RIP Michael Sugrue (1957- 2024). This is one of his last live streams on YouTube. I downloaded the audio that night because I knew he often deleted his surprise “improvisation on…” lectures.

This is a masterpiece lecture AND a heck of a book review: “Improvisation on Thucydides“

Audio ↓

TRANSCRIPT

“Today I’d like to talk about, uh, Thucydides, and, uh, I’d also like to talk about Plato, particularly Republic Book Three. But let me start out with my, uh, intellectual tough guy, Thucydides. Uh, I think he’s one of the greatest writers, greatest intellects I’ve ever, uh, put pen to paper. He’s an extraordinary individual, and, uh, he encapsulates and personifies, uh, A great many of the intellectual trends of his age.

He’s writing during the Peloponnesian War, which he describes as the greatest war ever to be fought up to that time. And he himself was a general, at least for a period of time, until he failed to succeed. And lost a battle, and he was cashed in and then ostracized, which means that he was sent to the east.

He was exiled. Uh, Thucydides wrote his Peloponnesian War, which is unfinished, uh, in this exile. And he had plenty of time to think through. What he had seen and experienced and reflect on how the events of this war and the politics leading up to it reflected something permanent about human nature. Uh, Thucydides clearly believes that there is such a thing as human nature and under the same circumstances or when operating under the same constraints, uh, any group of people are likely to behave like any other group of people.

In other words, we’re one species under different constraints. And, uh, it’s the constraints. that make possible, uh, social life and collective action. And also, those, the loss of constraint, which causes the dissolution of social bonds. Uh, these are some of the main themes of Thucydides. Uh, the, it’s a rather wistful book in the sense that, uh, It’s a tale of many lost opportunities and, uh, of a decline in the quality of leadership.

So, uh, Thucydides is going to give us the first realistic account of politics and war. And, uh, this realpolitik, uh, has a long and, uh, important tradition in, uh, Uh, the, in Western political philosophy, uh, it’s all very well to create utopias and ideal societies, but none of us live in those ideal societies.

And if you make the mistake of treating a real society like one of those ideals, you will harm yourself and others. Uh, Thucydides is deeply impressed with the fragility and evanescence of political order. And, uh, the dangers of arrogance, the Greek, uh, sin, the Greek mistake of hubris. And, uh, he is an acute observer of human affairs, and he has a, a rather skeptical bias, which is part and parcel Uh, of the demythologizing tendency happened in the previous century with the pre Socratic physicists.

So what pre Socratic physics was to the understanding of nature. In other words, it was a criticism of poetic mythic traditions of what that was to physics. Thucydides is to history. Thucydides is going to require evidence. Thucydides is going to insist that, uh, realism govern his choice of, uh, elements for inclusion.

And, uh, What that means is he’s distinguishing himself from somebody like Herodotus. Remember Herodotus, there, uh, I mean, he, Herodotus is in some ways like an anthropologist. He visited, visits many civilizations, cultures, he gets to, you know, he travels the Med. He goes to Egypt. He goes to Mesopotamia. He encounters a variety, a large variety of different, uh, traditions and cultural.

institutions. And, uh, he’s willing to tell a good story, even if it’s of dubious truth. You know, like the ants that are in India that are the size of dogs and mine gold with their big choppers. Uh, that’s the kind of story that makes it into, uh, uh, Herodotus. Uh, not into Thucydides, he’s not interested in entertaining people.

He’s interested in instructing people, as he says in the introduction, this is a composition for all of eternity. Given that human nature works the same way. Uh, what he says is that if as it’s likely. People find themselves in some similar situation in the future. They are likely to behave in exactly the same way.

In other words, human nature, uh, is, in his view, predictable. And if it is predictable, then it is, uh, um, governed by natural laws the same way the physical world is governed by natural laws in the new conception of physics that was, it’s been developed in the century up to his time and a century beyond his time.

