The Neo-Cons Have a Friend in Plato

My day job is teaching political philosophy and honors courses at Morehead State University in Kentucky. As a result, I was very interested in Salon's interview with Simon Blackburn about his new book Plato's Republic.

One of issues that the interview explores is the extent to which Leo Strauss and his contemporary neo-conservative supporters have an accurate understanding of Plato. Why, one might ask, is Leo Strauss significant? It's mostly because so many of his followers have served in the Bush administration and figured in the neo-conservative movement. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, Douglas Feith, and William Kristol are probably the most prominent people in public life who have had Straussian training. However, Straussians are dispersed through the lower levels of the Bush administration as well. As Harvey Mansfield, the Straussian political theorist at Harvard, notes, his students can "go to Washington and run the country" when they can't find academic jobs.

Simon Blackburn has an extremely low opinion of Strauss' analysis of Plato:

This was kind of a covert message, Strauss thought, of [Plato's] text. Strauss thought that this covert message or esoteric message was supposed to be perceived only by a number of people of special illumination, amongst which he included himself . . . And that was the ideology that eventually became American neo-conservatism, the view that the servants of the state are entitled to do anything -- to lie, to manipulate, to foment war, to destabilize neighboring states, to disguise their actions under a hypocritical cloak of goodness. So it's an extreme example of realpolitik, which I think is just a 180 degree misreading of what Plato is about. But it just shows that you can put down the clearest words on the page and it will be read saying the opposite.

In a way, Blackburn is most certainly correct. Strauss' idea that writings like Plato's Republic contain "esoteric" messages that can only be deciphered by "people of special illumination" is one of the dumbest ideas ever proposed by an academic. One of the reasons why academic Straussians are so annoying is that they have the smugness of people who are sure they have "the secret." In this way, Straussianism is a kind of secular religious cult.

However, one doesn't have to engage in an esoteric reading to view Plato as sanctioning the kind of deceptiveness alluded to by Blackburn. This is because Plato was such a determined opponent of democracy. Actually, Plato's situation was somewhat analogous to that of current Straussians. Just as Plato was an aristocrat living in the democratic city of Athens, contemporary Straussians live in an American society that has been extensive democratized since the sixties. With the success of the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements, the onset of the counter-culture, high levels of immigration and a cultural emphasis on toleration and openness, 21st century America has emerged as the most important successor to the freedom and multi-colored diversity of ancient Athens.

Plato's Republic seeks to refute, devalue, undermine, and subvert Athenian democracy at every turn and he doesn't hesitate to use dishonesty to achieve this purpose. The most obvious dishonesty was the "noble lie" that there were three classes of people--some with souls mixed with gold, others with silver, and most with bronze. The core deception in the noble lie is that Plato sought to convince most people to believe a false view that class hierarchy is based on the nature of the metal mixed into their souls. Of course, Plato is convinced that the Guardian class is superior in nature to the other two classes because the Guardians have the ability to contemplate the Ideas. At the same time, he is willing to engage in the crass manipulation of the three metals scheme to convince the lower orders of their natural inferiority. Given the fundamental character of this particular deception, there's no reason to think that Plato would not engage in wholesale deceptions in order to manipulate populations to give up the substance and form of democracy.

In this context, it's relatively easy to see Plato as viewing the relentless "swift-boating," the "gay marriage" scare that Karl Rove engineered in 2004, Doug Feith's phony intelligence, and the internment policies of the Bush administration as legitimate measures to convince the population to cede authority to the upper classes. As Blackburn argues, Plato wanted ethical government based on a knowledge of the Ideas, but he was also willing to sanction dishonest and unethical tactics if they served to undermine democracy.

As repugnant as the Straussians can be, they do have a philosophical friend in Plato.