Sir Keir Starmer said that Britain had come to a fork in the road. As usual, he took it – the fork between his words and his actions.
Athenians of the 5th C bc were fascinated by the implications of logos (‘speech, reason, argument’, cf. ‘logic’) and ergon (‘action/results’, cf. ‘erg’). While Homeric heroes (8th C bc) were ordered to excel as ‘speakers of words’ and ‘doers of deeds’ because that made them winners in both the political and military arenas, the statesman Pericles emphasised the high importance of the interaction between word and deed: ‘We do not think logos is an obstacle to action; no, the issue is the failure to use logos before action has to be taken.’ But the historians Herodotus and Thucydides were all too aware that history showed men’s logos could not guarantee successful results. Socrates meanwhile argued that logos could be put to evil as well as good ends, while logos without action was valueless, a form of mere verbal assertion or hypocrisy.
Aristotle thought along the same lines when he argued that what we might call ‘prudence’ or ‘wisdom’ was ‘a truth-attaining quality, based on logos, leading to results relevant to things that are good and bad for humans’. In other words, logos alone was not enough: it must be practically associated with (hopefully) a morally good outcome.
The comic poet Aristophanes had endless fun with all this. His comedy Clouds features a gullible, boorish old man whose horse-racing son has built up huge debts. His father decides to join Socrates’s ‘Thinkery’ where he hopes to learn the ‘wrong’ (i.e. corrupt and deceptive) logos which would persuade jurors into acquitting him. It is all too baffling for the bumbling old fool and he sends his son instead. Chaos ensues and the comedy ends with the disillusioned Strepsiades burning down the Thinkery. It is all quite unfair to Socrates, but typical of the Athenian people’s intense interest in the intellectual arguments of the day.
Sir Keir is already on the hook – or rather the fork – for his ‘promises’. The rest, Davey-like, are in the happy position of being able to fork about as much as they like. Let them enjoy it while they can.
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