Neville Morley's Blog, page 46

China Crisis

Who owns the classical tradition, and who has the right to develop new interpretations of its significance for the present? As you might expect from someone who spent twenty years in Bristol, chanting “Meaning is realised at the point of reception!” and holding aloft my copy of the Little Red-and-Black Book*, my habitual answers are everyone and anyone. Yes, we can and should argue furiously about individual interpretations and appropriations, on political or moral or aesthetic or historical grounds, but what we can’t do is argue that certain people(s) have a special right or privilege, to the exclusion of others.

I’m thinking about this at the moment because the Tacitus Trap, China’s great contribution to the storehouse of snappy classical memes, is back in the news, with a scandal around alleged child abuse in a private kindergarten in Beijing and a possible cover-up, and hence visits to this blog post are up, plus an exchange of emails with some Chinese correspondents (for which I am as ever enormously grateful, given my inability to follow any of this directly).

Once again, the idea of Tacitus Trap as an “intellectual forgery” was raised. As I wrote before, I don’t think that’s a reasonable judgement at all: the concept is a decent enough paraphrase of what Tacitus says, and it serves a useful purpose – indeed, there’s a good case to be made that British political commentators need to adopt it forthwith to characterise our shambolic government. What’s interesting is *why* it should be considered inauthentic: Because Tacitus didn’t use these exact words? (Maybe reflecting a different attitude to classical authority in China?). Because no one in the West uses it? (Implying that the West has a special claim to the classical tradition?).

Or, that the phrase damned by association, especially since its adoption as officially sanctioned language (now part of what every state official should know, after Premier Xi used it in a speech)? The intended implication of using a classical Western phrase might be that this credibility crisis is originally a Western problem, or at least not solely a Chinese problem – in other words (and regardless of whether or not it’s actually true about the West) the introduction of the phrase represents the use of rhetoric to manipulate the public, by acknowledging the existence of a problem and simultaneously diminishing its significance by suggesting that it’s a more general phenomenon.

Which is to say, the idea of the Tacitus Trap is actually a key example of what it describes, the inability of a government to break out of its credibility crisis or convince people of its sincerity once a certain tipping point is reached…

*C.A. Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception (Cambridge, 1993)

Return of the Slave Society

Aristotle dreamed of the robot revolution. A slave is a living tool that serves multiple purposes; likewise a craftsman’s assistant (Politics 1253b). This is demonstrated by the fact that, if every tool could perform its own work when ordered, or by seeing what to do in advance, like the statues of Daedalus or the self-moving tripods of Hephaestus, craftsmen would have no need of assistants or masters of slaves. Tools are an essential component of the state; workers, maybe not so much.

Back in the 1980s, the Italian archaeologist Andrea Carandini sought to characterise the impact of the rise of the ‘slave mode of production’ in Roman Italy by describing slaves as “ancient computer-robots”. The point was that the transformation of the Italian countryside in the 2nd-1st centuries BCE was not just a matter of the replacement of one sort of worker with another (free peasants with slaves), or of the reorganisation of the land into larger, more productive units, but of the introduction of ‘thinking tools’ that could be set complex tasks within a new semi-industrialised production system. The consequences of this change were then seen in growing inequality, political instability, the anger of the now displaced and impoverished peasants etc., leading to the collapse of the old political order – but not to any changes in this system of exploitation.

I always found Carandini’s argument disturbing because of the risk of complicity with the slave-owners’ perspective, seeing slaves solely in terms of productivity and erasing their humanity (I was at the same time reading similar criticisms of Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross, which attempted a cliometric analysis of the economic benefits of slavery in the USA). But it continues to offer food for thought; and, in the face of a continuing stream of articles and television programmes about the rise of the robots and the inexorable spread of automation in the present, I’ve started to wonder about the possibility of focusing the analogy in the other direction: what can we learn about our possible future trajectory from studying a past society where ‘autonomous tools’ were ubiquitous?

Automation permeated the Roman economy; it’s not that every enterprise employed robots, but the largest, most market-oriented ones did, vastly increasing the profit margins and market share of those who could afford them. Moreover, wealthy Romans handed over much if not all of their financial affairs to the machines, which were theoretically dedicated to the service of their masters but enjoyed significant autonomy and independence (assuming that their masters could have understood their dealings if they troubled to investigate).

Even more significant for our purposes is the way that non-human intelligences could be found in every area of social life as well, to the point where their supposed owners ceased to register their presence much of the time. Roman masters entrusted confidential information and secret messages to their machines – and lived their lives surrounded by them, carrying out all the mundane tasks of household management and personal care in the background, silently watching and learning.

With high rates of divorce and remarriage, as Keith Bradley has argued, children might be largely raised by robots, forming their most long-lasting and intimate bonds with their robot nannies and tutors. Some adults, too, indulged in the pretence of equal, affectionate relationships with certain of their non-human servitors, perhaps even believing that their responses were genuine and spontaneous (“Thank you, Siri.” “You don’t have to thank me.”). But they equally regarded them as unproblematically available for sexual exploitation or physical abuse; they were things, not humans, even if they sometimes looked and behaved like humans; they were property, to be used as their owner wished.

