New republics

There was a time when libertarians fantasized about starting their own countries on floating platforms. Now anyone can do it from home, on a digital platform. Some of these new countries are quite big. Facebook now has 1.7 billion users, more citizens (if you want to look at it that way) than China, and more adherents than Catholicism. 

If you're thinking that websites like this are just games ('Twitter isn't real life' etc.), you'd be right. But games are a serious business. Game designer Reed Berkowitz recently explored how QAnon (whose shaman is pictured) might have grown out of the same sorts of incentives that are generated by live-action role-playing and alternate reality games. People are given a quest (Who is Q?) and the motivation to want to complete it (this will show you the way thing really are). They build a world around them without a graphics card in sight.

This may sound like a new idea, or at least an eccentric one, but it's actually a highly familiar one in political science and economics, at least in the branch of economics known as the New Institutional Economics (NIE). The Nobellist Douglass North defined institutions as 'the rules of the game' in a given society. He may have meant it as a metaphor, but there's no reason why the rules of the game can't be the rules of a literal game.

Or, say, the ways a website is set up - its terms of service, its modalities, its incentive structures. The differences between social media sites might seem like just a matter of choosing different products - Twitter allows you less space per message; this bus company lets you drink coffee onboard. But there's more going on. The different sites have a vibe, a style, even (by now) a history - and we act differently when we're on (or in) them.

That's partly because of the multiplication of incentives within these worlds. I saw a link to Berkowitz's piece on Justin Murphy's Twitter feed. Murphy left academia, as he says, 'to spend more time on research and teaching,' and he seems increasingly interested in online learning not just a site for educational content, but for educational incentives. That last thing was what MOOCs were lacking. Murphy will send you an email a day (if you want him to) to help you learn R (What is R?). Khan Academy and other sites give you points, badges, etc. so that you keep levelling up in the game of Knowledge.

Meanwhile, in the world of real games (whatever that means), video games are apparently getting longer and increasingly nesting 'micro-transactions' within them to get you to pay up for a snazzier helmet, a deadlier weapon, or a more interesting adventure. (From what I can tell, this is one of the complainers' main complaints about the beautiful Assassin's Creed Odyssey.) We're long past the point at which companies have started selling real-world products in digital universes like Second Life (in fact, that's apparently something Reed Berkowitz used to do for a living). We're surely not far from Borgesian 'games' that electro-shock your brain into suffering or ecstasy as you proceed bravely through their new world.

But we're off on a side-quest now, so let's go back to something I wrote before. The different social media sites that already exist, I said, 'have a vibe, a style, even (by now) a history - and we act differently when we're on (or in) them.' If this reminds you of countries, well, that was sort of the point. Diving into an online community is kind of like visiting a foreign country and immersing itself into its exotic ways, its alien norms.

The reason countries used to be so different was because they had different pasts that led to different institutions, norms, customs - a different cultural infrastructure that in turn helped shape the way people were. I'm old enough to remember a time when people would talk openly about the way different countries (and its inhabitants) were, and even if some of this was ignorant or over-confident, some of it seemed about right. It had to be, in a sense - if changing laws or customs has any power to change behaviours, countries with different laws and customs should have a different vibe.

Of course, they still do, to a great extent, and this should remind us of something. The kinds of incentive structures nations have built up over the centuries are pretty formidable, and some of the axes they wield (like laws) ultimately trump the structures set up by social media companies. Twitter can oust Trump from its platform, true, but Twitter still ultimately exists at the pleasure of the US and other governments. Nation-states aren't going away any time soon, and their age-old institutions and norms continue to shape us in profound ways.

Still, sites like the United States of America are starting to seem a bit last century. If it's incentives and information that shape people, especially as they move like questers through whatever spaces open before them, trying to make meaning out of their lives - if that's what is forming individuals and communities, Arizona and Invercargill are really no match for the world wide web. What we'll have - what we to some extent already have - will be new republics shaped online, with new compatriots that are as different, and sometimes as hostile, to each other as Spaniards and Swedes were in 1634. 

The only difference is that this time, the citizens of these new republics - dressed differently, speaking different and mutually unintelligible languages, worshiping different gods - won't be separated by channels or ranges, but will be living side-by-side. And when fighting breaks out, as it has already started to, old-timers speaking of 'internal' or 'civil' war won't seem alarmist, but just quaint. 

Lockdowns and liberalism

For all the different forms the debate over the lockdowns has taken, it's the absence of one argument that's surprised me the most. At least until recently (as the lockdowns have dragged on), I was aware of very few people, at least in mainstream media, emphasizing that the lockdowns were a violation of our civil liberties.

