Talking to the Ghost of Food

Larry Gonick's "Cartoon History of the Universe" is always relevant.

 

  It's good to state at the outset that the reason something was developed might not be the reason it stays successful. In a episode of Radiolab called "The Cataclysm Sentence" contributors were invited to offer the single most useful sentence of human knowledge to pass onto a post-human intelligence, and of course I sarted thinking what I'd choose. I'm not a scientist but I'd want to pass on some fun short-cut to generating curiosity: maybe something about doubling the length of a string, then comparing its pitch when plucked to see, or rather hear, that leap of an octave – or something about the law of gravity: the idea that the very fact of our existence makes us attractive. Cute facts.

 

 One contributor was the excellent youtube mortician Caitlin Doherty, who's appeared on this blog before. She suggested, "You will die. Aand that's the most important thing... so you have to have Religion, you have to have Communities. You have to have Art. Those are created by our fear, and our strange, difficult, weird relationship with Death." Which is one theory for the invention of all the above, but listening along as a fellow atheist, I realised it wasn't mine. 

 What if we created Religion around about the same time we became evolved enough to start wanting to enjoy life, and to realise that wanting to enjoying life had a moral dimension – and that eating meat meant taking a life, for example, but that we still liked the taste? What if we created therefore a way to look upon the world not simply as an environment, but as a provider? What if we developed Religion not to help us deal with death, but to help us deal with killing? As I said however, the reason something was invented isn't necessarily the reason it hangs around.

Here's the episode.

This is somewhere on the riverbank outside Kew.

Who's Better Though, Greeks or Persians? There's Only One Way To Find Out... WATCH VIDEOS!

 I spotted this board game in the window of a charity shop in Clapham back in - let me check... September. Wait, September? That is... That's only two months ago! But it feels like... - 2020 has seemed so long, yet the days have seemed so short. Anyway... I had often wondered where the concept of "Western Civilization" came from, given it seemed to refer to influences from Egypt, Greece, Rome, and what I'll call the Bible Lands, all of which as shown in the map above lie to the North, South and East of the Mediterranean. My confusion however was lifted by the following short, computer-game-sponsored video from "Extra Credits" (and its sequel). I've a lot of time for "Extra Credits". Apparently it's the Greek historian Herodotus who first spun the idea of a pan-Greek identity in his account of the battle of Thermopylae against Persia, the battle depicted in the film 300, the battle the Greeks actually lost. In fact, as the video goes on to explain, the Hellenic alliance would be incredibly short-lived, and Sparta would turn on a rebuilt Athens before the century was over...

 

 In this short window between invasions however, the city-state of Athens would produce the Parthenon, the plays of Aeschylus (the Oresteia), Euripides (Medea) and Sophocles (Oedipus!), the philosophy of Socrates, the sculpture of Phidias, and a culture war between the rule of law and contrarian personality cults whose models bring us pretty much bang up to date.

 

Thanks again, Larry Gonick. 

 

 The influence of the team on the left hand side of the map, in other words, has not been overstated. But it's worth remembering that this fight against "Oriental despotism" (as the Persian Empire is described below in a Sunday Times publication from 1960 enigmatically titled Mainly For Children) fought for at Thermopylae and more successfully a few months later at Salamis, masterminded by Greeks who would later seek comfortable retirement themselves in that same Persian Empire, was a fight for freedom only inasmuch as it was a fight for self-determination, the freedom to, among other things, keep slaves, a model that again brings us pretty much bang up to date.

 On other pages: "Why Bother About Space?" by Colin Ronan, "The Chronicle Of The Great Carp" by Clifford Parker, and "Australian Animals I Have Met" by Axel Poignant.

Tight Lipped of Troy

 Helen, whose abduction famously precipitated the Trojan War, was one of two daughters born to the mortal Leda after Zeus came onto her in the form of a swan, a heritage subtly alluded to by the feathers round Helen's neck in the above still from Troy: Fall of a City, and less subtly alluded to in this illustration from Larry Gonick's far less trashy Cartoon History of the Universe:

 

 

 One thing I didn't know about Helen though, until I read the Odyssey, was that she had known all along about the Greeks' plans to conquer her adopted city with an army hidden in a huge wooden horse. According to her account to Odysseus' son Telemachus a decade later, she had bumped into Odysseus when he sneaked into Troy disguised as a beggar, immediately recognised him, gave him a bath and then, somehow, managed to get him to tell her the whole plan. But then she let him go and didn't tell anyone because she was sick of this now ten-year-long siege and just wanted to be taken back to Greece. Wait, I thought, why had I not heard his before? Was this the normal story? If this was the case, why didn't Helen just sneak out of Troy with Odysseus and end the war there? Happily I was able to ask Natalie Haynes all this, and here is Natalie's reply:

 "Ten points for reading the Odyssey, but you lose a point for thinking there is any such thing as the normal story. So, net gain: nine points... The version of Helen in the Odyssey does say/do that (there is a much madder bit, at least to my eyes, in some versions where, when the Trojan Horse is found and the Greek soldiers are suspected of being inside, Helen does a sort of Mike Yarwood thing and impersonates the voices of the wives of the Greeks. She's so convincing she reduces several horse occupants to tears... HOW MAD IS THAT?) I think the important thing to bear in mind with Helen is that you can't necessarily believe what she says – I think she probably did want to go back to Greece, but the insult of her kidnap/abduction/adultery wouldn't be removed if she just snuck off with Odysseus – the Greeks would still want revenge on Paris and they'd still want to loot Troy, which is the only reason a lot of them are there... So she might as well wait it out in the city than in the Greek camp. But that's just my reading... Also, Homer's Helen is a real plaything of the gods, esp Aphrodite, so she may not have had the option of bailing with Odysseus – Aphrodite threatens her quite pointedly in Iliad 3, when she says she's not that into Paris anymore..."

 So there you go! I now need to find out exactly what Helen did that made Odysseus talk. Might it have been her Mike Yarwood bit? If you have any mythology-based questions of your own, you can ask Natalie here.

 

 

 How many things can YOU name that have nothing to do with either horses or Troy?

Perhaps you'll see them in this video.

A Chair Is a Movable Raised L-Shape For Supporting Your Bum and Back. What?

From Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe. This and youtube and Carl Sagan and Natalie Haynes are how I know history. And books.

 Hot on the heels of Carl Sagan's take-down of Plato, Natalie Haynes Stands Up For The Classics has a wonderful episode on Western Philosphy's first poet, inventor of Atlantis, founder of an Academy that lasted nine-hundred years, and preserver of the Socratic dialogues, here just for balance. Being less familiar with the Socratic dialogues than the show's contributors I have maybe a happier and certainly a more ignorant take on the old guy's hair-splitting. "That's just like your opinion, man" can be a valid contribution I think. Socrates doesn't seem like a nihilist to me, more like Lebowski. And I was never attracted to "Fatso"'s idea of abstract perfection, but listening to this I realise how priviliged that makes me: When the talk turned to advertising I immediately thought, no that's not right, there's no Platonic subtext in advertising, ads aren't selling an idea of perfection, if anything - like politics - they're selling us an identity. But then I suddenly remembered the perfect Mitchell and Webb sketch below (I think written by Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley) and recalled that advertising treats men very differently to women.

 Men are spared the Platonic ideal. There's toxic masulinity and machismo, sure, but there are so many other options too. We still get to be the default. The fact a priviliged layabout like me can find Platonism - the idea that reality's just an imperfect imitation  - so alien a concept perhaps gives ammunition to Sagan's argument that it was always an inherently oppression-friendly philosophy. And I adore Edith Hall's theory it all came from Plato just being very short-sighted.