Education of the Guardians - Purposes of College Education, Lecture 10

0:00 Welcome, everyone. It's good to see you. We're well into our community unit now and it is the month of October. So we're also approaching midterms. We will talk today about the fifth book of The Republic, but I want to take the opportunity to review what we've seen in the first four books, and more broadly this week we'll be talking, as we did last week, about community and the problem of injustice. We'll be talking about community and inclusion and exclusion and the nature of the communitarian education that Plato proposes in The Republic. So the topic is the education of the guardians and we'll first have a review of Books I through IV, then a discussion of the role of women, which we touched on a little bit last time, but I'd

0:46 like to explore further. Then why does Plato propose to abolish the private sphere? [music] Looking back to Books I to IV, you'll recall that in the first book the question arises, what is justice? And Cephalus and Polemarchus host Socrates and friends and they, who are foreigners living in Athens, but wealthy foreigners living in Athens, offer what are relatively common- sense views. They say that it's telling the truth and giving back what a man has taken from

1:35 another, or helping friends and harming enemies. At this point Thrasymachus jumps in, and he offers the challenge, saying that injustice is more profitable than justice and that anyway justice is only a name for the advantage of the stronger. And Socrates, at the end of Book I, sets out to defend justice against the moral skepticism represented by Thrasymachus' position. Okay, now to Book II. The question is a little bit more focused. Why be just? What are the rewards of justice? And you'll remember the question in particular, is justice something you do for its own sake or for the sake of the rewards it brings you? And Socrates' or Plato's answer is it is both.

2:22 Glaucon and Adeimantus, Plato's brothers, restate the challenge that Thrasymachus has offered in the first book. They use the story of the Ring of Gyges to show that injustice can be more profitable than justice, and Adeimantus adds that people care about justice primarily for the reputation that it brings and that fathers tell their children to be just so that they will gain worldly goods from that. Socrates then turns from the question of justice in the individual to justice in the city, which is where we've been for a couple of books now. And after describing what the cities will be like, he says that the city needs guardians will be trained in "gymnastic for bodies and music for the soul." And this is where the theme of education is introduced in the book.

3:13 Now the last three books that we've read-- III, IV, and V--form a little bit of a unit because they deal with the question of how the guardian should be educated. We were in the character unit when we started out there, but you can see why it spans character and community. A lot of the book is about how to achieve, and of the whole Republic, is about how to achieve excellent character in the guardians, but the answer to that is by raising them in a very communitarian or community-oriented fashion. So he introduces the major themes of character education for the guardians. First of all, he bans Homer, and it doesn't quite ban him just yet, but he censors Homer and the other poets in order to provide a good set of role models. You remember, you know,

3:58 the Matt Damon Odysseus. We want to be more like Matt Damon and less like the actual Odysseus in the poem, because Christopher Nolan also has censored Odysseus in some sense--censored Homer in some sense. They go on to talk about the musical education focusing on simple modes, proper rhythm and harmony that will create a gentleman. And you'll remember that in the last book we read, Book IV, Socrates particularly compares the healthy, just soul with a good set of inclinations that's well-realized and harmonized to what a harmonic chord--like in our modern Western language, the C major chord, C, E, and G--the different parts of the

4:46 soul are harmonically connected with one another and make a pleasing harmony. But more broadly, music is to help in a sense create gentlemen by having people experience rhythm and harmony appropriately. You'll remember that our translator Allan Bloom had a particularly negative reaction to Mick Jagger, and we had a little bit of discussion, you know, would the Beatles be better or, you know, what's an appropriate kind of musical education for our modern guardians? And they talk about--Socrates and his friends talk about--how are we going to choose the guardians? And he creates these character tests, but then instead of telling all the people

5:32 about the character tests in a straightforward way, like practice for your SAT or you won't get into a good college, instead, he says that the people who have been chosen to be rulers have gold in their soul, that the auxiliaries have silver, and that the craftsmen and farmers have bronze and iron. And that myth, as it were, is meant to help the people accept the idea that they live in this very stratified class-bound society. But notably, it's a society with three classes exactly. The farmers and craftsmen, you might think would be more than one class, but as far as Plato is concerned, they're essentially considered to be the same class. So then in Book IV, Socrates turns back to justice in the individual by an analogy with justice in the city. He first

