Neville Morley's Blog, page 34

Poetic Licence

One of the interesting dynamics of Twitter is the way that it encourages imitation and development: predictive text games, variations on memes, daft hashtags etc, not all of which are designed to get you to reveal personal information that can then be applied to hacking your bank account. It’s one of the more joyful aspects of a platform that can at times be very depressing.

I think this explains why I sometimes have a similar response to things on Twitter that aren’t actually posted to provoke imitation; someone does something incredibly cool and thought-provoking, and I just want to have a go in the same spirit as I join in with #AddALetterRuinASong or whatever, without thinking that this might look like showing off or stealing thunder or trying to trump the originator. At least with Andrew Reinhard’s musical-archaeological music project, he did expressly make the files available for anyone who wanted to have a go at remixing a track; I just could have waited a little longer before leaping in. In other cases, which I won’t draw attention to, it’s been a case of me getting over-enthusiastic without any such invitation.

So, I feel a bit nervous about posting this… Will Pooley at Bristol has a fascinating research project, Creative Histories of Witchcraft, that combines exploration of the history of criminal cases involving witchcraft in France from 1790 to 1940 with experimentation in historiographical representation, collaborating with creative practitioners. His latest blog post, Fact… Possibility… Imagination…, explores one of these court cases, in which a man is accused of killing his neighbour, supposedly because he thought he was a witch, by setting out the summary and short discussion in the form of a vers libre poem.

This new form offers the opportunity to differentiate the historical material from the historiographical, partly by putting the recorded facts in bold and partly by pushing different types of material towards different sides of the page; there is also the communication of different speeds in the narrative and discussion, according to the length of lines, and the impression of hesitations and uncertain pauses on the part of the historian.

It’s a fascinating exercise, even if Will’s comment on the Twitter suggested that he didn’t think it quite worked. My two immediate reactions were, firstly, to be reminded of Henry Reed’s wonderful Lessons of the War (most famously, the first poem, Naming of Parts), as an exercise in making poetry out of very dull prose (or at least in appearing to do so), and, secondly and most unhelpfully, to think: yes, and this is how I’d do it…

And, as I had a long bus journey (and can’t read on buses) so couldn’t do anything more constructive, that’s what I did. I think this is a much less intellectually coherent product than Will’s poem, as I’m mucking about rather than doing serious thought about historiographical representation; it’s also more of a commentary on gaps and limitations in the historical record than one on historical analysis, as I don’t know the first thing about C19 witchcraft cases beyond what I’ve read on Will’s blog; and it’s definitely a pastiche rather than a poem. But within those limits…

28th April 1886

The date is not disputed.

28th April 1886. A Wednesday.

Around noon, as the men returned to work from lunch.

The weather that day is not recorded; perhaps it could be gleaned from another source,

But the date is not disputed.

Two men, reduced to bare facts

Which may or may not be essential facts,

Met. Joseph and Jacques, A and M, 66 and 29,

Which may or may not be essential facts.

Joseph married; Jacques not, or not specified.

Workers in the same factory; neighbours.

The last of which, at least, is surely relevant.

“So I see you’re still hounding me,” Joseph said,

Or is said to have said, to be precise.

“Fuck off, you old idiot,” replied Jacques

According to his own report, as it was later quoted

And set down in the record.

Two shots were fired. One account is offered

By the man who died,

Who walked as far as the mayor’s house to give it,

Telling others along the way.

The man who fired,

Who could have told his story many more times due to not being dead,

Remained silent

At least as far as the record is concerned.

Catch-23

Further to my piece on the decline of the blogosphere: WordPress has listened, and modified its presentation of viewing statistics so that I can see exactly how much they’ve declined! Result! Why they believe that depressing their regular users is a good idea is another question…

So, I shall defiantly continue to use this blog for things that it’s definitely good for: above all, keeping a record of random thoughts in case I ever want to refer to them (Twitter is great for many things, but finding old tweets is not one of them; “micro-blogging” my arse, unless “micro” refers to duration as well as length). And since at some point in the future I may well want to write about Thucydidean influences on Catch-22, it seems worthwhile recording my immediate reactions to the new TV adaptation.??

