Me in the NYT: Play-Doh, Plato, and the 'Form of the Dumb'
Texas lawmakers are dragging the classics into the culture war—and the academy back into the cave
I’ve got an op-ed in The New York Times today that you should check out. If you’ve been following FIRE’s work on this case—and my Times op-ed from last fall as well as my interview for The Daily—you’ll recognize a pattern: the current craziness on campus isn’t about dunking on individual administrators. They’ve been handed the misfortune of enforcing a state-level crackdown that practically demands prior restraint. It’s now more often the law, and the regime it creates, that deserve the spotlight. Still, it’s hard not to marvel at where this leads: we’re now at the point where a philosophy professor is told he can either cut Plato from his syllabus or teach a different class—an option about as appealing as a cup of hemlock tea. (And yes, my dictation software has revealed itself to be a Philistine, because it keeps trying to “correct” Plato into “Play-Doh,” which would be funnier if the situation itself weren’t so maddening.)
The absurdity lies in the fact that the thing being treated as contraband here is Plato’s Symposium—including Aristophanes’s myth of the androgyne, where male and female were once joined in a perfect, happy, spherical whole until Zeus tore them asunder, leaving each half wandering the world trying to become one again. It’s one of the loveliest metaphors we inherited from antiquity (with a musical number in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, for those keeping score). If even Plato now “advocates gender ideology,” we’re not keeping politics out of the classroom—we’re importing today’s culture war into the ancient agora, dragging the modern academy back into the cave, and calling it “enlightenment.” Rather than achieving the Platonic Form of Justice or Decency, Texas lawmakers have managed to achieve the “Form of the Dumb.”
Shot for the road
Lest you mistake me for an uncritical Plato super-fan, I’m actually closer to Karl Popper on The Republic: I don’t think Plato was merely building an elaborate metaphor for the soul and the state. I think he was sketching a form of government he believed might actually work—totalitarian levels of control with the end-result being a society run by philosopher-kings. This has always sounded to me like Plato working backwards from, “Society should be run by people like me… and, ideally, by me, personally.” I know people disagree with that interpretation. But I also know there’s a certain type of intellectual who likes The Republic or the idea of the Platonic Forms precisely because it flatters the idea that they’re the only ones who can see the Form of Truth—and that the world would be better if the self-appointed philosopher-kings were in charge. The theocracy in Iran believes it serves as a kind of “guardian class,” and it has worked out about as miserably as a system can work out—perhaps even more miserably than I would have guessed. Below is a speech I gave a couple years ago at FIRE’s expansion announcement gala in New York City on why we should fight the guardians—in other words, why we should oppose the rule of the self-appointed philosopher-kings.
Excellent. Misoponos would love your catastrophizing!
Plato hated Aristophanes and painted him as a fool in Symposium—drunk off his rocker and spouting ridiculous "myths" to avoid real arguments and discussion. Plato was skewering Aristophanes to highlight the absurdity of superficial mimesis as a cheap substitute for reason and explanation.
Prof. Peterson does not like to discuss primary literature* in his class, presumably because it encourages students to wrestle with difficult material themselves without the careful curation and filtering by the priestly Professor. In this case, a few select quotes are lifted from Plato's caricature of Aristophanes in order to disingenuously paint Plato as a "gender ideology" compatriot.
Texas A&M fell for Peterson's trap, ordering him not to intentionally and superficially distort Plato to further a political agenda. The dishonest press OF COURSE would add their own distortions in the form of catastrophizing exaggerations: "Texas A&M Bans Plato" or "the thing being treated as contraband here is Plato’s Symposium."
No. Plato is not being banned, nor is Symposium. Instead, the target is a sloppy and disingenuous use of completely out-of-context excerpt to twist Plato into some kind of "gender ideology" trailblazer and advocate. Sure, Texas A&M's "ban" on teaching "gender ideology" probably crosses the line into idiotic, but a response that bends the knee to Misoponos by catastrophizing the episode into a black and white battle between the Good People and the Evil People also borders on the idiotic.
Excellent coup, Prof. Peterson.
And Lukianoff, you've been played like a fiddle.
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* https://www.chronicle.com/article/texas-a-m-bans-plato-excerpt-from-a-philosophy-course
Seems to me that after reading a bunch of the other dialogues, one would see neither Republic nor Laws as Plato’s literal views.
A&M messed up in censoring by viewpoint, whereas I continue to believe it is ok for larger administrative and legislative bodies to determine the content taught by subsidiary ones; academic freedom is primarily institutional.
A content restriction applies to the module as much as the particular readings the professor is using to treat the topic. So if the prohibition were against teaching myths in science class and the module was about myths and the reading was Plato about Atlantis, same result.