6:23 claims that justice in the city involves each person doing one job. Justice is "the minding of one's own business and not being a busybody," which is surprisingly like what Polemarchus or Cephalus might have said in Book I. But the precondition for this to be true is that you live in a just city, and he will later acknowledge, we'll see in Book V, that it's quite hard to found such a just city. So it's not perhaps actually the case that in any actually existing society, justice is just doing your job. At the same time, there's an interesting analogy with the Bhagavad Gita, which I mentioned, which is an ancient Hindu epic poem, and the notion that dharma, duty, is to fulfill your role in society. So we see that this is a concept that's been around for a long time

7:12 and that was pretty widespread. And that, in turn, and we didn't have time to get into exactly how, contributed to the civil disobedience movement and the notion in particular, which--I realize I'm bringing in extra material here, and when you're a debater, you're not allowed to add new things during the summation, but this is not a debate. So I will just add that an important part of civil disobedience is the notion that I'm going to disobey, I'm going to take the punishment, and I'm disobeying even though I don't know that my disobedience is going to bring me the fruits that I want. In other words, I'm not going to directly take the thing that I want. I'm merely going to demonstrate through my sacrifice of my time, and possibly my body, that the current law

7:58 is unjust. And that theme of civil disobedience draws on at least three antique sources: Jesus, who we talked about in the context of Martin Luther King; the Bhagavad Gita, which is very influential not only on Gandhi, but also on Thoreau; and, interestingly, Socrates and Plato, not so much in The Republic, where they're arguing for how you should behave in a perfectly just society, but in the dialogues about the death of Socrates, the trial and death of Socrates, in which they talk about how to act in Athens at a time that it was being unjust, and the accepting of the punishment is for Socrates an important response to an unjust city. So, there's this tradition of civil disobedience that we've drawn on a little bit leading up to Gandhi and especially to Martin Luther King. But, in the perfectly just city we're imagining in The

8:47 Republic, justice is doing your job and not being a busybody. But this leaves open the question of an unjust city, which we talked about a little bit in the context of King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Now, justice in the soul turns out to be a similar kind of thing, but it is what I've described as a harmonious sort of mental health, that justice is making sure that the different parts of you are aligned. And the virtues that Socrates or Plato focus on are straight typically ones that involve a lot of self-control. We saw the similarity particularly to Freud. I know that the Hogwarts one somehow didn't seem to get you guys as excited as I expected you to, but we're going to see on Wednesday that the Hogwarts

9:33 ideal is not irrelevant to the question of admissions in Yale College. But anyway, the virtues that he focuses on are ones that are in some sense connected with self-control, wisdom, courage, moderation, and then justice, which is the correct alignment among the different parts of the soul. Wisdom is what the rational part of the soul provides and what the rulers provide for the city. Spirit, or courage, is what the auxiliaries provide, and then the farmers and craftsmen are the desiring part, but their job is in fact to keep their desires moderate. And the correct relationship among all of these things is justice in the city, as it is in the soul. And then, apologies 'cause I can't recall whether we ... I think we did read this passage

10:18 together. I'm going to read it out again just to give a sense of the transition from justice in the city to justice in the soul. He says, "[I]n truth, justice was, as it seems, something of this sort; not with respect to a man's minding his external business, but with respect to what is within, with respect to what truly concerns him and his own. He doesn't let each part in him mind other people's business or the three classes in the soul meddle with each other, but really sets his own house in good order, and rules himself, becomes his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts, exactly like three notes in a harmonic scale, lowest, highest, and middle. And if there are some other parts in between, he binds them together and becomes entirely one from many, moderate and harmonized." So, you can see here that character education and

