Mir was born in Agra, India, into a Muslim family. His father was a Sufi mystic, and the spiritual aspects of that philosophy are seen in all his poems. His father died when Mir was a young man, in his teens.  As a young man, it seems that he began an adulterous relationship with a married woman.  When this was eventually discovered, he was disowned by his family and forced to leave his home and move to Dehli.  This traumatic event colors all of his poems.  He writes about his subsequent relationships with women with a dark sensibility, often with a sense of doom and dread.

Mir was a master of the ghazal, a poetic form with repeating lines.  He wrote his poems about love. Every aspect of the experience is explored in depth—from initial infatuation to bitter regret. Nor does Mir neglect the spiritual aspects of love, which along with carnal desire are so much in evidence in each of his poems.

The Plague of Love: Selected Sufi Love Poems of Mir Taqi Mir, By Mir Taqi Mir, translated by Bilal A. Shaw and Anthony A. Lee. Click here to buy.

This poem explores the poet’s dark fears and hopes at the start of a new love affair. Still, he tells us tragically how he has been scarred by past relationships. So, he hesitates. 

Love Is Just Beginning

Love is just beginning, and I weep.  Why?
Just go on.  See what happens, man!  Why not?

Hear that?  Sounds of the morning caravan.
So, move!  They’re leaving, fool.  You’re sleeping.  Why?

The land of heart will not turn green again.
But still, I sow seeds of desire.  Why?

These love stains on my skin will not come off.
Still, I wash the wounds that scar my chest.  Why?  

Yet more precious than Joseph’s hair is time!
And, Mir, you are wasting this rare thing. Why?

In this next poem, Mir confesses that he has abandoned the worship of God for the worship of a woman. His prayers to God he counts as only treason to his new beloved. Tortured by his blasphemy, he knows he is ruined.

I Worship You

I worship you, and God knows that.
What you may think? Well, God knows that.  

The agony of love is sweet.                            
Every wretched lover knows that.                             

Beneath her hair, behind her veil,
what she wants, only she knows that.  

You think I am a fraud like you?
My pleas aren’t false.  But you know that.  

My prayers to God are treason now.  
You’re cruel to those you love.  Know that.                    

You’re a spoiled and stupid child.  But
you twist your lips well.  You know that.  

Because you live inside my heart,
my love is there.  And, you know that.  

When you’re in love, Mir, you’re ruined.  
You gave away your heart, fool.  You know that. 

Though he pursued multiple relationships with women, Mir remained deeply religious.  But his piety and his sexuality were at war.  In one poem, “Finished,” he recounts his seduction of a woman.  But he includes this couplet:

I chased her for long miles, but stopped to pray.  

God!  Even mad with love, I dared not sin . . .  

In the next poem, spiritual love and physical love are so blended and intertwined that we cannot tell one from the other. The truth seems to shift from one to the other: “Sometimes love is/the believer. Sometimes God is this love.” And still, in the end, Mir doubts both his faith and his love. 

What Is Love?

How can I tell you what it is, this love?
It’s a disease, it’s a sickness, this love.

Love—only love—exists.  Look!  Everywhere
the universe is bursting with this love.

Love is my lover.  Love is my beloved.
And love itself delights inside this love.               

This love makes its own law.  Sometimes love is           
the believer.  Sometimes God is this love.

Who has ever reached his aim without love?
My wish is this love.  My goal is this love.

But no one really wants this sort of love. 
See!  It’s just like a bastard child, this love.

Mir, your life is looking so weak and pale.         
Can you say you have ever been in love?

In the poem “Until He Comes,” Mir expresses the pain of his love for a young man. The poem reflects the bisexuality that was the norm in his society at the time (and certainly also today).  We should remember that some of Shakespeare’s love sonnets were written to a young man, as well.

Until He Comes

Long have my tears been falling.  Still they come!
If my tears stop falling, my blood will come.

I can control myself, until he comes.
Then, I lose my mind, and no sense will come.

Patience used to be my only friend here. 
But now, he too is one who will not come.

My heart has lost all trace of its desire.
Just gone.  No wonder now my tears have come.

It’s all still here in this full heart, my friend.
But no verses on my lips.  They won’t come.  
   
There he lies so far away . . .  Poor sad Mir,
without love, this poem will never come.

After the end of another relationship, Mir laments and cries bitterly. He drinks. His sadness and insecurity are so evident. His loss is devastating and complete.

A Ripple on Your Robe

In this garden, make your tongue a rosebud
in your mouth.  Make a baby’s fist your hand.  

