The Oldest Blueprint

It began, like a surprising number of history’s catastrophes, as an evening’s entertainment among educated men.

Athens, or rather the Piraeus, her harbor district, in the fourth century before Christ. Socrates has walked down from the city to take in a religious novelty: the festival of Bendis, a Thracian goddess newly admitted to the Athenian pantheon. There will be sacrifices, a procession, and, as the chief attraction, a torch race on horseback. A torch race on horseback! Even Socrates, a man capable of converting the purchase of sandals into an inquiry concerning the nature of justice, appears to regard this as worth seeing.

On his way home he is intercepted by young Polemarchus and a pack of friends. Polemarchus informs him, with the good humor of a wealthy young man who has brought enough companions to render good humor compulsory, that he will be staying for the evening. Socrates asks whether he might persuade them to release him. Polemarchus replies: could you persuade us, if we refuse to listen? The first political lesson of the Republic has arrived before the political discussion begins.

They return to the house of Polemarchus’s father, Cephalus, an elderly and prosperous arms manufacturer who has made his fortune supplying the objects Athenians use when persuasion has finally run its course. Cephalus is pious, rich, agreeable, and old enough to have converted the decline of his appetites into a philosophy of old age. The company settles in; dinner appears; lamps are lit. There is talk of money, death, justice, poetry, sons, debts, gods. The conversation grows, branches, doubles back, and takes possession of the night. Nobody ever gets back to the torch race.

What swallows the evening is a game. The company decides to construct, in speech alone, the perfectly just city, and the charm of the exercise lies partly in the fact that no one present holds a shred of legislative power. There are no taxpayers in the room, no mothers demanding to know where their babies have gone, no tradesmen pricing the marble, no farmers objecting to the latest theory of land tenure, no defeated opposition muttering about the suspension of elections. The city can be built in the smooth, frictionless substance of conversation. It is philosophy in its dinner clothes: cushions, wine, courteous objections, an old man’s pleasant reflections on mortality. Somewhere between supper and the extinguishing of the lamps, the most consequential thought experiment in Western political history begins to assemble itself on the carpet. The city will be called kallipolis. The Beautiful City.

For twenty-four centuries, students will be assigned this conversation as one of the monuments of the human mind. They will underline the allegory of the cave. They will write essays on the divided line. They will debate whether the philosopher-king is a serious proposal, an irony, a noble impossibility, or an elaborate educational device. Professors will lean back and speak of the Platonic project; doctoral candidates will examine the dramatic architecture of the dialogue; whole departments will pass through the text with the reverence normally reserved for relics. And somehow, generation after generation, they will keep their academic composure straight through Book V.

Because by Book V, the game has reached the children.

The city requires guardians, a class of rulers and soldiers bred, educated, and disciplined to protect the whole, and these guardians must be spared the petty distractions that make ordinary men so politically troublesome. They will possess no private wealth and no ordinary private houses. They will eat in common, live in common, train in common, and hold their goods in common. No locked chests. No family silver. No little domestic treasury into which a guardian might peer and think, with dangerous tenderness, This is ours. But common property is merely the beginning. Plato intends to go through the cupboard, through the bedroom, through the nursery, straight to the oldest loyalty in human life.

The wives of the guardians shall be held in common. The children shall be held in common. No parent shall know his own child, and no child shall know his parent.

Socrates introduces the arrangement with the composure of a wedding planner; which, in the strictest sense, he now is. Reproduction will be organized through solemn marriage festivals, at which men and women are joined by sacred lottery. The pairings will appear to be governed by chance and divine favor. Appear to be, because the rulers will quietly rig the lottery so that the finest men mate with the finest women as often as possible, while the inferior reproduce as seldom as possible. Naturally, the inferior must not be told they are inferior; people become morose when the state announces that their genes have failed to meet strategic objectives. The unsuccessful guardian must therefore be permitted to blame fortune. Another blank! The gods have spoken! Better luck at the next festival! His luck has been drafted by the committee. Here, amid the founding literature of Western philosophy, appears one of history’s earliest government raffles in which the organizers choose the winners, the losers blame Providence, and the prize is permission to reproduce. And as we have learned, the house always wins.

The children born from the approved unions are to be removed by appointed officers and carried to a communal rearing enclosure in a separate part of the city, into the care of nurses. The offspring of inferior unions, along with any children born defective, are to be taken to a secret and unspoken place, as Socrates says, “as is fitting.”

As is fitting. The phrase glides past in its sandals. No shouting, no stain on the carpet, no awkward description of what occurs in the secret place, which is one of the advantages of calling a place secret and unspoken. The beautiful city has already acquired the indispensable instrument of every advanced administrative system: the euphemism. Call it the birth of political correctness: the unspeakable, spoken of fittingly.

