The Sculptor: Abducted!

Socrates was, according some, a stonemason, like his father. According to others he was a sculptor, responsible for the sculpture of the the Graces that stood near the Acropolis. Whether Socrates was an artisan or an artist with stone, he was at the very least a sculptor of conversations, and artist with words. And it is for this that he was renowned and in demand.

There Socrates was, minding his own business, walking with his friend Glaucon back to the city of Athens after making a religious pilgrimage, when his garment was seized by a slave, on the order of his master Polemarchus, the son of a wealthy arms merchant named Cephalus. So there you are walking down the street, minding your own business, when suddenly you are seized from behind and ordered to wait, and told that you are being commanded to provide entertainment at a party. These people do not care that your wife Xanthippe and your two small children are at home expecting your return; and they don’t take your “no” at all seriously.

What did Socrates do? He announced his intention to proceed back home, of course; after all, this is where Xanthippe and his children live. But Polemarchus, catching up with his slave, demands that Socrates provide conversational entertainment at a “party” at his house—really a gathering of his and his father’s flatterers—and then Polemarchus appeals to the number of his mob to demand compliance: Socrates is brought to the party, occurring in a mansion of glory (327c),⁷² filled with slaves and their masters. There are in fact good contextual clues, like the passionate threats of bully Thrasymachus, the lechery of Polemarchus, and the slurred arguments of the assembled group, that the only sober ones there are the permanent slaves and the “temporary” ones, Socrates and Glaucon.

It’s a bitter pill that these abductors have stolen and swallowed. Socrates—with the aid of his own E-Street Band, Glaucon and his brother Adimantus—chastises their conspicuous consumption, their imperialism, and their attempts to control politics and manipulate the thinking of those around them. These elites exert control so as to maintain their privileged position. They live in a cave of pedagogical lies and make up “eternal forms” to supplement their paid armies. Socrates then warns that his captors’ mercenary guardians will eventually see through the lies they have been told and turn against their oppressors; the end result of this civil war is to be a city enslaved, indebted, ruined, and under the yoke of tyrants.

Of course the very livelihood of this assembled group depends on the overconsumption and warmongering of others as well; if Athens stopped living in such splendor and fighting so many wars of imperialistic expansion, then Cephalus’s arms-manufacturing business would go bankrupt, and his son Polemarchus would need to find a job and leave off his merrymaking and kidnapping. Thus the fiery Sophist Thrasymachus, a hired hand, is appointed to frighten and cajole Socrates so that he will stop his critique of the overconsumptive state. “Don’t you understand,” this august assembly says through its spokesperson, “that there is no justice beyond what we masters of the universe possess? We, dear fellow, control the levers of all power; we will make you rich, if we please, and we will destroy you, if we please. So please do stop using that concept of some other sort of justice to hurt our business interests. We here in this room, the arms merchants and their flatterers, are justice and the laws; while your boring ‘just man’ who is honest in his labor and fair in his dealings with his neighbors will be killed and forgotten, if we so order it. So, look man, just pull your chair up to this sweet table and receive the reward for your compliance. Or you will be killed and forgotten.” Well, in Socrates’s case, perhaps the threat was half true; he was killed.

The Singer: Abducted!

In 1948, George Orwell predicted that in 1984 a critic’s opinion would be abducted and perverted into an endorsement by a ruling elite engaged in perpetual warfare and perpetual lying, supposedly for the good of the Republic. Precisely on schedule, Springsteen, engaged in a critique of imperialistic warfare and overconsumption, was abducted by the two major American presidential contenders, Reagan and Mondale, who supported invasions of weak states (like Lebanon and Grenada) that had offered no plausible threat, and who simultaneously pretended that Springsteen had endorsed them. This abduction was not a physical one, as in Socrates’s case, but rather an abduction of his political endorsement. Perhaps you think that we oughn’t to take such a kidnapping seriously compared to the ones that befell Socrates; but we must take political kidnapping at a quite literal level, since our political opinions may easily be so important to us—if we choose them to be—as our bodies. There is, after all, a connection between what we believe and what happens to our bodies—as tens of millions of deceased dissidents could easily attest, if they were still here.