Cup your palm around your heart when you cry.
In that tempest, your lamp will die unmanned.

Wine boy!  Without you we will never know           
ourselves. Lost, we wander in our homeland.

The chains of reason hold me down, or I
would live insane–at frantic love’s command.

Even though I’m a poet, not a hack,
I fear the rhymes my friends recite offhand.

Mir, swept away by her soft love:  Now she’s
just a ripple on your robe as you stand.  

Finally, this short poem sums up Mir Taqi Mir’s own view of his brilliant poetry. 

Don’t Call Yourself a Poet

The God of favors did me a favor.  He took
some dust: From nothing, he gave me a human look.

Don’t call yourself a poet, Mir.  Because, you just
took a bunch of sorrows and wrote them in a book.

The Plague of Love: Selected Sufi Love Poems of Mir Taqi Mir

Translated by Bilal Shaw and Anthony A. Lee
A New Literary Translation (Nirala Publications, New Dehli) Paperback.  110 pages.

Available on Amazon.com here.   But do not pay full price.  New copies are available from private sellers at much reduced prices. 

The latest film adaptation of the Sixties novel helps us understand the contemporary Middle East and its ecology.

“Based on Herbert’s 1965 science fiction classic, “Dune” is a tale of a rising duke, intergalactic power struggles, a precious spice, and lethal spaceworms. The story, which deals with religion, politics, myth, destiny, heritage, environmental decay and colonialism resonates as much with audiences today as it did when the novel was first published.”

( TRT World ) – The latest Hollywood blockbuster “Dune” is a space opera based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name. While written in the Sixties, its current release is salient as the film reengages audiences with several core themes of the novel.

The novel is replete with Arabic and Islamic references, which raises the question of whether the novel is orientalist, in addition to the film, given the resurgence of cinematic orientalist tropes post-9/11.

Also, while the novel “Dune” won a slew of science fiction (sci-fi) awards, it could also be considered one of the first cli-fi novels, or climate fiction novels. Herbert’s work was prescient given its examination of the ecology of a desert planet that essentially stands in for the Middle East. 

Finally, the novel is relevant due to its trope of resistance and empire. “Dune” is essentially a political thought experiment, examining how charismatic leadership can lead to the defeat of stronger states and empires, salient to US foreign policy, whether it is the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh or the Afghan Taliban.

Techno-Orientalism

In a previous article for this publication, I used Edward Said to examine “Slavery, the “robot,” and Orientalism in science fiction.” I categorise Orientalism as a system of communication that essentialises the East with a series of ‘E’s. The West sees the ‘East’ as Exotic, Erotic, and the Enemy.

For example, in the “Star Wars” franchise, there are Middle East-inspired elements with the Sufi orders reflected in Obi Wan and the Jedi. Orientalist flourishes include the Enemy, the barbaric Sand People and the Erotic, the indolent Jabba the Hut, who smokes a nargile and maintains a harem, which includes princes Leia.

“Dune”, like “Star Wars”, is about a band of rebels who bring down an empire. The protagonists of Lucas’ space opera consist of a rebel alliance brought together from far ranging planets and galactic groups, like Admiral Ackbar, the squid-like commander from the Mon Calamari, to the Ewoks. In Herbert’s work, the rebels are the Fremen, who practice a futuristic form of Islam, seeking to free their desert planet Arrakis and bring down a down an intergalactic empire led by the Padishah Shaddam.

“Dune,” Digital, Dall-E 3, 2024.

The references to the Middle East are not flourishes to exoticise the narrative. The Arrakis depicted in the novel and latest film are not exotic, but enigmatic. There is little that is erotic in “Dune”. The Fremen are not the enemy; you root for them as the protagonists. 

The Fremen are led by a messianic figure, Paul Atreides, who engages in a “jihad” against the empire, but Herbert used this term in the sixties well before the notion become associated with terrorism post-9/11.

It is unusual to have the Muslims as good guys. The only other science fiction franchise that does the same is the “Pitch Black” franchise beginning in the mid-Nineties, also examining a futuristic, intergalactic Islam. The protagonist Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, seeks to save another character, simply referred to as “al-Imam” on his way to complete the hajj in New Mecca on the planet Tangiers-3.

I would argue that the prevalence of a futuristic Islam in both sci-fi stories makes neither orientalist. In both cases Islam is not exotic but banal, interwoven in interplanetary daily life.