Then come the arrangements for nursing, and here the reader discovers that Plato has really thought the thing through. Mothers whose milk has come in are to be brought to the enclosure to feed the infants, but every possible device must be employed to prevent a woman from recognizing her own child. The mothers will be rotated; the babies will be rotated; feeding will be scheduled and supervised so thoroughly that nature will have no opportunity to make an introduction. Milk may remain biological. Motherhood may not. A woman may lift a child, feel its weight settle against her, hear it swallow, smell its hair, watch the hand open and close against her skin. She may nourish the child with her own body. She must not ask whether this child came from it.

The philosopher has followed the plan all the way to the breast. And that is what chills, because this is no extravagance tossed off after too much wine; the scheme has reached shift scheduling. Plato knows that a mother might recognize her own infant, that recognition might become affection, affection might become loyalty, and loyalty might become a rival source of authority. So the state must intervene before the recognition ripens. The state must get there first.

When the children grow, biological kinship will be replaced by political nomenclature. Every member of the older generation will be called father or mother; every contemporary, brother or sister; every younger citizen, son or daughter. The words remain, glowing with all their ancient warmth, but the persons to whom they once belonged have become interchangeable. It is one of political language’s neatest tricks: preserve the vocabulary, confiscate the reality. Everyone is your brother, therefore no particular man has the claims of a brother. Every woman of the proper age is your mother, therefore your actual mother is whoever happens to be assigned to the room that morning. The address book of the human heart has been nationalized.

It is all there. The breeding program, the ceremonial pairings, the rigged lottery, the professional nurses, the communal nursery, the anonymized breast, the disappeared defectives, the reassignment of kinship. The grid of cribs lacks only its steel. Bucharest, drawn freehand over wine, twenty-three centuries early, while the company nods, and the lamps burn lower, and the philosopher proceeds.

Now, the easy response is to laugh. Ancient madness! One of those charmingly ghastly ideas philosophers produce when they are protected from implementation! That would be a mistake, and the argument of this essay requires us to grant Plato his full intelligence. He was not a fool, and he was not merely a sadist. He had seen something true and dangerous: private love creates private loyalty, and private loyalty divides political allegiance.

The word mine is a small word, but it arrives carrying a household behind it. My wife. My son. My land. My inheritance. My brother’s injury. My family’s enemy. My name. There it is, the little possessive with blood under its fingernails. Men love justice in general. But that love does not hold a candle to the love a man has for his own. A father bends rules for his son; a clan remembers what the magistrate would prefer forgotten; families accumulate property, arrange marriages, protect reputations, avenge injuries, and pass loyalties down the generations. A household is a small sovereignty within the larger sovereignty, with its own affections, obligations, memories, and secrets. Ten thousand homes create ten thousand centers of judgment, and ten thousand fathers do not ask only what is good for the city; they ask what is good for their children. And what happens when the answers differ? There, Plato sees, is the crack in the marble.

His solution is not to discipline corrupt families, restrain nepotism, or teach households to seek the common good. His solution is to eliminate the source of the competing loyalty. Make the city itself the only family, and every citizen will experience the pain and pleasure of every other citizen as his own. Plato uses the body as his model: when your finger is crushed, you do not stand apart and announce that the finger appears to be suffering; you say, I suffer. That is the nervous system he wants for the state. Touch one citizen, and the entire polis should say, mine.

It is a magnificent picture: unity is good, faction is dangerous, citizens ought to share one another’s joys and griefs. Then comes the turn. Private households produce private interests; private interests divide the city; division is dangerous; therefore the household must be overcome.

Click.

Plato proposes to expand the word mine until it covers everyone, never quite noticing that a word which means everyone may finally mean no one. And the scandal of Book V lies in its serenity. No one rages, no one pounds the table; there are no boots in the corridor, no wire around the compound, no searchlight sweeping a wall. There is only a civilized intelligence following a plausible principle to its logical destination. Unity is good; complete unity must be better; families divide; abolish the family. And there, at the far end of the reasoning, stands the perfectly unified city, shining beneath the moon, while the mother has disappeared.

The great planners will make the journey in this manner ever after. They do not begin with a declaration of war upon humanity; they begin with a wound everyone can see: poverty, ignorance, neglect, inequality. They identify a natural institution that has failed to eradicate the wound, and then convert that failure into a claim of jurisdiction. The father has failed? Replace him with an officer. The household produces inequality? Standardize childhood. Mothers are partial? Professionalize care. The planner need not hate the child. He need only trust the plan more than the people to whom the child belongs.

But the rebuttal was already on its way to Athens. It arrived from Stagira in the form of a seventeen-year-old physician’s son with a provincial accent and a mind like a cabinet full of labeled instruments. Aristotle entered Plato’s Academy and remained for roughly twenty years, absorbing the master’s system more thoroughly than anyone else, learning every room in the great intellectual palace, and then developing the discourteous habit of checking whether the floors were level. In Book II of the Politics, he took the beautiful city apart. No thunderbolts, no moral swooning. Aristotle begins with the sort of question that ruins a splendid theory faster than any philosophical objection: who, exactly, will look after the children?

