The Echoes of the Ancients

June 17, 2007

Because Millennium is an unusual religion, taking as its ideals the cultivation of reason, objectivity, and self doubt, and the promotion of eugenics, it is commonly believed that the religion is novel. This essay will follow the threads which we know as the Method and the Nation into history, showing that even while they may not have been woven together before Sherman Hawk's response to postmodernism, they actually began thousands of years ago, in ancient Athens.

The classical era can be seen as a great, unified period in history, beginning in the eighth century BCE with the emergence of the first Greek city-state (the polis), and continuing for over twelve hundred years through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Yet, the truly creative period of antiquity survived for only a fraction of that great span of time, starting late in the eighth century and extending to the early fourth century BCE, where, in a small area of the eastern Mediterranean, societies emerged which would permanently mark the course of Western history. (Boardman et al, 1986)

It has been pointed out previously that it was Hellenic genius which provided the scientific and artistic foundations for the Roman empire, but it is specifically the Greek culture, philosophy, and people, with their characteristic love of philosophy, their unusual reliance on logic, and their relentless questioning, which are of interest here. So before going on, it is worth providing some background on just who these people were.

Many are familiar with the architecture of ancient Greece, which made heavy use of the post and lintel, pictured at the right. The Greeks were assiduous sculptors and lovers of geometry, and these interests found a harmonious combination in Hellenic architecture. (Ling, 1988)

Because Athenian authors offer most of the surviving writings from the Hellenic world, most of what is known about Greek culture is restricted to the city of Athens, which was not necessarily a typical Greek city. Still, many customs and behaviors which are quite different from those of the modern West are known to have been ubiquitous throughout ancient Greece - idealized pederasty, casual nudity, and normalized slavery being the most obvious.(Boardman et al, 1986) These peculiarities of Greek culture are probably attributable, in part, to climatological forces; many have remarked that in the warm Mediterranian, clothing is far less of a necessity than it is elsewhere, and slavery is far more economical in warm climates where agriculture is more lucrative, life is easier to support, and farm workers are always in demand (this is arguably one reason why slavery was accepted by the Southern United States and rejected in the North). And of course this may also be an indirect cause of Hellenic pederasty, which Aristotle writes in his Politics was first instituted in Crete by King Minos as a response to population pressures.

Above is a satellite picture of the Aegean Sea. Athens and Sparta were found on the western side, across from famous Troy on the eastern side. The large island to the south is Crete.

But less widely appreciated today is the fundamentally maritime culture of Greece. The Hellenic world was made up of a series of coastal islands nestled in the Aegean sea, and travel between these islands was constant as ships brought goods from one city to another. Thus it should come as no surprise that while Sparta was famous for raising powerful Hoplite armies according to a harsh warrior code, between the years of 479 and 431 BCE it was the Athenians who dominated the map with their powerful navy: according to Themistocles, the Athenian naval commander, "We Athenians have a city so long as we have our ships."

The geography of this area greatly influenced the culture which sprang up there; rather than a single unified state, the Hellenic world was characterized by its singular arrangement of city-states, each one having its own laws and customs, but all united by language, the ties of trade, and periodic military alliances. The independence of each polis allowed not only for economic specialization and competition, but considerable cultural and governmental experimentation. (Sparta was a famous example of such experimentation, requiring unmarried men to eat in commons and live in barracks, and deliberately underfeeding young boys to teach them survival skills.)

Although the Greeks fought many wars during this period (both with Persia and among themselves), the Hellenic era was one of remarkable prosperity and ease of living. One way of measuring this is to note that the average daily wage, in wheat, of a Greek worker, was approximately 12 kg, while the typical Romano-Egyptian worker during the Roman period earned less than 4 kg of wheat from a day's labor (Schiedel, 2005). The strong economy was likely to be partly responsible for the surge of innovation during this period, when the Greeks dissected criminals to examine their organs, discovered the golden ratio and Pythagorean Theorem, founded sentential logic (under the Stoics), and even went so far as to invent "water-clocks and mechanical puppets, fire-pumps and steam-toys, and many engines of war" (Barnes, 1986).

