Monday, December 28, 2015

Hate Mail - Democracy Then Was Not Democracy Now

Someone is pissed off that what I said this morning would disqualify the glorious, so-called Athenian democracy of the classical period. 

Well, you tell me. Only men who were citizens of Athens- based largely on ethnic considerations, who owned land could vote and not all of them could, for example, any man who was accused of having been anally penetrated during sex would lose their rights of citizenship*.  There were other disqualifications. 

Though the greatest number of people who were not allowed to participate in the vaunted Athenian democracy were slaves and women who had no political rights and, in the case of slaves, hardly had any rights at all.  So, Athenian democracy was pretty much like the worst of American democracy at the end of the 18th and the early 19th century, only a lot worse.   It makes America under Jim Crow look, by comparison, quite liberal. 

The word used to describe that ancient regime of rule by men of certain families who owned property while the vast majority of people living under their rule were deprived of any rights, is the same one we use for a government of universal suffrage and equal rights but they're not the same thing, at all.  

You tell me if you would like to live under classical Athenian democracy and I'll tell you your gender, your economic status and your ethnicity without having to think too hard about it.  I will also tell you your politics.   Same for democracy before the great reform movements of the 19th century which were all based in the teachings of the Bible, the ones which succeeded here instead of producing what atheists sold as workers paradises in various places.   They called those "democracy" too.   You want to live under the rules of the "German Democratic Republic?" 

In ancient Greece there is one particular adult male who is identified with homosexual behavior. The Greeks had a name for this individual, “kinaidos’. This individual was the one who took the passive receptive role in the male homosexual behavior of anal intercourse.

In doing so by being willing to take the passive, submissive role he was seen as unworthy to be a free man, and more like a male prostitute. As a result forfeited his right as a citizen to hold office. The man who would allow himself to be anally penetrated it was thought would also subject himself to the abuse of alcohol, eating, money, or power.

“An adult male was not supposed to take the receptive role. According to Plutarch, “Those who enjoy playing the passive role we treat as the lowest of the low, and we have not the slightest degree of respect for them.” The passive role was the role played by a woman, a youth, or a slave; it was shameful for an adult man-though not for a youth or a slave. A youth’s subordination to an older man was “natural” and temporary, and a slave by definition subordinate to his master.” 

Greenberg,Transformations of Homosexuality-Based Classifications, p. 181 in The Gender/Sexuality Reader Culture, History, Politico Economy, editors Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo

Screwed up kind of "democracy", huh?  

Update:  I have always and will remain a political blogger, it's just that my studies of the problems of politics in the past decade have clarified a lot of these issues in ways I didn't suspect they would when I started.  

Update 2:   Really, how seriously should I take the insults of anyone who takes what Steve Simels says at two-faced value?  


2 comments:

  1. As I said downstairs, Sparky == it is always a bad idea to judge the brave men and women of an earlier time by the standards of your own. It's a mistake you make constantly, too.

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    1. Oh, you don't have any trouble judging people of former times by your standards of today, when you don't like them or, as in the case of Voltaire, what you absorbed of them through pop atheist "culture" mythology. Or to excuse them when you do like them. I would guess that most of what you know about Voltaire might have come from you watching the dreadful musical of Candide. Which was pretty bad.

      I don't have any trouble judging people of any century who professed Christianity as measured against the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels, or those of today. But, bunky, antisemitism is antisemitism (I mean real antisemitism, not your use of the term to mean anything you don't like like people judging the Israeli government by contemporary standards of criminality) racism is racism, sexism is sexism and stupidity is still stupidity no matter how much your fellow Eschaton Brain Trusters love to tell yourselves how brilliant you are.

      Voltaire's antisemitism, his racism, his sexism, his many and myriad bigotries are what they are. There were other people alive and writing at the same time who didn't share them or share them in nearly the same proportion. John Woolman, for example.

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