>Ellen Meiksins Wood writes in _Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The
>Foundations of Athenian Democracy_ (London: Verso, 1988)
[...]
>What is important here
>is Protagoras' conviction that political virtue is necessarily a
>universal quality, belonging not just to a select few but to
>'shoemakers and smiths', that is, to 'banaustics' as well as to
>gentlemen or philosophers.
Aristotle called us the "political animal." This has become increasingly obvious based on the study of language and human origins. The subject-object structure of language was developed entirely in the context of social relations. Its later application to nature and technology led us inevitably to anthropomorphize everything. At the core of our minds, we still think of things in terms of people and their desires. Consciousness and social relations are two sides of the same coin. To be human is to be the perfect expert on politics.
>To introduce his argument, he makes use
>of the Prometheus myth; and here Prometheus is clearly a benefactor,
>not the instrument of man's fall. Where Hesiod's Prometheus brought
>an end to the golden age in which the fruits of the earth offered
>themselves freely to mankind without their labour, Protagoras' hero
>gave them a gift of practical arts which allowed them to turn the
>earth's riches to their benefit;
Both of these views are correct. If any actual event in history roughly corresponds to a "fall," it's the decimation of the great herds we depended on for food, fuel, clothing, and tools. It happened all over the earth approximately 15,000 years ago, triggered by the end of the most recent Ice Age. But there were warming periods before that didn't result in such a catastrophic decline in ungulate populations. The difference is that we were so technologically advanced by this time that we could turn a bad situation into a disaster as everyone desperately tried to get a piece of the shrinking pie while it still lasted. This led to our reliance on domestication of animals and eventually plants, a strategy that requires far more labor. Of course, our transition would not have been possible without the "gifts of Prometheus."
>Where for Hesiod the cycle of human life
>has regressed from a golden age of leisure to a fallen condition of
>pain and labour, for Protagoras it has progressed from a state of
>nature where men lived like beasts to a civilized life marked by the
>practice of human arts and the universal distribution of political
>virtue.
If Hesiod represents the myth of regress, Protagoras represents the myth of progress. It's only with the rise of civilization that humans have learned to live like beasts. Back when our survival was tenuous, we had to be in solidarity. We were at war with predator animals. Not only did they routinely eat us, but we stole their food from their hiding places. Once the great herd populations fell, so did the predator populations. But instead of adapting to the new, peaceful conditions, we internalized the law of the jungle and made war on each other. That's why warriors, who had appeared on the scene by 12,000 years ago, commonly painted themselves in the colors of predator beasts. As Ehrenreich argues in *Blood Rites* the male ego revolves around heroics, and if we can't defend the tribe from lions and tigers, we'll just take on the role ourselves, each tribe defending itself against the beasts from next door. Gradually societies fragmented internally into class war and gender war. It's because humans became beasts that we came to require the political virtues.
Ted