Neville Morley's Blog, page 45

The Original Shithole

Accordingly Attica, from the poverty of its soil enjoying from a very remote period freedom from faction, never changed its inhabitants. And here is no inconsiderable exemplification of my assertion, that the migrations were the cause of there being no correspondent growth in other parts. The most powerful victims of war or faction from the rest of Hellas took refuge with the Athenians as a safe retreat; and at an early period, becoming naturalized, swelled the already large population of the city to such a height that Attica became at last too small to hold them, and they had to send out colonies to Ionia. (Thucydides 1.2.5-6)

There’s a low-level but persistent Twitter meme that Thucydides shows the dangers of immigration and failure to assimilate. I can imagine that it’s been reinforced by V.D. Hanson’s evocation of Thucydides’ Corcyrean stasis episode to attack the modern terminology of immigration (the account with which @Thucydiocy was engaging yesterday segued rapidly from “Thucydides tells us…”, offered (oh joy) as rhetorical ammunition to Jordan Peterson, who’s giving a talk on identity and immigration in the Netherlands, to citing Hanson’s piece), but it certainly predates it.

On the face of it, it’s one of the less entirely unreasonable appropriations of Thucydides; he does indeed blame the underdevelopment of early Greece on the constant migrations. But – leaving aside the question of whether it’s remotely plausible as a historical account – what Thucydides is describing is a constant churn of entire populations in the different regions of Greece, so that no one ever settles in one place long enough to start constructing a proper state structure. It isn’t remotely a denunciation of the effects of immigration into a existing settled society, as modern claims want it to be. Indeed, the second half of the passage quoted above could be taken to say the exact opposite: Athens was strengthened, despite its poor soil and lack of resources, by taking in refugees from political conflicts elsewhere in Greece, thus augmenting its population (and keep in mind we’re dealing with a period where a bigger population was invariably regarded as a good thing, rather than as threatening the reduction of entitlements for those who were There First).

But of course, the response comes, those were Good Refugees, in manageable numbers, who dutifully assimilated and were Racially Compatible – well, they don’t say that last bit, to be fair, but it’s difficult to avoid the impression that this is a significant undercurrent in these discussions. White Northern Europeans can migrate as much as they like because they’re spreading civilisation (cf. Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s excellent new discussion of the old portrayal of the Dorians as Aryans, that she really ought to have called something like ‘Black Achilles, White Greeks’); there’s a whole mythology also of the character-building effects of overcoming adversity, struggling with poor conditions, making do with little etc. in coming to a new world and/or pushing forward the frontier.

But as soon as we’re talking about dark-skinned migrants, the narrative shifts: the poverty of their conditions becomes not character-building but permanently degrading (the basic import of Trump’s recent “shithole” comments), and their overcoming of massive obstacles to make it to the West becomes a symptom of greed and low cunning not initiative or courage. It’s tricky, but not impossible, to make this fit the ancient Greek template: Thucydides’ comments about entire peoples moving from region to region and hence not establishing any substantial state becomes an analogy for migrants refusing to assimilate or identify with their new home, just pursuing material benefit, while oligarchic criticisms of the demos are taken as evidence of the corruption of Athens through its intake of migrants. Citing Xenophon’s project to encourage *more* migrants gets nowhere, if only because he lacks the name recognition factor…

Yes, I know it’s not about any serious study of migration or identity in antiquity, but the ideologically-driven search for evidence that Immigration Has Always Been Bad (Except When It’s People Like Us). It’s still depressing…

Well, Obviously the Roads…

In the recent debates about the Ethics and Empire project at Oxford and its apparently apologetic agenda – see the Oxford open letter, the letter from non-Oxford scholars of empire and colonialism, James McDougall in the Grauniad – ancient historians have kept relatively quiet; Jo Quinn was one of the signatories of the Oxford open letter, and was denounced in the Daily Mail for her pains, but the second letter seems entirely modern in its focus. This is understandable, not from any sort of cowardice or secret imperialist sympathies on the part of ancient historians, but because in the first instance this does appear to be a debate focused on the particular dynamics and problematic history of the British Empire, with the modern postcolonial experience in other regions as the second-ranked concern.

However, as I tend to argue at the drop of a hat, it’s difficult if not impossible to escape the spectre of the Roman Empire when discussing modern imperialism. The claim that, despite all the conquest and massacres and despoliation and expropriation etc., the imperial power also brought Civilisation and Culture, and so was a Good Thing, has always been entwined with popular images of the Roman Empire (encapsulated in 1066 And All That). As Richard Hingley has studied in depth, this idea of the Civilising Power lifting conquered peoples out of barbarism heavily influenced academic research into ‘Romanisation’ – and fed back into debates about the modern phenomenon. The key example of the discourse is of course the Life of Brian sketch, mocking modern apologies for empire – and of course it was inevitably that someone would bring this into the debate about the Ethics and Empire project. Cue Richard & Judy in their Daily Express column on 30/12:

This is not a subject for levity but I can’t help thinking of the Monty Python sketch where British revolutionaries labouring under Caesar’s yoke rhetorically demand: “What have the Romans ever done for us?” only to find themselves muttering: “Well… roads, obviously… sanitation… fresh water system… irrigation… wine… but apart from that?” etc.

Yes, we were subjugated and colonised by Rome. But what would we make of the intellect of someone today who insisted Roman rule was unqualifiedly a wicked thing? Quite.

‘British’ revolutionaries? Huh?

But there’s a more pressing reason why ancient historians ought to be involved in this debate; I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere, which is a little surprising, but the Ethics and Empire project has actually already started, with an invitation-only colloquium last summer on The Ancient Period. Presumably the outcomes of this event would give a clearer indication of how the project is approaching this complex and difficult subject, but in the absence of any concrete information on that, we can at least draw some provisional conclusions from the way it was set up. Leaving aside my basic suspicion of invitation-only events as likely to become echo chambers, it’s difficult not to feel that there is a degree of contradiction baked in from the start. On the one hand, the outline of how the events should run reads as follows:

In each 90- minute session a colleague will present a 45-minute paper expounding and analysing a tradition’s views of empire (e.g., the New Testament’s) or a classic critique of empire (e.g., Augustine’s). To this another colleague will then offer a 10-minute critical response, with a view to stimulating subsequent discussion. One focal question in every session will be, “How well did empire’s critics or supporters actually understand the historical phenomenon?”

So, there is the intent not only to explore ideas and philosophies of empire, but to relate them to the actuality of the historical phenomenon (though with the implication that this is a known thing against which ancient ideas can be evaluated). However, with the greatest of respect for some very distinguished colleagues, I can’t help feeling that the invited participants were almost all specialists in the ideas and philosophies, not in the historical reality – certainly when it comes to the speakers.

