Neville Morley's Blog, page 20

Half The Man I Used To Be

The glass-half-full position is that a problem I didn’t know I had has been solved by the very thing that raised it in the first place. It had simply not occurred to me to wonder whether the still-lingering after-effects of the plague – aka Long COVID – mean that I am now someone with a disability, or someone who is disabled. It’s certainly true that my ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities – and, like, do my job properly, especially the research-and-writing bits – has been substantially impaired, to a greater degree than can be explained by simple old age and uselessness, but surely that’s not the same as being disabled? Well, no need to worry; the Equality and Human Rights Commission has declared that it isn’t. True, the EHRC’s recent record on racism doesn’t promote complete confidence in its judgements, but like other British institutions I can choose to believe in my recent problems being a matter of a few bad apples rather than a systemic issue…

From the perspective of a solipsistic blog, what’s interesting is the strength of my reaction to the idea that I could, or even should, have been thinking in these terms. Intellectually, I know that disabilities are not necessarily visible, not necessarily genetic or the result of an accident, not necessarily lifelong or permanent. But this is still all about a category of which I instinctively assume I am not a member.

The obvious explanation is that this is a legacy of childhood: of growing up in a society where “Joey” was a ubiquitous playground insult and people with cerebral palsy or Down’s syndrome were seen as infectious and terrifying – and where other forms of disability were seen as affectations by work-shy scroungers. As a good Grauniad reader I quickly learnt that none of this is true, but either part of my subconscious still believes it, or this failed to shake the more basic assumption that we’re talking, however liberally, about Them rather than Us. And crossing that boundary – even contemplating the idea that I might become One of Them – is scary.

This is reinforced by my basic, admittedly unhealthy work ethic. I was once characterised by my then Head of Department as Boxer from Animal Farm: “I must work harder”. If I’m not managing to write and publish, what am I? If I’m letting people down because I can’t get that piece finished on time, what am I? If I’m a weak link in the department and they start wondering if they made a mistake in appointing me, what am I? I have to keep believing that tomorrow I’ll be back to my old self, because the alternative is to fear that I never will be. (No, no one said that this would actually make sense). And the idea that I might accept that I am actually disabled, that I simply cannot function adequately at the moment, is tantamount to declaring that I’m not me any more.

Hence, my interview with Occupational Health – because I have managed to get that far in acknowledging that I’m not 100% and maybe should do something about this – consisted, in retrospect, largely of me explaining how things really weren’t too bad, I was managing the teaching fine (just getting very tired afterwards), it is only the research and writing and I’m sure that’s just temporary… I don’t want to be the sort of bad colleague who claims lots of special adjustments that he doesn’t really need; I don’t want to be the person who actually needs special adjustments and allowances.

I’m even having personal feelings about terminology; the so-called ‘person first’ language of ‘someone with a disability’ feels less terrifying, less of a dramatic step, less of an unwarranted claim to special treatment, less of an admission, than ‘disabled person’. Which perhaps means that I do need to accept the latter, if accepting the reality of my situation is a necessary step towards dealing with it properly. But the EHRC has now declared that I can’t. So here we are.

We All Stand Together

I have just bottled my new Ukrainian-style stout, brewed as part of the Brew Ukraine initiative; at the beginning of the invasion, the Pravda craft brewery in Lviv had to stop brewing and switch to a war footing, so they made their recipes and label artwork freely available for other brewers – including home brewers – to produce their beer and help raise funds. I haven’t, unfortunately, found any proper UK breweries doing this, which is a shame as I’d have liked to have had an idea in advance what I was aiming for, but what I’ve got is dark and luscious with a hint of smokiness. Now available for a donation of £2 per 330ml bottle, all proceeds to humanitarian relief – with postage and packing on top if anyone beyond the immediate locality wants to try it, I’m afraid, as I suspect that might be a bit pricy. Cheers! Onwards Ukraine! Putin is a dick, as one of their other beers has it.

It’s a great initiative, imaginative and engaging, and offering a real connection with people who need help rather than just an abstract notion of charity. I’m honestly not sure whether that diminishes or exacerbated the nagging question in the back of my mind: why Ukraine? Why not Yemen, or Afghanistan, or Syria, or Ukraine in 2014, or the Uighur in China, or Ethiopia or Eritrea? ‘Whataboutery’ is a well-established means of derailing argument and undermining solidarity, implying that caring about one thing is hypocrisy unless you have demonstrably cared about every other thing – but it is not always an illegitimate question, even if it makes us feel uncomfortable.

I’ve given money to multiple appeals for humanitarian relief over the years, and support charities working to support refugees, but would have to admit that I do feel more engaged in this case, just as the western world more generally has responded much more energetically. I can completely understand why, from the perspective of Syria or Yemen or Afghanistan, this looks like hypocrisy, probably driven by self-interest (cf. the number of accounts on the Twitter pushing the ‘West is using Ukraine to attack Russia’ narrative), and racism. I can only speculate about the general response, but the least I can do is examine my own.

I think I can honestly say that I do not feel more compassion for Ukrainians because they are white, or European; I firmly believe that all people deserve help and support, and all refugees need to be welcomed, because they are human, rather than drawing up hierarchies based on supposed cultural affinity – let alone trying to exclude some groups altogether on such grounds. But I cannot deny that it is easier to find points of connection with Ukraine in other ways.

Ukrainian cities look (or looked) like cities that I’ve visited in Central and Eastern Europe, whereas Aleppo or Kabul look very foreign. Ukrainian jazz is right at home alongside the Polish jazz that I love. They have craft breweries! I don’t know how far they’re into artisan espresso – I remain scarred by the inexplicable popularity of Nescafé in Serbia – but it seems a reasonable bet. This cannot help but make a difference – it’s a matter of the pleasingly unfamiliar (different beer styles, different scales and rhythms) within the safely familiar (beer, jazz); variations on known traditions, rather than radically different traditions.

