Neville Morley's Blog, page 52

If It Comes Up Mud…

I am not a gambling man – but I know a pretty sure thing when I see one. David Engels has written a substantial rejoinder to the critique of his ‘The EU Is Doomed, Because Rome’ argument written by Roland Steinacher and me, characterising it as an Althistorikerstreit, and concludes with the suggestion that time will show whether he’s right or not. Fair enough; if over the next 20-30 years Europe collapses into civil war – and it’s worth stressing that this is not about a return to warring nation states, according to Engels’ model, but about conflict between suburbs and districts within different regions of Europe – and then willingly surrenders in toto to a single charismatic autocrat, then he wins, and as the prophet of the new regime will presumably be in a position to have me locked up and my property confiscated. We win if it doesn’t. My real problem is deciding what the stakes should be; let’s say 10 litres of fresh water, as that will be worth its weight in gold in any post-apocalyptical wasteland you care to imagine, and will be perfectly serviceable in any case.

Now, Engels is not actually daft enough to propose such a bet; his proposition actually represents a substantial rowing-back on his original claims:

Wenn wir in 20 oder 30 Jahren keine verheerenden zivilen Unruhen erlebt haben und zudem in einer nicht nur dem Namen, sondern auch der Sache nach wahrhaft offenen, demokratischen, bürgernahen und vielfältigen Gesellschaft leben werden, dann wird es erlaubt sein, meine Vorhersagen (und somit auch meine Methode) getrost auf das Verlustkonto der Geschichtswissenschaft zu verbuchen…

No, I don’t think so. We’ve suddenly shifted from “the history of the late Roman Republic shows the path that Europe is destined to follow” to the much vaguer assertion that “there will be civil unrest, and a range of problems with the legitimacy of European democracies and multicultural societies” – which is a wager more along the lines of “I bet I know what the weather was like yesterday”.

If the only solid, testable components of the theory are things that are already true, then it’s difficult to see what Roman history adds to the discussion beyond a veneer of scholarship and a claim of Historical Inevitability. Roland and I are not idiots; we’re not claiming that there are no issues with contemporary Europe or the EU, let alone claiming to predict that everything is guaranteed to be wonderful. Rather, we simply reject the claim that history – any history – can tell us what will happen in future. We find Engels’ particular claims especially problematic – I mean, seriously, a pan-European autocrat? – but this is about the general principle of what we can and can’t learn from the past, not about proposing a rival vision of future events. Maybe that was a mistake; clearly there’s more money and publicity in making prophecies than debunking them.

The original Historikerstreit was focused on the interpretation of Germany’s recent past, with only one side emphasising the contemporary political resonances of this while the other tried to insist on history as an apolitical, objective search for truth. Insofar as the current debate can be labelled an Althistorikerstreit – that really does seem much too grandiose, though I promise to change my mind on this if Habermas weighs in – then it is one in which the interpretation of the past is a secondary matter, even if I do have serious doubts about many aspects of Engels’ account of the Roman Republic. Rather, we both accept that past and present are intertwined, that the present inevitably influences our understanding of the past and that it is not merely reasonable but actually essential for historians to think about how their knowledge and understanding might help us in our present circumstances. The question is: how do we best go about this, and what do we historians actually have to offer?

A recent UK survey suggests that historians are among the most trusted professions – at least when they are talking about their own area of expertise – ranking miles above economists, let alone politicians. There’s no indication of why this view is held; my guess would be some combination of acceptance of our claims to research integrity and basing everything in the evidence, a belief that the past is something about which one can have reliable knowledge rather than just opinion, and recognition of the low-stakes nature of the subject matter, so that it’s neither in our interests to lie about the past nor in the interests of the media to rubbish our expertise on a regular basis.

The existence of such trust places a responsibility on us: not to undermine it by abandoning the principles of historical research and argument, and not to abuse it by drawing on historical authority to push a different agenda. That isn’t to say that historians cannot express political opinions or produce simplified popular accounts, but in both cases this needs to be done with responsibility: the simplification as a necessary compromise for the sake of accessibility, with the aim of moving the reader/viewer towards a more complex understanding, rather than peddling any old rubbish for the money with contempt for the audience; political opinions either clearly presented as personal rather than professional, acknowledging that we’re now speaking beyond our area of expertise simply as well-informed citizens, or presented in a professional manner, caveats and all.

Engels has regularly stressed that he is not promoting a political agenda, but simply reflecting on what he, as a historian, sees when he compares the present with the Roman Republic. It’s the Buffy defence, effectively: “I didn’t jump to conclusions. I took a tiny step, and there conclusions were.” I confess I find it a little hard to believe that someone would write, and energetically promote, an entire book about the comparison between Rome’s decline and the present state of Europe without the slightest hint of a political agenda, but let’s take this at face value. I still think there’s a problem.

When we put ideas out into the wider world, we cannot fully control what other people may make of them – but that doesn’t relieve us of responsibility; on the contrary, especially in a context where classical ideas and models have suddenly acquired contemporary salience, we need to write in full consciousness that our ideas may be used and abused by others. If we can’t stop them, we can at least protest and try to push back. If I feel my ideas have been taken out of context or misinterpreted, or simply used to support an agenda about which I feel deeply uncomfortable, I would certainly want to object.

