When Ancients Serve Ideologues

"Plato Goes to China

By Shadi Bartsch

(Princeton, 279 pages, $33)

In the opening pages of "Plato Goes to China," classicist Shadi Bartsch promises that by tracing the history of the Chinese reception of ancient Greek and Roman political philosophy, her book offers "a uniquely illuminating vantage point for observing China's transformation in its cultural and political self-confidence." She further promises to explore in depth the uses that have been made of the Western classics in the 33 years since the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.

These promises are not fully kept, for three reasons. The first is the chatbot-style superficiality of her historical overview, which begins with the early 17th-century Jesuits who tried "to make Christianity more palatable to the Confucians" by invoking Aristotle and the Stoics; then leaps ahead to the late 19th- and early 20th-century reformers who embraced Western concepts of citizenship; then ends with a quick sketch of the ferment leading up to Tiananmen.

The second reason for the book's unkept promises is Ms. Bartsch's unserious attitude toward religion. Rather than mention Aristotle's considerable influence on the church after Aquinas, she resorts to flippancy: "For the Jesuits it would seem, just about all ancient thinkers were proto-Christians." Academics often turn a blind eye to religious and metaphysical questions. But later on, when such questions loom large in China, this blind spot hinders her analysis.

Third and most important is Ms. Bartsch's limited perspective on her main story. Taking up the better part of five chapters, she relates how, after Tiananmen, the Chinese Communist Party began using the classic thinkers of Western antiquity to legitimize its continued monopoly on power. And she casts Leo Strauss, an American political philosopher who never visited China and died in 1973, as the villain of the tale.

There is a grain of truth to this view. Prior to the arrival of Straussian teaching, the Western classics in China had been fuel for democracy's cause. Afterward, pro-regime scholars steeped in Strauss began pointing to Plato's critique of democracy as a way of discrediting Western values in general. In Ms. Bartsch's judgment, this change is attributable to the Straussian theory of "esoteric writing," which avers that some ancient authors, such as Maimonides, protected themselves from persecution by swaddling their true meaning in layers of verbal camouflage.

The trouble with this analysis is that it doesn't apply to Plato's critique of democracy, which rather than being swaddled in verbiage is right there on the surface. All Strauss did, as a German-Jewish emigre who came of age during World War I and the Weimar Republic, was agree with Plato that democracy is the most dangerous form of government, because its lack of grounding in an objective moral order makes it vulnerable to the passions of the mob -- resulting, inevitably, in tyranny.

Plato's larger point is that, while an objective moral order can be discerned through philosophy, it cannot serve as the basis of a political regime unless the ruler is a philosopher -- and no true philosopher wants to rule. Plato's solution was to ground the political order in a "noble lie," meaning a set of beliefs, preferably religious, that can encourage virtue in the citizens while protecting the philosophers' freedom to ask radical, potentially disruptive questions.

Here we must distinguish between two different interpretations of Plato. The first, more Nietzschean one sees the noble lie as a smokescreen intended to conceal from everyone except the philosophers the stark (if liberating) fact that objective morality does not exist. The second, more traditional one sees the noble lie as a good-faith attempt to adjust the moral order -- which does exist -- to the contingencies of politics and the imperfections of human nature.

Both interpretations have been espoused by Straussian scholars. But the first has been justly criticized for ignoring the mature Strauss, who after years of living in Britain and the U.S. wrote approvingly of Anglo-American liberal democracy. At that stage, he had come to appreciate that it was an ingenious, and mostly successful, resolution of the tension between the freedom required for philosophy and the constraint required for social and political stability.

Rather than make this important distinction, Ms. Bartsch adopts the perspective of those critics, including a fair number of classicists, who view Strauss not as a scholar but as a political opportunist who misread ancient texts for cynical motives. Indeed, she echoes the charge, made in the New York Times Magazine in 2004, that various Straussians influenced George W. Bush's advisers to deceive their fellow citizens with a "noble lie" about the real motives behind America's invasion of Iraq.

This may explain why Ms. Bartsch devotes so little attention to the "apolitical professors" studying the classics in China and so much to "the loudest public intellectuals," meaning the ideological warriors who serve the party by rummaging through Plato and other classic authors for scraps of evidence that the ancient wisdom of the West stands in direct opposition to its modern ideals. Why she quotes so many egregiously ignoble lies churned out by these "thought workers" is not clear. Unless she is trying to create the impression that it is somehow the fault of Leo Strauss.

If so, that is regrettable, because the true antecedents of this "thought reform" are the mind-control techniques developed by Lenin and Stalin after the Bolshevik Revolution, then adopted by Hitler and the Nationalist government in China before being honed to demoniacal perfection by Mao. A broader perspective might have illuminated the deeper reasons why 21st-century China is becoming a place where no one, not even the philosopher, can speak truth to power.

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Ms. Bayles teaches in the political science department of Boston College and is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia." [1]

1. When Ancients Serve Ideologues
Bayles, Martha.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 27 Feb 2023: A.15.