Logoi

In my quest to understand when things in the West went wrong, I decided to go all the way back to the beginning. While this isn’t a book review of Herodotus because I haven’t finished it (halfway through Book 7), I have learned enough to draw some rather fascinating conclusions, the primary being: context is everything.

This has been one of the hardest books I’ve ever tried to read, for a number of reasons. At several points, I’ve debated giving up. The digressions can really test your patience, and when Herodotus manages to construct what modern readers would call a “flow,” he quickly breaks it by casually mentioning a side character and then delving into a page long story about something that character did, and then abruptly resuming the original story. It’s also a huge pain when he uses names without much clarification, so that you’ll see the same name used to talk about five different people. And don’t even get me started on Book 2.

There are a few reasons I’ve persisted. First, it’s foundational. I see references to Herodotus all over the place, and it also sets the stage for Thucydides and Xenophon, which I understand are the bedrock of modern history and philosophy. Herodotus is sort of like a bridge between the world of the Gods and what modern readers would recognize as their own. And given how crazy the world of 2018 seems, Herodotus helps illuminate just how sane and stable things are.

I think that when one encounters the world, especially from fresh youthful eyes, the natural reaction is to say “Wow, things are really messed up,” and the natural response is to have a desire to fix it. While this is good in theory, if done recklessly it will lead to hell. Therefore, I’d say the best possible response, and the way to facilitate that desire, is to ask “Why are things so messed up?”

In that the perfect is the enemy of the good, it’s easy to envision a world the way we want it to be, and more difficult to envision a world that’s the opposite. Therefore, when we look at the world, we tend to see the disparity between how things are and how we want them to be, rather than that between how things are and how bad they could get.

There is a mantra that we become more conservative as we get older. I remember when I was younger, wanting to change and fix the world, and getting upset and impatient when someone older would ask me simple questions that confounded me. Now I get a similar reaction from young protesters when I ask similar questions. I’m sure someone upstairs is laughing. This does make me ask what “conservative” means. Clearly it’s not all simply the horrible things I remember the religious right doing in the 90s, because those people also seem to have the same reaction to simple questions. Could it in fact be the curse of foresight, and asking of a few simple questions before taking a corrective action, such as to mitigate any potential unwelcome side effects?

I look at Herodotus’s tome and marvel at how things used to be. They aren’t currently perfect, but they *are* currently a lot better than in his day. Maybe we would all be better served by asking a few simple questions about why the world is broken before fixing it.