from the series Peace House Community Journal…
By MARTI MALTBY
Many years ago, I heard a debate about whether Greece’s Golden Age was represented by the great poets such as Homer, or by the philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Why should this matter to us now, thousands of years later? Because it might give us some insight into today’s situation.
Homer gave us epic tales involving a vibrant world of violent passions, both positive and negative. Wars were fought over trivial matters. Gods and men competed for glory. Each individual had unique powers and personalities.
By contrast, the philosophers sat around and discussed. Plato’s Republic, one of the classics of philosophy, contains no action other than people making speeches. Their goal is to discover reality (or however Plato phrased it; I haven’t read him in over 30 years). They focused on universal truths that applied equally to everyone, not individual people.
In our modern scientific, rational society, we side with the philosophers. We like to think we can understand, and therefore control, anything. We can master anything, from climate change to the common cold, if we can properly dissect and define it. Once we can understand it, we can manipulate it, and ultimately control it. We follow the philosophers, breaking everything down, examining it, and eventually finding the truth. We believe that with enough time and effort, we will command the economy through interest rates and trade policies, eradicate obesity through medications, and create fabulous cities through urban planning.
If anyone doubts my description of our society, let’s look at an example. The federal definition of homelessness contains 26,545 words. By contrast, the United States Constitution originally had about 4,500 words, which included the signatures. (It has grown to about 7,700 words with the amendments.) Put differently, we need about six times as many words to define homelessness now as were needed to found the country 250 years ago.
But today, the world feels much more like Homer’s writing than the philosophers’ treatises. We see incredible overreactions to personal slights. Passions are running wild. The battlelines are clearly marked, but they shift in a moment if an enemy becomes useful or an ally’s devotion becomes suspect.
What does this mean for us? To be successful, we need both passion and wisdom to deal with the situation around us. The truth is that the most successful people manage to blend the two worlds. They demonstrate intense passion in pursuing their vision, even if they themselves don’t come across as particularly passionate. They pursue their goals relentlessly. But they use ideas and concepts to find the best way of achieving their goals.
Those who can’t combine these attributes might succeed for a time, but eventually they will fail. If they rely solely on passion, they will be easily manipulated. Just as a wild animal can be trapped by a hunter who understands the animal’s instincts, so a passionate but undisciplined person can be manipulated based on their instinctive responses.
But those who rely too heavily on ideas and systems don’t fare much better. Without passion, and especially without being able to inspire passion in others, they create bureaucracy and argument but don’t make the world a better place. Their utopian ideals don’t gain the momentum to become reality.
In our day, we desperately need to marry passion with wisdom. The biggest threats we face are well funded, organized, and ruthless in pursuit of their goals. Without passion, we define the problems from the sidelines, but we won’t defeat those problems. And without wisdom, we can fight against the problems, but we won’t be able to clearly say what we are fighting for.
MARTI MALTBY is an avid cyclist, Director at Peace House Community, and an obnoxiously proud Canadian.
