I for one welcome our new Thucydides-quoting overlords… Well, no, not really. Back in 2013, when Dominic Cummings publicly expressed his love for Thucydides and his belief that there is no better book to study for understanding politics, I expressed concern that this was one more data point for the proposition that studying Thucydides can be a Really Bad Thing that leads people to Terrible Conclusions. I decided then not to spend any time developing a detailed analysis of the role played by Thucydides (and Pericles) in his essay ‘On education and and political priorities’, aka the ‘Odyssean Education’ piece, as on first reading it seemed that Cummings was mainly taking Thucydides as a model for critical thinking, something with which I wasn’t inclined to disagree too much, even if this idea clearly then led us in very different directions. A few years later, when Cummings resurfaced in the Vote Leave campaign, there seemed more important things to do than re-read the essay – though in retrospect, as discussed below, I now suspect that there were a few clues in there about his approach to politics that could have been worth discussing.
And now? The optimistic view, given the current state of things, is that this may be the last couple of months in which anyone is likely to care about Cummings’ views on Thucydides, either because the wheels will shortly fall off the populist clown car in which he and Johnson are attempting to drive the country off a cliff, or because we’ll be too busy hunting for battered tins of baked beans in the rubble while fending off mutated badgers. The pessimistic view is that we may be well on our way into a ‘new normal’ in British politics, the sort of collapse of traditional values and institutions that Thucydides described in Corcyra and Cummings takes up as a vision of the present and future, in which case understanding something of the thinking of the prime minister’s puppet-master, from the very specialised but nevertheless potentially revealing perspective of what he makes of Thucydides, may be of some use, better late than never.
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A love of Thucydides is a crucial element in the public persona of Dominic Cummings; this is exemplified by the first appearance of his character in the Channel 4 drama Brexit: the Uncivil War, where he announces that he’s spent the last two years reading Thucydides, Kipling and Tolstoy, which has confirmed his view that everyone in politics is an idiot. Those three are by no means the only authors who could have conveyed ‘maverick, Machiavellian mastermind’ (actually mentioning Machiavelli would have been too obvious), but certainly Thucydides carries all the right connotations: obscure and difficult – but, crucially, with established name-recognition factor as obscure and difficult – and, for those with a little more knowledge, all the associations with hard-nosed realism and power politics. Where a liking for Kipling establishes eccentric Englishness, and for Tolstoy an interest in speculation and the grand sweep of historical events, Thucydides is a text that can also be instrumentalised or weaponised. It plays an obvious role in his popular mythologisation as an incomparable political strategist; as Ailbhe Rea noted in the New Statesman, “Cummings is identified as a genius by his studied nonconformity, reading tastes and irreverent manner.”
But whereas Boris Johnson’s adoption of Pericles as his political hero seems to be largely superficial – certainly his explanation of the choice doesn’t communicate any great understanding or insight – it’s clear that Cummings does think deeply about Thucydides, and draw on his reading in his broader thinking about politics. There are, I think, too many gratuitous or unnecessary references in his various blog posts; a repeated insistence that there is no better book than Thucydides to study as training for politics, without any elaboration of why this might be the case, could indeed be seen as part of an artful self-presentation, but many of his comments serve no such purpose – it simply appears that he is regularly reminded of passages or quotations from the text, when looking for an example or simply when thinking about an issue. So, without claiming that this can ever offer the key to Cummings’ political ideas, it does seem worthwhile exploring what he has to say about Thucydides, and what this might mean.
The obvious problem with this enterprise is that there is no extensive discussion of Thucydides in Cummings’ extant blog posts. He offers Thucydides as a key example of the sort of humanities text that is an integral part of the ‘Odyssean education’ he wants to promote – “We need leaders with an understanding of Thucydides and statistical modelling, who have read The Brothers Karamazov and The Quark and the Jaguar, who can feel Kipling’s Kim and succeed in Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project” (p.2). More significantly, he includes “cool Thucydidean courage” as one of the five crucial attributes of a proper synthesiser: this is not just a text among many from which you might learn something, but an author who provides a model for a whole way of engaging with the world. But his essay expressly focuses on maths and science, on the grounds that there is better understanding of how to teach humanities successfully (reference to his own university education, presumably, especially since he proposes Ancient and Modern History as one of the desirable replacements for Politics, Philosophy and Economics) and that people in politics generally know much less about maths and science.
So, references to Thucydides are scattered and fragmentary; the closest we come to a sustained engagement is in Cummings’ blog post reviewing Graham Allison’s Destined for War? book, but there he is mainly concerned with the ‘Thucydides Trap’ model rather than the original text (while noting in passing that he disagrees about various of the interpretations of Thucydides, without giving details). However, even scattered references may be significant, if we consider them in the context of wider knowledge of the traditions of Thucydidean reception; put simply, we have quite a good idea of how 20th- and 21st-century readers of Thucydides, classicists and political theorists and creative artists, have tended to read and respond to the text, so at the least we can get a sense of how Cummings’ reading compares – even if it’s impossible to say in most cases whether he is consciously reacting to those readings or has reached a particular interpretation entirely under his own steam (certainly he is at least partly aware of the traditions; in defending Thucydides as a key text for politics on his blog, he remarks that “This is not an eccentric view but one that has been held for centuries”). Full information about every reference is listed in the appendix, together with my comments; here, I will pull together some general themes.
