Claude Lorrain, Apollo Muses

What the Ancients did for Us

Michael McManus, on our pagan heritage

The pre-Socratic pagan philosopher Anaxagoras took two pots of paint, one black and one white. He took a drop of white and added it to the black, then a drop of black and added it to the white. There, said he, mixing them. We know that both pots have changed colour – that is a fact – but we cannot tell the difference with our senses. If our senses are unreliable on such a basic detail in front of our eyes, then how can we be forever certain of anything else – especially how states should be organised or people ruled?

If by ‘us’ is meant conservatives, then pre-Socratic philosophers did a lot for us. Many of them favoured the conservative, pragmatic, cautious, live-and-let-live approaches to knowledge and policy that eschew the arrogance and certainty of dogma and ideology. ‘In human affairs,’ wrote Xenophanes, ‘there is no certain truth, and all our knowledge is but a woven web of guesses.’ Empedocles cautioned against our tendency to assume that we know more than we do: ‘Having seen only our own part of life, swift to die, we fly away like smoke, certain only of what we have met ourselves.’ Heraclitus pondered on the link between time and change and famously concluded that not only can we never step into the same river twice but that we ourselves are not the same person that we were on the first occasion. Ideologues imagine that they can implement a fixed system of state rule that applies once and for all: one man, one vote, one time, as a satirist put it. Lacking such arrogance, born of a cramped knowledge of the world, conservatives remain humble in the face of changing events. Beware the person of one book, cautioned Aquinas. He might have had twentieth century communists and theocrats in mind. Continue reading →