Nothing Left... But The Words
How much do we know about Rome? I often ask myself that question when I read a piece by Mary
Beard; her articles a refreshing insight into the current concerns of classical
scholarship.[i] The answer, I find, is quite a bit, but
not that much: there are so many gaps that most things can only be partially
explained. This provides a
wonderful opportunity for speculative flights of fancy and insane
theories. Departments of ancient
history the perfect place for the eccentric and the mad.
Let us take professor Beard’s review of a new biography of Caligula as evidence.
Let us take professor Beard’s review of a new biography of Caligula as evidence.
The focus of his book is the
dissimulation and hypocrisy that lay at the heart of Roman imperial politics,
and had in a sense been the foundation of the governmental system established
by Augustus. In making one-man rule work successfully at Rome, after almost
half a millennium of (more or less) democracy, and establishing a ‘workable
entente’ between the old aristocracy and the new autocracy, Augustus resorted
to a game of smoke and mirrors in which everyone, it seems, was play-acting.
‘The senators had to act as if they still possessed a degree of power that they
no longer had, while the emperor had to exercise his power in such a way as to
dissemble his possession of it.’ As others too have recently emphasised (in
particular Shadi Bartsch in Actors in the Audience), the politics of the empire were founded on
double-speak…
On Winterling’s model,
successful emperors after Augustus were those who managed to exploit the
double-speak, and turn it to their advantage; the unsuccessful were those who
fought against it. (It was satire)
This is a wonderful idea, and Winterling’s book uses it to
explain the outrageousness of Caligula’s reputation: his odd behaviour was a
political act designed to cut through the stultifying conventions of the
establishment by taking its fictions literally, so that a man who rhetorically
proffers his life to the emperor is expected to take it. Here was a new way of asserting the
emperor’s pre-eminence; for by cutting his way through the diplomatic
play-acting of an overly comfortable nobility he could increase his control by
humiliating it. Caligula, by replacing
staid social forms, which nevertheless restrained his power, with “real”
action, could thus make his rule absolute. It is a sort of establishment revolution, and inevitably
results in what Sir James Goldsmith called the “necessary vulgarity” of new
power; unconcerned with the refined sensibilities of a civilised elite. Fortunately it failed, and the ruling
class assassinated him.
Reading this review I was blown away. It was only when my head hit the
garden gate did my mind begin to work again…
What this book describes isn’t so much Rome as modern
western democracies, where according to theory and rhetoric the people rule,
but in reality do not. The real
power of the society invested in a relatively small oligarchy – the executives
and officials of the enormous multi-national corporations and the global
institutions that support them; with increasing numbers of billionaires as
their friends and associates.
Politicians, theoretically tribunes of the people, are actually
representatives of this international establishment; for whose
benefit they frame policy. This
creates a modern game of smokes and mirrors, where the politicians pretend both
to have great power and to represent the electorate who they proclaim are in
charge. Elaborate rituals
are then played out in the media to convince us of these untruths.
This creates a general dissatisfaction with politics as the
actions of the executive is directed towards the powerful, while the public
discourse is corrupted; managed, it is believed, by the dishonest and incompetent;
thus creating widespread cynicism amongst the electorate. A minority, as always, would like to
radically change things; and occasionally they get the chance to try. If they are successful a new culture
and a new set of institutions will be created; such as social democracy and the
welfare state after the Second World War.
However, if the discontents fail they are quickly isolated and become
caricatures: Oswald Mosley, Enoch Powell, Tony Benn are three prominent
examples. Although note, image is not
that far from the reality: these are odd
characters, their very eccentricity no doubt one of the reasons they were able to
successfully oppose the reigning establishment; though all three failed to
overturn it.
At some point there is a populist rebellion against this set
up, usually from some outsider in the establishment – Thatcher, Reagan, Sir
James Goldsmith are three recent examples – who expose the conventions
and compromises of the existing culture as lies and elaborate games, which they
then try to overthrow.
Goldsmith, when he was asset stripping British and American industries
and was keen to apply the same model to government, called it “executive
action”.[ii] It is a form of authoritarian rule, and
is often popular amongst the commonalty – contrary to much radical writing most
ordinary people seem to prefer hierarchal order to individual freedom.[iii] Now we see the power of new forces
pushing their way into a settled hierarchy, which they either want to
fundamentally change, or to control absolutely. If the timing is right this rebellion can be
successful, such as in Britain in the 1970s. A period when both its industrial base and its social
democracy were beginning to decline; the two intimately linked, for the latter
depended on the power of the trade unions.[iv] This arrangement was replaced by a
social system dominated by financial capitalism, and which helped to radically
shape a society where debt and globalization (the production of extraordinary
cheap goods based on the exploitation of Third World labour) have created a
dream like consumer culture – a sort of discount store paradise for the common
man -[v] ,
controlled by vast corporations, who increasingly condition the mores of most
people. The result is that we now
live in a world where advertising convinces us we can transform ourselves by
buying things, and politicians tell us that they are in control. These fantasies are broadcast daily
into our living rooms.
