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Notes -
Plato on the Woke Mind Virus
(c) J. Nelson Rushton. January 27, 2025 Note: this is the second post in a series. The first one is here.
Some people believe that wokeness emerged from the progressive counterculture of the 1960’s. Some hold that it has its roots in the 1930's with FDR and the New Deal. Others say that the origins of wokeness go back to the Frankfurt School of economics in 1920's Germany. Whatever wokeness is at its core, and whether it is good or bad, I submit that it is in fact older than any of that -- and, indeed, very old. That is the main thesis of this essay.
In The Republic, Book VIII (c. 375 BC), Plato described a faction whose social and political agenda included moral relativism, lax enforcement of criminal laws, multiculturalism, equality of outcomes, and the repudiation of their society’s founding principles and traditional values. Plato called the adherents of this ideology dēmokratikoi andres [democratic men]. Plato wrote that a state ruled by such "democratic men" is on the brink of descending into tyranny. Steps along the path to tyranny, as Plato described it, include sexual liberation and equality, aggressive taxation of the rich, expansion of the welfare state, open borders, forgiveness of debts, suppression of dissenting speech, and the confiscation of weapons owned by private citizens. Today, many with a similar agenda refer to themselves as "progressives". Most of them, I suppose, are unaware that they are "progressing" toward a vision of the world that dates back at least two and a half thousand years.
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato [Whitehead (1929): Process and Reality]. Whitehead was exaggerating, of course -- but at any rate this essay will consist literally of a series of footnotes to Plato. To the extent that there is truth in Whitehead's witticism, the difference between this and any other work in the Western canon is that I am up front about what I am doing.
Overview of The Republic, Book VIII
In The Republic, Book VIII (c. 375 BC), Plato takes the view that the chief distinguishing characteristics of a person is the set of virtues that person honors. He sorts men into five basic categories, according to the virtues they honor most:
Plato wrote that a nation's form of government emerges naturally from the values of its citizens, and in particular from the virtues they honor. In Plato's view, when the people of a society honor a certain virtue, they raise up leaders who exhibit that virtue -- and, conversely, when citizens fail to honor a certain virtue, they raise up leaders in whom that virtue is absent. The virtues present and absent in these leaders in turn determine the general character of the government. Thus, Plato writes that in principle there are five basic forms of government, corresponding to the five basic sorts of citizen (though, in practice, any given state is liable to be a mixture of these pure forms):
The five forms government considered by Plato in The Republic are as follows:
Book VIII of The Republic is presented as a narrative relating an archetypal story of how societies can decay over time -- from the ideal form of government, aristokratíā, to the worst form, tyrannía, and passing through the three intermediate forms along the way. At each stage in the process, the regime-change is affected by a change in the values of the public, in terms of the virtues they honor. In other words, for Plato, politics is downstream of culture.
It is easy to see how politics could be downstream of culture in a modern democracy -- because the voting populace consists of the entire adult population, who confer official authority upon whomever they wish. It is less easy to see how politics would be downstream of culture in, say, a timocracy (military rule) or oligarchy (rule by the wealthy), where one class of people has an exclusive hold on official power. The question is why would the class-in-power willingly abdicate that power, or how could it be wrested from them by others with no official authority? One factor in such a transfer of power could be violent revolution or the threat of it -- but it seems that for Plato, this is not the only factor, or even the chief factor. On the whole, the transfers of power from one class to another in Plato's narrative hinge more on moral suasion and perceived legitimacy than on threats or force. The driving force (or the control variable, so to speak) in Plato's theory of political and societal change is what Thomas Paine called the constitution of the people -- that is, the moral character of society. This stands in contradistinction to Karl Marx's theory of dialectical materialism, in which the driving forces of societal change consists in the material conditions under which people live, including the laws they have written on paper.
