Being a tyrant isn’t just bad for those who get in the tyrant’s way. It is bad for the tyrant. It corrupts their access to knowledge, and this educational insight goes back over 2000 years. It is a clue to the social value of self-respect, and shows us how self-respect and selfishness are quite different things. Here’s why.
My first real insight into the possibility of a serious justification for education came through my understanding of the device of the “Original Position”, developed by John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice. Here Rawls used a situation constructed with assumptions and constraining conditions derived from very basic and widely held core moral judgments; a procedure of decision-making that would generate the most general principles for regulating a society and progressing towards more detail about its institutions. He sought, as the end point of the procedure, a decision about the principles of justice, but his procedure has potential for a wide range of our most basic ethical issues.
In the beginning of the procedure, the decision-maker could have no awareness of their own identity or personal characteristics. As they made each decision, which would then bind subsequent decisions, their insight into their own circumstances would increase just enough to allow for the next decision at the next level of greater detail and specificity, until after the final decision they would realise the detail of themselves; what their qualities and properties were, and where they were placed in the society that they had been regulating.
The construction of the procedure was such that, in ignorance of what they would be, or where they would end up socially, they would be wise to allow that they might conceivably find themselves to be in any position in the society that they decision-making would make possible. Because of this they be forced to be fair to every social circumstance or role that would be created, since they would have to protect their chances of good living under any possibility that their decisions created.
I realised that such a procedure might enable us to address a fundamental question of the educational problematic; the fact that the new entrants who are born into our societies begin in just such ignorance – of their physical, social and mental attributes, and how a society might, potentially, evaluate them (including discriminate against them). They also begin in complete ignorance of anything that might matter in the determination of a worthwhile life, and that the ability to develop a worthwhile life will depend upon what they learn. They begin, crucially, in a great vulnerability to having much of their lives, including their sense of their own worth, decided by others.
Indeed, they will begin without the powers of reason at all. Since we do, in practice, have to make educational decisions for them, at least initially, we could approach this problem by imposing a hypothetical ignorance on ourselves that would partly mimic theirs, forcing us to protect and save our lives and our minds (and theirs) by the educational conditions that we would create. Without knowing how we would choose to live, we would be forced to protect the development of mind by the purpose of enabling its self-determination.
We, as their care-givers, and with a responsibility for our society and culture, must make crucial learning decisions on behalf of those who are coming to join us, deciding, to the extent that we can, on the value that is to be assigned to their many qualities and attributes, on the core values out of which all others will be built, and on the key intellectual judgments, attitudes and disciplines of character that they will need if they are to achieve good lives.
But since they are moral beings of equal value to ourselves, we must, so far as we can, make these decisions without imposing upon them the conclusions that we have reached and depend upon as being part of our own self-determination – those beliefs and values that we take to be a part of our personal moral responsibility. We must discount our own substantive conclusions; disqualifying our philosophies and outlooks on life to the extent that they, as equal human beings, should be equally entitled to freely develop and refine their own.
We must therefore make decisions for them that are guided by principles of intellectual growth and critical thought that allow conclusions to be arrived at independently, as they would be arrived at as our equals, unsullied by our own conclusions about what good living should be. We should construct a hypothetical ignorance in ourselves, setting aside our conclusions about how the universe, or life itself, should be approached, in favour of rich and powerful ways in which these things might be interrogated.
My own approach to education evolved out of that remarkable work by John Rawls. My justification of education can be found in three chapters on “respect” in my book Education – as if our lives depended on it, and in my own version of a decision-procedure developed in Part 4, re-working the Myth of Er which occurs near the end of Plato’s Republic.
This justification depends very much on the idea of self-respect as an aspect of the principle of “respect-for-persons”. I have proposed that we all have a duty of self-respect, namely to achieve a worthwhile life for ourselves in the best way that we can. Persons, under this view, are equally valuable, each having a duty to pursue their own good life. Since all persons are to be respected equally, respect for ourselves is held in balance with the requirement that we respect each other, and what we have to respect is each person’s duty to themselves – the duty to pursue a worthwhile life in the best way.
There is, however, such a concern in our societies for respecting each other, and such a condemnation of attitudes and preoccupations that are called “selfish”, that an immediate reaction to my proposal may be to suggest that my proposals for education are simply an encouragement to selfishness. This is not, I think, at all the case. I believe that I am as much against selfishness as anyone else.
Indeed, I think that the conventional approach is an invitation to selfishness. If the moral emphasis is on respecting other people to the neglect of proper attention to the worth of our own lives, it seems to me a very predictable developmental path that many of the young will grow up seeing morality simply as a means to control them in the service of the agendas of others – parents, teachers, the employers and the authorities of the State who care little for their interests so long as they behave. It would not be too difficult to see in morality a controlling hypocrisy.
But I don’t think that the defence of my view against the possibility of its encouraging selfishness should rest on the equality of respect alone (all persons should be respected equally). An equally strong argument lies, I believe, in our understanding of the social character of our personal interests. We each, in the interests of the development of Good Lives of our own have a very strong stake in everyone else being able to do the same.
