Print

---

at last some peace & quiet, after working for 16 hours straight! I've been translating an entire magazine from Greek into English - see I do use the lexicon, sure, but my tendency to look for the meaning of words (at least for the root of their meaning) in their etymology, comes from the fact that i am Greek. Greek language is structured in such a way that you cannot help but notice where/how the idea of a certain word started. And the word might not mean now exactly what its etymology describes, but the etymology sure informs the meaning the word now has. Simple example: The word "sighoro", which means "forgive"or "give pardon to", comes from the proverb "sin"(=add, plus) and the verb "horo"(=fit inside a space). So, when i say sighoro, I mean "it's ok, i forgive you", but what I actually mean (when i stop to think about it) is "i expand myself enough to fit your point of view as well, therefore I understand you, I see your humanity in mine, i stop looking at you as the 'other', i include you somehow inside of me, and so i forgive you".
This long, but lovely, example is to explain why dictionary.com cannot tell you all you need to know. You must look deeper to see what lies beyond. Dictionary.com says ethos means character & character (also Greek) means 'to inscribe' and so on and so on... But the root of ethos is pre-Hellenic and means place of origin & I had no way no know that, other than my luck to be friends w/ Costas Georgousopoulos (Prof. at the Uni of Athens, most popular translator of Greek tragedies and absolute master of etymology - google him & you'll know what I mean) who told me so.  :  )

As you say, it makes sense - as in "I know where you are coming from". That does not mean, though, that there's good & bad ethos. Nor that people from one place are more ethical than people from another place. Having ethos is one thing (and some people don't). What kind of ethos you have is another. And judging a kind of ethos as good or bad is an entirely different animal. That said, of course your example ("I imagine being robbed and the perpetrator being acquitted of crime on the grounds that robbery is ok where he / she lives") is a good one. Even though i know you use it to demonstrate how crazy such an idea would be, i can use it to claim exactly the opposite! The USA is the perfect example for that, really. The country functions under so many rules, obsessed w/ the letter rather than the spirit of the law in so many occasions, just because there is no common ethos amongst its citizens. there is no shared sense of what is good or bad, proper or improper, right or wrong. A Pakistani-American might touch the other person a lot as he speaks and a Korean-American might think that's really offensive, while an African-American thinks that the Korean-American is so posh to be offended by such a thing, and a Danish-American might not even notice what the whole fuss was about. Therefore there are rules and laws and structures that tell you what is allowed and what is not. The all-American ethos is that everyone respects these rules, otherwise they are punished (through the legal system of simply through social exclusion). When was it that in the UK so many dark-skinned immigrants were sectioned, thought crazy & locked in mental institutions, cause their ethos dictated they should speak and cry & laugh out loud in public when they felt like it? According to their cultural heritage, walking on the street & letting their emotions out was a way of remaining sane - a practice of mental hygiene; for the Brits that was insane, threatening, incomprehensible. I do not know how much of this is genetics - again, as i said before, i think the influence of genes is weaker. I cannot deny it completely as an ingredient to one's character, however, cause i know that what/how one thinks is affected by the way one is. (silly example: the mentality of a man w/ a small penis is different than that of a man w/ a huge one.)
But anyway, I agree -ethos is not purely a product of cultural heritage. It is, however, partly defined by it.
How about the ethos of a citizen of the digital world city then? Perhaps we are not that many (yes, so many people do not have access to the digital culture & so many do not know of it even. A large part -sthg like one 3rd- of the earth's population lives more than 2 hours away from a normal telephone even), but still = we are who we are. We, no matter how many of us are out there - share a space: a virtual, digital space: some kind of geography.
This does not necessarily relate to Foster's (and many others') idea of  not going anywhere or not. I feel this is an entirely different conversation. People who are part of the "digital world city" might physically travel or not. Their citizenship in this world city might prevent them from travelling or urge them to do so. The way i see it, this is irrelevant. Just as irrelevant one's actual place of origin is to one's travelling habits.
I am not a fan of Aristotle - i find him far too arrogant in his brilliance. I prefer Plato who feels like a medium of brilliance rather than its generator. Whatever each of them might mean by ethos though, they both examine its expression - the behavior that comes as a product of it. And once you live in a  city, you political ethos is examined. If you lived in the fields, your rural ethos would be examined, if you lived underwater, your submarine one... and so on.. No blogger & nobody who reads what a blogger writes can claim they do not have political ethos. It is according to that ethos that they can make choices about how to express themselves. Being non-political in what you write is a clear political choice (!), expressed though the "blog medium" because your ethos says that (expressing) is a good thing.
The ethos we, citizens of the world city, share is actually this: to share. To be on line is an act of participation. You participate in this specific form of civilization. You choose to take a stand & speak from there. the rest of us might be watchers - we engage in personal interactions only - but bloggers are talkers/actors/performers/poets (poet comes from the verb 'Poio', which means 'make' or 'create'). Bloggers expose themselves. They do so in good or bad taste, style, mood for this or that reason. They do so, though, according to the core ethos of the web: sharing. Being wired does not share our ethos, you are right. What I believe is that it actually IS our ethos, the ethos that we share. No, your ethos doesn't change when you are not online. It might change, though, the day you'll say (which i hope you won't): "I will never go online again".