Plato's Dēmokratía and the Democratic Man
Foreshadowing the Christian doctrine of the “will of the flesh”, Plato argues that men's hearts are naturally home to unclean carnal passions:
He writes that while all men have these beastly desires, they are restrained, more in some people and less than others, by law (nomos) and reason (logos):
When a society is in decline toward disregard of virtue, it will be a mixture of those who have some regard for virtue left (in particular, "oligarchical" virtues such as industriousness and temperance), and those who have little or none. However, the less virtuous citizens may gradually corrupt the more virtuous and recruit them into their ranks. This recruitment proceeds by Orwellian manipulation of language -- by calling good things evil and evil things good -- and has a religious character, as if the target is being indoctrinated into a cult:
Through this process, the recruit is finally transformed into a full blown dimokratikos anēr [Greek: democratic man], who no longer distinguish between clean and unclean desires:
Plato writes that as more and more men within a society are corrupted, the entire society is transformed toward a state of dēmokratía, or virtueless society. Dēmokratía is a challenging word to translate. It is usually rendered as democracy, and its meaning is something like democracy (in the modern sense) in that it entails relatively broad and equal participation in government. In Plato's narrative, however, dēmokratía entails much more: a thoroughgoing ethos of equity, in which people regarded, not only having equal rights of life, liberty and property, but also as being of equal ability, uprightness, and achievement -- regardless of their actual respective degrees of ability, uprightness, or achievement.
According to Plato, the virtueless society has a freewheeling spirit of moral relativism -- and, in that spirit, discards the principles of its national constitution.
Its public officials are often selected on the basis of their professed loyalty, rather than ability or integrity,
or, in some cases, at random by the drawing of lots, presumably on the grounds that "all men are equal" (Strange as this practice may seem to us today, this was indeed the policy of some Greek city-states in and around the time of Plato):
The society that has ceased to honor virtue repudiates meritocracy:
Since all ways of being are held in equal esteem, the people of the dēmokratía are diverse in their norms and values — one might say “multicultural”:
Thus, the society loses its sense of shared national identity and social cohesion:
In addition to discarding its traditional principles and values, the dēmokratía neglects enforcement of the law, allowing criminals to freely roam the streets:
In summary, the agenda of Plato's democratic men includes moral relativism, leniency in criminal justice, multiculturalism, equality of outcomes, and a loosening of their society's founding principles and traditional values. Sound Familiar?
Plato's Narrative of the Descent into Tyranny
Plato held that a society ruled by "democratic men" -- that is, men who neglect to honor virtue, or to distinguish between clean and unclean desires -- is in danger of degenerating into tyranny. The descent into tyranny is driven by a collection of people Plato calls drones, defined generally as those who do no useful work. The name "drone" is taken from the entomological term for male bees and ants -- who, even in Plato's time, were known to live off of the work of others in their hive, contributing nothing except to reproduce themselves.
Plato's "drones" are a rather curious coalition. He writes that there are two broad sorts: drone followers and drone leaders, which he metaphorically refers to as crawling drones and flying drones. The crawling drones, or drone followers, consist of career criminals and the non-working poor. The flying drones, or drone leaders, are elected officials and government bureaucrats who garner power by catering to the constituency formed by the crawling drones.
The descent into tyranny begins the decline of patriarchy within the home.
Foreigners and resident aliens are treated like citizens:
Children grow entitled and arrogant, and adults cater to them for fear of being labelled as authoritarians. Everyone wants to be the "cool parent" or the "cool teacher".
The decaying society embraces a spirit of sexual liberation and sexual equality.
Plato wrote that as the drones grow more numerous, the more ambitious drones begin to occupy positions of power and influence. Meanwhile, their less capable constituents form mobs to shout down speakers and suppress the political speech of those who disagree with them:
There are some members of society who have retained the virtues of the previous generation, such as diligence and temperance. Theses people naturally prosper, but the drones elect leaders who confiscate their wealth and redistribute it:
The drones use bureaucratic and criminal indictments to harass and immobilize their political opponents:
The redistribution of wealth continues, including the cancellation of debts:
The drones elect a leader who drums up national emergencies as a pretext for expanding the power of government. In Plato’s narrative, the emergency is a war — but a war on poverty, or a war on drugs, or a global pandemic would also do the trick.
