Neville Morley's Blog, page 53

Terrible, Yes, But Great

2016, as I reflected on at least one occasion, was a year that seemed to represent a return to old-fashioned l’histoire événementielle, where world-changing developments occurred at the sort of pace with which we humans feel naturally comfortable (indeed, sometimes a bit faster than we might have preferred) rather than unfolding over decades or centuries. Both Brexit and the election of Trump represented, or appeared to represent, the sorts of dramatic turning-points that make for an exciting narrative, played out on a human timescale. But in addition – and this is something that I noted in passing, but could have made more of – it seems to represent, or can be claimed as, a series of events driven by humans and human-level factors, rather than vast, mysterious and impersonal forces and processes. Indeed, the force of the ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ slogans is precisely that of a revolt against those who surrendered to abstract ideas like globalisation and the march of automation, in the false belief that they are more powerful than any human agency; we are presented with a reclaiming and repurposing of the progressive idea that something else besides eternal capitalism is still possible.

It struck me this morning that there may be a connection here to the sudden popularity of historical analogies, especially classical analogies, for contemporary political developments. Such evocations of the past, with claims about its immediate relevance, are in fact the evocation of a specific and tendentious kind of account of the past: a thoroughly old-fashioned political history, focused on the actions and decisions of a few larger-than-life individuals. Trump as Nero, or Cleon, or Hitler, or whatever, is ascribed the status of one of Hegel’s great historical men, capable of shaping the destiny of humanity; politics is presented as a drama of personalities, conflicts and individual pathology. International affairs are understood in terms of the motives and idiosyncrasies of Putin and a few others, nothing more abstract or complicated. Brexit is presented as the achievement of a few men – Newsnight editor Ian Katz’s view, expressed on Twitter, that Farage is “a major figure who’s changed course of Britain’s history”, or the self-serving accounts of someone like Banks – and/or as the failure of a few others to seize the moment or read the public mood.

It’s easy enough to see why the supporters of these individuals, and the cheer-leaders for these developments, should adopt such a perspective. It offers them the hope of change driven by human choice rather than vast impersonal forces – hence, of the sort of change that they might actually want, because there are now people in power who have promised them that it’s possible, and the sort of change they believe could then be reversed if it doesn’t turn out quite as planned. The world appears as malleable and controllable; the problems that other politicians claimed were intractable can in fact be solved through decisive action if only someone has the will and the courage. The forces of the market, of globalisation, of climate change and all the rest are revealed as paper tigers, invented by the elites as an excuse for self-interested inaction and personal enrichment.

The attraction for journalists, meanwhile, is that it makes the narrative more dramatic, conflict-based and focused on individuals; so, their default methods of interviewing individuals, retelling gossip and speculating on personalities and motives can be presented as the most appropriate and effective way to understand the situation, rather than a dereliction of the duty to interpret and explain.

Why, however, are the people opposed to such developments and/or with little sympathy for these larger-than-life individuals buying into this sort of narrative? These thoughts were originally prompted by Danielle Allen‘s piece in the Washington Post on reading Cicero’s De Officiis in the time of Trump. Of course, a focus on the individual makes sense insofar as the aim of that article is to offer a model for maintaining clarity of mind in the face of the maelstrom – but it still buys into a presentation of current US politics not just as resembling the fall of the Roman Republic but as resembling the Fall of the Republic understood, as Cicero did and as very old-fashioned political history does, as a clash of key individuals and their ambitions, rather than the product of longer-term structural changes that figures like Cicero manifestly failed to recognise or understand.

Does a reheated Great Man theory of history make it easier to see current developments as an accident, the result of a few personality quirks happening to chime with the historical moment, rather than a historic defeat for progressive values? Is the idea that the world is simpler than we thought and can be reshaped by the heroic action of individuals actually just as attractive to some on the left – we simply need to give the opportunity to the right individuals, a Sanders or a newly Trumpified Corbyn, in order to solve all those nasty issues with inequality, exclusion and climate change? Or is this a reaction of panic, trying to make sense of a terrifying turn of events by grasping traditional, familiar modes of historical analysis in the way that people persist in reaching for their guns when playing Call of Cthulhu?

It isn’t a universal reaction – and perhaps it makes more sense, psychologically, when one considers that the main alternative appears to be replacing the idea of globalisation as a force of irresistible transformation before which we must all bow with the idea of the Will of the People, variously characterised, as the immovable object around which we must all contort ourselves. The choice between despairing capitulation to such a force and an exaggerated belief in human capacity isn’t necessarily straightforward.

I’m reminded of the idea that the rise of postmodernism was in part a response to the failure of capitalism’s crises in the 1970s to produce revolution: the apparent failure of the conventional Marxist narrative of historical development led to a scepticism about grand narratives in general as an alternative to having to accept the triumphal claims of neoliberalism (or, as a tacit acceptance of them while trying to move the debate in a different direction). Now that the Fukuyama-esque narrative of the inexorable victory of capitalism and liberal democracy seems to have run into trouble as well, with a violent lurch into what looks like some version of the past – or, more likely, into something new and unexpected that we’re trying to make sense of by recourse to historical comparisons – we’re all scrabbling around for a response.

