I’m a, I think, a typically American, non-philosophical, person. In fact I may be the least introspective Boomer ever born. I’ve tried reading those Greek ‘classics’, can’t get through them.
But I did record the 12 hour Simpsons Tree House of Hours Marathon. If anyone looked at the numbers, I’m betting many people are in my group. I’m not sure what that means about me, or us as a culture.
Shallow?
Goofy?
Stupid?
Schteveo:
Tell me, you have never been in the position of “carrying” your entire department at work and then passed over for a promotion given to someone with better connections? How did you feel? What did you do? Did you quit when you found a better job? Did you “bring an outside offer” to your boss?
Maybe you were never that person but worked with someone who thought they were the Lord’s Gift and was always demanding special treatment? How did that person make you feel? Did you side with that person or did you think that person was a pompous so-and-so? Did you think that person to be disloyal and self-absorbed?
If you experienced any of those things, Homer wrote about just that some 2800 years ago. “The Simpsons” or “The Office” are maybe in more familiar, accessible language.
I tried to, but I never finished reading The Iliad either. But to me, the important thing is that Homer wrote about the exact things that trouble us here and now.
How I learned about this “stuff” is that I was captivated by the Michael Wood PBS series on ancient Troy, when a woman friend introduced me to a distant relation of hers, a grad student in the field who actually did know something about pre-Classical Greece, who patiently explained how “real scholars” were “rolling their eyes” about some of the stuff Wood was saying. In other words, Michael Wood was deemed to rank somewhere between Ken Burns and Erich van Daniken in credibility and hamminess.
Said grad student tossed off the term “shame culture” in reference to the Ancient Greeks with me innocently asked, “what is a shame culture?”, to which I was told the synopsis to The Iliad going something like this.
You probably know the part about how Helen, wife of Menelaus and most gorgeus babe, evah, ran off with Paris, a pretty boy himself, and the Achaean-Greek warrior king pals and fellow suitors had pledged to wage war (for 10 years!) to get her back.
The wives back home are supposed to stay faithful, which worked out for Odyssus and tragically didn’t work out for Agamemnon. But all these dudes kept mistresses “out at the job site”, actually slave girls from towns they plundered along the way to waging war on Troy where Paris was holed up. The gods however, inflicted a plague on the Greeks, and the sticking point was that Agamemnon had to return “his girl.” Don’t ask who these gods are and why this one woman had to be returned and not all the others, it is just one of those happenstance things.
These dudes are warrior-king-plunderers, somewhere placed between street-gang kingpins and Obama Administration functionaries, but some are more “warrior” and others are more “kingly.” Let’s say Aggie is “management” and Achilles is the “talent” — leading his soldiers, he is arguably the best warrior.
Aggie “loses face” by being the gang leader and having to give up “his girl”, for whatever reason. The grad-student woman-friend relative explains that “shame culture” is a different moral system from Judeo-Christian guilt. Such questions that maybe the gods were punishing him for cheating on his wife back home don’t come up. Shame is also about appearances, so in giving up “his girl”, he asks Achilles to “pass off his girl” to him, the head guy. Bad move: this disrespects Achilles big time, but Aggie didn’t know of any other choice owing to his upbringing. But Homer and other Greek thinkers were into this philosophy thang, meaning, how is that “face” and “disrespect” deal working out for you bro, it got Achilles all upset and now you are going to lose the War.
If Achilles was an under-performing beta male, he would just “take this”, but Achilles is by far their best warrior, he knows it, Aggie knows it, the other guys know it. Achilles “takes his football and goes home”, and hijinks ensue, forming the Iliad narrative itself.
Not saying you have to bore yourself slogging through the Iliad, but the point is that Homer had been disrespected by pompous scholars for writing about a pompous twit, Achilles, who walked out on his brother warriors because of a snit about a slave girl. He could have raided another nearby town and gotten himself another slave girl, as if one slave girl or another mattered to these warrior dudes.
The scholar quoted by Rand is saying, “Hold on, bro, this Homer dude is on to something. He could have been another Larry David or Matt Groening. That story could be about an academic department, a shop floor, the workers at a retail store, a sports team, or any place where people are working towards a common purpose but put in competition with each other.
In other words, Homer is still relevant because even though technology and situations have changed, human nature is still the same after all these centuries.
I was memorizing the Illiad shortly before I started studying Renaissance martial arts, and was struck by just how accurate Achilles was portrayed, based on getting to know top people who devoted themselves to mastering hand to hand combat with edged weapons. That seems to foster some of the same personality traits as those that afflicted mighty Achilles, and that recur countless times in history’s great field commanders.
I’d be tempted to say that Homer used random politicians for as the model for his gods, who never have anything at stake other than policy preferences, and used combat soldiers he knew as his model for men.
