Alcibiades on Socrates

When Alcibiades turns up, drunk as a skunk at Agathon's Symposium, he is startled to find himself lying next to Socrates. To Socrates annoyance, he starts making indiscreet comments about Socrates' qualities, physical, mental, and moral.

Socrates has a big head, he crows.  He's proud, because he'll grumble if he doesn't get a wreath as a man who "has never lost an argument in his life."  He has hollow legs, because he can drink all night and not get drunk.  He implies that Socrates talks rubbish ("the truth is just the opposite").

Socrates is like Silenus, i.e., ignorant, drunk, and lustful, but full of the images of the gods.  Or he is like Marsyas, also a satyr.  He's "impudent, contemptuous, and vile", a good "fluteplayer", that "possesses" people with words alone.  He's the only person that can make Alcibiades "feel shame".

Socrates is crazy about beautiful boys but not because they are beautiful.  He poses as an ironist, but inside he is godlike, "amazing".  Socrates is not really interested in carnal pleasures.  Alcibiades got alone with him and all he did was talk.  Then he got Socrates in bed with him and, in his "arrogance and pride," Socrates still wouldn't bite.

But now Alcibiades stops the clowning around and proceeds to admire Socrates' "courage and fortitude" with "strength of character and wisdom".  Money means nothing to him.  He's a hardy man, that "stood up to hunger" better than anyone in the Potidaea expedition.  He doesn't like to drink but when he does, nobody sees him get drunk.  And he's resistant to the cold.  He can focus on a problem, and he is brave, staying back to help and rescue the wounded Alcibiades and his armor, but was happy to have Alcibiades get the credit.  Even more brave was his coolness in retreat from Delium with Laches.

Socrates is unique; there is nobody like him.  You laugh at his arguments and "the same tired old words" but you come to realize that they are "worthy of a god, bursting with figures of virtue inside".  He's a deceiver, who "presents himself as your lover" but makes you fall in love with him.  Watch out, he tells Agathon.

At the end of the Symposium we see that Plato is a cunning fellow.  He knows that the best way to put across his idea of Love is not with the pedestrian mumblings of Eryximachus or the high-flown rhetoric of Agathon, or even Socrates hiding behind Diotima.  No, the best way is to bring riotous Alcibiades in and have him pretend to make a fool of Socrates, and in fact show that Socrates is the very incarnation of a man on the top rung of the ladder of love.  He is beyond loving one beautiful boy, or even several, or even learning beautiful things.  Look at him inside his armor of irony, and you see "just what it is to be beautiful."

Germans of Character

Obviously, the most important country of the last two hundred years is the good old U. S. of A.  Talk about lucky.  The difference between South Africa and the US, I once read, was that in the US the aboriginal North American population died from European diseases whereas in Africa the Europeans died of African diseases.

But the second most interesting people has to be the Germans.  You can start with Kant and Wittgenstein. Between those two the Germans did most of the philosophizing and most of the science.  Not to mention the political science and the psychology.  Then we get to the military arts, organization, strategy and tactics.  And don't forget education.

But while the US was incredibly lucky, the Germans were incredibly unlucky.  Their practical politics stank, from Bismarck to Kaiser Bill to Adolf Hitler.  Now, of course, the poor bloody Germans are caught in the mess of the Euro.

It's easy to think of the Germans as fascist pigs until you start to read about them.  I just finished a memoir of life in Germany from 1944 to 1951, German Boy: A Child in War by a man, Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, that was 10 years old in 1945 and living east of the Oder in Sagan, a town now in Poland.  Or there is the mother of Hans von Spakovsky, who got her professional ballerina certificate in Dresden in 1944.  Both of these young people were caught in the Soviet Zone, and both had harrowing escapes.  Both seem to have grown up to be adults of almost saintly virtue.  Both, of course, came to America, Wolfgang because his mother married a sergeant in the USAF after divorcing her wayward German husband.  Hans's mother Traudel also immigrated to the US in 1951 on her status as a refugee, a Flüctling, from eastern Europe.

There are many moving passages in German Boy, including the moment just before Wolfgang and his mother and father left the Soviet Zone to sneak across the border into the West.  Wolfgang was worried about getting his grade book so that he could show the teachers in the West his status.  It wasn't until he was explaining all this to a trusted teacher in his Communist school that he realized what a terrible mistake he was making.  Fortunately his teacher told him that he wouldn't need his grade book.

