Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The War of Ideas: Athens vs Sparta

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Aug. 22, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

11:43

The War of Ideas: Athens vs Sparta

We are living in Sparta when we ought to be living in Athens.

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	There have long been two conflicting impulses in political philosophy, and we can trace them back and frame them as a difference in approach between Plato and Aristotle.
	I was recently reading Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, and this video is inspired by how remarkable it was that Popper dedicates six entire chapters of the book to dismantling Plato's worldview and showing how, due to his commitment to transcendental forms, Plato's Republic is an attempt to construct a city that is perfect in its constitution and therefore unchanging through the ages,
	as any deviation from a perfect arrangement would of course be an undesirable degeneration through the various forms of government which Plato lists right the way down to tyranny.
	And it got me thinking about how this reflects on our modern state.
	Because the purpose of Plato's state is stability.
	It is designed to preserve a certain way of life indefinitely into the future.
	And it's understandable why Plato as an Athenian would be concerned with stability above all else.
	He was born near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, which was an intense conflict between Athens and Sparta, which lasted until he was a young man, an adult, and in which Athens lost.
	Plato wrote the Republic thirty years after the war ended, and it's evident that he had nurtured a great admiration for Sparta and saw in Lycurgus's dogmatic system of laws a permanence which democratic Athens, as a roiling mass of energy and contradictions, could never match.
	He therefore designed his republic to section off parts of what ought to be a highly regulated society, with the workers and producers at the bottom of this hierarchy and the guardians in the middle all to be ruled over by the philosopher kings.
	These classes ought never to mix and should live differently.
	The workers should live a basic plebeian life of labour, the guardians and administrators should keep watch over them, and the philosophers would live a near-communistic life where they didn't own property and held everything in common, even their wives and children.
	This arrangement would be quite similar to the Spartan system and was certain to preserve the state indefinitely.
	Plato locates the four cardinal virtues in the classes themselves.
	The common people ought to display temperance.
	The guardian class ought to display fortitude.
	And the philosopher kings must display prudence.
	Then, justice is found in the city as a whole, before then beginning to search for the virtues in the souls of the individual people themselves.
	Plato positions himself as an outsider looking inwards, searching to identify aspects of reality that he assumes must be there while he makes his judgments from a remote and aloof place.
	Aristotle took a contradictory approach to political life in his politics.
	Aristotle was not an Athenian.
	He was from Stagira in the north of Greece, which was occupied by Philip II of Macedon.
	Aristotle was born after the end of the Peloponnesian War and became a student of Plato in his academy before leaving the academy at the outbreak of the war with Philip.
	He personally never had any experience of the Peloponnesian War.
	Where Plato begins at the top and organizes a system downwards, Aristotle's worldview begins at the bottom and organizes upwards.
	For Aristotle, the state was something natural, not artificial.
	It was the product of the growth of the demos.
	The state had its genesis in the origin of a civilization, where the first families formed and then banded together to create a polis.
	And it was from the needs of the people to manage their public affairs that the state first emerges, with the form and function it has shaped by these contingencies.
	Aristotle categorised and expanded on Plato's conception of the virtues, locating them primarily within the individual and as a product of education and habit, rather than something that could be imposed upon an entire class of people externally.
	For Aristotle, the virtues had to be cultivated through an individual's behaviour, remaining within the golden mean between excess and deficiency, and it was only through long practice of virtue that a person could call themselves virtuous.
	For Aristotle, the virtues very much begin at home and expand outwards into all aspects of a person's life, including their public life as a man of the polis.
	Each person ought to cultivate the virtues themselves, and the composite of these well-bred men was how a just state was created.
	Where Plato regretted the contingent nature of existence, Aristotle was rooted in the changeable nature of life and our agency over it.
	Plato's state hinges on certainty.
	Today will be identical to yesterday, which in turn will be identical to tomorrow.
	As long as everything remains constant, then the state will function as intended.
