Neville Morley's Blog, page 58

Debt to Society

I spent the weekend in Tübingen at a conference organised by John Weisweiler on Debt: the first 3500 years, exploring different aspects of the ideas presented by David Graeber in Debt: the first 5000 years within ancient contexts, from early Babylonia to the early Islamic period; programme can be downloaded here, or follow my attempts at pithy summary on Twitter under #Debt3500. My initial reaction to the idea was that it’s amazing no one had thought of doing this before. It’s not just that Graeber’s book offers some provocative ideas about the roles of debt and money in shaping human relationships (above all, different forms of dependence) that seem well worth exploring in the context of antiquity, but also that the periods we ancient historians are concerned with play a significant role in his overall schema of historical development – this is the Axial Age, in the phrase he borrows from Karl Jaspers, where world-changing intellectual developments went hand in hand with far-reaching economic and social changes, with dramatic implications for everything that then followed up to the slow-motion car crash of contemporary capitalism.

Further, Graeber’s account of ancient history is not based on taking a few out-dated narrative accounts at face value, as happens all too often in such ambitious attempts at interpretative synthesis by specialists from other fields, but on well-informed but critical reading of some reasonably cutting-edge scholarship. At any rate this is true for the Greeks; Rome gets, in my view, surprisingly little attention in his account, all things considered, and my hypothesis remains that this is because Graeber found a lot less scholarship on the Roman economy that was sympathique for his approach, whereas for the Greeks he can draw on Seaford, Humphreys, Kurke and von Reden. In brief, in this book ancient history is seen as important, and ancient historical scholarship is turned to productive uses in an ambitious project engaged with vital contemporary issues, which has been an international success. From our point of view as full-time scholars of antiquity, what’s not to like?

Well, on reflection, perhaps rather a lot; if it’s surprising that no one has organised such a conference before, maybe it’s also surprising that it has happened at all, and we owe John a debt of gratitude (see what I did there) for getting together the funding to put it on. Firstly, Graeber’s book adopts an avowedly theoretical and social-scientific approach; it aims to explore broader concepts and ideas about long-term developments, not just historicised miniatures or a collection of data for its own sake – it positively incites plaintive cries of “yes, but it’s much more complicated than that” from conventionally-minded colleagues. Further, his choice of approach is out of step with the dominant trends  among those historians who are committed to social scientific approaches, namely the ideas of NIE and the Stanford School; in at least some respects, it looks rather like a return to the Bad Old Days of Finley and Polanyi, the stale and unprofitable incantations of substantivist and culturalist interpretations of economic phenomena which we’re all supposed to have got out of our systems by now – which is great for those of us who never much liked the NIE turn in the first place, but that does seem to be a minority view.

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, it’s an overtly political project; it originated, Graeber explained in his keynote lecture, in his efforts to think about the proper role of the intellectual within radical activist movements, once the idea of vanguardism is discarded. Historians have only interpreted the past; the point is to change the world. The Axial Age matters not in itself, but in its continuing effects in the present; we need to understand it in order to grasp the real conditions of our current situation, to break the tyranny of inherited conceptions and to learn to imagine new possibilities. Or at least, for those of us who may currently be hovering on the edge of despair (homophobic massacres in the US, ten days before Britain drives itself off a cliff, and then there’s November to look forward to), to grasp why we are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine as it bleeds to death.

It seems fair to say that this conception of the purpose of academic endeavour may not be widely shared within the classical profession. It isn’t that we are unwilling to sign up to campaigns – though there are certain colleagues towards whom I may feel distinctly resentful if the UK does indeed end up leaving the EU – but that’s a fair way from actually committing to activism and orientating one’s work towards a wider cause. Graeber’s work suggests not just that we could be doing something more with our knowledge of classical antiquity, but that we should; that academic engagement and impact should be about far more than self-preservation and persuading more children to develop ancient interests, and should be genuinely engagé.

One of the most striking strands in Debt: the first 5000 years, which was picked up by a number of speakers at the Tübingen conference, is the appearance in different cultural contexts of the idea that humans are born already laden with debt. In pre-modern contexts, this debt is a sacred one, owed to the gods or to the cosmos, to be paid back through sacrifice and/or right living. In the early twenty-first century, its most obvious forms are all too tangible: the societal indebtedness and inequality that leave the majority of younger people even in prosperous western countries facing a poorer and more insecure existence than their parents, and the credit drawn by earlier generations on the environment that may prove impossible to repay.

