It is available online at https://doi.org/10.36253/978-88-5518-612-4.09

Concluding remarks

Breno Battistin Sebastiani, Delfim Ferreira Leão

This book intended to emphasize three main suggestions for further reflections on both how democracies dealt in the past with issues involving staseis and metabolai, and how they can deal with them today. Those suggestions can be subsumed as epistemological, ethical, and anthropological ones.

As for the first group of suggestions, the chapters by Leão, Correa, and Gontijo highlight the central role played by sophia both for realizing circumstances of staseis and metabolai and appropriately dealing with them. Sophia is here understood as something much broader than someone’s intellectual background, or the amount of knowledge one can collect through one’s life. In a multi-disciplinary perspective, sophia means a keen and high-minded knowledge of the past combined with a sharp eye turned to the present. The byproduct of the hard work of philosophers, historians, orators, and so many others directly engaged with political affairs in their own contexts, form the necessary basis that enables anyone to start reflecting about two capital issues: the pressures exerted by staseis and metabolai, and how to appropriately deal with them so as to improve the situation rather than aggravate circumstances out of which they themselves arised.

A second group is formed by ethical suggestions chiefly derived from the chapters by Sano and Sebastiani, and Fialho. As Sano and Sebastiani highlighted, the lack of commitment towards an economic democracy (conveyed also as social and political) is equivalent to complacency, if not complicity, with forms of domination that hide beneath beautiful names easily legitimized by rhetorical charmers.

Without solid and properly oriented ethical foundations, staseis and metabolai can be quickly converted into negative and/or destructive situations instead of starting points to bettering or creating promising environments. This can happen when, for instance, economic power assumes the upper hand on political decisions or, as cristal-clearly stated by Fialho, “[t]he city is only the means by which personal interests are achieved”. Ancient tyrants, like current populists or (would be) dictators of whatever color of the ideological spectrum, form the most conspicuous examples of the former lack of commitment towards an economic democracy, especially when it becomes notorious that they are submitting their homelands to their own whims.

Finally, and according to Soares’ reflections, this book calls attention to the deep impact that every day and apparently banal decisions can have, and most of the time actually do, not only on the environment immediately neighboring the poleis, but also on the environment as a whole: “the environment is not separated from human life, nor is it not merely a setting for human history”. To pay attention to local staseis and metabolai and adequately ponder their reverberation beyond our own narrow walls is a necessary first step to realizing how all of us are interconnected and mutually dependent on each other.

These three points form like a red-thread that does not aim of course to serve as a guide to political action (in the sense that any of our actions are political and imply a previous political choice, either conscious or not); they can though at least give food for thought for everyone interested not only in reading about our world and its past, but chiefly in engaging their own knowledge with their immediate actions, because of being more conscious of the fact that our future as species depends also on a deep ethical commitment that shows up in every single one of our decisions.