To the Melians the Athenians declared “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” This observation from Thucydides 2,400 years ago echoes down to the present because it reflects much of the world we see around us. The ancient Athenian wisdom clearly come naturally to the government of the People’s Republic of China:
At this point, I’ll reiterate the wisdom of Thucydides. It’s not like on a deep level Muslims don’t know how the People’s Republic of China treats its co-religionists. So why the quiet? Because they know that their bleating and remonstrations against China will fall on deaf ears. A nation like Pakistan needs China far more than China needs it, and China and the oil kingdoms need each other mutually and are aligned on other salient geopolitical issues. In contrast, remonstrating against India or the West will obtain results.
Notice with China there are two issues. First, its raw power insulates it from external moral pressures. China’s concessions to morality are a matter of its own choice, its own agency. Second, there is the axis of self-interest. Self-righteous social justice warriors like NBA coach Steve Kerr balk at criticizing China’s atrocious human rights record because the economic carrot and stick dynamics loom large. Rather than a matter of practicality, where protestation would have no effect on China, the calculus of decision-making is on self-interest for much of the American corporate elite. They wish to become richer, so they turn a blind eye. Obviously, these two are often comingled, especially in the case of small Muslim nations who may empathize with the Uyghurs, but know their protests will have only negative impacts geopolitically and economically on themselves.
From this one might conclude that I’m a cold rationalist, espousing Nietzschean amorality. But 2,400 years on, despite all its flaws, the legend of Athens shines brighter than the militaristic ethos of Sparta. The victors lost in the halls of memory. 2,200 years ago the First Emperor of China crushed the power of the classicists and literati, only to have his image and name tarred by their depictions of him in future ages. The Christians were a pacific and marginal group for the first two centuries of their existence, but within a few generations, they captured Rome and became synonymous with Western civilization. The martial ethos of the Vedic Kshatriyas is not what undergirds Hindu civilization, rather, it is the pacific ritualists and the philosophers, the Brahmins, who turned away from animal sacrifice in the first millenium AD.
Blood wins the battles, but ideas win the war.
The closing line, “Blood wins the battles, but ideas win the war.” brings to mind a couple of others.
1) “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.”
2) “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”
Hmm… Yes, in a sense those are true, though: The centralised legalist system Qin founded still held a legacy of much practical power and shaped the practical ideology of China ever after. The memory of Rome and aspiration to Rome lived on in the post Christian period, continuously and shaped Western Christian structures (and its easier to imagine Western civilization as Western without Christianity than without Rome – a Romanized Hellenic Jew, we’d see as Western certainly; an Ethiopian Christian of the 10th century, no way). The Hindu civilization has frequently lost its battles to the expanding Muslim one, and that may explain a fair bit of the relative preeminance of those Hindus who are priestly, who could live within those orders and be coopted by them, over those who were more martial.
These seem like ambiguous outcomes more than straight victories, where the expanding ideology has to accommodate the power that came before it (in the worst case becoming mere dressing for it) or becoming a tool of the power that comes after it, offering some more limited cheers than the full three for the long term victories of ideas alone?
With some support from at least some portion of elites.
Another thought, this one with regard to “From this one might conclude that I’m a cold rationalist, espousing Nietzschean amorality.”
The story of Athens and Melos (as well as the main topic of the OP, China, the Uyghurs and the rest of Islam) suggests Machiavelli more than Nietszche. However, the other thread in the OP, which includes
– Sparta & Athens,
– the First Emperor of China … & the classicists and literati,
– Romans & Christians, and
– Vedic Kshatriyas & Brahmins
does indeed suggest an important concern of Nietszche’s.
He had a good deal to say about the destructiveness of priests when it came to cultures (civilizations?) that he valued. This was especially true about the long run victory of Christianity over Rome.* Nietszche saw this as a triumph of the weak over the strong, where an ideology created by the former (almost for this express purpose) slowly and inexorably ate away at the vigorous self-confidence of the latter, the strong, whom he frequently equated with the warrior caste in traditional societies. My impression is that he saw the priests as the most intelligent group in these societies and they were furious at being not the dominant group but subordinate to the warriors.** This fury and the awareness of weakness that accompanied it generated the ressentiment*** which he discussed at great length.
*Off the top of my head, it occurs to me that he may have been relying on Gibbon for much of his Roman history.