“History shows” that the EU is doomed to failure? Good lord, never imagined that this might be taken up by right-wing nationalists and the stooges of hostile powers who are actively seeking to bring down the European project. “History shows” that European culture is a unified body of values that’s intrinsically incompatible with Islam or other foreign stuff? I am shocked, shocked that this would be seized upon by racists and Islamophobes…

My disagreement with Engels is not because I believe all is well in Europe, but because the present state of affairs frightens me. We can argue about the EU’s democratic deficit, disastrous austerity policies and so forth: fine, that’s all part of political debate. Claiming that “History shows” the entire enterprise is doomed, however, is an attempt at circumventing and terminating discussion, at presenting an individual political opinion about the EU as an objective feature of reality.

Yes, in a couple of decades we can see what’s happened – but that, in its simple form, implies that ideas have no power to shape events. On the contrary, claims about What History Shows can become self-fulfilling if they persuade enough people. “The EU is doomed, Because Rome” thesis is either a conscious contribution to efforts to bring that about, or an abdication of responsibility for how others might make use of such ideas.

Thucydides Oikonomikos

The publication of Yanis Varoufakis’ And The Weak Suffer What They Must? in paperback has been heralded by a short video in which James Galbraith, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek and Jeffrey Sachs offer their praise; the latter presents him as “the Thucydides of our time”, and Vintage have taken that as a key line for their publicity. It’s an interesting indication of the contemporary standing of Thucydides – but also a little puzzling.

The Thucydiocy Bot, having expressed scepticism on this point, got into an entertaining little spat with the Vintage Twitter account, who doubled down on the claim: Varoufakis had written a history of the European project (this was repeated several times) that revealed the democratic deficit at its heart, hence the suffering of the weak. Okay… I have to confess that Varoufakis’ book, which I bought in hardback last year, is still sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to work through a list of more urgent tasks before I can do a proper analysis of his use of the Melian Dialogue – which I do have some hopes for. So, I can’t refute this claim – but on the basis of what I have read, I’d be inclined to say that this looks like a critique with some historical overview rather than a history in the normal sense.

Even if we use a broader definition and grant this the status of history, it’s hard to see what makes it Thucydidean. Certainly not the structure or organisation; it resolutely avoids a chronological narrative in favour of jumping backwards and forwards in time. It’s also much more personal than we’d expect from Thucydides. Varoufakis does echo some key themes, above all the Melian Dialogue from which his title is of course taken. But it’s a stretch to claim that Thucydides’ account is about the democratic deficit at the heart of the Athenian Empire; if anything, as someone else pointed out on the Twitter, his concern is with the problems of an excess of democracy. ‘Thucydidean’ here appears to be a set of ideas confined to the Melian Dialogue, and perhaps an image of the calm, illusionless analyst of human weakness.

To be fair to Varoufakis, I don’t have any reason to suppose that he is making this comparison himself; I would guess that he just talks about Thucydides a lot, and that Sachs – about whose knowledge of Thucydides, beyond what he’s read in Varoufakis, I know nothing – has spotted this as an appropriate compliment to offer. It could actually seem a bit double-edged, given that Thucydides’ brief career in public service was a bit of a shambles – or maybe deliberately non-committal, coming from an economist, pointedly *not* comparing Varoufakis to, say, Stiglitz, Krugman or Keynes.

What it reminded me of – and I’m well aware that I’m probably in a minority of one here – is Marx’s habit of referring to Wilhelm Roscher as “the Thucydides of Political Economy” or “Herr Thucydides Roscher”. Roscher had written the book on Thucydides earlier in his career, and persisted in the claim – presumably sincere, though definitely bizarre – that he’d learnt as much about political economy from Thucydides as from any other writer, ancient or modern. Marx picked up on his frequent references – but not as a compliment; rather to highlight the incongruity, both between Roscher’s pretensions and the reality of his work, and of introducing Thucydides into discussions of modern capitalism at all.

Being “the Thucydides of Political Economy” is a category error, like being the Picasso of particle physics; striking and original, but not actually what is required. There’s a more plausible case that we could do with a “Thucydides of our time”, though with lots of scope for arguing over what that actually means. Certainly, however, we can follow Varoufakis in thinking that what we need is the original Thucydides, who, read in the right way, can speak to our time.

Bring On The Night

“The future is dark, the present burdensome. Only the past, dead and buried, bears contemplation.” Thus G.R. Elton in The Practice of History, a book that I read at an impressionable age and so can still quote large chunks verbatim despite disagreeing with most of it. This line has always struck me as particularly, but interestingly, wrong; it encapsulates, tongue in cheek, the essentially conservative view of history as a means of escape into a past that is always conceived as preferable to the present – if only because it’s already over, so human suffering is more bearable (echoes again of Hegel’s account of history as the view from the shore of a distant shipwreck). It’s also linked to an explicit anti-determinism; there is no underlying logic to historical development, so the past speaks only to itself, not to the present, let alone to the future. Stuff happens, and we can grasp it properly only in retrospect.

