Differences

I saw The 300 earlier today. It's a pretty good movie. It's a bit simplistic in parts, and it is quite violent. It plays fast and loose with the facts as well. There was more than a smattering of the kind of post-Enlightenment phrases you would never hear in the 5th century B.C. And there was absolutely no reference to the helots (who, while not chattel, weren't that much better off than slaves). But the movie mirrors the spirit of Thermopylae fairly well, so I won't waste my time with quibbles. I give it a solid B/B+.

I could see why so many reviewers didn't like it, though. For one thing, it is unrepentantly male. For another, it not only refuses to present Spartan soceity as an object of contempt -- it openly admires it. And finally, the film promotes ideas that Western society now largely holds in contempt: that death is not an evil to avoid at all costs, that honor is more important than life, that a death in battle in defense of your country is more glorious than a death at the end of a long life spent avoiding conflict, and that freedom can only exist when people are prepared to die for it.

During the film I kept thinking of two things: the panoramic view of human history in G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, and how different our view of death (and therefore how different our view of life) is from the Spartans'.

At one point in Everlasting Man (see here for a summary of this excellent book), Chesterton spends a few paragraphs pondering several different points in human history (or at least the history of the West) where turning points were reached, where one people or civilization triumphed over another, and went on to contribute to Western civilization. Thermopylae was one such turning point. Leonidas and his fellow Spartans bought the people of Athens time to escape with their lives. If the Persians had entered Greece unmolested there was a good chance they would have destroyed Athens before the Athenians had time to leave, which meant that Greece would have likely become part of the Persian empire. There would have been no more Greek democracy, no philosophy, and no Alexander to spread Greek culture far and wide. Human history would have been very different, and perhaps not in a better way.

One of Chesterton's points is that the overall pattern in the clash of civilizations is that the "better" civilization prevailed. The Jews leave Egypt and wipe out the several nations of Canaan. They destroy the Canannites' tradition of human sacrifice and nature worship and pass on a tradition of montheism and the first unified vision of the divine and the moral. The feuding Greek city-states band together to repel the Persian empire, one of the largest empires in history. They eventually pass on a tradition of democracy, rational discourse, philosophical questioning, and empirical observation. The Romans battle and crush Carthage. They rid the Mediterranean of Carthage's tradition of child sacrifice and evetually pass on a tradition of impartial justice, popular government, and the rule of law. And this is all good.

I also thought of how different we are today from the people depicted in the movie. And I thought about how fortunate we were that Thermopylae happened 2,500 years ago, when people in the West genuinely believed that it was better to die as free men than to live as slaves. Our view of death today robs us of the strength to similarly defend our culture from extinction.

For instance, at the end of the movie, the Spartan king, Leonidas, curses the man who betrayed his army to the Persians by telling him, "May you live forever." Most people today would consider those words a great blessing because we acknowledge no future after death. We have no faith that the gods (or God) will honor a man's life or reward him after death. Our culture sees death as the supreme evil, to be avoided at all costs.

This attitude reminds me of Professor Weston, a character in Perelandra. In the book Weston allows himself to be possessed by Satan, who crushes out Weston's soul, leaving only unintegrated psychic remains that occassionally float to the surface in random expressions. At one point in the book, Weston's remains congeal at the surface of his personality long enough for him to tell the protagonist, Elwin Ransom, about the purpose of human life. Weston now sees life from the point of view of death, and he compares human life to an orange, with the rind being the conscious period that we call "life" and the fruit being the rest of existence. He claims that the whole point of human life is to thicken the rind by any means necessary. Prolonging life by a year, an hour, a minute -- that is all the meaning people can hope to find in life, he insists.

And if he is right, if our society is correct in believing that there is nothing worse than death, then the Spartans who died at Thermopylae were wrong: it is better to live as slaves than to die as free men, because the free men die, and living is better than dying. If that's the case, though, those Spartans were more than wrong: they were fools. They might be remembered in glory after they die, but what do they care? They're dead. Perhaps their culture will survive, but so what? They can find no greater meaning there, because their culture will die and will probably be forgotten and their glory will cease to be. Or perhaps they take solace in the fact that their people will live on. But how can that be? Their descendents, and all humanity, will eventually die and be forgotten. What is the point? There is no greater reality to give us meaning in life, so how could there possibly be meaning in death? Save yourself as long as you can. Cryogenically freeeze yourself if you have to. And save your family too, I guess -- at least until we reach the point when we can artifically preserve our genetic material well enough that we don't have to worry about passing on our genes through our descendents, anyway.

The Spartans (and most Greeks besides Lucretius) would have laughed at these questions. "You fools," they would say. "Honor the gods with your lives, and they will bless you and your family." Even 200 years ago our ancestors could laugh at these questions. "You fools," they would say. "God honors people with the consequences of their actions: glory and salvation for the righteous, damnation for the wicked." My father would say that these statements are an example of religion as marvelous social control mechanism, and are evidence of why religion is false. I disagree with him on the second point, but he could be right. If he is, though, he and his friends were very foolish to share their wisdom with the rest of us.

While we think the game has a point we can play it well. Once we are told there is no point, however, it becomes hard to shake the belief that we're wasting our time by playing. At least it becomes obvious that anyone who plays by the rules is a fool. This, of course, could all be wrong. Maybe the game really does have rules that matter, and maybe it really does have a point. I believe that it does. But if it doesn't, it's best to be honest about that fact and do our part to achieve a faster slow death for humanity. These beliefs might be true, after all, but no one who truly believes them is fit to defend them.