From the Bible to the Nation: Aristotle’s Zoon Politikon behind humanity’s historical tragedies

Aristotle appears to have been right to describe human beings as “political animals”. To be sure, such a definition of our species can be interpreted and understood in more than one way. But it would be difficult to argue against the fact that everything that is social within the human communities is political. Whether a particular community is matriarchal based upon lineage through the female line, or its basis is a particular caste-system - these are results of political decisions based upon the social consciousness of the members of these particular communities. Whether the society allows equal rights to women or not, whether it creates a system of compulsory and free public education or not, whether it allows religious blasphemy or not - all of this depends upon the existing political beliefs.

And aside from being political, we are animals precisely because we follow and act according to the political impulses that we receive. People would sacrifice animals because they believed that such acts would please their gods. People go to war because they believe their nation to have more rights than others, or, for instance, they consider it to be threatened by others. People mobilise for protests because they believe that gay people should have equal rights to everybody else (or that they should not). In this sense one may agree with Aristotle’s employment of the “term ‘political animal’ as a scientific description of humans as a part of nature.”

Of course, there are instances of soldiers going to war solely because they are getting paid, and not out of patriotism. And there are definitely cases of people acting out of pure inertia, for instance when baptising one’s child - who does truly believe in heaven and hell in our days? Also, there are European countries that still have not formally abolished monarchies - despite nobody believing in the “divine right of the kings” anymore. But to accept the framework of war between national armies is as much a political impulse as to stubbornly defend social traditions without ever critically reassessing them.

Human history is full of tragedies as a consequence of us being the “political animals”. Arguably, the most unfortunate aspect of the Zoon Politikon is the blind acceptance of the political impulses that lead us to the particular political actions. Humans can better resist the sexual urge in a public space than animals, and those on a nutritional diet are surely much better disposed than animals to resist the natural impulse of hunger. I might want that chocolate brownie really badly, but I am aware of the potential negative consequences or simply of the futility of indulging in such a sugary activity. And this might be sufficient to prevent me from entering that pasteleria.

But how many political battles have been avoided, or how many lives have been spared over the course of the centuries as a result of the conscious and critical appraisal on behalf of the society of the (ir)relevance of various political impulses? Probably not too many. How many individuals have been vainly sacrificed to gods, even if with their own consent? And how many lives, or even hours of labour, have been pointlessly lost on building the pyramids in Egypt? While these examples might not be the most tragic ones, they fall under the very same category as the Catholic Inquisition or the World Wars of the 20th century.

Of course, those who sacrificed humans to gods considered it to be very important. Likewise with those who built the pyramids. It is only from historically later social perspectives, such as ours for example, that such endeavours begin to be regarded as meaningless. As meaningless as the religious-political battles over the Bible during the foregone centuries. How ridiculous does the following prohibition look from our contemporary perspective?

“1229 Canon 14 of the Council of Toulouse, France, states: ‘We forbid the laity to have in their possession any copy of the books of the Old and New Testament, except the Psalter, and such portions of them as are contained in the Breviary, or the Hours of the Blessed Virgin; and we most strictly forbid even these works in the vulgar tongue.’”

Or, to take another example, how stupid does the prohibition of the translation of these texts into native and common languages appear in our epoch?

“1559 ‘[Pope] Paul IV put a whole series of Latin Bibles among the Biblia prohibita (prohibited books); he added that no Bible in the vernacular may be printed nor kept without the permission of the Holy Office. This amounted to prohibiting the reading of the Bible in any common language.’”​

Today even the Catholic countries allow full freedom of circulation of the Bibles in national languages - and, of course, they will not dare to admit that the protestants were historically correct. But even more importantly, these former political battles are completely irrelevant within our contemporary secular societies. And yet, how many lives were ruined in the name of something we no longer care about? In the Edict of Fontainebleau of 1685 in France, for instance, we find the following:

“We enjoin all ministers of the said R.P.R., who do not choose to become converts and to embrace the Catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion, to leave our kingdom and the territories subject to us within a fortnight of the publication of our present edict, without leave to reside therein beyond that period, or, during the said fortnight, to engage in any preaching, exhortation, or any other function, on pain of being sent to the galleys.”

Moreover, the protestants were even ordered, under the pain of a penalty, to ensure the baptism of their children. Completely incomprehensible from our contemporary standpoint. England likewise had its share of religious victims and martyrs. And even when the more general protestant trend had gained its acceptance by the mid-17th century, there were still the Quaker women, who “were persecuted for a host of reasons; perhaps most notably, however, they were treated harshly because they resisted convention. Quaker women confused the social hierarchy and engaged in activities that were typically reserved for men, like preaching”. And if that was not enough, these female Quakers were also “subject to persecution due to their plain clothing”. Their “mode of dress was considered an affront and a ‘refusal to use conventional politeness.’” Today we could not care less at the societal level about such issues. Rather, they would simply be non-issues.

But what has all of this to do with the Zoon Politikon? Well, if Aristotle really meant that “we humans possess certain distinctive capacities – reason, language, and sociability – that render us uniquely well suited to living in states, and that the exercise of those capacities is an essential part of our well-being”, it is questionable whether he was aware that this human reason is not a timeless and ahistorical phenomenon. Our social consciousness constantly evolves alongside the economic progress of humanity. And this evolution renders yesterday’s political battles completely meaningless today, while at the same time it creates ever new ones. And the most tragic aspect here is that this “political animal” can not overcome its political impulses while they are still in operation.

Take the question of women’s reproductive rights, for instance. Future generations will look upon these political battles that still take place today in the same manner as we treat the historical issue of the Bible and its translations into vernacular. The free and autonomous choice by the woman over her body will be a historical outcome as inevitable as was the Bible in various local languages. The idea that society must have a say in a private body matter of a woman is dying its natural death. But should we expect a contemporary conservative person to give up upon his political impulse to defend something that he finds so sacred? Or should the progressives, for the sake of social peace, give up their impulses to defend women's autonomy over her body? And simply wait for the older generations to die out in order to be able to build a society according to their political impulses?

It remains to be seen whether humanity can overcome its subordination to nature as “political animals”. Until this happens, human suffering remains, tragically, the order of the day. Once the further economic development moves the society beyond the so-called modern nationalism, and we will no longer imagine ourselves as composed of numerous competing nations, such calamities as the two World Wars, for instance, or the current genocide in Palestine will be placed on the same list of historical futilities as the persecution of protestants or human sacrifice to gods. Just some more human lives wasted away for absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, it appears, history must always run through its course. Hence, for now the nationalist political impulses reign supreme.

Sources:
https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/101982163
https://antigonejournal.com/2021/03/political-animals/
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1685revocation.asp
Lohr, Shelby (2014) "Protestants, Quakers, and the Narrative of Religious Persecution in England," DISCOVERY: Georgia State Honors College Undergraduate Research Journal: Vol. 2, Article 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31922/disc2.1

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