Neville Morley's Blog, page 50

Thucydides Who?

Courtesy of my colleague Richard Flower, another Thucydides reference in an unexpected context: the autobiography of Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor, Who on Earth is Tom Baker?, looking back to his childhood activity as a bookie’s runner.

Because the process of taking bets, or making a book, was illegal, the system of identifying betting slips was important. How to identify the winner of a bet? The punter couldn’t put his real name on the slip for fear that the police might raid the premises, find the slips and fine the gambler. This risk was avoided by a system of noms de plumes… One disgraced classicist used Thucydides which caused pronunciation problems back at base. The accepted explanation was that Thucydides was Turkish for nancy boy.

How did he know that the classicist was “disgraced” – specific knowledge, or simply the assumption that no respectable one would sink to gambling? How touching…

 

Oh Yes He Is (Oh Yes He Is)

[image error]There are many things, both serious and funny, to be said about the new advert from The Gap allegedly showing the ‘Tenure-Track Professor’ look, complete with one of the most hilariously appalling bits of advertising copy ever. Many of these things are specific to the US, to early career academics, and above all to female academics, and the following ramblings are basically tangential to all that; but thinking about academics and clothes did bring to mind the time I was interviewed by a student newspaper as part of their regular fashion column.

Deal with that for a moment – especially if you’ve known me for a while. For at least two-thirds of my adult life I dressed appallingly, without a clue – to say nothing of the haircuts. The fact that things have improved in recent years is due almost entirely to my wife taking me in hand, establishing some minimum standards and accidentally unleashing the hidden peacock (well, within limits), such that I not only take some care over my personal appearance, at least on work days, but have even been known to spend serious money on select items of clothing, with only minimal bullying.

The point isn’t that it’s ludicrous to ask me about the jacket I’m wearing; it’s rather that, if even I can get my act together and look as if I’ve made an effort, then the bar is not being set very high – so why does this remain rare among male academics? It’s been regularly observed that men have it incredibly easy in universities when it comes to dress – they’re automatically ascribed more authority, they’re much less likely to be judged on appearance, and there are basic principles which it’s hard to get wrong – and yet time and again they fail to meet even minimal expectations. Claims of having one’s mind on higher things as a cover for sheer laziness? Deeply embedded puritanism? Dominant male primate behaviour, treating the lecture theatre as part of the home territory?

One obvious point is that the medium is the message, and male academics seem both to get and not to get this. On the one hand, they clearly dress in full awareness of their advantages within the academy – or at least knowing that this is something they don’t really have to worry about. On the other hand, most of the time they seem to assume that clothing is invisible in the way that traditional historians think their prose is, i.e. you don’t notice it unless it does something dramatic and unexpected; of course it’s necessary to wear some, but its purpose is not to draw attention to itself (absolutely the opposite) but to work as a neutral medium for communicating ideas and information.

But, like academic prose, clothing communicates multiple things at once – and meaning is realised at the point of reception. The male academic may assume that the message of his outfit is “nothing to see here, let’s focus on the ideas”, but it’s equally possible to read it as “I don’t care, and I don’t have to care”, not to mention “I really wish I was still a student”, “I’m actually rather a dull person” and “Deep Purple were awesome!” If that’s the message you want to convey to your students, fine – and, yes, there’s always the risk that paying attention to clothes in an academic context communicates not only “I respect you enough to make an effort” but also “I don’t take things entirely seriously”, “I have more money than sense” and/or “Well, hello there…”. The point is that there are always multiple messages – and taking refuge in the standard academic uniform works just because your outfit is then saying exactly the same things as everyone else – including the counterproductive ones.

And on that uniform… The great Tim Whitmarsh remarked recently on the experience of wearing a suit a lot for his latest series of international academic rock star gigs, and the way it makes him look like he could influence elections. Hmm. Well, yes, that’s the point: instant authority, based on subsuming oneself into the long tradition of powerful men wearing suits and ties, just as a shabby tweed jacket works for academics by tapping into the reservoir of cultural stereotypes for academics. It’s the Men In Black principle: erasure of personality in order to become a faceless instrument of established authority.

To which the only reasonable answer is the Will Smith Principle: I make this look good. I mean, it isn’t hard. If it’s The Only Suit You’ll Ever Wear, get one that fits properly. If you’re going to wear the same jacket for weeks on end, you can afford to get a nice, expensive jacket – or even a couple of nice, expensive jackets, to introduce a bit of variety. Female academics have to think about their outfits every day; we men can stagger the public with our fashion sense just by varying the colour of our shirts from time to time. And in the Land of the Bland, the man with the DuChamp tie is Fashion King… Get respect for your ideas and your blazer choices!

