Thinking like the ancient Greeks

 I like to think that I think like some of the ancient Greeks. Paul Woodruff, a scholar at the University of Texas, has written some things that bring me back to earth.

The differences in cultures are vast. For example, consider the ancient consensus on the gods:

The ancient Greeks held that only human beings were capable of compassion. Their gods lacked a moral compass, and, to make matters more frightening for us humans, the gods of Greek myth had no capacity to put themselves in the shoes of a suffering, erring human being.

The gods murdered, raped, seduced and lied, but they found human weakness incomprehensible. They were usually bored by the subject, rather than struck by the tragedy of it. Only humans feel compassion.

Another example is the consensus toward what the folks I grew up with called scripture. Even today, most religious people don’t tamper with it. The Christian tradition has some severe injunctions against that sort of thing. By contrast:

The ancient Greeks used their myths. Myths were not treasures to keep sacred. Anyone could put fingerprints on a myth, tell it in his or her own way.

Homer would tell a story one way to make a point. Sophocles would tell the same story in another way to make a different, sometimes contradictory, point.

You might think these observations are about religion. But the Greeks thought about ideals, such as wisdom, leadership, courage, compassion, reverence and justice. As Woodruff points out, these things are transcendent, rather than religious. They are things we aim at, rather than achieve.

I spent my working life among people who believed in measurable goals — and thought that goals that couldn’t be measured were useless. Ancient Greek thinkers thought that aiming at anything measurable was aiming too low.

You can measure the acquisition of knowledge, for example, and that’s what American educators now do. The old Greeks would have wondered why you would want to acquire knowledge, when wisdom calls.

To think as the Greeks once did takes some adjustment, more than you’d guess at first glance.

• Paul Woodruff, The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness and Rewards; Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 107, 66.