By Christos Marsellos
In an interview given in France a few months after Russia invaded Ukraine, Fareed Zakaria, echoing what has been from the very start the official view of things, explained that Russia had to be defeated in Ukraine, otherwise we would be entering a world where, according to the old adage, the weak have no other option than to “suffer what they must”. More than a year later, with the disastrous outcome of an ill-conceived counter-attack lurking in Ukraine, more and more voices gather up to sing the same tune: the rules based order is in danger. Everybody feigns to ignore that the so called rules based order is nothing but a unilateral substitute to international law; the latter’s application being certainly problematic, without that making the unilateral character of the aforementioned ‘order’ less arbitrary, or, to say the things as they are, less unjust.
What Zakaria forgot to say, or indeed forgot at all, or perhaps never learned, was that the sentence, taken from Thucydides (δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσι) is supposed (since Thucycides does not transcribe, but reconstructs) to have been uttered not by the Spartans, no doubt less radiant, presumably less tolerant, certainly more militaristic if not more militarised, who we would tend to see incarnated in the current conflict by the Russians, but by the Athenians, culturally advanced, more attractive, democrats and liberals, whom we tend to think of as reincarnated in the United States of America. Those Athenians who, having moved the treasury of the League of Delos to Athens in 454 BC, at the time of Pericles, having also, according to the conviction of most historians, used it, among other things, to embellish their city, could not allow themselves any weakening of the league, and opposed any hint of independence from the cities participating in it and any hint of neutrality from the others; and who were therefore led to place all the other cities before the classic dilemma: either you are with us, or you are our enemies. This was the choice offered, in 416, to the poor citizens of Melos, with no scruples or justification other than the reason of the strongest. And for refusing to join their league, the citizens of Melos were decimated by an Athenian force.
It is interesting to see the sentence in its context (here from Richard Crawley’s 1874 translation, from which it is regularly taken) — so much of the past, through glaring similarities and discreet dissimilarities, is reminiscent of the present:
Athenians. For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences -either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us- and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that 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. Melians. As we think, at any rate, it is expedient-we speak as we are obliged, since you enjoin us to let right alone and talk only of interest-that you should not destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right, and even to profit by arguments not strictly valid if they can be got to pass current. And you are as much interested in this as any, as your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon. Athenians. The end of our empire, if end it should, does not frighten us: a rival empire like Lacedaemon, even if Lacedaemon was our real antagonist, is not so terrible to the vanquished as subjects who by themselves attack and overpower their rulers. This, however, is a risk that we are content to take. We will now proceed to show you that we have come here in the interest of our empire, and that we shall say what we are now going to say, for the preservation of your country; as we would fain exercise that empire over you without trouble, and see you preserved for the good of us both. Melians. And how, pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule? Athenians. Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you. (1)
Thomas Hobbes, in his time, translated the last sentence even more crudely (without really forcing the text, the translation probably exaggerates):
you, by obeying, shall save yourselves from extremity; and we, not destroying you, shall reap profit by you (2).
According to Thucydides, the Athenians regretted sending their force to Melos, but when it was too late; the messengers didn’t have time to catch up with it before the massacre. The episode remains to teach us what an empire is capable of doing when its dominance is threatened or even simply called into question.
Since the 2010s, there has been a lot of talk about “Thucydides’ trap” (theorised by the political scientist Graham T. Allison), which is supposed to describe the mechanism whereby an established or declining great power goes to war with an emerging power that it perceives as a threat. What else is there to think of the famous Wolfowitz doctrine, stipulating that the United States, seizing the opportunity provided by the collapse of the Soviet Union, must not allow any other power to compete with it, raising itself, as it is tirelessly repeated today, to the rank of “peer competitor”? In the time of Thucydides, it was Sparta that looked suspiciously at the rise of Athens; today it is the United States with China. Before being triggered with China, the mechanism of Thucydides’ trap was triggered with Russia, in the United States’ anxiety to put an end to non-allied powers, when not by war, by means of coups d’état or, to use the euphemism of the day, regime changes, the boundaries between the two not always being clear, except that the former are no longer so fashionable since they cannot be justified by the threat of communism.
Assuming that for the Athenians the fact of having got their hands on the League’s coffers created a more than symbolic vulnerability, and the need to flee forward, this is much more surely what is happening today with the predominance of the dollar, “our currency and your problem” as Nixon once put it in a stroke of sincerity. Before the break with the gold standard, the benefits of using the dollar for everyone were beyond question, but since the use of the money printing press to finance the Vietnam War, this benefit has gradually eroded. The erosion was halted at some point thanks to the agreements linking the dollar to the sale of oil, but now seems to be gathering pace again.
