I.D. Greeks 0014

One of the fundamental points all of this is heading toward is that the function, not “concept,” of “authority” is completely different between fully oral poetic tradition and fully written prosaic tradition. “Authority” did not and could not operate as a defined “concept” within living oral poetic tradition. And oral poetic tradition was all-inclusive of all tradition, not just this or that part at this or that time, at every single moment of a person’s individual life from birth to death. This can be seen enduring into written prosaic tradition with Aristotle’s concept of the judge whose fundamental and over-ridding function is not at all interpretation of the written law, but as the fully independent arbiter of balance and social harmony, of “the golden mean.” Achieving balance in Aristotle’s POLITICS, disturbing to our mind-set, completely disregards concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, and violation and recompense but rather concentrates on the best judgment that makes all parties relatively but not completely happy. Of course, there are “end” cases where only some kind of full termination of the process of social disturbance essentially erases the problem-maker, for instance the tyrant in whom Aristotle can find no ‘good’ whatsoever and those people who cannot be turned from their harmful ways who are essentially of the same character as the unrestrained and undisciplined tyrant. But even that is not a prescription of tit for tat in an abstract, contextless ideal of fixed, written justice but is a process of restoring proper balance to a society. Or one could say, as opposed to the Roman written code, justice for Aristotle is never blindfolded but always has its eyes wide open, taking in every aspect of the full context of the situation. Aristotle does openly take into account class differences but in regard to power, education, and discipline according to how those virtues are distributed within the political system of each city so that no class has fixed rights per se, and he also adjusts the estimation of the importance of the lowest people in the social scale, such as farmers and slaves, to account for the own desires in political matters that, unacknowledged, could disturb the balance of the whole.

I am slowly discovering the precise point I have to make. To present it in a possibly disconcerting and disorienting manner, it has to do with how one factually uses ritual. I wish to make it perfectly clear, just as the statement is presented, that using ritual is a matter of everyday fact in every person’s life and is not at all in any way limited to or even primary to so-called ‘primitive’ cultures. Modern, technological, ‘scientific’ man is obsessed with rituals. He just calls it by a different name, or, much more preferably, by no name at all so that no ‘issue’ is raised, i.e., objective, outsider examination of the processes of one’s life. The ‘issue’ is not even named so that there can be no free, interactive, rational examination of the non-issue bringing out all the facts and implications of unquestioned, ritualistic behavior which, if one does not call it that, does not exist. The standard and accepted definition of “ritual” is “devotional service especially as established by tradition or by sacerdotal prescription : the prescribed order . . .” “a code or system of rites . . .” “any practice done or regularly repeated in a set precise manner so as to satisfy one's sense of fitness” “the verbal formulas of ritual” “ ‘the neurotic is isolated by his very rituals,’ David Riesman” “ ‘the elaborate rituals of present-day medicine’” Journal American Medical Association. The very definitions from MerriamWebster end with statements about ‘scientific observation’ by scientists that brings itself into question. Ritual is formulaic behavior. The formula is unquestioned and, by sacred right, not questionable. It does not matter what kind of formula it is, whether religious or scientific or if at times the two are confused, if the formula is not open to questioning. Ritual is formulaic behavior. If you follow the formula correctly, and the result is not appropriate, then the formula was NOT followed correctly. Or: if you follow the formula, no matter how it looks, the results are to be fit together in an appropriate fashion, i. e., the results are always correct, though your technique or understanding may be deficient. In a free and open society, if the formula repeatedly comes up with inappropriate results, the formula is then put to question. But some aspects of a society may be free and others are not (although the society is defined as “free” and therefore every aspect of it must, by law, be free). And an “aspect” of society can either be ‘horizontal’ or ‘vertical’, i. e., it may apply to a clearly delimited area or may be something that runs through every use of knowledge – or all the above at the same time.

