Explaining the exceptionalism of the Greeks

I am posting in my blog an old post of mine that I liked. It's my first blog post without statistics.

Some people believe that the Greeks were an exceptional civilization. That they were fundamentally different in nature from other civilizations. I do believe that. While others don't. However this blog post is not about IF the Greeks were different, but explaining WHY the Greeks were different. It is for discussing why Hellas evolved a rather different culture from other cultures.

I think that the main factor in the emergence of a distinct type of civilization was the geographical factor. It was due to geographical factors that civilization first emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley. These places were in the middle of Eurasia, hence they had access to the greatest diversity in plants and animals for domestication, while being river valleys, which enabled irrigation.

One only needs to look at an map:

Mespotamia


Egypt


Indus valley


Now, lookin at Hellas we have a very different picture, instead of a society based on land and a river valley, we had a small sea surrounded by a very porous coast, which was consisted of a very irregular terrain:


Hellas didn't develop agriculture, nor nucleated settlements, but these innovations came from their epicenter in the fertile crescent, reaching Greece about 7,000 years ago.

However, due to the exceptional geographical conditions of Greece, the development of civilization took a different route from other places. In other civilizations the development of agriculture, cities and writting lead to the formation of centralized states that confiscated the agricultural surplus and feed a ruling class that was based on the power of the centralized state.

The spread of civilization to the geographical region of Greece, however, had different effects. Here the irregularity of the land and the existence of many islands made the formation of centralized states harder. This geography eventually resulted in the formation of many small states. These very small states each consisted of a single nucleated settlement and the surrounding countryside. While the aegean sea had the effect of making the transport of goods and people easier, increasing the degree of communication between the peoples of each state. The coasts were porous, increasing the penetration of the sea to the lands, further facilitating the use of sea transport.

So instead of developing a single centralized state and a population that was isolated in each region from the populations of other regions, we had many states and a population that was culturally and economically unified by the aegean sea.* Therefore each state was under intense competition from other states. Since there were many hundreds of states in classical Greece under close contact an evolutionary process of social institutions happened that eventually resulted in the emergence of democracy.

A city state tends to protect the rights of individuals better than macro states. That's because a city state is small and therefore it is easier for individuals to leave the state, hence to maintain it's population inside the city state needs to give a good measure of rights for the population. If every other city state around a certain city gives a good measure of rights, then this city also needs to give even better rights. As result a process of institutional copying and innovation happens when we have a city state culture, specially the huge city state culture of Classical Greece.

This process eventually resulted in a civilization different from others. The main difference was the cultivation of the concept of individualism. Science, freedom and democracy are the outcomes of individualism in the realms of mind, society at the individual level and society at the state level, respectively. How so?

1 - Science is the idea that the individual mind can understand the universe though the objective study of it. It's antithesis is the idea that the universe is not compreensible to the individual mind ("Puny human, you cannot understand the world that god created!"), that there exists a master creator whose mind is greater than the individual human's and whose wisdom a human cannot approach and that the universe is too complex (or chaotic) to be understood. The development of this concept is closely linked with the concept that the individual is sovereign in his personal matters, and not to be ruled by a master.

2 - The concept of freedom at the individual level is that the individual mind decides over it's own destiny, as opposed to the concept that another individual controls the destiny of this individual. In that case the individual is a slave of another. Individualism means that the individual is his own master.

3 - Applied to the concept of government the concept of freedom means that no single individual controls the state. As the state consists of the power to the legitimate use of compulsion over the territory of which it is sovereign, if a single individual controls that power this individual becomes the master of the population under his rule and everybody becomes his slave (that was the situation of Oriental Despotism, as characterized by the ancients). So the ancient Greeks developed the concept of democracy, where the government is shared by all and the concept of rule of law, where the government's actions are restricted by a constitution, which consists of a well defined set of rules for the conduct of the government.

So the unique geographical conditions of the aegean, facilitating sea trade and the formation of many small states ultimately resulted into the formation of a unique civilization, that some people call western civilization. The principles of Freedom, Democracy, Science, Rule of Law, etc, were all developed in tandem by this civilization over the critical period from 650 BC to 350 BC.

* Before the invention of the railroad in the 1830's, the only way to transport goods cheaply was by sea travel: A ship could carry 100 tons of goods, while a wagon could carry 1 ton of goods. As result the cost of sea transport was 50-60 times smaller than the cost of land transport and 10 times smaller than the cost of canal transport, during Roman times. So the only cheap way to transport goods was over the sea.