ciently fruitful, and there is a need for broader discussion of community goals, ethical and practical. The society learns to depend upon this discussion, as well as the benefits and satisfaction of carrying out a community plan and seeing the results. There are exceptions of course — there is pervasive evidence of single-family homesteads, hamlets of a few isolated families, and hermits engaging in either tactical or psychological refuge. Most people lived in villages that needed to conduct rather little political discussion on a day- to-day basis. But for many others, the special kind of community feeling in those small pre-industrial towns and cities, once tasted, was difficult to get off the palate. When Sparta defeated democratic Manitea, dismantled the city and dispersed the inhabitants to villages, Xenophon implies that the Maniteans suffered mostly psychologically. When given a chance, they re-declared their city a generation later, under no strictly environmental or commercial pressure to do so. They just wanted their town back. The city is the psychological and political center for much of recorded history, partly because that is where records are kept. But cities foster unusually vigorous social interaction. Urban communities can hold as strong a place in the human imagination as religions, ethnic groups, nations, kingdoms or empires. What we today call the Roman empire was in ancient times known mostly as Rome, the Eternal City. To destroy their rivals the Carthaginians, some Roman senators felt they needed to destroy the city of Carthage itself, a difficult, rash, and genocidal deed whose ultimate consequence was the political collapse of the Roman republic. Many cities developed gradually from villages, castles, churches or ports. But powerful ancient metropoles such as Rome, Carthage and Athens established many cities at one stroke to serve as outposts and colonies. Though quickly constructed for openly territorial purposes, these towns were still meant to satisfy very personal cravings for diversity and interaction. In most pre-industrial towns, ecologically responsible behavior was perfectly compatible with the city’s peculiar, vibrant level of regular social contact. To imagine a kind of ecological city, one has to blink away modem urban impressions, and visualize cities based in and served by primarily mral economies, cities that produce goods mostly for their own or their region’s consumption and where urbanites go to help with their region’s harvest. They are proudly local, willing to defend their city’s and their region’s autonomy. Their casual contact would seem to us today to be overwhelmingly personal. And in these cities we see the birth of the original form of politics; regular group discussion and face-to-face decision making. This kind of direct politics has almost disappeared in the mass media demagoguery of the modem age. Today what we call politics is really statecraft, something done by professional politicians and those who imitate their individualistic manipulations in smaller groups. The change in the use of the word politics, with its root of polis or city, reflects the astounding changes that the world has undergone in the past two hundred years: among them the formation of the modem bureaucratic nation state and the invasion, through modem communication, of corporate values into our social relations. The original politics, that of the city, can be seen early in classical Athens. *The JAtho-nlan Clty-Dcmocracy An indication of unusually wide political participation in Athens is the torrent of criticism Greek political institutions received from Greek writers allied with the rich. In contrast, Roman institutions, constructed to the advantage of the wealthy, were rarely criticized by contemporary literate Romans. Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XIV, Number 2 Page 33
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz