Last month, I talked about a philosophical journey for perspective on today’s politics. Plato is always a good place to start. If you’ve never delved into Plato, you’re in for a treat. I’ll try to be a helpful tour guide.
I’ll also talk about TV lawyers and the spirit of liberty because . . . it follows.
An election happened since my last blog post, so I’ll talk a bit about that as well. I also included a section on what to expect moving forward.
And now — on the theory that a little wisdom and perspective can’t hurt — let’s do some political philosophy.
The Thinker by Auguste Rodin
Euthyphro, which you can read here, is a good place to start. (I hope any Plato purists among you will forgive my paraphrases and summaries of the dialogue.)
Euthyphro opens in the area in front of the Athenian court. Socrates is there because he was indicted on charges of inventing new gods, refusing to believe in the existing gods, and corrupting the youth. More specifically, he was indicted on charges of impiety. (The Greek word is ὅσιος, which can be translated as pious, devout, undefiled by sin, or holy.)
As we know from historical events that took place after this dialogue, Socrates was brought to trial, convicted of impiety, and executed.
Euthyphro is in the courtyard because he is bringing charges of murder against his father. Euthyphro strikes up a conversation with Socrates and explains the facts of his case.
One day, a man, a “dependent” who worked for Euthyphro’s family, murdered a domestic servant in a fit of drunken temper. (The domestic servant was likely a woman and a slave.) Euthyphro’s father captured the murderer, tied him up, and put him in a ditch, evidently so he couldn’t escape. He then dispatched a messenger to find out from a “diviner” what he should do with the murderer. Before the messenger could return, the murderer died of cold and hunger while tied up in the ditch.
Euthyphro says this about his family’s reaction:
Euthyphro: My father and family are angry with me for taking the part of the murderer and prosecuting my father. They say that he did not kill him and that if he did, that dead man was but a murderer, and I ought not to take any notice, for that a son is impious who prosecutes a father. This shows, Socrates, how little they know what the gods think about piety and impiety.
Socrates: Good heavens, Euthyphro! Is your knowledge of religion and things pious and impious so very exact, that, supposing the circumstances to be as you state them, you are not afraid lest you too may be doing an impious thing in bringing an action against your father?
I bolded “supposing the circumstances to be as you state them” to emphasize that Socrates isn’t saying that bringing charges against one’s father is per se impious. He is asking Euthyphro whether, under these circumstances, he is afraid he may be behaving impiously by bringing the charges.
Euthyphro: The best of Euthyphro, and that which distinguishes him from other men, is his exact knowledge of all such matters. What should I be good for without it?
That’s quite a statement, right? Earlier he told Socrates that, “Every word I speak is the truth.”
Because Euthyphro is confident that he understands when an action is pious, Socrates asks to become Euthyphro’s pupil. He wants Euthyphro to teach him the meaning of impiety so that he can quote Euthyphro at his trial and thereby win an acquittal.
Euthyphro agrees to the plan. Socrates then asks a straightforward question:
Socrates: What is piety? And what is impiety?
Euthyphro: Piety is doing as I am doing; that is to say, prosecuting anyone who has committed murder, sacrilege, or any similar crime. Whether he is your father or mother, or whoever he may be makes no difference. Not to prosecute them is impiety.
Euthyphro goes on to say that because prosecuting a murderer is the right thing to do, it doesn’t matter whether the person is a relative. After all, Zeus punished (overthrew) his own father, Cronus.
Socrates points out a problem with this definition. Euthyphro has given him an example of piety, which is different from a general definition that Socrates can use to apply to other situations. What Socrates wants is “a standard to which I may look, and by which I may measure actions, whether yours or those of anyone else, and then I shall be able to say that such and such an action is pious, such another impious.”
So Euthyphro offers this standard: “Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.”
Socrates then points out a problem with this definition: The gods do not always agree. In fact, they often quarrel and disagree. Sometimes the same act is loved by some of the gods and disliked by others. Therefore, the definition fails.
Euthyphro tries again. He says that there are some matters upon which all the gods agree, and they all agree that a murderer must be punished, so he is doing what is pious.
Socrates then makes a detour and points out that when a murderer defends himself, he rarely says that murder is pious and good. Instead, he says that in his case, the murder was justified.
