Ordinary people are particularly disinclined to suffer the
hardships of prolonged and concentrated study. They have no
interest in theories or comprehensive views of things; they
naturally concentrate on the small tasks at hand, while leaving the
big decisions to those who may or may not deserve their confidence.
They will thus always be at the mercy of forces and conditions
which they do not really comprehend, and thus be in no position to
take effective charge of their own destiny. They will be persuaded
by politicians to trust them with their lives and fortunes, and
they have only the vaguest ideas of where these politicians will
take them, and no insurance that they will not be headed for
avoidable hardships or outright disaster. The following is Plato's
allegorical description of what typically happens in a
democracy:
Imagine something like this occurring on a ship or a fleet of
ships. The owner of the vessel is bigger and stronger than anyone
else on board, but he is hard of hearing, can't see well, and he
doesn't know how to navigate a ship. The sailors all fight over who
should be at the helm, and every one of them thinks he ought to be
the skipper--even though they have never learned the navigator's
craft, cannot name any instructor who has taught them, nor indicate
any time when they underwent training. They insist, in fact, that
there is no craft of navigation that could be taught, and they are
ready to rip to shreds anyone who maintains that there is.
They're always all over the owner of the vessel, begging, and doing
everything to get him to turn the helm over to them. Sometimes,
when others are at the helm, they kill them or throw them
overboard. Then they run the ship, having dulled the owner with
wine or drugs or in some other way. They use up the vessel's
supplies and sail along in a way that can be expected from such
people. Anyone capable of talking the owner into letting him steer
the boat is called by him a 'navigator' or 'expert of ships.'
Anybody else is dismissed as of no use. They haven't got a clue
that a real captain must know about the seasons, the sky, the
stars, the winds, and everything else about ships if he is to be in
genuine command of the vessel. And they don't think that there is
an art that empowers the captain to decide where to direct the
ship, regardless of whether the others feel like going there or
not. And they do not believe that one can master that art.
(Republic, 488a-d).
It is interesting that Plato acknowledges the demos as the rightful
owner of the ship of state, but it is clear that he does not think
the owner fit to be in charge of anything. Nor does he think that
the usual breed of politicians (the "sailors") could be trusted
with the task of governing--be they the spokesmen of the demos or
the oligarchs. Something entirely new has to be invented if such
disastrous events as the Peloponnesian War or the ensuing civil
strife are to be avoided in the future. Nothing short of a
carefully designed rule by highly educated experts would be equal
to the task: a carefully designed dictatorship of reason.
Not surprisingly, no philosopher has ever taken quite seriously the
idea of installing a council of intellectuals as the government of
a state, and scholars like Alan Bloom have suggested that the whole
argument in favor of Philosopher Kings and Philosopher Queens has
no other purpose than to demonstrate the impossibility of such a
utopian scheme. Yet, there is enough force in Plato's insistence on
expert knowledge as a precondition for good government that his
peculiar kind of elitism cannot be rejected out of hand. Plato's
discussion of his utopian state is an enlightening thought
experiment, and his critique of democracy an important challenge.
Even in an age that has finally adopted democracy as the basic norm
of acceptable government it is important to answer Plato's
challenge with detailed counter-arguments. With respect to the
argument implied by the ship analogy philosophers have responded to
Plato's critique of democracy in the following way:
Even if one admits that expert knowledge is necessary for the
government of a commonwealth, and that most ordinary people do not
have a sufficient grasp of all the social, administrative, legal,
and other relevant details that go into the running of a
government, people nevertheless need not relinquish their right to
appoint the officials that run the government, or to recall them,
if the results of their performance seem unsatisfactory. The owner
of a ship may not know how to navigate, but he or she still has the
right to determine where the ship will go. Hired expert navigators
may be necessary to figure out the best means of getting to some
place, but the owners of the ship should still be able to determine
the ends. Voters in a democracy may not know all or even any of the
technicalities of running a government, but they surely can judge
the results. What is essential for democratic government is not
that citizens be able to understand and do everything themselves,
but that they be able to determine the major outcomes and their
over-all destiny as a community.
Turning the ship analogy against Plato in this way is a persuasive
move, but it ultimately does not take care of Plato's challenge.
For if it is plausible to argue that voters may be too uninformed
to decide on the best means to reach a certain goal, then it is
also plausible to argue that they may not be informed enough to
choose the right goals. A serious lack of knowledge can manifest
itself not only in the way of how a boat is run, but also in the
choice of destinations. What can and has to be criticized is not
only a citizenry's possible ignorance of the due processes of their
government, but also their ideas and expectations about where their
society ought to go, what goals they want to reach as a
commonwealth. The democratic election of a leader who plans to
replace a capitalist democracy with a fascist warfare state, e.g.,
is a case in point. Hitler, it is worth remembering, was elected by
a democratic vote, and it is surely not irrelevant to ask whether
those who voted for him did not suffer from an unacceptable degree
of ignorance and lack of political education.
The democratic decision to engage in a series of expansionist wars,
as sanctioned by the Athenian Assembly, is another case in point.
What Plato witnessed as a young man was not a lack of understanding
of the technicalities of governing on the part of the demos, but
rather poor judgment in the choice of goals. Major political
destinies can be judged in terms of wisdom, feasibility, logic,
moral responsibility, and other criteria that make the general
intellectual competence of an electorate a relevant and urgent
issue. It is obviously not a foregone conclusion that whatever the
majority decides is also the bestor even acceptable. Both
long-term and short-term expectations and decisions of an
electorate may be quite thoughtless, ill-advised, stupid, illusory,
dangerous, or outright insane. ("With individuals insanity is
something rare. With groups, parties, nations, or whole epochs,
however, it is the rule, Nietzsche suggests in Beyond Good and
Evil.) In spite of the above critique of the ship analogy, in other
words, Plato's challenge to the idea of democracy still
stands.
Granted, then, that sound political decisions concerning means as
well as ends require not only a reliable knowledge of such things
as economics, geography, sociology, and military strategy, but also
something like moral competence, the question arises as to how this
sort of preparedness can be acquired. Plato's answer is: by a
thorough and systematic education; no viable government is possible
without an adequate amount of knowledge and training. It is for
this reason that education is a major preoccupation of Platos
Republic.
