Apartheid

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A prime example of the classical Greek competitive-eliminative ethos, in at least one
way unsuperseded by any racism since, is the way that Plato argued in favor of infanticide in
his ‘Republic’. The finest stock was to be selected, and the not so perfect babies should be
‘exposed’, i.e. left to die, in Plato’s ideal state. 593 The practice itself was in fact widespread
throughout the Greek and Roman culture spheres during antiquity. Especially unwanted
female infants were commonly left on garbage heaps to die slowly, sometimes perhaps to be
picked up and saved by someone who would want such a child, or who would take pity on it,
or feel morally obligated to take care of it. 594
The Greeks brought this practice along to Egypt, and apparently it horrified the
indigenous: ‘Egyptians, whose religion forbade infanticide, often rescued babies left thus to
die. The law allowed them to adopt foundlings or raise them as slaves.’ 595
An interesting fact about the Egyptians who saved the lives of these Greek and later
also Roman infants is that Roman lawmakers encouraged Egyptians to enslave ‘exposed’
babies, but indirectly punished them for adopting the same. According to Paragraph 41 of the
Roman law for Egypt, a quarter of the property of Egyptians who adopted children ‘found on
the garbage heap’ was to be confiscated by the state. 596 It is not immediately easy to see why
anyone should be punished for saving innocent lives at all, and secondly, why there was no
corresponding punishment for Egyptians who enslaved babies – Greek and Roman babies! –
found in the trash. On the one hand, Roman sexism (most of these babies were girls) seems
imperial regimes, ruling by military force for their own benefit, in the last resort massively indifferent to the
indigenous civilisations with which they came into contact (Cleopatra VII was the first Ptolemy who ever
bothered to learn Egyptian, there is virtually no trace of interpenetration between Hellenistic Greek and
Pharaonic or Babylonian literature).’ Ibid. Clauss 2003: 167f. describes how the Roman Emperor, Vespasian,
who ruled 69-79 CE, in a way made himself equal or superior to Sarapis, the main god in Alexandria at the time.
593 Plato: The Republic 460c, This is the first known substantial anticipation of Social Darwinism and the first
known justification of politically programmatic eugenics, see Mürner: Philosophische Bedrohungen:
Kommentare zur Bewertung der Behinderung, 1996: 28. The German Nazi propaganda gratefully made
extensive use of its Platonic inspiration. See Tzermias 1998: 130ff. (Of course this does not make Plato himself a
Nazi. Some post-World War II commentators have probably gone too far in dismissing him as such, though
others went at least as far in the opposite direction by preposterously trying to reinstate Plato as an egalitarian or
humanist social thinker. Ibid: 132ff.) A further indirect legacy of Plato’s can, for instance, be found in Israel’s
policy towards Palestinians, but also against its own disabled individuals, who are clearly underprivileged, unless
they have wounds sustained in wars, in which case the state spends ‘lavishly’ on them. Ilan Ghilon, a left-wing
Israeli lawmaker crippled by childhood polio, says: “It’s time we stop making this distinction between the ‘hero’
and the ‘weak’.” See Williams: Israel’s Disabled Fight for Respect, Recognition, 2002.
594 Tyldesley 1995 (1994): 69. Women in ancient Greece were in fact treated no better than women under
Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Ibid: 38-44. See also above, Chapter I.4.
595 Lewis, N. 1983: 54. In fact, it was more an Egyptian moral philosophy than Egyptian religion that forbade
infanticide. The life-centeredness and the humanism of ancient Egyptian philosophy was an integral part of the
culture from the very beginnings of the civilization, since long before de-secularization started to set in (with the
New Kingdom: around 1550 BCE). And although the religion contained rules of conduct that appear to carry a
notion of the sanctity of life, these rules vary considerably between the texts and in space and time. In spite of the
Greek term and concept for Egyptian phonographic signs, hieroglyphs, i.e. ‘holy signs’, there were in fact never
any holy, unalterable texts in Ancient Egypt prior to the biblical religions. On the whole, though, the ancient
Egyptian concepts of life appear to differ from ancient Greek and subsequent ‘western’ concepts, in particular by
not equating life with survival. At times, life even appears to have been conceived by the Egyptians as the
sublime opposite to both death and survival. Thus, the ethical drift of Egyptian ontology was no doubt anti-
Darwinist, i.e. anti-selectionist and anti-eliminationist. That is something that can hardly be said about European
or ‘western’ ontology, or even about much of western arts, for example, Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’ being, or
rather, begging, the question. It would be an exaggeration to say that life has therefore been devalued (to the
benefit of survival) by European culture as a whole, but it has certainly been so by strong currents within elite
European culture since ancient Greece. See Zandee: Death as an Enemy According to Ancient Egyptian
Conceptions, 1960; Bilolo: Les Cosmo-Theologies Philosophiques d’Heliopolis et d’Hermopolis, 1986;
Assmann 1995 (1990): 214f, Assmann 1996: 165, 231-238; Assmann 1997: 193; Karenga 1995: 322-343;
Löwstedt 1995: 151ff.
596 Lewis, N. 1983: 58