Even before Friday morning, I was feeling despondent; partly premonitions of doom (local political doom, apocalyptical climate and environmental doom), partly the after-effects of a heavy teaching load this term and of a year in which I seem to have been ill and/or insomniac quite a lot of the time, hence massively behind with research and writing commitments. And now? We’re definitely leaving the EU, and still at risk of a disastrous version of that departure; the culture war will continue and probably accelerate, with Johnson’s ‘bring the country back together’ a form of ‘you lost, time to get with the programme’ coercion rather than a genuine concern about engaging with other views; nothing will be done about climate change, or poverty.
I’ll be fine, of course, which is why my age bracket is where a majority starts voting Tory despite everything they stand for. I have home ownership, and a secure job with good salary (universities are likely to be ever more beleaguered, but it’s a heck of a cushy number compared with most people); the way I look and sound, no one is going to be telling me to go back where I came from and stop treating this like it’s my country; and even the barriers going up against Europe will be a minor inconvenience rather than a serious problem.* The issue is rather spiritual or psychological; the anger and frustration, the feeling of being out of step with (former?) friends and the country as a whole, the eroding sense of self, and above all a feeling of helplessness and uselessness, not just that the problems are too big – it is a constant struggle not to embrace total denial of climate change and environmental degradation, because thinking about it is too painful – but that my potential contribution to making a less crappy world is so pathetic.
I mean, who cares about another article on Roman economic thought or another blog post on Thucydides misattributions? I can well imagine that climate and environmental scientists struggle with the fact that nothing they do makes enough of a difference, but at least they’re doing something that’s relevant to the crises confronting humanity. As the result of a series of poorly-considered choices made decades ago, I find myself as a specialist in a branch of knowledge that is all too often elitist, a luxury indulgence for people who can afford it, a carrier of all the values that I loathe about our current political regime. And even if we struggle to decontaminate it of its more toxic elements, as Edith Hall continues to do magnificently and as I gestured towards in the Classics: What’s The Point? book, at best we produce something that’s not actively malign, rather than something that the world really needs.
Yes, of course this is the depression talking. I wouldn’t start from here if I were you, but there isn’t a terribly plausible scenario in which things end up very differently – I don’t think I’d be in a much stronger position to improve the world if I’d become a historian of medieval monasticism instead. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of novels or chefs, either, which were the main non-academic alternatives. I may sometimes wish I was working in a field where more than a handful of students want to talk about engaging with the modern world, not just the ancient one, but that’s probably a case of the grass being always greener and the students more engaged on the other side of the corridor, so to speak…
We are where we are. There’s a case, I imagine, for treating the academic stuff as just a job, paying the bills so as to permit efforts to make things less bad in other ways. So, yes, I am thinking of trying to re-join the town council, if opportunity arises. But, at least at the moment, it’s a job that seems to consume all my energy and still demand more, so it’s hard to imagine doing much else. And so, if I want to make a difference, it has to start here; to rework Nietzsche: interest in classical antiquity may be just a Western prejudice, but let us at least try to employ it in the interests of the present. The content of our research and teaching is of course endlessly fascinating, but this is more about how we engage with it and present it to our interlocutors, above all our students. This is what we do…
(1) Teach, and exemplify, the search for truth; never stop asking questions, never settle for an answer – and especially not a simple or comforting answer – except as a provisional assumption as a basis for further enquiry; always push the analysis further, always open up problems and ambiguities rather than trying to close them down. Critical thinking is a skill, a praxis, and an attitude, not an innate talent. It can be taught; we can teach it.
(2) Teach the politics of truth: understanding rhetoric, recognising cognitive dissonance and cognitive traps, knowing how to engage with theory and ideology. The study of antiquity is inseparable from the history of scholarship and the study of classical reception, and the social and material conditions of the production and consumption of knowledge more generally; students need to see all of this, to recognise the mechanisms and tricks, and spot the man behind the curtain.
(3) Promote cosmopolitanism. As Lucian remarked, the true historian should not be a citizen of any specific polis – but, we must add, we should be familiar with as many of them as possible, to avoid the temptation to take our own assumptions and prejudices for granted as a norm. Yes, easier said than done – realistically, if I set reading in another language, it won’t be read – but I can make the effort to introduce non-anglophone scholarly traditions, to make them at least partly available to students even if they can’t engage directly.
(4) Create conditions for practising civil discourse; building the confidence to articulate one’s own views, while also respecting others and negotiating differences. This, I think, is the hardest thing; somehow both stepping back to create a space in which they don’t feel intimidated or constrained by fear of giving a wrong answer, and also actively managing the discussion where necessary, to make sure that everyone is included. Last term I tried to promote an idea suggested by the philosopher Harry Brighouse, of discouraging ‘ping-pong’ discussion – student addresses comment to lecturer, lecturer responds, another student responds to the first one but by addressing the lecturer etc. – but too often the result was three students talking energetically with each other and the rest feeling bored and disaffected, wishing (according to the mid-term feedback) for me to do a lot more talking. Next term I’m wondering about getting one student to act as ‘chair’ for discussion of another student’s presentation… It’s about trying to orchestrate and simultaneously model constructive engagement.
When I say “this is what we do”, I mean that partly as a statement; this is what we do. It’s not a call to change our practice or scholarly principles – but perhaps to be more consistent in applying them (I know there are times when I take the easy way out of setting a ‘good enough’ reading list, or giving up on class discussion because no one is engaged and it’s easier all round if I just talk at them), and perhaps to prioritise and emphasise some of them a bit more, if only for my own sake. This is what we do; this is why what we do matters, and could change people’s lives.