Okay, so you put the story into chronological order [as the adaptation has done, and been praised for it], and it all makes sense – where the whole point of telling the story out of order is that this doesn’t make sense. It’s not a war story, it’s a portrait of a fragmented consciousness. It is, quite deliberately, the antithesis of Thucydides’ “thus ended the summer; in the following winter…”. Yes, in this version we get to see the unravelling, rather than starting right in the middle of the mess and having to follow different strands backwards and forwards… [and I can well imagine that this makes things much easier for people who don’t already know the book, and who are therefore having to get to grips with a lot of different characters, many of whom are barely distinguishable whereas in the book McWatt and Kid Sampson and Nately and Aarfy and the rest are brought to life with a few sentences] …and the same unifying theme, trying to make some kind of sense of the senseless absurdity of war. With Thucydides, randomness interrupts the apparent predictable logic of events (or at least people’s belief in predictability); with Heller, sense occasionally interrupts or emerges from the chaos. Both emphasise cruelty, violence, absurdity, and the collapse of even the facade of civilised values, and Catch-22 is the logic of the question the Spartans put to the Plataeans after their surrender. But Heller’s narrative structure says something important about *modern* war [that’s been completely lost from the adaptation].

Lawful Neutral

I’ve just discovered this blog post lurking in my ‘Drafts’ file, having apparently been created in mid-March; I can’t remember why I never got round to finishing it – unlike another post I started back in the autumn, which perhaps needs to wait for an appropriate moment – but that’s probably revealing in itself. Anyway, in a number of ways this unfinished discussion connects to what I was planning to write this morning, so I’ll post it here and then add current thoughts underneath…

If what you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If what you have is a copy of Thucydides, everything looks like the Melian Dialogue.

Sometimes, this is a great advantage: Thucydides offers a way – definitely not the only way – of seeing new connections between things, and asking new questions through a process of comparison and contrast. This was the way things turned out at Queen Elizabeth School, Crediton, yesterday [that is, way back in March], where Lynette Mitchell and I were running our first pilot session with Hattie Andrews from The Politics Project; the students had great fun playing what’s become known as the Peg Game – basically, the Peloponnesian War considered as Rock, Paper, Scissors – which then led perfectly into consideration of different examples of unequal power relationships, setting things up for next week’s exploration of the Melian Dilemma choose-your-own-adventure game. The only thing we could have asked for was an extra twenty minutes for discussion.

There were also some remarkable bits of strategic ingenuity and innovation within the simple rules of the game: the student who worked out that the way not to lose was not to play, and so declared himself Switzerland; the various budding imperialists who focused on avoiding rivals of similar strength while hoovering up the small fry; and the future World Empress who subjugated a few such smaller players and then sent them out to conquer others on her behalf. All of which offered yet more material for debate about how power can and should be used, and how the powerful tend to behave.

The reason this works is that it treats Thucydides not as a hammer but as a crowbar: it doesn’t nail things shut by providing The Answer about how the world works, but opens them up so they can be examined. It’s the polar opposite of the annoying habit of ascribing any vague statement about power to Thucydides, as if that instantly confers legitimacy (or indeed sense). Case in point: various people on the Twitter claiming this week [in March] that Trump’s latest incoherent babbling is referencing the Melian Dialogue:

….must stay strong and fight back with vigor. Stop working soooo hard on being politically correct, which will only bring you down, and continue to fight for our Country. The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them. Be strong & prosper, be weak & die! Stay true….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019

Yeah… The claim of Sebastian Gorka that Trump can intuit Thucydidean insights without actually reading any seems to carry more weight than that interpretation. Or, indeed, the hilarious assertion of Victor Davis Hanson, in his new book The Case for Trump, that Trump’s relentless focus on success and esteem as the only measure of value, and hence the only thing anyone should care, about echoes Thucydides’ distinction between prophasis and aitia – pay no attention to what people claim, but only to the real motives.

