. They are like arrows shot at the moon. What I feel is as far beyond feelings as what I think is beyond thoughts. Oh, I wish I could show you what I have in mind! If I could but share one second with you!

Many of us have had euphoric moments where we feel like we’ve transformed – a moment that causes us to think “All of my life I have been sleeping, now I am awake.” At these moments, our experiences, actions, and intentions unify into a perfection that is difficult to describe. This state could be our whole life, a life where we have woken up, which is to say, a life where we have become enlightened. This is an eschatological arrival.

The destination, when described like this, must be good.

But the posthuman story is not an unstoppable triumphalist narrative.

Attaining a techno-utopia will not be a painless ordeal. The myth is not Panglossian. A substantial portion of human civilization may be left behind in the transition to superhumanity. Livelihoods and communities will be rendered unviable. There’s something to the oft-reported grief and anxiety of seeing one’s nation’s culture evolve to the point where it feels like it’s no longer “one’s own.” A transhuman world will eclipse the human one and those who remain human will find themselves in an earth that is no longer their own.

More importantly,  no eschatology is complete without apocalypse. The future is a contingent matter – to attain bliss we must proceed through the time of perils. The technologies that enable utopia can also annihilate the possibility of it.

An unaligned superintelligent AI may come to dominate the world and erase everything of value instead of helping the human quest. An engineered bioweapon with an unforgiving mortality rate and unstoppable virality could end civilization as we know it. Worse than eliminating all life, future disasters could bring about suffering on a scale that exceeds all the suffering that has occurred in history so far. One could say that no salvation story is complete without the threat of hell.

Radical innovation, whether in bits or biology, carries the chance of both transcendence and perdition. 

And yet, despite the risks, the transhuman arc bends toward utopia. Transhumanists paint their world in a mixed, but positive light. After all, in this view, nature’s cruelty, indignities, and stupidities can be annihilated. It is a world where, in the words of the Utopian, society is:

A never-finished tapestry, its weavers equal to its threads; the unfolding patterns a mesh for life and adventure, an inexhaustible generator of beauty.

This is an entirely eschatological story. The unveiling has begun and the human species must decide to transcend itself or remain in mediocrity. 

Promethean Fates

In 1923, John Haldane wrote:

The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.

Prometheus stole divine fire from heaven for the sake of humanity. This was a violation of Zeus’s command. For this act, he was punished. Each day, an Eagle consumed his liver. Each night, it regenerated. 

Prometheus can be seen as a sacrificial hero. He sacrificed himself for the good of humanity – by stealing fire and giving it to humanity, he gave us the ability to engineer a better world. 

He can also be seen as a warning. In Medical Nemesis, the philosopher Ivan Illich tells the story as follows:

Driven by radical greed, he trespassed beyond the limits of man and in unbounded presumption stole fire from heaven…He thus inevitably brought Nemesis on himself. His hopeless and unending suffering turned the hero into an immortal reminder of inescapable cosmic retaliation.

In ancient myths, challenging nature and the gods is a symptom of vice. Yet if transhumanism is anything, it is such a challenge.

The transhuman story sees nature as fundamentally defective. Our bodies are beautiful but are also fragile, silly, and broken things. Our minds are capable of wonders from games, art, humor, and philosophy, but are relatively stupid in the space of all possible minds. Our lives are sublime, but also boring, tragic, and terrible. Nature is responsible for a world where mothers and children consume other mothers and children. These horrors and indignities are not the result of an intentional act of Adam, but a consequence of indifferent evolutionary processes.

Understood this way, the project of realizing superhumanity is fundamentally a rebellion against nature. A project against biological, cognitive, and experiential limits.

In myth, such insurrections rarely end well. Consider the war against death. The Utopian says “Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good.” But mortals who strove for eternal life were punished. Individuals who pushed against aging and Thanatos displayed vice, not heroism. 

Tantalus stole divine nectar – the substance which gave the gods immortality. For this, and more morbid crimes, he was punished to forever stand in a pool of water, shaded by a tree that was thick with fruit. Whenever he goes for water, the water recedes. Whenever he reaches for fruit, the branches withdraw. He cannot be satiated. 

Thetis sought eternal life for her son Achilles. She was told to dip him into an enchanted pot. She did so, but not fully. Thetis exposed Achilles’ heel, guaranteeing a pathetic and ignoble end to a glorious life. Death by the hand of a greater man or peer on the battlefield bestows glory. Consider Sarpedon’s death at the hand of Patroclus and Patrocolus’s death at the hands of Hector. But instead of ending his life nobly, Achilles falls to an arrow delivered by Paris – someone who could not hope to be a peer to the greatest of the Greeks.

The goddess Eos fell for the mortal Tithonus. Unfortunately, Tithonus was a man and all men are mortal. The prospect of Tithonous’s death was something Eos could not bear. Hence, she implored that Zeus give her lover eternal life. Zeus does as she requests, but like an unaligned artificial intelligence, he grants Eos’s ask without understanding it. Tithonus does live forever, but his body and mind decay. In the end, Eos places her senile former lover in a private chamber. There he sits, bereft of the ability to move or form a coherent thought.

There are many such tales of this nature from antiquity. The myths of Sisyphus, of King Pelias, or of Orpheus, and Euridice are additional examples.

Such stories warn against seeking eternal life in particular and against challenging the limits of nature in general. Death cannot be surpassed. Attempts to prolong life can make it worse. Similar lessons apply to other limits. There are fates worse than death. 

What is the key sin of the transhumanist narrative that these myths reveal?

Heraclean Decisions

Transhumanism is often criticized because it desecrates human nature. The thought is that changing biological human beings into other things is impermissible – even if such a transition results in happier, longer, and richer lives. It’s debatable whether human nature is accurately described in these critiques or, even if it is, it’s something we should care about. Regardless, reading the myths as bioconservative seems like a mistake. The ubiquity of metamorphosis in Greek myth suggests that the idea of transforming into other beings is not what’s wrong with transhumanism. Gods transforming into animals or humans is commonplace. That fact and the omnipresence of proto-superhumans, the demigod heroes, also suggests that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with radically extending human capabilities.

Instead, the key problems of the transhumanist narrative that these myths propose are:

• Challenging nature and the gods

• Trading off what matters in an obsession to prevent the inevitable

I do not think there is anything wrong with the first. To that extent, I am with Prometheus. Nature is malleable and not at all perfect. Zeus has his admirable traits, but he is also shallow, cruel, and arbitrary. The same can be said of the natural state of things.

The second is more challenging to think through.

Ivan Illich once stated that instead of seeking better national health policies, citizens should steel themselves and embrace the following truths:

• We will never eliminate pain

• We will not cure all disorders

• We will certainly die

Tantalus, Thetis, and Eos each denied what they had for the chance of escaping the inevitable. Tantalus was graced with the opportunity to dine with Gods and wasted it by greedily stealing from them (amongst other things). Thetis and Eos both wished to eliminate the chance of death for mortals. In doing so, Thetis prevented Achilles from dying a glorious death and Eos condemned Tithonus to drooling decline.

Instead of seeking to prolong health, extend intelligence, and experience the world more deeply, the classical attitude brings the focus back, always back, to character. At times, one worries that the transhumanists are only basing their judgments on compressed optimization procedures. More life, intelligence, and experience do not guarantee a better world. Arguably such things are without value when compared with virtue.

Though the argument for a future superhumanism is compelling, each of Illich’s tenets seems true for the foreseeable future. Eschatological visions of a different world ring of fantasy.

Of course, the transhumanist doesn’t need to deny this. Applied here, Illich’s point is technically all-or-nothing thinking. What matters is alleviating suffering and living well, not eliminating pain and living perfectly. However, internalizing the thought suggests that aiming to be anything more than a primitive transhumanist is hubristic. Today, apart from speculative bets, superhumanism is barely practical.

Transhumanism should be seen as less of an eschatological myth and more a matter of modest, incremental improvements. It’s not the Promethean quest that delivers purpose, but the Heraclean one. Society and individuals are always arriving at Heraclean forks – places where they must decide who to be – and ideally the virtuous path is taken.

