I am currently reading Neal Ascherson's The Black Sea: Coasts and Conquests from Pericles to Putin. It is very interesting. Ascherson's wide knowledge of the history of the Black Sea region is embedded in a wider reading of the history of western and general human thinking.
I have been particularly struck recently by his description in chapter two of western dualism and its ancient Greek roots. He wrote:
The Greek tragedians, when they had invented the barbarians [as a label for "ignorant" and "uncivilised" non-Greeks] , soon began to paly with the 'inner barbarism' of Greeks. Perhaps the part of the otherness f barbarians was that, unlike the civilised, they were morally all of a piece -- not dualistic characters in which a good nature warred with bad, but whole. The 'Hippocratic' authors - the unknown writers of the Greek medical treatises wrongly attributed to the physician Hippocarates - asserted in *Airs, Waters, Places that Scythians and all 'Asians' resembled one another physically, while 'Europeans' (meaning essentially Greeks) differed sharply in size and appearance from one city to another. Barbarians were homogeneous; civilized people were multiform and differentiated. The Greek tragedians thought this might be true about minds as well as bodies. If it was, they were not sure that the contrast between Greek and barbarian psychology - the first complex and inhibited, the second supposed to be spontaneous and natural - was altogether complimentary to the Greeks.
Ascherson identifies this movement in Greek thinking as the root of Europe's long, unfinished ballad of yearning for noble savages, for hunter-gatherers in touch with themselves and the ecology, for cowboys, cattle-reivers, gypsies and Cossacks, for Bedouin nomads and aboriginals walking their song-lines through the unspoiled wilderness.
He adds much detail to this thinking. Tying romantic myths about Scots with equally romantic myths about Russians of the Black Sea region.
I recognised in myself strains of the thinking he described. As I grew up I was enamoured of the back woods life and people of Canada and the USA. T.E. Lawrence's connection with the Arabs was tinged for me with the glow of the ideas of the desert in its awful emptiness and the people who could survive in it. I recall in the film Lawrence of Arabia an Arab prince saying to Lawrence that he (Lawrence) shared the European romantic view of the desert which, as an Arab, the prince regarded with distaste and fear - the desert to be endured not enjoyed. That simple statement by an Arab - albeit an actor in a film - made me question my own relationship with the romantic myths of my culture that I had imbibed since birth.
I don't know what I wanted to achieve by writing this here, except to urge other people to read Ascherson's book. It has relevance to our present lives, and the reference to Putin in the title is utterly intentional, I find it relevant to current events in Ukraine and Russia. In the chapter that I've referenced above he strives to make clear that all humans are ... human which is a message he sends to those who would re-enact the excesses of humans' history towards one another.
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