Sahlins on Iraq and Thucydides

Excerpt from "Interview with Marshall Sahlins", Anthropological Theory, Vol. 8, no. 3 (2008), p. 328-329.

Q What can the Peloponesian wars tell us about the contemporary war in Iraq?

A By substituting logos for Herodotus’ mythos, Thucydides usurped the title of ‘father of history’ and became the darling of International Relations Realists and other western devotees of Realpolitik. And no doubt Thucydides’ reputation will remain untarnished among the theorists of national self-interest despite that Bush’s Iraq war may be the most irrational political blunder since the Athenian invasion of Sicily. But the most revealing parallel to Iraq was the anarchic civil strife (stasis) at Corcyra, where the Spartans and the Athenians became engaged in an internal struggle between the local oligarchs and the demos for control of the city. Indeed the conflict was fateful for western political philosophy, inasmuch as Thomas Hobbes, who was first to translate Thucydides directly into English, found in the ancient historian’s description of the breakdown of order at Corcyra the model of his own ‘state of nature’.

At Corcyra, as in Iraq, when the institutions of state lost all legitimacy and violence became the means of every partisan cause, sacred values of justice, morality, and religion were drenched in blood and set to naught. Plato once remarked that every polis is many poleis, because it consists of a city of the rich and a city of the poor, which are at war with one another, and each of these is again made up of contending parties. And when global causes and forces – such as Athenian domination at Corcyra or democratic and Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq – are compounded with local dissensions, the effect is a seeming dissolution of cultural order by the irruption of a brutal human nature. At Corcyra, Thucydides said, ‘even words had to change their ordinary meaning and take what was now given to them’. Cautious plotting became ‘self defense’; moderation, ‘unmanliness’; prudence, ‘cowardice’. Echoing certain sophists’ arguments about the superficiality of culture (nomos) relative to the irresistibility of nature (physis), the ancient historian claimed that such maelstroms of hypocrisy and iniquity will always break out when a natural lust for power and gain is unleashed on the flimsy conventions of social order. The same ideology was echoed again in Donald Rumsfeld’s comments on the disorder following the American occupation of Baghdad: ‘Stuff happens’, he concluded – a cleaned-up version of the proverbial ‘Shit happens’.

It is supposed to be a failing of other people, yet how easily westerners thus conflate culture with nature. Whether in Corcyra or Iraq, it took an enormous array of conflicting moral and political causes to produce this so-called state of nature. In this regard it is difficult to credit Thucydides’ contention that words lost their meanings at Corcyra so much that the hypocritical use of them made people all the angrier at the evident deceit. Living as Americans do under a regime that, in the oxymoronic name of ‘compassionate conservatism’, enriches the already super-wealthy at the expense of the society, one is entitled to doubt that the cynicism changes the meaning of ‘compassion’ so much as it exposes the mendacity of those who so abuse the word. It is not for nothing that George W. Bush is the most hated American president since – well, since Clinton. But then, to attribute the mayhem instigated by the abuse of words to a pre-verbal human disposition is to practice ad absurdum the same kind of verbal deception one is claiming to unmask. In Corcyra and Iraq both, the intervention of fateful larger causes gave new and unconditional values to the internal schisms of the city, rendering them as unconditional as they were abstract and ideological. The fight was now over such ultimate ends as ‘freedom’, ‘slavery’, ‘democracy’, ‘Islam’, ‘dictatorship’, 'terrorism', ‘imperialism’. Which only proves that it takes a lot of culture to make a state of nature.