The purposes of this project are:

to trawl the history of ethical critiques of ‘empire’;
to test the critiques against the historical facts of empire; and thereby
to garner possible ethical resources for contemporary deployment.

It’s a classic “well I wouldn’t start from here if I were you” problem; every step in this set of research questions raises problems (what exactly does ‘trawl’ mean in this context? with what size/shape net, aiming to catch what? how are these critiques to be ‘tested’, against what? and how does that yield ‘possible ethical resources’?), which would fox even a completely different set of participants with a greater focus on the historical side. If this were a project focused solely on the ways in which empires have been understood and criticised in abstract terms then it would be slightly more persuasive – but that’s already been dismissed as inadequate.

In most reaches of contemporary academic discourse—not least in Theology, Religious Studies, Political Theory, Cultural Studies, and Post-Colonial Studies—the topic of ethics and empire raises no questions to which widely accepted answers are not immediately to hand. By definition, ‘empire’ is imperialist; imperialism is wicked; and empire is therefore unethical. Nothing of interest remains to be explored.

As has been discussed elsewhere, as a characterisation of the actual state of thinking in different disciplines this is nonsense. But it’s also a sleight of hand, implying that any researcher who regards imperialism as a bad thing is therefore closed-minded and opposed to any sort of deeper investigation, and therefore the only reasonable way forward for research is to recognise the positive aspects of imperialism. Two ideas of ‘ethics’ are conflated: the historical discourse of imperialism (which has certainly not been neglected as a research theme in many different disciplines) and the passing of judgement on imperialism in the present. The complaint is not that the latter has been neglected (where there might be some truth in it, given the tradition of historians shying away from present-focused moral judgements) but that everyone else has reached the Wrong Conclusion. But of course a research project explicitly dedicated to promoting more positive views of imperialism would be open to condemnation, so it has to be presented as an investigation of the tradition of ethical discourse, which will then magically lead to the desired results in terms of a Christian ethic of empire.

One can only hope that, since he invited her as a respondent, Prof Biggar will now be carefully reading Hannah Cornwell’s book on Pax and the Politics of Peace. In most reaches of contemporary academic discourse, the topic of peace and empire raises no questions to which widely accepted answers are not immediately to hand. By definition, ‘peace’ is a good thing; nothing of interest remains to be explored, beyond the historical question of whether there was or wasn’t peace. Well, no – what the Romans meant by pax was highly complex and ideological, always open to co-option and manipulation by different interests and for different purposes; it’s always about power, it always exists in a complex relationship with the reality of imperial rule (Tacitus’ ‘solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant‘ line)…

In other words: you don’t have to start arguing that peace isn’t a good thing to recognise that it’s complex and ideological, and recognition of its complexity and ideological nature doesn’t necessarily entail believing that it isn’t after all good (though one might ask questions about some of the things that get called peace). You don’t have to start arguing that imperialism isn’t a bad thing in order to recognise its complexity – and recognition of that complexity doesn’t entail hauling up the Union flag and celebrating the Empire.

But since the Roman Empire persists as the model of the good empire, we ancient historians need to be very careful not to get co-opted into such a project…

2017 on the Sphinx

It’s felt like a very, very long year – but also a productive one, especially on the blog; anger is an energy, there’s been plenty to get angry about, but also things worth celebrating with enthusiasm. As I did last year, the aim of this end-of-year review isn’t to parade my most-viewed posts, since I imagine most people reading this will already have seen them, but to look back over some themes and issues, and highlight the things I most enjoyed writing and/or feel most proud to have written.

January: dominated by the advent of Trump, inevitably, and just as much by the deluge of classical analogies; Welcome to the Toga Party was the start of my ongoing attempts at making sense of what’s really going on in these comparisons. Much more positive was my first encounter with the people at Kaleider and the start of some really exciting explorations of new ways of presenting and discussing Thucydides – even if some of the ideas in The Strong Do What They Can, Big Boy remain embryonic or even imaginary.

February: I’d forgotten that it was this month I got embroiled in ongoing debates about David Engels’ apocalyptical visions of European civil war and the rise of a new Augustus, chronicled in Bring on the Night and If It Comes Up Mud; that seems to have gone quiet for the moment. I have much stronger feelings about The Red Shoes, my fanciful juxtaposition of the ballet, the film and La La Land with Rachel Moss’s brilliant piece on Choosing Not To Give, reflecting on life goals and identity.

March: there seems to have been an endless cyclical debate this year about lectures, technology in lectures, students, students and technology etc.; Keep Lectures Live! was my contribution, responding to an excellent essay in defence of lectures by Miya Tokumitsu. This was quite a month, in retrospect: an essay on Marx and classical reception in Eidolon, my contribution to the excellent Crooked Timber seminar on Ada Palmer’s thought-provoking Terra Ignota novels, supplemented by The Future of Classical Reception for a load of ideas I didn’t have room for in the main essay, *and* the advent of my ‘choose your own adventure’ version of the Melian Dialogue (and I will add the Melian half of the game this year, I promise).

April: another hectic month, which was why I found myself pleading Mea Culpa for all the book reviews I’ve failed to write – with a segue into wider reflections on academic book reviews as a genre. A fantastic production of Parsifal in Berlin somehow connected in my mind to issues of community, good and bad, and Theresa May’s Vicarage Values. An opportunity to reflect on academic fashion was simply fun…

May: a quieter month, wondering whether there actually is any way in which the Melians can ‘win’ (a vital question both for my game, and for Brexit Britain) and contemplating the idea of a happy, even frivolous Thucydides in A Serious Man? – and that reminds me that I still need to research Thucydidean jokes…

June: various heavyweight pieces (well, by my standards) this month, on the dodgy Wonder Woman quote (and its appropriation by the Graham Allison marketing campaign) and on Thucydides being read avidly in the White House. Much more important, however, was a guest post from the CthulhuUK campaign, setting out a manifesto for Bragnarök, and a careful analysis of the alien origins of Roman technology.

July: starting to think about the book on Classics: why it matters (due March, early May in the US), I wrote something about the idea of Proper Classics (and why I’m not keen on it). Even more entertaining, for all its brevity, was the Emoji Thucydides (though I’m still not happy with parts of Book 8…). Finally, a belated addition to the User’s Guide to Thucydides, which will get finished some day.

August: maybe we should skip August – a fairly quiet month on the blogging (hard at work on the book and on overdue articles) which saw the highest viewing figures for the year, entirely due to getting involved in that very silly and revealing argument about ethnicity in Roman Britain. But I was quite pleased with my analysis of Greek hunting techniques to try to establish what sort of trap the Thucydides Trap was…

September: again, only a few posts – finishing book – but one which belatedly proved popular on the new Tacitus Trap idea developing in China, and one I’m very proud of on Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Ging, Gegangen and the need for an engaged Classics.

