Neville Morley's Blog, page 43

Around Here We Call That Wednesday

My book has been published (on Friday, to be precise, at least for the UK)! Rather to my surprise, it’s already been getting some attention, with blog posts from Matthew Reisz in the Times Higher Education Supplement and from Mary Beard. Yes, a gratuitously stroppy account of the current state of Classics as a discipline and Why It Matters is more accessible than some of my usual obscure ramblings – but I have written would-be accessible things in the past, which have largely sunk without trace. Maybe it’s the moment.

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Both Reisz and Beard comment on the way that I frame my discussion with a long chapter on What’s Wrong With Classics – the peculiar history of its development as a discipline, its remarkable legacy of prestige and authority despite all the reasons one might have expected it to fall by the wayside, its long-standing association with very dubious agendas and values. Oddly, Reisz charactises this as an account of ‘misconceptions’ about the discipline, whereas my point is that this is all perfectly true (however painful and embarrassing it is to confess) but not quite the whole story. The comment that it’s strange for me to be so gloomy when so many people are watching Mary Beard documentaries on BBC4 therefore misses the point; if there’s a long history of people being attracted to classics for problematic reasons, the fact that lots of people are currently interested in classical antiquity is not an unqualified good thing.

Beard’s take is much more nuanced, getting the point: yes, classics has a long association with imperialism, racism, sexism, elitism, classism etc. – but (and this was also my response to interesting comments from @natcphd on the Twitter, arguing that classics is and remains a colonialist project so long as it retains that name) there are alternative traditions, radical and liberating. Any number of the great figures of Englightenment and 19th-century thought built on their classical educations to question power and existing authority, not entrench it; there’s an inspiring tradition (revealed especially through the work led by Edith Hall) of ‘popular’, non-elite classics, and another one of non-Western writers drawing on the classical tradition as a means of questioning and overthrowing the oppressive monolith of Western Civilisation and its claims.

Of course the relationship between classics as a discipline and what other people ‘do with’ the classical legacy is always one of tension; of course lots of classics remains free from any radical political agenda, or even complicit with the less savoury appropriations of antiquity. Simply because of its history, classics is never going to be unproblematic; a certain defensiveness and an apologetic manner seem entirely appropriate.

To paraphrase an exchange from one of the greatest sitcoms of all time: “Did we save Classics?” “NO! No, you did not! You moved dirt around on Classics’ grave! Your discipline is still hopelessly outdated and irrelevant, it is still irrevocably associated with elitism and colonialism, and it is still on the permanent chopping block of anyone who has any say in its future!” “Well, around here, we call that Wednesday.”

A Very Peculium Practice

In recent years, it’s become clear that the traditional model of work, in which one is paid a regular wage for specified hours and tasks, generally carried out at a designated workplace, applies to ever fewer people, at any rate in the West. The division between work and non-work is blurred, as increased connectivity and/or zero hours contracts both, in different ways, create and support the expectation of permanent availability, and – especially but not only in the creative industries, including academia – the mantra of “do what you love, love what you do” turns enthusiasm and dedication into a system of self-exploitation. One of the revelations of the recent (ongoing) industrial action in British universities has been the revelation – for me, as I suspect for many, not so much a hitherto unknown bit of information, but something previously not fully registered or felt – of how far the whole system depends on us all working way beyond contracted hours (insofar as those can be defined at all), so that working to contract is tantamount to failing to fulfill the terms of the contract. Goodwill, self-sacrifice and willingness to go the extra couple of miles are now treated as the norm, or even the minimum.

One of the ways in which this works is the difficulty of distinguishing between things we do for the universities who employ us and things we do for ourselves – as seen in the debates around what activities we should and shouldn’t carry on doing during industrial action. (Yes, I know that there’s a clear union line on most of these, but empirical evidence suggests that it doesn’t appear so clear to many academics). Research and writing: a major part of most of our contracts – but something that we’d want to do anyway, and we’re still going to want to write these things later so actually we’re just hurting ourselves by refusing to do them now. Applying for grants: vital for faculty financial plans – but with the potential to allow us to do things we really want to do. Blogging: not something they pay us to do – but they’ll probably claim it as impact and engagement. Editorial boards and reviewing: prestige, for us and the institution, and we probably wouldn’t be doing it if we weren’t employed as academics…

The specific context for these musings was my second appearance on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, talking about Roman Slavery with Ulrike Roth and Myles Lavan (to be broadcast next Thursday, 5th April – but I would really recommend going for the podcast version, with the extra ten minutes at the end; you’ll see why…). Over coffee afterwards, the question came up: is this the sort of thing that we would have been expected to cancel if this had been a strike day? Is a cosy (albeit unduly Spartacus-focused) chat with Lord Bragg ‘work’ – and, if it is, is it work for our primary employers, or for the BBC?

