Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  Let us consider the child abuse that is involved here. Yes, I do not shrink from the charge of child abuse. The child’s need for a parent’s love is overwhelming. A parent who stresses achievement is irresistibly imposing on the child the idea that its being loved is conditional upon its performing well the tasks that the parent holds up before the child’s desperate eyes as the gateway to love. In this way, the child is conditioned to consider only the parent’s own desires for it, so urgent is its need to win this love, and in time the child will even lose the sense of any conflicting desires it has for itself, which, of course, is a situation much to the parent’s liking, since it makes its project for the child—the project that is the child—all the easier.

  And I would add, by the way, that this projectification of the child has only increased with the liberation of women. Ambitious women, who have invested so much in their education and careers, are required to make sacrifices to their own advancement by the obstruction that is a child. And so these mothers will require of that child that it really be worth the sacrifice, worth the slowing down of their own scramble up the ladder of success. And so the pressure on the child to be off the charts is only intensified. I think it is no accident that the author of this book which I have not read is herself a practitioner in a fiercely competitive field. For such a woman, a child is so substantial a setback to her own ambition that, in order to offset the setback, the child must earn back its existence by being so exceptional as to add to, rather than subtract from, the ambitious mother’s tallying of her successes. So feminism, I am sorry to say, has only intensified the projectification of children.

  Now let me just say that this projectification will certainly get positive results in good grades, admission to brag-worthy schools, and other tricks of the little performing monkey, but at what price? A person raised by an organ-grinding mother—which I suggest as a more suitable epithet for the warrior mother, stripping her of the pseudo-heroics of your phrase—will forever conflate self-worth with surpassing others and garnering external signs of success, which will forever be confused with love, though of a most distancing and unsatisfying sort. One is raising a person who will forever be appraising others as possible competitors and so will feel profoundly isolated, knowing only the quick fix of personal achievement to temporarily dull the pain of being shut up in the small cold space of her own eternal need to justify her existence by excelling.

  And this quick fix of achievement, mind you, is pursued not for the sake of the excellent work achieved, but rather for the sake of being regarded as excellent, whether there is true excellence there or not. Shortcuts to approval will be sought, methods of self-promotion will take precedence over the devoted hard work of true excellence, which, I might add, often goes unrecognized precisely because it is authentically superior. The author of this book, which has so much dictated tonight’s agenda, says that there is a happiness in the approval of others because it is a signal that true excellence has been achieved, but let me assure you on the basis of my years of therapeutic work that this is not accurate. It is the approval that is desperately sought, not the achievement itself. In fact, such a person has little feel for the integrity of the work itself, just as she has no sense for the integrity of the self, and shoddiness will do just as well, if not better, so long as praise is attained.

  In short, this is a prescription for lifelong anxiety, loneliness, and, in the end, mediocrity. So if that is what you would like for your child, then here is indeed the recipe to raise such an exceptional child.

  BURNS: Sophie, I think you ought to have a chance to respond to that.

  ZEE: It’s hard for me to respond since, quite obviously, Mitzi—may I call you Mitzi?

  MUNITZ: You may not. Audience audibly gasps.

  ZEE, laughs, a bit embarrassed, but quickly recovers: Well, since Dr. Munitz hasn’t read my book, it’s hard to know how to respond. She certainly doesn’t have to keep repeating that she hasn’t read it, since that’s obvious. As far as my abusing my children is concerned, that’s just ridiculous, and in fact, even though they, of course, often get annoyed with me, they have actually thanked me—and every parent knows how rare that is—thanked me for pushing them as hard as I have, because it was the pushing that got them to accomplish what had seemed far beyond them. But it wasn’t far beyond them, and too many parents never allow their children to discover how many goals they might have thought were beyond them are really in their power. It’s really about empowerment! That’s what child-rearing ultimately is all about, which is also what Dr. Munitz, I think, thinks, which is why I don’t think that we’re really, fundamentally, in disagreement.

  MUNITZ: Well, about that you could not be more wrong. I do not claim to be an expert on everything, but I am the world’s expert on what I think, and what I think is not within spitting distance of what you think. I very much hope for their sakes that your children are as happy as you seem to think them, and that this happiness will continue into their adult life, but my decades of research make me skeptical, to say the least. Of course, your children thank you, since you have incinerated any autonomous selves with which they could independently assess what it is you have done to them. You have made them success junkies for life. They will never be free, never. Empowerment! This is Orwellian. War is peace. Coercion is empowerment.

  BURNS: Sophie, do you want to respond?

  ZEE: Well, I think that being given more options in life is undeniably empowering. Going to the best schools gives you more options, opens doors that wouldn’t otherwise be open, and more options means more freedom. Freedom is obviously a really complicated philosophical subject, and I feel embarrassed even broaching it in the presence of a philosopher of Plato’s genius, but for what it’s worth I think that freedom is measured by the number of options that a person can choose among. You’re only free if you have multiple options. A less free person has limited options, maybe none at all that can make them happy. Give your child more options and you’re giving your child more freedom, even if you have to resort to warrior-mother tactics in order to give them that freedom.