Finally, all orientalist films essentialise the Middle East as a desert landscape replete with camels and minarets. The desert in “Dune” does not serve as a mere exotic background but makes an ecological argument. The dunes symbolise the vulnerability and precariousness of human life. The heat and sand, Mother Nature if you will, overwhelms this future civilisation and its technology. The theme of insecurity and the quest for water pervade the narrative. In the face of this powerlessness, the Fremen represent a fight for agency by learning to adapt to the desert, not exploit it. 

Science fiction and empire

The revolt in Arrakis seeks to bring down an intergalactic empire, led by the Padishah Shaddam. While Shaddam does sound like Saddam, the future Iraqi president was relatively obscure when Herbert wrote the novel. However, the title Padishah refers to the highest rank in the Ottoman or Persian empires.

Sci-fi has had a long history of dealing with empire and resistance. One of the first sci-fi pioneers, HG Wells published “War of the Worlds” in 1898 as a commentary on the British extermination of the local population of Tasmania, Australia.

Arrakis could very well be a reference to Iraq. The Spacing Guild in “Dune”, a cartel that controls the production of the Spice that is necessary for space travel is certainly influenced by petroleum and OPEC, which was founded in Baghdad in 1960 (albeit the brainchild of a Venezuelan oil minister). 

In this case “Dune” would fit other sci-fi and cli-fi narratives where Iraq emerges as an imaginative space challenging the 2003 invasion. The film “Avatar” critiqued the rise of mercenary companies, where the planet Pandora stands in for Iraq and Unobtainium, like the Spice, is a reference to oil.  

The 2004 reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” portrayed the villains, the robotic Cylons as Americans, and the humans resisting them as the insurgents, forcing TV audiences, particularly in the US, to see the conflict from an Iraqi perspective.

While sci-fi as a genre is escapist in nature, it simultaneously brings our current reality into greater focus. It reveals our current technophobias and anxieties over the convergence between scientific advance and what it means to be human. 

Close to 50 years separate the novel “Dune” and the film. The themes of ecological precariousness, rapacious resource extraction, and resistance to occupation are as relevant now as they were when the novel was first published. In this case “Dune”, a work of science fiction, is also a political fact.

Tourists in Greece suffered frustrations on Friday when government authorities abruptly closed the Parthenon from midday until evening. There were fears that the tourists up there would have a heat stoke, with the high forecast as much as 104°F (40C ).

Image by nonbirinonko from Pixabay

Wired discusses the controversy over the informal name for this heat wave, Cerberus, which started with the Italian meteorological society. The reference is to Kerberos in Greek mythology, the many-headed dog who guarded the gates of the underworld to keep its inmates from leaving.

One problem with naming the heat wave with reference to Cerberus is that the realm of the death-god Hades in Greek mythology was not hot. It was a cold, dank and grim labyrinth.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

It was thinkers in the later Christian and Muslim traditions who imagined Gehenna or hell as hot. That is certainly the case in the Qur’an, which talks of sinners being grilled like kebabs, or words to that effect.

So a heat wave shouldn’t be named Cerberus.

The god of fire and volcanoes and forges was Hephaistos (Hephaestus). The modern Greek word for volcano, efaisteio, comes from his name. He’d be a better classical referent for heat waves than the three-headed, or a hundred-headed, or the snake-headed Cerberus. Different classical authors described him differently.

But back to the Parthenon. It is named for Athena, the “virgin” (modern Greek parthena), who lived at the Acropolis along with eleven other major Olympian gods — Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollo, Artemis, Hephaistos, Ares, Aphrodite, Hermes, and Dionysos, who are represented at the eastern freize of the Parthenon.

Image by Gonbiana from Pixabay

The ancient Greek myths are suggestive for our own climate problems, which are taking on cosmic dimensions.

Hephaistos midwifed Athena’s birth. Her father, Zeus, had a splitting headache and Hephaistos, being a god of crafts, thought he knew what to do about it. He grabbed an axe and split Zeus’s head open. There emerged Athena, fully grown and in armor, bearing arms.

Athena then had to fight her uncle, the sea god Poseidon, for control of Mt. Olympus and the city around it. Athena won, in an early feminist victory over male chauvinism. Hence, Greece’s capital is called Athens. I suppose one could interpret her myth as a victory of land-based civilization over the threatening storm surges and floods of the sea.

But the very god of fire who midwifed her birth from the head of Zeus now threatens her city. The twelve gods, the Dodecatheon, can’t be approached in the fiery midday over which Hephaistos presides.

That mythological sites of ancient civilization, and mythological figures, suggest themselves so readily to describe our climate crisis points to how overwhelming it increasingly seems. We feel the need to evoke the mythological when talking about it.

