Neville Morley's Blog, page 4

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th April 2025

Woke around six, feeling exceedingly groggy – recovering from very little sleep the previous night, due to getting far too wound up on Friday evening by the need to be coherent and engaging on live radio and then getting talked over. It would have been nice to sleep rather longer, but I’m feeling a lot better. The cats want breakfast and attention, and I need the bathroom, so I can’t get back to sleep; I do puzzles from yesterday’s newspaper until A wakes up and then go down to wash dishes and make tea. The kittens go outside briefly but then come back to bed and arrange themselves in their now familiar places: Buddy lies next to A, Olga goes under my legs and Hector leans up against me. It’s now very nearly a year since B arrived, and while he really doesn’t like sharing with other cats and they reciprocate, things have really settled down, with only occasional spats, and they all seem quite happy and relaxed.

There is always something wonderful about the first proper cup of tea after being away: the right teabags, the water that I’m used to, decent soya milk. No free biscuits, but that’s the only thing. Scrolling through the usual websites to catch up on news and German football results, finishing puzzles, waiting for the regular social chat to start up on Facebook. The radio chunters away in the background, quiet enough that I can ignore it. We get up and strip the bedclothes, much to the annoyance of the cats (who perhaps feel that one should not do washing on the sabbath); get dressed and downstairs for another cup of tea. While A starts cooking kedgeree, I then drive over to Wincanton to fill up with petrol, as I have to make multiple trips to the dump with garden waste today. Back for kedgeree, which is not quite up to the usual high standard as A has mistakenly added caraway seed rather than cumin, producing not just the wrong flavour but a quite overwhelming one; it’s a struggle to come up with the right form of words to express genuine gratitude for being cooked for without total dishonesty that no, this does taste rather odd.

Cup of espresso, washing up, stirring the new pot of fermenting apple vinegar, load up car with rotting logs and bags of bindweed and nettle. Down to the tip – long queue, lots of people being rather slow and ineffectual. Back to work in the garden for the rest of the morning, planting out beans and sunflowers; load up car again; in the afternoon, clearing bindweed, rocks and junk from the shaded area at the very bottom of the garden to plant out some autumn-fruiting raspberries; mow lawn, trim edges around the raised beds. Regular breaks for water and a bit of lunch – weather is ridiculously warm and a bit stuffy. Towards the end of the afternoon, start juggling with preparations for supper; putting the beef in the oven, preparing batter for Yorkshire puddings, preparing dough for rolls for lunches next week, preparing vegetables. The final stage is rather thrown off track by waiting for the arrival of the man who has been repairing A’s border fork, who phoned to say he would bring it round in twenty minutes and then took over half an hour, and needed to be shown round the garden; supper is half an hour late and slightly over-cooked, but still entirely edible. We’re not taking a plated meal round to our elderly neighbour before we eat, as usual, as she’s preaching at an evening service – the plate goes round later to be heated in the microwave.

For entertainment, we continue with the classic Pride and Prejudice, after hearing The Reunion on the radio (the news that Mr Bingley decded to give up acting and become a teacher continues to delight). It’s episode three, the visit to the Collinses in Kent and Darcy’s first proposal. Magnificent brooding and glowering. Put oven back on for the bread rolls, and forget about it; put rolls on, and then forget about them, but thankfully A remembers and they are crisp rather than burnt. Fighting the urge for yet more beer – on the one hand I was very virtuous on Friday (actually a drink beforehand would have helped with my radio performance) and relatively virtuous last night (sheer tiredness), but I really do need to work tomorrow. [update: sadly I felt completely wiped next day, despite a reasonable night’s sleep, and got very little done].

I go down the garden and back with the bat detector. Newts and frogs in one pond, more newts in another; a decent assortment of bats, both regulars (common pipistrelle, serotine, noctule, brown long-eared), a soprano pipistrelle, and a strong signal from a Myotis – the software thinks it’s a Whiskered Myotis, but I now have enough knowledge of the subject to know that I can’t trust it and need to upload recordings to the higher-powered online software to check. Still, that’s eight bat species confirmed in the neighbourhood so far this year. Write up my nature journal briefly and then up to bed.

It’s been a while since I’ve had such a straightforward, unremarkable 27th of the month to report!

The Big Wheel

Ex-Twitter remains a right-wing cesspit – I now visit it solely in order to check on the Thucydides misquotation and misattribution situation, but since one especially deranged and/or trollish QAnon Trumpist has adopted ‘Thucydides’ as his – yes, I’m making assumptions here, but definitely his – online alias, I get a regular update on bizarre conspiracy theories and agitprop. Ex-Twitter also remains a fertile source of Thucydides misattributions – the “Scholars and Warriors” quote is all too deeply embedded there, whereas so far the infestation on Bluesky is manageable – which is why I keep visiting. And every so often this throws up something genuinely weird and interesting…

In the ancient chariot’s journey, we see the eternal dance of time and tradition, where each wheel’s turn whispers the wisdom of ages past.

Thucydides, obviously; a slightly loose translation of 1.22, the bit about the tendency for the present and future to resemble the past because of human nature? I really have no idea where this actually comes from, as there are no results if you search for the exact quote and far too many waffly New Age sites if you search for this constellation of words. I’m partly inclined to blame it on GenAI slop and partly concerned that my suspicions of the pernicious influence of GenAI slop may lead me to underestimate human stupidity. The author isn’t responding to enquiries, so we may never know.

Further evidence of Thucydides’ under-appreciated spiritual side (I really am going to have to rethink the paper I’m giving in July about his reputation for ‘atheism’) turned up just a day or so later:

Not another God, nor angel, nor demon, nor wisdom, nor anything else in essence, but the Lord alone is the creator of all, the all-perfect Word of all things.

This particular Ex-Twitter account – likewise disinclined to respond to polite enquiries from the Thucydides Bot – had a whole string of similar statements attributed to assorted ancient Greeks, none of them noted for their Christian faith. In this case, the source was quite easy to track down – and this is where it gets interesting, because this site presents translations of quotes from this site, which has not invented them but taken them from the walls of the Great Meteora monastery, where Thucydides and the other Greek philosophers and writers are depicted as following Saints Paul and Justin in procession towards the church door – they all carry scrolls, on which these quotes are written. This is the right-hand fresco:

This is clearly part of the long tradition of claiming virtuous pagans for Christ – crossed, in this case, one suspects, with a hefty dose of Greek cultural chauvinism; this is our heritage, so we are not going to let the pagans and atheists get their hands on it. In the case of someone like Plato, it wouldn’t be too hard to find a line in his writings that might suggest a foreshadowing of Christianity if you squint hard enough. This isn’t terribly easy for Thucydides – so the monks simply put imagined words into his mouth (oh the irony! what he might have been expected to say appropriate to the situation of him being a Christian…).

