46 - Athenian democracy and Plato w/ Graham Culbertson (Everyday Anarchism Podcast)

This episode is a crossover collabo with Graham Culbertson of the Everyday Anarchism podcast. Graham asked me over to talk Athenian democracy, Plato, anarchism and how modern meritocratic education sucks. We had a nice time with it and hope you do too. 

Transcript

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I know it's been a long time since I published the last episode of Good In Theory, and in fact, the episode that you are listening to today was originally, uh, recorded back in the winter of last year with the idea that. I would publish it with an announcement that good in theory was going on hiatus and would be back in whatever amount of time. And the reason was the developing circumstances of my life, also known as I had to get a job, made it impossible for me to spend as much time as I would like making podcasts in my room. Now, these circumstances remain changed, so, the announcement's the same and good in theory will remain on hiatus for another little while. However, I have not pulled the plug on the feed. Uh, don't consider it dead yet. Consider it at most in a coma. I hope to bring it back to life this year. I've done a lot of work on a mini-series about meritocracy, which I plan on publishing in not too too long, but also probably not in the next couple of months. So if you like the pod, you'll have that to look forward to. Um, And I hope to find a way to make podcasting compatible with, uh, the current circumstances, et cetera. Anyway, the main thing since I've been gone a long time, and I'll be gone quite a fare while longer, is I want to thank everyone for listening to the podcast. I want to thank everyone who obviously who supported us on Patreon, but anyone who. Rodin contacted us on email or social media to say that they enjoyed the pod. They got something out of it. They learned something from it. Honestly, that means a lot to me. I'm, I'm proud of what we've done here, and it is only with regret that I had to very drastically slow down producing it. So thank you. and also, If you are a supporter on Patreon, I put that shit on pause months ago, so I haven't been taking any of your money. I will start taking it again if I ever start regularly publishing episodes, but until then, We're good. Today's episode is a crossover episode with Graham Culbertson of Everyday Anarchism. He's also publishing it on his feed. Uh, everyday. Anarchism is a podcast about anarchy, anarchism. Graham's really into it. He covers texts, he interviews people. He's got a lot more episodes than I do by now, , and I really enjoyed talking to him. He contacted me to talk about ancient Greek democracy and Play-Doh, so that's what we did. I hope you enjoy listening to the conversation as much as I enjoyed having the conversation. Hi. So welcome to Everyday Anarchism. That is, that is also good in theory, right? We're, we're doing a crossover episode. Yeah. I'm really excited to be here. So, uh, thanks, thanks for inviting me, Graham, uh, love the podcast and, uh, looking forward to chatting Democracy. Yeah. Let's talk about democracy. So the, for those of you who are listening to this on the everyday Anarchism Stream, my guest today is Clif Mark, the host of the frankly wonderful podcast. Good. In theory, I often find it infuriating, but that's cuz it's mostly about Plato. And Plato is infuriating. I do, I do not find Clif infuriating. I, I cannot recommend your podcast enough, Clif. It's fantastic. Thanks. And yeah, to all the good. In theory listeners, if you wanna learn a ton about an interesting view of politics that I don't necessarily agree with, but I find stimulating, definitely check out everyday anarchism, with Graham Culbertson I was talking to Anthony Kaldellis um, who is a wonderful historian of Byzantium. And, uh, we were talking about, you know, I was doing this fun argument with him that, you know, the Byzantine Republic is kind of anarchistic, which of course the, you know, the Byzantines are supposed to be the opposite of anarchism. And Anthony is, is Greek. And he was like, you know, you also need to think about ancient Athens and have someone on the show and see how your conception of anarchy fits with their definition of democracy. And I thought, you know, I know a guy Yeah. I mean, I just, I just listened to that episode actually, and uh, it was really interesting. So, yeah, what can I tell you about, uh, ancient, ancient democracy? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the first thing is you can start, like, I think when people think of democracy in Greece, if, if they can remember 10th grade or I don't know, when they cover it in Canada, it's like, you know, there are these foot soldiers, they're called hoplites and they vote, but you have to be rich enough to be in the army to vote. That was my vague memory of Athenian democracy. But that's not, that's not right. The golden age of democracy isn't like that. It's, it's different. So it's navel based. Yeah. I mean, there is, there's a lot of truth to that, right? So I guess. You are absolutely right to say that in the, uh, I don't know how popular the imagination is, but we have an association with democracy and Greece, right? Greeks. They're the ones who did democracy first. It wasn't all Greeks. There were a lot of things that we would call democracy. Athens was the most radical democracy by far. They went more extreme than anyone else. So that's, if you're thinking of democracy, you're thinking of Athens. from a modern point of view, we have to put some qualifications in that it wasn't everyone, right? Slaves weren't citizens. Women weren't citizens. Foreigners weren't citizens. It was native board men. Um, what made Athens so much more democratic and inclusive than everyone else was just what you referred to earlier, most other Greek city states. To be a citizen, you had to be rich enough to be a hoplite. And that means. Hoplite a kind of soldier. So you had to be rich enough to buy some armor, a spear, your shield, that was like upper middle class. So it was a small group of people. Whereas Athens, they, they built their power not on foot soldiers, but as you said, on a navy, and you don't need as much equipment to be a sailor. All you need is, you know, a jug of water to stay hydrated and an ore and arms. So they needed a lot more guys to row these boats, but you didn't need as much money. So they just became much more inclusive and got rid of the property requirements. So the inclusiveness of Athenian democracy was more class inclusiveness than any of the, you know, exclusions we might be more worried about in the past couple hundred. Yeah. So one of the things that's often marks like democracy in the, you know, in this coming day and age is, is universal manhood suffrage. And although it wasn't a voting based system in the, in the same way you have universal citizen manhood participation in Athens, right? So this is something that like the, the modern western world reaches in like what the 20th century in, in some country, certainly in the United States, you know, black men can't vote even long after abolition, that, that sort of thing. So like universal citizen manhood participation is is a pretty recent thing in the Western world, as opposed to like a yeoman farmer form of democracy where everyone has a certain amount of property can participate. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, we it seems like it was a long time ago, but the older you get and the more you read history, you're like, oh my God, that was just yesterday. Right. Um, so yeah, it is pretty recent that they got rid of property qualifications. And this is, I mean, our democratic ideology today, we're always searching for what are the exclusions? It's supposed to be universal, everybody. And then, you know, people get upset about, oh, well, you know, we still don't, uh, give foreigners enough rights and this and that. But I mean, up until really recently for like the entire period of history between Athens and just, you know, a couple of weeks ago, basically , most people who were writing about politics and thinking about politics hated the idea of democracy. They didn't want the crowds involved. And so it was very intentional to exclude, uh, poor people from having a vote or having a political say. Yeah. One of the, one of the famous moments in this, in this kind of march through the enlightenment, we're already jumping around from the bullet points I gave you. Sorry about that, is, uh, the, um, the Putney debates, I think they're called when the, when, you know, the, the Army has taken control of, of the country of England. And, um, you know, they have this big Lord important guy named Oliver Cromwell and the Lords and some representatives of the new model army, the like, sort of the, the, the men in the army, they get together and they propose essentially like, Hey, we're in this army. We're all in this army. Let's have everyone who can lift a sword, get to participate in. in the political system. And, and Cromwell says the idea that someone in the quote is merely breathing the idea that someone who is merely breathing doesn't own any land, but just is alive and of course, and is a man, and is a citizen and not a slave, and all this stuff would participate in the political system is so offensive to him. And we're talking a revolutionary and we're talking a revolutionary who's only 400 years ago. So this is, this is some crazy stuff that they're doing it in Athens 3000 years Well, look, we could go even more recent, right? Like, uh, your founding fathers in the us, Yeah. Adams, you know, Hamilton, they were all against democracy. They were all, you know, boo Athens, yay Sparta, yay Rome. Um, and intentionally wrote, we need to keep the people in. Its mass out of government completely. And that's when you get, you know, people saying, oh, this is a republic, not a democracy. It is, it was never intended to be a direct democracy on Athenian lines, but that, I mean, that can maybe bring us to another, . Um, although, you know, I wanna, I want to just pull a couple of threads together that you mentioned about inclusiveness. So we're talking about how Athens was super inclusive comparatively, um, and to, to a point where in modern times we only recently got to the level of inclusion. Um, and one thing you mentioned about the Putney debates, and I already kind of implicitly mentioned about ancient Greece, is the connection with military organization, right? So now we have the, you know, no taxation without representation is a catchphrase, but then it was very much, if we're gonna put you in the army and put you in front of enemies and in danger of, uh, being killed, then it's awkward not to give you any political rights. And, and throughout the history of democracy, you see this, you know, um, the expansion of political rights and greater inclusion comes with. Participation in armies. So ancient Greece, depending on the military organization of the city states, that's who got included as citizens who was risking their lives, usually got to be citizens. Um, that was true. You know, there was a lot of inclusion. Um, at other periods in history after World War I in England, they, you know, um, expanded the franchise lot. Uh, and so this is one, you know, that's just one link for inclusion. If you want to , I guess if you wanna look for the more inclusive regimes, you look sometimes for constrict description and where, uh, the elites really need the help of poorer people. I mean, the Tribunes of Rome, the plebs of Rome only got representation through the Tribunes because Rome was about to be invaded and , and they all went and sat on the hill and refused to fight until. Until they got some, uh, political rights. So, um, yeah, I just wanted to draw out that link between military organization and inclusion, but that other difference I wanted to get to was between inclusion and participation. Right? Because we are talking about very different things, what a citizen was doing in Athens and what, you know, we modern citizens do today in our capacity as citizens with a vote. Yeah. Good. Yeah, this is, um, I, I just need to briefly mention, cuz I haven't had a chance to bring it up on my show yet. The, this is the point of the second amendment in, in the United States. Sorry, I'm not only an American Clif, but a. American Studies professor. So, um, you know, the whole point of this was like we, we, you know, to, to a certain extent, democracy or whatever you wanna say ends in, in Rome when the soldiers become professional. So the the idea is, yeah, we don't want everyone to have power in, uh, America, but we just fought a war against a professional army. And we do wanna make sure that like everyone who wants to be part of the army can be part of the army. We're gonna call this army a militia to distinguish it from the US Army. And you can think of the Second Amendment as like a left wing imperialist project. And obviously if you know anything about the Second Amendment now that's, that's not how it's, that's not how it's treated. But that was the idea is like, let's make sure the people have guns. The people are the army. Suitably led and well regulated. Uh, and that will be, that will resemble Rome or I suppose also Athens, but we, we want it to be Rome if we're the founding fathers, not Right, exactly. Um, yeah, I it is, it is so interesting the, like, history of that because you know, if the whole point is to, you wanna avoid a professional army cuz like, that's only a small number of people. And if you, once you have a professional army that means the citizens are excluded, the leaders don't need them, and it's just the tool of domination. And now you guys have, you know, really a pretty a pretty decent professional army army that we have, Yeah. And so, and so you've got, you've got the engine of tyranny that that the founding fathers were afraid of. But you also keep the second amendment, which allows you, if you cannot, um, menace and harm foreigners with your personally held firearms, you can at least menace and harm each