October: a hectic month, with my inaugural lecture (video of all but the last fifteen seconds here) and a trip to Croatia which raised important questions about the role of Open Access, but also an opportunity to finish my essay on the Castorf production of the Ring, which brought to mind issues of historical determinism and narrative.

November: this seems to have been another Brexity month, with further concerns over the dynamics of the negotiations and how the Melian Dialogue seems to be inescapable, and – more cheerfully – the first plot outline of Goodbye, Europe! The essay I was most pleased with turned to the comparison of Roman slavery and modern automation, and the possibility that the ancient experience of a society permeated with slavery might offer a guide to our future.

December: no major pieces this month, largely because I spent much of it trying to recover from the productive but exhausting experience of organising a Thucydides-related evening of games and performance at the end of the previous month. The latest Brexit shambles brought to mind, yet again, issues of counterfactualism and anticipation; the Tacitus Trap continued to provoke interesting discussions. Finally, though it’s so recent that it’s scarcely worth mentioning, I did enjoy the Thucydides Christmas Carol…

A Thucydides Christmas Carol

No, not a heart-warming story about how the curmudgeonly old cynic came to be persuaded of the essential goodness of human nature and the unshakeable bonds of fellowship – okay, simply writing that out makes it seem like a really good idea, but probably not this year – but a reprise of @Thucydiocy’s little song from the Twitter, in case you missed it…

On the twelfth day of Christmas Thucydides sent to me

Twelve misquotations

Eleven dubious analogies

Ten IR Realists

Nine war college seminars

Eight Auden references

Seven exemplary catastrophes

Six brutal massacres

Tragic irony!

Four hundred oligarchs

Fear, honour and interest

A bipolar conflict

And a κτῆμα ἐς αἰεὶ

Holiday Reading: Best of 2017

Once again, I’ve remembered to keep track of the blogs I’ve especially enjoyed over the last year (with the curious exception of April – I don’t know, at this remove, whether I was too busy to read anything, or not much was published, or I was feeling hyper-sniffy at the time so didn’t think there was anything worth recommending. Very happy to get suggestions in the comments of great things that I’ve missed). This doesn’t claim to be a definitive list, just the stuff I came across – often via the Twitter, which continues to be a great way of keeping up with what’s going on in different regions and fields, despite all the management’s efforts to ruin it and drive everyone away – that deserves a more than ephemeral readership…

January: I disagree with a lot of what Joy Connolly has to say about Trump and Roman rhetoric, but it’s the pick of the discussions that seek to extract something politically useful from classical analogies in this context. Roberta Mazza offers a robust case for seeing most such attempts as trite at best, focusing on the specific example of the Grauniad‘s Jonathan Jones. Turning to a different field of politics, Rachel Moss’ Choosing Not To Give is required reading on academic work-life balance and getting one’s priorities right; I can’t claim for a moment that I manage this, ever, which means this piece is a necessary reproach…

February: Llewelyn Morgan’s Talking to God, about the languages that are felt to be appropriate for addressing the divine, is light years away from anything I do professionally, and all the more fascinating for it; the same can be said for Leen van Broeck’s account of text mining, and the emotional and technical limits to its current use within classics. Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s writings on the plight of the ‘undocumented’ are probably familiar to many readers of this blog, but his piece in Eidolon on immigration and the US classical profession broadens the perspective to an institutional critique. Finally, SpottedToad’s analysis of Harry Potter’s fantasies of institutional legitimacy is both hilarious and spot on.

March: another book seminar at Crooked Timber, this time on Ada Palmer’s baroque, high-brow and provocative Terra Ignota series, which you all ought to be reading by now since they’ve started to be published in the UK at last. Okay, it’s a podcast (or recorded lecture) rather than a blog post, but Laurie Johnson talks a lot of sense about Thucydides and democratic citizenship – and elsewhere on the blog, her shorter clips about growing winter indoor food are also well worth exploring. Finally, there’s Shawn Graham’s thoughtful discussion of Slow Archaeology and whom it would actually benefit, followed by a parallel discussion cum response from Bill Caraher.

April: as I said, I’m not sure what happened in April…

May: a good survey of different issues in history teaching, albeit US-centred, from The Tattooed Prof – especially the remark that “Most of us think we’re scintillating, interesting, witty lecturers. Most of us are also wrong”. Fascinating discussion of the role of language and ‘fake Latin’ in The Handmaid’s Tale from Yung In Chae. One of the best accounts of the appropriation of antiquity by the far right, Konstantinos Poulis on Golden Dawn.

June: yes, Eidolon again – maybe I should just stop bothering to recommend these articles individually, as I imagine the number of people who enjoy this blog but don’t read Eidolon regularly must be vanishingly small – but Mathura Umachandran’s essay on White Fragility is powerful and thought-provoking.

July: why did it take so long for anyone to think of creating Bromans? More importantly, when are they going to confirm the commissioning of the next series? Emma Southon offered an essential primer to the series, while Yung In Chae’s regular updates over the next few months were a joy. More seriously, an excellent book forum on Duncan Bell’s Reordering the World at thedisorderofthings.com – annoyingly, there doesn’t seem to be a single link to all the posts, but if you go to Inder Marwah‘s discussion (the pick of the bunch, I think) you should be able to find the others. Finally, Eleanor Scott’s piece on cooking for archaeological digs brought back lots of memories – and subsequent posts in the ‘Dig Food Blog’ series offer some great recipes…

August: oh yes, the big ‘ethnic diversity in Roman Britain’ controversy. Well, if nothing else, it introduced me to Howard Williams’ excellent blog, via his discussion of the role of archaeological illustration in creating our impressions of the past. A niche interest, probably, but I loved Nicole Deufel on Winnetou and I – though my knowledge of the films is filtered entirely through Der Schuh des Manitu, which remains the funniest Western parody ever. The ever-fascinating SententiaeAntiquae offered an essential guide to the question of how one says ‘sharknado’ in ancient Greek.

September: obviously all academics feel guilty most of the time about everything they haven’t done (yet, honestly…), but Pat Thomson delves deeper into the phenomenon of academic guilt – why don’t we feel equally guilty about everything? Howard Williams (again; how does he write so much?) offered five (!) insightful commentaries on the media response to the ‘Viking Warrior Woman’ story – link is to 5 of 5, which contains links to the first four. Audra Mitchell’s writings on extinction have been almost too painful to read, but I hold on to her argument in an earlier blog that we have an ethical duty to think about the future, even nightmarish futures, rather than turn away.

October: not familiar with Firefly? Go away and educate yourself, so you can then appreciate angrystaffofficer’s analysis of the characters in US military terms. Alex Acks takes apart the very silly geography of Middle Earth via its rivers. And maybe I should have put these in a curated order rather than following the chronology of when I came across them, as my final choice is Maria Farrell’s heartbreaking account of her feelings as an EU migrant – even as a privileged EU migrant – in Brexit Britain.

