Captain John Smith
Pirate, duelist, mutineer, and the first enslaved man in America -- well, except for those enslaved by Native Americans, of course. It's really quite a story.
The Secret History of the Election
Plato's Laws X, 2
No true believer does wrong, says the Athenian, out of fear of the gods:
Ath. No one who in obedience to the laws believed that there were Gods, ever intentionally did any unholy act, or uttered any unlawful word; but he who did must have supposed one of three things-either that they did not exist,-which is the first possibility, or secondly, that, if they did, they took no care of man, or thirdly, that they were easily appeased and turned aside from their purpose, by sacrifices and prayers.
So we can distinguish the 'country music case' as the last one of those three options. He does believe in God! He just thinks that God is going to be pretty easily appeased, with some prayer and apologies. A Christian might well come to the conclusion that God is forgiving if only you'll ask, because preachers have been telling him that since childhood. The Greek gods were not supposed to be easily appeased where violators of justice were concerned: they had names like Nemesis. Zeus was supposed to be a particular defender of justice, and Apollo would bring plagues down on wrongdoers (the Iliad, recall, opens with one).
Thus, the Athenian reasons, Greeks who think they can easily turn away divine wrath are paying the gods an insult: such persons don't really believe that the gods are devoted to justice so much as to gifts and attention. That's a kind of sacrilege, and itself an insult to the gods.
He goes on to propose that, if they were honest, such persons would admit that they feel one of these three ways about the gods: that they don't exist, or that they don't care about us really, or that they're easily turned. Such persons would demand of "us" a proof that the gods do exist, and that they are in fact attentive to justice.
Cleinias responds to the challenge, stating that the gods' existence is obvious.
Ath. How would you prove it?
Cle. How? In the first place, the earth and the sun, and the stars and the universe, and the fair order of the seasons, and the division of them into years and months, furnish proofs of their existence; and also there is the fact that all Hellenes and barbarians believe in them.
These sorts of 'proofs' are still widely used. The argument from the orderly nature of the universe, for example, is Aquinas' fifth proof of the existence of God and yet also the oldest; here we see it in Plato. It is answered by atheists and agnostics in our day by the argument that the order is a kind of chance; that observers could only exist in a relatively orderly universe, and thus since we are here to observe, no other sort of universe is possible (and thus no explanation for the order is necessary, and via Occam's Razor, no God or divine plan is necessary, and should be omitted). The Humeans argue that there is no actual plan or order at all, just us imputing one based on our observations of uncaused patterns in the 'mosaic' of reality.
Plato is onto the fact that this explanation won't satisfy. Yet the Athenian praises it, and accuses his own people -- Athenians -- of being too corrupted by false poets to appreciate it. Well, false poets like Homer! The Iliad opens with the Greeks being punished by Apollo, as mentioned, and turning aside his wrath with a sacrifice. If Homer isn't a true poet, who is?
Not Hesiod, apparently, whom I take Plato's character to be describing in the next passage.
Ath. At Athens there are tales preserved in writing which the virtue of your state, as I am informed, refuses to admit. They speak of the Gods in prose as well as verse, and the oldest of them tell of the origin of the heavens and of the world, and not far from the beginning of their story they proceed to narrate the birth of the Gods, and how after they were born they behaved to one another. Whether these stories have in other ways a good or a bad influence, I should not like to be severe upon them, because they are ancient; but, looking at them with reference to the duties of children to their parents, I cannot praise them, or think that they are useful, or at all true. Of the words of the ancients I have nothing more to say; and I should wish to say of them only what is pleasing to the Gods. But as to our younger generation and their wisdom, I cannot let them off when they do mischief. For do but mark the effect of their words: when you and I argue for the existence of the Gods, and produce the sun, moon, stars, and earth, claiming for them a divine being, if we would listen to the aforesaid philosophers we should say that they are earth and stones only, which can have no care at all of human affairs, and that all religion is a cooking up of words and a make-believe.
