Athens: The Dawn of Democracy
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Bettany Hughes, our favorite pop classicist, is back with a new documentary, Athens: the dawn of democracy. It should be showing this Monday evening on your local PBS station if you live in the United States. I’ve recently expressed my skepticism at the democralatry which suffuses American discussion.
(Republished from GNXP.com by permission of author or representative)
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Well, it would be ‘democrolatry,’ wouldn’t it?
But I prefer demolatry, which sort of speaks more to the mental root of the prejudice. Going through one’s head and replacing the demolatrous mantra human with the neutral neologism neohominid (= hominid living today) is an especially fun exercise.
What, for example, are neohominid rights? Presumably these represent a certain set of constraints on the rules by which a controlling authority can or should manage a population of neohominids. What are the goals of these constraints? How are they derived from what we know about the biology and behavior of neohominids? Or of any intelligent, independently motivated agents?
The mental pattern of demolatry, or democralotry, or whatever, is essentially liturgical. Breaking out of this pattern, and thinking about law, economics and government in engineering terms – as structures designed to achieve goals – is a complete waste of time. But it can be quite fun.
cute.
Democracy is all well and good, if kept in check by some guiding principles, preferably written down in a Constitution or some such. In that case, and if such a Constitution is followed, demcoracy may be a fine way to decide many things. Our system was not designed as a democracy, but rather a republic, and remains so at the federal level. Many states, however, have mixed systems, where most issues are handled by representatives, but some are directly handled democratically by initiative or some such.
Pure democracy is two wolves and one sheep voting on what’s for dinner. But a pure republic is just 20 wolves and 10 sheep voting for a council of two wolves and one sheep who will then vote on what’s for dinner. In both cases, there needs to be some guidelines to determine what is up for a vote and what is out of bounds, so that the rights of the minority don’t get voted away by the majority.
PhilB
There’s also this whole tradition of what might be called demodicy, in which sincere and intelligent thinkers speculate on why democracy seems to work so badly, even though the People are so wonderful. (The analogy is to theodicy.)
You see this a lot with Iraq. For every writer who uses Iraq as an actual update to her priors on democracy, there are a hundred who use Iraq as an update only to their priors on Iraq. If Laetrile didn’t cure your cancer, obviously you had a really nasty case of cancer.
As for Constitutions, Britain has no such document. Nothing is out of bounds. The US had a written Constitution, which was obeyed more or less between 1790 and 1861, perhaps somewhat less from 1865 to 1933. I suppose it worked fairly well for most of that period. Its relevance today is pretty debatable, at least if we’re talking about the actual contractual document rather than the body of precedent known as “constitutional law.”
(It’s rather astounding that the political heirs of the New Deal can pose as the paladins of Law in the face of Presidential Tyranny. But chutzpah has never been scarce this side of the Atlantic.)
In any case, it seems pretty clear to me that life in Britain today is not a grinding Orwellian tyranny. At least not any more than life in the US today is a grinding Orwellian tyranny. Each of us can interpret these facts as we choose. However, they strike me as pointing more away from than toward the importance of Constitutions and other holy documents in ensuring the quality of government that Britons and Americans enjoy today.
Not that I’m not saying Bettany Hughes isn’t a hottie. But…
In any case, it seems pretty clear to me that life in Britain today is not a grinding Orwellian tyranny. At least not any more than life in the US today is a grinding Orwellian tyranny.It’s closer now than it’s been in a long, long time.
I think people underestimate how Orwellian their lives have actually become. Things never happen the way they’re depicted in dystopian fiction – that would be too obvious – but they can come surprisingly close.
Is the pale rider given his people’s keep or must he earn it?
The nice thing about democracy is that the people get what they deserve.
Hopefully the Chinese will cook up something better.
Caledonian,
I’m not saying it’s not Orwellian. I’m just saying it could get much, much more Orwellian. And even just on the scale of the great Orwellocracies of the 20th century, it hardly makes the cut.
@ J:
very cute indeed.
Britain doesn’t have a single written document called a Constitution, but there is a great deal of statute and case law that can be called ‘constitutional’, as well as unwritten customs like the rule that the Queen will always assent to an Act of Parliament. But if a properly elected Parliament passed an Act providing for (say) extermination of gypsies, I think she would say no. It’s good to have a bit of flexibility.
Francois:
Thanks. The others are blind, obsessed by their demolatrous mantras…
You sure that’s not a shot of Jennifer Connelly?
Bettany’s three one hour episodes on Sparta (and the conflict between Athens and Sparta known as the Peloponnesian War), available on a single DVD from e.g. Netflix is also very much worth viewing, even for those of us who did this stuff at a fairly high level in high school.
She does it so much better. There’s also surprisingly much new information that’s become available, at least for those of us boomers or I’d guess gen X’ers as well whose high school days were decades ago.
What I love about Bettany, in addition to her being an intellectual’s hottie of the first order, is that she plays it so straight. She gives a somewhat feminist informed view of the role of Spartan women, perhaps, but she does it with real balance. One senses that the nearest she can get to the nuanced truth, as opposed to looking for support for any particular socio-political stance, is truly what she’s after.
When they’re on the Brits often do this kind of stuff better than anyone else it seems to me, and Oxford born and educated Bettany’s at the very top of this quintessentially British game.
(Though I have to say by far the best version of the Odyssey I’ve ever read, and the only one I’ve gotten all the way through, is the recent translation by the American Stanley Lombardo. I “read it” by listening to it on my iPod it as an audiobook from Audible – one narrated by him, with chapter intros by Susan Sarandon. It was truly enjoyable that way, a true joy in fact. As Sarandon points out in her introduction, it was after all how the work was intended to be enjoyed to be enjoyed, and for centuries the only or certainly by far the most common way that it was.)