Neville Morley's Blog, page 22

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, ‘On the Reclamation of History’

The abuse of so-called ‘history’ for political purposes is as old as Herodotus’ invention of it a couple of years ago. Recently we have seen concerted campaigns to rewrite the history of Athenian democracy so as to undermine communal solidarity, our sense of achievement and total superiority over all other Greek states, and even our basic legitimacy. The foundational story of Athenian autocthony that expresses the deep connection between the pure indigenous inhabitants and their land is rationalised and rewritten in order to promote a multicultural, pro-migrant agenda that threatens to undermine our collective identity. Figures central to our history like the heroic Tyrannicides are stigmatised as self-interested and incompetent, and our noble leaders in the present are mocked and caricatured. Athens’ civilising mission is cast in negative terms as a mere exercise in power and self-interest.

Activists sometimes assert that ‘investigating the truth’ about a past they present as complex and problematic is the path to a better and more rational future – a ‘possession for ever’. But the real effect—perhaps the true aim—of their actions is nihilistic destruction whose only beneficiaries are themselves and their literary reputations. Tendentious and even blatantly false readings of history are creating divisions, resentments, and even violence, even as their authors claim to be analysing the roots of such divisions.  They depict partisanship, polarisation and culture war because that is what they feed on, even suggesting that the consolidation of power in the hands of a limited number of oligarchs might go against the freedom of all Athenians. This is damaging to democracy and to a free society.

Free societies depend on popular participation, trust and solidarity.  They need a sense of common purpose and self-worth.  A shared history is a necessary foundation for a successful democracy, rather than all this questioning and uncertainty. The best citizens are those who don’t think that they should be exercising their own judgement about public affairs or that they’re cleverer than the laws, but simply accept the advice of their superiors and sacrifice themselves for the city.

It is a law of nature that the strong will rule while the weak just have to suck it up; we didn’t invent that rule, and anyone else would have done the same given half a chance. You have to judge our empire by contemporary standards, not some anachronistic morality, and that means not paying any attention to all the people in the assembly, let alone elsewhere in Greece, who question whether our rule is actually just and reasonable. The Spartans and Persians have also massacred innocent civilians, you know!

In this historian’s so-called Melian Dialogue, the wisest of the Greeks are made to adduce the most disgraceful arguments, and invest them with the most disagreeable language. Perhaps it was because this historian bore his city a grudge for the sentence passed on him that he has deluged her with these reproaches, which were calculated to make her universally hated: for when the leaders of a state, entrusted by her with great power and appointed to represent her on missions to other states, seem to express certain views, those views are assumed by all to be those of the state which sent them out. The fact that he is praised – praised, not blamed – by one of his admirers for being a ‘citizen of nowhere’ tells you all you need to know.

We do not take the view that our history is uniformly praiseworthy—that would be absurd.  But we reject as equally absurd the corrosive claim that our empire is unjust and shameful, and that there is anything blameworthy in our continuing conquests and massacres.  We agree that history consists of many opinions and many voices.  But this does not mean that all opinions are valid, and certainly not these ones. Only some ivory-tower elitist would think it matters whether or not the Spartans have a troop called the Pitanate; only an enemy of all we hold dear would depict the Sicilian Expedition as an act of monumental folly and then revel in descriptions of the death and capture of our noble soldiers.

We cannot let those who wish to subvert the present state of affairs by questioning the past win this argument.

[Update: I have been politely upbraided by Johanna Hanink on the Twitter for taking Dion Hal’s name in vain; whereas I see his criticism of Thucydides for making the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue say disgraceful things as a problematic critique of historical practice, she – and she’s studied DH much more than I have – thinks it needs to be seen in broader context of his overall condemnation of the Athenians of that era. Not sure, but in any case this is an opportunity to note that she has a new essay out on DH’s reception of the Funeral Oration that looks like a must-read.]

It Wasn’t Me

One of the weirder experiences this summer – another minor symptom of the whole lingering plague thing – has been an intermittent feeling of total dissociation from my own publications: looking at books and thinking, well, I know I wrote this, and I can recall the circumstances and motive and so forth, I just don’t feel as if it’s mine. This is probably not unconnected to struggles with getting any new writing done; besides persistent fatigue and brain fog, apparently I need to feel like the sort of person who writes academic sentences for more than the odd hour at a time in order to actually write any – and actually writing some, as I have managed to do occasionally, unfortunately doesn’t seem to do much to convince my psyche that, yes, this really is what I do for a living. I do feel extremely sorry for the various editors who have had to put up with delayed submissions and requests for extensions because of chronic existential crisis.

