Neville Morley's Blog, page 38

Blogs of the Year 2018

It is perfectly possible that I spend too much time on the Internet, and on social media. But there is so much amazing stuff out there – insightful, informative, passionate, provocative, brilliantly written stuff, produced not for profit but for the sake of the ideas and the wish to communicate with others – and if it wasn’t for the Twitter I wouldn’t know a thing about most of it. My ‘best of’ list seems to get longer every year, perhaps because I’ve got into the habit of making notes as soon as I’ve read something, rather than relying on my ever more erratic memory to recall things from earlier in the year – and this is as much about reminding myself and revisiting things as it as about recommending that you should read them too…

January: Jonathan Saha on Safe Spaces for Colonial Apologists; Rebecca Futo Kennedy on Black Achilles and white Dorians; Michael Cook on the limitations of games and complex messages; Henry Farrell on Philip K. Dick and the fake humans – this is not the dystopia we were promised…

February: Serene Khader on women’s empowerment (why has there been only the one post from her on Crooked Timber..?); Yung In Chae on classical whitesplaining.

March: Clive Barnett on the crisis of legitimation in higher education; the (for me, anyway, in desperate need of optimism) highlight of Maria Farrell’s excellent How to Cope with the End of the World series, even the world’s biggest problems aren’t hopeless; magicman on Charlie Parker and I.

April: Andy Kesson on reasons to love Kate Bush; Jo Quinn on Phantasmic Phoenicia; Harrison Troyano on ancient aliens and Schliemann in space.

May: Howard Williams on depictions of Vikings on Lidl lager; Rachel Moss on Unsexy History; the start of Paul Hayes’ powerful and moving blog on keeping oneself alive; Laura Sangha on the ethics of writing about very dead people; Liv Mariah Yarrow on peer review as (self-) pedagogy; the CREWS project on writing systems in Star Wars.

June: John Holbo on epistemically sunk costs; the excellent series of blogs on science fiction and empire from Exeter’s Centre for Imperial and Global History (I do regret not having had the time to try to contribute something to this…).

July: Adam Roberts on fantasy violence; Phil Edwards on demographic cohorts and their taken-for-granted attitudes.

August: Emily Henderson on whether conferences are holidays.

September: Penelope Goodman on Quatermass and the Mitheaeum; Peter Gainsford on the citation problem in that terrible article on social networks in Homer.

October: the first instalment of Isabella Streffen’s new gardening blog; Angry Staff Officer on what Star Wars teaches about mentoring.

November: Catherine Fletcher on word counts and writing targets; Natasha Reynolds on cognitive dissonance and decarbonising archaeology; sententiaeantiquae on Classics, class and identity.

December: busy month so I’ve got stuff to catch up on, but Xenogothic on Mr Blobby, Mark Fisher and Brexit is unmissable…

Trading Places

One of the many ways in which we can read Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue’ is as a study of trade-offs, and how people calculate and evaluate them. The Athenians explicitly use such language; for example, off-setting the loss of respect and trust among Greek neutrals if they destroy Melos against the increase in fear among their subjects, with the view that the result is a net gain in their security – and their claims about Spartan reluctance to help their allies unless it suits them takes for granted a similar way of thinking. It is of course a paradox of their position, insisting on an unsentimental evaluation of present circumstances rather than speculating hopefully about what might happen in future, that their calculation rests so heavily on assumptions about how people will behave and hence how events will turn out – and Thucydides effectively critiques their assumptions, both by showing the Melians refusing to follow the same logic and by narrating the subsequent events that show how poorly the Athenians actually anticipate future developments.

Whereas the standard (e.g. Yanis Varoufakis’) way of representing the Melian Dialogue in terms of game theory focuses on individual decisions in a situation of unequal power, studying how people’s approach to that same situation changes with greater experience, one might equally present it in terms of choices between different sorts of benefit and loss, over different time scales and/or with different degrees of probability: because of their dominant position in the short term, the Athenians disregard longer-term risks, while the Melians disregard immediate disadvantage in favour of hypothetical future possibilities of salvation. As usual, the key point is that both are shown to be wrong…

In the case of my own choose-your-own-adventure game – latest version nearly finished, and as ever when I write about this topic I hope I’m not going to argue myself into another re-design – this is expressed primarily through the narrative, commenting on the consequences of the player’s choices: if the Athenians slaughter the Melians in the authentic historical manner, the story closes by looking forward to the sure-to-be-glorious-triumph expedition to Sicily, while if they opt for short-term caution, or even start favouring ethical integrity over power, the result may be less favourable in immediate terms. The Athenians can ‘win’ in multiple ways – indeed, arguably it’s difficult for them to lose – but that does depend on how the player decides to define winning, and that is largely a matter of whether they can achieve the sort of trade-off between advantage and integrity, short- and long-term perspectives that seems right to them. (Plus there is some uncertainty and randomness built into the game, but that’s a slightly different issue).

The main issue in designing the game has always been: can the Melians win? As before, it depends on how you define winning – in terms of trade-offs: crudely, you and your people can survive as subjects of the Athenians, or you can die as citizens of an independent state (there are some other possibilities and variations, but the one thing not on offer is the Athenians leaving you in peace; if you take the Melian role, you face the historical Athenians, not a modern player who decides to implement an ethical foreign policy…).

Cutting across this ‘slavery or death’, ‘sovereignty or survival’ dynamic is also one between mass and elite; it’s always worth keeping in mind that it’s the Melian oligarchs who decide that it’s better for everyone to be slaughtered by the Athenians than ruled by them. It’s clearly implied that the Melian people would opt for continuing existence, given the option; certainly that’s the Athenian view of why the Melian leaders want to talk to them in private, and arguably it’s another count against the Athenians that they know this and go along with it anyway, indifferent to the fate of the population – unless they assume that the Melian oligarchs will eventually see reason as well.

