Delphic Maxim 63: Despise a slanderer
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
63. Despise a slanderer
Whenever these Delphic maxims pull out a strong verb like despise, I always seem to wonder why it is applied so strongly. Maybe it’s because these strong terms are applied to concepts we’re less familiar with today — things with which we wouldn’t necessarily concern ourselves. So what lesson can we take from a maxim that calls on us to despise a slanderer.
Slander, when you really think about it, is a pretty savage character assault. It isn’t just about being a liar — slander involves making remarks with the express purpose of damaging someone’s reputation. It’s about impugning the character of another person. In this way, it flies in the face of all the virtues and values that have come before now in this exercise. There’s no nobility, honour, honesty or virtue in spreading false rumours about a person. Even the strategic maxims — those that call on us to be prepared, to think strategically — aren’t inviting us to do this sort of dishonest character destruction.
If slander itself is clearly a bad thing, then a slanderer is the identification of a person with this practice. To be a slanderer means a person has probably done it more than once. A slanderer might either regularly engage in this practice against multiple people, or they engage in it against the same person repeatedly. Either way, this is a person who is pretty clearly putting themselves outside our sense of what makes someone virtuous, but also upsetting the balance of good social behaviour.
Is this enough to make us despise someone? That’s a tougher question. I don’t think I’d much enjoy the company of a slanderer, even if I wasn’t the target of their activities. Dishonest people, compulsive liars, are generally pretty unpleasant. And someone who was doing this to hurt another person is likely even more unpleasant still.
But despising someone requires a level of energy — borderline hatred — that I think is quite unproductive for life. The effort required to despise someone is potentially more than it’s worth, when you could simply excise this person from your social web. This reminds me of the verb we’ve encountered previously: shun. In previous posts, the maxims invite us to shun evil and murder, to turn away from them completely. But slander we are told to despise.
Community is a fundamental underpinning for these maxims. The Greek polis wasn’t just about people being a part of a city: the city (at least Aristotle argues in Politics) actually precedes the individual. He sees the whole as being essential before we can understand any of the parts. This is a pretty radical inversion of how we see the world today.
In a context like that — where the collective existence of a polis is important in defining the existence, roles and virtue of the individual — then it makes sense that someone who actively disrupts the function of that polis might be despised. Slander does this: it introduces a malicious element of mistruth, of deprecation of character, and of disorder into the social body. When we see slander today (and with social media it is much easier to slander people), we should call it out, perhaps even despise it. But most importantly, the lesson in this maxim is not to engage in slander. Otherwise you’ll end up despising yourself.
