Category Archives: Greek philosophy

friendship and politics

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Last week, one session of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies was devoted to friendship, and the assignments were:

  • Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy, pp. 3-35, pp. 163-82, 290-8
  • Danielle E. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown, v. Board of Education, pp 140-186

When people treat one another as friends, interactions have a special quality. This is not a naive point, for people want to have friendships and will sometimes put the development and maintenance of their friendships above other goals. Aristotle observed as much.*

One might suspect that only some cultures cultivate friendships that are strong enough to make people check their conflicting self-interests. We might find people acting as friends among the ruling classes of classical city-states, but surely not in atomized and materialistic America.

Based in part on the great book by Mansbridge assigned for this session, I would propose instead that whether people act as friends depends on the immediate situation. When interactions are sustained and face-to-face (or possibly online, given sufficient bandwidth); when interests are not too starkly opposed or the stakes are reasonably low; and when groups are tolerably small, modern Americans will put friendship ahead of narrow interests and will work hard and skillfully to preserve friendship.

For instance, I hypothesize that a group like the Summer Institute itself (22 activists and scholars from six countries, gathered for 63 hours of seminar time), if asked to plan a recreational activity for themselves, would be primarily concerned with preserving their friendship. They would, for instance, be reluctant to put options for activities to a vote. If time pressures forced them to vote, they would be highly uncomfortable to see a minority disappointed and would–at a minimum–seek to acknowledge and regret their sacrifice. (Allen’s book is focused on sacrifice and how to repair it). If even one person said that he could not participate in a given activity (for instance, he couldn’t go on boat ride because of sea-sickness), that idea would instantly be retracted. On the other hand, if an individual simply didn’t like a given activity, he would be unlikely to say so because expressions of self-interest would make him look like a bad friend.

We didn’t actually assign the exercise of choosing a recreational activity, because it seems better for members of the Institute to make individual choices about how to spend their weekends. But we talked about how such a conversation would likely go, and the predictions seemed insightful to me.

Two big questions are:

  1. How can we create a degree of friendship in larger and less stable communities than the Summer Institute, or when the stakes are higher? Allen advocates “talking to strangers” in the US, to build sufficient friendship that we can govern ourselves justly. That requires, among other things, changes in the ways our cities are planned and our children assigned to schools. I doubt that Mansbridge would disagree, but her argument is that politics-as-friendship only works under certain objective circumstances, and when it is impractical, it is better to govern through explicitly adversarial politics.
  2. To what extent should friendship be a normative ideal? Philia may be a virtue, as Aristotle said, but it trades off against other virtues, such as freedom and equality. For instance, when trying to be friends, people may hide genuine interests that they should be free to express and act on. And that suppression may not play out equally.

Background on the two assigned books

Mansbridge emerged from the New Left of the 1960s and 70s, where she observed small groups , “appear[ing] everywhere like fragile bubbles” that had certain features in common. Decisions were made in face-to-face meetings, after much discussion, when someone expressed the consensus of the group. There were no formal distinctions among participants or offices. And there was a strong norm against making self-interested statements.

These forms seemed naïve from the perspective of what Mansbridge calls “adversary democracy,” which presumes that interests conflict and there must be winners and losers in decisions. Yet they seemed to work somewhat well and to have certain advantages.

She studied two examples. Helpline is a commune of the New Left: urban, somewhat racially diverse, aimed at social change. The other case is a Vermont Town Meeting in a rural, socially conservative white community. They differ, too, in that Helpline codifies the principles of “unitary democracy,” whereas Selby has official votes and office-holders and exercises powers granted by the state. And yet Mansbridge finds many similar practices.

This leads her to generalizations about where and when “unitary democracy” can work. She also finds convergence between the two examples.

Allen begins with the observation that democracy requires sacrifice. Some lose when others gain, and the losses are not fairly distributed. Her question is how you can build some kind of “friendship” when some must sacrifice?

Her friendly critique of Habermas: He explains why people will speak with reciprocity if they are in a setting where they are aiming for consensus, but not why they would enter such a space in the first place. She writes,“Friendship is not an emotion, but a practice, a set of hard-won, complicated habits that are used to bridge trouble, difficulty, and differences of personality, experience, and aspiration. Friendship is not easy, nor is democracy. Friendship begins in the recognition that friends have a shared life—not a ‘common’ nor an identical life—only one with common events, climates, built-environments, fixations of the imagination, and social structures. Each friend will view all these phenomena differently, but they are not the less shared for that” (pp. xxi-xxii).

