Undeceptions: Plato

If you're a regular reader of AVI's page, you know he's got a series called "Undeceptions" going. It's well worth your time. Since we've been doing a lot of Plato here, I thought I'd take a moment to bring forward the argument from the Lesser Hippias.

One of the things that Plato had to do in his work was to convince the people of Athens to rethink their judgment of Socrates. They had executed Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens, after all, and Plato wanted to build his Academy on the principle of furthering Socrates' work. That would be a dangerous thing to do if people still considered that kind of work a sort of corruption, especially in an age when the people were empowered to kill those they thought of as corrupting influences.

There are several approaches Plato adopts towards this end, but one of them is this rather playful dialogue. Socrates is often likened to Odysseus (whose name means something like 'troublemaker'): a clever, strategic thinker who can talk even those who proclaim themselves wise into knots. Hippias is a Sophist at the height of his fame and power during this dialogue, and is readily convinced to proclaim himself the greatest of calculators and thinkers. Socrates and he undertake to debate whether Achilles or Odysseus is the greatest of Homer's heroes. 

Socrates begins by convincing Hippias to accept that a liar is a better liar if he lies voluntarily than if he lies involuntarily. This is a relatively simple argument: a mathematician who can arrive at the right answer, but intentionally provides the wrong answer to an enemy, is a better mathematician than one who isn't actually capable of working out what the right answer is anyway. Both give wrong answers, but one of them is demonstrably a better mathematician. So too a liar who understands the truth, but is manipulating for his own reasons, is better than one who is telling an untruth because they aren't capable of seeing the truth -- or admitting it to themselves. 

Having gotten Hippias to agree to this basic principle, Odysseus proves to be the better man according to Socrates:

SOCRATES: [Y]ou say that Achilles does not speak falsely from design, when he is not only a deceiver, but besides being a braggart, in Homer's description of him is so cunning, and so far superior to Odysseus in lying and pretending, that he dares to contradict himself, and Odysseus does not find him out; at any rate he does not appear to say anything to him which would imply that he perceived his falsehood.

HIPPIAS: What do you mean, Socrates?

SOCRATES: Did you not observe that afterwards, when he is speaking to Odysseus, he says that he will sail away with the early dawn; but to Ajax he tells quite a different story?

HIPPIAS: Where is that?

SOCRATES: Where he says,—

'I will not think about bloody war until the son of warlike Priam, illustrious Hector, comes to the tents and ships of the Myrmidons, slaughtering the Argives, and burning the ships with fire; and about my tent and dark ship, I suspect that Hector, although eager for the battle, will nevertheless stay his hand.'

Now, do you really think, Hippias, that the son of Thetis, who had been the pupil of the sage Cheiron, had such a bad memory, or would have carried the art of lying to such an extent (when he had been assailing liars in the most violent terms only the instant before) as to say to Odysseus that he would sail away, and to Ajax that he would remain, and that he was not rather practising upon the simplicity of Odysseus, whom he regarded as an ancient, and thinking that he would get the better of him by his own cunning and falsehood?

HIPPIAS: No, I do not agree with you, Socrates; but I believe that Achilles is induced to say one thing to Ajax, and another to Odysseus in the innocence of his heart, whereas Odysseus, whether he speaks falsely or truly, speaks always with a purpose.

SOCRATES: Then Odysseus would appear after all to be better than Achilles?

HIPPIAS: Certainly not, Socrates.

SOCRATES: Why, were not the voluntary liars only just now shown to be better than the involuntary?

Hippias now tries to argue that you can't be a better person by being better at something evil, and accuses Socrates of being troublesome and dishonest (i.e., a troublemaker, like Odysseus). Plato is re-explaining Socrates by example, showing him to be an analogue for a Homeric hero involved in a kind of combat -- a duel of ideas, which he is winning like Odysseus won more practical combats, and in a way that makes him subject to the same criticisms as Odysseus.

Socrates says something I often think of at this point, which is worthy of any of us who are disagreeably inclined to speak our minds even when no one else aligns with our thinking.  "My deficiency is proved to me by the fact that when I meet one of you who are famous for wisdom, and to whose wisdom all the Hellenes are witnesses, I am found out to know nothing. For speaking generally, I hardly ever have the same opinion about anything which you have, and what proof of ignorance can be greater than to differ from wise men?"

What proof indeed?

A Blade for the Space Marines

By KA-BAR, of course.

I've been wearing my KA-BARs a lot more since moving to North Carolina. Georgia law -- a law I helped draft -- allows a concealed weapons permit holder to carry either a gun or a knife as he prefers. I thought that was reasonable:  why should you wish to ensure that the only option for concealing a weapon was a firearm?  If someone can defend himself with a blade, it carries far less risk of ricochet or of striking someone on the other side of the target. 

North Carolina law is fine with you carrying concealed firearms with a permit, but there is no legal way to conceal a knife. Thus, if you're carrying openly it's perfectly OK, but if it's ruled by a court to have been concealed you're in serious legal trouble. The KA-BAR depends from your belt, with the hilt entirely below the top of your belt. There's no way anyone could miss it.

Reception is mixed. Usually people out here are not the least bit surprised by knife-wearing, or gun-wearing as open carry of firearms is also legal. I did get a long look from a bouncer in Asheville when he noticed it, but he didn't say a word about it. He just filled me in on the current COVID-appropriate way to order a Guinness from the bar. An old man out toward Cashiers asked to see it the other day, and wanted to know if it was an old one. Well, the same way I'm getting to be old; I've been carrying that particular knife for thirty years. It was the one I took to Iraq, and wore strapped to my body armor when I went outside the wire. 

He said a knife like that was probably worth some money. It's not. They're pretty good knives for the money, but inexpensive enough that every Joe (or Space Marine) can carry one if he'd like. For that reason there's so many of them from so many wars and decades that none of them are very valuable. Or rather, all of them are in their way:  it's a proven design of many years' service. There are better designs for combat alone, but it is designed as a "fighting/utility knife" that is good for broad applications. I use it for tons of things; there's nothing handier than having a good knife on your belt.

New Gubernatorial Restrictions

Language warning.

Dominion Audit

A forensic audit is released to the public on authority of a Federal judge. 

"Ramsland’s team concluded that Dominion’s system 'intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors.'"

Well, what's really important is that the election is over, and it's just too late to worry about that. Or anything else, like the use of state police to bar Republican electors from the state capitol. (Or making the audience stand for the National Anthem "and the Black National Anthem," a more symbolic but still striking attempt at fragmenting America along racial lines.)

Laws IV, 2

We will not get much farther into Book IV today, as Plato brings up and then disposes of quickly two titanic subjects. The first is immigration, and the difficulty of diversity; the second, the effect of fate on constitutions.

The first subject arises because the Athenian wants to know from whence the population of the new colony is coming. He then gives a general set of remarks on the subject of the difficulties of trying to forge a new colony either of a homogeneous or a diverse population. Each has its challenges, he says:

Ath. Cities find colonization in some respects easier if the colonists are one race, which like a swarm of bees is sent out from a single country, either when friends leave friends, owing to some pressure of population or other similar necessity, or when a portion of a state is driven by factions to emigrate. And there have been whole cities which have taken flight when utterly conquered by a superior power in war. This, however, which is in one way an advantage to the colonist or legislator, in another point of view creates a difficulty. There is an element of friendship in the community of race, and language, and language, and laws, and in common temples and rites of worship; but colonies which are of this homogeneous sort are apt to kick against any laws or any form of constitution differing from that which they had at home; and although the badness of their own laws may have been the cause of the factions which prevailed among them, yet from the force of habit they would fain preserve the very customs which were their ruin, and the leader of the colony, who is their legislator, finds them troublesome and rebellious. On the other hand, the conflux of several populations might be more disposed to listen to new laws; but then, to make them combine and pull together, as they say of horses, is a most difficult task, and the work of years. And yet there is nothing which tends more to the improvement of mankind than legislation and colonization.

We can see plenty in American history to sustain these opinions for our own nation. The early colonies tended to be ordered around a particular faction that came of its own accord, with a homogenous view of life. These sometimes had trouble adapting to the harsher conditions of the new land, until they finally managed to overcome their convictions and adapt. The Plymouth colony famously had a religiously-inspired socialism at their root that failed them terribly; they were saved by the introduction of anti-socialist reforms. 

Likewise you have the story of ancient hatreds from the Old Country surviving for a time in the New World, until it became clear that they were no longer valuable. Even among those driven to emigration by destitution, pride in 'where one came from' was one of the last sources of personal meaning. It took a while for people to realize that it was not worth much in the new country, and to abandon it in favor of learning a new way of life that was functional.

