CHAPTER I

 

Plato and the Modern World

 

PLATO was born in 427 B.C., nearly two thousand three hundred and ninety years ago [more correctly 2429 years ago in relation to 2002 - Editor's note.] He lived most of his life in a tiny city-state in Greece, and busied himself with the problems of his fellow Greeks, a people living in scattered cities around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.  In all that he tried to do for the Greeks he failed.  Why then should people in this modern world bother to read what he had to say?  Can it be worth while to go to a Greek thinker for advice upon the problems of an age so utterly different from his own?

      To anyone who is not so steeped in the classical tradition that he finds all things Greek or Roman better than all things modern, these questions will seem extremely pertinent.  The Greeks lived in small cities: we live in large nation-states.  The Greeks depended on slave labour: we have abolished slavery.  Greeks religion was a tangle of superstition and philosophy: we, in the modern world, have the lesson of Christianity and have learnt from it a humanity and ideal of love and tolerance totally foreign to Greek thought.  Admitted they were a gifted people who produced great literature, great architecture, and great sculpture, yet in the realm of science they showed a dilettantism and lack of interest which must seem repulsive to modern man, who has learnt by scientific method and patient perseverance to master that nature which the Greeks feared.  We can enjoy Greek art and Greek literature: we may even enjoy Plato as an artist, but why should we bother ourselves to study Plato's views on politics and morality unless we happen to be interested in the byways of history?  Plato is dead; why recall him to life instead of trying to solve the actual political and social problems of our own world?  Why not set out ourselves, fearless and independent of all authority, to solve them in our own way by the light of our own native reason?

      But can we?  Is our modern reason, our modern outlook, so independent of the past?  If social science has taught us anything, it is this - that man is not a 'completely free intelligence', but, in large part at least, a product of his environment, conditioned in his feelings, his thoughts, his actions, by the society in which he lives.  And the society in which he lives is itself a product of the historical process, not a pattern of life designed and constructed by rational minds.  We are, in fact, creatures of history, and the story of the human race has been the story of our struggle to become not the creatures but the creators of history.

      The contribution of modern science to this struggle has been the fashioning of a weapon with which man can free himself from the domination of nature.  Distance, disease, starvation, are the tyrants which he can conquer by the aid of science, but even today science can tell us little about ourselves, or about the way in which we can build a decent and secure community.  The scientist himself who, as Bacon put it, can control nature by discovering and obeying her laws, is still as a person the product of the society he lives in.  In his own family and citizen life he is often the slave of the past, blindly submissive to the traditions of his country, his school, and his family.  If we consider the purposes for which science is used, we shall see that by freeing himself from the domination of nature man has only accomplished half the task which his destiny has set him.  the greater the knowledge of nature and the power over nature that he possesses, the larger the size of the state, the closer the communication between the continents of the world, the more dangerous becomes the subservience of man to tradition, and the refusal to ask himself the purpose and the place of the society in which he lives.

      But it was precisely this problem with which the Greeks were chiefly concerned.  Experimental methods in the natural sciences were almost unknown in Greece, where men were busied with social and political experiment, with the attempt by the light of reason, or by trial and error, to devise a way of life, or, as we should call it, a social system.  Greek civilization was, in fact, a laboratory of social science, and it was precisely its experimental nature which made it is impermanent, so ruthless, and so alive.  The science of self-government both in the individual and in the community was the central interest of Greek culture.

      The very smallness of the Greek city-state made it specially suitable for such social experiments.  Where few lives are concerned, great risks can be taken.  Revolution in Greece was not the terrible responsibility which it has become in modern nation-states.  A Greek city could go off the gold standard without creating a Greek crisis, far less a world crisis.  It could experiment with countless types of constitutional and legal systems without profoundly disturbing its neighbours.  And very largely for this reason, the Greeks were the first people to work out systems of social organization which we call constitutional governments.  The experiments which the Greeks tried out on themselves in the laboratory of the city-state are still, hundreds of years after those city-states perished, the basis upon which we try to build our states in modern Europe.  The application of Reason to the problems of morality and politics was their invention and their legacy to us.  Under their hands tabu became law, government became not a privilege but a science, religion not a superstition but a creed.  They left their rivers unbridged, their towns undrained, but they tried to make the life of man in society as clear and reasonable as the sculptures in which they portrayed him.