To be fair, that’s what they did with all the others too, even Plato, rather than singling out Thucydides as an especially problematic case. Even if he is. I really do think I’m going to have to incorporate this into my paper…

Teach Me Tonight

There’s been a bit of discussion on Bluesky this morning of the latest lot of advertising from the latest GenAI-based start-up, Cluely. It’s interesting mainly for its predictability and obviousness; aspiring to the perfect rearrangement of all the usual clichés, which could of course be the motto of GenAI in general. Its slogans simultaneously stress its putative ubiquity (“if everyone’s using it, it’s not cheating”) and its invisibility (“no one will know you’re using it”). The latter claim supports the former – if it’s invisible, you can’t know whether it actually is everywhere – but it’s also an admission that it is actually embarrassing to admit you’re using such a prop to sound as if you know things and have ideas; that it *is* ‘cheating’, or at any rate inadequate bullshitting, even if everyone is doing it.

People want to engage with humans, not with GenAI chatbots, and still less, one might conclude, with human sock puppets for GenAI. ‘Computer says no’ from a human is probably a little less annoying than the algorithm itself refusing to engage with the question or offer a relevant option; ‘computer says I should pretend to hear your concerns but remain non-committal’ is worse than either. Perhaps the humanities do need to rethink what they’re offering in the age of GenAI: not so much learning how to craft prompts as learning how to come across as, or even be, genuinely human in a society that’s full of fake, content-free humanness.

What this did remind me of was a text that, so far as I’ve noticed, has not been mentioned in discussions of the latest developments in EdTech: the teaching episode in the second series of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (original radio version – I’ve no idea if this made it into any of the books, as I gave up reading them after the first one and a third):

The Voice: Here is a typical computer class from the Bratisvogan Megalycee Unidate 911VCK168:

COMPU-TEACH: Good morning life-form.

PUPIL: Hi teach.

COMPU-TEACH: Are you sitting comfortably?

PUPIL: Yes.

COMPU-TEACH: Then stand up! Harsh Economic Truths, Class Seventeen. You are standing up?

PUPIL: Yes.

COMPU-TEACH: Good. Posit: you are living in an exciting, go-ahead civilisation. Where are you looking?

PUPIL: Up.

COMPU-TEACH: What do you see?

PUPIL: The open sky. The stars. An infinite horizon.

COMPU-TEACH: Correct! You may press the button.

PUPIL: Thank you.

[Button is pressed. Pleasurable tinkling noise.]

PUPIL: Wow! That feels nice.

The class continues, developing the idea that global economies tend to be taken over entirely by shoe-shops until they reach the so-called Shoe Event Horizon. Adams’ economic theorising – which remained blissfully oblivious to the rise to dominance of shops that don’t sell anything nearly so useful as shoes – is less interesting than his perhaps inadvertently revealing idea of what future education might look like.

It’s personalised, in the sense that the conversation is focused on the individual student’s knowledge and on individual reward; you could even at a pinch describe it as a flipped classroom, in the sense that the student is being tested on their reading. It’s also entirely focused on the regurgitation of a memorised script, with no concern for analysis or understanding – and while that may be partly down to Adams wanting to use the episode for a bit of plot exposition, that clearly isn’t a sufficient explanation.

Above all, it’s a model in which learning is purely transactional, a mechanism for the allocation of extrinsic reward – and not just on the part of the student, desperate to get to push the button again for an endorphin hit, but also on the part of the Compu-Teach, as the student has to push the other button at the end of the lesson to generate a burst of pleasure. In other words, the teacher cares as little about the subject as the student; they both aim to stick to the confines of the script and tick the necessary boxes.

There’s not much sign here of Adams’ more critical view of the impact of gratuitous technology in the form of the Nutrimatic Machine and the other ‘helpful’ Genuine People Personality products of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Share and Enjoy!

Babies

It is not a new or startling observation that the current regime in the USA is better characterised as a royal court than a modern state. More could be said, however, about the importance in such courts of competition for status, often taking bizarre forms – the 15th- and 16th-century fashion for enormous ornate codpieces, for example. Trump’s acolytes prefer to be real dicks rather than wear pretend ones; rather, in homage to their lord, they compete with one another through displays of ignorance and stupidity. Nauturally, as the chief pretender to power and influence, Musk had to respond to Trump’s obsession with a Golden Age of tariffs by demonstrating that his own knowledge had not advanced beyond the early 20th century.

I mean, what does one do in the face of such nonsense, other than wish he’d start resorting to a different historical reference point so that another group of specialists could feel shame and fury instead? All the bullshitting confidence of GenAI, without having actually bothered to plagiarise any recent publications.

“Throughout history, periods of extended prosperity for civilizations have always led to population declines.”

No examples or evidence provided, obviously; it’s just a version of that ‘Hard times make hard men who make good times which make soft men’ meme, but without the pretty pictures. The use of the term ‘civilization’ is of course conveniently vague; it brings to mind, I would suggest, examples like Egypt and Rome, where in the popular imagination the idea of population decline towards the end of the story does seem plausible (but of course it’s implied that population decline was the cause of the overall crisis and decline rather than a consequence). Was this true of 14th-century Italy, say, or 18th-century Britain? Presumably they weren’t ‘civilizations’ in the right sort of way, or weren’t prosperous enough, or some other get-out clause. And ‘civilizations’ is then the sleight of hand that allows him to sidestep debates about global population growth in favour of a predictable focus on declining White Europeans, who are of course the only people whose decline is a problem. Great Replacement Theory ahoy!

“Counterintuitively, it is when civilizations are richest that they have fewer children…”

Why is this counterintuitive, other than this making him sound like an expert whose knowledge may contradict common unthinking assumptions? Studies of the ‘demographic transition’ in Europe have long since established that in societies which become more prosperous, families are likely to have fewer children because those children are more likely to survive into adulthood; yes, if resources are abundant they could feed more children, but they could also choose to invest more in the education and support of a smaller number of children, to improve their prospects.

