After reading and responding to the thread at ZenPundit, in which Mark and others discuss education and the disconnected youths who grow into disconnected adults, I thought I’d refresh my memory of Plato’s paradigm for education. The Republic is endlessly fascinating, and I am not as dismissive of the book as those who see the roots of Communism in Plato’s intellectualized “State.”

Mark’s ideas for focusing on the education and development of disconnected youths — to make them connected adults — bear striking resemblances to Plato’s ideas for educating the future guardians of The State, although in sketch form only:

Mark:

I would suggest that a certain realistic ruthlessness is required to make the very young the focus of all our efforts for the first time and write off the already badly screwed-up, incompetent and sometimes criminal adults in their lives. For two generations we have worked through and subsidized the dysfunctional adults and I have to say, anecdotal happy cases aside, this strategy ran counter to basic economics, psychology, sociology and educational theory and has, unsurprisingly, yielded consistently miserable results.

^*Plato, speaking approvingly of the physician Asclepius:

And therefore our politic Asclepius may be supposed to have exhibited the power of his art only to persons who, being generally of healthy constitution and habits of life, had a definite ailment; such as these he cured by purges and operations, and bade them live as usual, herein consulting the interests of the State; but bodies which disease had penetrated through and through he would not have attempted to cure by gradual processes of evacuation and infusion: he did not want to lengthen out good-for-nothing lives, or to have weak fathers begetting weaker sons; —if a man was not able to live in the ordinary way he had no business to cure him; for such a cure would have been of no use either to himself, or to the State.

Mark, in the comments to that thread:

We are discussing a tiny subset who have already proven their incompetence to make decisions in their child’s best interests - most are already being monitored by State authorities - but not so certifiably and immediately dangerous as to have had their rights terminated by a court. Yet the ” ripple effect” and spillover costs to society of this antisocial demographic are enormous.

Plato:

You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken.

     Quite true.

And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

Plato, again:

We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul. Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of the beautiful and graceful; then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall glow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.

Plato’s use of “casual tales” and “casual persons” (in this translation) is interesting, because the opposite of those terms would be systematic tales and persons, which fits in with Mark’s ideas of a “System Administration” approach to correcting the disunion in our Union.

During my refresher, I skimmed ahead in The Republic and came to Plato’s list of the five types of government which correspond to the five types of individual. Put simply, Plato expressed the idea that states — and governments — do not exist separate from individuals but are the conglomerate of those individuals, so a correlation exists between individual behaviors and styles of government. After Plato’s ideal State come four types of imperfect government of descending efficacy or virtue — imperfect, because each includes inherent divisions within a society, and these divisions will lead to discord: Timocracy (government of honor), Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny. Interestingly, for the first three of these, discord will lead eventually to the type of government lower on the scale. Along with his descriptions of these goverments, and the eventual changes from one government to the next, Plato describes the generational shifts in terms of sons overthrowing their elders as well as describing the types of elders and sons within the societies living under these systems of government.

A short (and probably incomplete) summation of the transitions:

Timocracy

The rulers of a Timocracy have gained their position from meritorious service, usually in war and by being virtuous, but in later life horde wealth surreptitiously; non-rulers continue to support the rulers, who have a legacy of meritorious activity, but for a time do not see the disparity in wealth and power between the ruling class and the non-ruling class which is accruing. The society is therefore stratified, in ignorance of actual merit, seeing only the apparent merit that is but a reflection of previous meritorious activity.

Oligarchy

The youths of a society, eventually seeing how such hording has led to disparities between their fathers and other rulers, seek to surpass their fathers. They become focused on the acquisition of wealth, which has by now become the sign of merit, and ignore philosophic virtue, and this leads to the formation of an Oligarchy. Their fathers were, in many respects, failed oligarchs — at least in the eyes of the sons — so the sons set about creating a system for the efficient creation of wealth. The new rulers, the oligarchs, will act dishonestly (or without virtue) when such acts lead to the acquisition of wealth. Rather than various levels of stratification, a society living under oligarchy will eventually coalesce into

the inevitable division: such a State is not one, but two States, the one poor, the other rich men; and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.

Because the rich value the rich (and modes of living which lead to riches), government comes to be dominated by the rich, and those who are poor (and their activities) are disdained. Even the poor value wealth, looking up to the rich. So there are the rich and the drones of a society, as the rich gain riches from those who lose riches; but those who lose wealth remain in the society, either as abject paupers or as criminals. [I suppose the criminals are also failed oligarchs — who do not realize their system failures.] Laws in an Oligarchy favor the wealthy and the acquisition of wealth; and because wealth is so strongly valued by most members of that society, whether poor or rich, the people of an oligarchy are quite unwilling to pay high taxes for any purpose, including for war; thus, war isn’t waged as efficiently as it was waged under the glory-seeking Timocrats of the previous generations.

Democracy

The younger generation within an Oligarchy tends toward two types, one characterized by the children of the rich rulers and one characterized by the youth of the poor. Because the oligarchs are loath to make laws restricting the acquisition of wealth for their own members, they are less likely to restrict the activities of their children: displays of wealth are as important as actual power, when wealth is the virtue prized by the rich, and may lead to more wealth. Such extravagance produces children incapable of distinquishing between the image of success and actual success. Those who are poor far outnumber those who are rich, and the poor and rich are thus often brought to rub against each other. The poor eventually recognize the disparity between images of success and actual efficacy and rebel against the ruling oligarchs:

men like him [oligarchs] are only rich because no one has the courage to despoil them.

