VI Plasticity and Order

BUT is it just?—some one asks. Perhaps there are other things than order to be considered. Perhaps this hunger for order is a disease, like the monistic hunger for unity; perhaps it is a corollary to the à priori type of mind; perhaps it is part of the philosopher’s general inability to face a possibly irrational reality. Here for order’s sake the greater part of the people must work in silence: they shall not utter their desires. Here for order’s sake are sacrificed that communal plasticity, that freedom of variety, that happy looseness and changeability of structure, in which lie all the suggestion and potency of social reconstruction. If there is any lesson which shines out through all the kaleidoscope of history, it is that a political system is doomed to early death if its charter offer no provision and facility for its own reform. Plasticity is king. Human ideals change, and leave nations, institutions, even gods, in their wake. “Law and order in a state are” not “the cause of every good”;¹ they are the security of goods attained, but they may be also the hindrance of goods conceived. A state without freedom of criticism and variation is like a sail-boat in a calm; it stands but it cannot move. Such a state is a geometrical diagram, a perfect syllogism evolved out of impossible premises; and its own perfection is its refutation. In such a state there could be no Plato, with a penchant for conceiving Utopias; much less a Socrates, holding that a life uncriticised is unworthy of a man. It would be a state not for philosophers but for priests: very truly its basis would not be dialectical clarity but royal lies. Here is the supreme pessimism, the ultimate atheism, of the aristocrat, that he does not believe in the final wholesomeness of truth. And surely something can be said for democracy. Granted that democracy is not a problem solved but a problem added; it is at least a problem that time may help to clarify. Granted that men used to slavery cannot turn and wisely rule themselves; what is better than that they should, by inevitable trial and error, learn? Errando discimus. Granted that physicians do not consult us in their prescriptions; but neither do they come to us before they are chosen and called. “That the guardian should require another guardian to guard him is ridiculous indeed.”² But he would! Power corrupts unless it is shared by all. “Cities cannot exist, if a few only share in the virtues, as in the arts.”³ To build your culture on the backs of slaves is to found your city on Vesuvius. Men will not be lied to forever,—at least with the same lies! And to end with such a Utopia,—what is it but to yield to Thrasymachus, to arrange all things at last in the interest of the stronger? Is it just?