One of the dilemmas I occasionally face with the Thucydides Bot is whether, and how, to respond to people using perfectly respectable and genuine bits of Thucydides in less respectable ways. There’s a decent case that it might dilute the brand, so to speak, and reduce the account’s authority when it comes to fake quotes if it also pitches in on genuine quotes, and certainly I’m going to steer well clear of familiar debates about Macedonian identity and whether Thucydides contrasting ‘Athenians’ with ‘the Greeks’ demonstrates anything in particular. But every so often something comes along that seems worthy of push-back, if only to put down a marker for others who might come across the same comment and take it at face value.
Yesterday, one account suddenly sent out a flurry of identical tweets, responding to people talking about the wild fires on Rhodes, to the effect that ‘Homer speaks of wildfires in Ancient Greece, and Thucydides describes a wildfire that took place in the third year of the Peloponnesus War (429 BCE) from branches rubbing together on a mountainside’. Well, pedantically, Thucydides does not describe an actual mountain wildfire, but rather compares the fire set by the Spartans to try to break the siege of Plataea to one (2.77). But that is clearly beside the point.
The intention of the remark is clear: there have always been serious wildfires in Greece; therefore the current one is nothing special; therefore man-made global heating is a myth, or a deliberate lie. Invoking Homer and especially Thucydides is, I suppose, a means of giving the stamp of cultural authority to this claim, with perhaps a subliminal ‘Thucydides is all about the continuity between past, present and future’ message. No one actually claims that there were no wildfires in the past, nor that a single fire is in itself proof of climate crisis; it’s about frequency, and severity, and it’s always over-determined (e.g. land use patterns, fire management). So Thucydides is being cited against an imaginary argument – but it has the effect of reinforcing the familiar ‘climate has always varied, there have always been floods and droughts, nothing to see here, no need for action’ narrative.
Which is one of the reasons we’re in the mess we are, so the Thucydides Bot did politely intervene – as I said, to put down a marker in case anyone else read this stuff – and received a polite but rather confusing assortment of responses, half of them repeating the point that you can’t blame wildfires solely on global heating (true) and the other half suggesting that increased tectonic plate movement might be to blame instead (erm…).
This is an account that retweets Naomi Wolf on the subject of vaccination, so I am disinclined to take any ‘scientific’ claims at face value. I don’t think it’s a paid troll doing disinformation for the oil industry so much as a confused resin who has ‘done their own research’ and come up with a reassuring answer that then provides grounds for resisting any attempts at mitigation – or at any rate feeds into that, even if it isn’t their intention. Which is arguably as big a problem, as we see in the willingness of both major UK political parties to ditch climate policies for fear that they might lose votes.
Thucydides does not endorse this message. I like to think that he would weigh the evidence and cone down heavily on the side of the scientific consensus, and would be equally scathing about the short-termist, self-interested behaviour of politicians and the cognitive failings of too many ordinary citizens, deluding themselves that nothing can go wrong…
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