The question here, specifically, then, is what most thoroughly FIXES RITUAL? Is it traditional oral poetic culture or traditional written prose culture? The most ready answer in the past has been the more oral a culture it is, the more unscientific and therefore more superstitious and irrational it is. It is always, whether observed in ancient history or by modern scientific ethnography, more “primitive” by definition. Such a “primitive” culture has “beliefs” that must be respected and protected because they cannot stand the free and open discussion of a rational methodology.  Of course the ‘primitives’ are not, and should not be, asked if they desire such a situation of ‘respect’ and artificial protection. It is especially so if such a situation is purely mythical on the ‘scientist’s’ part in the first place. Of course a modern ‘primitive’s’ culture is neither respected or protected in the slightest in reality. It is only ‘protected’ in scholarly, obscure books no one takes seriously outside an academic context. Even if such ‘primitives’ have immense wealth and political power, the ‘respect’ and ‘protection’ are only superficial and temporary, in fact, becoming formulaic and unquestioned behavior. But since most people are not wealthy or politically powerful – although many such still participate in the formulaic behavior on the possibility they will acquire such benefices – such behavior is tolerated only by practical necessity.  

‘White men’ want to get to the point, not to the context. Such pointing-at, distinguishing from others, as in “white men” would be rejected by the traditional oral (epic) poet on the practical and contextual grounds that ‘he’ is wanting to find a unity of communication, of sympathetic reception in his audience to facilitate his performance and reception of reward. This necessitates the breaking down of differences, the breaking down of anything that cannot be practically ignored. One such thing would be skin color or any sort of so-called racial differences. One might well wonder about the variety of necessarily inherited physical varieties in mainland Greece, amplified in the southern islands like Santorini and Krete, and immensely variegated in Anatolia. This is just speculation on my part. If anyone has specific instances or arguments against this, I would like very much to hear it. But the main basis for this pure inference upon my part is, to me, the incredibly strange exact likeness in culture and physiology, or rather the complete absence of differentiation as we so-called modern people automatically now look for between different peoples. It has become so natural in travel and ethnological contexts that we no longer think about it seriously except on the shallow level of what is “politically acceptable.” But the whole concept of race and racial distinction was a creation of otherwise reputable scientists (e. g. Louis Aggasiz) using their credibility to support a popular idea and desire to prove ‘white men’ are physically, inborn (eventually genetically) ‘superior,’ sometimes in physical virtues (“healthy” versus “degenerate”), many times in terms of moral superiority (based upon knowledge of Christianity or an abstract, ‘scientific’ derivative thereof), and always upon intellect (not just greater efficiency in solving complex problems but in seeking “higher truths” versus “native slyness,” “cunning,” “craftiness,” “shrewdness,” “deception,” and “trickery” to gain things they have not rightfully earned). The whole pseudo-science of race was initially founded upon the arbitrary  (though, at the time, seemingly obvious) choice of measuring brain cases therefore brain size and equating that with intelligence on the basis that people with the smallest brains have darker skins and/or primitive or degenerate culture. The fact that there was no factual and certainly no scientific basis for establishing amount of intelligence is based on amount of brain or, sometimes more ‘scientifically,’ cortex tissue, did not seriously cross their minds in the slightest. It was also ignored that some animals had much larger brains, including cortex tissue, than human beings as well as that some animals with almost microscopic brains had an enormous variety AND variability of abilities.  This became, when united with the evolutionary theories of Darwin, supposedly the product of divine plan and temporal evolution toward a prescribed and predestined goal, i. e., since that is the ‘direction’ where time is going toward, and the end of time reveals ultimate ‘scientific’ physiological accomplishment or divine reward, then the “white man” is much farther along the road to either scientific or theological salvation. But as actual facts began to be discovered by prehistoric archeologists (that the brains of homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens Cromagnon were larger than modern man’s, homo sapiens sapiens, a name [wise wise man] I think that has fallen out of fashion in modern anthropology) and physical anthropologists like Alfred Russel Wallace (that the black skinned Australasian inhabitants of New Guinea had larger brains than “white men”) made discovering the already assumed conclusion of white supremacy much more difficult and they had to turn to other means of determining the validity of “white” racial superiority such as counting the number of crenulations on the cortex of the brain, etc.