(Notice that the word justify contains the word just which of course has the same roots as justice. 🤷♀️ I just felt like pointing that out.)
Socrates tells Euthyphro that he still hasn’t defined piety. Euthyphro digs in and says. “A pious action is one that all the gods love.”
Socrates then asks: Is an action pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious?
Euthyphro doesn’t see the difference.
Socrates explains that there is an enormous difference. If something is holy because the gods love it, we can never know in advance if an action is holy. We have to wait to see what the gods think. On the other hand, if the gods love an action because it is holy, there must be a quality that all holy things contain, in which case if we understand that quality, we will know in advance whether an action is just or pious.
Euthyphro says that the gods love pious acts because they are holy.
Socrates then basically says, well then, we are back where we started! We still don’t know what makes the act pious in the first place! We don’t know why the gods love the act, so we cannot tell in advance whether an act is pious or not. Therefore, we still don’t have a working definition.
Euthyphro maintains that in his own mind, the definition of piety is clear, but he cannot explain it to Socrates because “somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us.”
Socrates, who remains serenely contemplative, asks, “Is that which is just also pious?”
Yes, says Euthyphro. He then defines the relationship between piety and justice: “Piety or holiness, Socrates, appears to me to be that part of justice which attends to the gods, as there is the other part of justice which attends to men.”
I think this is an interesting point. There is morality, or what is right. Then there are laws made by humans, which may or may not be morally correct. If a law is immoral, and you follow the law, you might be a good citizen, but not a good person. A good citizen obeys the laws and falls in line. A good person may go against the current, depending on the direction of the current.
Socrates pounces on Euthyphros use of the word “attends” which is vague and doesn’t explain the relationship of piety to the gods. Euthyphro admits that his use of the word “attends” was vague, so he tries again.
Euthyphro: Piety or holiness is learning how to please the gods in word, deed, prayer, and sacrifice.
This isn’t a bad definition of piety. But Socrates points out that this definition, too, takes us right back where we started: We cannot learn how to please the gods in word, deed, and prayer if we don’t know what pleases them in advance. Once more Socrates pushes Euthyphro for a more precise definition.
Euthyphro: Another time, Socrates; for I am in a hurry, and I must go now.
With that, Euthyphro departs.
If this was typical of the kind of encounter Socrates had on the streets of Athens, it’s no wonder he was unpopular. Who likes being told that they don’t know what they’re talking about — particularly someone who has set himself up as an expert?
Much ink has been split over whether the arguments presented are sound. Churchmen later found themselves as confused as Euthyphro. Is something good because God loves it? Or does God love it because it is good?
Because Euthyphro never defined piety in a way that satisfied Socrates, the common way to read Euthyphro is that the ending results in aporia or an impasse. I don’t see an impasse at all. I don’t remember how I understood Euthyphro when I first read it as an undergraduate philosophy major decades ago. (Yes I started out as a philosophy major.) This time around, given what I learned, I believe the dialogue does make a positive statement about the nature of piety and justice. The statement is this: despite what Euthyphro thinks, it is not easy to define concepts like holiness, righteousness, or justice. Those who are so supremely confident that they never question their own judgment are more likely to participate in evil.
In other words, the lesson to glean is that dogmatism, intellectual arrogance, and black-and-white thinking are likely to lead to injustice.
In law, we have bright-line rules and we have flexible standards, or balancing tests. Bright line rules are objective and easy to apply but often result in injustice because they don’t take into account all circumstances. Balancing tests are harder to apply, more subjective, and may end up resulting in inconsistency, but (if applied wisely) can create more justice because they can account for varying circumstances.
Euthyphro can grasp only bright line rules. Murder is bad. Murderers need to be brought to justice.
Socrates pokes holes in bright line rules. He understands that circumstances can be different and that not all murders are alike.
Another way to understand the Euthyphro vs. Socrates mindsets is through the lens of political psychologists. Last month I offered political psychologist Karen Stenner’s definition of the authoritarian personality:
. . . a universal, mostly heritable predisposition rooted in a closed personality and cognitive inflexibility, which reduce one’s willingness and ability, respectively, to deal with complexity.
