In almost every description of a declining civilization we find the same tropes: an excess of liberty, a confusion of social norms, and the weakening of authority that soon descends into lawlessness. The medieval Muslim sociologist Ibn Khaldun, who developed one of the first theories of anacyclosis—the rise and fall of political regimes—explained this phenomenon as the loss of ¢aśabiyyah (group consciousness or social unity).¹ Exactly what it is that undermines cohesion in the first place, however, has been the subject of almost mythic speculation. Some accounts attribute it to the presence of foreign cultures and the “confusion of tongues”; others to the spread of witchcraft or deviant spiritual forces that cast doubt over religious and natural laws. A popular anthropological theory, proposed by J. D. Unwin, is that social breakdown begins with an increase in prosperity and the weakening of sexual restraint.²

But another theory, perhaps overshadowed by these, once exerted a powerful influence over the premodern world: that the decline of a civilization can begin in the decline of its music. Indeed, unhealthy societies are often described as “discordant” in figurative terms. But in ancient civilizations—especially classical Greece and China—the relationship between musical and social harmony was much more than a metaphor. It was believed that exposure to disorderly music could lead directly to the collapse of the political order. This degeneration, Plato warned in his dialogue the Laws,³ occurs when the taste for sensational music creates a “theatrocracy”: a society ruled by the irrational whims of the audience rather than any objective standard of the good.

The idea of theatrocracy, or “rule by the audience,” finds itself curiously relevant to nations in the modern West that are no longer, at least in the classical sense, strictly democracies. In a genuine democracy, there may be a diversity of individuals and communities—being, as Plato described it, “a coat of many colours”⁴—but the state must be unified by a shared consensus about virtue and justice. It follows that democracy requires the participation of rational, autonomous citizens who will always act in the interests of the common good. With the rise of individualism and a thinning definition of “citizenship,” this has ceased to be the case. Especially in an age of technology—when algorithms prey on our most irrational whims and political opinion is swayed by emotional reaction—the conditions that make for rational citizenship, and thus for genuine democracy, have been compromised. What we have instead may turn out to be much closer to the quasi-anarchic theatrocracy that Plato warned against in the Laws.

In that dialogue, a character called Magellus and an Athenian stranger are discussing failed states and the causes of their collapse. The Persian commonwealth, it is said, degenerated because there was no liberty and “improper intensification of autocracy.”⁵ As we learn from Plato’s Republic, autocracy quickly spirals into anarchy because of the inevitable revolt against unjust rulers. In contrast, the Athenian explains, the ancient state of Attica degenerated because of a lack of authority, and “unqualified and absolute freedom from all authority is a far worse thing than submission to a magistrate with limited powers.” But it had not always been this way: Attica had once been a stable and flourishing society. So what changed? Excessive liberty did not, asserts the Athenian, begin in the political sphere. Nor did it begin with the populace in the domestic sphere, as in Unwin’s theory. Rather, the decline of Attica began in the theater. 

The story told by the Athenian is as follows. Music in ancient Attica had originally been classified into four distinct genres: hymns, songs of worship; laments, songs of grief; paeans, songs of praise; and dithyrambs, songs performed in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility. Each type of music was reserved for a specific occasion and would have been identifiable by the use of particular meters and musical instruments chosen to evoke the emotions appropriate to each subject. Conformity to these genres, and the technical laws of music more broadly, were ensured by mousikoi, a class of musical experts.⁶ The obvious analogy here is to Plato’s guardians in the Republic: while philosopher kings uphold the metaphysical laws that govern the state, the mousikoi uphold the musical laws that govern the theater.

But all of this changed, so goes the dialogue, with the arrival of a certain kind of poet. Much confusion surrounds Plato’s criticism of poetry, which the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch attempts to resolve.⁷ Murdoch explains that Plato did not, contrary to a common misconception, condemn genuine poets: men of technical skill who received divine inspiration from the Muses. He did, however, condemn another kind of poet who had “native genius”⁸ but abused his talent to subvert order and harmony—much like a sophist who abused language to distort the truth. Such were the poets who took to the Attican stage, and thanks to them, “an unmusical licence set in.”

