I. I wasn’t going to say anything about the election until I saw this nonsense being spouted, and realized that I have to practice what I preach. I can’t allow my fellow conservatives to indulge in the paranoid “everything is a conspiracy against us” narrative complete with a “if McCain had run further to the Right and said everything bad all at once about Obama we would have won” garbage. That narrative is too complicated, first of all: if you look at the link posted, the author says openly that the Democrats had the media, the academy, a ton of cash and an unpopular President. That’s a lot for Senator McCain to confront. The article calls him honorable, then proceeds to implicitly bash him the whole way through, as if every little thing he could have done “correctly” in his campaign would have made a difference.
Look, I’m more right-wing than John McCain, but the forces arrayed against Republicans this year were too much. There is no conspiracy, though – forces are merely that, forces. Sometimes they can be overwhelming, but to a degree they can be controlled. This time out they were overwhelming. We do have ways of taking control. We have an alternative media via talk radio, the Internet, and even a TV station and a newspaper (FOX and the WSJ) that are at least contrarian enough to get conservative ideas out there. There are schools that are not as liberal as others, you’re talking to a product of the University of Dallas, which isn’t exactly liberal in temperament. Finally, the money and resources for political power are there – they just need to be spent properly.
So a practical conservative/Republican agenda would be:
- Get more candidates. A great idea would be if Republicans who have run for office before and campaign staffers would organize seminars anyone could attend, to teach them how to run for office and what papers need to be filed, what experience is necessary to have a good resume, what kind of understanding of issues is necessary, how to assemble campaign staff, etc. I know a lot of lunatics would show up to these seminars, but it’s worth trying – there are lots of decent people who should be running who don’t know where to start.
- Educate – make “What does it mean to be Republican?” a real question. I’ve spoken at this at length before: you want the people who vote with you to have some understanding not just of particular policies, but also of our heritage as Americans and Republicans. This is the party of Lincoln: why should that be hidden?
- Get the candidates to know the voters and vice-versa not just at election time. The conservative blogosphere has been dismissive of Kos even as he has become one of the most powerful men in the world. One reason this has happened is because he’s got some common sense – he does blog about candidates and their districts and the prospects for the party as a whole there. I’m not going to do this for you: ultimately, while I’m conservative, education is non-partisan, and that’s what I do here.
If you do these things recognizing that there is an alternative media, that there are alternative schools, and the resources are there, you can do more than win an election. Anyone can win an election – that’s the real lesson of this debacle. All you need is some cash and support. What we want is to build a party we’re proud of, and maybe make our political opposition better by leading by example.
II. I’ve preached enough. What I want to do now is just sit, discuss and think through a text with you. In a Platonic dialogue called “Cleitophon,” Socrates is reported as having given a public speech, not merely having spoken in private as he does in nearly every other dialogue. Whether or not Socrates actually gave the speech is an issue: Cleitophon reports it to us almost as if it were an abstraction from all other (private) Socratic speeches made into an all-too-public exhortation. Nonetheless, here is the speech:
“Whither are you borne, O human beings? Know you not that you do nothing of what you ought, you to whom all that matters is laying up riches for yourselves? While that your sons, to whom you will bequeath them, will know how to use them justly, that you neglect. Nor do you find them teachers of justice – if indeed it is to be acquired through study – or, if through exercise or training, people to train them and exercise them sufficiently. Nor have you even first provided for yourselves in this regard. But when you see that you yourselves and your children have learned sufficiently letters and music and gymnastic – which indeed you regard as a complete education in virtue – and that you are as a result not a whit less vicious where riches are concerned, how is it that you neither disdain the present manner of education nor search for people who will put a halt to this unmusicality? Yet surely it is because of this dissonance and heedlessness, and not because of a want of measure in keeping step with the lyre, that brother strives with brother and city with city, clashing without measure and discordantly, and in the heat of war do and suffer the utmost. Now you claim that it is not from want of education or from ignorance but voluntarily that the unjust are unjust. But then to the contrary you dare to declare that injustice is disgraceful and hateful to the gods. How then could anybody voluntarily choose an evil of this kind? Somebody, you reply, who is no match for pleasures. But then surely he is so involuntarily, is he not, if to prevail is voluntarily done? So in every way the argument proves that injustice is done involuntarily and that we must pay greater attention to it than we now do, every man privately and at the same time all the cities publicly.”