other. Yeah. Yeah. Okay., that's, no, that, that, that's precisely what the Second Amendment has become. And then, you know, you get progressives who say, I mean, one of my favorite things is dunking on progressives from my anarchist point of view. And they're just like, you don't need a gun. It's not like you could win against the US Army anyway. And I'm like, right. That's why the amendment was written to, so that once the US Army started being built, that we, we could win a war against them. We, we, the people, so like, you've, you've got a completely wrong progressive, although I'm, I'm with you dear Progressives on, uh, on, on fewer guns hate, guns, hate the second Amendment as it exists, but it really was, we as tied into this connection between military and participation, which gets us to what you're saying with participation. For me, the, the most obvious place to do this is. With the January 6th riots or stupid coup or insurrection or whatever you want to call it, everyone got really upset when these right wing idiots tried to, you know, subor this election. And the crowning of, you know, the, the new commander-in-chief as opposed to the old commander-in-chief who rules us with his professional army. And they all said, you know, I'm being a bit tongue in cheek. I'm not that far. Gone into my anarchism. And everyone said like, oh no, if this election is overturned, we don't have democracy anymore. We need to protect our democracy, which is a system whereby we choose representatives who have power over us. And our participation is limited to however long you have to stand in line. And if you stand in line and check the box, it's a democracy. And if you look at Athens, Uhhuh, they, there were, there were governments like that. But they weren't called democracies. Right. So, yeah. This is really, I think, one of the most interesting lessons about Athenian democracy, right? So, first of all, I do want to say that you can be tongue in cheek and, you know, uh, cynical about the existence of American democracy, um, or any modern liberal democracy. And I am sympathetic to that view from a theoretical point of view. But I just wanna say, at least for my listeners, I recognize the contemporary common use of the word , which associates democracy with liberal rights, voting rights, suffrage, elections. Um, so I think there is a case to be made that, you know, overturning an election does threaten demo democracy such as it exists in America or in the modern world. So, Okay. Actually now, now I wanna respond to that and say, yeah, first of all, I completely agree with that. And secondly, what you have talked about Clif on your show is that we have these, these measures. We have the rule of law, um, elections, that sort of thing. They are by now, that we're in the 21st century and we're a long ways away from the founding fathers. They are an expression of a, a democratic. Ideology. They are, in my opinion, a ver they do a very bad job of expressing the Democratic ideology. But for all of my contempt, for all of these things that we are, you know, living under, I do think that people want democracy. And I do think they think that that voting is an expression of that ideology. And in that sense, voting is an expression of a democratic ideology. I would just think it doesn't, it doesn't work very well for precisely the reasons that you can tell us. The Greek's thought it didn't, it didn't work very well. Yeah. All right, so let's, I mean, let's get.. What you know, I said was the other like big difference between Athenian democracy or ancient democracy. And modern democracy. Athenian democracy. So you think Athens, forget voting. Think voting for a leader. Think participation, right? All modern democracies, we vote for representatives. They rule us, we choose our rulers once every election cycle. In ancient Athens, it was really, you're a citizen, you can go turn up. They all got together on a hill called the Pixx. You can fit about 6,000 guys on there and you could go there and put your hand up and speak and try to persuade your fellow citizens what to do. Hey, you know, should we go to war with Sparta? Should we build a Navy? And people would get up, they would debate, and then they would have a show of hands or you know, vote in some urns afterwards. So there it was. The citizens. Are doing it themselves. They're making the decisions, they're doing the debates. Um, so it was this constant participation and they would be there all the time. There were like 40 meetings a year could be more so it's just a world of difference when we think of what the vote means now, which is you don't have to know or do anything , and you didn't have to in Athens, but like you could. So today, you know, we talk about freedom of speech and freedom of speech means, I don't know, you can mouth off on Twitter and whatever. Uh, you can say whatever you want without consequence basically. Whereas Iag Goria in ancient Athens, their idea of freedom of the speech was any citizen can stand up in front of the assembly and sort of say their bit, try to persuade their fellow citizens to take a course of action. And there would be consequences if you messed up, but you at least had the right and the platform to try to be heard. Yeah, I, I think it's also important to mention that, you know, this, this sounds like it's gonna take a lot of time. Um, and part of the reason, you know, the reason why politics has traditionally been the province of the wealthy is because there are people who didn't have to, to work.. So because they had, they had money so they could get involved in politics. Um, and it seems like Athens has a very democratic way that they solved this, which is, you can talk about it in a second, which is how they distributed, how, how they let people, um, have jobs. But they also had a very undemocratic way of doing this, was there was money lying around because they created an incredibly undemocratic empire. And every time we find democracy, anywhere, we seem to find democracy. You know, there, there's always a line drawn around, as you say, even today, people under the age of 18 foreigners, et cetera, like, yeah, democracy, but I mean, not for the islands that we are extracting tribute from. And if you're wondering, Hey, how do these simple sailors have money that they can just sit around and argue for hours? Well, they, they have become in a certain way, landlords, uh, just not of Athenians. Right, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, uh, doing politics all day, that takes a lot of time and you're not, uh, you're not doing that much labor specifically, although I will say at least the Athenians, a lot of them did have jobs. They did work on their farms. A lot of 'em did trade. Um, but yeah, it was, it was very expensive. And, uh, that is, that is. The big, you know, one of the big obstacles to us doing that now, because sometimes people talk about, oh, ancient Greece, it's so nice. Citizens really had, uh, freedom. They could participate. They had all these rights. They, they could do it themselves. But then you think like, how