Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  PLATO: That would be a grievous thing to do, not only for the child but for the greater good.

  BURNS: Because you make this spiritedness a requirement for the sort of perfecting of the child that you have in mind, the one you believe has the potential to do so much good in society.

  PLATO: Yes, though again I would stress there is an equal potential for harm. Thumos, on its own, can lead to terrible excesses, to a brutal and savage manner of person, his or her pride and ambition crowding out all other values. Such people will pursue their drive toward self-aggrandizement with single-minded fanaticism. And when such thumotically endowed persons possess intelligence and charisma as well, the damage they can wreak on the world is profound.

  BURNS: The sort of monsters to whom Dr. Munitz previously referred.

  PLATO: Yes, sometimes monsters, sometimes simply unconscionably charming rascals.

  BURNS: So even intelligence and spiritedness aren’t enough. Is the rest all a matter of training then, the projectification that Dr. Munitz referred to before? Can you take any child who meets your requirements of intelligence and spiritedness and turn him into the kind of exceptional person you’re looking for here?

  PLATO: To turn him or her into such a person, there is one more character trait, which is also inborn and essential. It is a trait that demands both intelligence and spiritedness but is something additional, since I have certainly known those who lack nothing in intelligence and spiritedness who yet lack this quality (Republic 375e). And here I would point to Dr. Munitz as a paragon.

  Munitz raises her eyebrows, which are pronounced and highly articulate, almost prehensile.

  PLATO: I don’t know whether to describe it as a desire or an antipathy, for it is equally both. It is an inborn horror of being deceived as to the nature of things, and it is an inborn desire to know the truth as to the nature of things. Perhaps the best name for it is love of wisdom, (ibid.), and it is something different from intelligence and different from knowledge. Those who have this trait love the truth not because it is like this or like that. They love the truth simply because it is the truth and are prepared to love it no matter what it turns out to be. They will stick to a view just so long as it seems to them the truth and will not be seduced away from that view no matter what others are telling them, or what flashier and more attractive options are dangled before them; but they are also the least reluctant among all people to abandon a formerly loved view, if once they become convinced that it is not true. They are always on the scent of the truth, like dogs, who are the most philosophical of animals (Republic 375d–e). And this trait is something different from intelligence and spiritedness, even though it enlists intelligence and spiritedness in its service. But it is surely something different since intelligence and spiritedness can exist without it. I have known certain types—notably poets18—who experience the aesthetic demands of their imagination far more keenly than they do the love of truth. If some proposition floods their sense of beauty, they will believe it with all their heart and soul, and express it with such touching beauty that others, too, will be induced to believe. Their sense of enchantment shapes their conception of the truth, rather than the other way round, as it is when the art is of a kind of which a philosopher can approve, the art which knows and imitates the forms.

  BURNS: So then there is art of which you approve.

  PLATO: Certainly. Very softly. Perhaps it can even be said that I aspired to it myself.

  BURNS: But didn’t you, in fact, deal quite harshly with the poets in your utopia? Didn’t you banish them (Republic 398a–b, 606e–608b)?

  PLATO: That is an overstatement.

  BURNS: But you do advocate censorship of the arts? I know I’m violating my own rule that we should avoid politics tonight, but I’ve always wanted to ask you about that. It’s always bothered me.

  PLATO: Beauty has a profound effect on us, drawing out from us our love. It is the one thing that can capture our entire attention because of our love for it, that is to say, the one thing, besides our own selves, to which we naturally and obsessively attend. What is it that can break our natural enchantment with our own selves if not our natural enchantment with beauty? If it were not for beauty, there would be no hope of getting us to pay serious attention to anything that does not directly concern us, and no hope of getting us to see the things that truly matter outside the limited personal scope.19 It alone can commandeer our disinterested passion. So beauty is a serious matter—too serious, I have often suspected—to be left in the hands of those who are drunk on its enchantments, and so will act irresponsibly in its presence, which is as good a way of describing the artists of whom I am forced to disapprove.

