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Say then, my friend : Plato on Democracy and Tyranny
(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. Plato clearly has a low opinion of the "democratic men" of his own time, and was probably on the other side from them of whatever political aisle ran through Athens at the time. Maybe they were right and he was wrong. But right or wrong, this faction must have existed, more or less as Plato describes them. If Plato made them up out of thin air, then he was not only a philosopher, but a prophet.
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).
"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.
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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