Sphinx

If I ever want to write a distillation of the political wisdom and insights of Thucydides that will get noticed by serious newspapers and sold in proper bookshops, it’s clear that I’m going to have to develop an eye-catching binary distinction with which to make sense of the entire world, the equivalent of the Nowheres and the Somewheres, or the Tight and Loose cultures distinguished by a social psychology study that claims to “provide a consistent way of understanding differences observed from antiquity to the present day, in everything from international relations to relations in our homes.” Hmm. The Thucydides and the Thucydidose? The Thucydiscerning and the Thucydiots? The people who believe in reductionist binary distinctions with universal validity, and everybody else?

Though they were separated by miles, and in some cases centuries, tight cultures as diverse as Sparta and Singapore have something in common: each faced (or faces) a high degree of threat, whether from Mother Nature – disasters, diseases, and food scarcity – or human nature – the chaos caused by invasions and internal conflicts. Strong norms are needed in these contexts to help groups survive. And when we look at loose cultures, from classical Athens to modern New Zealand, we see the opposite pattern: they enjoy the luxury of facing far fewer threats. This safety is used to explore new ideas, accept newcomers, and tolerate a wide range of behaviour. In contexts where there are fewer threats and thus less of a need for coordination, strong norms don’t materialise.

Sigh. This is such total bollocks, at least as far as the references to classical Greece are concerned, that it’s hard to get really cross, but only to shake one’s head despairingly that anyone should take it seriously, give it a prominent position in a respectable newspaper and so forth. There’s no proper analysis of ancient history here, only the recycling of the cliche that Athens was an open society (Pericles’ Funeral Oration, obviously, makes that claim – but what about the highly restrictive rules on citizenship, and a whole raftload of social and cultural norms?) and Sparta a closed one (yeah, insofar as we actually know anything about the historical Sparta) – and that then begs questions about the supposed origins of tight and loose cultures, as there seems no obvious reason to imagine that Sparta was somehow more under threat than Athens within the generally anarchic Greek world (who gets invaded by Persia, eh?), let alone more threatened by food scarcity (famous poverty of Attic soil, anyone?).

But then there’s not actually any analysis of ancient history in the article, since pretty well all the evidence it relies upon, neatly tabulated as if it all has the same status and reliability, is modern; there’s just a reference to Herodotus at the beginning (“As long ago as 400 B.C.E., Herodotus documented a wide variety of cultural practices that he observed in his travels in The Histories“) to make the scintillating point that cultures are not identical to one another, and a quote from him at the end to demonstrate that articles in Science offer so much more insight than any of that humanistic stuff:

Indeed, as Herodotus remarked centuries ago, “if one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being the best by far”. Such beliefs fail to recognize that tight and loose cultures may be, at least in part, functional in their own ecological and historical contexts.

Down with cultural relativism! Paul Cartledge’s The Greeks: a portrait of self and others to the contrary, the problem with Greek thought was clearly that it was insufficiently reductionist and bipolar. Athens (tightness score 3.1) might have prided itself on its looseness, but Pericles should have recognised that Sparta (tightness score 11.8) was just as functional (if not more so) in its ecological context.

What’s most impressive about this paper is the fact that it was published back in 2011, and yet somehow is now being splashed as the latest thing. I’m pretty sure that some of my old research must have predicted Trump, or Brexit, or something like that; why isn’t my university press office on the case? All I need is a decent set of categories…

Update 18/9: I initially described this as a political science study, as I saw – or thought I saw – the lead author described as such. Stefan Dolgert queried this, understandably, and on rechecking it’s clear that, whatever I thought I saw, this is the work of social psychologists. Which makes vastly more sense, both of the publication venue and of the habit of confident ahistorical generalisation. Apologies to all my political science colleagues for associating them with such twaddle.