(This is the tenth post of what is to be a limited series. I may already be more than half-finished with it; at any rate, I am taking a brief break from Plato and Thucydides with this post, and turning to Sophocles for a look at a theme that will prove relevant to my main focus. Previous posts can be found here.)

In a talk given in May 2023, the English intellectual Mary Harrington (whom we have encountered before) pointed to a question underlying many of the most bitterly contested political disputes of our time: what does it mean to be human? As she shows (beginning here), there are two basic understandings at play. The first is based in the old Christian notion of the imago dei – that is, of humans being made in God’s image. On this view of things, there is a definite human nature; ‘humanist’ medicine, as Harrington calls it, aims at bringing the body back to its natural state (e.g., by curing a disease or fixing a broken bone). Recent decades, however, have seen the emergence of a trans-humanist path, whose first moment came with the birth-control pill. This represented a new step, for all of a sudden, the aim was not to return the body to its natural state, but rather to improve upon that state by disrupting a natural process. This trans-humanist path sees human nature as a baseline from which we upgrade ourselves. There is no upper limit or known endpoint to this process of self-upgrading. The aim here is not attaining, but “mastering imago dei” (emphasis mine). Harrington says that every “scissor issue” today on which one cannot avoid taking a side turns on the dispute over what humans are: “Does normal exist? What is sex for? What is a woman? What is a mother? Are we entitled to opt out of normal developmental processes? Should we be free to modify ourselves as we see fit, and if not, why not? What, if any, are the limits to any of this?”

When Harrington speaks of mastery while describing the new view of what it is to be human, she brings up a matter that people worried over long before our own time. In the fifth century BC, the Athenian playwright Sophocles put the following words at the end of his play Oedipus the King: “do not seek to be master in all things.” Sophocles, no less than Harrington, was concerned with this sort of question: to what degree is it appropriate to aim at control, at mastery, and to what degree should one simply accept what happens? That is, how much of life should be activity, and how much passivity? We have just seen how such questions are of fundamental importance to our technological era, but the first, and perhaps the greatest, treatment of the matter is to be found in Sophocles’ play. At its most fundamental, the play is a reflection on activity and passivity, presenting a vision that goes to the heart of so much at work in our own time. (The theme of active and passive was not confined to Sophocles in his day; for its appearance in Thucydides and Plato see my book, p. 24 and pp. 263-265.)

We can start to see the central role of active and passive in Oedipus the King if we turn to the events around which it is built, the things that have already happened when the curtain rises. When Oedipus is born, in Thebes, an oracle declares that he will kill his father and have children with his mother. His parents, determined to avoid this outcome, hand him over to a shepherd, who is to kill him by exposure, but the shepherd takes pity on little Oedipus, beginning a series of events that see him brought up in Corinth. Years later, having grown up, Oedipus hears an oracle prophesy that he will kill his father and have children with his mother. In order to avoid this fate, he leaves Corinth for good. In the course of his travels, he encounters his real (i.e., biological) father, whom he kills, and he soon marries his real mother. The play begins after these events, and the action of the play is the process by which Oedipus comes to understand what has happened.

Already in this initial story, there are indications that the matter of active and passive constitutes a central theme. The action of a play typically involves some decisive series of events that brings about a new state of affairs. A prophecy, on the other hand, is normally just a kind of seeing, a fundamentally passive thing. But if we consider the series of events described above, we see that activity and passivity have traded places. The action of the play does not decide or change much of anything. All it does is reveal to Oedipus the truth about himself, revealing in the process that there is nothing that can done about it. The action of the play, then, occupies the passive role. The prophecy, on the other hand, plays a decisively active role. Oedipus only wound up fulfilling the prophecy because it was made in the first place: an oracle caused his biological parents to get rid of him, and an oracle caused him to leave Corinth, producing a situation in which he could encounter his real parents without knowing it, leading to the fulfilment of the prophecy. The actions of Oedipus and his parents, by which they try to avoid what has been foretold, are the means by which they become passively subject to their fate. It is because they think there is something to do that something is done to them; because they think they can act, they are acted upon; their belief that they can control things becomes the means by which they lose control. (The paradox is a typically Hellenic one.)

When I was teaching the classics, one theme I would bring out in numerous Greek tragedies was what I referred to as the “the natural and the rational.” The theme is essentially connected to the question of active and passive, and it allows us to be a bit more explicit about the sort of thing that is at stake here. The idea is that there are certain aspects of our lives that are determined for us by nature. For example, if one of your parents had a history a heart trouble, you and your siblings might find yourselves with similar problems – in fact, one could list at length attributes that we tend to inherit naturally from our parents (height, hair colour, etc.). You will always be bound to your natural parents and siblings, at least in the sense of sharing these attributes (and genes, etc.), in a way that you never can be to people you choose or happen to associate with. So we have on the one hand an aspect of each of us that is given to us passively, by nature – this is the ‘natural’ side – but there is also a great deal in our lives that we arrange actively, by thinking and choosing, and this can be labeled ‘rational.’ Of course all of this takes for granted that there is a natural order; a total mastery of imago dei would presumably leave all the talk of hair colour and heart attacks far behind.

Anyway, one thing to notice about Oedipus the King is that at its heart lies a natural abomination, a crime against the natural order: it is the story of a man who kills his father and has children with his mother – and we will see that this is to be directly connected to what is ‘rational’ in Oedipus.

I am now going to proceed to discuss some aspects of the action of the play, and while I hope my account can be read on its own by people who have never encountered the play, if you’re not familiar with Oedipus the King, why not go read it now? It should only take you an hour or two, it’s among the greatest works in the Western cannon, and reading it will enrich your understanding of everything I say below – you can even look up my references to the play’s line numbers! (Also, my preferred translation, by David Grene, remains available from the University of Chicago Press at an affordable price.)

If we are to sum up Sophocles’ Oedipus in one word, that word must be activity. He is a supremely competent person, a self-made man. He was the greatest of the citizens in Corinth (775-776), and later, having come to Thebes an exile, became king by solving a riddle which nobody else could solve (35-38), and along the way, single-handedly killed a group of five men who accost him (801-813; see also 752). At the end of the first scene he confidently declares: “I will bring these things to light ... from the beginning” (132) and “I will disperse this pollution from this land” (138); the play consists largely of the sequence of events according to which these claims are made good. Along the way, he pushes past the resistance of Teiresias (319-349), Jocasta (1056-1073) and the herdsman, using violence in the final case (1154). Clearly this is a man who gets things done.

When he has chosen a course of action, Oedipus wants things to happen quickly. Repeatedly, we hear him emphasise speed, using various forms of ‘fast’ (tachus – 143, 618-619, 765, 1154). Having sent Creon to Delphi, he wonders that he is not yet back (73-75); later he is similarly impatient for the arrival of Teiresias (289). When the people come to him at the start of the play, they find that he has already taken action; similarly, when the chorus suggest talking to Teiresias, Oedipus has already sent for him (284-289).

This swiftness, however, does not bring with it any lack of deliberation. On the contrary, Oedipus is a master of a certain kind of thinking. We have already noted his success in solving a riddle, in which his intellect prevailed where no other could (396-398). His decision to apply to Delphi comes only after much thought (67-69). Three times we see him cross-examine a witness – first Creon (85-132), then the Corinthian messenger (956-1046) and then the herdsman (1121-1181) – and in each case, he brings out all that he need to know as swiftly and as certainly as possible. He recognises at the beginning that the case of Laius’ murder will be a difficult one (110), but the play shows him correct in his belief that he needs only a small beginning to open it up (120-121).

We should pause to note how this intelligence is essential to the theme I set out at the beginning: activity. Only a person supreme in deliberative ability could be supremely active, for otherwise, his errors would soon hold him back; similar arguments obtain for such characteristics as courage, confidence and competence in general, and Oedipus does not lack these. His past successes make him confident – we have already noted his bold predictions (120-121, 132, 138) – but also give others faith in his ability on the basis of experience (44-45). Again, such confidence inclines him all the more towards activity. Thus Oedipus, in the combination of his temperament with his ability and the results of this ability, presents us with as full a development of the active side of the human character as there could be.

The kind of thinking that Oedipus employs is central to the play. His is the kind of mind that builds a bigger picture out of smaller clues. He says at the start that he needs only a small beginning (121): he approach is to sift through conflicting pieces of evidence, figuring out their relation to one another and thus the larger picture of which they are a part. (e.g., “Laius was killed at a triple crossroad? But I killed some men at a triple crossroads... could I have been the murderer?” – and soon the witness who can provide certain proof or disproof of this theory is sent for.) The ‘action’ of the play is his ultimately successful inquiry, but before he begins to figure out the truth, Oedipus encounters an altogether different manner of thought.

The first thing Oedipus runs into in his search for the truth is precisely the whole truth, and it blinds him. As soon as he gets Teiresias to tell what he knows, there it is: the old man tells him “you are the unholy pollution on this land.” (353) This is soon followed by other, more detailed aspects of the truth (366-367, 372-373, 379, 413-428, 438, 442, 449-460), and Oedipus is utterly incapable of grasping any of it. Because he runs directly into the whole truth rather than just a part, he is set upon the wrong path (readers familiar with Plato should think, at this point, of the image of the sun, which one cannot look at directly). Because it is revealed directly, rather than being pieced together from simple beginnings, it seems impossible, and so Oedipus searches for some different explanation. Obviously he is not the murderer – why would anyone say such a thing? This leads to the mistaken theory that guilt must lie with Teiresias. This episode puts the talk of small beginnings in a different light: Oedipus’ is the sort of mind which must have small beginnings. It can only arrive at the truth by working through smaller pieces, pieces of the sort which it can easily grasp, putting these together so as to work out the larger picture.

Teiresias represents a character precisely opposed to Oedipus. Oedipus is supremely active; Teiresias is passive. He moves about in a conspicuously passive manner: a blind man, he is led by a boy. His effort is directed at doing nothing: he tells us (358) that he only reveals the truth because Oedipus provokes it out of him. The course of the scene with Teiresias can be understood in reference to what we already know of Oedipus: as the supremely active man, he wants to know in order that he may act (note, for example, that at 785-786 that the reason – gar – he consults the oracle is not simply to attain knowledge, but to silence those who question his parentage). Nothing could be more incomprehensible to him than the position of Teiresias, who knows, and therefore wants to do nothing. Thus Oedipus swiftly becomes angry, and suspects the worst motives: the man must not be well-disposed towards the city (322-323); his aim was the betrayal and destruction of the city (330-331); soon enough, Oedipus accuses him of complicity in a plot to murder the dead king (346-349).

But Teiresias is no villain. Instead, he represents a manner of thinking and knowing precisely opposed to that of Oedipus. While Oedipus acquires his understanding by working through small beginnings, we never see any such work with Teiresias. On the contrary, he seems to have a sort of immediate, universal knowledge. In a certain way, he knows everything, but he forgets; to know any particular thing, he has to be reminded by something that happens to him. Thus among his first words, we hear him say “though I knew these things well, I lost them, for I would not have come here” (317-318). It is his contact with Oedipus that reminded him of the horrible truth about the man, and he only came because it was not before his mind with Oedipus absent.

Thus the confrontation between Oedipus and Teiresias is a confrontation of active and passive, and of related modes of knowing. Oedipus, it would seem, proceeds from parts to whole; Teiresias is moved in the opposite direction. Oedipus presents a superlative development of normal human knowing; Teiresias’ mode of knowing is akin to that of the divine, something typically allowed to humans only through inspiration, as in art or religion. Like Apollo, Teiresias is in immediate possession of the truth; normal mortals, if they can grasp it at all, must work to get there.

The encounter with Teiresias makes Oedipus more certain of his own manner of reasoning. He becomes convinced of the inefficacy of prophecy (357), and, as befits his mode of thought, he brings forth evidence, thus “proving” the inadequacy of Teiresias’ art (387-398). The opposition between the two thus reaches its furthest point.

In this opposition of active and passive we find the hamartia of the play – that is, the tragic flaw, the crucial moment of missing the mark. Oedipus represents only the active side of human character. What is missing is an adequate relation to the passive side, a fact given particular emphasis through the encounter with Teiresias. When Teiresias asks, “do you know who your parents are?” (415), he brings before Oedipus that part of his identity to which there can be only a passive relation: the natural side. One does not choose one’s parents; there is nothing one can do about them. Oedipus is ignorant of that aspect of himself which is passively determined. This extreme of activity is the fault through which he destroys himself. It is not a moral fault – indeed, Sophocles seems to have been particularly careful to make clear that Oedipus is not a bad man - note his considerable public-spiritedness (13) and his care for the city even at his own expense (443). The focus is not on crime and punishment, but rather on a flaw which causes an individual to bring about his own destruction.

The action of the play shows how Oedipus, through his supremely competent activity, brings himself to the most passive state of all, for he does not really make himself passive, but rather reveals himself as having already been the pollution in the city. His action in the play does not create a new situation so much as it merely shows that he is in a situation in which there is nothing to be done, and it is after this revelation that he blinds himself. The man who started from such a commanding height that he addressed the citizens as “children” – tekna, the first word of the play – is in the end reduced to the state of Teiresias, who is led about by a boy.

The final lines of the play drive the message home: an excessive orientation toward activity misses the mark. Pure activity might be a genuine possibility for the gods; it leads to self-destruction in humans. Oedipus, who earlier said “one must rule” (629), now finds himself saying “one must obey” (1516), although his obedience is still forced upon him. As the play comes to an end, the point is made given twice:

Oedipus: I must obey, though it is bitter.

Creon: All things are good, at the proper time.

...

Oedipus: Do not take my children from me.

Creon: Do not seek to be master in everything.

It is difficult to imagine a play more relevant to our own time than Oedipus the King. Its central character functions very well indeed as a representation of the state of affairs to which modern science has delivered humanity. Just as Oedipus had attained a peak of power and success, and thus confidence, as a result of his ability to make things happen using discursive reasoning, so too has our own peculiar form of discursive reasoning, modern science, delivered to us a power far beyond the imaginings of earlier generations.

A bit more than a century ago, it would have been possible to talk about how we had the confidence of Oedipus, but if we can no longer do so, it is because the truth that lurks at the heart of Sophocles’ play has begun to loom on our horizon. Science allows us to control and manipulate nature, but a central image of the play – of Oedipus lacking a proper relationship to his own nature, to his own self as passively determined – points to a reality: nature is not only something beyond us that we control, but is also something within us to which we are subject. The power to undo nature’s arrangements can also be the power to undo ourselves. (As C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man, “Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man” – and might I recommend my post on Lyons and Lewis for the reader who wants to hear more about that book?)

If we were to utterly destroy ourselves in a nuclear catastrophe, or with a virus from an out-of-control lab experiment, or by not-quite-succeeding in engineering our own nature, or by means of some kind of climate disaster – none of that would surprise Sophocles, at least if such situations are considered in their fundamentals. I’m inclined to think it’s about what he would expect, given our current situation.

Even after the great wars of the last century, after the atom bomb and the Holocaust helped shatter the illusion that scientific progress could only be good – even after all this has made itself felt, we nevertheless continue to have the situation to which Mary Harrington called attention at the start, in which the truth that Sophocles would teach us is being ignored. The new trans-humanist path aims precisely to be master in everything. Skin colour? Eye colour? Height? Your genes? If science can’t change all of these for you just yet, the day when it can may not be so far away – and plenty of people are working hard to bring that day nearer. More than that, the notion of choice – that is, of actively determining something for oneself – is now thought by many to be of paramount importance, to the point of perhaps being held sacred in some circles. Perhaps surprisingly, the last century failed to bring us to a standpoint from which the sort of vision presented by Sophocles in Oedipus the King could become widely accepted.

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This post is a sort of intermission, a break from my proper focus on Plato and Thucydides in relation to our own time, but it is meant to contribute something to that focus. The reader may have noticed above that in setting out two different conceptions of human nature, Mary Harrington pointed implicitly to a history, for the first view of what it is to be human – the imago dei – was an older Christian one, while the other view – “mastering imago dei” – is much newer, something that has arisen as (and because) the older Christian order is collapsing. This implicit history mirrors what we have seen in both Plato and Thucydides: an older order with its own ethical understanding is fading away, while something quite new rises in the resulting void. In the analogous history of ancient Athens, no less than today, the notion of mastery was central to the newer view of things, a standpoint that privileged activity over passivity. Recall as well an observation made by Harrington as she described the new view of what it is to be human: as we upgrade ourselves through technology, nobody conceives of any upper limit or endpoint to this process. That is, there is an infinity at work here, an abandonment or absence of any boundary or limit. All of these ideas – a striving for mastery, radical activity, infinity or the absence of limits – all lie at the heart of the works of Plato and Thucydides that we have been considering, and all come together in a further fundamental matter: tyranny. (The book, pp. 163-165, summarises these themes, but there will be more to say about them in what follows.)

(To give credit where it is due: my reading of Oedipus here is indebted to one of my teachers, Wayne Hankey, a theologian who had also reflected deeply on tragedy. Reading Bernard Knox was also helpful. I would also like to thank Zahira Patel, whose feedback on this piece gave me some much-needed encouragement towards publishing it.)