Where exactly does the notion of virtue play a role? Virtue is an abstract notion where it’s essential to be specific and concrete. These issues warrant precise examples and careful argumentation, but here it is better to end with a story.

There is one other classical myth concerning the afterlife, that of Admetus and Alcestis. For a story concerning human immortality, it has an unusually happy ending.

Admetus is a favorite of Apollo. Seeing that Admetus is to die, Apollo requests that the fates prolong his life. They agree, but only on the condition that Admetus finds another to die in his place. He cannot. So, it looks like he is destined for the grave. His wife, Alcestis learns this and consents to take his place. She dies. 

And Admetus is left to live alone. Without Alcestis, his house loses its color and worth. 

So things are until Heracles arrives in Admetus’s kingdom.

Heracles eats and drinks with abandon, ignorant of the recent tragedy until he is scolded by a servant who can take his buffoonery no longer. Grateful for his host's hospitality and ashamed of his behavior, Heracles decides to make a hero’s amends. He travels to the underworld, wrestles Thanatos, and returns Alcestis to the land of the living.

There are two relevant ideas here.

The first is properly Stoic and classical. Do not trade off the good, for the merely indifferent. Admetus’s quest to find a substitute for his death is desperate. Apollo erred in the same way Eos did. There’s a reading of the tale where Alcestis has less than virtuous motivations.

The second is perhaps more mystical. The story of Admetus and Alcestis is one of the few ancient myths where humans are allowed to defeat death without tragic consequences. Such an act required a mortal to display the simple virtue of hospitality, a demigod hero to undergo what no mere human could do alone, and the sacrificial death of Alcestis. Perhaps it is only through death that one can surpass it. 

At first this was going to be a hit piece against Sparta.

I’ve never really liked Sparta. Maybe this is because military history is by far the most boring part of history. The Spartans are known mostly for being badass warriors and dying in a heroic last stand against the Persians at Thermopylae, as depicted in the movie 300, which I have never watched and probably never will. 

They’re known for other things, too, but we have to recognize that pretty much every cool thing about ancient Greece (philosophy! architecture! theater!) came from the other great city-state, Athens, which did better than Sparta along all dimensions. Except the military, perhaps. Quite frankly, there’s no reason to pay attention to Sparta at all, except as a historical curiosity. Or, maybe, if you’re an anonymous Twitter account trying to gain insecure male followers by demonstrating Contrarian Opinions and Love of Discipline and Badass Masculinity. 

(To be clear, I fully support demonstrating contrarian opinions. We do it here too! Also, in case you hadn’t figured it out, this essay is going to contain a lot of hyperbole. Consider yourself warned.)

A Narrative of Acquainting Myself With Sparta

So I’ve never really liked Sparta, but there was no reason to stop there. With a bit of effort, I could hate Sparta.

And I started doing exactly that recently, after I read The Beginning of Infinity, by the physicist David Deutsch. This is a book about many things (it literally has a list of different meanings for the phrase “the beginning of infinity”), one of which is optimism in our ability to solve problems through free creativity combined with a tradition of criticism. According to Deutsch, such optimism is the only way to make real progress and improve our lives. But optimism has bloomed only a few times in the past: the Enlightenment from the 18th century onward, the Florentine Renaissance in the 15th century, and the Athenian Golden Age in the 5th century BC.

The Athenian Golden Age was a time of fast, open-ended progress. But it didn’t last. Why not? Who was guilty of ending it? I could answer something about complicated historical reasons and multifactorial something something, but why do that when you can pin the blame on a single entity: Sparta.

At the close of the Peloponnesian War, the Spartan army under general Lysander conquered Athens and installed the Thirty Tyrants to rule it. The Thirty Tyrants were all-around terrible people who brutalized the Athenians and stole their property, but they were, fortunately, rather incompetent, and Athens regained its independence and democracy within a year. Unfortunately, the damage was done: the city became unremarkable. It ceased to innovate at a fast pace. Deutsch thinks it’s because it had lost its optimism. If that’s true, then Sparta’s victory may have been one of the most tragic moments in history.

Okay, so now I had a great reason to detest Sparta. Hate is fun, so I decided to go further still and read a classic in Sparta-bashing: the “This. Isn’t. Sparta.” series of blog posts by historian Bret Devereaux. 

Devereaux did not disappoint. His thesis is that the popular conception of Sparta, most stereotypically seen in the movie 300, is off-the-charts inaccurate. Moreover, Sparta was almost certainly a horrible place to live, even by the pretty low standards of the ancient world. With a comprehensive look at the historical sources, Devereaux shows that there’s basically nothing at all to admire from its society. Take that, Sparta!

The seven blog posts (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII) are worth reading, but they’re kind of long, and I try to be mindful of your time, dear reader. So have a summary of some of the claims instead:

• The education was bad. The rigorous schooling of the Spartans, the agōgē, was a violent indoctrination program that ensured the perpetuation of the political system rather than the well-being of the citizens.

• The slaving was bad. The polis relied on a slave class, the helots, that comprised a higher fraction of the population than anywhere else, and that was exploited more ruthlessly than anywhere else. Some sources suggest that the agōgē involved murdering helots through the mysterious Crypteia institution. That may have been a rite of passage, a secret police, and/or a convenient way to terrorize the slaves into submission.

• The elite class was bad. Imagine if your local rich person not only spent all their time on leisure and the gym, but also actively despised anyone who worked for a living, while relying on a giant class of exploited and terrorized laborers to give them wealth. Well okay, some anti-capitalists among you may not have a hard time imagining this. The citizen class — the spartiates — was that, but worse.

• The class structure was overall bad. Although later writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau admired the equality of Spartan society, it is likely that such equality never existed, not even among citizens. Sure, spartiates were guaranteed equal shares of land by law. But in practice, there was likely never a time without large economic discrepancies within the citizen class. That doesn’t mean Sparta was less equal than (say) the Persian Empire, but that reputation has been overplayed by Mr. Rousseau and others. And of course, the vast majority of Spartans were either helots or non-citizens (who were free, but didn’t have the privileges and political rights of the citizens). 

• The military was not bad, but not great either. Militarily, it’s true that Sparta was pretty good at hoplite battles, but it was not that much better than other Greek cities. It didn’t shine in other military operations, like naval power, and it failed at accomplishing most of its strategic objectives. Even the conquest of Athens didn’t bring a golden age of Sparta, and Spartan dominance was mostly undone within a year.

• Other things were bad, like the inflexible political system and the unforgiving laws on who gets to be a citizen.

My understanding of Devereaux’s work is that it’s mostly correct (Elizabeth Van Nostrand has fact-checked some of the claims and finds most confirmed or plausible). Of course, people who love Sparta will be quick to say Devereaux exaggerates or judges Sparta according to unfair standards. It’s true that he was deliberately trying to counterbalance the cultural force that gave us 300 and the Spartan super soldier meme. 

At that point I realized I should make up my own mind about 300. But I still didn’t want to watch the movie, so I did the next best thing, which is to read the graphic novel that inspired the movie.

While I was at it, I also picked up Three, another graphic novel that was made as a spiritual response to 300, as the number-themed title strongly suggests. In Three, we follow three helots who flee from the spartiates after a conflict between the two groups. It is a well-documented work of fiction, with input from a specialized historian and approximately one historical footnote per page.

300 was pretty much what I expected. I disliked it, which to be fair was to be predicted after reading Devereaux. It is inaccurate, overly serious, and hagiographic. Very meh.

But Three was not what I expected. I thought it would paint Sparta in a negative light, since it was concerned with the plight of the helots (who are inexplicably absent from 300). But it didn’t. Instead, it was nuanced! It showed the Spartans as complex characters who disagreed with each other. It showed them — both helots and citizens, and also free non-citizens — as normal people, trying to do the best they could in their circumstances. And all of this was well-researched enough that I could trust it.

Suddenly it made less sense to write a hit piece. A little voice was telling me to aim for nuance instead, and to avoid strong, uninformed opinions. Maybe even read the classical sources like Plutarch and Xenophon myself. But also, at that point a fun essay idea was taking shape in my mind: a comparison between Sparta and North Korea, intended to show that one was as bad as the other. If the voice was right, then it was probably not appropriate to make such a comparison, not unless I did way more research.

