Neville Morley's Blog, page 29

First Contact

Further musings on what next year’s teaching might look like… Yes, I know that there are already highly successful distance-learning models out there, above all from the Open University, and we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I suspect that what we end up doing will be rather different: we don’t have the time to develop all the material and supporting framework for full-blown online courses by September (especially with the likelihood, given recruitment freezes due to enormous financial black hole, that we’ll all need to take on more courses than planned), and most of us lack the experience (and probably skills) to make that work – better to produce a hybrid that plays as far as possible to our existing strengths – and finally universities are likely to want to distinguish their offerings from what’s already available from the OU.

Of course, there’s a big risk there: that they decide to distinguish themselves by making some big headline commitments that turn out to be horrendous to implement in practice. I’m reminded of the obsession with contact hours of the last decade; the idea that a simple metric tells you all you need to know about the quality of a programme, the efforts involved in justifying to higher powers the benefits of small-group teaching (with lecturers, not just PG lab assistants) that then set limits on how many hours we can offer at existing staff levels, the time wasted on creating new activities to bulk up the notional contact hours count that students never attended because they didn’t see the point (hello, dissertation workshops!).

So, what I dread is a blanket edict that students will be guaranteed x hours per week of face-to-face contact with lecturers, or that current class hours must be exactly replaced with online sessions – ignoring all the evidence that asynchronous interaction may be much better for many activities for many students, especially if there are issues with their access to the internet. It’s going to be enough work turning e.g. my Thucydides class – which currently consists of a very flexible, improvised discussion around the set topic and passages for a given week – into something that offers students a lot more support and guidance; it will be so much more work if I have to guarantee a full two hours of online seminar as well as creating online material, moderating discussion boards and so forth. Guidance and advice, great, and I can see the argument that we won’t want too much disparity between what different lecturers offer. But as far as possible we need flexibility to produce something that suits both us and the students, with the demands of the marketing programme a very low priority…

Not least because this will inevitably work best with proper buy-in from lecturers: we (mostly) care deeply about our teaching, and enjoy the challenge of developing it, even under circumstances not of our choosing – but only if there is acknowledgement that we have actual experience and expertise, and know something about students and their needs. And, just as important, we will need buy-in from students, and the ability to make adjustments if not radical changes in the course of the term if/when it becomes clear that some things simply aren’t working. We haven’t done this before; we’re certainly not going to get everything right first time, and we can’t afford to impose constraints on ourselves in advance that will prevent any attempt at resolving issues.

Given the possibility of flexibility, we can unleash the enthusiasm! I’m actually delighted, for example, that we’ve had to switch conventional unseen exams for 24-hour take-home papers this term; it’s something I have long wanted to do (I hate unseen exams for anything besides basic language assessment), and suddenly all the usual objections have been swept away, guidance and principles have been developed pragmatically in a matter of days, and here we go – and, with a bit of luck, here we stay.

I’m also reminded a bit of the idea that past leisure activities can suddenly take on new significance…

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Yes, all those hours spent in online communities, especially the late lamented Readers Recommend music blog on the Grauniad, learning how to interact with total strangers through mutual interest in a topic (and wildly diverging views on it), watching how the discussion could become more engaged and personal as people got to know one another (even behind silly avatars and pseudonyms; what mattered was the persona presented in the interaction), and the community started to develop its own etiquette, norms and in-language. How can this not be useful?

As has been observed by others, there’s an enormous difference between providing online classes for students who have signed up for this from the beginning, providing them for a couple of weeks for students who already know one another pretty well from the previous two terms – and starting from scratch with a group which may not have met at all. My experiences so far of Teams, Zoom and the like is that they work better, at least with larger groups, with a clear structure and a fairly firm directing or coordinating hand. How is that going to work with my teaching style, I wonder (can everyone break into smaller groups?)? Even more, how does that support the small personal interactions, the chats before and after class, that gradually build a group identity? Simple answer: it doesn’t.