"Just go. Don't say anything to anyone. Do you understand what I am telling you? Don't say anything to your friends, to other students, but especially not to any teachers. Say nothing to anyone."

It's important to remember that, in the midst of terror, in the midst of utter collapse, when children are begging for food and mothers are selling their bodies for food, there are people of profound goodness, even in December 1946 in the Soviet Zone of defeated Germany.

We often say that crisis brings out the worst in people.  But it also brings out the best in them.

Plato's Ladder of Love

It is telling that when Plato finally wants to get down to brass tacks in his Symposium on Love, on Eros, he finally calls in a woman, the divine Diotima.  Apparently it's all very well for the lads, from Phaedrus to Pausanias, to Eryximachus to comic playwright Aristophanes and the noble tragedian Agathon to discourse on Love, and it's all very well for Socrates to demolish Agathon's soaring prose in his usual manner.  But Diotima is needed to give Love a feminine flourish and teach Socrates a thing or two about Love.

Even the pedophiliac Greeks seem to think that a woman needs to be called in to get to the heart of Love, and so Socrates recalls a conversation on Love with Diotima of Mantinea.  And Diotima leads Socrates up the Ladder of Love.

Yes, she says, you start with your love of a single beautiful boy, on the bottom rung of the ladder, and make beautiful speeches to his beautiful body.  But you'd have to be pretty dull not to realize that if one body can be beautiful then it is a single step upwards to realize that another can also be beautiful.  And if two bodies are beautiful then it is merely a single step upwards to "become a lover of all beautiful bodies."

But if bodies are beautiful, surely beautiful souls are even more valuable, and you will step up and seek to make the souls of young men better.  To do this you will be forced to "gaze at the beauty of activities and laws" and begin to think that "the beauty of bodies is a thing of small importance."

But customs and laws are one thing; it is merely a step up to move on to appreciate the "beauty of knowledge" and learn to give "many gloriously beautiful speeches, in unstinting love of wisdom."  So here we are back at the philosophy ranch boosting the glories of philosophy and philosophers.

Then at last you can take the final step up and view the Form of beauty.  It is not beauty in contrast to ugliness, or beautiful body parts, or speeches or knowledge or indeed instantiated in any Thing, but "learning of this Beauty, so that in the end you comes to know just what it is to be beautiful."  It is to "see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality."  And thus, "looking at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen" you can give birth not to "images of virtue" but "true virtue" itself.

The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true irtue and nourished it, and if any human beling could become immortal, it would be he.

So much for that.  The next moment everything gets thrown into turmoil when the turbulent rich kid Alcibiades turns up at the gate, drunk as a lord. 

E.J. Dionne's Mistake about Conservatives

Liberals say the darnedest things.  Like humans everywhere they regard their own approach to human social relations as the correct one, and the approach of others, particularly American conservatives, as mad or bad.

Thus E.J. Dionne's lament that "Conservatives used to care about community.  What happened?" is a classic case of "us" and "them."  He assumes that because conservatives don't agree with the liberal agenda of the moment, including the mammoth ObamaCare and the bureaucratic corporate regulation of Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank, that conservatives are mad individualists that care nothing about human community.

Of course this is rubbish.  Conservatives do too believe in community.  It's just that conservatives believe in different forms and different arrangements of community than liberals.  Most obviously, conservatives believe that the big-government approach to community beloved by liberals is profoundly anti-community.  That's because government is force.  The whole point of human social relations, conservatives believe, is to avoid use of force except in extreme cases.  Yet the liberal solution to almost any social problem is to create a government program, i.e. use force.

It is perhaps helpful to analyze this in the context of "relational models theory," a framework for categorizing human "sociality" first published by sociologist Alan Page Fiske in the early 1990s.  The theory is simple(pdf).  People relate to each other in just four ways.  There is the Community Sharing model,  where people interact as though their group was an undifferentiated unit.  There is Authority Ranking, the assumption that people interact based on an understanding of an authority hierarchy.  There is Equality Matching, in which people try to achieve a balance of giving and taking.  Then there is Market Pricing, where people interact on the basis not of straight giving and taking, but a more precise reckoning of ratios, i.e., market prices. Market Pricing is no more or no less social than the other models.  Success and achievement in the market economy are no more or less social than altruistic caring in a Community Sharing or Equality Matching context.

