When I first read the three
Platonic dialogues on the arrest, trial, and death of Socrates to my high
school teacher, Mr. Cohen, I was moved by the sacrifice he made of his own life
when he could have just gone into exile.
To do so, he felt, would repudiate his life’s work. He wanted to find what motivated people and
what were the most suitable ways to live in a democratic Athenian society. Instead he found most people were motivated
by power, making money, favoring their families, getting the approvals of their
peers, following their parental desires, greed, pleasure, or fame. What Socrates sought for himself was
intellectual honesty, a search for meaning in life, the satisfactions of
teaching, and skepticism of popular cultural and state credos. He developed the “Socratic method” of
inquiry, using a series of questions to explore a person’s claims by showing
where each person’s beliefs led to. Very often those who held shallow views
soon found themselves stuck in contradictions. Socrates did not do this to heap
ridicule on the pretentious, he did this to find what is true so that we would
not have to be defending false values and beliefs. Socrates taught the sons of
many wealthy Athenians. Their parents
were unhappy when their children began to question them and raise criticism
about the Athenian state. When Athens
lost to Persia and then gained control again, Socrates was arrested and charged
with corrupting the youth of Athens. He
was convicted by his peers. He gathered his friends together and drank a cup of
hemlock (his choice of how to die) and consoled them that he had lived a life
worth living.
I have never had that dramatic a
consequence for sticking up for something I believed to be true. I had one confrontation with a teacher in
high school, defending another student’s nomination for membership in our high
school Service Council. He later became
an undersecretary of State in the first Bush administration. Unlike Socrates, I
took the practical route and apologized to the teacher. I had a similar experience in the Honors
College at Stony Brook and defended a student that my fellow administrators
wanted to expel from the Honors College.
He asked me to write a letter of appeal and I did, writing one appeal
after another up the chain of command to the university president. And he won!
He went on to win a brilliancy prize in mathematics for the best
performance on the Putnam examination and went to Princeton, the top math
department in the US. My argument as
Master of the Honors College, was that we should tolerate idiosyncratic
students because they are more likely to become our eminent faculty. Socrates was idiosyncratic because he
challenged authority and conventional belief, making him both impious and
subversive to the state. We celebrate our founding fathers, but weren’t they
doing what Socrates did in Athens? But
for most people who are comfortable with their lives, the Socratic personality
is irritating and threatens the way those in power work. We don’t like whistleblowers, “rabble
rousers”, protestors, critics of industry, the military, the churches, or other
institutions that serve as the prevailing glue of society keeping it together. But without critics we would have racism,
sexism, cronyism, and oppression of the powerless. For some people, that is
exactly what they want for their status quo and privileges. I thank Socrates
for giving me a conscience about the abuses of society.
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