Just a little something funny I came across on Twitter-
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.
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.
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* 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.
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