Politics discussion

Currently reading it, but initial thoughts...

Is The Republic meant as a proposal for real-life governance? I would rather take this as a thought exercise, as it allows us to discuss the model with more openness and honesty. When taken as a true proposal, it's too easy to insert your own circumstances and personal interests into the equation, and lose sight of the big picture itself. Rather than worrying about Plato outlawing music and theatre because we like it (something you'd think about when you put yourself in the situation), we should look at the net effect of music and theatre in a society (the macro-effects).

The danger, that The Republic advocates a totalitarian nightmare world, is real. But The Republic is a world where everything must bend to cold justice... a single option for a world among many others. As we've seen with other flights of fancy and doctrines for ideal states, attempts to implement them fall far short.

In more successful attempts to institute totalitarianism, the crushing power of the guardians in instituting a timeless, threadbare culture inevitably falls to modernity and change, I feel. People, in their nature, can't bear to deny themselves tools to experience new things.

Here's a philosophical question that I thought of the other day- if we all woke up tomorrow and had pig noses (for example), would we eventually develop an attraction to pig noses? Think about it: our attraction to things determines reproduction and survival of the species. People get plastic surgery to look more like an ideal human, but once they get "too ideal", they start looking like an alien. Suddenly, we're less attracted to them.

Now here's the connection to the Plato stuff I've been reading:

Plato developed an absolute ideal for things, to include beauty. If beauty is malleable, though, it weakens his argument that we're all reaching for this absolute definition of a term. If evolution is correct (and I'd bet that it is), our definition of beauty has been subtly evolving over time. Note that we don't (and shouldn't) find our predecessor species attractive.

But Plato tries again and again to halt the evolution of everything in The Republic in his lust to create the timeless society. Whether he likes it or not, though, evolution will continue without his approval and would actually accelerate under his eugenic plan.