November: a powerful piece on sexual harassment and silencing in the academy, read via Christa Wolf and her take on Agamemnon, from L.D. Burnett. Provocative argument about whether Rome could have had an industrial revolution from the always-interesting Mark Koyama; I disagree with much of this, but it’s worth disagreeing with.

December: this is much more of a mainstream publication than I’d usual bother to recommend, but Stephen Bush has been brilliant about politics in the New Statesman all year, and his piece on not talking to the father he’d never met is superb, and remarkably heart-warming. That’s something we could all do with, as it’s been the sort of year when I start re-reading The Dark Is Rising and find that I’m getting disturbed by its Brexitty fantasies of plucky Britain as the sole bastion of the Light, threatened by invading hordes of darkness – it’s a relief to learn that I’m not the only person wondering about the role of classic children’s literature in creating a culture of aggressive nostalgia…

Thucydiocy 2017

It’s been a bumper year for Thucydiocy: an assortment of new sightings (‘Don’t confuse meaning with truth’, ‘You shouldn’t feel sorry for the lifestyle you haven’t tasted, but for the one you are about to lose’, ‘Democracies are always at their best when things seem at their worst’, and ‘You should punish in the same manner those who commit crimes with those who accuse falsely’), and the results of my study of who exactly is responsible for the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote with the stupid graduation photo (answer: a deeply annoying Social Jukebox), which means I feel justified in responding to it with emojis rather than a properly considered response.

But this year’s William F. Butler Award for Egregious Misquotation of Thucydides can have only one winner: the publicity team for Graham Allison’s Destined for War, for opportunistic bandwagon-jumping in adopting the ‘Thucydides’ quote from Wonder Woman, ‘Peace is only an armistice in an endless war’.

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There’s a case that the film-makers should have known better, since they had an actual classicist as consultant, and presumably ignored him. But the argument that Allison and co. should know better is unanswerable, given that this is all about publicising a book that claims to interpret current events through a scholarly reading of Thucydides, and regularly refers back to his ideas – and it’s not just an intern getting carried away, as both Allison and Niall Ferguson tweeted the image above from their personal accounts, without any hint of recognition that this line might not be completely authentic.

More and more, it’s the People Who Really Should Know Better who get my back up. Almost everyone on the Twitter is quoting Fake Thucydides in good faith, because they seem like thought-provoking ideas or because signing up to a social media company seemed like a good way to publicise their business; the ones at fault are the Social Jukebox people making money out of tweeting crap for people, ignoring all requests to delete the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ one from their database (apparently it is possible for individual users to remove it from their feed – but surely they shouldn’t have to), and the quotes websites that likewise ignore all correspondence. It’s the House Armed Services Committee, that correctly attributed the line to William F. Butler in a 1989 report but then switched to Thucydides in its 2010 successor. It’s the History Department at West Point, who included the ‘Peace is just an armistice’ line in the list of quotes they supplied when the West Point Museum was refurbished in 1988, which is the earliest example I’ve yet found that’s directly attributed to Thucydides…

***

It’s not the only dodgy line painted on the museum walls; there’s also ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war: Plato’. And to be fair, as I learned through correspondence with Tom Palaima at UT Austin (and see Thomas Pailama and Lawrence A. Tritle’s Epilogue in B. Campbell & L.A. Tritle, eds., The Oxford Handbook of War in the Classical World (Oxford, 2013), 734-5), West Point isn’t the only museum involved in such shenanigans: the line is also carved into one of the walls of the Imperial War Museum in London. Tom’s enquiries revealed that this happened in 1989, as part of a wholesale refurbishment of the public galleries; the quote was chosen by the then Director General, Dr Alan Borg; where he got it is unknown, but it does appear in the anthology of military quotations edited by Robert Heinl (1966), a copy of which is in the IWM library, so that seems a reasonable bet.

The source of this ‘Plato’ line is fairly easy to trace. In May 1962, General Douglas MacArthur gave a valedictory speech to cadets at West Point, offering a powerful account of the role of the military in the United States:

Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty, Honor, Country. Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men’s minds. But serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation’s war guardians, as its lifeguards from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiators in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice.

This does not mean, MacArthur argued, that the soldier is a warmonger.

On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

MacArthur had offered the same quotation in another speech, back in 1935. Both speeches, but the 1962 one especially, have been regularly quoted by serving and former military ever since, including the line from the wisest of all philosophers – which also found its way into the opening frame of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with Plato, so far as anyone has yet been able to work out. The earliest source seems to be the philosopher George Santayana, in one of his Soliloquies from England (London, 1922), presented as his thoughts in the immediate aftermath of the 1918 Armistice when he heard some soldiers singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’:

The poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war perhaps the last of all wars is over! Only the dead are safe ; only the dead have seen the end of war. Not that non-existence deserves to be called peace ; it is only by an illusion of contrast and a pathetic fallacy that we are tempted to call it so. (p. 102)

The train of Santayana’s reflections doesn’t get any more cheerful:

You suppose that this war has been a criminal blunder and an exceptional horror ; you imagine that before long reason will prevail, and all these inferior people that govern the world will be swept aside, and your own party will reform everything and remain always in office. You are mistaken. This war has given you your first glimpse of the ancient, fundamental, normal state of the world, your first taste of reality. (p. 103)

The ‘Great War’ great only because of the size of modern populations, compared with slaughters of Iliad; we are no true heirs of the ancient Greeks.

There is eternal war in nature, a war in which every cause is ultimately lost and every nation destroyed. War is but resisted change ; and change must needs be resisted so long as the organism it would destroy retains any vitality. Peace itself means discipline at home and invulnerability abroad, two forms of permanent virtual war ; peace requires so vigorous an internal regimen that every germ of dissolution or infection shall be repelled before it reaches the public soul. This war has been a short one, and its ravages slight in comparison with what remains standing : a severe war is one in which the entire manhood of a nation is destroyed, its cities razed, and its women and children driven into slavery. In this instance the slaughter has been greater, perhaps, only because modern populations are so enormous; the disturbance has been acute only because the modern industrial system is so dangerously complex and unstable; and the expense seems prodigious because we were so extravagantly rich. Our society was a sleepy glutton who thought himself immortal and squealed inexpressibly, like a stuck pig, at the first prick of the sword. An ancient city would have thought this war, or one relatively as costly, only a normal incident ; and certainly the Germans will not regard it otherwise. (104-5)

Santayana’s evocation of ancient ideas about war, to establish its eternal inevitability (‘ancient, fundamental, normal’) and to castigate those who believed in the War To End All Wars as naive and distinctively modern, offers an obvious reason for a casual reader – or one recalling a striking line without troubling to check the reference – to attribute the sentiment to Plato. It’s equally obvious why MacArthur, eulogising the role of the soldier as the foundation of society, made use of it. Why should two different military museums, on either side of the Atlantic, have chosen to revive MacArthur’s citation of ‘Plato’? One might surmise a connection to contemporary events, another apparent end to conflict and outbreak of peace when entrenched military attitudes might appear out of step with the Zeitgeist: the end of the Cold War. The ‘Thucydides’ line has the same import: don’t be fooled, people, and don’t stop funding the military – peace is a temporary lull at best.

