Philosopher-Kings

Note: It has been about six months since I actively blogged on this site. After ten years of posting a weekly opinion on topics related to Politics and Economics, Science and Religion, and Various Art Forms, I felt that I was “talked out” and beginning to repeat myself. Also, the political landscape has become much more volatile, and it is good advice—on both sides of the aisle—to be circumspect in our published opinions. But, after a break, I feel it’s now time to jump back into the fray, although from a respectful distance and without naming any names.¹

Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” (The word democracy is derived from two Greek words meaning “strength of the people.”) Churchill’s opinion doesn’t leave much room for excellence, does it? Democracy has sometimes been described as two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner, and the system’s great weakness is that deeply divided constituencies that manage to get a slim majority in one forum or another can end up victimizing and perhaps destroying a sizeable chunk of the population. The U.S. Constitution creates a republic with representatives chosen by democratic election, but then the first ten amendments—collectively called “the Bill of Rights”—bristle with protections for the minority against a coercive majority. And I think that’s the way it should be.

Other methods—oh, many others!—have been proposed. One that seemed to gain favor when I was in college in the late 1960s was the method of Plato’s Republic, where actual governance is turned over to a body of “philosopher-kings.” This sounds nice: people who have spent their lives studying, thinking about, and dedicating their minds to abstract concepts like truth, beauty, justice, and goodness should be in the best position to decide what to do in any situation in the best interests of the country as a whole, right? … Right?

This thinking appeared to find favor with many young people around me in college, where Plato’s work was taught in a basic required course of English literature. It rang bells because—and I’m conjecturing here—it seemed to dovetail with the Progressive views from earlier in the century. Then everyone was excited about the potential for government to step in and right the wrongs of Robber Baron capitalism, inspired by books like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and societal critiques like those of pioneering social worker Jane Addams. The Progressive view said that government and its programs should be in the hands of technical experts, who would know best what to do. Out of this spirit was born the economics of the New Deal and the Social Security Administration, and the creation of Executive Branch departments like Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The list goes on …

Giving free rein to experts who would know what to do seemed like the best, most efficient course of action. After all, we had money covered by the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve, and war—er, the national defense—was taken care of by the Department of Defense and the Pentagon. The experts will manage these things so the rest of us don’t have to think about them.

The trouble is, Plato’s Republic is a thought experiment, a utopia (another word from the Greek that literally means “no place”) and not a form of government that has ever been tried. Others have suggested ideal societies, like Thomas More’s book of the same name and Karl Marx’s economic and social imaginings. All of them end up creating rational, strictly planned, coercive, and ultimately inhuman societies. You really wouldn’t want to actually live there.¹

The trouble with philosopher-kings is that they are still human beings. Sure, they think about truth and beauty and justice, but they still have families, personal needs, and an eye to their own self-interest. Maybe if there were an order of angels or demigods on Earth, who breathe rarified air, eat ambrosia, drink nectar, and have no personal relationships, we might then entrust them with rule as philosopher-kings. These would then be a different order of people, a different race … perhaps a master race?

But such beings don’t exist. And even if we could trust them not to feel selfishness, greed, nepotism, or that little twitch of satisfaction people get when they have the power to order other folks around and maybe humiliate them, just a little bit, that’s still no guarantee that they won’t get crazy ideas, or mount their own hobbyhorses. They are still subject to the narrow focus of academics and other experts, concentrating their thoughts so hard and fast on one form of “truth” or “the good” that they tend to forget competing needs and interests. Experts can, for example, become so enamored of benefits of what they’re proposing that they forget about, tend to minimize, and dismiss the costs of their solutions. They can go off their rocker, too, just like any other human being. People who think too much about abstractions like truth, beauty, and justice tend not to get out among the people who must stretch and scratch for a living.

I’m not saying that all public servants with inside knowledge of the subject under discussion are suspect. Many people try to do the right thing and give good service in their jobs, whether they serve in government, work for a big corporation—as I did in several previous lifetimes—or run a small business. But that expectation is a matter of trust and, yes, opinion. Not everyone is unselfish and dedicated to playing fair.

And the problem, of course, is that under Plato’s model you will have made them philosopher-kings. They have the power. They make the rules. They are in control. And they don’t have to listen to, obey, or even consider the “little people,” the hoi polloi (another Greek word!) because, after all, those kinds of people are not experts and don’t know enough, have all the facts, or deserve to have an opinion.

I’d almost rather follow the governing formula illustrated in Homer’s Iliad, where the kings of all those Greek city-states that went to war were tough men, prime fighters, and notable heroes. That would be like living under rule by the starting offensive line of the local football team: brutish, violent, and hard to overthrow. But at least they wouldn’t be following their fanciful, navel-gazing ideas right off into the clouds, leaving everyone else behind. And they all had—or at least according to Homer—an internal sense of honor and justice, along with a reputation to uphold. So they couldn’t be publicly evil or escape notoriety through anonymity.

No, democracy is a terrible form of government—sloppy, error-prone, and inelegant—but at least you have a chance every so often of throwing out the bums who have screwed things up. No loose-limbed dreamer has come up with anything better.

1. But then, to get things warmed up, this blog is a retelling—perhaps a refashioning, with different insights—of a blog I posted two years ago. Some channels of the mind run deep.

2. In my younger days, we had friends who were still in college—although I had been out in the working world for a couple of years. They thought Mao’s China was a pretty good place, fair and equitable, and that they would be happy there. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that their laid-back, pot-smoking, sometime-student, rather indolent lifestyle, dependent on the largesse of mummy and daddy, would get them about fifteen years of hard labor on the farm in the then-current Chinese society. Maybe the same today.