<fontfamily><param>Times</param><bigger><bigger>RE: Barendse on the
inventiveness of Greeks
On the Athenian democracy -- many thanks for the term "thymos". Lacking
classical education, I suspected that there must have been a term for
the urge to excel before the (age-gender-class-tribe) equals in tribal
civic communities of the polis type. I am finishing a book on the
Chechen resistance. The more I study my mountaineer neighbors the more
I realize how profoundly blinding was the shine of Athenian
intellectual outpouring to the successive generations of "Western
civilization" inheritors and interpreters. What Barendse described
should be qualified in two respects:=20
a. The "classical" explosion of innovative artistic, intellectual, and
political forms lasted perhaps less than a century followed by
thousand or more years of reproductive stasis (the birth of
Christianity is a big problem, which demands special consideration, but
I suspect even that invention doesn't change the trajectory until much
later); and
b, Athenian thymos was particular (because there also was Sparta and
Macedonia, and brutish Rome) transposition of the competitve norms
instilled in the combat-age males of such 'mountain' frontier
societies. I mean the marginal (rather than peripheralized)
communities in the secure mountain (or, possibly, island, dense forest
and desert) pockets outside the effective reach of contemporary
world-empires but close enough to experience what Chase-Dunn and Hall
called "information networks" (or a Russian poet "the glow and thunder
of imperial grandeur on the distant horizon"). The marginal (but not
"primordial" least of all "primitive"!) societies, which Andrei
Korotaev proposed to group as "mountanous democracy", can neither
afford nor allow control/defense by the small exclusive retinue of
racketeer aristocrats. Such societies mobilize their entire menfolk and
often women, too, developing the norms of highly individualized yet
collective civic culture. Each member of the community ought to prove
oneself almost constantly by being able to afford his own weaponry
(customarily standardized infantry or cavalry weapons, depending on the
age and terrain), must excel in practicing the weapons, and must
internalize as highest civic norm the glory of self-sacrifice for the
sake of joining the legendary pantheon of community heroes.
In this respect there is little difference between the Chechen
taxi-driver Ahmed who sold his colored TV to buy a Kalashnikov rifle
and, together with a few brothers and neighbors, plunged into the cold
mud outside their village waiting for the Russian tanks, or a group of
Athenian farmers who stood at Plateia in the phalanx of socially equal
warriors waiting for the Persian army of slaves and mercenaries. The
difference is in the fact that Athenians in less dangerous times and in
the brief period when their polity was still in creative flux
transposed the warrior competitiveness on other kinds of competition --
don't forget the sports when you talk about arts. Sports were more
important, Spartans also practiced them but hardly any arts which may
suggest what were the original and the derivative fields of competition
in polis democracy.=20
So, I continue to insist on the importance of warfare in the evolution
of arts and sciences.
Georgi M. Derluguian
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Georgi=EF M. Derluguian
Department of Sociology
Northwestern University
1812 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, Illinois 60208-1330
USA
=46AX (1-847) 491-9907
tel. (1-847) 491-2741 (rabota)