A Stranger on the Shores of San Francisco
On Tech, Trade, and the Crisis of Virtue
The tension between commerce and virtue was a familiar topic for the ancients. In Plato’s final work, The Laws, Cleinias asks the Athenian Stranger, widely considered a stand-in for Plato, whether or not to found a new city by the sea. He advises against it. A city “right on the sea, with a good harbor,” he says, would require “some great savior, and some lawgivers who were divine, to prevent it from coming to have many diverse and low habits.”
With constant economic and cultural exchange comes the endless introduction of new people and customs. The generally transient nature of the population fosters cultural disruption at a previously unimaginable pace.
San Francisco is the world’s greatest port city because it is the epicenter of the modern economy. Billions of dollars of goods pass through its physical ports, but orders of magnitude more pass through its digital ports. Our ports are not mere economic or military utilities; they are also cultural utilities. The culture induced by port cities is the bedrock of global media and commerce. Today, the speed, multiculturalism, and instability of port cities is alive in every phone and TV. But at the moment port culture emerged as the foundation of global communications, its true significance became concealed.
San Francisco’s beauty, spectacle, and terror is unique. Tech is ascendant across economic, political, and cultural domains. Founders like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk are playing a critical role in deciding elections, shifting the cultural mood, and refactoring the nation-state. But apace with their ascendence, San Francisco’s tech leaders are looking inwards. They are becoming self-aware. They are reckoning with the Gomorrah-like price of their city.
Walk just a few minutes away from its ports and you might find yourself on Mission street, filled with homeless addicts at any time of day. “San Francisco, to some extent, has gouged its own eyes out,” says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. So some tech leaders, like Tan, are leading a movement for renewal. They want to clean up San Francisco, undo ‘criminal justice’ reforms, and return to merit-based schooling. All of these suggestions are commendable. But can short-term questions of governance be solved without asking longer-term—even eternal—questions? Can San Francisco’s civic mismanagement be separated from the eternal problems of a port city?
The Question of Virtue
Today’s technologists are revisiting the importance of virtue. Marc Andreessen praised ancient Roman virtues on the Joe Rogan podcast. “There’s a whole ranking, by the way, of the Roman virtues. If you read them today, you want to burst out crying, because oh my god, you just can’t believe what you’re missing.” While critics of technology eagerly embrace the Athenian Stranger’s argument, both Greek and Roman virtues are gaining attention even within techno-optimist circles.
At the start of Book IV of The Laws, the Athenian Stranger helps Cleinias, the co-founder of a new city, understand how the people and the land shape the virtues of the city.
For although a
land's proximity to the sea affords daily pleasure, the sea re-
ally is a "briny and bitter neighbor." It infects a place with
commerce and the money-making that comes with retail
trade, and engenders shifty and untrustworthy dispositions in
souls; it thereby takes away the trust and friendship a city
feels for itself and for the rest of humanity.
The Athenian Stranger warns against the influence of merchants. In his eyes, Andreessen and Silicon Valley’s ancient predecessors made the guided cultivation of virtue impossible. Distilled into its purest form, his argument is as follows:
The people of the city develop higher virtues through habit.
Habit requires a stable culture.
Commerce is an endless disruption of culture.
Therefore commerce erodes higher virtue.
A common rebuttal to this argument is to stress the benefits of modernity: Commerce, science, and technology have ended famine, drastically reduced child mortality, cured historic plagues, increased access to vital resources, and more.
The Athenian Stranger argues that this is a disordered ranking of priorities. “We do not hold, as the many do, that preservation and mere existence are what is most honorable for being beings,” he says. Rather, “what is most honorable is for them to become as excellent as possible and to remain so for as long a time as they may exist.”
Given the Athenian Stranger’s advice, Cleinias would have been unlikely to found a city like San Francisco. But the fact remains: Technologically advanced civilizations have dominated all others and made a pre-technological state unthinkable. It is not possible to reset society to Athens. So what lessons can San Francisco learn from the Athenian Stranger’s scathing words? Aside from moving inland, what other course of action do San Franciscans have?
Reality Shock
Modern communications technology has allowed civilization to conceal both its virtues and vices. Modern and postmodern ideologies make excuses for the degradation of the physical world. Nowhere is this more pungent than San Francisco. The first advice from the ancients to the moderns might simply be to be honest; to discard the concealing narratives and distractions which make the absence of ancient virtues difficult to perceive.