In light of the explosion of artistic, scientific, technological, and philosophical progress for which these ancient people are responsible, Sir Francis Galton, in the chapter on "Different Races" in his Hereditary Genius, described them as follows:

The ablest race of whom history bears record is unquestionably the ancient Greek, partly because their master-pieces in the principal departments of intellectual activity are still unsurpassed, and in many respects unequalled, and partly because the population that gave birth to the creators of these master-pieces was very small... Athens opened her arms to immigrants, but not indiscriminately, for her social life was such that none but very able men could take any pleasure in it; on the other hand, she offered attractions such as men of the highest ability and culture could find in no other city. Thus, by a system of partly unconscious selection, she built up a magnificent breed of human animals..."

Galton surmised that the ancient Athenians averaged two "grades" of mental ability higher than the Englishmen of his day, where one of Galton's grades corresponds to roughly 10 points in a modern IQ scale. He based this on the number and quality of the inventions and intellectual accomplishments they made, and on the percentage of eminent Athenians appearing in biographical sources. It is now known that a variety of factors outside of the raw mental ability of a population contribute to their innovation and the number of significant historical figures that live among them (Murray, 2003), but intelligence is still an important factor, as can be demonstrated by another estimate Galton made on the average ability of Africans as being "at least two grades" below the English average, and his further estimate that "the Australian type is at least one grade below the African negro."

These last two estimates may be corroborated by modern studies on existing races to arrive at some measure for Galton's accuracy in judgment; Richard Lynn's 2006 work, Race Differences in Intelligence, gives sub-Saharan Africans an IQ 33 points below the English mean, and Australian Aborigines 38 points below the English mean. Clearly, Galton was on the right track, although he appears to have either overestimated the intelligence of Africans and Australoids, or underestimated the intelligence of his own countrymen. The latter seems rather likely, given his comments that the Athenian aesthetic sense was "of a far more severe character than could possibly be appreciated by the average of our race, the calibre of whose intellect is easily gauged by a glance at the contents of a railway book-stall." So although most Greeks may have had unremarkable intellectual abilities, there is some reason to presume that the men and women of Athens had an average IQ somewhere near 110; educated readers will be aware that both of the most intelligent races of the modern day, the Ashkenazi Jews and the Asians of the Pacific Rim, fall short of this mark by approximately 5 IQ points.

But if this race were so advanced, then why the decline? Politically and economically, the causes are well established by historians: corruption and warfare between the city-states. Tax collection was poorly regulated and led to abuses; similarly Athenian jurors were paid to serve in trials, and this encouraged them to bring fellow citizens to trial with spurious accusations. And as Thucydides documents in The History of the Peloponnesian War Athens lost its supremacy over Greece when it attacked Syracuse, leaving Attica vulnerable to the Spartans, who ultimately conquered Athens.

All of this does not explain, however, why the modern Greeks are so different from their forbears. Had the Greeks maintained their character as a people, military subjugation and economic problems would not have prevented their eventual resurgence, but modern Greece, though a democratic nation, has not lived up to the achievements of the ancients. Galton's estimates of the mental ability of the ancient Greeks differ wildly from their modern intelligence; the average IQ in modern Greece is reported by Lynn as 92; neighboring Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Turkey, which once contained Hellenic colonies, fare similarly. And while IQ is only an indirect measure of creative potential, by more direct measures the Greeks of today fare even worse in comparison with the ancients: With a population of 11 million, the modern Greeks have produced only 2 Nobel laureates, Giorgos Seferis (in 1963) and Odysseas Elytis (in 1979), and both of these men earned prizes for Literature - modern Greece has earned no Nobels in medicine, chemistry, or even physics, when our very word for physics comes from ancient Greek! Obviously, we are no longer looking at the same people which existed in antiquity.

