“The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu”: Mark Carney at Davos, OR The Classicists Get Excited

Today, let’s start with Thucydides. I’ll write about Alice Feeney and Lucy Foley and murderous marriages later.

But first: please know that it’s very cold in Minnesota for a day of protests/walkouts: twenty or thirty degrees below zero.

Bitterly cold. I was born in St. Paul’s, and when we moved to Northern California the following year, my Prairies-raised mother was ecstatic.

Fortunately, while I know nothing about Thucydides worth sharing, both Carney and some very smart classicists do. There’s a good piece in the Globe & Mail.

My share is by an ex-classicist friend who became an actor but still keeps up his Greek.

Here’s Mark Carney, from near the beginning of his speech (during which his transitions from English to French were smooth and elegant, befitting the head of a bilingual nation–which also needs leaders who speak one or more Indigenous languages):

“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

This aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable — as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety.”

It’s a barn-raiser (nation-raiser?) of a speech.

My Canadian cultural sovereigntist heart is glowing, even the bit of me that’s still a “petite Péquiste” from my school immersion in the French Catholic religion and the separatist politics of the 1970s. There’s something about learning Quebec history as a dauntless quest towards national independence that tends to stick with one. It was only as an adult that the Plains of Abraham was presented to me as a war lost, not a temporary tragic setback.

But I digress.

And here’s my friend George’s Facebook post, shared with permission:

“Carney’s citation of Thucydides’ famous Melian dialogue in his Davos speech has of course received a lot of attention from other classical scholars, but this one would like to point out that Thucydides’ description of the shifts in the meanings of words during the civil war in Corcyra (a decade before the Melian incident) is also particularly apt to the Trump administration’s deranged distortions of reality.  I would like to draw readers’ attention to Thucydides 3.82, particularly passages like these:

τόλμα μὲν γὰρ ἀλόγιστος ἀνδρεία φιλέταιρος ἐνομίσθη 

‘Mindless bravado was considered loyal courage’

ὁ μὲν χαλεπαίνων πιστὸς αἰεί, ὁ δ’ ἀντιλέγων αὐτῷ ὕποπτος 

‘An enraged man (was considered) always trustworthy, while anyone speaking against him (was considered) suspect’

ἁπλῶς δὲ ὁ φθάσας τὸν μέλλοντα κακόν τι δρᾶν ἐπῃνεῖτο καὶ ὁ ἐπικελεύσας τὸν μὴ διανοούμενον

‘In short, anyone who denounced someone who was planning no crime was praised equally with someone who stopped a plotting criminal’

Sound familiar?”

• G.I.C. Robertson, St. John’s, NL