Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?: An Introduction to the Mind-Boggling “Simulation Argument”

in Computer Science, Games, Philosophy, Technology | March 10th, 2017

The idea that we are living in a vast computer simulation as hyper-sophisticated simulated characters with limited self-awareness sounds like the kind of thing that issues forth from stoned philosophy majors in late night dorm room sessions. And no doubt it has, thousands of times over, especially after 1999, when The Matrix debuted and turned an amalgam of Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, and other metaphysicians into a then-cutting-edge sci-fi kung fu flick.

But is it a ridiculous idea? The obvious objection that first arises is: how could we possibly ever know? Computer simulated characters, after all, have no ability to step beyond the confines of the worlds designed for them by programmers, a limitation illustrated when one reaches a dead-end in a game and finds that, while there may be the image of a forest or a field, the game designers have seen no need to actually create the environment. Our character bumps up against the game’s edge stupidly, until we toggle the controls and move it back into the prescribed field of play.

But (fire up your bongs), does the character know it’s reached a dead end? And if the universe is a simulation, who’s running the damned thing? And why? Welcome to “the simulation argument,” a theory endorsed by philosopher and futurologist Nick Bostrom, Tesla and Space X founder Elon Musk, and quite a few other non-dorm-dwelling thinkers. “Many people have imagined this scenario over the years,” writes Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker, “usually while high. But recently, a number of philosophers, futurists, science-fiction writers, and technologists—people who share a near-religious faith in technological progress—have come to believe that the simulation argument is not just plausible, but inescapable.”

Given their quasi-religious bent, are these technologists and futurists simply replacing a creator-god with a creator-coder to flatter themselves? Judge for yourself, firstly perhaps by listening to Musk explain the concept in brief at a Recode Conference above. (If you find yourself comforted by his answer, you may just be a game designer.) Then, for a more sprawling, pop-cultural dive into the simulation argument, spend an hour with The Simulation Hypothesis at the top of the post, a documentary that—depending on the laws of your current place of residence—may or may not be enhanced by an edible.

We might also reference Bostrom’s 2003 article—or watch him describe his position in the video below. Bostrom speculates that we might be living in an “ancestor simulation” run by an incredibly advanced civilization thousands of years in our future. Like Musk, writes Rothman, he concludes that “we are far more likely to be living inside a simulation right now than to be living outside of one.” The possibility raises all sorts of disturbing questions about the reality of choice, the moral meaning of our actions, and the nature of human identity. These are questions philosophers (and Philip K. Dick) have always asked, but until recently, they had little recourse to independent confirmation of their hypotheses. Now, as you’ll discover in The Simulation Hypothesis, physicists have begun to discover that “our universe isn’t an objective reality.”

It is indeed perfectly plausible, given the exponential speed with which technology advances, that we will be able to run simulations with the same level of sophistication as our reality in a matter of a few generations or less… provided we don’t destroy ourselves first or completely lose interest. Which answers the question of who might be running the program. As with the higher beings in Interstellar who reach back to give the dying human species a hand, “there is,” writes Rothman, “no sanctity or holiness in the simulation argument. The people outside the simulation aren’t gods,” or even aliens, “they’re us.” Or some sufficiently evolved version, that is, whose technological achievements would likely seem to us like magic.

The Simulation Hypothesis will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Yale Presents a Free Online Course on Literary Theory, Covering Structuralism, Deconstruction & More

in Literature, Online Courses, Philosophy, Yale | February 28th, 2017

It’s been a hallmark of the culture wars in the last few decades for politicians and opinionators to rail against academia. Professors of humanities have in particular come under scrutiny, charged with academic frivolity (sometimes at taxpayer expense), willful obscurantism, and all sorts of ideological crimes and diabolical methods of indoctrination. As an undergrad and graduate student in the humanities during much of the nineties and oughts, I’ve witnessed a few waves of such attacks and found the caricatures drawn by talk radio hosts and cabinet appointees both alarming and amusing. I’ve also learned that mistrust of academia is much older than the many virulent strains of anti-intellectualism in the U.S.

