Building a City State out of Plato
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and today we are talking about Plato’s Republic.
I was just telling Greg and Rachel that in high school we read certain excerpts from Republic, and in college I read different excerpts, so prepping for this episode was the first time that I’ve actually read it all the way through, which I recommend to a certain extent. We’ll get into all of the different things. Should we start at the very beginning?
It’s a very good place to start. When you come to a study of Plato, people want to talk about his ideals, the forms, the universals and epistemology generally, and yet Republic is by far his most famous and important work and the one that’s quoted and referenced and regurgitated in various forms for the next 2,000 years. It touches on those things – the ideal of justice. In fact, supposedly that’s what it’s all about.
Yes, there’s that. And so, as is the way with most of Plato – we call them dialogues but they’re more like trialogues or quadralogues. A bunch of people are hanging out one afternoon and someone asks the inciting question, as you say, and they begin to talk. Mostly Plato has a fictionalized Socrates do the talking, and there are a few people who are stuck in, normally more or less to be yes-men. “Yes, that is true! Certainly, without a doubt!”
The further you get into the book, the more you just skip over Glaucon’s lines.
Yes. So that’s the format. If some of you have never read it, that’s what it’s like.
The issue becomes the Greek city-state, the polis. What is the nature of justice within the system? These men say that maybe if they start from scratch, if they do a bit of roleplaying and build a city in their imaginations, a polis, city-state, that maybe then it will become clear.
Fine. Socrates says that the city-state has to arise out of human need. “A state arises out of the needs of mankind. No one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants. Can any other origin of a state be imagined?” and then whatever the yes-man says.
Notice, human need. None of us is self-sufficing. We all have wants. He throws it out there more or less as a rhetorical question. He can’t think of any other reason for a state. Hmm, God? The sovereign triune God who is in himself eternal community and communion, who creates in his image and therefore destines man for communion.
You could still say, “Well, that’s a need. Man needs God.” That’s not the kind of need he’s talking about here.
Certainly this one doesn’t. This is a very thoroughly humanistic approach to the whole thing, but it’s not individualistic. It’s not, “I bring my self-autonomy and freedom to this deal, and I’m willing to trade a little bit of my liberty for all the things that I want and need.” That’s not what’s going on here because the further they go in building this thing, the more the individual drifts into the formless mass that is the polis.
When we talk about utopias, Plato’s Republic usually is first historically on the list, but as utopias go it’s rather a pathetic one. It does not guarantee peace. In fact, it’s assumed that this will be a warrior state, necessarily so for reasons we’ll get to. It doesn’t promise luxury. It does promise that the guardians can share all the women around, but only at certain times and under certain conditions carefully regulated by a created manufactured liturgical calendar.
Why does somebody want this exactly? Well, because we need a state, and this one is what Plato or Socrates thinks would fit the bill for us.
And later in the dialogue we do come to that bluntly stated, where the interlocutor says, “Well, then these people won’t be happy,” and Socrates says, “Of course they won’t be happy. Who said it was about their happiness? It’s about the happiness of the state.”
But since this is a roleplay as you say, it’s a thought experiment and Socrates even says at one point, “We know this can never be. This is an ideal,” so how much are we to suppose that Plato is earnest in what he suggests?
There’s the problem, because we don’t have Sparks Notes from his students to tell us what he said off-camera. We look at some of his suggestions and say, “Okay, that went over ridiculously. There’s no way. What? Really?”
Or just, “And no one’s going to believe that lie. Yeah, you guardians, you actually came forth full-blown from the womb of the earth, and all those things that you remember about childhood and parents, all illusions. It’s all implanted thoughts. Trust us.”
It’s almost like a Brave New World kind of a thing he suggests, without the technology to explain how it could be possible. He’s just sort of fancifully creating this thing that is horrifying to me.
In Brave New World at least we have the predestination chambers where babies are created in test tubes and genetically modified to be content in whatever roles society needs them to fill. This is “If we lie to people enough and manipulate their environment enough and educate them properly, they’ll go along with all this.”
At this remove we can’t be sure. We don’t know to what degree he meant this, but I think we can be pretty sure that a lot of scholars and socialist daydreamers over the past 2,000 years either thought he was serious or just edited out mentally those things that were ridiculous. “That was just for fun, but the real part…” – no, that goes with it.
