Thrasymachus

by C. E. M. Joad

The life of man in a state of nature was, as the philosopher Hobbes tells us, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” His hand was against his fellows and every man’s hand was against him. Men acted offensively[1] towards each other as and when they pleased, and were restrained by nothing but fear for their own safety. Finding this state of affairs intolerable, men agreed to renounce their natural right to act offensively towards their fellows on condition that their fellows made a similar concession as regards themselves. The best thing of all, of course, was to do what you liked to others without their having the right to retaliate. Since this seemed impracticable, the next best thing was to renounce the full liberty to do what one liked, seeing that it was attended by the obviously unpleasant consequence to oneself of a similar liberty in others, and to venture only upon those actions that the law allowed. Society then was a pis aller. Your neighbour, it was true, could not harm you, but then no longer could you work your own sweet will upon your neighbour. Men lived at peace with one another, not because they were naturally peaceable and law abiding, but because they feared the consequences of being found out if they were not. Once that fear of consequences was removed, they would revert to their primitive, natural wickedness. Let a man, for example, learn how to become invisible at will and, as Plato points out, no virgin would be safe, no strong box unrifled. Man, then, is made moral by law; he is not moral by nature.

[1] The term ‘acting offensively’ in this connection is used to cover primitive conduct of the kind which is supposed to attract wicked and violent men, as, for example, carrying off your neighbour’s wife, raping his daughter, stealing his spoons, bashing in or otherwise mutilating his face, and so forth.

Now the man who makes the laws is in one sense like the man who has learnt how to become invisible. I do not mean that he can break the laws with impunity, but he can see to it that he has no incentive to break them. Thus we have the majestic impartiality of the modern law which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep in doorways. He can also, as Thrasymachus points out, ensure that, so long as others keep them, his own power will be automatically safeguarded. And, since the law is at once the prop and the mirror of the public opinion of the community, and, since the public opinion of the community is in matters of conduct at once the guardian and the arbiter of conventional morality, we may further say that the habit of acting in a way of which the public opinion of the community approves will be found to conduce to the maintenance of the status quo, and hence to the interests of those whom the status quo suits.

In the early eighteenth century Bernard Mandeville revived and elaborated the doctrine of Thrasymachus. Society was devised by skilful politicians for their own advantage. This they hoped chiefly to secure by the spread of what was called morality. Addressing themselves, therefore, to men’s pride, they pointed out that man had always considered himself to be superior to the brute beasts. Yet, if he indulged his passions as soon as he conceived them and gave way alike to sensual desire and violent rage, wherein did his superiority consist? Surely in order to demonstrate their superiority men must learn to master their appetites and restrain their passions. The plain man listened to the words of the flatterer, and, aspiring to live the higher life, transformed himself from a savage into a clerk. The process is known as civilization.

Tamed by his own conceit, man was now fit to live in society. As a social animal he regards as virtuous every action on the part of others by which the society to which he belongs is benefited, and stigmatizes as vicious the indulgence of private appetites irrespective of the public good.

But the skilful politicians who had planned the thing from the beginning had taken good care to ensure that the good of society should be identical with their own advantage. Uncivilized man is ungovernable man, but man tamed and tractable, with the bees of social virtue and social service buzzing in his citizen’s bonnet, is at once the prop and the dupe of unscrupulous governments. “From which”, as Mandeville says, “it is evident that the first rudiments of morality broached by skilful politicians to make men useful to each other as well as tractable, were chiefly contrived that the ambitious might reap the more benefit from, and govern vast numbers of them with the greater ease and security.”

To those who object that morality was invented by God and not by politicians, and that the sanctions of right conduct are derived not from social utility but from divine ordinance, it should be observed that God himself is the most potent instrument yet devised for securing the performance of conduct beneficial to the stronger. This at least is true of the great bulk of the gods who have figured in history. On this point perhaps it would be best to let the stronger speak for themselves. Napoleon may be taken as a suitable representative.

“What is it,” he writes, “that makes the poor man think it quite natural that there are fires in my parlour while he is dying of cold? That I have ten coats in my wardrobe while he goes naked? That at each of my meals enough is served to feed his family for a week? It is simply religion which tells him that in another life I shall be only his equal, and that he actually has more chances of being happy there than I. Yes, we must see to it that the floors of the churches are open to all, and that it does not cost the poor man much to have prayers said on his tomb.” Thenceforward, though an avowed free thinker, Napoleon set his face sternly against anti-Christian and anti-clerical legislation.

The moral is sufficiently obvious. Men whose lives are miserable and oppressed will either rise in revolt against their misery and servitude, or console themselves with the prospect of generous compensation hereafter. If steps are taken to ensure that their faith is sufficiently lively, they will look to the next world to supply them with the divine equivalents of the champagne and cigars they are missing in this one, an expectation which confers obvious advantages upon those whom it enables to monopolize the champagne and cigars. Tack on the further belief that riches and power in this world are the best guarantees of torment and anguish in the next, and the utility of religion to “the stronger” is sufficiently manifest. The parable of the needle’s eye and the story of Lazarus have been responsible for a political and social quietism among the many, which do credit to the political acumen of the early governing class realists who slipped them into the text of the New Testament; and whenever that quietism has showed signs of giving, way, a religious revival or the endowment of a church has usually been found the most effective method of dealing with the situation.