Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (22 page)

Plato's blindness to the corrupting influence of power was inflicted in part by his desire for a unified theory of justice that described both what it is for a society to be just and what it is for a person to be just. Plato claimed that a person's soul has three parts: reason, which supplies our rational abilities; spirit, which craves honor and victory; and appetite, which supplies our non-intellectual desires—our cravings for things like food, alcohol, sex, and material possessions. A person is just when these parts of the soul stand in the right relationship to one another. The rational part of the mind must be in control of the appetites, using the spirit to suppress these base urges.

Just as justice in the soul consists in the right relationship between these elements, so Plato believes that justice in a society consists in the proper relationship between people whose nature is primarily rational, those whose nature is primarily honor-driven, and those whose nature is primarily appetitive. Thus the rational people are placed in the ruling class to rule, the spirited people are placed in the warrior class to enforce the rule of reason, and the appetitive people, people who yearn for physical pleasures and material possessions, are placed in the lowest class to be ordered about and controlled by wiser individuals.

We're surely all familiar with the feeling of forces, something like this, battling over our will as we decide between the right course of action and the easiest one. When Zira urges Cornelius to go public with evidence that will show the sacred scrolls to be “not worth their parchment,” his prime concern is the implications for his own appetitive desires: “We both have fine futures. Marriage. Stimulating careers. I'm up for a raise.” It is interesting that the last straw that finally drives Taylor into violent rebellion is likewise a threat to his appetitive life—Dr. Zaius is going to have him gelded. By this point, Taylor has already stoically endured the curtailing of his rational life, as he is left unable to communicate and confined without intellectual stimulation. He has also patiently suffered the subjugation of his honor, being reduced not even to a slave but to a mere animal to be gawked at in a cage and led around on a leash. But when the monkeys come for his nuts, he finally goes berserk and fights back—only the wound to his throat that renders him mute robs us of hearing Charlton Heston rage “Take your stinking paws off
my balls
, you damned dirty ape!”

However, Plato's analogy between justice in a soul and justice in a society fails. The rational elements of the soul are, by definition, completely rational. But even people of a rational nature have other strong elements to their nature too. Their reason can be swept aside by greed or pride or compassion or personal attachment, or any of the other temptations that ruin our best intentions. Plato believed that the rulers could avoid believing falsehoods or falling into vice because they would be dedicated to reason. The mere fact that they are philosophers would ensure that they will never be “money-loving, slavish, a boaster, or a coward” or in any way unreliable or unjust (lines 486b6–7).

Yet
Planet of the Apes
illustrates how easily even reason can become twisted in the service of vested interests. Dr. Honorius's attempts at reasoning convince him that Taylor cannot reason at all, just because Taylor cannot recite the second article of the ape's faith or offer the traditional justifications for the beliefs that all apes are created equal and that humans have no souls. Honorius's conception of what reason dictates has become inseparable from the religious dogma on which ape society is founded. He appeals to “reason” even as he throws reason to the wind and falls back on holy law.

The temptation to be overcome by pride and to assume your own infallibility must surely be greatest when your rule is backed by divine sanction and your wisdom presented as being the wisdom of God. It is presumably the hubris of acting as spokesapes for God that drives the orangutans' authoritarian approach to government. That same hubris can be found in Plato's
Republic
. Even putting aside the fact that the rulers claim nature selected them to rule by putting gold in their souls, the very highest offices in government are only open to those who have had the experience of seeing through the ephemeral material world to the true, immaterial reality beyond it, where they apprehend perfection itself. As Plato puts it, they must be “compelled to lift up the radiant light of their souls to what itself provides light for everything . . . the good itself.” In theory, this is all achieved through the application of reason, but it has more of the character of mystical revelation than reasoned argument. Having a class of officially enlightened individuals in charge of government is a recipe for blind obstinacy. How do you convince someone that they're wrong when they believe that they have glimpsed ultimate truth and you haven't?

Plato makes some insightful criticisms of democracy. Democracy is, as Plato recognized, government by people who are largely ignorant about matters related to government. In the modern US, few members of the public have a firm grasp of international history, economic theory, ecology, or military strategy; yet it is these people who ultimately determine whether the US supports the United Nations, whether taxes should be lowered or raised, what environmental regulations will be put into place, and whether the US should go to war.

Even if we assume that the electorate is perfectly rational, they still know almost nothing about the important issues on which they must decide. On the face of it, it looks like a crazy system. Yet democracy has the great advantage that when our leaders become too oppressive to bear, we have a mechanism for removing them from office that does not require sticking anybody with iron spears. Plato was too optimistic about the ability of a small group in power to rule without favoring their
own interests, but it is a fact of life that people in power often become corrupted by greed or pride to the point that they need to be replaced.

Plato can be forgiven for not having observed how useful democracy can be for keeping the worst people out of power. We have two and a half thousand years more of history to look back on. In Plato's day, democracy had been a novel experiment, and one in which the Athenian people used the power they were given to settle old political grudges and to squeeze Athens's military allies for money by turning an agreement on international naval cooperation into a protection racket. Democracy is no guarantee of good conduct, and at that point in history, had yet to prove itself as a force for good.

Arguably, democracy has
still
not shown whether it will ultimately be a force for good. The grim prediction of
Planet of the Apes
is that human civilization will wipe itself from the world, leaving only roaming tribes of mute gatherers and a half-buried Statue of Liberty to mark that we were ever there. (What did the apes make of that half-buried statue? Was it an ancient human advertisement for torches or a memorial to a heroic arsonist?)