***

It’s possible that tracing the origins and histories of quotes like these is revealing an ongoing discourse of the naturalisation of war, working less through explicit justifications and analysis than through symbols and memes. And through other means: in a recent discussion of the ‘Thucydides’ quote at http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/thucydides-quote-wonder-woman-it-legit, Jon Miltimore feels sure he’s heard the line before, and wonders whether it might be one of the quotes that pop up in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Maybe, it doesn’t feature in the helpful fanwiki list of quotes – http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Quoted_sayings_in_the_Call_of_Duty_series – but I’m not absolutely certain that this is complete (interestingly, there’s no Thucydides at all that I can see), and the query I posted on Reddit hasn’t borne any fruit.

Looking further back, Nathan Tarcov at Chicago has suggested a possible source in Hobbes, perhaps drawing distantly on Thucydides – given that Chapter XIII, ‘Of the naturall condition of mankind’, from which the following quote is taken, is one where the influence of Thucydides (in the account of the warre of all against all, the irrelevance of questions of justice and injustice, the failures of anticipation, the three principle causes of quarrel etc.) is felt most strongly:

For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.

The paragraph concludes with the line “All other time is PEACE”; that doesn’t wholly contradict the ‘peace is only an armistice’ idea, as war is the period “wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known”, without implying that there is no will to battle during periods of peace – but it still feels a bit of a stretch to see as the specific point of origin. An alternative possibility, suggested by Chris Brooke at Cambridge, is to focus on the 18th-century discussion of ‘Perpetual Peace’, which draws partly on Hobbes:

I suspect the proximate origin of the fake quote in which you’re interested is the “Perpetual Peace” discourse of the eighteenth century, which goes way beyond what we find in Kant’s essay of the same name. So, Rousseau, summarising Saint-Pierre, writes (in Vaughan’s translation), “Let us admit then that the Powers of Europe stand to each other strictly in a state of war, and that all the separate treaties between them are in the nature rather of a temporary truce than a real peace…” [‘A lasting peace through the federation of Europe’, 1756]. That’s obviously a Hobbist thought (and the basic structure of Saint-Pierre’s thinking is Hobbist), but it’s much closer to your fake quote than anything that I think we find in Hobbes (and Hobbes on international relations is complicated, as first Richard Tuck but then especially Noel Malcolm showed). The core theme of the perpetual peace writers is that something radical has to happen to the structures and practices of international politics to escape this condition—but then all you need to do to get to the content of your fake quote is agree with the diagnosis but reject the prescription (and that’s easy to do, since the diagnosis is plausible, and the prescriptions so often come across as utopian). And radicals in the nineteenth century are indebted to this eighteenth-century discourse in one way or another (so this may be where the Fourierism you found comes from), culminating in things like Charles Lemonnier’s International League for Peace and Freedom in the later part of the C19th.

Even if the explicit focus of these discussions is contemporary Europe, there’s always a classical dimension; Rousseau’s account of Saint-Pierre, mentioned above, discusses ancient precedents for leagues of nations, and contrasts the spirit of the Greeks, sharply distinguishing themselves from ‘barbarians’ and hence rendering any such compact untenable, with the generosity of the Romans in extending citizenship as well as the benefits of peace to conquered peoples. There’s even a possibility that this discourse may offer circumstantial grounds for attributing the coinage of the specific quote to Napoleon (while taking on board the warning that, as so often, we’re relying on second-hand and not terribly trustworthy accounts of the great man’s words, which in any case were often exaggerated for rhetorical effect or simply flights of fancy; cf. P. Dwyer, ‘Napoleon and the Universal Monarchy’, History 95.3 (2010)). As Chris notes, the Abbé Sieyès, who played a key role in Napoleon’s rise to power, spent time in Berlin, and there’s a clear convergence between his ideas and those of Kant that suggests influence in at least one direction if not both (see I. Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: perpetual peace and closed society, Princeton 2011).

My impression, on a casual skimming of some relevant literature, is that the idea of ‘peace as a mere armistice’ is entirely conventional in the 18th century if not before; it has some ancient roots, both specific (Thucydides’ argument that the Peloponnesian War was indeed a single conflict, regardless of the existence of a period of peace in the middle, and Plato’s remark in Laws 626a) and more general, but those are secondary to the debate. Its subsequent development has two distinct components: its emergence as a quotable line attributed to a specific individual (Napoleon, then Thucydides), and the shift from ‘this is the present state of things; we need a radical solution (e.g. a federation of nations) to solve it’ to the more pessimistic, ‘realist’ and/or cynical view that ‘this is the present state of things, and it’s eternal and natural so get used to it’ – the dominant reading in the present, which, like the Santayana quote attributed to Plato, serves a quite different ideological function.

None of which justifies the Destined for War marketing campaign…

Funny Games

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For all that I spend quite a lot of my time critically analysing the deficiencies of modern claims to ‘learn’ from Thucydides, or simply throwing rocks at them, I do firmly believe that his work has enormous potential as a source of insight into the way the world works, not only in the past but today. There are continuities as well as dramatic changes in human behaviour across time; we can draw from Thucydides’ account understanding of the ‘human thing’, the way that people think and behave. Yes, I tend to think of this in terms of tendencies and persistent mental habits rather than ‘laws’ of ‘human nature’, but it’s part of the same general project to read the work as Thucydides’ intended it, a ‘possession for ever’ from which readers can learn valuable things for the present.

The challenge is to draw out such insights in a way that’s accessible to more than a tiny number of people. Thucydides’ work is long, often difficult, often incomprehensible without a substantial amount of contextual knowledge, and frequently dull unless you’re really, really committed to it. This is clearly the attraction of the widely-shared quotes (genuine or not) and the snappy slogans (Thucydides’s Trap, the idea of the Melian Dialogue as Ur-statement of Realism): the idea that Thucydides’ wisdom can be shared by those who don’t have the stamina or inclination to slog through the whole thing, and even by those who find the name off-putting rather than instantly recognising it as authoritative.

But that approach to making Thucydides accessible and meaningful works, when it’s not simply making stuff up, by stripping out all the ambiguity and complexity that I think is the whole point – Thucydides isn’t about slogans, he’s about the problem of slogans as a way of trying to engage with a complex world. You can’t abstract the speeches from the rest of the narrative without losing something vital; you can’t abstract individual lines from the speeches without ditto; you can’t treat the Athenians’ statements in the Melian Dialogue as Thucydides’ own views without saying something Really Stupid. And suddenly we’re back at the position of insisting that only a full reading of the entire work – and obviously there will be a test afterwards – is an acceptable basis for drawing any lessons from it.

