Neville Morley's Blog, page 39

Fables of the Reconstruction

Ah, history. To quote Catherine Morland, “I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” The reasons are familiar: not just a tendency to focus on content rather than form, as if the two can be separated, but also a determination to deny or obscure its invented nature by being as dull as possible. And even as some professional historiography has become more interesting and adventurous in its techniques of representation, history written for students or for a general audience defaults time and again to good old-fashioned naive realism, with predictable results.

I had two thoughts about the minor spat over Mary Beard’s recent remarks about eschewing programmes that include historical reconstructions: “No B list or A list actors, C list actors dressed up in sheets, saying, ‘Do pass the grapes Marcus’ and the like.” Firstly, that the problem is, as Beard notes, not the actors themselves, but what they’re asked to do: no actual acting, but only striking poses in costume. They are merely illustrative, with the effect of presenting the past as something fully known (rather than as fragmentary and disputed) – and, inevitably, presenting it largely or entirely in visual terms that conform to the viewers’ expectations (or the production company’s beliefs about those expectations). As Manu Gustin (@Manu_Gustin) remarked to me on the Twitter: it’s the Blackadder problem, that you’re constantly having to work with the images and ideas people have of the past – and Blackadder took the chance to play with and subvert those expectations, visually as well as verbally, whereas the historical documentary template at best confines its critique to the words.

Secondly, that the supposedly preferable alternative of an expert presenter talking to camera in front of ancient ruins or examining artefacts in a museum is no closer to authentic history, but is just as much a cliched trope of representation, a simulacrum of historical investigation. We appear to be offered the thoughts and accumulated knowledge of an authority – with the personal presence and reputation of that authority playing a significant role in making those thoughts credible – where, mostly, we are being offered a prepared script, based on the work of multiple historians and writers and editors, read from autocue. Of course it is – how else could it be done, given that we’ve long passed the days of just pointing a camera at A.J.P. Taylor and asking him to talk at it? But, given that the script for a historical documentary can only be such a collaborative effort, what is the effect of presenting the material as if it is actually just the product of the historian?

The obvious explanation for this practice, exactly as with historical reconstructions, is that this is what the viewer expects and likes (hence also, I was once told, the shift away from multiple talking heads to a single charismatic presenter). Beard partly engages with this point in her lecture, emphasising that her documentaries are always a team effort and admitting that she had to learn the importance of providing the viewer with something to look at (“I had needlessly and foolishly austere views about not getting on rivers or boats or going up in drones. I now see that that’s very important. I’ve learnt hugely about how to make people visually interested”). But there is still a tendency to imply that it’s the historian’s contributions – the contributions on screen, that is, rather than the contributions to the research and the script – that provide the elements of argument and debate in such programmes.

That may well be true in fact, without it being necessarily true: rather, it’s an artistic choice about how to present an argument, by putting it into the mouth of the aforementioned authority figure rather than developing it in different ways. You could instead develop the argument by careful orchestration of the views of multiple authorities (apparently they still like this in continental Europe); you could develop it by giving a script to a voiceover artist (the US preference, apparently); you could dispense with the words altogether and develop the argument through images and sounds. Taking Beard’s contribution out of the US version of Civilizations didn’t actually remove all argument from the programme: it removed her argument, the overt argument, so that the programme ended up offering a different and less obvious (and probably much less coherent) argument – just as historical reconstructions are not in fact argument-free, but rather embody and subtly promote different and less explicit perceptions of the past.

If you take the historian presenter out of the historical documentary, do you lose the history? Clearly not; what matters is the historical input into the programme overall, not whether or not there is a historian playing the part of a historian on screen. Conversely, ensuring that historical documentaries genuinely promote historical knowledge and understanding isn’t just (or even necessarily) a matter of explicit argument, but of using the whole range of available techniques to open up questions and debates and provoke thought. Including historical reconstructions – why ever not? Just more interesting, dramatic, exploratory ones, with actual acting…

It is odd that historical documentaries should be so dull, or at any rate predictable, when there is such a rich film and televisual tradition of exploring multiple timelines and counterfactuals, uncertainty and ambiguity, different perspectives and so forth – and audiences who thrive on this stuff. Maybe the audience for historical documentaries is utterly conservative in its tastes – but maybe that’s just what they’ve been trained to expect, and in any case there must be new audiences out there to be won.

Time Bandits

Thucydides is The Most Fabulous Author In The World. I don’t mean this as a compliment, but rather as an evocation of Terry Gilliam’s wonderful film Time Bandits, in which a motley band of dwarves and an 11-year-old boy called Kevin – you know, it has only just occurred to me, thirty-seven years later, that this is a snarky Hobbit reference – embark on a quest to find The Most Fabulous Object In The World, concealed in the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness (which of course demonstrates its desirability). The two key attributes of this Object are, firstly, that everyone sees it differently, as suits their own conception of Fabulousness, and, secondly, that the whole set-up is a trap.

And so with Thucydides: everyone sees him in their own terms, according to their own conception of an author with infinite wisdom and authority, and despite the fact that everyone else has a different conception (they’re just reading him wrong); the difficulty of making the text and its author conform to any modern conceptions, or of extracting any coherent theory or doctrine, just makes it all the more clearer that this must be worth the effort; and at the end – as I’ve argued before, this is the real Thucydides Trap – one is wholly in the thrall of the Evil One, intoning Thucydidean platitudes in response to more or less every current event.

