The Just City

"What we have here is time travellers setting up Plato’s Republic on an island with the help of Greek gods. These are time travellers from the past and present and future. So Cicero is there, but we also have Victorian people and Renaissance people who studied Plato, and robots from the future… And they are trying to set up and do the Republic. It’s a really delightful series, thinking directly through Plato’s Republic in the way it needs to be thought through. I find it especially charming having taught many iterations of a course where I had undergraduates reading Plato’s Republic and then writing papers about it, almost all of which are variants on ‘Plato’s Republic is stupid and wouldn’t work’. To which the real answer is, Plato’s Republic would work if the human mind and human psychology operated the way Plato speculated that they did. We believe that they do not work the way he thought they would. So it’s really interesting to see what happens when you take people who behave like we think people will behave, and plunge them into an ideal city set up for people who don’t behave like that. To unpack what I mean by that a little bit… Plato and many philosophers before the mid-17th century believed that one of the fundamentals of cognition was that knowledge is external and eternal, it exists as an absolute, and the mind is a sense organ which perceives that knowledge. Truth and justice exist out there in an immaterial, eternal space where knowledge is real, capital R. And when we learn, we are learning to process the mind’s perception of these things – just as the eye of a newborn infant needs to learn how to recognize objects and process shapes, and realise that this shape is ‘a book’ and this shape is ‘a bed’. So if that’s true, then the more one becomes wise, the more one agrees with everyone else who is wise; because when you’re talking about justice, you’re all looking at one eternal, extant object. Plato therefore assumes that you can make a society co-ruled by several hundred philosophers, because the better their education is, the more they will completely agree with each other on all things. The philosopher kings would agree with each other. But we don’t think that knowledge works like that: we think knowledge is created within the mind, and the mind has concepts in it that we individually form based on our own past experiences. Your concept of a cat is different from my concept of a cat, because I lived with a cat that hurled itself bodily at pumpkin muffins, and you didn’t; so I associate cats with pumpkin muffins, and you don’t. Everybody’s concept of everything is unique and different. So when you ask whether Plato’s Republic would work as a real society, the answer has to be half ‘no’ – because cognition doesn’t work the way Plato thought, according to us. But the other half has to be ‘except…’ – except it might actually still work better than a lot of societies we do have, because even if it has a flawed plan, it has some plan. And it’s a plan with many elements that are better than most historic societies – like gender equality, and being assigned a job based on your personal aptitudes. So the series is really fun because at the beginning, we bring in all these people who love Plato and Platonism and want to try this thing together; and then we watch the ways it doesn’t work, and the ways it does. There are people for whom it’s better than the society they came from, and people for whom it’s worse. It inevitably explodes in a ‘but that’s not how human beings work’ way – but at the same time, a world in which everybody is encouraged to live a philosophical life and self-examine and attempt to improve themselves as much as they can, to be their philosophically best self, is also going to result in good things. Then the aftermath of that continues… I would say that some series are one book that is so long that you can’t fit all of it between two covers, and so it is published in several chunks – Book of the New Sun is that, and my Terra Ignota is that. This isn’t. Each of the books does stand alone as a book, but they all end by beginning something new – in the same way that if a book ends “They all got together and got on the ship and decided to sail off into the seas”, it would be both a satisfying ending for a book and an exciting beginning for the next book. The three books fit together like that: each of them is the end of that stage, but then you become excited to explore the next stage."