Were the Greeks Any Good? WEIRD Morality, Democracy, and the Semiotic Paradox of Classical Historiography

Abstract

The moral center grounding the political grammar of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies is called the ethic of autonomy: individual rights, liberty, equality, and justice. In this ethic, you reason about moral questions by anchoring yourself in the question: ‘How and why has some individual been harmed?’ The exclusive normative preference for the ethic of autonomy is called WEIRD morality. It is dominant among Western university-educated leftists, such as (over)populate departments of humanities and social sciences. These numerically overwhelming leftist scholars—following the lead of classical historiographers—have celebrated classical Athens as the presumed origin of modern WEIRD—liberal and democratic—political grammar, or at least as a presumed historically convergent twin. But Athens was the fanatical extreme right: a small minority of men who, on their alleged gender and biological superiority, organized around warfare and oppressed—with wanton cruelty—a large population of slaves and every single woman (including those formally ‘not enslaved’). The scholarly culture of political philhellenism is thus a semiotic paradox. How to explain it? For centuries, Westerners. taught to identify the ancient Greeks proudly as their putative forefathers, have needed the meaning ‘the Greeks were good’ in order to conclude that ‘Being a Westerner is good,’ the meaning goal of their identity game. Since the identity game has cultural priority, it forces other games to eschew local meaning goals contradicting ‘the Greeks were good.’ Classical historiographers therefore long ago adopted ‘the Greeks were good,’ albeit tacitly, as the teleologically prior meaning goal of their own discipline. In the modern, democratic world, satisfying this meaning goal has required representing the ancient Greeks as ‘democrats’ as we moderns understand democracy. Doing so has had scholarly, cultural, moral, and political effects aplenty. To better grasp this meaning system, I here apply the syntagmatic-functionalist approach (Gil-White 2020a).

Keywords: Semiotics, classical historiography, WEIRD societies, Greece, Athens, Herodotus, political grammar, democracy