Socrates Censorship Depicted In Plato's The Republic

In The Republic, Plato creates a dialogue of Socrates, in which he seeks to uncover truths about what constitutes justice in an ideal society. In this version of an ideal society, Socrates decides there must be a censorship of anything deemed inappropriate or unwholesome. Although it is superficially reasonable to protect the populace from unseemly content in religious myths, literature, and music, it is impossible to create an ideal society based on ignorance. The most prominent of Socrates’ censorships was his censorship of stories about Greek religious myths. Many of these myths contain strange and horrific behavior by the gods themselves. He mentions the story of Cronus, who brutally killed his own father, and “the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him” (4479). Socrates believed that in the ideal state, this story of disobedience should be hidden because it will encourage bad children not to worry about being bad, because they will “only be following the example of the first and greatest among the gods” (4462). Socrates also thought people would use these stories to explain their own crimes “for everyone will begin to excuse his own vice when he …show more content…
It cannot work for censoring tales of the gods because it either is not necessary, if gods are good, or would deceive people as to the true nature of their gods. It cannot work in literature because it would keep people from understanding crucial parts of their own culture Greek culture and history that were deemed inappropriate. Finally, it cannot work in music because people hate being told what to do, especially when music is a natural expression. Socrates’ ideas censorship are flawed, because by censoring the myths and tales, the culture would become one of ignorant dullness, which would not be an ideal