How Ideas Change In History

OR, How the Titanic Helps Us Understand Plato & Thucydides

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.