This goes hand in hand with the technological developments that make such affinities accessible – I could simply look up lists of Ukrainian jazz artists and find their music on Spotify and BandCamp – and bring them to the fore, as Ukrainians have been undeniably great at the whole internet thing, from Zelensky downwards. Again, it’s the power of novelty in a familiar context, the very definition of a meme; “Go fuck yourself Russian warship!”; tractor-pulling-tank jokes; the multiple versions of the blue-and-yellow visual identify; feisty grandmothers giving sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers and so forth.

Further: whereas the accounts I follow to try to understand what’s happening in Syria or Afghanistan or Ethiopia seem mostly to be reporters in a conventional sense, a fair number of the Ukrainian ones are more like curators, gathering, translating and contextualising accounts from people on the ground; I’m not sure whether this is more a reflection of greater online activity in the country generally, or a different style of reporting, or just the randomness of which accounts I’ve ended up following, but again it makes a difference to the sense of connection and emotional engagement. Finally, there’s a greater possibility of engaging in return, since so many know some English; discover jazz musician, send a message, have a conversation – let alone the whole Brew Ukraine initiative.

Thirdly, there’s the nature of the situation: blatant war of aggression, rather than messy civil war. It’s harder – not impossible, of course – to do a convincing “they’re both as bad as each other” take, and the argument that Ukraine is simply being used by Western powers as a proxy, “let’s you and him fight”, likewise seems to require an implausible stretch of the imagination (and yet, Noam Chomsky and Juli Zeh disagree. Should I reconsider? Nah).

True, there’s a lot of “we must support Ukraine for the sake of The West” about, just as the USA goes into a spasm of demonstrating why we might be cautious about looking to it as a shining beacon of human values – a reminder of the considerable overlap between the rhetoric of some of the most fervent defenders of Western Cizilization TM and that of Putin when it comes to women’s rights, racial equality, gay rights etc. (Decadence klaxon!). Maybe we should support Ukraine as part of the defence of our values internally as well as externally? I would rather support Ukraine for the sake of Ukraine.

And there is even hope, that this is the version of the Melian Dialogue when others do come to the aid of the weak and where the chances of war do indeed come to bite back against the strong – and, if you’re really optimistic, that stopping Russian aggression now would have a beneficial knock-on effect across the world. And the hope that solidarity with Ukraine is not a one-off, that it’s a product of a specific set of circumstances, especially social media, that didn’t exist or operate in the same way before but which might support similar solidarity in future…

The Clowns

Two blog posts in less than a fortnight? It’s probably obvious that I’ve had a bit of a holiday, caught up on some sleep and generally recharged; Berlin and Potsdam for a long weekend, returning to my favourite city after three years of plague and chaos (one of my more elaborate jazz compositions is called ‘I Still Walk Those Streets in my Dreams’, as during lockdown I regularly found myself walking down Unter den Linden or, more commonly, through familiar places in Zehlendorf and Friedenau). Kaffee und Kuchen, Königsberger Klopse, Kindl*, KaDeWe (which has reorganised its food hall to focus on actually serving food, downsizing the cake section and greatly reducing the beer offering, so may not actually be going back in future…) and Kulturhaus Dussmann…

Cultural highlight was Le Nozze di Figaro at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, with Daniel Barenboim conducting. I’m not a huge devotee of Mozart, but would now readily admit that experiencing the entire opera, seeing how the famous bits fit together into a whole (albeit a very episodic whole), was a revelation, especially when performed by such outstanding musicians (Peter Kellner as Figaro was a last-minute stand-in for someone I’d actually heard of, and a star is seriously born; Elsa Dreisig as the Contessa was just amazing; and one of the things that really struck me from seeing the whole work was how far Mozart wrote great parts for the whole cast, not just a couple of stars with minor supporting roles).

But for me it’s always about the Gesamtkunstwerk, the setting and the drama as well as the music, however anachronistic this may be in the case of Mozart. This isn’t always a positive, though that doesn’t necessarily spoil things – I just draw different pleasures from the experience. There are three basic reactions: entering into the director’s vision and thinking further about its implications (Castorf’s Ring, Tcherniakov’s Parsifal); violently disagreeing with the whole thing and developing an extensive critique (Kosky’s Meistersinger); and imagining how I would stage the opera if someone was stupid enough to give me the chance – this is the standard response to a setting that is simply a bit meh.

This Figaro was unavoidably in the third category – a case study in gimmicky modernisation (Let’s open with a 1980s aerobics class! They won’t be expecting that!) that adds more or less nothing at all to the drama, or even makes sense. I can see the reasoning behind making the Contessa an aging pop star and the Count her record producer as well as husband – what’s the modern equivalent of ius primae noctis? The powerful record or film producer demanding favours! #MeToo! – but it wasn’t terribly convincing. As Mark Berry noted, you could have done the whole thing in period costume without losing the slightest bit of meaning or interest, which is always a bad sign; see his review for more painful details…

What would be my approach? The obvious starting-point is that Figaro is a comedy – but, as so often, that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be funny, but rather is a matter of narrative structure, the threat of upheaval and revolutionary change that then returns to the status quo. The social norms that uphold both political hierarchy and male dominance are questioned and threatened, but at the end restored and reinforced. It’s the operatic equivalent of six people trapped in two rooms, forced to experience an endless cycle of relationship drama with each other, where attempts at breaking away are always doomed and attempts at relationships with people outside the circle are soon corrupted and undermined – and obviously this is why The One With The Flashback is the best Friends episode, where the full horror of their situation becomes unmistakable, that the logical outcome is that, eventually, each of them will sleep with all the others.

The heart of the Figaro drama is the toxic relationship of Count and Contessa – she gets the heart-breaking arias and the sympathy, but one might plausibly argue that he is equally miserable in a less sympathetic manner. How can it be a happy ending for those two to remain together at the end? The answer in Huguet’s production is to have a lot of clowning at the finale, showing that they still get on each other’s nerves – and then have the Contessa run off with Cherubino. This is the Wrong Answer. Emphasise the implausibility of genuine reconciliation by all means, but the point is then precisely not to resolve it; they cannot escape each other except through death.

