Good to see he mentions some of Plato's odder (to our eyes) ideas in The Republic. Add iPhones to them and one arguably winds up close to 1984: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572
I do not look to China's Covid-19 response as worthy of emulation. People were literally bolted into their apartment complexes. China has a gross disrespect for individual rights that the West should never, ever adopt. We don't even know what the extent of Covid deaths are in China. We actually have no clue, because all information is tightly controlled by the CCP. Anything coming from China should be viewed through a lens of skepticism.
Meanwhile, from the viewpoint of Covid, I think Sweden showed that it would have been just the same results if we simply left people to make their own choices and decisions about how to react based on their own personal risk profiles and tolerance. This idea of centrally managing a mega region like Europe or the United States is absurd, and bound to fail. The states in the U.S. with the tightest regulations on Covid have had the highest death rates and the highest amount of social unrest. It's really hard to argue from that perspective that tighter, more centralized control of the citizenry is warranted, even without addressing the moral implications of it.
A lot to unpack here. China's response to Covid is maybe not the best, but Taiwan provides an excellent example of how a democracy can responsibly react to a crisis. The author's point that western governments have become woefully ineffective can be seen in other examples. A lot of civil institutions in the west are languishing and this should be improved regardless of what's happening in some foreign country.
Finally, the Sweden example is pretty demonstrably false. Compare the death rate between Denmark and Sweden (very similar cultures) and you will see the effect of doing nothing. The reality is that the US has broad bipartisan consensus to do very little about Covid and consequently we have seen very little progress in putting a stop to the disease and getting things running properly again. There are loose regulations, but they are not enforced. Most of the country's response has been purely voluntary on the part of citizens.
When you actually dig into the deaths in Sweden, the vast majority were in the over 75 demographic, which is vulnerable to any disease or cause of death. They had several early outbreaks in nursing homes and assisted living facilities and once they got those under control, the virus fizzled out on its own among the younger population. There are currently only 13 hospitalizations in the whole country at this point in time. Sweden's economy has suffered the least in the Euro zone. There's also no great reason to not compare Sweden to France, UK and Spain. While Sweden and Denmark may have Scandinavian culture, it's not as if Covid discriminates based on culture. If you want to make some sort of genetic argument, you're going to have to back that up with some data and studies.
Hospitalizations in the U.S. are currently plummeting, we've never hit anywhere near capacity for hospitalization, and the virus is fizzling out on its own. Each state has gotten to choose its own policy for Covid-19 (as they should, by the way), and some states have banned gatherings of more than 8 people, mandated masks in public, issued various stay at home orders, jailed business owners for daring to reopen, etc. Some states like South Dakota have never issued any restrictions whatsoever. There is no clear pattern in the data for policy, between countries or states. Indeed, there's a lot of confounding factors that make it difficult to infer the effectiveness of any region's policy choices. Taiwan, for example. Are their results on account of that they are an island nation with tight inflow and outflow controls or the fact that SARS1 and other weaker coronaviruses already disseminated in the population and therefore a higher amount of the population have natural immunity from fighting off a similar disease? If they haven't developed herd immunity, are they simply kicking the can down the road in the hopes a vaccine works? If not, will they forever be isolating visitors in 14 day quarantine to avoid an outbreak? That doesn't sound sustainable to me.
Notwithstanding your point about the desirability/practicality of a China style response outside of china, this:
" I think Sweden showed that it ..."
has not been established yet so remains only one of a number of (potentially) interesting noisy data sets.
Of course the range of response is much broader than US style incoherence to China style authoritarian control. There are bound to be a variety of interesting learnings from this range if we can get past personal/regional/national blinders.
We just need leaders who are capable. We haven't seen any capacity or desire to improve human lives from current leadership. We are suffering for our choices.
I'd say most of them are running private companies that are both improving human life and generating profit. I think the part I agree with the most from the article is the one that talks about having people in government who have the skill to know what experts to lay off issues to. I think if we had leaders that did we'd be much better off.
We could have leaders who are capable. Unfortunately, we would never vote for them because we'd find them boring, or assume they're venal baby-killing sociopaths like every other politician, or vote for someone else because we believe government is inherently evil and should be hamstrung by idiots.
If society treated governance, politics and civic leadership the way it does any other profession, we would raise up competent leaders the way we do doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.
I think Plato was spot on that when people go into politics for their own financial gain, the society as a whole will suffer for it.
We need to create systems that make politics attractive to people who do it out of ideology. I would agree with Plato that character training, or at the very least testing, is useful and appropriate.
Agreed. Or at least remove the possibility of career politics. 2 terms in most positions ought to remove all the oldies implementing policies of 70s on today's people.
When people are so entrenched and need to make a living, they will make a living out of what they are entrenched in. There are no other real career choices for them besides continuing in politics.
Isn't it the case that those politicians who leave office and continue to work (mostly those who are not of retirement age) almost always make more money in their post-office careers than while they were in-office as a politician?
> We need to create systems that make politics attractive to people who do it out of ideology.
Is your implication that right now most politicians are not politicians out of ideology first and foremost, but rather for their own financial gain?
I would take the contrarian view. I would guess the majority of politicians are politicians because of ideology. Although they may not believe everything (or perhaps even most of what) they say they do and what they do believe may change while in office, I would be surprised if they don't have some core ideology that powers them.
