32 - Idealism part two

Welcome to Reductio Adventures and Ideas. I'm your host, Andrew Lavin. Reductio is a show about philosophy, about ideas, and about understanding ourselves and our world more clearly. Brought to you by Inverted Spectrum Media.

Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Michael Fitzpatrick about idealism. So the...

First part, we kind of laid out a common conception of what idealism is. And then we started to address a couple of concerns and idealism or ideal theory versus non-ideal theory and tried to... make sense of what are non-ideal theorists picking up on when they distinguish themselves from ideal theorists and what sort of critiques of idealism or ideal theory are fair and what sort of... critiques are not fair, or maybe are fair only of certain practitioners of idealism or ideal theory.

And in this next episode, we'll sort of talk about maybe a little bit more practically about how do you actually... engage with political decision-making and political movements and political deliberation. And I hope you enjoy.

Okay, good. So this kind of leads us into this analogy that I think is really, really helpful for thinking through. these issues and the relationship between you know maybe idealism and pragmatism or ideal theory versus non-ideal theory um And I know it's an analogy that we've both kind of taken quite seriously in our own thinking through these issues. We actually mentioned it in our Rawls episode. You mentioned this analogy.

The analogy of basically like being on a landscape, right? And it's helpful because quite literally, right, navigating... navigating where to go as a society or a community or a nation or a state is navigating a terrain. Right. There are ways to go. There's paths you could follow that would lead in one direction and paths you could follow that would lead in another direction. And if you're like me, then you think.

You know, there are paths that can lead you in the wrong direction and in a bad direction. And there are paths that could lead you in the or a right direction or a good direction, better and worse directions and things like that.

And I think this is a helpful analogy, partially because it makes relatively clear one kind of worry that I have nagging me in the back of my mind. And it's a kind of... There's a sort of anti-idealism I have, just sort of intuitively. And what that looks like, I think, ends up looking like you're on this terrain. You want to get going uphill, right? And there's a sort of epistemological concern about your immediate environment, right? If we go this direction, then...

We're not totally sure where that's going to lead us. Right. If we introduce ranked choice voting, what is that going to do to our society? It's not it's not obvious. Right. It might it might be good. It might be bad. It might empower.

certain people that we didn't expect it to empower like you know it will it will move us one step in the immediate vicinity and it might be the case that actually the way to get to our ideal so i don't think i would reject the idea of ideals but i'm still a little skeptical of exactly what an ideal looks like and all that kind of stuff we'd have to flesh that out but

You know, if we want to move in a direction that is at least more ideal than where we are now, we might have to go downhill before we go uphill. And if we focus just on going uphill... we might end up on, um, what in like, I, I think what you would call in topology, I'm not like an expert on this, but I think you would call like a local maxima, maximum, or the plural would be local maxima, like where you're on a little foothill, right?

And if you focus on going uphill, you're going to end up at the top of the foothill. And then anywhere you have to go from there is down. But if you want to get to the mountain top, then you have to go down through valleys and things like that.

And so navigating these terrains are difficult. And also the terrain is not well lit. It's dark. It's difficult to know where to go. And so there's like sort of just as a matter of like how to carry out politics and political moves and political discourse, there's a part of me that really strongly feels like we just have to make a step. And then survey the landscape around us and see what did that do for us? Because we don't know antecedently.

How to get it's like we're never in Moses's position where we're actually at the mountaintop and we're actually seeing the route to the promised land. We're actually in a situation where we're like, OK, I know that we want to get. over there on the other side of the or the the senai desert right

And so I know we got to go in that direction. And I know in the meantime, it's going to be kind of hard. Once we get there, we're going to have to do a whole new survey. We're going to have to like figure out what's going on. And along the way, we're going to have challenges that are going to arise that we didn't. anticipate and all that kind of stuff so that's i i think where some of my

Where I kind of think of myself as a bit of a pragmatist sometimes, as opposed to maybe an idealist, is the idea that we can't know ahead of time where we're headed and what the path is. Oftentimes we just have to make a step.

and then survey the local terrain from there because we'll be in a totally different situation then. Well, that's a lovely picture. And I think the first thing to say is, at least some of the time, that is true. There's... countless examples from human history where we found ourselves in situations where it's just not at all clear what we should do i'm thinking of course of the French insurgency inside of Vichy, France in 1942-43.