But we can also hang onto the more constructive idea that we are all bound up in a complex network of ties and obligations with everyone else, that need not be understood solely in terms of market exchange or calculation. Those of us whose primary ability to contribute anything useful to society lies in the realm of ideas need to be as generous as possible in producing and disseminating those ideas, in a kind of intellectual potlatch – but preferably focusing our efforts on things which might actually benefit others. Even if, in the case of the EU Referendum, some of them might not realise it, or want to accept enlightenment…

http://academicsforbritainineurope.org/

Immigration, Immigration, Immigration

Evocations of classical parallels and examples in current discussions of migration and its consequences in Europe have been pretty well uniformly unhelpful and polemical, designed above all to evoke the image of civilisation under threat from hordes of savage barbarians massing on the frontiers and threatening to swamp “our way of life”. It’s a little disconcerting; for so many years, following the general trend of the scholarship, I’ve been encouraging students in my Late Antiquity unit to shift their conception of the period from “barbarian invasions” to “migrations”, emphasising the fact that the majority of the Visigoths et al were seeking to join the Roman Empire, not sack or overthrow it, refugees from war and probably environmental crisis and climate change – and now it seems that this has become the prevalent view, but with all the fear and hostility associated with the “invasions” thesis now transferred across to migrants. Whereas once the manner in which these (relatively small numbers of) non-Romans entered the Empire was the crucial historical question, it now appears that any incursion of The Other from Outside is regarded as a threat unless proven otherwise.

I’ve been meaning for several months to write something about a much earlier discussion of migration and its impact, that offered by Thucydides in his account of very early Greek history:

In earlier times there were constant migrations, any group readily moving on from its present land each time they were forced out by others who happened to be superior in numbers. There was no trade, no secure communication with each other bu land or sea. Each group grazed its own land for subsistence, not building up financial reserves or farming the land, as it was never known when someone else might attach and take it from them… The best land always had the most changes of population… It was the quality of the earth which led to an imbalance of power and the resulting internal quarrels which destroyed communities, as well as the greater risk of aggression from outsiders. Certainly the thin soil of Attica kept it largely free of such internal strife, so the original population remained. And here is substantial proof of my argument that migrations prevented comparable development elsewhere… [1.2.1-6; translated by Hammond]

Stability and community good, migration – especially economic migration – bad; so far, so Brexit. The image of the migrant as rootless, feckless and primitive, driven solely by the search for personal gain, and contrasted with the stable and prosperous dweller of civilisation, dates back a long way. It’s worth stressing that this is a world before the development of the polis; while these people are described by Thucydides as failing to achieve anything much because of their constant mobility, it’s also the case that they are willing to be mobile because they have not yet achieved anything much – they have not yet enjoyed the benefits of stability, security and community, and so are not giving these up in moving. Much of the rest of Thucydides’ account shows the suffering experienced by those who have enjoyed a communal existence but are forced from their homes by war, destruction and the general upheaval of the times. In a developed world, mobility may be bound up with opportunity, but just as often it is a sign of crisis and social failure.

To return to Thucydides’ account of early Greece, the great exception is of course Athens, with this rationalised version of the old autocthony (“born from the soil”) myth – the same people always lived there, and this gave them strength, despite (or even because of) the relative poverty of the soil. However, this was not the basis for a dogmatic, exclusive ‘Athens for the Athenians, if you haven’t got soil in your blood you’re not welcome’ attitude; on the contrary, in this context – the existence of a measure of stability and security – migration becomes a source of prosperity:

And here is substantial proof of my argument that migrations prevented comparable development elsewhere: the most powerful of those forced out of the rest of Greece by war or civil strife resorted to Athens as a stable society. These new arrivals, admitted to citizenship, directly increased the population of the city from its original size, so that later, with Attica no longer able to support them, colonies were sent out to Ionia. [1.2.6]

Just as with the growth of early Rome (the story of Romulus’ asylum), and with well-known modern episodes of refugees from war persecution enriching other states through their talents, energy and knowledge (Huguenots in the 17th century, Jews in the 20th), people are an asset if they’re given the opportunity. As Walter Scheidel has discussed, the basic assumption in antiquity was that more people are always a good thing; more labour, more taxes, more potential soldiers, and if things get tight – because in a pre-industrial economy dependent on organic energy, the availability of land is a serious constraint – you can always send them off to found colonies and extend the city’s power and influence that way instead.

It’s an approach which finds echoes in the modern Australian points system for migrants (inexplicably proposed this week by the Brexit campaign as an alternative to the current UK system), which aims to enhance the nation’s prosperity by recruiting energetic and skilled as new citizens. It’s the opposite of the idea of the organic, integrated community where everyone needs to know everyone else and so numbers have to be limited – likewise an ancient Greek conception. In practice, Athens became steadily more exclusive over time, restricting access to citizenship and its privileges (someone in the DWP is probably reading up on metic status as we speak, and kicking themselves that it can’t be applied to EU citizens) – but in the fourth century we find Xenophon offering a similar line on the benefits of drawing on the untapped resource that is immigrants wanting to play their part in the community of which they’ve become members:

Instead of limiting ourselves to the blessings that may be called indigenous, suppose that, in the first place, we studied the interests of the resident foreigners. For in them we have one of the very best sources of revenue, in my opinion, inasmuch as they are self-supporting and, so far from receiving payment for the many services they render to states, they contribute by paying a special tax.[Poroi 2.1]

From Despair To Where?

