Plato's Gorgias & Modern Journalism

25 Nov 2011

I have been reluctant to write about Plato's dialogues directly, but today I want to talk about a very important subject which is making headlines in British newspapers, and which is beautifully presented in Plato's Gorgias.

What is making headlines? Journalism itself - namely the public inquiry into British media standards now taking place. In the last week or two I have been writing about the problems of elite journalism, and meanwhile elite journalism has been writing about tabloid journalism. Whereas some countries such as France have strong privacy laws, in the UK journalists are allowed to do more or less whatever they like. They buy photos and stories from ex lovers, they stalk celebrities and try to get photos of actresses who climb out of cars the wrong way and expose their underwear, they spit and scream at famous people in order to get photos of them angry, they search for scandalous stories about their children, they hack telephones, they even send people computer viruses and hack their computers. Although widely regarded as morally reprehensible, tabloid journalism exerts and irresistible pull on ordinary people, like cigarette smoking it is universally condemned as a bad habit, but it is regarded as a human right, and a lot a lot of people can't resist it. Newspapers in the UK talk about a thin edge of the wedge threat to freedom of speech, also they claim that the hunt for scandalous stories ensures the moral purity of the elite, but deep down a lot of their arguments are also motivated by personal interest, they worry about the impact legislation would have on sales.

My interest is in elite journalism, I think it's an even more interesting topic, and Plato's Gorgias dialogue has many fascinating observations about it. Let me start by talking about an article I saw a couple of days ago in the Financial Times. The journalist argued that many celebrities thrive on all the attention the media gives them, so privacy laws would generally hurt not protect celebrities, so they are a bad not good thing. There is a grain of truth in this argument, but the point is there is a grain of truth in everything. If you are talking to a simple individual, and you are good at reading him, you can find the grain of truth in any debate that will hook him. If you are really good at leading him and firing him up, you can focus him on this grain of truth strongly enough to make him forget all other arguments, and get him to agree with your premise no matter how silly it is. If the person is smart he will see through your argument, he will say "you are clutching at straws", and he will create a parallel argument which connects to another facet of the debate. In the case at hand, namely the argument that celebrities thrive on media attention, we could construct a parallel argument by pointing out that that J K Rowling found her life under siege just because she had written a nice children's book about wizards. She had zero interest in all this attention, even her children were molested by paparazzi, her life was pointlessly ruined.

Imagine a mother talking to her child, the child says "mum, I don't like these carrots because they are mushy". The mother says "forget about the texture, can't you see how they have a certain sweetness and happiness? Look for that feeling in the carrots, and see how much fun it is!" What the mother mustn't do is allow the child to read her intentions because if the child realises that it's a trick, the spell is broken. Everything is multidimensional, she can win argument by showing her child the greater pleasure of a parallel perspective. This is what we could call the dark art of Dionysian persuasion, it's what politicians are famous for, it involves turning pain into pleasure by way of an alternate hook. There is another way to ague, which is to talk about the science of carrots and their effect on health, but your child needs to be an expert in order for this to work. The Orphics condemned underhand tricks, they said trust me kid this is correct, now learn to detach from the mushiness. They were open about disadvantages, ascetic not pleasure giving, they called virtue the overcoming of pleasure.

Now think about the idea of moral compass. A moral compass points to thing which we intuitively feel are right. When the child says my compass points away from these carrots, the Dionysian mother calibrates it to point back toward the carrots. The Orphic father, on the other hand, operates with a sort of negative image of the moral compass, it points not toward the good but rather away from everything bad. When I was young I started studying eastern philosophy, and one of the first concepts I came across is the bizarre and rather frightening idea that "God is nothing". In the West we say God is something and God is in everything. We say God is love and the goal of live is to be loving. In Buddhism they say God is nothing and God is in nothing and the goal of life is to detach from everything. Many years ago I read a book called "Samurai William", it talks about the first contact between the West and Japan back in the 1500s. The book is interesting because it describes the Japanese personality back in the old day before they picked up a lot of Western customs. The people in the West though the Japanese were heartless and self controlled, the Japanese thought the Westerners were uncouth barbarians. The Emperor felt Western personality would corrupt Japan, and he sealed the country off from Western visitors allowing only Samurai William to stay.

