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Troy, the Olympic Games and Elias (Part 2)

The film ‘Troy,’ which we discussed in the first part of this article, revels in its moments of passion and bloodshed, ostensibly revealing something fundamental about the spirit of the ancient Greek world. Yet the film did not and could not have adequately conveyed a mindset and attitude to civilization fundamentally at odds with our own, and still call it entertainment- at least not for us.

For their part, the organizers of this summer’s Olympic Games in Athens hope that the event will be equally passionate, less bloody, and perhaps more Greek.

Nevertheless, they would like to accentuate the return of the Olympics to its native soil as a positive moment for global friendship and cooperation at a time when widespread violence and hostilities suggest just the opposite. Assessing the true spirit of the ancient Games, however, one finds little equivalence between the two contests. We will return to this fascinating disparity a little further below.

Norbert Elias (1897-1990) was one of the leading sociologists of the twentieth century, though he only became well known within the last 30 years of his long life. Only then were his earliest works reprinted in English. Elias was responsible for several groundbreaking works, the foremost being The Civilizing Process (1939) that revised modern scholarship’s view of historical truisms in European history, and at the same time made theoretical contributions that remain provocative today. In the words of his recent editors, Stephen Mennell and Johan Goudsblom, The Civilizing Process

“…is primarily known as a fascinating case study of changing manners among the European upper classes since the Middle Ages. However, it also a paradigm of a mode of research, conceptualization, and theorizing which constitutes a radical challenge to many of the fundamental assumptions still prevalent in sociology today. Thus, building further upon the basic insights into the nature of social processes first developed in The Civilizing Process, Elias made several major innovative contributions to the study of power and to a truly sociological theory of knowledge.”

This description comes from an anthology of Elias’ work culled from his most important books, and also includes several key essays. From the title (On Civilization, Power and Knowledge, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998) and brooding, balding cover photo of the author, one gathers that the publisher sought to create a mental association with the works of the much more famous French philosopher Michel Foucault for marketing purposes. Yet while Foucault was also concerned primarily with power and knowledge, it would be simplistic to compare the two men, as their insights differed in many ways. While both do have a common historicizing approach to human events, and approach the concept of power as a subtle entity lurking in the interstices of relationships, Foucault’s theory of “radical breaks” is at odds with Elias’s singular contribution, the idea of “process reduction.”

The simplest example of “process reduction” is that contained in the linguistic fallacy, “the wind is blowing.” What, Elias argues, separates the “wind” from the “blowing?” In his works, Elias draws on much more complex examples of the same phenomenon to affirm a notion of human knowledge and power relations as structured yet fluid phenomena undergoing constant change, adaptation and development. As such, he exhibits the broadly Germanic approach to modern philosophy, as exhibited by dialecticians such as Hegel and Marx (Elias even studied for a short time with the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer and Adorno, though his topics of investigation diverged from theirs).

This theory is at the same time a complaint, one aimed at his sociological and philosophical predecessors. To Elias’ thinking, the prevailing approach of his time was characterized either by arrogance or excessive ideality, the false assumption that human understanding and knowledge were not dependent to a large extent on a long process of experience developed over the “long chains of human generations.” In one fascinating essay, on the subject of time, Elias argues that the human understanding and conceptualization of time is neither universal nor automatic. This is in contrast, he says, to the Modernist tradition:

“…from Descartes to Kant and beyond, the dominant hypothesis concerning time was based on the assumption that humans were endowed, as it were by nature, with specific ways of connecting events, of which that of time was one. It was assumed, in other words, that the synthesis of events in the form of time-sequences patterned humankind’s perception prior to any experience and was, therefore, neither dependent on any knowledge available in their society nor acquired through learning.” (p. 254)

In actual fact, says Elias, time and timing are the results of learning and experience built up over many generations and unique to individual cultures. He shows this by recourse to the examples of African pastoralist society vs. modern Western society. Everything is different between the two; the concept of connecting events shows widely divergent structuring capabilities, the relationship with nature is different, etc. In the former, the power of knowledge of time is far more restricted: only the village priest might be endowed with the knowledge of when the appropriate time is for planting or harvesting, for example. In the end, for Elias the relative relationship of various cultures with time also says a lot about “…the relative autonomy of a society within nature.” Elias argues that the degree of this autonomy changes between societies and indeed over the course of human history. It is ongoing today, and the modern world of virtuality, immanence, instant communications, flow of funds and information is changing not only notions and expectations of timing but nature itself. As time goes by (to make another pun of “process reduction”), Elias’ views will only be vindicated further.

