Saturday, June 25, 2022

A bad concept in governance

One of Plato’s dialogues begins with an argument about what statesmanship is.

The philosophers start with the idea that governance is basically tending. Cowmen know how to tend cows. Shepherds know how to tend sheep. Statesmen learn how to the tend people.

The dialogue doesn’t go far until the philosophers agree that it’s a bad analogy.  Governance is not tending because you can’t treat people in the same way you treat cows, pigs and sheep. Human nature is too complex for that to work. The concept is simplistic.

That discussion came to mind when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade yesterday.

• Source: “The Statesman” is in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns; Princeton University Press, 1978.  

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