You can see that the differences between liberals and conservatives arise out of different world-views that value the four models differently and implement their values in different ways.  For instance conservatives believe in the authority of fathers, mothers, and mediating structures like churches and associations.  Liberals believe in the authority of activists and "idealists."  Conservatives believe in the Invisible Hand to govern the working out of Market Pricing.  Liberals believe that Market Pricing is inherently exploitative unless minutely controlled by by a strong Authority Ranking government regulatory apparatus.  E.J. Dionne thinks that access to affordable health care is well-nigh impossible for many unless the government dictates universal rules of access.  Conservatives think that most people can afford to buy their own health insurance and charitable organizations can fill in most of the gaps.

We can thus interpret the great battle between socialism and capitalism over the last two centuries as an argument about the extent to which Market Pricing is a beneficial and useful model for basing social relationships among humans, the social animals.  Today's conservatives believe that Adam Smith's Invisible Hand doctrine is true, that in normal social interactions of an economic nature people satisfy their individual needs by serving the needs of others.  Today's liberals believe Marx's dictum that capitalist interactions are inherently exploitative because the capitalist always and everywhere denies the laborer the full value of his labor.

There are other disagreements.  Liberals seem to think that Community Sharing and Equality Matching relationships should usually be implemented in Authority Ranking government programs.  Conservatives believe that, where possible, we should do Community Sharing and Equality Matching in ways that avoid the hard power of government and use the soft power of civil society associations.

These arguments and conflicts about human society are, and should be, eternal.  But let us close with a word from Alan Page Fiske on "the inherent sociability of homo sapiens."

The most striking characteristic of Homo sapiens is our sociality. Social relations pervade every aspect of human life and these relationships are far more extensive, complex, and diverse (within and across societies) than those of any other species. And for survival and reproduction we are far more dependent on our social relationships and our cultures than any other animal.

In the coming weeks I am going to try and analyze this basic human social trait against the metric of government, to evaluate human social relationships directed by the social emotions against human social relations directed by governmental force.  Because I think that it is essential to understand that government is a limit case of human sociality.  For most things, government should be the red handle locked in a glass cabinet: "In Emergency, break glass."

E.J. Dionne and his liberal friends won't like it.  But that's too bad.

How to Un-stimulate Your Economy

Our good liberal friend Paul Krugman travels the world plugging the benefits of Keynesian stimulus.  Of course he does.  He's a liberal and liberals believe in bigger government.  Increase the good things that government is doing and society will be the better for it.  QED.



But the science--leaving aside the magic tricks of John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s--is pretty clear on this, and a new report pulls some recent findings together.  The findings are collected in the final report of the 2020 Tax Commission at www.2020tax.org.  Here are the results in bullet points from Alistair Heath:

• "[E]very one per cent of GDP rise in government spending reduces private consumption and private investment by 1.9 per cent". Furceri and Sousa, 2011.
  
  
  


• "[E]very one per cent rise in tax as a share of GDP is associated with a 0.14-0.27 per cent fall in GDP". Johannson et al, 2008.
  
  
  


• "[O]ptimal public spending share of GDP [is] 30 per cent." Mutascu & Milos, 2009.

Really, this is not rocket science.  Of course government spending is wasteful and reduces prosperity.  It takes money away from some people and gives it to other people.



There is a grain of truth in the Keynesian stimulus cargo cult, and it is this.  In the middle of a financial panic there will be some enterprises with healthy business models that are temporarily embarrassed.  If you lend them money it will help them get over a rough patch.  That is what J.P. Morgan did in the 1907 crash.



Good for J.P. Morgan.  He bailed out corporate America with his own money.  But that is not what Keynesian stimulators do.  They hand out our money to their friends.  They give it to states to stop teacher layoffs.  They give it to their green energy cronies so they can develop uneconomic green products.  They stiff creditors of auto companies so they can give money to overpaid union members.  That is not stimulus; it is politics as usual.



It is telling that these days our liberal friends need an attack dog like Paul Krugman to push the argument for bigger government.  A generation ago liberals had good old sheepdog Paul Samuelson plugging away at his Newsweek column and John Kenneth Galbraith with his pompous best-sellers that told liberals that their brain-dead conventional wisdom was the epitome of intelligent commentary on the other guys' brain-dead conventional wisdom.  Now they need a sharper message and tighter message discipline.



But like the Fram entitlement guy used to say.  You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.

When Eros Means Man-Boy Love

I have to admit that I can't really get my arms around the idea that the noblest form of erotic love is the love of an older man for a beautiful boy.  But Socrates and his pals at the Symposium seem to think it's the most natural thing in the world.