What if the Melians had a Meaningful Vote? It’s difficult to avoid thinking of Brexit at the moment, especially in this context. It’s clear that there are various people who would, for different reasons, love to be in the oligarchic position – May wanting to enforce her plan, the E ‘R’ G fanatics wanting to crash out with no deal – but lack sufficient support for their chosen trade-offs (total shambles as long as it stops Freedom of Movement and Disaster Sovereignty respectively). The EU, playing the Athenian role, can limit its concessions to the former and ignore the latter on the basis that these would-be oligarchs’ preferences are not the final word, even if they persist in their self-destructive irrationality. But, like the Athenians, they follow this course with the risk that a short-term victory may have serious longer-term consequences…

Before people start yelling at me, yes, it’s certainly true that it’s not just a few well-heeled ideologues who believe that economic harm is acceptable as the price of freedom from the EU, especially if that harm largely affects other people; crude material interest is not the only desirable good. The question is how much harm over what sort of timescale is acceptable for how much freedom, and that’s a discussion that still needs to take place, given that many Leave figures are still promising gains rather losses from their plans. One imagines that there were Melians with a similar perspective, given Greek emphasis on political independence as an essential part of life.

And this, as I keep saying, is why the Melian Dialogue matters: it doesn’t offer answers, but helps us think through questions in a relatively neutral context. Thinking ourselves into the roles of Athenians and Melians, we have to consider not only what it is that we want, but what it’s possible to get, at what cost – given that this also depends on what the other side want and do (the Melian Dialogue is, above all, utterly opposed to Cakism). That dynamic between the two sides is vital: how far does the situation itself, the condition of having the clearly dominant or clearly subordinate position, lead to a hardening of positions and escalation of rhetoric? The Athenians experience the Melians’ responses as irrational and deluded, and become more convinced of their own superiority as a result; the Melians see Athenian arguments in terms of bullying and tyranny, and so become ever more persuaded of the importance of protecting their freedom at all costs…

It is sadly too late to force everyone in government to play the game and think about the implications for Brexit; but maybe we can get this in place before the next crisis…

Just Disillusion

The idea of Thucydides as a man without illusions, who sees the world as it really is rather than as he or anyone else might like it to be, is a dominant strand in his modern reception. It lies at the heart of the historiographical representation of him as someone not merely impartial but genuinely objective; it underpins Nietzsche’s rhetorical contrast between Thucydides and Plato, and Arnold Toynbee’s portrait of a man “broken” by the events of his time who then puts himself back together; and of course it’s the foundation of the whole Realist tradition in International Relations.

No illusions, no arguments, no hope; take all that away, and what’s left? Me. Or rather, in the sphere of political thinking, broadly defined, the trick is to use Thucydides to tear down opposing ideas as illusions and delusions, with the implication that what’s left at the end is real and incontestable. Nietzsche dismisses Plato with the claim that he flees from reality into the ideal; Thucydides has the courage to face reality – which, at least for half an hour or so (one doesn’t look for consistency in Nietzsche) is taken to be really real, not just a different set of stories. IR Realism dismisses the idea that ethics or ideals can play any significant role in the world, in favour of the absolute rule of power – taken to be an unavoidable feature of the world as given to us, not a choice or a belief. Thucydides’ stripping away of all illusion works to present one’s favoured beliefs as not illusionary at all.

This post was prompted by the rather nice example of an article by Bruce Thornton on whether feckless millennials can be rescued from the siren song of socialism. This opens with the neat trick of condemning both Karl Rove’s recent call for the marshalling of arguments against socialism and the whole progressive agenda as manifestations of a 2500-year-old belief in the power of rational argument to improve human life, exemplified by Plato, already comprehensively demolished by his contemporaries [sic.] Thucydides and Sophocles. The status quo is naturalised, while any proposal to change it is dismissed as self-indulgent utopianism; and the defenders of that status quo are simply accepting the reality of things, exempted from the more general criticism of humans for irrationality and self-serving delusion. Faction is always the other guys; attempts at changing society always end in bloody disaster, so the resistance of older generations to any attacks on their privilege is always a selfless, rational rejection of the politics of self-indulgence.

Yeah, right. I mean, it’s undeniable that Thucydides had little respect for people’s tendency towards wishful thinking – but he was equally unimpressed by confident, cynical claims to understand the way the world works. The fact that the Melians appeal to justice and principle and still get slaughtered does not mean that the Athenians are right in their claims about the nature of the world. Rather, we’re shown that the sorts of arguments people put forward, and the beliefs that underpin them, are at least partly determined by their circumstances – much as the baby boomers for whom Thornton claims to speak see their current comfortable circumstances as a just reward for virtue, unjustly threatened by the politics of envy and resentment, while the coming crisis (which will confront cosseted millennials with harsh reality) is not their responsibility at all. It’s like the Athenians after the Sicilian disaster: shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that young people are disaffected and inequality is rife, as if they had never voted for such policies.

The unexpected effect of this article was to make me feel oddly sympathetic towards Karl Rove, otherwise associated with the worst excesses of Dubya imperialism: a commitment to arguing against ‘socialism’ (meaning wishy-washy social democracy by European standards) is surely preferable to a contemptuous dismissal of any attempt at communicating with the vulgar irrational masses. Rove believes in politics; Thornton’s world is anti- or pre-political, a weird combination of a Hobbesian state of nature and a natural aristocracy in which everything comes down to ‘character’ (citing Thucydides again).

