Justice and the Courts in Sophocles and Euripides - Sophists

As we contrast Sophocles’ Electra with Euripides’ Orestes what we can infer about Justice and the administration of the Law and the Courts in Athens of that era?

In Sophocles’ play we have the single-mindedness of Electra whose only purpose in life is to avenge the murder of her father and the injustice that has been brought to her house. Sophocles, through Electra, tells us that Justice must be served or else society will not be able to function.

“…For if the hapless dead lie in dust and nothingness, while the slayers pay not blood for blood, all regard for man, all fear of heaven, will vanish from the earth.”

In Euripides’ Orestes we see the view that “..yes! crime must be punished, but not by the citizen who has suffered the injustice. The perpetrators of a crime must be brought in front of the courts and let the courts decide of their guilt and their punishment.” Euripides view on this matter is expressed through Tyndareus below.

“Take this case: the wife of his bosom has slain him; his son follows suit and kills his mother in revenge; next the avenger’s son to expiate this murder commits another; where, pray, will the slain of horrors end? Our forefathers settled these matters the right way. They forbade any one with blood upon his hands to appear in their sight or cross their path; ‘purify him by exile,’ said they, ‘but no retaliation!’ Otherwise there must always have one who, by taking the pollution last upon his hands, would be liable to have his own blood shed…….My daughter is dead, and she deserved her fate; but it should not have been his hand that slew her.”

We know what is happening in 5^th century BC Athens and in the age of Pericles. Arbitrary decisions to  punish crime, either by the laymen or the rulers, are not allowed and each case has to be brought in front of a court and decided by the jurors of the court. We have the codification of Law which started from previous leaders like Drako in the 7^th century BC and later Solon, and in the 5^th century, we have the establishment of an elaborate system to administer justice. The system, unlike today’s 10-15 randomly selected jurors, was more direct in the sense that each court could have from a few hundreds of people to over a thousand, depending on the seriousness of the case. The people were randomly selected and assigned to each case which eliminated corruption. Although the courts had a magistrate, Archon, his function was only to administer the case, and the decision was solely made by the jurors.

So here Euripides reflects the custom of the Law as it was practiced in Athens of his time. But he also expresses his disdain for the dangers and abuses of the system. He calls the jurors “mob” that can easily be manipulated by anyone with the ability to play to people’s emotions and their idea of justice.

In that era, Justice had to do more with the ability to appeal to people’s idea of what is reasonable. Extreme actions and thinking wouldn’t go well with the jurors in Athens of 5^th century BC (Socrates’ trial and conviction provides some evidence to that.) Euripides is especially critical of the group of people who came to be known as Sophists. One of the main premises of this School of Thought was that one could argue both sides, pro and con, of an idea or a case. The Sophists were claiming that they could train people to argue a weaker point of view and win over a stronger one. In essence they were saying that “reality and truth are what each of us perceives them to be.” So, they were saying “..It’s not the facts that count but how people perceive of them and we could argue a weaker point and win over a stronger one by manipulating “people’s perception of what reality is.”

We see some evidence of how people argued in front of the courts in the reasoning and the appeals of Orestes.  Orestes says to Tyndareus,

“…….I sacrificed my mother, a crime, no doubt, but done to avenge my father. Now as regards the reasons, for which I deserve to be stoned as you threatened, hear the service I am conferring on all Hellas. If women become so bold as to murder their husbands, taking refuge in their children, with the mother’s breast to catch their pity, they would think not of destroying their husbands on any plea whatsoever. But I, by a horrible crime – such is your exaggerated phrase – have put an end to this custom.” And then he continues towards Menelaus,

“..A long statement has advantages over a short one and is more intelligible to hear…Say I am doing wrong. Well, I have a right to a little wrong-doing at my hands to requite that wrong, for my father Agamemnon also did wrong in gathering the host of Hellas and going up against Ilium, not that he had sinned himself, but he was trying to find a cure for the sin and wrong-doing of your wife…so this is one thing you are bound to pay me back. For he had really sold his life to you, a duty owed by friend to friend,….make me the same return. For one brief day exert yourself, not ten full years, on my behalf, standing up in my defense…Why, there is the point of that old adage, ‘friends are bound to succor friends in trouble.’  But when fortune giveth of her best, what need of friends?”

The Chorus at some point sings “….what seemed so right became so wrong, to cut a mother’s skin with a ruthless hand…” which gives account to the Sophists’ view that both sides of the story can be argued and the “right can become wrong.”