As Yale Professor of British Romantic Poetry Paul Fry points out in an interview with 3:AM Magazine, “satire about any and all professionals with a special vocabulary has been a staple of fiction and popular ridicule since the 18th century… and critic-theorists perhaps more recently have been the easy targets of upper-middle-brow anti-intellectuals continuously since [Henry] Fielding and [Tobias] Smollett.” Though the barbs of these British novelists are more entertaining than anything you’ll hear from current talking heads, the phenomenon remains the same: “Special vocabulary intimidate and are instantly considered obfuscation,” says Fry. “Reactions against them are shamelessly naïve, with no consideration of whether the recondite vocabularies may be serving some necessary and constructive purpose.”

Maybe you’re scratching your chin, shaking or nodding your head, or glazing over. But if you’ve come this far, read on. Fry, after all, acknowledges that jargon-laden scholarly vocabularies can become “self-parody in the hands of fools,” and thus have provided justifiable fodder for cutting wit since even Jonathan Swift’s day. But Fry picks this history up in the 20th century in his Yale course ENGL 300 (Introduction to Theory of Literature), an accessible series of lectures on the history and practice of literary theory, in which he proceeds in a critical spirit to cover everything from Russian Formalism and New Criticism; to Semiotics, Structuralism and Deconstruction; to the Frankfurt School, Post-Colonial Criticism and Queer Theory. Thanks to Open Yale Courses, you can watch the 26 lectures above. Or you can find them on YouTube, iTunes, or Yale’s own web site (where you can also grab a syllabus for the course). These lectures were all recorded in the Spring of 2009. The main text used in the course is David Richter’s The Critical Tradition.

Expanding with the rapid growth and democratizing of universities after World War II, literary and critical theories are often closely tied to the contentious politics of the Cold War. Their decline corresponds to these forces as well. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent snowballing of privatization and anti-government sentiment, many sources of funding for the humanities have succumbed, often under very public assaults on their character and utility. Fry’s presentation shows how literary theory has never been a blunt political instrument at any time. Rather it provides ways of doing ethics and philosophies of language, religion, art, history, myth, race, sexuality, etc. Or, put more plainly, the language of literary theory gives us different sets of tools for talking about being human.

Fry tells Yale Daily News that “literature expresses more eloquently and subtly emotions and feelings that we all try to express one way or another.” But why apply theory? Why not simply read novels, stories, and poems and interpret them by our own critical lights? One reason is that we cannot see our own biases and inherited cultural assumptions. One ostensibly theory-free method of an earlier generation of scholars and poets who rejected literary theory often suffers from this problem. The New Critics flourished mainly during the 40s, a fraught time in history when the country’s resources were redirected toward war and economic expansion. For Fry, this “last generation of male WASP hegemony in the academy” reflected “the blindness of the whole middle class,” and the idea “that life as they knew it… was life as everyone knew it, or should if they didn’t.”

Fry admits that theory can seem superfluous and needlessly opaque, “a purely speculative undertaking” without much of an object in view. Yet applied to literature, it provides exciting means of intellectual discovery. Fry himself doesn’t shy away from satirically taking the piss, as a modern-day Swift might say. He begins not with Coleridge or Keats (though he gets there eventually), but with a story for toddlers called “Tony the Tow Truck.” He does this not to mock, but to show us that “reading anything is a complex and potentially unlimited activity”—and as “a facetious reminder,” he tells 3:AM, that “theory is taking itself seriously in the wrong way if it exhausts its reason for being….”