This doctrine was called “Progressive Evolution.” It is associated with Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer as well as Charles Darwin. To some varying degree they are all responsible for it. But this is just the problem, especially with such men who actually tried to be just and fair in their relations with other human beings. It is an insidious doctrine because the accident of the historical discovery of the logical completeness and total coherence of the ‘theory’ of evolution (which is only a so-called “theory” on the level of Kopernicus’ and Issac Newton’s and Einstein’s discoveries) that literally made it a factual “advance” and accumulation of real knowledge unintentionally and offhandedly carried with it unexamined philosophical implications and doctrines which, if they had been clearly separated from the actual “theory of evolution” (the word “evolution” itself in English carrying a temporally value enhancing implication with it) its undefined and unexamined philosophical premises, would undoubtedly have rejected most or all of them. That this is true is actually quite explicit in Darwin’s concept of the “niche” that each version of living being filled. This is simply the natural situation at a specific time and place that determines what kind of life can survive or not survive within it. ‘Historically’ it is completely blind. There is no implication in the concept of “niche” of any “better” or “worse.” Where fish survive, man as man cannot. Where eagles and vultures survive, man simply as man cannot. Where dinosaurs survived, man as only man could not. Through his extensions NOW  man can ‘be’ there but he can never SURVIVE there as another animal can in its properly fitting niche. This does not make man ‘inferior’ to the fish, the bird, or dinosaur. In this context, “inferiority” sounds utterly ridiculous. Unfortunately, these men, however did not adequately extend their thinking to so-called “primitive” cultures where highly cultured and very educated Englishmen would die easily and quickly, something Alfred Russel Wallace learned to appreciate. And since Wallace was English, he proves that even Englishmen can adapt as he did to a very hostile, anti-English environment by essentially going “native”! In fact, a great number of ‘Englishmen’ learned to survive in a non-English niche in this fashion including such notables as Joseph Conrad and T. E. Lawrence. However, both of those men severely brought into question the traditional value of being a properly civilized Englishman as opposed to the patriotic and racial  denigration, “going native.”

And, culturally, the possession of writing was always considered a great validation of cultural superiority – until the English in India realized they had to contend with a culture that possessed a written tradition not only much older and much more complex in thought than theirs, but, heaven forbid, these brown skinned people with tiny brain cases were the actual direct cultural ancestors of our far superior Aryran cultural heritage. The way this logical conclusion was evaded, ignored, or discounted for over a hundred years must be a fascinating, though disgusting, study in the ways “fair play” and objective science can be fundamentally perverted.

In dealing with the Trojans and the Achaens of Homer’s ILIAD, we also have know for a long time that there must have been fundamental cultural and ‘racial’ differences. I am sure if Homer had not been accepted as the epiphany of Hellenic culture and therefore in turn the highest accomplishment in West Europen literary culture with whom only Shakespeare could compete, I am sure in the second half on the nineteeth century we would have discovered

