The following is an ancient Greek story, but probably one that you didn't hear in school (like any ancient culture, we have our own preconceived notions about the ancient Greeks).
King Midas sought great wisdom - the wisdom of the gods. Though he could not speak with the gods directly, he knew of the satyr Silenus, who was known to accompany Dionysus. After great effort, Midas managed to capture Silenus, asking him, "What is the greatest thing for all men?"
We can imagine that Midas had a head filled with ideas for possible answers to this question. But the captured Silenus at first kept still and silent. When finally compelled by the king, he (in one writing) "broke out into shrill laughter and said these words, 'Suffering creature, born for a day, child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what would give you the greatest pleasure not to hear? The very best thing for you is totally unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second best thing for you, however, is this - to die soon'"
This legend (most famously recounted in The Birth of Tragedy), might not fit our image of the Greeks. In all likelihood, it doesn't fit our image of reality, which at least seems more cheery. But there is at least an iota of truth to it. For the Greeks, the utterance refers to the cruelty and indifference of the fates, who sent Oedipus to kill his father and marry his mother, had Prometheus's liver eaten daily while he was bound to a rock, had Orestes kill his mother.
For people today, we might know Hamlet's "slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune," or any of the myriad horrors of the modern age.
But the point is the same. We all have some degree of familiarity with ancient Greek religion and the raucous mob that was supposed to run the world. We have some familiarity with the drunken Dionysus, the lecherous Zeus, the whole cast of Titans overthrown by the Olympian gods. And we likely remember some stories about them and their seeming humanity. The gods show jealousy, anger, love and lust. They make stupid mistakes.
When we look at the ancient Greek myths, the gods often seem indifferent to the fate of human beings. The whole Trojan war, after all, was started by the whims of the Gods, who then bet on the outcome. But even as they could be entirely indifferent to the thousands who died in wars, they could be obsessed with a single individual, as Poseidon was with Odysseus.
To the Greeks who weren't heroes or beautiful women then, the Gods were indifferent. They might care about the fate of your species, or your city state, but they didn't care about you. Even if they wanted to care about you, they couldn't necessarily. The gods are themselves constrained by the ancient fates.
The gods, at their most rational, might have debates, but we don't hear them. At their most hotheaded, they might fight, but we only experience the effects.
Though the Greek gods seem to explain the world, what they really explain is its arbitrariness, its immorality and its indifference.
How does this relate to Silenus? Because what Silenus said was true, in its own way. When we look at the bare structure of the world, when we reduce all of the machinations of the gods and of fate down to their most basic element, what we see is randomness. Cruelty and kindness come and go seemingly arbitrarily. The sum total of humanity is a mote of dust before capricious gods.
But how to react to this?
As I described in my columns recently, one way people react to this message is by ignoring it. In the most intense conspiracy theories, there is no randomness whatsoever. Every action can be explained. Politics, for most people, can also eliminate randomness. Because we're only interested in hearing what we've already heard, we can't be proven wrong. Our understanding of reality can remain unassailable.
Though more extreme, the witch craze of the middle ages is another excellent example. Over hundreds of years, as many as 100,000 people were killed in large-scale, organized persecution by the church in Europe. The witches, as we know now, didn't exist. They were women, mostly old, living on the margins of society, killed to try to control or make sense of the upheaval of the times. In the midst of the witch craze, Europe had undergone economic inflation, shifting social demographics and the Protestant reformation, and the Catholic church was discovering a large variety of heterodox beliefs in the religious periphery. Witches, in a strange way, made sense of social upheaval. As the consorts of the devil, they were responsible for whatever ill befell a community.
Racism is similar. We know that racism flares up in times of economic stress, high unemployment, social upheaval or inequality. The Nazi party could not have risen if German unemployment was low and inflation was in check, just as Neo-Nazi parties throughout Europe in the present day are flourishing in response to economic chaos, increased immigration or both.
Witches and other scapegoats render the vast, impersonal forces of history personal and explicable, like conspiracy theories.
But this chaos, this darkness, has also served a religious and aesthetic purpose through history. With St. John of the Cross, it can lead to the dark night of the soul, for Kierkegaard, it is the "fear and trembling" of Abraham as he went to sacrifice his son, Isaac. In both cases (one Catholic and one Protestant), religious faith is bound up with the chaos and seeming meaningless of the world. John of the Cross requires the dark night of the soul to become closer to God, Kierkegaard's analysis of the Abraham and Isaac story invokes the horror of God's demand (that he sacrifice his only son) as something the religious person must believe in to be religious.
And the ancient Greeks? Of course, they themselves had many responses to the darkness of the world. They responded aesthetically, with plastic art, music, literature. When we think of Greek art, which often used idealized forms based on the physical world (think, for example, of Greek sculpture), it served to give order and structure to experience, which was anything but ordered and structured.
But there was another way in which the Greeks reacted. My first column in this series, for those who were paying attention, concerned intoxication. Dionysian revels, which very likely involved hallucinogens of some description in addition to wine, can also be considered a reaction to the terror of the world, and one that is similar in certain ways to a religious or aesthetic response.
In the Dionysian revels, participants experienced what Freud called the "oceanic feeling," the dissolving of self through intoxicants, dance and music. As one became more drunk and danced more, one's self dissolved into the vast, swirling mass of humanity. In this undifferentiated mass, everyone realized their shared place in the world, their shared exposure to the world's terrors, their shared vulnerability.
So we are back full circle. There is no "proper" response to Silenus's description of the world. But there are plenty of improper ones. As much as our consciousness rebels, it is our duty to understand and embrace the fact that the world is not as ordered as we might like it to be, that the world can be indifferent, immoral and incomprehensible. If you'll excuse the mention of yet another philosopher, "and so the torch of slippery doubt is what the sage steers by."