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This Town Ain’t Big Enough…

Wouldn’t it improve British politics (and probably the politics of many other Western democracies) enormously if we reintroduced the Athenian practice of ostracism – holding a vote to decide which disruptive and problematic individual should be packed off into exile for ten years? Actually my reaction when this was raised casually in a Facebook discussion this morning was: no, I can’t think of anything about this that isn’t deeply problematic – but, at the risk of using a sledgehammer to crack the proverbial nut, and not at all because I’m procrastinating about writing a lecture and revising a chapter, the reasons why it wouldn’t work are worth a brief discussion…

(1) Most of what we hear about it in ancient sources suggests that it didn’t work then. Okay, it depends how you define ‘work’ – maybe it did add to the gaiety of the polis – but if we take the conventional view that ostracism was intended either to break a deadlock between two powerful politicians before it degenerated into outright factionalism or to get rid of people suspected of plotting a tyranny, then we hear of only a couple of (possibly, keeping in mind source issues) successful examples, and various anecdotes about how it could be manipulated (most obviously, Nicias and Alcibiades combining to ensure that Hyperbolus was ostracised instead of either of them) or deeply frivolous (the well-known story of someone voting to ostracise Aristides because they were sick of hearing him referred to as ‘the Just’). We could expect a modern ostracism to be at least as frivolous and manipulated, driven by the agenda of the tabloids and the echo chambers of social media. The idea of getting shot of Nigel Farage may be very appealing, but it’s at least as likely that we’d end up losing Caroline Lucas.

(2) In fifth-century Athens, exile meant exile: of course the man in question could continue to communicate with his friends and allies by letter, but that was slow – and the exercise of serious political influence in anything other than exceptional circumstances (Alcibiades in exile is the obvious case) depended on presence, in the assembly and the agora, giving speeches and engaging with people. We have numerous technological means whereby Piers Morgan is out of the country and still seems to be in urgent need of ostracism; ditto Farage. Maybe we could apply this on a smaller scale to appearances on the BBC – but again, the risk of losing voices that speak against the dominance of the majority is considerable.

(3) Athenian politics was a very small world in comparison to ours; this isn’t an issue of voting technology, but rather of the idea that removing one individual could make a significant different to the general political discourse and behaviour. Perhaps a yearning for ostracism is also a yearning for a simpler world in which the fundamental divisions of Brexit – a collapse into factionalism if ever there was one – could be resolved by exiling Farage or Johnson or May, in the way that exiling either Nicias or Alcibiades would perhaps have given Athens a clearer sense of direction. But Thucydides makes it clear that events then were driven by greater forces than a couple of individual politicians; they were figureheads and representatives as much as actors, and that is still more true for today’s crowd. May acts the way she does partly because of the knowledge that there are plenty of colleagues waiting behind her for their chance; and the moment you try to think of the identity of the Chief Remoaner, the man whose exile would decapitate the whole resistance movement, the absurdity of the idea becomes clear. Tim Farron? A.C. Grayling?

Of course, there is probably a better case that ostracism may be effective in a smaller-scale context where individual personalities do carry greater weight; in an office or department, for example, or as an answer to the ongoing agony of the Labour Party…

What Holds Us Together

This was, to put it mildly, an interesting week in which to find myself offering commentary on the theme of ‘Was uns zusammenhält’ for a “fish bowl discussion” as part of the Berliner Stiftungswoche. The event itself was extremely interesting (for ancient Chinese proverb values of interesting); representatives of six different Berlin charitable projects taking it in turns to give a 60-second summary of their work, followed by me (in my capacity as Einstein Visiting Fellow) hastily improvising some thoughts on wider themes, followed by more general discussion led by the very impressive moderator, journalist and presenter Jörg Thadeusz, who seemed determined to force me to talk more about Thucydides even when I was trying to waffle about ancient attitudes towards poverty instead.

I learnt a lot (or at least I think I will have learnt a lot, once I’ve filtered out the basic terror of having talked gibberish and/or said something incredibly unwise about the Gymnasium system without realising it). The projects included the Barenboim-Said Academy, bringing together young people from hostile communities through the common language of music; Kiron, which helps refugees gain access to higher education, especially if they’ve lost all their academic credentials (two quibbles: no Geisteswissenschaften, and they’ve taken the name from Cheiron, as if a mythical elite private tutor must be a good symbol for Bildung just because it’s Greek); and different approaches to supporting poorer people and giving them a proper stake in society.

