Plato

Newcastle University is advertising for a Director of Academic Advising, which will offer guidance that is ‘inclusive, compassionate, and genuinely personalised to [student] goals’. Plato would have been appalled. Should not students be meeting the university’s goals? In 361 BC Dionysius II, tyrant of Sicily, invited Plato to come to Sicily to educate him on the matter of ruling a country. Plato agreed, but had grave doubts whether Dionysius would respond well to his method, which was to ‘demonstrate the nature of the subject as a whole, and all the stages that must be gone through, and how much effort is needed’ in order to acquire ‘the daily routine which will best foster his powers of learning and remembering and conducting sober debate within his own mind’.

An artist, J.R., working with something called Snap Inc., has covered the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris with a gigantic tarpaulin shaped like a cave, through which the public is invited to walk. It is supposed to represent the underground cave where Plato (d. 348 BC) thought most of mankind metaphorically lived. Of course it bears no likeness whatsoever, being empty of everything with which Plato filled his cave. But then he is an artist, beyond such banausic considerations. Plato’s cave is seen as an allegory of the human situation. Plato sees mankind chained into position from birth like prisoners, able to see only the wall directly in front of them.

One could go on endlessly about what the ancients have done for us, but one of the most interesting things is that Plato could be said to have invented women’s lib, though it seems to have taken 2,500 years to catch on. Since most ancient states were at war much of the time, putting the male population especially at risk, women had to commit to the production line as soon as possible if the state were to survive. But Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue The Republic, portrays a utopia in which women shared the same status as men. The ruling class of this state are called Guardians and Plato likens them to dogs hunting and protecting the flock, an activity in which female dogs engage just as much as male dogs (though the males are stronger).

The Oscars mark the end of the awards season, with their annual rituals of self-applause to which actors are so addicted, as Oscar nominees are to the $350,000 gift bags. The ancient Greeks are to blame. Greek luvvies and athletes formed the world’s first trade unions to wring from their sponsors privileges and guarantees which make the Olympic Committee look like beginners.  The luvvies’ worldwide union, founded in the 3rd century bc, lasted 600 years. It came to be called the ‘Artists [some said ‘Toadies’] of Dionysus’. They negotiated freedom of travel and immunity from military service, taxation and arrest, and came from all over the Greek-speaking world to perform.

Just Stop Oil is complaining about laws preventing their particular form of antisocial protests. It is all part of a feeling that our world is sinking under the weight of legal rulings. Even Plato had doubts about what laws were for. In his perfect state, Plato made education the key to everything. Its purpose, he claimed, should be to inculcate habits appropriate to age that would last a lifetime, e.g. as small children, being silent in the presence of their elders, giving up their seats to them, keeping themselves looking neat and tidy. But the last thing that was needed was to make laws about them. So too when it came to business: honest dealing in fulfilling contracts, paying dues and so on should be ingrained.

The singer Cher, now 75, has announced that, because she refuses to appear old, she is not going to allow her hair to go grey. But the ancient view was that there was nothing inherently wrong with old age, as long as one prepared for it, accepted it and respected it for what it was, limitations and all. As Cicero pointed out, ‘each stage of life has its place in the nature of things, for harvesting in its time’. So, he went on, the child is weak, the young man self-assertive, becoming authoritative in his middle years and mature in old age. Each stage made different demands. Not to acknowledge that was to ask for trouble. One of Aesop’s fables put an amusing spin on the point. A man whose hair was black but flecked with grey had two lovers, one old, the other young.

The Globe theatre’s project to ‘decolonise’ Shakespeare, as if that would make plays like The Tempest ‘acceptable’ to them and their audience, would have met with no approval at all from Plato (c. 425-348 BC). For him, all poetry and the arts were corrupt, and in his Republic, a discussion of how an ideal state should be constituted, he called for them all to be banned. Plato’s argument begins from exactly the same position as the Globe’s: that all art, but especially that which deals in words, has an educational effect. In other words, it instructs, whether it likes it or not (and Greeks did indeed argue that this was its effect, and even purpose).

Twitter and other easily accessible means of online communication have encouraged the public to believe that Their Voice Will Be Heard. When it isn’t, they express their frustration through abuse and threats or by blocking roads. In this way, the mentality of the ancient curse-tablet lives on. In the ancient world, the purpose of the curse was to ‘bind’ the person you disliked — i.e. frustrate them from achieving the end they wanted and you did not. It was written on a thin lead plate, rolled up tight, sometimes twisted (to ‘hobble’ the victim) and pinned (to constrain him), then placed into the tomb of someone who had died before their time.

Professor Toope, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, had proposed a motion ordering all members of the university to ‘respect’ each other, or else. But significant numbers of members argued strongly against it, and rightly so: ‘respect’ is an emotional term implying deferential regard or special concern or solicitude for someone, a response more in line with the world of counselling and social welfare than with rigorous academic debate. Further, if ‘respect’ became justiciable because an academic appealed against dismissal from his job on that account, where would that end? Thankfully Professor Toope failed, as history suggests he should have. On the ancients’ intellectual agenda, respect had to be earned.