Demolishing the Circles of Dominance

I am tired of America bashers. They send me the latest by Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, et al, by the email box-full. When feeling generous — or maybe even sadistic — I forward these to folks who cannot seem to live without truckloads of such gloomy news and analyses. Mostly I let these missives die in the ’deleted’ folder on my desktop.

Then there are ’friends’ who tell me to look up a particularly depressing story in a newspaper that they feel is obligatory for starting a new day. ’What’s your problem? Why can’t you go down and check the article in the library, or have the librarian send you a photocopy?’ I am asked. ’Then again, why don’t you get some of the better papers delivered to your home?’ "Did you watch that amazing footage of bombing in (fill-in one of the hot spots around the globe, most likely in the Mid-East or Afghanistan)?"

Over a decade ago I found an answer to all this. I stopped looking at the dailies and avoid the TV. I am happy to tell my friends that when they visit my house they can only talk to an idiot but not get to see an idiot box.

Fisk, Pilger, Chomsky and company would do better by telling us the basic reasons for American nastiness and leave the elaboration and daily corroborations to their underlings. The great men could then find better use of their time and creative energies. By resting their pens, trees would be saved otherwise lost to newsprint. In turn, they will find new subjects to write about.

My simple-minded understanding of the hegemonic attitude of the US, make the daily dire happenings seem logical to me at least. Apart from the imperialist designs that the US shares with conquering armies of Rome, through to those of the Muslims who conquered India, Americans as a whole are slaves to their consumerism — the voracious demand for oil is the reason for much of the US-related trouble around the globe lately.

It helps to recall the ideas of antiquity’s most famous Greek scientist, weapons’ designer and mathematician who lived over 200 years before Christ. He had analysed perfectly why Romans who had then over-run the Greeks would eventually fail — there was a fatal flaw in their ideal of an empire.

Even though you cannot recall it this moment, it is likely that you have heard of the Archimedes’ principle in a school science class. That it has something to do with bodies in water, or fluids generally, and with the buoyancy force that help a body to float, creeps up into the consciousness on hearing the great scientist’s name. What is most remembered is the apocryphal story of when he discovered his new principle and had his ’Eureka!’ (’I have found it’) moment. He jumped out of his bath and ran naked through Syracuse.

This isn’t the place to discuss the intricacies of his theorem or the myriads of his intellectual achievements. Nor are we to issue the final word on his death for which the popular account talks about Archimedes falling to the sword of an angry drunken Roman soldier who was irritated by the mathematician drawing circles in his path. Other accounts suggest that he lost his life through an accident later.

It was Lucius, the ambitious staff centurion of the Roman general Marcellus who visited Archimedes to lure him over from the Greeks to work for the Romans. To disarm the great man, Lucian applauded the catapults and mirrors built on his design. Had it not been for these ingenious weapons, Syracuse would have fallen in a month instead of the two years that it took to repel the Roman armada. He conveyed the high regard that his fellow warriors had for the ingenuity of the weapon, in a manner of camaraderie that is shown by retired officers from both sides of the Indo-Pak border when they meet for their powwows.

Archimedes brushed aside the congratulations and responded that what he had come up with were ordinary mechanisms for throwing projectiles — more toys. They were of no great importance from a scientific point of view, he said. Here the similarity ends with the nuke weapons designers of South Asia. These proud makers of weapons of mass destruction lapped up the praise that their countries showered on them, although their bombs also largely required engineering competence, and not any significant advance in science.

Why should he join the Romans asked Archimedes? Because he lived in Sicily, of which Syracuse was a city state, and the Roman wanted to occupy Sicily said Lucius. But why Sicily, he enquired. To which came the condescending reply, that the Roman wanted to be the masters of the Mediterranean, and whoever was the master of that would be the masters of the world. What follows is a paraphrase of an account of the exchange, I read, between these two.

’And must you be masters of the world?’ asked Archimedes.

’Rome’s mission is to become that, and it is going to achieve its goal’.

’Possibly, but I wouldn’t advise it, Lucius. To be the master of the world you are going to have an awful lot of defending to do. That’s going to be very troublesome.’

’That doesn’t matter as we shall have a great Empire.’

’If I draw a small circle or a large circle, it’s still a circle. But a larger circle acquires a large frontier that needs to be defended.’

’You are juggling with arguments, Archimedes. We have got to be stronger than anyone else in the world.’

’Why?’ asked Archimedes.

’To keep her position. The stronger we are, the more enemies we get. And to guard against them we need to be the strongest.’

’But to guard your strength you have to expend a lot of it merely defending it. Then one day it will all become too much.’

Getting a bit tired of this philosophising, Lucius repeated his bait about Archimedes being invited to build the strongest war machine for the Romans. ’That a man like you would want to acquire mastery over the world.’

’You mustn’t be offended, but I’ve something more important here. Something more lasting.’

’What’s that?’

’It’s the method of calculating the area of a segment of a circle!’

That’s a lesson that our leaders, military and civilian, as well as the people need to learn. It is such distilled truth that our great writers need to get across to us so that it can be truly internalised instead of the noise that so often fills our media.