Today has brought an interesting spin on this feeling: reading through a chapter that I have no recollection of having written (presented to me, six years after I supposedly wrote it, with a request to proof-read and make necessary corrections in a fortnight, but that’s a different story). It is the sort of thing I might have written, it has a few recognisable phrases and idées fixes, and it’s not nearly silly or funny enough to be a parody – perhaps it is the result of training an AI on my published oeuvre and then telling it to pontificate vaguely about the historiography of the ancient economy…

It would be difficult to know what to do with a six-year-old paper of this nature, even if I had a lot longer than a fortnight, if I had a clear idea of what I was thinking when I wrote it. As it is, I’m trying to decide whether the imaginative exercise of recreating my then state of mind is at all likely to be worth the effort, especially given that I would not have the option to rewrite the whole thing if, as seems perfectly plausible, I came to the conclusion that ‘then me’ was wrong and/or boring. Of course what I really want to do, if I had the time and energy, is tweak it into an actual parody…

Video Killed The Radio Star…

We’re back in the season of lecture fetishism. ‘Workshy’ lecturers are being ‘ordered’ back into the classroom to provide ‘proper’ value-for-money education rather than cut-price online stuff, while apparently the university life of a Times‘ columnist’s offspring would be ruined by having too much online learning. What’s striking is how far their conception of what should be restored is the sort of lecture that went out of fashion, at least outside basic introductory courses in the hard sciences, decades ago: to quote the old joke, the lecture as a means of transferring information from the lecturer’s notes to the student’s notes without passing through the brains of either. And, as I commented last week, some of the defences of the shift to online learning are equally ignorant of what actually happens in lecture rooms these days. It really feels like a debate about the current state of popular music between adherents of 7″ flexidiscs and proponents of cassette singles; not just total indifference to the content (hey, maybe someone should suggest to the Times that it’s easier to promote decolonisation and cultural Marxism in in-person classes where there are no recordings…) but utter ignorance of how technology and techniques have changed, and what the real issues are.

The term ‘lecture’ is obviously part of the problem; in its traditional pairing/contrast with ‘seminar’, it no longer describes a distinctive activity or even a particular approach to teaching and learning, but simply denotes the size of the student group and (often) the nature of the room and the seating arrangements (which do then set certain limits on what can and can’t be done, and affect aspects of the experience). It’s a bit like the old distinction between singles and albums, which persists partly for the benefit of the music industry and journalism and partly because of the continuing influence of old people and their memories; for the young, increasingly they’re just ways of organising ‘tracks’, to be consumed in many different ways. Both lectures and seminars contain a mixture of content, discussion, small-group work, structured activities and debate, Q&A etc., just in different contexts and with a different feel; it’s a bit like putting together playlists for different occasions. (And, yes, I’m old enough that I originally wrote that as ‘mix-tapes’…).

If the ‘lecture’ is defined by anything, it’s passivity: both the traditional idea of what it’s all about, and the dynamics created by the class size and the design of bigger teaching rooms, constantly push the event in the direction of ‘aged authority figure knowledge to you dispense now will’. (And maybe that’s a major part of the fetishisation: it’s not the actual knowledge so much as the dispensing of it that matters, from someone who looks like a proper academic, and live one-off performance is clearly so much more of a worthwhile experience than a recording, at least when the performer is still alive.* The art of the lecture in an age of mechanical reproduction… Of course, this isn’t entirely new; I went to few lectures when I was a student, as simply hearing someone reading out their book didn’t seem very worthwhile – I wanted a live experience that was clearly different from the record, or stuff I hadn’t heard before…).

So… many of us have spent years developing different techniques to combat this tendency towards passivity in big lecture groups – and spent much of the last year developing new ones, as a lot of the old ones simply didn’t work in an online setting. Much of this was hard work, and unsatisfying all round, and I am desperate to get back into a normal classroom as a result – but not completely. Padlet looks like it will have continuing usefulness, offline and on, as an easier way to get discussion groups to report their conclusions rather than having to pick on people. At the moment I’m wondering how to recreate the Teams (or Zoom) Chat function, allowing students to ask questions, comment and talk amongst themselves in parallel to content delivery rather than in separate segments of activity, to emphasise that it is all, all the time, a matter of discussion and debate rather than a mixture of Authoritative Content and Officially Sanctioned Points of Uncertainty.

At the moment it looks as if I just have to run Teams at the same time – which will of course be good for any students who need to self-isolate even while the rest of the class meets in person – whereas what I really want is a chat sidebar to the PowerPoint slides. And what I really want is a holographic me to do the lecturing bits while I monitor the chat, or perhaps a clone – unless I can get an implant to connect the chat to my optic nerve so that it appears projected in front of me, and I can type replies just through eye movements….