It’s an open question as to whether Thucydides intended his critique of human folly to justify smug elitist quietism, as opposed to improving the quality of political deliberation through greater understanding. But regardless of his unknowable intentions, we as readers have a choice about how we use it: to invoke his authority to dismiss everything we dislike as foolish idealism, or to follow his example in questioning every illusion, including our own…

Mingle in the Mincing Machine

Somewhere in the middle of my very long list of ‘things it might be fun to do if I can ever find the time’ is the idea of writing an article, or at least do some thorough research, on the subject of ancient sausage-making (both cooked and fermented), if not curing and brining more generally. I can’t decide if it’s a character flaw, or just a predictable habit, that I generally feel an urge to ‘academise’ my hobbies; my bee-keeping phase led to what’s still one of my favourite publications, I have a half-finished piece on reading Roman agriculture through the principles of organic growing… It’s a fairly predictable but effective move: compare what we know of ancient practices with modern scientific understanding and/or principles, as a way of opening up questions – not least, on occasion, wondering about how on earth the Romans could have kept bees for centuries and still believed that one could gather a new swarm from a dead ox…

With sausages, one of the key questions is how (or how far) the ancients developed more or less effective, non-lethal production methods in the absence of any concept of microbial contamination. If nothing else, a bit of research would put me in a stronger position vis-à-vis broad and unreferenced historical assertions in some of my charcuterie books, where at the moment I’m reacting with purely instinctive annoyance. For example, in the introduction to John Kowalski’s well-regraded The Art of Charcuterie (2011):

The trade of charcutier goes back at least as far as classical Rome. In such a large town, slaughterhouses, butchers, and cooked-meat shops were well-organised to safeguard public health.

Harrumph. First sentence seems unfair to Greece (see e.g. the sausage-seller in Aristophanes’ Knights), though Kowalski may be using charcutier in a very narrow sense and thinking just of the solid material evidence for brined pork shoulders being shipped down to Rome from northern Italy. Second sentence… well, in the absence of any detail, it’s hard to be sure; perhaps this is just saying that we know different Latin words for slaughterhouse, butcher and cooked-meat shops, and could deduce from this that there was (at least some of the time) functional differentiation and specialisation. But the way it’s framed suggests that, firstly, this was absolutely standard; secondly, this was officially enforced (“well-organised”); and thirdly, this was done on public health grounds.

The emphasis throughout Kowalski’s book is on the need for obsessive hygiene and careful separation of raw, cooked and processed meats – understandably, given the major risks involved – and the underlying tendency of his introduction is to sketch not just the historical roots of charcuterie but also the development of health and hygiene principles. The implication – echoing some very conventional tropes about Roman urbanism, fresh running water, clean streets etc. – is that the Romans attained a high level of awareness and good practice that was then ignored or forgotten in the Middle Ages and only recovered with the advent of modern scientific analysis.

My instinctive reaction is to start yelling at the book: that’s not how it was! Ancient sausage-making, one imagines, was more in the tradition of Terry Pratchett’s CMOT Dibbler; if (big if) slaughterhouses were banished to the outskirts, that’s about practicality and aesthetics not public health; if butchers, cooked-meat sellers, preservers of meat products etc were separate enterprises, that reflects the benefits of specialisation within a large enough market, not fear of cross-contamination. But I have to admit that it’s a long time since I read the relevant bits of Roman law, and that there’s a lot of research to be done before I can get annoyed on a solid evidence base.

In the meantime, there’s a piece I want to write on the emergence of the musical trio in classical antiquity, as a kind of proto-jazz…

What’s In A Name?

Considering how far the Twitter is full of bots or sock puppets pretending to be people, so that’s become the automatic accusation against someone you don’t know spouting stuff that you don’t like, it’s interesting how far proclaiming oneself to be a bot is taken completely at face value. Especially when winding up angry, ill-informed neo-Nazis.

The original plan for The Thucydiocy Bot was indeed that it should be an autonomous programme, but I haven’t the first idea how to do that – and at best that would work only for familar fake Thucydides quotations, not the new and/or ambiguous ones that are generally more interesting. I retained the name, even though actually I do all the tweeting, on the assumption that people might get less cross at being corrected, however politely, by what they thought to be an automatic programme rather than by an actual human pedant, and this generally seems to be the case.

But every so often someone gets annoyed, and disinclined to accept correction – and more often than not the result is a conversation that seems, at any rate from my privileged viewpoint, confused and contradictory: they address it/me with questions and comments that are surely beyond the grasp of any current AI, and whether or not they expect a coherent and relevant response – I can well imagine the temptation to mess with a bot in that way – they then seem to accept the answer at face value, and carry on the argument, every so often throwing in phrases like “you’re just a bot, what do you know?” and “how can you be programmed with everything Thucydides ever said?” that do suggest a continuing acceptance of my professed identity. Is this how everyone talks to Siri and Alexa? As if the Singularity has already happened?

Case in point: on Sunday, a dodgy-looking account (don’t bother looking for it, it’s not there any more) posted a lot of dodgy statistics about ‘white genocide’, together with a quote: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”: Thucydides. No it isn’t – and it also isn’t Voltaire, to whom it’s more commonly attributed, but US neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom, who has written at least one angry blog post complaining about Voltaire being given the credit.

The poster was really not happy to have this pointed out. First, there was blanket rejection of the correction; then, presented with a few web links, resentful insistence that it was just a typo; all of this peppered with claims that I was editing his responses to make him look bad (yes, it’s tinfoil hat time) and furious denunciations of the malign agenda of my programmers, who are clearly determined to spread dissension and undermine order. It eventually became clear that the real trigger was the phrase “neo-Nazi”, applied to people like Strom and (by implication) himself: not because they repudiated white nationalism and any admiration for Hitler, but because the admirers of Hitler never called themselves Nazis, which was rather a term of abuse derived from AshkeNAZI Jews now being used to discredit the wholesome agenda of white nationalism, exactly as my programmers intended…

Yes… At this point, even an imaginary bot starts to edge towards the door, and reports the account for racism, anti-Semitism and general hatred-spreading. What struck me was the coincidental link to the book I was just finishing, the sixth in Volker Kutscher’s series of Krimis set in 1930s Berlin (see Fear and Loathing in Berlin), which is of course full of Nazis as we’ve reached 1934. I think – I haven’t checked – that the word is not in fact used by any of the Nazis themselves; Kutscher is good at this sort of background detail, such as the fact that the Geheime Staatspolizei are at this date still known as the Gestapa, although we readers know what they’ll soon become. But it’s clear that ‘Nazi’ here is an abbreviation in the same class as ‘Commie’; descriptive at best, often hostile, but that is a matter of what the name stands for, not the name itself.

