A blog, of sorts, intended as a place to experiment, struggle, question, and play with whatever research I am currently working on. The themes will thus change over time as my projects change, and the entries may be quotations that strike my fancy, attempts to puzzle through hairy problems, notes on sources, experiments, musings, dead ends, odd angles of looking at things. It is a voice to my frustrations, discoveries, curiosities, and confusions. It is thinking out loud. ...More 
cosmopolitanism, democracy, plurality, stoicism, virtue —
6 Apr 2010
Have we lost a recognition of the position from which we apply values with the turn to democracy? Question prompted by Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.
In other words, in the past, it was taken as given that those in power (emperors, patricians, etc) needed certain virtues in order to rule, while those who were ruled needed others. A just judge was impartial, and his impartiality was his fairness. This was a mixed blessing—it was easy for those who maintained total impartiality to others to become frigid or cruel, impartiality slipping into disinterest or isolation from others. To combat it, we cue up notions of shared humanity, fellow feeling, camaraderie with all as humans and brothers. But it is, by definition, abstract and not particular. The leader must universalize to be fair, but in doing so he creates a barrier between himself and those he rules, and he creates a different set of rules for himself and for others. This is understood as a paradoxical answer to a paradoxical question. To erase the paradox is not possible. The question was in maintaining the proper balance between two competing needs—identifying with others, but not so much as to cloud our judgment. Refusing to connect with the particular, but not so much that we lose the ability to connect altogether.
But with democracy, we are all judges, and we are all leaders, and we are all equally citizens (that's the story anyway...the reality would involve a much longer set of musings). As such, we are expected to maintain a judicious distance from one another. We are to see all as equal, and yet as the personal sovereign we stand apart. That is what we do if we are good leaders and citizens anyway. Those who do not exercise this self-control and objective distance are, one must assume, crappy at their jobs. They are not as good at being citizens as we.
It is a holdover. An atavism. As mini-sovereigns, we exercise our duty with care and understand that those around us will not have the same needs, beliefs, or responsibilities. We accept the plurality which we rule over and live amidst, and this is a requirement of the job. But now those around us are not merely our subjects (as subjects, we forgive them their different virtues, for those virtues are appropriate to subjects and they do their jobs well). But we judge them harshly as fellow rulers, for they've got it all wrong. When our fellow citizens are beneath us, we forgive them. When they are equal to us, we despise their failings and judge their values as inappropriate. In other words, they may rule as they wish, but only so long as it is as we.
We believe in the ideal type of democracy and equality so deeply that we no longer see the possibility of these different positions. There's no distinction between them anymore, so the bourgeois (psuedo-leader) adherents to notions like cosmopolitanism assume that it simply makes sense for everyone to be a cosmopolitan, and that that will mean the same thing, and serve the same purpose, for everyone. It is a virtue for all. The virtue. But what does it mean to be a cosmopolitan as a leader, and what does it mean to be one as a citizen? What does it mean to be both at the same time? Is it self-defeating and antithetical to plurality when separated from corresponding conceptions of hierarchy, which temper its inherent tendency to be universalizing?
Or is it, instead (or in addition to), that the Stoics were quiescent? One could act against Nature, or against another man, but the harm done was not important, indeed, could be imagined away. Today, however, our dignity is brittle and fragile, and any affront presents a terrible danger which compels immediate action. Those who do not agree thus pose a much greater threat than in the past, so, again, there is little to temper the demand that all must concur on this point.
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agreement, certainty, emphasis, knowledge, plato, virtue —
7 Jan 2009
Managed to make it to the Rose Reading Room at last. Bought a new scarf on the street. And the Internet fairy came two days early! Life is pretty good.
It took a couple of days to synthesize Plato's Protagoras (it always does, dammit), but when I woke up this morning a bit that had been nagging at me started to fall into place a little more. Let's see if I can recollect the gist of the argument from my memory and scribbled notes without doing too much harm to the poor thing:
The ultimate conclusion is that virtuous things are based on knowledge and can therefore be taught. This is achieved in fits and starts, but finally through the example of courage. Basically, it is agreed that all (healthy) men do pleasurable things and not painful ones. However, in some instances they choose wrongly the thing which is a short term pleasure (drinking) but a long term pain (cirrhosis). But, since they are healthy, and it was earlier agreed that all healthy men choose pleasurable things, the only explanation for the bad decision is that they were not knowledgeable enough about the long term pain their choice would cause. In other words, if they had been knowledgeable about cirrhosis, they would not have drunk. The same set up is used for courage—cowards flee from battle because fleeing would seem to provide them with short term pleasurable benefits (not getting stabbed to death), however, courageous men are courageous because they understand that battle needs to be done for the longterm victory and glory to the nation, yadda yadda yadda. Ergo, Protagoras and Plato-as-Socrates conclude, if a man has knowledge (and it is agreed that knowledge can be taught), he will also be virtuous. In the argument somewhere also appeared the assertion that knowledge is the highest thing that man can possess, though they admitted that not all men agree with them, but that that is because other men are wrong (seriously, that part was just like the playground, and that is almost exactly how they put it).
This was nagging at me for a while because, honestly, it just doesn't seem right. As I lingered lazily in bed this morning it started to occur to me why, though I don't think I've worked it all quite out yet. But it centers around a phenomena that I was discussing with my friend (whom we shall call Isabel) recently, in which we both observed that many other liberals seem to believe that if only everyone became educated enough, goshdarnit, then they would agree with the liberals.
There are two assumptions here that I don't believe are right. One is that people with the same set of information will agree on things—in addition to it being impossible to force all people to have all the same pieces of information, it is also impossible to force people to place the same emphasis on the same pieces of information, whether because of their personal life experiences, biological brain quirks, personality, or goals. The other is that the speaker making such a conclusion is definitely right, which, given the fact that no person can have all information at their disposal at any given time and is also subject to the weighting bias mentioned above, is a rather bold presumption.
Now, these things are awfully big, so I'm afraid I can't flesh them out much further than this at this point. But I think I will really need to come back to these two ideas a lot more, because they seem like they may hold some pretty important keys for me.
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