Perceiving the world as being at the mercy of the whims and tantrums of a few powerful individuals scarcely seems like a comforting view of things – but perhaps at a deeper level it works because it offers us familiar story patterns as a means of making sense of the situation. Our current predicament is raised to the level of tragedy and drama, with great deeds and decisive events; and monsters can be slain, and tyrants don’t live for ever. The alternative is to acknowledge uncertainty, as everything apparently solid evaporates and the ground beneath our feet starts to crumble…

[It belatedly occurs to me that this conclusion comes close to some of the ideas about the liquid world developed by the late Zygmunt Bauman, and if the bulk of this post hadn’t already been sketched out last week, I might have engaged more with that – though it’s some years since I read him.]

The Strong Do What They Want, Big Boy

I’ve just spent a fascinating morning at a workshop on Creative Pathways to Impact, splashing around well out of my depth and comfort zone, in search of further inspiration and possible creative collaborators for some of the ways I want to make use of Thucydides as a genuine ‘possession for all time’, a means of opening up questions about the complexity of the world, politics, power, rhetoric etc in the face of post-truth and post-democracy. One of the activities was the random drawing of cards, giving a research finding, a location and a form respectively, and then discussing as a group how one might enable the first of these of have an impact via the other two. So: Thucydides as a means of understanding the dynamics of power; phone box; street theatre.

The aim of the exercise was not to come up with actual plans, but to practice thinking outside the usual parameters, rather than just assuming that the road to impact is yet another exhibition or schools workshop – the key question always being, why should anyone care about your research? how are you going to get them to engage? Still, like any devotee of Borges and Calvino, I can’t resist the idea of descriptions of imaginary books – and so it’s not a big step to offer an account of some imaginary impact projects, especially ones that have no hope of ever attaining a real existence…

You’re walking past a phone box when it rings (yes, recollections of one of the passages in If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller…). If you answer it, the voice of Thucydides encourages to look at what’s happening outside (an escalating confrontation? staged by actors mingling with regular passers-by) with the historian’s-eye view afforded by the phone box, a good but never complete view on three sides, but with the possibility of analysing the situation. Probably, to ensure that the person stays on the phone until the end, we’ll need to have someone in position with a high-powered sniper’s rifle.

Or: you’re the sort of person who actually rings the numbers on those cards stuck up in phone boxes offering hot s&m action; you call, and a sexy, husky voice reads suitable extracts from the Melian Dialogue about power and domination. The aim of any of these exercises, according to the workshop, is to interrupt the flow (of everyday life, of assumptions, of desire) and to offer a gift at the end; so, people will engage with the number on the card because it seems to offer them what they want, and it will give them what they really need. Possibly.

This one seems technically feasible and relatively cheap to organise – even self-funding, if people have to pay to call the number. There must be online guides to setting up phone sex lines with recorded messages… I’m just not sure how to go about collecting the data to make this into a proper impact case study.

Incidentally, one major outcome of discussion was a strong sense that maybe Thucydides needs rebranding: no wonder that someone with a name that’s so hard to pronounce or remember remains primarily an elite, exclusive cultural possession. Any suggestions? Mr T?

2016 Part 2: Abendlandesdämmerung

See Part One here.

July A month of very conflicted emotions. On the one hand, back in Berlin; on the other hand, Brexit. On the one hand, the remarkable pleasure to be gained from the Ablehnung of a Ruf, and an opportunity to reflect on the sheer weirdness of German academic appointment processes; on the other hand, Brexit, and the thought that a job in Germany might be no bad thing. On the one hand, some actual research into cheap translations of Thucydides (though not in a REF-able publication, unless the rules change dramatically in the near future); on the other hand, my most-read post of the year on, you guessed it, Brexit…

August was a quieter month, largely because of the need to prepare new classes at the same time as writing papers for several different conferences and vowing not to accept so many enticing invitations in 2017. I did track down one of the more interesting fake Thucydides quotations (which thankfully hasn’t caught on as much as I feared), find an opportunity to sigh despairingly over the state of the Labour Party from the perspective of Greek history, and reflect on what Thucydides would have thought about the burkini and other Very Real Concerns of the modern world.

September was the start of my new job in Exeter. On the one hand, I’d forgotten how much time it takes to create new lectures in a new system of teaching and learning (the narcissism of minor differences is bloody hard work); on the other hand, a commute with more or less reliable free WiFi (thank you, SouthWest Trains!) offered greater opportunity to keep up with posts. So, not so many, but all quite substantial: reflections on technology in the lecture hall (good), the constitution of Thucydidean authority (mostly bad), the post-work world (could go either way) and the thoughts of Zeno of Elea on the paradoxes of Brexit (well, it amused me…).