- from Plato’s “Cleitophon,” trans. Clifford Orwin
Again, I’m not sure how Socratic this speech actually is: “every man privately and at the same time all the cities publicly” ignores a middle term, “public men,” and we know Socrates did exhort people to be more active in public life. The treatment of piety is strange here, too. Socrates would tell people to take the gods seriously. Here, the gods are ancillary to reason, and the latter seems self-sustaining given the emphasis on “volition.” Knowledge allows you to act, period: not-knowing means that actions taken aren’t truly actions in a sense. Furthermore, I don’t recall Socrates being this explicit about the dangers of materialism and wealth: in Plato’s Symposium, any critique of Athenian lavishness is implicit. Being a proper guest is paramount.
Anyway – “whither are you borne” suggests human passivity in the face of greater forces. “Laying up riches” makes us sound like bees (cf. Homer, Illiad). We may think we are all-conquering because we store things despite those forces, but the seasons change. The next season is literally that of the next generation, and the implicit bee metaphor drops away.
Justice becomes the explicit topic. It is neglected, but could be taught by “study,” or through “exercise” and “training.” The difference between the latter two is that one isn’t guided, whereas the other is. “Study” was identified with “teachers,” and so the very next time “exercise” and “training” come up – within that very sentence – we get the order reversed, resulting in “study” (guided), “training” (guided), “exercise” (not formally guided).
Now comes the question: do “letters,” “music” and “gymnastic” correspond with the first ordering (“study,” “exercise,” “training”) or the second? “Letters” – implying “logos” (Gk. for “speech, reason”) – absolutely goes with “study,” no matter what. I think all of us look at “music” as a matter of training, and “gymnastic” can merely be a matter of exercise. So the second ordering is the most plausible. Why does the first ordering exist then?
Truth is, the first ordering isn’t implausible. “Music” can be a matter of inspiration; “gymnastic” is fundamental to the art of war. Socrates is keeping this correspondence away from his listeners purposely, if this is indeed him speaking.
If the “bees” (the question of acquisition) led up to justice – and indeed, a large part of the Illiad is the question of justice (Troy is the fundamentally unjust city, not even realizing there’s anything wrong with taking another man’s wife away) – then the human arts (“letters,” etc.) lead up to virtue (Gk. “arete,” meaning “excellence”).
However, people thinking those arts alone are a “complete education in virtue” are nuts: they are still vicious with regards to wealth, do not see any faults with education presently, and put up with tunelessness. Given the correspondence between wealth and war, study and letters, we can say that there is another iteration of the list here – gymanstic/exercise, letters/study, music/training. Central is the failure to see any problems with present education, and that’s the Socratic point: mere theorizing would be very beneficial to Athens. As it is, they “do” more than “reflect,” and their “education” just emboldens their moral failure.
“Dissonance” and “heedlessness” are the problem – gymanstic rules all, since everyone is striving in violence to conquer the other. There is no musicality, and education has been replaced by purposeful ignorance. All of this has the added irony, of course, that gymanstic is for naught: the well-trained body “suffers the utmost.”
[Incidentally - there may be a hidden way to read the philosopher into this passage. A philosophic mind doesn't really get trained (Seth Benardete holds there are 3 moments in the dialogues where we can witness the education of Socrates), but it does exercise. Orwin points out that only the negative effects of injustice are mentioned here; what about the nature of justice and higher goods? "Do no harm" is characteristic of philosophy to a degree.]
After “war,” where virtue has been inverted and used to destroy humanity, comes again “justice” (“Now you claim that it is not from want of education or from ignorance but voluntarily that the unjust are unjust.”), and now instead of “bees,” “gods” – another Homeric invocation I can’t make sense of yet. What gods bring into play is the notion that people can choose instead of merely acquire: we are more than self-interest.
Socrates makes a strange argument when bringing in the “gods.” He says people say what is unjust is done voluntarily, and then argues this contrasts with the belief gods hate injustice. The surface idea is that truly voluntary actions are what the gods themselves would do. The hidden argument is that everyone in Athens is really an atheist and doesn’t know it: their materialism means they can’t distinguish between gods and bees.
So what does this critique tell us? The surface of the passage tells us “go get an education, and that’ll take care of injustice.” I’ll toast to that, definitely. A closer reading tells us the specific problems which led to Athenian education failing, and points at the solution – Socrates has a very clearly defined hierarchy, where justice governs acquistion, and is used to lead to greater virtue that establishes peace among men. That hierarchy can barely be conceived by Athens, which in addition to warring with Sparta, wasn’t above class warfare of the nastiest sort.
- On Plato’s Cleitophon
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