The Return of the Irrational

I'm not quite the classics geek I was before my girls were born. The project of teaching myself Attic greek, for example, died a peaceful death right around the time they started walking. My classics reading group, however, has persevered for eight years. While we rarely talk about classics anymore, some of us will still read the book and exchange some perfunctory geek-chat between the gulps of wine as an entré to discussion of something else.

We're rereading Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. a stately volume first published in 1903 by an unconventional woman scholar who didn't accept that the classics field was for men only. Harrison, through brilliant analysis of vase paintings and other art, penetrating study of the textual evidence, and a bunch of philological acrobatics that I pretty much skim through, establishes that much of what we think of as classical Greek religion — Zeus and shit — was an overlay on a far older and darker set of rituals that had to do with making bad things go away.

Classical Athens, that paragon of bright skies, wine dark seas, and cool reason, seethed with rituals to keep away ghosts, placate evil spirits, bring fertility, and all that stuff that people do in one way or another pretty much everywhere. A certain amount of this, it seems, is hardwired, and every time we deny it for too long, it comes surging back in distorted form. This has been called the return of the irrational.

The evidence, she says, strongly suggests that human sacrifice was still alive and well in the fifth century. This is the Athens of Pericles, Socrates and Euripides, thought by some to be the high point of civilization. Human sacrifice.

But here's the interesting part. They weren't just any humans. Once a year, they would take two of their most despised — people fed by the state, or maybe drunks or criminals — dress them up in ceremonial garb, and parade them around while everyone beat them with special branches. Then they'd burn them and have the wind scatter their ashes over the sea, after which everyone felt much better.

This wasn't a sacrifice of propitiation. It wasn't even about keeping evil away. It was about purgation. They were scapegoats. Through ritual humiliation, beating, and sacrifice, what was undesirable in the community was symbolically driven out.

And that got me to thinking about just how civilized we are, really. Take the death penalty, for example, which study after study says has no preventative effect. The revival of the death penalty has come with that of fundamentalist religion. It doesn't accomplish much, but it makes some people feel real good.

Maybe there's also something of the irrational in the burgeoning prison industry, where 1 in 42 Americans lives under the supervision of the criminal justice system. Maybe this is a sort of a magic amulet for the rest of us. We don't feel especially safe, but we make our sacrifices, and the evil goes away, sort of. But it always comes back to bite us in the ass.

On Sophistication

I was talking to a friend last week about the 1988 Neutralizing Homelessness article by Peter Marcuse, which, to me, is the Rosetta Stone for understanding federal policy on homelessness. I said the Ten Year Plan approach is an incredibly sophisticated means of defining the issue and controlling the way it gets discussed.

Most of us think of sophistication as an uptown Cole Porter kind of thing, but that's only when the word is used as a noun. When employed as a verb, as in to sophisticate, things get more interesting.

My friend said it came from the 16th century, and describes a process where hops and barley were replaced in beer with inferior ingredients, and that it means, basically, to weaken or water down. I said that it must come from the Greek, sophistes. These were the guys that Socrates liked to debate, and of which Aristophanes made fun, who were agile in rhetoric and able to make the true false and the false true. So, in this sense, I guessed, to sophisticate would be to cloud something in complication.

It turns out that my friend's beer definition comes from Nathanial Knott's Advice of a Seaman, published in 1634. "The brewers have gotten the art to sophisticate beer with broom instead of hops, and ashes instead of malt, and (to make it look the more lively) to pickle it with salt water, so that whilst it is new, it shall seemingly be worthy of praise, but in one month wax worse than stinking water." This was a tongue in cheek description of the terrible beer that was the general fare on long sea voyages.

So one of the meanings of the word is to alter and make impure, as with the intention to deceive, as in adulterate. It also means to cause to become less simple or straightforward; to, once again, mislead or deceive. The archaic meaning, says Merriam-Webster, is to corrupt, through sophistry.

So to say that something, like federal policy on homelessness for example, is sophisticated, isn't always to pay a compliment.

In Defense of Baldness

We have seen the moment of our greatness flicker. We have heard the eternal coatman snicker. Our head (grown slightly bald) has grown older and fatter.

It is a disturbing matter.

We try not to dwell upon the the fleshly expanse at the center of our head. So long as we need two mirrors to see it, we enjoy the illusion of youth. Our friends know better than to bring it up. Photographic evidence is immediately destroyed.

We fear the day that our thinning crown meets our high forehead and turns us into one of those pathetic old men who comb their three remaining hairs over the shiney area above their eyebrows.

Yet, this can also be seen as one more instance in which advanced age allows one to better appreciate the richness of classical literature.

In our youth, for example, we were always puzzled by 2 Kings 2:23-25, which, as most of you will no doubt remember, is a pleasant little story about the Prophet Elisha.

The elder Elisha was on his way from Jericho to Bethel when a number of small boys came out of the city and jeered “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!”

Elisha cursed them in the name of the Lord, and two she bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of them.

We used to think this evidence of a cruel, vindictive, and arbitrary God. Now, in our great maturity, we see that the little shits had it coming.

Socrates, with his bald head and pot belly, has rescued our self respect. He was ugly as a satyr, but through pure force of personality and intellect managed to be the Patrick Stewart of the ancient world. Alcibiades, the heart throb of Athens, the biggest playboy of the 5th Century BC, wanted to jump his bones so bad he could barely stand it.

In Plato’s Symposium, the beautiful, brilliant, desirable Alcibiades details his labors to seduce the old man. He corners him at the gymnasium, gets him drunk over dinner and crawls under a toga with him afterwards; he openly professes his love: the poor man tries everything.

But Socrates was too good for him. His brilliant, unattainable, bald head shown forth as a beacon of virtue in the night. Bald was beautiful baby.

As if further evidence of the virtues of baldness were necessary, we also have the testimony of Herodotus, who lived about a generation after the Great Socrates. The far-ranging historian tells of the Argippaei, a people of the north, who lived in the foothills of the Urals in what is now once again known as Russia.

These mysterious people lived under trees and evidently thrived upon cherries, which were strained through cloth and then concentrated into cakes.

Herodotus, who leaves the only extant record of this amazing race, says the Argippaei needed no weapons, for they were “accounted sacred” and no one would attack them. They were in fact sought by neighbors for their wisdom in settling disputes.

These tree-sitting, cherry-eating, dispute-resolving holy people were said to be snub nosed and to have large beards. They were also completely bald, from birth, men and women alike.

Kojak was never this cool. One can almost see the Argippaei, sucking on their cherry cakes, saying, “Who loves ya baby?”

“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.”

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.”

Apologies to T.S. Eliot, upon whose poetry we leech.