The lecture isn’t dead, it’s just gone a bit William Gibson.

*While a recording of a lecturer may seem to students and their opinion columnist parents like a cheap and shoddy substitute, even if it’s actually more expensive to produce, it’s surely only a matter of time before someone starts offering the experience of being lectured by academic superstars who are inconveniently dead. Chicago will soon have an animatronic Leo Strauss, and I believe the Cambridge Classics Faculty is working on a hologram of Keith Hopkins, to restore a vital element of the initiation trials of ancient history graduate students.

Update: with crushing inevitability, Gavin Williamson has been doing the media round this morning, suggesting that universities which don’t return to full in-person teaching shouldn’t charge full fees; he then admits that the government can’t force them to, but in any case the point is not to make reforms but to direct any possible anger towards convenient targets that aren’t the government. As Andrew McRae (@McRaeAndrew) commented:

Feels like the full lecture theatre is becoming symbolic for the government of an end to the pandemic. #r4today

— Andrew McRae (@McRaeAndrew) August 10, 2021

More entertainingly, Angela Murphy (@angelamurphy) passed on a link to evidence that zombie lecturers already exist, just not celebrity ones: Link.

Come What May

I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently preparing next term’s teaching – it’s been one of those weeks when the lingering effects of the plague make me incapable of stringing coherent thoughts together for more than five minutes at a time, and the better prepared I am for the new academic year then the bigger the chance I may be able to get writing done then, if the brain finds its way out of the doldrums. Bibliographies, guidance on assessment tasks, seminar texts, thumbnail pictures for the VLE. And then we come to the description of teaching and learning methods, and summary of how students will be expected to engage with the modules… Hmm. Can I get back to you on that?

Well, I have a draft timetable that puts me, and by implication the students, into specified physical spaces at specified times in the week; and, unlike at a number of other universities, we haven’t had any pronouncements to the effect that the traditional in-person lecture is dead and everything will now be at least semi-virtual. On the other hand, as has been observed on the Twitter, the government’s predictable failure to make any sort of decision about compulsory vaccination to attend university means that it will now be too late to introduce any such rule without massive disruption – and a student body with lots of unvaccinated people surely implies regular plague outbreaks in the autumn, class numbers reduced by students self-isolating and the rest of it.

It’s obvious that, as last year, we’re going to need contingency plans; the problem is that I’m not sure how many. It’s no problem for the small final-year modules that I taught last year; it’s a relatively small amount of work to switch from in-person to online discussion (yes, the latter is more stressful and headache-inducing, but we should all now be better at it, and certainly it doesn’t involve more preparatory work now), and since I already have a load of material recorded I can plan for a ‘flipped classroom’ thing from the start. Planning for an MA module that I didn’t teach last year can follow similar lines – albeit in the knowledge that I may have to make time for a load of recording at some point, rather than leaving everything to open discussion.

The real problem is the big Greek History survey course: precisely the sort of numbers (150+) that can’t fit into even the biggest lecture theatre with social distancing – and the room we’ve been allocated has, iirc, no windows at all, so ventilation may be a bit of an issue. Now, this may look like the sort of thing that, in the eyes of university senior management who haven’t actually taught for years (e.g, comments from the Leeds VC), can be done more efficiently online: just record the lecture material and stick with the small seminar groups. But I have never taught this as simple ‘content delivery’; that is one element, but it sits alongside lots of small-group discussion, individual and group activities, games, role-playing exercise and the like, which will at best be tricky and time-consuming to switch online even given a completely free hand – which I almost certainly won’t get, as (understandably) any eventual university decision to mandate changes in delivery will come with a load of rules intended to maintain quality and mollify student unrest.

How to plan, in the face of so many unknowns? Cross fingers and hope that plague outbreaks will be relatively small-scale, so default will be to soldier on with ‘normal’ teaching and leave the isolators to make do with lecture recordings? Assume worst-case scenario A that everything will have to be radically overhauled by the end of October – in which case, plan for how I would want to teach, or for how I guess university will probably insist that I teach? Assume worst-case scenario B, that actually everything will need to be radically overhauled by the start of term, in which case there’s not a lot of point in doing too much work now..?