I’m a, I think, a typically American, non-philosophical, person. In fact I may be the least introspective Boomer ever born. I’ve tried reading those Greek ‘classics’, can’t get through them.
But I did record the 12 hour Simpsons Tree House of Hours Marathon. If anyone looked at the numbers, I’m betting many people are in my group. I’m not sure what that means about me, or us as a culture.
Shallow?
Goofy?
Stupid?
Schteveo:
Tell me, you have never been in the position of “carrying” your entire department at work and then passed over for a promotion given to someone with better connections? How did you feel? What did you do? Did you quit when you found a better job? Did you “bring an outside offer” to your boss?
Maybe you were never that person but worked with someone who thought they were the Lord’s Gift and was always demanding special treatment? How did that person make you feel? Did you side with that person or did you think that person was a pompous so-and-so? Did you think that person to be disloyal and self-absorbed?
If you experienced any of those things, Homer wrote about just that some 2800 years ago. “The Simpsons” or “The Office” are maybe in more familiar, accessible language.
I tried to, but I never finished reading The Iliad either. But to me, the important thing is that Homer wrote about the exact things that trouble us here and now.
How I learned about this “stuff” is that I was captivated by the Michael Wood PBS series on ancient Troy, when a woman friend introduced me to a distant relation of hers, a grad student in the field who actually did know something about pre-Classical Greece, who patiently explained how “real scholars” were “rolling their eyes” about some of the stuff Wood was saying. In other words, Michael Wood was deemed to rank somewhere between Ken Burns and Erich van Daniken in credibility and hamminess.
Said grad student tossed off the term “shame culture” in reference to the Ancient Greeks with me innocently asked, “what is a shame culture?”, to which I was told the synopsis to The Iliad going something like this.
You probably know the part about how Helen, wife of Menelaus and most gorgeus babe, evah, ran off with Paris, a pretty boy himself, and the Achaean-Greek warrior king pals and fellow suitors had pledged to wage war (for 10 years!) to get her back.
The wives back home are supposed to stay faithful, which worked out for Odyssus and tragically didn’t work out for Agamemnon. But all these dudes kept mistresses “out at the job site”, actually slave girls from towns they plundered along the way to waging war on Troy where Paris was holed up. The gods however, inflicted a plague on the Greeks, and the sticking point was that Agamemnon had to return “his girl.” Don’t ask who these gods are and why this one woman had to be returned and not all the others, it is just one of those happenstance things.
These dudes are warrior-king-plunderers, somewhere placed between street-gang kingpins and Obama Administration functionaries, but some are more “warrior” and others are more “kingly.” Let’s say Aggie is “management” and Achilles is the “talent” — leading his soldiers, he is arguably the best warrior.
Aggie “loses face” by being the gang leader and having to give up “his girl”, for whatever reason. The grad-student woman-friend relative explains that “shame culture” is a different moral system from Judeo-Christian guilt. Such questions that maybe the gods were punishing him for cheating on his wife back home don’t come up. Shame is also about appearances, so in giving up “his girl”, he asks Achilles to “pass off his girl” to him, the head guy. Bad move: this disrespects Achilles big time, but Aggie didn’t know of any other choice owing to his upbringing. But Homer and other Greek thinkers were into this philosophy thang, meaning, how is that “face” and “disrespect” deal working out for you bro, it got Achilles all upset and now you are going to lose the War.
If Achilles was an under-performing beta male, he would just “take this”, but Achilles is by far their best warrior, he knows it, Aggie knows it, the other guys know it. Achilles “takes his football and goes home”, and hijinks ensue, forming the Iliad narrative itself.
Not saying you have to bore yourself slogging through the Iliad, but the point is that Homer had been disrespected by pompous scholars for writing about a pompous twit, Achilles, who walked out on his brother warriors because of a snit about a slave girl. He could have raided another nearby town and gotten himself another slave girl, as if one slave girl or another mattered to these warrior dudes.
The scholar quoted by Rand is saying, “Hold on, bro, this Homer dude is on to something. He could have been another Larry David or Matt Groening. That story could be about an academic department, a shop floor, the workers at a retail store, a sports team, or any place where people are working towards a common purpose but put in competition with each other.
In other words, Homer is still relevant because even though technology and situations have changed, human nature is still the same after all these centuries.
I was memorizing the Illiad shortly before I started studying Renaissance martial arts, and was struck by just how accurate Achilles was portrayed, based on getting to know top people who devoted themselves to mastering hand to hand combat with edged weapons. That seems to foster some of the same personality traits as those that afflicted mighty Achilles, and that recur countless times in history’s great field commanders.
I’d be tempted to say that Homer used random politicians for as the model for his gods, who never have anything at stake other than policy preferences, and used combat soldiers he knew as his model for men.