Moral duty

Cicero

This morning, I’ve put a text onsite, in English translation, that is already online in at least ten places: Cicero’s de Officiis.

Normally I’d never do such a thing, and I’m quite happy to link to existing online material, especially if it’s something like philosophy in which I have very little interest. And if that other site has a few typos, well I’m sure my own stuff does too — in fact, I’m reminded so about twice a week, when my e‑mail brings me (welcome) notice of them in my own house — and if they don’t slavishly reproduce the Loeb edition, well there’s no harm in that, and often enough that’s even an improvement.

But when on a rare foray into the meat of what it was Cicero might have said, I discovered that these Ten Sites — all, as far as I can tell, cribs of one single scan — print such things as this:

The pirates’ sense of can be expedient?

and find that the Loeb edition actually has:

The pirates’ sense of honour is higher than the senate’s. “But,” someone will say, “the revenues were increased, and therefore it was expedient.” How long will people venture to say that a thing that is not morally right can be expedient?

— I draw the line. (Go ahead, Google that phrase, in quotes: you’ll find 8 pages with that nonsensical line. One of them is brought to us by the “Britannica Online Encyclopedia”, actually hosted by http://www.britannica.com; and another is apparently a printed book.)

This passage, mind you, is not the isolated accident. It’s just one of about 20 such passages of nonsense, all of them involving the mindless skip of two to six lines at the bottom of the page being scanned: except for two inexplicable skips of fully three-quarters of a page each. All of them make it quite clear that the perpetrator didn’t read what they were throwing online. Here are two more, and notice how insidious the first one, which appears to make a sort of sense:

One’s purse, then, should not be closed so tightly that a generous impulse should be observed and that limit should be determined by our means.

where the correct text is:

One’s purse, then, should not be closed so tightly that a generous impulse cannot open it, nor yet so loosely held as to be open to everybody. A limit should be observed and that limit should be determined by our means.

and

It is their teachings that I am following in these books, and for these problems, if conducted by those who consider whatever is morally right also expedient and nothing expedient that is not at the same time morally right, will be more illuminating than if conducted by those who think that something not expedient may be morally right and that something not morally right may be expedient.

where the correct text is:

It is their teachings that I am following in these books, and for this reason: the older Academicians and your Peripatetics (who were once the same as the Academicians) give what is morally right the preference over what seems expedient; and yet the discussion of these problems, if conducted by those who consider whatever is morally right also expedient and nothing expedient that is not at the same time morally right, will be more illuminating than if conducted by those who think that something not expedient may be morally right and that something not morally right may be expedient.

Jona rails, and does well to do so, at certain academics who are slovenly and untrustworthy in their facts and interpretations; but what are we to say of people, including publishers of printed books and that first line of defense against ignorance, the Encyclopedia Britannica, who throw up nonsense like this? Clearly, without reading it. The first of these two slovenlinesses is tragedy; the second is just plain farce.

And why would anyone put stuff like this online? This to my mind is where farce, like all really good farce, falls back into tragedy, and it’s also what gets me downright angry. Putting Cicero online is a sort of decoration: it’s like decorating one’s house with a piece of art bought somewhere because it goes with your sofa. It doesn’t really matter whether you’ve read it, or whether you expect anyone else to; it doesn’t matter what it says, whether it’s true or not, or hell, whether it even makes sense. What matters is the façade. These are the same people, the same mentality, that say “amphitheatre” for “theatre” because the longer word sounds cool; that toss out as a decorative tag Wotton’s 1624 translation of a sentence in Vitruvius, “Well building hath three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight” — then to talk about commodities (this bizarre interpretation on an academic webpage!), or Wotton’s “quaintness” — rather than read Vitruvius in modern English and actually understand him.

I’m not a thinker or a philosopher, and can’t hold a candle to Jona or much of anyone else when it comes to historiography or archaeological evidence; but I can understand that the truth starts with plain facts, and behind that, with an attitude that things matter, and that getting them right matters. Caring for Truth is, to coin a phrase, a moral duty.