Such poets, being “ignorant of what is right and legitimate in the realm of the Muses,” rebelled against the traditional conventions of music and poetry. Instead, they experimented with strange and unearthly sounds to arouse the excitement of the audience. “Possessed by a frantic and unhallowed lust for pleasure,” they “contaminated laments with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs, imitated the strains of the flute on the harp, and created a universal confusion of forms.” The result was the eventual descent of Attica’s musical traditions into chaos, which undermined both the genre system and the laws of harmony. The poets’ folly thus

led them unintentionally to slander their profession by their assumption that in music there is no such thing as right and wrong, the right standard of judgement being the pleasure given to the hearer, be he high or low. By compositions of such a kind and discourse to the same effect, they naturally inspired the multitude with contempt of musical law, and a conceit of their own competence as judges. Thus our once silent audiences have found a voice, in the persuasion that they understand what is good and bad in art; the old “sovereignty of the best” in that sphere has given way to an evil “sovereignty of the audience.”⁹

Enter the theatrocracy. The poets’ disregard for musical laws, provoked by their museless art, soon inspired in their audiences a contempt for all laws. This occurred because the poets engendered a skepticism toward the very idea of the good—precisely the kind of skepticism that results from the sophistry defined by Plato elsewhere.¹⁰ Thus the audience became contemptuous toward any standard of technical excellence, instead judging music on the basis of pure pleasure. Such a predicament must be distinguished from a democracy precisely because the rationality of the spectators has been compromised by their exposure to extreme sensations. “If the consequence had even been a democracy,” the Athenian explains,

no great harm would have been done.… But, as things are with us, music has given occasion to a general conceit of universal knowledge and contempt for law, and liberty has followed in their train. Fear was cast out by confidence in supposed knowledge, and the loss of it gave birth to impudence. For not to be concerned for the judgement of one’s betters in the assurance which comes out of a reckless excess of liberty is nothing in the world but reprehensible impudence.¹¹

Thus the abandonment of musical laws, having given rise “to a conceit of universal knowledge,” brought about the decline of moral laws, and with it the descent into anarchy.

This phenomenon, fascinatingly, finds a close parallel in the fall of the Zhou dynasty in ancient China. The royal house of Zhou, the longest-standing royal regime, which lasted from 1046 BCE to 256 BCE, had for centuries upheld strict traditions governing the music that was performed alongside classical poetry and dance. Chinese music too had been classified into distinct genres, each being associated with particular qualities and instruments. Bells and stone chime sets, for example, would be used in ritual ceremonies such as burials, while woodwind instruments were reserved for war and entertainment.¹²

But these rules, according to one ancient account, were undermined by the meddling of musicians who “set about the task of always outdoing [what came before], employing neither rule nor measure.”¹³ Like the museless poets of Attica, they experimented with the largest drums, bells, and pipes they could find to create loud and shocking sounds, confusing extravagance with excellence and blaring out all harmonic subtlety. They too undermined musical authorities—Chinese rulers had their own court “music masters” who, like the Greek mousikoi, would regulate public performances—causing society to fall out of the rhythms of ritual. The state was further polluted by the influence of music from neighboring civilizations, which sowed confusion and eventually chaos. Another account of the decline of the Zhou dynasty speaks of a progression much like Attica’s descent into theatrocracy:

The House of Zhou deteriorated and became decadent; the rites collapsed and music went bad; the various feudal lords acted according to their whims.… The tunes of Sang Jian on the upper banks of the Pu River, as well as those from the states of Zheng, Wei, Song and Zhao, filled the air and travelled far. Plugging and clogging up one’s heart and ears, so that one forgot all sense of harmony and balance, throwing government into disorder, and causing harm to the people, these tunes caused extreme illness and docked years off of one’s life.¹⁴

In our world, which has become thoroughly desensitized to music, the idea that musical change could bring about such catastrophe seems implausible—perhaps as mythical as the witchcraft-blaming of early modern Europe. Yet, far from being a mere superstition, the association between musical and social harmony reflected a complex and profoundly rational system of metaphysics common to both ancient Greece and China. Only through understanding this metaphysics can we understand their reasons for attributing decadence to musical decline and so begin to reckon with the dangers of our own modern theatrocracy.

