Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (21 page)

The chimpanzees correspond to Plato's producing class. Like Plato's producers, they seem to form the bulk of the population on the Planet of the Apes—most of the citizens we see milling around town or gathering in angry fruit-hurling mobs are chimps. They also seem to do most of the work that doesn't boil down to administration or fighting. The chimpanzees supply society's doctors, like Zira and Galen; and its merchants, like the chimps we see working in stalls selling clothing, fabric, and fruit; and society's menial labor, like the chimps we see sweeping around the marketplace. While we are never shown who was growing the crops that the humans were raiding when Taylor first arrived, it seems safe to assume that it was hardworking chimp farmers in green overalls.

Significantly, it is the chimpanzee producers,
not
the orangutan rulers and arbiters of truth, who provide the scientists. Plato makes no special provision for scientists in the
Republic
. Living in the fourth century B.C.E., he had no conception of the possibility of scientific and technological progress as we understand it. He did believe that humanity could obtain understanding about the universe, but thought that this could only be achieved by philosophers using pure reason. Perhaps Plato would consign scientists to the producing class, which includes the doctors, craftspeople, navigators, architects, shipbuilders, and all other individuals with specialized practical knowledge. Or perhaps Plato would draw scientists from the ranks of the philosopher rulers, entrusting the search for truth to those who are supposed to love truth above all. In any case, on the Planet of the Apes, it's the chimps, at the bottom of ape society, who inherit science. It's chimps who work in the laboratories and
chimp parents who take their little monkeys out to the museum to see the zoological exhibits about humans.

In Plato's ideal city, the rulers were to be the champions of truth, even though they also deceived the people in the interests of maintaining social harmony. As philosophers, their pursuit of the truth was to be their ultimate goal and desire, with their understanding of the truth guaranteeing the wisdom of their rule. On the Planet of the Apes, it is curious chimpanzee scientists like Dr. Zira and Dr. Cornelius who are the champions of truth, casting off religious dogma to ferret out reality. The orangutans are champions only of falsehood; their primary function is to prevent the truth from ever being known.

The orangutans may not respect the chimpanzees, but just as Plato's rulers understood the need for the producing class, so the orangutans appreciate the importance of the chimpanzee's scientific work. Zira explains that her research into the human brain is so generously funded because “Dr. Zaius realizes our work has value. The foundations of scientific brain surgery are being laid right here in studies of cerebral functions of these animals.” Even orangutans can develop brain tumors. Plato likewise recognized that doctors have a vital role to play in his city. Even philosophers can get a bellyache.

However, all scientific research on the Planet of the Apes requires the approval of the National Academy, an organization of orangutans charged with suppressing inconvenient truths. Dr. Zaius is quick to stifle any research that threatens to contradict the written holy law. He sneers at the archaeologist Cornelius, dismissing him as “the young ape with a shovel” and warns him “as you dig for artifacts, make sure that you don't bury your reputation.” Later, he makes sure that Cornelius's travel permit to the Forbidden Zone is revoked, even though the academy had earlier approved it.

When Zira asks Cornelius how he accounts for the fact that Taylor can write, Cornelius rejects the question out of fear, replying, “I can't and I'm not going to.” Zira naively assumes that truth is everyone's goal just as it is hers, insisting, “If it's true, they'll have to accept it,” but Cornelius has a more realistic understanding of how his society functions. When she points out that Taylor's existence might prove Cornelius's theory that apes evolved from lower primates, he asks, “Zira, do you want
to get my head chopped off?” and observes that “Dr. Zaius and half of the academy declared that my idea was heresy.”

When Zira demands, “How can scientific truth be heresy?” she's showing that she doesn't understand the function of heresy prosecutions as a political tool. Heresy that is also the truth is the most dangerous kind. As Cornelius observes, if Taylor were the missing link in ape evolution, “the Sacred Scrolls wouldn't be worth their parchment.” Naturally, the orangutans are dishonest enough to deny that they are concealing scientifically demonstrated truths. Zaius announces, “There is no contradiction between faith and science. True science.” This is an insistence that we often hear today, yet it can't be true unless “faith” is defined in such a way that having faith doesn't commit you to any claims about the origin or nature of the universe and its contents.

Taylor calls ape society an “upside-down civilization,” presumably because humans are at the bottom and other primates at the top. But ape society is also upside-down in that the closed-minded and deceiving orangutans are at the top and the open-minded and productive chimpanzees are at the bottom. If the orangutans would just let the chimps get on with their scientific monkey business, the apes could gain a genuine understanding of their universe to replace religious dogma. That they also stand to gain technologies like refrigeration, painless dentistry and reliable flea-repellent, along with all of the other benefits of advancing past the nineteenth century, is just icing on the cake.

There's one last class of primate on the Planet of the Apes, a branch of the family so reviled that they are not even recognized as people, let alone citizens. The humans have degenerated almost to a level of simplicity once occupied by the apes. On the Planet of the Apes, we grow no crops, build no houses, and have even lost the art of speech—though for some reason we still make a pretty good pair of pants. The apes regard us as “beasts” and, apart from bleeding-hearts like Zira, seem to have no moral concerns about how humans are treated. Dr. Honorius, Deputy Minister for Justice, notes that a human “has no rights under ape law.” Taylor is treated as humans
would treat an animal today, and his fellow astronaut Landon has his brain cut up by chimps just to see what makes him tick. Dr. Zaius even says of humanity that “the sooner he is exterminated, the better.”

