Cicero begins his treatise on Laws with a dialogue between his brother Quintus and friend Atticus on the question of whether an oak tree on Cicero’s estate is the same as that which Atticus has read so often described in Cicero’s poem “Marius”. Their discussion bears transcribing here, if only to illuminate the discussion on recent events that will follow:
A: Surely I recognize that grove yonder and this oak tree of Aprinum as those of which I have read so often in the “Marius”; if that famous oak still lives, this is certainly the same; and in fact it is a very old tree.
Q: That oak lives indeed, my dear Atticus, and will live for ever; for it was planted by the imagination. No tree nourished by a farer’s care can be so long-lived as one planted by a poet’s verses.
A: How is that, Quintus? What sort of planting is it that poets do? It seems to me that while praising your brother you are putting in a word for yourself as well.
Q: You may be right; but for all that, as long as Latin literature shall live, there will not fail to be an oak tree on this spot, called the “Marian Oak”, and this tree, as Scaevola says of my brother’s “Marius” will
Through countless ages come to hoary eld.
For I suppose you do not really believe that your beloved Athens has been able to preserve in her citadel an undying olive tree, or that the tall and peaceful palm which Homer’s Odysseus said that he saw at Delos is the one shown there today. And in the same way many other objects in many different places live in men’s thoughts for a longer time than Nature could have kept them in existence. Therefore let us assume that this tree is that “acorn-laden oak”, from which once flew
Jove’s golden messenger in wondrous form.
But when time and age shall have destroyed this tree, still there will be an oak tree on this spot, which men will call the “Marian Oak”.
Following this, Atticus goes on to ask Cicero himself whether in describing the Marian Oak he had drawn from tradition or whether his own verses had truly “planted” the there. Cicero chastises him from too critical an inquiry into the transmission of tradition. Atticus insists, however, that the people who read his poetry would like to know whether the places, people and events described therein are “fiction or fact” and demand adherence to “the truth”. Cicero has himself reply:
And I for my part have no desire to be thought to deal in falsehood; but all the same…those “certain persons” whom you mention display their ignorance by demanding in such a matter the kind of truthfulness expected of a witness in court rather than of a poet…
Quintus arrives at the heart of the matter when he suggests that Cicero believes that truth is to be assessed by differing standards in history and poetry. Cicero replies:
Certainly, Quintus; for in history the standard by which everything is judged is the truth, while in poetry it is generally the pleasure one gives; however, in the works of Herodotus, the Father of History, and in those of Theopompus, one finds innumerable fabulous tales.
Cicero’s response to Atticus’s challenge is not to actually draw a firmer line between fact and fiction or truth and fable. Cicero neutralizes the challenge by showing just how often that line is blurred, how it is possible to draw distinctions between standards of truth-telling. The reality of the Marian oak, if one can speak of it, is made as such by the impression left by the verse. The narratives endure, intermingled with the facts of history, and become a part of it. Herodotus’s history, Cicero seems to be saying, is no less a history for the fact that he fielded the reports of the traditions and mythologies of people around the known world, however fabulous those traditions might have been. To hear the stories a society might tell of itself is to learn something important about that society. They are integral parts of any comprehensive narrative that must be constructed if one is to understand them.
What is it, after all, that separates the historian from the registrar? The latter is a mere recorder of unconnected and atomic facts. The former deals with historical causality. The aim of the historian is to affix to events a causal structure, without which a coherent narrative about the course of history would be impossible and incoherent. The historian is, always, without fail, a storyteller. It is an inescapable fact of the historical project and the aim of its practitioners. History is simply impossible without a causal narrative. If this were not so, disagreement over the interpretation of events would not be possible either, and the profession as it exists and has existed would have no reason to exist or purpose to strive for. There would be no historical debate or dispute, whether good-natured or malicious, to speak of. As the philosopher Arthur Danto reminds us, historical explanation consists not in facts but in statements about facts
There is something challenging about this mindset that makes it difficult for people who are accustomed to history as the business of facts to grasp, especially when they are (consciously or unconsciously) driven by their own narratives. When Vladimir Putin lays out a list of grievances in an emotional televised speech, the world is quick to condemn it as either cynical doublespeak, a conscious distortion of history, or the ravings of an irrational madman. But if history is nothing more than the relative weighing of the importance of particular facts, then to hold these vengeful declarations to a higher criterion of truth and accuracy is the height of folly. Funny, then, that the ravings of an irrational madman somehow arrive at a conception of historical explanation that is more honest, more authentic, than those coldly rational pathologies imposed upon him by his foreign detractors.