The Harmony of the Logos and the Tao

In both the ancient Greek and Chinese accounts, the descent into theatrocracy begins with the rebellion against musical authorities. To modern ears, the existence of these authorities might sound inherently suspect: What gave the “guardians” the right to regulate public performances in the first place? Cynical readers of Plato, most infamously Karl Popper, claimed that his political philosophy anticipated the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.¹⁵ Such a hermeneutic of suspicion might have us believe that the mousikoi’s governance of the theater was no more than an exercise of power for power’s sake and that their laws were simply a set of arbitrary rules designed to control the masses. Indeed, the theater or “spectacle” came to be used as a metaphor for ideological manipulation by postmodernist critics of mass media.¹⁶ If their critiques could be applied to the mousikoi, the revolt of the audience would be quite justified.

However, that would be a major misreading of Plato. As we learn from the Athenian, the revolution brought on by the poets was a rebellion not just against a particular authority but against universal knowledge itself. In Plato’s understanding, the role of the guardians was not to impose arbitrary political laws but to reflect the eternal, unchanging ones that naturally exist within the universe. Like Pythagoras before him, Plato believed that there was an intelligible order underlying all of creation, known in Greek as the Logos. The Logos, the expression of divine reason, contained the ordering principles of the cosmos and the human soul alike. The entirety of Plato’s Laws is concerned with how best to translate this order into the political (or in this case theatrical) context, from the belief that the conditions that bring stability to the cosmos also guarantee stability in the human realm.

In other words, the laws upheld by the mousikoi were not mere social constructs but a proxy for cosmic laws—specifically, the laws of harmony. In Greek cosmology, the order or Logos of the universe was seen as a fundamentally harmonious one, in which different elements and energies were balanced within a unified whole. This unity depended on the contrast between sameness and difference, an idea presented in Plato’s cosmological work, the Timaeus. In the Timaeus, the physical world is said to subsist in the interplay of fire, air, earth, and water, each having been arranged by the Creator in perfect ratios and proportions.¹⁷ Though each of these elements exists in conflict with the others, the creative tension among them is what brings about the stability of the cosmos overall, forming a paradoxical “harmony in discord” (concordia discors).¹⁸ Thus, harmony—understood not just as the momentary agreement of musical notes but as a complex unity born out of opposition and contrast—sustains the universe. Such a notion of harmony formed the criterion not only for good music but for the very idea of justice itself, defined by Plato as the flourishing of diverse individuals within a unified social body.¹⁹

What gave musical guardians authority, then, was the fact that they were attuned to the harmonious unity of the cosmos, an attunement that they possessed by virtue of being philosophers. The philosopher, for Plato, is a person who perceives the universal forms and patterns that underlie the diversity of appearances in the world.²⁰ This is why, in the Republic, it is prescribed that the guardians should study the quadrivium of music, mathematics, geometry, and astronomy, along with the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Commonly understood as the seven liberal arts, these disciplines reveal the rational order of reality and the unity present in all things. Understanding the Logos in this manner qualifies philosophers to govern. The same is true of the mousikoi in the theater: their insight allows them to judge music based on conformity with metaphysical harmony, thus bringing audiences into communion with divine reason.

Close parallels with ancient Chinese philosophy can be found here. In ancient China, the universe was also believed to exist in a state of harmony, similarly conceived as a unity formed out of diversity. One cosmological treatise from the Zhou period describes the planes of heaven and earth “jostling up against each other” and the contrasting energies of yin and yang “rubbing against each other,”²¹ evoking an image of creative tension similar to the Platonic-Pythagorean concordia discors. This harmony—also described as the balancing of different elements and energies—was likewise thought in Chinese philosophy to comprise the way, or Tao, of nature. The Tao, like the Logos, was understood to represent the intelligible order of reality that flowed through the cosmos and human life alike.

