lol 1st

Ah, my debut to the blogoblogosphereoblog, and with a title that rather fails to capture the essence of what this blog will (probably...possibly...hopefully...) turn out to be: just a collection of my thoughts on the stuff I encounter during the day, mostly at school.

For those (read: nobody) who are wondering what the title is about, nonrandom mating is one of the processes by which the allele frequencies within the gene pool of a population of organisms can be made to change over time aka evolve. Those of you with enough biological sense about you may recall the conditions for Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Those without are probably sitting there with their eyes beginning to glaze over, their hands and fingers ready to whisk their eyes away from this place of mine.

Anyway. Substance. One of the things I plan on using this blog for is a place to post my reactions to the stuff I have to read as part of my schoolwork, and all you lucky folks reading this will have the pleasure of reading the first such exercise. The first reading is for my Ancient Philosophy class: Book IV of Plato's Republic, found between pages 206 and 217 in The Longman Standard History of Ancient Philosophy, 2006 edition.

First observation: Having not read the previous books in the Republic makes understanding it a bit tougher. But Plato (or rather, Plato writing as Socrates) seems to be arguing that the guardians of a community need to do their job even if it doesn't make them 'happy', because by doing so it makes the community better as a whole. By 'happy', I mean the sort of happiness that is brought about by a life of luxury and leisure, which is exactly the sort of life you wouldn't think a guardian would have. Definitely seems more of a 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few' type of thing.

Second observation: These 'guardians' are apparently supposed to be the rulers of this fictional society, which fits with what I remember being discussed in the last class session. Basically, to prevent corruption and greed and such, the rulers don't get access to luxuries like gold and silver, which ties in with my first observation.

Third observation: Since, according to Plato/Socrates the 'guardians' are the only section of the society that can be said to possess true wisdom, I'm going to predict that they will also be the only ones to possess the other three values that he is looking for (courage, self-discipline, and morality/justice).

Fourth observation: The definition of 'courage' seems a tad odd to me. Maybe it's just the wording? It seems to be defined as something along the lines of "knowing what to fear at all times, regardless of what happens", although I may be off. having typed that out, I think I understand it better.

Fifth observation: Looks like I was wrong, self-discipline is a characteristic of the entire fictional community. Actually, it looks like I was wrong about courage, too: I confused the guardians and the militia. And morality/justice is another community-spanner, it appears...

Sixth observation: It seems that it is disastrous for a community if those in the military class try to enter the ruling class, or the working class tries to enter the military class, and such...on one hand, I agree that the military shouldn't be running the government, but I don't really get the other stuff...well, unless you look at it using something like big business as a proxy for the working class, then it makes more sense...so, is he advocating free market or socialism?

Seventh observation: I can sort of see the connection between wisdom/courage/self-discipline and rationality/passion/desire, but at the same time I feel that desire gets the short end of the stick in the analogy, as self-discipline, rather than being an extension of it, is basically the combined effort of rationality and passion to tame it. At the same time, however, I can't really think of a better way to explain individual morality using Plato's method used in this book.

With that bit out of the way, I want to go back to the free market vs socialism question. On one hand, I want to say that having the ruling class not interfere with the working class would naturally lead to a free market, but the more I think, the more I think that isn't the case. After all, is it not the job of the ruling class, the guardians, to protect the community and its laws? Would that not also include protections against those in the working class who wish to exploit the community for its own gains? Perhaps the proper way to look at the government-business relationship is that neither should explicitly try to run/influence the other. This obviously makes lobbyists and other who try to use their wealth to influence governmental policy that bad guys. It also means, I believe, that the rulers shouldn't be the ones making money in the business world. But that's just what I think.