This is before the Allies got an organized plan to liberate France, and you have just these people on the underground who are carrying out terrorist insurgency. and are incredibly anxious about what they should be doing because they just have no idea how in the world to oppose this incredible war machine that has dominated their country. So I do think it's important, and I think Plato himself is explicit about this, to say that just because there are ideals doesn't mean we...

always have access to them. And I think the kind of trial and error methodology you're describing to just do something is... Probably a perfectly good approach to that kind of a situation. I think the question I would ask is... Even in the situation you described, so we're completely lost, visibility is bad, we don't even know north, south, east, and west, that kind of a thing, right?

Isn't it still the case that there are ideals structuring the background of the example? I mean, it doesn't seem like you're contemplating a suicide. as a response. And that suggests to me that there's still an ideal of maintaining our survival. long enough to reconstitute some kind of life, right?

And what Plato wants to say is, well, suppose you do your trial and method error and you get to a point to where you all like have your bearings and can go somewhere where you can form a community again. What's the point of that? What's that for? And he wants to say that if the trial and error method itself is to be justified, it has to be because...

You're trying to get to a place where you can form a just society, where you can instantiate the good. If that ideal is not at least somewhere in the background. Then what's the point of the trial and error method? And I'd be curious to know what you would say to that. Yeah, so I think I'm, you know, this is sort of where I...

have started to think my like considered opinion has started to be that these these things actually just sort of collapse into one another to a certain extent like to be a real political pragmatist is just like I guess just to like care about your own political career or something, you know, it's like, Oh, this is a thing I could do and it would get me votes or something. You know, it's like, that's like a real pure pragmatist is like someone who has no ideals at all. And just.

does what seems prudent at the time, given some... really empty goals they have in mind of like gaining more political power for its own sake or something like that you know it's just like that's what a pure pragmatist is and then a pure idealist I guess on the other end of the spectrum is someone who has you know written written works of fiction about their ideal society and never even considers...

how to get from here to there never even considers whether their ideal like actually addresses all the concerns that all different types of people are going to have and and meets the needs of all different kind of people you know it's like that's a really bad idealist And there's a really bad pragmatist. And then everyone else is like somewhere in the middle and is actually has ideals of some kind and also cares about what the next step is.

Right. And so I think a lot of you and I like went back and forth a lot over like, I was kind of like, I don't know if I buy idealism and I'm like kind of like pragmatism, blah, blah, blah. And I've like come to think most of. Most of what we were actually arguing about is like concrete things that we actually concretely wanted to do. So the conversation ends up being about, A, maybe different ideals.

But I think that's actually less common. I think the most common disagreement ends up just being about how do you get from here to the ideal? Because most of the time we all basically agree on a lot of ideal. things, even, you know, maybe I can out you as a skeptic of democracy, but I still think you believe in a lot of democratic ideals, right? And so you still, I mean, I should say. I share a lot of your skepticism, and that's part of why I think...

you know, there's a sense in which we're both sort of people who accept democratic ideals. Then there's a question of like, how do we actually flesh it out? How do we actually get from here to there? What's the next step? And those are far more challenging and stuff like that. But I do think... most reasonable people actually do agree on a lot of the ideals a lot of the time and actually have ideals that they want to uphold.

Just just like I think a lot of people who detract from liberalism are angry at the actual versions of liberalism that come about rather than like, you know.