The theme raises all sorts of questions (as I attempted to articulate with only intermittent references to Thucydides). Who is this “us” – Berliners, Germans, Europeans, humans? Does this automatically imply a “them”, are identities exclusive or multiple and negotiable – and can I claim status (or, indeed, political asylum) as an honorary Berliner? As for “what holds us together”, is there a risk that even asking the question is a sign that something has already been lost (cf. Schiller’s contrast of the organic community of the ancient Greeks with the mechanical – and self-conscious and self-reflexive – modern society)?

The key point, nicely argued by former minister Michael Naumann, is that differences and divisions are not only inevitable but healthy; what matters is how they are negotiated and accommodated. The drive for a fully unified community, wholly united in a single opinion and purpose, is a return to the ideals of 1933; it’s the politics of Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, May’s Britain. Difference is presented as chaos, disagreement as sabotage of The Will Of The People; enough people can be scared by their apparent vulnerability, if they lack confidence in their institutions and fellow citizens, and persuaded to hand over more power to the authoritarian populists who promise to cure the problem. This is anti-democratic, even as it uses the mechanisms of democracy, and deeply dangerous.

So, yes, there were times when I felt my most constructive contribution to the discussion might simply be to sob quietly in a corner while everyone else took the UK as an Awful Warning and got on with things. What keeps us together – not just as a country (where currently the only obvious answer is the “shut up and recognise the glorious opportunities of walking off a cliff” line, which really doesn’t work for me) but at a personal level? I have friends who voted to Leave; older ones full of nostalgia, slightly younger ones fired up with the idealism of Lexit, contemporaries who seem to be living the cliche of moving from leftist 20s to Tory late 40s, and various relatives. What holds us together? Sheer proximity and neighbourliness, and the fact my wife may be unhappy if I start a row at a dinner party without really significant provocation; the fact that it’s just Twitter, and it’s good to remain aware of what others are thinking; and they’re family, aren’t they, so you just accept their flaws?

The problem is trying to scale this up; to establish accommodation, tolerance and a willingness to accept differences of opinion when the stakes remain high and when personal ties no longer operate effectively. Naumann, as Rector of the Barenboim-Said Academy, argued for the role of music as a common language and shared purpose, founded on the need to listen constantly to everyone else, that transcends other divisions – but that’s still pretty small-scale. Besides, as I argued, social life is more like jazz: no score, no conductor, requiring constant improvisation, and with the ever-present possibility of making what some will regard as a really horrible noise.

None of the Berlin projects offered answers to such society-level problems; they focus on the local, the practical, the manageable – and so are able to achieve real results. In the long term, such “schrittweise” approaches must be the solution, working together to maintain, develop and perhaps rebuild the public sphere. In the short term, faced with terrifying challenges? We have to hope that our existing institutions of politics, education etc. will hold together and function well enough, while we continue to improvise and listen to one another at the local and personal level.

So, no, even now I am not going to de-friend grouchy ‘bring back the Empire’ pensioners or irritatingly enthusiastic Lexiteers; if nothing else, it does me good to remain aware of such views. The fact that I think society needs more Peter Brötzmann at the moment doesn’t mean I actually want to ban Acker Bilk…

 

Mea Culpa

It seems entirely possible that there are certain people out there reading this blog and noting the fact that I’m currently managing to post at least once a week on average, and also remarking on my occasional contributions to online book seminars* and other non-academic publications, and thinking to themselves: “Okay, Neville, so where the hell is that book review you should have submitted eighteen months ago?” I try not to think about this too much, as I am genuinely embarrassed and guilty about my large backlog of missed deadlines – not to mention the thought of other colleagues’ reactions when they realise that I’m the reason why their book hadn’t been reviewed – but I’m prompted to do so this morning by discussions on the Twitter in the light of the recent debacle at the American Historical Review (links via @helenrogers19c). Why haven’t I got these reviews written? Not because I’m lazy, and not just because I keep taking on too many things, but because writing a decent academic book review is hard, and boring, and fraught with problems.

The basic purpose of the conventional academic book review as currently constituted is evaluative; one’s task as reviewer is to provide a reasonable summary of contents and argument, set it in a wider scholarly context and offer some sort of judgement, however vague and equivocating (as there are all sorts of reasons why we might want to hold back from really serious criticism – junior colleague who deserves support, senior colleague who might retaliate, friend of friend or indeed friend, general principle of ‘if you can’t say anything nice…’ etc.). What one should not do: spend too much time talking about stuff other than the book under review, talk about the book one would have preferred to read or would have written oneself, offer anything that could be accused of focusing on only one aspect or theme rather than the whole.

