\n<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve enjoyed the coverage of Texas A&M\u2019s decision to ban certain of Plato\u2019s dialogues for being too woke, but I wish the people covering it would place it in context.<\/p>\n
Socrates\u2014the protagonist of the dialogues\u2014was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. That\u2019s essentially what A&M is accusing the dialogues of doing now. Now we refer to \u201cwokeness\u201d instead of \u201ccorruption,\u201d but the underlying assumption is the same: Students were pure of heart and mind, untroubled by unpopular thoughts, until a teacher led them astray.<\/p>\n
Um, no. It wasn\u2019t true then, and it isn\u2019t true now. Students (and the young generally) are not, and never have been, pure. For that matter, neither has \u201cthe Western tradition,\u201d to the extent that it makes sense to use the definite article. The folks who try to use \u201ctradition\u201d to bash, say, homosexuality, might blush at the ancient Greeks\u2019 sexual practices. Speaking of blushing, those who embrace Stephen Miller\u2019s assertion that power has only ever been about force might face some awkward questions encountering Thrasymachus\u2019s blush in book one of the Republic<\/em> when Socrates points out that the claim that justice is simply the advantage of the stronger is incoherent. <\/p>\n If it were up to me, every political journalist in America, and every elected official, would be forced to grapple with Aristotle\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Probably my favorite line in the Western tradition about purity has to be Saint Augustine\u2019s howler \u201cgive me chastity and continence, but not yet.\u201d That\u2019s hardly the plea of a na\u00efve innocent. If anything, it frames purity as aspirational and sin as a default setting. Rephrase \u201caspirational\u201d as \u201cconstructed\u201d and we\u2019re off to the races.<\/p>\n I offer these for a few reasons. First, it\u2019s fun. Secondly, and much more importantly, to point out that \u201cthe classics\u201d and \u201ctraditional values\u201d (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\u2019 actual content. What makes the classics worth studying is not that they\u2019re simple little morality tales; they wrestle with recognizable and real dilemmas that we wrestle with, too. They\u2019re 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\u2019s attitude toward the family with Socrates\u2019s; they\u2019re sufficiently far apart as to seem to come from entirely different cultures. And that\u2019s without even considering Oedipus or Medea.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re true. <\/p>\n They aren\u2019t. 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\u2019t 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\u2014alternatively known as the liberal arts\u2014can provide. <\/p>\n Yes, Texas A&M embarrassed itself by trying to ban Plato. But it was just slightly right in noticing that elements of Plato don\u2019t fit cleanly into contemporary politics. They don\u2019t. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve enjoyed the coverage of Texas A&M\u2019s decision to ban certain of Plato\u2019s dialogues for being too woke, but I wish the people covering it would place it in context. Socrates\u2014the protagonist of the dialogues\u2014was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. That\u2019s essentially what A&M is accusing the dialogues of doing now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[21929,21853,6713],"class_list":{"0":"post-41971","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-morality","9":"tag-plato","10":"tag-tales"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}