Don’t trust anyone under thirty
Plato held
that even the guardians in his ideal city should not be permitted to study
philosophy, and in particular the critical back-and-form of philosophical debate,
before the age of thirty. And even then,
they could do so only after acquiring practical experience in military service,
the acquisition of a large body of general knowledge, and the intellectual discipline
afforded by mathematical reasoning. As
he says in The Republic, “dialectic”
(as he referred to this back-and-forth), when studied prematurely, “does
appalling harm” and “fills people with indiscipline” (Book VII, at p. 271 of
the Desmond
Lee translation). For young and
inexperienced people tend to make a game of argument and criticism, a means of
tearing down traditional ideas without seriously considering what might be said
in favor of them or putting anything better in their place. Describing the young person who pursues such
superficial philosophizing, Plato writes:
He is driven to think that there’s no
difference between honourable and disgraceful, and so on with all the other
values, like right and good, that he used to revere… Then when he’s lost any
respect or feeling for his former beliefs but not yet found the truth, where is
he likely to turn? Won’t it be to a life
which flatters his desires? … And so we shall see him become a rebel instead of
a conformer…
You must have noticed how young men,
after their first taste of argument, are always contradicting people just for
the fun of it; they imitate those whom they hear cross-examining each other,
and themselves cross-examine other people like puppies who love to pull and
tear at anyone within reach… So when they’ve proved a lot of people wrong and
been proved wrong often themselves, they soon slip into the belief that nothing
they believed before was true…
But someone who’s a bit older… will
refuse to have anything to do with this sort of idiocy; he won’t copy those who
contradict just for the fun of the thing, but will be more likely to follow the
lead of someone whose arguments are aimed at finding the truth. He’s a more reasonable person and will get
philosophy a better reputation. (Book VII, at pp. 272-273)
Similarly,
in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
says that political science (by which he meant, not primarily what is today
called by that name, but rather what we would today call political philosophy)
is not a suitable area of study for the young.
He writes:
A young man is not a fit person to
attend lectures on political science, because he is not versed in the practical
business of life from which politics draws its premises and subject
matter. Besides, he tends to follow his
feelings, with the result that he will make no headway and derive no benefit
from his course… It makes no difference whether he is young in age or youthful
in character; the defect is due not to lack of years but to living, and
pursuing one’s various aims, under the sway of feelings.
(Book I, pp. 65-66 of the Thomson
and Tredennick translation)
This lack of
experience and domination by feelings is commented on by Aristotle elsewhere in
the Ethics. For example, he observes that “the lives of
the young are regulated by their feelings, and their chief interest is in their
own pleasure and the opportunity of the moment” (Book VIII, at p. 262). And he notes:
Although the young develop ability in
geometry and mathematics and become wise in such matters, they are not thought
to develop prudence. The reason for this
is that prudence also involves knowledge of particular facts, which become
known from experience; and a young man is not experienced, because experience
takes some time to acquire. (Book VI, at p. 215)
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle develops these
themes in greater detail, writing:
The young are by character appetitive
and of a kind to do whatever they should desire. And of the bodily appetites they are
especially attentive to that connected with sex and have no control over it…
They are irate and hot-tempered and of a kind to harken to anger. And they are inferior to their passions; for
through their ambition they do not tolerate disregard but are vexed if they
think they are being wronged.
And they are ambitious, but even more
keen to win (for youth craves excess and victory is a kind of excess), and they
are both of these things rather than money-loving (they are least money-loving
of all through never having yet experienced shortage…) and they are not
sour-natured but sweet-natured through their not having yet observed much
wickedness, and credulous through their not yet having been many times
deceived, and optimistic… because they have not frequently met with failure…
And in all things they err rather
towards the excessively great or intense… (for they do everything in excess:
they love and hate excessively and do all other things in the same way), and
they think they know everything and are obstinate (this is also the reason for
their doing everything in excess), and they commit their crimes from arrogance rather
than mischievousness.
(Book II, Part 12, at pp. 173-74 of the Lawson-Tancred
translation)
To summarize
the points made by Plato and Aristotle, then, young people: are excessively
driven by emotion and appetite; lack the experience that is required for
prudence or wisdom in practical matters; in particular, are prone to naïve idealism
and an exaggerated sense of injustice coupled with arrogant self-confidence; and
tend, in their intellectual efforts, toward sophistry and unreasonable skepticism
toward established ways. For these
reasons, their opinions about matters of ethics and politics are liable to be
foolish.