We need to work our way there. Without consulting Moses and the prophets or anybody else for that matter, these men set about deciding what things people need – food, dwelling, clothing, stuff like this. If that’s all there is then we don’t need a lot of people, but when we consider division of labor let’s add a few more people so we don’t have to all do everything. We’ve got some more people going on.
The first point we come up with is this is a lame society. They need some things to spice up life, like spices and prostitutes and couches, as opposed to sitting on rocks, I guess. At this point Socrates says, “Oh, you don’t just want a state.” He uses the word ‘luxurious’ or a state at fever heat.
Yes, and he recognizes the geographical/geological/agricultural limitations of any place you put your city. No city is going to have everything. We would say, “Oh, then trade.” His response is, “Oh, then war.” Other people are going to have stuff you want. You need to go kill people and take their stuff. This is roleplaying, after all. So there we are.
The Republic then moves to the people, at least in the English translation, he calls guardians. These are not the common ordinary citizens. These are the people who are the soldiers, the politicians, statesmen, the bureaucrats, the people who run the city and who fight to protect and preserve it. It’s at this point that things begin to get a little weird.
Before I go on, Emily, since it’s so fresh in your mind, what else comes to your mind at this point of things you’ve read?
That is the first big subtopic, if you will. I think we said already that we get here by trying to ask about justice. Socrates says, “We need to look at a big scale because it’s easier to see at a big scale what we’re talking about.”
The state this whole time is in some sense an analogy or metaphor for the human soul, so he’s constantly drawing this parallel back and forth between what is an ordered state and what is the analog in the soul.
That becomes explicit right at the end. I haven’t read enough of it lately, if ever, to draw out anything along that line, but feel free. He does look at these guardians and he does consider their training for body and soul. He does not depart from traditional Greek models. There are some things he doesn’t say, and we can either assume he’s going to follow traditional Greek models then…
Well, he pokes at them. He says, “We wouldn’t want our guardians to be brought up on lies, unless they’re the lies that we think are good for them,” which does away with most of Homer.
Homer and Hesiod go right out the door because they say things about the gods that Plato and Socrates will not accept. There’s some argument that they present the gods as changeable, and for the gods to be gods they must be immutable. A number of things like this come out of his conception of what the gods are. There’s some quick superficial argument.
There’s no treatise on theology, no Theology 101, no “Here is who or what I believe God or the gods are.” The things he says could apply to some kind of vague theism or deism. It could just as well apply to polytheism stripped of its literary backgrounds. So people can come here with their Christian presuppositions and with the right translation and say, “Oh, this god person, yeah, he’s like the God of the Bible, immutable.”
He’s good. He does that which is good. He does not do evil. But using this rationalized standard he then begins to point out that there are some lies that must not be told. So we need to get rid of any of the poets, however great they may be, who describe the gods this way.
As Christians we’re kind of like, “Okay, we don’t really have a problem with this.” There goes classical education because we’re not starting with Homer anymore, for sure. But it goes all the way down to any kind of story that even nurses might tell children. “Once a god went out looking for an apple…”
There’s a very careful removal of a sense of immanence, which is interesting. Gods cannot be said to take disguises because that would be deceptive, so you can’t say, “You better listen up or the god that’s walking up and down the street will find you.” It’s like, “Oh no, the god would never catch you doing anything. We can’t have that thought, can we.”
No, the gods are far removed. They cannot appear or manifest themselves in any but their true form, and since their true form is invisible, intangible, and transcendent, we’re right out. God appearing as say the angel of the Lord is an impossibility, and worse, God taking incarnate form in the person of Jesus Christ is right out.
Yes, it’s unthinkable. Why would God do that? That would be a change according to Plato’s and Socrates’ standard of reason, so that’s out.
The key thing is not simply that he’s slicing and dicing theology. He’s putting it in the power of the guardians, or the people who train the guardians – the guardians behind the guardians, the people who watch the watchers to do the censoring. He’s handing to the super-state the people behind who are training these rulers.
The power to censor literature and theology and education in general, and anything that might confuse these guardians in the future or give them a misunderstanding of ultimate reality or the nature of God.
We mentioned in passing that God is good. If God is good, that which is good does good. It does not do bad. With a little sleight of hand that means it does not produce any harm, so God is not the source of all things but only of good things. God can send nice April showers on your flowers, but the storm that tears your village to pieces, that wasn’t God.