My instinct, both as a historian and as a political being, is to reject such an attempt at presenting history as a mere luxury, an exercise in leisured reflection – doubtless from an expensively upholstered armchair in a private library – with no possibility of gaining any traction on the present. But in present circumstances, struggling to keep one’s head above the rising tide of crude historical analogies, it’s tempting to wish that more people shared Elton’s perspective. “How the reign of Galerius explains Trump! If you squint at it in the right way! Episode 173.”

Partly, it’s the superficiality of the historical account – a selection of ancient sources taken entirely at face value so long as they can be presented in presentist terms. Partly it’s the obsessive focus on (faint) resemblances between past and present, ignoring the vast differences. Partly, as I’ve discussed obsessively on here, it’s the unstated implications for understanding the nature of historical developments – including the political implications of seeing everything in terms of individuals and short-term events. In brief, the vast majority of these evocations of the past are Not Helpful (because largely trite and silly).

Of course, much of this can be explained by the fact that they’re not intended to be helpful, or at least not in my terms. This is exemplified by the claims of David Engels about resemblances between the fall of the Roman Republic and the likely fate of the EU; first developed in his 2013 book Le Déclin. La crise de l’Union européenne et la chute de la République romaine. Quelques analogies (German translation 2014) and revived last week by an interview with the German version of The Huffington Post, which was then picked up and celebrated by a range of right-wing websites. In brief, there are numerous points of comparison between Rome and modern Europe (unemployment, family breakdown, decline of traditional religion, fundamentalism, excessive consumption of honeyed dormice etc.), so inevitably Europe is going to fall into civil war until a charismatic figure appears in 20-30 years’ time to establish an autocracy.

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Roland Steinacher and I have written a critical response to some of these claims (apologies to those who don’t read German; I guess an English version may appear at some point…); here, I want to reflect on something that doesn’t really belong in a sensible commentary, namely speculation on the underlying psychology of this sort of argument. Why are so many people longing for apocalypse? Studying history in order to feel powerless and doomed? Those who remember the past to see what we’re condemned to repeat?

At least the sorts of crude Marxist determinism that Elton hated were, in their own terms, optimistic: the past reveals the dynamics of history that are leading us through conflict and contradiction to Communism – or at any rate it reveals that capitalism is not eternal, it has not always existed and so won’t exist for ever. These contemporary analogies, in contrast, offer crude anti-progressivism and absolute pessimism: not just scepticism about the possibility of human improvement, hence a sense of the fragility of society and civilisation, but an active celebration of their imminent demolition.

This is explicit in the case of many of the right-wing sites that have picked up on the Engels interview, echoing Steve Bannon in their longing for chaos and apocalyptical destruction as the foundation of a new world order. Engels himself doesn’t appear to be celebrating the collapse of Europe that he predicts; he emphasises that, as a father, he finds the prospect alarming. But, if we take that claim at face value, why does he then promote such a vision at such length?

One possible answer might be offered by A.L. Rowse’s catty remark about Oswald Spengler: “Because the Germans were going the way to defeat, Western civilisation is to be regarded as coming to an end”. In other words, Engels’ particular situation as a resident of Brussels and its recent problems with social fragmentation/Islamist terrorism/etc. are being extrapolated to the whole of Europe (indeed, this can be seen in the way he substitutes an image of Europe fragmenting into isolated and mutually hostile ‘suburbs’ for the wholly implausible idea of a European civil war on the Roman model).

Is this also a vision of apocalypse that offers the prospect of escape for a few with foresight and luck? After all, there were winners in the Roman civil war, and the point of Bannon’s vision is that it conveniently sweeps away the old order so that people like him can build a new one. European readers delighting in the idea that a Proper Historian has predicted the collapse of the EU don’t think that it’s going to harm them (but the rest of the continent can burn…).

Failing that, I think we’re into the realms of psychology: Freud’s death drive, for example, coming to terms with one’s own mortality by willing the destruction of everything else as well. The crazy thing is that there are rational reasons for concern about the future prospects of humanity – but these are focused precisely on the sorts of things, like climate change, that the right wants to deny or at least ignore in the hope that they’ll go away. Yes, we’re all going to die – but we’re going to die in a manner approved of by precedent, as it’s all happened before…

Can’t Hack It?

I don’t have the time or the patience to look through more than a couple of pages of search results, so this is not a definitive conclusion, but Googling the phrase “hacking history” produces plenty of accounts of the history of computer hacking, and not a lot else. There’s a summary of a 2014 talk on how the rise of digital tools ought to have led to a democratization of the production of history, and an advertisement for a History Hacker’s Camp on a farm museum in Maryland in June (tickets still available!), where children can learn all about farm life in the early 20th century through practical activities; in both cases, “hacking” seems to be little more than shorthand for “new and exciting!!!” Finally, if you look instead for “history has been hacked”, you’ll find an Assassin’s Creed III tie-in where you have to identify how the historical record has been tampered with, and a collection of links to claims that history as we know it is all a lie, the Trojan War was actually the same event as the First Crusade, the Book of Revelation was written in 1486, and no life’s just too short to start on this nonsense.