Euripides clearly expresses his revulsion against the Sophists and the ways they used to manipulate the assembly, when he has a messenger describing the deliberations of the people to decide what should be done with Orestes and Electra.

“Next stood up a fellow, who cannot close his lips; one whose impudence is his strength; an Argive, but not from Argos; an alien forced upon us; confident in bluster and licensed ignorance, and plausible enough to involve his hearers in some mischief sooner or later; for when a man with a pleasing trick of speech, but of unsound principles, persuades the mob, it is a serious evil to the state; whereas all who give sound and sensible advice on all occasions, if not immediately useful to the state, yet prove so afterwards. And this is the light to regard a party leader; for the position is much the same in the case of an orator and a man in the office….”

While he expresses his admiration for the people he thinks are the backbone of the society,

“…another then stood up, not fair to outward view perhaps but a brave man, rarely coming in contact with the town or the gatherings in the market-place; a yeoman, one of a class who form the only real support of our country; shrewd enough, and eager to grapple with the arguments; his character without a blemish, his walk in life beyond reproach. He moved that they should crown Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, for showing his willingness to avenge a father in the blood of a wicked profligate who was preventing men from taking up arms and going on Foreign Service; ‘since,’ said he, ‘those, who remain behind, corrupt and seduce our wives left as keepers of our homes.’ To the better sort his words carried no conviction…”

“…Yet, for all he seemed to speak so fair, he should not persuade the assembly; but that villain who spoke in favor of slaying you and your brother, gained his point by appealing to the mob.”

Euripides wrote Orestes in 408 B.C., only a few years before the end of the Peloponnesian War and Athens’ devastating defeat from Sparta. Historians have been arguing about the possible causes of the War and why Athens lost the War. One argument claims that, after the death of Pericles from the plague during the war, the new leaders were lacking in “reason and moderation” so characteristic of the earlier era. One of those leaders was Cleon, characterized by his contemporaries as a warmonger and demagogue, who was known for his ability to manipulate the Athenian assembly with his eloquent speeches and his superb use of the Sophist techniques. Euripides’ villain in the play is believed to be Cleophon, the demagogue of Athens, who was a Thracian.

Euripides ends the conundrum of how to administer justice in the Orestes play by invoking the supernatural and having Apollo intervene and administer justice. It’s a disappointing end and it seems like Euripides was running out of ideas!

Could it be that Euripides was expressing his view here about the state of affairs in Athens and that the city was doomed with the leaders it had at that time?

Could we speculate that Euripides, in essence, was saying that “Athens is in such a mess and that there is no leader around with good judgment and reason to lead out of this mess and only the Gods can save us?”

Prometheus Bound and Rational Thought

As we read through Prometheus Bound, we see a clear path of progression and optimism in society. This path of progression is based on the people themselves and their actions. In other words their fate is not decided by the Gods but by their ability to use their minds and their critical thinking to understand and control the physical world. In no place and time is this trust in controlling the physical world and furthering the progression of society greater than the America of the 19^th and the 20^th century.

Should we assume that the progression of society based on science and technology is “one way street?” Should we assume that humanity is well aware that its current state is the result of reason and the scientific method?

“How did we get here?” you might ask.  We started on this path the moment we started asking questions in a deliberate manner. Most of the questions are the same questions that people have been asking since “Prometheus gave them intelligent calculation.”

What is the nature of the physical world? What is truth? What is reality? What is knowable and what is not? Can humans control their lives or are at the mercy of their God? Is there Free Will?

While the questions are really important, the critical issue here is the process. The process of rational thought in questioning and learning and developing knowledge as opposed to using superstition and belief. It is necessary that the process of rational thought expands to all strata of society as it strengthens the world’s democratic ideas, tendencies, and institutions. One of the biggest risks this world faces is that the division between science and the rest of the society grows wider. As science and technology grows and becomes more abstract, it becomes more difficult for the general public to follow and understand the new scientific developments. It doesn’t help that scientists have become equally detached and arrogant in their dealings with “laymen.”

It is only natural for people to grow skeptical, even negative, of big science that absorbs huge amounts of limited public funds. It is to be expected that the public is afraid of “controversial” research such as Stem Cell, efforts to “read and write” Human DNA, selective breeding, and genetically modified food, to name just a few. These are complex issues and require a conscious effort by the scientific community to educate the public so the public can understand and debate the issues in a critical manner. But if the scientific community of all persuasions do not rise to the occasion and engage the public, then others will fill the gap. We see that the main issues, from going to war, framing the agenda to security issues of terrorism, civil liberties and energy, dealing with the global warming, reforming the major institutions of the state, are being debated by people who try to appeal to people’s emotion and not their reason.

