Brief note on philosopher-kings

 

One of the keys to Plato’s Republic is to note that it is primarily a work concerning the interior organisation of man (a psychology and anthropology) and only by extension, or parallel, about the polity. Socrates sets out to find “justice” (dike) – a proper order - in a man, and at one point proposes that it might be easier to find this by expanding the inquiry to a city of men, the state. The entire work is built on this inner/outer, microcosm/macrocosm parallel and should be read in that light. It is a naïve reading to suppose that the descriptions of various political constitutions are some sort of programme. In context, most importantly, they are metaphors for inner states and human types. 

 

It is hard to say where Plato himself stands in it all, although we can say this: the man=city parallel implies, as a first principle of Platonic political philosophy, that governance ought to conform to human nature, that there ought to be a tight correspondence between the inner organisation of man (Plato assumes that there is one, a reality, that is, by nature) and his outer social organisation. The purpose of the outer is to allow the inner to flourish and be the best of what it can be, which is justice (fittedness). We can argue over what this human nature that a polity should reflect is and is not, and debate what social constructions (or misconstructions) we mistake as ‘natural’ and so on, but a core tenet of Platonic political philosophy is that there is a bedrock nature – human beings are not just sludge that you can successfully mold into any shape you want – and that good government is measured by the extent to which it accords with that bedrock reality. 

 

To be clear, Plato regards that bedrock reality to not only be man’s animal nature and appetites, but to consist of man’s higher faculties as well. Plato offers an expanded view of human nature, insisting (against merely natural or utilitarian views) that man is both a physical and metaphysical being. It is the fullness of man and the totality of human potential that suffers under bad political constitutions and flourishes under good ones.

 

Regarding the so-called philosopher-kings that rule over the best of polities, they correspond to the highest faculty inherent in human nature – that part of us that loves wisdom above all things. Do you want to be ruled by people who are themselves ruled by base and mean appetites? In any case, Plato seeks objective government, where the best course of action isn’t obscured by vested interests and where the rulers are beyond corruption. Plato is so concerned about nepotism that the philosopher-kings are forbidden from knowing who their children are. Moreover, these philosopher-kings are so in love with wisdom that they don’t want to be rulers. They don’t seek power as tyrants and dictators do. They exercise power rarely and reluctantly. (Would you rather sit around contemplating Beauty, or go to policy meetings?) For Plato, politics is civil war. His philosopher-kings are a device to bring civil war to an end.

 

But, you say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The problem of power is a central theme of the Republic too. We encounter the modern suspicion that power is all there is. Power, as Chairman Mao said, comes from the barrel of a gun. On one reading of the Republic, Plato seeks the best possible solution to that aspect of the human predicament, at root. The Republic is best considered a thought experiment on this problem. Does anyone have any better ideas?

 

While we are on the topic, I want to say here that I doubt the entire story of Plato trying to teach philosophy to the tyrant of Syracuse. I take a skeptical view of all aspects of the received biography of Plato, including the autobiographical letters, especially where they are in tension or open conflict with the evidence of the dialogues. There is not the slightest notion in the dialogues that Plato supposed you can take a miserable reprobate like Dionysius of Sicily and magically convert him into a philosopher-king by teaching him some arithmetic and geometry. Yes, Socrates instructs a slave boy in squares and angles at one point to show that nous is innate, but he doesn’t turn him into Archimedes. Plato did not believe you can turn a tyrant into a philosopher-king. In Plato, tyranny is not a path or prelude to ideal government. The tyrant has a wretched soul - 729 times more wretched than a wise man, in fact.

I doubt the whole story. It seems post hoc to me. The Seventh Letter is bogus anyway. The misguided do-gooder story is exactly the sort of drivel that people made up about philosophers and it was then carried on and padded out by subsequent dim-wits across the centuries. It probably began as a joke. Ironic, no? We severely underestimate the number of jokers, liars and dim-wits in our chains of textual and cultural transmission. I don’t believe for a minute that Plato thought he could train philosopher-kings, or even that philosopher-kings were possible, perhaps not even  ever, and certainly not in Plato’s age which, on the evidence of the dialogues, he thought as remote from the rule of philosopher-kings as it was possible to be. The whole story is built on the naïve reading, or misreading, of the Republic as a practical programme for political action. My reasoning is simple: The Republic is plainly not that, only dim-wits read it like that, therefore I think the story is rubbish and attributable to dim-wits.

 

And let’s get a more mature grip on things than the cheap reductionism that says that Plato thought of politics as civil war because of what he saw his uncles get up to and then the abuses of the Athenian democracy. Sure. Sure. But if there was one thinker who transcended his age it was Plato. Give him some credit.


