Political and Personal Identities

The family and the clan, and later on the state, nation or church, assume the same function which the individual mother had originally for the child. -- Erich Fromm, page 39


Fromm's interest in the powerful psychological effects of individual psychology were really highlighted for me in Aeneas' story throughout The Aeneid. Aeneas' drive to visit his father in the Underworld and desire to embrace him showed his deep need for familial rootedness. In my opinion there was also a certain tension between this desire and his responsibility to establish a community in a new land. Ultimately he trudges ahead with his responsibility and creates rootedness at the community level, therefore looking beyond his personal desires and taking his people or society's future into account.

I appreciated the pairing of readings this week because they reminded me of the important linkages between personal identity as defined by familial history and political identity as defined by shared customs, values, and laws. In The Aeneid, the authority of the state depends heavily on Aeneas' family's energy and resources. He is an appropriate and good leader because of his heritage (e.g., his father's reputation) as well as his own valor and choices.

As we have seen throughout this semester's readings, we often define ourselves through our families -- in essence family ties are used as a language from which we learn values and customs. In this light it is only natural for us to look more deeply at the way we talk about our individual identities and our families in the past and present communications in order to understand our own human development.

Historical Narration Emerges with Style(s)

In reading Herodotus and Thucydides, I was struck by how sophisticated it was of both of them to, in their own way, analyze a set of events and retell those events through prose in their own voice. If we look back on the semester's readings we know that the origins of 'documenting' history (and values and norms) came from an oral tradition that used memesis. So here we have two authors that effectively separated themselves from the historical knowledge and broke it down according to their own methodologies -- that's pretty impressive!

A major difference between the two of them is their stylistic approach to the prose. Thucydides takes on a very detached narrative style (one could say with a smack of academic flair?), where aside from describing his methodology at the beginning, he does not refer to himself at all. Herodotus on the other hand takes on a much more personable approach where he is constantly referring back to himself and his own opinions as a way to contextualize the source of the material he is presenting.  We know that both accounts of the wars they document are not perfect as they are writing from their own ethnocentric perspective. However throughout much of Western history (especially after the Enlightenment), we have been inclined as a society to follow a Thucydides-type of approach to narrating history, where we remove ourselves from the narration in order to appear objective. Personally I prefer the approach Herodotus takes: explicitly subjective if equally manipulative! I suppose it comes down to the ongoing questions we keep asking in this course: is it better to reach for Truth even if we know we will never be perfect in reaching it? Or is it better to realize our limitations as humans and through that realization, evolve beyond seeking one Truth?