Hesiod's Theogony sounds like the source for this objection. Uranus can be translated as "Sky," and the Hamilton translation invokes the word "sky" in this passage about the earliest stories about the gods. Now these earliest stories about the gods involve parricide and castrations, and various other sorts of violence by the gods including Zeus. These are old stories, though, and the Athenian isn't quite willing to say they shouldn't be taught (though Plato is! He says in the Republic that the poets should only teach things about the gods that are in line with justice; and the Athenian has already decried any new such stories from poets).
It does complicate the matter, however, of proving that we are governed by true gods who do care about justice and won't be easily turned aside by flattery. The Athenian has argued for the importance of upholding the old ways, civic customs, and the honor of our ancestors; but here is a place where the stories our ancestors have long told about the gods themselves are a real problem for his intention.
Note that the Athenian is preparing to prove that the divine beings include the stars and planets. We'll get to that argument in the next part.
Bob Newhart
Having given up cable television in 2004, when I discovered I was only using it to watch old movies that I could just buy for much cheaper, I wasn't aware that Bob Newhart was still in business. Apparently he is!
I'm just the right age that his best-known character for me is the Vermont innkeeper who is never quite accepted as a local even after a decade. He's been on a more recent series, though; and perhaps more famously on an older one. Of course he also did a great deal of quasi-Vaudeville sketch comedy, which was very often good.
A Bright Spot on a Dark Sea of Danger
North Carolina's lieutenant governor is looking good so far. Let's hope the moment produces more like him.
UPDATE: Less good local NC news.
What is a Fact?
In general our dictionaries all suggest that a "fact" is something that has or can be shown to have happened: here are three such examples. The Oxford example includes an etymology, which I always find helpful in understanding the deeper meaning of a word.
Late 15th century from Latin factum, neuter past participle of facere ‘do’. The original sense was ‘an act’, later ‘a crime’, surviving in the phrase before (or after) the fact. The earliest of the current senses (‘truth, reality’) dates from the late 16th century.
Now when I was a boy in school, the way this was taught to us was as a distinction between "a fact" and "an opinion." A fact was said to be something that could be proven true or false. An opinion was a statement about reality which cannot be proven true, nor proven false. This model raised hackles among those who did not like the idea that a thing proven false was a sort of fact; it might be better to say that there is 'a fact of the matter' about it.
The ACLU gives us four "facts" about trans athletes today.
1) "Trans girls are girls."
2) "Trans athletes do not have an unfair advantage in sports."
3) "Including trans athletes will benefit everyone."
4) "Trans people belong on the same team as other students."
Only one of those statements, the first one, is possibly a fact. The others all depend on things that fall in the category of opinions, e.g, "what does it mean to have an unfair advantage"? Obviously athletes do have advantages over each other, which is one of the reasons to have the competition: to see who is best. Many of these advantages are considered fair, for example, two boys who are differentially strong or skilled but of similar weight will be allowed to wrestle. That one boy has been wrestling for three years and the other one has never done it before is not considered an unfair advantage; it is for the unskilled boy to learn to do it better. That one is weaker will be met with the advice: "Grow stronger!"
So too for what it means for a thing to be a benefit, which we must know before we can evaluate (3); what it means to belong, etc. Those are value judgments that are opinions. One might say that 'to benefit' means to obtain some good, such as a scholarship; in that case, several people will benefit at the expense of several others, but it is not true that 'everyone' will benefit. Or one might say that 'to benefit' means to develop a character that accepts all kinds of others even when it is expensive to one's self; perhaps then 'everyone' will benefit, but not to the same degree -- some will have to pay a cost, and some will not.
The first one is a fact, though, unless we turn 'being a girl' into an opinion. That actually seems to be the proposal: that if one feels like a girl, one is a girl. Yet there is a fact of the matter about this, which makes (1) a fact in the sense of being a false fact. This is not an opinion; and therefore, it is also not a prejudice (which is a 'pre-judgment') because no judgment is being made. We don't have to decide if an individual, X, is or is not a girl; we simply have to know that 'a girl' is 'a young female human being.' Whether X is or is not that depends on facts about X that we don't have to know to know that the definition of the word means that non-young human beings are excluded from the category, as are non-females, and non humans. There's nothing wrong with being a kitten or a foal, but they're not "girls" in a factual sense. If you call one "a little girl," you're speaking metaphorically, not factually.
