Babies and Gender Construction

When I look at my daughter, my baby girl, I don’t detect her gender. I am aware of her sex, for it was announced to me, rather loudly and emphatically, by nurses and surgeons, when she was born, ‘It’s a girl!’ I am aware of her sex too, when I change her diapers. Other than that, I do not know if I’m dealing with a boy or a girl. At eleven weeks, it’s all baby all the time; no sexual difference manifests itself. Perhaps I’m not expert enough to know the difference between a boy’s wailing and a girls’ wailing, or perhaps there is some magic marker that I am not aware of. But I think I possess sufficient expertise in this domain; I am the child’s father after all. Why would anyone else know better than me? My daughter’s mother, my wife, agrees; for now, it could be just as well a boy; we don’t see the girl yet.

But there are times when we have seen my girl, accompanied by her gender. My mother-in-law, her grandmother, bought her a frilly white dress, sleeveless, complete with white fur stole. My wife dressed her up in it for an outing to a wedding. She was cooed and gushed over, and everyone told us how adorable she was. It was the first time I had seen her look so ‘feminine’; the clothes had clothed her in a gender. And then, just the other day, she wore a pink skirt, also a gift. Again she looked, suddenly, as never before, ‘like a girl.’ The clothes magically transformed her; immediately, the collected set of impressions associated with white and pink dresses, ‘pretty’ and ‘delicate’, forced themselves to the fore. We were looking, amazingly enough, not at a gender-neutral baby any more but at a creature with a very distinct gender. We had participated in an act of gender construction. (I had noticed inklings of this when her first pink gifts came rolling in after birth; before that, as we had asked the asked the ultrasound clinic to keep her sex a secret, her gifts had been gender neutral.)

I have been told for a long time that gender is a social construct. I have both read and taught feminist theory. (In Fall 2007, at Brooklyn College, I taught ‘Philosophy and Feminism’ using Ann Cudd and Robin Andreasen‘s anthology; I also assigned Ursula Le Guin‘s ‘Left Hand of Darkness‘).  But I don’t think I have ever experienced the truth of that theoretical claim quite as viscerally as I have in the past few weeks, by something quite as simple as my interactions with this gurgling, bawling, cooing creature, recognizably human for sure, and certainly of the female sex as far as her biological inheritance is concerned, but lacking any other mode of definition that would allow her to be slotted into our socially determined categories of ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘man’, or ‘woman’. Right now, she’s just a baby; she awaits definition, a process in which she will participate, and hopefully, leave her own distinct imprint.

Here’s Looking At You, Sherrybaby

The narrative lines of movies about addiction, substance abuse and recovery often follow a predictable arc: protagonist at the bottom of the pit, clambers up its steep sides, slips back again and again, a moment of truth, a new dawn. Sherrybaby (written and directed by Laurie Collyer and starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as Sherry) doesn’t work quite like that.

When the movie begins, Sherry is already clean and has been for years. She is now exploring the contours of the landscape exposed by the new dawn (on the outside of the prison from which she has been released on parole), and what she finds on the outside of the pit is that there are more steep sides to be traversed and more slipping to do: the drug-free world is dreary and stubbornly resistant to manipulation by fantasy if you are sober. Sherry knows one way to make it work better for her: she can still use her sexuality. Her seemingly indiscriminate bedding of strangers suggests, possibly, some deeper pathology, one revealed later in the movie in subtle yet creepy fashion and which serves to illustrate, perhaps, a great deal of her history.

Inevitably, the most difficult reconciliations for Sherry are with family. Sherry’s daughter is now in the custody of her uncle and aunt, and she has grown as accustomed to her foster parents as she has to the absence of her mother. Besides, Sherry doesn’t seem to know quite how to reckon with her girl anyway: Shower her with gifts? Make up for years of absence in a couple of visits? The foster parents who have been taking care of the little girl with love and affection and care are understandably suspicious. Drug addicts, even supposedly recovered ones, are difficult creatures to deal with; we are left to imagine a time when Sherry must have lied, stolen, and wheedled her way to the next fix. And even in this, her new clean state, Sherry’s persona shows traces of the devastation wrought on her psyche by her years of addiction and imprisonment: her temper is unpredictable, her temperament is prickly, hostility and suspicion come easily.