Plato uses a nice metaphor for this process, that of two horses who have both been traced to the same chariot learning to breathe together as they run. As long as they fight the new conditions, and struggle against learning to work together, they will have a more difficult time of it. When they get it together, though, the work will go more smoothly for everyone.

We use 'the melting pot' for the same idea, a metaphor from cooking. Things that were quite different when they were put into the pot meld together into something that is -- hopefully! -- tastier and better than the two different things were alone. You can imagine a rich fondue as the ideal, but the truth is that the products are more like a stew: one recognizes that this element is a carrot and that one a piece of meat, but they have taken on each other's character to some degree and been joined in a broth that provides a savory harmony to each and to both.

We are far enough along in our own project that the initial failings of the homogeneous have been worked out, and many of the new additions have already successfully learned to breathe with the team. Others are still learning, but the process is ongoing in spite of ideological efforts to discredit it. The reason is Plato's reason:  it is a pragmatic reason. Things get easier as we learn to live and work together. They get easier for everyone. Whatever values or resentments you hold against the idea are expensive: you must literally pay for them, in your own life and in the extra difficulties they cause you. A particularly devout man might pay for his values, or resentments, but over time simple economy causes most of us to dispose of them. 

There is much, much more to be said about this, but I will leave it for you to say in the comments if you like.

The second huge idea is the effect of fate on human intentions. This rises naturally from the discussion of how hard it is to transplant homogeneous ideas from one area to an area of different physical conditions. How much do we really legislate, the Athenian wonders? How much are we not planning our political ideals, but just admitting to the necessities that reality is forcing upon us?

Ath. My good friend, I am afraid that the course of my speculations is leading me to say something depreciatory of legislators; but if the word be to the purpose, there can be no harm. And yet, why am I disquieted, for I believe that the same principle applies equally to all human things?

Cle. To what are you referring?

Ath. I was going to say that man never legislates, but accidents of all sorts, which legislate for us in all sorts of ways. The violence of war and the hard necessity of poverty are constantly overturning governments and changing laws. And the power of disease has often caused innovations in the state, when there have been pestilences, or when there has been a succession of bad seasons continuing during many years. Any one who sees all this, naturally rushes to the conclusion of which I was speaking, that no mortal legislates in anything, but that in human affairs chance is almost everything. And this may be said of the arts of the sailor, and the pilot, and the physician, and the general, and may seem to be well said; and yet there is another thing which may be said with equal truth of all of them.

Cle. What is it?

Ath. That God governs all things, and that chance and opportunity co-operate with him in the government of human affairs. There is, however, a third and less extreme view, that art should be there also; for I should say that in a storm there must surely be a great advantage in having the aid of the pilot's art. 

"That God governs all things" is the Jowett translation, which is 19th century. He was an Anglican, and not the only one to shoehorn Greek theology into Christian wording. He doesn't have to go far, though, because the original Greek is "θεός," that is, "Deus," which for a long time now has been given in Latin as "God" in English. It had a somewhat different usage in classical Latin. This is from scroll 709b, if you want to look at it yourself.

This is a point of great importance at the moment: we ourselves are struggling to find a way to reinforce our constitution against the winds brought by a disease and our fellow citizens' adaptations to it. Our constitution provides for unfettered free expression of religion; our governors ban church services. Our constitution calls for most powers to be divided among the state governments; yet such diversity of planning and legislation proves to be inefficient as a way of responding to a disease, though it does tend to give us opportunities to test which of the legislated ideas were really effective. Governors assume heretofore-unknown powers to close businesses or to forbid you purchasing seed to grow food. Mail-in-voting schemes may be adopted unconstitutionally in order to minimize disease spread; should they be accepted in view of public health, or set aside in view of the constitutional order? Are these temporary changes, or permanent ones?

Wars have also brought major changes to our constitutional order, especially but not only the Civil War. Immigration likewise was behind major constitutional changes: at a minimum the 18th and 19th Amendments were about making America less attractive to immigrants and diluting the power of mostly-male immigrants respectively. It is very likely that, absent circumstances in Europe that led to the flight of millions of migrants, we would never have had Prohibition or women's suffrage. These things are, then, accidents rather than the careful products of our legislation -- but we have come to think of the former as a ridiculous mistake, but the latter as a fulfillment of principles embedded in the work of earlier legislators, rather than an accidental product of pressures no one planned to endure.

The Athenian invokes this big idea briefly in order to bring the discussion back around to the skill of the navigator, who in our analog is the legislator. Constitutional changes may be products of necessity, but they can be made skillfully or not. That will be the subject of the next section.

Theorbo

Since we have heard so much talk from Plato about the universal laws of beauty in music, perhaps it would be well to take a moment to play some magnificiently ordered music. Here is a piece you will have seen this week if you followed all my links, on what at the time I first posted it I identified as a lute.

I have since learned that is a late development of the lute that is known in English as a "theorbo."

How about one more, accompanied by an academic's explanation of some of the mathematics and musical forms involved?

RIP Charlie Pride

One of the men David Allan Coe said you 'don't have to call me,' Charlie Pride, has died at 86.

Plato's Laws IV

It is fitting that this section falls on the same day as the Army-Navy Game, which is being played at West Point this year. This section treats the question of whether the army or the navy is better, not so much from the perspective of offense and defense but from the perspective of inculcating virtue. 

The issue comes up because the Athenian asks after the physical situation of the new colony. He quickly establishes that he would be a poor city planner by ordinary standards, because his interest is in avoiding anything that would make the city economically viable. He is disappointed to discover that there are harbors available nearby, though somewhat distant from the site of the city, but glad at least that the city is not being built right on the sea. That leads to retail, he says:

Then there is some hope that your citizens may be virtuous: had you been on the sea, and well provided with harbours, and an importing rather than a producing country, some mighty saviour would have been needed, and lawgivers more than mortal, if you were ever to have a chance of preserving your state from degeneracy and discordance of manners. But there is comfort in the eighty stadia; although the sea is too near, especially if, as you say, the harbours are so good. Still we may be content. The sea is pleasant enough as a daily companion, but has indeed also a bitter and brackish quality; filling the streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begetting in the souls of men uncertain and unfaithful ways-making the state unfriendly and unfaithful both to her own citizens, and also to other nations. 

Also comforting the Athenian is word that the city will be located on rugged ground, not on a plain. While productive this land will be somewhat difficult to farm, and thus require hard work from those who live there, while producing only enough to get by on. A virtuous people is more likely to take root if they have to work hard for little. 

Though I am inclined to agree that mountainous regions have many advantages, especially strategic but also in terms of the character produced by mountain climbing and the regular observation of far vistas,* Plato seems to me to be on shaky ground here. He is worried about love of luxury supplanting love of virtue, and clearly if luxury is impossible then it won't make any difference how much you love it. 

However, Plato has been clear that the education of the individual toward right reason is what produces good men even among Persian elites, or Athenian musicians. Now education is itself a kind of luxury good. Only in a city with enough resources to support a leisured class can you afford teachers, especially teachers of things like philosophy. If the land is hard enough that all hands need to be turned to farming or fishing, you will have no one studying history or music well enough to teach it; nor will the young have leisure for studying rather than labor. 

Indeed, this is so obvious that I wonder if Plato wasn't trying to draw out the objection from the dialogue's audience; perhaps the Athenian is less to provide us with answers than to provoke our own thoughts. The earlier dialogues often end in aporia, a confusion about the truth, which is an invitation for readers of the dialogue to try to pick up and carry the argument. The Athenian's certainty about some dubious ideas might be a similar invitation, this time an invitation to challenge.

Plato draws an even more surprising conclusion when he turns to the defense of the realm. Here he claims that it is good that a naval defense of the city will be impossible, because navies and marines are trained by their military arts away from virtue. The Athenian is contrasting marines with infantry soldiers, notice, not cavalry: for the wheel-and-strike maneuver that cavalry employs, and the ease of getting free and then striking again, characterizes cavalry maneuvers as much as marine tactics.

