The Prime Minister is urging citizens not to throw caution to the winds when lockdown ends on 19 July but to behave ‘responsibly’. But there seems little incentive when legions of psychiatrists, lawyers, counsellors, social workers etc appear to insist you must never blame people (only ‘society’ or ‘the Tory cuts’) for anything. Can the ancients help?
For ancient Greeks, it was the prospect of public shaming that kept people behaving responsibly. In Homer’s Iliad, the first work of European literature (c. 700 bc), the heroes who always feared what other people would say about them if their behaviour did not come up to what was expected of them exemplified that sense of shame (aidôs).
A myth explained all. Early humans, living in communities but lacking social skills, existed by crime and fighting. So Zeus sent Hermes to instil in them aidôs (‘shame’) and dikê (‘justice’): aidôs was the impulse to respect mutually agreed social norms, while dikê was the legal sanction that enforced that respect.
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