When you know someone for almost all your adult life, you don’t expect to be surprised when you read his obituary. I felt that way when Jim Tatum routed me to Benjamin Fortson’s memorial on the death of Don Cameron.… But I was surprised, moved and enriched by it.  Whether you knew Don or not, Fortson’s words are worth pondering.  They catch the spirit of a remarkable human being, and of an era in American liberal education. 

​ Over the years Don may have taught  15,000 undergraduates at the University  Michigan, most of them Honors students enrolled in the Great Books classes he taught. He loved the texts he taught and teaching itself.  It worked: eyes were opened and lives changed.
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But it didn’t stop at the classroom door. Andy Szegedy Maszak told me a story about Don reaching out to him. While an undergraduate at Michigan Andy for various reasons never enrolled in any of Don’s classes,
“ … and yet I think of him as one of my cherished teachers.    It was a turbulent time, and Don was not happy about a lot of the student protests, which I tended to support. I think I learned from him what it meant to have a spirited, civil, adult conversation.  “
What a gift! I wonder whether that capacity was simply a feature of Don’s personality, or whether it was also nurtured by the books he so valued and taught so well.  Synergy, I bet.
          I admire the work  he did on Aeschylus and Thucydides,  but for me he was the embodiment of the study of the Great Books.  That means of course than in addition to personal loss his passing marks for me the end of the era in which liberal education was nurtured by those books.
          Where do we go now? I’ll explore that question in a subsequent post,; meanwhile, a moment  of blog silence in honor of H. Don Cameron.

​She is classically trained with important publications on ancient democracy; she has seen clearly how it links to the problems democracy confronts today; she left a cushy post at the Institute for Advanced Study to direct Harvard’s Edmond Safra Center for Ethics and helped launch the Educating for American Democracy project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Now she has decided  to put all this academic experience to the test in the “real world.”
Here’s the link to the Boston Globe’s coverage of Danielle Allen’s announcement of her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  And, if you share my enthusiasm for her candidacy, here’s  the link  for contributing to her campaign.  Or, if you’re like me and prefer to write a check, send it to:
Committee to Elect Danielle Allen
124 Washington Street, Suite 101
Foxborough, MA 02035
 
 

Based on comments by Jed Atkins, Paul Cartledge, Richard Martin, Greg Nagy,  Josh Ober and Dan-el Padilla
,
The discussion of civil society in Haiti and elsewhere (blog posting of July 16) stimulated  some lively comments, some on the blog (scroll down and see), others as email messages.  Here’s a summary of some of these responses.
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No one was  optimistic about the future of Haiti, but some people agreed that building civil society offered the best hope.  Greg Nagy , for example, urged a  “focus on supporting the work of community-based organizations (primarily NGOs), rather than on the counterproductive habit of  funneling aid to governmental bureaucracies that, as we all know, are endemically vulnerable to corruption and, in fact, sustain not a “democracy”, but a covert small elite plutocracy – or rather, kleptocracy – that has dominated Haitian politics behind the scenes ever since the days of Haitian independence.”
      But what about the concept of civil society itself? Is it too narrow?  Too colonial? Too ‘white’? Too tied to a thought pattern rooted in the Enlightenment and more recently in the work of Havel. Habermas and other Europeans?
 
