Every day, Amazon’s best seller list consists of books railing against “cancel culture.” Writers can now win millions by publishing books that say, “I’m not allowed to write this thing I’m writing right now.” Whoever said Americans do not have a rich sense of irony?
What really interests me about this whole conversation on “cancel culture”, is how many of these writers, like Haidt, Peterson, Weinstein, and Shapiro, fancy themselves classicists. Explicitly championing the values they claim are rooted in ancient Greece in the face of modern decadence that takes the form of transgender people, feminists and political activists.
Naturally, the conversation eventually turns to Socrates. In probably Plato’s most read work, Apology, Socrates (Plato’s go-to protagonist and usual mouthpiece) defends himself against the angry people of Athens and bravely defends the truth against a shallow and morally deprived mob. In their lack of sanity and virtue, unwillingness to be confronted or uphold the highest ideal, the people sentence Socrates to be executed.
Whether implicitly or explicitly, these writers like to invite the comparison for their own agenda against “cancel culture”. In this case, as with the Catholic Church, a martyr’s death is a disciple’s profit.
The only problem is they’re misreading the story of Apology.
This misreading is understandable. Despite being the single most foundational philosopher of Western civilization, Plato is misunderstood by most people who read him. This is because Plato talks about a lot of heady ideas, from epistemology to ethics, framed in the context of ancient Athens that is alien to modern readers. Also, as a character in a drama, Socrates says things he doesn’t entirely mean leaving the dialogue a lot more subtle than untrained reader realize. Sometimes he is trying to persuade people by appealing to their ambitions like in his conversation with Alcibiades. Other times he’s trying to compel thought rather than provide conclusive insights and at other times still he is being ironic or even flirting like in Phaestus. Plato expects his readers to do a lot of heavy lifting by figuring this out for themselves while still picking up his philosophy.
To make matters worse, Plato never made it clear what order his dialogues are to be read or how they interact with each other. Scholars have literally spent the next thousands of years debating this topic.
That being said, Plato’s Apology is one of the easiest dialogues on its surface. It’s relatively short at around 40 pages, the conversation flows better than in other dialogues, and the ideas presented aren’t esoteric as other dialogues. But there’s a missing element if you’re not familiar with his broader work.
The fundamental question you have to understand if you want to grasp this dialogue is: Why is Athens really condemning Socrates to die?
We know the stated reason is impiety and “corrupting the youth,” but killing someone over that serves as a great embarrassment to the authorities of Athens who pride themselves on freedom of speech. In his own trial, Socrates pointed out it would have made things a lot easier for his persecutors if one of them had pulled him aside and corrected his behavior instead of resorting to execution as a first recourse.
Some scholars suggest it’s because Socrates was proving a threat to Athens’ fragile democracy by undermining it in dialogues like Republic. But, as Catherine Zuckert, author of Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues, points out, Socrates, while he viewed the Philosopher-King as the ideal government, had a less harsh view of democracy than all other forms of existing government (Republic). In fact, he is grateful for the freedom of speech and inquiry he’s enjoyed under democracy which he himself asserts he never could have enjoyed anywhere else (Crito). Besides, would we really be reading about Socrates to this day if his finest hour was being killed for challenging democracy?
No, the real reason is explained in Plato’s Symposium. Here Socrates gives a more elaborate telling of his education and upbringing than he does in Apology. He explains how he was mentored by the priestess, Diotima, who taught him his most valuable lesson that would charge the rest of his philosophy for the rest of his life: the fundamentals of human desire (or Eros).
And what people desire more than anything else is to be united with what is true, noble, and beautiful (kalos k’agathos). Because what is true, noble, and beautiful is eternal, it would explain why humanity painfully desires what it can’t have: immortality.
Failing to achieve immortality, the people look for subliminal substitutes through procreating, attaining glory that will have you remembered through the ages, and passing on their traditions. By persuading the youth to challenge their parents and challenge their traditions, Socrates was inadvertently challenging the older Athenians’ false sense of immortality. Going back to Zuckert:
As Diotima pointed out in the Symposium, all human beings seek immortality by perpetuating themselves or their way of life in future generations. Insofar as the philosophical way of life Socrates seeks to perpetuate casts doubt on the validity of the practices and opinions of the Athenians, there is ground for real, abiding hostility.