What about Figaro and Susannah and all the rest? The first – perhaps most plausible and conventional – reading is that they are normal people being dragged into the gravitational well of that central relationship, forced to play out its patterns, slowly robbed of any distinct existence of their own; Susannah becomes the Contessa, Figaro the Conte and so forth. Or, if you like, the claim that these are universal human emotions, simply a slice of life, with toxic power imbalances permeating all relationships (yes, I could do a Thucydides take…).

But I wonder also about a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead interpretation, in which the tragedy is deliberately decentred (just as directors like Huguet don’t seem to notice it at all), and we’re mainly offered the oblivious activities of bit players in the foreground with only glimpses of what’s really going on (could perhaps also heighten the political elements of that background activity). Or a combination, as the well-meaning (but also self-centred) machinations of everyone else certainly make things worse for the Contessa, even as she’s persuaded to join in.

My final thought, even less coherent than the above, derives from one of the books I read over this holiday: Fumi Okiji’s fascinating Jazz As Critique, which shows how exploring Theodor Adorno’s notoriously misconceived account of jazz is actually productive – in a way, using ideal-theoretical Adorno to critique real-existing Adorno, but still more reading him, and jazz, through a specifically black frame of reference. Charles Mingus plays a prominent role in this account, as composer, performer and spokesman for black artists, and there’s a nice discussion of his piece The Clown, which offers raucous, disconcerting carnival music as accompaniment to a story about a clown who finds that it’s his own suffering, rather than all his attempts at comic business, that makes people laugh. This tension seems to lie at the heart of Le Nozze di Figaro too…

*In fact mostly Potsdamer Braumanufaktur organic beers, but once you get into the alliteration thing it’s hard to stop, and I do like the Kindl Dunkelbock now and again; likewise Köstritzer Schwarzbier.

Weaponising Thucydides

‘Doom-scrolling’ is, I imagine, a familiar thing, that many of us have been doing far too much of lately. You may not, however, have come across ‘professional doom-scrolling’, which unfortunately does not mean you get paid for it, but rather involves justification of the activity through some sort of “but I have to do this for work”, addressed to frustrated loved ones and even to ourselves, to explain how this is not simply a deeply unhealthy bit of obsessive behaviour. It’s relevant to this piece I’m working on; I need to cover related issues in class next week; there’s a developing methodological debate that connects to my area. This practice is quite distinct from what we might call ‘catastrophe dissemination’, the uncontrollable urge to link current events to one’s own research in order to write topical social media posts and would-be popular comment pieces, although the professional doom-scroller may indeed end up writing such pieces as a doubling-down on their original justification for spending a deeply problematic amount of time on the Twitter.

In my defence – or as a further plank of laughable self-delusion – I started thinking about this post when struggling a few weeks ago to finish a piece on ‘Thucydides on Twitter’ which made engagement with the platform unavoidable, but also meant – for better or worse – that most of the doom was focused through references to Thucydides. This does, if nothing else, reduce it to a manageable quantity of information, albeit – as happens in the midst of any such crisis – a dramatic increase on the usual levels of background quotation and comment. On an average day, one would expect somewhere between 30 and 50 Thucydides-related tweets, excluding those that show up in search engines because it’s part of someone’s ID or user name; at the moment we’re getting about 50 to 70, which is down from the peak of 100+ in the last week of February – and I would also say, a bit more subjectively, that fewer of these than normal are contextless quotes advertising mindfulness classes and wellness, and there’s a noticeably higher level of comment and engagement – and debate, rather than so much of the single account laying down the law to (often rather limited) followers.

I briefly had the idea of including a section in the chapter I was writing specifically on the analysis of Thucydides-related responses to the Russian attacks on Ukraine, in 2014 and 2022, but there was not in the end any space within the word limit. It’s scarcely the most vital response to the war, but this does offer an interesting reflection of the place of Thucydides in wider culture across the globe, and ways in which his work and associates ideas can be deployed, so it seems worth summarising the results here instead – if only because I’ve managed so few posts this year…

In 2014, reading current events through the lens of Thucydides was a pretty minor preoccupation; the number of quotations of the Melian Dialogue – ‘The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must’ – doubled from February to March, but that’s a doubling from 20 to 45; plenty of these are the usual bots, churning out random quotations in the belief that this builds meaningful engagement, but 13 of the March quotes including a #Ukraine or #Crimea tag, or made some explicit comment. By April, the number had fallen back to the mid-twenties, mostly bots, and/ or tagged with things like #Leadership (and #NationalTaxDay, for some reason). Another thirty or so tweets refer to the Melian Dialogue without quoting it, or offer general comments relating Thucydides to the situation. This is too small a sample to establish clear patterns rather than just making subjective observations, beyond the fact that there is no single reading.

The Dialogue is clearly assumed to express a truth about war and/or foreign policy – “If you want to understand Crimea read T. not the armchair experts”; “T. described why wars 2500 years ago and human condition has not changed” – but the nature of that truth is uncertain: roughly a quarter of the tweets seem to take it to be a description of the way the world works (“If T. is correct then so long Crimea”; “anyone wanting to see the limits of diplomacy should read the Melian Dialogue”), roughly a quarter see it as a key to Putin’s mentality or Russian strategy (“As Putin’s patron saint, T., said…”; “It is a general law of nature to rule wherever one can #Russia”), and roughly half adopt no position that I can discern, but either assume the interpretation must be obvious or put forward Thucydides to open up discussion (and/or establish their social media persona as the sort of person who knows and quotes T.) rather than to make a specific point. All these tweets are in English (I haven’t searched for other languages), although one did link to a fascinating online post in Russian that quoted the Melian Dialogue and concluded “so it is clear from which eggs those nameless and polite little green men hatched on the northern coast of the Black Sea”. Where geographical information about the account is provided, which is rare, the majority are associated with the USA. Overall there is no clear tendency to support or condemn Russia or identify with any particular side, only an established belief that Thucydides offers some sort of illumination or relevant knowledge.

