Alexander the Great says ‘Just do it’

In an ideal world - the world say, of many of the most important philosophers in the history of Western thought, and virtually all economists - human beings make decisions guided purely by reason,  assessing carefully beforehand the likely advantages and disadvantages of any given course of action.  Although there are other internal influences  on human behaviour, namely emotions and desires, what distinguishes humans from animals is our power of rational thought, and that is what can, and should, prevail in human decision making.

This paradigm  came down to us from Plato and Aristotle - by way of the 17th century Rationalist philosophers, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, followed by Kant and the other philosophers of the Enlightenment - into the work of 20th century social scientists, especially economists, who enshrined the idea in Rational Choice Theory. This theory is based on the supposition that the ‘Rational Actor’,  free of any external influences, performs a cost-benefit analysis on each and every potential course of action, and then chooses how to behave accordingly.

This model of decision-making, ubiquitous in social science is, of course, a little detached from the real world, as even economists have finally started to admit: in the last 20 years or so the advent of  ‘behavioural economics’  has acknowledged the existence of  ‘fuzzy’, non-rational elements also influencing human behaviour.

These non-rational elements developed at a much earlier stage of human evolution than rationality. We only have to look at the way the human brain is structured to see that rationality, which is processed by the neo-cortex,  was a late addition to the human cerebral tool-kit:

 

Beneath the neocortex, the reasoning brain, lie the limbic  and reptile brains. These are much, much older and more primitive,  and provide instinctive responses governing behaviours essential to the maintenance of human life: the homeostatic physiological systems of the human body, defence, dominance and aggresion, and mating. The instinctual behaviours deriving from these older parts of the brain can, and often do, override the commands of conscious rationality.

The human brain has evolved in a fairly haphazard fashion– if you were setting out to design a brain for a thinking being, it certainly wouldn’t be constructed   like this – and the rational brain has been compared to ‘an iPod built round an eight track cassette player.’  Thus, in contrast to the smooth cost-benefit calculus of the imaginary Rational Actor, the way we behave is generally a messy compromise, the outcome of the constant tension between the dictates of reason and the powerful inputs from our instinctual emotions and desires.

The subordination of rationality in human decision-making concerned with any kind of desire, corporeal or otherwise is, perhaps, summed up most neatly in   Pascal’s celebrated  anti-Rationalist one-liner: ‘Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point’ : ‘the heart has its reasons, of which Reason knows nothing.’ Pascal and Descartes did not get on, and this remark was by way of an ‘up yours’ gesture to the man who inflicted the lingering blight of Cartesian Dualism on the world.

All bets are off, then, when it comes to the conflict between reason and passion, as was demonstrated only too vividly on my second visit to the camel barn. In  a previous post  I described  visiting Ayvalik for the first time, seeing and falling in love with the camel barn, and buying it the next day. That is the essence of what happened, but of course it wasn’t quite as simple as that.

I went back to look at the house and barn for a second time the next morning, before making a formal offer for the property,  and  during that second visit both the rationality of my decision, and  my sanity, were  called severely into question by the friend with whom I had come to Ayvalik.

Standing in the camel barn that morning, and again overwhelmed by a passionate longing to turn this building into my long-desired library, I was assaulted by reason in the form of my Turkish friend and university colleague Tuğçe (pronounced Too-cher – we will discuss the Turkish silent "ğ" at a later date). She had brought me to Ayvalik for a weekend to see if I liked the place and might one day consider buying a house there, and was now seriously alarmed by my sudden  – and, as she saw it, manifestly crazy -  determination to do so immediately, only 24 hours after arrival.

Acting as the Voice of Reason in the face of my raging passion to acquire the camel barn as soon as was humanly possible,  Tuğçe seemed that morning to be channeling  Immanuel Kant (poster boy for Enlightenment philosophy, high priest of Pure Reason, declared enemy of passion and kill-joy extraordinaire), something quite unusual for this blonde, beautiful academic and  feminist of  the postmodern kind, who is normally much more likely to be found channeling her icon and look-alike, Marilyn Monroe.*

Whilst I stood, speechless , smitten, in the camel barn,  with the vision of the glory of my future library before me,  Tuğçe  was looking round the place with an expression of marked distaste. 

