Patients, Young Grasshopper: Tainted Love

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons history has to teach.

— Aldous Huxley

We're in Athens now. As we explore the great monuments of Greece and the world, I wonder about how many of humanity's historical treasures would still have been built if their commissionings were put to a slaves-included-citizen-wide vote.

Aqueducts? Quite functional and helpful for everyone, green light.

Great Wall of China? Protective, practical for defending against Mongol invasions, probably cool.

Temples and churches? Most of them likely alright, although I hope the excessively gaudy or enormous ones would have gotten the boot.

Statues? 50-50, depending on the subject's street cred.

Obelisks? Maybe some of them.

Pyramids? Pretty doubtful.

Louis XIV's Palace? Good luck.

I guess in general: the more on the functional public works side, the better the chance, the more on the "immortal life through giant monument" or "I'm going to live filthily rich because it's fun and because I can" side, the slimmer the odds.

Organizing the construction of public works is a key task of any government, but its a tricky one that can easily be abused. As Jared Diamond describes it:

The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor, is merely one of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of the tribute extracted from producers is retained by the elite, and how much the commoners like the public uses to which the redistributed tribute is put.

Throughout most of history, the common people have unfortunately had little say in how resources should be used. It's interesting how much we cherish things like the Pyramids then -- I would imagine the Egyptian people of the time would have preferred to spend all that energy in better ways.

Fast forwarding to a democracy in today's world, what if a society's rich leaders decided to build a bunch of giant monuments to boost their global image, despite most of their people still living in poverty -- would the common people allow it?

This has been more or less the question at play in Brazil the last couple years, as the government gears up for the World Cup and the Olympics, building giant stadiums and trying to give the country an extreme make-over in the process. As the protests recently exploding across the country attest to though, the people aren't too happy about it.

Brazil's leaders believe (or at least did at one point) that the World Cup is a blessing; it is incentivizing the country to make long-needed improvements. But the tough questions we heard from Brazilians are: why should it take some external commercial enterprise (FIFA) to awaken the government to address long unaddressed needs? Why does the government need an incentive to help its people? Moreover, is Brazil's attempted makeover for its upcoming global events really going to do anything meaningful in the long term? Or is the rush of quick improvements just a superficial, temporary bandaid? Will the economic activity of these huge events ever trickle down to those in the favelas (slums)?

To the common citizens, the efforts are dubious. It's hard for Brazilians who need to use public transportation each and everyday to witness bus prices increasing while billions of dollars are being funneled to tycoons for building massive stadiums that are only needed for a one-time only event. The streets we walked in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are now full of protesters who have had enough of these kinds of choices, who would rather see much-needed education and healthcare valued first.

We certainly felt and heard this disillusionment with the government's World Cup efforts firsthand from the youth in Brazil so it's not too surprising to see what's happening now. Nonetheless, who ever would have thought soccer-crazed Brazilians would be mad about having a World Cup?

Aftermath of some of the Brazilian protests in Rio. Our friend, Luana, took this photo after a night of riots. At least as of now, a lot of the people we spent time with in Brazil seem proud of their generation standing up for themselves.

Fascinatingly, in our post-Brazil travels through South Africa (the site of the most recent World Cup and similar stadium-building and beautification efforts) we found their youth were still upset about all the money that went in to their great global event in 2010, money that its regular people never ended up really seeing. Indeed, the beautiful, enormous stadium that was built next to the ocean in Cape Town is hardly used today, with the exception of the occasional Lady Gaga concert. More poignantly, numerous new South African housing developments for the poor that were in construction leading up to the World Cup are still unoccupied. Perhaps the incentive to finish them is gone now that the world's watchful eye is too.

While the series of new stadiums are nearly built in Brazil, many Brazilians are saying they no longer want to attend the World Cup. A brief thought experiment though: I think if their society were to collapse today and a couple thousands years were to pass, the stadiums would be viewed as testaments to how great their civilization was, even though no one is really all too happy about them right now. Meanwhile, all the poorly built slums would be deteriorated, forgotten. I think the World Cup stadiums are probably on the pretty positive end of the spectrum of public works, but they still can make for an illustrative example of how a society's physical monuments don't always tell the full story, and how they may not always be worthy of unconditional praise.

Indeed, I've noticed that in general, if we only put a little time between whatever blood and social injustice went in to making a great monument, we can find it pretty pure, beautiful and inspiring. We disdain modern dictators but exalt the greatest works of dictatorships if their crimes were a long enough time ago and they built cool enough monuments. At the same time, however, seeing as almost every great society up until the 20th century is guilty of one grave social injustice or another, totally protesting historical works for this reason would rule out appreciating most of humanity's commissioned achievements.

As far as Greece goes, thankfully many of the great monuments we're checking out came from a time of decently good-meaning government. The Golden Age of Greece was ushered in partly by Pericles, a near populist leader who seemed to have actually cared about the people.

At the end of the day though, I wonder: can you extract aesthetic beauty from an ugly context? Can something pure spring from impurity? Can Germany celebrate Wagner's moving classical music even though he was an anti-semite whose work inspired Hitler?

The world's a crazy place; there's a lot of good to be found in reviled men like Che Guevera, and so too a lot of ugliness in some of humanity's greatest works, so many of which I love.

The Acropolis overlooking Athens.

One of Greece's old Olympic stadiums.

We have a tendency to hike whatever hill we can find. Perhaps it's not a bad life strategy.

This monument is on top of one of Athens' hills. It was built by a guy that wasn't really even Greek. He was really rich and powerful though. Word on the street is that no one really cared too much for him during his time and they thought it was weird he built a monument for himself there.

We all yearn for some sort of immortality I think. Whether it be through ultimate communion with God, our works in this world, or building monuments, most humans seem to have a deep fear of one day being forgotten.