Neville Morley's Blog, page 47

Fake News?

There are ‘Thucydides’ quotes that immediately raise suspicions, and generally they are easiest to eliminate as being fake – “A collision at sea can ruin your whole day” is so obviously a modern fiction that it’s scarcely worth worrying about, even before you notice that it was originally attributed to Book 9. Most, however, are at least plausible – and, given that Thucydides’ difficult Greek can almost always be translated in multiple ways, it can be extremely difficult to establish that a quote really isn’t genuine if you can’t track down the phrase in another source that is manifestly not Thucydides. I suppose one could argue that the burden of proof should be on those who propagate dubious quotations to justify the claim that they’re from Thucydides, but given that most of these sites and Twitter bots ignore all attempts to get them to correct quotes that are definitively fake, even when provided with evidence, the chances of getting them to do any work themselves seem to be zero at best.

The plausibility of some of these quotes, the way that they seem to ring a faint bell, means that even someone who obsessively tracks fake Thucydideana (that would be me, then – though the other day someone else on the Twitter did leap in to correct a misquotation before my own @Thucydiocy account caught up with it) occasionally misses one. It was just this morning when I suddenly became suspicious of a quote I’ve seen numerous times before:

You should punish in the same manner those who commit crimes with those who accuse falsely. Thucydides

I think I’ve let this one pass before because it seemed so obviously to come from the Mytilene Debate, where Cleon and Diodotus (especially the latter) start talking about the responsibilities of the speakers in the assembly not to mislead the people for the sake of popularity or for fear of the consequences if they offer wise advice that goes down like a lead balloon. Suddenly, however, I was struck by the weird phrasing: surely it should be “punish those who accuse falsely like you punish criminals”, or “punish criminals and those who accuse falsely in the same way”? And, having developed this suspicion, I have looked through the Mytilene Debate, and done a wider Google search for relevant phrases, and cannot find anything beyond a series of cheap quote websites offering this exact phrase and attributing it to Thucydides.

Now, at this point I can’t be certain that this isn’t a slightly weird (or bad) translation of a genuine bit of Thucydides, whether from the Mytilene Debate or somewhere else; for that, I really need more of a trail, some sense of when this line first started being quoted (at the moment, all I have is the fact that it doesn’t appear to be attributed to anyone else, at least not as far as Google is concerned). If anyone has any brilliant suggestions, do please get in touch…

Update: playing around a little with the search parameters, I find that, before 2010, there were only 13 webpages which included this quote, all in exactly the same form and attributed to Thucydides, all of them part of sites which compile deep and meaningful quotations – and all of them appearing on 1st February 2001, not before and not after. Impossible so far to discern which is the original and which the copies, or whether they were all generated simultaneously from the same body of material, let alone where they got this line in the first place – and I can’t avoid a suspicion that perhaps these sites were created then, but only added this quote later. In the absence of other evidence, I’m tempted to blame GoodReads, as (a) it’s the most prominent and (b) I’ve tried to get them to change quotes in the past and been ignored…

Thucydidean Times

So, when I announced my Exeter inaugural lecture a few weeks ago, I was persuaded to arrange for it to be recorded, for everyone who wasn’t in a position to trek down to Devon on a Thursday evening. It has turned out to be surprisingly and annoyingly difficult to make this happen, but we have the technology…

This is offered to the general public with the usual caveat that it was written far too hastily while trying to do too many other things at the same time, and so it would have been much better if delivered in different circumstances; and the slightly less usual caveats that (1) it was recorded from the very top of a rather weird, extremely precipitous lecture theatre, which is why you mostly see the top of my head from a steep angle, and (2) my watch was ever so slightly slow, so my brilliant timing actually meant that the recording cuts off literally seconds before the end. My actual final words went something like:

…the epitome of the humanities academic, with the usual “yes but actually it’s much more complicated than that” spiel. Thucydides is above all the man who knows how to ask the right questions, and who tries to teach us to do the same. If we live in a Thucydidean world, it’s not because he’s an all-seeing prophet or infallible social scientist, but because we still haven’t learnt to ask the right questions consistently.

But the most annoying thing of all is that I’d come up with a really good line, in a piece I was writing for the magazine of the Einstein Foundation that generously supports my current collaboration with colleagues in Berlin, and then forgot to use it… Will have to save it for another occasion.

Hello? Is there anybody in there?