(1) Cummings’ engagement with Thucydides appears to be mediated primarily through translations; pretty well all his quotes are taken directly from Benjamin Jowett’s 1881 edition. There is one instance where he refers explicitly to the Greek original: “In one of the most famous speeches, Pericles singled out the Athenian quality of adaptation (literally ‘well-turning’) as central to its extraordinary cultural, political and economic success” (p.20, n.39). The word in question, eutrapelōs, is an adverb rather than a noun as Cummings seems to imply, but the etymology is correct, and the overall sense of this tricky sentence is indeed that the Athenians are especially adaptable. It’s arguable whether Pericles’ emphasis is on adaptability per se as the basis for Athenian success; I’d read the passage (2.41.1; Cummings, incidentally, is not big on providing references for any of his quotes, and this one was not especially easy to identity) as focusing rather on the soma autarkes, the self-sufficient body of the Athenian citizen, as the source of their versatility. But it certainly shows deeper knowledge of and engagement with the text than just using a translation. It would be interesting to know what Cummings’ objections to Graham Allison’s interpretation of Thucydides actually were, as one certainly could raise some philological ones to Allison’s use of decontextualised and sometimes dubious translations from Richard Crawley.
Cummings’ reliance on Jowett is…unusual. This is less a matter of reliability – I’d take Jowett’s choices over the ubiquitous Crawley in most instances, though there are issues with his use of ‘party associations’ to translate hetairiai in the Corcyrean civil war episode – than of currency and accessibility. Crawley is ubiquitous because of (a) the Internet in general, as his out-of-copyright text gets reproduced regularly, and (b) the Landmark Thucydides in particular; hence, this is the version that non-specialists generally first encounter (followed, probably, by the Rex Warner Penguin Classics edition). Going with Jowett either indicates a lack of resources (i.e. this just happens to be the version in your local library) or a deliberate choice to eschew Warner or the Smith Loeb edition that were the obvious options from the mid 1950s onwards. It seems reasonable to assume that Cummings’ preference was shaped by his education, and hasn’t been updated by turning to any of the more recent translations (Lattimore, Hammond, Mynott); does anyone know if Jowett was recommended to students at Oxford in the early 1990s..? It does seem notable that, while demonstrating an ability to engage with the Greek occasionally, Cummings seems happy to accept Jowett’s version without demur; perhaps because he is simply offering passing references rather than developing a detailed analysis…
(2) Readers of Thucydides tend to concentrate on a limited number of passages, taken to be especially important, illuminating and/or typical, even if they accompany these with general claims about the work as a whole; further, within different traditions of reception (political theory rather than historiography, for example), the same passages tend to recur. Cummings’ preferences are interestingly idiosyncratic, strongly suggesting that this is an individual reading that takes in most of the text if not all of it. He does mention some of the most familiar sections – the methodological discussion in Book 1, the Mytilene Debate and the Melian Dialogue – but spends surprisingly little time on them. His most striking suggestion in this context is that Athenian politicians, unlike modern ones, reflected carefully upon the lessons of Melos and Miletus, something which Thucydides certainly hoped for, but for which (as far as I’m aware) we have no actual evidence. Absent references, there seems to be no way of establishing whether Cummings thinks there are important lessons to be learned from the revolt of Miletus in Book 8, or whether that’s a misprint for Mytilene.
He makes several references to the classic ‘Realist’ trilogy of state motivations (e.g. 1.75.3) offered by the Athenians at the allied congress at Sparta, fear, honour and interest, and appears to take the claim at face value and elevate it into a general principle as the IR mainstream does, rather than questioning Athenian motives in making it. However, Cummings ascribes these motives to all humans rather than just states or collectives, implies at points that this is a selection of motives rather than the whole set, and disparages them as irrational compared with proper scientific analysis of political problems, where the conventional reading is to see them as the underlying basis for rational calculation. This seems to show awareness of the IR interpretation in order to diverge from it; ‘Realism’ is insufficiently realistic and too influenced by emotion to serve as an adequate basis for decision-making in the modern world.
While Cummings engages several times with Pericles’ Funeral Oration, one of the most-cited parts of the work, his take on it is quitw distinctive, tying it closely to his educational project (seeking to rival Athens’ claim to be a ‘school of Greece’) rather than offering the usual praise of democracy, freedom and the need for self-sacrifice. He devotes more attention than is usual to Pericles’ other speeches, partly because he wants to promote Pericles as a model for foresight and judgement (taking Thucydides’ concluding judgements on him at face value) and partly because they offer useful quotes disparaging the ability of most people to make decisions coolly and rationally and then stick to them. Themistocles is likewise offered as a model of foresight, and praised for his ability to respond constructively to unexpected situations – an idea which is echoed, even if Themistocles is not mentioned (Thucydides is), in a later talk and blog post, praising Jean Monnet for “having plans in his pocket for when crises hit and politicians were desperate”.
Cummings cites Thucydides’ description of the stasis or breakdown of civil order at Corcyra on several occasions. The first of these is one of a series of quotations at the beginning of a section in the essay on ‘Political economy, philosophy, and avoiding catastrophes’. There’s no subsequent discussion, so one has to guess at the tone it is intended to set; my best guess is that the ‘decay of the ancient simplicity’ foreshadows everything he goes on to say in this section about the loss of old certainties in a changing world, while also revealing the tendency for humans to resort to selfish and factional interest and for civic ties to decay under stress. It’s striking that the quote is put together from several different chapters (including 3.84, regarded by most scholars as spurious), and out of the original order (in fact it offers edited highlights from 3.83.1, 3.82.7, 3.84.2-3, 3.82.7, 3.82.6); more detailed analysis will be needed to see if this composite echoes the ordering of the subsequent argument of the essay, or works to construct a narrative that is different from Thucydides’ original train of thought – or is just the product of sloppy note-taking. Cummings cites the same passage in a later blog post, where the meaning is now made clearer (or, a different meaning is drawn from it): it is taken to illuminate “the issue of why more educated people often make huge errors of judgement”. “Intelligence is not just necessary for some things – in some areas such as maths and physics it is directly related to achievements. Politics is very different. Thucydides reminds us that morality is not positively correlated with intelligence.” It’s interesting that he doesn’t bring the Mytilene Debate in here, with its elaboration of very similar themes; a wish to avoid association with Cleon..?
