(The next subsection starting with this entry, is devoted to the great utopians of history. However, before we embark on the present journey, let us ask ourselves a very important question. Considering that every utopia [at least those of them that are forward-looking] represents its author’s hope for a better future world, what can be called the most recent utopia of our time? Humanity needs “utopias,” to have an idea of what kind of world we would wish our grandchildren to inherit. Well, to be sure, there have been a few books, published in the last fifty years, which can be found on the same library shelf as the more traditional utopias, yet it does not make them comparable to the “oldies.” I suspect that our modern world doesn’t have the vaguest idea of what “a better world” might look like. As for our Christendom, it appears preoccupied with personal, rather than wholesale salvation, and probably takes the inevitability of Armageddon too literally to care too much about a better secular future anyway. As for the lucky saved ones, pretty soon they will all be dancing “in the streets that are golden,” and they have no need for utopias to know that for a fact… Summarizing all this in one sentence, the state of modern utopia is bleak, and the future of the world with it.)
It could be easily assumed that the old fascist Plato was the first political wishful thinker in history, with his totalitarian Politeia. After all, Thomas More’s Utopia was explicitly written as a response to, and under the influence of Plato. We are not going to dispute the fact that Plato’s work is the earliest serious philosophical work in the genre, and one of the most important such works in history. But his entry comes only as number two in this series, as there had been some earlier examples of toying with this genre, in pre-Socratic Greece, and elsewhere, which require our attention, and this entry number one will be dealing with these.
One could surmise from this that just about any idyllic environment, such as the Biblical Garden of Eden or Pan’s Arcadia of Greek mythology, might pass off as an ancient version of Utopia. But this is not so. In our understanding and usage of the term, Utopia is an ideal social organization. The Garden of Eden was not an imagined country, but an idyllic abode of Adam and Eve, before human civilization exceeded the number of two. By the same token, there wasn’t any social organization in mythical Arcadia, where carefree flocks of adorably ugly satyrs and dainty nymphs reveled happily, in total ignorance of what it takes to make a world, or at least a responsible Hobbesian Commonwealth.
By far the most significant effort to paint a social utopia (as opposed to some asocial paradise) was made by the great Greek poet Hesiod in his work Erga kai Hemerai/Opera et Dies/Works and Days, primarily in the part of it, which is known as the Myth of the Five Ages.
The first original Age was the Golden Age. Unlike Arcadia, it was populated by humans, and unlike Eden, it contained a multitude of humans not limited to just one happy couple. Chronologically, Hesiod ascribes it to the reign of Kronos, that is, the time before Zeus and his siblings came to rule the world. During that blessed age, “men lived among the gods and freely mingled with them.” They did not have to work, as the earth was generously producing food to feed them all. They lived to an old age, remaining physically young, and they passed away peacefully and painlessly, their spirits lingering on as guardians of the successive generations.
The Golden Age ended with the arrival of Zeus on the scene, and the end of Kronos. During the Silver Age, humans lived for the first hundred years of their lives as ignorant infants, but having grown up, their lives as adults were short and marred with strife. During the Silver Age, “men refused to worship the gods” and were destroyed by an angry Zeus for their transgression.
During the next Bronze Age men were hard with nothing but war in their hearts and on their minds. All their arms and tools, and even the homes they lived in, were made of bronze.
The fourth Age was the Heroic Age. Unlike the other four ages characterized by a gradual degeneration, this age stands out as the time of heroes, celebrated in Greek mythology as the Argonauts, the Seven who fought against Thebes, heroes of the Trojan War, etc.
The last Iron Age is described by Hesiod as his contemporary age. Human life is mired in hard toil and deep misery. Children dishonor their parents, brother fights brother, and the rules of hospitality toward strangers do not apply. Might makes right, and bad men use lies to be thought good. At the height of this age, humans no longer feel shame or indignation at wrongdoing; very soon babies will start being born with gray hair and “the gods will have completely forsaken humanity” so that “there will be no help against evil.”
Paying tribute to Hesiod’s great opus, written around 700 BC, we must realize that there is a big difference between this work and Plato’s Politeia, written more than three centuries later. Hesiod does not provide any explanation of how come the humans of the Golden Age had been so good, as though their being good had no connection to their personal and/or collective merits, but was the hand of destiny (most likely associated with the reign of Kronos, as opposed to Zeus, and having nothing to do with anything else). Intriguingly, the progression of the ages in Hesiod, as if from better to worse (with the already noted exception of the Age of Heroes), represents wishful thinking in reverse, and thus possesses no edifying virtue, being a nostalgia for an irretrievable past and providing the reader with no clue as to how to better the world, except for instilling doom and gloom in him, as there is no sense in being good and righteous, because this is not going to bring Zeus down and Kronos back, bringing in the good old Golden Age back with him.
