The Death of Socrates 

                              (credit: Jacques-Louis David, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 2.                                  (continued) 

And we can emphasize the point here. In the past, we often tested “ways of life” against each other by war. We can’t do that anymore. Not if we want to survive.

It is also interesting to note here that in the cultures of the West, some of our most enduring myths are the ones in which we have embedded our beliefs in freedom and love and the morés and customs that are informed by these values.

Over centuries, our basic ideas of the free way of life, democracy, have become shrouded in myth. In the West, we look to Athens as our cultural ancestor, but, in the first place, other areas of the world contained democracies, and in the second place, Athens was far from a model democracy. Most of its citizens were bigoted and jingoistic by today’s standards, i.e., not our mythic view of Athens.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were not myths. They were real men of Athens, sometimes wise and free, sometimes not so much. But we’re as close to certain of the fact that they were real men as we can be of any fact that we believe in.

However, Aristotle did not think women could be citizens of democracy. Plato’s Republic describes an oligarchy, not a democracy. Socrates felt the idea that anyone could be a wise leader just because he won an election was absurd. More generally, Athens the city was not respectful and fair with other city states. In fact, its behavior toward its “allies” was closer to bullying than supportive.  

In short, Athens was not a model democracy: but we like to believe it was.

Jesus’ existence is surrounded by uncertainty, but most historians, even atheist ones, believe Jesus really did exist in the time of the Roman emperor Augustus. However, even the original four evangelists record that he sometimes lost his temper. Did the buyers and sellers in the temple deserve whipping? They were only behaving in ways that everyone around them endorsed.

Furthermore, what we even indirectly know of Socrates is what we can glean from Plato’s accounts of him. Plato could have been putting into Socrates’ voice ideas that Plato wanted us to believe. Socrates, as far as our best research has been able to determine, never wrote any of his ideas down. His devoted student, Plato, did that. We think.

Jesus as well did not write his ideas down. His disciples wrote down what they or others close to him could remember of his words, and even they, likely with the best of intentions, differ in their accounts.

The wisdom of the Greeks balances the wisdom of the Hebrews in the two most dominant morés of the West: democracy and Christianity. Freedom and love.

Socrates, in Plato’s account, was intensely loyal to Athens. Even when its courts sentenced him to death, he would not run away. He felt he wouldn’t be a true citizen of Athens if he ran away just because its courts had come to a decision not in his favor. In short, he believed he had to be true to the morés of his homeland: its way of life with its freedom to think and speak for oneself. But also, its rule of law. He was so loyal that he was willing to die for his belief.

Or at least this is the picture of him that is believed here in the West. He was, and still is in millions of people’s eyes, the exemplar of the free-thinking way of life because he could apply the methods of reason to any subject, and he did so, over and over again. Athens had made him into the free-thinking man that he was. If his homeland’s democracy decreed that he should die, then so be it.

Or so we’re told. How much of his story is myth, we don’t really know. But we like the story just as it is.

Jesus would not run away, even when he had a chance to. In our stories, he went so far as to ask the god he believed in to pardon the ones who were killing him, while they were killing him. He believed that profoundly in brotherly love. In the end, even his loving disciples deserted him. Yet still he forgave them all.  

In short, for us in the democracies of the West, Athens and Christianity have become integral parts of our mythology. We are still learning how to balance them, but that they have mythic status in our culture is very clear. Seeing how they function as modern myths further affirms our Moral Realist model.  

Freedom is balanced by love. As a moré, love fosters in its adherents a readiness to accept others as they are, and therefore, love creates and supports diversity and pluralism: freedom. If you can love your neighbor not in spite of the ways in which s/he differs from you, but because of those very ways, you improve the odds that your neighbor’s strange ways may one day, during a crisis, save your life, the lives of all the people you love most, and maybe even your nation.

That’s what the moral code for these times is telling us. Love all people as long as they treat you with respect in return. Love them for the ways in which they differ from you, not in spite of those ways.

After our species’ performance in the twentieth century, I feel we must add the caveat that we aim to balance our society so that no single way of life allows its adherents to physically force their ways onto others. No one has the truth about the human condition. In a quantum universe, there is too much too know and even more that for the foreseeable future will remain unknowable. Too many surprises are possible for any one person to pretend to be superior to the rest.

                                                       Jesus in Gethsemane 

                            (credit: Heinrich Hofmann, via Wikimedia Commons)