Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis

Chapter Six: Enough Is Enough.

Chapter Six Enough Is Enough. Unbridled growth threatens the world. The Amazon jungle is going up in smoke as farmers clear land to raise ever more cattle to satisfy the endless demand for beef. In the suburbs of every major city it’s known as “sprawl.” The slums of the mega-cities, “where one-third of the world’s 3 billion urban dwellers are already crammed in” and whose populations are projected to “double to 2 billion people within 30 years,” relentlessly expand as the villages, which not too long ago were self-sustaining, are now being progressively drained.1 Densely populated India is running low on water. The hyperexpansion of population, industrialized agriculture, and the incessant consumption of natural resources are only the more palpable manifestations of a culture founded upon growth without limit. Others are more abstract. The nation-state, for example, long construed as a limited and self-contained political community with its own local culture and language , has been challenged by the forces of globalization. National borders are increasingly porous or even, from an economic point of view, irrelevant. More abstract yet: we live in an age in which a fundamental criterion of success has become growth itself. An economy that is not expanding is counted as a failure, and a standard typically used to assess the success of a society is the average life span, a strictly quantitative measure whose only version of “better” is “more.” So too in the hospitals, as the doctors, equipped with ever more powerful machines, always push harder to keep the elderly alive longer, even when the quality of their lives is so severely diminished that they must be institutionalized. The medical imperative is unequivocal: more life, longer and longer. The dream of immortality inches closer toward realization. Alive forever, but for what? Bereft of any measure of the quality of a human life, and certainly having no conception of a telos, the engineers 189 190 / Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis cannot tell us when enough is enough. As a consequence they are left only with what the Greeks called pleonexia, the desire to have more and more.2 Some of us fear that the outcome of this logic will be catastrophic. In the age of globalization the Aristotelian ranking of the finite as superior to the infinite has been reversed (VI.6). Because they are not the best regimes, it follows that the practical life is not superior to the theoretical one. Aristotle begins the argument that reveals the limitations of cities like Sparta: “It would be absurd if what is despotic and not despotic did not exist by nature. Therefore, if this is the case, there must be no attempt to rule over everybody, but only those who are fit to be ruled. This is analogous to the fact that one ought not to hunt human beings for food or sacrifice, but ought to hunt only that which is suited to this, namely those wild animals that are edible” (1324b36–41). This argument is densely packed with presuppositions. Its key phrase is “by nature” and its key concept is that of natural superiority or rank ordering. Just as some animals are fit to be eaten, some human beings are by nature fit to be ruled. This implies that not all human beings are fit to be ruled. In turn, this implies that in its unlimited expansion and quest to dominate all, the tyrannical or globalizing regime is blind to the natural heterogeneity of a human population and thus acts in a manner contrary to nature. Even if this argument is designed to criticize tyrannical or expansionist regimes, its presupposition is disturbing. For Aristotle, here reveals a willingness to defend slavery. There are some human beings, he asserts, who are “fit to be ruled.” We turn next to his argument on behalf of natural slavery in Politics I. 196 / Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis VI.3: Natural Slavery Is Justified. Aristotle’s justification of natural slavery occurs in the context of his discussion of the nature of the polis, the city itself. “Since we see that every city is a community and every community is constituted for the sake of some good (for everybody does everything for the sake of what seems good), it is clear that all communities aim for some good. And the most authoritative of all communities, which embraces all the others, aims for the most authoritative of all goods. This is...