Warm greetings to all new followers of this blog (even if usernames suggest that a surprisingly large number of you are heavily into the supply and fitting of high-quality flooring…). I don’t actually know why WordPress should have chosen this week to give me a boost, as it’s actually really terrible timing; the first couple of weeks of term are always a bit hectic, but on top of that I’ve been writing my inaugural lecture (last week) and pursuing a lengthy and increasingly tetchy correspondence about why I don’t seem to be allowed to share the recording outside the university (this week), plus finishing a short-but-nevertheless-quite-substantial-given-everything-else book that ought to have been finished last month (yesterday).

The end result is that it’s been a bit quiet on here, and things may not pick up for a little while yet, until I’ve caught up slightly on the rest of my ‘to do’ list. It’s the usual problem; I love writing stuff for this blog, but it’s not what I’m paid to do (or at least there are many other things that I am more obviously paid to do), and so it has to take second place. But rest assured that the normal service of rants about obscure misquotations of Thucydides, rambling reflections on German culture and random whimsy will be resumed soon – and I feel another music podcast coming on…

Deep and Meaningful

All too many of the quotations attributed to Thucydides on the internet fall into one of three categories: not quite what he said, not really what he meant, or not actually Thucydides at all. Or, more succinctly, sad, bad, or mad. Okay, as a would-be ‘Morley’s Law of Thucydides Quotes’ that is pretty thin and equivocating, but anything more assertive would be too easily falsified with reference to the numerous bland but basically innocuous citations of “the secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is courage”. Yes, I do understand that the Royal Road to a world-straddling media profile, enormous book sales and the adoration of thousands of beautiful women is to pick an intellectual gimmick and defend it to the death, but I’m just too much of a British academic for that.

When it comes to misattributions, as I’ve remarked before, the reason for attaching a quote to Thucydides is normally pretty obvious: as a figure with inherited authority in the fields of war and politics, he generally attracts quotes about war and politics. But not always; the version of Thucydides that I find the weirdest is his incarnation as self-help guru and motivational speaker, such as the following, which I came across on Twitter this morning for the first time:

“You shouldn’t feel sorry for the lifestyle you haven’t tasted, but for the one you are about to lose” —Thucydides

You what? I’m not even sure what that’s supposed to mean. One possible answer is offered by tracing this back to what appears to be its source, a 2014 Forbes article on ’10 Classical Quotes for Modern Investors’, written by one Panos Mourdoukoutas.

The market has been treating you well in recent years. You have been in the right stocks. You have amassed a small fortune. And now you’re asking yourself some questions: Should you stay in the market to see your fortune grow bigger — or cash out? Should you treat missed opportunities the same as actual losses? How should you treat negative news about your favorite stock holdings? What should you do when your brain is hyped over a stock? The answers to these questions are to be found in the wisdom of anquity. [sic]

I have at times thought that writing a book on Thucydides’ Secrets to Success for the airport bookshop community might be a lucrative move. It might seem that this plan has been preempted by more than my lack of time – but my book would be better founded in Thucydides’ actual words.

8. “Those who have experienced good and bad luck many times have every reason to be skeptical of successes” –Thucydides

9. “People get into the habit of entrusting the things they desire to wishful thinking, and subjecting things they don’t desire to exhaustive thinking” —Thucydides

10. “Amassing of wealth is an opportunity for good deeds, not hubris” –Thucydides

Okay, the last one is genuine (Pericles at 2.40.1), while number 9 is a rather odd but more or less accurate rendition of 4.108.4 (Athenian allies considering possibility of revolt after Brasidas’ capture of Amphipolis). I guess it’s possible that both 8 and the quote about lifestyles above (which is 7) are also correct, though Google so far brings up only other motivational sites offering the same version, rather than anything that I can trace back to an actual translation or paraphrase of Thucydides. Sad, bad or mad – or at least rather silly – or all three?

Changing the Rules

Amid the constant froth of “how the internet has transformed our lives, and ohmygod the robots are coming!” chatter, it’s occasionally worth reflecting on the things that could have changed but haven’t, or haven’t much. Take the scholarly article; yes, we can all access things so much more easily (provided we have the institutional support that gives us access to JSTOR), which is generally fabulous, and it’s becoming a reflex to remember to worry about Open Access issues, at least for those us in the UK worrying about whether our publications will be able to ‘count’ for the purposes of the Research Excellence Framework hoop-jumping exercise – but the article itself hasn’t dramatically changed in decades, and nor have the journals that might publish it (even something completely online like Histos otherwise more or less replicates the format of a traditional journal). Of course this is at least partly a consequence of working in a humanities discipline; for the most part we don’t have large quantities of supporting data that isn’t accessible elsewhere, so the possibility of uploading masses of supplementary material doesn’t mean as much to us as it does to those working in other fields.