Ath. Better for [the Athenians] to have lost many times over the seven youths [that King Minos demanded as tribute, in the famous story of Thesesus and the Minotaur], than that heavy-armed and stationary troops should have been turned into sailors, and accustomed to be often leaping on shore, and again to come running back to their ships; or should have fancied that there was no disgrace in not awaiting the attack of an enemy and dying boldly; and that there were good reasons, and plenty of them, for a man throwing away his arms, and betaking himself to flight-which is not dishonourable, as people say, at certain times. This is the language of naval warfare, and is anything but worthy of extraordinary praise. For we should not teach bad habits, least of all to the best part of the citizens. You may learn the evil of such a practice from Homer, by whom Odysseus is introduced, rebuking Agamemnon because he desires to draw down the ships to the sea at a time when the Achaeans are hard pressed by the Trojans-he gets angry with him, and says:

"Who, at a time when the battle is in full cry, biddest to drag the well-benched ships into the sea, that the prayers of the Trojans may be accomplished yet more, and high ruin falls upon us. For the Achaeans will not maintain the battle, when the ships are drawn into the sea, but they will look behind and will cease from strife; in that the counsel which you give will prove injurious."

You see that he quite knew triremes on the sea, in the neighbourhood of fighting men, to be an evil;-lions might be trained in that way to fly from a herd of deer. Moreover, naval powers which owe their safety to ships, do not give honour to that sort of warlike excellence which is most deserving of it. For he who owes his safety to the pilot and the captain, and the oarsman, and all sorts of rather inferior persons cannot rightly give honour to whom honour is due. But how can a state be in a right condition which cannot justly award honour?

Invoking Odysseus here is remarkable. Odysseus is of course the great strategist, who was making a tactical point to Agamemnon in the quoted piece. Yet what Odysseus is most famous for doing in the Trojan war was staging a false retreat, in order to deceive the Trojans into accepting the Trojan horse. Plato had Socrates argue that Odysseus was the greater hero than Achilles in his Lesser Hippias, in part based upon the fact that Odysseus was better at deception.** So here, too, I wonder if Plato isn't trying to get a rise out of his readers.

Likewise, of course, the whole Greek army at Troy was an army of marines. Just because marines can retreat does not mean they must retreat; the Greeks spent ten years before the walls of Troy, with their ships handy the whole time. Not just Odysseus but Achilles and all the heroes on the side of Agamemnon were marines by nature. 

But the wider point that the Athenian is making is even worse than the literary analogy. It may inculcate virtue in the individual to learn to die boldly at his post, or to stand in a line of infantry that cannot retreat before the foe. It will not inculcate virtue in the city, however, to be conquered. A conquered people will not be educated with an eye toward virtue, but will be kept ignorant if possible in order to keep them weak and enslaved. In ancient Greece, slavery (or death) was very much the fate of the populations of conquered cities.

Thus, the discussion of honor and dishonor is entirely ill-founded here. In war, nothing is more honorable than a victory that ensures your independence; however you get there, that is the most honorable thing. A cavalry or marine corps that can effectively keep a city free and independent is better than an infantry that would fail to do so, given the terrain; and the greatest honor would attend to belonging to whichever force was most responsible for the continued freedom of your people.

The Athenian of course assumes the necessity of defending the city, however it must be done. His point is that you'll have a better city if it is possible to defend it with infantry than if it requires marines. The argument for this is so implausible, though, I can't help but think it was intended to be provocative:  perhaps of the kind of inter-service rivalry debates that we all so much enjoy, which the Greeks must have had as well.

With that thought, enjoy the game!

* This is a point of disagreement between myself and G. K. Chesterton, who was of the opinion that living on mountains was dangerous just because of the vistas, which make other people look small like ants. He also said that one sees great things from valleys, but only small things from peaks. 

** Hippias claims that Odysseus was worse than Achilles because he relied on deception rather than honorable strength. Socrates argues, successfully, that both Achilles and Odysseus practice deception -- but Achilles practices it on himself in ways that harm himself, and accidentally, whereas Odysseus practices it intentionally for his own gain. Odysseus is thus greater than Achilles, on the same principle that a runner who isn't capable of running well is not as good a runner as one who is capable of running well but chooses to run poorly for reasons of his own.

The Free State Project and Bears

Vox published an article yesterday describing the failure of the Free State Project, a program I remember people recruiting for back in the early 2000s. Apparently a major part of its downfall was its relationship with the black bear.

The experiment was called the “Free Town Project” (it later became the “Free State Project”), and the goal was simple: take over Grafton’s local government and turn it into a libertarian utopia. The movement was cooked up by a small group of ragtag libertarian activists who saw in Grafton a unique opportunity to realize their dreams of a perfectly logical and perfectly market-based community. Needless to say, utopia never arrived, but the bears did! 

Well, actually, they're making more of that than they should because it's an interesting part of the story. The real problem was that it drew a bunch of unmarried, unemployed young men who wanted -- well, they wanted what Plato said that the Athenians wanted, i.e., to live a life unregulated by government authority. They were apparently fairly obnoxious about their lawsuits to try to break the hold of local government on their lives.

Initially they ran into another very predictable sort of trouble, which is that people reliably hate other people who move into town and try to take over. There is a very good reason for this. Most human meaning comes from relationships. We have these relationships in a community of people we know, who live and work together in what we call a "culture," i.e., a way of life. Outsiders moving in who disrupt a community are thus attacking the source of meaning and happiness for those already there. It doesn't matter if this is 'immigration,' or 'gentrification,' or the Free State Project: there will always be friction when lots of people move into town and start changing things.

However, the Free Staters found that many of the existing folks were persuadable on at least some of their designs. This is the part that harmonizes with Plato's Laws:

By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.

So there were all sorts of negative consequences that started to crop up. And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.

This actually sounds a lot like the "anarchist" free zones from last summer: more violence, more sex offenders, fewer police to deal with them, and those having their funding cut. We are seeing something like this play out outside of outright anarchist zones: Minneapolis is continuing to slash is police force even though their violent crime is way up. 

It could be that Plato has more of a point here than those of us with an anarchist or libertarian strain might like to believe. Those ideologies are quite different but aligned in their rejection of formal authority, and they have both led to the same sort of results. 

The author being interviewed in the Vox piece oddly reasons that the real problem is philosophy itself:

Sean Illing

There’s a lesson in this for anyone interested in seeing it, which is that if you try to make the world fit neatly into an ideological box, you’ll have to distort or ignore reality to do it — usually with terrible consequences.

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Yeah, I think that’s true for libertarianism and really all philosophies of life. 

It's certainly not true of pragmatism, that most American of philosophies, which judges the worth of projects (and even the truth of claims) by how well they work out practically in the world. Really, though, I think that the older philosophies are stronger on this score as well. Plato may be wrong about some things (both you, dear reader, and I have said that he is quite wrong in places); even Aristotle may be wrong at times. They're robust, though, in being willing to criticize approaches based on practical results. As we've seen, Plato sharply criticizes both Persia and Athens -- two highly successful societies by some measures -- based on pragmatic concerns. 

Plato's Laws III, 4

When the Athenian turns his critique on Athens, he hits at our part of American society very strongly. His criticism is that love of liberty, if not tempered with submission to authority based on common good, is just as disastrous as Persian luxury. It is for the same reason:  love of pleasure, exercised in Athens by the individual, and in Persia by the elite.

He begins with what philosophers call a 'contingent' account, that is, a discussion of a set of particulars that might or might not have happened. This is chiefly of interest to historians, not to philosophers. After that he tries to shift to a formal account of the universals involved, once again by invoking music and its laws.

Ath. I will. Under the ancient laws, my friends, the people was not as now the master, but rather the willing servant of the laws.

Meg. What laws do you mean?

Ath. In the first place, let us speak of the laws about music-that is to say, such music as then existed-in order that we may trace the growth of the excess of freedom from the beginning. Now music was early divided among us into certain kinds and manners. One sort consisted of prayers to the Gods, which were called hymns; and there was another and opposite sort called lamentations, and another termed paeans, and another, celebrating the birth of Dionysus, called, I believe, "dithyrambs." And they used the actual word "laws," or nomoi, for another kind of song; and to this they added the term "citharoedic." All these and others were duly distinguished, nor were the performers allowed to confuse one style of music with another. And the authority which determined and gave judgment, and punished the disobedient, was not expressed in a hiss, nor in the most unmusical shouts of the multitude, as in our days, nor in applause and clapping of hands. But the directors of public instruction insisted that the spectators should listen in silence to the end; and boys and their tutors, and the multitude in general, were kept quiet by a hint from a stick. Such was the good order which the multitude were willing to observe; they would never have dared to give judgment by noisy cries. And then, as time went on, the poets themselves introduced the reign of vulgar and lawless innovation. They were men of genius, but they had no perception of what is just and lawful in music; raging like Bacchanals and possessed with inordinate delights-mingling lamentations with hymns, and paeans with dithyrambs; imitating the sounds of the flute on the lyre, and making one general confusion; ignorantly affirming that music has no truth, and, whether good or bad, can only be judged of rightly by the pleasure of the hearer. And by composing such licentious works, and adding to them words as licentious, they have inspired the multitude with lawlessness and boldness, and made them fancy that they can judge for themselves about melody and song. And in this way the theatres from being mute have become vocal, as though they had understanding of good and bad in music and poetry; and instead of an aristocracy, an evil sort of theatrocracy has grown up. For if the democracy which judged had only consisted of educated persons, no fatal harm would have been done; but in music there first arose the universal conceit of omniscience and general lawlessness;-freedom came following afterwards, and men, fancying that they knew what they did not know, had no longer any fear, and the absence of fear begets shamelessness. For what is this shamelessness, which is so evil a thing, but the insolent refusal to regard the opinion of the better by reason of an over-daring sort of liberty?

