ecall Plato’s Republic, where Thrasymachus quite simply asserted that justice is for the weak; and that nothing is better than having a reputation for being a just person while in fact being brutally wicked.  Plato, of course, held a quite different view.  He maintained that justice was a deep, deep characteristic of the soul.  And he understood that embracing Thrasymachus’s view lead to nothing but disaster, momentary gains notwithstanding.  I used to think that Thrasymachus was beyond hope.  I was mistaken in thinking that, as I hope should become evident by the end of this essay.  Modernity, so I shall argue, is worse than Thrasymachus.

When I reflect upon the state of political discussion throughout the world, I am utterly stunned by the extent to which the ideology of Thrasymachus seems to have gained a hold upon the discussants.  Quite significantly, things are worse than even Thrasymachus imagined.  For even he recognized the importance of at least appearing to be just.  To be sure, we can ask: How just can a person be if he is behaving in unjust ways at every turn?  Still, Thrasymachus recognized that appearing to be just had its benefits; and presumably, he grasped that people who are successful in appearing to be just can’t do anything that they please.  That is, he recognized constraints.

One of the benefits of appearing to be just is a very simple one: credibility.  The concept of credibility is quite closely tied with reality, in that a person is in fact credible only if she or he is believed to be an individual who is absolutely committed to presenting the facts as they indeed are.  So even Thrasymachus supposed that having credibility with others was a good thing and that it is indispensable to advancing one’s interests.

What has become manifestly clear to anyone who is remotely self-reflective and unbiased is that facts have ceased to matter in political discussions.  Accordingly, having credibility is no longer seen as something is worth having.  Not even Thrasymachus could have imagined that.

To say that credibility no longer matters is in effect to say that it no longer matters that it is manifestly obvious that one’s utterances are nothing but lies.  Instead of being tied to the facts, credibility is now tied to supportive cacophony.  That is, what a person says now has the value of truth if enough people make supportive noises when the individual makes his utterances; and there are tactics for preventing people from making critical noises.  The charge of X-ism (racism or sexism or antisemitism or homophobia) has become one such tactic.  If one can make a particular charge of X-ism stick against individuals making critical noise, then one has effectively silenced their critical noise.  It is irrelevant if what these individuals are saying has any truth to it or not. 

Here are some examples of political noise at various levels of life.  (1) Polls in the European Union maintain that Israel is the biggest threat to world peace.  (2) When the Hill-TV fiasco occurred at Syracuse University many black and Latino students reacted as if the offense was a throwback to the Jim Crow era if not slavery itself.  (3) Black people cannot be racist.  (4) Being gay is entirely caused by the genes.  (5) Females and males should be treated exactly alike in all social respects; otherwise, we have sexism. 

What intrigues me about claims (1) – (5) is that, while each may actually be true, I am stunned by the fact that I have yet to hear a good argument in support of any one of these claims, though everyone of these claims has a group of individuals who insist that the claim in question is as true as any claim that reason itself could deliver.  But really? 

Take (5), for instance, who on earth really believes it?  When a woman puts on a low-cut dress, does her hair ever so nicely, and puts on that walk that accentuates her curves does she really want me to have the same reaction to her that I have to a man?  I don’t think so.  If she did, then she could have spared herself a lot of effort and put on a damn pair of jeans and a cowboy hat.  And even then, she would have to be careful.  For I still find myself seeing quite a difference between a man in jeans and a woman in jeans. 

No one really believes (5).  But try saying that; and one will be shouted down as sexist.  You see, the charge “sexist” makes facts irrelevant.

Now, women allow that women can be sexist, but blacks have been brilliant here; for blacks insist that blacks cannot be racist.  So when it come to dealing with other ethnic groups blacks can only have decency, goodwill, and purity of heart.  That is one alternative.  The other is that blacks can be as vitriolic in their hatred as anyone.  It is just that hatred by blacks does not amount to racism! 

I love Europe’s view of Israel.  On the one hand, it takes preposterousness to utterly new heights.  On the other, it illustrates most poignantly the point of this essay.  There are Muslims running around committing and threatening to commit terrorist acts all over the world, but the real threat to world peace is Israel. 

Publish some cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and violent protests on the part of Muslims breakout across the globe.  Indeed, the language of hate is very much a part of the Muslim vocabulary, as the book Rêver la Palestine (2002) by Randa Ghazy so poignantly reminds us.  We find the following words towards the end of the book:

il hait, il hait (...) il hait les soldats, il hait chaque Israélien qui vit à la surface de la terre, c'est une haine inconditionnelle, irrationnelle qu'on ne peut expliquer, justifier, mais non plus critiquer

(transl: He hates and he hates.  He hates each soldier.  He hates each Israelian who lives on the face of the earth.  This hate is unconditional and irrational.  It cannot be explained or justified.  Moreover, it cannot be criticized. 

There has been no equivalent book written in French by an Israeli Jew that is about hating Muslims or Palestinians. 

How is that those who do not espouse hate and who do not make committing terrorist acts a way of life turn out to be more of a threat than those who do precisely that?

Let me come back to Thrasymachus.  As I remarked at the outset, I had always supposed that he was beyond redemption.  But he held that it was always worth appearing to be just; and this means that he in fact recognized the difference between right and wrong.  His view was that there is no need to adhere to the difference when one can get away with not doing so.  At the very least, Thrasymachus held that there is something there to which lip service should be paid. 

Arguably, modernity no longer acknowledges the differences between right and wrong.  It does not even pay lip service to the difference.  It cannot, given some of the stances that it steadfastly and unabashedly takes. 

Now, as long as a person is willing to acknowledge that there is a difference between right and wrong—that there is something there that makes a difference—then there is hope.  There is, among other things, the hope that what is right can take priority over what is wrong.  It is precisely that hope that is lost when right and wrong no longer matter.  And there can be no surer sign that these vectors no longer matter than that those who clearly and routinely espouse hate are feared very much less than those who do not.

In Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus represented the very epitome of the unjust person.  Yet, even he would have found absurd a world in which those who unabashedly espouse hatred are preferred to those who do not. 

\Plato held that in the end democracy is disastrous, precisely because it obliterates the difference between right and wrong.  The surprise, alas, is that Thrasymachus would have had to have agreed with him.  The fact that we are now at this point in history where right and wrong no long matter and that cannot see how far we have fallen tells us just bad things have gotten. 

If tomorrow holds out any hope, it is only because enough of us will have found a way to take right and wrong seriously again notwithstanding the fact that modernity has destroyed the very foundations that once made doing so second nature in Aristotle's felicitous sense of the term. 

Take away a public commitment to right and wrong, and Posterity will not have a very good future, if any at all.