So, uh, Thucydides is the social scientist who transforms the understanding of human nature, of society, of, uh, uh, the individual and community that in such a way as to make it intellectually respectable in this new naturalistic, non mythological, uh, orientation towards the world that we got first with pre socratic physics and then second with sophists who taught what they called virtue and rhetoric.

But what it often was, was dangerous nonsense given to young men who were inflamed with ambition And perhaps had more testosterone than brains. So the sophists taught many of the young aristocratic men in Athens and Thucydides learned rhetoric from sophists. And that’s one of the peculiarities of his history that we wouldn’t allow for today.

Some of the speeches that are in his history, he actually was there and he heard them. On the other hand, there are plenty of speeches that were made in his opponent’s account, uh, among his opponents or, uh, on, uh, uh, say, uh, uh, a conspiratorial side, uh, that he doesn’t know, uh, how to, uh, or, or that he doesn’t, he’s not able to give you a verbatim transcript analogous to say a court reporter, but what he can do since he knows the.

Two speakers, one from each side, and he knows what the issue is, and he knows how the issue was decided by the audience. He is able, using the common rhetorical education that young men in many Greek city states got, Um, he knew how to drop into a template. the necessity of getting a yes or a no from a given audience.

So they will argue, uh, in such a way that they will make what they think is the optimal appeal to their audience. And if you’ve studied rhetoric under the sophists, um, Commonalities will emerge and, uh, these commonalities include, uh, a kind of hedonism, kind of self indulgence, various descriptions, uh, often a kind of relativism or sometimes a nihilism, but Thucydides just takes it as a kind of empirical realism.

In other words, he’s trying to describe people as they are, not as they ought to be. Uh, for example, when he begins his discussion, he starts with archaic Greece and he attacks the poet Hesiod and also some of the, uh, uh, parts of Homer that suggest that There was prior to us a far better age when everyone was excellent and full of virtue and, uh, when men were truly men and now that we’ve degenerated into the poor creatures we are.

Thucydides says, look When Hesiod talks about a golden age, and a silver age, and a bronze age, falling, you know, declining down to us at the very bottom, um, that’s really a kind of poetic lament about the human condition. There is no reality behind that. In fact, human civilization starts out not in a golden age, not in a Garden of Eden, but in a really primitive, feral stage.

We are social animals, we’re hierarchical animals, uh, we’re adaptive animals, but, uh, there’s nothing about us which would have created immediate perfection and then allowed us to degenerate to the condition we’re in now. In other words, as far as Vicinities knows, the civilizations in which he is li in the civilization in which he lives, and the others around it are the best that have ever been created.

In some ways, ath the story of Athens is a tragedy by a collective tragic hero. The the Athenians are genuinely great people, but they go too far, too fast. They are seduced by the arrogance of, uh, well, demagogues, Cleon, or even worse, Alcibiades. And, uh, it turns out that life imitates art because the Athenians had tragedy and the history of their flowering and then self destruction.

Uh, is, uh, a remarkable and tragic, uh, set of events where a superior collective subject pushes the envelope, pushes it too far, and then is forced to face the difficulties that attach to, uh,

that attach to self destructive arrogance. So, uh, Thucydides is able to supply us with speeches even though he wasn’t there and doesn’t have, uh, physical written evidence. It’s an interesting, uh, element in the culture in which he developed. Now, another important issue worth thinking about when we deal with Thucydides is he has a cyclical conception of time.

And this in some ways is the most natural kind of intuitive. Um, sense of time because, uh, well, we live in a cycle of, in a temporal cycle, uh, day and night. I mean, that’s not the kind of thing that anybody anywhere can fail to notice or the pattern of the seasons, right? And that also turns out to be a cycle.

If you look at the pattern of human life, moving from infancy to adolescence, to. So, uh, when we talk about, you know, youth and middle age and then old age, um, that also is a kind of cycle. So, uh, what we have here is a natural view of, of time, which indicates that it’s an eternal circle. And that, uh, there is that history repeats itself.

