Jeremy L.:	Wow, everyone is being so well behaved. I didn't even say anything. Well, good evening everyone and welcome. My name is Jeremy Lefkowitz, Assistant Professor of Classics here in the department at Swarthmore. On behalf of my colleagues in the department I want to welcome all of you, students, faculty, alumni, friends, and relatives of the Ostwald family to our third annual Martin Ostwald Memorial Lecture. 
	This event, which takes place every fall has already proven to be an incredibly valuable addition to our calendar and to our curriculum, and we'd like to thank our devoted alumni for all of their support. We are incredibly fortunate to have Ineke Sluiter here from the University of Leiden as our speaker this evening, but before I introduce her, I'd like to say few words about Martin. After all, a full cycle of undergraduate students have ... This is awkward of an angle here. Just to prepare you. A full cycle of undergraduate students have entered Swarthmore and graduated since Martin passed away in 2010. So current students have heard almost nothing of the memories, and stories, and some myths as well about Martin so I wanna just say some things briefly. 
	I first met Martin on my second, or third, day teaching here just about five years ago. And I remember very clearly stepping out of my office and encountering him in the hallway in Trotter, and he walked up to me and extended his hand. In my memory it's both arms, but I think it was just his hand and he said, "You are my grandson." And I kind of took this in stride because in my experience as a Jewish kid growing up on the upper east side of Manhattan, hardly a week went by when an older person with a thick European accent didn't mistake me for their grandson. So I think my reaction right away was "No, no, but very nice to meet you." What Martin meant, which he then calmly explained to me, was that since my PhD advisor Ralph Rosen had been Martin's student at Swarthmore, Martin and I were now related. We were part of the same tradition and the same academic family. So needless to say these kinds of relationships and links to the past were of enormous importance to Martin.
	He taught here at Swarthmore from 1958 until his retirement in 1992. Helen North who taught in our Classics department from 1948 to 1991 brought Martin, or I guess stole perhaps is the right word, from Columbia University a few years after a chance encounter brought them together in the Pirus room of the Columbia University library in the fall of 1954. What Helen and Martin were able to achieve in their individual research, and their leadership of national and international scholarly organizations, and above all in their astounding success as teachers and mentors, both in terms of the number and quality of the scholars they trained here, is remarkable and I think without parallel. If Martin was my scholarly grandfather then I have more aunts, uncles, and cousins than I could ever count.
	The more than 50 years of his life that he spent in our leafy suburban world here, stand in sharp contrast to the turbulent and traumatic years of his adolescence and his young adulthood. Martin was born in Dortmund, Germany on January 15th, 1922 and was well launched on the study of classics at the local gymnasium, when his life suffered a tragic upheaval with the rise of the Nazis. In November of 1938 after Kristallnacht, Martin, with his father and younger brother, was arrested and sent to a concentration camp near Berlin. Both of his parents would later be put to death by the Nazis, but both boys were able to escape in one of the Kindertransports. First to the Netherlands and then to England. 
	Then in 1940, Martin was shipped to Canada where he spent two and a half years in refugee camps with a status of 'Prisoner of War: Class Two'. So somehow Martin was able to establish a high school in this Canadian concentration camp. Martin was simultaneously Assistant Principal, teacher of Latin and English literature, and eventually a graduate of that high school. Whatever he managed to do there, it was enough to gain him admission to the University of Toronto, from which he would go on to earn a BA. And after completing an MA from the University of Chicago in late '40s, in the recently established Committee on Social Thought. Martin did his PhD work at Columbia University, where he wrote a dissertation that was never published but showed up in all kinds of ways in his work on 'The Unwritten Laws and the Ancestral Constitution of Ancient Athens'.
	If his academic path had somehow miraculously managed to morph into a rather conventional one, his achievements were of course extraordinary. Time does not permit a listing here of the profusion of honors and awards showered on Martin. He spent his leaves, every fourth year, in an environment congenial to his research for example, at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the American Academy in Rome, Balliol College, and Institute for Advanced Study several times. The [forein language 00:05:52] in Paris and he was regularly supported by awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Guggenheim, the ACLS, the NEH, and the Kenan Professorship. The list of significant articles and books Martin wrote is also too voluminous for me to go into. His magnum opus on Athenian constitutional history, which had begun from numerous early articles and the two books Nomos and Autonomia, was 'From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law', which received the Goodwin Award of Merit from the APA. 