Case in point: new article in the New York Review Of Books (or at least their blog; do we still draw this sort of distinction?) by Edward Mendelson, reflecting on the contemporary relevance of Thucydides to the United States. Mendelson opens with the apparent coincidence that he turned to Thucydides as an escape from the awful reality of the 2016 presidential election and found himself reading the prescient account of the Corcyrean stasis – yeah, right – before moving on to Pericles’ claims of Athenian exceptionalism, shown to be hollow by the plague and then Athens’ disastrous attack on Syracuse. In case readers haven’t got the message, he switches to Thucydides’ own claims for his work as a possession for all time.

He was proved right when Napoleon and Hitler sent their armies into Russia, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, when the United States sent its forces into Vietnam and Iraq.

This is all very familiar: Thucydides as the man who knows, who understands the way the world really works and who can help us understand, with his uncanny anticipation of future events. The question is always how this Thucydidean prescience is understood and explained, rather than simply taken for granted – and here Mendelson’s article takes an interestingly eccentric turn.

Historians argue among themselves whether Thucydides is a moralizing philosopher or, in a common phrase, “the first scientific historian.” What is radical about him, and gives him his unerring clear-sightedness, is that he is both.

Or, erm, neither? Yes, there’s a persistent tradition of claiming Thucydides as the inventor and exemplar of modern historiography, however conceived, though it’s not a position that any specialist today would defend in an unqualified manner. But it’s news to me that anyone, let alone any historian, has ever claimed that he’s a moralising philosopher. Far more common is the position articulated by Wilhelm Roscher, seeing Thucydides’ work as antipathetical to philosophy insofar as it’s concerned with the nature and fabric of reality rather than with abstract speculation. That’s the line followed by Nietzsche in contrasting Thucydides with Plato, arguing that the former has the courage to face reality as it is, rather than grounding his interpretation in morality or, like Plato, taking refuge in the ideal. Possibly Nietzsche is implying a philosophical position here – but, if so, it’s one akin to his own project, a critique of all moral values, rather than a moralising one.

The only precedent that comes to mind is Leo Strauss’ reading in The City and Man, and that always seemed to me more of an attempt to defuse the threat of historicism by emphasising Thucydides’ concern with broader transhistorical principles, rather than actually claiming that Thucydides wasn’t a historian at all. But Mendelson needs to imagine such a debate so that his solution – why can’t Thucydides be TWO sorts of anachronism? – makes any sense. (It’s not at all obvious what’s happened to Thucydides the Social Scientist, surely the most influential version in modern discourse…). But Thucydides is The Most Fabulous Author In The World; he is the sort of writer that the reader wants, delivering the desired perspective on the world.

He understands morals, not as a set of arbitrary rules imposed or wished upon reality, but part of the fabric of reality itself, in the same way that Greek philosophy had begun to understand physical laws as inseparable from reality… In Thucydides’s morally coherent universe, moral action is also, inevitably, practical action, and immoral action is inevitably impractical, no matter how insistently short-sighted strategists pretend that it isn’t.

Again: huh? This is so much the anti-Nietzschean Thucydides – not by suggesting that Thucydides doesn’t look to reality (he’s still not a Plato) but by claiming that Thucydides looks to reality and finds a coherent moral system embedded in it. As I remarked on the Twitter, this seems to echo F.M. Cornford’s argument that Thucydides tries to be a proper critical historian but can’t help seeing the world through a framework inherited from myth and tragedy – but like it’s a good thing. It’s not stated that Mendelson shares this view – one might, as Cornford does, offer this as a criticism of Thucydides’ account from a historical perspective – but it seems to be implied pretty strongly that he does, given that the whole point of the article is that Thucydides knows what’s really going on – why else reprint four paragraphs of the Corcyrean episode without feeling any need to offer concluding comments?

Implicit argument: Thucydides recognised the true (moral) nature of world, which is why his work speaks to us and predicted our present. The content of Thucydides’ philosophy is established in two ways: firstly, by events (Pericles was over-confident, and was killed by the plague; the Athenians acted with hubris, and were defeated), and, secondly, through the speeches. These are, Mendelson notes, normally presented in pairs (Pericles’ Funeral Oration isn’t, of course, but the Plague represents a kind of answering speech), and while Thucydides doesn’t offer any explicit endorsement of either side, “it is almost always clear which side is closest to his own habits of thought.”

This is a familiar line of argument from readers who seek to attribute normative political principles to Thucydides: in the crude Realist reading, the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue express Thucydides’ own views which are also basically true. Mendelson doesn’t discuss Melos, which is a shame as it would be interesting to know which side he thinks is obviously closer to Thucydides’ own habits of thought (one would guess the Melians, given the Athenians’ rejection of all moral arguments). Instead, the key example is the Mytilene debate: Diodotus is obviously right, as being anti-massacre – and the fact that his arguments are pragmatic rather than moral is not, as e.g. Cliff Orwin has argued, a sign of the debasement of Athenian political discourse ‘cos even the goodies are being cynically instrumentalist, but rather a claim that, as in the quote above, moral action is practical action and immoral action is inevitably impractical.

Hmm. I guess it would be nice to live in a world where, to quote another insightful text, “the good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and we always defeat them and save the day.” I just don’t believe a word of it, and think that such an attitude can lead only to dangerous complacency and quietism. More to the point, I struggle to imagine Thucydides believing a word of it. Too many people die pointlessly. His world is bleak; events are driven not by any objective moral order but by the decisions taken by people, under circumstances not of their own choosing, mostly on the basis of ignorance and uncontrolled emotion – and the fundamental question of the whole work is whether things could have been different and whether they can be different in future. He’s about questions, not answers.

