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You know, it's funny you went straight to the bronze age, cause I just wrapped up The Iliad and The Odyssey, and it was a trip. The morality on display was virtually amorality. Common stories included murdering someone in a town, and having to flee before their brothers kill you back. This was bad. If you fled to another town and found allies, who would then help you finish off the entire family of the person you killed, this was good! If you manage to steal the flocks from a town, that's awesome. If the town you stole them from hunts you down, steals them back, and burns your town down for the effort, that was bad. And all along the way, it's all as Zeus wills it. Zeus doles out success and failure, and the most common reason anyone's attempts at murder, thievery or revenge fails is insufficient piety. Even the most talented individuals must be beloved by the gods for their murder and mayhem to succeed.
The only exceptions are of course, the lands, flocks and people's that belong to the gods, those are verboten to fuck with.
Increasingly I lean into religion/morality as a social technology with consequences. Does it promote prosocial values that help your civilization flourish, or does it burn out or wither and die? Morality is not a single axis, it's a 4X custom civilization screen with lots of pluses and minuses, and it has to compete with a lot of different people's that made different choices, possibly adapted to their environment.
Whatever else you can say about Sam Seder's morality, it's clearly dying. Either because the legacy American's it seeks to rule over no longer feel like being oppressed, or because the foreign legions it imported to keep the natives oppressed don't actually have any buy in to it. But one way or another, whether Sam Seder knows it or not, his morality is an evolutionary dead end.
Agree. And it's important to remember that traditional Stoicism was one of the first sort-of-trasncendental philosophies to come into existence. And far from the "I take cold showers" bro-Stocism of today, it was more about being happy with whatever your station in life is because you were acting in accordance with Zeus' ordering of the universe ....
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It's worth dialing in on this. They weren't amoral, they had morality - it is just alien to us.
For example SKILL was moral virtue. As opposed to unselfishness, which is often what we use these days.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete
Lots of Ancient Greek myths and cultural output make more sense if you go back and think about it this way.
Dialing in on this and its implications is a big piece of what Nietzsche is about and importantly this kinda stuff still lives with us today a little bit in other moral systems and countries (....could this explain woeness????).
However the general Judeo-Christian/Western ethical system is so baked into our lives and culture that it often results in a bit of "this is water" type problems.
And of course the word "virtue" has the Latin root of "vir", meaning "man" in the sense of "adult male displaying the classical masculine virtues" (as opposed to "homo", meaning "man" as in "person assumed male because that's the default").
The Latin word virtu translates into modern English as "manliness" if you want a literal translation, but I would translate it as "prowess" - when applied to an adult human male it is approximately synonymous with the Greek Arete. (Arete could also be applied to inanimate objects which were exceptionally fit for their purpose - when applied to a bladed weapon it gets translated as "sharpness".)
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