Why awful! You don’t think it’s awful that people who aren’t even born yet are going to look back and wonder how we just didn’t see?
They’re going to know all sorts of stuff we don’t know. They’re going to be using all sorts of technology we can’t begin to dream of, and seeing all sorts of stuff we can’t begin to imagine.
No, Rhonda, you’re comparing apples and oranges. They’re not going to condemn us for not having the technology they do. The kind of things I’m talking about are things they’re going to condemn us for not seeing. They’re going to say we were too self-serving to see them, just like that mother of the abused kids. Doesn’t that drive you to distraction?
No, not really. It’s kind of what you’d expect if anything that you’ve been saying is true.
No, it isn’t what you’d expect at all! What I expect is that I’ve been able to teach Valerie and Jason how they should live their lives, that I’ve taken care of all of that just the way I’ve taken care of, well, straightening their teeth.
By handing their teeth over to Dr. Kolodny.
Right, the best orthodontist in the San Francisco Bay Area.
That’s been established, I said.
And that’s about the only thing that has been established, she said. She was still drumming those clicking fingernails on the tabletop. They’re deep purple and they match her lipstick.
What is so awful to contemplate, she went on after a pause, is that someday Valerie and Jason, or their kids or grandkids or great-grandkids, are going to look back at us and wonder how we just couldn’t see how wrong it was.
It? What it? I asked her.
Well, how the hell do I know? she all but exploded. We’re the ones who aren’t seeing it yet! Some future guy running around in some crazy getup is going to make some argument that’s going to sound completely bizarre and ivory-tower-ish, until it starts making a little bit of sense to a couple of others, and then to more others, until it seems so obvious that people won’t need any argument at all. They’re going to feel it in their marrow.
So I guess the crowd-sourcing thing really isn’t going to work, if we’re all waiting for some guy in a crazy getup to show us the error of our ways.
Yeah, she said, Marcus’s EASE is total toast.
Too bad for Marcus, I said.
Oh him. Cheryl flicked her wrist in dismissal, sending her bangles a-jangling. He didn’t seem too upset about any of this. He took it all in his stride, just like he did when he found out he wasn’t going to be a philosopher-king. I think at the end of the day I was a lot more upset. I mean picture it, Rhonda. We’re on this path, walking to Plato’s Google event, and I stop walking, just stand there stock-still, and everybody stopped with me, the whole contingent, Plato and Marcus and all the Googlers who are trailing after us. It was just bizarre. I’m standing there on a walkway in the middle of the Googleplex, running late for an event with an author in a toga, talking about some crazy ethical search engine that doesn’t even exist but is just the pipe dream of a software engineer in dreadlocks who’s just turned down the nonexistent position of philosopher-king, and I’m feeling really upset because EASE can’t give us the answers that it’s supposed to. And it’s all because of Plato, going on about how bad teeth are like a bad life and how we have to find the Dr. Kolodny who can straighten us out. I mean, I just can’t explain it, Rhonda, the whole effect it had on me. I’m just standing there, as if we have all the time in the world, which we certainly don’t. And, I mean, I’m the media escort!
What did Plato do? I asked her.
Oh, he was perfectly happy to just stand there next to me, biding his time. He said I walk like a free person and not a slave.36
Again with the slaves, I said. It’s a regular obsession with him. That and the crooked teeth. Do you have any idea what he was talking about?
Well, as a matter of fact I do, because I asked him. He said, a slave doesn’t own his or her own time, and so he or she can always be known on the street by his or her rushing, but a free person can walk and talk at his or her own leisure, stopping when he or she will.
You’ve got to hand it to him, I said, for remembering to keep saying “his and her” and “he and she” to the point of its being downright awkward.
And the freest of all is the philosopher, Cheryl continued on, quoting Plato and not paying attention to me, who thinks so little of the ceaseless flow of time as to step out of it. This is why the philosopher often appears ridiculous in the practical affairs of life, because he or she has stepped out of the rush of time (Theaetetus 172c–173b). And then he said to me in just the sweetest way: Cheryl, I think that this is what has happened to you. Isn’t that just the nicest thing for him to have said to me? And he used my name to address me directly. That was the first time he’d done that.