Of course, that is just how I see The Most Fabulous Author In The World – just as convinced of his significance and relevance, but for a completely different world-view. But at least I can acknowledge the existence of other possible readings, and understand their attractions (while recuperating this into the idea that the power and Fabulousness of Thucydides lies precisely in his invitation to readers to project their desires onto him). It’s either that, or reviving my ‘Thucydides as killer zombie virus’ thesis for Halloween…

The Undateables

I’ve joked before that I gravitated towards economic and social history because I have a terrible memory for dates. That’s not entirely true – it’s rather the case that I think that, most of the time, longer-term structural factors are more important than short-term l’histoire événementielle in shaping human life, and of course that applies to politics as well – but I *do* have a terrible memory for dates, and hence tend to get defensive on the subject, given that a lot of people assume that history is basically about dates so this must be what I do.

Given this proclivity, you might expect my reaction to this week’s news story about a Pompeian graffito that potentially changes our view of the date of the eruption of Vesuvius would be basically negative: whoop-di-doo, as I once remarked of the fuss over the discovery of Richard III’s bones. Not at all! That is to say, if new evidence claimed to show that the eruption happened in 78 or 82 rather than 79 I’d be largely indifferent, but a shift from August to October – or rather, to be precise, a further bit of evidence to support the existing case for preferring an autumn date; this isn’t quite as radical or as decisive as media reports inevitably make it seem – is really quite exciting.

How does a shift of a couple of months change our understanding of the destruction of Pompeii? It doesn’t in the slightest – and some of the negative comments about the story might be explained by an assumption that discoveries in Pompeii should be telling us about Pompeii. Rather, as Kristina Killgrove’s article sets out very nicely (and see also her Twitter feed at @DrKillgrove), this is significant for what evidence from Pompeii can tell us about other aspects of Roman life – which in my view is much more important than things which are unique to a single city.

The reason is that the sorts of ‘structures of everyday life’ that I’m interested in – agriculture, diet, health and disease, climate – are not static and unchanging. They don’t change much from year to year in their broad parameters – it makes perfect sense to talk about ‘Roman agriculture’ or ‘Roman demography’ as things that endure in more or less the same form over decades and centuries, and not just because we lack the evidence for a more nuanced account – but within the year they vary enormously, partly predictably (seasonal variation) and partly not. Even today, in our cosseted modern economy, summer brings strawberries that actually taste of something and winter brings a higher incidence of flu; in pre-industrial societies, these seasonal variations were much more noticeable and significant.

In other words, we would not expect the diet or the health or the demographic profile of the Pompeian population to vary much on average from year to year, and so, as far as using Pompeian evidence for these things is concerned, it’s a matter of total indifference whether the eruption that produced and preserved this evidence was in 78 or 79 or 82.* But the potential differences in diet, health etc between August and October are considerable, and would have a real impact on how we interpret the evidence – as Dr Killgrove discusses, the conclusions that can be drawn from the bodies of those who died in Pompeii will be different if we think this is a sample of an autumn population rather than a summer one.

And that’s why this media story is rather different from the norm. Typically, a find is presented in the most dramatic terms possible, linked to famous individuals and dramatic events: Boudicca’s rebellion, Alexander’s tomb, Caesar’s toothbrush etc. If any question is raised, it’s “can we be sure?” – the significance of a find relating to a famous individual is taken for granted (and this is very annoying). In this case, however, the questions are both “can we be sure?” and “so what?” – which creates the opportunity for explaining why this matters. Of course the news story is over-simplified and over-dramatised – that’s what they do – but it’s much closer to a genuinely useful ‘teaching moment’ than usual, and much closer to significant cutting-edge research on antiquity than just a re-hash of old-fashioned emperors, battles and nice artefacts history. Go Team October!

* Well, maybe not total indifference; it would be good to correlate the data with detailed evidence for climate conditions that year…

Western Lights

I spent a chunk of Saturday evening marshalling traffic; only four vehicles, granted, and mostly this involved standing around waiting for them to show up so I could tell them where to park (while inwardly steeling myself for the possibility of having to tell other people that they couldn’t park in the designated area), but it was still a great source of satisfaction to play even a tiny part in the complex enterprise that is a Somerset Illuminated Carnival. Not least because Carnival is very much a local thing; anyone can watch, of course, and there’s always a need for volunteers to stand around in hi-vis jackets, but actually having a role in the organisation (albeit one acquired by marriage, as my wife is actually on the committee) is a sign of having been here long enough to be counted as part of the community, despite being one of those rootless cosmopolitan academics…

Bridgwater Carnival, the original and biggest, traces its origins back to celebrations of the defeat of the Gunpowder Plot in a traditionally Protestant region (the Monmouth Rebellion and all that), though it’s no longer held consistently on 5th November. Our local carnival is much newer, and always focused on the night-time procession rather than beginning as an off-shoot of the traditional Guy Fawkes night bonfire – as a celebration of returning troops in 1919 and for about a decade after, ditto in the late 1940s, and then in honour of the Silver Jubilee in 1977 and ever since.

