List of Benedict

This level of Bible-thumping always holds me at bay from a text, but Benedict says a bunch of things I can get down with. The whole premise of the text is that Benedict is establishing "a school for the service of the Lord," and the first thing he does after confirming this objective is distinguish the different kinds of monks, half of which are absolute trash, so that's kind of a funny way to start. 

One of the early chapters that was poignant in my opinion was Chapter 4: What Are the Instruments of Good Works. This chapter is a thorough list of ways to behave in accordance with the will of God. It immediately reminded me of my class on the Buddha, because the Buddhists are obsessed with lists. The Buddha's lists are definitely more concise; many of Benedict's bullet points same nearly identical things.     

Even conceding the redundancies, and approaching the text without a real religious backdrop, many of these decrees are still worthy endeavors. For example: "not to become attached to pleasures," "to keep constant guard over the actions of one's life," and "then not to murder" are all pretty decent tid-bits of advice. Some, though, are a little more heavy handed, like "to love fasting" and to attribute to God, and not to self, whatever good one sees in oneself... but to recognize that always that the evil is one's own doing, and to impute it to oneself."

I do believe it is important to bear responsibility for one's own shortcomings in life, considering we all have a handful, but I do not think that it is healthy to internalize everything bad you do and externalize everything good.       

Establishing a Utopia

One interesting aspect of Plato's Republic that is unlike other well-known Utopias like Omelas, Utopia as Thomas More invented it, and others is that Plato sets out to illuminate the process of imagining a Utopia, rather than simply placing his characters and reader within one that the author has already fleshed out. This is one of Plato's greatest authorial strengths, because we as readers never know what Plato thinks.

The characters in this dialogue, Socrates, Glaucon and Adeimantus, decide that in order to determine what is truly just in a man, they must discover what justice is in a city. In this sense, Plato opens the door to an enormous overarching irony, when by the end Socrates has banished the poets from the city based on the postulate that they are furthest from the truth, meanwhile the bedrock of the entire text is founded on an extended metaphor.

More importantly for our purposes, the three parties involved spend Book II raising a city up from scratch. First they begin with only a core crucial craftsmen, but eventually the city expands more and more. This expansion is based on the fact that each person is best suited to be well trained at one specific task, and that they should be allowed to focus all of their energy on their specialized craft, so that they are capable of performing it as best as possible. However, this also leads to the invention of currency, because each person needs to be able to trade their skills for food, unless they are a farmer, in which case they need everything else.

When Socrates believes he is finished describing the just city, Glaucon famously rebuttals that it sounds like a city fit for pigs. Socrates then proceeds to describe the luxurious city, wherein the development of justice and injustice should become more transparent. I think one take-away from this argument is that injustice, or to put it another way, the need for justice, comes from a surplus of goods which allows people to live luxuriously and therefore want more than they need. Surely this is the origin of a great many crimes and acts of injustice.    

Congress

I think Capitalism is behind a lot of America's current struggles but I don't really have the socialist vocabulary to articulate exactly what to do and how to do it. That being said, I think that America would become a much more virtuous place if the people in charge (i.e. Congress) were not so apt to ignore the intentions of the vast majority in order to acquiesce the insanely wealthy sliver of the population who financially contribute to their campaigns and ask for favors in return. The Affordable Care Act, for example, could have been improved or tweaked if the issue was the issue average Americans were facing with it. Instead, the most significant problem posed was the tax breaks that the wealthiest 200 families in America would receive if it were repealed.

Therefore, my solution is to send Congress toward the medium of American culture, meaning that their salaries and campaign funds would be shredded. I think Congress should make the minimum wage, actually, and that their health care should match that of their constituents. This would ensure that the minimum wage and the most basic health care are both capable of providing living conditions, because the people in charge of operating it would be utilizing it. Furthermore, if Congress made the minimum, it would inspire more people to be engaged for its own sake, rather than running simply out of greed and potential profit, which is exactly (one) of the things our country needs right now.