Sphinx

There’s an interesting contrast of different dynamics of classical influence in two articles that I happened to read this morning. The first is George Monbiot‘s denunciation of capitalism in the Grauniad, in which he mentions an alternative principle of socio-economic organisation he’s been promoting for a couple of years: private sufficiency and public luxury. The more times I see this phrase – I was more sceptical when it first appeared – the more it looks like something derived from classical thought, and in particular the line from Cicero’s Pro Murena that the Roman people hates private luxury but loves public munificence; it’s not just the neat rhetorical antithesis, but also the recourse to value terms like sufficiency and luxury, and the idea that wealth is not good or bad per se, but it depends on whether it’s being deployed for public benefit.

Of course, in lots of ways (some of which I discussed two years ago) the Roman precedent is rather problematic for Monbiot’s agenda; it’s embedded in a system dedicated to the protection of the private property of the wealthy, in which the regulation of their use of that wealth is limited to trying to leverage their need for popular approval and acclamation – Cicero, one suspects, would be an enthusiastic advocate of libertarian arguments for minimal taxation so the rich could choose their own approach to philanthropy.

But this doesn’t matter for Monbiot’s project: he doesn’t credit the idea to Cicero or anyone else in any article that I’ve seen (so its intellectual origins remain uncertain), and he doesn’t attempt to bolster its credibility with appeals to historical precedent or timeless values. His advocacy is based on common sense and logic; if everyone is to enjoy the same private luxuries as everyone else, you end up with an endlessly sprawling Los Angeles, so doesn’t it make more sense to provide most things for the use of everyone? Cicero may not have approved of wealth taxation for the public good – but that doesn’t mean his idea can’t be repurposed for the present.

Perhaps this strikes me as interesting simply because I read Monbiot’s piece shortly after looking at a hilariously terrible article on ‘The Trump Doctrine’ by former foreign policy adviser Michael Anton – yes, he of the ‘Publius Decius Mus’ pseudonym. You might think that Trumpian foreign policy is driven by ignorance, vanity, mood swings, insularity and vacuous right-wing slogans, but, Anton is here to tell you, that’s because you lack the sophistication to discern not only its underlying philosophical coherence but its fundamental necessity, returning to harmony with nature and natural human instincts rather than hubristically trying to remake the world.

Right. Many years ago, someone demolished the claim of one of those pseudo-archaeologists that the layout of a set of temples in SE Asia reflected the stars by showing how you could draw lines between any selection of public monuments, e.g. in contemporary New York, and discern a significant pattern – so long as you selected the monuments carefully, and knew what pattern you were looking for beforehand. This is the Anton method, selecting odd quotes from different Trump speeches as having hitherto unrecognised significance, in order to draw lines between them and reveal the whole intricate design.

And even with all this effort, the end result is still a slightly more polished version of “yes, he’s an ignorant nationalist; what’s wrong with that?” This is where classics comes in: to present this ‘doctrine’ as the worthy successor of thinkers like Xenophon and Aristotle, and as a reflection of eternal and universal truths. After all, nationalism is a feature of human nature, as Aristotle tells us – there are always insiders and outsiders, citizens and subjects and foreigners, and it is simply natural to side with your own kind against the rest. “You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, Horace said, but it keeps on coming back.” Athens and Sparta could occasionally unite against a common foe, but their primary drive was to distinguish themselves from one another and pursue their own interests. Only empires attempt to be multi-ethnic, and we all know that empires are BAD.

Love of one’s own extends beyond the family to the clan, to the tribe, and to the nation. Human beings have always organized themselves around some concept of civic friendship that takes the bonds of family and extends them outward—but not indefinitely. On a fundamental level, politics is about banding together to do together what can’t be done (or done well) alone. So there will always be nations, and trying to suppress nationalist sentiment is like trying to suppress nature: It’s very hard, and dangerous, to do.

‘The nation’ is a natural and enduring object that always arouses such sentiments, whether it’s nations of a few tens of thousands in classical Greece or nations of hundreds of millions in the modern world? Historically, of course this is nonsense, but of course that’s not the point; such arguments start from an ideological position and then hunt around for some legitimising authority – and the old “ever since the days of Aristotle/Thucydides/Xenophon” routine still works better than anything.

One could argue that both Anton and Monbiot are mobilising and reinterpreting classical ideas for present political purposes, and in doing so both are thoroughly anachronistic. But Monbiot makes no claims about the past, nor seeks to draw any legitimacy from it; the sole test of his idea is whether it works in the present. Anton’s argument, on the other hand, is thoroughly historical, offering an account of Ancient Greece and of the ideas of its thinkers in order to establish that these represent the eternal nature of humans and human society – and so the fact that it’s all unhistorical nonsense matters rather more.