“And he had come to a bazaar of constitutions,” is the way Plato, in The Republic, sets about criticising democracy. In a way and in parts he is right. But Plato is earnestly set against democracy. As long as we do not think of it as necessarily the sort of constitution we have in the Western, so-called “democracies” then we may reject Plato’s ideas as the thoughts of a mind set in extreme conservatism and closed to any thought that “the people” are capable of ruling the state, let alone dealing with the complexities of legislation and taking public office.

In the vivid parable of “the ship” he goes further and is almost abusive concerning the people and the necessary factions and opinions current in any state where speech is free and free men and women have their say in the running of the nation or the city. For that is indeed what democracy is. It is the rule of the people, all the people, with everyone equal; an idea which is anathema to Plato and has been to conservatives and authoritarians since before and after his time.

In “the ship” the demos is likened to the master who is short sighted and partially deaf. Factions among the crew are constantly trying, by force or with the aid of drugs or drink, to overcome the master and to take over the helm. From there they go on what seems more like a drunken pleasure cruise than a proper trading voyage. (Bk.VI. P286)

There are uncomfortable truths set forth here which we ought to take to heart. Many people are misled by the political classes and by the factions and parties among them. Many people fail to consider rationally about how and for whom they are to cast their vote and would never think of going for office themselves. This is to be what the Athenians of Socrates’ and Plato’s time would have called an idiotees. That is someone unfit for the life of the state by lack of education or because of laziness. Our word “idiot” is derived from the Greek word, but the meaning has changed. Basically it means a “selfish person”.

Among the political classes, the factions and those who emerge to lead them, are often more motivated by the ambition for power than for the genuine well-being of the nation and of the people. Nor do these folk think that the ordinary people are capable of public service so they are often neglected, despised and made to make do with only a third rate education. The system, then, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the political leaders and active members of the parties, see themselves, in Plato’s terms, as an elite, and the only ones who are capable of political leadership and power.

Another valid point which Plato makes is that liberty, without self-control, easily becomes licentiousness. “They are free men,” he says, “the city is full of freedom and liberty of speech, and men in it may do what they like.” (Bk.VIII. p.355) The end is as in the Book of Judges, where it says, “In those days there was no king in Israel, everyman did that which was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 17:6.) Continuing his argument, Plato paints a picture of selfishness where each man seems to consider himself an island, cut off from any responsibility for the rest of society.

Also criticized are lax methods of child rearing. This does not imply that he advocates harsh discipline and hard chastisement. On the contrary, we see in The Meno, Socrates, patiently and with extreme sensitivity, steering a slave boy through the complexities of geometry. Plato does argue that this permissiveness will cause a decline in the moral, social and political state. He argues, “are not the young people luxurious and lazy in matters concerning both body and soul. Are they not too soft to stand (i.e. to resist) both pleasures and pains, and idle?”

He goes on to argue that this is one of the causes of the decline which he traces in several stages. Starting with the rule of an aristocracy of the elite, that is what we should call “a meritocracy”, he sees this decline to a military elite or Timocracy who love honour to an oligarchy of rich men, then, finally, into democracy and tyranny. Of the rule of the few richest men he says they, “care for making money,” and careless of all else. He concludes, they care no more for virtue than the poor do. (Bk. VIII. P.354)

It is a sad thing that many of the young democracies, born after the upheaval caused by world war, have rapidly degenerated from the high hopes invested in them at the time of the “wind of change” speech, into full blown tyrannies. Some are managing to extract themselves from the morass and where this is happening give us hope for the democratic process and for the new breed of politicians and political forms emerging in the developing world.

Plato misused the word “justice”. He turns the arguments by Socrates in The Republic to make it seem as if the harmony of the state is based on a rigidly controlled caste system. It is rather a system of injustice and not justice or righteousness.

Plato’s system is one where only the ruling meritocracy initiates the laws. This is enforced by a highly trained class of “assistants,” who are the professional police and army. The rest must simply follow the trade or occupation of their fathers and mothers and are not allowed to do anything else. Indeed the educational system is such that there is no room for moves from one caste to another except among the Guardians and the Assistants.

This is sanctified by a lie that God moulded in the nature of various people gold, silver, or brass and iron. That is Guardians, Assistants, craftsmen or merchants. The slaves of course did not count, they formed another class like the untouchables in the old Hindu system of caste.

After seeing to it that, among the Guardians, the “best” men breed with the “best” women, the children are selected by the education system so that the “best” become capable of dialectic and a vision of “the good”. These will be the future Guardians while the rest will be deemed only to have silver in their nature. As for those children of the craftsmen they will spend their childhood in the workshop or the counting house, serving an apprenticeship at the family craft or trade.

So the education system selects for and keeps in being a rigid caste system and people remain in the categories they are born in. This would obviously be distasteful to present day democratic thinking. However it has not been without its supporters in the past and the recent present. Hitler and Himmler, in the Third Reich tried to introduce a system of breeding and Hitler justified this in Mein Kampf in just the same way as Plato in The Republic. Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, also believed that people are genetically fitted to their station in life and founded the Eugenics movement.

Given that Plato’s system is founded on a lie and that Hitler’s breeding experiment ended disastrously it must be apparent that humans are far too complex to breed for single characteristics as one would animals. Anyway who can tell which characteristics in humans are the most valuable. Sometimes the most successful of men and women have been the most seriously flawed. In fact we all have our flaws of character and who can tell how breeding experiments may turn out since, though a certain trait may, possibly be enhanced in the offspring, while also exacerbating deep psychological flaws.