So the real question is not why Athens and the other Hellenic city states fell into decline, but why the Athenian people lost their biological edge. It has been pointed out by Arthur Kemp that racial mixing is likely to have played some role, and it can be further argued that after Athens and the other Greek city-states were brought under Roman rule, the best and the brightest left Greece for what had become the new Athens: Rome. It is well known that wealthy Romans had been acquiring tutors for their children long before conquering Greece, and the rise of Rome would have exerted an ever-increasing pull on the creative elites to draw them away from Athens. (Today, Italy is among the brightest European countries, with an average IQ of 102 (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2006), and a respectable record of creative achievement in the arts and sciences with 19 Nobels.) But these effects were strongest hundreds of years after the end of the Hellenic period, in which the real advances were made. The Greeks of the later Hellenistic period, after Alexander the Great, were still an impressive people, and some of their finest minds were born into this period (Archimedes is a prime example), but the golden age of Greece was already over by the fourth century BCE (Boardman et al, 1986). Thus, simple dysgenesis seems to be the primary cause for the decline of the ancient Athenians, as Francis Galton himself argued:

We know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this marvelously-gifted race declined. Social morality grew exceedingly lax; marriage became unfashionable, and was avoided; many of the more ambitious and accomplished women were avowed courtesans, and consequently infertile, and the mothers of the incoming population were of a heterogeneous class.

Those who are familiar with Sir Francis Galton understand that he founded the eugenics movement in an effort to stave off this dysgenic decline, and indeed most Seekers understand Galton's philosophical reaction to his cousin Charles Darwin's Origin of Species to be the precursor to Millennium. Although many may believe Galton founded of eugenics as merely a political or scientific movement, he did not think of it in this way, but instead insisted that eugenics "must be introduced into the national consciousness as a new religion." This usage of the word "religion" was not a mere whim, as Arthur Jensen corroborates: "[H]e later promoted eugenics as a secular religion, with the express goal of increasing the future well-being of humanity. Galton took it for granted that superior mental and behavioral capacities as well as physical health and stamina are beneficial both to individuals and to the whole society." (Jensen, 2000) George Bernard Shaw echoed this sentiment: "there is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations." (Glad, 2006).

Even as early as Galton, therefore, eugenics was viewed as religious in character, and so it should not be surprising that a host of secular religions incorporated eugenics into their doctrines, not only Millennium but also Cosmotheism, Prometheism, Logos Pantheism, and Beyondism. So discussions on the historical origins of eugenics often focus on the Victorian Era; this was, after all, when Francis Galton began the modern eugenics movement in response to Darwin's uncovering of heretofore unknown principles of evolution, and it was around this time when eugenics became popularized.

But the origins of eugenic thought long precede Galton and Darwin, arising first among the ancient Greeks, from whose language the term eugenics of course arises from the words "well-born." Thus it is here, in the Hellenic world, that the foundations of Millennium can be first identified. It was in Plato's Republic where the first eugenic system was proposed, as a means of keeping his Guardians (the leaders of a utopian society) in good condition. In his Republic, Plato wrote:

You have in your house hunting-dogs and a number of pedigree cocks â.¦ do not some prove better than the rest? Do you then breed from all indiscriminately, or are you careful to breed from the best?â.¦ How imperative, then, is our need of the highest skill in our rulers, if the principle holds also for mankind? â.¦ [T]he best men must cohabit with the best women in as many cases as possible and the worst with the worst in the fewest, and that the offspring of the one must be reared and that of the other not, if the flock is to be as perfect as possible.

Plato's idea was to have the various members of this guardian class periodically draw lots to see with whom they will reproduce; but Plato envisioned that the lot would be secretly rigged so that those who were considered unfit for reproduction would draw a blank lot with no name. Many will notice that this system ran against honesty and humanitarian principles, but it is covered here to point out that its rationale was specifically eugenic. And Plato's was not a voice crying in the wilderness; the ancient Greeks often discussed questions of nature and nurture centuries before Galton began his research; for instance, Aristotle believed that the low condition of slaves was an inevitable product of hereditary, while Hippias asks why "parents of good stock do not always produce children as good." Galton's research of course provides an answer in the form of regression to the mean, but again, the point is that the ancient Greeks had all the pieces necessary to understand eugenics and discuss possible ways in which it might be implemented.

