Neville Morley's Blog, page 27

Rocket Man

A key issue in much work on ‘classical reception’ is the tendency to over-value and over-interpret classical allusions and references. We pounce on every faint echo, because it’s what we’re trained to do and because it’s what we value – without necessarily considering whether it actually matters, or matters very much, or is any more than background cultural noise. And even if the allusion is definitely present, which isn’t always the case, how much can we assume about its meaning for the audience, or its significance in the wider culture? If you regularly search for references to Thucydides on Twitter and other social media, you do get a clear sense that he is a more significant figure than, say, Polybius. But does that make him an all-pervasive influence on modern thinking about war and politics? Not so much.

But occasionally something comes along that does suggest, if not an all-pervasive influence, then at least the assumption on someone’s part that a Thucydides reference is just what’s needed to appeal to a particular audience. This is illustrated by the latest additional to my small collection of what might be called Thucydideana, a full-page advertisement from the February 15 1960 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology, placed by Space Technology Laboratories Inc. of Los Angeles, the division of Thompson Ramo Wooldridge Inc. that worked on ICBM development for the US Air Force…

[image error]

This is… interesting. I don’t profess to have any great knowledge of what attracts highly-qualified scientists into missile research, but until this point I would have assumed it was some combination of lab facilities, money, prospects and location. This suggests an additional concern with freedom – the ability to discuss scientific issues and publish results without having to worry about security restrictions – but that still doesn’t explain why anyone felt that the best way to present this was through a relatively complex take on Thucydides. In the original Greek. I suppose it is more striking than a couple images of rockets or mushroom clouds.

The best sense I can make of this is to assume that Thucydides, and the sentiments of the Periclean funeral oration above all, was indeed well-established as a template for thinking about the Cold War. There’s no explanation of who Thucydides is, no concern about why he should be associated with the idea of an ‘open city’ – the reader’s knowledge is taken for granted, as is their agreement that Thucydides’/Pericles’ words express the ideals of liberal democracy for which we are fighting against the totalitarian, anti-culture Spartans. The only point felt to be in need of explanation and justification is that the peril of our situation means we cannot risk the radical openness of democratic Athens. The advert doesn’t even take the trouble to serve up the predictable ‘happiness depends on freedom, freedom depends on putting your scientific training at the service of the arms race’ line…

The obvious explanation is the power of Great Books programmes in major US universities in this period, as studied by Liz Sawyer (who also makes some interesting points about the issue with which I opened this post). Unlike in the British system, where specialisation begins early, in the US not only Classics students, but any undergraduate – including science majors – might encounter an edited, carefully packaged version of Thucydides as a pillar of Western Thought with direct relevance to the present. Liz’s study starts from the contents of curricula; this advert can be taken as evidence for their reception and influence, not just individuals’ knowledge of Thucydides but the fact that others could then assume such knowledge.

Now I just need to start skimming other publications for similar adverts. Thucydides tells you why you need to subscribe to Time magazine and watch John Wayne movies. Thucydides endorses Coca-Cola as the beverage of freedom. We enjoy the best things in life without being effeminate, and that’s why Thucydides wants YOU to smoke Lucky Strike!

Welcome to the Machine

One of the basic principles of our society is that success and failure are individualised: you are naturally talented and worked hard, YOU are just not good enough, or should have tried harder. This is fair, isn’t it? Places at the Best Universities should go to the Best Students, Important Jobs should go to the Right People, it should all be sorted out on merit rather than attempts at social engineering or quotas or positive discrimination. Just think how awful it would be for someone to know they didn’t get on that course through their own merit, or if they got a job that was better suited to someone else. Clearly unfair. Not everyone can have prizes.

But fairness is not evenly distributed. Some people get pre-approved as members of the Right Sort: they get multiple chances to succeed – to get better exam results, to get into Good Universities despite their exam results, to get good jobs despite their abilities and qualifications, to fail in those jobs and yet keep on rising. It’s not they’re necessarily worse; they’re just not actually better, but ‘fairness’ means ignoring the many things that give them an advantage, and reducing everything to a question of individual qualities – which may be demonstrated by academic qualifications, except when that’s inconvenient and we have to come up with more intangible claims instead. Anything other than admit what’s actually going on: class and race.