“…as most people cannot cognitively override the limbic attraction of hedonism and envy, the latter being particularly pernicious.”

Yes, that’s the reason, obviously. I know that trying to extract sense from this garbled psychological jargon-vomit is an entirely pointless exercise, but why does an apparently universal tendency towards hedonism and envy, preferring self-indulgence to procreation, not apply under conditions of poverty as well?

“Low birth rates were a big deal for the Romans as early as ~50BC, for example. They debated endlessly about how to solve the problem and they failed.”

I mean, he could at least have remembered to evoke Tiberius Gracchus and his concerns about the emptiness of Etruria, leading to proposals to impose limits on the rapaciousness of the wealthy and to redistribute Rome’s wealth to support the poorer citizens… Maybe not the agenda he really wants to promote.

The significance of ‘~50BC’ escapes me, as the thing he’s obviously talking about is Augustus’ marriage legislation – which, as is well established, was concerned only with the elite not with the population as a whole, and so would have had negligible impact on the overall demography, and may also have been a PR exercise to express the traditional values of the regime rather than having any practical impact. Maybe vague memories of Sallust developing the idea of Romans becoming flabby after the defeat of Carthage? Maybe he’s pulling dates out of his arse? Evidence for endless debates about the ‘problem’ of populousness: not a lot.

Let’s look on the bright side; at least, in this particular brain splurge, we are not also getting the Tenney Frank line on race mixture being responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire, or the stuff in Juvenal about promiscuous women finding it too easy to get hold of abortifacients so they can pursue their liaisons with slaves and foreigners. He’s probably saving that for the next time J.D. Vance comes out with a remark that threatens to be even stupider.

Stop Making Sense

The dominant tendency in historical studies over the last fifty years or so has been to assume rationality on the part of people in the past, even if their behaviour and ideas seem at first sight to be ridiculous, inexplicable or ‘primitive’ by our standards. The core argument of E.R. Dodds’ classic The Greeks and the Irrational was not that the ancient Greeks were actually confused and illogical, but that the majority did not stick to ‘modern’ patterns of thought like philosophical reason and scientific scepticism but held a more traditional worldview – coherent in its own terms – built around belief in divine forces and fate. Elections are a tool for manipulation by the elite, so all offices should be allocated by lot? Not our way of doing politics, but you can see the reasoning. The emperor gets upset by the rising price of eggs, blames this on greedy and cheating merchants, and so issues a blanket decree that no one should ever charge more than than the apparently arbitrary figures listed in his decree, on pain of death? Ignorant, confused and self-defeating from a modern economic standpoint, but it makes perfect sense in the context of what passed for Roman understanding of what we call the market.

The historian’s task, then, is not to condemn past ideas for failing to conform to modern conceptions and assumptions, but to make sense of them in their own terms and context – on the assumption that there is a sense to be made, even of some of the wackier fragments of pre-Socratic thought. Where this becomes trickier is with ideas or behaviour that did not conform to the prevalent worldview in the past – it was never a monolith, even if we tend to treat it as such. In some cases, we risk unconsciously taking sides, when the minority view resembles our familiar taken-for-granted ideas (scientific enquiry; ‘freedom of speech’ liberalism; Christianity) and so tempts us back towards treating the majority view as aberrant and illogical (how could the Athenians have condemned Socrates for Just Asking Questions?). But generally the historicist approach, seeking to understand why Christianity or Socrates would have seemed dangerous to some at the time, given their values and worldview, wins out.

What of the actions of certain individuals that were clearly regarded by contemporaries as bizarre and unacceptable – the emperor Gaius making his horse a senator, having the sea whipped for frustrating his plans and having angry conversations with the gods about the siting of his own temple? A few reach for the tools of psychology and point to Gaius’ disturbed childhood as an explanation; a few others ‘sanewash’ his behaviour by suggesting, for example, that the horse thing was a deliberate satire on the obsequiousness of the senatorial elite, with the emperor simply exploring the extent of his power rather than pretending not to have it (as his predecessors had done). Mostly, however, historians emphasise the unreliable nature of our sources; these are the stories that get told about Caligula by people who hated him and who favoured a model of imperial behaviour that upheld traditional norms and respected decorum, and so we cannot take such stories at face value but perhaps can only ever discuss the representation of individual emperors, not the reality. The most extreme anecdotes are too extreme to be credible; let’s just think about why such stories would circulate…

And today we have Donald Trump, who makes Caligula look like a paragon of moderation and self-control and Diocletian seem like Paul Krugman. It should be stressed that much of his world-view is not at all aberrant if we consider the overall context; there are lots of ignorant, vindictive, racist and nationalistic misogynists out there, it’s just that they haven’t normally been elected to the highest office in a major western country or at least haven’t been (allowed to be) so open about their views in public – usually we have to wait for the insiders’ memoirs for the full story, but here it’s difficult to imagine much of a gap between public and private. And, as has regularly been noted, it’s striking that the stories in circulation – if we take the mainstream media to be our equivalent of Tacitus and Suetonius – are often milder and less extreme than the visible reality, as if the journalists fear that writing the truth will look too much like over-the-top polemic so write lies in the hope of retaining their credibility. (Some more ridiculous and irrational thinking that requires a cultural, contextual explanation).

Some aspects of the Trump regime go much further, and threaten to break the obsever’s brain. I still find it difficult to accept that the ‘bleach as a cure for COVID’ routine was not some clumsy bit of satire. The tariffs stuff today is UNBELIEVABLY stupid. At best we have someone with a Ladybird Book-level understanding of trade – Country A produces wheat; Country B produces shoes; they exchange their goods and everyone is happy, except when the evil A people also start producing shoes and then force the A people to buy them, which is BAD – crossed with a remarkable commitment to old-fashioned autarky and the usual rampant xenophobia. But then to divide the US trade deficit with a given country by the total volume of imports into the US from that country, and claim that this number must be the level of tariffs imposed by that country to frustrate the natural (sic.) tendency for trade to balance, so half that number is an appropriately generous level at which to set US tariffs…

And there are people enabling this stuff, and elaborating it in documents, and presumably doing all the individual calculations for what level of tariffs should be imposed on penguins in the South Atlantic and US forces on Diego Garcia (the Council of Economic Advisers, no less!), and then justifying it all in public. I was struck yesterday morning by one interviewee on BBC radio claiming that price rises are inflation only if they are caused by excessive government spending – and being allowed to get away with this by the interviewer, whether through their ignorance or spinelessness, whereas the only reasonable response is to conclude that this person is neither serious nor sincere, end of discussion.