It's very clear that things that John Locke say and things that Thomas Jefferson say give you a society where there is no slavery, right? Even though they were both slave owners and might have even... written some stuff that was kind of pro-slavery or or at least you know sympathetic to um the status quo when it came to slavery and stuff like that but it's like

But we all basically agree on the ideals of basic human equality and what a basically good human life looks like and that it doesn't look like being a slave, you know.

Yeah, let me. So I share that view, too. I think as Rawls formulated in a theory of justice, ideal theory and non-ideal theory should be two halves of one whole. I think the problem is Rawls didn't practice that. But I do think that the things that non-ideal... theorists raise as concerns are excellent concerns. They should be incorporated into our ideals. So I'll give a quick example here. I think war is evil.

And that the only ideal we can have is peace. But I'm not a pacifist. I consider myself... an anti-war non-pacifist, which means I do think that sometimes we have to fight war to make peace possible. And so this is what you were describing when you said sometimes we have to go downhill to go uphill. Yeah, it's a great example. But Plato's way of thinking about this is... You have to, if you're going to fight a war, you have to fight a war in a way that makes peace a live possibility afterwards.

Yeah, that that's the I think where pragmatists and idealists have sometimes gotten into a fight is pragmatists will sometimes fall into a by any means necessary trap. Right. Which we might describe as realism. As realists, sure. Absolutely. Yeah, political realists are like that. And again, I think political realists have their uses. But... What Plato wants to enjoin is that our ideals shape our means.

And that, I think, it's not that he was against pragmatism. In fact, I have a quote I hope we can end with that I think shows he was the ultimate pragmatist. But it's that if you believe there is a form of the good that should shape any particular set of relationships, that means you can't go about realizing that ideal just in any particular way. Right. You have to pursue a certain course of action that will make the ideal possible on the other end of the action. Right.

And that's really it. I am open to almost any pragmatic proposal that meets that condition. And I think a lot of my disagreements over the years have been with proposals that I look at them and I think, but wait a minute, is that going to make, is that going to bring us closer to the ideal on the other end? Because if not, then I start to ask again, where are we going? Yeah. So I was thinking that there are sort of two, there are two types of means you could take.

that I can think of in the moment that would make accomplishing better things later on more difficult. And so one of those things is the sort of... to flip the common phrase on its head to let the good become the enemy of the perfect or something like that, right? Where if you're like... This happens all the time in politics. It happens all the time in deciding voting and things like that of just like, let's, you know, we have this very like non-ideal law that's just.

messy and difficult and maybe it's too baroque or maybe it's maybe it's too simplistic and it doesn't accomplish but it's at least doing something right so you can imagine We finally get something to make some moves towards establishing common sense gun control or something like that. But it's just like we know it's not going to work and it's not quite going to work.

the right way. It's not going to accomplish the full thing. And so maybe we should hold out for something different. If we do go ahead and vote for it, we might... have exhausted all the political capital that we have for gun control and then in two years when we go back to try to do more gun control everyone's like we already did that like we we already figured out gun control or whatever let's move on to a different

thing when the people who deeply care about gun control reforms and things like that are going to be left without any options at that point because we've sort of exhausted the political capital. You run the risk in the opposite direction, right? If we vote something like that down, then it's like, well, we put gun control in front of you and you voted no on it.

That's happened in California a number of different times when it came to like certain kinds of, you know, just sort of consumer protection laws and stuff. It's like, well, we put it in front of you and you all voted no when a lot of people voted no because it wasn't. a very good law you know and it wasn't actually a referendum on the issue itself so that's one thing is the the good being the enemy of the perfect and then the other thing that you could do is is where you

I think the war example is one example. Just like the scorched earth thing where you go so far as to exclude certain people from... political discourse or even from like the goods offered by society so that you've effectively excluded them from society and then they don't go away and they're still there.