It isn’t as political as you might think, either from that history, or from the examples of Bonfire Night in Lewes or carnival in Köln. Overt political statements are very rare – and then ambiguous; I’m not at all sure how to take a tableau – a carnival cart where the participants stand completely still to present a scene, in contrast to the usual energetic gyrating to loud music – celebrating Votes For Women, including Emily Wilding Davison being trampled by the king’s horse…

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Rather, the ‘political’ elements tend to be unthinking and rather stupid in a more or less innocent manner; conventional depictions of Native Americans, for example, or African warriors in ‘jungle’ scenes. This remains a very white and conservative part of the world (leaving aside the People’s Ecorepublic Of Frome and Notting Hill On Brue up the road); carnival involves appropriating whatever bits of other cultures offer the chance to dress up and dance to suitable music – very revealing of cultural stereotypes and prejudices, but not actually directed against anyone. In fact casual racism was less in evidence this year – rather more ghouls and zombies, Irish fishermen, and comical superheroes, which may or may not say something about the times. Meanwhile, the discourse on gender, normally exemplified by terrifying numbers of scantily-clad majorettes, is complicated by the presence of a troupe of male majorettes:

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Arguably, the most dubious element of a Somerset illuminated carnival is the one that hides in plain sight: not any of the costumes or scenery or music, but the lights that illuminate them. The biggest carts must consume a terrifying amount of power, and pull enormous generators along behind them – and one might guess that a major source of pro-Brexit feeling in this region must be linked to EU bans on incandescent light-bulbs, given their traditional importance. Yes, it’s all about lighting up the dark autumn night and defying the death and decay of the old year with music and celebration – but in the broader scheme of things it’s also doing its bit to plunge us further into environmental crisis.

There is hope – which is to say that there are plenty of things I can watch with a completely clear conscience and without any need to wrestle uncomfortable thoughts to the back of the mind. Alongside the big carts there are plenty of ‘walkers’, groups or individuals in costume, and in recent years these have demonstrated the potential of LEDs, not just to allow people to illuminate themselves but to enable the development of some really spectacular outfits (which unfortunately don’t photograph very well).

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The impetus for change is, I suspect, less “I want to save the planet but still dress up” and more “wow, I can look like a fully decorated Christmas tree or giant glowing butterfly or futuristic space warrior or cityscape by night”. How far the big carts will be willing to change seems less certain, given the amount already invested in their existing kit, and it would be interesting to know whether this is a matter of discussion within the higher level of the regional organisations (alongside highly esoteric issues of judging regulations). For the time being this remains a festival of communal consumption, of energy as well as of the time which so many people devote to it. But at least it is communal…

 

Patent Absurdities

There’s a long essay in today’s Grauniad by James Miller, offering a broad-brush overview of the history of democracy, focusing mainly on what political theorists have had to say about it. I’ve come to think of this as rather an odd sub-genre; these essays are almost invariably condensed versions of books rather than written as essays for a specific publication, and they unite the desire of the author and publisher to hype the book and the desire of the newspaper to be publishing Big Provocative Ideas – hence, in this case, the claim of the title and sub-heading that this essay is all about arguing that maybe populism is essential for democracy rather than a threat to it, a thesis that is only touched on in passing in the actual piece.

The process of editing a book down to essay-length may account for a certain tendency to non-sequiturs:

Current affairs may seem especially bleak, but fears about democracy are nothing new. At the zenith of direct democracy in ancient Athens, in the fifth century BC, one critic called it a “patent absurdity” – and so it seemed to most political experts from Aristotle to Edmund Burke, who considered democracy “the most shameless thing in the world”.

Modern “fears about democracy” – that it’s being subverted, that populism is leading democracies to vote for anti-democratic and anti-liberal values – are clearly not the same sort of thing as the criticisms of democracy offered by thinkers ancient and modern who disapprove of the entire system and seek to uncover its weaknesses and contradictions. Plato’s “fears about democracy”, one might say, are fears of democracy rather than for it.

But it was the “patent absurdity” line that caught my eye, and on further inspection it’s odder than expected – at least once I remembered where it’s from, as ‘long essays’ don’t bother with silly things like references, and the online versions of Miller’s books (he’s used this line before, in his 1984 book on Rousseau) don’t give access to the endnotes. Thucydides 6.89.6: Alcibiades at Sparta. So, rather than being either a friend of democracy worried about its populist tendencies or a critic of democracy denouncing them, this is an aristocratic populist presenting himself as a life-long critic of democracy in the hope of ingratiating himself with an oligarchic, authoritarian regime. I’m sure there are some contemporary parallels we could think of…

The fascination of Alcibiades is his apparent lack of any convictions whatsoever beyond the furthering of his own success; he’s happy to perform the role of dashing democratic leader and voice of the Athenian Id in return for the opportunity for glory and honour, but if that’s taken away then he will play the role of the Lakonophile aristocrat or the friend of Persian autocracy with equal enthusiasm. The one thing we cannot ever take him to be is sincere – or at any rate consistent, given the possibility that he is actually sincere in the moment. That is, this isn’t a terribly solid basis for an argument about how democracy was viewed by its contemporaries, beyond the fact that this is the sort of thing that someone thought a critic of democracy ought to say.

A little further on, Thucydides is lumped in with Plato as a “reviler” of democracy:

The historian Thucydides, another citizen of democratic Athens, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War with Sparta that ended with the defeat of Athens in 404, essentially blamed the power of the ordinary people of Athens, and their susceptibility to manipulation by mendacious orators, for this catastrophic outcome.

“Essentially” is doing a lot of work here; the cynic might suggest that it stands in for “I can’t actually find a quote to this effect, and actually there’s all this positive stuff about democracy from Pericles, and many of the harshest criticisms of democracy are offered by speakers addressing the assembly which seems a bit odd, but I definitely read stuff which says T was hostile to democracy. Hobbes, probably”.* There are many fascinating things to be said about the depiction of democracy in Thucydides, partly presented through sock puppets like Alcibiades and Cleon – and maybe Miller does this in hs book, but the essay seems mainly determined to move into the eighteenth century as quickly as possible. One other by-product of this is the depiction, without much discussion, of Aristotle as a fervent opponent of democracy, which seems open to debate.

