So, why the emphasis on Protagoras in my earliest posts here?
The answer, simply, is that already more than 2,000 years ago, Protagoras, a traveling teacher of ordinary people, provided the most convincing, more important, and most direct argument in favor of democracy ever. Not the only one, not the one of value nor the only one we will explore in these pages, but the best, most convincing, most important and most straightforward.
But that’s not all. In his debate with Socrates our brother Protagoras provided the best argument against a tendency that in our own day has done untold (almost literally untold, at least until recently) damage, and which is the principle value and element of political philosophy of our educated classes, our political elites, our intellectual leaders – technocracy, or expert-worship.
He does all this with a parable really. Every worker, every mother at home doing the domestic labor to make life comfortable for her family, every farmer and peasant, every soldier in the barracks, every unemployed person on the street corner, everyone in the barrios, the trailer parks, the ghettos, the de-industrialized cities, the reservations, the banlieu on the outskirts of French cities, or in the favelas in Latin America, everyone studying at a community college to try to gain a greater skill, every artisan or craftsperson, every itinerant street vendor, nurses’ aide and home health care aide, truck driver or Uber driver, Amazon warehouse worker or ship’s crewmember, or waitress, and yes, every adjunct professor everywhere, all around the world, even if they never read Plato, should know about Protagoras and know his argument. Protagoras’ argument is self-defense for ordinary people, as surely as having a union, knowing basic self-defense, or having a spare tire.
Along with others, like a character or two in Shakespeare, like knowing about Malcolm X (and not only as a great African American leader though he was indeed that and so much more), like the arguments of Thomas Rainborough in the 1640s in defense of democracy, or the American Populists (the real ones) of the 1890s, about Eugene Debs, or following what, today, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is telling us about how democracy ought to work on our behalf, every working class person owes it to themselves to know about what Protagoras said in his argument with Socrates.
The reason is simple: you are going to have, or at least overhear, that same debate that Socrates and Protagoras engaged in so long ago, in your own life and with regards to how to run your community, your country, the place your work, the place you live, maybe even your own household, certainly anyplace you study and most of the professions you are going to come into contact with. This debate may occur in person, something that is likely at least once in your life; or it may be – and I can guarantee you will encounter the viewpoint of Socrates, expressed by people who have no idea who he was, many times during your lifetime - in the mainstream media and among political leaders; it is all over college campuses and is the default setting in nearly all professions that I can think of, not just medicine, university teaching (and even more so administration !), economics, and law, but even in the military, even among ordinary soldiers.
When Protagaras, as recounted in Plato’s Dialogue “Protagoras” comes to Athens, Socrates comes to meet him and the two have a debate for the ages about democracy and technocratic expertise. Socrates hated the democracy in Athens, where ordinary people took turns running the government, where all decisions were made by an assembly of the people – yes, of the male citizens, but although women did not have the vote, they were also citizens, could join and run associations of various kinds, and could sue in court if the man of the house wasted the resources of the Oikos, the household. So, while there was not equality for women, and they could not vote, anymore than American or British women before 1920, Italian women before 1946, or Swiss women before 1971, women were not in the conditions they are today in say, Saudi Arabia’s monarchy either. And though there was slavery in Athens, most of the slaves worked in households of aristocrats, those who opposed the democracy. So blaming Athenian democracy for slavery is like blaming the democratic part of the pre-Civil War United States, the north, for slavery, when it was the undemocratic parts, the Slave States of the South, and in particular the rich plantation owners in those states, opponents of democracy that held most of the slaves. I don’t claim Athens is in any way a model we should follow today of course, but it was no worse than the American Republic in the 19th Century on these issues.
Anyway, these conditions of slavery and gender and class inequality are NOT the reasons Socrates hated the democracy. He hated it because, as he explains to Protagoras, when he wants a house built he goes to a carpenter, and when he needs to travel by sea he goes to a mariner. But when he goes to the assembly to govern the state, he finds there the same (to him) blockheads of a carpenter and mariner who think, he says, that just because they know how to build a house or sail a ship that they can also run the government. We need experts in running government, argues Socrates, just as we use experts to build houses or sail ships. This is the argument for technocratic expertise. For government by those “qualified”, by those who are “above” selfish interests like how they will make their livelihood, what will happen to their trade or their industry, how high wages will be.