But it clearly is the case that the form of the scholarly article could have changed more than it has – to the point where we might suspect the inertia might have something to do with those same research quality evaluation processes, as (a) everyone knows what they’re doing with a traditional article, and it suits reviewers to evaluate content and argument rather than having to think about form as well (yes, Hayden White fans, of course there’s the Content of the Form to worry about, but if everyone in a discipline follows the same principles this can be discounted, and (b) no one wants to risk crashing and burning by trying something even slightly new or experimental.

Obviously I find this sort of conservatism lamentable, and so it’s been an enormous pleasure to watch the development of Epoiesen, the brainchild of Shawn Graham at Carleton, which has now gone live and will be officially launched later this month. Describing itself as “a journal for creative engagement in history and archaeology”, this is exciting and original in at least two respects: firstly, its emphasis on new forms of engagement with the past, especially digital means – in other words, it’s pushing people to take full advantage of the fact that it’s an online publication – and secondly, the way that it replaces traditional blind, anonymous and hidden peer review with the publication of responses alongside the article, commenting and criticising it as appropriate but also using it as a springboard to further exploration.

Basically, you need to go and read it all as a matter of urgency, to get a fabulous sense of sheer possibility – there are explorations of the relationship between art and archaeology through maps and other depictions of road networks, a game that takes you through the existential torture of academic publishing, another game that explores the whole question of anachronism and the reshaping of history in memory, the record of a Twitter conference and the issues it raised, and an account of an engagement project around archaeology and heritage in the Middle East and North Africa, all with equally fascinating and thought-provoking responses.

The problem with Epoiesen is that it makes a lot of the rest of what we do seem, well, rather stale and unexciting. I suppose that one reason I’ve welcomed this project so enthusiastically is that I was already thinking of different ways of presenting and exploring my research on Thucydides – the still-in-development-sorry Melian Dialogue game, the ideas I’m developing for a public event in November as part of the UK’s Being Human festival of the humanities (watch this space), and some even wackier ideas. I can immediately recognise Epoiesen as somewhere I could seek to publish this stuff – if only I had the time to devote to it, rather than the bread-and-butter publications that I ought to be getting on with. So, I feature in this opening issue (not really the right word; salvo? manifestation?) just as a respondent, to Lucas Coyne’s interesting use of a Twine time travel game to explore issues of anachronism and contingency – which was great fun, and not too much of a distraction.

Heaven only knows how such experimental pieces would be evaluated for monitoring and disciplinary purposes – presumably there are people in Visual Arts and the like who could offer us some advice? It’s a bit of a paradox; on the one hand, if such outputs could stand a decent chance of ‘counting’ then we could feel less guilty about devoting time to them (in the same way, I suppose, as blogging and other forms of engagement currently operate as supplements, even if desirable supplements encouraged by the powers that be, to ‘regular’ academic activity, rather than as a valuable replacement for some of it) – but I guess they would then lose some of their charm as a daring alternative, a creative and intellectual space free from the usual constraints and anxieties – as a form of play rather than work.

Maybe this is the future. It’s certainly a future, and an incredibly inspiring one. Seriously, people, you need to check this out: a new space for unrestrained scholarly creativity.

World in Motion

How does our knowledge of classical antiquity relate to the present and its problems? How do we as classicists – to address at least a subset of my readers – engage with the world through our knowledge of the classical past, or is our chosen field of activity precisely a means of not engaging with the world? 

Jenny Erpenbeck’s magnificent, heartbreaking novel Gehen Ging Gegangen (shortly to appear in translation as Go Went Gone) is probably the first serious literary attempt at engaging with the plight of refugees in western Europe, the horrors that drive them here, the appalling conditions they endure and the heartlessness of the bureaucracy and nativist hatred that confronts them. It’s hard to believe that it won’t come to rank as one of the very best on this theme (even assuming anyone else tackles it at all), and it needs to be read for that alone. In its quiet, restrained way it is a deeply political and deeply angry novel, forcing us Europeans to confront our own failings and prejudices against those who arrive in ‘our’ comfortable, settled, peaceful lives.