But I’ve seen it happen in online discussion boards. Yes, some people participate more than others, some are more interested in the serious business of suggesting Songs About Fish than the joking around (and vice versa), and it is inevitably going to make a difference that we’ll be doing it with our real names on a university system (the Uncanny Treehouse Problem), and it’s compulsory rather than voluntary. The point is that the potential exists, and I have ideas about how it might be coaxed into existence.

And a major part of that is thinking about how to avoid the standard blog problem – exemplified here – of a long discussion followed by stony silence. One key point – equally valid for normal classes, of course: always ask open questions. So, people, what does or could excite you about these new teaching conditions..?

Being Boring

I am not, whatever my wife thinks, a workaholic. Punctiliously conscientious, maybe; if I fall ill and am likely to be out of commission for a while (yes, as feared at the beginning of the week, I do seem to have come down with the plague, thankfully so far in a pretty mild form) then I am going to take the time to inform the people who might otherwise be expecting to hear from me over the next week or so – Head of Department, people in charge of teaching, assessment and exams, students on my various modules especially those with an exam coming up, postgrads, colleagues involved in impact project, co-editor of book, a couple of contributors, niece who won’t be getting a Skype history lesson this week. That’s not workaholism, that’s common courtesy. Workaholism would be getting worried about the fact that the university webpage sends me on an endless loop from the ‘guidance on COVID-19 sickness reporting’ page to the ‘this form no longer exists, please see the sickness reporting guidance’ page. Which to be quite honest I am really not.

But it is true to say that I am very bad at doing nothing. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve remotely grasped the point of a summer holiday involving a lot of sitting around in the sun relaxing, rather than charging round lots of museums and interesting sights – and only on the basis that I have a big pile of books, the opportunity to scribble some blog posts, and the prospect of doing things with exotic local ingredients later in the day. If my brain isn’t working – a common occurrence – then I either do mundane but necessary admin, or something practical like cooking or weeding the vegetable patch, or go for a walk. Whereas currently my head is full of cotton wool, my limbs ache, my coordination has gone and I don’t have the energy to get off the sofa. Which is, I repeat, a much better situation than most people with this virus, to the point where I even wonder whether this is a false alarm or something else, but it is BLOODY BORING.

A friend once tried to persuade me of the benefits of yoga and meditation, as a means of managing my propensity to stress and depression, and I can see this in theory – I just can’t manage it. My energy is restless, even when I don’t have any. I fidget, I tap my fingers without noticing; my thoughts flit from one thing to another, but not in any sort of productive manner. I suspect I’m going to be spending a lot of time on the Twitter.

https://images.app.goo.gl/sYQmb4KXTpUG4WQR8

The New Normal?

It’s the first day of the new term! Interesting to see how far the countryside along the line from Castle Cary to Exeter has changed in just a month, especially with all the warm weather we’ve had in recent weeks. An excuse to drop into The Exploding Bakery next to Exeter Central station, as it’s over a month since I last indulged in one of their cakes. Lovely to meet up with colleagues again. Above all, however, it’s the culmination of my final-year Thucydides module, the student conference on Thucydides’ Contemporary Relevance, in which they all offer their different perspectives on the text that they’ve been slogging through all year, culminating in a guest lecture and general debate. Well, that was the plan…

Instead, here I am at home, wondering whether that current slight headache, achy shoulders and tiredness is a sign that I am inevitably succumbing to the virus, or just the legacy of an energetic weekend in the garden and a rather disturbed night. My sense of seasonal change is limited to the aforementioned garden (which is doing very well so far this year, because of all the time we’ve been able to devote to it in lieu of any other activities), and the ‘student conference’ now consists of uploading everyone’s PowerPoint slides and notes to the VLE. I think a fair proportion are focusing on Thucydides and COVID-19; it might have been fun – since now the only person likely to be engaging with this material is me – to have got everyone to do that topic, but that would be unfair on those who’ve been planning their presentations for well over a month.

The combination of this and a couple of interesting threads on the Twitter this morning has got me thinking about the future – what is teaching going to look like next term? (Especially, as some of my dreams have made abundantly clear, as I am very definitely suffering from lecturing withdrawal). I’m due to take on a substantial admin role next year, so scheduled just to teach two final-year modules rather than, as this year, doing a big (150-odd students) survey course as well. I keep changing my mind about whether this is a good thing or not.