I did what anyone would have done: I told that voice to shut up, and I began comparing with North Korea anyway.

Sparta and North Korea Are Obviously Literally the Same Thing

Everyone loves answering the question of which country is the modern Sparta. Lots of people will suggest their own country, usually a liberal democracy with easily criticized flaws, because who doesn’t like to use The Ancients to advance a political point? And so we get comparisons with the United States, because like Sparta, it’s highly militarized. Or Israel, because it’s highly militarized and it discriminates against the Palestinians just like the Spartans discriminated against the helots.

These comparisons are weak sauce. As open, culturally productive societies, the US, Israel, and all other Western countries are much closer to Athens, if for some reason we insist on comparing them with an ancient Greek polis. We can do better. We can compare with what is probably the worst society to live in today, in the year of our Lord 2022 (or the Juche year 111, if you prefer counting from Eternal President Kim Il-Sung’s birth): the longest-lived totalitarian society in history, the nuclear-backed, cartoon villain-led, irredeemably un-self-aware Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

I thought of the comparison myself, I swear, but Devereaux got there first:

Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. 

What is there to add? Lots, as it turns out. If you start looking for similarities between any two things, you will find similarities. Here are some that I found:

• High reliance on the military. North Korea is the most militarized country in the world in relative terms: despite having a population comparable to Australia or Cameroon, it fields the 4th largest army in the world. 5% of the population is part of the standing army, and a staggering 30% are either active, reserve, or paramilitary personnel. In Sparta, all male citizens were exclusively soldiers, and men from all other social classes could be forced to fight in the army when needed.

• Poor grand strategy. Other than self-perpetuation, neither Sparta nor North Korea demonstrated a strong capacity at using their military to achieve strategic objectives on the international stage. The Spartans didn’t win a proportionately high number of crucial battles, for example. 

• Discrepancy between claimed equality and achieved equality. We already went over the supposed equality of spartiate citizens; let’s add the growing class of ex-citizens who had been disgraced in some way, and who would forever be shut from citizenship along with their descendants; and let’s remind ourselves that most people were helots. Meanwhile, as a socialist state, North Korea claims equality among all Koreans, but in fact there are classes based on political loyalty, including a small rich elite at the top, mostly in Pyongyang. 

• Oppression of the lower classes. The Spartans murdered helots in ritual war to terrorize them. The North Koreans have been accused of human rights violations whose “gravity, scale, and nature . . . reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.” Oppression is hardly unique to these two societies, but it does seem to have been uniquely worse than elsewhere in both cases.

• A relatively mysterious, secretive, and closed society. It’s difficult to know anything for certain about North Korea because of the ubiquity of state surveillance. For example, no one really knows to what extent cannabis is legal or not. Sparta seems to have also been difficult to access, at least much more so than Athens.

• A cultural life centered on large festivals. Sparta had its Gymnopaedia; North Korea has its quasi-annual and frankly insane Arirang Mass Games.

• No production of cultural value for the wider world. Outside of its military victories, bizarre political system, and peculiar customs, Sparta has barely innovated in anything that we know. The works of only two poets have survived: Tyrtaeus and Alcman. Meanwhile, it’s difficult to find anything culturally or scientifically significant that has come out of North Korea, except an international expertise in monumental statues in the socialist realist style, which for some reason are popular in Africa.

I could keep going, but I’m pretty sure I have made my case that Sparta and North Korea are literally identical.

Do you not agree? Are you saying that there must have been some differences between two countries that are separated in time by 2,140 years and in space by 8,500 kilometers?

You got me. You’re right. There are differences. For one thing, totalitarianism is a concept that doesn’t really make sense for anything before the 20th century. For another, the cult of personality around the Kim dynasty has no equivalent in Sparta, whose kings and magistrates are far less known than the intricate political system they were part of. I could keep going, but I won’t: identifying differences is as easy — or even easier — than identifying similarities. If you look for them, you will find them. 

So, yes, the header of this section is wrong and hyperbolic, and Sparta and North Korea are not two emanations of the same Platonic ideal. 

The comparison is, I think, interesting and instructive. But the more I thought about it, the less it made sense to strongly claim that North Korea is the modern Sparta. Many of the similarities, after all, are just characteristics shared by all states, like having festivals and economic inequality. And North Korea is not necessarily that different from the totalitarian states of the past. We could as well have compared Sparta with Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union or the Islamic State. (I’m… not sure that would have gone well. North Korea at least has the following benefit: it’s almost universally recognized as a totally ridiculous country. That is a great antidote against controversy!)

The little voice that had been born after reading Three was getting stronger. I could no longer ignore it. My essay was not going to be a hit piece. I had to add nuance.

In Which I Keep Comparing But This Time With Nuance

The comparison between Sparta and North Korea was predicated on the opinion that North Korea is a bad society. But is it?

Well, not according to Juche ideology, I’m sure. But according to my own values, which are the best values (otherwise I would have different values), North Korea is definitely bad. Still, my opinions of that country have become more nuanced as I learned more, just like they did for Sparta.

My personal equivalent to Three for North Korea was a popular South Korean TV drama called Crash Landing on You. The premise is that a rich South Korean woman has a paragliding incident involving a tornado and ends up on the other side of the border, where she will of course meet a handsome North Korean soldier from the elite who’ll help her hide and go back to her country. Among many other plot points.

Crash Landing on You is good drama, if a bit over the top. But it’s also a great window into what life in North Korea may look like. Some defectors to the South have said that the representation is about 60% accurate, which in the realm of TV drama is probably as good as it gets.

The creators of the show purposefully avoided dealing directly with political events. I don’t think Kim Jong-un was even mentioned, for instance. This allowed the narrative to focus more on the lives of the characters, who for the most part are… just normal people who happen to have been born in a very bizarre country.

From the outside, it’s difficult to have a clear image of North Korea. We mostly hear about the crazy stuff, like the overenthusiastic news anchor who’s always dressed in pink or the gigantic pyramidal hotel that’s been under construction since 1987; or the horrifying stuff, like the political repression, the famines, and the intra-elite assassinations abroad. This is because the North Koreans have no freedom of speech. They cannot write or talk about themselves, except through government-approved propaganda. 

As a result, any information we get is biased. Defectors, for instance, hate the regime they have fled, and sometimes exaggerate their stories for sensationalism. Tourists can visit and see some of North Korea for themselves, but they are constantly accompanied by guides who make sure to paint them a rosy picture.

For totally different reasons, Sparta is the same. We have almost no sources about Sparta by the Spartans. Everything we know was written by outsiders, such as Athenian aristocrats who admired the city and liked to use it as a way to criticize the flaws they perceived in Athenian society. Classical scholarship has long recognized this problem and called it the “Spartan mirage”: the tendency to project whatever we want on the polis, without being able to prove any of it right or wrong due to the lack of sources.

Yet in both cases, one must assume that under the hood of their strange and dreadful political systems, most people are and were just like you and I. They live normal lives, they mostly like their country despite its flaws, and they don’t spend all their time thinking about politics. 

And Now, the Nuanced But Not Relativistic Conclusion

Still, it would be a mistake if this attempt at nuance concluded on something like “Sparta and North Korea weren’t worse than any other country, everyone’s right on some things and wrong on others, who’s to say which!” On balance, I think it’s correct to say that these two societies caused more harm than good. 

And I’d even say that the root of those evils is the same in both. Sparta and North Korea have fallen into the same trap. They constituted themselves as reactionary societies in which ideas do not flow freely. Everything else — the helots, the cult of personality, the secret police, the overmilitarization — could have been solved (and could still be, for North Korea) if people were free to do what David Deutsch argues for: generate new ideas and criticize them.

Sparta could have resembled Athens; North Korea could resemble South Korea. This would be better for the well-being of their people, and it would be better — with a minor caveat about cultural diversity — for the world. But Sparta and North Korea were and are stuck in their traps, unable to reform themselves without external intervention. 

The lack of self-critical stories is both a clear symptom of this problem, and a barrier to forming accurate opinions on our own. 