Is Winterling reading back into Roman history our contemporary
society? Beard’s review, although
she doesn’t say this, suggests he is: forcing a theory onto a rabble of facts
that resist it.
He is… repeatedly forced to
adjust a good deal of unpromising, or even conflicting, evidence to fit his
basic scheme. Too often, he takes some bizarre anecdote supposedly illustrating
Caligula’s madness and ingeniously reinterprets ‘what actually happened’, to
end up with yet another example of Caligula’s resistance to (or exposure of)
imperial double-speak and hypocrisy.
Beard offers a solution more attuned to the realities of
Rome, where the central problem was legitimacy in an empire where the
succession was always uncertain, the reason for its bloody imperial
history. To legitimise the murder
of an emperor gothic horror stories had be manufactured about their heinous
deeds; and thus the tales of Caligula’s madness and cruelty; a fiction created
by the elite to secure their positions after his death – it was a way of
distancing themselves from the dead victim. In a society dependent on personal rule the defects of the
ruler become paramount, and discrediting him by claims of madness would seem a
reasonable political strategy; made juicier in the retelling…
This sounds convincing too, until we realise we live in a
post-modern age; a label created by intellectuals who believe the media world
is a mirror of reality. A “soft”
world where there is no truth only carefully manufactured fictions; and where
life is a series of public performances.[vi] The result is a prime minister
who changes with each election broadcast: from Christian socialist to
neo-liberal, from a law enforcer (“tough on crime, tough on the causes of
crime”) to international war criminal - even his own legal team doubted the
legality of the Iraq invasion.
Is Mary Beard overly influenced by this fashionable academic
model?[viii] Is she turning the empire into an
historical drama, made for the BBC? Her discussion earlier in this
piece of film adaptations of the emperor’s life is suggestive.
The public in a modern democracy finds it difficult, if not
impossible, to understand what is really going in the offices of power. And yet it is they who are supposed to
legitimize the political system.
This need for the general consent of an ignorant electorate is conducive
to political fictions.
Verification of the facts will be hard, and confined to a politically
active minority with little influence; made more so by their own limited
understanding of how the system actually works – they will tend to be outsiders
with a too academic approach to what is essentially a rough ready business,
governed through a network of personalities.[ix]
A more knowledgeable aristocracy, closer to the holders of
power, would not be so convinced by these stories, which could easily turn into
the kind of conventional forms Winterling writes about – they become part of a
reflexive tradition to rubbish the deposed emperor. Another form of play acting, which has only a tangential
relationship with the exercise of actual political power; for no one actually
takes these stories seriously; because they don’t need to – power resides in
their person and not in their position.
If this is true Mary Beard is mistaking an essentially ideological or
literary convention for the workings of politics.[x]
Alternatively, rather than ideological actions around
political legitimacy, we may be simply witnessing court gossip, which tends
towards hyper-inflation, especially if someone is especially odd; and Caligula
does sound eccentric. This
is then recorded in the history books because it is more interesting and can
potentially suggest a moral: the mad and tyrannical are fated to fall (success
in a society usually requires conformity, which such a story conveniently confirms).
To justify her interpretation professor Beard quotes Pliny.
Just occasionally Roman
writers themselves recognised that survival in Roman imperial politics depended
on the ability to reinvent oneself at regime change. In the nicest example,
Pliny, in a letter written in the early second century AD, told of a dinner
party where the conversation among a group of friends turned to one Catullus
Messalinus, a notorious hatchet man during the reign of Domitian. ‘I wonder
what he would have been doing now, if he was alive today?’ one of the guests asked.
‘He would have been eating here with us,’ another replied. Whatever the ups and
downs of double-speak, the fact is that most of Caligula’s senatorial friends
and enemies survived his years in power to denounce him after his death; their
vitriol is our legacy.
Without reading the original letter one wonders at this
interpretation. She is surely
right that “their vitriol is our legacy”, but it doesn’t follow that it is
related to personal reinvention at the reign of a new emperor; for clearly
Pliny and his guests here make no attempt to distance themselves from Catullus
Messalinus. Instead they recognise
that he is both a morally ugly character and an intimate colleague, who if
alive would be sitting at their table.