In brief, Gehen Ging Gegangen narrates how Richard, a recently retired, widowed professor of Classical Philology from east Berlin, becomes intrigued (without really knowing why) by a group of refugees who protest silently outside the Berlin town hall, and gradually gets more and more involved in their lives. After the protest is brought to an end, the refugees are housed in the suburb where he lives; he gains access initially to ask them their stories, with vague claims about a research project.

Erpenbeck’s laconic, sometimes lapidary style, and her concern with words and language, perfectly, painfully invoke the depth of hurt behind the simple (because expressed in halting German, English or Italian) stories that the men tell of their experiences and feelings, in what is not said, or only partially said, or alternatively repeated again and again. Broke the memory, says Awad of the Libyan militiamen who destroyed the SIM cards of the guest workers’ phones. Broke the memory. Raschid repeats the names of his children, and their ages, but not what happened to them. Life is crazy, says Osarobo. Crazy life, crazy life.

We are drawn into the drama of these men’s traumatic pasts, their current existence in social and legal limbo, and the question of whether there is any hope for the future. However, this work has many layers; it’s also a novel about Richard’s own silences and evasions, his own hypocrisy as well as that of his society – and his own troubled past, alienated present and uncertain prospects. His motives are sometimes obscure even to himself – and certainly mixed, as he fantasises about the beautiful Ethiopia woman who teaches the refugees German and so volunteers as an assistant. He is human, all too human; naive, pedantic and by nature unconfrontational – at one point he sorts out the legal permits for a demonstration, then slips off home.

The fact that Richard is (or was) a classicist is not coincidental; not (merely) a convenient caricature of an unworldly academic, but a significant theme. At the beginning, his classical learning provides Erpenbeck with a way of characterising his naivety; because their names are alien to him, he gives many of the refugees nicknames – Apoll, Hermes, but also Tristan – and when they talk of having been in Sicily, he thinks at once of the temple at Agrigento.

But he is self-aware enough to recognise this tendency, and when one man says he is Tuareg – Richard at first can think only of the Volkswagen Toureg model – he sets about some proper research, beginning – naturally – with Herodotus’ account of the Garamantes and his account of Libya. Suddenly, his own knowledge appears in a new light, as the familiar Greek idea of the edge of the world, Atlas keeping heaven and earth apart, the customs of the Libyan tribes and so forth are unexpectedly connected to the present.

Much of what Richard reads on that November day, a few weeks after becoming emeritus, he’s known for almost his whole life, but today, through the small amount of knowledge which he now adds to it, it revombines in new and different forms. How often does someone have to relearn what he knows, discover it again and again, tear open how many disguises, until he really understands the things down to their bones? Is a lifetime long enough? His – or someone else’s? (177)

Above all, Richard is struck by the phenomenon of a world in motion, of migration as something that has always happened rather than as a modern phenomenon or a production of globalisation. People have been moving ceaselessly for thousands of years: for trade, war, seeking food and water, fleeing drought and plague, searching for gold, salt or iron. It is a kind of law of human beings: they don’t stay still.

To explain to a student that he doesn’t mean a moral law but rather a natural one, Richard would just have to point out of the window at how so many of the leaves, whose appearance in the spring had delighted him, now lay on the grass, while the buds for next spring were already formed. But there is no student here to ask him. (178)

And yet modern European societies seek to restrict this phenomenon, to present it as something new and unnatural and threatening, something that must be controlled –  just as the French had drawn arbitrary lines across the traditional territory of the Tuareg and divided them between different countries.

The second key episode of engagement with the classical offers a similar contrast between past and present: a sympathetic lawyer, who has been explaining the hopelessness of one refugee’s case, reaches for Tacitus’ Germania to read the section about German guest-friendship: it is forbidden among them to turn away a stranger from your door, but rather everything is shared, and there is no distinction between mine and yours. “And now,” he concludes, “2000 years later, there is Paragraph 23 Section 1: Right to Remain” – which rarely bestows such a right. Ancient history reveals consistencies and continuities in human behaviour and feelings, but also highlights the changes in law and custom, that have rendered the modern world harsher and less compassionate.

The central episode, both intellectually and personally, comes late in the novel when Richard accepts an invitation to a colloquium in Frankfurt to speak on Seneca – at very short notice, making it clear that he’s a last-minute replacement. Initially he plans just to rework chapters from the books he’s written on the topic – “but scarcely had he begun to flick through Seneca’s De Tranquillitate Amimi, new ideas came to him and he noticed how much pleasure his work still gave him.” (298) He’s clearly relieved and surprised to find that his mind is still active, that he can think in new ways and identify new connections.

