Neville Morley's Blog, page 55

The Poverty of Analogy

So it begins. It seems a reasonable bet that the election of Trump will join Brexit in the category of Momentous Events of 2016, at least within the horizon of l’histoire événementielle, joining various developments whose significance we haven’t recognised yet in hammering an extra stake into the heart of that ‘End of History’ nonsense. But the beginning of what? Competing narratives before the election seemed to be offering a choice between the Return of American Greatness and the Rise of the New Nazis as the likely outcome; now that it’s actually happened, we can add ‘small earthquake, relatively little damage’ predictions like Trump as the new Berlusconi to the mix. History offers us a myriad of possibilities; we don’t know which one (if any) is the better comparison, or how far our choice is driven by emotions (fear, hope, desire, loathing) rather than any sort of reason. History offers comfort, if that’s what we’re looking for; it offers reasonable grounds for buying gold and a copy of The Zombie Survival Handbook. It doesn’t offer any kind of certainty.

This is a problem, at least for historians who genuinely want to use their knowledge for the benefit of their fellow humans and/or are desperately trying to jump through the hoops of Relevance and Impact. As I’ve argued in a recent piece in Aeon, we don’t offer the sort of knowledge or understanding that policy-makers or industry value, precisely because there are too many possible analogies, most of which can be interpreted in different ways, implying different conclusions and courses of action. We complicate things rather than simplify them; we multiply possibilities rather than narrow down the options. This could be considered unhelpful, however true this picture actually is.

What of the wider public, the ordinary folk whom we can help to think better about issues? The past does matter to people; just not all the past (indeed, only a very small selection of it), and not necessarily (or usually) the past of the academic historians. Nevertheless, that interest and engagement in the past would seem to offer a starting-point for conversation. As I said, the run-up to the election did see a variety of historical comparisons, from knowledgeable specialists as well as journalists and commentators; drawing not just on obvious material like the rise of European fascism, but on numerous other periods. Obviously I’m most familiar with the classical ones: Trump as Nero, Caesar, Catiline, Alcibiades, Cleon; along with 2016 as a general re-run of the collapse of the Roman Republic.

Did any of these work, or help, or sway opinion, or do whatever it was they were supposed to do besides offer their authors a chance to write about their specialist topic and peg it as relevant? In the absence of any research on this, I’ve no idea, but my guess is no, because of the nature of the exercise. Hypothesis one: historical analogies can be considered on a scale of full to empty in terms of their potential significance and present resonance, depending on their degree and nature of their connection to the bits of the past that matter to the target audience – put crudely, comparisons with Han China, however persuasive the parallels might appear to a specialist, are unlikely to say much to the median American or British voter. Hypothesis two: in practice, today if not universally, the middle of the spectrum is largely vacant, and analogies tend to be either empty or over-full.

The empty analogies are easiest to deal with. For most possible comparisons, the reasonable non-academic response is: who cares? Historians may weigh up even the most unlikely comparisons in a serious manner, because we’re professionally committed to the idea that the past can be relevant and that parallels can be made on many different bases, but everyone else? If the example doesn’t immediately resonate, it’s simplicity itself to highlight the inevitable differences between past and present, between different cultural contexts. Even if you can keep the conversation going, and persuade your audience that they should take C14 Florence seriously as a comparator, is it really plausible that this will make anyone change their established political convictions or habits? At best, we’re hoping for a “that’s interesting”.

This is true of all those classical comparisons. Yeah, USA founded on Roman constitutional principles, all those neoclassical buildings in DC, yadda yadda. Come off it. It’s a parlour game; it’s a source of handy bits of rhetorical abuse for people who already share the background knowledge and assumptions, or a means of winding up the opposition by adopting aliases like P. Decius Mus. It turns a figure like Trump into a pantomime villain, not to be taken seriously. The alleged deeds of a Nero or an Alcibiades are historical colour, not the stuff of nightmares, and so Trump as Nero doesn’t resonate, except as mockery for the already-converted. It persuades nobody else of anything; it may have served to disguise the real threat.

What of the history that does resonate? The problem here is that such comparisons are already saturated with meaning, and already in play before the historians get involved, and hence devalued before the conversation even starts. Trump and the rise of fascism; yes, I’m pretty sure there’s a serious historical case there, but it’s not a case that gets taken seriously because fascism has already risen again too many times. Godwin’s Law was invented for a reason: the ‘Nazis are Bad, This is Bad, therefore Hitler’ gambit has been deployed for Saddam Hussein, feminism, internet censorship, Islam and women writing comic books, to name just a few. The fact that now it’s a Serious Historian saying, okay guys, we can ignore Godwin this time, shit just got real, doesn’t persuade anyone who wasn’t already persuaded – everyone else can easily dismiss it as partisan rhetoric, or even hypocrisy. At best it just gets lost in the noise; at worst, it looks like another of those damned experts talking down to people and dismissing their Serious Concerns by labelling them fascist.

I’m not saying that the comparison can never illuminate. It certainly looks as if it may be important in the process of trying to understand what has happened – but that is the familiar task of employing historical material in the process of historical analysis and interpretation. The problem lies in the attempt at using historical material to address the present and the future.

Does this imply that history is indeed bunk? No; the error is to think of history in terms of its content, at least as far as the history of events is concerned (there is a much stronger case that we do need to know about the history of longer-term social, economic and ecological processes in order to understand our present situation). What we need to take beyond the academy are the skills and habits of thought that can be developed through engagement with historical material – any historical material. Helping people to make sense of the world around them and its impact on their lives; giving them the tools to take apart the lies and half-truths they’re told by politicians of all tendencies, all manner of public and private institutions and all shades of the media. mainstream or otherwise.

I wouldn’t claim any special status for history in this, it’s just that I happen to have ended up as a historian – other humanities and social science disciplines have equally vital cognitive skills to impart. It’s about education; but education understood in terms of skills and understanding, not the mindless acquisition and regurgitation of information that dominates the UK school system ((I can’t speak for elsewhere). What we have to offer is not, as we tend to assume, our superior knowledge and understanding of everything, that just needs to be packaged in the right sort of pre-digested, bite-size chunks for the masses; it is our skills, such as they are, in using this material to help people learn how to think about it for themselves.

The Death of Meaning

Words had to change their meanings in response to events. Mindless aggression became courage. Forethought and hesitation became cowardice. Moderation was unmanliness. Seeing different sides of the question was a sign of an ivory-tower academic ‘expert’. Real men said what they thought, the more extreme the better, and anyone who objected was not to be trusted. If an opponent said something reasonable, this had to be condemned as criminal nonsense. Cheating the system was a sign of cleverness, while honesty and integrity were condemned as simple-mindedness. Law and morality were an unacceptable restraint on the Will of The People.