P 207.
Nonetheless, Socrates persists in poking the bear, and is willing to die doing so, because these sacred traditions were corrupting the youth. The pursuit of material wealth and glory through violence the Athenians espoused as proof of virtue had led Athens to a catastrophic war with Sparta that ended in not only defeat but the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. If, Socrates tells his jury, Athens had pursued true virtue as he taught it, and not material wealth, they would ironically be wealthier and better off now than they currently were. And now this same generation that had screwed up so much was leading the next generation down the same path in their lack of self-awareness and self-reflection.
Like many older people of today, the Athenians believed their youth were corrupted. But Socrates argued that he, as one man, could not have single-handedly corrupted the youth of Athens if everyone else was fighting to preserve virtue. If the youth have gone astray, it is the fault of society at large.
Rather than acknowledge this fact, Athenians chose to scapegoat the problem. It clung to the traditions that got it into this mess and were going to do the same for the next generation because to do otherwise would compromise their own sense of immortality. Socrates considered the fear of death to be one of, if not the, greatest obstacle to virtue.
The thing about these reactionary traditionalists who publish books and go to major speaking engagements talking about how “cancelled” they are is, if that were true, they would be ostracized like Socrates. Instead, many of them are millionaires with lavish book deals and speaking engagements. Like Hippias (Hippias Major), they make their money telling audiences what they already believe to be true or desperately want to be true. When they refer to classical wisdom, like Ben Shapiro’s obsession with Athens and Jerusalem, they aren’t doing it to draw from ancient wisdom. They do so to assure their audiences that their beliefs are exclusively products of a long tradition that has existed for millennia and will continue to do so forever in the future (so long as their side of the culture war wins of course). In other words, they reassure their audiences of their vicarious immortality. This is true in Jordan Peterson’s ahistoric narrative that the vast and intricate landscape of Western canon can be reduced to simple and easily replicable dogma and that totalitarian atrocities are just the result of lashing out against said dogma (and “the woke mob” is at it again). Or take Stephen Haidt’s tenuous claim that he has “proven” his specific understanding of ancient wisdom is validated through science and that the modern psychological practices (that just happen to be unpopular in his audiences) are veering us off course. Like the Athenians in Apology, their diagnosis is largely the same: the young people are deranged and it’s all the fault of a small minority of intellectuals, be it liberal arts professors, feminists, activists, or the Deep State (far too often a dog whistle for Jews).
Socrates taught that in the face of mortality of ourselves and our culture, we should sincerely seek out what it means to be virtuous. As difficult as that is, we should also practice that virtue. Instead, these influencers have largely fanaticized their readers and audiences. Even now, desperate to keep the world from changing, many Americans have turned to truly desperate political measures that have already gotten people killed and are going to make things worse. These "cancelled" authors' own influence is now destroying the very Western civilization they said they love. This is what Socrates meant when he said it was better for a person to have harm done to them than to inflict harm or deception on others.
In Phaedo, Socrates is scheduled to be executed and yet he spends his last hours consoling his students, and the students of Pythagoras, over his own death. He offers three arguments that he says will prove the soul is immortal and therefore he has nothing to fear. Even though he is going to die, he coxes his students to try to disprove his proof and they succeed. This is the last conversation he will have before he dies but, rather than giving in to despair at the possible permanence of his own death, Socrates still congratulates his listeners for refuting the proof of his immortality and encourages them to continue the process of philosophizing after he’s gone. Even if there may not be an afterlife, Socrates was glad to have spent his life doing what he did because this was the life worth living. Culture and politics, like the human body, are mortal, it doesn’t matter how “virtuous” its people are. Either society will collapse like the Song dynasty or evolve into something unrecognizable like the Roman empire. Denial of this fact is what drives people to insanity. What is in our power, and worthier of the test of time, is to relinquish our fear of death and to pursue that which is noble, true, and beautiful, that is how we achieve a life well-spent. Socrates showed us how it’s done.
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