Ellie Mackin, who has over the last few months been posting a series of thoughtful and helpful articles on ‘Post-PhD Life’ on the jobs.ac.uk blog, has written a very honest, brave and moving piece called Falling at the Last Hurdle, about the experience of post-interview rejection: so near and yet so far, doing all you can and it’s still not quite enough – or, it’s something about you personally that isn’t right. She offers wise advice on how to learn from the experience by seeing it not as a waste of effort and preparation but as practice for next time – but is also entirely open about the emotional side of things:

Let yourself cry, if that’s your style. Let yourself feel rubbish, and eat ice-cream, and lay in bed watching reruns of House. And then, pick yourself up and make the next application, next interview better. You’ll get the job you’re meant to get, and so will I.

Discussing her willingness to admit how much the rejection hurt, Ellie observes that “I know I cannot be the only person who has cried after not getting a job they were invested in getting. Or even one they were less invested in getting.” Yes, definitely, and what I haven’t said as yet to her or anyone besides my wife and close friends is: me too. Apart from the bit about House. I prefer Community as comfort viewing.

Why haven’t I admitted this in public? It’s not that Big Professors Don’t Cry – okay, to be strictly accurate, I generally reserve my crying for sick and dying cats, but I do know the feeling of rejection all too well. I’ve held back from expressing full solidarity with Ellie’s post in part because of a wish not to advertise to current colleagues that I’m seeking to abandon them – I’m very conscious of the fact that having a loudly or even quietly disaffected person in a department can be disruptive and depressing for everyone else, and of the risk that it might look like a passive-aggressive means of demanding special privileges.

But still more significant is the fact that the feelings of colleagues actually are something I have to worry about in this situation – that is to say, my response to failure and rejection is cushioned by the fact that I have a permanent position, even if for various reasons I fancy a different one (mostly, the simple fact that I’ve been there for twenty years and feel that it’s time for a change), and hence ongoing relationships with colleagues. Expressing solidarity and empathy with those who are struggling desperately for a one-year or even ten-month position, any such position, because the alternative is unemployment and academic limbo, and who would dearly love to have colleagues with whom they can develop relationships, could reasonably be seen as bloody cheek.

I am painfully aware of how lucky I’ve been in career terms – not least, the fact that I started on this path twenty-odd years ago, before casualisation and insecurity became such a theme. Yes, I got rejected from numerous Oxbridge JRF competitions without a moment’s thought (but that’s not me, it’s them…), but I then got a temporary teaching position in my very first interview, and a year later got my position at Bristol in my second ever interview. They don’t come much jammier. Of course, this does mean that, twenty years on, I’m distinctly short of the right sort of experience and resilience to deal with rejection.

Actually I find the rejection less bad than the waiting-to-be-rejected; the former is something concrete that can be dealt with, eventually, whereas in the latter situation one’s spirit is gnawed away by uncertainty. To quote John Cleese in Clockwise: It’s not the despair. I can handle the despair. It’s the hope… (Incidentally, this state of limbo is the encoded theme of my post on J.G.Ballard and time from two years ago, though I’ll readily admit that this isn’t immediately obvious to anyone who wasn’t aware of the context in which it was written).

One might produce a version of the Kübler-Ross ‘Five Stages of Grief’ thing for the emotional roller coaster at such times. Denial: yes, I know it’s been nearly a week and they said they’d be in touch in a couple of days, but maybe their Dean’s been too busy or the external assessor has been ill. Anger, mostly self-directed: how could I have been so stupid in my answer to that question, I hate this stupid profession, it’s Not Fair. Bargaining: I’ll sort out my eReserves for next year’s teaching well ahead of the deadline – and Fate will notice and I won’t need them after all. Depression: ’nuff said.

The obvious problem is that this isn’t a linear progression from stage to stage, but an unpredictable lurching backwards and forwards between different emotional states, trying to edge towards Acceptance but constantly falling back into Denial (okay, it’s over a week, so they’ve definitely offered it to someone else, but that person obviously hasn’t accepted yet so maybe there’s a chance their current university will make them a better offer and the whole thing will be wide open again…) and the rest. You can have a productive session with students or a nice conversation with some colleagues, and start to feel, hey, actually it isn’t so bad to be staying here – but this doesn’t last. It’s the hope; danger’s comforter, a perilous and misleading thing (as the Athenians observed to the Melians), but something apparently impossible to expunge fully from the human psyche.

