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jsburbidgeI have just finished Jo Walton's The Just City, which is the first book of a three-part whole (The Philosopher Kings and Necessity, which I keep thinking of as Ananke, never mind, being the other two). Brief summary: Athene decides to set up an actual attempt to build Plato's Republic during the Bronze Age, pulling in philosophers/classicists from throughout history as masters to start it up and populating it with ten-year olds purchased over several hundred years of time travel from slave markets. Socrates gets pulled in five years after the foundation and the sorts of effects ensue that you might expect. (There was a reason the Athenians voted to get rid of him[1], and that was in a city where most people ignored him as much as they could. In a city of committed Platonists, though, this is not going to be the reaction...)
This is at least as good as one might expect from Jo, given her current track record, and arguably her best work yet. The thematic elements that undergird it mesh effortlessly with the characterization and plot elements, and they are among the themes which are absolutely central not only to Plato but to a long succession of philosophers after him: justice/righteousness (both are translations of dikaiosyne), the good life, the nature of learning (via instruction and via experience (vide the Meno, not referenced directly in the work)), the nature of freedom. And there are hints of other themes which are promised to surface later (Necessity being an obvious one).
If the two following volumes keep to the same level, this will be a major work.
One's immediate reaction is to enter into dialogue with what it shows. My immediate reaction along those lines was to reflect on how and why it's probably impossible for a modern (say, post-1950) author to present an implementation of the Republic which is not fated to blow up badly.
Plato's city is designed not around how actual cities best worked -- that's an Aristotelian approach, and Aristotle spends a large chunk of his life bashing away at Platonic idealism by sticking to observed phenomena. He has a theory of the mind/soul, and designs the city to mirror the mind.
In this, as in so many things, he stands at the head of a long tradition: both the city as a representation of the individual (consider Bunyan's The Holy War, with its town of Mansoul) and the more general view of the macrocosm as mirrored in the microcosm (which gives us not only astrology but a long tradition in political science, and an immensely rich literary tradition (sometimes allegorical, sometimes merely symbolic)).
This is pretty much dead; recent (say, the last forty years') researches into how the mind works have thrown up models which are non-reproducible at a larger level (let's just say that nature doesn't build the way engineers do, and leave it at that, for the moment). Nobody setting out to design a community would think, these days, that the relation of individuals to the whole could be analogized to parts of the mind to the whole mind.
More generally, Plato also makes an assumption that is pervasive until sometime in the Enlightenment, but is not generally accepted now: he assumes both (in a connected way) that the internal structure of the soul is hierarchical and that the external structure of society is also naturally hierarchical. He doesn't assume a pyramid with a single point -- he's not a divine-right-of-kings apologist -- although that version of the model was the normative one throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance (the classic go-to in political science being Filmer's Patriarcha; most literature students probably encountered this in Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture).
(Shakespeare expresses this view twice, memorably, in his plays (though not his most popular plays): in Ulysses speech regarding degree in Troilus and Cressida --
-- and in Menenius' retelling of Aesop's fable of the belly and the members in Coriolanus (where he picked up that detail from Plutarch).)
Plato doesn't put a single king in place in his state, sticking instead to classes, but he does assume that there is a top-to-bottom ordering of human faculties with the reason on top, emotions below that, and instinctual behaviours below that again; and that because the mind is so ordered, the best state should also be so ordered.
This is the model of the mind which is at the foundations of the mediaeval (Thomistic) disparaging of sex: in fallen humanity, passion in sex overwhelmed the reason, inverting the natural and harmonious order of the mind. (In unfallen humanity, it was supposed by some scholastics, this inversion would not have taken place, and it is this view that Milton reflects in Paradise Lost.)
It is also the model which lies behind expressions such as "get a hold of yourself": that "you" are to be equated with the rational faculties on the top, and the appeal is for the ruling reason to take control of the subordinate passions.
Not only have we pretty well ditched the idea that you can choose a "best" stratum of society by nature to govern it (aristos + cratia), although you occasionally find traces of that view in technocrats of one form or another (obSF: Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll"), and it's implicit in much Randite discourse; we've also found that the mind isn't hierarchically organized, or even very coherently organized. Like most products of evolution, it's a Rube Goldberg machine, with multiple coordinating faculties and no clear centre. There are even those who take the position that conscious thought itself is an ex post facto construction by the brain, an illusion to provide a unified view.[2]
So it's pretty well inevitable that any early 21st-century take on the Republic would have it run headfirst into problems with the intractable nature of reality. There are -- we would generally say -- no natural kings and no natural servants or menials. (Occasionally you get the view that capabilities do sort people generally into heaps -- Arts students here, science students there, physical labourers yet another place -- but given the complex nature of intelligence and skills, and the fact that lots of individuals can have "natural" skills in several areas, and interests at odds with the natural skills, any attempt to follow that route (as in school streaming) runs into problems fairly quickly.) And the people who are most "rational" are often the people we want to keep as far away as possible from managing other people[3].
So it's pretty well inevitable that any modern examination of the Republic as a real city would focus on the failure modes. It stood at the font of the literary/philosophical stream that eventually gave us the Utopia (pretty well literally: More's Utopia is mainly the Republic with the numbers filed off, as are Swift's Houyhnhnms), but it's also very close to the modern dystopia by way of Bentham's panopticon.
Jo's take on it -- allowing the dynamics which break it down to operate effectively enough, early enough, to make it not become a simple dystopia is a welcome approach.
[1]He would probably just have been ostracized, if the procedure didn't require voting between a penalty proposed by the prosecution and one proposed by the defence one the verdict had been determined, and Socrates' proposed penalty hadn't been essentially a pension for life.
