Socrates’
discussion of justice in Plato’s Republic
considers how this cardinal virtue relates to the other cardinal virtues,
and how these virtues relate to both the individual soul and the state in the
same ways (cf. book 9).
The
four cardinal virtues are wisdom (prudence), courage (bravery), temperance
(self-control), and justice. The first three relate to parts of the person: the
soul, the high-spirited part, and the body.
This division of the person can also be stated with wisdom in the head,
courage in the chest, and self-control in the stomach and genital areas. Wisdom is the virtue to govern reason in the
soul; courage is the virtue to govern one’s high-spirited part; and temperance is
the virtue to govern the appetitive part, the body with its various
desires. Justice involves the right rule
within each part, and the right ordering of the parts. Various disorderings of
the soul are possible when one part is not rightly ruled by virtue and when the
parts of a person are not rightly ordered.
A glutton’s not exercising self-control over the appetites and his
letting the appetites rule over the two other areas of the soul might be an
example. We might say that such a person
is internally disordered.
In
Plato’s Republic, the
philosopher-king embodies wisdom and exercises rule over the rest of society. Following him are the guardians, the trained
army and officials of the state who exercise courage. Following them are the rest of the citizens,
corresponding to the appetitive part of the soul.
Plato
also discusses how different types of government correspond to different
arrangements of these classes. The
government that comes closest to Socrates’ vision of the ideal republic is
Sparta’s timocracy. The ruling guardians
in Sparta were what he calls the ‘auxiliary guardians’—the military. The political, non-military guardians trained
to rule the state with reason, including the philosopher-king, are ruled by the
auxiliary guardians. Socrates argues
that this relationship needs to be reversed.
Sparta’s timocracy, then, equates to the soul being ruled by courage
over wisdom.
Corinth,
at the time, was ruled by an oligarchy.
An oligarchy is rule by the few, and it is also typically understood
that, unlike aristocracies and timocracies that may also be ruled by a few, an
oligarchy involves the rule of a few in their own self-interest. In both a timocracy and an oligarchy, the
appetites are restrained, the first by force and the second by an order in
society that protects private property.
Athens
in the 5th c. BC represented democracy among the Greek city
states. This form of government represents
the rule of the appetites for Socrates.
The masses control the government, and they seek unrestrained
fulfillment of their desires, which are considered justified in their own right
as the exercise of freedom.
Finally,
Syracuse had a tyrannical form of government.
For Socrates, this was the worst form of government. It was a monarchy in which the monarch’s
grasp of power serves his own ends. Base
desires rule absolutely, with nothing to hold them back.
Each
of these forms of government have their faults, but if a philosopher-king,
representing wisdom, is placed in power, the republic will be just. Such a person needs to be placed in power,
even against his own wishes, after having been trained in virtue and governance
for years. He must have no property
beyond his basic needs, and he must govern for the citizens, not in his own
interests.
Those
who formed the government of the United States of America advocated a
representative democracy, a republic, more along the lines of Pericles’ Athens
than Socrates’ ideal republic. They had
experienced monarchy and determined that self-rule was better than rule by a
fallible king. Socrates’ version of the
state assumed that there could be a perfect individual and therefore that
person could be given absolute power.
The framers of the American Constitution sought to limit power and place
various checks and balances on government precisely because they understood
that humans are fallible in many ways.
The government that governs better is not the one that gives individuals
power to enforce virtues on the rest of society but the one that reduces the
power of individuals and the state because of vices.
What
the West faces today is a different philosophy.
It is a post-Christian philosophy that rejects the idea that people have
sinful appetites and desires: there is no sin.
Thus, it uses democracy in the way that Socrates feared: all desire is
good in itself, and each desire is of the same status as the others. It goes further than Socrates imagined,
too. The tyranny of desire allows desire
to revise nature and define its own reality.
This is expressed vividly in transgender ideology and social
control. Not only is this a disordered
society in that the appetites are unrestrained but also in that the appetites
rule over reason. Democracy, said Plato,
will devolve into tyranny, and in our present situation, this tyranny is a
tyranny of the anti-natural, transgender philosophy. What we see in the West today is a new social
experiment of the worst kind in which persons internally disordered are forcing
on the state a similar disorder—unrestrained and unnatural desires.
A
further development in the West is the replacement of antiquity’s cardinal
virtues of wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice with diversity, equity,
and inclusion—each understood within the framework of critical theory. This follows on from the Enlightenment’s
shift from the cardinal virtues to a value system of freedom and equality (and
fraternity, for the French). Freedom,
authority of oneself, became empowerment, authority of groups, which, in turn,
became diversity. Equality, the treatment of all as equal, became equity, the
special treatment of some. Fraternity, a sort of obligatory activism in social
solidarity, incorporated inclusion of out-layers and came to be what is now the
third member of postmodernity’s triad of values. In its enforcement, it has equally become an
exclusion, a social execution, of any not joining the revolution. The Postmodern West is a child of the French
Revolution, not the American.
Socrates’
timocracy was a meritocracy: people were put into their social roles based on
their training and competencies. Western
society rejects merit in the name of equity: people are advanced on the basis
of their group identities, whether natural (ethnicity, e.g.) or contrived
(gender identities). Such identities
contribute nothing to the task of individuals in a society. Equity’s new definition, thanks to Marxist
theory, means the unequal advancement of individuals in order to advance a
perceived social inequity among groups (i.e., to reverse intersectional
discrimination). It amounts to a reverse
racism and a rejection of competence.
Diversity
as a cardinal virtue trumps other virtues: it is an absolute value. Socrates’ interest in promoting people to
their rank according to their merits also resulted in diversity. A person from a lower class could advance, or
one from a higher class be demoted, or a foreigner could be promoted in society
because of his skills or wisdom, depending on where they best fit in the
socialist republic that he envisioned.
The West’s notion of diversity would be for Socrates an example of the
rule of the appetites—fulfilling our own desires—rather than rule by wisdom. There is no wisdom in promoting a foreigner
because he or she is a minority over a citizen with the skills needed for the
job.
Finally,
in the West, ‘inclusion’ is not about welcoming others but about removing
barriers of any sort that hinder the fulfillment of desire. It also involves enforced approval in the
culture, institutions, and state that an individual rejects, such as affirming
one’s chosen sexual identity over against their obvious biological
identity. Christianity, in particular,
is viewed as a threat and an enemy as it says that there are such things as sins,
there is a difference between good and evil, and there is truth, not just
opinions that should all be ‘included’ or valued. There is a God—we are not gods who speak our
own little universe into being. God the
Creator has established right and wrong in His creation. (We may not be able to turn an ‘is’ into an ‘ought,’ but
God could and did as Creator; and we certainly cannot turn an ‘ought’ into an ‘is.’) The West is involved in a self-scrutiny and
emolument for past sins that leaves it incapacitated, unable to approve the
good in its past. The very notion of ‘civilization’
is rejected as discriminatory and abusive. Thus, ‘inclusive’ is actually a
deconstructive and ‘cancel-culture’ category that wears a welcoming mask.