The final key reference is the most striking, if only because it is so unusual; I don’t recall seeing this line quoted anywhere before, though Google turned up a reference in a 2009 Rutgers dissertation on ‘Technogeopolitics of Militarization and Security’. “A man harms his foes thus: those things that they most dread he discovers, carefully investigates, then inflicts upon them.” It’s 6.91.6, Alcibiades persuading the Spartans to trust him and follow his proposals. Cummings has clearly thought about this, as he offers an example of the principle from elsewhere: “Themistocles’ use of spies to trick Xerxes into fighting the Battle of Salamis.” It’s difficult not to imagine that he has adopted this as one of his key principles of political strategy…
(3) How does Cummings conceive of Thucydides as an author? He’s taken as a reliable source of information, of course, for example about Themistocles and Pericles, but is clearly much more than that; how else could this be taken as a key text for understanding politics? Cummings doesn’t offer a disciplinary label, beyond categorising Thucydides’ text (or, perhaps more accurately, the study of the text) under ‘humanities’; it’s enough that Thucydides is Thucydides. He includes him in an eclectic list of names who viewed the world in ‘evolutionary’ rather than ‘anthropocentric’ terms – the pre-Socratics (Anaximander, Heraclitus), Hume, Smith, Darwin, and Hayek, in opposition to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau , Bentham, Mill, and Marx (p.104) – and perhaps that is as close as we are going to get to an implied label: a ‘great thinker’.
The focus is rather on the content and ideas of Thucydides’ work, and its utility: it is about politics, but to judge by the passages that Cummings focuses on, it is still more about how people think (and fail to think) – Thucydides as a pioneer in political psychology and critical thinking, observing how people regularly make avoidable errors and offering models and precepts for foresight and anticipation. As suggested in one blog post, Thucydides has already identified our characteristic failings:
We often are governed by ‘fear, honour and interest’ (Thucydides). We attribute success to skill and failure to luck: ‘The movement of events is often as wayward and incomprehensible as the course of human thought; and this is why we ascribe to chance whatever belies our calculation,’ said Pericles to the Athenians. We prefer to enhance prestige rather than face reality and admit ignorance or error. ‘So little trouble do men take in the search after truth, so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand’ (Thucydides).
There is a strong echo in Cummings’ account of Nietzsche’s characterisation of Thucydides (in Goetzendaemmerung) as the man who sees the world as it really is and has the courage to face reality (cf. the elevation of ‘Thucydidean courage’ as an essential attribute), in contrast to Plato fleeing into the ideal. There are fainter hints of the Realist tradition in International Relations, as discussed above, suggesting knowledge of that reading but divergence from its conclusions – and the wish to dissassociate Thucydides from them.
It is conventional to present Thucydides as a ‘difficult’ writer, emphasising the complexity (and hence authority) of his analysis, and coincidentally bolstering the prestige of his interpreter. Cummings offers a different, though equally self-aggrandising, take on this: reading Thucydides is easy – so why is everyone failing to learn the right lessons from him, or to operationalise them? (cf. this blog post):
Given we can all read Thucydides and Sun Tzu and there are many outstanding studies of the dynamics of successful and failing organisations, why do we nevertheless keep making the same sorts of mistake, with cycles of senior people being presented with ‘lessons learned’ reports on disasters only to repeat the same failings? Why do so many with high IQs leave the world’s best universities and immediately start doing things that we know will lead to predictable problems and failure? How do human decisions shape organisations, institutions, and cultures? (p.84)
In fact, it’s a problem that Thucydides remains relevant at all, he suggests here:
Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children’s arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge. Archimedes is no longer cutting edge. Thucydides and Sun Tzu are still cutting edge. Even though Tetlock and others have shown how to start making similar progress with politics, our political cultures fiercely resist learning and fight ferociously to stay in closed and failing feedback loops.
The answer, clearly, is that not everyone is Dominic Cummings, and not everyone has the right education or the right qualities (Thucydidean courage etc.) to make proper use of Thucydides. Put another way: if everyone was capable of understanding Thucydides properly, reading Thucydides would become redundant, as we would absorb his lessons about inadequate political thinking and move on to a higher level of analysis building on those insights. But as long as the majority don’t read Thucydides, or don’t grasp what he is really saying, or don’t have the courage to accept it or put it into practice, an enlightened few are left railing against their fecklessness (that of the leadership class, of course, not the ordinary folk who wouldn’t be expected to engage with such things) and at the same time smugly putting into practice their superior knowledge: abandon your hopeful illusions about politics and human beings, recognise the motives that drive your adversaries, identify their fears, and push their buttons…
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Appendix: All the Thucydides References, with comments
The main source is Cummings’ 2013 essay ‘Some thoughts on education and political priorities’. Note that the summary of the essay on his blog doesn’t include any reference to Thucydides – because, as C. notes (see below), he has chosen to focus his discussion on the teaching of maths and science rather than humanities. In blog comments (https://dominiccummings.com/the-odyssean-project-2), one person says “P.S. Thucydides the most realistic introduction to politics? Really?”, and Cummings responds: “Yes to Thucydides – really. This is not an eccentric view but one that has been held for centuries and if one reads him and works in politics one immediately sees why.”
