We do it for the Children It is a cliché that a truly great philosophy book is chock full of ‘extra theories’, - ones which at other times, other philosophers will take up and develop, twisting them into new hypotheses and explications. None more so than Plato’s Republic. - A book overtly about justice, and yet which includes theories about knowledge, education, political theory, history, psychology, myth, household management, theology…all within its highly textured discussion. Perhaps though, there is a central tenet, which unites all these theories, and that is the problem of education. Hence Plato’s driving problem is very much ‘how should we educate the young to virtue and justice?’ Attached to this is a subsidiary problem of what happens if we fail to educate them properly? Plato’s answer to the first problem, is that education can only produce virtuous individuals if it is supported by an elaborate (and ultimately unfeasible) political, and spiritual system. Politics and epistemology (theory of knowledge) had to conspire to produce an ontology (way of being) that was just. The second problem then arises because of the very unfeasibility of the answer of the first. That is, the problem of exactly what it is that destabilizes the system, what is it that makes perfection so unattainable, is, for Plato, only askable, if one knows what perfection itself is. Perfection rests upon being able to educate the young in a way that keeps them virtuous, and so allows the system to continue as it is. Its unattainablity is therefore founded on the sheer impossibility of one generation simply passing down its experience to the subsequent generations. An impossibility that wrecks the entire system. This leads Plato to discuss in considerable detail exactly what it is that is so incommunicable. His answer, which was founded very firmly on the real-politics of his day, was that every ‘non-perfect’ political system includes within it, as an extra inexpressible dimension, a necessary schism between the experience of parents and their offspring. The problem here, for Plato, lies not with the children, so much as with the parents, and beyond the parents, with knowledge based upon experience itself. The central problem with knowledge founded upon empirical principles, lies in the process that leads to its inception, rather than in its application. What creates a principle (or a revolution in thinking) are always rather specific events. A generation’s starting point, is never a collective ideal so much as a set of unique constellations of events, from which it then unwinds its beliefs and values. Hence the importance of ‘critical events’, which serve to jolt the world otherwise and yet in doing so, open out divisions between the generations. Here, following a very Platonic theme (who has a passion, in The Republic, for dividing reality into three) one might distinguish three different layers of response to an event, such as ‘the eleventh of September’. The first response, belongs to those for whom parameters of the mind were preset within another era, that of, say the Cold War (or World War Two). According to their principles, the meaning. of the attack was obvious. Someone had ‘declared war’ on America. The precedent here being ‘Pearl Harbour’. The ‘event’ itself was therefore merely one event in a long story of how a cowardly enemy declares a surprise war. However a problem arose immediately over the nature of that war. On the one hand it was obvious enough that the ’enemies’ were no longer simply a ‘state’, and did not behave according to the normal ‘rules’ of engagement. And yet on the other, the very premise ‘this is a declaration of war’ (akin to Pearl Harbour) that is the very recourse to a historical precedent, necessitated the need to look for ‘conventional elements’ which might be somehow bound into the oddity of an attack that was at once so devastating, and yet so amateur. Here two very conventional responses came rather readily to the mind of someone schooled in the politics of the Cold War. On the one hand one must fight with war on the level of intelligence (that is, spies). The most ‘hot’ dimension of the Cold War (that is the one that was always a real war), can be carried over pretty directly (and without further ado) into the new ‘cold’/terriorist war situation. On the other hand, such a mind set looks for the nearest equivalent to a state, to blame and wage war upon. So called ‘failed states’ (as if being a state was some kind of exam, itself a beautifully Platonic notion) became the target, and war waged upon them, irrespective of whether they either were actively responsible, or even vaguely complicitous. The effect of such a war in turn is to warp the ‘war on terror’ into the nearest equivalent to ‘a real war’. The two come together to form a very uncomfortable conjunction. Entire countries become a terrorist war zone, as their people are sacrificed to routine ‘terriorism’. Western soldiers are caught up in fighting a terror war of their own. While the terrorists themselves are dragged into fighting a prolonged campaign, which eventually gets a logic of its own, and one not immediately reconcilable with their avowed intentions (Zarqawi’s desire to murder, outflanked Laden’s desire to be a prophet, for a while). The first ‘take’ on the event understands it in terms of a history, from which it erupts. It is therefore understood in terms of other principles. That is, in terms of what the mind already contains. A second order of response opens out amongst those who are able to respond to such an event as the changing moment. It is the point therefore that war itself changed its nature (and by implication the old way of waging a war became redundant). The difference here is not simply that of age. Indeed, it is clear enough, that the neat platonic differences in generations is not quite what it seems. What really matters in the articulation of this division is not a simple matter of education (although it is no doubt seen most clearly in the issue of education), so much as differing responses to an event. That is, whether one allows the event itself to change the nature of what has been (and thereby set it up as some kind of new principle within the mind), or not. Nor do these alternatives need to be simply tied down to different individuals. Part of the problem of the response to the 11th of September, was that both these two options clearly resonated within the mind of the politicians. Politicians were torn between the desire to immediately ‘solve’ ‘the war situation’, and a knowledge that in fact the very event which defined the war in first place, might change the nature of war itself. The current problems then resulted because the former instinct overruled the latter. This last fact then led to a strange new problem. Plato knew that the process by which one lets an event resonate within one’s mind is by no means a simple concern. He is very careful to link the development of new principles, new ways of governing, to private and very personal mental struggles. One needs in such a struggle to attempt to balance what was, with how it has changed, to allow that change to