In the golden age of the ancient Greek city-state (polis), moral clarity was easy. It was easy for a citizen of one of these many city-states to know the difference between right and wrong. Your action was right if in accordance with the customs (nomoi) of your city, wrong if it violated those customs. Your city was your ultimate moral authority.
Your political community, besides being a moral community, was a religious community, too. Greeks of this golden age didn’t have our idea of the separation of church and state. It’s not that they merged the two; the two had never been distinct. From its beginning, the city had been a political-religious thing. Its civic celebrations were religious, and its religious celebrations were civic.
But the golden age of the city-state was short-lived. During that era, each city was an independent thing, a sovereign entity with no superior government above it. Greece (Hellas, as they called it) was not a body politic. Rather, it was a geographical expression. Hellas was present wherever there was a Greek city-state, whether it be in mainland Greece or Asia Minor or Crete or Cyprus or Italy or Sicily or Gaul or Libya. More importantly, Hellas was a cultural expression. The city-states shared a pan-Hellenic culture. They had a common language (divided into dialects). They believed in and worshiped common gods and goddesses. They had common religious shrines (e.g., Delphi). They played common games (at Olympia and a few other places). They had a common literature, especially Homer. Above all, they had a shared sense that they were Hellenes, superior to those inferior humans called barbarians — in other words, superior to the vast non-Hellenic majority of the human race.
One thing they did not have was a common political structure. Some were democracies, some aristocracies, some monarchies, some oligarchies, and some (dreadful to say) tyrannies.
Early in the 5th century B.C., the city-state began losing prestige. The great invasion of mainland Greece by the Persian King Xerxes (480 B.C.) was repulsed — but not by a single city. Only an alliance of many cities, above all Athens and Sparta, was able to accomplish that. Very soon after this victory, Greek maritime cities, under the leadership of Athens, created the Delian League, a great naval alliance (the NATO of its day), intended to conduct an ongoing struggle against Persia. This alliance was soon transformed into what was in effect an Athenian empire.
Many hitherto sovereign city-states, fearing they would fall victim to Athenian imperialism, asked Sparta to lead them in an anti-Athenian alliance. What followed was the great Peloponnesian War (431-404), which terminated in the defeat of Athens and the breakup of its empire.
For those with eyes to see, it was becoming clear that the future would belong to political entities far larger than city-states.
City-states continued to exist after this and even, to a degree, flourished. The two greatest thinkers of the 4th century, Plato and Aristotle, still had great hopes for the future of the city-state, as can be seen in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics.
The final blows were struck when Alexander’s father, King Philip of Macedon, subjected mainland Greece to his rule, and Alexander, continuing his father’s work, made Greece part of an immense Euro-Asian empire. While this empire soon disintegrated, its residue was not city-states; it was a number of lesser empires. The day of the independent city-state was done.
But if so, what about Greek morality? The city-state had been the foundation of this morality. What foundation would it now have?
Certain philosophical thinkers, so-called Sophists, recognized this problem as early as the mid-5th century. They had a threefold answer. (1) Customary morality is merely a man-made set of preferences; it has no divine foundation. (2) While custom varies from place to place, nature is the same everywhere. (3) We humans should therefore live according to nature. This Sophistic moral teaching was a symptom — and to some degree a cause — of the moral confusion that increasingly reigned in Greece as the city-state declined in moral authority.
By the end of the 4th century and beginning of the 3rd, two great moral philosophies had emerged, candidates for replacing the city-state as the supreme moral authority. One was Epicureanism, a variety of atheism that taught that nature tells us we should spend our lives in the rational pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. The other was Stoicism, which held that Nature is but another name for Reason, and Reason another name for God. Hence, “living according to Nature” is living according to Reason and God.
What the two philosophies had in common, in addition to many practical precepts, was the idea that one’s moral code will be the result of an individual search, not a belief given by society.
It seems to me that we Americans are today in a situation similar to that of the Greeks when the moral authority of the city-state began to decay. Within the memory of some people still living (me, for example), we lived in a society that that had a generic Christian moral consensus, a set of moral beliefs shared by almost all Protestants and Catholics. But that old consensus has been collapsing since about 1950, and it collapses more and more every day. We no longer agree on sexual morality. We no longer agree on abortion. We no longer agree (God help us!) on the question of whether a man can be a woman and vice versa. And some young Americans, we discovered the other day, do not agree that Palestinian Arabs should not murder Jewish babies to advance a political cause.
If the USA is unlikely to become once again an overwhelmingly Christian nation (and this seems to be the case), where will we turn for a new morality? Is it possible that we are now entering a century or so of moral anarchy? I fear the worst.
Image via Picryl.
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