Contrast the sort of thing I’ve written for book seminars or this blog: perfectly acceptable to focus on a particular theme rather than having to cover every aspect of the work; perfectly acceptable to use book as a starting-point for wider discussion and speculation; perfectly acceptable to talk about how I might have approached things differently. Put another way: freedom from the “yes, but what about..?” rejoinder; I can engage with the/a high-level argument without feeling the obligation to pre-empt a “yes, but what about the detailed handling of the evidence?” criticism; I can focus on something I find interesting and important without the need to cover everything else as well to fend off the “yes, but what about the rest of the argument?” complaint.

This doesn’t by any means preclude evaluation and criticism, and it doesn’t imply any less careful reading or engagement – but it avoids the requirement for a complete evaluation of everything, including bits that are less interesting, which is the time-consuming and tedious bit. I’ve actually read the majority of books on my ‘to review’ list, and could certainly write commentaries on most of them with only a limited amount of re-reading to check certain points – but this isn’t nearly enough of a basis for writing proper, all-encompassing academic reviews.

On reflection, all academic book reviewing suffers from the familiar issues with reviewing collections of papers: the need to say at least something about every one, within a limited space, works against the possibility of saying anything interesting. If you don’t mention every individual chapter, those authors will be resentful; if you don’t cover every aspect of a book, the author will think you’re being unfair; and in either case, readers who are looking to a review to summarise a publication and tell them whether or not they need to read it, rather than hoping for interesting ideas, will complain that you’re being partial and unhelpful.

So, book reviews remain boring and without any original or interesting content to speak of, and so are not valued as publications; so, there are always higher priorities for our time (and/or more stimulating things to do), so reviews are done late and hastily, hence even less likely to be interesting or significant, and so round we go again…

Of course, from the perspective of the book author (and of the discipline as a whole), my implied alternative of flexible commentaries rather than traditional reviews is also very problematic. Giving the commentator freedom to focus on a particular aspect and talk about things other than the book works best if there are several commentators, so different aspects of the book get discussed rather than a single narrow and partial commentary – but that involves more people writing on the same book (even if it’s more fun and less work than a normal review), and that implies that fewer books will be treated in this way than are reviewed under the current system – and any approach that selects certain books for consideration is likely to be biased towards established scholars, favouring dominant groups in the academy.

The solution? I don’t currently have one, beyond a resolution to try to get rid of the pile of ‘books to review’ on my desk and then refuse absolutely to take on any more, ever again. I did have thoughts at one time of trying to organise some ancient history online book seminars, on the Crooked Timber model – but so long as everyone else is bogged down with traditional reviews, this isn’t likely to get off the ground. In the meantime, I can only apologise to review editors (but I TOLD you that I was massively behind with things and not to be relied upon…) and still more to various colleagues (it’s not that I hate your book; it’s the need to compromise between the bits I found most interesting and the rest…).

*Series of excellent responses from Ada Palmer to discussions of her Terra Ignota books now up on Crooked Timber, everyone!

Vicarage Values

There’s a lovely passage in John Moore’s Brensham Village (second volume of the Brensham Trilogy, one of the great accounts of British rural life), in which Mr Chorlton, the retired prep-school classics teacher, talks about his affection for the absurdities and rituals of the Church of England, agnostic though he is:

The funny thing is that thousands of people who don’t believe in it have the same feeling. I suppose in Greece and Rome, when the old gods fell out of favour and people ceased to believe in their thunderbolts and their power, the crumbling ivy-grown altars were still regarded with a sort of half-amused, half-apologetic affection, and people made an occasional shame-faced sacrifice at them for old time’s sake. That is how I feel about the C. of E. and I still wonder why!

The village church continues to function as one of the binding institutions of Brensham life – though Moore suggests that it’s rather less significant than the pubs and the cricket team. Taken together, and combined with an anarchic and pagan rural spirit, the village is capable of accommodating all manner of individual eccentricities, both home-grown and incomers – and even of taming the representatives of the new modernising, statist order of the late 1940s, in the form of the new Labour MP, Halliday, and his activist wife.

One suspects that this sort of nostalgic vision of communal solidarity is precisely what Theresa May wants to summon up with her talk of the values of her vicarage upbringing and the way that the Easter spirit is bringing all Britons together to seize the opportunities presented by Brexit – the spirit of traditional British pagan-Christian syncretism, rather than anything more fervently religious.

Moore’s vision is more nuanced, and defiantly anti-nationalist, but it’s not hard to imagine most of his characters lumping ‘Europe’ in with ‘London’ as a bunch of interfering bureaucrats imposing rules and regulations where they’re not wanted. The narrator, who spends most of his time in London writing novels and hanging out with the literary crowd, and certainly Mr and Mrs Halliday, and perhaps Mr Chorlton with his books, might have a more internationalist perspective, but each of them is too much in thrall to the ideal of an organic community to oppose the consensus; they would doubtless accommodate themselves quickly to the ‘very real concerns’ of the rest of the village.