The early days of the second Trump administration contained some unwelcome surprises for America’s allies. Trade wars waged through tariffs, even against friendly nations, the threat of annexing nearby territories, stern words for Europe and a rough ride for Zelensky in the Oval Office: here was a new regime with little time for diplomatic niceties. One thing that Trump did seem to respect was strength, and so before long commentary on current affairs was awash in references to Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, together with its classic line, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” (e.g., here or here.)

The Melian Dialogue is certainly the best known part of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Because of its brevity, it seems often to be assigned on its own in classes on international relations or political science, with the result that one often encounters people whose only knowledge of Thucydides comes from it. In fact, it is short enough, and provides an introduction to principles so fundamental to political and social action, that readers unfamiliar with it might want to read it right now (it can be found online here or here for a PDF). It does pack an emotional punch in the end.

I have touched on the dialogue before, in my post on Lyons and Lewis, but here I want to take a look at its central theme, which provides a note of caution in relation to the foreign policy emanating from Washington these days.

The basic action surrounding the Melian Dialogue is as follows. The tiny island city of Melos, which had taken a position of neutrality in the war between Athens and Sparta (i.e., the “Lacedaimonians”), finds itself confronted by an overwhelming invading force from the Athenian empire, the preeminent naval power, which demands, at the point of a sword, that Melos become a tributary “ally” of Athens. Before attacking, however, the Athenians try to convince the Melians to give in without a fight, and the resulting exchange is recorded by Thucydides in what is now called the Melian Dialogue.

As they try to convince the Melians to give in, the Athenians take a position from which the realities of power are all that count. They demand that safety is the only proper focus of the discussion, and effectively dismiss moral claims, redefining a word in a well-known formulation: “right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The Melians provide a mirror image to all this, leaning heavily upon normative concerns such as (conventional) justice and honour, and they respond to the Athenian redefinition of justice as subordinate to power with the suggestion that justice can in fact be a kind of power in itself – e.g., the unjust Athenian attack on Melos might persuade other neutral cities to take up arms against Athens, or the Spartans might be moved by the just claims of their Melian kinsmen to send help to Melos.

In the opposing standpoints of the Melians and Athenians, we have the Thucydidean theme know as “justice and power.” It runs through much of his work, but it is in this dialogue that it finds its most accessible and straightforward presentation. The ideas at the heart of this theme can be summarised as follows. There are two fundamentally different ways in which we might relate to other people: we might try to force them to do as we wish, or we might develop a relation of trust with them, in which they might act in a manner agreeable to us of their own volition. To the extent that we rely on force, we will tend to destroy trust; to the extent that we rely on trust, we tend to leave an opening for others to use force against us.

If one knows nothing of Thucydides beyond the Melian Dialogue, its message will seem to be a simple and straightforward one. The Melians allow themselves to be moved by justice and honour, and talk hopefully of Spartan intervention, of fortune and the gods. The Athenians, on the other hand, place their faith in their present, observable, material power, in the superiority of their navy and army, and point to the importance of safety and self-preservation. The final result of the episode – the total destruction of Melos and the Melians – surely puts the matter beyond doubt: the Athenians are right and the Melians are wrong. Thus understood, the episode provides a lesson against forgetting the overriding importance of the realities of power, and a warning against assuming that justice will win out in the end (lessons that Western societies might do well to remember today). One might go further than this, and see Thucydides as an advocate of the views espoused by the Athenians.

However, it is very often the case with Thucydides that matters that appear simple on their own turn out to be rather more complicated, and take on another aspect, when seen in a wider light. In the case of the Melian Dialogue, we don’t need to look very far, because it is immediately followed by the account of the Sicilian expedition, in which the Athenian army is totally annihilated, something I took up in my last post. The Melian Dialogue is filled with allusions to the Sicilian expedition, and these lead us to a truth in the words of the Melians, one no less important than the sort of power found in naked force.

When the Athenians point repeatedly in the Melian Dialogue to the fact that the Melians are islanders, while the Athenians are “masters of the sea,” it seems at first simply to suggest Athenian rationality and commitment to the facts: they are giving a reason why intervention from Sparta is unlikely – indeed, impossible – and are thus showing why resistance on the part of the Melians is futile. The Melians, on the other hand, seem to be avoiding the reality of the situation when they fail to acknowledge such considerations to be decisive. However, in the course of the Sicilian expedition, the Spartans will send aid to the island of Sicily, aid that turns out to be decisive in its effect, and the Athenian mastery of the sea will be overcome by the Syracusans, who learn to beat the Athenian navy in the novel conditions of the Great Habour at Syracuse. That is, in a respect in which the Athenians seem at first glance to be simply correct and the Melians seem to be most unreasonable, there is an implicit connection with the undoing of Athens.

There are other implicit connections with the Sicilian expedition. The Melians talk repeatedly of neutrals, i.e., of those allied neither to Athens nor to Sparta, and of how the Athenian attack on Melos might move those neutrals to become actively hostile to Athens. This doesn’t happen in relation to Melos, but it does happen in response to the Sicilian expedition. At Melos, the Athenians warn against trusting in prophecies and oracles, and declare that “the Athenians never once yet withdrew from a siege for fear of any” – and yet at Sicily they do put their faith in oracles, and do withdraw from a siege in fear. So in the midst of what seems a straightforward triumph of Athenian power at Melos we find allusions to a crushing Athenian defeat. One could continue with other connections between Melos and the Sicilian expedition as well.

The point of these allusions becomes clearer if we look to the cause of Athenian defeat (my last post touched on one aspect of this). A decisive factor was the atmosphere of distrust among citizens within Athens as the Sicilian expedition was being prepared, which soon led to a plot against one of the expedition’s commanders, which led to his defection from Athens to Sparta, and to the crucial advice he then gave to the Spartans, which led in turn to the arrival of Spartan aid to Syracuse at a decisive moment. That is, it was a lack of trust within Athens at the time of the Sicilian expedition that provided a cause of the total annihilation of the Athenian army at Sicily – the very sort of consideration to which the Melians pointed in the Melian Dialogue.

So the Melians were pointing at something true after all, even if that truth takes a somewhat different form than they had thought, and it is a truth we can find running through the gradual decline of Athens over the course of the Peloponnesian War that Thucydides lays before us in his work. I will confine myself here to one telling sentence, from a moment long before the catastrophe at Syracuse, when relations between citizens were not characterised by distrust and plots, and Athenian power was at its height. Here is Thucydides explaining the cause of Pericles’ power within Athens: “being capable through his reputation and his judgment, and being manifestly most incorruptible by money, he restrained the multitude freely, and was not led by them but himself led, on account of not speaking to please to acquire power from what was not proper, but because, having power through his character, he even spoke against them angrily.” That is, Thucydides explains the power of Pericles to a very great degree by normative considerations, and these align with the views of the Melians: his reputation and character, his superiority to money, his refusal to seek power by improper means. That is to say that Thucydides agrees, at least to some degree, with the Melian contention that there can be a sort of power in justice. The disaster at Sicily shows us the other side of this truth, the danger that lies in abandoning normative constraints to such a degree that citizens conspire against one another. (See the book, pp. 80-82; the basic idea here is one that will be taken up by Plato, but that’s another story.)

Understanding the Melian Dialogue requires that we take this truth of the Melians and bring it in relation with the truth presented by the Athenians – “right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power” – which also points to something true, though not exactly in the way the Athenians thought. The case of Athens, we have just seen, shows that a situation characterised by satisfactory normative relations exerts a kind of power of itself, so in some sense, right is in question everywhere, regardless of power relations. Nevertheless, to trust in it in the way that the Melians do is a foolish mistake: the realities of power must always be kept in mind in the manner of the Athenians, not the Melians; the mistake is to think that that is the end of the matter.

The point is not to come to some grand theoretical harmony of the principles at work here, but rather to understand each of them on its own, and thus to be able to apply them in an intelligent manner as particular occasions arise. If the fate of the Melians shows the danger of leaning too far in one direction, so too does the fate of Athens at Sicily show the danger of leaning too far in the other. (The idea that Thucydides’ own views do not align with those of the Athenians at Melos is not a revolutionary one, and even made its way into a few of the pieces of recent commentary on the Trump administration, such as this or this.)

Turning back from antiquity to our own time, we can see one important respect in which international relations today do not reflect conditions then. The Athenians at Melos are afraid of their subjects – in fact, they claim to be more afraid of them than they are of their official enemies, the Spartans. The picture we get of the Athenian Empire is of an entity held together by fear, by the ability of Athenian power to overawe others. It provides an example of the claim that “right... is only in question between equals in power:” Athens is more powerful than her subjects, and it is power alone that determines the relationship. American power is a very different matter. Certainly it could frighten American allies if it had to, but that has never been the aim of US foreign policy – nor has there been any reason for Americans to worry that if they fall, their allies would try more vigorously to destroy them than America’s enemies would. No, the American alliance has long been exactly that: an association of states with common interests, to be sure, but also with general outlooks that are at least aligned, and which therefore form the basis of mutual understanding and trust.

John F. Kennedy gave expression to this sort of thing on a visit to Canada in 1961: “We share far more than a common border. We share a common heritage… Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies.” There is more at work here than mere rhetoric.

American power is different from Athenian power, then, by virtue of its being based on both sides of the divide we see between the Melians and the Athenians at Melos, on justice and power, on trust and force. American power therefore lacks the brittleness and instability, as well as the fear, that Thucydides brings to light in the Athenian Empire. It accordingly attains something undreamed of in Athens. However strong you are in material terms, you will be stronger still if you have friends you can depend on.

Or rather, American power did lack that brittleness and instability. With the new administration, one begins to wonder where things will end up. What have we seen from the new administration that suggests they understand the importance of friendly relations with others? When have they shown themselves skilled at making friends? Certainly it is not difficult to come up with examples of this administration creating ill-will.

The whole tariff business has not only created ill-will, it began to create a parting of interests among allies. The famous Zelensky meeting back in February will have weakened the perception of the value of US friendship everywhere. I visited Canada this past summer and found a level of anti-American sentiment I had never seen before, or imagined possible. Stores carried signs declaring that they carried no US products, which is certainly new (given the sudden change in US tariff policy, which will cause real harm to many Canadian – and American – businesses, it’s hard to blame Canadians). The kind of goodwill that existed between America and her allies has been dealt a devastating blow – and for what? A price has been paid for no gain.

I can remember that as the executive orders rolled out at the beginning of this year, some of them targeting the DEI industry, somebody suggested (I can no longer remember who) that in at least one respect it didn’t really matter if the Democrats won in 2028, for one reality had changed decisively: a DEI sinecure could never again be what it was. The threat of another Republican administration would always loom, and with it the possible end to many DEI jobs. Those jobs must now come with a kind of insecurity that they once did not. Something similar must be the case in international relations. Whatever happens after Trump, it will take an awfully long time to rebuild the trust and goodwill that was once there as a matter of course.

Now of course, America does not strictly need friends, and is capable of dealing with direct threats on her own. But friends are a form of power. No, America did not absolutely need their European and other allies in Afghanistan or Iraq, but the hundreds of European soldiers who died there each represented an American who didn’t die but might have. That is a kind of power. It is also not difficult to imagine scenarios in which the US is pulled to multiple theatres at once, in which help freely given from allies might prove most useful. A move away from mutual goodwill is generally a move away from maximal power. Why not aim at having it all?

Thucydides is not only interested in these two kinds of power, trust and force. He is also interested in the logic inherent in each. With that in mind, consider this summary of one aspect of US foreign policy: “the pro-Trump theory is that America will force the other nations of the world to ally economically with it against China.” (emphasis mine) It’s a marvellous statement: force… to ally. It makes me think of Thucydides, because of its uneasy internal logic: to the extent that you force people, you risk creating resentment and hostility, which will tend to undermine an alliance. This sort of thing can work, at least for a while, but it more closely resembles the brittle power of the Athenian Empire than it does the more broadly-based power that America once enjoyed.

The system of alliances that America built up after the Second World War, which did not only depend on fear and the threat of force, but also on mutual regard and goodwill, were something that Thucydides does not seem really to have imagined. For him, relations between states seem largely to have boiled down to power relations, with little more being possible. He would, however, have recognised the immense advantages conferred by a series of relationship based on trust, and would have regarded any policy producing a move away from this situation as being in need of improvement.

(This post is part of a series which aims to relate the Athens of the late 5th-century BC to our own time. If you want an overview of the larger picture, of which this post is a piece, you might want to start with my introductory post.)

In 2021, a property survey was performed at a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, using GPR technology, and it showed that there was something beneath the earth. The technology could not show what exactly this “something” was – it might have been rocks, or soil disturbances, or some other thing – but before long a peculiar interpretation of these facts gained acceptance in many quarters: it was decided that 215 unmarked graves containing indigenous children had been found. Thus began a national scandal – the murder of indigenous children! Much of the country’s media credulously reported the alleged graves as fact, and soon the whole country was caught up in the affair: “there were protests and violence in cities and towns from one end of Canada to the other. Dozens of churches were vandalized. Several churches were razed to the ground, some of them beloved old Indian reserve churches where Indigenous communities had baptized their children and eulogized their dead going back generations. Statues were toppled and smashed. Canada Day events were cancelled. The Maple Leaf was lowered on Parliament Hill and on all federal buildings across the country [for more than five months]. United Nations human rights special rapporteurs called on Canada to conduct a full investigation.”

Those who cast doubt on the accepted narrative by asking for more substantial evidence of the alleged 215 graves were (and sometimes still are) castigated as “denialists,” and a law against such denialism was proposed. (You can read more about the affair here and here and here and listen here.

One interesting aspect of the whole affair is the almost complete indifference to reality lying at its heart. On the basis of almost no evidence the presence of children’s graves was declared, and this swiftly produced a narrative that took on a reality of its own and carried all in its path. Nothing contrary to the preferred narrative was able to impinge on it; reasonable questions were met with accusations.

Such a situation may seem relatively harmless and unimportant on its own, but seen in a wider context it should disturb us, as it suggests that something has gone deeply wrong. It is not hard to come up with other examples of the same indifference to reality in current events – I shall give a couple below – but if we want to see how dangerous this orientation is, it is hard to think of a better teacher than Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which will be my focus here. At the same time, the matter of indifference to reality links up with my last post, and in fact provides a sort of culmination of the themes treated there.

In that post, I took up Mary Harrington’s claim that the contemporary United States had begun to reflect a certain conception of “Satan” in a number of respects: “an unrestrained individualism characterised in part by a refusal to be ruled, the liberation of the individual will from laws and customs ... as well as from any other constraint, and thus an unconscious attempt at liberation from reality itself.” Canada’s vehement advocates of the dead children theory of underground phenomena can be said to have achieved a sort of liberation from reality. Let us turn to Thucydides to see what he has to say on the matter.

Thucydides is typically taken to be a historian, and today, when we hear “historian,” we tend to think of someone who records facts and tells the story of a particular era (in Thucydides’ case, the Peloponnesian War, in which Athens and Sparta fought one another over nearly three decades). He is, however, rather more than this, for he shows himself interested not only in facts and stories, but also in ideas, in characteristic realities, in the principles that most deeply drive political action.

In my last post, I claimed that Thucydides “showed how an unbounded subjective freedom found a place in Athens, and how it produced the total annihilation of the Athenian army at Sicily.” Here I want to try to explain at somewhat greater length what I meant by this, by taking a look at Thucydides’ account of the Sicilian expedition, showing how he brings the governing ideas out of the facts of the case.

The Sicilian expedition is, for Thucydides, a decisive turning point in the war between Athens and Sparta. He gives it more space – two books out of eight – than any other episode, and sees in it the culmination of numerous themes that he has set out in earlier portions of his work. At a moment of relative quiet – though not true peace – vis a vis Sparta, Athens decides to invade Sicily in the hope of conquering the entire island. The shocking result of the campaign is the annihilation of the Athenian Expeditionary Force, and this outcome is the natural result of the subjective principle that has come to exert such influence in Athens. Given that a similar idea is at work in our own time, this should be of more than merely antiquarian interest.

One theme that plays a crucial role in Thucydides’ account of the Sicilian expedition, and which has been set up much earlier in the work, is that of people focusing too much on their own private interests. This is a good starting point for my exposition, because it provides a first step towards my claim about an unbounded subjective freedom. It should be clear to a reasonably attentive reader of Thucydides that he thinks that an excessive attention to private interests at the expense of the city as a whole helped bring about the terrible result at Sicily. For example, if one reads his overview of the course of the war from the standpoint of the death of Pericles (ii.65), one finds some form of the word idios (‘private’ or ‘personal’) peppered about, and in fact it is an idea that governs the whole: while Pericles reminded people of the need to make sacrifices for the city, those who followed him were too intent on merely private interests, and thus brought doom upon their city. This overview is consistent with what we find later in the work, as Thucydides relates critical events. Thus when he gives his overview of Alcibiades and the Sicilian expedition (vi.15), the matter of private interests (the same word, idios) is once again central, and as the expedition itself nears its end, one general, Nicias, is explicitly moved more by his concerns for himself as an individual (once again the word idios – vii.48.4) than by what is good for the city as a whole.