I didn’t see why Cheryl was so bowled over by this, though maybe you had to have been there.
This author certainly did have an effect on you, I said.
You have no idea, she said.
Are you sure you’re not a little sweet on him? I asked her.
Don’t be ridiculous, Rhonda, she said, he’s old enough to be my … well, I don’t even know what he’s old enough to be to me.
They ought to bottle that trick of stepping out of the flow of time and sell it at Bloomie’s cosmetics counter, I teased her, but she was too distracted to react.
Anyway, when he mentioned the word “time,” she continued, even though he seemed to be telling me that being out of time is a good thing, the word itself was like an alarm clock going off in my brain, and I got us moving again and finally delivered him to the auditorium, which, by the way, was hugely—and I mean hugely—crowded. They’d put him in their biggest venue, and still there was standing room only, which was gratifying, at least for me. I don’t think Plato gave it a thought. And the Googlers seemed almost as hyper as when the fantasy writer George R. R. Martin came to speak to them. They’d made up T-shirts they were all wearing with Greek letters and showing two guys in togas, one with his finger pointing up and the other with his finger pointing down. I don’t know whether one of them was supposed to be Plato or what. Neither of them looked the least bit like him. Anyway, they were all wearing these T-shirts, grinning like a bunch of idiots so that I hoped that Plato was finally getting the message that this wasn’t really the place to go shopping around for a philosopher-king. Marcus took off his oversized Grateful Dead T-shirt to reveal that he’d been wearing the Greek T-shirt the whole time, with a grin that revealed the full extent of the job Dr. Kolodny has ahead of him. Right before they all surrounded my author and swooped him away from me, I asked him how we’re supposed to get our answers if EASE can’t give it to us.
So did he answer you? I finally had to ask her after a considerable pause, accompanied by the tapping of her fingernails.
(illustration credit ill.3)
Not really, she said. I’m not sure giving answers is in his bag of tricks. He seems to be more about messing with your mind so that you can’t stop thinking about his questions. And if he thinks I can afford to keep stepping out of time like this, with my schedule, then, well, he’s just way off.
Maybe that’s why he needs slaves, I said. A slave would help if you’re stepping out of time all the time. Kidding, Cheryl, I hastened to add, given the glare she directed at me.
Here’s what he said to me, she finally said. He said, I do not say your questions cannot be answered, Cheryl. I only say they cannot be answered with ease.
Her voice had gone so quiet when she spoke the last line that the long silence just seemed a natural extension of it.
Was that “EASE,” all capitals, or just lowercase “ease”? I finally asked her.
I’m not sure, she said. When all is said and done, I’m just not sure.
There was an odd look plastered on my friend’s face. I couldn’t read it at all. Maybe it was her timeless look, or maybe she was just plain plastered.
* * *
1The Googleplex is the corporate headquarters complex of Google, Inc., located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara, California. The word “Googleplex” is a portmanteau of “Google” and “complex,” but it is also a pun on googolplex, which is an enormous number. First, start with a googol, which is 10 raised to the power of 100, or a 1 followed by a hundred zeroes. A googolplex is 10 raised to the power of googol, or a 1 followed by a googol zeroes. Google, Inc., has always thought big.
2A Long Island Iced Tea, tasting innocuously like the kind served on the back porch by your maiden aunt, is typically made with equal parts vodka, gin, tequila, rum, and triple sec, with one and a half parts sour mix and a splash of cola.
3The grant of being fed at public expense in the Prytaneum or the tholos, a round building, was known as sitēsis (food grant). The prytaneis (the fifty citizens who led the Boulē, the Council of 500, for each of the ten months of the Athenian calendar) were also fed at public expense, usually in the tholos.
4See Myles Burnyeat, “The Impiety of Socrates,” Ancient Philosophy 17, no. 1 (1997): 1–14 for the now widely accepted view that Plato represents Socrates as guilty as charged. The specific charge brought against Socrates was that he didn’t believe in the gods of the city, and Burnyeat argues, on the basis of the Apology, the Euthyphro, and parts of the Republic and the Laws, that that’s exactly how Plato represents Socrates. I will argue that his skepticism was such as to undermine the very identity of his Athenian society. Cf. chapter ζ below.
