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Roman gamblers can give scholars of humanities a lesson in honesty
11 February 2010
Ancient attitudes to uncertainty might be "more useful, appropriate and crucially more honest" than the current ethos governing teaching and research in the humanities.
In a lecture on "Risk and Humanities" to be delivered on 12 February, Mary Beard, professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, will explore the images of gambling and associated brawls that appear on the walls of bars in Pompeii.
Although the Romans were obsessed with playing dice, and used gambling as a metaphor for life, she will argue that they had no understanding of the modern concept of probability.
Today, sociologists argue that most people see themselves as living in a "risk society" where individuals and governments constantly try to estimate the likelihood of various hazards and then do their best to avoid them.
In many cases, we are little more than "passive victims", she will say, affected by acts of God or the actions of polluters in foreign countries over which we have no control.
None of this would have made much sense to the Romans.
After setting out "the ancient model of danger", Professor Beard will ask whether this "can still speak to us".
Plagiarism is now sometimes regarded as something anyone might blunder into, rather than as an illicit form of behaviour an individual should take responsibility for, and risk-averse funding models take no account of the open-endedness and sheer luck central to any worthwhile research in the humanities.
Professor Beard will suggest that universities and funding councils might learn a thing or two from the attitudes of the ancient world.
The classicist is a well-known blogger who attracted controversy in 2001 after the 11 September terror attacks with her comments that "the United States had it coming" and that "world bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price".
This week's lecture is part of a series on risk organised by Darwin College, Cambridge.
matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com.
Readers' comments
Mary B's right.
Why? Well, the factors involved in evaluating the risks and benefits of a high general level of education and of research are just not accounted for in the models being used in relation to higher education to close departments and exclude working class youth, etc. Same goes for the models used for creating bad schools and criminalizing working-class kids and their parents (aka promoting excellence and freedom of choice). (Criminalizing because parents can be jailed if their children play truant, for instance.)
It's an obvious case of market failure that those running the system will never admit.
The best example of this kind of thing is the market failure of capitalism itself. The models used there assume that the system is basically in equilibrium and basically rational. This isn't the case. The system is out of control, as its recurrent crises since the 1850s (say) demonstrate clearly enough, together with the permanent state of war within the system between the states constituting the system. People like Mervyn King talk of the economy returning to a "normal state" - but boom and bust are just as much normality as the ups and downs between them. So the assumptions used in the models explicitly exclude crisis, for ideological reasons.
Education and economic systems are excluded from rational scientific investigation, whereas most insurance statistical work isn't. You can't be actuarial about developments you refuse to understand.
So toss those dice! And shoot yourself when you lose the society you've staked on the outcome.
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