The Crew Has Won the Argument

The sailors in Plato's Republic have a problem with the navigator. He spends his time attending to the seasons, the winds and the stars. He has neglected the more urgent business of persuading everyone that he should be in charge.

Around him, the crew quarrels over the helm. Each sailor claims the right to steer, though none can say when he learned navigation or who taught him. They insist the skill cannot be taught at all. The shipmaster is strong, but his sight and hearing are poor. Whoever can win his favour, or overpower him, gets control of the ship. The crew praises that person as a master of seamanship. The actual navigator is dismissed as a useless stargazer.

The scene occupies a few paragraphs in Book VI. Its economy is vicious. A contest for power develops its own definition of competence, and the people most successful at that contest acquire the title belonging to a different activity. Winning the helm becomes evidence of knowing how to use it.

Plato offers the image to explain the position of philosophers in a city that cannot recognise their value. His intended remedy is hardly democratic. The Republic asks us to entrust rule to people with philosophical knowledge, under an exacting scheme of education and authority. A modern reader should resist the convenience of turning this into a charming endorsement of experts we already happen to like.

The analogy nevertheless identifies a problem that survives disagreement with Plato's politics. The skill required to secure a position can diverge from the skill required to discharge it. A public can judge the first much more easily than the second. We can watch the contest. Much of the work happens elsewhere.

That divergence gives political attention an awkward relationship with political knowledge. A forceful performance is available immediately. A competent decision may take years to become legible, and its best result may be the absence of an event. An avoided crisis makes poor theatre. The person claiming to have prevented one must also be scrutinised; unobservable success is an excellent hiding place for a fraud.

The difficulty cannot be solved by asking people to applaud quiet competence. They need ways to distinguish it from inactivity, and both from a convincing imitation of either. Institutions are supposed to make that distinction possible. When they fail, the spectacle becomes the evidence.

Social media adds a particularly efficient market to Plato's deck.

In a 2021 PNAS study, Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden examined more than 2.7 million posts from news-media accounts and members of the United States Congress on Facebook and Twitter. Posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted roughly twice as often as posts about the in-group. Language referring to opponents was a stronger predictor of sharing than the other forms of emotional language the researchers measured.

This was an observational study of a particular set of accounts and platforms. It does not establish that every hostile post changes a vote, or that today's platforms reproduce the same effect at the same magnitude. It supplies a narrower and more useful finding: in the material studied, identifying the opposing camp was unusually effective at eliciting circulation.

The result helps explain why a politics organised around attention can become fluent in enemies while remaining vague about tasks. A position travels because it tells an audience whom it belongs with and whom it opposes. The audience can perform its membership by passing the message on. The next speaker has an incentive to make that distinction easier to recognise.

None of this requires citizens to be stupid. Sharing a post can be a reasonable way to express solidarity, warn others or coordinate action. The problem appears when success at those functions becomes the principal measure of a political claim. A message can be excellent at assembling a faction and useless at explaining what its members should do with power.

Plato's sailors have already made the same substitution. They honour the ability to persuade or compel the shipmaster as though it were navigation. The missing knowledge concerns the vessel's relation to something outside the contest. The sea will not ratify their choice because the victor has a large following.

That observation carries a temptation of its own. Every faction can imagine itself as the navigator, surrounded by ignorant sailors. The metaphor then becomes another instrument in the quarrel it describes. Calling an opponent unqualified is considerably easier than showing that one's own judgment is sound.

Expertise therefore needs an arrangement in which its claims can be inspected and its failures can carry consequences. Credentials establish something about training; they cannot confer immunity from error or disguise a conflict of interest. Political authority also involves choices about whose interests count and what risks people should bear. Those choices cannot be settled by presenting them as technical necessities.

A democratic answer to Plato has to preserve the public's authority without pretending that every question is answered by the same procedure. Citizens may choose the destination and the constraints on a journey. The person responsible for the course must explain what is possible, what the evidence supports and where uncertainty remains. Neither side gets to call its own preferences the weather.

The practical question is how to make the work visible without forcing it to become a performance of tribal loyalty. A decision can state what would count as failure before the outcome is known. An institution can preserve the evidence behind its choice, so a later account cannot quietly replace the original one. Public scrutiny can examine whether a promise was fulfilled rather than merely whether its author still commands the room.

These are modest requirements. They are also inconvenient for people whose principal asset is the ability to win the next argument. A standard fixed in advance limits the freedom to rename a defeat. A record makes it harder to announce that one had always intended to arrive somewhere else.

Plato's ship remains useful because it separates the applause from the voyage. It does not tell us which modern faction deserves command. It asks whether the competition for command has left anyone capable of explaining the course.

The crew may have won the argument. The coast is still where it was.