Plato the art-fearing, almost emotionless sexist
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006In his Republic, Plato fears when “imitators” (in this case, artists and poets) create unrealities, especially when those unrealities seem like reality. He worries how these things will affect his fellow men, and worries that the emotions that such unrealities produce in others will make his society “unmanly.” And once he decides that poetry is mostly dangerous, he begins referring to it with female pronouns, since I guess he thinks women are dangerous too. He does allow that some art forms and some emotions are all right, such as poems that incite patriotism.
Wow. Does this guy need to see a psychologist or what?
Anyway, Plato would have a strange concept of our modern-day concept “derivative work,” since to him everything is a derivative of the Forms that God created. “There is nothing new under the sun” and all that. I’m sure he’d just be blown away by the way power is given to such a select few artistic creators in our culture. While “copy leftists” today argue that the power should be given to everyone, Plato would say that no power based on artistic creation should be distributed at all. He would weep that things got to be this way… oh wait, Plato doesn’t cry. Sorry, I forgot.
Frankly I don’t think Plato would know what to do or to say at this point regarding massively multiplayer online games. It’s simply way too far outside of his experience. But for the purpose of this exercise I’ll try to help him.
MMO games vary widely in some respects. Some are based in text only while others have graphics, for example. The level of realism varies. Also, you will find different cultures of people playing these games. Some games have a wide variety of people playing them, and others are mostly populated with one or two select subcultures. None of these differences would matter much to Plato, I don’t think. He’d be more concerned that the people playing these games might not go outside their room, and see reality. All this would be a cheap imitation.
But what is reality nowadays? Look around your room, your office. Look in your closet and your refrigerator. All of the things you’ll find were mass-produced. Unlike Plato’s analogy with the flute-player and the flute-maker, it’s pretty rare nowadays to have something made just for you, tailored to your needs. You go to the clothing store and buy pants that you hate because that’s what they’re offering us this year and you need pants: cheap imitations of what we really want, everywhere. Even the Internet is an imitation of the information sharing and retrieval system that I really want (did I mention I enjoyed reading Ted Nelson?).
Perhaps we are a reality-bankrupt culture. In MMOs, though, players often get a chance to create a new reality for themselves. And who can blame them, with what actual mass-produced reality has to offer them? Though MMOs are embedded in a power structure just like everything else, this class has taught me that the power that people have online, while not endless, certainly extends in ways I hadn’t realized. There are MMOs out there where the players actually created additional virtual towns and gameplay areas. They have more control over the environments in which they’re immersed themselves than they may have in real life.
So the problem, then, is not the artistic creation, whether it be a poem or a painting or an online game. The problem, which art critiques, is that reality does not meet our expectations. Art is an attempt to gain power and control in a world where those come in increasingly rare, precious quantities. Therefore, the fault is with reality, not art.
And that, my friends, is something to get worked up over.