For ten thousand years, We, the People, have sought to live in community and in polity. To be both one and many is in the very fabric of our nature, and in the foundations of our states.
The form of those communities, the great places we call cities, has changed so fundamentally with the course and flow of culture and technology through time.
And now, as in time before time, we fight for the very survival of our species. We, the People, are both from this Earth and of this earth, and we share and steward it for countless others, both like and unalike to ourselves. And as we continue to grow either toward peace and harmony or away from those ideals, those Idea of justice—dikaisyni—of beauty—Kalos—of righteousness in mind, body, and action, as we face mounting questions of social or societal collapse in a time of unheard of prosperity, I, in my Gorgian and Isocratean modes will call back to those proto-states and myths of lives lived well.
That is the tradition in which we operate, for better or worse, in the West. And—too—I recognize that there are many other modes of thinking and ways of being that I do not have access to, but I will argue that fundamentally, there is a universal experience of being an existing and thinking thing that ties together these modes, modalities, and ordinant points. But I must stick to what I know, and what I know is classics, western tradition, and civics as understood by a very small minority of scholars when we look to the history of human experience, writ large. This language is informed by and charged with Americana, but a very specific type of Americana that edifies itself in the tradition of the “Founding Fathers” who I will spend no time defending as individuals, but will praise, herein, for the moves they made at liberty, however constrained they were by their own moment and lack of identifying the universality of human experience that abolition, civil rights, and equity seeks to tackle now.
We’ve grown a lot, and we’ve got a lot of growing to do, but on its face, the idea that two bodies are created differently yet are equal in the eyes of the law and the state and in Justice and in righteousness, that idea, the idea that we are equal in the eyes of governance is so central to our project as Americans and as—to speak to my own niche—American scholars of the history of rhetorical study. That idea, the Idea of equity, of justice in experience in the presence of Truth is what compels me to write these words, but the words themselves, are, in the Platonic mode—of the city. And for brevity and to capture the Idea of the ideal city, I will refer only to the polis or the urbs, which it’s important to note are associated but have slightly different intonations for how we might live together.
This series of posts—should I be able to keep to it—will interrogate our current moment and look for, using the metaphors of the earliest Westerners, a way of seeing, a rhetorical lens, that we might use to critique our contemporary body. I hope, in doing this work, to encourage and invite thought, as I myself and a perpetual student in the study of living well.
Photo accessed at: https://www.britannica.com/event/January-6-U-S-Capitol-attack