Public speech, which had once been the medium through which free men actually thought together about shared problems, had become a performance of thinking.
Without having much specialized knowledge, I am generally skeptical of claims that what is now a venue for political showmanship were venues of “real thinking” in a prior era. Are there reasons to think that prior to Athens becoming an empire, the debates in the assembly were more authentic, instead of being a place for special interests to rationalize and advocate for their interests?
I feel like we can see something similar in the trajectory of our politics. Go read a speech by dunno, Abraham Lincoln. It’s clear that it appeals to reason and tries to justify its positions logically. This doesn’t tell us that every single politician was therefore a honest and good faith advocate. But it tells us that society at large valued logic and rationality and consistency as fundamental to believable arguments enough that politicians felt a need to perform them, which is a good position to start from. Today a politician with the same style would likely be penalised because they’d appear to be boring and perhaps a bit too snotty compared to the Guys Just Like Us, who speak broken nonsense or parrot thoughtless slogans.
“the debates in the assembly were [...] a place for special interests to rationalize and advocate for their interests” seems like a better situation than the one I described. But I don’t see how even what you describe could build or maintain the capacities that made Athens the preeminent city in Greece in the first place.
Perhaps I should ask more directly: what leads you to think that the the public speech of pre-empire Athens had been “a medium through which free men actually thought together about shared problems”?
Is it because Athens became the preeminent city in Greece?
That, plus the early-empire cultural output of Athens, plus the discussion in Socrates’s time of higher standards in fairly recent memory, plus the much better documented (because mass literacy plus recency) arc in America pre vs postwar.
My impression on Greece and Rome is that there’s not a lot of good info about the more functional eras of their republics because people didn’t feel much need to write for the vindication of history, because there was more opportunity to talk through their differences to solve local problems.
But of course that forces us to speculate if we want to have any opinions at all.
That, plus the early-empire cultural output of Athens
What are you thinking of here?
The most lasting cultural impacts of Athens are works of Plato and Aristotle and the methods of inquiry / intellectual traditions that they started. But those were post-Athenian-empire.
And I’m generally not very convinced that their military success is indicative of a healthy, rational, polity that is openly trying to understand and solve shared problems. Notably, the Spartans ultimately defeated the Athenians, and they do not have a reputation for active and open discourse.
plus the discussion in Socrates’s time of higher standards in fairly recent memory
Aeschylus and Herodotus[1] seem like they’re trying to contribute to some sort of live conversation about where current norms and institutions came from and what problems they were invented to solve; Aeschylus by trying to imagine e.g. the origins of the jury trial in Oresteia, Herodotus by literally going around asking people in different places questions about the origins of their institutions, and comparing this with the stories he’s heard about Greek origins.
On this particular desideratum I think Sparta is underrated; at the time it was clearly understood to have a deliberative culture (public assemblies, the sort of mixed constitution that prevents unipolar power from accreting), just one with unusually strictly regulated personal conduct, and of course limited to a fairly small class. Spartans weren’t very talkative to foreigners (whence we get the term “laconic”), but I get the impression there was a language barrier because they spoke a very different dialect of Greek. Herodotus reports that they were capable of coherent enough action to be relevant at all to the king of Persia long before Thermopylae, and Thucydides’ testimony seems to imply some level of live collective problem solving as late as the Pelloponesian War, which he compares favorably with Athens’s contemporary discourse.
Xenophon’s Anabasis demonstrates these capacities in a military expedition contemporaneous with Socrates’s trial, which is some evidence against my claims in the essay. Greek soldiers stranded in Mesopotamia defaulted to assemblies, voting, and elected leadership, which suggests deliberative culture was deeply embedded enough to reproduce itself under pressure. Sometimes colonies and military expeditions retain capacities that are already in advanced decay in the imperial core; Imperial Rome documented that pattern pretty well.
After the World Wars American public discourse looks to me like it declined very clearly.
Presidential debates shouldn’t suffer from e.g. improvements in access creating the false impression of reduced elite quality. Compare the Nixon-Kennedy debate, the Ford-Carter debate, and the Trump-Biden debate. N-K were dishonest but trying to fool voters who were trying to track arguments and figure out what was going on. I recently watched Nixon’s Checkers speech too; it’s famous as an innovative subject-changing appeal to emotion but to my contemporary ears the main thing that stood out was that most of the speech was an appeal to reason that would be tedious to someone who wasn’t thinking explicitly in terms of argument and evidential value.
Back to debates. F-C was sound bites designed to give the superficial impression of argument. T-B was just trading personal insults. I watched the unofficial version on Rumble where RFK Jr inserted himself and there was a strong contrast between the officially included debaters and RFK Jr, who just … answered the questions, like it was still the ’90s.
