The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

A PHENOMENON noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.

Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity.

“While all other sciences have advanced,” confessed our second President, John Adams, “government is at a stand; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.”

Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens’ attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II’s of England via the Armada, Germany’s twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan’s bid for an empire of Asia; 3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire, the last Romanovs and the last imperial dynasty of China; and finally 4) folly or perversity.

To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight.

Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. To remove the problem from personality, a third criterion must be that the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.

After two hundred years of separate existence, the ten tribes of Israel were conquered by the Assyrians in 722 B.C. and, in accordance with Assyrian policy toward conquered peoples, were driven from their land and forcibly dispersed, to vanish into one of the great unknowns and perennial speculations of history.

Hastened by cabals and plots, usurpations, assassinations and uprisings, the turnover in kings during the 7th century was rapid,

In those dark ages between the fall of Rome and the medieval revival, government had no recognized theory or structure or instrumentality beyond arbitrary force.

Since disorder is the least tolerable of social conditions, government began to take shape in the Middle Ages and afterward as a recognized function with recognized principles, methods, agencies, parliaments, bureaucracies.

Solon of Athens,

Having neither participated in the oppressions by the rich nor supported the cause of the poor, Solon enjoyed the unusual distinction of being acceptable to both; by the rich, according to Plutarch, because he was a man of wealth and substance, and by the poor because he was honest.

His decision suggests that an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom.

For all their flaws and quarrels, the Founding Fathers have rightfully been called by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., “the most remarkable generation of public men in the history of the United States or perhaps of any other nation.”

the most condemned act and worst error of Louis’ career was his Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, canceling his grandfather’s decree of toleration and reopening persecution of the Huguenots.

Wilson’s offer of December 1916 to bring together the belligerents for negotiation of a “peace without victory” was rejected by both sides. Neither was prepared to accept a settlement without some gain to justify its suffering and sacrifice in lives, and to pay for the war.

Character is fate, as the Greeks believed.

An alternative strategy would have been to proceed against the Netherlands Indies while leaving the United States untouched. While this would have left an unknown quantity in Japan’s rear, an unknown quantity would have been preferable to a certain enemy, especially one of potential vastly superior to her own.

At a time when at least half the United States was strongly isolationist, the Japanese did the one thing that could have united the American people and motivated the whole nation for war. So deep was the division in America in the months before Pearl Harbor that renewal of the one-year draft law was enacted in Congress by a majority of only one vote—a single vote. The fact is that Japan could have seized the Indies without any risk of American belligerency; no attack on Dutch, British or French colonial territory would have brought the United States into the war. Attack on American territory was just the thing—and the only thing—that could.

Japan seems never to have considered that the effect of an attack on Pearl Harbor might be not to crush morale but to unite the nation for combat. This curious vacuum of understanding came from what might be c...

A principle that emerges in the cases so far mentioned is that folly is a child of power. We all know, from unending repetitions of Lord Acton’s dictum, that power corrupts. We are less aware that it breeds folly; that the power to command frequently causes failure to think; that the responsibility of power often fades as its exercise augments.

The ultimate outcome of a policy is not what determines its qualification as folly. All misgovernment is contrary to self-interest in the long run, but may actually strengthen a regime temporarily. It qualifies as folly when it is a perverse persistence in a policy demonstrably unworkable or counter-productive.

Laocoon, a priest of Apollo’s temple, comes rushing down from the citadel crying in alarm, “Are you mad, wretched people? Do you think the foe has gone? Do you think gifts of the Greeks lack treachery? What was Odysseus’ reputation? “Either the Greeks are hiding in this monster, Or it’s some trick of war, a spy or engine, To come down on the city. Tricky business Is hiding in it. Do not trust it, Trojans; Do not believe this horse. Whatever it may be, I fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts.”

With the circular justice that man likes to impose upon history, a survivor of Troy founds the city-state that will conquer Troy’s conquerors.

How much fact lies behind the Trojan epic? Archeologists, as we know, have uncovered nine levels of an ancient settlement on the Asian shore of the Hellespont, or Dardanelles, opposite Gallipoli.

The period following the Mycenaean collapse is a shadowy void of some two centuries called the Greek Dark Ages, whose only communication to us is through shards and artifacts. For some unexplained reason, written language seems to have vanished completely,

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the puzzle that is life on earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design.

The gods’ interference does not acquit man of folly; rather, it is man’s device for transferring the responsibility for folly.

Under its impulse the individual found in himself, rather than in God, the designer and captain of his fate. His needs, his ambitions and desires, his pleasures and possessions, his mind, his art, his power, his glory, were the house of life. His earthly passage was no longer, as in the medieval concept, a weary exile on the way to the spiritual destiny of his soul.

That the Renaissance popes were shaped and directed by their society is undeniable, but the responsibility of power often requires resisting and re-directing a pervading condition. Instead, the popes succumbed, as we shall see, to the worst in society, and exhibited, in the face of mounting and visible social challenges, an unrelieved wooden-headedness.

