Plato and his revolutionary ideas about the family unit

Summary of Plato’s revised family structure for the Guardian class

In The Republic, Plato envisions a revised family structure for the Guardian class. In the beginning of Book V, Plato writes that ‘if the only difference apparent between them [men and women] is that the female bears and the male begets, we shall not admit that this is a difference relevant for our purpose’. Plato comes to the conclusion that although women are physically weaker, “many women… are better than a good many men at a good many things”. He explains that men and women share the same natural capacity to fulfill their purpose in The Republic: “both [men and women] can and both should follow the same range of occupations and perform the same functions”. He uses this argument to support his thesis: “If men and women are to lead the same lives, the family must be abolished”. Instead of the traditional family structure, Plato suggests a system of eugenic breeding. Mating festivals should be held among Guardians, where Rulers decide which couples should mate in order to breed ‘good’ citizens. No parent knows their child and vice versa. Children should be looked after in state nurseries, so as to not divert the attention of the biological parents from their purpose within the state. In this way, the Guardians are a single family. Parents should treat all those children born 7–10 months after conception as their own to prevent incest. However, Plato writes that there needs no rule to prevent brothers and sisters from ‘cohabiting’.

The Rulers also engage in a sort of ‘noble lie’. They convince the public that such mating festivals are a lottery. In this way, those citizens who are not selected will not feel betrayed nor grow distrustworthy of the Rulers class. To ensure that the offspring are of the highest quality, children of the ‘better’ Guardians are kept in a separate nursery from the ‘inferior’ Guardians. Plato suggests that ‘defective’ offspring should be “quietly and secretly disposed of”. If intercourse during festivals, not authorized by the Rulers, results in childbirth, the child would be regarded as a bastard, outcast from society. Children born outside of the mating periods indicated by the Rulers will be ‘disposed of’ as a ‘creature that must not be reared’. In summary, Plato believes “It would be a sin either for mating or for anything else in a truly happy society to take place without regulation”.

The strengths and weaknesses of putting this into practice…

There are some positives to Plato’s revised family structure. To foster a non-nuclear family is intuitive. It ignores the emotion and the input of the senses that can be illogical. To obtain the ‘ideal’ state, it must come as close as possible to The Form of Justice and The Form of the Good. It is valuable to rely on rationalism as opposed to empiricism as forms are unchanging and closer to the ideal ‘truth’.

A modern interpretation of Plato’s thesis is described in a book written by Sophie Lewis named Abolish The Family; A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. Lewis encourages the thought that the traditional family unit is unnecessary, and in fact can be severely flawed in many if not most cases: “We know that the nuclear private household is where the overwhelming majority of abuse can happen.” Lewis uses the concept of a surrogate — a mother who is artificially impregnated — to demonstrate that: “babies belong to anyone… challenge the idea that the product of gestational labor gets transferred as property to a set of people”. Nonetheless, Lewis understands that: “the private household and the family are where many of us get the vast majority of nourishment and solace”, and so she clarifies that “abolition isn’t just absence… Abolition is figuring out how to work with people to make something rather than figuring out how to erase something.” We focus on mending relationships between child and parent, but we don’t focus enough on simply caring for one another. We tend to rely on these familial connections because they provide us with a sense of safety and security, but if the goal is ‘utopia’ then it makes more sense to connect with those who are more equipped to care for us. For the good of the whole, eliminating the negatives that come with a traditional family is more valuable than maintaining the family unit for the sake of tradition and path of least resistance.

There are several flaws in implementing both Plato and Lewis’ revised structure. For one, Plato

assumes that every person has one purpose and is willing to devote the rest of their lives to that niche, and bases his system on this assumption. Yet, in order for this assumption to be true, in order for the ideal state to be attained when it comes to familial structure, absolutely perfect individuals must exist. Individuals must be absolutely obedient to the wills of the state, and fulfill their role to the maximum extent. In practice, this would never be possible. As humans in our current state of evolution, we require the material world to give ideas context and access the realm of the forms. The majority of people live far below the Divided Line — relying on senses/emotions to fulfill their shallow opinions. Almost nothing is a completely mental endeavour. As was the problem with Plato’s 3-class system in Book IV, in theory, the revised family structure is logical in theory, but in reality, the individual suffers and the happiness of each class is limited. In order to achieve such a family structure, government intervention would be required, which would require a total revolution — shifting from a regime of capitalism and democracy to extreme marxism and authoritarianism. This revolution, in practice, would result in more harm than good, as the individual would lose basic rights and freedoms. Specifically in our modern Western society, one obsessed with the virtues of connectedness, unity and self-love into one that is essentially dystopian, reflecting many of the values anticipated in George Orwell’s 1984. We are too entrenched in the material to forgo traditional connection altogether, as characterized by Chuck Palahniuk: “We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like”. The current population would be very unwilling to destroy the few relationships of love they have left, in the support of a political system that has never once succeeded throughout history.

Furthermore, by venturing beyond the modern Western-based perspective, and instead relying on a more East Asian perspective (where Buddhism is popular, and culturally, the mind is prioritized over the physical), this system would still have its flaws. In Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, he writes: “When family ties are disturbed, devoted children arise”. While in some cases this may appear to be true — the fact that a lack of traditional social connection allows individuals to surpass their family and strive for greatness — in most situations this is absolutely not the case. A lack of social connection often leads to depression and other mental health issues. This quote should be used to help those with familial issues cope and strive for greatness, rather than as a ‘one size fits all’ model to enforce on those with existing and positive connections. From a psychological perspective, “all humans… share the need for a close social connection… the cravings for social intimacy are as powerful and compelling as those of food or drugs of abuse, such as heroin”. As much as systems can attempt to replace familial connections with ‘artificial’ connections, humans crave intimacy. Until there exists a system that perfectly replaces familial connections with ‘artificial’ connections, most individuals will simply be left craving much-need intimacy — causing a mass epidemic of sadness and a lack of fulfillment.