do you really want to spend your afternoon, you know, and , how, how are you gonna gather 300 million people on a hill? And what would that even mean? That everyone could speak? Like if you look at an unmoderated internet forum, it's a sewer. So, uh, just the practicalities of it are, um, are, are, are really difficult. And even if you could overcome that, no one wants to spend all that time and it's expensive. So, yeah, as you said in, in Athens, the way they made that time, you wonder like, you know, its, is like, it's not even that fertile around there. Like how are they feeding the. the city, if they could just sit around and go to all these meetings and debate all day. And the answer was, uh, they, they had an empire. They were just kind of exacting tribute out of all the surrounding islands in a sort of defense racket, uh, based on their, on their navy. Um, Yeah. And this ,I mean, ,I, I mean, the other thing I'm struck by in, in your description of it, on your episode about it is, you know, you talk constantly about, about festivals, and this is, this, this isn't quite falling into the lines we've gone down so far. But I needed to bring this up because when Graber, who is my, you know, the person I'm following most in terms of anarchism and also the person who defines anarchism and democracy as more or less the same thing, which all the other radical Democrats, and I think all of the other anarchists hate this idea, but I, I like it, so I'm gonna keep trying it. Um, he talks about festivals over and over again in his book Debt, and especially the book you wrote with David Wengrow, the Dawn of Everything, festivals just comes up over and over again. Festivals are kind of like the great expression of, you can call it anarchy or you can call it democracy if you want to. What, what would you do if you had some time and money? Well, you would, you know, spend some time running the city to make sure you still had time and money. What else would you do? You would have a party. That's really what the people want is a party. And then I think Plato would say like, and this is why the people cannot be in charge because they want a party. Yeah. Well, I mean, okay, so you're making the case that Plato is annoying. I but, uh, yeah. What, what about it? Like, they had tons of festivals in Athens, but, and you know, they were like, a lot of them were reinforcing their political system in ideology., but also why not? Why it's, it's Americans more than anyone else that think you have to be working every second of your life. nobody believed this Yeah. I don't look, I don't, I I don't know. There's, this is usually traced through the Protestants. This is usually John Calvin and John Knox are usually blamed for this. But that's, uh, I think a different, a different topic. Yeah. And hey, look, I'm up here. I'm in a glass house too. You know, Canada is not much different., I'm. So I guess I, I do wanna get to Plato, which is why I brought him up Um, one thing I'm thinking is you know, one, one of the things that I'm really struck with in your discussion of this is that this is a problem scale. And it's true that when most people come up with versions of radical democracy that they might wanna see implemented in the modern world, the obvious one is like, descale, scale down, let's go to the neighborhood, let's go to the town, let's go to the village. And there's a sense that it seems like obviously that that would work. And you can find democratic traditions in, in India, in, you know, the Basque country, all that sort of thing. And then the argument goes, but these could only work. Like even Athens is maybe a little too big for the kind of democracy that the people who want democracy, uh, can have. And so this is why we have representatives and what we now call like liberal representative democracy, because it's just a question of of scale. The alternative is Twitter. Twitter, democracy. That seems bad. Definitely . So there is the question of scale. I think that's a real question. And Aristotle had a specific answer, right? He said, your democracy can be the size of the number of people that you can gather in one place, and that can all hear each other speak. And he figured that was around 5,000, 6,000 people, which I mean, they had more, much more powerful speaking voices, I think. Uh, but um, that's one answer, but it's not just a problem of scale. So you mentioned Plato and I, I want to just get a little bit into the viewpoint, the, the other argument, a kind of platonic, snobby argument about why modern democracy wouldn't work. Okay. I say this in the episode I do on Athens or something like this. If you want to get kind of a intuition about why people hated democracy, Just

imagine doing it this way: 28:35

you pick up the PA system at a crowded Walmart on a Saturday and you say, will everyone with license plates that start with A to M come out to the parking lot so we can decide whether to bomb Iran or, or, or to like, oh, oh, uh, we need to, we need to plan our sewage system and we're gonna do it the same way. looking at the discussions you see on Twitter and other public fora, you might think that's a terrible idea. I mean, there's like a grand trope in, you know, American internet discourse, which is just the absolute misery of talking politics with your ignorant relatives over the holidays. Um, and, and I guess, you know, it depends on which side you are, who counts as ignorant. But I think it's pretty obvious to a lot of people why running a state like that might present some dangers and problems just by letting everyone throw in their opinion and, uh, make decisions. And, and so if you get that, if you are a little bit shocked by the idea of just pulling a random, you know, pull over a city bus and let them, you know, determine education policy, uh, I mean, look, that's actually not the worst group of people, but, um, there. See, there you go. Right, because he but I, I mean like this idea of just letting people at random, uh, make big political decisions that affect everyone, that's the platonic, uh, intuition. I think you can't just let anybody make important decisions. You want people who know what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just, I'm gonna throw out my, my answer that I've been thinking of. I don't think I. Said anywhere yet, which is, I mean, you hear, you hear this, I, I mean, I love this example. It's a perfect example. Should we bomb Iran? Um, presumably , uh,, presumably the group of people who from elite circles associated with Samuel Huntington and or Francis Fukiyama and or Dick Cheney. And in fact, if you , if you actually grabbed these group of people from Walmart 20 people and was like, should we bomb Ron? One of 'em would be like, did they do anything to us? Yeah. Sort of in 79, believe us. Something to them first. Well, what the fuck? Why, why do we even have this conversation? Let's not bomb Iran. So this is the argument for non-professional actors is that professionals are a small. S selecting and self-selecting group who can go down some really, really