Alright, everyone’s seen Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” by now, but in case you were scared away by the dumb complaints of wokeness or have been in a coma for the latter half of the summer, here’s a minor spoiler alert. The idea of Zeus’s law, that a host must welcome a visitor (regardless of social status) with food, drink, and shelter before even asking who they are or why they have come, is pretty central to the plot.
Though Nolan took the ancient Greek adherence to Zeus’s law in his own direction for the film, it had powerful historical implications in real life. Ancient Greeks’ religion told them that gods regularly walked among humans incognito, dressed as travelers or beggars. Kindness could be handsomely rewarded. On the other hand, nastiness might be brutally punished.
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The benefits of adhering to Zeus’s law were not limited to matters of divine judgment. A good host could expect human guests to be respectful, to not take advantage of the host’s hospitality or overstay their welcome, and to reciprocate the generosity they were shown in the future.
Tons of major religions have their own version of Zeus’s law. It’s not so dissimilar from Jesus Christ’s admonition (ye olde fancy edition), “[a]nd as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” The idea that gods disguise themselves to test humanity is not unique to the ancient Greeks either, though I must say that the Norsemen of myth really seemed a bit thick in figuring out that all those cloaked, one-eyed old men were really Odin.
Unfortunately, nobody fears divine retribution today. Obviously, modern access to objective, provable reality cuts pretty strongly against the proposition that a god or gods directly intervene to punish or reward humans here on earth, yet I don’t really even think that’s at the bottom of it. For instance, it seems that many of the people who claim to be the strongest believers in Jesus are quite certain that they will not be punished for simply ignoring everything he actually taught.
The practical consequences of being a total dick are not what they once were, either. Upward social mobility has nearly ground to a halt in the U.S. Someone who is gratuitously nasty to a poor person can be pretty confident that the victim isn’t going to unexpectedly rise to power and then settle some scores. Likewise, the message has been crystal clear for at least the past decade that nobody’s going to repay kindness in the future if you yourself fall on hard times. In Trump’s America, you are on your own.
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Is there any hope of reversing this sad decline? Well, I suppose we can all try in our own little ways to reignite the rapidly cooling coals of kindness in the world, but only one group of people could easily bring back the fear of godlike justice being meted out in everyday circumstances: billionaire oligarchs.
Think about it: What if instead of spending so much time watching the rocket scientists they hired fire giant phalluses into the sky, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk threw on disguises and wandered skid row for a few weeks? Without even noticing a tiny difference in their net worth, almost like magic, they could bestow such marvels as healthcare, decent housing, and quality sustenance on the dozens they’d surely encounter who offered even a modest kindness.
Those who denied undercover billionaires basic human decency might find themselves facing a frivolous lawsuit (as opposed to the journalists and critics billionaires normally weaponize the justice system against). Hey, these rich douchebags might even themselves undergo a Scrooge-like transformation in the course of interacting with some of the struggling people they seem to have forgotten they share the world with.
Sadly, I think the billionaires are going to remain above us rather than among us for the time being. Neither powerful men nor clandestine gods are here to incentivize decent behavior. So, whether you call it Zeus’s law, the Golden Rule, or something else, I guess it’s up to all of us to try to follow it simply because we want to.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].