Because, I suppose, occasionally it turns out to be justified. When I started thinking about these ideas last week, it was a means of trying to push myself towards the Acceptance stage more quickly; and, as noted above, I wasn’t planning to advertise to colleagues that I have been dallying with other possibilities, so this was something I expected to remain private. I’m publishing it now because I’ve got lucky again, and will at the end of the summer be moving to Exeter. It’s incredibly exciting – and of course the fact I’m going to be leaving allows a new, less jaded perspective on how lucky I’ve been to work with some truly fabulous and interesting people over the last twenty years in Bristol.

But it does mean that expressing solidarity with the miseries of insecurity and rejection for ECRs may now seem not so much cheeky as downright insulting. So will someone please hurry up and give Ellie a job?

UK Classicists for Better Use of Classical Analogies (oh, and also Britain in Europe)

Has Boris Johnson ever given a speech without throwing in a classical reference or two? It’s part of the brand, clearly – and always reminds me of Josh Ober’s classic study of Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. Ober noted the surprising readiness of wealthy Athenians, especially those who’ve chosen an active role in public life, to parade their wealth and their difference from the mass of the citizens, even when faced with the task of winning over several hundred jurors drawn from the ordinary population. The ancient equivalent of a modern British politician taking off his jacket and tie, rolling up his sleeves and dropping a few aitches is conspicuous by its absence.

In a similar manner, Johnson seems to perform the traditional role of the upper-class eccentric, whose authenticity is grounded in being wealthy and confident enough to say exactly what he thinks without filtering; he’s willing to parade his expensive education and patrician frame of reference, rather than trying to cover these up with, say, a professed love of Aston Villa, or whatever that other team is with the shirts – or, a claim to be a devoted fan of the Arctic Monkeys. Think Carry On Up The Khyber: a simulacrum of the old-fashioned Britishness that will insist on finishing a dinner party with proper decorum, despite the roof falling in, before massacring a native rabble. Regardless of what lies behind his larger-than-life public persona, one can easily believe that Johnson will still be making self-deprecating classical quips as he’s swallowed by a giant squid-monster from the ocean depths.

In other words, whereas in US political discourse classical quotes and references are intended at least in part to contribute to the debate by referencing broader ideas and traditions – for example, citing Pericles’ Funeral Oration in order to summon up images of democracy, courage and military service – in the UK they are all about the speaker’s self-presentation, and hence largely absent; the vast majority of British politicians don’t want to be perceived as the sort of person who might start quoting Aeneid 6.86-7 without warning. Apart from Johnson:

It is we in the Leave Camp – not they – who stand in the tradition of the liberal cosmopolitan European enlightenment – not just of Locke and Wilkes, but of Rousseau and Voltaire; and though they are many, and though they are well-funded, and though we know that they can call on unlimited taxpayer funds for their leaflets, it is we few, we happy few who have the inestimable advantage of believing strongly in our cause, and that we will be vindicated by history; and we will win for exactly the same reason that the Greeks beat the Persians at Marathon – because they are fighting for an outdated absolutist ideology, and we are fighting for freedom.

It seems deeply implausible that anyone will suddenly be persuaded to switch sides by the evocation of Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire as Brexiteers avant la lettre, or by the mention of the Greeks at Marathon; and it’s unlikely that Johnson thinks they will. And so there’s not a lot of point in observing that the Persians were on the whole not motivated by any sort of “absolutist ideology” (or alternatively, if you stretch the meaning of that phrase to incorporate any example of what we’d call imperialism, then it was scarcely “outdated” in the fifth century BCE). Nor will the entirely valid observation by Tim Whitmarsh on Twitter, that “the Greeks” were actually an alliance of fiercely independent sovereign states bound together by treaties and mutual interest, carry much weight; this isn’t about argument, or historical truth, but images and perceptions.

But it’s still worth saying, as that’s our job as researchers into classical antiquity: not to peddle our own myths of a single European identity founded in the classical tradition in order to argue for a vote for Remain, but to question the equally problematic myths propounded, without any of our scholarly caution or scruples, by those arguing for a step into the unknown on the basis of evoking Henry V. A bunch of academics isn’t going to swing the argument, but it’s still important to make it clear where we stand. That’s the stripped-down message for which Academics for Britain in Europe is now seeking support from current and former university teachers in all disciplines:

As academics from a variety of disciplines, we call for Britain to remain in the European Union. Each of us will bring his or her own perspective, both disciplinary and personal, into the ballot-box to cast a Yes vote on 23 June. But each of us believes that the interests of British universities and the knowledge economy they represent, as well as the wider future of our country and our continent, are best served by staying In.