Why am I worrying about any of this? Because of the opening sentence of an essay by Mike Davis in Jacobin, ‘The Great God Trump and the White Working Class’:

History has been hacked. Trump’s “impossible” victories in June and November, together with the stunning challenge of Sanders’s primary campaign, have demolished much of elite political wisdom as well as destroying the two dynasties, the Clintons and Bushes, that have dominated national politics for thirty years. Not since Watergate has so much uncertainty and potential disorder infected every institution, network, and power relationship, including the Trump camp itself. What was unimaginable a few months ago, has now come to pass…

Okay, I will concede that life at present does often feel like switching on the world to find the keyboard is unresponsive and the screen is dominated by an orange-haired skull laughing at you and demanding $20 billion not to blow everything up. But ‘hacking’ is something that’s done to a machine or a computer programme, to make it work better or differently, to take control of it or divert or sabotage it. The USA has been hacked (literally and metaphorically): fine. The world has been hacked? Maybe. But history? Does history have a code or mechanism that makes it operate predictably unless this is interfered with by external agency? There’s a big difference between things taking an unexpected turn, and the idea that the machinery of historical development has been tampered with while it’s running, rather than the historical record being altered retrospectively.

The thrust of Davis’ opening argument is the reasonable claim that hardly anyone expected the election of Trump (or Brexit, for that matter); from that perspective, it does indeed seem as if the proper course of events has been derailed, a spanner thrown in the works, a pothole in the road that’s broken the axle – but only from that (elite/mainstream) perspective, whereas that opening sentence adopts the same perspective without any hint of irony. No, history hasn’t “gone wrong” in any meaningful sense (though obviously this is the darkest timeline. Wait, there are other timelines?). This is how it works: people do things, people respond to other people’s words and actions, people make decisions, things happen (that’s the simplified, anthropocentric version). There is no objectively correct or predestined way in which things ought to happen – the Whig Theory of History is bad enough when it’s applied retrospectively. Are we really so insulated from risk and uncertainty in normal life that this comes as a shock? Or is this an attempt to get down with the young people and their lingo, without quite thinking through the implications of the phrase..?

Red Shoes

The most interesting and provocative comment on Rachel Moss’s wonderful blog post last month on Choosing Not To Give, on the sacrifices that women are expected to make in academic culture, was from Lucy Northenra: “How many women are remembered for their ability to never miss a school run compared to those who manage against all the odds to publish enough to be made professors?” Rachel’s response was equally passionate: “I may well only have one child, and during the week I see her for an hour in the morning and an hour and a half in the evening. Perhaps I might somehow write an extra 4* publication if I gave up one of those hours each day. For me, the cost isn’t worth it.”

Do you want to be remembered as a great scholar but a lousy parent – or not remembered at all except by your nearest and dearest? Why are you mucking about with plasticine instead of changing the world? Why are you wasting time on an article that five people will read with limited attention when you could be making a real difference to one or two individuals who completely depend on you? Such dilemmas go to the heart of academic ambitions and self-image.* Who do I think I really am, who do I want to be, and what to do about all the things that threaten to get in the way?

This issue of personal and creative compromise, of the choices we have to make in life, lies at the heart of two equally brilliant works of art that I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks: Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes at Sadlers Wells, and La La Land. Perhaps because I came to them after reading Rachel’s post, and perhaps because this is something I think about quite a lot anyway**, I’ve found myself returning to their common themes and concerns, reading each against the other and measuring my own life against them – as well as humming a lot. In both cases, the lead characters face painful choices between different paths, in a manner that speaks to much more than their niche concerns of ballet and Hollywood respectively – or at least speaks to those of us, like academics, who treasure a sense of ourselves as being full of creative potential if only we had the full opportunity to develop it.

In the original Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, the red shoes are the devil’s snare and punishment for vanity and godlessness. In both the Powell & Pressburger film and the Bourne ballet that’s based on it, they are curse and blessing: they represent the ability to produce great art, at the cost of renouncing other aspects of life. Is artistic perfection worth the sacrifice of love? Lermontov, the impresario, insists that it is; he sees Vicky Page solely in terms of her potential for greatness, and cannot comprehend any other attitude to life. Vicky disagrees, choosing instead her love for the composer Julian – but is then faced with the question of whether love is worth the sacrifice of art; what is she, if she can no longer fully express what’s inside her, but is reduced to dancing burlesque (a lovely and hilarious touch in Bourne’s version)? There are echoes here, I think, of Andersen’s other great foot-fetish story, The Little Mermaid, who for the sake of love denies her true nature and suffers the agony of it every day. It’s not the red shoes that kill Vicky, it’s the necessity of making this choice between different parts of herself, which drives her mad and leads to her suicide.

You could say that at least Vicky knows exactly what her choices are: true art or true love. La La Land flirts with a darker strain of tragedy in showing how Mia and Seb are both contemplating the sacrifice of health, happiness and love for things that may prove utterly illusory. We root for Mia, but there’s not much evidence from her auditions or performances that she’s genuinely a brilliant actress; Seb’s drive, meanwhile, is not to produce great music, for all his snobbery on the subject, but to open a bar for which no audience may exist. The former pursues fame, the latter a fantasy; they are committed to the dream, but with no confidence that it will actually justify their endeavours.