The tensions the Athenian Stranger raises remain true to this day. The price of commerce is the loss of trust, courage, and virtue. Today, we have a near-pathological habit of glancing over these costs, constructing byzantine narratives about why these virtues may be unimportant, outmoded, or oppressive.
San Francisco is the ultimate example of a modern port city. “[S]hifty and untrustworthy dispositions” are equally evident in the homeless along Mission Street and the high-stakes backstabbing of tech’s heroes. Tech founders brag about personality changes after taking psychedelic drugs; San Francisco influencers make statistical diagrams about their orgies. The ideology of disruption permeates all things.
Honesty is the first thing the Athenian Stranger can teach us. The way vice spreads like a contagion is another. In his critique of marine warfare, he describes a protean mimetic theory:
Now the evil imitation of enemies I was referring to is the
sort that occurs when someone dwells near the sea and is
vexed by enemies—as in the days when (I say this not intend-
ing to remind you of ills) Minos imposed a certain harsh trib-
ute on the inhabitants of Attica. He wielded great power on
the sea, while they did not possess ships, as they do now, for
war, nor a territory well stocked with shipbuilding timber that
allows for the easy creation of naval power. As a result they
were not able, through nautical imitation, to become seafarers
immediately and defend themselves, at that time, against
their enemies. For it would have been in their interest to have
had many times seven youths destroyed, if by doing so they
could have remained steady, heavily-armed infantrymen in-
stead of adopting the habits of marines.
While the Athenian Stranger recounts a pattern of imitation in military conflict, the dynamic he describes only grows stronger in modern economic competition. Economic competitors face a constant pressure to adopt tactics from their competition—for good or ill. Competition becomes all consuming. Founders copy more than their competitors' features. They copy whole lifestyles, desires, and belief systems.
In practice, few people draw clear distinctions between the domain of competition and the domain of cultivated stability. Without discipline, unbounded mimesis is second nature. The same is true for political competition. The distinction between politics and non-politics is eroded whenever ‘outside’ cultural factors influence politics or vice versa.
The culture of ports spreads throughout a port city in a rapid contagion. In the modern day, the culture of a port city spreads throughout nations and civilizations. Constant disruption is not only the culture of San Francisco. With global media, all Americans are in visual range of each other, participating in a constant game of persuasion and imitation. National and international political factions are set against each other, sweeping up Americans in a winner-take all election frenzy every four years. The culture of endless disruption has swept across all concepts of American life.
In practice, there is currently no distinction between culture, commerce, and technology. All such divisions have collapsed, spilling into all areas of life.
Rebuilding
What would it take to rebuild the most important aspects of the city? The Athenian Stranger tells us “[I]t would have required some great savior, and some lawgivers who were divine”.
In their hubris, many Silicon Valley leaders have rejected faith, spirit, or any kind of higher authority. They have nothing to protect themselves against the fate of Plato's port cities.
However, not all is lost. Despite our global port culture, many San Franciscans continue to hold close to permanent things. We continue to hold on to faith, philosophy and literature. In practical terms, it is possible to learn from Plato without fighting in a land war. It is possible to hold an eternal faith without working a subsistence farm. But it is harder. It requires conscious insistence on a separate loyalty to sacred traditions.
I believe that it is possible to cultivate virtue despite the flux of the port. San Francisco can still form a culture of virtuous habits. But to do so, we must make a conscious commitment to something beyond ourselves, beyond the constant change, and beyond the allure of the sea.
San Francisco has the discipline to learn, think, and build. Technologists have a focused intensity to their work that is rarely matched in modern day industry. Across the entirety of The Laws, Plato reminds the reader that the cultivation of virtue requires not only discipline, but direction. San Francisco is a city without a common direction. Its offices host a rapid turnover of peoples and cultures. Individual discipline is constantly tested by the trends of novel fashions and stigmas.
As the Athenian Stranger advises Cleinias, rapid change can erode the moral foundation of a city. When moral foundations are based on what is constantly changing, they form no foundation at all. For San Francisco to reclaim virtue, it needs a foundation that does not change with the fashion of the season. Instead our stable moral foundation must begin with respect for an authority higher than what is merely useful.
We must commit ourselves to founding institutions. San Francisco doesn’t need a new kind of institution, but an indisputably old one. It is easy to found a startup on the premise that everything will change. The great institutions of the past were founded on the opposite premise.
At this moment more than ever, it is time to build institutions with an ear to the eternal.
 | A guest post by
|