**He may well have been projecting here. At the least this analysis was likely based on some very insightful introspection.
***Falling back here on a French word both because it was N’s in the original text and because I know of no exact equivalent in English.
@Matt, your example only holds for the recent post-Christian West. I’d bet that the average Parisian or Constantinopolitan in 1000AD would identify more with a contemporary Ethiopian than an Antique Hellenized Jew. And as long as that Ethiopian Christian didn’t get caught up in sectarian disputes, he’d probably find more welcome in Europe than would the Hellenized Jew all the way up until the 19th century.
The Melian dialog is chilling but Thucydides(T) intentions
in writing it are not at all clear. Like so much of
the Greek classics a great deal is left to the reader to interpret.
My take:
1) T makes no moral judgment here. He is describing how
the Athenians (and probably himself) thought the world worked,
not how it should work.
2) The Melians rejected the Athenians demands — and were then
completely destroyed.
3) The dialog was likely written after Athens had lost the war
and was utterly dependent on Sparta showing mercy.
Yes, the Melian dialogue is more Thucydides showing war destroying a country’s moral compass. Yet Athens still lost in the end. And why do I see the example of Melos cited more often than the Athenian invasion of Syracuse (that ended in disaster for Athens and essentially led to Athens’ ultimate defeat as their entire army and navy were destroyed in that adventure).
Syracuse seems more relevant than Melos as we’ve seen many recent examples of a “power” overestimating their abilities in an invasion leading to ultimate disaster for their country (Hitler in WWII, the Japanese invasion of China that ultimately led to Japan’s destruction, the Russo-Japanese war, arguably the current Ukraine war) or mere defeat for the invaders (every invasion of Afghanistan by every power).
@Marco, that shows that people in 1000AD didn’t care very much about “the West”, not that Christianity defines the idea of the West.
@Matt
West evolved from the concept of Christendom, no? The Romanized Hellenic Jew in the 1st century would feel more in common with a Babylonian Zoroastrian than a Germanic tribesman.
The way I see it is that Christianity united Latin, Hellenic, Germanic, Celtic and Slavic cultures into one Western megaculture. Certainly, Islamic invasions played a big role in this as they separated North Africa and Middle East from this zone.
@Harry, or the idea of “the West” is more a set of post-Roman cultural ideas that develop more in the west of Europe and spread out by land. Certainly isn’t synonymous with Christianity – Near Eastern Christians (Lebanese, Syrians, Armenians) generally aren’t seen as part of “the West” and Russians marginally so, while secularly integrated religious minorities in Western Europe – atheists for’ex – are.
Bangladesh allied itself with Hindu India against Muslim Pakistan in 1971.
Enough said.
The West is not synonymous with Christendom as a whole, but it is synonymous with what was once Western Christendom. Historical adherence to Catholicism or Protestantism almost perfectly overlaps with the modern West, and edge-cases are almost always another type of Christian. For what it’s worth, there are certainly Westerners who feel an intrinsic bond with Near Eastern Christians, and Near Eastern Christians who identify with the West.
Classical Greco-Roman heritage has played an increasingly important role in Western identity since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but it’s not the core of what the West is or was. A fully secular Western identity is a recent development, and has not been directly inherited from the ancient Mediterranean.
Yeah but there will be no return to the middle ages no matter how much christian romantics want to return. Its time for a new theology which will combine what we have learned via science with metaphysics. Atheism(the negation of any sort of divine reality) and materialism is a dead end and just doesn’t nourish humanity’s natural spiritual thirst.
@Marco well if greco-roman culture isn’t the core, then what is? Something from the Bronze age? The Mycenaeans? The Minoans?
@Jason, The core is the fusion of Latins and Germans into a new civilization in the aftermath of the fall of Rome, united by the Catholic Church. It’s foundational texts were the Bible and saints’ lives, written in Latin. Anything more than a faint recollection of the Greco-Roman world had to be borrowed from the Arabs, or the actual surviving Greco-Romans in Constantinople.
Materialism is a dead end, but IMO so is any form of rationalist religion. Faith is strengthened by tradition, community, and personal spiritual experience. Appeals to external reason are unnecessary, even counterproductive.
I partially agree, but the Protestant Reformation had the negative affect of delatinizing a big chunk of the Germanic peoples. It is the latinized Italo Celtic peoples(Italians, French, Portuguese and Spanish) that are the core of Latin Christendom, the “West”.