Plato at the Googleplex

by Rebecca Goldstein

  PLATO: Nor should you.

  BURNS: You really mean that? You wouldn’t have required that I take algebra in the ninth grade, geometry in the tenth, trigonometry in the eleventh, and to tell you the truth I can’t even remember what math I took in twelfth grade, but whatever it was, you wouldn’t have made me take it?

  PLATO: I see no reason why anyone should be force-fed information that does not agree with their cognitive digestive system. It will not nourish them. It will pass right through their system, just as soon as they have passed through the school system. How much of what got drilled into you do you remember now?

  BURNS: I couldn’t tell you what a sine, cosine, or tangent is if my life depended on it! Audience laughter. And remember those word problems they used to torment us with: if one train leaves New York for Boston at 11 a.m. going 75 miles an hour, and another train leaves New York for Boston at 11:30 going 100 miles an hour, at what time will the operator of the first train text his wife that he left his lunch bag on the kitchen counter?

  PLATO: I do not understand the question.

  BURNS: Wow! I stumped Plato! Anyone?

  ZEE: At no time, since it’s illegal for an operator to text while he’s operating a train! Audience laughter and applause.

  BURNS: And once again, ladies and gentlemen, Sophie Zee demonstrates the high achievement attainable by warrior mothers! But actually I want to ask you, Sophie, your take on Plato’s views. I would imagine you might find Plato’s easing up on certain requirements, like taking math in high school, somewhat soft.

  ZEE: Soft? I don’t know about soft. I was sitting here thinking how harsh his views are.

  BURNS: Harsh, really? He wouldn’t have made me take geometry. That sounds pretty sweet to me.

  ZEE: And he also wouldn’t have granted you admission into his top-tier Academy, since you wouldn’t have passed his one requirement.

  BURNS: Yes, that’s true. I’d forgotten about that.

  ZEE: I don’t know, but I have to ask why Plato takes such a fatalist attitude toward human nature. He seems to be implying that some people have it and some people don’t, and those who don’t, well, there’s nothing that they or their parents can do about it. That just seems such a defeatist attitude, and if people accepted it, a lot of kids who could achieve excellence are never going to.

  I’ll tell you a true story. When my daughter Mimi was in the third grade, she suddenly started doing badly in arithmetic. They were doing long columns of addition, having to carry, and she just kept making careless mistakes, one after the next. At report card time, before the teacher gave them out, she called Mimi over and had a private conference with her to prepare her for the shock, which was that she had gotten a C+, which of course for Mimi might as well have been an F− since she’d never gotten anything less than an A on her report card. Her teacher was just as sensitive to my little girl as she could be, stressing that this one bad grade shouldn’t affect how Mimi feels about herself, she was still a very smart little girl, I mean just this great big fuss being made for fear that the C+ would take a major bite out of Mimi’s self-esteem, which I think just ended up making Mimi feel a lot worse about herself. All those assurances just made her feel weak. When she brought that report card home I didn’t make Mimi feel like a weak little thing who needed to be propped up and reassured that she was smart. Instead I was extremely stern with her about her carelessness, which was something that was completely within her control, and I let it be known that nothing less than an A was acceptable in our household. I made her practice and practice those columns until she was dreaming about them at night, and not even making careless mistakes in her dreams. And the next report card: an A in arithmetic!

  MUNITZ: So you invaded the poor little mite’s dreams as well. You didn’t even give her autonomy to escape you in sleep.

  ZEE: I was joking about her dreams. It was clearly a joke since I couldn’t know whether she made mistakes in her dreams or not.

  MUNITZ: I see. A joke. But it is still true that what you wished for this child was that your desires for her, of the high achiever that she must of necessity become for her to have a place in what you called your “household,” were meant to invade the deepest recesses of her mind. And I ask you: why?

  ZEE: Because what Plato just said about athletics, how it promotes a person’s self-discipline and bolsters their sense of mastery, is true for other things as well, including the skills you’re required to learn in school, even if you’re never going to need those skills later on. Instead of trying to bolster a child’s self-esteem by praising her in spite of what she didn’t do, which is so artificial and pathetic, and kids are smart enough to see how artificial and pathetic it is, the right approach is to make sure the child can do what she thought she couldn’t, and have her self-esteem be based on her own sense of mastery.

  BURNS: Plato?

  PLATO: When I spoke just now of mathematics as a subject that nobody need learn unless their minds held within them a love for mathematical beauty just waiting to be kindled, I was not thinking of adding up columns of addition. Few of us take delight in that.

  ZEE: But if my daughter hadn’t mastered her columns of addition, if she had gotten it into her head that she should feel good about herself even if she wasn’t good with numbers, which was what her well-meaning teacher was telling her, she would never have had the confidence to do well in all her other classes in math, including geometry. She wouldn’t have had the confidence to take her AP classes in mathematics, and if she had applied to your Academy, she would have been rejected!

  PLATO: I would not have held it against your daughter if she could not add up columns of numbers without making careless mistakes. I am sometimes prone to careless mistakes myself. Unlike her teacher, I would have been able to see whether her mind, despite its tendency to be careless, was of a kind to take delight in abstract beauty. I once saw Socrates questioning one who came from the bottommost rung of society, a person who had enjoyed no privilege whatsoever, having never even been taught to read. But this unfortunate, led gently along by the teacher who knew how to ask the right questions and awaken in his mind a love for the beauty of logical connections, was able on his own to comprehend a subtle geometric proof (Meno 82b–85c).22

  ZEE: I’m not saying that there’s no difference among people in their natural talents. Some people have aptitudes that others lack. These inequities exist just as other inequities do, like class differences. But just like those class inequities can be corrected so can these inequities of talents, if a person is willing to put in the hard work. Mimi had to practice her sums hours more than some other kids, but in the end they performed the same, and that’s what counts.

  PLATO: Even if that were true, I still do not know why you would subject your children to long hours of grueling work, if it does not come naturally to them.

  ZEE: How can a child feel truly good about herself if she has such glaring deficiencies?

  MUNITZ: It’s only you, the warrior mother, who instills such a sense of deficiency in your child. If children don’t have parents who make them feel that if they are not exceptional, and exceptional in precisely those areas that the parents have designated as counting, then they are less than nothing, then it won’t matter. They will be content with who they are, what their nature has stamped them to be. And again I’ll quote Plato. Did you not write that the student who is not akin to the subject cannot be made so by any readiness to learn nor yet by any memory (Seventh Letter 341d)?

  ZEE: No, Plato agrees with me on this—or rather I should say that I agree with Plato, or with Socrates, or whichever of you said that the unexamined life is not worth living. A life not worth the living is not exactly what I or any of us has in mind for our children!

  MUNITZ: Your little performing monkeys are hardly in a position to live Plato’s examined life. They’re on a lifelong quest for applause and approval, not for the beautiful, the true, and the good.

  ZEE: If the examined life is really the mo
st perfect life, then I assure you that my children can achieve it! If it can be taught, then they’ll learn it!

  PLATO: And if it cannot be taught? If there is a subtle form of beauty that isn’t expressible as other kinds of knowledge are, so that the only way for a mind to receive it is for it to keep constant association with the subject itself, living with it day and night, until suddenly, like the fire that is kindled by nearness to a fire, the soul itself bursts into the flames of knowledge of the beautiful (Seventh Letter 344a)?

  ZEE: Yes, exactly! Living with it day and night! There’s nothing that practice and hard work can’t compensate for. If our kids aren’t born with a natural aptitude for the beauty you’re describing, then with enough effort they can overcome the deficiency!

  PLATO, gently: And how do you know this?

  ZEE: Because anything else is intolerable and ugly. You yourself mentioned moral beauty as a real thing, really existing, there to be loved for the soul who can love it. But how can the world be morally beautiful if the whole thing is rigged so that some people are going to live lives that aren’t truly worth living no matter how hard they try? Where’s the moral beauty in that?

  PLATO, somewhat sadly to Munitz: Can you understand now my justification for proposing the noble lie? I didn’t propose it for superficial reasons, but rather to prevent precisely such bitter recoiling against the state of how things are.

  MUNITZ: No, Professor Zee’s objection would still be pertinent no matter how noble you convinced yourself your lie to her was, telling her that she and her bright children are made of some lesser metal than gold and so she has not even the right to aspire to a life of dignity and responsibility and must leave the essential choices to her guardians. All that your noble lie would do is dishearten her so that she no longer had the spirit to protest the injustice of such a universe. You’d take the stuffing right out of her thumos so that it posed no threat to your social stability.

  PLATO: Never underestimate the desirability of social stability. Its goodness emerges most fully in its absence. May you never live, Dr. Munitz, under circumstances that reveal to you how wrong you once were to have underestimated the desirability of social stability.

  MUNITZ: But I have lived under such circumstances. I am a refugee to this country from such circumstances. When I protest that stability must not be purchased at any price, it is because of circumstances I fled.

  PLATO, quietly: I understand.

  MUNITZ: Putting those circumstances aside, have you never thought to draw a distinction between stability and stagnation?

  PLATO: I have always been pessimistic, human nature being what it is, that perfection, in the unlikely event that it is achieved, can be sustained. There are internal forces that lead it to unravel (Republic 546).23 I only propose safeguards to fend off its inevitable collapse.

  MUNITZ: And those safeguards safeguard against all the citizens having equal access to the truth?

  PLATO, softly: Not all share your love of the truth, Dr. Munitz. If they did, there would be no need to lie.

  MUNITZ, first clearing her throat and then speaking so that her deep voice rumbles with her emotion: I do not know if I am able to articulate what I am thinking.

  BURNS, smiling: Oh, I think we all have faith in your powers of fully articulating what you are thinking.

  MUNITZ: What I am thinking is that your faith, Plato, in a perfect state is incompatible with the finest moment in all your writings.

  PLATO, quietly: And which moment, Dr. Munitz, would that be?

  MUNITZ: When Socrates, about to die, says in his chipper, no-nonsense way, that those who fear death are only demonstrating our entrenched tendency to think we know what we don’t. I apologize. I know that you—or Socrates—put it much better than that.

