The Choice of a City by Bill Washabaugh

Augustine lamented the decline of the City of Man and looked instead toward the City of God. He was, after all, a deeply committed Roman, and could not easily let his beloved City languish without some compensating vision. 

 So, ever since Augustine, we have been searching for the political order that best realizes the Christian vision. 

 A recent effort in this regard is offered by Adam Gopnik in a spell-binding essay in The New Yorker (Sept.12). (I reprinted it below).

 We were talking about it last night, and we focused our attention on the proposal that maybe the most promising political order would be one in which individuals feel free to pick up and leave when they find that conditions become oppressive.

 Karatani argues that this possibility was realized in pre-Athens Greece. He calls it "isonomia."

  “Isonomia”…. the condition of a society in which equal speaks to equal as equal, with none ruled or ruling…Such an order existed around the Ionian Islands of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., before the rise of Athens.

But I argue that, before we go all "isonomic," we should pause to wonder how individuals can ever know when conditions are sufficiently oppressive to warrant flight.  After all, there is no such thing as unalloyed equality.  Every liberty carries hidden oppression.  Every good brings its bad.  So, how is one to ever know when there is sufficient equality to "compensate" for otherwise oppressive conditions?

(I find R.W. Emerson's argument compelling:  No man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him....As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one, and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. )

 Yes, Iceland had its drowning pool, but it also had its Þingvellir. Should the drowning pool be enough to force one to leave Iceland?  If not, then what oppressive condition should be enough?  And how would one know?

The long and short of the matter is that there is no isonomic utopia.  We are stuck in a world that forces us to compromise good with evil at every turn.  

What would Augustine say?

Bill Washabaugh is a retired professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.