The little kid that comes and visits and stays as a friend of your children, God may have sent that, but the lion who devours your sons and daughters out in the fields, that wasn’t God. Don’t blame God for that. God doesn’t do those things, and we keep going. So by the time we’re done, God does not do much. God can’t do much because being good he is the source of good. Of course, the question as Christians we come to immediately but that the world has trouble with is good by whose standards?
The president of my college used to wander around the cafeteria asking students, “What is the good?”
So children must not hear any stories, and songs are censored that corrupt their moral natures or their understanding of the gods. Homer and Hesiod are out.
Yes. That’s beyond what I usually have my students read. Plato was touchy about music because of the power to disrupt the soul. Aristotle and Plato had different takes on the power of music and what it could do. Plato I believe was the one who said, “I’ll let you write the nation’s laws if I can write their music.” He understood that there’s something there, and something that powerful must be regulated by the state.
We’re not talking here of a state where people are free to express themselves, think their own thoughts, do what’s best for themselves, find themselves. As you said earlier, it’s about the good of the state. And although we don’t want people lying to the guardians of the state in their youth – well, we don’t want other people doing it. We’ll come to that in a moment.
Here it is in my notes. Socrates, bordering on the ridiculous, proposes that educators put forward an audacious life for the good of state. The rulers, the soldiers, and finally the people will be told that what the guardians remember of their youth was all a delusion and never happened. They will be told that they were birth-shaped and formed in the bowels of Mother Earth and emerged full grown, their skills and powers fully developed and their minds full of false memories. And so the guardians only care about the land and the state and nothing about family or childhood friends.
How many movies, novels, stories and things hinge upon, “Wait, you were my childhood friend. I must rescue you from my own people because of this special bond we have.” None of that is going to happen.
Interestingly enough, this kind of fits in. We were watching NCIS and Mark Harmon’s character, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, gets a call from his dad. His dad says, “I just got a note from an old friend back from my Air Force days. I was flying this plane and I lost all sense of where I was. My compass was out. The radio wasn’t working and I was done for. This guy pulls up beside me in his plane and then leads me out. He saved my life and now I have this letter from him saying that he’s about to die. We must go find him. I need you to meet him.”
This is actually a secondary plotline, but through the rest of the show we’re left wondering whether Gibbs’ dad is sane, whether or not dementia has set in, because he’s so insistent and it’s so important. They get to the man’s house and he’s not there. There’s some reference to an ambulance having picked him up later, but when the team does searches he’s not showing up at any hospital or the morgue.
They do the background search and this man, as far as they can tell, never existed in Gibbs’ father’s squadron. He seems to be a complete figment of the imagination, and yet the dad keeps saying, “No, no, he’s real. You’ve got to meet him. I know you don’t believe me. That’s your problem, but I’m your father and you should respect me. This is so important.”
At the very end Gibbs confronts his father and says, “Dad, we looked. There was no such man in your squadron.”
And so it turns out that indeed he is alive and the whole thing hinges upon World War II. We see the memories relived and finally we’re shown the second plane and there’s a swastika on it as he comes up and he guides Gibbs’ dad back to safety, and that’s why it’s so important.
At that moment this bond – and here’s the point – that transcends city-states, that transcends political identities and political ideologies kick in and they both identified themselves as human beings and that was more important, and the story goes on from there.
That’s not going to happen in Plato’s Republic. There will never be that moment of realization when you understand there’s something more important than the state – not an ideology, not a religion, not a person, not a memory. It’s all about the state. The suggestion is if somehow that slips up, well, we know what to do about children who don’t fit in. We can assume that guardians who are troublemakers might meet a similar fate. Plato doesn’t go there because he doesn’t want to admit that his educational system is actually going to fail at any point.
The next thing is that these guardians – the goal here is to get them to identify wholly with the state so not only can they not have any memories that are uniquely theirs, any past, anything precious to them in the past, but they can’t have anything in the present because, you know, we fight over our stuff. “That’s my car. That’s my house. That’s my library. That’s my Rolex. You can’t have it.”
Well, if they don’t have these things, there’s nothing to fight over. All they have is what they have, which is the state, so let’s make them eat the same food, drink the same drink, have their meals at the same place, sleep under the same conditions, all have the same blankets, all have the same beds, all have the same food. I have nothing that is uniquely mine that sets me apart from you.
There’s a scheme to maintain satisfaction with this situation by flattering them. “Oh, but your soul is made of silver and gold. What would you want that pale imitation called money for?” I don’t know a single human being on which that would work. What good does the silver and gold in my soul do for me if I can’t have what I want?