A further problem: even if it were possible to develop some version of Thucydides that was accessible and yet somehow remained true to this spirit of complexity and ambiguity, why should anyone care? It’s the perennial issue for academics, especially but not only humanities academics, seeking ‘impact’; so often our proposed contribution is some version of “actually things are more complicated than you think”, which may seem a vital insight to us, but isn’t necessarily what anyone else is looking for. Thucydides’ insight, in my view, is the way that people are often really bad at thinking about things; if that’s so, how many of them are likely to sign up to be told that?

The solution – and I owe this to various discussions over the last year or so with people at Kaleider – is that you have to offer your target audience something they want, as a means of giving them something else that they didn’t know they wanted. The ‘choose your own adventure’ version of the Melian Dialogue that I began developing last year (yes, I am going to get round to creating the Melian version as soon as I have any spare time) was the first iteration of this: the pleasure and challenge of playing a game as a way into highlighting issues around counterfactualism, choice, chance, and ancient and modern assumptions about justice and morality.

So, when I was prodded into writing a proposal for a Thucydides-related event for the annual Being Human Festival of the Humanities, further gaming developments seemed to be the way to go. The theme of the Festival was ‘Lost and Found’, which didn’t really offer any obvious links to Thucydidean stuff or issues of ‘might and right’ – unless I took a cue from the traditional ways of reading Thucydides via decontextualised quotes, got people to think about isolated lines, and then put them back into context through a performance of the latest version of my Melian Dialogue adaptation… Yeah, why anyone found this proposal coherent or persuasive is a mystery to me, and there have been times over the last six months when I have cursed my apparent ability to write convincing proposals on the basis of a few random thoughts; but, having found myself committed to delivering such an event, I had to sit down and start designing the actual games (rather than simply asserting their future existence); with the help of Andy Wood, one of Kaleider’s residents with interests in storytelling and gameplay, and colleagues and students who helped with play-testing and the evening itself, the process was a lot more productive than I feared at the start…

Game One: The Strong and the Weak

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The icebreaker. On arrival, everyone was given an envelope some cards, some clothes pegs, a lengthy feedback questionnaire from Being Human central command, and the following instructions…

Welcome to the world of ancient Greece, in the fifth century BCE; the world described and analysed by the Athenian writer Thucydides, whose ideas continue to resonate today and to inspire debates about power, justice, war and peace.

In the fifth century, Greece was made up of hundreds of little city-states, some of them democracies and others ruled by aristocrats. Each ‘polis’ (this is where we get the word ‘politics’) was fiercely independent and jealous of its neighbours, always suspecting them of plotting to seize their territory or undermine their constitution.

For the next fifteen minutes, you are one of these states, struggling to survive in this anarchic world. In the envelope you were given, you have three strategy cards to choose from: War, Diplomacy, and Plotting to undermine your rival’s political system. War beats Diplomacy, Diplomacy beats Plotting, and Plotting beats War. Yes, it’s basically an ancient version of Rock, Paper, Scissors….

You issue a challenge by holding out a strategy card, face down, towards someone. If they accept the challenge, they too choose a strategy card and hold it out face down, and on a count of three you both turn them over to see who wins. After each challenge, move on to another – unless your rival challenges you back.

In your envelope you also have some tokens (clothes pegs!), showing your city’s resources: these should be displayed with pride. If you win a challenge, you take one of your opponent’s tokens; if you lose, you have to hand one over. If you are reduced to zero tokens, you must follow your conqueror around for the rest of the game, cheering them on – and if they are conquered, follow the new victor.

However, there is justice only between equals: if one player has more tokens than the other, they win challenges where both play the same strategy card, which would normally be a draw. Beware of the emerging imperial powers, reducing everyone else to slavery!

The crucial addendum to the final point: a few players started with more clothes pegs (five) than everyone else (three), so began the game with the advantage of the stronger – and they were the ones who finished with fifteen or more pegs, and little entourages of conquered opponents.

This game worked really well; simple, easy-to-grasp mechanics, demanding that everyone gets involved and interacts with lots of other people, trivial enough that no one was going to get really upset at losing – and definitely helpful that they were given something to do even after they’d lost (another of the ideas that Andy contributed to the enterprise). If/when I do this again, it would be worth having a quick discussion before moving on to the next game – if only to see if anyone realised that the whole thing was rigged from the beginning…

Game 2: Justice Only Between Equals

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The second game is more directly connected to the Melian Dialogue; partly through the inclusion of quotes on the playing cards, and mostly because it is an adaptation of the version devised by Yanis Varoufakis for his game theory analysis of how people behave in a situation of unequal advantage…

War is never predictable. In the heat of battle, the outcome of confrontations between two armies can be much more uncertain and more complex than a simple win/lose result – and you have the opportunity to learn from experience and develop your strategy accordingly. But the field of conflict is rarely level; advantage almost always lies with the stronger.

You play this game in pairs, one with Red cards and one with Blue, which you’ll find in the envelope. Each of you selects a move, Attack, Hold or Retire; play your cards simultaneously, and then then consult the table to see the results of the confrontation – whether each of you gains or loses points. Keep a running total of your score on the scoresheet, as it’s your position at the very end that matters.

After every game, swap cards, so that if you played Red in the last round you now play Blue. Play six games in all, three as Red and three as Blue, and we’ll move to a discussion of a few issues.

The point – which smart players pick up very quickly – is that the scoring table is rigged, in three ways; there is a solution (both players Retire) which leaves both of them in an advantageous position, but the consequences of playing Retire and the other player playing a different card are seriously negative; the least risky choice is always Attack; and in almost all situations, Red has an advantage over Blue. The numbers could certainly be tweaked further (indeed, part of the point of Varoufakis’ experiment was to see what happened when they were tweaked, but that seemed like way too much fiddling about for this sort of event).

Most importantly, the round of games – giving everyone an equal shot at Red and Blue, so that no one had to experience constantly being on the weak side – was followed by a discussion of the issues raised: How did people feel about playing the game? Did they spot the unfairness? How did it affect their strategy, depending on which role they were playing? How far did they feel compelled to be more aggressive, whether they liked it or not? Did anyone get the result that benefits both sides, e.g. if both of them play Retire?

Can they think of analogous situations, in which one side of a confrontation clearly has greater power than the other? Can they see similar patterns, with the stronger or the weaker behaving in different ways?

Game 3: Gods and Mortals

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This was the most interesting and also the most challenging of the games – challenging in part because, having finalised the concept, I was still desperately writing the text the night before the event, and so the people acting as facilitators hadn’t had a proper chance to practice. I won’t, therefore, give the full text here (also, it’s long), but will sketch out the idea.