One of the things we discuss in the programme is the Roman institution of the peculium. Legally, a slave was property, and clearly an object owned by somebody cannot itself then be the rightful owner of anything. But Roman slaveowners allowed some of their slaves to accumulate money as if they were acting on their own behalf as well as managing their owner’s business, and to retain this money as if it were actually their own, and to use this to purchase their freedom in due course. It’s a brilliantly nasty bit of social control: slaves are thus incentivised to remain absolutely loyal (since they have no legal right to the peculium, nor to purchase their freedom; it still depends on the consent of their owner), and to work as hard as possible, and at the end they continue to have obligations to their former owner, even as free people, and have furnished their owner with the means to buy a replacement slave.

The parallel with academic life isn’t exact, of course, but it is suggestive. We believe that we are working on our own behalf, writing books and popular articles and making media appearances, and this isn’t untrue – but it’s all dependent on our position as university employees, and it all works to the university’s benefit too; not just for REF environment statements and student recruitment, but precisely because it helps obscure the boundary between public and private, work and leisure.

The point is not to make a crass and manifestly silly claim that academic employment is like slavery, but to note the similar ways in which the real conditions of the worker are deliberately obscured in order to make him/her work harder and toe the line obediently. “The Roman slave was bound by chains,” Karl Marx said. “The modern wage-labourer is bound by invisible threads.” But actually the Roman slave was bound by plenty of invisible threads too; the threat of the whip (and worse) was omnipresent, as Myles notes in the programme, but Roman slaveowners had other techniques at their disposal as well, above all making the slaves believe that they were working for themselves, and that they had greater autonomy than was actually the case.

There was the phony consultation, for example, as Ulrike noted in our conversation afterwards; landowners might regard their slaves as “tools with voices”, not as autonomous human beings, but they also recognised that allowing those tools to speak, and pretending to take their views seriously, was a useful management strategy:

When I perceived that their unending toil was lightened by such friendliness on the part of the master, I would even joke with them at times, and allow them also to joke more freely. Nowadays I make it a practice to call them into consultation on any new work, as if they were more experienced, and to discover by this means what sort of ability is possessed by each of them and how intelligent he is. Further, I observe that they are more willing to set about a piece of work on which they think their opinions have been asked and their advice followed. (Columella 1.8.15-16)

Yes, we’re all involved in the same enterprise, working towards the same goals… What’s striking about this class is that they are paranoid and fearful, harshly punishing any hint of dissent, and yet utterly dependent on the loyalty and sense of duty of the exploited class – which they generally receive with little question. Senior university management? No, no, Roman slaveowners, honest…

He’s Back

"I think he can be successful in this role," @kroenig says of John Bolton, President Trump's choice to be national security adviser. pic.twitter.com/pq6AdjLTMf

— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) March 23, 2018

Ever since the days of Thucydides, states have used force to get what they want, and have expected weaker states to comply with their wishes. Ever since the days of Thucydides, they have claimed that this is all perfectly justifiable as the way of the world. Ever since the days of Thucydides, men have made confident claims that war is easy, straightforward, risk-free, simply an opportunity to demonstrate one’s greatness and reorder the world in a more congenial manner. Ever since the days of Thucydides, international relations academics and military strategists have spouted cliches like “Ever since the days of Thucydides…” as a cheap source of borrowed authority and gravitas. I just don’t get the part where this is supposed to be reassuring, even if it is delivered by a chiselled jaw and Action Man stare.

He’s back. John Bolton, that is. Thucydides never seems to have gone away – but it could be argued that one version of Thucydides is starting to win out over others. As I suggested last year, talk of Thucydides taking over the White House needed to be qualified by the fact that different people clearly had different conceptions of what Thucydides is all about, from the clear-eyed rational strategist of the military men to the China guru of the Allison fans to Bannon’s burn it all down Sparta groupie. Bolton’s retu4n brings to mind the Neocon Thucydides of Kagan and the rest: Athens in the Melian Dialogue as a template for superpower dominance, and Sicily would have been a cakewalk if not for those pesky liberals…

Must Try Harder

If ever there was a good week to smuggle out an announcement of a conference with a few diversity issues, it’s this week; unless you have Jordan Peterson and Steve Bannon as keynotes and put on a minstrel show as part of the evening entertainment, there’s no way you could look worse than the Stanford Sausage Fest.

But having more female speakers than none is hardly cause for self-congratulation; 25%, as we have for our forthcoming workshop in Berlin at the beginning of next month on Thomas Piketty and Capital in Classical Antiquity, really isn’t great. I’m writing this partly to acknowledge the problem and accept responsibility for it, and partly – more importantly – to emphasise the lesson: having a diverse range of speakers as one of your goals in putting together a conference programme, and taking various steps to try to ensure it, may still not be nearly enough.

