In praise of ostracism

Many years ago, in the midst of another, dreadful election season, my father suggested to me that it was maybe time to return to the ancient Athenian system of filling most civic posts by lot. "How," I asked, fully agape with youthful astonishment, "would that be better?" "I don't know," sighed he, tired with so many years of having thought these things through. "But it couldn't be any worse."

I have since come to see some wisdom in this. The whole thing feels like a crap shoot already. Which rich such-and-such will have the least damaging effect on us? Which will be beholden to the least destructive powerful interests and persons? I have never voted for anyone in my life, but only against, and I cannot imagine that I am alone in this. At least if there were a real lottery for each post, you'd have a better chance to get someone outside the political caste, and maybe someone who doesn't care about having a lot of money would be less eager to spend everyone else's.

My dear Maine has sort of tried this by instituting term limits for legislators (as the nation and most states have for their executives). It is really fun to see the Great Oaks have to pick up and leave Augusta and a bunch of Sycamore Saplings rush in, fresh with enthusiasm and ideas they're too young to know aren't new. But the thrill fades when you see the staffers and the political parties who really run the show, and despair soon enters when you realize how glad all those Sycamores are to become Oaks and move further up the ladder.

Another important component of Athenian democracy was the ostracism, and this, I think, has more promise for today's situation. The name has ugly connotations because it is usually used in personal or small-group contexts: it conjures a popularity contest in reverse, mob mentality, the tyranny of the majority against the freedom of the individual to be just that. Or, worse yet, the television series "Survivor". But in its original form, it was a healthy corrective to the mob rule that was Athens. Plutarch (Aristides, 7.2) defends it thus:

Now the sentence of ostracism was not a chastisement of base practices, nay, it was speciously called a humbling and docking of oppressive prestige and power; but it was really a merciful exorcism of the spirit of jealous hate, which thus vented its malignant desire to injure, not in some irreparable evil, but in a mere change of residence for ten years.

In a direct democracy, the biggest problem (as exiled Thucydides noted) is that the passions of the people can be too easily swayed. But once that passion has cooled, the mob looks upon its instigator with contempt, which intensifies with the depth of that former passion. Ostracism was a perfect tool for reminding would-be demagogues that their ultimate reward may well be being thrown out of the city for all their hard work.

Here's how it worked: Each year, the Athenians (yeah, yeah, yeah: only land-owning males, yadda yadda, yadda) came together and wrote down on a shard of pottery (ostrakon) a name of the man they most wanted thrown out of the city. There were no primaries, no speeches, no campaigns for this (though there were pre-printed "ballots"), just write down the first name that pops into your head. Now, imagine that, instead of writing down Mickey Mouse or Madonna or Morgan Freeman for president, thus depressing us ever further (except in that last case; I think he'd make an awesome president), idiots like us would write a name down in order to throw him or her out of the country. The basic idea is that anyone who is well known enough to come to mind when writing on a piece of broken pottery has done something wrong, or why else would he be so well known? (Try it at home: Write down the first ten names that come to your mind: are there any of those that you wouldn't want to see exiled?)

Ostraka from the Athenian Agora

Of course, it will be objected that too many good leaders will be sent away this way, either through the fickleness of the masses or the machinations of the opposing parties. Themistocles is probably the most famous example of this: Having saved Athens from the Persians with courage and remarkable intellect, he was later ostracized, and ended up in, of all places, in the kingdom whose attacks he had helped the Greeks ward off. But, as we all know, even the greatest of leaders has failings, and every victory was made possible by at least one dirty trick or lamentable sin. The very pride which attends their successes has also caused more than one politician to over-reach thereafter and veer far too close to tyranny.

Then there is just too much of a good thing. US magazine is full of embarrassing pictures and stories of people they helped make celebrities just years or even months before and are now need to reduce, Zeus-like, for their overweening pride. In Athens, there is the famous, perhaps thus apocryphal, story of Aristides the Just who was asked by an illiterate man to write his (Aristides') name on the potsherd. Asked why he had chosen him, the fellow, not realizing who was asking, replied, "I don't even know the fellow, but I'm tired of everywhere hearing him called 'The Just'." One could just wait for these people to fade into the background, but the problem is all the damage they do in the meantime (extended as it is by the legions of publicists and agents attending each star). Think of how many fewer cases of measles and mumps there might be now had Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey been exiled a decade ago and not been allowed to give such a boost to the anti-vaccination movement. If most two-term US presidents had been exiled instead of re-elected, there probably would have been no Watergate cover-up, no Iran-Contra hearings, no Lewinsky scandal, no Katrina debacle, no Veterans' Administration embarrassment. (Now, please don't get excited: I am agnostic on all these, and I don't care about your politics, so don't bother me with them. My point is that these are all controversies seen in second terms.) In power or out, the longer celebrities are around, the greater the chance that they will do more harm than good.

