The Collective Layer of Modern Life
Last time, I proposed that we can gain new leverage over the problems of modern life by treating its structures and values as if they were gods (see “A Modern Pantheon”). Experience tells us that, like the ancient gods, the structures of modern life, such as capitalism, freedom, and culture, are living, changing forces which can never be fully rationalized. They continually exhibit new and surprising behaviors to benefit or disrupt our lives. Only they know to which ends they are directing us. This perspective implies that much of modern life is collective, a theme I will explore further here.
We live in such an individualistic age that we struggle to get our heads around collective experience. We think of humans almost as prisoners, each of us locked inside our own skull, who can reach others only by communicating across the void separating us from one another. We can talk about what we felt and suffered, but others can at most empathize with us from a distance, without directly sharing our experience. Even when we go through an event with others, we assume that we each experience it individually.
Nevertheless, we can observe collective phenomena if we look for them. For example, a crowd of people are talking, and everyone spontaneously falls silent at the same moment. No one has signaled for quiet, and no external event has distracted people’s attention. Nothing has caused the silence; it simply happens. The phenomenon of sudden silence is unpredictable and therefore can’t be studied systematically. When it would occur in antiquity, the Greeks said that the god Hermes had entered the room. We can learn how to recognize such transpersonal experiences by laying aside our individualistic lens and seeing how the ancient Greeks imagined the gods intervening in human affairs.
Let’s start with one of the most famous scenes in Western literature: the confrontation between Achilles and Agamemnon at the beginning of the Iliad (see Figure 1). The Greeks had sacked a town near Troy and allotted two captives, Chryseis and Briseis, to Agamemnon, the commander in chief, and Achilles, the best warrior. The town’s priest of Apollo prayed for the return of his daughter Chryseis, and the god decimated the Greeks with a plague until they agreed. Having had to return Chryseis, Agamemnon gathers men to take Briseis from Achilles in compensation. Achilles first wants to resist:
Anguish came to Peleus’s son [Achilles], and within, the heart
In his manly chest pondered two courses,
Either he could draw the sharp sword from his thigh
And stand up to them and kill Atreus’s son [Agamemnon],
Or he could stop his anger and restrain his passion
Until he turned things over in his mind and heart.
He drew the big sword from its sheath, but Athena came
From heaven. (For she was sent by the white-armed goddess Hera
Who loved and honored both men in her heart.)
She stood behind and grabbed Peleus’s son by his golden hair,
Appearing to him alone. None of the others saw her.
Achilles was amazed. He turned around and recognized Pallas
Athena immediately. Her eyes appeared terrible to him. (I, 188-200)
Achilles resents the dishonor of having this prize of war taken away from him by force and wants to murder Agamemnon rather than give it up. Athena tells Achilles that he would gain the most honor if he concedes Briseis to Agamemnon but withdraws from the fighting. The Greeks will eventually realize that they need him, so they will offer him much bigger prizes to return to the war.
Figure 1. Achilles Restrained by Athena in Agamemnon's Tent
The modern reader likes to translate this scene into familiar terms. In a pre-scientific age, the argument goes, Homer doesn’t know anything about the brain and the neural pathways that underpin cognition. He doesn’t have a concept of the inward person as distinct from his outward behavior—“that within which passeth show,” as Hamlet puts it. For a concrete thinker like Homer, everything must happen externally. Consequently, Athena embodies Achilles’s mind, coming to him all of a sudden with a brainwave. No one else sees her just as no one can see our private thoughts. In other words, we conceive of Achilles as an individual, and we reduce the machinery of the gods, to whom Homer accords so much respect, to a mere allegory of a person’s thought.
If we are to take Athena and the other gods as seriously as Homer does, we must ask instead how they manifest collective experience. The gods are “ever-living,” but they aren’t ever-present, not always active in human affairs. They tend to make their presence felt at moments of transition where one set of conditions gives way to a new set of conditions. The life we lead after the god’s intervention differs qualitatively from our previous life. Before Athena appears, Achilles fights in the war and is accounted the best by Greeks and Trojans alike. After Athena, Achilles sits in his tent, sulking and partying. At one point, he just about makes up his mind to abandon his quest for military glory, leave Troy, and return to a long, quiet life at home.
But this isn’t Achilles’s personal drama. Athena doesn’t come of her own accord. Hera, who wants the Greeks to capture Troy, sends Athena at that moment for strategic reasons. Moreover, Athena’s idea for how Achilles can gain more honor is just part of Zeus’s inscrutable plan to fulfill fate with the destruction of Troy. Something larger is going on that Achilles, Agamemnon, and other mortals and even gods do not perceive, something beyond their individual ken. There are layers within layers. Opportunities for peace will arise and fail. The fighting will go back and forth, the Greeks now attempting to breach the walls of Troy, the Trojans now threatening to burn the Greek ships. Many will die on both sides. Agamemnon’s high-handed seizure of Briseis will threaten his grip on power once the Greeks understand its consequences for themselves. Achilles’s beloved companion Patroclus will go out to fight in his place and be killed. Thus, Achilles will suffer grievously from his decision to withdraw. He will re-enter the war, not motivated primarily by a shower of gifts from the Greeks, but to avenge Patroclus’s death. Athena isn’t just Achilles’s mind. She is a cosmic factor that redirects the action at a number of junctures in the Iliad, directly or indirectly at the behest of Zeus.