Sherrybaby‘s resolution of the mother-daughter relationship crisis is its most distinctive feature. There is no magic day in the sun, no childhood memory of a lullaby, or cooking of a favorite treat that produces a loving, teary, reconciliation. Instead, Sherry comes to realize–after an episode of falling off the wagon–that motherhood is a little harder than she might have thought. She acquires that painful knowledge that many parents possess: that parenting is not ‘natural’, that the biological bond with a child is a tenuous one and merely the preliminary deposit on a bond that needs considerable strengthening, that caring and nurturing a child is difficult and tedious even for those who might be sober, that no amount of extravagant, short-term affection can substitute for slow and steady caretaking.

The world of substance abuse and recovery remains relatively impenetrable to third-person descriptions; the precise contours of the inner maelstrom of the addict can perhaps only be mapped by the addict. But Sherrybaby is a brave and unconventional attempt to chart this strange land.

The Mind is not a Place or an Object

Last week, I participated in an interdisciplinary panel discussion at the Minding the Body: Dualism and its Discontents Conference (held at the CUNY Graduate Center, and organized by the English Students Association.) The other participants in the panel included:  Patricia Ticineto-Clough (Sociology), Gerhard Joseph (English), and Jason Tougaw (English). As might have been expected, with that group of participants the discussion was pretty wide-ranging; I’m not going to attempt to recapitulate it here. I do however want to (very) informally make note of one remark I made in the question and answer session that followed, which touched upon the frequently mentioned, discussed and puzzled-over relationship between the brain and the mind. This discussion was sparked in part, by Jason Tougaw’s remark that he had ‘noticed a recurrent phenomenon in contemporary literature [especially the so-called ‘neuronovel]: scenes in which brains (or other body parts) are  touched or explored for signs of immaterial elements of self: mind, consciousness, affect, emotion, imagination, desire.’

In response to this perennially entertained scientific, philosophical, and literary possibility of ‘locating’ the mind in the material or ‘identifying’ the mind with it, I said it seemed to me these sorts of prospects traded on a confusion about the mind as a place or an object, rather than as a term used to describe an entity’s capacities. The term ‘mind’ is perhaps best understood as having been coined in order to mark out particular kinds of entities that were able to enter into very distinct sorts of relationships with their environments. This ascription in our own human case goes from the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’ as it were, beginning with mental states perceived from the first-person perspective, but it is then extended by analogy to other creatures that show patterns of behaviors like ours. These relationships display modes of interaction that stand out, for instance, for their rich adaptiveness and flexibility, and show themselves to be receptive to a particular vocabulary of description, explanation and prediction: we might term them ‘mindful’ interactions. So creatures capable of mindful interactions are said to ‘possess’ a mind or ‘have minds’.  But this does not mean that they need be radically similar to us. A different environment and a different entity could conceivably generate the same kind of interactions, perhaps one arrived at by a slow, imperfect evolutionary process like ours. These entities might have brains like ours or they might not; they might have bodies like ours, or they might not; they might have biologies like ours, or not. And so on.

Understood in this way, the term ‘mind’ has come to represent over the years what those creatures capable of ‘mindful’ interactions with their environs ‘have’. But speaking of it as something we ‘have’ send us off and running, looking for it. And since we have bodies with components that seem distinctly articulable, it became natural to try and identify one of its components or locations with the mind. But this, to repeat, is a confusion.

To say that something has a mind is to describe that entity’s capacities, its relationship with its environment, and our modes of understanding, predicting and responding to its behavior.

Reflections on Facebook, Part Two

Facebook’ problematic relationship with privacy issues infuriates most of its users; it has ensured that no contemporary discussion of online privacy can proceed without a Facebook-related example. This has largely been the case because Facebook set out to provide a means of social networking and communication with an architecture designed to induce behavior in its users that would violate conventional privacy norms. Its default options were set for maximum information exposure and changing them required opting out via a complicated, cumbersome interface. This has had precisely the effect its designers had in mind: user behavior observed on Facebook established new social norms for information sharing, which then facilitated the conclusion the modern social networker was not as concerned with privacy as his forebears. This conclusion in hand, Facebook could defend itself against the charge it violated the privacy of its users by pointing to their behavior. The trap had been set, and Facebook users had walked right into it. Facebook shows quite clearly that the architecture of a system can create new social norms quite easily, in this case, those pertaining to privacy.

Perhaps the prime example of Facebook’s privacy-damaging architecture is the Wall. This has been a feature of Facebook ever since its inception, and nothing quite shows off how privacy norms have changed than the way that Facebook users use it. From the very beginning, Facebook urged user X to ‘write something on Y’s wall’. Note, write on the Wall, not ‘send them a message’. That is, write them a public message that everyone can see. Soon enough, Wall messages had begun, and very quickly, a pattern emerged: what people used to write in email messages was now being written on Walls. I remain amazed at the content of Wall messages: dates are planned, medical test results discussed, break-ups commiserated over, the list goes on. Indeed, I am astonished when someone bothers to send a message using Facebook’s messaging facility, so ubiquitous has the Wall scribble become. It’s the first thing you see when you see a user’s page, and the temptation to write something there is strong. And not easily resisted; I have succumbed to it myself on many an occasion. Similar behavior is observed in the comments spaces of Facebook posts. Here too, users engage in communication which might have previously remained confined to email messages. The architecture isn’t particularly to blame but these are users who are by now, acculturated to speaking loudly and openly in public. And of course, the Facebook status space encourages announcements and proclamations, which often would be better kept private; these in turn, provoke replies subject to the same caveat.

Facebook has changed some of its policies in response to some vociferously expressed concerns over its architecture but the features I’ve listed above are not going anywhere, and indeed, have never served as a focal point of any these complaints. But  they are as important as any of its default information-sharing options in changing our collective, social, reasonable expectations of privacy in social spaces.

Reflections on Facebook, Part One

This post is the first of several posts I intend to write on my Facebook experiences.

Like many (very many!) people, I’m a Facebook user. And like many of those people, I have a vexed relationship with it, a fact best demonstrated by my decision to leave Facebook a couple of years ago, close my account, and then return again. (I did so in 2010, and then returned in 2012.) Many users of Facebook have indulged in such short-term separations. When we left, we were informed our accounts would be waiting for us when we returned. I think it might have been an ‘if’ but it felt like a ‘when’.  When I returned, it was all there: my old messages, my comments, my likes, just like I had never left. I had deleted all my photos before I left, but of course, they still exist on Facebook’s servers somewhere. Once you give your data to Facebook you don’t get it back.

Here is a composite of my response to two friends of mine who wrote me asking me why I had left Facebook:

It’s a distraction, and I’m a little freaked out by how much Facebook snoops on user activity. I don’t know what they are doing with all the data they are collecting, and I’ve found their privacy policies quite bothersome in general). I’m also trying to simplify my life a bit, sort of retreat from the techno buzz, so this is part of that. I’m feeling a bit done in by all of it; it either feels voyeuristic or like the panopticon.  The way people are behaving on it is also ludicrous. The last straw is the grinning face of its founder, Zuckerberg.

It’s still all true: it’s a distraction, I’m being surveilled, I don’t know what Facebook does with its data, its still voyeuristic, people behave badly on it, and Zuckerberg is still leering at us.

I returned to Facebook because: a) I had started blogging late in 2011, and wanted to find more venues to distribute my posts and talk about them and b) I wanted to participate in what seemed to me to be some very interesting conversations taking place on its pages. Facebook has helped in both regards: some great discussions have spun off my posts thanks to my linking to my posts there, and I have had some very engaging and informative discussions on Facebook. There are, after all, many smart and passionate people on Facebook.

But all is not well: discussions based on my blog posts have taken place on the closed pages of Facebook, and not here, on my blog comments space, so blog readers don’t get to see them or participate. Discussions on Facebook and in this blog’s comments space take place separately; they are not informed by each other. This is a rather frustrating state of affairs, one that I have occasionally addressed by responding to Facebook comments in the shape of a post here. (As I did recently in my post on Glaucon.) But this is unwieldy and time-consuming. And Facebook’s user habits being what they are, it is extremely likely that they will continue to post their comments ‘there’ rather than ‘here’. For the time being, this problem seems insuperable. To me, at least. (A variant of this problem occurs with Twitter as well, but it does not feel as problematic because my Twitter discussions have been extremely few and very short.)

So what Facebook giveth with one hand, it taketh away with the other. As I will note in posts to follow, this is a recurring feature of its design and my experiences there.

Glenn Greenwald on Civil Liberties and Their Willing Surrender

Today, at Brooklyn College, Glenn Greenwald delivered the 39th Samuel J. Konefsky Memorial Lecture. I was lucky enough to be in attendance and thoroughly enjoyed watching this top-notch muckraker and gadfly in action. I have often seen Greenwald speak on video but this was the first live presentation I have witnessed. It was everything it was promised to be: Greenwald was passionate, precise and polemical. The title of his talk was ‘Civil Liberties and Endless War in the Age of Obama’ and so, appropriately, Greenwald began by offering a definition of ‘civil liberties‘: a set of absolute, unconditional constraints on governmental and state power, ones defined and defended by the people. These should be so stark and clear that no abridgments should be possible or tolerated; those who suggest or support these show themselves to not possess a true understanding of the concept.

With this uncompromising bottom line clearly articulated, Greenwald then presented a tripartite analysis of why, despite the presence of the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights, the state of civil liberties in the US today appears to be quite as problematic as it is and why the US populace has so easily acquiesced to this denial of their constitutional privileges.

First, the US has been since 2001, in a state of ‘perpetual war’, against poorly defined enemies, with no geographic or temporal limitation. This war ensures the endless invocation of natural security as a reason for the attenuation and abuse of civil liberties, whether it be surveillance, indefinite detention without trial, or the assassination of American citizens without trial. The lessons of history have been learned well by the administrations that have held power in the US over the past dozen years: war provides refuge for roguish government behavior of all kinds, and nothing quite prepares a populace for the surrender of civil liberties like the threat of an enemy, one whose threat can only be repelled by increasing the powers a state commands.

Second, the surrender of civil liberties is made more palatable when their abuse by the state appears to be directed against a demonized minority. The gullible majority, convinced that these systematic corruptions of the Bill of Rights remain confined to just this hapless lot, and convinced that their liberties are being protected as a consequence, gladly sign on and form cheering squads, unaware that soon the baleful eye of the powers-that-be will be turned upon them. In the American context  Muslim-Americans have borne the brunt of the the post-911 ravishing of the Bill of Rights. There is little sympathy for them in most parts of the American polity, but the damage done to what is considered ‘normal’ is real enough. Our civil liberties were, and are, next.

Third, yesterday’s ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’ is today’s normal. When the Patriot Act was first passed, it provoked vigorous debate and contestation even in a country still traumatized by 9/11. Its renewals have provoked little debate and attention. We live in a post-Patriot Act US. Its draconian provisions are now the new normal. In this context, I’d like to note once again, the seemingly-useless but very-effective-in-getting-citizens-used-to-the-idea-of-random-searches subway searches in New York City.

Greenwald spoke on a great deal more, including, most importantly, how concerted, determined, political activism by the citizenry still remains, the only and best way to safeguard and preserve the Bill of Rights.

My brief notes above are merely a sampler; catch him at a speaking venue near you if you can.

Mozart on Constanze: Tepid but Frank

In December 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote a letter to his father Leopold, telling him he wanted to marry Constanze Weber. He might have been a brilliant composer, but when it came to describing his beloved, his skills did not transfer so well.

[I] must make you acquainted with the with the character of my dear Constanze. She is not ugly, but at the same time, far from beautiful. Her entire beauty consists of two little black eyes and a nice figure. She has no wit, but she has enough common sense to enable her to fulfill her duties of wife and mother. It is a downright lie that she is inclined to be extravagant. One the contrary, she is accustomed to being shabbily dressed, for the little that her mother has been able to do for her children, she has done for the two others, but never for Constanze. True, she would like to be neatly and cleanly dressed, but not smartly, and most things that a woman needs she is able to make for herself; and she dresses her own hair every day. Moreover she understands housekeeping and has the kindest heart in the world. I love her and she loves me with all her heart. Tell me whether I could wish myself a better wife?

