We often use the term “social fabric” by way of analogy to the complex economic and governing relationships woven into communities of people. In Plato’s Statesman, the Visitor from Elea equates the art of fabric-weaving with ruling, and asserts that the ruler must measure the fabric not to its extremes but to its mean in order to promote harmony in its connections. What skills and knowledge does the leader require to locate the mean, which is like an average or common ground between extremes, and how is the mean relevant to us now, 2,400 years after Plato wrote about it? Members of the Toronto Philosophy and Calgary Philosophy Meetup groups discussed the questions on May 8, 2022 in the second of three dialogues on The Statesman. We began by listening to a current legislator speak about the division and discord in today’s politics which she placed in the broader context of time as she vowed “We will not let hate win”. As we considered the present tendency toward extremes, we discussed the importance of language in finding a common definition of democracy. The challenge in locating the mean, as the Visitor in Plato’s dialogue points out, is that there are two types of expertise in everything we do. One type is the only cause of an outcome without input from other people over time, and the other contributes – along with the expertise of many others – to a series of outcomes over time. The wise statesman is one who understands the separations and combinations of expertise over time because, as one participant observed, there are two focal points: one is the middle of the extremes and the other is to the standard of the mean.
