Mandy, Morality and Mythopoeicism

I can’t put off blogging about Plato any longer. Why? In a nutshell, Plato was all about morality, and everyone these days is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein, who was all about living a most immoral life, as was Peter Mandelson, the aptly dubbed Prince of Darkness. Once UK Deputy PM, UK Ambassador to the US and (still) a peer of the realm, Mandelson was successively promoted and protected by Blair, Brown and Starmer, who are tainted by association.

Yet Boris ate cake, and I can’t find many Boris-critics venting the same level of rage against the Labour hierarchy as they vested on him. For eating cake. I ask you. Get a grip. This madness even stretched in my direction when I voiced support for the blond bombshell for pragmatic, proportionate purposes. On the other hand, for partisan, prejudiced purposes, Private Eye and other red media are still trying to deflect flack, or at least dilute it, away from the lewd Left and towards Nigel Farage, the left’s (and remoaners’) post-Boris nemesis. In such a warped morality play, rubbing shoulders with billionaires, because they’re billionaires, is more immoral than consorting with a millionaire sex trafficker because he’s a sex trafficker.

Life used to be simpler once. Good was good, and bad was bad. It was all very tidy. Like my mind used to be: rude, but tidy. One example of my tidy mind was my assumption that the Ancient Greeks invented philosophy in the sixth century BC (Before Christ, none of this non-Christian BCE nonsense) which, like scientific knowledge, improved, expanded and progressed ever outwards and upwards over the centuries towards a more reliable ‘truth’ and understanding. Before science and philosophy, there were fanciful myths and religions. That was it. See? Neat and tidy.

Then I started campaigning and delving and blogging and PhuDding and experimenting with ideas and mixing with the wrong crowd and whaddya know? The world aint so tidy anymore, and it’s got a helluva lot ruder. There are now a plethora of ideas, theories and arguments messing with my head, which is no longer tidy, and my way of thinking is no longer compartmentalised. For example, while PhuDding, I consciously and rationally separated then reconfigured the relationship between myth, religion, philosophy and science. I started in the ‘cradle of civilisation’ over 5,000 years ago. Whether this was Ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia (mainly modern-day Iraq) isn’t that important. They each have valid claims to that title, advancing as they did in different ways with technology, e.g. architecture and engineering, and culture, e.g. artistic subject matter and content. What they had in common was how they approached the big puzzles of the day: Why was there a flood/drought/epidemic? How did the world come into being? Why do we die / What happens to our ‘life’? Their approach has been dubbed ‘mythopoeic’ or myth-making that involves polytheism, causality and man’s inseparable existence from the natural world and society. The resultant ‘explanations’ aren’t as we in the modern world understand that term; they are speculative complex images that intertwine the nature of the universe, function of the state and values of life, including morality. They have their own era-appropriate logic that isn’t, well, appropriate any more. Or maybe it is. Keep reading.

Specifically regarding morality in Ancient Egypt, ‘good’ behaviour meant maintaining stability in daily life: no displays of anger or argument. “Behaviour was a social skill as much as a virtue” (www.historyandmyths.com). In that case, because I meet anger with humour (unless I’m pushed too far) and parry argument with the mother of all put-downs, when my time comes I’ll be sitting on the right hand of Maggie while looking down on the stokers of Satan-Starmer fires and saying, “I told you so.”

Meanwhile in Mesopotamia, different social classes were subject to different moral codes; in all cases the focus was on not angering the gods. This moral framework, which included legal protocols complete with 'an eye for an eye’, influenced legal and ethical systems in later civilizations. Under such a regime in the 21st century, an ‘eye for an eye’ should mean that Boris is deprived of cake, while Mandelson should be dispossessed of his manhood. Judging by that photo of him in his underwear, that’s a very small punishment.

Fast-forward to Ancient Greece where philosophy was ‘invented’: explanations had to sufficiently conform with observation, experience and deductive logic, outweighing speculation and imagination. I’m guessing ‘philosophy’ was an intellectual evolution not a revolution, a nightly shooting-the-breeze-down-the-pub kind of thing rather than a sudden paradigm shift. The Ancient Greeks were great traders and borrowed lots of mysticisms, maths and architecture from their trading partners. It was only a matter of time before they began to wonder about an underlying reason for it all. What is real and why? How do we accumulate knowledge? How are language and knowledge linked? What is good / bad and how do we / should we judge? In answer to the big question, ‘What is reality made of?’ Greek scholars surmised that there was more to reality than what could be seen. Thales of Miletus in about 600BC, credited with being the first philosopher, claimed that everything is made of water.  About 50 years later, Anaximenes said everything was made of air. At which time, the phrase ‘don’t hold your breath’ was first uttered.

As can be seen, philosophy (what is real) and science (what is reality made of) were kind of one and the same discipline. The split between the two came with Francis Bacon at about the turn of the 17th century when, for scientific inquiry, he advocated empirical observation over cerebral theorizing and speculative thought. Since then, science has progressed in leaps and bounds as mentioned above. And philosophy? This discipline hasn’t so much progressed as changed, bloated, multiplied, merged and separated, co-existed, harked backwards … and is probably responsible for more insidious creep than any nefarious scientific development: one of the biggest creeps of the lot being Critical Theory (vying for top spot with Mandelson).

