Thucydides Roundtable, Book III: Understanding Stasis
As the plague spread and subjected the Athenians to unbearable stress, funeral customs (which there, as in many other pre-modern societies, were endowed with a sense of propriety verging on taboo) were violated in shocking ways. (2.52-53) In Thucydides’ view, such behavior was not an uncomfortable adaptation to necessity but rather a symptom of a complete loss of moral standards: Men now did just what they pleased . . . Perseverance in what men called honor was popular with none . . . [‘Honor’ translates to kalon, primarily meaning ‘the beautiful’; and its identification as a profound moral value is characteristically Greek.]
As he tells of the plague’s impact, Thucydides does more than shake his head in horror. He posits two reasons for the collapse of morality. The first is an acute scarcity of vital resources: from want of the proper appliances through so many of their friends having died already. The second is a contraction of the time horizon: regarding their lives and riches as alike things of a day. This second factor is readily understandable to us: a modern economist would say that during the plague, the Athenians applied an extremely high discount rate. This is always demoralizing. Students of poverty have long observed that the poor are driven to do whatever they can to survive in the present, making little provision for the future; but this very style of behavior, as much as anything else, ensures that they will remain poor. And as I will observe in a moment, the time horizon is even more important socially than economically.
If you will permit me some freedom of interpretation, the first factor (acute scarcity) also resonates with modern analysis. For the life we are used to is one of ‘moderate scarcity’ and that circumstance profoundly shapes our sense of values. Recall the thought experiments David Hume offered in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: in scenarios of effortless unlimited abundance or desperate deprivation, “the strict laws of justice are suspended.” While Hume was exploring the conditions for morality, his thought experiment is more broadly suggestive. Homo economicus chooses a combination of goods to maximize utility under an income constraint. What is popularly called the law of diminishing returns makes itself felt all the time: a person of normal income will not consume ‘too much’ of one good — even if there is no risk of satiety — because to exceed some level of consumption of that good he would need to reduce his consumption of other goods to the point that he felt a pressing need for them, a need that would outweigh the additional benefit of consuming more of the first good. Increased consumption of one good thus incurs, at some point, negative feedback, and that ensures both stability and the choice of a variegated basket of goods.
But what if there isn’t enough food and water? For the starving, the whole self-equilibrating system of rates of exchange becomes irrelevant. “All that a man hath will he give for his life.” In a famine, the one who gets a morsel to eat will still want more food and he will sacrifice other things, if he has them, to get more food. Negative feedback does not come into play, and if an equilibrium is attained it will be a “corner solution.”
***
How do these two factors of demoralization apply to civil strife? First, consider the discount rate or time horizon.
Relationships persist, and the future constrains the present. A. will think twice about doing an injury to B. because B. is going to be around for a while. If the contemplated injury is serious enough, perhaps B. won’t be around: but his family, or his friends, or people who identify with him in some way, will be around; and A. will have to deal with their enmity and distrust. If the society in which both A. and B. find themselves also has a functioning system of justice, then even people who have no personal tie to B. are going to come after A., unless he can neutralize the whole system. These considerations tend, under normal conditions, to restrain domestic political competitors from the commission of atrocities.
Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page