5There are, in fact, reports that Plato lectured at the Academy in a very soft voice, perhaps a ploy to get his students to lean in closer to catch every word.
6According to Alexander of Miletus, who is quoted by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives and Doctrines of Eminent Philosophers (Book III, Life of Plato, chapter 4), which was probably written toward the beginning of the third century C.E., Plato’s real name was Aristocles, son of Ariston, of the deme Collytus, and later sources confirm his name as Aristocles, though perhaps they are simply depending on Diogenes as their source. Aristocles, we know, was the name of his grandfather, and it was customary to give a boy the name of his grandfather, so that is some (slight) independent evidence as to his original name. Diogenes goes on to say that the name Plato was given him by one of his teachers in gymnastics, Ariston of Argos, “because of his robust figure,” adding “but others affirm that he got the name Plato from the breadth (platutèta) of his style, or from the breadth (platus) of his forehead.” Few scholars continue to hold this view of Plato’s name having been other than “Plato,” ever since James A. Notopoulos disputed it in “The Name of Plato,” Classical Philology 34 (1939): 135–145.
7In fact, Plato showed astonishing gender egalitarianism. See Republic 451–457b, for his general discussion of why exceptional girls should receive exactly the same education as exceptional boys, designed to train them to be the guardians of his utopian city, his kallipolis. His discussion includes such statements as this: “Then there is no way of life concerned with the management of the city that belongs to a woman because she’s a woman or to a man because he’s a man, but the various natures are distributed in the same way in both creatures” (Republic 455d). It is, however, important to point out that his gender egalitarianism derives more from considerations of what will make for the best-run state. The considerations focus less, if at all, on the unfairness to women in depriving them of equal opportunity but rather on the unfairness to the state in depriving it of all its talented individuals.
8Apology 28b–29c.
9Ibid. 28b–d.
10Xenophon asserts that he believed that Socrates wanted to die, having reached an age when life would progressively deteriorate: “Socrates was already so far advanced in years that had he not died his life would have reached its natural term soon afterwards; and secondly, as matters went, he escaped life’s bitterest load in escaping those years which bring a diminution of intellectual force to all—instead of which he was called upon to exhibit the full robustness of his soul and acquire glory in addition partly by the style of his defense—felicitous alike in its truthfulness, its freedom, and its rectitude—and partly by the manner in which he bore the sentence of condemnation with infinite gentleness and manliness. Since no one within the memory of man, it is admitted, ever bowed his head to death more nobly.” Memorabilia, Chapter VIII, trans. H. G. Dakyns (Macmillan, 1897).
11Plato is, I think, referring to his Myth of the Cave. See Republic 514a–518d. And see chapter θ, in which the Myth of the Cave is discussed in more detail.
12Plato’s excitement is understandable, considering that the non-localized cloud has something Platonic about it.
13In some dialogues Plato goes so far as to connect goodness and knowledge so strongly as to suggest that knowledge of what is good is both necessary and sufficient for doing the good. This strong connection between goodness and knowledge renders the notion of akrasia—or weakness of the will—problematic, since weakness of the will consists in knowing what is good but nevertheless not doing it, presumably because one doesn’t want to. Claiming knowledge is sufficient for goodness depends not only on a theory of the good but also on a theory of the human will, according to which it is in the nature of this will to want the good. See, for example, Protagoras 358d: “No one goes willingly toward the bad.” It is possible that this view corresponds more closely to the historical Socrates’ view than to the mature Plato’s. Plato’s theory of the tripartite soul, worked out in the Republic, is a reformulation of the theory of will that would leave room for akrasia.
14The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Cheryl is not quoting Vaidhyanathan verbatim. Here is what he writes: “We are not Google’s customers. We are its product. We—our fancies, fetishes, predilections and preferences—are what Google sells to advertisers.” This specific claim of Vaidhyanathan’s has been challenged. At this point, Google does not sell specific information about each of us to advertisers, though Facebook does. For an excellent discussion of Google and its omniscience, see Daniel Soar, “It Knows,” in the London Review of Books, October 6, 2011.
