Just a few weeks ago we covered The Republic in Honors Political Theory and one of the big things we talked about was Plato's intense censorship, especially of literature. I have always hated censorship and wrote several papers in high school (and one so far in college) about how harmful it is to society and the pure idiocy of the entire idea.
But, while I still don't agree with Plato's brand of censorship, it is worth mentioning that it is generally quite different than censorship that we encounter today. Plato didn't care one bit about saving people's feelings with political correctness or shielding people from sex, drugs, and violence. Plato was only concerned about the moral state of the city and that required a ban of much different things.
Basically, he would ban anything that encouraged or glorified cowardice, selfish, shallow, or otherwise morally damaging materials. (One notable example Dr. Biskner gave in Political Theory was Keeping Up With the Kardashians). Plato certainly had better motives for his censorship than its modern proponents and may have been right about some media being bad for us, but I still can't get with the censorship program.
P.s. I commented on Kennedy's post
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