Annoying Books

Often I find that reading books that I disagree with is more productive than reading ones with which I agree. I suppose that I have to take a step back and try to work out what it is that I disagree with, rather than just forge forward safe in the knowledge that I and the author are of one mind.

As a case in point, the philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga is my favourite ‘irritating’ philosopher. The reason for this is, to me at least, a little mysterious. To some extent I do agree with some of what he says. I could, if I applied myself sufficiently, agree with quite a lot of what he says. And yet I find that something in his works annoys me. If ever I want a good intellectual work out, I read a chunk of what he has written and try to establish why I disagree. I have not really managed that yet. I suppose that if I ever do, I will have become some sort of philosopher.

This post, in initial conception, was going to be about Wolgang Reinhard’s ‘A Short History of Colonialism’. This is a tome from my winter book box which I finished a week or so ago, and rather good it is too. By ‘good’ I mean, of course, that on the whole and insofar as I know anything about colonialism, I agree with the book. Colonialism is intrinsically neither particularly good nor bad overall. It can be very good or very bad of individuals, leading to massive enrichment, slavery and death. But the overall accounting of colonialism is harder to judge.

I have, from time to time on the blog, attempted to provoke slightly by suggesting that wargaming, in some of its aspects, are neo-colonial. By this I have meant that we force non-European armies and political entities into European forms. In fact, it can be argued that this is exactly what Europeans did, for example, in some parts of Africa, where they ruled through appointing tribal chiefs, on the assumption that there must be a tribe somewhere.

However, Reinhard makes a careful distinction between colonialism in its various forms, which he wants to treat as a value neutral label, and imperialism, by which he means the projection of great power rivalry onto the world stage in such activities as the ‘Scramble for Africa’. These activities, which included the newly arrived great powers of the United States and Japan, were far more damaging to the colonised regions than the previous British trading hegemony, although that too was not without its faults.  

The accusation I can thus make to provoke has to be modified in this light to accuse some wargaming of neo-imperialism, then. I suspect that, if unpacked thoroughly, there would be some substance to the accusation, if only that wargaming, as wargaming, usually requires two enemies to be willing to stand up and fight. To that extent, given that European warfare might be described as being more about that than some other forms of warfare around the world, the accusation might stick. However, it may also be noted to be full of holes as other, non-European, armies did, from time to time, stand and fight.

Having now spent a considerable time (or number of words, at least) describing what the post was going to be about, I can now move on to what it is about. In a sense I have not gone mad (or madder than usual) because it does link up.

The other book I have just finished from my book box is Stephen R. L. Clark’s ‘Ancient Mediterranean Philosophy’. I did find this book rather annoying and, in places, rather obscure. That could be because he covers an awful lot of time and space, and large chunks are devoted to ancient authors of whom I have heard little. It is hardly an introductory work, I think, and pays little heed to the standard ‘Greek and Roman Philosophy’ of normal academic process.

Clark’s main point, as I understand it, is that ancient philosophers were not doing what we think of as philosophy. He understands the ancient authors as doing something along the lines of constructing plausible world views and ways of life, not some sort of abstract, cool, detached and analytic thought. This is not, so far as I am aware, a particularly original insight – Pierre Hadot’s ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ (1995) has trodden that path before. But Clark throws his net wider. He encompasses Jewish and early Christian thought as philosophy, as well as Egyptian and Babylonian thinkers and (although I suspect he would dispute the term) proto-scientists.

The point that struck me about all this is not the detail, on which I am not an expert and cannot really comment, but how alien to modern thinking ancient ways were. The world view is, in point of fact, completely different. The ideas about gods and their interaction with the world are so alien as to be almost completely incomprehensible. Even though some of the early philosophers are characterised as proto-scientists, that was not what they thought they were doing. The idea of experiment, for example, was far from their thinking.

In terms of wargaming, of course, the point is hopefully obvious to any reader who has struggled through thus far. A Roman army, for example, was doing many things, and some of them are not the sorts of things we would expect of an army. We force it into modern categories, as we force Plato, for example, into the modern conception of philosophy. We might talk about Roman tactics, or logistics, but given the foregoing, perhaps we need to reconsider these terms. Were the Romans thinking tactics, or were they doing the obvious (to them) given the circumstances, or even recreating the great Roman armies of centuries before?

I am not sure of the answers here, or whether there can, in fact, be any answers. I am fairly sure that we could not wargame without forcing the Romans into a modern framework and categorization. But whether that necessity amounts to some sort of imperialism over the past I really cannot say.