A Word In Edgewise: Sophrosyne, A Cast-off Concept?

A friend and I recently agreed that folks didn’t used to chat about the “good old days” when conservatives had liberal friends, and vice versa. I recounted my surprise upon learning my best friend’s parents were voting for Adlai Stevenson, unlike my own, who were voting for Ike. It was 1952; we were eleven.

I recalled “sophrosyne,” an ancient Greek concept that, in the well-balanced individual, led to qualities of temperance, moderation and self-control. I’m more liberal than my parents were, but two points of view always seemed logical, each able to curb the other’s wilder edges to create the reasonable.

War has been a human hallmark for millennia, but after August 6, 1945, we’ve known that mankind is capable of escalating to the end (ours, though perhaps not the cockroach or horseshoe crab). Even with that deterrent, we’ve twice avoided Armageddon — by a whisker — only through an enemy’s judgment call.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vice Admiral Vasili Arkhipov prevented a Russian sub from launching a nuclear torpedo at an American aircraft carrier on October 27, 1962. Sophrosyne through non-action? In 1983, on October 26, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov received the report a missile had been launched from the US, to be followed by more. Judging the report false, Petrov, against military protocol, did not pass along that information. How thin is the ice upon which humanity skates.

Short of war, innuendo, sly repartee, and insults remain a staple of human exchange:

Lady Astor: ”Mr. Churchill, if you were my husband, I’d put poison in your tea.”

Churchill: “Madam, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.”

In politics? Especially:

MP to Benjamin Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.”

Disraeli: “That depends, sir, on whether I embrace  your policies or your mistress.”

The burning question in 1852, was whether Kansas should be admitted to the Union as a free or slave state. On May, 22, Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA), vocal proponent of free Kansas, was in his chamber when Representative Brooks, kin to Andrew Butler (D-SC), a slave-Kansas proponent earlier excoriated by Sumner, entered the chamber and thrashed Sumner unconscious with a metal-tipped cane. Sumner had earlier referred to Butler’s “ugly mistress … I mean that harlot, Slavery.” Perhaps the past wasn’t so rosy.

Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise” offers some insight. Up until 1440, humanity was not saturated with information, and what there was stayed at the top. Then, Johannes Gutenberg created the printing press, allowing information to accumulate exponentially and fast. Rivers of information, but while a scribe’s error in a manuscript might be copied to others, one by one, press runs reproduce them by the dozens, hundreds, and more.

The information explosion, notes Silver, not only produced more than any individual could process, it brought unintended, unpredictable consequences — war — and led into the Industrial Revolution, where individuals like Ada Lovelace foresaw applications of Charles Babbage’s new machine beyond pure calculation. And so on to the internet and our current social fragmentation.

Today, everyone has access to more information than can be accurately processed, of wildly varying quality. Silver posits that facing “too much,” the individual engages selectively, then makes allies with of those in agreement.

How to return to my folks’ “We’re voting for Ike, your friend’s parents prefer Adlai,” a simple statement, not a hill to die on, or separate a childhood friendship? It’s not a simple question, and I’ll not hazard an answer. I don’t have enough information.