October The Melian Dialogue really is the all-purpose analogy for everything; it can be applied to any situation in which there’s an imbalance of power, and since that applies to pretty well every conceivable situation (especially when you start reckoning with different sorts of power), it can be applied to virtually any situation. It is most useful – and I would claim this post is gesturing in that direction – not as a means of predicting how people will behave, but as a means of thinking about the situation itself, and the different positions of those involved. And nothing so far suggests that this reading of Brexit is wrong… However, I think my most substantial contribution this month was an attempt at comparing the situations of (humanities) academics and musicians in the gig economy and digital world. I just write stuff I enjoy, and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus…

November The sort of month when the only sane response was to write tendentious, polemical translations of the Corcyrean stasis and other bits of Thucydides, and hope that reality turns out better… Crass analogies for Trump and his victory continued to proliferate, and my rants against them became ever less temperate; meanwhile, it became suddenly clear that the road to increased viewing figures ran through the gates of Braudelian historiography.

December Analogies, analogies, analogies… The Classical Allusion Fail! Klaxon has been working overtime, not least when Arron Banks clashed with Mary Beard about the Fall of the Roman Empire and I felt called upon to offer a very partial defence of his position. The question of whether the twentieth century was Short, Long or Basically Irrelevant brought further visitors from the followers of DeLong (thanks again!), while I felt called upon to try, yet again, to find something intelligent to say about the Thucydides Trap in full knowledge that it will make No Difference Whatsoever to the runaway success of the idea.

2016 Part I: Aller Tage Abend

Death. Death. Crisis. Death. Crisis. Death. Death. That was 2016, that was. Good riddance, apart from the uneasy feeling that it may have been just the overture, and next year we won’t have the all-too-brief comic relief of England v. Iceland to cheer us up.

It’s all been very serious German novel. One of the themes on the blog this year has been the avoidance, if not fervent denunciation, of crass historical analogies, so I’ll save my next discussion of Volker Kutscher’s excellent Krimi series set in 1920s and 1930s Berlin [pervasive atmosphere of impending doom and dramatic irony] until the Tom Tykwer adaptation starts next year, by which time I may have caught up with the latest volume. Rather, I’ve been reminded all too often of Jenny Erpenbeck’s brilliant Aller Tage Abend (and I still dislike the English title End of Days without having a good alternative suggestion), in which the central character dies again and again – as a baby, as a teenager, at various stages of adulthood – with a constant dialectic between the hopeful counterfactual (if only this, then she would have lived…) and the inevitability of death, against a backdrop of twentieth-century horrors. That was 2016, that was…

The fashion in blogs these days appears to be the celebration of the ‘most read’ posts of the year. I don’t think I’m being completely perverse in offering instead a review that focuses on my favourites, which have often been the least read. I can think of at least three different reasons for this. Firstly, the sheer randomness of which posts get picked up by the wider world, which seems to depend largely on whether Tom Holland or Brad DeLong happen to notice them and get annoyed or interested by something – most of the credit for this blog hitting 16,000 visitors this year goes to them. Secondly, many of my favourite posts are also the most personal ones, which I tend to sneak out without bothering to advertise them. Thirdly, I have a terrible idea what my readers may actually want to read…

January Looking back over my posts, I realise that one of the dominant trends of 2016 was sitting there in plain view from the beginning: death. I concluded 2015 with a tribute to Christopher Brooke; I began 2016 with tributes to Geoffrey Hawthorn and Ellen Meiksins Wood, and started praying fervently that the Grim Reaper would lay off any more significant intellectual influences. He did (well, apart from Umberto Eco the following month); he moved on to musicians instead… Still, I did find time for a gratuitous intervention in the Rhodes Must Fall controversy, arguing for a proper bit of Damnatio Memoriae rather than all this pussy-footing around with just removing statues.

February was, from a professional perspective, perhaps my lowest point since some of the darker days of the PhD. As an eldest child with a massively over-developed supergo, I have always been a Good Boy, obsessively keeping to the rules and trying to satisfy those in authority, and so it was a bit of a shock when my line manager decided that getting a reasonably prestigious visiting fellowship in Berlin was a Bad Thing – because why should I be working for some other university when Bristol is paying my salary? – and that my wish to take up the opportunity was grounds for disciplinary action. The basic lesson, still valid even if expressed in code: if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone, It Could Be You. Rather more cheerful – but in the circumstances also self-consciously defiant – were my reflections on language and translation, in Bridge of Spies and the excellent German translation of Anthony Powell, in Eine Frage der Erziehung.

March The first signs of what was to become a recurrent, deeply annoying theme this year: endless citation of random and generally trivial historical analogies, to at best rhetorical effect. Is Trump the New Catiline? Or Nero, or Cleon, or Caesar, or Crassus, or Alcibiades, or Gracchus, or Agamemnon..? This doesn’t help – as I think subsequent events have shown… Other than that, the first in what will be an annual plea to change my title to Professor of Ancient Hxtory, and what proved to be a depressingly prescient discussion of how the Melian Dialogue tells us that Project Fear was not going to win the Brexit debate.