This is what is interesting about the current A-level fiasco. Every year, some young people do brilliantly well and get places in Top Universities because they’re naturally talented and worked incredibly hard and not at all because they enjoyed the privilege of an expensive private education with more resources, more attention, smaller class sizes etc.; every year, some young people fall short because they just weren’t good enough or lacked the right work ethos and not at all because of their socioeconomic background or the lack of resources or the class sizes. But this year, the underlying structures of inequality are all too visible, with exam results being shaped by an algorithm that, wholly coincidentally, favours some sorts of schools over others.

The subtext becomes text: individuals are to be sacrificed in order to maintain the status quo, some teachers are trusted more than others. And it’s not a deliberate, malevolent decision; it’s the result of people genuinely aiming to solve a massive problem but not properly thinking through the implications, or caring about some of them, or recognising their own assumptions and prejudices. It reveals that privilege – smaller class sizes that evade the simple application of the algorithm – is taken as grounds for more trust, not less. It reveals that the purpose of the whole system is not to recognise individual merit or attainment, but to maintain its own credibility in the eyes of big business and pundits, and to sort the population according to predetermined criteria and maintain the status quo.

The whole class of 2020 has had its world disrupted. Of course, so have lots of other young people (the university class of 2020, most obviously), and not just young people, and the return to any sort of normality may be postponed indefinitely. For the most part, however, although the pandemic has affected some groups much worse than others, the impact of coronavirus is both easily individualised (especially as government propaganda, sorry, guidance and messaging seeks to make it all about individual responsibility and behaviour not state actions or competence) and easily generalised – it affects everyone, it come out of nowhere, it’s nobody’s fault and we’re all in it together. Cf. the 2008 financial crisis; nothing wrong with the system, honest, we just all need to save and cut back public services.

This could be different, because it is unmistakable that individuals are not being treated fairly on the basis of their individual merits or efforts, but downgraded or rewarded on the basis of the school they went to, which clearly also correlates with their class and social status, their degree of privilege, their location within the UK. And it may not just be those who have been directly disadvantaged who see the basic unfairness, but also those who can see how it could so easily have been them – and maybe even some of those who benefitted (look, if I can go through seven years of private education and come out of it recognising how the system is stacked in my favour, so can you…).

The optimistic part of me, battered and downtrodden as it is, can see this as the closing part of the first act of the new Hunger Games-style franchise, as our protagonists realise that they are being exploited and manipulated, and that only fullscale revolution will suffice. We’re moving into the political education and preparation phase, and my classes on Greek Tyranny and Thucydides may have even more pointed political subtext that usual this year (it would be very easy to rework the Melian Dialogue for this, as for any situation of power imbalance: “justice applies only to those already judged to be of equal merit” etc.).

In the meantime, all one can do is feel desperately sorry for the young people who have been robbed of their dreams and ambitions, and hope that the advice and support some of them are getting on social media will pay off somehow – while of course other disappointed students have parents and head teachers lobbying for them, who know the right people with whom to have a quiet word, and the right things to say… Once again: the problem is structural, not individual.

Note: original version of post was edited to remove a tweet, supposedly from Gavin Williamson but actually from a cleverly constructed parody account, and commentary thereupon.

Ignoreland

Yesterday I marked some essays, did more work on preparing next term’s teaching, produced supporting materials for an ongoing political literacy schools project and had a productive online meeting with a postgrad about his dissertation. I followed a new recipe for green coconut rice, and made some red pepper and tomato sauce from garden produce; I had a cup of espresso by the pond, watching water boatmen, dragonfly nymphs and water snails; I detected six different species of bat. And this is all good, and helps keep me grounded, and helps fend off the VAST BLACK ABYSS FULL OF TOXIC FUMES AND ENDLESS SCREAMING THAT IS EVERYTHING ELSE.

Where do you start? Where do you stop? Every single aspect of the coronavirus response, from the complacency to the hopeless messaging to threats callous indifference to the double standards to the assumption that firms like Serco will always be better than local authorities or other public bodies to the handing multi-million pound contracts to firms without even the track record of Serco that just happen to be owned by donors or advisers. The willingness to wander aimlessly into a no-deal Brexit on the assumption that we’ll be too preoccupied with coronavirus to notice. The OH LOOK OVER THERE, BLACK PEOPLE IN BOATS! INVASION, CRISIS, CALL OUT THE NAVY! All the rest of the casual racism. That honours list. The constant lying. The dead cats all the way down.

