Philosophical essay on Plato, Syracuse, and modern technocratic governance

thumos - that wild popular political rage that burns like hot pitch, but which is the essential glue for all politics, even today. Who should rule? Again and again Plato watches the best of intentions fail. His family members’ brutal rule is overthrown. It is replaced by a new and hopeful group of real democrats. With in a few years they effectively murder Socrates. Another group rises. They gut the intellectual life of the city. Plato hunkers down and establishes his Academy as perhaps the only safe, sensible path to politics, to train minds. He develops the transcendent, completely original approach to philosophy we know him for today - man can strive for knowledge, but total and perfect wisdom is impossible. We may imagine his Academy as it appears in Raphael’s famous 16" Century painting: A sort of leisurely graduate seminar with Aristotle and Plato arm-in-arm in conversation; Diogenes lounging around tossing off bon mot. It was nothing of the sort. The real legacy of the Academy was rigor. The best students made contributions in mathematics or metaphysics, fields where you could check answers on the inflexible measure of reality. Plato craved the solidity of numbers. “Evil was growing with startling rapidity,” he wrote of Athenian life in his age. “Though at first I had been full of a strong impulse towards political life, as | looked at the course of affairs and saw them swept in all directions by contending currents, my head finally began to swim; and, though I did not stop looking to see if there was any likelihood of improvement in these symptoms and in the general course of public life, | postponed action till a suitable opportunity should arise.” So it was that he heard from Dion, asking if Plato might sail to Syracuse (we know it today as Sicily) to take the young king in hand. This was, Plato thought, a test he had to take. In 367 BC, he boarded a boat for Syracuse. He found the state to be beyond salvation. His friend Dion hovered on the verge of expulsion. And young Dionysus, it emerged, had only a passing interest in philosophy - he studied for a few months, then gave it up. Too difficult. The court was meanwhile inflated by evil gossip, edged with murder and jealousy. Plato angered the King with his attitude; he was nearly sold into slavery. Months later, briefly forgiven, Plato tried a public speech about the dangers of dictatorship. Dionysus tried to have him poisoned. “I, an Athenian and friend of Dion, came as his ally to the court of Dionysius, in order that I might create good will in place of a state war,” he later said. “I was worsted.” Plato made a final effort to point out a path to just order for the new king and, when that failed, he was quickly smuggled out of the city. Plato summarizes his time in Sicily in the formula that has become his most famous: “There will be no cessation of evils for the sons of men, till either those who are pursuing a right and true philosophy receive sovereign power, or those in power become true philosophers.” Who should rule? No just order until kings become philosophers. Or philosophers become kings. I] think now we face a similar sort of dilemma. We consider our own problems of future order. Do we make technologists kings? How much purchase do we give their tools on the roots of our democracy? What lingers at the heart of Plato’s failure in Syracuse is not merely the disaster of a pure academic playing his ideas out of tune with reality. Rather, it reflects a crisis. To fuse a balance of any sort between the various temperaments needed to rule is the most unstable sort of work. Great states are unusual not least because such matches between men, their instincts and their 199 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018431