Meg. Very true.

Ath. Consequent upon this freedom comes the other freedom, of disobedience to rulers; and then the attempt to escape the control and exhortation of father, mother, elders, and when near the end, the control of the laws also; and at the very end there is the contempt of oaths and pledges, and no regard at all for the Gods-herein they exhibit and imitate the old so called Titanic nature, and come to the same point as the Titans when they rebelled against God, leading a life of endless evils.

This is different from the earlier discussion of music, which held that there were universal laws of beauty that should govern music. Here the argument is that there were once several forms with defined purposes, which upheld specific social functions as well as each form adhering to internal laws governing that form. The admixture of the forms ended up damaging each. 

Meanwhile, the shift of the seat of judgment from the musical experts to the popular audience meant that the ability to judge how and why the music was losing its quality was lost. 

Remember to read back in Plato's concern about who the right experts are, however. It is not the most talented, but the ones who understand the right relationship between the music and the goods it is to produce. They are the ones who understand what the music is really for, and can thus judge properly whether a change is for good or bad. Changes are not forbidden under the Athenian's ideal, but regulated by the right kind of trained and educated mind.

One runs into a similar debate if one goes to a church that allows music, or explores different churches while traveling. Here too music is supposed to support a sacred form, and there were once well-established basic norms about this. That did not disallow innovation! The great period of church music, from the Baroque through the Classical to the Romantic, was marked by much greater technical innovation than now. Yet it was done by people who were trained in the mathematics that underlie music, who knew and appreciated the earlier forms, and who were striving to intensify the experience. Along the way, much of the greatest music of human history was produced by these same great minds -- quite a bit of it that very church music.

Now compare that to an experience I imagine you all know well, that of stopping in a church and encountering... well,  you know just what kind of  'music' I mean, don't you? The kind where you console yourself with a story about how this might help you remit some of your sins, while practicing important virtues like tolerance and patience.

So Plato's clearly on to something, at least as music attends to holy forms. Does the analogy hold up well when pointed at the general society? The Athenian moves very quickly from this discussion of the damage to music from popularization to 'consequently, look how bad things are when we stop looking to expert judgment in society at large.' 

Yet this is an old problem that Plato and Socrates both knew well:  crafts like music, or shoemaking, or navigation, admit of genuine experts who really do know best. Politics seems to be a realm in which expertise does not have the same role. Everyone is affected by it, and each one is the most expert in just how it affects him or her, and just what they'd like most to get out of it. Excluding anyone seems to exclude an important perspective:  that is the whole argument for democracy (and something Plato treated both mythically and through philosophical argument in his Protagoras).

The Laws like the Republic attempts to restore a role for experts in politics. Again, though, the people who are to be the right experts are going to be those who understand the relationship between authority and the rationally-understood good that society ought to want to obtain. They are not much like our credentialed class, yet it is definite and certain that members of that class -- should they read the Laws, which very few people of any class do -- would see in it an argument that they are the proper authorities who have a duty to rule and govern mankind. 

Well, they would not say 'mankind,' but something else intended to dispose of the oppressive weight of history and tradition. That, though, underlines the distance between themselves and those Plato hopes to find. They are not the musical masters who understand what the traditional forms were for, and can judge innovation rightly as a way of heightening access to the goods that the old forms obtained. They are the ones who are sweeping away all the reliable old forms, and establishing new things that attain none of the goods but that are found pleasing to themselves and their class.

The book ends with a preview of the next book's discussion, as the Cretan announces that, actually, Crete has just been tasked with setting up a new colony and needs to draft laws and a constitution to govern it. Wouldn't this be an excellent opportunity to move from theory to practice? 

Some Olde Fashioned Humor

 Just a little something funny I came across on Twitter-

Skekling

A neat winter tradition from the Scottish isles, “100% Scandinavian” in its roots. 

Plato's Laws III, 3

Once Plato has outlined what he takes to be the chief destroyer of nations, he then has his Athenian return to the question of what went wrong with the Greek alliance. Unsurprisingly it turns out to be that the leaders had the quality he identified as the chief destroyer. So how can a nation remain healthy?

Plato now proposes a typology of constitutions, quite different from Aristotle's. Aristotle famously held that there were three basic types of government, of which each had a healthy and a diseased form, yielding six total. The three types are 'rule by the many,' 'rule by the few,' and 'rule by the one.' Thus we get constitutional government and democracy (note that democracy is diseased -- mob rule that tends toward theft of wealth and abuse of the minority); oligarchy and autocracy; kingship and tyranny. 

Plato's model is both simpler and capable of more complexity. He proposes that there are two 'threads' of government, which can be woven together in myriad ways. These are kingship and democracy. He says that Persia is the perfect example of kingship, Athens of democracy, and that Sparta and Crete are both mixed forms -- which, the Athenian says, actually work better than either pure form. 

The next section is an examination of the rise and fall of Persia. Once again, the fall is going to come from what I called in the last post the 'country music' cases -- dissolute men who identify pleasure as the good they pursue rather than the goods that reason itself identifies. 

The Athenian puts this down to the fact that the Persians in their great days were so busy winning their empire in glorious battle that they forgot to educate their sons. Instead, even Cyrus the Great left education of the youth to the women, leading to disaster in the next generation:

Ath. I imagine that Cyrus, though a great and patriotic general, had never given his mind to education, and never attended to the order of his household.

Cle. What makes you say so?

Ath. I think that from his youth upwards he was a soldier, and entrusted the education of his children to the women; and they brought them up from their childhood as the favourites of fortune, who were blessed already, and needed no more blessings. They thought that they were happy enough, and that no one should be allowed to oppose them in any way, and they compelled every one to praise all that they said or did. This was how they brought them up.

Cle. A splendid education truly!

Ath. Such an one as women were likely to give them, and especially princesses who had recently grown rich, and in the absence of the men, too, who were occupied in wars and dangers, and had no time to look after them.

Cle. What would you expect?

Ath. Their father had possessions of cattle and sheep, and many herds of men and other animals, but he did not consider that those to whom he was about to make them over were not trained in his own calling, which was Persian; for the Persians are shepherds-sons of a rugged land, which is a stern mother, and well fitted to produce sturdy race able to live in the open air and go without sleep, and also to fight, if fighting is required. He did not observe that his sons were trained differently; through the so-called blessing of being royal they were educated in the Median fashion by women and eunuchs, which led to their becoming such as people do become when they are brought up unreproved.... 

Ath. Let us note the rest of the story. Observe, that Darius was not the son of a king, and had not received a luxurious education.... he made laws upon the principle of introducing universal equality in the order of the state, and he embodied in his laws the settlement of the tribute which Cyrus promised-thus creating a feeling of friendship and community among all the Persians, and attaching the people to him with money and gifts. Hence his armies cheerfully acquired for him countries as large as those which Cyrus had left behind him. Darius was succeeded by his son Xerxes; and he again was brought up in the royal and luxurious fashion. Might we not most justly say: "O Darius, how came you to bring up Xerxes in the same way in which Cyrus brought up Cambyses, and not to see his fatal mistake?" For Xerxes, being the creation of the same education, met with much the same fortune as Cambyses; and from that time until now there has never been a really great king among the Persians, although they are all called Great. And their degeneracy is not to be attributed to chance, as I maintain; the reason is rather the evil life which is generally led by the sons of very rich and royal persons; for never will boy or man, young or old, excel in virtue, who has been thus educated. 