But the emotions are still real: despair when the dream seems increasingly beyond reach, the feeling of utter failure and the destruction of self-image when Mia gives up and goes home, Seb’s anger and frustration at the compromises that he feels he has to make with his music. Both seem terrified of losing the thing that gives them a sense of themselves. It all feels very familiar from the academic life course, even if for me some of it is well in the past: the feelings of failure and nagging imposter syndrome, the constant questioning of how long it’s worth plugging on with auditions and menial jobs, the sense of having to compromise one’s academic/artistic values for pragmatic ends – and the nagging doubt about whether it’s actually worth the struggle, the suspicion that surely plagues even Seb occasionally that his passion is of no interest to anyone else. Is a dream a lie if it doesn’t come true? What if it all turns out to have been wasted time? How much is it worth?

This is the curse of the Red Shoes; a punishment not so much for vanity (though that can’t be ruled out completely) but for ambition. We’ve dared to believe in our own possibility; we’ve put on the Red Shoes, and they will drive us to drive ourselves into the ground, to sacrifice others for the sake of art and knowledge, to feel frustrated at every necessary compromise. We do it to ourselves, and that of course is why it really hurts…

*I am conscious that by presenting it in those more general terms I’m moving away from the focus of Rachel’s discussion and the question of gendered roles and expectations. I don’t deny for a moment that there is a long and not yet extinct tradition of male academics solving the problem of the necessary compromise between work and life by dumping all responsibility for domestic and emotion labour onto their long-suffering wives and partners: “Hush, children, Daddy’s writing deathless prose.” But this is slowly changing, as Rachel and a number of the commentators noted, and so the dilemma is becoming more universal even if still very unbalanced.

Indeed – at risk of getting yelled at by a lot of people – I vaguely wonder how far Seb, while in various respects the epitome of the narcissistic male jazz snob (yes, I know the ‘male’ is a bit redundant there), actually takes on more of the traditionally female role in the relationship: he compromises his artistic principles and dreams to make sure there’s a meal on the table (albeit with a fair degree of resentment at the lack of recognition for this – “I thought it’s what you wanted!”), he’s the one who’s constantly urging Mia on and supporting her ambition (yes, he misses her one-woman show – but because he’s stuck with unavoidable commitments as a result of the aforementioned compromising gig, not because he’s off boozing with his mates or prioritising his own ambitions). In both the real ending and Mia’s fantasy alternative, she gets the fame, husband, big house and baby; it’s Seb who’s shown giving up his own dream for her sake – in the fantasy – though of course we don’t get to see his fantasy in which maybe Mia is waiting at home with the kids while he hangs out in his bar…

**Not necessarily that domestic life is getting in the way of my brilliant contributions to scholarship, but more often that the demands of the day job take time away from the veg garden and my development of innovative salami flavours, and heaven only knows when I’ll ever be able to write my novel…

Because: Reasons

This morning’s developments – Trump sacking the acting Attorney General Sally Yates for ‘betrayal’ – has brought to mind one of the more frustrating episodes of my teaching career.* Some years ago I was advising a mature student, a retired commercial lawyer, on his Masters thesis; lovely bloke, good knowledge of the material, interesting ideas, but we hit a complete impasse when it came to his style of argument. He would cite a passage from a source as if its meaning were obvious, or at best assert his understanding of it and move on; or he would make a statement, with a reference to a single modern source, and then treat the matter as settled. Our meetings increasingly became variants on the same basic conversation: “Don’t you think it might be more complex than that?” “No.” “What about these other interpretations and arguments?” “I don’t agree with them.” “Don’t you think you should set out your reasons for rejecting them?” “No, I don’t see that.”

Today, with hindsight and a lot more experience, I would move rapidly to the “well, the norms of historical discourse say that you bloody well should, so you need to change your approach or you’re going to fail” gambit.** As it was, I tried a more indirect tack, trying to engage with his past experience. After all, my mother had trained as a barrister, and I grew up with competing styles of argument and a certain amount of meta-commentary on the subject (that is to say, my father, who as a mathematician had different standards, characterising the legal style as represented by my mother as “The window is not broken. Even if it is broken, it wasn’t me. Even if it was me, it was an accident.”). Surely, I argued, the law is all about interpretation and argument, considering the different ways in which a given situation might be understood and the different laws that might apply, depending on how they’re interpreted? Not in business, he replied. “If the Managing Director asks me a question, he wants a straight answer about what the law says, not all this humming and hawing.”

Obviously it would be illegitimate to conclude from a single anecdote that the entire business world is like this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a fairly common attitude. The charitable interpretation is that it’s a means of limiting the number of variables for the purposes of planning and strategy: the lawyer’s job here is not to multiply uncertainties but to help establish parameters. As with any sort of model, the existence of complexity is not denied, but it’s discounted for the moment on the basis of a “good enough” assumption. The less charitable reading is that MDs, chief executives and the like are deranged tyrants who will happily decree complexity to be non-existent if it interferes with their plans, on the assumption that if things go wrong they can always blame the lawyer or other underlings. Someone who insists on reminding them that the world (or the law) may be resistant to their desires is simply asking to be fired.

Increasingly, incidentally, I suspect that the vogue for motivational quotations from figures like Socrates and Thucydides, endlessly retweeted by business-related bots, is closely related to this phenomenon: the belief that the world is governed by simple principles, and all you need to do is find the correct one that will lead you to business success. Yes, I really should find the time to write The Strong Do What They Can: The Real Art of Negotiation According to Thucydides… It was inevitable that Trump would become frustrated with institutions and individuals who dared to disagree with him or suggest that his plans might not be realisable or legal; it’s only a surprise that it’s happened so quickly and comprehensively.