	One of the qualities that I think connects Martin Ostwald's legacy to our speaker this evening, Ineke Sluiter, is an insistence that the study of the political and intellectual world of antiquity is and must be grounded in active engagement with the contemporary political and intellectual world in which we live. And of course, the idea that the very best way of going about this is through the meticulous study of language. Another thing that Martin and Ineke have in common is that their list of publications is simply too long for me to dip into. 
	So instead, I will just tell you briefly that Ineke is full professor and chair of Greek Language and Literature at Leiden University, where she's been since 1999. From 2000 to 2011 she was the academic director of OIKOS, the National Research School in Classical Studies in the Netherlands that is a consortium of six universities. And she is currently the director, this is something I hope we hear about tomorrow a little bit, of a project called ‘Anchoring Innovation’ through the OIKOS commission. I guess, it's related to that as well, yeah. 
	Ineke's won several prized and awards both for her research and her teaching, including the Spinoza prize in 2010, which is the highest award a Dutch scholar can achieve. Comes with some 2.5 million euros to spend on research and she has given numerous prestigious lectures, including the lecture on the 430th birthday of Leiden University. She is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, and the Academia Europaea.
	So, we are incredibly honored and fortunate to have her here. Please join me in welcoming Ineke to deliver our third annual Martin Ostwald lecture 'Tough Words and Soft Hearts'.
Ineke Sluiter:	Right, that angle is sort of strange. I'll just start pulling a little bit. There we go. 
Jeremy L.:	Is that good?
Ineke Sluiter:	Yup, that's good.
	Haven't been here for five minutes and I'm destroying the whole place. 
	Thank you so much Jeremy, for that introduction. Ladies and gentlemen the Martin Ostwald Memorial Lecture. I cannot even begin to tell you how honored I felt when I got the invitation to be your speaker here today. And how determined to try and do honor to Martin, as a scholar and a human being. We just heard something about him. 
	I met Martin on and off at Penn, most memorably maybe at the 2002 Penn-Leiden conference on 'Free Speech in Classical Antiquity', a topic dear to his heart. He had just turned 80 at that point. He was lively, engaged, and interested to the point of writing a forward to the book that came out of the conference. A volume that my friend and colleague Ralph Rosen, Martin's student, and I dedicated to him. Martin's story couldn't but resonate with me. His father died in the concentration camp that my mother survived. And he managed to turn a history of injustice, hatred and persecution into a life dedicated to learning and teaching, from warm interest in humanity and a deep love for the classics. What an example. Let's see what we can do today. 
	So ladies and gentlemen, conflicts and disagreements come with being human. Obviously, we are able to disagree about almost anything but a widely used distinction divides conflict into two groups. On the one hand, there are conflicts of value. On the other, conflicts of interest. The latter mostly revolve around access to resources, which all parties equally appreciate, money, land, education, medical care, etc. There is no dispute about the relevance of the resource, or it's appreciation. Everyone wants those things to a greater or lesser degree. The conflict is about who gets what or how much. 
	Value conflicts go deeper, they go to the heart of people's identities, what they hold sacred, and what they consider good, virtuous, pious, wise, and just. And in a conflict situation those values are precisely not shared or applied in the same way by the other party. What the one party considers just, as a matter of course, the other may see as a crime or religious anathema and vice versa.
	Social psychologists have often designed experiments in which pure conflicts of value are played out or pure conflicts of interest. But in real life things are often more complicated. Many conflicts can have both aspects, and it is possible for the opposing parties to either insist on both or to emphasize, or privilege, one aspect over the other. For instance, by their rhetorical framing. So in a sense, it can be a decision to regard a conflict as either one of value or one of interest. 
	Philosophically speaking, the distinction cannot be a hard and fast one. Before turning to some modern and ancient examples, let's look a little bit closer at the most recent insights of the social scientists studying conflicts and conflict resolution. In a fascinating review social psychologists [Pheka 00:12:46] Harding and Naomi Ellemers, both from my own university, compare different aspects of conflicts of values and conflicts of interest and they try to formulate recommendations for solving them. There are four points that are specially salient to my concerns today. First of all they noticed that displays of anger work out very differently in the two types of conflict. Whereas anger may be perceived as relatively fair and legitimate in a resource conflict, it is highly likely to cause escalation in a value conflict. 