Euthyphro is uncomfortable with complexity. He is, to borrow another of Stenner’s phrases, a “simple-minded avoider of complexity.” Socrates, in contrast, is not only comfortable with complexity, he believes the purpose of life is to delve into the complexity of human matters. As he famously says later at his trial, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Euthyphro is also uncomfortable with Socrates’s method of questioning. He acts as if something nefarious is happening. He feels tricked. “Our arguments,” he says, “seem to turn around and walk away from us.” In the end, he recoils completely.
Elsewhere Socrates explained why he is going around Athens engaging in these kinds of conversations. When the Oracle of Delphi revealed that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, he didn’t believe it because he knew he wasn’t wise. But the oracle never lies. So he set out to prove the oracle wrong by finding a man wiser than him. His method was to closely question anyone who claimed to have wisdom. This resulted in the kind of conversations Socrates had with Euthyphro. A lot of people, like Euthyphro, became uncomfortable. Some believed that Socrates was doing something dangerous and nefarious by examining and calling into question basic “truths,” particularly those that religion and government rested upon.
The closer you look at Euthyphro, the more interesting things you can find. For example, when the men first begin talking, we learn that Euthyphro claims he always speaks the truth, yet the public response is that people laugh at him. Socrates, on the other hand, claims not to know the truth. He insists he is simply trying to discover the truth from people wiser than he is. Yet it is Socrates who has aroused so much anger among the population that he is about to be executed by irate Athenians.
Shortly after the two men begin speaking, we also learn that Socrates would never bring charges against anyone:
Euthyphro: What are you doing in the Porch of the King Archon? Surely you cannot be concerned in a suit before the King, like myself?
Socrates: Not in a suit, Euthyphro; impeachment is the word which the Athenians use.
Euthyphro: What! I suppose that someone has been prosecuting you, for I cannot believe that you are the prosecutor of another.
Socrates: Certainly not.
By the end of the dialogue, we understand why Socrates would never bring charges against anyone. To bring criminal charges against a person and seek to have the person punished, you have to be certain that the person deserves punishment, and for that, you need to believe that the behavior was not justified, which is more difficult than it sounds because you have to define “justified” and examine the behavior from all angles.
Every defense lawyer has encountered a few Euthyphros across the table. “But they broke the law!” the prosecutor says. “Therefore, they deserve punishment!” But what if they didn’t know what they did was wrong? What if the harm caused was trivial and nobody was bothered? What if, because of brain defects, they were unable to control their actions? Moreover, what do you mean by “deserved”?
“What if the defendant was an abused woman with a mental illness that wasn’t controlled because her abuser withheld her medication and one night, she ran away and hid in the park? Because she had been drinking, she stumbled and accidentally damaged public property?”
“She was drunk in the park! She was in the park after hours! She damaged property! She broke the law! I must uphold justice!” (*slams table*)
Before law school, I taught English at the college and university level. I observed that students were often quick to judge characters and slow to empathize with them. I saw this as a problem. What is the purpose of literature if not to enlarge our ability to empathize? It seems to me that point of the humanities is to make us more humane, which — it also seems to me — requires less judging and more empathy.
To prosecute is to judge. Moreover, punishment is the deliberate infliction of pain on another person. In criminal matters, the government is inflicting pain on an individual. Punishment increases the level of suffering in the world by inflicting more pain. (If you are leaping up to refute me with Kant’s theory of retribution, hold your horses. We will get to Kant farther down the road.)
If Euthyphro ever paused to consider the full story regarding his father and the servant who murdered a slave, we have no indication of that. He sees no nuance or moral ambiguity in the circumstances. He is 100% confident in his own judgment.
The dialogue is thus about the virtues of intellectual humility vs. intellectual arrogance. Those who are intellectually humble recognize the limits of their own understanding and appreciate the complexity of human situations. They are slower to judge and less likely to inadvertently (and unnecessarily) increase the level of suffering in the world.
This brings me back to a topic I raised last month: TV lawyers and our current media disruption.
Dannagal Goldwaithe Young describes the characteristics of TV pundits in this way:
Intellectual humility is the extent to which people are open to the possibility that they might be wrong. Well, partisan pundit panels are characterized by performances of intellectual arrogance or “I am not listening because I just want to show I’m right.” Intellectual arrogance plays well on television, whereas intellectual humility does not. In fact, we rarely see intellectual humility modeled in our mediated political world. When we do, it’s from the occasional appearance of scientists—people trained to never prove things or remove themselves from doubt. They don’t speak in absolutes or forevers. They speak with caveats and conditions and often answer with “Time will tell” and “for now this seems to be the case.”
