[Prometheus (2 of 3) Chủ nghĩa độc đoán của Hesiod]-[BznongwlNnM]

So let's start with Hesiod. Hesiod is not someone we have any historical data about. The only thing we know about him is what he tells us himself in his poems, The Theogony and Works and Days. Hesiod was roughly contemporary with Homer or whoever composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. We'll talk more about that when we get to the Iliad and the Odyssey. But if there was a historical Homer, he would have lived a generation before or after or the same generation as Hesiod. Who came first is a matter of debate that goes all the way back to the 5th century BCE Greece. And we're going to move from Hesiod's time, which is frequently described as the Greek Dark Ages, this time before the flowering of Greek civilization that we think of when we think of ancient Greece, which is mostly the 5th century Greece. But we're going to move into that time period, the 5th century Greece, when we get to Aeschylus. And it's important to recognize that despite the fact we may think of Athens as being this sort of peaceful place with philosophers and playwrights and poets, this was during a time of warfare with the Persian Empire. So as I mentioned earlier, Hesiod says that his father came from the region of Kume in western Anatolia and moved from there to this rural area called Boeotia around the slopes of Mount Helicon, which is a mountain to the west of Athens. So he's not in Athens and Athens is not yet the sort of cultural capital we'll be familiar with that we may think of when we think of ancient Greece. It's not quite, it's on its way to becoming that, but it's not quite that yet. He probably lived sometime between around the year 750 and the year 675. Now that doesn't mean he lived to be 75 years old. It means that there's a 75 year period in which he lived and wrote. He may have lived 30 years, he may have lived 80 years, but it probably would have been sometime during that time period. So we can call Hesiod our earliest identifiable oral performer due to his multiple descriptions, autobiographical descriptions of himself. And that means that he would have been a storyteller, but remember that in the oral tradition at this time, and in most cultures, you didn't just tell a story, you sang a story. And when we refer to poetry and poems, these aren't things that you would just sort of speak, but you would actually sing them. It would probably be more accurate to call them songs. And he's best known for these two works. There's a third work called The Shield, which may or may not be by him, but these two works, Works and Days and Theogony, seem to have been written by the same author, or maybe not written, maybe just performed and sung, and then maybe someone else wrote them down, we don't know. But Works and Days is written to Hesiod's brother, Perseus. He names Perseus in the poem and describes Perseus as being this really wasteful, lazy, and self-indulgent person. And he's trying to tell Perseus that you can't keep living the way you're living, you have to work, you have to dedicate yourself to hard labor, because that is the lot of human beings in life. So a lot of what you read about Prometheus and Pandora is part of his description about why human beings have to work, why we can't just have fun all the time. And then he writes the Theogony, which is this long description of the origin of the gods. And he doesn't just say this is the way I think things are. In the beginning of Theogony, he says that while he was acting as a shepherd, while he was working as a shepherd on the slopes of Mount Helicon, these muses, the daughters of the gods that give human beings the ability to sing poetry, come to him when he's out on the slopes of Mount Helicon shepherding his sheep. He says, from the Heliconian muses, let us begin to sing. This is the invocation of the muse at the very beginning of Theogony. Let us begin to sing from the Heliconian muses who hold the great and holy Mount of Helicon. One day they taught Hesiod a glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon. And this word first the goddess has said to me. The muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus, who hails the Aegis, this shield that identifies Zeus, they say, shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true, but we know when we will to utter true things. So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus. They plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvelous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime, or in times past. And they bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both first and last. So he's claiming that all of the things, that the contents of his story aren't just his artistic license. They're not just the caprice of his imagination. But these are things that these divine beings have taught him to sing and commanded him to sing. So notice he is claiming a certain divine authority, a certain inspiration. You may have noticed several themes in both the short passages I asked you to read from both the Theogony and Works and Days. We come back to the same themes over and over again. And this is one of the things that indicates that both the Theogony and the Works and Days are probably written by the same person. One is the dominance of Zeus. Zeus is the most important god throughout the Theogony, but also throughout Works and Days. He advocates in both the Theogony and the Works and Days, but especially in Works and Days, he tells his brother, you just have to accept fate. You know, you have to accept the way society