This seems right to me. The
real man and the fabulous stories about him co-exist, and which suggests that
the latter are not that serious; hardly more than tickle tattle. That is, the professor seems to be
exaggerating the need for fictions after an emperor’s death – would a person
own up to being a friend of a hated victim, as they do here, if the need to
distance oneself from them was that acute?
The people who would need to worry would be the relatives,
close friends, and clients of the deceased tyrant. Their emotional and material commitment to the dead man
would make them suspect. And no
amount of storytelling would change that.[xi]
An alternative explanation could be that these gothic tales
are the reflexive response to people thrown out of the charmed circle of power;
abused and ridiculed because now outsiders who still pose a threat, albeit
small. It is the loss of their power that exposes them to slander – compare the
press treatment of the failing Brown and Major premierships with the rising
ones of Blair and Thatcher. And we
see this all the time, although today there is a significant difference:
because so much of politics is mediated through journalists, intellectuals and
academics, individuals tend to be excommunicated rather than exiled or killed;
and thus we see the exaggerated use of certain words like anti-Semitism
and genocide
to discredit people who disagree with particularly the media establishment.[xii] Today fictions are extraordinarily important to position oneself inside
the elite. Was this really the
case in Rome? Was it as suffused
with ideology as our society? On
the face of it this seems unlikely: the ties that bound the ruling elite
together were surely more personal than ideas or political positions; the
latter two the main preoccupation of contemporary journals and the press, whose
function is both to record the doings of the establishment and mediate them to
the wider polity, which has hardly any connection with them at all. That is: we only know the rulers
through images and ideas;[xiii] which now become immeasurably important in determining their success and
failure. Though this may also have been the case in Rome, there was
nevertheless a significant difference: then the public was not regarded as
part of the political nation, as they are today; and the need to influence them was therefore much less.
If my assessment is true what Pliny and company are writing
is not history but literature.
While the latter can offer insights into the former, the former cannot
be reduced to the latter. Instead
we have to sieve out these different elements, to establish what is likely fact
from probable fiction. It is
possible that over time this essentially literary genre came to be mistaken for
real history. And now there is a
huge counter-reaction as the academy becomes aware of the literary
artifice. However, as with all new
movements it is tending to exaggerate its discoveries.[xv] With the corollary that there may be a
tendency to project these literary fictions back onto the original events, and
so fictionalise them. The result is that ideology, or more
specially the intellectuals who produce it, replace the events themselves as
the main area of study.[xvi] This produces a curious effect; with
the academy increasingly coming to resemble today’s corporate media, which
often confuses itself with a reality it only occasionally renders accurately.
No doubt there will be a further reaction, and the hard
facts of political life will be recognised as something different from the
reports written about it. Although
I expect we will have to wait till the next generation for that. Or maybe there
will never be enough hard facts to decide. Always, it seems, we have to make it up as we go along.
[iii] An interesting illustration of this statement is
Pieter Geyl’s Orange
& Stuart. To use his words, it was the mob that
wanted a strong man in charge.
[vi] Barack Obama seems a post-modern master at this kind
of thing. A few weeks ago I heard
him confess that he has been unable to change the Washington political
establishment. It is difficult to
capture on the page but his comments sounded extraordinarily cynical: to be
elected he created a fairy story about reform, and now he is saying that other
people have prevented him from doing it.
Of course, there is a lot of truth in the statement, but there is also
an enormous lie: he never intended to change it in the first place, and once in
office has simply submitted to the balance of forces, too weak even to fight
them. Now he is asking people to
elect him again even though he says he won’t be able to do anything. It shows fantastic chutzpah. (For an excellent running commentary on
the Obama presidency see David Bromwich’s
articles in the LRB)
[vii] The number two in the foreign office legal team,
Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned because of her doubts. See John Kampfner’s Blair’s
Wars.
[ix] Christopher Meyer’s DC
Confidential is a useful
insider’s account of this political world. It is an endless round of networking and meetings, and where
most policy initiatives are reactions to immediate events. There is an over-arching culture, which
supplies the commonsense understanding and the political and ideological
clichés that guide their decisions and justify their actions. However, this is a place where things
are done not thought about; at least with any originality. It is wonderfully captured by
Paul Krugman:
“The
fact is that most senior officials have no idea what they are talking about:
discussion at high-level meetings is startlingly primitive…”
[x] What Meyer shows is how little our rulers are aware of
ideology. Other people in their
immediate circle are their primary concern. Ideas are simply decoration, signs to show they are part of
the in-crowd: the ball gowns and dress suits that establishment figures wear to
identify themselves on public occasions. Only in moments of cultural crisis –
like in the 1930s or 1960s, - when the nature of the social system itself is
being transformed, does ideological conflict enter into the political arena;
and the intellectuals have a more prominent role. They are now useful in rubbishing the old and legitimising
the new.