p. 2 Some ideas are presented, aimed mainly at 15-25 year-olds, for what physicist Murray Gell Mann described as an ‘Odyssean’ education synthesising a) maths and the natural sciences, b) the social sciences, and c) the humanities and arts, into crude, trans-disciplinary, integrative thinking. This should combine courses like The Big History Project, Berkeley’s ‘Physics for Future Presidents’ (or Professor Timothy Gowers’ planned equivalent for maths) with the best of the humanities; add new skills such as coding; and give training in managing complex projects and using modern tools (e.g agent-based models, ABMs). Universities should develop alternatives to Politics, Philosophy, and Economics such as Ancient and Modern History, Physics for Future Presidents, and Programming. We need leaders with an understanding of Thucydides and statistical modelling, who have read The Brothers Karamazov and The Quark and the Jaguar, who can feel Kipling’s Kim and succeed in Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project. An Odyssean education would focus on humans’ biggest and most important problems and explain connections between them to train synthesisers…
Such an education and training might develop synthesisers who have 1) a crude but useful grasp of connections between the biggest challenges based on trans-disciplinary thinking about complex systems; 2) a cool Thucydidean courage to face reality including their own errors and motives; 3) the ability to take better decisions and adapt fast to failures; 4) an evolutionary perspective on complex systems and institutional design (rather than the typical Cartesian ‘chief of the tribe’ perspective); and 5) an ability to shape new institutions operating like an immune system that will bring better chances to avoid, survive, and limit damage done by inevitable disasters.
Comment: Thucydides, and history and politics more generally, feature only in passing in C.’s essay, but it’s made clear in his introduction that they are central to the idea of an ‘Odyssean education’. Knowledge of Thucydides is as important as a grasp of statistical modelling, and the imitation of Thucydides’ character and temperament, “a cool Thucydidean courage”, is one of the five essential elements of a proper synthesiser. The latter seems to be straight out of Nietzsche’s account, emphasising the courage to face reality rather than retreat into the ideal – with, possibly, an additional acknowledgement of Thucydides’ (qualified) willingness to treat his own actions objectively and without resort to special pleading, not just scrutinise the decisions and actions of others.
p.2 (repeated on 133): Pericles described Athens as ‘the school of Greece’, we could be the school of the world. Who knows what would happen to a political culture if a party embraced education and science as its defining mission and therefore changed the nature of the people running it and the way they make decisions and priorities.
Comment: Funeral Oration, 2.41.1. This does suggest a reading of Athenian history focused on the quality of (some of) its leaders; as will be seen later, Pericles, together with Themistocles, is taken as a model of foresight, analysis and anticipation of events.
p.8 I loved studying classics, and do not think there is a better book to study than Thucydides as training for politics, but I have focused on maths and sciences because, first, there is far more understanding about how to teach humanities successfully than maths, science, and crude interdisciplinary integrative thinking about big issues; second, because politics is dominated by people with little knowledge of many of these subjects.
Comment: repeated mention of Thucydides as a key text, though without any indication of how or why it is so useful as a training in politics. Would that be giving away all his secrets?
10: These themes of uncertainty, nonlinearity, complexity and prediction have been ubiquitous motifs of art, philosophy, and politics. We see them in Homer, where the gift of an apple causes the Trojan War; in Athenian tragedy, where a chance meeting at a crossroads settles the fate of Oedipus; in Othello’s dropped handkerchief; and in War and Peace with Nikolai Rostov, playing cards with Dolohov, praying that one little card will turn out differently, save him from ruin, and allow him to go happily home to Natasha.15
n.15: ‘I know that men are persuaded to go to war in one frame of mind and act when the time comes in another, and that their resolutions change with the changes of fortune… The movement of events is often as wayward and incomprehensible as the course of human thought; and this is why we ascribe to chance whatever belies our calculation.’ Pericles to the Athenians
Comment: Thucydides 1.140.1. It isn’t entirely obvious how this footnote relates to the main passage; is it intended as a further example of human concern with uncertainty and prediction, or as a different kind of example (since we are moving into the realm of self-conscious analysis of events rather than accepting them as fate), or even as an ironic comment on them (since ‘chance’, Pericles suggests, may be a name we give to our failed calculations; the fact that events appear incomprehensible doesn’t mean that they are wholly contingent…)?
20: Complex systems are, therefore, hard to understand, predict, or control. Given our limited understanding of complex systems and their vast possibilities, success requires adaptation,39 adaptation requires prediction amid uncertainty, and our evolved nature gives us not only amazing pattern recognition and problem-solving abilities but also illusions. ‘So little trouble do men take in the search after truth, so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand’ (Thucydides); ‘men may construe things after their fashion / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves’ (Cicero, Julius Caesar). We often are governed by ‘fear, honour and interest’ (Thucydides), we attribute success to skill and failure to luck, and we prefer to enhance prestige rather than admit ignorance or error and face reality. Accurate prediction is therefore hard and we struggle to adapt in a ‘fog of war’ that makes the simplest things hard and failure the norm. Faced with such complexity, politicians and others have operated mostly on heuristics, guesswork, willpower and tactical adaptation.
n.39: “In one of the most famous speeches, Pericles singled out the Athenian quality of adaptation (literally ‘well-turning’) as central to its extraordinary cultural, political and economic success.”
Comment: three different references to Thucydides, offering three different ideas. The first, from Thucydides’ preface (1.20.3, here in Jowett’s version, which seems to be Cummings’ translation of choice; and note that he doesn’t bother to give references), complains about the fact that most people lack critical instincts and fail to question what they are told. The second is a little more interesting: C. takes one of the components of the standard Realist interpretation of Thucydides in International Relations, interpreting the claim offered by the Athenians at the allied congress at Sparta (1.75.3) about the motives for their acquisition of empire as a general statement of the motives of all states, makes it less of an iron rule (“we often are governed…”) but also transfers it to individual humans rather than to collectives or states, and interprets it in terms of a failure of rational calculation under the influence of emotions, where the IR tradition – and, implicitly, the original Athenian claim – sees this triad as the motives that then drive rational calculation. One might make a case that C.’s reading is more in the spirit of Thucydides, since the overall trajectory of his narrative raises serious doubts about the idea that states’ decisions are rational and consistent, but either a number of steps in the argument are being left unsaid, or he is actually incorporating a conventional reading of Thucydides into his own, rather different, framework of ideas.
