Shadowplay: Plato’s Cave and Political Spin

by Mark Gullick (September 2015)

Much sport has been made recently concerning the career path of the average British politician. Travel smoothly from graduation to internship, from SpAd (or special adviser) to policy adviser, possibly with a brief sojourn in advertising, PR, publishing or journalism, and Westminster is your oyster. The route is bland, anodyne and lacking in anything but mastery of the managerial and technocratic arts, and gives us a political class to match. There is nothing of substance, nothing which could remotely be called life experience. There is one rite of passage for the elites, however, which may hold the key to this world of artifice and salesmanship.

Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) has long been a staple of the upper echelons of politics. David Cameron, Theresa May, the Miliband brothers, William Hague, Danny Alexander, Yvette Cooper and, interestingly, Peter Mandelson are all PPE graduates, along with two other members of the current Conservative Cabinet. A cursory glance at the current state of British politics and economics may cause Oxbridge dons to shake their heads and pass on, but the relationship between philosophy and our political masters and mistresses is an interesting one when one considers one seminal philosophical text in particular.

Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is until political power and philosophy entirely coincide… cities will have no… rest from evils nor, I think, will the human race. [473c. Note: The Stephanus numbering system for Plato’s works is used throughout.]

The Republic takes as its subject the ideal state, a title which only the doughtiest spin-doctor would claim for the UK. But, in whatever state we find ourselves, philosophy is far from absent in the modern corridors of power. As a review of our current ‘kings and leading men’ shows, we are not as distanced from the Platonic lament as we might think.

The Republic is perhaps the best known of the Platonic dialogues, and is probably based on what Plato knew of Sparta. Many of its ideas are well known: the communal upbringing of children, the expulsion of the poets, metempsychosis (reincarnation), the tripartite roles of guardian, auxiliary and worker, the noble lie or necessary falsehood, and the famous myth of the cave.

Imagine human beings living in an underground, cave-like dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets. (514a/b)

There is a wonderful animated version of Plato’s cave here. Socrates supposes that there are people on the wall ‘carrying all kinds of objects’, statues of people and other animals which, from the light of the fire, cast shadows on the wall in front of the shackled prisoners, shadows which are all they are able to see.

Unable to see their genuine cause, the prisoners take these shadows as reality, and the familiar Platonic division between the real and the ideal is played out in this subterranean drama. Plato believed that the things of this world are second-order shadows or copies of ideal realities, a metaphysics which would later fund Christianity.

[I]t looks as though our rulers will have to make considerable use of falsehood and deception for the benefit of those they rule. [459c]

Smuggled into the debate during a discussion of how to tidy up the behaviour of the Homeric gods to make them suitable for young and impressionable minds, the necessary falsehood is now exposed as political spin avant la lettre, and its apparatus, the actual mechanics of subverting reality and replacing it with mere shadowplay, is nowhere better dramatised than in the depths of Plato’s cave.

When one of [the prisoners] was freed and suddenly compelled to stand up, turn his head, walk, and look toward the light, he’d be pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows he’d seen before. [515c]

[A]s for anyone who tried to free [the other prisoners] and lead them upward… wouldn’t they kill him? [517a]

The prisoner who has stared at the sun – an action which became a classical sign of insanity – might be the very person the other prisoners fear, with his subversive tales of reality from above ground.

Perhaps there is no secret order behind the suppressio veri of the Republic, which has travelled from the low wall of the cave to the news managers and wonks of the 21^st century. One only has to see the treatment of whistleblowers, counterjihadists, satirists and cartoonists, dissident non-MSM journalists and other pariahs to suspect what happens if one stares too long at the sun. The real name of the escapee of the Republic may, however, be easier to discover.

Among their other deeds they named Socrates, an older friend of mine who I would not hesitate to call the wisest and justest man of that time, as one of a group sent to arrest a certain citizen who was to be put to death illegally, planning thereby to make Socrates, whether he wanted it or not, a party to their actions. But he refused, risking the utmost danger rather than be an associate in their impious deeds. [324/5]

Don’t you think that cities that are badly governed behave exactly like this when they warn their citizens not to disturb the city’s political establishment on pain of death? [426]

In the end, it is never philosophy which disappoints but its practitioners. Plato would be as disgusted by the modern political warping and manipulation of the truth as he was by Athens’ treatment of his mentor and his own subsequent adventures in Syracuse, where he tried and failed to teach Dion, that country’s ruler, the finer points of political acumen.

In any case, the present error, which… explains why philosophy isn’t valued, is that she is taken up by people who are unworthy of her, for illegitimate students shouldn’t be allowed to take her up, but only legitimate ones. [535c]

 

 

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