This brings me to the famous words of Judge Learned Hand (yes that really was his name):
Learned Hand is talking about the dangers of intellectual arrogance. The philosopher Bertrand Russell quipped once that he would never die for his beliefs because “I might be wrong.”
This is what I see now in Euthyphro. Plato, of course, could not have intended his dialogue to be about TV lawyers, but what makes a literary work great is that it speaks to us across the centuries and offers perspective on the modern world.
Had Socrates lived during our current information disruption, I am sure he would question every headline. He would probe every slogan. He would pick apart every statement made by every candidate. He would not be fooled by easy answers. He would reject bumper-sticker maxims like “Justice Matters.” He would not believe whatever news sources told him if he suspected the news sources were manipulating him by confirming his biases.
I have often thought that the whole idea of political “messaging” is problematic. If we need “messaging,” there is an inherent problem with democracy. Democracy requires people able to think about complex matters. The idea that messaging is what matters assumes that people must be given simple bumper-sticker messages.
What I call rage-inducing simplifications do the opposite of what is needed in political discourse. Rage-inducing simplifications, like “if all lawbreakers are not punished, rule of law is dead,” are designed to trigger strong reactions and fool people into thinking that difficult concepts are in fact easy. (If you want to know what’s wrong with, “if all lawbreakers are not punished, rule of law is dead” click here and start reading.)
The problem is that the truth is nuanced and cannot fit onto a bumper sticker.
Someone (I have forgotten who) said, “I have a little Hamlet in me.” It seems to me that people in a functioning democracy should strive to say, “I have a little Socrates in me.”
Intellectual humility, by the way, needn’t lead to nihilism. There is good and justice, but knowledge of these things is like a mathematical limit: If we keep trying, we can get closer to a perfect understanding, and theoretically, we can arrive, but, because we are human, we never do.
Now, a few words about the election
Last month I speculated that Trump would lose because I couldn’t see how he picked up voters since the 2020 election.
Well, he did pick up about a million. In 2020, Trump received 74,848,942 votes. In 2024 he received 75,944,251 votes.
The problem for Democrats was that they lost more than 8 million voters. In 2020, 81,284,666 people voted Democratic, but in 2024, only, 72,932,409 people voted Democratic.
(The Federal Election Commission reported that 158,429,631 people voted in the 2020 presidential election. In contrast, in 2024, 151,166,643 voted.)
The problems preceded Harris, so don’t blame the Harris campaign. She entered late in the game.
The solution is to get those voters back. People who stayed home know who Trump is, and evidently his vileness was not enough to bring them to the polls. If the voters who stayed home cared about Trump’s illegal behavior, these things would have brought them to the polls:
- Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in New York.
- A jury found Trump guilty of sexual abuse.
- The Trump Organization was convicted of multiple felony charges including tax fraud.
- Multiple other indictments were brought listing devastating facts.
Looking back, it’s easy to see the errors. It seems to me that more energy should have been spent on Biden’s successful policies. Instead, for 4 years, the topic of conversation — at least among those most engaged with politics — was Trump and his vile behavior.
Counter-intuitively, a pro-democratic, pro-rule-of-law administration frustrated some of the left-leaning cable producers because rule of law is not thrilling. In fact, when it works correctly, it is slow-moving and boring. So they invented a gripping conspiracy theory: Merrick Garland is destroying rule of law by refusing to move quickly to throw Trump in prison. Given MSNBC’s ratings during the Biden era, a few million people were glued to their screens. Would the DOJ save the day? Or would the DOJ stumble and forever destroy American democracy? (For more on that, see this post and this post.) This was a small percentage of the voters, but a large percentage of the people who (1) lean left and (2) are what we might call hyperpartisans.)
The hyperpartisan right-wingers responded with their defenses of Trump. Click-generating headlines met the demand. The topic of conversation was Trump, not economics.
I wrote about The Other Divide in last month’s blog post. According to Yanna Krupnikov, a professor of political science and communication, and political scientist John Ryan, instead of being divided into right v. left, we are now divided between a relatively small group of hyperpartisans who are glued to their screens and engage in hyperpartisan yelling, and most Americans, who respond to the angry yelling by tuning all out.
