Socrates knows Justice

An accurate (not really) modernized (in the loosest possible sense) summary (just barely) of Plato's Republic:

 "The essential minimum for a city is four to five men, except actually it's a whole bunch more, because we need to trade and make war. Because this ideal city is still going to have war."

"You're so right, Socrates!"

"And we're going to have to tell our children stories, so they can get educated. But, the stories we have right now can teach them bad things, so we're going to have to censor the ever living daylights out of them. We're throwing out three fifths of the Iliad, because we can't let any young minds be warped by seeing Achilles misbehaving. Censorship is awesome for this ideal city."

"No one will ever doubt your wisdom, Socrates."

"And it would be aweful if sick people just laid around being sick, or, gods forbidding, procreated. That's just prolonging their worthless miserable lives. So we're just going to leave sick people to die. This ideal city embraces eugenics."

 

"Please give me your babies Socrates."

"And as for wives, well, friends share everything in common. In this city, women won't just be one persons property, they'll be everyone's property."

"You are a beautiful person, Socrates."

 "And we need to make sure people don't go laughing too much. Too much laughter and the next thing you know your children will be running around playing lawless games. Everything in moderation. "

"Seriously Socrates, please let me have your babies. Please."

"And justice? Well, in this ideal city, justice is doing your own work and minding your own business. If the leaders decided  you would be a good farmer when you were eight, that's what you're going to be. Forever."

"Those 500 Athenians are gonna be super sorry they didn't give you the lead in the spring musical, Socrates."

"Injustice, on the other hand, is meddling. When people want to do anything besides what's been decided for them, that's just a big piece of injustice." 

"We love you Socrates!"

"And I know justice"

Eternal Mercy Triumphing Temporal Destruction: The City of God over Rome

The Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 AD was more than just a single event in history. To contemporary Romans, their entire world was falling apart at the seams. What had caused such an event to occur, where the center of the Roman Empire itself falls? Saint Jerome, in a letter written two years after the Sack, bluntly states that “The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken.”[1]

What did the Romans blame this catastrophe on? After all, the last time Rome was sacked was over eight hundred years earlier, around 390 BC,[2] so, according to contemporaries something introduced in the meantime must have caused this. But what?

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 Sadly, not this.

 

The most obvious introduction is the advent and rise of Christianity. Catholic Christianity had become the official state religion of the Roman Empire less than fifty years prior to the attack, in 380 AD.[3] Those who were over thirty years old would clearly connect the downfall of the Eternal City to the introduction and acceptance of this new and foreign religion. Clearly, to these people, the ancient Roman gods were punishing them for accepting this religion from Judea!

 

Bibleartists.wordpress.com

Among other things, Christianity introduced table-flipping boxing.

However, Augustine notes a sort of irony in those who assert this theory. He notes, perhaps correctly (I’ll leave you to decide), that these Romans “would not be able to utter a word against the City if, when fleeing from the sword of their enemy, they had not found, in the City’s holy places, the safety on which they now congratulate themselves” (pg 6). In other words, the entire reason for their survival is the very thing in which they claim caused the Sack.   

Vintageprintable.com

As I type this post, I have not read any other portion of the reading – I have only read the Introduction and Book I. Therefore, I see this introduction for the City of God as a small taste of things to come. Augustine here tells us that the divine City – which, I believe, can represent anything from Heaven to the Church itself – trumps the temporal City of Man. The Visigoths would not have “[shown] mercy beyond the customs of war” if it weren’t for their “honor of the name of Christ” (pg 7). To Augustine, the fact that the Visigoths had spared those who hid in the churches shows a more powerful force at work, which proves superiority to most other instances of war. Had Christianity not been there, all of Rome would have been dead. 
  
As you may have noticed, the medieval historian inside me is ecstatic. You can always count on me to be excited about the most challenging reading in class. Definitely expect more posts to follow soon!

