There is no doubt that we are indebted to the ancients, Greeks and Romans first of all, as the vehicles through which the wisdom of the Mediterranean, refined over centuries of experimentation, conflict, consolidation and destruction, were transmitted to us moderns by the post-classic world.

But no matter how strong that heritage may be, and it certainly is, there is so much stuff that didn’t make it into the package that got delivered to our modern doorstep.

In today’s Substack, I’ve got three items of this stuff for you, but I’m only going to focus on the last one. The first ancient idea I want to mention that didn’t quite make it in our modern consciousness was Polybius’ theory of regimes cycle known as ‘anacyclosis’, which debunks both the idea of political ‘evitability’ (that certain forms of government can be avoided) and that of, though unbeknownst to Polybius, progress; the second is oikeiosis (Greek for ‘familiarization’), the Stoic solution to the dilemma of explaining altruism from first principles; and lastly, the “theory” of cunning intelligence known as mêtis. As we’ll see, mêtis is not at all a theory, but it’s becoming almost impossible to talk about something without calling it a theory or a concept these days.

A distinct mode of intelligence in Greek thought, mêtis is best described as flair, opportunism, deception, timing (which the Greeks called kairos), and adaptability, embodied by figures like Odysseus, Hermes, and the octopus, and practiced by helmsmen, hunters, weavers, and politicians.

Mêtis is one of the strangest casualties in the history of Western thought. A fully-formed theory of decision-making that predates Plato, it was actively suppressed by him, and then vanished so thoroughly that only academic scholarship has kept track of it, bringing it back via arcane books and Substacks.

In good archaic tradition, Mêtis was a who before it became a what. Originally a Titan goddess, she was Zeus’s first wife, so the whole thing goes to the very beginning, ab origine, in illo tempore. She was described by Hesiod as wiser than all gods and mortal men.

Fearing a child of hers would overthrow him, Zeus swallowed Metis whole while she was pregnant, absorbing her cunning into himself and later giving birth to Athena from his own head (you can’t make this stuff up). The myth has often been read, since classical times, as an allegory for what happened to the concept itself: raw, embodied cunning gets swallowed and domesticated by the rational, sky-father intelligence that becomes the value pursued by philosophia.

We could say today that mêtis was not a virtue or a piece of knowledge but a whole mode of cognition, built around several core qualities working together: the ability to seize kairos (as I mentioned, the precise, fleeting right moment) rather than follow fixed rules, adaptability and multiplicity, deception and disguise using illusion, masks, and misdirection as legitimate tools of intelligence, and practical embodied skill.

Around the fifth century BC, Greek thought split cognition into episteme (theoretical knowledge, pretty much what modernity packs under the heading ‘knowledge’) and techne (rule-based technical skill, which you have to experience rather than read about). These were categories that we inherited and that could be written down, taught systematically, and verified with logical precision.

Mêtis fit neither.

I’ll leave it up to you to reflect whether mêtis should come back or not.

Whether it’s climate, AI, civil war, or the thousand mythologies explored in fiction, television and cinema, such as plagues, aliens, natural disasters or anything in between or beyond, one thing is certain: the apocalyptic mindset is not a bug, but a feature of our post-modernity.

And how can it not be, since Europe had at least 1,000 years to incubate the kind of thinking that obssesses over sudden loss, death, destruction and world collapse.

The period between roughly 500 and 1500 AD was when European medievals went to apocalyptic school and graduated from it magna cum laude.

Medieval people lived in a more or less constant state of apocalyptic expectation, fuelled by plague, famine, war, and celestial omens. The framework was the Old Testament, but the phenomenology of it went beyond Scripture.

With beautiful hindsight bias, medieval historians at the time were able to explain every political and social disruption by portents and omens that foreshadowed and predicted impending doom, even though no scholar at the time was able to make any prediction before the fact. In fact, they seemed to lack any interest in predicting events based on available evidence. All predictions were post-factum narratives. For example, in the chronicle I studied in my doctoral thesis, the civil war of 1214-15 was ‘predicted’ (or postdicted?) in the 1220s by natural signs such as, predictably, comets and eclipses, and, less predictably, by a multitude of deer galloping down from the north of England and throwing themselves into the sea near Bristol.

Despite this “post-predictive” mindset, the medieval mind was geared altogether towards expecting the future to be bleak, bleaker, the bleakest, moving towards the end of the world, in alignment with a very literal reading of the book of the Apocalypse and the other apocalyptic passages in the rest of the Old Testament.

The Renaissance and early modernity may have done away with post-predictive predictions, but the negative forward-thinking remained. And it remains to this day, muddled with anxieties about the end of the world, fascination and fear.

Call it medieval slop, if you will.

Francesco Petrarca, born in 1304, certainly saw something rotten in the intellectual output of his own century, even if he lacked the vocabulary to name it that way.

He hunted down manuscrip…

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I have another confession to make here.

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Get up and leave. The rest is human history.

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T…

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What would the greatest orator of the ancient world make of a technology that produces fluent, well-structured prose in seconds?

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I’ve just finished reading Geoffrey Miller’s Spent, now over 15 years old, and, whatever its limits as evolutionary psychology, it gives you a genuinely mischievous lens through which to look at almost everything we do with our leisure and our money, including, it turns out, our books. And including this very Substack.

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