Authority encases context. It does this to establish that there is nothing beyond its authority and therefore its authority is unquestionable. This is how morality works. Everyone knows they should be moral. Everyone also knows this is perfectly untrue. But no one questions this authority. Some few because they do not dare to, but most never even think of fundamentally questioning morality as such at all, merely of judging who is right and who is wrong, usually translating as “I am always right and your judgment is always open to my righteous questioning and condemnation,” i. e., morality on the whole is a trivial social technique of one up-man-ship. As Theognis says, only the nobility tell the truth, commoners always lie. And in establishing Hesiod as a truth-telling former shepherd become bard, they leave the question of how “truth” is determined entirely ambiguous. Another such encasement of context is “The universe must have been created, and there is only one possible creator, God.” This is based on the supposedly rational proposition that every effect, every object, has a cause. The automatic response of someone like Bertrand Russell is, “If the universe necessarily needs a creator them God needs a creator. Who created God?” This is judged invalid because God is taken out of the chain of effects because it is his nature by definition and conception to be uncreatable (along the line of Descartes and Anselm). But that is precisely encasement of context by authority, this time by pure arbitrary, whimsical definition alone whose only rational judgment of validity is that A) one cannot conceive of anything greater than God, and B) one cannot conceive the universe without a point of origin. However, the second was denied as obviously incorrect by the Greek philosophers before the age of Christianity because A) any such point of origin is not only inconceivable by the human mind but totally unnecessary, and B) it is also open to Bertrand Russell’s same objection he applied to God’s needing a point of origin, and then that point of orgin needing a point of origin, and then thatb point of origin needing a point of origin ad infinitum. That something greater than God could be thought of has been contradicted by numerous cultures possibly intentionally taking the chain of points of origin to what can only be ludicrous lengths  by the standards of fixated writing but entertaining by the standards of oral poetic tradition, i.e., “The world exists on the back of a turtle on the back on an elephant on the back of a whale . . .” And various ‘mystics’ define God and then that which is the ground of God as the “Godhead” which is an absolute desert (Meister Eckhart) or simply a mere pointer, a simple diection in and of itself, the “beyond” of the Sufi thinkers, or the “nothing” of Damascius and Heidegger or the unnamable of Samuel Beckett. Upon such things no doctrines or codes of demanding ethics (“I demand you act in such and such fashion or I will punish you.”) can be founded and that is precisely one of the main reasons why such thinkers soon got into trouble. This does not mean that they were all harmless and simply minded their own business or tried to. That does apply to most of them, but not all. “Harmful” and “harmless” are deductions of certain kinds of cause and effect primarily effecting the status of things, and not primarily or even necessarily a ‘moral’ judgment.

That authority encases context primarily intends to limit thought to what is “proper.” However, in scientific revolutions, great ‘advances’ (What does it fundamentally mean to scientifically advance?) are only possible through a discarding of an encasement of context of authority. Kopernicus discarded the obvious authority of the human point of view that the earth is the center of the universe. Now, not only did the Ptolemaic system work rationally (though extremely awkward), psychologically the only point of view possible is that the earth is the center of the universe. It is a matter of “importance,” and “importance” relies on moral judgment not rational deduction. Since no other point of view is communicable and available than the human point of view, for all practical purposes the earth is still the center of the universe. Issac Newton finalized the mathematical simplicity of Kopernicus and grounded it upon the ‘laws’ of action and reaction of any and all objects observable on or from earth and the human point of view. So we go from one logical point of view to another logical point of view to another point of view only possible by a rejection of context encasing authority. With the rejection of the authority of Euclidean geometry as the only geometrical method, though, the way was open to implement the thinking if Immanuel Kant to physics by Hemholtz, Ernst Mach, and Einstein. You dispense with “point of view” as any sort of authority since obviously that is a psychological and moral prop and not scientific fact. With Heisenburg, it even becomes a contaminant to scientific observation, unavoidable and necessary to take account of, but definitely interfering. Science here has dispensed with the authority of “a straight line is the shortest distance between two points,” essentially then, with “here” and “there” which are determined by point of view as well as “now” and “then”. This is all dealing with the “large” and “larger” which then lose their ‘scare’ factor in astrophysics and become mathematical formulae. With atomic particles, “particle” is a correspondent to Kant’s “object X”, an imaginary “object’ as such necessary to do one’s thinking within. But Kant is quite clear about exactly what this is, and that obviously there is a “beyond” to itas there is to “God.” In comes Quantum physics, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, that dispenses with the ego=supportive concept of “particle.”

