The Thucydidean Slip
On Mark Carney's speech in Davos, Thucydides, and the repressed tension between justice and necessity
Since listening to Mark Carney’s much-praised speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, something has been bugging me. Carney says, quite remarkably, that international law is a fiction, and that saying so out loud is an act of emancipation, like the shopkeeper’s gesture in the Václav Havel story he cites. From the speech:
Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn't believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along… [W]hen the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack…
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order… We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false… [but] [t]his fiction was useful… So, we placed the sign in the window…
[But now…] [w]e are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it.
Carney’s speech was widely received as a denunciation of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. But how exactly is Carney’s speech, in the passages just quoted, different from what Trump said in his equally remarkable interview with the New York Times a few weeks ago:
Katie Rogers
Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?
President Trump
Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.
Aren’t both Carney and Trump saying that there is no such thing as a rules-based international order? And if so, wasn’t Trump the first to tell everyone to get rid of their hypocritical signs in their windows? How is it that many people find the interview outrageous and the speech inspiring?
I think the best way to read Carney’s speech is to psychoanalyze it.
In his collection of essays Serious Noticing, literary critic James Wood explains how he learned to read books:
I was taught how to read novels and poems by a brilliant poststructuralist critic called Stephen Heath. I have an image in my mind of Dr Heath holding a sheet of paper – the hallowed ‘text’ – very close to his eyes, the physical proximity somehow the symbolic embodiment of his scrutinising avidity, while he threw out his favourite question about a paragraph or stanza: ‘what’s at stake in this passage?’
He meant something more specific, professionalised and narrow than the colloquial usage would generally imply. He meant something like: what is the dilemma of meaning in this passage? What is at stake in maintaining the appearance of coherent meaning, in this performance we call literature? How is meaning wobbling, threatening to collapse into its repressions? Dr Heath was appraising literature as Freud might have studied one of his patients, where ‘What is at stake for you in being here?’ did not mean ‘What is at stake for you in wanting to get healthy or happy?’ but almost the opposite: ‘What is at stake for you in maintaining your chronic unhappiness?’ The enquiry is suspicious, though not necessarily hostile.
This seems to me a very good method for reading pieces of legal and political rhetoric as well. So, what’s at stake in Carney’s speech? Where can we find the dilemma, the Freudian slip, the philosophical crack?
I think the answer is the quotation from Thucydides. Carney quotes an (in)famous sentence from the Melian dialogue in the History of the Peloponnesian War: “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” He calls it an “aphorism of Thucydides,” but of course it’s what the powerful Athenians say to the powerless Melians. The Melians appeal to principles of justice, but the Athenians respond that “questions of justice apply only between equals,” not between the powerful and the weak. Then they proceed to capture Melos and its citizens.
The Athenians’ theory of the world is no different from the theory proposed by Carney when he says that international law is a fiction. But when Carney pronounces those words—”the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must”—his discomfort is palpable. He can’t bring himself to endorse it, and yet he proceeds to denounce international law as a lie.
There’s the crack, the dilemma of meaning, the Freudian slip. Or perhaps we should say the Thucydidean slip.
What should we make of it? In Wood’s words, “What is at stake for Carney—and Canada and Europe—in maintaining their chronic unhappiness?”
For 2,500 years, scholars have debated what Thucydides wanted to tell us through the Melian dialogue. Not long ago, two very sharp legal scholars neatly summarized the two opposing interpretations of the episode.
Brian Leiter borrowed from Nietzsche the idea that Thucydides reveals the “strong, severe, hard factuality” of the world, that is, in Leiter’s own words, that political leaders “are not moved at all by ‘philanthropic and righteous principles’ but are driven, instead, by selfish and self-aggrandizing concerns, restrained only by the limits of their own power.” (Leiter, In Praise of Realism (and Against “Nonsense” Jurisprudence), 100 Geo. L. J. 865, 869, 870 (2012)).
For Leiter, Thucydides’s lesson is that talk of “justice” is a cowardly retreat into comforting illusions. Here’s another illuminating passage (Id. at 870-71):
Thucydides… puts into the speakers’ mouths their true, amoral motives, reflecting Thucydides’ realistic view of human nature and human affairs, in contrast with the idealistic fantasies of a Socrates or Plato. Thus, Nietzsche declares,
“[M]y cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and, perhaps Machiavelli’s Principe are most closely related to myself by the unconditional will not to gull oneself and to see reason in reality-not in ‘reason,’ still less in ‘morality.’”
Thucydides views political leaders as essentially motivated by selfish concerns—power, fear, wealth—and as creatures for whom moral considerations are rhetorical window dressing rather than a reason for action.
Darien Shankse, however, notes that Thucydides likely used the Melian dialogue as a cautionary tale against hubris. He rightly observes (Thucydides and Law: A Response to Leiter, 19 Legal Theory 282, 291 (2013)) that the next thing that happens to the Athenians after the siege of Melos is their disastrous expedition to Sicily. After the “hubristic assault” on Sicily and the consequent debacle:
the Athenians end up in need of the kindness they denied the Melians (which they do not get). To the extent, then, that the supposedly realist speech of the Athenians is supposed to be a guide to action, it is quite a treacherous one.
In Thucydides, too, there seems to be a tension. Indeed, one famously suspicious reader of Thucydides, Leo Strauss, who was constantly in search of cracks and hidden clues in the text, explained the overall goal of Thucydides to his students as follows:
[T]he first two speeches of [The Peloponnesian War are] the Corcyraeans and the Corinthians in Athens. Now the first word of the Corcyraean speech… is, in literal English translation, the adjective “just.” … In the Corinthians’ speech, the first word is the adjective “necessary.” Now this is clearly Thucydides’s speech and not that of the Corcyraeans and the Corinthians. And what does this mean? This is something which neither speech conveys by itself, but both together as composed by the inspired Thucydides: the relation, the difference, the tension, the opposition between justice or right and necessity. Thucydides never says that this is the major theme of his history and of any political history. He never says so, but… this thought, the most forceful reminder of the secret difficulty regarding justice, illuminates everything which went before and everything which follows.
(This is from the transcripts of Strauss’s 1962 seminar on Thucydides at the University of Chicago.)
Strauss probably read too much into those little textual clues. (Indeed, his interpretive style of finding secret meanings between the lines has generated much skepticism.) But it’s hard to deny that Thucydides wants us to think about both justice and necessity. He lays out the tension without telling us how to resolve it.
Carney, as a man of action, can’t do that. He must chart a path, and his discomfort with the Thucydidean tension is a fatal flaw. Is justice a lie or a project? He hesitates. Hence our puzzlement as listeners.
The Thucydidean slip reveals practical problems as well. For example, if the brutal realism of the Athenians is an act of arrogance when uttered by the Powerful, what function does it play when proposed by the Less Powerful (or, if you prefer, by the Middle Powers)? What language can the Less Powerful now use to make sense of the world? Strauss notes that the Athenians’ “open impiety” led to civil and military disaster; but for there to be “impiety,” there must be something sacred in the first place. And where is it, in Carney’s speech? If we have always known “that the story of the international rules-based order was partially false,” what exactly does it mean to try to build something “more just” as Carney proposes?
One possible solution to the puzzle is to distinguish the descriptive diagnosis from the normative endorsement. Carney, one might say, is merely unmasking what the Athenians defend. But it’s hard to find signs of robust normative aspiration in Carney’s speech, except for a few crumbs dropped distractedly here and there. The “unhappiness” of the text lies precisely there. Justice has fallen through the cracks of meaning, and the tension has been relegated to the subconscious.
Reading more Thucydides might help: not just the snippets that support the brutal demands of necessity, but also those that warn us against abandoning justice and reveal the tension between the two. As Freud would say, the first step is uncovering the tension; but then the patient must work through it.