GREEK RESILIENCE: SPARTAN AND ATHENIAN STRATEGIES
A while back, at the prompting of Dan Abbott, I picked up Howard Bloom’s excellent Global Brain:The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang To The 21st Century. The book lived up to the billing Dan gave it and I was as impressed with Bloom as I have been with such eminent scholars as Robert Conquest, E.O. Wilson or Jacques Barzun. Which is to say, that Global Mind is a work of a rare intellectual caliber.
This however, my opening paragraph to the contrary, is not a review of Global Mind. Instead, I would like to draw attention to a section where Bloom has, correctly in my view, pointed to a dichotomy of paradigms that describe two espistemological -cultural meta-strategies for civilizational resilience:
” …But the subcultural struggles retarding science’s advance are minor maladies of mass mind compared to a set of twenty-first century clashes in which Sparta and Athens remain vigorously alive.
Today’s cyber-era Spartans are bone crushers of conformity. they are the fundamentalists of both the left and the right. Some are godly, some are secular. Religious extreminsts, ultranationalists, ethnic liberationists and fascists fall on the fundamentalist side of the line. Brooking no tolerance of those who disagree, they invoke a golden past and a higher power, both which demand submission to authority. The worst shoot, burn and bomb to get their way. Their opposites are Athenian, Socratic, Aristotelian, diversity-generating, pluralistic and democratic….these champions of human rghts use the word ‘freedom’ to liberate he individual, not hammer the triumph of a chosen collectivity.”
Count me as an Athenian.
Nevertheless, while I find the people who are Bloom’s Spartans or Eric Hoffer’s True Believers to be anything from misguided to dangerous, I am aware that both the Spartan as well as the Athenian approaches to life represent resilience strategies. Each with particular advantages and dangers.
Spartans are resilient in the face of ideological and often physical attack. They react with moral certainty and outrage toward threats to deeply cherished beliefs. They have the solidarity of moral cohesion and rigidly disciplined unity and the heightened attention, even paranoia, of a people under siege. Hallowed traditions and unifying themes become banners of war, metaphorically or literally. This is a response of vigilance appropriate for an existential threat or similar grave emergency.
Athenians are resilient in the face of shifting conditions of the environment. They react with debate, analysis, multiple perspectives, insight and experimentation. They have the creativity of competent, self-confident, individuals and do not fear to hazard risks. Hallowed traditions that no longer serve are quickly discarded in favor of efficiency and effectiveness that force Rule Set resets. This is the response of adaptive evolution, even revolutionary change, appropriate for epochal shifts and long term adversity.
Each has their flaws. Spartans stubbornly corner themselves in mental cul-de-sacs built from self-imposed blindness, Athenians bicker over the existence of a threat at all even as the enemy is at the gates -or even after he has breached the walls. Of the two, though, I will place my bet on the Athenians. They can correct errors more readily.
Creative resilience deals with the unknown unknowns over the long haul as they emerge in a way that the most violent and reflexively vigilant response cannot.
November 14th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Very interesting.
I wonder what a graph of American Public Policy ideas, actors, or philosophies would look like with Athenians vs Spartans on one Axis, and Meade’s Categories (Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Hamiltonian, Wilsonian) on the other.
November 15th, 2006 at 3:10 am
Mark,
Thank you for the kind words. I am glad you enjoyed the book.
However, I disagree on your take of the Athenian / Spartan divide
Spartans are resilient in the face of ideological and often physical attack. They react with moral certainty and outrage toward threats to deeply cherished beliefs. They have the solidarity of moral cohesion and rigidly disciplined unity and the heightened attention, even paranoia, of a people under siege. Hallowed traditions and unifying themes become banners of war, metaphorically or literally. This is a response of vigilance appropriate for an existential threat or similar grave emergency.
Athenians are resilient in the face of shifting conditions of the environment. They react with debate, analysis, multiple perspectives, insight and experimentation. They have the creativity of competent, self-confident, individuals and do not fear to hazard risks. Hallowed traditions that no longer serve are quickly discarded in favor of efficiency and effectiveness that force Rule Set resets. This is the response of adaptive evolution, even revolutionary change, appropriate for epochal shifts and long term adversity.
Take, for Example, the English as a culture. It’s hard to think of a place more reflexively traditional (right down to the Constitution). Yet English is very “Athenian. Likewise, Mao was resolutely anti-tradition but very Spartan.
Rather, I think Spartans are those High Authoritarians who will make you trod the One Way. From The Spanish Inquisition to the Red Guards, the Planners of post-war Britain to the architects of Brasilia, they saw irrationality and behleld an enemy. Whatever their internal psychological state, Spartans destroy diversity.
Athenians are those whose actions generate diversity. From the Society of Jesus to the Austrian economists, they prefer to loosen the hand of government and allow internal tournaments to generate new paths.
(I’ve thought that a good next installment in Jesusism-Paulism would highlight St. Ignatius arrest by the Inqusition, their fight with the Benedictines over Chinese use, the supression of the 18th century, etc. Very Athenian. And very traditional.)
November 15th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
“Likewise, Mao was resolutely anti-tradition but very Spartan”
Well, not quite my friend. Mao was as much a reactionary traditionalist Chinese ruler as he was a revolutionary one.
From perusing _The General Mirror for the Aid of Government_ to Han Fei-Tzu’s Legalist school, Mao delved very deep into the strands of Chinese tradition that strengthened his hand as a ” Red Emperor”. For many of Mao’s policies, all you need is a ” rectification of names” to see their Chinese rather than Communist characteristics.
(Not unlike Stalin’s selective revival of Russian chauvinism, anti-semitism, great power imperialism, a table of ranks for the military, a Party aristocracy in the nomenklatura list, even the Orthodox Church)
I do however, agree with this generalization:
“Rather, I think Spartans are those High Authoritarians who will make you trod the One Way. From The Spanish Inquisition to the Red Guards, the Planners of post-war Britain to the architects of Brasilia, they saw irrationality and behleld an enemy. Whatever their internal psychological state, Spartans destroy diversity”
November 15th, 2006 at 6:13 pm
Thanks for the link, cool! To be linked by Zenpundit is indeed a great honor, no sarcasm intended.
In Steve DeAngelis’ last blog on resilience, “An Electoral lesson in Resilience”, he left out Sparta. He mentioned nimble as a sign of resilience, but I thought, like you, about Sparta being resilient also. Its conformity gives it resilience for its survival, but by definition I thought Sparta actually seemed anti-resilience. If you use the physics use, resilience means “In physics and engineering, resilience is defined as the capacity of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and then, upon unloading to have this energy recovered. In other words, it is the maximum energy per volume that can be elastically stored.”, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resilience). While I thought you and I were correct, I couldn’t see Sparta as elastic, so the energy couldn’t be elastically stored. To be resiliant the object has to transfer the energy that attacked it into a flow of energy (life) that sustains it. This made me go back and re-read Global Brain.
What I concluded was that Howard would define resiliency as the moving of a state, between Sparta and Athens. He sees the inner judges and resource shifters as making choices and shifting resources to the winner of the inter-group tournaments. If Greece could have scaled itself, as per Bar-yam, it would have seen that it had the perfect society as a whole. It would have also seen that divided Greece would have survived, but because they were united it fell. When Sparta took Athens it meant the eventual distruction of Greece at the world scale.
I have made this same comparison to the USA. If the Liberals or the Conservative win, or the Right and Left win, it would mean the end of the USA. Our strength comes from not just the inter-gourp tournements going on inside our society, but by the fact that theses tournements are able to take place at all. You can see this tournement taking place in our society today. The diversity generators have taken over so much of our resources that the conformity enforcers rebelled.