Extreme cases make bad law; speculating about the undesirable consequences of certain patterns of thought on the basis of a single narcissistic sociopath would be rather rash. Still, I do wonder about the prevalence of such thinking: assuming away complexity and ambiguity can be a powerful and effective form of analysis, of course, but it’s risky if there is no recognition that complexity and ambiguity are still there even if you temporarily pretend that they aren’t – e.g. my student’s apparent belief that, because the anti-ambiguity approach works in the Real World of business, therefore historians’ obsession with issues of uncertainty and interpretation is a ridiculous bit of self-indulgence that gets in the way of actual knowledge.

The core of our task as teachers of humanities subjects at university level could be seen as helping students to learn how to think critically, to move from the rote learning they experienced at school to a proper engagement with evidence and competing interpretations. But how often do they get stuck halfway (temporarily, one hopes), recognising the need to provide evidence to support statements but thinking that their job is done when they’ve put in a reference? The idea that they need to consider different interpretations and arguments, and to test their own ideas as rigorously as possible, may be as big a step for them as the shift at the beginning of their university studies from learning not just to regurgitate authority.

I’ve always had a certain nervousness about the idea of ‘Evidence-Based Policy’ on the same basis: what we academics mean by it is of course ‘policy based on a proper review of all the evidence’, but in practice it often becomes ‘policy for which we can cite something that fits what we were planning to do anyway’. Likewise – at the risk of this descending into absolute banality – in wider political discourse; leaving aside the tendency of authoritarian governments simply to invent their own ‘facts’, too often commentators (and everyone else) simply pick things that fit their world-view and ignore things that don’t – and are adept at dismissing contrary views as partisan.

That is probably the point. The core task of the historian (critic, philologist, whatever) is not only to read the evidence critically but to be self-critical. ‘Because: reasons’ is never enough: are they good reasons, and are my judgements reasonable? (Which cuts both ways; not just, am I too trusting of things that suit my assumptions, but also, am I too cynical about things that don’t?). This skill is essential at postgraduate level, and a student who manifestly fails to test their own arguments properly or to respond adequately to the counter-arguments and questions of the examiners is going to fail. But surely it ought to be essential for the many more students who head out into the world after their first degree, or we will be failing in our duty as teachers.

Well, at the moment I fear we are too often failing. We don’t generally have the sustained engagement with undergraduate students and their work that we do with postgrads; there’s insufficient time and resources for the detailed critique and discussion of their arguments, over time, that would properly support them in learning how to analyse and argue properly. Assessment systems test their knowledge and understanding at a specific moment – and I suspect that in many cases, even when I do comment on their approach to constructing an argument, this is not fully carried over to the next assignment, on a different topic and assessed by someone else. Of course we reward those who do engage properly with a range of evidence and interpretations, which is better than nothing; but those who take the ‘statement: reference of some sort’ approach don’t get failed for it, as it’s clearly a lot better than a load of unsupported assertions – which is to say, self-critical argument is not regarded as essential but only as desirable. Is that sufficient? I don’t think so.

What to do about this? I think it certainly requires the explicit teaching of historical theory and methodology, rather than treating this as something that will be picked up by osmosis or just by practice. It’s a focus of the feedback I offer on essays already – and I wish that more students would come to talk to me, both before and after – and next year I intend to try the approach pioneered in Exeter by my colleague Rebecca Langlands of a two-part written assignment, in which I can comment explicitly on a draft and then the final essay is assessed in part on the basis of how well the student has responded to criticism and suggestions. I’m open to further ideas…

*Yes, this is trivial and irrelevant in the face of world events, but it’s a coping strategy, and my next course in post-apocalypse survival skills (basic butchery) isn’t for another couple of months.

**Which won’t necessarily work – in this case, when I eventually became that blunt, the response was something to the effect of “well, that’s historical discourse’s problem; I think that’s silly” – but at least I’ll have covered myself professionally; the student then proceeds at his/her own risk.

The Mouse and the Crocodile

Once upon a time, a mouse decided to cross a great river, because it looked sunnier on the other side, and she didn’t like some of the other mice in her neighbourhood. Unfortunately there was no bridge and no ferry, but there was a large crocodile thrashing about and making angry noises. “If that crocodile will help me,” thought the mouse, “this will be very straightforward, and I’ll be on the other side enjoying the sunshine in no time.” And so she went across to talk to him.

“I’ve got the biggest teeth,” yelled the crocodile to no one in particular. “Simply huge. Magnificent teeth. And don’t forget the jaws. And my hands are great. Really great hands.”

“I think we have many common interests, and are both at the start of programmes of national renewal,” said the mouse, and climbed onto his back to make the journey across the river. And was of course eaten, possibly by accident.

Moral: WHY NOT THINK TWICE ABOUT CROSSING THE BLOODY RIVER FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE?