	The interpersonal effects of anger vary with the type of conflict. Well classicists are unlikely to be extremely surprised by this result because our western literature starts with the word [foreign language 00:13:37], rough, a Homeric anger word. And the personal and interpersonal effects of Achilles anger, or rough, are the stuff of the Iliad. The conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon was not just about the amount booty or about access to one more woman, more is at stake for both men. And the very rapid escalation of the conflict itself fits, although of course doesn't prove, the idea that this is a clash of values. That the conflict is also one about leadership, about identity, and respect. Oddly, whereas the woman may represent both a commodity and a value, at the same time Homeric kleos, each man's reputation and fame is indeed a value but one that resembles a commodity in that more for one person, means less for another. However that is, anger is a problem in value conflicts. 
	Apart from the role of anger, a second important result has to do with the expectations of the opponents. Since conflicts of interest are about things that everyone finds desirable, parties expect that their interests will conflict and that they will have to fight over the scarce resources. And they will also frequently have a zero sum, or a fixed pie, perception of the problem. There's a finite amount of the resource and when one party gets more, the other gets less. In a value conflict, on the other hand, parties tend to be surprised to find that their norms are not shared by everyone. Before the conflict then, there is a sense of false consensus and as a result because of the unexpected nature of the conflict, parties tend to overestimate their disagreement. They see less common ground, they perceive fewer possibilities to resolve the issue. So expectations, apart from anger, expectations are a second problem in value conflicts. 
	Third, parties tend to be more personally involved in a value conflict because it is tied up with their sense of identity and this personal evolvement is also a problem when trying to solve a value conflict. So we have three issues that make value conflicts a lot more problematic than conflicts of interest. But the fourth point in the Harding-Ellemers review give us some hope. For there is a distinct and promising type of intervention in cases of value conflicts, which is to engage in other afformation, which I personally find a rather infelicitous term. But what is meant is not that we start saying nice things to the other party, but that the party should be encouraged to take the perspective of their opponents and to see what is good and positive about the other party. So they say positive things to themselves about the other party. So you just imagine what would it would be like to stand in the shoes of your opponents. 
	Now the good news is that people are, in principle, very good at this. Perspective taking and what we call mind reading, or theory of mind, is part of the basic cognitive toolbox that makes living in groups even possible in the first place, so we're good at it. Ancient tragedy abounds with examples of conflict in which we can see how some of these points play out. I'll take Sophocles tragedy Ajax as my example. It shows us how the parties themselves can determine whether their conflict is one of value or one of interest. 
	So just some background, Ajax had intended to kill all the Greek leaders but in a fit of madness had slaughtered flocks of sheep instead. When he realizes what he was done he commits suicide and then, as in so many other Greek plays, a problem arises over the question of whether or not to bury him. The Greek leaders Agamemnon and Menelaus take a principled and very angry stand. They say that Ajax was a traitor and they will not allow him to be buried. There's also someone who speaks up for Ajax, it's Odysseus, actually a former adversary of Ajax. He says, "Ajax was a great hero. He was the best of the Greeks after Achilles. It is the right thing to do, to bury him." So it's value based argument, on the ones side he's a traitor that is being opposed and conquered by another one, it's the right thing to do. 
	And all that you see happen is that Agamemnon grows more and more stubborn. So there's a complete aporia, an impasse, when Odysseus throws in one final argument. He says, "Everyone dies. One day I will also need somebody to bury me. It's human, we die." Now what kind of argument is that? Most likely Odysseus intends it to be another value based argument because at the very beginning of the play he had also shown himself unexpectedly capable of taking Ajax's perspective. And to the pity the man based on their common humanity he says, "That could've been me whose suffering all these things." But Agamemnon does not chose to understand him on the same terms so when Odysseus appeals to the common needs of all human beings Agamemnon says, "Aha, this is just all about your own self-interest. So you're just making sure that you will get buried. In the end everyone just cares about their own interest. Well alright then, go ahead if you must. Bury him." So in two quick moves, it's a done deal. It's over, and it is because according to Agamemnon it is no longer a matter a principle, he can allow Ajax to be buried without having to acknowledge that he's a great hero or that it's the right thing to do.