That is because the knowledge that we would need for a proper self-respect so much resides in others. We should suspect this, of course, right from the dependency on such knowledge from the very beginnings – from the wisdom (or lack of it) of our caregivers. We have a stake in the success of their lives and their insights into life long before we could possibly be aware of them. This stake in the quality of the lives of others therefore includes a stake in a good society into which they might be born; a society that can deliver good care-givers to us, and sound educational decision.
Both Rawls’s “Original Position”, and my reworking of the Myth of Er, should deliver a society having certain characteristics. A society – indeed a community – of free moral people would be committed to determining for themselves and living, each in their own way, the best possible life. Their society would not merely grant that all others have the right to do the same, but support the establishment, in the community, of conditions which would enable all to understand the implications of that right, and to assist them in exercising it.
The rationale for the community would be to facilitate the worthwhile life for all of its members. Presumably this would mean that it would have to defend these lives from harm, ensure the basic necessities of life against ill-health and misfortune, and create the economic conditions, the infrastructure and the processes that a diverse wealth of lives would need.
It would also place a very high priority on the sorts of experiences that members were likely to have through living and participating in the community, favouring those that enabled or encouraged the learning of thought and feeling that enables high quality self-determination; the development and implementation of personal conceptions of the worthwhile life. Equally, it would be very concerned to seek out and eradicate those conditions that might dumb down these capacities, or corrupt their possibility.
A free mind capable of conceiving of a worthwhile life in an open and critical way, and a vigorous spirit able to realise a challenging and rewarding life, are present in human beings at first only as potentials, and require particular conditions of learning and experience to bring them to fruition.
There would be other reasons for equipping these minds, to be sure. The community would need members to be productive where possible, because the opportunities for diverse, rich and satisfying lives would require community wealth. But the wealth is pointless unless it represents worthwhile living, and despite what our contemporary actions so often seem to suggest, the development of a worthwhile life is not an easy undertaking, and requires considerable knowledge and insight, skill, appropriate attitude and disposition which we do not automatically acquire.
If the newborn begin life with a positive impulse to live well, they cannot, at the beginning, conceive of what living well might be, or involve. They cannot know that the language they are yet to acquire will give them enormous additional potential, both good and bad. They cannot yet conceive of the possibilities of a complete life, and its difficulties and dangers. They cannot yet imagine all the different ways in which people have tried, with varying degrees of success, to make the best of their lives. The cannot even begin to explore the possibilities for new forms of life that the evolution of their societies might soon make possible. They cannot imagine the full richness of the store of past invention, discovery and blunder which their societies possess. They cannot yet, in any recognisably human way, think.
Among the paths that their learning might take from birth onward are some that could so impede their intellectual and emotional development that they could be little more than children for life. Some could lead them to thievery, addiction, or the abuse of other people. Some could so stunt their spirit that they will settle readily for any small life suggested to them. Some would condemn them to lives decided for them by others who have realised no more of their own potential than the infant could eventually have realised for themselves with very little help – or even worse lives, poorly adapted to the conditions under which they must be lived. Some would make them pawns and tools in the plans of others.
Some would even equip them well in a number of ways, but leave them empty and confused in others, so that they do not know what to do except look around for the sorts of things other people seem to approve of, and copy that. The community that assumes the responsibility for bringing them up must decide which pathways will give them power, confidence and opportunity to develop the wisdom to live well. Such up-bringing decisions, when they are made well, should be considered education. Made badly, so that the opportunity to develop their own good way of living is lost or subverted and humane potential needlessly squandered, the decisions should be considered indoctrination.
This is the standpoint from which we should express our educational purposes. We must ask what sort of person we should be trying to produce. We should ask what kinds of learning and experience they will need in order to become the sort of person we have in mind. We must ask these questions developmentally, recognising that experience grows out of experience, learning out of prior learning.
We should ask these questions, and build reasonably sophisticated answers before we ask “what are the best ways and the best places for securing this learning and experience?” Only then should we ask if we should have schools, and what sorts of schools, designed for what experiences, and developing what processes. Our experience of looking at our whole social organisation through the Original Position should alert us to the fact that schools will never be the only places in which appropriate or inappropriate learning and experience can occur. They should not even be the first places that should occur to us.
Many prior decisions (such as those in Rawls’s scheme) will have a large bearing on the value of schools as partial educational solutions, on their nature, and on their relative efficacy, just as these decisions will also shape the nature of the family, the workplace, the street, entertainments and the culture at large. We should be asking where the most appropriate and effective sites of learning could be, and it will be a blessing if we can find or devise places other than the school for much of the learning that will need to occur, so that the focus of schooling can narrow down to fewer tasks which it is better suited to accomplish.
The idea of beginning to think about education by trying to consider the issues in terms of the interests of the newborn seems so obvious that it may be hard to see why it needs to be discussed, let alone emphasised. The problem is that if when we do give it attention in our ordinary way, we make no more effort to exercise our imaginations than we do with considering education at any other point. What are the long term interests of the newborn?