And of course, since human nature is the same, Thucydides thinks that, uh, you’re likely to see the same patterns and the same outcomes. Nowadays, there’s, I guess, much discussion in Beijing and in Washington about what’s called the Thucydides Trap. Uh, where an up and coming Civilization, uh, with increasing power faces and established hegemonic power that doesn’t want to, uh, that doesn’t want to be pushed off its position of dominance.

Sparta had been traditionally the most powerful soldiers, land army. In Greece, they of course distinguished themselves in many battles. They were essentially in the war business and, uh, their, uh, profound military training. allowed them to be a dominant political power without developing all that much in the way of culture.

In that respect, it was much simpler, much plainer than Athens. Much, much more old fashioned and, uh, static. Um, Athens, on the other hand, was a rising power. And, uh, It was a rising power, and it began to flex its muscles, and Sparta, as the established hegemon, understandably became concerned. In some ways, like the two biggest kids on the block.

Uh, sooner or later, you know, there’s gonna be a fist fight. Well, um, if Thucydides were right, and we were stuck, In an endless cycle, that would seem to make something like a conflict between China and the U. S. unavoidable. But I don’t think that’s the case, and here’s why. Um, there’s an alternative view of time.

which is attributable to monotheism. And that’s a linear rather than a cyclical view. And that’s where it’s possible to learn from the past and learn from your mistakes. And that means that progress is possible.

Thucydides. Allows us to be, to learn from our mistakes, but regrettably, we are still sucked into an inevitable cycle, which is determinate as the orbits of the planets, because human nature’s one continuous thing, and under the same set of circumstances, will act in the same way. Notice, for example, let’s just take a thought, consider this.

We had a similar kind of rivalry during the Cold War with the Russians. And yeah, we had some, uh, we had some outbreaks of proxy wars, like in Korea, for example. But, uh, we did manage to avoid Mutual assured destruction. We managed to avoid a nuclear exchange. And, uh, that was, uh, a rivalry which did not result in a mutually destructive hot war.

Uh, my sense is that the reason why is that both Russian and American leaders when they were face to face with nuclear exchange, say, during the 1962, uh, Cuban Missile Crisis. Um, both of them realized that this was a negative sum game and that they were better off not pushing this and deciding not to Thucydides trap.

That’s another way of using Thucydides realistic account of human affairs. So we are perhaps more malleable and more adaptable than Thucydides realized. And this linear view, which is alien, of time, which is alien to the Greeks and the Romans, uh, is something that gets introduced, not, uh, from Jerusalem, not from Athens or Rome.

So Thucydides has us in this cycle of historical events, and, uh, what gets built up, like a civilization, inevitably crumbles because, well, that’s the way all human things are, right? They’re a process, right, rather than a static entity. Now let’s look at some of the ways in which Thucydides new outlook reveals itself.

Um, first of all, in his idea of ancient, uh, society, ancient human societies. He’s quite convinced they were barbarous and violent and, uh, they lived in a world of Hobbesian moral chaos. In that respect, the growth of families into villages, villages into cities or city states in Greece was a natural progression, which was beneficial because civilization creates order and security and, uh, the possibility of accumulation, both culturally and physically, and, uh, I guess, temporally in terms of lifespan.

So it turns out that civilization is a great. Uh, uh, achievement of our species. And what he’s saying is this process, um, may continue on for an extended period, but it appears that, uh, the limitations of human decision making and, uh, the, uh, the limitations of human judgment. Inevitably. suggest a tragic resolution to such a great power politics.

There’s a funny combination of idealism and realism in Thucydides. Let me not overstate. I mean, the realism is 80 percent of it, but there’s about a 20 percent chunk of idealism, and I think that’s true in Greek art and Greek culture in general. If you ever look at Greek statues, they never have any odd scars and none of them have warts or, you know, uh, any, any, uh, anything that’s asymmetrical that mars the surface.

