In our Great Books Redux, we had a final summary session to discuss the Greek works covered so far. Prior to the class, there had been a surprising email that pornographically portrayed the speakers of Plato's Symposium as a group of exploitative and self-congratulatory men. The writer further stated that these men confuse desire with love, love with self-love and self-love with beauty. I reread it several times because it was so passionate. There were no emails in response so I thought perhaps our discussion would unpack the reasons for such a heated diatribe.
Instead, the class followed through with the spirit of that email, beginning with the concept that the speakers were rationalizing their disgusting behaviors. In the spirit of a Greek play, a full chorus of support followed. The discussion veered into contemporary simulacra with Harvey Weinstein, the larger movie production area, student-teacher relationships, athlete-coach relationships and finally medical school training as evidence of the horrible and pervasive forces described favorably in the Symposium. I sat stunned.
When I was asked to speak up (because in a prior email, I had indicated that while in college I had been groped by a Classics professor), I shared that I could feel a lot of anger and pain had been provoked by the Symposium. I then expressed that my being groped experience was unfavorable and yet after I had gone back to the professor and explained that I had no interest in that dynamic, we moved on to a good working relationship (in which good grades were now assured). I then shared that I felt we all operated from self-interest and that the journey described in the Symposium is about a pathway to enlightened self-interest.
One of the classmates had made an observation that our discussions were normative rather than descriptive about the Symposium. I felt that it hit a core concept of what I was experiencing. This appeared to be a new orthodoxy in which power - particularly in the hands of "white males" - is synonymous with abuse, inequality is equivalent to exploitation and difference is defined as injustice. We never did address where my classmates' passion was coming from, but it was certainly religious in its specificity of language and tenor.
Later I engaged in some discussions and it seems that the fallacy is the racist fallacy. We tend to take superficial characteristics that occasionally accompany a set of actions and label them as causal. When people see a serial killer with blue eyes, they start saying that blue-eyed people are serial killers. For historical reasons, more white men occupy positions of power and become assigned a race and gender reason for their bad behavior. Interestingly, despite the intelligence and social power of my classmates, it appears that they are susceptible to the same cognitive fallacies affecting our police forces - establishing, of course, that we are all just human.