  MUNITZ: And tell me, have your children the choice of being ordinary? Is that a choice you would allow them to consider? Is that, after they have been raised by you, a choice that they could ever allow themselves to consider?

  ZEE: Why would they want to be ordinary, if they have it in them to be extraordinary?

  MUNITZ: Nevertheless, if they did decide that’s what they wanted, if that’s what would make them happy, would they be free to choose it?

  ZEE: Well, of course, they’d be free to choose ordinariness. That’s the default position. You don’t have to do much to prepare your children so that they can choose, if they want, to be ordinary. Almost everybody’s born to be middling, which is where the job of parenting comes in.

  BURNS: Well, I see that we’ve definitely strayed out onto some dense philosophical terrain here, conversing about the nature of freedom, no less! And fortunately, who should we have with us to help lead us into a clearing but Plato! What do you say, Plato? Do you agree with Professor Zee that the more options a person has, the freer they are?

  PLATO: It seems to me that the free person has a severely restricted range of choices.

  BURNS: That sounds rather paradoxical.

  PLATO: Yes, and I will make my statement sound even more paradoxical. The free person’s choices are completely determined.

  BURNS: You’re right. That does sound even more paradoxical. How can someone whose choices are completely determined be free?

  PLATO: When it is the person’s own better nature that is determining that person’s choices. Imagine a two-horsed charioteer, with one horse unruly and unable to stay the course, and the other horse knowing his way even without the whip or goad (Phaedrus 253c–d). The charioteer has only to control the bad horse so that the better horse may lead him in order to be free. Freedom isn’t the absence of control; rather, control is the essence of freedom.

  Burn
s, Zee, Munitz all begin to speak simultaneously.

  BURNS, to Zee: Go ahead.

  ZEE: Well, I just wanted to say that I completely agree with Plato, and his point about freedom only reinforces what I was saying, since a child’s nature is still very much in the making, which means that they don’t really have a nature yet, certainly not a better nature, their bad unruly horse has total control, and so they can’t possibly be free, so it’s sort of conceptually incoherent for parents to try and give them freedom. I mean, given what Plato’s just said, coercion of children shouldn’t even be considered coercion, and what you’re doing in perfecting their natures is ensuring that when they’re grown-ups and actually have better natures that can determine their choices, those natures will be determining them to wonderful, off-the-charts results. Their freedom is going to express itself in excelling and achieving, as opposed to just taking up space. And I actually want to quote Plato here. Zee turns to Plato. Because I remember that in the Republic you used the expression “city of pigs”10 (372c–d), which really made an impression on me when I was a freshman in college, which, like Zack, is when I read your masterpiece. If I remember correctly, the city of pigs is one where only the necessities of life are met, and the people are contented to just lie around and be, well, content, but there’s no motivation to improve themselves, to get to the next stage of civilization. They’re all equal and totally happy to be equal. It seems sort of idyllic, their lounging around on their rustic beds made out of leaves, and drinking wine and eating barley cakes and singing their simple little ditties together, probably most of them out of tune, but still it’s a city of pigs, and there aren’t any painters or poets or great musicians or scientists or philosophers, all the advancements that require people to get off their beds of leaves and practice their scales and study hard to get into the best schools and push themselves to make something distinctive and distinguished out of their lives. So, yes, it’s an idyllic city of pigs, but it’s still a city of pigs. Maybe we’d all be more content, not always being haunted with the possibility of failure no matter how much we succeed, or not getting stabbed through the heart when our peers surpass us, if we were all just lying around living in the moment and toasting each other with cheap wine, but we never would have moved on in the history of our species, never would have achieved the glories of, say, a Leonardo da Vinci, or an Einstein or … a Plato! Zee throws her arms open to Plato and smiles jubilantly. I mean, what is it that moves us forward—and I mean collectively, as a species, a species we can all take pride in? What makes us worthier than those contentedly grunting pigs? It’s the off-the-charts people who are constantly exerting themselves, driven by the high standards that have been instilled in them and who set the bar higher for all of us, and I think—Zee turns to the audience, her arms wide in the same gesture she had directed toward Plato—that’s what we all want for our children!

  Prolonged audience applause.

  MUNITZ: Do you actually believe that your little performing monkeys are going to move us forward as a species? They are trained to be people-pleasers, looking for validation in applause. Munitz glares at the audience, as if daring a single one of them to applaud. None does. Those who move the species forward are, by definition, out of sync with the bulk of humanity and are not very likely to win its approbation for their efforts in their lifetimes. If it’s approbation one seeks, then you do well to stay far back within the bounds of the “tried and true.” And I, too, can avail myself of Plato’s Republic, which I first read at the age of twelve and entirely on my own, to support what I am saying. It is to the famous cave that I am referring.

