What can Plato teach us today?

By Andre van Heerden

How the corruption of language hurts us

Josef Pieper (1904 - 1997) was a leading German philosopher, whose views strongly reflected the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas and Plato. After studying philosophy, law, and sociology at the universities of Berlin and Münster, Pieper worked as a sociologist and freelance writer, and later held the position of ordinary professor of philosophical anthropology at the University of Munster from 1950 to 1976. Thereafter, he continued to lecture at the university as professor emeritus until 1996. Pieper’s thought has earned great respect throughout the academic world among people of widely differing philosophical standpoints. This article looks at how he links ancient wisdom with a serious on-going modern controversy.

In seeking answers to the breakdown of civilisation in the twentieth century, the German Thomist philosopher, Josef Pieper turned to the greatest thinker in history. He was deeply impressed by the prescience of Plato in seeing the smooth talk of the Sophists as the seductive illusion of the political process, enabling a fraudulent arrogation of power from the legitmate authority. Pieper found that when public discourse is vitiated by the undermining of truth, it becomes a valuable tool in the hands of the power-seekers and totalitarians.

In its exercise by unscrupulous politicians, the abuse of language is more commonly known as propaganda. This now all-too-familiar practice is especially dangerous when democracy is under siege, as it is in our day.

However, Pieper made it clear that the use of propaganda is by no means confined to totalitarian regimes. It is in evidence wherever an ideological faction, a special interest, a lobby group, or any powerful organisation or corporation employs the word as its weapon of choice. He noted that the word could be used to intimidate in many ways other than the threat of political persecution. Defamation, public ridicule, political correctness, and reducing someone to the status of non-person, are all instances of how the word can be deployed to destroy lives.

Pieper saw the common element as the degrading of language into an instrument of rape. That it does violence surreptitiously was demonstrated by Plato drawing on his personal experience with the Sophists of his day. Plato’s lesson says that the abuse of political power is intimately related to the corruption of the word, which actually provides the fertile ground in which it can grow. The surest way to discern the hidden potential for a totalitarian takeover is by being aware of the public misuse of language.

The humiliation of man by man through the acts of physical violence, like forced labour, torture, beatings, and murder, has its origin, where things appear more benign, in that almost indiscernible instant when the word loses its dignity. And the dignity of the word amounts to nothing more than the fact that it can do what nothing else can, that is, it can convey meaning based on reality, the way things actually are. When in the place of authentic reality a bogus reality is set up, then it becomes well nigh impossible to discern the truth.

Pieper explained how Plato sweated over his philosophical labours for more than fifty years, always returning to the same question: what is it that makes the Sophists so dangerous? He finally wrote one last dialogue, “Sophist”, in which he expounded on the fact that the Sophists set out to manufacture a fictitious reality. Pieper was not alone when he expressed his concerns that the Platonic nightmare has a terrifying relevance in the modern world.

Public opinion has been impoverished because people no longer know where to find the truth. And most are not even inclined to look for it, deceived and manipulated as they are into going along with the fictitious reality created by the power-mongers of our day through the corruption of language.

Pieper summed up Plato’s position in three statements: first, a meaningful human life requires, as far as possible, to be able to understand all things as they actually are, and to live and act in accordance with this reality, this truth; secondly, the potential of all people can only be brought to fruition by access and receptivity to truth, and society can only be sustained by a commitment to truth; thirdly, the truth lives and grows naturally in human relationships where there is free and open communication. Truth has to be promoted in dialogue, in discussion, in conversation, because its dwelling place is language, or the word.

The New Barbarism by Andre van Heerden

The most cursory perusal of the headlines from a selection of newspapers around the western world today illuminates the grim realities of a civilisation disintegrating: all manner of social dysfunction, crimes of sickening depravity, sensual gratification of epic proportions, financial prodigality once considered the preserve of banana republics, serial corruption in both corporate and government sectors, staggeringly ill-conceived military adventurism, and a voyeuristic obsession with supine celebrity. We seem to have lost the ability and the will to live together in harmony and to run our affairs responsibly.

Emblematic of the circumstances we find ourselves in are the many ugly episodes of bullying among schoolchildren, which instantly stream into cyberspace to entertain the millions who have nothing better to do with their time. Bullying of course, has plagued human society from the start, but what unsettles one in our allegedly advanced stage of civilisation are the shocking levels of demonic cruelty in souls so young. Innocence has been shattered long before any meaningful worldview might have been inculcated in these culturally deprived malcontents, and before any balanced character formation might have taken place. They are condemned to a life of barbarism before they even know the possibilities and pitfalls of human life. Jose Ortega Y Gasset many years ago penned the classic definition of barbarism:

Barbarism is the absence of standards to which an appeal can be made.

To what standard might an appeal be made in the face of these youthful thugs? The Ten Commandments? The Beatitudes? Honour? Virtue? The Golden Rule? The Categorical Imperative? The happiness of the greatest number? They would not know what you are talking about. Our brave new world that has swept aside all standards now finds the new barbarians within its gates. We have wilfully been producing them for generations, and are now living with the consequences of our folly.

Sixty years ago, in a 46-page work of genius called The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned western society that it was actively undermining the very qualities that it held up as essential for success and well-being: drive, dynamism, self-sacrifice, and creativity. Lewis’s insight and eloquence were seldom more brilliantly deployed:

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Of course, while we wring our hands, not knowing what to do in the deluge of dysfunction destroying lives daily all around us, most people are risibly ignorant that the warning was even given, let alone unheeded. Throughout the last century, astute observers saw the signs of the impending collapse of western civilisation. Many of them also prescribed the essential remedy – a return to the virtues of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, on which our flawed but once progressively humane culture was built.

Culture is transmitted by education, but the rejection of our culture by nihilistic elites has entailed the dismantling of our education tradition and its replacement by skills-based vocational training and ideological brainwashing. Social control has been the prime objective of state schooling since its introduction in the 19th century, though the elitist practice has been with us for much longer. It was the sage, Lao Tse, who some two and a half thousand years ago counselled:

Empty their heads and fill their bellies, weaken their minds and strengthen their sinews. To teach the people is to ruin the state.

That is the mentality that has spawned our malaise. In the inevitable downward spiral into meaninglessness, young people today are supposed to find that vital human quality called hope in consumerism, promiscuity, and licence. It is a spurious quest, and the rage of the deceived generations that erupts with ever-increasing frequency is but a symptom of the disease that afflicts them – the absence of answers to the ultimate questions posed by Kant:

Who am I? What may I hope? What ought I to do?

The once fertile fields of our civilisation are now choked by the weeds of the new barbarism, and there will be no quick fix. Tragically, less than civilised expedients like a return to capital punishment and more ruthless forms of incarceration will almost certainly gather popular approval as the incidence of social pathology worsens, but they will not eradicate the toxic crop we have sown. Only education can do that.

The bottom line is this: we have to stop filling the heads of young people with nihilistic nonsense. Can you cure an alcoholic by giving him alcohol? Can you cure a junkie by feeding him methamphetamine? Well, you can be sure you won’t cure raging despair in a youth by feeding him nihilism, telling him there is no meaning in life beyond self-gratification. The great treasure of western civilisation is the literature, art, music, architecture, history, philosophy and science that have sought the truth that enables the sovereign human soul to discern the meaning of life. Ideology, in many different guises, has tried to obscure and even destroy that treasure. The future will be determined by whether we are able to restore it.

Eighty years ago, G.K. Chesterton gave an unerringly accurate description of our condition:

People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.

The new barbarism is upon us. Who are the parents, teachers, and business and community leaders who will help to turn the tide?

The American Civil War – an education in leadership by Andre van Heerden

2011 marks the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War, and the next four years will see many commemorations of the terrible conflict that transformed forever the life of the United States. History in general overflows with lessons for leaders in all walks of life, but certain watershed events, like the fall of the Roman Republic, the French Revolution, and the World Wars of the 20^th century, offer perhaps more sharply-defined demonstrations of the dynamics of leadership and misleadership. The American Civil War is one of those especially illuminating episodes.