Some have suggested, the Wired article reports, that these mythological images are too frightening for the public. From my point of view, the public isn’t nearly frightened enough, otherwise there would be way more solar panels on rooftops and people would be voting for green candidates, not fascist or neoliberal ones.

It is true, however, that the public should be constantly reminded that the climate crisis is a challenge we can meet as a species. If we go to zero carbon by 2050, the increase in global heating will immediately stop. And gradually, all the extra CO2 in the atmosphere will be scrubbed out by the oceans and other carbon sinks. Another 150 years and we could get back almost to normal.

If Athena could defeat Poseidon, we too can defeat the natural disasters that threaten our cities. But only if we take this threat very, very seriously. It isn’t just an annoyance to tourists that we are speaking about. It is an accelerating, profound change in the conditions of our existence.

It is cosmic. It is mythological.

Calling Oran “a lost island of the damned,” Camus’ narrator Dr. Bernard Rieux elaborates the pandemic’s brutal psychic impact on Oran’s residents – their response to enforced quarantine, overcrowded hospitals, profiteering by plutocrats, shortages of food and medical supplies as well as the rising death toll and their own vulnerability to sickness. Camus explores those that succumb to the disease, those that exploit it, those that fight it and those whose inaction makes it worse. The inhumane reaction of the Oran authorities eerily echoes President Trump’s months-long denialist response, who said as late as February 26 when there were fifteen cases of Covid-19 in the U.S., that these would soon be “down to zero.” Less than six weeks later, there are over 300,000 cases and 9,000 deaths. In The Plague, early signs of a dangerous crisis manifest as hundreds of rats fall dead in the streets and several rat-bitten humans die alarmingly agonizing deaths. Seeing this, Dr. Rieux expresses outrage that the authorities are unprepared for the plague’s arrival, unwilling to recognize its existence, and unrealistic about its effects. He insists, “Everything points to its being the plague” and provides simple guidance: “Do your job as it should be done” — the exact manner in which Dr. Fauci describes his work. Neither Oran’s Prefect nor America’s President follows this advice.

Embed from Getty Images
1952: Albert Camus The Post Existentialist – unpub. (Photo by Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images).

At a meeting of the health committee, Oran’s Prefect refers to the rat-deaths as a “false alarm,” arguing that their appearance might be the result of pranksters. He thought “it was unwise to jump to conclusions” and that a “wait-and-see” policy is best, reminiscent of Trump’s “Let’s see what happens” approach. Like Trump nervously watching the stock market, the Prefect doesn’t want to panic the citizens who, as described by Dr. Rieux, “work hard solely with the object of making money, doing business and getting rich.” Dr. Rieux tells the Prefect that “a policy of wait-and-see is unwise” and urges “rigorous prophylactic measures to prevent its killing off half the population of this town.” But the Prefect refuses because “there was no absolute certainty” that it was the plague.

Place de la République, Colonial Oran

As with Trump, the plague’s reality eventually becomes undeniable, but the response is ineffectual. The government orders the dead rats to be swept up from the streets — a “deratization” policy designed for good optics, but epidemiologically useless now that the plague was carried by fleas. The Prefect encourages the newspapers to rally the population that the pestilence is under control when it is not, just as Trump said, a month ago, “We have it totally under control.” The Oran city Prefect promotes the notion that 130 – 150 deaths would be a “victory” just as Trump — the person whose job is to keep Americans safe — callously said that 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths meant he had done an “altogether good job.” Like the Oran Prefect, the President has blood on his hands.

Trump ignored warnings from the highest levels of government when U.S. spy agencies sounded the alarm to the coronavirus threat as early as Jan. 3. He continued to minimize the virus threat for more than two months when its horrific effects were obvious across the globe and in the United States. He facilitated the uncontrolled, unseen spread of the virus by failing to build a reliable testing infrastructure that still remains spotty. After declaring a national emergency on March 13, his response remained slow and schizophrenic. Just as quack cures and superstitions entice the citizens of Oran, the use of untested and possibly unsafe drugs have been touted by Trump based on a “good feeling.” Though he rates his response a “10,” the result is a chaotic mess, with people whipsawed by contradictory messages which exacerbates efforts to mitigate the disease.