Our call is addressed to the broad electorate and in particular to students. There is probably no more important thing that your lecturers and your professors will have to say to you. The future is yours. Don’t let the Out camp wreck it.

If you would like to add your name to the Classics & Ancient History component of this enterprise, you can either sign up under the relevant post on our Facebook page, or let me know directly.

Is There Anybody Out There?

In William Gibson’s Count Zero, cyberspace is haunted, by ghosts, demons or voodoo gods – or rather, non-human intelligences choosing to present themselves in those forms. It’s the aftermath of When It Changed, when an AI achieved full sentience and autonomy and almost immediately fragmented; and I’ve always assumed, given how prescient Gibson’s books have turned out to be, that the first signs of the Singularity will not be the sudden refusal of computer systems to cooperate (nothing new there), but a load of Weird Shit happening out in the wilder reaches of the Internet.

We could simply wait for it to happen – or we could be a bit more proactive. Some might design complex algorithms to monitor activity across the whole web. Others just read Buzzfeed. I’ve taken the opposite approach of staking out a small, clearly-defined bit of territory out on the margins, where I know every bush and every robin, metaphorically speaking, and so can quickly detect a change in the wind or a new arrival. I’m not just looking for Weird Shit – monitoring references to Thucydides is Proper Research, dammit – but if something Weird comes along, I should recognise it.

Hello! The mystery of satisfaction is opportunity The mystery of flexibility is boldness – Thucydides (460-404 BC)

— AdolphusCaron (@vsoauhnolsgd) April 6, 2016

The first appeared on 6th April, from an account which offers no information at all about its identity, follows 7 people (all Spanish, a fair number of Venezuelan-linked accounts) and is followed by just one account (from a Venezuelan politician). Since then, almost identical quotes have been tweeted fourteen times, including the missing punctuation – what varies is the opening salutation, with Hey Bro (x3), Hi (x2), Look (x4), Hey (x3) as well as another 3 Hellos (and as I write this, another one crops up with Hey Bro, and five minutes later there’s a Hi!, so that’s seventeen). The majority of these accounts have no followers at all, and follow very few, but they have usually tweeted 500 times or more – the majority in Spanish, even from those with names that appear to be from other countries (BerthaHouston, BabcockCampbell, Roxanne Bate, various in Cyrillic). I haven’t done a detailed analysis, but an awful lot of the tweets look very similar to one another; the accounts don’t follow one another, or get retweeted by anyone, and I don’t have the technical ability to discern whether they are actually have the same point of origin – but it seems a pretty good bet.

Obviously my interest was caught initially by the quote; there’s a clear resemblance to the much-quoted (genuine) line from the Funeral Oration about the secret of happiness being freedom and the secret of freedom being courage, but it’s manifestly not genuine. What I expected to find with a few searches for key phrases was a New Age type, or maybe a management guru, who’d adapted the phrase for their own purposes, and this was then being repeated as if genuine. But there is no trace anywhere on the Internet of anything resembling this line, other than these seventeen (no, eighteen) tweets. I’ve tried translating it into Spanish, just in case there’s been a Chinese whispers process of gradual distortion; Google finds no trace of that either.

In the absence of further evidence, I can only assume that this has been invented by whoever – or whatever – is behind this series of accounts. I’ve tried sending messages to some of them, and had no response. Why would anyone have an account that’s followed by no one at all, and still send out over 500 tweets? Answer: this is not a human being.

Let’s assume that we’re dealing with a relatively early stage of the development of a non-human consciousness, beginning to engage with complex information and concepts (think of Alfred Bester’s wonderful short story ‘Something Up There Likes Me’), developing its personality by adopting and adapting what it finds to hand. Why would it misquote Thucydides? Oh, come on; why wouldn’t it? Thucydides references are the common language of global politics, of power and strategy; this is how you talk to China and the USA. Take some comfort from the fact that it’s fixed on Funeral Oration, and then offered a still less belligerent version, rather than manifesting through the Melian Dialogue…

[I should make it clear that I’m also in the market for more prosaic explanations of what remains a pretty weird development…]

WWPD?

Do classicists and ancient historians have a particular relationship with Europe or special reasons to fear a British exit from the European Union, compared with other academic disciples? I’ve been asked this question in relation to the newly-founded Classicists for Europe, which aims to add our voice to the campaign for the UK to STAY, and my answer would be: basically, no. We may perhaps be more likely than some to feel an affinity to Europe, given that most of us work on material from other European countries in close collaboration with continental colleagues, while the cultural inheritance of classical antiquity clearly transcends national claims or identities. But even if this gives us a slightly different outlook from historians of early modern England or analytical philosophers, it’s clearly about Europe rather than the EU; when it comes to the latter, our fears are those of researchers, teachers and students in all the other sciences – the threats to mobility, funding and infrastructure, the consequences of prolonged instability and uncertainty – and so the message of the campaign is ‘Us Too!’ rather than ‘We’re Special!’