Now Plato's dialogues contains many opaque references to people looking up and people looking down. Think of the Dionysian mother as someone looking up into the stars for a guiding image of what truth is. Now think of the Orphic father as someone who looks down on his body and heads away from everything that gives it pleasure, his image of truth is all about what is not. One of my favourite stories about the way of detachment comes from Japan. A Samurai was sent to execute an enemy of the Emperor, as he drew his sword the man spat in his face, and the Samurai couldn't control his anger - so he just walked away. He believed in super human self control, he couldn't kill for sentimental reasons.

Plato's dialogue Gorgias is about Dionysian personality. Think about Saint Francis, he was put in prison and found himself in suffering, giving him an amazing courage. He was so tuned into good he could find good in a place everyone else called hell. Think about Martin Luther. The Puritan religion became popular during the Medieval Ice Age when people were starving, he was famously hard working, he had the strength to enjoy the fight against hellish conditions. Both of these characters headed towards the good, they were not Japanese ascetics, but as they spiritually developed they became increasingly refined and sort of converged on Japanese ascetic lifestyle. It's irrelevant to this article, but in the same sort of way the Japanese ascetic who practises self control also converges on the courage of the Catholic and the strength of the Puritan. We could say they are paths up the mountain, and although they climb different faces they all climb toward the same place- to selfless idealism.

Now think about the example of the carrots again, how the mother teaches the child to enjoy the sweetness and forget the mushiness. If the child is good he will love the carrots easily, but if he is corrupt he will only be happy with great pleasures. The mother has to strike a fine balance, she has teach the child only to love good things, she must not spoil him and create a vicious circle of immoral pleasure seeking. The good mother gradually gives the child less pleasure not more, she teaches him to head toward selfless idealism. Now if you think about the UK Tabloid Press, is it exactly the opposite, it like a vicious circle of base pleasure giving. Every year that goes by it became more and more outrageous, more and more like something that would have horrified any idealist in history. It is reaching toward the Sodom and Gomorrah endpoint we associate with Ancient Egypt and Ancient Athens and Ancient Rome.

The collapse of society is not however created by the tabloid press, it is created by the elite press. The process is more subtle, and still largely invisible to the masses, but for philosopher such as myself who study human thinking the approaching nemesis is obvious. Plato's dialogue Gorgias describes this process. It has three characters, each representing a greater degree of intellectual corruption.

Amongst Plato's collected works, I think the most aggressive speech given by Socrates is found in the dialogue called Gorgias and it's got some nasty characters and it talks about killing and tyranny in a very unusual way for Plato. Like all Plato's dialogues it's extremely complicated, and I am going to focus on the broad big picture theme in this article.

The dialogue is named after a famous orator call Gorgias, and it opens by discussing the nature of "oratory", but modern readers who think about what is being said will excitedly substitute the modern word "journalism" for oratory, it's truly a perfect match, in fact it's an even better match than that the world oratory was back in Ancient Athens. Socrates describes journalism as a profession that appeals to people "who have a mind which is good at hunches, also bold, and good at dealing with people".

So we can think of Gorgias as journalist, and he is described as a highly regarded elderly "urbane" intellectual (urbane = polished, refined, cultivated, cosmopolitan), but he is accompanied by an aggressive young student called Polus who represents the profession of journalism in a far more dangerous condition. So Gorgias reminds us of what the Financial Times is supposed to be, a sort of brilliant Ancient Greek version of Philip Stephens, and Polus reminds us of a Sun writer, an arrogant down to earth BNP supporting thug. The third character, Callicles is a tyrant, a sort of Napoleon Bonaparte who understands a bit of philosophy but has turned his back on it.

