Living Polemarchus

A Platonic Character and the Decline of Canadian Freedom

(This post is part of a series which seeks to relate the Athens of the late 5th-century BC to our own time. If you want an overview of the larger picture, of which this post is a piece, you might want to start with my introductory post.)

In my last post, I used the sinking of the Titanic as an analogy for gradual changes that take place in the ideas that dominate a society. One aspect of this gradual change that there is an intermediate period in which it is not always clear what exactly is going on. Here I want to focus on this transitional phase, a situation in which many do not recognise that anything is changing at all, while others grasp the full significance of the moment, while others still feel pulled in both directions, unable or unwilling to fully grasp what is happening, and uncertain how to respond.

This sort of transition is of particular concern to me, because it seems to me to describe the Western world as I have observed it since coming of age in the nineties. Foundational elements of our society, which seemed as solid as rock a decade or two ago, now seem rather to have been passing phases, no more lasting or substantial than a breath of wind. As I look back over my adult life, I find myself connecting it with that character in the first book of Plato’s Republic who stands for a transitional phase from one state of affairs to another: Polemarchus. In hindsight, I would say that I have been “living Polemarchus” – indeed, we all have been. In what follows, I am going to try to explain what I mean by this by giving a brief overview of this character in Plato. I will then set out how I think the situation portrayed through Polemarchus relates to our own time, using the disintegration of liberal norms in Canada as an example. (I will leave Thucydides to one side this time, although his Mytilenian debate occupies a position similar to Polemarchus – p. 85 of the book provides a summary of the principal points of comparison.)

In the first book of the Republic, after Socrates speaks with Cephalus, an old man who represents an ossified older ethical order, Polemarchus enters the discussion. There are indications that we are to regard him as a continuation of Cephalus – for example, we hear he is the older man’s son, and we are reminded that he is Cephalus’ heir – but as Polemarchus speaks, it soon becomes clear that he also represents a break away from his father. He shows an active interest in argument, as his father did not: whereas the conversation with Cephalus was punctuated by expressions of agreement and admiration, Polemarchus comes ready to disagree and make his case. Furthermore, when he defines justice as “helping friends and harming enemies,” we are in the presence of something new because Cephalus never spoke of harming anyone: it is a first subtle hint of darker things to come. As the argument with Polemarchus proceeds, he is soon led to the conclusion that his new way of thinking justifies stealing from others, and as Socrates probes further, the attentive reader notes that the doctrine at issue in fact contains within itself the abolition of almost all ethical limits, a situation that could produce an entirely unrestrained brutality.

As the uncomfortable consequences of his words come into view, Polemarchus retreats from them, and abandons his definition of justice: in the end he proves loyal to the world of his father. Still, the encounter with Polemarchus does not simply consist of this loyalty. On the contrary, he represents a moment of uncertainty: he introduces a new view of the world that contains hints of brutality, but then retreats from it; when the dialogue proceeds to Thrasymachus, it becomes clear that Polemarchus was in fact a moment of transition, from an older ethical order that would tend of itself to produce peace and stability to a terrible and savage new situation.

Polemarchus’ uncertainty, then, contains two different moments: first, a felt loyalty to the world of his father, and second, an altogether different ethical understanding that arises out of his own active thinking. The connection to my Titanic analogy should be clear enough; in the context of the first book of the Republic, Polemarchus represents an historical situation in which an older ethical tradition, despite being mostly dead, nevertheless retains a kind of hold over people. Ideas whose time has passed do not disappear in an instant. Instead, their influence wanes, and they continue to make themselves felt for a time before disappearing completely. Plato has used Polemarchus to give this reality dramatic form.

So how does this relate to us? What foundational elements of our society have proved less secure than they seemed a few decades ago? The example I want to use here concerns the degree to which our society cherishes and is prepared to uphold liberal norms. One hears a great deal about freedom of speech these days, but there is another way to frame the matter, by thinking in terms of the status that liberal norms taken more generally hold within the culture. Consider the notion that it should be possible to air unpopular opinions in public without fear of losing one’s job. This certainly counts as a liberal norm, so the question is, how important does the average person consider it? How much disgrace is incurred by ignoring it? How ready are people, especially influential people, to encourage or enforce compliance with it?

Such a framing not only seems to me to point to what is decisive in our present situation, it also ties in directly to the character of Polemarchus as I set it out above, for a central question with him is how great a hold the older ethical order continues to have. In our case, the older order is the liberal order, in which people were free to air controversial opinions without fear of job loss or other forms of retribution. To the extent that illiberal methods receive condemnation and effective penalties from all sides, the liberal order can be said still to be alive.

