In the garden of Athens

Or, growing basil at the end of the republic

“So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.”

—Revenge of the Sith

In writing this, I had four quotes pinned to the wall of my mind. In the Republic, Socrates says democracy always ends up destroying itself by elevating freedom as the highest good. Freedom is like the growth of a plant. I like to grow most of the herbs I use in my cooking, and basil is a favorite of mine. I don’t want anything restricting the growth of my basil, nor do I want the formless growth of a slime mold. Basil, like any plant, follows a genetic blueprint. A healthy human society also requires a kind of blueprint, one of shared values, without which growth becomes a sprawling slime mold, choking itself.

Consider feminism’s path from women’s suffrage to Susan Brownmiller saying rape is how “all men keep all women in a state of fear.” All men. Or, as Andrew Sullivan recently wrote, how the gay rights movement radicalized and lost its way. Or how black liberation went from MLK to BLM, from “I have a dream” to an NC State professor saying he wants to exterminate all whites and a Yale psychiatrist saying she “fantasizes of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person … wiping my hands as I walked away … with a bounce in my step like I did the world a fucking favor.” (By the way, her full quote is even worse.) In each case, a once sweet basil tuft mutated into a slime mold.

Slime mold (Physarum polycephalum), Scott Camazine

Second, I thought of Benjamin Franklin, the First American. The Constitutional Convention adjourned on Sept. 17, 1787. The next day, as Doctor Franklin was leaving the Pennsylvania State House, the socialite Eliza Powell met him on the steps, and asked him whether the delegates had given the people a republic or a monarchy. He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Shortly after, in 1814, John Adams wrote in a letter to his friend John Taylor, the senator from Virginia, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.”

And, in his Lyceum address, delivered in 1838, a young lawyer in Illinois named Abraham Lincoln warned that without sufficient law and order, mob justice would destroy the nation. He was referring to lynch mobs killing black men in the state, but the same principle applies to the BLM riots and the $1 billion in damages they inflicted on the nation. “If destruction be our lot,” he said, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Each of these men understood that the most likely cause of our undoing would be ourselves, our failure to know when to insist upon certain values.

The united slime molds of America

American democracy is in decline. The right has become authoritarian and proud of it, while the left is sliding into communism in total denial. On the one hand, we have democratized information with the internet, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT. On the other hand, we have smashed our own institutions like a toddler, or sat back complacently as a festering ideological pestilence ate its way right through them. So now we mistrust medical science, our finest universities, our best news sources, our government, our legal system, our own elections. We’ve shattered the shared narratives that once allowed our sprawling and diverse republic to hold together.

We no longer even argue about what facts mean. We argue about whether they even are facts. People popularly like to pin this on Trump, but the term post-truth politics goes back at least back to a 1992 essay by the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich. The concept entered mainstream discourse in 2017, when Kellyanne Conway defended Trump’s false claims about the size of his inauguration crowd, using the idiotic phrase “alternative facts.” But, as noted above, the left has no greater claim to facts. Besides, Trump’s perfunctory dismissal of mainstream media was never entirely baseless. Indeed, he perhaps simply had more experience dealing with the press, became understandably jaded, and has developed a censorial opposition to the media that is now, frankly, unhinged and unconstitutional.

All together, these dynamics form a feedback loop. Norms erode, which deepens mistrust, fracturing our knowledge base, eroding basic scientific facts and even logic itself, which worsens systemic injustice, leading to radical movements on the left and right, which erodes norms, and around it goes. It’s a Möbius strip of democratic decay. We are the victims of our own triumph. We have become the Axiom humans in WALL•E.

Bread and circuses

I don’t much care for the muscular verse of the Roman satirist Juvenal, but it can be instructive to read him because he lived during the height of Roman power, from about 55 to 130 in the year of our Lord. It was the era of the Five Good Emperors, when the Roman empire was at its largest, the economy was good, and the army was successful in its campaigns. But Juvenal, being a satirist, depicted Rome as if every corner was caked in filth and the streets were crawling with crime. He wanted to provoke Romans to think about corruption and immoral behavior, so he gave them a kind of Robert Crumb caricature of themselves. But he did genuinely lament the loss of his republic, though not at the hands of an enemy. He lamented the death of Rome at the hands of its own people, who forsook their own values for personal pleasure:

The people have poured out their cares, for those who once gave us this imperium, our power, our legions, everything, now restrain themselves and eagerly long for only two things: bread and circuses.

The United States is similarly at the peak of its powers. And, similarly, we seem unwilling to stand by certain values. It’s a pattern across the West. Weaker enemies we could defeat and problems we can solve erode our union because we believe it would be racist to honestly confront China, North Korea, or the Islamic world, or Russia, or European cowardice over immigration, or our own immigration, or black crime rates, or to even have a conversation about these issues, or so much as listen to speakers talk about these things in public if we happen to disagree.

But decline is not destiny. I never met a gardener who was a pessimist. Something about nurturing life turns one’s leaves from the dark. Athens crumbled, Rome fell, but America is not fated to follow. Not if we care to keep Doctor Franklin’s republic. Institutions can be rebuilt. A common language rediscovered. But we will never have shared values again if we cannot hammer them out in the first place.