Right. And, you know, maybe there's a sort of analogy with the Civil War. I don't know. I'd be kind of timid about making that not knowing, not being a historian and not knowing, but, you know, sort of like. Well, let me give you. Let me give you a pithy phrase that we can play with here. That's a very sharp way to make the point. Yeah. Genocide is an excellent way to make peace. Yeah. And...

No non-ideal theorist is going to advocate that. Why? And it's because we don't think peace by the annihilation of those who are causing you antagonism actually is a realization of the ideal of peace. We think, no, peace means everybody who's here right now forming a healthy set of relations with each other. Mm hmm. Right. Yeah. No, that's a that's a great example of, you know, at the end of the day, you either, you know, you either separate and then form, you know, a sort of.

allyship with a different country that you don't. you're not in the same country with which i have not let go of the the possibility that that's the right thing to do actually but uh right i would say i haven't ruled it out i guess is what i should say or you have to make peace You have to find a way to live together and to make a society together.

It's not obvious what the right move is, but what the wrong move is is to, you know, go to war or, you know, attempt genocide or attempt to just so marginalize one.

point of view that those people aren't actually invited into the community they're just shoved aside and made irrelevant as as tempting like i mean every day i have that fantasy right of just shoving people to the side and not just not acknowledging them because they seem to me to be so irrelevant from things that truly matter but I also you know the angels of my better nature like remind me every day also that that's like not

the way you can actually achieve lasting peace. Yeah, some quick Plato things here as we just wrap this up that I think are, again, show how practical and relevant Plato was. Again, Plato's watchword is if it's not good for all, it's not good. I think that radical... sense of inclusion is a political vision that we would really benefit from. Another thought is that the thing that everybody has missed in Plato is that...

different contexts are going to manifest the good in different ways. He is not proposing or encouraging a one size fits all solution. He's saying, Justice in your context, which might look different than justice in my context, is still justice. That's the crucial thing. It's something in common, even though the...

contextual details are distinct. And, and that way I, in my context can advocate for justice for you and you and your context can advocate for justice for me because it's the same universal form. even though the pragmatic on the ground practice of it is going to require different strategies.

He has this great passage where he says, this is at the very beginning of the laws, he says, you know, the real difficulty is to make political systems reflect in practice the trouble-free perfection of theory. So... He just comes right out and says it. And he says the human body is probably a parallel. One cannot rigidly prescribe a given prescription or medicine.

for a given body because any regime will invariably turn out in some respects to injure our bodies at the same times as it helps them and others. So he's acknowledging that like... you know, these contextual sensitivities are intrinsic to the political situation. And I think we've created this kind of extremism where we say either there's a one size fits all ideal. Or we say, screw the ideal and just do what works. And Plato is saying, no, be somebody who contemplates the form of the good.

So that you have the wisdom to know what the good looks like in your situation. Right. Yeah. And I kind of started thinking about this conversation. I was thinking like, I feel like I'm kind of the Aristotle to your Plato a lot of the time. And I think in exactly the same way that Aristotle and Plato are actually not that far from each other when you like really drill down on what. what their philosophical pictures are and look like there's some key differences and like i'm not

not denying that they're distinct, but they're also, in the grand scheme of things, they're quite close to one another in a lot of ways. And I think that's true here where one of my skepticisms comes from... A Aristotle plus Wittgenstein kind of approach to these things where I think ideals almost can't be truly transcendent from. the things for which they're ideal so like ideals arise out of the practices and the and the the concrete realities

for which their ideals. And a certain, I am completely open to this being like an unfair caricature of Plato, but I'll invent this caricature where...

