By John von Heyking, May 18, 2009 in Pedagogy and Teaching
The nature of a particular regime's behavior is a key focus of our study of Thucydides' History. The students hear the Athenians defend their actions as those any strong power would take. International strength (or lack thereof) defines action, not regime, according to this argument. Yet, the Athenians themselves credit their strength to their innovative spirit (which their enemies call 'pleonexia, or overreaching). It seems one can never completely dissociate the character of a regime with the ways it defines its self-interest, ambition, and fears.
The students are surprised to see innovation (or progress) so vividly linked to imperialism because while progress is one of their core beliefs, imperialism certainly is not. Innovation seems to imply an expansive economy that requires an expanding sphere of alliances, if not subjects, to secure material resources to feed that innovation. Even if one accepts the classical liberal argument that international trade is conducted among equal bargainers, one still needs a large naval force (e.g., navies of ancient Athens, England during its imperial age, or, today, the United States) to maintain the political peace that secures the economic peace.
When we cover Canada's Founders, the students read about the "glory argument" whereby confederation offers greater opportunities for ambitious citizens to test themselves. Backwaters become standing water, as it were. By and large, the students sympathize with that argument about confederation. They are eager to test themselves against the world, and they want a large playing field to maximize the chances their challenges will be worthy of their ambitions.
My students are less sure when they see their ambitions tied to innovation or progress, which is tied to imperialism. This is especially troublesome for many of them who tend to identify the United States as the imperialistic power of the world. By examining the link between Athenian innovation and empire, they see how their own regime might be connected to empire. In this light, Canada, which is the same sort of regime, plays the mafia wife who enjoys her pearls but does not want to know where the bodies are buried.
The students learn about the Spartan sense of themselves as moderate or clear-sighted (sophrosyne). I use PowerPoint slides, and on one of them I have an image of Luigi Massini's "Education in Sparta," which shows a Spartan youth learning the evils of immoderation by observing the follies of a drunkard. I get a chuckle or two from the students when I tell them the Spartan youth is watching one of them at the bar on a Friday night. How would they feel if their 12-year-old younger brother saw them like that? While that's not the same as Spartan shame, they do seem to see how the Spartans used shame to enforce sophrosyne and honor.
I tend to play up Thucydides' apparent criticisms of Athenian democracy, including its pleonexia and the fickleness of its mob. I do this to moderate my students' democratic self-love, which their culture, not to mention the bulk of their undergraduate education, tends to flatter. As with their reading of Socrates and Canada's Founders, they learn some criticisms of democracy that I hope will enable them to distinguish justice, practical wisdom, moderation, and courage from the democratic definitions our society tends to paint of virtue, including fairness, cunning, pusillanimity, and egalitarianism.