Per Wiki, Critical Theory is a philosophical perspective which argues that knowledge, truth, and social structures are fundamentally shaped by power dynamics between dominant and oppressed groups. Many commentators, argue that CT has led directly to the demonisation and persecution of aspiration, elitism, the nuclear family, agriculture, non-compliant academic thought, freedom of expression, Western values, and even Western science. CT feeds on scientific, historical and contextual ignorance and wilful misinterpretation, societal envy, guilt complexes, intellectual torpidity, and moral grandstanding confused with moral cowardice. In this respect, philosophy hasn’t so much gone backwards as dug itself, and civilised society, into an early grave.

As for those earlier civilisations, I mentioned above that Egyptian/Mesopotamian mythopoeic thought intertwined various concepts, including morality. It was morality, or ‘how best to live’ or ‘what is a good life’ that was at the heart of Plato’s philosophy and makes him as relevant today as he was 2,500 years ago. As a teen, I didn’t get that. In class we read extracts from The Republic, discussed them under the direction of a teacher, and therein lies the problem. I went to an all-girls’ school where most of the teachers were peri-, full-on or post-menopausal, hadn’t had a good jump in over 20 years and took their frustrations out on the kids.

Discussing Plato today, with a wide spectrum of ages, professions, educations, and genders (all two of them), is far more enjoyable and enlightening. I joined a discussion group I heard about when I signed up to one of my new organisations last year, ‘The Academy of ideas’. It does what it says on the tin: it fosters public debate and free speech, and encourages open discussion on controversial topics and contemporary issues. Plato is therefore a shoo-in. His Republic explores justice in the individual and the state, morality, politics, and human nature, and presents a vision of an ideal society. His "Ring of Gyges", which inspired Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, is an allegory that examines human nature and morality. The question asked is:
Does man act justly because he wants to do what is right, or because he fears retribution if he does what he really wants to do and act unjustly?

The discussion group suggested a 21st-century version of this question:
Does man act justly because he wants to be seen to be doing what is right, or because he doesn’t want to be seen to be not acting at all or acting unjustly?

‘Acting justly’ or virtuous living, according to Plato, entailed true knowledge, which he differentiated from ‘opinion’. Knowledge is truth, which is eternal and unchanging, whereas opinion is subjective, changeable and therefore unreliable. This differentiation inspired a further iteration of the Ring of Gyges question to:
If man acts unjustly in pursuit of an outcome that in his opinion is just, is he in fact acting justly, or is he a jackass?

Such a consequentialist train of thought directly from Plato could almost have been written by Niccolò Machiavelli (early 16th century) who did almost write, ‘The ends justify the means’.

Plato’s fingerprints can again be seen in Thomas Hobbes’ social contract theory (mid-17th century). In one of his ‘dialogues’, Plato argues for the obligation to obey the laws of Athens, suggesting a form of social contract where individuals consent to the laws that govern them, which in turn provide the structure for their lives and society. This reflects the idea that individuals have a moral obligation to uphold the agreements that form the basis of their community. I would argue that individuals (the electorate) in Britain have not agreed to two-tier systems of laws that 1) prioritise the ‘feelings’ of some communities over the feelings and more importantly the rights of individuals and other communities, and 2) protect powerful allies or dangerous adversaries (e.g. Mandelson, Rayner, Reeves, Hamas, antisemitic police constables). There is therefore no actual agreement, or social contract, that Brits are morally obliged to uphold. Anarchy, Baby!

By referring issues throughout history back to Plato – in the context of what preceded him – we can see a) how he presaged much, and b) where we could learn from him by extrapolating his teachings. His big break from mythopoeic thought was his stance that knowledge was truth and opinion wasn’t. Critical Theorists take note. 

He also moved away from trying to appease the gods, towards a more community/societal-minded ‘we’re all in this together’ morality framework. Sometimes it feels like we’ve returned to the time of mythopoeicism, where leaders think they’re gods, dragons eat the sun, unicorns fart methane, and jumping spiders cure cancer.

Regardless of what he believed or tried to figure out, it was Plato's didactic method of teaching and learning that should be indispensable in these neo-mythopoeic times. He emphasized the questioning of even his own standpoint, i.e. critical thinking. Ironically, adherents of Critical Theory eschew critical thinking, which is part of their problem. In The Republic and the (imagined) dialogues between his master Socrates and intellectual protagonists, he would literally set Socrates up for a fall in order to tease out advancements in ideas. In this way, Plato made progress towards understanding what was a ‘good’ (as in ‘moral’) life. The sad thing is, too many people today – Blair, Brown, Starmer, Mandelson, McSweeney, Rayner, Sturgeon, antisemites, striking doctors, Polanski (he’s celebrating the fracturing of a police officer’s spine) – have no interest in living a 'good' life. These immoral miscreants are not interested in Plato’s aspirational virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice, preferring instead mob rule, echo chambers, soundbites, spin, punishing ideology, self-preservation and nest-feathering.

To dig our civilisation out of this early grave, Joe Public needs to be properly informed. For that, we need to get back to basics, to a classical education (someone give Bridget Phillipson smelling salts) where Plato is taught, or at least his didactic method applied, in every school, college, apprenticeship, training programme and continuing professional education. This should instil in everyone the confidence and ability to think for themselves and question everything.

Labour’s worst nightmare.