And you are free to speak metaphorically! You're also free to speak falsely, as by saying that an opinion is a fact; or even to say that a fact ought to be an opinion. Freedom is important; but so is clarity of thought. One's freedom to say those things must not interfere with our ability to point out that, in fact, that is not how things are.
The Thirty Tyrants
An outstanding piece by Lee Smith, analogizing the current situation vs. China to the conflict between Athens and Sparta following Sparta's victory in the Peloponnesian War. Socrates and his student Critias make an appearance.
The basic problem is that China has become the source of vast wealth and prestige for a large group of people at the top of industry, government, and former government officials or others who can make useful introductions. The problem has been fomenting since Nixon, took sharp shape during the Clinton administration, but in the last decade its advocates generated 'class consciousness' and began actively working to subjugate America as Athens was subjugated.
For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige.... Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite gave them collective self-awareness as well as a powerful motive for solidarity. Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public and private sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits but also the same center of gravity—the U.S.-China relationship. And so, the China Class was born.
Smith provides many useful examples, which makes it clear that the lines don't fall cleanly along our apparent party factions. Dick Gephardt turns out to be one of the good guys, arguing against trade with China because its use of slave labor will both undermine American workers -- who can't compete with slaves on wages -- and American honor. John McCain and Bill Clinton are aligned, but sadly (tragically) so is Jim Mattis.
The piece also chides Trump for failing to staff his administration with those who would fight for America, rather than find ways to backslide to Chinese wealth. In a way this is fair: the buck stops with the President, and the President was routinely undermined by his team -- leaks, impeachments based on leaks, outright betrayal and refusal to carry out his policies. In another way, though, who could do what Smith asks? You could find a few handfuls of people to put in the very top positions, but moving the whole ship of state requires a great deal of people. Who are the people who both understand the problem and are committed to solving it?
Don't answer that, because if you do they may well be destroyed before there's a chance to use them. Yet if you can't answer that question, how would you put together the staff?
Smith suggests the betrayal goes very deep indeed, in language that may be too strong. Some of you will think it is; but others of you will think it's just right. I could probably guess which of you will feel which way, but that's not important; the point is that both perspectives are present here.
[B]ecause it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s....That Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes is irrelevant to America’s version of the Thirty Tyrants. The job was to boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they succeeded. As with Athens’ anti-democratic faction, America’s best and brightest long ago lost its way. At the head of the Thirty Tyrants was Critias, one of Socrates’ best students, a poet and dramatist. He may have helped save Socrates from the regime’s wrath, and yet the philosopher appears to have regretted that his method, to question everything, fed Critias’ sweeping disdain for tradition. Once in power, Critias turned his nihilism on Athens and destroyed the city.
That's an interesting proposition. Can you teach philosophy, which requires wrestling with the harderst questions, without encouraging nihilism? Many of the hardest questions end up having no certain answers. These hard questions without certain answers are often discovered at the foundation of all fields of knowledge, even mathematics. If there are unanswerable questions at the basis of these things we take to be certain, then nothing we know is really reliable. Finding that no one is right about anything, perhaps, it is easy to drift into nihilism, solipsism. and the like. Even Kant ends up conceding that we can't really know anything about the world as it actually is, the noumena; we can only discuss phenomena, the world as our brains give it to us.
(Or maybe we can: our brains give us a Euclidean world, but we have decided that gravity actually seems to create curves in spacetime. This is based on math and physics, which we performed inside our minds, based on observations that we had to understand with our minds in order to apply the tools. So perhaps we can get outside the world our mind presents to us to say something about the actual reality, even using the tools that depend on our mind. Or perhaps not; after all, every observation is itself a phenomenon, and our conclusions are themselves phenomena. Maybe there's no way to the real thing; and the fact that we can't be completely sure about that, either, is another of these hard questions at the root of our world.)
