In an obscure corner of the Humanities, they study a place called Serindia. Serindia appears on no map, as it had no political identity. It was a region defined by a common and very unusual artistic culture. It was a fusion of two great cultures, actually, and it produced some stunningly beautiful artworks. Serindia had no definite geographical boundaries, it was just a curious borderland.

Right now I am southwest of Serindia, in a place that has served as a crossroads between cultures since the time of Alexander the Great. Travellers to Serindia use to pass through here. There have been great treasures here, though little fusion. You could say I am on the highway, along which goods were transported, not in the foundries in which they were made. Art was traded here, but that doesn’t mean that artistry was mixed.

That road long ago turned to dust, and you won’t find much high culture moving through here now. But if we move ourself back in time, to happier days, we can look to the west, and see an ancient event unfold that has meaning for this place today.

The Siege of Syracuse, 212 BC, was a minor footnote in the Second Punic War. While Hannibal was making a holy terror of himself, marauding through Italy, King Hieron of Syracuse broke with Rome and sided with the Carthaginians. Being an island seaport town, Syracuse soon had 60 Roman warships bearing down on it, under the command of General Marcus Claudius Marcellus.

The Romans, of course, possessed one of the most powerful armies in history– even Hannibal was eventually defeated by them. They were the acme of physical might. But little Syracuse had something it could pit against them; Archimedes, one of the greatest minds in human history. Archimedes discovered how levers worked, he wrote the law of bouyancy that we still use today, and he came breathtakingly close to inventing calculus– 1900 years before Isaac Newton. He found the value of Pi, the square root of three, and the volume of a sphere relative to a cylinder that contains it. He was the acme of intellectual ability. Hieron assigned Archimedes to the defense of Syracuse against Marcellus, in a perfect test case of brains versus brawn.

Marcellus’ ships approached Syracuse. From some distance out, ballistic weapons of various sorts struck at them with unnerving accuracy. But the fleet pushed on, and got inside the range of these weapons. There are reports– bordering on the implausible, but reports all the same– that Archimedes burst ships into flames with some kind of death ray. Using large copper mirrors in a parabolic array to focus the heat of the sun, this just might have been possible. How many ships he supposedly took out by this means is not known, but in any case the advance continued.

Archimedes’ final weapon forced Marcellus into a tactical retreat. As ships reached the city wall, a giant mechanical arm reached out from inside the city. The clawed arm plucked a ship from the water, hoisted it up, and shook it. Romans fell to their deaths, and the arm cast the entire ship away like a piece of debris. It then reached for another ship…

Marcellus fled, and saw that a naval attack was impossible. He retreated, grumbling about the mathematician “who plays pitch-and-toss with our ships.” The Romans would have to find another way. What resulted was a long, slow, and comparatively dull siege that lasted two years. The Romans circled Syracuse and camped far outside its walls, hoping to starve their enemies out. They could not get close enough to stop all resupply, though one imagines that they did make life uncomfortable.

In the end Syracuse fell. Brawn won. The victory was not dramatic or inspiring; the Romans simply had to be patient more than anything. And as they swept into the city, Marcellus’ instructions were clear: he wanted the mathemtician taken alive. Unfortunately, Archimedes was struck down anyway by some anonymous soldier who didn’t know who he was. Thus ended a brilliant career.

The battle of Syracuse was not an abberation; might is stronger than thought. Archimedes taught us about the lever, and showed us how it can generate incredibly large amounts of force from a tiny force input. But even the cleverest lever needs that initial tiny input. Thinking alone cannot provide it. Somewhere, there must be muscle. Neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington recognized this, with his famous quote, “To move things is all mankind can do, and for such, the sole executant is muscle, whether in whispering a syllable or in felling a forest.”

Physical force rules the day, and whoever rules physical force controls the state. Max Weber identified the state as having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, the ends to which this violence is put being a lesser concern. As an American, I notice many Americans (and many other first-worlders, for that matter) tend to forget this. For us, physical violence has been under firm control for so long– the question of who holds the sword has been resolved for so long– that we forget it was ever a point of discussion. Thus we talk about pens being mightier than swords. We no longer remember what swords do.

In 1990, I was in Kathmandu, Nepal, having arrived just before pro-democracy riots broke out. My hotel was two blocks from the royal palace, and we could her shouting and gunfire all day long. Some 150 protestors were shot. That night, the Nepalese Army rolled in, and established martial law and a 24-hour curfew. For five days, nothing moved. No one was allowed on the streets, the employees at our hotel could not go home, and the Army didn’t really care if we were running low on food. Nobody was moving and nobody was getting hurt.

(As an aside, I should mention that Nepal was something of a democracy already, the rioters were calling for a democracy which would suit them better. That, and the Queen of Nepal at the time was extremely unpopular. As far as I am aware, there were no extrajudicial punishments of key dissidents or other human rights abuses during the martial law period– just no freedom of movement. There were, as I recall, two one-hour windows opened on day four; this saw no violence, and the curfew ended the next day.)

The multi-party democracy that the protestors were calling for was eventually implemented, and today even the Nepalese monarchy has been discarded. The pen brought about those changes. But those changes happened within the context of a state with a firm grip on the sword. Violence did not spread for five days after the riots, violence was smothered for five days after the riots. That peace– extreme as it was– had as its guarantee the might of physical force.

Nepal is to the east of my location. I am in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and last week, the Taliban demonstrated that there is no monopoly on violence here. In a dramatic night attack, they struck the main prison with a massive truck bomb, killing 15 policemen and freeing some 1600 prisoners– 400 of whom were fellow Taliban. The next morning, there was no martial law, no massive military presence, no material restriction on movement. I was reminded instatly of Kathmandu, and I was depressed by the contrast. The Afghan government could not secure Kandahar simply because it does not have the manpower. It is too weak, in the most physical of terms. We have been on edge for the last few days, waiting to see if the Taliban will attempt to retake the entire city– the Afghan army would be unable to stop them.

And we find that a pen is useless here. The Taliban refuse to negotiate. This may be for ideological reasons on their part, though it may be for practical reason, too; why negotiate with an enemy when he is too weak to oppose you? The Taliban have nothing to gain by talking; they can simply take by force anything they want.

Physical might is not limited to acts of violence. Afghanistan needs peace, but it also needs roads, and buildings, and irrigation, and so on. That is why I am here; 30 years of war have reduced the Silk Road to a legend, the loya jirga to an anachronism, and the Durrani Empire to a page in history. Afghanistan, once prosperous, is nearly the poorest country on Earth. Even its own artistic culture is forgotten, with the present generations having never learned about Afghanistan’s great poets or its traditional folklore– or Serindia. If this is to change, if civilization is to succeed here, then physical might is needed. Might to repel the Taliban, but might also to shape the land, and to build a country. 

They want me to help with things like irrigation canals. One cannot rebuild canals through words; somewhere, there must be muscle. Founding a civilization requires first that nature be subjugated to man’s will. Afghanistan is in such a primordial state that we can see clearly here the primacy of the sword over the pen. We would do well to remember that the rest of the world, though positioned to enjoy the luxury of discourse, rests on the same rough foundation of physical might.

Image copyright 2000-2008, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Reproduced in accordance with their guidelines, as described here. See also www.metmuseum.org.