As long as Nietzsche is allowed to create dichotomies in Greek mythology that never existed in the minds of the Greeks, I should be allowed to do the same.
Tiresias was a mythological figure known as the hermaphroditic prophet of Thebes, who advised seven generations of the city’s kings, and was changed into a woman by Hera for the crime of killing a pair of copulating sacred snakes. Coming across another pair of snakes after many years, he was transformed back into a man for (depending on myths) killing them again, or choosing to leave them alone. He was also blinded by Athena, in another myth, because he accidentally came across her bathing naked, and in compensation she gave him the ability to talk to animals.
Tiresias was most famous for his sex-change, his prophecies, and his ability to contact divine sources of knowledge. Sources concerning him are often contradictory and fragmented.
Hermes, among his many other roles, was considered the patron of messengers, which is the aspect I have chosen to focus on.
Gods tend to have limits in pantheistic models; there are boundaries they can’t cross. Hermes cannot give messages except through the flawed method of human speech. Meanwhile, Tiresias is fluid; able to cross between the ultimate divide (man and woman) and understand someone else’s perspective as if it were his own (because it is his own) and receive direct messages from nature and beyond death. This is Tiresian/Hermetic.
To understand the difference, a reference to Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s ‘beetle in a box’ is a thought experiment wherein there exists a society of people who possess a creature seen only by themselves in a sealed container. They can never understand the contents of anyone else’s box, and have no way of knowing if the ‘beetle’ inside is the same creature at all. It’s a metaphor for the internal experience, for emotions if you like, meant to demonstrate that language is an entirely cultural, intangible system of communication, where meaning that is shared is not necessarily shared in the same manner.
My point in creating a Hermetic/Tiresian distinction is that because Tiresias switched sexes, he is able to see the ‘beetle in another person’s box’ and truly understand another person’s internal experience by becoming them, the only figure in all mythology and in fact all human culture to ever do so. And Tiresias is distinct from Hermes because the god can’t do that, despite being privy to most if not all ‘messages’ in existence. He has knowledge of it all, but not true understanding – more like a digital database than a browser of that same database. Tiresias understands what he knows through at least two sets of eyes, meaning that it has meaning for him.
Applying Nassim Taleb’s antifragility/fragility would explain another aspect of this arbitrary division. Tiresias is antifragile – confronted with sudden unwanted womanhood, he adapts, gets over it, and improves – s/he has kids, and lives for seven years until changing back. And when Athena blinds him, she also gives him the ability to talk to birds… the ‘gain from disorder’ is pretty obvious there. That’s one way to look at it. But you could also say he was antifragile because none of the information he received as a seer was enough to stun him or put him out; Tiresias’ pre-existing idea of life didn’t include the idea that he was supposed to know everything and have domain over any sphere of existence, so things that surprised him didn’t disable him. He is a singular, adaptable unit. Antifragile.
Whereas if you confront the god of communications with a communication method he didn’t expect, or unknown information, his position as ‘god’ is challenged. Hermes is big, all-encompassing, and very vulnerable. Fragile.
A good example of the Tiresian and Hermetic lies in journalism. Early ‘journalistic’ practice, as practiced during the Protestant Reformation, consisted of the haphazard distribution of millions of propagandist flyers. Denunciations, praises, and everything in between were circulated constantly. There was no MEAA; there were no ‘industry codes.’ If you had a printer and a person to operate it, you could publish whatever you liked. There were hundreds of independent operators. I would call this system antifragile, because it allowed the readers (of course there were very few people at the time who could read, though the number was growing) to read panegyrics from different sources which wildly disagreed very easily, and make up their own minds. Like Tiresias, a little socialist primer understands the mindset of the traditionalist newspaper because they are at the root the same.
Modern journalism I would not call antifragile, especially since a massive number of newspapers and formal/respected news sources are owned by Rupert Murdoch, meaning that if he fails in some manner, they follow suit. Like Hermes, he owns all, yet understands little of the information his papers carry in a human way due to a preoccupied, Olympian, top-down nature that precludes natural understanding.
Then there’s the idea that a tiny socialist pamphlet or a comparatively small website like, say, the Daily Beast creates new content. It publishes the results of the endeavours of its creators – a rally, say. It’s small, and makes no pretense at objectivity. Like humanity, it creates, while the Hermetic/Murdochian newspaper can only report on what’s already there and add spin. Because pantheistic gods all have their individual realms, they cannot create anything, they cannot expand, they cannot change. A tiny independent newspaper can. It has freedom to act and it has the freedom (from industry codes) to be original. For better or worse.
For all the complaints of the Greeks about the rule of their old gods, they were wise enough to acknowledge that they, as small units lacking responsibility, had those very freedoms in contrast to those gods. Journalism of the future – and we’re seeing it already, people are calling newspapers and large outlets ‘legacy media’ – will be an ongoing debate between antifragile outlets – “small, independent, mobile, and intelligent units” because the internet has forced people at large to be that way.