*Our next business after this will be to discuss Friendship. For friendship is a virtue, or involves virtue; and also it is one of the most indispensable requirements of life. For no one would choose to live without friends, but possessing all other good things. … Moreover, …  friendship appears to be the bond of the state; and lawgivers seem to set more store by it than they do by justice, for to promote concord, which seems akin to friendship, is their chief aim, while faction, which is enmity, is what they are most anxious to banish. And if men are friends, there is no need of justice between them; whereas merely to be just is not enough—a feeling of friendship also is necessary. Indeed the highest form of justice seems to have an element of friendly feeling in it. And friendship is not only indispensable as a means, it is also noble in itself. We praise those who love their friends, and it is counted a noble thing to have many friends; and some people think that a true friend must be a good man (Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1155a3, 20)

avoiding the labels of East and West

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(Hartford, CT) Between the 320s and the 130s BCE, there were kingdoms in what is now Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan that had monarchs with Greek names who communicated in both Greek and Pali, who honored both Olympian gods and Buddha, and who had diplomatic relationships, marriages, and wars with both Mediterranean and South Asian neighbors. Here, for example, is a coin of king Strato I and his consort Agathokleia. They are named on one side in Greek. On the other side, in the Kharosthi script, it says, “King Strato, Savior and of the Dharma.” The figure is Athena, but other coins from the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms show the Buddhist wheel.

These kingdoms are fascinating because they may have influenced the ideas and art of Mahayana Buddhism, on one side, and Hellenistic philosophy and Judeo-Christian monasticism, on the other. Discussing them, however, can be politically sensitive. Ever since they were rediscovered, scholars–both Indian and European–have identified the Greek aspects of these communities with Europe, with colonialism, and with whiteness, and the Indian aspects of these communities with Asia, with independence, and with darker skin. Thus proponents of the British empire have accentuated the Greeks’ contribution to “Hellenistic India,” whereas anti-colonial scholars have either dismissed it or viewed it critically. This is a helpful overview of the historiography by Rachel Mairs.

I’m no expert, but I have a strong instinct that these categories are false and misleading. I happen to be white (of European extraction) and I studied some Greek. But the Greek cultural aspect of the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms is deeply alien to me. In their militarism, monarchism, paganism, misogyny, and peculiar metaphysics, the ancient Hellenes are far more remote than modern Indians are. If I had to choose between the ethics of a Greek circa 200 BC and a Buddhist of the same time, I would select the latter as both more persuasive and more familiar. The British imperialists who came to dominate South Asia in the late 1700s were not much more similar to ancient Greeks than I am, although they thought they belonged to the “classical tradition.”

The Greeks themselves distinguished between Europe and Asia and named “India” as that part of Asia that lay beyond the Indus River. But those are arbitrary distinctions, as my family and I recalled when we stood on either side of the Europe/Asia border in Turkey several times this summer. Ancient Indians tended to call the Greeks “Yona,” which refers to the Ionian Sea. It lies between Italy and Greece, but if Indians had called the Greeks “Aegeans” instead, that name would have encompassed both Asia and Europe (per the Greeks’ own distinction.)

Race is a hugely influential category today, but ancients did not divide people up that way. When the Greek emperor Seleukos and the Indian emperor Chandragupta sealed a peace treaty by arranging a marriage between their children, no one thought that a white person was marrying a person of color. Some Greeks may have thought that the marriage involved a barbarian, but that meant someone who couldn’t speak Greek. Barbarians were people who said “bar bar bar”: unintelligible foreign words. The important divisions involved language, not skin color.

If you can drop the association of Greeks with Europe and Mauryans with India, what really jumps out is the continuity of culture and history from North India to southern Italy in that era. The philosophical milieu of Siddhartha Gautama resembled that of Socrates. Both men lived in city-states that would be overrun in the late 4th century BCE by monarchical empires. In both cases, a polytheistic background culture allowed reflection on abstract fundamentals that yielded agnostic and atheist ideas. In both circumstances, the essential question was how to achieve equanimity despite the intrinsic cruelty of life. And both regions traded intensively with each other. Once we drop the division between East and West, we can learn to read Sextus Empiricus and Marcus Aurelius as guides to meditation and Nagarjuna as a systematic metaphysician much like Aristotle.

[See also when east and west were one; Jesus was a person of color, and strange lives (last paragraph)].

when east and west were one

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(Washington, DC) I am highly skeptical of distinctions between “eastern” and “western” thought, considering the enormous diversity within both domains, the thousands of years of interaction between the two, and the arbitrariness of any border. (Why, for example, should a body of water less than 2,000 feet across be considered to divide two continents, Europe from Asia?)

But if you are committed to the distinction, it’s worth taking a look at the Milinda Pandha.  This is a dialogue written originally in Sanskrit or Pali before the year 200 CE. It describes a dialogue between a Greek king of India named Milinda (who is probably Menander I) and a Buddhist sage named Nagasena.