It's otherwise unclear to me why politicians seek re-election so frequently. In most Western democracies, a person with the opportunity to become a career politician has far more lucrative job opportunities outside of politics than within, especially once you've become a high-level politician. If people were doing it for money, I'd imagine they'd do a single term and then immediately try to parlay that into another job rather than trying to slug it out term after term.
The other mildly persuasive explanation to me is enjoying the power of the office, but the feeling of power is very hard to separate from fervent ideology.
A simple answer may be Darwinism. The politicians that survive are politicians that seek re-election. The 'why' they originally go into politics (money or ideology) may be irrelevant as a fitness function for this sort of thing. (And eventually, as t -> ∞, the percentage of politicians that seek re-election will -> 100%.)
Darwinism generally arises in a world of fitness where reproduction is the dominating force. That is if politicians reproduced while in office to form more politicians and reproduction among politicians was the main source of new politicians then yes we might have reason to believe that seeking re-election is an emergent behavior from basic survival.
However, that's not the way politics works.
There is a stable equilibrium where politicians are constantly replenished by the larger population as they leave office, which holds true as t approaches infinity. And indeed this is more or less what we observe in Western societies.
Behavior can “reproduce” when it is copied by (or taught to) others. There are a variety of selective factors that make it more likely for certain copied behaviors to “survive” and then be copied further. This is cultural evolution.
Of course, much complexity is uncovered when you dig into the details. It isn’t a perfect analogy but it seems very useful.
By the time we're talking about things like cultural evolution and memetic propagation, we're getting pretty close to just talking about ideology again.
I don't want politicians who rule based on ideology. That's how we get disasters like the USSR. Instead I want pragmatists who change their minds in response to new information.
Maybe we ought to "summon" people semi-randomly to work in politics for a few years, the way you get summoned to a jury or get drafted in a war. It's gonna suck for many of these people, but at least it's gonna make it harder for career politicians and predators to assume office.
Issue is you have to protect the "choosing" process from interference.
The most dangerous leaders in history have been those who do it out of ideology. That group includes Hitler, Lenin, Mao, bin Laden, et al.
We want people who are attracted to politics out of a sense of responsibility. Folks who feel a bond of both trust and obligation towards the people they lead. Both ideology and financial gain optimize for the wrong things.
> The most dangerous leaders in history have been those who do it out of ideology.
Does this also include the founding fathers (Or Abraham Lincoln? How does he stack up, compared to the likes of Jefferson Davis, or many of the other defenders of an unjust status quo?) Were they not ideologically motivated? They certainly spilled a lot of ideologically-sounding ink, and started an ideologically-motivated revolution, and then made a lot of ideologically-motivated decisions. Or do we define ideology to explicitly consider our current orthodoxy to not be ideological? [1]
Lenin and Mao certainly had enough of a sense of responsibility. Just because you disagree with their ideology[2] (And agree with that of the founding fathers) does not mean that they didn't feel that it was their responsibility to bring about what they thought was a better future.
> Folks who feel a bond of both trust and obligation towards the people they lead.
This is, in my opinion, actually a much better litmus test then the rather subjective 'ideology' versus 'responsibility' question (Which hinges entirely on where you stand on an ideological spectrum.)
[1] That would be the 'everyone but me is an ideologue' argument. I don't think it's a great one.
[2] It doesn't need to be said that most people would disagree with their methods, so let's not veer into that tangent.
Most of the founding fathers were very pragmatic. The Constitution is one big compromise - it is the document that it needed to be to get 13 colonies to agree on a political union. There's plenty of stuff there (like the 3/5 compromise, or electoral college) that doesn't hold up ideologically today.
Certainly stuff like Declaration of Independence or Common Sense is ideololgically-sounding. But these are propaganda pieces: they are also what they needed to be to get the citizenry behind the revolution.
The way to tell an ideologue apart from a pragmatist is to look at their actions when faced like a choice like "Hundreds of thousands of people need to die, but it's for the greater good." The ideologue will choose the greater good; the pragmatist will choose the people.
(Interestingly, by this definition, America's two greatest ideologues are probably FDR and Abraham Lincoln. Which I think is accurate, but they're still widely esteemed. I still maintain that they are two of the most dangerous leaders in U.S. history though.)
Just because they were pragmatic about points they disagreed on, does not mean that they weren't ideologues about the points they agreed on. Ideologues can have internal dissent.
> The way to tell an ideologue apart from a pragmatist is to look at their actions when faced like a choice like "Hundreds of thousands of people need to die, but it's for the greater good." The ideologue will choose the greater good; the pragmatist will choose the people.
In this case, the founding fathers were absolutely, unabashedly ideologues. They started a revolutionary war for their idea of the greater good. In an age of hereditary absolute monarchs and colonies and authoritarian rulers, their ideas were completely ideologically motivated (And batshit bonkers, in the world of the 18th century - but rather old-fashioned and uninteresting in the world of the 21st century.)
Given that you've cited both FDR and Lincoln as examples of ideologues, but the founding fathers as not, I postulate that your definition of an ideologue might be predicated on how orthodox and uninteresting their policies are to you.