11:08 the theme of community are not totally separate issues in Plato or in the course. And we talked a little bit, near the beginning of the semester, we talked about Aristotle and Confucius, of course, but also about the broad idea that education is about developing your character, about becoming a more virtuous person, about successfully inculcating the habits of virtue in young people. And although it's a somewhat long and winding road, to quote the Beatles again, that we're not going to necessarily travel the entire way through, we saw in the 18th-century Yale College rules the notion of a godly life and a sense that character education was a big part of what those 16-year-old boys were doing when they got here, learning to be godly Christian

11:55 people. Of course, that's not Plato's language at all, but it's connected to this notion that what school is about is primarily the development of character, or at least that's an important part of it. When community comes into ... where community comes in, we mentioned Dewey's progressive education and the notion that the school--he was talking about elementary schools, but applies to colleges as well--is primarily a social institution, meaning an institution in which people are going to develop this character through cooperation with others, and sometimes through competition with others, which is a theme we'll see also in the next week or two. For Plato, and I think he directly or indirectly influenced the traditions we talked about of the English boarding school, the American boarding school, the Ivy League

12:44 colonial college, and so on, a lot of the development of character takes place in the participation in a community. And we're going to look at two dimensions of that today that are, in fact, quite shocking both for Plato's time and in some ways for our own time, although we'll see that the first of them is something we may take for granted. So, I mentioned last time that women and men in Plato's republic essentially get the same kind of education. We'll look at that in a little bit more detail. And that sexual relations are not regulated through monogamous marriage, but through a very complex system of what I called breeding or mating, where certain generation of women and certain generation of men will have children together and incest

13:32 will be prevented by careful monitoring of who's who, but the family will be separate, the parents will be separated from their children, and the children will be raised in a collective fashion so as not to have the preferences associated with nuclear family. And we talked a little bit about that hostility to the nuclear family in several dystopian works of fiction like "Animal Farm" and "1984" and "Brave New World," which were also commentaries on particularly totalitarianism, but in the case of "Brave New World" also on capitalism. So this theme of the role of women is of course very deeply intertwined with the theme of the nuclear family and women's role in reproduction. As you know, and we'll talk about more next time, women were not admitted to Yale College until 1969

14:20 and I've just been preparing Wednesday's lecture so the number of terrible things that have been said by deans of Yale College and other people with important administrative responsibilities in the '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s that I will be sharing with you on Wednesday might blow your mind. They're just things about how people of different races or people of different religions or women should be viewed or treated, and whether they should be equally educated. But by the 1960s there was a very strong pressure to educate women, and it was a pretty, I would say, a relatively sudden change in the culture. Of course you some of you will have read the "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" by Mary Wollstonecraft, who was the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of "Frankenstein," during the

15:05 revolutionary period, I think the 1790s. There were other feminist works between then and the 1960s, but in the 1960s there was a sudden shift in attitudes to the relationship between men and women, and in particular the rise of the modern feminist movement, sometimes at that time called women's liberation. Some of you will have known about Gloria Steinem, who was a leader in that movement, who recently passed away. We'll talk a little bit more about that. An important text in the interim is Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." So, there was a feminist movement in the '20s. There was the movement for women's suffrage that sort of culminated around the time of the First World War and women having the right to vote. But, the idea

15:51 of women as full and equal participants in society and taking leadership roles, and being educated in the same way as men, was still controversial enough in 1961 or '62 when it was proposed by a Yale University faculty committee that it took seven years of negotiation and conversation before the university was ready to go there. And even then, there was a whole lot of resistance in the first few years of coeducation. So, what Plato had in mind was well ahead of his time in some ways. And we'll also encounter Woolf's comments on the matter. If you haven't already read them, please do try and read them. Okay, so the first thing to understand is about ancient Athens. We think of Athens as a democracy, and we may imagine that democracies are places

16:38 where women have a relatively high status. And that's true in many democracies. But, in fact, in ancient Athens, women had a particularly low status even relative to the other Greek city-states. They had essentially no legal rights. Widows had to marry their husbands' male relatives, so you didn't get to just be a widow. Women did not have property, so the property passed to the nearest male relative. And women from respectable families were not allowed out in the street. They stayed home all the time. And they could only go out to festivals. They generally spent all of their time with their male family members or with other women. And you may be aware of the fact that in Greek culture

