Tag: The Republic

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“If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself.”

Major in the Being an Influencer?
Texas Public Radio reported this week that, “The University of Texas at San Antonio is launching a college degree program in becoming a digital social media influencer.” When I saw this news on my Facebook feed, I had to check to make sure that it wasn’t April 1st. It wasn’t. The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) received “Carnegie R1 classification,” so it’s a good university but this didn’t sound like the type of degree program that a good university would launch. I presume that the people putting together this program know better than I do whether there’s a market for it and whether or not such a program will enhance or harm their brand. So, the only thing I know to say about this is what I said on Threads last night:

I’m old enough to remember when blogs, and then social media like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, was fun. It was fun because it allowed you to connect and reconnect. It helped you find people with similar interests. It could turn ugly at times—especially blog comments—but most of the time it seemed like Internet 2.0 was constructive. Something changed with the ability to “Like” this or that. And when Twitter shifted away from calling connections “Friends” to calling them “Followers,” it felt like we entered an era where social media was performative, theatrical.

We’re constantly tempted to “build an audience”; to turn ourselves into a “brand”. I won’t lie, it would be nicer to get more than 2-3 responses on Threads. I would like to have more people reading my blog. But I don’t have in me what it takes to turn one’s self into something marketable; into a product. This may be why I don’t understand what people at UTSA appear to understand.

Plato’s Warning
In Book I of The Republic, Plato’s Socrates says the following of “good men” who will consent to lead others (Lee’s translation, p. 29):

“So good men will not consent to govern for cash or honors. They do not want to be called mercenary for exacting cash payments for the work of government, or thieves for making money on the side; and they will not work for honors, for they aren’t ambitious. We must therefore bring compulsion to bear and punish them if they refuse—perhaps that’s why it’s commonly considered improper to accept authority except with reluctance or under pressure; and the worst penalty for refusal is to be governed by someone worse than themselves. That is what, I believe, frightens honest men into accepting power, and they approach it not as if it were something desirable out of which they were going to do well, but as if it were something unavoidable, which they cannot find anyone better or equally qualified to undertake.”

I don’t think it’s true that people who want to lead should be completely adverse to pay, or honor, or even power. I do think there remains something to Plato’s/Socrates’ observation though. Many misguided people are drawn to leadership, politics, power, influence, etc., for the worst of reasons. Many good people have found themselves in the mud of politics for the sole reason that their opponent, if not defeated, would wreak havoc. As Socrates quips, “That is what…frightens honest men into accepting power”. They know that if they don’t do it, someone who shouldn’t do it will. They would be happy not leading, not influencing, but they lead/influence to prevent those who shouldn’t lead/influence from doing so.

I thought of this when I heard of UTSA’s program. Who will it draw? What kind of person wants to be an influencer for the sake of being an influencer? What kind of culture creates what has become, in essence, the job “influencer”? Have we lost the necessary fear of misleading people? Do I want people to spend money on a product just because it was given to me for free, or to take up a trend because by encouraging others to do so, I gain more attention? This seems unhealthy. It may be that it isn’t. I can’t know for sure. But if it’s to be done in a healthy way, there needs to be a lot more self-reflection from the students than we see from your average influencer.

Epictetus’ Warning
I’ve increasingly been thinking about what it means to live a good life—a genuinely good life. I presume that the nearness of fatherhood has intensified this for me. So, tonight, as I was reading excerpts from Epictetus’ Encheiridion (translated by Nicholas White) found in The Good Life edited by Charles Guignon, I came across these lines (pp. 57-58):

“If you want to make progress, let people think you are a mindless fool about externals, and do not desire a reputation for knowing about them. If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself. Certainly it is not easy to be on guard both for one’s choices to be in accord with nature and also for externals, and a person who concerns himself with the one will be bound to neglect the other.”

A footnote explains, “‘Making progress; (prokoptein) os the Stoic expression for movement in the direction of the ideal condition for a human being…” It’s implied that this saying suggests that those who truly want to experience full human flourishing can’t be concerned with how one is perceived. In fact, flattery and praise should give pause: “If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself.”