April seemed to become Melian Dialogue month, with some thoughts prompted by the publication of my loose adaptation in Disclaimer magazine, and a reconstruction of the little-known first Melian Dialogue, in which the Melians turned up in Athens during the Persian Wars and insisted on leaving the alliance. But there was also the post that has probably now shot into the Top Ten posts of the year for views in the last two days, thanks to the patronage of the aforementioned Holland, in which data from the Thucydiocy Bot suggested (to me, anyway) that we may have reached the Singularity without noticing, and that the new superintelligence speaks Thucydides.

May was rather a dark, exhausted and unproductive month, with just two posts: a quick rant about B. Johnson’s use of classical analogies in the Brexit debate, and some musings on the Five Stages of Job Rejection (the main reason for May being exhausting…) in response to @elliemackin – somewhat undercut (but not much less true, I think) by the fact that I was in the end successful, and could look forward to Getting The Hell Out of Bristol and a Head of School who thought that co-supervising a doctoral student at another university was equivalent to pilfering the office supplies cupboard and embezzling the coffee fund…

June Oh dear. Between the Scylla of gratuitous classical analogies and the Charybdis of post -Brexit despair, it was a struggle to find any consolation in history; a theme I plan to return to in the spring, linking Thucydides’ scepticism about hope and the human propensity to making really terrible decisions to his desperate efforts to combat pre- and post-truth politics… Still, I did offer an account of Kutscher’s early Berlin novels, as well as an idea for a Thucydides gameshow that has, bizarrely, not yet been taken up by any television production companies…

Solid Gold Classics: The Thucydides Edition

[image error]

It’s podcast time! Welcome to another occasional episode of Radio Abahachi, in which I attempt to find some music inspired by Thucydides that I can actually bear to listen to!

https://www.podbean.com/media/player/63vs3-65cc4e?from=yiiadmin&skin=3&share=1&fonts=Helvetica&auto=0&download=0

[Update 15:35 21/12/16: just realised that there’s a minute or so of dead air towards the end; have hastily re-edited, and new version has been uploaded, but many apologies to anyone whose listening pleasure was spoiled by this.]

[As opposed to some of the actual ‘music’.]

[For further discussion of Bob Dylan’s reading (sic?) of Thucydides, see John Byron Kuhner’s ‘Tangled Up In Thucydides’ from Eidolon last year; more generally on T’s reception in modern culture, my chapter ‘The idea of Thucydides in the Western tradition’ in Lee & Morley, eds., A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides.]

Holiday Reading! Posts of the Year

For all the ghastliness everywhere else, it’s felt like a good year for blogging. Partly this is because I’ve managed to keep up with this blog rather better than in previous years, and have written some things that I’m really rather proud of; increasingly, I’ve come to understand posts (and articles for online publications, of which I’ve also published a few this year) as valid outputs in their own right, rather than as either advertising for or shorter versions of ‘proper’ academic publications, or as a mere distraction from ‘proper’ research (though there have been times this year when blog posts are the only things I’ve felt capable of writing). Even more, however, it’s been the insights and ideas of other people, which I’d never have found or bothered to read without the internet (and, to give credit where it’s due, without the much-maligned Twitter), that have been most informative and inspiring – and this year I’ve remembered, most of the time, to keep a note of the posts that made the biggest impression and are certainly well worth reading if you haven’t yet seen them.

January: I’ve spent a fair proportion of this year meaning to get around to writing a response to the very nice discussion of ‘Thucydides, Canon and Western Civilization’ by Emily Rutherford on the JHI blog. I strongly suspect that this is never going to happen, as I have some higher priorities for ‘things I really ought to get round to writing’ – and perhaps it would be unfair suddenly to launch a critique of such a post a year later – so the least I can do is point you towards it.

February: Crooked Timber book seminar on Jo Walton’s Thessaly novels: yes, I’ve wondered about including something in which I was a participant, but these are always great events, and this one was especially good. Particularly brilliant contributions: Ada Palmer, Belle Waring and Jo Walton‘s own response to the discussion. I’ve finally got round to starting the third novel in the trilogy, and will post some thoughts in due course – and look out for the next CT seminar on a SF author, Ada Palmer herself, coming up in the spring…

March: another Crooked Timber piece, Maria Farrell’s National Hero, offering a very personal as well as political reflection on the Easter Rising. It’s not that I don’t read any other blogs, but it is the case that I check CT regularly rather than relying on recommendations from elsewhere, as its roster of regular contributors includes some brilliant and insightful writers, and the quality of the discussion remains high by current standards, for all that the management have felt compelled to change the comment policy.

April: I don’t follow a lot of proper classics blogs (or at least not qua classics – there are a couple of really thought-provoking commentators on academia and ECR life, Ellie Mackin and Liz Gloyn, who happen to be classicists but that’s not really why I read them) but since I discovered Katherine McDonald’s writings on Latin, linguistics and science fiction, it’s been a regular stop. This was the post that first led me there, on translating the Song of the Ood in Doctor Who – which also provoked an interesting discussion on the Twitter about the erratic performance of the Tardis’ translation circuits. Amazing that we’re now colleagues.