17:24 there was a very strong tradition of men having erotic relationships, high-status men having erotic relationships with younger men and boys, and that was in a sense a lot of what we might call romance, or the sexual dimension of f a marital relationship or the romantic dimension of a marital relationship did not really exist, or it does not seem to have existed between the men and the women to a large degree, but instead was in a male-male thing that would happen outside of marriage. So, today we might say gay or lesbian or bisexual or what have you. It wasn't, those categories were not the right categories in this case 'cause the high- status men would have a wife and a boy, and this was just part of their cultural arrangements.

18:15 Okay. So, you'll remember Glaucon and Adeimantus 'cause they've been in for a while. They've been talking to Socrates on and off throughout Books II to IV. Thrasymachus comes back, and it's sort of fun to think that Thrasymachus--and not only Thrasymachus, but also Polemarchus, I noticed he has a very short line in here--Thrasymachus and Polemarchus, who seem to sort of drop out of the narrative after Book I, have apparently been here all through Books II, III, and IV, because at the beginning of Book V, the four of them complain about the notion that "as for women and children, the things of friends will be in common." And that's, as I noted earlier, the books often start with one of the interlocutors challenging something Socrates

19:03 has said and asking for more explanation. And here is Socrates' explanation for why women and men should have the same education. I think in fact we'd be hard-pressed to disagree with it in some ways: "a man and a woman whose souls are suited for the doctor's art have the same nature," and we just now have a case where there are, I believe, more women in medical school than men, but of course at this time that was not the case. Then, "if either the class of men or that of women shows its superiority in some art or other practice, then we'll say that that art must be assigned to it. But if they look as though they differ in this alone, that the female bears [children] and the male mounts [in sexual intercourse], we'll assert that it has not thereby yet been proved

19:51 that a woman differs from a man with respect to what we're talking about; rather, we'll still suppose that our guardians and their women must practice the same things." And his point here is that women are as capable as men of serving as guardians according to everything he sees. He doesn't really get into the question, remember I mentioned "when Adam delved and Eve span," do the women do more of the weaving and the men more of the digging? Not really mentioned. He's primarily concerned with whether women can be guardians, and he believes that women in principle have the same character as men and there's no reason that women can't. Now again, this is a very counterfactual situation in ancient Athens 'cause women in fact had no political power, no right to vote, no right to come to the assembly, no right even to be outdoors away from their family members,

20:38 at least if they were in the higher classes, but what seemed fairly straightforward to Plato and to Socrates. And as I think I also mentioned, some subsequent readers think he must be joking or being ironic or something like that because no society, it's arguable whether any society has ever achieved the situation where women were judged equally with men for leadership and character positions, but certainly no society existing up to the 1960s had done that. And it's only in the 1960s that this kind of thinking about women's equality is widespread. Okay. So, that's the question of women and men having the same education. As you'll see in "A Room of One's Own," Oxford and Cambridge did establish women's colleges in the 19th century, but they

21:26 didn't grant degrees until the middle of the 20th century to women. They were, of course, ahead of us, because although we had this Yale School of Art with women admitted starting in 1869, we didn't have women in Yale College until 1969, and we'll look at the story of that ahead of us. Strikingly, and I've just come from reading this over my lunch break, a lot of the argument in the 1960s was, well, we're training leaders, and will the women actually take on leadership roles? Are we taking away roles that would have been, taking away positions that could have gone to men who would have been leaders, and giving them to women who will not be leaders? The same language, by the way, was used about African- Americans, Jews, and Catholics. So, it was not exclusively sexist; it was also racist and anti-Semitic, but that it doesn't excuse

22:13 the sexism of the thought. Okay. So, then the question of the children being reared in common, and we talked a little bit last time about Huxley's "Brave New World." As you'll recall, one of Plato's big concerns is that the men, or all of the guardians, will have a preference for their own children. And remember that part of the noble lie is to say, if one of your children, gold guardians, has bronze in their soul, be sure to cast them out, make them a farmer or craftsman. We don't need any gold any bronze rulers, and rulership should not be handed down in a hereditary fashion. That said, he does believe that there will be some kind