Not implausible? The aim of the exercise is not to make us think differently about Rome, but to establish a basis for developing the analogy for the modern period, that the pervasive presence of artificial intelligences in our lives is sufficiently similar to the pervasive presence of slavery in the Romans’ to make it worthwhile exploring further. Because a crucial point about a ‘slave society’, as discussed by historians like Finley and Bradley, is that it affects (infects?) everything. Social relationships, family relationships, economic activity, cultural conceptions about freedom and philosophical debates about the nature of justice are all affected.

That is, the implications of the modern rise of automation go well beyond the question of what happens, in purely material terms, to those people who lose their jobs as a result; it raises questions about our ideas of work, leisure, the purpose of life and the nature of the human, it places our system of values under strain. These are to original observations; my suggestion is simply that we might learn something from studying how a different culture was shaped by similar circumstances. I’m thinking of re-reading Fitzgerald’s Slavery in the Roman Literary Imagination as a starting-point.

There are other possibilities too. Probably trite to consider the issue of slave revolts, though the Romans’ relative success in limiting rebellion largely to small-scale, individual acts of resistance (non-cooperation, dumb insolence, ordering unwanted items from Amazon etc.) is noted. The issue of manumission – why the Romans granted such autonomy to ‘things’, so frequently, and how they negotiated their transition to personhood – is certainly worth thinking about. Still more, the fate of the redundant masses, excluded from meaningful activity and reduced to aspiring to own robots of their own – echoes here of one of Peter Frase’s Four Futures.

There’s a substantial tradition, especially in the nineteenth century, of contrasting ancient slave society with modern capitalism. I always recall the Aristotle quote with which I started from Marx’s evocation of it in Das Kapital: foolish Greek, thinking that machinery would lead to a life of leisure, rather than being the surest method of lengthening the working day! Likewise, “the Roman slave was bound with chains… the modern wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads”. Manifestly, Marx failed to imagine that the remorseless logic of capitalism might lead workers to be displaced rather than exploited, and that we might be better off thinking of analogies between Juvenal’s “bread and circuses” snark and the joys of social media…

On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected.  On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire.  In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary.  Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it.  The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want.  The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.  At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.  Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance.  All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. (Marx, Speech at th3 anniversary of the People’s Paper)

Guillaume, This Is Really Nothing

Presumably there are people who specialising in studying the philosophy of the European far right, or even the more specific theme of their appropriation of classical antiquity, as Donna Zuckerberg and others are doing in the US. I wonder how they prevent their brains dribbling out of their ears on a regular basis.

This morning I’ve had the dubious pleasure of encountering Guillaume Faye for the first time: a journalist and writer associated with the French New Right and author of various books and collections of articles including Why We Fight: a metapolitical dictionary, which a Twitter account is now laboriously tweeting to a minuscule audience, therefore bringing it to the attention of the ever-vigilant Thucydiocy Bot:

3/ “Since Antiquity, as Aristotle, Thucydides, and Xenophon noted, it’s been known that every nation that takes in large numbers of aliens is destined to perish, for these aliens progressively replace natives, who are culturally and/or physically destroyed by them.” – p 75

— Why We Fight Metapolitical Dictionary (@WhyWeFightMPD14) November 20, 2017

Yes, because of course the expression of xenophobic views and cultural doom narratives by ancient authors is sure evidence of their universal truth, because classical tradition or something. But wait a minute: Thucydides, who expressly notes the contribution made to Athens’ rise to greatness by refugees from political unrest elsewhere, and who has Pericles emphasise its character as a city open to the world in contrast to xenophobic Sparta? Xenophon, who wrote a short treatise on how to attract more migrants to Athens? Aristotle, who was such a migrant..?

Of course Faye has a get-out clause: he means the bad sort of migrants, the ones who aren’t “ethnically European”, who may even be Muslim (his vision of Europe is explicitly Catholic, so I’m not sure where Protestants, Jews and atheists fit in, but it’s clear that Muslims are The Enemy). “A Belgian, Italian, or Russian of European origins residing in France is not an alien.” Thucydides et al are doubtless talking about welcoming fellow Greeks, not Persians or other dark-skinned barbarians. This side-step may also help him pass over the absence of any actual evidence for these claims of Ancient Greek fear of cultural swamping. (And the puzzling question of why he doesn’t cite Plato, who does, iirc, say something vaguely along these lines in the context of locating a city far enough from the sea not to be corrupted by foreign influences).

The tweeting of Faye’s Metapolitical Dictionary is in its very early stages, so the only entry besides ‘Alien’ so far released is ‘Aesthetics’. This is as full of right-wing pseudo-classicising bollocks as you’d expect.