To enlarge his constituency, the drone-leaders open the borders and encourage the immigration of more drones from foreign countries:
In the last stages of social and political decay, corruption spirals out of control. Having plundered the wealth of the upper classes, the tyrant begins to confiscate the property of the working class and underclass that elected him, but now they cannot remove him from power. Plato likens the tyrant to a son who steals from the father who has raised him:
Finally, the tyrant turns violently on its own citizens, drones and all, after depriving them of the right to bear arms:
Conclusion
It may be worth mentioning how I came to be acquainted with Plato's account of dēmokratía and the descent into tyranny. I first learned of it in listening to a lecture by Hillsdale College historian Paul Rahe. The lecture was on Plato's Republic for its own sake; Rahe did not make any analogy between Plato's narrative and current day politics, and am not sure whether he intended to. Nevertheless, the analogy was clear to me, and I found it so uncanny that I was incredulous. To be frank, I was pretty sure that Rahe was cherry picking passages from a long text to make it look as though Plato was writing about contemporary politics. So, I read Plato's Republic for myself. In doing so, I found that, contrary to my expectations, Rahe was simply summarizing a section of Book VIII -- and that, if anything, he had undersold the similarity between Plato's "democratic man" and the modern left. I would not insist that you take my word for that, and I do not even believe it would be rational to take my word for it on the basis of the snippets quoted in this essay (for all you know, if you haven't read the text, I am doing what I suspected Rahe of doing). Thus, I invite the reader to examine the relevant sections of Plato's Republic for themselves. The entirety of Book VIII can be read in about an hour, or in two hours for a slow reader like me.
When he spoke of tyranny, Plato was speaking from experience, both personal and collective. At the time he wrote The Republic around 375 BC, Plato's home city of Athens had suffered through four different tyrannical regimes over a two-hundred year period -- including the reign of the so-called "Thirty Tyrants", which Plato himself lived though as a young man, and during which approximately five percent of the population of Athens was murdered by its own government. Summarizing the history of the era, Alexander Hamilton would later write,
So in The Republic, Plato was not speculating about something distant from his experience. On the contrary, like the "Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come" in Dickens's Christmas Carol, Plato had been where we might be going, and hoped to warn us so that we would be less likely to go there.
Can you post these to Substack so I can share them with others?
Absolutely. https://jnelsonrushton.substack.com/
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If you haven't, I bet you'd be interested in learning about the state of Athenian democracy—Thucydides is pretty good, especially the Landmark edition.
I'm not sure to what extent I buy that the word democracy is different. Sure, it's different from what we call democracy now, in that we usually mean by that an often large representative republic, where we elect or appoint people to various functions, and they do the actual ruling, but their getting there is in some way dependent on popular appointing. Athenian democracy was far more direct: they had deliberative assemblies that were, if I remember correctly, open to all male citizens (note: citizen≠resident). Their trials were also before enormous juries, with hundreds of people. And this is all in a relatively small city-state. But I would think fundamentally, it mostly just has in view the form of government it has, in which there is (largely direct) popular rule, and the other tendencies you describe are just a result of the usual popular tendencies in such a setting. But yes, I agree that we find many of the same tendencies among people today, and a portion of this probably is downstream from our form of regime.
The setting of the Republic, as with the Platonic dialogues in general, is during the Peloponnesian war against Sparta, which Athens eventually lost. They were briefly ruled oligarchically, due to the Spartans, then democracy was restored, before they were conquered by Philip of Macedon, Alexander's father. During the Peloponnesian war, in most greek cities there were differing factions who sought democratic and oligarchic rule, promoted by the Athenians and Spartans respectively.
If I remember correctly, Socrates describes democracies as making philosophy more possible than most of the other regimes.
One other note: drawing of lots isn't all that crazy! We use random chance, to an extent, in our own jury process. Drawing lots has the downside of not letting you choose the most qualified people, and the upside of avoiding any negative effects from what sorts of people would seek out the position.
This glosses over some things that are worth mentioning, don't you think?
Well, yes.
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Just a comment, I like these posts but I would read them more if they were far more concise.
Thanks. For every person that says this, there are probably 10 or more who feel it.
By "concise", do you mean (A) broken into smaller pieces per post (B), having less content altogether, or (C) putting the same content into fewer words? "Concision" usually refers to (C), but maybe that is not what you are saying.
All of the above? I think A is probably the easiest to do and I would prefer that yeah.
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I think theres something missing here, on the connection between indulging ones appetites, and the ideology which approves of such. Plato seems to think the drones cause the ideology, but how does selfishness cause approval of other peoples selfishness? Most drones currently dont even do that - honest approval of lifestyles other than ones own is mostly seen in the supportive elites.
And that is the important part of your claim - moocherism as a constant political background force is not a new idea. An ideology which approves of them in general would be. Again, most poor people even today do not claim a general right to redistribution - they have stories about how these particular rich people, or the current rich people, dont really deserve what they have, often with justifications that try to be similar to the bourgeois standards of justice. This may be motivated reasoning, but thats not the point. If Plato does indeed describe progressive ideology this well (I have yet to read), then thats evidence for something - but Im not even really sure yet what his version of that thing is.
