Because I had to have a name and this is the best I could come up with, right?
The name comes from the Melian Dialogue, the infamous exchange in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, from which we derive the saying “might makes right.” It is also one of a set of classic texts in which some international relations theorists ground their belief that power is the eternal currency of global politics.
And they’re probably right, in a way. Power has a foundational ring to it. It’s one of those words that gets used in the absence of more concrete details. But the problem always comes when you sit down to figure out just what it’s all about. Michel Foucault, one of my favorite explorers of this power thing, never pinned it down. He could locate it, describe it, provoke it. But he could never say what it was for.
This same uncertainty is at work in the Melian Dialogue. The Athenians want the Melians’ island. The Melians don’t want to submit. The Athenians appeal to might, the Melians to right. And, of course, the Athenians win. They take the island. That’s the lesson we’re supposed to learn. Might makes right, right?
But two scholars have a different take, one I find intriguing if you can wade through the jargon that cripples critical academic text these days:
“Thucydides believed that interest and justice are inextricably connected and mutually constitutive. Superficially they appear to be in conflict; almost every debate in history pits considerations of interest against justice. But Thucydides was interested in the underlying and often hidden nature of things. And at this level, his history shows that interests cannot be intelligently considered, formulated and pursued outside a community (homonoia) and the identities it constructs. As the Peloponnesian War progresses, the terms of discourse that functioned at the outset in intelligible ways shift and change and the language and community constituted by it deteriorate into incoherence. Athenians can no longer use the traditional language of justification for their foreign policy. They struggle to find an alternative and finally resort to assertions of pure self-interest backed by military clout. Such a language is not rooted in ideas, is unstable and deprives its speakers of their culture and identities. By using it, Athenians destroy the distinctions among friend, colony, ally, neutral and enemy, and make the world their enemy through a policy of limitless expansion. Athenians have in effect abandoned the culture through which self-interest can intelligently be defined, expressed and bounded. As language deteriorates, so does behaviour… Thucydides’ history indicates that while there is often tension between interest and justice, they are also two sides of the same coin. They validate and give meaning to one another.”
– Richard Ned Lebow and Robert Kelly, “Thucydides and hegemony: Athens and the United States”, Review of International Studies, 27:4
What I think they are saying, in their roundabout way, is that values give meaning to power. A language of interests, without shared values, becomes unintelligable.
It is this communication gap which I find so interesting about the Melian Dialogue. For all the arguments made, there is little attempt on either side to engage the assumptions of its interlocutor. Of course, the dialogue is almost certainly reconstructed (ie – it never actually happened), but the arguments are likely authentic. They mirror many of the same debates we see today. Arguments are not refuted, merely dimissed. For all the work Thucydides does putting the Melians and Athenians in the same room, they might as well have been speaking to themselves.
Without a shared language of interests, each side’s arguments become irrelevant to the other.
This is my general impression of the blogosphere. Each blog is a tiny little empire, proud of its own interests, seething with authority and, for the most part, busy casting itself into a great pile of noise. Blogs might respond or react, but they rarely listen. There is not a dialogue at play, just an endless series of monologues.
Of course there are some interesting blogs. But this isn’t one of them. I’ll say what I’ll say and then throw it out there.
I don’t expect to say much. I prefer to write where people are reading. I set up the blog to have a “presence”, so when I pitch a story an editor can look and see I’m a real person (because I have a blog), that I have done stuff, that I still do stuff, that I consist of stuff and might actually deliver something they would publish.