But we don’t have to wait in order to see the wisdom of Norbert Elias at work on a current topic: the Olympics and their legacy. As mentioned above, the modern organizers are stressing the historic nature of the Games and its long Greek heritage to put a happy face on the global gathering- as meanwhile war and terrorism rage in many places of the world.

However, in an essay also included in the above-mentioned volume, Elias paints quite a different picture of the Olympics as they once were. “The genesis of sport in late Antiquity” offers an eye-opening account of just how nasty and brutal the ancient Games really were.

In the ancient Olympics, the sports as we now know them were markedly different. A Greek wrestler was allowed to break fingers and toes, head-butt, strangle, etc. Sometimes before the judges could separate the impassioned contenders, eyes were gouged out or one of the men was even killed. In such cases, the dead man was pronounced the winner, winning the eternal glory that Achilles sought in the Iliad (p. 171).

Aside from this ancient one, modern notions of “fairness” did not apply in wrestling. Similarly in boxing, no attempt was made to separate contestants by weight categories; the only division was between men and boys. Opponents could kick one another, and leather straps with protruding edges were placed on the knuckles to allow for the bloodiest of blows. Elias thus shows the concept of sport is not universal, and the modern Olympics is no a continuation of the ancient. The exertion was brutal in the latter, Elias says, because it was “…regarded as a training for warfare as well as for game-contests” (p. 172). In contrast, our modern Olympics are a means of avoiding thinking about whatever violence happens to be ravaging the world at the moment.

Sport has improved since ancient times- or has it deteriorated? Today, similar physical punishments and “illegal” holds are merely simulated in the World Wrestling Federation and related gatherings. Professional athletes wear padding and are strictly regulated by incontrovertible laws. Even today’s staged displays of violence are merely imitative, taking inspiration from neither nature nor valor, but rather from simulations (recall the real “Fight Clubs” that sprung up in the basements and back lawns of suburban America following the viewing of simulated ones in Achilles’- er, Brad Pitt’s- film of the same name).

Elias attempts to distinguish between the modern concept of sport and the ancient understanding of physical contests, describing changes in 18th and 19th century English society which modified the game by changing its focus: towards the spectator’s enjoyment of the “tension-excitement” generated by a contest as it built up, and related pastimes such as betting, as opposed to the Greek love of action and climax. Even in the concept of a “tie-breaker,” there are huge differences between soccer’s extra-time penalty kicks and the ancient boxing practice:

“…if the fight took too long, the judge could force the two opponents to take and to give blow for blow without defending themselves until one of them was no longer able to continue the fight. This agonistic type of boxing, as one can see, accentuated the climax, the moment of decision, of victory or defeat, as the most important and significant part of the contest, more important than the game-contest itself. It was as much a test of physical endurance and of sheer muscular strength as of skill.

…we hear of two boxers who agreed to exchange blow for blow. The first struck a blow to the head which his opponent survived. When he lowered his guard, the other man struck him under the ribs with his outstretched fingers, burst through his side with his hard nails, seized his bowels and killed him.” (p. 174)

Indeed, the stark differences between our society and theirs include a diametrically opposed relationship with death and the physical world in general. Whereas Americans literally hold vigils and organize mass protests to prevent doctors from taking a hopelessly brain-damaged, comatose child or adult off of life support, the ancient Spartans would routinely and remorselessly kill babies deemed unfit for combat. Today, people who could not have even survived in the time of the ancient Olympics are awarded with their own sporting events. Which culture is more civilized? How is civilization defined, anyway?

The contrasting socio-political implications of this divergence, especially now in our era of state-ordered displays of violence and peace, and the preservation of (our own) lives at all costs (while disregarding the others as “collateral damage”) are fascinating:

“…the higher levels of physical violence in the games of antiquity itself was anything but an isolated datum. It was symptomatic of specific features in the organization of Greek society, especially in the stage of development reached by what we now call the ’state’ organization and by the degree of monopolization of physical violence embodied in it. A relatively firm, stable and impersonal monopolization and control of the means of violence is one of the central structural traits of contemporary nation-states.  Compared with it the institutional monopolization and control of physical violence in the city-states of Greece was still rudimentary.” (p. 167)

The markedly different reality of ancient athletics as compared to our own is far from being the only noteworthy detail in Elias’ On Civilization, Power and Knowledge. Articles on the constraints of society, historical changes in etiquette practices, game models, the state’s monopoly on violence, and the balance of power between the sexes in ancient Rome are only a few of the book’s other fascinating articles. All in all, this is a highly recommended introduction to the work of one of the world’s most original and important sociologists.