21st January 2012

The reason why shadow chancellor Balls is such a liability is that he is incapable of understanding how other people feel. That may not matter in relation to the opposition — they do not care how he feels either — but it does, for what one would have thought were fairly obvious reasons, when he is dealing with us. Aristotle (384–311 bc) explains why.

In his brilliant Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle devotes considerable space to a discussion of the emotions and the way in which they may be manipulated to one’s advantage. He is especially interested in anger and its opposite, praotês, which means ‘calm, mildness, patience, tractability, good temper’. ‘We are angry with those speakers who belittle us,’ he points out, ‘but calm toward those speakers who treat us as the speakers would treat themselves; since no one would ever disregard or belittle himself.’ We also appreciate a little humility, he goes on, ‘for such speakers appear to be agreeing that they are inferior, and an inferior person would never belittle another.’

Aristotle illustrates the point charmingly from Homer’s Odyssey, when dogs rush out to attack Odysseus, but he cunningly sits down and (apparently) defuses their anger. Again, we stay calm before those we respect but also those we fear; presumably Aristotle is thinking of someone who would fight back if we got angry, though politicians can do nothing about us throwing things at the telly when they are on. All these, Aristotle concludes, should be borne in mind by someone who wishes to win an audience over.

This is the very last thing that Balls seems to understand. When he solemnly tells us that he has been enthusiastically cheering on the coalition cuts from the moment they were announced, and no policy has ever been dearer to him, you really do wonder what he takes us for. Aristotle goes on ‘there is disrespect in denying what is obvious, and disrespect and contempt amount to shamelessness. We show no respect to those for whom we feel contempt’.

Which is precisely how Balls feel towards us. The feeling, he can be assured, is mutual.

28th January 2012

So: So: capitalism bad, ‘responsible’ capitalism good. But is ‘responsibility’ the real issue? What is irresponsible about taking bonuses written into your contract? For people in that world, there should be more at stake.

Cicero’s de officiis (On Duties) — so influential that it was the first Latin text set in print (1465) — was composed at great speed (it shows) in the last months of 44 BC. This, with his other major tracts on ethical theory and government written at this time, was his response to the situation in which he found the Roman state: heading for tyranny in the grip of the new generation of politicians like Caesar and Marc Antony, who had jettisoned patriotic republican values in favour of self-aggrandisement by whatever means, however destructive.

De officiis laid down the markers for the redefinition of political values that Cicero thought was the only remedy for Rome in its plight at the time. First, the gloria that every upper-class Roman yearned for should be granted not just for military or similar triumphs, but only when greatness of spirit was integrally connected with justice, at the service of enlightened social awareness. That would generate among the public the goodwill, trust and admiration that was the source of true gloria for such a man.

But given that not everyone was cut out for a life of gloria, Cicero continued, all could still aspire to honestas: in Latin, the integrity that won the respect of the community. The key to this, Cicero argued, should be the identification of one’s personal interests with the state’s. In other words, the honestas of the individual should be judged by the extent to which his actions were utile for the republic.

Cicero’s vision of self-serving plutocrats, contemptuous of public concerns, maps neatly onto our world. So forget prissy ‘responsible’ capitalism. Raise the rhetorical temperature. Do these people want real gloria, or not? If they do, make clear they can earn it only with an ‘honourable’, ‘principled’, ‘public-spirited’ capitalism that is directed at serving the state’s interests.

4th February 2012

The Grand Olympic Opening Ceremony will apparently inform us ‘who we are, who we were and who we wish to be’ — just in case we had forgotten — and you will have to pay to sit in a stadium to watch it. Romans did not go in for this sort of claptrap, let alone restrict attendance to officials and a few paying customers. When they celebrated, it was for everyone.

The Roman triumph featured a massive procession through the streets led by the victorious general’s army, with booty, captives and paintings and three-dimensional models of Great Moments on display. There would be street parties, shows and handouts.