The importance of the difference between traditional oral poetic performance thinking versus traditional (or otherwise) written fixed or fixating thinking resides in what is the most formidable and important (in every possible aspect) thesis – not axiomatic at all – of whether authority is fixed or relative. This both relates to authority as a whole, per se, and the applications of different kinds of conflicting authorities in varying situations and also how a universally acceptable authority – which would here be loosely identifiable with ethnic identity, interrelation and mutual interests of local cults, and simple ability to universally communicate with and entertain populations with various and proudly asserted local differences. In other words, the issue of authority as mutually recognized values does not begin as the assertion of a specific code but as the practical and diplomatic discovery of common grounds. In oral tradition, a bard going from village to village would be able to find and develop interconnections but this would only broadly develop over time into any sort of unity. In actual fact, the whole of what might be considered ‘ethnic identity’ would change connections and emphasis and be required to temporarily absorb new elements that may be of no use in any other village, i. e., the idea of a universally recognized code would be considered nonsense, at the least rejected, at the most cause harm to be done to the bard trying to bring in another and higher authority, however subtly, such as Socrates tried to do in a very mild and relatively benevolent fashion to the local cults of Athens. Left alone, such a situation develops into the very loose Pan-Hellenism by which the independent Greek cities could participate in overtly Pan-Hellenic festivals but only rarely in any vague and very ephemeral unity of political action. This also maintained the severe differences of class and tribe within a city, the exclusivity of citizenship rarely awarded to outsiders, and the consequent savagery and frequency of internal political discord. The creation of anything like a real state as understood in modern times is an imposition from the top down. Yet even then, as in the ancient empire states, the ruler most often ended up mainly as an arbiter between numerous competitive and inimical interests  to the point that any political action on the so-called autocrat’s part came out of satisfying the desires of the necessary parties for the endeavor. A great deal of autonomy had to be either de facto or de jure given to provinces, cities, priesthoods, guilds, etc., so that to a large extent the only area actually controlled by a monarch was the capital city and its outlying province with direct influence rapidly diminishing with the crossing of boundaries. The strong ties of ethnic nationality we see today are artificial constructs created by tyrants for personal power and is enforced more and more by the elimination of “them” by “us” such as in Yugoslavia where common history, language and nationality backed by a strong leader was still not strong enough to create an overriding union of local factions. This collapse of Yugoslav unity actually began I just found out long before Milosevitch while Tito was still alive in 1971 when the legal distinction of “Muslim” was introduced (Poland and the U. S. S. R. also had a distinction of “Jew” in Communist Party membership from any recognized nationality possessing its ‘own’ territory, although Stalin did try to create an ‘Autonomous Jewish Oblast’ on the Amur River in Siberia.) regardless of national or political loyalty or even, as with the Bosnian Muslims a common language shared with the Serbs (or the Croat/Serb combination legal language throughout Yugoslavia – Tito was a Croatian).

The identity of city as basic political unit with the Greeks and the identity of tribes (demes”) within those cities as well as class distinctions sometimes based on education and writing is also relevant to the historical evolution of Israel which retained a similar political divisiveness within itself which dimly reflects a similar religious variety that seems to arbitrarily break out at times in Israel’s history but could not have been possible unless the basic, groundlevel peasant culture was highly localized and extremely jealous of their differences with other ‘Israelites’ just like the local entities in the Greek world with included different Gods (Yahweh versus Baal) and even polytheistic gods. Unlike the Greeks, though, an artificial unity of history and belief was created by the was very loosely created by the surviving parties from conquests, exterminations, and exiles sometimes committed internally within Israel but most drastically committed by external parties using total terror over the remaining and acquiescent population. And even that point of view of the critical editing of tradition still left many hints of what existed before, and sometimes local groups like the Samaritans survived and persisted against orthodox persecution. Many different groups are represented in the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ and these were the relatively unified survivors after foreign conquest, destruction, exile and the Maccabee extermination of impure and foreign elements within Judaism. And then that changed even much more drastically after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 66 CE. Even then the Rabbinic Judaism that survived through political compromise and compliance with the powers that be had to compeat not only with the Samaritans still, but with groups that totally rejected Rabinism to the point, at Dura-Europos, the synagogue could have a pagan zodiac mosaic on their floor as well as pagan motifs in Jewish domiciles throughout the Roman empire.

Think of what it must have been like in the kingdom of David and Solomon. Writing did not have the same function or authority at all like now at that time. The ‘Law’ came from the Voice, not from the letter. And what the Voice said and how it said it (and even the ‘letter’) undoubtedly changed from locality to locality and according to circumstances and according to what people wanted to hear, or else, considering human desire, motivation, and nature, the Greeks are a wholly different animal species from the Israelites. And they are not. The “Israelite” is a relatively recent creation repeatedly revised according to circumstances whose identity is defined by the party most widely read in print.