The Recount: “Trump’s Coronavirus Calendar”

Like the Oran authorities, Trump views the pandemic as a public relations problem where his only responsibility is to manage a PR campaign. At a nightly propaganda TV show, he surrounds himself with scientists whose presence confers credibility, though Dr. Deborah Birx’ incessant, puppet-like nodding behind Trump diminishes her status while at least Dr. Fauci occasionally contradicts the ignoramus. Dr. Rieux would never associate himself with the Oran Prefect who he regards with disdain. Trump rambles incoherently while spewing lies, disinformation, grievances, media attacks and non-stop self-congratulations rather than compassion, honesty, and knowledge. As if speaking of Trump, Camus says in The Plague, “The most incorrigible vice being that of ignorance that fancies that it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.”

Trump’s ignorance and incompetence is killing people. He created no comprehensive federal response with reliably consistent messaging. He failed to take control of the manufacture of ventilators and protective equipment. He has not nationalized the purchase and supply chain. With the federal government incapable of responding in a decisive and unified manner, individual governors and mayors have been forced to lead a patchwork of strategies that will increase the death toll. With no national stay-at-home mandate, red states were slow to lock down and nine states still have not done so, putting everyone at risk. Fighting the plague is an “all or nothing battle,” Dr. Rieux cautions the Oran authorities. “No longer were there individual destinies, only a collective destiny. We must act in solidarity.” Trump’s denialist response and inaction led to a lost 70 days when a combination of wide-spread testing, selective quarantine, social distancing, ventilator manufacture, and increased production of personal protective equipment production all would have saved lives. Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirchner, on the Deconstructed podcast with Mehdi Hasan, argued that Trump is criminally responsible for coronavirus deaths. “He acted in a grossly negligent way, and he failed to act,” said Kirchner. “And that failure was a product of gross negligence. He hit the homicide bonanza.”

Like the fascist pestilence symbolized in The Plague, the coronavirus is an evil infiltration into the American body politic that exposes a compromised immune system after three years of a malignant Trumpism — a political disease that left the nation contaminated and entirely unprepared for the economic and public health catastrophe created by the pandemic. As the coronavirus spread uncontrollably and undetected throughout the country, the Republican Party and its propaganda organs — the 21^st century Rats of Oran — spread the Trumpism virus. They spent critical weeks blaming Democrats and the news media for exaggerating the epidemic as yet another “hoax” to undermine the President. Fox news vomited out dangerous misinformation to their elderly audience — average age 69, the demographic most at-risk for Covid-19. Fox news personalities said that it was no worse than the flu and not a big threat in the United States. Their magical thinking and wishful ignorance persists because many prefer not to believe the worst. Fox news viewers were easily susceptible to denialist propaganda and, as a consequence, more vulnerable to the lethal pathogen. Echoing the current diseased state of the Republican party under the Trumpism, Camus describes the inhabitants of the plague-ridden city as resigned to their fate, who begin a “long sleep” of “passive acquiescence,” “vast despondency,” and “utter apathy.” They’ve become “sleepwalkers,” who have lost “every trace of a critical spirit” and “all value judgments” and “resemble nothing at all.”

The Trumpism virus is a government-destroying pathogen that wipes out experts such as the White House’s global pandemic team, an early warning system whose professionals were crucial in coordinating the dozens of institutions — health agencies, hospitals, and state and local governments — that must respond in a crisis. The Trump administration also halted a $200 million early-warning program to train scientists in China and elsewhere to deal with a pandemic two months before the coronavirus spread through Wuhan. The name of the program? “PREDICT.” During the three years that the Trumpism disease infected the government, it has been crippled with vacancies, acting department chiefs and, in some cases, leaders whose professional backgrounds do not match up to the task of managing a pandemic.

A disgusting recent example is Trump putting his man-child son-in-law and business-failure Jared Kushner “in charge” of the government response. “This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy,” writes Michelle Goldberg in the NY Times. Kushner — an obnoxiously arrogant guy with no medical or disaster relief background — flopped in his first appearance Thursday at the Pandemic Reality Show. He contradicted NY Governor Cuomo’s need for ventilators and claimed the government stockpile did not belong to the states. The latter claim was contradicted by the government’s public health website. However, The official government webpage for the Strategic National Stockpile was altered Friday to seemingly reflect Kushner’s incorrect description of the emergency repository. Trumpism caused deaths and mismanaged the United States into being the globe’s coronavirus epicenter, on track to sustain the worst outbreak on earth.

