By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

If Plato were alive today, would he be a member of the Moral Majority, or the ACLU?

Plato scholar Myles Burnyeat has no intention of answering that question, but his thought-provoking series of lectures may get listeners wondering which of these organizations the ancient Greek thinker would have been more likely to sympathize with.

Burnyeat, senior research fellow in philosophy, All Souls College, Oxford University, is presenting this year's Tanner Lectures on Human Values. His two-part talk is titled "Culture and Society in Plato's Republic." Burnyeat gave the first lecture, "Couches, Song and Civic Tradition," on Wednesday. The concluding lecture, "Art and the Menace of Mimesis," will be presented today.

In his opening lecture, Burnyeat introduced The Republic, arguably Plato's most influential and challenging dialogue, by placing it solidly in the context of fourth century B.C. Athens, while at the same time relating its concerns to issues of censorship, free speech, and the debasement of culture that trouble us today.

Plato's object in The Republic was to sketch the outlines of an ideal society, one whose institutions would ensure the formation of good citizens. Plato considered the arts (poetry, music, drama, sculpture, painting, as well as the decorative arts) to be a particularly influential factor in this process -- so much so that the vigilant government of his ideal society would continually monitor both their style and content.

Plato believed that the influence of the arts is gradual and pervasive, subtly altering the ideas and attitudes of the people exposed to them. In order to find comparably powerful influences in our own society, Burnyeat said, we must look, not to the arts that Plato enumerated, which have become elite pursuits, but to the more ubiquitous mass media, such as television, radio, movies, popular music, and advertising.

Contemporary discussions of the influence of mass media tend to dwell on direct cause and effect relationships (i.e., can violent movies be proved to cause greater violence in society?), but Plato, Burnyeat said, had a more sophisticated view.

"We should think rather of a continuing interaction over time, as in a marriage, where each party is influenced by the other. In ways neither need be aware of, each is gradually adjusting to the other's expectations while at the same time each is gradually changing what the other's expectations are."

Plato's belief that art wields this powerful and pervasive influence persuaded him to take a step that would be highly controversial in our society and, if anything, even more so in his own -- namely, the banishment from his ideal republic of works by the greatest poets and playwrights of his age: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes.

This radical act of censorship was part of Plato's plan for reforming the total culture of his day. Just how the plan was to be carried out, and its implications for today's social issues, will be the subject of Burnyeat's second lecture, to be delivered at 5 p.m. today in Lowell Lecture Hall.

But in an interview, Burnyeat cautioned listeners not to expect a prescription for society's ills based on an updating of Plato's revolutionary recommendations.

"I want to provoke thought," he said. "I don't have the answer. Of course we reject Plato's solution, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned with the problem."

Burnyeat said that he has been engaged with the issues that Plato treats in The Republic for most of his career. In this respect, he is not alone, since, as he pointed out, the work has been a major influence worldwide.

"Plato is one of the most read philosophers in the world today. He's part of everyone's philosophical education, and The Republic is Plato's number one work. The Republic is read not only in Europe, but also in Asia, Africa, North and South America. You might say the sun never sets on the reading of Plato."

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a nonprofit corporation administered at the University of Utah. It is funded by an endowment and other gifts received by the University of Utah from Obert Clark Tanner and Grace Adams Tanner.

At the request of a founding trustee of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, the lectures are dedicated to the memory of Clarence Irving Lewis '06, PhD '10, who served on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1920 to 1953.

Administered by the Office of the President, the series is designed to advance scholarly and scientific learning in the field of human values, a term which embraces the entire range of moral, artistic, intellectual, and spiritual values, both individual and social.