I think there are two things that can fill in the missing pieces of this puzzle:
Even one man marooned on an island has a conscience. He knows what he'd be ashamed for his father to see him do, if his father was there -- and that inner voice doesn't go away when his father dies. So in order to indulge his unclean appetites, he has to tell himself things like, "It's all good", and "Who's to say what's clean and unclean", and "Dad was a prick anyway" (which is why the woke smear their ancestors and tear down their statues). For that reason, I believe the behavior depends crucially on the ideology.
Remember that not all drones are poor. Also, Plato's view is not as simple as drones causing demokratia.
In an earlier part of the narrative, not recounted in my essay, Plato says that it is brazen oligarchy that first begins to make the drones more numerous: ruthless exploitation by the rich of the poor and of each other, turning the some of the losers in the economic free-for-all into poor, ruined wretches (my words, but his basic picture of things). From there, the causation between drones and demockratia is a mutually recursive chicken-and-egg cycle. More drones --> more democratic men --> more drones --> more democratic men... But *basically if Plato had to pick a single root cause, I think he would pick the ideology rather than a certain group of people. He tends to focus on the ideal as ultimate.
I'm not sure what "new" means here. I think Plato implicitly posits such an ideology.
I submit that living off of the work of others in your peer group violates universal, intuitively self-evident natural law. Every clan and tribe has disdain for people who don't pull their weight. Thus, saying it's OK to be a moocher requires turning down the volume on morality itself. It doesn't require that logically, but I believe it requires it psychologically. Moral nihilism is a very old philosophy, and I think its chief motivations make up a very short list: theft (by deception or by force, including government force), and sexual libertineness.
So as far as the ideology and the practice, I don't think you can have one without the other. Men find it easier to rationalize than to brazenly violate their conscience. A rationalization is better than sex. Have you ever gone more than one week without one good juicy rationalization? [Jeff Goldblum as Michael Gold in The Big Chill]
I don't know about that. They probably lean in that direction as a group far more than the working and middle classes when asked -- but they are not as zealous and vocal and organized in advocating it, because they are not zealous or vocal or organized on the whole. Crawling drones play different positions on the team than flying drones -- as different as quarterback and an offensive lineman.
Maybe I wasnt clear enough about this, but what I mean is: Yes, people need a justification for what theyre doing. But there is a lot of freedom in how that justification generalises. You can justify taking a rich guys money by arguing he got it illegitimately. This isnt that different politically, because you can make these allegations against whoever you want, but its not an explicit endorsement of redistribution. Its this explicit endorsement that I think is limited to elites (even actual leftist politicians often prefer to argue without it, e.g.), and would so far have considered a modern phenomenon.
Basically, I dont see why drones would lead to the development of democratic-man-ideology specifically, instead of some variation on "We wuz".
This is not something Plato touches on directly, but I have an idea about it. The guiding principle, if you can call it that, is a collective decision by the drones on the central question in founding any fundamentalist/extremist movement: As a function of the material and cultural circumstances I find myself in, what group can I demonize, scapegoat, and rally a coalition to attack and plunder? The details of the target group, the moral rationalization, and the attack strategy arise from culture and circumstance -- but when they find the answer it then plays out in (1) censoring the target group and their ideas, (2) scapegoating them for all the world's ills, (3) disarming them, (4) seizing their property in the name of justice, and often finally (5) murder. The target group is chosen opportunistically, not according to any eternal principle. Depending on circumstances, it could be heretics, Jews, the aristocracy, the Tutsis, the vaguely defined and ever-morphing "bourgeoisie", or straight white males. The tyranny Plato observed must have been of the left-wing variety, like that of Stalin and Mao -- but the dragon can wear the mask of the left, the right, religious fundamentalism, racial supremacy, or whatever.
Plato's "crawling drones" are thugs and paupers, that tend to stoke leftist tyranny, but leftist tyranny is just one of many possible answers to the question of who can I blame for my problems and attack and plunder with righteous indignation?
Also, that's pretty much a summary of the top-level post I am planning for next week.
Thats what I would have thought as well - but as per your post, Plato does describe something much more similar to modern ideology. You dont need moral relativism to fuck up the heretics. I guess Im waiting for next week.
Maybe this is the line that is causing the problem (from the OP):
Plato's view here is narrow -- focusing on the sorts of tyranny he (or his teacher, Socrates) witnessed -- which were evidently of a leftist variety. The most natural constituents of that kind of tyranny are the non-working poor. But in a broader view, which Plato does not discuss, the natural constituents of the tyrant might be a different group.
