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Without knowing why you are reading Plato, or how familiarity you have with classical Greek culture 500 BC (I’m guessing a fair amount, given your Lexicon), I’ll note a couple things. However, I’ll point to another way of thinking about Plato: he was in the first generation of literate humans. He was bright, but he had a new and powerful tool: the alphabet.

Note that I say ‘the alphabet’: there had been other systems of writing (and there still are), but alphabets create systems of writing that make unique demands on the human brain. In addition, alphabets seem to act like an intellectual forge; they spawn novel ideas, new thoughts. Whereas other writing systems are more rigid, much more limited in the range of what can be expressed, the alphabet is truly novel. And that’s what Plato had.

A brief backtrack: classicist Eric Havelock puts 750 BCE as the key period in which the Phoenician alphabet was entering wide use in Greece; for the first time Homer’s Iliad was written down, Hesiod’s poems were written — but Homer and Hesiod were illiterate.

If you go to wikipedia’s ‘Cadmus’ page, you’ll see that the Greeks attributed writing to the Near East; there’s a whole long, fascinating story about how it developed in the multicultural, dynamic coastal cities of Asian Minor between 3000 – 800 BC. The key point for this thread is that Cadmus is also associated with agriculture (ie, calendars, instructions, water laws), and with making bronze (metallurgy). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmus
Both agriculture and metallurgy probably drove the need to develop and refine writing (as did commerce), and they also drove the need for WRITTEN laws.

Socrates, circa 500 BC, probably believed that Cadmus arrived in Greece bringing ‘Dragon’s teeth’ (ie, letters, an alphabet). But Socrates was an illiterate at a moment when writing was coming into wide use. And he was very concerned about the implications of writing, and what it might portend for individuals, for their ability to achieve ‘virtu‘ : their abililties to act wisely and justly. Had Socrates been born a generation later (and to a family wealthy enough to afford a tutor), the history of philosophy might be considerably different.

Around 500 BC, Athenian society shifted from orality to literacy. I’m among many who suspect that we’re now in The Next Great shift, and that like any significant change it means there will be cognitive changes — new demands on the brain, new modes of thinking, and new demands on information.

Why ‘cognitive shifts’?
Because the brain is plastic; we become what we do, we believe what we see.

As you note, Socrates understood this fundamental fact. He recognized that ‘method’ structures thought and behavior.

And he observed that people who used writing lacked that ‘embodied knowledge’ — that they would use words without understanding what those words actually meant. (And doesn’t that make Monica Goodling spring to mind…?) They became careless of words; arrogant with them. And in that process, they became ‘precocious’ while losing knowledge. And losing knowledge meant losing their ‘paths’ to God, and losing the ‘paths’ to their ability of being able to render justice wisely.

Socrates feared that the people who used writing as — it seemed to him — an intellectual crutch were quite susceptible to unethical, inadvertantly destructive conduct. Only virtue would save them, but writing would blind them to virtue — because in the mind of our ‘midwife of knowledge’ virtue existed in LIVING words, SPOKEN words. But it did not exist in written language.

That’s part of what he and Plato were ‘dialoging’ about, but Plato was able to write it for posterity. It’s like a lens through which we can decipher a huge cognitive shift; a phase-change in human thought.

I highly recommend a recent book, ‘Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain‘ (Maryanne Wolf), as you consider Plato. It’s recent, it’s absolutely superb, and it’s phenomenally wise and compassionate. (FWIW: I know a ton about the topics, and this book is stunningly good.)

Basically, Socrates thought of spoken words as ‘living’: stress, intonation, volume, these all provided additional meaning and information to the listener. He thought that written words were ‘dead’, because they couldn’t argue — they couldn’t change in response to someone’s pointing out a problem with their logic. To him, written language must have seemed inert and lifeless. So even if he was able to sound words out, he almost certainly never became a skilled reader.

Moreover, Socrates feared that WRITTEN language ‘could be mistaken for reality’ — and I think most EW readers have seen that very thing among Bush administration employees. (IMHO, John Yoo is a stunning example; I wrote it, therefore it must be true. And GWBush’s “Pixie Dust” = ‘I edited it, therefore, I have revised reality’ certainly speaks to the type of cognitive dysfunction that might be used by a man who is said to have found reading to be quite a challenge, and who is said to dislike reading.)

Socrates also feared that WRITTEN language would lead to superficial understandings — and that people would say and write things they didn’t actually understand; in his view, if you had to defend yourself in a verbal argument, then you assured yourself that you actually understood the logic and the issues. But we’ve seen a lot of superficial, inept conduct in Bush administration testimony and documents. (Lurita Doan is a classic example, although she’s also got other nefarious characteristics mixing in.) Some of it is clearly CYA, deliberate evasion; however, in a number of cases it certainly appears that people were in way over their heads. Socrates predicted as much.

Socrates was still living in the period of craft knowledge; he was an illiterate who recognized that somehow — in ways he didn’t fully grasp — the processes of reading, and of writing, altered the way that people think and what they think about. And as we know, he got no thanks for all his well-intentioned curiosity (!).