In a lot of ways, comparison with the last couple of months reveals significant continuity. The number of registered Twitter users has more than doubled between 2014 and 2021, so it’s not too surprising that the number of references to Thucydides in the context of Ukraine and the Russian invasion in January and February this year is a bit more than double the 2014 numbers – c.160 evocations or quotations of the Melian Dialogue. Some of these are directly linked to pieces published in the mainstream media, in particular a commentary on Russian foreign policy by Sergey Radchenko (“Putin… has a worldview closer to that of the Greek historian Thucydides”); in March, which I haven’t yet analysed in detail, discussions of the Realist IR theorist John Mearsheimer, his argument that NATO expansion effectively provoked Russia, and the question of whether or not his ideas are actually drawn from those of Thucydides (a profile by Adam Tooze argued not, citing a book on The Atlantic Realists by Matthew Specter that I haven’t read yet to see how much it draws on the work of people associated with my past research project, or if this is a matter of parallel arguments), meant that references to Thucydides in published articles went further through the roof.

One significant change has been the establishment of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ as a trope, if not cliché, of global politics discussion – in 2014, this was only just starting to be mentioned (20 or so tweets all told in March, nothing in February) and almost always just in the form of retweets of articles. In January and February this year, besides 70-odd TT tweets limited to US-China relations and 85 either focused on other conflicts (India-Pakistan, sports teams, bitcoin versus old-fashioned money) or just offering a quote or reference without any specific theme indicated, there were 60+ tweets that linked the idea directly to the invasion of Ukraine. 90% of these asserted or clearly assumed the truth of the Trap, with most presenting it as inevitable – it is clearly seen by most as an objective attribute of the world, rather than a theory (whether attributed to Thucydides or Graham Allison); the remainder of these tweets, with just one exception, were agnostic about the idea rather than rejecting it (whereas discussions of the Trap in relation to China do regularly reject its premises).

“The primary cause of the Ukraine War was the growth in power of NATO and the alarm this inspired in Russia.” What is striking about these Trap tweets is that, where the author’s evaluation of blame or responsibility can be clearly identified, it is in almost all cases directed against the United States (and to a much lesser degree NATO, which in this context is generally presented as simply the puppet or agent of the US; still more so Ukraine, which is deprived of all agency). “Russia=Sparta. USA/Ukraine=Athens. I am Thucydides and this is my story.” “I think TT would better refer to Sparta (Russia) v Athens and its minions from the league of Delos (NATO).” “US is in the TT and this is their solution; Europe, Russia and Ukraine are just being sacrificed.” Perhaps most strikingly, a journalist from Chinese state-affiliated media simply quoted “It was the rise of Athens and the fear this aroused in Sparta…” with a map of NATO expansion. Indeed, far from being an objective situation, the Trap is sometimes presented rather as a strategy: “Ukraine was a huge T Trap set by NATO for Russia and Putin didn’t fall into it yet.”

This holds true, remarkably, whether the US is presented as the established (or, increasingly often, ‘declining’ or ‘waning’) power lashing out against a rising Russia to try to shore up its position, or as the aggressive ‘rising’ power seeking to extend its hegemony. At least in English-language tweets, the apparently more plausible (or at least no less vague or tendentious) interpretation of events in terms of an established/declining Russia acting out of fear at a rising, independent-minded Ukraine is conspicuously absent. Even when the idea of the TT is explicitly questioned, this serves as the basis for critique of the USA; “TT is glamour trash from the American Think Tank Myth Factory; if Russians wanted to fight, NATO would have been smashed to bits a long time ago” (n.b. this one comes from January, attacking US claims that invasion was a serious possibility).

This pattern is so consistent that one suspects either that the popular reception of Allison’s T-Trap has now become established as a drama about potential US aggression in all circumstances, rather than being about the structural dynamics of a specific situation, or that – rather like the Mearsheimer version of Realism that sees NATO activity in Eastern Europe as the problem – the idea comes readily to hand as a means for pro-Russian actors to recruit NATO sceptics to the cause of delegitimising opposition to the invasion. There are perhaps echoes of the ‘decadence of the West’ rhetoric offered by Putin and sympathetic European politicians and commentators; again, Biden’s USA is simultaneously seen as lashing out to protect its position against new, popular movements and leaders and as aggressively forcing its woke agenda on innocent traditionalists. Certainly the dominant demand is for any further US involvement to be resisted, and Putin’s actions to be accepted, whatever the result. As one Austrian poster claimed, “We are in T Trap; surrender and keep peace, no other option.” Perhaps this is a genuine conclusion from reflection on international affairs; perhaps the message came first, and the Thucydides Trap is one means for promoting it.

As in 2014, references to other passages in Thucydides, especially the Melian Dialogue, are more varied in their claims and conclusions, more often presented as a matter of debate, and much more frequently ascribed to Thucydides as a thinker worth taking seriously rather than just a taken-for-granted condition of the world. The three principles of state motivation are cited multiple times, but more as an explanation of Russian thinking than a justification of it. “T. was right: strongest motives are fear, honor and interests, Putin is captive to all three.” “What if the last of T’s fear, interest and honour means more to Putin than to us?” “Wars rarely come from mistakes; if Russia decides to invade it’s for T.’s fear, of NATO expansion, or UKR falling into W orbit (not in their interest).”

In February, no one at all that I could see turned to the Sicilian Expedition as a lens through which to view the Russian invasion; this may have changed over the course of recent weeks, as its failures have become more apparent, or – and I don’t actually recall seeing any such comment – this may be further evidence for the dominance in Thucydides reception of a very small number of passages, even if others might be equally relevant. That limited list certainly includes the funeral oration, with a few people quoting variants of “the secret of happiness is freedom” in relation to the Ukrainian war effort, but above all it means the Melian Dialogue.

“Ukraine brings to mind the words of the Athenians: hard power counts.” “The Melian Dialogue is about the evil done by a great power to a small country who wants to choose its own alliance partner.” As in 2014, two different lines of interpretation are clearly visible. On the one hand, its statements are, as in the standard Realist interpretation, presented as a description of the world and the only reasonable form of behaviour in such circumstances. “Putin just did what he was supposed to do; Realism is vindicated; the strong do what they can.” History shows us the only real principle is might makes right.” “The strong do what they can: if Ukraine is divided it is weak; if Putin can divide he rules; the EU is united in running away.” On the other hand, the words of the Athenians are seen as epitomising the mentality of “Great Power cynicism”, that should be resisted and/or will not prevail. Russia “decided to read the Ukrainians the Melian Dialogue.” “Putin’s speech [on recognition of breakaway republics] is remarkably compelling; that it sounds like half the Melian Dialogue is not a great indication of where the world is headed.” “Remember what happened to Athenians a few years later.”

