Father’s Day Without Factions: Plato’s Theory of Communal Parenting
The father of philosophy sought to reconfigure society by engineering cooperation into humanity’s most fundamental institution
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Celebrating Father’s Day always reminds me of Plato’s Republic.
Clearly, that observation demands an explanation, so here goes.
My high school had a terrible boys basketball team. My senior year the Smithfield Dominos (not my high school’s real name) won only 5 games in roughly 30 tries — a new low for a historically inept program.
By contrast, the football team played for the state title that same year, and a couple dozen of those players got college scholarships after graduation.
That contrast begs the question: in a school with enough stellar athletes to fill out an 80-player roster and compete for championships in football, why couldn’t the basketball team find 12 to do the same?
After all, in small high schools like mine, star athletes should presumably star in every sport — not just one.
The answer likely won’t surprise you: it all came down to money. At Smithfield High, if a student’s family could afford to make big donations, then that student got first consideration in everything — including sports.
Now, because football requires dozens of participants to field a team, Smithfield’s “pay-to-play” scheme never excluded anyone who wanted to compete. So, the best athletes made the team, even if they didn’t come from wealth.
Basketball, however, only takes 12, and at Smithfield, those 12 spots went to the sons of affluent donors, regardless — and often in spite—of their talent.
The way we do family in America isn’t perfect
I never blamed the rich parents of Smithfield for using their advantages on behalf of their children. At least I don’t anymore.
I get it — I’m a father of two and I know that if I don’t leverage whatever influence I have for them they will likely be left behind.
One might refer to the anti-merit commercialization of everything under capitalism to explain what happened to the Smithfield boys' basketball team nearly 30 years ago and leave it at that.
To be sure, such an analysis would have much more “merit” than the ’94 Dominos hoopers.
There is another factor, however, common to high school politics throughout the US that helped determine the boys' basketball roster at Smithfield when I was a student there, and it’s one we implicitly celebrate every Father’s Day: the nuclear family.
Easy now. Stick with me.
No explanation is necessary to justify why we love our children and advocate for their place in life — even when it means that someone else’s child will fail to make the cut.
We invest psychological and emotional resources we didn’t know we had to raise our children and to cultivate their well-being, and we desperately hope that our efforts will fetch rich rewards for them in the long run.
Unfortunately, in a dog-eat-dog society like ours, that frequently means helping our kids to shoulder past their peers in their endeavors.
Despite the readily apprehensible social friction fostered by independent nuclear families competing for standing, the American cultural ethos is nevertheless hardwired to affirm the way we do family as “the bedrock of society.”
But the American way isn’t the only way, even though we forget that truth all too often.
Plato’s theory of communal parenting
Contrary to the common assumption in the US that the family clan is the first and most important stitch in the fabric of society, Plato argues that competition for social standing between small families subverts civic harmony.
Plato poses his criticism of the traditional family in the form of a rhetorical question:
“Can there be any greater evil than discord and distraction and plurality where unity ought to reign?”
Plato is referring here to just the sort of conflict we’ve been discussing — the clannishness born of the normal impulse to place family fortune ahead of the common wheal.
Not one to raise objections without offering alternatives, in Book V of The Republic, Plato sketches a family schema with 2 distinct features that are alien to our common conception of kith and kin. They are:
1.) Common Spouses
To prevent clannish oppositions from ever arising, Plato recommends a system of polygamy for his guardian class — the philosopher monarchs of his ideal state.
Both men and women would participate in Plato’s “regency of the enlightened,” and instead of pairing into distinct households, they would share “common houses and meet at common meals.”
Plato contends that in such a system, factional conflagrations between guardian class families get no oxygen because everyone belongs to a common familial partnership at the outset.
2.) Common children
Plato reinforces his ambition to marry the family with the state through a proposal even more inflammatory to our inherited family values than polygamy: common children.
To arrange for this, Plato recommends breeding for eugenic purposes and founding state agencies to raise children in place of biological parents:
“The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter.”
By removing children to nurseries, Plato intends to sever the parental bonds so prized throughout the world to keep his guardians’ motivations focused on statecraft.
Neither would the guardians ever know who their children are, and would never, therefore, be able to distinguish “‘mine’ and ‘not mine’” in Plato’s ideal state.
Consequently, individual guardians would have to develop a parental concern for every child in the republic to guarantee that their own are adequately cared for.
And in so doing, the guardians would foreclose the interfamilial strife that divides society against itself.
Without the natural inclination toward favoritism fostered in a traditional family, that intellectual task becomes both possible and attractive — at least according to Plato.
So, in Plato’s world, Father’s Day would mean something different entirely: It would be an occasion to celebrate senior generations rather than an opportunity to honor the one special man who you call “Dad.”
And that’s why Father’s Day always reminds me of Plato’s Republic.
We needn’t be doctrinaire to reap the benefits of Plato’s system
Plato’s thoughts on eugenics are best committed to the scrap heap of history. Frankly, we don’t need a lesson on the topic to dismiss it out of pocket.
Neither do we need to divide society into distinct and immutable classes to glean something of value from Plato’s program for guardian class family planning.
What we should do — always — is critically examine our most basic assumptions so we can improve our way of life.
Happily, Plato’s theory of communal parenting fashions critical tools to probe one of our most cherished but unchallenged institutions: the nuclear family.
And in the bargain, Plato provides a template for scrutinizing other sacrosanct features of our society.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s good that you love your children
I love mine, too, and I wouldn’t trade them for Plato’s ideal state in a million years. Nor would I trade my father — and hero — for a state-run nursery.
Still, if we take nothing from Plato other than a fresh commitment to treat every child in our community as if they are our own — especially if they aren’t — then I think our time in The Republic will have been well spent.
And that commitment can be fruitfully extended to the other humans in our vicinity with the simple determination to distinguish less rigidly between “mine” and “not mine.”
With any luck, that determination will soon see us meeting in “common houses” and taking “common meals” with “fathers” we once called strangers. And that will bring a new egalitarian dimension to the way we do Father’s Day.