Introduction to Theory of Literature will be added to our list of Free Online Literature Courses, a subset of our meta collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Study Shows That Teaching Young Kids Philosophy Improves Their Academic Performance, Making Them Better at Reading & Math

in Education, Philosophy | February 28th, 2017

Should we teach philosophy to children? You’d have a hard time, I imagine, convincing many readers of this site that we shouldn’t. But why? It’s not self-evident that Kant’s ethics will help Johnny or Susie better navigate playground politics or lunchroom disputes, nor is Plato’s theory of forms likely to show up on an elementary school exam. Maybe it’s never too early for kids to learn intellectual history. But it’s less clear that they can or should wrestle with Hegel.

Perhaps the question should be put another way: should we teach children to think philosophically? As we noted in an earlier post, English educators and entrepreneurs Emma and Peter Worley have answered affirmatively with their Philosophy Foundation, which trains children in methods of argumentation, problem-solving, and generally “thinking well.” They claim that practicing philosophical inquiry “has an impact on affective skills and… cognitive skills.”

Peter Worley also argues that it makes kids less prone to propaganda and the fear-mongering of totalitarians. While one reader astutely pointed out that several philosophers have had “authoritarian tendencies,” we should note that even some of the most anti-democratic—Socrates for example—have used philosophical methods to hold power to account and question means of social control.

But while this noble civic motivation may be a hard sell to a school board, or whatever the British equivalent, the idea that philosophical thinking promotes many kinds of literacy necessary for children’s success has found wide support for decades in England and the U.S. as part of a movement aptly named “Philosophy for children” (P4C), which “began with the work of Professor Matthew Lipman, who founded the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University, USA in 1974.”

Inspired by an earlier American pedagogical thinker, John Dewey, Lipman and co-authors published Philosophy in the Classroom, under “the assumption,” writes Temple University Press, “that what is taught in schools is not (and should not be) subject matter but rather ways of thinking.” Lipman and his colleagues have had significant influence on educators in the UK, prompting a huge study by the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) that tracked nine and ten year old students in England from January to December of 2013.

As Jenny Anderson writes at Quartz, “More than 3,000 kids in 48 schools across England participated in weekly discussions about concepts such as truth, justice, friendship, and knowledge, with time carved out for silent reflection, question making, question airing, and building on one another’s thoughts and ideas.” The results were pretty astounding. “Overall,” the study concludes, “pupils using the approach made approximately two additional months’ progress in reading and maths.” This despite the fact, notes Anderson, that “the course was not designed to improve literacy or numeracy.”

Children from disadvantaged backgrounds saw an even bigger leap in performance: reading skills increased by four months, math by three months, and writing by two months. Teachers also reported a beneficial impact on students’ confidence and ability to listen to others.

The rigorous study not only found immediate improvement but also longitudinally tracked the students’ development for two additional years and found that the beneficial effects continued through that time; “the intervention group continu[ed] to outperform the control group” from 22 of the schools “long after the classes had finished.” You can read the study for yourself here, and learn more about the Philosophy for Children movement—“inspired by a dialogical tradition of doing philosophy begun by Socrates in Athens 2,500 years ago”—at the Philosophy Foundation, the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, and the Center for Philosophy for Children at the University of Washington.

via Quartz/Big Think

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How Did Nietzsche Become the Most Misunderstood & Bastardized Philosopher?: A Video from Slate Explains

in Philosophy | February 23rd, 2017

Is there a more misunderstood philosopher than Friedrich Nietzsche? Granted, the question makes two assumptions: 1) That people read philosophy 2) That people read Friedrich Nietzsche. Perhaps neither of these things is widely true. Many people get their philosophy from film and television: Good Will Hunting, True Detective, Coming to America.… There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. I don’t read medical books. Most of my knowledge of medicine comes from hospital dramas. (If you ever hear me make unsourced medical claims, please remind me of this.)

But back to Nietzsche…. If few people read philosophy in general and Nietzsche in particular, why is his name so well-known, why are his ideas so badly mangled? Because some of the people who read a little Nietzsche write films and television shows. In many of them, he emerges as a twisted nihilist with no scruples and little regard for human life. In the most infamous case of Nietzsche-twisting, the philosopher’s sister extracted from his books what she wanted them to say, which sounded very much like the ideas of the Nazis who later quoted him.