It's like Plato thinks that in the same way that like the definition for triangle has nothing to do with actual triangles in the real world, right? It's sort of like the definition for triangle floats out in... geometrical heaven completely distinct from real attempts at making triangles in the real world and we can use these you know concrete attempts at triangles to try to learn things about geometry but

At the end of the day, we're like using these sort of pale reflections of real geometry or something. And I think politics doesn't... work that way or maybe can't work that way because politics has to arise out of and be sort of embedded in the concrete realities that we are we find ourselves in And so the idea that one of my professors at UCLA, Gavin Lawrence, used to say was things like, there's no Archimedean point out there. So there's no like, there's no point.

outside of the reality that we're in that's pointing us as like this is the ideal what the ideal is is something that arises directly out of what we're doing and and i think It's kind of the picture you're giving of Plato actually is not, you know, if you want to know what a citizen is, then let's like define in the way that you define a triangle. what a citizen is, completely divorced from the actual behavior of real citizens. No, you actually look at what is a citizen, what is a citizen for?

And then your picture of what the ideal citizen is arises out of looking at real societies and... the the way that real people interact in a society it doesn't arise out of just like the axioms you have that you derive a theorem that is this is what a citizen is or something like that and it's completely

divorced from concrete reality right and and so i think when i think of aristotle versus plato perhaps unfairly sometimes i think of this dialectic between someone who thinks the The ideals and the real world is out there. At an infinitesimal point, like, you know, in geometry, it's like, you know, sort of this point way out there that an Archimedean point that we can use to orient based off of, but has very little.

to do with what we're actually doing here in the here and now. And the Aristotle I have in my mind is one who thinks that functions and ideals and what things are for is embedded in... the reality that we're living in right now and embedded in the systems and the contexts that are actually happening here and and like in in the very real human nature that has has evolved over time of course that's not aristotle um but you know

the sort of Aristotelian idea I have. Yeah, so I'm not sure I've... articulated that the perfect way but that's kind of a vague idea of like where i think of there's like an aristotle and a plato and i think of myself more on the side of the aristotle even though i don't think of these as like these deeply

divided positions, you know. Well, I do think you've done something extremely useful, which is I think you've given voice to maybe the other side of the stereotype of Plato. We started this podcast discussion with... the stereotype of idealism. And I think this is the other side of that coin when it comes to Plato, which is the ideals are off and never, never land. And all we're, all we're.

poor pitiful humans are doing here as we're trying in vain to draw the perfect triangle. As is my want, I like to... Take all the standard tropes of contemporary Anglophone philosophy and turn them on their head. I think the real picture when you do the textual work... is almost the exact reverse. I think Aristotle is the one who has these pictures of natures that are really difficult to justify on empirical reality. So...

The obvious, the easiest one, for example's sake, is the opening of the politics, where Aristotle gives a non-racist defense of slavery. He thinks... Some people, not based on race, but based on other things, are just born to be slaves by nature. Plato doesn't make that mistake. He argues against the idea of slavery being inherent to anybody.

And in my view, my reading of Plato, he sows the seeds for an abolition of slavery. And I think the difference between them was precisely that Plato's methodology... was in all of those dialogues that he writes is to run a bunch of concrete thought experiments of what if we did it this way? What if we did it this way? And he's like doing the trial and error testing that you were talking about earlier.

And he doesn't buy into this idea that we're locked down to these predefined essences. To the contrary, he starts almost every dialogue by... throwing out a bunch of definitions and then calling them all into question. And as far as the heaven of forms idea that all these ideals are floating off somewhere and we just got to set our compass to the right thing. I think that has been a misunderstanding of a literary.

trope. Plato was a master literary writer. He comes up with all these wonderful allegories and mythologies and examples that are just so intuitive and so effective, but they are... are just literary devices. And I do not think that an accurate read of Plato is that he thinks there's like this other realm where these forms just float around. or something like that. And, you know, no Platonist that I know of who comes after Plato thinks that.