This involves the usual underlying two-step of Thucydides’ contemporary image: content/sensibility and authority/insight, each reinforcing the other, and attaching oneself to Thucydidean sentiments is naturally taken to imply Thucydidean authority. There’s a certain echo of Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Government isn’t about right or wrong, it’s about order against chaos.” Thucydides as lawful evil, as Stefano Frullini, @saxeusque, presented him around this time: https://twitter.com/saxeusque/status/1105515539621916672?s=21

In other respects, Hanson’s take is rather odd, given his overall – much-derided – claim that Trump is a kind of Homeric or tragic hero. Thucydides appears twice more in Hanson’s book, plus as an opening epigraph. He’s mentioned in passing as one of the many Athenian writers who “dreamed of a better route to consensual government than radical democracy” – yes, we see what you did there, VDH, and the use of ‘consensual’ to describe attempts at doing without the active consent of the governed is a neat trick. Trump and his “middle-class populism” are presented as nothing new – but as part of the noble tradition of Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, and of course Thucydides (and in subsequent paragraphs Achilles, Ajax, Augustus, Martin Luther, Dirty Harry, and The Wild Bunch).

Secondly, he acknowledges that critics have compared Trump to a classical demagogue, including Cleon, “the bete noire of the aristocratic Thucydides’ masterful history” – but then seeks to turn this into a positive, refiguring Cleon as a model of rhetorical power and directness, as “those who cannot speak to a crowd cannot become demagogues”. This could have been predicted from the opening of the work, where Hanson, without the slightest trace of irony, quotes Cleon’s claim that “ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows”, normally offered as a populist attack on elites. Is Hanson really claiming that the superhumanly gifted Trump is ‘ordinary’? Or quietly admitting that Trump’s great gifts may not entirely suit him to managing public affairs? One would guess that the “ordinary men” are the voters who ignored the sneering of those superior liberals to elect Trump, but it’s not entirely clear.

The next chapter presents two Americas in terms of Athens v Sparta, the sophisticated coastal elites versus the rough unlettered rural folk, again explicitly evoking Thucydides. Hanson presents himself as the mediator, who lives among the real people but knows his way around the world of the city – and so his choice to side with the ‘Spartans’ is based on full knowledge and understanding, not the ignorance of knowing nothing different (a fault of the clever Californian and Beltway elites as well). He is the modern Thucydides, seeing events from both sides with scrupulous objectivity, and ultimately favouring the stability of Sparta; a man who stays out of politics and does not seek power but recognises, even as he recoils from, the charisma and power of a Cleon, despising and desiring at the same time his rough anti-aristocratic manliness. Cleon’s methods are not those of Thucydides’ class, but they promise to have the desired effect on the corrupt status quo, which is simultaneously too democratic and anti-populist…

***

Which brings us to the present, as, whatever conclusion I had in mind for this piece back in March, what I did actually wrote down does connect to what I was talking about, in a slightly rambling manner, in ‘Remaking Thucydides’ at the Institute of Classical Studies reception seminar yesterday (audio and PowerPoint slides here). In brief, what’s the proper relationship between the critical study of the modern reception of Thucydides, of which Hanson’s book offers one example of very many cases, the critique of such receptions on different grounds – and one’s own ‘remaking’ of his work for present purposes, as in our project with schools?

It’s easy enough to note how far Hanson’s references imply a reading of Thucydides in which he can be presented as a purveyor of pithy political wisdom, combined with Thucydides as the reliable purveyor of historical data that can then be reinterpreted, and with a powerful image of Thucydides as a particular kind of writer and authority. The question of the grounds for criticising this reception is trickier; a matter, I think, of drawing out the work that this evocation of Thucydides is doing, and identifying the goal of the enterprise, rather than allowing Hanson to imply that this is all a natural and inevitable conclusion. It seems wise to avoid arguments that this is in itself a ‘misuse’ or illegitimate appropriation of ‘the real’ Thucydides – however much it seeks to claim that it is the only reasonable reading.

As I’ve commented before, the world of Thucydidean reception is a paradoxical world in which a long, complex and ambiguous text is reduced to simplistic sound bites, and in which detailed accounts of the causes and consequences of specific historical events are read as timeless, universal principles. Is it actually any different to take the Melian Dialogue, turn it into games and interactive activities, and encourage students to draw analogies with their own experience?