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18th-century portrait of Epictetus, including his crutch” via Wikimedia

Again: “distrust yourself”.

I read in this the reminder to not let one’s ego become inflated by the praise of other. You can’t buy into your own brand. You must maintain a healthy sense of skepticism toward your own ideas, accomplishments, successes, and especially when others praise you. Distrust the part of you that, in the words of St. Paul (Romans 12:3), “think of yourself more highly than you ought”. As he said in the next part of that statement, “think of yourself with sober judgment”. Remain self-aware. Remain transparent to yourself. Remain honest about your flaws.

Our world is full of people who never second guess themselves when they should—the Andrew Tate’s, the Jake Paul’s of this world. And we’re becoming a culture that increasingly celebrates that stubborn narcissism. But I presume that such lives have dark, hidden areas that none of us would want to live with on a day to day basis and I predict that they’re untenable. Self-destruction awaits those who show no concern for wisdom. We need more of what Plato, Epictetus, and St. Paul offer us, so I hope students applying to UTSA will consider programs in higher education that cultivate their humanity

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The apocalyptic Jesus is Plato’s just man

I live with a form of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I find Jesus of Nazareth to be the greatest moral exemplar, likely due to my upbringing, culture, and religion. On the other hand, I’m aware that his morality was shaped in a context very different from my own, most importantly as a first-century CE Jewish person living in Galilee and Judea, which was under Roman occupation, who held to an apocalyptic understanding of the world which from our perspective seems to have been somewhat misplaced. For this reason, mere parroting of Jesus’ ethics may not be wise for most of us, if such a thing is even possible. So, as a Christian, I try to ask myself what it means to live in some form of alignment with Jesus’ vision of the good, though a version of the vision that is applicable to the twenty-first century.

The tricky business here is that this kind of mindset often leads to Christianities that may as well abandon any affiliation with Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, I would say that most American Christianities function in complete independence from anything related to Jesus. His “Sermon on the Mount” is critiqued as “woke”. His ideas are rejected by Christians as impractical (should we really treat people who are poor that way?!). Therefore, the label “Christian” retains a cultural significance as one that secures some form of status but it has little to do with the person that “Christians” have called “Christ”.

There is a part of me that thinks that only certain radical groups, like Anabaptists/Mennonites (with their emphasis on non-violence and simplicity), or the Christianities practiced by the oppressed and marginalized, are worthy of being affiliated with Jesus. This would leave me on the outside looking in, sort of like Nicodemus in the first part of the Gospel of John. But this might not be a bad thing. It reminds me of the American author and poet, Maya Angelou. When she was asked if she was a Christian, she responded:

“I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ I think, ‘Already? You already got it?’ I’m working at it, which means that I try to be as kind and fair and generous and respectful and courteous to every human being.”

The long history of Christianity has shown that the word can mean anything. Therefore, the label “Christian” can mean anything. Christians can support unjust imperial power. Christians can be violent. Christians can demonize people because of their ethnic identities (think of the centuries of persecution of the Jews). Christians can be as addicted to wealth (think of the Prosperity Gospel). Christians can be harmfully superstitious (think of the “Word of Faith” movement or popular forms of “spiritual warfare”). Many brush this off by saying something like “Christians aren’t perfect, only Christ is” but that’s an excuse for maintaining the cultural value of the label Christian without taking seriously the demand that this word should have upon our lives (think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship*).

I live in South Texas where being “Christian” is an important label. To respond as Maya Angelou did would earn you suspicion from many. But when I say I’m a Christian, I mean something like what she did: “I’m working at it”. And honestly, many of the people who quickly and definitively name themselves “Christian” are the type of people who make the word mostly meaningless. I think, “if you’re a Christian, then clearly being a Christian means nothing for the world”. But I also think this of myself: if I’m a Christian, then Christianity needs help. I guess the important difference is self-awareness.

