Sphinx

Last week I was at a fantastic conference in Newcastle on Authority and Contemporary Narratives about the Classics (details here), discussing different aspects of the image and appropriation of the ancient world in the public sphere; Rebecca Futo Kennedy gave the full version of the discussion of the history and problematic politics of ‘Western Civilization’ that she’s been trailing on the Twitter (@kataplexis if you don’t already follow her), and there were fascinating papers on topics like postgraduate blogging, the intersection of ideas on Roman imperialism and Realist international relations theory, concepts of myth in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and whether Livy was a good Wikpedian. As ever, the main problem was that we needed much more time for discussion – well, that, and the fact that I could carry only so many bottles of local craft beer home with me.

I was discussing, in a slightly aimless manner – perhaps because I don’t usually spend so much time talking about raw data – the presence of Thucydides on the Twitter, and the activities of the Thucydides Bot. As always, it’s difficult not to get distracted by the most egregious examples (that wretched ‘scholars and warriors’ quote, especially when accompanied by the daft graduation picture, and some of the funnier examples of new-agey motivational posters (#Thucydides #quote #love #bollocks):

But understanding Thucydides references in terms of wider issues of information – whether Twitter is characterised as a marketplace of ideas or an informational ecosystem – needs to encompass the whole range of references. If we see fake quotes as a minor example of misinformation rather than disinformation (not disseminated for malign purposes – and for the most part not disseminated knowingly as fakes), then they may help shed light on the reasons why people are not as critical, or as consistently critical, as they might be.

One persistent theme in research on this topic is that people are not inclined to question things that ‘look right’ – not quite “accepting the first story they hear”, as Thucydides complained, but certainly accepting stories that confirm to their expectations and/or are presented by trusted sources like friends and family – without considering why something ‘looks right’. With Thucydides, of course, there’s a strong temptation to accept quotes that conform to the pervasive image of him as illusionless commentator on war and politics, as the sorts of things he would have said; far more than reliance on external authority (except perhaps GoodReads, as I’ve complained before).

But there’s also the negative factor that it can be difficult to establish the authenticity of a given quotation – even for someone who spends a lot of time working in this area. I’m still in the process of tracking down one recent example, which I think is a paraphrase or remark by the Franco-Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis that has become transmuted into a Thucydides quotation through a process of Chinese whispers, passing from blog to blog and from language to language (French into modern Greek into English). As this is the prompt I needed to engage properly with Castoriadis, but my French is rusty, this may take a while. In the meantime, another quote on the Twitter illustrates the problem nicely:

When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason.

One person had already seen this and alerted @Thucydiocy. My immediate reaction was that this is perfectly genuine, as I’d definitely seen something like it before – but after half an hour of googling produced nothing but dubious Great Thoughts websites (plus a critique of modern scientific culture published by Princeton; apparently The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology don’t include a failure to reference quotes) I was starting to wonder whether I was mistaken.

It’s the familiar translation problem: if the version being disseminated doesn’t come from any standard translation, it’s a waste of time searching for exact key phrases; instead, I had to switch to searching for key terms – a waste of time, as there are so many discussions of Thucydides using terms like ‘argument’ and ‘reason’ that don’t have anything to do with this quote – and finally to trying to imagine alternative ways of translating what I imagined the original Greek may have said, if this was genuine – and searching for “full force of reason” yielded a passing reference to 4.108, where Thucydides offers a passing comment on cities abandoning their alliances with Athens to surrender to Brasidas:

The usual thing among men is that when they want something they will, without any reflection, leave that to hope, while they will employ the full force of reason in rejecting what they find unpalatable. (Warner version)

I did have a full-back plan – which was simply to skim through all the passages in Thucydides where such a sentiment might be appropriate. I’ll be completely honest, I think it would have taken me a while to get round to this bit – and actually it’s very unusual to come across a quote that isn’t from one of the familiar set-pieces.

What can we conclude from this? My initial reaction was correct – but I came close to thinking that I’d got it wrong. Plenty of people would accept this line because it looks like the sort of thing Thucydides would say, and the process of evaluation is long and tedious even for someone professionally committed to this stuff – but someone who was initially suspicious would probably have concluded, wrongly, that it was fake, because searching for the passage produces only unreferenced, unscholarly sites (plus, passing reference in academic work from a non-historical discipline, which is never a good guide).

I think the crucial issue, for thinking about information and misinformation, is understanding the reasons why we do or don’t accept something at face value, and what we then do about it. The primary goal of @Thucydiocy – given that the task of driving the ‘scholars and warriors’ quote from the face of the earth seems to be quixotic at best – is to interrupt the flow, to raise questions where people might have taken things for granted, to prompt critical enquiry about everything. But, realistically, if it takes me this long to check one Thucydides quote, even drawing on existing knowledge and expertise, I can just imagine how much dodgy stuff I’m letting pass because I’ve already unconsciously assessed it on the basis of my priors, or just because I’m not paying attention…