If reason is indeed fiery material, then this is best seen in how, over the centuries, the thought of one sets off those of another, and keeps it alive. Further, the ancient idea of constant and endless change and mutability is actually familiar to Richard and his contemporaries, maybe from their wartime childhoods, maybe from their experience of the unexpected fragility of the Socialist system. But now people have forgotten, or have never known it, and believe in the end of history; they defend their peace so fiercely that it looks like war. And so his lecture for the colloquium ends up in a very different place, engaged and political and personal:

He speaks however not only about reason, but also memory, and power and powerlessness. He isn’t sure whether it’s the sort of lecture that he gave previously, when he was still at the Institute. In the break there is in the lobby coffee from big thermoses, as well as orange juice, mineral water and a few biscuits. The Tacitus specialist he knows is unfortunately not there, but there are a few others whom Richard knows, they greet him, clap him on the shoulder: So, what are you working on now – as a retiree? You’re not at the Institute any more? How long is it since we last saw one another? I’m flying over to Boston next week. So-and-so, he’s an extraordinarily interesting man. There’s a new translation, have you seen it? No one says a word about his lecture. (311-12)

When the others go back to hotel to get ready for dinner, he heads to the station and travels back to Berlin. It’s a recognition of his own marginality and irrelevance – and this had often been his experience in the past as well, returning to Berlin to look after his wife – but also of the facile obliviousness of mainstream scholarship to the world beyond the academy.

Things threaten to fall apart; Richard returns home to find he’s been burgled, and suspects one of the refugees to whom he’s been trying to teach piano and who knew he was away that evening; the whole group receives the official order that they are to be sent away from Berlin to different parts of the country, pending possible deportation, and certainly lose their current accommodation; and one of them seeks to set himself alight in Oranienplatz, where they’d previously demonstrated. But Richard doesn’t break; he and many of his friends find room for the refugees to sleep, and try to help them in other ways, and for the first time since his wife died he celebrates his birthday with a gathering of the whole group – even if this becomes a moment of melancholy self-revelation. He acknowledges openly, for the first time, not only his wife’s alcoholism but also the botched abortion – at his instigation, because it was too soon in his academic career – and the feeling that he hated her for the possibility that she might die; and the implication that this had then shaped all the subsequent decades together.

Then, I think, says Richard, it became clear to me, that what I feel is only the surface of everything that I don’t.

Like on the sea? asks Khalil.

Yes, basically just like on the sea. (348)

And so the novel ends. The word I’ve translated here as ‘feel’ is aushalte, which has a wide range of meanings including suffer, endure, go through, persevere, withstand etc. The contrast, I think, is not between things that were and were not experienced, but between things – equally traumatic and with consequences for later life – that were and were not acknowledged, recognised, spoken of. I’ll be interested to see how it’s rendered in the English translation.

The sea is the Mediterranean, which the refugees had struggled across – a barrier, rather than the unifying space of antiquity – with so many dying in the attempt. It is also memory (individual and collective) and tradition, and the past, and the world; and it is through acknowledging the limits of knowledge and self-knowledge, the fluid and perilous nature of existence, that Richard achieves a degree of reconciliation and wholeness, bringing his academic knowledge into engagement with the world and truly engaging with his fellow humans. The values of the classical world – guest-friendship and self-knowledge – are not lost for ever.

Assorted Alliterative Ancients’ Aphorisms

As I’ve remarked on here before, I really wish I had some grasp of Mandarin, in order to be able to get a proper sense of how Thucydides is being discussed in China: do they simply follow the conventional US international relations reading, and especially Allison’s Thucydides’s Trap theory, on the basis that this will help them understand American foreign policy thinking, or are they engaging with this and other classical texts (including Chinese ones) more creatively? A recent report from the Asia News International website (original link from @rogueclassicist) suggests the latter may be more likely, as it reports on an article from the official news agency Xinhua that speaks not of Thucydides but of the hitherto-unremarked Tacitus Trap.

I have to rely on the ANI reporter’s summary of this article, as my web browser issues dire warnings against viewing Xinhua’s site (can anyone tell me if this is justified?). It focuses on the need for members of the Communist Party to serve the people and bring about the rejuvenation of China, and includes a warning against the Tacitus Trap:

The concept of the Tacitus Trap apparently posits that ‘neither good nor bad policies would please the governed if the government is unwelcome’. It also warns leaders that ‘when a government loses credibility, whether it tells the truth or a lie, to do good or bad, will be considered a lie or to do bad’.