The same goes with tiresome gags about how Plato made philosophers into kings because he was a self-serving philosopher himself much as plumbers might think plumbers should rule the world.

* * *

Here though I am slightly sympathetic to the fact that the entire idea of the philosopher-kings does invite unmeasured ridicule and has received much of what it deserved over the centuries. Plato sees the humor too, I'm sure. He knows it's ridiculous. "Let's put Socrates in charge." Lol. Like in the Parable of the Ship in the Republic where the layabout star-gazer is the only one onboard who knows where they're going. It offends all common sense, but that's where the thought experiment goes.

A Few Thoughts on Mohammadanism For Forlorn Libertarians

 

I found a libertarian paradise, but you’re not going to like it. Things turn up where you least expect them. You shouldn’t be surprised, though. The habit of reading premodern books is a rich enterprise and exposes much unexpected terrain.


My own habit is to delve into so-called orientalist books, European accounts of the East, and sometimes vice versa, during the Golden Years of Empire. This maligned literature has much to recommend it to every contrarian. This is the literature Edward Said says you no longer need to read.

 

Amongst it are works by that fascinating and anachronistic group, upper-class converts to Mohammadanism, well-to-does who, as the saying went, “turned Turk.” They are very different to our contemporary Turk turners. These days, converts (or ‘reverts’ as they like to be called) come from a different socioeconomic strata altogether, and are an untidy bunch by comparison. In Victorian times the exotic creed of the Ottomans (speaking of Empires) had a different cache. Let’s not forget Carlyle, too. There was a Mohammadan!

 

Another one was Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall. Famously, he rendered the Koran into English and defended the appropriation before the hostile jurists in Cairo in fluent classical Arabic sweating bullets. An educator, he championed the education of boys for the Nizam of Hyderabad.

 

He came to the faith and lifted his forefinger for Allah after a libertarian vision. It is recorded in his early travel writings. One sunny day in the Levant, strolling through hinterlands, he chanced upon a world that struck him as a veritable paradigm of freedom. He wanted to sign up straightaway but respectfully waited till his mother died, lest his heathenism disappoint her.

 

The world he describes is, I want to say, nomocratic. That’s the thing about Mohammadanism. It’s not a political creed. It’s a legal system. Like Judaism. In fact, it’s a continuation of, or abrogation of, Jewish Law, the ultimate Jewish heresy, except for Christianity (which abolishes Jewish Law and, by default, accedes to Roman Law, but that’s another story.) On the ground, Mohammadanism is a legal system. Which is to say it’s upside down.

 

It’s upside down to libertarians because they think that laws are bad. (Laws restrict. Restriction bad.) The less laws the better. I actually like one of those Pythagorean city-states down on the toe of Italy that had a few laws written on stone and they prevailed forever and a day. You could propose new ones, or changes to the old ones, and everybody would vote on it. But if the proposal was rejected, you died. A solid, if inflexible, legal minimalism.

 

Mohammadan law is inflexible too, but rather than minimalistic, it is absolutely pervasive. There are laws about how to clean your teeth in Mohammadanism, namely exactly the way Mohammad cleaned his teeth. There are laws based on his favorite sexual positions. It’s not quite monolithic, though. There is a spectrum of interpretation, to be sure, but there’s always the expectation that every aspect of human behavior needs legislation. Everything. Needless to say, there are no Taliban libertarians.

 

But the Taliban are a new phenomenon, a new political phenomenon, as are all Mohammadan modern states. Here the intrusive apparatus of the modern state imposes the law (Sharia) from the top down. In Saudi Arabia the religious police will give you a thrashing if they catch you resting on your left elbow rather than your right.

 

This is nothing like what Marmaduke Pickthall found during his oriental adventures. Rather he describes rural and semi-rural communities deeply embedded in a fabric of religious law and local ancestral custom such that there was no need for police or even judges: if an offense was committed, elders would form a court to sort it out. Conservative, no doubt, but stable, and ordered without any overbearing external authority. Your father might give you a slap if you introduce one of those modern Western toothbrushes instead of cleaning your teeth with a chewed stick the way the Razool did it, but at least there weren’t any policemen or a state planning to put surveillance cameras in your bathroom.

 

Not that there was a lack of authority, though. And this is where Neoreaction steps in and schools the libertarians in the matter of power. In this case, the power in question is the biggest power there is. Allah Almighty. And amongst gods – if one may dare say such a thing – he is the mightiest of all. There’s simply no other conception of divinity to match it. This is a god you can’t argue with. So His law is uncontested and incontestable.

