The Mechanisms of Joy

I was talking to a much-loved friend the other night, we were both hampered by a lack of words for different kinds of love-relations. I was reminded that the Greeks had a number of extra words for love and this took me into a flight of fancy. I promised to identify them all. I knew the first three most often named, because they appear in the New Testament, namely eros, philia and agapé.
The Wikipedia, I notice, stretched the list as far as five by adding storge and thelema although I’m less convinced by them. I would add three significant others, though: epithymia, oikeios and erastés.
I talked of Paul Tillich and his Theology of the Erotic, of Freud, Rollo May and Plato to explain agapé and eros, and of Aleister Crowley to define theléma. I quoted from Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony to explain the mysteries of erastés. I was reminded that this last one “stressed the quality of areté and played down something self-evident: pleasure. Areté means an “excellence” that is also “virtue.” The word always had a moral meaning attached...”
In the end, though, I realised that there is a problem with any discussion of love and the ancient world... they thought in a different way to us. We’ve had our minds twisted up with ideas of romance (as its name suggests, a Roman invention) and witless celebrity. These words just don’t map onto ours at all. In a society which has lost the ideal of the areté, that has no passion for ‘excellence’ and ‘virtue’ it is impossible for us to understand what the Greeks meant. We have replaced virtue with commerce and consumerism, with Jordan and Paris Hilton, with people who are famous only for being famous, with artists and writers who say nothing about anything except themselves, with those who are empty of values. In a culture where no-one can be shamed any more, perhaps we cannot really attain the more advanced forms of love in the way they could. If we want them, we will have to create virtues of our own and uphold them, admire them, desire them, and share them.
I think the ancient Greeks saw their many concepts of love as components that all overlapped and fitted together, each turning the next, none able to stand without the others. I think it’s relevant that we now know they had developed a mechanical computer long before the birth of Christ, a miraculous assembly of cog-wheels and dials that calculated eclipses of the sun and moon, the movements of the planets, the dates of the Olympiads and much more besides. The Antikythera Mechanism was a means of representing the heavens to the people of the Earth - as above, so below. I think it is possible the Greeks thought of love and their culture in the same way, each wheel turning another, none separate from its neighbour, no movement possible without affecting all. In our new age of the computer, can we not engineer something similar again?

Another Point of View

This has been going through my mind for a while now... It’s inspired by the approaching start to the Olympic Games in China, and a warped kind of alternative history took form in my imagination. It is quite preposterous, of course... pure sci-fi, because nothing of the kind could ever happen in real life, but I cannot help wondering how we would have reacted if it had?

September 4, 2001: Four CAAC aircraft on internal flights from Beijing are hijacked. They are crashed into strategic targets in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, killing 2,993 people. Osama bin Laden is blamed, apparently angered at Chinese anti-separatist action in the largely Muslim province of Xinjiang. The date of the attack is seen as significant as 4 is an unlucky number for the Chinese and '9/4/01' sounds quite like a phrase in Mandarin meaning 'a close shave'.
October 7, 2001: China, together with a small group of ASEAN nations invade Afghanistan. The People's Liberation Army quickly defeat the Taliban.
January 11, 2002: China transfers captured militants from Afghanistan to a small island base near Taiwan which they seized from the Philippines at the end of World War Two. International groups are not granted access.
September 12, 2002: Chinese premier, Jiang Zemin, says China has identified a link between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/4 and will move on Iraq if the U.N. does not. He reiterates the claim that Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction poses a direct military threat to China.
March 18, 2003: PLA troops launch a terrorist-seeking raid in Afghan villages
March 19, 2003: Newly appointed Communist Party General Secretary, Hu Jintao, says in a television address that “the People's Republic of China and its allies have launched a campaign to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq and ‘free its people.’”
March 20, 2003: Iraq War begins. Chinese and North Korean troops invade.
April 9, 2003: Saddam Hussein’s statue is toppled in Fidros Square in Baghdad by PLA troops.
Dec. 13, 2003: Saddam Hussein is captured alive by North Korean troops in Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown.
Jan. 17, 2004: The death toll for Chinese soldiers in Iraq reaches 500.
April 29, 2004: Photographs of Chinese soldiers torturing and humiliating inmates at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad are made public.
June 28, 2004: The Coalition provisional Authority is abolished, power is transferred to Iraqi authorities in a hurried, secret ceremony two days ahead of the scheduled transfer.
Oct. 7, 2004: A People's Liberation Army report concludes Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.
Sept. 6, 2004: The death toll for Chinese soldiers in Iraq reaches 1,000.
October 29, 2004: A study published by the Lancet says the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the Chinese-led invasion.
November 15, 2004: Chinese troops re-establish control over most of Fallujah after a fierce assault.
Nov. 5, 2006: Saddam Hussein is convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging.
Nov 17, 2006: The Japanese newspaper, Nikei Shimbun, reports a sign of Chinese "permanency" in Iraq. The new Chinese embassy going up inside Baghdad's well-fortified Green Zone will be almost the size of the Vatican City.
Dec. 6, 2006: The Iraq Study Group releases its report, recommending against permanent bases in Iraq.
Dec. 30, 2006: Saddam Hussein is executed by hanging.
October 11, 2006: A team of Chinese and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.
June 5, 2007: Hu Jintao, now Chinese president, announces that China wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all Chinese soldiers and contractors in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that if Chinese troops occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, it will lay the basis for unending conflict. President Hu wants to push through the accord by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory at the 17th National Party Congress in October and claim the 2003 invasion has been vindicated.

August 8, 2008: China hosts the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing.

Who do you think will be coming?