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Great post. I've had a lingering suspicion that most social conflicts are between the same impulses we've had for thousands of years. Maybe I gotta finally read the Republic. Is there a translation you recommend? Any prerequisite baseline level of familiarity with Greek?
I think Allen Bloom's translation of the Republic is supposed to be quite good—if I remember correctly, he makes an effort to prefer literal to idiomatic translations, which decreases the extent to which interpretations are forced upon you. At the same time, I believe he also has plenty of notes to explain nuances, etc, and maybe an interpretive essay. But it's been some time since I looked.
The Straussian interpreters, including Bloom, put a lot of work into textual interpretation, which is kind of essential for Plato, because everything is in dialogue form, and it's not like it's always obvious whether Plato always agrees with whatever is being suggested.
I don't remember the details of what the Republic said all that well, but yes, many human problems recur. Their societies obviously had some pretty substantial differences from now, but there'd surely be a good bit in common. They were generally much smaller—e.g. Athens and the surrounding countryside, not the United States, even if they had colonies, other places paid tribute, and they could project force. Athenian democracy was also considerably more of a direct democracy, and less of a representative one. Of course, he's speaking in the abstract, but the one that they would have been familiar with, and, indeed, living under, was Athens—I imagine there would have been models in mind for all the regimes, except the ideal one.
If you read it, don't expect it to be purely political, though that's certainly in there. He also spends a lot of time on philosophy, and wants to pair regimes with states of the human soul.
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I have been working from Benjamin Jowett's translation. His is easy to find online, as is Paul Shorey's in the Perseus digital library. I haven't looked at different translations enough to make a recommendation.
No need to know Greek unless you are reading it in Greek. I only know a few Greek words myself. I look up some of the key words in a Greek dictionary using a pain-in-the-ass process:
I used to use ChatGPT for this, and it was awesome, until I realized that it doesn't always give me the same answer when I ask the same question twice. i.e., it's cull of crap.
I need a friend who knows ancient Greek.
I believe I heard that Jowett can be a bit censorious at times, at least when things are being kinda gay. On the other hand, it's easy to obtain him, because he's not under copyright. He's the translator that I've read the most Plato from.
If you're using Perseus, make sure to take advantage of the ability to pull up the text in English down the side. And if you just click on the word in Perseus, you should be able to find the LSJ entry—Strong's is more targeted at biblical era Greek, which, while there'll certainly be a ton of overlap, will not always agree fully with the Greek of 400 years prior.
If you have Greek questions, I could probably attempt to answer them.
I'm going to take you up on that.
Thanks!
All the instances I found were forms of ανηρ, or adjectives without a noun (Greek does that more frequently than English). ανδρες is the nominative plural of ανηρ. It's male, specifically. ανθροπος is just generically human, no sex implied.
It's logos.
Thank you!
So in the latter case, what is the Romanized form of the adjective? Are you saying Plato literally called them democrats (transliterating into grammatically correct English)?
It would be democratic (greek democraticos/δημοκρατικος). Likewise for oligarchic, and tyrannic, though that last one isn't really a word.
I might render the paragraph starting in 545a, if I were trying to be pretty literal and keeping cognates when possible, something like, "Then after this, we must go through the worse: the lover of victory and lover of honor, according to the established Laconic [Spartan] polity, and again oligarchic, and democratic, and the tyrannic, so that seeing the most unjust, we might set him opposite to the most just, and our examination will be complete."
In book 8, with forms of the word δεμοκρατικος, there's no noun in 545a, 559d, 559e, 560a. In 545c, 557b, and sort of in 562a, there's forms of ανηρ. But I don't imagine there's much of a difference in sense—it's implicit what we're talking about throughout the whole book, I think: the men (andres) who correspond with the various regimes.
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Liddell and Scott is on Perseus, and is the canonical dictionary for Attic (i.e. Classical) Greek.
For @NeltonRushton: LSJ is short for Liddell-Scott-Jones. Perseus will also have Middle Liddell, which is a less complete dictionary, also by Liddell and Scott. I've seen the three sizes called the Little Liddell, the Middle Liddell, and the Great Scott (the LSJ).
