Grizzly @ Adams

Senior Seminar. Here are your final exam questions, everyone — right after the jump. Remember, the exam is 10-11:50 a.m. Thursday, May 7. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the questions.

Sarah Joslin: You have written that “in a utopia…it’s absolutely necessary for one’s free will to be absolutely authentic, not some synthetic illusion pulled over the eyes by a manipulative government — this would indeed be an anti-utopia. Censorship lands smack in the middle of this conflict. It’s necessary for individuals to have free range for expression and development of identity, but it’s also necessary that these individuals don’t stomp all over their neighbors in the effort.”

So say we all. But censorship is not only a matter of what one is allowed to express; it’s also a matter of what is allowed to hear and read. And children in particular are typically prevented from hearing and reading a great deal, and this censorship exists precisely in order to limit the child’s free will. The most obvious example of this sort of thing is what we politely call a “religious upbringing.” I’ve never known of a religious parent going out of their way to expose their child to ideas that would undercut that child’s faith. Paradoxically (or nonsensically, or hypocritically), the parent wants the child to “freely” choose the faith even as the parent prevents the child from weighing the arguments against the faith or experiencing the potential spiritual joys of some other faith. In this sense I would say that every parent and every school and every church is a censor of the first order.

Would you agree? If not, why not? If so, is such censorship a problem? If it is a problem, what should we do about it?

Anthony Guerrero: You argue in one of your comments that “the degree in which Plato proposes censorship is disgusting, and would have the Founding Fathers rolling in their graves.” I agree. Plato’s Republic is not in any sense a liberal democracy. The Republic might well be a valuable exercise in philosophy, but as a blueprint for an actual society it can only be read as a dystopia.

My question concerns the nation we have today. Please think about the Constitution as it exists right now. Suppose that we do not change it a bit, and that we continue to abide by it faithfully. That is, we continue to have a First Amendment, a Fourth Amendment, etc., and our government actually does respect the rights guaranteed by them, and we continue to elect our representatives and senators and presidents as we do today, and so on. Is it possible that under those conditions the United States might turn into a dystopia? Explain.

Gregg Porter: In one of your comments you compared “Socrates’ idea of the ideal state” to what sounds very much like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: “Once the process of extra-uterine fetal development is perfected, society might indeed be able to raise legions of anonymously-parented children for its military, workforce, and general needs. All that without having to be pestered with troublesome emotional bonding….”

Sure. It’s easy enough to name some of the things we don’t want to use biotechnology for. It’s equally easy to name some of the things we do want to use it for (say, to cure cancer). What’s not so easy is to develop a set of bioethical guidelines to help us distinguish good from bad uses of biotechnology more generally. Not so easy — but that’s exactly what I want you to do for the final. Enjoy.

Lacie Paulson: You’ve written that “Socrates’s idea is anti-utopian,” in no small part because “[t]he women have no choice in who they marry.” Of course, marriage practices vary considerably from culture to culture, and to see how that might matter to our understanding of utopia, here’s what I want you to do. First, familiarize yourself with the myth of Shangri-La, one of the West’s most popular images of utopia. (Wikipedia describes Shangri-La as “a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains” and as “synonymous with any earthly paradise but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia — a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world”).

Next, look into the actual marriage and family structure of the real Himalayan kingdom of Tibet, starting here. Describe Tibetan polyandry to the class in some detail, then address the question of whether such marriage practices are intrinsically inimical to human happiness, and then compare and contrast Tibet to The Republic.

Rob Warden: My question for you is easy to ask but (I hope) not so easy to answer. Do you think transhumanism would lead inevitably to dystopia? Why or why not?

Sheth LaRue: You note in one of your comments that “eugenicism is still occurring today, maybe not as blatantly as it once was, but still occurring nonetheless. A quick search will find a number of dating websites for ‘perfect’ genes - although now it’s more about brains than brawn. There are even sites where you are judged before you can join…. Was Socrates all that insane in suggesting genetics be used as a starting point for choosing a mate?” At your suggestion I checked out BeautifulPeople.com and was suitably appalled — and jealous. But why are we appalled with this sort of thing? Is there really anything wrong — ethically, morally, religiously — with people systematically seeking out what they consider the most attractive mate possible? Isn’t BeautifulPeople.com right when it says that “it may not be politically correct, but it’s honest”? Finally, would a ChristianBeautifulPeople.com be possible without being an oxymoron? Why or why not?

Beth Tantanella: After commenting on the utopian family structure proposed in The Republic, you note rather archly that Socrates “is just thinking about the good of the community” and ask, “What is wrong with that?” Well, what is wrong with that? More specifically, what’s the best way to balance the good of the individual against the good of the community? If you haven’t done so already, please read Ursula Le Guin’s utopian story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and come to class prepared to summarize it and explain its significance in the utopian tradition.

Ashley Pacheco: In one of your comments you insisted that for a utopia to be a utopia it must be utopian for “all society.” At least for us today that makes sense: true utopia cannot rest upon an exploitative social hierarchy. The society must be ideal for all its members. But what if a society were to achieve that ideal not by accommodating everyone but simply by getting rid of those it doesn’t want? What if Hitler had succeeded in making Germany into his planned judenfrei utopia — I mean, what if post-Holocaust Germany really were utopian, at least in its own eyes, but only because there were no Jews left there for it to oppress? Or what if Israel were to succeed in creating its ideal Jewish state by excluding all the Palestinians? Getting rid of the “others” with whom part of a society is in conflict obviously simplifies the task of achieving utopian perfection.

I trust we can see the problem with predicating utopia on ethnic cleansing. But isn’t that in a sense what Charlotte Perkins Gilman does in Herland — create a feminist utopia by getting rid of all the men? Sure, it’s not as if the Herlanders killed the men themselves, or even wanted to. The men are eliminated by other, fully acceptable means, but the result is the same: a society free to perfect itself because it no longer has to deal with a “troublesome” element.

How can Gilman be defended against the charge that she takes too easy a way out, creating her utopian society by means of what might be called “gender cleansing”?