Sybarites, Scholars, and the Buffoon Who Got Himself Taken Seriously

If you behave like the youths of today,
Your chest will be narrow, your skin will be grey,
Your shoulders will shrink, and your tongues will extend,
And your public harangues never come to an end:
At last you’ll believe that black is white,
That right is wrong, and wrong is right.

Aristophanes, The Clouds (423 B.C.)

Some of you have no doubt read Sir John Glubb’s trenchant and thought-provoking pamphlet, The Fate of Empires.  If you haven’t, a free copy can be downloaded from several sites.  Glubb published this pamphlet in the 1970s, when the unfolding cultural revolution seems to have crystalized his lifetime of historical research into an exceedingly clear and alarming understanding of the deep meaning of contemporary events.  The world, or at least his world, had come to its end.

Glubb saw that every empire does, indeed, have a fate, and that this fate is to burst out from an unlikely quarter, to rise to a high-noon of glory, and finally to decay and await its coup de grâce.  Moreover, he discovered that, through all changes of technology and philosophy, every empire has taken about 250 years to traverse this arc from birth to death.

Glubb’s thesis is, of course, similar to the cyclical theories of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee.  As Spengler wrote:

“The great Cultures accomplish their majestic wave-cycles.  They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, flatten again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste” (Decline of the West, vol. 1 [1918]).

Spengler’s worldview was essentially Hegalian, so he saw the mechanism driving this majestic wave cycle as the working out of an idea.  Hegel himself described the “swelling” phase this way:

 “The Spirit of a people . . . erects itself into an objective world” (Philosophy of History [1822-1830]).

But when this idea has reached its limit, and has been either fully realized or insuperably arrested in its realization, the culture dies.  Thus Spengler says:

“A culture  . . . . dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities . . .” (Decline of the West, vol. 1 [1918]).

Death is not synonymous with disappearance, however, only with the end of life.  The fully realized culture has nowhere to go.  It may linger for a spell, like an impressive old man who is really a dotard, but only until some hearty barbarians show up to deliver the coup de grâce.

“The aim once attained—the idea . . . fulfilled and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens . . . and it becomes Civilization” (The Decline of the West, vol. 1 [1918])

Glubb’s model is compatible with Spengler’s, but he follows the classical authors who explained the rise and fall of empires as a consequence of character.  To build an empire takes men of a special character: men who are bold and brave, and who believe they have a right to rule.  But once an empire is built, it remorselessly destroys this character.  As Herodotus put it, it takes hard men to make an empire, but the empire makes the sons of these hard men soft.

Lucan described imperial Rome in just these terms:

 

“Their fathers’ frugal tables stand abhorr’d,
And Asia now and Africa are explor’d
For high-priced dainties, and the citron board.
In silken robes the minion men appear,
Which maids and youthful brides should blush to wear.
That Age by honest poverty adorn’d,
Which brought the manly Roman forth, is scorn’d;
Whereever ought pernicious does abound,
For luxury all lands are ransacked round,
And dear-bought debts the sinking state confound
. . . .
Hence debt unthrifty, careless to repay,
And usury still watching for its day:
Hence perjuries in ev’ry wrangling court
And war, the needy bankrupt’s last resort

(Pharsalia, book 1 [A.D. 61-65]).

 

The manly Roman gives way to minion men in silken robes—“pajama boys,” if you like; and the fabulous parties of these epicene gourmands are increasingly paid for by war and debt.

It’s a crazy idea, I know; but people really used to worry about this sort of thing.  Here’s Edward Gibbon:

“A secret poison had been introduced by long peace and lethargic inactivity into the very bowels of the empire.  Military spirit no longer existed. . . and the commanding genius of Rome forsook the polluted habitations of a luxurious and effeminate people.  The improvement of arts, whilst it refined, had gradually enervated the country; the splendor of the cities served only to allure the impending rapacity of a hearty race of barbarians.” (History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1789]).

Here’s Francis Bacon:

“When warlike states grow soft and effeminate, they may be sure of a war; for commonly such states grow rich in the time of their degenerating, and so the prey inviteth, and their decay in valor encourageth a war”  (Francis Bacon, “Of Viscissitude of Things,” [1625]).

Glubb agrees that an empire falls because there is a fatal change in the character of its people.  The military spirit of the founders is extinguished by the riches that reward their conquests, and the race of hearty empire builders inevitably degenerates into “a luxurious and effeminate people.”  However impressive the façade of their civilization may appear, in it must become a dotard awaiting its coup de grâce.

As Glubb describes it, an empire is born with the appearance of a conquering people:

“Again and again in history we find a small nation, treated as insignificant by its contemporaries, suddenly emerging from its homeland and overrunning large areas of the world . . . . These sudden outbursts are usually characterized by an extraordinary display of energy and courage” The Fate of Empires [1976]).