For the ANI reporter, this is a real gotcha moment. The Chinese, the report claims, regularly refer to P. Gornelius Tacitus rather than P. Cornelius, because a China Daily article in 2012 misspelled it and they all cite it without checking. And of course no one has ever heard of the Tacitus Trap.

There is, it seems, real innovation taking place in China, perhaps as desired by Supreme Leader Xi Jinping. This involves making up non-existent quotations, from people long dead (nearly 1900 years ago in this case), who are not there to clarify matters. Thankfully, the works of historians like Tacitus have survived in original Roman and English translations. And, these by no stretch of the imagination, seem to even remotely contain concepts attributed to Tacitus.

Hilariously, ANI continues, the alleged quote clearly indicts the Chinese government, which cannot possibly be welcome, and therefore its policies cannot possibly be popular. This is just like the Thucydides Trap, which “is often quoted by Chinese experts to try and explain the ‘insecurities’ developing within the US, stemming from the rise of a confident China” but which respected professors from Yale and Harvard point out is not to be found in the ancient text but can only be linked tenuously to the situation if one focuses on the actions of the stronger established power.

So, the two ‘traps’ again prove the success of Xi Jinping’s policies of bringing innovation into manufacturing. In an innovative manner, the ‘Tacitus Trap’ has been manufactured by Chinese propaganda, and is now being foisted upon an unsuspecting world.

At this point, if not earlier, we might start to question the reliability of ANI’s analysis. Chinese scholars have responded critically to the model of the ‘Thucydides Trap’, which has been energetically promoted by a respected professor from Harvard and widely cited by Western commentators, because they disagree with its claims and implications, rather than inventing it for their own purposes. More interestingly, as Gerald Krieghofer (@krieghofer) pointed out, there is in fact a very obvious source for the idea: Tacitus’ Histories 1.7: “when a ruler once becomes unpopular, all his acts, be they good or bad, tell against him.”

So, a perfectly sound quotation, and a not unreasonable political maxim: once you lose credibility and authority, it doesn’t matter how sound your policies are. This is how the phrase was used by the President of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong in 2013, for example (see report in the South China Morning Post), and a blogger at the time noted that the disparity of Google hits for the phrase – 1,690 in English, 714,000 Chinese results – made it clear that this was a Chinese invention, sanctioned for use in the media. The most important source, if not the original, is a 2012 article (I’m tempted to call it an editorial, but lack knowledge of the context to know whether this is a meaningful distinction in Chinese media) in the China Daily:

BEIJING – Some local Chinese governments are prone to slip into a credibility crisis in the Internet era in which inadequate information access and poor explanation spur public blame and simmer distrust.

Despite governments’ assertion of approved environmental assessments for several planned chemical projects recently in cities of Dalian, Shifang and Qidong, local residents, nonetheless, did not trust them and turned protests into violence in some extreme cases.

In one of the latest conflicts between a military officer family and a flight attendant as well as a nationwide huntdown of a most wanted serial killer, the public also tended to believe online rumors rather than official statements.

Publius Gornelius Tacitus (56-117 A.D.), a historian and a senator of the Roman Empire, said neither good nor bad policies would please the governed if the government is unwelcome, which was later called “Tacitus Trap” in political studies.

“Tacitus Trap” warns any leaders in power that when a government loses credibility, whether it tells the truth or a lie, to do good or bad, will be considered a lie, or to do bad.

There was a similar political adage in ancient China when Confucius (551-479 B.C.) told his followers that the people’s trust is the top priority among all considerations of governance.

It is not enough for the government to publicize information concerning public interests, which was demanded by the above-mentioned residents in fear of environmental hazards. The public have the right to know at the beginning of the government’s project plans and the right to participate in debating the project’s feasibility.

To establish a sound government-people interaction will help accumulate public trust and make it easier to elaborate a bigger picture of economic and social development to the people.

Therefore, to win or lose public support seriously matters, for not only the better government-people relationship but also government’s public image.

As the Big Lychee blogger noted, it’s interesting that the article cites a similar Confusius quote – to endorse the idea? – but nevertheless wants to adopt the Roman name; it suggests that the reception of classical ideas, and the construction of classical authority, in Chinese contexts is a really interesting topic, and I hope someone with the requisite language skills is studying it (and if anyone out there with the requisite language skills feels like organising a joint research project on this, get in touch!).