(Thucydides 3.82.4-5, adapted)

Knotty Problems

There is at least one classical analogue for Glyn Davies MP and his recent remark about not considering academics to be ‘experts’ because they lack experience of the real world: Alexander of Macedonia. This is not intended as a compliment.

According to legend, the Gordian Knot had been tied by a legendary king of Phrygia (centre of modern Turkey), Gordias, who used it to tie his ox-cart to a post (being one of those kings who began life as a humble peasant before being unexpectedly elevated by meeting the terms of an oracle). The cart was dedicated to the chief god of the Phrygians and kept in the royal palace; centuries later, Alexander paused there in his campaign to conquer the known world, and decided to untie it. Depending on which version you believe, he either cut the knot with a sword or pulled out the post so it unravelled; either way, Success!, and some oracles were hastily written to explain that untying the knot made you king of the universe, rather than just being a bit of gratuitous vandalism of priceless heritage.

Alexander the ‘Great’ is the archetype of the unreflective ‘See thing; hit thing with stick’ man of action, of the ‘Must do something; this is something; therefore must do it’ politician. He makes Homeric heroes look introverted and sensitive. He is celebrated, and certainly celebrated himself, for having Done Things that others counselled against or considered impossible, turning the world upside down for the sake of his own inflated ego, without any concern for the consequences. He Thought Outside The Box, and the Gordian Knot has become the go-to metaphor (as a quick Google will demonstrate) for any problem that looks complex and nigh-on insoluble – or so those ivory-tower ‘experts’ will try to tell you – that actually just needs some decisive action from a proper Man Of Action to slice away all the unnecessary nuance, ambiguity and qualifications.

This is such a terrible model for anything, and yet it’s incredibly powerful: the idea that complexity only appears to be a problem to those who think too much, and can actually be disposed of in an instant of decisiveness. The Gordian Knot feeds into the legend of Alexander the Prat, and his military successes legitimise taking his actions as exemplary leadership. It’s the dream of politicians, and of the popular media: a world that really is simple, if only we could cut through the nonsense propagated by those who have an interest in making it seem complicated. Brexit Means Brexit; all we need to do is leave Europe and everything will fall into place; the refugee problem can be solved with a firmer hand; build a wall; and so forth.

The obvious points: there was no need to do anything to the Gordian Knot in the first place, beyond Alexander’s restless desire to Do Things; even if there had been a solid reason, it can easily be argued that he’d missed the point completely by cheating; and solving problems by destroying the object of puzzlement is rarely without consequences. Put another way; this sort of thinking – not exactly magical thinking, though it’s clearly allied to it – is precisely what makes politicians dangerous; Alexandrian Leadership is at best futile (because most problems in the Real World are resistant to being hit with a sword) and more often destructive, both because hitting things with a sword often makes them worse and because it reflects and encourages a general reluctance to accept that the world is complex and things are difficult – and that experts may know what they’re talking about.

I was delighted to discover that this isn’t a new idea; in a lecture of 1957, Albert Camus depicted the history of the twentieth century up to that point as the violent cutting of the intricate knot of civilisation by the sword of totalitarian and populist politics. We need, he argued, to re-tie the knot, not just to accept that everything is intertwined but to celebrate this; we need anti-Alexanders. Absolutely; and now more than ever.

Cleon and the Lying Media

Another day, another classical Trump analogy – or rather, a reiteration of one that’s already somewhat familiar, Trump as Cleon, put forward this time by G.W. Bowersock in the New York Review of Books. I have to say that, the more I see this comparison, the more I think it’s deeply unfair to Cleon, and reproduces an old-fashioned view of Athenian democracy that is based largely on sources hostile to the whole thing. Of course we don’t expect classical analogies to be based on detailed historical insight – I don’t have much to add on this point to Donna Zuckerberg’s ‘Make Comparison Great Again’ – but there are definitely bad and worse cases, evocations of the ancient world for present political and polemical purposes that are deeply dodgy rather than just moderately dubious.

At best, what this offers us is the pantomime villain whom we can boo and hiss with a sense of smugness that we have a superior idea of how bad he really is. But this one seems riskier than normal, if it slides easily into the belief that the emergence of such a figure is also a judgement against the system that has allowed him to rise to prominence. That’s precisely how Thucydides and Aristophanes (the lying MainsSteam Media) present Cleon, as evidence of the negative tendencies of Athenian democracy that headed downhill from there; is there a sense that Trump, even as he denounces American institutions, is also fuelling a suspicion of those institutions among some of his fiercest critics? Yes, there may be a case for that – but it shouldn’t be a case based on this arguable interpretation of the relationship between Cleon and Athens.

I may return to this theme in more detail – currently supposed to be working on a paper on a completely different topic for tomorrow evening – but for the moment, it suddenly occurred to me that I’ve already developed these ideas nearly twenty years ago in a piece for Omnibus called ‘Cleon the Misunderstood’ (can’t remember whether I put a question mark after that in the original). I’d certainly update this today with more discussion of how Cleon gets read in relation to Thucydides’ trustworthiness – George Grote’s criticism of the portrayal, and the academic row that ensued – but I think this stands up well enough as a summary to be worth reproducing here:

Cleon the Misunderstood

In the mid-fourth century B.C., an Athenian citizen called Mantitheus sued his half-brother for the return of his mother’s dowry. At one point in the speech, he tells the jury that his mother had once been married to a man called Cleomedon,

Whose father Cleon, we are told, commanded troops among whom were your ancestors, and captured alive a large number of Spartans, and won greater renown than any other man in the state; so it was not fitting that the son of that famous man should wed my mother without a dowry. (Demosthenes, 40.25)

Juries in Athens were made up of at least a hundred and one dikastai, chosen by lot from volunteers who had to be Athenian citizens over thirty years old. The speaker had to try to persuade the majority of these jurors to vote in his favour, whether because of the strength of his case or by appealing to their sentiments. Certainly he would not want to alienate too many people by expressing unpopular views; Mantitheus must therefore have assumed that his description of Cleon as a famous Athenian leader would be accepted by many among his audience. Yet such a positive assessment is likely to come as a surprise to most students of Athenian history, especially those familiar with Thucydides’ account of the part played by Cleon in the course of the Peloponnesian War.