And, uh, if you look at the earlier archaic statues of Greek Kouros boys, uh, they’re all with one foot out, uh, completely stylized figures. And they, again, don’t have any asymmetrical or unanticipated scars or anything else about them. They’re always perfect and uniform. Uh, that’s also true in parts of Thucydides.

For example, Thucydides great Uh, idea of a great leader in this war is Pericles, and he gives a funeral oration in which he says that, uh, Athens is worth fighting for because Athens is the greatest society that has ever existed. And he is speaking over the recovered bodies of the young men who had been killed in combat.

And he’s in a situation very much like that of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, trying to explain to a democratic culture, why they should give up their sons for something greater than any individual human being, the greatness of Athens, or perhaps later on the greatness of Rome. Or in Lincoln’s view, the greatness of, uh, the world’s last best chance for self government.

Uh, all of them had deep commitments to a particular set of political arrangements. And also, uh, religious sentiments. And, uh, they had to find the words to Tell grieving parents and widows and children

why their sacrifice was not in vain. That is a deeply idealistic account of Athens. He says, look, we’re every bit as military, as ferocious as the Spartans. No one has ever called us cowardly. We have achieved great things, and we are a civilization that has embraced all that is new and important and intellectually transformative.

We have art, we have science, we have philosophy, we have, uh, Uh, we have painting, we have poetry, we have all of the muses as well as gymnastic. And that’s why we are the, in some ways, like , the Athenian analog of LBJs great society. We are the great society and we are made up of great human beings, great men because we have.

Civilization, as well as military prowess. In other words, we are complete human beings. The Spartans are crude, blunt instruments. Yes, they can fight, but we can outthink them. And, we’ll give at least as good an account of ourselves in a fight as they do. We’re a naval power, they’re a land power, and we can more than hold our own.

So Pericles funeral oration is, uh, an idealizing, uh, speech. It’s beautifully constructed. And Pericles admits, look, we have an empire. And yeah, uh, he says, uh, Admittedly, it may have been unjust to take it. Because they’re operating essentially a protection racket. Uh, and, uh, shaking down the various islands of the Aegean.

It’s called the Delian League. And, uh, and Pericles says, Look, it was unjust to take it, but check this out. It’s unsafe to let it go. Do you want to let all those people go and say, Let’s call it even? No, they will hate us and they will turn on us. So now that we have this empire, we have no choice but to hold on to it.

All right. Now, this is fascinating because the influence of the sophists preferring power to justice is immediately evident.

And uh, he is also justifying the separation of politics and ethics.

It doesn’t necessarily follow that Thucydides is endorsing this any more than, say, analyzing snake venom means that the herpetologist endorses poison. But Thucydides is looking at the world as it is and knew that Pericles had to come, like Lincoln, had to come up with a very powerful speech. And seize this moment to define in ideal terms what we are fighting for.

For our homes, our families, our safety, and for Athens, which is a uniquely great achievement.

Now, uh, immediately juxtaposed after this, Pericles talks about The arrival of the plague in Athens, an epidemic disease, nobody knows for sure what it was, hits Athens and it takes away, uh, something between 25 and 50 percent of the population. Right, so the casualties are immense, uh, the terror of the unknown makes social interaction.

Uh, strained and it causes social cohesion to break down.

It shows you how fragile and even essence society really is. Uh,

Thucydides actually had it. So he says, I’m going to talk from firsthand experience as so much of the book is, um, about what the plague was like. So he describes. The symptoms and how long it took for the fever to break. And what he gives us is, is very much like a Hippocratic case study. Uh, those of you who have read, uh, Hippocratic writings, which you remember is the kind of technological application creating medicine 2.

0 on the basis of physics 2. 0. And Hippocratic Medicine was empirical, not magical. So Hippocratic Medicine doesn’t involve fairy dust, uh, chanting to the gods, shaking the magic rattle, doing the disease dance, it doesn’t, it gets rid of all that stuff because it holds that spooks and spirits and stuff like that are not the cause of disease.