May: two excellent posts from The Tattooed Professor, Kevin Gannon, this month, and I can’t choose between them: ‘Objective history is impossible. And that’s a fact’ does what it says on the tin, offering a succinct run-down of the age-old debates on the so-called politicisation of history and the power of the myth of historical objectivity, while ‘Let’s ban the classroom technology ban’ was a sane and sensible (and very funny) response to this year’s spate of “laptops are making our students stupid” thought-pieces, that has inspired me to tell my students quite explicitly that I’m happy for them to live-tweet my lectures, and if they want to muck about on social media that’s their problem.

June: I’m tempted to ignore June partly on the basis that the whole thing was both unedifying and deeply depressing, and partly because so much of what was written was focused on the immediate circumstances and has largely been falsified by subsequent events, but in the interests of the historical record… Freddie Foks’ ‘The UK is in the middle of an all-consuming constitutional crisis’ was well worth reading at the time, and gets a reasonable number of predictions more or less right, while ‘How fascism came to Britain’ at Feminist Philosophers was right about a depressingly large number of things.

July: Crooked Timber again, Maria Farrell again, and maybe I should be trying to cover as many different outlets and writers as possible, but ‘#asamother’ is a tour-de-force: taking its cue from immediate political events (the short-lived Tory leadership contest and the entertaining candidacy of Andrea Leadsom) but using this as a springboard for a wide-ranging discussion of the timeless question of whether parents have a bigger stake in the nation’s future.

August: really interesting discussion of the often complex and resentful relationships between academic, public and popular history by Catherine Fletcher, ‘On academic ambivalence’; includes issues of gatekeeping and the status of ‘historian’ (themes which have recurred several times this year, including the Arron Banks v Mary Beard controversy).

September: arguably, some similar issues – at any rate as concerns popular and media misconceptions of what academics actually do, crossed with general anxieties about political correctness and the like – in a post about combat archaeology at The People’s Republic of Mortimer.

October: I had a slightly odd feeling in reading Kelly Baker’s ‘Cruelty and kindness in academia’, almost certainly bound up with the fact that I’d been working for just over a month in a department that occasionally feels almost Stepford in its niceness (no offence intended, dear colleagues, I’m just not used to such things); at the time, it didn’t feel as if this had much connection with my own experience, but in retrospect I can think of more and more examples of the behaviour described, which makes me even more thankful to have the colleagues I do have, and even more determined to be kind myself, even if largely in a distracted, absent-minded sort of way… I also have to put in a shout for the ongoing Thucydides Roundtable at zenpundit.com, now only a month behind its original schedule – which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned, as I haven’t managed to keep up with all the posts (so how they expected people to keep up with writing them…).

November: Donna Zuckerberg in Eidolon, ‘How to be a good classicist under a bad emperor’. It was a pleasure to contribute to this online journal earlier in the year, as it’s published a series of really interesting and important essays; more formal than a blog post, but operating to high editorial standards and with a clear identity. This piece is important and provocative, a call to arms for humanists – and whether or not you agree with every point, the appalling online abuse directed against its author makes it clear that there are cultural battlelines, and that refusing to take sides and claiming that the classics are above politics is itself a political position.

December: a case study in Why Twitter Is Still Great Despite Everything: it’s how I came across T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) and his fascinating writings on Chinese strategy and thought, which led me to the zenpundit.com roundtable and to various people working in the field of military and strategic studies whom I wouldn’t otherwise have encountered, including Pauline ShanksKaurin (@queenofthinair), without whom I’d never have heard of Angry Staff Officer (@pptsapper) or this excellent post ‘Stop Calling Us Warriors’, on how the military profession is conceptualised and why the Spartans are a terrible role model.

Thucydides Trap, China and Trump

What more is there to say about the Thucydides Trap? The issues with this as a reading of Thucydides and as a model for current US-China relations have been quite extensively discussed (see e.g. T. Greer’s excellent contribution to the current zenpundit.com Thucydides roundtable, or Seth Jaffe’s National Interest piece last year, if you’re sick of my frequent comments on this issue). And yet it keeps coming; as I’ve remarked before, any mention of tensions in the South China Seas prompts a flurry of re-tweeting of Graham Allison’s original article in The Atlantic, while this week the concept has been given a big push in another Atlantic article, this time by James Fallows on China’s ‘great leap backwards’ and the threat this poses to the USA, followed up by a blog post by Fallows in response to Trump’s cack-handed and provocative tweeting about the situation: “But if historians and citizens look back on our era as the transition point, at which 40 years of relatively successful management of U.S.-China relations gave way to a reckless focus on grievances and differences,tweets like the one today will be part of their sad record.”

What’s most striking about this latest intervention, which has been enthusiastically retweeted (with or without additional commentary like “Coming US-China war?” or “USA-CHINA – THEY CALL IT Thucydides trap – and the world must dance to the chinese drum with a gun against their heads – manipulation”) is the title: Remember the ‘Thucydides Trap’? The Chinese Do; Trump Clearly Does Not. To be fair to Fallows, this may be nothing at all to do with him, but it is the point that, to judge from the Twitter, many readers have latched onto, with calls for PEOTUS to be forcibly educated in Thucydides (or at least in the Trap) without a moment’s hesitation in order to avert WWIII.