Did each change of emperor involve such a cultural shift? This seems unlikely.
Did each change of emperor involve such a cultural shift? This seems unlikely.
[xi] For a sense of this in a later court see J.E. Neale’s Elizabeth
I. Reading
this biography one feels there is a large difference between interpersonal
relations and the elaborate ritualised language of court life; the latter a
weak hold on the Queen’s affections, and thus a poor instrument of influence
and control.
[xii] During the Cold War it was Communist and Bourgeois
Imperialist; while during the 16th century, that other ideological
age, it was heretic and anti-Christ.
[xiii] And this was recognised by Machiavelli:
“Men
in general judge by their eyes rather than by their hands; because everyone is
in a position to watch, few are in a position to come in close touch with
you. Everyone sees what you appear
to be, few experience what you really are… The common people are always impressed by appearances and
results.” (The
Prince)
[xiv] Meyer’s book is again instructive in this regard.
[xv] See H.R. Trevor Roper’s introduction to the Penguin
edition of Macaulay’s The
History of England.
[xvi] A good example of this is Chase Robinson’s review of a
new book on seventh century Middle East history. According to current scholarship:
“The
field has taken a sceptical turn…
Arabic accounts of Muhammad’s life in Medina and Mecca, for example, can
be shown to derive from a reservoir of biblical stereotypes, themes and tropes,
which function to integrate Arabian prophecy into the deeper (and
better-attested) monotheist teleology of the Jews. Conquest narratives often hopelessly confused in chronology
and contradictory in detail, can be shown to reflect the political, legal and
administrative concerns of the post-conquest state, particularly its frequently
anxious elites, both Muslim and Non-Muslim. To the tradition’s sharpest critics, what we have in this
material is not history in the modern sense of the word, but narrativized
theology (and law)… ” (Lost
Decades, TLS 11/05/2012)
[xvii] It also shares the same superficially attractive
sophistication. Thus in his review
of a book that tries to determine between what is fact and fiction in the
Islamic conquests of the seventh century Chase Robinson writes:
“[To
exempt] Islamic religious thought from the highly creative and adaptive
hermeneutics that helped forge Jewish and Christian identities, is to
misunderstand late antique religious history.”
This
all sounds very impressive. And
those outside the television studios, not well versed in this glossy expertise,
can be simply dismissed as unfortunate fools. Thus after the knowing reference to the latest fashion, we
have the holy condemnation from the high altar:
“Howard-Johnston…
is an unapologetic positivist.
Historical understanding begins by reconstructing events that, occurring
in time and space, are subject to human observation (be it first- or
second-hand, visual or aural), such observation first being recorded,
contemporaneously or subsequently, and secondarily transmitted, faithfully or
less faithfully. Doing history
thus means finding reliable witnesses, the earlier, the better; ‘autopsy’ is
the explicit ideal, though in this case very difficult to achieve. It must be said that these presumptions
sit awkwardly alongside the consensus that human perception itself is a process
governed by cognitive biases and limiters, and that memory is malleable,
creative and suggestible.
Eyewitnesses, a mountain of research is showing, can be notoriously
unreliable… distortion is intrinsic to perception and recall, and that all
modes of rendering the past in narrative form necessarily reframe, filter and
fill in.” (Lost Decades, TLS 11/05/2012
If
we were to take the latter sentences of this passage literally not only history
but nearly all empirical knowledge would have to be condemned as impossible.
And perhaps we could go even further: even life itself would defeat us. For how can we be sure we won’t be
arrested next Thursday for something we did last Wednesday – was that tin our car hit actually somebody's head? Imagine living all the time with such doubts. If you can’t, read Kafka’s The
Trial.
This
is the old problem of knowledge, which is different from experience and cannot
be reduced to it. Always there
will be some uncertainty even in what appears to be the most well attested
theories. Once outside the hard
sciences that uncertainty increases; until in some subjects, and antique
history may be one of them, it is all we have. Discovering this truth, that knowledge is different from
reality, and its foundations are potentially weak, many academics, although
it has been known to philosophers for centuries, become intoxicated with it.