Nietzsche’s mastery of the aphorism and his fiercely polemical nature have made him supremely quotable: “God is dead,” “What does not kill us, makes us stronger.” And so on. Bring the context of these statements to bear and they sound nothing like what we have imagined. The video above from Shon Arieh-Lerer and Daniel Hubbard explains how Nietzsche became “the most absurdly bastardized philosopher in Hollywood.” It leads with a tellingly hilarious clip from The Sopranos in which A.J. calls the philosopher “Niche” and Tony tells him, “even if God is dead, you’re still gonna kiss his ass.”

We might half expect Tony to embrace the German philosopher. The way Nietzsche’s been interpreted seems to justify the principles of sociopaths. This should not be so. “In reality,” the video’s producers write at Slate, “Nietzsche was a very subtle thinker.” The two biggest misconceptions about Nietzsche, that he was a nihilist and an anti-Semite, get his philosophy grievously wrong. Nietzsche “wrote letters to his family and friends telling them to stop being anti-Semitic” (and calling anti-Semites “aborted fetuses.”) He famously broke off his intense friendship with Richard Wagner in part because of Wagner’s anti-Semitism. His work is not kind to Judaism, but he rages against anti-Semitism.

Far from endorsing nihilist ideas, Nietzsche feared their rise and consequences. So how did he become “a darling of Nazis and sad teenagers?” The caricature arose in part because readers from his day to ours have, like Tony Soprano, found his complete and total rejection of Judeo-Christian morality too shocking to get beyond, mischaracterizing it as tantamount to the rejection of all human values. On the contrary, Nietzsche argued for the “revaluation” of values, “the exact opposite of what one might expect,” he wrote,” not at all sad and gloomy, but much more like a new and barely describable type of light, happiness, relief, amusement, encouragement, dawn.”

Of course, the fact that Nietzsche—or a butchered version thereof—was co-opted by the Nazis did more to sully his name than anything he actually wrote. “By the time Nietzsche made his way into American pop culture,” says Arieh-Lerer, “we were predisposed to getting him wrong.” Nietzsche may have had some strange quasi-mystical conceptions, and he believed in a definite hierarchy of cultures, but he was not a racist or a psychopath. He has been as misunderstood as many of the sad teenagers who love him. Perhaps you will be moved to read him for yourself after seeing his rehabilitation above. If so, we can point you toward online editions of nearly all of his books here.

Download Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Modern Thought (1960)

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: An Animated Introduction to the Most Insightful Study of American Democracy

in Philosophy, Politics | February 22nd, 2017

We cannot rightly see ourselves without honest feedback. Those who surround themselves with sycophants and people just like them only hear what they want to hear, and never get an accurate sense of their capabilities and shortcomings. And so the best feedback often comes from people outside our in-groups. This can be as true of nations as it can be of individuals, provided our critics are charitable, even when unsparingly honest, and that they take a genuine interest in our well-being.

These qualities well describe one of the sharpest critics of the United States in the past two centuries. Alexis de Tocqueville, aristocratic French lawyer, historian, and political philosopher, who traveled to the fledgling country in 1831 to observe a nation then in the grip of a populist fever under Andrew Jackson, a president who became notorious for his expropriation of indigenous land, ruthless relocation policies, and embrace of Southern slavery. But the groups who flourished under Jackson’s rule did so with a tremendous enthusiasm that the French thinker admired but also viewed with a very skeptical eye.

De Tocqueville published his observations and analyses of the United States in a now-famous book, Democracy in America. Though we’ve come to take the idea of democracy for granted, for the young Frenchman, a child of Napoleonic Europe, it was “a highly exotic and new political option,” as Alain de Botton tells us in his animated video introduction above. De Tocqueville “presciently believed that democracy was going to be the future all over the world, and so he wanted to know, ‘what would that be like?’”