But the trophies of their conquest are wealth and dominions.

“The conquests resulted in the acquisition of vast territories under one government, thereby automatically giving rise to commercial prosperity” (The Fate of Empires [1976]).

And thus it is that the sons of the conquerors turn to commerce, and the sons of the merchants turn to play.

“There does not appear to be any doubt that money is the agent which causes the decline of this strong, brave and self-confident people” (The Fate of Empires [1976]).

But not all of these playboys are sybarites: some are scholars.

“The merchant princes of the Age of Commerce seek fame and praise, not only by endowing works of art or patronizing music and literature. They also found and endow colleges and universities. It is remarkable with what regularity this phase follows on that of wealth, in empire after empire, divided by many centuries . . . . Every period of decline is characterized by this expansion of intellectual activity” (The Fate of Empires [1976]).

 

II

Glubb’s discussion of intellectualism is, to my mind, the most stimulating part of his Fate of Empires, and the part most germane to anyone seeking to discern our fate.  Much of what he calls intellectualism is simply the scramble for intellectual status symbols by individuals who could not dream of academic laurels under more austere conditions.  I have myself participated in this scramble in these fat days at the end of America, and I routinely talk to young people who hanker after a Ph.D. in much the same way as they hanker after a Mercedes Benz.  Like any luxury, learning can be a very pleasant thing to possess—I have gotten much pleasure out of mine, such as it is.  But this does not exempt the luxury of learning from the general rule that luxury is the kiss of death.

Widespread learning is both a symptom and a cause of decadence.  Glubb points to two pernicious effects.  The first is that it spreads discord in the body politic.  The second is that it distorts, and ultimately destroys, the understanding of human character and the human condition.

With respect to discord, Glubb observes that increasing education causes people to become increasingly dialectical and disputatious.  An educated man demands to hear the reasons he should believe or do anything, and thus becomes all but incapable of believing anything on authority, or of doing anything under command.  This same man will be emboldened to publish his own reasons why other people should believe what he believes, or should do what he wishes to see done.  And as his reasons seldom have the persuasive power he believes they ought to have, the educated man grows frustrated and feels the need to raise his voice.

A dialectical society is consequently a disputatious society.

This is why Glubb follows Nietzsche and considers “dialectic a symptom of decadence.”

“All the world over, where authority still belongs to good usage, where one does not ‘demonstrate’ but commands, the dialectician is a sort of buffoon; he is laughed at, he is not taken seriously . . . . We choose dialectics only when we have no other means . . . . We know it does not carry much conviction.  Nothing is easier wiped away than the effect of a dialectician:  that is proved by the experience of every assembly where speeches are made” (Twilight of the Idols [1889]).

Likewise Glubb:

“Intellectualism leads to discussion, debate and argument, such as is typical of the Western nations today. Debates in elected assemblies or local committees, in articles in the Press or in interviews on television—endless and incessant talking” (The Fate of Empires [1976]).

The great irony of intellectualism is that this failure to effect “conviction,” this “endless and incessant talking,” suggest the futility of dialectics to almost no one.  Every assembly where speeches are made testifies that making speeches accomplishes almost nothing, and yet no man in the grip of intellectualism will surrender his belief in the magical power of speeches (or articles, or books, or arguments).  As Carlyle rhetorically asked:

“Is it the nature of National Assemblies generally to do, with endless labor and clangor, Nothing . . . [to] with motion and counter-motion, with jargon and hubbub, cancel one another . . . and produce for net result, zero?”  (Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol. 1 [1837]).

Indeed it is their nature, as it is the nature of every institution in a decadent society overgrown with dialectics, like ivy on the ruins of a dead culture with nowhere to go.

“America too will find that . . . stump oratory and speeches to Bunkum will not carry men to the immortal gods . . . . Not without heroic labor, and effort quite other than that of the Stump-Orator and Revival Preacher . . .” (Thomas Carlyle, Later Day Pamphlets [1850]).

Can anyone honestly say, all these years later, that this is something America has not found?

Nor will the man in the grip of intellectualism (Oakshott called him a Rationalist) surrender his belief in the magical power of intelligence, for as Glubb tells us, he has an unshakable belief in the sufficiency of right opinion, or what he calls science, independent of all other aspects of character.  Let us only be intelligent, he says, and it matters not if we are cowards, traitors, pickpockets or whores.  He thus falls under the ludicrous delusion that, by itself, “the human brain can solve the problems of the world,” and that his people will flourish if only they can get the science right.

To this absurd conceit, Glubb mordantly replies”

“The impression that the situation can be saved by mental cleverness, without unselfishness or human self-dedication, can only lead to collapse” (The Fate of Empires [1976]).

