Plus ca change...
Plato grew up in Athens, a city that once was nearly torn apart, as Plutarch wrote, by the “disparity between the rich and the poor.” It was saved by a heroic lawgiver, Solon, who canceled all the debts of the poor, to the great chagrin of the rich. And in Plato’s youth, as the city fought the Peloponnesian War, it suffered three successive class-based civil wars — an oligarchic revolution of the rich against the poor, followed by a democratic revolution of the poor against the rich, followed by yet another oligarchic revolution.
It’s no wonder that when Socrates reflected on inequality in Plato’s “Republic,” he observed that a state characterized by significant wealth disparity is not a state at all but rather “two states, the one of poor, the other of rich men, and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.”
For Plato, the source of inequality was a disease of the soul that the Greeks called pleonexia — a kind of insatiable greed. In Plato’s “Gorgias,” Socrates likened this condition to a leaky jug: No matter how much water one pours into it, it will demand more. For some, the desire for money extends only so far as is necessary to cover their needs; for others, the desire is infinite. Plato likened those insatiable souls to slaves who are ruled by their desires.
Someone consumed with his unquenchable desires comes to love himself far beyond what he can feel for the rest of humanity. He was, for Plato, “a poor judge of what is just and good and noble,” because he would always treat his desires as more valuable even than the truth. As a consequence, Plato wrote, “it is impossible that those who become very rich also become good.”
I feel a certain obligation to call attention any time one of the ancients are called upon in the mainstream media to remind us what everybody in any age has always understood but which seems to escape us.
It doesn’t mean that they were any more successful in restraining the super-rich than we are. The oligarchs always seem to come out on top in the end. Nobody has yet successfully found a way to repeal the Iron Law of Oligarchy. But the difference between then and now is that at least then they had a vision of what the just society should be, whereas we believe that guys like Musk deserve every penny they make. That’s basically enshrined in the constitution, and it’s why the reactionaries on the Supreme Court think they are perfectly justified in their decisions that seem to defy common sense and commmon decency: “Just, y’know, working with document that the founders gave us,” they will tell us. “If you don’t like it, amend it.” And technically, their decisions have a strong constitutional basis even if humanly their decisions are monstrous.
Ok. sure. Our constitution has the Bill of Rights. The founding fathers threw the demos a few crumbs. But every other part of it is designed to keep the wealthy wealthy, and yet we have all come to believe at some level of conviction that America’s constitution is what makes America great. Peter Thiel will tell you that anybody who disagrees that America is all about giving the super-rich the freedom to do as they please must be an agent of the Anti-Christ. Too many Americans, especially evangelical Christians, agree with him.
And another difference between now and then is that a society that is dominated by mad men like Musk and Trump, men so compulsively the slaves of their passions, are capable now in a way they were not then to wreak havoc not only in their own societies but throughout the rest of the world. The technological multipliers and the astonishing concentrations of wealth magnify the personal power of a small group of people beyond anything possible before in human history. And so this unprecedented situation screams for the world to get organized to contain these sociopaths even if we Americans are too intellectually and morally confused to do so.
We are no longer the good guys. For us to think otherwise is a symptom of our intellectual and moral confusion. Everybody else in the world seems to understand that but us. Inspiring speeches by the Obamas don’t change the underlying structural realities that make that the case.
I think that another interesting point implied in the article is why the early Christian fathers when they read Plato and Aristotle, went, “Huh. They thought that too? Maybe you don’t need revelation for everything. Maybe some truths are universally true.” That was also Thomas Merton’s response when he read Chuang Tzu. That openness to “pagan” wisdom was thrown out after the Reformation. But even so, funny how what Jesus said about the rich seems to get lost on so many so-called American Christians like Thiel. Maybe it’s because they’re more out of touch with Reality than the ancients who didn’t need the bible to tell them what was obvious.
Thank you, Jack, for your response re: John Rawls. I was not referring to anything specific in Rawl's 'A Theory of Justice'. It was merely the fact that reflection on social justice is part of the intellectual and political ecosystem of the U.S and I cited Rawls as an example. I agree with most of what you had to say in response to my post. However, I would lean more towards the gradual reform idea in the Edmund Burke style. An electoral system that facilitates this a little better, it seems to me, is the PR (proportional representation) system, which has an ability to allow more voices a say. Green Parties in Europe would never have had an opportunity to push and implement an environmental agenda in government without it.
It's astonishing to me, from the vantage point of now, that I spent an entire year in college studying 'A Theory of Justice' by the American philosopher John Rawls. I'd love to see somebody take up the cause of recovering his ideas. They are American ones!