Obviously, the prodigious figure of Abraham Lincoln continues to dominate all discourse on the Civil War, and there are few finer examples of practical wisdom and integrity for leaders today in politics, business, and the professions. There is a vast literature on Lincoln, but the recent book, Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin would be as good a place to start as any. The central theme of the book is Lincoln’s determination to pick the best people for the job, regardless of all-too-human inadequacies and the undisguised antipathy they sometimes showed towards him. He accepted personal responsibility for managing conflict and dissent within his team.

The performance of many other famous people chosen to bear the mantle of leadership in that maelstrom – Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, George McClellan, William Sherman, and Ulysses Grant, to name an obvious few – dramatises the demands and duress of leadership in a time of upheaval and uncertainty. Again, there is a wealth of enlightening and entertaining historical analysis on all the major personalities, and even many less well-known ones, but the classic best-sellers by Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote will provide no end of insight and instruction for leaders today. Catton’s single-volume This Hallowed Ground would be an absorbing starting point.

The best video presentations of the tragedy and triumph of the conflict are Ken Burns’ superb documentary The Civil War, and Ronald F. Maxwell’s sweeping recreation of the battle of Gettysburg.

There is, however, much more to the leadership learning to be gained from the history of the Civil War than the characters and careers of the principle players. The great and enduring controversy centres on the cause of the conflagration, the Brothers’ War that tore apart not just a nation, but also communities and families. Obviously, the causes of any human conflict are complex in the extreme, and it was no different with the Civil War. Historians still contend with each other over the question as to whether the root cause was slavery or the constitutional issue of states rights. Did the seeds of the struggle lie in the institution of slavery itself, or in the federal constitution which balanced the power of the central government with that of the individual states? For example, if the New England states had felt they were being held back economically by the rural southern states, would they have had the right to secede from the Union? Would Arizona or Texas have the right to secede today?

Even though Lincoln had stated that he would leave slavery alone where it existed, believing as he did that it would die a natural death if it was not allowed to spread westwards, the political establishment in the southern states insisted that their state sovereignty was being violated. When they claimed the right to secede, and acted on it, they were declared to be in a state of rebellion against the United States and the war erupted.

Many southerners were opposed to slavery, and many northerners were racists, and as Lincoln pointed out, there were good and bad, weak and strong on both sides. People from north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line were sucked into the vortex created by the political wrangling that had troubled American politics for decades, but slavery had been an ugly scar on the nation for more than two centuries, and was a glaring contradiction of the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution.

Neutrality in life, in the face of the injustices we encounter in our communities and in our workplaces, as well as in other countries, is impossible; sooner or later the injustice affects the lives of all, and we must follow our conscience. This is a particularly tragic reality for those whose consciences have not been properly formed through genuine education at home, at school, and in the community at large.

As we remember the savage struggle that started in 1861, the next four years will be a good time for all leaders to reflect on their responsibility for the lives of others that is the core reality of leadership, and to grow the insight into human nature, culture, and conflict that is so sorely lacking in our world today.

The Poetry of Leadership

by Andre van Heerden

In the age of Wikileaks and leaky homes, conspicuous consumption and conspicuous corruption, with truth ensnared and trust a mythical grail no longer sought by anyone, leadership is a fugitive phenomenon. It seems as if no one knows, nor cares, what it means anymore, and the word’s currency in the media and the corridors of power rests solely on its usefulness as a social analgesic. Significantly, the loss has come at a time when poetry has all but disappeared from our cultural repertoire, and the affinity of leadership with poetry is compelling.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose garden.

TS Eliot’s lines from his Four Quartets inspire in me the urge to take up the mantle of leadership with greater conviction in my own life and in my relations with others. For surely the whole point of life is to take the right passage, and to open the right doors to find the fulfilment we seek. It is the very essence of leadership to avoid the regrets and disappointments of untapped potential, indecision and drift, and a lack of vision. Creative vision based on reality is the form of leadership, and action is the substance; together they inspire oneself and others to strive for a better future.