Thucydides on Cleon

As far as Thucydides was concerned, Cleon was typical of the unscrupulous, rabble-rousing politicians who rose to power in Athens after the death of Pericles in 429:

His successors, who were more on a level with one another and each of whom aimed at occupying the first place, ended by surrendering the conduct of affairs to the pleasure of the multitude. (2.65)

Cleon featured prominently in the debate in the assembly in 427 over whether the Athenians should reverse their decision to massacre the people of Mytilene for revolting against them. Thucydides gives an account of the speech, in which Cleon argues that the Athenians are justified in taking any action to preserve their power. Cleon is seen to call on every trick of oratory — including warning the assembly against being misled by clever speaking and unscrupulous politicians!

In 425, the Athenians won a victory at Pylos, on the west coast of the Peloponnese, and besieged a force of Spartans on the nearby island of Sphacteria. The Spartans offered to make peace, but Cleon persuaded the Athenians to reject the proposals. He was then outmanoeuvred by his opponents and forced to assume command himself, since he had so fiercely criticised the way in which his opponent Nicias was conducting the siege; but through sheer luck (according to Thucydides) and the skilful generalship of others he was wholly successful, achieving the surrender of the Spartans with minimal Athenian casualties.

Finally in 422 Cleon led an expedition into Thrace, and was killed during the battle of Amphipolis, as was the Spartan commander Brasidas. Thucydides’ account is highly uncomplimentary; Cleon placed his troops in danger in the first place because they were starting to lose confidence in him, and he was killed while trying to escape the battlefield, although the army as a whole was still putting up some resistance. Thucydides remarks that this created the opportunity for peace between Athens and Sparta, which Cleon had opposed ‘because he thought that in a time of peace and quiet people would be more likely to notice his evil doings and less likely to believe his slander of others.’ (5.16)

The archetypal demagogue

Thucydides is not the only writer to offer a negative view of Cleon. The comic playwright Aristophanes caricatures him in the Knights as the corrupt and unscrupulous Paphlagonian, favourite slave of Demos, who maintains his position through flattery and takes advantage of his power to collect bribes and blackmail his fellow slaves. He is finally ousted by a sausage-seller, even more vulgar, uneducated and unscrupulous. Aristophanes’ view of Athenian politics is rather cynical — Demos (‘The People’) is a short-tempered, cantankerous, indolent old man — but his greatest contempt is reserved for the politicians (like Cleon) who profess love for the people but are really concerned with feathering their own nests.

Other sources emphasise Cleon’s vulgar style of oratory as much as his populist political methods or his alleged corruption:

It was he who first introduced shouting and abuse into his speeches, as well as the habit of slapping his thigh, throwing open his dress and striding up and down the platform as he spoke, and his habits produced among the politicians an irresponsibility and a disregard for propriety which before long were to throw the affairs of Athens into chaos.                                            (Plutarch, Life of Nicias 8)

Upper class prejudices

How far should we take this negative picture at face value, since it’s clear that Thucydides and Aristophanes are thoroughly prejudiced against Cleon? Thucydides’ account of the battle of Amphipolis in particular is designed to show Cleon in the worst possible light, even at the risk of inconsistency; he is said to have been forced into an attack because of his soldiers’ impatience, and yet his decision to fight is also offered as evidence of his arrogance. There’s no independent evidence that Cleon was at all corrupt: these are the sort of accusations that were levelled against all politicians in Athens on a regular basis. Certainly he was popular with the Athenians during his brief political career, and trusted by them, since they adopted many of the policies he advocated (such as rejecting the Spartan peace proposals). Although the majority in the assembly eventually rejected his arguments over Mytilene and voted to cancel the massacre, the vote was very nearly even; his was not a lone and unpopular view. A later generation of Athenians saw Cleon simply as one of their few successful leaders in a war which had ended disastrously for Athens.

How, then, do we explain the enormous hostility towards Cleon shown by most of our sources? Their two main objections to Cleon seem to be, firstly, his policy of aggression towards Sparta and, secondly, his populist, rabble-rousing style. Thucydides and Aristophanes, like most other ancient writers, came from the Athenian upper classes (the only people who could afford a high level of education), and therefore shared a particular set of prejudices. Such men were often pro-Spartan; more importantly, they considered themselves the natural leaders of Athens and resented the fact that under the democracy they no longer enjoyed automatic power and authority. An aristocrat who wished to become an important figure in the state had to submit to the judgement of the masses, in elections and in the assembly, competing with men like Cleon.

Cleon was the son of a wealthy tanner: not a member of the lower classes himself, whatever Aristophanes might suggest, but probably not a member of an old aristocratic family either. Whatever his background, he was certainly a populist, who won support by appealing (in both his message and his style) to the lower classes. Nothing could be further from the upper class ideal; and it also made a striking contrast with the behaviour of Cleon’s great predecessor, Pericles.

Pericles, because of his position, his intelligence and his known integrity, could respect the liberty of the people and at the same time hold them in check.  It was he who led them, rather than they who led him, and, since he never sought power in any improper way, he was under no necessity of flattering them . . . So, in what was nominally a democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen. (Thuc 2.65)

The Anti-Pericles?

In Thucydides’ view, this is the ideal form of government for Athens, in which the excesses of democracy are held in check by a wise ruler. Pericles commands the Athenians; Cleon, in contrast, flatters and cajoles them and allows them to have influence over policy. It is Cleon and his like who are to blame for Athens’ defeat, not Pericles, although he had started the war. Thucydides tries to emphasise the contrast between the two men as far as possible, even at the expense of strict fairness. For example, both Pericles and Cleon were accused of making war because of their personal interests, but Thucydides mentions only the latter accusations, ignoring the ones levelled against his hero.

Above all, Thucydides conceals the extent to which the political positions of Pericles and Cleon were more or less identical. Neither held power because of their official position, for there was no Athenian equivalent to Prime Minister or President (Pericles was elected strategos almost every year, but that gave him military, not political, authority). Instead, their power rested on their popularity and their ability to persuade the assembly to follow their proposals. Both men dedicated themselves to the service of the state, repudiating their old friends (or claiming to, anyway) so as to avoid any conflict of interest. Both put forward populist legislation, such as Pericles’ introduction of pay for jury service, to win the support of the people.  The philosopher Plato, for one, considered that it was Pericles who first corrupted the Athenian masses by making concessions to them.