bad roads. Yes. I think that in this case, uh, you know, I like to believe that the American people is more peaceable than the, uh, neo-conservative establishment was. But, um, I, I don't think I would want to give up expertise altogether because if you think about, say, public health policy or, I mean, here's a, here's a public health example, I think was in Canada. There's a, a city somewhere in Western Canada, I think it was BC and the , the people in the city council, small town, they got to reading on the internet about the dangers of fluoride in the water. And, and you know, it was, they were scandalized and so they voted, they exercised their local democratic right to take care of their water supply against all dental and medical advice and wound up with like a 600% increase in cavities, in dental problems in the city. And they were like, oh, , whoops. Yeah. Why did we, why did we ever think we knew what we were talking about? There are people who have studied this. Right? And, and I think, you know, that might be, that might be, a better example of something that you do. People are more likely to think there's a technocratic answer to, uh, and that education might help. Yeah, I mean look, I go, I go through this in my head like a thousand times a day cuz the other public health thing was, it was pretty obvious to me that hand washing was not very important very early in C O V. And the reason why it was obvious to me was because of the of the experts who I was reading. I wanna be very clear that this idea came from experts, but it's also clear that those experts lost for the first, like six months of covid, the, the intra expert battle. And we got six months of no new ventilation and the windows were closed, but we were all watching our hands and doing the, the worst thing. I don't wanna suggest there's not a place for experts. I mean, Proudhon has this really easy, ample answer that's like, you know, if I want the cobbler, I'll ask the cobbler to be an expert. And I take it that that's not very, that's not very useful in the case of a plague or the case of Fluoridization. But I also think that the nu the number of times, let's put it this way, the number of times the experts have driven us off the cliff is so many that I am trying to pull us the other way. And if I sound crazy in how far I want to pull us. I probably don't actually want to pull us as far as it sounds like I do . I want, I want a world in which experts exist, but, and this can take us to Plato, the way I see experts being chosen, trained, and empowered. Right now, I'm not, I'm not a big fan of, I mean, you and I both taught in meritocratic institutions and I think are not huge fans of how they choose and train experts. Yeah. Uh, that's, that's correct.. Um, yeah. Okay. So let's., let me do the Plato thing first and uh, to talk about Athens and the Republic. So in my podcast, good. In theory, the sort of big project was I adapted Plato's Republic. It's like a 13 part series, rewrote the dialogue and did a lot of explanation of it. And so this is Plato's most famous dialogue, and this is the one that's most famously elitist, snobby, critical of democracy. And in it, there's this long discussion. He and his younger boyfriends are talking about the perfect city, what would be the like perfect city. And it turns out it's a completely totalitarian utopian technocracy, where you have these philosopher kings that are trained since, you know, before birth, um, and brainwashed in a completely immersive education system for their whole lives to become philosophers and in touch with the form of the good and lots of math. And they alone will have the wisdom to rule the city. And everyone else is just supposed to listen to them cuz they're the ones with the best souls and the best brains and all of that. And so his whole thing is expertise. He says, look, you, you want someone making laws. You want someone running the city. You want a person who knows what's up, what's good for people, what are the best rules? And that just takes a lot of training and expertise and talent. And so who do you want in charge? You don't want just anyone. You want the people who are best suited to it. And that, I think is the basic intuition behind a lot of what Socrates is saying and that dialogue and.. Yeah. I think that is an intuition that even though a lot of people balk at the extravagantly, oppressive nature of the city and speech in the Republic, that basic intuition that we should have experts and people that know what they're doing is certainly, uh, you know, very active today. I mean, I would say more or less underpins the the private school and s a t prep to Harvard. To McKinzie, to Secretary of Transportation, to hopefully eventually for Mayor p Buttigieg, president, uh, structure of our current American, and I would say also your, uh, slightly more lovable Canadian society. This, this re you know, if, if we weren't trying to have philosopher kings, we wouldn't make it that you have to go to Harvard to be a senator, but you more or less do have to go to Harvard to be a senator. Yale and Princeton, somewhat acceptable. Not as good. I thought, I thought Yale law would get you a lot of places, You're, you're don't right. Yeah, so I mean, it's, it's, it's weird that on the one hand, um I feel like the democratic instincts are like boo Plato, boo totalitarianism, meritocracy. But we've somehow combined democracy with meritocracy. And meritocracy is the cover for inequality. Um, and so that's how you produce your ruling class that said, look, I've, I've been to some elite institutions and met the people from there, and they, they don't, they don't necessarily turn out like Plato described the philosopher kings, so I don't know that we've got it perfect. Yeah. I mean, I Plato, even Socrates would not, he would not look at the system and say, this is a fair approximation fit in the least. yeah. I think what he would say is this does, it doesn't go far enough, you know, like,,we need to, we need to turn Harvard to 11 and we need to re, re remove McKinsey from the loop and that sort of thing. 