Dan-el Padilla wrote challenging the dominance of such concepts when  applied to Haiti: ” that discussions of building civil society in Haiti will need to be more steeped in and responsive to the work of Haitian scholars: I've been recommending Jean Casimir's The Haitians: A Decolonial History to anyone and everyone who will listen these past few months, as an example of a work that shifts focus away from Ango-American discourses about (eg) civil society and towards more dynamic and finely braided local knowledges and practices of institution-building.”
I find this interesting at the theoretical level   Can we can extrapolate from Dan-el’s observation to some  wide-ranging questions, whether, for example, we outsiders can even recognize indigenous state-building efforts when we see them  Is that why US efforts in troubled areas such as Afghanistan and Haiti so often bog down? Or, more generally, whether concepts such as civil society can be applied cross culturally.  If so, students and scholars alike  will benefit from reading Aristotle and, as Jed Atkins reminds me, “ Aristotle is a good person to think with here; Tocqueville, even better!”   Fortunately, we don’t have to choose between them.
Athens in the fifth century before our era provides a good test case for such question. Was there a civil society in Athens, or simply a direct, unmediated relationship between citizen and state, “direct democracy” in a narrow sense?  Or push the conceptual issue one stage further, would we even recognize the institutions of civil society in their Athenian garb?
Paul Cartledge   suggests that there was no civil society in ancient Athens but goes on to make an important observation:.  “The democratic ancient Athenians had no 'civil society', and they were not in any sense liberal, but they knew how to build from the ground up - from the deme.”  
      Exactly! Those  villages in the countryside and extended neighborhoods in urban settings  were immensely important.  But other structures may be important as well. That makes me very excited to  hear about Richard Martin’s  research plans. His email to me  quotes the conclusion of my blog post and then starts panning for gold, “ ‘Build Civil Society’--exactly. How, of course,  is another question ( I would start with bowling leagues, laugh clubs, and unionizing...). As it happens, the whole issue is on my mind as I am wrestling (still) with writing about Aristophanes with a focus on such groups in Athens, from phratries to demes to thiasoi and "kômoi" (as well as kômai). Comedy, too, builds community and not just in a we-vs- them divide.”
      These features of   Athenian society stand between individual citizens and their  government.  They also, I believe, generate knowledge, not grand syntheses or handy maxims, but patterns of understanding that work at multiple levels in the society and account for much of its success..
Was that what Aristotle had in mind  when, as  Josh Ober  reminds us, he discusses: “… the degree to which the parts (say, Attic demes) are strictly subsidiary parts of the whole, they seem to be other than what Havel & Habermas had in mind for civil society. There is some way that democratic diversity adds up to something political and good for Aristotle (at least that’s how I read the famous Politics book 3, chapter 11 on the “wisdom of the many” - but it’s a tricky passage…”
So, back to Aristotle and a treasure trove of other texts from antiquity and modern times . If you really care about the suffering, misgovernment and mismanagement  inflicted on people around the world, you need all the help you can get, ancient and modern.
Well, this is not really the promised ‘summary’ of a rich series of responses, but it gives, I hope, a sense of the important issues involved. So, post a comment and if you like the discussion pass it on to others.. 
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The Guardian reports a  pilot program  to expand  instruction in Latin at state schools in the UK:  https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jul/31/latin-introduced-40-state-secondaries-england?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
  Thanks to Paul Woodruff for calling this to my attentjon.
   Like many in the US the Brits have been put off by fears that Latin is "elitist."  The answer to that objection, of course, is to see that Latin is available in schools serving every social, economic and racial group. 

​Goals, Compromise, Leadership.  
by Josh Ober
(with an assist from Edmund Burke)
Guest Blogger
Note: Josh responded some while ago to the discussion on this blog of resilience, especially at the institutional level. I found his comments so important that I asked his permission to post them as a free-standing post. Let us hear what you think about it.
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I agree strongly with Bob Kaster on the need for a set of shared principles - which does not mean shared ideological or partisan commitments all the way down - but does mean having a basis for making reasoned and ethical choices, together, on a grounds of something other than “the strong win.” And on shared goals - which do not have to be all singing in the same pedagogical choir, but do have to add up to something like your notion of adding to technical skills training (those engineering courses Denis Feeney alluded to…), the goal of  "individuals [students] developing capacities they will need for a productive and rewarding life.” I suppose that those capacities prominently include the ability to compromise, and to do so in a principled way. 
 
I just came across this quote from Edmund Burke (“Speech on conciliation with the colonies,” March 1775: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5655/5655-h/5655-h.htm): 
 
"All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others; and we choose rather to be happy citizens than subtle disputants… But, in all fair dealings, the thing bought must bear some proportion to the purchase paid. None will barter away the immediate jewel of his soul.”
 
So here is my current worry: Burke's statement is NOT likely to be endorsed, or even taken seriously as a matter for discussion, by some of those engaged in the current academic Kulturkampf, either because compromise is considered immoral (that is: all rights are inherent and inalienable and so none may ever be “remitted” ) or because Burke’s opinions are not worth of attention because he was conservative/ imperialist/ otherwise intolerable. 
 
In re. Brook Manville on the essential role of insightful leadership: fully agreed both on the necessity and on your addendum concerning the distinctive form of academic leadership. You and I have both chaired academic departments (in my case both Classics and Political Science) and we both know that chairing is fundamentally "all responsibility/no power." A department chair can try to model the right kind of shared principles, goals, pedagogy, but if one’s colleagues don’t want to be led, they don’t have to be: chairs have very limited carrots and no sticks. Perhaps it is different at “higher” administrative levels, where incentives can at least be offered. But there are no effective sanctions for faculty who choose rankly uncooperative factional behavior that rejects the possibility, indeed the value, of shared principles and goals (unless they are, without compromise, principles and goals of the faction). 
 