Of course, eugenics itself is far from the essence of Millennium; rather, it is a means of increasing man's ability to apply the disciplines of reason, objectivity, and self doubt which comprise the Seeker's Method. Yet this, too, has its origins in ancient Greece. When reading through the discourses of Plato, modern readers may well be surprised by how frequently Athenians bring up mathematical or geometric principles to illustrate a point, but what is especially striking is how casually speakers resolve their disputes by turning directly to logic and supporting their cases with the most scrupulously constructed arguments. The Stoics believed that "everything is discerned by way of logical study" (Boardman et. al, 1986) and Aristotle formulated a whole host of logical principles (e.g. the principle of negation) necessary for arriving at unclear conclusions. All of this was made possible by the Greeks' attitude towards the field of logic as being a serious area for study rather than a mere tool to arrive at deductions or sway the opinions of others. The ancient Greeks were obsessed with the metaphysical idea of knowledge, and believed not only that the art of living must rest on knowledge, but that this knowledge must itself be philosophically sound. Not only were philosophers held in high regard (Hellemistic monarchs commonly had philosophers at court) but they were popular throughout the Hellenic world; for instance, Theophrastus attracted as many as 2,000 students to his lectures. (Barnes, 1986)

The core principle of Millennium - namely, that in order to do good, a person must know what good is - was a commonly debated idea among these philosophers. Although the Greek conception of virtue (arete, which connotes excellence and nobility) might be somewhat different from a modern conception of morality, Aristotle appears to have understood morality even as modern day Seekers do, believing that knowledge of virtue was itself virtuous, with the caveat that a person who lacked self control could be turned from virtuous behavior even though he understood virtue correctly. This idea was not originally Aristotle's (although the caveat was), coming as it did originally through Plato's teacher, Socrates.

Little is known of Socrates; even the date of his birth can only be estimated as some time in the 5th century BCE, a hundred years after the founding of the Roman Republic and four hundred years before the Roman general Sulla would crush Athens after a siege. Most available information on Socrates is derived from the writings of his students, Plato and Xenophon. (There are also records written by Aristotle, although he did not know Socrates himself, and the works of Aristophanes, who wrote of Socrates only as part of a satiric parody on philosophers.) But the information that we have shows Socrates as a man who troubled his fellow Athenians by questioning everyone and everything, earning a reputation as the gadfly of the state and ultimately being executed for "corrupting the youth of Athens" with his controversial attitudes.

The two accounts of Socrates trial and death given by Plato and Xenophon are alike in their general form, but disagree on certain particulars; in Xenophon's Apology, Socrates is recorded as beginning his controversial interrogations after a friend of his, Chaerephon, asked the Oracle of Delphi whether there was anyone of higher moral excellence than Socrates; Plato's version is similar, save that the question is recorded as being whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates:

[T]he Pythian prophetess answered that there was no man wiser... When I heard the answer, I said to myself, What can the god mean? and what is the interpretation of this riddle? for I know that I have no wisdom, small or great. What can he mean when he says that I am the wisest of men? And yet he is a god and cannot lie; that would be against his nature. After a long consideration, I at last thought of a method of trying the question. I reflected that if I could only find a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand. I should say to him, "Here is a man who is wiser than I am; but you said that I was the wisest." Accordingly I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him - his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination - and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is - for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know.

