Eugenics, the science of manipulating births to produce desired and designed offspring, is tackled in Plato’s The Republic. The section on eugenics is premised by an earlier assertion that there is nothing better for the city than the coming to be in it of the best possible women and men (456e). The best women and men of the city will have the same training and education. In an age where women were treated as property and limited to the domestic sphere, such requisite of Plato for both men and women signals his disposition for radical change. He sought to overturn existing practices and ways of living, and proposed actions that are deemed aberrant of human nature.
Plato’s program for eugenics occurs in a society where there is no individual ownership. Everything belongs to the State and is for the State to dispose as it sees fit. Even the normally private couplings and matings of citizens are a State affair. The Republic states that, “All these women are to belong to all these men in common and no woman is to live privately with any man. And the children, in their turn, will be in common, and neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent.” In such a society, there is not only communism of material property but of people as well. The family, as we know it, is abolished. The family is the State; the State is the family. Parents do not know and own the family they mated for. The children are all offspring of the State. A marriage between a man and a woman is only sacred if and until the State sees it beneficial in producing quality progeny. Intercourse outside of State approval is deemed unholy. The most sacred marriages are the most beneficial marriages (458e) and these marriages are not supposed to last a lifetime. Partners are shuffled by the State in permutations that produce the best possible progeny at the prime ages identified for men and women. Women are supposed to bear children from their 20th up to their 40th year while men have to bear children for the State beginning at the period he passes his peak at running until his fiftieth year (460e). Even if men and women are in their prime ages but mate without the blessing of the State, the children they bear will be deemed as bastards and unauthorized by the State. Children born of terrible incontinence are not worthy of being in the best just society (461a-b).
Plato recognizes that the concept of ownership divides people, within and without. Engagement in the erotic and consumerist desires for possessing something and someone will only stir discordant energies better off channeled towards building the ideal society. No longer will there be disparities in wealth and sexual successes from which fragmentation among citizens may stem (464 c-e). Couplings are clinically decided by the State. It seems that Plato envisions a utopian society composed of asexual beings that cannot truly fulfil human desires by having something of their own and having sexual intercourse borne of private passion. The material and bodily human realities are subsumed by Plato under the supposed higher faculty of reason that is found in the human being’s soul. Plato deems the earthier erotic and material desires destructive to society. Eradicating all forms of private ownership is thus seen as an effective control of passions that make one blind to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The utopian society is a just society. Private property is a source of injustice. Anything and anyone that one can call one’s own can be a source of injustice. Thus, communism of all property, anything and anyone owned because of one’s desire, is a requisite for Plato’s society.
