One cold winter morning earlier this year, Christina Hansen, a carriage driver and spokesperson for the trade,  walked into the Clinton Park Stables office and found two other drivers with books waiting to go to work. One was reading Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, a bible of existentialist literature, another was reading Plato’s famous treatise on philosophy, The Allegory Of The Cave. This didn’t surprise Hansen, she is a former professor of history.

But it surprised me a bit.

I know better than to stereotype people,  but my view of the carriage horse drivers was shaped for years by the very many reports from animal rights groups and the news media about their brutish abuse, cruelty, thievery and callousness. I have been continuously surprised and delighted by the generosity, humanity and individuality of the carriage drivers I have met. I did not expect to like them this much, or to come to love many of them.

The reader of Plato was a carriage driver named Jerry Ledbetter,  Hansen said he was  relating Plato’s allegory to the years-long attacks on the carriage trade by the animal rights movement, and more recently, by the city’s new mayor, a self-described proud member of the animal rights movement in Brooklyn.

Ledbetter was trying to understand what he saw as the movement’s rigid, unfiltered or mediated understanding of the world of the carriage horses, and how anyone who tries to speak a different truth about the horses to them is reviled or shunned, accused of supporting cruelty and abuse.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I first went to those same stables in January.  I know I wasn’t expecting to find Plato, but then again, nothing I saw was really what I had been led to believe. These images of brutish thugs and tortured animals I had been seeing for years didn’t quite square with the people reading Greek philosophy in an earnest effort to understand the hatred and anger that is now a part of riding a horse carriage in America.

I decided to first re-read The Allegory Of The Cave this weekend, it is considered one of Plato’s best and most beautiful works. I could hardly put it down,  it was astonishingly prescient and relevant to our culture today. And I found myself reading right into the heart of the dilemma that is at the heart of the carriage horse controversy, the challenge of finding the truth amidst the shadows of manipulated and trapped minds.

So I tracked down Jerry Ledbetter,  the stable office philosopher reading Plato.

I caught up with him while he was riding his bike in New York City.

While riding, and without skipping a beat,  Jerry quoted numerous passages from the allegory from memory in between horn honks, turns and pauses to catch his breath. I imagine he must be in good shape, and I have met few people who talk five times as fast as me.

Ledbetter is in his 40’s, he is studying philosophy in college right now, and he has been driving carriage horses since 2006. The money he earns pays for college, among other things. Without it he would either have to drop out or seek a big loan. The carriage horse controversy is not a remote political issue for him, it is very real. The people leading the animal rights movement in New York, he says, are evil. They are seeking to destroy his reputation, vocation and earning potential, without cause or due process or any regard for truth.

On the phone from my farm, talking to a stranger  on a bike racing to somewhere in New York City,  I had this quite wonderful conversation about philosophy, truth, and controversy. And it was with a horse carriage horse driver who I haven’t met but would like to. Ledbetter speaks in a rapid-fire, 100 words a minute way, his thoughts and words come pouring out like a hose turned on full blast. He knew who I was – “hello, Jon Katz, you are important, you care about truth” – but there were no other niceties or introductions, he is not into small talk and he was trying to breathe, bike,  talk and think at the same time. He did just fine. When he got to his destination, he said goodbye and hung up. We covered a lot of ground in that call.

The carriage horse story is personal for me as well as Jerry, it continues to surprise me and challenge my own understanding of reality and truth. It reminds me to talk to people, not simply read other people’s accounts, to see things for myself, to seek out facts, not arguments. I have tried a half-dozen times to speak with the animal rights people, but they will not speak to me because, they say,  I disagree with them about the carriage  horses.

One animal rights group official said she would only speak with me if I submitted my questions in writing in advance, another said I had to show them everything I had ever written about the carriage horses before they would even think about speaking to me. A third said they would have to approve of anything I wrote in advance before publication. Even the NSA doesn’t do that.

The animals rights spokespeople tell me if I disagree with them, I am their enemy. They told me I was on their enemies list, their demonstrators took photos of me for their animal abusers rogue gallery. I am in good company, Liam Neeson is there.

Talking to the drivers is different. Everyone in the carriage trade will speak to me, anytime, anywhere. They seem to love talking to people, and are eager to explain themselves. In New York City, few people in power want to listen.

And yet the animal rights groups – so hostile to discussion and disagreement – are the ones that the journalists in New York call for comment every time a horse trips over a curb or has a heart attack. They are the ones who have defined the controversy without challenge for years, for New Yorkers, for the world at large. For me. They are the ones who presume to speak for animals and their rights and their welfare. They live in apartments, have no animals that are not pets, and seem to know nothing about them. In the Alice and Wonderland world of the carriage horses, that does not seem to matter.

They are the shadow makers in Plato’s story, they get to define reality of the horses – up to now at least.  No wonder the horses called for help.  I wonder how it is that these people have earned this position in the debate, while no reporter has ever talked to Jerry Ledbetter at all, his voice, like that of all the drivers, has been lost in the story of his own life.