And we have, what, another four years of this before we have any hope of getting them out? – unless they decide they’re in an unassailable position and decide to go early to reinforce their position. I can see the rationale for an opposition strategy of avoiding making any major errors or commitments, on the basis that there’s no election in prospect, but it’s scarcely inspiring. And imagine how much more damage they can do, given how little they care about people who don’t vote for them…

This has all been true for months; what’s triggered the current meltdown is the shambles over A-level results. How did anyone think it could be fair to downgrade individuals’ grades on the basis of past school performance, except as a means of ensuring that nice children from the right sort of schools do as well as their parents feel they’re entitled to? A basic principle that better-than-expected results from a ‘less good’ school must by definition be distrusted or downgraded. The immediate move to shift responsibility somewhere, anywhere else – so universities should keep places open, and it’ll be their fault if the end results don’t match whatever position on social mobility the government has decided to profess this week. And all this with the parallel threat of ‘reforming’ universities that run into financial problems – in the interest, as a friend remarked, of ensuring that no one is allowed to be rude about Toby Young and his crowd, and of rigging the HE market until it generates the desired results that actual market forces failed to produce.

Coronavirus didn’t steal your future, kids; it simply revealed that your future had already been stolen. Everything is basically crap. But we had a frog in the wildlife pond today.

Update: apparently this is my 500th post. Not inappropriate, I guess.

In Your Room

Here comes the fear… I continue to be excited and energised by thinking about how to embrace the positive possibilities of teaching next year, and not too alarmed (which is not to say, not also infuriated) by the mismatch between universities’ bold promises about face-to-face-in-person (f2fip?) teaching and what a lot of emerging research is saying – hey, if we suddenly have to switch to 100% online, that’s just more of a challenge, right? – but now I’m also scared. Not about my courses, but about what happens to students in the times in between.

If our answer to the question “where are students supposed to be all week, and who are they supposed to spend it with” is “in their room, alone” we have a monumental mental health crisis coming.

That’s one of the many pertinent comments in an excellent new piece by the ever-reliable Jim Dickinson of WonkHE, which takes its cue from sarky newspaper articles about freshers missing out on booze and sex to make some important points: *our* sense of what is more and less essential in a university experience may not be terribly reliable; in any case, the different components can’t be easily separated, and actually support one another in unexpected ways; and once we start disassembling the package anyway and cancelling some bits of it, new contradictions can emerge.

For example, if teaching is going to be totally online, what’s the rationale for students being expected to be in residence? How does a bio-secure campus mesh with the fact that many students live out in the community, travel on public transport etc? What are their living conditions going to be like – given that student accommodation, as far as I can gather, presumes a significant role for shared, communal and public spaces to offset the tiny study-bedroom?

These are not issues that have suddenly appeared out of the blue; at departmental level, we’ve touched on quite a lot of them in our discussions so far – insofar as they relate to teaching. Limited or no access to library: make sure resources are online. Privacy issues for Teams/Zoom meetings: blur backgrounds, allow ‘no video’ participation, include asynchronous options. And so forth. We focus on these issues in these terms because it’s our job, obviously, and the wider problems and decisions are above our pay grade – but it also offers the reassurance that they are solvable, and we can do things to solve them. We are in control, we are prepared to master chaos…

This is a comforting illusion, and we need to recognise it as such. Our teaching is likely to be seriously impacted by what’s happening with/to our students beyond the classroom (virtual or not), in ways that we can’t hope to control or even mitigate. Think of the time that gets taken up in a normal year trying to support the student who struggles all year with juggling coursework and job and health issues, and in trying to contact the students who just drop off the map for a couple of weeks – and then imagine that it’s the whole class, and some of them have terrible broadband…

My immediate reaction on reading the story this morning was to think, okay, what else can I do? Get them to check in every day for online discussion, put them into pairs or small groups and order them to support one another, create lots of fun online activities..? But, let’s be honest, this is trying to frame the issue as something that I can solve to make myself feel better, fending off the panic and calming the anticipated guilt at something going horribly wrong on my watch. It’s not at all obvious that it will actually help anyone else. But what will, absent the magical normality-restoring vaccine?