This is why media such as Three and Crash Landing on You are valuable. Since Sparta and North Korea won’t provide us with nuanced views of themselves, and external views tend to be biased, the few narratives that make a real effort at nuance and research should be rewarded. They’re simply the best thing we’ve got.

That’s also, I think, why I found 300 grating. Charitably, 300 is a modern take on Spartan propaganda. It describes the image the spartiates may have had of themselves: strong, beautiful, free people who war against the effeminate and the monstrous. And sure, propaganda can be enjoyable — I love North Korean propaganda as an art form myself. But considering the paucity of stories about Sparta, propaganda is exactly what we don’t need. It just makes everyone’s view less nuanced! It perpetuates the mirage!

So do hit pieces, by the way. Bret Devereaux’s blog posts are entertaining and well-argued, but I can’t shake the feeling that he did indeed venture too far in his critique of Sparta. His work did not actually give me a nuanced view, and I may not even have realized that until I spent more time wrestling with the topic. It’s fine, of course, to discover truth from the collision of strong opinions — but really it’s better to just strive for nuance from the start. Especially when writing about a society that is unable to respond, whether that’s because it’s long gone or because it’s a totalitarian hellscape.

In this essay I wasn’t going to strive for nuance from the start. But the little voice saved me. Listen to that voice, when it tells you to be nuanced. It’s the right thing to do.

​​The story of Rome begins with a wolf. Rome’s founders, the twins Romulus and Remus, were born in the line of Aeneas — a hero of the Trojan War, and the forefather of their mother Rhea Silvia. Rhea Silvia was the daughter of a King named Numitor of the Latin city Alba Longa. Her consort, their father, was Mars, the god of war. 

Shortly before their birth, Numitor had been deposed by his brother Amulius, who usurped the throne and forced Rhea Silvia to become a priestess of the goddess Vesta. For her, this meant a vow of lifelong maidenhood, precluding the possibility of bearing an heir in the line of Numitor who might depose her uncle in turn.

But the god Mars had other plans for Alba Longa and for the Latin peoples. He visited Rhea Silvia in secret and impregnated her. She bore him the twins Romulus and Remus. 

As soon as he learned of the birth of his grand-nephews, Amulius condemned them to death, fearing the threat to his ill-gotten power that they represented. A servant was ordered to kill them. But instead, taking pity on the helpless infants, he set them adrift on the river Tiber.

Lupa

The Tiber bore the babes Romulus and Remus far away from Alba Longa before depositing them safely upon a riverbank, where they were found a lupa (she-wolf). She suckled them as though her own cubs and her milk saved them from starvation; that is why the lupa is now one of the most enduring symbols of Rome.

It was within her cave, the lupercal, which was at the foot of the Palatine Hill — later to become one of the seven hills of Rome — that they were found by a shepherd named Faustulus. He brought the babes home with him and raised them as one of his own. 

When they grew into manhood, Romulus and Remus eventually learned of their true identity. They avenged their grandfather Numitor and honored their father Mars by overthrowing Amulius and killing him, reinstating their grandfather and thereby restoring the throne of Alba Longa to its rightful ruler.

However, the twins were not content to be mere princes of Alba Longa. They had a hunger to start something new of their own, and they decided to do it at the site on the Tiber where they had been suckled by the she-wolf as infants. This is how Rome got its start.

If you take the story of Romulus and Remus literally, it may seem like nothing but the fanciful tale of a primitive people. But while skepticism and realism about mythology are often warranted, I think the pendulum has swung too far in that direction and we are missing the fact that such stories often contain kernels of truth. They rarely endure for thousands of years without reason, particularly if they have laid the foundation of a city, empire, and civilization with the significance of Rome.

When I look at the story of the lupa, instead of some kind of naive fairy tale made up by a bunch of Bronze Age farmers, I see an archetypal pattern of continuing relevance — one which typified the spirit of Rome at its founding, the organizing animus that would forever define Roman culture, and just maybe, a blueprint for future cities and nations. 

I see, in other words, a narrative symbol — one that reveals something true, not only about how great cities were founded in the past but also about what the emergence of a new civilization might look like in the future.

The accuracy of the Romulus and Remus story, and of the broader Aeneid of which it forms a part, is difficult to ascertain — but I believe it to have been an accurate portrait of the early spirit of the Roman People. This arc of abandonment, of birth as an outcast, of perennial lack of belonging or status, is parallel to the early history of Rome, which started as a community of outcasts and was continually seen as an upstart power — first by the other Latins, then by the Etruscans, then by the Greeks, and finally by their greatest adversary, the Carthaginians. 

The sons and daughters of Rome who embodied this animus over many generations experienced the world as a hostile place. They were, at first, strangers to the love and care of a family, since Rome was at first populated exclusively by unwed young men (until they famously took their wives from the Sabines). 

They also lacked the sense of belonging to a community, because the early Romans were the outcasts of the other Latin cities. They were furthermore strangers to safety since they lacked any natural barrier between them and the Samnites, Gauls, and other marauding tribes who were constantly threatening to overwhelm their new city.

And just like Romulus and Remus, early Rome was a stranger to the comfort or care of a traditional nourishing mother. Unlike many new cities in Italy and throughout the Mediterranean world at the time, Rome was not the direct offspring of an older and more powerful Etruscan or Greek mother-city who could be relied on for help in times of crisis.

Instead, the Romans’ maternal surrogate was the ferocious beast of unending war, represented by the lupa. Their paternal figure was Mars himself, the very deity of armed conflict. While the war god was scorned, hated, and feared by the Greeks, the Romans embraced him as a father figure, compelled by grim necessity, and knowing that only by learning his brutal lessons could they ever hope to survive. 

The story of Rome’s founders was therefore a clarion call for the early Romans. It told those who sought to join the new community that they did not have to be the abject slaves of circumstance; that they could rise above their mean origins by building a new place together; but also that the price of this dream was an enduring struggle.

This wolf-spirit is one reason why the early Republic was so invincible in war despite being surrounded by stronger enemies. It is why, no matter how often or devastatingly the Romans suffered military defeats — such as the one dealt to them by the Senones, a Gallic tribe, under the chieftain Brennus in the early 4th century BC, or by the Carthaginians under Hannibal in the late 2nd — the Republic managed to persevere and ascend to new heights.

So while the Capitoline Triad — Rome’s three chief deities — are traditionally given as Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, I would argue that Mars, father of Romulus, was the real patron god of early Rome, from the time of the Kings to the end of the Punic Wars. And the lupa was the real symbol of the kingdom and early Republic.

Aquila

After the Punic Wars in the 3rd century BC, the Romans completed their transformation from a community of outcasts fighting for their lives to a dominant superpower with no true geopolitical threats left on the map.

This accomplishment meant that they successfully ate the pain thrust upon them by a hostile universe and shaped that universe, by sheer force of will, into a shining beacon of civilization. They built enduring monuments to their triumph, the great temples and theaters, arenas and hippodromes, and civilizing instruments, the bathhouses and highways and aqueducts which endure today.

The aquila (Latin for eagle) was the symbol of Rome’s greatest deity — Jupiter Capitolinus, the king of the gods — and also the symbol of her legions. Aquila was therefore the spirit of Rome at her zenith, when the pain of Rome’s childhood and adolescence gave way to the majesty, pride, and finally arrogance of her adulthood.

The eagle-spirit represented Rome’s confidence in her manifest destiny to become the mistress of the Mediterranean world and beyond. This was the spirit that animated the poet Virgil, who living at the high water mark of Roman power under Caesar Augustus, was moved to write in the Aeneid that the Romans had been given empire without limit or boundary by the favor of Jupiter himself.

This faith in her destiny to rule was Rome’s Will to Power. The eagle-spirit is what drove Rome to pursue a vision of civilizing the world and creating a stable, universal peace in a world that was frequently the victim of barbarism and war. Aquila was Rome’s Imperial Dream, and in its best form it did not simply represent the lust for power, but rather what Romans would have perceived to be a sacred mission to bring Roman civilization and Roman peace to the whole world.

This spirit is somewhat overshadowed today by the fallout from the Ides of March: the death of the Republic and the autocracy of the imperial period, during which everything that made Roman civilization what it was — from its political system to its religious underpinnings — were gradually eroded away. 