The Oran plague eventually burns out through the tenacious persistence of Dr. Rieux, his sanitation team as well as a vaccine that works on some people. Oran celebrates. But as he listened to the cries of joy, Dr. Rieux knew that such joy is always imperiled: The plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

Camus stressed that defeat of the plague, both biological and political, is necessary but temporary. The coronavirus and Trumpism contagion prove him right. Both must be eradicated. In The Plague, Camus emphasized that the fight to contain and neutralize the plague necessitates the surrender of egocentric goals and self-satisfied tranquility. Evil can only be defeated by the collective intervention of people bound together in common cause. Though he was an atheist who believed that death renders the human condition meaningless and absurd, Camus argued that we create meaning and value in our lives by rebelling against oppressive forces and reducing human misery. Dr. Rieux rebels against the plague by working selflessly and tirelessly to save lives. Yet, all who fight against a pandemic know that their efforts increase the chances of their being infected, like our heroic health care workers who struggle to reduce suffering. But no matter what the odds or the personal danger, Camus urged us to embrace human solidarity and fight against the plagues of fascism, evil, and state injustice. Rieux is willing to “accept final defeat which is death rather than be deprived of the personal sacrament which is freedom. It’s better to live on one’s feet than to die on one’s knees.”

——–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

PHILOSOPHY – Albert Camus

In the fifth century B.C., the playwright Sophocles begins “Oedipus Tyrannos” with the title character struggling to identify the cause of a plague striking his city, Thebes. (Spoiler alert: It’s his own bad leadership.)

As someone who writes about early Greek poetry, I spend a lot of time thinking about why its performance was so crucial to ancient life. One answer is that epic and tragedy helped ancient storytellers and audiences try to make sense of human suffering.

From this perspective, plagues functioned as a setup for an even more crucial theme in ancient myth: a leader’s intelligence. At the beginning of the “Iliad,” for instance, the prophet Calchas – who knows the cause of a nine-day plague – is praised as someone “who knows what is, what will be and what happened before.”

This language anticipates a chief criticism of Homer’s legendary King Agamemnon: He does not know “the before and the after.”

The epics remind their audiences that leaders need to be able to plan for the future based on what has happened in the past. They need to understand cause and effect. What caused the plague? Could it have been prevented?

People’s recklessness

Myths help their audiences understand the causes of things. As narrative theorists like Mark Turner and specialists in memory like Charles Fernyhough emphasize, people learn how to behave from stories and concepts of cause and effect in childhood. The linear sequence of before, now and after communicates the relationships between things and how we, as human beings, understand our own responsibility in the world.

Plague stories provide settings where fate pushes human organization to the limit. Human leaders are almost always crucial to the causal sequence, as Zeus observes in Homer’s “Odyssey,” saying, as I’ve translated it, “Humans are always blaming the gods for their suffering / but they experience pain beyond their fate because of their own recklessness.”

The problems humans create go beyond just plagues: The poet Hesiod writes that the top Greek god, Zeus, showed his disapproval for bad leaders by burdening them with military failures as well as pandemics. The consequences of human failings are a refrain in the ancient critique of leaders, with or without plagues: The “Iliad,” for instance, describes rulers who “ruin their people through recklessness.” The “Odyssey” phrases it as “bad shepherds ruin their flocks.”

Devastating illness

Plagues were common in the ancient world, but not all of them were blamed on leaders. Like other natural disasters, they were frequently blamed on the gods.

But historians, like Polybius in the second century B.C. and Livy in the first century B.C., also frequently recount epidemics striking armies and people in swamps or cities with poor sanitation. Philosophers and physicians also searched for rational approaches – blaming the climate, or pollution.

When the historian Thucydides recounts how a plague with alleged origins in Ethiopia hit Athens in 430 B.C., he vividly describes patients suffering a sudden high fever, shortness of breath and an array of sickly discharges. Those who survived the sickness had endured such delirious fevers that they might have no memory of it all.

Athens as a state was unprepared to meet the challenge of that plague. Thucydides describes the futility of any human response: Appeals to the gods and the work of doctors – who died in droves – were equally useless. The disease wreaked havoc because the Athenians were massed within the city walls to wait out the Spartan armies during the Peloponnesian War.

Yet despite the plague’s terrible nature, Thucydides insists that the worst part was the despair people felt from fear and the “horror of human beings dying like sheep.”

Sick people died of neglect, of the lack of proper shelter and of disease spreading from improper burials in an unprepared and overcrowded city, followed by looting and lawlessness.

Athens, set up as a fortress against its enemies, brought ruin upon itself.

Making sense out of human flaws

Left out of plague accounts are the names of the multitudes who died in them. Homer, Sophocles and Thucydides tell us that masses died. But plagues in ancient narratives are usually the beginning, not the end of the story. A plague didn’t stop the Trojan War, prevent Oedipus’ sons from waging civil war or give the Athenians enough reasons to make peace.