	Aristotle's approach relies instead upon having a competent population that will respond in a sensible and appropriate manner to changing conditions.
	As a quick aside, this mindset was not present in the ancient Democratic Athenians, but that's a story for another time.
	Though what this dichotomy reveals is the nature of the two different approaches to politics and the state.
	Plato's approach requires all elements of the system to be artificially locked in place, rendering it brittle and oppressive.
	It is regularly characterized as totalitarian, and there seems to be little incentive for the people who are not a part of the ruling class to actually wish to live in such a civilization.
	But by contrast, Aristotle's approach is dedicated to producing free, flexible, and decent people who have agency over their own lives and who are proud of who they are.
	This system is obviously more robust and creates a population who are happy with where they are and want to remain there.
	It doesn't require oppression to maintain itself.
	To Aristotle, the changing nature of the world is required to practice the virtues, as events provide opportunities to exercise our decision-making faculties and actually become virtuous.
	But to Plato, events themselves become problems which must be managed by the guardian class in order to prevent the events from impacting on the crystalline political structure.
	For Plato, the state required certainty to function.
	For Aristotle, the state required uncertainty to function.
	The reason I am explaining these two approaches to governance is that in the modern era of data-driven managerial states, our ruling class have clearly decided to choose the Platonic model of governance over the old-fashioned Aristotelian model.
	This, I think, is a very unhealthy state of affairs, because it is a very negative frame in which the state and society become, like Plato's Republic, brittle and afraid of new events, fearful of the future.
	Any shock to the system might collapse it, and the people living within it are not happy even if they are materially satisfied.
	Important aspects of human nature are denied, and the thymotic principle is dedicated to the suppression of the workers rather than their advancement and gain.
	The rulers become unsure and paranoid about things happening outside of the horizon of their vision and seek to mitigate contingencies before they've even happened.
	This requires them to have ever more information about the society, increasing their control over its citizens, and, as Michael Oakshot observed, it turns every event into a crisis.
	This forces them to make education a technical endeavour designed to produce cogs for the machine, who ought only to know as much as the system requires of them.
	In turn, the guardians become contemptuous of the workers, who they feel are their inferiors, and an irritating source of future uncertainty.
	The only sensible thing to do from this position is to employ more stringent controls in order to maximise the strength of the system, but in doing so it becomes ever more brittle and unable to adapt.
	The general competency of the people is eroded as they are prevented from improving by overcoming challenges, and the general quality of the stock is reduced from generation to generation.
	It's not surprising then that 20th century philosophers like Popper would identify such a method of governance as inevitably leading to totalitarianism and tyranny.
	It seems that as a system, it has little choice in the matter.
	As time moves on, compounding events that the system overcomes also weaken it until it is no longer certain to be able to overcome the next challenge whereupon it collapses.
	The alternative is unthinkable to the managerial type, whose drive is for certainty, because it relies upon uncertainty.
	A competent, confident, and free population is, as was ancient democratic Athens, a hotbed of unpredictability.
	However, it also improves upon itself when it's exposed to difficulty and contradiction.
	Its people are honed by challenges rather than destroyed by them.
	They grow and mature, learning and developing rather than stagnating and calcifying under the ever-watchful eye of a paranoid managerial state.
	This, however, requires a totally different approach to the civilization as a whole, beginning in an education system that is designed not to turn them into cogs in the machine, but places upon them the expectation of advanced reasoning skills and teaches them how to discern truth from falsehood.
	Such people thrive in uncertain times because they are presented with opportunity, the arch enemy of the manager, and they change the world by their actions.
	Given the state of the world at the moment, it seems that we are a long way from changing course and becoming the kind of civilization we were but a century ago.
	But I think that we ought to keep in mind the kind of people we used to be because this decline is a choice.
	We chose one path instead of the other, and now we are suffering the consequences of this decision.
	It's important to remember that only one of these two kinds of society is actually enduring.
	The problem with trying to preserve a certain state of affairs indefinitely is that as the world changes around it, the state trapped in amber doesn't.

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