works. You have to work within that framework. He emphasizes the necessity of labor. You have to work hard, you have to be frugal, and you have to be orderly. You have to keep everything in its place. That means keep yourself, your work habits orderly, keep your farm, your flocks, your business orderly. But also recognize that you're part of this larger order and you can't upset that order. And you may have also noticed he is not a fan of women. He's got a lot to say about women and none of it seems to be good. So if we look at individual passages within both Theogony and Works and Days, we see how important Zeus is. And we see the description of Zeus not just as this one god among many, and not even just as this sort of the most powerful of the gods, but almost as the god who decides what is right and wrong. In the beginning of the Theogony, the Muses sing of Zeus, the father of gods and men. And they begin and end their strain, how much he is the most excellent among the gods and supreme in power. Reigning in heaven, himself holding the lightning and glowing thunderbolt, when he had overcome by might his father, Cronus, and distributed fairly to the immortals their portions and declared their privileges. In other words, Zeus has sort of created the order of the world as it is. He's not just the most powerful, but everything about the way the world is is put there by his power. He overthrew the order that he inherited, but now he's in charge, and everything is where it is. The orders of the gods, the great chain of being is there because Zeus has decided it should be that way. And then in Works and Days, he says, through him, mortal men are famed or unfamed, sung or unsung alike, as great Zeus wills. In other words, everything you know about other people, whether you remember it after your death, is going to be decided by Zeus, not by you, not by your actions, not by your individual autonomy. For easily he makes strong, and easily he brings strong men, for easily he makes strong, and easily he brings the strong man low. Easily he humbles the proud and raises the obscure. Easily he straightens the crooked and blasts the proud. Zeus, who thunders aloft and has his dwelling most high. In other words, it's not people that decide their own fate. It's not your own actions, it's not your own thinking and acting upon your own thoughts that make you who you are. Zeus decides who you are, and it doesn't matter what you do, he will decide if you're going to be strong or weak. He decides whether you're gonna achieve glory in your life or not. There's no way to escape the will of Zeus, so it is not possible to deceive or to go beyond the will of Zeus, for not even the son of Ioptos, kindly Prometheus, escaped his heavy anger. But of necessity, strong bands confined him, Prometheus, although he knew many a while. So after he tells the story of Prometheus, he wants to emphasize that Prometheus may have been very smart, he was known for being wily and crafty and intelligent, but it doesn't matter because no one can outthink Zeus. No one can outperform Zeus. No one can escape Zeus's will. And there's not really any way to get around Hesiod's portrayal of women. In Works and Days he says, Zeus says, I will give men, as the price for fire, an evil thing, in which they may be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction. A lovely, sweet, maiden shape, like to the immortal goddess in face, and in her shameless mind and a deceitful nature, in the likeness of a modest mind, a modest mind which hides lies and crafty words and a deceitful nature, a plague to men, over and over again. And then in Theogony he refers to Pandora specifically as the beautiful evil, for from her is the race of women and female kind. Of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble. So now it's not just Pandora, but it's all women. No help meets, in other words, no helpers, in hateful poverty, but only in wealth. And this is a common misogynistic complaint that women just want to take a man's money. They don't want to actually help provide for the family or anything like that. And as in Thatched Hives, bees feed the drones whose nature is to do mischief. By day and throughout the day until the sun goes down, the bees are busy and lay the white combs while the drones stay at home in the covered scapes and reap the toil of others into their own bellies. Even so Zeus, who thunders on high, made women to be an evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil. In all of these four recurring themes, Hesiod starts to show a type of psychology that is referred to as authoritarian. And I'm using the word authoritarianism here not to describe a political ideology. I'm not saying, this is very important, I'm not saying Hesiod's a Nazi or Hesiod's someone who shares some particular culturally inherited set of beliefs. But rather he shows signs of a type of psychology that has been studied around the world, especially over the last century. A type of way of thinking that individual elements of which tend to cohere, whether we're talking about people with this sort of psychology in the United States in the 21st century or people on the other side of the globe. These sorts of themes that crop up tend to crop up together. And it's the kind of thing that everyone is susceptible to. Authoritarianism is a state of mind that people tend to gravitate toward in times of social stress, like during a time of war, during a time of threat, if there's a plague or some sort of disease. People that are confronted with death, confronted with danger and afraid tend to show this