The way you phrase this dilemma is telling - the implication is that people will die as a result of a deviation from the status quo, without quantifying what the greater good is. What if people will be saved as a result of a deviation from the status quo? Is someone who looks at an ongoing injustice, and acts in response to it an ideologue?
What about someone who adopts an ideology of tolerance towards slave states? Does that person become a pragmatist, because they've weighed hundreds of thousands of deaths, against millions of people enslaved for their entire lives, and decides that actually, the greater good requires those millions to continue to be slaves? [1] What if they decide that the greater good would be to actually go to war, but they choose the greater evil, instead? Is whether or not they are ideologues predicated on which of the two options they believe the greater good to be?
These sorts of questions, of course, lead to truly absurd responses. It's why the ideologue test isn't actually a good one.
Your other metric (Trust and obligation) for determining the quality of a leader is much better, because it does not try to give answers to difficult moral problems, without having any context of what those moral problems are. It's not a guiding principle that a leader must follow - it is a quality that they must express, so that they can make a correct decision.
[1] Is there a formula that determines how many slaves the death of a freeman can buy? And if you pay too dearly for the freedom of a slave, you become an ideologue? [2]
[2] As I said, any guiding principle that seeks to give a one-size-fits-all answer this question, without even knowing what the question is, on 'pragmatic' grounds (Where determining which side is pragmatic is completely subjective!) leads to truly absurd outcomes.
> The Covid-19 crisis has shocked us by revealing the weakness of Western government, particularly in the United States and Britain, and the strength of the Chinese government.
This is not correct, we don't know how China faired yet. Firstly; they are probably lying about their case numbers - their case counts are absurdly low. And secondly, we aren't going to get a clue about what the experience on the ground is like for the Chinese citizens. It isn't like the Uyghurs situation was obvious 6 months in. It takes time to figure out what China is doing.
And more Plato isn't going to solve anything. You'd need to be an idiot to sign up as an honest politician. The only reward is people screaming at you on the streets. Corruption is the only way to get rewards that justify the vitriol. It'd be good to change that equilibrium.
> And more Plato isn't going to solve anything. You'd need to be an idiot to sign up as an honest politician.
Plato knew that. The role of guardian wasn't exactly voluntary. The philosopher-kings were compelled to rule. The only rulers you can trust are those who don't seek power.
The oldest democracy today is ~200 years old, and a modern democracy [1] for much less - 100 years. Still, we have been talking about democracy for at least 2300 years.
If Plato had the answers, we should have learned by now. I think the jury is still out on wether this is just a matter of "bad implementation", or long-term democracy is an impossibility without degenerating into a dystopia.
Also, funny way to "pick apart" Plato's ideas from a modern lens - e.g. accepting that we need a caste of thoughtful leaders while at the same time rejecting eugenics, because we have seen what it leads to, even though it's the logical conclusion of the former.
[1] No barriers regarding race or gender right to vote.
> If Plato had the answers, we should have learned by now.
The passage of time doesn't implies moral progress, unlike natural sciences who progress is only forward. What I'm want to mean by this is: we'll do the same mistakes again and again and again.
Every generation learns anew, so that is one of the reasons why this occurs. At best you have a mentor who is at max 100 years old.
Books can be informative, but it is no substitute for people actually being part of history. Especially if you frame it in the lens of power dynamics and the ownership of wealth. Those in power are connected to those with wealth and their ethics and politics determine to a great extend what happens.
Eugenics isn't the logical conclusion of the "leader caste" because we know that not only is it deeply unethical, it also doesn't work. We don't really know what makes someone "better", we don't know how to do it, and we don't even know how to define "better". Stephen Hawking contributed an enormous amount to society despite having a devastating genetic condition. Note, correcting devastating conditions in newborns (somatically, not in the germline - i.e. for individuals, not their descendants) might be OK, the only issue is where you draw the line. If you correct for sickle cell anemia or cancer prone-ness, should you also correct for depression? (assuming we ever figure out how to do that).
I think you have a good point about democracy maybe not benig the full answer. It seems to be a very flexible/enduring system so far (more so than e.g. fascism or communism), but technology might poke huge holes in it regarding free will (manipulating people's emotions to vote for someone, for example). Yuval Harari talks about this a lot in "21 ideas for the 21st century".
> We don't really know what makes someone "better", we don't know how to do it, and we don't even know how to define "better".
All of your problems go away if we use a "better" definition of "better".
What makes someone a "better" leader? That they were educated and raised in a "better" way. What makes that way "better"? Well, it should be evident - it, after all, produces "better" leaders.
True, it does lead to a kind of circular thinking, but that's allright - a lot of ink gets spilled to justify subjective preferences on objective grounds, like the ones I just described. If people can feel utterly convinced that by applying such circular criteria, they can demarcate that one piece of music is objectively better than another, surely those people would feel just as justified to use such circular criteria to decide that one leader's education, and upbringing, and social background is objectively better than another.
As long as you can let current leaders pick future leaders, you will indeed have a definition of "better". You might not like that definition very much, though.
Yeah I'm also pessimistic about misleading thinking + demagoguery. I do think that there's a good contingent of society that has a decent bullshit detector though. I guess we'll find out.