People who don't understand Plato think his arguments are presented in a random order, but in fact they have a very complex structure. In this dialogue we can imagine the disintegration of Ancient Athens. It begins with the honour loving Gorgias, then we read about currupt son Polus who misuses his father powers to promote pleasure seeking, then we read about the new tyrannical elite represented by Callicles who shamelessly uses journalism for personal power and wealth. This is not the only relationship between Gorgias, Polus and Callicles, but it's what I want to focus on in this article.

Under cross examination, and with lots of help from help of Socrates, Gorgias manages to describe himself as someone who persuades non-experts to believe things not based on specialist knowledge, but rather by universal appeals to arguments about justice and injustice. Stop for a moment and think about that line carefully: someone who persuades non-experts to believe things not based on specialist knowledge, but rather by universal appeals to arguments about justice and injustice. Gorgias spends most of his time making speeches about politics, but he says that in competition with a doctor, he could if he wanted to, persuade an audience of ordinary people to follow his advice instead of the doctor's.

What do they mean by universal appeals to arguments about justice and injustice? Let's take the example of the Eurozone crisis. The European sovereign debt crisis started breaking out in late 2009, by December 2009 Greek 10 year yields were 2.5% higher than German 10y yields. If you go back and pick up copies of the Financial Times from late 2009 you will see the words "moral hazard written in almost every single Eurozone article. But by early 2010 the words moral hazard had vanished from the FT. Why? Basically there was a conflict between moral hazard and living standards and democracy, and the FT choose to abandon moral hazard. It then became a vehement proponent of default, bailouts, bond purchases, money printing and every other trick in the book. The debate between moral hazard and living standards was presented as a moral not practical point of view. Martin Wolf wrote articles calling people who want the Greeks repay their debt "sadists", the world "pain" cropped up in many of his articles. This debate had nothing to do with science, nobody in Greece would have died if they had been forced to repay their debts, and the Greeks later ended up in more pain two years later as a result of their failure to embrace reforms anyway.

The Telegraph picked up on the conflict between moral hazard and democracy, and wrote many articles about the evil Germans forcing people to do things against their will. Again this debate had nothing to do with science, it was all about the morality of sovereignty. Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal started printing a whole series of articles about the Eurozone breaking up, not because breaking up the Eurozone is a sensible pragmatic calculation, but because it gave their readers pleasure to look at the problem as a moral debate and take that viewpoint. For complex psychological reasons, even though Tea party types love the Gold Standard, they hate the Euro, so they enjoyed this moral viewpoint. Later, when the US economy started suffering, Americans began to worry about the consequences break-up of the eurozone would have on America, so the Wall Street Journal joined the FT in supporting bailouts, money printing, big bazookas etc. Suddenly eurozone breakout had begun scaring their readers, it was no longer a sensible moral choice, better to make the Germans pay. Of course for professionals eurozone break-up was an absurd suggestion all along.

The closest thing the world has to experts in finance is traders, traders on the desk don't sit around discussing morality, they leave that to senior management and politicians and newspapers, they specialise in translating the moral debate into numbers. When the words moral hazard disappeared from the newspapers they stopped buying Eurozone bonds. When the Germans decided it was morally right for the banks to take a hit of their Greeks bonds, they started selling Eurozone bonds.

This big picture morality debate described above in the Financial Times, Telegraph and Wall Street Journal is what politics and journalism is made of. This is what Socrates means by universal appeals to justice and injustice instead of specialist skills. The specialist debate revolves around hard headed calculations of future consequences, it is totally inaccessible and uninteresting to people outside the financial world. One of the great secrets of Ancient Greek philosophy is the amazing and very complicated idea that "moral justice" and "pragmatic calculation" converge. The human mind is not a computer that sits around calculating future outcomes, it makes instinctive choices based on morality. It senses the difference between carrots and ice cream instinctively, and it knows deep down that ice cream is dangerous by the way it makes the person feel. If the human mind didn't have that facility to read future outcomes by intuitively grasping aesthetic psychodynamic energies (Forms) in the present journalists wouldn't be able to do what Gorgias could do, namely to persuade a crowd of ordinary people that they know more about doctoring than doctors themselves. Journalists "wing it", they specialise in this human instinct, I call them "witch doctors" because they make people believe that have supernatural powers which know everything about everything.

