Roughly 2,500 years ago the Greek philosopher Plato wrote The Republic, in which he floated an allegory so compelling it remains in active use today. Plato described people who spend their lives chained in a cave facing a blank wall. They watch, and come up with names for, shadows projected onto the wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them. The shadows are the prisoners’ sole reality, as if the hand puppets parents make in the lamplight of their child’s bedroom were the only thing that existed, ever.
We all live in metaphorical caves, some more expansive than others, subject to flickers of realities portrayed by our families, friends, media, and the wider world in which we engage. Neighboring caves may be saturated with different shadows, depending on whether FOX or CNN is casting light on the wall, if the inhabitants are living paycheck to paycheck or with an ample bank account, or in Pacific Heights or the Tenderloin. There are stark differences in our understanding of whether we’re looking at shadows or the real deal, and if shadows, how they can best be interpreted.
The information consumed in our caves varies in quality, offering different measures of understanding. “…our newspapers are not all alike;” wrote George Orwell, almost 80 years ago, in what’d now be an understatement, “some of them are more intelligent than others…some are more popular than others.” Words themselves are a kind of shadow, able to convey a facsimile of a feeling or fact, subject to interpretation or disagreement, sometimes deployed intentionally to obfuscate.
Historically, cave differences have been resolved through a limited number of means: educate, segregate, fight, or subjugate. Education is supposed to be the enlightened path to common understanding of reality, the one Plato advocates. But this cure can contribute to the disease when each cave school is individually curated. Kansas City’s summer reading list for teens, as advocated by KC Parent, shares not a single title with the San Francisco Library’s recommendations. In Kansas, Descent is a top pick; “mountain-climbing prodigy Peak Marcello faces his toughest challenge yet as he descends into Tibet and goes head-to-head with an old enemy.” San Francisco prefers One Good Thing About America, an “evocative story about what life is like for a young immigrant facing a new school, language, and culture; one she’s not sure she likes.”
From the Platonic perspective, education doesn’t always have to be entirely fact based, so much as widely believed. “We want one single, grand lie,” Socrates’ states, in The Republic, “which will be believed by everybody; including the rulers, ideally, but failing that the rest of the city.” For a while Americans largely shared a number of “noble lies,” about democracy, the quality of our institutions, the well-meaning nature of our fellow countrypeople. Until we didn’t.
It’s only been a thin time period in which peaceful assimilation has been attempted: you live your cave fantasy, I’ll live mine, but we can still be friends, perhaps entertain one another with different shadow stories. Even in places that purport to embrace this approach, like San Francisco, the reality adheres more to segregation than integration, as exhibited by our largely race- and income-determined neighborhoods and schools. When’s the last time any of us had dinner with anyone who had a significantly different socio-economic profile?
Cave shadows loom large in this fall’s election. Much of the shade, in local and national contests, revolves around how much dangerous chaos is swirling outside the cavern. Do city dwellers have to sidestep a constant stream of human feces and mental disfunction to get to the grocery store, in which excessively high-priced items are being looted by unsheltered zombies? Have rural residents been robbed of their votes by recent immigrants dedicated to destroying a free America? Is an 81-year-old man too elderly to be President as compared to one who is four years younger?
According to surveys – also a kind of shadow – more than two-fifths of Americans believe civil war is at least somewhat likely in the next 10 years, with half of “strong Republicans” considering as much. If such a thing came to pass, 164 years after the last one, it would likely pit a similar set of states against one another. Abraham Lincoln effectively ended the abomination of slavery. But the national cave remains divided.
Two and a half millennium after Plato came up with his metaphor, we remain bound to our caves. But we’re not actually shackled. The shadows can be chased away, as Plato relates, by sunshine, and through shared stories. Knowledge is best fostered through experience, wandering outside, experiencing neighborhood shopping corridors bursting with peaceful exuberance, checking out those other caves, comparing silhouettes, complementing the interiors. Civility can be challenging between cavemen, but it’s better than war.