In my opinion eugenics is only wrong when it is forced. I see nothing wrong with providing financial incentives for people to reproduce if they have qualities that society tends to find positive, such as having a high IQ or performing well on some exam. Obviously no metric will be perfect, but they are at least a better proxy for intelligence than a coin flip.
Consider a democracy without capitalism.
That's a combination I can't recall being tried. I think personal wealth and the associated detachment it gives people from thinking they are part of the masses is a problem for democracy.
Plato addresses that notion, although he (outdoing Lycurgus) proposes aristocracy without capitalism.
(The Dictator's Handbook would say the difference between aristocracy and democracy is in the size of the selectorate, a distinction which is quantitative but not necessary qualititative.)
(Modern democracy only since 1971. Before you laugh, consider that we've now had 5 different female presidents from 3 different parties. Yes, consensus takes a while to achieve, but it also facilitates implementation.
One can, of course, argue the continuity between the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Swiss_Confederacy and the current confederation. (especially due to Napoleon, whose infrastructural, legal, and social improvements we kept even after getting rid of his people, at the end of his interregnum) However, there have also been substantial changes in the selectorate of the US between the 13 colonies and today.
What a bad essay. I'm shocked that standards for writing have dropped so low.
Consider this paragraph:
> Democracy’s fetishisation of freedom inevitably gives way to anarchy. Fathers pander to their sons, teachers to their pupils, humans to animals, and ‘the minds of the citizens become so sensitive that the least vestige of restraint is resented as intolerable’. Anarchy produces class struggle, as the poor attack the rich and the rich retaliate; class struggle produces war and disorder. When all this becomes intolerable the masses will turn to a dictator who can restore order.
It's meaningless! Democracy apparently makes "humans pander to animals." Why does this happen? Just because! The author spits out this weird gob of nonsense and continues as if he's made a real argument that democracy always leads to anarchy (which, confusingly, leads to class conflict, and not the other way around).
He does mention uneducated voters making bad decisions earlier, but that's a whole other can of worms that he never even digs into (i.e. can we fix this with education reforms, or by introducing new journalistic standards into media?). He just throws it out there as if it's all the proof he needs that only "wise elites" can save us from ourselves.
How about this part:
> Thus the paradox at the heart of tyranny: even though tyrants have absolute power over other people, they have no power over themselves. Slaves to their own passions – ‘ill-governed’ in their own souls as Plato puts it – they use their positions to inflict those passions on the entire population. A tyranny is a psycho-drama in which everyone is caught up in the tyrant’s raging ego.
This is flatly untrue. Let's look at some of the greatest tyrants of the 21st century. Xi Jinping, Vladmir Putin, the Saudis... we could go on. Are any of these people particularly prone to temper tantrums? "Slaves of their own passions"? No! They're ruthless, disciplined, and experts at consolidating and leveraging power. This weird psychoanalysis of authoritarianism has no basis in fact -- it's just storytelling.
Finally, scraping away the abysmal analysis, we get the actual argument:
> The metaphor of the ship is a way of driving home Plato’s wider point about the importance of ‘guardians’. Plato argues that a successful republic is run by a class of people whose job it is to think about the long-term success of the polis.
The trouble with this is that putting a discreet class of people in charge of society leads to those people acting in their own interests. The whole motivating reason behind democracy is for the public to have a veto on their leadership so that leaders can't act in their own interest. The author's solution is "let's educate our leaders not to act in their own interest," but that's practically a childish suggestion. What part of history has ever suggested that you can educate humans out of their innate instinct to act in self-interest?The author provides basically no real examples. Who gets to decide how these rulers are educated? The rulers? Wow I'm sure we can trust them not to act in their self-interest in that regard. After all, they "educated" themselves not to.
They did include a couple vague gestures at evidence:
> Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol from 1870 until his death in 1893, devoted his life to two great projects: producing a definitive edition of Plato and turning his college into a production line for Platonic guardians.
> [...]
> There was a certain amount of priggishness in the cult of Plato. But it nevertheless produced an elite that was remarkably public spirited by today’s standards: too dignified to put its fingers in the cookie jar and too well-educated to be blown hither and thither by the latest intellectual fads. The old elite didn’t hog publicity for the sake of publicity – most of them were happy to work in the background without any public credit ...
1984 owes much to Orwell's boarding school (pre-Oxbridge) experiences. Orwell's having been second rate, they studied strictly to the test, and never read entire works, but I find it plausible he read The Republic on his own. Which leaves the question: does 1984 resemble The Republic because Orwell was directly making fun of Plato's ideas[1], or because his school was stanning Jowett who was stanning the greeks, and playing telephone with Plato produces Oceania?
[1] Goldstein explicitly states the Inner Party / guardians are a meritocracy. (Orwell's observation on equality of educational chances is that children of the Inner Party do not in principle become inner party members themselves.) Life is difficult for the Outer Party, because, having failed their quals, they must rely on ideology over aptitude to keep their positions. (The yanks, innovative as ever, have shown us the IngSoc model works even better with two mutually antagonistic yet still self-policing outer parties. Competition between outer parties frees up inner party members to do, without having to waste time keeping everyone else down, whatever it is that inner party people do.)
Yes. I suppose my sarcasm didn't come through very well. To paraphrase a popular meme, Plato is only known to us today via his wrestling nickname. His opinion on leadership was that a philosopher-king, somebody both thoughtful and powerful, should dictate society. In his own life, he was politically entangled, but he was never given the power that he felt he earned.
