Given the depressing nature of the comments trashing the very idea of democracy that I reacted to yesterday in this space, I decided to go back a few years to a post I made about PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX, a terrific book expanding on the conceit that Plato is on a book tour for his latest,THE REPUBLIC, and in the course of the tour speaks to many iconic figures of our current culture. The great thing about the book is that, since it is Platonic as all get out, it does a beautiful job of explaining democracy. I wish some of those sad thirty somethings who have despaired over the state of the world would consider the following thoughts I posted a couple of years ago:
But I want to talk mostly about laws and justice here. Plato proposes a fascinating thought experiment. Imagine you had in your possession a ring that would render you invisible whenever you wore it, reminiscent of Perseus’ helmet in CLASH OF THE TITANS (“I’m invisible. Can’t you see that.”). When invisible you could do anything you felt like with no fear of getting caught, no fear of retribution. You could walk into a house and take whatever you wanted. You could rifle money out of cash drawers. Lurk around girls’ or boys’ locker rooms. Steal cars. Take free rides on airplanes. Anything. Would you take advantage of that situation? Regardless of your answer, what percentage of the rest of us would? Most everyone would answer, “Of course not. Of course I wouldn’t take advantage.” But do you think that’s an honest response? If you had the ring long enough, wouldn’t you be tempted to use it for little stuff? You’re short of cash and you’ve left your bank card at home. Wouldn’t you slip on the ring and score that Twinkie, or that $100,000 bar? Who’s it gonna hurt? And wouldn’t that make the next transgression a little easier? I mean, that’d just be human, right?
Plato goes off from that experiment to suggest that at the extreme end of the range of human desires lies the ring. If heaven or hell were not hanging over our heads, we would all ultimately agree that being able to do anything we would like to do and get away with it would be ideal. Of course, we would also agree that the worse that could happen to us is if someone else who was getting away with everything did anything to hurt us. The space between those two conflicting desires is the realm of law and justice. Since we have no choice but to live in a community (Plato thought that anyone who lived outside of society was by definition either a god or a monster), we have to cooperate to survive. We have to have a social contract. And to do that we would have consider questions like “What is the good life?” “What makes life matter?”
Even more than that, the good of the polis, the city-state, outweighs the good of the individual. Anything else equals chaos. Sparta honored collective glory. Individual glory—a life that matters—was secondary to the glory of the state. Athens gloried in the individual, but a life that mattered for the individual was still one that furthered the state. The braid of beauty, truth, and goodness held this magical society together. The pursuit of any part of this trilogy was the purest endeavor and one that could not help but further the good of the state. All politicians in Plato’s utopia would be the poorest people in the state and forbade extravagance so as to guard against the inevitable corruption that comes from the combination of power and wealth.
In the ultimately unsatisfying chapter where Plato is interviewed by the Bill O’Reilly character (It is unsatisfying because you finally see that it is not possible to win an argument with a prating knave.), Plato asks Roy McCoy if he would rather refute someone, or be refuted? Would he rather hurt another, or himself be hurt? McCoy treats it like a trick question. Of course, he would rather refute, would rather hurt than be hurt. What kind of idiot wouldn’t? Plato is just that kind of idiot. He is the kind of idiot any polis needs to hold it together. The USA of the first part of the twenty-first century is in short supply of such idiots and if we had them they would just queue up to be demolished by the pundits, the cable news hosts, the bought and paid for politicians.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment