The Nomadic Alternative – Page 201

V

Invasions have one salutory aspect. The invaded almost invariably counter-invade the invaders, and the invasion of their ideas more than nullifies the invasion of armies. The North Vietnamese and their North American allies have successfully invaded North America with incalculable effects on the future. Similarly in the ancient world the Greeks propagated their way of life among the oriental barbarians and in return oriental ideas deflated the expansionist pretensions of the Greeks. Naked Eastern ascetics, the Gymnosophists, forbears of today's money-making gurus in the West, paraded through, and exposed themselves in, the cities of Greece, strenuously preaching the futility of effort in this world. No people before or since the Greeks has accorded the beautiful body such alarming veneration.

Yet influenced by Asian ecstatics, Pythagoras managed to convince his followers that it was nothing - a worthless rag for the immortal soul to sieve through. Such were the attitudes that undermined Greek self-confidence, and no external invasion was so shattering as the movement known as Cynicism.

Cynicism proposed a strategy for the minimum and tried to dissipate the chaos of civilized life by a nihilistic denial of its value. To Diogenes and Antisthenes, Cynicism's two most loquacious exponents, Greek civilization was a sham. It was pretentious as it was funny, and Diogenes' anarchic sense of the ridiculous realized its comic possibilities as a target for satire. That the Greeks might represent some superior race was grotesque. All men regardless of race, creed or colour, were the same. Barbarians could not, and did not, exist. Kosmopolites eimi, he said. "I am a citizen of the world" - a sentiment dangerous and damaging to the morals of the nation state.

Cynic meant 'Dog'.* The Sleib hunters of Arabia were 'Hounds of [illegible]'.

*KUNOS = Dog, Gk.