Well, that’s something I am continuing to think about, not least because I am conscious of how far my insistence on reading Thucydides as a text that’s all about raising questions and provoking debate is no less founded on subjective interpretation and imaginative projection than the usual Realist or neocon versions. Perhaps I can claim some credit for not seeking to draw on Thucydides’ authority – there is no expectation in this project that anyone should have heard of him or that they should accept ideas simply because of the association – but rather drawing inspiration from his work (both the ideas and the literary experiments) as a means of developing something useful that doesn’t overtly depend on Thucydides at all.

One of the interesting challenges of the ICS talk – which probably explains the lack of focus – is that it’s the first time I’ve sought to think about how the project does relate to these broader questions of reception and appropriation. Conceivably, I was given an easier time in the discussion than I deserve; one might reasonably complain that my drastic re-engineering of the Melian Dialogue is no more credible, let alone authentic, just because it’s mine, and is just as much a politically-motivated travesty as all the stuff I regularly criticise. Perhaps, as was raised in discussion, the problem is really with the persistent conception that Thucydides is not just another literary artefact to be reworked at will, but something that demands more respect. After all, there are still people who get furious about modern productions of Shakespeare…

As I was planning to say in my conclusion, but ran out of time: I began my research into Thucydidean reception with more or less no convictions about ‘the real Thucydides’ or the true meaning of his work – and have somehow ended up with both a powerful sense of its susceptibility to multiple contradictory interpretations and a powerful belief in what one might call its spirit. I can sidestep this with the cliche ‘good to think with’, without having to commit to the position that this was intentional or that this is how Thucydides intended to make us think as a result of reading his work – but if I’m totally honest, I do partly believe that.

Lawful Evil? I think one could make a better case for Lawful Neutral – but maybe even Chaotic Good, opening up questions and problems in the belief that people will be able to start sorting themselves out if only they can break free from ingrained assumptions and patterns of thought…

We Have The Technology…

So it turns out that the best way to revive the blog viewing statistics and get some discussion going, at least temporarily, is a post on the decline of blogging and the absence of discussion… Thanks to everyone who read and commented; yes, the numbers are sliding back to their old level already, but it’s good to know that there are people out there still committed to this genre (and I still maintain that it’s a distinctive genre, certainly from the perspective of a writer, whatever @rogueclassicist thinks…). In the meantime…

In the meantime, I try to work out why WordPress won’t let me embed an embeddable player… In the interim, this will have to do:

https://abahachi.podbean.com/mf/play/v2dzgy/Thucydiocy01.mp3

Yes, prompted by some of the suggestions on here and on the Twitter, I have moved into podcasting. Or at least into a different sort of podcasting. Some readers might vaguely recall that I’ve posted music-related podcasts in the past, which does mean that I already have some grasp of the technology (not the linking to iTunes, though; still working on that) and already own a decent microphone. The bad news is that the wish to link to iTunes and build a proper audience means I’ve had to delete the old music podcasts before the copyright police come a-knocking; I still have copies, if anyone would like one…

This is very much a work in progress; I had done some research for this episode about a year ago, when I first wondered about getting into vlogging and then never got round to learning how to use the technology, so it is likely to take a month to find time to research each future episode – but there is certainly enough material to keep me going for a while. I also need to work out cat-related strategies; the occasional interruptions, when Olga jumped into a cardboard box on the table and then somehow pushed herself off or when Hector started attacking the cat flap, were manageable (I guess I could have edited them out altogether) – but I really hadn’t realised how much of the episode features the jingling of collar bells in the background…

Update: it turns out that wordpress.com doesn’t support the embeddable player. Harrumph.

Blogs? Huh!

What are they good for?

This thought was prompted in the short term by a friend’s remark in a Facebook discussion that “I remember blogs” – followed up, when I enquired, by “#obsoletetechnology” – but I’ve been wondering about it for a while in the face of a steady decline in the viewing and visitor statistics for this one.

