Literary Saturday: The View From Lycabettus

A few years ago I was lucky enough to have some time in Athens, while attending one of those endless conferences during which the world’s affairs are handled in such an exemplary fashion.  I think this one may have been about relations between Turkish and Greek Cypriots.  It went as these things usually do; the problems of Cyprus weren’t solved, but wise words were exchanged and many good dinners were had.  The participants agreed that more conferences in the future would be helpful.  It was an unusually magical conference; it overlapped a total eclipse of the moon and to see the Parthenon under the reddish-orange disk of an eclipsed moon was an unexpected delight.

During a break in the proceedings I had time to do something I’ve long wanted to do: I climbed Lycabettus, the hill in Athens that towers over the nearby Parthenon.  From the summit, drinking in the fresh air that blows in from the Aegean, you can see from the port of Piraeus out to the mountains to the north.  In ancient times, I realized as I stood there, a young Athenian could have seen everything that mattered.  Standing there you could see the rich and poor neighborhoods of the city; you could see the long walls that led down to the port and made Athens secure against attacks from the land while the city commanded the sea.  You could see the farms and fields that surrounded the city — and you would know which families in which houses inside the walls owned which farms beyond.  You could see the connection between rural wealth and urban power: how the families with unusually large or unusually fertile farms built in the nicer parts of the city.  When you entered the assembly, you would know who owned what, who made their living from what branch of agriculture or commerce, and the voting alignments in the assembly would tally up with your observations of how different interest groups and kin groups were linked.

In other words, from the height of Lycabettus you could see the layout of your world; a reflective mind could draw the connections between physical facts and politics.  Society was transparent and comprehensible; it all made sense.

This experience of understanding the polis must have been exhilarating; I think it had something to do with the extraordinary clarity and simplicity of Greek thought at its peak.  The human mind could understand the world; reason, operating on the date provided by the senses, could work its way to a clear understanding of the forces that made things work.  “Δος μοι που στω, και κινω την γην ,” said Archimedes; with a lever long enough “Give me a place where I can stand, and I can move the world.”  The summit of Lycabettus was a place where you could stand and acquire a perspective that made sense.  With that kind of vision, you really could change the world.

It didn’t work that way for long.  In the fourth and fifth centuries BC, when Athens was at the peak of its power, the polis was a self contained unit, the master of its fate.  But already in ancient times, when Philip of Macedon established control of Greece, the masters of your political fate had retreated over the horizon.  The polis was no longer enough, and Lycabettus was no longer the kind of που στω (pou sto) that could show you the world. That is even more true today.  From Lycabettus you can see the ghastly concrete housing developments that sprawl through the countryside, but you can’t see the European Central Bank that held interest rates low to accommodate Germany’s slow growth in the last decade even as housing markets in Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain overheated.  You can see the port of Piraeus and the cruise ships carrying tourists to the Aegean islands, but there’s nothing to show you the factories in China that make the cheap goods that have destroyed local manufacturing in countries like Greece, even as they reduce the prices of the goods we all need. You might see the contrail of a NATO jet overhead, but there is nothing to show you the military structures that keep you secure — certainly nothing comparable to the views of the long walls during the Peloponnesian War.

Standing on Lycabettus I found myself thinking about my own standing place: what is the spot from which I see the world, to the extent that I do.  We all have a που στω (pronounced pooh stow), a vantage point from which we look out on reality and try to make sense of it.  Mine, I think, is a kind of tripod. I spent my childhood in the American South, and at the age of 11 spent a year in the UK.  At 13 I headed north to a boarding school in New England.  Those three experiences, different enough to make me aware of the power of cultural differences but similar enough to make it possible, just, to make sense of the whole picture, and all standing in a fairly close relationship to the realities of global power in recent centuries, both help me make sense of the world — and shape the sort of things that I see.

It’s not a bad standing place; having to adjust to very large differences between the American south and the north, not to mention the UK, gave me a sense of cultural difference that in later years I’ve been able to apply to the much greater differences found throughout the world.  I understood that people could interpret the same words and actions in quite different ways, and that if you observed people carefully, much of what they did and said that seemed incomprehensible would take on meaning. I also figured out that it was no good trying to get people to behave as you expected them to; you had to manage as best you could with people as they are.  It was also an interesting education in history.  The south, then even more than now, was still shaped by the consequences of defeat; many of the people I met in the UK remembered when their country had been the world’s greatest power, and had experienced the decline through their own careers.  (On one particularly memorable day my father took me to visit the House of Commons.  By sheer chance, Winston Churchill happened to come in and take his seat in the backbenches.)  And in Massachusetts, where they had never known decline or defeat, the deep self confidence of unbroken victory was only beginning to tremble as the age of the Wasp Ascendancy began to draw towards its close.  Culture, history and power: I’ve been trying to figure them out ever since.

I was lucky in the three standing places into which I more or less fell by chance.  It was a kind of Goldilocks situation; the three cultures I lived in were not so similar as to give me a one dimensional view of the world — but they were not so wildly different from each other that I couldn’t make sense of them.  I was also lucky that in every case — England vs. America, North vs. South — there is a large literature reflecting on the similarities and different whether reading a novel like Henry James’ The Bostonians or Portrait of a Lady, I’m working to a deeper understanding of the three cultures I’ve known since childhood.

That που στω doesn’t so much prescribe my ideas as it defines my obsessions.  Readers of Special Providence and God and Gold don’t have to look to hard to see ways in which that tripartite childhood experience informs both the subject matter of those books (reflections on Anglo-American culture and its relationship to world power) and their method (an attempt to see quite different ideas whole, neither suppressing the contradictions between them or losing sight of the deep connections they share).  No doubt there are many things I don’t see well from this stance, but the longer I reflect on the view from my own Lycabettus the more engaged I am with it. And while no standing point can give a human being the kind of omniscience and all-comprehension that God has, this viewpoint has given me a glimpse of something bigger than itself — and for that I’m grateful.

If there are any readers out there with some time to kill, let me suggest that you think about your own που στω.  What experiences, what encounters ground you in our world?  What shapes the angle(s) from which you look out at the passing scene?  What does it help you see — and what are some of the things that might be hidden from you because of your characteristic stance?  If you are raising kids, it might be useful to think about what kind of experiences you should be giving them that will help them see the world most clearly and usefully in the years ahead.

I didn’t always like the changes from US to UK or from south to north, and making sense of them was hard sometimes.  I invested a lot of emotional energy in childhood and adolescence trying to fit in worlds that didn’t quite fit me.  But over time, that hard work made me a better and more interesting person.  To this day I encourage my students to get out there, especially in the United States, and get to know regions or subcultures to which they haven’t been exposed.  You can learn a lot more from spending a summer as a waiter at an IHOP in Tulsa, I tell the New Englanders, than serving as a flunky at a Washington research institute or a media outlet in Manhattan.  Every now and then, they listen — and nobody who has followed this advice has ever told me that they regretted the adventure.

It’s easier for young people to take this advice, but for all of us the που στω isn’t something you have to take for granted.  It’s something you can develop.  I still plan my travel with an eye to encountering cultures and ideas that can extend the range of my sympathy and understanding.

Even if it doesn’t give you the ability to move the world, thinking about your standing point and working on making it a higher and better one will help you with another project the Greeks recommend: γνῶθι σεαυτόν.  Know yourself.