So, it’s all court politics: who has the emperor’s ear to try to sway his whims for an hour or so until he talks to someone else, who encourages his senile burbling because of sycophancy or equal ignorance or because this distracts him from other things, who tries to channel his obsessions for their own ends, who is oblivious to possible consequences and who is willing to see the world burn for kicks and giggles? There are factions with more or less irreconcilable ideas and goals – compare Henry Farrell’s analysis of the divide between the hardcore religious right and the Silicon Valley crowd – and there are a few shared traits, such as an eagerness to hate and punish anything resembling opposition or difference (which extends to tolerating the punishment of the objects of hatred of other factions, even if they themselves feel indifferent to them).

Treat this seriously and try to discern any reason or coherence, and you’ve already lost. And yet people keep doing this, keep trying to identify the Really Cunning Plan that makes this all make sense – suggesting, for example, that the economic incoherence of the tariffs policy is beside the point because this isn’t an economic policy at all but a political move, to create internal disruption and opportunities for shakedowns. Or maybe the incoherence is the point, to break the brains of anyone trying to make sense of it all – dead cats all the way down. Or maybe some of them are actually aliens bent on global subversion. Mostly, it is just not serious. But the consequences are serious already, on multiple fronts, and will only get worse.

My personal take this week is that this is the Bitcoin regime; not so much in the literal sense that at least half of them seem to have financial interests in such scams, but culturally/ideologically, insofar as Bitcoin seems to draw together accelerationist futurism and an atavistic drive for independence from state institutions, libertarianism and the far right, preppers and gamers and coders, money and influence both entirely detached from any sort of material basis, hype, bullshit and the terminally online. But mostly because Bitcoin is one of the few things I can think of that is as multi-facetedly stupid as the Trump regime.

No, I’m not expecting to be invited to visit the USA any time soon, why do you ask?

At The Zoo

Tl;dr: massively over-interpreting a throwaway comment and extending a metaphor way beyond any reasonable point…

Should our primary goal as ancient historians be to rescue our field, perhaps by trying to shake off the embarrassing legacies of ‘Classics’ and then infiltrating history departments, or should we be aiming to blow it up altogether? This question, which has been circulating social media (for ‘professional ancient historians interested in this sort of navel-gazing’ values of social media) for a few years, cropped up in the round table discussion I organised at the European Social Science History Conference in Leiden this week on ‘Ancient History and Global History’, which brought together the differing perspectives of Eivind Heldaas Seland (author of A Global History of the Ancient World), Jo Crawley Quinn (author of How The World Made The West) and Miko Flohr (offering as ever thought-provoking ideas from the intersection of archaeology, ancient history and decolonisation). My role, having got all three of them into the same place with a set of vague talking points, was to draw a few strained analogies between periodisation and my attempts at structuring discussion and to lob in the occasional provocation.

The comment which I’m taking much too seriously came right at the end, when I attempted to goad the panelists into considering what institutional changes might be required to support a genuinely global ancient history. I don’t want to blow up up the discipline, remarked Jo, but rather the whole faculty; replacing the disciplinarily-siloed zoo with a safari park.

Hmm. Two equally artificial environments, that at least in theory both seek to balance the welfare of the animals (academics) with the pleasure of the paying public (research funders, government, students). From the perspective of the inmates, the safari park does offer a lot more space to roam around, a greater illusion of freedom and self-determination. On the other hand, both the conditions and public expectations clearly favour charismatic mega-fauna, the big beasts who can inspire awe and excitement even when viewed from a distance, proudly bestriding extensive intellectual territory. It’s less obviously good for the small nocturnal rodents of the academic world; we thrive in a smaller, more restricted environment, and would be entirely invisible in a safari park – if we’d find a place in it at all – whereas the zoo can level the playing field (how many layers of mixed metaphor can I work into this discussion?) in showing how many different animals can be equally interesting when observed closely.

What neither set-up does is promote or allow the sort of genuine free-ranging across boundaries and mingling of different species that I imagine was Jo’s intended point; even in the safari park, some species are kept well apart from others. Or maybe for the big beasts it is just about the territory, the individual freedom to fish around in different periods of history in the morning, do some philosophy in the afternoon and then head over to the sociology of music in the evening, without being confined to a single small enclosure, whereas I’m thinking too much about the collective impact – the promotion of interaction between the people who do these different things to see what happens.

The advantage of being a small nocturnal rodent is that you can just get on with stuff without people paying much attention, whether you’re in a zoo or a safari park. Concretely, while my research and teaching has regularly been influenced by the particular colleagues and structures with which I’ve found myself interacting, I’ve never felt either restricted or compelled to do things I don’t want to do. If I was in a History department rather than a Classics & Ancient History department I might be doing some different things differently, but not to the extent that this seems either like a nightmare or like the promised land; ditto, some bigger and less defined school of humanities or humanities and social sciences. Perhaps I am especially adaptable, able to find a niche in any ecosystem, but actually I think this is true of most academics. The potential impact of institutional restructuring, beloved of ambitious vice chancellors and university presidents across the globe, is vastly exaggerated, other than the time and resources that the process of restructuring consumes.

What we have to avoid is the circus – and both zoos and safari parks can effectively become circuses if they shift from passive to active manipulation of the behaviour of their inhabitants. There’s a significant difference between leaving animals to adapt to an artificial environment and compelling them to behave in artificial ways; between putting academics with some group of other academics with some high-level goals in teaching and research, and seeking to direct and limit exactly what research and teaching they can do. University restructuring, where it’s not just about cost-cutting and profit margins, is often driven by top-down ideas that this is what everyone needs to be doing to entertain the punters. All humanities must be environmental humanities! Social justice is the trick that will get you nice fish! (Until this becomes politically inconvenient). Everyone should digital futures!

