The Ides of March and Our Contemporary Thresholds

Today, the 15th March, marks the anniversary of the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. Caesars death was followed by civil war and the ascension of Augustus, whose reign ‘marked the end of the Roman Republic and the start of the Roman Empire.’  

I am, of course, a few thousand years too late to provide political commentary on this, but  this anniversary offers us a chance to reflect on our current world. To do this, I want to first introduce you to an idea. That we can identify at various points in history a threshold which once crossed, à la Rubicon, irreversibly plunges us into a different world. 

This is not necessarily an original idea, it may ring as obvious to some. After-all, how comfortable would we be in saying that the world was the same after the outbreak of the Second World War as it had been before? 

Declaring epochs is, naturally, controversial and no small part political in itself. However, assuming for the sake of this article at least that there are instances where general shifts and changes in human affairs can be identified we might have plenty to ponder in the contemporary world as to what the next threshold will be.

To take an example that may serve as a model for us we might briefly consider Socrates. The very existence of a group of philosophers labelled the pre-Socratics gives us a pretty clear indication that something might have changed with him given that the identity of an entire group is now defined by predating him.

Taking this as a reference point and surveying the world around us, I would invite us to ask what threshold we might be stood on. The phrase ‘post-truth’ has been around for some time now, are we in the mists of a final decisive shift to an empirically relativistic outlook on the world? AI is comfortably finding its way into public discourse and common usage, are we about to see a revolutionary shift in what we associate with intelligence and what uses we are happy to turn such means to? We have seen devastating conflicts in Europe and the Middle-East, is there a post-war world coming in these regions and if so what will that look like? And finally, given the US administration’s willingness to brutalise norms and conventions, exemplified by President Trump’s recent claim that he believes the United States will annex Greenland, will we see a ‘post-Trump’ world formed in the image of his prejudices and foibles.

Any number of further potential thresholds could be conjured up and considered, and the possible interplay between these factors and their possible agglomeration as part of some other grander threshold that future historians can identify could be probed.

Consider the following thought experiment. Take something of your choosing that you feel might be said to be a modern instance of such a threshold, something that will bring notable change to our lives. And then, assuming such change takes place, what do you see that change as being? Are you happy with it? And what would you like that change to be in your ideal world? 

John Rawls’s ‘Veil of Ignorance’ argues that if we knew nothing of ourselves then we would favour supporting those least fortunate in society, in case we turn out to be the least fortunate. Here, instead of imagining that we know nothing of ourselves I would encourage us to assume, for the sake of the exercise, that a general change will come because of a given factor. And from there, let’s take the natural ambiguity of what is to come in the future and use it as a wellspring to consider what we might personally and collectively favour as the outcomes of such potential thresholds in our world.

It would not take long for us to collate a variety of examples of when a lack of forward thinking has come to return a heavy cost. In the spirit of avoiding such things, if there were a day to do this then it may as well be today, given that as well as marking the threshold that we might say was Julius Caesar’s death, so too ‘in the ancient Roman Calendar’ is today marked as the Ides of March which we are told ‘is associated with misfortune and doom.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Vincenzo Camuccini

Licence: public domain.

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