The third reference is not a familiar one, and C.’s failure to provide a reference – and the fact that his summary implies that Pericles used a noun, ‘adaptation’, which turns out not to be the case – makes it a right pain to find. Given the emphasis on his understanding of the original Greek and hence of the true meaning of the text, this comes across as an assertion of superior knowledge rather than an accidental oversight. I’m very grateful to my colleague Lynette Mitchell for identifying the intended passage as being 2.41.1, from Pericles’ Funeral Oration (Pericles’ most famous speech, surely, so presumably C. is suggesting that this is also one of the most famous speeches ever, up there with the Gettysburg Address?), where the word in question is eutrapelōs, the adverbial form: ‘dexterously, without awkwardness, nimbly’. It’s not an easy sentence, though the general sense is clear. Jowett has “the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace”; Crawley, “I doubt if the world can produce a man, who where he has only himself to depend upon, is equal to so many emergencies, and graced by so happy a versatility as the Athenian”; Mynott, “I believe every individual among us has the self-sufficiency to respond to every situation with the greatest versatility and grace”. On the one hand, Pericles does indeed observe how the Athenians are able to respond to different situations. On the other hand, his focus is on the ‘autarkic body’, the soma autarkes, that makes this versatility possible (to be echoed ironically in the Plague, 2.51.3, where Athenian bodies turned out not to be proof against anything), not on adaptation as the crucial attribute as C. claims; and Pericles further offers this as a good thing in itself, rather than linking it to cultural, political and economic success.
76-7: It is also vital that such students be given a broad education and a feel for how to apply fundamental skills in maths and physics to many problems. They should be reading books like Gell Mann’s The Quark and the Jaguar, E.O. Wilson’s Consilience, Pinker’s The Blank Slate, Beinhocker’s Complexity Economics, Mitchell’s Complexity, and others in the Endnote; studying the issues in Muller’s Physics for Future Presidents; learning how to programme agent-based models and simulations; reading classics from Thucydides to Dostoyevsky; and experiencing very different environments and responsibilities.
Comment: a slightly curious implied definition of ‘classics’, but otherwise not much to see here.
84: How should we ‘think about thinking’? Why is effective action so hard and why do most endeavours fail? (Cf. Endnote on Failure.) Given we can all read Thucydides and Sun Tzu and there are many outstanding studies of the dynamics of successful and failing organisations, why do we nevertheless keep making the same sorts of mistake, with cycles of senior people being presented with ‘lessons learned’ reports on disasters only to repeat the same failings? Why do so many with high IQs leave the world’s best universities and immediately start doing things that we know will lead to predictable problems and failure? How do human decisions shape organisations, institutions, and cultures?
Comment: the obvious point to which these rhetorical questions are leading is that not everyone does read Thucydides and Sun Tzu, even if they could, hence the need to reform education. To which one might add the question of how they read these texts, but it’s clear that C. thinks the lessons of Thucydides are entirely obvious.
96: Better performance and limiting the damage done by human instincts requires better educated and trained leaders. If people of understanding, talent and will enjoy great training, then they face reality and know themselves. They spot shadows of the future, they have more accurate predictions and, occasionally, Themistoclean foresight,204 more rapid error correction, and more effective action.
n.204: Themistocles and Pericles were singled out by Thucydides for their foresight: ‘For Themistocles was a man whose natural force was unmistakeable; this was the quality for which he was distinguished above all others; from his own native acuteness and without any study before or at the time, he was the ablest judge of the course to be pursued in a sudden emergency, and could best divine what was likely to happen in the remotest future… Nobody could foresee with equal clearness the good or bad which was hidden in the future.’ On Pericles: ‘During the peace while he was at the head of affairs he ruled with prudence; under his guidance Athens was safe, and reached the height of her greatness in his time. When the war came he showed that here too he had formed an accurate estimate of Athenian power. He survived the beginning of war by two years and six months, and, after his death, his foresight was even better appreciated than during his life.’ A condition of such foresight is courage to face reality.
Comment: the content here, a couple of long quotations praising people for foresight, is pretty straightforward; one might question whether Thucydides’ praise of Pericles is quite as genuine and unequivocal as it appears at first sight. The first passage is from 1.138.2, again in Jowett’s version; one might simply note that what Themistocles is actually praised for is his ability to improvise on the spot, which doesn’t seem to be quite the same thing that C. is trying to promote – the fact that Themistocles’ instinct tended to be right doesn’t necessarily contradict C.’s argument that it’s necessary to limit the role of instinct in decision-making, but it isn’t an obvious support for it. The Pericles passage is 2.65.5-6. The final sentence is interesting; “courage to face reality” looks rather like Nietzsche’s praise of Thucydides, in contrast to Plato.
97 n.209: ‘A man harms his foes thus: those things that they most dread he discovers, carefully investigates, then inflicts upon them.’ Thucydides. E.g. Themistocles’ use of spies to trick Xerxes into fighting the Battle of Salamis.
Comment: another unusual reference, from 6.91.6; it’s Alcibiades, now in exile from Athens, talking the Spartans into trusting him with a speech that could come straight from the mouth of a DC super-villain. Google, at least, suggests that this is a remarkably neglected passage; it gets cited in just a couple of works on intelligence work and the weaponization of information, plus historical studies of information-gathering in ancient Greece. It is perhaps reading too much into this to imagine that it’s actually C.’s motto, given the whole Vote Leave enterprise.