11, I think. I think Socrates would say it's not even headed in. It's not that it doesn't go far enough, it's not even headed in the right direction because it's all private education. And the education system in the Republic is the exactly the opposite about that, of that. It's about eliminating your sense of like particular personal interest and creating these people who are only concerned with the most abstract and, and public things. Uh, and probably more, more trigonometry. Yeah. I don't know. I, the problem, I mean, one of the problems, this is Harvard is, you know, it's a charity. I don't, I'm sure, I'm sure you've heard it's a, it's, it's a nonprofit, so it's not, it's not that private. It's supposedly serving this public good. I don't know if you guys have that same structure in, in Canada, but like if Harvard were truly private, they would be giving the US taxpayers like hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but they're not because they're a nonprofit Right. What I meant more was that, um, this sort of implicit reason that people try to get good educations is to get ahead, Hmm. right? So it's getting into an elite school is not, let's face it, not on the like, retail level because people all want to serve, right? It's, it's, it's not that they want to go on, it's not that McKinsey is necessarily a step to public service. It's a goal in itself and so is Wall Street, right? And it's to win, uh, as an individual. And you know, you have another ideological trick that says winning as in individual is good for the whole. Plato wouldn't go along with that. Um, all to say, uh, meritocracy in both the American version and the, uh, platonic version are antithetical to democracy, but in different ways, yeah, I find them to be more similar than you do, but I realize there's something else that my listeners absolutely need to hear, which is your explanation. Well, I mean, anyone's explanation, but yours is very good, and you can give it now, of why voting is incompatible with democracy, at least according to, uh, Athenian democracy. So yeah, forget what Plato for a second. This is one of the most interesting to me things I learned from studying ancient democracy., right? It's that for us, moderns, the mark of democracy is elections. Can you pick your leaders in a freedom fair election? Yes. You live in a democracy. Great. Um, Athenians, they saw election as an oligarchic institution, right? They, they figure there's two kinds of government ruled by the few, the rich people that's oligarchy, ruled by the many, that's democracy. and elections, they say we're oligarchic. Why? Because what do you need to win an election? You need money cuz you need to take all that time off, whatever else you were doing to go knock on doors and talk to people, even today. You could use fame, the more prominent you are, the more name recognition you have, uh, the more likely you're going to to win an election. And, when I did my episode on this, I said, look, Donald Trump a famous rich kid, just in Trudeau. The closest thing we have to Canadian aristocracy, the son of a former prime minister, the premier of my province, Doug Ford, was the son of another provincial politician and the brother of the mayor of Toronto, former mayor of Toronto, now famous. Um, and then even now the current mayor of Toronto is name is John Tory, and he's the fourth in a line of John Tory that go back to before the Confederation of Canada, who are all like rich lawyers and insurance company owners and stuff like that. So you get the occasional commoner, uh, coming up and becoming a congress, a congressperson, um, but mostly elections skew towards the rich and famous. So from the Athenian point of view, If you're picking your leaders by elections, it's always gonna be these aristocrats who get picked. If you want to do a democracy, if you want the common people really exercising power, they pick their leaders differently. They picked their magistrates differently. They didn't have a set of civil service exams, they didn't have elections. They pulled names out of a hat. And I mean, , if you want to give the people power, um, and you also want to activate all those panicked worries we have about putting amateurs in charge of important things. That's how you do it. Well, I guess I wanna say that, uh, the obvious solution to the meritocracy as it exists is, you know, what is sometimes called the level playing field, the idea that, and this maybe sounds more like Plato and you can tell me what you think. The idea that if we're more communistic, if we go look for the golden souls, no matter who their parents are, we can get something that maybe is not very democratic, but has meritocratic expertise without being oligarchic. It could almost be, I mean, Plato's Republicans in some ways almost like post- political. There's not a sense that people are arguing about politics. It's just everything is, is, is working. And certain anarchist thinkers like Oscar Wild is one kind of suggests that maybe people should be found that should be running things, but there should be no prestige or even power associated with running things besides like, you know, why like the, the person who runs the city should be like a cleaning person is right now someone who does a vitally important job and who isn't, you know, regarded that highly. And it does seem to me that that's one potential road to try and square this circle. And I wanted to see what you thought or what you think Plato would think. Okay. So the idea is that the solution to oligarchy is more meritocracy. Yes. That's the know You don't believe that Graham I'm going,. I I know for a second. You don't think that Okay. Um, Okay. Yes. But , I thought, I thought I Okay. So my, my instinct from the, just the first thing I'm thinking of when you mentioned this Oscar Wild example of, you know, yeah. Why our, our captains of industry and captains of government should take the bus to work like everyone else. And, you know, everyone's a sort of, uh, lunch pail prince, whatever. I don't know. Uh, the first thing I'm thinking of is good luck with that, because attention's naturally attracted to power and hierarchy is a strong tendency. The second is maybe, and this is just, you know, I thought I had cause I read too much, you know, Russo and Hobbs and stuff is the important thing necessarily isn't necessarily political power. The important thing is the recognition and status. So we need a way to order each other . Um, and so the, the trick is stopping the people at the top of the hierarchies just from taking all the power and using that to dominate every sphere of life rather than necessarily, uh, the people who, um, use political power to like, get too rich or something. I think that the problem isn't, you're not searching far enough for the diamonds in the rough because if education works at all, and we have reason to believe it does something, then it's not so much about finding these diamonds in the rough or raking, you know, raking the people of value out of the ash heap of the American youth as like, this was one of like Lincoln's ways to describe meritocratic scholarship system and leaders are in large part made right. So to me the answer is don't go looking further. It's make sure everyone has a fair chance to develop, try to develop everyone and just make the band of inequality much smaller and you're gonna get better results If you don't want rich people to constantly compound their advantages and hold other people down, then just make the stakes lower. And you make the stakes lower by not allowing people to be poor or rich You set a, you set a ceiling and a floor to the control of, of resources, and you have to do something right to make resources and prestige. Un unconnect, you know, disconnected so that if someone has obtained infinite prestige, they do not also obtain 55 billion. Right. And, and vice versa. Um, it can be done Yeah, I think we call this the New Deal in this Yeah. I mean that's, it's amazing how many times these conversations just to end up with