You Can Only Tell What You Know

 

"...not that I mean to depreciate [the poets]; but everyone can see that they are a tribe of imitators, and will imitate best and most easily the life in which they have been brought up; while that which is beyond the range of a man’s education he finds hard to carry out in action, and still harder adequately to represent in language.”—Plato, Timaeus (Jowett)

It is a common Twitter trope these days to portray our American elites (political or artistic) as a deliberate set of societal saboteurs, scheming in air-conditioned offices about how to take down the whites and the Christians, the "grillers" and the "normies." They lure us with innocent-sounding phrases like justice and neighbor or a wonderful Episode 1 of a streaming series. The mass of middle America joins in, some with caution, more with enthusiasm. And then--bam--in swoops the Wokeness, the lawfare, the main-character-who-surprise-is-actually-gay-but-still-somehow-just-as-awesome. The trap closes, we conservatives lose another political battle or beloved IP, and the process starts all over again.

And there may be some of that. Mankind is evil at heart, and some folks like to tug others deeper into the black and tarry parts of their souls, so that they have more company while they sink into damnation. But our problem is actually more basic than a few deceptive, mustache-twirling feminists running Disney or stalking the halls of Congress. As usual, C.S. Lewis called this long ago:

"It's all in Plato, all in Plato; bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!"

 For the epigram above is from Plato's Timaeus, where Socrates is lamenting that those charged with carrying the knowledge of his society--the poets--really don't know what they're talking about. They don't know politics or philosophy from the inside, but only by imitation. For in Plato's schema, imitation is necessarily inferior to that which it imitates, and so the poets are inferior to those whose stories they tell--the real warriors and statesmen. They only know a second-rate polis (the weak and faction-ridden Athens of his day) and so they can only tell second-rate stories. Like the old saying goes, you can only tell what you know.

And this brings us to our elites (who hold that title by courtesy rather than fact). The next time you see a talking head on the television breathlessly intoning about some Democratic talking point, perhaps you shouldn't assume that she is lying through her teeth. Consider what she knows: 

• She was probably born in a deep-blue urban area, like the majority of the population of the United States since 1950. Her parents probably both worked. So she spent her formative years in daycare and government schools, being shaped by the kind of short-haired, dreamy-eyed women who gravitate to those careers in deep-blue urban areas.
• Those schools (and the Disney movies she watched alone when her family was too busy to be with her) taught her that Peace was always just around the corner, but was currently being thwarted by three monstrous things: personal repression, stifling tradition, and societal indifference. If she could be true to herself and care deeply enough, she could bring that Peace into reality.
• She worked hard to do exactly that. This made her stand out above her peers, which brought guilt--for now she was reinforcing societal indifference by benefitting from it. She worked harder to bury the feeling. Her distant father greased the skids to skewed sexual attachments, which made the guilt worse. So she worked harder.
• She makes it in to a prestigious Ivy League school, where she finds sophisticated, book-length justifications for everything she ever suspected. The world is far more broken than she ever knew, and it is all the fault of the most repressed, traditional, powerful people ever--dead white Christian men. This is probably also where she makes her first contact with any form of Christianity whatsoever; the sort that can survive in the hellhouse garden of a modern Ivy League university. These Christians confirm everything her professors have told her. Perhaps she joins them at services a time or two when she's feeling "religious." They warn her against any of the "Christians" she sees on the news, who check every stereotyped box she's ever been taught in class. She happily acquiesces in their more informed judgement. Her view of the world is cemented and dried.
• She then spends the next ten years working her way up an organization of people who have nearly identical backstories. Sure, some of the names, places, or skin colors might be different, but the life--the education--has been pretty much the same. Some have more repression than others, some have more tradition than others, some have more societal benefits than others, but they are all eagerly attempting to throw those things off and live genuine, expressive, world-changing lives. And if you're having trouble doing that, sex, drugs, and ideological pathos are all helpful lubricants on the path to fulfillment.

Now, why on earth would we be surprised when such a person (of any gender) tells the sort of stories we see today? Why wouldn't there be black lesbian space witches impregnating themselves with the Force on Star Wars shows? Why wouldn't tossing an immigrant out of the country on his ear be a heinous cruelty? Why wouldn't blocking a woman's access to health care and reproductive rights be illegal? Why would Western norms (those eternal springs of guilt!) not be something worth eradicating from the face of the earth?

Does this perspective actually gain the conservative anything? In our hard-nosed world, it can seem squishy. Sure, you can quote some Van Til and pull some inescapable concepts. But the problem with presuppositionalism is that it tends to make your reasoning ironclad at the expense of burning off your sympathies. Yes, the elites are in sin. But you probably can’t lead off with that fact if you want to convince them otherwise. You have to be able to talk to them—to “adequately represent their language” as the philosopher said. And at the very least, you can stop feeling so betrayed. They’re not doing this in order to chuckle madly at your helplessness—at least, many of them aren’t. They’re just being “normal”—the poets imitating our disintegrating polis.

Critical theory (and postmodernism in general) did tap into one truth that Plato knew long ago. We are a tribe of imitators, and we imitate best and most easily that life in which we were brought up. And telling a story outside of the stories we were ever told is difficult in the extreme. Before you get mad at them for living in their "normal," have you tried to build a new normal?

That's why I teach students a classical education, and a Christian education. The Christian part centers you, and deals with the guilt. The classical part gives you the breadth and depth to tell better stories than one about bitter old white men (perhaps trapped on an island drinking green milk, or mocking you with a smile in alien halls of power) trying to stop the dreams of plucky heroines who need to unlock their internal potential. Perhaps we can get back to the true, the good, the beautiful, and the logical. But we have to grow it at home first. So go read some Plato.

For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. For every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.--Luke VI: 43-45