I think that’s maybe implied, and there’s a lot that has to be implied, in that these guardians grew up in this state. They don’t get to see another one. This is it. As far as they’re concerned, this is the limitation on mankind.
I’m reminded of citizens of the Soviet Union during the Cold War when they were told we were starving, we were poor, we were wretched, we had nothing, and they lived in paradise. Forget the long lines. Forget the substandard quality of everything. They weren’t to know it was substandard. They weren’t to know that they were poor. They were told, “You’re living your best life ever. Compared to the rest of the world, this is heaven.” Therefore, it was very dangerous to let their citizens reach out beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union.
The book I’ve been proofing for my friend is simply so far an account of groups who came in to visit the Soviet Union shortly after the revolution to and see what the quality of life was. First of all, these people were let in very selectively. Where they were going, what they were doing was all planned out in advance. No last minute, “Hey, can we go see that?” “No.”
They were just not allowed, and if people accidentally came up and bumped into these foreign visitors it could get you sent to prison for years, just having an interaction with someone from the outside.
There was an interesting side benefit of this. A man named George Bailey in a book called Armageddon in Prime Time argues that one of the reasons the Soviet Union fell was exactly this. In America we don’t like people hacking into our systems, but we keep training young people to run computers. We let them experiment with computers. We let them have computers and we maintain these great phone lines, across which signals can go.
The Soviet Union couldn’t chance any of that. Their fear was not people hacking into the system, it was people hacking out, because what if they reached out and touched America and found out what was really going on in America?
Which is the exact reason why Google is a banned site in China. You can’t just surf the internet.
No, and it was like that before there was an internet. You can’t get out. We will tell you what we want you to know.
Back to the guardians. I think the assumption here is that having grown up in the state they don’t know any other life. You have to plan on that because if they’re getting magazines from Sparta, Athens, and Corinth trying to advertise all kinds of luxuries, that’s self-defeating.
We’re already censoring literature. I assume we’re censoring mail or whatever would be the equivalent in that culture that would let other people know, “Hey, they’ve got some pretty cool stuff going on in Corinth. You might want to go check it out.” No, no, no. All you know about Corinth is that they’re poor, illiterate, and the enemy. That’s it. We have to keep a lid on this.
That brings us to wives and children, and here’s where it gets really complicated. Even after I have it fresh in my mind I can’t always remember the details, so Emily feel free to jump in and correct me or supplement. The idea is that we want to have the genetically – he doesn’t say genetically, but that’s what he means – smartest, fastest, strongest marry with the smartest, strongest, fastest, and thus produce seed of that nature and this will be our stock.
But the problem is that some of the women are going to be more desirable at some level, more beautiful, maybe they can beat you up on the gymnasium floor or whatever, and the young men are going to want quite a few women, so how do you handle that? You can’t really. The whole point is that they work together. You can’t really keep the men and women apart and only let the handsome men see the handsome women, although that would probably work as well as what he actually suggests.
He does suggest that all of the men and the women who are athletes are to be exercising together, just as you would have both your male dogs and your female dogs out on your hunting trip.
Of course. So the solution is we’re going to lie again. We’re going to tell them that every man has a chance to be with every woman, but it’s going to be arranged by lottery. He even suggests a little machine, not unlike our gumball machines.
Or election machines. We might get cancelled for saying that in some contexts.
And they will be rigged, but the guardians won’t know that. Everyone will believe everything is fair and above board.
“I’ve been trying to get with Susie for six years now and it always comes up Claudia instead. I just have rotten luck, I guess,” because once you tell them, “No, this is being done to you deliberately” you’ve got problems.
Now, children will be conceived, not necessarily every time but often enough, so it now becomes the question of are the guardians going to be interested in these children. Won’t they stake claim on the ones they perceive to be theirs?
Well, if we have the mating take place at particular times, then the children will be born all at the same time. We’re going to take those children and we’re going to put them in a state nursery. I believe he uses the word “pen” like for pigs. They’re not going to have much contact with them, but we’ll appoint nannies and nurses by the state who will feed and clothe and train these children.
The parents can come by now and then, but all they’ll be met with is all of these children who were born about the same time and who apparently won’t look too terribly different from everybody else, and they’re all your children. They’ll all call you mom and dad or aunt and uncle, and you’ll call them all sons and daughters, so you are now invested in all of the children, not just the ones that biologically you know to be yours, and they in turn are invested in you.
