Cities into nations
Call me a philhellenist. I have to acknowledge that from the start here, since from my early days, I have been absorbed by the intellectual and aesthetic world that existed in Greece of the fifth century BCE—though I put no hard borders around that period, especially given the rise of science in the Greek colonies in Ionia, the work in science and literature that took place in Alexandria in Egypt until monotheists set off a millennium-long war against freedom of thought, and, of course, the compositions of Hesiod and Homer, be they individual poets or schools of poetry. The gods could be negotiated with; humanity had both a duty and an opportunity to better ourselves, and the cosmos rewarded contemplation of its wonders.
I say all of that to put context around the admission that ultimately, the Greek experiment failed. Or rather say that it suffered a major setback that has taken centuries for civilization to recover from. This is not a final comment on what the Greeks were doing. Human culture is not analogous to assembling a puzzle or a bicycle from a box of parts with the guidance of pictures. At each stage, we have to invent the pieces and their relationships while we are working out the telos of the whole. But we can look back and see where previous attempts went wrong—not to assign blame, as if we would have done better. Instead, we can see how to improve the work today.
I will agree with my contemporary progressives that one key failing of the ancient Greeks was in their treatment of women and slaves, the latter category something that ought not to have existed, though again, this was something that all cultures across the globe took a long time to realize, but I see another fault that I must mark down against them, one that prevented them from having the time to see the humanity in every human being, their inability to develop political unity out of a broad cultural agreement as to what it meant to be Greek.
The Greek peninsula is broken up by mountain ridges and inlets of the surrounding seas into a fractured landscape that forced many of the Greeks to seek a livelihood in maritime commerce. Its individual city-states could stand as ideal examples for libertarians of local political control in which every citizen—remembering that many persons were not citizens—could participate directly in the activities of his society, limited as they were in times of peace.
And this is an illustration of precisely why the libertarian fantasy cannot work: Times of peace were few.
Persia, Macedonia, Carthage, and Rome all saw Greece or Greek colonies as territory and treasure to be conquered. To stop the Persian Empire’s advance into Europe, the Greeks were briefly able to unify, and Alexander held them together as a sort of inspirational idol for as long as he lived, but it was only with the Romans that the Greeks were for some time glued together, and this by making them politically impotent even as Hellenism flooded Roman intellectual life.
What the ancient Greeks pass on to us is the challenge of finding a way to work collectively while preserving the individuality that they discovered.
The idea of each person being in possession of inalienable rights was not something that they would have expressed in detail or as an article of political belief, but it was implicit in the notion of citizenship, in the participation that citizens had in the affairs of their cities, as was their insistence on what today we would call local control, the recognition that the people who must live with the decisions should be the ones who decide, all things being equal.
How, then, do we preserve those advances while adding the political unity necessary for long-term survival?
We will not do it by enforcing a single culture across the nation. The Greeks were proud of being Greek even as they slew each other in their many squabbles among cities. And though we are seeing something similar to the effect that the Persians had as Europe stands up to Putin’s Russia, it would be best if we did not need a war to pull people together—and if we did not require an alien invasion, either.
Philhellene that I am, I would like to believe that if we secure the blessings of an advanced society for all members—if we guarantee healthcare, a living wage, and higher education to each person, for example—and make meaningful our democratic ideals by making serving in elective office something that even those of modest means can do, along with removing the barriers that the two major parties have erected against electoral diversity, we would see a greater buy-in, a greater identification with the nation as something we all own and must preserve, rather than as a tool of one’s race, religion, or party.
The Romans tried a bit of that by expanding citizenship and had some measure of success until other structural weaknesses led to collapse. We stand in better chance of making the above work, given developments in communication and travel in recent decades. And since we all are one species alive on one planet—until we can expand outward in significant numbers—unifying a nation the size of the United States is good practice for how to bring the whole of Earth together.