Right after this he goes on to note that the Spartans avoided this problem, in spite of their attachment to war, by making no distinction between the poor and the rich in education. So we might ask whether the problem isn't really that the children of wealth are ill-suited to rule precisely because of their luxurious upbringing (as opposed to the absence of fathers or the presence of eunuchs and princesses).

In favor of this proposition is the fact that the children who failed Persia were all raised in luxury. Plato's description of the luxurious education of the Persian elite is the opposite of what Herodotus says, by the way, which is worth noting because Herodotus' account is quoted by American fighting men as praiseworthy (see first comment, by Raven). They agree about the women being primary influences, but Herodotus says it was only for the earliest part of their lives.

Here is what Herodotus claims:

Next to prowess in arms, it is regarded as the greatest proof of manly

excellence to be the father of many sons. Every year the king sends

rich gifts to the man who can show the largest number: for they hold

that number is strength. Their sons are carefully instructed from

their fifth to their twentieth year, in three things alone,- to ride,

to draw the bow, and to speak the truth. Until their fifth year they

are not allowed to come into the sight of their father, but pass their

lives with the women. This is done that, if the child die young, the

father may not be afflicted by its loss. 

Herodotus died in 425 BC, however, and his histories mostly concern the period of Cyrus the Great. Plato was born about the time Herodotus died, but both of them lived in the right timeframe to have known about Xerxes as well as Cyrus. So for what it's worth, there's a difference in their accounts about how the Persian youth is raised. Herodotus thought it praiseworthy, and many of our own have as well. 

(Also praiseworthy, in my opinion, is another custom Herodotus claims for the Persians: that they debate weighty matters first while drunk, and then again when sober, and only take the actions their drunken company proclaimed if the sober reconsideration approves those actions. In this way they probably came to many creative and bold solutions, tempered by reason and reflection, that a purely sober reflection could have missed.)

After this, the Athenian turns his critical eye on Athens. 

Banning Election Talk

YouTube is the first to bar discussion of a stolen election. 

Philosophy and Pandemics

There's a longstanding sense that philosophy is kind of up-in-the-clouds; Aristophanes drew on that image in ancient Greece, and it remains with us today. One rarely turns to philosophers for practical advice as a consequence. 

Yet if asked, philosophers generally have some, and for those whose study encompasses the great sweep of the philosophical tradition, it's generally pretty good. The continual disagreements can mask the fact that the field has come up with important and worthy answers. 

Black Guns

 They matter, argues Megan Fox.

Not all victims of violent crimes are so lucky, and business owner Tieesha Essex took the opportunity to make a viral video out of the incident, encouraging women to carry firearms to protect themselves. Essex, a military veteran and police officer, owns Tiemonex.com, a company that sells firearms accessories like holsters. Posing as the victim, Norma Nimox, Essex took the story in a whole new direction. (This is a parody video, not a news report.)

We know it's not a news report, because people defending themselves with guns happens every day but rarely makes the news. In general only negative uses of firearms are considered newsworthy.

Being Ordered to Do What I Want

Governor Cooper has just issued a revised 'Stay at Home' order that mandates you to be at home from 10 PM until 5 AM, unless you have a good reason not to be. I can't remember the last time I was out after 10 PM or before 5 AM without a damn good reason. 

So on the one hand I object to the order, which I don't believe to be good policy nor within the bounds of his authority. On the other hand, I'm nearly certain to obey it because it's what I wanted to do anyway.

Plato's Laws III, 2

The great destroyer of states is a kind of ignorance, Plato says. 

Ath. That the greatest ignorance is when a man hates that which he nevertheless thinks to be good and noble, and loves and embraces that which he knows to be unrighteous and evil. This disagreement between the sense of pleasure and the judgment of reason in the soul is, in my opinion, the worst ignorance; and also the greatest, because affecting the great mass of the human soul; for the principle which feels pleasure and pain in the individual is like the mass or populace in a state. And when the soul is opposed to knowledge, or opinion, or reason, which are her natural lords, that I call folly, just as in the state, when the multitude refuses to obey their rulers and the laws; or, again, in the individual, when fair reasonings have their habitation in the soul and yet do no good, but rather the reverse of good. All these cases I term the worst ignorance, whether in individuals or in states. You will understand, Stranger, that I am speaking of something which is very different from the ignorance of handicraftsmen.

Cle. Yes, my friend, we understand and agree.

Ath. Let us, then, in the first place declare and affirm that the citizen who does not know these things ought never to have any kind of authority entrusted to him: he must be stigmatized as ignorant, even though he be versed in calculation and skilled in all sorts of accomplishments, and feats of mental dexterity; and the opposite are to be called wise, even although, in the words of the proverb, they know neither how to read nor how to swim; and to them, as to men of sense, authority is to be committed. For, O my friends, how can there be the least shadow of wisdom when there is no harmony? There is none; but the noblest and greatest of harmonies may be truly said to be the greatest wisdom; and of this he is a partaker who lives according to reason; whereas he who is devoid of reason is the destroyer of his house and the very opposite of a saviour of the state: he is utterly ignorant of political wisdom. 

That this should be described as a kind of ignorance is a position we might well expect from Plato, who appears to have been persuaded by Socrates that virtue was a kind of knowledge. Aristotle ends up rejecting this position in favor of virtue being a kind of habituated character, which he thought solved a key problem Socrates kept running into -- if virtue is a kind of knowledge, why can't it be taught reliably?

But what kind of ignorance is it that Plato is talking about? It is not a failure to correctly discern, and thus know, what is noble or good. It is not a failure to know what is base. Those kinds of things would be more obviously called "ignorance," since in that case the person would be lacking in knowledge. But this person does know what is noble, and what is base, and errs in assigning his love to the base and his hate to the good.

I think Plato might be doubly wrong here. I think he might be wrong to have decided that this is a sort of ignorance, and I think he is definitely wrong to think it is the worst kind. Rather, what is going on here is that a person knows what is right and chooses to do the wrong thing anyway because it is more pleasurable. This is a regular feature of country music songs about men who ought to be home being good fathers, but are instead out honky-tonking and drinking up their paycheck. (Roger Miller's "Dang Me," for example.)  It may well be ruinous behavior, but they aren't doing it out of ignorance. They know it is wrong, and are doing it anyway.

What strikes me as a worse kind of ignorance -- and properly a kind of ignorance -- is to have come to the conclusion that the base is actually noble, the bad actually good. It seems to me that the great destroyer of our nation is not the country music song case, where people are failing in what they nevertheless recognize are their duties. The great destroyer is that people have embraced a host of things that are wrong, but that they have learned and taught each other to uphold as right. Arson in our cities and riots that result in great damage to public buildings and the common peace, for example, are celebrated as the pursuit of justice. Abortion is said to be health care.

These people are often college educated, so they are not ignorant in the sense of having never been educated. They are nevertheless possessed of a towering sort of blind ignorance, which can no longer discern good from bad, but instead names the bad as good and navigates as if that were the case. 

Likewise the reverse: a boy on the verge of becoming a man tries to help preserve his community in the face of riots, is attacked by a mob, defends himself, and is now on trial for murder. Public officials who cannot do the things their offices exist to do -- such as preventing riots or the burning of people's buildings -- act as if they are doing good and just things by behaving in this way. 

These are the people of whom I say, as Plato says, that they are to be stripped of power even if they are the best at calculations; and that those who can reason about the good more rightly, even if they are otherwise buffoons, are better choices for these public offices. This is close to the famous Buckley quote about preferring to be governed by the first 500 names in the phone book, but it is not quite that; Plato is going to give a strong argument against 'government by lot' later in the Laws. It is, rather, that even relatively simple people who really at least know right from wrong and good from bad are better choices than well-educated, credentialed, professional men and women whose judgment on these most basic issues is backwards. 

It is of those people, who make up so much of our government and managerial class, that I say as Plato says:

He who is devoid of reason is the destroyer of his house and the very opposite of a saviour of the state: he is utterly ignorant of political wisdom. 

Alwyn Cashe Closer to Congressional Medal of Honor

The legal hurdles have been cleared away, though there remains the business of getting the DOD to actually submit an award nomination. He was one of the Iraq War's heroes, honored by the soldiery closer to his death: I visited Combat Outpost Cashe during the war.

Plato's Laws III

This book begins with an inquiry common to political philosophy: how do governments arise in the first place? The most famous of these texts in America are John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, but Aristotle's Politics also begins with an account of how governments come to be. 

