Stop Making Sense

The dominant tendency in historical studies over the last fifty years or so has been to assume rationality on the part of people in the past, even if their behaviour and ideas seem at first sight to be ridiculous, inexplicable or ‘primitive’ by our standards. The core argument of E.R. Dodds’ classic The Greeks and the Irrational was not that the ancient Greeks were actually confused and illogical, but that the majority did not stick to ‘modern’ patterns of thought like philosophical reason and scientific scepticism but held a more traditional worldview – coherent in its own terms – built around belief in divine forces and fate. Elections are a tool for manipulation by the elite, so all offices should be allocated by lot? Not our way of doing politics, but you can see the reasoning. The emperor gets upset by the rising price of eggs, blames this on greedy and cheating merchants, and so issues a blanket decree that no one should ever charge more than than the apparently arbitrary figures listed in his decree, on pain of death? Ignorant, confused and self-defeating from a modern economic standpoint, but it makes perfect sense in the context of what passed for Roman understanding of what we call the market.

The historian’s task, then, is not to condemn past ideas for failing to conform to modern conceptions and assumptions, but to make sense of them in their own terms and context – on the assumption that there is a sense to be made, even of some of the wackier fragments of pre-Socratic thought. Where this becomes trickier is with ideas or behaviour that did not conform to the prevalent worldview in the past – it was never a monolith, even if we tend to treat it as such. In some cases, we risk unconsciously taking sides, when the minority view resembles our familiar taken-for-granted ideas (scientific enquiry; ‘freedom of speech’ liberalism; Christianity) and so tempts us back towards treating the majority view as aberrant and illogical (how could the Athenians have condemned Socrates for Just Asking Questions?). But generally the historicist approach, seeking to understand why Christianity or Socrates would have seemed dangerous to some at the time, given their values and worldview, wins out.

What of the actions of certain individuals that were clearly regarded by contemporaries as bizarre and unacceptable – the emperor Gaius making his horse a senator, having the sea whipped for frustrating his plans and having angry conversations with the gods about the siting of his own temple? A few reach for the tools of psychology and point to Gaius’ disturbed childhood as an explanation; a few others ‘sanewash’ his behaviour by suggesting, for example, that the horse thing was a deliberate satire on the obsequiousness of the senatorial elite, with the emperor simply exploring the extent of his power rather than pretending not to have it (as his predecessors had done). Mostly, however, historians emphasise the unreliable nature of our sources; these are the stories that get told about Caligula by people who hated him and who favoured a model of imperial behaviour that upheld traditional norms and respected decorum, and so we cannot take such stories at face value but perhaps can only ever discuss the representation of individual emperors, not the reality. The most extreme anecdotes are too extreme to be credible; let’s just think about why such stories would circulate…

And today we have Donald Trump, who makes Caligula look like a paragon of moderation and self-control and Diocletian seem like Paul Krugman. It should be stressed that much of his world-view is not at all aberrant if we consider the overall context; there are lots of ignorant, vindictive, racist and nationalistic misogynists out there, it’s just that they haven’t normally been elected to the highest office in a major western country or at least haven’t been (allowed to be) so open about their views in public – usually we have to wait for the insiders’ memoirs for the full story, but here it’s difficult to imagine much of a gap between public and private. And, as has regularly been noted, it’s striking that the stories in circulation – if we take the mainstream media to be our equivalent of Tacitus and Suetonius – are often milder and less extreme than the visible reality, as if the journalists fear that writing the truth will look too much like over-the-top polemic so write lies in the hope of retaining their credibility. (Some more ridiculous and irrational thinking that requires a cultural, contextual explanation).

Some aspects of the Trump regime go much further, and threaten to break the obsever’s brain. I still find it difficult to accept that the ‘bleach as a cure for COVID’ routine was not some clumsy bit of satire. The tariffs stuff today is UNBELIEVABLY stupid. At best we have someone with a Ladybird Book-level understanding of trade – Country A produces wheat; Country B produces shoes; they exchange their goods and everyone is happy, except when the evil A people also start producing shoes and then force the A people to buy them, which is BAD – crossed with a remarkable commitment to old-fashioned autarky and the usual rampant xenophobia. But then to divide the US trade deficit with a given country by the total volume of imports into the US from that country, and claim that this number must be the level of tariffs imposed by that country to frustrate the natural (sic.) tendency for trade to balance, so half that number is an appropriately generous level at which to set US tariffs…

And there are people enabling this stuff, and elaborating it in documents, and presumably doing all the individual calculations for what level of tariffs should be imposed on penguins in the South Atlantic and US forces on Diego Garcia (the Council of Economic Advisers, no less!), and then justifying it all in public. I was struck yesterday morning by one interviewee on BBC radio claiming that price rises are inflation only if they are caused by excessive government spending – and being allowed to get away with this by the interviewer, whether through their ignorance or spinelessness, whereas the only reasonable response is to conclude that this person is neither serious nor sincere, end of discussion.

So, it’s all court politics: who has the emperor’s ear to try to sway his whims for an hour or so until he talks to someone else, who encourages his senile burbling because of sycophancy or equal ignorance or because this distracts him from other things, who tries to channel his obsessions for their own ends, who is oblivious to possible consequences and who is willing to see the world burn for kicks and giggles? There are factions with more or less irreconcilable ideas and goals – compare Henry Farrell’s analysis of the divide between the hardcore religious right and the Silicon Valley crowd – and there are a few shared traits, such as an eagerness to hate and punish anything resembling opposition or difference (which extends to tolerating the punishment of the objects of hatred of other factions, even if they themselves feel indifferent to them).

Treat this seriously and try to discern any reason or coherence, and you’ve already lost. And yet people keep doing this, keep trying to identify the Really Cunning Plan that makes this all make sense – suggesting, for example, that the economic incoherence of the tariffs policy is beside the point because this isn’t an economic policy at all but a political move, to create internal disruption and opportunities for shakedowns. Or maybe the incoherence is the point, to break the brains of anyone trying to make sense of it all – dead cats all the way down. Or maybe some of them are actually aliens bent on global subversion. Mostly, it is just not serious. But the consequences are serious already, on multiple fronts, and will only get worse.

My personal take this week is that this is the Bitcoin regime; not so much in the literal sense that at least half of them seem to have financial interests in such scams, but culturally/ideologically, insofar as Bitcoin seems to draw together accelerationist futurism and an atavistic drive for independence from state institutions, libertarianism and the far right, preppers and gamers and coders, money and influence both entirely detached from any sort of material basis, hype, bullshit and the terminally online. But mostly because Bitcoin is one of the few things I can think of that is as multi-facetedly stupid as the Trump regime.

No, I’m not expecting to be invited to visit the USA any time soon, why do you ask?