One thing you write i do not understand:
" If we *did share ethos by sharing city then there would be no need to have any politics. Being in the city is public; but politics is public and private, it includes what is not disclosed behind the avatar" you wrote.
What do you mean? Politics is the way you deal with the city, the way you go about negotiating your relationships within the city, the way you choose to connect , to communicate - right? Public includes what's private in a city. it does not exclude it. How could you share ethos, be sharing city, and not have politics? I really do not get what you mean...please explain more if you want. You don't do ethos, you have it. Originating from you ethos you do your politics = public actions and also private actions made public, as well as private actions that remain private but affect public ones = in other words, everything you do is politics. Hmmm.....interesting!

Re poetry - I was referring to a lovely discussion we had on the subject last summer. I was in Denmark & I remember I couldn't wait to get on line cause the discussion on what art is & what it is for & what an artist is and all that was so exciting! I have actually saved this discussion in a word.doc somewhere to re-read it. A lot of people participated in the discussion & at some point I had written that you write poems as a way to process our experience - to comprehend, digest in a mythical, mystical, unconscious, conscious, more real than real way -or sthg like that - and that if we fail to do so, we still write the damn poem & maybe our kids will process it for us. And i remember you were particularly fond of that idea, which is why I thought you'd remember it. :  ) but anyway, art is the most subjective word of them all. And i must disagree w/ you, cause yes, a lot of art is propaganda too! Or even advertisement: the most severe form of propaganda.
I don't think that making art is ethical necessarily. (I take it that you mean good by ethical). It is too late (3:45am) to expand on that, but I just don't.

so good the police didn't shoot you - I'd miss you! And such an interesting report of the ethics you marched alongside. Well, you all shared the ethics of protesting - to all of you (how many thousands really after all?) marching is good. And so you did it - you participated. The way you did it was your politics. Different politics, same ethos. This can often be a problem, which is why i have stopped marching.

my favorite line from your e-mail:

because language is metaphorical and is subject to metamorphosis

Dear Eugenia

Thank you very much. & I can always do with someone who can speak of the
Greek lexicon and is prepared to challenge my assumptions. But

- I am going to rush this because I am going to _march_ through London
against the murder in Lebanon -

I was amazed, yes. And then I began to rationalise it; and I thought of the
slang / colloquial (Am.) usage _I know where you're coming from"

And then I looked it up. That volume of the Shorter OED is not here. (??? I
think the mice are getting more ambitious and taking whole items of paper
home to eat - usually they prefer interference shielding from Belkin modem
cables) But I looked it up on dictionary.com & that traces it back to Greek
_thos, character._

So that one's ethos descends from the kind of person one is - if that is
right

(Does this derivation and yours indicate an idea that people from place a
are more ethical than people from place omega? If so, I reserve the right
not to deduce anything from it!)