properly stand forth. The failure of the government in simply ignoring this inner world of conscience, felt a strangely personal betrayal. A feeling which was then articulated within the ‘Anti-War’ movement. Such a movement naturally then encompassed the oddest of bedfellows and beliefs; Radical Islam united with the radical left, in the hope that a wicked old secular tyrant might somehow not be bought to book. The very feeling of betrayal eclipsed reality for a while. Or better the act of reworking what the West was and how it should deal with the consequences of its actions (that is exactly what it might ‘learn’ from the eleventh of September’) was at that time the reality, and the failure of the government to respect that fact, felt like the biggest of problems. However there is clearly a final ‘take’, which is yet to come, to the eleventh of September. There will exist, by the very nature of things, a generation that will only remember it in the consequence of the world it bred, and not in the event itself. The depth of the schism here is difficult to exaggerate. If (as must be the case, for Plato in anything other than the most perfect of states) experience defines the principles, which are then pulled out into political actions; then, when one does not share those experiences, but only the actions which they produce, one necessarily lacks the essential secret which allows one to understand exactly how and why a certain series of actions were/are being followed. Moreover, for Plato at least, an immediate consequence arises from this last fact. What is lost in this communication across generations, is in effect the ‘inner’ reason for a course of action. That is, the personal dimension which allowed a course of action to have its significance. Events become thereby dragged into an increasingly public domain, where their value is ‘lost’ within repeated (and expanding) use. One only has to think of the position of voting in our society to feel the effect of this consequence. Voting was once something special, something worth fighting and dying for. Women were more likely to vote because the death was more recent, and voting felt more personal. It is this element which has then vanished, with a world where voting is absolutely everywhere, and yet never significant, never really personal. Indeed in a sense the entire parameter of ‘celebrity culture’ involves the pulling of voting away from a personal decision, which somehow expresses what one believes, and into the thoughtless desire to be as someone else. Hence, as Plato knew so very well, Desire becomes detached from any notion of inner reality (or inner depth), and wanders rather aimlessly across a public sphere. A single event (in the above case the death of a suffragette) eventually serves to pull generations (or the equivalent) apart. One side remain caught up in the consequences of personal sacrifice (and being worthy of that sacrifice), while the other lives in its eventual consequence that voting is now everywhere, and cares little for the event which inspired that situation. Plato’s argument is ultimately therefore rather a dark one. He argues that in a perfect society, a political system can be defined which is powerful enough (through reason and supporting myths/education) to encompass most (if not all) events. Such a system can therefore, once set up, endure. The problem is that (as he readily admits) it will never be able to be set up (as it cannot simply emerge from humanity as it is – that is as it is historically). All other political systems are possible, but ultimately unstable, as the very events which set them up, are themselves open to differing interpretations, and their effect changes across time. In effect therefore Plato argues, politics, as it tends to be rather simplistically understood, is impossible. Not only will any political set of dogmas (free press, fair voting, open and transparent campaigning) be perpetually being reworked across the generations; but also, and far more problematically, that act of reworking itself tends to open up divisions within the way that elements of a society understand one another, divisions that cannot be simply or immediately reconciled, and yet which perpetually appear to question the assumptions on which the entire process is built. It is this final fact that is perhaps the most problematic legacy of the eleventh of September. For Plato’s pessimism about the possibility of politics, in the face of events might in itself be surmountable within a single society (or set of interlinked societies). The chaotic tendencies might be containable within endless re-negotiations. The problem with the ‘eleventh’ is that an event has encompassed a large portion of the world, and has demanded a response, and thereby demanded to be significant, and yet has at the same time, sealed differing communities within their own responses. At its very inception therefore it creates deep divisions, between peoples. The problem is that as the ‘event’ moves into the past (and becomes communal), these divisions are rather likely to remain, creating fissures not only between generations, but also between cultures, which are locked in differing responses, and their own differing histories, and therefore find it increasingly impossible to negotiate with one another. Hence, perhaps, it might not be premature to claim, that there is a real significance to the fact that two westerners were expelled for negotiating with the Taliban, on the very day that Benazir Bhutto was shot. Both separate events bear witness to the schism which appears to be being hollowed out between West and the Middle East, and across generations (Bhutto, was the daughter of a popular ‘western style prime minister’….), a schism in which the very possibility of politics, as we have rather complacently envisaged it, appears bought to be into question. It is certainly not what Plato’s Republic is famous for, and yet the strange litany of the failure of states to surmount the problem of time, is perhaps the most compelling, and certainly the most telling element in the entire book. That is, it is the one theory that Plato based upon experience, and had seen at first hand the tortured way a democracy dies. A death, which he pungently argues, arises as the very real consequence of its failure to address the way that empirical experience is next to impossible to communicate to subsequent generations (as it is only given in myths). It is this story, which it appears we are at risk of being caught up within. The event of the eleventh of September, is an event, and an experience which cannot be simply encompassed in the world as it was lived, and therefore demands new ways of thinking to understand it. It throws us therefore firmly into the Platonic melting pot, of having to rework the world according to the reality of a single experience, and adds the addition chaotic dimension that such an experience is breeding not only a likely dissention between generations, but also is opening up divisions between peoples. A course, that if it is blindly followed. will take a miracle (or perhaps global warming) to stop from slipping into disaster.