  Recall how Plato describes the cave,11 the prisoners chained so that they cannot move their heads and are staring at shadows that move across the rock wall at the back, cast by puppets they cannot see, which are being carried back and forth on top of a wall behind them, with a small fire burning behind it to provide the dingy light. For them, these shadows before their eyes constitute the world, and they have trained themselves to be experts in discerning any patterns to be found there, earning their bragging rights by predicting what shadows might follow next. Some of them will be off-the-charts shadowists, earning the admiration of the other shadowists, expressed no doubt with prolonged applause.

  Then one prisoner manages to free himself12 and see the shadows for what they are. He sees the wall, the people behind it carrying the puppets, and the fire behind the wall, and pushes himself on, groping his way to the cave’s opening, suffering the pain of the bright light of the outdoors entering his darkness-habituated pupils for the first time. But he forces himself not to look away, not to slink back into the familiar gloom in which he and everybody else were raised. Slowly, by himself, in the grandeur of his solitude, he acclimates himself to the pain of illumination until he can see clearly, until he is finally able to cast his eyes on the radiance of the sun itself, the sustaining truth that gives the lie to all that passes for truth within the cave. How he would love to ignore the subterranean cave dwellers, to never go down into the sooty depths of the darkness again, but he will feel an obligation to share his clarified vision with his former compatriots out of pity for their benighted blindness and enslavement. How he will struggle with himself to turn his head back to the awful cave, finally overcoming his resistance and heading back down to the throngs in the darkness, speaking to them of the undreamed-of radiance he’s seen with his own eyes, urging them to throw off their shackles and follow him out of the truth-swallowing darkness.

  And how do they receive him, he who has truly achieved the worthwhile in his lifetime? Is it with approval? Certainly not! His eyes now accustomed to the light, he won’t be able to make out the shadows, and so they’ll say that he has returned with his faculties ruined. For his bumbling in the meaningless darkness, they will direct at him not accolades but jeers. He will try to convince them that what they are looking at is not worth the looking, and they will respond with hostility and attempts at invalidation, throwing the pseudo-statistics of shadowism at him. By challenging their erroneous version of the world, he will provoke such a reaction formation in them that they will stop their ears from hearing a single word of what he says about the actual reality that explains away their shadows. His achievement will be met with rejection and ridicule.

  I cannot count the number of times I have gone back and reread Plato’s account of the cave, understanding from it that jeers are the lot of the truth seers—at least until such time as the truth cannot be entirely ignored, and then it will be sanitized and turned into a Disney movie with a happy ending, which mothers who are raising off-the-charts children can safely take their little monkeys to see.

  BURNS: Well, this is fascinating, ladies and gentlemen, because both Professor Zee and Dr. Munitz have appealed to Plato’s work in support of their own divergent views. This highlights what I said in introducing Plato tonight, that everybody likes to trace their ideas back to him, happy to be counted among his footnotes. So after hearing Professor Zee cite you and Dr. Munitz cite you, let us finally turn to you, Plato, and let you speak for yourself.

  PLATO: Where would you like me to begin?

  BURNS: A good question! Well, why don’t we begin with the projectification of the child that Dr. Munitz referred to. While she was speaking I couldn’t help thinking of the intense program of child-rearing that you lay out in the Republic. You’re as hands-on as any warrior mother, discussing everything from the kinds of bedtime stories little children should be told13 to dictating what subjects ought to be studied in school and even which extracurricular activities should be encouraged. As I remember, you agree with Professor Zee that drama club is definitely out (Republic 398a) while music is in—though you two sharply disagree over sports. Sophie, you weren’t at all enthusiastic that your kids participate in sports, while you, Plato, make athletics very central in raising the perfect child.

  PLATO: Both music and athletics are essential, since they have opposing but ameliorative influences on the develo
ping child (Republic 410b–412a).

  MUNITZ: On all children?

  PLATO: Well, I mostly confined myself to a certain subclass of children.

  MUNITZ: Yes, the elite. The only ones who truly count in your estimation.

  PLATO: I would not say so.

  MUNITZ: No, I’m sure you wouldn’t say so.

  PLATO: I was trying to think about what was best for all in society, not just for one class (Republic 410b–412a). If there is an exceptional kind of person to be identified and then further trained in my just society, it is only for the collective good. Indeed my own admiration for Sparta stemmed from their promoting the collective good above those of any individual, even the most exceptional. It was somewhat different in my own Athens. The collective good ought to take precedence over all in matters of justice. And it is difficult for there to be justice in a society when groups are pitted one against another, so that occurrences that count as winning for one group count as losing for another.

  BURNS: You’re speaking about zero-sum conflicts.

  PLATO: Yes, exactly. Zero sum. A society is a just one when zero-sum conflicts are minimized to the point of elimination (Republic 422a–423e; Laws 628b–e).

  MUNITZ: But how can you avoid zero-sum conflicts when you give all the privileges of self-fulfillment to one group alone? Your entire social setup is about as zero sum as it gets.

  PLATO: Self-fulfillment is, of course, a good for everyone, and the self-fulfillment of all is a positive-sum good. But there are different kinds of selves, with different abilities leading to different kinds of fulfillment. Insofar as fulfillment is a good, it is exactly the same, no matter if the particular fulfillment consists in philosophizing or in farming.