The Church taught philosophy for centuries without falling into nihilism, because it taught there was a final ground that had to be accepted on faith. This was also Socrates' answer: that not man, but a God, had to be the final root and the final measure. On the other hand, the fall of the Church from its central position was also brought about by philosophical enquiry that undermined some of its core teachings: having rooted them on God, the Church looked to be wrong about God when they were proven to be wrong about the basic nature of reality. Many lost faith as a result.
In any case, I've only taken you about a third of the way through Smith's piece, which you should read in full. It is an excellent treatment of our present problems, At minimum it offers you a model for knowing your enemies, their motivations, and many of their names.
Smith concludes:
What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.
I will add to the good news side of that ledger. In their wake came Plato's work, and Aristotle's, which advanced the human condition in ways from which we still profit today. Also to the bad news side: neither Plato nor Aristotle escaped unthreatened by tyranny in their lifetimes. Plato's Seventh Letter discusses a problem he has with a tyrant; Aristotle had to flee Athens to escape being put to death. In Aristotle's lifetime democracy vanished from the world for a time under the hand of his best student, his Critias, known to us as Alexander the Great.
This philosophy stuff is dangerous work.
An unpaid ad for Brexit and the Bad Orange Man
Powerline on the inconvenient power of freedom of choice to give us stark examples of how some approaches work out better than others. If the Very Smart People had had the power to enforce global standards for the pandemic, we'd have no way of sorting out which policies were most effective. They'd just be telling us their way averted terrible disasters, and its huge costs were completely unavoidable, and there's not going to be any way to alter the progression of the pandemic in the next few months, anyway. Luckily, what we have instead is 50 states who had some freedom to try different things here in the U.S., and dozens of countries (not counting the EU captives) who had the freedom to try different things worldwide.
Sensitivity to Bull
Not only a useful skill but a sign of a good person, argue these Scandinavian academics.
A Grey Horizon
Two pieces published in the last twenty-four hours call for the government to make war on a subset of the American people. The first is by a CIA officer who also served with the Army in Afghanistan.
The second is by "an investigative journalist" in New York. It's not clear what exactly he's investigating here.
Despite the differences, Grant and Biden share more similarities than most might assume. One was a grizzled war hero, who’d crushed the most treasonous movement the country had ever seen. The other is a seasoned politician, known for moderation and political tact.
Which of those were meant to be similarities? And "tact"? That's what Joe Biden is known for, his tact?
I worry that these people actually believe they are facing an "insurgency" that would merit a severe response. They aren't, at all. The 'Stop the Steal' rally created the events in Congress only because the security forces -- who are already more than adequate to stop such a thing if properly employed -- didn't take any of the obvious steps necessary to contest tens of thousands of angry demonstrators. It also took months to arrange, and can't be repeated without a similar public process of organizing that would give security people plenty of time to respond. We already have more than enough force deployed, we just need people to pay attention and do their jobs.
Meanwhile, the threat to the American way is much greater from this impulse to wage war on Americans than from the relatively few crazies out there. Demanding loyalty oaths from every fire fighter in America (as the CIA officer recommends) is crazy. Those guys wear American flag patches on their uniforms because they're already patriots. They picked that line of work to do good things for Americans. Many of them are volunteers, who risk their lives to help their fellow Americans at any hour of the day and without pay. Treating them as suspect is poisonous to our whole culture.
Relentless Propaganda
David Foster's post on the effects of relentless gaslighting and propaganda is worth reading (h/t AVI). By coincidence, I was awakened this morning by the New York Times' email of its daily thoughts they'd like me to think. Today's newsletter begins, "Good morning. Why has the U.S. economy fared so much better under Democratic presidents than Republicans?"
Why indeed? Wait. It hasn't, though. The greatest economic growth in decades just happened, growth that (unlike the growth of other administrations) improved the lives of working class people and not just the rich. Until the coronavirus and its associated policy responses, growth was gangbusters under the most recent Republican administration. Likewise, the Reagan years were good years for America -- good enough that our economic growth broke the USSR's ability to compete.