[2]An Augustinian would still be in a reasonable position to handle much of this, treating the inherent disorder as a consequence of the fall.
[3]Note the behavioural traits that Jo has handed her incarnate Apollo: he comes across as high-functioning Autism spectrum.
This is at least as good as one might expect from Jo, given her current track record, and arguably her best work yet. The thematic elements that undergird it mesh effortlessly with the characterization and plot elements, and they are among the themes which are absolutely central not only to Plato but to a long succession of philosophers after him: justice/righteousness (both are translations of dikaiosyne), the good life, the nature of learning (via instruction and via experience (vide the Meno, not referenced directly in the work)), the nature of freedom. And there are hints of other themes which are promised to surface later (Necessity being an obvious one).
If the two following volumes keep to the same level, this will be a major work.
One's immediate reaction is to enter into dialogue with what it shows. My immediate reaction along those lines was to reflect on how and why it's probably impossible for a modern (say, post-1950) author to present an implementation of the Republic which is not fated to blow up badly.
Plato's city is designed not around how actual cities best worked -- that's an Aristotelian approach, and Aristotle spends a large chunk of his life bashing away at Platonic idealism by sticking to observed phenomena. He has a theory of the mind/soul, and designs the city to mirror the mind.
In this, as in so many things, he stands at the head of a long tradition: both the city as a representation of the individual (consider Bunyan's The Holy War, with its town of Mansoul) and the more general view of the macrocosm as mirrored in the microcosm (which gives us not only astrology but a long tradition in political science, and an immensely rich literary tradition (sometimes allegorical, sometimes merely symbolic)).
This is pretty much dead; recent (say, the last forty years') researches into how the mind works have thrown up models which are non-reproducible at a larger level (let's just say that nature doesn't build the way engineers do, and leave it at that, for the moment). Nobody setting out to design a community would think, these days, that the relation of individuals to the whole could be analogized to parts of the mind to the whole mind.
More generally, Plato also makes an assumption that is pervasive until sometime in the Enlightenment, but is not generally accepted now: he assumes both (in a connected way) that the internal structure of the soul is hierarchical and that the external structure of society is also naturally hierarchical. He doesn't assume a pyramid with a single point -- he's not a divine-right-of-kings apologist -- although that version of the model was the normative one throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance (the classic go-to in political science being Filmer's Patriarcha; most literature students probably encountered this in Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture).
(Shakespeare expresses this view twice, memorably, in his plays (though not his most popular plays): in Ulysses speech regarding degree in Troilus and Cressida --
"How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows!"
-- and in Menenius' retelling of Aesop's fable of the belly and the members in Coriolanus (where he picked up that detail from Plutarch).)
Plato doesn't put a single king in place in his state, sticking instead to classes, but he does assume that there is a top-to-bottom ordering of human faculties with the reason on top, emotions below that, and instinctual behaviours below that again; and that because the mind is so ordered, the best state should also be so ordered.
This is the model of the mind which is at the foundations of the mediaeval (Thomistic) disparaging of sex: in fallen humanity, passion in sex overwhelmed the reason, inverting the natural and harmonious order of the mind. (In unfallen humanity, it was supposed by some scholastics, this inversion would not have taken place, and it is this view that Milton reflects in Paradise Lost.)
It is also the model which lies behind expressions such as "get a hold of yourself": that "you" are to be equated with the rational faculties on the top, and the appeal is for the ruling reason to take control of the subordinate passions.
Not only have we pretty well ditched the idea that you can choose a "best" stratum of society by nature to govern it (aristos + cratia), although you occasionally find traces of that view in technocrats of one form or another (obSF: Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll"), and it's implicit in much Randite discourse; we've also found that the mind isn't hierarchically organized, or even very coherently organized. Like most products of evolution, it's a Rube Goldberg machine, with multiple coordinating faculties and no clear centre. There are even those who take the position that conscious thought itself is an ex post facto construction by the brain, an illusion to provide a unified view.[2]
So it's pretty well inevitable that any early 21st-century take on the Republic would have it run headfirst into problems with the intractable nature of reality. There are -- we would generally say -- no natural kings and no natural servants or menials. (Occasionally you get the view that capabilities do sort people generally into heaps -- Arts students here, science students there, physical labourers yet another place -- but given the complex nature of intelligence and skills, and the fact that lots of individuals can have "natural" skills in several areas, and interests at odds with the natural skills, any attempt to follow that route (as in school streaming) runs into problems fairly quickly.) And the people who are most "rational" are often the people we want to keep as far away as possible from managing other people[3].
So it's pretty well inevitable that any modern examination of the Republic as a real city would focus on the failure modes. It stood at the font of the literary/philosophical stream that eventually gave us the Utopia (pretty well literally: More's Utopia is mainly the Republic with the numbers filed off, as are Swift's Houyhnhnms), but it's also very close to the modern dystopia by way of Bentham's panopticon.
Jo's take on it -- allowing the dynamics which break it down to operate effectively enough, early enough, to make it not become a simple dystopia is a welcome approach.
[1]He would probably just have been ostracized, if the procedure didn't require voting between a penalty proposed by the prosecution and one proposed by the defence one the verdict had been determined, and Socrates' proposed penalty hadn't been essentially a pension for life.
[2]An Augustinian would still be in a reasonable position to handle much of this, treating the inherent disorder as a consequence of the fall.
[3]Note the behavioural traits that Jo has handed her incarnate Apollo: he comes across as high-functioning Autism spectrum.