You know, maybe Plotinus. I don't know. Plotinus writes a lot of really weird things that I don't understand. But the vast majority of them don't think that. What they think is that Plato is trying to say... My hope here is to say something that really touches what you were calling your Aristotelian tendency. Plato is trying to say... That when you look at a particular concrete relationship, or in your example, a particular concrete political situation.

if we limit ourselves to saying what is possible is only what is what is what is there then we cut ourselves off from the possibility that the good of that situation is not what is currently happening. Right. And so all he's saying is that every relationship that exists... has a good, not just what it is, but what it could be if it were good. And that has nothing to do with something somewhere else that has to do with something.

that could be instantiated here but is not yet. So I think the spatial analogy actually misleads us. And we would be better to think of Plato's forms as being inherent in every relationship, but not reducible to the material facts of the relationship. Right. That's the right way to state Platonism. And once we see it that way, then we can absolutely say with you, ideals do emerge from the concrete situation.

but they are not bounded or determined by the concrete situation. And I think we want to say that if we want to make sure that the powerful don't get to define what the ideals are.

Right. Yeah, which I think is the picture that Aristotle should have arrived at. Right. Which is that, you know, if you look at a and I mean, just an organism, I think, is my favorite example when you're talking about Aristotle, which is you look at an organism, it is possible to. see that, you know, some things are not working, you know, to spec, that some things are not functioning properly. And it's possible to figure out like, okay, what would it be like if things were functioning properly?

And to do that isn't to draw up a blueprint of the organism. It's just to look at what's going on in the organism and look at what might be going wrong. You end up with a picture that's not totally dissimilar to a blueprint, but it is a sort of picture of, okay, this is what it would look like if everything was functioning well. Aristotle himself, I think, like you point out, ends up with misogynistic and, you know, for his day racist, even though they're not.

Like you point out, it's sort of anachronistic to call them racist, but he does have these sort of, like, ethnocentrist views and things like that. Like, he has bad views, and it's partially because he...

probably pays too close of attention to the way things are and is bounded in his imagination by the way things are. Whereas Plato... like you pointed out earlier in our conversation, believes very strongly that our imagination should not be bounded by, it should be informed by, but not bounded by.

the way things are right now. And so yeah, I think it's certainly if you look at their actual views on concrete things that still matter to us today, like... it's team plato all the way right he's the he's the feminist and he's the like you say maybe maybe sort of proto abolitionist and things like that like he he clearly has the right views on that

And Aristotle clearly has the wrong views on some of those things. And possibly because of, you know, maybe it's a lack of imagination or an imagination that gets too heavily bound up in... the way things are. And what we're imagining is not, gosh, I wish I could live in that perfect city in the clouds. Right. What we're imagining is, what if this city was closer to the good of this city than it currently is? Right. And with that, let me maybe wrap this up. I just want to read a few...

Plato passages for listeners to give people a sense, just in case I still have a few stragglers who think I've invented Plato, maybe the way Saul Kripke invented a Wittgenstein. Yeah. I actually want this to be a read of Plato that is faithful to the actual person and the actual text and not just what I want Plato to be. Yeah.

Plato has some letters in addition to his dialogues. And in one of his letters, he talks about his own activist work. A lot of people don't know that he wasn't just some airy fairy academic because there really wasn't such. a thing in his day. He actually engaged in several attempts to instantiate political reforms, both in Athens and in other places. And when he writes a letter where he talks about his... partnership with another politician to try to overthrow the tyranny in Sicily.

He says part of why he did it was, lest I appear to myself as a pure theorist unwilling to touch any practical task. So he's very much has in mind like it is not okay to just sit around and like come up with clever ideas and not try to bring them about. So he actually walked into Sicily with a copy of the Republic under his hand. determined to like do the thing. And so that gives us some sense that he really is imagining this as a set of practical proposals.

And that allows us to then draw our attention to book five of the Republic, where either Glaucon or Adiomantius, you know, they've been listening to this kind of construction of what the different aspects of the good society. are for and they say okay you know this all sounds nice but let's now try to convince ourselves that it is possible like to quote quote them you know

we're not going to let you off from telling us how it's possible for this type of a society to actually come into being. And... Socrates' response is really fascinating. This is book 5, 472c to 473b for those nerds who want to check my math here. He first says, well, just remember, contemplating ideals is good for its own sake. Whether or not we can bring these things about, like being the kinds of people who...

train ourselves to gaze upon the ideals is good for us, like for our soul. But then he goes on to say, And now I'm quoting, if we are able to discover how a city could come to be governed in a way that most closely approximates our description of the ideal. Let's say that we've shown what you've ordered us to show, namely that it's possible for our city to come to be.

