Don’t Get Fooled Again: A Selection from Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? (2016)

“Not much is known about the ancient Greek sophist Thrasymachus. Only a few fragments of his own writings survive. His name means ‘fierce fighter’, and Plato describes him entering a room like a wild beast about to spring. He has gone down in history as the anti-hero of the first great book of Western philosophy, who bursts into the house where Socrates and his friends are passing the time before dinner by talking about justice. In his sly old way, Socrates has asked his companions to define it, and proceeds to demolish all their definitions. Their attempts are shallow, conventional, in need of demolition: telling the truth and giving back what you’ve borrowed? Helping your friends and hurting your enemies? Socrates needs no more than a counter-example to dispense with each one.

Enter Thrasymachus. He is as young as he is wild, and his contribution to the discussion is, roughly: bullshit. Not his elders’ definitions but the very fact that they are spending their time talking about justice and morality at all is what rouses his ire. Can they really be so naïve as to talk about morals? Don’t they know that what we call morality is merely the invention of men holding power who construct a lot of rules to fool us into helping them maintain it? And what’s wrong, by the way, with that? We are all of us out to serve our own interests, and it usually suits our interest to be immoral. No wonder the company has trouble defining justice: it’s a fiction invented by strong men to keep weaker men down. Anyone who takes moral language seriously is not just a fool but a baby. In a striking piece of rhetoric Thrasymachus asks Socrates if perhaps he needs a nurse. It’s the ultimate insult of a young man to his elder. For only a baby needing a nursemaid could fail to see the difference between sheep and shepherd: the sheep may believe the shepherd’s care is devoted to the sheep’s welfare, and it may continue to believe that all the way to the slaughterhouse.

Part of Thrasymachus’ anger, and all of his insults, stem from his conviction of discovery. He is not, or not only, pleased to have seen through the deception his elders have swallowed. His rage is fuelled by disappointment. These are the men who ought to know better; they’re his elders, after all. . . .

There is no way to know how old Thrasymachus was when . . . conversing with Socrates, no way even to know if the encounter with Socrates was real. Yet in quite a different way than he intended, Plato captured a near-eternal truth in describing the adolescent indignation that the certainties he was raised on are shakier than they seemed, and the resolution to doubt absolutely everything thereafter. . . .

The other interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues are little more than foils for Socrates. Unlike them, Thrasymachus makes Socrates feel fear. And no wonder: the problem with Thrasymachus’ critique is not that it’s false. He has put his finger on some of the lies on which conventional authority depends. If you cannot think of a statesman who has trumpeted a moral principle that he does not practise, with which he hopes to lull his public into silence, you haven’t been paying attention to the news. Having seen through several such instances, Thrasymachus is determined to reject everything that smacks of moral principle at all. What was advertised as just policy turned out to be self-aggrandizement; Thrasymachus henceforth will deny that anyone can act justly for any reasons other than self-aggrandizement. Let us call him the first postmodern nihilist. He’s the first to offer the argument that claims of morality are the product of somebody seeking power trying to deceive us combined with a portion of self-deception—an argument that has reappeared, with varying degrees of sophistication, from Machiavelli to Hobbes to Foucault. One thing common to all these thinkers—as well as to your neighbour or teenager—is a sense of revelation. This sense can’t be simply the product of the familiar desire to say something new. Embarrassed by his earlier readiness to believe his pious, dogmatic elders, Thrasymachus is resolved: he won’t be fooled again. For he is convinced that he’s seen through everything. It takes a grown-up to know that this doesn’t mean he’s seen it.

If Thrasymachus was the first recorded thinker to suggest that morality is nothing but self-interested, deceptive rhetoric, Plato was the first to think the right response was to provide morality with foundations. It cannot work, as Hume would so elegantly show: you cannot derive an ought from an is. Plato’s attempt to answer Thrasymachus by providing a metaphysics to undergird the reality of morals produced great philosophy—all ten books of The Republic—but not even Plato’s student Aristotle thought it worked. No wonder every age produces a crop of Thrasymachuses, each one defiantly unmasking ideas of virtue as the triumph of a stronger faction that has managed to trick a weaker one into believing it. And each act of unmasking is presented as tough, and radically truthful: you may be fooled by all that noble-sounding rhetoric, but I’m bold and honest enough to see through the manipulations behind it. . . .

Sceptical challenges to all established doctrines are almost as old as those doctrines themselves. If you’ve witnessed much of this sort of unmasking, you may agree with British philosopher Bernard Williams that it soon becomes immensely boring, and explains very little: claims that knowledge is reducible to power cannot even ‘explain the difference between listening to someone and being hit by them’. . . . This kind of scepticism is harmless, for its unmasking is potentially endless. If every moral claim is a mask for a claim to power, why not help yourself to a portion of whiskey or weed or similar anaesthetic, and settle in with the powers that be? . . .

Avoid places where you are the smartest person in the room, and seek out those where you aren’t. This could stand as a rule for getting an education, but it doesn’t always happen in schools or even universities, and it certainly shouldn’t stop with them. Minds need at least as much exercise as bodies, but all too many people get stuck lifting lightweights. Nor can you know in advance who has knowledge or wisdom that you might need. The smartest people I know are those who can quote classics from multiple traditions and learn from the astute street vendor on the corner.

About those classics: there’s a reason they’re still around. Invent what you like, but the wheel has been in evidence for about six millennia, and it needn’t be invented again. Reading The Republic should make many a latter-day Thrasymachus stop short. He may have discovered something troubling, but he hasn’t discovered anything new. If he wants to move the conversation about morality and power forward, he’d better know what Plato had to say about it. . . . You may be an atheist, but if you never read the great texts of religion you will not understand the world’s history, nor many parts of its present.

The last few decades have seen fierce debate about what is called the canon. The very word suggests ecclesiastical decree, as if a corpus of old texts were handed down by fiat, and could be ignored as soon as you’ve decided that authorities no longer dictate what you read. But though the canon may need to be widened, most of its contents hold up, and few things are more misguided than the attempts of some educators to appeal to their students by doing away with classic texts, often in the name of avoiding Eurocentrism. They would do better to look to the Enlightenment, often wrongly thought to be the source of Eurocentrism itself. Quite to the contrary, its authors knew how to value both universal principles and particular differences, and they knew how to tell one from the other. They were steeped in classical Western literature, though they were more likely to read Latin than Greek, but they were well aware of how much they had to learn from other cultures. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters criticized Europe from a Muslim perspective, over Voltaire’s desk hung a portrait of Confucius, and Rousseau pleaded for knowledge of Africa that was not written by travellers ‘more interested in filling their purses than their minds’. A grown-up relationship to your culture is no different from a grown-up relationship to your parents. You must decide which parts of the inheritance you want to make your own—but you have to examine it first. De Beauvoir put the matter eloquently: to abandon the past is to depopulate the world.”—Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age (2016)