To start with the big one: it’s a no-brainer that this will be impossible under conditions of social distancing – it takes 10 minutes to get the previous group out of the room and my group into it, under ‘normal’ conditions of everyone milling around in close proximity, and idea of two lines of evenly-distanced students, each line about a quarter of a mile in length, somehow avoiding contact with one another and with all the other students trying to get to or from different rooms is simply inconceivable. Besides, the whole point of my lectures is to get the students talking in small groups at least some of the time – doesn’t work if they’re all two metres apart. So, the whole thing might as well go online; it’s then manifestly obvious that there’s no point at all in expecting everyone to log in live (even if the system could cope), so it becomes a matter of redesigning the whole thing as a different kind of learning experience.

Much of the time, this feels quite unappealing; as I think I’ve commented here before, I enjoy the performance and improvisation aspects of lecturing, and the challenge of getting discussion going in a big group, and I’ve found this year difficult at times because of the demand for me to change my style of PowerPoint slides (which also necessitates a change of lecturing style) and to make available (which is also to say: to fix) much more in advance. Creating an online module would leave even less space for such flexibility. But I can think of some interesting things I could try, if I needed to.

The big advantage, I think, is knowing that I would have to start more or less from scratch. The reason why it often feels an advantage that I’ll (probably) just be doing small final-year seminars is that it feels less impossible to try to recreate the usual seminar experience online; the reason why it doesn’t always feel like an advantage is the suspicion that actually it may not be so easy and/or maybe I shouldn’t be thinking in those terms at all. It’s possible to see Microsoft Teams (the university’s mandated system) being used for a seminar of 10-12 students, where a class of 150 is clearly a non-starter. But having now had a couple of department meetings via Teams, I’m sceptical of the value of the experience. We’re going to be putting a lot of thought and effort into creating protocols for online class discussion that might, perhaps, be better invested in thinking about whether online class discussion is what we actually need to prioritising. The fact that it’s currently the core of these modules isn’t set in stone; it’s worth keeping in mind that it is, in the end, the means to the end.

Again, part of the issue has to be: do I instinctively try to preserve something resembling the normal seminar experience because that’s what a final-year module is all about, or do I do it partly because it’s what I’m used to and partly because I enjoy the experience myself, improvising different ways of getting discussion going, responding to unexpected questions or perspectives etc.? If the discussion were more structured, as a result of being set up properly in advance, might it be possible to get more people more involved – and even more so if it takes place asynchronously, so people have time to think and compose their answers, rather than privileging the ability to come up with coherent thoughts spontaneously?

The really unpredictable factor, of course, is what sort of external constraints there will be on how we are expected to go about switching to online delivery (assuming that this becomes unavoidable) at some point over the summer. Probably there is no point in thinking too hard about this, if I might have to tear everything up again in due course. But it’s difficult not to wonder about what’s going to happen – if only, let’s be honest, as a means of grasping some illusion of control: goodness knows what’s going to happen to society, economy or higher education over the next four months, but I *can* still think of how to deliver my teaching effectively, on the assumption that there will be some students to deliver it to. The cats are getting rather sick of it…

Fear Itself

The Thucydides Bot (@Thucydiocy) is not monolingual, but I remember only occasionally to check variant spellings like Thukydides and Thucydide, and to be honest I very rarely remember Tucidide. It’s therefore taken me a while to realise that there is a new iffy quotation in town, that is circulating almost exclusively in Italian media and social media (with one slightly surprising reference from an Albanian language school in Kosovo), so that even the couple of citations of the line in English use Tucidide rather than Thucydides.

Atene fu distrutta dalla paura della peste, non dalla peste

Athens was destroyed by fear of the plague, not the plague itself.

Hmm. Surely not? Thucydides never makes anything resembling this claim, as far as I can see – not least because Athens doesn’t actually get destroyed until decades later, and not in his surviving narrative. One might, if you squint at the text a bit, offer this as an interpretation of the reason why the plague was so deadly (T’s comment in the way that those who fall ill were filled with despair and basically resigned themselves to death), or as an interpretation of the collapse of traditional values and morals (which T presents as a response to the uncertainty of life and the dramatic changes of fortune, rather than to the fear, but it would be reasonable enough to say that the way people responded to the plague was more important than its actual effects). But that doesn’t make it an actual quote.