What I’m interested in here is a deeper version of this obvious point: it wasn’t just private interests and individualism, but also a subjective principle that doomed Athens; it wasn’t just a move towards the self, but also a move into the self. Of course we have to be at the level of the individual, of the private, before we can start talking about a subject.

In his portrayal of the time when Athens is deciding whether or not to attack Sicily, Thucydides gives us speeches from two Athenians, Nicias and Alcibiades, the first speaking against the expedition, and the second in favour.

In an earlier post, on Lyons and Lewis, I discussed Alcibiades, who Thucydides shows speaking with decisive effect in favour of making an expedition against Sicily. I suggested that Alcibiades is characterised “by specious rhetoric, that is, by an ability to bring about a conviction within people without regard to the facts of the case in objective world, and he shows himself to be particularly concerned with appearances at the expense of reality.” That is, Thucydides depicts the Athenians, at the time when they are deciding to attack Sicily, as being moved by what is within the self rather than objective reality (and of course, the very notion of appearance presupposes a perceiving subject, since an appearance only ever exists for a particular person: if you think you see a fox in half-light but it is actually a cat, the (false) appearance of a fox only exists for you, whereas the cat is there whether you see it or not).

Thucydides has intensified this point by giving us two speeches of Nicias, as he tries and fails to convince the Athenians not to attack Sicily. His attempt, which can be taken as characteristic of what the Athenians were not moved by at this point, is remarkably accurate in its analysis of the challenges that will face Athens if she proceeds, at least if it is judged by the account of the expedition that Thucydides subsequently provides. So, for example, Nicias warns about the strength of Syracusan cavalry; anyone who reads the account that follows will find cavalry mentioned again and again, sometimes at important moments, and often with an effect harmful to the Athenians (the observant reader will notice it mentioned in a quotation I give below). There are at least five other such points (see the book, p. 60), some of them obvious, like the great distance to Sicily and the consequent problem of supply.

So if Alcibiades stands for specious rhetoric and appearance, which successfully moved the Athenians, Nicias stands for a sober and accurate appraisal of reality, by which the Athenians were not moved. That is, as Thucydides presents things to us, the Athenians at this point are allowing their focus to drift away from objective reality, for they were moved by what is within the self rather than realities beyond it. In more than one respect, they are oblivious to what is beyond the self, and this constitutes a move into the subject: a “subjective principle.”

At this point we should recall a remark made by Mary Harrington, whom we encountered in the last post, and who suggested that one thing at work in contemporary “satanism,” as she understood it, was an attempt at a liberation even from reality itself. I found a parallel to this in Plato’s depiction of Callicles and Thrasymachus, but we can now see there is a parallel in Thucydides as well: the Athenians, as they decide to sail against Sicily, have attained a certain liberation from reality, caught up as they are in the world of appearance while making a decision without a genuine attempt to come to terms with the actual facts of the case.

Let us now skip ahead, passing over most of the account of the Sicilian expedition itself, and look at a brief passage from Thucydides as the expedition nears its terrible end. The passage provides a potent symbol of what is becoming of Athens: it gives a picture of a whole that has lost all coherence and dissolved into its component parts, with individuals now acting as mere individuals, no longer moved by anything beyond their own immediate impulses. More than that, notice how the subjective aspect is emphasised: these individuals are described in terms of their inner feelings and drives – e.g., they supposed that they should breathe more freely, and were driven by exhaustion and craving. At the end, they become entirely focused on drinking, even at a moment of extreme danger, even though the water is spoiled: they display an oblivion to anything beyond their own internal drives.

The Athenians pushed on for the Assinarus, impelled by the attacks made upon them from every side by a numerous cavalry and the swarm of other arms, supposing that they should breathe more freely if once across the river, and driven on also by their exhaustion and craving for water. Once there they rushed in, and all order was at an end, each man wanting to cross first, and the attacks of the enemy making it difficult to cross at all; forced to huddle together, they fell against and trampled one another, some dying immediately upon the javelins, others getting entangled together and stumbling over the articles of baggage, without being able to rise again. Meanwhile the opposite bank, which was steep, was lined by the Syracusans, who showered missiles down upon the Athenians, most of them drinking greedily and heaped together in disorder in the hollow bed of the river. The Peloponnesians also came down and butchered them, especially those in the water, which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most even fighting to have it. (vii.84.2-5, trans. Crawley)

The Sicilian expedition, then, ends as it began, with a fundamentally subjective orientation characterised by an oblivion to what is beyond the self. The end can be seen as a deepened form of what was present in the beginning, since this oblivion is maintained in the face of the most immediately pressing realities.

At this point we can return to our own time. I began with affair of the alleged children’s graves in Canada, which I think provides a straightforward example of oblivion or indifference to reality today, but is it an isolated occurrence? Unfortunately, further examples are not hard to find. One recalls, for example, how President Trump declared Ukraine’s President Zelensky to be a dictator, and said he shouldn’t have started the war with Russia – this at a time when Zelensky had a democratic mandate and was fighting against an unprovoked invasion by Russia. When asked about these remarks in front of Zelensky, Trump simply cast doubt on whether he’d ever said such things. “Indifferent to reality” is an entirely appropriate description of such statements.

If we turn to the United Kingdom, we find the one example that above all others has long remained in my mind for its cynicism and bizarre disregard for the facts of the case at hand: the reaction to the assassination of David Amess, a Member of Parliament. In October 2021, Amess was stabbed to death by an Islamist as he met with constituents. Here MPs were confronted not only with the death of a colleague but also with an implicit threat to their own safety. Incredibly, they responded by focusing on something totally irrelevant: bad and abusive behaviour online. The fact that the killer was an Islamist and that there might be concerns about further dangers from that quarter seemed hardly to register. To me there is a distant echo here of the Athenians fighting in the river for dirty water as their enemies hack them to death: they are so wrapped up in their own subjective concerns – in this case a series of taboos that precluded a particular narrative – that even a direct threat to their own safety does not divert them.

Such indifference to reality is not a constant feature of politics at all times. Not so many years ago, any of the examples given above would have been considered shocking and even unbelievable, but today one could go on with further such material at some length. All this is a reflection of where we are in the West at the moment.

A retreat into a subjective standpoint that fails to give the real world its due is likely, in the long run, to have consequences; it will tend naturally, and predictably, toward disaster, just as Athens tended naturally towards disaster at Sicily. I have given examples here of indifference to reality in our own time, but it does not seem to me that the consequences have really landed yet. If we find ourselves confronting extraordinary catastrophes in the future, do not be surprised.

I would like to thank Nina Power for her help and encouragement with this piece.

(This post is part of a series which aims to relate the Athens of the late 5th-century BC to our own time. If you want an overview of the larger picture, of which this post is a piece, you might want to start with my introductory post.)

For me, one of the most interesting public intellectuals to appear in recent years has been Mary Harrington. She seems to have made a name for herself primarily on the basis of her peculiar brand of “reactionary feminism,” but she is worth reading more generally for her often profound reflections on the contemporary Zeitgeist. What has made her so interesting to me is the fact that she repeatedly says things that seem to echo aspects of the crisis of ancient Athens, including even the first tentative steps of Plato’s response to that crisis.

(Also, she’s hilarious!)

Here I will focus on one echo of antiquity that we can see coming to light in a piece titled “How Satan Conquered America.” It provides an opportunity to treat several points of connection between antiquity and today. Perhaps more importantly, the connections lie in the third and final stage of the process I see unfolding in the Athens of Plato and Thucydides, and it is this final stage that has unhappily come to seem the most relevant to our own time. This post will be the first of a number that try to open up the third stage in its various aspects.

So what does Harrington mean by her rather provocative title? “At its core,” she tells us, “Satanism is simply the doctrine of untrammelled individualism, shorn of any link to the divine.” Her piece gives a brief history of the development of this doctrine in modern times, beginning with Milton, whose Satan is characterised by a refusal to be ruled. A more recent development of the same idea is found in “the occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), [who] pursued a doctrine of individual will unconstrained by law or stuffy morality.” More specifically, we find in Crowley a pursuit of “the liberation of individual will from taboo, custom, law and even (as practitioners of ceremonial magic hoped) reality itself.” She also discusses “Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan,” which rejected “all collectivist constraints on individual behaviour and emphasise the primacy of individual desire. ‘There is a beast in man,’ he declared, ‘that should be exercised, not exorcised.’”

Harrington shows how these ideas have developed into phenomena that we are accustomed to see around us every day, including even aspects of the modern self-help industry. My own interest in her piece, however, came from another angle. Every detail I have just quoted from Harrington is present at the end of the tale told by Plato and Thucydides about the life of ancient Athens: an unrestrained individualism characterised in part by a refusal to be ruled, the liberation of the individual will from laws and customs (i.e., from nomoi, a word she uses) as well as from any other constraint, and thus an unconscious attempt at liberation from reality itself. Driving all this is the primacy of individual desire. Plato’s Republic also points to cutting of the link to the divine, and to the “beast in man” in the figure of Thrasymachus, who is compared to a wolf, a lion and a “wild beast.” Even the implicit notion of a history, of an idea developing more deeply over the years and culminating in the various elements listed above, provides a link to our two ancient Greeks.

It will, I hope, prove interesting to take a brief look at these points of connection, primarily as they appear in Plato’s Gorgias, which seems to me to provide the most straightforward basis for comparison. I have already provided a window onto the form of individualism we find at the heart of this dialogue, and the equivalent moment in Thucydides, as well as the matter of nomos and phusis (custom and nature), in my piece on Lyons and Lewis, but there is more to say.

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Consider the figure of Callicles, who stands for the third and final stage in Plato’s Gorgias. By the time the reader of that dialogue has gotten to Callicles, he has already seen Socrates argue against two other characters, and the movement through the three characters has a definite structure, one that brings before us a sort of liberation. First Socrates argues with the elderly Gorgias, and in the course of their discussion, it becomes clear that there exist ethical boundaries the old man will not cross. As Socrates begins to speak with the next character, Polus, it swiftly becomes clear that Polus is willing to push the envelope ethically to a much greater degree than Gorgias, and is willing to express his admiration for the use and abuse of power, even when the talk is of tyrants and the horrific tortures they inflict on others. Callicles, however, is willing to take things further still than Polus. Thus we have a tale of a gradual move beyond the limits of conventional ethical life: Polus will abandon ethical constraints to a greater degree than Gorgias, and Callicles will go farther still. Recall that Harrington wrote of “the liberation of individual will from taboo, custom, law:” it is the same story as we move through the Gorgias, and it culminates in Callicles’ dismissal of such things as taboo, custom or law as “papers, trickery and spells.”

Satan, of course, is known for his refusal to be ruled - “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven,” Milton has him say. Callicles would agree, but he takes this refusal to be ruled to an extreme that might test even Satan. Consider the following exchange:

Callicles: It is fitting... for the rulers to have more than the ruled.

Socrates: But what about themselves, my friend? Rulers or ruled in what way?

Callicles: What are you talking about?

Socrates: I’m talking about each one of them ruling himself. Or shouldn’t he do this at all, rule himself, but only rule the others?

Callicles: What are you talking about, ‘ruling himself’?

Socrates: Nothing complicated, but just as the many say – temperate, master of himself, ruling the pleasures and appetites within him.

…

Callicles: How could a man become happy who’s enslaved to anything at all?

This is a remarkable thing for Callicles to say, for people who can’t control themselves don’t tend to do terribly well at - well, much of anything. The very idea of self-rule is novel to him. What the exchange shows is just how intent he is on the notion of ‘freedom’ as a liberation from any form of authority. The idea of not being ruled is clearly of crucial importance to Callicles; he wants to adopt the most active standpoint imaginable (an aside: the opposition of active and passive forms a theme that I think important to a number ancient Athenian works, and we shall see in a few weeks that it is not confined to Plato or Thucydides).

This radical focus on not being ruled, in particular in relation to the appetites, points to another aspect of the Harringtonian Satan that we also find in Callicles: “the primacy of individual desire.” On this subject Callicles could hardly be more emphatic: “the man who is to live rightly should let his appetites grow as large as possible and not restrain them, and when these are as large as possible, he must have the power to serve them.” From this, it quickly becomes clear that what Callicles is fundamentally interested in here, the end towards which all else must be directed, is pleasure.

Harrington mentions, in passing, the notion of being liberated from reality itself, and this is something that we also brush up against in Plato. For example, you may have noticed that Callicles’ desire to serve his appetites does not obviously cohere with his desire not to be enslaved to anything at all, and in fact, Callicles’ views are awash in things that do not cohere – recall my post on Callicles and Dr. Frost. In the Republic, as well, liberation from reality comes into view: Socrates has to bring before Thrasymachus the fact that people make mistakes. It is in Thucydides, however, that the idea of liberation from reality itself gets a fuller and more empirical treatment, and I will save that for the next post, which will look into radical subjectivity and its consequences in history.

Finally, there is the matter of how ‘satanic’ individualism is “shorn of any link to the divine.” For this connection to stage three, we must turn to Plato’s Republic, which makes an implicit comment on the relationship of the third stage to the divine (here I repeat a point from my introductory post). The first book of the Republic starts with Cephalus, who has just finished making sacrifices to the gods as the conversation begins, and soon leaves to attend to more sacrifices. The impression is of someone in continual contact with the gods. When the argument moves to Polemarchus, this connection to the divine (and to any other form of tradition) quickly falls away. The third stage, the conversation with Thrasymachus, completes the movement: his only remark touching on divinity comes when he speaks of stealing all things, “sacred and profane.” That is, Thrasymachus is conspicuously impious, especially when taken in the context of the overall development: Plato has been careful to characterise Thrasymachan individualism as quite definitely disconnected from the divine.

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All this is, I hope, interesting enough, but there is another reason that a comparison of our own time with antiquity is worthwhile, and this concerns a question Harrington raises implicitly: is Satan really bad? “Milton,” she tells us, “saw Satan’s refusal to submit to any law (however ambivalently) as the sin of pride. Now, in our post-Christian world of self-actualisation, pride is no longer a sin. Rather, it’s a vital part of becoming fully yourself.” Because she begins her story with Milton, the two sides are implicitly framed as Christian and anti-Christian. Given that so many today have only ever encountered Christians who have a passive relation to their beliefs, merely going through the motions and responding with a stunned silence to any critical inquiry, Harrington’s framing will, for a great many people, bring with it the implication that one side – the Christian one – hasn’t thought things through, and is based on nothing more than blind faith. The Christian aversion to Satan might thus appear to be little more than an aesthetic preference. If Satan is identified with ‘liberation’ and with an anticipated flourishing, then it’s not hard to see why so many people today might seem inclined towards him.

However, we do not need to appeal to Christianity at all to get an idea of what’s wrong with the ‘satanic’ perspective, for Plato can give us some insight here. Let us return to the Gorgias. Soon after he has established that Callicles is so deeply interested in pleasure, Socrates begins to provide an alternative perspective of his own. He has his own notion of what ‘good’ is, and he bases it on a distinction between doing something at random, and acting while looking to a certain structure or order. I explain his view in my book, p. 157:

The craftsman, we are told, aims to produce in his work some form, setting it in some arrangement, and forcing each part to fit with and be suitable to every other, so as to produce something structured and ordered (503e7-504a2)… Skilled activity does seem to be characterized by the production of order, and this is not only true of human inventions, such as ships or houses, but also of attempts to improve the body, whether through training or medicine. A poorly built house will leak, allow drafts, or collapse; a well-made ship will better survive a storm; a trainer might aim to correct a muscle imbalance. Even the move from order and structure as productive of health and strength (504b-c) is a highly plausible one, and does seem to conform to many facts of life: people who act simply at random, who are utterly unpredictable, seem mad; those who have regulated their passions, and are capable of self-control, can respond reliably to even the most stressful situations. There does seem to be a notion of ‘good’ according to which a great many things – perhaps all – are better off when they attain the order appropriate to their nature; skilled activity aims to produce this.

With this in mind, let us look at Callicles and ‘Satan’ again. They represent the unconstrained will, the primacy of individual desire, and action based on such a principle will not be focused on any structure or order. After all, these would constrain rather than liberate the individual’s will; they would cage the “beast in man.” No, the behaviour of those who seek unbounded subjective freedom will be random rather than ordered, conforming only to the whim of the moment as their desires direct. But when we look to the world, we see that the strongest, the most reliable – in short, the best – things are those that attain their proper order, and this is true regardless of whether we’re talking about ships, houses, bodies – or really anything else. Plato, then, has given us reason to think that the path of ‘Satan’ is the path of weakness and misery, for that is where it must lead, to the extent that we allow it to become the principle governing our lives.

The argument here is simple, but it is far from superficial. It is of central importance to understanding Plato (the Good will be the central concept in the Republic), but I have also found myself returning to it in other contexts. Harrington has recently spoken about the difficulty of getting people today to admit that there is a human nature; Plato’s argument here confronts the more fundamental question of whether we should accept any notion of order, with its inherent limits, at all – but it does seem a necessary first step. The argument here also provides a response to something that came up in my Lyons and Lewis post, namely the ancient Greek problem of nomos and phusis, which seemed to wipe away the normative basis for action (on this, see the book, pp. 156-157). I have also heard Plato’s argument here echoed by priests holding forth on theology. The Christian rejection of Satan begins from reasons such as these, even if it does not end there.