With a grant from the French government, De Tocqueville traveled the country (then less than half its current size) for nine months, getting to know its people and customs as best he could, and making a series of general observations that would form the vignettes and arguments in his book. He was “particularly alive to the problematic and darker sides of democracy.” De Botton discusses five critical insights from Democracy in America. See three of them below, with quotes from De Tocqueville himself.

1. Democracy Breeds Materialism.

For De Tocqueville one kind of materialism—the excessive pursuit of wealth—disposed the country to another, “a dangerous sickness of the human mind”—the denial of a spiritual or intellectual life. “While man takes pleasure in this honest and legitimate pursuit of well-being,” he wrote, “it is to be feared that in the end he may lose the use of his most sublime faculties, and that by wanting to improve everything around him, he may in the end degrade himself.”

De Tocqueville, says De Botton, observed that “money seemed to be quite simply the only achievement that Americans respected” and that “the only test of goodness for any item was how much money it happens to make.”

2. Democracy Breeds Envy & Shame

“When all the prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished,” wrote De Tocqueville, “when every profession is open to everyone, an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects.” Unable to rise above his circumstances, and yet believing that he should be equal to his neighbors in achievements, such a person may blame himself and feel ashamed, or succumb to envy and ill will.

De Tocqueville was far too optimistic about the abolishment of “prerogatives of birth and fortune,” but many Americans might recognize themselves still in his general picture, in which “the sense of unlimited opportunity could initially encourage a surface cheerfulness.” And yet, De Botton notes, “as time passed and the majority failed to raise themselves, Tocqueville noted that their mood darkened, that bitterness took hold and choked their spirits, and that their hatred of themselves and their masters grew fierce.”

3. Tyranny of the Majority

De Tocqueville, De Botton says, thought that “democratic culture… often ends up demonizing any assertion of difference, and especially cultural superiority, even though such attitudes might be connected with real merit.” In such a state, “society has an aggressive leveling instinct.”

It wasn’t only attacks on high culture that De Tocqueville feared, but what he called the “Omnipotence of the Majority,” a phrase he used to denote the power of public opinion as an almost totalitarian means of social control. In volume two of his study, published in 1840, De Tocqueville devoted particular attention to “the power which that majority naturally exercises over the mind…. By whatever political laws men are governed in the ages of equality, it may be foreseen that faith in public opinion will become for them a species of religion, and the majority its ministering prophet.”

From this prediction, De Tocqueville foresaw “two tendencies; one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other prohibiting him from thinking at all.”

De Botton goes on to discuss two closely related critiques: democracy’s suspicion of all authority and its undermining of free thought. Rather than encountering the kind of marketplace of ideas the country prides itself on fostering, he found in few places “less independence of mind, and true freedom of discussion, than in America.” The criticism is harsh, and De Tocqueville did not flatter his hosts often, and yet for all of its “inherent drawbacks,” De Botton writes at the School of Life, the Frenchman “isn’t anti-democratic.”

His aim is “to get us to be realistic” about democratic society and its tendencies to inhibit rather than enlarge many freedoms. As Arthur Goldhammer observes at The Nation, De Tocqueville believed that “True freedom lay not in the pursuit of individualistic aims, but “in ‘slow and tranquil’ action in concert with others sharing some collective purpose.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Take a Break from Your Frantic Day & Let Alan Watts Introduce You to the Calming Ways of Zen

in Philosophy, Religion | February 16th, 2017

By the end of the 1960s, Alan Watts had become one of the gurus of the counterculture. Though he was not really a Zen Buddhist, he was many a person’s gateway into the religion due to The Way of Zen published in 1958. His was a philosophical and populist approach to Eastern religion, an antecedent to the Eckhart Tolles of our time.

This short film, Now and Zen, was directed by Elda and Irving Hartley, shot in the gardens at their residence, and features Watts encouraging the viewer to go beyond the material world, especially as we understand it through language and our cultural viewpoint. Instead, he says, “This world is a multidimensional network of all kinds of vibrations” which infants understand better than us adults. The film then transitions into a guided sitting meditation of sorts, and ends with the sounds of nature. (Plus, there’s ducks.)