The earliest reference I can find via Google is an essay by the writer Pierfranco Bruni on March 7th (in Polis Notizie), which was reprinted next day in the Corriere di Puglia e Lucania. It’s a slightly rambling meditation on Gabriel García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera (context obvious), with wide-ranging reference to other plague-related literature: Camus, Lucretius, Gogol, Thucydides…

Così come disse Gogol riprendendo una frase di Tucidide. Gogol: “Più

contagiosa che la peste la paura si diffonde in un batter d’occhio”.

Tucidide: “Atene fu distrutta dalla paura della peste, non dalla peste”.

Variazioni in tema e oltre. Considero Marquez riferimento insieme a

Camus.

The Gogol is perfectly genuine; it’s from Dead Souls (p.301 in the edition I found online: “fear is more contagious than plague and spreads in an instant”. But the idea that he’s reworking a phrase of Thucydides is something I can’t find mentioned anywhere; is this Bruni’s own idea (it certainly seems to be his own translation of Gogol – where he has “in un batter d’occhio”, published versions have “all’istante” or “in un baleno”).

Bruni’s article seems to have been picked up and quoted by various people (and, interestingly, on 8th March an article by one Alessio Mannino, discussion official responses to coronavirus in the Veneto opened with the “Athens was destroyed…” quote as if it was familiar to everyone – but I can find no trace of it before Bruni’s piece, so absent other evidence I think Mannino simply took it on Bruni’s authority). But what really disseminated the line was a news story for Corriere TV by Claudio Bozza, which interviewed the head of the carabinieri in a town in Lombardy about the way his men were now delivering vital oxygen cylinders. The article opens:

Atene fu distrutta dalla paura della peste, non dalla peste». Per affrontare la drammatica ondata di contagi, il comandante della stazione dei carabinieri di Alzano Lombardo cita la massima di Tucidide: «Stiamo facendo di tutto per aiutare i cittadini, anziani in particolare — spiega il luogotenente Fabrizio Dadone — siamo 15 militari e nelle ultime due settimane siamo impegnati a tappare la falla più grave che sta lasciando in ginocchio la nostra terra». Il comandante si riferisce alla forte carenza di ossigeno, vitale per curare questo maledetto coronavirus che attacca i polmoni e lascia senza respiro.

“Athens was destroyed by the fear of the plague, not by the plague.” To face the dramatic wave of contagions, the commander of the police station of Alzano Lombardo quotes the Thucydides maxim: “We are doing everything to help citizens, the elderly in particular – explains Lieutenant Fabrizio Dadone – we are 15 soldiers and in the last two weeks we are busy plugging the most serious leak that is leaving our land on its knees.” The commander refers to the severe lack of oxygen, vital to cure this damned coronavirus that attacks the lungs and leaves you breathless.

Unfortunately the video clip doesn’t show Lt. Dadone quoting Thucydides; rather, it offers a much more mundane summary of what he and his men are up to. I’ll be quite honest, while I love the idea of a local carabinieri chief quoting Ancient Greek history, even if it’s not actually a genuine quotation, I remain somewhat sceptical in the absence of any concrete evidence…

Toxic!

#HowCoronavirusDemonstratesTheEternalRelevanceOfThucydides Part 752… There are still few signs that the infection curve is flattening out; no sooner had I finished a snarky Eidolon piece on the proliferation of ‘Thucydides and the plague’ hot takes then a couple more appeared – thankfully, without doing anything to undermine my general claims about the pointlessness of most of these discussions. I did quite enjoy Jennifer Roberts’ ventriloquism, perhaps a distant cousin of my occasional donning of a fake beard to make Thucydides videos.