Politicians and democracy

Modern historians have often wondered whether the ability of orators like Pericles and Cleon to persuade the assembly to follow their proposals meant that Athens was not really ruled by the Demos. Aristophanes’ Knights suggests that, however powerful a politician like Cleon might appear, he was always at risk of losing the favour of Demos, and hence losing all power and influence in the state. The citizens of Athens were not completely gullible; they were probably fine judges of the art of public speaking.  As a later politician, Demosthenes, argued:

I notice that in general an audience controls the ability of a speaker, and that his reputation for cleverness depends upon your acceptance and discriminating favour. (On the Crown 277)

In the same speech, Demosthenes offers an idealised picture of the job of a politician (rhetor, orator) in Athens:

For what is he responsible?  For discerning the trend of events at the outset, for anticipating results and forecasting them to others.  That I have always done.  Further, he ought to reduce to a minimum those delays and hesitations, those fits of ignorance and quarrelsomeness, which are the natural and inevitable failings of all free states, and on the other hand to promote unanimity and friendship, and whatever impels a man to do his duty.  (On the Crown 246)

All decisions in Athens were taken by the assembly, the Ekklesia. All citizens had the right to speak as well as to vote, but it was hardly practical for each of several thousand men to have their say. The orators played an important role in providing leadership and direction, setting out the issues at stake and arguing for a particular course of action. They were men who had the necessary training in public speaking and the leisure to dedicate themselves to public business. They gained honour through doing service to Athens, and also other rewards — Cleon was awarded maintenance at public expense — but they always had to strive to retain the support of the assembly.

Conclusion

The reputation of Pericles as one of Athens’ finest leaders is based in part on Thucydides’ savaging of his successor. In fact, Cleon was equally popular with the Athenians, and quite as successful.  There is no evidence to say that he was definitely wrong to reject the peace proposals in 425; he provided the impetus for the victory at Sphacteria, and had the sense to rely on the greater experience of his fellow general. Cleon’s oratorical style may even have come as a relief after the cool aloofness of Pericles. We should not be misled by aristocratic contempt for the Athenian masses and their leaders; Cleon served Athens as well as any of his rivals, the interminably eulogised Pericles included.

[originally published in Omnibus 35 (1997) pp.4-6]

Rigged!

Here is your regular Thucydides Twitter Quotes update, brought to you by @Thucydiocy and its tireless, if erratic, monitoring of quotes and references on Twitter! There’s been a minor upsurge in references recently, to a fair degree in relation to the delightful Trump, and in particular this line:

Someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.

It’s a perfectly genuine quotation, from 8.89, in Rex Warner’s Penguin Classics version. It gets tweeted without comment – too many characters for anything else? – and it would be very interesting to check exactly how different people understand it. In the context of the Donald, it seems reasonably certain that it’s intended as a critical commentary on his pre-emptive questioning of the legitimacy of the election (though it’s not so much that he’s “consoling” himself about the result as preparing the ground for anger and insurrection). Previous to that, I’m less sure; is there a possibility that the emphasis is on “it wasn’t fair” as an actual property of democratic elections, rather than as the sort of thing that losers claim? That this is being offered as further grounds for cynicism about the whole system?

In either case, there is a certain reworking or repurposing of Thucydides’ idea. The original quote begins with “In a democracy”; arguably this is redundant when the discussion is focused solely on democracies – but omitting it does obscure the fact that Thucydides is offering an explicit contrast with oligarchy, in the specific context of the overthrow of the Athenian democracy in 411 and the moves of some members of the elite to promote an extension of the franchise. The focus is not on the election system itself but on the psychology of the would-be aristocrat, especially when things are in a state of flux.

They thought they should dispense with the excessively narrow oligarchy they had [the 400], and should instead demonstrate that the Five Thousand existed in reality and not only in name, and should establish the constitution on a more equal basis. But this form of words was just their political pretence. Most of them were drawn through personal ambition into a mode of behaviour that is sure to end uo destroying any oligarchy that emerges from a democracy. Right from the first day they not only fail to consider themselves equals, but each thinks he deserves the very first place himself. Whereas under democracy an election is held and a person can bear the result more easily, telling himself he was not defeated by his peers.

[This is Jeremy Mynott’s 2013 translation, incidentally, whereas the quote that’s commonly used comes from Warner. The differences in the way that they translate the final line highlights that this is another of those Thucydidean sentences that defy straightforward reading. Crawley, the most common source for Thucydides quotations on Twitter, took the same line as Mynott: “while under a democracy a disappointed candidate accepts his defeat more easily, because he has not the humiliation of being beaten by his equals.” This preference does seem to support my suggestion above that the quote is being deployed at least some of the time as a critique of democracy rather than as a criticism of sore losers.]

Democracy (or at any rate the Athenian version) is founded on the idea of equality among all the citizens; inevitably there are those who regard themselves as superior, but there is less of an issue for them when that superiority fails to be recognised in an election result – the decision was left in the hands of people who can’t be expected to show the same level of good judgement, who were swayed by the lying arguments of one’s opponents and the crooked MainStream Media, and so forth. Within an oligarchy, however, the abandonment of the idea of complete equality in favour of the idea that certain people are born to rule leads every such man to think of himself as superior to all (and not just superior to the ignorant masses) – and so the experience of seeing others being recognised or even preferred causes pain, in itself but also because this is now a system based on the idea that status is an objective recognition of actual personal qualities, rather than bestowed by the preferences of the multitude.

This feels like it might be a more useful way of interpreting aspects of the Donald’s behaviour. He is, manifestly, driven by his own sense of superiority, and deeply sensitive to any perceived slight (cf. the whole “tiny hands” thing, and his persistent use of superlatives about himself and his actions). It’s not just that he draws no consolation from the fact that voters are sometimes unpredictable, but that this doesn’t appear to be his primary concern; it is simply assumed that all decent people [sic.] would naturally vote for him if only they weren’t being lied to and/or that they will vote for him but the result will be manipulated.The real point at issue for him, however, is one of oligarchic amour propre. He objects vociferously to the fact that attention, respect and status are being accorded to someone he regards as an inferior – and the more he thinks about it, the more obvious the disparity seems to him, and so the more enraging the fact that others are refusing to acknowledge this. He is the ranting Id-monster of the “don’t you know who I am?” mentality that permeates the upper layers of business and celebrity (and academia…), all the would-be aristocrats trapped in a world that doesn’t yet fully accept their claims to superiority…

Another quote – which has only recently appeared, and doesn’t show up much on a Google search although when it does it’s presented as a “famous” quote, is this:

“The security of the city depends less on the strength of its fortifications than on the state of mind of its inhabitants”.(Thucydides)

My best guess is that this is a commentary upon Nicias’ line in 7.77: “Men make the city, not walls or ships with no men inside them”. No comment from Thucydides about their state of mind – but obviously it’s in the context of Nicias desperately trying to raise morale in the face of ignominious defeat, so easy to imagine someone offering such an exegesis. If anyone knows where it originates, please let me know…

Finally, if you haven’t already seen it, you are strongly urged to head over to http://zenpundit.com/ for the Thucydides Round Table; some great posts already, and I dearly wish I had the spare time to get properly involved in the discussion.