Worrying about whether we should keep separating primates from ungulates, or instead move to a geographically based organisation, really does seem beside the point when university management is determined to get every animal to balance a ball on its nose and when the world outside is burning. Angus Wilson’s The Old Men At The Zoo was all too prescient…

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th March 2025

Woke from a deep, largely dreamless sleep at seven on the dot – which is six in British money, but still represents a significant improvement over the regular weekday alarm time of half five and the regular weekday cat-demanding-breakfast time of five, let alone the total lack of sleep the night before due to cat shenanigans. I would never be without cats, and am far too soft-hearted to lock them out of the bedroom – actively encouraging Buddy to spend the night on the bed, which is A’s current socialisation programme, may be a different matter, as he growls whenever one of us moves let alone when one of the others hoves into view – but there are times when it becomes a bit too much. High on the order of business for this morning is writing to apologise to the friend whom I blew off last night due to being at the end of my tether and desperate just to find hotel and crash – the fact I had managed to make a vaguely coherent contribution to discussion in one panel session that afternoon was an enormous, unappreciated achievement.

Naturally the hotel room doesn’t have tea, but it does have a small coffee pod machine – albeit one that produces more liquid per brew than the mugs provided can accommodate – so I can have a gentle coming-round phase. One of the great disadvantages of the European Social Science History conference, the reason why I’m here in Leiden for two nights, is that the organisation thinks half past eight is a good starting time for the first morning session every day, and, while the conference as a whole is enormous, the Antiquity strand is small enough that absences from panel audiences are a bit noticeable. The good news is that the Antiquity strand is small enough that there isn’t a panel in every session, and the first slot this morning is clear; in other circumstances I might look elsewhere in the programme for something interestingly comparative, but today I am taking it easy.

So, leisurely catch-up on the less unbearable news, shower and shave (slightly tricky when there is no sink plug at all, rather than the usual inadequate plug that does at least slow the flow of water slightly), and stroll down the road to the bus stop, feeling confident after yesterday evening that I have grasped the local public transport system – if I can manage it when sleep-deprived, I can do it any time. I’m out in a north-western suburb of Leiden, halfway to the coast, as Exeter expenses rules preclude any of the hotels in the centre, even with conference discount – and I am happy enough with this, having successfully found my way there without any trouble, whereas my first ever experience of the ESSHC involved finding that I’d booked a chalet in an out-of-season holiday park on the coast, miles out of The Hague, half a mile beyond where the bus stopped out of holiday season… It’s a glorious morning, and we pass a patch of open ground with the usual ditches, sheep, geese and other water fowl, and a pair of storks. I love storks, so this brings joy.

The bus terminates at the central station and I then walk into the centre along the usual picturesque canals to find a well-recommended cafe for breakfast; good coffee (Dutch flat whites retain a considerable kick, whereas in the UK they have tended to become slightly less milky lattes) and a spectacular confection, listed as a local speciality, called a Speculoos Croissant – croissant stuffed with the ubiquitous whipped cream, plus speculoos syrup and chocolate flakes. Well, I don’t have to eat anything for the rest of the day… Slightly embarrassed to be told off politely for breaching the ‘no laptops’ rule in the downstairs seating area (no laptops at all Friday to Sunday, of which I approve), but in my defence the notice was in Dutch. Actually it’s interesting that despite my obvious lack of facility in Dutch one barista stuck to that language despite clear evidence that she possessed the usual perfect English; I honestly don’t know if this was making a point – the impact of the new right-wing nationalist government, even – or she was just assuming that my limited responses are typical of Old People; what is striking is that I can grasp almost everything she’s saying.

Onwards to the conference, arriving conveniently five minutes into the coffee break. By lucky chance run into one colleague from Scotland and then another from Munich, so plenty to talk about – trying not to spend too much time lamenting the state of UKHE and the identikit strategic hack’n’slash plans of management teams, but this isn’t easy. Into a panel session on Hellenistic taxation, not a topic I know much about but with enough structural similarities to things I do know about, and anyway the whole point of attendance at this sort of thing is to broaden one’s knowledge and learn new things.

I had sent a message to the aforementioned friend, and we’d arranged to meet for lunch at the cafe of the Leiden Botanical Gardens round the corner – very busy, given the combination of a conference full of hungry historians all looking for lunch at the same time and the glorious weather, but she’d found a table. Very good spring soup, decent quiche, and a very enjoyable catch-up, including something with a sufficient resemblance to progress in thinking about the chapter we are, very slowly, writing together, at least insofar as we’ve agreed that we’ll both potentially write about Friedrich August Wolf in drafts of our respective sections and worry about how to make these fit together later. We head back to the conference, late for the next session, and after some hesitation (mostly from me, being too British for words) crash into a panel on Roman agrimensores and their early modern reception five minutes into the second paper. This does mean that when I want to contribute to discussion I have to draw attention to this by apologising for the possibility that the question has already been answered before I arrived. Chat to.a few colleagues afterwards; realise later, from emails, that there were also people avoiding me for fear that I might hassle them about overdue book reviews. In fact I have been too busy identifying potential future victims, not least for a couple of books on Roman agrimensores that I believe will appear on the review pile in the next month or so.

Rather than going to another session – again, there is nothing specifically related to antiquity or to any of my other interests other than one incredibly vague-looking panel on historical theory – I have booked an early table in a brew-pub which I wanted to visit years ago, when I visited Leiden to give a talk to postgrads and got stranded for an extra night (I cannot remember the reason why my flight was cancelled; snow, possibly) and found it was booked out. Walked along more pretty streets, seeing lots of cats in windows and enjoying the sunshine, to relish two very nice beers brewed on the premises, a saison and a milk stout, and some excellent fish and chips. Then decided to walk back to the hotel rather than take the bus, partly to work off some supper and mostly in order to get a photo of the storks – and a grey heron who landed right next to me and looked rather surprised.

The twenty-eight days of February mean that the last entry I wrote for this series was also covering a Thursday, and so I find myself doing exactly the same thing as last time, eschewing any academic activity (not in this case skipping a free dinner) to attend my online jazz composition class, at least after ten minutes of trying to persuade Teams to work – the joys of having both a work Microsoft account and a student Microsoft account at a different institution means that I can no longer log into Teams calls for work at all except by clicking on someone else’s link, as it automatically forwards me to my student login – and this evening it insists on autofilling my work credentials, which of course don’t work, however hard I try to input the correct password.

