One of my old professors, Chris Zeichmann, recently published a book called Radical Antiquity about anarchist (in the etymological sense of the term) movements in antiquity. It was an easy read, by which I mean that I ripped through that densely-packed tome in about 4 or 5 days. He gave a plethora of examples of groups that were radically democratic in their leaderlessness and egalitarian structures throughout the ancient world, from Cynics to freed slaves to pirates and beyond! It was really cool. It even revived an old dream of being a pirate. Apparently, or so I’m told, there were moments in writing the book that Chris had that same feeling, staring wistfully out the window.
But leaving aside impossible dreams of sailing the high seas, it was his epilogue that really stuck with me amidst the cornucopia of historical facts. It was about the ghost of Spartacus, the famous (or infamous) leader of the slave revolt in Gaul (now France) that was thwarted by Caesar and Crassus. In his reflection, he talks a lot about what it means to have heroes, why that can be problematic, and what we should learn from these stories instead.
By no means was Chris unsympathetic to the exploits of these “heroes” from the past, but at the same time, he acknowledges that we are not them, our societies are not their societies, and their time is not our time. There is only so far that an apotheosis can take us. These were mortals, after all, steeped in flawed and flabbergasting will like the rest of us. They did not “ascend” anywhere upon their deaths. Hell, the history books may not even remember their names, or consider them only a footnote. These were ordinary individuals who did something extraordinary. And in some ways, I’d argue that it runs counter to an anarchist spirit to hold them up as anything other than what they were: exceptionally-human human beings.
So Chris suggests that these stories are the ghosts of the past: the story of Spartacus is the ghost of Spartacus, still speaking to and inspiring us to this present day. What can we learn from him? What are the eternally human values that we glean from his story? How can we live these values today and create a better, fairer, more egalitarian world?
I’ll be the first to admit that Chris said this better, so read the book. You won’t regret it. But I wanted to think about this idea of ghosts a little more. I’ve sometimes wondered how quickly graveyards fill up and the demand for new ones are created. The world is filled with ghosts—that is, stories that go unheard. How many stories, for instance, are “taken to the grave”? How many more are simply ignored? How many people lived remarkably unremarkable lives that weren’t noticed. Our history books are peppered with the exploits of “the great men of history”, but this is not history. That’s just “his story”. (Excuse the terrible pun!)
On some level, we are all just footnotes like this. That’s true of our deepest selves, at any rate. There are “hidden transcripts” that make up individual stories all over the place. So much tension in human life remains unsaid. One of my favourite authors, Osamu Dazai, said this with exquisite precision:
Human life is, it seems to me, rife with vivid examples of an insincerity that is pure, happy and serene—people deceiving one another without amazingly, inflicting pain, without even realizing their mutual deception.
These are the ghosts in our midst, if you will. Not just our past but our present is volatile, and if we listen to the voices that float in the background, how might we change the world? Or are we simply content with the stories, the histories, the narratives that are spoon-fed to us?
The beauty of ghosts is that they suggest how the world is and how it might be. Their “supernatural” existence is proof of the ultimate hidden truth of the world: “[the world] is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” (David Graeber) How will we bring these ghosts back to life? Only in solidarity—that same radical force that brought us the pirates, cynics, and of course Spartacus.
Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash
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