Protagoras is having none of it. First of all, he argues, people are capable of learning to do almost any trade or job or form of work. But we have to be trained. But in learning how to do a job, we learn more than the techniques of that job, more even than the skills which might themselves be useful for more than one kind of job. We learn how to learn how to do things. A meta-learning we might call it. We need to be taught, but we are being taught more than just the thing itself. We are learning to learn, more even than what today is often called “capacity-building”. We can learn to govern ourselves as well, to take a part as active citizens in governing, in being elected officials or in running the necessary agencies of a democratic society. These tasks are no different than those of any other kind of job, it takes training and experience to get good at it, but we can get those as we go, as on any other kind of job. So democratic government, self-government, is inherently tied up with work, the ability to work, work as a form of intelligent activity that most people are engaged in during our lives.
But Protagoras goes further in his defense of democracy, and of working people. He tells a parable: a story about the gods providing people with their various gifts at the origin of the world. After Zeus sends Hermes, the messenger of the gods to distribute to people their different abilities, Hermes comes to Zeus to ask about two other, important abilities: a sense of Justice and a sense of Shame. We can translate the Greek words “dike” as Justice, or as Right, or as a sense of Right and Wrong, and we can translate “aidos” as Respect, Reverence, or as a sense of Shame. I have chosen the translation of Justice and Shame, as the title of this blog itself, because while respect, reverence, right are all also lacking in the world today, it is the almost total lack of a sense of being ashamed of shameful ideas and statements, of dishonorable actions and statements, of shameful policies and politics, and the vast injustice of life today that seem to best capture the state of things, and the relevance to us all today of Protagoras’ message.
So Hermes asks Zeus if he should deal out these two things, aidos and dike, a sense of Justice and a sense of Shame, as he did the other gifts, giving them only to a few, as the ability to be a doctor enables one doctor to cure many patients, or the ability of one carpenter to build a house can provide many families with houses, without everyone having to be equally enabled and equally good at being a doctor or a carpenter, a cook or a farmer. No, says Zeus, these two you must give equally to everyone. To have cities, to have societies, to have civilization, to have organized life, everyone must have a sense of Justice and of Shame, to know right from wrong. These two gifts enable people to govern themselves, and all, without exception, have these gifts, are capable of using them to discern the right from the wrong, and so to participate in governing. Without exception.
The message here is twofold: first, everyone has the capacity to govern because the REAL issues of governance are NOT TECHNICAL in nature but are MORAL. The issue of whether to develop easily accessible public transport based on renewable energy instead of highways using fossil fuel-using automobiles is NOT a technical problem, but an issue of what is right or wrong, what is best for people and the environment or what is destructive and wasteful of resources, health, well-being. There ARE technical issues – how much energy can be generated by this or that source or technology, and to what end, how most efficiently or economically we can produce trains or trams or solar panels, how quickly we can phase out coal or gas or gasoline or oil at what cost per unit, and how quickly we can realistically produce alternative energy or trains given a certain proposed cost or budget. But these are ONLY technical issues for experts to ADVISE US ON, not to decide what to do. If we are told that a certain option will cost more than we might have thought, that is useful information that an expert is useful to supply us with. But we may, and only we the people CAN decide that the additional cost is worth it because WE and ONLY WE can determine the priorities – saving money, doing things in the most efficient way, or the quickest way in an emergency or looking for the best quality and so taking our time to do it right. These are ethical and moral questions and questions of priorities, questions for THE PEOPLE to decide, not for experts to decide. A doctor can tell us the options and likely outcomes of various treatments for cancer for example, and the risks involved in each or in waiting or in doing nothing, and letting things take their course. But only WE can decide on our lives, the quality of life we want for the time remaining, what level of pain, disability, discomfort, we are willing to go through to fight for our life and possibly win the battle against cancer or to live out our life in the time remaining in the most dignified way and with the greatest mobility left to us while it lasts. No expert can make that choice for us, because no one is an expert in anyone else’s problems, life, priority, philosophy, needs. This is why we need democracy and why experts must learn to keep their place, to be advisors. Hopefully trusted advisors NOT based on their education, their own experience, their degree of expertise, least of all their own evaluation of their own worth and that of the knowledge they possess as a form of private property, but based on OUR collective experience of following their advice and our happiness or not with the outcomes and consequences and cost of taking their advice.