I spent an awful lot of time in my room as an undergraduate – working occasionally but mostly doing other writing, recording music and the like, and I also decided at an early stage that I could cook for myself much better and cheaper than frequenting the cafeteria – and if I think of those days, that’s my immediate association. But actually I also spent plenty of time in the student bar, at student union meetings, rehearsing with an assortment of mostly terrible bands, playing sports, going to pubs, listening to choral evensong, just hanging out with friends in gardens or out in the countryside…

And the last thing I wanted, in my periodic bursts of depression, was a lecturer checking up on me; when the postgrad who was supervising my essays for one course (the lovely, late lamented Jonathan Walters) raised concerns with my Director of Studies, I simply reassured him that everything was fine. What did make a difference to my mental state was being dragged out of the room occasionally by friends. Which of course presumed (1) that I had somehow acquired some, despite everything, and (2) that they were allowed to do that. How’s that going to work for this year’s freshers?

It’s a solid rule of thumb for academics never to develop policy on the basis of our own experiences as students: it was a long time ago, and we were by definition not typical. And perhaps it is true in this case also, and I’m getting needlessly worried because I was, let’s be honest, a very delicate and socially inept little flower. But the principle when it comes to student welfare surely has to be that we’re concerned about all our students and especially about those most likely to struggle – and I would certainly be in that category…

Our Friends Electric

About this time last year, I think, I was asked to contribute to a PGR training course, for a session covering social media and blogging. It never happened due to the strike action at the end of the autumn term – and that is starting to feel like a really serious gap in those students’ training. It should now be obvious that this topic deserves more emphasis than being scheduled in December (by which time, one suspects, student attention may be dropping off), going hand in hand with a different focus: this is not (just) about public engagement and self-publicity, an optional extra that tends to reinforce the idea that PGRs and ECRs are expected to do more and more to have any chance of an academic career. Rather, in this new world, it looks more and more like THE essential toolkit for networking, in the absence of conferences and the like, since the informal networking element is precisely the aspect of conferences it’s hardest to replicate online.

I write this as someone who dislikes big conferences, is pretty hopeless at networking, and absolutely hated my PhD supervisor for months for forcing me to introduce myself to people – and even I can’t deny that it has sometimes been enormously productive (and occasionally even enjoyable in retrospect). It’s especially important where students are in a department with only a small graduate community, but even in bigger universities the likelihood is that other people working in your field will be elsewhere – and meeting them is the quickest route to realising that you may benefit more from exchange and even collaboration, rather than thinking of them simply as the people who may wreck your research project by Saying It First. And it’s equally important to start building a sense of all the relevant work that’s going on, to be able to situate your project and calibrate your own interventions in the debate, and hear about opportunities at an early stage. Listening to conference papers offers a partial snapshot of the field, but in a passive and distanced manner; just as important is the gradual induction into the communities of researchers, including being recognised as one of them, and the benefits of the reciprocal exchange that can follow.

Online conferences offer the papers, and a chance to ask questions about them; I’m less persuaded, on experience so far, that they’re very effective at promoting wider discussion. What they really don’t do well is the equivalent of the coffee break afterwards, where the group can fragment and reconfigure itself in different combinations, not necessarily involving the speaker; the chance to nervously approach someone else who was in the audience and attempt to introduce yourself, or to tag along with a group.

What we have instead is Twitter. Now of course this platform is at least as hierarchical as any academic conference, and when approaching any established academic on Twitter it’s safest to assume that they’re thin-skinned and stuffy until proven otherwise. It’s also public, of course, and the online equivalent of having got horribly drunk and embarrassingly loud at the conference dinner the previous evening is the possibility of someone checking your profile and recent tweets before deciding whether or how to engage.

But the big advantage is the old “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog” thing. Or, knows that you’re chronically shy and socially awkward. Twitter offers the possibility of better interaction than at a conference; it’s gradual, so you can follow someone for a while before deciding to take the plunge and interact, and it’s asynchronous, so you can prepare your opening gambit and it won’t sound prepared, and it will come off the way you planned (as opposed to the classic HellosorrymysupervisorsaidIshouldtalktoyousorryImeanIreallyamabigadmirerofyourbooktheonewiththeredcoversorryforgottosaymynamesorryAAAAARRGHHH! [exit hurriedly stage left]). Similarly, you can then weigh your replies, rather than having to respond on the spot (which is equally an advantage for us older people, especially those whose hearing has long since decided that big, crowded rooms are not worth the effort).

It’s perfectly possible that many (most?) PGRs already know all this – you’re the digital natives, after all – and just need a bit of encouragement and perhaps some hints that older academics may not engage with quite the same ease or confidence. Ideally, of course, more senior academics would *also* be taking training courses in these new forms of networking; no, Twitter is not just a means for you to advertise your new book, even if the only reason you’re on it is that your publisher told you to. In the new post-COVID world, I think there will be more of an obligation on established scholars to be on here, and to be accessible; to learn new forms of interaction and networking – to see this as part of our responsibility to the wider discipline.

Absolutely basic principles: don’t pull rank, don’t dump on people, and if you have lots of followers take some responsibility for their engagement with people who engage with you. There is certainly an issue with the fact that, unlike at most academic conferences, the people who try to engage with you may or may not have any experience in the discipline, and may not even be engaging in good faith, but all you can really do is be aware of this possibility; I think it’s up to you whether you respond initially to people in exactly the same way and see how it plays out, or try to establish the person’s academic standing, so to speak, and engage accordingly – I can imagine both approaches working. The main area where I have no real experience, being male and generally working on less controversial topics, is how to manage bona fide interactions when you generally have to operate a stringent policy of block lists and other forms of self-protection against trolls – if anyone with experience in that area wants to offer advice in the comments, I’d be very grateful.

Ideally, I think colleagues should go further, the online equivalent of not just giving up a bit of time to chat but buying the coffee or lunch for younger colleagues: follow junior scholars and PGRs rather than just accepting their homage and paying attention only to your “peers”, amplify their ideas and writings, engage in debates on their terms rather than insisting on your own. What was more interesting at the last major conference, meeting eager young scholars who wanted to engage with your ideas and take them to new places, or hanging out with the same old crowd to gossip about other members of same old crowd? Yes, I know some people will answer B; that’s why we still have Facebook. Finally, don’t be a creep – remember, we can all see you, and if you’re already sliding off into DMs so we can’t all see you: bad sign…

I remain quite excited about next year’s teaching, despite all the uncertainty and mixed messages from higher authority and anxiety, above all because of the sense (as I think I’ve mentioned on here before) that my years spent in online music discussions, gradually building a community (complete with social norms and in-group language) out of a shared interest, are suddenly going to pay off. There is potential here for deeper, more engaged and egalitarian student discussion than is the norm in ‘regular’ seminars.

And actually this applies also to a lot of academic interaction at more advanced levels, if we stop trying to replicate normal seminar or conference conditions and practices online – the natural response, understandably – and instead focus on what is actually important. Yes, part of me is hoping now for a revival of blogs, or something like blogs; surely, rather than trying to set up synchronous presentations and discussion, with all the now-familiar technical issues (not to mention time zone issues), it makes more sense to have asynchronous online discussion in response to a properly recorded presentation, or at the very least set up a discussion board to follow up on a presentation? What’s with the fetishisation of ‘live’? Committing time to research interactions in the middle of a hectic teaching term is a lot easier when *you* can choose when to interact.

Not least because it’s also then dead easy to scroll past the ‘this is more a comment than a question’ contributions rather than actually having to listen to them in real time…

There’s a persistent view (certainly expressed strongly by critics of universities) that online is by definition inferior. Maybe, for specific things – which are not necessarily the most important things. We can rethink our priorities; we can come up with alternatives and workarounds. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of taking things more slowly; exchanging ideas with someone over a period of time before deciding that it’s worth scheduling a Skype chat to explore collaboration, rather than the conference thing of the now or never, all or nothing post-panel coffee because you may never meet this person again (and where, indeed, you can commit to only one or two people at a time, or have to go with a big group where more focused conversation is difficult if not rude).

We certainly didn’t choose the current circumstances, but every cloud etc.; we can anticipate more ‘slow conferences’, more networking on the basis of interests and expertise rather than just who knows who, more collaborative projects between people who have never met irl – and all of this will be a good thing.

Mwahaha Soon My Electro-Ray Will Destroy Amphipolis

Not just at the moment, while my brain persistently refuses to sustain joined-up thought, but as a career-long habit, I come up regularly with ideas that I’m entirely incapable of realising; not only because of lack of time or energy but also because of lack of skill and talent. That’s my entire musical career, obviously – perhaps I should have tried to become a Malcolm McLaren-style impresario instead, finding other people (and other people’s money) to realise my plans – but also plenty of passing whims that swim into view around 4 am, hang around for a few days and then drift off again…

I’ve noted before that the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue talk rather like comic-book villains – “the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must”; “if we don’t destroy you, other people will think that we’re weak”; “hope? Ha ha ha! A fine comfort in danger” and so forth – in a manner that really ought to embarrass those who seriously claim this as a statement of Realist political doctrine to a much greater extent than it actually does. But it occurs to me that many, if not most, of these lines could equally well be put into the mouths of superheroes, at least since the 1980s when they became increasingly willing to question their roles, their relationship with ‘normal’ people, their attitude to their own power etc. Indeed, the confrontation of the different philosophies of the Athenians and Melians (if not their relative strength) could quite neatly transpose into one of the debates between Batman and Superman about power, responsibility and methods.

And that leads to the thought that the rest of Thucydides could likewise be repurposed in this way: not the Thucydides graphic novel (could be cool, but risk of dull worthiness), but Thucydides remixed as comic book. Pericles and Nicias supply dialogue for mayors, police chiefs and other honest but helpless civilian authority figures; Archidamas and Pericles offer lines for the inevitable training sequence in the origin story (“the best are those trained in the hardest school…”); Cleon is already a comic-book villain so not much work needed there. Obviously, before the DC lawyers turn up waving writs, we’ll need new characters (Demos v The Spartan, or is that too crass and obvious?) and a new setting (I rather like the idea of a fictionalised Bristol, hyper-modern city full of statues of slavers-turned-philanthropists), rather than being able to draw on the accumulated symbolism of existing figures, but that’s not the end of the world.

And Thucydides can also supply the structure of the plot: the inevitable ‘rising power arouses fear in the establishment’ thing leading to confrontation, but also the interaction of individual actions and larger processes (what difference can one person make, however heavily armoured?) and the vagaries of democracy (but this is not going to go all Frank Miller…). A city devastated by plague, by war, and by stasis; a city that tries to ignore the truth about the past in favour of its self-serving myths…

The problem? I can’t draw for toffee…

Birth of the Uncool

My online jazz composition course has come to an end, leaving me feeling rather bereft – I really didn’t expect that I would respond so enthusiastically to being given homework, and if I’ve learnt anything from the experience it’s the importance of structure and direction, as well as the right balance between openness and clear limits. Plus, a reminder of how much students hate any sort of peer review or assessment – I was the only person to comment on other students’ compositions as we’d been told, and that was with massive trepidation and because I like the online discussion. Looking ahead to next term, it’s really important to get students interacting with one another rather than just doing the ping-pong thing with me (someone makes a point to me, I respond, someone else responds to the original point by addressing me, and so on), and this is a reminder that I need to do a lot more than simply ask people to do this.

Oh, and I did learn some useful things about jazz composition, including a real breakthrough in understanding modal approaches. It’s interesting that I seem to be finding it relatively easy to come up not just with melodies but with harmonic structures, when my brain continues to refuse to string sentences together except under protest; probably, as my wife suggests, it’s because I don’t have anything at stake in it and so there’s no fear involved, whereas research and academic writing are currently all about anxiety and insecurity. Yes, I might get some pushback from reducing the glorious blues and rhythm heritage of jazz, the wonders of improvisation and interaction and spontaneity, to rather chilly, abstract, ECM-lite sketches – but to be fair this is partly a product of (1) still getting the hang of the technology and (2) not actually being able to play with other people at the moment, and in any case my stuff is always going to be judged in terms of a dog walking on its hind legs.

So, having now expanded one of my 8-bar exercises into something a bit more substantial – and which I could imagine being played properly with a bigger range of instruments – I’ve taken the plunge of making it publicly available…

https://soundcloud.com/user-607603876-430286694/solaris

Take Two…

This is something of a negative and/or holding post, but it seems worthwhile putting it down as a marker to myself if no one else… As I’ve mentioned before, one of my resolutions for lockdown was that I would finally make some progress on my Thucydides musical project. This hasn’t got anywhere, partly because of the ongoing brain fog issue (in the light of recent scary newspaper reports, I’m trying to take the optimistic view that once again I’ve got off lightly compared to others and so this will pass if I just take it easy, rather than contemplating the thought that this might be permanent), but partly as a result of the jazz composition course I’ve been doing online. As I’ve noted, this has been enormously valuable as an exercise in seeing things from the student perspective (and I really feel for the tutor, as he’s falling into exactly the traps that I would fall into, trying to engage with students in a normal manner although this takes much more time than usual, and trying unsuccessfully to get people to make use of the chat facility between classes). But I have also learnt a lot about jazz composition, especially when it comes to modal approaches.

And this means my original plan, to read the whole of Thucydides and characterise each chapter according to a set of parameters that would then drive melody and harmony choices, needs some refinement. At the moment I’m wondering about assigning a different mode to each Book, but certainly I think I need a more complex and interesting set of mechanisms – deciding in advance that certain events will trigger a chord or key change, for example – while also aiming to produce something that sounds half decent. I’m wondering about drawing on my Thucydides class next year, asking them to characterise different books and identify key moments and themes as the basis for composition, rather than determining everything myself. Or, of course, I could produce multiple versions. Current idea is to start doing this in the autumn, producing a Book every month, but this may be over-optimistic. Anyway, nothing for the moment, but watch this space…

Doubling Down

As the old proverb (sometimes attributed to Solon) has it, gods, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man on the Internet. Am I being hasty and unfair, leaping to judgement on the basis of fleeting interactions with ‘The Mystic’ (brooding headshot with goatee, quote about chaos and perfection, cover image of some heavily tattooed wrestlers) or AwesomeDude (avatar of a dog, cover image of a Dilbert cartoon)?* Yes, quite possibly. But if they not only ascribe that wretched ‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors…” quote to Thucydides, but firmly reject gentle correction from the Thucydides Bot, they’re gonna get judged…

I actually quite enjoy these conversations; it doesn’t bring the same satisfaction as someone thanking me for the information – which is after all the point of the whole enterprise, trying to lessen the volume of global misinformation, one Thucydides quote at a time – but it’s a lot more entertaining than just being ignored. The nature of the response seems to me interesting and illuminating. Initial pushback is understandable; there are still, despite all my efforts, a load of apparently reputable websites and people presenting the line as authentic Thucydides. But continuing pushback, despite inability to find the line in Thucydides or anywhere except William F. Butler’s 1889 book, until a simplified version of the original quote starts being attributed to Thucydides in the mid-late 1990s? That takes some intellectual gymnastics, or just absolute self-confidence.

The Mystic: “The society that separates its warriors from its scholars will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools” – Thucydides

Thucydiocy: Not actually Thucydides, but C19 soldier and author Sir William F. Butler.

The Mystic: Okay, I switched scholar and warrior. My bad. Get a life.

Thucydiocy: No, it’s not actually Thucydides either way round.

The Mystic: Well I checked Google and Wikipedia and that said otherwise but whatever.

Thucydiocy: [link to Wikiquote page listing it as misattributed]

The Mystic: [screenshot of Google search including Wikiquote talk page]

Thucydiocy: Yes, if you check that Wikiquote talk page you’ll see the quote was removed for being unsourced. There’s no trace of it in Thucydides, and no one attributes it to him before the 1990s.

The Mystic: So no one really knows. It “could” be him.

Thucydiocy: Except no text before Butler’s 1889 book contains anything like this quote, so you’d have to imagine an entire secret train of transmission. Occam’s Razor says it’s Butler.

The Mystic: Well I’m sticking with the Greek general, sorry pal.

Is the fact that Thucydides is identified as a general significant? I suspect it is (and note in passing that V.D. Hanson is quite fond of referring to General Thucydides, though to be fair I don’t believe he’s ever used this quote). This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered the “we don’t know everything about the past so how can you prove it’s not true?” argument, though it’s normally in the form of “X might have happened but no record survives” rather than “X might have said this even though it doesn’t appear in his work or any other ancient text that we know of but Butler came across the quote and plagiarised it and then somehow destroyed all evidence of the source where he found it”.

I was reminded of this exchange from last week by a similar one over the last day or so.

LoneTraveller: A society that separates its scholars from its warriors, will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting done by fools. h/t @AwesomeDude

AwesomeDude: I got it from Thucydides but maybe he stole it from Herodotus, who’s to say?

Thucydides: It’s not actually either of them, but C19 soldier and author Sir William F. Butler.

[LoneTraveller liked the tweet]

AwesomeDude: I wouldn’t know who said it originally, but no knowledge is original. The quote, and its attribution, has been taught at the Naval War College, and Westpoint, for 100 years (or more?). My first acquaintance was from a text book from the NWC published in 1957.

Well. I’ve asked for a reference to that textbook, and so far received only a stony silence, because, despite the precise detail, I honestly don’t think it exists. Certainly Thucydides was taught at the NWC before Stansfield Turner’s reforms in the early 1970s – another fake Thucydides quote, “a collision at sea can ruin your whole day”, was coined by a cadet in 1960 or so – but not this line, which is correctly attributed to Butler (in the original longer version) into the 1990s (including in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 1989 report on professional military education). The most charitable explanation I can imagine is that a recent edition of a hypothetical textbook first published in 1957 might have added the quote. But the unequivocal claim that it’s been taught at both places for a century or more? It’s hard to imagine that I wouldn’t have heard about it if soneone had done the extensive research needed to establish that fact. Absent further evidence, I call bullshit.