Jerry wants to be a journalist or producer when he graduates in four or five years. He believes in facts, in truth, in rationality. But he is no rationalist, he assured me, he is an empiricist, he believes that knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience, not formal learning. I am eager to meet him and buy him lunch, maybe take a ride in his carriage and his photo. I want to tell him that John Locke, the theorist who invented modern notions of liberty and moral government, was a passionate empiricist. But I bet Jerry knew that before I did. I do not underestimate people twice.

In this wrenching and prolonged controversy, the carriage trade people have been dehumanized, always a prelude to destroying people and their work and way of life. It is important for me to give them voice, to take their photos, to capture their point of view. And they are very human, they are not one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. They deserve dignity and their rights.

The carriage horse controversy is a hall of mirrors really, there is no way for anyone to come to terms with it other than to trust their own instincts, their own senses. Journalism will not help them out, there are no websites for truth in the animal world or in New York media, journalists do not seem to seek out truth any longer as much as they relay arguments.  This story is about much more than the horses, it is a journey through the surreal and angry world of American dialogue. It is a quagmire of hostility, polarization and rigidity. It is about fairness and liberty and also about the future of animals in our world.

Plato is a wonderful place to go for help, he remains one of the world’s great and clearest thinkers. He was an advocate for the kind of reasoned and democratic dialogue that has nearly vanished from civic life in America, and is a rare thing on the Internet. Plato was a student of Socrates, and when Socrates was executed for thinking too much, Plato became a philosopher and wrote almost all of his thoughts in his teacher’s words.

The horse story  speaks to Plato’s ideas in many ways. In this long conflict, now deep and many years old,  there are no universally-accepted facts, truths, or realities,  just arguments that are repeated endlessly and never softened, altered or changed.  Each side has it’s own truth, it’s own reality. It’s own shadows.

There could hardly be a better parable for the carriage horse story than the parable of the cave. The Allegory Of The Cave can be found in Plato’s famous work, The Republic. In it, he describes the predicament of mankind – and the quagmire the carriage trade people in New York  find themselves in. The allegory is written as a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, Plato’s brother.

In the allegory, Socrates describes a cave in which a gathering of people have lived their whole lives chained to a wall, facing another blank wall. They watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them presented by their unseen captors. The shadows are as close as the prisoners ever get to reality or the real world. Socrates explains to Glaucon how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to his own truth to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all. The philosopher – the thinker, journalist, writer or seeker, the intellectual, the enlightened person, the moral leader, the good citizen – does not seek reality in the shadows, but in the light of the world beyond.

At one point, one of the prisoners escapes and is blinded by the light and sees the truth of the world, he returns to the cave to share his discoveries with the prisoners of the shadow world. They are enraged and horrified by what he tells them, they don’t want to hear it, discuss it or believe it, the seeker is, as Jerry suggested in the stable office, reviled and shunned.

In the Allegory Of The Cave, Socrates asks Glaucon to consider the condition of the man who escapes and is blinded by the light.

“…were he to return there, wouldn’t he be rather bad at the game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? Wouldn’t it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it’s not even worth trying to get up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead them up, wouldn’t they kill him?”

We see Plato’s caves all around us – Fox News, MSNBC, the “left,” the “right,” hateful political leaders, elements of the animal rights movement, extremists across the spectrum  – prisoners of the shadows, seeing only the images others offer us. They will not reason or debate, negotiate or compromise. Anyone who differs  is shunned and exiled and reviled  – or picketed and shouted at – if they step out into the light to seek our own truth about the reality of the world. The people in these caves are prisoners, just as Plato’s prisoners were captives. They live in the shadows others make for them, they can neither hear or accept any other truth.

It is this somewhat hopeless reality that Jerry Ledbetter was trying to come to terms with.

It was fascinating talking to Jerry, a fierce individualist branded the worst kind of human by the mayor and the people who call themselves supporters of animal rights, a person not even worth speaking to, a person who did not have the right to live his life or even choose his work. A person who would be just as happy driving an electric car as a horse. He is very much worth speaking to, he has a lot of things to say, his voice ought not be taken from him.

But here, I thought of Socrates talking of Jerry Ledbetter: “But if he is unfit to ride a horse, how then could be be fit to drive an electric car? And if he is cruel and abusive to a horse, then how could he be trusted to drive visitors around the great park?”

Glacon: “I wonder. And if he is stealing money from tourists and torturing animals, and committing the crime of abuse, and blind to the suffering of the world, how then could he be walking free at all?”

Talking to Jerry, I was also thinking of my own experience with the horses.

