On Wisconsin, and legitimacy.

Q: Why is union dysfunction taken as a reason to abolish collective bargaining, while it couldn't be suggested in polite company that similar forms of corporate dysfunction (rigidity, inefficiency, delusional budgeting, stubborn self-interest masquerading as public-mindedness) be taken as a reason to dramatically change corporate structures and/or legal attitudes toward said institutions?

A(1.0): Why are so many people willing to believe that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a single country, while it was considered in poor taste to mention George W. Bush's public floundering and flubbing of foreign policy facts during his first Presidential campaign? Grant the latter having been far better documented, during his campaign for POTUS, and he having had no special reputation for command of the facts (of the sort that probably explains people's tolerance of exaggerations and misstatements from e.g. Obama on the campaign trail), on the contrary presenting himself as a brash anti-elitist whose favorite philosopher was Jesus.

A(1.1): Because George W. Bush came from money and manners and fancy educational institutions and large private endeavors, obviously, and because he was a man, obviously. And perhaps because his (adopted) Texas twang was more familiar than her (native) MatSu Valley sort of Upper Midwestern Scandinavian thing, so that he sounded "folksy" while she sounded strange, like a backwoods hunter.

A(1.2): Equally obviously, people didn't compare the evidence on the two, weigh and sift carefully, and decide to judge them differently in these ways. Even people who explicitly analogized the two didn't tend to draw it out in this way. No, people just saw and heard him one way and her another way.

A(2.0): Here are other versions of the same question:
A(2.1): When a random Muslim or Arab or Persian man beats or kills his wife, why is it newsworthy, when domestic violence almost never gets much press? Why do people claim that al Qaeda proves that Islam is inherently a savage religion when people have done the worst possible things in defense and behalf of every sort of cause? (Flip side, for the leftists: why does the persistence of violence an unbundle conditions show that the nation-state in general, and often enough Israel in particular, ought to be abolished?)
A(2.2): Why do missing black children go unreported while a blonde girl will be in the news for weeks? Why was the drug bust of a black girl at Harvard several years ago -- which included violence perpetrated by someone she'd let in and culminated in her expulsion, not nearly as widely reported as the arrest of half a dozen white Columbia boys who turned out to be wholesale-level drug dealers?
A(2.3): When Haley Barbour sanitizes his memories of how integration went down in Mississippi in the sixties, why do reporters write blog posts about it? When a man molests a boy, why does that say something about how men who are attracted to men are in general, but a man's molesting a girl shows nothing about what men who are attracted to women are like? If the latter does show anything, why is it taken to show that the longstanding differences in the way we -- meaning people of European descent, in particular -- treat male and female sexuality are based in or even determined by biology?
A(2.4): Why is one anecdote about China sufficient for a columnist to prove a point when the same sloppiness would be laughed off if one person were taken to stand in for the whole of say the UK, which has maybe a fifteenth of China's population and is much more geographically concentrated (in and around London) and is much more linguistically and culturally homogeneous than China?
A(2.5): Why is it that hostile male students try to intimidate me and assume a female friend knows no physics, and friendly ones treat me as their guidance counsellor, feel free to go over my head to the professor (female students probably do this too but they haven't to me), and describe me to a professor in a complaint as "incredibly caring and giving ... That said ... [any and all classrooms silences were the TA's fault]?"
A(2.6): Why do people assume that any so-called "dark" or "cynical" Beatles song is pure Lennon?

A(3.0): Naive epistemic realism is utterly untenable, because there just is no way we "perceive" things that's separate from and prior to our interpretation of events; and that perception-interpretation process depends very much on shortcuts that certainly are cognitively useful (I don't want to have to reason out every night whether I should expect the Sun to rise tomorrow and bread to be nutritious) but by the same token are very much in need of examination and questioning.
A(3.1): Given that Socrates encourages interlocutors to examine separately their underlying assumptions and the systematic interconnections between them, while Aristotle assumes we can more or less rely on heretofore-accumulated human wisdom: Socratic epistemology is much, much closer to how we ought to deliberate than Aristotelian epistemology.

On logos and magic in Plato's presentation of Socrates.

Plato's Socrates was not a normal human being. He went barefoot in winter and in battle. He stood motionless for hours, even a day, on end. He gave up his craft -- presumably stone-masonry, his father's craft -- to stand in the market-place or at the baths asking people questions about truth, beauty, goodness. Though hemlock is a miserable death and a long process of loss of functions, he died with dignity and quietness. He associated with strange people: Pythagoreans, priests with odd beliefs, boys, slaves, aspiring tyrants, future tyrants; yet somehow the dully respectable and practical Xenophon became a devoted follower (of the historical Socrates, not Plato's), too. Other pupils and friends of the historical Socrates included the hedonist Aristippus and the devoutly ascetic Antisthenes, and perhaps Aristophanes, whose brutal mockery in "The Clouds" Plato's Socrates claims in "Apology" set the stage for his later condemnation, yet who is given the most beautiful speech of the "Symposium." He moved in aristocratic circles -- Plato was descended from Solon and other legends of Athens, Alcibiades, Nicias, Laches, and later Xenophon were important generals, the famous sophists he conversed with and their wealthy hosts hardly made it a practice to invite members of the laboring classes to their speeches and soirées -- which does not sound so strange until we reflect and realize that we can't think of a single other classical Athenian who demonstrated even that degree of social mobility. Later came others like him -- court poets and philosophers, and a very few -- really I can only think of Cleanthes (the second head of the Stoic school, 4-3c BCE) at the moment -- who succeeded as figures of culture and learning without patronage or private wealth; and Cleanthes gardened for a living even when he was a prominent philosopher, and is condescended to for his manners and appearance and intelligence (!) in our ancient sources. (He was nicknamed "the Ox.") -- The Stoics and Epicureans actively embraced outsiders of various sorts, it is true. Epicurus's school received the only female pupils we know of in any school but the Academy, which supposedly took on two female pupils under Plato's rule (Axiothea and something with an "L") one of whom was reputed to dress in male garb while the other wore women's clothing. The Stoa was founded by a foreigner of dubious pedigree -- for, as Cicero points out repeatedly in his Tusculan Disputations (isn't it?), Zeno was from Cyprus, and therefore not necessarily of Greek descent -- and headed next by Cleanthes, though from Chrysippus to Marcus Aurelius most of its spokesmen are high-hats. The important late exception is Epictetus, who began his philosophical studies as a slave and later was freed, in middle age I think. But that was at Rome, and the Roman Empire offered dramatically better chances for social improvement than Athens ever had at its peak. There, the classes simply did not mingle. Yet Socrates did.