 

In retrospect, I suppose she may have had a point, but at the time I was baffled by Tuğçe’s lack of enthusiasm;  the ensuing discussion, across a vast gulf of mutual incomprehension,  went something like this:

T: Caroline, you should really go away and think about this for a while before making a decision.

C: I don’t need to think any more, thank you. I’ve already made my decision.

T: Caroline, this barn is just a wreck, a big empty space, a heap of old stones. The amount of work required  to restore this building would be enormous. And enormously expensive.

C: It’s an empty space now, admittedly, but like all empty spaces, it has a HUGE  amount of potential.

T: Shouldn’t you discuss this with your family first?

(Family is all important in Turkey. Very close family ties, and constant family togetherness, are central to Turkish culture. Taking a major financial decision like buying a house and barn would be unthinkable  without lengthy discussions involving, probably, the entire extended family, including uncles and aunts. Uncles and aunts loom large in Turkish family life).

C: No, what’s it got to do with them?

T: (shaking her head) I don’t understand you English.

She then decides to come at it from another angle:

T: It will be very, very expensive to make a restoration of this building.

C: Yes, you’ve already said that.

T: For the same price, or less, you could have a lovely  new villa in Şirinkent (a delightful seaside suburb of Ayvalik, where many residents of Istanbul and Ankara have summer homes) with central heating, air-conditioning and a communal pool. Low  maintenance, lovely gardens, right by the sea, no restoration needed. Are you crazy?

C: I don’t want a villa, Tuğçe, I want a library.

Tuğçe sighs, heavily.

T: OK, if you really MUST have one of these high maintenance, inconvenient and  uncomfortable  old houses, why don’t you get one that’s already been restored?  There are plenty of them for sale, and they’re not that expensive.

Then you will know how much money you’re spending up front. If you buy this… wreck and try to restore it, you have no idea what the final price is going to be.

C: We’ve already looked at some restored houses, Tuğçe, and they’re perfectly lovely, but none of them has enough room for MY LIBRARY.

T: Have you ever restored an old building before?  Do you know ANYTHING about restoring old buildings?

C: No, and no. I’ve lived in some, though.

T: Do you know anything about plumbing, wiring, roofing, anything about building at all?

C: Not as such.

T: Do you know anything about Turkish building regulations? They’re very complex, especially in a conservation area like this, and the planning office bureaucracy is always difficult to deal with. It’s one of the things we inherited from the Byzantine empire.

C: I’ll find someone who does know to help me.

T: And you will communicate with this person how, exactly? To my certain knowledge you only speak 4 words of Turkish so far: merhaba, teşekkürler, and çok guzel. (hello, thank you, and very nice)

C: I’ll find someone who speaks English to help me.

T: This is not Ankara: Ayvalik is a small provincial town 170 km from the nearest city. Almost no-one here speaks good English. And the builders will cheat you because you are a foreigner. That’s a given. And you’re a foreigner who doesn’t speak Turkish, so they will cheat you more. MUCH MORE.

And you’re working 700 km away in Ankara, Caroline. How can you possibly manage a building restoration project in Ayvalik when you can only come here in the breaks in between university semesters? You will lose all your money, it will be a total disaster, and then your family will blame ME for bringing you here.

C: I think I’m beginning to sense a little negativity here, Tuğçe.

T: That’s because you’re being CRAZY. This is a crazy, irrational idea. You will regret it if you buy this place. It will bring you ALL SORTS of trouble. I’m trying to save you from yourself.

By this point I was mentally sticking my fingers in my ears and going ‘lalalalalalala I CAN’T HEAR YOU!’

Then Tuğçe went in for the kill:

T: Also, you have no practical skills whatsoever. You told me your mother spent your entire childhood trying to keep you away from sharp objects.

C: And that is relevant to this discussion how?

T: Caroline, I know you. Your brain works very well for tasks requiring abstract verbal reasoning. That’s your special skill. But you should leave building restoration projects to others. People who can successfully use scissors.

But by now Tuğçe’s voice was receding into the distance, merging with the faint squawks of the seagulls flying overhead across the Aegean towards Lesbos, just offshore.