I'm also reminded of Idiocracy, which checks all of the same boxes. I don't know whether Mike Judge was thinking of Plato, though.
There's good general stuff in the piece. Governance is important, we do need better governance, and we need to cultivate virtue and responsibility in citizens and leaders. That's all true but it's also kind of obvious. That things go to crap if society is run by private interest, greed or straight up clowns seems self-evident.
But every time someone brings up old ideas, in this case Plato's philospher caste, there's an immediate question. If it is so great, and if it worked in the 19th century, why did it die out? Good things don't vanish randomly. Whenever someone tries to restore some old form of governance the question needs to be answered why it died out.
I think for Plato's Republic it's quite obvious. Modern commerce and technology, mass communication and the information society have melted all that is solid into air, and there's no barriers in the way of democracy. Celebrities and businessmen have more to say than the Dean of Harvard and that's not going to change unless you put technology back into its box, which is hard to do.
The author brings up China as a modern society that improves governance, and I think that's true. But Chinese politicians aren't philosopher kings. The CCP is more like a hyper-competitive, ruthless machine than some kind of school for the humanities. Xi himself was cast to the countryside for years, people who make it to the top have to proof themselves over and over, and punishment can be quite harsh. It's fundamentally still Marxist and technocratic, and sees economic and technological advance as a driver for pretty much everything. It's not virtue that matters but Darwinian competition.
Stalin said that Leninism is American effectiveness combined with Russian revolutionary spirit. I think when China decided to ditch parts of its socialist economic program but kept it's Marxist political system in place they created a governing body that embodies that quite well. I don't think it's possible to recreate that in the West at all.
> Good things don't vanish randomly. Whenever someone tries to restore some old form of governance the question needs to be answered why it died out.
Good things vanish because people forget history, or fail to learn it, and thus don't understand the reason why the things came to be. Consequently, we ignorantly and futilely attempt to reinvent the wheel.
> The Covid-19 crisis has shocked us by revealing the weakness of Western government, particularly in the United States and Britain, and the strength of the Chinese government.
> The philosopher and the cult of Plato provide us with both a model and inspiration for how to fix the ship of state.
Yet Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, graduated in Classics at Oxford University, and would not only have studied Plato's Republic, but read it in the original Greek, as part of his course.
Boris Johnson's education at Oxford was less Greek classics and more Oxford Union, as was that of many current Tory candidates. Of course, the one who led the UK down the crapshoot of a Brexit path in the first place, David Cameron, was a first class holder.
The last paragraph was a bizarre pivot to China, which no apparent justification for the analogy. As a totalitarian state, China would be the first to suppress and oppress philosophers. No freedom of thought. They'd put Plato to death much faster than Athens did to Socrates.
It's not bizarre. It's the culmination of an unfortunate "democracy is bad" and even "freedom is bad" undertone in the rest of the author's essay.
Plato of course got a lot going for him, but The Republic never really solved the problem of making sure you get a philosopher-king instead of a tyrant. This essay's author declines to mention the possibility of tyrants because he knows it will undermine his argument badly.
> The Republic never really solved the problem of making sure you get a philosopher-king instead of a tyrant.
I disagree.
"train the guardians through a prolonged education that involves not just academic education but also character-training designed to ensure that guardians put the public good above private interests"
"the guardians should be banned from getting married or owning private property in order to focus their minds on the common good"
The point is that you don't just give any idiot supreme power after they win an election. The guardians go through lifelong training for rule, and only the best of the best, the most thoroughly tested, are left at the end of that process.
58 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadMore seriously, does 1984 ever address the sex lives of the Inner Party? For all I know, they're also purely Platonic.
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZRA-Dwv86E
Meanwhile, from the viewpoint of Covid, I think Sweden showed that it would have been just the same results if we simply left people to make their own choices and decisions about how to react based on their own personal risk profiles and tolerance. This idea of centrally managing a mega region like Europe or the United States is absurd, and bound to fail. The states in the U.S. with the tightest regulations on Covid have had the highest death rates and the highest amount of social unrest. It's really hard to argue from that perspective that tighter, more centralized control of the citizenry is warranted, even without addressing the moral implications of it.
Finally, the Sweden example is pretty demonstrably false. Compare the death rate between Denmark and Sweden (very similar cultures) and you will see the effect of doing nothing. The reality is that the US has broad bipartisan consensus to do very little about Covid and consequently we have seen very little progress in putting a stop to the disease and getting things running properly again. There are loose regulations, but they are not enforced. Most of the country's response has been purely voluntary on the part of citizens.
Hospitalizations in the U.S. are currently plummeting, we've never hit anywhere near capacity for hospitalization, and the virus is fizzling out on its own. Each state has gotten to choose its own policy for Covid-19 (as they should, by the way), and some states have banned gatherings of more than 8 people, mandated masks in public, issued various stay at home orders, jailed business owners for daring to reopen, etc. Some states like South Dakota have never issued any restrictions whatsoever. There is no clear pattern in the data for policy, between countries or states. Indeed, there's a lot of confounding factors that make it difficult to infer the effectiveness of any region's policy choices. Taiwan, for example. Are their results on account of that they are an island nation with tight inflow and outflow controls or the fact that SARS1 and other weaker coronaviruses already disseminated in the population and therefore a higher amount of the population have natural immunity from fighting off a similar disease? If they haven't developed herd immunity, are they simply kicking the can down the road in the hopes a vaccine works? If not, will they forever be isolating visitors in 14 day quarantine to avoid an outbreak? That doesn't sound sustainable to me.