Miller concludes with the suggestion that a motto favoured by both Rousseau and Jefferson – “I prefer freedom with all its dangers to tranquility with servitude” – is perfect for our dark times. For an essay concerned with democracy, by someone who’s written on Rousseau, this seems distinctly odd, since the next two sentences in The Social Contract read: “If there were a nation of gods it would be governed democratically. So perfect a government is not suitable for men.” Is this the essay of an oligarch, praising and defending democracy because it’s what he thinks his audience wishes to hear..?

* In fact Hobbes doesn’t get a mention – and nor does the entire seventeenth century.

Makes You Stronger…

I’m feeling shamed by one of the cats. Admittedly this isn’t entirely a new experience – they regularly regard me with deep reproach, especially when I’ve abandoned them to go off to some conference or other, and occasionally reinforce the message by pissing on my trouser leg – but this is rather different, as it’s about their mark example. Hector has been with us barely a month; he had an infection as a very small kitten and lost the sight in his right eye, but that didn’t seem to slow him down at all. However, on Saturday night we came home to find his eye was oozing unpleasant stuff, and the vet’s response next morning was to suck in her teeth like the mechanic who’s just been inspecting your car engine to work out why it’s been making funny noises. So, yesterday morning Hector was straight in for a very expensive operation, and now… Trigger Warning: don’t click on ‘read more’ unless you’re prepared for gruesomeness…

And other than looking like he’s at the stage in the supervillain origin story where he vows vengeance on the world and starts constructing a costume, he’s absolutely fine – eating like a horse, charging round the place, jumping on the other cats (whose phase of being pleased to have him back lasted about ten minutes). It puts my current struggle to form joined-up sentences with occasional footnotes into perspective, and I’d be quite inspired to get this bloody chapter finally finished if I wasn’t having to spend time cooking him chicken and generally fussing over him…

Virtue Signalling

It’s been rather an odd weekend. On Friday I had to admit that N.N. Taleb was right about something related to the study of classical antiquity, even if not in the way he thinks he is; on Sunday I came to the conclusion that my eminent and inspiring colleague Edith Hall was completely wrong about something, and I’ve spent the intervening time wondering whether I should just let sleeping dogs lie rather than blogging about it.

Let’s start with the easy bit. Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) had commented on the flurry of Spartan references produced by conservative commentators in response to the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing (because working oneself into a state of tearful fury at having one’s privilege challenged is exactly like Thermopylae), and this made NNT extremely cross.

1) One thing we know: Professors of Spartan history (like this bloke) are no Spartans.

The heroes of history were not virtue-signaling library rats. The last person to learn classical values from is career "classicists".

You learn about doers from doers. https://t.co/2dT6DcQT5q

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) September 28, 2018

Absolutely. Can you find a professor of classics or ancient history anywhere who’s willing to teach you how to become a Spartan? Can you hell! They insist on talking about historical reality and the problems of evidence all the time, rather than focusing on mythic virtues; if you’re really unlucky, they’ll also offer an overview of the different people over the centuries who have admired the Spartans, including sone pretty dubious contemporary characters, and make the whole thing seem very unappealing, if not positively disturbing. And certainly they are no Spartans! No, you learn about doers from doers; you learn about uncultured thugs from uncultured thugs; heavens forbid that your hero-worship should be undermined by historical truth or scepticism from people who don’t have any “skin in the game”.*

Of course, there are plenty of classicists who seek to explore the meaning and significance of classical ideas today – albeit in the sort of critical, demythologising manner that NNT doubtless regards as mere virtue-signalling rather than actual virtue; Edith Hall, for example, with her recent accounts both of Aristotle’s philosophy (Aristotle’s Way (2018); essay version here) and of the pernicious effects of classics conceived as an upper-class prerogative. Edith’s blog regularly reflects on the relation between classical antiquity and today, with a careful balance between political awareness and scholarly caution.

Earlier this year, as I’ve mentioned before, I was ambushed with the question of what Thucydides would have thought of Brexit; Edith has clearly been getting this a lot with reference to Aristotle. It doesn’t require much effort to conclude from their works that they’d have regarded the whole thing as a colossal mistake, and a clear example of the failings of democracy; and in her post, Edith constructs a plausible case for the idea that Aristotle would have favoured a second referendum on the basis that people had deliberated further and recognised their error, given his praise of Neoptolemus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes for changing his mind.

What about Thucydides? As mentioned on here before, the example of the Mytilene Debate has been cited on several occasions in the last two years as a precedent for a democracy changing its mind; well, yes, but the Athenian citizens voted on stuff all the time, not just in once-in-a-generation referendums, and it’s not clear to me that citing Thucydides adds much to the debate. (Plus, by all accounts we’ve now passed the point where, figuratively, the first trireme can still be caught before reaching Mytilene/March 29th 2019 and giving the order for wholesale massacre of the population/unleashing the wholesale massacre of British society and economy. Unless we can open the bag of winds that is an Article 50 extension in order to delay its arrival…).

But Edith wants to make a stronger claim, that Thucydides’ account of the Athenians changing their minds should be taken as an endorsement of changing one’s mind as a matter of principle, and hence of a second referendum. Well, I suppose that can’t be ruled out, for the same reason as it can’t be confidently asserted: the total absence of any authorial commentary one way or the other (which is also why describing him as a “democratic theorist”, as opposed to a political thinker, is problematic). As Hobbes observed so perceptively, Thucydides doesn’t offer lessons or precepts: he puts the events in front of us and forces us to think about them.