“Well”, we are inclined to say, “eventually they are going to need to get a job. We want them to get a good one, so that their later life-prospects will be good. They will need to learn to read and write, and achieve other forms of academic success. They can sort out the rest for themselves, as we did. We have sorted out our own religious convictions for ourselves, for instance, and our own convictions are, presumably, a pretty good place for them to start.” The upshot is schooling and child-rearing as usual. In considering the question, we have failed to shed the narrowness of our upbringing, and of what is conventional about living a life. We continue to inflict our own ignorance of the potential for worthwhile living upon the young – an educational ignorance resulting from the neglect in schooling, from advertising, from the low standards of expectation of thought and the very limited discussion about it, and from conformity to convention and expectation.
Rousseau claimed that moral reason grew out of moral passions, and that these moral passions did not come complete at the beginning. In the beginning is self love. The moral passions underlying respect for others – sympathy, empathy, pity and compassion – arise as we envisage ourselves suffering the pains and discomforts of others, in the light of our own self-love. We begin to extend our concern to others as a result of imagining ourselves, with our priorities, being in their circumstances, and of course understanding others and their circumstances – as well as our own experience – are difficult and life-long learning trajectories. Self love comes first, and respect for others is only possible because of it.
This may be what commonly happens when humans develop morally, and it leads eventually to the development of conscience and senses of obligation and duty. Granted, we all begin with an impulse to live well, but why is it a good thing that our self-love be extended to a concern for others? To be sure, we need to be able to get along with others to some extent in order to get what we want, and others might want to impose a morality on us, so that we consider their interests too.
Nevertheless, is it in our interests to develop in this way? Might it not be better for our self-love – easier to promote its well-being – not to have to go through the pain and discomfort of the imagined discomfort of others? We might be able to “get along with others” sufficiently for our needs without having to get too close to what they are experiencing. There seem to be plenty of cases of people with little concern for the well-being of others, and it isn’t difficult to see what we might do to stamp out concern for others in the young. Doing so certainly would not be impractical.
Is the effort to encourage the young to take a considerate interest in others based on no more than our own defence against the possibility that the young may grow up making excessive demands on us; based on no more than self-preservation, or for the sake of “society” at large? Is there anything more to this, then, than an imposition, or a taking-advantage of one possible developmental potential? Is it, indeed, in the interests of self love to extend it to a concern for others?
Such questions sound selfish, of course, but this may be because we are used to having a very narrow view of the interests of the self in mind when questions such as these arise about the self. The “interests of the self” – even the “best interests of the self” – sound very close to “self interest”, which in turn seems a short step to the self’s interest in the self, or various forms of self-preoccupation, or obsession. All the same, if a proper self-respect – in one’s own interests – turned out to depend upon a full-hearted respect for others, because of what our social nature means for the possibilities of our own lives, then many people would have to rethink their ideas about “self-interest”, and even “selfishness”.
The interests of the self (not to be confused with what the self finds interesting) can encompass the best interests of other people. When I love someone unconditionally, for example, then it is a part of what is in my interests to seek for them what is in their best interests. But to love them in this way is then to blur the apparently sharp boundaries between our interests as unique individuals.
Whatever else this is, it is not selfish. We can hold such a view without being driven to reduce love to a simple pleasure-seeking motive on our part. Love enlarges the interests of the self to include the interests of others. It is a rectifying or balancing force against self-preoccupation, or self-obsession. Thus “getting what we want” can include getting more money to pay for the music or the movies we want to stream. But it could also include getting a more just and satisfying society for all, or a greener planet.
“Self interest” need not mean something narrow, then. But is it in the interests of the self to have a broad interest – an interest not unlike the interest of unconditional love, in which the interests of the self encompasses the best interests of others? Is a broad interest more than just one option among many? Are there compelling reasons for favouring an interest involving concern for the well-being of large numbers of other people, and the social conditions under which they may thrive?
If this is important to our possibility of developing our own conception of our own good in the best possible way, then we will begin to see how self interest might connect us in to a community of interest. If our first impulse should be to seek conditions which will enable us to develop for ourselves our own conception of our good in the best way, would this also lead us to want the same favourable possibility and conditions for other people? Is it in our interests to live in a society that is just, not just for our own sakes, but for the sakes of all others as well? Plato gave us some interesting clues as to a valuable way to pursue such questions.
Gyges Ring
The crucial turning point in Plato’s Republic occurs when Socrates is challenged by Glaucon to face up to explaining what justice actually is, and Socrates begins to do so. Glaucon uses the story of Gyges, the shepherd who finds a magic ring and discovers that it will make him invisible, to illustrate the challenge. Using the ring, he enters the palace of the king of Lydia, kills the king, seduces and marries the queen and becomes king himself.
Why, Socrates is asked, is being just not something we do simply because people will admire and praise us if we do it, and disapprove and sanction, or even punish us if we don’t? Is justice not simply a matter of doing what “society” says is right, and rewards, and avoiding doing what it says is wrong, and punishes? To put the matter more bluntly, would we all act like Gyges if we were really convinced that we could get away with it? Suppose that we could do whatever we really felt like doing, and people would never find out.
