A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack

Notes

217 Notes ONE: THE Lack OF FREEDOM 1. “The loss of freedom is often dismissed on the grounds that because of cultural differences, authoritarian policies that would not be tolerated in the West are acceptable to Asians. While we often hear references to ‘despotic’ Oriental traditions, such arguments are no more convincing than a claim that compulsion in the West is justified by the traditions of the Spanish Inquisition or of the Nazi concentration camps. Frequent references are often made to the emphasis on discipline in the ‘Confucian tradition’; but that is not the only tradition in the ‘East,’ nor is it easy to assess the implications of that tradition for modern Asia (even if we were able to show that discipline is more important for Confucius than it is for, say, Plato or Saint Augustine)” (Amartya Sen, New York Review of Books, 22 September 1994: 69). 2. This does not mean that slavery was an integral part of many social economies . According to M. I. Finley (1980, 9), there have been only two genuine slave societies outside the Americas, classical Greece and classical Italy. If Finley is correct, it carries the uncomfortable implication that the world’s first democracy generated the world’s first slave economy: the slave economy of Athens was a consequence of Solon’s reforms, which gave political and economic rights to the demos. The loss of such a large source of involuntary labor was compensated by the decision to import large numbers of slaves from outside Athens, a solution welcomed by the demos. Perhaps this helps to explain the Greek understanding of freedom and slavery as opposites that require each other. 3. History of the Peloponnesian War I.10. Thucydides’ main concern in this book was to demonstrate the vulnerability of Athenian democracy; Pericles’ rule was a golden age before the populace deteriorated into private ambition and interest. “Thucydides’ History is the greatest text ever written on the powerful, ultimately self-destructive, impulses toward greed and domination . . . Ironically, in his obsessive attempt to prove how rationally the Athenians could behave in the jungle world of international politics, he demonstrates just how mad they were” (Patterson 364). 4. “In discarding the Inherited Conglomerate [traditional worldview], many people discarded with it the religious restraints that had held human egotism on the leash.To men of strong moral principle—a Protagoras or a Democritus—that did not 218 A Buddhist History of the West matter: their conscience was adult enough to stand up without props. It was otherwise with most of their pupils.To them, the liberation of the individual meant an unlimited freedom of self-assertion; it meant rights without duties, unless self-assertion is a duty” (Dodds, 191). 5. See Sagan (1991) ch. 11 and passim. 6. The emphasis that Euripides put on human irrationality (in Medea, Iphigenia in Aulis, etc.) reminds us that the discovery of reason is also the discovery of unreason. This gave his tragedies a nihilistic undertone that rationality thereafter has never escaped , because nihilism becomes reason’s alter ego, the other that reason can never subdue. For Euripides “the gain which has accrued to man from his newly-found independence” is that “he has no firm ground to stand on, and is helplessly exposed to the hazards of life” (Snell 130). 7. “Plato is almost the last Greek intellectual who seems to have real social roots; his successors, with very few exceptions, make the impression of existing beside society rather than in it. They are ‘sapientes’ first, citizens afterwards or not at all, and their touch upon social realities is correspondingly uncertain” (Dodds 192). 8. “[I]t is one of the more wonderful ironies of late medieval and early modern Europe that the more independent and absolute the European state became, the more it acquired the trappings and thought processes of the church it sought to separate from and dominate. And at the same time, the more the church came to look like an absolutist state” (Patterson 377). TWO: THE Lack OF PROGRESS 1. “It is one of the most amazing facts of Western cultural history that the striking acceleration of technological development in post-Carolingian Europe emanated from contemplative monasticism” (Ernest Benz, in Noble 13). 2. “What he [the prophet of a millenarian revolt] offered them was not simply a chance to improve their material lot. It was also, and above all, the prospect of carrying out a divinely ordained mission of stupendous, unique importance” (Cohn, in Strozier and Flynn...