 

But, for the most part, He doesn’t enlist policeman. A good 90% of Sharia is, in fact, an entirely private matter, between the Musselman and his Creator, whereby Allah enforces His law by the tried-and-true method of stick and carrot, Hellfire and Virgins. And there’s always the over-riding caveat that man was created weak as piss and Allah knows it and has promised to take all the design limitations into account. His Mercy outweighs His Wrath. (There’s a lot of weighing in Mohammadanism. Traders. Shopkeepers.)

 

This rarefied, all-powerful, transcendent Being – root of all Being – presides over the police-less villages of Ottoman Levant. What sort of liberty do you want? A minimum of laws, or a minimum of enforcement? Anybody wearing the prefix anarcho- will say both, but what if it’s one or the other? What if you drive past a speed limit sign – 60 mph – but you know there are no traffic cops? They retired all traffic cops long ago. No one is going to enforce it. What if speed limits were just recommended?

 

But then, what if it was God Almighty, who recommended it, and said if you disobey it and you die in a crash don’t expect any sympathy from Him! No virgins for you! He didn’t put up speed signs for His own amusement, you know. Only an idiot would ignore them. And, over time, anyway, a rich code of customs and traditions of courtesy – hand signals, gesticulations, horns, flashing lights etc.  - developed among drivers such that miscreant drivers were shamed behind the wheel. Don’t you know God’s limit?

 

In a Mohammadan nomocracy, God sets all limits. I say law is pervasive – and that’s a Mercy because man is as forgetful as a maggot – and yet, in principio, in the beginning all things were permitted. God only sets limits to constrain man from the self-harming proclivities of a free-willed creature. (This is the curly bit of Mohammadan theology – free-will and predestination – and the bit that the arch Dark Prince of quasi-Mohammadans Calvin lifted into a usurious context.)

 

All the same, what we have is a sedate semi-pastorale, a fabric, a rug, a weave, of immutable religious law, along with all the necessary adaptations to the local temperament. Alcohol’s a big one for Mohammadans. Ask the Turks. Or try to buy a drink in Riyahd. It can be done, of course. My Arab friends really like good Scotch. Some jurists say an occasional glass of ginger beer isn’t going to hurt. The Koran only talks about wine; it doesn’t say anything about fermented fennel liquor. There are always ways. If there was a local tipple with ancestral connotations, it was likely to survive the imposition of Sharia, in the long run.

 

I can’t resist recounting that story of the Italian diplomat who turned Turk back in the day. He lived in Istanbul. When an old friend from Italy visited one time he was surprised to be offered a glass of fine wine. “But I thought Mohammadans don’t drink,” he said. To which the disgraced diplomat replied, “I’m just as good a Mahommadan as I was a Catholic.”

 

You see, anarcho-libertarians and the like should all rest easy – nature does win in the end. Laws can only ever shape it. As it is, Mohammadanism makes lots of concessions to nature. Four wives. And what about the Shi’ites and the wholesome institution of short-term marriage as a concession to nature? The Mohammadan instinct is to bring everything, even promiscuity, under the merciful guidance of Al-Rabb, the Lord.

 

Also al-Malik. The King. The King of Kings. Nerds for monarchy pay attention. Herein is a different model of Kingship. Strictly speaking, earthly kings – exercising or claiming real sovereignty that is – are haram. All those post-colonial so-called “kings” in the Mohammadan world are an historical abberration. Allah doesn’t much like kings. He doesn’t like kings in much the same way He doesn’t like other gods. Sovereignty belongs to Him. All others are pretenders. (You can tell those loathsome Wahhabi characters, the Sauds, are pretenders, can’t you? It’s pretty obvious. You might have noticed that Mohammadans don’t do kingship very well. This is why.)

 

So, what we have in this nomocracy, is a fabric of custom, lore and Law on the ground, governed by a vastly transcendent Abrahamic version of Plato’s One-and-the-Good way, way, way up in the stratosphere. Imagine a village, a community, a patchwork, if you will, governed by an absolute monarch located in a satellite in geo-stationary orbit 600 miles overhead. He governs, primarily, by the Noble Lie of Hellfire and Virgins, and yet for effective power there must be something, some agent, between the earth and the sky. Otherwise we’re in a nominalist power vacuum and everything sinks to the bleak equality of the desert. That’s the real problem with Mohammadanism. Not nomocracy, but nominalism. If you put Sovereignty way up there in the sky, you end up with a flat earth.

