I read Plato’s Lysis today, as part of the heroic ordeal which is Plato’s complete works. It’s a fairly typical early dialogue, which mostly run as follows:

Socrates is wandering around Athens looking for teenage boys to groom for sex.

He finds some aristocratic teenage boys and initiates a tiresome conversation about some topic, in this case friendship.

Almost nothing he says is sincere or logical. It is mostly sophistry. His favourite technique is a bait & switch, e.g. “we agree, do we not, my lovely boys, that people drink gin because they enjoy it? And enjoyment is a good. Therefore if we want to be good we must drink gin. Whisky is not gin, and what is not good but evil? Whisky, therefore, is evil.”

As he leads his victims down rhetorical rabbit holes they are reduced to baffled assent: to conclusions which, individually, seem fair enough, but which lead to insanity.

He then somehow leads things back to The Good and Wisdom and says the boys need a tutor to teach them about such things. They then beg Socrates to become their private tutors and the dialogue ends with them all agreeing to let Socrates do what he wants to them.

Lysis follows this course up to the ending, where Socrates is interrupted by the relatives and guardians of the boys he is trying to groom, and he is forced to scurry away like a paedophile at the playground.

The older I get, the harder it is for me to stomach Socrates. His sly, predatory manner around teenage boys, referring to them as “my beautiful boy!” and so on, and telling them how only an older man’s love can help them attain Wisdom and The Good, is almost as offputting as his sophistry and utter insincerity. He comes across as something between a paedophile and a used car salesman. In Vox Day’s terms, he is a gamma.

His tiresome “explorations” of e.g. friendship, seem designed to wear his victims down, so they numbly assent to being sodomized because they can’t understand anything and lose all faith in reason or logic and thus surrender to this leering old man.

It’s not all bad, mind you. Just reading a narrative from 2500 years ago is interesting, even if all modern translations make Socrates sound like a kind of Victorian parlour paedophile, full of “my good sir” and “by Jove!” and other incongruous idioms. And there are usually interesting moments, e.g.

“Look at it this way,” I said. “If someone smeared your blonde hair with white lead, would your hair then be white or appear white?”

An interesting question – that is, is there a difference between being and appearance when it comes to colour? But I was struck mostly that Lysis, like the Egyptian Pharoahs, is blonde. I’ve met several Greeks and they all look thoroughly Mediterranean, and when one looks at their dysfunctional corrupt nation it’s hard to reconcile with the Greece of Sophocles and Homer.

Unless – they are no longer the same genetic group, as the modern Egyptians are probably very different to those of yore. And then, perhaps there is a certain civilisational order which only appears in genetic groups liable to produce blondes, and these groups have lived as far afield as Egypt, Greece, modern Turkey, and are now mostly confined to Europe and dwindling fast.

Another interesting point that made this tedious dialogue almost worth reading:

From this we may infer that those who are already wise no longer love wisdom, whether they are gods or men. Nor do those love it who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid man loves wisdom. There remain only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant and stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don’t know.

A point Wittgenstein might have appreciated, that those who are wise don’t love wisdom, that is, they don’t do philosophy.