The causes of disease are not supernatural, but natural. That’s what the Hippocratic Breakthrough is. And since it’s natural, and you can find out about nature by looking at it, what they do is observe nature. And in the process of observing nature, um, they see certain commonalities, they make generalizations on the, on the basis of those, and what you have is a, a genuinely scientific medicine, which probably had considerably better results than, uh, snake oil and the magic rattle.

Okay. Um. Thucydides, very much in that scientific empirical tradition, first describes what the plague was like for him as an individual. And then he describes what the plague was like for Athens as a whole. In other words, think of Athens as a body politic that’s been invaded by this same epidemic disease.

And it’s caused Uh, fragmentation of the body politic, stress and disease and death of portions of the body politic. And if you think of Athens then as a large, uh, as a large collective subject, Thucydides points out that the various beliefs that this subject held often contradictory, or at least sometimes, uh, Had differential outcomes.

He said, look, there was some deeply devout religious people in Athens. And when they got the plague or their family got the plague, they went to the, uh, uh, temple and, uh, made sacrifices to the gods. They killed a bunch of livestock and they made many promises and, uh, they had, uh, Rituals performed and, uh, then they died, usually.

Because none of this magic stuff has anything to do with whether you live or die of whatever this disease was. On the other hand, there were plenty of people who, uh, didn’t perform any sacrifices at all. And, uh, most of them died too. In other words, here we have, uh, A blind experiment. Some people perform religious rites, some don’t.

They die at roughly equal rates. The inference to be drawn here is that whatever it is that causes epidemics like this it can’t be supernatural. Right? It’s some natural thing.

Okay. And the natural course of this disease can be described and the way in which we might deal with it is yet, I mean, in which scientific Hippocratic medicine might deal with. It hasn’t been worked out yet, but he does. But, uh, he does point out that, uh, uh, it’s a much better.

Understanding of the world, uh, this Thucydidean and Hippocratic and, uh, and Hippocratic kind of a human science, which I thought in some ways what medicine is.

It’s both an art and a science at the same time, and that’s in some ways true of history as well. So, um, this new empirical scientific approach to, Uh, to medicine and to, uh, history, uh, share a common empiricism concern with practical, with a factual detail. And they’re looking for commonalities and looking for patterns.

That’s what Hippocratic doctors do. And that’s what Thucydides does as, uh, as an object, he’s trying to create an objective social science. Saying under these circumstances, this is how people behave. Uh, his scorn, for example, for generals that are interested in things like, uh, uh, omens, you know, in the flights of birds and stuff like that, his contempt is profound, but he also understands that superstitions like.

uh, uh, fear of, uh, eclipses or various other omens may well have a practical social significance despite the fact that they’re not magical manifestations of divine displeasure, that you have to calculate them in, in the same way that say, Machiavelli had to calculate Christianity in to his, uh, account of Italian politics.

So. Thucydides gets it and Thucydides hometown, Athens, also gets it. And he describes the ineffectiveness of religious ritual. Now, the point here is that Thucydides is living in a completely new intellectual world or intellectual milieu. Compare this to the first book of the Iliad. There, we start in Media’s Race, the way all epics have to start, in the middle of things.

And, uh, we’re in the middle of an epidemic. According to Homer, this epidemic was caused by the priest of Apollo being disrespected by Agamemnon, who refused to release his daughter. And insisted on keeping her as a slave. The priest appealed, prayed to Apollo. Apollo was not allowed, willing to allow his priest to be disrespected.

And he sent down the arrows of disease from his golden chariot as it moved across the sky. And those that became sick had been hit by those magic arrows. Okay, here’s the problem with that. This is make believe, but it’s the only game in town in the archaic world that produced the Homeric epics, all right?