What follows is the sort of statistics that Mark Twain admired, which ends up putting Trump at the very bottom of the list of economically successful presidents in the last hundred years. Naturally there is no need to contextualize the mass destruction of our economy occasioned by the virus, nor to show how his policies were quite successful at spurring growth before an Act of God (or, arguably, China) came around.
Now everybody lived through this not long ago, so we all know that Trump's first three years were a time of massive economic growth. Yet the thing we're supposed to know is that Trump was the worst president ever, and the thing we're supposed to learn is that massive increases in regulation and vast government spending on the Green New Deal, etc., are the path to economic gains.
So that is, of course, what the newsletter says. Here's the larger piece from which it was drawn.
Readers know that I think Trump was largely a buffoon, who nevertheless succeeded in several respects in much the manner of the line from Casablanca: "We musn't underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918." His success, where it happened, was bred of his willingness to reject expert opinion and try things that seemed sensible to ordinary people: drill for oil. Expand fracking. Cut taxes and regulations on business, reducing the cost of doing business so that the little guy can compete with the firms who can afford lots of lawyers and accountants. Help your friends. Punish your enemies. Don't make deals that disadvantage your own country just so you can have some sort of legal arrangement in place. Compete, rather than govern.
Yesterday I read that the Biden administration has changed the rules on calculating the cost/benefits of regulations to allow regulations to enjoy incalculable benefits. Yes, this regulation may cost the average business a million dollars to implement; but there will be an untold benefit to racial or social justice. Therefore, even though we can't say anything about what the actual benefit will be, we can rule it an acceptable burden for businesses to bear.
Bloomberg calls this "exceedingly important," "excellent," and "fresh." The NYT would have you believe the economy is going to benefit from all these new regulations.
I'll bet it won't.
The Feast of St. Brigid
Today is the feast day of St. Brigid, who may or may not actually be a pagan goddess. This day was known in pre-Christian times as Imbolc, a festival to mark the very beginning of Spring. It was sacred to the goddess Brigid, who may or may not have been transformed into the saint by early Christianity.
Since I missed out on Burns Night this year, I decided to combine the feasts into a general Celtic holiday.
So that’s a North American Haggis at the top left. Also served was venison pie, Scottish shortbread, Cranachan, and of course Scotch. This bottle was a gift from a friend. The beer is an Old Chub Scottish Strong Ale, from a local brewery here in the mountains.
Plato's Laws X
We're down to the last quarter of the book, for those of you who are happily anticipating an end to this series. Yet I've really been enjoying it; if you have nominations for a philosophical work to read after this (ancient or medieval by preference, but I'll entertain other suggestions), please drop it in the comments.
This book of the Laws should be fun to read. It contains a proof for the existence of the gods, against "those" who say that things like stars and planets are just rocks and fire in the sky. We're in the unusual position of (a) knowing that the planets and suns are in fact 'rocks and fire,' and not gods, but also (b) believing in theology (as far as I know; it's fine if any of you are atheists, but I'm not aware of any atheists in the audience). The theology Plato is defending is of a very different sort from the kind of theology that was developed by Avicenna, and later altered and adopted by Jewish and Christian philosophers. So you're free to entertain the idea that these arguments are just wrong; but also to entertain the idea that there might be something to them.
It's also worth asking yourself which side Plato is really on here. As with the last section of Laws IX, it's possible that Plato intends for the Athenian's arguments to fail. Maybe Plato really doesn't believe in Apollo, as Socrates was said not to; but he can't say that he doesn't because that sort of thing gets you killed. Which side comes out stronger in the work?
I'm not going to provide any further analysis today, just this introduction. Read it yourselves first, if you like, and see what you think before I tell you what I think.
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear
This looks like a good read; I've just downloaded it in Audible form. Apparently this civilization business is harder than it looks:
If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right.That's not to say I've changed my attitude toward my local governmemt. Much of what they do is a silly waste of time. I just sat through an Economic Development Corporation meeting in which I received the breathless good news that these people have yet again developed a new logo. Honestly, they come up with new logos and new color schemes constantly, along with sending out endless surveys to discover "what the local businesses need to sustain and grow their businesses." I don't know, maybe a business plan, a product, customers, financing, lower taxes, relief from the heavy hand of the local Heritage District?