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I had similar reactions reading the republic recently with how much felt like it could apply to our times but I didn't quite pin it as "progressive left" entirely, although there are definitely some echoes there. I think there are clear echoes in modern populism generally, as well as with liberalism which both have strains in both American parties, and the left/right divide in general. Given that Plato's alternative suggestions were completely unworkable, the temptation for me is to throw my arms up and say "that's life", but the other commentator's description of Aristotle makes me want to follow up with his writings which I've barely explored.
In his book "Conflict of Visions", Thomas Sowell slams Plato as an adherent of the "unconstrained vision", and a proto-Marxist. However, it is not clear that Plato actually advocates the policies he describes as "ideal state" to be a thing in the real world.
In any case, while the Greeks described certain problems very cogently, I wouldn't turn to them for wholesale solutions. They obviously never figured out how to run a sustained democracy. The Romans did, though -- from around 500 BC to 150 BC. Unfortunately, the Romans didn't write much in that period, and we do not even have a full text of their constitution, the "Twelve Tables of Roman Law" (I'm not even sure they kept a written copy). Maybe that's the secret -- don't write it down!
The Spartan constitution attributed to Lycurgus was deliberately unwritten, or at least it was claimed to be so. Some copies apparently did exist, most notably at the oracle of Delphi. Spartans themselves were supposed to maintain it orally.
From Plutarch:
Sparta's government and domestic policy was truly bizarre, though, and doesn't map well to modern politics. Caste society, mostly automated ascetic communism, no private property, iron coinage (to make wealth unwieldy and theft ungainly), two kings, an elected-for-life-council-of-elders, many other peculiarities.
My own two cents is that the value of the unwritten constitution lay in its looseness. It allowed, and depended on, virtuous men to exercise real decision making power.
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This is a genuine question: Is this a repost? This is both an obscure argument, and one I feel I've read exactly before. In specific this language:
This same passage comes up in one of Yarvin's best-known pieces, Technology, Communism, and the Brown Scare.
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This Motte post is a synthesis and refinement of two posts I made previously on Substack. There were links to my Substack in some old posts I made on the Motte about Russian and Chinese communism, so that may be where you saw it.
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If we're talking about ancient political philosophy, I tend to prefer Aristotle's politeia to Plato's aristokratia. A mixed constitution with all the best aspects of aristocracy, monarchy and democracy and with checks and balances to reign in the weaknesses of each of those systems seems like a better way to constitute a society than by trying to cultivate a truly virtuous and wise ruling class. I also feel like Aristotle's methodology (researching the constitutions of 158 Greek city states to see what makes them tick, and then distilling his findings into a book on politics) is more likely to arrive at viable, real world conclusions than Plato's comparatively more limited exposure to different constitutions. (There's also the fact that Plato's efforts to make Syracruse into his ideal republic ended in disaster, and resulted in his later political work "The Laws" being much less ambitious and utopian as a result.)
Plato was undoubtedly a genius, and his systematic approach to philosophy meant that he is often a great starting point, but I definitely don't think he should be taken as the last word on anything. He had a tendency to be lost in the airy heights, and I think a more grounded pragmatic approach can often outdo him.
The usual positions in later (I'm thinking e.g. early modern) political philosophy were (at least, I'm pretty sure):
Some measure of virtue among those with power is indispensable for a well-functioning polity.
Mixed regimes (that is, between monarchy, oligarchy, democracy), of some variety, are best.
I would be pretty careful about taking the portions of any dialogue and saying that this is definitively the opinion of Plato. I don't know that he actually intended anyone to form his proposed aristocratic regime. But I haven't looked at any of this for a few years, so I'd want to reread.
It wouldn't be very Socratic to hold an opinion.
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As a progressive, I would say, within Plato's framework that a political ideology is defined by the virtues it places highest, that I am guided by honouring kindness above all else. I wonder if this term is missing from his system because he was uncharitable in his view of the motives of the people he wished to criticize, or if this is a difference between his democratic men and my bunch (such as it is).
Aristocracy: Do what is most rational.
Timocracy: Do what gives me honor.
Oligarchy: Do what gives me wealth.
Democracy: Do what gives me pleasure. (Or was this something about liberty? I don't remember.)
Tyranny: Do what keeps my rule. (Or was this something else about pleasure? I don't remember.)
At least, as I would roughly characterize the motivations of the ruling classes in the various regimes, from my (possibly faulty) recollection of Plato from several years ago.
How would you propose that kindness be an organizing principle of society?
Rational according to which goal?
