Dear Friends,

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

Perhaps the British novelist L. P. Hartley, who wrote those words, was inspired by his many days being water-chauffeured around Venice in his private gondola by his own personal gondolier. (I know I would be.)

But the past is a foreign land, and the distance between our experience and that of our ancestors is why I love studying history so much. By understanding the world as it was, we can recognize the ways culture has changed, and might change again in the future. 

Take Greg Anderson’s book The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (or this phenomenal review of the book by Claire Hall in the London Review of Books.)

Anderson explores how our constructs of reality simply did not exist in ancient Athens. And that if we try to understand classical Greece with our 21st century gaze, we fail to understand what life was actually like. 

For example, we see ourselves having distinct public and private lives. Who we are at home is different from who we are at work, or out on the street, which means that our homes are separated from the outside world. (At least they were before COVID.) But, argues Anderson, for the Athenians of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, this wasn’t the case. There, the domestic was part of the civic. 

This matters because we immediately have to re-think the role of women in democracy, for example. Suddenly, women inside the home can be understood to be carrying out essential democratic duties, much as men were fulfilling them outside. Indeed, for the Athenian imagination, the democratic unit wasn’t the individual – but the household. This explains why “nobody in Athens seems ever to have made the argument that it was ‘undemocratic’ to exclude women and slaves from participating in the city’s business,” as Hall writes. Families were themselves a kind of person, a world away from our focus on the individual. (Remember Mitt Romney on the campaign trail? “Corporations are people, my friend!“)

The pattern continues when we look at religious activity and belief.

Whereas our dominant religious culture separates the sacred from the profane, where some spaces are deemed religious (churches, synagogues, mosques, temples) and others non-religious (the stock exchange, the hospital, the park), for the Athenians, there simply was no distinction between the secular and the sacred. How could there be when gods like Zeus and Athena participated in secular decisions like whether the city should go to war?

Instead, religious categories delineated between that which belonged to the gods and that which belonged to human beings (but were nonetheless approved by the gods.) Writes Hall, “None of this should imply that the Greeks didn’t distinguish between gods and humans. Of course they did, though porously – hence demigods like Hercules. Instead, the gods suffused, maintained and underpinned everything.”

Exploring these different mental models to make sense of life isn’t just about history. We are in the midst of rapid ontological shifts, too. 

• Think about how our understanding of our bodies is changing, as ever more technology is integrated into our physical selves. Where does the body begin and end? 
• Or look at the rapidly expanding understanding of gender identity, moving away from a binary female/male and toward a much richer spectrum.
• Also, the disintegrating separation of work from leisure, as leisure activities are monetized and work is gamified. 
• Perhaps even the proliferation of multiple selves through online avatars, drag, and character creation instead of a steady, single self.
• And, of course, the move from god being ‘up there’ to a sense that god is ‘in here’, or as Tara Isabella Burton describes it in her new book Strange Rites, the move from an institutional to an intuitive spirituality. 

Throughout his book, Anderson’s argument is this. “To understand the Athenians properly, we must recognize that it isn’t just that they perceived the world differently, but that the world itself was different.”

Isn’t that a marvelous invitation? The world can be different all over again! 

Have a wonderful weekend, Shabbat Shalom,