The positive aspect of all these different evocations of the Athenian plague has been the fact that they’re mostly accurate summaries (the repeated assumption that democracy came to a permanent end after the Peloponnesian War aside); the problem is what this summary is supposed to signify. But this morning brought an exception, which seemed worthy of remark; not an entire article on Thucydides and plague, but one of those ‘Ever since the days of Thucydides…’ openings, familiar from international relations pieces, in a bizarre Washington Times article on coronavirus as bio-terrorism.

The idea of biological warfare has been with us over the centuries. You can start with bits of Thucydides’ vividly ugly description the Plague of Athens in 430 B.C.E…. Mycotoxins, biological agents that can occur in nature from rotting or spoiled food or grain, would produce that sort of horrible death. Thucydides briefly considered the possibility that the enemies of Athens mixed toxin-laden grain in shipments to Athens. 

Yeah, but no. What we have here is a confusion of something that Thucydides did mention – the rumour, at the beginning of the outbreak in Piraeus, that the Spartans had poisoned the wells – and one of the innumerable modern theories about the nature of the plague, given the bewildering range of symptoms Thucydides recorded, namely ergot from spoiled grain. As far as I can recall, there is no suggestion in the latter discussion that this was deliberate – after all, if Athens’ enemies had known enough about the dangers of toxic grain to concoct such a plan, the Athenians would have known enough to recognise the problem – but the idea of accidental poisoning, like the idea of an epidemic as a devastating natural occurrence, doesn’t fit with an article whose basic aim is to present Covid-19 as a deliberate Chinese plot, abetted by the World Health Organisation.

It’s an interesting example of the garbled transmission of second- or third-hand information (writes and then deletes ‘Chinese whispers’…) and inadequate fact-checking. As a reception of Thucydides, however, it’s rather dull; he’s the ever-reliable reporter and authority figure, and if he noted the possibility of enemy action (and not as “this is what some foolish people believed”, which would be more accurate but less convenient) then we all ought to be on our guard…

My Name Is…

There’s nothing like an enforced lockdown in the middle of a global pandemic to force someone like me – not antisocial, exactly, but inclined to assume that others are happy to get on with their lives without me imposing on their precious time – to start making contact and reinforcing connections. Longer emails for family and close friends, regular social media contact for everyone else – with a powerful sense of how far I’m already a member of a couple of really important online communities, consisting mainly of people I’ve never met in person, that are now even more important.

One of the things this has brought home is how downright weird some of the algorithms have become. I mean, the whole point of belonging to a local community group on Zuckerberg’s Evil Empire is to hear the latest news, not to get an update on Wednesday that someone was looking for a recommendation for veg box deliveries last Wednesday. Various people have disappeared from my feed entirely, unless I search for them, while I still get regular updates from a couple of students I taught in Bristol a decade or more ago (hi Clio! I hope you found your online yoga tuition). The Twitter is slightly better, but it was very odd to get a notification this morning that someone had liked a tweet I was mentioned in, which turned out to be a discussion from over a month ago of which I had no knowledge whatsoever as I’d never received any alert.

I now feel rather bad that people were looking for my input and just got silence, especially as the topic is indeed something on which I have Opinions. Okay, there are relatively few topics on which I don’t… Even weirder, the alert has now disappeared again, and I can’t find any trace of it, so I can’t check that my recollection of the debate is actually correct or weigh in belatedly there. So, just to prove that I can start an online argument in a disregarded blog post…

How should we conceive of ‘Classics’ – or, what should we call it instead? This is now a well-trodden issue, and people like Jo Quinn have written insightfully about the great weight of historical and ideological baggage the term now lugs around with it: the obsession with language and literature, the narrow geographical and chronological focus, the elitism, imperialism and sexism… Of course much of actually-existing Classics is nothing like this, but the question of whether the subject can ever shake off these associations remains open – especially when, as becomes clear whenever there’s a wider Classics-related news story, many people in the wider culture in countries where Classics has traditionally been strong want it to remain what it was (if not to strip away some of its modern accretions). And especially when, let’s be honest, it’s still difficult not to fall back into old-fashioned evocations of ‘the roots of (Western) civilisation!’ when defending it to university administrators or trying to tempt in students.