It is not only Plato who sees in ‘Satan,’ as Harrington presents him, a danger to be avoided, and a merely illusory form of freedom. Thucydides treats the same ideas, but he shows how they are effective in history. In particular, he shows how an unbounded subjective freedom found a place in Athens, and how it then produced the total annihilation of the Athenian army at Sicily. I hope that in my next post, I will be able to make all this clear.

(This post continues a comparison between C.S. Lewis, as explained by N.S. Lyons, and Plato, which I began in my last post . Both are part of a series which tries to relate the Athens of the late 5th-century BC to our own time. If you want an overview of the larger picture of which these posts form a piece, you might want to start with my introductory post.)

Readers of my last post will recall that it centred on a particular form of evil, one that begins in a concern to get ahold of what is really real. The first step in this direction was named “debunking” by C.S. Lewis, and had a predecessor in the fifth century BC in the theme of custom and nature (nomos and phusis) as treated by both Plato and Thucydides. Our guide to the thought of Lewis, one N.S. Lyons, summarised this debunking as “the belief… that any moral feelings or pangs of conscience are merely subjective experiences and what would today be called ‘social constructs,’ while the real world is purely material, and therefore purely materialistic. To be ‘purely objective’ is therefore, in this view, to focus only on the material, and dismiss the rest as non-existent.” I found an analogue to “social constructs” in ancient Athens in the word nomos, or custom, which is compared unfavourably with what is taken to be really real: phusis, or nature.

What I want to do here is to look a bit more closely at one connection between Lewis and Plato, both because I find it interesting in its own right, and also because I think it sheds some light on our own time. It concerns the division between what is taken to be really real and what is not, between the material world and mere “social constructs,” between what Plato and Thucydides knew as nature (physis) and custom (nomos). What struck me after working through Lyons’ essay was not simply that this division is present in antiquity, but in particular that it is present within Callicles, a character in Plato’s Gorgias, who has been written so as to contain both sides. The difference between Callicles and Dr. Frost, a character in Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength, seems to me to provide another window on what is peculiar to our own time, and what is not.

The division in question should be familiar enough to people today, but because it is my central focus here I will risk labouring the point and give a brief sketch of it before going any further. The idea is that the material world is the only true reality, and modern science is the main (or sole) source of genuine thought and understanding. Quite apart from this reality is the world of our norms, which tells us what we ought and ought not to do, a world that includes all judgments of what is good or evil, or beautiful or ugly, and all love. All of this second world is taken to be merely second-order, derivative phenomena, to be explained in terms of such things as chemical reactions in our brains.

The problem with this view is that it has us live in two quite separate worlds at once, and human life requires that we attend to both. The first is taken to give us the truth; in the other world, from which we get the notion of good and bad, we have the only basis from which we might act. But if we were to focus only on the “truth” as it is understood here, there would be no reason to do anything, nor could the truth be a good thing (and that would bring up the question of why we should bother focusing on it). On the other hand, if we were to retreat entirely into what we take to be good and right, we would seem to abandon the truth completely.

If we ask what moves people today into accepting this view of two separate worlds – I will refer to it below as “the double world hypothesis” – in which only the material side counts as true, the answer seems obvious enough: science. The modern scientific account can seem to be so completely adequate on its own, and has given such a convincing account of things in strictly material terms, that it seems a straightforward matter to see the truth in the material realm only.

With this in mind, let us turn to Lewis’ character Dr. Frost. A few words from Frost himself should suffice to give an idea of his view of things: “resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to one another are chemical phenomena. Social relations are chemical phenomena. You must observe these feelings in yourself in an objective manner … subjective feelings of mutual confidence and liking… are chemical phenomena. They could all in principle be produced by injections.” Such views are, in themselves, not really remarkable these days. What makes Frost interesting is the fact that he takes it to be important to focus, all the time and as consistently as possible, on what he takes to be the truth of things. Feeling nervous about talking in front of a great crowd of people? Remember, it’s just chemical phenomena. Do you trust your colleagues or love your spouse? Don’t let such things influence you in any way, as they’re just chemical phenomena. If you find yourself moved by pity to go easy on someone in a weak position – well, do you really want to be moved by mere chemical phenomena? Dr. Frost, then, represents an attempt to resolve the difficulty of the relation between the two worlds I described above by affirming one to the complete exclusion of the other. He might seem to represent a working-out of the scientific worldview to its logical conclusion.

I think a look at the ancient world complicates this picture, because we find close parallels there to the view of things that produces Dr. Frost. So let us turn to Callicles.

When Callicles enters the argument of the Gorgias, he launches into a long speech in which he sets out his views (482c-486d), but immediately before he does so, Socrates addresses him with words that direct our attention to a particular concern: “... Callicles himself will not agree with you, Callicles, but he will be discordant with you in the whole of your life. And yet I think, my excellent friend, that it is superior to have my lyre out of tune and discordant, and any chorus I might equip, and for most men to disagree with me and contradict me, than for me – just one man – to be discordant with myself and contradict myself.” (482b-c, trans. Irwin) The concern here is consistency. That is, immediately before he has Callicles speak, Plato focuses the reader’s attention on the question of whether Callicles will contradict himself.

If we keep this in mind as we consider what Callicles proceeds to say in his lengthy speech, we find that he does in fact contradict himself. In that speech he sets out the distinction between convention and nature (i.e., nomos and phusis, which we encountered in our treatment of Lyons and Lewis), and it becomes apparent that he believes he can occupy a position of great argumentative strength by basing his claims upon nature rather than mere convention.

One portion of his long speech carries the pretence that it is simply an account of the way things are. He begins this part by saying “nature shows,” and ends it with the words “that’s how that truth is” (483d-484c). That is, he is simply being realistic, giving a straightforward account of the facts, and his manner of speaking is simply indicative – we do not hear about how things ought to be. On the contrary, he speaks in a derogatory fashion first of “spells and incantations”, and then of “writings, charms, incantations, all the rules [nomoi] contrary to nature [para phusin]:” he is pointing here to what he sees as the deficiency in the world of convention. With this in mind, consider the view of justice that he sets forth in this context: “it is just for the better man to have more than the worse, and the more powerful than the less powerful. Nature shows that this is so in many areas – among other animals, and in whole cities and races of men, that the just stands decided in this way – the superior rules over the weaker and has more. For what sort of justice did Xerxes rely on when he marched against Greece, or his father against the Scythians?... I think these men do these things according to nature” (483d). This account differs from charms and incantations by virtue of its claim to be based in nature: this is simply what the facts of the world show, at least if we free ourselves from the filter of how we might like them to be. We have in this portion of Callicles’ lengthy speech the world according to nature, not convention.

Immediately after, this, however (484c-485e), we suddenly find ourselves awash in conventional language telling us how the world ought to be. For example, Callicles tells us that “philosophy is a delightful thing, if someone touches it in moderation at the right time of life; but if he persists in it longer than he should [emphasis mine], it’s the ruin of men.” He goes on to talk of how one must have experience of the right things if one want to be gentleman of good reputation – and in particular, he thinks it important to have experience of the customs or laws (nomoi) of the city. Soon he is holding forth on how people talk: he sees it to be fitting [emphasis mine] for a child to mumble, but if an adult mumbles in a similar manner, it is something fit for a slave, ridiculous and unmanly for a free citizen. Thus he speaks here in quite a different manner than a moment before, focusing on how things ought to be, on what is fitting, and even points to the importance of experience of one’s local customs. This sort of thing quite plainly gives us the world according to convention.

So Callicles gives us two very different views, one right after the other, and they point in two very different directions. One is based in nature and is harshly critical of a foundation in convention, while the other adopts a straightforwardly conventional standpoint. All this comes right after Callicles has himself set out the distinction between nature and convention. He never explains the relationship between these two sides, nor does he even acknowledge what he has done here. It seems that Socrates’ initial warning about self-contradiction was well given. (I give a somewhat more detailed overview of these two sides in the book, pp. 138-141.)

We have, then, two sides to Callicles, one based in nature, one in convention.* In fact they are two quite separate worlds. It is above all in this two-sided portrayal of Callicles that Plato anticipates the contemporary problem I set out above, what I called the double world hypothesis. What Callicles knows as the side of nature lines up with the material side of the division today, which is taken to be really real; the conventions that Callicles derides as spells and incantations are equivalent to what are dismissively referred to as “social constructs” today. Just as Callicles is committed to both worlds, so are all people (aside from the odd Dr. Frost today) – and yet we do seem to be dealing with two quite separate worlds here, that exclude one another in their basic natures. Plato has done something significant by putting the two worlds together within a single character: he has pointed to the need somehow to know both sides as parts of a single whole.

What should seem remarkable to us today is that we see the same shape of things in antiquity, millennia before the advent of modern science. This suggests that simply saying ‘science’ is not be the right way to explain how one ends up with a double world hypothesis of the sort I set out above. I would rather explain that in terms of the historical situation: the normative side of things, the side of custom and moral intuitions – it all gradually comes to seem less real as an ethical order comes apart. That, I think, is likely to play the major role in bringing about this view of a double world: not so much the success of modern science in giving a material explanation as the collapse of the older order through which norms were seen to be real (I gave an overview of this collapse in my first post). After all, there is nothing in modern science per se that requires us to see norms as mere “social constructs,” as something that is not really real.

That is not to deny that science today plays a decisive role in determining the form these ideas can take today. Let us return to C.S. Lewis and Dr. Frost. The character of Dr. Frost is supposed to show us one endpoint to which the double world hypothesis leads today, when worked out to its logical conclusion. Lewis explains: “for many years he had theoretically believed that all which appears in the mind as motive or intention is merely a by-product of what the body is doing. But for the last year or so – since he had been initiated – he had begun to taste as fact what he had long held as theory. Increasingly, his actions had been without motive. He did this and that, he said thus and thus, and did not know why. His mind was a mere spectator. He could not understand why that spectator should exist at all. He resented its existence, even while assuring himself that resentment also was merely a chemical phenomenon. The nearest thing to a human passion which still existed in him was a sort of cold fury against all who believed in the mind. There was no tolerating such an illusion! There were not, and must not be, such things as men.”

As I suggested in my last post, I don’t think there is any equivalent in antiquity for this cold fury. The whole passage here, and indeed the character of Dr. Frost in general, represents something we do not find in Plato or Thucydides: the resolution of the double world in favour of one world, that is, the world of nature or matter, to the exclusion of norms or values. So while Callicles has two sides, Dr. Frost has (or is trying to have) only one. In the difference between the two, I think we have an important difference between antiquity and modernity.

There is another, related difference. If we look to the examples from antiquity that I brought out in my last piece, we find that those who bring forth the doctrine that the strong should rule the weak do so at a moment when they believe themselves strong. The Athenians do so at Melos, not when vanquished at Sicily; Callicles clearly does not believe himself to be among the lesser sort of men. In similar fashion, Diodotus, when he engages in something like the “debunking” that Lewis identified, does so in order to save the people of Mytilene. That is, when we see people engaging in “debunking” in antiquity, there is more than a hint of instrumentality about it: they are not simply pursuing what they think is true, but are concerned with practical matters. The move is in each case made in pursuit of some end.

The case of Dr. Frost, and those who are inclined to move in his direction today, seems to me to run on different tracks. Because modern science has done so much to explain the world in strictly material terms, the view that there is nothing but matter is a much more natural one than it once was. Dr. Frost and many others will resolve the problem of the double world as they do because they are moved by a regard for the truth above all else. This, I take it, is where the “cold fury” mentioned by Lewis comes from: great sacrifices have been made to pursue the truth as Dr. Frost understands it, all else has been cast aside, and it is an affront to all this and to the most fundamental motive principle, the “truth,” that there might be “such things as men.”

Thus the modern world does not invent the distinction between natural and the normative for the first time, as that appeared many centuries ago. What is new is the way in which it is sometimes present to us: I think many people today can be more easily moved to accept the double world hypothesis because of a zeal for the truth than because of practical matters, and they consequently find it easier to enter territory that nobody in Plato or Thucydides quite reached (even if they flirted with it). That is, people today might be feel a compulsion towards the vision of Dr. Frost because modern science can make it seem true as nothing in antiquity could.

It is important to recognise that the older, more pragmatic way in which people might come to accept the double world hypothesis is also still with us. We saw, last time, that Diodotus was striving for something good as he “debunked” the norms of his own time: he was trying to save the lives of the people of Mytilene. In similar fashion, many today engage in similar practices, tearing down longstanding norms in the hope of attaining something good. The good in question is often a liberation from something that seems oppressive and confining – I gave the example of marriage in my first post. But of course the same problem that was present with Diodotus, that a short-term success might lay the ground for deeper difficulties in the longer term, might also be present today, and once the last norm has been deconstructed, is there anything better than Dr. Frost waiting?

With that thought, I conclude my look at C.S. Lewis, as seen through N.S. Lyons, and Plato. It has, I hope, given a further instance of something suggested at the start of the earlier piece, that the study of antiquity allows us to see our own time more clearly, because it helps us grasp what is peculiar to it.

* Dr. Wolff, in the 1999 Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, was the first to set out this view of Callicles as a two-sided character, so far as I know.

(This post is part of a series which seeks to relate the Athens of the late 5th-century BC to our own time. If you want an overview of the larger picture, of which this post is a piece, you might want to start with my introductory post.)

Those who do not spend a great deal of time online may have missed a hidden gem of the contemporary internet, the essays of the pseudonymous writer “N.S. Lyons.” The subjects of these essays are wide-ranging, but all are related to the notion of an “Upheaval” which has three main aspects: ideological changes sweeping the West, the rise of China, and a technological revolution consuming the whole world. Lyons is a gifted, and often entertaining, writer, and appears to be particularly well placed to reflect upon these changes, for in addition to the outlook of an educated person, he also shows some familiarity with both the inner workings of the US government and with Chinese affairs. Lyons’ own introduction to his essays can be found here. (Alas, the series is now going to be paused for quite some time, but there’s a good deal to read there in the meantime.)

My favourite Lyons essay, “A Prophecy of Evil,” concerns the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. In it, Lyons reviews the work of these two writers of fantasy novels insofar as it brings out a particular form of evil, and suggests that they saw more deeply into the problems of our present situation than celebrated dystopian authors such as Orwell or Huxley. The essay was of particular interest to me because I had seen a good deal of its content before, during my study of Plato and Thucydides. A look at the ground common to these ancient and modern figures should be worthwhile in itself, but it can also serve as an instance of a more general view concerning the value of studying the classics that I once heard from a distinguished classicist and philosopher: in the ancient world one often encounters phenomena that anticipate contemporary realities, but in a simpler form, so that one ends up with a richer understanding of what is peculiar to one’s own time.

In what follows, I will focus on C.S. Lewis as Lyons presents him, primarily in relation to The Abolition of Man, a little book that sets out an important argument directly. Lyons also discusses That Hideous Strength, a novel that treats much of the same material in literary form; I shall touch on it as well. The reason for my focus is that in Abolition, Lewis gives an explicit statement of the logic by which he sees a terrible progress unfolding, and his statement can very nearly be taken as an account of developments we see in Plato and Thucydides. The connection is remarkable because Lewis was concerned with developments he saw (or feared) arising out of twentieth century science. As ‘scientific’ progress proceeds in the twenty-first century, his worries seem all the more prescient, and Plato and Thucydides all the more relevant.

Three themes will give us a view of the similarities between Lewis and the two ancient Athenians. The first is the what Lewis calls “debunking,” a process that finds an ancestor in the theme of custom and nature (nomos and phusis) in Thucydides and in Plato’s Gorgias. The second concerns the result of this ‘debunking:’ in Lyons’ words, “starting from the insistent attempt at pure objectivism we arrive at pure subjectivism.” Specifically, the result is a view of the world focused on individual whim and therefore pleasure, an outcome that we also find in antiquity. A third point of connection comes in the sort of response that Lewis thinks necessary, something that he holds in common with Plato.

(A) Debunking: Custom and Nature

Lyons gives a concise summary of the view with which we will be concerned here: he describes “the belief… that any moral feelings or pangs of conscience are merely subjective experiences and what would today be called ‘social constructs,’ while the real world is purely material, and therefore purely materialistic. To be ‘purely objective’ is therefore, in this view, to focus only on the material, and dismiss the rest as non-existent.” Let us see how this view, or something like it, is brought out in Lewis, in Plato and in Thucydides.

Lewis, in Abolition, notes an enthusiasm among the intellectual class for what he calls ‘debunking,’ that is, for seeing through the pretensions of any judgments of value, whether moral or aesthetic, so as to show that they are mere feelings. His first example comes from a book for schoolchildren. The authors take the case of someone looking at a waterfall and finding it sublime, and declare that this is in fact a mistake: the waterfall is not actually sublime; it is in fact our feelings that we are attempting to describe with this statement, and nothing at all about the world beyond them. This sort of debunking can be applied very widely indeed, to any value judgment including all notions of good and evil, right and wrong. The procedure allows people to believe themselves clever on account of having seen through conceptions of good and evil that ordinary people take to be sound reasons for judgment and action.