And of course this is a thoroughly homogeneous community in ethnic terms, where the only foreigners are a Jewish businessman from Birmingham and the Welsh postman, both of whom are tolerated but marked out as alien and not quite assimilable. Historically plausible, for a Gloucestershire village between the 1920s and the late 1940s, but also all too familiar for any such vision of English communal solidarity – all the more so, if the Christian element is emphasised, as May does, rather than Moore’s insistence on the deeper pagan roots.

 

 

Historiography is all about perspective; the recognition that events can always be recounted and understood in different ways. Herodotus opens his account of the Persian Wars by considering the different stories that Greeks and Persians offer to explain their mutual hostility, before claiming that he will now present the real reasons, and regularly highlights the existence of different versions and explanations. Thucydides notes the fact that different eye-witnesses can make different reports of the same event, whether because of their memories or their loyalties, and at key points in his narrative stages the conflicting perspectives of actors on the world around them, showing how this leads to critical decisions being made one way or the other. This is not just a move to replace ‘believing the first story you hear’ with the would-be omniscient, objective view of the god-like historian; it’s the recognition that different interpretations will persist, and that things can suddenly look quite different with a slight shift of perspective.

These thoughts have been developing over the past week in the aftermath of the cultural experience of my year so far, the Berliner Staatsoper’s Parsifal (directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, conducted by Daniel Barenboim). I’ve always steered clear of Parsifal, and certainly wouldn’t have gone to this if the tickets hadn’t been a Christmas present (leaving aside the question of affordability); partly because the music never wholly grabbed me (I would now say that of all Wagner’s operas this is the one that is most bound up with the theatrical performance) and partly because of all the associations. Heavy doses of Christian mysticism; a sacred warrior brotherhood dedicated to ideals of purity; woman presented as source of evil, deceit and corruption; whole thing presented quite deliberately as a ritual. How much more Nazi can opera get?

The answer to this problem is: to recognise it as a problem (and, having done a bit more research, I can stress that Tcherniakov isn’t the first to do this; there’s a whole post-WWII tradition of worrying about Parsifal). In Twitter terms, restaging =/= endorsement; or rather, if the Brotherhood of the Grail seems, with a slight shift of perspective, to be a gang of violent, misogynistic, sexually-repressed religious fanatics, then maybe that’s what the opera is about.

In Tcherniakov’s staging, the most disturbing aspects and associations imaginable are brought to the fore with the grail ritual at the end of Act 1: far from being a weak old man begging for relief, Titurel as charismatic cult leader forces his son Amfortas to participate, to be violently handled and stripped by the frenzied mob, literally providing the sacred blood that his followers believe will give them eternal life. It’s a community, united by tradition, belief and common purpose; as such, it reveals the horror of such a community, from the perspective of someone outside it.

One reason (says he, on the basis of reading two books) why Parsifal is often seen as more of a ritual than a real drama is the lack of, well, drama. Parsifal is identified from the beginning as the man destined to bring back the Holy Spear and restore the fellowship, once he’s grown up enough to feel true sympathy for Amfortas and finally finds his way back from wandering in the wilderness. He will, in the conventional version, be the bringer of wholeness and the restorer of solidarity and tradition.*

But Tcherniakov, through his shift of perspective, has raised the stakes: is this a fellowship that any sane person would want to restore? What would constitute the healing of such a community; a return to its original form, with a stronger and more enthusiastic leader – or its abolition? So, are we going to see Parsifal turn into the sort of person who looks at such a community and its rituals and still wants to participate – the making of a new kind of monster – or is a different sort of ending planned? The already complex psychological drama of Act 2, in which Kundry brings Parsifal to terms with his past and who he is, is thus heightened by the question of what he will then become – which, if we assume that the model of ‘simple heroic knight’ is already called into question, isn’t going to become clear until we see what he actually does in Act 3.

Which is…ambiguous, and I really need to see this again having had a chance to think about it. Certainly Amfortas is freed from his pain, through the weapon that had wounded him (in this case Kundry, rather than the spear), and the grail fellowship is given a new focus for its fanaticism; but when Parsifal departs the stage carrying Kundry’s body, is he turning his back on them, or setting out to found a new version of the same thing? Again, perhaps this ambiguity is precisely the point: we are left to ask ourselves whether a community of flawed, selfish people prone to violence and self-delusion – humans, in other words – can be restored, and at what price. Whatever happens, the clock cannot simply be turned back through a simple act of will.