What belongs to the greatest number, Aristotle observes, receives the least attention. Men attend most carefully to what is their own and neglect what is everyone’s; when a responsibility is shared by all, each assumes that someone else will handle it. Plato imagines that a child with a thousand fathers will receive a thousand shares of paternal concern. Aristotle notices that each father will carry one-thousandth of the obligation. Everyone may call the child son, but no particular child possesses the claim that sends a particular man running through the rain for a physician. A thousand fathers in theory can amount, in practice, to none. The child who belongs to everybody is an orphan with administrative support. Long before the economists discovered that a pasture owned by everyone is grazed bare and reseeded by no one, and named it the tragedy of the commons, Aristotle had found the same tragedy in the nursery. The exhausted resource was not grass. It was a child’s claim upon somebody’s heart.

Then he considers the quality of the affection Plato hopes to produce. Spread a mild familial concern across the entire guardian class, and would it still resemble the love of a household? Aristotle compares it to a small quantity of sweet wine stirred into a great deal of water. The flavor remains in some theoretical sense; a chemist could perhaps establish its presence; but no one takes a swallow and calls for the vintage. The two words on which men set the most store, mine and dear, go slack when they can mean anyone. Hence Aristotle’s wonderfully dry judgment: better to be somebody’s actual cousin than a son after Plato’s fashion.

A cousin!

Not a son. Not a brother. A cousin, that minor relative who appears at weddings, misremembers your age, and sends greetings through your aunt. Yet even this modest, particular bond has more substance than the universal family in which everyone is related and nobody is responsible.

Then comes the deepest cut. Plato is wrong, Aristotle argues, not merely because communal parenthood will be badly administered, but because a city is not the kind of thing that becomes better as it approaches perfect unity. A polis is by nature a plurality: different households, trades, offices, ages, authorities, loves; its unity is an ordered unity among distinct parts. Press the unification far enough and the city does not become a better city; it ceases to be a city at all: first it contracts into a single household, then into a single man. A choir is not improved by reducing all voices to one note, and a body would not become more beautifully integrated by becoming nothing but an eye. And the city cannot be prior to the households in any case, because it is made out of them: household, then village, then polis, in that order, by nature. The household is not a branch office created by the city; the city arises from households, and fathers and mothers raise citizens. A city is made from households as a wall is made from stones. Grind the stones into powder in pursuit of perfect uniformity, and you will not obtain a stronger wall. You will stand in the rubble holding an exceptionally advanced theory of masonry.

There they were, then: teacher and student, one school, one generation, and the two positions that would frame political thought ever after. Does order arise by drawing every person and function upward into the widest possible unity, or does it depend on preserving the smaller associations from which society grows? Is the household raw material for the state, or does the state meet it as a boundary? What began as a faculty disagreement became the longest-running argument in Western civilization.

Whitehead famously observed that European philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, and the remark is usually quoted as praise, deservedly. But there is another ledger. The wards are footnotes to Plato too. The communal creches, the breeding offices, the maternity homes, the youth leagues, the compounds, the clinics, the immaculate institutional rooms in which every physical requirement is professionally administered except the need to belong irrevocably to someone. Book V with plumbing. Book V with a payroll department. Book V with electric lighting, washable floors, nutritional standards, and a deputy minister for child development. Every experiment in the chapters ahead will repeat some part of Plato’s wager, and every restoration will repeat Aristotle’s reply: a child moved from a ward to a kitchen table, a mother permitted to recognize her infant, a household allowed to govern the matters proper to a household. The centuries have passed, and the equipment has improved enormously. The argument has not.

Yet Plato and Aristotle shared one assumption so completely that neither seems to have noticed it. Both treated the arrangement of the household as philosophy’s business. Plato believed the wise should redesign it; Aristotle believed the wise should describe its natural form more accurately; but in both cases the family lay upon the table, the philosopher stood over it, and the only question was what lines reason ought to draw. It did not occur to either man that the drawing might already exist; that the household might have been architected from somewhere above the level of philosophy, its offices carrying duties and limits no city had granted and therefore, no city could revoke.

That blueprint was older than Athens, and it was given not at a symposium but in a desert; not to philosophers reclining on couches while servants refreshed the wine, but to a nation of escaped brickmakers who had just walked out of the most ambitious planned economy of the ancient world. Egypt had been the total state before the phrase existed: Pharaoh claimed the land, the grain, the labor, the sons, the daughters, the worship, and the future, and the Hebrew household stood before him as a unit of production with a quota. Then the slaves walked out, and at a mountain in the wilderness they were handed an order. And in the middle of its charter, engraved in stone by the finger of God, stands a commandment built on the very word Plato spent Book V abolishing:

Honor your father and your mother.

Not parenthood in general. Not the caregiving profession. Not whichever approved adult has been scheduled for the current shift.

Your father. Your mother.

The possessive Plato feared stands inside the commandment.

The blueprint is older than Athens. It is time to unroll it.