Eventually I join the class five minutes late. We are continuing to explore modality, which I really like (and I’m pleased to realise, having checked up on last month’s entry, that I’m making much better sense of it than I was then). However, there is a constant issue with composing anything that doesn’t sound exactly like a cheap imitation of Herbie Hancock’s ‘Maiden Voyage’. I’m the only one with any homework to look at this week – does everyone else hate modes, whereas I’m the Eurojazz fan? I get a pretty positive reception from the tutor for something that was, to be honest, largely hacked out as an afterthought after he told us that we shouldn’t generally use melodic minor modes for more than about 25% of any given tune, whereas my previous composition was entirely melodic minor. Interest was expressed in hearing the latter, so maybe I’ll tinker with that rather than trying to write something completely new for the final class of term next week.

Afterwards I call home for updates on the cats, apologies for completely forgetting to give A. details of where I’m staying, and reassurance that I can’t wait to be back tomorrow. It’s now going on for ten, Dutch time, so a brief bit of reading and sudoku then crash, not least because tomorrow starts with an 8.30 session…

I Could Write A Book

Over the last year or so, like other academics, I’ve received occasional emails from different publishers asking whether I’d be willing for my work to be included in any deal they might sign with GenAI companies to make their publications available as training data. I do appreciate their position, trying to protect their interests in a less risky and expensive way than suing OpenAI, Meta and the rest into oblivion, but one of the reasons why my response has been and will continue to be negative is the strong sense that the horse has already bolted; they’ve already used it all. Which would make my continued refusal questionable, I admit, if it were a choice between opting in to receive recompense for already-stolen material and opting out to receive no recompense although the material has already been stolen – if I thought there was any serious prospect of substantial recompense trickling down to authors. Which I don’t.

It was interesting, therefore, to see my sense at least partly confirmed, with the news that Meta trained its GenAI using material downloaded from LibGen – depending on your perspective, a giant free library that allows researchers beyond the comfortable West to access research or a giant database of pirated publications. This news came with the bonus of an email from a Meta employee admitting that if they paid to use even one book this would undermine their implausible, self-serving claim that everything they were doing counted as “fair use”. But most entertainingly, it reminded a lot of naive western academics of the existence of things like LibGen, and provided an online search tool for it: if your work was on LibGen, you can take it as read that Meta has stolen it. In my case, I haven’t checked all 137 entries in the database, a lot of which seem to be reviews I’d forgotten I’d written plus a number of wrongly-tagged chapters in volumes I’ve edited, but definitely all but one of my books are in there, maybe all of them, and most of not all of the articles in anglophone journals.

Among the varied reactions and emotions I’ve experienced, one of the more interesting is a feeling of failure and despair, or at least a sense that failure and despair might be appropriate: this machine has read my work, and yet it still produces such crap? Clearly my attempts at conveying ideas and promoting understanding have been fruitless. True, this isn’t confined to GenAI; it does occasionally happen that a student attributes some completely erroneous idea to me on the basis of misreading or misunderstanding – but then I get to add a gentle comment to the essay and use the resulting embarrassment as a teaching moment. ChatGPT is impervious.

Our aspiration as writers is to find the right reader – I’m reminded of the passage in. Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller... where an author is watching a woman on the other side of the valley reading, wishing to be read as the author she is reading is being read – even if we have to create or mould them through our writing (as indeed Calvino shaped me). Maybe we have dreams of reaching thousands or millions, but especially in the academic sphere I imagine we’ve all at some point had the experience of reading something old and/or obscure and suddenly thinking, well, I get this, this writer is speaking to me and their writing has found its true reader, and I can hope that even the most unjustly disregarded article or chapter by me may likewise some day make a difference to the right person.

GenAI training is the absolute opposite of this. Your work is not being read in search of ideas or emotions or experiences that will be unique to reading that author and that text; on the contrary, any such uniqueness is to be filtered out or ground down into homogeneous sludge, in pursuit of the expression of the most statistically average statements possible (hence the tendency, as has been observed, for GenAI summaries to omit original arguments of books or articles because they don’t conform to the database). There is no prospect of GenAI being inspired by something in your words to create something new, to apply your ideas in new contexts or connections – only the theoretical possibility that its statistical regurgitation of the homogeneous sludge will accidentally produce something that looks (if only in the eyes of the occasional washed-up novelist or academic desperate to jump on the bandwagon for attention) as if it is genuinely new and interesting.

The death of the author, for Roland Barthes, was intended to be the birth of the reader. GenAI gives us the shambling undead version of both. Books are not read but merely processed, so that the most perfectly average regurgitation of cliché can be generated to stand in for writing. The romantic dream is that some image, some turn of phrase might unexpectedly touch the heart of the most savage or degenerate listener, but you might as well hope for the meat grinder to be affected by the sensibility of the young bullock chewing an especially crisp dandelion plant on a misty morning, or for the resultant sausage to communicate this. And the GenAI sausage isn’t even a good sausage.

The romantic dream is that the robot is jolted out of its programming to recognise something of the human; instead, the human is becoming as indifferent to meaning and specificity as the robot. Calvino’s brilliant novel includes the idea that novels might be mechanically analysed, dissected and summarised, and it is clear that this entirely misses the point of either writing or reading – not least because it entirely ignores the possibility of pleasure. For GenAI, and its worshippers and enablers and users, reading is nothing more than the accumulation of data about statistically meaningful relationships between discrete combinations of letters, and writing is nothing more than the generation of data that echoes these patterns. And there is no health in us.

Fake Plastic Trees

I am reasonably confident that my little brother does not read this blog, and nor does anyone who is likely to mention it to him. This is important, because I wouldn’t want him to think I was ungrateful for the birthday present he bought me last week – but I do want to talk about this. The present was, in theory and 50% in fact, a perfect choice, given my interests: two books on ancient beer. One is really excellent: a second-hand copy of Patrick E. McGovern’s Ancient Brews: Rediscovered and Recreated (2017), a detailed account of reconstructing beers of antiquity by an academic expert in bimolecular archaeology and anthropology who has collaborated with craft brewers, and I can’t wait to see how this compares with my own efforts in this direction a couple of years ago for a conference in Bochum on beer in antiquity. The other… is not.

Louis F. Hartman, On Beer and Brewing Techniques in Ancient Mesopotamia ((c) 2013 Read Books Ltd). Both the book and the blurb on Amazon present this as a reprint, as part of a series of Vintage Cookery Books:

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing many of these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Well, up to a point. The core of the book is indeed a reprint, not of a pre-1900 book but of a 1950 supplement to the Journal of the American Oriental Society by Hartman and A.L. Oppenheim, which offers a detailed textual and critical analysis of a Neo-Babylonian tablet, Met.Mus.86-11-386, a copy of a much earlier text, that deals with brewing ingredients and techniques. I need at some point to check whether it’s a full and accurate reprint, but as it stands it is almost entirely incomprehensible – even to someone who already knows a bit about the topics of both ancient history and brewing. The first chapter starts relatively gently:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired this tablet through a dealer in 1886, and nothing is now known of its exact provenance. However, since it is inscribed in typical Neo-Babylonian script, we may safely assume that it was written somewhere in southern Mesopotamia during the fifth or fourth century BC – copied, of course, at that time from a much older text. Its excellent script and the fine texture of its clay make it probable that the tablet was made for one of the temple-school libraries.

Okay, that assumes rather a lot of knowledge (that ‘of course’…), but the subsequent description of the physical form of the tablet is reasonably intelligible. Not so the next chapter:

Until now, our knowledge concerning the contents of the 23rd tablet of the series u r5 . r a = hubullu5 was based on a fragmentary tablet in the British Museum (K 4351) and on the information contained in the commentary series H AR . GUD = imru = ballu and the so-called Vorläufer texts. The Kuyundjik tablet K 4351 (published in II R 30 no. 5, transliterated and translated by A. Goetze in MVAegXXXII/1 65 ff.) yields about 26 complete equations and approximately as many fragmentary lines…

That is not, it seems fair to say, the sort of gentle introduction to ancient Babylonian brewing required for a casual reader. The analysis of the tablet itself is just as incomprehensible. And the effect is heightened by the fact that the preface to the volume, added to the original perhaps in order to disguise from the casual browser the actual nature of the text, goes in completely the opposite direction: a completely bland, badly organised overview of ‘Beer Brewing’ that appears to be largely plagiarised from the Wikipedia entry on Brewing. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Brewing is the production of beer through steeping a starch source (commonly cereal grains) in water and then fermenting with yeast. Brewing has taken place since around the sixth millennium BC, and archaeological evidence suggests that this technique was used in most emerging civilizations including ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Descriptions of various beer recipes can be found in cuneiform (the oldest known writing) from ancient Mesopotamia, where the brewer’s craft was the only profession which derived social sanction and divine protection from female deities, specifically: Ninkasi, who covered the production of beer, Siris, who was used in a metonymic way to refer to beer, and Siduri, who covered the enjoyment of beer.

The opening sentence of the Wikipedia entry: ‘Brewing is the production of beer by steeping a starch source (commonly cereal grains, the most popular of which is barley) in water and fermenting the resulting sweet liquid with yeast.’ And the first paragraph of the History section:

Brewing has taken place since around the 6th millennium BC, and archaeological evidence suggests emerging civilizations including China, ancient Egypt, and Mesopotamia brewed beer. Descriptions of various beer recipes can be found in cuneiform (the oldest known writing) from ancient Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia the brewer’s craft was the only profession which derived social sanction and divine protection from female deities/goddesses, specifically: Ninkasi, who covered the production of beer, Siris, who was used in a metonymic way to refer to beer, and Siduri, who covered the enjoyment of beer.

Entertainingly, that final sentence in that Wikipedia passage is supported by a reference to the 1950 Hartman/Oppenheim article – except that I an pretty sure it doesn’t appear there; certainly the preface as published in the book cannot be from there, as it happily refers to the legalisation of home brewing in the UK (1963), Australia (1972) and the USA (1978). (Again, the wording here is largely identical to the Wikipedia entry). It must be an open question whether the publishers of the book are creating a fake online trail to boost its credibility, or a credulous reader has added this. The detailed Wikipedia entry for Siris doesn’t cite Hartman & Oppenheim, while the entry for Siduri doesn’t mention beer at all…

Why is this worth discussing? Partly, I feel just cross. It would have been interesting to read a detailed study of these ancient sources, written for a broader audience than just experts in ancient Sumerian (which is casting no shade on Hartman and Oppenheim, who were expressly writing for experts in ancient Sumerian). But this is the smallest issue; even if McGovern’s book doesn’t discuss this material, I am confident I could seek it out reasonably easily. It’s more that I feel professionally offended, as someone who does sometimes present historical material to a general audience; I could easily – given a week to pull some research together – write a clear, accessible account of ancient brewing, with no claim to originality but also no plagiarism, so why does this crappy, unintelligible knock-off even exist?

Stupid question. Amazon rate for printing on demand a black & white paperback of fewer than 100 pages: £1.93. Amazon royalty rate: 60%. Amazon list price for Beer and Brewing in Ancient Mesopotamia: £19.71. Amazon’s profit: £11.83. Knock-off plagiarism merchants’ profit: £5.95. I don’t know what sort of sales figures are implied by being ranked 463rd in Beer (Books) – probably not huge – but the time required to put together such a book means that the break-even point must be pretty low. Yes, if you had bought this in good faith you would send it back and demand a refund – though whether you would get it, or all of it, is another question. Since it was a present I can’t even leave a review to warn off other people who might be tempted.

It’s not a bad book – it doesn’t meet that standard. Even bad books have involved some commitment and/or craft, somewhere along the line. This merely mimics a book; like GenAI writing, it might fool the credulous, or serve the same function as a proper book (a thing to give as a present; an essay to submit), but it doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. And I can’t help fearing that somehow it speaks to the present and the future, in which giant tech platforms are happy to promote any old mendacious and plagiarised crap in the interests of profit, and in which genuine scholarship is obsolete. Positive associations are invoked – the pleasures of the second-hand bookshop, of rediscovering past knowledge and simple practices – as a means of exploitation. And it does in fact offer genuine knowledge, but in a form which is entirely useless and inaccessible, which in itself may be a kind of message…

Something Stupid

As the apeirokinetic pantoustasis rolls ever onward, it is increasingly clear that this must be the darkest timeline.* It is at any rate the stupidest. Reason, analysis and theory have little purchase on events, leading only into a dark place of aporia and despair – even if you can keep up with the constant barrage of random idiocy, making sense of it simply confirms that there is little sense to be found. Perhaps Melanie Klein may be able to help, since so many important decisions these days seem to be different forms of childish acting out. Mostly, one suspects that the best means of coming to terms with the world, without giving in to the death drive, may be to join everyone else and stop trying to discipline the id. Why forego that bit of cake when tomorrow Trump might decide to bomb Europe in order to construct more golf courses?