23:01 of tendency to inherit this golden status. So he wants to prevent that preference. In the church, there was the idea that the Pope would-- the Catholic Church--the Pope would sometimes appoint his nephew to an important role. Sometimes the nephew might also been an illegitimate son. And from that we get the expression nepotism, because the word nepos means both nephew and grandchild. So Socrates had, or Plato has, a very strong anti-nepotistic position. And to make that work, he says that "[a]ll these women are to belong to all these men in common, and no woman is to live privately with any man." Interestingly, the way it's phrased takes away a little bit of the

23:47 gender equality that seems to be present in the earlier quotation where he talks about women and men having equal ability to be leaders, because here he's talking about the women belonging to the men. I don't know how much of that is part of the translation. "And the children, in their turn, will be in common, and neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent." I also feel that Bloom, our translator, sometimes gets a little bit of a biblical tone going. This one "neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent." Just something about the way the phrases work has a kind of a biblical air to it. Anyway, as I mentioned, he creates a very elaborate system for the mating of the guardians to avoid the situation where anyone will

24:33 accidentally mate with a near relative. And we are reminded of "Brave New World," which I described last time so I won't go into it in great detail now, but just to say that the test- tube babies in that novel are assigned to roles that they're going to play based on some early version of genetics. Plato obviously did not have genetics. They're labeled alpha, alpha minus, beta plus, etc. And the decision about what they're going to do with the rest of their lives is based on some genetic decision that's made very early, while they're still in the test tube. Plato, by contrast, imagines character tests to allow us to do that. And we talked a little bit

25:21 about the sexual revolution of the '60s and the'70s. So, again, preparing for what we're going to see with the feminist movement and coeducation at Yale, it was also in the early '60s that the feminist movement, for example, in the work by Betty Friedan in "The Feminine Mystique," started to question the idea that women's place, especially middle to upper middle class women, that their place would be primarily in the home and as child rearing, and then to instead insist that women should be able to have careers. But, this whole period, which we'll talk about more at the next lecture, was a period of transition in which an old set of rules had not yet been replaced by the set of rules that, in my view, we more or less live under today. And I always feel that when we talk about the generation gap,

26:10 the generation gap between my parents, who were college students in the 1960s, and their parents, who didn't go to college and who grew up in the'30s, was much, much larger than the gap between me and my parents or the gap between my kids and my wife and me. The reason being that the '60s really were a watershed in all kinds of social expectations, including these sexual ones and also racial and other egalitarian questions. Okay, now let's turn to the education of the guardian and the theme of the abolition of the private sphere. We talked about these last time. We talked about how these resemble the commune, the kibbutz, the monastery, but in particular the boarding school and the Yale of perhaps 1701 to roughly 1969, although

27:03 many traces of this linger today. A communal education, the guardians would eat together. Women would receive the same education as men; that didn't arrive at Yale until 1969. The nuclear family would be abolished. Children would be reared in common. The nuclear family seen as competition for the loyalty of the citizens in the state. There would be no private property. And the rulers would be philosophers or philosopher- kings or lovers of wisdom. And we'll turn next time in Book VI, you'll see that the interlocutors once again object and say, Socrates in all the history of society, philosophers have always been terrible rulers. Why would

27:51 you want the philosophers to be rulers? And he's going to make an argument as to why philosophers really would be good rulers. And this is something I didn't mention perhaps last time, at least it wasn't on the slide last time, but I want to mention it now. All through there's this comparison to breeding and raising dogs, which just really struck me the last time I reread The Republic in preparation for these lectures. Okay. So, I want to focus in particular on this sense that there's going to be a communal experience that they're all going to share, described here as a community of pleasure and pain. "Have we any greater evil for a city than what splits it and makes it many instead of one? Or a greater good than what binds it together and makes it one?" So,

