Helping friends and harming enemies

An aristocratic dinner party - a symposium - with a female aulos player

In the opening book of Plato's Republic, Polemarchus says in answer to Socrates' question about the nature of justice that it is a matter of helping one friends and harming one's enemies.To people like us today this might seem a strange answer, even a little gauche and embarrassing, but it was the popular answer among the Greeks. Polemarchus was not saying anything novel, provocative or strange. He was just stating the facts as everyone knew them to be - that is what we all think and that is how we all behave. That was what everyone believed. They had no thought of any other attitude. 


If we are honest with ourselves, we can see that this is how we do think about and act towards other people. If they are friends or people we would like to see as friends, we go out of our way to do things for them and if there are people we see as enemies, we are happy to do them down or to see them done down. And we know from experience that people can shift in our estimation from being friends to becoming enemies in the space of an evening and back again. Our lives are a mixed weave of friendships and enmities. But something in us refuses to recognise these facts about human nature. We deny that we are like this or if we see others behaving like that we say that they are being childish. Perhaps we just fail to be as open and clear-headed as the Greeks because of the heavy overlay of many centuries of Christian precept and admonishment. We should love everyone and even if we don't, we like to think we do.


"Friendship, and the desire to help our friends and protect them from hostility, may seem to us as to the Greeks both natural and pleasant. But unlike most of us they realistically acknowledge that it is also human to be pained by our enemies' success and take pleasure in their downfall. When people see an enemies' dogs or horses admired, says Plutarch, they feel pain; if his land is well worked or his garden flourishing, they groan (Moralia, 88b). On the other hand the anger provoked by injury can in Achilles' famous words, be 'sweeter than dripping honey' (Iliad, 18.109). This in turn stimulates the desire to retaliate, for 'revenge is sweet' (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1370b30)...Nietzsche's comment still holds true, that 'close observation still spots numerous survivals of this oldest and most thorough human delight in our own culture' (Morals 198)" (Helping Friends and Harming Enemies, Mary Whitlock Blundell, chapter 2).


It does seem to be true that this is how we are and that Christian teachings serve only to overlay these basic behaviour patterns. Polemarchus in Plato's Republic puts this formula forward as the natural rule for what constitutes the right and proper behaviour between people. For him as for ordinary Greeks at that time this was what 'justice' was; this was how one did and ought to treat people, marking a very big difference between one's friends and one's enemies. Today, in contrast, we think that we should treat all people equally, honourably and fairly and if we don't we at least pretend to be doing that. 


Were the Greeks wrong? Don't we gloat when our enemies and opponents are destroyed or just lose out? Think of the endless outpouring of delight at our military victories - which was more like crowing when the Argentines were defeated - or England's occasional wins over Germany in the World Cup or over France in Rugby. Or just our delight when a hated classmate or colleague gets his comeuppance. The word itself says it all. Or should we suppress all this and have football games as they are said to do on one South Sea island where the two teams play until the score is equal? Or do they do this because they do not wish to offend each other and cause a real fight? If that is what concerns them, then that shows they are just like us - wanting to be on good terms with others, but sensitive to slights and injuries.


Should we behave like the Greeks - helping friends and harming enemies or should we behave as the moral philosophers tells us to behave? Christians say that you should love your neighbour like yourself. Kant tells us that we should have the right kind of motivation and treat everyone with the same fundamental respect. Utilitarians, like Mill and Bentham, say that we should maximize happiness for people everywhere and that seems to imply having their interests at heart equal or more than equal with our own. Whatever their differences, these philosophers exhort us to behave in a manner that we today call 'moral'. That's what the word 'moral' means in the modern world; that we should treat everyone the same as if they were friends. But is this a real possibility? Aren't we just kidding ourselves when we claim that we should love everyone? Were the Greeks right about how we do and should behave towards others? 

Warriors boast they will make their enemies food for the birds and dogs