This isn’t a passive-aggressive demand for affirmation; I don’t feel entitled to an audience, especially when my posts can mostly be characterised as “self-indulgent and random”, but rather am genuinely interested in the reason(s) why the aforementioned self-indulgent and random posts (which have not noticeably changed their character over the last few years) are now much less popular than they were. No, nothing I’ve written has been picked up recently by a powerful influencer like Mary Beard (generally good for a couple of thousand extra views), and I haven’t picked fights with any writers of popular history (at least a few hundred) – but comparing the last six months with similar fight-free, influencer-disregarded periods, the decline is unmistakable.

I’ve published three things in the last week, on different topics, and am still struggling to hit viewing figures that, a year ago, were normal for periods when I hadn’t published anything for a while. Something has definitely changed. Audience tastes? The style of this blog hasn’t changed, but maybe that’s the problem, as people want to read about different topics or prefer different styles. General crisis of the humanities, or crisis of Classics in particular? Or is it a wider shift in communications technology and patterns of consumption, so people just don’t read blogs so much any more?

It would be interesting to hear about other people’s experiences, as writers and readers. My fuzzy and unscientific sense, based on my impression of discourse on the Twitter, is that more people seem to be publishing longer pieces in curated web magazines or via sites like The Conversation, rather than having their own blogs – but I’m not sure if these are bloggers who have switched medium, or people new or writing for wider non-academic audiences who have decided that this is more straightforward than trying to keep a blog going. And of course the people I follow on the Twitter are certainly not typical of the wider public, who may all be sticking to traditional media brands, even if now online, or alternatively getting everything from some new platform I’ve never heard of.

If so, that does feel rather sad. As a writer, I love blogging, for the freedom to write about anything I feel like, however I wish, on the spur of the moment and in response to current events or to whatever I happen to come across; it’s immediate, without necessarily being ephemeral, and it keeps me writing even when my days are hectic and fragmented. And as a reader I love it equally for the random thought-provoking post from someone I’ve never read before and probably never will again and for the opportunity to get to know a writer over time in many different facets.

And blogs are really, really good for certain kinds of things. Does the world need a book on, say, Brexit and Classics? I don’t think so; there’s not enough material to support a serious analysis of classical reception (and it’s only classicists who will believe for a moment that any of it is significant), while attempts at drawing lessons for Brexit from antiquity will inevitably be trite, polemical, both, or at best – the use of the Melian Dialogue, obviously – just an instance of a wider phenomenon (Thucydides illuminates everything), rather than specific to Brexit.

Rather than the would-be totalising discourse of a book, even a multi-author book, what this topic needs is blogging: multiple perspectives, describing different analogies (Syracuse! The departure of the legions!) and promoting them or criticising them, polemicising from different positions, engaging furiously with one another, varying between serious academic analysis and humour and satire and personal reflection and snark. Which is pretty well what we’ve already got, if you put together the range of blg posts from people like Mary Beard and Edith Hall, articles in the New Statesmen and the Spectator and on the Politico website, and my interminable rants. Maybe all that’s missing is for someone to pull together a handy collection of links with limited commentary, like the annotated bibligraphies that Eidolon has been producing. But an old-fashioned book is simply the wrong medium.

Technology is one of ways in which I feel – as pretty well everyone does, some time or another, for different reasons – slightly out of time: just too old to have properly got the hang of computers and the internet so always a ‘digital immigrant’ and always catching onto trends when they’re already passé, just too young to be able to feel relaxed about this. I always had the sense when I started blogging that I’d already missed the best bit; like I’m really getting the hang of the technical possibilities of the scroll when the cool kids are switching to the codex.

Twitter is great, for many things, but too short-form (even with 280 characters) for much of what I want to do. The problem with podcasts and vlogs is that they need a chunk of free time for the recording, whereas I can write a blog in little increments over a few days – and the fashion for vlogs seems to have risen and fallen over the period of me acquiring some equipment and trying to get the hang of it. If anyone can actually tell me what the next big thing will be, I’m more than willing to consider it, just to have the feeling of being ahead of the curve for once – but only if it can offer me something of the genuine joys of blogging…

If fellow bloggers read this, I’d be very interested to hear how you’re finding things these days – and if you’re reading this, you’re a reader of blogs by definition, so arguably an even more important source of evidence for what’s going on. I make no promises whatsoever of taking any notice of feedback, so you can forget about the fan petitions to make future posts adhere more rigorously to canon, but I would be keen to hear how my experience relates to wider cultural trends.