What emerges from the writings about Socrates is the picture of a man whose restless intellect would not allow him to passively accept what others casually held as self evident. Socrates is commonly quoted as saying in his defense before the Athenian council, "I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others." Unfortunately, this does not appear to be a genuine quote, not only because Plato and Xenophon did not write in the style of stenographers, but because those words are not even given in their accounts. It is perhaps a trifle sad to think that this quote is unquestioningly attributed to Socrates by his modern admirers, although a passage which Plato did record still conveys a rather similar meaning:

If I tell you that... I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living - that you are still less likely to believe.

What can then be said of the religion of Millennium, if both the philosophical virtues of the Method, and the eugenic ideals of the Nation, can be traced to the Athenian philosophers? Not that its founder was an imitator, by any means, for no Greek in Athens or elsewhere ever recorded a rational progression from the moral imperative to learn the truth in order to know good, and a foundation of relentless self-questioning, to the need for improving a society's understanding of truth and a need for eugenic improvement. Nor is Galton's own achievement regarding the field of eugenics to be minimized, since Plato had only the most basic conception of hereditary traits and no real understanding of dysgenesis. But it cannot safely be said that any of these men, or any of us who continue in their traditions, were acting purely under our own genius. As Bernard of Chartres might have said, if we can see far, it is because we are standing on the shoulders of giants. But is it an exaggeration to say that, insofar as any people should carry on the ideas and intellectual seeds of these giants and nurture them once more into bloom, such a people would become their heirs?

...it has been a severe misfortune to humanity that the high Athenian breed decayed and disappeared; for if it had maintained its excellence, and had multiplied and spread over large countries, displacing inferior populations, it would assuredly have accomplished results advantageous to human civilization, to a degree that transcends our powers of imagination...

~Francis Galton

Further Reading

Insofar as I am not well versed in the Classics, I have attempted to draw only the most obvious conclusions and to provide only a broad overview of the ancient Athenians. But it is hoped that this essay will stimulate interest in the Hellenic era, so readers are encouraged to consider browsing through these online resources for further information:

• The Apology: Plato's version, Xenophon's version (txt format). Each version describes Socrates defending himself against the Athenian council which sentenced him to death.


• EAWC: Ancient Greece: Selected works by the ancient Greeks; includes several Socratic Dialogues written by Plato.


• The Republic: In this lengthy work, Plato discusses his ideal society.


• Basic Greek Elements: A list of common Greek elements which survive in modern English words.


• Best of History Websites: This supplies a list of detailed web pages on ancient Greece.


• Virtue and Knowledge: A brief essay contrasting Socrates' and Aristotle's views on the issue.


• Hellenic Weaponry: The deployment and usefulness of the spear and sling are discussed extensively and entertainingly in these two essays.


• "Greek Ruins": An opinion piece on how Americans are losing their Classical knowledge.

References

Aristotle, Politics; II.10.

Boardman, John; Griffin, Jasper; and Murray, Oswyn (1986). The Oxford Illustrated History of Greece and the Hellenistic World Oxford University Press.

Barnes, Jonathan (1986). "Hellenistic Philosophy and Science." In The Oxford Illustrated History of Greece and the Hellenistic World Oxford University Press.

Galton, Francis (1892). Hereditary Genius: An inquiry into its laws and consequences."

Glad, John (2006). _Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century_. Hermitage Publishers http://www.whatwemaybe.org/txt/glad.john.2006.future_human_evolution.web.003g.en.doc

Jensen, Arthur R. (2000). "Mixing up Eugenics and Galton's Legacy to Research on Intelligence." Psycoloquy: 11,#17
http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000017/

Ling, Roger (1988). The Greek World. Equinox (Oxford) Ltd.

Lynn, Richard (2006). Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis. Atlanta, Georgia: Washington Summit Books.

Lynn, Richard and Vanhanen, Tatu (2006). IQ and Global Inequality. Washington Summit Publishers: Augusta, GA.

Murray, Charles (2003). Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-019247-X.

Plato, The Republic.

Scheidel, Walter (2005). "Real slave prices and the relative cost of slave labor in the Greco-Roman world." Ancient Society, vol 35, pp 1-17

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War