I was lost in Library World again, and this time my vision was much more detailed.

I could see right before my eyes the bookcases in the library: vaguely Greek looking, with that neoclassical revival vibe, and all the books lined up there, finally out on  shelves again after all those years stored away in boxes, and neatly divided on the shelves  into sections and subsections, and properly catalogued with some of that amazing bibliographic software you can get now, which comes complete with YOUR OWN BARCODE SCANNER, and how cool is THAT?

And I could see a great big stone fireplace on the end wall, with big comfy chairs and sofas around it, and desks, and tables to put books on that you don’t need just now, but might need a little later, so you don’t have to put them back on the shelf in the interim, and lots of lamps and good reading lights,  and on the 10 metre long wall of the barn opposite the main door a wooden gallery, with an iron  spiral staircase going up to it, and then up on the gallery more bookcases and a small desk underneath the little window in the centre, where you would be able to sit and work and look out of the window at the giant mulberry tree that stands in the garden of the house behind the barn.

I saw all those things quite clearly, right inside my head. My very own bibliographic paradise. And all that was standing between me and the beautiful library in my head was the organisation of a  little building project, just a few months’  work.

Was not the realisation of my life-long dream worth a little effort and expense?

Suddenly, I thought of Alexander the Great, who swung by this part of the world a couple of thousand or so years ago and whose passage, against all the odds, was marked with a pretty substantial record of success.

I turned to Tuğçe.

C: Sometimes, Tuğçe, when you have a dream, you just have to forget about rationality and take a step into the unknown. Alexander the Great would never have got out of bed in the morning if he’d thought rationally about his prospects of success in trying to invade Asia Minor, overthrow King Darius III and take over the  Persian empire, would he?

T: What ARE you talking about?

C: Really, Tuğçe, compared to conquering the entire known world between Macedonia and India, renovating a camel barn in the north Aegean should be a piece of cake.

T:   (keening) Allah, Allah…

C: And  let’s not get this out of proportion: I’m not going to be unravelling the Gordian knot,  just renovating a couple of old stone buildings in a town where loads of other houses are already being renovated.

Really, how hard can it be?

 

* In order to protect Tugce’s  privacy, I offered to change her name in this blog, in which she will be a frequently recurring character. This suggestion  horrified her: she has opted instead for full disclosure,  pictorial representation and, moreover, would like it to be known that she is currently single.

A City on a Hill

‘ You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.’  Matthew 5:14

On the day that I first stepped into the camel barn and instantly decided that it would become the library of my dreams, I was  unaware that the ruins one of the greatest libraries of the ancient world were situated only a few miles away from Ayvalik, at Pergamon. Pergamon was the literal embodiment of the biblical metaphor of the city on a hill, standing high on a rocky bluff 16 miles inland from the Aegean, about 1,000 feet above the surrounding plain.  Its ruins still stand there, looking down on the modern Turkish city of Bergama.

Pergamon  -   mentioned in the book of Revelation, which accuses it of housing the ‘Throne of Satan’ - became important during the Hellenistic period  (the centuries following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC ) when colonists established Greek cities and kingdoms in  Asia and Africa. Under the Attalid kings, the Kingdom of Pergamon controlled a large part of western Asia Minor (i.e. most of the western half of  present day Turkey).

The last Attalid king, dying without an heir, bequeathed his lands to the Romans in 133 BC, and Pergamon became  the capital of the Asian province of the Roman Empire,  continuing to be a  commercial and cultural centre of major importance, with a population of 150,000.

Pergamon’s decline began when the Goths arrived in 262AD, after which it was ruled by a series of other invaders before, eventually, being abandoned and falling into ruins. This city on a hill was not hidden, but simply forgotten for over a thousand years until 1871, when a German railway engineer bought some old mosaics from local farmers, and later came back to excavate the site.  Much of what was excavated, including the enormous altar of the Temple of Zeus,  was taken to Germany,  where it is displayed in the Pergamon Museum , part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Nevertheless the ruined buildings which remain – like the partly reconstructed Temple of Zeus, below - testify to Pergamon’s lost magnificence,

while the drawing below gives some idea of what the city would have looked like in its prime.