 

Did I mention Calvin? Neoreaction points the finger at Calvin. And rightly so. But the rot really begins with Mohammadanism. Or rather, by the infiltration of Mohammadanism into Christendom where it becomes pernicious. First among the aristocracy. (They couldn’t resist all those shiny sweet-smelling goods from the East. See what Petrarch has to say about it.) Then the Church. What is Protestantism but a Christianity rejigged in the Mohammadan mode? If you turn the Christian God into Allah don’t be surprised that the Church – an edifice of intercession – starts to dissolve.

 

Yes, nominalism and nomocracy share an etymology. But Allah is not a dill. He knows that you can’t govern effectively from up in a satellite, not without a deputy, some necessary human agent. Slave and Caliph is the Mohammodan polarity. It works pretty much like power exchange in BDSM. Allah is Master. You are slave. Obey. That’s one device in this nomocracy – slave mentality. Nietzche gets all this wrong. Orwell gets it right but for entirely the wrong reason: Slavery is freedom. The free Mohammadan can, in the end, declare himself slave to Allah above and to no man, and defy all human pretense. Allahu akbar!

 

This is actually what Luther did. Another quasi-Mohammadan dressed up as a neo-primitive Christian. I could go on about this Mohammadan-Protestant connection. It’s very important. You see, it is no accident that Pickthall – like others Turk turners of those times – was first of all a Unitarian. That whole Unitarian Trinity-skeptical theme in Protestanism, the Quakerism, etc., is rife among the proto-progressives of the Early Modern age and it is coming into Christendom on camels! Some serious thinking needs to be done on this. It’s no accident that the Hammer and Sickle is a modification of the Mohammadan crescent and star. You see, dissenting Christians feared that the God-forsaken Mohammadans were better Christians than the Christians: there’s the real roots of the progressive genealogy.

 

Queen Victoria investing the Ottoman Sultan, Adul Aziz (Slave of the Almighty), with the Order of the Garter.

But it’s benign in the Mohammadan context. Because there’s a Caliph. Or in this case the Sultan. These happy folk in Pickthall’s vision had photographs of their Sultan on their lounge room walls, but they’d never actually met him, or even anyone who knew him, but he was appointed by God Above, and he was a good man. They were happy that he lived 500 miles away. They paid him some sheep and goats in the springtime and in return he made sure hostile armies didn’t upset the status quo. Very wisely, he had no interest in policing how they cleaned their teeth.

 

Modern Mohammadan states are not like this, are they? No. Your gut instinct about them is correct. They are an ambomination. The worst of both worlds. A pervasive religious nomocracy AND an intrusive state increasingly bent on using technology and pseudo-science to micromanage the citizenry. It’s not enough that your family will shame you if you sleep with someone you shouldn’t: the state thinks it’s its business as well and makes it a crime. In its best examples, though, the premodern Mohammadan order, as Pickthall observed, could produce happy outcomes. The Sultan didn’t need to fuck with people’s lives. His job was to protect the borders, keep peace and build a High Culture back in Istanbul. On an every day level people were ruled by the Law in their hearts, by traditional modes of inculturation and by peer pressure, under the austere but remote sovereignty of Allah al-Malik and the military umbrella of His equally remote deputy.

 

Anyway, in all my reading Pickthall’s travel books provide the most tangible and convincing model of a life that seems to answer to certain libertarian pipe dreams. The main point being: nomocracy. You can do without policemen in a well-woven nomocracy, provided you have a Lawmaker no one can corrupt and a Sultan with a big army watching your back. Noting that the Sultan doesn’t have legislative power. He doesn’t make laws. He creates the peace for the Law. Allah makes Law. Locals can adapt it as they will. Locals know best. If they can be good God-fearing Musselmen and still drink arak, fine. That is, lots of subsidiarity.

 

As I have argued elsewhere, the Saidean narrative is bunk. The Orientalists were, with few exceptions, the first generation of Europeans to even bother to try to reach an understanding of the Mohammadan devils. It was a luxury they could afford. Finally – thanks to the corrections of the Reformation – the world had been set aright and Christendom (although no longer recognizable as such) was no longer an embarrassing backwater compared to a more advanced and prosperous “Islamicate” world, to use the newly sanitized, secularized Whig word you might have noticed coming out of Universities of recent times. Columbus thought he was sailing to India. Why? To get around the Mohammadans. It’s a crucial factor in every step towards the modern world. More broadly, when Mohammad declares himself the last prophet, he is at the same time declaring himself the first modern man.


Harper McAlpine Black