One word for our species

Let’s raise the tone for Christmas. Let’s talk of Plato. Bertrand Russell said that all Western philosophy was just footnotes to Plato. Plato, in turn, said that all his philosophy was just footnotes to Socrates. Socrates, however, who was a carver of tombstones, said nothing that has swum down the gutter of time. So Plato gets the credit.

I think of Plato because of the political ructions that are currently sweeping the globe, though there is nothing new about political ructions. Like herpes, they are always with us, for politics is just the business of dealing the drug called power. Plato had plenty to say about power, and especially about elections.

We love an election. It’s part ideological warfare and part beauty pageant. It turns dry social debate into thrilling theatrical conflict. During a campaign, candidates perform acts of abasement. In search of our vote they emerge from the palaces of privilege to insist that they long for nothing more than to kiss our hands and shake our babies.

We know it’s a performance, but having our hands kissed, our babies shaken and our vote sought gives us a sense of being in control. This democracy thing is all right, we say. Pfui, says Plato.

Power, says Plato, is far too dangerous to entrust to the likes of us. We’ll be seduced by lies or charm and we’ll pick the wrong leaders. And a glance around the democratic world suggests that Plato may have had a point.

The Brits have just had to choose between a superficially endearing toff whose sole ambition as prime minister is to be prime minister, and, well, Jeremy Corbyn. While the United States has saddled itself with a 72-year-old know-nothing who is sick with self-love. ‘‘It’s so unfair,’’ began a recent tweet from Trump, ‘‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’’ Ignore the lies; just hear the tone. The most powerful man on earth is whining like a 5-year-old.

He wouldn’t be there under Plato. In Plato’s ideal republic there were three classes of citizens. At the bottom was the mob. We were welcome to get on with our lives so long as we didn’t start having ideas. Above us and keeping us down was the military and bureaucratic class. And above them were the Golden Ones, the beings superior in thought and manner, the philosopher kings who made the decisions and issued the orders. People like, well, Plato.

Plato’s republic operates as a single organism, like a hive of bees in which the individual is subordinate to the whole. And just as bees instinctively organise themselves into the same form of colony, so it seems that human beings instinctively organise themselves into something along platonic lines: hence the upper, middle and working class; or pope, clergy and congregation; or board, executives and workforce; or nobles, army and commoners. It is our default social structure.

Perhaps the closest thing to Plato’s imagined republic is modern China. The party leaders are the golden ones who have been groomed to govern rather than elected. Below them stands a huge bureaucracy and military. And below them the masses who are free to pursue prosperity so long as they leave politics alone.

Plato would have been impressed. But the young of Hong Kong aren’t. They are risking their lives to resist being sucked into it. What Plato missed was that streak of independence. We would rather get things wrong for ourselves than have them got right for us by others. It’s what makes us not bees. If Socrates were to carve our species’ collective tombstone, one word would suffice: uppity.