A post by Maynard
Are you familiar with Plato’s Cave? I’m not really making a political point here. But when I heard Tammy talk about the insular world of the Beltway, the cave allegory came to mind. Click “More” for a bit of basic philosophy.
The Cave is a famous thought-experiment. It’s one of those fundamental ideas you ought to know about. I’ll borrow the Wikipedia overview:
Plato (428 BC – 348 BC) imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.
This highlights a limitation we all experience in one way or another: Our environment both nurtures us and limits our perceptions. The Washington elite seem out of touch with real people living real lives. But that knife cuts both ways. Just because the elite sneer at dumb yokels like me doesn’t necessarily mean I should sneer back. Of course I want to grab these aggressive nincompoops by their throats until they realize they’re not allowed to run my life. At the same time (and this is either my great strength or my worst weakness), I’m wondering what it is that I, too, might be blind to. We all have our limitations.
Socrates (469 BC – 399 BC) went on to speculate about the fate of a cave dweller who was released from his bonds.
Suppose that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up. If someone were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees.
Suppose further, Socrates says, that the man was compelled to look at the fire: Wouldn’t he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: Wouldn’t the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn’t he be distressed and unable to see “even one of the things now said to be true”, that is, the shadows on the wall?
And it would be even worse if the freed man returned to enlighten his erstwhile compatriots.
Were he to return there, wouldn’t he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? Wouldn’t it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it’s not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on the man who attempts to release and lead them up, wouldn’t they kill him?
Every era has its political correctness and its thought police. Anyone that challenges the tenets of the latest dogma, whether for good reason or bad reason, is in for a rough time.
Every wannabe-philosopher has a take on Plato’s cave. Some argue that the Matrix movies derive from the concept of the Cave. Now you can join the fun.
These people have created this neat 3-minute stop-motion video to introduce the Cave:
Great post Maynard as usual. I also thought of the allegory when Tammy spoke of the basement people coming into the sunlight. Which also brought into mind Plato’s problem with democracy. When on a ship at sea during a storm whom do you want at the helm? The most popular (Urkel), or the most qualified (Palin)?
What would Dobie Gillis think? hmmm
I guess I have a more cynical view of the cave and our role in this allegory. I see the vast majority of the American people as the prisoners in the cave. All we can see is what we are allowed by the “powers that be.” They stoke the fire and they know the end game and how things are really being run — the levels of corruption. Some of us are fortunate enough to escape our bonds and begin to see what is really going on. Unfortunatley, when we go back to the cave to tell the others, they aren’t able or ready to hear the truth. We the freed just have to be careful not to fall under the spell of the fire stokers and keep trying to find a way to bust the others out of the cave. We just have to stay focused and hope that the “powers that be” don’t find a way to prevent us from doing that.
Maynard,
While imprisoned cave dwellers are themselves free to interpret these Rorschach images in whatever way they wish the properties of combustion and the principles that direct the dance of light and shadow are forever bound by the immutable laws of physics. The truly wise man or woman recognizes where his or her sphere of influence begins and ends. Newton could posit a theory explaining why the apple fell upon his head but he had no power to make it fall skyward instead. Copernicus, for a time anyway, shattered the illusion that Man and his domain are the center of the Universe. In our current self-centered age there is much confusion between perception and reality and very little tolerance for alternate world views. If only each of us could learn like Harper Lee’s Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird about the power of empathy and compassion by standing in another person’s shoes as she ultimately did upon Boo Radley’s porch. So we all must struggle to turn away from the narrow prism of our own perspective to understand that others see different shadows upon the wall. To do this we must abandon our biases and discard the filthy spectacles that society’s stereotypes use to blind us to the uniqueness of the individual. Even reputedly wise leaders and scholars and jurists sometimes fail to cast off these chains that so tightly lock our gaze upon distant shadows. But we too must recognize the painful echo of the shackles that not only figuratively but once literally bound the ancestors of some to an inconceivably dehumanizing theft of their individuality that, like our own, was bestowed upon us by our common Creator.
Yes I love the writings of Plato, only a very limited amount of people think in philosophical terms anymore, we have comletely lost all philosophical forms of thought/discourse. Now we are becoming just one big giant collective thought process lacking in creative, individual thought, this is not philosophical it is a rigid tyrannical abstract type of thinking that is being imposed on creative individuality.
We’ve got to impose some common values (e.g., Thou shalt not murder), but it’s gotten out of hand when we’re down to the level of “Thou shalt not offend anyone.” Wisdom is having a sense of what to tolerate. Trouble is, we seem to be on something of a “Thou shalt not be wise” jag.
plato’s cave could also easily be used by people like gates- he’s the one freed from the restraints ( because he’s such a genius certainly and REALLY very important and enlightened)to seeing racism- everyone else is an inherently racist western european or an uncle tom blind to ‘the truth’.
perhaps because of my ethnicity and religious beliefs i find myself, when thinking of the current political situation (which horrifies me ) and the left’s casting of thought not actions as being subject to governmental censure and near criminalization, turning to the rise of nazi germany and one of it’s very favorite philosophers -friedrich nietzsche.
” all things are subject to interpretation. whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power, not truth.”
reality has nothing whatsoever to do with some profound universal truth hovering out there for only the wise ones to break free and see- every meaning is subject to who has the Power capital P not to the Truth capital T. it’s not lack of education, lack of ‘ light/fire’, lack of perception, lack of empathy that keeps people from seeing, understanding. it’s who is the daddy or you are the daddy. most people are just trying to survive- to go along as easy and seamlessly as possible with as little personal discomfort as possible- and that includes avoiding ostracism from groups of other humans particularly those with power over one. ostracism is the slippery slope to eradication. power determines ‘ truth’ and can right well determine survival .
the second quote that chills me to the core in this vein comes from a holocaust survivor. it is a constant reminder to me that we must remain eternally vigilant and vocal no matter what. you can’t look away even though it hurts your eyes. a democracy is only as true and strong as its adherence to protecting not abridging the innate rights of humans. those with power have to be kept constantly in check- the Constitution is the daddy not whomever is POTUS or speaker of the house at a given time.
“Concentration camp existence … taught us that the whole world is really like a concentration camp… There is no crime a man will not commit in order to save himself. And having saved himself, he will commit crimes for increasingly trivial reasons; he will commit them first out of duty, then out of habit and finally- pleasure…The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power…”-Tadeusz Borowski
of course the nazis were socialists….