	Values complicate conflicts, interests are easier. Now bearing all these points in mind, it is time to turn to some modern examples, and I will start in recent European history. Actually an issue that we haven't quite put behind us, the crisis about Greece. Some background, after the fall of the military junta in 1974, Greece worked very hard at becoming a true democracy and Europe hastent to anchor the country firmly within the European union. It was admitted in 1981 pretty soon after the political reforms, and it was also made part of the Eurozone very quickly, right at its inception in 2000, 2001. And they were a very good political and symbolic reasons for this quick embrace of Greece, especially its strategic position vis-a-vis Turkey and a desire to support the young Greek democracy. And obviously the imagined community of Greece with its classical heritage as the oldest civilization of Europe was felt to be a vital part of the equally imagined community of Europe. Europe is not some essentialized entity, it is constituted by the sense of community oof its members and Greece was a fixed part of the narrative of Europe, a foundational one even. 
	The European community has always emphasized that it is not just simply a community of interest, but it is also based on shared values, and a shared history. And those values and foundational stories come from all European countries, but tracing them back to Ancient Greece is a natural thing in most European cultures. Greece belongs to everyone, however, in 2009 the role of Greece in Europe was severely compromised. In October, the newly elected prime minister Papandreou confessed in so many words that in order to be admitted into the Eurozone, his country had manipulated financial statistics. The debate about Greece broke loose throughout Europe and it is the form of that debate that was quite remarkable. I collected, in fact I started collecting almost straight away, collected media reports and debates on the Greek crisis in the German and Dutch press from October 2009 to 2012. 
	In the Netherlands the debate was complicated by the political constellation at the time. There was a very loud populist party led by Geert Wilders who until that moment was mostly associated with a violent anti-Islam program, and his party was supporting a minority coalition of liberals and Christian democrats. Both of those, were in principle, pro-European and the situation with Greece gave Wilders the opportunity to distinguish himself from those parties by giving voice to the negative sentiments about Europe and especially the transfer of Dutch money and Dutch authority to Brussels [inaudible 00:23:50].
	So provoked by the Greek deceit, Wilders went into complete rhetorical overdrive. He's actually an excellent public speaker. He used broad stereotypes about all of southern Europe, not putting too fine a point on it, and in this rhetoric he was very comparable to what was produced in Germany by the [German 00:24:17]. It was an almost complete match. The Greeks were called lazy, lying, unreliable, corrupt, they were leading an easy life while we were footing the bill. So Wilders used a strongly polarized language always opposing them and us, an out group to an in group. The Greeks were constantly framed negatively. Greece was a bottomless pit, or a contagious patient. Sometimes Wilders derived his inspiration from the language of the rating agencies. Standard and Poor, curious name in itself. Standard and Poor gave Greece junk status, which seems a remarkably unprofessional and tendentious use of language itself, but Wilders went one better. There was a debate in 2011, in the Dutch equivalent of the House of Representatives, where he called the Dutch Secretary of Finance a dealer who was enabling the Euro addiction of the junk Greece by more and more loads. Well that was at the very least, creative and in any event aimed at maximal emotional effect.
	On the German side, we found the neologism [German 00:25:45], which combined the notion of bankruptcy with the general idea of losers. [German 00:25:54], is just one word, but it's a little package of negatively loaded information performing a lot of cognitive and emotional work in just four syllables. But maybe the most important effect of terms such as these [German 00:26:13], is radically to block and prevent, or try to prevent, emotional identification with the Greeks. It is extremely hard to empathize with a bunch of [German 00:26:26]. There is nothing there to illicit warm or fuzzy feelings and in fact the term is designed to do just that, to create distance and distaste. That is how language can be a very forceful weapon.
	On the Greek side, incidentally, things were hardly better. Cotemporary Germans were compared to the Nazis and Angela Merkel, in particular, was singled out for criticism as a new Hitler. So at first look it might have seemed as if this was our conflict, a fight between Greece and western Europe. A shouting match across Europe with the media functioning as an amplifier, a loud speaker. But if we look closer we see something else, the populist position was not primarily intended for the ears of the Greeks at all. Wilders and [German 00:27:23] were producing moves in the debate within the Netherlands and within Germany. The shouting was intended to influence the group internal debate on the question of whether or not we should bail the Greeks out. So this is a classic case of triangulation where two parties are engaged in a conflict about their policy towards a third party, in this case Greece. Will we help the Greeks or not? 