One significant development since 2014 is the extent to which these references sometimes include an explicit call to action, or at least a call to learn from events via Thucydides. “Take note from T; this is a natural law that transcends Putin, the only thing that allows liberalism/peace to work is strength.” “Lesson from history: get strong and stay strong.” “Be strong and help those that are weak.”(!) Another is the level of explicit debate, rather than just the presence of different perspectives in parallel, and an awareness of how citations might be deployed for a purpose. “The MD is not a side, it’s an expression of current state of affairs”; in response, “people who cite it are usually just telling us to give up and accept things.” “Seems like those who explained/justified Russian action through Melian Dialogue forgot T-Daddy meant it as a cautionary tale about arrogance and hubris.”

Given this range of perspectives, it’s surprising how often people still simply cite lines from the Melian Dialogue, in response to tweets or news stories about Ukraine or tagged appropriately, without any further explanation. Okay, yes, it’s clearly relevant, one might say to them – but are you offering this as a Mearsheimeresque defence of Russian actions and an argument for staying out of things, or a moral condemnation of imperialist aggression and call to support the Ukrainian government? Or neither, but just an evocation of Thucydides as the Man Who Knows, reflecting on the timelessness of war and brutality? (There have been a fair few quotes of the Auden poem as well, in the spirit of “and we thought we had seen the last of war, well, Thucydides knew this was a naive optimism…”).

I’ll be quite honest, I’ve done this myself, without thinking – on the assumption that anyone who follows my feed will know perfectly well what I mean. Maybe everyone is making the same assumption, without thinking that a tweet may well be read in isolation, out of any such context – or even hoovered up, analysed and categrised by an academic who is simply trying to rationalise continued anxious perusal of social media for some sign of hope that isn’t just a fine comfort in danger…

And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Mediocre Course Evaluations…

I was reminded this week that the great Cliff Orwin once ran a seminar comparing Jewish and non-Jewish political thought – Herodotus and the shook of Esther – which included in the rubric: ‘The class motto is that of the Oregon Trail: the cowards never started, the weak perished along the way’. (I actually recalled this as ‘fall behind and get eaten by wolves’; similar sentiment…). I cannot help but admire this, while at the same time my own teaching philosophy is that offered by an French Alpine guide, an old friend of my parents: ‘You go at the pace of the slowest member of the party’.* Make sure people don’t get abandoned to the academic equivalent of hyperthermia, modify your goals if necessary, always have escape routes and alternative plans in mind, and always be prepared to change speed.

Of course, it’s important to remember that, with the Oregon Trail approach, charging off ahead on your own can be equally fatal. Yes, if it’s the teacher who has left everyone else behind, it’s reasonsble to assume that someone like Prof Orwin is an intellectual Natty Bumpo, entirely capable of surviving alone in the wilderness and finding their way back when it suits them – but if the rest of the party has got completely lost and all died of starvation or frostbite in the meantime, that’s a bit of a failure in terms of the duties of a guide. And if the person forging ahead is a student who isn’t actually equipped for it, the imperative is surely to drag them back and keep the whole group together as much as possible, for their own sake and for to give the collective the best chance of success.

I’m thinking about this at the moment because my jazz composition class – trying to draw lessons from my own classes is moderately pointless because despite all my best efforts half the students seem to have fallen victim to grizzly bears and fever regardless, to judge from current attendance… Because my jazz composition class seems to be trying to illustrate the problems with both approaches at once, much as my compositions are apparently managing to be simultaneously too dissonant and not dissonant enough. On the one hand, entirely understandably, the organisers have decided to deal with the problem of certain students being a bit more advanced and/or self-confident by setting up two groups, with the idea that each can then move at a natural pace. On the other hand, for whatever reason, it seems to be assumed that the more advanced group is perceived as much more able and knowledgeable than it actually is (or at least than this member of it is), so we’re being left to a significant degree to our own devices, and given relatively little guidance or structure. And to be honest, given how much I’ve discovered I like being set regular homework tasks, I feel I would rather be plodding along in the slower group where at least I’d know what’s going on.

I do feel really bad about feeling this. I know how much it would upset me if I got a message from a student saying something to the effect of ‘from the perspective of my considerable teaching experience you’re doing this all wrong’. But it would also upset me at least as much if I knew, or suspected, that someone might be thinking this. Or, if I knew there was someone with such experience in the group, I’d probably spend my whole time imagining that they were thinking such things. And I can imagine all sorts of reasons why we might be being relatively neglected, not least that the poor tutor is having to do back-to-back 90-minute classes with us coming up second, so no wonder if he’s a bit vague and frazzled – but on the other hand, speaking as someone who has paid real money for the course…

I’ve commented before about the experience of feeling completely at sea in this class, which isn’t a normal experience for me in an academic context but can really make me empathise with some of my students. I guess I need to make lemonade out of these lemons in a similar manner: I never had to experience the feeling that I’m being short-changed by a lecturer in this sort of way. Yes, one can feel sympathetic and understanding and bloody cheesed off at the same time. And, yes, it comes with a sense that perhaps this is my fault, that if only I was a bit more capable of instantly identifying what key a given chord is in then I wouldn’t be floundering quite so much, and I might even understand how something can be both too dissonant and not dissonant enough, without suspecting that this might be one of those mess-with-your-narrow-rationalism Zen things…

*Completely irrelevant to this topic, but M. Petr also supplied one of the greatest examples of gormless military thinking ever: in 1939, he was called up to the French army and, as a native of the alps who knew mountains like the back of his hand and could spring from crag to crag like a mountain goat, assigned to the cavalry. Whereupon he was captured in the first week after an entirely ineffectual cavalry charge and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I have long had an interest in varying forms of assessment, besides or instead of the conventional types of essays and unseen exams; I’ve experimented at various times with journals, blogs, different sorts of research tasks, online engagement, Wikipedia editing, group projects and probably a few other things. I think more or less all the stuff I’ve written on this has disappeared, with the demise of the various resource sites or organisations who published them (at any rate I’ve given up trying to update the URLs; tl;dr, students are generally massively resistant to anything new as they don’t know how to do well…), but I can demonstrate their past existence. All of this is of course intended to establish my credentials as thoughtful, innovative and even radical in this area – because suddenly I am confronted with something that makes me feel oddly reactionary and resistant: the idea that students should be offered a choice of forms of assessment. 

