But science is only a part of knowledge so the leaders of the
knowledge industry should be the preachers, which is kind of elitist.
This would make churches like colleges, but if you think about it most
of these preachers are highly educated. Actually your post seems like
an argument for a bias in which brainch of knowledge should be more
important to all the others. There are also many kinds of science, how
do we decide which kind of science shall be preached at the people?
--------------------------------
On Plato
We must begin by "sending out into the country all the inhabitants of
the city who are more than ten years old, and by taking possession of
the children, who will thus be protected from the habits of their
parents" (540). We cannot build Utopia with young people corrupted at
every turn by the example of their elders. We must start, so far as we
can, with a clean slate. It is quite possible that some enlightened
ruler will empower us to make such a beginning with some part or
colony of his realm. (One ruler did, as we shall see.) In any case we
must give to every child, and from the outset, full equality of
educational opportunity; there is no telling where the light of talent
or genius will break out; we must seek it impartially everywhere, in
every rank and race. The first turn on our road is universal
education.
For the first ten years of life, education shall be predominantly
physical; every school is to have a gymnasium and a playground; play
and sport are to be the entire curriculum; and in this first decade
such health will be stored up as will make all medicine unnecessary.
"To require the help of medicine because by lives of indolence and
luxury men have filled themselves like pools with waters and
winds, . . . flatulence and catarrh-is not this a disgrace? . . . Our
present system of medicine may be said to educate diseases," to draw
them out into a long existence, rather than to cure them. But this is
an absurdity of the idle rich. "When a carpenter is ill he asks the
physician for a rough and ready remedy-an emetic, or a purge, or
cautery, or the knife. And if anyone tells him that he must go through
a course of dietetics, and swathe and swaddle his head, and all that
sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and
that he sees no good in a life that is spent in nursing his disease to
the neglect of his ordinary calling; and therefore, saying good-bye to
this sort of physicians, he resumes his customary diet, and either
gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his constitution
fails, he dies and has done with it" (405-6). We cannot afford to have
a nation of malingerers and invalids; Utopia must begin in the body of
man.
But mere athletics and gymnastics would make a man too one-sided. "How
shall we find a gentle nature which has also great courage?-for they
seem to be inconsistent with each other" (375). We do not want a
nation of prize-fighters and weight-lifters. Perhaps music will solve
our problem: through music the soul learns harmony and rhythm, and
even a disposition to justice; for "can he who is harmoniously
constituted ever be unjust? Is not this, Glaucon, why musical training
is so powerful, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the
secret places of the soul, bearing grace in their movements and making
the soul graceful?" (401; Protagoras, 326). Music moulds character,
and therefore shares in determining social and political issues.
"Damon tells me-and I can quite believe it-that when modes of music
change, the fundamental laws of the state change with them." [Of.
Daniel O'Connell: "Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not
who makes its laws."]
Music is valuable not only because it brings refinement of feeling and
character, but also because it preserves and restores health. There
are some diseases which can be treated only through the mind
(Charmides, 157) : so the Corybantic priest treated hysterical women
with wild pipe music, which excited them to dance and dance till they
fell to the ground exhausted, and went to sleep; when they awoke they
were cured. The unconscious sources of human thought are touched and
soothed by such methods; and it is in these substrata of behavior and
feeling that genius sinks its roots. "No man when conscious attains to
true or inspired intuition, but rather when the power of intellect is
fettered in sleep or by disease or dementia"; the prophet (manlike) or
genius is akin to the madman (manike) (Phcedrus, 244).
...With minds so freely growing, and bodies made strong by sport and
outdoor life of every kind, our ideal state would have a firm
psychological and physiological base broad enough for every
possibility and every development. But a moral basis must be provided
as well; the members of the community must make a unity; they must
learn that they are members of one another; that they owe to one
another certain amenities and obligations. Now since men are by nature
acquisitive, jealous, combative, and erotic, how shall we persuade
them to behave themselves? By the policeman's omnipresent club? It is
a brutal method, costly and irritating. There is a better way, and
that is by lending to the moral requirements of the community the
sanction of supernatural authority. We must have a religion.
The Story of Philosophy
The Lives and Opinions of the Great Philosophers of the Western World
by
WILL DURANT
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671739166/