The only question, for young Phaedrus, is what is honorable or dishonorable in man-boy love, or whether, for Pausanias, there are two kinds of eros, the common or the heavenly. The common is the one for those that care only about "completing the sexual act" and like women as well as boys.  Whereas the heavenly version...

For Eryximachus the doctor eros suffuses everything, even in the business of the physician and his patient, for "the physician's task is to effect a mutual reconciliation and establish mutual love between the most basic bodily elements."

And then there is Aristophanes, with a Platonic "likely story" about humans as "completely round, with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands".  Plus two faces, two sets of sex organs, etc., until Zeus decided to cut humans in two.  Thus cut in half, humans wanted to reunite with their lost half, and that is how you get love.

Then Agathon goes off into ecstasies about the beauty of the erotic god, his youth and delicacy.  "Love fills us with togetherness and drains all of our divisiveness away." Mildness, kindness, "comrade and savior".  Everyone should follow love.

I suppose the problem for us 21st century moderns is our attachment to the ideal of romantic love.  In that, at least, we can understand Aristophanes and Agathon.  But the curious way in which man-boy love is experienced by Greek aristocrats as a preparation for valor, and a way to socialize boys into manhood:  t's just as weird as what comes next: Plato's insistence that the highest form of love is philosophy, the love of wisdom.

Today's philosophers don't seem to be much in love with wisdom.  They just love to chop logic.

Think of Private Equity as Healthcare for Business

I've been thinking.  At least I hope I have.  I've been thinking about how to explain private equity to the American people.



After all, until Mitt Romney came along I should imagine that the average American voter had never thought about private equity before.  In campaign-speak, therefore, the Obamis are trying to define it for the American people before Mitt Romney does.  They want us to think of a vampire sucking the blood out of good union jobs at good wages.



The vampire metaphor probably does have application in some cases.  After all, there are bad apples everywhere--even in left-wing politics.



But I propose a new metaphor.  Think of private equity as healthcare for business.



Let's think about health care for a moment.  There are two key times of life when you really need health care.  You need it at birth, and you need it in your last months on earth.  Health care at birth is the reason that women now have a longer life expectancy than men: they no longer die in childbirth.  And healthcare is the reason that we don't have half of babies dying in their first year of life.



Why, that's just like private equity!  One of its key contributions is to help start-up companies, providing start-up capital and management advice.



In healthcare, obstetric and pediatric care is pretty straightforward.  Where things get messy is with the diseases of aging: geriatric care.  When you get sick, you look for the healthcare system to save you from early death and from serious disability, and that might mean surgery, cutting out a cancerous growth, or reaming out your coronary arteries or putting in a stent.  Guess what.  Very often, there's nothing the doctor can do for you.  He may order an expensive operation but you might still die anyway.



Here's a shocking fact.  When you get a doctor to operate on you, you pay him whether he fixes you up or not. He doesn't suggest an equity deal where he gets a cut on every extra month of life he's given you.  Talk about greed!



Just like aging humans, aging corporations are often a mess.  They may be paying their employees too much; they may be paying their executives too much.  They probably got into debt to tide them over a couple of rough patches.  Now they are really in trouble. and they can't get any more money from the bank.  Enter the leveraged-buyout guys.  They come in with new money, new management, new ideas, and try to save something from the wreck.  Like the doctor doing surgery, they want to get paid for their expertise.  Like anyone doing a high-risk business deal, they want a big payout if they succeed.



It's a pity that the Obama administration wants to teach the ordinary American voter that private equity stinks.  But you can understand why.  Almost everyone in the Democratic coalition is sitting on some sort of government benefit, whether the benefit of union intimidation or subsidy or straight out pay-for-play.  The politicians and the activists promised them lifetime security and told them they had a moral right to that security.  But now the money is running out, and the rest of the American people are getting a little restless about, e.g., paying government workers 45 percent more than private sector workers.  The only way they can keep the money going for a while is with demagoguery.



The Obamis can do this because the Democratic faithful still believe.  They believe what their leaders taught them, that they have a moral right to their handouts and their benefits.  And President Obama believes that too.  He believes in "spreading the wealth" through government programs.



In the end, of course, the whole Democratic political power will collapse into ruin, as every other empire has done.



But for ordinary people that aren't plugged into the national Democratic machine things are different.  What's wrong with the private-equity guys helping the start-up you work for?  What's wrong with a leveraged buyout when your employer is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy?



Not everyone gets a lifetime government job with tenure and lifetime benefits.