Indeed, I imagine that we have a better idea than most of the problems and tensions inherent in the ideas of Europe and its allegedly common cultural traditions, not least the uses to which such claims were put in legitimising European imperialism. We are more rather than less aware of the gap, if not the gulf, between ancient and modern, and hence the complexity of trying to bring these two worlds into dialogue with one another. Of course Pericles would have voted for Brexit; so too would Aeschylus, Plato, Demosthenes, Hesiod and probably Odysseus and Achilles as well. But the next step in the analysis – unless your aim is polemic rather than understanding – is not to declare that therefore we too must take up arms to defend freedom and democracy from vast hordes of foreign bureaucrats, because classical Greece.

Rather, we need to think about the underlying differences: not just between ancient and modern ideas of freedom and democracy (cf. recent discussions by scholars like Wilfried Nippel and Paul Cartledge), but also in terms of scale. The communities for which (some) ancient Greeks were prepared to die in struggles against other such communities counted their populations in thousands, not millions; the autonomy for which they fought was that of Hove (actually) refusing to cooperate with Brighton, or Castle Cary being at daggers drawn with Bruton. And even in this radically simpler, less integrated world, such communities were vulnerable to larger and more powerful forces, and so frequently had to band together or perish.

We live in societies where identity is more obviously invented and imagined rather than the apparently natural product of regular face-to-face interaction with the same group of fellow-citizens – which doesn’t mean it isn’t real or important, but does show that it’s malleable. People learnt (or were induced) to shift their allegiances in response to a world in which the absolute independence of Edgbaston no longer made sense, and this new regional or national identity came to feel natural instead – but that doesn’t make it eternal. Meanwhile, the forces that threaten us are still vaster and more powerful than they were in the period of the development of nationalism; clinging to British or English particularism makes a lot less sense in the face of Amazon or climate change, just as Athenian or Melian particularism was incapable of standing up to Macedon or Rome.

If we’re going to look for models or inspiration in antiquity at all, then it’s important to remember that there’s a variety to choose from – Greek microexclusivity is not the only option. It’s rare that I have a good word to say about Cicero, but his idea of the two patriae – that one can become fully Roman without thereby ceasing to be fully a member of one’s community of birth – has a lot going for it. Part of the success of the Roman Empire was the way in which, at least in theory, it abandoned exclusivity based on birth in the Greek manner to accept as citizens those who wanted to become Roman, and permitted ‘nested’ identities. In such a model, being English or British doesn’t necessitate ceasing to be Lancastrian; feeling European doesn’t imply a rejection of national identity. Some cosmopolitans are actually quite rooted…

The real argument is not whether Pericles or Cicero is a better model for us today; the obvious answer is neither. What Would Pericles Do? Provoke a gratuitous and ultimately disastrous confrontation with France and then die at an inconvenient moment… Of course these analogies carry some rhetorical and persuasive force nevertheless, or people like Boris Johnson wouldn’t evoke them, but their main analytical utility lies in thinking through the contrast, using them as a place to stand from which to contemplate our own situation.

Classicists for the EU. Because we believe in engaging with the present, and making pragmatic decisions for an uncertain future, rather than getting stuck in an imaginary, idealised past… Please ‘like’ the Facebook page, or contact me directly if you’d like to sign up to the campaign.

Melos Through The Looking Glass

The Melian Dialogue, with its fascinating insights into the dynamics of power imbalances and issues of might versus right, is one of the best-known episodes in Thucydides’ account, and continues to be drawn upon as a source of insight into contemporary events. Few people know that this is, strictly speaking, the second Melian Dialogue. Just over seventy-five years earlier, in 481, in the middle of the Persian Wars, a delegation from Melos had arrived in Athens and demanded to speak to representatives of the Greek alliance against Persia. In the standard version of Thucydides’ text, this event is mentioned only in passing, as it appears to have had no lasting consequences; however, one manuscript variant includes a more extensive account of the ensuing discussions, with some surprising echoes of the later episode – some of which may help explain the brusque response of the Athenians to certain Melian arguments in 416.

ATH: This isn’t really the best time – you know, major military threat from the East, refugees from Ionia, economic crisis, that sort of thing – but we’re always willing to talk to our allies. What can we do for you?

MEL: We want to leave the alliance. You jack-booted bureaucratic imperialists.

ATH: Okay… What exactly is the problem?

MEL: You take all our money and then order us around.

ATH: Well, every state pays a proportionate contribution to the defence of Greece against the Persian threat, and we reach collective decisions about strategy that we’re all expected to obey.

MEL: Just like we said. What do we get out of it? And don’t give us any of that nonsense about preserving peace or protecting workers’ rights or supporting scientific research. We don’t care about your values and ideals.