	When we analyze this debate as rhetoricians, which some of us are, we must first notice again the effects of negative stereotyping, which blocks empathic identification. Empathy is the ability to share the feelings of others while not being in the same situation. In other words, empathy presupposes perspective taking and perspective taking is absolutely crucial in conflict resolution and as we saw this is particularly true if we're dealing with conflicts of values. But no one feels inclined to wonder about the feelings of a lazy, unreliable parasite or to look at the problem from his point of view. So this characterization just provokes disgust. What this means is that stereotyping, which is by the way a completely normal way for human beings to form quick first impressions and preliminary judgements. Stereotyping is capable of checking and preventing another entirely normal human phenomenon, namely empathy and perspective taking. 
	The negative effect of this cognitive and rhetorical strategy of stereotyping is related to a second striking characteristic of the debate about Greece. And this is something I will call the Mytilene factor. I will discuss the reason for that name in a minute but what it refers to is a rhetorical context in which both issues of morality and expedience play a role, but in which one party feels obliged to mask its position in a debate as a very tough propagation of self-interest and calculation only. A propagation of expedience over justice, while the legitimacy of the influence of empathy is rejected. Tough words. How does that work?
	Well let's look at the Dutch and the German debate again and divide the participants roughly into those in favor of helping the Greeks, and those opposed to it. Theoretically, each of these parties could launch an argument based on moral considerations and one based on expedience and self-interest. In other words, this is the kind of conflict that can equally easily be presented as a conflict of values, and a conflict of interests. For the no party, no help to Greece, you're represented by Wilders and the [German 00:30:43]. This works out as follows. First the moral point, and notice that however we think about the rhetoric this party does have an entirely valid type of moral argument at its disposal. Their stereotypes may have been inspired by anger, but their anger was based on an understandable moral judgment. The Greeks had indeed, and by their own admission, deceived the rest of Europe. They had violated the trust of their partners, they had harmed cooperation, and they had thus not been moral. Human beings, and other primates too, or prepared to spend energy on punishing free riders and defectors. Individuals who choose noncooperation and pure self-interest and there by violate an implicit or explicit norm of cooperation. So " Not a penny to the Greeks" can be regarded as just a typical tit for tat reaction based on a moral judgment. 
	In addition, Wilders and [German 00:31:51] also proffered a calculating argument based on self interest. They said, "Helping will cost us more money." So both considerations converge on the same conclusion, "We must not bail out the Greeks again." Right, moral and self-interest. The party in favor of helping Greece could have countered each of these considerations with an argument of the same type, so morality or expedience just focusing on different aspects. Their moral answer could have invoked empathy and solidarity in the interest of European cohesion. And in addition, they could point out that the ordinary Greeks were hit disproportionally hard in their flourishing and their very existence. The financial backlash against Greece, they could argue, would not primarily have harmed the principle instigators of the financial fraud. And that fraud by the way was uncontested. But it would've harmed precisely those ordinary Greeks. That is a normative argument based on what is right, and just, and proper. It's a moral position. It is also a position that is based on perspective taking, it requires the willingness to look at the situation from the point of view of those ordinary Greeks. And like the willingness to punish defectors, this capacity for empathy and perspective taking is also something at which humans, virtually all humans, excel. If not, if not at all, there's a pathological issue going on.
	It is a natural thing for us to do, in fact just as natural as the tendency to lash out against those who have violated trust. And in this case too, the moral argument can be combined with an argument based on expedience, on self-interest. Not helping might eventually cost us even more money because of the effects of a Greek bankruptcy on other countries and on the financial sector. Right, so balanced. Based on all of this we might have expected a symmetrical debate with two opposing moral arguments and two opposing ones based on expedience, but that's not what happened. The party in favor of helping Greece almost entirely suppressed the expression of its moral convictions, it's considerations with empathy and solidarity. Instead they argued almost purely on the basis of self-interest. It is my hypothesis that the harsh rhetoric of their opponents made it extremely hard to admit to empathic identification without further qualification. Rather than seeming weak or unassertive by letting the Greek misdemeanor pass unpunished, or by needing wordy explanations of a nuance position, it's always complicated in a public debate. The proponents of helping Greece asserted their toughness by insisting on the course of action that would benefit themselves most, helping is simply in our interest. So here we have an asymmetrical rhetorical constellation in which a moral consideration is suppressed in favor of a form of tough posturing based exclusively on self-interest and calculation.
