Where the Greeks Any Good? Weird Morality, Democracy, and the Semiotic Paradox of Classical Historiography

Abstract

The normative political grammar of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies (after Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan 2010), has a strong ethic of autonomy: individual rights, liberty, and justice (Haidt, Koller, & Dias 1993). The strongest expression of it is among scholars in the humanities and social sciences (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek 2009) because this grammar dominates the political left and they are overwhelmingly leftists (Duarte et al. 2015). Included are classical historiographers, who (proudly) identify classical Athens as the origin of our WEIRD political grammar, or at least a twin. But Athens was ruled by a small minority organized around martial values and a warfare-based political economy that oppressed—with considerably cruelty—a large population of slaves and every single woman (including non-slaves). This is a paradox: classical scholars celebrate an extreme right-wing culture as the putative origin of their own liberal-leftist ideology. A semiotic analysis can explain it. The Western identity game, if well closed, must express the one-sentence goal: ‘Being a Westerner is good.’ But since modern Westerners consider the ancient Greeks their putative forefathers, this game output is possible only if one can also express ‘The Greeks were good.’ Hence, this latter meaning has come to organize, as one-sentence goal, the game of classical historiography, discursively coercing us to see the Greeks as freedom-loving ‘democrats’ (as we use that term). The syntagmatic-functionalist approach (Gil-White 2020) is here applied to examine this semiotic paradox and its effects on classical historiography.