One of the attractions, which is simultaneously one of its great dangers, of blogging is that there are no referees (and editors) to warn you against a serious mistake. Since these digressions are by and large ephemeral, and since I tend to discuss abstruse topics, the stakes are pretty low -- the worst that can happen is that my balloon-ish reputation is deflated even more -- so by and large it's worth acquiring some freedom for the risk of letting a howler slip through. Besides, howlers also slip into the august pages of our best journals, and I often have friendly readers that offer quiet or more notable corrections. I often quietly correct factual and typographic mistakes in the first day of 'publishing' an Impression. And when I am wrong about something substantively, I alert the readers to my corrections in the original post and/or leave em standing with the hope that some future nerdy scholar, running on lots of terabytes, who has decided to use my pieces as a window into 'the decadent phase of late capitalism's philosophical scene' will find my mistakes amusing.
So, it's all a bit embarrassing that my (2018) piece on Plato's ship of state (here) has attracted more than 17,400 page-views. (My hunch is that these are undergrads looking for help on their term paper in some way.) Even by my standards that's not a shabby number of page-views. In this case, I don't gloat about this because the piece contains a glaring mistake. Remember that the analogy starts with this sentence (now quoting Reeve) "The shipowner is taller and stronger than everyone else on board. But he is hard of hearing, he is a bit short-sighted, and his knowledge of seafaring is correspondingly deficient. The sailors are quarreling with one about captaincy."
In my commentary at the time, I reject the (correct) idea that the people are the ship-owner, and claim (incorrectly) that the ship-owner reflects the propertied class. This is bad enough, but because of this mistake I fail to mention that in the analogy the sailors are supposed to be the political elites of a democracy. This is, in fact, hard to miss because Socrates says it explicitly at 489c. (And some of my own students reminded me of this.)
Somewhat surprisingly much of what I said in the post is not actually much undermined by this mistake. But what the piece ends up missing is that the point of Socrates' criticism of democracy in the ship of state analogy is to be especially scathing about democratic political elites. And, in fact, there is a tempting way to read Socrates as a true democrat because in the ship of state analogy the people are the victims of their elites. (Of course, this also exhibits a strain of elitism because it kind of denies the agency of the demos.)
What's worth noticing about this today is that Socrates' critique of democratic political elites anticipates the tenor of contemporary so-called populist criticism of liberal democratic elites, who don't represent the interest of the people and who by their bickering undermine unity and flourishing.* He later suggests they are composed of the useless drones, a parasitic rentier class (564c).
That Socrates anticipates the populists becomes even clearer when one recalls his first law of political science/unity: "[T]he simple and unvarying rule, that in every form of government revolution takes its start from the ruling class itself, when dissension arises in that, but so long as it is at one with itself, however small it be, innovation is impossible" (Republic, 545d, translated by Shorey). For the populist this empirical-conceptual regularity is actually encouraging because if they can nudge such disunity along, political rule is within reach.
I don't mean to suggest that contemporary populists are (despite the fondness of some of them to quote classical sources) promoting a kallipolis. Nor do I mean to deny that from Socrates' perspective such populists are in fact the intoxicant who eat and drink up the ship's cargo and become would-be tyrants (565e).
At this point one might think that I could have saved my initial argument back in 2018 by saying (as contemporary critics of our democracy are won't to do) that the people are to blame for their leaders. And there is a sense in which Socrates also, eventually, makes a claim like this later in Book 8 (in 562cd & 563d), suggesting that the people will reject leaders who won't give them what they want which just is license and live from moment to moment (561c). Interestingly, the main examples of such license are extreme sex-equality and (near) abolitionism of slavery (563b), and relatively open borders to immigrants (562e/563a). {I love hearing folk saying that such ideas are modern inventions.}*
Now, more is worth saying about how when democracy was revived in recent centuries some of the criticisms of Socrates were internalized in different ways in different liberal democracies. But that's for another time. I have decided not to delete the earlier post on the ship of state. What gives these diaries their charm, if any, is that they reflect my howlers, too. But I will add a disclaimer to it to check out this post, too, for corrections to it. And, yes, it's possible I will need to do that again.
*While populists tend not to be cosmopolitan, contemporary populists divide on this: some wish to promote a reaction and restore gender hierarchy and a pure ethnic unity; others wish to protect hedonism (and ethnic unity) against religious fundamentalists.
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