Losing Touch With ThucydidesWhy we don’t understand Putin and Xi.
MARCH 12, 2022
NAPOLEON LINARTHATOS
In the conflict between Athens and Sparta, the Melians tried in vain to maintain their neutrality. As Thucydides apprises us, the Athenians were rather blunt about the issue: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” As the Athenians succeeded in the siege of Melos, all Melian men were executed, the women and children sold to slavery.
That the “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” is one of the many nuggets of wisdom accessible in even a rudimentary reading of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. For a deeper reading, we might turn to renowned classicist Jacqueline de Romilly, who shows how and why Thucydides chose to write. But we don’t read Thucydides anymore, nor do we read someone like Romilly.
If an undergraduate encounters Thucydides today, it is through the prism of race and gender. Consider the case of a Princeton academic who the New York Times said “has been speaking openly about the harm caused by practitioners of classics in the two millenniums since antiquity: the classical justifications of slavery, race science, colonialism, Nazism and other 20th-century fascisms.” The subtitle of that Times piece was “Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal — even if that means destroying their discipline.”
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The fashionable pose today is for one to declare himself a citizen of the world. And we do so even though we evidently understand less of whatever that world is. We are continuously surprised by the moves, attitudes, and opinions of someone like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Recently, the New York Times ran an article titled, “How China Under Xi Jinping Is Turning Away From the World.” Noting that even “if the [Chinese] government values the economic benefits of globalization, the same does not seem true of less tangible ones: artistic, intellectual, interpersonal”. And “[d]espite his rhetorical commitments, Mr. Xi is narrowing the scope of economic engagement, calling for reduced reliance on exports and keeping Chinese companies closer to home.”
It never seems to have dawned on the writer that the Chinese may have different goals for globalization. Perhaps the Chinese never thought they were signing up for a process that would lead to a liberal global village where everybody sits by the fire singing kumbaya. Maybe they were really into America exporting jobs and know-how to China, and, as they gradually became stronger and richer, feel freer to move away from their “rhetorical commitments” to our illusions about globalization.
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Romilly, the classicist, reminds us that Aristotle thought that the birth of rhetoric was interwoven with the birth of democracy. These contests of words have been fundamental elements of our heritage. Do not expect von der Leyen or the British spy chief to have any sense of loss as they go about breaking with that fundamental Western tradition. Our education today consists in making us insensible to our depleted selves, hostile to the past and numb to the world itself. In replacing Thucydides and women such as Romilly with the semiliterate grifters like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, we are losing the means to understand the world. We are otherizing reality. We don’t understand Putin and Xi. Pretty soon, even the idea of the Ukrainians fighting for their own country might appear to us a strange and foreign sentiment.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/losing-touch-with-thucydides/