Moreover, ancient Chinese philosophy also shared an ideal of the statesman as a sage who, like the philosopher guardian, is supremely attuned to cosmic harmony. Though it was believed, as in Plato’s theory of innate ideas, that all human beings possess an intuitive awareness of harmony—being able to recognize it when they hear it—the sage bears the strongest imprint of the “pattern of heaven” and serves to guide us back to it.²² This is why only sages, with their grasp of divine law, were appointed as “music masters” in the royal court. Just as Attica’s musical guardians ensured that music reflected the Logos, their Chinese counterparts ensured that music reflected the Tao.

We can now begin to understand the reasoning behind the musical laws upheld in both Attica and the Zhou dynasty—in particular, the classification of their music into distinct genres. Key to the Logos and the Tao is the expression of different elements in proper measures and proportions. If there is too much of any one element, others will be drowned out and harmony disturbed. The same is true of the human soul, which itself contains a variety of energies or passions: an excess of any one of these will cause the soul to fall out of balance and become cacophonous. For this reason, the genre system—recognizing the powerful effect exerted by different types of music on the human psyche—allows for the proper expression of each emotion at the right time and place. While funerals, for example, were an occasion for grief and sorrow, parties were an occasion for the cathartic release of vital energy or spiritedness. Thus both the Attican system of hymns, laments, paeans, and dithyrambs, and its equivalent in the Zhou dynasty, were means of ensuring the internal harmony of the soul through the musical regulation of emotion.

This was, in turn, closely related to the idea of virtue. Just as harmony consists in the balancing of extremes, virtue consists in the tempering of the soul’s passions. In the Chinese context, the concept of dé—usually translated as “virtue”—has been defined as the force that brings “cacophonous things subtly into balance with each other,” connoting an idea of internal harmony like that of the cosmos itself.²³ In the Western tradition, such ideas of proportion and balance are associated with the cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, and prudence. These virtues, which appear both in ancient Greek philosophy and in the Old Testament, articulate the importance of moderation and the avoidance of excess in all human conduct.²⁴ Orderly music, then, encourages virtue because it allows human beings to regulate their passions in a way that orders (or perhaps tunes) their souls into a state of harmonious unity. 

Ancient musical laws, then, brought stability because they created the conditions for the human soul to flourish—an orderliness not to be mistaken for ideology in the political sense. Such was the distinction made by English author C. S. Lewis, who contrasted political ideology with what he aptly called “the Tao”: the immutable divine law acknowledged by all traditional religions and cultures. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis explains that ideology not only disregards such a metaphysical ideal but actively violates the order of nature by imposing another, artificial one in its place.²⁵ The regimes of the early twentieth century especially, he writes, attempted to fashion a wholly new kind of man in their image, be it that of communism, fascism, or liberalism. The result is the eventual abolition of human nature, where future generations become “patients of power” that has been contrived by the state and technology. Following the Tao, by contrast, does not deny our nature but allows us to perfect our nature in accordance with divine reason. Instead of imposing an order on us, it merely affirms that which inherently exists. The musical guardians ought not to be seen as instruments of ideology, then, but as guardians of the Tao as Lewis understood it.

This may explain why, in both Greek and Chinese accounts, the abandonment of musical laws was associated with civilizational disaster. The revolt against the mousikoi was opposed not simply because the revolt challenged the aristocracy but because it challenged the order of nature itself—in Greece, the Logos, and in China, the Tao. The musical sophistry of the poets and musicians engendered skepticism toward universal knowledge, inspiring in people a contempt toward the principles of harmony that are in fact crucial to human flourishing. Specifically, the confusion of the genre system disturbed the means for the proper release of the soul’s passions, causing audiences to be ruled instead by their unfettered emotions and impulses. Herein lies the real danger of the theatrocracy: though the rebellion against a long-established order may first appear as a form of liberation, in reality it proves to be exactly the opposite.