You’re going to keep on doing this in tune to some kind of liturgical calendar where we’ll celebrate some god or something. Those will be the days when we’ll let the men and women breed and the children will be conceived. We’ll keep it on a fixed rhythm so that all you know is, “I had a child in that generation someplace, but there were like 40 kids born so I don’t know.”
So not only do I not have my own house or car or Rolex, I don’t have my own kids. I don’t have my own life. If I haven’t already had sex with the women I’m interested in, I have good hopes I will one day because I trust the system.
At what point are we supposed to get disgusted here and say, “Why are we holding up this man as the champion of the good, the beautiful, and the just?”
“Because clearly he’s joking, Greg. This is too ridiculous. He can’t possibly mean it.”
As you’ve been talking it reminds me of the fact that his system has been, with some variations, asserted and repeated over and over and over again. I think it is an example of humanistic wisdom in the sense that if you are going to control people and make your state supreme, this is how you do it. You detach them from every root that they would otherwise have.
You detach them from God. You put God far away. You detach them from education of the world around them. You detach them from the family, from their children. It’s just been a wash/rinse/repeat in lots of cases – in the actual book Dystopia, in other dystopian novels, plus what we’ve seen in Marxism and socialism.
It actually even reminds me of something I studied in the Ottoman empire, where they would pull out a group of young Christian men and brainwash them into being Islamic soldiers for the sultan. They were to know nothing but the state.
So as I’ve been listening I’m thinking, yes, if you want to control people, the state is your means and these are all the methods, because you’ve got to disconnect them everything. Then they have nothing but to trust and believe you.
It’s like an abusive situation. In a pure sense you are isolating them from everything except what you control.
Speaking of dystopian novels, 1984 comes to mind. I was thinking so what’s the point. 1984 would tell us the point is control. It’s the power. It’s the power to destroy a human soul and remake it in your image. It’s not about luxury or lust or sex or wealth. It’s simply about the power to terrorize and destroy, and the thirst for that is unending and it’s frightening.
1984 in many respects is a faithful retelling of Plato’s Republic, just with greater technology. And the more the technology increases the more we think, “Wait, it was ridiculous then but look what we could do now.” Let’s not do that, please. The problem is not the technology. The problem is in the human soul. He was looking for justice and at the end he asks, “Did we find it?” What’s your take on his final solution, Emily?
I don’t think he’s willing to answer that question. He sort of segues into great cosmology, which is a bit of an excuse, I think. He sort of talks about what he posits as the nature of the final judgment and the fates.
This does tie in with his sort of fixation on music – the music of the spheres and the resonance of the different spheres of which the universe is composed. Fundamentally I think that’s basically my answer, is that he’s not willing to answer the question of whether he found justice or not, which is rather telling.
“Justice is the harmonious interaction of the social classes within the city-state.” Yes, but that begs the question. Yes, that’s like saying justice is when people act justly. Yeah, and? By what standard?
“Justice means doing one’s own business, the citizens of each class doing the work appropriate to that class,” and here’s a quote – “Any meddling of the one with the other or the change of one into the other is the greatest harm to the state and may be most justly termed evildoing. When the trainer, the auxiliary, and the guardian each do their own business, that is justice and will make the city just.”
We’re back to and by what standard? How? Why? What? It sounds like there’s something there but there’s not. Why should they do their own business? Who defines their own business? You did when you created the city-state I suppose. Does that mean that every person at some point in their life, presumably when they’re quite young, is given a badge or a tag or a number that says, “You are worker 604. You are assigned to being a tailor.”
“You’re our cobbler, and it is a transgression of divine justice to be otherwise.”
Again we’re back to Brave New World where it’s all done by genetic engineering, but it’s the same thing. Who decided? The planners did. Again, as you say, it’s the deep state, the planners behind the guardians.
There’s an old phrase, I assume it was a Roman writer, who said, “Who watches the watchmen? Who guards the guardians?” and that’s a real question. Who’s behind all this?
This is what he finally says – “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils – no, nor the human race, as I believe – and then only will this our state have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.”
This is kind of the peak of the discourse, I think, where Plato is saying, “Who really should be running this is the philosophers,” surprise surprise.
Right. I think it’s Book VI where he defines the nature of a philosopher and describes what the philosopher is like. Boy, good luck finding one in real life, by the way.