You think of the people you know who might have interesting things to say about the theme – and if you’re a male academic of a certain age, you tend to know plenty of blokes. You send out invitations – and all the blokes accept but a few of the women decline, for different reasons but including caring responsibilities. You send out a call for papers, as a means to ensure a decent number of younger scholars and grad students – and for some reason (something about the theme?) 80% of the submitted abstracts come from men. And then you try to think of someone else to invite to make the numbers a bit less dreadful, and all the names that come to mind are US-based, and there’s not enough left in the budget…

None of this is offered as an excuse; there’s nothing new here, nothing I didn’t already know – unless perhaps the way that they’ve all reinforced one another, which came as more of a surprise than it should have done. There may indeed be an issue with the topic; not just that ancient economic history may be a bit male, but this kind of approach to economic history perhaps appeals more to men. Even so: not good enough, must try harder.

History Can Be Bad For Your Health

Reading David Andress’ thought-provoking new book Cultural Dementia*, on the ways that the anger and resentment of much contemporary politics in the UK, France and USA are founded in confused, self-serving and largely imaginary ideas of national pasts, I’m inevitably reminded of Thucydides, and his denunciation of the Athenians’ unwillingness to make any effort to enquire into the truth of the past but simply to accept the first story the hear – especially, we may surmise, if it flatters their sense of themselves and their place in the world, like the story of the tyrannicides that served as a foundation myth of democracy. The duty of the historian – the theme that I’m lecturing on in Toronto this week, as it happens – is to struggle to uncover the truth of things, to treat everything critically, to make no compromises for the sake of personal loyalties or entertainment, to acknowledge ambiguity and complexity, and try to help others to come to terms with it.

One example, which chimes with Andress’ emphasis on the role of imperialism in underpinning the now taken-for-granted prosperity (relative) and “sense of entitlement to greatness” of these benighted countries today, is Thucydides’ subtle presentation of the Athenian empire. We’re left in no doubt of the dependence of Athenian power and wealth on its suppression and control of other peoples, of the lengths they will go to to protect their privilege, of their relentless logic of deterrence through violence and intimidation and their self-serving justifications – anyone else would do the same if they had the chance, but currently we’re on top so you can suck it.

One way – probably the conventional way, but I haven’t checked – of reading such passages is to take them as a reflection of Athenian thinking; they accept imperialism and its consequences, and are inured to the concomitant violence, in a way that we moderns are far too squeamish to do. But I wonder. It’s naive to take the speeches in Thucydides as exact transcripts of what was really said; it’s downright idiotic to assume that they reflect his own views. Rather, they serve to reveal and highlight things that might otherwise pass unnoticed, so that we are forced to think about them: the motivations (stated and unconscious) of individuals, the moods and inclinations of the masses, the underlying dynamics of events and the way the world works.

At the beginning of the Melian Dialogue, the Athenians declare that they’re not going to bother to justify their Empire in the usual manner, in terms of their service to the Greeks or the favour of the gods or anything else; it’s just about power. Clearly, in the real world – not when Thucydides is staging a confrontation in order to reveal the true nature of their rule – those are precisely the sorts of arguments they would use to their subjects and to neutrals. But perhaps they are also the arguments they use to themselves, most of the time; and when Thucydides makes both Cleon and the noble Pericles explain in their speeches that empire is inseparable from violence and tyranny, he is making manifest not the conscious beliefs of the Athenian people, but things that they may know at some level but prefer not to admit to themselves.

Andress’ metaphor of “cultural dementia” doesn’t apply to fifth-century Athenians; they are not misremembering their history in the modern manner, because the idea of ‘history’ in the sense of a critical account of the real past, and the associated idea that this is better than non-critical, fictional, mythical accounts, is only just being invented. But then, other than its undeniable dramatic force, I’m not terribly convinced by the metaphor as a way of understanding the present situation either.

Yes, contemporary conceptions of national pasts in Britain, France and the United States are incoherent, partial and self-serving (and celebration of Germany’s tradition of Vergangenheitsbewältigung shouldn’t obscure the fact that this applies – still, though cracks are showing – to public discourse, not the entire culture). But this seems to be less a matter of these cultures losing, through a natural process of mental decay, a firm grip on a once-clear and reality-based sense of identity, as the metaphor implies. It’s more a combination of, on the one hand, a persistent human tendency to found social identities in self-serving myths with a hefty shot of fantasy and repression (especially as regards one’s own crimes), and on the other hand the weaponisation of the past as an instrument of control or disruption.

The problem with history today is not that it’s a symptom of a general cultural malaise (though it probably is as well), nor that it’s failed in the mission that’s occasionally given to it of producing better citizens or people (though clearly it has). The problem is that most of what’s on offer is actively bad for us. It’s like processed food; full of the sugar, fat, flavourings and aromatic compounds that fire up the endorphins and get us addicted (drama! kings and queens! dramatic battles! Nazis! charismatic presenters in exotic locations! embossed covers!), stripped of anything that might actually do us some good, the nutrients and roughage of complexity, ambiguity and national shame. We think we’re getting proper history, and that this is good for us; what we’re actually consuming is industrialised pap, carefully engineered and expensively advertised; a mechanically recovered and reconstituted past.