Indeed, suppose that we could do any evil or bad thing, and people would nevertheless continue to think that we were the most noble and just of men or women, heaping praise and appreciation on us, despite whatever we really did. Why would we want to restrain ourselves and actually be just? Alternatively, suppose that whenever we were in fact just we were always misunderstood, and considered awful, bad or evil, even to the point that people might stone us to death for being so unjust. Why would we still continue to want and act justly?
Socrates begins his long answer by saying that in order to understand justice in the individual, we must understand justice in the society, and he begins to build, in imagination, his perfectly just society of perfectly just people. Because Socrates doesn’t follow the advice always given to every well-supervised Ph.D candidate (“say what you are going to say, say it, and then say what you said”), it is possible to miss his precise answer to the problem posed through the story of Gyges ring. Readers are apt to get so caught up in the intricacies of the marvellous vision of the Republic that they forget to keep asking those initial questions. But why should we be just if we can get away with being unjust, or why should we continue to be just, despite being forever misunderstood?
The simple answer is, of course, that you won’t have a hope of finding the Good Life, let alone living it, unless you live a life that is ordered by justice to yourself and others, whatever else your life is – and preferably doing so in a just society. That simple answer can sound like yet another person imposing their conception of the good life upon us (and the young child), yet if we look more closely, we see that this is not necessarily true, and that his answer promises us something about the nature of the quest for the Good Life itself.
An important clue is to be found in many of Socrates’s remarks after he has completed the construction of his ideal society, and encourages us to be pessimistic about its prospects. Clearly the fathers and mothers of the ideal society will have been familiar with all kinds of regimes and their deficiencies, will have much experience, carefully considered, and will have reached their conclusions about how to build their society from scratch after extensive and profound philosophical reflection.
But their children will only have known the ideal society, and will not be so sharply alert to the dangers of living in other ways. They will be like the good souls who have spent too long in heaven, and when returning to earth to choose a new life, choose unwisely out of ignorance of the dangers. They will lack the sharpness of hard experience, and will be more vague about the importance of doing things the way their parents had painfully learned to do, since the reasons for doing so will not be truly their own. In their practices and judgements, they will soften the rules of the ideal society, and become less of an aristocracy of philosophers, and more of an oligarchy.
The next generation will have this as its starting point, and will soften and alter the applications of the rules and the laws even further; and so will continue a gradual decline down the ladder of desirable societies, down to the penultimate stage – democracy – to the final, last and worst stage – tyranny. By the time the society has declined into democracy, individuals will have declined with it from philosophers, or people with their philosophic potential developed as fully as possible, to mere democrats.
“Philosophic” and “democratic” need to be treated with some care here. For our purposes, let us think of “philosophic” as being equipped to think well about one’s own good life, and “democratic” in terms of the worst personal attributes of people who readily participate in simple, majoritarian democracies – playing party politics and special interest, swayed by mass opinion and demagoguery, ready to join in the shouting down of the minority of careful thought. In other words, the decline represents a decline in the ability to think carefully about the nature and possibilities of the worthwhile life. The society is no longer capable of doing its people justice, and nor are the people capable of doing justice to themselves.
Socrates alerts us to the disaster that is a tyrannous State, but importantly he stresses the nature of the individual tyrannous character that it nourishes, and it will prove useful to explore this a little further. We can think of historical figures who exercised tyranny and consider the sorts of characters which seem typical of them. Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, Nicolae Ceaucescu of Romania and Sadam Hussein are obvious examples. In Plato’s day, the familiar contemporary example was Dionysius of Syracuse.
Such people gather final power into their hands, and usually employ terror to maintain it. To assure their power, they not only have to control the masses, and circumvent revolution from below, they must also protect themselves from those around them who might wish to do the same. They must mistrust all who have the potential to overthrow them. Dionysius is said to have allowed only his daughters to shave him, being suspicious of the razor in any other hands.
Typically, they create competition among their lieutenants, and pit them against one another so that they are too preoccupied to cast a jealous eye on the top position, and the tyrant is reluctant to delegate any of them more power among the rest for this reason. Internal, as well as external spying and informing are common elements of such regimes.
Total power, and its exercise in maintaining itself, frequently finds expression in the personality in other ways. A person who can lightly have close collaborators or large groups of people destroyed or killed simply to maintain their own position is likely to recognise and be open to the possibility that they can have almost anything else that they want. Few make much apparent effort to resist this temptation, adorn themselves lavishly, and surround themselves with opulence. Some reveal an enlarged sexual appetite, and gluttonous desires, and exercise these freely as well.
Total power means not only that such demands can be met, but that they can often be met now. In the moment of the desire; the urge. Dangerous tantrums seem commonplace among tyrants. They also frequently reveal susceptibility to fawning and boot-licking behaviour – the constant reassurance that they are, indeed, the greatest – and encourage this behaviour, even when they also see through it, and maintain their suspicion. It is important to notice that these attributes are commonly found not only in the tyrant, but are also expressed in the ruling caste in the exercise of its power in the tyranny – the Waffen SS, and party bosses, for instance.