Funny Games

Two apposite remarks on the Twitter this morning. David Henig (@DavidHenigUK) noted the current Brexit paradox (which might easily be added to my ongoing collection of fragments of Zeno of Elea) that prospective Tory leadership candidates compete for the role of delivering Brexit by adopting positions that make it ever less likely that Brexit could actually be delivered; he’s responding to a thread by Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) that includes the comment that “a more useful way to do this would be one of those fables, where the king sets the suitors a task in order to win the hand of the princess: results before reward”. For some reason this idea is then dismissed as impractical. Is it really?

Okay, it’s not as if we can let a bunch of drugged-up ideologues actually attempt to negotiate with the EU without any mandate (though it’s not as if there’s much the UK could do now to make everyone else take it any less seriously) – but this is where simple simulations come into their own. I have reluctantly concluded that it would not now be a good idea to let these people loose on my Melian Dilemma game, as the “let’s get everyone killed in the interests of personal power and wishful thinking” option is just too close to what they’re already offering. But the power of the Twine system is that it would be dead easy to build a simple ‘Choose Your Own Brexit Negotiation’ adventure.

Persist in seeking imaginative technology-based solutions to the Irish border? You end up in an endless loop and lose by default. Opt for the decisive “blow it all up” No Deal option? You immediately find yourself back in almost exactly the same game, seeking to negotiate a trade deal, only this time with the country collapsing around you. There’s no way of ‘winning’ – all you can do is try to find a way of not losing too badly – other than not to play in the first place. Anyone who actually realises this should get to be PM by default – but of course they’ll then be torn apart and eaten by rabid party members…

Letting Go

This week is especially heavy on travelling, which is terrible for doing all the writing I imagined I’d get done once marking was out of the way, pretty terrible for my waistline as I resort too often to coffee and cake to keep going, moderately good for starting to work through the long list of overdue book reviews, and very good for blog posts. I’m currently, in theory, on my way to Zagreb for a doctoral workshop on pre-modern economics [update, three hours later: finally on the move…] On Tuesday I was in Manchester, and on Wednesday in London, for teacher-training sessions for the ‘Understanding Power’ project – aka ‘Thinking Through Thucydides’, but that name isn’t going to pull in the punters – that Lynette Mitchell and I have been developing with the Politics Project.

This was tiring, a little stressful – and finally a joy. It’s the moment when the fledgling stork, still fluffy and ungainly, starts to jump up and down in the nest, trying out its wings, gaining more and more height each time, and you think: yes, this is going to fly. [whaddya mean, you don’t watch Stork Cam?] Presenting our material, the activities and the underlying resources, to the teachers who will actually be putting them into practice, feeling deeply nervous about their reactions – and seeing that, yes, they get it, they can see what we’re trying to do and are keen to give it a go. This thing is going to fly. And it’s going to go to places we could never reach ourselves.

I think I’ve commented on here before that one of the big things I’ve learnt about engagement beyond academia – and it’s one reason why this project has been at least six years in the making – is that you have to give people something they want, even if you give them other things as well; you can’t force anyone to accept your exciting new project, however brilliant it is, if it doesn’t suit their needs. This week has been more about the other big lesson: you can’t limit what people then do with what you give them, and you shouldn’t try.

Okay, I guess this principle is less absolute than the first one, partly because it is possible to imagine cases where you would want to limit what people do with your research, and partly because it might be practical to do so, if we ran every school session ourselves. Which does exist as a possibility, if anyone wants to invite us for a one-off session, but if that was the only route to engagement and impact, it would have a very small reach indeed before we collapsed from exhaustion. By handing delivery over to teachers, having worked with the Politics Project to develop and refine the activities and resources and training, we can expand the number of schools and students who can get involved, and increase the amount of time spent on the activity, since we don’t have to be there to do it all.

