Plato, Public Character, Australia

Plato, Public Virtue, and Australia:

Cassandra had an interesting post yesterday that I've already cited a couple of times, but let's do it once more. It deserves a top-level discussion.

Classical thinkers like Plato were very much concerned with encouraging responsibility and public virtue because they - like our Founding Fathers - considered these qualities essential to the survival of a free society. I hear a lot of talk about freedom these days but precious little about accountability. Freedom cannot long exist where men seek to be excused from the consequences of their freely made decisions. Such men can neither control nor support themselves.

We have become a society that will accept no limits on individual freedom - not even those imposed by nature and consequence.

This is very well said. I noted in the comments:

I was just reading the Charmides this week. It's interesting because it's a discussion of the virtue of duty, sophrosyne. (This is often translated as "temperance," or "moderation," or "self-control," but the real trick to sophrosyneis that it's about understanding your duty, and then doing it.)

One could read the Charmides as comical -- no one in the dialogue actually appears to have the virtue, as Socrates is being tempted by lust, Charmides by liquor, and Critias by pride. Or one could read it as a purely philosophical exploration of the difficult of defining a word that we think we understand, which is how it is usually read.

But the real point of the dialogue is unspoken, because the Greeks reading the dialogue would have known the history: Critias becomes one of the leaders of the Thirty Tyrants, which executes many Athenians and restricts their traditional rights. Charmides joins him in this as one of their officers. Both of them are killed in the ensuing civil war.

Or take the Laches, wherein Laches and Nicias are talking with Socrates, who challenges them to define "courage." They cannot do so; and this is the same Nicias we read about in Plutarch, who lost the Sicily campaign out of timidity. It was the loss of the war with Sparta that caused the Thirty Tyrants to come to power in the first place.

These questions of character have real and severe consequences. Plato could see them clearly from where he sat, following a loss of war to a foreign power, a tyranny set up by the Spartans to rule over the people of Athens, and a brutal civil war. All that could have been avoided, he thought, had the leaders been better men.

Today in The Australian, there's an article that argues that the new Green Party is the party of these civic virtues.

ARE the Australian Greens the party of libertines? Sydney's Catholic Archbishop Cardinal George Pell thinks so, dubbing their influence poisonous.

The Australian Sex Party agrees, recently expressing indignation that the Greens could betray their principles by endorsing candidates (including myself) critical of pornography.

Both the sex industry and moral conservatives see the Greens as the political torchbearers for the liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. Yet a consideration of what it actually stands for suggests that, rather than being the party of extremes that its critics want it to be, the Greens are the party of moderation....

While the Greens embody many of the social values that defined Australia after World War II, their philosophical roots go back to the foundations of Western civilisation.

Indeed, it may be said that the Australian Greens are the party of Plato, the original philosopher of the West, who described the four cardinal virtues as self-control (sophrosyne), prudence (phronesis), resilience (andreia) and justice (dikaioasyne).

When applied to our fellow humans as well as to the natural world, these virtues are precisely what the Australian Greens stand for.

If after this election the Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate, Plato's spirit will come alive in our upper house.

Now, as we noticed from the Timaeus, being 'the party of Plato' ought to be a warning sign as much as a point of praise. Some of his ideas were great, and some more problematic.

The idea of public virtue, and its importance to politics, is nevertheless a solid point. It's also part of our broader discussion: how do we decide what it is? Are there any qualities observable at a distance (i.e., that voters who do not actually know the candidates can see) that are reliable guarantees, or does the sinful nature of humankind mean that the best we can do is look for proxies for virtue? What proxies should these be? What do we really want in candidates for office, or those whom we choose to consult about the future and direction of the nation?

These are important questions. Cassandra is very much on the right track in looking for responsibilities as the root of rights, I think; but then, I would say that, because it is an expression of the idea that our liberties (and rights) lie on a foundation of mutual service and fealty. That is to say, it is entirely compatible with the idea of frith discussed below, or Dr. Painter's ideas about the feudal roots of liberty and our rights.

What do you think? These are challenging times, and if there is an answer to these problems we face, part of it must lie here.