Indeed. Perhaps the mystery of why Mozart was so enamoured of someone whom he could only bring himself to describe in such modest terms as above finds its solution in what preceded these words. For in the first part of the letter Mozart had written:

The voice of nature speaks as loud in me as in others, louder perhaps, than in many a big, strong lout of a fellow. I simply cannot live as most young men do these days. In the first place, I have too great a love of my neighbour and too high a feeling of honour to seduce an innocent girl; and, in the third place, I have too much horror and disgust, too much dread and fear of diseases and too much care for my health to fool about with whores. So I can swear that I have never had relations of that sort with any woman.

If such a thing had occurred, I should not have concealed it from you; for, after all, to err is natural enough in a man and to err once in this way would be mere weakness–although indeed I should not undertake to to promise that if I had erred once in this way, I should stop short at one slip. However, I stake my life on the truth of what I have told you. I am well aware that this reason (powerful as it is) is not urgent enough. But owing to my disposition, which is more inclined to a peaceful and domesticated existence than to revelry, I, who from my youth up have never been accustomed to look after my own belongings, linen, clothes and so forth, cannot think of anything more necessary to me than a wife.

When the ‘voice of nature’ is to be heeded, then perhaps little else matters. Even for a man as gifted as Mozart.

Source: Francis Carr, Mozart and Constanze, Avon Books, New York, 1983, pp. 34-36.

Should Free Software Go Into the Public Domain?

I’ve just finished an interesting Twitter conversation with Glyn Moody (author of Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, still one of the best books on the free and open source software phenomenon). Moody has written a very interesting article over at TechDirt, which wonders whether the time has come to put free and open source software into the public domain rather than releasing it under a variety of licenses which rely for their efficacy on copyright law. (Moody’s article finds its provenance in a paper by Clark Asay, who argues that FOSS could be released into the public domain and yet still thrive as a collaborative project.)

My initial response to Moody’s article was skeptical. (Full disclosure: I have not read Asay’s article but will soon do so.) Several years ago, in our book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software, Scott Dexter and I had argued for the superiority of FOSS licenses like GPL over permissive licenses like the BSD because of the worry that the latter made free-riding possible. (Those arguments are still relevant though I will not repeat them here; please do check out the link.)

Moody addresses this worry by quoting Asay:

if a firm were to take and close a project, they almost certainly would not obtain the free labor that contributors around the world are willing to provide to open-licensed projects. Without that free labor, firms would lose the most significant advantages of an open model of innovation, and the free labor would likely remain loyal to the open version of the project. Firms thus already have incentives to open and contribute as much of their materials as possible, since doing so will attract free labor and trigger innovation in directions that better suit the firm and its strategic direction.

and then goes on to say:

The key point is that the code without the community that creates it is pretty much dead. A company may gain a short-term advantage in taking public domain code and enclosing it, but by refusing to give back its changes, it loses any chance of collaborating with the coders who are writing the future versions. It will have no influence, and no way of raising issues of particular concern that help it with its products. Instead, it will have to keep up the development of its own version of the code single-handed. That’s likely to be costly at best, and may even be impossible except for the very largest companies (Apple is an example of one that has succeeded, basing its Mac OS X operating system on the free BSD version of Unix.)

As I noted in my conversation with Moody, I’m considerably less sanguine than he is about these prospects. I do not doubt that FOSS has made great inroads in the world of software (Moody quotes figures like ‘94% of top supercomputers run Linux; 75% of smartphones run Android; tablets next…’). What I do doubt is whether the value of free software is understood at a more conceptual level so that the closing of a formerly open project would be viewed as a bad thing by the developer community (and by users). Moody thinks so, of course, hence our polite disagreement. (I also think new laws will be needed to protect developers from patent infringement claims.)

In any case, I think the argument is an interesting one especially as one might think that copyright protection was only required for FOSS because of the onerous copyright regimes that it exists in and that a move to the public domain would become easier in an environment that understands FOSS’ promise better and so would be less tolerant of the closing of a formerly open project (like Apple closed BSD). Again, this will only happen in a different legal regime.

Hopefully, I’ll get the time to read the Asay article and respond to it more thoughtfully sometime soon. In the meantime, comments welcome.