 

 

As Mark Berry has brilliantly observed, this is not art to make us feel good about ourselves, but art to make us think – not least, about why we shouldn’t feel good about ourselves. It is, at its heart, all about “the human thing” that drives us again and again to violence, faction, stupidity and war. (And, yes, I think there’s a case to be made for reading Wagner via Thucydides, and vice versa, not least because we know from Cosima’s diaries that he read the book to her). It is art that is willing to fix its gaze on apparently simple, uncontroversial things like community, national identity and religion, and to ask difficult questions about them – and to refuse to supply easy answers. The simple homilies of an English country vicarage may seem innocuous enough, mere historical remnants – but that is the view of an insider; switch perspective, and their continuing power to compel, to constrain, to manipulate and to exclude becomes clear.

*I have a brief, horrific vision of a Brexit staging of Parsifal, in which Amfortas is Britain, bleeding cash from the unhealable wound of Europe, until Theresa May returns with the Spear of Sovereignty, having brought down the magic castle of Jean-Claude Klingsor and his seductive foreign exchange students, to restore harmony and unity…

New Europeans

Full of future thoughts and thrills… Published in last week’s The New European.

Europe was invented, or at least first defined, by the ancient Greeks. In the sixth century BCE, geographers like Anaximander and Hecataeus imagined the world divided between Europe, Asia and Libya Africa; their successor Herodotus turned this division into a great historical drama with the confrontation between the Persian Empire, rulers of Asia, and the heroic little Greeks at Thermopylae, Marathon and Salamis.Other Greeks speculated about the influence of climate and environment – Asiatics were soft and slavish, Europeans were tough and freedom-loving – as the start of a tradition of Orientalist stereotypes that persists today. Long before anyone thought of Europe as a political entity, or even knew where its eastern boundary was, it was conceived as a distinct culture.

The Greeks also provided Europe with a founding myth; the continent is named after Europa, a Phoenician princess who was abducted by Zeus in the form of a bull and gave birth to the Queen of Crete. The tasteful classical associations of the story seem to have obscured the violence of the rape; images of Europa and the Bull are associated with key European Union buildings, including the debating chamber of the European Parliament, as well as appearing on the Greek 2-Euro coin. (The reliably confused Christian Soldiers for UKIP denounce these as depictions of the Whore of Babylon riding on the Beast, revealing the satanic agenda of the whole European enterprise.)

Ideas of a common European culture have often emphasised Europe’s roots in the world of classical antiquity and the long tradition, since the Renaissance, of drawing on its legacy: in law, literature, architecture, art and philosophy. Almost every European nation claimed its own special relationship with the ancient world, especially the Glory That Was Rome (always particularly attractive to would-be autocrats and imperialists like Napoleon or the British). But antiquity offers more consensual models of politics; the republican institutions of earlier Roman history, but especially democratic Athens. The draft of the abortive European Constitution from 2004 opened with a line from the Athenian politician Pericles, quoted by the historian Thucydides: “Our constitution is called a democracy”.

The ancient world offers useful resources for modern Europeans. The Romans, for example, pioneered the idea of dual citizenship; Cicero proclaimed equal loyalty to Rome and to his home town. Greece provides models of deliberation and debate; the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, perhaps the fiercest defender of the European project, promotes the idea of the agora, the meeting place at the heart of the ancient Greek city, as a sphere of public discourse. Above all, classical culture transcends national and political boundaries, and has not only inspired artists and intellectuals but also fostered cross-border conversations and intellectual exchange.

No one in Europe proposes the recreation of the Roman Empire or the world of the Greek city states – and there is widespread acknowledgement that these cultural achievements were founded on slavery and violence. But the memory of classical antiquity represents a common legacy; something which everyone can draw upon and reuse in different ways while still sharing in a living tradition. Indeed, the fact that the ancient world had a multiplicity of religious traditions until the fourth century – and the role of the Islamic world in preserving much classical culture after the collapse of classical civilisation – suggests that this tradition may have still greater potential as Europe comes to terms with its multicultural future.

However, the more important a tradition is for one group, the more it can also be used as a weapon by that group’s opponents. A foretaste of this was offered by the Greek economic crisis of 2014, when every cliché of ancient Greekness was employed to characterise and denounce the German government and European officials – a tendency exacerbated by the habit of Yanis Varoufakis of referring to the Melian Dialogue from Thucydides (as in the title of his new book, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?).

