Mark Vernon applies Plato’s thinking to the current “might is right”, rules-based order we find ourselves in

Much talk doing the rounds about “might is right” and the “rules-based order”. I wish commentators would read – no, really read – the source document for the might-is-right arguments: Plato’s Republic. Because then, they/we might realise that rules are not the constrainer of might at all. Rather, both trap us.

Consider the first section of the Republic. Book I features Socrates talking with the combative sophist Thrasymachus, who argues that justice has become merely that which advantages the stronger. “What I say is that ‘just’ or ‘right’ means nothing but what is in the interest of the stronger party,” Thrasymachus insists. Hence the proverb, “might is right”.

But Socrates seeks a more nuanced position, first by trying to befriend Thrasymachus, because he perceives that he and Thrasymachus are really on the same side. Then, in the following parts of the Republic, Books II-X, he unpacks what their collaboration might discover, by offering a variety of explorations of the bigger issue: the nature of justice itself.

In short, Plato advocates for justice which, according to him, isn’t to do with morals or principles, well-honed judgments or righteous outrage, but, rather, the state of the soul: individual and city-state. “For our discussion is about no ordinary matter,” Socrates points out, “but on the right way to conduct our lives.”

Justice is a form of inner coherence: alignment of each person and the body politic with what is good, beautiful and true. Conversely, when you lose that sense of justice, the “might is right” temptation grips society, coupled to attempts to constrain unruly power by law.

Socrates’s point is fleshed out further when you realise that morality, as is meant now – right by calculation (utilitarianism) or reason (deontology) – is antithetical to the older idea of justice. The inner coherence that Plato presents as key is taken out of the equation altogether with these more recent ways of seeking the good life. Behaviour is all, not character and certainly not soul, which is sniffed at or pooh-poohed.

The upshot is that people today are rarely educated in what Plato thought fundamental. Moral diktats are blind to the inner conflicts that are at the heart of the art of knowing yourself, as are ethical calculations to the longings of the soul. Uneducated, the conflicts and longings run riot.

Why do might and moral rules determine the parameters of debate today? They appear to be the only two options because modern people feel themselves to be imprisoned in a cave-like reality, trapped by dark material constraints that raw power promises to ease and rules to govern. (Incidentally, utilitarianism and deontology emerged within a couple of years of each other, in the 1780s, just when the notion of meaninglessness, captured in the Georgian neologism “nihilism”, was gripping the modern imagination.)

Gone is the spiritual vision that knows of the light, desired by love, and pursued not by power or principle, but by perception: discovering that the divine life within is the divine life without. For only then comes true peace and strength. As Plato, in the voice of Socrates, concludes the Republic: “If you’re persuaded by me and believe the soul is immortal and able to keep itself in tact in the face of every evil, and every good as well, we’ll always keep the highest road and pursue justice in every good sense in every way, so that we might be friends to ourselves and to the gods.”

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