It’s a pity that Rome’s ascendance to a superpower was so shortly followed by the fall of the Republic, because the eagle-spirit of the Augustan age, with all its peace and triumphalism, was adulterated by the trauma of the preceding generation — civil war, proscriptions (i.e. politically-motivated murders), mob violence, and the ultimate breakdown of the mos maiorum (“Way of the Ancestors”), which is what the Romans called their traditional patterns of life.

Perhaps there is a lesson there — something about the incompatibility, or at least the difficulty, of maintaining a triumphant, majestic culture without also suffering from infighting, erosion of norms, and weakness of character. Nevertheless, Roman power managed to endure quite a long time after the Republic fell, and Roman legionary eagles were recognized as an emblem of majesty and power for centuries, from the misty forests and fields of Britannia to the sands of Parthia. 

If any imperial people can have claimed to come close to solving the difficult formula of how to preserve their power and majesty through time, it was the Romans with their aquila. 

Defiance and pride

Looking at the Roman animus from modern eyes, defiance and pride stick out. 

This is partly because our own cultures, especially in the West, tend to see national pride as dangerous due to its perceived role in motivating the first and second World Wars; whereas defiance former has not been necessary for a long time.

Defiance is an attitude appropriate when one perceives oneself to be the underdog. It is an emotion that arises when one’s own perceptions of self-worth (even pride) are at odds with the perceptions of the outside world.

Because perceptions often lag behind reality, defiance is often to be found in rising peoples and civilizations, who are slow to lose the memory of their underdog days. The wolf-spirit is tenacious, not only as an ally against adversity, but as an instrument of maintaining momentum in the face of complacency and stagnation.

But civilizations which are in decline have long exhausted their defiance, and often see themselves as superior to their upstart rivals long after they have lost their power in reality. Arrogance can be seen as the inversion of defiance — where one’s perceived self-worth is at odds with reality, even if the external world has not yet caught up to that reality in their perceptions of you. 

So cultural symbols of defiance or pride are mostly missing in the West today, except perhaps in the nationalist-separatist movements of secessionist peoples like the Basque, Quebecois, or Scots. 

To me, there are two consequences of this. 

First, it is likely that if a new group of societies arise in the cultural lineage of the West, they will have to either look to the distant past — to a time before Europe became mistress of most of the globe — for inspiration, or construct entirely new symbols and myths. 

Second, for a future society to recreate the success of Rome, pride will have to become acceptable again, not seen as an inherent character flaw. If arrogance is the unearned self-perception of superiority, a people’s pride is the accurate perception of greatness that both the external world and the nation themselves agree upon. 

This type of pride is necessary because it allows a people to see their own potential and strive to achieve it; not to become complacent in mere subsistence or even in modest success, but to always remain focused on the gap between what has already been accomplished and what there is yet to achieve. 

Whatever future cities and civilizations emerge from the downfall of the West in its current form, I think that Rome’s example will be an inspiration for the most promising, just as it has been time and again for the societies that have arisen since its fall, from Charlemagne’s Germanic empire to the American Republic to the French Republic/Empire of Napoleon.

G. K. Chesterton once described tradition as “democracy of the dead.” Along the same lines, one may say that the ancients believed in the “family of the fallen.” That is, a family consisted of both the living and dead – and not in any metaphorical sense.

That’s a relatively alien belief today, but it’s this fact that explains the organization of the earliest Greek and Roman city-states. At least, that is the core thesis of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City.

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges may be an obscure and relatively unknown figure today, but arguably he should be considered one of the founders of sociology. Indeed, he was one of Durkheim’s teachers at ​​École normale supérieure. In 1864, he wrote The Ancient City, in which he proposed unique models of ancient Greek and Roman city formation and religion. His insights were limited to antiquity but are suggestive of deep truths concerning how spirituality and statecraft. Ultimately, his work reminds us how foreign the past was and how strange the future could be.

The Domestic Gods

According to Fustel de Coulanges, to understand the ancient city, one must understand the ancient family. The most important fact about each domicile is that it’s grounded in a unique religion. The religious practice of the home determines how a family lives and organizes.

The family, managed by a patriarch, consists of members both alive and dead. One's ancestors survive death. However, their existence depends on the rituals of the living family. By offering worship, the living nourish the dead. In return for performing the family rites, the living receive the dead’s blessings.

When each generation passes, they are sustained by the following one. The continuation of this cycle demands that rites are followed in perfect detail. To manage sacerdotal logistics, family power is passed down via primogeniture. The firstborn becomes the new priest and patriarch. In turn, he passes down the domestic rites, hymns, and beliefs to his first son.

The key symbol of the domestic religion was the hearth. This serves as the organizing principle of the house. The tending of this fire gives us some idea of what the ancient rites looked like:

In the house of every Greek and Roman was an altar; on this altar there had always to be a small quantity of ashes, and a few lighted coals… Every evening they covered the coals with ashes to prevent them from being entirely consumed. In the morning the first care was to revive this fire with a few twigs. The fire ceased to glow upon the altar only when the entire family had perished.

In this world, strangers are more alien than the strangers of today. When a man leaves his house, he leaves his gods behind:

Out of the house man no longer felt the presence of a god; the god of his neighbor was a hostile god.

The Rise of the Ancient City

If each family is separated from each others by their gods, how can the city form? According to Fustel de Coulanges, they arise out of a change of belief. Bigger gods organize larger groups of people together:

Later the belief grew, and human society grew at the same time. When men begin to perceive that there are common divinities for them, they unite in larger groups. The same rules, invented and established for the family, are applied successively to the phratry, the tribe, and the city.

It’s important to recognize the direction of the causal arrow here. The city emerges because man believes in bigger gods. The city did not come first. Some explain history by reference to material factors such as technology or geography or economy. In these models, culture is downstream of more fundamental facts. Fustel de Coulanges does not have that view. The history of the city is principally determined by religion. Culture is not a side effect:

Man may, indeed, subdue nature, but he is subdued by his own thoughts.

Ideologies that allowed gods to be shared by neighbors created the early cities of Greece and Italy. As such, the city’s authority is religiously grounded. To ease the transition from domestic religion to the polis, the initial aristocrats of the polis may be a single-family. In this case, the form of the city's religion has much in common with the domestic.

The stranger is no longer one’s neighbor, but a member of another polis. The city is bound together by a single worship. The presence of a foreigner may defile that worship. For instance, a city’s purification rites are annulled if a stranger should be found among the citizens. If politics is a matter of friends and enemies, the stranger is the enemy and one’s fellow citizens are friends.

As a consequence of the city religion, “there was nothing independent in man; his body belonged to the state, and was devoted to its defence.”

The Fall

It’s clear from reading historical sources that the cult of ancestor worship, to the extent that it ever was popular, became less popular over time in Ancient Greece and Rome.

By the time of the late Roman Republic, regular ancestral rites had decreased in frequency. One’s family was emphasized during special occasions, for example, elite funerals contained actors for the ancestors of the deceased. This may have been a remnant of ancestor worship, but it became an instrument to publicly proclaim the great deeds of one’s family. Ancestor worship shaped many cultural norms and practices – think of how the Roman ideal of family honor was reinforced through ceremony and object – but the cult and daily practice had significantly faded by that time.

Fustel de Coulanges describes four revolutions that led to the decay of ancestor worship and the religious organization of the polis.

The first revolution was intra-elite. The aristocrats, skeptical of the priestly power of the king, had his power curtailed. This is epitomized by Rome’s early rejection of their kings.

The second revolution concerned the weakening of the family. Fustel de Coulanges wrote:

The family, indivisible and numerous, was too strong and too independent for the social power not to feel the temptation, and even the need, of weakening it. Either the city could not last, or it must in the course of time break up the family.

The city won by removing the rights of primogeniture and by empowering the clients of families. In Attica, Solon abolished the right of the creditor to enslave the client. Primogeniture and paternal authority were slowly hacked away, though “this change was not accomplished at the same time, nor in the same manner, in all the cities.”