A False Liberation

Once the theatrocracy had taken hold in Attica, audiences were “free” from all musical and moral conventions. Instruments once reserved for laments could be played in dithyrambs and vice versa; emotions once withheld for certain occasions could be unleashed at any time and place. Music became an outlet for the “unhallowed lust for pleasure,” determined by the subjective whims of individuals rather than a shared ideal of the good. Relativism in the musical realm soon became anarchy in the political realm, with the very notions of virtue and justice—themselves expressions of harmony—also being called into doubt. 

For the poets, nothing could have felt more liberating. The overthrowing of the guardians, they presumed, was necessary for the advancement of creativity and individual expression—both of which had surely been repressed in the ancient theater. But this was their fatal folly. The poets did not foresee that, with the abandonment of all artistic conventions and standards, the people of Attica would not really be free at all, nor would they be able to truly express themselves. Paradoxical though this may sound, Plato had a clear reasoning in mind: the “rule of the audience,” in the absence of social unity, soon descends into the rule of individual whims. No longer able to participate within a shared, rational paradigm, audiences instead become enslaved by their own desires.

This reveals the close relationship between anarchy and tyranny in Plato’s thought. True freedom, in the ancient understanding, is not simply a freedom from external restraints but a freedom to pursue higher ideals. This freedom comes only from the inner harmony of the soul and thus from the tempering of our passions through reason. Anarchy, in defying all laws, undermines not only the political order but human nature itself. It actively encourages us to act on our every desire and impulse, causing us to be ruled entirely by our base appetites, unable to rise above our animal nature. What might first appear as freedom turns out to be its own kind of tyranny. Unrestrained by reason, we become—to use another metaphor from Plato’s Laws—like puppets pulled in all directions, held captive by our conflicting desires.²⁶ This is the antithesis of true liberation and also of genuine democracy.

Thus the defiance of musical limits in the theatrocracy did not liberate the audience; it instead caused them to become consumed by an obsession with sensation and novelty. Yet more sinister is the fact that, in doing so, it undermined something that the audience had long taken for granted: the importance of technical skill. Good music under the mousikoi was complex and subtle, emulating the delicate mathematical harmony of the cosmos. Supporting this ideal of excellence were traditions of technical skill, involving the knowledge of musical modes and the complementarity of different instruments and timbres. The pursuit of artistic mastery had been closely connected to the attainment of virtue and the perfection of the rational soul. By playing music, one could become personally attuned to the Logos or Tao and could learn to express the most subtle of emotions.

As soon as people ceased to equate good music with complexity and harmony—becoming instead content with formless noise—such skills eventually ceased to be valued and practiced. Hence it is said that the poets and musicians “unintentionally slandered their profession”: they gave the audience a taste for instant gratification, thereby causing the demand for technical excellence to diminish. In the Zhou dynasty, the corruption of music was specifically said to have been caused by rebels who played the biggest instruments they could find all at the same time, the masses “considering the large to be beautiful and the many to be wonderful.”²⁷ When this becomes the norm, subtlety and quietude soon fall out of fashion. In a matter of generations, traditions that accumulated over centuries disappeared. An entire language through which humans could relate themselves to reality got lost, and with it the ability to communicate the complexities of feeling and emotion. Without technical skill, there can be no collective paradigm of expression.

Nor can there be genuine individual expression. We might assume that rebelling against conventions allows us to unleash our true selves and experiment with forms that best reflect our unique personalities. Yet this too is endangered by a lack of skill. Only through developing a mastery of technique can individuals fully express their experiences and emotions, be it through music, poetry, or the visual arts. Someone who has been trained as a dancer, for example, is far more capable of expressing themselves through movement than someone who has not. After years of training, dancers have the strength and flexibility to respond to a piece of music—and with that, the freedom to develop their own individual styles. 

Without discipline or training, our movements become purely reactive. We struggle to add anything truly unique or distinctive. Instead we can resort only to impulse, which tends to erase individuality by dragging us down to the level of the animal. The theatrocracy, then, ends up reducing us to the lowest common denominator. Attempts to innovate can only go deeper into the basest of appetites, with artists turning to things ever more violent and carnal in search of originality. None of that can substitute for the self-expression that comes through reason and refinement.