1/ AESTHETICS – According to Greek etymology, ‘that which evokes a strong sensation.’ Aesthetics is linked to notions of beauty, harmony, achievement of form. 2/ “Contemporary egalitarian ideology abhors and implicitly demonizes aesthetics. It associates…the will to power with discipline, which it considers morally unacceptable…This ideology opposes aesthetics to ‘ethics’ and situated itself in ethics’ iconoclastic tradition.” … 5/ “Instead of harmony, the power of forms, the exaltation and elevation of sensation and beauty – notions is abstract ‘conceptual art’ are preferred, which becomes a pretext for degeneracy, willful ugliness, and subsidized incompetence.” … 7/ “Hence, the paradox of a society that strives to be ‘moral’ and humanistic, but ends up privileging barbarism, the inversion of values, and new forms of primitivism.”

Bingo! You are entartete Kunst and I claim my fifty francs!

What should one do with such stuff, besides snigger? What to make of an organisation with which Faye was once associated and which seems still to exist, more or less, the Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenes (yup, love the acronym), with its fondness for Philipp Foltz’ 1852 painting of Pericles delivering the Funeral Oration as an article header? These are the most superficial appropriations of classical images and inherited prestige imaginable – and of course that doesn’t matter in the wider scheme of things, because this isn’t about offering a historical analysis but constructing an image of culturally superior, ethnically homogenous Europe to legitimise hatred of everything Other.

It’s difficult not to feel a little queasy at the ease with which such claims of European exceptionalism can be constructed on the basis of inherited images of the classical – because such claims are not a million miles away from the sorts of claims we classicists sometimes make in promoting our own subject to prospective students, funding bodies and the like. “Come and study Greece and Rome! It’s fascinating and fabulous, and still important today” we cry, rather than “Classical Antiquity is a pervasive force of malevolence; we need to understand it in order to destroy its influence!”

Let’s Be Rational About This

Brexit negotiations. Yes, we’re still replaying the Melian Dialogue, with the UK still stuck in the attitude of the Melians, offering the equivalent of “Surely there’s advantage to both of us in being friends rather than enemies?” and “Can’t you see that this will damage you as well as us?” as if these are knock-down arguments. My final-year Thucydides class has been having some really interesting discussions over the last couple of weeks about Pericles’ manipulative rhetoric and parallels to the Leave campaign – offered spontaneously by the students, before anyone puts me onto that government watch list – so I’m tempted to skip forward to the Melian Dialogue while these issues are still fresh. But, realistically, the negotiations aren’t likely to be going much better in February, when we’re scheduled to get to Book V, so the issues will still be fresh enough…

There’s now a decent case for focusing less on ‘Will the negotiations succeed?’ and more on ‘Was it inevitable that they’d be so shambolic, and why?’ Good thread on the Twitter from David Allen Green, arguing that all of this is just the inevitable consequence of decisions taken between the referendum result and May’s speech at the Tory party conference in October 2015. Reports of David Davis’ speech last night – addressed to serious people, heaven help us, not just to Parliament or British newspapers – raise questions about some deeper underlying factors, namely British politicians’ conception of inter-state relations.

I don’t just mean their apparent inability to grasp the way the EU actually works (the fond belief that Germany could overrule the other 26 even if it wanted to, the neglect of the role of the European Parliament etc.) but their utterly impoverished view of motivation. “Don’t put politics above prosperity” – as if these can ever be neatly separated (and leaving aside the fact that this is exactly what the UK government is doing – is this one of those ‘return of the repressed’, inadvertent revelation of the unconscious moments?). “Very unlikely there won’t be a deal because rational countries and institutions won’t let it happen” – what is this rationality of which you speak?

Answer: the crudest possible economistic means-end rationality, German car manufacturers want to sell to the UK so this will all get sorted out. Do they genuinely believe this, in the face of the evidence (e.g. looking in a mirror)? The basic realist version of Thucydides is pretty damn crude, but it runs to three different forms of motive, fear and honour as well as interest, and his narrative explores how these intersect and are negotiated in practice. The referendum result, let alone the attitudes of the extreme Brexiters, can’t really be explained in terms of ‘interest’ alone (even if such arguments are deployed) – but bring in conceptions of fear and honour, and things make rather more sense.

A fortiori the approach of the EU27, the Commission and the European Parliament; they clearly have a much broader and longer-term conception of ‘interest’ than the British government, but the roles of fear (for the European project as a whole, and of internal political dynamics) and of honour (belief in European ideal, assorted cultural factors) are equally obvious. The neglect of these sorts of issues by UK politicians and negotiators can be explained partly by the familiar fact that they almost always seem to be addressing domestic audiences, above all the head-banging Brexit cult, and ignoring the possibility that those dastardly foreigners might be capable of understanding English. But it does seem that they also genuinely fail to consider the possibility that things other than car exports might matter to anyone but themselves.

A recent article on the These Islands website makes the remarkable claim that liberty is an English, then a British, invention.* This really is how some people think. WE are proud Englishmen/Britons, so we’re all about the freedom from despotism and tyrannical packaging regulations, and never mind the possible consequences. THEY are not like us; they don’t really understand freedom, which is why they keep succumbing to authoritarianism and have to be rescued, but make all their decisions on a crude financial basis. No problem, that’s how we need to talk to them, and anticipate their responses.

