When we look at the world, we understand more than just a chaos of things. We recognize trees, houses and clouds despite their countless shapes and variations. Our minds are capable of combining an infinite number of images into one concept. Aristotle spoke of categories and current linguists define this process as compositional generalization. A key skill in language development that artificial intelligence fails at and that may bring us closer to what is essentially human. However, this neural power also carries dangers, especially when applied to humans: generalization, simplification, the tendency to trap others in our hermetic mental framework.
In ancient Greece, theater was born to debate tensions and battles of wills in public. The tragedy staged ethical and military conflicts, those bitter conflicts in which it is most tempting not to understand the opponent’s motives. At the beginning, however, an unexpected text appears: The Persians by Aeschylus, the first surviving European play and the only existing historical work. During the author’s lifetime, the Persian Empire attempted several times to invade the hive of tiny cities that was Greece. In Athens they felt the constant threat to their democracy and freedom from this powerful enemy. Aeschylus fought on several battlefields, including Marathon, where his brother fell. The war was very different back then: they faced each other without aviation or missiles. The combatants looked into each other’s eyes as they plunged spears and swords into the flesh of the enemy, mutilating bodies, stepping on corpses, hearing howls of death, and staining themselves with mud and entrails.
With the Greek victory still fresh in Aeschylus’s memory, he recounted the bloody battle of Salamis. He could have written a patriotic pamphlet, but the experienced poet decided to be bold: he adopted the enemy’s point of view. The action takes place in Susa, the Persian capital, and no Greek characters speak. It begins with the arrival of a messenger on the palace promenade to announce defeat and ends with the return of King The view is unusual: it does not describe the Persians as incarnations of evil or as born criminals. Aeschylus captures the helplessness of the older advisors who opposed the war and were ignored, the fear of those waiting at home for the return of their loved ones, the internal divisions between hawks and doves of the empire, the pain of widows and mothers’ misfortune of the soldiers who were dragged to the slaughterhouse by their king’s megalomania. It is fascinating to imagine that Aeschylus, after fighting hand-to-hand combat with the Persians, looking into their eyes and seeing his brother killed in battle, brought to the stage the suffering of the other side, its nuances and motifs, without turning everyone into guilty evils.
The philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, whose family was almost wiped out in the Holocaust, observed that the face of the other – the other – defines the beginning of ethics: “The revelation of the face leads to humanity.” In moments of dilemmas and conflicts, there are none more difficult – and perhaps much more humane – exercise than worrying about the motives and feelings of your opponent. Recognize that the dividing line between barbarism and civilization is not a territorial boundary, but rather an oscillating ethical line within each country, each group, each individual. Disprove the illusion of apparent unanimity. Deceived by this fallacy, we view strangers, enemies or foreigners as monolithic groups with clear hostile positions. We fit others into a single mold that justifies our hostility when we ourselves cannot agree on our own contradictions and internal polyphonies. Perhaps living together requires the courage to discover a new territory: the face of those who are not us. As we became aware of the harm of our prejudices, we learned in the Greek theater that all people are exceptions to a non-existent rule.
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