Fustel de Coulanges calls the third revolution “The Plebs Enter the City.” In Athens, the aristocratic Eupatrids are overthrown by popular tyrants. In Rome, the clash of the orders resolves by granting the common pleb political standing. 

The fourth revolution involved extending the political rights of each citizen. In some cities, this meant democracy; in most, it simply meant that the state became more citizen-focused. This was done in a manner that paid no heed to religion. The Athenian statesman Solon established four ranks of citizens, only allowing the rich to hold the highest offices. The city was hence grounded in wealth, not religion. In Rome, Servius, a key player on the plebeian side, selected allies from the richest plebeian. Crucially, this cuts the cord between religious and political prestige. In the ancient domestic-states, the father is the head priest and king. Initially, the kings of city-states were also head priests. Wealth provides an independent, non-sacerdotal way to rise in prestige.

The last step, as in many stories about the ancient world, arrives in the form of Christ. We started with small domestic gods, so it’s only fitting that we end with the universal Christian one. While the ancient city emerged from a cult of burial worship, Christ remarked, “let the dead bury their dead.” Where the ancient city detested the foreigner, Christianity embraced him. The apostle Paul wrote:

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.

For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.

For the body is not one member, but many.

1 Corinthians 12:12-14

With these revolutions, the fall of the ancient city was complete. The beliefs which founded the ancient city eroded. Those who suffered under the early regimes revolted. The newer cities are more familiar to us than the ones grounded in ancestor worship.

The Future City

What is the ancient city’s relevance to present and future ones?

One reaction to this question is to discard Fustel de Coulanges’ study. He overstated the role of ancestor worship, patriarchy, and religion in forming the ancient city. He wrote in 1864 and was principally reliant on ancient texts. Since then, the corpus has grown and other forms of evidence have become available. Mycenae does not appear in The Ancient City and so Mycenaean burial practices, worship, and civilization are not referenced.

Yet we shouldn’t reject all of The Ancient City. It’s better to adopt it as one model of the ancient world, one that is too simplified, but insightful. It reminds us how alien the ancients can be to us and of the crucial interplay between the religious and civic. Fustel de Coulanges brings to the surface key differences between the ancient and the modern.

First, our citizen bodies are larger and more empowered. The “fall” of the ancient city as told by Fustel Coulanges is essentially the fall of religious monarchy and aristocracy. The plebs rose in number and power and were able to challenge the reigning religious body – either alone or with elites. Today, in modern democracies, citizen bodies are even more empowered to the point where there are concerns that we’ve ossified into vetocracies.

Second, our states do not demand the loyalty that the ancient city did. In the Crito, Socrates discusses whether it would be just to avoid his death sentence. Socrates' companion, Crito would have him escape – after all the sentence itself is unjust, but Socrates will not. Speaking as the voice of the law, Socrates asks:

Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding?

Crito

The answer is, of course, no. Socrates will face his death because it is what the law and gods will. This kind of attitude is far too conciliatory to state power for contemporary liberals. The modern attitude, complete with a reference to Christianity, is better captured by Martin Luther King Jr:

There are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.

Letter from Birmingham City Jail

This view, correctly, rejects the ultimate authority of the state. Nonetheless, governments have many signs of special authority. Government buildings are aesthetically distinct. Court judges wear unique costumes. Many government officials, from police to senators, are legally immune in a variety of ways. Legal language itself is distinct and opaque by design. Whenever a new leader accedes to power a ritual is required. Fustel de Coulange's identification of religion and original power has been broken, but many vestigial signs of the sacerdotal are present in today’s governments and may even be required.

Third, despite claims about the alienating power of modernity, our neighbor is less alienated from us than they would be in the ancient world. Our neighbors are a part of the same society. In many cases, they will share many of the most important ideals. Trust is much higher in individualistic societies – a prediction that the model of the ancient city makes. Work by cultural evolutionists, like Joseph Henrich, emphasizes the role of religion and kinship structure in shaping societies, thereby advancing Fustel de Coulanges’s inchoate ideas.

Given these differences, what is the import of the Ancient City for future ones?

David Hume speculated that theism and polytheism are in flux. Theism is abstract religion – one that worships the greatest conceivable being. It’s philosophically defensible and elegant. Polytheism is personal and particular. It worships the image and the concrete, such as ancestors, weather spirits, and Mother Mary. Hume proposed that we cycle between them.

Currently, one could see us in the theistic phases – a period of relative globalism and trust. The ancient city was a paradigmatic polytheistic one.

We could move back to a world of many gods. With maximal power of choice, each person could find their niches and communities. What began as a universal pluralistic liberal society, may splinter off into several distinct zones. For example, one could see the states of the US continue to sort into personal, cultural, and political pockets. If one runs that sorting process long enough, particular pockets may exit. We could see an acceleration of the Brexit trend.

Even so, a more federated world isn’t the ancient city. Fully reverting to that would require a stronger family and a higher cost of exit. Empowering the family is unlikely to happen to the required extent – see the decline in fertility and new domestic norms. Increasing the cost of exit isn’t much more feasible. Today, the cost of leaving nearly anything is low. This is true for cities, companies, and families. What bound the ancient person to their city was that they had fewer, sometimes no, alternatives. With the lack of optionality comes loyalty. Today, where there’s a market there’s movement. Restricting that amounts to infringing on freedom.

Perhaps moving back to a polytheistic world requires adopting a new ideology. Such a belief system must necessitate the emergence of new social units. This suggestion takes on Fustel de Coulanges’s view of human nature full sale. It’s not our material conditions or social arrangements that play the dominant role in explaining our behavior, but our thoughts. This ideology would need to bind people to one another. It must have a hostile stranger whose existence reinforces the group’s loyalty. There’s no guarantee that the impact of the ideology would be positive.

This isn’t something that can be done through engineering. Sometimes people decry the loss of myth and propose resurrecting old ones or promoting new ones. But to describe what we've lost as a myth is to already lose the game. The ancient people saw their gods as reality.

An ideology that births new cities will need to contain something one can touch – whether or not it reflects reality. Of war, Foustel de Coulanges writes:

While fighting against the enemy, each one believed he was fighting against the gods of another city. These foreign gods he was permitted to detest, to abuse, to strike; he might even make them prisoners.

The days of those crude polytheistic fantasies are over, but that isn’t to say that new ones won’t arise.

We also have an exciting collaboration in the works, which we’ll announce in due time. Stay tuned!

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The most successful ideology of all time is arguably Christianity. It is two thousand years old, has about two and a half billion adherents, and has been the dominant religion of most of the most powerful countries. Few belief systems have come close, although the other big religions are in the same order of magnitude. If we ask the question of secular ideologies, then the strongest contender is probably liberalism, which has been at the core of the political and economic systems of the wealthiest states over the past few centuries. 

Now let us perform a little exercise. After you have read this paragraph, close your eyes, and take a few moments to visualize Christianity. It won’t be obvious, since Christianity is an abstract idea, but you should be able to see something anyway. You can imagine the sounds, too. When you are done, do the same for liberalism.

What did you see and hear? 

To my mind’s eye, Christianity immediately evokes magnificent cathedrals, spires rising into the sky, the play of light through stained glass, and elaborately ornamented architectural detail. I see Jesus on the cross, and indeed crosses everywhere: the cross is a simple symbol, easy to remix into countless variations. I hear organ music, and choirs singing, and bells ringing, and the hypnotic utterances of a priest during mass. 

Liberalism is trickier to visualize, but some things come to mind too: the Statue of Liberty overlooking New York harbor. Lady Justice, blinded and watchful. Neoclassical buildings, serving as the houses of government or the law, with their white marble columns and stately appearance — a nod to the birthplace of democracy in ancient Athens. Sounds: the chatter of lively debate in a coffee house of the Enlightenment; the bustle of an industrious and ethnically diverse city; the scribbling a quill laying down the principles of political liberty.

These descriptions point to what we can call an aesthetic. An aesthetic is a coherent, recognizable style. It manifests in everything from architecture to music, clothing, poetry, storytelling, or website design. Aesthetics determine how beautiful a thing is, which is simply a specific way of saying how interesting it is. 

