Zimmern: Ancient Greek Political Theory

Page 16

What are the chief and most enduring thoughts which contact with the Greek political thinkers leaves with us? They are surely twofold, the first concerning the material of politics, the second concerning the men and women of to-day who are called to be citizens. Public affairs, we feel, so far from being a tiresome preoccupation or 'a dirty business' are one of the great permanent interests of the race: if they were not too trivial or too debasing for great artists like Thucydides and Plato, we need not fear lest they be too trivial or debasing for ourselves. And if they are not beneath our study, neither should they elude it by being enwrapped in clouds of rhetoric or in the cotton-wool of sentimentality. The Greeks should teach us, once and for all, that the common affairs of mankind are matter to think about as well as to feel about. What distinguishes what we call a 'good' statesman and a 'public-spirited' citizen from their less truly political colleagues is not that they have warmer feelings—there are as many affectionate sons and loving husbands among the tools of politics as among the elect—but the fact that by a resolute use of the related powers of intellect and imagination they have been able to raise their feelings on to a higher plane and to face great issues with a mind attuned, not to the familiar appeal of hearth and home, but to the grander and more difficult music of humanity. The psychologists are teaching us, in the individual life, how we can 'sublimate' our emotions, when life denies them an outlet on the level of our desire, by raising them to a higher and more rarified range of feeling and action. As we can sublimate our love of individuals, so we can sublimate our love of country, not quenching or denying our patriotism, but consciously dividing and apportioning it. We must learn to preserve for our blood and nation that precious part of our gift of service which, just because it is intimate and of the family, cannot be offered directly to humanity; but we must learn also the more difficult lesson of transferring to the international stage, the arena where men, because they are men, labour at common tasks and seek a greatest common measure of co-operation, all these interests and loyalties which safely and rightly belong there. This is the claim and call of the modern Caesar, whether his separate capitals remain, as they are to-day, in London, Paris, Washington, and the other centres of state-sovereignty, or whether mankind can rise, if not in our own day, to the level of a single allegiance. We shall neglect that call at our peril. For, unless we render unto Caesar that which is properly his, unless we discard our unthinking and divisive nationalisms, our noble sentiments will avail us nothing and, in the civil war of the angels, patriotism against patriotism, Mammon and Beelzebub will come into their own. In these days of large-scale organization and mammoth syndicates, it takes a Caesar, a multi-national government, to keep a giant trust at bay. Had the land of Washington and Lincoln been broken up into separate governments instead of drawn together into a single territory of United States, private interests would have taken and defeated each government in detail, and freedom would have vanished from the land—unless indeed, in some conflict of devil with devil, of bank and railroad against oil and lumber, the angels crept once more into their own. The same reasoning applies to the smaller governments in other continents to-day. Local patriotism is but a stripling David in face of the Goliaths of modern commercialism. More and more men will be driven, if not by reason, then by exploitation and suffering, to learn the lesson of what is still mistakenly thought of as imperialism until they find themselves crying out, with the apostle of the Gentiles, who fought his own battle against nationalism, 'I appeal unto Caesar.'

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A. Zimmern
Ancient Greek Political Theory

Learned Freeware

A. Zimmern Ancient Greek Political Theory

Learned Freeware

A. Zimmern
Ancient Greek Political Theory