Every Loser Wins

The grand tour continues. Hello Warszawa! Sorry, Wrocław! Is it time for Thucydides on atheism, or the lessons of history, or powerlessness, or something else entirely?

Partly because I talk more happily from notes than reading a prepared text – not least because non-anglophones apparently enjoy listening to my old-fashioned BBC English regardless of whether I’ve completely lost the thread – I tend to give a lot of different papers, even if they’re hastily improvised variations on a smaller set of themes (my academic model is of course the second great Miles Davis Quintet), rather than the same properly-prepared one multiple times. This does mean that plenty of them never get published, or even looked at again until, when preparing another talk, I vaguely recall using a particular passage in a set of PowerPoint slides and so go hunting for it.

In the case of the paper on the reception of Thucydides’ ‘atheism’ that I gave at a conference in Bochum last week, I am fairly confident that they are planning a conference volume and so I can expect to have to write that up at some point. In the case of today’s paper, it seems vanishingly unlikely that it will ever appear in print – not least because I did lose the thread somewhere in the middle, and just had to keep talking in the hope of stumbling across it again. And so, since it did actually contain one original idea, I thought I should note it here for posterity…

Any fan of Star Trek will probably be familiar with the Kobayashi Maru exercise. This is a simulation, in which a Star Fleet Academy cadet takes command of a ship and has to decide whether to try to rescue a civilian vessel, the Kobayashi Maru, that is damaged and stranded in the neutral zone between Federation and Klingon space; if the cadet proceeds to launch a rescue mission, their ship is suddenly surrounded and fired upon by three Warbirds, with no hope of escape – surrender or abandoning ship are the only options. The complaint of those who take the test is that it’s a cheat; there is no way to win. The response is that this is the point: it is a test of how a cadet responds to such a hopeless scenario, to the fear of death and defeat, and how they lead their crew in this situation.

Thesis: Thucydides invented the Kobayashi Maru exercise. That is to say: his work repeatedly places the reader in no-win situations (I follow Hobbes in echoing Plutarch that T.’s skill as an author is to make his readers vicariously experience the events described, rather than observing them from a safe distance, as Hegel describe contemplation of history as being like observing a distant shipwreck from the safety of the shore). The fate of the Plataeans (“What have you done to aid the Spartans in this war?”). The plague (sheer chance as to whether people survive, and those who try to maintain traditional virtue are more likely to die). The Corcyrean stasis (ditto). The Melians (discounting the very remote chance that the Spartans might actually turn up to help for a change). And with many of the set-piece debates, the agony is that we hear specious and risky arguments but are powerless to object to their premises, to influence the course of the discussion or prevent foolish decisions being made.

Taking at face value T.’s claim that he hopes his work will be found useful or advantageous, what is it that he might intend us to take from such episodes? One might draw the sorts of lessons and understanding that modern readers have often claimed to identify in his text: the failures of democratic deliberation (does that help, or just lead us towards a Hobbesian suspicion of democracy?), the dynamics of factionalism and polarisation (but is the lesson then simply to keep a suitcase packed for the first signs of trouble, or to commit heartily to one faction as it’s the reasonable moderates who get attacked from both sides), the rhetoric of the powerful (but we kinda already know that)?

Perhaps the point is the experience itself: finding oneself in a position of inferiority, mortal threat and hopelessness, as a test of one’s character and emotional resilience. How would one respond? How should one? It is important that we imagine ourselves as the Plataeans, not just the Spartans; as the Melians, not just the Athenians [gestures violently towards traditional Realists]. It’s not about precepts or normative principles, but about how it feels to be helpless. The captain cannot cheat death.

In both 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and the 2009 Star Trek retcon/alternate timeline, cadet James T. Kirk reprogrammed the simulation so that he could win, on the grounds that he didn’t believe in no-win scenarios. In the former, he was praised for his ingenuity and determination; in the latter, he’s summoned before a disciplinary committee for cheating, and told that he has entirely missed the point of the test. Mr Spock was the Thucydidean…