There is No Good Reason For The State To Regulate Art: A Cautionary Platonic Tale
It was Karl Popper who famously laid at the feet of Plato (and Hegel) responsibility for the horrors of Nazi totalitarianism in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).
Popper’s thesis, suffice to say, proved to be controversial, and remains so today. The idea that any thinker could be held responsible for the actions of any human being, let alone an entire regime, more than two thousand years later is dubious, to say the least. That said, Plato, for all his genuine brilliance as a philosopher, provided Popper with plenty of ammunition. The truth is that Plato had egregiously authoritarian tendencies.
In this article, I draw attention to his cultural authoritarianism and why it stands as a cautionary tale against the bad political instinct, found on both the Left and the Right, to want to control culture through the apparatus of coercion and compulsion that is the state.
In The Laws, Plato’s final work written 450s–440s BC, “the Athenian,” the dialogue’s key protagonist, regales his companions Cleinias and Megillus (a Cretan and Spartan respectively) with what he regards as the legal regime of the ideal state. The occasion for this dialogue is the fact that Cleinias is a member of a small group charged with establishing the laws for a new Cretan colony. In characteristic Platonic fashion, the dialogue ranges across multiple disciplines (by modern standards) in a somewhat haphazard fashion, albeit a fashion that evokes a realistic and organic conversation between human beings.
The fact is that hardly anyone today seriously believes that the human character, to put the soul into its contemporary secularised conception
The point of interest for present purposes is Plato’s (via the mouth of the Athenian) proposition that the ideal state ought to regulate, effectively via censorship, all forms of art, including poetry, music and even dance. No one, the Athenian proposes,
shall sing a note, or perform any dance-movement, other than those in the canon of public songs, sacred music, and the general body of chorus performances of the young—any more than he would violate any other ‘nome’ or law. If a man obeys, he shall go unmolested by the law; but if he disobeys, the Guardians of the Laws and the priests and priestesses must punish him…”
In another indicative passage, this time dealing with poetry, the Athenian avers that
a poet should compose nothing that conflicts with society’s conventional notions of justice, goodness and beauty. No one should be allowed to show his work to any private person without first submitting it to the appointed assessors and to the Guardians of the Laws, and getting their approval.
While this level of censorship might strike a modern reader as rather extreme, it is not entirely unfamiliar in a world in which authoritarian regimes still practice censorship via the regulation of speech, including artistic expression, such as in North Korea and Iran. The erstwhile communist regimes of twentieth century Europe were notorious for censuring their bohemian classes, with the attendant sublimation of art into the vulgar and kitsch. What makes Plato’s belief in the virtues of regulating artistic expression a cautionary tale is its rationale.
Regulating dance, music and poetry was not merely a matter of good taste for Plato. The very character of society was at stake in the mode and nature of its artistic expression, along with its prospects for peace, cohesion and prosperity. Why? Because he believed that the human soul, in particular its development in the young, could be affected by everything from words to melodies. The soul, moreover, was the defining feature of the human being, ie that which determined whether it was virtuous or evil, and to what extent. There is a large section of The Republic that outlines the requirements of a well-governed soul and its direct relationship to the well-governed state. In essence, the fate of the state, Plato believed, is to a large extent bound up in the virtue or lack thereof of its citizens, which in turn is determined by how well ordered their souls are. The education, or rather formation, of souls was thus very much a matter of interest to the state, making it a natural area for regulation (if one accepts Plato’s presupposition).
The problem, of course, is that the soul is an entirely metaphysical concept. The Greek conception of the soul was ultimately rejected by Christianity in favour of a more simplified version (the details are beyond our scope here), which latterly has been widely rejected in a heavily secularised West. In fact, even Christians these days speak rather infrequently about the soul. Needless to say, it is no longer taught as part of the school curriculum, including ostensibly in Christian schools.
It is not entirely unfamiliar in a world in which authoritarian regimes still practice censorship via the regulation of speech, including artistic expression
In a nutshell, the fate of the individual soul, and the fate of society via the body soul politic, is a bad reason to censor art, or anything for that matter. No metaphysical doctrine should shape a contemporary society’s laws and regulations. Metaphysics is, by its nature, speculative. This is not to say that there is no place for metaphysics in our intellectual life. Empiricism, logical positivism and the scientific method are limited in their scope of application, insofar as they are incapable of explaining all human experience and answering all important human questions, e.g., the meaning of life, ethical dilemmas and what makes good art (as it happens). Because metaphysics is by its nature speculative, it is liable to diversity of opinion, which makes it a very weak basis for law, especially when punishment is in the equation as it is with Plato’s recommendation regarding permitted forms of art.
There have been periodic episodes of mass hysteria over the purported nefarious effects of art in our own times, or at least within living memory—remember the 1980s–90s hysteria over the alleged satanic messages of heavy metal records played backwards? Such episodes are now rightly looked back on as instances of social psychosis. The fact is that hardly anyone today seriously believes that the human character, to put the soul into its contemporary secularised conception, is affected by the content and form of dance, music and poetry. And those who do, or are inclined to make the case, are unlikely to assert that an individual’s entire fate, let alone that of an entire society, hinges on the type of dance, music and poetry heard and performed.
Metaphysics, and more to the point, speculative ideas about the nature of reality that cannot be confirmed by either empirical observation or experimentation, are not a good reason to censor art. The only criteria upon which to judge art are things like beauty, signification and emotional resonance or evocation. These are inherently subjective qualities, illustrating why artistic expression must be left to a free market of consumer taste. Experimentation and innovation, two threats to the educative effects of sound artistic form and expression on the soul, according to Plato, are essential to the discovery of beauty in art. It is difficult to see how Plato’s approved “canon” of dance, songs and poetry in practice could have come into existence except by experimentation and innovation across successive generations.
A state, which in practice means bureaucrats in the case of the application of regulation, is in no position to make judgments on questions of subjective taste. Art, whether in the sense of expression, taste or consumption, is one of the most fundamental of fundamental individual freedoms. As such, it is not suitable for government regulation. Plato reminds us why there are no good reasons for the state to regulate artistic expression by imposing forms and standards, standing in judgment of content, establishing permitted canons and punishing artists who fail to comply.