That's surprising, because they clearly did restrict our liberties to a degree that's probably not been paralleled since the Second World War. Putting the whole population under house arrest is quite a serious move, not only virtually cancelling freedom of movement, but also related rights (some of which are constitutionally enshrined in the US) like freedom of assembly - at least until the 'Black Lives Matter' protests.

Come to think of it, though, maybe the reason the civil liberties argument hasn't had much of an airing is simple: it wouldn't be particularly convincing in the context of a global pandemic. That's because a pandemic is a situation in which my freedom clearly impacts others. My going about the place risks spreading a disease to others, and thus doing them harm.

In other words, it violates John Stuart Mill's 'harm principle,' perhaps the essential principle of liberalism. The idea is that people should be free to do as they like as long as they don't harm others. The only problem with this famous principle is that it's no help at all.

Everything we do harms others in some way; even if all we do is sit at home and meditate we're using up space and resources that might have gone to somewhere else. And besides, someone might find my sitting at home and meditating annoying and hence (so the complaint might run) psychologically harmful. So where do we draw the line?

As an objection to Mill's principle as a philosophical principle this seems pretty devastating. But it may retain its usefulness as pragmatic principle or as a rule of thumb. Most liberal democratic societies have in fact operated more or less on the principle that people shouldn't do things which clearly cause others serious harm (on a reasonable definition of 'harm'). Who decides what clearly constitutes harm on a reasonable definition? We do, through our democratically-enacted laws.

This isn't the blog post where I tell you whether I think the lockdowns did more good than harm. At least not at any length: my sense at this point is that, while Covid-19 is clearly dangerous (killing something in the region of 0.1% of people it infects), it's significantly less dangerous than some thought (this widely-read article depended on a 3-4% fatality rate, for example). Against this danger we have to stack all the negative health effects of the lockdown.

Part of those will flow from the economic downturn caused by the lockdowns. But part of them will flow from the suspension of our freedoms. And they'll do so in a way which sheds light on the value of those freedoms.

Simply put, freedom isn't simply a matter of the consequences of what are sometimes taken to be natural entitlements. Besides its moral claims, it also has pragmatic ones. One of these is that it allows decisions about individual lives to be made by the people who know the most about those lives - those individuals themselves.

The lockdowns effectively prevented people from making decisions in reaction to the circumstances of their own lives. My own parents are an example: my father suffers from a medical condition that benefits from him going to the gym, something that also helps release my mother from the strain of being a care-giver for a time. But the British government decided that it would be best for them to stay cooped up at home.

This is a version of a problem Joanna Williams touched on in her piece on domestic violence and the lockdown. She concluded that that problem could easily have been eased if the government had simply decided to trust those who needed 'to take a second walk or go and sit on a park bench for half an hour.'

The point is that liberalism doesn't just function as a system of moral entitlements. It's also partly a solution to problems of information. How do we know who needs to go sit on a park bench, get out and exercise, or whatever? The government could try to gather all that information itself, but it's far simpler just to let individuals make their own choices. They know their own circumstances better than anyone else, and they're more motivated to take care of themselves.

This is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the points at which we can see liberalism and democracy intersect or overlap. Democracy, too, can be seen as the consequence of moral entitlements (the idea that people should be political equal). But it can also be seen as a way of gathering individual preferences in the most efficient way - by allowing people to express them, and then counting them up.

Of course, one of the things people have long seemed to want is a stable state that can ensure a basic level of order. That usually involves imposing some minimal rules. But there's a danger of the state overstepping its bounds, like a clumsy Gulliver, keen to help, who ends up squashing whole footprints of Lilliputians. The trouble is precisely that he's too big, and too far away, to see what the the smaller people are up to, or to hear everything they are trying to say to him.

There are obviously only two solutions: Gulliver knows his place, or he's replaced by a more nimble giant composed entirely of Lilliputians, a millions-strong Megazord. This is something we will come back to. In the meantime, a well-meaning Gulliver is stalking the earth - lovingly and crushingly.

Wealth and health

One of the tropes of the current crisis has been that to re-open the economy is to sacrifice lives on the altar of profits. It's also been widely pointed out that this is a false dichotomy. In fact, wealth and health tend go together. Economic downturns lead to deaths as predictably as viruses. In this post I just want to re-state this view one more time, since I think it's a crucial one to grasp if we want to react sensibly to this (or any other crisis).

As the above graph suggests, there's a positive association between longevity and GDP. GDP and child mortality seem to be inversely related. Deaths from the five most lethal infectious diseases have declined as the global economy has grown.

Correlations like this aren't a slam-dunk case that wealth causes health. Studies that have looked at the association in detail have found it to be a slightly complicated one. But even if the exact causal mechanisms at various stages of growth can be difficult to disentangle, the basic picture seems clear: wealth and health tend to go hand in hand. That's the case not only if you look at individual countries through time, but also if you look the set of countries at a particular point in time and compare the well-being of people in richer and poorer parts of the world (even controlling for other factors).

