IX
But to breed Guardians is only one-half the problem. The other half comes under the heads of education and discipline; and when Plato discusses these things, he is not speaking, as a modern college president perhaps would, of book-learning alone; he is referring to all the activities that mold a person’s life. He follows the older philosopher, Pythagoras, and anticipates the great organizer, Benedict, by laying down a rule of life for his guardians. He did not imagine that disinterested activities, spacious thoughts, and clear vision would arise in people who normally put their personal comfort and “happiness” above the necessities of their office.
Let us recognize the depth of Plato’s insight. It is plain that he did not despise what a modern psychologist would call “the normal biological career.” For the great majority of people happiness consisted in learning a definite trade or profession, in doing one’s daily work, in mating, and when the tension of the day relaxed, in getting enjoyment and recreation in the simple sensualities of eating, drinking, singing, lovemaking, and whatnot. This normal biological career is associated with a home, and with the limited horizons of a home; and a host of small loyalties and jealousies and interests are woven into the very texture of that life.
Each home, each small circle of relatives and friends, tends to be a miniature utopia; there is a limited community of goods, a tendency to adjust one’s actions to the welfare of the little whole, and a habit of banding together against the world at large. But the good, contrary to the proverb, is frequently the enemy of the better; and the little utopia of the family is the enemy—indeed the principal enemy—of the beloved community. This fact is notorious. The picture of a trade union leader which Mr. John Galsworthy portrays in Strife, whose power to act firmly in behalf of his group is sapped by the demands made by family ties, could be matched in a thousand places. In order to have the freedom to act for the sake of a great institution, a person must be stripped of a whole host of restraining ties and sentimentalities. Jesus commanded his followers to leave their families and abandon their worldly goods; and Plato, in order to preserve his ideal commonwealth, laid down a similar rule. For those who as guardians were to apply the science of government to public affairs, a private life, private duties, private interests, were all to be left behind.
As to the education of the Guardians, I have scarcely the space to treat the more formal part of it in detail; for among other things, as Jowett points out, The Republic is a treatise on education; and Plato presents a fairly elaborate plan. The two branches of Greek education, music and gymnastic, applied in the student’s early years to the culture of the body and the culture of the mind; and both branches were to be followed in common by both sexes. Instruction during the early part of a child’s life was to be communicated through play activities, as it is today in the City and Country School in New York; and only with manhood did the student approach his subjects in a more formal and systematic manner. In the course of this education the students were to be tested again and again with respect to their mental keenness and tenacity and fortitude; and only those who came through the fire purified and strengthened were to be admitted to the class of guardians.
The daily life of the Guardians is a rigorous, military regime. They live in common barracks, and in order to avoid paying attention to private affairs, instead of minding the good of the whole community, no one is allowed to “possess any substance privately, unless there be a great necessity for it”; next, Plato continues, none shall have any dwelling or storehouse into which whoever inclines may not enter; and as for necessaries, they shall be only such as brave and temperate warriors may require, and as they are supported by other citizens, they shall receive such a reward of their guardianship as to have neither an overplus nor a deficit at the end of the year. They shall have public meals, as in encampments, and live in common. They are to refrain from using gold and silver, as all the gold and silver they require is in their souls.
All these regulations, of course, are for the purpose of keeping the Guardians disinterested. Plato believed that the majority of people did not know how to mind public business; for it seemed to him that the ordering of a community’s life required a measure of science which the common man could not possibly possess. Indeed, in a city of a thousand men he did not see the possibility of getting as many as fifty men who would be sufficiently well versed in what we should today call sociology to deal intelligently with public affairs—for there would scarcely be that many first-rate draughts players. At the same time, if the government is to be entrusted to a few, the few must be genuinely disinterested. If they possessed lands and houses and money in a private way they would become landlords and farmers instead of Guardians; they would be hateful masters instead of allies of the citizens; and so “hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, more afraid of the enemies within than the enemies without, they would drag themselves and the rest of the state to speedy destruction.”
It remains to take a glance at the manhood and later life of the Guardians.
As
