Digital technology has amplified and accelerated the politicisation of almost everything, including scientific inquiry. Researchers who publish findings or explore questions that run afoul of progressivist ideology are regularly attacked by social-media mobs and can expect little support from the leaders of their universities and academic organizations, some of which, like Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry, have formally institutionalised censorship. The situation has drawn thoughtful and informed comparisons with the Soviet Union, where engineers, physicists, geneticists, linguists, and others were purged from the academy for practicing “bourgeois science.”
This is not all. For technocracy and technology exacerbate the worst characteristics of late-stage democracy, a transitional period that Plato illuminates with prophetic clarity. His description of the growth of tyranny in the midst of democracy cuts close to the bone today.
In the Republic’s grand arc of political decline, democracy emerges from oligarchy, a regime ruled by stingy and avaricious money-makers. Oligarchy contains the seeds of its own destruction. The children of the wealthy are “used to luxury and unaccustomed to labors in body and soul, weak in resisting pleasures and pains, and idle”. The old misers are furthermore happy to make loans to this spoiled cohort. This produces a class of indebted and dishonored young men “hating and plotting against those who acquired their property, and all the rest, and longing for political change”.
The revolutionary longing of these frustrated and dispossessed elites finds fulfillment in democracy, which is characterised by freedom and free speech, personal license, the indulgence of criminals, the neglect of education, and the equality of equals and unequals alike. License and leveling go hand in hand, because the acknowledgment of fundamental differences between what is noble and base, good and bad, hinders the unrestricted satisfaction of individual desire. The democratic man turns a deaf ear to the admonishments of older relatives and banishes shame and moderation, calling them foolishness and cowardliness.
The desire for limitless freedom eventually becomes insatiable, especially among the young, who attack customary restraints with sacred fervour. Rulers who resist are accused of being religiously polluted, while obedient citizens are vituperated as willing slaves and nonentities. Anarchy pervades the polity and enters the household. Fearing vilification, fathers capitulate to their sons, while sons have no fear or shame before their parents. Rulers imitate the ruled and the old come down to the level of the young, flattering them “so that they won’t seem to be unpleasant or despotic”. The condemned carry on like free men, foreigners are treated like citizens, and the souls of the people become soft and tender and unable to bear anything that smacks of servitude.
In the end, ancestral customs and written laws lose all authority, and the city is governed by the most ferocious among the idle sons of the oligarchs — the ones who had longed for political change under the regime of their fathers. These rulers seize the wealth of the money-makers, the class that is most invested in civic order, keeping the lion’s share for themselves and distributing the rest to the poor.
In the Republic, we see the present in an ancient mirror. The radicalisation of the children of the elites; the repudiation of ancestral customs, political traditions, parental and educational authority, and the very idea of sacred order; the normalisation of previously illicit pleasures; and the weakening of civil rights are all features of contemporary American life. So are the vehement shaming and scapegoating of political opponents; clemency toward criminals amid a surge of lawlessness; the enrichment of the ruling class, destruction of the middle class, and increased dependency of the poor; the fragility and unwonted aggressiveness of the young; and the fatuousness and cowardliness of the old. Is this not astonishing?
But these ills are now supercharged by technocracy, which is perfectly compatible with democratic passions even if it is incompatible with representative democracy. There is currently no shortage of “scientific” support for the liberation of human beings from the constraints of nature and custom alike.
Wesley Yang recently used his Year Zero substack to draw attention to a 2019 USA Today article that cites policies adopted by the American Medical Association in 2018 to substantiate its claim that feminists who resist the inclusion of transgender women within female-only spaces, including restrooms and athletic competitions, “deny transgender people their full humanity and go against what the medical community today has accepted as scientific fact around gender and sex”. The arguments of these “transphobic” feminists get no mention; the exclusionary position is summarily dismissed on the ground that it violates an implicit and newly minted right to “full humanity”— a term that can mean whatever those who claim that right want it to mean.
This example illustrates the invidious political dynamic of our time. Having begun to condemn great masses of Americans as scientifically illiterate bigots, our self-appointed guardians find themselves on a road from which there is no exit. Turning political disagreements into occasions for public shame and vilification has failed to produce the desired alignment of public opinion. It has only emboldened the opposition, whose refusal to be silenced has been met with increasingly heavy-handed controls. Extreme democratic passions have paradoxically fuelled the anti-democratic takeover of the public square.
Read in the twilight of the present, the great books of the past disclose new meanings. The Republic’s Cave Image offers a chilling prophecy of the human terminus, the total triumph of ideological technocracy in the age of advanced technology.
Chained prisoners facing the bottom of a cave watch a play of shadows on the cold wet wall beneath them. The shadows are cast by puppets manipulated in front of a flickering fire by men above and behind them, players in a rigged game of whose existence the prisoners know nothing. Living in social quarantine, they cannot move their heads and have never seen a human face, never directly encountered another existing individual. All they know of themselves and one another is mediated by the shadows of artificial things: dark, flat, uniform, fundamentally negative shapes, abstract forms not of light but of its absence.
These shadows — today limned by an electronic glow — tell only the official story, the thin and impoverished “narrative”, that the puppet masters, competing for money, power, and honour, wish to project.
This whole human tragedy will be complete, the dying embers will sputter and smoke, when not a single person in this dank and gloomy underground — not one prisoner or puppeteer — has any remaining inkling that, on the sunlit uplands above and beyond their poor constructions, there is a warm, vibrant, colourful, three-dimensional, naturally ordered organic world. The one that was once called reality.
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