But it’s actually about much more than scale; it’s about flexibility, and trust. The core of the whole project is the idea that Thucydides helps open up questions, rather than closing them down; the core outcome we’re aiming at is that students will have thought about a set of related issues, not that they will have acquired specific knowledge or specific views.* Opening things up means they could head off in many different directions – the fundamental questions that the Melian Dialogue raises about power and justice can apply to any number of different situations, and certainly different students will have different responses to them. It’s their teachers, not us, who will know best how to guide the discussion, how to help their students engage with and connect different ideas, and how to handle difficult situations when they arise – when the image of an abusive power relationship comes too close to home.

So this is what we’ve tried to create: a framework that provokes thoughts and questions about power, generating ideas which teacher and students then work through together under the guidance of the former. It’s an approach inspired partly by the original US Naval War College use of Thucydides, as a means of talking about Vietnam without having to mention Vietnam, but also by making a virtue of the fact that people can clearly find analogies between episodes in Thucydides and absolutely anything. It is the polar opposite of trying to promote a specific idea or message; for us, it’s been all about learning to let go, to create a space in which each discussion can learn to fly in its own way – just hoping that, at the end, they remember it was Thucydides who gave them that initial push out of the nest.

Of course, this creates a different problem: not wanting to be there at every session to see that they run according to plan, but wanting to be there at every session to see all the different ways in which people respond to the activities and the ideas…

*Obviously if they acquire knowledge of ancient history, and an interest in it and a sense of ownership and engagement, that’s a massive bonus, but it’s not the point of the exercise.

Note that, while you’ve clearly missed this set of training sessions, we are definitely aiming to do another round in September. If you are interested in getting involved with the ‘Understanding Power’ strand of the Politics Project’s digital surgeries, please do contact Hattie Andrews (harriet.andrews@thepoliticsproject.org.uk) at the project, or get in touch with me (n.d.g.morley@exeter.ac.uk) for a preliminary chat.

And, yes, I am posting this at 1am UK time as my flight was hours late and I’m only now unwinding at the hotel…

The Birth of Strategy from the Spirit of the Muses?

I’ve just had a review published on War On The Rocks (a reliably interesting website for analysis of foreign policy and strategy, from a viewpoint that is predominantly US-focused and frequently Realist), on the new book by Hal Brands and Charles Edel, The Lessons of Tragedy: statecraft and world order (Yale UP, 2019). As you can probably gather from the review, I found this rather an odd experience; indeed, half-way through the book I became increasingly convinced that I was a completely unsuitable reviewer, as after the first couple of chapters the ‘tragedy’ element largely disappeared, and B & E’s conclusion is not that US strategy people all need to start reading tragedy (that might be fun…), but that they need to review more recent history in the alleged spirit of tragic sensibility, which largely boils down to an assumption that bad things will continue to happen.

In a TLS review a couple of years ago, Donna Zuckerberg pondered the continuing influence of Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way and its romanticised, idealised image of Greece as the fount of Western Culture. B & E offer further evidence for this, as Hamilton is their key source for the claim that Athenian genius derived from their tragic sensibility, founded in their constant reference to the advice and admonitions of the great tragedians. It’s the sort of idea that is so outdated, so out of step with classical scholarship for half a century and more, that it’s quite difficult to know where to start. My review ended up longer than expected simply because of the need to try to explain current (well, you know, post-1960) approaches to a non-specialist audience, and rewrote various sentences multiple times to avoid making statements that needed a paragraph or two of references to justify something that would barely need a footnote in a current academic publication.

As I said, the bulk of B & E’s book has absolutely nothing to do with classical Athens or tragedy (or Nietzsche, though he gets cited rather a lot), and the choice of a classically-inclined reviewer seemed inappropriate, however much sense it must have made looking at the title. But in practice I suspect that most reviewers will be foreign policy wonks or IR specialists, perhaps with the odd historian to comment on their takes on the Peace of Westphalia and the Congress of Vienna. My take on those topics is unavoidably general and amateurish – but the same can probably be said of other reviewers’ takes on the classical stuff. In isolation, my review might be problematic, but as part of a review ecosystem, so to speak, it has a part to play.

Of course, the most interesting aspect of the book is why they wanted the classical framing for a basically historical and strategic argument at all. Is their policy approach of a reworked ‘Nothing in excess’ genuinely inspired by reading tragedy, or at least Hamilton? Or is this all about the power of the classical (cf. That Bloody Thucydides Trap) to add authority and prestige to an argument about politics and history..?

