An Ignoble Lie

 The New York Times ran a gooseflesh-inducing article earlier this week about a group of racists in Arkansas who are trying to establish a "whites only" housing development. Obviously, such a complex would be a straightforward violation of the federal fair housing law and ought not to be allowed. But some proponents of the development are convinced that the deterioration of law and morals has already proceeded so far in Trump's America that they might be able to get away with it. 

One of the creeps behind this idea apparently moonlights as a "Plato scholar" on YouTube. To prove his bona fides, he is pictured in front of a bookcase stocked with English translations of famous Neoplatonists and ancient commentators on the Greek philosopher (Proclus, etc.). (The Times reporter notes that the shelf behind him also prominently displayed a copy of Mein Kampf—but he strategically turned this one around, with the spine facing in, before proceeding with the photo shoot.) 

These pseudo-intellectual trappings might strike some as incongruous—but one quickly perceives the connecting thread as the interview proceeds. At one point, the guy starts trying to convince the interviewer of the theory of genetic determinism, race and IQ, intelligence and heritability, etc. In short, he is an adherent of the modern-day version of Plato's "Noble Lie"—the idea, presented in The Republic as a convenient fiction to dupe the masses, that social inequality is founded in nature.

It is quite obvious why this theory would have appeal to the contemporary racist. In the face of persistent social inequities and the appearance of rank racial injustice—the Noble Lie reassuringly informs us that all such disparities derive from nature. Some people are just born compounded of baser metals than others—and that's why they can never be equal. There are brass men, and gold men, and ne'er the twain shall meet. 

It's an idea with an obvious appeal to any self-appointed "master class" or "master race" in history; so it should not surprise us that today's white supremacist—trying to resurrect a micro-apartheid in his corner of Arkansas—would proclaim himself an adherent of Plato. (Except that the Greek philosopher was at least honest enough to admit that his theory of the different orders of human kind was in fact a politically convenient deception—not a true statement about the world.) 

It would seem that our Trump-era white supremacists are trying to revive the theory of innate natural inequality between different groups ("an idea that has been broadly debunked"—as the Times journalist notes), so as to justify present-day social injustice. Just like the aristocrats of yesteryear—they have appointed themselves the lords of the Earth, and they look upon the rest of humanity as "A creature of another kind, / Some coarser substance, unrefin'd, as Robert Burns once put it. 

But Burns—in another poem—penned the best possible philosophical rejoinder to this: 

"If I'm design'd yon lordling's slave, 

By Nature's law design'd, 

Why was an independent wish 

E'er planted in my mind? 

Or, as Burns put it still elsewhere—writing in a more vernacular mode: 

Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord,

Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that,

Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,

He’s but a coof for a’ that.