The Face of Democracy

The Polis

Allow me to quote Charles Wayper from his book ‘Political Thought’

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“Brilliant in spirit and fortunate in language, the Greeks, by accident or by some singularly gracious gift of the gods, hit upon that organisation of life which focused as nothing else could have done their great energy, and allowed them to make the most of their great gifts. That organisation was what the Greeks knew as the Polis, a term for which there is no exact translation but which we render most inadequately as the City State. It was much more than we mean by a city and a great deal more than we understand by a State.”
 

“Above all, the Polis was free. Its liberty was the breath of life to the Greeks. The Melians, saying in the face of overwhelming Athenian might: “it were surely great baseness and cowardice in us who are still free not to try everything that can be tried before submitting to your yoke,” were typically Greek. So were the two Spartans who offered their lives to the Persian king in palliation of the execution of the two Persian envoys at Sparta, saying, “you have never tasted liberty … if you had you would urge us to fight for it, not from afar with javelins, but with axes at close quarters.” It is, indeed, because the sovereignty of the Polis was so fundamental to it that the Greeks never formed a nation — the very idea of the Polis being as much opposed to it as the idea of caste in India. The better is the enemy of the good, and in all that makes life thrilling and whole the Greek was convinced that he had the best.”
 

“Its size and sovereignty made the Polis the most intimate and intense form of political grouping that has ever existed. Its impact upon its citizens was much more direct than the impact of a great modern State can ever hope to be. This is obviously so in a democratic Polis where the citizen was a member of the Sovereign Assembly, where he might be chosen by lot to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he could reckon on holding office every so often, where he might find himself in command of a campaign as one Athenian leather-merchant did after expressing trenchant criticism of the conduct of operations. But it is no less true of the non-democratic Poleis. There the citizen’s sense of belonging to the Polis, of being a member not a subject of it, was as acute.

There his sense of living in immediate contact with it was as strong. There his devotion to it was as ardent — in its way Simonides’ epitaph on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae, “Go, stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here obedient to their commands,” is as eloquent as the famous Funeral Oration of Pericles. To the Greek, therefore, the Polis had a much more concrete meaning than the State has for us. In it things that appear to us abstract and wearisome necessities were vivid and immediate, so that even the paying of income tax became less objectionable because less remote. Rich men in the Polis were not required to pay supertax but were expected to produce a play, or to commission a warship, and however strong their reluctance to part with money may have been, it is not unreasonable to believe that they felt more satisfaction in contemplating the plays they had produced or the warships they had fitted out than those who pay surtax today do in contemplating their tax returns.”
 

“As a result of this intimacy and directness, the Polis had a much fuller meaning for the Greek than the State has for us. He identified it with all human values. It was so much a part of his life that it was impossible to think of him apart from it, so that the Greeks never found it sufficient to know a man’s name and his father’s but always required the name of his Polis as well. The Polis was so much a part of his life that it was impossible to think of it apart from him, so that the Greeks did not speak of Athens, Sparta, or Melos, but always of the Athenians, the Lacedaemonians, and the Melians. No Greek belief was stronger than that it is only in the Polis that men worthy of the name can live. Indeed, the Greek word “to live” means also “to take part in communal life.” (It is interesting to note in the modern Greek word “politeuma,” which means culture, perhaps the last trace of this old conjunction of life and politics.)

And the name they gave to a man uninterested in the Polis was “idiotes” — from which comes our word “idiot.” For life to be worth living must have meaning, and only in the Polis, they were sure, did it acquire meaning. The life of the Polis, they believed, was essential to the whole man. When Aristotle said that man is a political animal, he meant that it is the characteristic of man to live in a Polis; and if he does not, he is not truly man. The Polis alone made the good life possible and was therefore the greatest education in virtue that man could ever know. This is what Simonides meant when he said : “The Polis teaches the man.” It was Church, University, State all in one. There where the Polis was not, slavery and barbarism reigned; here where it added colour and passion and intensity to life, man could alone fulfil his nature.”
 

The Greek democracy, Polis, was a small post-agricultural cultural phenomenon, but it showed us what real day-to-day engaged direct democracy can feel like for the people; having true influence in state affairs, it’s liberating. It couldn’t last because it wasn’t scalable with the technology of that day, so it was succeeded by the Roman Republic. But today, with the use of modern technology, we have the power to bring that culture back on a grand scale, let the people have the rule once again, give us meaning, give us influence, let us be more than just term votes and consumers, free us from our shackles.

It’s nothing if not ironic that we now find out that due to corruption and bureaucracy, the modern republic isn’t scalable, so it must be succeeded by the modern democracy.