Certain words that characterize the oddness of Socrates recur throughout Plato: atopia, or being out of place, bizarre, absurd; eironia, "irony," which really meant "dissembling" (Socrates is rarely simply sarcastic), or preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet; epo[i]de -- incantation (lit. "sung over")-- and other words of magic spells and charms. Reversal too is a constant theme. In the "Apology," Socrates proposes as the alternative to the death penalty that he be given a state pension. In "Euthyphro," he stops a moment on the way to his trial for impiety to point out that well-regarded priests know less of piety than he. In "Protagoras" he engineers such thorough confusion that by the end he and Protagoras have switched their positions on all the issues they were considering. In "Gorgias" he acknowledges that by Athenian standards he is politically powerless and a poor speaker, then redefines politics and rhetoric so that he is the only person in Athens with any grasp of either. Further he cites the Pythagorean (and perhaps Heraclitean -- cf. "immortal mortals, mortal immortals") teaching that "who knows whether we the living are really dead, while the dead have life?" In "Phaedo" he asks his friends to offer a thanksgiving offering to Aesclepius the healer god after his death. And more, and more and more, climaxing, surely, in Alcibiades's drunken rant in "Symposium" about how ugly old Socrates refuses to play the part of lover but instead others woo him as if he were a beautiful young boy. His is the last speech. The dialogue ends with Socrates -- alone sober after the night's revelries -- trying to persuade the tragedian Agathon and the comic playwright Aristophanes that the true poet should be able to compose both tragedies and comedies, at dawn, while they struggle not to join the rest of the company in sleep. The echo of Socrates's night with Alcibiades, when too Socrates seemed simply not to see the physical temptations to which everyone else succumbed, and to which Alcibiades frantically endeavored to rouse him, is unmistakable. Alcibiades thinks that Socrates must have bewitched him to make him act the fool so, while remaining himself teasingly unaffected.

Charmides and Phaedrus (?) too accuse Socrates of witchcraft, and Meno compares his effect to the sting of a puffer-fish. Thrasymachus in "Republic" i and Callicles in "Gorgias" have nastier words for it: they feel not enthralled but bullied. In one important way Plato clearly sides with them against the charmed. For they recognize that Socrates has only his words for a net and a spell, and that he traps them and catches them with just words. They are not special, magical words unique to Socrates. On the contrary, he draws them out of every interlocutor, from famous sophists like Protagoras and Hippias to teenagers like Charmides and Theaetetus to Meno's innumerate slave. The words are theirs, not Socrates's. Famously he calls himself a midwife in "Theaetetus," because he can only help others nurture and deliver the babies conceived (if we accept "Symposium"'s account) in encounters with the Forms. "Symposium" suggests that we fall in love because we are already pregnant and wish "to give birth in beauty" -- that is, to express the goodness and truth and beauty we feel certain we have within us -- and for that we need others' help. Socrates helps through talking with us, through asking questions and worrying our replies until the weak spots show. His magic is speech and reasoned argument (both central meanings of the Greek "logos"), not a mumbled spell or sacrificed bird or buried curse-tablet. His wizardry and his bullying aggression are partial views of his midwifery.

Socrates was strange. He moved in social circles beyond his class, he sought out beautiful boys and then ignored their bodies, he humbled great speakers and arguers with simple questions, he sometimes felt no effects from cold and alcohol, he refused to take money for what he considered to be the most valuable service of all, his aid in the care of souls. Other contemporaries tried to explain him as magical. (The pseudo-Platonic "Theages" suggests the astonishing claims made for him when one of its characters claims to become wiser and better through mere physical proximity to Socrates.) Xenophon mostly ignores such claims, fearing perhaps that they come too close to the critiques that led to his trial and death. Plato, on the other hand, as is his wont, does something more ambitious and more audacious. He acknowledges the magic of Socrates, but offers a revisionist account on which it is nothing more than logos -- something we all have -- and on which any special talent or might of Socrates's lay in midwifery -- a profession of poor women (including Socrates's mother, he says in "Theaetetus") that no one powerful would dream of pursuing. It's true, Plato tells us, that Socrates is different, bizarre, dissembling, magical. In a culminating reversal, those very qualities only show the more clearly what is universally human in him.