Antigone and Anarchy
Sophocles’ Antigone explicitly uses the Greek Anarchy and with negative connotations. In Antigone, the State is held as the measure against which Anarchy is said to pale. In all, it is a story about accountability to a higher law than Man’s law—nomoi. The problem with the argument is its base in Theistic thought. There may be a higher law, but it is not God’s law.
Plato, in his Republic, argues against Tyranny and Democracy in favour of a guided Democracy—a Republic. In his position, it was not the system that was broken; it was Pericles, the leader of the system, a military man. This is the sentiment of many Right Wing so-called Conservatives, today when discussing George Bush. The system is fine; the problem is that in his madness, King George is ruining the system—a form of cognitive dissonance.
In any case, the concepts of Natural Law and the Civil Disobedience are raised by Sophocles, anticipating people like Thoreau in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is interesting to me, too, how Creon mirrors Bush in his degree of hubris. We can only hope that Bush takes the same path as Creon is seeing the error of his ways, but I remind myself Antigone is fiction.
LVX
I’m not sure we can count on much from any system of government. In my Reformed Christian perspective, it is God-ordained, but it is also prone to error (sometimes to the extreme).
I am praying for Christians to form a spiritual sub-culture that puts building relationships with all sides over engaging in combative political rhetoric against each other.