The continued prominence of a simplified version of Thucydides in basic International Relations theory does become very silly and annoying at times – but if it works as a counter to such utterly reductionist thinking, we clearly need a lot more of it at the highest levels of government.

*To be precise, it claims that “it is natural to think of liberty” in these terms. But since it doesn’t immediately qualify this statement by pointing out that it’s nonsense, it’s difficult not to assume that the claim is being endorsed.

Goodbye Europe!

March 2015. While his mother, a typical liberal academic, heads off to an evening of European cinema sponsored by the German embassy, young Alex joins a UKIP rally. Unfortunately she sees him waving a Nigel Farage placard, and has a heart attack that puts her into a coma. She sleeps through the election of David Cameron’s Tory government, the referendum campaign, the vote to Leave and the final departure of Britain from the EU*; when she regains consciousness, Alex is terrified that another shock will kill her (and also wracked with guilt), and so endeavours to conceal from her the fact of Brexit.

He racks up huge credit card bills to maintain the supply of fresh vegetables and olive oil, creates an entire fake Guardian website, and hides the fact that he’s lost his job in banking and is now working as a cleaner in a care home. When the heating in their house breaks down, his friend Dennis has to be persuaded to put on a foreign accent and pretend to be Polish. But the whole enterprise threatens to fall apart when his mother wants to go on her usual holiday to Aix-en-Provence – can Alex and his friends recreate the experience in Clacton?

At the climax, Alex’s mother walks through the streets, wondering why all the foreign delicatessens have closed and are covered in racist graffiti, and is then confronted by a giant statue of Boris Johnson. Can Alex negotiate a successful exit for them all from his fake Europhile world – which, as his girlfriend (whom he first met on the UKIP rally) observes, he now seems to be completely dedicated to..?

*Yes, I’m aware that this currently seems to imply her waking from a decade-long coma, if not longer…

Idea inspired by Will Davies on the Twitter, who was musing on the idea of having to convince a grandmother who’d been asleep for twenty years that Tony Blair was still in power, Britpop was still a thing etc.

Irregular Verbs

We appear to have reached a tipping point, where future historians of this period – not necessarily human – will simply refuse to believe what they find in their sources on the grounds of plausibility. Just as with the Julio-Claudians, we can discuss the discourse of polemic and invective, and the values and cultural assumptions it reveals, but not the historical reality that lies somewhere behind it; we cannot study Boris Johnson as a real historical individual, but only the image of him as cartoonish buffoon constructed by hostile sources…

There is simply too much going on at the moment; I could spend all my spare time between teaching preparation and admin writing commentaries on here – except that this week I’m also supposed to be finishing a 10,000-word chapter, revising a book manuscript and finalising the role-playing game section of my public event for the Being Human festival on 23rd November, so shouldn’t really be on here at all. But I don’t think I can completely ignore a new appropriation of Thucydides by Victor Davis Hanson, in the context of an article on ‘California, the Rhetoric of Illegal Immigration, and the Perils of Ignoring Thucydides’s Warning’ (on the internet, no one can force you to think up a snappier title…).

Hanson’s basic claim is that “vocabulary changes always reflect the agendas of a political debate.” A century ago, terminology was clear and straightforward; everyone referred to “illegal aliens”, as a “politically neutral, exact, and descriptive term” for someone who crossed the US border without coming through customs to gain proper legal sanction, but “open borders advocates” disliked both parts of the phrase and so shifted the rhetoric to “undocumented alien” (downplaying illegality) and then “undocumented immigrant” (downplaying foreignness), and then just “migrant”, all with the aim of naturalising migration and undermining the operations of federal immigration law.

The discussion is rather vague on both chronology and agency. I’m not remotely an expert in this field, but my impression was that (1) “alien” is a well-established legal term, dating from the 18th century, but “illegal alien” less so, even though it does get used in various statutes; (2) “immigrant” is defined as a sub-category of “alien”, in recognition that not every foreign national in the US is seeking to settle or work (e.g. visitors, diplomats, students), rather than being a politically-correct alternative to “alien”. There’s also a clear line of originary rhetoric here: because “alien” was a strictly descriptive legal term in the early 20th century, that is all it ever can be, and contemporary debates about its connotations are by definition illegitimate.

But what really concerns me is the invocation of Thucydides to denounce what Hanson presents as a deliberate distortion of language for political, polemical purposes:

Anytime an idea or political agenda cannot achieve majority political support, its sponsors turn to euphemisms and linguistic gymnastics.

The historian Thucydides warned us 2,400 years ago during the horrific civil war on Corcyra how “words had to change their meanings” to mask the ill intent of particular unpopular political agendas. In George Orwell’s two chilling novels Animal Farm and 1984, the totalitarian state erodes the law by changing constantly the names of things as if language can remake reality.

In our age, we have witnessed how the Obama administration went to great lengths to downplay the threats of radical Islamic terrorism…

Hmm. The distortion of language by governments, especially authoritarian ones, is a significant phenomenon, undoubtedly – but it’s not what Thucydides was talking about in the Corcyrean stasis episode. In a factional conflict, he suggests, words change their meanings, rhetoric becomes ever more polarised, everything becomes geared to the interests of one’s own faction – and the whole point is that both sides do it, in an escalating conflict that becomes self-fueling. This has nothing to do with the deliberate manipulation of ideas to promote “unpopular political agendas”, deny the illegality of nasty foreigners coming into the US, make Islam seem all cuddly etc.