The Real Thing

NAMEPlayedMWMLMTNRWWWLWTNRPointsInvincibles4100120007Brave4020020004Fire4200002004Phoenix4110011004Rockets4200002004Superchargers4020020004Spirit4010111003Originals4110002002

I have, so far, quite mixed feelings about The Hundred. On the one hand, it’s been great to see some more cricket on television, the level of skill and excitement involved has been pretty impressive (and I remain delighted – cf. T20 – that the advent of shorter forms of the game has brought about a dramatic revival in the art and importance of slow bowling, rather than, as I feared when the bush-bash style first appeared, destroying it). On the other hand, so much of it seems to be gratuitously gimmicky, revealing total lack of belief in the inherent attractions of the game itself so it’s necessary to switch to decimal, add a pointless DJ and adopt fluorescent colours that were the cutting edge of modernity back in 1986. And the franchise names. Oh dear gods, the names. The only explanation is that the marketing people were given a brief to exclude anything that gave the slightest hint of place or tradition, as that might accidentally remind people of the county game. So instead we get things that sound like cheap aftershave or rapacious hedge fund operations.

What I really like is the degree to which the women’s game is being put, if not front and centre, then at least in a much more visible position, with matches being played in parallel with the men’s as part of a day’s entertainment. After the hugely entertaining series between England and India earlier in the summer, which must also have persuaded some people that there’s just as much skill and excitement on offer here as in the regular men’s competition, this is all for the good. The one thing that’s missing is a combined table – why not treat the whole thing as a single competition? This has been noted by a few people (I owe it to Paul Cotterill, @Bickerrecord), but for some reason no one yet seems to have actually constructed said table. So, here it is – and, no, I am not planning to go down the rabbit-hole of calculating strike rates as well, unless I get seriously bored, but I will keep this updated over the course of the season…

[Notes on table: should be pretty self-evident, but MW = Men Won, WL = Women Lost and NR = No Result. Teams on the same number of points ere in alphabetical order, whereas I assume in reality they would be sorted by net run rate or something like that.]

The Real Thing

NAMEPlayedMWMLMTMNRWWWLWTWNRPointsBrave102201410013Superchargers102201310112Invincibles102201320011Rockets83100220010Originals10210213019Fire8220022008Phoenix10320014008Spirit10040123005

I have, so far, quite mixed feelings about The Hundred. On the one hand, it’s been great to see some more cricket on television, the level of skill and excitement involved has been pretty impressive (and I remain delighted – cf. T20 – that the advent of shorter forms of the game has brought about a dramatic revival in the art and importance of slow bowling, rather than, as I feared when the bush-bash style first appeared, destroying it). On the other hand, so much of it seems to be gratuitously gimmicky, revealing total lack of belief in the inherent attractions of the game itself so it’s necessary to switch to decimal, add a pointless DJ and adopt fluorescent colours that were the cutting edge of modernity back in 1986. And the franchise names. Oh dear gods, the names. The only explanation is that the marketing people were given a brief to exclude anything that gave the slightest hint of place or tradition, as that might accidentally remind people of the county game. So instead we get things that sound like cheap aftershave or rapacious hedge fund operations.

What I really like is the degree to which the women’s game is being put, if not front and centre, then at least in a much more visible position, with matches being played in parallel with the men’s as part of a day’s entertainment. After the hugely entertaining series between England and India earlier in the summer, which must also have persuaded some people that there’s just as much skill and excitement on offer here as in the regular men’s competition, this is all for the good. The one thing that’s missing is a combined table – why not treat the whole thing as a single competition? This has been noted by a few people (I owe it to Paul Cotterill, @Bickerrecord), but for some reason no one yet seems to have actually constructed said table. So, here it is – and, no, I am not planning to go down the rabbit-hole of calculating strike rates as well, unless I get seriously bored, but I will keep this updated over the course of the season…

Update: belated thought that what would be really good is if, once it becomes obvious that some franchises’ women’s teams are much better than their men, they switch round the double-header order occasionally, so the men’s match is the curtain-raiser…

[Note on the table: should be self-explanatory, but MW = Men Won, WL = Women Lost, NR = No Result, and teams on the same points total are listed in alphabetical order pending me deciding that, yes, I am going to waste time calculating their run rates…]

Crown of Creation

Final jazz composition class of the year, and, no, to be honest I didn’t really want to spend the first part of it discussing creative processes and the things that get in the way of writing. In musical terms, it’s a very interesting question, and I’ve made enormous progress this year; I had not realised quite how much I like being given homework on a weekly basis, but this is not just about having a structured task to complete but also learning the importance of setting parameters – rather than “go away and write something”, it’s a matter of e.g. “go away and write something featuring fourths”, immediately giving a focus for one’s efforts, and that then reinforces the need to set some other parameters for oneself, at least as a starting point. It works both as a learning experience (getting a really good understanding of fourths by exploring the different things you can do with them in the process of trying to produce something that sounds half decent) and as a structure for the process, and I’m going to see how to replicate this in some of next year’s teaching – tricky, since this is about developing skills more than learning content, whereas ancient history courses tend to be more the other way round, or at least the skills are developed in parallel over the course of the year rather than explored one by one, but not impossible…