The reality that the poets eventually had to confront is that nobody thrives in the theatrocracy. It may be true that inspired art can emerge from a break from tradition, where what remains of technical skill is met with a newfound freedom. But without anything to anchor that skill, the potential for genuine self-expression easily becomes endangered. Art and music instead descend into “unmusical shoutings” or, in the case of Zhou, the blaring of loud and dissonant noises. In time, the Athenian says, “man returns to the old condition of a hell of unending misery,” for he is stunted by his lack of creative capacity and cannot express himself.²⁸ Technical mastery of the arts turns out to be vital not only to true creativity but also to human dignity.

Above all, mastery of technique in the arts brings us closer to a knowledge of God. In a number of religious traditions, the acquisition of skill is closely associated with divine inspiration. In ancient Greece, the flashes of insight that came to those practicing an art were attributed to the Muses, spiritual beings who, not unlike angels in Islam and Christianity, mediate our relationship with the Divine. Muses come to artists when they are in a state of spiritual receptivity, with this depending on the perfection of the rational soul. Harmony is given, says Plato in the Timaeus, “to him who makes intelligent use of the Muses, not as an aid to irrational pleasure, as is now supposed, but as an auxiliary to the inner revolution of the Soul, when it has lost its harmony, to assist in restoring it to order and concord with itself.”²⁹ Hence it is said that the rebellious poets of Attica were “ignorant of what is right and legitimate in the Muses.” In undermining the laws of harmony, they closed themselves off to divine inspiration.

Restoring Concord

We can thus see how, in Attica and Zhou, tradition served a profoundly spiritual purpose. Musical conventions were not, as the museless poets assumed, designed to repress emotion. Rather, they served to refine our emotions into something higher and to relate our own experiences to the true order of reality. This was the logic behind the Greek genre system and the Chinese conventions of ritual and dance, which belonged to a wider tradition known as the odes. Through the odes, it was believed, the individual could “lend true feeling to his expressions, not diluting or cheapening them with other, conflicting ones.”³⁰ In other words, the odes provided people with the form into which they could then channel their own emotional content. Hence, in The Analects of Confucius, students who wish to express themselves through art are taught to “find inspiration in the Odes, take your place through ritual, and achieve perfection with music.”³¹ Tradition and technique exist to transform our raw expressions into something orderly and harmonious.

This process is itself closely connected to the idea of the Tao. In another ancient Chinese treatise, Human Nature Emerges from Heaven’s Command (Xing zi ming chu), the human path to the Tao is described as a movement that begins in subjective emotion and then, through self-discipline, transcends it. “He who is beginning on the path of the Tao,” it says, “is near to the emotions, whereas he who is ending on the Tao is near to rightness.”³² The path of the Tao, Erica Fox Brindley explains in her study of Chinese musicology, “starts with the individual in the raw and proceeds to transform those raw characteristics and potentials into moral characteristics with emotional value. Music thus serves as a means of guiding these raw characteristics and potentials effectively along the human Way.”³³ Once again, musical conventions allow us to progress from our subjective experiences to the universal Tao or Logos.

In the twentieth century, such an understanding of the relationship between tradition and creative expression was beautifully articulated by the poet T. S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Criticizing the museless poets of his day, Eliot argued that good art is not that which takes us deeper into subjective experience but that which uses a historical and traditional sensibility to relate the experience to what is universal and timeless. Hence tradition is associated not just with historical precedence but also with eternity itself. In light of this, Eliot says, poetry should not be “a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”³⁴ This does not mean that art should deny emotion or personality; rather, it means that artistic discipline gives us the ability to refine emotion and personality into their purest forms. Tradition should not be about repressing our nature but perfecting it.

Eliot knew, as much as the ancients, that true creative liberation comes from the habituation of the soul. It is when we are grounded in a tradition that we have the widest possible means of expression and even spontaneity—like the jazz musician who, having learned by heart the tonalities and rhythms of his genre, is able to freely improvise. True to the meaning of the Muses, we find that inspiration occurs not by violating the laws of harmony but by entering into communion with them. Only then can we escape the theatrocracy, restore order and concord, and align our selves with the ordering principles of the cosmos and the human soul.