THIS is the reason experts MUST NEVER RULE. They can only be experts in their field of expertise, and we see now that Socrates’ argument about the blockhead working class people was a cunning attempt to turn the tables, and claim that it is working people, not educated experts and professionals, technocrats, who claim that their degree of knowledge in one narrow field qualifies them to rule and to govern and decide the general issues facing everyone in society.
You, we, cannot avoid this debate. It has become, for historical reasons, today, more than ever before, indeed in an unprecedented way, even if it is an ancient debate, THE argument, THE debate for our times.
The question is this: should things be run by experts or by everyone?
Your answer to this question tells us most of what we really need to know about you, your outlook on life, your view of the world, your understanding of human nature, what you think of other people and their abilities, how you think things should be run and in whose interests.
My perspective in these pages is humanist. I write this intending that I am opposed to the recent trends of anti-humanism, posthumanism, transhumanism, while also refusing to be limited by the traditions of humanism that were too closely identified with being merely Western, Christian, secular, male-centered, or with the privileged and powerful classes in society. I am a humanist for the 21st Century and want to fashion with many others a humanism appropriate to the 21st Century, a humanism for everyone, and for the ecology and our cousins the animals and other living beings.
As a humanist, I think, as President Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, that our problems are made by human beings and so can be solved by human beings. This was a profound statement, no less profound, indeed even more meaningful as it was made by someone about to take over as head of state of a powerful nation and leader of an alliance of other states.
The upshot is this: you either think that human beings can govern themselves, that they can create institutions that serve their interests, that they can change these institutions when necessary because they are their, our, own creations, and so you believe in democracy and in republican values; or else you think that human beings are basically flawed creatures, incapable of rendering themselves happy on Earth, despite their best efforts: that people need to be led, controlled, or ruled over – in which case you need to answer Thomas Jefferson’s question as to how those who say people cannot govern themselves think that they can govern others, or else you think that people need an automatic mechanism, a system that is outside our control to run things because we cannot do it ourselves. This argument leads to hereditary monarchy (we need to have an automatic way to decide succession because otherwise we cannot agree on what to do), or to market-worship (the automatic working of the market handles things outside of our control), or today to some kind of hope for an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that will be more capable than we are and lack our flaws and weaknesses and failings.
The technocrats have a foot in each of these last two camps. Highly educated, most likely in Economics today, they are convinced of both the monarchist and the AI versions of the anti-democratic argument. Most people are incapable of governing themselves they think, because they lack education, experience and expertise. So let the educated and presumably enlightened elite rule through monarchist-inspired institutions that stand ABOVE (supposedly) all political conflict and interest. Most importantly this means the Central Banks, like the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England or the EU Central Bank, to name a few. In her enormously important book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein recounts how one country after another had neoliberal free market and globalization versions of capitalism imposed on them from the 1970s through the early 2000s. In her chapter discussing the fall of Apartheid in South Africa, ending not in the hoped for turn toward greater social justice and equality, even as racially discriminatory laws were removed, but in the country becoming the most unequal in the world in terms of economic distribution of wealth and income, Klein shows that the key demand of the white minority government, business interests and international capitalists was the “independence of the Central Bank”. This demand, seemingly innocuous and concerned only with efficiency and transparency in keeping the Banks free of interference by politicians, was also central to Germany’s negotiating position in the creation of the EU Central Bank. It is THE KEY platform today for the technocratic practice of keeping governing out of the hands of the people. If Central Banks are independent of elected government, then on what basis are their policies formulated?
And what is the basis of legitimacy for such power over the economic life of a country?