To bring this back to the semi-real world, if one is able to find the proper historical writers and the proper original texts, it’s not that hard to trace this kind of thinking through the years that led out of the late middle ages, through the renaissance, into the enlightenment, and then to the French revolution – this esoteric thought – “There are smart people who know stuff and they should plan the world.”
The experts. The word technocrat hadn’t been invented yet, but that’s what it will become in the 20th century. Originally it was the philosophers – Danton, Robespierre, their ilk and all of that – and they weren’t from the lower classes. They were from the upper middle or lower upper classes. They were people who were university-trained. They were people who were wrapped up in journalism and in the secret societies that had honeycombed France at the time.
They thought in terms of transcendental – we would say myths, but to them, truth. From the Rosicrucians to the Freemasons to the Illuminati on, there is this ongoing “We are the people who know really cool stuff. We should run the world, but if we came out and told you that you wouldn’t like it so we’re just going to kind of kiss up to the sons of the rich and powerful and tell these stupid jocks or money horses how to use their money and power, and they’ll never notice that we’re the ones pulling the strings.” This leads us into the 20th century.
There’s a lot of fear in Christian circles and conservative circles about conspiracies, and conspiracies behind conspiracies, and the great conspiracy and all that, but there is really a habit within the human mind to say, “I’m smart but I could never beat up anybody. I will use my smartness to get other strong people who trust me to do the beating up for me. It’ll be great.” It’s not much different from a playground at this point, but it is a common theme.
So people worry about the Illuminati or the Freemasons or whatever. They’re just people. They’re people who think that they know stuff, or they’re not going to admit they don’t. Sometimes it’s about UFOs or ascended masters or international bankers or who knows what. These are the people who know stuff.
Just a quick glancing over the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, from Roosevelt on we have brain trusts, we have eggheads, we have people with university degrees who hang about the presidents and advise them and tell them how to make the world work. No one stops and asks, “Why are you listening to these people?”
Can we define smart, please? The Bible says it begins with the fear of God, and says it involves keeping his commandments, and there’s none of this here. It’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s all illusion. It’s all what we get in Plato, and that Christians have not figured this out to me of late has become very frustrating. We get our kids through Christian high school and send them off to Christian colleges oftentimes, where they are taught Plato and Aristotle, as if this is some great Christian discovery. We do our best to inoculate them against that, but it is so pervasive.
“You want to be an intelligent Christian? Then you need to study Plato, Aristotle, Socrates. They will tell you about the good, the true, and the beautiful. They were almost Christians because they were rational.”
Let’s see what we can chock up to Plato. I made a list here. In the name of social harmony he called for conspiracy and deceit, the abolition of marriage among the elite, state-controlled nurseries, and the destruction of eugenically-inferior children.
This is wisdom? This is the just and the beautiful? Christians need to stop listening to this garbage. Christians honestly need to read Plato.
There was one particular pastor who accused me of assigning wicked books to my students. I was a little confused at the time. I think I finally figured out what he meant. “You’re assigning books not written by Reformed Presbyterian Christians.”
First of all, most of our clientele doesn’t come from that sector of the church anyhow. We assign the Bible, strangely enough. But yes, we do assign some books written by our enemies so that our students can see them while we’re around to say, “Look, this is unbiblical. Look, this is ungodly. Look, this is stupid.”
Yes, we’re there to shine scripture on them. I actually had one very fine young man, and I was impressed that he actually did come to me. He came with his mom, I suspect because his pastor was the pastor in question. He said, “Why are you having us read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time?”
“It’s culturally significant. It’s a good introduction to what philosophers and astrophysicists are thinking, and I would rather have you read it now here while I’m around to answer questions than to run into it the first time in university. You need to know what the enemy is thinking.”
His mom accepted that as a good answer and I think he did, but it was interesting, that same kind of thing. “We’re not going to read anything that disturbs us.” Yeah, until you get to college. You are going to college, aren’t you? Most of them do, so what do they find there? Who are they going to listen to?
I’ve told my students again and again over the 40 years I’ve been teaching now, “I don’t want you to believe things because I say them, because when you get to college you’re going to find someone who’s a lot smarter, more charismatic, better looking, and more entertaining that I am, and if you believe stuff just because I say it you’re going to believe them just because they say it. You need to be able to measure this against the word of God.”