No, the problem with thinking about creative processes is that I can’t help thinking about my academic writing as well, and that is much less fun. Why is it so much more painful and difficult? The answer is obvious: the music is entirely stake-free, as I’m doing it solely for my own private pleasure, and so while there is personal pride involved in trying to produce something that pleases me and doesn’t get too heavily criticised, it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit rubbish. It also helps that I can think of it as a technical exercise that doesn’t have to be perfect, just whatever I can manage to do in the week given these parameters – the moment I start thinking of a composition in terms of art, at least at the beginning, creativity evaporates in the face of the overwhelming range of possibilities and the vast number of examples of things that will always be so much better. So composition is above all playful, an end in itself, and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus.

Academic writing is… not like this. It sometimes was in the past, when I was younger and had more energy and less fear, and the stakes felt lower – how much that is due to the fact that the job market was much less vicious and universities were less obsessive about progression criteria, and how due to my own naive obliviousness and general lack of seriousness, I’m not entirely sure. Now, it feels almost impossible that writing could ever feel like play – pleasure, sometimes, but a very serious grown-up sort of pleasure – at the very least, so long as it’s dominated by trying to catch up with the lengthy backlog of things I agreed to do ages ago. I can’t treat it as an end in itself (it’s always being written for something and/or someone else, and if I was completely free from such obligations I’m not sure I’d choose to do these particular things), I can’t think of it as a technical exercise or exploration of a key point or skill for my own benefit, it can’t just be ‘this is what I could get done in a week’ good enough, it is always going to be public rather than private.

What I have now that I didn’t have then is a lot more knowledge and experience; enough that I can feel quite confident that an idea is relatively original and worth pursuing, when I have one, and enough that I could, so to speak, simply improvise around that idea by drawing on a repertoire of familiar material. That works pretty well for talks and seminars – the live performance, if you will – and less well in writing where the audience generally expects a bit more polish and depth. And I don’t want to be the sort of performer who basically relies on the same old routines with minor variations (heckle from audience: Too late, Morley!); if an idea is actually decent, it ought to be developed properly, and explored in depth, not just used to embellish a familiar chord sequence…

Whether in jazz or academia, anyone who’s enjoyed a degree of success tends to become their own tribute act, or at least has to confront the expectations raised by their own past. My secret aspiration was always to be a historical/classical Miles Davis or Wayne Shorter or Anthony Braxton, experimenting and genre-hopping and confounding expectations to the end. Thinking that aloud is of course the royal road to crippling self-doubt. A better, more realistic model is offered by those composers and musicians who found their basic idiom quite early on, but were then able to make new and beautiful music within those parameters for the rest of their careers – McCoy Tyner, say. But what stands out there is the continuing joy and enthusiasm, never just going through the motions; playing familiar tunes because there is always something new to be done with them, not just because that’s what’s expected.

Unlike with my amateur efforts at composition, with academic writing the fear of failure is always going to be there (the closure of and threats to humanities departments in the UK and elsewhere, and the firing of an Exeter colleague for failing to get a book written don’t do anything to relieve this). The composition does, however, offer a reminder of what the creative process ought to be like, at least occasionally – and, more practically, a reminder of the fact that there can be different routes to the same goal. I am aware of a tendency to wait until I feel inspired and the conditions are perfect for writing – which of course provides ample grounds for procrastination, not making the attempt because things aren’t just right. One thing the jazz has shown me is that often inspiration can emerge from the more craft-like process of just organising material and trying out different things with a vague general goal and some basic parameters.

In other words, stop trying to write Blood Count by staring at a blank piece of manuscript paper, and start by tinkering with some of the chords in a 12-bar blues to see what happens…

Roots and Culture

It’s an interesting coincidence that this week I happen to be re-reading Marshall Sahlins’ Apologies to Thucydides. Sahlins explores the contrast between the idea of a monolithic, predictable and universal ‘human nature’, such that behaviour is assumed to be determined by a limited number of normative principles (an idea he associates, slightly unfairly, with Thucydides; it’s rather a feature of one tradition of the modern reception of Thucydides), and the idea of ‘culture’ as innately human but also endlessly various, highlighting the many different ways in which one might understand and relate to the world, society, other people etc.