The basis is neoliberalism, a philosophy of life that suggests that all human activity must be a form of competition and so favors putting the people in constant and merciless competition against one another, and against our brothers and sisters in other lands. The main mechanism for achieving this endless ruthless competition as a poor excuse for social life is the Market. Not markets, which are actual places where you can go, meet neighbors and friends, look at and touch goods you may want to buy, talk about other things of interest to your community. No, THE MARKET. THE MARKET, or as the economic historian Karl Polanyi called it “One Big Market” is an abstraction, a Cartesian (after the philosopher Rene Descartes) idea that does not exist in the real world, but which can be imposed on people and societies to make them conform to the abstract idea. The market supposedly fixes everything perfectly and automatically, and so avoids human beings having to actually work together to make things be the way they want and need, to make their lives secure, fulfilling, comfortable, happy. Instead people must do what the Market dictates. It works automatically: if workers in one workplace or industry demand a living wage for the work they do, investment and consumer spending will flow to another place where workers are held down and wages are lower and so the items cost less, and profits are higher.
This idea of an automatic system, the modern version of the archaic idea of hereditary monarchy, is deeply anti-human and anti-democratic. The idea is that the really important things must be kept out of the hands of people, especially of people working together to solve problems, decide priorities, make choices based on moral considerations, especially those involving a sense of Justice and a sense of Shame. Should we protect the environment, our health, our communities, our children by using renewable energy sources and public transportation systems relying on these sources? But if fossil fuels cost less per unit and their production is more profitable to investment than the renewable, then the almighty market has determined what we should do, free of the messy moral or ethical considerations, ABOVE all the corrupting political influences, that is, free of and above human beings.
So, see how the monarchist idea and the automatic mechanism or AI ideas are tied together, in a common anti-humanism and anti-democratic posture? Letting Central Banks run the economy is like letting your life be determined by the random outcomes of a slot machine together with having a king decide whether you can go to the doctor, have enough to feed your children, or do work that is useful to others, fulfilling to yourself and interesting, or boring, monotonous, destructive of the environment and run by a tyrannical hierarchy. Why would we want that to be how we make choices?
And the Central Banks are only the most obvious feature of the technocratic approach to government and social life. Internationally, their extensions are organizations like the EU Commission, which decides on policies the elected national parliaments then have to pass into law (the EU Parliament can really only vote things up or down wholesale that the Commission sends to them, and has no real power), the International Monetary Fund and World Bank that monitor government budgets and determine their access to needed credit to run their economies, as the Commission must now approve EU member state budgets, the World Trade Organization, and others. And private technocratic organizations like the Ratings Agencies such as Moody’s, Standard and Poor, and Fitch, claim expertise in deciding the credit worthiness of companies, cities, states, governments. But worthy based on what?
A country can allow slavery and get a good rating. It can permit global companies to exploit their workers who are denied the most basic rights at work, and who do not earn enough to live decently. Companies can crush their workforce, or produce shoddy or dangerous goods and services. But the ratings agencies will give them good ratings. Only if governments act too strongly in the interests of the people will the agencies downgrade them, leaving them without access to needed capital and investment to function. This is technocratic monarchy today in 21st Century form. Socrates would be proud.
We saw this debate in partial form take place in the despicable 2016 Presidential Election in which the real issues were, as always, moral and ethical, but in which these were not put front and center. Instead, the moral issues were shunted aside for one main, other one: whether Hillary Clinton was the most “qualified” candidate ever for President and whether Donald Trump was “qualified” to be President.
We see from the discussion above that the only question of qualification or not to hold public office is moral and ethical: having a sense of Justice and a sense of Shame. This issue has two aspects: what are the moral and ethical issues facing the People, and what do candidates for office or those in power propose to do about them?
As to the first, the campaign all but ignored issues like how morally or ethically acceptable is the now extreme degree of inequality, the stagnating pay of most working people when a handful of billionaires monopolize wealth as never before, whether it is ethical to let the environment be wrecked as a habitat for human beings for the profits of large corporations and the rich, what we owe to the workers who for so long by working dangerous jobs like coal mining and oil rigging, that enabled all of us to heat our homes in the winter, drive our cars and live our lives more comfortably, now that we are moving away from the use of the products their work produced, what do we owe to manufacturing centers like Detroit, Flint, Pittsburgh, Youngstown etc. that made our country rich in the past- that is, how moral is Free Trade, how ethical is globalization, what is the right policy toward those who want to come and live in our country and why are people being shot by police regularly in a democratic country and how much of it has to do with immoral behavior like racism?
