In conversation with Elyse Hargreaves
Before the Open Society there was tribalism: tribal settlements, tribal chiefs, tribal loyalty, and tribal violence. Run things back far enough and the world begins to take on the same unpleasant shape. The decades and centuries rolled-by, and nothing ever changed, nothing ever improved, and everyone suffered… a lot. What defined this way of life was the ideas people held and the attitudes that ran through them. Any question about the social order, any doubt about the rhythms of nature or the rigidity of customs, had the same blunted answers, dressed-up in slightly different ways.
These tribal societies were places of magic and irrationality. Every aspect of life was dominated by routine, by taboos, and by fear. It was also comfortable! At no point did any member of the tribe ever have to ask themselves things like how should I act in this situation? Proper behaviour was always determined in advance, and if everyone simply followed the path already set before them, they could avoid the ire of their community, and be sure in the safety of their group-given identity.
They were sacrificing themselves and their personal responsibility, but they had never experienced such things, and so didn’t know what they were missing. From the high walls of their tribe, this alternative looks only as an ever-widening wilderness of problems and doubt and insecurity and risk and fear and pain and disownment and alienation. All the promise and fulfilment of being able to make one’s own decisions, had not yet been felt… by anyone! At least not anyone in the tribe. Their culture and their institutions were violently geared to snuff such things out, with dissenters either quickly corrected, quickly exiled, or quickly killed.
This is the Closed Society. Tribe might feel like a derogatory type of word to describe large and well-organised communities, but Karl Popper has something even more inflammatory in his next breath: “herd”! If herd doesn’t do it for you, then how about “organism”? An unchanging, semi-biological binding of people to one another, with such strong knots and such steely purpose, as to never allow any sort of upheaval, any social mobility, nor any desire that isn’t already approved and given. Nothing about the individual is ever permitted, and everything about the group is reinforced: “common efforts, common dangers, common joys and common distress.”
Then, in a single, impossibly bright explosion, things began to change in “one of the deepest revolutions through which mankind has passed”… and it started with the Greeks. After lifetime upon lifetime of disregard, the traditional class of Athenian landowners were suddenly forced to pay attention to the larger, poorer, population. This population had been growing fast, as the Athenian state stretched its borders in a benevolent type of colonialism. Daughter cities sprung from the earth or were transformed from their tribal colours, all from the understanding that they might mirror the extraordinary changes of their neighbours, and benefit from inter-city trade.
Seafaring and economic minds are a heavy part of the story here. All the cooperation and technology and wealth and knowledge that bounced around Greek cities with the growth of commerce, had an impact on the people it touched and the ideas they held. The economic revolution became a spiritual revolution, and all that magical or irrational thinking was under threat. New “danger spots” emerged, and although all of that movement and trade postponed things to a degree, tribalism and the Closed Society had found its executioner. Yet even in these earlier moments, “the strain of civilization was beginning to be felt”: an unease somewhere deep in the stomach, as the structures of the old fell away to a new world of increased freedom, increased choice, and the horrors of increased responsibility.
It is the price we have to pay for the knowledge we gain and the progress we make, but it is an unpleasant, dizzying price. The natural order of things comes to a sudden and hard end, and all that these new Open Societies have to offer is uncertainty, doubt, and insecurity. This strain of civilization is a personal and emotional crisis, and the destroyer of tradition. So no wonder it was resisted.
With the most to lose from these changes, the oligarchs of Athenian society went to war against democracy. But they had to more than argue against people having a vote, they had to go to “the roots of the evil” they saw around them. The new trade routes, the new monetary policies, the new commercialism, the naval strategy, the harbours, and even the long walls that linked the harbours to the city became targets for the oligarchs: symbols of a “humanitarian” revolution.
When an early force of Spartans was discovered north of Athens, these oligarchs jumped at the chance to conspire with a friendly enemy “in the hope that they would put an end to the democracy.” These are the words of Thucydides, the great historian of the Peloponnesian war – and the man whose writing defined this clash of people and ideas – himself an ardent, unashamed, card-carrying “anti-democrat”.
Sparta lost this expeditionary skirmish, and people like Thucydides learned that beyond the traditional ruling classes and beyond the educated few, there was a majority of Athenians who identified with the Open Society, believed in its ideas, and were willing to fight and die for it. But the drum beats were in motion, the oligarchs now knew how to play the fifth column, and along with Sparta they began tapping any pocket of unrest they could find across the Athenian empire. As democratic Athens was completing the sea walls, producing the most extraordinary flourishing of culture and progress that had ever been seen, the oligarchs were plotting their second chance.