In some ways, Kutscher’s latest book is less depressing and disconcerting than the last couple; not for its leading characters, who have a miserable time of it, but for the reader alert to contemporary parallels. Hitler is now in power, the police (especially the ever more powerful Gestapa) is stuffed with his loyal supporters, and with the SA he has a paramilitary force of several million men, who arrest, torture, extort and kill with impunity; at least in the West, things today are clearly nowhere near this bad.

But… 1934 Berlin is also full of people who think that things aren’t too bad, or that the crisis will pass; there’s widespread belief in the ability of Hindenburg and Papen to make use of Hitler and moderate his excesses before dropping him back into obscurity, in the idea that abuses are the work of a few bad apples, in the efficacy of just keeping one’s head down and obeying the law. Kutscher presents the process of normalisation, and the power of optimism and hope; we readers know that things are going to get worse – and are prompted to reflect whether that’s actually true of our times.

Meanwhile, we see characters negotiating differently slippery slopes, sometimes unknowingly. Kommissar Rath has been compromised since Book 1, and suffers this time mostly from failing to take his gangster patron seriously enough, but now his wife Charly makes the mistake of asking the charming but sinister Dr M for a favour, as well as getting mixed up with communists on the run; meanwhile, their foster son Fritze is agitating to join the Hitlerjugend because all his friends have and it looks fun, and then starting to wonder about his parents’ suspicious behaviour, and Rath’s former assistant is rising in the ranks of the Gestapa and dealing with his homosexual leanings by shooting his occasional lover from the SA during the Night of the Long Knives, and you don’t want to know about the dog…

As before, part of the interest is seeing how small-scale personal stories play out against wider events whose course is already familiar; we know what’s happening to Germany, and the question is how these characters will respond to changing conditions. The delay between hardback and paperback publication meant that I knew from the start that there would be at least one more book even before I started this one – and I’m almost inclined to invest in the hardback this time, just for the thrill of not knowing whether this time it’s the end. There is a sense of impending crisis and of narrative pieces being moved into position; Rath’s freedom of action gets ever narrower, professionally and personally, and we’re shaping up for multiple betrayals – Charly has now called him a Nazi in the course of a row, in a contact in which this was certainly an insult…

 

Goodbye to Berlin

I sit in Kilkenny’s Irish Pub
In Flughafen Schönefeld
Uncertain and afraid
Or at least rather depressed
As the clever hopes expire
Of an interesting couple of years...

This has been my final week in Berlin as Einstein Visiting Fellow – we weren’t successful with an application for an extension, and in any case my long-standing collaborator, Christian Wendt, has moved to Bochum – and I’ve spent much of it trying not to get too miserable. It’s been a privilege to spend so much time here over the last three years, to work closely with an excellent group of colleagues and graduate students, to get to know more about the German university system and the research landscape (especially as I started getting invitations to events organised by the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaft and similar organisations), and to participate in some interesting events organised by the Einstein Stiftung. If nothing else, it has been incredibly good for my German.

I’m sure that, whatever happens with the ongoing car crash of Brexit, I’m not going to lose touch with Germany; the most positive aspect of this week was a meeting to hatch plans for future collaboration with Christian, I still have a co-supervised doctoral student to worry about, and I have plenty of contacts elsewhere. But there’s is something special about being able to develop a long-term relationship with a university and especially a city that isn’t one’s own: time to work out properly how the different library catalogues work, time to find the best cafes and narrow down my preferred Berlin craft beers, time to find the more obscure jazz venues. It’s easier to feel like a proper European, not just a tourist.

Highlights? The workshop we organised on Capital in Classical Antiuity at Easter; the discussion of Thucydides Reception at the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaft a couple of years ago; the crazy Einstein Fishbowl Diskussion where I had to react spontaneously to random comments and ideas. I will miss the sour espresso at The Barn, the barbecue at the Rollberger bar in Neukölln, the glories of Dussmann Kulturhaus but also the fact that every little centre, at least down in the south-west, has a bookshop. Some amazing jazz gigs (Aki Takase’s Japanic, Alexander von Schlippenbach solo, and a whole load of groups whose names I can’t remember at ZigZag in Friedenau), and the fantastic production of Parsifal last year at the Staatsoper. But I never did get round to experiencing any avant-garde theatre…

Well, the cats will be happier that I won’t be away so much, and probably my wife too. It’s been a big part of the last three years – and will also always be bound up with my move from Bristol to Exeter, as one of the things that broke my loyalty to the former was a line manager who thought such a fellowship was a terrible idea – why should I do work for a German university when they were paying me? – and that I needed permission even to do it outside term. So, I suppress my fear that it’s going to be much more difficult to collaborate in future, and look forwards. Any other European cities want to have me visit a couple of times a year..?

IP, IP, ‘Ooray!

It’s interesting – I can’t work out whether it should also be sobering – to reflect that my main ‘legacy’ to academia, broadly defined, may have nothing at all to do with any of my miscellaneous scribblings about Thucydides, the ancient economy, historiography, the influence of classical antiquity on the development of 19th-century social theory or counterfactuals. It won’t even be directly related to my teaching, but rather to my past identity – somewhat out of step with my usual academic persona – as ruthless academic bureaucrat, determined to bring order and consistency to the organisation of teaching and learning at department, faculty and university level. As a legacy of my time as Faculty Education Director in Bristol, and more specifically being named on the website in such a role, I still occasionally get invited to apply for positions as Pro-Vice-Dean for Educational Enterprise, and even occasionally wonder about that alternative career path. A certain preference for tidyness leads to guideline writing, guideline writing leads to subject review processes, subject review processes lead to the dark side…

More particularly, as part of that role I developed an assortment of guidance for students on such things as referencing and grammar (including a load of online quizzes), as well as support for colleagues in assessment criteria, plagiarism detection and the like. How much of this stuff survives in Bristol I’ve no idea – but it also has had offspring elsewhere, as over the years a fair number of colleges and universities have asked permission to make use of different bits for their own students. I never quite understood these requests, as my conception of education management was that it’s all about imposing my, clearly superior, approach to everything, rather than borrowing from elsewhere, but I can recognise that others may not be quite so obsessive.