I do not think the situation is hopeless. My (perhaps Pollyanna-ish) hope is that at least some students are sufficiently fed up with polemics, and sufficiently eager to gain something of value (beyond technical training), that they will gravitate to courses and to teachers who aim at helping them to develop capacities for flourishing lives. And that academic leaders will reward those teachers and incentivize faculty to offer such courses. We’ll see how that goes. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about Haiti these days, as, I suppose, most of us have.  I have no insight into its present situation, , still less about its future, but reading ad thinking about it have led me to  two strands of thought about democracy, both  Greek in origin  They in turn have led me to some unexpected and perhaps unwelcome inferences, presented here in hope of provoking discussion
                                             --
 
       Why is democracy so difficult? Haiti is a good test case for answers to this question.  If your goal is to establish a lasting, democratic government there, , you have two ways to proceed, as best I can tell.  Both are rooted in ancient Greek patterns of thought but they lead to very different ways of looking at the situation and responding to it.
       The first of the two is a familiar one. It’s based on a widely used taxonomy in which government are classified by the extent of franchise within them: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy. Or if you prefer more emotional language: tyranny, plutocracy and ochlocracy. We get all these words from the Greeks and with them a convenient way of classifying governments.
       This taxonomy may seem purely academic but it has real world consequences.  It focuses attention on eligibility to vote and on free and fair elections. Want a democracy? Make sur everyone can vote and that their votes get properly counted and weighted.   Americans know -or most of us do- how important this is for a democracy. If we want it for our country, surely we should want it for others, too.  So, focus on elections and whatever it takes to ensure they are free and fair, observers, technical support, equipment, maybe even troops.  Then when a duly elected government is in place funnel food, medicine and other aid through it to help the citizenry and build support for the government.
That’s one way of looking at the situation and responding to it.  The second approach derives from a long tradition of political theory, going back to an idea in Aristotle’s Politics reformulated in the Enlightenment, and put to work whenever citizens break away from dictatorships and try to create  a society run by and for  its citizens.  Democracies  seen from this vantage point derive from and depend on the efforts of citizens to take charge of things and make government respond to them, rather than the other way around.
The building blocks of a well-functioning state, then, are all the organizations and structures through which people act for teir  mutual benefit.  That’s why Aristotle started not with a candy shop of different forms of government. but with the household, the neighborhood and other forms of sharing or collaboration (koinonia). 
If he and  political thinkers of a similar cast of mind are right, then a stable democracy begins not with elections but with  strengthening civil society, including a wide range of  neighborhood and social organizations, business and professional associations,  trade unions, religious and philanthropic organizations, even athletic teams and their supporters
People recognize a need, share an objective, band together to do something about it.  No central authority tells them what to do or when to do it.  They probably argue about  the best course of action, take a lot of time to reach a decision, but then roll up their sleeves to do what they can  
Slavery, colonialism, foreign interventions, dictatorships all take a continuing toll.  Drugs, gangs and corruption do further damage.  Haiti has had more than its share of all of these Yet,  there are, as the New York Times has reported,  hundreds of such organizations in Haiti. They face, to be sure, great difficulties – more than I can imagine.  Even in the best of times such  organizations, as we all know, run into difficulties   Their members probably often disagree, get angry with one another, squabble, get discouraged, because of lack of resources, recognition and support.
But they provide an often unrecognized by-product:  Participants in such efforts  develops habits of shared decision making and that in turn is the foundation on which democracy can be built.
They deserve support.
       This way of looking at democracy does not deny the importance of electoral politics, but its priority is clear: Build Civil Society. 

Anther lecture on "resilience:"
 .. lecture held by professor Michele Salzman (Riverside) on 16th July (10 am San Diego/ 7 pm Florence) “Resilience and Resurgence or Decline and Fall: Rome in the Fifth-Century”.
 
These are the Zoom-data that you need in order to join the meeting. 
 
Join Zoom Meeting
https://ucsd.zoom.us/j/98275023675

Meeting ID: 982 7502 3675
 
Password: 310260
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Again.,  thanks to Jim O'Donnell for the  tip.

Jim O'Donnell has called or attention to an ongoing discussion of resilience in antiquity. The fina l session on July 16th sounds  interesting:
CHANGE & RESILIENCE IN ANTIQUITY
Exploring change and resilience in ancient individuals and societies.
Resilient Environments & Roundtable, 16th July 1-3 pm (UK)
At our fifth and final session, we will explore Resilient Environments and conclude with a Roundtable.

1. Erica Angliker (London): “Resilience, Memory and the Worshipping of Divinities at Abandoned Settlements on the Cyclades”
2. Luise Erfurth (Frankfurt): “If worse comes to worst, my neighbors come first”: Social identity as a resilience factor in areas threatened by sea flood”
3. Roundtable with Gil Gambash (Haifa), Rebecca Sweetman (St Andrews) and Kostas Vlassopoulos (Crete).

