by Huss, John
We know a lot more about the role of women in Plato’s society than we do about the role of females in ape society. We do know that a female chimpanzee, Dr. Zira, has become a respected animal psychologist who is considered by her colleagues to have “made it” and receives generous funding for her research on human beings. This suggests at the very least that it isn’t impossible for a female to get ahead in the monkey-eat-monkey world of chimpanzee academia. Yet if the Planet of the Apes is like Plato’s city in that it allows particularly talented females to advance, it also looks suspiciously like Plato’s city in that more males than females rise to the top. We never see a single female orangutan in Planet of the Apes, let alone a female serving in a position of authority. The evidence is hardly conclusive since we only meet four orangutans in the film: three powerful government officials and a religious minister. Still, it seems reasonable to guess that fewer females than males rise to high office in Ape City.
Female gorillas, like female orangutans, never appear in Planet of the Apes. I’ve identified the gorillas as a warrior class, like the warrior class in Plato’s city, but the women of Plato’s warrior class were themselves warriors, while female gorillas don’t seem to take part in warrior activities. They do not ride out to the fields to shoot down human crop raiders or wrestle with escaped animals in the market square. My best guess is that they occupy a more traditional social role than Plato’s warrior women, maintaining a home and raising a family. On the other hand, maybe half of those horse-riders are female gorillas and I just can’t tell the difference.
How Babies Are Made
One striking parallel between society on the Planet of the Apes and the society invented by Plato is their unromantic approach to the human sex act. Dr. Zira shocks Taylor by arranging for him to mate with another human, Nova. Back in twentieth-century USA, it was traditional to give a human being a say in such things. “There were women, lots of women” Taylor confesses to Nova, safe in the knowledge that she can’t understand him or appreciate the implied health-risk. It’s true, the American government had assigned Taylor to be one of the mates of fellow astronaut officer Stewart, who was to be the new “Eve” on a new world, but there’s no suggestion that Taylor was denied the right to decline the mission, or that anyone insisted that it was his civic duty to take part.
In Plato’s ideal city, on the other hand, all members of the warrior and guardian classes were expected to mate in accordance with the needs of the state, not their hearts. Plato notes that owners of dogs and horses try to breed their best stock and advises that the government make sure that “the best men must have sex with the best women as frequently as possible.” To this end, his city will hold regular mating festivals for warriors and rulers at which men and women are paired up randomly by lot. In the interests of decency, the couple would be married before they got down to business, but then they would be divorced again as soon as they were done—a neat legal trick that you can’t even pull off in Las Vegas today.
Any children resulting from these unions are taken to be raised together in government institutions and no record kept of the child’s origins “so that no parent will know his own offspring or any child his parent” (lines 457d1–2). Plato believed that preventing warriors and rulers from forming family ties would induce them to direct their energies towards what was good for the entire community rather than to the good of their relations. To emphasize that all citizens of the warrior and ruler classes are family, they are to address each other as “father,” “mother,” “sister” or “brother,” a practice that would many centuries later be adopted by Christian monks and nuns.
Conversely, the apes, like Zira and Cornelius, are permitted to marry whomever they choose. In fact, the apes continue to value families at all levels of society. At the gorilla’s funeral, he is praised as a “cherished husband” and “beloved father.” The attitude of the apes seems healthier. It isn’t obvious that denying families to people will make them attach themselves more closely to society. Taylor had no family ties, but rather than making him a more civically minded individual, it alienated him, and he flew away into the distant future just to escape from his disconnected existence on Earth. Such an attitude of alienation is easy to imagine rising among generations raised by the state.
What an Ape Could Teach Plato
Plato’s Republic remains as one of the most brilliant works of political philosophy ever written, yet the more cynical take on politics in Planet of the Apes shows a more realistic image of what happens when power is concentrated in a few hands. By stratifying society and giving power to a small group of people who specialize in the craft of government, Plato would be placing power exactly where it belongs, if only the rulers were perfectly rational individuals who were exclusively concerned with the common good. But people are not like that (and neither are apes, not even the greatest of them). A class holding complete power is more likely to act like the orangutans on the Planet of the Apes.
The orangutans rule ape society with an iron paw, honoring themselves and silencing all dissent. When the chimpanzee Dr. Galen complains about his lack of professional advancement (presumably, he’s being paid peanuts), he reminds his colleague Zira that she promised to speak to Dr. Zaius on his behalf. She answers, “I did. You know how he looks down his nose at chimpanzees.” Zaius demands to be addressed as “Your Excellency” and “Sir” by lesser primates, yet may not even acknowledge their greetings. Far from being paragons of justice, the orangutans show no sense of justice at all in their dealings with Taylor, or with the chimpanzees Zira and Cornelius, whose careers are endangered just for offering a defense of Taylor in court.