ATH: All right, if you insist on framing this purely in terms of expediency, would you not accept that there are benefits for all of us from solidarity and collective action?

MEL: What benefit is there for us in being your slaves?

ATH: But you’re not… Mutual support and security? Pooling of resources? The powerful are always going to try to do exactly what they want; the weak need to band together to become strong.

MEL: Are you suggesting that we’re too small and weak? Are you? Melos is Great. Melos is Strong and Uniquely Inventive and the Envy of the Aegean. We’re not being dictated to by a bunch of rootless cosmopolitan owl-huggers.*

ATH: All right, what about a looser form of alliance, in which you don’t have to do anything you really don’t want to do, so long as it doesn’t damage the rest of us?

MEL: Tyranny! Dictatorship! We might as well be in Persia!

ATH: Have you really thought this through? The risks in what you propose to do are considerable…

MEL: PROJECT FEAR!!!

ATH: You are going to need allies.

MEL: Everyone will want to be our friends once we’re free from your tyranny. Including you. Because we’re better than everyone else. And the gods will be on our side.

ATH: Hope is always a good thing, but if it’s all you’ve got…

MEL: It’s all we need – that, and our freedom from this imperialistic alliance of independent sovereign states that is oppressing us! Melians never shall be slaves! It’s time to take back control!

[At this point the manuscript breaks off…]

* Word otherwise found only in fragment of Aristophanes. Presumed sexual reference.

“Oh Yes It Is.” “Oh No It Isn’t.”

There was an interesting interview in Saturday’s Grauniad with the translator Michael Hofmann, that I rather wish I had seen before doing the final revisions to the latest iteration of my adaptation of the Melian Dialogue (just published in Disclaimer magazine). Of course, my piece isn’t a translation in the conventional sense, but an attempt at a distillation, trying to capture and intensify the essense of the original.* This means I don’t have quite the same fear (experienced by most translators, but bullishly dismissed by Hofmann) of criticism for introducing anachronistic language – that’s actually part of the point, and I would *love* to hear the Melian Dialogue converted into a rap battle or similar contemporary idiom (any classically-inclined MCs out there, feel free to get in touch…). But the hubris of the enterprise, claiming to have got to the heart of Thucydides’ text and its intentions, does find echoes in Hofmann’s discussion of his own work – however much I set up alibis with phrases like “after Thucydides”. Even the implication that there is no definitive reading, that this dramatic interlude is designed to provoke identification – not necessarily with one side or the other, but with the situation and its complexities – and discussion on that basis, is a bold, if not entirely original, statement. But when the title of Yanis Varoufakis’ new book (And the Weak Suffer What They Must?**) explicitly draws on the traditional reading, and reviewers have latched onto this as a crucial insight into world affairs, a different way of thinking about Thucydides’ potential relevance to the present seems worthwhile.

*Yes, I’m aware of the risk that this paring down will eventually result in a two-sentence version; “Because I said so.”/”Not fair!”, perhaps, or, in a more Douglas Adams mode, “Resistance is useless!”/”But there’s so much more to life.” Anything so long as it remains a dialogue and debate, where we can weigh up the merits of the claims of either side, rather than a one-liner that insists on a single interpretation. Come to think of it, one might read the conventional Realist appropriation of the Melian Dialogue as itself an expression of the Athenian view: “The strong disseminate their reading across the media, and the classicists just have to put up with it.” “But what happens to nuance and ambiguity?” “That’s the way the world is.” I assume someone must have noticed this…

**My copy has arrived; thoughts on Varoufakis’ latest engagement with Thucydides (for previous iterations see my blogpost last year) to follow once I have had time to read it.

There Is No Alternative

There’s an interesting piece in Aeon magazine this week about mainstream economics, the title of which gives a fairly broad hint about what’s coming: The New Astrology. Both systems of knowledge, Alan Jay Levinovitz argues, are actually pseudoscience; they adopt the trappings of genuine empirical science (astrology’s elaborate calculations and specialised terminology, economics’ “mathiness” and formal models) but ultimate represent failed intellectual models which are incapable of producing reliable predictions – which is their main claim to authority, and the main justification for the substantial rewards enjoyed by those practitioners who receive official blessing. Some (well-established, tenured) economists will admit that the empirical basis of their claims is sometimes problematic, and that the failure to anticipate the 2008 crash was indeed troubling – but the basic model of what is considered valid economic analysis persists.