Although it is the purpose of both poetry and leadership to inspire heroic endeavour in the face of life’s challenges, being roused once more to a determined and inventive response by a piece of verse is always a singular experience. For example, in contemplating the constantly daunting responsibilities of leadership, I am often drawn back into the gently-spoken wisdom in Blake’s Jerusalem. It is a message of hope, and leaders are measured by the hope in the hearts of their people.

I give you the end of a golden string

Only wind it into a ball

It will lead you in at Heaven’s Gate

Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

Leadership is not a game; it is the perilous contest of life itself, in which there is an inevitable final reckoning, whatever one’s religious affiliation might be. Leadership impacts on real flesh and blood people and their families and communities, shaping who they are and what they will become; and that is as true of the leader as it is of the led. That is why the uncompromising pursuit of truth and virtue, the bedrock of integrity, is the sine qua non of effective leadership. Any deviation from this principle is a descent into misleadership. Blake’s words emphasise that through all life’s dark tempests, truth alone will lead us to fulfilment.

Of course your fulfilment needs to be defined before you set out to pursue it, and our post-modern world, obsessed as it is with systems and methods, is notoriously inept when it comes to delineating a clear and decisive vision. The egregious misleadership that results is a common feature in politics, business, and society at large. Lewis Carroll, in his delightful The Hunting of the Snark, reminds us of the folly of ill-conceived, utopian goals, and the bewildering pitfalls that attend them.

But the principle failing occurred in the sailing

And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed

Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due east

That the ship would not travel due west.

Whether it be a statesman like Mandela uniting his people, an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs unleashing a flood of creativity, or a teacher sparking the desire to learn in a group of enraptured young people, leadership is, to fall back on a beautiful cliché, poetry in motion. How sad that the phenomenon is evanescent today, menaced on every side as it is by the misleadership which toils only for more power. Shakespeare saw the danger four hundred years ago, spelling out the consequences in Troilus and Cressida, Act One, Scene Three.

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself.

As envisaged in the minds of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, leadership exemplifies the quest for goodness, truth, and beauty. Perhaps that is why, though science is an astonishingly productive tool in the hands of leaders, only poetry can in the end express the nobility of the leadership ideal, which requires nurturing in the family, development in self-leadership, and fulfilment in helping others to be the best that they can be. Mysteriously, life itself seems to be an on-going struggle between leadership and misleadership, for individuals, communities, and nations, and it is significant that in this time of proliferating crises, there seems to be a reawakening of interest in poetry. Perhaps that will inspire a renaissance of leadership.

Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677), was born to a Dutch Jewish family of Portuguese extraction, and grew up to become one of the foremost of the 17^th Century Rationalist philosophers who exerted such a strong influence on the 18^th Century Enlightenment. His fame was limited during his short life, and he worked for the most part as a humble lens grinder. His ideas led to his expulsion from the Jewish community in Holland, and the condemnation of his works by the Roman Catholic Church, but however one may view his standpoints on relativism, materialism, and determinism, he was no doubt a sincere and brilliant thinker seeking after truth. The quote above is proof of that.

“Peace is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.” Baruch Spinoza

COMMENT:

If history teaches us anything it is that there can never be any lasting security in an imposed peace. The people on whom it is imposed will sooner or later rise up against the injustices they would never have accepted voluntarily. This historical lesson is particularly pertinent in the business world today.

Peace is an ideal that can never be achieved until justice is achieved. Justice, of course, is a particularly challenging goal for human beings for the mere fact that unless it applies to everyone, it doesn’t really exist. Justice is either for all of us, or for none of us. The problem is compounded by the academic difficulty in defining the concept. I say “academic” because none of us really has too much trouble in recognising injustice when we see it.

The Rawlsian interpretation of justice as fairness suffers by dint of its semantic pliability and the consequent openness to abuse by ideologues. Perhaps we are obliged to stay with the Platonic definition: “giving each person his or her due.”

When there is justice, society (the contractual entity built on rights and obligations), becomes community (the shared thing built on respect and compassion). Leaders are required to be builders of community – in the home, the neighbourhood, the workplace, and the nation – misleaders will continue to be proponents of the imposed peace.