More often it is the Roman Empire that is evoked in order to denounce the European project. It represents the first attempt at establishing a single currency, the first attempt at forcing the peoples of Europe into a political union, the first universal citizenship. It ‘made a desert and called it peace’, in the words that the Roman historian Tacitus put into the mouth of a rebellious barbarian. If the European Union is presented as the second Rome, it is revealed as a violent tyranny – and the enemy of Christianity.

Above all, as everyone knows, Rome declined and fell; if the European Union is Rome, then we already know it’s doomed to failure. Historians have disagreed for centuries over the reasons for the failure of the empire, and every possible explanation has been revived to prophesy the collapse of the EU: excessive bureaucracy and control of the economy, inflation, economic mismanagement, moral decadence, race mixture and above all barbarian invasions. Traditionally, this last cause was understood as the threat from east – hence the ‘Huns’ as slang for Germans – but in recent years it has been repurposed for the refugee crisis; as UKIP funder Arron Banks declared on Twitter, “True the Roman Empire was effectively destroyed by immigration”.

Few historians would accept such a view, as Banks discovered when Cambridge classicist Mary Beard responded to his claim. The numbers of such ‘barbarians’ were tiny compared to the empire’s population, and most of them entered Europe to fight for Rome as mercenaries – the ‘fall’ of the empire is better seen as a change within the military leadership, as the empire fragmented for quite different reasons. But the image of barbarian invasion is powerful, and the complex arguments of historians have at best limited purchase on popular understanding.

More recently, the prophets of doom have turned to an earlier period of Roman history: the collapse of the Roman Republic into civil war, followed by the autocracy of Augustus and his successors. A Belgian ancient historian called David Engels claims in a book that has been eagerly seized on by right-wing websites that Europe exhibits the same symptoms as first-century BCE Rome – unemployment, family breakdown, the decline of traditional religion and so forth – and so will inevitably fall into civil war, leading eventually to the popular acclamation of a single charismatic dictator. Even more improbably, former UKIP MP Douglas Carswell is about to publish a book arguing that late Republican Rome shows how Brexit was not nasty populism but a sober restoration of liberal values.

Even if such comparisons were exact, rather than vague and largely fictional, there is still no reason to imagine that events will therefore repeat themselves. The EU is not Rome reborn, or classical Greece; but because of the importance of the classical world for Europe’s culture and sense of identity, people will persist in claiming that it is, so they can claim that it’s doomed. As Thucydides remarked, in one of the founding statements of European thought: “so little trouble do people take to seek out the truth, and so readily do they accept whatever they first hear.”

But There Aren’t Any Real People Here At All

As regular readers may faintly recall, one of my minor projects for March was to monitor all the occasions when that stupid William F. Butler quote about “A society that separates its scholars from its warriors…” was attributed on the Twitter to Thucydides, if only to work out precisely how much of a waste of time it is for the Thucydiocy Bot (@Thucydiocy) to keep correcting it. The results are now in, and the conclusion is: lots.

The line was quoted, attributed to Thucydides, 74 times, by 53 different accounts. 64 of these featured the weird picture of some students in academic costume that I talked about a while back. When @Thucydiocy replied with a correction, just two people responded (one other account simply followed without any comment, which I suspect was an automatic response); two other accounts deleted the tweets in question; two others blocked @Thucydiocy.

it’s now overwhelmingly obvious that the majority of these quotes – and above all the ones with the picture are being tweeted automatically by accounts signed up to a ‘social jukebox’ service (see http://www.socialjukebox.com). The free version sends out 5 tweets per day, of which 1 is customised and directly related to the business behind the account (see e.g. @MtsLimousine). For $19.99 per month, you can send out far more, running several different accounts if you wish; @JeanneCEvans tweets 80 or more times a day, mostly ‘words of wisdom’/’tips for success’ quotes interspersed with advertisements for gadgets promoting wellness, while the connected accounts @anneduncanlive and @highimpacthabit fire out over 200 per day, with plenty of links to videos and webpages promising success in business and digital marketing.

Only 8 of the accounts showed no immediate evidence of having any sort of business interest to promote – no mention in the biography, no website (I haven’t bothered to go through all their tweets to check whether I’m being too naive and optimistic – after all, Social Jukebox and its relatives are selling themselves to small businesses, and why would anyone else sign up to Twitter and then have all their tweets sent out automatically from a limited preprogrammed repertoire?). Among the business accounts, there’s a clear preponderance of digital marketing consultants (12), wellness, mindfulness and psychic advisers (8) and secrets of business success people (6), followed by limousine hire firms (4) and a miscellaneous tail of accommodation finders, travel consultants, sellers of expensive watches and a house cleaning service.