like, and that's why there should be, you know, higher taxes and more access to employment. It does seem like it's a fairly workable solution that doesn't, you know, doesn't push us into Utopia, but or, or let's go full Plato and maybe you'll be sympathetic to this And completely separate them so that those who exercise political power can literally not own property, have their own house, um, ever be alone or unsupervised by others, and then, then we know that they won't be exploiting their merit for, for personal gain. The, the only thing they want to do is contemplate the forms. I think that system would last for about a a a a week. Um, I know, I know that the idea behind Sparta and behind Plato's strange version of Sparta is that things don't change and the institutions remain perfect and are preserved. But, uh, I've seen the ruling elites, they change the rules in favor of themselves immediately. Well, you know, uh, Plato Socrates might just say that's cuz they weren't educated properly. They never actually did it. But I mean, look, this is a, this is a debate about like, what does Plato actually mean? But, uh, I, I think that the point about separating personal advantage and political power is again, something that is a point that everyone's kind of interested in, I think that you're probably sympathetic to as well. Yes, absolutely. Uh, yeah, I mean, sure. I'm not sympathetic to, to Plato solution, but I am sympathetic pla Plato is right. I mean, this is the, this is the one place that I am sympathetic to Plato is that he doesn't, he doesn't want the kind of oligarchy that I also don't want. Sure. Fair enough. Good in theory welcomes Graham Culbertson, famous Platonist and elitist Glad to have You You know, I just, um, I've achieved a lot of success through, through hard work and, uh, and and merit and I just wish everyone else could do the same. Yeah. I think people should not have to work so hard and merit shouldn't count for so much, just like make the stakes slower, let's just make the stakes lower. I, I mean, I can't, I cannot find, um, a simpler way of putting it than that. Make, make the stakes lower. I mean, I think about universal basic income a lot, which is just another way of saying ma make the stakes lower. And, uh, that is, I suppose, the crucial thing. If you're gonna draw a line, I mean, I'm thinking of the work of Corey Robbin between like left wing and right wing thinking. One of the things that the right wing always does, it defends power and privilege. But also, you know, when Corey Robbin does his readings of people like Burke, he shows that they really do think Hayek is another that like winning is everything, or, or everything is winning. And you have to, like, when you, when you enter the economic field for Hayek, the fact that you might starve and die is like what gives life its flavor. And, uh, that seems like a bad way of doing it. you say, Burke thinks that I'm even gonna push back on Hayek because when you read the road to serfdom, there's a lot more scope for a welfare state than libertarian neoconservatives, which have, have you believe. So when we're talking about the individual interpretations, yeah. But I get this view that it's all about like this dog eat dog world and only the strong survive. But yeah, I don't believe in that. I would like to share with you, one of the things that I found most interesting when I was getting into the Republic for the podcast and that maybe you'll be sympathetic to, and that relates to our discussion about oligarchy democracy, and so on, uh, money inequality. So, There's this bit in the Republic where SOCs is describing how the regime changes, how it goes from the like perfect regime of the philosopher kings, and it becomes a timocracy where the military virtuous guys, all the soldiers rule, then it de generates into a oligarchy and then a democracy, and then tyranny. Anyway, oligarchy is the one I wanna talk about because I found something that I thought was interesting in here and that kind of just makes me always remember the, the lower the stakes principle, which is when he describes the oligarchic man, the oligarchic citizen, it's not what we think of as an oligarchic. It's not like some guy driving around, London in a Bugatti going to nightclubs and stuff like that, right? It's not, it's not the unassailable rich person that characterizes oligarchy. It's someone with tremendous status anxiety and who is very cheap. And the reason, and the reason that is, is because, so he describes the oligarchy man. They're like scrimping and scrounging. They love excess. They love spending money, but only if it's other people's money because in an oligarchy there's a huge gap between rich and poor. If you fall below the threshold of being one of the elite, then you are screwed. You do not wanna make that fall. The stakes are too high. And that makes me pull people paranoid and anxious and willing to hold others down so they can maintain this very precarious position. And that insight into what is a oligarchy like? It's not about a few people just living it up and being rich. It's about a fear of falling. Um, and I think you see that in more libertarian, unequal countries. And that brings us back to the whole idea of new deal welfare state. Let's put a floor down because not only is there just like poor people will have more oliar Hebrew ruins, everyone's lives, even the people who are part of the elite. Um, I have this constant anxiety and that's what like all these books, critical of meritocracy that have come out in the past few years are about right. You got Michael Sandell wrote one, uh, mark Vitz, who's a, a Yale guy. There's all these meritocrats are like, this sucks all us people who are in the elite, all US university professors, all us McKinsey consultants, all US Wall Street guys, were working 70 hour weeks. We don't get to have any life and we have to, we have to. Or else, you know, we plummet down to the totally precarious underclass. And so I think from my view of Plato's analysis of oligarchy, Uh, you know, smaller, smaller band, lower the risk. Get rid of the rich, I'll give you another way that, uh, that Plato is absolutely right because where I have seen the meritocratic suffering is, is not from these, you know, these professors. I mean, look, yeah, I know like Duke professors, they're miserable. They're all miserable. Um, but I've also taught their children. And the parents live in absolute fear, and frankly, it is a justified fear that their kids will fall below a threshold. And in America, if you fall far enough, You can literally die. We're not talking about, oh no, my kid will only make $50,000. As a teacher, we're talking about, oh, my kid has a mental health breakdown, doesn't finish college, et cetera, et cetera, may not actually make a living wage. And so most of the driving force that I see for the meritocracy now is from Meritocrats imposing it on their children because they are, they cannot pass down. They, they're not rich enough to pass down a billion dollars to their kid. The only thing they can pass