On the basis of my own Google searches, it remains the case that references to “Tacitus Trap” appear solely in the context of Chinese discussions or articles reporting on them (and note that according to this report, Xi himself has referred to it), and the number of English-language references remains an order of magnitude smaller than Chinese references (the figure of 1,690 for the former flatters it, as many of these are in Mandarin with just the phrase in English).

Final thought: why was the Asia News International report so certain that the “Tacitus Trap” is fake, and so eager to offer this as evidence for Chinese fraud and/or malevolence? The fact that ANI is based in India, and that there have been attempts over the last year to apply the “Thucydides Trap” to China-India relations as well as US-China relations, may be a significant part of the context.

 

 

Singapore Slim

A measure of the success of an idea, or at least its temporary trendiness, is when it crops up in completely irrelevant and inappropriate places. It can only be a matter of time before ‘Thucydides’s Trap’ starts getting referenced in sports reporting (Bayern versus Red Bull Leipzig?) or pop music (Taylor Swift versus someone we haven’t heard of yet?), but at the moment it does appear compulsory to mention it in any discussion whatsoever of inter-state relations in Asia. This morning’s example comes from a piece by John Blaxland of ANU in East Asia Forum asking ‘Do the lessons of Thucydides apply to Singapore?’

Tl;dr: nope. The real question: why did anyone imagine that they would? The Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, Kishore Mahbubani, started this when he reflected last month on possible lessons for Singapore of the Qatar crisis, one of which was the need for small states to recognise their position in the world and keep their heads down:

This action was part of a larger pattern of behaviour where Qatar believed that its mounds of money and its close relations with the US would protect it from consequences. In so doing, Qatar ignored an eternal rule of geopolitics: small states must behave like small states. Why? The answer was given by the famous historian, Thucydides, when writing about the war between Athens and Sparta: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” When I spent a year in Harvard in 1991/1992, Professor Joseph Nye highlighted this rule constantly in his lessons of history.

Boilerplate Realism, taking the questionable assertion of the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue as an objective feature of the world, and hence a reason (or excuse) for ducking any awkward issues of justice or ethics.

It’s not actually obvious from Blaxland’s summary of Mahbubani’s article that it mentions Thucydides; rather, his name gets evoked initially on the authority of Graham Allison’s reading of the likelihood of a US-China confrontation, before Blaxland segues back to Melos.

Great power dynamics can certainly generate tensions but the jury is out on whether such a war is inevitable in Asia. Smaller states sometimes play disproportionate roles, and other times not. During that war, for instance, Athens subjugated the city-state of Melos, which had sought to stay neutral in the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides observed that in subjugating Melos, Athens demonstrated a truism: ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. There is a sense that Mahbubani seems to have tapped into a fear that Singapore may have some Melian-like tendencies and that if not careful, the city state could become a casualty in a great power clash in and around Southeast Asia reminiscent of Thucydides’ war.

Blaxland expands on Mahbubani’s reference to Melos (while distorting the context of the quotation a little further), and thus draws out the implication of the comparison: that there are such things as ‘Melian-like tendencies’, and that the Melians had somehow failed to acknowledge their own weakness and keep their heads down in an appropriate manner. Blaxland’s response is that Singapore is not so small or insignificant, and so need not adopt such a policy; ” Singapore has understood that very well and worked assiduously to cultivate a range of constructive relations to shield the city-state from the kinds of great power challenges the Melians experienced.” So, “while Thucydides’ work remains eminently readable, due to geography, alliances, regional architecture and other ties, its application to Singapore is of limited utility.”

Fair enough, though this ignores Thucydides’ crucial point, that the crushing of Melos was completely independent of any actions by the Melians themselves; this is what power-crazed imperialist powers do to minor bystanders. Blaxland could in fact have argued that his reading is more Thucydidean than Mahbubani’s; one of the implied counterfactuals in the Melian Dialogue is that the Athenians might have been more circumspect if the Melians had been less isolated, more closely allied with other powers etc., whereas their wish to remain neutral and friends with everyone (Mahbubani’s policy proposal for Singapore) was doomed.

But what is most striking is that Thucydides gets evoked at all; both writers take it as read that his account might be relevant. His name serves as a synecdoche for basic Realist theory (there is only power, and those who don’t have any) and for the possibility of great power conflict; it feels as if a discussion of inter-state politics in Asia that didn’t mention Thucydides would be judged as inadequate…

The Centre Cannot Hold?

