The Doubter's Companion (31 page)

Socrates and Aristotle remain the martyr and the genius of the Western intellectual tradition. However, it was Plato who—like St. Paul and Thomas Aquinas for Christianity—acted as the general manager charged with shaping our understanding of the past and therefore our expectation of what we might be able to do in the future.

The democratic citizenry in Plato's model could only be a childlike mass incapable of evolved—that is, disinterested—thought. And thus incapable of looking after the public good, because dominated by superstition, prejudice and fear. The enlightened aristocracy of Knowers that Plato prescribed as the solution to the citizenry's flaws is the élite which our rational corporate society has persisted in producing.

Given Plato's success in locking his argument into place, it isn't surprising that today, as in Athens, democracy works to educate and create the sort of élites who do not believe in democracy.
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In fact, the Platonists have always taken themselves so seriously that they miss Plato's fictional and ironic talents. They have interpreted him as being more severe about the weaknesses of the populace than he actually was.

As for Plato's intellectual position, it did not spring entirely out of cool philosophical musing. It was partly the product of his reaction to the Athenian treatment of Socrates. What Plato retained from his master's tragedy was that Athens' greatest thinker had been unjustly accused under a democratic system and had responded with a defence speech which Plato interpreted as showing contempt for the 501 jurors who represented the citizenry. They in turn convicted him. This was the searing emotional drama which determined the slant of Plato's theories.

Bitterness. Contempt. A desire for revenge. These are tricky components in the construction of a philosophy—particularly if the writer is a genius with an important contribution to make. The greater the genius, the more likely it is that he will be able to redefine these destabilizing factors as if they were disinterested theory.

The result of Plato's successful absorption of his master's ideas is that there are a lot of Platonists around who think of themselves as having a Socratic approach to life. The key to this may be that the former is presented as a state of being and the latter as an attitude or a method. To the extent that Plato invented Socrates, this confusion is perhaps not surprising.

But the messages are quite different, even opposite. We can only imagine that Plato worked hard to make his master's mind appear to be one with his own. He must have been restrained by some combination of Socrates' penetrating genius, which could control a posthumous scribe; Plato's own genius which, however bitter, held him to a reasonably faithful reconstruction; and perhaps most important, the presence in Athens of an audience which also remembered what Socrates had said and done.

In spite of the obvious and profound differences, our own civilization seems unable or unwilling to see these two men as separate entities. Yet it is the Platonic tradition which has fed the corporatist, technocratic, anti-democratic ideology. The humanist, citizen-based, democratic movement has been nourished by
SOCRATES.

PLATOON
   A film which confirmed its director, Oliver Stone, as the legitimate heir to Leni Riefenstahl. As in
TRIUMPH OF THE WILL
, false mythology is created making nonsense of reality without seeming to use manipulation or propaganda.

Platoon
presented itself as the first attempt to reconcile Americans with what had happened in Vietnam by telling the everyday truth of how soldiers experienced the war. It was indeed constructed to heal the still-suppurating wound inflicted on the greatest nation in the world by its defeat in open combat at the hands of a small, poor, Third World country.

Stone's method was built upon a deceptively simple dramatic conflict. His platoon was made up of a young, naïve and well-intentioned officer who commanded young, wellintentioned soldiers, including the naïve hero, Chris. The source of power in the group was a blondish, pale, beautiful, gentle yet strong and wise sergeant. These people all believed in the American dream and saw themselves as victims of injustice. The source of power in their company was also a sergeant—a senior staff sergeant. However, he was dark-skinned, cynical, scarred and cunning. The first represented the American ideal; the second was the devil. To be more exact, the second represented a constant in American history—the traitor, Benedict Arnold in modern dress, the man who believes that men of principle are weak, the force of evil within each person and therefore within the nation. His cynicism and crude interpretation of reality enable him to trick others into temporarily betraying the American dream.

The film rises through two successive apocalypses. The first ends with the Christ sergeant being abandoned to a swarm of Viet Cong while the company rises above him in helicopters in the care of the devil sergeant. It is a false resurrection. A betrayal. We last see the good man who died for them on his knees with his arms out as if on a cross.

In its final culmination of apocalyptic violence—a confused night of smoke, explosion, light and sound—the platoon is defeated without the Viet Cong becoming visible. They remain vague shadows in the trees. They can not appear. In Stone's mythology America is neither fighting Vietnam nor defeated by it. America is struggling to defeat the enemy within itself. The great and good people are attempting to cast out the devil. The early morning reveals a wasteland of bodies, some half-alive. One is the devil sergeant, another the naïve hero. He executes the devil, thus freeing America.

The film ends with his rising from the disaster, again in a helicopter. In voice-over, Chris reflects as he is evacuated:

Looking back, we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves—and the enemy was within us.... The war is over for me now, but it will always be there—the rest of my days.... Be that as it may, those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know and to try with what's left of our lives to find a goodness and meaning to this life.

This is the true resurrection.

Stone has vaporized the defeat by converting it into the caricature of a morality play about a civil war. The wound of defeat was converted into a cathartic experience in which the American dream persisted.

Art heightens
MEMORY
. As Riefenstahl demonstrated, propaganda can erase it, as well as any sense of ethical reality. Stone's visual manipulation literally exorcised the public's memory of failure and of responsibility. In the aftermath of
Platoon
, other films, such as
The Hill
, were made, reflecting this new perception, and slowly the general manner in which the whole war was treated softened and became positive.