Art and Artlessness (Reprint Project)

I’ve been involved in an interesting exchange on the Twitter this morning with Helen Rogers (@helenrogers19c) and Will Pooley (@willpooley), both of whom work on different aspects of historical rhetoric, narrative and creative historiography about – well, those things, starting with the question of why ‘narrative’ is sometimes (often?) regarded as a dirty word by academic historians: too easy and simplistic, too focused on Great Individuals and traditional political/military history, too closely associated with popular history, too literary and hence liable to undermine modern critical historiography’s claim to have transcended the old ‘history as art’ model. Of course, none of those things is necessarily true, but that doesn’t necessarily make a difference, given how much is at stake in mainstream analytical historiography’s claim to offer a trustworthy, objective account of the past (and how fragile we know that claim actually is).

Partly as a distraction from the ongoing ghastliness elsewhere, this has prompted me to offer another installment in my – very, very slow – project to make available copies of various old articles that may not be readily available. This is one of my favourites, perhaps because of its utter obscurity: Narrative Economy, first published in P.F. Bang, M. Ikeguchi & H.G. Ziche, eds., Ancient Economies, Modern Methodologies: archaeology, comparative history, models and institutions (Bari: Edipuglia, 2006), pp. 27-47 – an analysis of the different rhetoric approaches of two historians of the Roman economy, Keith Hopkins and Richard Duncan-Jones. The idea was that economic history appears to be the most unrhetorical and artless of sub-disciplines, so demonstrating that it’s actually as rhetorical as everything else would make a general point about historiography…

Welcome to the Toga Party

The idea behind a Toga Party is obvious: to elevate the conventional student pursuit of drinking to excess by associating it with the well-established image of Roman decadence. Vomiting down one’s front is legitimised by classical precedent! To paraphrase Marx’s 18th Brumaire, the participants find in ancient history the self-deceptions necessary to conceal from themselves the humdrum nature of their activities. In a similar manner, the spate of Roman analogies for the rise of Trump serves to present our current historical predicament in more elevated terms as the crisis of the Republic and the potential triumph of decadent autocracy, as historical events in the grand old manner, rather than any of that tedious or depressingly complex analytical stuff. We are living in time of Great Men and Terrible Villainy and Heroic Deeds and Grand Gestures! The fact that this all derives from a thoroughly old-fashioned and dubious conception of history, just as the toga party is based on multiple layers of literary representation and reception, is beside the point, except for pedants like me. No, the Romans didn’t spend their entire time eating honeyed dormice, shagging their sisters and changing the course of World History with their speeches or battles – but ‘The Romans’ did, and that’s what matters.

A man stands before a crowd, trawling for votes. He’s rich and the son of a rich man, though his personal finances are tangled, he’s saddled with debt, and his career to date has been studded with scandal. Far from pretending to be good, he makes a virtue out of his lack of pretense, and plays up his excesses as extravagantly as he stokes the crowd’s resentment of his own class.

Call him Donald Trump. But this man is also Julius Caesar, Catiline, Clodius, and a legion of other men who lived in ancient Rome, from which the American Founders drew inspiration for the political system we have today.

This morning’s rant is prompted by the two latest iterations of the current ‘USA is the New Rome’ discourse, with Joy Connolly’s overview in the Village Voice of a series of allegedly Trump-like figures from the late Republic and their populist rhetoric (from which the above passage is taken) and Izabella Kaminska’s article in the Financial Times about ‘fake news’ in the confrontation between Octavian and Antony

As you’d expect from both these authors, the articles are substantially better informed and more interesting than the average – but they suffer from the same limited, misleading historical perspective. Connolly focuses on the rhetorical techniques of ‘populist’ politicians, the ways in which they denounced their enemies and played on the resentments of the masses – in a manner intended to heighten resemblances to Trump, but also with a slightly odd recurring  emphasis on the reception of the Roman Republic by the Founders of the United States, as if this automatically makes those resemblances more plausible or significant. Insofar as the wider context for these speeches is considered, it’s presented in terms of a growing divide between the elite and the mass of the population; not implausible, but scarcely the whole picture, and again clearly intended to resonate with the now-conventional account of our own situation.

Everything is then understood in terms of the ability of unscrupulous demagogues to take advantage of popular discontent – which tends to imply that historical developments are indeed shaped by the actions of a few larger-than-life individuals. There’s little reference to the institutions and structures of Roman politics, beyond the suggestion that they’d already failed; the idea that leading Romans were prisoners of circumstances, driven towards populism for the sake of self-preservation as much as they cynically sought to take advantage of it, doesn’t feature, because of course that’s one key respect in which the American situation is radically different. The USA needs to be the new Rome, so that ‘we’, the new Roman elite, can learn the lesson of the past that things can’t go on as they are.

Rome’s political class never succeeded in refreshing their own habits of speech and thought. They failed to probe and heal the alienation that had fragmented the republican community. Like today’s self-absorbed elites, they had become addicted to their wealth and to traditional authority, and never imagined their influence could disappear.

Kaminska avoids such overtly didactic statements; the message seems rather to be ‘nothing new under the sun’, as Octavian’s production of ‘fake news’ (accounts of Antony’s debauchery and sexual excesses – which come from Cicero’s Philippics rather than Octavian propaganda, but never mind – and rumours that he was under Cleopatra’s thumb and planning to move the empire to the east) allowed him to ‘hack the republican system’. There seems to be a certain amount of inconsistency in the account, not least the citation of Syme’s caution – “of the facts there is and was no authentic record”- followed by confident statements about how the Roman people viewed the whole thing.