Two questions may appear to capture our interest in tyrants. Firstly, do they live good lives? Though we should note how shallow the life becomes, this is not our central concern here, since our question is educational. Do tyrants live in such a way that they are intellectually and emotionally open to the possibilities of good lives for themselves? This is what is of most interest to us. The short answer is “no”. They foul their own nests. Why this is so, is enormously revealing for education.
The newborn child is a potential tyrant, as well as having the potential for much else. Their potential for tyranny, however, is manifestly evident. Their wants and desires (mere impulses, but very powerful ones) are immediate. They are not born able to think, “gosh I’m hungry, but I can see mother is going to be busy for a little while, so I will just have to be patient”. Their discomfort and satisfaction governs them entirely. It takes some time before they recognise adults, and their dependency on them, and once they do, they want adults to ease this discomfort, and supply this satisfaction, now. A trial of wills begins, as the infant discovers the social, and some of its terms and conditions.
It can be misled about these, of course, by the parent who always puts the child’s demands first, and rushes to satisfy them the second they emerge, thereby reinforcing the infantile perception that its desires are to be attended to immediately. The longer it takes, the louder I scream. The louder I scream, the quicker I receive attention. This is the potential tyrant. It is no accident that we equate the tantrum of the adult tyrant with infantile behaviour.
Consider what will happen if this approach genuinely persists. Firstly, the child will not learn to delay gratification. Why does that matter? Because so much knowledge, understanding and insight depend upon it. As a student once pointed out to me, a person cannot even learn mathematics if they do not know how to delay gratification, because they need some patience to reach an answer. Reading books (or other material) requires delay of gratification. Listening to another point of view requires patience. So does thinking a problem through, or constructing or inventing something.
Consider how poor we often are at listening to others with an open mind. One problem here is our unwillingness to wait for someone to come out with something they find hard to express, or they are reluctant to put before us, and we often hasten to guess at the conclusion of the story prematurely. Many ideas or concerns are dismissed before they even have time to breath air.
The more complex the activity or undertaking, usually the more patience is required in seeing it through. Without delay of gratification, the whole world closes down to the most immediate and most primitive pleasures and pains, and these will become the centre of life. This is no doubt why comfort, sycophancy, gluttony and sex figure so prominently in the lives of tyrants.
A second likely development is that of mistrust. Impatience will bar the budding tyrant from learning and understanding the motivations of other people. Their best guess at what motivates others, will be what motivates themselves. Since getting other people to gratify their desires will be their primary motive in social interaction, they are most likely to understand others as having the same motive – a motive to be acutely aware of if your own desires depend upon other people.
Other people will always be seen as having their own self-serving agendas, which means they are to be mistrusted. Every exchange that is not an immediate gratification of one’s desires resulting from one’s irresistible insistence will be viewed as a clash of wills. This was a central concern of Rousseau, who went to considerable lengths to understand how a child might grow up accepting many social restrictions as matters of necessity, rather than as the simple wilfulness of other people. He sought to bridge the developmental gap between the necessity of higher order moral principles and the wilfulness of the young child.
Failure to tell the difference will, of course, lead to an inability to understand and recognise legitimate authority. Authority will simply be the imposition on the weak of the will of the powerful. The difference between authority and mere power lies in our consent in the former, but to do that we must be able to recognise and accept constraints on our own behaviour willingly.
This requires a voluntary giving up of some of the empire of personal desire, an impossibility if personal desire has never been tamed, and has become untamable. Authority becomes simple power, a thing to be railed against imperiously, and overthrown if there is some possibility of doing so, or to be submitted to while weaseling or sneaking to get around it. Just don’t get caught. Since authority is intellectual and personal as well as political, the young tyrant is being set up to be an intellectual and emotional cripple, as well as a total political and social outsider.
With authority being mere power, and primitive desires depending very often upon others for their satisfaction being paramount, fear, anger and frustration will become central passions, next to the most primitive desires. Since other people hold the key to the satisfaction of many of our desires, any perception that others have the power to deny us what we want if they have the will to do so will evoke fear. That they could give us what we want, will supply the foundation for anger.
If anger works, because others sometimes back down before it, there will be little to check fury and rage, and we should not be surprised at the emergence of violence. Whatever we thought of a life being narrowed to the satisfaction of primitive desires, we must now see an emotional life torn between them and a ruling anger at, and a fear of, the many ways and the many objects which thwart these desires. Blaming and a strong sense of victimisation will be central in the growing tyrant’s “moral” discourse.
With all this, it will not be surprising that the growing tyrant will have extreme difficulty forming intimate personal relationships. Inability to delay gratification will mean an incapacity to know another person in any depth, because that takes patience and time. Constant mistrust will, of course, corrupt the possibility of gaining any insight into how a partner really feels, but will also prevent any stable understanding of their behaviour. The possibility of admiration for another will be overwhelmed by fear, and the rich source of valuable feedback which is available to us in a mutually caring, trusting, and intimate relationship will be completely cut off.
