I realize of course that his credentials and post making his thinking much more likely to be true, but I wouldnt think this would suffice.

I think an apologia, if that was really Thucydides’ primary purpose (I havent a clue about that), can still be more neutral than most works. As I say above, if something accurately and with balance recaps most of highly respected views on pretty much every controversial point, then we can decide for ourselves, and (relative) neutrality is achieved. Suppose I am him, and I know I was right about the war, and I also have confidence in peoples’ ability to find the truth. In that case, an apologia and a neutral history are not at cross-purposes.

After all, I could easily write a rather neutral account of the sources on Tiberius, no? What is hard, when so few sources exist, is to actually be right about Tiberius. To be neutral, I would only have to recount the best arguments about the value of each source. To be highly neutral, I would have to use up a lot of ink, so that I could cast a wide net — that is, include arguments from people who dont have a lot of prestige today; even those who shouldnt have a lot of prestige according to me, myself. But it can still be done.

And when it comes to the philosophical level — the question whether things can ever be rather objectively “true”, I say they can be. I say they chances of being deceived can go very low indeed, much lower than would be suggested by very abstract ultra skeptics like Derrida. The fact that quite a bit of indeterminacy may remain in the case of TIberius, due to a paucity of sources, doesnt mean that such indeterminacy inheres in *all* attempts to find truth. Indeed, I would say that many people knew the truth about him, with very limited indeterminacy. But they all died. We arent them.

The truth we are after in life is never totally un-admixed with pragmatism. This is where Derrida errs. Would you be surprised if, at the end of life, things we provisionally believe turn out to be illusions created by god, or a deceiving genius, or by shadows in a cave? Of course not. Of course Decartes’ so-called “disproof” of the deceiving genius possibility was erroneous. But we dont philosophize about such possibilities. They are infinite in number, and no headway can be made with them. We may think about them but we do not attempt to validate or invalidate them. And the reason for that is really mere pragmatism — something that comes out of the good, not the true. It may not take very *much* pragmatism to choose not to spend all your time considering possibilities on which zero empirical or a priori validation or invalidation is possible. But it does take a mote at least.

So, while I dont doubt his honesty, I think he came to a really bad conclusion. And he has limited credibility with me. Thems the breaks.

There is no way Thuc can be perfectly neutral, but we call him neutral if he is a lot more so than the average bloke. Neutral means he gives us the views of highly regarded individuals, both on matters of fact and on matters of interpretation. Who is highly regarded? While it is a little subjective at the edges, the highly regarded people tend to substantively agree on who is in their club. Artists tend to know who are the great artists, and they substantially agree on this. Etc. We know that these people disagree and cant all be right. We know that sometimes the right view is not even found, always, among their various views. But usually it is.

Thuc is neutral — that is to say, a lot more neutral than most — if on almost every important and disputable point, he prepares us to decide against what he himself believed to be most likely true. He should give us such complete information as will prepare us to opine better than he opined, when for whatever reason we think we have reason to know better. It could be because someone gathers better info than he did, two centuries later — he himself doesnt know for sure that this wont happen. This person wasnt there when it happened, but perhaps he had greater wealth than Thucydides had, permitting him to travel around and obtain better primary sources. Or maybe someone finds out that a written source or two of Thucydides’ (if he had any) was faked by someone who needed a few drachmas. Etc. Evidently someone told Herodotus that a certain people had very much thinner skulls than the greeks, which we now know is boloney. We could dismiss all info from that source.

Now the skulls of the Persians are so thin, that if a man hit them only with a pebble he will break them easily, but the skulls of the Egyptians so strong that scarcely with a great stone will a man break through them. And the people of the country say that the cause of this difference is this that shall be told, and indeed it seems a reasonable thing. An Egyptian hath his head shaved even from a child, and the bone grows thick, the sun beating upon it. But with the Persians it is not so, for they have their heads covered from childhood, wearing turbans and hats.

Whoops! Well, Thucycdides was smarter and a better scholar.

As Kagan himself said in a lecture, wherever and whenever he disagrees with Thucydides about what happened, he better have very clear reason for thinking Thucydides wrong.

Neutrality is not a construct.

I think that’s the space Professor Hanson in looking for, and your comment is more of a retreat from that epistemological ambition with a flourish of topic literacy, rather than a build upon it. It reminds me of the worst of Professor Gelman’s comments to Professor Hanson’s posts.

I wonder if Professor Hanson has a more widespread tendency to draw these type of reactions out of topic experts (less epistemological ambition, perhaps more topic literacy, adopting a critical posture toward a professor Hanson post about their field)?

A common theme you see in sci-fi movies is men and women sharing bathrooms/shower rooms. Battlestar Galactica and Starship Troopers come immediately to mind. Do you foresee this happening in, say, 200 years?

PS I’m not asking because I’m a pervert!