However, Lewis is a bit too sweeping when he looks to the past: “until quite modern times,” he tells us, “all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it – believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.” All men? Perhaps not quite all. The practice of “debunking” had a predecessor in antiquity, one that we can see arising in Thucydides’ account of the political life of Athens, and that we also find being put under the microscope by Plato.

The first view we get of this predecessor is in Thucydides, in his record of what is known as the Mytilenian debate. In 428 BC, the city of Mytilene rebelled against Athens, its imperial master. After the revolt had been put down, there was a debate in Athens to decide what punishment should be meted out to the newly reconquered city. At first, the assembly resolved on the murder of all Mytilenian men, and the enslavement of the women and children, but there was soon a second debate in which the Athenians reconsidered this measure. Of the many speeches given in this second debate, Thucydides presents to us his reconstruction of two of them, one from Cleon, the other from Diodotus.

Cleon is an advocate of the original brutal policy. The aspect of his speech that concerns us here has to do with law or custom (i.e., nomos in Greek): he tries to present the original decision as settled law (nomos), and to present those who would change it as excessively clever innovators (“experts” or “elites,” one might say today). Cleon is made to speak as follows: “ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows. The latter are always wanting to appear wiser than the laws [nomoi], and to overrule every proposition brought forward, thinking that they cannot show their wit in more important matters, and by such behaviour too often ruin their country; while those who mistrust their own cleverness are content to be less learned than the laws [nomoi], and less able to pick holes in the speech of a good speaker; and being fair judges rather than rival athletes, generally conduct affairs successfully.” (iii.37.3-4)

It is worth drawing attention to the anti-intellectual tone of these remarks, a tone that would be all the more evident if I were to quote the speech at greater length. The suggestion that less intelligent people ought to be the ones who conduct affairs is certainly a remarkable one, perhaps remarkably foolish. In the wider context of Thucydides’ History, however, these remarks take on another aspect, and we can begin to see this if we consider a bit of the opposing speech.

Diodotus confronts an audience that is at once angry at the Mytilenians for their rebellion and also hesitant at the prospect of inflicting too savage a punishment. He wants to move them toward mercy. The tactic he adopts in response to this situation involves a novelty. He paints a picture of human nature according to which all people are moved by natural compulsions such as hope and greed, a picture that reminds us that all people tend to make mistakes, and he claims that laws and customs are insufficient to restrain our natural drives once they get going: states may have set down the death penalty for certain crimes, but who commits a crime in the expectation that he will get caught? Diodotus concludes that “it is impossible to prevent, and only great simplicity can hope to prevent, human nature [phusis] doing what it has once set its mind upon, by force of law [nomoi] or by any deterrent whatsoever” (see iii.45). Here we have the theme of custom and nature (nomos and phusis), and custom is understood to be powerless in the face of nature.

Applied to the matter at hand, Diodotus’ argument is effective, but perhaps too much so. It suggests that trying to make a terrible example of the Mytilenians would be futile, but it also suggests that the Mytilenians themselves are guiltless. After all, they’re only human, and thus subject to the same drives of human nature as anyone else, drives whose consequences are apparently “impossible to prevent.” Athenian anger at the Mytilenians would thus seem to be misguided.

Diodotus carries the day, and the Mytilenians are spared, but the ending of the episode is not such a straightforwardly happy one as it might at first seem. Diodotus has introduced what will turn out to be a double-edged sword: he has used nature to undermine the claims of human custom (or ‘law’). In regard to the immediate case at hand, this is a source of mercy, but within a bit more than a decade, the same line of thought will provide a foundation for an atrocity. (It is also worth noting that Cleon was already playing around with the idea of custom or law, as he tries to pretend that a decision made the day before is somehow settled law that it would be inappropriate to change: the suggestion is that what is happening here is not merely a matter of an innovation of one man, Diodotus, but is the result of a more general destabilisation of norms.)

The problem is that if we make appeals to nature, as Diodotus does, appeals to customs or laws are always going to seem insubstantial by comparison: yes, we may have set up a bunch of rules that describe the world as we might want it to be, but whatever rules we may set up, people will always be driven by their basic impulses – they can’t help it. Such impulses are real and substantial in a way that customs, which are now seen to be mere human inventions, are not. If such considerations seem to absolve the Mytilenians of any ‘guilt’ for rising up against their Athenian overlords, no less can they absolve all people in all circumstances of responsibility (and thus guilt) for anything at all. The whole of normative, ethical life is thus threatened with dissolution. The most famous episode in Thucydides shows us where this can lead.

A bit more than a decade after the Mytilenian affair, the Athenians show up in force at the small and independent island city of Melos, demanding at the point of a sword that the islanders become subject to the Athenian empire. Just as Diodotus did, the Athenians invoke a natural state of affairs to sweep aside all appeals to right and wrong, that is, to sweep away appeals to human customs. Above all, they remind the Melians that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” No less than the natural drives of Diodotus, this is an appeal to the way things really are, to a natural reality. The Melian response, which is an appeal to custom, seems pathetic by comparison. They protest, for example, that “you should not destroy what is our common protection, namely, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right.” The conclusion of the episode drives home just how insubstantial the Melian response is, for they receive precisely the brutal treatment that Cleon had wanted to inflict on the Mytilenians: the Athenians conduct a successful siege of Melos, and “put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and settled the place for themselves.”

What is of interest to us in all this is the fact that the Athenians, by means of their appeal to the natural behaviour of “the strong,” are absolved of any guilt or responsibility for what they do, which is just what Diodotus’ appeal to nature did for the Mytilenians. In fact, talk of “guilt” or “innocence” is eliminated altogether by the appeal to nature – just like in the “debunking” that Lewis described. But this liberation from ethical constraint will soon prove to come at a terrible cost for Athens. As the Athenians free their own natural impulses from conventional limits, they begin to act not only brutally, but also foolishly. Soon their greed leads them to launch an ill-considered large-scale attack on Sicily, where one of their commanders betrays his city, leading to the annihilation of the expeditionary force, a result that Thucydides believes played a central role in the eventual fall of Athens. The commander in question, Alcibiades, whom we will consider more closely below, is a sort of paragon of liberation from convention, and his betrayal of his city is just the sort of thing that follows naturally from that liberation. (See also pp. 82-84 in the book.)

Recall at this point the anti-intellectual aspect of Cleon’s words that we saw above. In hindsight, there is reason to look more favourably on his words there than one might have thought from a narrow reading of the Mytilenian debate on its own. The clever arguments of Diodotus, which pit nature against custom, have the potential to wipe away the conventional basis of human life, and thus contain a seed of great evil, an evil that will eventually consume Athens. The “ordinary men” that Cleon favoured could hardly have produced a worse result in the end than their more gifted fellows. (This sort of thing – an apparently straightforward phenomenon that takes on another aspect when considered in a wider context – is altogether typical of Thucydides.)

I want to draw attention to this point that Cleon gets at least partly right, because it aligns with something we see in Lewis: the problem, in his view, is a sort of perversion of human intellect, a cleverness that only really sees superficially, and that thus produces a sort of “progress” that gradually produces serious problems on a deeper level (i.e., the very abolition of normative life that we get from the ‘natural’ arguments of Diodotus and the Athenians at Melos). Lyons notes the appropriateness of a central symbol of That Hideous Strength, a disembodied head from which the technocrats take their orders. For Lewis (who is explicitly following Plato on this point), adequate normative thought cannot be attained with a head alone. Rather, “as the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest – the seat… of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.” Perhaps Diodotus’ clever use of nature to overrule custom could be thought analogous to a head without a chest.

Let us turn now to Plato’s Gorgias. The dialogue is based around a development that culminates in the argument with a fellow named Callicles. What Thucydides communicated implicitly, Callicles says right out. He begins by setting out the distinction between custom and nature (nomos and phusis), declaring that these are generally opposed to one another, and continues as follows: “in my view those who lay down the rules [nomoi] are the weak men, the many. And so they lay down the rules [nomoi] and assign their praise and blame with their eye on themselves and their own advantage. They terrorize the stronger men capable of having more; and to prevent these men from having more than themselves they say that taking more is shameful and unjust… But I think nature [phusis] itself shows this, that it is just for the better man to have more than the worse, and the more powerful than the less powerful. Nature shows that this is so in many areas – among other animals, and in whole cities and races of men, that the just stands decided in this way – the superior rules over the weaker and has more. For what sort of justice did Xerxes rely of when he marched against Greece, or his father against the Scythians? … I think these men do these things according to nature – the nature of the just [phusis… tou dikaiou]; yes, by Zeus, by the rule of nature [nomos … tes phuseos], though no doubt not by the rule [nomos] we lay down” (483b-e).

Callicles’ natural justice seems simply to be describing a reality that anyone can observe: the powerful do in fact have more than the less powerful, and as he says, we can see this sort of thing playing out among animals and in human conquerors. By contrast, when we speak of customs or conventions, we are talking about rules that people have agreed upon between themselves, and we are precisely not talking about a reality anyone can observe. Customs are mere human creations, they describe what people might want to be the case rather than what actually is. Accordingly, they are insubstantial in comparison with realities of nature. When Callicles complains of “papers, trickery and spells” (484a), it is precisely this insubstantiality that he’s focused on – and his words parallel the dismissive reference of the Athenians at Melos to “unseen things, prophecy and oracles, and other such things as cause ruin through hope” (v.103.2, my translation). Thus when Callicles speaks of the better person ruling the worse, he echoes the Athenians at Melos, who spoke of the strong ruling the weak, but more than this, he sees the same significance in that distinction as they did: we are dealing with what actually happens in the real world, not with some imaginary desired world.

Clearly, the ‘social constructs’ to which Lyons alluded above line up with the conventions (nomoi) of Callicles, and also with the same word in Thucydides. Of course, having revealed convention (nomos) as something entirely dependent on the whims of humanity, and having attained the objectivity of the perspective of nature (phusis), there is a problem: on what basis might we act at all? Most people act because of their belief in conventions, which tell us which actions are better than others. Once these are gone, what basis is there for living a life, for any action at all? Callicles has an answer to this problem, and it has a deep resemblance to the result that Lewis sees coming about as a result of “debunking.” This brings us to our second theme that connects Lewis with the ancients.

(B) From Objective to Subjective

N.S. Lyons, we recall, described the rather paradoxical result of debunking as follows: “starting from the insistent attempt at pure objectivism we arrive at pure subjectivism.” That is, once we have accepted the view that all value judgments are mere feelings rather than descriptions of some reality of the world – and this applies equally to feelings about beauty, good, evil, right and wrong – we seem to have attained a more accurate and objective view of the world. We have purged it of the confusions brought about by our feelings, and can begin to see things as they really are. But a paradoxical result of this is that when we turn to the question of what might justify or motivate any kind of action, all we have is feelings: “all motives that claim any validity other than that of their felt emotional weight at a given moment have failed... Everything except the sic volo, sic jubeo [thus I will, thus I command] has been explained away. But what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism… When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.” (This could actually serve as a largely accurate account of the logic unfolding over the course of Plato’s Gorgias and of the first book of the Republic.)

What is more, those who find themselves in a position of power may at first “look upon themselves as servants and guardians of humanity and conceive that they have a ‘duty’ to do it ‘good’.” But of course there is no ‘duty’ or ‘good’ any more, only feelings. Will the powerful do all they can to support the flourishing of their fellows, or will they torture and exterminate millions, or something else entirely? It is no longer possible to say that any of these paths are better or worse than the others, only that certain individuals might feel something to be better or worse. As this reality gradually makes itself felt, we get to a point at which the powerful “come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure.” (Recall at this point all the talk of gradual change in my first two posts.)

This path, including the move from “the insistent attempt at pure objectivism” to “pure subjectivism,” can be seen in both Plato and Thucydides. When I first began to see it in these ancient texts, it had confused me, because it does not initially seem to make any sense. The objective and the subjective are quite different – perhaps even contradictory – things, are they not? Why was I repeatedly seeing both of them, one after the other, in what otherwise seemed to be a single coherent development? In Thucydides, the point is not initially so easy to see, almost as if the author is trying for the first time to make out an unfamiliar shape. In Plato, it shines forth more clearly, but the point is the same. Reading Lyons’ essay was exciting for me partly because it confirmed these things I thought I was seeing and got me to think them through a bit more thoroughly (see p. 261-262 of the book for my initial reflection on the matter).

We saw above how the Athenians of the Melian Dialogue appeal to the right of the stronger as a fact of the world, using this allegedly realistic focus to brush aside the merely conventional objections of the Melians. Immediately after this ‘objective’ moment – and clearly connected to it (see the book p. 59 for the most direct links) – we see that this same Athens is characterised by a radical focus on the subject as she sets out on the Sicilian expedition. The point here is a large one, and I intend to return to it in a subsequent post, but we see this focus above all in Alcibiades, the man who is represented as decisively moving the Athenians to sail on Sicily, and who then plays a decisive role in that expedition’s catastrophic result.

Alcibiades is characterised by specious rhetoric, that is, by an ability to bring about a conviction within people without regard to the facts of the case in objective world, and he shows himself to be particularly concerned with appearances at the expense of reality. Both of these involve a focus on the human subject rather than on the world as it really is. For example, he boasts of his great expenditure at the Olympics and at home, saying that such displays make Athens look powerful; while recommending the Sicilian expedition, one advantage he sees is that “we will be seen” to sail against Sicily, as if that spectacle would itself constitute a significant result; when discussing the battle of Mantinea, he declares that although the Spartans won the battle, they have not yet regained confidence (an example of empty rhetoric if there ever was one). What all such remarks have in common is the notion that making an impression on people is the crucial thing; whether the impression corresponds to reality is beside the point. Accordingly, we have here a focus on the subject – apparently the precise opposite of the focus on an objective view that characterised the Athenians at Melos.

Nor is this focus on impressions or appearances confined to the words of Alcibiades: Thucydides makes clear that it characterises the situation in Athens as a whole as she sets out for Sicily. There is, for example, the scene in which the Athenians see off their fleet at the Piraeus: when they think of the danger ahead, as their ships depart, they comfort themselves not with deeply considered reflections on the power of their force relative to the enemy it will confront, but instead by focusing on the great sight of the fleet before them, and the splendour of its outfitting (vi.30-31). This focus on appearances constitutes once again a turn towards the subject. (Again, I will return to this point in a future post.) The “objective moment” of the Melian dialogue, then, is immediately followed by the “subjective moment” of the Sicilian debate and the expedition that follows, just what Lyons saw in Lewis.

Plato shows us the same phenomenon, again rather more directly than Thucydides. We saw above how Callicles aimed at an “objective” account of justice, one that was based in nature rather than in mere custom, but as Socrates investigates what is behind all this, he brings out just how far Callicles will take a certain form of individualism, which is explicitly motivated, in the end, by the very same subjective factor that Lewis saw: pleasure. That is, having begun with a claim of pure objectivity, Callicles ends up with a motivation confined entirely to the subject. (Thrasymachus, in the first book of the Republic, follows a similar path and ends up in a similar place, but we will not concern ourselves with him here, on his relation to Callicles, see the book, pp. 248-251.)

In both Plato and Thucydides, then, we begin with a focus on objectivity, and end up with subjective factors. If this presents a rather surprising parallel to the situation described by Lewis, there are also significant differences.

As we saw above, Lewis lays out a process that will unfold naturally as people internalise the view that ordinary human values are susceptible to ‘debunking.’ When people act after this disenchantment, at first the earlier, given norms will influence their behaviour to a considerable degree. As time passes, however, these norms will lose their influence. What is then left to drive action? The will of the individual, and whatever it happens to desire. The overall movement of Thucydides’ history, as well as both Plato’s Gorgias and the first book of the Republic, each show us just such a process unfolding. (I have already written about the place of this process in each of these works, for example in my first post.)

At this point, however, Lewis and Lyons see things in the modern world that are not really found in ancient Athens. Prior to the modern era, the notion that human nature could be changed did not have wide currency. More recently, however, human nature has sometimes seemed quite malleable indeed, and to some it seems that the possibilities here have no limit. Thus it might seem that future generations could be shaped through education (and perhaps, one day, also by chemical manipulation) into something altogether new by those who have grasped the nullity of existing customs and who are also backed by the full power of modern science. Values, of course, will now be understood as natural phenomena, with no basis in anything other than the will of those shaping the future, who Lewis calls “the Conditioners”.

Lewis saw things going further than this, to an attempt to supersede and get rid of natural life. The character Dr. Filostrato, in That Hideous Strength, looks forward to the day when trees can be replaced by artificial aluminum trees, and birds by artificial birds, whose song can be switched on and off at will. In fact, Filostrato dreams of being able to get rid of organic life as such, as people upload consciousness to something non-biological. This, of course, would allow the new ‘humanity’ to be a purely human construction and to conquer death. None of this is dreamed of in Plato or Thucydides – and yet, it does represent an intensification of what we do find in them, above all of the extreme and unbounded activity, essentially connected to tyranny, that forms an essential and inextricable aspect of Callicles, Thrasymachus and Alcibiadean Athens. (On this activity, see the book, pp. 263-265.)