type of psychology. And I'm not asking you guys to remember any of this, but I wanna go over some of the basic elements of this type of psychology as it's been studied over the last 60 or 70 years. Authoritarianism as a psychology tends to prefer a strict social hierarchy. So you obey the authorities that are over you, but that means that people underneath you of lower rank, you have power over them. There's this endorsement of inequality. We don't expect everyone to be treated equal because some people are just higher up in the social order than others. We tend to believe that the world is just. We call this just world beliefs where everyone gets what they deserve. So if you don't have much, well it's because you haven't worked hard. And if you have a lot, then it must be because you've worked hard. Also, this social hierarchy means inequality among men and women. So women are expected to submit and have a very sort of submissive role, whereas men are supposed to do the work and women are supposed to submit to whatever the man wants. And there's also this justification of the upper class is usually this sort of warrior aristocracy, the people who have all the power. We presume that they're using that power for the good of the people below them. And the only thing for the people of lower ranks to do is just serve the ones in power. It's for their own good. It's for the good of society. Authoritarianism also tends to depend on ethnocentrism, which means the way your culture, your traditions work, that's all you should, that's the way you should live. You should accept your group's identity. You should not try to identify with people from other regions. Those people are foreigners and they're potential enemies. If they do things different, then that's a threat to us. And anyone who questions these conventions is regarded as a traitor or a threat to the group. Authoritarians also tend to be close-minded. And remember that need for closure I described a few videos ago. They want simple answers that are true all the time. They stereotype people. Rather than understanding the particular quirks of an individual person's mind, they just typecast everybody. This person is that stereotype. That's all I need to know. And also there's this fatalism, the superstition, which is a script where we infer a cause even though the cause may not actually lie behind a particular effect. Superstitions are usually false causal associations. There's an inability to recognize that something is actually new, that a new situation can't just be explained in terms of old, familiar concepts or schemas. And there's a strong anti-intellectualism. Intellectuals are dangerous, just like anyone who questions a convention or questions authority is dangerous. There's this idealization of a past golden age. And that word golden age actually comes from Hesiod. Hesiod says that when humans were first created, there was this golden age where they were all, they lived happily under the reign of the gods, but then that was replaced by a silver age and then a bronze age, and it's the bronze age that Zeus wanted to wipe out. But they narrowly survived, and now in Hesiod's day, they live in an iron age. And this is a time of toil and of labor, and everything is just bad. So this, authoritarians tend to believe that the past had this golden age, and all the changes that have come along in society since then are some sort of decline, or they're indicative of moral decay. And there's also a strong militarism. That is, the capacity for violence is regarded as better, more virtuous than intelligence or empathy. And leadership must come from the ones who have the highest capacity for violence. So obviously Zeus, if he's the most powerful of the gods, should rule the gods. Never mind if he's cruel, never mind if he's violent, never mind if he's not very intelligent. Authoritarianism as a psychological study started after World War II, when during the Nuremberg Trials and that sort of thing, people started wondering how could ordinary people do the kinds of things that Nazis do. And a psychologist at Yale named Stanley Milgram, during the 50s and 60s, had people come in, ordinary people would come in and be part of the psychological experiment, and he would ask them to sit at this console. And he would tell them that in the other room is another participant in this experiment, and they're gonna take this test, and every time they get an answer wrong, I want you to press this button and give them a shock. Each time they got one wrong, then the participant was supposed to go up to the next level. And they would be giving these shocks, and they would hear someone shouting in pain in the other room. And of course, these participants didn't want to continue. They said, oh, I'm hurting this person, I don't want to continue giving this person a shock just because they answered this question wrong. But the experimenter would say that the experiment requires that you continue. And so many people would actually go against their own will because this authority figure told them to. Go ahead and deliver that shock, and it would go all the way up to, if you can see the switches on the right, they're labeled extreme intensity shock and danger severe shock. And these participants would be asked to go all the way and deliver these extreme or dangerous levels of electric shock. And so many of them did that it really upset our view of human nature and of human empathy. But when they were asked, why did you do this, why did you shock somebody, even though you knew they were under a lot of pain, most people