It was a distinction of the sort suggested by this framing of the matter that was at the back of my mind over the past decade as I began to observe speakers getting shouted down, something I had not noticed before. Here is one video that stuck in my mind after many years, and was an early indication that things were starting to change:

More remarkable still than the fact of speakers getting shouted down was the fact that those disrupting speaking events would not face censure from all sides, but often received tacit support in the media and elsewhere. One increasingly hears justifications for shutting down speech: it isn’t the government doing it, so it doesn’t really count; the heckler’s veto doesn’t count; the speech in question was ‘hate’ (an ever more capacious term) so it’s right to censor it, and so on.

Another early indication that something was changing was my surprise at how authorities were now reacting to illiberal acts. Violations of liberal norms are natural and constitute a reality that simply will happen from time to time – it is liberal norms that are not natural – so to maintain a liberal society, it will be necessary to push back from time to time at such incursions. What struck me in recent years was that authorities did not push back. In fact, I began to realise that I had a sort of script in my head that I had been once accustomed to hear from those in positions of authority, a script that reminded us, for example, that it was important that people should be allowed to speak even if their views seemed noxious. All of a sudden, it seemed, people in positions of authority had stopped running this script. They did not remind us of the importance of liberal norms. They did not impose penalties of any kind on those who caused events to be canceled or shouted others down (in one case, they even gave an award after such behaviour). They did not do anything at all to preserve the status those norms had once enjoyed. I began to wonder if these authorities were not now more fundamentally moved by something else.

There is a “something else” at work in our culture today, and to shine a light on it here, I am going to avoid a discussion on laws passed by governments, turning instead to three examples of measures taken by professional societies in Canada – “characteristic realities” of the sort I mentioned in my first post. The reason for doing this is that these examples are not the product of top-down coercive action from the government, but seem to have arisen spontaneously across the country. They thus seem to me to have a better claim to be indicators of a genuine change in the culture rather than the accident of a single government. In all three cases, a professional association has made an issue of the political beliefs of its members, and has used the threat of disbarment from the profession against those who hold disfavoured beliefs. Each case clearly constitutes a departure from liberal norms to a degree that would have been unthinkable only a decade or two ago, and in each case, the silence from a very large segment of society (especially elite society) is deafening. It is above all this silence that tells us that the older liberal order is dying, that its influence, though not yet gone, is fading away.

In all three cases, the episode ends with a decisive victory for the illiberals.

The first example is the case of Amy Hamm, a nurse in British Columbia, who made statements from 2018 to 2021 “denying the gender identities of transgender people.” As a consequence, she was investigated by the BC College of Nurses and Midwives, with the possibility of losing her nursing licence and thus her livelihood hanging over her head for years. Hamm’s supporters believe that part of what is at issue is the right to assert biological realities; her own account of the affair can be found here. The views for which she has become known, if they are not of the sort that confer status in elite circles these days, are nevertheless very widely held indeed, and without doubt constitute mainstream political speech on an issue that is widely discussed. I consider myself a pessimist on such matters, but even I was surprised when Hamm lost her case. (Update August 15th, 2025: the BC College of Nurses and Midwives has ordered Hamm to pay $93,639.80.)

A similar case is that of Jordan Peterson and the College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO). Here, complaints about certain of Dr. Peterson’s public comments on social or political matters were made to the College by members of the public who do not know him (though it seems two of them did falsely claim to be his clients). The complaints seemed to many to be merely vexatious, but the CPO began proceedings against Dr. Peterson. As a result, he found himself threatened with the loss of his license if he were not to submit to retraining, apparently at his own expense, and for as long as the College deems fit. (His own account of the affair can be found here, and more recently, on video here:

As with the Hamm case, the outcry one would once have expected from major media has been absent, except from more conservative outlets. In a result that would once have been inconceivable, Peterson has lost his case against the CPO. Worse yet, he has felt the need to leave the country, a development that would once have been thought a black eye to any country aspiring to call itself free or liberal.

A third case concerns the Law Society of Ontario (LSO). Since 2016 there has been a question concerning whether or not the LSO should compel its members “to adopt and abide by a ‘statement of principles’ (SOP) that acknowledged their obligation to promote equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in their affairs, both professional and personal.” The objections to the exercise of this compulsion upon those who wish to practice law are obvious: it impinges upon freedoms that lie at the heart of a liberal society, above all the freedoms to speak and act according to one’s own conscience, and it even impinges upon a member’s personal life. I find myself comparing the SOP with the ‘encouragement’ many people in communist countries felt to be members of the party if they wanted to advance in their profession, or practice it at all. (Those interested in a somewhat more detailed objection to SOP can look here.)

