Delphic Maxim 42: Have respect for suppliants
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
42. Have respect for suppliants
‘Suppliants’ is a bit of a dated word here — we don’t really have that many people prostrating themselves before the aristocracy these days, making a plea to someone in power. Even in the courts, or when constituents make representations to a local MP, there is still a recognition of basic human dignity that kind of removes us from the context in which this maxim was inscribed. We’re talking about an era in which Sparta was run by a powerful minority of military-oriented Spartans, and supported by the labour of a massive, repressed class of helots. Power imbalances back then were pretty brutal, exciting as 300 may have looked.
However, there is a lesson in here for our lives today, and it centres around that imbalance of power.
One of the most unedifying qualities I see in people is not only a lust for a power, but the cavalier abuse of it when they are able to exercise it. Power — following from one of my intellectual touchstones, Michel Foucault — is not a commodity to be possessed, it is a dense net of force relations in a social context. Power is the means by which people exert influence and action over the action of others — it acts only on subjects (as in royal subjects, and also thinking subjects — the subject as opposed to the object, and the subject who is subject someone else). Without resistance, power becomes simple domination and control, a person with genuinely no ability to resist is essentially an object — and so what we see in practice isn’t ‘power’ (you don’t have ‘power’ over a chair, because it is inanimate: you simply move it yourself — you can’t will it to do something).
So much for power, you say, but why is this relevant for today’s maxim? Well I think it goes to the idea of abuse of power. We may not have suppliants, but we do have people who are in positions of unequal power relations, and it is important that we show respect to them. I think it’s an ugly characteristic in people when I see them being rude, arrogant or dismissive to people over whom they have power, or who occupy less powerful positions in society.
Translated into daily life — you might have people who report to you at work, or people who serve you in retail locations, or people you deal with over the phone. The power relations here are complicated of course — they may have more knowledge of product and procedure than you, but you as a ‘consumer’ in a consumer-oriented society have a deal of power and status. This is a circuit that we really need to break — Plato, for example, was disgusted by the idea that wealth and money would be the basis of a system of governance. But as long as we live in a system where money buys status, it’s crucial that we be polite, kind and respectful to each other — regardless of our station in life.