The application of the idea of ‘fake news’ to the deliberate production of anti-Antony material, i.e. conventional political propaganda, seems to miss the point of the concept (and the suggestion that it is at least partly new, and closely connected to the rise of social media) completely; presumably that’s the aim, but it really needs to be argued more explicitly. Again, events are presented in terms of the actions and decisions of a single individual, Octavian, to win the struggle and then establish his power.

There certainly are interesting things to be said about the war of images and value-signalling between Octavian and Antony – and important work has been done on the basis of implicit comparisons with twentieth-century authoritarianism (not just Syme but also Zanker – but see Wallace-Hadrill’s criticisms of some of the underlying assumptions). However, these have to be informed by a clear sense of the radically different technological context: the slowness, and very partial reach, of any form of communication in a pre-modern society. Suggesting that the slogans (more often images, of course) on coins are like archaic tweets is cute – but it’s the differences between the Roman monetary system and Twitter, above all in terms of people’s use of them and their reception of the message, that seem more interesting, and certainly demand more careful analysis than a throwaway remark. Again, there seems to be an implicit argument about precedent here; no, Twitter isn’t actually new or interesting, this sort of thing goes back to the Romans, more or less.

People being people (Thucydides’ ‘human thing’), you can always find resemblances between past and present if you look hard enough; sometimes – and this can be discerned in Connolly’s article, though I’m not sure whether this was intended – the tradition of identifying such resemblances is so well established that we are conditioned to find them and treat them as emergent properties of the historical facts, rather than our own imaginative projections.

Marx’s point about the French revolutionaries draping themselves in the costumes of ancient Rome was that this was a self-deception as much as a deception – and that this belief in continuities and analogies then had consequences for actions and decisions. People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please… It’s unavoidable – but at least we can try to imitate Nietzsche’s historical men, in choosing our myths and analogies carefully, conscious of how this choice will shape our perception of the world.

Dressing up Trump et al in togas may be helpful – but if its purpose is simply to depict our present situation in the bright colours and exaggerated gestures of imaginative fantasy, whether of heroic great men or appalling decadence, then this is probably not what we need right now.

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Teaching Trump (Part I?)

This spring, I’m teaching on the Roman Principate, including the nature of political and social life under a capricious autocracy (think not only of the grotesque antics attributed to pantomime villains like Caligula or Nero, but also the air of casual menace in Trajan’s letters that prompts Pliny’s desperate, paranoid grovelling). I’m already wondering what to do about possible Trump analogies, given the prevalence of classical references in current discourse – all the Suetonius-style kinky stuff to add to Caligula’s horse references, consumption habits straight out of Trimalchio and so forth. I’m not (at least at the moment) planning to make any – given everything I’ve already written about the problems of seeing the world in such short-term, individualistic terms – but I can certainly imagine some of my students making such points or raising questions in discussion. Which could be tricky.

The problem is not the intrusion of the political into the neutral space of history, given that I don’t think history is remotely neutral or unpolitical, but rather the potential conflict with time and relevance. Now, if it’s in a seminar – we’re not doing Suetonius or Tacitus, as they feature heavily in another course, but will be looking at Pliny in depth – that’s fine: format is flexible and open-ended, so as long as they don’t wait until the final minute, there’s plenty of time to explore the different issues of evidence, competing interpretations, institutions versus informal relationships, different theories of power and so forth.

The problem is rather in lectures; there is time set aside for discussion, and questions are always encouraged – but in both cases this is rather more directed and goal-orientated than in seminars, as the aim is to cover a set body of material and ideas more or less adequately in the available time (with one two-hour session a week, running material over into the next class is an absolutely last resort). An unplanned 5-10 minute digression on, say, whether a tyrant’s sexual proclivities are really relevant or even ascertainable, let alone getting into issues of power and sexual consent in suitable depth, could throw the rest of the lecture off-balance – but at the same time, simply closing down any such question isn’t an option.

And of course an additional consideration is that the lectures are being recorded, if I forget to pause the system during discussion sections – though this is probably a bigger concern if I embark on a comparison of the absence of strategic thinking in the government of the Roman Empire, its dependence on a confused mixture of tradition, institutional inertia, factional self-interest, pragmatism, knee-jerk reactions to events and rulers’ whims as a basis for decision-making, with, I dunno, the current UK regime…

One possibility – which I’m going to have to decide on quite quickly, as the class is at half twelve – would be to address the more general issue directly via Augustus and Syme’s Roman Revolution (and Zanker’s Power of Images). That is, avoid the trite pantomime villain analogies (and signal them as something worth avoiding) by acknowledging the established tradition of making sense of the Principate – even or especially a ‘good’ emperor like Augustus – through comparison with modern autocracy, and vice versa. Focus on systems, on formal and informal institutions, and on the potential pitfalls of such comparisons – giving license to students to analyse Trump in these terms while attempting to judge that analysis in a more productive direction.

Put another way: my classes don’t try to pretend that history is apolitical, or that the past has nothing to offer the present, but I certainly don’t seek to impose any sort of party line. Start peddling crude Great Man Theories of History, however, and you’ll get stomped…