One of the problems with changing the name is the loss of such ‘brand recognition’ – perhaps an issue especially for the UK, where students have to be persuaded to commit to a subject from the very beginning of their university careers, rather than in a system where they can pick and choose different courses, and may be much less bothered about the name of the department that delivers them.

Another, however, is the worry that changing the name would be somewhat fraudulent; what sort of ‘Department of Ancient Studies’ teaches only Ancient Greece and Rome? It’s already – albeit quite rarely – a question that gets raised by potential students in relation to Ancient History; no, sorry, despite the name on the door, we don’t do pyramids. Privileging Greek and Latin does actually make some sense in a Department of Classics; is the Department of Ancient Studies going to re-educate all its Latinists to deliver Hebrew and Sanskrit?

Okay, so Classics is a classic case of “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you”, and it may be that the depths of crisis, upheaval and uncertainty are not the best place for a radical re-think (the original Twitter thread was, I think, back in February). But one could argue that the aftermath of crisis, upheaval and uncertainty – the likely need for different sorts of rebuilding – is an excellent time for a radical re-think. We can adopt a name that is about the future, not the past, of the subject; not what we are, but what we want to be. Start thinking of ourselves as, say, Ancient Studies, and see where that takes us.

This isn’t a blueprint for wholesale revolution and reorganisation, firing and hiring – not least because no one is ever likely to give me that sort of power, and especially not if I explain what I’d do with it. But we can be the change we want to see in smaller ways. Think about the way we present ourselves to students, and the messages we give them about what’s important. Think about the assessment questions we set, and the topics we include in courses – and next time we need to propose something new, make sure, insofar as we’re able, that it fills a gap in the Ancient Studies curriculum rather than the Classics programme. Keep looking out for opportunities for collaboration and exchange – easier in some universities than others when it comes to teaching.

In the longer term, it’s important to be flexible and imaginative when it comes to replacing posts. Yes, there’s a real double-band here, needing to justify replacement above all in terms of ability to deliver the existing curriculum while wanting to change the curriculum through recruiting people with different expertise – but at the least we can write cunningly-worded job remits, and then hope that the best people who apply are also the most interesting and diverse, in which case it’s just a matter of fighting off the “yes, they’re brilliant, but can they deliver these seven modules that we’ve taught since time immemorial?” argument.

Be the Ancient Studies you want to see…

Thucydides Explains Everything

People respond to crisis, not to say imminent apocalypse, in different ways. I’d been expecting to struggle through the final two weeks of term, staggering punch-drunk out of the maelstrom that was 150 Greek History essays into the need to write the final classes – an interesting exercise to view the expansion of Rome from the perspective of the eastern Mediterranean, but to be honest I wasn’t looking for new intellectual experiences at this time of year – and hours of consultations, about dissertations, essay feedback, final essays and the Bloody Impact Case Study. I was planning to spend most of next week asleep.

Instead, I find myself strangely full of energy. It does help that Hans, the cat who’s taken to prodding me awake at about 3.30 am because he’s bored and/or hungry, has adopted a more civilised sleeping pattern, probably helped by the fact that the weather is better and so he gets more exercise. But mostly – and I confess this with a certain embarrassment, as I know how difficult many people are finding this – I think this is down to the crisis. My inner Ballardian antihero is finding new purpose in the radical alteration of daily life, the sudden opening up of new possibilities…

So, the shift to online teaching offered lots of creative problems – what’s the best way to support anxious students *and* effectively reproduce (or even enhance – I’m actually really excited about the enforced change to 24-hour take-home papers rather than traditional exams) the original experience as far as possible? – and far from bring relieved that classes are now over, I fear a significant withdrawal crash, and will probably be lecturing to the cats by Thursday if I can’t find an alternative audience.

My peasant ancestry kicked in for a couple of days, and I made jars of kimchi, pots of braised red cabbages and five pounds of wild garlic sausages – wild garlic pesto next week – and would have had a baking drive if I hadn’t managed to break the oven. My new imperial stout has been bottled, and ingredients bought for the next brew. New raised beds have been constructed and fed with well-rotted compost, seeds sown, potatoes planted and logs sawn.