Not all aesthetics are created equal. It seems clear to me, at least, that Christianity has a richer aesthetic tapestry than liberalism does. Yet liberalism still has an aesthetic. Other religions and philosophies have their own, with varying levels of definition: the relationship between an ideology and its art is not straightforward. The aesthetic of a movement can be intentional or incidental. It can derive from existing prestige and power, or it can be the cause of prestige and power (or a mix of both in a self-reinforcing feedback loop). It can obscure the goals of the movement through attractive propaganda, or make them legible by bringing to light a clear vision. 

Whatever the situation, it should be obvious that aesthetics matter. They matter because they are unavoidable — if you don’t define them, they will be defined for you, probably in a haphazard way — and because they are often associated with success in some way. It would be a mistake to view them as a superficial part of your enterprise, a casual task that you can offload to some marketing department to deal with PR while you focus on “the important problems.” Companies, political parties and philosophical movements that ignore their aesthetics are poised to do less good for the world (at least according to them) than they could otherwise do. What could possibly matter more?

One such movement has been catching quite a bit of tailwind recently: Effective Altruism. Rooted in utilitarian ethics, Effective Altruism seeks to maximize the good that a person can do in their life by examining the impact of various choices, such as careers and giving to charity. With the recent launch of organizations such as the Future Fund, it has been able to mobilize large sums of money and is becoming an increasingly relevant part of the public discussion on global problems such as poverty and risk from artificial intelligence.

This is, overall, a good development. People making a serious effort at improving the world is great! But for reasons that I have had a hard time articulating, I have been unable to get enthusiastic about Effective Altruism, despite knowing about it for years and agreeing with most of the philosophy it rests upon. I have been led time and time again to the inescapable conclusion that Effective Altruism is the right approach, at least in theory — and yet I really balk at the idea of identifying as an effective altruist.

Why would that be? A possible answer is that I’m mistaken about my own beliefs. Perhaps, as a fallible human, I do not truly want to be ethical. Or perhaps utilitarianism is not the right framework for me. Yet neither of these things match my internal experience: I do think that people should try to do good, and my complex thoughts around utilitarianism lean towards it being at least as good as the alternatives. 

A more likely hypothesis is that I dislike the current incarnation of Effective Altruism in the real world. That could be because of its social scene, for instance. But again that’s not quite it, since I interact with effective altruists often enough and enjoy doing so. Neither is it because I disagree with the priorities of the movement as I understand them. 

Instead, the most interesting explanation I have at the moment is that Effective Altruism has an aesthetic problem. Its visual style is underdeveloped. Its ideas are expressed with dry and boring language. It inspires very little art. As a result, it has been difficult for me to get excited about contributing, or even to make sure that the values of the movement match mine. And I’m not the only one in this situation. The scientist Michael Nielsen recently said that a disregard of the arts by the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer may be a sign of something wrong in Effective Altruism’s very foundations. So we could reasonably conclude that Effective Altruism is made less effective and perhaps even less altruistic by the lack of intentionality around its aesthetics. If true, this poses a serious problem to the movement.

This is not primarily a post about Effective Altruism, nor is it a full-fledged critique. Rather, it is the perspective of an outside observer who wishes well on the movement, and who worries that a lack of aesthetic may be a larger obstacle than effective altruists may think. More importantly, it is a useful case study of a philosophy with minimal aesthetics, which we can use to examine three reasons why beauty matters to a movement: attracting people, making members feel good and remain involved, and solving the value alignment problem. 

Most things that can be called a “movement” depend on recruiting members. This can be done in any number of ways, including rational persuasion, peer pressure, and outright coercion. But the best method is arguably seduction.

Religions understand this well — or at least, the ones that have survived to this day do. To thrive, a religion must gain new followers in either of two ways (or both): by encouraging its members to pass on the religious memes to their children, or by convincing non-followers to convert. In both cases, having a rich artistic and architectural tradition helps.

In politics, the art of gaining new converts is known as propaganda when it is done by someone in a position of power. Communist propaganda, with its clearly defined realist aesthetic, comes to mind. But aesthetics also matter for movements that are trying to gain power, notably in democracies in the form of political campaigning. Political parties engage in marketing, a term that also describes the act of seduction in the world of business.

The relationship between power and art is complex, and it seems common that aesthetics receive more attention not before, but after a seizure of power (which itself depends on the strength of ideas or of an army, or both). Once a new king has established a dynasty, he will commission monuments and lavish buildings to legitimize his rule. Once a revolutionary movement has taken hold of the capital, it will create art to show its moral superiority over the previous government. In this way, politics works differently than religion, whose focus on spirituality often means that the aesthetic experience is central from the beginning.

Therefore, I would hesitate to claim that a movement (or company) must invest in its aesthetics well before it has grown. At the start, resources are limited. There may be other priorities. 

In the medium to long term, however, aesthetics matter. The reason is that they are what Scott Alexander has called a “symmetric weapon.” Once you are important enough to have competition (from other ideologies, parties, religions, companies, etc.), then ignoring your own appeal means that you will lose support to your competitors if they use their weapon. Unlike an asymmetric weapon — something like logic, which works well only for the people who side with truth — a symmetric weapon can be effective no matter who uses it. The Nazis can create inspiring art, and if you don’t counter with your own inspiring art, then you’re giving the Nazis a chance.

Some effective altruists are keenly aware of this. An essay from late 2021 argues that fun writing can save lives, since it allows important ideas to be read more widely and therefore improve their impact. (“Fun” isn’t quite the same thing as beauty, but can be considered part of aesthetics.) What’s quite fascinating is that the author spends more than half of the essay’s length anticipating objections such as “Won’t interesting writing lower the quality of the epistemics?” and “The highest impact people don’t care about it being interesting.” Her answers are on point, but clearly the issue is somewhat controversial among effective altruists. And all this preempting didn’t manage to catch everything: the discussion below the article brought up several other points of pushback.

Many of the comments were about a specific concern: the difference between mass-market and elite appeal. A piece of art or writing could be intended to reach as many people as possible, by using strategies such as clickbaity headlines or sexualized imagery. But you don’t always want to do this. In fact, sometimes you want the opposite: your aesthetics should seek to attract only a sliver of the population, to get only the best people and to avoid growing too fast. Arguably, Effective Altruism is one of these “elite-first” movements: the people who identify as effective altruists are expected to be highly-educated, sophisticated people who have given much thought to ethics and philosophy. 

This concern is valid, and it adds useful nuance to my take. But it doesn’t contradict it. Even if your movement is supposed to be for the educated or the powerful, you still need to do the job of rallying those people. In fact, the small size of the elite, together with their generally higher means of achieving goals (due to wealth, intellect, and connections) means that competing for their attention is even more crucial to success. And whether they want to admit it or not, elite people are sensitive to aesthetics. A billionaire who agrees with Effective Altruism may pride themselves in thinking that they don’t care how “interesting” an essay is, as long as it’s correct and impactful, but they will be less likely to read a dry and boring essay anyway. 

Put differently, the aesthetics you need depend on your target audience, and it’s very much worth worrying about that. But there does not exist a possible target audience for which aesthetics don’t matter. 

Having attracted people to your movement, the obvious next step is to make sure that they stay involved. To make them stay, you need to provide them with something — such as joy, meaning, or interesting experiences. To achieve this, a sensible strategy is to surround them with beauty. 

Think of two companies, both equally attractive on paper. One has dreary offices, dominated by the color gray, fluorescent lighting, cubicles, and practical desks and chairs. The other has established its workspace in an elegant old building, and filled the place with plants, sunlight, colorful furniture, and art. Which one is more likely to retain its employees?

There’s no need to belabor the idea that quality of life is important and that it depends in no small part on aesthetics. But it’s worth pointing out that while my previous answer — attracting strangers — framed aesthetics as a tool to be used, this answer is, in a sense, more fundamental. It shows that beauty is a basic need of believers that must be met. If it isn’t, then your believers will lose motivation and leave the movement or, worse, stay and slowly become depressed and suicidal.