Thus
we have Chase Robinson fusing many levels of explanation into one, and so
confusing them. For example, it is
true that perception distorts and creates experience – an excellent example
is vision. However, humans tend to
see things in largely the same way, with important but miniscule differences
(M.D. Vernon, The
Psychology of Perception). Creating the past often means shaping
it rather than just making it up: having worked with the public for over twenty
years it is rare to find a person inventing a complete fiction; rather their accounts
are full of biases, distortions, and omissions. Moreover, people are often surprisingly truthful; even if it
is not in their own interest. All
of this is a confusing mixture; and a real headache for anyone, let alone an
historian, who wants to acquire real knowledge.
No
doubt eyewitness testimony can be unreliable, but such a statement needs to
unpacked. I suspect the “mountain
of research” will show, except in a minority of cases, many variations on a
single theme, rather numerous entirely different themes: six witnesses of a
murder will each see it slightly differently, but they will not identify the
corpse as Gladstone, Emperor Augustus, Mary Poppins, George Best, Chase
Robinson and Leo Tolstoy. If they
do: goodbye trials by jury.
Reality, in such a case, has become insane.
Robinson’s
breezy disdain also overlooks the difference between facts and
interpretation. The date of
Napoleon’s birthday will never change although theories about his rise to power
will alter radically, especially between the scholarly generations. Causes, because they are not obvious,
tend to be the most unstable of part of our knowledge, and they tend to follow
fashion (A good discussion, particularly about history, can be found in JH
Plumb’s Crisis
of the Humanities).
Surprising
as some academics may find it, before the current age there were thinkers aware
of the unreliability of factual information. David Hume has a section on it in his discussion of
miracles, where he notes we cannot rely completely on witness testimony, although
he argues we can depend on direct experience; which provides at least some
confidence in the accounts of witnesses. Nevertheless, pace professor Robinson, Hume argues that miracles are
impossible not on the basis solely of observation, because the witness accounts
are variable in their reliability, but on the basis that they infringe natural
law; the latter previously established by experience and by a series of consistently confirmed observations. That is, both experience and a system of knowledge gives us enough certainty to
reject specific phenomena that appear unnatural. And this belief in the
possibility of knowledge exists in an epistemology that accepts that knowledge,
as opposed to direct experience, will always include a level of doubt – because
there is no absolute foundation to reason. All is probability. It is a major insight, and should sober
up our intellectual enthusiasms. (See Hume’s
Enquiries)
Without
Hume’s depth and acuteness the modern academic drinks too much at the sceptical
well (though note: Hume was not a sceptic). With the result that this uncertainty, the unreliability of
knowledge, is being used as an insuperable obstacle to understanding: facts are
impossible we are being told. The
result is a new metaphysics, where the past becomes the noumenon, to be interpreted indirectly only through the written word. We have come full circle, to the period before the scientific
revolution, where the metaphysical reality behind appearances was more
important than the world itself; and which could only be grasped by an intensive study of visible signs (mostly supplied by theology).
It is little surprise that bookmen have dominated both these
enterprises.
We
see this in professor Robinson’s use of the term positivism; a swear word in
sophisticated academic circles, used to abuse the innocents who still believe
in factual research (see footnote xlv in my Dropout
Boogie). And yet what he describes as
positivism, which seems to involve close reading of texts to shift out the
facts from their narrative fictions, bears little relation to its classical
definition:
“A
strong form of empiricism, esp. as established in the philosophical system of
Auguste Comte, that rejects metaphysics and theology as seeking knowledge
beyond the scope of experience, and holds that experimental investigation and
observation are the only source of substantive knowledge.” (The Collins
English Dictionary. See the Hume quotation in my Professional
Amateurs for an example of a
positivist statement.)
The
mistake Robinson makes is after his “though in this case very difficult to
achieve” in the quoted passage above.
This phrase is correct.
The further in history we go back the harder it is to fill the factual
gaps. Much (most?) is going to be
conjecture. But like so many
academics before him he wants to make it easy for himself, and thus that next
paragraph, which effectively argues we create the world for ourselves. Thus a reasonable point that the book
under consideration might be wrong (though the review is a generous one – there
are moments he accepts facts can be distinguished from interpretations) becomes
an untenable assertion about knowledge itself. And illustrates the academic’s natural bent towards
metaphysics now refashioned in its modern garb of hermeneutics (see my Russian Climate for more comment).
Curiously,
if August Comte were to come back to visit our times, and was to read the TLS, he would have to condemn history as impossible:
there are simply not enough facts to properly observe the past. But this conclusion, I’m sure, is not
one our good professor will want to reach. Although it naturally follows from the quoted passage, and
shows that Chase Robinson, under all the academic bluster, is nothing other
than what he himself condemns.
Remove the designer clothes and we see him clearly for what he is: a
Logical Positivist! (My The Specialist supplies the evidence).
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