On the Planet of the Apes, the orangutans oppress the chimpanzees, but here on modern Earth it is the appetitive souls, those who hunger for wealth and material possessions, who hold power. Plato's productive class provided the merchants in his perfect city, while the rulers, who have all political power, have no wealth. Yet wealth is political power everywhere that wealth exists and has been so for as long as wealth has existed. Plato recognized, to his dismay, that wealth rather than wisdom held sway in Athens. Likewise, in the modern world, politicians tend to be from wealthy families, and corporations donate billions of dollars to political parties to sway government policy. If making money makes you a chimpanzee, then in our own society, the chimpanzees are in charge. If we eventually find ourselves left like Taylor, standing on the beach and helplessly screaming “You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” they will have made monkeys of all of us.

L
ESLIE
D
ALE
F
ELDMAN

F
ear and isolation. A rocky and desolate planet. Is it the Stone Age? Just as the planet is bare, with no cosmetic shield, and the rocks comprise a dramatic, stark tableau, animal nature is played out and shown in all its ugly reality. There is nothing but the primeval—here, nature rules. But it is not a forgiving and kind nature, the nature of Bambi and the woodland nymphs. This is a state where war lurks and there is no assurance of peace, where every creature is a potential enemy to every other creature, surviving only by its own strength and guile, where there is “no culture of the earth, no navigation, no building, no arts, no letters, and worst of all a state of continual fear and danger.”

The opening scene of
Planet of the Apes
? No. This is from
Chapter 13
of
Leviathan
. Written in the seventeenth century by the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
describes the nature of humans, the origin of government, and what people are like in a “state of nature” where they have to fight for survival, punish the wicked, and in which true human nature is on display.

Humans, said Hobbes, are acquisitive, belligerent, competitive, and possessive. According to Hobbes, life in the state of nature is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Some time later, the Lawgiver said something eerily reminiscent of Hobbes: “Beware the beast Man, for his is the Devil's spawn.
Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him.”

A rocky and desolate scene in 3978 that is eventually revealed to be a civilization blown back to the state of nature—this is where the
Planet of the Apes
(1968) begins. But at first Taylor, an astronaut and time-traveler played by Charlton Heston, simply does not know. He is carrying a Geiger counter to measure radiation. Are there intelligent beings here? Are they ready to act on their worst instincts? Are they belligerent? Taylor asks “Does man, . . . who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” Are these beings competitive and acquisitive? As one of the crew plants an American flag in the dirt, Taylor muses: “In six months we'll be running this planet.”

We don't know whether Rod Serling, who wrote the original script for
Planet of the Apes
, ever read Hobbes, but he demonstrates much of the same negative view of human nature in it as he did in other work, including
The Twilight Zone
where greedy people cheat each other, there's no honor among thieves, and people are ready to believe the worst about their friends and neighbors—be they human or alien.

Fear, isolation, exploitation, and alienation are part of Serling's worldview, which explains his preoccupation with nuclear annihilation. We have only to look at such classic
Twilight Zone
episodes as “People Are Alike All Over” to see aliens acting toward Earthlings as Earthlings act toward animals in a zoo. When you see something different you put it in a cage—but unlike in “People Are Alike All Over,” where Roddy McDowall was the Earthling in an alien zoo, this time he winds up on the other side of the cage as the primate Cornelius. Now it's his turn to put someone else in a cage, his turn to be the master.

This is Serling's view of human nature which, at times, is pessimistic but also, at times, optimistic. It represents an essential tension, a duality, in his thought that is demonstrated in
The Twilight Zone
and
Planet of the Apes
. “You thought life on Earth was meaningless—you despised people” Landon says to Taylor. But Taylor expresses the optimistic view that “somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man.” Both pessimist and optimist, Serling is the reluctant Hobbesian, or the hopeful pessimist.

In
Planet of the Apes
, the state of nature is a state of war. As soon as Taylor and his two crew members land on the planet, and decide to take a swim, a war ensues. Their clothes are stolen and apes on horseback come with weapons and nets to scoop up and kill the natives, primitive humans, foraging for corn in the Apes' Green Belt and considered inferior by the apes. This is the Hobbesian “war of all against all” where there is a fight for resources—but more about that later.

In order to determine the origin of government Thomas Hobbes, a social contract theorist, imagined a so-called state of nature, a time before humans invented government. The purpose of the state of nature concept for the social contract theorists was twofold: to figure out how humans would act if there were no government or man-made laws, and to hypothesize the origin of government which they call the social contract. For instance, if humans were peacemakers and got along well, there would be less need for laws than if they were belligerent, competitive, and acquisitive.

But Hobbes said that if humans were acquisitive and belligerent in the state of nature then that would demonstrate their need for a government to rein in their belligerent and acquisitive impulses—that is, punish those who commit crimes. As Julius says of humans “they're natural born thieves, aren't they?” Dr. Zaius says man “is a warlike creature who gives battle to everything around him” and calls Taylor a killer.

A naturally born thieving race would require more laws and greater restrictions placed upon it by government than a naturally born altruistic race. As Plato noted in the story of the Ring of Gyges from
The Republic
: man only does right under compulsion; if two men, the “just” and the “unjust” were given a ring that made them invisible both the “just” and the “unjust” would make nefarious use of it. Therefore, according to Plato and Hobbes there are no “just” men, only those who act on the natural impulses of greed, belligerence, and fear.