The Athenians hear speeches, and then enough of them change their minds to reverse the decision. Can we assume that Thucydides endorsed this? It’s not obvious why, other than our own preference for not massacring people; we don’t assume that he endorsed the Sicilian Expedition because that’s how that debate turned out, so why assume he endorsed this outcome? The fact that he presents it in detail is a clear indication that something significant is going on – but it could be the portrayal of the Athenian demos as fickle and confused, and/or the nature of the rhetoric on display (Diodotus’ arguments are as dodgy as Cleon’s), building up a critical picture of the failings of democratic deliberation, rather than offering a cheerful endorsement of the demos on this occasion.

I entirely share Edith’s desire to stop Brexit by any means necessary; I just don’t think that mischaracterising Thucydides in order to claim him as an ally is the way to go. The readin that Aristotle, Sophocles and Thucydides accepted second votes as a normal part of politics is that such votes were a normal part of politics in a direct democracy, and modern representative democracy is so different that the example is scarcely useful or relevant.

What we should be focusing on are the arguments that Thucydides offers, in the mouth of Cleon, against the idea of a second vote; he forces us to clarify the case against persuasive (and certainly powerful) claims that consistency is preferable to changing one’s mind, and that ordinary people have a better grasp of what’s good for the city than the smart-arse intellectuals and experts. That isn’t to imply that Thucydides endorses these ideas either – but he thinks we need to think about them. He doesn’t come to teach us virtue, but understanding.

* A curious phrase, reminiscent of 17th/18th-century praise of certain historians for having had actual experience of generalship, carefully retooled for 21st-century publishing where every bestselling pop psych book must have a constantly repeated gimmick or slogan…

Marginalia

As mentioned at the end of my last post, I spent several days last week at a conference in Serbia on Imperialism and Identity at the Edges of the Roman Empire – perhaps appropriately, held at a conference centre in the middle of nowhere, with no bar, twenty minutes’ walk from the nearest supermarket, reminding us what it must have been like to be stationed on the Roman frontier in the early days before the local culture began to change and familiar foodstuffs (tea, proper coffee, beer…I mean, wine, olive oil and garum) became more readily available…

Actually the whole thing was a salutary and productive experience, both encountering research on regions that I don’t normally think about much (my default when it comes to the Roman Empire tends to be Italy and Westen Europe) and seeing how the debate shifts in multiple ways when it gets out towards the margins. There’s the persistence of older practices and concepts, not yet fully subjected to reflexivity and self-evaluation through the encounter with alien ideas – at least some people still want to talk about Romanisation – and also the fact that this reflexivity operates in both ways, and we have to think about ‘Roman Globalisation’ differently and more critically when looking at encounter zones between different cultural systems rather than at regions already fully incorporated into the Empire.

The edges of the empire are always also the edge of something else – not nothingness or a barbaric wasteland, whatever Roman ideology might persuade us to believe (interesting that the word “barbarians” also persists in some of these debates). Further, the frontier is not just something permeable, shaping and perhaps limiting but never preventing movement and exchange, but also something created; the “divergent” cultures on either side were not always so. Borders may move backwards and forwards, and then the attractions of one set of cultural practices may look very different compared with another.

It was especially interesting to be thinking about such issues in the Balkans, precisely a region of shifting frontiers and identities, and arguably *the* region of Europe most affected by the encounter of different cultures; and at the same time to be reading the Croatian novelist Daša Drndić’s novel Trieste, set in a region tossed backwards and forwards between different states, with towns changing their names half a dozen times in a few decades.

Along that border, as along all borders, deep into the soil is thrust the steel axis of a Ringelspiel, a merry-go-round, a lively carousel doomed to repeat eternally the invidious drama of family sagas. History – that lying, traitorous mother of life – continues, logorrhoeically, to spin its tiresome story, secretly dreaming up new borderlands one after another. And a border, like every long, Deep wound, even if it heals and does not turn into a wellspring of putrid stench, is streaked with proud scar tissue that separates the living from the dead.

The tragedy of Drndić’s book is not just the pointless warfare and displacement, but what happens to the hybrid, interwoven populations of such places with the rise of regimes that want to draw hard distinctions between different races; specifically, what happens to a family of mixed Jewish, Slovenian, Italian and German stock, long converted to Catholicism, in the face of Fascism and Nazism and the insistence that one part of that inheritance trumps all the others, and especially to the son that the daughter of the family has with a handsome SS officer, deputy commander of the local extermination camp, who is then kidnapped to be brought up as a good Aryan by a Catholic couple in Austria.

The book is, I must admit, horribly overwritten in places. It echoes Sebald in some respects, besides the subject matter, especially the blurring of fact and fiction and the inclusion of little pictures; but, where he is all about silences and evasions and the uncanny, Drndić piles up information and overwhelms with horror and outrage. It’s sometimes very effective, and one has to admire the audacity of devoting forty-three pages, each with four columns in small type, to the names of c. 9,000 Jews who were deported from or killed in Italy between 1943 and 1945 – a moral challenge to the reader, who will of course not read every name, or certainly not with the same attention, but will be all too conscious of their guilt in skipping forward.

What disappointed me slightly in the novel was the failure also to engage with the more recent past in that region, the latest spasm of ethnic hatred and violence released by the break-up of Jugoslavia in the early 1990s – though admittedly Gorizia and its satellite in Slovenia, Nova Gorica, were well away from any fighting. But perhaps there were quite enough contemporary resonances last week to be going on with. As my fellow speaker Andrew Gardner observed, here we were in the middle of a gathering of scholars from multiple countries, using English as common means of communication, engaged with same issues, at a time when the British as a nation seem determined to cut as many ties as possible.