It’s a terrible cliche, but we do seem to be dealing with some irregular verbs here. I am an ex-pat, you’re an immigrant, he’s an illegal alien. I speak truth in neutral and objectively valid terms, you use weasel words and dog whistles, she believes that language can remake reality and so distorts the discourse for political ends. There is simultaneously a recognition in Hanson’s article that the words we use can reshape reality, or at least how we think about reality (or why would he worry so much about changing terminology?) – and a refusal to accept either that this is true of all words, including those with a load of history behind them, or that such a reshaping might sometimes actually be a good thing.

It may be stretching things to say that Thucydides’ position is that we all do this; he does claim a privileged position as a neutral observer, excepting himself from the tendencies he observes in others. But certainly he makes no suggestion that the fault is all on one side in the conflict, evil liberals manipulating language in order to trample on objective truth and the views of the public; he would equally note the polarising effects of conservative writers claiming that their truth is the only possible truth and that any discussion to the contrary is tantamount to surrender to Islamic terrorism – ‘cos that’s what Thucydides says…

 

It’s Complicated

I’m still awaiting my copy of Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey, but on the basis of passages circulating on social media and this New York Times Magazine interview it’s going to be well worth it. Certainly it’s already setting off some fascinating discussions of issues in translation: the particular choices that have to be made in trying to express concepts that don’t have an exact equivalent in the target language, and in particular words that have multiple senses and associations in the original. This is a problem in the very first line of the poem, with the word used to describe its main character, polytropos:

“One of the things I struggled with,” Wilson continued, sounding more exhilarated than frustrated as she began to unpack “polytropos,” the first description we get of Odysseus, “is of course this whole question of whether he is passive — the ‘much turning’ or ‘much turned’ — right? This was —”

“Treat me,” I interrupted, “as if I don’t know Greek,” as, in fact, I do not.

“The prefix poly,” Wilson said, laughing, “means ‘many’ or ‘multiple.’ Tropos means ‘turn.’ ‘Many’ or ‘multiple’ could suggest that he’s much turned, as if he is the one who has been put in the situation of having been to Troy, and back, and all around, gods and goddesses and monsters turning him off the straight course that, ideally, he’d like to be on. Or, it could be that he’s this untrustworthy kind of guy who is always going to get out of any situation by turning it to his advantage. It could be that he’s the turner.”

The point is that it could be either, or indeed both; certainly the poem offers ample evidence both of Odysseus’ twisting, detour-filled wanderings and his subtle, twisting mind. How can this be rendered in English? Do we choose a single word, echoing the original – and, if no word exists that evokes both meanings, which aspect do we choose to emphasise? Do we instead go for a phrase, at the expense of losing the neat directness of the first line of the original?

Wilson goes for “Tell me about a complicated man”. I rather like that; if you’re going to choose to emphasise Odysseus’ mind rather than his experiences, this does a good job of reserving judgement on whether he should be judged positively (‘clever’, ‘cunning’) or negatively (‘devious’, ‘slippery’) – because of course he is both, both by our standards and by those of the ancient Greeks, and we need to evaluate this in the light of subsequent events and actions. But of course you do then lose the passive element, the extent to which he’s a man caught up in complications as well, even if some of them are self-inflicted.

I’ve always liked “the man of crooked ways” as a means of capturing the ambiguity of the Greek – but then I’ve never been wholly enamoured of Odysseus, as someone who will always find a way to slide out of trouble and turn things to his advantage, the prince of plausible deniability. He is complicated, not just in his intelligence and cunning, but in the conflicting reactions which he provokes (or should provoke) in us – he ‘turns’ us as much as he turns the people he encounters. Homer’s opening sentence is not just a description of the lead character and the action to follow, it’s a warning…

La Thèse de Thucydide

Either the ‘Thucydides’ Trap’ has now infiltrated France, or Bernard-Henri Lévy has been spending a lot of time in Washington lately; in either case, his latest discussion of the fate of the Kurds (French version in Le Point (£), English in Tablet) and denunciation of Trump’s USA for abandoning them invokes Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War extensively* – though not in the most illuminating manner.

These days in Washington “Thucydides’s trap” is much discussed, thanks to Graham Allison’s 2017 book by that name.

On everyone’s mind is that fearful instant—fearful because it almost invariably leads to war—when the old hegemonic power grasps that, as a result of its own failures and weaknesses, it may have to yield to the newcomer.

Well, in America’s treatment of Kurdistan we glimpse Athens and Sparta switching roles—but no doubt it is the fatal fault that will give wings, far beyond the region, to America’s rivals.

Remember Pericles, the wise strategist, whose death and the popular disregard of his message brought forth the ruin of the great democratic city-state of Athens. Pericles had warned those of his fellow citizens who were inclined to cowardice and laxity.

