Thucydides Roundtable, Book II: Beware Greeks Bearing Faulty Assumptions
Which leads me back to Thucydides claim that these kinds of mistakes, blindness and miscalculations are natural. Why are they natural? Can they be avoided? Is it that we refuse or are not able to critically examine our own assumptions about ourselves and the adversary? I can see that its harder to do the second because you have less or inaccurate information about them, but surely self-examination (especially for the society that gave birth to Socrates and the Western philosophical traditions) is not beyond our reach? Or is the real issue, that we simply refuse to do so in the emotional excitement that is the rush to war? (Is there a war equivalent to the ‘beer goggles’ effect?)
A related issue seems to be the difficulty we, like the Greeks, have in thinking through the second, third and fourth order impacts of our own actions, much less those of the adversary. (Again, its hard not to think about 2003 in Iraq.) Thucydides notes that the plague was unanticipated, which is interesting. If we allow this point, it doesn’t explain how many of the other effects (immediate and further out) also need unanticipated or people believed that they would not happen. Is this a failure of strategic thinking and rationality? Or is it the emotions involved which make it difficult to think through or believe that the bad will happen? How many couples resist the idea of legal agreements prior to marriage or cohabiting, in the throes of love, lust or infatuation, only to regret it when things fall apart?
Like with romance and human relationships, surely things falling apart in war and not going according to plans and assumptions is entirely predictable. We check our equipment and personnel before going to war; we should also check and rigorously examine our assumptions.
P.S. An assumption is not simply true because we want it to be true!
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Grurray:
October 25th, 2016 at 8:26 pm
Pericles tried to convince the Athenians in his funeral oration that their exceptionalism would fortify against and elevate them past adversity, self imposed or otherwise. He overestimated his people. I would say it was definitely a failure of emotions. This was evident with the Dorian War oracle. The Athenians interpreted it as prophesying death, when at some other time it might mean dearth (I was wondering if that was some sort of cynical humor by Thucydides). The more determined Spartans considered the prophesy to be telling them ‘if they put their might into it, victory would be theirs.’
Neville Morley:
October 27th, 2016 at 12:35 pm
One of the wider issues this raises is how far we can, or are expected to, generalise from T’s specific account of how the Athenians behaved in a specific situation to wider truths about the world and/or about ourselves. Yes, T invites us to expect parallels between the events he describes and our own present and possible future, grounded in some sort of universal human tendencies – but at the same time he, or at any rate characters in his narrative, emphasise the particular qualities of the Athenians compared with the Spartans. The Athenians are shown to be susceptible to violent changes of emotion that override rational calculation – the idea of ‘beer goggles’ fits the debate about the Sicilian Expedition perfectly – but is this to be seen as a human trait, or as a specifically Athenian trait, or as the result of a democratic rather than more oligarchic political system? Or is the point of the work that we’re being prompted to debate this..?
T. Greer:
October 27th, 2016 at 3:37 pm
That is very well said Neville. I think it applies particularly well to the Spartan debate over entry into the war–though we think of, and T speaks of, the Spartan decision for war in grand transcendental terms, the actual arguments presented by the Corinthians are narrowly focused on culture. Is it the character of man up for discussion, or the character of Athens?
Pauline Kaurin:
October 27th, 2016 at 7:28 pm
I think these are great comments. I think that the ‘beer goggles’ thing is a human thing, but of course its filtered through culture to some degree.
Neville Morley:
October 27th, 2016 at 7:51 pm
Exactly – and I don’t think this is just us projecting our fuzzy culturalist perspective onto the text; it is entirely reasonable to see T as developing a general picture of ‘the human thing’, including a propensity to see the world through beer goggles, through a series of different examples and case studies that are never wholly reducible to the underlying principle. It’s the Realist claim that he presents a single, simple and consistent view of Human Nature that requires a partial and rather imaginative reading of the work…
Zen:
October 28th, 2016 at 2:39 am
The beer goggles concept coincides with what Joe Guerra raised regarding “strategic narratives” and their universality vs. historical and cultural narratives likely to be parochial.
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A strategic narrative is meant to have explanatory power for the people going to war, both to themselves and the wider world that includes their allies, enemies, observers and posterity. Sometimes these narratives which are rooted in politics and policy (Clausewitzian sense) are not sufficiently rooted in empirical reality. As the strategist John Boyd would term it, there can be a “mismatch” with reality that if not corrected (strategy being an iterative process) will lead a belligerent further and further astray in terms of reading the strategic, operational and political situation and increase the chances of defeat.
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However, political communities often cannot either make cooly rational strategic decisions about going to war and demand comforting myths to give their assent or worse, reach a stage where truth cannot be openly spoken because it will be harshly punished. This forces debate about critical strategic decisions to be made on indirect or proxy grounds instead of facts through the employment of code words or worst of all, as litmus tests of loyalty and authenticity. Athens progressively suffered from this but Sparta did as well, essentially leaping into war on the breeziest of assumptions from the first and being dragged closer to reality as the war went on