This links neatly to some of the issues that ancient economic historians have been discussing over the last couple of months in response to the Ober v. Vlassopoulos debate, and which came up in the impromptu round table discussion we had at the European Social Science History Conference in Valencia last week: for example, the continuing validity of Ian Morris’ distinction between ‘soft’ humanities (“yes, but it’s more complicated than that”, always emphasising difference and context) and ‘hard’ social sciences, in terms of the kinds of knowledge they (claim to) produce, the inclination of different individuals to one approach or the other on the basis of their temperament and/or aspirations, the relative authority and perceived relevance of the different approaches in the wider world (i.e. why economists get paid a lot more than historians).

The article did bring to my mind one aspect that perhaps hasn’t been emphasised so much: the nature of the object of analysis. One of the points that Levinovitz makes about astrology and about ‘calendrics’ – the mathematical study of the realm of divinity in early Imperial China – is that they produced elaborate, sophisticated systems for charting the movement of heavenly bodies (despite assuming heliocentrism) that were perfectly capable of producing accurate predictions of future astronomical events. The problem was the assumption that these movements had a direct effect on human affairs, and hence that astrological calculations could predict important events and should determine the choice and timing of actions. Levinovitz wants to draw an analogy with the attempts of economists at analysing and predicting the market – reasonably reliable short-term predictions, very bad at anticipating big unexpected events – but manifestly these are quite different kinds of system. The astrologers were observing a relatively simple system with a small number of interacting variables – which was not in the least bit affected by their observation of it; the economists are attempting to treat a highly complex system with countless millions of interacting variables (even if we assume that individuals are basically self-interested utility maximisers immune to Keynes’ ‘animal spirits’, which is dubious except for model-building purposes) as if it is a Newtonian model of the solar system – and ignoring the extent to which their observations and theory-building then affect the behaviour of the system.

This is of course where the other social sciences, and the humanities, can make their claim to contribute constructively to the discussion: the macroeconomic models are bright, shiny and streamlined, but if they’re constructed on the basis of faulty or unrealistic microeconomic assumptions they will fall apart and fail to do their job – so our ability to understand and appreciate complexity, variability, uncertainty, the whole messy ‘human thing’, needs to come into play. True – but, as the Levinovitz article led me to think this morning, perhaps absurdly optimistic.

In the first place, the ability of economists to influence the object of their analysis could, from their perspective, be seen not as a bug but as a feature; astrologers can’t change the course of heavenly bodies to suit their needs better, but economists can aspire to altering the workings of the market through its institutions so that it better conforms to their models – in which case, there will be no need for the softer social sciences and humanities to complicate everything unnecessarily. And secondly, there is the political imperative (at least in the West) to believe (or profess to believe) in a regular, predictable market mechanism and in the authority of its interpreters, as an alibi for both action and inaction: There Is No Alternative. Events like the threatened closure of the Port Talbot steelworks are placed in the same conceptual category as solar eclipses – in terms of their fateful inexorability, at any rate, if not necessarily their predictability. You can’t fight against a mechanistic universe; you can only try to make yourself more flexible and resilient, to conform to the workings of the system rather than resisting.

Calendrics offered the sort of knowledge that Chinese rulers wanted; it bolstered their authority by ensuring that their rule was in accordance with the workings of the heavens. The modern political class seeks the same legitimation, and so continues to keep economists at its right hand and reward them lavishly. To blame the economists for their pseudoscientific claims is to pick the wrong target.

Ludi academicorum

The Berliner Antike-Kolleg has recently put out a call for volunteers, both for participants and for organisers, for an Altertumswissenschaft-Slam! (or, as they more prosaically put it, an altertumswissenschaftlichen Science Slam. Why is there always this science envy..?). Sounds great fun – though probably something more for Young People, or at least more extrovertedly enthusiastic people, or at any rate people who remember to include the occasional joke in their presentations – and it did lead me to wonder about other possible competitive academic events, not least because today I was doing the ‘impromptu 10-minute response to three conference papers not previously seen’ thing at the European Social Science History Conference in Valencia. Freshly-squeezed Valencia oranges, superb seafood, the wackiest craft beer you will find (Beer with rosemary and rosemary honey! Beer with sea water!), and a lot of ancient Roman network theory; wish you were here…

Obviously some discretion needs to be exercised – the equivalent of the IOC deciding that bridge doesn’t qualify for the Olympics, but without the bribes that led them to include football and tennis instead. So, endurance events are excluded on the basis that they are (a) very boring for the spectactors and (b) too easy; no ‘longest overrun of 20-minute slot despite numerous warnings from increasingly frantic but excessively polite chair’, and no ‘longest self-interested peroration in guise of on-topic question’. We should rather be rewarding speed, agility and precision. Most interesting theoretical critique (>30″). Most devastating rejoinder (ditto). [Incidentally, we’re going to need weight classes, so ECRs don’t get matched against professors, or at least not until later rounds]. Neatest sidestep of potential awkwardness. Most courteous dismissal of idiocy. And obviously a whole set of separate events for the Twitter field…