Glaucon and the Basic and Advanced Polis, Contd.

Yesterday’s post on Glaucon and the preferred forms of the polis for him and Socrates  sparked off an interesting discussion on Facebook with Alex Gourevitch. I’m reproducing it here as Gourevitch’s responses are wonderfully rich and worth responding to carefully.

Here is the sequence of comments on Facebook, followed by my response last.

Alex:

I still think it’s better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

Samir:

Indeed. I’m just not sure the inhabitants of the basic polis are pigs; that description matches the often rapacious, gluttonous inhabitants of Glaucon’s preferred state.

Alex:

They are pigs because they will eat anything. They are easily satisfied. They lack culture and refinement, which you only have if you are leisured – which is what, I think, the reference to reclining on couches is supposed to be about. It’s not just about having lots of desires to satisfy, but time to reflect on and develop one’s desires. Of course, that requires a social surplus, and someone else to do the work, which is what introduces class relations. We go from being pigs to being wolves. So you must tame the wolves. That is the question of justice, I think, for Plato. But it’s one also defined by the circumstances of justice. Socrates, Glaucon and Adeimantus set up the problem in such a way that the only way to imagine a surplus necessary to sustain leisure and culture is by conquering others, taking their land, and enslaving them. At the time, that may very well have been correct – Aristotle says the same thing about why slaves are necessary (the tripods of Haphaestus, looms spinning themselves). But one can imagine other ways, like machines/technology, so that everyone can have that leisure to develop their tastes and participate in culture. Note, by the way, that the theory of justice that develops out of the original problem as Glaucon and Socrates set it up is an attempt to restore that natural harmony of the ‘healthy state’ but through rational principles. In fact, Glaucon wants to be convinced of the idea that it is better to perfectly just and perfectly unjust. So even he does not deny that there is something superior to the condition of the pigs to that of living with wolves. Don’t you think?

Samir:

 Does Socrates’ description of the basic polis really sound like people who don’t have leisure? Sitting by the fire, drinking wine in moderation, roasting nuts? They aren’t eating just anything. They live in peace to old age too. Perhaps they work into their old age rather than retiring. So what? There is a false opposition set up here. If you don’t grant the opposition that Glaucon sets up little remains of the desire for the advanced polis, which as you note, brings war, class conflict, and the problem of justice and law. It is almost as if Glaucon didn’t pay attention to the description Socrates provides. I would agree with him (and you) if the state described by Socrates was indeed pig like: scrounging for roots, eating dirt, the hardscrabble life from birth to death. But that is not what Socrates has in mind.

Alex:

Very interesting. I see the plausibility of your reading but I think it rests on overstating the hardscrabble life of the pig as the central issue. In Glaucon’s eye the key feature of the pig is not that it scrounges but that it is indiscriminate. I take that to be one of the oldest metaphors about pigs – they eat anything. The connection to leisure is then that in the primitive division of labor of the ‘healthy city’ everyone works, they have an occupation, but there is no leisure, no culture, and indeed no philosophy. It is only the original act of injustice, the primitive accumulation, as it were, that creates the leisured class, sets reflection in motion, and brings about a philosophical attitude towards the human condition. Of course, what we find upon reflection is injustice. And we can retrospectively appreciate what is harmonious and good about the healthy state, but it is still a state of pigs. It is a state of pigs not because they work from dawn until dusk per se but because there is no demand for leisure and culture, and that demand is not there because people are satisfied with what they have. Needs are limited to a ‘natural’ range, to what can be supplied through a very simple division of labor and a few objects. Everyone is happy to do their work and consume what they can. They are indifferent to the limted range of their lives.

Samir:

I’m not sure the text supports the reading you attribute to Glaucon. He listens to Socrates’ description of the basic polis and calls its inhabitants pigs anyway, seemingly without having paid attention to the leisure that is built into it. Your reading, and his, only works if this ignored. I’m getting stuck on this point, because I’m willing to concede the rest of your points if indeed all that happened in the basic polis was mere adherence to occupations. Thus I don’t see the necessity for the ‘original act of injustice’ or the ‘primitive accumulation’ either. I would also find it strange that Glaucon/you term them pigs when given a description of their working days: Is no reflection possible while at work? Is no reflection possible by being in the moment of one’s daily activities? You identify ‘culture’ with the arts; I think I have a broader reading of culture that is more inclusive of a broader range of human activities, many of which are possible in the basic polis. And thus I don’t buy the ‘limited range’ view of the polis that you have. But perhaps most importantly, it seems to me that we have lost a great deal by preferring a state that includes class conflict and war. There’s something depressingly Nietzschean about this vision, as if war is the inevitable price we must pay for the fine arts.

