More Than Words

Pretty well all my mental bandwidth at the moment is taken up with teaching – learning new computer systems, recording lectures, correcting auto-captions (the variants on ‘Thucydides’ – Through CDC, These Sedatives, Civil Liberties – are a marvel, but isn’t the bloody AI capable of learning from my constant corrections?), checking online discussion fora and wondering why no one is participating, waking at 3 am to worry about the fact that no one is participating… So, an exchange of tweets with the great Shadi Bartsch is pretty well all the intellectual engagement I can currently muster. Even there it’s taken me nearly a week to work out what I actually think, by which point it would seem weird and even rude to push the conversation further (plus, I realised that I was doing this as the Thucydiocy Bot, which is a not-terribly-secret identity but nevertheless not immediately identifiable as me…).

Confucius said it before Thucydides!

"When the names [for things] are not right, what is said will not sound reasonable; when what is said does not sound reasonable, things will not be accomplished." (Analects 13.3)

— Shadi Bartsch (@ShadiBartsch) September 30, 2020

These things are, I guess, always a matter of perspective and emphasis. Is it most striking, as the tweet implies, that the concern of Thucydides 3.82 with words changing their meanings – much cited in present conditions of polarisation and culture war – was anticipated by Confucius? It seems like another bit of evidence for the ‘axial age’ thesis, the idea that similar philosophical concerns developed roughly in parallel in different parts of the globe; the perception that words could be malleable (and manipulable) and the sense that this was a serious problem for society and politics.

Or – and this was my initial reaction – are the differences within that broad area of concern more striking than the similarities? It’s not just that Thucydides was (ostensibly) describing the course of concrete events, albeit abstracting from them, where Confucius was offering a normative principle. Rather, they are describing two quite different problems. Confucius’ sequence is (1) words are wrong, (2) reasonable things don’t seem reasonable, (3) nothing gets done; Thucydides agrees on (1), but then moves partly to (2) unreasonable things seem reasonable (e.g. factional violence seems like sensible behaviour) and hence (3) things are done that shouldn’t be. And even the element in the latter’s presentation that comes closest to the former, that moderation (the ‘reasonable’ course of action) comes to be seen or presented as cowardice, still leads to the problem of action (people throw themselves into factional conflict rather than holding back and seeking compromise) rather than inaction.

This is where my capacity for abstract thought grinds to a halt; does this reflect the different political contexts (unifying state versus fragmenting political community), or the specific perspectives of the two authors, or the broader conditions in which they found themselves, or even one of those wild transhistorical generalisations about the East being cursed by inertia and the West by hyperactivity? Are they not just using different killer apps but different operating systems? [note that, unless someone wants to give me a six-figure advance to turn that speculation into a blockbuster trade book, I am not at thus point being serious]. And would western political discourse be more or less productive if more Confucius was cited and less Thucydides..?