“Come then, tell me, dear friend, how tyranny arises. That it is an outgrowth of democracy is fairly plain[.] ... Liberty.... is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?”
“How?” he said.
“Why, when a democratic city athirst for liberty gets bad cupbearers for its leaders and is intoxicated by drinking too deep of that unmixed wine, and then, if its so-called governors are not extremely mild and gentle with it and do not dispense the liberty unstintedly, it chastises them and accuses them of being accursed oligarchs.... [T]hose who obey the rulers... it reviles as willing slaves and men of naught.... Is it not inevitable that in such a state the spirit of liberty should go to all lengths?”
“Of course.”
“And this anarchical temper,” said I, “my friend, must penetrate into private homes and finally enter into the very animals.”
“Just what do we mean by that?” he said.
“Why,” I said, “the father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents, so that he may be forsooth a free man. And the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to him, and the foreigner likewise.” ...
“The teacher in such case fears and fawns upon the pupils, and the pupils pay no heed to the teacher or to their overseers either. And in general the young ape their elders and vie with them in speech and action, while the old, accommodating themselves to the young... for fear they may be thought disagreeable and authoritative.”
“By all means,” he said. “And the climax of popular liberty, my friend,” I said, “is attained in such a city when the purchased slaves, male and female, are no less free than the owners who paid for them. And I almost forgot to mention the spirit of freedom and equal rights in the relation of men to women and women to men.” ...
“And do you note that the sum total of all these items when footed up is that they render the souls of the citizens so sensitive that they chafe at the slightest suggestion of servitude and will not endure it? For you are aware that they finally pay no heed even to the laws written or unwritten, so that forsooth they may have no master anywhere over them.” “I know it very well,” said he.
“This, then, my friend,” said I, “is the fine and vigorous root from which tyranny grows, in my opinion.”
Republic VIII
An excerpt, for Tom but also for Cassandra, from Plato's great work on politics. But for one line, it sounds like something she has been saying to me for years. How many of these markers do you see around you?
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5 comments:
Yet another reminder that I misspent my undergrad years.
I recently read a Victor Davis Hanson essay talking about the importance of having a connection to the past. One of his comments was that, if we understand the past, we aren't limited to one life's knowledge.
It's even more interesting when you recognize the apparent conflict with what he had argued in Book V about the role of women in society. There, he argues that -- in the ideal state -- women would in fact be educated in the same way as men and would take on the same roles if they had the right capacities:
"You agree then, I said, that men and women are to have a common way of life such as we have described --common education, common children; and they are to watch over the citizens in common whether abiding in the city or going out to war; they are to keep watch together, and to hunt together like dogs; and always and in all things, as far as they are able, women are to share with the men? And in so doing they will do what is best, and will not violate, but preserve the natural relation of the sexes."
Why the apparent difference? In this passage from Book VIII, Plato is talking about a society organized around the principle of "equal rights," by which they essentially mean equal freedom from being restrained by anyone -- not parents, not culture, not laws 'written or unwritten.' The more people who receive these 'equal rights,' the worse things get.
In the Book V passage, he's talking not about rights but duties. These duties are rationally ordered by your natural capacities. They aren't rights -- they're obligations. A woman who happens to have the right kind of capacities will receive the same education and the same duties, and participate with men who are similar to her in nature.
If it seems like a subtle distinction, a lot turns on it.
Thank you for this. Have been incredibly busy finishing up a big project at work but am looking forward to thinking about this.
No doubt the restless desire for freedom from constraint gets people into trouble. But I think the real trouble happens when the people around us agree to insulate us from the consequences of our free choices.
Most people pursue security even more fiercely than they pursue freedom from restraint. If you give them freedom, they'll experiment until they crash up against a few hard walls, then they'll learn to moderate their urges. If you give them a comfy enough safety net, lots of them never will learn any such thing. In fact, they'll cheerfully trade their freedom for more security. It's child's play, then, for the tyrant to step in.
Democracy is a way to maximize liberty by dispersing power. It can work if people have the courage to let the people around them endure the consequences of their own failures, at least beyond the point that each of us is unwilling to foot the bailout bill personally. If democracy becomes a way to force everyone to bear the consequences of everyone else's failure, it certainly becomes an instrument of tyranny: not because there's too much liberty, but because there's too much lying and impersonal rescue, so no one's forced to learn the limits of liberty.
Another possibility, of course, is to eliminate the threat of democracy turning into tyranny by making sure that tyranny has a firm grip from the beginning--but I don't see what's gained that way. One way or another, people will have to govern themselves if they don't want to be slaves. There's no way for them to live their whole lives like a pig loose in the vegetable garden. But they really do have a choice between controlling themselves and letting someone else take over that job.
So the general argument in the Republic is that cities are like people, because they are made up of people. Now people have souls, and souls have parts -- a rational part, a spirited part, and a part that feels appetites. Some people are led by reason and some by appetite, and others by the love of honor that is the mark of the spirited individual.
So the argument by analogy is that some states are better in exactly the same way that some people are better. Just as in some people appetite takes over their lives (whether for food, sex, money, drugs, whatever), in some states people of this kind come to dominate the culture and government. Likewise in some people the love of honor overrides reason, and in some states (perhaps thinking of Sparta) the culture becomes dominated by a military elite. And in some states, as in some people, reason governs and the various appetites and spirits are ordered appropriately. This, the argument says, is justice.
So the argument is not that people can't govern themselves. It's that people can govern themselves appropriately, and a state should be governed in the same way. The whole argument is an analogy that could be accused of the fallacy of composition, but I'm not sure that's the core mistake. I think the real mistake is that honor should govern reason, rather than the other way around.
This is because reason generally needs desire to set an end for it, so that it can calculate the best means to the end. At most, reason can set additional ends once you have some input as to what the most important end might be (e.g., 'if you value this, then you ought also to value that').
So the real question isn't whether reason should govern, because it can't set final ends. Some desire has to do that. Now honor, because honor is sacrifice, is the only one of these desires that considers the good of the community as its chief end. Thus, of the desires that might set final ends, honor is the best one to serve as the first guide to reason.
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