Moreover, unlike in the case of spurious associations (scores for M. Night Shyamalan's films going down on Rotten Tomatoes in line with newspaper sales, for example), it's not hard to think of reasons why these two variables might be linked, and why the wealth of a country might help its people be healthier. Richer countries can give more funding to health services. They can invest in better-quality housing, safer infrastructure, and a more comprehensive social safety net. Its citizens are wealthier, and they can spend more money on their well-being.

So far we've been looking at the positive side of the story, with better wealth being associated with health. But there's also a dark side to the association, with poverty being associated with disease and shorter life-spans.  You can see this effect with economic downturns even in the rich world: opioid deaths rose by 85% in parts of the US where car factories had closed down (and here too it's easy to think of how this might have happened, with unemployment leading to despair and addiction). A 1% rise in the unemployment rate makes working-age men 6% more likely to die of any cause.

And that's in the rich world. Economic growth is even more vital to the developing world, since increases in wealth just make the citizens of rich countries even healthier, whereas people in poor countries live much closer to death and disaster. They're highly dependant on trade and exchange with the rich world. It's no surprise that UNICEF is now predicting a 45% rise in child mortality because of lockdown-related disruptions.

The relationship between economic downturns and health does have its complications. Some studies suggest fewer people die in the actual course of recessions than normal (although more people die of particular causes, like suicide), but there are lasting health costs over the longer term. So even if the coronavirus lockdowns are followed by a V-shaped recovery, with locked-up demand immediately bursting out again, then we might expect our health (on average) to be slightly worse than it otherwise would have been over the next few decades.

There probably are a few people out there who would put profit for themselves ahead of other people's lives. But most of the people raising warnings about the lockdowns are probably just trying to draw attention to the harm we can do to ourselves if do too much damage to the economy. Whether Covid-19 is dangerous enough to justify the public-health costs associated with the economic downturns that are now starting to bite - that's a different question, and one that's best left for another day (and maybe even another website). But it's not a simple question.

'Your money or your life?' isn't a question that, in ordinary circumstances, anyone would want to be asked. But it's actually a much easier question to answer than the one many countries are faced with now.

Epic drop

A few months ago, it was announced that Oxford is proposing to drop Homer's Iliad and Vergil's Aeneid as compulsory first-year texts. I found this particularly interesting, since I did Classics at Oxford, and hence studied the two texts in question in my first couple of terms. In fact, though by the time I started college (2002), I don't think we were required to read the whole of the Aeneid in Latin (only 8 books out of 12, if memory serves), the whole of the Iliad in Greek was still compulsory. I believe that requirement was watered down as well the following year, to 22 books out of 24. I'm thus one of the last hundred or so people to have read the whole of the Iliad at Oxford in my first term (and the following vacation - I have a bittersweet memory of working through Hector and Achilles' duel on Christmas Day). And I'm definitely among a dwindling number of people anywhere who've read the whole thing in the original. Looking back, I feel quite ambivalent about the whole experience, as I do about my degree as a whole.

First off, it's worth pointing out how unusual it is to read that much Greek these days. Even when I was doing my PhD exams in the US, we weren't asked to read either of the Homeric epics complete, only a few books. Some European Classics undergraduates from outside of Oxford will have read that much by the time they finish their first degrees, but not many, and North American Classics majors will be lucky to have read more than a couple books all the way through in Greek. Is this a boast? In part, yes. Reading the whole of the Iliad through took me a lot of time and effort - at least an hour a day for months. It did give me a deeper experience of the work; nothing quite brings home the futility and horror of war like reading through endless descriptions of pitiless bronze slicing through people's limbs. But it was also frustrating and deeply stupid.

That is, the way we were asked to do it was. One of the problems with Oxford's Classics course is that it's still slowly coming down from a 19th-century high in which it could be taken for granted that anybody embarking upon it would have spent the lion's share of their schooling on learning the living daylights out of Greek and Latin. (My favorite example of just how nuts they went on that is Aldous Huxley's reminiscence of spending a full day every week during his time at Eton just on Greek composition.) In those days, first-year undergraduates probably could just read through Homer without much help. (William Gladstone would later look down on the undergraduates who came after him for being able to have recourse to cribs like lexica - he, of course, improvised his own vocabulary lists, which built character.) Nowadays, things are different, even among the two hundred or so undergraduates who turn up having done A-Level Greek.

