Plato, Aristotle and Socrates Can Save Us From Culture Wars

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams examines the complex relationship between the classics and identity politics. And he is speaking to Walter Isaacson about racism, education and cancel culture.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Thomas Chatterton Williams, welcome back to the show.

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS, CONTRIBUTING WRITER, THE ATLANTIC, AUTHOR, “SELF-PORTRAIT IN BLACK AND WHITE: UNLEARNING RACE”: Thanks for having me.

ISAACSON: You know, you’ve been very critical. You signed the letter that was in Harper’s Magazine, critical about cancel culture, what’s sometimes called wokeness or overusing critical race theory that teach kids in high school. And yet, recently, you signed something and wrote something against conservative state legislatures that are trying to ban critical race theory. Explain to me why you changed on that.

WILLIAMS: Well, I think it’s not a change really at all. I think it’s just sticking with a fundamental principal, which is that, you know, for better act of any type of freedom is the freedom of expression, the freedom to think freely, to explore ideas and to discuss ideas that are controversial and that are potentially even wrong. And the way to defeat wrong ideas is through persuasion and through superior ideas and clearer thinking. But it’s not through any kind of authoritarianism or bans or undemocratic means of forcing people to think the same. So, you know, the Harper’s Letter was a defensive freedom of expression. And the op-ed that Jason Stanley of Yale, Kmele Foster and David French and I wrote in “The New York Times” was arguing that, you know, banning ideas that we think are unpersuasive is a really bad way of going about defending so-called liberal principles.

ISAACSON: But don’t you think that parents, you know, when they’re faced with their kids coming home, saying, here’s what they’re teaching me at school, and at some point. they have a right to say, wait, wait, that’s going too far?

WILLIAMS: Yes. I absolutely think they have a right to say that and I think that’s where persuasion comes in and that’s where discussion come in. But, you know, one of the problems with this type of bans is that it’s very difficult to pinpoint what is this thing that’s being banned and what is actually outside of that. And so, you have this huge kind of mistakes being made where a letter from a Birmingham jail by Martin Luther King is being banned because its potential to make white students uncomfortable or, you know, texts that are key to understanding, you know, the racial history of the United States of America, which, frankly, is an uncomfortable history are being banned. And we’re in danger of sugarcoating, I think, conversations that need to be a little bit difficult to digest.

ISAACSON: One of the common themes of these laws is that they say that we shouldn’t have things that make kids feel uncomfortable about their race. Is there an advantage to having kids feel slightly guilty about their race?

WILLIAMS: Well, you know, I probably disagree with, at least, one of my co-authors on that. I think that we have a huge mistake in this country about how we go about indoctrinating children and each other into believing in these abstract categories of racial classification to begin with. So, I think that we’re in the process of educating children into thinking of themselves as white, thinking of themselves as black. And then, there are a lot of problems that come out of this that are all — you know, I think of a more fundamental solution to the problem is actually find ways to transcend the mistake of race in the first place.

ISAACSON: Do you think that the Democratic Party has been hurt by its association with what some call wokeness or is that a whole bunch of gibberish?

WILLIAMS: No, I — it’s an interesting question because there is gibberish, and there is something there. The Democratic Party has had a difficult time standing up to, I think, its most — its loudest and its most visible niche fringe. So, the kind of voices that dominate social media, the voices that dominate Twitter and that therefore, catch the attention of a lot of the media class are not actually representative of even most of the minority constituents of the Democratic Party. And so, there’s a kind of mistaken belief that more of the Democratic base is woker than it actually is. So, I think that actually has hurt politically Democrats, that they have veered too far to a kind of progressive world view that is not shared by not even most of the country but not most of their own voters.

ISAACSON: You come from a mixed-race background. How does that help inform your thinking about not categorizing people by race?

WILLIAMS: Well, my personal experience has made my belief in racial classification fall apart. Having children who I know are descended from Africa and are descended from Europe and that the world perceives as white but I know could have been enslaved in another time in America, I mean, it makes these walls of identity fall down around me. I see individuals. I see conflicts. Human beings with mixed up histories. And I know that many other people share this kind of interconnectedness that we seem to deny when we fall back on what I would call, you know, the myth of race, the veil of race that falls between us when I see you and I think I see something and I deny the complexity of the individual underneath the story that I tell myself about you. And I don’t mean to deny racism or the history of oppression that exists in this country, but I mean to say that to transcend that kind of racism, we’re going to, at some point, have to transcend racial thinking. And this is what kind of the anti-CRT bans and the kinds of anti-racism that focused on racial difference both neglect to do. And that’s why I think we stay in this impasse.

ISAACSON: You know, about 10 years ago you wrote that you’re from a mixed- race background but you had — I think you used the phrase ethical obligation to identify race as black. What made you change?