My blog has been more active, together with the usual yelling at the internet, and I’ve recorded a new podcast in my Thucydiocy series as well as being interviewed for a War on the Rocks podcast. Finally – and this may be the conclusive evidence that the crisis has done something to my brain – I’ve seized the opportunity to put into action an idea that my wife had a year or so ago but I never had time for, and so have bought a false beard…

Everyone treats Thucydides as an unimpeachable authority figure, The Man Who Knows – but for some reason assumes that he has knowledge to contribute only on topics like war and politics. In Episode 2 I offer his forthright views on the pressing issue of social distancing, and that’s pretty sane compared with some of the ideas I have in mind. Normality can’t return soon enough.

Doom! Doom!

What is the point of these proliferating ‘Thucydides and coronavirus’ takes? Besides giving different academics a chance to get an article into one or other prestigious publication, obviously – never let a good crisis go to waste… This was one of the key themes that emerged in the course of an online discussion this morning with at least some of my final-year Thucydides class, for the final session of the year (and I can’t quite believe how emotional I feel about having a chance to interact with some students, rather than just creating discussion topics that no one comments on and launching audio files into the void…).

If there is a point besides self-advertisement, it’s not a consistent one. Some takes seem focused on reassurance – if only that Thucydides was able to make sense of such events, 2500 years ago, so we should feel okay about it. Others take the opposite tack, seeing the new Plague as the thing that will finally trigger the Thucydides Trap they’ve been confidently predicting for some years – or as something that will sound the death-knell for democracy (whatever happened to the fourth century..?). It makes me feel like a bit of an outlier, since – in my contribution to the ongoing flood, an interview for a podcast at the War on the Rocks website – I took the line that the Plague seems to have had remarkably little effect on the ability of the Athenians to wage war, apart from the possible consequences of the death of Pericles.

Obviously if Xi does get Corvid-19 and is replaced by a new generation of more aggressive and reckless leaders, indulging the demands of the people for an aggressive strategy, we should all start worrying.

People Are Strange

Has the Independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) read Thucydides, or Camus? The indications aren’t promising; on the basis of the publication yesterday of the evidence supporting the UK government’s rapidly evolving (sic.) strategy to handle the epidemic, this is the Scene That Celebrates Itself, with a list of scholarly literature mostly consisting of publications by members of the group (way to massage the h-index, guys!). Yes, a major plank in the case for deploying behavioural science to deal with the coronavirus outbreak is an op ed article arguing for the deployment of behavioural science to desk with the coronavirus outbreak…

What they do have, of course, is a lot of polling data about how people say they would respond to different sorts of interventions, as a basis for anticipating behaviour and trying to ‘nudge’ it in the right directions. What worries me is not the accuracy of this data and how it’s analysed, or even whether we can trust that the people being polled are telling the truth (an issue, of course, in political polling); it’s the fact that people are being asked to imagine how they might behave in an imagined, unfamiliar situation. They haven’t lived through a fast-spreading pandemic; how can they know how they would actually respond, in completely new conditions?

This is why we need history, whether the detailed records of the influenza pandemic of the early 20th century or the careful account of Thucydides of the Athenian plague or the imaginative reconstruction of Camus: as a means of understanding how people may behave under unprecedented conditions of stress and uncertainty. A key aspect of Thucydides’ account is precisely that they don’t behave ‘normally’; the traditional institutions, values and social expectations all buckle and collapse, time horizons shrink – live for the moment’s pleasure, because wealth and life are transitory, and the path of honour takes too long – and emotional states are dramatically heightened, from absolute despair to unshakable confidence.

It’s entirely plausible to argue, as people like Josh Ober and Aaron Turner have done, that Thucydides needs to be considered through the lens of social psychology – the Sicilian Debate as a case study in cognitive traps and biases, for example. But it’s not normative social science, establishing clear principles on the basis of a fixed idea of human nature. On the contrary, Thucydides’ ‘human thing’ is fuzzy, inconsistent, and somewhat unpredictable; just as no single remedy for the plague works for everybody, so not everyone responds in the same way. Some shun the sick, even their own families, while others risk their lives to keep looking after them; and reducing this to a quantified estimate of self-sacrifice probability rather misses the point.

