Romney and Cameron: the platonic view

It’s a commonplace in the West, accepted by virtue of being so frequently repeated by so many people, that the great philosophers of antiquity have moulded and formed the cultural structures on which our societies are based.

I rather suspect many of those who hold this view are of the kind who regard certain literature as ‘good’, though they may not have got round to reading the books themselves. Busy people, you know, but they know what’s good for others. Like, say, reading Plato.

On the basis that it’s never too late for a good resolution, I’ve recently been trying to remedy that great void in my own education, and fascinating I’ve found it. There are certainly aspects of Plato which have inspired much (relatively) recent history, such as what he has to say in The Republic about children with disabilities:

‘...the offspring of the inferior [parents], or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.’

Hardly a very Paralympian spirit, one can’t help. Not a view to find favour with the founder of that fine movement, Ludwig Guttmann, though it would not have been out of place in the mouth of his persecutor, Adolf Hitler.

So in this respect at least I’m disinclined to join in the general chorus of admiration for Plato. There are however other passages of the same book that strike me as far more useful. Take what he says about different types of government.

For Socrates, the main speaker in Plato’s dialogues, aristocracy is the best government because it is the government of the best people. Which would be fine in my view except that I find that in most such governments, the people who choose the best are, coincidentally, generally the very people who get chosen.

Oligarchy, on the other hand, was much less appealing.

‘And what manner of government do you term oligarchy?.

‘A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it.’.

No good, Plato reckons, can come of this arrangement:

‘And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.’

Overdoing respect for the wealthy, dissing the poor. If they could see in Athens two and a half millennia ago that this was a pretty bad show, maybe it’s time we relearned the lesson now.

Is that something to bear in mind in the States this autumn when voters on ordinary incomes take a look at Mitt Romney and his near quarter billion dollars? 

And in Britain when David Cameron, with the wealth he inherited and the wealth he married, decides to slash a load more benefits?

Mitt and Dave: a Platonic couple but not an ideal one?

Bankers: the wise man who saw them coming...

Words of extraordinary wisdom: talking about different types of human activity, the speaker mentions ‘the various ways of money-making – these do us good but we regard them as disagreeable, and no-one would choose them for their own sakes, but only for the sake of some reward or result which flows from them.’

If I were being really picky, I might question whether financial services do us good or whether they’re just a necessary evil, something we put up with just so that commerce can keep going and we can get the things we need to make life liveable. Or at least survivable.

But the rest – spot on. The only motivation for going into that shady sector is for the sake of the rewards. It’s almost as though the speaker had met the Bernie Madoffs of our days, the Fred Goodwins, the Bob Diamonds. To say nothing of those fine upstanding people at Standard Chartered.

Bob Diamond: sacrificing himself for all our sakes
with nothing but astronomical pay to show for it

These are the people who sacrifice themselves to do those disagreeable things which most of us wouldn’t touch with a bargepole, but which are necessary to ensure society keeps going. And who nobly reward themselves out of their clients’ or the taxpayers’ pockets because, hey, someone has to do that too, and why shouldn’t it be them?

So, you may be asking, whose wise words was I quoting? Why, Plato’s. In The Republic, from 2500 years ago. Smart guy, wouldn’t you agree? You certainly can’t fault his prescience.

The author of The Republic.
Saw it all coming

And what a testament to all the progress we’ve made since his primitive times.

The best of friends

Being made redundant is, I’ll admit, a pretty depressing experience (particularly when it happens for the third time – why, I may soon have to start wondering whether I’ve been doing something wrong in my career, a thought that had never previously occurred to me). However, there are benefits too.

First of all, there’s the time for reflection offered by what I hope will turn out to be a brief period of unemployment. Then there’s the redundancy itself which can be quite a learning experience.

In my case this has led to my giving some thought to the nature of friendship.

My reflections were helped by listening to a discussion on the theme in an old episode of In Our Time. The participants started their review way back in classical antiquity.

Now I should say that I don’t always go along with the unquestioning admiration of all things Greek. For instance, Plato’s Lysis which I learned is devoted to the subject of friendship, rules out the attraction of opposites as a possible basis. This is because it would imply the good being attracted to the bad. This strikes me as a painfully formalistic and limited view of good: two people of opposite temperament can still both be good – there are many ways to be good. My way of being good may be the best way, but I’m tolerant and broad-minded enough to admit that yours may not be entirely without merit.

What really interested me was when they got onto the subject of Aristotle. He, it seems, distinguished three categories of friendship on the basis of utility, enjoyment or excellence. The problem with the first two is that as soon as the utility or enjoyment ends, so does the friendship – only the third endures.

Now this I can go along with. Utility friendship is clearly the kind of thing that exists in general between colleagues. At the lowest end of the scale, it’s forced – you oblige yourself to get on with people you’d probably go out of your way to avoid, left to your own devices. I confess I’m not good at that kind of artificial friendliness as people read my real feelings much too easily. I like to think that I have no patience with fools, but lots of people link to think that: after all, it’s a neatly disguised boast wrapped in contempt for others. Clearly, I think numerous people around me are fools, while thinking that I’m not a fool myself. Ironically, I’m probably at my most foolish when I get impatient with others who disagree me with me (and class themselves by that token with the fools).

Then there are the colleagues with whom one can have a real friendship. These are people one admires or who do outstanding work or with whom it’s just fun to work. Sadly, however, once we part company there’s little basis for the friendship to continue. It’s a pity, but I suspect before long all I’ll have of these utility friends is some pleasant memories and a sense of pride over some of our of things we achieved together.

This is the same as what happens with friends of enjoyment. Drinking friends or friends with whom one plays football are great until one realises that hangovers really aren’t much fun and running up and down the same pitch several dozen times is no way to spend an hour or two. When you go off to do something a bit more rational – which means more or less anything – you tend to lose touch with the old friends, some of them getting very old, who are still trying to cling on to the image of their youth and its pastimes.

Then there are the friends of excellence. These are the ones to whom you’re bound by an affection that’s mutual and unconditional: they’re your friends not because they’re cleverer or more skilful or more amusing than others but because they are who they are. No-one summarised that better than Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French writer. After his friend the poet Etienne de la Boétie died, he wrote if people pressed him to say why he loved la Boétie, he could find no better of way of replying than to say ‘because he was Etienne de la Boétie and I was Michel de Montaigne’.

Now that’s the kind of friendship that’s worth having. And I’m glad that I leave my former company with a few friendships of that strength and they won’t be broken by a mere inconvenience like redundancy.