I’ve Come For My Award…

I’m in two minds about scribbling this, and may change my mind about publishing it by the time I’ve finished; something that has always, quite irrationally, infuriated me about academics on social media is the way that some of them just use it to celebrate their successes and forthcoming media appearances. Non-specific sighs and laments in search of sympathetic responses are entirely forgivable in comparison…

But I am really chuffed about this: I’ve been given an ‘Above and Beyond’ award by the university, in recognition of my efforts on impact activities and social media. Now, The moment I write that I feel the urge to qualify it; it’s just a Head of Department nomination, the impact stuff is very much a collaborative exercise with my colleague Lynette Mitchell, and the whole thing is somewhat invidious as we’re all working well beyond any reasonable measure of a normal workload. But it’s still nice that Exeter attempts to recognise such efforts, and, more importantly, this is the first time that anyone in a position of authority has said anything positive about my blogging.

So, next time I catch myself wondering whether it’s worth it – whether the efforts I put in here, for steadily diminishing readership levels, are the reason why I’m so far behind with ‘proper’ academic writing – I have an additional motive to keep plugging on, the guilt that I might be letting the department down if I stop… More seriously, I do this because it’s still fun; and, realistically, if I wasn’t devoting time to this, I would probably not be making any more progress with chapters and articles, but continuing my work on a soundtrack for the forthcoming Thucydides cartoon, having spent yesterday recording the narration in my best Oliver Postgate manner.

Nouvelle Vague

“Knowledge without understanding is useless.” Duh. It’s exactly the sort of banal truism that excites my paranoia; the idea isn’t important, but rather what someone making such a statement then wants to do about it. You could deploy it in opposition to rote learning, and the idea that there’s a list of Essential Facts and Dates that every child ought to know by heart, to argue for a focus on analysis and interpretation. But you could also – and this comes to mind with the publication this week of a new report on post-18 education in the UK, with implications for the health of the whole university system – deploy it in an attack on high-falutin’ book learning in general, or on studies that aren’t directly engaged with the Real World – it depends on whether you imagine that understanding comes through the acquisition of knowledge, or derives from a separate source (practical experience, ideology, religion…) which is independent of actually knowing things.

How much difference does it make if the quote is attributed to Thucydides, as has happened in contexts as varied as the Grauniad tech blog (back in 2009) discussing webpage front ends, editorials on recent developments in dairy research, and the usual plethora of motivational posters and tweets? Probably not a lot; vague maxim just needs any old authority to back it up. It may be significant that, at least on posters and quote sites, it isn’t attributed to anyone else, but none of my searching has found a more credible, potentially original attribution. The problem is that the line is SO bloody vague and trite that Googling the phrase without mentioning Thucydides gets nowhere; it’s used in any number of homilies and meditations (cf. Luke 18: 31-4; Colossians 1.9), reflections on Eastern Wisdom, discussions of education, mental health, leadership and entrepreneurship, personal development… When I asked about this on the Twitter last year, Eric Glover (@dolichon) noted a resemblance to a fragment of Heraclitus (Diels-Kranz 40, from Diogenes Laertius IX.1): “Much learning does not teach understanding; else would it have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, or, again, Xenophanes and Hecataeus.”

Could it actually be Thucydides? Again, it’s so vague… I do plan to skim the Funeral Oration again to see if any phrase resembles it, but it could come from other speeches as well – it simply lacks any specific reference or associations. It is a phrase that I can imagine a commentator on Thucydides using, specifically on 1.21 and the idea that his history will be useful and a possession for ever, not just a compilation of information for its own sake. But as far as what Thucydides himself actually says, the emphasis is far more on the knowledge and the need for accuracy – understanding is to be acquired by having a true knowledge of events, rather than something to be set up in opposition to that knowledge. So my best guess, given the relatively persistent attribution (and, more importantly, the lack of other attributions), is that this comes from someone’s account of Thucydides, transferred to the man himself – but the chances of actually tracking down the original seem quite slim.