What is striking about UK government pronouncements about the lifting of coronavirus restrictions, echoing most of their rhetoric throughout the pandemic, is their combination of these two positions: a rigidly absolutist concept of national culture.“Other cultures” – the publicly acceptable expression of “scary inscrutable orientals who all look and think the same” – may be happy to continue wearing masks and following social distancing rules for the collective good, but noble freedom-loving Brits will never stand for it! The fact that mask-wearing in countries like South Korea is an acquired habit following the SARS outbreak cuts no ice as an argument that maybe the British could also learn new behaviour under new conditions; they accepted it because they’re all instinctively conformist anyway.

Strong echoes here of the argument last year that lockdown would never be accepted; obviously this government is congenitally unwilling to do things that people (and especially the right-wing press) might not like, but they also seem determined to frame issues in a way designed to heighten tensions and accentuate contrasts – why sell 19th July as ‘Freedom Day’ if not to compel people to embrace it as the only reasonable way forward? You’re not opposed to freedom, are you? Why are you pro-lockdown and in favour of mental illness, domestic violence and keeping children out of school? We can’t let the virus rule our lives by cowering at home. Etc. I am faintly surprise that we haven’t yet had the old Thucydides quote – “The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage!”, or variants thereof – but perhaps that’s being saved for the press conference when they insist on pushing ahead with the abandonment of restrictions despite ever scarier infection rates.

Open up now or remain in lockdown for ever! Open up completely or you might as well not bother! There are times when I wonder whether this is solely messaging, or whether it’s an inadvertent expression of their own fears. I mean, why not stick with rules about face masks, or at least give a consistent message about them? Perhaps because masks are all too visible: they can’t ignore the rules they set for others, and there is a constant reminder both that the pandemic is not actually over (they don’t want it forgotten, as I wrongly suggested on the Twitter; they want it to have been defeated, and to reap the credit for the vaccination programme) and that they screwed up last spring with their obsession about hand washing for months after the role of aerosol transmission was becoming unmistakable. Also, of course, masks work as a means to collective benefit – my mask helps protect you, your mask helps protect me – in a manner that they clearly loathe and so try to project their own self-centred, privileged individualism onto everyone else as a national trait.

My anger at this is not driven by personal concern. I realised, sitting through endless repetitions on Radio 4 of the question “How do you feel about the lifting of all coronavirus restrictions on July 19th?”, that my basic reaction is Meh; I’ve spent so much time over the last year dealing with the anxiety of wondering whether my lingering Long COVID symptoms might flare up again or whether I’ll ever get back to normal that I’m now – irrationally, given possibilities of re-infection – completely unconcerned about the actual virus. I wear a mask and keep my distance purely as a social duty; after the 19th, I suppose it will also become a kind of political statement, perhaps even more provocative than wearing my EU face mask.

I am, finally, fourteen months on, feeling that I’m really recovering: less fatigue, fewer aches, and above all the brain fog is clearing and I can actually concentrate – and write! – for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Bouts of feeling that my creativity and career are effectively over (yes, I realise that my sense of self-worth is unhealthily bound up with my ability to write books and articles; it doesn’t matter if anyone else reads them, but I need to feel creative and productive) are rarer.

I would not wish this on anyone, but especially I would not wish it on the young. I am very conscious of my enormous advantages in getting through this. It’s not just that I’ve got financial security and a nice garden in which I could spend lots of time recovering, and the sort of job that could easily be done from home and actually leaves lots of scope for regular breaks, even when teaching. It’s also experience – the repertoire of techniques that I can fall back on to manage a class, even when feeling rough, and the fact that I needed to do less preparation – and reputation, such that I don’t have to worry too much about adverse consequences from having a very unproductive year. And I think about how much my undergraduate, postgraduate and early career development depended on having huge amounts of energy, let alone the fact that today’s students and trainees are expected to do so much more on much less, and I get a cold sweat imagining what it would be like to try to do all that with no energy and little ability to think – and about the consequences of missing a year, falling behind.

Maybe it’ll be fine. Maybe, as the virus is let loose to run through un- or semi-vaccinated young people and children, the percentage who get serious symptoms will indeed be tiny and the number whose symptoms then linger will be negligible. We’re going to find out; not at once, because all the headlines will concentrate on hospitalisation and death rates, and my guess is that they are going to remain pretty low. What I fear is an increase, gradually becoming discernible over the next few years, in the number of students with fatigue and concentration problems and depression; and, even harder to measure, young people who don’t make it to university who might otherwise have done, and those who don’t make it into their chosen job, or who struggle to manage the demands of full-time (insecure, underpaid) jobs – and, given what we already know about disproportionate infection rates, the extent to which this will also be a race and class issue.