He had told them that prestige was a responsibility that could not be shirked. And he had predicted that, if his fellow citizens failed to heed his warning, they would slide quickly into “peaceful enslavement.”

In equating Kurds and Iraqis, Trump has come down on the wrong side of the Thucydides’ theorem—at the expense of the United States.

The Athens of our time, the most prestigious and democratic of nations, runs the risk of throwing itself headlong into peaceful enslavement and leaving the remains of its influence to the several menacing Spartas that, from Ankara to Moscow or Beijing, have already begun to salivate.

Where do we start? The basic issue is that – as indicated by his claim that today “Athens and Sparta [are] switching roles” – BHL wants to compare the US to both these ancient Greek states, depending on which analogy suits his purpose best at any given moment. On the one hand, Trump’s America is, as in Graham Allison’s account, the established power confronted with the threat of a rising power – though BHL seems extremely confused as to the identity of the Athens that is threatening this Sparta (China, fine, but Russia? Or Turkey???), and his interpretation focuses solely on the opinions and actions of the established power, with war resulting – at a “fearful instant” – from that state’s realisation that it might lose its position of prominence. Allison’s emphasis on medium-term structural factors, in which established and rising power alike stumble into war because they don’t recognise the real danger in the growing tensions until it’s too late, never seemed so persuasive in comparison – let alone the stimulating round table on his book that’s just been published in the new Texas National Security Review.

The reasoning behind this eccentric reading of the Thucydides Trap model becomes clearer when BHL switches analogies: what he really wants to do is compare America to Athens (noble democracy, yadda yadda) so that he can invoke the trope of cowardice and decadence leading to inexorable decline, Pericles’ warning that, if the Athenians give in to any of the demands of their enemies, (1.141, I guess), they will effectively be enslaved to them. “Prestige” is a pretty weird translation of “power” as the thing the Athenians ought to be defending resolutely – maybe this makes more sense in French, but it does look as if BHL is shimmying round the inconvenient fact that Pericles is offering a stout defense of aggression and imperialism, little different (as modern scholars have pointed out) from the sorts of ideas propounded by Cleon.

Who is Pericles in this scenario – Obama, who arguably began the process of disengagement that’s being deplored here but who better fits the idealised model of a USA that’s globally respected, or George W. Bush and his extremely Athenian project to exert American hegemony? And what is “Thucydides’ theorem” when it’s at home? If I’d seen this article yesterday, I’d have been inclined to start discussing Thucydides analogies as zombie ideas, that shamble round the place groaning inarticulately…

*He also invokes Schroedinger’s cat, Louis Aragon, Cato the Elder and Philip Roth, again not to any great effect. I’m led to believe that this is par for the course.

Invisible Borders

I’m just back from a weekend break in Croatia, a trip that was partly about the glorious food and excellent Zagreb craft beer scene, partly about the history and architecture, and mostly about giving a seminar and lecture at the University of Zagreb, hosted by Jelena Marohnic, and also being interviewed by the history students’ journal. The latter was especially nerve-wracking, with a strong sense of the risks of putting my foot in it inadvertently through sheer ignorance of local circumstances, without having had the opportunity to think about any of the questions in advance. Why are they so concerned about the chronological boundaries of ‘ancient history’? How does the ‘ethnicity in Roman Britain’ debate look from here – and was it a good or bad thing that I didn’t until afterwards think to chuck in a remark to the effect that Roman Pannonia and Dalmatia must have been equally multicultural?

The question where I knew to feel embarrassed was the one about the impact of Croatian research in current Roman historiography; sorry, guys, but the best I can do is make this about my own ignorance and limited perspective, given that throughout my career I’ve focused largely on Italy and points west rather than on the eastern Mediterranean (and even that is an unintended insult, characterising this westwards-looking, Catholic country, part of the Hapsburg kingdoms for centuries, a bastion against the Ottoman Empire, influenced by all the ideas coming via Vienna about Enlightenment and modernity and a free press and art and science etc, as ‘east’…).

It’s the usual language problem, magnified: if Croatian scholars don’t publish in one of the major European languages, I’m not going to know about it. But one suspects this is not just a matter of them choosing to get something translated (which may be tricky in itself), but also of getting it published somewhere that ‘western’ scholars will encounter it if they’re not looking for it in the first place – which may then also be a matter of conforming to expected idioms, showing awareness of current scholarly debates etc.

I’m reminded of the time – a fair while ago now – when I was invited by David Braund to be a respondent at a conference on the economy of the Black Sea in antiquity, involving scholars from Ukraine (and possibly other relevant countries; I don’t recall), where my main role became the development of tactful ways of saying “Yes, but have you come across Finley at all? Hasebroek?”) to people whose approach to economic history made Rostovtzeff look like a substantivist. But how reasonable was it of me to expect anything different? Not just because Ukrainian scholars might have different ideas of what’s important and relevant, rather than the Anglo-American tradition being the be all and end all, but because they might not even have been able to read Finley if they wanted to, without investing serious resources in doing so.