This is a cross between an improvisation game and a role-playing game – no fancy dice (shame, but not really practical or appropriate), but each player being given a character (hero, monster, ruler, child, citizen or deity) and taking it in turns to say their piece in the context of a developing story – and each time having to work an appropriate quote from Thucydides into what they say. The story offered a series of dilemmas focused on issues of might and right, justice etc., via a mash-up of the Oedipus and Perseus/Andromeda myths, and ideally players could ham up their roles to the nth degree (one reason why I eventually settled for a scenario where one might hope many if not most people would have some idea of the cultural archetypes they were called upon to play).

Ideally, this game picks up on the issues of the strong versus the weak raised by the previous game, and the various real-world analogies that might be imagined. Indeed, early in the development I toyed with the idea of creating much more realistic, meaningful scenarios: a family scenario, for example, playing out the relationships between parents and children, siblings, husband and wife etc. But on reflection a neutral, more entertaining scenario simply seemed safer – without entirely excluding the possibility of engaging with some powerful, thought-provoking dilemmas.

The two main things I need to do for future iterations are (a) make this less dependent on me to work 100%, and ideally make it self-sufficient rather than requiring a facilitator who’s had some guidance and practice beforehand; (b) work out how best to get people into the swing of acting, rather than reading out their instruction sheets. In both cases, this is going to require more extensive rewriting of the scripts.

And After…

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As mentioned above, the three games were followed (after a welcome break for refreshments) with a performance of my adaptation of the Melian Dialogue, with the idea that people would recognise lines they’d encountered earlier and could think about how they fitted into the wider context of the arguments of the Melians and the Athenians. (The evening concluded with a short lecture by me, talking a bit about Thucydides and how his work has been interpreted in the modern world.

The first time this was performed, in 2013, the Dialogue was framed by a television report to provide context, followed by the Athenians and Melians confronting one another across a conference table. This time, for various practical reasons (lack of time to learn lines…), we went for a political chat show set-up, with me moderating (in a minimal manner) the argument between guests. This could be definitely be developed, if I decide to pursue such an aesthetic in future. Having heard a fascinating talk from my former Bristol colleague Emma Cole on Australian post-dramatic adaptations of Greek tragedies, I’m currently more inclined to go for something a bit more exciting (I have visions of a version in which the Melian is progressively stripped naked or covered in paint…) – but I do appreciate that this might be less effective in connecting things up to the games and the issues they raised. Time to make some videos…

Conclusion

This has been a really interesting experience, even if it left me pretty well wiped out for the rest of term. It was interesting to return to the world of games once again, and to think about what makes for a playable, enjoyable game that can nevertheless raise interesting questions. It continues to be productive to be forced out of my comfort zone, to think of how to engage people with ideas and experiences in ways that go beyond my default “let’s have a seminar discussion” mode. The games themselves are, I think, worth persevering with, making some changes and then trying them out with new audiences as a basis for exploring what I still think are important issues about power…

 

Party Over Principle

Listen, I don’t spend my time concocting spurious parallels between ancient history and contemporary events so that I can indoctrinate my students and subvert society under the guise of teaching. I open up my copy of Thucydides to prepare for this week’s seminar, the topic of which was set three months ago, and there parallels are…

[image error]Thucydides on stasis – the collapse of society and collective values under the pressure of factionalism, a text which has spoken to successive periods of history from the warring city states of Renaissance Italy to the English Civil War (Thomas Hobbes!) to the French Revolution (Edmund Burke):

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)

Anyway, most of the time it’s the students coming up with these comparisons, not me…

 

In Übersetzung verloren

Some years ago, when my grasp of German was at a level of competent-but-not-idiomatic, I used the word Selektion – I can’t remember the exact context, but it may have had something to do with the British system of university admissions compared with the German – and was taken aback by the reaction of the people I was talking to. “You can’t used that word! Yes, it means ‘selection’, but that’s not what it means…” Because the Selektion of people into different categories is what happened on arrival at concentration camps; if you’re going to talk about dividing people into different categories, for example with admissions to university courses with restricted numbers of places, you definitely need to find a different word for it.

It was clear that, at least for these people – I’ve carefully avoided the word ever since, to be on the safe side, so don’t have any further evidence – ‘Selektion’ was unavoidably entangled with historical and political issues; not that every usage was deliberately evoking the horrors of the past, but that it could evoke such a reaction in the hearer. I can imagine (I haven’t checked) that there are people who employ the term precisely in order to provoke such a reaction, with a degree of deniability; but accidental usage, except by ignorant foreigners who don’t know any better, could only be because someone hasn’t thought things through adequately. You wouldn’t use the term ‘Selektion’ in the title of an academic conference, for example, unless you were either discussing the actual historical topic, or were being explicitly provocative.

Do Germans experience a similar feeling of shock or uneasiness when they encounter ‘Selection’ in English – in the context of university admissions, or boxes of chocolates? I would imagine that they might well do – but would recognise that this is essentially their issue, that the English usage is, almost certainly, entirely innocent of the cultural and historical associations that they cannot ignore. In some instances, this might not be true – an academic conference on 20th-century German history that used ‘Selection’ in the title would be reasonably be suspected of deliberate evocation (even if not provocation), or open to accusations of ignorance and thoughtlessness. But that’s because there are specific reasons why one can assume some degree of knowledge of the connotations of the equivalent term in German, even in a different cultural context; someone who objected to the name of Cadbury’s Selection Box would rightly be ridiculed.

Context is key. On the one hand, there’s a recognition that words cannot be abstracted from their wider cultural context and stripped of their associations, even if that’s the writer’s sincere intention. On the other hand, words don’t necessarily carry their associations with them into a different cultural context, even if that’s how someone from the original context will instinctively read them. To take a concrete example, the subject of a recent flurry of argument on the Classicists email list, in a US context the word ‘undocumented’ is inextricably associated with the specific plight of Undocumented immigrants (movingly discussed by Dan-el Padilla Peralta). I can well imagine that it’s now impossible to use the term in the US without evoking this theme, or without revealing oneself as naive and thoughtless (I’ve no idea what the consequences may have been for established phrases like ‘undocumented feature’).

How far do these associations extend beyond that context? The term ‘undocumented’ is used in the UK in the context of immigration, but I wouldn’t say that it had the same cultural resonances; that is to say, it’s obvious what it means in discussions of immigration or when used in relation to someone born outside the country, but simply seeing the word ‘undocumented’ in a different context doesn’t instantly bring to mind the topic of immigration, let alone the specific topic of immigration in the US. Artefacts may be undocumented. Historical events may be undocumented. The use of Undocumented as the title of an academic conference about ancient documents may indeed be a deliberate reference to the US situation, but I’m not convinced that it can only be a deliberate reference to it.

