What Plato Can Teach Facebook
“American academic debates have become more vicious today than they were 60 years ago. Already at the beginning of my academic career, I found myself involved in scholarly controversies, just as I am now. But I formerly thought of the scientists with whom I disagreed on scientific matters as personal friends, not as personal enemies. For example, I recall spending a vacation in Britain after a physiological conference, touring ruined Cistercian monasteries with a nice and gentle American physiologist with whom I had strongly disagreed about the mechanism of epithelial water transport at the conference. That would be impossible today. Instead, I’ve now repeatedly been sued, threatened with lawsuits, and verbally abused by scholars disagreeing with me. My lecture hosts have been forced to hire bodyguards to shield me from angry critics. One scholar concluded a published review of one of my books with the words ‘Shut up!’ Academic life mirrors American life in general, just as do our politicians, our voters, our elevator riders, our car drivers, and our pedestrians.”—Jared Diamond, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (2019)
To study people as a group, we have to place them into categories. Individuals must cease to be individuals. They must become representatives of this or that category. If you want to know humanity the way an entomologist knows butterflies, you’ll have to learn how to see forests not trees. But if you want to be a decent human being, who treats people with respect, you’ll have to learn how to see trees not forests. Because people are not butterflies. And few things are more dehumanizing than being treated like the representative of a category.
A former student of mine experienced this first-hand at Concordia University. She wears the hijab, which makes her rather obviously Muslim. A well-meaning progressive prof—who, as she put it, “talks about privilege all the time”—called on her in class whenever they were talking about anything remotely related to Islam (e.g., Islamophobia, I.S.I.S., women in Islam, etc.). As you might expect, being habitually treated like a group representative made her profoundly uncomfortable. It made many of the other students uncomfortable too. Apparently this prof calls on black students for “the black perspective” on a regular basis too, much to their chagrin, and she systematically silences young white men who dare to “take up too much space.” She never seems to remember her students’ names.
Plato was acutely interested in sociological categories and psychological types. All of the major human types are captured and cataloged in his dialogues with cold-eyed precision. Agathon, the charming host of The Symposium, is a type: an intellectual lightweight, with a flair for language, who’s smart enough to suspect that he’s not all that smart, a good-looking guy who loves pretty things and doesn’t care if they’re real, the sort of guy who values beauty far more than he’s ever valued truth.
Eryximachus, the annoying doctor in The Symposium, is also a familiar type: an overbearing know-it-all with a stick up his ass and a PhD in Being Boring, a narrow-minded expert who seems to know everything there is to know about the little fenced-in patch of intellectual property he calls home, but practically nothing about the world outside of it. Phaedrus is also a type: a self-absorbed narcissist who celebrates love, not because he’s a romantic, but because he’s noticed that people do lots of nice things for you when they’re in love with you.
These are flawed characters. No doubt about that. Agathon is a bit of a tool, Phaedrus is a bit of a dick, and Eryximachus is a bit of a douche; and yet you can’t help but like all of them. Because they’re so much more than just types. Like all of Plato’s characters, these guys are thoroughly human, entirely believable, and utterly unforgettable. These aren’t cardboard cut-outs or sock puppets; these are real people, people you recognize. You never forget their humanity when they’re in the midst of a heated debate, regardless of whether or not you agree with them.
Alas, this is not the norm online. Heated debates slip into demonization and nastiness far too easily in Social Media Land. My friend Jean-Louis says this is an inescapable feature of the medium. And maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s just too easy to be an asshole online. Plato figured out how to talk about the complicated relationships between people and power, ideas and institutions, without dehumanizing us. We’ve yet to figure out how to do this in Social Media Land.
—John Faithful Hamer, Social Media Land (2020)