Without having much specialized knowledge, I am generally skeptical of claims that what is now a venue for political showmanship were venues of “real thinking” in a prior era. Are there reasons to think that prior to Athens becoming an empire, the debates in the assembly were more authentic, instead of being a place for special interests to rationalize and advocate for their interests?
I feel like we can see something similar in the trajectory of our politics. Go read a speech by dunno, Abraham Lincoln. It’s clear that it appeals to reason and tries to justify its positions logically. This doesn’t tell us that every single politician was therefore a honest and good faith advocate. But it tells us that society at large valued logic and rationality and consistency as fundamental to believable arguments enough that politicians felt a need to perform them, which is a good position to start from. Today a politician with the same style would likely be penalised because they’d appear to be boring and perhaps a bit too snotty compared to the Guys Just Like Us, who speak broken nonsense or parrot thoughtless slogans.
“the debates in the assembly were [...] a place for special interests to rationalize and advocate for their interests” seems like a better situation than the one I described. But I don’t see how even what you describe could build or maintain the capacities that made Athens the preeminent city in Greece in the first place.
Perhaps I should ask more directly: what leads you to think that the the public speech of pre-empire Athens had been “a medium through which free men actually thought together about shared problems”?
Is it because Athens became the preeminent city in Greece?
That, plus the early-empire cultural output of Athens, plus the discussion in Socrates’s time of higher standards in fairly recent memory, plus the much better documented (because mass literacy plus recency) arc in America pre vs postwar.
My impression on Greece and Rome is that there’s not a lot of good info about the more functional eras of their republics because people didn’t feel much need to write for the vindication of history, because there was more opportunity to talk through their differences to solve local problems.
But of course that forces us to speculate if we want to have any opinions at all.
What are you thinking of here?
The most lasting cultural impacts of Athens are works of Plato and Aristotle and the methods of inquiry / intellectual traditions that they started. But those were post-Athenian-empire.
And I’m generally not very convinced that their military success is indicative of a healthy, rational, polity that is openly trying to understand and solve shared problems. Notably, the Spartans ultimately defeated the Athenians, and they do not have a reputation for active and open discourse.
This seems seems like relevant evidence.
Aeschylus and Herodotus [1] seem like they’re trying to contribute to some sort of live conversation about where current norms and institutions came from and what problems they were invented to solve; Aeschylus by trying to imagine e.g. the origins of the jury trial in Oresteia, Herodotus by literally going around asking people in different places questions about the origins of their institutions, and comparing this with the stories he’s heard about Greek origins.
On this particular desideratum I think Sparta is underrated; at the time it was clearly understood to have a deliberative culture (public assemblies, the sort of mixed constitution that prevents unipolar power from accreting), just one with unusually strictly regulated personal conduct, and of course limited to a fairly small class. Spartans weren’t very talkative to foreigners (whence we get the term “laconic”), but I get the impression there was a language barrier because they spoke a very different dialect of Greek. Herodotus reports that they were capable of coherent enough action to be relevant at all to the king of Persia long before Thermopylae, and Thucydides’ testimony seems to imply some level of live collective problem solving as late as the Pelloponesian War, which he compares favorably with Athens’s contemporary discourse.
Xenophon’s Anabasis demonstrates these capacities in a military expedition contemporaneous with Socrates’s trial, which is some evidence against my claims in the essay. Greek soldiers stranded in Mesopotamia defaulted to assemblies, voting, and elected leadership, which suggests deliberative culture was deeply embedded enough to reproduce itself under pressure. Sometimes colonies and military expeditions retain capacities that are already in advanced decay in the imperial core; Imperial Rome documented that pattern pretty well.
Herodotus was not from Athens originally but went there to publish.
I do not understand this reference. Which war are we talking about here?
After the World Wars American public discourse looks to me like it declined very clearly.
Presidential debates shouldn’t suffer from e.g. improvements in access creating the false impression of reduced elite quality. Compare the Nixon-Kennedy debate, the Ford-Carter debate, and the Trump-Biden debate. N-K were dishonest but trying to fool voters who were trying to track arguments and figure out what was going on. I recently watched Nixon’s Checkers speech too; it’s famous as an innovative subject-changing appeal to emotion but to my contemporary ears the main thing that stood out was that most of the speech was an appeal to reason that would be tedious to someone who wasn’t thinking explicitly in terms of argument and evidential value.
Back to debates. F-C was sound bites designed to give the superficial impression of argument. T-B was just trading personal insults. I watched the unofficial version on Rumble where RFK Jr inserted himself and there was a strong contrast between the officially included debaters and RFK Jr, who just … answered the questions, like it was still the ’90s.
Usually the war would be WW2 but I don’t know if that’s the relevant context here.