Locating the periphery is always a matter of perspective. It’s interesting to see how different the world looks from a different region; as Swedes tend to focus on the Baltic, as Poles get very cross at being described as ‘eastern’ rather than ‘central’ Europe, so in the real east the west, so convinced of its own centrality to everything, feels a long way away. Britain was definitely marginal in the Roman period; it seems determined to reclaim that identity. It’s interesting that we conventionally think of the withdrawal of the legions, and the subsequent decline of Romano-British culture, as basically a bad thing, condemning the region to irrelevance for a couple of centuries. It can only be a matter of time before someone  insists that it was really just taking back control, the necessary prelude to a glorious new era of independence.

Too Much

One of the highlights of last academic year for me was a trip to the University of Toronto at Mississauga, to participate in a student-focused event; a lecture to undergraduates (they’d given me the general theme of ‘Authority and Nonconformity’, which I decided to interpret in terms of the historian’s duty to speak truth to power, Lucian’s idea of the historian as “apolis, autonomos, abasileutos” etc.) and an all-day workshop for postgrads (focusing on Varro, as I always like talking about Varro, and thence on wider themes of economic thought and social science ancient history).

It was great to have a chance to get to know Toronto (especially its coffee shops and brewpubs), as the only other time I’ve visited, I ended up spending all my spare time chatting to a couple of PolSci students and a postdoc. The hospitality offered by UTM colleagues was wonderful – I can especially recommend the amazing Boralia, with dishes based on aboriginal and C18-19 recipes, and the range of ciders on offer at Herfathers (though all a little strange to West Country tastes, due to the lack of proper cider apples in Ontario and hence the lack of tannin) – but it was all amazing. I was also impressed by the new hi-tech teaching rooms being developed at UTM, and their potential – especially as the one I saw was not an actual finished teaching room, but one of two temporary ones set up so staff could experiment with different technology and arrangements to see which worked best, before making a final decision about the design of the actual rooms in the building under construction. Such a difference from the usual “here’s the technology we now expect you to use, so get on with it” approach.

What most sticks in the memory, however – well, besides a particularly spectacular aged smoked beer – is the enthusiastic engagement of the students, especially at the undergraduate lecture; the discussion afterwards could have gone on for another hour, if we hadn’t had to move on to the reception, and the conversations during the reception could have gone on all evening if we hadn’t been heading off to dinner. And that’s where I started to think of this post in terms of the theme of excess and rationing. I tried to talk to everyone who wanted to talk, and to engage with their ideas and questions as they deserved – but I’m well aware that those two aims aren’t always balanced very well, not least given my tendency to embark on stream-of-consciousness mini-lectures in response to interesting questions. And all this depends on people pushing themselves forward; if anyone was waiting for a quiet moment to get my attention, they were probably out of luck.

It’s a matter of self-discipline, I suppose; if I was running a seminar, or chairing a session, I’d be much stricter in ensuring that everyone got a chance to speak and no one (especially me) talked too much – even with the risk that interesting ideas didn’t get discussed in sufficient depth. But of course the situations aren’t identical; there, the conversations can continue in the following lesson or informally (and I’d like to think that maybe some people in Toronto were still talking about some of this stuff after I left…), whereas this was a matter of my trying to give them their money’s worth, on a one-night-only basis, and not being sure whether to prioritise quantity or quality…

It’s an eternal problem – as is evident from the fact that I’m only now managing to finish writing this blog post, six months later. We have only so much time and energy, only so much capacity for attention (around the time of my trip, there were debates about the impact of social media in consuming too much of that, with damaging consequences), only so much to offer. I’ve spent much of this year feeling permanently over-committed and under-powered, so that everything is being done last-minute or late and I never seem to catch up properly on sleep or energy. I don’t for a moment imagine that I’m alone in this.

Some of it is externally imposed: tighter turnarounds on marking, for example, with ratcheting expectations on feedback and more time-consuming online systems. Most of it, however, is voluntary – or at least exists in a strange space where one is expected to do *something*, but there’s no clear indication of how much is enough or too much, or whether it’s the right sort of thing or not. The temptation is to try to do as much as possible, to ensure that expectations are met – but at the risk of not doing any of it well enough. But the alternative may be equally undesirable; stop doing things you actually want to do, to ensure that you do the things you *have* to do (or suspect you have to).

Take impact and engagement, for example. This is something that I’m wholeheartedly committed to, rather than an externally-imposed obligation; I have lots of different things I’d like to do, some of which I’ve talked about on this blog. There is a general approval of such activities within universities, so I can justify time spent of them as at least partly ‘work’; but at the same time there is an effective hierarchy of activities – crudely, is this going to contribute to an Impact Case Study or not? – and, crucially, approval of such activities in the abstract doesn’t necessarily translate into giving time for them, or allowing other things to be dropped.

So, I end up pursuing some things that wouldn’t be my own priority, because Case Study, and don’t pursue things that I’d really like to, because Not Case Study and time and energy are finite resources. And I feel conflicted about things like this blog and the @Thucydiocy account on the Twitter, because they’re never going to make a Case Study but I don’t want to give them up but they threaten at times to become a burden. But where else could I indulge in this sort of self-pity..?

There are similar pressures when it comes to research, lectures, publications etc. There are things I want to do which, realistically, are never likely to be REF-able, given the criteria for higher star ratings; they’ll be too slight or too discursive or too fuzzily experimental. My answer has always been to do them anyway, as well as the stuff that could be REF-able – but that’s what leads to over-commitment and exhaustion, and to a decline in the quality of everything, REF-able or not.