103: the start of Section 7 on Political economy, philosophy, and avoiding catastrophes. Three substantial quotes from Thucydides: the Corcyrean stasis and the decline of the ancient simplicity (labelled as ‘Thucydides III’; actually a composite of 3.83.1, 3.82.7, 3.84.2-3, 3.82.7, 3.82.6), the Athenians at Sparta on their acquisition of empire (1.75.3-5), and the Athenians at Melos noting that anyone else would do the same if they could (5.105.2), book-ended by short quotes from James Maddison (sic.), “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”, von Neumann “If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is” and Feynman, “Theoretically, planning may be good etc – but nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity – and until they do and find the cure, all ideal plans will fall into quicksand”.
Comment: there is no explicit discussion of these passages anywhere in the subsequent discussion, which is dedicated to speculating grandly about the future trajectory of world affairs, taking in such themes as the superiority of markets over any other form of organisation (let alone state planning), the contrast between open, innovative Europe and closed, conservative China, the impacts of demographic change and rapid technological innovation, and the state of the global economy. The general conclusion: “While our ancestor chiefs understood bows, horses, and agriculture, our contemporary chiefs (and those in the media responsible for scrutiny of decisions) generally do not understand their equivalents, and are often less experienced in managing complex organisations than their predecessors, while dangers are greater.” We must, I think, take these quotes as setting a mood and/or raising some general themes, rather than constituting a coherent step in the argument. As noted above, the Athenians at the allied congress are taken to establish the trio of motives of rational statecraft; but C. chooses to excerpt more of the passage than is usual, emphasising the role of fear and rivalry above all, the extent to which inter-state rivalries are a zero-sum game, and the idea that no one can be reproached for seizing every possible advantage when they feel threatened – echoing the lines from the Melian Dialogue, where the Athenians dismiss the idea that the gods might punish them (not sure whether it’s significant that C. leaves that bit out) with the claim that it is an eternal law for people to make use of power when they have it. So far, so boilerplate Realism – without it being wholly clear how far C. fully endorses this, given that he offers a more sophisticated reading at least of the fear/honour/interest idea elsewhere.
The Corcyrean stasis passage, meanwhile, sets a different tone: the ‘decay of the ancient simplicity’ foreshadows everything C. goes on to say about the loss of old certainties in a changing world, while emphasising the tendency for humans to resort to selfish and factional interest and for civic ties to decay under stress. Various pedantic quibbles could be raised: reliance on Jowett’s translation creates a rather anachronistic impression of ‘party associations…formed in defiance of the laws’, not least by implying a greater degree of formal organisation than might reasonably be assumed of hetairiai; and we can also note that C.’s reliance on 3.84 would be questioned by many scholars, who regard that chapter as spurious. Can we read anything into (a) the comments that C. leaves out (nothing on rhetoric and the changing valuation of terms, for example) and (b) the complex rearrangement of ideas from different sections to create a subtly different narrative (or is he just drawing on random notes without checking their original order)?
104: Why Markets Work. What we have learned about our world vindicates the evolutionary perspective of the pre-Socratics (Anaximander, Heraclitus),Thucydides, Hume, Smith, Darwin, and Hayek over the anthropocentric perspective of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau (‘the general will’), Bentham, Mill (who introduced the concept of the ‘natural monopoly’) and Marx.
Comment: it’s not obvious where to start with this. Thucydides offers an evolutionary perspective? (The Archaeology, maybe, with its account of emerging complexity and sophistication, but it’s scarcely ‘evolutionary’). Perhaps the most solid conclusion is just that C. counts Thucydides as one of the good guys, someone who understands the true nature of the world, with the explanation of why he falls into this category being very much an afterthought.
128: Imagine a combination of a financial crisis, depression, and a declaration of independence by Taiwan: might a future Thucydides write, ‘the avowed cause of the war was Taiwanese “freedom” but the real cause was America’s fear of China’s growing power’ (or ‘China’s fear of collapse’)?
Comment: a riff on Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’ thing.
129: Democracies are notoriously unable to cope with long-term strategies and commitments: consider Pericles’ warning to the Athenians to stick to a long-term plan and the demos’ failure to do so… The change in economic power is already leading to understandable demands from the developing world for changes to international organisations but the West has no new vision. On one hand, people in the West sometimes demand ‘something must be done’ about suffering abroad; on the other hand, people shrink from the consequences, inevitably messy, of ‘savage wars of peace’ and ‘The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard’. ‘Between the idea / And the reality… Falls the shadow’ and our politicians seldom analyse, clearly and publicly, such problems in the way Athenian politicians analysed Melos or Miletus. Imagine a Prime Minister saying on TV, ‘Given I do not think the possible costs of removing X are worthwhile, it would be a foolish and counterproductive gesture to pretend we are serious by a token attack on X, so I will continue to focus my efforts elsewhere and not pretend we are going to solve the problem of X.