To Err Um Gosh Oh Cripes Is Human

It was scarcely a revelation that Boris Johnson should have written two articles about the EU Referendum, trying out the arguments and testing the different propositions before choosing the side that seemed to suit his personal ambitions best. A little more surprising was the lapse in his knowledge of classical myth, confusing two different classical accounts of journeys into hell: “He [Cameron] was going to probe the belly of the beast and bring back British sovereignty, like Hercules bringing Eurydice back from the underworld.” Johnson’s gratuitous classical references are, we may reasonably suspect, all part of his carefully constructed image, and I wouldn’t be wholly surprised if one of the reasons for the crisis of A-level Classical Civilisation turned out to be widespread aversion to classical literature and history as a result of his appropriation of them, making it ever harder to argue against the association of the subject with arrogance and privilege. But this supposed display of superior intelligence and education does depend on him getting the references right…

Well, we all make mistakes. But it would be an error, as Freud reminds us, to imagine that mistakes are always random and meaningless, and that the only thing of interest here is Johnson confusing Orpheus and Eurydice with Heracles and Alcestis. Why does he confuse or conflate the stories in this particular way? For example, Heracles is a very different sort of hero from Orpheus; the master of bewitching music might indeed have made a better analogy for PR man Cameron, but figuring the latter as a club-wielding, lion-wrestling strongman introduces a deliberate note of bathos – while at the same time revealing Johnson’s unconscious fears and sense of inferiority compared to such a figure, who had at least attempted to act rather than write a few self-deprecating newspaper columns.

Further, Heracles succeeded in rescuing beautiful Sovereignty from the hell of Brussels bureaucracy [you see why classical allusions are great? Giving an air of sophistication to a fundamentally idiotic conception of the world], whereas Orpheus failed: which story did Johnson really have in mind, only to be sabotaged by his tendencies in the other direction? A story of the hopelessness of Cameron’s renegotiation, undercut by the sense that this could actually end well with the right man in charge, or a story of the successful reclaiming of the right to discriminate against foreigners disturbed by the thought that, in a globalised world, this may be a pretty hollow victory, the recovery of a ghost that fades away when you look at it?

And then we might compare the back story of the two expeditions; why travel to hell in the first place? For Orpheus, it’s all about love of an idealised object, a selfish refusal to accept change. Heracles, on the other hand, is genuinely heroic, but it’s all because of the absolute selfishness of Admetus that he has to do it at all. By conflating these stories, Johnson is perhaps trying to construct a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the British people’s beloved Sovereignty has been taken from them by a cruel twist of fate with the connivance of the self-serving cosmopolitan elite, so she must be rescued – but the wrong hero has been chosen…

Paying Your Dues

A couple of weeks ago, someone on Facebook raised the question of whether, as an early career researcher with no permanent position, you should accept an invitation to speak somewhere that wasn’t going to pay your travel expenses. The majority of responses were horror-struck that any academic department would even suggest such a thing, with a certain amount of O tempora, o mores lamentation as a counterpoint;  yes, we academics do regularly give our time without compensation, as part of our normal activities (reviewing proposals, writing references and tenure reports and so forth), but incurring actual expenditure is something else – especially for those who don’t have a regular income or access to travel funds. However, there was one dissenter: of course you should, the response ran; you’re being given a chance to develop your skills, hone your arguments and raise your profile, just like The Who got good only as a result of playing every gig they could in the early years, paid or unpaid. Actually you should probably pay *them* for providing you with an audience who have to endure your amateurish strummings.

This exchange brought to mind various thoughts I had a while back, when the phrase ‘gig economy’ really started to become common currency, about the current state of academic life and its parallels with the music industry. The phrase ‘gig economy’ itself is deeply suspect and sneaky in the way that it seeks to normalise and even romanticise insecurity and exploitation; it’s a close cousin of the manipulative ‘do what you love, love what you do’ mantra (see Miya Tokumitsu’s , if you missed it the last time I recommended it, or even better buy her book). We are encouraged, whatever our actual occupations, to think of ourselves as the lead in The Buddy Holly Story or similar uplifting tales, dedicating ourselves to our craft and seizing every opportunity with enthusiasm until success finally comes knocking. We’re not actively discouraged from watching Inside Llewyn Davies instead, but that’s definitely not the idea…

Now, there’s a real risk here of ‘special little snowflake’ syndrome: the changes in working conditions of recent years are scarcely unique to either music or academia, except insofar as now they’re affecting people with a strong sense of entitlement and the ability to articulate their discontent. But my point here is less about casualisation in general than the specific pressures on people working in ‘creative industries’ – who don’t need to be persuaded to interpret their lives in terms of Boston’s Rock’n’Roll Band because we’re already doing that. Academia has the same deeply embedded myths as popular music of talent and hard work eventually reaping their rewards, of genius and originality gaining recognition – even if we set our sights rather lower when it comes to the hoped-for rewards. We drive ourselves on for the benefit of others because it can actually be fun and rewarding in itself to perform, and because failure to do that risks missing out on the big break, the media opportunity, or the chance meeting with the Dean who’s looking for the Next Big Thing in classical philology.

And we now face the same fear that actually it’s all a trick, that it was always a bit of a long shot but now changes in the industry make it ever less likely that new artists will succeed in establishing a long career. Hype them up, knock them down, bring on the next fresh-faced New Thing. Have a cigar, dear boy. Meanwhile, what we produce seems to be valued ever less; it’s not just that publishers no longer pay out advances to academic authors, increasingly we’re expected to pay – if not necessarily from our own resources – to make our work available free to everyone, because that’s what’s expected.* Of course there are still rewards for the chosen few – which serve to keep everyone else striving for success, by showing that success is possible, disguising how far things have actually changed for almost everyone. The continued career of Taylor Swift doesn’t mean that the music industry is in rude health, and nor does the success of Mary Beard reassure us about academia – indeed, further reflection reveals how far both of them are actually enjoying radically different careers from what would have been the norm a few decades ago. It’s about money, connections and marketing as well as talent- and if the talent is as great as it was with the stars of the past, the structures within which this talent is developed and sold have changed dramatically.