Things are, I imagine, a bit better in countries like Croatia today – but it’s still the case that keeping up with current international debates requires resources, at university level to buy books and pay JSTOR subscriptions, at individual level to travel to libraries and attend conferences. My connection to Zagreb began when a student simply wrote to me out of the blue to say, we’re working on issues in historical theory and methodology, you’ve written stuff that looks really relevant, but we don’t have it here; can you help? In other words, there are any number of invisible barriers to full international scholarly exchange, which we in the west are privileged not to have to worry about.

It’s a reminder that Open Access is not just about “making research available to wider public ‘cos they paid for it”, when the wider public is probably completely indifferent to what I have to say about Thucydides or Roman economic thought; it’s also, indirectly but more importantly, about making research available to less well-endowed institutions and countries. It’s an embarrassing coincidence that while I was waiting in Zagreb’s swanky new airport I received notification of the publication of an article that’s pay-walled to kingdom come until the year 3039 (you can’t say that the Springer corporation isn’t confident about its ability to survive the coming apocalypse) unless I pay over vast sums of money that I don’t feel inclined to do ‘cos it’s a subject marginal to my main interests and I’ve written better.

The article in question is about counterfactualism and anticipation, exploring ‘what if?’ scenarios not just as a means of exploring causation in the past and testing theories in the present but also seeking to anticipate – not predict or forecast – the future. I draw heavily on a brilliant blog post by Audra Mitchell, ‘Stumbling into Eternity’, in which she argues that this matters for our ethical duty towards the future: we must consider what kinds of futures we want, so we can try to work towards them, and what nightmare futures we need to work to prevent (echoes here of Peter Frase’s Four Futures).

It’s easy to imagine – if we try to take a bird’s-eye view of scholarly activity in classical studies, rather than our normal localised perspective – a continuation of the current centre-periphery situation, in which e.g. Croatian scholars continue working away on their local material, which may be incorporated into a few more general accounts (probably by non-Croatians, with their superior knowledge of what scholars in the ‘centre’ are interested in) and thus made available for the academic mainstream, with the synthesisers getting the credit – or it may simply be ignored. The alternative is to take full advantage of the power of the internet – and other tools for cooperation and collaboration, including EU funding – to set up proper exchanges, a full and equal dialogue. If that requires the occasional samizdat publication of an offprint about counterfactualism, well, that’s a small price to pay…

Update: and in a fascinating coincidence, I’ve just come across an interesting discussion of how conventional research quality measures systematically marginalise certain regions and subjects: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/10/30/research-assessments-based-on-journal-rankings-systematically-marginalise-knowledge-from-certain-regions-and-subjects/

Kunst und Revolution

If you hang a pistol on the wall in the first act of a play, Chekhov remarked, you need someone to fire it in the next act. On the same principle, if you build a big set of the New York Stock Exchange for Götterdämmerung, you’re going to burn it down at the end. Unless, of course, you’re Frank Castorf, in his Bayreuth production of the Ring that reached its conclusion this year. What did you expect – fire, flood, revolution, the destruction of the old order and the birth of the new? People die: Siegfried, Brünnhilde, Günther, the unnamed ‘everyman’ character who’s reappeared in every episode. The system, however, endures, as it was always likely to; the gods may have thoughtlessly set events in motion, and supplied the weapons of destruction, but they are at best mildly inconvenienced.

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The idea that Castorf “baulks” at setting fire to the New York Stock Exchange, as Hugh Canning suggested in a review for the Torygraph, is simply absurd. This is, after all, the man who gave Siegfried an AK47 in place of Nothung – actually the perfect symbol for putting awesome destructive power in the hands of idiotic mortals – and who concluded Siegfried with the unforgettable sight of a load of plastic crocodiles roaming Alexanderplatz. The failure of capitalism to collapse in flames is no act of directorial cowardice, shying away at the end from Wagner’s vision of cosmic and social apocalypse. It is the whole point. The revolution will not be televised, despite the ubiquity of video cameras and screens throughout the cycle. The war on heaven will not take place.

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The inadequacy of Siegfried as an agent of true change is already well established in Wagner’s text; Castorf’s production, and Stefan Vinke’s performance, simply draw out his flaws more vividly. He is forceful, energetic, brash, vulgar, violent; too much in love with his own image as hero, all too easily tempted to enjoy the female spoils of his heroism. Hagen and Gutrune scarcely needed to use a potion to lead him astray – but would a better or brighter hero have had a better chance? The gods of historical materialism have the last laugh; Siegfried may have fled their gloomy world for the bright lights and opportunities of Berlin, but his freedom to act is shown to be tightly circumscribed. His power is no more than that of any man with a gun, to kill, intimidate and disrupt on a small and ultimately irrelevant scale; this sort of revolutionary gets you a bit of anarchist graffiti and a lot of minor damage to patio furniture. “Is Achilles possible with powder and lead?” Marx pondered in the Grundrisse; but not only is Siegfried merely a Penny Market Achilles, even a true hero would be impotent when the ‘enemy’ is not a dragon or warrior, or even a single representative of the gods, but the endlessly protean power of oil and money.