I’m struck by the number of assumptions embedded in that headline, and in most of the subsequent discussion. Firstly, that the ‘Thucydides Trap’ is a real thing, an objective quality of the way the world works, rather than an IR theory (whether offered by Thucydides or Allison). Secondly, that it is a real thing in the present, specifically in relation to US-China relations. Thirdly, that the Chinese understand this (and even, by implication, that this knowledge is shaping their own policy) whereas the US is in danger of forgetting.

Well, the Chinese know about the Thucydides Trap BECAUSE U.S. POLITICIANS AND JOURNALISTS KEEP GOING ON ABOUT IT AND ASKING THEM TO COMMENT; insofar as it plays any part in their strategic thinking, I imagine, it’s on the basis that it’s a core element of American thinking so they’d better take account of it. The focus of their public pronouncements is on insisting that there is nothing inevitable in this situation, whereas the clear risk of the US adopting the model is that it may lead not to an exaggerated concern to reduce the risks of escalating conflict, as intended, but to acceptance that war is inevitable so better prepare for it. Yes, this could all be a Machiavellian deception, and they’re secretly ramping up to war readiness ‘cos Thucydides told them to while doing the Mars Attacks “we come in peace” thing – they’re using our own poorly-analysed classical reception against us! – but I find it hard to believe that this is really based on Thucydides.

It does seem increasingly clear that it would be rational to assume an unhealthy attachment to Thucydides on the part of at least some American commentators. Okay, as Greer remarked to me on the Twitter, with regard to my post about the increasing number of current and former military personnel looking back to antiquity, newspaper and magazine articles do this sort of casual reference to a current soc sci theory as a starting point for their argument all the time; this is just evidence for Allison’s success in turning his theory into a social media meme (which is interesting in itself, and at some point I do need to study its spread in more detail and correlate this with my ‘Thucydides is a virus turning people into zombies’ theory; presumably one can chart infection vectors on social media?).

What strikes me, compared with similar break-out theories – I immediately think of Fukuyama’s End of History or Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations – is the lack of push-back, at least so far. Both those essays were highly influential, but also immediately criticised – you couldn’t escape the fact that these provoked debate, that for every commentator claiming that one or other of them had Explained the Current State of the World there was another roundly denouncing the whole enterprise – whereas debate around the ‘Thucydides Trap’, leaving aside my lonely plodding academic pedantry, seems to focus almost entirely on whether it’s unavoidable or not. As I said above, the existence of the Trap is taken for granted; it’s just a question of the details of its mechanism.

My starting assumption is that this is largely a function of Allison attributing his theory to Thucydides, at the cost of a certain amount of his own glory: the ‘Thucydides Trap’ thus becomes something that has always been true, and has been known for two and a half thousand years, so there’s not much point in arguing about the basic outline, as opposed to a time-bound theory developed to interpret the specific situation of the present which is therefore open to extensive debate (this might indeed be a basis for an interesting comparison of the reception of Fukuyama’s essay, in brief ‘this is where we are now’, and Huntington’s ‘we are where we have always been even if not previously recognised’). Belief in Thucydides as ultimate authority figure? Willingness to give credit for timeless insights to an ancient Greek but not to a living academic?

Down the Rabbit-Hole

Next to the originator of a great sentence is the first quoter of it. Said Emerson. Stories happen only to people who know how to tell them. Said Thucydides. A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak, minus much of the novel, is money for old rope. Said David Markson. The quotation of a misquotation is still a misquotation. Said @Thucydiocy.

Interestingly, it was last December that this line attributed to Thucydides first appeared on Twitter, and rapidly disappeared again – it isn’t a hardy perennial like some quotes. This week, it reemerged:

Stories happen only to people who know how to tell them. Said Thucydides.#DavidMarkson

— Señor Hijas (@TedDaughters) December 15, 2016

Senor Hijas didn’t take kindly to being informed that this wasn’t actually Thucydides, nor to the suggestion that this might have been clearer with some quotation marks, to show that “Said Thucydides” was part of the quote rather than his own attribution, but I am at any rate grateful to him for pointing me towards David Markson’s The Last Novel. Not a writer I’d encountered before, and David Foster Wallace’s enthusiastic recommendation of his work tends to have the opposite effect as far as I’m concerned, so I wouldn’t have encountered this unaided.

The Last Novel (2007) consists largely of gnomic little quotations and anecdotes about writers, with occasional references to the character Novelist (from the same page as the Thucydides reference quoted above, p.12: “And thus in which Novelist will say more about himself only when he finds no way to evade doing so, but rarely otherwise.”). It becomes clear, more or less, that Novelist is elderly, possibly dying, writing this book (which may be his last) in a manner that is clearly intended to impel the reader to search for hidden meanings in the quotations and anecdotes. If stories happen only to those who know how to tell them, does the absence of story here imply the inability of Novelist to write anything worth reading? Or is the story precisely of a kind that can be told only by someone able to communicate solely through other people’s fragments? And so forth.