would just say, well, the person in charge said that's what I'm supposed to do, and I didn't want to stand up to him, or I figured he knew what he was doing, or it was his responsibility. Well, the person who was screaming in pain in the other room was just pretending. None of this, there was no actual real electric shock. But it's the fact that people were willing to hurt others simply because this authority figure told them to, that metaphorically shocked the people that kept up with that experiment. And a short time later at Stanford University, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo had Stanford students participate in what he called, or what came to be called the Stanford Prison Experiments, where they had a fake prison, and all these students knew that they were just acting these roles, but by random choice, some students were required to perform the role of prisoners, some students were asked to perform the role of the guards. And this was supposed to go on for a long period of time, but the two groups adapted to their roles so quickly, and so the guards became so malicious, so cruel in torturing the prisoners. And some of the people playing prisoners, a few of them quit, but a lot of them just accepted that role and there are videos of them, and these videos are hard to watch because not only are the guards acting so cruelly, but the prisoners themselves, despite all that they're being put through, and all the agony they're being put through, they're staying with the experiment, they're afraid to quit, they're afraid to leave, they're afraid to break that order. And just like the Milgram Experiments, the Stanford Prison Experiments revealed just how quickly people can turn cruel when they're in an institutional order, or this social hierarchy that puts certain people above others. And part of that authoritarianism is this assumption that the person in charge deserves to be in charge, and that this person must not just be there by chance or by deceit, but this person is actually supposed to be there. And this belief in authority, and we see Hesiod really sort of wrestling with, in Works and Days, when he describes that first sacrifice at Makoni, where Prometheus creates the two piles of parts of the sacrificed ox, and he wants to give the best parts to humans, but he makes the pile of bones and hooves, by putting the fat on top of it, makes it look the most enticing, and tricks Zeus. In Works and Days, Hesiod tells us that Zeus was fooled by this. He says, for the gods keep hidden from men the means of life, but Zeus, in the anger of his heart, hid the means of life, because crafty Prometheus deceived him. He says, Prometheus did deceive Zeus. Therefore, he planned sorrow and mischief against men. He hid fire, but that noble son of Ioptus stole fire again from men, from Zeus, the counselor in the Hall of Fenelstock. But Zeus, who delights in thunder, did not see it. So once again, Zeus is being fooled by Prometheus. Afterwards, Zeus, who gathers the clouds, says to him in anger, son of Ioptus, surpassing all and cunning, you are glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire. So three times in Works and Days, we're told that Zeus was fooled. But in Theogony, Hesiod is really trying to maintain that Zeus, as authority, cannot be deceived. He says, for when the gods and mortal men had a dispute at Mekone, even then Prometheus was forward, to cut up a great ox and set portions before them, trying to befool the mind of Zeus. But Zeus, whose wisdom is everlasting, saw and failed not to perceive the trick. So just reminding us that okay, Zeus is going to choose the one that Prometheus is trying to trick him into choosing, but he wasn't tricked. His wisdom is everlasting, he knew. He saw that he was being deceived, but he played along, or something to that effect. And in his heart, he fought mischief against mortal men, which also was to be fulfilled. In other words, he chose the bone pile instead of the meat of the ox, not because he was fooled, but because he wanted to use this as an excuse to be cruel to humanity. I'm not sure that that really makes him a better authority, the type of authority that Hesiod praises so often during the Theogony. With both hands, he took up the white fat and was angry at heart, and wrath came to his spirit when he saw the white ox bones craftily tricked out. So again, this sounds like the language from works in days where Zeus really is fooled, but it's been followed by this narration. So in the story, the action of the story depends on Zeus not knowing that Prometheus has deceived him but Hesiod tries to maintain the schema of Zeus as all-knowing, all-wise. And if we're aware of the difference between the story and the narrative, we can see the narrative trying too hard, and it's trying too hard to add something that does not fit into that story. Specifically, Hesiod is adding an explanation that fits his belief, that fits his schemas about how Zeus ought to be, but it doesn't help explain what actually happens. So the narrative says one thing, but that doesn't seem to be what's actually in the story that it's trying to narrate. It's an added explanation that's a little bit more than we actually need. So if you're interested to learn more about the psychology of authoritarianism, I'll give you this quick slide, just pause it and come back to it later. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it, but it is a very interesting course of study, and it's something that I'm gonna contrast to Aeschylus and the way, the psychology that Aeschylus uses in Prometheus Bound.