Noble Lies

Plato gets the credit for inventing the concept of “noble lie,” a false tale circulated to make a society more civic-minded and justify social stratifications (Republic III 414c-415c). Of all Plato’s ideas, this one may be the one received most unfavorably. No one likes being told that they must be deceived into being good, and egalitarian impulses, especially in the present age, revolt against the idea of sanctifying social classes.

As is so often the case, Plato is misunderstood. He was not truly inventing anything but rather critiquing pre-existing Greek religious ideas.

Plato presents the “noble lie” in three sections. The first tells what kind of story it’s going to be: a “Phoenician tale,” something supernatural, the sort of thing that happened in olden days but doesn’t happen anymore. As we see momentarily, this is a mythic origin story for the ideal city. Every Greek city-state that was not a colony of another city had a myth such as this.

The specific myth that Plato proffers is that all the citizens sprang up out of the earth with all their education and equipment. They are thus all brothers, children of the earth, and charged with defending their sacred birthplace. Strange as this story may seem, both Athens and Thebes had origin myths almost identical to this one.

The final section elaborates on the myth of the autochthonous citizenry, claiming that the people have metals in their souls fitting them for certain roles within the city: gold for the rulers, silver for the soldiers, bronze and iron for the laborers. For the most part, these soul-metals are passed down from father to son, but every now and then someone is born suited to a different role from his father. Any Greek reading this passage would have immediately noticed that Plato was appropriating Hesiod’s myth of the Five Races of Mankind for his own purposes. Plato’s version stands in contrast to conventional stories which conferred divine origins only on the Eupatrid families.

By calling this tale a ψεῦδος, a lie, Plato echoes the growing religious skepticism of his day. Fifty years before Plato, Herodotus did not dare to call even the most fantastic of his accounts lies; fifty years after the Republic, blatant corruption and politicking had destroyed much of the authority of the old Greek religion. People still believed in the gods, of course, but their religious observances were largely perfunctory and they sought new ways of understanding and connecting with the divine.

Plato did not believe the foundational myths of his own city in a literal sense, but he accepted that they were useful. People need a sense of group identity and group feeling, asabiyah, in order to cooperate and accept mutually beneficial social arrangements. The main point of his proposed myth, the way in which it is different from all the others, is that he believes status should be conferred based on merit rather than birth, though he holds the two to be closely linked.

Another criticism Plato makes of Greek religion is the emphasis it placed on Homer. In tradition there was a contest between Homer and Hesiod, the former producing long epics of heroes and adventure, the latter shorter poems about the gods and common people. Plato’s hostility toward Homer is well known, considering that Plato banished Homer from the ideal city, but here he takes the side of Hesiod. Plato didn’t care so much for the stories of high adventure that inspired the Athenians to send out his friends and colleagues to die on vainglorious imperialistic expeditions. Far better, he thought, to stay at home, living peacefully and virtuously and not meddling in other peoples’ affairs.

One thing Plato absolutely did not advocate is constant manipulation of the populace through politics and propaganda. On the contrary, this foundation myth for the ideal city is a one-and-done sort of affair: the citizens believe it and act on it and don’t need any additional persuasion to defend their city from external or internal threats. There is no Ministry of Truth in the ideal city of the Republic.

Real Greek religion, however, did involve that kind of constant manipulation. Herodotus tells how the pronouncements of oracles were carefully interpreted, sometimes even outright bought, so as to yield particular conclusions. The most notable example is the plot by the Alcmaeonidai to incite the Spartans to overthrow the Peisistratid tyrants, which they did by bribing the priests at Delphi. By the opening of the Peloponnesian War, the cynical knew that the Delphic oracle was owned by the Spartans, and by the end most survivors were cynics. Socrates was a notable exception.

It is at times difficult to determine to what extent the Greek leaders were aware of their manipulation of religion, but sometimes gaps appear in the pious façade. During the battle of Plataea, for instance, the auspices for a Spartan advance were repeatedly unfavorable until they all of a sudden turned favorable. It is certainly possible that this indeed was the case, but more likely Regent Pausanias was waiting for the light Persian infantry to move too close to his own lines. When the enemy was in the proper position, he launched a rapid charge and caught the Persians before they could run away. To the Greeks, however, that didn’t make as good a story.

A “noble lie” is a people’s origin story. Plato proposed one version; Athens, Thebes, et al. had their own; the Hebrews had one; the Babylonians, Persians, and Egyptians had their own; the Romans had theirs and so did the German tribes that destroyed the Roman Empire. The formulation of an origin story is easiest when it lies outside of historical memory, but even America has the tales of the Revolution and the Founding Fathers.

The point of the “noble lie” is to distinguish the society from those around it, to encourage the people to live together relatively peacefully, and to inspire them to resist attacks by outsiders. Any society that fails to do at least these three things is doomed to perish and quickly. If a lie of some kind does the job, then it is indeed noble.

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