I think we should be careful of deductions like

because language is metaphorical and is subject to metamorphosis according
to linguistic trends not scientific / philosophical analysis (off the top of
my rushed head I offer yoof slang _wicked_ as an example of this) and - re
genetics - I resist the idea that ethical behaviour is an output of the
genetic code. That way lies Auschwitz

Having said which, I do agree that detail of ethos is often partly and
largely a matter of cultural heritage - but it is not purely a product of
cultural heritage. I disagree, therefore that ethos is defined by one's
geography of origin in terms of practice.

(I imagine being robbed and the perpetrator being acquitted of crime on the
grounds that robbery is ok where he / she lives)

Now then, big breath, turn the chattering radio down, deny myself a cup oif
tea a little longer... I nearly wrote about the world city etc in our
previous exchange; and maybe now I should express some view as youi argue
that

Not that I *disagree; and I may come back on that presently. But what I
wanted to say was that we are hardly living in a world city given the number
of people who are *not online. I think the world city is an idea that has
been in the air for a while - McLuhan, for instance, who came to it for
slightly different reasons.

There is a truth to it, but there may be other things to be said (see for
instance a section in E M Forster's THE MACHINE STOPS where one of the 2
main characters ponders the pointlessness of going anywhere because it's all
the same; and the other character sees the need to smash it all up and start
again in order that anything / something will be worthwhile

I'll leave that bracket open, Black Mountain poetry style, because I want -
always - to be cautious about the benefits of being webbed... There's a bit
in C S Lewis's THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH about "pragmatometry" which is often
taken as a visionary prediction of the web; when it was clearly meant as an
attack upon Haldane-style technological progress

I think that if one looks at Aristotle's ETHICS, it's clear that he was far
from suggesting that we all share the ethics of our city. Personal action
comes into it. There is a lot more to it than allowing one's to be seen,
anonymous or not. And it is in that - good or bad action - at least which
leads him on to TREATISE ON GOVERNMENT / POLITICS, how we govern ourselves
in a city... I *think this is not a perception that the city is one form of
civilisation but *the form of civilisation, leaving the country to idealised
shepherds! but I feel less sure of myself there

I've expressed disagreement with anyone, blogger or not, who suggests _I
have no politics_ is a valid statement; and I have to disagree that being
wired shares our ethos. Do my ethics change when I am not online? NB It's
not that I want to offer Aristotle as a model of governance; just that the
bits that are not anachronistic still serve as a commentary which needs to
be answered as one of the bases of our ideas

For instance, he documents a wide variety of political arrangement, not one.
Perhaps you are being a little more Platonic here, going back to the idea of
what a word may mean and arguing from there - Aristotle starts from what
people are actually doing and generalises from there...

There is also the idea of governance. If we *did share ethos by sharing city
then there would be no need to have any politics. Being in the city is
public; but politics is public and private, it includes what is not
disclosed behind the avatar

Also there is a differential in our access to the web.

If it were simply that

>bloggers are citizens of the same city, sharing ethos.

then, having established the fact of _Mitochondrial Eve_, we'd have done
ethics, having already done Politics by going online

This cannot be so

Plug-and-Behave?

Making art is ethical, an attempt at it... And perhaps what makes it
ethical, when it is, lies in cutting out the bullshit that we are heirs to

And poetry is a lot more than processing experience

I think you are expanding the meaning of _art_ when you say

e.g. a lot of blogs are a form of propaganda!

Expanding the idea of art is good, but surely not if it leads to a
generalised / undifferentiated category

I hope that was still good to read. I am off now to protest against what I
see as Racist Murder. I wonder what Ethics I shall find myself marching
alongside!

I hope the police don't shoot me

Smileys and Emoticons