Thucydides Roundtable, Book I: An introduction
It is difficult to peg this Thucydides. Political scientists, historians, and military theorists all claim him as the father of their craft. Whenever one of these disciplines is infected with a new “path breaking” paradigm, a blizzard of articles are written to graft the latest fashion onto his work. This literature is enormous. Forgive me for quoting none of it. So many of yesteryear’s intellectual fads have died. They are forgotten. Thucydides and his history live with us still. He will outlast them all.
In any case, their purpose for consulting Thucydides differs from mine. They approach his work like miners on the mountainside, drilling narrow shafts down through hardrock until they find something marketable. The results are predictable: Thucydides’ book is more often referenced than read, and when read, more often in part than in full. The quote is what matters.
There is nothing entirely wrong with this. Analogies to Thucydidean events can be revealing; pithy Thucydidean one-liners add punch to all essays in need of it. But those who limit their acquaintance with Thucydides to a few snapshots miss a great opportunity. There is more to Thucydides than a frantic search to find another model for all time. If they look hard enough, the seeker of evergreen political models or eternal laws of war will find what they are looking for in Thucydides, though it is hard for me to believe that any thinker as subtle as he would smile on this quest. What I value in Thucydides is something different altogether. I do not turn to him for templates “for all time,” but for an escape from my time.
We all live in the moment. A cacophony of words and sounds follow us wherever we go, broadcast into our cars, our workplaces, our homes, and our pockets. We live in an unescapable echo chamber—an echo chamber relentlessly focused on the now.
Not so with Thucydides! His history is about many things, but 2016 is not one of them. Here then is a chance to put the present to the side. Cast away that dreadful election! Muffle the droning of the news reports. Close the Twitter stream. Before us is a world that has never heard of the twenty-first century nor imagined its problems. Your guide to this world will be a man from an alien past; his values and assumptions will be starkly different than your own. Wrestle with him—let your beliefs and assumptions be tested. What better chance to assay the building blocks of your politics than by exploring the politics of a different age, removed from the passions of the moment? Thucydides does not spell out his lessons for you. Instead he invites you to follow along with him and find what lessons history allows by yourself.
This is a long process, for Thucydides’ history is a long book. But it does not go on forever. When you come out the other end, you will be ready to face the present again, hopefully more thoughtful, wise, and penetrating than when you began. My hope is that I will carry a little of what I have learned with me wherever else I go. In reading Thucydides, I aim for what Joseph Sobran once described as the real purpose behind reading ‘old books’:
To know a single old book well, even if it hasn’t been canonized as a “classic,” is to have a certain anchorage you can’t get from most contemporary writing…you should find a few meritorious old writers you find absorbing and not only read them, but live with them, until they become voices in your mind — a sort of internal council you can consult at any time.
When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with its fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us remain fad-proof…
When confronted with a new topic or political issue, I often ask myself what Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, or James Madison — or, among more recent authors, George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, or Michael Oakeshott — would have thought of it. Not that these men were always right: that would be impossible, since they often disagree with each other. The great authors have no specific “message.”
But at least they had minds of their own. They weren’t mere products of the thought-factory we call public opinion, which might be defined as what everyone thinks everyone else thinks. They provide independent, poll-proof standards of judgment, when the government, its schools, and the media, using all the modern techniques of manipulation, try to breed mass uniformity in order to make us more manageable.1
Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page