Sphinx

A crucial element of Thucydides’ depiction of the plague in Athens is that it appears as, so to speak, a heuristic crisis: it is an event that no one can make any sense of. It’s not that fifth-century Athenians were unfamiliar with epidemics, in myth, literature and reality, but all of those had an explanation in terms of their inherited concepts and assumptions. In this situation, however, every explanation falls short – belief in the fulfilment of oracular prophecy or other supernatural explanation, rumours of enemy action, even the more recently developed ideas of the doctors. Whatever the actual nature of the disease – and this point holds true even if we follow the idea that there wasn’t actually a single plague, but a multitude of more common diseases, perceived as a single baffling phenomenon – Thucydides shows how its unfathomable and irresistible nature then became the dominant influence on behaviour, sweeping away the traditional institutions of religion, law and social norms by revealing that everything was actually random and unpredictable. Why pray when it doesn’t help? Why deny yourself pleasure when you might die tomorrow? Why obey the law when you probably won’t get caught? Why strive for virtue when it doesn’t bring any reward? Why worry about what the neighbours think when they might be dead tomorrow?

We are, thankfully, a long way from that degree of crisis, perhaps because most of us still have faith in the power of the scientific understanding of plague to make sense of things and save us. But it’s still an interesting starting-point for reflection, on two related issues. The first is the persistent promotion of a limited, fetishised imago of ‘normality’, even when this not only makes little sense but will be actively harmful: most obviously the obsession with ‘a normal Christmas’ even at the expense of rising infection rates and a still more severe lockdown in January, where people might have settled for a sensible, COVID-appropriate celebration this year. I can’t decide how far this is driven by the government’s belief that this is what people want to hear, and reluctance ever to announce bad news in a serious manner, and how far it’s all about the attempted rescue of the pre-Christmas shopping binge. Quite possibly they don’t know either.

In my little corner of the world, this has been most visible in the insistence of the government on face-to-face in-person teaching as the only truly acceptable mode of higher education, in the confused guidance about how to get everyone home for Christmas (continuing assumption of a default model student as 18-21, living away from home during term and returning to single nuclear family with labrador during holidays), and in the exciting new even more confused guidance about getting everyone back in the new year. Again, it’s over-determined: the persistence of very traditional ideas of what universities are all about, drastically simplifying a complex reality, and the fact that ignoring messy complexity in this manner just happens to sidestep and displace issues of money, accommodation costs etc. It’s as if the Athenian answer to the plague was having Pericles repeat his funeral oration on a regular basis as a defence against the Spartans poisoning the wells.

At least within the subset of my group of first-year tutees who turned up for a session on well-being this morning – which in retrospect would probably have gone better if I’d just introduced them to the cats rather than trying to dispense advice – this is already having a somewhat Thucydidean impact: asked to describe one of their concerns anonymously on Padlet, they returned time and again to themes of fear, uncertainty, not knowing how to prepare for what problems might arise, and feelings of doubt about the point of it all. Okay, none is this is exactly new or unprecedented, but I’m not sure it would have got more or less unanimous assent in the past. The study of classical antiquity can feel like a luxurious indulgence at the best of times, but perhaps especially so when the future is so dark and potentially apocalyptical.*

The obvious contrast between Athens and today – that is, among the obvious contrasts – that is, one of the innumerable obvious contrasts – is that the demos was the government, and vice versa, rather these being separate entities. The closest we get to a Prime Minister desperately trying to deflect blame and insist that everything is fine and we’ll come through this soon is Pericles’ resentful final speech, continuing to insist that he’s right about everything and it’s the Athenians’ fault for not trusting him – and, while that actually does offer quite a lot of parallels in rhetorical terms, the demos retained the power to vote for a different course of action whereas we remain powerless, just trying to anticipate future events and dramatic changes of course so we can try to prepare for them.

And perhaps this accounts in part for the continuing insistence on maintaining things like university terms and Christmas shopping and summer A-levels and GCSE exams, making lots of minor adjustments and hasty bodges in order to keep the old Ptolemaic system staggering on rather than contemplating a new approach. The demos might be more open to, say, scaled-down festive celebrations or more emphasis on teacher assessment, or more money and power to local government to manage the pandemic, but they’re not being given the option.

So we have the appearance of, well, not ‘business as usual’ per se, but ‘business as usual’ as the unquestioned default state to which we will return as soon as possible – while underneath the taken-for-granted rightness of many aspects of this have been seriously shaken. And this is the second issue I mentioned some paragraphs ago: the weakness of the entire British higher education model, the corruption of the relationship between government and (selected) private enterprise, the incompetence and venality of our ruling class have all been thrown into sharp relief by the pandemic, only partly disguised by the media’s obsession with making this all about the court politics of Johnson’s gang. As in Athens, the plague doesn’t create problems and divisions; it reveals the hollowness and fragility of the funeral oration’s version of society.

This isn’t to suggest, as the more excitable ‘heighten the contradictions!’ people tend to do in such situations, that we’re on the cusp of a revolutionary re-ordering of society, as the majority realises quite how badly it is governed and how far the system is stacked against them. On the contrary, recent history shows how easily distrust and discontent can be turned to the advantage of the elite. The Athenians did pull themselves together and (wisely or not) continue to fight Pericles’ war; insofar as the plague offered them an opportunity for a new course, they didn’t take it. But it does imply that ‘normality’ may be harder to restore than just allowing people to hug their grandparents – even if we are, as the Education Secretary has recently suggested, the greatest little country in the known universe.

* Perhaps unwisely, I did note that one of the rites of passage for any first-year classics or ancient history student was facing the interrogation of elderly relatives at Christmas as to “why are you doing that, then?”, and the one thing to be said for the pandemic was that they’ll probably be seeing fewer elderly relatives this year…