 

III

Aristophanes appears to have had a similarly low opinion of men who try to live on nothing but their wit and their words, and wrote The Clouds (423 B. C.) to show what happens to those who do.  This is the story of Strepsiades, a “country bumpkin” who has gone into debt to keep his wastrel son Phidippides in luxury.

“He curls and scents his hair, and rides and drives his tandems, and at night he dreams of horses—while I groan and watch the moon bring near the day of reckoning.  For interest does not grow less with time.”

To weasel out of his debts, Strepsiades decides to enroll his son in “the Thinking-School of philosophic minds,” where “they can teach us, if we pay a fee, to win our suits, just and unjust alike.”  Phidippides at first rejects his father’s plan, not because of a moral scruple, but because the Thinking School is déclassé.  The dashing young buck sees that the philosophers are nothing but “pale-faced, barefoot wind-bags, taught and led by Socrates.”

Most commentators reprove Aristophanes for lumping Socrates in with the other Sophists of Athens, but Nietzsche thought Aristophanes was right.  He tells is that the Socratic method was “indicative of decadence,” and that superior men have always scorned dialectics. “Dialectic manners were avoided in good society—they were regarded as bad manners.”  They were, in fact, regarded as the oily pleading of weaklings, “the last defense of those who have no other weapons.”  As for Socrates himself, he was for Nietzsche nothing more than

 “The buffoon who got himself taken seriously” (Twilight of the Idols [1889]).

And not only by the country bumpkin Strepsiades.

Rebuffed by his son, Strepsiades decides to enroll himself in the Thinking School, and there to master the “hair-splitting arguments” by which to defraud his creditors.  As he is shown round the school by one of Socrates pupils, Aristophanes show us that this Thinking School is dangerously detached from reality.  The heads of the philosophers are, as we say, “in the clouds” (if Aristophanes did not invent this idiom, he was almost certainly alluding to it).*

When the pupil shows Strepsiades “a map of the whole world,” for instance, the country bumpkin ingenuously complains that it does not show his own home—the place where his real interests lie.  He ingenuously complains that it shows only the spatial relation of Attica to one of its troublesome neighbors—not the political relation that really matters.  And he complains that one cannot use this map to do something really useful, such as moving Sparta, the great enemy of Athens, to a more remote position.

In other words, this country bumpkin unwittingly shows us that this map, and philosophy generally, is of very little practical value.  They are, at best, toys for “cloud people.”**

When Strepsiades is introduced to Socrates, the great philosopher teaches him that the Gods are a myth and that philosophers instead “converse with the holy Clouds.”  He means they worship nothing but their own notions, their own wit.  Moreover, Socrates says, it is from these Clouds that his “idle sect” obtains its power of “judgment, logic, wit and intellect”—not to mention (as he tells the audience in an aside) “peraphrasis [circumlocution] and humbug, power to overawe and cheat.”

As for the Clouds themselves, who form the Chorus of the play, their name for Socrates is “high priest of subtlest nonsense.”

Thus, Aristophanes tells us that the doctrine of Socrates and the Thinking School is essentially nihilistic and manipulative.  It teaches men that they are under no transcendent authority, that there is no commanding power above the dialectic.  They are not bound by any divine, or even any natural, logos.  There are just human notions—clouds—that men put in circulation, sometimes artfully and sometimes not.

This putting into circulation of human notions —clouds— is what the Thinking Schools of today call discourse.

As Socrates tells Strepsiades:

“You must have no other gods than those we worship here, Chaos yonder, and the Cloud-banks, and the glib Tongue, just these three.”

And these are precisely the gods Strepsiades had hoped for, since his only aim is “to deceive the court and leave my creditors behind.”  But, alas, Strepsiades proves a poor pupil, and so must finally force his son Phidippides to enroll in the Thinking School and learn the arguments that will release him, Strepsiades, from the demands of justice.

Phidippides proves himself an apt student, and quickly masters the art of the “Unjust Argument.”  This is sophistry calculated to overturn conventional wisdom and the established truths of the Attic nomos.  The stratagems of the Unjust Argument will be familiar to anyone who has wrangled with a “critical thinker” of today.

1) The Unjust Argument is contradictory, and denies the premises of conventional wisdom.  Contradiction works especially well against conventional wisdom, or what are generally supposed to be self-evident truths, since very few people are prepared to argue for beliefs that are not normally called into question.  These beliefs are the grounds normal people argue from. And as Plato would later admit, a great many of these basic beliefs are right opinions that cannot be fully demonstrated to critical rationality, but are rather at least partly intuited by right reason.  The Sophist exploits this by affecting moral cretinism and demanding reasons where reasons are not wanted.

