Sold
“I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me.”
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
In what is perhaps the origin of the Ship of Fools parable, Book Six of Plato’s Republic, Socrates posits before Adeimantus the analogy of a myopic and uppity crew attempting mutiny, with each crewman naturally favouring himself the worthy usurper of their captain; Plato’s famed Philosopher King.
Socrates’s parable was meant to illustrate the axiomatic deficiencies within democratic societies, which will invariably descend into dysfunction and pandemonium as each faction competes against the other for ascendancy over more meritorious authorities. Centuries later, the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau would ostensibly concur with this sentiment when he wrote:
“Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.”
Plato’s analogy of a doomed society has been reiterated and adapted in various philosophical and satirical works, from Sebastian Brandt’s 1494 Daß Narrenschyff ad Narragoniam (which served as the main inspiration for Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic oil painting) to Katherine Anne Porter’s 1962 bestseller Ship of Fools, a novel chronicling the exploits of passengers and crew aboard a German luxury cruiser traversing the Atlantic Ocean in the portentous 1930s, just as Hitler's Nazi Party was beginning to threaten the frail democracy of the Weimar Republic.
Arguably the most prescient and equally subversive portrait of Socrates’s parable is to be found on the decks of Herman Melville’s ill-fated Pequod. In Moby Dick, Melville offers readers a similar glimpse into the inevitable fatality of civilization brought about by man’s incessant lust for material reward, industrial expansion, ethnic sectarianism and exploitation of nature. Unlike Plato though, there is no sagacious Philosopher King to found in the monomaniacal Captain Ahab.
I make no decisive statement concerning my idiosyncratic parable on South African society. Allegories, symbols and epiphanies remain opaque and contingent on the viewer’s interpretation since an artist should not pretend to know where the truth lies.