Comment: familiar riff on Pericles’ final speech and on Thucydides’ closing judgement on him. Curious suggestion that Athenian politicians “analysed Melos or Miletus”; reference? Of course we can surmise that this was Thucydides’ hope, but there’s no actual evidence for anyone in Athens learning from Thucydides in the manner suggested. And it’s interesting that there is no reference at all to the comments of Diodotus in the Mytilenaean Debate, that speakers have to disguise their good advice if it is to be accepted by the people – one would have thought that Cleon and Diodotus offered lots of potential for C.’s argument, but perhaps he is a genuinely idealistic Pericles fan…
237: Reading recommendations: On war and international relations… Three classics: Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War; Sun Tzu’s The Art of War; Clausewitz’s On War…
Comment: utterly predictable
Later blog posts
19/8/14: ‘Standin’ by the window, where the light is strong’: de-extinction, machine intelligence, the search for extra-solar life, autonomous drone swarms bombing Parliament, genetics & IQ, science & politics, and much more @ SciFoo 2014 (https://dominiccummings.com/2014/08/19/standin-by-the-window-where-the-light-is-strong-de-extinction-machine-intelligence-the-search-for-extra-solar-life-neural-networks-autonomous-drone-swarms-bombing-parliament-genetics-amp/)
I’m going to do a blog on ‘How scientists can learn from Bismarck and Jean Monnet to influence politics’. Monnet avoided immediate battles for power in favour of ‘preparing the future’ – i.e. having plans in his pocket for when crises hit and politicians were desperate. He created the EEC in this way. In the same way people find it extremely hard to operationalise the lessons of Thucydides or Bismarck, they do not operationalise the lessons from Monnet. It would be interesting if scientists did this in a disciplined way. In some ways, it seems to me vital if we are to avoid various disasters. It is also necessary, however, to expose scientists to the non-scientific factors in play.
Comment: it would be interesting to know more about this; what are the ‘lessons’ of Thucydides (as I’ve written plenty of times, there is a widespread belief that he intended to offer lessons, and very little convincing identification of them), and how should they be ‘operationalised’? One might speculate, of course; positively, there’s the claim (implied in the Essay) that we might learn from Pericles’ Athens to transform our political culture through a programme of education, while negatively the quote from Alcibiades about identifying your enemies’ worst fears might indeed be taken as a principle of action. Is the suggestion that it is hard to do this, or that ‘people’ (undefined) find it hard? Is Monnet being offered as another example of the same thing as Bismarck and Thucydides, showing the need to have longer-term plans in order to seize opportunities, or are they being offered as examples of different lessons that are equally difficult to operationalise?
30/10/14: The Hollow Men II: Some reflections on Westminster and Whitehall dysfunction (https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-some-reflections-on-westminster-and-whitehall-dysfunction/)
The selection, education, and training, of those making crucial decisions about our civilisation are between inadequate and disastrous. The institutions they work in are generally dysfunctional. First, our mentality. We often are governed by ‘fear, honour and interest’ (Thucydides). We attribute success to skill and failure to luck: ‘The movement of events is often as wayward and incomprehensible as the course of human thought; and this is why we ascribe to chance whatever belies our calculation,’ said Pericles to the Athenians. We prefer to enhance prestige rather than face reality and admit ignorance or error. ‘So little trouble do men take in the search after truth, so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand’ (Thucydides); ‘men may construe things after their fashion / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves’ (Cicero, Julius Caesar). As Feynman said, if you want to understand reality, ‘The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.’
Comment: largely a retread of points made in the ‘Odyssean Education’ essay; Thucydides as objective analyst of failings in human thought processes.
8/8/15: On the referendum #13: new ICM poll shows growing support for Yes/In; couple of other thoughts on education and judgement (https://dominiccummings.com/2015/08/18/on-the-referendum-13-new-icm-poll-shows-growing-support-for-yesin-couple-of-other-thoughts-on-education-and-judgement/)
Two other brief thoughts on the issue of why more educated people often make huge errors of judgement, perhaps the best example of which being the way in which the best educated were the most suckered by Soviet propaganda and most resistant to the truth about Stalin’s terror, the Ukrainian famine etc (see Orwell’s famous essays).
- Thucydides and simplicity.
One of the best bits in Thucydides is his account of the civil wars that wracked Greece. In that account is this passage:
‘Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared… [his emphasis] In general, the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple do for goodness; men take pride in one, but are ashamed of the other… At such a time, the life of the city was all in disorder, and human nature, which is always ready to transgress the laws, having now trampled them under foot, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her… When men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain… The cause of all these evils was the love of power, originating in avarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked in a contest… For party associations are not based upon any established law nor do they seek the public good; they are formed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest…’ Book III, Jowett translation.
‘The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature…’ Intelligence is not just necessary for some things – in some areas such as maths and physics it is directly related to achievements. Politics is very different.
Thucydides reminds us that morality is not positively correlated with intelligence. Some modern evidence even suggests that more intelligent people are less compassionate (see my Essay).
Comment: largely reproduced from the Essay, as noted – including the composite nature of the passage – but with that final comment, strongly echoing Cleon in the Mytilenaean Debate, that clever people are not to be trusted and the simpler folk (this seems to be how C. is now interpreting ‘the ancient simplicity’) are more moral and better citizens.
29/10/16: On the referendum #20: the campaign, physics and data science – Vote Leave’s ‘Voter Intention Collection System’ (VICS) now available for all (https://dominiccummings.com/2016/10/29/on-the-referendum-20-the-campaign-physics-and-data-science-vote-leaves-voter-intention-collection-system-vics-now-available-for-all/)
There were many things we could have done much better. Our biggest obstacle was not the IN campaign and its vast resources but the appalling infighting on our own side driven by all the normal human motivations described in Thucydides – fear, interest, the pursuit of glory and so on. Without this obstacle we would have done far more on digital/data.
Comment: partly a retread, though implies that Thucydides includes more motivations than the canonical three…
23/6/17: On the referendum #23, a year after victory: ‘a change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points’ & ‘how to capture the heavens’ (https://dominiccummings.com/2017/06/23/on-the-referendum-23-a-year-after-victory-a-change-of-perspective-is-worth-80-iq-points-how-to-capture-the-heavens/)
It is very very hard for humans to lift our eyes from today and to go out into the future and think about what could be done to bring the future back to the present. Like ants crawling around on the leaf, we political people only know our leaf.
