Social media lit up last month when a Texas A&M philosophy professor reported that he had been told to remove certain readings from Plato’s Symposium from a course in order to comply with the university’s prohibition against “topics related to sexual orientation or gender ideology.” Conversations online and headlines in the news media ranged from outrage at the famous Greek philosopher being “banned” or “censored,” to mockery of the right’s complaints that “Western Civilization” is being neglected in the academy. What, after all, could be more central to “Western Civilization” than the philosopher about whom Alfred North Whitehead famously wrote “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” The American Association of University Professors, an organization that advocates for academic freedom, noted as much in its objection to this policy, which, they wrote, “denies students the opportunity to engage critically with the foundations of Western thought.”
I share this outrage at the university’s policy but hesitate to laugh at the absurdity of this latest example of conservative hypocrisy. As I argue in my new book, The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate(Yale), Plato is indeed foundational to Western thought, but not in a way we should celebrate. Most people associate Plato with sophisticated ideas and an insistence on truth, but many of his ideas have a much darker legacy than that. The ideal city described in the Republic, probably Plato’s most influential work,practices infanticide on deformed children and seeks to control human reproduction so that the “best” people only reproduce with each other, a passage beloved by early 20th century eugenicists. Plato’s Socrates argues that when Greeks are at war with Greeks they should treat each other like human beings but that when Greeks are at war with “barbarians” they should think nothing of destroying their homes and enslaving them, a distinction chillingly reminiscent of the ideologies that dehumanized Africans to legitimize their enslavement.
And Plato’s dialogues advocate for societies organized around allegedly natural hierarchies, of the old over the young, strong over the weak, and the wise over the foolish. Sure, it might sound appealing to live in a society ruled by the wisest people, but when Plato’s Socrates compares women with civic rights to livestock that have been allowed to wander out of their pens, we do well to remember that aristocracies like those Plato celebrates always establish themselves in power through violence and then declare their members to be wise. Even the allegory of the cave — so often regarded as a parable of liberation from superstition — is better understood as a political myth intended to justify the ruling class’s self-serving contempt for those who they claim are incapable of full participation in the governance of the state. It’s great to be one of the few who escape the cave, but Plato makes very clear that most people have to stay there.
If Plato has been foundational to Western thought, it’s because so many of his ideas justify those aspects of “Western Civilization” that the right doesn’t talk about explicitly but that, historically, have contributed the most to the domination of the rest of the world by “the West”: social and economic inequality, concentration of power in the hands of a few, and contempt for and exploitation of outsiders. Texas A&M has said that Plato will be taught “in a variety of courses this semester” and in the future. I believe them, because Plato, as he has traditionally been taught, serves the current administration’s politics extremely well.
I’m not suggesting we cancel Plato from the left: far from it. Students should absolutely be studying Plato. But they should be studying him as a case-study in how brilliant thinkers cloak anti-democratic ideologies in impressive-sounding ideals and in how powerful people throughout history have used the prestige of such thinkers to legitimize their regimes. But it’s this kind of critical reading of Plato, and “Western Civilization” more generally, that our current administration cannot tolerate, because it exposes them as the authoritarians they are.