What’s the problem? The colleagues who are promoting this approach might justifiably ask me this question not just in general terms, but specifically in relation to the fact that in both my final-year seminars I offer students a… choice of forms of assessment when it comes to the ‘class presentation’ element. Indeed, at various points this year I have celebrated their innovations: exploring key episodes in Thucydides through podcast episodes, or a choose-your-own-adventure game on foreign policy decisions, or a draft film script of the Pylos and Sphacteria episode. Even with the more conventional ‘here is some assorted information and points for discussion’ approach, encouraging students to record their presentation in advance and then handling questions in class not only seems preferable for those who get really nervous about speaking up but also is a much better use of class time. Scope for innovation and creativity, flexibility to accommodate student learning needs – what’s not to like? 

Well. There are two key things that these assessments have in common, which make it easy to accommodate lots of variety of form: the core aim and key criterion of assessment is simply to get discussion going, and the exercise constitutes a small part of the overall module mark. If the activity was also supposed to emphasise the depth of knowledge and understanding, or the level of engagement with modern scholarship, I would be much more worried about the extent to which that might not be possible or even appropriate for certain forms – no one wants a film script with footnotes, so presumably in such a case the student would need to provide a separate, more conventional academic piece to explain and justify all their choices, demonstrate their specialist knowledge etc. Put another way, the ‘presentation’ in whatever form is a means to an end, student discussion in class, and I can focus on its success in provoking the latter (making due allowance for unresponsive students; I can have a pretty clear sense that a given exercise ought to have got them talking, even if they don’t…). 

And if the assessment in question was the main or only determinant of the overall module mark, I would be really worried about its ability to test all the different learning outcomes (and of demonstrating this to other people, e.g. external examiners), and about the risks of the choice of some forms more or less setting up the student to fail, and the increasing difficulties of comparison to ensure that students are all being assessed according to the same criteria. It’s always bothered me a little that traditional class presentations may tend to favour students who are confident and glib and are great mates with others in the class, which are not the qualities we are aiming to develop or reward; I do tend to adjust my emphasis slightly in marking, to expect better content from those who don’t need to sweat the presentation aspect, and to give credit to those who clearly hate it if they can manage an effective even if not eloquent presentation of material. Allowing pre-recording or other forms is great for precisely this reason. But the risk of, say, replacing core essays with creative exercises is that one ends up advantaging those who just happen to be creative types, who can produce something that is objectively much better with respect to the form; we are used to evaluating essays with an eye to such issues – not letting someone’s sophisticated writing style distract from deficiencies in the content and argument – but I fear we, or at least I, am less practised in doing this for less familiar forms, but also the more emphasis on the creative aspect as the aim of the exercise, the less one should be discounting this… 

Of course, the answer may be that this is my problem: I need to improve my skills and understanding of assessing such things, in order to do the students’ work justice. That does make this a riskier enterprise for the students, if only because my ability to offer them advice and support will be limited until I get a bit more experience – I’m likely to offer lots of warnings and caveats, alive to the potential drawbacks and pitfalls rather than to the opportunities, because this is a big gamble (whereas for the presentations, contributing just 10% of the module mark, I can be unhesitatingly enthusiastic and encouraging). 

Although, realistically, I’m not sure how many students would take up such an option in the first place, unless the default possibility of a conventional essay was excluded altogether. Maybe it’s just ancient history students, but if they are unkeen on book reviews or research reports rather than essays, where the relation to the actual skills and knowledge they should already have acquired is easily explained, how keen will they be on something more creative? My experience is that they are generally risk averse even with the choice of essay questions (in any given year, more than half will choose one of the boring sample questions from the module handbook rather than talking with me about the development of a suitable question based on their own interests). Cynically, I could introduce the possibility of choice into my modules, to maintain a reputation for openness to innovation, in the firm expectation that students will rarely if ever choose this in practice… 

You’re Not Welcome Any More…

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for! I am clearing my schedule for a flood of media invitations, and clearing a space on the mantlepiece ready for the announcement of the next honours list, for I have been CANCELLED. Yes, having solicited my contribution, the editors of a new volume have now decided that free thinking is out of step with their radical Woke agenda, and that even a hint of criticism is not welcome within their opinion bubble. I am devastated, and will be maintaining a dignified silence in order to weep quietly, as soon as I’ve finished alerting my loyal Twitter followers and soliciting a few outraged responses from eminent figures in the field. I’m not orchestrating a pile-on, I’m just trying to defend my reputation.

It is of course entirely possible that the piece in question was a pile of crap, further evidence for my sad intellectual decline in recent years, but that’s not going to get me a sympathetic profile in the Sunday Times…

Slightly more seriously: what is a little upsetting – hence trying to work through this with a sarcastic blog post – is not that the editors decided the piece didn’t fit (and I’m going to take that at face value, rather than as a euphemism for “this is a pile of crap”), which is entirely their right, but that the work (and I did work hard on this, even if it may not look like it) is entirely wasted. It was written expressly the volume; there is not the slightest hope of repurposing it for something else, without huge amounts of additional work and time, neither of which I can afford as I have to move on to the next massively overdue thing. The ideas – and there were a couple, albeit very under-developed – will flare and die, like attack ships off Orion, like tears in rain.

And I won’t even get an MBE out of it.

All Together Now

I am trying – and so far failing, but there is a vague hope that working through the ideas by writing about them might help – to think of helpful analogies for contemporary big band composition and arrangement. Over the last few years, I’ve happily drawn lessons and ideas from my musical hobby to help think about different aspects of teaching, writing and research, so there must be at least a possibility that the reverse process might also work. I must stress the helpful aspect; I can think of plenty of possible analogies, but they don’t do anything to suggest a way forward.

