Tag Archives: Plato

Writing Dialogue

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As all of you readers know, I am not a novelist but a historian. Not just a historian, but an academic one. Which means that, over the fifty years since I got my first academic post I have never written dialogue. Except, perhaps, for some sketch at a family party; although, to be honest, I cannot remember doing even that.

The way academia sees it, and the constant call for “dialogue” between A and B and C and D and E and F and G and H apart, there are two things to be said about written dialogue. First, literature and drama are full of it. Some of it is excellent and deserves to be studied as if it were holy writ; as with the works of Aeschylus, Plato, William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and God knows how many others. The rest is trash and can safely be ignored. Second, worried lest they would come up with trash, modern academics themselves seldom write dialogue. Neither of the intellectual type nor of the dramatic one. It has its place, to be sure. But not within the hallowed halls where serious, meaning that it is provided with footnotes, work is done.

I, however, have just published The Gender Dialogues which is dialogue from beginning to end. A special kind of dialogue, mind you; the kind that takes place in an interview, with which I have plenty of experience. How did it all start? When a young lady from Kingman, Arizona, contacted me and asked me to do an interview for her podcast. The topic was my 2013 book, The Privileged Sex. In it I argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong. The advantages of being female are at least as great as the advantages. Everything considered, perhaps a little greater.

So she sent me some questions. And I sent her some of my own that I thought would be worth discussing. And so we exchanged views until we had enough material to talk about and did the interview. A very pleasant one, I hasten to add. By now you can find it on the Net (at https://andyoverthinks.com/womenhaveitbetter/).

As I wrote down the answers to her questions, more questions presented themselves. As I answered those, the process started repeating itself. Soon enough the material expanded. Until it became necessary to divide both questions and answers into sections, each one dealing with a different aspect of the problem. At first the sections were numbered, but later they received titles too. Until they expanded into a book 40,000 words long.

However, neither the contents of the book nor the details of its eventual publication are what I want to write about today. Rather, what I do want to write about is the dialogue form itself. Originally dictated by the interview, I found it a challenge. As well as great fun. A challenge, because I had never done anything like it before. Fun, because it enabled me to ignore the usual rules of academic writing. After half a century of doing the latter, it set me free.

Apart from reading Plato, Cicero, and a few others I have never studied how to write dialogue. Nor did I ever take a “creative writing” course. Instead I went my own way. Searching, trying, erasing, discarding, and re-writing. Thank God for word processing; Plato, it was said, re-wrote the first sentence of The Republic twelve times. As I went along I learnt, or thought I’ve learnt, a few lessons others beside myself might find interesting.

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First, for a reader to follow a very large number of questions and answers is hard. It requires the kind of concentration and memory not everyone is capable of. Sometimes that may even include the author himself. So it you have more than twenty or so of each, better divide your work into sections. Preferably such as have titles rather than mere numbers.

Second, make sure to allow the side whose argument you want to refute to present it in as strong a form as possible. Why? Because he who answers a fool risks becoming one. Galileo in his famous Dialogue of The Two Chief World Systems named one of his characters, Simplicio. In my view that was a bad mistake. Why should anyone want to argue with what a fool has to say? Better follow Plato all of whose characters, though not necessarily very sympathetic, are smart and well spoken.

Third, allow your interlocutors to make life difficult for each other. Easy questions, resulting in easy answers, are boring. For the same reason they should also be allowed to change places from time to time. If only to show that the matter is well in hand, each should express the views of the other. 

Fourth, don’t go too far in putting your learning on display. Goethe’s dictum, mastery is knowing where to stop, applies. More so, perhaps, in a dialogue than in some other kinds of text.

Fifth, spoken language tends to be simpler and less cumbersome than its written equivalent. This fact should be reflected in the dialogue you write. Select the simplest, most succinct, forms of expression you can think of. Write isn’t, not is. Don’t, not do not. Use idioms: make peace, instead of reconcile. Unless, of course, you want to bring out the character of one of the speakers. Such as learning (real or fake), pomposity, etc.

Sixth, and for the same reason, make your sentences as simple and short as you can. They should not sound like a machine gun, which in the kind of dialogue I am writing about is out of place. However, on the whole short ones are clearer and easier to understand. There is an essay by Hugh Trevor-Roper, a one-time Oxford Don famous for his style, about how to write good English. Using the “find” function of my word processor, I checked the average length of his sentences: 18 words. I think that, writing dialogue, you should be able to do better than that.

I could go on and on. However, from this point you are on your own.  Why should you have my laurels free of charge?