Democracy dumbs down
This should
sound like common sense, because it is. And
notice that so far, Plato and Aristotle are describing the tendencies of the
young as such, even in the best kinds of social and political
arrangements. But things are even worse
when those arrangements are bad. In The Laws, Plato warns that the young
become soft when pampered and affluent. “Luxury,”
he says, “makes a child bad-tempered, irritable and apt to react violently to
trivial things” (Book VII, at p. 231 of the Saunders
translation). And again: “Suppose
you do your level best during these years to shelter him from distress and
fright and any kind of pain at all… That’s the best way to ruin a child,
because the corruption invariably sets in at the very earliest stages of his
education” (ibid.).
In The Republic, Plato argues that music
and entertainments that celebrate what is ignoble and encourage the indulgence
of desire corrupt the moral character of the young in a way that cannot fail to
have social and political repercussions:
The music and literature of a country
cannot be altered without major political and social changes… The amusements in
which our children take part must be better regulated; because once they and
the children become disorderly, it becomes impossible to produce serious
citizens with a respect for order. (Book IV, at pp. 125-26)
Similarly,
in the Politics, Aristotle cautions:
Unseemly talk… results in conduct of
a like kind. Especially, therefore, must
it be kept away from youth… And since we exclude all unseemly talk, we must
also forbid gazing at debased paintings or stories… It should be laid down that
younger persons shall not be spectators at comedies or recitals of iambics,
not, that is to say, until they have reached the age at which they come to
recline at banquets with others and share in the drinking; by this time their
education will have rendered them completely immune to any harm that might come
from such spectacles… We must keep all that is of inferior quality unfamiliar
to the young, particularly things with an ingredient of wickedness or hostility. (Book VII, at pp. 446-47 of the Sinclair
and Saunders translation)
Plato’s Republic also famously argues that
oligarchies, or societies dominated by the desire for wealth, are disordered,
and tend to degenerate into egalitarian democracies, which are even more
disordered. I
have discussed elsewhere Plato’s account of the decay of oligarchy into
democracy, and of democracy, in turn, into tyranny. Among the passages relevant to the subject at
hand are the following, from Book VIII:
The oligarchs reduce their subjects
to the state we have described, while as for themselves and their dependents –
their young men live in luxury and idleness, physical and mental, become idle,
and lose their ability to resist pain or pleasure. (p. 291)
The young man’s mind is filled
instead by an invasion of pretentious fallacies and opinions… [He] call[s] insolence good breeding, license
liberty, extravagance generosity, and shamelessness courage… [He] comes to
throw off all inhibitions and indulge[s] desires that are unnecessary and
useless...
If anyone tells him that some
pleasures, because they spring from good desires, are to be encouraged and
approved and others, springing from evil desires, to be disciplined and
repressed, he won’t listen or open his citadel’s doors to the truth, but shakes
his head and says all pleasures are equal and should have equal rights. (pp. 297-98)
A democratic society… goes on to
abuse as servile and contemptible those who obey the authorities and reserves
its approval, in private life as well as public, for rulers who behave like
subjects and subjects who behave like rulers…
It becomes the thing for father and
son to change places, the father standing in awe of his son, and the son
neither respecting nor fearing his parents, in order to assert what he calls
his independence…
The teacher fears and panders to his
pupils… and the young as a whole imitate their elders, argue with them and set
themselves up against them, while their elders try to avoid the reputation of
being disagreeable or strict by aping the young and mixing with them on terms
of easy good fellowship. (pp. 299-300)
In short,
the affluence and egalitarian spirit of a wealth-oriented society that has
decayed into a democracy (in Plato’s sense of that term, which has more to do
with ethos than the mechanics of governance) greatly exacerbate the failings to
which the young are already prone. In
particular, it makes them even softer and thus unable to deal maturely with
challenges and setbacks, even more prone to sophistry and excessive skepticism,
even more contemptuous of authority and established customs, and more vulgar
and addicted to vice. Even worse, the
egalitarian spirit of democracy makes adults more prone to acquiesce in this bad
behavior, or even to ape it themselves.
A general spirit of license and irrationality sets in and undermines the
social order, greasing the skids for tyranny (in a way that, again, I describe
in the article linked to earlier).
What then, would Plato and Aristotle think of the mobs of shrieking student protesters we see on campuses today (or for that matter, the student mobs of the 1960s and of every decade between then and now)? To ask the question is to answer it. Nor is it a mystery what they would think of the professors who egg on this foolishness. They are the heirs, not of Plato and Aristotle, but of the sophists to whom Plato and Aristotle sharply contrasted the true philosopher.