VI
Plasticity and Order
BUT is it just?—some one asks. Perhaps there are other things than order to be considered. Perhaps this hunger for order is a disease, like the monistic hunger for unity; perhaps it is a corollary to the à priori type of mind; perhaps it is part of the philosopher’s general inability to face a possibly irrational reality. Here for order’s sake the greater part of the people must work in silence: they shall not utter their desires. Here for order’s sake are sacrificed that communal plasticity, that freedom of variety, that happy looseness and changeability of structure, in which lie all the suggestion and potency of social reconstruction. If there is any lesson which shines out through all the kaleidoscope of history, it is that a political system is doomed to early death if its charter offer no provision and facility for its own reform. Plasticity is king. Human ideals change, and leave nations, institutions, even gods, in their wake. “Law and order in a state are” not “the cause of every good”;[42] they are the security of goods attained, but they may be also the hindrance of goods conceived. A state without freedom of criticism and variation is like a sail-boat in a calm; it stands but it cannot move. Such a state is a geometrical diagram, a perfect syllogism evolved out of impossible premises; and its own perfection is its refutation. In such a state there could be no Plato, with a penchant for conceiving Utopias; much less a Socrates, holding that a life uncriticised is unworthy of a man. It would be a state not for philosophers but for priests: very truly its basis would not be dialectical clarity but royal lies. Here is the supreme pessimism, the ultimate atheism, of the aristocrat, that he does not believe in the final wholesomeness of truth. And surely something can be said for democracy. Granted that democracy is not a problem solved but a problem added; it is at least a problem that time may help to clarify. Granted that men used to slavery cannot turn and wisely rule themselves; what is better than that they should, by inevitable trial and error, learn? Errando discimus. Granted that physicians do not consult us in their prescriptions; but neither do they come to us before they are chosen and called. “That the guardian should require another guardian to guard him is ridiculous indeed.”[43] But he would! Power corrupts unless it is shared by all. “Cities cannot exist, if a few only share in the virtues, as in the arts.”[44] To build your culture on the backs of slaves is to found your city on Vesuvius. Men will not be lied to forever,—at least with the same lies! And to end with such a Utopia,—what is it but to yield to Thrasymachus, to arrange all things at last in the interest of the stronger? Is it just?
VII
The Meaning of Justice
BUT what is justice?—asks Plato. Don’t you see that our notion of justice is the very crux of the whole business? Is justice merely a matter of telling the truth? Nonsense; it may be well to have our children believe that; but those who are not children know that if a lie is a better instrument of achievement than the truth in some given juncture of events, then a lie is justified. Truth is a social value, and has its justification only in that; if untruth prove here and there of social value, then untruth is just.[45] The confusion of justice with some absolute eternal law comes of a separation of ethics from politics, and an attempt to arrive at a definition of justice from the study of individuals. But morals grow out of politics; justice is essentially a political relation. And taking the state as a whole, it is clear that nothing is “good” unless it works; that it would be absurd to say that justice demands of a state that it should be ordered in such a way as to make for its own decay. Social organization must be effective, and lies and class-divisions are justified if they make for the effectiveness of a political order. Surely social effectiveness forbids that men fit to legislate should live out their lives as cobblers, or that men should rule whose natural aptitude is for digging ditches. Justice means, for politics at least, that each member of society is minding his natural business, is doing that for which he is fitted by his own natural capacity. Injustice is the encroachment of one part on another; justice is the efficient functioning of each part. Justice, then, is social coördination and harmony. It is not “the interest of the stronger,” it is the harmony of the whole. So in the individual, justice is the harmonious operation of a unified personality; each element in one’s nature doing that which it is fitted to do; again it is not mere strength or forcefulness, but harmonious, organized strength; it is effective order. And effective order demands a class division. You may mouth as you please the delusive delicacies of democracy; but classes you will have, for men will always be some of gold and some of silver and some of brass. And the brass must not pass itself off as silver, nor the silver as gold. Give the brass all the time and opportunity in the world, and it will still be brass. Of course brass will not believe that it is brass, but we had better make it understand once for all that it is so, even if we have to tell a thousand lies to get the truth believed.
And as for variation and plasticity, remember that these too are valueless except as they make for a better society. They assuredly make for change; but change is not betterment. History is a chaos of variations; without some organ for their control they cancel one another and terminate inevitably in futility. Our problem is not how to change, but how to set our best brains to controlling change for the sake of a finer life.
VIII
The Future of Plato
THERE are aperçus here, and a bewildering wealth of suggestions, which one is tempted to pursue to their ultimate present significance. But to do that would be to encroach too much on the subjects of later chapters. The vital thing here is not to accept or refute any special element in Plato’s political philosophy; it is rather to see how inextricably politics and philosophy were bound together in his mind as two sides of fundamentally one endeavor. Here is the passion to remould things; here is the seeing of perfection and the will to make perfection; here speaks out for the first time in European history the courage of the intellect that not only will perceive but will remake. Here is a man; no dead academic cobweb-weaver, but a masterful, kingly soul, mixed up in warm intimacy with the complex flow of the life about him. He paints Utopia; but at the same time he takes his own counsel anent the importance of an educational approach to the social problem, and founds the most famous and influential university the world has ever seen. Picture him in the gardens and lecture-halls of his Academy, arranging and supervising and coördinating, and turning out men to whom nations looked—and not in vain—for statesmen. Not merely to lift men up to the beatific vision of unities and perfections, but to teach them the art of creation, to fire them with the ardor of a new artistry; this he aimed to do, and did. “The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do after the death of the mortal men who planted them.”[46] So grew the Republic, and the Academy.
To catch in a chapter the deep yet subtle spirit and meaning of this “finest product of antiquity,”[47]—it is not easy. In Plato’s Utopia there would no doubt have been a law against writing so briefly on so vast a phenomenon,—with, in this case, the inevitably consequent derangement of the Platonic perspective, and the impossibility, within such compass, of focussing Plato in the political and philosophical meaning of his time. One’s feeling here is of having desecrated with small talk the Parthenon of philosophy. Perhaps as we go on we shall be able to see more clearly the still-living value of Plato’s thought: in almost everything that we shall hereinafter discuss his voice will be heard, even though unnamed. To-day, at last, he comes again into his own—as in Renaissance days—after centuries dominated by the influence of his first misinterpreter; and generations bred on the throned lukewarmness of the Nicomachean Ethics yield to a generation that is learning to feel the hot constructive passion of the Republic. Dead these two thousand and some hundred years, Plato belongs to the future.