The fact that Lewis sees things going further at this point than his predecessors in antiquity did explains the character of the inhumanity he sees arising. For Plato, people who fully liberate themselves from convention are falling back from humanity into something bestial: Thrasymachus is thrice compared to a wild animal. Lewis, on the other hand, when he looks ahead to men who have fully taken on board the debunking of ordinary values, sees people who are trying to leave behind the world of animals, with the aim of becoming post-organic beings of pure intellect and will. When he says of such people, “they are not men at all,” he has in mind a failing precisely opposite to that seen by Plato: an intellect that has divorced itself from the natural rather than having fallen back into it.

There is a further aspect of Lewis’ vision that departs from what we see in antiquity. Lewis posits a hatred arising out of the void left by the ‘debunking’ of all conventional values – i.e., out of the notion that there is nothing good. “I am inclined to think that the Conditioners will hate the conditioned,” he says, and (as Lyons shows) in That Hideous Strength this tendency finds expression in the character of Dr. Frost. Plato does not seem to have seen anything in his own time that went this far. On the contrary, he seems to see all people as moved by things they believe to be good. It becomes clear that Callicles actually believes things other than just pleasure to be good, while Thrasymachus has his own peculiar conception of the good (to agathon – 343b), in that he is most fundamentally oriented around getting what he takes to be good things. Lewis sees people really stepping into the void in a way that Plato did not. Thus we get the prospect of people acting from a hatred, which arises out of the view that there is nothing good. It is remarkable what a close parallel to this hatred Lyons is able to find in contemporary events, in the figure of Adam Lanza, whose nihilistic philosophy realises some of Lewis’ worst fears. (Lanza is the one who shot 20 children and 6 adults to death, and then himself, in 2012; the reader should turn to Lyons for a look into this episode and its connection to Lewis.) In antiquity, it was Thucydides who provided the parallel in events; we touched on the most famous example above, the case of Melos.

Lewis also sees a tendency toward the deliberate perversion of normal human instincts and reactions, something connected to modern science. The basic idea here is familiar enough: science, as it seeks an objective view of things, requires that we leave behind and even repress our natural and conventional reactions. For example, if someone were to stand in front of a crowd and cut open his stomach and start removing his intestines, there would be automatic expressions of horror and disgust – but biologists or doctors, when trying to understand an animal by dissecting it, or when operating on a patient, are accustomed to do just this sort of thing without any reaction of disgust. A standpoint that seeks purely scientific objectivity thus aims at killing conventional reactions as a matter of principle, at least in certain respects. (For an exposition of how this idea is worked out in That Hideous Strength, I once again direct the reader to Lyons, whose commentary on Mark’s training into a standpoint of “total objectivity” is particularly illuminating - and note how this continues the idea mentioned above, of a view of the world “purged ... of the confusions brought about by our feelings”). I don’t think this sort of thing really has a proper predecessor in antiquity – the worry there is rather that we are going to allow our natural tendencies to run free without being limited by convention, not that we will deliberately and consciously seek to turn away from them.

Once again, it is simply extraordinary how Lyons is able to find examples from contemporary society that line up so closely with Lewis’ concerns from eight decades ago. For example, he points us to Yuval Noah Harari, who has so internalised the new, post-debunking view of the world that he speaks of “useless humans,” and asks, “What do we need humans for? Or at least, what do we need so many humans for? … At present, the best guess we have is keep them happy with drugs and computer games.” He also understands our time as a sort of second industrial revolution, and he notes that the first industrial revolution allowed those countries that underwent it fast enough “to subjugate everybody else.” That is, our new era is understood here in terms of the subjugation of some people by others, an echo of the tyranny mentioned explicitly by Callicles and Thrasymachus; it also constitutes a theme in Thucydides. Harari further tells us that the product of this second industrial revolution will not be machines, but rather humans themselves. This new, post-human ‘humanity,’ which will be a construction of humans, is a step beyond anything imagined in antiquity, but it is just what Lewis foresaw. Indeed, Harari foresees the abolition of man, just as Lewis did: “we are probably one of the last generations of homo sapiens, because in the coming generations, we will learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds.”

What we have in our own time, then, is a recurrence, but also a deepening, of something that appeared before in ancient Athens, and this happened at a time when Athenian society was undergoing a process of cultural transformation (or collapse) much like our own. The evil that Lyons sees prophesied in Lewis is, in its fundamentals, very much the same as the evil that Plato and Thucydides saw coming to light in their own time. It arises as a result of conventional values coming to seem insubstantial and unreal, and produces a situation in which individual whim, liberated from all constraints, is let loose to do as it wills - a situation in which the strong prey upon the weak, and in which it has become difficult or impossible to explain why they should not. The power given to people by modern science, which vastly outstrips the power of any ancient tyrant, makes the potential for brutality in our own time much worse.

(C) The Response to Debunking

Lewis tells us how cultures and peoples prior to the modern era held “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is, and the kind of things we are.” He uses the term Tao for this view, using a non-Western term to emphasise its universality. While I’m not inclined to agree with everything Lewis claims for the Tao, what I want to focus on is what I take to be the reasoning by which people, after the appearance of the doctrine of subjective value, should be moved to return to the ‘older’ way of viewing the world, the notion that value judgments describe something about the world, and not just our feelings. The reasoning, as I understand it, is a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument: the result of the doctrine of subjective value is “the destruction of the society which accepts it.” That is to say, it is not the case that Lewis claims that he can demonstrate that when we call a waterfall sublime, we describe something about the world rather than just about our feelings. Rather, we come to know the doctrine of subjective value by its fruits, and reject it as a consequence. This is how we get to the claim that “a dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”

This is not an argument with which Plato would disagree. His own doctrine of objective value is put forth in the course of the Republic, and it finds its motivation in the first book of that work, which culminates in the very result – “the destruction of society” – that troubles Lewis. Briefly put, as we progress through the development of the first book of the Republic, we find that the society that could be maintained as a consequence of the doctrine in question at each stage gets ever more fragmented as we proceed. We start with the world of Cephalus, which could produce a polity at peace with itself; when we proceed to the next character, Polemarchus, we find that the doctrine he puts forward would produce multiple camps at war with one another – friends against enemies, factions within a city. The final character, Thrasymachus, contains the move from factions to tyranny, that is, to a society of one person, who aims to dominate and exploit all those around him. A society of Thrasymachans would tend not to be a society at all, but rather a kind of war of all against all (at least until somebody won). So the first book of the Republic traces out the gradual “destruction of society,” as a polity becomes divided and ultimately finds itself broken down to the level of its smallest component part, the individual. Plato’s philosophy is, in part, an attempt to answer this problem: how is it possible to set things up so that society does not tend of its own nature towards its own destruction? His answer is precisely the doctrine of objective value that Lewis talks about, and from the perspective attained by the end of the first book of the Republic, that doctrine can be seen as necessary in the same sense and for the same reasons that Lewis laid out, i.e., the reductio ad absurdum of its opposite. (The rest of the Republic may provide other forms of necessity, but that would be well beyond our current focus.)

Thucydides traces out a disintegration of society that parallels what we see in Plato. Indeed, such a disintegration is a major focus of the work: the Peloponnesian War is not only a story of cities at war with one another, it is also a story of faction, about cities going to war with themselves, and thus ceasing to function as coherent units. The subjective spirit epitomised in, but not confined to, Alcibiades, is the logical endpoint of such a movement, and it coheres in the decisive respects with the tyrant. However, Thucydides only presents a hint of the solution that Plato is aiming at, so I will leave the matter there. (On that solution, see the book, pp. 80-82, on the power of justice, something to which I shall return in a future post.)

The Last Word

The evil observed both in antiquity and in the 20th century is that of a will liberated from all normative limits. It is true that Plato saw some good coming out of all this, and that is something to which I hope to be able to return in a future post. Unfortunately, the good he saw was of an intellectual kind, and would have been little consolation to people living through the times to which he and Thucydides bore witness. Thus a comparison between ancient Athens and C.S. Lewis may help us to understand what is peculiar to our own situation, but it cannot make us optimists.

Finally, there is one further aspect of this connection between Lewis and antiquity that I want to discuss, involving a specific comparison to Plato, and I shall take that up in the next post, on Callicles and Dr. Frost.

(I would like to thank John Leen for his response to this piece, which made me think it might be worth publishing, and also got me to begin publishing this whole series.)

(This post is part of a series which seeks to relate the Athens of the late 5th-century BC to our own time. If you want an overview of the larger picture, of which this post is a piece, you might want to start with my introductory post.)

Some years ago I was in Berlin, and found myself visiting the church on one side of Alexanderplatz. A statue of Martin Luther stands outside, and inside one finds material commemorating the visit of his (almost-) namesake, Martin Luther King Jr., in the 60’s. When I was there, a side room contained recently updated explanatory placards, and I remember one item in particular from all that I read there, because it told me that something had changed.

The placard contained a novel definition of racism. I had grown up with the idea that racism consisted of discrimination against people on the basis of their race. It was this definition that lay behind King’s famous dream of a world in which his children might be judged on the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin. The placard in the Berlin church, however, looked in a very different direction, declaring racism to be “power plus prejudice.” We need not worry here about the significance of this change. The point is rather that when I was growing up, a rejection of King’s phrase would have indicated backwardness and bigotry; now it is increasingly the case that one must accept the new definition if one wishes to count oneself among the enlightened. In the space of relatively few years, the word has changed its meaning.

There is a passage in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War that can seem almost as though it was written as a description of our own times. It is a portion of a larger passage that is often referred to as the “Pathology of the Polis,” which provides a high-level overview of the kind of changes that cities typically underwent as the war progressed. The crucial section runs as follows:

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries… (trans. Crawley)

In one obvious respect, Thucydides is talking about something quite different from our own time: he is describing a war between states, one that often becomes a civil war within states, with all the violence that entails. In the face of such violence, people are often driven into a cycle of immediate reaction, in which their inhibitions against extreme action are naturally lower. Political actors today have no such excuse: our own situation is the product of profound peace rather than war. Nevertheless, the similarities are telling. In recent years I have come across passages that seem to echo Thucydides both in rhetoric and in certain aspects of its content. Here, for example, is Bruce Pardy, writing from Canada:

Double standards on speech and conduct are baked into our current political order. Burning churches and blocking railways are blows in support of social justice, but peacefully protesting vaccine mandates constitutes a public order emergency. Defying pandemic lockdown rules is a threat to public safety when parishioners gather for church services in parking lots, but not when thousands gather for Black Lives Matter marches. The federal government vilifies law abiding gun owners while it eliminates minimum sentences for gun crimes. The hypocrisy of our authorities is no accident. Their choices are deliberate and calculated.

For another example, consider Kathleen Stock in the UK:

Attempts to express kindness or curiosity about another person can get rebranded as “microaggressions”. Apparently sincere efforts to communicate a particular message in good faith are framed as “covert dog whistles”. Reasonable concerns are dismissed as “moral panics”. The phrase “cancel culture” — as good a tool as any other to discuss the silencing of many, via the visible punishing of a few — is batted back with lofty condescension, dismissed as conceptually deficient and not really capturing the right phenomenon in quite the right way. What does “cancellation” mean anyway? Are you really cancelled if you’re still upright after some horrendous ordeal or other? Was it even cancellation at all, or were you just facing “consequences”?

For a final (and more recent) example, let us turn to Abigail Shrier in the US:

“My body, my choice,” was a sacred and undeniable maxim, unless you refused the Covid vaccine. Calling the 2016 election “stolen” was fine; claiming the 2020 election was stolen made you an enemy of democracy. Uttering a word in Mandarin Chinese that sounded like the N word was enough to get you suspended from your university teaching job. But calling for the death of your Jewish or Israeli classmates, blocking their access to the library or large sections of campus, defacing university property—this was free speech, or rightful protest, or kids being kids.

These passages originally struck me because they seem to echo the “x was y” motif that Thucydides employs as he gives examples of how words changed their meanings. Of course, neither Pardy nor Stock nor Shrier is focused on merely verbal matters, but I don’t think Thucydides is either. There is a larger point concerning something that has happened to normative life, which is now characterised by hypocrisy, by a want of fair dealing. I am inclined to explain the echoes of Thucydides in terms of a basic similarity between our own situation and the one he was focused on: words are changing their meanings because the older ethical order that originally gave such words their content is disintegrating.

So long as an ethical order is accepted as a matter of course by most people, the meanings of words will tend to remain fixed, on account of being tethered to that order. Under such an order, citizens can rely on established institutions, on widely accepted norms, on “the ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered,” as Thucydides puts it. As an ethical order disintegrates, things become muddier, and it becomes easier to understand normative principles through the lens of the immediate situation where once might once have done the opposite. The pressure of particular situations can thus exert a sort of gravitational pull, giving political life a tendency towards factionalism and making words instrumental as much as descriptive.

People at odds with one another will naturally feel the pull of these new possibilities – in fact, they can end up twisting words for political convenience without realising it. Take any example from our three contemporary writers above – for example, the notion that “my body, my choice,” was a sacred and undeniable maxim, unless you refused the Covid vaccine. It is not the case that a group of people sat down in some shadowy room somewhere and decided that “my body, my choice,” would apply only in one situation and not in another. Rather, they reached for a principle in one situation, and didn’t notice or care that they were violating it in another because they were more concerned with the immediate situation (and perhaps especially the battle against their opponents) than with the principle.

In a healthier, more unified normative order, words and the norms they represent will be stabler; they will tend to determine how one views a situation rather than the other way around. We have known a different situation: notice how every example given by Pardy, Stock and Shrier is a new phenomenon, confined to the last decade or so.

In each of these examples, the dominant regime has, perhaps unconsciously, twisted the meanings of words in a manner that deprives its enemies of the protection they would have if words were used in a consistently fair spirit. The change in the meaning of ‘racism’ mentioned above is no different – see, for example, this article from Bari Weiss’s Free Press about the state of equality before the law (a major achievement of recent centuries) in Canada. As an ethical order collapses, words change their meanings because those who are able to change them do so, for the sake of their own power.

Thucydides would not be surprised by the claim that power is what drives things once a traditional ethical order has lost its influence. In the story he tells, people go to much more extreme and violent lengths to destroy each other than anything we can (yet) point to in the Western world today. The fear of violence from our political opponents is something that is felt occasionally, but is, for now, a relatively rare thing (incidents such as January 6^th, 2021 or the summer of 2020, both in the US, are exceptions to a generally more pacific situation; in the UK, one thinks of Islamism). There is, however, a general truth behind both the ancient and the modern situations in question: as an older ethical order collapses, there is a danger – indeed a likelihood – that it will be replaced by nothing more than the unrestrained exercise of power, which will take increasingly brutal forms. (This is a truth that is also central to Plato’s Gorgias and the first book of his Republic – but now is not the time for that.) With this in mind, we should recognize the logical endpoint of the sort of changes at issue here: if you want destroy people utterly, the redefinition of words is about the best place to start.

The incremental nature of the changes at work here – something I stressed in my discussion of Polemarchus (and of the Titanic) – is worth emphasizing once again, because it conceals the nature of the logical endpoint. The exercise of power is likely to be muted and hidden at first because the older order does not disappear instantly, as though in a puff of smoke, but rather disintegrates over time. Initially, it does still retain much of its influence and prestige. Accordingly, those who slowly begin to seek the full personal destruction of their opponents rather than merely their political defeat, will not initially be honest, even with themselves, about what they are doing, and will begin by exhibiting significant restraint. They will initially claim that nothing has changed, and then that any changes have been slight – the phrase one often hears today is “I support free speech, but...” Changes in the meanings of words are a means by which substantive changes can be introduced while obscuring the fact of the change. By redefining words, one may enjoy, for a time, the prestige of the fading older order together with the advantages of abandoning it. The recent mania around ‘disinformation,’ which apparently requires a rethink of fundamental speech rights, is a good example of this tendency, for in practice it does involve the silencing of very widely held opinions, and even facts, that the dominant elite class does not like, even as it allows them to tell themselves that they are doing something quite different (e.g., preserving “our democracy”).

In ancient Athens, traditional ethical restrictions proved unable to restrain people’s behaviour; revolutionary ideas spread like a disease across multiple states; words changed their meanings; ideological ties trumped blood relations; party and private interests usurped the good of the state; and political extremes obliterated the moderate middle. Many readers will be able to think of parallels to all this in our situation today. We will look in more detail at some of this, both in antiquity and in our own time, as these posts progress, and will certainly take a look at the natural outcome of these trends: tyranny.

(This post is part of a series which seeks to relate the Athens of the late 5th-century BC to our own time. If you want an overview of the larger picture, of which this post is a piece, you might want to start with my introductory post.)

In my last post, I used the sinking of the Titanic as an analogy for gradual changes that take place in the ideas that dominate a society. One aspect of this gradual change that there is an intermediate period in which it is not always clear what exactly is going on. Here I want to focus on this transitional phase, a situation in which many do not recognise that anything is changing at all, while others grasp the full significance of the moment, while others still feel pulled in both directions, unable or unwilling to fully grasp what is happening, and uncertain how to respond.