Taiwan is not China.
Of course the range of response is much broader than US style incoherence to China style authoritarian control. There are bound to be a variety of interesting learnings from this range if we can get past personal/regional/national blinders.
If society treated governance, politics and civic leadership the way it does any other profession, we would raise up competent leaders the way we do doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.
We need to create systems that make politics attractive to people who do it out of ideology. I would agree with Plato that character training, or at the very least testing, is useful and appropriate.
> 2 terms in most positions ought to remove all the oldies implementing policies of 70s on today's people.
This sounds exactly like a problem of ideology, not financial gain.
By enforcing duration of political careers, there will be a constant influx of new blood who will represent the people of the time.
Is your implication that right now most politicians are not politicians out of ideology first and foremost, but rather for their own financial gain?
I would take the contrarian view. I would guess the majority of politicians are politicians because of ideology. Although they may not believe everything (or perhaps even most of what) they say they do and what they do believe may change while in office, I would be surprised if they don't have some core ideology that powers them.
It's otherwise unclear to me why politicians seek re-election so frequently. In most Western democracies, a person with the opportunity to become a career politician has far more lucrative job opportunities outside of politics than within, especially once you've become a high-level politician. If people were doing it for money, I'd imagine they'd do a single term and then immediately try to parlay that into another job rather than trying to slug it out term after term.
The other mildly persuasive explanation to me is enjoying the power of the office, but the feeling of power is very hard to separate from fervent ideology.
However, that's not the way politics works.
There is a stable equilibrium where politicians are constantly replenished by the larger population as they leave office, which holds true as t approaches infinity. And indeed this is more or less what we observe in Western societies.
Of course, much complexity is uncovered when you dig into the details. It isn’t a perfect analogy but it seems very useful.
Issue is you have to protect the "choosing" process from interference.
We want people who are attracted to politics out of a sense of responsibility. Folks who feel a bond of both trust and obligation towards the people they lead. Both ideology and financial gain optimize for the wrong things.
Does this also include the founding fathers (Or Abraham Lincoln? How does he stack up, compared to the likes of Jefferson Davis, or many of the other defenders of an unjust status quo?) Were they not ideologically motivated? They certainly spilled a lot of ideologically-sounding ink, and started an ideologically-motivated revolution, and then made a lot of ideologically-motivated decisions. Or do we define ideology to explicitly consider our current orthodoxy to not be ideological? [1]
Lenin and Mao certainly had enough of a sense of responsibility. Just because you disagree with their ideology[2] (And agree with that of the founding fathers) does not mean that they didn't feel that it was their responsibility to bring about what they thought was a better future.
> Folks who feel a bond of both trust and obligation towards the people they lead.
This is, in my opinion, actually a much better litmus test then the rather subjective 'ideology' versus 'responsibility' question (Which hinges entirely on where you stand on an ideological spectrum.)
[1] That would be the 'everyone but me is an ideologue' argument. I don't think it's a great one.
[2] It doesn't need to be said that most people would disagree with their methods, so let's not veer into that tangent.
Certainly stuff like Declaration of Independence or Common Sense is ideololgically-sounding. But these are propaganda pieces: they are also what they needed to be to get the citizenry behind the revolution.
The way to tell an ideologue apart from a pragmatist is to look at their actions when faced like a choice like "Hundreds of thousands of people need to die, but it's for the greater good." The ideologue will choose the greater good; the pragmatist will choose the people.
(Interestingly, by this definition, America's two greatest ideologues are probably FDR and Abraham Lincoln. Which I think is accurate, but they're still widely esteemed. I still maintain that they are two of the most dangerous leaders in U.S. history though.)
> The way to tell an ideologue apart from a pragmatist is to look at their actions when faced like a choice like "Hundreds of thousands of people need to die, but it's for the greater good." The ideologue will choose the greater good; the pragmatist will choose the people.
In this case, the founding fathers were absolutely, unabashedly ideologues. They started a revolutionary war for their idea of the greater good. In an age of hereditary absolute monarchs and colonies and authoritarian rulers, their ideas were completely ideologically motivated (And batshit bonkers, in the world of the 18th century - but rather old-fashioned and uninteresting in the world of the 21st century.)
Given that you've cited both FDR and Lincoln as examples of ideologues, but the founding fathers as not, I postulate that your definition of an ideologue might be predicated on how orthodox and uninteresting their policies are to you.
The way you phrase this dilemma is telling - the implication is that people will die as a result of a deviation from the status quo, without quantifying what the greater good is. What if people will be saved as a result of a deviation from the status quo? Is someone who looks at an ongoing injustice, and acts in response to it an ideologue?