What Plato Would Have Said

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My own interest in Plato got under way during the mid-1970s when I took some courses on him with my reverend teacher, Prof. Alexander Fuks. I’ll never forget how five or six of us young students used to spend Monday afternoons in his office, reading The Republic in the original, not only line by line but word by word and, when necessary, letter by letter, in an effort to get at his exact meaning. Since then that interest has never flagged; and no wonder, since there is hardly a topic about which the great Greek seer did not have something to say that was both interesting and important.

As the years went by, I have often spent an idle hour wondering what he would have said if, like Rip van Winkle, he would have been brought back to life. And having been brought back to life, put in a position where he could observe the modern world and form an informed opinion about some of its main characteristics.

So here goes.

First, confronted with the statistics, Plato would have been astonished at the approximately seventy-fold increase in the earth’s population that has taken place (from about 100,000,000 to over seven billion today). Here it is important to note that his own ideal polis only counted 5,400 citizens. He might well have asked how on earth they can be fed, clothed, and generally maintained, and wondered at the results.

Second, he would have wondered about the immense number of elderly and old people around. True, people’s maximum lifespan has not changed that much since his time. One of his own acquaintances, the sophist Gorgias, was said to have died at the ripe old age of 108; interestingly enough, he used to attribute his long-livedness to the fact that he had never accepted anyone’s invitation for dinner. What has increased, and greatly too, is the percentage of people above the age of fifty, sixty, seventh, eighty, and ninety. A true miracle, that.

Third, he would have acknowledged the achievements in science and technology that made all this, and much more, possible. Including, to mention but a few of the most important fields, mathematics—which he regarded as the queen of the sciences and in which he was very interested—physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, agriculture, construction, transport, communication, and whole hosts of others.

That said, and having spent some years studying to reach the point where he was no longer a total stranger in an unfamiliar world, most probably he would have focused on the things that world has not managed to achieve.

First, he would have been disappointed (but hardly surprised) by our continuing inability to provide firm answers to some of the most basic questions of all. Such as whether the gods (or God) “really” exist, whether they have a mind, and whether they care for us humans; the contradiction between nature and nurture (physis versus nomos, in his own terminology); the best system of education; the origins of evil and the best way to cope with it; as well as where we came from (what happened before the Great Bang? Do parallel universes exist?), where we may be going, what happens after death, and the meaning and purpose of it all, if any.

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Third, he would have observed that, the vast number of mental health experts notwithstanding, we today are no more able to understand human psychology and motivation better than he and his contemporaries did. As the French philosopher/anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once put it, there was (and still) an uninvited guest seated among us: the human mind.

Fourth, he would have noted that we moderns have not come up with works of art—poetry, literature, drama, rhetoric, sculpture, architecture—at all superior to those already available in his day. Not to Aeschylus. Not to Sophocles, not to Euripides, not to Aristophanes. Not to Demosthenes, not to Phidias and Polycleitus. Not to the Parthenon.

Fifth, he would have dwelled on our failure to build a system of government capable of abolishing some of the greatest evils afflicting mankind. Including, besides the kind of minor “everyday” conflict and injustice we are all familiar with, war on one hand and the contrast between plutos (wealth) and penia (want) on the other.

Sixth, he would have been saddened by our utter failure to improve ourselves, morally speaking (to come closer to the Good, as he would have put it).

Seventh, he would have noted our continuing inability to foresee the future and control our fate any better than people around 400 BCE did.

Finally, he would have wondered why, these and other problems notwithstanding, so many of us still refuse to look reality in the face and cling to the idea of progress instead. But then what is the alternative?

 

He and She

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Some years ago I told a friend of mine, a female librarian who unfortunately has died since, that, for the first time, I was taking an interest in women. She looked at me and said: “It is time, don’t you think”?

Seriously, how did a military historian like myself ever start writing about women? The answer is twofold. First, during the 1990s, at the latest, the presence of women in the military, its causes, its significance, and its implications reached such a crescendo that it became impossible to ignore. Second, leafing through the works of the great military theorists I noted that none of them had anything to say about women. Yet women form half of the human race and by no means its least important half. Clearly there was a gap there, and one which, in Men, Women and War, I set out to fill as best I could. 4141F05E81L

Delving into women’s history, I found it fascinating. So much so, in fact, that since then I have devoted a considerable part of my work to that topic. Follows a brief summary of some of the things I think I have learnt.

First, when Steven Pinker and many others say that the characteristics of people of both sexes are in large part biologically-determined rather than socially-constructed they were right. Second, when Margaret Mead said that in all known societies what men do is considered most important and that, should women enter a male field in any numbers, the field in question will start losing both its prestige and the rewards it can offer she was right. Third, when Freud said that a great many women suffer from penis envy—whether biologically or socially based—he was right. After all, as I wrote in a previous essay posted on this website, what is modern feminism if not the greatest outburst of penis envy ever? Fourth, when Thomas Aquinas said that men can do anything women can (except for having children, of course) but not the other way around he was right. Fifth, when Plato said that, though no field of human endeavor is absolutely closed to the members of either sex, in all fields men are better on the average, he was right.