Without abilities for genuine intimacy, sexual life will inevitably operate at the level of primitive desire, and be quite animal in the ways in which it is sought and gratified. Perceiving relationships simply in terms of power will necessitate a power-struggle, or complete compliance on the part of a partner, who will probably receive constant belittling in order to keep them in their place. Together with mistrust, the reduction of authority to power will encourage the development of devious and manipulative techniques, accompanied by a constant stream of grievance. Generally (if we are sensitive to the degree of domestic violence that exists in our present world) a sadly familiar picture.
This picture of a potential tyrant is artificial to the extent that, apart from the fact that it would be an appalling thing to do to bring up a child deliberately to be one, it would be unimaginably difficult to control the conditions totally so that every whim was met, and met with haste. Thus most of our adult tyrants went through processes that muted their tyrannical potential in various ways, while arguably making them more dangerous.
Most great tyrants learned to read and write, for example, and completed other elements of schooling. Many display considerable insight into the workings of political processes, and learned to delay gratification enough to be able to time their strike. Many, in the process of learning how to manipulate other people, clearly develop considerable insight into the motivations and experiences of others, even if they are incapable of significant empathy, or mistrust these motives at the deepest level. Some, no doubt, learn to develop tyrannous characters “on the job”, gradually giving in to the potentially corrupting influence of power.
With this greater complexity in mind, we can see that the notion of the tyrannical personality enslaved to its passions is not so remote from our current experience. The late Christopher Lasch had much to teach us in his several books on the “culture of narcissismChapter 6 – The Tyrant’s Choice Laschof our times.
We seem now to be talking about the possibility of tyrants in democratic regimes, rather than in tyrannies, but this may reveal that there was something to Plato’s insight that democracy is close to developing the “educational.In this chapter there will be considerable reference to “education” in the first sense of the terms, as discussed in the chapter Educational Basics, as anything which falls within the educational domain, in contrast to education as a worthwhile enterprise. In order to better establish this distinction, I will indicate the former by surrounding it with inverted commas, though normally the context should be sufficient to enable the two uses to be told apart. conditions of tyranny – at least when it is a poor democracy driven by the powerful engine of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century capitalism.
If we were in a position to set some conditions at birth on the sorts of educational environment we would be brought up in, it is pretty safe to assume that we would not want those conditions to foster our potential to be tyrants. This is not because tyranny is not nice. It is because it would close down our world of possibility. It would severely restrict the potential worthwhile lives that would be open to us, and the subtlety and sophistication that they might contain.
More fundamentally, it would severely restrict our abilities to seek out and explore the possibilities of good lives that other people are trying to live. It would, in other words, stifle our learning potential. This is not just because the character of the tyrant would repeatedly lead us to draw unhelpful conclusions from our experience and blind us to the kinds of knowledge and understanding which we would need in order to be able to see and create many rich possibilities and choose among them well. It would also create an environment around us that would be additionally unhelpful to our chances to do these things.
We might not turn other people into tyrants on our model (though the conditions we would create for our children are not pretty to contemplate) but other people around us would have to contend with the tyrant in their midst, and would learn to defend themselves against this untrustworthy, insensitive and unloving, impulsively unreliable powder-keg, given to manipulation and total self-absorption. No matter how kind and willing these people might be, they would be wise not to let us far into their lives and to minimise their dealings with us. Our mistrust and impatience would breed mistrust and impatience.
A Life among tyrants
If we want to grow up to be able to develop our own worthwhile lives in the best way, we will therefore want two things: we will want to be brought up in such a way that we can reason well about life-planning, and can be receptive to other people’s accounts and exemplification of their lives, to the accumulation of their experience, to their inventions and discoveries, and to the possibilities of intimacy with them, including the possibilities of love. We will want this to happen in a just community of honest, open and reflective people who live rich and diverse lives themselves.
Consider what it would be like in a tyranny which promoted tyrannical values (including through child-rearing), if a family or a small group attempted to bring up children to be most effective at developing their own worthwhile lives for themselves. Firstly, social marginality would have to be built into the very culture of the small group, and this would become an educational condition for the young. Their upbringing would have to be enormously coloured by the sharp social contrast, and the necessary defensiveness. It would have to be firmly recognised, by the young, that they would have to make continual efforts to reaffirm their commitment to the values and conditions necessary for the continuing choice of the worthwhile life.
Even this, however, would be undermined by the necessity of bringing them up with a deep mistrust of others, since most people they are likely to have dealings with outside the group would be devious and deeply infected with tyrannical mistrust themselves. Unless the group could live as a relatively discrete enclave, and provide all the possibilities of love, intimacy, mentorship, and a rich diversity of life within itself – an implausibility since all of these things would, of necessity, be very narrow – the child would eventually have to make their way in that larger world. Then it would be a question of how far and how long that person would be able to maintain their freedom without serious compromise in the face of the onslaught of tyrannical values and practices.
Later in the Republic, Socrates speaks of the philosopher in a democracy as being like a person caught in a hailstorm, sheltering behind a wall, and here we are reminded of that earlier question; why be just even though you are likely to be so misunderstood that you might be stoned to death? Why, in a world of tyrannical people and institutions, would you want to persist with the life of seeking to understand your own good? Why resist slipping into the character of the tyrant?