And all for a month or two of continuing limits on some elements of behaviour, until more young people can be vaccinated. It is difficult to avoid a sense that their lives were shut down last year for the benefit of older people, and now we’re all safely vaccinated they can be put at risk for the sake of getting everything back to normal for us; probably too cynical, but it would be easier to believe that we’re all in this together if government policy actually reflected that.

“Other cultures” do not seem to be quite so contemptuous of their own young.

The Pubic Untellectual

Perhaps it was A.J.P. Taylor’s fault. Certainly, if he imagined a ‘public intellectual’, it was Taylor who came to mind – not because he’d ever actually experienced Taylor in that role, but an impressionable age he had read an obituary or tribute that stressed Taylor’s activities in taking academic history to a wider audience, and their consequences for his career. He had drawn from this two things, one more obviously erroneous than the other: firstly, that in any conflict between history as the exclusive preserve of an elite and history as something for everyone, the latter position was clearly noble and correct; secondly, that, having established one’s academic credentials, it was enough then to be willing to take these to a wider audience for the opportunities to do so to materialise. The possibilities that Taylor had energetically sought out such opportunities, and benefited from being enormously well connected and having the prestige of an Oxford position if never the Regius chair, or simply that times had changed and there was now no shortage of historians willing to take their work to a wider audience and pronounce on the issues of the day, genuinely had not occurred to him until much later.

It was not that the books he wrote didn’t sell; once or twice a year he was able to buy a nicer bottle of wine than usual, or cover unexpected household expenses without so much anxiety. But they didn’t sell remotely enough to compensate for the fact that they weren’t taken very seriously seriously as scholarly contributions. They were never noticed in the press, nor was he ever asked to write reviews except for specialist journals – let alone write articles or give his opinion on things. He was interviewed as a talking head for a BBC series once, but only for a version to be sold to international markets, so no one he knew ever saw it; the recording he made for another programme, explaining a historical topic to a celebrity, was dropped from the finished version, and he was very glad he had been bold enough to extract a small fee as well as travel expenses. Rationally, any hope that one of these outings might be a step towards bigger things had long evaporated – even the generation behind him of telegenic young historians was starting to look a little careworn – but reason had little to do with it.

There were so many different things one might blame: luck; hair colour; accent; being outside Oxbridge; not being part of certain apparently influential networks. The most obvious problem was a combination of diffidence – a refusal, for example, to embark on the sort of feud with an already-prominent figure in the same field that would guarantee attention, although this would be so easy in the era of social media – and stubbornness, clearly grounded in arrogance, so that he refused to compromise his own idiosyncratic standards by producing the sort of history for which there was actually a demand, insisting instead on trying to create an audience for what he felt was important. The result, when online user reviews became a thing, was that readers tended to express bemusement or disappointment, and recommend the works of more conventional popular history writers instead.

He might reasonably claim to be an unpopular writer of history – but that had never been the goal. What was the phrase for an unsuccessful would-be public intellectual, someone who would happily connect his academic expertise to issues of the day if only anyone was interested? Hardly a ‘private intellectual’, when he spent so much time now on Twitter – the blog had never taken off either, nor his attempts at writing pieces for online publications. One might make a case for the aphorism as a valid form of critique, but the temptation to snark for likes was all too strong. A public untellectual at best. He wondered when it was he should have started writing different sorts of books, to build a different sort of reputation.

Unless the real problem was that he had never worn a bow tie.

How The Light Gets In

Scene: The Secret Headquarters. A group of heavy-set, anonymous-looking men in suits, wearing mirrored sunglasses indoors, are seated around a table. Editorial Board member 1: So what did we learn? Editorial Board member 2: I don’t know, sir. Editorial Board member 1: I don’t fucking know either. I guess we learned not to do it again. Editorial Board member 2: No, sir. Editorial Member 1: I’m fucked if I know what we did. Editorial Board member 2: Yes, sir, it’s, uh, hard to say.

Okay, that’s just gratuitous snark, and I like Burn Before Reading. The thing about the Peter Singer Does Apuleius affair is that there are many different things that different people ought to consider not doing again, of varying degrees of wider interest. I continue to be flabbergasted by the overweening arrogance of Singer’s “Now, I do not believe you wanted to do that, did you, Lucius?” approach. I mean, I’m very familiar with readings of Thucydides that claim to have identified what his real message or intention was, and generally these do involve ignoring large sections of the book to concentrate on episodes that suit the thesis (e.g.: International Relations Realism focuses on the debate at Sparta before the war, the Mytilene Debate and Melian Dialogue, and maybe the Sicilian Debate). But no one has actually claimed that this is what Thucydides really meant and produced a heavily edited version to loud fanfare and lots of publicity.