That radical “a plague on all your houses” centrist Thucydides is muttering “I told you so” to himself again…

Factionalism and polarisation became facts of political life, and places that were affected later rather than sooner, hearing what was happening elsewhere, went to ever greater extremes in identifying new grievances and new accusations against their opponents. The usual valuation of words and actions was changed. What was once seen as reckless aggression now appeared as the loyalty one owed to fellow campaigners, while forethought and hesitation became cowardly equivocation; calls for moderation meant you lacked decency, while seeing different sides of the question was a sign of secret sympathies with the enemy. (3.82.3-4)

You’re Already Caught

There is one crucial question about Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides’s Trap’ model of power transition and the confrontation of rising and ruling powers* that has not yet, so far as I’m aware, been asked: what sort of trap did Thucydides have in mind? Mouse? Elephant? Bear? Rat? Lobster? Honey? Because clearly this must affect how we imagine the process of being captured and the possibility, if any, of escape – and indeed the likelihood of realising that one is in a trap in the first place, before it’s too late. A basic starting assumption for such an analysis is that the idea must be based on ancient Greek hunting technology, and so, in the absence of any comment on the subject from Thucydides himself – we can safely assume his familiarity, as an Athenian aristocrat, with the basic techniques – we turn to a comparable figure in the next generation, Xenophon, and his treatise Cynegeticus, or Hunting with Dogs.

This short but comprehensive survey presents a range of techniques and technologies, suitable for different prey. For hares: nets, carefully specified. For hinds: caltrops.** For wild boar, nets and caltrops. Relevant here is the elaborate set-up to be used when a boar declines to emerge from its hiding place, which does seem to merit the label ‘trap’:

So take the hound and tie her up with the others at a good distance from the lair, and have the nets put up in the convenient anchorages, hanging the meshes on forked branches of trees. Out of the net itself make a long projecting bosom, putting sticks inside to prop it up on both sides, so that the light of day may penetrate as much as possible into the bosom through the meshes, in order that the interior may be as light as possible when the boar rushes at it. Fasten the (lower) rope to a strong tree, not to a bush, since the bushes give way at the bare stem. Wherever there is a gap between a net and the ground, fill in the places that afford no anchorage with wood, in order that the boar may rush into the net, and not slip out. (10.7)

The other relevant model is found in Xenophon’s brief discussion of the capture, in foreign parts, of “lions, leopards, lynxes, panthers, bears and all similar wild beasts”. These may (most unsportingly) be poisoned by adding aconite (wolfsbane) to their favourite food and scattering this around their territory, but a more sophisticated and trap-like approach is also described:

Sometimes the hunters dig large, round, deep holes, leaving a pillar of earth in the middle. They tie up a goat and put it on the pillar in the evening, and pile wood round the hole without leaving an entrance, so that the animals cannot see what lies in front. On hearing the bleating in the night, the beasts run round the barrier, and finding no opening, jump over and are caught. (11.4)

So, what sort of trap did Thucydides have in mind for the dynamics of the Athens-Sparta rivalry, that now arguably characterises the US-China relationship – the tangle of concealed nets, so the furious animal is trapped in a structural path determinacy before it realises what is happening, or the pit, where it is the insatiable appetite for power (i.e. goat) that leads to its downfall?

The answer is of course: neither. Thucydides never refers to a ‘trap’ of any sort; he simply emphasises the longer-term structural factors that underpinned the Spartans’ eventual decision that they needed to resist Athenian expansion, and the Athenians’ disregard for the concerns of other powers. Giving this a snazzy alliterative nickname works for marketing purposes, clearly, but in other respects it seems a bit odd; doesn’t the existence of a trap imply that someone has laid it deliberately (history, maybe?), and isn’t it generally the case that a trap traps one animal at a time?

It’s not that I necessarily have a better analogy to propose – the Thucydides Tango, perhaps, in which the movements of each partner constrain and provoke those of the other, neither able to break out of their close embrace until the music stops playing or one collapses from exhaustion…

*Newcomers to this blog won’t know that I have written about Allison’s idea here many, many times – and have also had to do this in two different pieces for publication just in the last week – so don’t feel like doing it yet again. For background info, put Thucydides Trap in the search box on the right, and you’ll get more than enough…

**The bastard. At the expense of massive anachronism, I find Xenophon’s attitude towards spiky things that are intended to hobble but not otherwise harm the quarry, so the hunters can catch up and enjoy despatching it, basically distasteful.