These issues were occasionally touched on by Clinton – on police violence or racism here or there, on workers in fossil fuel industries in an inexcusable way, and by Trump on Free Trade, mostly rightly but without the idea that there were debts owed to the workers that had been damaged by these policies, more only on how it affected the US economy or power as a whole.
Instead, the issue of who was qualified was an endless drumbeat, a theme that has all but no place in a democracy UNLESS AS A MORAL ISSUE and then because the underlying assumptions of what our moral and ethical values are that are informing us in our judgment of candidates are made clear and explicit. Instead the issue was made to be that the lack of previous governmental experience disqualified Trump, meaning nearly everyone in America except for a few hundred people would be qualified to hold office in Washington, those already there, and that Clinton was the most qualified ever, as though experience governing is the only issue because government is about technical knowledge, not moral and ethical decision-making.
I despise Donald Trump, his administration and nearly all of what it stands for but the idea that we can identify who is technically qualified to hold high office in a democracy is a deeply anti-democratic attitude and approach. Trump and his policies are immoral, and he clearly, and many of his cabinet members and aides have no sense of shame and no sense of justice. If they are also technically incompetent that is really a secondary issue – would we want a fascist who is MORE technically proficient to govern us, a technically effective racist? No.
In every American town and city there is a pool of candidates for office that is very large. Everyone who has in any way administered anything – a Little League, a darts or bowling league, a charity or a church group, who was a union representative or shop steward, who was a supervisor at work or a manager or who started and ran a business, who was active in the Parents-Teachers Association, or at a local community center. These number in the thousands in a city of a hundred thousand and are all imminently ready to be on the city council. That gives us a pool within a couple of years or so of them having experience at that level of a several hundred to a few thousand ready for the State Legislature or Mayoralty, and within five years therefore to run for Congress, or Governor. This pool multiplied by every town in the United States is our default pool of potential Presidential candidates, and that is if we insist on people having held lower offices to go on to higher ones, which is not always necessary shown by cases like that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or even Abraham Lincoln, who had served only one term in the House of Representatives and then lost a Senate campaign before becoming our greatest President.
Our world is only more technically complicated today than that of fifth century BCE Athens, not politically or morally or ethically more complicated. The ordinary people, often illiterate, most of them farmers or craftsmen or ordinary workers and sailors, governed for two centuries, taking turns to hold office and voting together to approve every major decision. They decided on war and peace, ran trade in the Mediterranean, organized diplomacy among many states. The society that they ran twice defeated the superpower Persia in major wars, and held its own against the militaristic Sparta, losing in large part due to treason by the pro-Spartan aristocrats. That society developed philosophy, tragedy and comedy, the origins of science and must else that we today hold as foundations of our civilization.
All that was done in a single city the size of Cedar Rapids, Iowa or Padua, Italy, and run by ordinary people based on the ideas of Protagoras, not those of Socrates. Today we have let experts run amok, economists advising neoliberal technocrats in Central Banks, Treasuries and running governments and international agencies imposing policies to make the real world conform to their theories and ideas, scientists and researchers working for pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations telling us we have to accept genetically modified foods or the latest opioid for our pain without concern for the long-term or social consequences be they food monopoly or lowered life expectancies, cosmetic surgeons ignoring issues of greater well-being as their income is tied to convincing people to change their bodies as a form of profit-making, software writers developing algorithms to make us dependent on social media use, to rob us of our privacy and to sell us products and exploit ideologies, damaging democracy.
The result is disastrous for society, yet experts continue to wonder why the public does not trust them anymore, and is even suspicious today of their good advice such as to do something about climate change. They see themselves as “the qualified” as “the best” – the Greek word is “aristos” as in the modern aristocracy. Their track record of failure ranks with that of any set of rulers or elites in all of history. Yet they continue to believe that they should be evaluated (to use one of their keywords) by their qualifications and expertise, not the results of their actions, their advice put into practice and our experience with listening to them over time. That is, they expect to be both the lawyers and the judge and the only qualified jurors in their own case, and we are to be…what? The audience witness to how smart they are? Their grateful subjects? Isn’t this why their latest idea is a Basic Income (in itself not a bad idea but only if made part of a much larger project to do away with capitalism and exploitation and to make work a democratic sphere of self-governance, and social duty). Don’t they want us to stay away from things, to stay home, take opioids, watch TV, stay on social media and let them run things, with us spending the money they let us have to buy the products they and their masters sell us through the ubiquitous advertising?