  BURNS: It just seems so strange to me that, with all your talk about beauty and how central you make it in your philosophy, you’d show such little respect for the artists. And it’s even stranger considering that you’re a great artist yourself. Your dialogues are an art form, aren’t they?

  PLATO: I would hope that I have not shown disrespect to the artists simply by pointing out that a great artist is not, simply by virtue of being a great artist, a great philosopher, or even a passable one, and so our awe of his artistry should not give us any reason to pay attention to what he has to say regarding how things actually are and ought to be.

  BURNS: So you don’t think we should regard our artists—our painters and novelists and poets and movie and theater directors and actors—as public intellectuals?

  PLATO: Not simply by virtue of their performing their art well, no. Sometimes they’re public intellectuals. I considered Euripides to be one.

  BURNS: He was quite critical of his society, wasn’t he?

  PLATO: He was.

  BURNS: But perhaps no more than you?

  Silence.

  BURNS: I’m sorry to persist, but this business about art just sticks in my craw, and I guess this is my opportunity.

  PLATO: Yes?

  BURNS: I’m relieved to hear you’re impressed with Euripides, but it bothers me how unimpressed you are by so much great art. Doesn’t an artist have to be privy to at least as much wisdom as a philosopher to be able to move us so artfully?

  PLATO: There are many ways that we are moved, and not all of them involve wisdom. How much more tractable those problems of democracy we were just now discussing would be were this not the case. There are those who know all too well how to move the people artfully even when it is very much to the detriment of the people.

  MUNITZ: You mean the powers of the demagogue, no doubt.

  PLATO: Who are often quite artful. Our public intellectuals must be driven by the quest for what is true and what is good and how lives should best be arranged in the light of what is true and what is good. Our sense of beauty is invaluable in leading us to the truth, because the truth, quite simply, is beautiful.

  BURNS: So then what do you have against artists, since they’re more devoted to beauty than anyone? You’re not saying that artists are demagogues, are you?

  PLATO: Those who are truly devoted to beauty are equally as devoted to truth and to goodness as well. Such a one will succeed in bringing to birth, not phantoms of virtue, because he is not grasping a phantom, but true virtue, because he is grasping the truth (Symposium 212a). And that is the art that I love. It is the art that is moved by the same love of truth of which we were just speaking when specifying the characteristics we will be looking for in our children and trying to cultivate further in them.

  BURNS: Okay, I’m glad you’ve brought us back again on topic, which is raising our kids. So you think there’s some kind of innate difference there, too, that not everybody is born to love the truth?

  PLATO: There are people in whom this love of truth is a driving force, but not so very many. For them, the pleasures of learning are unmixed with pain, and they belong not to the general run of men but only to the very few (Philebus 52b). For them, there is pleasure in the truth, no matter its nature, simply in the thought that it is the truth. I think, per
haps, that Dr. Munitz is such a person.

  MUNITZ, clearly touched: That is one of the finest compliments I have ever received.

  PLATO: I do not say it to compliment you. I say it because it is true. Dr. Munitz’s love of truth stands out prominently, but in children it is not so easily detected. Intelligence and spiritedness announce themselves in the manner of children’s play, but this other trait, the love of truth, is more hidden. And so it was that I proposed a somewhat artificial test for detecting it.

  BURNS: So instead of submitting your future leaders to a battery of IQ tests, you submit them to a truth-loving test, measuring their ΦQ, as it were.

  PLATO: As it were. What I proposed was having our children be told glorious tales to stir their imaginations, very much stressing all the time that these tales were true, and then seeing which among the children can resist them, can see the logical inconsistencies within these tales, and see all their inconsistencies with other truths that they have been told (Republic 413c–414a).

  MUNITZ: Sounds a cruel and unusual form of testing to me, Plato, to deliberately take advantage of a child’s tendency to trust the adults in authority. Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, have evolved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked, and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed. It is altogether ironic that, just because truth-loving is so prized by you, you would traduce the brightest and most spirited of children with deliberate deception. Do you not see the logical inconsistency in your proposal?

