The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [116]
By modern standards, this is an example of collective mystification. But such a way of viewing society is distinctly Western, rooted in ideas that originated in ancient Greece, particularly in Athens. The Greeks’ understanding, which began to develop about the same time as Buddhism, was revolutionary in the way it challenged false ideas about society—in fact, just as revolutionary as the Buddha’s challenge to delusive ideas about the self. It has been the norm in societies not exposed to these ideas to view their social structure as being in some way inevitable: as reflecting natural order or divine will. In the West, this way of thinking was challenged and eventually overthrown. The Greeks made a distinction between nomos—the “norms” or conventions of human society (including culture, technology, and so forth)—and phusis, the natural world.
The Greeks realized that, unlike nature, whatever is social convention can be changed: we can reorganize our own societies and in that way determine (or at least attempt to determine) our own destiny. Traditional societies didn’t realize this distinction. Without our understanding of historical development, and therefore of future possibility, premodern peoples usually accepted their own social structures as inevitable, as something that was just as “natural” as their local ecosystems. When rulers were overthrown, new ones took their place at the top of the social pyramid, which was also a religious pyramid: kings were gods or godlike, because of the special role they played in maintaining harmony with the transcendent powers that kept the cosmos going.
We call the Greeks humanists because their great discovery challenged the religious worldview that supported the traditional social order; now humans would decide for themselves how to live. We in the modern world tend to take this insight and all it implies for granted, as foundational to our way of life and how we see the world. But in a way it was as pivotal as the Buddha’s insight into the emptiness of the self. For just as the (sense of) self arises dependent on conditions, so too do the social and political arrangements under which we live. Self and society: both are impermanent, contingent, and therefore changeable.
An unusual set of cultural conditions encouraged this development in classical Greece. Homer’s detached, ironical attitude toward the gods authorized no sacred book, proclaimed no dogma, and set up no powerful priesthood. Greek merchant fleets sparked a great colonizing movement that exposed the Greeks to very different cultures, which encouraged skepticism toward their own myths. Thales founded natural philosophy when he did not use gods to explain the world. Unlike Moses and Muhammad, Solon did not get his tables from a divine source when he gave Athens new laws. Greek drama reduced the gods’ role by emphasizing human motivation and responsibility. Socrates’ philosophical quest for wisdom did not depend upon them. With the help of some remarkable leaders, Athens was able to reorganize itself more or less peacefully. Solon broke the power of the aristocratic assembly by admitting the lower classes. Cleisthenes replaced the four traditional family-based tribes of Athens with ten districts, organized by one’s area of residence. Pericles extended the access of humble citizens to public office. The result was a unique, although limited, experiment in direct democracy (women and slaves did not participate).
Not everyone liked democracy. Plato, for example, offered more elitist plans to restructure the Greek city-state in two of his dialogues, The Republic and Laws. But such alternative visions also presupposed the same basic distinction the Greeks had established between phusis and nomos, nature and social convention.
Virtually every social justice movement in modern times—the abolition of slavery, civil rights, feminism, workers’ rights, anti-apartheid—is a consequence of this distinction. The various revolutions that for better and worse have recreated