Plato, nomadism, and nostalgia

I watched Werner Herzog’s documentary about Bruce Chatwin over the weekend. They shared a passion for nomadism. The contrast between nomadism and settled life reminded me of the contrast between oral and textual learning in Plato’s Phaedrus.  

The Neolithic saw a transition from nomadism to settlement: small, nomadic bands were replaced by larger agricultural settlements. Settled agriculture was a transformational technology, and I can imagine Plato’s critique of writing working just as well against agriculture—and Neil Postman’s Technopoly anxieties about television working just as well for agriculture. 

I’m not sure nostalgia is exactly the right word for the hankering for a bygone past that is part of romanticism about the nomadic life, but it’s part of it. Another part is a yearning for a Golden Age; most cultures see history in terms of declension.

This led me to wonder if one could read the critique of writing in the Phaedrus as nostalgia for a bygone era. Under that rubric it’s no longer a question of whether Plato thinks one could (or should) actually stop writing, any more than we could wind back the clock on settlement and all become nomads again. It allows one to sidestep the controversy over whether Plato intend his critique to apply to all written works, including his dialogues.* The claim would be that, underlying Plato’s very sophisticated analysis and trenchant critique, is a longing for simpler times.**

I understood from Paul Diduch that the Sophists’ discovery of nature was massively destabilizing to Greek culture because it made the gods obsolete and led to morality being seen as merely conventional. As I understood him, Plato was profoundly affected by this crisis and was trying to build an alternative basis for morality. 

This connected to piece by Clay Routledge about nostalgia in the workplace. Routledge argues that “[w]hen people engage in nostalgia, they’re accessing personally meaningful autobiographical events.” Nostalgia is triggered by negative psychological states. He says that “nostalgia is best described as a self-regulatory existential resource that people naturally and frequently use to navigate stress and uncertainty and find the motivation needed to move forward with purpose and focus.”

Combine these two straws and you have the beginnings of an argument that Plato’s anxiety and sadness over the loss of a sound moral basis for society triggered a hankering for an earlier way of being and learning, which was represented by Socrates in general and oral dialectic in particular.

Notes

* Werner’s discussion of the controversy in his dissertation was very helpful to me. It strengthened my skepticism about anybody claiming to know what Plato “actually” meant or intended. On pp. 416–17, Werner lists eight scholars in footnote 68 who take the view that Thamus’ and Socrates’ criticisms apply to all written works, including Plato’s own dialogues, and lists nine scholars in footnote 70 who argue that the critique applies to some but not all written works, and that it is not intended to apply to Plato’s own dialogues.

** Writing seemed to emerge soon after agriculture, ca. 10,000–5,000 BCE. I wonder if Plato had a critique of agriculture or urbanism.