Ep. 122: A Complete and Total Shutdown on Celebrities
Young Heretics
Spencer Klavan
4.9 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2022
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We did it! The final installment of the Republic series is here. In this last and possibly most infamous book of his masterwork, Plato calls for a complete and total shutdown on artists until he figures out what the hell is going on. In this episode of Young Heretics, Spencer Klavan discusses Plato's challenge to art, and the ways we might grapple with it today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Alright, enough fooling around. It's high time we got around to exiling the artists. |
| 0:10.9 | I knew you've all been sitting around and thinking, yes, yes, the glory's a question of culture, |
| 0:15.7 | the canon, it's magnificent, the classical education, you never knew you were missing, |
| 0:20.0 | but you know what the real problem is, it's those artists. And I'm only half joking. I mean, |
| 0:25.5 | I think I thought as I was preparing for this episode, which is about Republic Book 10, |
| 0:32.0 | I was remembering that time when I think it was at the beginning of lockdown, you know, |
| 0:37.4 | when everybody was freaking out about COVID and authoritarianism and it was just nobody knew |
| 0:43.5 | what the heck was going on. And like a bunch of celebrities made a video, you guys remember this, |
| 0:49.4 | where they just spliced together each of them singing in like different keys, various pieces of |
| 0:55.6 | John Lennon's imagine, you know, imagine all the people. It was like kind of, it was bizarrely off-key |
| 1:02.3 | and also just like incredibly cringe. And it was delivered with the kind of solemnity that was like, |
| 1:08.1 | oh, yes, now, now the celebrities are here to make everything better. And in that moment, |
| 1:12.8 | I thought of Republic Book 10 because I think actually there's something to the self-importance |
| 1:20.1 | with which that video is delivered that gets at a lot of what Plato is talking about through |
| 1:25.1 | Socrates in this final book of the Republic. I've been alluding to it throughout this whole |
| 1:30.4 | series, the whole time we've been reading the Republic together, book by book. I've been saying, |
| 1:34.5 | and at some point we're going to have to get to this controversial famous controversial thing, |
| 1:37.8 | where he exiles the poets. He kicks the artists and the poets out of the Calibacy ideal city. |
| 1:42.6 | And we've gotten to some of it. We've dealt in books three and four with some of Plato's kind of |
| 1:48.6 | concerns about certain forms of art, right? Right? Art that depicts ignoble and on manly behavior |
| 1:55.4 | on the part of heroes and vicious behavior on the part of gods, right? But we haven't really gotten |
| 2:00.8 | right down to the root of his critique of Mimesis full stop. That is kind of representation |
... |
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