I was also in the shadows, looking only at the images others had shown me. I followed Plato’s course without even knowing it.  I went to see the horses for myself, to trust my own senses and instincts and judgements.  I saw another truth, was disoriented by the light, and like the prisoners in the allegory, I was instantly reviled by people in their caves, they called me weak-minded blind to cruelty, brain-washed, supportive of abuse and torture. They pledged to abandon me and my work, my books, my blog, to list me on their enemies page, to urge people to stop reading my books, deprive me of my livelihood, my future.

I felt at moments what Jerry and the other drivers has felt for years, this feeling of having my self taken from me, of not being seen as a human being worthy of joining the moral community. I am not as vulnerable as a New York carriage horse driver, but when you tell people to punish a writer by not buying his books, you are also attacking the sense of self, his subsistence and right to work. What if they could  take my self away, as they are doing to the carriage drivers? I believe they would if they could..

Plato believed that wise men and philosophers should rule the world because they had considered it, because they knew philosophy, they had stepped out of the darkness, seen the world for themselves and sought enlightenment. He believed the duty of the enlightened man, the  citizen, was to see the good and to pursue it. Public life is a dialogue, he wrote, a negotiation, a ballet of respect, of  common reasoning of moral and open-minded people.

The carriage horse conflict is powerful on many levels, one is because it reveals how corrupt and dark our public discourse has become, and how trapped it is by the shadows of people who are neither wise or open-minded nor committed to the public good. Whether they are right about the horses or not, the conduct of the animal rights movement in New York and many other cities is neither moral nor humane nor compassionate. It is, in fact, without reason, dialogue or any kind of empathy. The movement is eerily closer to a hate group than a progressive social movement. Such a movement in this incarnation ought never be entrusted with making decisions about the future of animals in our world, and does not have the legal or moral authority – no one has elected to make decisions for the animals in our world – to speak for them.

I believe now, and without apology, that this is why the horses called out for help.

“Everyone in New York City,” said Jerry “knows the truth. This is not about horses, this is about money, about real estate and property.” This is a common belief in New York, I can’t really speak to it. The animal rights people I have seen appear to be motivated by ideology, not money. The money people tend to be much more pragmatic and in touch with reality.  But they do live in their own cave, for sure. The people who call themselves supporters of animal rights live right out of the great philosopher’s imagination, right out of his allegory.

“The truth is so important,” said Jerry, “I’ve seen what happens when people lie, when there are no facts, no truth. That’s why I have decided to become a journalist, so I can seek the truth and relay it to people.”

I wonder if Jerry knows how tough a road is ahead of him, perhaps even tougher than the one he is on. Journalism is rarely the home of truth these days. The mayor of New York is not open to dialogue. He will not speak with Jerry Ledbetter, he will not come to the stables and see the horses, he will not speak to the carriage horse owners. No animal rights demonstrator has ever come to the stables, or touched the horses, or asked the drivers what their view of the truth is, or listened to them. These are people who shout names at children who ride in horse carriages and call them cowards and murderers. There is no common reasoning, no good faith. The New York Times, just blocks from the stables, has never in all the long years of this fierce debate even sent a reporter to find out how the horses are being treated.

Socrates: “And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their errors. At first, when any of them are liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him that what he saw before was an illusion..”

Reading the allegory, I also saw what Jerry saw in this dialogue about truth and reality, two things so hard to find in the carriage horse debate, now the world of the shadow caves.

But here is where Plato and I come together, and Jerry as well. The truth is right there, anyone out of the shadows can go to the stables and see it, feel it, sense it. Anyone can go to Central Park and touch  the horses and watch the lovers and the children and the park built for the horses and see it. Anyone can talk to the carriage drivers – they will talk to anyone, most of them, and they are articulate and open and passionate about their work and their horses.

They stand in vivid contrast to angry and uniformly joyless people shouting at them from across the street.  They are among the last free spirits and individualists among us living their lives freely and out in the open.  They have nothing to hide, and they hide nothing. The carriage drivers still believe in the magic of the horses, like the children and the lovers and the tourists. People who have no magic in their souls should not be deciding the fate of the horses.

Anyone can set out into the light and give rebirth to their own instincts and judgments.

I am not a maker of shadows, nobody needs to take my word for it.

And people are coming to look for themselves. This is happening every day in New York City, it is ironically a gift of the horses to us.

Jerry is a seeker of truth, and I don’t know if he will find it in the world he seeks to join, but I imagine he will find it one place or another, perhaps in the cluttered office of the Clinton Park stables.  He won’t find the Allegory Of The Cave in too many other places. Good for him for caring about truth and looking for it.

Glaucon: You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Socrates: Like ourselves, I replied. and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

Glaucon: True, he said: how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads.”

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Note: Next month I’ll be publishing an e-book original “Who Speaks For The Carriage Horses: The Future Of Animals In Our World.” This book will be available everywhere digital books are sold and on any devices where they can be read. The book will only  be available digitally and some of the proceeds will go to help the fund to save the carriage horses.