By Mathis Bitton
Monday, July 27, 2020
“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger
than the causes of it.”
— Marcus Aurelius
The genealogy of the state has long been a subject of
philosophical inquiry. Aristotle, seeking the origins of human society, found
the polis to be a fact of nature. For him, man was a political animal, a
creature of logos in search of collective bonds. Born out of a desire to
achieve self-sufficiency, the state constituted a sublimation of our most
deep-rooted feature: rationality. Centuries later, Hegel would go further and
argue that the state embodies “the spirit of the world,” an almost mystical
force without which the course of human events would have come to a halt.
Rejecting Saint Augustine’s insistence upon the futility of the civitas
terrena, i.e. the City of Man, Hegel called the state “an incarnation of
the divine idea as it exists on earth.” Naturally, these accounts of statehood
feel rather detached from today’s globalized world. In 1970, the historian
Joseph B. Strayer wrote that “we take the state for granted”; 50 years later,
the disappearance of statehood seems more evident than its inescapability.
For the literary critic Harold Bloom, the value of
statehood was best captured by the Greek playwright Aeschylus. In his
tripartite Oresteia, the tragedian related the rise of Athens and the
fall of the house of Atreus, an aristocratic family trapped in a vicious cycle
wherein one kin-murder justifies another.
The play begins with the end of the Trojan War. The
Greeks have vanquished their enemies, and their commanding general, Agamemnon,
is on his way home. Behind the expressive smiles of soldiers, tension shrouds
the night. The ten-year conflict may be over, but the Mycenaeans still recall
the bloody act that enabled their ships to sail. When Greek warriors assembled
at Aulis to launch the expedition against Troy, the goddess Artemis demanded
the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia. The dilemma opposed
Agamemnon-the-father to Agamemnon-the-statesman. The latter prevailed — and had
his daughter executed to appease the whims of Artemis.
Iphigenia’s death represented the logical continuation of
a dreadful pattern haunting the house of Atreus. Agamemnon’s father had
murdered the children of his own brother Thyestes, with whom he had fought for
the rule of Argos. In response, Thyestes had pronounced a curse on Atreus’s
descendants: Decade after decade, they would kill one another in a perpetual
struggle for power and revenge. By sacrificing Iphigenia, Agamemnon carried the
curse into another generation.
When the victorious Greek warriors reach the shores of
Mycenae, Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, welcomes her husband with open arms.
Eager to celebrate the glory of her beloved war hero, she asks the returning
king to approach ceremonially on a red carpet. He hesitates; she insists;
surrounding soldiers begin to moan in foreboding. Agamemnon decides to follow
his wife’s command. Shortly thereafter, Clytemnestra slaughters him to avenge
her daughter — and the pattern continues.
Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, returns
to Mycenae. On the way, he meets his sister Electra, who questions the code of
blood vengeance. But Orestes knows that his duty is to avenge his father by
killing his mother, which he does. At no point does Aeschylus encourage any
illusion about the inescapability of revenge; blood, and blood alone,
can wipe away the stains of blood.
After the death of Clytemnestra, the Furies — ancient
earth-god creatures who oversee primeval justice — pursue Orestes to the Temple
of Apollo at Delphi. The Furies embody the violence of what Hobbes would later
call the “state of nature,” this uncivilized world of violence and rage that
precedes the emergence of statehood. They think in simple terms: Orestes’s
matricide is a blood crime, for which he must pay with his life. Their
reasoning does away with circumstances, with subtleties, with dialogue. Devoid
of clemency and forgiveness, the Furies blindly uphold their moral absolutes.
Yet Apollo refuses to yield to their ire and protects the young man.
Troubled by this conflict, Athena welcomes Orestes to
Athens, where she asks him to be judged by a jury of citizens selected at
random. Apollo will defend the accused, and the Furies will prosecute him. Gone
is the unrestrained anger of the state of nature, gone is the use of violence
in the name of the good. Enters a new conception of justice based upon mutual
respect, due process, and rational deliberation. The trial also symbolizes the
separation between the public and the private; for the first time in centuries,
the house of Atreus leaves the fate of its heir in the hands of others. These
two phenomena do not happen simultaneously by accident. For institutions to
serve their purpose, opposing sides must leave the emotional weight of personal
grievances at the door.
The trial results in a hung jury, but Athena casts the
deciding vote to acquit Orestes. Naturally, the Furies refuse to accept the
verdict and threaten to pitch Athens into civil war. Their outrage must
be legitimate, and any disagreement with their rage must constitute an
affront to real justice. The Furies’ rejection of Athenian jurisprudence
signifies the fragility of civil order. Those who fail to distinguish between
the public and the private, those who dress themselves in the garb of heroes
whose virtue they have never possessed, and those who hide behind “justice” to
sentence people to infamy will never accept the rule of democratic
institutions. Just as many pluralists today exhort their compatriots to “live
and let live” as long as everyone chooses to live in “the right way,” so the
Furies stand ready to accept the trial as a process — but only if its outcome
ratifies their worldview.
