(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.