POLITENESS
   A mechanism of control distinguished by urbane, smooth, courteous, refined and other agreeable mannerisms of social intercourse. We are conditioned to think of this control in classic Marxist terms as a phenomenon of vertical class structure. Those divisions still exist with their paraphernalia of the said and the unsaid—the said being about control, the unsaid about power.

But in a
CORPORATIST
society the real class divisions are horizontal. Thousands of specialist groups—public, private, interested, even disinterested—are spread throughout society like inaccessible volcanoes sending up little puffs of smoke as their official communication with the outside world. This is corporatist politeness: the solutions, the answers, the truths all swathed in the expert
DIALECT
of the particular class. A second, more complex level of dialect is used inside the volcano as the equivalent of the old social “unsaid” with all its assumptions of rightfully held power.

An obsession with polite or correct public language is a sign that communication is in decline. It means that the process and exercise of power have replaced debate as a public value.

The citizen's job is to be rude—to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of
DOUBT.
Politics, philosophy, writing, the arts—none of these, and certainly not science and economics, can serve the common weal if they are swathed in politeness. In everything which affects public affairs, breeding is for fools. See:
PUNCTUALITY
and
VOLTAIRE.

POWER, PUBLIC
   The single purpose of power is to serve the public weal.

There's nothing new about this. The Encyclopaedists said it clearly in the eighteenth century:

The aim of all government is the well-being of the society governed. In order to prevent anarchy, to enforce the laws, to protect the citizens, to support the weak against the ambitions of the strong, it was necessary that each society establish authorities with sufficient power to fulfil these aims.
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Do those who gain power, administrative or political, understand this? Is the system in which they labour designed in order to make this possible? Does the “sophistication” required to succeed in contemporary technocratic systems turn power into the sort of self-justifying goal which rewards courtesanage rather than the service of the public weal?

These are simple questions which have been asked many times over the centuries. Each time the reply is of vital importance to the lives of those whose society is at stake.

PRAETORIAN GUARD
   See:
WHITE HOUSE STAFF.

PRIVATE LIVES 
   The private lives of public people may be considered private only so long as they don't trade on them to advance their public careers.

If an individual presents himself to the public for election as a happily married father of three, then he has made his weekend with a secretary or his visit to a prostitute of either sex a matter of public interest. If he makes a point of drinking milk in public, then the public will want to know whenever he gets drunk. If he buys his suits at Wal-Mart for the cameras, then proceeds to holiday on rich men's yachts, he will be photographed with telephoto lenses. But if he were to present himself to the public for election as a believer in specific policies, he might well be judged on those while his genitals, interesting though he himself might consider them, would be forgotten by those not directly concerned as being of little relevance to the public good. He would probably even be able to fall down drunk in public from time to time without anyone much caring so long as the interests of the citizenry were being looked after. See:
AD HOMINEM.

PRIVATIZATION

1. Ideology.

2. A way to finance political parties.

Privatization makes friendly lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers, bankers and investors rich. They then make contributions to their benefactor's party, give jobs to defeated or retiring candidates, enrich the private lives of politicians with travel and entertainment and, in certain cases, fill their on- or off-shore bank accounts.

3. Sometimes a sensible thing to do.

There are new areas of development in which the public interest is served by public involvement. When that area is well established it may be a good idea to transfer it to the private sector so that the public can concentrate on new areas of development. This suggests that capitalism is not very good at substantial risk when it involves long-term investment. It also suggests that the private sector owes a debt of gratitude to the citizenry who have been willing to risk their painfully accumulated shared wealth in order to encourage innovation.

4. A backward step if utilities or essential services are involved.

 Privatization means a return to the sort of private monopolies which two centuries of experience taught us were politically and socially dangerous. The basic needs of the populace cannot be entrusted to the linear and short-term needs of private investors.

5. A way to undermine growth.

Privatization encourages private investors to lock up their capital in utilities or well-established sectors which are dependent on stability and rarely at the centre of innovation. This money is no longer available to be invested in those risk areas which encourage new ideas and create
GROWTH.
See:
INEFFICIENCY
and
NATIONALIZATION.

PROGRESS
   Often presented as the central moral tenet to succeed Christianity, progress is a complex and ambiguous mixture of technique and ideology.

This ambiguity is erased in our society by reducing the subject to a simple question: Are you for or against progress? thus denying any middle ground. The imposition of a false question to create an equally false moral quandary is a strategy often used by ideologies to ensure the desired answer To be for is to seek the salvation of mankind (and more recently of women). To be against is to join the
LUDDITES
and other pessimistic sentimentalists in their dark corners of refusal, destruction and disorder.

Like most ideological terms, the actual meaning of progress is vague. Historically it has meant not improvement but movement—that of a king, for example, making his progress across the kingdom. We, of course, have the right to change the meaning of words. Indeed political movements and
académie
fix definitions which suit their interests. But language will end up meaning whatever a civilization wants it to mean.

But precisely what progress are we referring to when it is evoked as a moral necessity? The progress of the species mankind itself? In which domains? Physical? Mental? Ethical?

Does our health-obsessed population on average run faster farther longer than the average Athenian or Spartan citizen? Is the Western individual as capable of hard physical labour as the eighteenth-century European peasant or the settler in the new world? We are taller than they were, but is that progress or simply a matter of protein? We live longer, but that is not a change in the species itself.