To be honest, my crude literary judgement is that this is Flaubert’s Parrot by someone who can’t be bothered to do detailed research, and so has instead simply plundered a couple of anthologies of literary quotations. If you assume that it’s clever and meaningful, then there are presumably hours of fun to be had in contemplating whether a misquotation in such a context is a deliberate misquotation, emphasising the essential fragility of all our knowledge and the ease with which a literary persona can be constructed out of fragments, or whether Markson just picked it up from one of the ‘How to Write’ books where it first appears, and didn’t bother to check its authenticity.

There is a second reference to Thucydides, on p.107, which does offer a bit of evidence in Markson’s favour:

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

America is now given over to a damned mob of scribbling women. Determined Hawthorne, in 1855.

The greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of, said Thucydides. Who mentions not one of them in his history.

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets – which mentions none either.

At any rate this particulat formulation doesn’t appear anywhere on the internet before Markson’s novel, suggesting that he has taken the idea and put it into his own words rather than simply lifted it from somewhere. (It does then appear on a few occasions, for example at the head of Chapter VII (p.189) of Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra from 2010 giving Markson as the translator).

I remain unconvinced by the whole enterprise…

 

 

Achilles as Philosopher

There’s a strong case to be made that the most active field of engagement with the classical past and its legacy outside the creative arts, and certainly the area where this engagement has the greatest potential for real world impact, is military education, especially in the United States. Several ancient authors have long been included within the canon of military and strategic studies: Thucydides above all, but also Homer, Xenophon and Caesar (and the candidate for Secretary of Defense, retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, is a devotee of Marcus Aurelius). Works on ancient warfare, largely based on these texts, regularly feature in lists of recommended reading: Donald Kagan on the Peloponnesian War, Victor Davis Hanson on the Western Way of War. This clearly derives from the importance of historical studies in the curricula of various military education establishments, most famously the US Naval War College with its use of Thucydides as a foundational text, and the way that this reading then regularly features in the public remarks of senior military officers.*

Recently – this is an impression rather than a scientific survey – this tendency seems to have increased; not just the proliferation of ‘Thucydides trap’ articles in response to the latest development in US-China relations (not least because the military seem to have rather less time for that idea than journalists), but a growing number of serving and retired military personnel reflecting on the importance of classical figures and texts, and a widening of the scope of that discussion. Just in the last fortnight, a single website focused on strategy, national security and military affairs, The Strategy Bridge, has offered the thoughts of an Australian army officer on Thucydides’ continuing importance and two discussions by US officers on military ethics (part of a series), one evoking Archimedes, Thucydides, Plato and Augustine, and the other focused on Plato’s Republic and Cicero’s De Officiis.

I had two immediate reactions to these pieces, especially the Plato/Cicero one this morning.** The first was to wonder about causes. Is it simply that sites like The Strategy Bridge now exist to offer an accessible outlet for such articles by professionals, whereas in the past there were few publication options besides proper academic journals, hence a long-standing tradition of reflection on the relevance of ancient texts for contemporary warfare and strategy is now becoming visible? Or is there a real turn towards the classical past as a source of insight, as a new phenomenon – and, if so, how far does this reflect a crisis of Enlightenment analysis and values, such that they are no longer felt to be adequate? It’s certainly the case that the ‘philosopher king’ model offered by Plato and Cicero works much better, or at least raises fewer problems, in the context of the hierarchical military rather than in wider society – but I still feel a little nervous at the appeal to ‘timeless’ ancient ethical values, leap-frogging the debates of the 17th-19th centuries that put that alleged timelessness under scrutiny. Plus, slavery: extracting timeless values that still work today from ancient ethics does imply either a selective reading of the past (that isn’t properly acknowledged) or the introduction of some very questionable assumptions into the present.

There’s a definite risk of both idealisation and decontextualisation in these readings, and that then leads to my second question: what’s the role of academic research in classical studies in these discussions? It should be stressed that, especially compared to the vast majority of brief and trite invocations of Thucydides and other ancient writers in mainstream publications, these pieces are clearly based on extensive reading, with careful referencing. However, this referencing falls firmly into the category of ‘provide a source for this statement’ rather than ‘show engagement with current debates about interpretation’ – and the works referenced are for the most part both general and conventional (Gilchrist’s heavy reliance on Kagan for his account of Thucydides is the obvious example).

The end result is that, if I were marking these as student essays, I could happily write “discuss” or “it’s more complex than that” at least once every paragraph. Obvious objection: these aren’t written as student essays, let alone as academic papers, so such scholarly pedantry isn’t appropriate. Yes and no; I fully acknowledge the different demands of writing for a non-specialist audience – but there is no hint here of an awareness that texts may be interpreted in different ways and may indeed be the focus for fierce argument, although clearly that has implications for any attempt at making use of them for the present. The rhetoric is not ‘here is my personal reading of Thucydides’, acknowledging a degree of decontextualisation, but rather ‘this is what Thucydides says’, invoking the ancient author’s authority to ground more general claims; much more powerful, but also more problematic if ‘what Thucydides says’ is actually a matter of debate.