This sort of transition is of particular concern to me, because it seems to me to describe the Western world as I have observed it since coming of age in the nineties. Foundational elements of our society, which seemed as solid as rock a decade or two ago, now seem rather to have been passing phases, no more lasting or substantial than a breath of wind. As I look back over my adult life, I find myself connecting it with that character in the first book of Plato’s Republic who stands for a transitional phase from one state of affairs to another: Polemarchus. In hindsight, I would say that I have been “living Polemarchus” – indeed, we all have been. In what follows, I am going to try to explain what I mean by this by giving a brief overview of this character in Plato. I will then set out how I think the situation portrayed through Polemarchus relates to our own time, using the disintegration of liberal norms in Canada as an example. (I will leave Thucydides to one side this time, although his Mytilenian debate occupies a position similar to Polemarchus – p. 85 of the book provides a summary of the principal points of comparison.)

In the first book of the Republic, after Socrates speaks with Cephalus, an old man who represents an ossified older ethical order, Polemarchus enters the discussion. There are indications that we are to regard him as a continuation of Cephalus – for example, we hear he is the older man’s son, and we are reminded that he is Cephalus’ heir – but as Polemarchus speaks, it soon becomes clear that he also represents a break away from his father. He shows an active interest in argument, as his father did not: whereas the conversation with Cephalus was punctuated by expressions of agreement and admiration, Polemarchus comes ready to disagree and make his case. Furthermore, when he defines justice as “helping friends and harming enemies,” we are in the presence of something new because Cephalus never spoke of harming anyone: it is a first subtle hint of darker things to come. As the argument with Polemarchus proceeds, he is soon led to the conclusion that his new way of thinking justifies stealing from others, and as Socrates probes further, the attentive reader notes that the doctrine at issue in fact contains within itself the abolition of almost all ethical limits, a situation that could produce an entirely unrestrained brutality.

As the uncomfortable consequences of his words come into view, Polemarchus retreats from them, and abandons his definition of justice: in the end he proves loyal to the world of his father. Still, the encounter with Polemarchus does not simply consist of this loyalty. On the contrary, he represents a moment of uncertainty: he introduces a new view of the world that contains hints of brutality, but then retreats from it; when the dialogue proceeds to Thrasymachus, it becomes clear that Polemarchus was in fact a moment of transition, from an older ethical order that would tend of itself to produce peace and stability to a terrible and savage new situation.

Polemarchus’ uncertainty, then, contains two different moments: first, a felt loyalty to the world of his father, and second, an altogether different ethical understanding that arises out of his own active thinking. The connection to my Titanic analogy should be clear enough; in the context of the first book of the Republic, Polemarchus represents an historical situation in which an older ethical tradition, despite being mostly dead, nevertheless retains a kind of hold over people. Ideas whose time has passed do not disappear in an instant. Instead, their influence wanes, and they continue to make themselves felt for a time before disappearing completely. Plato has used Polemarchus to give this reality dramatic form.

So how does this relate to us? What foundational elements of our society have proved less secure than they seemed a few decades ago? The example I want to use here concerns the degree to which our society cherishes and is prepared to uphold liberal norms. One hears a great deal about freedom of speech these days, but there is another way to frame the matter, by thinking in terms of the status that liberal norms taken more generally hold within the culture. Consider the notion that it should be possible to air unpopular opinions in public without fear of losing one’s job. This certainly counts as a liberal norm, so the question is, how important does the average person consider it? How much disgrace is incurred by ignoring it? How ready are people, especially influential people, to encourage or enforce compliance with it?

Such a framing not only seems to me to point to what is decisive in our present situation, it also ties in directly to the character of Polemarchus as I set it out above, for a central question with him is how great a hold the older ethical order continues to have. In our case, the older order is the liberal order, in which people were free to air controversial opinions without fear of job loss or other forms of retribution. To the extent that illiberal methods receive condemnation and effective penalties from all sides, the liberal order can be said still to be alive.

It was a distinction of the sort suggested by this framing of the matter that was at the back of my mind over the past decade as I began to observe speakers getting shouted down, something I had not noticed before. Here is one video that stuck in my mind after many years, and was an early indication that things were starting to change:

More remarkable still than the fact of speakers getting shouted down was the fact that those disrupting speaking events would not face censure from all sides, but often received tacit support in the media and elsewhere. One increasingly hears justifications for shutting down speech: it isn’t the government doing it, so it doesn’t really count; the heckler’s veto doesn’t count; the speech in question was ‘hate’ (an ever more capacious term) so it’s right to censor it, and so on.

Another early indication that something was changing was my surprise at how authorities were now reacting to illiberal acts. Violations of liberal norms are natural and constitute a reality that simply will happen from time to time – it is liberal norms that are not natural – so to maintain a liberal society, it will be necessary to push back from time to time at such incursions. What struck me in recent years was that authorities did not push back. In fact, I began to realise that I had a sort of script in my head that I had been once accustomed to hear from those in positions of authority, a script that reminded us, for example, that it was important that people should be allowed to speak even if their views seemed noxious. All of a sudden, it seemed, people in positions of authority had stopped running this script. They did not remind us of the importance of liberal norms. They did not impose penalties of any kind on those who caused events to be canceled or shouted others down (in one case, they even gave an award after such behaviour). They did not do anything at all to preserve the status those norms had once enjoyed. I began to wonder if these authorities were not now more fundamentally moved by something else.

There is a “something else” at work in our culture today, and to shine a light on it here, I am going to avoid a discussion on laws passed by governments, turning instead to three examples of measures taken by professional societies in Canada – “characteristic realities” of the sort I mentioned in my first post. The reason for doing this is that these examples are not the product of top-down coercive action from the government, but seem to have arisen spontaneously across the country. They thus seem to me to have a better claim to be indicators of a genuine change in the culture rather than the accident of a single government. In all three cases, a professional association has made an issue of the political beliefs of its members, and has used the threat of disbarment from the profession against those who hold disfavoured beliefs. Each case clearly constitutes a departure from liberal norms to a degree that would have been unthinkable only a decade or two ago, and in each case, the silence from a very large segment of society (especially elite society) is deafening. It is above all this silence that tells us that the older liberal order is dying, that its influence, though not yet gone, is fading away.

In all three cases, the episode ends with a decisive victory for the illiberals.

The first example is the case of Amy Hamm, a nurse in British Columbia, who made statements from 2018 to 2021 “denying the gender identities of transgender people.” As a consequence, she was investigated by the BC College of Nurses and Midwives, with the possibility of losing her nursing licence and thus her livelihood hanging over her head for years. Hamm’s supporters believe that part of what is at issue is the right to assert biological realities; her own account of the affair can be found here. The views for which she has become known, if they are not of the sort that confer status in elite circles these days, are nevertheless very widely held indeed, and without doubt constitute mainstream political speech on an issue that is widely discussed. I consider myself a pessimist on such matters, but even I was surprised when Hamm lost her case. (Update August 15th, 2025: the BC College of Nurses and Midwives has ordered Hamm to pay $93,639.80.)

A similar case is that of Jordan Peterson and the College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO). Here, complaints about certain of Dr. Peterson’s public comments on social or political matters were made to the College by members of the public who do not know him (though it seems two of them did falsely claim to be his clients). The complaints seemed to many to be merely vexatious, but the CPO began proceedings against Dr. Peterson. As a result, he found himself threatened with the loss of his license if he were not to submit to retraining, apparently at his own expense, and for as long as the College deems fit. (His own account of the affair can be found here, and more recently, on video here:

As with the Hamm case, the outcry one would once have expected from major media has been absent, except from more conservative outlets. In a result that would once have been inconceivable, Peterson has lost his case against the CPO. Worse yet, he has felt the need to leave the country, a development that would once have been thought a black eye to any country aspiring to call itself free or liberal.

A third case concerns the Law Society of Ontario (LSO). Since 2016 there has been a question concerning whether or not the LSO should compel its members “to adopt and abide by a ‘statement of principles’ (SOP) that acknowledged their obligation to promote equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in their affairs, both professional and personal.” The objections to the exercise of this compulsion upon those who wish to practice law are obvious: it impinges upon freedoms that lie at the heart of a liberal society, above all the freedoms to speak and act according to one’s own conscience, and it even impinges upon a member’s personal life. I find myself comparing the SOP with the ‘encouragement’ many people in communist countries felt to be members of the party if they wanted to advance in their profession, or practice it at all. (Those interested in a somewhat more detailed objection to SOP can look here.)

In 2019 there was a movement called Stop SOP among Ontario lawyers that successfully removed the measure, leading many to think that liberal society had been saved, and that there would be nothing more to worry about. I was less optimistic, believing that it would be back in another 10-15 years. In fact, even my rather pessimistic view proved to be too optimistic, for the illiberals successfully brought SOP back in 2023. Thus it seems that those wanting to practice law in Ontario from now on will need to declare their fealty to the dominant ideology.

All three examples have in common what seems to be a new phenomenon: the readiness of professional societies to use political considerations to determine the fitness of their members to practice a profession. In all three cases, the outcry one would once have expected from major media, and from civil society more generally, in response to such a step has been muted or non-existent. To me, the silence was extraordinary: Canadians who get their information from non-ring-wing major media seem to have been unaware of the Hamm and Peterson cases for quite some time. There has also been a feeling in some quarters (e.g., here or here) that certain significant media have supported the illiberal side. (Update Aug. 25th, 2025: an article in the National Post provides further commentary on the matter of professional societies in Canada censoring members.)

One could comment at length upon the chilling effect such measures must have – the threat of losing one’s livelihood is obviously a serious matter – but our focus here is simply on how such episodes suggest the dwindling influence of the older liberal order. Certainly “freedom of speech“ still retains a positive connotation for now – recall that Polemarchus still had a felt loyalty to his father’s world – and even those who use effective means to destroy it (for example by using professional associations as a weapon against their political opponents) are still likely to proclaim their loyalty to such liberal notions as “freedom of speech.” Nevertheless, behind this seemly facade is a hard reality: those who disagree with their professional association’s new politics find themselves with a terrible choice between their livelihood and their conscience, the sort of choice that was once thought an marker of the authoritarian societies that we in the West rightly looked down on.

It is this new approach to disagreement that shows us what the “something else” is that I mentioned above. The liberal norm of trying to convince one’s opponents through dialogue is being replaced with intimidation. The new way of doing things is simply to exert a form of compulsion, to use force rather than persuasion. This is not how people in a liberal society behave towards one another. It is, however, how tyrants behave towards their subjects. We have here a hint of possible future tyranny, just as Plato hints at something similar as the encounter with Polemarchus concludes: Socrates suggests that the new understanding to which Polemarchus gave voice is really appropriate to men such as “Periander, or Perdiccas, or Xerxes, or Ismenias the Theban, or some other rich man who thought he had great power.” (trans. Griffith) Periander was a tyrant, Perdiccas an unscrupulous king, Xerxes an aggressive king, while Ismenias was a Theban whose integrity and patriotism seem to have been questionable at best: Plato is pointing to power rather than to scruples over moral concerns. The analogy to the new way of doing things in Canada should be obvious.

There is one difference with Polemarchus, however. Whereas he ultimately turned away from the terrible new world that was emerging, in Canada, there has been no turning back. All three cases ended in a decisive defeat for liberal norms, and in no case have I noticed any significant hand-wringing among the elites.

It should be clear enough by now how one might see a sort of Polemarchan situation through the three examples given above. We are experiencing a gradual change, in which an older, liberal, way of doing things is failing to sustain itself against a new way of doing things that operates through force rather than trust. The old institutions and processes are still there, and many people will feel that nothing has changed, but as we see speakers shouted down rather than debated, or professional organisations using their institutional power to intimidate or crush their political opponents, and as we see how scarce the public objections to such behaviour are, it becomes clear that there are in fact substantial changes afoot, even if the people driving these changes may not all be conscious of where it is they are leading us. If the process is not arrested, one can imagine how the result might ultimately be something quite ugly.

Canada is a country with a liberal past, and thus with liberal habits. It is still possible for Canadians to discuss controversial matters without the kind of fear one has in genuinely totalitarian states. The government does not usually proceed with tyrannical severity against its critics. But is it still appropriate to call Canada a liberal country? When we consider the country through the lens of Polemarchus, we find no cause for optimism. The analogy would have us understand the current state of affairs in Canada as a sort of mix of an older order, and a newer ideology that is increasingly dominant among the chattering classes. That liberal willingness to allow controversial people to speak which is still found in Canada is not a natural expression of the new ideology embraced by those who occupy the heights of Canada’s institutional order. On the contrary, it is a remnant of the older order: insofar as words noxious to the elites are not met with official sanction, it is simply because this is the way that things have long been done. If this is correct, it is likely that Canada’s claim to be a liberal country belongs more to the past than the future.

On a calm night in April more than a century ago, the Titanic met its fate as it ran into an iceberg, but it did not instantly sink. It was not the case that all the passengers, as they went through the unremarkable activities characteristic of an uneventful voyage, were suddenly overwhelmed by water pouring into their rooms without a moment’s warning. On the contrary, as the ship hit the iceberg, most of those on board will not have experienced much at all: a bit of shuddering, perhaps, but then nothing. The Titanic had been fatally struck, and was certain to sink, but at first, most of the people on board had no reason to think that anything was wrong. It was only with the passage of some time that the news began to spread: something actually had gone quite wrong; a bit more time and it became clear that this was an emergency, that the unthinkable was happening – the ship was going down! – and it then took hours for that emergency to play itself out to its terrible conclusion, when so many of those on board found themselves confronted with the inescapable rush of icy water.

This account of the sinking of the Titanic points to a sort of process, one that is relevant elsewhere. We start with an initial, perhaps scarcely noticeable event; there follows a period of time during which the event, and its significance, gradually go from being unknown and perhaps inconceivable to being universally recognised, until finally, after more time still has passed, we get to the point at which the consequences of all this are inescapably felt by people in their lives. This process, this development in time, is not only characteristic of maritime emergencies, but also of changes in the ideas by which we live our lives.

I think we can see a process like this in our own time, but because the events in question play out over decades rather than hours, it can sometimes be difficult to see the significance of whatever is going on around us. The picture presented by Plato and Thucydides, which I began to introduce in my last post, is also illuminated by the case of the Titanic, and is perhaps easier to think about on account of being further away, so let us start there. In fact, the analogy to the Titanic is particularly appropriate to the works in question, because they present a world in motion, a development rather than a static state, and anyone who forgets this will miss a great deal.

The reader will recall that two Platonic dialogues in question, the Gorgias and the first book of the Republic, each contain a three-step development represented by the three characters with whom Socrates speaks in succession: Gorgias, Polus and Callicles in the first case, and Cephalus, Polemarchus and Thrasymachus in the second. If we look at the first character in each dialogue, we can begin to see how the Titanic analogy might be relevant.

In my last post, I noted how Cephalus is conspicuous for his lack of active thought in relation to the way he lives his life. He can give an account of how the world looks to him, but gives little sign of having thought things through on his own. Instead of encountering a mind that has actively worked out its own understanding of things, we find repeated appeals to authority figures such as Themistocles or Pindar, and a single directly critical question from Socrates is enough to remove Cephalus from the conversation.

In Plato’s Gorgias, there is an analogous lack of thought in the first character, Gorgias. Like Cephalus, Gorgias is an old man, and old age has the same significance in both cases. It is meant to suggest something that happens to many people as they advance in years: they can become set in their ways, doing things as they have always done them, simply because that is how things are done, perhaps having become somewhat disconnected from the fact that other ways are possible, and that it can sometimes be necessary to be able to give reasons for one’s own worldview. When Gorgias declares that nobody has asked him a new question in years, it is an early hint of a man who has been saying and doing the same thing for quite some time without having been forced to reason deeply about any of it (Socrates, of course, will swiftly remedy the want of new questions). But Gorgias’ lack of reflection is suggested in another way. The rest of the dialogue will dive deeper and deeper into the difficulties that lie behind any claim about how one ought or ought not to behave. When Gorgias repeatedly talks about how “one ought” to behave, he simply asserts these things as if they are obvious. There is no sign of any awareness of all the problems that later get raised.

Plato sees in this lack of thought something very much like the Titanic hitting the iceberg: just as the fate of the Titanic was sealed as it hit the iceberg, so too is the fate of the ethical world of Cephalus or Gorgias sealed once it has become something that is just passively accepted, no longer subject to a process of regular criticism and active thought. At that point it is not in danger of dying, but is in principle dead, just as the Titanic was done for once it had hit the iceberg. Each dialogue can be seen as giving an account of the consequences of this initial moment, consequences that proceed naturally according to a sort of logic from that initial moment. As in the case of the Titanic, we begin from a moment that determines much of what follows, even though it will scarcely have seemed significant at all as it happened.

If we understand the first character in each dialogue like this, then the second character – Polus in the Gorgias and Polemarchus in the Republic – is analogous to the period of time during which the news that the ship was going down was starting to spread, when not everyone knew that anything had happened at all, and many who had heard felt certain that it couldn’t be all that bad. Polus and Polemarchus have each begun to sense, as their predecessors had not, that something has changed, and each is willing to push ethical boundaries in ways that their predecessors were not. Nevertheless, there is something holding them back; they are not willing to go all the way, and completely repudiate the older ethical order, however alive they may be to the new possibilities that are opening up.