The apes generally limit their moral concerns to members of their own society. In this, they are like Plato, who designed his ideal city to benefit the city's citizens with little thought about anyone else. Dr. Zaius's views on the need to exterminate humans even echo Plato's view that while fellow Greeks should never be subjected to “enslavement and destruction” in warfare, anything goes when fighting against barbarians (everyone who
isn't
Greek). After condemning brutality between Greek states, he concludes that the people of his city “must treat barbarians the way Greeks currently treat each other” (line 471b5).

Perhaps the most socially revolutionary of all of Plato's doctrines is that women should be allowed to do any job that men can do, including fighting in the army and working as a member of the ruling class. Females of the warrior class should be educated right along with males since “if we use the women for the same things as men, they must also be taught the same things.”

Plato did not believe in the equality of the sexes, though. He thought women were, in general, intellectually and morally inferior to men. On the other hand, he didn't think that every woman is inferior to every man. He wrote: “It's true that one sex is much superior to the other in pretty well everything, although many women are better than many men in many things” (lines 455d2–3). For this reason, Plato believed that women of unusual ability should be allowed to fulfill their potential, even if it meant promoting them to positions of power and authority over less able men.

We know a lot more about the role of women in Plato's society than we do about the role of females in ape society. We do know that a female chimpanzee, Dr. Zira, has become a respected animal psychologist who is considered by her colleagues to have “made it” and receives generous funding for her research on human beings. This suggests at the very least that
it isn't impossible for a female to get ahead in the monkey-eat-monkey world of chimpanzee academia. Yet if the Planet of the Apes is like Plato's city in that it allows particularly talented females to advance, it also looks suspiciously like Plato's city in that more males than females rise to the top. We never see a single female orangutan in
Planet of the Apes
, let alone a female serving in a position of authority. The evidence is hardly conclusive since we only meet four orangutans in the film: three powerful government officials and a religious minister. Still, it seems reasonable to guess that fewer females than males rise to high office in Ape City.

Female gorillas, like female orangutans, never appear in
Planet of the Apes
. I've identified the gorillas as a warrior class, like the warrior class in Plato's city, but the women of Plato's warrior class were themselves warriors, while female gorillas don't seem to take part in warrior activities. They do not ride out to the fields to shoot down human crop raiders or wrestle with escaped animals in the market square. My best guess is that they occupy a more traditional social role than Plato's warrior women, maintaining a home and raising a family. On the other hand, maybe half of those horse-riders
are
female gorillas and I just can't tell the difference.

One striking parallel between society on the Planet of the Apes and the society invented by Plato is their unromantic approach to the human sex act. Dr. Zira shocks Taylor by arranging for him to mate with another human, Nova. Back in twentieth-century USA, it was traditional to give a human being a say in such things. “There were women, lots of women” Taylor confesses to Nova, safe in the knowledge that she can't understand him or appreciate the implied health-risk. It's true, the American government had assigned Taylor to be one of the mates of fellow astronaut officer Stewart, who was to be the new “Eve” on a new world, but there's no suggestion that Taylor was denied the right to decline the mission, or that anyone insisted that it was his civic duty to take part.

In Plato's ideal city, on the other hand, all members of the warrior and guardian classes were expected to mate in accordance with the needs of the state, not their hearts. Plato notes
that owners of dogs and horses try to breed their best stock and advises that the government make sure that “the best men must have sex with the best women as frequently as possible.” To this end, his city will hold regular mating festivals for warriors and rulers at which men and women are paired up randomly by lot. In the interests of decency, the couple would be married before they got down to business, but then they would be divorced again as soon as they were done—a neat legal trick that you can't even pull off in Las Vegas today.

Any children resulting from these unions are taken to be raised together in government institutions and no record kept of the child's origins “so that no parent will know his own offspring or any child his parent” (lines 457d1–2). Plato believed that preventing warriors and rulers from forming family ties would induce them to direct their energies towards what was good for the entire community rather than to the good of their relations. To emphasize that all citizens of the warrior and ruler classes are family, they are to address each other as “father,” “mother,” “sister” or “brother,” a practice that would many centuries later be adopted by Christian monks and nuns.

Conversely, the apes, like Zira and Cornelius, are permitted to marry whomever they choose. In fact, the apes continue to value families at all levels of society. At the gorilla's funeral, he is praised as a “cherished husband” and “beloved father.” The attitude of the apes seems healthier. It isn't obvious that denying families to people will make them attach themselves more closely to society. Taylor had no family ties, but rather than making him a more civically minded individual, it alienated him, and he flew away into the distant future just to escape from his disconnected existence on Earth. Such an attitude of alienation is easy to imagine rising among generations raised by the state.

Plato's
Republic
remains as one of the most brilliant works of political philosophy ever written, yet the more cynical take on politics in
Planet of the Apes
shows a more realistic image of what happens when power is concentrated in a few hands. By stratifying society and giving power to a small group of people who specialize in the craft of government, Plato would be placing
power exactly where it belongs, if only the rulers were perfectly rational individuals who were exclusively concerned with the common good. But people are not like that (and neither are apes, not even the greatest of them). A class holding complete power is more likely to act like the orangutans on the Planet of the Apes.

The orangutans rule ape society with an iron paw, honoring themselves and silencing all dissent. When the chimpanzee Dr. Galen complains about his lack of professional advancement (presumably, he's being paid peanuts), he reminds his colleague Zira that she promised to speak to Dr. Zaius on his behalf. She answers, “I did. You know how he looks down his nose at chimpanzees.” Zaius demands to be addressed as “Your Excellency” and “Sir” by lesser primates, yet may not even acknowledge their greetings. Far from being paragons of justice, the orangutans show no sense of justice at all in their dealings with Taylor, or with the chimpanzees Zira and Cornelius, whose careers are endangered just for offering a defense of Taylor in court.