Is it better to teach by precept or by example? A paradox infects the first method, and a problem infects the second. The paradox in the first is that only the wise can learn from precepts, but, being already wise, they do not need them. The problem in the second is that example is a hit-and-miss teacher; some see the point, others do not, and yet others see it but do not like it.
These reflections are prompted by the fact that the United States is currently engaged in teaching democracy to the rest of the world by precept, but not by example. On the contrary, the dismaying spectacle of a presidential election stained by slur and smear, whose participants need millions of dollars just to get near the starting post, where serious doubts attend the electoral process — fraud-prone electronic ballots, deliberately abbreviated electoral rolls, emotion-directed advertising — and where more than half the electorate fail to take part, is scarcely a shining example of democracy at work. The main lesson it teaches is how to preserve the status quo; the point is neatly captured by Gore Vidal’s remark that the US is governed by a single political party with two right wings.
The United States is in fact a plutocracy. A plutocracy is a polity in which wealth is the basis of power. At current values it takes a hundred million dollars to be elected (cynics would say: to purchase the office of) President of the United States. The campaign which raises the most money has the best chance of winning, because money means advertisements, mobility for the candidate and his (sic) staff, leaflets, flags, razzmatazz, lobbyists, research, polling, and all the rest of the expensive business of trying to win. In fact this price tag is considerably too low, because running for president is a life-long task in which many further costs have to be paid, and not just in cash, to get into the right position even for a chance of nomination.
Theoretically, a democracy is a political entity in which anyone should be able to stand for election simply on the basis of his or her attributes and ideas. But even in Britain elections cost millions, from the deposit each candidate must put down in order to stand in a constituency, to the advertising costs involved in putting across one’s own message and inflicting damage on the opposing message.
In Ancient Athens the qualification for office was eloquence. At first blush this seems a questionable aptitude; do we not have plenty of mistrusworthy examples — the glib and oleaginous politician, the fast-talker, the smoothie, the snake-oil salesman? It is true that when antiquity’s Sophists set to work, teaching anyone who could afford the fee “how to make the worse case seem the better” as one of them put it — thus inventing “spin” — the persuasive tongue began to seem a disingenuous thing.
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But the reason that Sophists could sell the art of eloquence at all was that in the pristine state of the ancient polities, eloquence was a mark of intelligence, knowledge, experience and good judgment. These qualities by themselves make anyone eloquent; they speak with the tongue of nature. No one thus equipped need learn the tropes of rhetoric, the psychology of persuasion, the power of the calculated witticism and the covert insult.
Despite claiming the name, the Ancient Greek democracies were anything but: slaves, women, and men under 30, between them constituting the vast majority in the state, were voiceless. Among the enfranchised remainder, such differentiating factors as reputation and personality might work their magic, but it was only later in the Greek city-state’s history that family name, wealth, and the ossification of institutions, leached power from the agora (the forum, the open space where the men of the state gathered to debate) and put it into the hands of those with a knack for manipulation.
Among the drawbacks of the democracy of eloquence was the fact that there was no guarantee that the most persuasive speech contained the best advice. But the Athenian agora was not an assembly of fools: very often what made a speech the most persuasive was precisely that it contained the best advice, and the listeners knew it when they heard it.
Does the money and calumny of our modern hustings serve us better? With them as our present example, we do better to heed the ancient precept.