Context: this is what my jazz composition course is focusing on this term. More specific context: I spent a fair amount of time over the holidays obsessively fiddling with four- and five-part harmonies, to arrange a couple of my own compositions for jazz orchestra, as had been suggested – perhaps, in retrospect, not entirely seriously, as no one else in the class bothered – and I was reasonably pleased with the results, for a first attempt. First class of the new term, and the tutor airily remarks (not, I should say, about my efforts, but in general terms) that all the stuff about close-harmonised sax and trumpet sections and call-and-response and soli and shout choruses and the rest is how this was done back in the fifties, but contemporary approaches are quite different.

Okay. Part of the problem is that this stuff is what all the books talk about – it’s not that they teach you only to produce Count Basie imitations, but they present innovation as residing in the composition and harmonisation – different chord structures and tone clusters etc – not in… well, part of the problem is that I’m not entirely sure what else we’re talking about, but it seems to involve much less harmonisation, and having more instruments play on their own rather than as a section, and less explicit countermelodies. Which to me then rather begs the question of why you’d want to bother with a jazz orchestra in the first place, when you can get a rich and complex sound and texture from a sextet or septet. It’s not that I’m quite signing up to a philosophy of ‘if I’ve got fourteen horns I’m going to damn well use them’ – but basically that. I mean, doesn’t everyone just get bored if they don’t get to play much?

Among the issues is the fact that I don’t listen to a lot of big band or jazz orchestra music – certainly not contemporary examples. It’s just not particularly my thing; it often feels too old-fashioned, or too cluttered – or it’s just a background for a star soloist to show off against, trying to be the new Miles’n’Gil, which doesn’t appeal at all. And so the answer to all this may simply be: why try to do stuff you don’t understand and don’t have any feel for? But, apart from the fact that this is the subject matter of a course I’ve already paid for, it feels like an interesting challenge, if only I can get some idea of what it is that I’m not getting.

Maybe this is – starts groping for academic analogies – a bit like my early encounters with the American Political Science Association conference when I began my explorations of Thucydides reception; initially baffling and alienating, as apparently familiar things appeared in strange and confusing new contexts and combinations, but with further experience and study it started to make sense, and while I will never be a proper political theorist it has enriched my own approach, and I do now have a much better idea what’s going on. So, a matter of gaining experience, and in the very unlikely event that any readers of this blog are aficionados of contemporary jazz orchestration, I’d be very grateful for recommendations of stuff to listen to, ideally with some indication of what makes it contemporary and good.

But I can’t help feeling that this is not the right analogy – this is like introducing a bebop fan to the avant-garde of the 1960s, where you’re talking about different approaches (even if radically different ones) to the same basic enterprise of a small group of musicians creating music together. Big band composition/arrangement feels like a wholly different thing altogether [unison: “a wholly different thing”. Yes, this entire blog post is an excuse for an Airplane reference]; not a political theory paper or article compared with an ancient history paper or article, but something that is not a paper or article at all.

And that is where I’m stuck; I don’t know what it is like. The fact that it involves a lot of people is clearly important – creating both possibilities (but for what?) and problems (rather more obvious). Is this like organising a research workshop or conference? Not really – that’s about a selection of guest soloists, so to speak, and the performance of the whole is left entirely to chance, apart from making sure that the coffee arrives on time. Yes, I can see how my organisational philosophy – create a flexible structure within which random new things can happen – might usefully transfer over, but, at least for the purposes of this course and its homework exercises, jazz orchestration surely involves a great deal more, well, orchestration.

The other thing that occurred to me – and this might explain why I’m finding this whole thing rather stressful – is that perhaps the better analogy, given the need to try to get a bunch of disparate personalities with different skills and interests to work together for collective goals, is running an academic department. There’s the need to distribute tasks, to make sure they get done, balancing aptitude and fairness; there’s the need to stop people treading on one another’s toes, to produce a teaching programme that actually hangs together rather than simply reflecting individual preferences. And that’s before we start thinking about the financial aspects. Is the contemporary big band idiom primarily a response to marketisation and the forces of late capitalism?

Hmm. Didn’t like being head of department, bad for my health, not inclined to do it again if I can help it. Not sure whether musicians are easier to manage than academics. Maybe I can come up with a Thucydides analogy instead…

Hit Me Baby One More Time

Folks, the tone for 2022 has already been set, and I think it’s a pretty clear indication that we should simply go back to bed for the next 362 days: two British newspapers, which still to the best of my knowledge claim a degree of seriousness of purpose, have published articles claiming that the University of Reading has cancelled Semonides. You can imagine the furore: an author whose work has defined and shaped Western Civilization for millennia, beloved by every British schoolchild who first encountered his enchanting imaginative world in primary school, essential for a true understanding of philosophy, politics and cosmology – and they DARE not to assess students on every single line? They’ll be coming for Anacreon next, mark my words.

Honestly, if this is the best they can manage from a broad trawl of UK Classics departments – I assume we all got that “have you ever used trigger warnings or adjusted your course content to reflect woke values, you subversive cultural Marxist scum?” Freedom Of Information request at the beginning of December – then they should really give up muck-raking journalism and start picking sprouts in Lincolnshire instead. Of course we give students some warning about problematic and controversial content, and think carefully about how to handle some material, and it’s very easy to imagine the stories that could be spun if we didn’t – and they go with violence towards women, and Semonides? No offense to lovers of Semonides, but if I was writing a parody of outrage at the cancellation of an author scarcely anyone has ever heard of, he’d be on the list of possibilities.

Actually it now occurs to me that the whole thing is probably a put-up job by the Semonides specialists – I assume there is more than one of them out there – to get their boy a bit of publicity: profile in the Spectator on the newest victim of the woke mob, GB News offering special discounts on West’s Greek Lyric Poetry etc. They will already have lined up someone to declare that he will teach all of fragment 7, in every class, as a matter of principle!