For Pompey’s celebration of his conquest of the East in 61 BC, 700 ships were brought into harbour. Captured royalty and generals (324 in number), all in native costume, featured in the march-past, with gold mountains, thrones and statues, and wagons hauling 75,100,000 silver drachmas, more than the total revenue of the whole Roman empire, enough to feed two million people for a year.

Julius Caesar’s triumph over Pompey in 46 BC, after a civil war fought all over the empire, was celebrated in five separate and different performances. Crowds, saddened by depictions of the heroic death of Romans they respected, cheered and laughed at the paintings of the demise and flight of exotic foreigners. One of the placards celebrating a victory in Turkey proclaimed ueni, uidi, uici. Horse races, plays, musical contests, athletic contests and gladiators all featured, with ‘an elephant fight with 20 beasts a side, and a naval battle with 4,000 oarsmen plus a thousand marines on each side’. Handouts to soldiers and people, rent-remission and luxury street dinners capped the fun. Forty elephants carrying lamps accompanied Caesar to the Capitol by torchlight for the final thanksgiving at the temple of Jupiter. People were crushed to death in the crowds.

Now that’s a celebration. Our Grand Olympic Opening Ceremony will have to end by midnight to allow spectators to get home by public transport.

11th February 2012

The world informs us that the ex-Sir-cised knight Fred has been tipped off his horse onto a scapegoat. Wrong again. The Judaic [e]scapegoat ritual provided annual blanket cover for the community by transferring its sins mechanically onto a wilderness-bound goat. It was not a response by the ‘mob’— that’s us — to a one-off crisis. For that, we turn to the Greeks.

Their scapegoat (pharmakos) often referred to those who touched religious sensitivities at times of political crisis. One Andocides, for example, was involved in a sacrilegious scandal in 415 BC that threatened the success of a huge Athenian military expedition to Sicily. The prosecutor said of him ‘in punishing Andocides and ridding yourselves of him, you are cleansing the city, purifying it of pollution, expelling a pharmakos and one who has offended against the gods’.

Kings, whose authority was thought to come from Zeus, were especially open to responsibility for communal disaster. The reasoning seems to have been that, while ordinary men were controlled by law, only divine wrath could restrain kings or a community that decided, in special cases, not to uphold its own principles. ‘Through big men is the city destroyed,’ said the statesman Solon.

This absolved groups like the ancient equivalent of bankers, the corn-dealers, who held sway over a vital area of life. In one court case they were accused of ‘having interests the opposite of other men’s. They make their greatest profits when they hear bad news has struck the city and can sell their corn dear. So they are delighted to see disaster hitting you.’ But they were just being greedy. No religious sensitivities were involved.

Perhaps they are now, if we wish to see Mammon as today’s god of choice. In that case, bankers would doubtless prefer the Judaic tradition, when a goat took the hit, not one of the guilty parties. But just to be on the safe side, the ‘mob’ — that’s us — might suggest the Queen’s honours list nominate annually a People’s Goat (Banking Division).

17th -24th December 2011

Since tyrants have had such a high profile this year, child-slayer King Herod, an important player in Matthew’s version of the Christmas story, though absent from Luke’s, is sure to bulk larger than usual in Christmas homilies.

Pompey had annexed this volatile part of the world in 64 bc, and part of the settlement involved allying with local kings. Herod’s father Antipater had been a client of Pompey and ally of Julius Caesar. Appointed procurator of Judaea, Antipater made Herod governor of Galilee, but was poisoned in 43 bc. Antony (Caesar’s successor) saw Herod as a safe pair of hands and in 40 bc, against much local opposition, made him king of Judaea and Samaria; it was only in 37 bc that Herod eventually fought his way into Jerusalem, with the help of Antony’s legions. In 31 bc Antony was defeated by Octavian (Augustus, the first Roman emperor), but Herod was kept in power and remained loyal to Rome till his death in 4 bc. He was known for his ruthlessness, maintaining a secret police and doing away with both his wife and assorted sons when he felt threatened by them. So he was certainly the sort of man who could have ordered a slaughter of innocents, though the pro-Roman Jewish historian Josephus, who had little time for him, never mentions such an act.