It is doubtless a sign of the times, and how they’ve corrupted me, that my initial response yesterday to another such request, this time relating to some guidelines I once wrote about assessing student presentations, was to wonder about signing over my Intellectual Property to a private company. It’s not, on reflection, that I would expect to make any money, or even to be given a credit; the people in question could very easily just have done a quiet cut’n’paste job and I wouldn’t be any the wiser, so the fact they bothered to ask me is probably a good sign (unless it’s a sign that they are expecting to make lots and lots of money out of this and so wanted to cover all the bases for fear of future lawsuits – but that doesn’t seem terribly likely).

No, it’s more about the pervasive sense – accentuated by the fact that there simply isn’t enough time ever – that everything should be ends-driven in one way or another, or what’s the point? Why write an article that isn’t going to be REF-able, unless it’s useful in some other professional way? Why do engagement activities if they don’t count for Impact or personal progression? It isn’t that one doesn’t then do things that don’t offer such a return – but there is a tendency to come up with ad hoc rationalisations for them, and/or to start thinking, yes, I did that thing because it was interesting/fun, but it ought to bring me more. I’ve even been wondering about adding one of those ‘Buy me a Ko-Fi’ links to this blog, because, while the primary purpose of the thing is to let me ramble inconsequentially, there are people out there making money from blogging, and this is all my Intellectual Property after all…

From a different perspective, however: I don’t need to monetise my stray ideas and writing, so long as I keep jumping through job-related hoops to a sufficient degree. During the annual runner bean glut, I don’t feel the need to sell my surplus beans; in a similar manner, I can give away my surplus ideas to anyone who wants them, especially as that doesn’t deprive me of the use of them – and the likelihood of anyone else making a fortune from them is on a par with the risk that someone takes a bag of my runner beans and then sells them at a market. Insofar as any of this stuff counts as Intellectual Property, there’s every reason then to practise Intellectual Altruism, giving it away to anyone who finds it useful or interesting. And if that means I contribute to improved assessment performance among students of advanced metallurgy and casting techniques, then that’s a bonus.

Update: I should clarify that when I talk of ‘developing’ online guidance about grammar and referencing, I don’t mean to imply that I wrote all of them; a fair amount of the material (including, I should stress, the obsession with sausages in the Referencing examples) was produced by a student intern under my direction. Which just goes to emphasise the idiocy of claiming this as the Intellectual Property of an individual or institution – he deserves a share of the film rights as much as I do…

But it’s another sign of the times that it didn’t for a moment occur to anyone that even should sign a form relinquishing any creator’s rights, whereas for a current side project making use of students reading bits of Thucydides, I’ve been careful to get them to sign bits of paper giving permission for me to use the recordings for academic, non-profit purposes.

 

We Need To Talk About Classics

Today seems like a good day to talk about the culpability of Classicists in the ongoing horror clown saga that is the Brexit process. Partly, I think that it might be good for everyone in the UK, whichever way one voted (or didn’t), to admit to some degree of responsibility for the mess in which we now find ourselves, as a principled counter-example to the unedifying spectacle of those who do actually bear a considerable amount of responsibility merrily distancing themselves from the shambles and pretending that it’s nothing to do with them and if only people had listened to them we wouldn’t have all this trouble (I mean, how can anyone have the brass neck, or total lack of shame, to repudiate an agreement that they were involved in negotiating, less than twelve hours after they’d accepted a collective cabinet decision to endorse it?). Partly, with a bit of luck there’s so much else going on that no one will notice…

Yes, ‘culpability’ is a bit strong; let’s say instead ‘the manifest failure of a Classical education to cultivate the values of reason, analytical skill and moral integrity that its defenders regularly claim or imply’. There’s been a fair amount of discussion in recent years about how we can blame everything rotten in British politics on the dominance of Oxford PPE graduates; someone on the Twitter lamented that the reason things are in such a mess is the fact that none of the holders of the Great Offices of State studied History. Well, that ignores the number of Prominent Brexiters who did, and who seem so determined not to learn from the past that they’ll willingly blow everything up to ensure that it doesn’t repeat itself (“The lessons of Suez? Hah, we’ll show up Suez as trivial and basically rational! The Melian Dialogue? Let’s make both the Melians and the Athenians look sensible and moderate!”).

More importantly, two academics have now crunched the numbers properly for all MPs, not just a few prominent individuals, and revealed that PPE graduates were significantly more likely to support Remain – only 5% supported Leave. Historians aren’t too bad either – only 22% voted for Leave, which is close to the average for all members of the House of Commons with an undergraduate degree.

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The overall breakdown among MPs was 25% Leave, 75% Remain; those without any degree were significantly more likely to vote Leave than the average, and those with degrees in a number of subjects – Economics, Medicine, Politics, Natural Sciences – were marginally more likely to do so. In just two disciplines were MPs dramatically more likely to favour Leave, with more than 50% voting against EU membership: Philosophy, where 4 out of 7 did, and Classics, where 6 out of 8 did (plus one who hasn’t disclosed how he voted).