The final character in each dialogue, Callicles or Thrasymachus, is characterised by a willingness to abandon traditional ethical restraints to a greater degree than any before him. Each is remarkably frank about a readiness to indulge in unseemly, even brutal behaviour; each is open in his admiration for tyranny. Thrasymachus takes things farthest of all: almost absolutely liberated from conventional ethical restraints, his relation to other people is simply parasitic, as he uses others either as sources of praise for himself or as the recipients of his brutal behaviour. If Callicles can be compared to a time at which everyone knew that the Titanic was going down, and many were already obliged to swim, Thrasymachus represents a time a bit later, at which the ship had completely sunk, leaving floating bodies together with the cries of people freezing as they splashed about in the water.

Thucydides is not telling exactly the same story as Plato, but he presents an analogous case. Athens at the start of the Peloponnesian War is not obviously lacking in thoughtfulness. On the contrary, while it is led by Pericles, Athens presents a supreme example of adequate deliberation in government. Nevertheless, it has a hidden weakness in the very nature of its strength: it is dependent on the presence of Pericles himself, and his death plays a role rather like the iceberg does with the Titanic, beginning an unravelling that culminates in the total collapse of the ethical order that Pericles embodied, and thus in the collapse of his city as well.

Just as with Plato, there is an intermediate moment at which it starts to become clear that something bad has happened, but it is not yet clear that a fatal blow has been struck. The standard of deliberation within the Athenian assembly declines; orators within the assembly make (and fail to answer) veiled accusations of corruption; citizens think more of their private interests than of the good of the city – but none of this is catastrophic (yet). There comes a time, however, when the Athenian assembly reflects so poorly on affairs that it begins to take dangerous risks, when orators directly (and accurately) accuse one another of corruption, and we see citizens plotting against one another, resulting in open treason. Such a state of affairs swiftly and naturally produces the total annihilation of a large Athenian military force, something that itself plays no small part in the eventual surrender of the city, the political equivalent of a ship that has sunk.

If we consider a few of the aspects I’ve just covered in the works of Plato and Thucydides – a lack of thought, old age, death – it should start to give an idea of how the older ethical order that was regnant in the West not so long ago has undergone a process rather like the sinking of the Titanic. In my introductory post I suggested how the lack of thought we see in Cephalus (or Gorgias) is reflected in our own time, for example in former practices, such as the institution of marriage, that seem no longer able to justify themselves, and have consequently been abandoned. The heart of the ethical order in the West until quite recently was Christianity (something I shall return to in subsequent posts). Even readers who, like me, were not brought up in any church may be able to recall intelligent and inquisitive friends who left their families’ churches after seeing priests and other elders struck dumb by the most elementary questions concerning their religion. This lack of thought has been a hugely consequential thing. When a way of life has become old and stale, when it is no longer anything more than a matter of going through the motions, it is already dead. What remains is simply the process by which it disintegrates.

Old age and death are central to the way in which this disintegration unfolds, for they are a major reason why there is a process at all rather than an instantaneous change. Long after a way of life has become a matter of rote repetition, long after its leading practitioners respond with blank stares to searching questions, it continues to exist in a sort of half life, much as the Titanic continued to float for hours after it was fatally struck. The reason is that people grow old before they die. That is, old people, who naturally tend to occupy the most influential heights of a society, will keep the old ways going, possibly for a number of decades, so that it will not be immediately obvious that anything has happened. It may only be once a large number of the older generation has died, once a certain threshold has been reached, that changes really start to become apparent. Even then, not every old idea will be abandoned in an instant, because most people tend to act as they always have, and only become aware of a fundamentally new situation in a gradual manner.

When considering our own time, we should keep in mind that we may be in the midst of gradual changes, unfolding over the course of decades, so that much that seems static may actually be in the process of changing into something quite different. It may also be that a decisive moment is long past, and we are watching its consequences play out.

The Titanic analogy is meant to suggest one other reality relevant to our thinking about historical change because it describes a process that unfolds unevenly and over time. There will have been a time at which some people on the ship were not yet aware that anything at all was wrong, while others had been informed of the emergency, while others still, who had been deep in the bowels of the ship when disaster struck, had already drowned. The fact that different people were in quite different situations does not affect the claim that there was a period of time during which knowledge of the ship’s fatal state was gradually spreading among the people on board. This sort of thing is generally true of the sort of realities we’re dealing with here: they are not likely to be refuted by a single counterexample. To point out, for example, that there are still patriotic people today, or that we can find examples of true patriots in Athens even as it surrendered at the end of the war, is to answer nothing said earlier about patriotism today or in post-Periclean Athens. Plato, Thucydides and I are interested in what you might call characteristic realities, moments that represent something essential about a situation, even if they do not fully describe any specific empirical reality.

This point is important enough that I am going to use a second analogy. Some scholars have seen an analogy between the spread of ideas in the Hellenic world as Thucydides understands it and the spread of a disease in a body (I think Thucydides would agree with this). Taking up this analogy, imagine if I go to the doctor, and am told that I have pancreatic cancer, and am not likely to live more than six months. It would be no answer to the doctor’s diagnosis to point out that I have plenty of healthy cells in my arm, and that his warning about my risk of death was therefore to be ignored. In the same way, when I claim that our situation today is characterised by the collapse of the religion (Christianity) that once stood at the heart of our ethical understanding, it is no answer to point out the continued existence of many sincere Christian believers, or even of Christian fundamentalists: they may still be around, but they no longer have the same significance that they once did.

The analogy between the fate of the Titanic and the unfolding of historical events is illuminating in several respects, but there is one way in which the analogy misses the mark: the sinking of a ship is an unambiguously bad thing, a catastrophe, in fact. This marks a change from my introductory post, which suggested how a period in which an old ethical order is collapsing can be a time of liberation, and thus a good thing. So which is it? Good or bad? This is not a question that deserves a simple answer, for we are dealing with a development that is good in some respects and bad in others; the point is not simply to praise or blame, but to understand. From the perspective of the older order, the analogy to a sinking ship is entirely appropriate, and it captures Thucydides’ view of the changes he witnessed. For others, however, things will seem rather more ambiguous, and Plato saw a real potential for good as well as evil in the new view of things that came onto the scene in his day. Both perspectives can be helpful in considering the situation today. In what follows, the matter of what exactly is good in all this, and what is not, will not always be an easy one: one must maintain an openness to both possibilities.

What exactly is it that has happened before? The essays that follow will focus on an historical process, a change in the culture that has come about as an older ethical order, based in an old religion, disintegrates. Specifically, our contemporary situation has profound similarities with fifth-century BC Athens.

I began to notice this as I wrote and then published a book over the first two decades of this century. It was an academic book, a close reading of three classical Greek texts, and so I did not expect a huge number of sales (in this I was not disappointed). Something unusual had happened as I wrote it, however: while the material seemed to be relevant to our own time in a vague and general way when I first encountered it in the late 90’s, as the years passed I found myself confronted with increasing frequency by direct connections between the ancient Greeks and ourselves. Considered in their fundamentals, many of the controversies and problems that confront us today began to seem like replays of things that had happened in ancient Athens – indeed, the similarities sometimes seemed eerily precise. As time passed, I began to think that these connections to an earlier era might be of interest to other people, and further, that by virtue of the perspective they grant upon our own time, they might help us better to reflect upon it. This and the posts that follow are my attempt to set all this out in a manner accessible to the ordinary reader.

What kind of similarities could our modern world have with a city in ancient Greece? The Athens of the late fifth century BC was a time during which the basic ideas by which people live their lives, their norms, were becoming controversial. Fundamental notions that everyone had long taken for granted started to seem questionable, poorly thought out or even oppressive.

It is not difficult to find examples of this sort of thing today. Take the question, what is marriage? Until fairly recently, there was a generally accepted answer to this question that had simply been taken for granted as long as anyone could remember, a set of rules that everyone followed concerning the conditions on which one could enter a marriage or leave it. In recent decades, however, these old rules began to seem arbitrary and excessively restrictive. Why should it be so hard to get a divorce? Were there not a good many circumstances in which it was cruel to compel a couple to stay together? There did not seem to be a compelling answer to such questions, and so the old ways were left behind. More recently, people began to ask why homosexuals could not marry. Again, there seemed to be no justification for established norms, and so a change came about.

This is the sort of process we see in the Athens of the fifth century BC. The specific matters at issue are sometimes different (though not always), but both today and in ancient Athens the basic story is the same: an older ethical order finds itself unable to justify the demands it has long placed on its adherents, and thus begins to dissolve. There is a further aspect common to both the ancient and contemporary versions of this situation: the release from the older ethical rules was experienced as a kind of liberation. It should be clear enough how this is true in the case of the norms surrounding marriage today: a woman released from an abusive marriage is likely to understand the change as a liberation from something oppressive, as are people able to marry today who were not allowed to according to the old ways. Indeed, one might ask how an escape from arbitrary restrictions could be anything other than a liberation?

The book I mentioned above concerns Plato and Thucydides, and it is with reference to the two of them that I draw a comparison between our own time and ancient Athens. Each gives us a window onto this process as it unfolded in the Athens that they knew. Thucydides, the second historian whose work we still have, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.), fought between the empires of Athens and Sparta, which was taking place as Plato was growing up. Two Platonic dialogues, the Gorgias and the first book of the Republic, give complementary views of the development that Thucydides saw taking place in his history. Taken together, these three works provide a sort of distant mirror of our own time. My aim here will be to set out some of the ideas most fundamental to these texts, and make clear their contemporary relevance, in a manner that I hope will be accessible even to people who have not read them. (This aim may prove too ambitious, especially in the case of Thucydides, but I am determined to try; the reader may judge whether or not I have succeeded.)

The casual reader of Thucydides is not likely to come away from his history of the Peloponnesian War with any significant impression of the developments I have in mind. Thucydides, however, can be a very careful and precise writer indeed; in subsequent posts, I will try to bring out some of what can be seen when one follows Thucydides with some attention to detail. For the present let us consider a single example to give the flavour of the sort of thing I have in mind: the case of patriotism in Athens. At the start of the war, Athens is dominated by Pericles, who continually reminds the Athenians of how their security and prosperity depends upon the city, and of the consequent need to make sacrifices for it. He can also invoke his own well-known patriotism (philopolis) to brush aside any reproaches concerning the possibility that his own private interests might affect policy (ii.60.5). A few years later, after Pericles has died, Thucydides gives us another view of the Athenian assembly, and a change is noticeable: speakers who disagree about many things are nevertheless united in their concern that the interests of the city are falling from view, as citizens are beginning to focus on merely private interests. Later still, when we are given a view of the assembly debating an expedition against Sicily, Thucydides makes it quite clear that private interests are moving to center stage, and one influential member of the assembly goes so far as to suggest that, rather than his interests depending on the city, the city depends on him. Before long, we find him redefining patriotism: it is “what I do not feel when I am wronged, but what I felt when secure in my rights as a citizen.” (Readers may find themselves thinking of contemporary occasions on which words are redefined, a phenomenon to which we shall return in a future post.)

Thucydides, then, shows us a gradual disappearance of patriotism in Athens as the war progresses; citizens are progressively less moved by faith in their country, turning increasingly to focus on their own private interests instead. More than this, we see a structured progression focused on characteristic realities, in which patriotism declines in three logical steps: present, disappearing, gone. This three-step progression is repeated in many other aspects; the interested reader is invited to refer to my book, pp. 13-15, 85-86, for a summary.

This example from Thucydides can profitably be compared with our own time: do we not see a similar case today as regards patriotism? No matter where you live in the West, would you really be prepared to argue that people are, in general, as patriotic as they were three or four decades ago? I don’t think you could, as recent decades have seen the rise of a view that Western countries are, as such, simply evil. This view is to be connected to a confrontation with the legacy of colonialism, as thus to the question of liberation, mentioned above – but I am getting ahead of myself. For now it is sufficient simply to note the similarity between what I have said of Thucydides and our own time. The real issue here is not the specific matter of patriotism so much as the gradual falling-away from an initial set of dominant norms; patriotism is an instance of this.

The casual reader of Plato should have a much easier time seeing the basic progression I have in mind, because it is present in the progression of characters in each of the two relevant dialogues. In the dialogue known as the Gorgias, Socrates speaks with three different characters: first Gorgias himself, then a young man called Polus, and finally Callicles. In the first book of the Republic, Socrates speaks with Cephalus, then Polemarchus, then Thrasymachus. In each case, we can see in the progression of three characters a development in three steps that parallels the three-step development in Thucydides.

To give the reader an idea of the sort of progression one can see in Plato, let us focus on the Republic. The first character, Cephalus, is an agreeable and decent man, as well as a pious one: we get the impression he spends a good deal of time sacrificing to the gods. He is not, however, a thoughtful person, leaving the conversation the instant Socrates poses a critical question. The next character, Polemarchus, is Cephalus’ son, and while he is clearly more thoughtful than his father, the conversation with him is not conspicuously pleasant – in fact, it is more an argument than a conversation. Thrasymachus is by far the most thoughtful of the three, and is able to respond to Socrates’ criticism by adjusting his own position repeatedly, but he also proves to be an abrasive, even violent, character. He praises a life of injustice, and he admires tyranny. In contrast to the piety of Cephalus, Thrasymachus speaks of being able to steal all things, sacred or profane, from others.

In this and other aspects, the first book of the Republic provides us with a clear and consistent development from beginning to end. Within it we can see moments that remind us of certain aspects of our own time. For example, everyone has met characters like Cephalus, such as those Christians today who go through the motions of their inherited religion, but are struck dumb the moment anyone presents them with a critical question about it. I suggested above how certain aspects of our inherited ethical order have proven unable to sustain themselves in the face of criticism, and how they have therefore been abandoned, and we can see something similar reflected in Plato in the increasing thoughtfulness of the characters, together with their decreasing allegiance to the older order, as we move through the progression. Plato is also showing us the collapse of an older ethical order, and here, too, the notion that there is a kind of liberation in all this is present: Thrasymachus describes his preferred kind of life as “more free” (344c).

As the terminus of the development we see over the first book of the Republic, Plato’s presentation of Thrasymachus points to another reality about the changes he saw in his own time, one I have not yet mentioned: the collapse of the older order is not simply a matter of liberation, but also has a negative aspect. It leads to the rise of a new state of affairs characterised by brutality, and clearly linked, in both the Gorgias and the Republic as well as in Thucydides, to tyranny. Many readers will immediately recognise a parallel in this to our own times, having noticed how Western societies are swiftly becoming less liberal than they once were, how people are now regularly fired, debanked, ostracised or otherwise destroyed – ‘canceled’ is the word these days – as they were not only a decade or two ago. The increasing similarity of aspects of our own time to the final, brutal and tyrannical stage I saw in Plato and Thucydides has been a sobering and dispiriting aspect of working on this project over the years. There will be more to say about the new brutality today as it is appears through the lens of antiquity, and cancellation is by no means the only form it now takes.

This, then, is the basic picture that I’m going to be filling out in what follows. This substack, which I conceive of as a sort of limited edition publication (i.e., I will publish a certain number of posts and then stop), will treat specific events or ideas of our own time in their relation to the work of Plato and Thucydides, in the hope that our contemporary situation and that of ancient Athens can be mutually illuminating. That is, using ancient Athenian writers as a lens through which to see our own time might allow us to understand our own situation better. The discussion might also allow some people better to appreciate Plato and Thucydides, and might even persuade others to read them.

I am not going to be concerned with justifying my interpretations of Plato or Thucydides in any detail here, as I have already done that for about 120,000 words in the book. Instead, I am going to assume those interpretations, and focus on how the picture they give us provides us with insight into our own time. I have also already published a piece attempting to treat Plato and Thucydides in relation to three particularly interesting English writers of our own time, Paul Kingsnorth, Theodore Dalrymple and Mary Harrington.

New posts will appear every two weeks. I would like to thank Eddie Beloiu (in Germany), André Bernier (in Canada), Zahira Patel (in England) and John Leen (in the US), each of whom provided valuable feedback on earlier versions of this and / or subsequent posts.

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If anyone wants to look at the text of Plato or Thucydides in English, here are my thoughts on translations. I recommend The Landmark Thucydides for three reasons: it sets the text amid a collection of maps in which little-known ancient Greek place names are set out, it is the only English edition I’m aware of that allows the reader to look up exact citations (e.g., iii.37.2 – when writing about Thucydides I tend to pepper my text with such references), and it contains the classic 19^th-century Crawley translation which, if it cannot be said to be the most precise rendering of the Greek, is nevertheless to be recommended for the elegance of its English. For Plato, I can recommend Irwin’s translation of the Gorgias because I used it while doing my own work, but I have yet to find a translation of the Republic that I really like (e.g., one that gets the highly significant word agathos – ‘good’ – right throughout book i). Still, any translation with the Stephanus page numbers running down the side (e.g., 337b) should do.