Unsurprisingly, Plato's account here is not far off from Aristotle's account, and probably informed it: governments arise when clans, whose patriarchs have given them their laws by natural authority, begin to join together into larger unions. These unions develop codes of laws because the natural authority of the (extended) family is no longer available in a society that does not share blood bonds.

What I want to comment on first are some striking facts about Plato's inquiry. When we think of Ancient Greece, we tend to think of it as the beginning of the project of constitutional democracies. Writing more than two thousand years ago, though, Plato's characters view constitutional states as already very old. So old, in fact, that they are incapable of giving an account of when they might have arisen:  such states are so old that they must be founded on myth.

Ath. Why, do you think that you can reckon the time which has elapsed since cities first existed and men were citizens of them?

Cle. Hardly.

Ath. But are sure that it must be vast and incalculable?

Cle. Certainly.

Ath. And have not thousands and thousands of cities come into being during this period and as many perished? And has not each of them had every form of government many times over, now growing larger, now smaller, and again improving or declining?

Cle. To be sure.

They then turn to the myth of the Flood, which they know in a form that isn't exactly Biblical. The Athenian describes this as one of several mythic traditions about how there was a great calamity that ended everything, and everything had to arise again from the few survivors. The inquiry into the origin of government thus takes as its assumed starting point such a calamity, looks at what the facts would be for far-flung survivors (such as bands of shepherds in the mountains), and then ropes in Homer's account of the Cyclopes for a view of what a savage society like that might be like. 

By coincidence, this once again gives us reason to reference Robert E. Howard. As you all know from reading this page regularly, I subscribe to the view that Howard was correct in his central conceit of 'The Hyborean Age' -- that is, that civilization is much older than we believe it to be, but that we have lost knowledge of what it was once. 

This view is also held by G. K. Chesterton, as he explains in The Everlasting Man.

The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been like a man watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting to see that dawn breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks. But that dawn is breaking behind the black bulk of great cities long builded and lost for us in the original night; colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees; in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size of the man; with tombs like mountains of man set four-square and pointing to the stars; with winged and bearded bulls standing and staring enormous at the gates of temples; standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake the world. The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilized. Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old. 

The Athenian goes on to give a philosophical account of why the Flood -- if there was a Flood -- must have been extremely long ago if it occurred at all. Men who remembered a Flood would not have build their cities on plains by giant rivers, but the great cities were so built; and how long would it have taken to re-learn how to make all the old tools, if you had only shepherds trying to rediscover smith-craft? Small wonder, then, that these learned Greeks cannot even estimate how long civilization has existed, or how many thousands of civilizations there have been.

The conversation snakes along until it comes within the field of what is properly history, at least for them: the founding of the three kingdoms of Lacedemonia, of which Sparta is the most famous. The Athenian asks the Spartan why the project failed; the Spartan proudly demands to know in what manner it can be said to have failed. The Athenian points out that the original project was that all three kings swore a great oath to uphold the political order, and the idea was that whenever one should depart from that oath the other two should ally against it. Yet that did not happen; in fact, all but Sparta itself fell into corruption, and rather than peace in the valley there was continual warfare. 

In fact the Spartan cannot answer why that happened, and the Athenian tries proposing that the issue was not a lack of strength -- those Lacedemonian warriors are even today famous for their valor -- but rather a kind of corruption in which vice was mistaken for virtue, and affection arose for pleasure and comfort instead of right.

I will pause here to give any of you interested the chance to read that account; also, to compare this book with Chesterton's parallel account, in the chapter cited above. He too is wondering about civilizations that might fall, and how they might rise again. Chesterton says some things that he intends as a challenge to his contemporaries, but they also serve as an effective challenge to Plato, for example:

[I]t is obvious on the face of it that any peoples reduced for any reason to a ruder life would have some things in common. If we lost all our firearms we should make bows and arrows; but we should not necessarily resemble in every way the first men who made bows and arrows. It is said that the Russians in their great retreat were so short of armament that they fought with clubs cut in the wood. But a professor of the future would err in supposing that the Russian army of 1916 was a naked Scythian tribe that had never been out of the wood. It is like saying that a man in his second childhood must exactly copy his first. A baby is bald like an old man; but it would be an error for one ignorant of infancy to infer that the baby had a long white beard.

So I will resume tomorrow with the discussion of corrupted vice and virtue.

A sensible medical blog

This doctor posts on a number of topics, not just COVID, and applies more statistical rigor than most commenters.

A Different Kraken

J. Christian Adams shines the light on a Kraken that may account for a legitimate* Trump loss.

Two things happened in 2020. First, COVID led to a dismantling of state election integrity laws by everyone except the one body with the constitutional prerogative to change the rules of electing the president – the state legislatures.

Second, the Center for Technology and Civic Life happened.

According to Adams, the CTCL is a "non-partisan" nonprofit that focuses on get-out-the-vote efforts in urban areas. Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg gave them hundreds of millions, and they in turn spent that to reach urban voters and get them to the polls last month.

They are non-partisan to the extent that they didn't focus on Democrats or Republicans, just generic "Go Vote" type efforts, but they focused their efforts on urban areas that typically vote Democrat. Little was done to get people to vote in areas that typically vote Republican.

Adams's article is worth a read. The CTCL may account for some things that look like anomalies in this election. And it's something Republicans may very well need to duplicate if they are to be competitive in future elections.

Adams based his article on research by the Capital Research Center, if you want to take a deeper dive.

###

* Grim rightly points out in the comments that the "dismantling of state election integrity laws by everyone except the one body with the constitutional prerogative to change the rules" would not be part of a legitimate loss by Trump. I was too focused on the CTCL when I wrote. My apologies.

Pearl Harbor Day

This year it suddenly seems as if it doesn’t even matter; China, our old friend, now threatens human freedom. Our ancestors fought for good reason, but times have changed. New wars are before us. 

Perhaps this is a better moment for prayer than for memory. Pray, then. 

Plato's Laws II, 3

There are at least two more issues worth commentary in this book. The second of those two is the regulation of drinking, about which the concluding remarks are concerned. You end up with something like Prohibition except for mandatory social drinking for approved ends. That's sort of the worst of both worlds, there.

The first is a kind of artistic censorship.

Ath. [I]f I were a lawgiver, I would try to make the poets and all the citizens speak in this strain, and I would inflict the heaviest penalties on any one in all the land who should dare to say that there are bad men who lead pleasant lives, or that the profitable and gainful is one thing, and the just another... For tell me, my good friends, by Zeus and Apollo tell me, if I were to ask these same Gods who were your legislators-Is not the most just life also the pleasantest? or are there two lives, one of which is the justest and the other the pleasantest?-and they were to reply that there are two; and thereupon I proceeded to ask, (that would be the right way of pursuing the enquiry), Which are the happier-those who lead the justest, or those who lead the pleasantest life? and they replied, Those who lead the pleasantest-that would be a very strange answer, which I should not like to put into the mouth of the Gods. 

There's a great deal more by way of argument about why this is philosophically correct. I'm going to stick to a different question, which is whether it is or is not good art -- good both in the sense of making interesting art, art that is true to the world, and also in the sense of whether it does in fact improve people to have art of this sort primarily presented to them. 

So, one way to approach this topic is by telling the story of Conan the Barbarian.

Conan is well-familiar to readers of this page, but mostly as he was in his original incarnation: the works of Robert E. Howard. Sometime after Howard's death in 1936, the Conan intellectual property was picked up by L. Sprague De Camp. De Camp's role in the story of Conan is much debated, but one thing that is clear about it is that De Camp decided to purify Conan of some of Howard's wilder aspects. 

He was influential on Conan's second life as a comic book character, which was constrained by a set of moral codes governing comic books at that time. They were close to the ones Plato is recommending here: that a protagonist should be just, not merely successful. The Conan that is produced by this careful censorship is much like the hero of the detective noir that Raymond Chandler promised in 1950:

"But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things."

That figure is also the hero of Louis L'amour novels. He could wear Chandler's trenchcoat and fedora, L'amour's Stetson and duster, or Conan's wolf-cloak and sword -- but he is not Conan. 

I have written approvingly before of L'amour's effect on moral education. I definitely think that, if the stories are being written for moral education, there's a lot to be said for this approach. And all three of these sets of stories -- Chandler's, L'amour's, and the Conan stories -- have also been highly successful as art. People consume these things across generations, not as matters of fashion but out of recognition of a deep truth about the world. 