To attend, please register here: https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtdumorT8qGtb90oWwTE7o98MUxGzQbN1d
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The Department of Classics at Princeton has decided to cut language requirements for majors. This raises two questions, I think:  First, what is the value of the classics for students in our time?  And, second, if the classics do have value for our students, to what extent does that value depend on their having knowledge of the languages?
 
I teach courses on leadership for mid-career executives in an MA program we offer.  I begin each course with a reading and discussion of the opening scene of the Iliad, in which Agamemnon acts out almost all the traits of a bad boss.  Most strikingly, he puts his interests ahead of those of his team, with consequences that could have been ruinous for the team mission. Most of my students have faced bosses with such defects, but they have been too close to their particular situations to identify what it is about bad bosses that makes them so bad. And we have all recently experienced a president who puts his interests ahead of those of the nation.  But the scene in the Iliad is so stark, so clear, so far removed from our politics, that we can see the issues clearly.  It’s a great way to begin, and my students thank me for it. This is just one example of how effectively the classics may be used in leadership education. I have written a book on the subject: reading fine works of history and literature from any culture is (I argue) an essential part of education (notice I do not use the word “training”) for future leaders. Parents who want their students to advance in life are mistaken if they think that the STEM disciplines suffice to prepare young people for success.  They are not. We need to get the word out that the humanities offer keys that our students may use to unlock happy futures.
 
I also teach year-long courses in world literature for first year students in an honors program. I devote the first semester to the literature of war.  We begin with the Iliad and end with the most recent novel I can find that deals with the aftermath of war. Last year I used On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong.  In between we ranged widely—some obvious Shakespeare plays and something much less obvious, the national epic of Vietnam, The Tale of Khieu,  by Nguyen Do. At the end of the year, at a pizza party, the students started talking about the books they had enjoyed the most.  The Iliad was at the top, tied with Vuong’s delicious and disturbing novel. Why? Simply, the Iliad tells its tale brilliantly, and it is a wonderful tale, in which the bloody, dehumanizing trauma of war is balanced by Achilles’ very human love for Patroclus and then, at the end, by his appreciating father-love in Priam as, he knows it from his own father. It helps, of course, that I used an accessible translation (Lombardo’s), book-ended the Iliad with an absolutely contemporary work, and balanced it with works from other cultures. And that’s a great way to use the classics.
 
That’s enough to give you the idea: my students find value in the classics.  Do they need to know Latin and Greek for this?  Certainly not. But someone needs to know the languages in order to produce accessible, contemporary translations.  And this need continues into the future.  So we need at least a few language scholars.  That said, for the reasons I have given above, I hope we do offer majors in classics that can attract larger numbers of students.  So, yes, I am happy to welcome majors in classical or Mediterranean civilizations that are not hedged around with tough language requirements.
 
Paul Woodruff is Professor of Philosophy and of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin.  

      After posting Bob Kaster’s insightful observation in this blog , I asked Brook Manville, a classicist now in the business world, how he thought such a consensus can be developed within a department. His answer: leadership.  It turns out Brook is co-author of the Harvard Business Review’s  Leader’s Handbook.
    Bob Kaster is right, Brook assures us, but - guess what?-  there’s a lot more to it. So I asked Brook, “Like what?”. His answer:
 "For example,  even with shared principles, it takes time to develop a shared set of goals--which usually begins with some kind of process of visioning. Thereafter, you need to develop an actual strategy to achieve the goals/vision--which in a turbulent world, always means exploring different options for a new direction (to keep one alive and vital), and then setting some capacity for testing and learning which might stick. There's also going to be a plan for developing networks of support and influence, to help the organization pivot in new directions, and some kind of agreed process to keep revising and reorienting, as the results from the strategy making and then implementing come in. One needs to think about a coherent and ongoing process, not just getting agreement "at the front end"--though of course that first step can indeed be helpful."
Helpful?  Sure, but  here’s the nagging question:  Do academic organizations  (esp. departments) require a different kind of leadership than businesses? If so, we’d expect different prerequisites for them to function well.  Most of us assume they’re different, but just how?
      The big difference, I think, is students. They must not be viewed  as consumers, but as individuals developing capacities they will need for a productive and rewarding life. A department that focuses on them will ask itself what   distinctive  contribution  a course  or a sequence of curses can make to that goal. Taking time to focus on that question, in my experience, can make all the difference both for student learning and for faculty satisfaction  with their work. ..
      Am I right?