Post #42: The Comments Question and Plato’s Cave

6 July 2023

I’ve been wondering, these past couple of days, about my buddy Federico’s suggestion that it might enliven the site to allow commenting. The proposition is sound enough: human beings tend to care far more for their own opinions than anyone else’s (if it were otherwise, they would change their minds and adopt those other opinions as their own, wouldn’t they). Not that we are generally unwilling to listen to contrary views, but we tend to hear what we want to hear, and in the end it is invariably our own views that count for most, turn the matter any way you wish. Since I cannot deny that it’s true of myself, like it or not, should I not make allowances for others?

It’s a tempting argument, but an incomplete one. The complexities of right view have been central to my site from the first post on. I don’t mean to devalue anyone’s sincerely held opinions; they are needed to make one’s way towards the truth; we have no more direct access. But they are not the truth itself, far from it, and that’s where the problems arise. Perhaps the most widely recognized part of Plato’s Republic (apart from the term “philosopher-king”) is the famous allegory that depicts the mass of men as prisoners chained in place at the bottom of a cave, staring at a screen and engaging in shouting matches and contests for various prizes about the meaning of the dancing shadows on the wall before them. To see things in a truer light would require turning around, which no one can do without help and considerable pressure, according to Plato, and the upward journey towards the mouth of the cave and the rays of the sun is both arduous and uncertain.

An aspiring philosopher’s progress on the troublesome ascent depends on the vigorous exchange of arguments—the Platonic dialectic—by which ideas can be refined, one step at a time, in the course of a lifelong journey towards the domain of the true, the good, and the beautiful, which Plato took to be entirely real and definite—the most real thing there is—even though it must remain doubtful, in any particular case, just how close one will be able to get to it, owing to one’s own limitations and those of one’s circumstances. Hence the importance of free discussion, if there is anything to the timeless image.

The fine print follows immediately, however, and makes for less heartening reading: the vaunted dialectic, for all its power, will be useless and pernicious in the wrong hands. Discussion alone is not enough; there must be maturity, responsibility, and suitability for the task among the discussants, and Plato insisted that dialectics should not, under ideal circumstances at least, be taught to anyone under thirty (a negotiable number, but a telling one). The rash and ready exchange of throwaway judgments, as multiplied beyond all measure by our internet culture of pronouncing on everything under the sun in ten seconds or less, is the furthest thing from the ascent: it is the chains themselves.

I like to think of my site as a writer’s garden, tended with great care. I am happy to share it with visitors; there would be little point to my labors otherwise (as per the passage from Seneca’s sixth Epistle that I mention in Post #34). Still the question lingers what kind of behavior I can reasonably expect from my guests, and what terms I may legitimately attach. I cannot budge in my insistence that the fixed paths with their set boundaries be respected, and that no drinks or food be brought lest I find the litter adorning my rose bushes—nor pets that may be expected to do their business on my daffodils. In this spirit, I’ve been thinking about prefacing my invitation to discussion with a few basic rules and cautionary remarks that should need no spelling out with most of my visitors; what I am still pondering is how effective I should expect them to be with those for whom they do not go without saying.

Nor is it any wonder that very different habits should prevail on all sides, given the free-for-all that is most of the web. It is I, not most visitors, who is “standing athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it,” as William F. Buckley once put it. An altogether hopeless stance, I must admit: the future is relentless and stops for no one, and what has been lost cannot be easily brought back (see Post #23). No one could be more conscious than I of fighting a losing battle. But why should I give in even when it comes to my own back yard? What good will the extra traffic do me if I must purchase it at the price of vitiating what I am trying to cultivate, a habit of slow and orderly reflection, rather than knee-jerk illiteracies? Why should I open myself up, in return for my labors, to the risk of reaping not joy but grief and annoyance? To make my site more popular, would be the obvious answer. And the wrong one, surely.

If I were mainly hoping to make myself popular, it would be singularly stupid to let on how little I trust most of my contemporaries to make the effort required to string two correct and coherent sentences together. (Chatbots may come to the rescue, but only at the price of clearing the unaided human mind of its last vestiges of verbal cogency.) It would be smarter, if I wanted to please the crowd, to make myself the champion of speaking and thinking in one or two syllables only, with sentences that can fit in a single line, and no mention of paragraphs—all the while assuring the most accomplished practitioners of this high art that they represent not merely the pinnacle of human civilization, but the crown of Creation itself, with nothing at all to learn from other ages above which they tower so very obviously and impressively.

Here one might object that the bold venturers on my site—evidently undeterred by the obstacles that my texts put in the way of easy comprehension—are the very ones to be trusted, if anyone can be, with writing correspondingly careful comments. A heartening argument before which I would only too gladly bow and give way, silencing all doubts as to whether the most serious readers would really be the most ready to leave comments as well. May it be so. Perhaps one ought to be guided by the little flame of faith in this as in so much else, not by apprehension, and I should at least make a trial of it.

(We did make a trial of it not long after, and it proved a resounding failure. So it goes.)