As Nietzsche argued, we are as humans historical animals. We cannot do without history of some kind, as a source of meaning and identity, just as we cannot do without food. It’s tempting to consume greedily what’s on offer, because it’s there, because it slips down easily and satisfies our appetite, at least for a while – but it’s leaving us malnourished and deficient. We need to develop our tastes – and we need to teach more people how to cook…

*David Andress, Cultural Dementia: how the West has lost its history, and risks losing everything else (London: Head of Zeus, 2018)

Melian Dialogue: UUK Version

Thucydides 5.84ff

…and sent envoys to enter into discussions. They spoke as follows:

Athenians: Since these negotiations are not to go on before the people, so that we may speak without inconvenient interruptions and continue trying to deceive the ears of the multitude without listening to any counter-arguments, please don’t bother with any set speeches, but let us discuss things in a civil manner without reopening the question of the valuation agreed in January.

Melians: How can we have a proper discussion when you’re not willing to discuss the central issue? We see you have come to be judges in your own cause, and all that we can reasonably expect from this negotiation is continuing conflict and disruption to students, if we prove to have right on our side and refuse to submit, and otherwise we just become your slaves.

Athenians: We don’t see any point in such melodramatic hypotheticals; let’s just stick to the facts.

Melians: All right.

Athenians: For our part, we shall not trouble you with specious claims about how we’re all in this together as part of a community of learning and how we deeply respect your commitment and dedication, because manifestly that’s untrue. Let us rather keep in mind how the world works: justice and fairness apply only between equals, especially to ensure that talented senior managers are given internationally competitive salaries. The strong provide dynamic, ambitious and financially prudent leadership, and you lot suffer what you must.

Melians: If you insist on talking in terms of expediency rather than fairness, then do you not think there is practical advantage in having a secure, motivated workforce? And that you damage yourselves as much as us, if not more so, through your behaviour?

Athenians: The trashing of the UK higher education system in the longer term doesn’t worry us nearly as much as the idea of having to spend more money on staff costs rather than shiny new buildings. We’ll have our knighthoods and government sinecures long before then. But we will now show you how this whole enterprise is in the interests of our empire, sorry, university, and that it’s also in your interests to let us exercise dominance over you without any fuss.

Melians: How can it be as good for us to serve as for you to rule?

Athenians: Because you get to carry on teaching and researching and all that other stuff you like doing, rather than us having to make threatening noises about redundancies.

Melians: Shouldn’t a university be more of a partnership? After all, we’re the people who actually deliver the education.

Athenians: Good grief. If we start taking staff consultation seriously, no one will believe that we’re visionary leaders prepared to take the tough decisions. The more you hate us, the more it shows our strength.

Melians: But you’ll be making an enemy of everyone, including the students, who will see what you’re prepared to do to lecturers in the name of profit.

Athenians: Nah, why should they care? It’s in their interests to see us win as soon as possible, or they risk their degrees being affected. Anyway, what can they do?

Melians: I think you underestimate them. But if you’re prepared to take such risks to protect your power and privilege, you must understand why those of us who are still free would be despicable cowards not to do everything we can to avoid our working conditions and future prospects being trashed completely.

Athenians: Oh, get a grip. Who controls the budgets? It’s a simple matter of self-preservation: don’t resist those who are far stronger than you. Plenty of ECRs out there desperate for anything we toss their way.

Melians: If we surrender now, we give up all hope; as long as we resist, we still have something to hope for.

Athenians: Hope? Always a great comfort when you don’t have anything else. This is the modern university: hoping for something different, hoping for a return to the past, will lead you into disaster. It’s clearly a law of nature that whenever someone has the upper hand and a lavish expense account they’ll take full advantage of them. We didn’t invent that law. We found it well established, and being urged upon us by a legion of expensive consultants; we follow it, knowing that you and anyone else would do the same if you actually had the talent for an academic leadership role; and it’ll still be true long after we’re gone. You’re stupid enough to expect anything different. There’s no loss of face in submitting to a superior power that’s offering reasonable terms. Well, reasonable as far as we’re concerned, anyway. There’s one sure recipe for success in this world: cutthroat competition with your equals, absolute deference to your line managers, and do whatever your customers, sorry, students demand of you. Nice university you’ve got here; shame if anything happened to it.

Melians: We are not going to abandon the traditions of academic freedom and solidarity, and the expectation of decent working conditions and rewards. We make one last appeal: surely we can work together to find a compromise that suits us both?

Athenians: You must be the only people on earth who think the future is clearer than what’s right in front of you. Granted, what’s right in front of you is a projection based on our dubious and inconsistent assumptions about the future, but we’re not willing to open that up to discussion. But we are happy to talk, any time any place. But not tomorrow. Or maybe tomorrow. We’re delighted to see that you’re now willing to talk tomorrow…

Note 1: The final speech of the Athenians is, in the original Greek, a single highly complex sentence that switches between tenses, subjects and objects and human reason, as a means for Thucydides to convey their particular mindset.

Note 2: I am conscious of the risk that demonstrating the continued usefulness of Thucydides’ analysis of the pathological mindset of the powerful runs the risk of being construed as impact…

Can Civilisation Be Saved?