The worldwide use of the dollar allowed the United States an extravagant debting, and monetary creation at a rythm that borders on frenzy, on the pretext that this is merely “quantitative easing”; in support of this argument, the absence of inflation was invoked; meaning secondary inflation, i.e. the increase in commodities’ prices. In truth, some of the inflation was simply exported, spread around the world, while another part of it boosted assets, making the rich even richer; in the meantime, secondary inflation was controlled by importing low-priced products, so that the simple manipulation of what entered in the price index was enough to create the impression that there was no inflation. This is today’s device for what every empire has always been: a hoover of the wealth of the dependent world. Imperial power is now exercised not just by importing goods taken from others, but also by manipulating their value, and indeed the value of labour, through the manipulation of money. The wealth created, and not just accumulated, in this way, is then distributed – unevenly, no doubt, but with highly visible benefits – to all those who participate directly or indirectly in the imperial system. In particular, this allows the richest to swell their pockets with the wave of a magic wand, and then to inflate the remuneration of the services, and in general of all the dependent functions, so that even those on whom the last crumbs fall, the poor civil servants who are offered educational trips to compensate for stagnating salaries, or the journalists paid to promote “democracy”, can be happy – and certainly never ask not how small their fortune is compared to the big ones, but above all who is really paying the bill, namely the exploited world around them. This system is maintained by a proliferation of wars, each with a nobler pretext than the preceding one, and the ultimate insult (the utter ridicule, one might say, if these were not such tragic situations) is when we start thinking that the people expatriated by the war who take refuge in our countries, along with all the others who come clandestinely simply to pick up the crumbs of the imperial feast, are doing so because they appreciate our democracies and our freedoms! And when you hear a senior EU official say that outside the West the world is a jungle, it is hard to avoid thinking that the metaphor came so naturally to him because Westerners are so used to seeing the world as an opportunity to go on safari – not in the original sense of the word, but rather in the derived sense of trophy hunting… As for our ‘democratic values’, our new civil religion, if one happens to sleep thinking of Dostoïevski, upon awakening the truth may dawn on him, that they are what religion was for the father Karamazov: protection for his possessions and privileges…
In truth, our democracies are succumbing to imperial logic in exactly the same way as the Roman res publica succumbed to the formation of the empire, and our societies decay from within in the same manner. The citizen, in an empire, is no longer the one who participates in political life, which rapidly erodes and fades away; he is the one who enjoys certain privileges, on which his consent depends. In this, and only this, sense, those who think that “neoliberalism” can only lead to the extreme impoverishment of the people are mistaken; the imperial system needs consent, and it is prepared to pay the price. And in fact, the devaluation of labour is such that the imperial system, by generalising the well trodden system of prebendes, can even replace the remuneration of labour by a ‘social income’ which, like the Chinese ‘social credit’, will benefit anyone who does not question the system and its masters, so that the first risk, before that of impoverishment, will perhaps be that of indignity. Not that we are immune to extreme impoverishment; but it will only come about through the failure of the imperial system, for exogenous reasons, through increased resistance from the outside world, not through its internal logic. And so be it then: fiat justitia, pereat mundus…
In the meantime, the imperial system has to buy a lot of consciences, but at a low price; consciences are not very expensive today, and they will be as cheap as it gets as long as the feeling of indignity, and therefore the capacity to be indignant, will remain under control. There is a mechanism that explains the effectiveness of this control. What has changed since the time of Thucydides is that we are no longer stingy with specious pretenses. Two thousand years of Christianity have taught us to think that to follow one’s own interests to the detriment of others is to be a slave to one’s nature (the Middle Ages precisely contrasted the voluntas ut natura with the voluntas ut libera), not to be free, therefore to be deprived of a part of one’s humanity; hence our need to convince ourselves and others of the existence of nobler motives, which leads to hypocrisy and false conscience. One has to think of oneself as being the good Athenian, and at the same time think that the Melians are always being decimated by some evil Spartans. Peoples have the leaders they deserve, one says; our leaders are those that do the necessary to appease our consciences. And the media, as part of the same complex of power of which our leaders are only the last wheel, sort out or conveniently reshuffle what has to occupy our minds, erasing what is most disturbing and covering everything else up with a good dose of levity until the ‘normal’ human being becomes a fully domesticated little animal; and, since it is a human animal after all, sure of its ‘good conscience’. Efficiency comes at the price of freedom and dignity.