I am definitely not arguing for the innate and automatic superiority of academic readings, which can indeed render themselves stale and unproductive through constant insistence that everything is contingent, historicised and undetermined. I do share the view that some ancient texts are powerful and thought-provoking, and can offer us knowledge and understanding relevant to the present – and, most importantly, that discerning such useful knowledge and understanding can’t be left to the academics, but needs to be based on extensive engagement with those actually practising in the relevant field of activity.***

So, the more military officers who read and reflect on ancient texts the better, up to a point – but it would be good to see more acknowledgement that, like the world, the means by which we make sense of the world (including texts) are complex and ambiguous. This has always been the attraction for me of the USNWC approach, focused on engagement with the whole work rather than isolated extracts, and with opening up questions rather than instilling a specific interpretation. A simplistic reading of Thucydides is, in itself, just slightly dull; a simplistic reading of Thucydides that is then applied to the real world is potentially dangerous.

The usual reading of the William Butler quote (more commonly misattributed to Thucydides) – “the nation that divides its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools” – is that the scholar-warrior and the warrior-scholar should be single individuals, hence the emphasis on military education. But Achilles scarcely has time to become a true scholar or philosopher, as opposed to a thoughtful and well read one, without the risk of reducing his effectiveness as a warrior (and a fortiori this applies to the scholars). We could read this line instead not as a complaint against specialisation, but rather as a plea for dialogue instead of division: the danger is not that warriors are not scholars, but that warriors don’t pay any attention to scholars, and vice versa.

 

*See e.g. Dempsey on Thucydides, Powell’s love of the pseudo-Thucydides “Of all manifestations of power…” quote, and Mattis at length:

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun. For all the “4th Generation of War” intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc, I must respectfully say… “Not really”: Alex the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying (studying, vice just reading) the men who have gone before us. We have been fighting on this planet for 5000 years and we should take advantage of their experience.

From an email exchange in 2003: http://www.strifeblog.org/2013/05/07/with-rifle-and-bibliography-general-mattis-on-professional-reading/

**Leaving aside my usual regretful muttering that British military education isn’t more interested in this sort of thing, as I’d love the opportunity to explore the potential usefulness of Thucydides in this context.

***Cue my usual regretful muttering etc.

The Structures of Historiography

As Marx wrote in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, more or less: People write history, but they do not write it just as they please; not under conventions chosen by themselves, but under conventions directly encountered, given and handed down. Especially once the publisher starts weighing in about what readers expect from heavyweight-yet-accessible attempts at encapsulating entire periods of time…

At the risk of dragging this whole thing out well beyond its sell-by date (though it does seem to be very good for my viewing statistics), I wanted to offer a quick response to the blog post that C. Trombley* published yesterday on recent exchanges between Brad DeLong, Branko Milanovic and me (see here for links). The minor and uninteresting point is to reiterate that I didn’t think I was defending or otherwise endorsing Hobsbawm’s take on the ‘Short Twentieth Century’, but rather offering some metahistorical musings on why an economist like DeLong wants to get embroiled in such arguments in the first place; my argument was less that the Long rather than Short 20th Century makes better sense, but that thinking in terms of centuries at all may be largely unhelpful (whereupon I’d normally start evoking Braudel and la longue duree, except that, as one commentator on my post remarked, he too seemed to be stuck in conventional chronological divisions, whether the 16th century or the reign of Philip II).

The major point that I wanted to pick up on is Trombley’s observation that Hobsbawm’s conception, insofar as he can comment on it without having read Hobsbawm (Chapeau!), seems to sit very oddly with Hobsbawm’s well-known Marxism. Yes! Surely one of the most attractive features of an economic or social approach to history, including historical materialism, is its forthright rejection of conventional political events (let alone the names of kings or dynasties) as an adequate framework for true historical understanding; rather, we need to focus on the very different (and often but not invariably slower) rhythms of economic cycles, technological development, shifting relations of production etc.? Let’s go back to arguing about the different phases of capitalism rather than all this nonsense about the special snowflake nature of the 20th Century!

Which does indeed make it odd that Hobsbawm – editor, don’t forget, of the English translation of Marx’s 1857-7 writings on pre-capitalist economies – should end up offering a version of events that’s so strongly dominated by politics and ideology rather than economics. Trombley suggests that it’s a very back-handed way of admitting the complete failure of the Stalinist project, without being willing to admit that the awful juggernaut of capitalism was in any way right. I can’t help wondering about the continuing power of the inherited conventions of historiography, especially British historiography, especially when it comes to writing the sort of heavy-weight-yet-accessible narrative that can happily sit on the shelves of the large airport bookshops and feature on ‘Best Books of the Year’ lists…

*Who also deserves kudos for quoting Ghost in the Shell…