I’ve enjoyed the coverage of Texas A&M’s decision to ban certain of Plato’s dialogues for being too woke, but I wish the people covering it would place it in context.
Socrates—the protagonist of the dialogues—was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. That’s essentially what A&M is accusing the dialogues of doing now. Now we refer to “wokeness” instead of “corruption,” but the underlying assumption is the same: Students were pure of heart and mind, untroubled by unpopular thoughts, until a teacher led them astray.
Um, no. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. Students (and the young generally) are not, and never have been, pure. For that matter, neither has “the Western tradition,” to the extent that it makes sense to use the definite article. The folks who try to use “tradition” to bash, say, homosexuality, might blush at the ancient Greeks’ sexual practices. Speaking of blushing, those who embrace Stephen Miller’s assertion that power has only ever been about force might face some awkward questions encountering Thrasymachus’s blush in book one of the Republic when Socrates points out that the claim that justice is simply the advantage of the stronger is incoherent.
If it were up to me, every political journalist in America, and every elected official, would be forced to grapple with Aristotle’s definition of friendship. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle explained that the opposite of a friend is not an enemy but a flatterer. Both a friend and an enemy can bring out the best in someone, but a flatterer brings out the worst in them. Any application to our current politics is left as an exercise for the reader.
Probably my favorite line in the Western tradition about purity has to be Saint Augustine’s howler “give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” That’s hardly the plea of a naïve innocent. If anything, it frames purity as aspirational and sin as a default setting. Rephrase “aspirational” as “constructed” and we’re off to the races.
I offer these for a few reasons. First, it’s fun. Secondly, and much more importantly, to point out that “the classics” and “traditional values” (as asserted by some political actors) have little to do with each other. The only way to use the former to prop up the latter is to ignore the classics’ actual content. What makes the classics worth studying is not that they’re simple little morality tales; they wrestle with recognizable and real dilemmas that we wrestle with, too. They’re complicated. They make didactic morality tales look shallow and silly. And, as anyone who does the reading knows, they disagree with each other, sometimes drastically. Compare, say, Antigone’s attitude toward the family with Socrates’s; they’re sufficiently far apart as to seem to come from entirely different cultures. And that’s without even considering Oedipus or Medea.
Part of what makes me twitchy about community colleges being treated entirely as job-training centers is that neglecting the classics can contribute to the project of historical erasure that allows people with agendas to write their desired futures into imaginary pasts as if they’re true.
They aren’t. We need people to experience different answers to big questions, both for the sake of the exercise and for gaining the great gift of historical study: a sense of how things don’t happen. Seeing others across time and space as three-dimensional people, wrestling with the same uncertainties and mixed motives they are and, can vaccinate against coercive utopianisms that are, inevitably, founded on simplistic and false ideas of how people are. That healthy skepticism is what the arts of liberty—alternatively known as the liberal arts—can provide.
Yes, Texas A&M embarrassed itself by trying to ban Plato. But it was just slightly right in noticing that elements of Plato don’t fit cleanly into contemporary politics. They don’t. All the more reason to read him. As another complicated figure put it, there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in their philosophy. And a good thing, too.