down is this path to meritocratic success. And this is precisely why Plato says these people cannot have children. I mean, they can, they can biologically create children, but they cannot be involved in the rearing of children. Because as soon as your meritocrats have kids, The family of the meritocratic is the enemy of the meritocracy. And I see that E at unc. It's not quite Harvard, but man is it a meritocratic place and I see that every day with my students. Well, yeah, and that's what I'm talking about. When I talked earlier about the private nature of American education, what I meant is the family still exists, so, um, you know, Okay. It seems to me like we've done, we've done enough work for this episode. Um, oh, I guess I wanted to ask you the same question that you asked me. Was there anything, uh, you wanted to ask me or anything else that you wanted to get covered on this episode? Well, I mean, I, I thought I would let you guide it but I would like you to tell me a little bit about how, um, you talked at the beginning about how you thought Athenian radical democracy might be an embodiment of anarchy. So, I mean, gimme the brief Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. This is, again, I'm following this idea in Graeber, and I've already spoken to multiple other anarchist intellectuals who have just been like, no, I'm, I'm not buying it, Uh but I am buying it. So when you describe, like for example, in your podcast, which is the most detailed description of, uh, Athenian democracy that I've ever taken in you, you describe a world without experts in which everyone is working and pitching in, in a way that is organized and has room for experts on the side, but isn't devoted to experts and is devoted to, in a certain way the good life. And when you look at whether, whether the people who call anarchists or the people who call, I call radical Democrats like, uh, Jane Adams or John Dewey, what they are looking for is the day-to-day participation of everyone of the community coming together and whatever project there is to take on the community does the taking on. And as soon as anyone imagines this bigger than a village, they start imagining things like drawing lots or committees or councils or something. And yet, without ever putting together what you might call a, you know, a coercive sovereign. And so when I'm listening to you describe Athenian democracy and you say, you know, the guy in the guy running Athenian democracy, he's just a guy, right? His name is Pericles. He's not the emperor. He's not the king, he's just someone who has articulated a project that other people then have bought in on and are working towards. And one of the descriptions of anarchism that people say is like, you know, you couldn't do anything. You couldn't actually achieve anything. And grave says, well, sure you could. You just need someone to say, this is my idea, who's with me? As opposed to this is my idea and we have a place called prison for anyone who is not with me. Okay, so Athenian democracy, they don't really have a theory of sovereignty, but very coercive. In fact, Well, So it, it's like, it's not as socially conservative as as Sparta, but there's a difference between, you know, like this is the concept of coercion and essential authority is compatible with democracy, right? That's why there's majority rule. You eventually take a vote and then everyone abides by that decision. And if you don't abide by that decision, they're gonna force you. Um, so, well, I don't want people to walk away thinking Athens was like this liberal place where every individual can do what they want. They could do so in their private lives, but once they made the decision there would be consequences if you went against it. So it wasn't like, . It wasn't in the terms liberal democracy, they come apart, they didn't have liberal rights, they had democracy. They got to participate in the decision. But if you're in the minority, you lost, you still have to follow the rule. And I think that is probably the nub of a lot of worries about anarchism is that well look, we, we still need to be able to force the people who don't wanna go along. Yeah. And I need to I need to jump in here and say, um, this is precisely why all of the anarchists refuse the label democracy because they view it as ultimately constituting a, a hole, a polity, whatever you want to call it, which is coercive at the end of the day, after the participatory process has happened. Yeah. I mean, hey, Hobbs, Hobbs. It says there can be a democratic sovereign, right. You can have assembly, so, And I want to, I wanna be very clear, this is an anachronistic project. This is not a description of Anthony democracy as an actually was, but the elements of it that are radical and, and incompatible with what we now call liberal democracy seem to me to, to rhyme with. If I can borrow that like history rhymes thing with with radical democracy. Sure. And with anarchism, I don't want to suggest that, uh, Pericles's Athens was, uh, anarchy, nor do I want to suggest that, uh, that, you know, Pericles's Athens was, was even democratic along the lines of what I would imagine a democracy to be. But all of its strengths and all of its articulation of itself as a democracy, as opposed to what we have, you know, they, they have ultimately a sovereign state based on the will of the people. We have that also, but the various ways that their democracy is different than ours seems to me to be more anarchistic, Okay.. I mean, look, I don't wanna agree or, or disagree cause I'm not really that clear on the concept of anarchy, but it is more participatory that much. Yeah, we can look, we, I'm, I'm not, I'm not gonna ask you to go out on a limb, uh, on the, on the, on the question, on the question of anarchy. That's, that's certainly not what I asked you here to do, but I, I do wanna say the idea that, the idea that your participation Uhhuh. that it is, no one gets to decide whether you participate or not. You participate if you want to in something besides voting cuts to me completely against the grain to what we call democracy now. And it resembles something much more like what someone like Kropotkin would describe as anarchism, or for that matter, Thoreau, you want, you know, you want kids to learn, put a little sign on your house. that says, I'm teaching here. That was Thoreau that was Thoreau was a teacher. He put a sign on his house or not ing on his house, but the lye was like, here I am. Come learn from me. Much in the same way Socrates did. And if you try that in a so-called liberal democracy right now, you might even get arrested for like un un, unlike if, if you use the It will be for corrupting the youth. ex it'll be for, it's the same thing that they got Socrates for. Yeah. Yeah. Should have known that was going there. Okay. This has this, this has been good in theory slash every day anarchism. Such, such a pleasure. Such a pleasure, Clif. Thank you so much. And thanks. Thanks again for getting in contact and having me on, and, uh, good talk. Let's, let's be in touch. Okay.