After invoking Peitho, the goddess of persuasion, Athena
forces the Furies into submission. If they are to remain in what will soon
become the Athenian republic, the dreadful creatures must abandon their
unidimensional rage and embrace the spirit of deliberation. Rhetoric and
rationality triumph over unrestrained anger and revenge. Centuries before
social-contract theorists, the tale of Aeschylus captured the essence of
statehood and democracy: Both presuppose a strict separation between the public
and the private, a rejection of emotional whims, and an unwavering respect for
institutions.
In a way, tragedy itself constituted an Athenian
institution to be revered. Inculcating civic virtue to an attentive citizen
audience, the playwright was a figure of primary importance. By promoting a
sense of responsibility through the lens of ancient traditions, drama became a
democratic paideia — i.e., education — complete in itself. Freed from
the urgency of decision that marked other political institutions, drama
encouraged inclusive and reflective thinking about contemporary issues. The Oresteia
was no exception. The trilogy made the Athenians reflect upon the revolution of
462, a series of uprisings in which democrats led by Pericles brought the city
close to civil war in order to defend the rule of law against an arbitrary
justice system.
By interweaving founding myths with contemporary
politics, Aeschylus established a balance of proximity and distance that put
events of his time in a pattern more complete, and thus more intelligible, than
that available to Athenian political leaders themselves. Distance from the
present furnished a universal context in which to understand the complexities
of the time. Tragedies did not deprive issues of their urgency, but they did
allow the citizen-audience to see themselves both as protagonists responsible
for their deeds and as products of forces beyond their control.
Dramatizing Athens’s original struggle against revenge
politics, Aeschylus reminded his contemporaries that the gifts of their
ancestors must be deserved and their victories rewon. He turned the citizenry
into a new generation of heroes and provided them with a magnified reflection
of their living past — notably, the Oresteia ends with the whole people
of Athens on stage. With eyes on those who came before them, and thoughts on
those who would follow, Athenians could turn sight into insight and foresight.
The Polish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote that
“literature is the memory of humanity.” Unfortunately, our time suffers from a
pernicious kind of amnesia, deliberate for some, innocent for most. We have
left the warnings of Aeschylus unheard. As Gilbert K. Chesterton put it, “every
high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things” — among them, the need
to keep Furies in check.
Rage has gripped the democratic world. The recent spasms
began in Chile, where over a million people descended to the streets in
response to a 4 percent increase in mass-transit fares. In all, 29 protesters
were killed, 7,000 were arrested, 2,500 were injured, and property worth $1.4
billion was destroyed. A few months later, the French would launch the “yellow
vest” movement after the imposition of a 7.6-cents-per-liter tax on diesel.
There, 12 protesters were killed, 4,000 were injured, 8,400 were arrested, and
an estimated €4.4 billion were lost to the economy. Now the tide of political
anger has come to American shores — and the death count has already reached 28.
Naturally, these numbers need not delegitimize any of
these mass movements. In fact, popular outrage is first and foremost a symptom
of the widening gap separating the elite from the citizenry. But we should note
that the only country where recent protests have remained peaceful and
calm is Hong Kong — where people are fighting against a non-democratic
government. Why do the victims of despotism feel the need to protect the kind
of decorum that American, French, and Chilean protesters have proven incapable
of maintaining? Perhaps because the causes of this surge in violence are not
exclusively political.
Consider Portland as a case study. On the left, the same
media outlets that deemed conservative gatherings careless, selfish, and
fascistic now applaud mass protests. While the protests have been by and large
peaceful, a majority of activists and commentators seem unable
to condemn riots and arsons with even a bare minimum of tact. On the right,
President Trump’s decision to send federal security officers dressed for combat
— wearing jungle-camouflage uniforms with unclear markings, carrying heavy
weapons, using batons and tear gas, and throwing people into unmarked vans — to
Portland has done nothing but galvanize protesters.
Was the decision unconstitutional? No.
Was it comparable to “storm troopers” or to the Chinese police state? No — had
Trump wanted to imitate President Xi, peaceful and violent protesters would be
staying in Xinjiang-style “re-education” camps by now. But what Trump’s
response does show is his wider attitude toward politics. The president needs
to fight an enemy, to be against something, to manufacture a narrative
in which he is the last defender of civilization — even if that narrative
elevates the status of the rioters and gives critics handy arguments to talk
about “dictatorship.” A few weeks ago, the Trump campaign rolled out an ad
proclaiming that the president would protect a statue of Jesus from the great
awokening — which could have been fair enough had the statue not been Rio de
Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer. This week, another ad in defense of “law and
order” used a Ukrainian photo from 2014; the supposedly evil protesters in the
picture were democrats fighting against the authoritarian rule of Viktor
Yanukovych, a Ukrainian autocrat backed by Putin’s regime.
Some may respond that culture wars need to be fought with
panache, or that the end justifies the means. But these incidents are not
clumsy missteps. They are symptomatic of a zero-sum conception of politics in
which every facet of life becomes a gladiatorial contest to be won with fire,
fury, and unabashed intellectual dishonesty. Every maladroit provocation, every
careless ad, every manufactured battle opposing Americans to one another gets
us further away from E pluribus unum.
On both sides, the public–private distinction has
collapsed. We live, breathe, and work in echo chambers where everything and
anything has to become political. Addicted to Twitter duels and fiery
hyperbole, we have unleashed the Furies of our age — and their ire threatens
the foundations of the nation.