The experts, the Socratic technocratic elites think they are above the sordid questions of politics, of interests, of daily life and class struggles. Two other thinkers would challenge them on this, and neither was particularly a fan of democracy:
In his book “Politics” Aristotle argued that while the aristocrats might be superior in their abilities and knowledge (we would add, if true only as a result of their privileged positions) INDIVIDUALLY, that COLLECTIVELY the common people are superior to the aristocrats because each coming from their own particular experience of work, life, needs, interests and problems, when the people are gathered together in the assembly they bring the whole experience of the society and all available knowledge to bear on a problem. This enables us collectively to also be able to evaluate (that word again) and judge the merits of the proposals that technical experts on a particular subject, like the engineering issues involved in building a bridge, or the possible economic outcomes of a trade agreements. But we remember that those judgments will still be moral and ethical in nature, not technical.
Meanwhile in Federalist Paper number 10, which again is largely opposed to democracy in its tone and content, James Madison makes clear the reason that any political system must be based on accepting as inevitable the presence of various interests in society and that the real issue is the best way to bring these to bear and to deal with them and their conflicts. He writes,
"No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? And what are the different classes of legislators but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine? Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail. Shall domestic manufactures be encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures? are questions which would be differently decided by the landed and the manufacturing classes, and probably by neither with a sole regard to justice and the public good. The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets."
There is, in other words, NO group in society that is above party, above having their own interests involved in an issue. Not monarchies, not Central Bankers, not IMF economists, not EU Commissioners. Each of these, aside from any other class or material or ideological interest they may have involved in the questions they decide on or advise on, have an interests in increasing their own influence and power and importance, and so in decreasing the power, influence and importance of real or potential rival groups, organizations, classes. If we let technocrats, experts, run things, we are letting one group with its own interests take and hold power ON ITS OWN BEHALF and that of any of its allied classes or groups. Why would we ever do that? This is why experts and technocrats need to be kept in their place: to give technical advice on the strictly technical questions involved in OUR making a decision politically that affects everyone and which must not be decided on the technical merits but on the moral and ethical questions involved. And, as our brother Protagoras taught us, ALL of us are able to make those kind of decisions. We all have consciences, and we can all have our sense of Justice and of Shame developed through teaching of all sorts, from many sources in our lives and society, family, school, peers, religion, movements for change, books, and political leadership and our own participation. Today these great gifts of the gods are atrophying, and it is in the interests of the Socratic classes of technocrats that they atrophy. But we need them more than ever to be able to judge what is good advice and what bad.
A final note: Socrates criticized Protagoras and the other traveling teachers known as Sophists, who taught working people logic, thinking, argument and how to understand what they heard in the public assemblies and in court and how to make their own arguments in those arenas (there were no lawyers in Athens). His main complaint was that they got paid to teach, which he saw as yet another sordid interest interfering in yet another expert and elite sphere that should be above these things. He famously refused to be paid for his teachings, but nearly all of his students were very rich, from aristocratic and anti-democratic families, as the great journalist IF Stone shows in his wonderful book, The Trial of Socrates. Many of the ideas in this essay come from my reading of Stone’s book, along with the late Ellen Mieksins Wood’s book Citizen and Slave and from CLR James’ great pamphlet on democracy in ancient Athens “Every Cook Can Govern”. Stone found only one exception among Socrates’ students. Socrates did not get paid but he ate his meals and slept and often lived in as a guest the homes of his patrons.
Most of us who teach, and I have taught college for 27 years as of this writing and am and have been for years an adjunct, a modern traveling teacher of college course. I get paid to teach, though not very much. The public school teachers in West Virginia, Kentucky, Colorado, Oklahoma and elsewhere have been striking and fighting for better pay, for decent pay as their own interest in their work, which they do well and correctly consider to be indispensible to democracy in America. They see their interest as coinciding with that of the communities they live in, those of their students, and of the society at large. They don’t consider themselves above interests, nor to be experts above the fray, but rather parts of their communities, parts of a democratic order. Protagoras would approve.