  PLATO, smiling: As I have said, Dr. Munitz, you are particularly well endowed with the love of truth. It throbs in you as Professor Zee’s thumos throbs in her.

  MUNITZ: Which is why I will not allow myself to be misled by your blandishments. Artful as your flattery is, it will not deter me from pointing out that exactly the same inconsistency that I have noted in your test for ΦQ permeates the fabric of your utopia, in which you valorize truth and yet authorize your guardians to put forth untruths, so long as they are what you dub “noble lies,” by which you mean lies that serve the greater truth, which the guardians alone can see.20 Putting aside the little matter of logical inconsistency here, as well as the infantilizing of citizens, who are being robbed of their dignity in being fed untruths, let us just consider such a proposal from a pragmatic point of view. I do not think we have to tax our imaginations very hard to come up with ways in which such a license to lie, on the part of political leaders, can lead to horrific abuses. History furnishes us with many examples of what can happen when a populace is bred to be passive and isn’t provided the tools to see through their guardians’ so-called noble lies, from the self-serving fabrications told through the ages by religious establishments to the equally self-serving deceptions told by oligarchs of capitalism, believing that their commitment to their truths of the free market justifies their noble lying. Not to speak of the dictators of totalitarian governments, who disseminate their mythologies, which often demonize minorities to further the greater good of social cohesion. Even granting your exceptional specimens, culled from the crowd and cultivated to see the truth, how can you prevent their being subject to their own self-deception? If you think that you, or anyone else, can devise a program of child-rearing that will prevent self-deception in our guardians—she drawls the word out sarcastically—then I am afraid that you yourself are very much self-deceived, which is why it is only asking for the worst kind of trouble for leaders not to be held accountable by those whom they lead, who, I would suggest, have just as much moral authority to demand moral accountability as the guardians. It is the essence of the moral standpoint that each person has the authority to demand accountability. Anything less is an insult to human dignity.

  BURNS: You’re raising urgently important questions here, Dr. Munitz, and I think we’re all grateful to you for bringing them so forcefully to our attention. In fact, I think everyone here would agree that the questions you raise, Dr. Munitz, are so important that they deserve a dialogue in their own right. Zee is energetically nodding yes. Maybe we can even reconvene this panel, only this time exclusively debating politics. But for tonight, I don’t want the equally urgent issues raised by child-rearing to get short shrift.

  And I’d feel remiss, Plato, if I didn’t address your attitude toward parents in the whole business of child-rearing. We take it for granted in our society that these questions of how best to raise our children are for parents to ponder and decide, and the best-selling books on the subject are all directed at parents. But you, in effect, remove these decisions from parental jurisdiction and assign them to the state. In fact, your most radical proposal would take parents out of the picture altogether. It reminds me of the early kibbutz system, with the children raised communally. But that communal system didn’t turn out well for the kibbutzim, and almost all of them have abandoned it and gone back to having the children live with their parents.

  PLATO: I confess I know nothing about kibbutzim. I will have to google it. What went wrong?

  BURNS: Well, I think the children longed for their parents, and the parents longed for their children.

  PLATO: My proposal for the ideal society would circumvent that problem. What I proposed was that neither parents nor children would know who their blood relations were. Parents would not know which children were theirs and so would direct a more generalized love and sense of responsibility toward all the children who were their own children’s age. And children, not knowing who their parents were, would feel a generalized love and veneration for the whole generation of parents. Of course, this was all put forth in an idealized theory, meant to answer the question of what perfect justice might look like. The sense of cohesion and unity in such a society, in which all would be acting for the sake of all, not out of compulsion but out of solidarity, seemed to me to promise a high level of justice.

  BURNS: How does a warrior mother react to Plato’s suggestion that in a perfectly just society you wouldn’t know who in a whole generation of kids was your own?