Of course it’s possible that this is the first instalment of a long series, and at some point they will get round to colleagues giving warnings about rape in Ovid and the use of Spartan imagery by alt-right racists and the like – but the general idea, I would imagine, is that you start with your best story. And if that’s Semonides, well, that’s a basic failure in reading comprehension, as frankly I could have spun at least a couple of stories just out of my own response to the FOI request. Especially given the way that my Thucydides seminar seems drawn to controversial topics like Brexit and hapless populist leadership.

And, come to think of it, the problems of a society where public discourse becomes driven by partisan shit-stirring without regard to truth or integrity. Thucydides 3.82 trigger warning: may remind you of the British right-wing media.

2021 on The Sphinx

It’s been…interesting. Even more than usual, doing this annual review has reminded me of all sorts of things that I’d forgotten I’d written, which does reflect both my general mental state this year, and a degree of detachment from the blog that is probably healthy – I’ve managed, partly deliberately, to break the habit of obsessively checking the viewing statistics several times a week. Which is good, because otherwise I would regularly be getting upset as they continue their inexorable decline – worst performance since 2014! Where has everybody gone..?

This does also mean that I’ve written stuff only when I really had something to say, rather than hacking out a post for the sake of keeping the posting rate up – which probably hasn’t had much effect on the quality level, as the absence of throwaway filler is balanced out by the absence of those serendipitous moments when writing throwaway filler turns out to spark original ideas. Mostly, I just haven’t had the energy – or the time, as the lack of energy means I’ve had to use a lot of my commuting time, which is normally when I scribble this stuff, to try to keep up with regular teaching prep and the like. And let’s not think about how far behind I am with proper academic things I’m supposed to have written, or various minor side projects (the ancient Greek Call of Cthulhu scenario WILL see the light of day, but it has been stalled for months). I continue to believe that at some point the fog will lift, and in the meantime I am managing, more or less, to restrain the impulse to tackle the repressed panic by burning all my remaining energy.

January It’s déja vu all over again, again – and perhaps I should keep the posting rate up next year just by reposting old content with new dates, as it remains entirely relevant: in the face of renewed plague-related disruption, The Bare Necessities offered thoughts on online teaching and the idea of a ‘return to normality’ rather than rethinking our ideas about what is actually ‘essential’, while depressed reflections on the future of the discipline in Near The End are never untimely (also, a reminder that I still haven’t felt emotionally robust enough to watch the third series of Shtisel…).

February Well, this was a miserable, solipsistic month, wasn’t it? Clearly my mood was not lifted by having to complete data returns on a grant that meant I had to revisit the long-lost halcyon days of February 2020, let alone by getting dropped from a tv appearance. But we’ll always have the Handforth Parish Council meeting – which raised some serious issues about the workings of politics, local and otherwise (Village Green Preservation Society), as well as being entirely hilarious.

March By this point in the year, trying to run seminars online was really getting to me, and as so often my jazz composition class highlighted the reason why: the sheer awkwardness of any attempt at spontaneity or fun in a Teams meeting, so everyone has to be focused and serious, whereas every successful seminar needs to have the possibility of random derailment (Crazy Train). Interesting also to recall that this was the point where an apparently straightforward chapter assignment started to turn into a serious research project (Across the Barricades).

April One of the interesting things about this year’s posts is the relative absence of comment on UK politics, as being simply too depressing. A couple of minor exceptions this month, as the contrast between Thucydidean and Caesarean historiographies offered by the putative Museum of Brexit was too stupid to ignore (English Civil War (Remastered)), and I made an early attempt at associating B.Johnson with the ‘Tacitus Trap’, something that now looks quite prescient (for ‘clearly he was going to lose hs gloss sooner or later; actually it should have been sooner’ values of prescient; Rat Trap). Otherwise, discontent with the online was spilling over into conferences as well (Together in Electric Dreams).

May By this point in the year even the jazz composition was getting me down, and I came to the conclusion that, at least from my tutor’s point of view, I just simply be the musical equivalent of the student who simply insists that the military campaigns of Alexander the Great are the most interesting topic in the whole of ancient history (Oh! You Pretty Things). But it was at least time to unveil A History of Classical Greece from So Long to I Guess, Potami. Automatic captions, how much do I hate you..?

June Since this is supposed to be a vaguely upbeat, entertaining overview, we will pass hastily over my miserable but necessary acceptance of the total failure of any hoe at becoming an old-fashioned public intellectual, and instead focus on making fun of Peter Singer, who actually is one: Peter Singer’s Guide to the Classics was, understandably, my most-viewed post of the year, while How The Light Gets In was a more serious, if not entirely successful, attempt at drawing some wider lessons about the issues in relating ancient texts to contemporary problems.

July Reflections on the rush to abandon all plague restrictions, with a particular focus on the claim that British culture (unlike those slavish Asiatics) won’t accept such limits on freedom (Roots and Culture), and the psychological fall-out from a music class that focused too much for my liking on creative processes and what can block them (Crown of Creation) – look, this is supposed to be an escape from the day job…

August In the doldrums (a phrase that inevitably reminds me of The Phantom Tollbooth): preparing teaching, feeling disassociated from my own writing, getting very cross about the fetishisation of lectures… Maybe the last of those is still worth reading: Video Killed The Radio Star….

September This month, I shall mostly be having muddled thoughts about ‘culture wars’… It took me some time to remember what on earth I was doing with an apparent parody of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, before eventually realising that the title ‘On the Reclamation of History’ was a reference to the – barely three months later, completely forgotten – pile of twaddle produced by would-be lobby group Reclaiming History. But I was quite pleased with my attempted coining of the phrase Weaponised Parochialism…

October Work-life balance? Nothing in academia is ever as pressing as the need for the apple harvest to be pressed. Gone Fishing…

November Alarming flashbacks to my time in charge of an assessment and feedback review working group, with rumours that another UK university was out-sourcing feedback provision to a private contractor: The Horror, The Horror. Disconcerted by being head-hunted for a management position, so threw myself into the sort of pointless exploration of rabbit-holes that research is really all about… Only Human.

December One can hardly have a ‘pick of the month’ if there’s only one post – especially when it’s just a doom-laden response to rumours of strategic reviews and total institutional reorganisation, which will probably make next year’s blogging even more cheerful and optimistic…