Science has shown us a different way. Newton looked up from his leaf, looked far away from today, and created a new perspective — a new model of reality. It took an extreme genius to discover something like calculus but once discovered billions of people who are far from being geniuses can use this new perspective. Science advances by turning new ideas into standard ideas so each generation builds on the last.
Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children’s arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge. Archimedes is no longer cutting edge. Thucydides and Sun Tzu are still cutting edge. Even though Tetlock and others have shown how to start making similar progress with politics, our political cultures fiercely resist learning and fight ferociously to stay in closed and failing feedback loops.
Comment: a very double-edged comment. On the one hand, it’s made clear that Thucydides remains essential reading for understanding politics, because he developed insights into universal principles of human behaviour. On the other hand, it’s depressing that he is still relevant, because actually politics ought to be more progressive and cumulative, so we should be reading the latest stuff rather than constantly going back to Thucydides and finding him more illuminating than many contemporary commentators. It’s not entirely clear whether the problem is with those who study politics, or those who practice it, or everyone.
29/9/17: Review of Allison’s book on US/China & nuclear destruction, and some connected thoughts on technology, the EU, and space (https://dominiccummings.com/2017/09/29/review-of-allisons-book-on-uschina-nuclear-destruction-and-some-connected-thoughts-on-technology-the-eu-and-space/)
In Thucydides’ history the dynamic growth of Athens caused such fear that, amid confusing signals in an escalating crisis, Sparta gambled on preventive war. Similarly, after Bismarck unified Germany in 1870-71, Europe’s balance of power was upended…
New leaders must build institutions for global cooperation that can transcend Thucydides’ dynamics. For example, the plan of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, to build a permanent moon base in which countries work together to harness the resources of the solar system is the sort of project that could create an alternative focus to nationalist antagonism.
Looking at the US-China relationship through the lens of ‘winning without fighting’ and nuclear risk suggests that the way for America to ‘win’ this Thucydidean struggle is: ‘don’t try to win in a conventional sense, but instead redefine winning’.
Attempting to escape Thucydides means trying to build institutions and feelings of cooperation but it also requires that militaristic Chinese don’t come to see America as vulnerable to pre-emptive strikes. As AI, biological engineering, digital fabrication and so on accelerate, there may soon be non-nuclear dangers at least as frightening as nuclear dangers.
Comment: ‘escaping Thucydides’ here as shorthand for ‘getting out of the situation, if the world is indeed as Allison describes it’.
I’ve got some quibbles, such as interpretations of Thucydides, but I won’t go into those.
Comment: shame, that might have been interesting…
Finally, there is an interesting question of self-awareness. American leaders have a tendency to talk about American interests as if they are self-evidently humanity’s interests. Others find this amusing or enraging. Its leaders need a different language for discussing China if they are to avoid Thucydides.
Talented political leaders sometimes show an odd empathy for the psychology of opposing out-groups. Perhaps it’s a product of a sort of ‘complementarity’ ability, an ability to hold contradictory ideas in one’s head simultaneously. It is often a shock for students when they read in Pericles’s speech that he confronted the plague-struck Athenians with the sort of uncomfortable truth that democratic politicians rarely speak:
‘You have an empire to lose, and there is the danger to which the hatred of your imperial rule has exposed you… For by this time your empire has become a tyranny which in the opinion of mankind may have been unjustly gained, but which cannot be safely surrendered… To be hateful and offensive has ever been the fate of those who have aspired to empire.’ Thucydides, 2.63-4, emphasis added.
Comment: Bismarck, like Pericles, is praised for having the courage not just to face reality but to make no bones about it, dropping any illusions about one’s subjects welcoming your rule. This all sounds terribly George W.-era Neocon…
A decade later he warned other Powers not to ‘play Pericles beyond the confines of the area allocated by God’ and said clearly: ‘Bulgaria … is far from being an object of adequate importance … for which to plunge Europe from Moscow to the Pyrenees, and from the North Sea to Palermo, into a war whose issue no man can foresee. At the end of the conflict we should scarcely know why we had fought.’
Comment: well, if researching this essay has done nothing else, it’s given me another example of Thucydides reception from 19th-century politics. If only Cummings gave his bloody references…
Outstanding blog, Cummingsian only in length, happily.
If his Thucydides was part of the “Ancient” side of his Ancient and Modern history course (as opposed to part of a synoptic module ?Intro to historiography or the like) I reckon Greek would have been the only official option, translations being a necessary but unmentionable evil.
If Jowett was recommended in 90s Oxford (highly unlikely) it could only have been at the whim of a single maverick tutor. The nearest-edition-to-hand theory seems more likely. Sir Dom probably nabbed one from a secondhand shop and it has been with him ever since.
Thank you! And, to be fair, it’s so long because I diligently quote so much of his writing…
Thucydides was a set A-level text for at least one exam board in the mid-late 1980s, so that must be a possibility – but again translations are ‘necessary but unmentionable’, and it’s fair to say that Jowett would probably be less misleading as a crib than Warner; old-fashioned language a bit of a giveaway, but not so prone to flights of fancy without warning…
Great stuff, as usual.
I was reading lots of Thucydides for Greats in the mid 90s. I don’t remember having Jowett explicitly recommended as such *but* it became apparent pretty quickly that it was the most helpful crib available – much more helpful than Warner, which is what I’d read at school (I didn’t do A-level Greek). It’s also explicitly the basis for most of Simon Hornblower’s translations in his commentary, so I became familiar with it that way too. Nowadays it’s on Perseus along with Marchant, so still easily accessible.
Thanks, Ben; makes sense. I think what puzzles me is that a big Thucydides fan would then stick with Jowett after superior translations have become available – or at least wouldn’t quibble with at least some of his versions.