And it is really honesty that is at the heart of the contention today. Had NATO stuck to the assurances that were repeatedly given by State Department officials to the Russian leadership as the Soviet Union entered its twilight years, had foreign policy practitioners remained clear-eyed about the the entirely predictable response on the part of the Russians to NATO enlargement during the Clinton years, had a realistic appraisal of Russian security interests not mysteriously dissipated from the thinking of the foreign service and its leadership, then perhaps this would not be happening today. Of course, it is likely that Viktor Yanukovych or someone like him would not have been toppled from power, but so what? Are the Ukrainians better off today than they were in 2013? Was anything gained from his removal? It seems that Ukraine is now learning the perennial realist (properly understood as itself a product of normative thinking) lesson that they are a middle-power bordering a larger and insecure state. That insecurity was not inevitable. The rise of an irredentist and revanchist Russia was not a necessary outcome of the events of 1991.
Of course, one may argue that an assurance is not a guarantee, just as one can argue that the Budapest Memorandum contained no security obligations that compel a military defense of Ukrainian territorial sovereignty. In the end, this invasion may prove to be more revanchist than irredentist. Russian leadership might be aggrieved at the perceived slights and humiliations endured after 31 years, but western observers should be capable of putting themselves into the shoes of their self-made foes to understand how those humiliations might have accumulated into the perception of an untenable security threat. There ought to be no bewilderment at the course that Russia has chosen. We cannot on the one hand take seriously the claim that Putin seeks to restore Russian dominion over the political communities formerly under its control while downplaying the notion that it sees a legitimate security threat on its border. Whether Ukraine is or is not one is beside the point. It is impossible to lose status without suffering humiliation and insecurity. Do not expect those more comfortable with pulp-fiction portraits of the Russian leadership to understand that.
It is for this reason that we must distinguish between the revanchist and irredentist mindset. They are often interlinked, but they are not identical. It was irredentism that compelled Nazi foreign policy towards a retrieval and integration of the volkdeutsche. It was the revanchist mindset that compelled Adolf Hitler to speak of obliterating “the memory of 1918”, just as it led the French, seething with fury after Sedan and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, to embrace the “cult of the offensive”. When Putin declares that he is striking out against the American “empire of lies”, he is transforming resentment into a narrative of authenticity, sharpening it into a weapon of truth.
So we arrive at a kind of inflection point, though it is one which may well terminate in the status quo that prevailed up to 2013. David Galula speaks of four conditions (some necessary and some merely enablers) for a successful insurgency: favorable geography and terrain, a critical mass of support, a charismatic leader/idea, and foreign support. Ukrainians have at least three of the four, making a full occupation of the country untenable in the long-run. If I may be so bold as to advance a prognostication, then it is that this will result in regime change in Kiev and perhaps an expansion of the Donbass republics, but not much more.
It does not particularly matter how this ends, but those who
now cry foul would do well to self-reflect. Insofar as we can draw any
historical analogy to this moment, it is not to 1938, Munich and appeasement
that we should return to but 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then, as now,
the “west” was engaged in a standoff with a Russian-controlled political entity
over the foreign policy of a third-party state. Then, as now, security
interests overrode the autonomy of that third-party state to choose its
preferred course. Then, as opposed to now, it was American security at stake. Youthful
and contumelious idealists drawn to the human drama, who idolize dissidents
like Navalny, who express Manichean outrage at the latest act of Russian verve,
are suffering the same brainless churn as afflicts the likes of Samantha
Power, Madeline Albright and Anne Applebaum; lost in the tangled exercise of deficient
discursion, drawn merely to the feeling of speaking truth to power when it is
nothing more than power to truth, or rather poetry to history. Quintus came close to discerning the proximity of historical truth to artistic truth. The poetry calls to Russia.
