Athens Then and Now: From the Agora to Antipathy
“Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured”.
Thucydides
Athens, Greece
October 2019
Few would deny that the majority of Greeks have endured an exceptionally tough decade. As the financial crash of 2007 emanated outwards from the US, it was Athens that became the politicised epicentre of the crisis. Despite a national referendum rejecting the harsh terms of a bailout deal from the ‘troika’ of financial institutions, the popular vote was ignored and drastic austerity ensued. Today, anger still lingers not only at the cost to the poorest in society but also at that bitter betrayal in 2015. It’s a far cry from the ideals of the much-lauded Athenian democracy of the ancient world.
As it turns out, the annual ‘Athens Democracy Forum’ is being hosted by the New York Times during our stay. It’s marketed as a barometer of the global conversation on democracy, and indeed it is, but perhaps not in the way it intends to be. Well-heeled academics, journalists and former statesmen unleash their grand oratories about the democratic ideal yet the spectators largely listen on in silence. The whole show ends in a mud-slinging match between the argumentative liberal Bernard-Henri Lévy and the ‘reactionary street-fighter’ Steve Bannon. Winning the argument it seems is more important than the collective outcome, while the audience sit and obediently listen to the drivel emanating from a ‘debate’ that even the moderator struggles to get a handle on. It’s embarrassing to watch, and yet not all that different to the daily mud throwing matches that occur in most ‘democratic’ parliaments around the world.
We’ve had enough, so we decide to leave before the closing speeches, and just in time to see an altogether different version of ‘democracy’. As we walk out of the fancy Grande Bretagne Hotel into central Athens, we catch the unmistakable whiff of teargas, quickly followed by a series of loud explosions as the Greek police take another charge at a body of student protesters, angry at the government for refusing to listen to their demands on education. Ridiculously out of place in our smart shirts and chinos having just left the conference, we enter into the mix of anarchist students kitted out in gas masks, motorcycle helmets and makeshift plastic shields.
As we watch the well-rehearsed dance between protesters and police, students tell us how from their perspective, they had little choice but to protest, no one would listen to them otherwise. The stark contrast between the empty words in the grand forum to the actions in the streets is only softened by the antagonism common to both, with neither giving meaningful proposals for a way forward out of this repeating cycle of grievance, protest and rejection. And all the while the Parthenon throngs with tourists admiring the democratic legacy of Ancient Athens parallel to where its modern equivalent is losing its legitimacy. And so, looking for answers, we too take our place as tourists in history to examine the origins of one of the most used and abused words in our lexicon. Democracy.
As much as we might like to pretend otherwise, we don’t actually live in ‘democracies’ in the original sense of the word. In fact, our contemporary systems bear little resemblance to the practice of fifth century BCE Athens, from where we take the term. Rather, the model largely in play today instead owes its origins far more to the English, French and American bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who in turn drew inspiration more from the Roman republics than from ancient Athens. And these bourgeois revolutionaries were careful not to design a system of too much participation out of fear of the ‘mob’ and what they might have to say on where the money really goes.
Perhaps it’s understandable that we have so rarely witnessed an Athenian level of direct popular inclusion throughout history. On the face of it, democracy is a pretty wild proposition. That a vast number of people who don’t know each other, who all want different things, might reconcile their differences in the interests of cohabitation? Madness of the highest degree. Plato himself, a man who experienced the Athenian demokratia first-hand, was no friend of such radical notions, and recoiled at the idea that the ordinary man could know anything about the important affairs of state. But unreflective mobs are not a product of democracy, they are a product of disempowerment. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that everyone fears the mob, but very few will ever acknowledge that they are a part of it. The mob is us, we’re it. You too. Healthy democracies require politically aware citizens, true, but we learn by doing. If you want to make people more responsible, you have to give them more responsibility, even if that takes time and a fair number of missteps along the way. The alternative is to hope that every now and again we win the lottery and end up with a truly benevolent (and wise) dictator. And if history is anything to go by, the odds aren’t good. Plato may have argued for government by ‘philosopher kings’, but as the 16th century French thinker Michel de Montaigne put it so eloquently, “et les Rois et les philosophes fientent aussi” – kings and philosophers shit too. Instead, Aristotle’s inkling that objective truth and virtue is ultimately the sum of all subjective truths together in a sort of collective mind arguably lies closer to our evolutionary success as a species. As always though, the devil is in the detail, and the challenge of coordinating that collective mind into a single entity that is at once diverse and unified was as much a challenge then as it is today. Time to dig deeper then.
Most scholars of democracy place its genesis in ancient Athens. But can it really be that after almost 200,000 years of human existence, nobody else had realised that ‘working things out together’ might be preferable to leaving their fate in the hands of a single sovereign? In other words, just how ‘European’, or ‘western’ is the basic idea of democracy anyway?