Geoffrey Cox, born 1960, Law and Classics, Cambridge, Conservative, Leave
Michael Fallon, born 1952, Classics and Ancient History, St Andrews, Conservative, Remain
Nick Hurd, born 1962, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Remain
Boris Johnson, born 1964, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Leave
Kwasi Kwarteng, born 1975, Classics and History, Cambridge, Conservative, Leave
Charlotte Leslie, born 1978, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Leave
Nigel Mills, born 1974, Classics, Newcastle, Conservative, Leave
Jesse Norman, born 1962, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Not Disclosed
Michael Tomlinson, born 1977, Classics, KCL, Conservative, Leave

It’s not that, as one person suggested on the Twitter, that all these Brexity classicists are of the vintage when one read Classics because it’s what you do between Eton and Westminster – half of them were born in the 1970s, well after that era. And it’s not about Oxbridge, or not in a simple manner – yes, the majority of classicist MPs studied there, but the two who didn’t split evenly, and the study notes:

Overall, however, MPs with an Oxbridge education were only slightly (and non-significantly) more likely to support Remain. When we controlled for MPs’ political party, however, the difference increased from 4 percentage points to 13 percentage points (and reached a high level of statistical significance). This is because Conservative MPs were both more likely to have an Oxbridge education and more likely to back Leave.

In other words, the Oxbridge effect perhaps magnifies an existing classics-related tendency, but the example of PPE surely demonstrates that there is an important disciplinary component. We can be charitable, and assume that latent Brexity tendencies might influence someone’s decision to study Classics, rather than fearing that studying Classics actually influences political orientation. We can take some heart from the fact that the numbers are so small – if only a couple of left-leaning classicists had got themselves elected, we might be looking at a less skewed picture – there must be a few left-leaning would-be politicians with a classical background out there, surely? And maybe this is the sort of evidence we’ll need to provide for the brave new future world of Heterodox Academies and Journals of Saying the Allegedly Unsayable: classics, certified free of having any pernicious Marxising or postmodern scepticism effects on its students…

Can a whole discipline be blamed or discredited for the political and critical failures of a tiny proportion of its graduates? Of course not – though it hasn’t prevented such accusations being levelled against PPE. But when Classics is already so closely associated with the Establishment and its values, it’s hardly good news that we run the risk of being associated now with the Establishment in its most reckless, destructive, incompetent manifestation since the Russian Revolution…

 

Put Out More Flags

This year of all years, one might hope that Remembrance Day would encompass all the dead of the First World War – not just in the carefully orchestrated public ceremonies at national level, where diplomatic protocols will play a role, but across Britain. Judging by the flags around the town where I live, that’s a bit of hopeless liberal idealism. I’m not actually objecting to the waves of union jacks, with a sprinkling of the flags of the home nations; of course this will be primarily a commemoration of ‘our’ dead – and it still always strikes me how many of the surnames on the war memorial are familiar from the locality today.

No, it’s the other flags. Australia, Canada, New Zealand; first reaction (certainly from non-historians) will be, okay, that’s the good old Commonwealth, and India and the like weren’t independent yet so it’s a shame but it would be inaccurate to display their flags – except that of course the Commonwealth wasn’t founded until 1931, so this is actually all about Empire, and isn’t it convenient that we end up including ‘our’ white comrades in arms and quietly passing over the rest? Echoes of the CANZUK twaddle that some Brexit ideologues have been peddling, too, though that’s surely inadvertent.

And then France and the United States. If we’re doing ‘allies’, where’s Italy – or Russia? (Some Russian imperial flags would be rather a nice addition…). But of course this isn’t about historical accuracy; it’s about the extension of the scope of ‘us’ in directions that are not neutral or innocent, that emphasise victory and celebration rather more than commemoration and mourning (so definitely no German flags), that carry strong echoes not of the First but of the Second World War, and its aftermath (I don’t imagine we’d see many Soviet Union flags, even if celebrating Allied victory in WWII – and Italy isn’t the sort of WWI ally anyone wants to claim).

The past – albeit mostly in the form of myth and fragmented fictions – retains its power to shape present conceptions of who we are, while at the same time present-day concerns reshape claims about the past. I spent yesterday thinking about this from the perspective of appropriations of classical antiquity, at an excellent workshop in London organised by Naoise Mac Sweeney and Helen Roche on ‘Claiming the Classical’, focused on brief reports about this phenomenon from across the globe (though inevitably with more focus on the anglophone sphere). From South Africa to Mexico, China to Turkey, Germany to Ghana, classical images, and above all their association with an idea of ‘Western Civilisation’, are deployed for political purposes that mainly present themselves as a simple echo of a real, straightforward and unpolitical past. I didn’t go looking for parallels, I just happened to look at classical antiquity and there they were…

A case in point: the recent speech by Roger Scruton in Budapest, ‘The Need for Nations’, that has contributed to the row about his appointment as a government expert in beautiful buildings. Something that hasn’t received much attention so far is the role of the Roman Empire in his argument:

As an Englishman and a lover of the civilisation of Rome I am not opposed to Empire. But it is important to recognise what it involves and to distinguish the good from the bad forms of it. In my view the good forms serve to protect local loyalties and customs under a canopy of civilisation and law; the bad forms try to extinguish local customs and rival loyalties and to replace them by a lawless and centralised power. The European Union has elements of both arrangements: but it suffers from one overwhelming defect, which is that it has never persuaded the people of Europe to accept it. Europe is, and in my view has ever been, a civilisation of nation states, founded on a specific kind of pre-political allegiance, which is the allegiance that puts territory and custom first and religion and dynasty second in the order of government. Give them a voice, therefore, and the people of Europe will express their loyalties in those terms. In so far as they have unconditional loyalties – loyalties that are a matter of identity rather than agreement – they take a national form.

It’s a slightly more sophisticated version of a very familiar theme that I was looking at for the CTC workshop: the deployment of comparisons between the Roman Empire and the European Union in order to discredit the latter. Scruton’s account is striking because he is happy to admit to a nostalgia for empire on his own terms – the problem with the EU is that it’s the Wrong Sort of empire, because it’s trying to rule over Noble Englishmen and their Always-Already-Existing National Spirit, rather than over benighted non-European primitives who haven’t yet recognised the Hegelian truth of the primacy of national identity. And because the Nation is defined in völkisch terms, Scruton then feels no hesitation in supporting the right of Hungarians to feel suspicious of the Roma who inconveniently occupy the same territory as them without meeting their standards for belonging, and of the Jews who persistently fall into cosmopolitanism and liberal attitudes – it’s perfectly reasonable, in his terms, to see them as potentially subversive and disruptive.