Plato’s blindness to the corrupting influence of power was inflicted in part by his desire for a unified theory of justice that described both what it is for a society to be just and what it is for a person to be just. Plato claimed that a person’s soul has three parts: reason, which supplies our rational abilities; spirit, which craves honor and victory; and appetite, which supplies our non-intellectual desires—our cravings for things like food, alcohol, sex, and material possessions. A person is just when these parts of the soul stand in the right relationship to one another. The rational part of the mind must be in control of the appetites, using the spirit to suppress these base urges.
Just as justice in the soul consists in the right relationship between these elements, so Plato believes that justice in a society consists in the proper relationship between people whose nature is primarily rational, those whose nature is primarily honor-driven, and those whose nature is primarily appetitive. Thus the rational people are placed in the ruling class to rule, the spirited people are placed in the warrior class to enforce the rule of reason, and the appetitive people, people who yearn for physical pleasures and material possessions, are placed in the lowest class to be ordered about and controlled by wiser individuals.
We’re surely all familiar with the feeling of forces, something like this, battling over our will as we decide between the right course of action and the easiest one. When Zira urges Cornelius to go public with evidence that will show the sacred scrolls to be “not worth their parchment,” his prime concern is the implications for his own appetitive desires: “We both have fine futures. Marriage. Stimulating careers. I’m up for a raise.” It is interesting that the last straw that finally drives Taylor into violent rebellion is likewise a threat to his appetitive life—Dr. Zaius is going to have him gelded. By this point, Taylor has already stoically endured the curtailing of his rational life, as he is left unable to communicate and confined without intellectual stimulation. He has also patiently suffered the subjugation of his honor, being reduced not even to a slave but to a mere animal to be gawked at in a cage and led around on a leash. But when the monkeys come for his nuts, he finally goes berserk and fights back—only the wound to his throat that renders him mute robs us of hearing Charlton Heston rage “Take your stinking paws off my balls, you damned dirty ape!”
However, Plato
’s analogy between justice in a soul and justice in a society fails. The rational elements of the soul are, by definition, completely rational. But even people of a rational nature have other strong elements to their nature too. Their reason can be swept aside by greed or pride or compassion or personal attachment, or any of the other temptations that ruin our best intentions. Plato believed that the rulers could avoid believing falsehoods or falling into vice because they would be dedicated to reason. The mere fact that they are philosophers would ensure that they will never be “money-loving, slavish, a boaster, or a coward” or in any way unreliable or unjust (lines 486b6–7).
Yet Planet of the Apes illustrates how easily even reason can become twisted in the service of vested interests. Dr. Honorius’s attempts at reasoning convince him that Taylor cannot reason at all, just because Taylor cannot recite the second article of the ape’s faith or offer the traditional justifications for the beliefs that all apes are created equal and that humans have no souls. Honorius’s conception of what reason dictates has become inseparable from the religious dogma on which ape society is founded. He appeals to “reason” even as he throws reason to the wind and falls back on holy law.
The temptation to be overcome by pride and to assume your own infallibility must surely be greatest when your rule is backed by divine sanction and your wisdom presented as being the wisdom of God. It is presumably the hubris of acting as spokesapes for God that drives the orangutans’ authoritarian approach to government. That same hubris can be found in Plato’s Republic. Even putting aside the fact that the rulers claim nature selected them to rule by putting gold in their souls, the very highest offices in government are only open to those who have had the experience of seeing through the ephemeral material world to the true, immaterial reality beyond it, where they apprehend perfection itself. As Plato puts it, they must be “compelled to lift up the radiant light of their souls to what itself provides light for everything . . . the good itself.” In theory, this is all achieved through the application of reason, but it has more of the character of mystical revelation than reasoned argument. Having a class of officially enlightened individuals in charge of government is a recipe for blind obstinacy. How do you convince someone that they’re wrong when they believe that they have glimpsed ultimate truth and you haven’t?
Planet of the Humans
Plato makes some insightful criticisms of democracy. Democracy is, as Plato recognized, government by people who are largely ignorant about matters related to government. In the modern US, few members of the public have a firm grasp of international history, economic theory, ecology, or military strategy; yet it is these people who ultimately determine whether the US supports the United Nations, whether taxes should be lowered or raised, what environmental regulations will be put into place, and whether the US should go to war.
Even if we assume that the electorate is perfectly rational, they still know almost nothing about the important issues on which they must decide. On the face of it, it looks like a crazy system. Yet democracy has the great advantage that when our leaders become too oppressive to bear, we have a mechanism for removing them from office that does not require sticking anybody with iron spears. Plato was too optimistic about the ability of a small group in power to rule without favoring their own interests, but it is a fact of life that people in power often become corrupted by greed or pride to the point that they need to be replaced.