Even if you breed a pair of artists together you will not necessarily get a Picasso. You are just as likely to get a perfectly ordinary human being average in all things. On the other hand who can say what “ordinary” is when applied to people? Might not a loving concerned mother of children be of far more value than an Alexander or a Napoleon? Might not a jolly happy teacher or youth leader be of more value than a Caesar or a Plato? I think most of us would prefer a good and helpful neighbour than a prima donna of the soccer pitch to live near by.

We are mostly, all over the world governed by elites who send their children to those schools which get the best results in the narrow curriculum which they, themselves have devised or succeeded in. Yet which of us can truly tell which is the best way to teach the young and what are the subjects necessary for the good life?

Most educational systems are self-fulfilling prophecies which shut out the children or the poor or the underprivileged and keep them as a grumbling but subservient lower class. Nowhere but in a few private experiments has there been a true flowering of the talent that is latent in the working classes of the world. Sometimes men and women have clawed themselves up; “by their bootstraps” lifting themselves until they find their way out of the darkness of the cave into the glorious light of day and even get to see some vision of the good only to be driven back, by the haves to their “rightful ” place among the have-nots.

Jonathan Rose, in his The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, gives hundreds of examples of people who have, from the most difficult and deprived of circumstances, managed to achieve excellence and, often outstanding success, in a variety of ways as well as in the public service. That many by dint of determination and sheer hard work did manage to do so suggests that there is a far greater pool of talent dormant there than few if any of the ruling classes have cared to admit or even to think.

The inequality and poverty which doomed the rural cottager to a life of toil and ignorance is sadly meditated upon by Thomas Gray in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. It ought to move our hearts to see that our own children are given the best we can afford and that we ourselves seek knowledge and understanding wherever we can find them.

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;

Hands that the rod of empire might have sway’d,

Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

But knowledge to their eyes the ample page

Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;

Chill penury repressed their noble rage,

And froze the genial current of the soul.

Equality of opportunity does not exist where the rich and the powerful can buy schooling for their children. If Plato considered education to be essential for the continued existence of his state then perhaps we may take a leaf out of his book and decide on a proper system based on those forms of knowledge which every person needs as well as giving opportunity to develop the talents common to that person alone. How we do that is beyond the scope of this work though it would seem to be essential or our world is likely to dissolve itself in violence and in vice.

If loss of self-control and the despising of virtue be the corrupting influences in the state, according to Plato, then we may take at least this warning and agree that they are too the corrupting influences of all states. Violence breeds violence breeds more violence and where self-control is lost then anarchy is not far away. Nor may these things be imposed.

Of what value is law if it is enforced by armed police and spies in every household? Of what use is virtue if every transgression is punished with the utmost severity and men live virtuous lives only out of fear of what might happen if they transgress? In these situations once the guardians of the laws relax their vigilance then anarchy breaks out and rioting leads to the barricades and to civil strife the most ruinous of all wars.

Since the main characteristic of our dissolving civilisation is the love of pleasure and of entertainment, there is little hope that we are capable of achieving a willingness to act responsibly and to value virtue overnight. There is certainly no evidence that the political classes, even if the people achieved virtue, would be willing to relinquish power to the demos. Nor is it at all desirable that power should be taken away from those who misuse it by violence since what is born in violence inevitably continues by means of it.

There is however a lot of evidence that social and political changes for the better often come about by a sort of process of political and social osmosis from the lower to the upper classes. The various reform acts in the nineteenth century came about because the people were ready to be enfranchised. They came about because of a moral change in the thinking of the nation whereby the rulers realised that control by a minority of landed aristocracy and mega-rich business families was an injustice.

It is probably also true that corruption starts more often from the top than from the bottom of the social pyramid. It then works its way down until, often after several generations it reaches the lower level of society.

A change of heart, a revival of thinking, and a vision of better things often becomes the motivation for many from among the lower orders to educate themselves and to enlighten their fellows. While this goes on, increasingly the moral change among the workers affects and effects some change of heart among those who had traditionally exercised power and control.

Though Sartre, in Nausea, mocks the “autodidact”, such people are heroes and heroines and not the parody presented by Sartre. They are not to be despised by those who by birth and not by talent have opened up to them the paths of power, of prestige and of preferment. Nor are they to be slighted for they are the hope for a better future by a society jaded by mass entertainment and “dumbed down” by cheap pleasures where the final bill is to be paid by a society where ignorance and vice make for inefficiency and idleness.

Walter Lipmann makes the point that every society and every culture needs a “public philosophy”. This must consist of a set of standards of virtue agreed upon by the majority of the population. One might add that such a value system cannot be promulgated by the government, nor can it even be taught in the schools, nor is it to be made up by any one class for its own ends. It has to be what governs the thinking of the whole of the society because that society agrees that it is good and just and right.

Such a philosophy may seem impossible to conceive of or to implement. Such a philosophy will be resented by vested interests but will lead to equality of opportunity where all humanity is valued and where all education is of the first rate with the well-being of the individual in view. Such a philosophy is, as was described to one of old who wrote. “A new heart also will I give you and a new spirit will I put within you. And I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you. And ye shall keep my judgments and do them.” (Ezekiel 36:25-27.)

The laws of a just society are to be agreed upon by all. They should be part of the very moral nature of all the people, written as it were on their hearts and their minds, and based upon an absolute set of moral values, where that vision of the good is open to all and not restricted to an elite.

Plato has much to teach us but we should beware of many of his ideas for they lure the ship of state into dangerous waters where shoals and treacherous currents make navigation perilous. Working class traditions, whatever the supporters of Platonic elites might think, in Britain and the USA, have been the real cradle of democracy and of all that is and has been good in those societies.