Wealth and power are redistributed evenly amongst the members of the Democracy, but in terms of an even distribution of freedom. Why? Because the former oligarchs, having attained the reins of government, have been able to act freely, as have their spoiled children, and the rebels (who are failed oligarchs) do not see the redistribution in terms of wealth but in terms of freedom to act. Freedom is so prized, all apparent expressions of freedom become prized, and the Democratic society becomes a patchwork quilt, with more variation among the members than in any other type of society. Democracy is

a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike

because no one will limit the idea of Freedom. There is a confusion between necessary pleasures (such as eating) and unnecessary pleasures (such as eating delicacies); and the Democratic man comes to value all desires equally, as does the Democratic society. Furthermore, those individuals who can help the Democratic individual to satisfy his desires become the most respected, are the bearers of honey for the buzzing drones. The search for honey — the satisfaction of pleasures, or the sign of Freedom — leads to friction within a Democracy.

Tyranny

As far as wealth may lead to pleasure, members of a Democracy continue to have oligarchic impulses. In an oligarchy, the efficient oligarchs held the most power, having been able to order the laws (and the society) toward the creation of wealth (for themselves), and being willing to repress desires that would lead to failure or a loss of wealth (unnecessary desires). Their children had less organizational ability, having inherited wealth, and the children of the rebellious poor had even less ability to organize and maintain wealth for themselves, especially also since they focused on freedom rather than on wealth to organize their society. In fact, the search for absolute freedom to satisfy whatever impulses motivate the members of a Democratic society, would lead to mismanagement of wealth and a throwback to oligarchic structures: If I see that others possess property but I do not — since I have squandered wealth in my libertine life — I may try to take that property away from those who possess it. The scramble for honey leads to paranoia, as “freedoms” come into conflict, and some may revert to oligarchy while others continue to seek to destroy all vestiges of oligarchy. The proponents of Freedom in fact turn to those most able to fight the supposedly selfish neo-oligarchs (as if they are not themselves being selfish in their search for honey) and thus

The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.

The patchwork quilt, of individuals pursuing individual freedoms, tends to form into factions of various natures around those individuals who can help to satisfy or ensure the members’ senses of “freedom.” The drones congregate around honey-givers. The increase in paranoia, the fear that some other congregations (whether seemingly oligarchic or otherwise), are limiting one’s freedom leads to turmoil within a Democracy, and this leads to Tyranny:

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.

Plato extends his description of the tyrant by outlining the steps by which the tyrant consolidates power. Throughout these steps, for a time, the tyrant continues to appear benevolent to his supporters. Like the other transitions, the tyrant comes from the younger generation — those reacting to the excesses of the previous form of government — and is thus the “son” of the former system. As with the other forms, any individual can go through the stages, first being a Timocrat, then becoming an Oligarch, then a Democratic libertine, and finally a tyrant: “The Child is the Father of the man.” [Wordsworth]. Democracy is the father of Tyranny, in Plato’s estimation, and those within a democracy who at first support the tyrant expect that the son will support the father in his old age. Contrary to the wishes of the Democrats, the tyrant becomes something else:

     By heaven, he said, then the parent will discover what a monster he has been fostering in his bosom; and, when he wants to drive him out, he will find that he is weak and his son is strong.

Why, you do not mean to say that the tyrant will use violence? What! beat his father if he opposes him?

     Yes, he will, having first disarmed him.

Then he is a parricide, and a cruel guardian of an aged parent; and this is real tyranny, about which there can be no longer a mistake:  as the saying is, the people who would escape the smoke which is the slavery of freemen, has fallen into the fire which is the tyranny of slaves. Thus liberty, getting out of all order and reason, passes into the harshest and bitterest forms of slavery.

Conclusion?

Looking at Plato’s paradigm, and considering Mark’s, I wonder if the desire to focus on a systemic education of the young (for uniting the State), is an effort to break the generational shift from one form of governance to the next lower. The dysfunction mentioned by Mark, and alluded to by others including myself, most resembles the dysfunction outlined by Plato in his consideration of Oligarchy: the impoverished drones sometimes have stings, become criminals, and must be subdued…for what purpose? The rulers of an Oligarchy seek to protect their personal wealth and power from these criminal members of their society. Or perhaps the libertine belief in absolute freedom, in this Democracy, has led to a relativism in the “disconnected” classes, who are following the path of their own pleasures in ways which seem criminal to the neo-oligarchic elements of modern America?

I also wonder how we measure “connectedness” and “disconnectedness,” since all members of our society are just that: present within the Society. They may be involved in different tasks, different goals with different motivations, but I’m of the same mind with Plato when he asserts that any system of society is a reflection of all the actual members of a society. I.e., we are already connected within the society, even if we don’t always notice the connections or recognize the type of connections that are present. These questions seem paramount, if we are to decide what, exactly, will be taught to the children of our society: what values, what merits, what future.

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^* All translations by Benjamin Jowett.