Reagan and Mondale, like Polemarchus and Cephalus, are not so stupid as they might appear—they knew, of course, that Springsteen was a critic and not a flatterer at the time they pretended he would endorse them, and the point of the kidnapping was to cajole him to accept a prominent role—as offered by the latter-day Thrasymachus, George F. Will in a newspaper editorial entitled “A Yankee Doodle Springsteen,”—as the poet laureate of joyous overconsumption and the oppression of foreigners. Springsteen, of course, pointedly turned down all these offers. His critical voice has since been censored by some of the largest corporate-owned American radio stations who now refuse to play his music, perhaps because they well understand that his critique of overconsumption might mean reduced profits for them, if people heard it.

At any rate we may still be surprised that Orwell’s bold prediction of the year 1984 came true, right on schedule. But I think that Orwell is here less a prophet than a good reader of history, as the same thing had happened on roughly the same schedule to the critic Socrates a couple of thousand years before—it was a few decades after the Greek defeat of Xerxes and his Persian army that Athens fell into the same sort of miasmic post-imperialist disrepair that undid Xerxes; likewise it was about so many years between Hitler et al., and Springsteen’s critique of the decline of America. To the victors goes the spoilage, apparently. Several decades, that is, after defeating the tyrants Xerxes/Hitler, the once-just people, strong by virtue of minding their own business and leaving others to mind theirs, who nobly fought those who failed to mind their own business because they were in quest of lording over others’ business, began to imitate the actions of their former oppressors: the children of the children of the “greatest generation” revel in luxury and think themselves better, in the words of Socrates, not merely to the unjust, but to everyone. The children of the children of the victors, enflamed with appetites and passions that far outstrip the ability of the land to provide for them, must, then, turn to despoiling the neighbor’s land and censoring its domestic critics. Suddenly the wars have no purpose but to seize the excess of our rapidly proliferating desires. It’s hard to understand, in a ghost city like Youngstown:

These mills they built the tanks and bombs
That won this country’s wars
We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam
Now we’re wondering what they were dyin’ for.

Elenchus and Epoche

The Socrates of The Republic and Springsteen are strangely, but almost universally, misread as succumbing to “Stockholm syndrome”—parroting the beliefs of their abductors, and endorsing a “patriotic” state that forcibly discourages dissent, censors art, encourages recitation of comforting lies, and seeks endless wars against foreign states, all for the one purpose of allowing consumption to grow exponentially. There are two main reasons for this misunderstanding. The first derives from the effects of censorship as earlier discussed; the second comes from Socrates’s and Springsteen’s shared critical method, wherein they do not obviously denounce overconsumption and imperialism “from the outside,” so to speak, but they patiently consider those activities from within, first when people are apparently flourishing, and finally in their cataclysmic decline. To the unsensitive reader who hears Springsteen’s repeated chorus: “Born in the U.S.A.,” and odes to fast cars and street racing, and Socrates’s encomiums in The Republic to the lying eternal forms, and to the self-serving “philosophical” ruling class of Athens, these critics seem instead to be paid celebrity endorsers. But if we read the songs and speeches in a broader context and listen for Socrates’s and Springsteen’s judgments as to the consequences of such beliefs and behaviors, we will easily see that Socrates and Springsteen are far from endorsing the debauched behaviors; this car-racing and these eternal universal forms lead to loneliness, death and suffering for those who believe in them and those with the misfortune of living near to them.

Both Socrates and Springsteen use the same method of elenchus to criticize those whose desires necessitate parasitic predation on the labors of domestic and foreign workers: both perform a sort of thought experiment that corresponds to actual conditions, beginning by humoring those whom they criticize by temporarily endorsing their message. After all, it’s easier to catch a fly with honey than with vinegar. But then they run the experiment and show how, in the end, such beliefs and behaviors result only in unhappiness. Unfortunately, in both cases, readers and listeners often lose sight of this method of elenchus and ascribe to both Socrates and Springsteen those beliefs they are criticizing!