28:37 essential to Plato is the idea that the city is going to be bound together and just unified in this way. I'll mention in this regard Rousseau's "Social Contract." Rousseau makes a distinction between the will of everybody and the will of all, I think that's the expression he uses, the notion that--and he had in mind Geneva, where he spent a lot of time, a self-governing city, a little like Athens, but you know, many centuries later-- that in a self-governing city, faction is the main thing to be worried about. People need to be all together and not pursuing their own individual purposes. So, "[h]ave we any greater evil for a city than what splits it and makes it many instead of one? ... Doesn't the community of pleasure

29:24 and pain bind it together, when to the greatest extent possible all the citizens alike rejoice and are pained at the same comings into being and perishings?" So, it's important for him that the spirit of the city is such that we all love each other and care only for each other and that each person's harm is as is shared by all. "Then is that city best governed which is most like a single human being? For example, when one of us wounds a finger, presumably the entire community--that community tying the body together with the soul in a single arrangement under the ruler within it--is aware of the fact, and all of it is in pain as a whole." So, you can see again

30:10 that this is a very strong, demanding notion of community. The community is such that if I hurt my little finger, you will feel that same pain. It's not even that my having some pain feels like your finger is hurting. Even my little finger hurting is enough to cause you pain. And he's particularly concerned that these rulers will have no private pleasures and griefs. Sorry, I didn't get to break this one up into sub-paragraphs, but: "So, as I'm saying, doesn't what was said before and what's being said now form them into true guardians still more and cause them not to draw the city apart by not all giving the name 'my own' to the same thing, but different men giving it to different things--one man dragging off to his own house whatever he can get his hands on apart

30:57 from the others, another being separate in his own house with separate women and children, introducing private pleasures ... of things that are private. Rather, with one conviction about what's their own, straining toward the same thing, to the limit of the possible, they are affected alike by pain and pleasure." Now, once again, I've mentioned the idea of liberalism that we'll come to a little bit more later in the course, the notion that there's some might be some private sphere, that people should just be free to do what they want to do, and that's sort of the opposite of what Plato has in mind. For a society to be successful, there should be no privacy. Everyone should be fully committed. Now, this is not the Athens that he actually lived in. It's not even the Athens that Pericles praises in the funeral oration, which we're going to read in two weeks, but it's an

31:43 imaginary world in which the community is fully committed and fully engaged together. I mentioned Rousseau; Marx is another example of this. So, Rousseau says that the first person who marked off a property and said it was their own was the first great criminal. Marx believes in the abolition of private property. Proudhon, the 19th-century anarchist, said that property is theft. And Plato, interestingly, seems to accept all of these approaches. He's very, very far from the modern liberal in that regard and in some respects similar to the communist, except we've seen a lot of ways in which he's not a communist. But who does he remind me of most in the culture? Now, I realize that the Harry Potter reference was lost on some of the people who

32:31 maybe, I don't know, didn't have children and grandchildren at exactly the right time for Harry Potter, but I think a lot of the people in the front rows up here, the people more of my generation, will recognize "Star Trek: First Contact" and the Borg, "Resistance is futile." And who knows about the Borg? I'm shocked that so few of you know about the Borg. Okay. "Star Trek" is the great American adventure story, and this is by the way a speech I used to make when I was a 16-year-old debater. So you're getting 16-year-old Pericles channeled here. Captain Kirk was the spokesman for U.S. individualism, for the ideal of the new frontier, Kennedy-esque, and all of

33:17 that kind of thing. The subsequent generation has Captain Picard, who's right in the middle there, who's somebody I also admire a lot. And he was on when I was in grad school. But they represent everything that's true about American and Western individualism and liberalism as understood in the'60s through the '80s. The Borg is the opposite. The Borg is a mass-mind that takes people in. And if you get caught in the Borg, you become a member of this Borg. You start to have these sort of mechanical parts added to you, you can sort of see them down at the bottom there, that connect you to the rest of the Borg, and you all share one single mind, and you do exactly what the Borg tells you. And that was arguably communism, in any case collectivism of some kind, in which the individual counts for nothing. And all I'm