Conservative politicians in Britain often speak of recapturing powers from Brussels, as though these powers will not have been altered by captivity, and as though they can be easily domesticated when they are brought back home. This is like Menelaus thinking that home life in Mycenae would be just the same when he had returned victorious from Troy, the recaptured Helen obediently trotting behind, as it was in the good old days before she left.

This is… disturbing. And a rather peculiar reading of that section of the Odyssey. And what would Menelaus be doing in Mycenae anyway – is Scruton confusing this episode with the Oresteia? At any rate, British sovereignty is conceived as a woman, in order to plug into tropes about the way in which her purity and character will be irrevocably altered by tramping about with other men.

It’s a decent example of a question which recurred in the workshop: what, as classicists, ought we to do about this sort of thing? Simply point out that it’s tendentious, ahistorical, sexist rubbish? Add it to the bulging database of right-wing British politicians and commentators sprinkling classical ‘erudition’ on their speeches (Powell, Johnson…)? Try to develop alternative ‘myths’, equally powerful narratives to counter these reactionary messages, even at the expense of suppressing our instinct to point out that the past is always problematic and complex? Or try to think of ways of conveying that complexity in a more sophisticated way than just lecturing people?

Patriotic displays are designed to draw lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, to build and reinforce the imagined community (albeit, in the case of the flags, expanding that imagined community beyond its usual boundaries) and to identify the malcontents and subversives. Like all myth, they provide answers without ever admitting that there were questions – and they set a trap for those whose instinctive response is to oppose all such displays, just as the invocations of history sets a trap for those whose instinctive response is to offer pedantic corrections. Sometimes – often – these responses are necessary and important, but they always come with the risk of alienating those who are not peddling such myths but are happy to accept them at face value, as straightforward and unpolitical. Sometimes, therefore, we need different tactics.

So the title of this post is not meant ironically at all. We’re going to have flags; why not lots of flags, as a means of opening up new conversations? At the moment, it’s a matter of: why these, but not others? Let’s have Germany, and Austria; let’s have all the Balkan countries, as a reminder both of the 1914 spark of conflict and of the unpalatable fact that many of the factors that drove conflict in WWI *and* WWII have not gone away. Let’s have the historical flags of 1914, and the flags of modern Europe – and of the European Union. A provocation, in the Brexity West Country – but surely better than the silent erasure of people, and bits of history, that don’t fit a highly politicised idea of ‘us’ that pretends to be unpolitical and natural.

Diplomatic Impunity

I do it to myself, I do – but WHY can’t people provide references to their sources? I’ve just spent over half an hour tracking down a couple of Thucydides quotes which, as is often the case, weren’t immediately familiar but looked plausible. Now, if someone is citing the Melian Dialogue, it’s understandable why they might not bother to give the precise reference, since everybody already knows it – but when clearly the whole point is that this isn’t a well-known line but a newly-extracted bit of wisdom and enlightenment that others won’t have heard before..?

It started, as always, on the Twitter: “One has to behave as friend or foe according to the circumstances. Thucydides”. What’s interesting about this one is that searching for the exact quote initially yielded just three Google results, whereas normally one finds that such words of wisdom already appear on forty-odd quote sites, all obviously scraping data from one another, and an assortment of motivational posters. This at least suggested that the search for the source would be relatively short. It appears, in a discussion of diplomacy, in two editions of a textbook on World Politics, without any reference (but with Thucydides introduced as “realist theoretician”). Modern works do get referenced (and I briefly wondered whether the one cited in the same paragraph might be the source; no such luck), which perhaps suggests an interesting attitude to citation (ancient authors are dead so it doesn’t matter??) but probably just reflects the lack of references in what’s almost certainly the source: Diplomat’s Dictionary, by Chas. W. Freeman Jr., 1994 (National Defense University Press, Washington DC), which offers a selection of different quotes, all of them unreferenced, under different topic headings (this Thucydides quote is used for ‘Demeanor’).

Searching for the exact quote having reached its limit as regards trying to confirm whether or not this might be genuine Thucydides, I switched to the more laborious process of looking for combinations of key words. This did indeed confirm the authenticity of the line, from 6.85.1: “Circumstances determine who is friend and foe”, and assorted variants. It’s the Athenian ambassador speaking at Camarina, answering the arguments of the Syracusans – and so one has to say that Freeman’s implied reading is somewhat dubious, as this isn’t remotely about appearing friendly or hostile while pursuing a consistent foreign policy, but rather altering that policy according to changing circumstances. That’s something which the World Politics Book gets right, so perhaps they are not drawing on Freeman after all.

Freeman includes three other Thucydides quotes, likewise unreferenced, but likewise – as I can confirm after laborious searching – genuine. “Nothing is unreasonable if it is useful”, which gets no Google hits at all but is 6.85.1 again – and again this could do with a bit of context, given that the Athenian ambassador expressly offers this as a summary of the right policy for imperial states, perhaps not the message that Freeman intends to convey. A long quote from the Lacedaemonian ambassadors after Pylos (4.19.1, Crawley version). Finally, “He passes through life most securely who has least reason to reproach himself with complaisance toward his enemies” which does get widely cited (without reference, of course), as in the 1997 Joint Doctrine for Operations Security issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (which is full of gratuitous quotes from Thucydides, Sun Tzu and Machiavelli – B.A. Friedman (@BA_Freidman) tells me that this is completely typical for Joint pubs, perhaps because a common store of Ancient Wisdom helps smooth over inter-service rivalries); it’s the wordy and arguable Crawley version of 1.34.