Key lesson #1: past people were not stupider than you. Classical antiquity invented ‘the novel’ as a genre, and the fact that their novels don’t wholly correspond to a (very conservative) modern conception of what a novel should look like isn’t evidence that they invented it wrong. Of course you can rework the material into new forms, maybe more relevant/accessible for new contexts – but you need to be conscious all the time of what you’re losing in stripping out the strangeness and alienating elements, and the risk of producing something basically boring that simply confirms your own smug preconceptions. This holds true for modern readings of Thucydides that try to make him fit into the mould of a conventional historian or political theorist – to be celebrated for having anticipated our way of seeing the world – at the expense of ignoring or explaining away a lot of the things that make him fascinating and thought-provoking, and out of step with mainstream assumptions.

These musings were prompted this morning by reading an article about a fascinating new documentary, All Light, Everywhere. The film is concerned with the recording of images, in surveillance and evidence-gathering and documentation, and the way that their apparent objectivity is a dangerous illusion; even without altering the image itself, its meaning can be distorted or manipulated transformed by framing or de-/re-contextualisation. To take the scary example of police body-cam footage, supposedly a great protection for our civil liberties:

Little things exert a significant influence over how these auto-generated visuals convey perspective; shooting from the sternum instead of at eye-level makes a suspect seem taller and more imposing, and the fish-eye lens creates the illusion that they’re closer than they appear while rendering their movements choppy and more severe. We learn that the cameras’ technical sophistication is intentionally limited to replicate the officer’s imperfect sense of sight rather than capture all visual information possible, placing a theoretical jury in a position of empathy for the difficulties of the job.

What interested me is the account of how the director, Theo Anthony, is conscious of his own complicity in the manipulation of images to convey one message rather than another, and seeks to educate his viewers in the sort of visual critical literacy needed to navigate this world.

Anthony exhorts his viewer to consider in all circumstances what they are and aren’t seeing, an imperative to “unpack, deflate and disassemble” that he extends to his own work. Beyond the clearer gaps in the film – during a body-cam demo at the local precinct, he’s made to stop rolling as the instructor plays an illustrative clip of the equipment in use – he exposes his own cinematic seams by including multiple takes of subjects getting spontaneous behavior “right”, or dropping in a special-effects shot and then showing the strings making it go.

And, predictably, I think: Thucydides. The concern with truth, and its manipulation, and what happens when it is disregarded or abused or just stops working properly, but also the self-awareness and deliberate highlighting of how his account of this is being presented. The issue of the speeches is a very familiar one: the historians’ attempt at rescuing them as some sort of objective record, the IR theorists’ attempt at reading them as straightforward summaries of Thucydides’ own views, anything to make them less rhetorical and literary and disconcerting. But we need to ask, not just what T is actually doing or attempting to do in the speeches, but what he’s doing in telling his readers about what he’s doing in the speeches: is this just an attempted explanation (as if he’s conscious of the standards to which modern historians will attempt to hold him), or is it actually the sort of directorial piece to camera that would alert us to be on our guard if we saw it in a contemporary documentary? Is he being Rob Reiner, or Marty DiBergi?

Yes, this is in essence just a slightly sillier version of W.R. Connor’s brilliant ‘Postmodern Thucydides’ article, and, yes, it’s easy to see it as form of projection, turning Thucydides into a fifth-century Chris Morris or Adam Curtis because I find that more interesting than seeing him as a sub-par Donald Kagan. I don’t have a problem with that: meaning is realised at the point of reception, yadda yadda. The point is not to read T. as a clever manipulator of narrative construction and perspective and voice as a basis for praising modern documentary makers; it’s to develop a sense of what he’s doing to see if we can actually learn from it – given that the question of truth and its manipulation remains a pressing issue.

To be fair to Peter Singer, I imagine this is what he thinks he’s doing: recovering one possible version of Apuleius because it relates to an important contemporary issue. But his reading doesn’t tell us anything new about that issue, beyond the (contestable) claim that Apuleius anticipated his concerns, and it certainly doesn’t tell us anything new about Apuleius; it diminishes the work (and not just by throwing out most of it), reducing it to a single disputed meaning – see Spencer McDaniel’s blog post for more detailed discussion. It’s pat, seamless, inert. Whereas this reading of Thucydides is about discerning an extra layer, without claiming that the work isn’t actually an account of the Peloponnesian War at all. It pushes us to see the cracks and seams in the text, as a prompt to see the cracks and seams in the world.