Sphinx

Not many posts at the moment as I’m struggling to keep on top of the teaching prep with two new modules this term, plus having to catch train before 7 am on both Thursdays and Fridays which then leaves me staring blankly into space by lunchtime. BUT! I am still capable now and again of stringing together a series of thoughts on the Twitter, which quite possibly get a bigger audience there, but if I copy them onto here I will at least have a record…

In the Melian Dialogue (Choose Your Own Adventure version), the discussion eventually ends up going in circles. There’s actually no limit on how long this can continue, but it’s pretty obvious after a while that talking has reached its limit. If you’re playing the Athenians, it’s a matter of when you lose patience and force a decision (and allowing the Melians to blather on does, up to a certain point, increase the chances that they will in the end see sense and accept your terms), or just massacre them already.

If you’re playing the Melians, it’s the eventual acceptance that the situation is as it is, and isn’t going to change however much they wish it was different; the Athenians have the superior position, there’s no reason for them to change their minds just because you want them to, and so the decision is the same as it was at the beginning. That is, accept their terms and try to make the best of it, or double down on heroic defiance and gamble on the tiny chance that the Spartans might actually turn up to save you.

The Athenian position isn’t really terribly interesting – they have the power, they know they have the power (even if they tend to over-estimate it), and so they can just let the Melians squirm until they get bored – and so it’s a little odd that they’re usually the main focus (e.g. in the International Relations Realist tradition and related discourses). The Melian dilemma is the interesting one: surrender or glory, rational self-preservation or heroic gamble in the name of sovereignty. They don’t have a good option – and which of their options is less bad depends on how you rate different criteria. Is it better to die free etc.?

One interesting aspect – and this is where I start getting to the point – is the effect of the passage of time on this decision. Talking with the Athenians doesn’t change the realities of the situation, nor the Athenian attitude, but does it change Melian thinking? On the one hand, there’s the possibility that they gradually come to see their situation clearly – there *is* no reasonable way out – and capitulate to Athenian demands, trying to make the best of it. This seems like the rational option, certainly from the Athenian perspective. But then there is what actually happened. Is it just a matter of them always having preferred sovereignty over survival (n.b. keep in mind that this is the Melian elite making that decision for their whole people), or is partly a product of the Dialogue – Athenian intransigence makes them more defiant?

Certainly that’s what we see in the actual text, and I have plans for actual experiments to see how often this plays out in practice: does dialogue with an implacable adversary produce reckless defiance more often than demoralised capitulation? What we see in the UK’s case – yes, we’re back with the Brexit thing – is the latter, for all Johnson’s bluster and the cheer-leading of the press: the situation hasn’t changed, the EU hasn’t shifted any of its red lines, but the passage of time and the sense of deadlock – accentuated by internal political issues, has resulted in sudden acceptance of all the things that were declared to be completely unacceptable a few months ago. Rational calculation wins out over ideology. Of course it helps that this choice keeps Johnson in power, whereas Athens would probably have deposed the Melian elite and replaced them with a more democratically-inclined government.

And of course we saw exactly the same pattern in the previous modern Melian Dilemma, the negotiations of the Greek government with the Troika: defiance, but then acceptance of the terms on offer, and marginalisation or sacking of proponents of more drastic/radical choice. Was Thucydides wrong? Or is it that times have changed, the stakes are higher, sovereignty matters less, so modern states are simply far less inclined to follow the Melian route? Perhaps that was the Athenians’ error: if the rulers of Melos had felt confident that they would continue to thrive under Athenian rule, rather than being replaced by a more popular government, they’d have rolled over in the end without much fuss…

Further thought: maybe the problem with the internal UK political situation at the moment is that there aren’t any Athenians – so, no one has the power to dictate terms, but everyone falls into the characteristic mindset of the ‘weaker’ party. Ditto within different political parties; groups like the old One Nation Tories and the Centrist Labour crowd certainly feel beleagured, but it’s not as if their opponents are free from such a defensive mindset either. Melians all the way down…