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[1] http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001127.htm

[2] http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/romebattles/p/battleallia.htm

[3] http://history-world.org/christianity.htm

 

 

Plato's republic

Plato’s Republic was actually a decent read once I got past all of the “Socrates is god and I agree with everything he says” dialogue. I liked the fact that he started out really simple when he was building his city because it definitely caught my interest and made me focus more. Right away, I was a little turned off with how much he wanted to control the people in his city. It seemed like right from the start; the only freedom they had was in their choice of clothing. I didn’t like the idea that the epics are basically going to be destroyed because Plato thinks that it would be in the best interest of the people living in his city if all of the violent scenes are taken out of the stories so that his people do not learn about anything bad. Next I hated the idea that people had no choice in their occupations and could not do anything about it if they wanted to change it. Human beings are natural learners and if they only learn one thing then they will never be able to grow. People can be taught right from wrong but what path they choose should be up to them which is why I didn’t agree with this idea. I found that when I was reading this my first instinct was to look for contradictions and flaws in how Plato planned to run his city. He had a lot of support for most of his plans, so I was a little upset that I didn’t get to debate him on much. But someone made the argument in the last class to the idea that Plato is essentially raising these people like infants, but if he plans to have the people fight to defend their land, they have never been exposed to anything bad, so how are they going to be able to defend themselves?  Finally I don’t agree with the idea that wealth and poverty make a man worse at his craft. If anything I would say that wealth could motivate a worker to work more because he is being rewarded with money, not become lazy.

The Dysfunctional Utopia

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I am assuming that many of you have heard of the new movie Warm Bodies. For the select few that have been living in a "dead zone" as technology ads have so aptly named it, Warm Bodies is what seems to be a modern-day rom-com for the more adult Twilight era. The main character, R (Nicholas Hoult), is a zombie. Big woop, right? Not so much, due to his chiseled features and strangely attractive appearance. While out hunting for humans, R spies a PYT (get out of here if you don't pick up on that reference) that he decides to, you know, just take back with him to the zombie compound. From there, she magically flips the human switch inside of him and he begins to regain his humanity, heartbeat by heartbeat.


As this is an educated person's blog, this will not be a synopsis of the film, rather a brief discussion of a part of the book, written by Issac Marion, that the film is based on.

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I will give you a minute to let it sink in that a college student actually reads books for pleasure.



Alright, time's up. In the book, R realizes that he needs to take his lady friend, Julie, back home or the humans will hunt her down and really kill all the zombies. Zombiness has plagued the states so badly that only about 30% of the nation's cities are functional. On their journey through a deserted city, they take respite in a long-abandoned home. In the morning, Julie is able to sneak away and get back to the shelter where the humans have hunkered down at. This shelter is a huge superdome rigged into a makeshift city. 

R has been realizing his human aspects sneaking back up on him for a while, but his first night without Julie, he dreams. This dream, which of course features Julie propels him into his mission to get her back. 

Teaming up with a handful of other zombies, R heads for the superdome and is able to
"play human" (imagine teaching your dog that trick) and sneak in past the guards. 

Immediately I was struck with the utopian nature of this contrived community. There had been so many measures taken to make it seem like a true city, even in the midst of tragedy and peril.  Street signs had been replaced with pictures. There are "underpowered streetlamps provid[ing] dim orange illumination" (Marion, 134). There is debris littering the sidewalks: used condoms, cigarettes and soda cans. "We built schools once we finally accepted that this was reality, that this was the world our children would inherit" (Marion, 136) and in those schools, children were taught practical skills first (zombie killing, concrete pouring) and in spare time, reading, writing and reasoning. 

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This book goes to show a great aspect of utopianism in my opinion. People can try so hard to give the people what they need and what they want, but too much control, too much structure will essentially lead to discontent. People were not meant to be confined and oppressed, humans by nature want to explore, roam and learn things for themselves. 

The Girl Who Never Grew Up

MJ was out flying with Peter Pan above Neverland. It was the perfect time of day, the sun was warm against their backs, and the clouds were fluffy little puffs of aerated happiness for them to bounce on.

"This place is amazing!" MJ exclaimed, hopping from one cloud to the next.

"That it is!" Peter replied, tossing a cloud in her direction. She caught it and took a bite. It tasted like candy floss. Normally, MJ would be very grossed out, as candy floss is far from her favorite food, but here it made sense and was ultimately delicious, so she ate it.

"It's a utopia!" she further exclaimed.

"No it isn't," Peter said. "Utopias are perfect, this place isn't perfect." Peter was acting very knowledgeable, but MJ was very aware he didn't know what the word 'utopia' meant until about five minutes ago when MJ first mentioned it. He had also forgotten MJ's name at least six times since the beginning of this adventure. But he was very handsome and MJ had always had a crush on Peter, since she was a wee little MJ hearing Peter Pan stories from her mother.

MJ shook her head as she dived under a cloud to avoid another cloud-ball Peter threw her way.

"Perfect isn't everything about utopia. Utopias are nowhere places somewhere in time and space."