  PLATO, staring off into the noosphere: To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest evil. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know (Apology 29a).

  MUNITZ: Yes. Superb.

  PLATO: I can take no credit for it.

  MUNITZ: But you do agree, even until this day, with its point?

  PLATO: I do.

  MUNITZ: I do as well. I also think that the point it makes regarding our complacently thinking that we know what we do not know regarding death is equally true of life. Or to be blunter, this complacent ignorance is the error of anyone who tries to mold something, whether a child or a state, by brandishing some idea of perfection, and thinking that such an idea can cancel out such moral truths as always speaking the truth and according all humans the dignity to take responsibility for their own lives. This warrior mother, in her zeal to perfect her children, doesn’t leave open the possibility that there is contained in the interior of her children creative possibilities of which she can form no conception and which she will mindlessly destroy in her attempts to mold those children to her own inflexible standards. You, Plato, seem to acknowledge these creative possibilities by emphasizing free play, but then you deny these same possibilities by trying to freeze your utopia in time, by having the guardians doing the thinking and deciding for the citizens, just as the warrior mother does the thinking and deciding for her children. No wonder the two of you have found such commonality. There among the populace, among your gold and silver and, yes, even in the iron and brass, there may be lurking creative possibilities of which your guardians can form no conception, precisely because they are creative possibilities. There was a superstition among the ancients in your own country that the gods punished man’s hubris. But there is nothing superstitious about foreseeing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.

  PLATO, quietly: How could I disagree with that?

  MUNITZ: Of course, you couldn’t. You’re too marvelously creative yourself to disagree. But then we must be willing to tolerate instability in the political sphere, too. No look at reality can ever give it to us whole—the beautiful, the true, and the good. Maybe it’s there whole. I’m ready to let you convince me that it is. But at no moment in time are we ever going to get it whole, or enough of it so as to be in a position to shape our society and freeze it in time. Are there things about our society that surprise you?

  PLATO: Without a doubt. Too many for me to enumerate.

  MUNITZ: I mean not just the scientific and technological advances, the computer to which you appear to be so oddly attached, but in the sphere of morality as well? Are there ways in which you find our polis more moral than your own, with a more evolved sense of the dignity and autonomy of all people than your own slave-keeping, misogynistic, war-mongering Athens?

  PLATO: Again, without a doubt.

  MUNITZ: Did you, the best of all Greeks, foresee these moral advances? Did you include them all in your kallipolis?

  PLATO, quietly: I did not.

  MUNITZ: Then I rest my case.

  ZEE: But if I could just speak up here for Plato, whom you seem to be accusing of having been less than omniscient—

  MUNITZ: Only because his moralocracy would demand such omniscience—

  ZEE: Be that as it may, I’d just like to point out that if these moral advances are due to our reasoning out the implications of what human life is all about, for which I think Plato could make a good case, then Plato shouldn’t be put on the witness stand under your prosecutorial inquiry, Dr. Munitz, but rather praised as having gotten the whole process started. I read an article in The New York Review of Books that was called “Philosophy for Winners,” which, for obvious reasons, is a title I love! Audience laughs. I wrote down a line from it because I thought it might be pertinent, and it is. “The moral philosophy of the ancients, much more tha
n their science, was a living presence throughout the history of modern philosophy, and still is.”24 The very fact that Plato is surprised by how far we’ve gone beyond his best-reasoned conclusions, and how superior the laws of our polis are to those of his day, is proof of the contributions he’s made to our progress. So rather than berating him for how much more we see now than he did, we ought to be applauding him for first pointing us in this direction!

  BURNS: And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why, when you’re in need of a good lawyer, you should always hire a warrior mother!

  Vigorous applause, while a guy in T-shirt and jeans slinks onto the stage, hurriedly hands Burns a note, and then slinks off.

  BURNS: I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen, that we’re going to have to let Professor Zee’s spirited last statement stand as our summation since I’ve just been informed that the NYPD has declared a state of emergency out there. So unfortunately we’re going to have to dispense with the Q&A. Audience groans. Yes, I know! I’m disappointed, too! So let’s thank our illustrious panel for giving us such a lively evening of provocative dialoguing. Dr. Munitz, Sophie Zee, and Plato: thank you! Audience applauds for several long moments. Zee jubilantly applauds, too, turning first to applaud Plato, who smiles and politely applauds back at her, then to Dr. Munitz, who grimaces and looks away.

  Afterword to Chapter δ: Plato’s Responses to the Myers-Briggs Psychometric Questionnaire

  1. You are almost never late for your appointments. YES

  2. You like to be engaged in an active and fast-paced job. NO

  3. You enjoy having a wide circle of acquaintances. NO

  4. You feel involved when watching TV soaps. NO

  5. You are usually the first to react to a sudden event: the telephone ringing or an unexpected question. NO

  6. You are more interested in a general idea than in the details of its realization. YES

  7. You tend to be unbiased even if this might endanger your good relations with people. YES

  8. Strict observance of the established rules is likely to prevent a good outcome. NO (so long as the established rules are reasonable)