This being said, I find that Jesus can remain a moral exemplar even if his apocalyptic vision of the Kingdom of God coming to earth seems to have missed the mark. (Whether there’s some eschatological truth to his vision is impossible to address because we can’t know that truth until the end of our lives or the end of human history, so I find that debate unhelpful except to give people a reason to maintain a certain form of Christianity, which is fine if that works for others.) Jesus remains the type of person who stood not only for the marginalized and oppressed but with them. He wanted to see people restored, healed, and whole. He wanted to see oppressors regain their humanity. And he refused to contribute to our cycle of violence when he was cornered. (Whether Jesus was ideologically pacifistic seems beside the point; that he refused to engage his enemies violently when it really mattered says what needs to be said.)

"The Death of Socrates" by Jacques-Louis David (1787)
“The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David (1787)

In Book II of The Republic, Plato’s Socrates is discussing the meaning of “justice” and what it means to be a “just person”. Is “justice” just a construct that the powerful use to justify themselves? Or is justice something objective that can be measured over against whether someone has power? Socrates says to his interlocutor Glaucon, that the truly just man will be just for justice’s sake, not for the appearance of justice since being just for the appearance of justice is being “just” in order to gain a reputation that can be used for selfish gain. Socrates proposes that the most just a person can be is “to be and not seem good” (p. 45 of Lee’s translation). He states:

“We must, indeed, not allow him to seem good, for if he does he will have all the reward and honours paid to the man who has a reputation for justice; and we shall not be able to tell whether his motive is love of justice or love of the rewards and honours.”

For Socrates, the only person who can be clearly just, is the one “we must strip…of everything except justice”. He continues:

“Our just man must have the worst of reputations for wrongdoing even though he has done no wrong, so that we can test his justice and see if it weakens in the face of unpopularity and all that goes with it; we shall give him an undeserved and life-long reputation for wickedness, and make him stick to his chosen course until death.”

It has been noted that Plato likely has Socrates in view. Socrates was charged by the Athenians for being “impious” and for “corrupting the youth”. In a sense, these charges were accurate but the question is whether or not Socrates’ “impiety” and “corruption” were clearly evils or just evils perceived by the misguided worldview of the Athenians. Plato’s views seem clear here.

Jesus was perceived by his followers in much the same way. In short, Jesus is presented as a just man who was unjustly condemned by an unjust society. In fact, Plato writes something that is hard for Christians to read without thinking about Jesus, even though it was written centuries before Jesus** (again, from Lee, p. 45):

“…the just man, as we have pictured him, will be scourged, tortured, and imprisoned, his eyes will be put out, and after enduring every humiliation he will be crucified (or “impaled” depending on the translation), and learn at last that one should want not to be, but to seem just”

With those words, Plato’s Socrates draws a line between true justice and seeming justice. Justice exists, though rare, in the form of people who are so just that they will die for justice rather than take the easy path. Now, in a sense, this helps me with the question of whether or not Jesus’ ethics are completely relativized by his apocalypticism. If we read Jesus’ actions through Plato, what matters is that this just man Jesus was not rescued by divine intervention but went to his grave refusing to muscle the “Kingdom of God” into existence, which would only contribute to the cycles of violence that consume us. He used what life he had to try to bring the “Kingdom of God” by means of healing, care, forgiveness, empowerment, etc.

From this perspective, people like Martin Luther King Jr. are Christians. On the other hand, I’m in a category with Maya Angelou: “I try to be as kind and fair and generous and respectful and courteous to every human being”. I fail but I try. And I think Jesus’ vision, as read through Plato, remains worth our effort even if, as Jesus’ crucifixion, Socrates’ trial, and Dr. King’s assassination (not to mention all the other innocents) teach us, most of us must settle with wanting to be just rather than achieving it. More precisely, we must settle with wanting to want to be just, since is Jesus, Socrates, King, etc., are the measure of a just person, I think many of us would prefer to never be truly tested.

*Sadly, the copy of this book that’s available on Amazon has a forward by Eric Metaxes, who embodies how worthless the label “Christian” can be.

**For those who are curious about how Plato’s ideas about justice have been read with Jesus in view, see the very thorough article by Mateusz Stróżyński titled “Plato the Prophet? The Crucified Just Man in Republic and the New Testament”.