I know, since I was one of them. I turned up with an A (the top grade in those days!) and having read Iliad 16 as a set text, and...couldn't really read the Iliad to save my life. I did make use of all the aids I could find - lexica (sorry Gladstone), commentaries, and so on. But Homeric Greek is quite hard, and I still think it makes very little sense to ask first-year undergraduates to read more than half of it on their own. In fact, I'm increasingly convinced of that, since I've been teaching Greek to undergraduates for going on ten years now, and (somewhat to my relief), they find reading Greek hard too. They need a lot of help, and there are a lot of things you might well want to ask about or discuss along the way, so we tend to move through texts quite slowly.

So it might be all to the good to move the Iliad to the second part of the course ('Greats'), where students particularly keen on Homer can work on it with more attention, and with their Greek in a better state. (The old 'Early Greek Hexameter' course would seem to be just the place.) That would also give students more choice in general. There's a macro version of this point that's been ably put by Solveig Lucia Gold: the Oxford Classics course is in general quite narrow compared to North American-style à la carte degrees. I'm definitely among those who think UK degrees could and should become more like that; in the meantime (as Gold notes), both systems have their strengths and weaknesses.

One of the strengths of the European system is that it allows students who want to to specialize much more quickly, and to get a really solid grounding in what they've chosen to study. That's nowhere more evident than in the Oxford 'Literae Humaniores' course, in which reading the Iliad and Aeneid has always been only the first step in a very extensive tour of Greco-Roman culture (especially its literary texts). And if you want a really solid grounding in Greco-Roman culture, it makes an awful lot of sense to start by reading a lot of Homer, who was always seen by subsequent Greeks as both the first and the best of their poets. Homer may not have quite been their Bible or their Koran (though theological readings of Homer were a thing, his text wasn't the Revelation of a monotheistic religion); but he was their Chaucer and their Shakespeare at once. The best comparison is probably to say that he was like Dante for the Italians.

It's also nice, I might add, to read whole works. I don't know if this is a dirty secret, but this is getting to be something that classicists very rarely do, at least at undergraduate level. I know, because I'm one of the instructors failing to get through whole texts in the time allotted to me. But I don't blame myself - it takes time to prepare and discuss these texts, and that means it can be hard to get through even a play in a single, six- or seven-week block of classes. Arguably, though, it does make sense for people getting majors in Greek literature (or even Greek or Classics) to have read one or two works all the way through in the original language by the time they finish.

That, of course, needn't mean it's the Iliad students have to read all the way through. They could read one or two shorter works entire. And shorter works make up most of the rest of Greek literature, including, come to think of it, the Odyssey. Why didn't they make me read the Odyssey in my first term? The conventional answer is that the Iliad was always considered the weightier and greater work in antiquity, and while that may be true, the Odyssey was hardly straight-to-DVD either, at least not to the point of justifying me being made to read 24 books of one epic and 0 of the other.

This brings us to one of the reasons that Oxford has given for proposing this change. The main reason I've seen is that this will make things easier for female students, for a range of reasons. One is that they might be less into all the killing that takes place in the Iliad than the lads. I think that's true - after all, preference for rough-and-tumble play is one of the most well-documented of the many natural differences in interest and disposition between men and women, and that seems to be reflected in differing tastes for things like violent movies. The most I think this argument would justify, though, is for students to be given a choice between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Then students, male or female, could choose to spend their time on what most called to them - the harrowing world of the Iliad, or the magical narratives of the Odyssey.

Oxford's main line of reasoning, though, appears to go as follows. More boys than girls take A-Level Greek and Latin. That's true, especially for Greek, with most of the 200 or so pupils who take A-Level Greek coming from all-male boarding schools (which was also, by the way, the case for me). Because of that, male students will on average have a big advantage in reading through the Iliad and the Aeneid in their first two terms. That's also true. Therefore, the argument runs, we shouldn't make understanding those two epics such a major part of the first phase of the degree ('Mods'). That's where I'm not so sure.

One reason is that if having done A-Level Greek gives you an advantage with Homer and Vergil, it'll also give you an advantage with all the other texts on the course (which has a lot to do with reading Greek and Latin texts). If students from certain schools have already read some Homer, students who haven't could be put at even more of a disadvantage by not having a thorough exposure to these fundamental works at an early stage. Besides, Oxford already has a series of variations of the traditional Classics course for students who've done A-Level Latin but not Greek, Greek but not Latin, or neither.

In the end, I don't really mind whether Homer and Vergil's martial epics remain compulsory for first-year students at Oxford. I don't think it would be a disaster if they didn't, and obviously there are bigger issues out there. But if the proposed change doesn't concern me all that much, some of the reasoning behind it does. In the end, it may be that reading Greek and Latin, like other advanced skills - chemistry, maths, or playing football or an instrument to a high level - is the kind of thing that you get better at if, for whatever reason, you've been able to spend more time on it. To what extent it might make sense to change the requirements of highly competitive training programmes for people who've done less of these things - well, that's a complicated topic, and one best left for another time. But the answer's probably not 'to an infinite extent.'