What Went Wrong? Platos Allegory of the Cave vs. Cartoon Man from Nina Parker Below are two different stories about the nature of human beings. One is a 2,000-year-old story--retold by Plato as the Allegory of the Cave. The other is a contemporary cartoon animation by Steve Cutts called simply Man. Both offer explanations that we can apply to the burning question of our age: How has it happened that our own species, homo sapiens, is destroying life on earth? In Man, a representative cartoon human is depicted as vicious, self-absorbed to the point of pathology, and gleefully cruel. He strides through the world committing atrocity after atrocity against the natural world--boiling chickens alive, slashing the legs off living animals, and mowing down forests--without a blink of remorse. And at the end, he sits crowned and smiling, smoking a cigar, atop the pile of rubble he has created out of the living planet. Platos Allegory of the Cave offers an alternate narrative, although the story is still disturbing. Slaves chained in a dark cave from birth are forced to watch shadowplay on the wall opposite them, and they mistake the shadows of people and objects passing behind them for Reality. When one of them escapes and gets outside the cave, he discovers for the first time the actual animals, people and objects that were creating the shadows. Overwhelmed by his discovery, he rushes back to the cave to tell the others--but what he is trying to tell them is beyond their comprehension. They dont believe him. Both cartoon man and Platos slave are morally blameless--cartoon man because he is apparently just acting out his intrinsically vicious and disgusting nature--the slave because for his entire life he was chained in the dark and deluded. So of these two narratives, which version is closer to our own situation? If we assume we are like cartoon man, we risk despising ourselves for our innate mindless brutality--even though few of us are remotely like cartoon man in this way. And in any case, how could we even recognize this behavior as vicious unless we could apprehend something better--BE something better? On the other hand, if we identify with the slave, we admit to being blind and deluded about the reality of our situation--but that is something that is not intrinsic. THAT can be remedied. I suggest that we are committing ecocide not because we are like cartoon man, inherently programed to be exploitive, brutal and destructive, but because we have been deluded in much the same way as Platos slaves. We have been born and reared in darkness by the forces of Industrial Civilization, and we have participated in this culture of death through blindness and ignorance. We have been duped for a long, long time. Some of us are waking up. And this is what we can tell the children. heres the cartoon video by Steve Cutts entitled Man: https://facebook/video.php?v=513013392131663&set=vb.100002690208589&type=2&theater Heres a claymation version of Platos Allegory of the Cave: https://youtube/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 22:38:19 +0000
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