‘They Make A Loneliness And They Call It Peace’
Almost certainly there never was anybody called Calgacus, and surely he never spoke the following words, recorded in Tacitus’ Agricola, rallying the Scots to fight the implacable Roman invaders. This was part of the literary conventions deployed by Roman historians to vivify and add specificity to their bald narrative of events.
We, at the furthest limits both of land and liberty, have been defended to this day by the remoteness of our situation and of our fame. The extremity of Britain is now disclosed; and whatever is unknown becomes an object of magnitude. But there is no nation beyond us; nothing but waves and rocks, and the still more hostile Romans, whose arrogance we cannot escape by obsequiousness and submission. These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. [Tacitus, Agricola 28–31]
Still, this speech is very famous. The irony is that by writing these words, so eloquent in their opposition to Rome, the intensely Roman Tacitus shows that Romans are, whatever their enemies might say, not so single-minded or ignorant of their enemies’ views as they are made out to be, actually. It’s almost a kind of empathy, and it works because we feel Calcagus has a point. But that’s not the same thing as saying that Tacitus is taking the Scots’ side, here. In fact he’s not. Roman dominion is assured, and although there is pathos in the inevitability of the impending Scottish defeat, pathos is a pleasurable emotion for the refined literary reader to savour, especially if that pathos is attached to a group of people other than your own. Something similar happens in Wells’ War of the Worlds, another imaginative entry into the ‘this is what it feels like to be on the receiving end of an overpowering imperial military machine’ genre. But Wells’s is not an anti-imperialist novel, any more than is Tacitus’ speech. The Shape Wells discerned in Things To Come was one in which his preferred empire (he called this ‘World State’ and anticipated a global, and indeed interplanetary, scope for it) rolled over the holdouts of resistance with implacable grandeur. Wings Over The World!
The consensus is anti-Empire nowadays, and for very good reasons. Of course, we are aware that the old Roman or British imperial model (of direct governance backed up by military occupancy with a view to the extraction of wealth) has been replaced by newer American and Chinese models, in which the extraction of wealth happens without the need for colonial officers on the ground, and increasingly without even the threat of actual military occupancy. Still: for all the horrors of empire, ‘we’ continue to find them curiously compelling. There is a glamour, an appeal to them, somehow.
Last night I attended (remotely) Cymera, the Scottish SF/Fantasy convention. I was on a panel with the excellent Arkady Martine, whose A Memory Called Empire (2019) is an exceptionally good space-opera galactic empire novel. Martine writes from a position of knowledge — she was a scholar of Byzantine and Armenian empire before she started writing science fiction, and so fully understands the violence and oppression that are the currencies of imperial power. Nonetheless she and I agreed: there’s something ‘in’ empires that draws us. Star Wars is ostensibly a story about plucky rebels overthrowing an evil empire, and yet its fandom keeps gravitating to the baddies, cosplaying their shiny-white armoured stormtroopers, salivating over their gigantic military machines. So it must be that each episode of the franchise must ressurect the empire in order for it to be overthrown. It’s like the joke about the man who goes bear hunting. Every time he creeps up on the beast in the forest the bear surprises him, grabs his rifle and snaps it in two, and then shags the man roughly. Every time this happen the man hurries back to town furious, buys a new gun and returns with more determination to the forest. After this event has played out half a dozen times the bear turns to the man and says: ‘you’re not really here for the hunting, are you.’
What is the appeal of empire? I suppose my joke, there, suggests that we are drawn to compensatory fantasies of power (excited by how dangerous and oppressive power can be) in ways that are, fundamentally, about eros. There’s doubtless a neurotic component to this as well, but that’s just to repeat what Freud says about the compulsive and repetitive nature of eros as such, which inevitably works via repression into some neurotic fixation, or repetition, or other. I once wrote a post in which I argued that the true heir of Ballard’s violent technology-and-bodies fantasia Crash was precisely George Lucas’s Star Wars.
But I want to go back to Tacitus to argue something else about the perverse attraction of Empire nowadays. Arkady Martine has recently published her follow-up to A Memory Called Empire, a novel with the splendidly Tacitean title A Desolation Called Peace.
Tacitus’s Latin here is: ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. Where they make a solitudo, they call it “peace”. ‘Solitudo’ means three things: ‘an instance of being alone; loneliness, solitariness, solitude, privacy’; ‘a lonely place; desert, wilderness’ and ‘a state of want, destitution, deprivation.’ They make a desert and they call it peace is not a bad translation of this famous phrase exactly, although it is liable to make a modern reader thing of actual wastelands, ruined cities, scorched farmlands and so on. I don’t think that’s what Tacitus’ Calgacus is getting at.
There is more than one kind of loneliness, of course. Robinson Crusoe, solus on his island, is lonely (he’s also a perfect rebus of imperialism, actually: an Englishman ruling this faraway territory with absolute possession). But the mere addition of other people does not, necessarily, end loneliness. On the contrary, it can — and for a great many people, in these modern globalised times of ours, it does — intensify rather than alleviate the loneliness. This is the real face of empire, Tacitus is saying. Take the various tribes and families of 1st century BC Scotland, the diverse network of allegience and obligation, of feud and alliance, the islands and the highlands, farmers, hunters, fishermen: all this will be replaced. The people will still be there, still living more or less the same lives, but they will no longer be a tapestry of diversity. They will be all the same: subjects of Rome. All those Star Wars stormtroopers are variegated individuals behind their white plastic helmets, but that variegation is overwritten by something collective, a clonelike loneliness-in-the-crowd.
But this is what intrigues me: is there a part of us that is drawn to that loneliness? Do we invest, emotionally, erotically, in the anonymity of that mode of life? Perhaps loneliness is a refuge of sorts? Our conscious minds insists we want independence, but our subconscious wants to dissolve all that painful, angular, frightening separateness into something collective, even though we know that such dissolution will overwhelm the us that is us. It’s that scene in Life of Brian, when the alienated messiah tells his followers ‘you are all individuals!’ and the entire crowd replies, with one voice, ‘yes, we are all individuals!’ It’s funny, but perhaps it’s funny because it’s true. Perhaps we yearn for the imperial elimination of our separateness. Perhaps we crave to be lonely in the crowd.