34:08 saying by putting this up--and "resistance is futile" means, don't try and resist the Borg; the Borg is going to take over--but yet somehow Picard and Kirk and the subsequent Enterprise captains managed to resist the Borg and keep individualism alive and mostly well. So that's an old one. Now this one I'm worried too, because I realize that I have idiosyncratic taste. But does anyone recognize this? Yeah, the same people. All the people my age and nobody else. Okay, good. Well, this is from a great show that I realize you guys all just like watching my videos over and over again on YouTube, or maybe you prefer to watch TikTok, but you should watch some good TV. This one is called "Pluribus," and it's about a world in which a virus comes

34:55 in from outer space and all of the inhabitants of Earth except for about 15 or 16 are converted into being part of a single organism. They all share one mind. They all address each other as "we." They do things without, they are fully coordinated without, any discussion with one another about how to be fully coordinated. There are a lot of dystopian things about this, but war stops because nobody fights anymore. But, there's 15 or 16 people who are left as fully conscious individuals, and the question of why they are is left a little unclear. It's set in Albuquerque, New Mexico; it's by the same people who made "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul." And Rhea Seehorn is in "Better Call Saul" as well, and she plays one of the 15 or 16 people who is not converted into part of this massive mind. And they keep arguing with her,

35:44 you should join us; you'll feel so much better; you won't have any private pain or pleasure anymore; you'll be part of us and you'll feel all the joy that we all share together. And there will be no war or conflict. And she says, but I'm an individual; I want to be an individual. And to me, although that I believe they wrote this largely before ChatGPT came out, I think it is in some sense, you know, just whether deliberately or accidentally, a little bit of an allegory of AI. And so now we're going to turn over to how AI connects to collective consciousness. I used to have a high school teacher who I could get, you know, if you asked him the right question, he would spend the entire history class telling you about Romance language etymologies of words and so on. So, I'm a little bit channeling my high school history teacher, too, I'm afraid. But

36:32 anyway, I did plan this one. The thing about AI is it draws on the collective everything that anybody has ever written down, essentially. If you ask it a question about one of these shows, it will draw an answer from Reddit. And it will draw it very well, and it will edit up what Reddit has to say. It won't get it exactly right; it's not perfect. But it will probably get it better than 95% of people will. If you ask like, in that final scene in "The Godfather," who are the guys who close the door on Kay when Michael is sitting at the desk? And it will more or less get it right. So, the thing about this "Pluribus" world is that all of the people in the "Pluribus" world have shared information. A person who's never flown a plane can fly a plane. They figure out how to get the

37:21 food from one place to another. When they want to turn off the electricity, it's turned off right away. They're in automatic contact with each other because they all have one mind. And AI is a little bit like that. It is drawing from an incredible well of everything that's ever been written down, and I suppose also things that have been recorded or painted or illustrated, and so on. And I don't know how it works. I realize I should know more about how it works. My son, who knows about these things, has tried to explain to me how it works. I have a vague notion of a mountain with many different steps on it in the dark and the clouds, but I think that is only a metaphor, and that's not actually how it works. But it does create this sort of collective wisdom that is actually incredibly useful, but also totally lacking in individualism. You can, however,

38:07 that being said, train it to talk like you, write like you, know who you are, behave like you, and so on. So, it's a funny combination of things. So, what am I saying? Plato's republic is a little bit like if we live in a world totally dominated by ChatGPT, 6 or 7, Claude ... and Gemini seems to be a pretty far-back follower but I hear that it's got some good options as well, or maybe more personalized AI agents or whatever. Everything is known, everything is collective, no pain or pleasure is private. But what is missing there, and this is not a lecture about how terrible AI is, but what is missing there is some kind of individual perspective or some ability to