If you read Plato he constantly talks about specialist skills, he says if you want to get healthy you go to a doctor, you don't walk in the market place and ask journalists or politicians or crowds of ordinary people on what's wrong with you. Socrates was the genius who figured out the way the human mind works, how intuition works. If you compare an Egyptian plumber and a German plumber, you will notice that one has a messy toolkit, and the other one has a tidy toolkit. What happens is that over the years the specialist develops a sort of intuitive matrix which allows him work more effectively. He is not a computer with a more effective CPU, he has written a more effective software program that can solve the problems he is used to working with more effectively. I went to a tennis coach once, and he said the first thing I have to do is get you to unlearn everything you think you know so we can start again. But he was exaggerating, even if someone has never played tennis in their life they can still have a stab at it, but they will be playing with a very basic badly setup program. If they are aggressive they will hit the ball too hard, if they are pacifistic they will hit it too softy. What we are talking about is a sort of intuitive sense of what is right and wrong, a sort of moral justice sense. The expert learns by experience to give up on this dogma and work out what really works, he effectively develops a whole new moral philosophy for the game of tennis by practice. This new software will even colour his entire life, if you ask him questions about the Eurozone crisis he might give different answers compared to an expert marathon runner.

Socrates says journalists need to have good hunches, which means they have to be good at transferring this intuitive sense from one subject to the next. Socrates says they need to be bold, which mean they don't say I haven't got a clue how this works, they have faith in their instincts and jump right in. Socrates says they need to be good at dealing with people, because what they are doing is sensing other people's intuition and constructing arguments that appeal to it.

In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates then puts himself under cross examination, and asks Polus to extract his definition of journalism by questioning him. Polus, however, proves completely incapable of conducting a cross examination, so Socrates ends up just giving a brilliantly precise and terrifying speech. He says what Gorgias practises is not really a craft, but rather a knack, passive instead of active, aimed at producing gratification in his readers. He goes on to describe it as a shameful type of flattery which hoodwinks non-experts by creating an artificial image of justice which gives them pleasure when they agree with his premise.

What does this mean? Imagine John Wayne in your mind. You can sort of sense how he would react to things, you can sort of sense what kind of things he thinks are right and wrong. If we wanted to write an article about the Eurozone for John Wayne we could hook him by talking about sovereignty, about little guy's suffering against greedy banks etc. A good journalist can use his image of John Wayne to predict how he feels about all sorts of things and then figure out how to exploit that to entertain him. But what we are doing is not really a craft, we are like a bad mother who spoils her children for the sake of their love, we are pressing their psychological buttons, we are writing a song that appeals to their sense of justice and injustice. It's got absolutely nothing to do with truth, it's just a shameful game of hoodwinking non-experts by creating artificial parallels.

In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates then describes journalism as a similar to junk food - he uses the word "pastry-baking", today we might use the word "kool-aid". One pretends to add value but slowly poisons the body, the other pretends to be enlightening but slowly poisons the soul. So Socrates describes the profession of journalism as toxic, the impact on both the journalist and his audience is the opposite of enlightening, the opposite of good, the impact is what the Greeks called bad and the Christians call evil. Notice the rightness or wrongness of the message does not even matter, the very mechanics of this manipulative duplicitous pleasure giving persuasion knack are in of themselves ruinous to the soul.

This goes back to the point I made at the start of the article, the point about the mother who spoils her children instead of keeping them focused on truth. The good mother is constantly keeping them headed toward the light and slowly reducing the pleasure she gives them. She is not trying to sell something, she is not trying to win their love, she is caring for them, she is making them better. Good journalism, such as that on this web site, is constantly stretching and challenging the reader, tearing apart everything he believes and rebuilding his personality more constructively. Alternatively, good journalism might be reporting what the experts say as faithfully as possible. In a well run country like China it means reading what the experts running society are thinking, and trying to build their arguments into your pieces. For example, if they think society needs more expertise, you write a lot of pieces about examples of non-experts doing stupid things and experts saving the day.