Who will win in the fight between superstition and rationality if only a small group of the society engages in rational thought? Science and critical thinking stand absolutely no chance. “It can’t happen you say!” It happened in the past.

Prometheus set the human race (the one in the West) on a path of progress and enlightenment. It reached its apogee in 5^th century B.C. Somewhere between the 3^rd and 4^th century A.D., knowledge and critical thinking were banned and humanity (the Western part) went into a period of dark ages. Some have called this era “the closing of the Western Mind.” It took the West more than a thousand years to start asking questions again. It was only in the 17^th/18^th century that they reached the same level of sophistication and reasoning that they had in 500 B.C.

Are we entering an era of the closing of the American Mind?

Aeshylus’ Important Ideas

“Necessity, Humanity’s Driving Force”

“With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”

“Tyranny Breeds Mistrust and Misfortune”

Landing on Earth – “Is the Internet making us stupid?”

I woke up with a strange feeling and realize that “I am not in Kansas anymore”. I am sitting in the pilot’s cabin and try to collect my thoughts and analyze the situation I am in. It seems that my spaceship malfunctioned and it crashed into this unknown to me planet. It looked pale-blue to me as my spaceship was diving towards at an incredible speed and somehow my ship’s advanced data bank systems have no record of the planet. Wind blows through the window and there it is. Several pages stapled together and the title reads “Is Google making us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains?” By Nicholas Carr.

I should first mention that I come from a highly evolved race where we have mastered data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. It took me a few picoseconds to tap into my extended brain, a mix of organic and inorganic matter, and decode a white object with black unintelligible marks into written English. Immediately I realized that something important is happening here when I saw the word brain.

In the early years of my civilization when we had just started to experiment with the augmenting of our brains, with what humans call “drugs,” we almost had a global civil war. Our society was split in two camps, for and against the new “science.”  Some people took the view that this is the beginning of a new race and eventually we will lose out to the machines. Others, while acknowledging the dangers of this new “science and technology,” they maintained that we should see these changes as an evolution of our race.

These “drugs” became more powerful and we started seeing an amazing power and capacity in our brains. The voices of the critics became hysterical when further development of these “drugs” enabled us to extend our brains with inorganic matter. There were many issues with this new “science” at this early stage as we didn’t understand them how they really worked and how to control them. It seemed that our brains were taking a life of their own. Ever more threatening, there was an unexpected discovery by a “brilliant,” others say “evil,” scientist in the field of communications. She developed a way of using wireless technologies to connect the inorganic, let’s call them silicon brains, parts of people’s brains. Then, using them as a bridge, she was able to establish direct communication between people’s brains. We were, for first time, able to have machine-type communication among ourselves. There was still a difference in interpretations as the emotional part in people brains was kept separate and in i.e. the color green still meant a different green for different people. You don’t want to know what followed after this discovery but I hope I will be able to touch on some of the issues later.

Needless to say that the Technology Industry of that time was ecstatic; now they had 6 billion people to sell them security and antivirus software for their brains!

As I said before, there was close to a revolution in my society and we had turned into us against them, not unlike the Luddites of 19^th century Britain. The social movement against the brain technologies became larger and stronger and now they were after everything new. In essence, they wanted to destroy everything that wasn’t organic based and didn’t have a consciousness and return our civilization to the Stone Age. But somewhere around that time the unexpected happened. But where was I? I think I am getting ahead of myself.

Here I am stranded in a strange planet reading a story about how some technology, called Internet, changes people’s minds. For a moment I want to tap into this planet’s information sources and gain knowledge on everything about the planet. Next, I can tap on my extended “brain” which consists of several parts. The main parts are the data warehouse, the heuristics engine, the emotional part, and the universal truths and measures part. Should I tap into all these parts of my brain and gain wisdom about the planet, its people, its history and its evolution and then provide them some advice? As I am ready to push the button to gain the wisdom I need, something tells me otherwise. Maybe it’s an old remnant of my organic circuitry that I can’t control. At least that’s how I explain the strange signal (you call it urge) I get right now.