In Book One of the Republic, we learn that Cephalus—the wealthy arms merchant whose son abducted Socrates—is terrified of Hell, but he thinks that wealth alone (such as he possesses by an accident of birth) will enable him to make peace with the gods. He also asserts that the poor are almost certainly doomed to Hell since they must cheat their fellows and cannot pay off the gods. Let us pause here to remember that Socrates is an unashamed member of this working poor, and Cephalus knows this very well, so Socrates is being insulted quite directly. It’s almost as if Springsteen were dragged to dinner at the Trump Palace in Atlantic City and then told by The Donald that all those working people back in Asbury Park were unworthy of heaven. It’s not like he doesn’t know where Bruce comes from. How would Bruce take that?

In Book Two Socrates praises the modest workers, in communion with the forms of particular expertise that enable their labor, and whose labors sustainably meet the needs of their people—meaningful work. It’s this genuinely happy political condition that forms the “control” or epoche against which the experiment of the diseased overconsumptive state is tested, and found lacking. If you really want to know what ails Atlantic City, you need a healthy contrast—a happy, productive working class neighborhood. Later in the Republic, we are subjected to Socrates’s restatement, now at greater and tragic length, of the conditions foreshadowed in the beginning, when the critics are kidnapped and horsemen risk death for the amusement of the wealthy—a horrible litany of abuses against the human person and collective intelligence that must be undertaken by the wealthy, overconsumptive, diseased state. There will be censorship of the artists, starvation, murder, infanticide, violation of the constitution and of taboo, and war without end; and finally, at the end, Socrates declares that the “smart but wicked men,” the tyrants and the oligarchs who create them, shall be the sole inhabitants of Hell—and not the working poor, as Cephalus had assumed.

As with Springsteen in “Born in the USA,” the doctrines that are widely attributed to Socrates—of eternal fixed forms, of the Cave as a good pedagogical model—are in fact descriptions of the hopeful beliefs of his kidnappers: that if they lie in just the right way, they can set things up so that they will be always able to overconsume and lord it over their fellows, just as they are now. Alas, the Republic, the most commonly read of Socrates’ conversation, is very long. Scholars, tired by the many words, forget the elenchus, and begin to ascribe to Socrates the beliefs of his oligarchic kidnappers!

In the twentieth century, respected philosophers such as Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell, and indeed thousands of others, are shocked that Plato, writing in middle age, has stolen from us the humane Socrates he wrote about when he was younger. But such scholars forget that Socrates has been kidnapped, and that he is, by the critical method of elenchus, demonstrating what will happen to the censors, kidnappers and enslavers of critical domestic artists and unthreatening foreign peoples. Slightly more sophisticated readers like Leo Strauss (1899–1973) remember the elenchus but for some reason neglect the epoche, of Book Two, the healthy city or working people, and they fail to note the importance of the death sports that are the center of this culture—forgetting this, they implicate Socrates in other sorts of strange prescriptions, like the wholesale rejection of politics, when in fact he is merely rejecting the consumptive idealism of this group of wealthy abductors.

Likewise, with Springsteen, listeners are sometimes distracted by individual lyrics or refrains and miss the elenchus. The refrain of “Born in the USA!” is such an example; a casual listener hears uncritical patriotism and may assume that the proper response to invading weak nations like Grenada and Lebanon is to unfurl the flag and shout patriotically over the objections of the conscience of friendly cooperation. But if we listen more carefully, we hear the critique of a nation at pointless war abroad, with no respect for work or the natural environment at home. One does wonder why Springsteen chooses to deliver his lyrics in ways that make them hard to decipher on the first hearing. But Socrates is pretty hard to understand in his own somewhat different way. Perhaps Springsteen is inviting those who care to know to read the lyrics and let the fools who won’t take the trouble think whatever they want.

Some slightly more sensitive critics of Springsteen’s poems have understood the presence of the critique but hastily reduced it to an “anti-war” position that still celebrates other typical signs of American excess, notably its fetishistic love of automobiles. But these cars as ideal ends, too are tested by Bruce with the method of elenchus, and are found as tragically wanting as the diseased city of the Republic, as in “The Angel,” where:

The interstate’s choked with nomadic hordes

in Volkswagen vans with full running boards dragging great anchors

Followin’ dead-end signs into the sores

The angel rides by humpin’ his hunk metal whore.