Now what? Are they to be pitted in a bloodless war for cultural capital against the larger structures of society? That may be a dramatic presentation of the idea, but it is essentially what is happening. People are too thinly spread out for general impressions and general applications to actually apply to them all. Case in point; the mainstream media doesn’t report on much of what happens to most of us. Interests, hobbies, fields of study, have diversified and fractalised into pieces so small that auto-didactic behaviour with the status of ‘polymath’ as the end goal is impossible.
Formal education is far behind the world’s events at the younger levels, with only universities managing to keep up with what’s going on. The world is digital, but nothing is connected except on a personal level, where one researcher knows another and so on. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, people are disenfranchised by the established media and they have been exposed to so many bizarre and characterful cultures by the internet that they feel as though the mainstream culture is simply too uninformed to support them. Society is too large and not involved enough in the concerns of the citizens. The solution – or, rather, the inevitable conclusion – is digital city-states in the Ancient Greek model. City-states were united by common passions and fears, which transgressed class boundaries. Passions, culture, common interest unite us, and the Internet is not a new phenomenon in this regard at all – it merely allows for previously unimagined combinations of intellectuals and hobbyists/specialists in any particular field to communicate.
There was a sense in older societies of ‘knowing one’s neighbour’ and feeling relatively safe in a city which is now gone due to the large numbers of people refusing to engage with the world immediately around them, the high amount of immigration around the planet compared to the rates from the 50s, and the increased suspicion people have of strangers as a result of various wide-reaching cultural changes which would take too long to explore here. The West’s cities are filled with strangers, and combined with the lack of cultural cohesion I described earlier this fact is leading people to naturally make more friends with common interests online and eschew their immediate physical environment. In other words, we are seeing the slow formation of online city-states.
We have already seen it, actually. 4chan and Tumblr consider themselves different tribes. There are subcultures within those sites. People united by a common culture flock together and form a tribe, differentiating themselves from the outsiders by virtue of their shared interest in a given subject. Cultural movements begin on the fringe, with fetishists and obsessives, and move slowly to the centre, and as they move closer to the center they become exponentially faster and larger. To take a now-famous example, Jordan Peterson spent decades on the fringe, as a complete unknown in the field of clinical psychology who wrote one obscure book. In 2016, he came to the mainstream’s attention through some manufactured controversy or other and had to explain what he’d found on that fringe over all that time.
Every proper cultural movement begins in the fetish. And it does that because it’s essentially Tiresian, blinkered and separate from the amorphous Hermetic mass of information that is ‘everything else.’ If it begins in the center, it’s a forced meme and it will either be plugged and consumed by the masses or quickly die out and be replaced with no one noticing (e.g. Top 40 pop music). But true cultural movements, things that change the status quo and things that have merit and attention paid to them by intelligent people begin on the fringes of the culture with the fetish. Because fetishists pay attention to every detail of their work – the particular over the general – and look upon the entire world through the prism of their interest, making it able to survive in any environment. By contrast, stuff made for the centre dies in the centre.
I wonder how long it will take before someone else uses the phrase ‘digital city-state’ and that idea becomes mainstream, and the auteurs and hobbyists who make video essays and online lectures become more popular than the academies they learn from. Perhaps we’re already there – Digital City-States now run the Western world in the cultural sense. Everyone in a Digital City-State knows everyone else, and they hold one another accountable by virtue of their shared knowledge. “Booktube.” “Anitube.” The video-essay types (although they’re idiots). Tumblr. 4chan. Everyone in an online community is able to vouch for or castigate everyone else based on personal experience, in a similar vein to ancient Athenian radical democracy.
There are a lot of metaphors comparing the Internet to the wild west. But it’s not the wild west anymore, the unexplored, lawless New World – now, the internet is more like 7th century Athens, with primitive, as-yet-uncemented, newly codified laws. We’ve moved forward in time, independently of outside forces, and now we’ve divided ourselves into city-states dispersed enough that we need sets of individual laws and rules to regulate participation in the culture. Whether that be “Booktube” or the video-essay bunch who have no collective noun.
When I say we ‘need law’ I don’t mean Youtube has to start regulating the content. I don’t even really mean we ‘need’ it as much as ‘we already created it by virtue of sharing a common standard of video quality.’ So, a video-essayist’s videos are expected to support a hypothesis with accurate and relevant evidence, and an anime Youtuber is expected – but not required! – to use footage of the show in question in a video.
It’s not that humans naturally make laws as much as we do conventions, naturally. So, where is our Solon? Where is the lawmaker who comes from within, the Tiresian lawmaker who’s seen it from the inside, to stand against the Persian invaders, as this extended metaphor calls the advertising companies and copyright claimants? Who is our Pericles?
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