Aristophanes illustrates this in a debate whether warm public baths should be allowed.  The Just argument is that they should not, since young men would flock to this comfortable place, and their lounge, gossip and wrangle, leaving the gymnasium empty.  The Unjust Argument answers this right opinion with a demand to know “the principle” on which it is founded.  And that’s just the problem, since the principle lies no deeper than the intuition that warm baths “are immoral and play havoc with a lad.”  There are no further reasons you can give a man who cannot see the truth of this, so his demand for dialectic is out of place.

2) The Unjust Argument quibbles and carps.  This means that it offers trivial or irrelevant reasons to remain skeptical of the conventional wisdom.  It will, for instance, make a tremendous fuss over words, engaging in an interminable logomachy of literalism, equivocation, and belligerent semantics. It will also unload fusillades of spurious data, such as that cold baths cannot be conducive to hardiness and heroism, since there is no cold bath named for Hercules, the heartiest hero of them all.  Such quibbling and carping is, once again, a disease of dialectics characterized by a proliferation of “reasons” that are not really reasons.

3) The Unjust Argument denounces conventional wisdom simply because it is conventional, not because it is not wisdom.  Since a great many truths have been known for a very long time, and are consequently “old fashioned,” the Unjust Argument finds it easy to scoff at those truths as “old fashioned,” without troubling to show that they are untrue.  It also finds it easy to shame a diffident man out of a conventional belief by saying he is, when he professes this old bromide, exposing himself as “a dull young blockhead” and “Mamma’s pet.”

Delighted by his son’s success in the Thinking School, Strepsiades gives him a dinner party, and there calls upon Phidippides to sing a song, preferably an old one.  The ungrateful Phidippides at first refuses, and then accedes to sing a bawdy ditty “about the wrong that some brute did to his sister.”  When his father objects, Phidippides beats him, and when his father objects to that, Phidippides uses his “New Philosophy” to cast doubt on the self-evident truth that it is wrong for a son to beat his father.  Indeed, he contrives a clever argument to show that a son ought to beat his father, and his mother too.

And thus it was that Strepsiades came to rue the day he fell in with Socrates, “the buffoon who got himself taken seriously.”

 

IV

Phidippides was a sybarite who became a scholar, but his scholarship was nothing but a means to a more expansive sybaritism.  He made himself a master of discourse, grew a long tongue, persuaded himself that black is white, and proposed to live on his wit and his words.  He proposed to live in discourse and dialectics—in other words, in the clouds.

But he was, even as he triumphantly beat his father, a dotard waiting for a hearty barbarian to come and deliver the coup de grâce.  And as Glubb told us to expect, this hearty barbarian burst out from an unexpected quarter.  It was none other than his father, Strepsiades, the “country bumpkin” who has repented of his flirtation with the “vortex of philosophy” and resolved to destroy the Thinking School.

“I have been mad.  It was an evil day when I drove out the gods for Socrates.”

What Strepsiades now understands is that he drove out the gods for personal advantage.  It was convenient for him to overturn the authority of the nomos that said that promises should be kept and debts should be paid.  His madness was failing to see that, in releasing himself from the authority of the gods and their nomos, he had released Phidippides as well.  If he, Strepsiades, was not bound to honor his promises to his creditors, then Phidippides was not bound to honor Strepsiades.

What we should now understand is that, while reason and dialectic have authority, they do not have sufficient authority to adequately govern human conduct without other sources of authority.  But they do have authority sufficient to destroy those other sources.  This is what Nietzsche meant when he said that Socrates was “the buffoon who got himself taken seriously.”  He was the buffoon who said that he could fill the shoes of the king and the throne of Zeus.  But when men like Strepsiades took this buffoon seriously and committed both deicide and regicide, they discovered that those shoes were larger, and that throne higher, than the buffoon had led them to believe.

But by then it was too late, since authority cannot be manufactured.  A dead civilization can of course simulate authority, and this simulation fools no one.

If you behave like the youths of today,
Your chest will be narrow, your skin will be grey,
Your shoulders will shrink, and your tongues will extend,
And your public harangues never come to an end:
At last you’ll believe that black is white,
That right is wrong, and wrong is right.

Aristophanes, The Clouds (423 B.C.)

______________________________________________________________________

 

*) This of course calls to mind the flying island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels, which like the Thinking School spread the pestilence of philosophy to the lands below.

“Certain persons went up to Laputa . . . and after five months’ continuance, came back with a very little smattering in mathematics, but full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region . . . . These persons upon their return began to dislike the management of everything below, and fell into schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages, and mechanics upon a new foot.  To this end they procured a royal patent for erecting an academy of projectors at Lagado; and the humor prevailed so strongly among the people, that there is not a town of any consequence in the kingdom without such an academy.  In these colleges the professors contrive new rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments and tools for all trades and manufacturers . . . . The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; and in the meantime, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes.  By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes . . .”

**) To the best of my knowledge, the happy phrase “cloud people” was coined by the blogger known as Zman.