From Plato to Porky’s, the politics of the right
If you’ve ever read Plato’s Republic, you know that one of its central features is the argument, pursued quite sincerely by Socrates, that the state should prohibit the teaching of certain texts, particularly by the poets, by which Socrates (really, Plato) means Homer.
Fast forward a couple thousand years and change, and we see the state of Texas discovering what is truly the best way to teach Plato in today’s world: ban him.
Back in November, the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System, which is a state body, voted to adopt the following rule:
No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO.
In December, the chair of the philosophy department at Texas A&M reiterated these directives to individual members of the faculty teaching material that might fall afoul of these state rules. One of those faculty, Professor Martin Peterson, submitted his syllabus for Contemporary Moral Problems for review. It included Plato’s Symposium, which features several arguments about sexual love between people of the same sex, including older and younger men; hermaphroditism as the source of heterosexuality; and long disquisitions on the efforts of Alcibiades to seduce Socrates. It’s pretty racy stuff, and a touchstone of any discussion of sexual morality, which has been a concern of moral and political philosophy since, well, the ancients. Peterson’s chair responded that he had a choice: get rid of Plato from the syllabus or teach another course.
This was bound to happen. From the very beginning of this latest round of conservative assault on “woke” and “gender ideology” and higher education, it was clear that there was going to be showdown between, on the one hand, the right’s claim to be defending the great books and the western canon and the classics, and, on the other hand, the right’s opposition to what it considers to be outré ideas about sex, gender, and the body. For the simple reason that those outré ideas run rife throughout the western canon and the great books and the classics. You just can’t avoid them, which is why Plato wanted to ban so many of them.
I say “from the very beginning of this latest round of conservative assault,” but the truth is, this has been obvious since forever. Just watch a silly movie like Porky’s II, which came out in 1983, and takes place in the Florida of the 1950s. The movie is about the effort of a high school drama company to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet, featuring a kissing scene between a white student playing Juliet and a Native American student playing Romeo. The local right is up in arms about the indecency of Shakespeare, and the movie goes from there.
Sometimes, increasingly often these days, I feel like we should stop talking about the right as if we were in some fancy dress-up costume drama of the European past, where we pore over the texts of the latest National Security Strategy as if it were some sort of holy grail, and instead look to idiot movies like Porky’s as our guide. Porky politics, that really is the alpha and omega of the current moment.
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3 Comments
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F. Foundling
‘No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity’
How do you ‘advocate a topic’? You can advocate a certain stance/opinion/position on a topic, but you can’t ‘advocate’ the topic itself. What you can do is *discuss* a topic. I suppose that this is a hybrid of two formulations of the rule that the authors were vaguely considering – that courses shouldn’t *advocate* ‘the LGBT agenda / everybody becoming LGBT’ (a rule too easy to avoid running afoul of) and that they shouldn’t even discuss any LGBT-related *topics* (a rule perhaps a bit too obviously unacademic to state directly). In any case, this rule for higher education seems to have been written and approved by people who haven’t themselves been educated well enough to write – and think – clearly and logically, or at least to value such clarity and logic highly enough to be embarrassed by the incoherence of their own sentence. That said, the fact is that it was the chair of the philosophy department – presumably a well-educated person – who took the decision to interpret the incoherent sentence in such a way as to ban Plato. This just goes to show – for the umpteenth time – that the situation in academia isn’t all that great either with respect to logical thinking or, more likely, character, which enables the ‘regents’ to find willing collaborators there, too (and, of all people, among the bosses – no surprise there). The chair could have easily said that the course only *discusses* the topic (and Plato’s view of it) and does not ‘advocate’ it (whatever such ‘advocacy’ would have entailed), so that it doesn’t violate the nonsensical rule.
‘the right’s opposition to what it considers to be outré ideas about sex, gender, and the body. For the simple reason that those outré ideas run rife throughout the western canon and the great books and the classics. You just can’t avoid them, which is why Plato wanted to ban so many of them.’
Hmm. These three sentences, logically read, say that Plato wanted to ban poets because they had ‘outré ideas about sex, gender, and the body’. I don’t see how this can be considered correct. First, the overwhelming majority of Plato’s objections to poets have nothing to do with sex and the body at all. Second, to the extent that he briefly broaches these subjects, he does not condemn ‘outré ideas’, but rather the lack of ‘temperance’ and ‘self-control in sensual pleasures’ (the examples of intemperance he gives are quite conventional and not at all ‘outré’). As for actual ‘outré ideas about sex, gender, and the body’, Plato himself clearly had quite enough of those – hence the current ban – so he couldn’t condemn that per se. Plato may have been an authoritarian, a totalitarian even, but – like any philosopher worth the name – conventional he wasn’t.
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Donald Pruden, Jr., a/k/a The Enemy Combatant
What Plato hated about Homer is that Homer had the nerve to make explicit the grisly violence of war which could then make people too scared to take up arms, and to suggest that military leaders had less than noble motives in their decision making.
He also favored propaganda and lying, hence his belief in “necessary illusions”.
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Nqabutho
That’s why morality should be distinguished from ethics, and why the terms ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ should not be regarded as synonyms referring to the same area of concern. Why the political tendency referred to as “the popular right” has the morality they have ended up as having, or why they have the conception of what “religion” is all about that they have ended up as having, are questions for anthropology and social psychology. Is it possible to have a national dialogue about what the aim of understanding the world is all about and how to achieve it?