blatham wrote:Your clear suggestion is that social agreements made by Americans post-Constitution are unprecedented and of a unique quality which makes adherence to them more morally necessary or legitimate than previous or other cases. I think that romantic, and deeply false. But again, I have to leave right now. I'll add to this later.
Not my "clear suggestion," but rather what you extrapolate from it. What i wrote, and what i'm expressing, is that the ancient world is not place to look for inspiration in social behavior; that there is a paucity of written evidence because life for the privileged and literate had nothing to do with the commons, growing food for them in the fields, the slaves attending their personal needs and whims, the illiteate and impoverished "free men" of the cities. We know about them only by inference--therefore, you don't know if "loving pederasty" (to put a positive gloss on it, which is what you seem to intend) were common custom, only that the literate were not opposed to writing about it, even glorifying it. Did the Attic farmers feel that way? Did the Thassalian slaves feel that way? Did the commonalty grubbing for their daily meal in Athens feel that way? Who were the objects of the "affection"--were they the children of the class which exploited them? Were they more likely the children of farmers and slaves and day laborers? The same depravities of existence which produce crack whores in Columbus, Ohio were undoubtedly operative then, and there could have been the equivalent hanging around the Agora when you and Solon went strolling by. (Your picture assumes you'd show up there as member of a decided minority who had the leisure and the freedom from fear to stroll about the market in daytime.)
My point about Pennsylvania, the U.S. and the U.k. is to demonstrate that we live at the dawn of the age in which social contracts are codified, and the majority of the populace has a real stake in the process and it's outcomes. Before this last few hundred years, the most of the human race endured Hobbe's description of life in a state of nature. Even today, for far to many, and perhaps for most of the world's population there is "continual fear and danger of violent death . . . and . . . life . . . solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." You have the British North America Act (which has been back and forth across the pond many times); the Germans and Japanese have democracy as it was handed to them, and then modified by them; the French are in their fifth Republic, and seem to have finally gotten it right, and in each interregnum, a King or Emperor actively taking from them what they had struggled so hard for--the mastery of their own lives. But the rule of privilege, in societies in which the commanalty might as well not exist--for as much as they have any control over the rules by which they're governed--and even in those with ancient title to knowledge and sophistication: China is a gerontocracy, Singapore the most shameless plutocracy since the Venetian Republic, Iran a theocracy as severe as Calvin and Zwingli's Geneva--and the Taliban were far worse. You are the one who puts a rosey image on the past--if simple odds were applied, you'd likely not be sitting in the shade of the lintel while Isocrates held forth--the odds if you were transported to ancient Athens, and your landing zone a crap shoot, is that you'd be near death after a life of unrelenting labor for the bare means of subsistence, to insure the comfort of an elite class. And if one of them took a fancy to your son or daughter, naught that you could do to gainsay whatever action they wished to take.
I'm not romanticizing about the U.S., or any of the modern "democracies," i'm just pointing out that we only now live in a world in which such a discussion is possible for so many, because equity is finally introduced into the social bargain, which a fair degree of the assurance that it can be made to govern. I consider no ancient society to be preferrable to the present. If nothing else, consider that even were you privileged in those ancient days, you could still expect half of your offspring to die before reaching any kind of maturity; and you would yourself be more likely to die of disease or misadventure than of the degenerative conditions of the elderly as we know them. You and I live in nations in which the social contract has been codified, and has endured. Ancient examples mean nothing now, because the governance is (or ought to be, if it can be wrestled into compliance) played by entirely new rules, in terms of what the standards of the community establish. The most venal and corrupt of our politicians still must face the electorate, which puts a brake on them that no Solon, nor Draco, ever knew. Were Abraham, in our day, to take his boy up on the hill, and put a knife to his throat while speaking to "God" in the clouds, he'd be in a rubber room lickety split. Giles de Rais, Bluebeard, could take a break from fighting along side Joan of Arc, and run home to sodomize, torture and murder a few adolescent boys, before returning to the "Holy War." These days, somebody would eventually cope wise to him, and he'd likely be put out of business.
I cannot accept an appeal the standards of other times and other places.