In my judgment, Hesiod had almost succeeded in turning his backward gaze toward the future, which would have qualified his work as the first true utopia, yet he had failed to make the necessary step of extrapolating from his Kronos mythology toward Kronos nostalgia, treating the Kronos phenomenon as a principle, rather than as merely a thing of the mythological past. Hesiod could have become the first “totalitarian,” wrestling this title from Plato, but he had missed his chance…
Plato, on the other hand, did not miss his. He was a professing totalitarian, and his thinking radically differs from Hesiod’s in this respect. It is forward looking, and our next entry in this series elucidates this point…
It could be easily assumed that the old fascist Plato was the first political wishful thinker in history, with his totalitarian Politeia. After all, Thomas More’s Utopia was explicitly written as a response to, and under the influence of Plato. We are not going to dispute the fact that Plato’s work is the earliest serious philosophical work in the genre, and one of the most important such works in history. But his entry comes only as number two in this series, as there had been some earlier examples of toying with this genre, in pre-Socratic Greece, and elsewhere, which require our attention, and this entry number one will be dealing with these.
One could surmise from this that just about any idyllic environment, such as the Biblical Garden of Eden or Pan’s Arcadia of Greek mythology, might pass off as an ancient version of Utopia. But this is not so. In our understanding and usage of the term, Utopia is an ideal social organization. The Garden of Eden was not an imagined country, but an idyllic abode of Adam and Eve, before human civilization exceeded the number of two. By the same token, there wasn’t any social organization in mythical Arcadia, where carefree flocks of adorably ugly satyrs and dainty nymphs reveled happily, in total ignorance of what it takes to make a world, or at least a responsible Hobbesian Commonwealth.
By far the most significant effort to paint a social utopia (as opposed to some asocial paradise) was made by the great Greek poet Hesiod in his work Erga kai Hemerai/Opera et Dies/Works and Days, primarily in the part of it, which is known as the Myth of the Five Ages.
The first original Age was the Golden Age. Unlike Arcadia, it was populated by humans, and unlike Eden, it contained a multitude of humans not limited to just one happy couple. Chronologically, Hesiod ascribes it to the reign of Kronos, that is, the time before Zeus and his siblings came to rule the world. During that blessed age, “men lived among the gods and freely mingled with them.” They did not have to work, as the earth was generously producing food to feed them all. They lived to an old age, remaining physically young, and they passed away peacefully and painlessly, their spirits lingering on as guardians of the successive generations.
The Golden Age ended with the arrival of Zeus on the scene, and the end of Kronos. During the Silver Age, humans lived for the first hundred years of their lives as ignorant infants, but having grown up, their lives as adults were short and marred with strife. During the Silver Age, “men refused to worship the gods” and were destroyed by an angry Zeus for their transgression.
During the next Bronze Age men were hard with nothing but war in their hearts and on their minds. All their arms and tools, and even the homes they lived in, were made of bronze.
The fourth Age was the Heroic Age. Unlike the other four ages characterized by a gradual degeneration, this age stands out as the time of heroes, celebrated in Greek mythology as the Argonauts, the Seven who fought against Thebes, heroes of the Trojan War, etc.
The last Iron Age is described by Hesiod as his contemporary age. Human life is mired in hard toil and deep misery. Children dishonor their parents, brother fights brother, and the rules of hospitality toward strangers do not apply. Might makes right, and bad men use lies to be thought good. At the height of this age, humans no longer feel shame or indignation at wrongdoing; very soon babies will start being born with gray hair and “the gods will have completely forsaken humanity” so that “there will be no help against evil.”
Paying tribute to Hesiod’s great opus, written around 700 BC, we must realize that there is a big difference between this work and Plato’s Politeia, written more than three centuries later. Hesiod does not provide any explanation of how come the humans of the Golden Age had been so good, as though their being good had no connection to their personal and/or collective merits, but was the hand of destiny (most likely associated with the reign of Kronos, as opposed to Zeus, and having nothing to do with anything else). Intriguingly, the progression of the ages in Hesiod, as if from better to worse (with the already noted exception of the Age of Heroes), represents wishful thinking in reverse, and thus possesses no edifying virtue, being a nostalgia for an irretrievable past and providing the reader with no clue as to how to better the world, except for instilling doom and gloom in him, as there is no sense in being good and righteous, because this is not going to bring Zeus down and Kronos back, bringing in the good old Golden Age back with him.
In my judgment, Hesiod had almost succeeded in turning his backward gaze toward the future, which would have qualified his work as the first true utopia, yet he had failed to make the necessary step of extrapolating from his Kronos mythology toward Kronos nostalgia, treating the Kronos phenomenon as a principle, rather than as merely a thing of the mythological past. Hesiod could have become the first “totalitarian,” wrestling this title from Plato, but he had missed his chance…
Plato, on the other hand, did not miss his. He was a professing totalitarian, and his thinking radically differs from Hesiod’s in this respect. It is forward looking, and our next entry in this series elucidates this point…
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