The graduation picture seems to be a pretty sure sign of someone using this service – but the quote without a picture isn’t a guarantee of genuineness, as among the accounts tweeting the quote alone were @alphabetsuccess, the CEO of Social Jukebox Tim Fargo, and @tweet_jukebox another branch of his enterprise. The clearest indicator of a Social Jukebox user, however, is the fact that sooner or later the account tweets quotations from that famous thinker and sage…Tim Fargo.

In sum, the evidence suggests that the vast majority of accounts tweeting this line are automatic, coordinated by the sinister mind-polluting enterprise that is Social Jukebox – and that I should simply ignore them, except to relieve occasional frustration by hurling abuse at their terrible approach to social media, ‘cos it’s not as if they’re real people who might be upset…

Rewriting the Past (Again)

Ideas matter. Perceptions, expectations and beliefs, however detached they may be from reality, matter. This is clear enough from the events of the last year, with the votes in the UK and the USA; and, for all that the ‘Thucydides Trap’ (currently enjoying another burst of publicity) presents global events as the predictable outcome of impersonal dynamics in the relationship between objectively-defined established and rising powers, it’s clear from Thucydides’ account. The events of the Peloponnesian War were shaped above all by the desires, fears, assumptions and misconceptions of individuals – with disastrous consequences.

Thucydides’ complaint that most people take no trouble to enquire properly into the truth but simply accept the first story they hear (especially if it’s from Herodotus)  is often read as a statement of smug, elitist superiority – the epitome of the ivory-tower expert, trashing the sincerely-held beliefs of ordinary folk. We might better see it as a cry of anguish: this is the ultimate cause of all the miseries that the Greeks inflicted on themselves, this is the problem that his entire work is devoted to addressing.

History can seem trivial, a matter of mere entertainment – a source of jokes about the king of Spain’s beard – but of course one of the reasons that Brexit negotiations have gone wrong so quickly is the dominance of myths and misconceptions about the past among too many politicians and ordinary Britons, fuelled by a media that probably does know better but doesn’t care (see the excellent history syllabus proposed by Onni Gust: http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/the...).

It feels even more pressing in other regions of Europe; in Lithuania, for example, where they fear the gradual rewriting of the past in order to cast doubt on the state’s legitimacy and the integrity of its border (see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/03/lithuania-fears-russian-propaganda-is-prelude-to-eventual-invasion?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other). The idea that Lithuania’s claim to parts of its current territory is undermined by the fact that they were once incorporated into other kingdoms is scarcely more persuasive than the idea that parts of Russia and Ukraine, to say nothing of Belarus, should be handed over because they were once part of the Grand Duchy. But it’s enough to muddy the waters, to create doubt and the impression of a debate, to discourage anyone else from getting involved in what could be presented as an intractable, both-sides-as-bad-as-each-other local squabble. Just as in Crimea.

Truth matters. If we don’t make the effort to try to find it, we will be lost. The problem with ‘fake news’ is not that it’s something new, but that we seem to find it harder to make the effort to enquire into the truth…

 

 

Resisting the Thucydides Trap

Resistance is useless! The zombies are coming! About eighteen months ago, I suggested that the impact of my research into the modern reception of Thucydides might be measured by how far discussions of world affairs in the British media remained uncontaminated by the ‘Thucydides Trap’ meme that crops up whenever someone in the US talks about China. Well, so much for that. Earlier this month, the phrase turned up at the end of a letter in the London Review of Books – without any explanation, suggesting that not only the author but the Letters Editor were treating it as a sufficiently familiar idea not to need any context – and now Gideon Rachman (who really deserves a lot of the blame for publicising the idea on this side of the Atlantic) has opened a review essay in the Financial Times on US-China relations books with Graham Allison’s new book-length version of his theory, prompting the sub-editor to include it in the headline. Rachman raises some questions about Allison’s argument, in particular the familiar issue of whether nuclear weapons have changed the whole dynamic of such (alleged) great power relationships – but he takes Allison’s reading of Thucydides as read. Sigh.

I don’t actually think I have much to say about the ‘Thucydides Trap’ at the moment, other than “oh, do go away”, but this seems an opportune moment to update the list of blog posts where I’ve ranted more energetically about the wretched thing, for ease of reference…

The Thucydides Trap Once Again (list of blog posts up to February last year)

Questions of Character

Starter for Ten (if we’re stuck with ‘The Thucydides Trap’ as a thing, let’s make it a panel game)

Thucydides Trap, China and Trump

Plus, if you haven’t already read it, see T. Greer’s excellent piece as part of the zenpundit.com seminar on Thucydides back in the autumn.