In brief: language is always political. But there is not yet a homogeneous global political context in which language is always political in exactly the same way everywhere.

Anticipating Disaster

To be absolutely honest, I’m struggling to focus this morning. Partly, it is simply that there are Too Many Things even for a normal week, let along for the penultimate week of term, and my ability to choose between different priorities other than those which actually have to be done more or less immediately has evaporated – they’re all important, none of them is so important that it’ll be a catastrophe if I don’t do it until tomorrow, and my head hurts. No, I know this isn’t a sensible strategy and will end in tears, but that doesn’t help.

I imagine, in my more sympathetic and understanding moments, that this is probably how David Davis feels. Mostly I am lacking in either sympathy or understanding, as the other – and more important – reason why I can’t focus is fury and bewilderment at the revelation this morning that there are no sector-by-sector-in-excruciating-detail assessments of the impact of Brexit, and apparently this doesn’t matter. To some extent I’m bewildered by my own bewilderment; this government keeps on providing evidence of its cluelessness, incompetence, mendacity, blustering arrogance etc., so why do I seem to retain a residual faith that they can’t possibly be this awful and useless? Do they really have no shame? Are they really so stupid and oblivious? Or are they simply overwhelmed by the realisation that they are committed to delivering the impossible, yet incapable of considering an alternative.

What is appalling is the apparent insouciance, the nonchalant shrug at having to admit that, no, actually, all those impact assessments mentioned on numerous occasions in the past weren’t actually assessments, or detailed, or much of anything, but it doesn’t matter because economic models can always turn out to be wrong so what the hell. It’ll all turn out okay, and in any case it’ll be someone else’s problem by then.

I’m reminded of some of the issues I was engaging with earlier this year, in a piece on ‘Counterfactualism and Anticipation’ (https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-31737-3_58-1). It’s paywalled, unfortunately, but I imagine I won’t actually be hunted down and torn to pieces by Springer’s copyright hounds if I reproduce a couple of paragraphs from the closing section that seem to be relevant:

Counterfactual thinking about the future is not scientific, or objective, or empirically robust. It often depends heavily on the assumption that past and present offer at least some guide to the future; that we can identify immanent tendencies in the present and explore their possible consequences, and that our existing data sets are our most important resource for such an exercise. It can indicate possibilities, but its main utility lies in questioning the more confident and dogmatic assertions of other forecasters; in highlighting the fact that past developments were never necessary or preordained, and emphasising uncertainty and indeterminacy.

Anticipation is not about forecasting; indeed, it is less concerned with the future, than with how we think about the future and engage with the present as a result. The inability of counterfactualism to aid in the identification of a single or most probable future is therefore not a problem from this perspective; rather, it directs our attention towards how humans think about the relationship between past, present and future – and how this may lead them into trouble. It offers a means of identifying and correcting common cognitive biases: confirmation bias, framing, reliance on unexamined heuristics such as analogies, and, above all, hindsight bias (e.g. Kahnemann, Slovic & Tversky 1982).

This is precisely the aspect of Thucydides’ account of the war between Athens and Sparta that Allison’s model ignores; far from offering a single explanation of a deterministic cause, the narrative highlights both the complex interaction of multiple causes (individual actions and decisions, the characters and cultural assumptions of different states, and the continuing consequences of past events, as well as structural factors) and the multiple ways in which things might have turned out differently (Hawthorn 2014). The same is true of his account of the course of the war, which is presented as neither predetermined nor purely contingent, but always open, even if there was a recognisable tendency towards path dependency. Above all, the ‘lesson’ which Thucydides’ readers can draw from a better understanding of these past events is that people suffer from multiple failings in evaluating the present and anticipating the future: oscillation between over-optimism and excessive pessimism, assumption of greater knowledge and confidence than is rationally justified, susceptibility to false analogies and confirmation bias, and a habit of reinterpreting events afterwards in a self-justifying manner rather than learning properly about their own errors.

The primary contribution of counterfactual thinking to anticipation is therefore psychological and ethical, as Audra Mitchell has argued: “It cannot give us predictions or certainty, and it can’t prove that everything will be ok, or tell us how to ensure this. But it can help us to see possibilities, to scope the boundaries of our knowledge, to appreciate the limits of our agency and to expand our ethical sensibilities” (2013). Mitchell’s argument focuses on the specific issue of the storage of nuclear waste, where it is essential for us to imagine futures that are unknowable or unthinkable – to break through what she calls ‘futural amnesty’ or the forgetting of the future – because what we do or do not do in the present will inevitably have far-reaching consequences. Relatively few issues – climate change is the other obvious one – combine such long time-scales with the knowledge that our actions or inaction will have consequences for the future. But the wider points she makes about counterfactual thinking and anticipation are valid also for shorter-term concerns.

By combatting assumptions of determinism in human history, and emphasising that there are multiple possible futures, counterfactual narratives work against a crippling nihilism and sense of a lack of agency. They can offer a qualified sense of hope, that the future might not be entirely bleak and certainly that its bleakness is not pre-determined – and hence, an ethical obligation towards the people of the future, to seek to build a better rather than a worse future. Conversely, imagining horrific and nightmare possibilities, including human extinction or degradation, provides the ethical imperative for trying to avert such futures; futural amnesty is a protective strategy, allowing people to get on with their lives without constant awareness of horror (this resembles Friedrich Nietzsche’s arguments about the inability of humans, with rare exceptions like Thucydides, to face too much reality), but it is also an abdication of responsibility for the harm that we might thereby do unknown future others. Counterfactualism tells us that the future is still open, that we can usefully seek to anticipate it – even as it also highlights the ways in which humans constantly fail in this effort – and that we have an ethical obligation to try.

The point is that Davis is partly right – uncertainty is inevitable when trying to anticipate future developments and their consequences, and economic models do generally assume the continuation of certain current conditions so can be derailed by paradigm changes or unexpected variables and events – and utterly, culpably wrong in thinking that therefore he’s isn’t obliged to try. As Audra Mitchell suggests in the blog post cited above – which appears to have vanished from the internet; damn, will need to chase this up – we have an ethical duty towards the future, to imagine possible developments – especially nightmarish developments – so that we can act in the present to try to avert them. Failure to do so may be comforting – of course it’ll all be fine – but it’s a dereliction of duty and a fundamentally immoral act.

It’s entirely possible that Davis and the rest of them are suffering from a crippling nihilism and a sense of a lack of agency, that they have found themselves with responsibility for something they cannot understand or control. But it was their choice – and this is what they are supposed to be good at, and what they’re paid for. The result is to inflict crippling nihilism and lack of agency on the rest of us, since we have no capacity at all to respond to looming capacity other than seeking individual escape roots, or just hiding under the duvet, or ranting at the internet…