DID THEY BELIEVE IT?

Raphael's School of Athens, courtesy of wikipedia.

(Note for first time visitors: The theme here lately is the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.)

The American writer H.L. Mencken defined puritanism as "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Puritanism as a turn of mind has been around a lot longer than the dissenters from the Church of England in the 1600s.

It was a major factor in some schools of Greek philosophy, especially that of Socrates and Plato (judging by what we know of the former from the latter). Along with some other killjoys, these people criticized Homer and other poets and purveyors of Greek myth and tragedy for teaching immorality by portraying the gods as behaving badly.

They just didn't get it. As noted previously, several of these gods were at least in part personifications of natural forces: storms, the sea, wild animals, sexual desire, earthquakes, etc. And nature is not known for being moralistic. For that matter, the whole point of many myths is that humans should not try to overreach or act like gods lest they bring about their own destruction.

Socrates liked to torment lovers of myths and poetry by asking them logic-chopping questions and dismissing them if they had trouble answering...as if the whole point of art, song and story was not to speak to the conscious and unconscious and rational and irrational parts of the human psyche. And as if it was all taken literally.

Plato went farther than his teacher. In the Republic, he wanted to ban poets and only teach edifying state-approved stories to its citizens, something that has been the dream of tyrants through the ages.

Goat Rope verdict: there is arguably more enduring and useful wisdom in the Greek tragedies than the whole of Plato's corpus. Get over it, dudes, or drink the hemlock.

For many Greeks, however, there was little room for doubt. To experience awe over storms or fear over breaking oaths and mistreating hosts or guests was to experience Zeus. To experience desire was to experience Aphrodite. To cultivate the land was to honor Demeter and receive her gifts. To drink wine was to experience Dionysus. And so on.

Some of the other gods were derived from and represented human experiences, such as marriage, sickness and healing, exchanges, music and poetry, metal-working etc.

Athena, the main divine character of the Odyssey, is a special case. In that story (and to a lesser extent in the Iliad), she is experienced either openly or, more often, in disguise. Directly or indirectly, she is who/what restrains people from taking rash actions and who/what brings hope, stength and wisdom to people who were tired, forlorn or hopeless. Next time you get a boost when you need it, consider that an Athena moment.

All these examples are derived just from daily life, not counting sacred festivals or holidays. All religions make sense from the inside, and Greek religion was no exception.

ILLUSIONS OF WAR. Here's Krugman on what the war in Georgia might mean.

WAL-MART: EVERYDAY WORKER INTIMIDATION. Labor groups are urging the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether the retail giant broke any laws by telling employees the world would come to an end if they voted the wrong way.

HOME FORECLOSURES are up 55 percent from this time last year.

BAD BALLOON. Meanwhile, inflation is at its highest rate in 17 years.

VERY COOL HOT IDEA. Researchers think they've found a way to turn roads and parking lots into solar energy collectors.

IT'S OFFICIAL. Joggers live longer than people who don't exercise (most of the time).

IS THAT A BIGFOOT IN YOUR FREEZER or are you just happy to be here? Two searchers in Georgia claim to have found a dead one.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MORAL DISENGAGEMENT

St. Anthony tormented by demons, by way of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is understanding human evil, along with links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Most normal people have internalized moral norms about how other people should be treated. However, under certain conditions, these moral restraints can be shut off. The result is what psychologist Albert Bandura called "moral disengagement" and it is often a key feature in acts of violence and cruelty. Here's a link to an essay of his on the subject.

This is the abbreviated Goat Rope version:

Under normal conditions, people have both inhibitive and proactive moral tendencies. Inhibitive means we understand it's not nice to hit little Tommy with a sledge hammer. Proactive means that if little Susy falls into a pit of boiling sludge we should pull her out. That's the good news. The bad news is that people all too often have ways of tossing both out the window.

Here are a two ways that can happen:

*Reconstruing the situation or coming up with moral justifications to treat people badly. Labeling them as the enemy usually works pretty good here. So does ideology. As Voltaire once said,

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

*Using euphemisms. Orwell was all over this one:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

We don't blow away villages; instead, we use surgical strikes. We don't torture, we just use rough interrogation. We don't kill innocent civilians, although collateral damage happens.

There are other ways of kicking off the switch, about which more tomorrow.

THE WIDENING GAP between rich and poor isn't just about money; it's about life expectancy, as the latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute suggests.

OH GOOD. Inflation may be the order of the day. That's all we need during a recession...

HEALTH CARE. A new report from the Commonwealth Fund found that

the United States spends more than twice as much on each person for health care as most other industrialized countries. But it has fallen to last place among those countries in preventing deaths through use of timely and effective medical care...

A TOUGH TEA LEAF TO READ. The US is finally sending a high level official to talk with the Iranian government. With a normal administration, I'd say that was a good sign, but I trust this one about as far as I could throw it. A worst-case scenario would involve the Bush administration prematurely declaring diplomacy to be a failure in order to try to justify yet another war.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE, many Americans oppose a rush to war with Iran, if anybody is listening.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Bobby Brewster pleaded guilty to charges related to the kidnapping and torture of Megan Williams and faces up to 40 years in prison.

MINE SAFETY. Federal investigators are winding up a criminal investigation related to the fire at Massey Energy's Aracoma mine that killed two workers in Jan. 2006.

URGENT EXTINCT FLYING REPTILE UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED