Neville Morley's Blog, page 28

Boost for Bertie!

It’s a very long time since I had any direct contact with UCAS forms or the whole process of undergraduate admissions. At that time, a vital part of the knowledge handed down by more experienced colleagues was how to recognise examples of what one might call Lake Wobegon School of Reference-Writing: Where all the students are above average, and one of the best I have ever taught, and uniquely well suited to the degree programme in question. We could have filled our admissions quotas many times over with such applicants, which would be fine for the bottom line, but a slightly depressing teaching prospect, especially thinking of the better students we might miss because their teachers were more honest and/or less practised in talking up their charges. Oddly enough, such boosterism was wholly associated with fee-paying schools.*

As the admissions process has become more and more professionalised, I would imagine that this sort of thing has become less effective, and less worth the effort. Instead, as a story in the Grauniad this week revealed, we get a new sort of game-playing: exaggerated predicted grades. Of course this isn’t exactly new – one always had a sense that fee-paying schools were, on average, optimistic about the academic potential of some of their students. What has changed is the degree of competition for students and the not unrelated expansion of unconditional offers; whereas once an applicant would actually have to get their predicted grades, or at least something close, so boosterism just gave them a chance, now it might get them the place regardless of actual performance. Oh, and also the fact that the guidance openly states that the predicted grades aren’t intended as actual predicted grades, but a means “to facilitate application to a more selective university”.

That is…lying. Up to this point, I had vaguely assumed that grade predictions were more or less honest in intent, even if they might be based on an optimistic view of what a given student might achieve on a good day with a following wind and a bit of luck. How naive even a middle-aged cynic can be… Of course other schools have probably been sensible enough not to write down the stuff that should remain understood, but it seems unlikely that this is an isolated practice.

This isn’t quite as infuriating as the present government’s incompetence and corruption, but it is pretty infuriating – bringing back memories of the number of times I got harangued by private school headmasters for Bristol’s supposed bias against their students. Actually they probably think such tactics are wholly justified as a weapon against the social justice agenda of universities… It’s all about protecting the bottom line; why would parents pay tens of thousands of pounds per year in school fees, if not partly in expectation of benefitting from expertise in gaming the university admissions system? If they can’t get young Bertie** into a decent place, what’s the point?

This isn’t necessarily great for Bertie, if you think about a degree not in terms of the perceived prestige of the university but the actual, you know, education stuff; he’ll probably do okay, but might have been much happier and more engaged on a different course somewhere else. Meanwhile, that’s a place that could have gone to someone better suited to the course, whose teachers thought the point of predicting grades was to predict grades. Britain in microcosm; ordinary people work hard and follow the rules on the assumption that the system is fair, and if they fail it’s because they just weren’t good enough, while the privileged few get to play by different rules, buy their way through life, and constantly fail upwards…

*To be fair, there was also the phenomenon of teachers who apparently despised their students and wanted to destroy their prospects, judging them vastly inferior to some mythical generation of genuine talent in the distant past, or possibly just to themselves. But such references did go out of their way to emphasise the quality of the school and its high standards, by way of implying that even their more feeble specimens must be more intelligent and talented than the best products of other establishments.

**I am using Bertie as a generic name partly as the reference to the P.G. Wodehouse story ‘Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg’ and partly after a late, much lamented cat. No aspersions are intended on any actual Berties I have taught over the years.

Imperial Sunset

Around twenty years ago, I used to daydream occasionally about a revival of the eighteenth-century Royal Navy. Oddly enough, this coincided with a rather bumpy patch in my role as stepfather to a teenage boy; who of us in such a position wouldn’t sometimes dream of an institution that would take them away for a few years, feed and train them, and then either return them as a mature, disciplined adult with prospects, or not return them at all? I suppose this may be why elderly Telegraph readers occasionally call for the return of National Service to lick delinquent youth into shape, but that always struck me as far too short a period of service.

Now, there are many respects in which Britain’s current problems are manifestly bound up with a failure to get over the loss of empire: a persistent and entirely ungrounded sense of its importance in world affairs, belief in superiority and virtue, conviction of its ability to stand alone, obsession with WWII etc (see e.g. David Andress’ Cultural Dementia for further details. The practical consequences are less widely discussed (if anything, the current debate emphasises the extent to which national prosperity still rests on wealth expropriated from the rest of the world), and above all I think we underestimate the benefits of an outlet for surplus and aggravating youths.

Feckless liar who’s incapable of keeping it in his trousers and certainly can’t be trusted to manage the family estate? Hapless tosser who doesn’t even realise how little he understands? Smirking delinquent whose sole talent is to make trouble? Lazy pillock who just wants to shoot everything in sight? Drug-addled smartarse? In the good old days, there were places such people could be sent, to smarten up their ideas or die of yellow fever; unfortunate for the poor inhabitants or crew or garrison of whatever region, ship or fort they were given command of, but at least they were out of the country, rather than attempting to run it…

Disclaimer: this post is satirical, and should not be taken as a serious comment on my stepson.

Consider the Beetles of the Pond…

How on earth is it the middle of June already? Whether I think of this in terms of the end of the academic year (since I’ve finished all my marking, and am up to date with external examiner stuff) or of the end of strict lockdown (however temporary that may prove to be), it’s hard not to be seized by a feeling of panic, at all the things I meant to do and haven’t done, and all the things I’m supposed to get done before the end of the summer that I should have started already. Of course there were Reasons – there always are – but I was so confident that I would at the very least make some progress with my Thucydides music project…

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Among the more positive reasons is the one thing I have definitely achieved during the coronavirus lockdown: the new wildlife pond, replacing one that sprung a leak a couple of years ago and in any case was too overshadowed by trees and taken over by an especially aggressive water lily. This took a couple of weekends’ worth of labour to construct – and has absorbed more time ever since, as I can’t resist wandering down the garden regularly to watch the wildlife gradually making it their home.

First it was a lot of little water beetles who just turned up within a couple of days of the pond being filled, and I could spend half an hour at a time just observing them come up to the surface for air and then disappearing back into the depths. They were followed by pond skaters and water boatmen, and then a striking blue dragonfly – a broad-backed chaser – who has decided that this is his pond, and turns up pretty well every day to chase off other male dragonflies and mate with any females who turn up. Apparently they do this, as a decent pond is the equivalent of a really flash sports car for pulling chicks, and just from what we’ve observed there should be a fair few dragonfly nymphs in the pond this year. (Arthur – we had to give him a suitably wide-boy name – was perched on the left-hand flower spike, whence he flies sorties to inspect any intruders, seconds before I took the photo).

A week or so back we were worried by the arrival of an especially large water beetle, as one hears terrible things about Great Diving Beetles and their ferocious eating habits. But at c.15 mm she’s definitely a Lesser Diving Beetle (the sex is indicated by the fact that she’s been laying eggs up one of the reeds, when not swimming energetically round the surface), and apparently they have been considered as potential biological controls for mosquito larvae, so that’s all to the good. Lots of damsel flies, lots of other insects – and this morning there was a frog! I just have to persuade the newts to migrate from the old pond…

It is all very educational, and it is terribly relaxing. I’m not sure if it’s a very good or very bad thing that the WiFi signal doesn’t extend that far, or I’d be out there the whole time…

Aristotle Must Fall

SCENE: the reception area, morning. Sybil is doing accounts. Basil is painstakingly recolouring a map of the world. One of the members of the visiting cultural delegation from Ghana approaches the desk cautiously. He is ignored.

Stephen: Excuse me?

Basil continues to ignore him.

Stephen: Sir? Mr Fawlty?

Basil: Not. Now.

Sybil: Attend to Mr Assamoah, Basil.

Basil: Oh! Right! Stop whatever you’re doing, Basil, it can’t possibly be important!

Sybil: It isn’t.

Basil: But the colours are all wrong! They should be pink! And what’s happened to Rhodesia?

Sybil: Attend to Mr Assamoah.

Stephen: I don’t want to make any trouble…

Basil: Well, you have. So what is it now?

Stephen: It’s about the picture in Mr Asante’s bedroom.

Basil: Leopold II Bringing Civilisation to the Heathen Savages of Darkest Africa? What’s wrong with it?

Stephen: Well, it could be regarded as somewhat offensive…

Basil: Nonsense! Don’t you approve of Civilisation? I suppose it is a bit alien to you.

Sybil: Take the picture down, Basil.

Basil: Take it down? Take it down? Because of some over-sensitive n… w… c… foreigner? That picture is part of the cultural fabric of this hotel! It would be destroying our history and heritage!

Sybil: You bought it at a car boot sale in January.

Basil: And what else do you want me to take down? The British Museum? The Acropolis? The bust of Aristotle in the breakfast room?

Sybil: Not just now, Basil…

[you just know that the episode is going to end up with Basil in scarlet jacket and pith helmet, beating Manuel done up in blackface]

I'm very confused about toppling statues…

The Greeks, whose civilisation has long been admired in the West, believed that in the Ancient World, a cultured society was only possible if it was based on slavery

So should we be getting rid of statues of Socrates and Aristotle ?

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) June 12, 2020

John Cleese’s comment this morning on the Twitter is classic bad faith whataboutery, a neat combination of attempted derailment – other cultures had slavery so why all the fuss just about the Atlantic trade? #VictimsOfBarbaryPiratesMatterToo – and would-be gotcha: we admire the Greeks, but aha! they had slaves too, so if we object to statues of other slaveowners we’re clearly hypocrites.

But one might nevertheless think that he has a point – just not the one he thinks. The idea that “Greek culture depended on slavery” is modern, rather than reflecting ancient debates or self-consciousness; we can as historians see how important the labour of enslaved people was for their economy and society, and how the opposition of freedom and slavery permeated their culture, but that isn’t the same as saying that they consciously constructed a slave society and defended it in those terms. Such defences – or, more commonly, intellectual gymnastics to concede the fact of slavery but downplay its significance in comparison to the glories of Greek Civilisation – are found rather in the late 18th and especially 19th centuries, the work of anguished moderns who fear their culture may never match up to the Greeks and wonder why, or who love the Classical but feel slightly shifty about it. Or, in the case of Nietzsche, who want to mock modernity for cowardice, hypocrisy and lack of culture, because real culture needs slaves but moderns are too scared to admit it.

So, bringing in the Greeks largely serves to confuse the issue. But not entirely, because, different as the ancient institution was from the modern, they are nevertheless connected. Aristotle’s articulation of a theory of ‘natural slavery’ fed directly into modern justifications, and was cited to support modern prejudices about ‘inferior races’; colonising and enslaving whites could think of themselves as civilised men, despite their actions, and as superior beings, despite all the evidence to the contrary, because of their adherence to and recreation of classical culture. Ever since I first read it, I’ve been haunted by this passage from Derek Walcott’s Omeros:

…small squares with Athenian principles and pillars

maintained by convicts and emigrants who had fled

persecution and gave themselves fasces with laws

to persecute slaves. A wedding-cake Republic.

Its domes, museums, its ornate institutions,

its pillared facade that looked down on the black

shadows that they cast as an enraging nuisance

which, if it were left to its Solons, with enough luck

would vanish from its cities, just as the Indians

had vanished from its hills…

Aristotle must fall? In present times, this is a ridiculous distraction, intended as such. But the basic point holds: we should not unquestioningly venerate and commemorate classical antiquity, ignoring its sinister legacy, any more than we should be celebrating human traffickers because they then endowed schools and museums.

Enharbouring Doubts

Thucydides doesn’t mention the fact that a statue of the Athenian tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, occupied a prominent position in the agora; almost certainly he didn’t have to, as this would be well known to his readers, but in any case he had a bigger and more important target: the story that the statue was intended to commemorate. “People accept the traditions that they hear quite uncritically, even when it relates to their own country,” he remarked caustically (1.20) – though perhaps he should have said especially when it relates to their own country, in the light of his observation a little further on (1.22) that accounts of the same event might vary “depending on individual loyalties”. Athenians – at any rate the democratically-inclined majority – knew what their past was all about, without any need for inconvenient historical fact, and they would surely have been outraged at any proposal that the statue should be removed because the real story behind it wasn’t quite as straightforwardly noble and democratic as they believed.

This is one of those points where we modern readers might feel somewhat nervous about Thucydides’ political views; he was at best sceptical of democracy in practice, and arguably much more hostile to it in theory as well, and the claim of a member of the educated elite to be offering disinterested Truth in place of the ignorance of the masses is one we’d generally regard with suspicion. It’s difficult not to read this choice of example to illustrate the failure of most people to treat the past critically as a political dog whistle. Moreover, in the context of current debates about the rights and wrongs of enharbouring honorific statues, it’s pretty likely that Thucydides would have considered Edward Colston and Cecil Rhodes to be precisely the sorts of people deserving of commemoration for their euergetism, with the ownership, exploitation and killing of other people being taken for granted as part of aristocratic life.

But the gulf between our values and those of C5 BCE Athens doesn’t mean we can learn nothing from this account of historiography. Thucydides makes a bold claim for the utility of true knowledge of the past, that is reinforced, a considerable time later in the narrative, by the negative example of how Athenians’ false beliefs about the tyrannicides contributed to their confused over-reaction to the vandalism of other statues, the hermai, with the conviction that this could only be the work of people determined to overthrow the settled order of society.

And, most interestingly, we can also consider Thucydides’ reflections on the power of physical remains: the likelihood that Athens would be seen as vastly more powerful than it really was, and Sparta vastly less powerful, if you were to judge solely on the basis of the buildings and monuments of the two cities. Athens celebrated itself, and sought to impress others; in a similar manner, one could say, honorific statues sought (and seek) to establish the greatness of the subject, imposing a single conception of their life and works on posterity; if you trusted just in the statue of Colston (and its original inscription) you would believe that he was a great and generous man beloved by all the people of Bristol. Toppling and enharbouring the statue isn’t “destroying history”; it’s a means of creating a space for the real story, or at least the full story,

Wicked Game

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time over the last week or so in conversations with colleagues about how we’re going to manage teaching next year. One takeaway from this is a reminder of how dedicated, imaginative and insightful the aforementioned colleagues are. It’s fair to say that we’ve got a spectrum from those who see this as an exciting opportunity to try out new approaches and radically change some of our traditional teaching styles, and those who are focused on ways to maintain more conventional teaching approaches in dramatically new and uncertain circumstances. But there’s nobody who is insisting on privileging their convenience over flexibility, or unwilling to countenance radical change if that’s what best suits student needs.

A second takeaway is how difficult this actually is. Perhaps it’s because even the revolutionaries among us are more used to incremental change; we assume a basic model of teaching and then think about how to accommodate particular student needs (rather than assuming that students will accommodate themselves to the system), we modify content while maintaining structure, or modify assessment methods while keeping the core content – we don’t normally go back to the drawing board to this extent, and maybe it’s too open-ended to make decisions easily in the time available.

But there are at least two reasons why this isn’t just academics being academical and unworldly, exploring every nuance and hypothetical problem rather than just getting on with things. One is the uncertainty about the behaviour of the virus and hence the appropriate countermeasures; intuitively, it makes sense that big lectures will be much riskier than small socially-distanced tutorial or seminars (hence announcements from Cambridge and Bristol that they’re cancelling physical lectures next year), but actually there are indications that this may not be the case, which then makes it harder to decide on even the most basic questions of what teaching should look like next year.

The second issue is that many of the issues we’re trying to tackle either are, or come close to being, wicked problems: not just that there is no perfect solution but only an uncomfortable choice between sub-optimal alternatives driven by contradictory imperatives, but the success of a chosen policy is dependent on factors that cannot be predicted, and yet we will be blamed for the outcome regardless. And all this is taking place in the familiar context of quietly vicious inter-university competition, with institutions carefully watching what their rivals are doing, weighing up whether to make bold announcements now about next year (risky) or delay as long as possible (risky), knowing that what happens now will affect student choices and hence finances, but not knowing how it will affect them.

As the Government guidance on reopening universities, published yesterday, makes clear, universities are expected to ensure the quality of the education and to ensure student and staff safety. Ensuring student and staff safety means we can’t just do what we normally do. Quality education is defined, more or less, in the eyes of students and external observers, by us doing what we normally do – note that various voices in the media have already denounced any shift online, the only sensible means we have for ensuring safety, as by definition a reduction in quality. And “quality” is as ever an utterly meaningless and unhelpful term with no fixed standard or means of measurement; actually we will be judged by student satisfaction, which may have no particular connection to the learning provision itself but be all about the university experience, or lack thereof. How far is it the responsibility of universities to replicate the experience of going to pubs or clubs with lots of other young people? Not much – except that it could make an enormous difference to the success of our plans for teaching. I need to post this on the departmental discussion board…

And this problem goes all the way down. Suppose we (I’ll come back to the identity of ‘we’ in a moment) take the line that safety requires the abandonment of all face-to-face teaching, so we focus our energies for next year on ensuring the quality of online provision. This brings us to the sorts of issues we’ve been discussing. We know that not all students have great broadband or equipment, or the privacy or opportunity to take part in online Teams or Zoom seminars at a specific time, or may be in different time zones. Do we respond to this by making everything asynchronous as far as possible, at the risk of general student discontent (since one imagines that they will be expecting at least online face-to-face interaction as a bare minimum), or do we set up a minimum level of synchronous activity for all courses despite knowing this might disadvantage some students in some groups? Having the former as a possibility in the event that a given group contains a student who needs such alternative provision doesn’t work, as we’ll need to do the preparation in advance for one mode of delivery rather than another – besides the risk of marking out a ‘target’ if other students then feel unhappy that they’re getting an inferior experience to other courses because of one person’s needs. Again, there’s no good answer to this one; we’re just searching for the least bad option.

Which brings me back to the question of ‘we’: who takes responsibility? Certainly not the individual academic; we clearly need departmental solidarity on this. The department? Deeply problematic in a place like Exeter where so many of our students do joint or combined degrees, and can easily compare what different departments are doing. I think we could make either system work not too badly, especially if – bluntly – we can present it as the decision of faculty- or university-level authority which we are required to implement; some students might not be happy, but I would guess that they would be less unhappy than if they knew we as a department had a choice and chose the approach that directly affects them.

Does the new government document offer any helpful guidance on this? I think you all know the answer to that, but it is still remarkable how vacuous it is; the twin imperatives of quality and safety are repeated incessantly – there’s clearly a minimum word count for this sort of briefing paper, that had to be met somehow – but it’s all left down to universities, on existing budgets, to decide what to do and then carry the can if something goes wrong. The government has made it clear that safety should be a priority; if there’s an upsurge in infection because of face-to-face teaching of some sort, that is universities showing reckless disregard for safety. The government has made it clear that quality should be a priority; if there’s widespread dissatisfaction because teaching is all online, that is universities ignoring student needs despite charging them enormous fees.

It’s entirely of a piece with all the other coronavirus guidance they’ve produced since the shift from ‘Stay At Home’ – a policy introduced with palpable reluctance – to the meaningless ‘Stay Alert’, and the push to get everything back to normal as quickly as possible while making any resurgence in infection rates the responsibility of individuals for failing to stay alert. Yes, they too face a wicked problem – but apparently it’s one where they can get away without actually taking direct responsibility for a decision or its consequences.

Perhaps this is what we need for the next academic year, a set of meaningless slogans directed at students that demonstrate we’re taking everything seriously without actually doing anything. ‘Work Hard! Have Fun! Don’t Get Infected!’ Other suggestions welcomed in the comments…

Taking Sides

There’s been an uptick in misattributed ‘Thucydides’ quotes on the USAnian Twitter in the last couple of days, for obvious reasons: “the tyranny the Athenian leadership imposed on others it finally imposed on itself” (journalist Chris Hedges drawing an explicit analogy with Iraq War blowback, which certainly can include the militarisation of the police; interesting, Incidentally, how he tries to focus on “Athenian leadership” not the demos…), and “justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are” (actually Solon, in Plutarch’s Life). There’s also been an interesting interpretation of the Melian Dialogue line “there is justice only between equals” as a plea for equality rather than as an utterly immoral conception of justice.

Do pedantic corrections have any role to play at this time? Well, much more than usual I am very conscious that people are tweeting these lines in good faith because they are powerful and/or useful ideas, and acknowledge this in replying to them (which does take substantially longer than just tweeting derisive emojis), but I’ve decided to carry on doing it; truth still matters, even in such circumstances.

It did bring to mind another of Solon’s ideas, that we ended up discussing quite a lot in my Greek Political Thought class this year: that in times of stasis, those who “out of indifference preferred to let events take their course” should be stripped of their citizen rights (as quoted in e.g. the Ath Pol, 8.5). It’s a line that has been much debated by scholars, given the sense – as seen for example in Thucydides’ powerful depiction of stasis at Corcyra – that a political community collapsing into starkly polarised factions is surely the worst possible scenario, and yet Solon seems to be reinforcing such decisions, calling on everyone to take up arms with one or other side.

One interpretation is that, whatever later centuries thought Solon was saying, the original intent was not to divide the whole polis into two hostile camps but to get everyone to take a stand in resolving the conflict. The true threat is indifference – which we can also understand as selfishness: if the wealthy few are oppressing the poor (and we can update that to recognise other conflicts in modern society: black and white, men and women etc), sitting back to see who wins is an utterly antisocial act, which entirely merits the loss of honour and citizen rights. It echoes Solon’s line about those who are not directly affected by injustice needing to become equally angry; T’s echoed in Pericles’ funeral oration, with the claim that in Athens those who decline to play their part in public business have no place in the political community.

Of course it’s absurdly optimistic; it’s very easy to imagine all the reasons people will keep their heads down (with the risk that, as Thucydides noted for Corcyra, that all the reasonable moderate people, confident in their powers of common sense and prediction, will end up being equally despised and destroyed by both sides). But if your community is riven by injustice, how can you not take a stand?

Turn of the Tide

Is this the moment when the Trump administration decisively repudiates one of the great traditions of American politics, honoured by both parties for over a century? I’m not thinking of the executive order to denounce Twitter and Facebook, since all manner of presidents have sought to manipulate or gag the media over the years (but, hey, can they both lose?). No, this is a subtler but perhaps more significant shift in behaviour and attitude, signalled in a US State Department paper on Arms Control and International Security, published under the name of Dr Christopher A. Ford, Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation and currently moonlighting as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, on US National Security Export Controls and Huawei.

Now, I must admit that I don’t read a lot of State Department papers, but I may have to change that habit if this one is typical, because the opening section is hilarious.

Huawei is a PRC-state-supported information and communications technology firm that serves as a tool of manipulation and influence for the CCP, both at home and abroad, and of course the company is therefore nothing whatsoever like a beautiful ancient Chinese painting.

Okay.

Nevertheless, I hope the reader will forgive a loose analogy to Chinese art as we look at the challenges Huawei presents to the United States and to many other countries around the world.

It is not uncommon in Chinese landscape painting – as seen, for example, in the early 11th-century masterpiece Travelers among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan, a classic of Northern Song landscape painting that is currently in the permanent collection of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan – for an artist to employ multiple different perspectives in the same painting. This ancient approach made no use of the “laws” of one-point linear perspective later articulated in the Italian Renaissance during the 14th and 15th centuries. Instead, works such as Fan’s Travelers often painted the foreground, middle ground, and distance as if each were being seen from a slightly different angle, yet at the same time.  This was not so much a technical failing, one presumes, than it was simply a way to help the viewer appreciate a landscape more fully – albeit less “realistically” – than is arguably possible with merely a single, quasi-photographic perspective.  Such overlapping perspectival framing permitted immediate visual access to more facets of a scene than could be directly apprehended from a single vantage point.

Taking that artistic insight as inspiration, therefore, this paper will offer three overlapping and complementary perspectives upon the Huawei challenge that the Western world faces today, and upon what we in the U.S. Government are doing to meet it.  Each of these framings is valid, significant, and compelling in its own right, but the reader will benefit most – and be able more fully to appreciate the U.S. position – by having all three of these overlapping and complementary perspectives spelled out distinctly.

Seriously? All that to say “I’m going to offer three different but complementary perspectives”? Is tunnel vision the official State Department policy, so that acknowledging the complexity of things requires elaborate self-justification? Or is he padding things out to reach a word limit?

Alternatively, this is all about messaging. (1) Look at me, I know all about art history, so you can trust me on contemporary security issues; (2) See how we value and validate Chinese culture! It’s the regime and their agents that we hate, not the great Chinese people and their achievements, like a wall you can see from space. A great bunch of lads! (3) But it’s a masterpiece that’s in Taiwan, not Beijing! Ha-ha!

After this, the style settles down a bit, and we get a lot of sober (though exceedingly vague) assertions about technology theft, strategic competition and human rights – largely concerned with the PRC state, on the assumption that this automatically transfers to Huawei. I’m tempted to award credit for the absence of any mention of the Thucydides Trap in the second section – but then wonder whether it’s a significant absence, given that it’s an idea promoted largely by those who want to avoid conflict (there have been increasing references on the Twitter in recent months to Graham Allison as a ‘China appeaser’, so perhaps a message is being subtly pushed from somewhere).

But there is not a total absence of Thucydides. On the contrary. We come to the conclusion. US policy, Ford insists, is no longer as naive as it used to be about the threat, and is seeking to make its international partners see sense as well.

We are today not, for instance, open-heartedly foolish in the ways suggested in Thucydides’ rendering of Pericles’ famous funeral oration for Athens’ early casualties in Peloponnesian War:

“We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality ….”

WHOA! Liberal western states have been quoting Pericles, as an expression of their own core values, since the 19th century – as did authoritarian regimes in Germany in the first half of the 20th, so it’s not as if the Trump crew need to see these words as a threat. As Liz Sawyer has charted, US politicians have been especially fond of quoting him, albeit not so much this passage – but plenty of them don’t, and that seems like the obvious approach if you don’t feel the ideas are useful or appropriate. This is something else, a direct repudiation of part of the original celebration of democratic culture that implies suspicion of the whole: if Pericles could be so naive and wrong about the virtues of openness, what else was he wrong about..? And even if he was right about some stuff, you shouldn’t let that sucker you into accepting his highly suspect cosmopolitanism and potentially treasonous openness.

If we reject Pericles (and/or Thucydides), whom do we turn to instead? Aristotle, obviously.

Nor, however, are we needlessly paranoid and restrictive about engaging with foreigners in the high-end technologies of our day – as were, for example, the Venetian officials who in 1745 actually dispatched an assassination team to pursue two local glass-blowers who had taken the lucrative secrets of their trade abroad. In truth, the right answer surely lies between such asymptotes, and – as in so many other arenas – we will all suffer if we cannot navigate a prudent middle way between such extremes.  In the arena of national security export controls, it is just such an Aristotelian Mean of a response that we have been trying to implement.

No assassination teams for those suspected of undermining security; Graham Allison can sleep soundly, at least for the moment…

Living for the Moment

As Buffy wisely (but perhaps unhelpfully, given the result) remarked in the very first episode of the series, life is short. A key theme in Thucydides’ account of the plague in Athens is its psychological effects precisely in relation to a sense of time and the future: the abandonment of any concern for the longer term, on the assumption that one is more likely than not to die, and hence loss of respect for the law (you’re not going to live long enough to be tried and punished, so who cares?), neglect of traditional virtues like thrift and caution (why save for tomorrow when you might not be there to enjoy it?), and above all disregard for what other people think of you. Honour is something that has to be accumulated slowly, for uncertain benefits beyond the feeling that you don’t want to be despised or jeered by your fellow citizens; in the short term it’s just a restraint on what you want to do NOW.

It is at least possible that Dominic Cummings was motivated by a similar conviction that his days were numbered and so consequences could be damned. But we can scarcely rule out the less positive hypothesis that his lack of concern for the longer term had a different foundation: lack of respect for the law (what matters is results, and don’t you know who I am?), neglect of traditional values (they are for the little people), and disregard for what anyone else thinks of you. The slow accumulation of honour, the effort to retain the respect of your fellow citizens, has little purchase if you are genuinely not bothered by what they think of you, and if your firm conviction is that the media narrative can simply be changed within a few days – people’s self-interest (especially the self-interest of certain specific people, like MPs and journalists) will make them respect you (or at least conceal their disrespect) regardless of their actions.

I will admit that I am particularly cheesed off because Cummings’ extended self-justification riff yesterday ran into the planned premiere of the video of Do What You Must, the amazing version of Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue that a wonderfully talented group of performers and creative people developed back in February. Yes, it’s now available to view at any time, but I had really hoped to make it a bit of an event, provoke some interest, and if nothing else have a bit of fun live-tweeting it, rather than digging up nettles in the garden to get away from the television…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=_fY3pLycVoU

But the issue is actually interesting. Up to this point, the population of the UK in general has been proving Thucydides wrong, or at least demonstrating that social ties are not yet under intolerable strain. Trust in the wisdom and foresight of political leadership may be fraying (and secretly updating blog posts to demonstrate foresight is not a very Periclean move), but the continuing popularity of the Thursday night clapping shows that most people remain susceptible to the potential disapproval of their neighbours and prefer to demonstrate allegiance to collective norms. Apart, that is, from those who are actually in charge of everything.

The great difference – one of the great differences, among the great differences – is that Pericles led the Athenians into lockdown as the heart of his strategy, and invested political capital in it; Johnson, Cummings and their lackeys went into lockdown with great reluctance, seeing it as a distraction from their true buccaneering mission. It’s not a belief that there’s no tomorrow that drives their reckless, self-centred actions; it’s the basic assumption that tomorrow belongs to them.

Shock Tactics

Every crisis is an opportunity, and the idea of creative disruption – shaking up the system to create space for innovation and profit – is so much easier if something else has already done the shaking up for you. This is as true for universities as for everything else at the moment. The immediate and understandable response of most has been to wonder how to restore the pre-plague status quo as quickly as possible, or to worry about how far some things may already be broken beyond repair (a business model based on ever-increasing numbers of overseas students, and devil take the disciplines that can’t recruit them, for example). Some – like me – have quietly welcomed the sudden acceptance that take-home papers and other ‘alternative’ forms of assessment are actually fine and dandy. But it doesn’t take too much imagination to hear the hand-rubbing and gleeful cackling of people whom we should generally prefer to be subdued and miserable; just think of the most cynical approach to higher education you can, and almost certainly someone is already planning it…

(1) Shrinking the wage bill. For some university managers, the answer to every problem is to reduce the portion of turnover spent on employing people to deliver teaching and research, and so a burst of austerity for which they cannot possibly be blamed is manna from heaven. Already, some down-sizing and voluntary severance schemes in response to the expected fall in fee income have been announced with such efficiency that one might almost imagine that had already been drawn up. Who’s going to do all the teaching that would have been delivered by these staff (and the numerous short-term and casually employed people whose contracts won’t be renewed), given that putting everything online is definitely a lot more work? Well, this REF period is very nearly up, and hardly anyone is still going to be working on outputs for it, even if the deadline gets moved by six months – so we just need to shift the time allowance for research over to teaching! Maybe there will never be another REF, so no need to restore that time in future (at least not for humanities and social sciences), but in any case the investment now in online provision will make it easy to manage with far fewer staff in future…

(2) Why, as has already been remarked on social media, do we need so many universities giving separate lectures on the same topics? This ridiculous level of inefficiency has been sustained hitherto by the social capital and socialising opportunities afforded by actual attendance at a university, but the shift to online learning undermines that whole anti-competitive-established-provider thing. Now there’s a serious chance to grab some market share! After all, who really wants to be lectured by Dr Annabelle Earlycareer when they have the chance to be lectured by Professor Tellydon or Bloke Whose Books Are Sold In W.H. Smith? Universities may, if they really want to, find an appropriate niche in providing ancillary support and marking services for the online provider, though it will probably be cheaper to stick with casually-employed PhD students…

Further dystopian thoughts may be added as they occur to me…