How do we respond? If you spend any time on music blogs, you’ll be familiar with the complaints of would-be musicians that crop up regularly about the basic unfairness of the whole thing, the brilliance of their music (or that of their friends) that isn’t being properly rewarded. There’s a clear wish to turn the clock back to a better time, defined according to their age and stylistic preferences; a return to before Home Taping Killed Music, maybe, or back to the days when making mix tapes was the sign of someone who really cared about music but before all that horrid sampling came along. Yeah, Keep Music Live. That’ll work. In a similar manner, laments over how things were in universities in the 60s or 70s, or even the halcyon days of the 90s, aren’t terribly constructive, beyond the possibility of shaming a few established academics into greater solidarity with current early career people – and even then there are strict limits to what they can do, even if they want to, as employment conditions are set by HR departments and the ever present arguments about finance. The digital music genii isn’t going back into the bottle any time soon; ditto the ‘university as business’ model.

At the risk of appearing to condone or justify these new conditions, I’d like to use the rest of this post to think instead about ways of trying to live with them. The idea is to draw inspiration from music, especially as it’s practised by those who’ve grown up under these new conditions; instead of the ‘gig economy’ mantra of, implicitly, “work yourself into the ground and don’t expect to get paid much if at all, for the chance to get lucky and enjoy a traditional sort of career”, a hard-headed and opportunistic approach to building new sorts of careers. I should stress that my experience of this is all second-hand, and I’m especially grateful to Owain Gwilym, formerly of Trwbador, for the origins of a lot of these ideas; also that this is very much a sketchy work in progress, to distract myself from the ghastliness of Bloody Brexit and various other current developments, so ideas and suggestions welcome…

(1) You’re the product, so you have to make yourself the complete package. Once upon a time, in certain very specific contexts, ‘raw’ talent could find success, but mostly the hits and money (or the permanent positions) went to those with a whole machine behind them, however artfully disguised (hello, Oxbridge!). Today, the machine is reserved for the chosen few (Oxbridge again, the Brit School of classical studies), but – except when it’s a carefully developed act – untutored rawness doesn’t get you very far. You need to take control and realise that having some great ideas isn’t enough, they need to be fully developed and presented. Mastering, graphic design, social media, marketing; you don’t necessarily have to do it all yourself – see below at (5) – but you need to make sure it gets done, and done well.

(2) Know your audience, and target them. It’s difficult if not impossible to appeal to everyone – yes, the big stars manage it, but that’s at least partly if not mostly a consequence rather than a cause of their high media profile – but if you’re too niche, your only hope is to make your limited target audience completely besotted, to the point where they will trample over everyone else to ensure your success. For most of us, it’s necessary to reach out to other constituencies – to become the ancient historian who’s comfortable with the literature crowd, the researcher who can relate to students – but it’s important to keep in mind that too broad an appeal can turn into too bland an appeal, liked by everyone but not enough that they buy your product, and loved by no one. The rise of social media creates the possibility that a niche audience may nevertheless be global and even substantial – but work is still needed on how to make that pay in specific, local terms.

(3) This leads to the issue of Image and how to cultivate it – and the particular problem that academia is as narrow-minded as hard-line punks, Trad Jazz enthusiasts or the early 90s Sub Pop scene in its obsession with ‘authenticity’ and its suspicion of anything that appears to be contrived. Of course anyone with any sense will tailor their self-presentation to the particular situation – but getting ‘caught’, exposing any apparent discrepancy between the cv/interview answer/presentation and the real individual, can be fatal. If you are, for example, a specialist in classical historiography who’s ended up doing a lot more language and literature teaching, you don’t get credit for recognising that you need to present yourself as more of a ‘proper historian’, you get marked down for trying to pretend that you’re something you’re not. Worse, the default setting in academia appears to be landfill indie and the willful suppression of personality: even if the research is the sort of glittery moonstomp 70s glam that sounds as if it was recorded by impossibly beautiful alien cyborgs, interview panels seem to prefer to be told that actually the whole thing is the work of two bearded blokes from Chelmsford called Dave. Anything else is too easily dismissed as pop music, coded as feminine, frivolous and lightweight.

I don’t have a good answer to this one. Insofar as you’re still trying to get onto a traditional career pathway, perhaps the only thing to do is to recognise that it’s all a contrivance, and make it a damned good contrivance; to ‘be yourself’, the last thing you want is actually to be yourself. Outside the interview room, there’s more scope to develop a distinctive image; to become fascinating and various and unpredictable, to be more ourselves and less Ed Sheeran. But it’s still an image, that demands careful cultivation, and most of us don’t get to be Bowie; picking fights about Labour Party politics on Twitter works less well if you’re trying to be the Lana Del Ray of Roman cultural history.

(4) What’s your business model? This may be an uncomfortable question; if not the traditional academic career, then what? Still, let’s try to think through the comparison. For many acts today, selling records is not a major source of income; rather, records become a means of marketing the music, that’s then sold via concert tickets or licensed to advertisers and the media, and/or of marketing the musician, for future opportunities in composition, producing, collaboration etc. Maybe we academics are ahead of the game here, at least insofar as most of us have no expectation of making much or any money from our academic publications, which serve different purposes – but this might suggest ways of being more strategic: integrating our releases with tours and other public appearances, trying to be responsive to changes in the market rather than just ploughing on with our own thing, maybe making a splash with a gimmick like the Wedding Present’s famous 1992 ’12 7″ singles in a year’ campaign. At the least, we could think a bit more about open access, blogs and the like; we should be less afraid of of our ideas escaping onto the internet – look, none of us is Kanye West – and more afraid that hardly anyone will read them. Finally, if we think about diversification – or ‘selling out’, as the purists would call it – we tend to have a very limited set of possibilities in mind: the best-selling ‘trade book’ model and the tv series. But that’s a market which is crowded and very quickly saturated, and involves handing over an awful lot of creative control to reach a mass market. There must be some other possibilities; I wonder about merchandising…

(5) Collaboration! I think this may be the most important point of all. Humanities academics have a tendency, I would suggest, to fetishise the lone genius in the library, doing his own thing quietly until it’s ready for the world – the Nick Drake model. (There’s less focus on the idea of the band, 3-5 people coming together to create something bigger than themselves; more of a science or social science approach, focused on the research group?). This can work for some, but is rather too often associated with isolation, depression and narcissism – and ignores what may be a large number of put-upon session musicians and other supporters. The development of digital music has arguably led to more lone geniuses working away in their bedrooms – but they are also constantly exchanging ideas and working with others thousands of miles away, seizing every opportunity to collaborate with other musicians, video artists, graphic designers etc. In many ways the advent of records credited to Big Star and Trendy Producer with Up’n’Coming Act feat. Several Others, Bloke in Bedroom Remix is reminiscent of jazz in the 50s and 60s, with innumerable groups put together for specific projects: it doesn’t work if everyone gets precious about their own ideas, but it can produce something amazing in the moment. We can do this! The networks of mutual support for ECRs on Twitter can be a model for mutual research activity, so long as we stop thinking of everyone else as The Competition and instead imagine the ways we can work together.