In 2019 there was a movement called Stop SOP among Ontario lawyers that successfully removed the measure, leading many to think that liberal society had been saved, and that there would be nothing more to worry about. I was less optimistic, believing that it would be back in another 10-15 years. In fact, even my rather pessimistic view proved to be too optimistic, for the illiberals successfully brought SOP back in 2023. Thus it seems that those wanting to practice law in Ontario from now on will need to declare their fealty to the dominant ideology.

All three examples have in common what seems to be a new phenomenon: the readiness of professional societies to use political considerations to determine the fitness of their members to practice a profession. In all three cases, the outcry one would once have expected from major media, and from civil society more generally, in response to such a step has been muted or non-existent. To me, the silence was extraordinary: Canadians who get their information from non-ring-wing major media seem to have been unaware of the Hamm and Peterson cases for quite some time. There has also been a feeling in some quarters (e.g., here or here) that certain significant media have supported the illiberal side. (Update Aug. 25th, 2025: an article in the National Post provides further commentary on the matter of professional societies in Canada censoring members.)

One could comment at length upon the chilling effect such measures must have – the threat of losing one’s livelihood is obviously a serious matter – but our focus here is simply on how such episodes suggest the dwindling influence of the older liberal order. Certainly “freedom of speech“ still retains a positive connotation for now – recall that Polemarchus still had a felt loyalty to his father’s world – and even those who use effective means to destroy it (for example by using professional associations as a weapon against their political opponents) are still likely to proclaim their loyalty to such liberal notions as “freedom of speech.” Nevertheless, behind this seemly facade is a hard reality: those who disagree with their professional association’s new politics find themselves with a terrible choice between their livelihood and their conscience, the sort of choice that was once thought an marker of the authoritarian societies that we in the West rightly looked down on.

It is this new approach to disagreement that shows us what the “something else” is that I mentioned above. The liberal norm of trying to convince one’s opponents through dialogue is being replaced with intimidation. The new way of doing things is simply to exert a form of compulsion, to use force rather than persuasion. This is not how people in a liberal society behave towards one another. It is, however, how tyrants behave towards their subjects. We have here a hint of possible future tyranny, just as Plato hints at something similar as the encounter with Polemarchus concludes: Socrates suggests that the new understanding to which Polemarchus gave voice is really appropriate to men such as “Periander, or Perdiccas, or Xerxes, or Ismenias the Theban, or some other rich man who thought he had great power.” (trans. Griffith) Periander was a tyrant, Perdiccas an unscrupulous king, Xerxes an aggressive king, while Ismenias was a Theban whose integrity and patriotism seem to have been questionable at best: Plato is pointing to power rather than to scruples over moral concerns. The analogy to the new way of doing things in Canada should be obvious.

There is one difference with Polemarchus, however. Whereas he ultimately turned away from the terrible new world that was emerging, in Canada, there has been no turning back. All three cases ended in a decisive defeat for liberal norms, and in no case have I noticed any significant hand-wringing among the elites.

It should be clear enough by now how one might see a sort of Polemarchan situation through the three examples given above. We are experiencing a gradual change, in which an older, liberal, way of doing things is failing to sustain itself against a new way of doing things that operates through force rather than trust. The old institutions and processes are still there, and many people will feel that nothing has changed, but as we see speakers shouted down rather than debated, or professional organisations using their institutional power to intimidate or crush their political opponents, and as we see how scarce the public objections to such behaviour are, it becomes clear that there are in fact substantial changes afoot, even if the people driving these changes may not all be conscious of where it is they are leading us. If the process is not arrested, one can imagine how the result might ultimately be something quite ugly.

Canada is a country with a liberal past, and thus with liberal habits. It is still possible for Canadians to discuss controversial matters without the kind of fear one has in genuinely totalitarian states. The government does not usually proceed with tyrannical severity against its critics. But is it still appropriate to call Canada a liberal country? When we consider the country through the lens of Polemarchus, we find no cause for optimism. The analogy would have us understand the current state of affairs in Canada as a sort of mix of an older order, and a newer ideology that is increasingly dominant among the chattering classes. That liberal willingness to allow controversial people to speak which is still found in Canada is not a natural expression of the new ideology embraced by those who occupy the heights of Canada’s institutional order. On the contrary, it is a remnant of the older order: insofar as words noxious to the elites are not met with official sanction, it is simply because this is the way that things have long been done. If this is correct, it is likely that Canada’s claim to be a liberal country belongs more to the past than the future.