This does strike me as a really odd selection Freeman. Thucydides is full of suitable quotes about inter-state relations, policy and the conduct of embassies, none of which (apart from the Melian Dialogue) would be obviously more or less problematic when decontextualised and offered as timeless wisdom to professional diplomats – so why these three passages, and only these three? One wonders whether there is a link to the specifically American practice of handing ambassadorial positions to people whose qualifications are limited to connections and money – in which case, given recent pronouncements from the British Foreign Secretary, maybe I need to write an equivalent UK-centric volume for ambassadors with no diplomatic experience. Still, why Camarina, where the Athenians were being even less diplomatic than they were at Melos..?

It is striking how much difference can be made by minor variations in search terms. While writing up this blog post, I did another search for the quote, but this time including only the first eight words – and this produced a fourth result, taking things in a completely different direction. In 1985, Narasingha Prosad Sil published Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra: A Comparative Study (Academic Publishers: Calcutta & New Delhi), exploring a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft and strategy that dates from some time between the 2nd century BCE and the 3rd century CE, and comparing its ideas to Plato, Aristotle and Machiavelli – not least to provide an introduction to those thinkers for Indian readers. Thucydides is mentioned in a brief discussion about Machiavelli’s classical influences: a line from Euripides, and then “The Greek historian, Thucydides, said that ‘nothing is unreasonable if it is useful’, and that ‘one has to behave as friend or foe according to circumstances’.”

Sil does give his sources; not Thucydides, but the place where he found the reference: a discussion of Hindu Politics in Italian by Benoy Kumar Sarkar, first published in installments in the Indian Historical Quarterly (1925-6) and then as a brochure (Calcutta, 1926), which surveys different Italian accounts of Indian political thought, including an article by one Giovanni Bottazzi, published in the Annali della R. Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Filosofia e Filologia 26 (1915), on ‘Precursori di Niccolo Machiavelli in India ed in Grecia: Kautilya e Tucidide’. Bottazzi’s basic argument is that allegedly ‘modern’ political arguments are in fact found in ancient texts; Kautilya is the ‘spokesman’ for ancient India, at least as far as practical affairs are concerned, in the way that Thucydides represents ancient Greece. Asarkar notes, Bottazzi doesn’t actually say much about Machiavelli; rather, he focuses on the affinities between the two ancient thinkers – without ever suggesting that Kautilya knew Thucydides – with respect to ideas of human nature, self-interest, determinism and so forth. It’s in the chapter on self-interest that Bottazzi includes 6.85.1 among many other illustrative passages, which Sarkar then highlights to emphasise the point:

To T’s idea that anybody who opposes you is your enemy and that to gain one’s ends one should even praise one’s enemy and go so far as to make alliance with him or that nothing is unreasonable if it is useful and that one has to behave as friend or foe according to circumstances (I, 43, I, 82, 1, III, 9, 1, VI, 16, 4, VI, 85, etc.) Kautilya and Kamandaki can furnish a host of parallels. One may cite the Hindu doctrine of the sadguna (six expedients) for one.

Sarkar’s account is not uninformed or uncritical; he notes that, where Bottazzi emphasises the parallels between T’s and K’s attitudes towards monarchical rule, the former was writing in a context where such rule was the exception, whereas in the world of the Arthasastra popular or democractic rule was purely theoretical speculation. But overall, while he does not offer any clear judgement, he seems to accept much of the parallels that Bottazzi puts forward. To quote the final two paragraphs of the review:

The Kautilya-Thucydidean philosophy would not be pleasant, says B., to the inert idler who under the atmosphere of Christian pessimism lives and preaches the cult of pacifism, nor to the cowardly who dare not rise against the dictates of destiny with an iron will. But it is a fountain of inspiration to the normal human beings fortifying him with the value of self-importance and moral responsibility and encouraging him to develop his immortal energies in the pursuit of his mission as padrone dell’universo (master of the world).

Bottazzi nowhere mentions Nietzsche, but it is evident that if Nietzsche had lived long enough to be acquainted with Kautilya’s vijigisu (aspirant to conquest) and caturanta or sarva-bhauma (world ruler) his crusade against the slave mentality as engendered by Christianity would have been tremendously reinforced. As it is, Nietzschism has encountered a powerful support in the ideas of this Italian scholar.

This seems to be supported by the conclusion of Sarkar’s survey of different Italian discussions of ancient Indian political thought, which gives a better sense (to an ignorant amateur like me) of his broader agenda:

The tendency is very manifest among the Italian scholars to attribute “modern” ideas to the Hindu texts.” If by “modern” they do not mean anything later than, say, 1700, or, at any rate, if they do not include the tenets and ideals of social thought as developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries their position would the main appear to be acceptable. Otherwise the trend of their writings can lead but to the formulation of a “vague universal” or “eternal human nature” in which 1925 A.C. should seem to be as simple, young and elemental as 1925 B. C. But this is an absolutely wrong sociology, failing, as it does, to give due weight to the epochal momentums in historic and philosophic experience. And although one may argue that there is nothing new under the sun such an interpretation of culture-history would remain blind to the objective progress of the world achieved cumulatively in thought and deed through the ages.

But the Leitmotif of these Indic researches in Italy militates, unconsciously, perhaps, against the Hegelian dogma of an alleged distinction in “spirit” between the East and the West. And from this standpoint Italian scholarship is to be appreciated as a great ally of Young Asia in the risorgimento of social science.

It’s another of those rabbit-holes; I don’t remotely have time to look further into the uses of Thucydides as a comparitor for Indian political thought, or to consider the possible influence of the image of Pericles as the wise ruler on Sarkar’s admiration for Nazism and call for a fascist dictatorship to be established in India.

The question remains as to why Freeman should have quoted the very same two lines from Thucydides 6.85.1 as Sarkar. Is it a coincidence that he cites Kautilya on nine occasions? It’s not clear from his bibliography where he might have found those quotes (Sarkar isn’t listed, and nor is any other work on Indian thought) – but as a career diplomat he did serve in India…

And all this to establish that some quotations genuinely came from Thucydides.