What about someone who adopts an ideology of tolerance towards slave states? Does that person become a pragmatist, because they've weighed hundreds of thousands of deaths, against millions of people enslaved for their entire lives, and decides that actually, the greater good requires those millions to continue to be slaves? [1] What if they decide that the greater good would be to actually go to war, but they choose the greater evil, instead? Is whether or not they are ideologues predicated on which of the two options they believe the greater good to be?
These sorts of questions, of course, lead to truly absurd responses. It's why the ideologue test isn't actually a good one.
Your other metric (Trust and obligation) for determining the quality of a leader is much better, because it does not try to give answers to difficult moral problems, without having any context of what those moral problems are. It's not a guiding principle that a leader must follow - it is a quality that they must express, so that they can make a correct decision.
[1] Is there a formula that determines how many slaves the death of a freeman can buy? And if you pay too dearly for the freedom of a slave, you become an ideologue? [2]
[2] As I said, any guiding principle that seeks to give a one-size-fits-all answer this question, without even knowing what the question is, on 'pragmatic' grounds (Where determining which side is pragmatic is completely subjective!) leads to truly absurd outcomes.
This is not correct, we don't know how China faired yet. Firstly; they are probably lying about their case numbers - their case counts are absurdly low. And secondly, we aren't going to get a clue about what the experience on the ground is like for the Chinese citizens. It isn't like the Uyghurs situation was obvious 6 months in. It takes time to figure out what China is doing.
And more Plato isn't going to solve anything. You'd need to be an idiot to sign up as an honest politician. The only reward is people screaming at you on the streets. Corruption is the only way to get rewards that justify the vitriol. It'd be good to change that equilibrium.
Plato knew that. The role of guardian wasn't exactly voluntary. The philosopher-kings were compelled to rule. The only rulers you can trust are those who don't seek power.
If Plato had the answers, we should have learned by now. I think the jury is still out on wether this is just a matter of "bad implementation", or long-term democracy is an impossibility without degenerating into a dystopia.
Also, funny way to "pick apart" Plato's ideas from a modern lens - e.g. accepting that we need a caste of thoughtful leaders while at the same time rejecting eugenics, because we have seen what it leads to, even though it's the logical conclusion of the former.
[1] No barriers regarding race or gender right to vote.
The passage of time doesn't implies moral progress, unlike natural sciences who progress is only forward. What I'm want to mean by this is: we'll do the same mistakes again and again and again.
Books can be informative, but it is no substitute for people actually being part of history. Especially if you frame it in the lens of power dynamics and the ownership of wealth. Those in power are connected to those with wealth and their ethics and politics determine to a great extend what happens.
I think you have a good point about democracy maybe not benig the full answer. It seems to be a very flexible/enduring system so far (more so than e.g. fascism or communism), but technology might poke huge holes in it regarding free will (manipulating people's emotions to vote for someone, for example). Yuval Harari talks about this a lot in "21 ideas for the 21st century".
> We don't really know what makes someone "better", we don't know how to do it, and we don't even know how to define "better".
All of your problems go away if we use a "better" definition of "better".
What makes someone a "better" leader? That they were educated and raised in a "better" way. What makes that way "better"? Well, it should be evident - it, after all, produces "better" leaders.
True, it does lead to a kind of circular thinking, but that's allright - a lot of ink gets spilled to justify subjective preferences on objective grounds, like the ones I just described. If people can feel utterly convinced that by applying such circular criteria, they can demarcate that one piece of music is objectively better than another, surely those people would feel just as justified to use such circular criteria to decide that one leader's education, and upbringing, and social background is objectively better than another.
As long as you can let current leaders pick future leaders, you will indeed have a definition of "better". You might not like that definition very much, though.
(The Dictator's Handbook would say the difference between aristocracy and democracy is in the size of the selectorate, a distinction which is quantitative but not necessary qualititative.)
another take on guardians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvAsR4O4W0w
(Modern democracy only since 1971. Before you laugh, consider that we've now had 5 different female presidents from 3 different parties. Yes, consensus takes a while to achieve, but it also facilitates implementation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23415639 )
One can, of course, argue the continuity between the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Swiss_Confederacy and the current confederation. (especially due to Napoleon, whose infrastructural, legal, and social improvements we kept even after getting rid of his people, at the end of his interregnum) However, there have also been substantial changes in the selectorate of the US between the 13 colonies and today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lMOL7GaPWI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
Plato's rebuttal (virtue can't be taught or learned, but occurs): http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... et seq
Bonus clip (can virtue be recalled?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIq4Az-M9Ts (thank you Chekhov)
Consider this paragraph:
> Democracy’s fetishisation of freedom inevitably gives way to anarchy. Fathers pander to their sons, teachers to their pupils, humans to animals, and ‘the minds of the citizens become so sensitive that the least vestige of restraint is resented as intolerable’. Anarchy produces class struggle, as the poor attack the rich and the rich retaliate; class struggle produces war and disorder. When all this becomes intolerable the masses will turn to a dictator who can restore order.
It's meaningless! Democracy apparently makes "humans pander to animals." Why does this happen? Just because! The author spits out this weird gob of nonsense and continues as if he's made a real argument that democracy always leads to anarchy (which, confusingly, leads to class conflict, and not the other way around).
He does mention uneducated voters making bad decisions earlier, but that's a whole other can of worms that he never even digs into (i.e. can we fix this with education reforms, or by introducing new journalistic standards into media?). He just throws it out there as if it's all the proof he needs that only "wise elites" can save us from ourselves.