This isn’t exactly the worship of the car on the road. Let’s turn, then, to examine the epoche and elenchus in slow motion, so that we are not deceived into thinking the critics are endorsing what they in fact oppose. First we’ll examine the “control,” the good city; then the “experiment,” the luxurious city. Then we’ll compare consequences. We’ll finish with a discussion of what Springsteen and Socrates’s artistic criticism means for understanding philosophy itself.

The Good City

The first hurdle we face in understanding the philosophical criticism of the artists Socrates and Springsteen is fairly obvious—to realize that they are not finally endorsing the diseased cities in which overconsumption and censorship run rampant, but merely humoring the abductors. The second hurdle is more subtle, and it has tripped up many of the critics who have skillfully leapt over the first (by reading a little more closely). This subtler view regards Socrates’s and Springsteen’s criticism as so unrestrained as to negate any genuine patriotism. Thus Strauss mistakenly has it that Socrates asserts that the “good city,” the ideal republic, inevitably must fall. The wise philosopher therefore turns entirely away from politics once he has dismissed it.⁷³ Likewise, for interpreters of Springsteen, the culmination of this period of his musical thinking is that he has become an “anti-war” musician. But for both Socrates and Springsteen the main point is not merely to criticize the bad city, but it is to examine it and the good city, and to compare them. Indeed by contrasting the horrible experiment of the elenchus with the control of the flourishing practical, working-class life (the epoche),— the overconsumptive, aggressive city of these captors is measured and found lacking by Socrates and Springsteen. But Strauss goes too far in taking Socrates to be rejecting any hope of a political good.

For Socrates and Springsteen, need, rather than pleasure, is placed at the center of the genuinely healthy city; and devoted work with our fellows is the only way to fulfill need with decency and dignity. This healthy city of workers is found in such places as Book Two in the Republic. Such a life turns out well, in love, as for Springsteen’s “Cautious Man”:

Bill Horton was a cautious man of the road

He walked lookin’ over his shoulder and remained faithful to its code

When something caught his eye he’d measure his need

And then very carefully he’d proceed.

And it is such a devoted worker who gamely faces troubles and pains, and doesn’t seek to avoid them by forcing others, slaves and artists, to do his bidding. Only such as these, Springsteen argues, will taste the true pleasures that the Kingdom of Earth may provide, as in “All that Heaven Will Allow.” The storms of life don’t prevail:

If you got a girl that loves you
And who wants to wear your ring
So c’mon mister trouble
We’ll make it through you somehow
We’ll fill this house with all the love
All that heaven will allow.

In the healthy city, joy is constantly measured against need; loving co-operation in work with our fellows is the fundamental and necessary tool for this accomplishment. There is, for Socrates and Springsteen alike, a real and lasting satisfaction that accompanies such willing work, undertaken with our fellows. Such work is indeed a permanent comfort, even in times of dreadful social decline. As Springsteen has recently put it, “What others may want for free / I’ll work for your love.”

The double benefit of work, for the self and for others, and the dangers of avoiding it, are described in Springsteen’s song “Galveston Bay,” which discusses parallels between the working careers of two professional soldiers turned fishermen, one Vietnamese (Le) and one American (Billy), who fought for the same cause in Vietnam and who now labor in the same trade in America. In this poem, Springsteen requests a “do-over,” so to speak, for our nation’s “pre-emptive”—meaning unprovoked—strike against the Vietnamese who were minding their own business before the battle of Chu Lai, who were then attacked in their yards by invading American forces. In the song, racist Texans plan to burn the Vietnamese fishing boats, and Le shoots two of them one night as they attempt to carry out their plan. Billy, their friend, seeks vengeance, but at the last moment he “stuck his knife into his pocket / Took a breath and let him pass.” Billy returns to his work and family, and lets his Vietnamese compatriot do the same.

It turns out, indeed, that the Vietnamese were able to figure out how to mind their own business, even without French or American oversight. Socrates in the Republic likewise requests a “do-over” of the Peloponnesian War, in which, rather than Athens choosing to treat those of these other neighboring cities as “barbarians” who are to be fought and controlled, they are instead to be treated as fellow Athenians.