      For the last hundred years, Western European man has been so busy conquering nature that he has left the development of society to the chances of a historical process which he has called (over-optimistically perhaps) by the name of Progress.  This development has been concerned more to apologize for it after it has happened than to predict or plan its advance.  The wild disarray of our world-society is in strange contrast to the meticulous neatness of the discoveries of science.  In the latter there is cooperation and systematic advance in all fields: in the former there are wars, conflicts, and rumours of final catastrophe.

      Perhaps, after all, the contrast made earlier between Greek and modern life is not so great as it at first appeared.  These scattered sovereign cities, largely dependent on imports for food supplies, filled with the jangle of party conflict and the threat of class-war, were like a small-scale map of modern Europe.  The problems of government which harassed their rulers, the rules of diplomacy and the techniques of propaganda they employed, have an astonishing similarity to their modern analogues.  And so, naturally enough, the two fundamental problems of Greek city life, how to give freedom to the citizen without producing anarchy, and how to retain the independence of the sovereign state without falling under the constant threat of international war, are the fundamental problems of the modern world.  Why did the Greeks fail to solve both of these problems?

      If we raise this question, there is one man above all to whom we must turn.  Plato's life was lived in the decline of the city-state.  The grandeur of the defeat of Persia had paled long before he was born.  More than all his contemporaries he felt the failure of Hellenism, and his diagnosis of that failure is the most ruthless, and the most objective which we possess.  He lived, as we do, at the end of an epoch of expansion: he was twenty-five when the great war between Athens and Sparta ended in the defeat and humiliation of his countrymen; the Athenian Empire crumpled before his eyes, and he saw that the real task was not to rebuild Athens but to save Greece.  To do that, a searching analysis of the city-state and of the nature of man was necessary, for he saw that a 'League of Cities' could only be constructed if the cities were fundamentally changed.  To that task he devoted his life.

      Thus in turning back to the world of Ancient History, we shall not be neglecting our own problems.  On the contrary, to see those problems in miniature as they were first presented, is to see them isolated from a host of incidentals and accessories which blind and befog us when we look at the modern world.  It is the peculiar skill of the scientist to isolate the phenomena he wishes to examine, and it is the peculiar difficulty of the social scientist that he can never get society into a laboratory, or dissect human relations under a microscope.  The study of Greek politics offers a sort of substitute for this isolation and abstraction to which modern problems can rarely be submitted, and the study of Plato is the first step in this study of Greece.

      If we consider Plato's life we shall see why this is so.

      The analysis of a society can rarely be made at the moment when that society is most creative and vital.  Reflection and criticism arise only when the rifts begin to show and conflicts refuse to be solved in action.  Philosophy is thus the outcome of failure: we do not analyse the best till it is past.  Then we attempt to recall a golden age, or to reconstruct a broken society in the pattern of that age.  In Greece, as in our own day, the age of expansion was an age of activity: theory and analysis began when that expansion ceased, and it became clear that planning, reconstruction, and self-restraint were necessary if collapse was to be averted.

      It is this striking similarity between the age of Plato and our own which makes him so apposite a study for the Western world.  It is no exaggeration to say that it is world war that has made Plato intelligible to us.  For us, too, the old traditions are breaking down; art has lost touch with the life of the people, democracy is in danger.  We, too, are standing on the edge of the abyss, and philosophy has become a matter of life and death instead of a matter for polite discussion.  Our life has become 'politicized': we are forced to make up our minds if we are Democrats or Marxists or Fascists.

      Is the equality of man a mere idle dream?  Is the freedom of the spirit worth the bother it gives, or the preservation of national sovereignty worth the perils it brings?  These are no longer merely questions to discuss; they are political issues, the expression of conflicts on whose solution depends the future of our civilization.  We can no longer solve them at our convenience by armchair discussion: they must be solved by action at any moment when the conflict becomes acute.

      These are the signs of a transitional epoch, and it is not surprising to find that once again men's minds have been turned to Plato, the philosopher of transition.  For many decades the philosopher has been regarded as an 'academic', a dreamer or thinker, remote from the petty conflicts of the everyday world: and Plato has inevitably been portrayed as a philosopher of this kind.  Now, when our civilization has reached a crisis similar to that in which he lived, we are able to see him as he really was - an idealist, thwarted in action, a revolutionary reformer who could find no political basis for his reforms.