“Hence the importance of meditation in zen,” he continues, “which is, from time to time, to stop thinking altogether, and simply be aware of what is. This may be done very, very simply. By becoming aware of the play of light and color upon your eyes. Don’t name anything you see. Just let the light and the shadow, the shape and the color, play with your eyes, and allow the sound to play with your ears.”

Elda Hartley, working with her husband Irving, used this film to launch the Hartley Film Foundation, its mission to produce documentaries on world religions and spirituality. (It still exists as a non-profit). Zen as a subject came first, because Elda had been on a trip to Japan with Alan Watts, and when she proposed the film, he agreed to narrate. She would later make films with Margaret Mead, Joseph Campbell, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and others.

There are several other films on archive.org’s Hartley Productions page, and another Watts-narrated one: The Flow of Zen. (Warning: this is the opposite of meditative, and its harsh atonal electronic sounds very far removed from any mediation CD you might have kicking around.)

Better still: Open Culture also has plenty of Alan Watts in the archive.

Finally, as someone who spent many an undergrad night listening to his late-night lectures on KPFK and at the time not understanding a whit, it was edifying to hear Watts say in the above film:

As you listen to my voice, don’t try to make any sense of what I am saying. Just be aware of the tones and your brain will automatically take care of the sense.

I can vouch that he was right about that…eventually. But only after reading many, many books on Buddhism.

Now and Zen and The Flow of Zen will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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How Machiavelli Really Thought We Should Use Power: Two Animated Videos Provide an Introduction

in History, Philosophy, Politics | February 15th, 2017

Nice guys, so they say, finish last. Many of us might instinctively label such a worldview “Machiavellian,” partially for good reason and partially not. It stands as a testament to the insights of the Renaissance-era Florentine political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, expressed with great clarity and succinctness in his books The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, not just that his name became an adjective, but that it became one that remains in wide use nearly 500 years after his death. But like other such terms — “Kafkaesque” and “Orwellian” come to mind — its modern usage tends to come detached from its namesake writer’s original ideas.

So what did Machiavelli actually have to say to humanity? “Machiavelli’s Advice for Nice Guys,” a new animated video from Alain de Botton’s School of Life, highlights the core insight of his work: “that the wicked tend to win. And they do so because they have a huge advantage over the good: they are willing to act with the darkest ingenuity and cunning to further their cause. They are not held back by those rigid opponents of change: principles.

They will be prepared to outright lie, twist facts, threaten or get violent. They will also – when the situation demands it – know how to seductively deceive, use charm and honeyed words, bedazzle and distract. And in this way, they conquer the world.”

This line of thinking, put in such stark terms, can make Machiavelli seem like an offputtingly harsh (if quite intelligent) character. But his writing is more nuanced: he advocates not using flat-out lies and violence to achieve one’s ends, but indeed to be nice — just “never to be overly devoted to acting nicely,” an attitude he thought the West’s popular readings of the story of Jesus of Nazareth too often advocated — while always knowing “how to borrow – when need be – every single trick employed by the most cynical, dastardly, unscrupulous and nastiest people who have ever lived.” Nice guys, in short, have no choice but to learn from their enemies.

You can learn more about the sometimes harrowing experiences that taught Machiavelli all this in the School of Life’s introduction to his political theory just above. He reckoned, more memorably than any other, “the price of dealing with the world as it is, and not as we feel it should be. The world has continued to love and hate Machiavelli in equal measure for insisting on this uncomfortable truth.” Machiavelli, as Salman Rushdie put it in a clip we featured a few years ago, lived in a time when Italy’s ruling families behaved “in the most ruthless way, and he wrote this little treatise about not what he would like things to be like, but how power actually works, which he observed.” Rushdie calls the negative associations with the philosopher’s name “a classic case of shooting the messenger” — something, alas, even the most good-intentioned ruler may find himself forced to do once in a while.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Did Plato’s Republic Predict the Rise of Donald Trump?: A Chilling Animated Video Narrated by Andrew Sullivan