15“But what we require, I said, is that those who take office should not be lovers of rule” (Republic 521).
16Cheryl is not an entirely reliable narrator on the details of Greek clothing. As a Greek male, Plato would likely have been wearing a chitōn (tunic) with a himation (cloak) if an extra layer was needed.
17Long hair as a sign of aristocracy had passed out of fashion by the fifth century B.C.E., but it’s possible that philosophers wore their hair long to indicate that they couldn’t be bothered with appearances. Aristophanes, in any case, makes such a claim about Socrates and his followers.
18The ruler who came closest to realizing Plato’s ideal of a philosopher-king was, most Plato scholars would say, Archytas of Tarentum (428–347 B.C.E.). Later in history, there was Marcus Aurelius (121–180 A.D.).
19Plato founded his Academy around 387 B.C.E., after he returned from the years he’d spent away from Athens, prompted by the execution of Socrates. It was located in what was originally a public garden that had been left to the Athenian citizens by the Attic hero Academus. The Academy has a claim to being the first European university, although there were other schools in existence, specifically one that was founded by Isocrates, but these were confined to the teaching of rhetoric. The most famous student to have studied at Plato’s Academy was Aristotle, who came to Athens from Stagira, in northern Greece, where his father was the personal physician to the Macedonian royal family. Aristotle stayed for twenty years, leaving after Plato’s death to found his own school in Athens, the Lyceum. The Academy continued to exist throughout the Hellenistic period, terminating, for the first time, after the death of Philo of Larissa in 83 B.C.E. During the Roman period, philosophers continued to teach Plato’s ideas, but it wasn’t until 410 C.E. that a revived Academy was reopened as a center for Neoplatonism. The Academy las
ted then for a little more than a hundred years. Its doors were finally shut in 529 by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, a stickler for Christian orthodoxy.
20“At any rate Dion, who was very quick of apprehension and especially so in regard to my instruction on this occasion, responded to it more keenly and more enthusiastically than any other young man I had ever met, and resolved to live for the remainder of his life differently from most of the Greeks in Italy and Sicily, holding virtue dearer than pleasure or than luxury” (Seventh Letter 327 a–b). If the Seventh Letter is authentic, it would have been written sometime after Dion’s death, round about 352 B.C.E.
21Syracuse was a polis in what is now Sicily, and was first founded by Corinth.
22In later years the Greeks condemned tyranny, but at first it was regarded as an irregularity that wasn’t always objectionable. In Attic tragedy the word tyrannos is often used more in the sense of “king.” Plato and Aristotle both condemned tyranny as the worst possible form of government, but by their time tyranny had outlived its original usefulness and developed vices with which we’re all too familiar. See Sian Lewis, Greek Tyranny (Liverpool: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2009).
23Plato is here referring to his “noble lie.” He arrives in the Republic at the conclusion that the just state is one in which a person’s role is determined by their fitness for that role. His utopian state would consist of three classes. On the top, making the decisions, is the ruling class, whose members would have, both by their intrinsic natures and their training, the self-discipline to act strictly in the interests of all the citizens. Next come the soldiers, charged with implementing the decisions of the rulers. Last come the farmers and the craftsmen, who live by those decisions, pursuing the necessary tasks of keeping the material support of the city flourishing. In order to ensure that members of each class would obligingly perform their respective tasks, with no thought of destabilizing the society by trying to jump into a class for which their natures don’t suit them, Plato proposed that the people all be told the myth that there are different metals mixed into their constitution. The rulers have an admixture of gold, the soldiers silver, and the farmers and craftsmen bronze. He himself puts the suggestion for the noble lie forward with some embarrassment. Noble lies, of one sort or another, have gone on to have a long history in governments, both democratic and not, such as to vindicate Plato’s embarrassment. Still, it is an important and thorny question, both moral and political, whether governments—or individuals, for that matter—are ever justified in lying, and if so under which conditions.
Plato at the Googleplex Page 15