Because they have a long oral tradition before they get written down. And back then they were living in a magical world of things that go bump in the night. They were living in a world that was personified. Uh, that’s why it, you know, they would, uh, it made sense to, uh, beat up a body of water that was behaving in an unfavorable or unfriendly way.

Right. Uh, that happens. I believe that, uh, one of the Greeks, uh, beats the river Scamander. in the Iliad. And it’s also true that in Herodotus, uh, Xerxes orders his men to flog the Hellespont. Well, that’s true. That makes sense if you’re living in an archaic world of personified energies, but that’s not where Thucydides is.

That’s not where Athens is. Now, instead of calling An epidemic, the result of disrespecting the gods. We leave the gods entirely out of it and we look for naturalistic causes. If it works for diseases of the individual body, why wouldn’t it work for diseases of the body politic? For human collectives? And what that means, of course, is that now it is possible Um, to create human sciences, both an applied science like, uh, medicine and, uh, uh, a science that’s applied in a different way through Thucydides in history.

He intends to make predictions about how people behave under particular constraints. Uh, it’s not an accident that Thomas Hobbes, that, uh, great, uh, writer on fear and political violence, uh, he made the first translation into the English language of Thucydides because he was writing during the English Civil War and he thought to himself, you know what these guys really need, they need to get realistic.

And stop pretending that they’re fighting about who really has the favor of God. It’s all about power. And that’s where political, uh, order comes from. Violence. Well, there’s some truth in that for Thucydides as well. There’s no political order without violence. But violence is a long way from guaranteeing

Regrettably, political order is fragile and you don’t know how much you depended on it and how much you got from it and how valuable it was until you are thrown into the condition, the hellish moral chaos of a world you. Without law, without a goal, and without, without transcendence. So, uh, Thucydides is giving us, uh, a pessimistic account of human nature.

Uh, the pessimism lies in the fact that, uh, Uh, justice and power are separated and that if you’re, if you intend to continue on alive, there are going to be times when you’re going to need to choose power over justice. As Pericles says, look, shaking down all these islands and putting together an empire.

Admittedly, it was unjust. We wouldn’t want it done to us. But, I mean, let’s get real. It’s not worth us getting ourselves killed over. I mean, we’re here now and we’re stuck with it. Uh, this is a very strange disjunction between politics and ethics. And in some ways, it’s going to prove to be its own nemesis.

That’s Athens. Doesn’t really lose the Peloponnesian War. Or rather, better to put it, Sparta doesn’t really win the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians rather beat themselves because they’re too clever for their own good. And, uh, Thucydides never got a chance to see the destruction of Athens. It’s a kind of mercy, I guess.

But on the other hand He can see the writing on the wall. He understands the trend. And after the expedition to Sicily, he knows that his side is finished. Would have been maybe someone like on the, the Nazi general staff, you know, once the Normandy invasions are successful, you know, there’s no, no hope for the regime.

Uh, Thucydides gives us the first true social science. And, uh, he shares with Cormac McCarthy an appreciation for the greatness of civilization. He is, uh, writing an encomium, or a series of encomia, on the advantages of civilization, on its, uh, On its fleeting and uncertain duration and how human beings all too often let their ego get ahead of them, become their own worst enemy and end up destroying themselves because they lack a sense of purpose.

of uh, wholesome human limitation. So uh, Thucydides is somebody that is well worth reading and I’ll close with this. Those of you who are young, college, um, this is a book you should read but it’s really too, too much for you to appreciate at this point in your life. Uh, I read it in college. I liked it, but we only had excerpts and, uh, I was just primarily concerned if this was going to be on the exam.

On the other hand, I read it again over the course of three weeks sailing the Aegean, from island to island, reading it slow. And at the age of 40, it was one of the greatest books I ever read. So, uh, I would recommend Uh, this book to those of you who are sufficiently middle aged to appreciate its depth.”

RIP Michael Sugrue