This vast programme of abandonment of freedom and dignity has been around, consciously or unconsciously, for decades, has even been condensed fairly early on in a book with a very telling title: Beyond Freedom and Dignity, by the behaviourist psychologist B.F. Skinner (1971). It should be read not as the exposition of a particular theory, but as the framework of what is actually our natural understanding of reality – “our” in the sense that, albeit by an imperceptible shift, we find ourselves in the playground of a new civilisation that is now supplanting the one we knew as Western — which is no longer, precisely, “ours”. How the benevolent author of this book, and an entire society that follows him, failed to see the potentially Orwellian twist in this project is a very complex question. But the fact itself proves, if proof were needed, that the problem does not lie, or at least not solely, at the level of the hidden intentions of a few, or of the dominant classes. At that level, men will always be able to plan, and the gods will never cease laughing at human planning. Neither those who think that everything unfolds according to the plan of the ruling castes, nor those who think that things happen as they always used to do, “naturally”, are seeming to rise to the horizon where the rationality of the system appears, which goes beyond individual reasons and uses them as its pawns, like an invisible hand similar to the one Adam Smith imagined for the economy. This supra-individual rationality has nonetheless its cultural presuppositions, whose study goes far beyond the scope of this text. Only the most extreme, and therefore the most general, terms can be suggested here, as a very short preview of developments to come.
Effectiveness (ex+facio), the ability to get results, fully accomplishes its potential when based upon the convertibility of truth and fact (verum factum convertuntur) that the Roman spirit put in place of the Greek convertibility of truth and being (ἀληθές, ὄν) — teleologically pushing, by its internal logic, towards an activism of all kinds that has made the manifest strength, and the weakness that is less so, of Western history. It is this convertibility of truth and fact that shows its ultimate face today in what Chomsky has called the manufacture of consent. In the beginning, it was the basis of modern science, which sees itself as a capacity to act (the capacity to predict and provoke effects) and is measured in power (scire est posse). It is on the basis of this notion of science that Skinner can think that psychology, like any science, must end in a technique: in this case, a technique of behaviour. It is the collision with technology that fully unleashes today the harmful nature of the project. We are only just beginning to see it, and there’s nothing to be proud of: it’s simply that we are living it, but it will probably take generations to measure its scale and scope.
This Western science knows only mechanical causality, the causality that the Greeks called final being in its eyes only a mechanical causality with a temporal projection, which is not sufficient to found freedom (Kant, who tried to think the difference between a technical finality and a practical finality, would soon be seen as a relic of the past both by those who did not understand the distinction and by those who refuted it). Calvinist Protestantism, which accompanied the first steps of bourgeois society and left its traces beyond it, had frayed the way, construing predestination as determinism, thus evacuating an increasingly problematic notion of freedom, and by the same token transforming the humility of the Christian who sees God as the true author of his virtues into an abandonment of dignity. This particular determinism achieves its activist nature insofar as destiny becomes manifest. Since manifest destiny is the proof of God’s will, it guides decision beyond the vicissitudes of the will, towards a fulfilment that lies beyond good and evil. If this were an individual, rather than a collective, manifestation, it should have been described as mental alienation, where the subject considers itself as being beyond the rules that apply to others: historically, this has been called exceptionalism.
Talk of freedom and dignity surely persists in our society, but it is an illusion: it is the freedom and dignity to be what we are, without being externally hindered. Accordingly, politics, which used to be a matter of project, is now the art of obtaining consent. In today’s imagination, wanting to be what we are, a will without projection, without goal, is the guarantor of individuation and rational choice, this homogenisation in the neutrality of a fact (that is the only truth), being the material basis of a Calculus of Consent, according to the title of Buchanan and Thulock’s classic book. How little an atomised, homogeneous and, to that extent, manipulable population decides freely is significantly shown by the fact that one of the authors of the Calculus, Thulock, never voted; he explained that voting has no effect. One consoles oneself by saying that manipulation can never be complete. True though this may be, still, by setting points of infinitesimal tendency, where quantity becomes quality, by having spinners exercise their famous nudging, by imposing self-censorship on people who do not wish or dare to be outcasts, by reinforcing the gregarious instincts, one can achieve very good results, while maintaining the illusion of a freely taken decision. Today’s societies switch from repression to control, and it is the absence of repression – important though always relative and open to question – that they call freedom.
We have not yet reached the perspective that will show whether, in the course of this process, the Western exception of the free individual will be absorbed into the long history of the preponderance of the collective, or whether other civilisations will be able to rise to the horizon that will one day see the sun rise on a new and unpredictable form of human maturity. But there is no doubt that our societies are undergoing a genuine, and very disturbing, from the point of view of what has hitherto been called the western civilisation, transformation.
(1) Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Duke Classics 2012, p. 327
(2) Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, University of Michigan 1959, vol. II, p. 70
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