I am older now, and my father's world-weariness has become my own, as well as his cynicism not just about the absurdity of what is, but about the impossibility of any really changing it (Housman, as always: "The toil of all that be / Helps not the mortal fault: / It rains in to the sea, / But still the sea is salt."), especially not for the better. So, taking refuge in books and history and the sense of self-satisfaction that at least I'm not to blame, I shall just wait until the time that I must hold my nose and choose to vote for what I can only hope is the not-worst. And may Heaven protect us all from the result!

Science!

I am always made miserable when I look at Facebook, and I ought to have learned my lesson about wandering down that dark path, beset, as it is, on all sides with nonsense and fluff and walls of opinion everyone else shares but me. Most of all, I need to learn to keep my mouth shut.

In the space of a few hours, I insulted an old high school friend by linking, in response to a message about how proud he was to have his mouth washed out with soap as a child, to the very funny Monty Python skit about which rich jerk had the hardest childhood; aggrieved my sister-in-law by posting this in response to her complaints about negative campaign advertising; and came close to alienating another life-long friend by suggesting that Ayn Rand and Kurt Vonnegut were aiming at the same thing, to wit: enlightened self-interest, each defending selfishness (the one in terms of money-making, the other in terms of being a sloth) as somehow helping the common good.

Sometimes, I have a muzzle and use it. But the steam needs to escape, and I guess here is as good a place as any for it. A great and distinguished writer whom I was able to add to my list of "friends" because he went to school with my sister, recently gushed about the triumphs of science, in the discoveries of the great Alexandrian tomb in Amphipolis in northern Greece, on the one hand, and in the landing of a spacecraft on a comet:

Today is a magnificent day for science--the field of intellectual enquiry which a large proportion of the population, and its leaders, don't "believe" in--in many forms, looking both deeply back into the past and thrillingly into the future. First, the announcement this morning of the remarkable findings at Amphipolis, where an early Hellenistic tomb (or hero-shrine) clearly belonging to someone of tremendous importance has yielded at last a burial chamber and human remains, which will now be studied using the full array of scientific tools in order to solve the mystery of who was in the grave. Then, a few hours later, the fabulous and breathtaking news of the landing of a probe on a comet 300 million miles (!) from Earth will allow vast new understanding of space. A marvelous day for intellectual enquiry and civilization all round, I'd say.

One of the comments made reference to the rise in anti-intellectualism, which is, of course, nonsense. Has there ever been an era which has issued more diplomas, even measured per capita, than ours? Is there some other period of time with as many teachers? Or with so many "experts" on absolutely every subject, no matter how minute? The difference, it seems to me, is that the anti-intellectuals today have equal access to the tools usually reserved for and monopolized by their opponents.

I guess I really lack the courage to go up against the great master, or even one of his disciples, and perhaps I just want to stop trying to rain on various parades. But here's what I wanted to say against the post:

Is it really impossible to be at once intellectually curious and at least somewhat skeptical of the idea of science as an unalloyed good? Is there any scientific advance of the last two centuries which has not brought about at least as much harm as the good we keep hearing about? Is there a horror of the 20th or 21st century which was not help greatly by what scientists, however good their intentions, brought forth upon this world? Let us set aside the most obvious examples of explosives (at least we have the money for the Nobel prize!) of ever-increasing magnitude and other inventions which were certain to be used as weapons. What of, say, the light bulb, the internal-combustion engine, computers and the internet? What of refrigeration? What of advancements in agriculture and building sciences, making it to cheap to make things to eat and places to sleep for larger and larger populations (living more often and longer because of advances in medicines)?

I am reminded almost daily of Auden's take on all this. The relevant part goes thusly:

This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.

If only I had the heart to blurt this out, too.