As Sparta regrouped, the Athenian oligarchy swung their ears around the empire, looking for bits and pieces of unrest, and building them to hostility and revolt. Athens taxed its people, and it taxed its daughter cities. But whereas the Romans would loot their provinces of treasure and heritage, transferring wealth to the “dominant city”, as in all things Athens was ahead of its time. They instead placed a small five percent levy on everything imported and exported by sea. It was a method that encouraged the continuation of trade and independence and growth, conscious not to push the limits, or betray the principles, of the Open Society.
But a tax is still a tax, and no one likes paying them. And being taxed by a distant neighbour can easily feel like imperialism, not partnership. Through this, the oligarchs slowly twisted Athens’ empire against itself. The alternative was Sparta, and their method of handling foreign affairs was much less appealing. It was the method of the Closed Society: keep taboos rigid and resist all change, suppress any impulses toward individualism or egalitarianism, don’t trade with your neighbours but dominate them with force, maintain your superiority to outsiders, and at every opportunity enslave and steal from other tribes; avoiding growing too large and, with it, unified.
These are the principles of all tyranny, not just Sparta. And the people of Greece knew little of it at the time. They only knew Athens, they knew of the taxes they didn’t like, and they had not yet appreciated the large – and uncertain – step that Athens had made towards a better world. Tribal societies have a deep emotional anchor on their side, something that holds minds and bodies in place: they know how to select their enemies, how to explain-away their unpleasant values in terms of saving the people – and the state – from those enemies, and how to claw together a hardened patriotism around that fight; all in easy to appreciate – and hard to reject – slogans like: “back to the state of our forefather” or “back to the old paternal state”.
That the Athenians who bought into this patriotic return were the same ones willing to commit open treason against their own state, is an irony that doesn’t need explaining. It was a mistake, but one of weakness and fear, not of contempt and malice. Though they were still as wealthy as ever, they desperately missed what they once had: stability, order and tradition. It was a nihilism of the spirit and of the mind. A generation of men, young and old, who rather than adapting and becoming democratic leaders, sought to bring the whole institution down in a grand statement of sedition. The foremost group of these oligarchs came to be known as the Thirty Tyrants, and the single most prominent member, the leader of the cabal, was Plato’s uncle Critias.
On the other side are people who Popper likes to call the Great Generation. The conservatives and liberals alike who lived immediately before – and during – the Peloponnesian War; a difficult to pronounce assortment of intellectual folk heroes: Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Pericles, Herodotus, Protagoras, Democritus… The great early statesmen of Greek civilisation, the builders of the new “humanitarian” institutions, and people wise enough even then, in the premature stages of the Open Society, to say things like this: “The poverty of a democracy is better than the prosperity which allegedly goes with aristocracy or monarchy, just as liberty is better than slavery!”
Those were – of course – the words of Democritus. Here is Pericles speaking of Athenian identity: “Our city is thrown open to the world; we never expel a foreigner… we are free to live exactly as we please, and yet we are always ready to face any danger… We love beauty without indulging in fancies.” Those uplifting, and extraordinary forward-thinking, tones were spoken as a funeral oration for dead Athenian soldiers. The war was again hot, and this time Sparta would win.
Five years later, with the battles still raging, and Athens still losing, a pamphlet was published and passed around the open hands of a then-doubting society. Deceptively titled The Constitution of Athens, and making false allusions between democracy, imperialism, and societal decay, it was a knife into an already weakened enemy. All the problems that Athens now felt, were reshaped from being caused by internal treason and conspiracy with the enemy, to being the fault of freedom; of letting the unruly masses have a say about things that only the superior classes – the oligarchs – understood. The author was Critias!
It was the Closed Society trying to reassert itself, pointing to the war and fear that they had welcomed to Athens’ door, and claiming that this was the price of abandoning the traditional – magical and irrational – order. All those grand statements about an open future and being “free to live exactly as we please” were being publicly tortured by an alternative vision. One where everything was certain, everything was given, everything had its natural place, and where even history was foreseen and controllable (historicism).
As Athens fell to its knees, there was an intellectual problem to deal with: Socrates. More than anyone else, he had been responsible for Athens’ brief moment of light and hope and progress; not as a “theorist of the Open Society”, nor as a leader of democracy, but as a critic… of everything. He famously wandered the dusty city streets, challenging the deepest held convictions of the people he saw. And so naturally democracy itself also became his target.
In a petty turn of blame and retribution, the Athenian revolution from Closed to Open showed its age and its immaturity. After the Spartan defeat, humiliated eyes twisted inward and settled angrily upon democracy’s loudest critic. The mistake cannot be overstated – it was a hangover from their once-tribal selves. They could not tell the difference between a democratic criticism and an authoritarian one. The difference between someone who wants to improve the errors he sees, and someone for whom those errors instead mean that the whole enterprise ought to be destroyed and replaced by a totalitarian substitute: “there is no need for a man who criticises democracy and democratic institutions to be their enemy”.