Me, I just write stuff that I enjoy, and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus…

*Yes, in the case of making academic work freely available there is a justification of sorts, namely that public money has already paid for it to be produced, whereas the musicians have to face a general lack of inclination to pay for music simply because everyone now expects it to be free. But this justification doesn’t work for self-funded researchers, who also are excluded from the institutional resources that established academics can draw upon to pay for Open Access fees.

The Brexit Dialogue

The Melian Dialogue, in which Thucydides imagines the exchanges between the powerful imperialistic Athenians and the defiant-but-deluded Melians to whom they’ve issued an ultimatum (see my adapted version in Disclaimer magazine, for example), is a founding document in game theory and the analysis of power relations. Indeed, one vaguely hopes that the UK’s newly appointed negotiators for sorting out future relations with the EU and with other potential trading partners have read it (though admittedly his in-depth knowledge of the Dialogue didn’t seem to help Yanis Varoufakis that much in the Greek economic crisis last year…).

On closer scrutiny, however, the analogy starts to fall apart, as analogies often do; not because the issues raised by the Melian Dialogue are irrelevant to the situation, but because the parts become confused. At least going by the recent statements of various Conservative ministers, these Melians seem to be convinced that they’re the ones with the advantage, and hence try to speak the Athenians’ lines as often as their own…

A:  So, we think it’s worth reiterating that the European project is about values; it’s social and cultural as well as economic, and that as far as we’re concerned the free movement of people is inseparable from the free movement of goods and capital…

B:  Codswallop. And don’t try and dress this up by claiming that you’ve brought peace to Europe for fifty years and defended human rights; that was us, defeating the Nazis. You know as well as we do that arguments about justice and rights and right and wrong are just a cover for weakness and liberal flannel. In the real world, it’s all about power.

A:  Well, if you’re not prepared to talk about principles, then you should at least see that there’s real advantage in working together rather than trying to go it alone.

B:  Rubbish, that just makes us your slaves, submitting to your ridiculous rules about bananas and red tape and fishing quotas. No, we’re going to go it alone and make Britain Great Again. And actually that’ll be good for you as well.

A:  How so?

B:  Easy. Your whole stupid project will fall to bits and you’ll all be much better off once you’re free from the Brussels superstate. But not as well off as us, obviously, because we’re better than you. And of course you’re not going to get pissed off by us saying that sort of thing.

Pause

A: Okay, this isn’t getting us anywhere. What’s your negotiating position?

B:  We keep all the advantages we had before, but we don’t have to pay you any money or do anything we don’t want to, like allowing foreigners in.

A:  Why on earth should we agree to that?

B:  Because we’re great, and you need us. Look how many German cars we buy! Not to mention all the prosecco!

A: Even if that were true – and we think it’s more likely that you’ll carry on buying from us, you’ll just have to pay more for it – we’re not going to capitulate to such demands. That would make us look weak, and perhaps other countries might decide to follow your lead. We make an example of you, and it shows we mean what we say.

B:  Nonsense, you wouldn’t do that. We know you’re desperate to do business with us. Not to mention all those Eastern European countries who are already suspicious of you trying to tell them what to do. You’ll have a revolt on your hands!

A:  On the contrary, they are the ones most eager for you to be punished if you insist on abandoning free movement of people. If you persist in this course of action, you’ll be out of the single market, and that will inevitably impoverish you.

B:  We’re sure something will turn up. We have boundless confidence in the character of the British people, once freed from the fetters of Europe! Except when they play too much golf. We’ll have freedom and sovereignty! We’ll have hope!

A:  Hope? Always a great comfort in danger. Not a problem if you’ve got something solid to back it up, but if all you’ve got is hope… Your hope could lead you into disaster.

B:  Poppycock. Free trade is the way forward! And all the other countries will be desperate to do trade deals with us as soon as possible.

A:  Free trade? Why do you think you’re going to have such an advantage there? You need to have something worth exporting, for a start. And according to the laws of the market, anyone who has the upper hand will take advantage of it. We didn’t invent that law, we just recognised that this is how the world is, and so we formed a single market and a collective negotiating position to deal with it.

B:  We have exports! We have innovative jams and marmalades! We can sell coffee to Brazil and naan bread to India and bottled country air to China!

A:  If you say so. As for your faith in other countries helping you out, well, good luck with that. Nations are pretty good at seeing what’s right in terms of what’s in their interest. That’s not going to help you.

B:  No, that’s exactly why they’ll help us. They’re not going to leave us in the lurch, when we have special relationships and history and everything. They’d rather negotiate with us than you. Probably.

A:   You know, people in your situation can go a bit crazy; you can be completely aware of the danger you’re in, and still insist on signing your own death warrants because of this thing called ‘sovereignty’. Where’s the sovereignty in wrecking your own economy for no reason? But actually you just seem to be delusional about your situation. There’s one sure recipe for success in this world: stand up to your equals, defer to your superiors and be moderate towards your inferiors – and know where you actually stand.

B:  We believe in both having and eating our cake, and in any case we’d rather have our freedom. We trust in God, and in our friends, and in the Greatness of Britain, rah rah; we can’t see any reason why you won’t just give us what we want, but even if you don’t we have no doubt that everything will work out brilliantly.

A:  You must be the only people on earth who think that what might happen in future is clearer than what’s right in front of you.

Achilles and the Brexit

A newly discovered fragment of one of Simplicius of Cilicia’s commentaries on Aristotle – this time on the Politics – has revealed, among other things, a substantial addition to our knowledge of the paradoxes invented by Zeno of Elea (recently the subject of an episode of In Our Time).

Just as one grain of millet falling to the floor makes no sound but thousand grains falling make a great noise, so too the opinion of one man carries no weight but a myriad opinions together can move the world, and so a myriad nothings become something. But the desires of men being various in both their content and their strength, yet there are those who speak of a single Object of that desire, for the attainment of which the opinions of all these men have spoken. And this Object can in truth be anything, and so everything, and therefore is nothing.

The attainment of this Object is impossible. For firstly, in order to do this, one must take the initial step of triggering Article 51; and before that one must reach the halfway stage before that triggering, and so forth, Achilles and the tortoise yadda yadda. But secondly, and more importantly, because this Object is both anything and everything and nothing, it is unattainable; for every completed action, however great, will fall short of the ultimate greatness of the true Object and so can be condemned as insufficient, and every move in one direction will be denounced because it does not also move in the other direction, and every step will be both too far and not far enough.