This sounds dramatic, but it isn’t far-fetched. The most famous proponent of utilitarianism himself, John Stuart Mill, suffered from depression as a young man when he realized that accomplishing his goal of a just society wouldn’t make him happy. From his autobiography:

In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" 

At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

What saved Mill? You guessed it: poetry and the arts. 

This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life. . . . [His] miscellaneous poems . . . proved to be the precise thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture.

Effective Altruism is based on the same philosophy, and as a result its adherents are at risk of falling in the same trap. As paraphrased from Twitter, there are many people who, in trying to “maximize utility,” just end up feeling “fucking miserable.” 

This is not a trivial problem! It’s easy to say that an effective altruist should care about their own happiness and surround themselves with art, if that helps them maximize impact. But it’s tricky to do in practice, when you are used to calculating the impact of every dollar (or hour) that you spend. Sure, you could buy this nice painting for your living room, or spend some time learning to play music, but couldn’t you buy some malaria nets to save lives in Africa instead? Or work more at your high-paying job so that you can throw more money at the malaria nets? 

At the core of Effective Altruism is the idea that we should “shut up and multiply,” which means ignoring our intuitions in favor of cold, dispassionate calculations of what is good. Since aesthetics are a key source of intuition on moral goodness, a utilitarian may be tempted to do away with them entirely — and thereby make themselves miserable.

To be fair, the tension between cold calculation and moral intuition has been central to Effective Altruism since its inception. The entire movement can be said to exist in reaction to most models of charity, which maximize the good feelings of philanthropists rather than their actual impact. It would be counterproductive to suggest that effective altruists give that up. But it seems plausible that their reaction has gone slightly too far. 

Aesthetics provide an elegant solution to course-correct. They can add a layer of inspiration and emotional appeal to the sense of purpose that drives the movement, but which may not be sufficient on its own. And they don’t even require a huge investment of resources: commissioning some art would probably be just a rounding error in the big philanthropy budgets. So it may even be a good way to “maximize impact.”

More generally, this is a lesson that political parties should learn, too. With rare exceptions, political aesthetics are markedly poor, perhaps because parties try to appeal to everyone and end up with bland visual identities. As a result, there is very little joy that comes from being in them. I suspect that this is a major reason that people are dissatisfied with traditional political blocs. 

Of course, it’s not easy to develop good and uncontroversial aesthetics, especially when you aim for broad appeal. But it’s something worth trying. Most religions show that it’s an achievable goal. (Incidentally, the lack of inspiring aesthetics may be why New Atheism has mostly failed as a movement, while religions are still doing just fine.)

The third and last reason that aesthetics are important for success is that they help determine what success even is.

A philosophical question: What is the point of art? Certainly a part of the answer is that art creates pictures, sounds, and stories that are pleasant to the senses. A more sophisticated thinker might add that art has a spiritual dimension: it is good for the soul as much as for the body. But even deeper than that, I think that art is a worthwhile endeavor because it forces us to pay attention to what is most important.

In other words, art is the main mechanism by which humans create visions of what they want. Our true desires are typically hidden by the fog of daily life and bodily needs, and we need to be challenged by a novel, a movie, or a painting in order to understand what these desires are. The process may be aspirational: a beautiful photograph of a landscape may make us realize that we have a yearning for nature. It may also be cautionary: dystopian fiction is about defining what kind of future we don’t want. 

When a movement spends time and energy defining its aesthetics, it also, simultaneously, defines its values. It’s not the only way to define one’s values. But it often leads to different results than the other ways, like pure reason or religious revelation. 

Consider the current state of Effective Altruism’s aesthetics, insofar as it has any. Its logo is a lightbulb with a heart in it. Its main website is clean, with teal as a dominant color, a graph as the first image, and not a whole lot of art. When I asked people online what they thought Effective Altruism’s aesthetics were, the answers revolved around spreadsheets, precision, math, and basic clothing. 

To the extent that a vision of the future can be extrapolated from this, it seems to be a future of pure optimization, in which we do not waste our resources on flashy clothes or leisure time — or one in which we have replaced humans with robots who don’t suffer and are easy to make happy by incrementing a happiness variable, thereby “maximizing utility.” I’m not claiming that these visions are what effective altruists actually want, but it’s hard to deny that they’re what their aesthetics suggest.

In fact, scratch that: if you haven’t put in any work to make sure that your aesthetics suggest the future you want, maybe you don’t truly want it. Maybe (some) effective altruists would actually be okay with a fully “optimized” world, in which all living beings are wireheaded to a system that feeds them a chemically-induced bliss. 

Is that the world that effective altruists would like to see come true? Probably not, for most of them. But without art to show us otherwise, how can we be sure? If you’re an effective altruist who does not want this, how can you steer the movement away from what would otherwise appear to be its logical conclusion?

Success is not a good thing if you succeed at something that is morally abhorrent. So it is fortunate that aesthetics, in addition to helping movements succeed by attracting people and improving the lives of its followers, can also contribute to figuring out the right kind of success. In this way, it helps solve a problem analogous to the alignment problem in artificial intelligence: making sure that the values of a powerful non-human thing — a movement or an AI — are aligned with those of humanity.

Of course, aesthetics are not a guarantee of morality. The Nazis are a shining counterexample, with their elegant swastika symbol, their stylish uniforms, a taste for grandiose architecture, and ethics that were about as wrong as ethics can get. But then again, they liked to display skulls on their caps. Which led a fictional Nazi, in a classic British comedy skit, to wonder: are the Nazis the baddies?

So perhaps aesthetics are not a fully symmetric weapon after all. They can help reveal the moral worth of an ideology. They can show directly that a movement wants to bring goodness to the world, since art and beauty are good. Effective altruists and political campaigners may worry that aesthetics distract them from their goals, but that’s something only someone who’s afraid of firing the weapon would say — either because their goals are unclear, or because their goals are wrong.

Suppose you agree that aesthetics are important, and you want to provide your movement with some. What should you do? What kind of art should you aim for? 

Any precise answer depends on the specifics, of course. For Effective Altruism, there are some interesting suggestions. Solarpunk is one. It is, with its focus on both nature and technology, one of the most common aspirational aesthetics, yet one that is, for some reason, almost never embodied by any real movement. 

Another idea that I saw floating around an effective altruist discussion group is this modern sculpture from the Grady Hospital in Atlanta, to emphasize that death is bad and should be fought: 

As a sign that Effective Altruism is not completely devoid of aesthetics, this poster for a recent event in Boston is also quite nice:

All of these are aspirational in very different ways. The solarpunk aesthetic in fact doesn’t please all effective altruists: some think that it carries with it the errors of environmentalism, which shuns industry even though industry has been the most efficient way we have found to increase welfare. Fair enough! Such debates are the whole process of trying to define your values through your aesthetics. As we saw, it’s not necessarily easy to reach consensus on these questions.

But let me conclude with a suggestion for an aesthetic that is, at the moment, underutilized. You see where I’m going with this: classicism. 

Classical antiquity provides the foundation to Western culture — and, through Western influence, to the world’s. As such, it is an aesthetic choice that manages to be both fairly neutral and compelling, while also drawing from a rich artistic and architectural tradition. Yet for whatever reason, classicism is less in vogue now than it has been for most of Western history. So it doesn’t take a lot of effort to remix it into something original. Of course, classicism is more on the elite side of the aesthetic spectrum, since it assumes quite a bit of background knowledge on history and literature, but as we discussed, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. 

I shall make no comment as to whether Effective Altruism or any particular ideology should adopt the visual style of the Greco-Roman world. But I do predict that those who do are likely to find themselves more successful than others in the next few decades. Classical aesthetics have occupied the pinnacle of Western art many times in the past few millennia. They will again. And then the only question is: through which movement?

Further reading

• LARPing Up the Wrong Tree, my last essay for The Classical Futurist, can serve as a counterweight to this piece. It is about the dangers of making your movement solely about aesthetics.

• A call from 2019 on the EA forums to use art to convey Effective Altruism.

• Also from the EA forums, a very recent and widely read piece on current challenges in community building. Not directly related to aesthetics, but aesthetics could be a part of the answer.

• The results of a solarpunk art contest from last year.

• The effective altruist philosopher Peter Singer on the ethical cost of high-price art (2014).