	Now for the locus classicus of this situation, we must turn to the Greek historian Thucydides, the author of the histories, in which she describes the momentous Peloponnesian war, the confrontation between Sparta and Athens. We are in the year for 427 B.C. and things are not looking good for Athens. Their a great leader Pericles has succumbed to the plague, which is still sweeping through an overcrowded city. The Athenians were clearly struggling, and it is under those difficult circumstances that one of their allies, the city of Mytilene, Mytilene there it is, on the island of Lesbos exchange its democratic regime for an oligarchic one, which in practice just meant that it changed allegiance from Athens to Sparta. In other words they defected. 
	The Athenians respond immediately, they arrest the ringleader of the oligarchic revolution and kill him. They hold a great number of revolutionaries captive in Athens intending to execute them as well. And in the assembly of the people they deliberate on how to handle the situation further. Thucydides, our historian, is exceedingly brief about that council. He reports that the Athenians are very, very angry. They decide to send a trireme to Lesbos with orders to execute the entire adult male population of Mytilene, and to sell all the women and all the children into slavery. Then something peculiar happens, the Athenians apparently literally sleep on it and when they wake up the next morning they instantly regret the cruelty of their decision to eradicate a whole city rather than just punish the perpetrators. So they call another assembly and this time Thucydides gives us a complete text of two speeches, the two main speeches, that were supposed to have been held there. One against reversing the verdict, one in favor.
	It is worth emphasizing the information we get from Thucydides, introduction to this assembly. There is he says, "instant regret." And the terms in which the Athenians now think about their earlier decision are moral evaluations. It was cruel, it was a huge decision that they had taken. So this introduction suggests that the Athenians perceive a conflict with their own values. This is not like them, they had not behaved in accordance with their own moral standards, and they are sorry for their rashness, they feel pity. The debate itself is an absolute masterpiece, if you never read another bit of Thucydides, this is not a bad choice to start yourself off on. In book three you can find it.
	The first speaker is Cleon, the most influential politician of the time, and he urges the Athenians to stick with their earlier verdict. He says you cannot go on changing your mind. "You can't afford" he says, "to show weakness or pity because no one will be grateful for it and it will only encourage other cities and other allies to behave equally badly and to abandon and betray you as well." There was no need whatsoever for the Mytilenians to defect. It was their choice and to all intents and purposes they did what they did specifically to harm and hurt Athens, and for that reason only one reaction is appropriate, which is harsh punishment. Instant retribution. The only reaction that will combine justice with the justifiable self-interest of the Athenians. Justice and expedience, moral considerations and considerations of self-interest, they go hand-in-hand. 
	Cleon's arguments resemble the position of the [German 00:39:53] in the modern debate over the financial crisis in Greece. And his speech is not just a weak one, it is in fact extremely forceful and strong. And his argument has quite a bit of punch and plausibility to it. Anyone wishing to defend the opposite view is now put in the unenviable position that he may look precisely weak. It's not that Cleon doesn't know what pity is, he mentions it even, it is just something he says that the Athenians cannot afford. In a sense they have become the prisoners of their own power. They may be a democracy at home, but they are a dictatorship in their relationship to their allies. Strong language. 
	Now comes the second speaker in the Mytilene debate, who is called Diodotus, and this is his only appearance in our sources. We know nothing about him, we don't even know whether he really existed or who he was, but what we do know is that he is the second speaker. Yeah that may not seem very important but as experienced readers of Thucydides that means we may reasonably expect that he will win the debate. Yeah, that's how Thucydides presents his debate, the second speaker is usually the winner. But how is he going to do it? It is clear that a singular focus on justice, or compassion, or pity has basically been preemptively blocked by Cleon quite effectively. Although remember we know that those were the kind of considerations that had led the Athenians to call the assembly in the first place. Our narrator historian has told us that but no, that's not what Diodotus does. Instead he chooses to focus completely and exclusively on the argument of self-interest. He says, "We must do only what is in our self-interest. Even if the Mytilenians deserved forgiveness, I wouldn't ask for it unless I thought it was in our best interest." That's the Mytilene factor.