Plato can be forgiven for not having observed how useful democracy can be for keeping the worst people out of power. We have two and a half thousand years more of history to look back on. In Plato’s day, democracy had been a novel experiment, and one in which the Athenian people used the power they were given to settle old political grudges and to squeeze Athens’s military allies for money by turning an agreement on international naval cooperation into a protection racket. Democracy is no guarantee of good conduct, and at that point in history, had yet to prove itself as a force for good.
Arguably, democracy has still not shown whether it will ultimately be a force for good. The grim prediction of Planet of the Apes is that human civilization will wipe itself from the world, leaving only roaming tribes of mute gatherers and a half-buried Statue of Liberty to mark that we were ever there. (What did the apes make of that half-buried statue? Was it an ancient human advertisement for torches or a memorial to a heroic arsonist?)
On the Planet of the Apes, the orangutans oppress the chimpanzees, but here on modern Earth it is the appetitive souls, those who hunger for wealth and material possessions, who hold power. Plato’s productive class provided the merchants in his perfect city, while the rulers, who have all political power, have no wealth. Yet wealth is political power everywhere that wealth exists and has been so for as long as wealth has existed. Plato recognized, to his dismay, that wealth rather than wisdom held sway in Athens. Likewise, in the modern world, politicians tend to be from wealthy families, and corporations donate billions of dollars to political parties to sway government policy. If making money makes you a chimpanzee, then in our own society, the chimpanzees are in charge. If we eventually find ourselves left like Taylor, standing on the beach and helplessly screaming “You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” they will have made monkeys of all of us.
11
From Twilight Zone to Forbidden Zone
LESLIE DALE FELDMAN
Fear and isolation. A rocky and desolate planet. Is it the Stone Age? Just as the planet is bare, with no cosmetic shield, and the rocks comprise a dramatic, stark tableau, animal nature is played out and shown in all its ugly reality. There is nothing but the primeval—here, nature rules. But it is not a forgiving and kind nature, the nature of Bambi and the woodland nymphs. This is a state where war lurks and there is no assurance of peace, where every creature is a potential enemy to every other creature, surviving only by its own strength and guile, where there is “no culture of the earth, no navigation, no building, no arts, no letters, and worst of all a state of continual fear and danger.”
In Six Months We’ll Be Running This Planet
The opening scene of Planet of the Apes? No. This is from Chapter 13 of Leviathan. Written in the seventeenth century by the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan describes the nature of humans, the origin of government, and what people are like in a “state of nature” where they have to fight for survival, punish the wicked, and in which true human nature is on display.
Humans, said Hobbes, are acquisitive, belligerent, competitive, and possessive. According to Hobbes, life in the state of nature is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Some time later, the Lawgiver said something eerily reminiscent of Hobbes: “Beware the beast Man, for his is the Devil’s spawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him.”
A rocky and desolate scene in 3978 that is eventually revealed to be a civilization blown back to the state of nature—this is where the Planet of the Apes (1968) begins. But at first Taylor, an astronaut and time-traveler played by Charlton Heston, simply does not know. He is carrying a Geiger counter to measure radiation. Are there intelligent beings here? Are they ready to act on their worst instincts? Are they belligerent? Taylor asks “Does man, . . . who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” Are these beings competitive and acquisitive? As one of the crew plants an American flag in the dirt, Taylor muses: “In six months we’ll be running this planet.”
We don’t know whether Rod Serling, who wrote the original script for Planet of the Apes, ever read Hobbes, but he demonstrates much of the same negative view of human nature in it as he did in other work, including The Twilight Zone where greedy people cheat each other, there’s no honor among thieves, and people are ready to believe the worst about their friends and neighbors—be they human or alien.
Fea
r, isolation, exploitation, and alienation are part of Serling’s worldview, which explains his preoccupation with nuclear annihilation. We have only to look at such classic Twilight Zone episodes as “People Are Alike All Over” to see aliens acting toward Earthlings as Earthlings act toward animals in a zoo. When you see something different you put it in a cage—but unlike in “People Are Alike All Over,” where Roddy McDowall was the Earthling in an alien zoo, this time he winds up on the other side of the cage as the primate Cornelius. Now it’s his turn to put someone else in a cage, his turn to be the master.
This is Serling’s view of human nature which, at times, is pessimistic but also, at times, optimistic. It represents an essential tension, a duality, in his thought that is demonstrated in The Twilight Zone and Planet of the Apes. “You thought life on Earth was meaningless—you despised people” Landon says to Taylor. But Taylor expresses the optimistic view that “somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man.” Both pessimist and optimist, Serling is the reluctant Hobbesian, or the hopeful pessimist.
The State of Nature
In Planet of the Apes, the state of nature is a state of war. As soon as Taylor and his two crew members land on the planet, and decide to take a swim, a war ensues. Their clothes are stolen and apes on horseback come with weapons and nets to scoop up and kill the natives, primitive humans, foraging for corn in the Apes’ Green Belt and considered inferior by the apes. This is the Hobbesian “war of all against all” where there is a fight for resources—but more about that later.