The Bar-Bars

"Bar bar bar bar bar. Bar bar bar! Bar bar bar bar bar bar."

With these words, the Greek soldier mimicked the foreign tongues heard beyond the boundaries of the familiar Hellenic world. To his ears, the speech of distant lands melded into a chorus of “bar bar bar.”

Who were these Bar-Bars? Why weren’t they civilized like the Greeks?

"That's all they sound like - 'Bar bar bar bar...,'" he repeated, a hint of derision lacing his tone as he recounted his experiences amid non-Greek settlements. These places lacked the sophisticated democratic government of Athens, or the administrative efficiency of Sparta, and their art and culture were… well, foreign. Inferior.

Barbaric, even.

What is it about culture that makes us so certain that what we’re doing is civilized, or morally right, or somehow better than what the other has going on out there?

The Greeks came up with the word "barbaros” to describe literally anyone who wasn’t Greek. If you didn’t speak the language, you sounded funny to them, and you weren’t in the cool club. This might be easier to understand when we consider some of the amazing things that seemed to differentiate the Greeks from the rest of the world at the time.

If you consider the architecture alone, the Greeks really understood how to make beautiful, lasting temples expertly crafted in stone. The sculpture was other-worldly in its humanistic and stylized presentation of the human form, something you didn’t see eclipsed for nearly 2000 years, during the Renaissance.

Mathematics was dominated by the Greek world at the time, with Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Euclid contributing ideas we view as foundational today. Homer wrote great epic stories, Socrates and Plato opined about the nature of existence, and Hero of Alexander came up with the idea for a steam engine.

And then there’s that time the ancient Greeks invented and built an analog computer 2000 years ago.

In retrospect, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that the Greeks are the ones whose name we ultimately adapted to describe this concept.

Eventually, the Romans adopted the term “barbarus”, and the English-speaking world uses “barbarous” today.

Over time, the word gradually evolved to mean not just anyone who was from outside of the culture in question, but rather to imply a lack of culture, period. In other words, “barbaric” came to be synonymous with “uncivilized”, but it can also mean things like “cruel” and lacking any sort of moral compass.

This means we’ve moved on and can stop thinking about that Greek ethnocentrism that spawned the origin of the word, right? We’re using it differently, so we can continue to use it with good conscience today, right?

Well… maybe not so fast.

Ethnocentrism continues to rear its ugly head in the 21st century.

I’ll be honest with you: every time I hear the word “barbaric” used to describe a person or an organization, I shudder inwardly just a bit. I don’t think we’ve really left behind all of the connotations of the word itself. Words have a great deal of power, and the way they’re used by a culture ultimately shapes that culture.

It is a knee-jerk oversimplification of a given situation to describe another culture’s practice as barbaric. While the Greeks were closed off to all those other cultures, the Chinese were using paper, which could have revolutionized Greek writing systems and democratized writing to a large degree. Babylonian mathematicians and philosophers could have debated and discussed new ideas with these Greek thinkers, but there was far less of this than there could have been.

In the same way that the Greeks threw out the baby with the bathwater by not being as open to exchanging ideas with other cultures, we are vulnerable to this way of thinking today. Whenever I hear this incantation uttered, I hear “I am shutting off my brain to anything positive this person or culture could possibly have to contribute, and I am lumping everyone who is a part of this practice in together.”

To put it bluntly, it is dismissive of deeper thought, and we are better than that.

So, here is the cheat code for escaping this trap. It’s pretty rare that I’ll offer a specific solution to a problem I pose, other than to try to get folks to think more about it. Sometimes, that’s enough, but here I am, giving you the keys to the castle.

The solution is to be curious.

If millions of people believe something, instead of calling their point of view “barbaric”, keep thinking about why they might think that. Learn about how that specific point of view arose, the one that doesn’t seem logical to you. You don’t have to agree with their viewpoint or even change your mind—although that is always possible—but you can certainly discover why a belief exists.

I don’t think I’ve ever been disappointed by playing viewpoint detective. I learn something every time, and I tend to have a fuller perspective because of it. Even if my own viewpoint doesn’t change, I am satisfied by the nuance beyond the fear of the unknown.

If my writing has any central message, it is to become more curious.