Ancient & modern | 19 September 2009

Is ‘progress’  happiness and relationships or philosophical awareness and self-discipline?

‘What is “progress”?’ asks President Sarkozy, and answers ‘happiness and relationships’. One looks forward to his ‘progressive’ policies. The ancients would have thought him mad.

Greeks and Romans took the view that, far from things getting better, they were getting worse. The ages of gold, silver and bronze were long gone; they now lived in the age of iron, when (to paraphrase the 7th-century bc farmer-poet Hesiod) there would be no cease from toil and misery; men would hold the law in their fists, disrespectful of parents, family and friends, honouring criminals, abiding by no oaths, while Decency and Moral Disapproval disappeared from the earth.

As a result, the main purpose of education was to open up to students the accumulated experience of this golden past, mainly literary and philosophical, so that it brought its influence to bear on the iron present, in particular by providing students with a rich source of material for understanding how humans behaved and of examples, largely moral, to follow and avoid. Absorbing and putting into practice those lessons, especially those relating to the control of emotions and appetites, constituted the key to successful living.

An example: when Cicero fell victim to political enemies and was briefly exiled from Rome (58 bc), his biographer Plutarch (c. ad 100) tells us that he sank into deep depression, unable to rise above his misfortunes, and became ‘more dispirited than one would have expected in a man who had enjoyed such an education’. Pointing out that Cicero had always said he was a philosopher first and foremost and an orator only for career purposes, Plutarch reflects: ‘Public opinion has the strange power of washing reason out of the soul as if it were a dye.