Presumably, something like do what is best, what leads to a well-ordered society or at the philosophical form of the good, or something like that. But it's been a few years, don't trust everything I say here from memory.
This still sounds like the person creating this classification thought there's only one kind of order and a universal definition of good. Needless to say, it's not obvious. Unlike the other four fairly straightforward concepts, "do what is best" is so nebulous that it can define any rule.
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I don’t think kindness is a virtue so much as an affectation. Everyone pretends that their views are kind, loving, and so on. But im kind because I want to bring society in line with my view of reality, and you do too, except we don’t agree on reality. Is it kind to encourage kids to live as trans people and eventually become sterilized eunuchs? Or is is kind to stop them even if they’re mad today but will eventually become parents? Is it kind to not make your kid do his math homework and play on his computer, or to force tge issue so he learns the material and has options to get into better colleges and better jobs in ten years? Cancer treatment today or dead of cancer in two years? Kindness can only kosherize what you’ve already decided. And quite often kindness is used to make terrible decisions on behalf of other people, on the grounds that the decision that would make their life long-term better is going to hurt in the moment, or require effort beyond what the person is willing to do.
That depends. You might treat these questions as practical questions of fact: what will make my child happiest in the long run? In which case, yes, you might come out on either position while having "kindness" as your guiding light. But a lot of people will come down on one side or the other based on very different principles; will say that kids should still go to school or be trans or not be trans even if they were shown hard evidence that on average the other would be preferable in utilitarian terms. That is the distinction I am talking about, and I don't think it's a meaningless one. My personal belief is that any society that places other values above kindness, whatever those values might be, runs a much greater risk of descending into tyranny, because it allows ends other than human welfare to justify means that might entail human suffering. You can still get to very dark places playing the trolley problem on massive scales, but nowhere near so dark as if you place non-human-welfare-related considerations above human welfare altogether.
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What is kindness exactly? You can be kind towards one people and unkind to other as the same time.
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I'm interested in whether, as a self-defined progressive, you feel that progressiveness as whole is define by holding the virtue, whose shadows are kindness, charity, generousness etc.?
I don't want to force you into a no-true-scotsman situation or an inevitable dogpile so I apologize in advance if that happens. Anyways, quite a few progressives I know in my circle of friends and family definitely express their virtues as kindness and/or empathy. But the longer one talks to them the more it really appears their kindness or empathy is very narrowly directed. They clearly have outgroups they are not kind or empathetic to. They don't consider the second order effects of their "kind" policies and who it hurts or sometimes even care that it does hurt people. I'm not saying this is you or even your bunch but have you encountered this, how do you differentiate yourself?
Certainly I've encountered it. I'm sure you've also encountered army-fetishists who aren't particularly brave or self-sacrificing when push comes to shove, priests who aren't very godly, etc. etc. I don't regard it as an argument against any position or movement or value to point out that a great number, perhaps even a plurality or majority, of the people who profess to support it fall short of the ideal. Humans are flawed, messy, unreliable creatures.
And so am I - but nevertheless I choose to be a humanist in the truest sense; to extend kindness/etc. to the whole sorry lot of us, including myself. The ostensibly-'unkind' included. I think too many people claim to want to be kind, but take the easy road and revoke kindness-privileges to those who they think fall egregiously short of the principle themselves. This may or may not be sound game-theory when it comes to tolerance, the paradox of which is of course is what they'll cite if pressed; but it's bad moral philosophy when it comes to kindness, and too many of my fellow progressives have allowed themselves to confuse the two because it makes the whole ethos a good deal easier to practice… at the cost of making it a lot hollower in effect.
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"Kindness" isn't a virtue. It's a demeanor. It, in itself, doesn't require any skill or competence. It can come from abject weakness and fear as much as it can come from magnanimous and openhanded strength and generosity.
I mean, if you've read Cicero's On Duties it is. According to Cicero (following the Stoic philosopher Panaetius), kindness/beneficence is a component of the cardinal virtue of justice. It is in this mode that the subordinate virtue of generosity is thought to fall under justice.
Now, Cicero's idea of generosity is limited, and he thinks that we should always keep enough to fulfill our obligations to our friends and families, and he also draws the analogy of your obligation to strangers being at about the level of helping a stranger with directions, or lighting someone else's torch when you already have a fire going (e.g. acts that don't require much from you in terms of time or resources.) A person with enough resources can, of course, go above and beyond what is morally required of them, and that is virtuous and good if they do.