"Oligarchy in America"
I think this piece has much truth in it.
I encourage all to read it, and look forward to hearing your thoughts.
"A republic, Plato noted, decays from within, not from invasion. Build the American Athens and, sooner or later, you will find yourself living in the American Rome."
Gravy
I'm going to do one more, this one not about anything serious at all. It's by Dale Watson, who (if you follow the link about Billy Joe getting in trouble) did the song that caused Billy Joe trouble at his trial. But this one's just about finding a man's heart through a man's stomach.
Black Rose
I want to follow on that thought immediately with another one.
So this is a song written by the recently deceased Billy Joe Shaver, performed by Waylon Jennings on his best album. What's it about? It's about a man who falls in love with a woman that he can't keep up with; and he stays enchanted with her until he catches her with another man.
But of course the "Black Rose" is black; and the singer, like Billy Joe or Waylon, is white. So is the song racist?
In a way it has to be, in that everything coming out of their time and place and era was tinted with the concept of race. This is Caribbean philosopher Charles Mills' theory about race: our society did so much with it for so long that we can't really expect to walk away from it, not easily or quickly. When Billy Joe Shaver wrote this song, society had only barely made interracial marriage legal. Society had not in any way processed the change; and anyway he was writing about a relationship he'd had in his youth, when the law probably hadn't changed.
So he and she and whomever was in a similar case were forced into illicit gatherings, and informality rather than the clear lines of marriage. (Though it must be admitted that Billy Joe had a strange relationship with marriage; he was married three times to the same woman, as you may remember from the story.) This kind of unstable and hidden relationship was the best he could do.
And he shows no scorn for her; only the need to walk away when she proves unfaithful. But then again, how could you expect her faith when she had no hope of a legitimized relationship with you?
Ultimately it shows how deeply this philosophical error -- I mean accepting the concept of 'race' -- cut into human tissue. Wolfram von Eschenbach did not need it, and neither do we. It's only done harm, and very great harm.
The Iron Horse
We've done this one before, but I was reminded of it by AVI's discussion of trains. It's a really nice piece, too, which none of you should mind to hear again. She's picking with three fingers, two up and thumb down. It's very good work.
The story is pure Americana, too. It's the story of the meeting across cultures, the love that unites; and the separation occasioned by technology. You could say that the Native American aspect is tragic, spirited in its failure to overcome the technological advantage, and that would be true enough as far as it goes.
But who made the banjo? Why, that's an instrument the South has from African... er, "immigrants." It's become a key feature in Southern music of all kinds, especially bluegrass, which she has adopted at another remove.
So really this is an American song. It's about the meeting of cultures in the wild American land, the ways they come together, and the ways they are kept apart.
Plato's Laws IX, 5
There is a whole school of interpreting philosophy, following Leo Strauss, that believes in reading philosophers ironically or without assuming they're really saying what they mean. The argument, which Strauss developed with care over many works, invokes the fact that death was always the likely fate of especially political and moral philosophers who disagreed with their society's elites. Socrates was executed; Aristotle nearly so, having to flee Athens to escape that fate; numerous Christian philosophers either were charged with heresy or threatened with it; and even in our own age, the fate of thinkers in many parts of the world has been grim.
When Plato reaches the end of Book IX, he says something that makes me wonder if a reading like that is plausible. Strauss apparently posthumously published a book on the Laws, and perhaps when I'm done I will look it over. I am intentionally not reading other people's thoughts on the work before I've encountered the work and finished this set of notes about it; later I will compare my thoughts with those of others, to see where they provide insight or illumination to things I may have missed on my own.
(Generally this is a good way to read serious philosophy, in my experience. You want to directly encounter Plato and Aristotle, etc., and form clear ideas of your own about the problems they are raising. Then, when you encounter scholars who have studied them with care, you will not merely assume their opinion; you will have brought something of your own out of the work as well. It is a matter for historians to decide which of you was right, if either; the work of philosophy is to struggle with the hardest problems of human life. You should do that yourself, and not simply be told what to think even by the Wise.)