Menander I is well attested in Greek and Indian texts and archaeological evidence as a Greek king who converted to, and patronized, Buddhism. Here he is on a silver coin that reads “King Menander the Just” in Greek on one side and “Great King Menander, follower of the Dharma” in the Kharosthi script of South Asia on the other.

Nagasena is not known outside of this dialogue, wherein he is described as the son of a Brahmin who, having quickly exhausted the Vedic scriptures, studied Buddhism under a Greek monk named Dhammarakkhita (“Protected by the Dharma”).

Compared to a Platonic dialogue, the Milinda Pandha includes more fantastical details. The gods, for example, are directly involved. But it paints appealing portraits of the human characters. Menander goes around stumping sages with metaphysical paradoxes until he meets Nagasena, who bests him on a couple of those exchanges. Then the King simply asks questions about Buddhist doctrine and Nagasena answers with illustrative similes. The King replies after each one, “Very good, Nagasena!”

I can read the text only through the 19th century English translation of T. W. Rhys Davids. As far as I can tell, the perspective of the original document is orthodox Theravada Buddhism. Thus I am glimpsing Menander I through layers of interpretation, Asian and English; and it is hard to imagine how this European-born king of ancient India might actually have thought. But he and Nagasena seem to share the same social and cultural horizon, and the differences between them stem only from their respective roles as monarch and sage:

The king said: ‘Reverend Sir, will you discuss with me again?’

‘If your Majesty will discuss as a scholar (pandit), well; but if you will discuss as a king, no.’

‘How is it then that scholars discuss?’

‘When scholars talk a matter over one with another then is there a winding up, an unravelling; one or other is convicted of error, and he then acknowledges his mistake; distinctions are drawn, and contra-distinctions; and yet thereby they are not angered. Thus do scholars, O king, discuss.’

‘And how do kings discuss?’

‘When a king, your Majesty, discusses a matter, and he advances a point, if any one differ from him on that point, he is apt to fine him, saying: “Inflict such and such a punishment upon that fellow!” Thus, your Majesty, do kings discuss.

‘Very well. It is as a scholar, not as a king, that I will discuss. Let your reverence talk unrestrainedly, as you would with a brother, or a novice, or a lay disciple, or even with a servant. Be not afraid!’

the West and the rest

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It seems impossible to distinguish between the West and other civilizations or regions of the globe, because anything we might call “the West” is so internally diverse and vaguely bordered. It’s easy to make up a list of famous Western people who have vanishingly little in common: Saint Teresa of Ávila, Oscar Wilde, Daniel Boone, Lenin, William Penn, Cole Porter, Thomas Edison, Heidegger, Andy Warhol, Donald Trump, Emily Dickinson, and Hernán Cortés.

Or consider two people who are famous for being (in very different ways) anti-Western: the Ayatollah Khomeini and Gandhi. The former studied and admired Plato, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the French Revolution. The latter spoke English, practiced English law, and read the works of Thoreau and his friend Tolstoy. If these two were not “Western,” why should we count all the others listed above?

But here is a suggestion for an actual difference. One thousand years ago, Europe (from Greenland to Sicily) was actually quite homogeneous. It was all agrarian and Catholic, and it had a warrior caste, monks, and peasants. The languages varied but they all contained a large dose of Latin, which was spoken by the educated class. Across the continent, villages were dominated by their churches, manor houses, and castles. That world vanished or was destroyed–unevenly, so that little pieces of it still linger today. It was replaced by technology, urbanization, mass communications, bureaucratic states and businesses, secularization, and markets.

Roughly the same pattern (“modernization”) occurred in most parts of the globe, provoking the same enormous range of reactions that we observe in Europe. But in Europe–and in countries like the United States that view themselves as inheritors of Europe–most of the changes were perceived as internal. Steam engines, bureaucratic files, securities markets, and all the other hallmarks of modernity did not seem to come from some alien civilization but to be choices of the society itself. For example, when the first train puffed through the German countryside, some people might have disliked or even feared it, but they saw it as a German train. In contrast, the same changes came to other places as the direct consequence of conquest, military pressure, purchase, or persuasion by people regarded as complete outsiders.

I don’t know if this is correct. Perhaps Portuguese or Icelandic or Serbian peasants felt the same way as people in China and Africa when the first steam engines and ID cards arrived. But I think not, if only because so many human beings have defined “the other” in terms of skin color and religion. This is not to say that the definition of the West is whiteness or Christianity. My hypothesis is more subtle: when innovations come from a place perceived as fundamentally like one’s own, they feel one way. They feel a different way when they come from people perceived as foreigners. In both cases, a whole range of reactions is possible, from delirious enthusiasm to horror. But “the West” is where modernization is perceived as an internal process.

(In a somewhat similar post, I tried to explore why modernization feels different in Istanbul and Baltimore.)