Ancient Greeks, who endlessly discussed the best sort of constitution, found the single ruler acceptable on condition that his powers were limited. Aristotle, for example, distinguished monarchy from tyranny on four main criteria: whether the ruler (a) was subject to the law, (b) held office for ever, or merely for a set term, (c) was elected or not, and (d) ruled willing subjects. Herod would have failed the monarch test. So would most modern counterparts.

Romans were highly sensitive on the subject. From its traditional founding date of 753 bc Rome was ruled by kings, and many of these were admired by later historians like Livy. But the last king Tarquinius Superbus (‘the arrogant’) ruled like a tyrant; Livy tells us ‘he was the first king to break the established tradition of consulting the Senate on all matters of public business, and to govern by the mere authority of himself and his household’. When in 509 bc his son, Sextus Tarquinius, raped the noblewoman Lucretia, who subsequently committed suicide, the kings were thrown out and the republic emerged. Hating the idea of ‘king’, the Romans ensured that the top post in the new state — consul — would be filled by two people at a time, and the tradition of running all policy decisions past a Senate of 300 former post-holders held firm.

‘Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque’ proclaimed the epic poet Ennius, ‘The Roman state stands firm on its ancestral traditions and its men’ (no coincidence that vir and virtus are connected); and so it did for 400 years. But in the first century bc it fell apart: big beasts like Sulla, Caesar and Pompey imposed their will by military might and brought the republic down in a welter of blood. In 49 bc civil war broke out between Caesar and Pompey. It was a development that appalled the great statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 bc). A peace-loving traditionalist, he had sided with Pompey, though half-heartedly: ‘I know whom to flee but not whom to follow’ was his doleful epigram on the matter.

It was now that Cicero began to think seriously about the meaning of tyranny. In a letter he reflected on what a man should do under a tyrant: stay put? Attempt to overthrow him internally, even if that risked the country itself? Make war on the country from outside? Of the contestants, as he said in other letters, ‘both men have always put personal power and private advantage before the safety and honour of their country’ and ‘I realise we shall never have a free state in the lifetime of those two, or either one singly’. When Caesar — ‘more Hannibal than Roman general’ — emerged victorious, Cicero lamented, ‘All power has been handed on a plate to one man, who takes no advice except his own from anyone, even his friends. But it would not have been much different had our man won.’

These get to the heart of the issue for Cicero who, marginalised politically, turned to writing. In very short order he poured out a stream of influential treatises on the art of government. On tyrants, Cicero made a specifically linguistic point:

‘A state which is ruled by a tyrant really does not deserve to be described as a state at all. For the word that defines a state is res publica, “the property of the people”, and obviously a country under a tyrannical regime is not the property of the people at all. On the contrary, it presents a situation in which the entire people is subjugated by the brutal authority of one single man, and there is no shared bond created by the law, so that those who live together in the community — that is to say, among its people — are united by no true partnership whatsoever... When, therefore, a country is ruled by a tyrant, we ought not to pro¬nounce that it is a bad kind of state, since logic requires us to conclude that it is no sort of state at all.’

This is all of a piece with Cicero’s view that ‘it is impossible to live well except in a good (properly ordered) community... he who directs a state aims at a happy life for its citizens, fortified by resources, rich in material wealth, glorious in reputation and respected for its integrity.’