I should mention here that the major breakthrough in our evolution from Organic to an Organic-Inorganic race was when we discovered how we could control our instincts as well as our brains. We have the ability to shut down our brains or parts of the brain and the only thing that is running is a small part of the heuristics engine and the universal truths and measures. We save energy that way too. This is not to say that we do not have emotions. On the contrary, the emotional part is very important to us and critical in learning in the early stages of our lives (well, we live forever now if we want to, but many people decide to terminate their lives and start a new life) and communicating and understanding amongst us. Although, we share our brains and all the data, it’s the emotional part that gives different interpretations to much of the data where we are dealing with individual preferences. For example, different people like different wines although we all analyze them in exactly the same way. But we communicate these individual differences by sharing emotional states between us. What you call empathy, we take it into the extreme. In essence if I want to fully understand what someone feels when they listen to their favorite music, I load their emotional state and feel exactly like them while at the same time I am maintaining my own identity. I know this is complicated stuff but we should have time to explore these subjects as we go along.

This old circuit in my organic brain tells me how lucky I am and what a great opportunity I have in front of me by crashing in this pale-blue planet. This is an opportunity to go back in time and relive all the great and turbulent times of my race (outside a simulation machine). For simplicity, let’s call my race Pierians. The more I think about the idea the more I get excited. It seems that this guy Carr is asking some legitimate questions but I have a few of my own.

The relevant question here is this; does a society develop a communication method or technology for its needs or a particular communication technology or method creates a specific type of society? Is the Internet more revolutionary than the passing from the oral tradition of the Greeks to the written form in the 9^th/8th century BC? How about the mass market availability of books with the development of the printing press by Gutenberg in the 15^th century? What about the impact of the telegraph, telephone, and the Industrial Revolution on people’s lives of that time? My view, as an alien, is that Carr’s worries are superficial and have nothing to do with the important questions that people of this planet should be asking. These questions are the same questions that humans have being asking since they developed “intelligent calculation” and we will be dealing with them for the next 3 months….and I hope we keep them  for the rest of our lives.

Prolegomena

As I reread Carr’s article I thought of the question in the class; what would an out of space visitor think reading this article? What if this visitor then proceeds to read our class material in sequence and use some superior ability to tap into our data and information resources to backfill missing pieces in his understanding of our planet and its inhabitants? The data and resources need not to be limited to written format but to everything that we used and use to store information, communicate, express ourselves, including culture, ways, arts, structures, landscapes, cities, and any type of human construct physical or intellectual. We always communicate something with the presence and form of the above, with their variability as well with their absence. I am certain that we all have been in a situation where we communicate much more by not talking (relationships and marriage comes to mind!)

There are multitudes of ways we communicate and convey information on a day to day basis or from generation to generation to generation, from a previous era to next era and so forth. We even broadcast a sequence of numbers in binary code (we think that no matter how different other civilizations might be, for them to venture outside their solar system or galaxy they would have to be scientifically and technologically advanced, meaning they would have mastered mathematics, the language/coding of science) hoping that if there is life somewhere in our universe they will receive it and hopefully will acknowledge it (let’s hope they would be peaceful too).

A word of caution for my group and whoever reads this blog.

My training is in engineering, mathematics, information technology, and business and finance. Writing outside highly specialized and structured subjects, is very difficult and doesn’t come natural to me. I hate it! English is not even my first language but started learning it around the age of 20.

My writing might seem unpolished and even have errors and require editing. I only ask for your patience and understanding. Finally, any editing and other suggestions (email me please) would be much appreciated and I see this as an opportunity to improve myself in this area.

But I thought long and hard how to approach the blog writing for what I think are universal questions and subjects that we are dealing with here and the progression and evolution of our civilization. I felt that the best way to approach the various themes of this course is, where is possible, through a narrative.

I would like before I start with my narrative to present a formalized model of a communication system. I would draw from my electrical engineering background and present the communication system as it was developed by Claude Shannon. He was one of those rare individuals that come along once in a while and illuminate a particular field of human or scientific endeavor. He single handedly developed the theory of information, or communications as he called it, in a matter of years in the 1940s. He developed this new field “out of necessity,” that of decoding the communications of the Germans during WWII. It was the Greeks who said that “necessity is the mother of all inventions.”

William Poundstone gives a fascinating account of Shannon and his work in his equally fascinating book “Fortune’s Formula” where he tells the story of using science to beat casinos and Wall Street.

Shannon, in his classic 1948 paper he wrote…”The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.”

Shannon’s linear communications model is depicted below.

 This is strictly a communication model between technical systems, and as a follower of Shannon’s observed, it has no human aspect in it.

Imagine in some distant future where a society uses the above model to communicate. What kind of society that would be? How might this society get to this state? Would it be the result of its evolution that will create the need for this type of communication or it would be the discovery/invention of technological breakthroughs, allowing machine like communication, which will bring about this society?