This continues to be a bad time to try to finish a book on how Thucydides might help us understand politics. However much Thucydides may have anticipated a lot of ideas about cognitive biases and failures in deliberation, even at its worst Athenian democracy doesn’t seem to have been quite so self-destructively stupid as so many modern states. More than this, however, Thucydides has actually become part of the stupidity. The fake ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote continues to be used to promote assorted toxic masculinities (even if Pete Hegseth himself hasn’t come out with it yet, a load of his fans have). The ‘Thucydides Trap’ continues to be applied, more or less randomly, to anything that looks like a potential conflict; Trumpiam foreign policy is either a manifestation of it or a brilliant attempt at averting it, apparently, likewise the inevitable clashes between Bitcoin and old-fashioned normal money, AI and outmoded human systems, state support and the new libertarian future… Basically it’s become a way of asserting the inevitable triumph of Thing X, in the all-too-familiar ‘there is no alternative, we must change in order to stay the same’ manner – ‘Thucydides’ tells us that conflict is now less something to be averted, as in Allison’s original formulation for US-China relations, and more something to be welcomed and promoted as a means to an end, bringing the future into being in an accelerationist manner.

And of course there’s Melos, references to which have escalated in recent weeks. Some of this is straightforward re-litigation of the invasion in a familiar register (as discussed here a couple of years ago), sometimes by social media accounts that look remarkably like Russia-affiliated bots and sometimes by gormless real accounts that might as well be Russian bots – along with familiar responses that Melos didn’t end well for Athens and so it’s implausible that Thucydides was endorsing the Athenian position. More striking are the cases that see the Dialogue – or rather the only line from it that most people know – not as an analysis of power dynamics but as a straightforward celebration of untrammelled power: not just the representatives of the US regime throwing Ukraine under the bus and disdaining European allies and the ‘rules-based international order’ in the name of “the weak suffer what they must”, but Elon Musk and his pimply stormtroopers taking sledgehammers to the American state and constitution. A marginally more refined or pretentious version of “cry moar, libs”, essentially.

It makes slightly more sense to see the trope applied to the Trumpian intimidation of Ukraine, with the latter framed as the weaker party who should get with the programme and recognise the hopelessness of the situation; it’s just interesting to see this relationship now being openly framed as one of antagonism, as if America has actually entered the war on Russia’s side and is certainly all too happy to see inter-state relations as governed solely by power and threats. What is most irritating here is the way that some are presenting this Thucydides echo as evidence for the Trump regime having a coherent foreign policy strategy, where even to characterise it as ‘Neanderthal Realism’ (as did a recent New York Times piece**) seems to give far too much credit. A good post yesterday by Dan Nexon at Lawyers Guns Money noted the tendency to claim ‘Great Power Competition’ as the (imaginary) unifying theme of US grand strategy in Trump’s first term. Some variant of ‘Realism’ is now being promoted in a similar manner for Trump 2, and this allegedly Thucydidean reading of his behaviour so far is not just an example of this tendency but also, I would suggest, a key means of arguing for its existence, a way of associating random self-interested thuggishness with sonething that looks more like an intellectually coherent strategy. If one defines Realism vaguely enough, then almost anything can be labelled as Realist – but a Thucydides reference shows that it’s the Real, Powerful, Illusionless kind.

If Realism and Thucydides offer us any sort of tool for making sense of the current US regime, it’s not as a template for or theoretical influence on their conscious strategy. Rather, it’s the Melian Dialogue as a critical depiction of the rhetoric and psychology of the powerful, not in the good way, and it’s the less rational and instrumental aspects of ‘realist’ state motivation depicted in Book 1. We can recognise that Trump, Musk and co (and arguably Putin) are driven by interest (but in narrow, possibly self-defeating terms; no nonsense about soft power or building long-term relationships), honour (the constant demand for Respect, as an act of submission) and fear, above all that they are actually weak (it was difficult not to hear the American interviewee on the World Service at about 5.15 GMT this morning, explaining why Ukraine should submit, and not hear something of an American surrender to awesome Russian power as well).

Tim Ruback’s analysis of Thucydides in IR discourse suggests that it serves primarily as a foundation myth and a means of constituting the discipline, rather than a substantive source of ideas or content. Similar references in these discussions of the actual foreign policy strategies of the Trump regime serve a similar function: a means of rhetorically invoking an atmosphere of seriousness and coherence, of constituting a ‘strategy’ out of what a critical observer might reasonably see as a set of random impulses and contradictory responses. It’s Thucydides-washing, a powerful process capable of making the pettiest of street louts into a master of global politics. It is very, very stupid.

*By coincidence, our semi-biennial rewatching of Community has just hit the classic Remedial Chaos Theory episode in season 3, in which rolling a die to decide who has to get the pizza creates six different timelines, at least one of which requires the donning of fake black goatees to commit to the vibe.

** This piece – by Farah Stockman – also offers a rather annoying misreading of the familiar “think about the aftermath of Melos; this shows that Thucydides can’t have endorsed the Athenian line” response to crude Realism, that leaves out the second part of the argument: “But here’s the thing about great powers: They all decline eventually. Neanderthal realism doesn’t save them. After Athens sacked Melos, word of its brutality spread. Its allies turned against it. Athens lost the war. Noble ideas, it turns out, do matter.” No, Athens was already resented by a fair number of its allies/subjects – for goodness’ sake, “we’re less worried about what neutrals sull think of us and more concerned about keeping our allies in line” is one of the Athenian argunents in the Melian Dialogue – and its liking for brutality as a response was already on display in the Mytilene Debate; Athens lost the war because its sense of exceptionalism and untouchability led it to attack Syracuse, and then its allies turned against it. “All great powers decline eventually” is not the actual message here; “All great powers start making stupid decisions and stop getting away with it” plausibly is.