Yet Conan as Howard wrote him is not a man like this, and it was violence to his character to try to distort him into another token of the type. Conan is just as happy to be a pirate as a hero, and perhaps happier. In the famous adventure with Belit, he watches her and her crew kill all of the proto-Greek sailors he had shipped with but chooses to side with her for perfectly lustful reasons. He then becomes her right hand at piracy, and describes himself as highly satisfied:  

Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Conan is described by Howard not as a 'man of honor,' though he has a 'rude chivalry' and treats women invariably with kindness -- sometimes respect. But he is a red-handed killer, and loves his pirate queen and the life she gives him. 

Conan is a hero, though, like Achilles is a hero, like Odysseus is. Homer is Plato's foe here, and Homer may be greater than Plato. The fire Homer captures must have something of the divine in it, and yet it is that very quality that Plato wishes to tamp and tame. Plato has reasons to try to tame that divine fire; yet if it produces such men as Conan and Odysseus, how can we say it is wrong? 

Mear and Poland

"No prophet speaks to calm our grief/But all in silence mourn"--that line gets me every time. This tune being Common Meter, these Texas singers are free to add a verse of "Amazing Grace" at the end. I haven't been to a singing for a while. I miss these people.

   

 "I'm but a sojourner below/As all my fathers were"--I'm working on a Project Gutenberg exegesis of the Psalms, and ran across this phrase in Psalm 39:12: "for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were."

 

Living Stones

I don't know if they build or fight as well as they make commercials, but this is really something.

Plato's Laws II, 2

After we get to the idea that art and moral education are linked, there is an interesting question raised about who is the right kind of judge of the best art. This is presented in a way that might at first seem silly. In fact Plato acknowledges that in the voice of the Cretan. 

Ath. One way of considering the question will be to imagine a festival at which there are entertainments of all sorts, including gymnastic, musical, and equestrian contests: the citizens are assembled; prizes are offered, and proclamation is made that any one who likes may enter the lists, and that he is to bear the palm who gives the most pleasure to the spectators-there is to be no regulation about the manner how; but he who is most successful in giving pleasure is to be crowned victor, and deemed to be the pleasantest of the candidates: What is likely to be the result of such a proclamation?

Cle. In what respect?

Ath. There would be various exhibitions: one man, like Homer, will exhibit a rhapsody, another a performance on the lute; one will have a tragedy, and another a comedy. Nor would there be anything astonishing in some one imagining that he could gain the prize by exhibiting a puppet-show. Suppose these competitors to meet, and not these only, but innumerable others as well can you tell me who ought to be the victor?

Cle. I do not see how any one can answer you, or pretend to know, unless he has heard with his own ears the several competitors; the question is absurd.

It does seem absurd at first. How can you judge the winner of a contest that includes horse riding, and puppet shows, and poetics, and maybe an opera for all we know? It seems as if you're trying to compare apples and oranges, as we say. There's no clear standard against which such dissimilar events can be compared. 

What you have to realize that Plato is raising a metaphor for how a whole society functions. A whole society involves many, many kinds of different activities going on at once. Decisions have to be made about which of them are most important even though they are unlike. The question is really about who should rule, not who should judge the art.

Ath. Well, then, if neither of you can answer, shall I answer this question which you deem so absurd?

Cle. By all means.

Ath. If very small children are to determine the question, they will decide for the puppet show.

Cle. Of course.

Ath. The older children will be advocates of comedy; educated women, and young men, and people in general, will favour tragedy.

Cle. Very likely.

Ath. And I believe that we old men would have the greatest pleasure in hearing a rhapsodist recite well the Iliad and Odyssey, or one of the Hesiodic poems, and would award the victory to him. But, who would really be the victor?-that is the question.

Cle. Yes.

Ath. Clearly you and I will have to declare that those whom we old men adjudge victors ought to win; for our ways are far and away better than any which at present exist anywhere in the world.

Cle. Certainly.

Ath. Thus far I too should agree with the many, that the excellence of music is to be measured by pleasure. But the pleasure must not be that of chance persons; the fairest music is that which delights the best and best educated, and especially that which delights the one man who is pre-eminent in virtue and education. 

This is an approach that is most often credited to Aristotle, who makes a lot of it in his ethics. It is clearly one of the principles he learned from Plato. The best judge of the most virtuous activity is the person who is in fact virtuous. Just as the spectator who has never tried to play football won't understand the nuances of what makes a route pass play especially impressive, so to the person who has never been in a position to have to be courageous may have a cartoonish idea of courage. 

The best judge will be the person who has proven a capacity to do the thing. This holds not just for courage, but for all the virtues -- and therefore for everything, including art, that might or might not be virtuous. 

Ath. And therefore the judges must be men of character, for they will require both wisdom and courage.... He is sitting not as the disciple of the theatre, but, in his proper place, as their instructor, and he ought to be the enemy of all pandering to the pleasure of the spectators. 

So say we all who, for example, deplore the way American entertainment has devolved into cheap superhero fantasies and garbage pop music. 

I'm not quoting at length the Athenian's argument that there are discoverable (even mathematical) principles of music that are eternal and truly good, but it is a version of the argument from the video yesterday. It is well-traveled ground here over the years: things like the pentatonic scale really exist, and so too other demonstrable forms. Plato is appealing to that, in music, and going beyond it to the theatre and to all forms of art. But he's really not talking about art. He's really talking about everything. 

Ath. The inference at which we arrive for the third or fourth time is, that education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the eldest and best has agreed to be truly right. In order, then, that the soul of the child may not be habituated to feel joy and sorrow in a manner at variance with the law, and those who obey the law, but may rather follow the law and rejoice and sorrow at the same things as the aged-in order... And similarly the true legislator will persuade, and, if he cannot persuade, will compel the poet to express, as he ought, by fair and noble words, in his rhythms, the figures, and in his melodies, the music of temperate and brave and in every way good men.

One of our key disagreements with Plato lies here: who gets to judge? Capitalism puts the right of judgment with everyone, insofar as he or she has money to spend. They make different judgments, and many of them judge in favor of superhero movies or garbage pop. 

Likewise people may vote for Donald Trump, whom all the wise know to be the worst of men. They might prefer traditional forms of faith and society, rather than bending the knee to social justice and trans* movements. But that in itself points up a problem Plato has with himself, not with us. He would have wanted his legislator to put that kind of activist to the sword if necessary: to compel, if they could not persuade, such people to comport themselves in accord with the general laws of beauty and right. 

So here lies another problem, and a problem for both of our sides as well as for Plato. None of us are in perfect agreement: our love of liberty enables the perverse, the garbage, the worthless. Plato's love of the rule of the wise, however, enables the Woke; and the Woke, who would find much to agree with in Plato's account, would be horrified to realize that he never meant for them to be the ones who'd be thought fit to judge. That power would have been placed with old men of proven virtue, the most conservative body in any society. 

Plato's Laws II, 1

The part I elided over in the first book returns strongly in the opening of the second book:  the importance of drinking, singing, and dancing to good education. In Book I the Spartan in particular was worried that allowing pleasure would weaken (cf. this contemporary concern about virtue and pleasure). The Athenian defended the idea that communal pleasures are of moral significance. 

But they must be the right kind of pleasures; it is not just good that you should drink and sing and dance, but that you should drink and sing and dance well. Not all dances, or songs, are equally ordered to virtue. Some are better than others:

Ath. There are others, again, whose natures are right and their habits wrong, or whose habits are right and their natures wrong, and they praise one thing, but are pleased at another. For they say that all these imitations are pleasant, but not good. And in the presence of those whom they think wise, they are ashamed of dancing and singing in the baser manner, or of deliberately lending any countenance to such proceedings; and yet, they have a secret pleasure in them.

Cle. Very true.

Ath. And is any harm done to the lover of vicious dances or songs, or any good done to the approver of the opposite sort of pleasure?

Cle. I think that there is.

Ath. "I think" is not the word, but I would say, rather, "I am certain." For must they not have the same effect as when a man associates with bad characters, whom he likes and approves rather than dislikes, and only censures playfully because he has a suspicion of his own badness? In that case, he who takes pleasure in them will surely become like those in whom he takes pleasure, even though he be ashamed to praise them. And what greater good or evil can any destiny ever make us undergo?

Cle. I know of none.

Ath. Then in a city which has good laws, or in future ages is to have them, bearing in mind the instruction and amusement which are given by music, can we suppose that the poets are to be allowed to teach in the dance anything which they themselves like, in the way of rhythm, or melody, or words, to the young children of any well-conditioned parents? Is the poet to train his choruses as he pleases, without reference to virtue or vice?

Cle. That is surely quite unreasonable, and is not to be thought of.

