EMOTION, NOT THOUGHT:

As Covid-19 continues, we have started using a new vocabulary in our struggle to understand its effects: "brain fog," "breakthrough cases," "long haulers," "Covid rage." Thucydides, too, pushed language to better understand the full effects of the pandemic on the life of his city. It led him to an important insight into a critical moment in the politics of his own day. His terminology also raises serious questions for our own time, for he knew that political decision-making may be more deeply impaired by a pandemic than citizens recognize.

Thucydides did not hesitate to explore such effects. He did this by recounting a matter ostensibly only loosely related to the pandemic.

By the end of its second year, the war was going so badly for Athens that its legislative assembly voted to send a delegation to Sparta to sue for peace. This was a total repudiation of Pericles's strategy and of his leadership.

Pericles believed--and Thucydides clearly shares his view--that the Athenians' decision was not based on a cool-headed assessment of the strategic situation, but on an impulsive reaction to the pandemic, which had left the citizenry vulnerable to its unspoken and unrecognized emotional effects. That, above all else, was what needed to be brought into the open and forthrightly addressed.

Pericles knew that he would have to deal with these emotions if his city were to avoid what he regarded as a disastrous blunder. So, using his authority as a general, he convened another session of the assembly to focus attention on what he regarded as the underlying causes of the blunder. It would do little good, he realized, to describe the economic consequences of a capitulation or conjure up an image of Spartan troops imposing a narrow oligarchy on a once proudly democratic city. Instead of these obvious rhetorical strategies, he would have to deal with the emotions underlying the decision.

Here Thucydides stretches his language, adopting, or perhaps coining, a remarkable phrase to describe this remarkable rhetorical strategy. Its intent was, he says, to "lead the enragement of their judgment onto gentler and less fearful ground."

The phrase is built on a Greek term, orge, often translated as anger or rage, but which includes as well a loss of ability to restrain any of a number of intense emotions and drives. It implies that the Athenians were not just angry; their emotions had taken over, affecting their ability to make sound judgments. Even worse, Thucydides indicates, they were not aware of what was happening to them.

They had good reason to be angry--at the war, at Pericles's strategy, at the terrible pandemic. But that pandemic had left the citizenry vulnerable to something worse, hotheaded decision-making. That's what a pandemic does, as Pericles explains in his speech to the Athenian Assembly: "A great disruption falling on you suddenly has impoverished your understanding." For, he explains, "something so swift, unexpected and unaccountable enslaves one's judgment." That, Pericles asserts, "is what has happened to you."

To speak in such a confrontational way risked intensifying the assembly's anger, but Pericles pushed on with a powerful speech. Yet, it was only partially successful. The Athenians, apparently recognizing the force of his analysis, decided to stick with his strategy, but in their continuing anger imposed a fine on him, large enough to remove him temporarily from office.

Pericles was willing to undergo personal risk for what he believed was the good of his endangered city. A demagogue would be more self-serving, recognizing in the distress caused by a pandemic an opportunity for advantage and self-gratification. Demagogues, ancient and modern, know how to exploit such situations, then pretend they had nothing to do with the outcome. A few inflammatory speeches--nothing need be explicit--can turn a crowd into an angry mob, provided conditions are right.

Thus, while a pandemic in ancient Athens may seem inconsequential when we are trying to cope with a pandemic of our own, Thucydides's analysis of the political consequences of the Athenian pandemic raises pressing questions for American politics today, most important, perhaps, whether the Covid-19 pandemic can affect the body politic as gravely as it does the health of its individual citizens.

The crowd attacking the U.S. Capitol building on January 6 is an obvious example of such "enragement of judgment." Yet, it presented itself as a political act, an exercise of a constitutional right to freedom of expression. Clearly, however, it was mob violence driven by blind rage. Thucydides would see behind such enragement the pandemic's erosion of civilized norms--not that the pandemic caused the riot, in some narrow sense, but by heightening and exacerbating emotions, thereby it helped provide the conditions, the tinder, for such an unprecedented flare-up.

Tweet   @brothersjudd