Greek stupidity

II. Greek Stupidity

There are three contemporary attitudes toward ancient Greece: One is indifference toward anything that happened that long ago; a second is reverence (which became widespread during the Renaissance); and the third is condemnation of a culture which retarded the development of science and inhibited progress in Western Civilization for centuries. In adopting the third of these attitudes here, we must beware our own modern tendency to equate technological development with progress. Actually, if there is any consistent theme throughout Western history, it is the underlying failure of knowledge in general and scientific knowledge in particular to promote moral development and improve people and the way they relate to each other.

While we will emphasize the shortcomings of Greek thought and the debilitating influence it had on the Greeks and those who followed them, we should be able to muster enough respect to give them the credit that is due. They did make some real contributions to intellectual life with their discoveries of mathematics and the art of deductive reasoning. Geometry, particularly, is a Greek invention, and nothing serves better to exemplify the static nature of the Greek mind. In the broader context of logic in general, the one-sided genius of the Greeks appears clearly in the way they reasoned deductively from apparently self-evident truths rather than inductively from observed facts.

Ironically, the Greeks' strong point was also their weak point in that their inventive genius in philosophical abstraction was basically the obverse of their impracticality in responding to the problems confronting them. For example, they conceived the grandiose idea of democracy but failed to unify their city-states in a cooperative effort which would have worked to the mutual advantage of all.

Generally, the world of the Greeks was as small, orderly and statuesque as they could make it, and for all their genius, everything Greek remains comprehensible in a glance. Their political ideal was the little polis—the statuary city-state. Their gods were superlative shapes rather than omnipotent forces. Their religious services were formalities of piety not expressions of soaring emotions. Their great ethical systems—Stoicism