It was during the reign of  the Attalid king Eumenes II (197-159 BC) that most of the major buildings of Pergamon were erected, including its  famous library. Eumenes II wished to make  Pergamon  a major cultural and artistic centre, and built a theatre seating 10,000 (the steepest  theatre in the ancient world), a library, a large gymnasium complex, and a number of temples and altars.

In order to establish his new library as an important centre of learning which could rival Alexandria,  the greatest library of the ancient world, Eumenes II recruited Crates of Mallus, a Stoic philosopher – now best known for having constructed the earliest known globe representing the Earth - as its resident scholar.

According to the Greek historian Plutarch, the Pergamon library contained about 200,000 volumes: not, of course, books in the form we have them today, but manuscripts written on to parchment, and then rolled into scrolls. One of the legends of Pergamum, related in Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’ , is that parchment was invented there: previously, all books were written on papyrus, produced only in Egypt. The story goes that  King Ptolemy, ruler of Egypt, feared the library at Alexandria might lose its pre-eminence to Pergamon. He therefore banned further exports of papyrus to Pergamon, to prevent the library from increasing its holdings.

Pergamon responded by beginning to produce its manuscripts on parchment – thinly stretched sheep or goat skin – thus breaking the stranglehold the Egyptians had over the dissemination of information , with the result that, as Pliny puts it -

‘ afterwards the material on which the immorality of humans depends spread indiscriminately.’

- a sentiment frequently echoed today in relation to the ubiquity of  pornography since the invention of the internet.

Since  parchment was used in Asia Minor well before the time of the Pergamum library, this story would not seem to be entirely true, but it is an appealing one, nevertheless. So, too,  is the other great legend of the Pergamon library, which concerns Antony and Cleopatra. Plutarch relates that when in 35 BC the Roman general Mark Antony married Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic pharaohs (the dynasty descended from one of  Alexander the Great's generals who had seized control over Egypt after Alexander's death) , he gave her the entire contents of the Pergamon library as a wedding present, to replace volumes lost in fires at the Alexandria library,  and thus brought to a sudden end Pergamon’s days as a major centre of learning.

Scholars disagree as whether or not this story is true, but when you visit Pergamon, and wander around the ruins trying to find the location of the library, it doesn’t seem to matter very much exactly how things ended. The library has been gone for 2,000 years, and very little of its structure remains. It’s also quite hard to find, but I persevered, since my first visit to Pergamon was by way of being a pilgrimage,  to pay homage to one of the legendary libraries of history before beginning to create my own, rather smaller, version.

Eventually I found the site of the library, but there was little to see: the outline of the building, and a few stones. There was something nearby, however, that was a rather more arresting sight:

This monumental headless torso, part of a statue of the Emperor Trajan, immediately brought to mind Shelley’s  Ozymandias, King of Kings, of whom all that is left are ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’
standing in the desert.

Here, I thought, was Ozymandias’ missing trunk at last.

And then it occurred to me that if, like Shelley’s traveller in an antique land, one were to travel round Turkey and explore more of the many ruined ancient cities of  Asia Minor, it would be quite possible to assemble a complete Ozymandias from the countless pieces of statuary scattered across the landscape.

A head, perhaps, from amongst those frozen deities that stand for all eternity on the peak of Mount Nemrut, built 2,000 years ago for the eternal glory of  King Antiochus I Theos of Commagene:

We might also add  the 5 foot long right arm of  the Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius,  bearing a globe,  recently discovered in the ruins of Sagalassos, high in the western Toros mountains, which  was destroyed by an earthquake between 540AD and 620AD:

I could go on. 

Asia Minor is, quite literally, littered with innumerable  pieces of stone left by the astonishing array of  civilisations that have emerged from, or moved into, this part of the world: the Hattis, Hittites and Hourrites, the Uruartians, Phrygians and Lydians, the Assyrians,  Persians,  Greeks and the Trojans, the Romans, Byzantines, Selcuks and Ottomans. That is only a partial list: there are many more.

This land wears empires lightly, though.

Nowhere else demonstrates quite like Asia Minor the vanity of human wishes, as all those broken memorials to long-forgotten kings and emperors bear witness:

‘And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’