So he's not saying, and Plato's view is not that we all have to go and instantiate the Republic as written. Rather, we just have to figure out what is possible that we can actually instantiate.

And that is the closest possible approximation to the thing. And then he goes on to say, then next it seems we should try to discover... and point out what's now badly done in cities that keeps them from being governed in that way, and what's the smallest change that would enable our city to reach our sort of constitution. One change, if possible. Or if not one, two. Or if not two, then the fewest a number and the least extensive.

So he's saying like, okay, yeah, we sit down and we figure out what's the closest approximation to the ideal. And then we figure out what's the steps that have to be taken to get from our current situation. To that closest possible approximation. This is right here in the heart of the Republic.

which is supposed to be Plato at his most ideal. No, it's Plato at his most practical. He's saying, here's the ideal. And now what we're going to spend the rest of the Republic doing is figuring out how we get from there to here. His point here is to say... that we have to differentiate between possibility and difficulty. Plato believes that the good society is possible, and he takes extensive pains throughout.

The Republic, the statesman, the laws to show that it's attainable. But sometimes I think we make impossible what is just hard to do. And what Plato draws somewhat of a hard line on is that sometimes doing the right thing is just hard. And so that's, that's the kind of note I wanted to end on here is saying like Plato is very clearly right here in the Republic, very sensitive to non-ideal conditions, very sensitive to pragmatic concerns, very sensitive to.

not just saying something that's true in theory, but could never be done. But he wants to push back and say, ask yourself, are you worried about the possibility of something? Or are you worried about the difficulty? Because... There are no roads to the good that aren't difficult. And I think that's a really striking thing to realize. Like we think about the civil rights movement from.

the Montgomery bus boycotts all the way until Johnson signs the civil rights act of 1964. Right. Like there's just, there are no roads open. There are no roads open to them that are not difficult. And so if the only roads of the ideal are difficult, we want to make sure that whatever pragmatism we bring in, which I'm all for, whatever non-ideal considerations we bring in, which I'm all for.

They don't have as a condition, well, let's do the things that aren't difficult. Right. Because if we do that, we give up the ideal. And the ideal is worth fighting for. Yeah. Amen to that.

So I want to bring up one thing because I think this is going to sort of nag in the minds of some listeners. But maybe we can keep this kind of brief because we've run...

We run short on time, but I do think one of the things that gets to me and I think gets to a lot of people... is so sometimes thinking too much about the ideal and what an ideal society looks like and even thinking too hard about how to get from here to the ideal can sometimes get in the way and rob attention from people who are suffering in the here and now and people

who are being oppressed and murdered and brutalized and killed and assaulted. And, you know, like people are suffering right now. And so I think my most resistant moments. to like sort of idealism or to this sort of picture of how to go about thinking about politics is thinking about like the very real cost of

different ways of moving forward. And I don't think this is necessarily like a challenge that you have to answer for, because I do think everyone is going to have this problem to a certain extent. Like it's not. It's like you say, all roads are difficult. All roads that lead in an even moderately good direction are difficult. Not even all roads that lead towards the ideal.

all roads are difficult and also all like basically whatever we do people are going to suffer as a result um and so i do think this is a problem that everyone faces I don't think it's really unique to the kind of picture that you're painting of Plato or the kind of idealism that you're...

you're defending here but I do think it like bears mentioning because this is the thing that keeps me up at night and it's the reason why I'm tempted to keep voting for really disappointing candidates and it's because I just can't bear to see people And I think, you know, I care so much about the individual people involved, maybe even to a detriment of actually getting us moving towards an ideal.