Of men we know one thing, that their opinions change like the wind and flow back and forth like the tides, and so the popular assembly votes many times on different issues and occasions to allow them to express their changing views. And yet in this one thing, in their desire for the Object, their opinions are held to be unchanging and irrevocable; and this gives strength to those who profess to know the nature of that Object and to speak for those who desire it.

A clever speaker in the assembly can always say, thinking of his own desire, that every action that is completed or proposed is a betrayal of the Object for which all have expressed their desire. As I have said, this Object is composed of many different desires, none of which takes precedence over the others; and so the clever speaker does not directly impose his own desire upon the desires of others, but claims instead that they are inextricably linked within the Object, so that the thwarting of his own desire would entail the thwarting of the desires of all, even those who actually desire something quite different. And this is bloody convenient for him.

And so the Object was never solely about clamping down on immigration (except for People Like Us), and so have its proponents repeatedly emphasised; but nevertheless a failure to clamp down on immigration (except for People Like Us) would be a betrayal of the expressed desires of all (even those who weren’t terribly bothered about immigration but wanted more money for the shrines of Asclepius). The part becomes the whole, or the essence, in one moment; and in another moment it is merely a part again, or entirely absent if that suits the argument better.

For the Object is anything and nothing. To attain the Object, people can be persuaded to burn down their own houses and expose their children, and yet the Object can never be attained, for that which can be attained will never wholly satisfy the desires of all, and so cannot be the true Object. And the value of this enterprise can never be truly examined, for we shall never attain the true Object, and so cannot tell whether it was worth the effort. And those who promoted the quest for the Object cannot be prosecuted for bad advice, because we will always have failed to achieve what they advised, and in any case they were just reflecting the desires of the population.

The Object is the Object.

In Thucydides We Trust?

Why do we trust historians? How far is it (as I’m sure most people, or at least most historians, would claim) solely a matter of evaluating their data, the quality of their interpretations and their adherence to professional norms, and how far do other factors play a role? I was in Hamburg last week, for the biennial Deutsche Historikertag, which is always an interesting conference in part because they seek to focus on a specific theme, without insisting that everyone should conform to this. This year it was ‘Glauben’, and I co-organised a panel with my regular collaborator Christian Wendt from Berlin on ‘Die Glaubwuerdigkeit des Historikers’, with a particular focus (inevitably) on Thucydides and the ways that he becomes an ‘authority’ in modern discourse. If anyone’s interested, there’s a short report on the session from Deutschlandfunk as part of a programme on the Historikertag generally, here, from about five minutes in.

The majority of ‘academic’ readings of Thucydides – and I should stress that I’m talking about those which take him as some kind of authority, whether on facts or method or theory, not philological studies – seem to depend on some degree of recognition of him as ‘one of us’, a colleague with shared professional values even if he also displays a number of idiosyncratic habits. Historians focus on his critical methodology (and disparagement of fictional or otherwise unreliable rival accounts of the past) while social scientists focus more on the aims of his study, namely to establish general principles or laws, because these are the aspects that most interest them; they end up with radically different ideas of what Thucydides is all about, but in structural terms the interpretative moves are similar. In both cases there is also a substantial influence from the tradition of reception – we think Thucydides is worth citing because our predecessors did – and this then seeps out into the wider culture, where Thucydides becomes a free-floating authority on certain issues, above all war and politics, without those citing him necessarily having a coherent idea of why he should be accorded this respect.

However, while there is a fair amount of mileage in reading Thucydides as a pioneering critical historian in the tradition of Niebuhr, Ranke and ‘Geschichte als Wissenschaft’, or as a pioneering social scientist or International Relations theorist, there are always elements of his work that manifestly don’t fit with contemporary disciplinary norms and values. There are time-honoured means of explaining away such awkwardness, usually by making the obvious point that he was writing in the fifth century BCE before normative social science was properly established – a small concession to historicism, in order to rescue him from a more absolute historicism that would confine him fully to his original cultural context and deny any relevance to the present. The question is always: why would you want to?

Certainly it isn’t a permanent condition, as the decline of Thucydides’ standing within historiography since the early 20th century shows; after a certain point, either his usefulness as a model came to an end (as the successful professionalisation of history meant that classical precedents were no longer needed) or the mismatch between his approach and that of contemporary historiography became too great (and Thucydides’ example became ever more awkward and embarrassing), or some combination of the two and/or other factors (given that there’s little sign of this being a wholly conscious, explicitly debated development). We might anticipate that the same thing will eventually happen within IR theory and other areas of social science; at some point, readers will start reading Thucydides less charitably as trust in him diminishes.

This issue of trust in Thucydides appeared in a different perspective over the weekend, as a result of a passing comment on Twitter about Donald Trump: Kurt Eichenwald of Vanity Fair remarked that:

Trump’s not a liar. He says what he needs 2 be true at any particular moment. He believes it. It is the nature of his psychological problem.

What gave me pause for thought is the resemblance to Thucydides’ explanation of how he composed the speeches in his work, when it was not always possible to determine with complete accuracy what had actually been said: he made the speakers say what was appropriate for them to say in that situation. That’s a bit worrying.

In the cases of both Trump and Thucydides, statements in their speeches are at best only partly verifiable with reference to any sort of reality: in the latter’s case, because pretty well all other evidence is lost, while the former simply brushes aside the idea of fact-checking as irrelevant and partisan. Rather, there are two bases on which the speeches’ credibility may be assessed (leaving aside those who dismiss them wholesale on the basis that they’re transparent and manipulative fictions): their consonance with our own world-view (which is not to say that they simply reproduce it; rather, they’re definitely concerned to push the Overton Window of what can be said and thought) and the trust that we vest in the author. His expertise and experience in relevant fields of human activity – politics, war, money-making – bolstered by key incidents from his life, creating the impression of someone who knows what they’re talking about; the sense of character and sensibility to be drawn from his style, as someone who sees how things really are and isn’t afraid to say it how it is. Now, the biographical information may be dubious, involving numerous exaggerated and unverifiable claims, and reading off actual character from an overblown public persona is notoriously risky – but you could say exactly the same about Trump.

The speaker is trusted by his audience and so they accept his claims, his claims speak to their perceptions and assumptions and so they trust him – and in many cases, it’s the disjunction between those claims and the mainstream, which might make others suspicious of their veracity, that is taken to demonstrate fearless, uncompromising truth-telling. The speaker creates his own reality that persuades his audience, so that it becomes reality. Now, of course there are plenty of differences between Thucydides and Trump in terms of their stated aims and values (though maybe less than some would hope), but in this respect there is a fundamental similarity, the willingness of the audience to accept their authority. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?