Musing

If the reason of the founding of a city is the recognition that mutual benefit, materially and in terms of security, can arise, then the basis of the necessity of noble lie must lie in the belief that the established rational basis for the allocation of power within the city is precarious against human greed and striving.

By associating the citizens of the city with a higher order, the noble lie widens the range of those whom the individual identifies with as his own to include the whole city, thereby dissipating self-interest. However, this is but a preparative to Socrates's wider goal to dispel material wants completely within the perfect city. The identities of clan and self contain tacit boundaries which exclude those beyond; in such divisions lie the source and justification of private possession, both of knowledge and of goods. Socrates significantly neglects the needs of the body in attempting to reshape the way citizens expect their needs to be met in the city; he realizes that the bodily wants, of which a majority are in a nature of private goods, reconciles human greed with human selfishness; poisons the nature of identity and man's need to belong. Socrates overhauls both the impacts of identities on men's choices and the identities themselves.

The new identities Socrates propose attach themselves along the defining characteristics of vocation and their attending class. The mode of creation, rather than consumption and need, becomes the flag to which men rally by. He lends it the allure of divine fulfillment, aiding men's necessarily selfconscious tempering of his bodily wants.

At this point however, one must consider if Socrates indeed saw moderation as a virtue worthy of huge sacrifices beyond the material, or if the impetus to turn his citizens into purely political creatures reached an end in itself. For it would be surely draconian and unjustifiable to go to such lengths, indeed, breach the limits of human nature, in the name of moderation. Perhaps Socrates attempted to align human lifestyles to divinely virtue, therefore requiring religious observance in his subjects.

The necessity of the noble lie should be debated as well. Enlightenment thinkers believed in channeling of human self interest into activities that would fulfill an alternative set of moralities and result in mutual benefit. The worker and the consumer benefits. In contrast, the noble lie seeks to limit the meaning and concept of the consumer. Socrates attempts to reverse the demand and supply driven relationship between consumer and worker; in his city, the consumer exists for the worker. Such a lie is therefore necessary, it seems, if human survival and human invirtue derive from the same source, bringing forth yet another example of Platonic tragicomedy. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if the replacement of self-interest with self-neglecting loyalty marks any real progress.

In certain conceptions of Enlightenment societies, the "common good" does not extend beyond the sum of individual good. Society merely acts as enforcers of laws that maximize individual good. For Plato, individual benefit is sacrificed in the name of checks and balances against injustice. Therefore it must arise out of a deep suspicion of the citizens in the city; a strong belief in their potential to be corrupted and manipulated. In proposing draconian static laws, the role of institutions are diminished into enforcers: warriors, not philosophers.

BATMAN!

Since everyone, everyone, everyone is blogging about how adverb-defyingly GOOD Batman the movie is, I would have pressured myself to differ. But, but, my blogger's honesty will not give in. Batman is a very good show. (I mean the Dark Knight.) (Spoilers ahead).

Good. Nolan is smart and savvy. Not completely, consistently so. His relative inexperience shows, I suppose, in the unnecessary audio dramaticisms in certain scenes. But there is no doubt that for someone who popularizes the dilemmas of ethics by making them an integral part of the understanding and enjoyment of the movie- from its own characters, to its implications for the audience, to the taunting means of engaging the audience itself, thereby in effect casting a mirror in its closeup shots of characters- there is little doubt that Nolan has read his canonical texts.

The movie's ethical and narrative approach is straightforward enough- we unanimously support and approve of Batman- this often in opposition to the people of Gotham City Therefore, politically placed as one of the hapless in Gotham but situationally privileged to obtain Batman's view of events, the movie can assert its points to its audience; cram out its insights in a clockwork manner.

For instance, the death of the woman as a turning point. It signals the irremediable shift from the personal to the political for Batman- he becomes the perfect political creature that the attorney Dent could never become. Dent needed a personal reward for political virtue which Batman was adept to living without. Therefore, the change in Dent. And the last straw for Batman; his 9/11 moment. Obviously, this in turn signals the shift from the focus of this superhero movie, and such movies perhaps in general, away from the personal issues of the hero to the political, and the universal, which the movie did, through the introduction of ethics, and personal/social order vs disorder.

If Batman had achieved an insight of social relevance, it could only have done so in such a fictional setting; through the beauty of superhero cinema that dispensed with the realisms of human abilities, leaving the viewer with few demands of conventional norms of human differentiation such as class. The fluidity and fragility of the upper class of Gotham is felt throughout in a way that cannot mirror the real world; this is possible due to the distortions in human ability assumed in the show. Without these fictions, the moral situations would have been difficult to imagine. The movie lends them both the weight and realism of real situations; rarely have real-world issues been made more pressing by a movie's analogies.

So. Now I suppose I know why Batman is a greater superhero than superman or spiderman.

Routine Retrospective

Of course, I need hardly state that blogging is a life buoy for the sinking flesh of my mental state. I write at the desperate moments; only at the desperate moments, or the appropriately elated ones, charged with beams of hope that burn bright but falter and cease at the first real obstructions.

Blogging contains an element of both.

When the constant pang of need, the deafening hums of hurt pride; not feelings, for they are immediately aroused, with the effect of a injection of sugar or salt- how superficial!- when the surrounding edifice encloses you within its shrinking walls, you had best falter and pretend nothing wrong existed by blogging. By blogging, trusting the truth of your words as the world folds its possibilities like a blanket under your fingers, shaped into a soothing path from the insanity that thuds the thunder of its war drums reverberating through the dark of the darkening forest.

I will wander through the protected circle of my mind, tracing the possibilities in a way that would never materialize, unconscious of the flaws; never needing to awaken to a nightmare- posing as a detached mode, the patch you land where you fall from yourself. The quiet breathed alone darkness.

................................................Why do people blog about their lives?

No.No.No. I'd rather have nothing at all. It's better than the dark.