If you’re ever short of a case study in the anxiety of influence, turn to the new BBC Civilisations series. It’s a programme which, in important ways, makes very little sense unless you’ve seen the original, while simultaneously doing its utmost to telegraph a wish to distance itself from much of what was supposed to be great the first time around. It’s a reboot made not by fans – which brings its own problems, of course – but by people who want to cash in on the cultural capital of the brand while at the same time claiming superiority. Basically, it’s the American remake of Inspector Spacetime, only with pretensions.

What do they mean by ‘civilisation’? We aren’t told – but it’s made very clear that it’s not the same as Kenneth Clark’s version, in the programme’s insistence not only on broadening its scope well beyond Europe, signalled by the shift into the plural, but also pushing far back into the past, to periods where pretty well nobody would think to use the term ‘civilisation’ unprompted. Okay, message received, this is about the innate creativity of all Homo sapiens (sorry, Homo neanderthalensis, you don’t get to play) rather than a privileged subset, ‘cos we don’t believe in that racist and essentialising vision any more – but then why is the programme just about art (including claiming some things as ‘art’, in modern terms, that could be plausibly interpreted quite differently) and not also about technology or social organisation or religion or any other manifestation of human creativity? Because art is what Clark talked about, and the programme doesn’t have a better idea.

In other words, the original, problematic conception of ‘civilisation’ is simultaneously critiqued (moving away from any distinction between civilisation and barbarism – other than the opening shots of ISIS destroying ancient artefacts and their guardians – in favour of an “all humans are differently amazing” approach) and accepted without question (what matters is art, as we moderns understand it). It’s only the failure to discuss what the programme actually means by its own title that prevents the whole thing from collapsing into incoherence from the beginning. And Clark’s narrative of the eventual triumph of European Genius may be pernicious and presumptive in numerous ways, but at least it told a coherent story in its own terms; Civilisations is so desperate to avoid Eurocentricism that it flattens everything out into a largely timeless, placeless panorama of creativity that nevertheless persistently hints at some sort of narrative (“the earliest depiction of battle that must reflect stories of heroic warriors, centuries before Homer” – how many unexamined assumptions can you spot, children?) without ever developing or explaining it. A history of art that not only refuses to historicise the idea of ‘art’ but also declines to admit that this is actually what it is.

It’s all too much of a “well I wouldn’t start from here if I were you” situation. It’s easy to imagine a panoramic account of human history, doing an Attenborough (as at least one reviewer has suggested, clearly that’s the key model here in documentary-making terms) – but then you’d call it something like Cultures, or The Story of Us, or Humans, rather than adopting the implicit narrowness and value judgements of Civilisations. It’s even easier to imagine an account of human creativity through the ages, looking at a series of amazing objects – because Neil McGregor has already done it, with a structure that cleverly side-stepped questions of ‘development’ or ‘influence’, whereas Civilisations, as a consequence of dealing with multiple objects in a single programme, can’t help implying the existence of some sort of theory of how they are connected, without having the courage to make it explicit (or, more likely, without actually having a coherent idea). They want to imitate Civilisation, and surpass it, and do something different, and disassociate themselves from it altogether.

My guess is that the programme-makers, writers and presenters don’t really believe in ‘civilisation’ as a useful concept, and may even go further in recognising how problematic it actually is; but, rather than pursuing that thought – which could have made for something really interesting and provocative, either a thorough-going critique of human claims to be ‘civilised’ (actually, what does a miniature representation of war say about either its makers or us, celebrating its aesthetic qualities?) or an arty I’m Not There search for civilisation, as something that might indeed be considered a good idea in principle – they stick with a fuzzy, but extremely dramatic and portentous, notion of Something, which is mostly, for reasons they either can’t or won’t articulate, about Art, which is Good, and so smashing it is Bad.

In the original series, as well as the assumed unity of Civilisation in contrast to barbarism, there was a strong sense of an implicit ‘our’ – Clark strongly identified with most if not all of what he discussed, and understood his task as one of identifying what needs to be celebrated and preserved. Yes, it’s a very Eurocentric ‘our’, just as his concept of what constitutes ‘civilisation’ was – but at least he had a clear idea of what he thought. Civilisations is, again, much more equivocating and evasive. The immediate association of the title for me was Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations; and even if the programme makers aren’t thinking in those terms (though it’s difficult to avoid such associations during Schama’s discussion of the vandalism of Palmyra), the question of identification or ownership can’t be ducked – are these Our (i.e. humans’) Civilisations, or Our (i.e. enlightened liberals like Simon, Mary and David) Civilisations – or Our Civilisation and Theirs?

