The Strange

timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

The next horizon we come to is a very difficult one to grasp. In the intimate and the familiar we confront what is close at hand: the self, the family, friends, foes whose faces we know. Of course much about these things close to us remains mysterious, dynamic, mobile. But the political brings new challenges, notably the challenge of the stranger. Almost all human action today takes place in arenas where strangers, people we don't know, play important roles, providing opportunities and dangers we don't always see easily.

The best introduction I have come up with so far to the political starts, actually, with the familiar. Imagine that you are hunting with a few adult men from a tribe of San Bushmen. Louis Liebenberg did this, repeatedly, and wrote carefully about his experience. He records that the hunters were expert trackers, well aware of how to read a landscape after years spent playing there and watching and learning from others. And yet, they would inevitably come upon animal tracks hard to interpret. When that happened, they would create different stories imagining the tracks as a series of events: (1) perhaps the animal crouched here, smelled a predator on the ridge over there, and fled this way; (2) on the other hand, maybe the animal crouched here, felt itself dry, and went a different way in search of water, etc. Sometimes, a really hard spoor would offer no decisive information about the animals whose presence it recorded. When this happened, the hunters would perform some ritual--the functional equivalent of flipping a coin in our society, something like tossing knucklebones or drawing straws--that would pick a path for them. The bones say that the animal has gone for water, that it is not fleeing a predator. In this way, hunters avoided the modern paradox of needing to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth via data and reasoning. If you wait for more data from an old spoor, or reason over that spoor too long, your game will escape, even if you end up reading the situation correctly. So the Bushmen make friends with animal luck, explaining away its failures as necessary (the bones can lie as well as tell the truth) to keep everyone invested in the valuable activity of hunting, which often ends in failure, but pays for that failure with notable moments of success. Karl Meuli has written at length about similar practices among the tribes of the northern Eurasian steppes, and about the survival of primitive hunting rituals in certain Greek sacrificial cults.

Why bring this up? Well, hunting is an activity that we engage in for generations to secure goods we absolutely need (food, clothing, shelter). It involves negotiating with the environment, and it requires a certain ability to cooperate among people, even when those people disagree significantly among themselves. The political horizon makes us confront this situation with other humans, including eventually many whom we cannot know in any intimate or familiar way. They are strangers to us, as the prey is often strange to hunters. How do we negotiate with strangers? In simple terms, we make rational appeals to circumstance (reading human spoor as we find it, arguing about the right reading among ourselves), and religious appeals to luck (invoking some mechanism beyond our immediate volition to make decisions we cannot decide by arguing over the spoor). Xenophon's Anabasis shows how ancient Greek folk do politics this way, making careful arguments about the right thing to do (reasoning about the spoor), then putting things to a vote, taking omens, sacrificing (cutting the endless play of reason short before the spoor gets too cold). A good result to these proceedings generally involves minimal loss to life and limb. The only real measure of success, however, is survival. The state that maintains relations among strangers who survive will persist, even when it errs or uses methods that turn our stomachs. The Mayans used to sacrifice the losers of ball games.

The Latin header for this essay comes from a famous episode in Vergil's Aeneid, the death of Laocoon (2.39-233). Like many of us, the Trojans in this myth face a situation they cannot easily read: after ten years of war, the hostile Greeks abandon camp before their walls, leaving nothing behind but a wooden horse and the deserter Sinon. The latter offers a flattering story about how the Greeks have given up, sailing for home and leaving the horse behind as an offering to the gods, whom history has revealed as hostile to their cause. Laocoon, the priest of Neptune, isn't having this:

    Ahead of the crowd, coming first before all
    Laocoon burning runs down from the wall
    "Citizens! Wretches! What madness is this!
    "Have you forgotten
         that Greek gifts are tricks?
    "Can you believe that such enemies flee?
    "Is that all you know of great Ulysses?
    "Maybe Achaeans lie shut up within!
    "Maybe this horse is their spying engine!
    "Some hidden ruin, but no need to seek
    "I fear his gifts as I fear the Greek."