Ath. And yet he may do this in almost any state with the exception of Egypt.

Here we have a very conservative case being made against the First Amendment, as it were. Who can deny that music is much degraded in our age, compared with (say) the 1960-70s? There are very rational reasons to believe it.

Those are concerns that might bother Apollo, certainly Athena; there are perhaps base moral concerns as well, which are more the prerogative of Zeus. Of course we don't think of Zeus as especially moral, reading the Greek legends; but the Greeks did. This is one of Plato's concerns in the Republic, you may recall:  the poets keep telling scandalous stories about the god who is supposed to root justice. They must be stopped!

So here is another important question where we differ -- in our devotion to free speech and free expression -- from Plato. Are we right? Well, it was free speech and free expression that got us the flowering of the 1960s-1970s, too. Something has gone wrong, but it isn't necessarily freedom that has done so. What, then, is it? 

Plato's Laws I, 2

A little later in the dialogue, the Athenian proposes that the real reason for which Cretan law should be praised, and the proper purpose of the law, is the way it regulates all the aspects of society in order to create human happiness. 

"The Cretan laws are with reason famous among the Hellenes; for they fulfil the object of laws, which is to make those who use them happy; and they confer every sort of good."

Note how total this is: "Some... ordinances will relate to contracts of marriage which they make one with another, and then to the procreation and education of children, both male and female; the duty of the lawgiver will be to take charge of his citizens, in youth and age, and at every time of life, and to give them punishments and rewards." 

This is a fundamental difference in how we see society from how Plato sees it, although it is in line with how progressives see it. The government should have all power, and perform all functions, necessary to bring about maximized human happiness. Laws should require people to behave in the right ways.

We then get a very strange ranking of the goods of life. They are of two kinds, human and divine. The human goods are lesser, and are attained by striving first for the greater divine goods. These goods, which are virtues, have a rank as well.

"Of the lesser goods the first is health, the second beauty, the third strength, including swiftness in running and bodily agility generally, and the fourth is wealth... [W]isdom is chief and leader of the divine dass of goods, and next follows temperance; and from the union of these two with courage springs justice, and fourth in the scale of virtue is courage. All these naturally take precedence of the other goods, and this is the order in which the legislator must place them, and after them he will enjoin the rest of his ordinances on the citizens with a view to these...."

The ranking of the virtues is odd, I say, because it has no clear priority. Wisdom is chief, but also a precondition for Justice. Thus, it makes sense if Justice is considered of a lower rank, since Wisdom must be pursued first in order to create the conditions for Justice to be possible. Yet notice that courage, also a precondition for Justice, is considered of the fourth rank rather than the third. 

It's not clear to me what Plato is thinking of here. He plainly wants to say something like "It's more important to be wise than courageous," but that itself is out of order with what has usually been Plato's position as expressed through Socrates, i.e., that virtue is a kind of knowledge or wisdom. To be courageous is to be wise, in a way. Here wisdom is severable from courage, and even partly from justice. 

The Athenian here is not Socrates, and here at least is a proof of it. He is approaching courage as something different; and, as Aristotle will do in his own ethics, Plato is going to at once demote it to a lesser rank among the virtues yet also use it as the first and paradigmatic example of what a virtue is. 

"I think that we must begin again as before, and first consider the habit of courage; and then we will go on and discuss another and then another form of virtue, if you please."

Also, having disposed of 'victory in war' as the key end of the state, the rest of the first book returns to it as a primary concern. Education is said to be good in that it produces victory, for example; courage is only properly courage and not a vice like rashness if it is ordered to victory.

All in all, a strange opening to a significant work. Note also the distinction between foreign and civil wars, and the perfection of virtue that is required only in the second -- which is nevertheless said to be a worse form of war, though it perfects virtues in its victors, which is supposed to be the true purpose of the state.

Non-COVID medical news for a change

From Maggie's Farm, news of a pharmacological breakthrough that might prove pretty wonderful.

Hyborean Age in Michigan

Or, Robert E Howard was right, again. 

Plato's Laws I

As a useful way to spend my evenings, I am reading Plato's Laws from the beginning. I may occasionally make notes here, mostly for myself but also in case any of you are interested. 

The Laws is one of the longest things Plato wrote, and the last, and the only one that doesn't feature Socrates. Instead, the three characters are old men -- one from Athens, one from Crete, and one from Sparta -- who are taking a long walk together and decide to discuss political philosophy. The Athenian, more philosophical given his national character, quickly takes the lead.

The Cretan opens by confirming that 2/3rds of the constitutions of their states are supposedly divinely given, but likewise affirms the wisdom of the founding men involved. In especial, what impresses him is that his government was set up with the understanding that all other states in the world were at least potentially at war with them: that even in peacetime, one had to keep up preparations to repel invasions or conquests. As a result, their island nation had regular public feasts -- not only to build national friendship, but also to maintain the infrastructure necessary to feed the public if it needed to muster as an army. Martial training of the militia was kept up as well.

The Spartan naturally approves of this approach.

The Athenian begins questioning them in what is a very Socratic way, attempting at first to get them to declare whether they agree that what is true for the nation should also be true for the family; and when they do, whether they also think it should be true for the individual. This is a rapid reprise of the move Socrates makes in the Republic, in which he convinces everyone to go along with what is usually called "The Fallacy of Composition." 

This move allows Plato to explore political philosophy by analogy to self-control in a good individual. However, there is good reason to doubt that a nation should be run like a family, or that an individual is a good analogy for a group of people. There are crucial differences that make this unlikely, and call the value of the whole dialogue -- both of them -- into question.

Nevertheless, both of the interlocutors agree to the proposition. Just as a nation should be ordered to be prepared to resist conquest from abroad, so families should be ordered to ensure that they are disciplined against bad influences or tyranny from the outside. The individual, meanwhile, should run himself so that he is not conquered either from outside or, more importantly, by his own base desires. 

Now the Athenian asks if there isn't a third approach, which is translated as "mediation." It's not a mediation in our sense of the term, though, because the mediator has access to capital punishment: the Athenian wants to know if the best mediator would kill bad people to prevent them from corrupting the whole, or control them while not killing them if not necessary, or if he would instead construct the whole society so that the good and the bad live in harmony without the need for violence or coercion. The two other old men agree that the last option is best. 

If you've read the Republic, you know that Plato has just laid out the basic argument in a few paragraphs so that he can take another run at what such a just society would look like. The Laws is much longer, and goes into much greater detail about particular laws the elder Plato thinks are just and worthy. 

Ultimately there is a lot to object to in the setup itself; and thus I will stop here, to see if any of you want to discuss that. 

In Praise of Grift

BLM Central might not be the Marxist insurgency threat they proclaimed, because it looks like they just kept all that money and spent it on travel and self-dealing. 

Capitalism wins again. 

UPDATE: They should be ashamed, these ice-cream socialists and their Commie chic. 

Taboo Deformation

This author’s idiom annoys me, but the subject is an curious aspect of linguistics and philology. 

St. Andrew's Day

Happy St. Andrew's Day. If you followed along with the Scottish steak pies, you've got some appropriate leftovers today!

Suicide Numbers

These are from Japan; as the article points out, Japan is one of only a few places you can get timely suicide numbers. 

All the usual caveats apply regarding international or cross-cultural comparisons, of course. 

Happy Advent / Thanksgiving Casserole

Today is, as those of you interested already knew, the first Sunday of Advent. I hope you have a good period of preparation for the Yuletide.

We are also in the period of trying to finish off Thanksgiving leftovers. Today I said to my dining companion, "At some point, you're going to ask me what this is." 

What it was, was Thanksgiving casserole. A few days ago I turned part of the turkey into a diced, mushroom-rich pasta filling for home-made ravioli. (I'm not a great maker of egg pasta, but it's fun sometimes to do different things.) Today I took what was left of that, which was quite a lot because it turns out you only put a teaspoon of filling in each ravioli, and mixed it with other leftovers. I put in the leftover macaroni and cheese, the leftover cornbread stuffing, the leftover gravy, mixed it all thoroughly, and baked it with some additional cheese on top. It didn't look like much of anything, but it tasted pretty good.

As we polish off the remaining leftovers, we can turn our attention to what kinds of festival foods we'll want to make once the big feast arrives. I've decided to focus on meat pies and other "Great Pyes" this year, which is different from usual. This evening I'm trying out a recipe for Scottish Steak Pie, a Hogmanay classic, to see what I'd want to change about it to make it as good as it can be come New Year's Eve.