How far can ‘we’ appropriate the past as an extension of ourselves – rather than emphasising its strangeness and the fact that, as Walter Benjamin argued, “every document of civilisation is at the same time a record of barbarism“ (that lovely little Mycenaean depiction of violent death)? What is all this talk of ‘civilisation’ if not an attempt at disowning, in the words of Professor June Bauer, “the shrieking, blood-drenched, sister-raping beast from which we all sprang”? These are all legitimate, indeed vital, debates, and my point is not that we shouldn’t discuss the fabulousness of past objects and the magnificent creativity of their producers without a ritual invocation of their parallel ghastliness; rather, these are the sorts of issues that ought to be front and centre in any series on the topic that actually knew what it’s doing. Maybe things will get better in later episodes, but for the moment we are firmly in the territory of the Ralph Fiennes/Uma Thurman Avengers…

How Democracy Dies

How does democracy die, and can the process be stopped? It’s a pressing question at the moment, not only in the United States – the focus of Levitsky & Ziblatt’s new book, How Democracies Die – but across much if not most of the rest of the world, from South Africa to Germany to India, and even at a more local level, such as the steady marginalisation of all but a tiny clique in the management of universities, despite them still being presented as communities of teaching and scholarship – the reason why I’m writing this blog post when I would normally be talking about such issues in the context of Thucydides and his account of the crisis of Athenian democracy with my students.

It’s a shame, then, that a book with the subtitle “What history reveals about our future” is so lacking in historical perspective. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s discussion extends back to the foundation of the United States when it suits them, but their choice of examples of failing democracies extends barely eighty years into the past, with the inevitable examples of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy in the 1930s, and they clearly feel much more comfortable with the recent history of South America as their core warehouse of analogies. It doesn’t help that their sole engagement with the issue of defining democracy comes right at the very end, and consists solely of quoting E.B. White’s answer to the question in 1943, including the helpful transcultural principle that it’s “the score at the beginning of the ninth”. That this is considered to be all the definition that’s required is a clear indication that they don’t perceive any actual problem; that is, as far as their analysis is concerned the United States is the epitome of democracy, democracy means the US constitution, and other states are democracies insofar as they resemble the US. This may explain why their one excursion into an earlier period of history takes them to the conflict between Charles I and the English Parliament, not anyone else’s obvious example of a democratic system.

It’s difficult not to feel that this is less a serious comparative study of the historical experience of democracies than the rhetorical deployment of some historical examples that happen to fit the general principles they’ve already developed; to be charitable, we could accept that those principles were derived from recent Latin American history rather than just from abstract theorising, but that still means the book’s subtitle is distinctly misleading. It’s the invocation of ‘history’ as a signifier of reality and objectivity: this isn’t some theory we’ve just made up, it’s What Really Happened (and, if it happened once, it can happen again…). Examples of democracies that don’t fit the implicit model (like classical Athens) aren’t welcome; likewise alternative interpretations of developments in 1930s Europe, because the point of such analogical thinking is that the past is assumed to be known and understood, hence capable of serving as the basis for predictions about an unknown future. Too much history, and too much historical debate, would be a distraction.

But the fact that Levitsky & Ziblatt don’t feel inclined to engage with ancient history doesn’t mean that we can’t take their general claims and see how far they work in a different context. Let’s assume for the moment that Athenian popular democracy has enough in common with modern conceptions to make a comparison at least faintly, potentially enlightening – the idea that the majority, not a single person or a small clique, should have a meaningful say in government, for example – and consider whether the crisis of Athenian democratic institutions from winter 412/11 to summer 411/10 (the period involving the rule of the 400, as narrated in Thucydides 8.47-97) fits the model.

A couple of themes that echo L & Z certainly stand out. We might take it as read that part of the background to the oligarchic coup in Athens was increasing polarisation of the citizen body and the erosion of norms of discourse and political behaviour – Thucydides’ most detailed account of such factionalism focuses of course on Corcyra (3.82-3), but it’s presented as a case study and precursor of similar developments in other cities rather than as a one-off in unique circumstances, and there are clear indications in several set-piece debates in Athens, especially the Sicilian Debate, that similar tendencies towards factional conflict, extreme rhetoric and bad faith had developed as depicted in the earlier episode, the epitome of polarised politics:

Their factions were not dedicated to collective well-being under established laws but to undermining the law for their own selfish advantage. The strength of their bonds with one another were less a matter of trust and friendship than on their common involvement in a criminal cause. If their opponents made reasonable proposals, they responded, when they felt themselves in a position of strength, with defensive counter-measures rather than generously accepting them. To get revenge on someone mattered more than not being hurt in the first place. If they ever agreed on reconciliation, this was only considered binding for the time being, as each side only agreed to reconcile with its opponents when they felt they had no other option and no other source of power; but when the opportunity arose, each sought to strike first…

The less intelligent were the ones who often came out on top. They were afraid that, because of their own shortcomings and the cleverness of their opponents, they might be defeated in any rational argument and be caught unawares by plans being hatched against them. They therefore committed themselves boldly to action, while those who complacently assumed that they could foresee developments in advance, so there was no need to secure by action what would be attained through proper analysis of the situation – they were taken off-guard and destroyed.