Another very important thing Plato said is that, whereas men and women are similar in some respects, they differ in others. The most important thing they have in common is their humanity, the qualities that distinguish them from animals. Including, above all, their big brains and the things they make possible. True, men have ten billion more brain cells than women on the average. But nobody knows what they serve for.

The most important differences—all of which are statistical and mean little if anything in the case of each individual—are as follows. First, women have less testosterone than men. That makes them less aggressive, less competitive, and less inclined towards dominance than men. Second, their bodies are weaker, less able to absorb shocks and blows, and, unless properly taken care of, less resistant to dirt and infectious disease. Until urbanization started changing things from about 1800 on, the outcome was a considerably shorter life expectancy. Third, women conceive, become pregnant, give birth, nurse, and, as with all other mammalians, are mainly responsible for raising the young. Whereas men do not and are not. Fourth, since men are able to have countless offspring whereas women cannot, society is better able to bear their loss than that of women. The enormous investment women make in their offspring, plus their relative physical weakness, also explains why, as Diderot said, women are less able to find delight in the arms of strangers than men.

To repeat, the differences are statistical. Hence they only go so far in dictating the fate of each individual. They are, however, sufficiently significant to explain many things concerning the way human society has always functioned and, presumably, will continue to function. Indeed there probably is no aspect of life, whether private or public, so isolated that sex and gender will not play a role in shaping it. First, in no known culture has there ever been a situation where all persons male and female, shared all activities on an equal basis and received the same rewards. Second, in all known cultures men did the lion’s share of hard, dirty, or dangerous work. Third, in all known cultures men were responsible for feeding women and not the other way around. Some, the above mentioned Margaret Mead included, saw this as the most important difference that set humans apart from other animals. Fourth, in all known cultures it was men who held the great majority of whatever public positions existed. Though some societies, one of which is traditional Judaism, trace descent by way of the female line, no known one has ever been governed by women. Finally, the higher the positions in question the more likely that they would be occupied by men.

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The objective of modern feminism has been to abolish these distinctions. Though not to the point where many women are prepared to marry and support men; several sets of statistics show that women who make more than their husbands are more likely to get a divorce. Depending on how one looks at it, the effort can be said to have been either a success or a failure. It has been a success in the sense that, watching old movies, one is always surprised at the fact that, among important decision makers, there are few if any women. Far more women now work outside the home and have careers than previously, and many of the legal hurdles that used to limit their participation in public life have been removed. The same applies to the kind of laws that made husbands the “heads of the family.” The introduction of the pill has also done away with many sexual restraints, enabling women to sleep around or, as the current phrase has it, “hook up” with men much as men themselves do.

As feminists never stop complaining, however, a society in which absolute equality prevails is as far away as it has ever been. Moreover, such advances as women have made

came at a high cost. Leaving the home, many women have lost their freedom and turned themselves into “wage slaves” just like men. Working women are heavily concentrated in the service sector, including the one known as “household services.” The outcome is that they now do for strangers what they used to do for their own families. They also pay taxes as never before. Since working outside the home means having to spend more on such things as clothing, transportation and help, whether most of them really end up by having more disposable income is doubtful; at least one highly successful female researcher, Elizabeth Warren, has warned against “the two-income trap.”

Judging by the number of best-sellers which claim to advise women on how to efficiently manage their time, no group in the population is more stressed than working mothers. These problems are literally killing them; whereas, for almost two hundred years before 1975, the gap in life expectancy between men and women kept growing in favor of the latter, since then it has been declining.

One reason why progress, if that is the right word, has been slow is that a society based on equality between the sexes might result in more divorced women losing custody over their children and being obliged to support their ex-husbands. It might also lead to the justice system treating women as harshly as it does men; increasing the penalties it imposes on them and executing them much more often than is actually the case. At present even military women only enter combat if it suits them. However, a truly equal system might oblige them to do so. All this explains why, judging by the failure to pass ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), many women are not at all certain whether equality is really what they want.

Even so, the attempt to separate sex—the biologically-determined identity of men and women—from gender—the roles they play in society—has led to a very sharp decline in fertility. That applies to all developed countries except the U.S and Israel. In the latter, to quote a popular song, “her eyes are tired but her legs are quite good looking.” So great is the decline that societies such as those of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore either are obliged to rely on immigrants to fill their labor force or simply appear to have no future.

Looking at Europe, what reliance on immigrants may mean, probably will mean, is becoming more and more clear with every passing day. As to having no future, it was that great feminist, Carroll Gilligan, who said that the essence of feminism consists of women looking after themselves first of all. With such an attitude, will there even be a future?