	So we have a situation in which utter toughness apparently comes to dominate the self presentation of all the parties in the debate. And with regard to arguments based on morality or on expedience, the debate becomes lopsided. Only one party, the one advocating the hard line will use both. The other party always the one who is moral arguments are based on empathy, solidarity, cooperation suppresses these and claims to consider self-interest only. Cleon claims that harsh punishment combines justice and self interest but Diodotus countermove is not that justice would require moderate punishment and so would self-interest, no. He declares that morality and self-interest yield incompatible results in this case. It may be just to punish the Mytilenians but it's not in Athens' best interest. 
	And where the two diverge, the argument of realpolitik should win. Diodotus does not ask for Athenian's solidarity with the Mytilenians or for their pity, let alone those of Cleon. He asks them only to safeguard their self-interest and oddly this strategy is precisely what creates the elbow room for the Athenians to opt out of killing the entire Mytilenian population, without having to admit to doing so out of pity or regret. So it's very, very clever. He justifies for them why they can waive the punishment for in this case because of the way Diodotus structures his rhetorical argument, punishing the Mytilenians represents paradoxically being too soft, not too harsh, too soft, too indulgent to moral considerations. The Athenians of course are too businesslike for this, and so yes Diodotus wins.
	The end of this story is breathtaking because the boat had already left the previous day and there are no telegrams, there is no email, there's nothing. So the new orders are conveyed to Lesbos just in the nick of time, just because there are some very motivated rowers giving it their very best, and the previous boat was not so motivated because they were carrying bad news, right? So the execution and the enslavement of the whole population is just barely prevented. Now it may not be so surprising that the Mytilene factor first emerges in a very full form in Thucydides because he is a superb analyst of conflict and power. But once we've identified this rhetorical constellation, we can see the Mytilene factor in other places as well in compressed and full formed, it is still around us. 
	Compare the way President Obama spoke about closing Guantanamo Bay before he was first elected and after his reelection. In 2008 his campaign promise was almost entirely based on moral indignation, on the incompatibility of the camp with American values, America's moral stature in the world, American moral claims. That we are acting on behalf of broader universal principles and the fact that the Americans, again a quote, "Should stand for human rights, true to our values and our ideals." All purely value-based arguments but in April 2013 he made a speech in which defended the same course of action, closing the camp, in entirely different terms. Guantanamo he said is, and this is a quote, "Inefficient, it hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counter terrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed." There is Diodotus for you. Note the language, the powerful asyndeta, the staccato, the factual nature of the list. The Mytilene factor makes Obama suppress all references to the moral issues surrounding Guantanamo. Nobody can call him weak if you read the statement. His tough position means that Guantanamo must be closed and at the same time he is offering his adversaries the common ground to admit this, not that that has actually happened so far, but at least the potential is there. So Obama's moral position, which we may assume has remained unchanged, is elided from the debate.  The Mytilene factor.
	Let's return to the debate about Greece again. We can now see quite clearly that the Mytilene factor was also operative there, but we must notice one other important feature of the linguistic form of the debate. One perhaps even more obvious in the Netherlands than in Germany. The Dutch Yes Camp, focusing on self-interest and suppressing morality had a particular mantra, which I found many times in the media. Not out of solidarity but in our own interest. In Germany, we got the slightly weaker form [German 00:47:48], it's not just a matter of morality but also of common sense. Now watch the linguistic form of these expressions. If you say "Not A but B", you do a number of different things at the same time. It looks like a way to eliminate one factor and substitute it with another, but there are some crucial differences between this expression and just a simple "B". Not A but B. B, right. Which logically comes down to the same thing but not rhetorically. "I would like to have not vanilla but chocolate ice cream" is materially identical to "I would like to have chocolate ice cream." But the difference is first of all, that we are very bad at negations, at negatives. They do something strange. Instead of straightaway obliterating a concept they actually activate it. Don't think of an elephant. It can't be done. 
	So in our example we are now thinking not just of my chocolate ice cream but also the vanilla, which I claimed I did not really want. Second, "Not A but B" is what we call a focus construction. It makes B even more prominent than it would have been if it had just been out there on its own. In other words the chocolate ice cream, this time really gets the full limelight because it is not alone anymore it's opposed to a different choice. In our example, the business like consideration on which groups are more likely to be able to agree we happen to know that, is represented as eclipsing morality in the debate about Greece. 