Dispensations were forged for sale, donations for crusade swallowed up by the Curia, indulgences peddled in common commerce so that the people,

complained the Chancellor of Oxford in 1450, no longer cared what evils they did because they could buy remission of the penalty for sin for sixpence or win it “as a stake in a game of tennis.”

By the 14th century, protest had taken form and found a voice in the dissident movements of Lollards and Hussites, and in communal lay groups like the Brethren of the Common Life, where genuine piety found a warmer home outside the official Church.

Here, many of the doctrinal dissents that were later to mark the Protestant revolt were already being expressed: denial of transubstantiation, rejection of confession, of the indulgence traffic, of pilgrimages and of the veneration of saints and relics.

Through visible beauties and grandeur, they believed, the Papacy would be dignified and the Church exert its hold upon the people. Nicholas V, who has been called the first Renaissance Pope, made the belief explicit on his deathbed in 1455. Urging the Cardinals to continue the renovation of Rome, he said, “To create solid and stable conviction there must be something that appeals to the eye. A faith sustained only by doctrine will never be anything but feeble and vacillating.… If the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings … all the world would accept and revere it.

This use of spiritual sanction for temporal motives, though certainly not new in Church practice, earned Sixtus wide discredit because of the harm done to the Florentines and their commerce and because of the suspicions it aroused of the Pope’s personal involvement.

He published a manifesto calling on Christian princes to summon a continuation of the Council of Basle in order to prevent the ruination of the Church by Pope Sixtus, whom he accused of heresy, simony, shameful vices, wasting Church patrimony, instigating the Pazzi conspiracy and entering into secret alliance with the Sultan.

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come, a fact that generally escapes despots, who by nature are rulers of little wisdom.

No sudden conversion or dramatic circumstances propelled him into the Church, other than the accepted fact that to someone with the right connections the Church offered a substantial career.

When pardons instead of death penalties for manslaughter, murder and other major crimes were questioned, Cardinal Borgia defended the practice on the ground that “the Lord desireth not the death of a sinner but rather that he live and pay.”

Swamped beneath the influx of Sixtus’ cardinals, who included members of Italy’s most powerful families, the Sacred College was a stage of pomp and pleasure. While a few of its members were worthy men sincere in their calling, the majority were worldly and covetous nobles, ostentatious in their splendor, players in the unending game of exerting influence in their own or their sovereigns’ behalf.

From revenues of papal offices, of three bishoprics he held in Spain and of abbeys in Spain and Italy, from an annual stipend of 8000 ducats as Vice-Chancellor and 6000 as Cardinal and from private operations, Borgia amassed enough wealth to make him over the years the richest member of the Sacred College. In

The Papacy’s detachment from religion over the preceding fifty years, its sinking reputation and aversion to reform, gave the French plans for invasion an added impulse.

In proportion to their absorption in the realm of Caesar, the popes had less time or concern for the things of God. Continually engaged in the quid pro quos of one alliance or another, they neglected more than ever the internal problems of the Church and the religious community and hardly noticed the signs of coming crisis in their own sphere.

“The most grievous danger for any Pope,” he told a consistory of cardinals, “lies in the fact that encompassed as he is by flatterers, he never hears the truth about his own person and ends by not wishing to hear it.” It was an unheard message to every autocrat in history.

The late Pontiff was said to have gained the tiara by a pact with the Devil at the price of his soul.

Scandal sheets, to which Romans were much given, appeared every day hung around the neck of Pasquino, an ancient statue dug up in 1501 which served the Romans as a display center for anonymous satire.

Certain revisionists have taken a fancy to the Borgia Pope and worked hard to rehabilitate him by intricate arguments that dispose of the charges against him as either exaggeration or forgeries or gossip or unexplained malice until all are made to vanish in a cloud of invention. The revision fails to account for one thing: the hatred, disgust and fear that Alexander had engendered by the time he died.

In the history books the pontificate is treated in terms of political wars and maneuvers. Religion, except for an occasional reference to Alexander’s observance of Lenten fasts or his concern to maintain the purity of Catholic doctrine by censorship of books, is barely mentioned. The last word may belong to Egidio of Viterbo, General of the Augustinians and a major figure in the reform movement. Rome under Pope Alexander VI, he said in a sermon, knows “No law, no divinity; Gold, force and Venus rule.”

Michelangelo was eventually won back and consented to model a huge statue of Julius three times life size as ordered by Julius himself. When it was viewed by the subject while still in clay, Michelangelo asked whether he should place a book in the left hand. “Put a sword there,” answered the warrior Pope, “I know nothing of letters.” Cast in bronze, the colossal figure was toppled and melted down when the city changed hands during the wars, and made into a cannon derisively named La Giulia by papal enemies.