How about this part:
> Thus the paradox at the heart of tyranny: even though tyrants have absolute power over other people, they have no power over themselves. Slaves to their own passions – ‘ill-governed’ in their own souls as Plato puts it – they use their positions to inflict those passions on the entire population. A tyranny is a psycho-drama in which everyone is caught up in the tyrant’s raging ego.
This is flatly untrue. Let's look at some of the greatest tyrants of the 21st century. Xi Jinping, Vladmir Putin, the Saudis... we could go on. Are any of these people particularly prone to temper tantrums? "Slaves of their own passions"? No! They're ruthless, disciplined, and experts at consolidating and leveraging power. This weird psychoanalysis of authoritarianism has no basis in fact -- it's just storytelling.
Finally, scraping away the abysmal analysis, we get the actual argument:
> The metaphor of the ship is a way of driving home Plato’s wider point about the importance of ‘guardians’. Plato argues that a successful republic is run by a class of people whose job it is to think about the long-term success of the polis.
The trouble with this is that putting a discreet class of people in charge of society leads to those people acting in their own interests. The whole motivating reason behind democracy is for the public to have a veto on their leadership so that leaders can't act in their own interest. The author's solution is "let's educate our leaders not to act in their own interest," but that's practically a childish suggestion. What part of history has ever suggested that you can educate humans out of their innate instinct to act in self-interest?The author provides basically no real examples. Who gets to decide how these rulers are educated? The rulers? Wow I'm sure we can trust them not to act in their self-interest in that regard. After all, they "educated" themselves not to.
They did include a couple vague gestures at evidence:
> Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol from 1870 until his death in 1893, devoted his life to two great projects: producing a definitive edition of Plato and turning his college into a production line for Platonic guardians.
> [...]
> There was a certain amount of priggishness in the cult of Plato. But it nevertheless produced an elite that was remarkably public spirited by today’s standards: too dignified to put its fingers in the cookie jar and too well-educated to be blown hither and thither by the latest intellectual fads. The old elite didn’t hog publicity for the sake of publicity – most of them were happy to work in the background without any public credit ...
[1] Goldstein explicitly states the Inner Party / guardians are a meritocracy. (Orwell's observation on equality of educational chances is that children of the Inner Party do not in principle become inner party members themselves.) Life is difficult for the Outer Party, because, having failed their quals, they must rely on ideology over aptitude to keep their positions. (The yanks, innovative as ever, have shown us the IngSoc model works even better with two mutually antagonistic yet still self-policing outer parties. Competition between outer parties frees up inner party members to do, without having to waste time keeping everyone else down, whatever it is that inner party people do.)
Bonus track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEeBAO5o3aU
Tough guy persona, a king in all but name, and formerly a wrestling heel[0].
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkghtyxZ6rc
I'm also reminded of Idiocracy, which checks all of the same boxes. I don't know whether Mike Judge was thinking of Plato, though.
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8vOpyGW1sA
But every time someone brings up old ideas, in this case Plato's philospher caste, there's an immediate question. If it is so great, and if it worked in the 19th century, why did it die out? Good things don't vanish randomly. Whenever someone tries to restore some old form of governance the question needs to be answered why it died out.
I think for Plato's Republic it's quite obvious. Modern commerce and technology, mass communication and the information society have melted all that is solid into air, and there's no barriers in the way of democracy. Celebrities and businessmen have more to say than the Dean of Harvard and that's not going to change unless you put technology back into its box, which is hard to do.
The author brings up China as a modern society that improves governance, and I think that's true. But Chinese politicians aren't philosopher kings. The CCP is more like a hyper-competitive, ruthless machine than some kind of school for the humanities. Xi himself was cast to the countryside for years, people who make it to the top have to proof themselves over and over, and punishment can be quite harsh. It's fundamentally still Marxist and technocratic, and sees economic and technological advance as a driver for pretty much everything. It's not virtue that matters but Darwinian competition.
Stalin said that Leninism is American effectiveness combined with Russian revolutionary spirit. I think when China decided to ditch parts of its socialist economic program but kept it's Marxist political system in place they created a governing body that embodies that quite well. I don't think it's possible to recreate that in the West at all.
Good things vanish because people forget history, or fail to learn it, and thus don't understand the reason why the things came to be. Consequently, we ignorantly and futilely attempt to reinvent the wheel.
> The philosopher and the cult of Plato provide us with both a model and inspiration for how to fix the ship of state.
Yet Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, graduated in Classics at Oxford University, and would not only have studied Plato's Republic, but read it in the original Greek, as part of his course.
Plato of course got a lot going for him, but The Republic never really solved the problem of making sure you get a philosopher-king instead of a tyrant. This essay's author declines to mention the possibility of tyrants because he knows it will undermine his argument badly.
I disagree.
"train the guardians through a prolonged education that involves not just academic education but also character-training designed to ensure that guardians put the public good above private interests"
"the guardians should be banned from getting married or owning private property in order to focus their minds on the common good"
The point is that you don't just give any idiot supreme power after they win an election. The guardians go through lifelong training for rule, and only the best of the best, the most thoroughly tested, are left at the end of that process.