But along came Plato, who WROTE down his recollections of Socrates’ ‘midwifery’. And Socrates, was later lampooned by Aristophanes, along with other sophist ‘Clouds’, from which I shamelessly copy and paste a passage with allusions to “techne, maieusis, or midwifery – skill at helping others give birth”:

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/clouds.html
——————–
A DISCIPLE from within
A plague on you! Who are you?

STREPSIADES
Strepsiades, the son of Phido, of the deme of Cicynna.

DISCIPLE coming out of the door
You are nothing but an ignorant and illiterate fellow to let fly at the door with such kicks. You have brought on a miscarriage-of an idea!

STREPSIADES
Pardon me, please; for I live far away from here in the country. But tell me, what was the idea that miscarried?

DISCIPLE
I may not tell it to any but a disciple.

STREPSIADES
Then tell me without fear, for I have come to study among you.

DISCIPLE
Very well then, but reflect, that these are mysteries. Lately, a flea bit Chaerephon on the brow and then from there sprang on to the head of Socrates. Socrates asked Chaerephon, “How many times the length of its legs does a flea jump?”

STREPSIADES
And how ever did he go about measuring it?

DISCIPLE
Oh! it was most ingenious! He melted some wax, seized the flea and dipped its two feet in the wax, which, when cooled, left them shod with true Persian slippers. These he took off and with them measured the distance.
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I suppose Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are Aristophanes’ truest decendents.

But the underlying notions – that people act foolishly and selfishly because they don’t have the genuine, ‘craft’ knowledge to really understand what they’re about is worth contemplating.

I’ll not overlook John Yoo’s unethical conduct, but I don’t think it’s simply enough to castigate the man; I think it’s more important to try and ferret out what’s going on. What types of learning can best help people understand what they’re about, so they don’t make such appalling, costly mistakes?

Come to think of it, Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison might want to spend a few moments on the same topic.

Anyway, I hope this wasn’t a redux, and I also hope the few end-of-thread stumblers who happen by find it relevant to the overall themes of ‘how does Pixie Dust happen’? Who is most likely to invent it? Use it? How does it damage their ability to act in their long-term (as opposed to their short term) interests?

And I hope you haven’t read only Plato, without also reading Aristophanes, who has a thing to two to say about tyranny. But note that Aristophanes words are WRITTEN in order to be SPOKEN. Plato was the other way around. Of the two, I suspect Aristophanes was by far the more democratic.

We have never been able to legislate controls on the proliferation of the tools we have unleashed, from the bomb to the information age.

Completely agree, although some of the reasons include the fact that politicians seldom have the knowledge base required to do a good job, and then much depends on the skill, competence, and knowledge of staff. That’s where staff can ‘make or break’ an issue or piece of legislation.

I also agree that McNealy and Ellison are not able to control what they’ve unleashed; engineers and inventors seldom foresee how the benefits of their technologies will be subverted by Dark Forces: envy, greed, fear…

Ethics underlie many problems that appear to be technical, but can often be traced to poor decisions made by tired, stressed people in a hurry. Thinking through the implications of a technology requires time, and we don’t admit that fact.

As for the database committee… A good committee is a great experience; but they’re rare. Good management, and good leadership can produce remarkable results; however, it’s an art form. Sigh…

$467,000,000 in the 2004, and another $1.1 billion up to 2008…
Listen, for that kind of cash, who needs the San Pedro, anyway? You’re getting ‘rapid flows’ of data — what else should you want?

Whiner!

;-))

The information would be held for at least 12 months and the police and security services would be able to access it if given permission from the courts.

(Hmmm: CoG / pre-cog. Also recently: CUI / cui bono. A guilty subconscious can be a leaky thing…)

falasafa, will respond later; much to synthesize – a remarkable amount of ‘intellectual midwifery’ occurs at EW’s, eh?

Interesting to see the derivation of ‘texvn‘ evoking ‘path’; IIRC, the Greek word ‘dike‘ is also related to ‘path‘. This term is used in early **written** law, evidently with the intention of helping the community ‘find a safe path, or right method‘.

However, I’ve just recently (re)stumbled on the fact that there is a tradition — evidently back to Akkadian and Sumerian script — in which the words for ‘written law’ and ‘oral law’ were different. Perhaps these were intended to distinguish between what the Brits might call ‘Custom’, as opposed to more formal, legally rendered – written — Case law.

The craft knowledge, particularly of early metallurgy, was ‘written’ (probably in ideograms distinctive to each writer, who alone could interpret them) but these ‘writings’ were regarded as **secret** knowledge. To possess this precious knowledge was to control a treasury. It wouldn’t be a stretch to suppose that a similar mindset may lie behind a ‘method’ like Main Core.

More later, but thank you so very much for the lexical insights!

Bob in HI

It doesn’t have to be this way at all. The proposed gameplan is a scam, a sham doctrine of interdiction that will work only to inflict terrorism by our own government upon our own people in order to perpetuate a permanent ruling class! That 8 million people should be on such a list is an outrage and it is time to resist it, investigate it and end it.
This is a plan put together by ruling Beltway elites out of fear, fear of democracy and fear of the people.

The cure is to Crush The Cell.

The Military Commissions Act must be rescinded – NOW!