I’m most fascinated by the “no knowledge is original” line, as a means – I guess – of dismissing the identification of Butler as author, since he must have got it from somewhere else. Surely all knowledge is original at some point? Why couldn’t Butler have coined the phrase? It’s bad enough ignoring his contribution by assuming the quote comes from Thucydides, but actively dismissing it in the apparent grounds that only ancient Greeks could come up with original thoughts? Why is the response to “it’s not Thucydides” a casting around for other ancient authors, rather than the modern author in whose work it actually appears? It seems like a clear example of belief that only classical authority carries any weight, and so must be defended to the death against all contrary evidence.

* N.B. Lightly fictionalised, as I got some very confusing guidance about using public tweets of private individuals as research material when I asked the college ethics committee about an idea for a project. You can just check @Thucydiocy’s timeline for the real thing…

Not Fade Away

Thinking that we’re getting older and wiser, when we’re just getting old…

We’ve recently started watching The Kominsky Method – yes, two years late, but by my standards that’s finger right on the cultural pulse stuff. If you don’t know it, highly recommended: proper Hollywood stars Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin, showing off their acting chops in a subtle chamber-piece comedy as an actor (mostly making a living as a coach) worrying about his prostate, and his recently widowed agent. It feels more like a credible (and big budget) indie film than a US television series, including the fact that it’s only eight episodes per season. Lots of dry, dark humour and lots of reflections on age and what it does to you. “You know, I wake up every morning,” says Norman, Arkin’s character, “And my first thought is, what part of me is not working today?” Ouch.

Okay, things aren’t this bad with me. Yet. I guess my issue may be a more middle-aged one: waking up (generally about half four), gently probing the state of my mind, and thinking, at what point do I have to admit that this is normal and things aren’t going to get better? It’s not physical (that’s just the effects of not getting enough sleep) but rather mental: the persistent brain fog, the memory lapses, the impaired focus (a kind of intellectual fidgeting), the inability to string ideas together or to keep an idea in mind for more than a couple of hours. If this is the way things are at 5 am, then, given my inability ever to get back to sleep, then that’s the way things are for the rest of the day. And the days drift into weeks, the weeks into months…

Where this echoes The Kominsky Method is the sense that – like Michael Douglas’ character walking into a bar full of bright young things and realising that he’s effectively invisible – it wasn’t like this in the past. This isn’t me. It’s not that I still think of myself as a bright young thing cruising metaphorical bars, as I was never like that in the first place, but my brain used to work so much better. I could elaborate ideas, and keep developing a complex argument in my head over weeks, and juggle multiple things without losing the thread of any of them. I could produce articulate sentences without effort. On a good day, I could bloody well scintillate.

And so I cling to the idea that this is just a phase, that some morning I will wake up and the clouds will have cleared, and I will then effortlessly write all the overdue articles and reviews and everything else; that I will be back to being myself. But what if this is the new normal? If this is the natural outcome of age and dying brain cells, or a more immediate effect of having had even a relatively mild dose of COVID-19, which apparently can infiltrate the brain and do as-yet uncertain things to it? I’m used to periods of depression, which can feel quite similar, but they have always passed eventually. This has gone on for longer than usual – and the longer it goes on, the more I feel the creeping fear that this be just the way things now are.

Some middle-aged men, I believe, feel a bit under the weather and start googling the symptoms of various cancers; I’ve been looking up cognitive function tests. This has been enough to determine that I’m a long way from it being an actual medical problem – except insofar as I feel myself to be not functioning in the way I used to. And the problem with this is realising that so many of my working practices have developed on the basis of taking that sort of performance capacity for granted; I used to be able to do all this stuff, I used to be able to get away with bad habits and sloppy practices – so what if I now can’t? And this isn’t going to be solved, or even shoved off into denial, by buying a motorbike. What’s the intellectual equivalent?

I normally try to round off this sort of self-pitying whinge with a more cheerful thought, or at least a self-deprecating comment. I don’t currently have one; probably I need to watch more episodes to collect some performance anxiety jokes. I can at least still write blog posts – it’s keeping it up for any longer that’s the problem…