(Thucydides 3.82.6-7, 3.83.3-4, adapted from Mynott)

Secondly, there’s the role of crisis in precipitating this attack on democracy – which is then presented as a legitimate response to the threats faced by the city, that can be reversed at any time once the danger has passed. What chance does Athens have, argues Peisander, “unless we stop consulting more about our constitution than about our salvation in the present situation (we can always make some changes later if there is anything we don’t like).” Thucydides presents the Athenian people as giving in reluctantly, “partly in fear and partly in the hope that things could be changed later”. It’s worth noting the importance of the argument that accepting this political change is a necessary prerequisite for obtaining aid from outside, specifically Alcibiades and the Persians; this isn’t relevant to the US, of course, but it does rather resemble certain Latin American coups, where the expectation of US aid for a less democratic and/or socialist government was an important factor in precipitating coups.

Thirdly, in Athens we see the gradual erosion of democratic norms and subversion of democratic institutions, rather than their immediate and public overthrow, just as L & Z argue is almost always the case in modern times: the claim that the change has been the relatively minor one of limiting power to 5,000 reasonably well-to-do citizens (the comfortable middle class that has, historically, shown a certain receptiveness to more authoritarian rule) rather than the shift to an oligarchy of 400 that had actually taken place; the continuation of meetings of the Assembly and of Boule until a later stage, even if (as Thucydides notes) they actually conducted only the business agreed by the conspirators. Fourthly, we see a growing campaign of targeted assassination and intimidation, directed at those perceived as offering the biggest threat to the new regime because of their popularity, eloquence and/or known sympathies.

Those are the obvious parallels with the L & Z model; what of the differences? The crucial one is the amount of time Thucydides takes to discuss the thoughts and reactions of the mass of the citizens, as well as the political machinations of the conspirators and other oligarchs. It’s clear that the question of why the people, or a substantial proportion of them, were willing to acquiesce in the degeneration of democratic norms and institutions is a central one for him, and he explores the range of factors that either promoted sympathy for the coup (resentment on the part of the well-to-do hoplite class against those who receive payments from the state) or silenced objections (uncertainty about what was happening or who was actually involved, hence fear of being identified as an opponent of the regime, and the constant background of rumour and concern about external events).

The story of how democracy dies is surely, at least in part, the story of how the mass of the people allow it to die, rather than just being a story of a few evil men seizing control; how democracy loses (some of its) legitimacy, not just how it’s undermined and corrupted – but this isn’t the story that L & Z want to tell. Either because the US system is designed as a representative democracy rather than a popular democracy, or because this is their conception of politics in general, they focus their analysis on the professional politicians, whether the potential autocrats or the established representatives, rather than on the citizens more generally. Far from engaging with the sorts of issues considered in Colin Crouch’s work on post-democracy, they offer reassuring comments about the low level of support enjoyed by the Nazis until a few foolish gatekeepers made the mistake of allowing Hitler access to power and legitimacy.

This isn’t a matter of the historical fact that Athens didn’t have organised political parties, for example, so that they couldn’t serve the gate-keeping functions that L & Z identify as important in the US tradition – in other words, that a concentration on the activities of the elite politicians is what makes sense in the US context. It’s the fact that the Athenian dislike of organised factions, such that they designed their political institutions to limit their influence, was because they regarded them as incompatible with democracy, whereas L & Z’s conception of democracy is basically undemocratic. This is something that they tacitly (perhaps unconsciously) admit, remarking on the tension between a system in which party elites work to exclude candidates who might be popular in the wrong sort of way, and the ideals of democracy – but then happily carry on talking about such gate-keeping as essential to protect democracy from authoritarianism.

Suddenly the fact that L & Z limit the definition of ‘democracy’ in their book to the E.B. White passage about civility makes perfect sense; it’s not just that the norms of democratic discourse and the proper operation of political institutions are in their view essential for the safeguarding of democracy, these norms and institutions are treated as if they constitute democracy – or at least, in the context of a United States of America that is treated without question as “one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies”, as if nothing else needs to be discussed. Further: their analysis constantly presents a binary choice between democracy (hurrah!) and authoritarianism (boo!) – so that everything that is not yet sliding into authoritarianism is assumed to be democratic.

But clearly that isn’t the case, as any Athenian could tell them. The ‘death’ of Athenian democracy was not the rise of a single authoritarian leader (and his cabal, though L & Z focus on Trump to the almost complete exclusion of the people around him); it was the establishment of an oligarchy. From an Athenian perspective, one might suggest, American democracy in L & Z’s account is already not democratic, always already oligarchic, and deliberately so – but they are unaware of this, and hence cannot but remain oblivious to the possibility that democracy can die in different ways besides the trajectory they claim to have identified in their modern examples.