It’s not about the red pill; the idea of a single moment of enlightenment, a gnosis that will reveal the true nature of the world to the elect, is precisely one of those idiotic denials of complexity that plague humanity. It is rather the slow process of education, acquiring and practising the habits and attitudes of critical engagement and self-reflection, and critical respect for the strongly-held views of others while remaining dedicated above all to truth rather than lies and self-serving illusions. Our only hope is that more people learn to engage with the world critically.
*Sentence revised as it could have been read as implying that you can’t be properly British unless you’re white, or at least as ventriloquising racism. Thanks to David Jones (@metaburbia) for pointing this out.
Sing, Neville.
We need exactly more – and as much as possible – of this. One of the offshoots of reading your blog is that it has pushed me into reading things I would not otherwise have read. And that has made me think. And as a direct result, the reading, the thinking, the discussions have helped me in my ‘proper’ job. For that, I thank you.
We need as many people as possible who have that capacity to reason, to question, to accept having their preconceived ideas challenged. (I was going to say: “the capacity for abstract thought” but that would have got me too much into the Coen Brother’s film ‘Oh Brother, Where are Thou?’. Which, on second thoughts is not ‘that’ far from the main thrust of your work, all things considered!).
Education, education, education.
May you have a lovely Christmas, and my best wishes for 2020. Tomorrow is another day!
‘O Brother…’, like so many of the Coen Brothers films, is of course a study of the capacity of people who think they have superior intelligence to be very stupid, with unintended consequences – I can’t help thinking of the ending of ‘Burn After Reading’…
Thank you so much for writing this. You articulate so well so much of what I’m feeling myself. The sheer sense of powerless at the direction we’re heading as democracy is being eroded around the world and truth itself is being attacked and distorted; also the existential crisis of being an academic in the humanities and knowing that you are, as you say, in a privileged position of having a fairly comfortable job and working on a subject that in so many ways seems to have so little impact on what’s happening in the world. But thank you also for your thoughts on the difference that we can and do make. I completely agree that those working in the humanities, because we are nothing if not seekers of the truth (or truths) and because critical thinking and discussion are so central to what we do, do have an important role to play in education and encouraging people to apply the way we approach antiquity to the world around them. That is of course one reason why universities and the humanities have been so under attack in recent years as bastions of leftishness; what we do is often portrayed as expendable because it is relatively economical insignificant but the reason for the attacks is really because what we do is at its very heart fundamentally opposed to the direction certain forces are trying to take us. But I would say the very fact they’re attacking us is because we are a source of resistance, however small, and that should give us reason to carrying on doing it and fighting to be able to do it. I’m not quite sure how we fight but we can’t give up. I’m still struggling to think of other ways to find meaning and to do *something* but you are right – just carrying on doing our work *is* doing something.
One more specific reaction to what you said about student discussions – I have some experience of working with student chairs of discussions. I taught in Nijmegen for a while and that’s an approach they strongly encourage in the history department. It can work really well so I’d definitely recommend it. The only trouble I had, especially with first years, was getting some chairs to realise that the idea was to get a really good discussion going instead of rushing through the issues as quickly as possible. It was also difficult, as I’m sure most of us would find, taking a back seat sometimes…..
This response is longer and more rambling than I had in mind when I started out but that’s partly the lack of sleep – I can relate to the insomnia which is why I’m up at 5:30 browsing the internet. I’m sure that current events are taking their toll on the mental health of many of us. I really just wanted to let you know that your post really struck a chord with me. Thanks again.
And best Christmas and New Year wishes to you too. I’m still hopeful that there are bright things ahead.
Thanks for this, Chris. Very interested to hear that you’ve experimented with student chairs; that suggests still more pitfalls I need to be wary of.
You’re right that education is certainly going to be a key arena of political conflict, on multiple levels; the idea that ‘the problem with Britain today’ lies in education has already had a massive impact on schools, with the regression to lots of rote learning, exams and teaching to the test, and it’s already clear how the ‘free speech’ debate (to a significant degree imported from the US) can be used to undermine or muzzle more progressive areas of universities. All of this within a wider frame of ‘out-of-touch urban liberals looking down on the views of Ordinary Folk’ that’s straight out Cleon’s speech in the Mytilene Debate…
Is Diodotus’ argument then the answer – lie to them for their own good? It may be Thucydides’ answer, but I prefer to read it – in parallel to the point that Diodotus’ proposal to spare Mytilene is just as cynical and instrumentalist as Cleon’s, just with a different conclusion – as being equally problematic in a different direction; the speeches are paired not as ‘right and wrong’, but ‘wrong in different ways’ (cf. the Sicilian Debate). Thucydides’ elitist line is that “the masses do not bother to enquire, but accept the first story that comes to hand” – but we could emphasise that it’s “do not” rather than “can not”…
Absolutely right, Neville. I am a historian of a different sort: secret intelligence and international history post-1900; but feel much as you do, the only thing we can do is keep on producing the best work we can.
You speak for me, too. I’m in a much more practical field, where it is conceivable that I should be mitigating climate change. In fact, the CTO volunteered me for a team that’s supposed to come up with ideas. Once we resurfaced from a week of getting up to date, though, everything else seems … trivial. And even though the boss is willing to throw seven-figure sums at the challenge, she’s still three orders of magnitude short. And there are politicians over here, too, doing everything they can to stop anything we come up with.
I admire your ability to find a course of action through all this. I shall attempt to find a parallel.
I’m very grateful for all the supportive comments; it’s not so much that they persuade me that I’m not simply stating the bleeding obvious, as that they reassure me that sometimes it’s worth stating…