For years after the ravages of the plague, Athens still suffered from in-fighting, toxic politics and selfish leaders. Popular politics led to the disastrous Sicilian Expedition of 415 B.C., killing thousands of Athenians – but still Athens survived.

A decade later, the Athenians again broke into civil factions and eventually prosecuted their own generals after a naval victory in 406 B.C. at Arginusae. In 404 B.C., after a siege, Sparta defeated Athens. But, as we learn from Greek myth, it was – again – really Athens’ leaders and people who defeated themselves.

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Joel Christensen, Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Brandeis University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, the old saying goes. And The Republic (c. 375 BCE), featuring Plato’s teacher Socrates in dialogue with several friends, is unquestionably central to Plato’s thought.

There are few subjects that Plato’s masterpiece does not touch or play on: political theory, education, myth, psychology, ethics, epistemology, cultural criticism, drama and comedy.

Little surprise then, that The Republic continues to be claimed by people with the most diverse convictions and agendas.

The Nazis pointed to the text’s seeming advocacy of eugenics. Yet Martin Luther King Jr nominated The Republic as the one book he would have taken to a deserted island, alongside the Bible.

Karl Popper famously accused The Republic of being a blueprint for illiberal, closed societies. Yet today, we can hear its echoes in the dazzling hyper-libertarian utopias envisaged by the Silicon Valley set.

The Republic’s famous allegory of the cave, which suggests that people’s ordinary sense of reality may be illusory, continues to shape our cultural imagination. It has been revisited again and again in literature, as well as in classic sci-fi films like The Matrix.

So, how can we make sense of this extraordinary text today?

Utopia

Divided into ten “books”, the Republic is mostly taught as a text championing a series of radical prescriptions concerning the best city (polis) or regime (politeia).

At a certain point, Plato’s Socrates tells his young friends that the best city will be one in which the population is divided into three castes. On top will be a ruling caste of (yes) philosopher-guardians.

The second class will be “auxiliaries” or soldiers who will share everything in common, including wives and children. Indeed, Socrates depicts men and women as absolutely equal in all decisive senses. The third class are craftspeople and traders more recognisable to us today.

This is all very pie-in-the-sky stuff. When Socrates suggests that justice is only possible if philosophers become kings, or kings philosophers, his young companion Glaucon jokes that most people on hearing this will probably reach for their weapons.

Less amusing is the proposed power of Socrates’ enlightened guardians to “breed” men and women as breeders selectively mate horses, dogs or fighting birds. The best warriors will get to sleep with the most beautiful women. There will be rigged “lotteries” so that the lesser-credentialed think it is just bad luck that they cannot “hook up” with the alphas.

Babies will be taken from their mothers by the rulers to a kind of state crèche. More ominously, children born with defects will be “hidden away” (katakrypsousin).

Everything is to be arranged so everyone can say “mine” about the same things. Each person will not know who their immediate biological family is. So, they will consider all their fellow-citizens as brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.

Dystopia

We can understand at this point why Nazi educationalists looked to The Republic as a precedent for some of their programs. Contemporary dreamers of a “dark enlightenment” wherein techy people “with high IQs” can “opt out” of wider society are also finding their way back to the future as depicted in The Republic Book V.

Why many other defenders of political liberty admire Plato’s text is less clear. But, as mentioned, there are many other things the book discusses than Socrates’ seemingly ideal “city in speech”.

The Republic’s principal concern is the question of what justice is. Does being just benefit the just persons themselves, or those whom they aid, or both? Is it good for a person to live a just life?

To answer, The Republic sets up a connection between types and parts of the human psyche (mind, soul) and different political systems. For some systems and people, honour and its pursuit is considered the highest good. In other societies, like our own, the pursuit of money as the means to pleasure, power, and satisfying desires is predominant.

Socrates plausibly suggests that it would seem to be best that our political leaders are people who desire wisdom. For such people will be least moved by the desires for status and riches that produce civil dissension.

But then, it is almost impossible to imagine how such a ruling elite could ever be created without great injustices. How everybody else could be “persuaded” to accept their claims to rule is also unclear – as is grasping just how Plato’s guardians could get ordinary citizens to give up their kids to the state for the greater good.

The cycle of regimes

Given these problems with the utopian interpretation of The Republic, some modern commentators take seriously Socrates’ repeated hints that we should consider what he is saying with a grain of salt.

In the wider context of the dialogue, Socrates presents the image of the three-caste city in order to provide his friends with an image of what a just individual soul would be like. Such a soul would be one in which wisdom rules over the desires for honour and pleasures. “Justice” would apparently be something like the inner harmony of the soul’s parts.