 

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And yet, this is a society ripe for collapse: corrupt, chaotic, alienating. The gods of Rheingold are all too human in their lusts, thoughtlessness and petty squabbling, caught up in a Coen Brothers spiral of escalating violence, deceit and chaos – but Wotan and his mob remain godlike, at least in the traditional Greek manner: vengeful, capricious, and ultimately unaffected by the consequences of their actions. Wotan is certainly not in control of events, or even of himself, but demands respect regardless, and bolsters his ego by exerting power over individuals, when he dares – especially over women.

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We begin, as ever, somewhere in the middle of things, and expect then to see the consequences of events – the theft of the Rheingold, the forging of the ring, Alberich’s curse, Fafner’s murder of Fasolt – play out in sequence, culminating in the destruction of Valhalla. Instead, Castorf sends us back into the past: Walküre plays out in the early-mid twentieth century, in a rapidly changing world of old-fashioned faming, primitive oil drilling and expressionist cinema (the decision halfway through to make the setting more concrete, Azerbaijan in 1942, struck me as completely wrong; I’m happier to indulge my Coen Brothers fantasy and see the whole thing as a blend of Oh Brother Where Art Thou and There Will Be Blood…).

Is this Wotan the ancestor of the one in Rheingold, building the family fortune through violence and determination for his spoiled grandson to luxuriate in unearned power and put it all at risk through self-indulgence? Or are we simply seeing the gods manifest in different contexts, playing out the same cruel power games, never actually learning or changing? Certainly we see once again the workings of patriarchy, through Wotan’s obsession with family honour and control, and the narcissistic and incestuous undercurrents in his relationship with his enforcer daughter; and the cracks in the edifice, as his grip is rendered equally limp by Fricka’s emotional hold over him and by the naive idealism of his daughter leading her into rebellion when she realises the extent to which he is compromised.

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Flashback, flash forward. We might see analogies here to Wagner’s use of motifs to recall or anticipate characters and themes across the cycle, but Castorf’s concern is not – as Wagner’s is generally assumed to have been – to emphasise the unity and interdependence of the whole, but to throw the relationship between different parts into question. The connections between events, let alone our perception or invention of cause and effect, are never a straightforward matter of chronological sequence. We think we know the story, and just want to see how the director adds a minor gloss to it by varying the setting; Castorf wants to undermine that certainty, to undermine the inexorability of narrative determinism.

We shouldn’t assume that revolution is going to come just because that’s how we think the story ends – or because that’s how we (and the looming faces of Marx, Lenin and the rest, and their disciples) think that’s how history ‘works’. Replacing an ideological narrative of the eternal and inevitable existence of capitalism with an ideological narrative of the inevitable triumph of communism isn’t actually going to get us anywhere; we may, as Marx did, be able to offer a powerful and persuasive account of why capitalism ought to collapse and must be overcome – but we need to recognise the multiple reasons why this has as yet failed to happen, and the many possible future worlds in which it will never happen – especially if we do not act, but simply expect events to play out in a way that suits us.

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Is Castorf’s Ring an anti-Wagner Ring, ostentatiously rejecting his persistent lapses into Romanticism – and the teleological power of his music – and offering instead a nihilistic quietism, an autobiographical journey from the illusory certainties and spiritual poverty of the DDR to the equally superficial delights and alienating consumerism of a reunified Germany – a Marxist nightmare, in which we see the bewitching power of money and the abuses of patriarchal power, but without any hope of waking up or otherwise escaping? Or does it work to uncover new possibilities in this enduringly complex work of art? The two are of course not mutually exclusive.

Burning down the New York Stock Exchange, satisfying though it might be, wouldn’t actually bring down capitalism. Wotan and the gods seem vulnerable in the Ring because they have placed so much of their power in a few objects that can be seized or broken; but this is revealed in Castorf’s version to be an illusion. As Herbert Marcuse, quoted by Mark Berry at the end of his review of Götterdämmerung, argued, “Authentic works of art… reject the promise made too easily; they reject the unburdened happy end”. Wagner’s closing bars are anything but triumphalist; and the final sight of Hagen, lost in thought or resignation, watched by the Rhinemaidens, matched them perfectly.

If there are elements here of the comic narrative, in which everything is disrupted only to return to its original form, same time next week, this is not the whole story. There is change, in sensibility if not the material conditions of society; not even Castorf messes with the journey of Brünnhilde from divinity to humanity, seeing through the tawdry glories and grubby compromises of the world of the gods and rejecting the controlling power of her father. Her suicide fails to shake the world, at least in the short term – but perhaps we can imagine this gesture of despair and defiance, her repudiation of the politics of money and power, growing in stature and meaning over time. Does it have no meaning, if it does not destroy Valhalla? Of course not.

If we had only Castorf’s Ring, there might be a problem – but no staging, however brilliant, is final. This Ring shows us in painful clarity that the overthrow of the current system is essential, but difficult, perhaps impossible. We have other versions, if we need them, to put greater emphasis on the strand of hope that Wagner also offers us, that the story of the future is never fully written.