38:53 recognize my own individuality in relation to it, and it's a little bit like the Borg or the ideal communist society or a society as imagined by Rousseau where everybody loves the same things and everybody agrees with each other but there's no faction at all, and no faction means no differing interests. The shoemakers don't get in a fight with the leathermakers, because they're all sharing in one shared mind and they're all going to get along with each other. And the leather- makers would deliver the leather to the shoemakers and there will be no problem. Another biographical fact, my ancestors in England, like before the great-grandfather who was a minister, were tanners. Tanners meaning that their job was leather. And one of the first publications in my family is a patent for a method of tanning leather that my great, great, great-grandfather published

39:43 in a quarterly for workmen in the 19th century, so, sorry for the digression. The challenge of Plato's ideal of The Republic is the idea of a place where we would all get along, nobody would have competing interests, nobody would have any privacy but we would be a fully united city and therefore get rid of all faction. The reality, as we can immediately imagine when we encounter that or, as we will see when we start to encounter liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill, is that in real life people have a private sphere where they want to be separate, and that's part of what makes them human and individual, and they don't want to be fully committed to the state or the city or the community. And furthermore, there's no way to allocate all of the resources in

40:35 society in such a way that there is no conflict. Any actual society always is going to involve some kind of conflict over resources and some decision about how to allocate those resources, which by the way is relevant to the discussion of admissions next time. So, I'll end with a little bit of an overview of the philosopher-king. This is where Plato makes the claim that the philosopher-king is the only way to manage this problem. He essentially recognizes that there will always be conflict until such time that "the philosophers rule as kings or those who now called kings and chiefs genuinely and adequately philosophize...." This, by the way is 473d; I accidentally marked it 472d. "[T]here is no rest from ills for the cities, my dear Glaucon,

41:21 nor I think for human kind, nor will the regime we have now described in speech ever come forth from nature, insofar as possible, and see the light of sun." Because the only way that it would work is if there were philosopher-kings in charge of it. Or as Julia Annas, the philosopher I mentioned a couple of times, says, Plato only believes that his republic can be achieved by "a total change in people's hearts and minds." And the total change is in a way not that different from the conversion that we talked about with respect to the Calvinists, the idea that suddenly I'm going to become part of the elect. Only here it's that we're going to become part of the republic, have total devotion to the society we belong to. But his interlocutors understand that that's entirely impractical, and for that matter so does Socrates. So, I'll end with a quick overview and then point you to the assignment for the next paper. At the beginning of the book, Glaucon,

42:12 Adeimantus, Thrasymachus, and Polemarchus too, by the way, demand that Socrates explain his ideas about the role of women and the implications for reproduction. Socrates then explains the community of pleasure and pain in the ideal city and shows that it doesn't really match up with the various existing kinds of city. Glaucon wants to know how such a city will come into being, and Socrates introduces the notion of philosopher- king, who is awake rather than living in a dream. And this theme of awakening is one that we'll come back to. Remember we talked about the Great Awakening in 18th-century America. We talked about the notion of being woke. A very important theme to Plato is that the philosopher-kings will snap out of the dreams that we all live in all the

42:57 time and will instead govern as if they are awake. And then at the very end of Book V is an introduction of the ideas and the forms, and we'll be seeing in Book VI through, especially Books VI and VII, but a little bit in the later books, we move from Plato's theory of justice, politics, and ethics to a theory of knowledge that's connected to that, which is also obviously important for education. So, that's what we'll be seeing in the next couple of weeks. So, we see that we're not quite wrapping up the community section because I'm going to talk a little bit more about community with respect to admissions and to women's status in community in the next two lectures, but we see that Plato has

43:50 gone from the idea that what we need most is guardians who have the well-educated character to the idea that the only way to do this is through a thoroughly communitarian education in which all their individuality is essentially taken away, and they have full devotion, like good guard-dogs, to what is the best of the city. Okay, so that's where we leave Book V. And when we move on to the citizenship section of the course, we'll look at how this plays out in more actual politics. In a sense, the politics that Plato's been describing so far is a purely ideal politics. We'll turn to the question of how do actual political systems work in our citizenship unit. Thank you, everybody,

44:40 and we'll see you next time for the discussion of admissions at Yale College. [applause]