JUNE 28, 2022 – “Another crazy . . . strike that,” I said. “Another fascinating aspect of the human condition is how we govern ourselves—or to cover the various means that we’ve thus far devised, how we are governed.
“I understand you’re different from ants,” said the alien.
“Yes, though there’s a lot to be learned from ants,” I said, feeding the alien’s peculiar fascination with ants, as I recalled its earlier mention of the tough-customers. “They could well hold the secret to survival. I mean, when we humans have destroyed the planet as our own habitat, you can safely bet that ants—maybe cockroaches too, but definitely ants—will inherit the earth.”
“They’re my next stop after humans,” said the alien, as its filaments pulsated orange and yellow with apparent enthusiasm.
Next stop? It felt like a put down. Sure, ants might be successful survivalists, but show me art, music, literature, not to mention modern medicine, produced by . . . an ant colony. I let the insult slide.
“Back to the matter at hand,” I continued, “namely, politics.”
“Yes, what’s politics?”
“To grasp it fully, you need some acquaintance with Ancient Greeks, most notably, Plato and Aristotle. The latter was the student of the former and lived from 384 BCE to 322 BCE. Those two guys talked a lot about political thought—politics or πολιτεία (“politeia”) having been derived from the Greek word, ‘poli’ for ‘city.’ As Aristotle himself observed in his classic work, Politics, ‘[humans are] by nature a political animal.’
“Here in this country, in this times, ‘politics’ has become somewhat of an unsavory word, as in ‘All politicians are corrupt’ or ‘He’s just playing politics.’ In fact, many Americans oppose government and governance and go around displaying big, yellow flags featuring a coiled snake and the words, ‘Don’t Tread on Me!’ A loosely bound bunch of people calling themselves Libertarians espouse that the best governance is the least governance and implicitly condemn politics. But the full context of Aristotle’s statement provides critical insight into his famous observation regarding humankind’s political nature:
“‘Hence it is evident,’ he wrote, ‘that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either above humanity or below it; he is the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homer denounces—the outcast who is a lover of war; he may be compared to a bird that flies alone.’”
With this quotation, the alien’s filaments assumed their brightest magnitude yet and alternated among all the individual bands of the spectrum. I took this to mean the alien was either duly impressed or duly worried. Where else in the cosmos did a Plato, an Aristotle, or πολιτεία exist? Then the alien threw me a curve ball.
“Was Greek your original language?”
“Say what?” I’d heard the question perfectly well, but in my surprise I needed to hear it again.
“Greek. Is that the language you humans you started with?”
“No, our first language consisted of grunts.” (Cont.)
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