The best that life could be would be bittersweet, with very large amounts of pain and sadness to offset the sweetness. You would know what love could be, but also that your chance of finding it if you want it would be small, because there would be so few who would be capable of genuine love. You would know what mentoring could be, but that most people would only agree to teach you because they had designs for you to serve their purposes. You would know how people might work together freely for mutual benefit and satisfaction, but that any social activity you entered into would be warped with power-hunger and ambition. You would see the pain of the powerful and the powerless, knowing that much of it was unnecessary, but be aware of your limited power to do anything about it.
It would certainly be a grim life, but it would be a better life, knowing that there could be more to human motivation than those primary passions, and that even in this life we could choose among more impulses for living, feeling and responding than could those around us. We would not be condemned to live between fury and fear. We would have a richer emotional life, and we could make choices about how that should develop. We would have a very large capacity for pity at the suffering that the development of the minds of others had trapped them into, and though we may not assume a personal mission to alleviate it all and change the world, we are not likely to wish to contribute to it, and make things worse, both because we would cling dearly to our knowledge of our own insight into human potential – our humanity – and also because anyone who might, as a result of our actions and our model, come a little way out of their tyranny would represent a victory, and widen both our worlds of potential action as well as their own by just that much.
We would not choose to be stoned. We would, no doubt, shelter behind the wall. We might dissemble, up to a point. But we would not lightly slip into the life of the tyrannous character, because to do so would be to turn our backs on the larger self we have achieved, with its knowledge, and with the human dignity for which it stands. To become tyrannous would be to perform an act of self-abuse.
Plato insisted that we could not understand justice within the individual without understanding the just society. The person who tries sincerely to do justice to themselves will be in a continual state of mental and emotional war with their society if it is less than just. Our pursuit of the person to be brought up to choose and develop their own worthwhile life for themselves should lead us to a similar conclusion. They will not merely want to be equipped, by their caregivers, to pursue their own worthwhile life, they will want a society in which others are fairly encouraged to do the same, and can do so freely.
Other free people will explore and test various life possibilities and will develop them together, producing a fund of knowledge and tradition which will enable us to short-cut laborious processes of trial-and-error in seeking to develop our own life. This effective “short-cutting” will benefit us most if people recognise the value of the efforts of others to understand these things, and the additional knowledge and insight that can be gained through sharing their experiences with similarly sensitive people.
We would want to find ourselves in a culture in which dialogue about these matters is rich, widespread, easy to enter, and rewarding for all. We would not want to find ourselves in a society in which people were grasping and manipulative, divided by caste, class, colour, gender or excessive wealth, simply because these things will both narrow the range of people to whom we have access, and unfavourably distort, and stunt, the impulse to develop their own worthwhile lives. It does not require much thought about our own social systems to recognise the barriers that have existed for ourselves, born into our particular location, to an understanding of the possibilities of experience and satisfaction discovered by other people in other positions that are not readily accessible to us.
The importance of supporting the enhancement of the lives of others out of an interest in our own prospects of living well can be illustrated from Aristotle’s treatment of friendship or love.Aristotle on friendship Aristotle recognised a number of kinds of love or friendship, and ranked them in value. The one he identified as the highest, was the love we have for another person because of the admiration we have for their aspiration, and their courage and commitment in their efforts to realise it. We love them for the vision of the person they are trying to be. It has a beauty and nobility that captivates us. This is a person whose view of life, and of ourselves, is of particular value to us. The image of ourselves, reflected in their eyes, will be the most highly prized piece of knowledge that we could have from other people. Such a person is one we would want to learn from, above all others.
At best, this kind of relationship is not going to happen very often. Not just anyone will do. It will be a special treasure, if it is found, and because it is such a treasure, it will also have the potential for the greatest loss. Eventually, through one’s death or forced departure, or that of one’s friend, the thing most prized will be taken away. The pain of one’s loss will be a measure of the height of one’s joy. Just as such a relationship will be difficult to find in the first place, so it will be difficult to replace (1)
For our purposes, we should notice that the difficulty of finding and replacing such friendship or love will be made much harder if the only people who are free and enabled to engage in a full search for their own Good Life are limited to a small, privileged class (and it will be even worse if we are not a member of that class). In Aristotle’s case, he could hardly expect to find such a potential love or friend among women in his society, or among slaves.
If we want the possibility of this sort of love in our lives, will we agree to institutional arrangements that will stunt or degrade some people to the benefit of others? Would we be willing that the rare chance that we might find a soul who would set our own soul on fire be an even more rare possibility than it would be under the best conditions? Our earlier example of our person brought up to seek their own good in a world of tyrannous characters puts a twist on the idea that “there are more fish in the sea (more pebbles on the beach)”. There certainly may be plenty of fish (or pebbles), but the chances of finding a congenial one in an on-going tyranny, are not likely to be high. If we step back from the idea of trying to find our one best love, and consider that we might like to have many worthwhile friends and acquaintances as well, we can see that the same problem will apply. Not much of a beach here!