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This is just equivocating between different definitions of "kindness". I meant kindness as a virtue - where it is loosely synonymous with "generosity", though with different connotations; Christian, and particularly Catholic, moral philosophy would liken it to "charity", which is yet again broadly comparable though not quite synonymous. I wouldn't apply the word to people who behave in kind-seeming ways for other motives, any more than "martial valour" would apply to someone who fights out of fear of punishment, not courage or honour. But let us not quibble over words. We can say that my lot are the people who place the virtue of generosity or charity highest, if you like.
Kindness as virtue is similar to the Confucian highest virtue of [Ren](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren_(philosophy)), which I have seen translated as "humaneness", "beneficence", or "kindness". Kong-Fu Tze came up with the term himself, and the kanji 仁 is literally two radicals: 'man' and 'two' (or 'also'). Like "kind-ness", in the sense of considering someone else as like yourself or your kin.
(I promise to have a question for you in the end, after I set up the premise.)
Confucius (or rather his school) falls within the general framework of the Chinese political schools of thought of the time, which rests on three main questions: What is the Way (to fix the society)? What virtue (in the sense of personal power) does one get for following this Way? What kind of society does this Way lead to? (I'm loosely paraphrasing Van Norton's intro to classical Chinese philosophy, which is excellent.)
So Confucian school regarded the virtue of Kindness as power, which makes sense: if you understand another person, does that not give you power to guide that other person in a way closer to your goals? The Confucian school also was adamant that this very useful power is hard to obtain. To truly be Kind, you need to spend years studying people, starting with those closest to you and whose foibles you are most familiar with. Thus the school emphasized family as the root of Kindness: if you can be Kind to your grouchy out-of-touch parents, your annoying siblings, your infuriating spouse, your disobedient children... well, then you're onto something. (In particular, maybe then you can transfer that power to being Kind to your grouchy out-of-touch boss, your annoying co-workers, your infuriating office mate, and your duty-shirking underlings.)
So my question for you is: do you regard the virtue of Kindness as something hard to obtain, something that requires years of diligent study, as opposed to a more common notion of "kindness" in a sense of good disposition or well-intention? And if you do: how do you go about obtaining this virtue? (I suspect that, as a modern progressive, your answer would be substantially different from Confucius.)
I don't define it in precisely the Confucian way, but there is a lot to this as implementation of Kindness, yeah. Where I would part from these recommendations is that I don't think family can be the root of Kindness. Humans have in-group/out-group instinct, and if you train yourself to be kind to your family only, you might accidentally wind up training yourself to be loyal to your in-group no matter what, without getting any closer to being truly kind to your fellow man in general. Call me a Westerner, but I'm looking for "good Samaritans" (in the original sense of the man who helps a member of his out-group without a second thought), not just good family men. Still, the skill to be kind to your family is certainly a necessary one if you want to live your life Kindly, just not a sufficient one, and if you find yourself having trouble being kind even to your relatives, you're in trouble. I'm just not sure that you're home free and need only extend the line outward once you've mastered that much.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. There is indeed a danger on "overtraining" Kindness on family (and by extension kin and friends) if one takes the Confucian idea of family being the root of Kindness. I think the metaphor still holds: a tree sapling that has healthy roots but fails to grow is a failed tree.
The advantage of training in Kindness on the people you actually know and interact with is that it gets quickly apparent why Kindness is a hard virtue to achieve. Especially in the original sense of virtue as a moral force, a form of personal excellence that is actually useful in accomplishing something. If your father is eating himself into an early grave, what's a Kind way to dissuade him? If your teenage daughter is driving herself insane with social media, what's the Kind way to wean her off? Is it even Kind to meddle into their affairs? Are you sure of the superiority of your judgement? These questions get much harder, the nearer the people are to you.
Whereas if I train in Kindness on strangers, the typical failure mode is that it devolves into simple politeness.
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Epic freudian typo.
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May reply more substantially later, but maybe you just leave this typo (?) up:
Had to fix it, but it was cool while it lasted. The typo will live on in this comment.
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Great post. I actually have read Republic, as it was required reading when I was a freshman in college, but this post makes it clear that I need to read it again. Both because I've forgotten a lot of it (that was 20 years ago after all), but also because I feel like I'll be able to get insights from the book that wouldn't have occurred to me at 18. So at the very least, you have gotten one person to read the book!
Thanks!
...An angel got their wings today.
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