{"id":22348,"date":"2023-02-16T17:19:20","date_gmt":"2023-02-16T22:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=22348"},"modified":"2023-02-16T17:19:20","modified_gmt":"2023-02-16T22:19:20","slug":"aristophanes-and-the-lgbtq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/16\/aristophanes-and-the-lgbtq\/","title":{"rendered":"Aristophanes and the LGBTQ"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Bust_of_Aristophanes.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-22349\" src=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Bust_of_Aristophanes.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"330\" height=\"481\" srcset=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Bust_of_Aristophanes.jpg 330w, https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Bust_of_Aristophanes-206x300.jpg 206w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 330px) 100vw, 330px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>All this historical comparison to 5<sup>th<\/sup> century Athens has made me jealous.\u00a0 But instead of looking at the military and political similarities, I think I\u2019ll compare the cultural revolutions that occurred in Athens and the United States.\u00a0 And the primary evidence for the nature of the Athenian cultural change will come from Aristophanes comedy, \u201cThe Clouds.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rather than going back to the Greek original (for which my extremely rusty knowledge of the Attic comic dialect would be insufficient) I will use the text of Arrowsmith\u2019s mid-twentieth century American English.\u00a0 And this is fitting because I am also mid-twentieth century American in my origin.<\/p>\n<p>The Clouds is the story of a wealthy but culturally traditional Athenian farmer, Strepsiades, who marries an aristocratic wife and subsequently ends up with a son whose patrician tastes are bankrupting Strepsiades.\u00a0 In desperation to escape from his debts, he goes to Socrates\u2019 School of Sophistry to learn how to flim-flam his creditors.\u00a0 But it turns out Strepsiades is too old and adle-pated to learn the sophistic methods.\u00a0 In desperation he forces his son, Pheidippides, to become a pupil at the school and learn the art of sophistic logic.\u00a0 Or as it is described, \u201cthe art of making the worse argument appear the better.\u201d\u00a0 But once the boy is trained in the sophistic art, he turns his skill against Strepsiades and beats him when he dares to question the \u201cgenius\u201d of some of Pheidippides\u2019 literary favorites like the progressive poet Euripides.\u00a0 And when Strepsiades complains of the impiety of dishonoring his own father Pheidippides uses his \u201clogic\u201d to prove to Strepsiades that beating his father is logical.\u00a0 After Strepsiades admits the logic of his argument Pheidippides offers to prove that horsewhipping his own mother is also a reasonable practice.\u00a0 But that is a bridge too far.\u00a0 Strepsiades realizes that using the sophistic methods is a deal with the devil and he rushes to Socrates\u2019 school and sets fire to it, to put an end to all the corruption.<\/p>\n<p>During Pheidippides education we are witness to a debate between sophistic logic and normal logic personified as two fighting cocks.\u00a0 During their exchange we learn that sophistry is completely immune to shame.\u00a0 When accused of buggery, pederasty and perversion Sophistry laughs saying he\u2019s being pelted with roses.\u00a0 All such things are complements to the new way of thinking.\u00a0 Sophistry finally defeats Normal Logic by proving to him that all the successful lawyers, politicians and poets are all perverted buggers.\u00a0 Therefore, buggery is the successful lifestyle, QED.<\/p>\n<p>Arrowsmith succeeds in putting the Greek into modern idiom but the ideas are all there in the original.\u00a0 The traditional culture of the Athenians, which included filial and religious piety and a warrior tradition had been replaced among the young with an atheistic, materialistic philosophy wherein respect for tradition, the desire to compete for honor among fellow citizens or even the desire to just raise a family had all been replaced with a hedonistic imperative to eat drink and be merry with whatever money their parents may have accumulated.<\/p>\n<p>The parallels between Aristophanes\u2019 description and what we have in modern America are too striking to miss.\u00a0 Besides the disrespect for all traditional virtues and heroes we also have the very pointed championing of sexual deviancy.\u00a0 If this play was being written today, we could name the sophistry character LGBTQ and it would fit right in with Aristophanes\u2019 dialog.\u00a0 Look at this exchange:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Philosophy<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>And suppose your pupil, by taking your advice, is promptly convicted of adultery and sentenced to be publicly reamed up the rectum with a radish? \u00a0How, Sir, would you save him from that?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophistry<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Why, what\u2019s the disgrace in being reamed with a radish?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Philosophy<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sir, I can conceive of nothing fouler than being buggered by a radish.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I could just hear this kind of argument being put forth in National Review under the title, \u201cThe Conservative Case for Buggery.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What all this tells me is that the path taken whenever traditional culture is subverted by an effete, materialistic, hedonistic and sexually deviant culture is essentially the same regardless of whether it is 21<sup>st<\/sup> century A.D. America, 1<sup>st<\/sup> century A.D. Rome, 5th century B.C. Athens or antediluvian Ur.\u00a0 They go after the children and teach them that their parents are stupid and that the traditional rules are outdated.\u00a0 And they tell them that raising a family is unnecessary and expensive so the better course is to feed their vices and live as a parasite on society leaving nothing after they die.\u00a0 We seem to be in the midst of western culture succumbing to this impulse.\u00a0 Like the Greeks and Romans before us we\u2019ve lost the aspects of our culture that preserved and strengthened it.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know whether we\u2019ll end up like Rome but at the rate we\u2019re going it shouldn\u2019t take too much longer to find out.\u00a0 We\u2019re rapidly reaching a crisis point.<\/p>\n<p>And as for escaping this trap, Aristophanes had the right solution too.\u00a0 Go to the school and burn it down.\u00a0 Hopefully one day Harvard and Yale will join Socrates\u2019 \u201cThinkery\u201d in the actual ash heap of history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>All this historical comparison to 5th century Athens has made me jealous.\u00a0 But instead of looking at the military and political similarities, I think I\u2019ll<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[931,3885,932,3886,194],"class_list":["post-22348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-aristophanes","tag-decline-of-western-civilization","tag-greek-comedy","tag-the-clouds","tag-western-civilization"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.4 - 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