The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) by Anthony Esolen Read Free Book Online

together all the classes of the state: those spurred mainly by appetite, who produce goods to buy and sell; those spurred by glory, who become valiant warriors or “guardians”; and those rare few who long for wisdom, the philosophers, who must govern the workers and merchants by means of the guardians.
     
    The curse of democracy, as Plato saw it (and de Tocqueville, and the Adamses, as we shall see), is that the appetite may come to rule, both in the State and in the common people. We misunderstand him if we conclude that he does not believe in a vibrant civic life. Democracy, untempered by higher ideals, will rot the pith and marrow from civic life, as its tendencies are to efface all exclusive institutions—clubs, families, guilds—and leave the arena naked of anything but State power and individual will. Freedom and the franchise are not the same thing.
     
 
     
    A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read:
     
    Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath; New York: Encounter Books, 2001.
     
    Classicists now “privilege,” “uncover,” “construct,” “cruise,” “queer,” “subvert,” and “deconstruct” the “text.” Titles abound with the words “construction,” “erotics,” “poetics,” “rhetoric,” and “discourse” randomly joined by the preposition “of ” to the following
     
    (it makes little difference which):
     
    “manhood,” “the body,” “masculinity,”
     
    “gender,” and “power.” (136)
     
     
    A brave defense of the impressive accomplishments of the Greeks, overcast by a certain sadness that anyone should have to be reminded of them. It is also a savagely funny exposé on contemporary teachers of the classics, who seem to loathe what they study, and who despise all but the most intelligent of the students they are paid to teach.
     
 
    Yes, Plato was an elitist, but that does not mean he would favor government by graduates of Harvard. It all depends on how you choose your governors: “elite” means nothing else but the object of discriminating choice. I do not love Plato’s ideal republic (which, let’s note, he confesses to be impossible), but surely he is right to see something self-destructive in pure, appetite-driven, egoist democracy. Its people will lack the patience to be corrected by traditions and laws that delay or prohibit the gratification of their desires. They will be too shortsighted for visions of beauty or justice. Such things matter little when the wallet, or the boudoir, calls: “How superbly [democracy] tramples down all such ideals, caring nothing from what practices and way of life a man turns to do politics, but honoring him if only he says he loves the people” ( Republic 8.558b). Besides, the rulers in Plato’s imaginary republic are not supposed to be cleverer than everyone else, but wiser, more deeply in love with the good, the true, and the beautiful. That would rule out our academic elites, who cannot be in love with those things, because they do not believe they really exist.
     
    On the dark side, we see in Plato the first inventor of a Utopia, and, not coincidentally, the first man to suggest, it is hard to tell how seriously, that the State should take over all childrearing and should officially recognize no differences between the sexes. But Plato’s critique of democracy, bolstered by the ineptitude of the Athenian demagogues who parlayed incomparable prestige and wealth and naval might into a surrender from which Athenian democracy never recovered, underlies all later criticisms of the liberal, secular, and soulless state.
     

The State and the end of man
     
    Plato’s pupil Aristotle learned from that critique, and adjusted it to suit his understanding of physical nature and of man. Aristotle was not a mathematician by hobby, but a biologist. The difference is intriguing. He could not conceive of immaterial objects existing separate from