SOCRATES (470-399 B.C.), PART IV
Socrates was concerned: If the government was an absurdity (at times, it seems to me that ‘we the people’ – the true government in a democracy – are enabling our elected officials to move in this direction of becoming an absurdity; forgive me, for I digress); if it rules without helping, and if it commands without leading, how can we, Socrates wanted to know, persuade the citizen (remember, Socrates is referring to free, Greek men) to support and obey the laws and work for the common good?
Given this situation (whether in Greece or elsewhere) it is no wonder that there is chaos for lack of thought; the crowd will decide in haste and ignorance. Is it not pure superstition that mere numbers will give wisdom? Is it not universally seen that men in crowds are more foolish and more violent and more cruel than men separate alone (see Reinhold Niebuhr’s great work: ‘Moral Man and Immoral Society’ – written in the 1930s it remains deeply insightful)? Surely, Socrates noted, that the management of a State is a matter for which men cannot be too intelligent, a matter that needs the unhindered thought of the finest minds. How can a society be saved, or be strong, except it be led by its wisest men [our Founding Fathers believed this and so they insisted on ‘public education’ for the citizens so we could choose the wisest to lead; Jefferson warned that if the citizens were not educated then democracy would eventually fail for we would not be educated enough to know who the wisest are and hence we would not elect the wisest].
Now, gentle reader, imagine the reaction of the popular party in Athens to this Socratic gospel at a time when war seemed to require the silencing of all criticism (again, sound familiar?) and when the wealthy were plotting revolution. THEN the revolution came and men fought for it and against, bitterly and to the death. When the wealthy won, the fate of Socrates was sealed; he was the intellectual leader of the revolting party, however pacific he might have been; he was the source of the hated aristocratic philosophy; he was the corrupter of the youths who were drunk with debate and desirous of dialogue. It would be better they said, that Socrates should die. The rest of the story all the world knows, for Plato wrote it down in prose more beautiful than poetry.
Today each of us has the privilege and opportunity to read for ourselves that simple and courageous ‘apology,’ or defense, in which the first martyr of philosophy proclaimed the rights and necessity of free thought, upheld his value to the state, and refused to beg for mercy from the crowd whom he had always challenged. They had the power to pardon him; he distained to make the appeal. It was a singular confirmation of his theories that the judges should wish to let him go, while the angry crowd voted for his death. Had he not denied the gods? Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn!
So they decreed that he should drink the hemlock. His friends came to the prison and offered him an easy escape; they had bribed all the officials who stood between him and life. He refused! He was seventy years old now (399 B.C.); perhaps he thought it was time for him to die, and that he could never again die so usefully (think of the contrast with Leo Tolstoy’s death. As he was dying on a bench in a railway station he repeated over and over: “I do not understand what it is I have to do!” – Socrates knew!). ‘Be of good cheer,’ Socrates told his sorrowing friends, ‘and say that you are burying my body only.’ [Want more: See Plato’s ‘Apology’].
Socrates drank. He now lay dying and Plato provides us with his last words; Socrates addresses them to his friend Crito: ‘Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?’ ‘The debt will be paid,’ replied Crito; ‘Is there anything else?’ There was no answer to this question; Crito looked at Socrates, his eyes were set, and Crito closed his eyes and mouth.
And Plato noted: ‘Such was the end of our friend, whom I may truly call the wisest, the justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever known.’