The Luxurious City

Witness what passes for entertainment in the Athens on the day of Socrates’s abduction. Not only is Socrates abducted to put on a free show at the house of Cephalus,⁷⁴ but on this same night, a new kind of death-sport will be invented!: a “torchlight race,” wherein “they carry torches and pass them along to one another as they race with the horses,” (328a). The allusion and danger are identical in Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street”: “Tonight tonight the highway’s bright / Out of our way mister you best keep / ’Cause summer’s here and the time is right / For goin’ racin’ in the street.”

But all this is repaid by Socrates and his E Street band, Glaucon and Adimantus. After Cephalus’s and Thrasymachus’s insult of the working poor and the artists, Glaucon asks Socrates a crucial question, one that immediately follows Socrates’s description of the healthy working city in Book Two: “If you are founding a city of pigs, Socrates, what other fodder than this would you provide? [You must provide] what is customary, they must recline on couches, I presume, if they are not to be uncomfortable, and dine from tables and have dishes and sweetmeats such as now are in use” (372d). This is at least an accurate description of hopes—Socrates’s kidnappers are adorned in chaplets, and sit on cushions (328b–c), they eat fancy Athenian pastries, and drink fine wines. For them, salvation quite literally is to live amongst these pleasures, having escaped the need to work with others. It is like unto Springsteen’s “Seaside Bar Song,” where the tempter, the proud owner of a “a Chevy ’40 coupe deluxe” becomes the seducer, the enemy of the work of the day, a denier of the consequences of the morning:

Well don’t let that daylight steal your soul
Get in your wheels and roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll . . .
I wanna live a life of love while the night’s still young.

This is roughly the attitude of this assembled group of partiers at the house of Cephalus, who want to live for the night and not worry for the brutal hangover of the next day. For them, seeking profit for self-advantage is all there is to justice, and justice for its own sake is burdensome (359a–b), and it’s interesting only insofar as it pays (364a–c). Indeed, profit is the only important thing, the work that produces it is a tremendous bore: business for them now is mere “huckstering.” Even controlling most of the levers of power, this group still hopes for a “Ring of Gyges” (the fabled Ring that makes the wearer invisible—an idea famously copped from Plato’s Republic by J.R.R. Tolkien) that would enable them entirely to escape the constraints of the law, so that they might be pure parasites; and even without such magic, they use the more modest means of their actual control of the government so as to make a “fillet of the state” (465d), and design ways around paying taxes for it (551e). Others shall pay, we shall enjoy.

In this luxurious city, the government of this assembled group’s ideal state, rather than including workers, is for the richest who have bought the best education that money can afford—philosophy, they expect, is for the rich masters who can afford tutors to teach them, while the working poor shall ignore it (474c). Indeed, no one who does honest labor is to have a role in governing the state (551b). Here again, many readers have been lulled into believing that Socrates endorses such nonsense, and that his ideal of philosophy is a lazy one, a strictly a priori affair, conducted with clean hands in a life lived on the isle of the blest. But Socrates shows that children of “educated” oligarchs, like Cephalus’s impetuous son Polemarchus, are not so smart after all, despite the seeming evidence of their wealth and the array of flattering tutors set before them: the general conditions of lying advantage that have been arranged for them mean that such a child is “defeated for the most part—and finds himself rich” (555a). No thanks, indeed, to his own intelligence; but thanks to the machinery of the state that holds his competitors down while it robs their wallets. How could Socrates endorse such an order any more than Springsteen could? For Socrates such a position would be a denial of his own origins, his situation, and the life of poverty he freely chose. For Springsteen it would be acting as though he were entitled to the gifts he has been given, which he has never done. The truth is that Springsteen believes in hard work.

A look at the successive drafts of the song “Prove It All Night,” reproduced in Bruce Springsteen, Songs, second edition (New York: Harper, 2003), pp. 82–91, shows how hard he works to retrieve a song from an idea. His work ethics at his concerts is, of course, legendary. Never has a word of entitlement come from him, only gratitude. No doubt he earned the wealth he has, but he knows better than to confuse it with virtue and entitlement. This is what working class origins will impress upon a person who is at home with his or her own way of life.