It also wasn’t helpful for his reputation to have spent so much of his time in the company of “anti-democrats”. Members of the Thirty Tyrants, people like Alcibiades, Charmides, and Critias, were often seen with Socrates, talking about politics and culture. When these people crossed over to the Spartan side during the war, Socrates was stained by a betrayal that he didn’t commit himself. Here again, Athens showed its not-yet-erased tribal colours, failing to see the difference between someone debating his enemies (trying to change their minds) and someone conspiring with like-minded criminals.
Worse! As a “teacher-politician” Socrates was charged with actually guiding these men – all renamed as his students – towards their betrayal. The people he had taught were the people who had gone on to bring-down Athenian democracy, and colluded with a foreign, butcherous enemy. In its fragile condition, there was enough here for Athens – and its newly constructed laws – to accuse Socrates of master-minding their defeat, by educating the “most pernicious enemies of the state.”
A post-war amnesty for all political crimes made things hard for the prosecution though. And so the charges were limited in ways that might have seemed acceptable to both sides of the courtroom; intending only to set a standard of sorts, and protect the future Athenian state – as they mistakenly saw it – from a repeat insurrection. Their plan was to simply “prevent him from continuing his teaching” and the crime was written to match: “corrupting the youth.”
Socrates stood before his accusers, denied the charges, announced publicly that he had “no sympathy” with The Thirty Tyrants, nor with their actions, and pointed out that he had – in fact – risked his life by challenging them and then by denying any association with the winning army. Convicted, and offered a choice of punishment – exile or death – Socrates took the chance that so many would – and had – not: to stand on principle; “Only if I stay can I put beyond doubt my loyalty to the state, with its democratic laws, and prove that I have never been its enemy. There can be no better proof of my loyalty than my willingness to die for it.”
Enter Plato, the “most gifted” of Socrates’ disciples, and in Popper’s view the “least faithful”. To put things in simpler, blunter terms: “He betrayed Socrates, just as his uncles had done.” Unlike his teacher, Plato was a totalitarian at heart, and no sooner was Socrates dead then Plato was going to work implicating him posthumously in the fall of Athens.
Plato’s great political work, The Republic, was whipped-up to revive the worst spiritual horrors of The Thirty Tyrants and of the Closed Society. A book designed to normalise, and provide intellectual weight, to totalitarianism, Plato inexplicitly chose Socrates to be its mouthpiece. He then had Socrates novelistically talking-up new laws that would make “free thought”, political criticism, and “teaching new ideas to the young” as capital crimes: effectively admitting to his own criminality, and approving of his own execution, under Plato’s pen.
And the debauching of Socrates’ legacy continued as he was made into an enemy of democracy (“had not Socrates been killed by the democracy? Had not democracy lost any right to claim him?”), and an aristocratic elitist, happy to denigrate the common man (“Had not Socrates himself encouraged his disciples to participate in politics? Did this not mean that he wanted the enlightened, the wise, to rule?”). As he perverted the thoughts of Athens’ greatest ever statesman in this way, Plato was consciously rebuilding the once-lost ideas of tribalism and the Closed Society.
Here, in the final analysis, Popper has a small fleck of sympathy with Plato. He almost certainly knew that he was betraying Socrates, and a heavy motivation for this was to “quiet his own bad conscience”; but he was also a creature of his time. He was scared. He felt that uncomfortable strain of civilization. And he wanted desperately to be free of it all. He wanted to be happy again, and to know his place in the world… he also wanted this same relief for his fellow Athenians. The mistake he made was a simple one: thinking that happiness belonged to a previous time, and wanting to return there.
Socrates, Plato, Critias, Sparta, and that first Athenian democracy, can all feel like an impossibly distant crumb of our history. But as you read it – in its twists and worries and insecurities and hopes – it rings much, much closer to home. Regardless of what we might like to think of ourselves and the progress we have made, we are still very much at the beginning of this revolution from Closed Society to Open!
The largest problem with this Greek history, as it tends to be told, is its end point. The fall of Athens to a rising Sparta was not the “final results”. At first it was only seventy of the surviving Athenians, then more, then more still. Under the leadership of Anytus and Thrasybulus, the Athenian armies were reformed in exile. Eight months later they returned, defeated Critias, defeated the Spartan garrison, and restored what had been lost: “the democrats fought on.”
*** The Popperian Podcast #22 – Elyse Hargreaves – ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies, and Happiness’ https://popperian-podcast.libsyn.com/the-popperian-podcast-22-elyse-hargreaves-the-open-society-and-its-enemies-and-happiness