  ZEE: Well, speaking just as a mother—I don’t think the warrior aspect is relevant—I’m sort of vehemently aghast! If justice consists in nobody being deprived of what’s their own, which is what I understood Plato to be saying earlier on, then how can justice demand that a person be deprived of what’s more her own, and what means more to her than anything else in the whole world, namely her very own children? I mean, take anything away from me—my shelter, my worldly goods, even my freedom—but not my children! You deprive parents of the privilege and joy of rearing their own children and you’re removing the most meaningful part of our lives. That generalized love that Plato just mentioned would be a ludicrously impoverished substitute, and, forgive me, but I can’t help thinking the proposal could only be made by a man who never had children of his own. That generalized love could never, not in a million years, take the place of the fierce-as-a-tiger attachment that every mother feels toward her own flesh and blood, and the sort of sacrifices that she’s prepared to make for them to ensure that they live the best life possible for them to live.

  Sustained applause from the audience.

  BURNS: And you, Dr. Munitz?

  MUNITZ: Well, I was also going to dismiss Plato’s proposal as monstrous, but listening just now to the last speaker I feel myself warming toward his view. The fierce attachments she’s speaking of here are, at heart, the projections of the narcissism that causes such a parent to see her children as extensions of herself. And since narcissism is rampant in our society—what Plato praises as spiritedness I would suggest is better described as runaway narcissism—the dangers to the developing child are legion. These fierce attachments are treacherous precisely because they’re fierce, and they lead to the fierce projectification by which such parents try to produce children that will sustain their narcissistic fantasies. At least Plato wants his exceptional childr
en to be exceptional for the collective good that they can render, whereas warrior mothers want their children to be exceptional simply because they are their very own, their flesh and blood, as she so graphically, if primitively, put it. No, Professor Zee, a child’s flesh is its own flesh and a child’s blood is its own blood, and it is a crime against the child to appropriate what is theirs for your own.

  ZEE: I don’t think that’s exactly fair! Yes, a mother loves her child fiercely because it’s her own, but that doesn’t mean that that love ultimately reduces to narcissistic self-love! Vigorous applause and even a few whistles, which Zee patiently waits out. Are you really going down on record as being against a mother’s love? More applause.

  MUNITZ: No, I’m not going down on record as being against a mother’s love. Though it’s hardly relevant, I happen to be a mother myself, and it goes without saying that I love my children. And I truly mean that it goes without saying. I find it unseemly for a mother to repeatedly articulate to us that she loves her children. It’s like a pig boasting it can root around in its filth. Audience gasps. Munitz turns to the audience and smiles strangely. Ah, you gasp. This is well and good, since it tells me who sits out there in cavelike darkness whose faces I cannot see. Can you contain your offended sentimentality and hear me out? I am simply trying to point out that a mother’s love is a complicated thing, and to the extent that a mother cannot separate out her love for her child, who is an autonomous being, from her love for herself, then that love is as much a threat to the child’s well-being as are all the external dangers that the mother so fears and tries to protect against with fierce-as-a-tiger vigor. It is the most pernicious of threats since it is by its very nature invisible to the mother. Plato’s proposal, as extreme as it is, at least acknowledges the limits of parental omniscience on the matter of the child’s well-being. That much I will say for his wild utopian proposal. But once again the lengths he is willing to go to in the direction of the authoritarianism of the state strikes me as naive at best, immoral at worst. The way to reduce the tyranny of the parent is not to transform the state and its educational system into the tyrant. One must find a solution that doesn’t sacrifice the dignity and autonomy of all individuals. And you are entirely correct, Professor Zee, that this generalized love directed toward a generation cannot take the place of a personalized love, and the institutional attention cannot take the place of a more familial arrangement, whether conventional or not, that provides a highly individualized sense of attachment, commitment, responsibility, and yes, I would agree with you, intense, if not fierce, love. Applause. Dr. Munitz grimaces.