    Behind the words he hurled his spear
    Its huge blade bit the beast's broad rear.
    Trembling then the shaft stuck strong
    The Greek horse's guts gave hollow song.
    If only fates and gods were kind
    If only folk had kept their minds,
    This blow had laid the Greek plot bare
    Troy would stand, old Priam's lair.         
                                 
                my translation of Aeneid 2.40-56

Instead of heeding Laocoon, the people decide to offer sacrifice: normal behavior when a group cannot decide what to do about an uncertain situation that requires response. They watch the omens closely during this ritual, looking for clues the way hunters look for spoor. The gods put on a good show: Minerva sends snakes to interrupt the sacrifice by killing Laocoon and his sons, causing the Trojans to assume that his advice must be wrong. As a result, the wooden horse is brought into the city. Within its guts lurk a company of Greeks, including the hero Ulysses, who emerge by night to open the city to their comrades and sack it. This sets the stage for Aeneas' journey that will lead eventually to the founding of Rome.

You might suppose that Aeneas and his band of survivors would learn from this experience not to trust the gods, not to make sacrifice and take omens. But this is wrong. They continue both practices, as hunters who have failed to find game continue to hunt, employing rituals whose success in the past includes many moments of failure. Politics demands continuity, a commitment to rituals and laws whose integrity transcends their material success or failure in individual circumstances. Thus we continue in our own society to refer difficult matters of criminal and civil justice to juries--not because we know rationally that juries cannot fail, but because we trust the ritual, and through it, one another. Groups of strangers need rituals like this more than they need whatever things the ritual may provide in given moments. They need faith and trust in strangers, faith and trust that can only be bought by cooperating somehow, showing some kind of mutual commitment. Laocoon was committed to his position, that the Greek horse was evil, so he went to the sacrifice querying that position, and there met his doom. Change his name to Socrates, to Jesus, to Joan of Arc: all these and a horde of other political actors made their mark by taking heavy personal risk, to the death, to justify their social position to strangers, the people. And they did so in contexts of ritual, notably rituals involving public trial.

Public trial offers words and deeds. Both matter. Modern civilization occasionally likes to forget that deeds matter, to pretend that if the words are rational or beautiful or passionate enough, the action will take care of itself. This is naive, and wrong, even when it appears correct (e.g. when we decide not to admit the Greek horse into Troy, and the lair of Priam remains intact another generation). Deeds always matter. And the death penalty is always applicable. Even if the law forbids it, because we make a rational decision that it is inhumane, it lurks hidden in the human heart, like Ulysses in the wooden horse. Give that ember air, let the wooden horse into your city, and it will blaze forth.

But the stranger does not bring only death. He is also a source of marvelous wealth, exotic plants and animals and precious minerals. He can provide powerful medicine, beautiful wives and husbands, culture and opportunity for people with no local outlet. He is thus a source of life, too, and we find rituals throughout civilization that recognize him as sacred. When the young men of Sodom approach the stranger aggressively at Lot's house, the Lord does not look kindly on them. Like other customs and laws mitigating the danger of dealing with strangers, the death penalty protects as well as it destroys. Oftentimes our customs and laws work so well that we fail to notice what really happens as we negotiate life and death with politics. Here is a remarkably short, blunt summary by Han Shan:

    Heaven is boundlessly high
    Earth is endlessly deep
    between are living things
    dependent on these powers
    butting heads over food and clothes
    making plans to eat each other
    still unclear about cause and effect
    blind men asking the color of milk
                                                                               
        poem 92, translated by Red Pine         

Political factions are not rational, though they can be rationalized. They are not controlled, though they can submit to control (cf. the Roman summation of politics given by Vergil in Aeneid 6.853: parcere subiectis et debellare superbos, to spare the submissive and war down the proud). Plato famously compares them to a hydra in the Republic, a many-headed beast liable to eat its handlers, susceptible always to ruinous appetites and passions. Han Shan sums it up well: whether the people want trade or war in the moment, their plan is ultimately to eat you, and themselves, and they will do this without achieving a clear or universal understanding of it. Knowing fear and hunger in yourself, you can see it in them, in yourself when you become political, but you cannot teach the faction or the party or the people to be humble or wise as you would teach yourself. There is a limit here, a boundary over which only gods can cross. Not priests or rulers: they merely mark the passage of the gods, and when they attempt to explain what they are really doing, who the gods really are and what divine omens must mean, they sound like blind men asking the color of milk.

ante diem XIV Kalendas Apriles, anno Domini MMXX                                           --JGM.