And I think there's a real tension there. So, yeah. Yes, I very much endorse everything you just said. I think... Plato's counsel. Let's put it that way. Plato's counsel is it is possible to be so concerned about suffering and to just want to do something that... what we do is we end up perpetuating the suffering while mitigating it. So there's a really wonderful book out right now by Matthew Desmond called Poverty by America.

in which he argues that the difference between the right and the left in America is just a difference between people who don't care about the poor on the right. and people who care about the poor in a way that just keeps them perpetually poor on the left. In other words, because they're so concerned about the suffering of the poor, they enact all these programs that keep the poor just helped enough to not like die.

but not enough to cease to be poor. And what Plato wants to say is absolutely, we should start from the suffering. That's going to be our first clue, like where to look for where the good needs to be instantiated. Right. But we need to have wisdom, which is a virtue. We need to have wisdom that says, here's the thing that's actually going to alleviate suffering rather than just make it not quite as bad.

but perpetuates it in the long run and he was not immune to this athens had been sacked by the i think it was the persian army and just utterly destroyed. The Greek states eventually repelled the invaders, but Athens paid an extremely high price. And that was one of the things he was thinking about. Like, whatever else happens, we've got to prevent foreign empires from just destroying entire city states. Like, this is horrible.

And so he was trying to come up with really practical proposals in the Republic on how to do that. And that shows, I think, a real sensitivity to suffering. But he wanted to make it so that it was a real solution. And not, you know, to use the common metaphor, a cure, not a bandaid.

I'm not saying we don't ever do Band-Aids. So yes, there might be temporary situations where a Band-Aid is the best you can do. Right. But if we are only ever putting Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids and we never get to a solution. Right.

That's when Plato wants to say it's time for a more radical politics. Yeah, I'd feel remiss if I didn't say that. I think the left in general. if they had their way, would not create a society where poor people are just taken care of enough.

to not be poor anymore i i think the there is no way to point to actual american policy as an indictment of the left of america the left wing of american politics because they've never gotten their way you know that's fair that's fair the leftmost president we've ever had is joe biden or maybe barack obama you know it's like these are not leftists now come on jimmy carter is jimmy carter yeah much further to the left

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I was thinking like in the recent years, I guess is what I was thinking, recent decades. But yeah, no, it's just like... Like these, these are not leftists. And also they, even they haven't had the resources to really enact the things they would want to do. And so that's fair. Yeah. I absolutely think that's fair.

But but I actually think your comments, you know, we got to have a little bit of disagreement here. Exactly. I think your comment shows the depth of Matthew Desmond's point, which is why then? Is the left not getting its way? Because... I don't know anybody who's more virulently in support of, you know, democratic institutions than the left. And I just want to say, like, Plato is not a Democrat, lowercase d, for a reason.

Because he doesn't think it is okay for a minority of the population to prevent the good being shared by all. And that is exactly what contemporary liberal democracies. So I'm not saying you're not right about the intent of the left or even the economic policies of the left. But I think there is a real unwillingness to be so radical as to ask.

Is there a tension between the type of political institutions the left supports and the economic policies the left supports? And if there is a tension there, what should we do about it? Plato has a very... clear set of suggestions i would love to i'd love to sell them some yeah yeah i i uh i'll i'll leave it there i think that's a good spot to leave it um

Michael Fitzpatrick, thank you so much for joining us. That was a super interesting conversation and I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom and your deep reading of Plato with us. This was super fun and I hope some... people are inspired to read Plato in a new light. And more practically, I hope people are inspired to dream beyond what they currently think is possible. Amen to that. Thank you to Michael Fitzpatrick. Thank you for listening.

As always, don't forget to like and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a review. Find us on Patreon if you'd like to financially support Reductio. Until next time, I'm Andrew Lavin, and this has been a production of Inverted Spectrum Media.