More importantly, I think there is a fairly convincing argument to be made that Plato finds the basic polis, despite the attention he pays to the advanced polis, a morally superior one. Remember what he terms the life of the philosopher: unconcerned with material acquisition but only with the pursuit of the truth. The basic polis provides this without the temptations of the advanced polis. A frugal life is possible here without evoking our worst instincts; it can give us time for the pursuit of the truth without necessarily owning or consuming the ‘finer things’ that Glaucon thinks are possible in the advanced polis. Indeed, Plato’s philosophers would be unmoved by the material wealth of the advanced polis; the contemplative time provided by the basic polis is enough. The basic polis makes possible a society where laws and government might play a minimal role; it might be the kind of community anarchist political philosophies have in mind.  The rudimentary polis can get along without being  a state; the advanced polis has to be one. And I find it hard to believe that the state represents an advancement on the basic polis.

Note: My arguments above are not original to me. I read them many years ago in David Melling’s lovely little book on Plato, which I’ve often recommended to my students. I stumbled upon the book again recently and was moved to write yesterday’s and today’s posts in response.

Glaucon’s Porcine Preference for the Advanced Polis

I never particularly liked Glaucon. His responses to Socrates‘ description, in Plato‘s Republic (372 (a-d)), of the basic polis are a good reminder of why.

Socrates quoth:

First of all, then, let us consider what will be the manner of life of men thus provided. Will they not make bread and wine and garments and shoes? And they will build themselves houses and carry on their work in summer for the most part unclad and unshod and in winter clothed and shod sufficiently? And for their nourishment they will provide meal from their barley and flour from their wheat, and kneading and cooking these they will serve noble cakes and loaves on some arrangement of reeds or clean leaves, and, reclined on rustic beds strewn with bryony and myrtle, they will feast with their children, drinking of their wine thereto, garlanded and singing hymns to the gods in pleasant fellowship, not begetting offspring beyond their means lest they fall into poverty or war?

What is Glaucon’s interjection?

No relishes apparently, for the men you describe as feasting.

Socrates recovers from the silliness of this and responds, gamely:

True, I forgot that they will also have relishes—salt, of course, and olives and cheese and onions and greens, the sort of things they boil in the country, they will boil up together. But for dessert we will serve them figs and chickpeas and beans,  and they will toast myrtle-berries and acorns before the fire, washing them down with moderate potations and so, living in peace and health, they will probably die in old age and hand on a like life to their offspring.

Glaucon’s response:

If you were founding a city of pigs, Socrates, what other fodder than this would you provide?

The ever-polite Socrates responds:

Why, what would you have, Glaucon?

The real ‘pig’ in all of this, Glaucon, respond:

What is customary; they must recline on couches, I presume, if they are not to be uncomfortable.

Waddaprick. The basic polis sounds pretty nice, especially when you consider that the kind of polis envisaged by Glaucon requires–as he admits a little later in the dialogue (373 (d-e)–the introduction of the doctor and the soldier. (Healthcare and the Military! Sound like budgetary problems to me.) The first occupation addresses the rash of diseases that will be caused by the ‘richer’ lifestyle of the more advanced polis–Socrates’ argument for the need for doctors in the advanced polis is an interesting anticipation of modern thinking about diseases of affluence. More perniciously, the advanced polis results inevitably in a desire for territorial expansion: the standing army with its budgetary demands and its endless conscriptions, its creation of wars, the scourge of human history, is a function of the mode of organization of the state it defends.

Glaucon disdains the frugal nature of the basic polis, seemingly unaware that the richer polis he has in mind is the one that will actually encourage porcine behavior.

Excerpted from: Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969. Available online at the Perseus Digital Library.