We experience similar transitions in the modern world, such as geopolitical crises, public health emergencies, and recessions. We’d miss the significance of 9/11 if we focused on the decisions of individuals, whether al Qaeda’s leaders, the hijackers, or U.S. officials. In response to the terrorist attacks, wars were started, security concerns affected transportation, organizations made different investments, attitudes toward government changed, suspicion of foreigners increased, and on and on. Some of these changes were wise, some useless, some made life worse, some had little to do with 9/11 itself. In any case, life after 9/11 acquired a new tenor. As with Achilles’s withdrawal from the Trojan War, few foresaw the event, and, once it happened, few foresaw the ramifications.
In the modern world, we live within conditions created by transpersonal forces. The U.S. federal funds rate, for example, isn’t just a technocratic control. It determines how fast the economy will grow, what unemployment will be, where investors put their money. The federal funds rate sets conditions for economic life. Whatever the rate is, some people are pushed to destitution or are rescued from it. Some companies go bankrupt, or they survive. Someone gets rich. Wages rise or flatten. Yet, as much power as the rate has over our lives, it’s no more visible to most people than Athena was to the other Greeks in Achilles’s tent. If a company hires me, my life changes. I never think, “Oh, it’s because the Fed lowered interest rates by a quarter point,” which may have been a decisive factor.
One might object: The federal funds rate isn’t so mysterious as you make out; it’s set by a careful decision of the Federal Reserve. This attempt at rationalization only displaces the gods’ intervention elsewhere. The 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee are appointed by different presidents with different political agendas. The members themselves have different views of monetary policy, and often confront ambiguous or unprecedented economic situations. They suffer from confirmation bias, recency bias, and all the other cognitive biases endemic to humanity. However carefully they make fact-based decisions—and the Federal Reserve has done a good job over the last 45 years (past performance doesn’t guarantee future results)—there’s plenty of scope for irrational influences.
Homer doesn’t rationalize away the gods’ effect on humans in the Iliad. He makes a point of saying that he’s composing an epic about the conditions determining human life rather than about the choices and actions of individuals. The Iliad begins:
Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Peleus’s son Achilles
Destructive as it was and caused Achaeans much suffering,
Sending the stout souls of many heroes headlong
Into Hades to become the prey of all dogs
And raptors, and to fulfill the plan of Zeus
By whom indeed were first split in a quarrel
Atreus’s son, king of men, and godlike Achilles. (I, 1-7)
The Iliad isn’t about Achilles, who is in fact absent from the scene for most of the epic. For comparison, the Odyssey begins: “Tell me, muse, about the wily man who suffered so many things after he sacked the sacred city of Troy.” The Odyssey is about a man, Odysseus. By contrast, the Iliad is about Achilles’s anger at the way Agamemnon treated him and especially about the consequences of that anger, which go far beyond what anyone but Zeus foresaw. As lines 2-7 indicate, Achilles’s wrath sets the conditions for Greeks and Trojans alike from the beginning of the Iliad to the end. Zeus and the other gods use Achilles’s anger as a way to manipulate human affairs to achieve their ends. The Iliad lifts us above daily events and proximate causes to see who the gods are who direct them, what the gods’ personalities, preferences, and jealousies are, and how they enact their will.
The modern obsession with reason and individuality leaves us defenseless against the irrational forces that determine our collective experience. During the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of Americans unexpectedly decided that the vaccine wasn’t safe, and quarantines and masks were an imposition on their individual freedom. Not only did they leave themselves open to infection, they spread coronavirus to other people. Hundreds of thousands died needlessly. The whole country suffered, not just the individuals making foolish choices. Public health officials were caught out. The more they communicated facts and logic, the more stubbornly the anti-vaxxers resisted.
What a Homeric calamity! In this situation, the author of the Iliad would have us ask: Which god in our modern pantheon did we offend? How did we offend? What could we do to propitiate that god? We can’t answer those questions and thus protect ourselves from similar catastrophes in the future unless we go beyond microorganisms and public health statistics to imagine a living personality motivating this particular kind of pathological behavior. In fact, we will remain blind to the whole powerful layer of our collective experience if we don’t follow Homer’s example by acknowledging that the modern gods are real, independent entities that set the conditions within which we must live.