The difference between Gorgias and Polus is that Gorgias still has that openness. In the dialogue Socrates warns him that he is about to rip his argument apart, and Gorgias says go ahead I am a friend of the truth. For Gorgias it is all about the joys of journalism, for Polus it is all about himself. Although Polus is pretty far gone, Socrates manages to bring him back, to reawaken his love of truth and get him to forget about himself.

I would like to mention something from Plato's dialogue called Alcibiades as well. Alcibiades asks Socrates why he is interested in teaching him. Socrates says because I think if god were to ask you: "would you rather live with what you have now, or would you rather die on the spot if you weren't permitted to have anything greater" you would choose to die. That's very much the idealism philosophers should aspire too, although of course we should love philosophy not personal fame like Alcibiades or Alexander the Great. In this dialogue Alcibiades is about to embark on a career in Athenian democratic politics. Socrates says where did you learn about truth and justice, who taught you? Alcibiades says from the newspapers I guess. Socrates says but haven't you noticed that real experts don't waver, they reach a consensus? Look at the newspapers, do you think their is any consistency in their viewpoint? Alcibiades admits that not only is there no consistency, but people wage wars and kill each other over their disagreements. Socrates says that is because there are no experts on truth and justice, they are all charlatans. Of course Plato' Apology describes Socrates are the single really wise individual in Greece. By the way, the Socrates "knows nothing" line does not mean what modern scholars think it means - it's a bit like "God is nothing", it's a complex statement about the nature of truth.

Now I want you to ask yourself something honestly: Plato described the four dimensions or paths of justice as courage (Catholic), strength (Puritan), self control (Japan), judgement (China). Now think about the way the Japanese used to be in the 1500s- remember the Samurai story. Do you think the modern Japanese have more or less self control today? What about the German strength today compared to Fredrick The Great? The truth is the world has gone completely downhill, we are at our nemesis, the next phase of history is the ripping apart of everything we believe in. It's not just about capitalism, it's about everything. You can not hold back evolution, our world is toxic and it will be ripped apart and shredded until we are either virtuous again or dead. It really is the end of the world as we know it.

In Plato's Gorgias, Callicles is the final speaker, and now we start getting really frightening. Socrates said he defeated Gorgias and Polus by shaming them in front of an audience. However Callicles no long cares about self contradictions in his arguments or even what people think, he just want want power, he knows everything he says is toxic. I think someone like Newt Gingrich is probably an example of this shameless nadir. Socrates could not turn Callicles around and he pulled one last argument out of the bag right at the end of the dialogue - he said people who commit injustices burn in hell. Socrates talked about reincarnation, but like Christianity, he said that when a soul dies without any idealism it is thrown into a fiery hell. When someone has lost all idealism, when they are completely shameless, the only thing you can do to turn them around is talk about the fires of hell. Did it work on Callicles? The dialogue doesn't make it clear.

Now I hope that anyone who reads this web site will purchase Plato's Complete Works by Hackett, but just in case there is anyone who wants to decide whether or not it's worth doing that by reading this dialogue first here is a link for you containing this dialogue as published by Hackett. Please don't circulate this file or draw attention to it because it's for you alone and I don't want to be hassled for having hosted it. Please note that Hackett's Complete Works are available from Amazon.Com in crappy Kindle format, but if you are a serious student you need them in pdf. I like to print the dialogues on a4 paper in landscape mode with the writing on the left hand side of the page, giving you lots of space for making notes on the other half of the page. So after you have purchased your hardback copy you should go onto pirate bay and download the pdf. If I ever became a billionaire I would purchase the Hackett translations, or better commission new translations, and make them available to the world for free! Charging for Plato's works is like charging for the bible, it's frankly sick. There are free translations available on the internet by Benjamin Jowett, but they are all but worthless.