So if we do have any university professors or bureaucrats listening, are the things you’re teaching actually taken from scripture or is scripture an add-on afterwords. Does scripture you think give you permission to go romp around in pagan thought and bring it back into the church and feel content because, “Well, these men were smart and classical [there’s that word] and nearly Christians anyway.”
Read what they wrote. It’s abominable. It’s horrifying. We haven’t even yet got to the fact that Socrates and Plato both had sexual proclivities that would horrify us, but that’s for another day.
The time has flown today. The time did not fly when I was reading Plato’s Republic this week, but I will make that my recommendation for this evening. Read Plato’s Republic. It is more tolerable early on when you can pretend that you’re reading Oscar Wilde instead, and the sort of cattiness in the dialogue is a little bit less tiresome. The further you go the more you just skip Glaucon’s lines, as I said. It’s tedious, but it is worth reading to know what it actually says.
Recommendation: Read Plato’s RepublicI was surprised with this read-through how much of what I know of Plato, what he’s known for, the forms, the platonic ideals, as well as the things like the allegory of the cave is in here. This is the source for a lot of what we know about Plato, so if you’re just going to read one thing by Plato, this is pretty representative, I would say. That’s my recommendation. It’s kind of dull in that it’s relevant to our conversation, but there we are.
I have been on a bit of a podcast kick so I have another podcast to recommend. This one is called the Off Code podcast. It’s by Monique Duson and Kevin Briggins. They’re from the Center for Biblical Unity. Both of them are from the black community, taking on the black community with biblical truth to try to throw out and get rid of all the stuff that that community has bought into that is false and harmful to them and unbiblical.
The particular episode I want to recommend they did a couple weeks ago and it’s “What are we actually celebrating on Juneteenth?” which is a thing I know very little about. I mean I knew the basic history but I didn’t really know anything else, so it was interesting to listen to them talk about it and say, “We didn’t grow up celebrating this. It was a Texas thing because it happened in Texas.”
I guess the thing that instigated that podcast is that Kevin had posted a picture of Abraham Lincoln on Juneteenth and said, “Happy Juneteenth,” and got completely clobbered for posting a picture of a white guy on a black holiday. So they were discussing, “How do we call it a black holiday and yet President Biden made it a national holiday? How are we supposed to celebrate it? What are we celebrating? What’s actually going on here?”
It was very interesting to hear their take on it because I had just had a passing knowledge of it and didn’t even know it had been made an official national holiday, so I recommend that for more information on that holiday.
I’m going to recommend a book I probably recommended a long time ago with some other connection. It’s R.J. Rushdoony’s The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy. It’s a discussion, you guessed it, of the problem of the one and the many, but it is mostly a history of philosophy beginning with the chaos-order dialectic of Mesopotamia on through Greece, Rome, on into the future and ending with Van Til.
Recommendation: The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and UltimacyIt is uneven in quality, but where it’s good it’s great. Some of the things he says about Greek philosophy and the Greek worldview are so on point. If you’re a Christian and you’re just trying to get oriented toward philosophy, it’s a pretty good place to start.
Again there are some things where, unless you already have some kind of background you might get a little lost. Just skip that part, but he again and again points out “…and this is unbiblical, and this is man making himself God, and this is a rejection of divine revelation,” and so on.
It is thoroughly Reformed, Calvinistic, covenantal, and presuppositional. If you have a college education, read it. If you don’t, it’s not a bad book to have around and poke around in and see what you can read. As I say, a good part of it you will find accessible. There are lots of footnotes and lots of quotes, so things to pursue. There’s something I need to recommend sometime, pursuing footnotes, but we’ll save that for another day.
First of all, they should be footnotes. They should not be endnotes because nobody’s going to flip to the end of the book. Don’t put in endnotes. Nobody wants them.
I do flip to the end of the book and it irritates me trying to flip back and forth.
Yeah, it just makes me angry so I resent the knowledge that I’m gaining. But if you want your readers to actually check your work, which would be the intellectually honest thing for you to want, you should put them at the bottom of the page.
I will say for The One and the Many, I read this in the spring and summer before I started college and it was a really good time to have read it because then when I took history classes and history of philosophy classes, I would always get this weird bell ringing in the back of my brain like, “I’ve seen this name before. Why have I seen this name before?” and I would go look it up in The One and the Many, which was fun. It's a survey book so there’s not a whole lot of detail about any one person, but as you say it’s a good orienting resource. I concur with that recommendation.
That is all the time we have for tonight. Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
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