Is democracy inherently fragile? L & Z’s account implies that it is, since it has to be made at least partly undemocratic (by transferring as much power as possible out of the hands of the mass of the population over to gate-keepers, institutions and behavioural norms) in order to stop it becoming thoroughly undemocratic. Thucydides is more optimistic, in his own pessimistic way, emphasising the combination of external circumstances, deliberate machinations and the carefully judged exercise of fear and violence that was required to persuade the Athenians to abandon their cherished ideals and freedom. And this is surely a more useful perspective, to study the present as well as the past – unless we accept that L & Z’s view of the US as essentially oligarchic from the beginning (even if that’s not how they think they see things) is actually true.

Postscript And what of USS and the management of UK universities more generally? We see the gradual erosion of common norms (the growing divide between the academics and professional staff on one side, the highly-paid top managers on the other); the exclusion of the mass of the employees from power on the grounds of efficiency and expertise, and in response to external threats, with the growing authoritarianism of the management; the reduction of traditional institutions like university senates to merely consultative roles, with all business decided by the executive; the use of coercive rhetoric (“there is no alternative, and we can always change things back at a later date”); the tendency of most people to prefer a quiet life until it’s too late…

Steven Levinsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: what history reveals about our future (Viking Press, 2018)

 

BE MORE CAT

[image error]I’ve always been much more of a cat person than a dog person; no offence to the memory of dear old Bailey the neurotic greyhound, or to the various dogs of family members and neighbours, but it’s cats that I can’t imagine living without.

Partly it’s just a matter of upbringing, with Minou being the one person who understood and sympathised through much of my childhood and adolescence, but it’s also something to do with temperament; I can respect cats, and feel that it’s a relationship of equality and reciprocity (yeah, I wish…), whereas the basic slavishness of dogs, their expression of pathetic misery when they’re told off, the feeling that one could mistreat them horribly and they’d still be begging for forgiveness and affection, make me incredibly uncomfortable. Just as in the postcard above… Dog: “They feed me, they look after me, they worry about me… They must be gods.” Cat: “They feed me, they look after me, they worry about me… I must be a god.”

What has dawned on me this morning is that this is not a matter of identification but of wish fulfilment – or, rather, of the wrong sort of identification. I would love to be confident, independent, self-sufficient; instead I am pathetically grateful to university management for allowing me to run around and chase sticks for their entertainment, for the scraps of food they deign to offer, for the opportunity to show how loyal and dedicated I am. They pay me, they give me scope to teach and write, they must be gods – or, worse, we must all be part of the same pack, all working together for the same common ends. I think it’s called imprinting; get an academic young enough, and they’ll think the university is its loving parent.

Be more cat…

Der Wiki’ser

One of the things that I’ve meaning to do for ages, in the event that I had any spare time or energy, is to contribute something to Wikipedia. The basic principle of the collective creation of a gigantic repository of knowledge is inspiring, the overall quality of entries has improved so much over the years so that we academics need no longer discourage students from drawing on it (as a first step, and without citing it, of course, let along copying it…) – and it has been very helpful at times, when trying to correct Thucydides misquotations and misattributions on the Twitter, to be able to point people towards the small Misattribution section within the entry on Thucydides, which gives the correct source for the ubiquitous ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote.

Don’t bother looking for it; it’s not there any more.

Today is the first day of the strike over the proposed wrecking by Universities UK of the pension scheme for lecturers in universities like Exeter. Taking strike action and cancelling classes makes me deeply miserable – yes, I know how far our devotion to teaching leaves us wide open to exploitation within the marketised modern university, but it doesn’t take away the feelings of guilt and frustration – and so spending a bit of this unwanted free time on Wikipedia editing seemed a good idea, since it’s anonymous and so can’t be counted by the university as research, impact, engagement or anything else.

What a waste of an hour, adding five more of the most common misattributed quotes, with full references; within half an hour it was all gone, taken out by one of their established contributors on the grounds that sections on quotations and misquotations have no place in an encyclopaedia entry. Now, I can actually see some merit in that argument, so I’m not going to bother getting into an editing war, but it would have been nice to see it put in less dismissive terms, with some acknowledgement of the work I’d put in. The disclaimer on their personal page, that this isn’t anything personal but they just don’t want to see the encyclopedia wrecked, doesn’t do anything to improve the impression.

More than that: there’s been a section on Quotations in the Thucydides entry for years, but this contributor has clearly only just noticed this and decided that they rdon’t like it. So, not a Thucydides obsessive who jealously watches over that particular page and objects to anyone making changes to it, which I could half understand, but presumably someone who jealously watches out for anyone making any changes to anything at all Antiquity-related, to decide whether they like them or not. Yes, that’s going to encourage other people to get involved…

I’ve taken my changes off to the Wikiquote page (where we’ll see how long they last before some self-important tosser decides that this is an affront to his amour propre), and will now go and hack down some brambles for the rest of the afternoon.

On a more cheerful note, some of my brilliant colleagues out on the picket line in Exeter, showing that classicists make the best protest signs…

[image error]Update: I’m very grateful for the supportive response from various people over on the Twitter, especially Adam Parker (@adamarchaeology), and I’m happy to accept that loads of the people involved in Wikipedia are great – but it doesn’t persuade me to spend any more time on it, however long the strike lasts…