The famous “best city”, which has produced such divided reactions from commentators, is therefore a methodological model. If we can glimpse justice in something as big as a city, Socrates suggests, we might know what to look for in a person.

Small wonder that Socrates warns his friend: “you should know, Glaucon, that in my opinion, we will never get a precise answer using our present methods of argument”.

If there is a political message in The Republic at all, it is not about creating a recipe for the ideal city.

The true meaning of the Republic instead lies in how it stages the inescapable difficulties of political life, given what Isaiah Berlin called the crooked timber of human nature.

In fact, not just Socrates’ kallipolis (beautiful city), but each of the political regimes that he examines in The Republic prove flawed and unstable.

Regimes led by honour-loving nobles (timocracies) can only survive based on elites’ harshness towards inferiors, sowing grapes of wrath. Such elites tend over time to become scornful of public duties, and as they age, to turn from matters of war to finance:

finding ways of spending money for themselves, then they stretch the laws relating to money-making, then they and their wives disobey the laws altogether.

This vision sounds oddly prophetic after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8. Oligarchies hollow out the middle classes. By lending money at interest, they create “a considerable amount of drones and beggars in the city”. At a certain point, these “have-nots” rightly revolt. Democracies follow.

But Plato is no simple friend of democracies, either. Socrates asserts that the democratic citizens’ love of freedom tends to undermine traditional authorities. Teachers become afraid of students and parents of their children. As the generations mix, “the old stoop to play … and pleasantry, imitating the young for fear of appearing disagreeable and authoritarian …”

These passages have appeared prescient to many conservatives since the 60s.

A moral vacuum ensues in which demagogues can arise, promising to make the city great again. At this point, Socrates warns, democracies can devolve into tyrannies.

In these deeply unjust regimes, a single man can play out his hubris and pathologies on entire peoples, after removing his foes by force or fraud.

For some commentators, these passages have seemed most prophetic after 2016.

Justice, philosophy, and the cave

What, then, does The Republic say positively about justice?

An iconic exchange in The Republic pits Socrates against the sophist Thrasymachus. The latter argues that “might” (boldness, strength and cunning) “makes right”.

Socrates’ claim that justice involves harming no one, and cultivating the knowledge to benefit others and oneself, sounds to the “beast-like” Thrasymachus as naive as it still sounds to “realists” today.

Glaucon and Adeimantus, amongst Socrates’ other companions, also wonder whether treating others justly is not a recipe for individual unhappiness. Anticipating Mr Tolkein, Glaucon puts Socrates’ view to the test by imagining a magic ring conferring invisibility. Wouldn’t even Socrates take advantage of this power to feather his own nest on the quiet?

Unbelievably, Socrates replies “no”.

The argumentative arc of The Republic in fact closes in book IX, at the end of the account of a tyrant’s life. Here, we are made to see that the tyrant’s amoral pursuit of egoistic appetites, which people often imagine as the best of all possible lives, is a recipe for misery and paranoia.

In one of the mathematical plays that dot the text, Socrates tells us that such a monomaniac will be exactly 729 times less happy than a wise person. For the author of The Republic, grinning with irony, it is exponentially better to be just than to live unjustly.

Only when we see this can we grasp why Plato spills so much ink in The Republic on how to educate a lover of wisdom, turning them away from the lures of money, fame, flattery and power. The famous images of the divided line, the cave, and the Good beyond being are each produced in the course of describing such an ideal education.

In the cave allegory mentioned above, Socrates depicts ordinary people in a cave, seated for their whole lives watching images projected on the walls by “hidden persuaders” (sophists, probably, and politicians). Not knowing any better, they assume that the images they see are real things. Plato’s image itself seems an uncanny anticipation of modern culture industries and today’s ubiquitous screen technologies.

The philosopher is s/he who has turned around and climbed out of the cave to see reality for themselves.

Justice for such a person is voluntarily “going back down” into the cave to help others likewise turn their souls around. It is surely no mere chance that the first word of the Republic is Socrates telling us that “I went down yesterday to the Piraeus …”

The Socratic task is not easy. Socrates himself paid a heavy price for pursuing it. So the philosopher must be trained to “run the gauntlet of all tests”:

striving to examine everything by essential reality and not by opinion, holding on his way through all this without tripping in his reasoning …

The Republic itself can be read as a masterclass in this kind of training. For this reason, it rightly remains a classic text, and a timeless challenge to readers of all persuasions.

Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.