Akratēs was the problem of the last section, and the Athenian's firm conclusion appears to be that all evil actions are involuntary. If one was not ignorant, seeing the truth of what was right and best, one would act according to a moral principle. Now he realizes that acting according to principle can sometimes bring harms -- a difference from Aristotle, for whom virtue as a state of character brings success, not just a principled decision. (Aristotle is proto-pragmatic in this way: you can judge the virtue of a man in part by how successful he is in noble undertakings.)
Ath. And now I can define to you clearly, and without ambiguity, what I mean by the just and unjust, according to my notion of them:-When anger and fear, and pleasure and pain, and jealousies and desires, tyrannize over the soul, whether they do any harm or not-I call all this injustice. But when the opinion of the best, in whatever part of human nature states or individuals may suppose that to dwell, has dominion in the soul and orders the life of every man, even if it be sometimes mistaken, yet what is done in accordance therewith, the principle in individuals which obeys this rule, and is best for the whole life of man, is to be called just; although the hurt done by mistake is thought by many to be involuntary injustice. Leaving the question of names, about which we are not going to quarrel, and having already delineated three sources of error, we may begin by recalling them somewhat more vividly to our memory:-One of them was of the painful sort, which we denominate anger and fear.
So the idea here -- similar to Kant, really -- is that one can only act freely when acting according to a rational moral principle. Otherwise, one is being driven along by base nature, and not really voluntarily choosing an action. Thus, all evils are involuntary in this special sense; all principled actions are good, even if they lead to harm "by mistake."
Having established that "clearly, and without ambiguity," the Athenian proceeds into a very extended discussion of different kinds of homicide. What turns out to be extremely important to just punishment of these different kinds, though, is whether or not the decision was voluntary.
Ath. Having begun to speak of homicide, let us endeavour to lay down laws concerning every different kind of homicides, and, first of all, concerning violent and involuntary homicides. If any one in an athletic contest, and at the public games, involuntarily kills a friend, and he dies either at the time or afterwards of the blows which he has received; or if the like misfortune happens to any one in war, or military exercises, or mimic contests. of which the magistrates enjoin the practice, whether with or without arms, when he has been purified according to the law brought from Delphi relating to these matters, he shall be innocent. And so in the case of physicians: if their patient dies against their will, they shall be held guiltless...
Now remember that theft was to be punished the same way regardless of whether much or little was stolen, because all theft is of a kind: an involuntary overwhelming of the deciding capacity by some pleasure, or avoidance of pain, or passion, etc. Supposedly we've established that all wrongs are involuntary. But the very first question, and one explored at extreme length -- much too long to quote -- is all the ways in which a crime can be more or less voluntary.
So a man who kills a fellow citizen at the warlike athletics is to be forgiven after ritual purification; that we already knew from earlier books. The city prospers by maintaining so vigorous and warlike a population, enough to justify the occasional death in training. What if you did mean to kill a fellow citizen, though? Well, one case is it might be your spouse, and done in a matter of passion; that deserves one level of punishment because of the strength of the passion (i.e., it was less voluntary because an ordinary person could be expected to be more overwhelmed in a case like this). This goes on and on. What if you used an assassin, and thus freely chose to murder, and also corrupted someone else into choosing to carry out the murder for you? Etc., etc.
It leaves me with the question as to whether the discussion of akratēs was ever serious at all. It seems to be; Plato returns to the problem over and over throughout his works. Per Aristotle, we believe Socrates took this to be a serious proposition. Is Plato here ironically refuting him, by first declaring for the principle and then showing at length that ordinary notions of justice completely reject it? That, indeed, the question of intent and voluntary choice pervades our ideas about justice?
Or are these issues somehow severable in his mind? Perhaps what he means is that 'in a way' these acts are involuntary; but 'in another way' they are obviously chosen after deliberation in some cases, and in other cases were not chosen but just happened. Even here, though, we are not in a clean binary between 'in a way' voluntary cases and complete mistakes or accidents; there are very fine degrees of voluntary choice and deliberation examined.
It's curious. See what you think of it.
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