Progress, Regress, Digress

For some time now, since the primaries began or even before, Democrats have been dreaming of enough luck in the post-Bush era to capture veto-proof majorities in Congress, such as those elusive 60 Senate votes, as well as maintain the half-century of liberal (increasingly toe-) hold on the Supreme Court. Democrats want near-total power, and they want it back. Now this seems ever more likely and frightening for more and more panicking yet realistic Republicans. But just how impressive would such a “devastating” Democratic victory be? Not even all that impressive. This last decade or so has been slightly bizarre and abberrant. The general rule appears to be near-domination by the more progressive of the two major parties, whatever they happen to be called at any given time, punctuated with certain, and by that I mean guaranteed, setbacks. But the so-called liberal cause marches on. Can we extrapolate from this to speak of human progress in general? Well, why not?

Let’s think back to our first encounter with classical authors, the so-called ancients. In every case, I bet, one of the primary, almost inevitable reactions was surprise at the levels of expression, reason, moral processing and overall elegance on display—as compared to our expectations. “Surprise” is by definition an unexpected turn. But what did we expect? Something less? Why would we have such low expectations of the past? Maybe that’s only for psychologists to help us find out. But in fact, we generally do have low expectations of the past, and I guess it’s probably because we are so fully aware of the reality of progress.

It’s easy to create a mythologized past, as we well know. One common trap we fall into is imagining a past more progressed than it actually was. An even more dubious belief, of course, is one of an idealized past that's even more progressed than the present—thus actually claiming that we have inexorably regressed, presumably from some distant, angelic form. But probably we more frequenty mythologize the past in the other direction, in a way that makes it out to be worse than it really was. This is because for the most part, we are indeed realists, and reality can breed a lot of pessimism. Encountered with evidence of human communication from one hundred or more generations ago, this pessimistic myth proceeds to fall as well, and is replaced or re-shaped by the news-blast. A blast of the unexpected discovery of all that we truly share with Plato, with Sun Tzu.

We are so struck by our common humanity! But what kind of barbarism might we have come to expect, after all? Hmm. There are countless examples. Presently, the abuse of animals, and of each other. Name-calling, and war. We have good reasons to expect barbarism: it is real. What’s harder to nail down is its form, and extent. So we have to observe fearlessly.

A kind of boxing in ancient Rome consisted of two slave-gladiators sitting face to face, chained down except for their arms, their fists reinforced with something like brass knuckles, except less childish and innocent than brass knuckles. They boxed until one of them died.

St. Catherine’s College, part of the University of Cambridge, displays the breaking-wheel on its shield, above its alma mater. The wheel was a punishment that went out of style about three hundred years ago, although its principle elements haven’t exactly been abandoned—only as state-sanctioned punishment. But being broken in the wheel surely demanded an inhuman, evil, incorrigible criminal candidate—it was reserved for the worst of the worst of the worst, wasn’t it? Yes it was, yes sir it was, as is the case with all forms of highly serious punishment. It involved being strapped to a man-sized wheel, with the limbs arranged to lie across the spokes. What do I mean? As opposed to along the length of the spokes? Yes, as opposed to along the length. We're talking "across the spokes." The joints of the limbs, however, such as the wrists, the knees, the elbows, the ankle, were arranged to lie on top of spokes. With solid wood behind them, instead of air. This is where the blows would NOT fall. The executioner took a giant hammer right to the middle of the long bones that define the limbs, and broke them cleanly through the spaces between the spokes. In France, the death-blow to the chest was called the “coups de grace” on the rare occasions that such grace was granted. But by that point, I’m guessing, more and more people were beginning to have the uncomfortable feeling that maybe, just maybe, wheeling is no longer an appealing way of dealing with the feeling that this guy here is just begging for a wheeling, and so maybe it should be discarded. Because the whole point was to break limbs, without causing a massive loss of blood and also leaving the organs fully intact. Thus, after being properly broken in the wheel, it took many hours and even days to die from shock, from dehydration. So this entire “coups de grace” trend was totally missing the point and starting to ruin the whole thing, basically.

These days, when it comes to the least worthy of all Americans, we just inject them with poison or gas. And we’re not adhering to the old-school when it comes to boxing, either. We have come a long way, for sure.

We need not (necessarily) imagine humanity as a parasitic virus, nor ourselves (necessarily) in parallel. We will not (necessarily) self-destruct in a conflagration wrought by idiots, nor rape the earth, nor bring about some other apocalypse. Let’s not forget the reality of progress. Now, I’ll digress.

The famously philosophical and democratic Athenian citizenry consisted of 30,000, ruling over a city of 250,000, which in turn ruled a vast country-side. Yes, a vast country-side. And ancient Greeks sold each other into slavery, and yes, they invented the breaking-wheel as a form of torturous punishment, one which lasted for over 2,000 years, continuously. But wait, wait, let me try again to digress:

Yes, I said a vast country-side. The ancient city-state is such a strangely idealized entity! Such a thing never existed in the past, and no, it does not really exist today, I don’t care what Singapore says. Cities by definition are not self-sufficient, and so they don’t merit such weird glorification.

The village is a self-sufficient socio-political unit, being the settled agricultural domain of the tribe. The state is also a self-sufficient unit. But the city-state is mere fiction, one that means to mythologize the elites who built the state. The city is part of the post-communal, post-tribal political development, the final embodiment of a very significant re-organization of society under the new rules of strict class-hierarchy, the kind which can never be possible in tribal societies: too much intimacy there. The city is also a direct product of the wealth-surplus resulting from hierarchy. It is, in essence and always, the monumental capital of surrounding lands, be they a whole empire, or just enough to provide the requisite food.

To this day it remains what it always was, the truest home of concentrated leadership preserving the social order. It is fundamentally anti-agricultural in attitude except when it comes to consumption. By the time the first cities were actually built, I imagine that agriculture was already convincingly determined to be hard and dirty labor best left to people who really should just be solidified into a slave-caste and have it the fuck over with. Every political unit that has ever been called a city-state is nothing less than a perfectly normal state, with a capital. The word is a pure oxymoron. The idea is a lie.

A city is most definitely NOT a very large village.

Which notion sounds more likely—a village-city, or a village-state? Is a village-city anything more than blurred nonsense? A village-state, on the other hand, is what you might call the condition that immediately preceeds the urgent building of a capital. And unlike the raising of a barn, this one will not be a cooperative effort.

And that is something too: Progress! Capitalized, and exclamation pointed right at you.