Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [16]
Plato, born of an aristocratic family, concludes: “Just as the philosopher is the best and happiest of men, so the aristocratic State is the best and happiest of States; and just as the tyrannical despot, the slave of ambition and passion, is the worst and most unhappy of men, so is the State ruled by the tyrant the worst and most unhappy of States.”6 For Plato, the tyrant and the philosopher have much in common. Both have a passionate love—the philosopher for wisdom; the tyrant for political power (573b).
The Ideal City is neither ideal nor a republic. Plato built and rebuilt his utopian society in the Republic and then abandoned it. Why? To his great credit, he accepted its impossibility, but it is unclear whether he believed its various manifestations were undesirable. He appears resigned to mankind’s inability to conform to his models. Plato insists the City cannot be built upon experience. He requires a clean slate. However, there is no way to effectively clear the mind of the supposed clutter of history and limit knowledge to that which has yet to come.
In the Republic, Plato is openly hostile to individualism, which he believes destructive of the collective good of the Ideal City. Although Plato is clearly exploring a wide range of human characteristics, including knowledge, education, family relations, etc., he does so not to embrace human nature, but to shape and order it. In so many ways, he drains the individual’s lifeblood of free will and self-interest.
Yet, as Karl Popper, a critic of Plato and the Republic, wrote, “This individualism, united with altruism, has become the basis of western civilization. It is the central doctrine of Christianity (‘love your neighbor,’ say the Scriptures, not ‘love your tribe’); and it is the core of all ethical doctrines which have grown from our civilization and stimulated it.… There is no other thought which has been so powerful in the moral development of man. Plato was right when he saw in this doctrine the enemy of his caste state; and he hated it more than any other of the ‘subversive’ doctrines of his time.”7
Plato’s caste system assigns roles and duties to people as if they are not people at all, based on his own preconceptions and prejudices. In this way, the individual loses his identity and can be directed toward the City’s best interests. Ultimately, therefore, it is the rulers for which the City exists. These are Plato’s masterminds. Only they are smart enough and expert enough, by birth and training, to properly manage the City. As Plato wrote, “Unless either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophic intelligence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsorily excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles … for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either” (473c–d). In the Republic, it is as if Plato built a society over which he and the students of his Academy would rule—an elitism of philosopher-kings hatched of the same sort of arrogance too often found in the modern academy. Yet the overtones of egalitarianism persist, for within the three classes of the Republic, the individuals are mostly indistinguishable. They live as political, social, and economic equals without autonomy or even their own identities.
It is possible the Republic reflects Plato’s hostility toward the fragile, off-and-on-again Athenian democracy that took the life of Socrates—Plato’s mentor and teacher—and represents Plato’s search for a “just” alternative. Socrates was considered a threat to the teetering Athenian government for his unrelenting and provocative questioning of its personages, institutions, and morality.