Indeed, if I were inclined to be really sarcastic, I might suggest that Thucydides’ juxtaposition of the noble, in retrospect entirely unrealistic generalisations of Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the horrors of the plague – which of course also carried off Pericles – offers a possible analogy for the fate of the Nudge Unit…

Wishful Thinking

We have already had a number of ‘Thucydides explains Coronavirus’ takes, of varying degrees of silliness – and the first sign of a fractal effect, whereby Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’ misreading of Thucydides generates ‘Coronavirus Thucydides Trap’ misreadings of Allison misreading Thucydides – but I would dare to suggest that we’re already past the worst. Writing to students, the Dean of College at the University of Chicago eschewed the usual discussion of new rules and practical measures in favour of a rather idiosyncratic form of reassurance. His former graduate adviser had told him an anecdote about the dark days of 1942, when his superior officer reassured him with reference to Thucydides: wars rarely turn out in way you expect them to at the outset.

It might seem a bit of a stretch to draw an analogy between the Peloponnesian War and the current pandemic – but the Dean has a much more ambitious imaginative leap in mind:

History provides insights into the powerful impact of institutional structures, traditions, and deep cultural patterns, beyond the quirks of individual human choices, in determining historical outcomes. That is, there is a powerful lesson, which I believe offers hope for us today, embedded in the arguments of one of the greatest of ancient historians and his magnificent work about the dire struggle between the Athenians and the Spartans in the Fifth Century before the Common Era. Thucydides reminds us of the resilience of common institutions and sustaining values, and above all of the importance of holding together in support of the human communities that undergird and constitute those institutions. Even dark moments are transitory, and crises can end with bright spots from everyday heroism.

Yes, that’s exactly Thucydides’ point in showing how Athens responds to the plague and Corcyra deals with political divisions and Athens then copes with catastrophic military defeat. Resilient institutions, sustaining values, bright spots of everyday heroism.

The charitable interpretation – involving at least as many intellectual gymnastics as the original claim – would be to argue that Thucydides does show us the importance of social institutions and values by highlighting their fragility and the dire consequences when they do start to collapse. But manifestly that’s not what is being said here – that would be a very different sort of message. If the man has ever actually read Thucydides, it must have been an awful long time ago, and probably skipped the plague narrative.

In which case what we have here is another example of the powerful image of Thucydides as the man who knows, the man who understands the workings of the present and future from the distant past – but in place of the usual cynical realist, with no illusions about the fact that everybody dies and most people die miserably, we have Thucydides as Pollyanna. Don’t worry, be happy. It’ll be fine. Fear not, folks, if we stay true to our values we will come through this and…get to invade Sicily.

And this from a university that still prides itself on studying the Great Books. Maybe that doesn’t involve actually reading the things, but knowing the names – and of course they wouldn’t be Great if they didn’t say the right things, like the inevitable triumph of Good over Evil and the inherent benefits of capitalism. Thucydides is a cornerstone of our values; these are our values; so Thucydides must say something along those lines.

The current world health crisis, like all great but also terrible moments in history, will impact our lives in many unknowable and frightening ways. But it will also pass, and in passing it will reaffirm our confidence in the fundamental logic of our institution, in the productive and creative learning of our community, and in the extraordinary dedication and courage of you, our students.

Because manifestly the core message of coronavirus is that the education offered by the University of Chicago is superior to every alternative. Thucydides must have been an alumnus. This doubtless explains his prominence in one of the Chicago Maroons’ fight songs – which in turn is probably why the Dean thought this was the best Great Western Author to evoke…

Themistocles, Thucydides,

The Peloponnesian War,

X squared, Y squared,

H2SO4.

Who for? What for?

Who we gonna yell for?

GO, MAROONS!

Update: I’ve been reminded by @SethLSanders on the Twitter of the great Danielle Allen’s address in 2001 at the same University of Chicago, a model of how one might reflect on Thucydides in times of crisis…

https://college.uchicago.edu/student-life/aims-education-address-2001-danielle-s-allen