	Then third, if you use this construction you can really only sensibly do it if the "Not A" part refers to something that is already in what we call the common ground, if only to be set aside. Common ground means that cognitively it is readily available to all parties, they know it is there. Apparently, the speaker might have reasonably been expected to say the other thing also, but he dismisses it in favor of something else. So rather than [inaudible 00:50:21] omitting the moral argument altogether, the speaker who says "Not out of solidarity but in our own best interest" activates the concept of solidarity and acknowledges that solidarity could've been invoked as everyone knows but that he chooses instead an argument, which the adversee must acknowledge as valid. 
	Those of you here who have studied rhetoric will recognize the rhetorical figure of [foreign language 00:50:50] here, which means you pass something over. I will not be talking about X and you've mentioned it already. It's very important, however, not just to slap these rhetorical labels on such expressions but to think through the psychological and cognitive effects of such a figure of speech. So where are we at this point? Experimental psychology and empirical practice tell us the conflicts of interest are much simpler in many ways than conflicts of values. The distinction is not a hard and fast one, up to a point it's a matter of how the opposing parties choose to construe their conflict. In Sophocles Ajax, Odysseus found out that his argument to bury Ajax, which to his mind may have been a value-based argument, it's a matter of common humanity to grant burial to the dead, he found out that it only worked because Agamemnon took it as an appeal to down to earth self-interest. That's what made it possible for him to yield without admitting to the merits of Ajax. 
	The intrusion of values into a debate can complicate matters no end. In fact, in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, economist Paul Krugman claimed that, this is again a quote, "Righteousness is killing the world economy." What he meant is we just cannot let go of the value inspired idea that irresponsible borrowers should face the full consequences of their actions. Although we'd all be better off if we canceled a bunch of those debts. I would like to thank, by the way, Swarthmore professor of Economics Mark Cooperburg who may or may not be here. He is here, thank you very much for bringing that piece to my attention, as you can tell it was relevant. So he may be making a Diodotus argument, we don't know because he doesn't say anything about the underlying ... That that is a Diodotus argument, moral idea. Bu however that is, values complicate conflicts. 
	The Mytilene factor seems to be one rhetorical strategy to cope with that empirical fact, one party in the debate will suppress its moral considerations and try to argue exclusively on the basis of moral interest. Now one last question remains, is it really advisable to just get rid of value-based arguments in a conflict? Well obviously things are not as easy as all that, and there are some very good reasons for why values are not easily suppressed. The most important one being that we are simply not prepared to do that. Values are part of our identity, I've said it many times now. And sticking up for our values, is itself a value. So that complicates matters considerably. People would feel like cowards if they could not express the beliefs that are most sacred to them. So although this might have seemed really practical advice, likelihood is that it won't work in many cases simply because we're not willing to adopt this strategy. It's not for nothing that free-speech has been linked to courage ever since antiquity. 
	There's another reason for the persistence, and the reemergence of values even when we do try to make other considerations more central in the debate. In many cases it is possible to agree on a course of action without necessarily being in agreement about the justification for the course of action. So temporarily values or not so much put on the back burner, they're there, they motivate the participants in the debate, but they are not overtly expressed within the agreement. This is what Cass Sunstein calls minimally theorized agreements. They can be very useful, they enable negotiators to go back to their various constituencies and all claim a success. All parties are successful. This time to their own audience obviously using the value-based arguments. 
	So if Guantanamo Bay is ever closed Obama's explanation to his fellow Democrats of why this is a success will be phrased rather differently, I should think, than his rhetoric to get it done in the first place. And when his opponents agreed to closing it, ideally, they should've been handed something that enables them to go back to their constituency and explain how this course of action is a good thing, not just a useful one but one that fits their values. Now since everyone knows these shifts in rhetoric depending on one's audience, the underlying values may often remain transparent even though they're not really there. They're like the ghosts of their arguments. They may remain transparent to the onlookers even when they're not overtly expressed. In effect, and to end on a positive note, this may be a reason why we can tolerate the temporarily lower status. We'll get back to them, maybe. Maybe we can accept that temporary lower status. Maybe in some cases and in those we may member the Mytilene factor and the effect of using tough words without abandoning our soft hearts. In honor of Martin.
	Thank you.