Freedom and justice for all
Would we simply be opening the door to forms of self-obsession and self-absorption at the expense of an authentic morality that accorded due respect to each other if we focussed on self-respect in education? If we were to provide an education which had a genuine chance of enabling people to choose their own worthwhile lives in the best way, does that mean that we would be endorsing selfishness?
The correct answer to this, I think, lies along the following lines. We are dependent on others, not just for help in implementing any plan we may happen to devise, but for access to the knowledge we will need in order to appreciate the possibilities of potential plans, and for the knowledge, skills and attitudes we will need to acquire in order to pursue them. This knowledge must be accessible to us in forms that allow us to learn it, and access to it must be available in an ongoing way throughout our lives, because we, and our circumstances, are likely to change. “Knowledge” here, involves more than mere information. It involves conceptual, perceptual and affective schemes, activities, practices and other “doings”, and such things as discipline and habits.
It will not do to think of this knowledge and our access to it simply as local matters, though we will always make contact with it through whatever happens to be local to us at any given moment – through face-to-face exchange with other people, through books, as well as through various forms of computing and electronic media. What can be local will always depend upon structures and conditions larger than the local.
But in our time so much of the knowledge, even to the extent that we access it locally, is global in origin. Pluralism and diversity are almost unavoidable everywhere. Living in an isolated homogeneous pocket is becoming more and more exceptional, and requires more effort. Even if we establish ghettos of our own kind, the mere presence of “electronic devices” brings difference into our midst.
The development has been rapid. Within living memory, my country of New Zealand was “at the ends of the earth”. My mother, on her first flight to Hong Kong, had to take it with two over-night stop-overs. Now, New Zealand chefs working in London, or business people in New York, commute home for the weekends. Summer traffic is heavy with tourists in the small town near to me. Visitors from Asia and Europe seem as numerous as the locals on the paths and in the shops.
This extraordinary richness in possibility, in terms of knowledge and resources for understanding and reflecting on the Good Life does not mean that we are handling it well. Though we live more intimately now, that does not mean that we meet and exchange views very effectively.
The intellectual tools exist, and the core judgments of equal intrinsic human worth are embedded widely and deeply, and explode spontaneously in impulses to mutual aid whenever natural or man-made disaster strikes. Yet the values and their implications are poorly thought through at all levels – unexamined and relatively inarticulate both at the individual level, and at the highest forms of collective authority. Cliches and platitudes are not enough, and conceal the incompatibilities, incongruencies and hypocrisies that abound in our systems, our organisations and institutions, and our more domestic behaviour. Given the primitive character of our educational arrangements, this is hardly surprising.
And so, though the intellectual traditions and tools exist to achieve a greater alignment according to moral principles that are held almost universally, they have not been developed and made vivid in ways that should enable us to be so much better at building good lives, and good societies. Instead, unprepared, rapid technological advance plunged us too quickly into globalization, bringing unprecedented difference suddenly much closer, before we had learned to talk through the forms of association that our new confrontation with difference should require. We are still too slow to grasp that we each have a stake in the well-being of others – globally.
Far too many, in too many places, still dream of imposing their personal conceptions of good living on the rest, thinking they have cornered the wisdom on how all should live, and too often they attempt to do so when they can gather up a little power. The old nightmare of religious conflict has re-emerged in this new intimacy; something that we should have learned from more effectively. And those who flee these new-old forms of bloodshed find themselves unwelcome among those who have been among the most proud of championing freedom, and should have developed better, more principled ways of dealing with the new “crises” before they had a chance to erupt.
Difference in tradition, in ways of living and experiencing, are not just important because people matter as human beings; not just because the right to live as they choose should be theirs to decide, consistent with mutual respect. That is, of course, the bottom line. We owe each other that. But live-and-let-live does not exhaust the value of the differences in the uniqueness of our experience.
The value is not exhausted simply because it allows us to go our separate ways. It is in that difference that knowledge vital to our own interests can be birthed in each of us. It always was; in the detail of our respectful but courageous conversation, though often buried beneath our homogeneity, and our sense that we needed to conform for, and please, the others of our kind.
Getting that vital extra value, however, requires disciplines that go beyond mere talk, and that subordinate the powers of persuasion. It helps that we can make our stories vivid and compelling, but it hinders that we are certain of our own rightness, or desire to impose our wisdom and cultural experience on others, and use our powers of persuasion to that end. Humility, a willingness to have our own convictions challenged because we want to work upon them, a keen social imagination, a wariness of our own complacency, and a strong self-confidence that will allow us to doubt ourselves – these all have to be cultivated.
The value of difference to each of us personally lies in an eager curiosity about the experience of others, that we may challenge our lives and learn for our own sakes, just as it lies in our willingness to share with others, and accept and work with them on the challenge of our difference without the arrogance of self.
We have yet to entertain such educational possibility – and its disciplinary requirements – seriously, and we are all paying the price.
(1) Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. p 354ff.
Being a tyrant isn’t just bad for those who get in the tyrant’s way. It is bad for the tyrant. It corrupts their access to knowledge, and this educational insight goes back over 2000 years. It is a clue to the social value of self-respect, and shows us how self-respect and selfishness are quite different things. Here’s why. 