WILLIAMS: The birth of my first child. You know, I wrote that op-ed in “The New York Times” arguing that race wasn’t biologically meaningful but that it was essentially ethnically meaningful. And I really couldn’t defend that when I thought about how I might send my child out into the world and teach her what essentially was the logic of the slave owner, the logic of the plantation, that even though no one could perceive that a drop of black blood made her black and that she must present herself in the world as black. And I didn’t want to send out her out in the world saying, therefore, I’m white. I wanted to send her out in the world saying that these are not categories, these are not meaningful for me, that I have both of these histories in me, but these are not biologically meaningful. And we have to find a flew language for what is culturally and what is politically and what is socially meaningful.

ISAACSON: You’ve been a great defender of the classics, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. Even though some have said, you know, that’s imposing sort of a white western narrative on a multicultural society. First off, tell me about your father, you know, growing up black in Galveston, Texas, being turned onto the classics and how that affected your thinking.

WILLIAMS: My father lived — he was born in 1937, grew up in Galveston, Texas, segregated part of town. And a neighbor of his, there was a pile of books that he found on the neighbor’s property. And one of the books was Will Durant’s, “The Story of Philosophy.” My father was quite young, under 10 years old. And he says that he just was flipping through the book and saw this image of Socrates and that he was transfixed by it. And he was trying to understand how this guy’s face which was not a remarkable face, it was actually a kind of funny looking face, how it was something important enough to be preserved in a book across all these years. And so, you know, this led him to reading Plato’s dialogues at some point. And, you know, this was a lifeline for him. At that point in time, I mean, my father’s identity was telling him that he was a second-class citizen. And the ideas that he encountered in these texts were telling him that his humanity was far more expansive than that. And so, this was the first step in a lifelong process of transcending the parochial, the local and getting in touch with, you know, the universal. And this is the message that my father always instilled in me and that, you know, I think is very important to uphold this kind of time in the culture wars where everything becomes hyperpolarized and everything becomes a matter of what represents me, what is speaking to me directly as the classics and this kind of transcendent power, this liberatory power of an education, it breaks down those barriers.

ISAACSON: Yes, but Plato’s dialogues and the Socratic dialogues, they actually defend slavery at times. How do you disentangle that from the universal values you’ve just talked about? Because that’s almost a metaphor for what we have to disentangle in our society today.

WILLIAMS: Well, you know, I mean, slavery was a fact of human societies for most of human existence. So, I don’t think that everything that’s said, you know, in the republic is 2022 life advice to follow. But, you know, the idea that slavery that Plato was talking about is exactly the equivalent to the kind of chattel slavery that happened in the American South is also — it’s overly simplistic. And the idea that even Plato or Socrates could be thought of as white men is a kind of idea that really we have to, you know, discard because they wouldn’t understand themselves as white. They wouldn’t understand themselves as having something in common with people that were outside of the city State of Athens. Blackness and whiteness are relatively recent constructs. The way we conceive of racialized slavery is specific to our time and our geography. And so, I think that we have to be able to do justice to the past, which is to read the past on its own terms but also, to understand the things that are eternal and that are linking us across time and space.

ISAACSON: Why have we become so polarized, so politicized, so tribal in our political instincts? What is the antidote to this era of polarization and social tribalism?

WILLIAMS: It’s going to have to be learning to trust each other again. I don’t think there’s any way that either side can have a total victory. And we seem to be perceiving politics — electoral politics, but also, we seem to be pursuing electoral politics as though we can have an electoral victory. But the politicization of all the aspects of our life, which has really heated since 2016 or maybe a few years earlier than that, the politization of every facet of our lives, this has made it that you have to have a total victory everywhere, that you cannot turn the politics off anyway, you can’t turn it off in your place of worship, you can’t turn it off when you just started talking about whether you’re wearing a mask to the grocery store. You can’t turn it off whether you just talk about whether a book is good or bad. This is — this will never heal our society so long as the stakes are so high in every aspect of our interaction. We have to find ways to just depoliticize and come together and trust each other and socialize with each other. I think we live far too segregated lives.

ISAACSON: What are the classics and the humanities in general teach us about how we can heal our society today?

WILLIAMS: Well, I think the humanities teach us and classics teach us that you can — that some societies don’t heal. I think that study of the ark of — the history of the West is very important because you can see that there are times of decadence. There are times of bitter polarization and balkanization where we don’t actually listen to our better angels and when we don’t allow the biggest questions to animate our discourse and we get stuck in (INAUDIBLE) and disputes that degrade our social structure from within, and that we can actually become very vulnerable to outside foes or just fall apart from a lack of solidarity. So, I think, you know, there are — the beautiful thing about the classics and the humanities, there are fewer answers than there are models of thought and questions and, you know, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes. And so, I think that, you know, you have to constantly be thinking about what was seen and done and thought and said before so that you — you know, if you want to have a new thought, the best thing to do is to read an old book. And I think that too many of us are — and, you know, I’m guilty of this, too, too many of us are getting too much of our thoughts generated from the ultra-contemporary discourse all around us on social media.

ISAACSON: Thomas Chatterton Williams, thank you so much for joining us.

WILLIAMS: Thanks for having.