I've always loved this quote from comedian Gilbert Gottfried: Did people in ancient Greece walk around saying: 'Gee, this is a long time ago...'
It cracked me up at fourteen. It cracks me up now. (Which says something about how much I've matured, but...)
I can't even figure out why it makes me laugh so much, but I remembered it recently when I was reading one author's take on Alexander the Great, and his explanation of how we can't judge yesterday's standards by today's morals.
I was reading a biography of Alexander and his conquest of most of the freakin' world, and I wondered: Why did most of these people, these conquered people, give themselves so freely to this young punk after their land was invaded, their fields razed, their citizens slaughtered?
The explanation was, well, in those times, that was what people did. Plain and simple. If your land was invaded, and your side lost, sorry, pal, but you gave up any authority you had to the rightful victor, like it or not.
Similarly, those who judge Alexander's seemingly endless desire for more and more lands to dominate as essentially barbaric may have a point, but they're also missing the point, because he lived in a 'pre' time --pre-Ally McBeal, pre-Freud, pre-Victorian, pre-Christian, pre-everything. The way we've been conditioned to view the world cannot possibly mesh with how he saw the world. Was it right? Was it wrong? Irrelevant. It was, period. You can't project backwards. You don't have to agree with the way things were. But you have to acknowledge the way things were, acknowledge the framework through which people saw the world. Alexander believed himself to be a descendant of Zeus. Oracles were consulted regularly for advice (oracles being the primitive version of Dr.Phil.) War and conquest were the standard by which success was measured. Aristotle was a soldier and a scholar, and saw no contradiction between the two. The world was an unknown entity, there to be fought over, divided, and contemplated upon, preferably in white loincloths, I'm guessing.
Think of it this way. Three thousand years from now, scholars, future Aristotles, may look back at our time, at 2004, and marvel at a world so divided by culture and religion, by linguistic differences and theological clashes that led to the deaths of thousands of innocents. Three thousand years from now, there could be one race of yellowish/brownish/blackish/whiteish type people, and the teenagers of that future era will read their history texts (or have them implanted in their heads, I guess) and laugh at how primitive, unsophisticated and basic we were.
From our horizons, Alexander and his ilk were basic, yes, ignorant of human psychology, sure, and overly dependent on oracles and sophistry, uh-huh, but their legends endured. Their exploits inspired. Alexander was so well known he was written about in the Bible and the Koran. Not bad. Which of today's leaders (or conquerers) are mythic enough to make the cut three thousand years from now in some as-yet-to-be-written gospel?
Just think: As you butter your bagel and watch Katie Couric on the Today show and settle into your comfortable cubicle at work and bop around town looking for a Dairy Queen so you can nab a Blizzard for lunch, diet be damned, you are also living and breathing right here and right now in that land known as 'a long time ago.' People thousands of years from now (assuming the world will still be around, and I think it will), college kids whizzing around the skies in vehicles too abstract and surreal to contemplate, are studying your life and your values, your diet and your weapons, your judgements and choices, and they're snickering, these kids are. Sighing. Wondering how you could be so ignorant. Wondering how you could be so skeptical. So naive. They're relieved, these futuristic sophomores, that humanity has somehow managed to advance past that barbaric and primitive Dark Age known as the 21st century.