A particular issue here is the role of invitations, and how I respond to them. Basically, I have always tended to accept almost everything; partly because I often find it stimulating to develop something on the basis of someone else’s idea (which may reflect a certain lack of confidence in my own ideas…), partly because I feel a certain obligation to help with a project when I’ve been asked to do so, and partly because I’m so flattered that anyone has thought of me. Plus, in the case of lectures and conferences, it’s wonderful to have a chance to visit new places, and maybe I won’t get another chance.

It’s all too easy to accept an invitation for six months or a year hence, since that’s plenty of time in which to imagine the backlog of other commitments being cleared. The reality is that this almost never happens; there’s just the constant stress of trying to finish one overdue thing so I can get on with the next thing before I have to start on the conference paper – which then becomes another thing added to the to-be-written-up list in another six months. And as a result no one gets the best of me; everything is a last-minute improvisation, relying on some underdeveloped but interesting-enough ideas as a substitute for really solid research.

I think I have finally reached the point of feeling – not just knowing – that this is Too Much, sufficiently for me actually to change my behaviour rather than just complain about feeling tired all the time. If someone invites me to speak or write something, they deserve better than they’re currently getting, in terms of quality and, for publications, punctual delivery. Of course, what this requires – besides resisting the temptation of attractive foreign locations – is the development of enough self-confidence to turn down invitations without fearing that no one else will ever invite me to do anything, and at the same time a tempering of the arrogant assumption that I’m necessarily the best person for something. Yes, I’m going to be saying no more often, including to things I would actually like to do – but rather than feeling guilty at disappointing the person who’s asked me, I can make it a positive experience by thinking of the other people who could do it just as well if not better.

Maybe this will give me more time and energy for the things I really want to do, not just what other people want me to do. Maybe I’ll just do fewer things in a less slapdash manner. In the meantime, I’m just landing in Belgrade for another conference…

Tight Fit

If I ever want to write a distillation of the political wisdom and insights of Thucydides that will get noticed by serious newspapers and sold in proper bookshops, it’s clear that I’m going to have to develop an eye-catching binary distinction with which to make sense of the entire world, the equivalent of the Nowheres and the Somewheres, or the Tight and Loose cultures distinguished by a social psychology study that claims to “provide a consistent way of understanding differences observed from antiquity to the present day, in everything from international relations to relations in our homes.” Hmm. The Thucydides and the Thucydidose? The Thucydiscerning and the Thucydiots? The people who believe in reductionist binary distinctions with universal validity, and everybody else?

Though they were separated by miles, and in some cases centuries, tight cultures as diverse as Sparta and Singapore have something in common: each faced (or faces) a high degree of threat, whether from Mother Nature – disasters, diseases, and food scarcity – or human nature – the chaos caused by invasions and internal conflicts. Strong norms are needed in these contexts to help groups survive. And when we look at loose cultures, from classical Athens to modern New Zealand, we see the opposite pattern: they enjoy the luxury of facing far fewer threats. This safety is used to explore new ideas, accept newcomers, and tolerate a wide range of behaviour. In contexts where there are fewer threats and thus less of a need for coordination, strong norms don’t materialise.

Sigh. This is such total bollocks, at least as far as the references to classical Greece are concerned, that it’s hard to get really cross, but only to shake one’s head despairingly that anyone should take it seriously, give it a prominent position in a respectable newspaper and so forth. There’s no proper analysis of ancient history here, only the recycling of the cliche that Athens was an open society (Pericles’ Funeral Oration, obviously, makes that claim – but what about the highly restrictive rules on citizenship, and a whole raftload of social and cultural norms?) and Sparta a closed one (yeah, insofar as we actually know anything about the historical Sparta) – and that then begs questions about the supposed origins of tight and loose cultures, as there seems no obvious reason to imagine that Sparta was somehow more under threat than Athens within the generally anarchic Greek world (who gets invaded by Persia, eh?), let alone more threatened by food scarcity (famous poverty of Attic soil, anyone?).

But then there’s not actually any analysis of ancient history in the article, since pretty well all the evidence it relies upon, neatly tabulated as if it all has the same status and reliability, is modern; there’s just a reference to Herodotus at the beginning (“As long ago as 400 B.C.E., Herodotus documented a wide variety of cultural practices that he observed in his travels in The Histories“) to make the scintillating point that cultures are not identical to one another, and a quote from him at the end to demonstrate that articles in Science offer so much more insight than any of that humanistic stuff:

Indeed, as Herodotus remarked centuries ago, “if one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being the best by far”. Such beliefs fail to recognize that tight and loose cultures may be, at least in part, functional in their own ecological and historical contexts.

Down with cultural relativism! Paul Cartledge’s The Greeks: a portrait of self and others to the contrary, the problem with Greek thought was clearly that it was insufficiently reductionist and bipolar. Athens (tightness score 3.1) might have prided itself on its looseness, but Pericles should have recognised that Sparta (tightness score 11.8) was just as functional (if not more so) in its ecological context.

What’s most impressive about this paper is the fact that it was published back in 2011, and yet somehow is now being splashed as the latest thing. I’m pretty sure that some of my old research must have predicted Trump, or Brexit, or something like that; why isn’t my university press office on the case? All I need is a decent set of categories…

Update 18/9: I initially described this as a political science study, as I saw – or thought I saw – the lead author described as such. Stefan Dolgert queried this, understandably, and on rechecking it’s clear that, whatever I thought I saw, this is the work of social psychologists. Which makes vastly more sense, both of the publication venue and of the habit of confident ahistorical generalisation. Apologies to all my political science colleagues for associating them with such twaddle.