Cicero’s noble cry of freedom (libertas), however, has a slightly conditional ring to it. It raises the question ‘freedom for whom, and to do what?’ The view that consistently emerges from these treatises is that ‘the best state will be one that comes under the rule of a number of good men and not just the one’. In other words, it will largely replicate the Rome republican system, oligarchic Senate and all. That in fact is what libertas meant to Cicero — the freedom to take his rightful place among the great and good and be given the chance to have a fair say in the running of the state. Under a tyrant like Caesar, that was impossible. One wonders, had he been in the inner ring, whether he would have discovered in Caesar the good tyrant who ‘considers the whole country as his estate and all the citizens as his comrades’ (Xenophon, Greek essayist). Perhaps what irked Cicero more than anything was Caesar’s enormous popular appeal.

Does a tyrant have to be tyrannical? It is a question as relevant today as it was then.

10th December 2011

Since austerity is now the order of the day, Greeks are doing the sensible thing and beginning to barter. Aristotle thought it was the only system that kept the world honest.

At the centre of Aristotle’s thinking lay a concept dear to him — the purpose for which something was designed (its telos). So, the purpose of a shoe was to wear it. That was its ‘use-value’. Bartering it for something else did not change that: the shoe was still a shoe, with a specific use. If you did not wear it, someone else would. In return for the shoe, you would be receiving a commensurate item — a cloak, a pot, a mattock — which you would also put to the use for which it was made. Aristotle agreed there was a problem about the commensurability of any barter — how would you equalise the use-value of a shoe/bed/house? — but that did not affect the principle.

Now bring money into the equation. Aristotle’s point here was that it added a further dimension to the idea of use. Take medicine. Doctors used it to provide health. But if the doctor also used it to make money, health, a good per se, was no longer the sole aim: it was also a means to a further end — making a profit. So what were the priorities?

Further, the fact that anything from health to education could be turned into money suggested that the stock of wealth was infinite; believe that, and making money became life’s goal. But how ‘good’ was the activity of generating profit by compromising the use of something good in itself?

Aristotle knew about furthering trade by credit and loans. But his was an ethical, not economic, analysis. Barter keeps one honest because it puts equality, not profit, at the heart of all exchange. It does not judge the worth of any activity by its profit/loss potential, nor make financial accumulation the sole arbiter of life’s value.

But money in Aristotle’s time did at least derive directly from use-value. He would be aghast at today’s myriad instruments for producing fantasy money on the back of other fantasy money, and not a bit surprised by the consequences.

3rd December 2011

Newcastle University library, happily removing academic journals from the shelves to the (apparent) cheers of the academics (Letters, 12 November), is well behind the pace. Michael Wilding, an Australian correspondent, writes that Sydney University’s Fisher Library is planning to chuck out 500,000 books and journals to make room for, of course, more computers.

The first libraries we hear of are found in the Near East and, like Ashurbanipal’s (c. 650 bc), were mainly for internal reference purposes. That contained about 1,500 titles, with warnings against theft, maltreatment and late return. Libraries of the sort we would recognise began with the ancient Greeks. The finest of all was founded in Egyptian Alexandria in the 3rd century bc by the Greek king Ptolemy. His purpose was to outdo Athens as the intellectual centre of the Mediterranean, and his money ensured he did. Acquiring or copying texts went on at a phenomenal rate. Eventually it held nearly 500,000 rolls. Others got the idea, and rival scholarly libraries sprang up in Antioch and Pergamum, poaching top directors. They were a matter of national pride.

But they were not public libraries. These came with the Romans, martial conquerors of Greece but Greece’s cultural captives. Julius Caesar planned Rome’s first (39 bc). Emperors endowed them in large numbers, and by ad 350 there were 29 in Rome alone. You could not borrow the rolls, except by bribing the librarian, but you could make copies. Nowadays librarians rejoice that you can gawp, one page at a time, at a screen.

Mr Wilding likens modern librarians’ purges in favour of computerised literature to the Gutenberg revolution, when anything that was judged unworthy of becoming a printed book was lost forever, or to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, where books are rewritten to match state requirements — so easy on a computer. To that extent one must applaud another Australian university’s decision to bury books in landfill sites. When an electronic storm wipes out every computer and its contents, it will become the new Oxyrhynchus.