in Philosophy, Politics | February 8th, 2017

We stand, perhaps, at the threshold of the singularity, that great event when machine intelligence overtakes our own. The writhing of late capitalism may in fact be the death throes of Western modernity and, for both good and ill, much of its Enlightenment legacy. Institutions like the press and the polling industry have stumbled badly. No amount of denialism will stop the climate crisis. Something entirely new seems poised for its emergence into the world, though what it might be no one seems fully equipped to say. Why, then, should we look back to Plato to explain our epoch, a philosopher who had no familiarity with modern weaponry, artificial intelligence, or information systems?

Perhaps a better question is: do we and should we still value the contributions of European philosophy in contemporary life? If so, then we must allow that Plato may be perpetually relevant to learned discourse. Alfred North Whitehead famously characterized “the European philosophical tradition” as “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Suggesting his agreement with the sentiment, Massimo Pigliucci titled his regular column at The Philosopher’s Magazine, “Footnotes to Plato.” Though he did not invent his mode of inquiry, and often got it very wrong, Plato, he writes, “is a towering figure for an entire way of thinking about fundamental questions.”

There may be few questions more fundamental than those we now ask in the U.S. about tyranny, its origins and remedy—about how we arrived at where we are and what ethical and practical matters lie in the hands of the citizenry. These questions were central to the thought of Socrates, Plato’s mentor and primary character in his dialogues, who had some surprisingly contrarian ideas on the matter in The Republic. Here, as Andrew Sullivan tells us in the BBC Newsnight video above, Socrates theorizes that “Tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.”

The statement shocks us, but it also ran counter to the Athenian sentiments of Plato’s day. The picture Socrates paints of democracy’s ills finds its echo in the contemporary conservative’s worldview, but we should point out that Sullivan misrepresents the text he reads as one continuous passage, when it is actually a series of excerpted quotations. And as always, we should be careful not to try and see our own partisan divides in ancient thought. Socrates also had many other things to say the modern right finds truly objectionable.

The problem with democracy, Socrates thought, was too much freedom. Its “freedoms multiply,” he says,

until it becomes a many-colored clock decorated in all hues. Men are interchangeable with women, and all their natural differences forgotten. Animals have rights. Foreigners can come and work just like citizens. Children boss their parents around. Teachers are afraid of their students. The rich try to look just like the poor.

Soon every kind of inequality is despised. The wealthy are particularly loathed. And elites in general are treated as suspect, perpetuating inequality and representing injustice.

Under such presumably decadent conditions, “a would-be tyrant would seize his moment”:

He is usually of the elite but is in tune with the time. Given over to random pleasures and whims. Feasting on food, and especially sex.

He makes his move by taking over a particularly obedient mob, and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. He is a traitor to his class, and soon his elite enemies find a way to appease him or are forced to flee.

Eventually he stands alone, offering the addled, distracted, self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities.

He rides a backlash to success. Too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery. He offers himself as the personified answer to all problems. To replace the elites, and rule alone on behalf of the masses. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, impetuously, repeals itself.

The grim, dramatic animated video that accompanies Sullivan’s narration of this chillingly prescient ancient text is not subtle about the modern parallels. We can heartily debate the diagnosis of “too much freedom” as the cause of democracy’s yielding to tyranny. But whatever democracy’s failings, the effects Plato describes above are as evident today as they were almost 2300 years ago, though we may flatter ourselves in thinking that the mechanics of our political systems have evolved since then. In any case, our technological evolution means that unlike in Plato’s day, the rise of a tyrant like Donald Trump, as Sullivan wrote last year, may be “an extinction-level event.”

Introduction to Political Philosophy: A Free Yale Course

Philosophy Bites: Podcasting Ideas From Plato to Singularity Since 2007

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

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