"But that's everywhere," Peter says. "To me, Frederick is like a nowhere place in time-space."

"Time and space," MJ corrected him. She tucked clouds on her feet and they looked like big, fluffy shoes.

"That's what I said," Peter said, huffily. "And besides, Neverland is so much better."

"That's what makes it a utopia," MJ said. "It's better than the society I live in is."

Peter flew under her cloud and gripped her hand, spinning her around. MJ giggled, her heart all twitterpated by this magical boy who would never grow old.

"Of course, any utopia could go bad," MJ said. "To someone who feels differently than you and I do."

"What does that mean?" Peter demanded.

"I mean, if someone thought that the bright sunlight and the big jungles were too bright or too scary, this place could easily become their dystopia."

Peter blinked at her. MJ was very aware this meant he did not understand what she meant by 'dystopia'. But it was true, she thought. What is good for one may not be good for others, and things could go very wrong very fast if things started to change. What if Peter decided that all the Lost Boys had to find mothers, or a new leader took over and wanted them to become someone else, someone they thought would be 'better'?

"This place is better," Peter said, mirroring her thoughts.

"Better is subjective," MJ replied.

Peter laughed. MJ was very aware this meant he did not understand what 'subjective' meant. All the same, he took her by the hands again and spun her around and around in the clouds, while the sunshine shone down on them and the warm, happy presently-a-utopia Neverland sat below them, waiting to be explored.

This was when MJ woke up. She sighed, stretched, and padded out of her bedroom to the kitchen. Her personal angel, who had presently taken the form of MJ's biggest celebrity crush, Benedict Cumberbatch, was already making breakfast.

He turned around and gasped in horror, and then threw the pot he was cooking with down to the floor.

"You hussy!" he cried. "You were dreaming about that boy again!"

MJ looked down in shame. The cloud-shoes were still on her feet.

Read me a story...

Regardless of how we feel about the strict rules of censorship that Socrates proposes for his kallipolis, there can be no doubt that he is a firm believer in the importance of stories.

Big Bird and Friends gather 'round for a good story.
http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Read_Me_a_Story

Socrates tells us that the stories we listen to as a young child play a key role in forming our morality. They also teach lessons - whether intentional or not - about the types of behavior that are permitted.

To be honest, I'm not sure that I find Socrates to be that far off the mark. I don't know how many of those good ol' Greek myths I'd want to use as bedtime stories for young children. Those gods and heroes do get up to some wacky hi-jinks, don't they?

But aside from the concerns of the content and form of the stories, something that struck me about Socrates' discussion is how it highlights a group of people that we wouldn't naturally associate with loads of power in this particular utopia. Not just the storytellers, but the "nurses and mothers" (53). They are the first educators, the ones who nurture the guardians when they are their youngest and most vulnerable. (Not the philosophers, who will presumably get their hands on the young men - literally and figuratively - once they are ready for a more formal education.) It's those nurses and mothers who must be "persuaded" to choose good tales for the wee guardians. Is it me, or does Socrates seem a bit insecure about whether or not those nurses and mothers will listen to his persuasion?

So let's hear it for those mothers and nurses. They are the linchpin of the kallipolis, whether in Ancient Greece or the contemporary US. Our stories are still what teach us our morality and guide us in our behavior. And is that is as it should be.

SUPER BOWL!

This post has nothing to do with the Super Bowl. I'm sorry. I lied...But that's okay. I mean, not to Plato but who cares, he's way past dead. He's dust.

I know that sounds mean but I just finished books 2 and 3 of Plato's Republic and I am mentally drained. I go into the reading expecting to learn all about Plato's idea of justice and injustice. Nope, I get the building of a hypothetical city. That part is groovy. I can totally dig it. It was the education bit that bugged me.

Now, we all know how I feel about education. Well, I don't agree at all with the censorship that Socrates is proposing. He is making the assumption that if all that is bad or represents what they believe to be bad is removed. If it can be taken out completely so it's not exposed to the youth so it won't inspire them to do the bad things. This is garbage.

This is the argument made today about so many things including sex education and video games. I, as a person who see immense value in both of those things, am offended that it is assumed that I don't have the ability discern what is good. I thinks its offensive because it assumes that people can't make their own moral decisions.

Okay, I thought I could multitask and write up a blog and watch the Super Bowl. Well, I am too busy cracking up at the power outage.

THIS ENTRY WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE NUMBER 250!