The problem, of course, is that 24-hour coverage of Biden’s successful economic policies would not have generated outrage or kept cable viewers glued to the screen.
I’ve read a few commentators who believe that Trump voters were misinformed. One former colleague told me the problem is that 50% of the country watches Fox News. Nope. Ordinarily, Fox gets under 2 million viewers per day. Fox viewership has been up 20% since the election (because the news is fun to watch right now for conservatives). At its current height, Fox draws more than 3 million viewers per day. I’ve seen recent numbers as high as 5 million per day. More than 151 million people voted in 2024. It’s a small percentage.
No doubt there are misinformed and uninformed Republican voters, but I think most people know who Trump is and what he stands for. I don’t think it’s a good idea to take a condescending and paternalistic attitude toward half the voters. I suspect that most (if not all) Trump voters understood exactly what they were doing. Some may have been secretly defiant. “The liberals spent four years trying to make me hate Trump and I’m not going to do it.” Some no doubt reasoned like this: “Okay, yes, he cheats on his taxes, he grabs women, he incites violence, and a lot of times he’s incoherent, but at least he will enact the policies I agree with. At least he isn’t one of those annoying lefties who are always telling me that everything I do is wrong.”
In other words, some Trump voters may dislike Trump, but they fear liberalism more. Some even embrace and celebrate his lawbreaking and rule-breaking. If you think the rules and laws should not be there, you will not think worse of a person who breaks them. (More on that in a future blog post.)
What to Expect Moving Forward
Reactionaries and regressives don’t take us forward into an unknown future. They take us backward. We know what kind of America MAGA wants because we have been there. Trump attracted reactionaries who want to go backward and conservatives who are afraid of what seems like a strange new world that the Democrats want to create.
One thing you can expect is for Trump to set to work dismantling, or rendering ineffective, the regulatory agencies that have been put in place since the 1920s. Ever since the New Deal and the rise in administrative agencies, there has been a strong conservative movement to dismantle them. Make America Great Again is a regressive manifesto. The regulatory agencies are part of what brought us from the 1920s to the present. If you want to take America back before the Civil Rights movement and New Deal, the quickest way to do it is to dismantle the regulatory agencies.
Trump will also try to reshape our alliances. The American right wing and Putin are natural allies. Russia is an oligarchy. Trump wants to be like Putin and control American oligarchs. Oligarchy is not new to the United States. According to historian Heather Cox Richardson, we’ve had two oligarchies and we are currently slipping toward a third. The first was the plantation era when 1% of the population controlled all three branches of government and much of the nation’s wealth. The second was the era of Robber Barons. Now, thanks to Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump, we are slipping toward a third.
But Teri! What do we do?
I told you last month: Build a large forward-looking coalition, which means finding common ground with as many people as possible.
The Solution to Our Current Media Disruption
Recall from last month’s blog post that, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, mass media began fragmenting. Networks created different content for different groups, which exacerbated polarization. As a result, different outlets present news in a way to appeal to specific groups. Right-wing viewers have particular demands, which right-wing news producers meet or risk losing viewers and readers. Left-wing viewers have different demands, which left-wing producers must meet or face irate viewers and readers.
The solution is for enough consumers to insist on neutral, fact-based news. News is for-profit, so if enough consumers demand something, producers will deliver. Neutral fact-based news might even bring back the majority of Americans who (as professors Krupnikov and Ryan explain) are tuning out the noise and yelling by disengaging with politics.
The problem with fact-based news that avoids opinions and slant is that there are not enough facts to fill a 24-hour news cycle. There are not enough facts to fill dozens of hours each day of cable programming. For that, you need opinions, speculation, rage, and fear.
To bring back the lost voters, I suggest that conversation should be calm, rational, and fact-based and should be about the issues people care about. This will be difficult because Trump will spend the next 4 years making himself the center of attention. It’s a neat trick to prevent people from talking about the policies that matter to most people.
Don’t fall for it.
“But Teri, you’re wrong! The truth can fit onto a bumper sticker!”
Well? what do you think of the journey so far? Should we continue to the next destination? (Perhaps next time, a little more Plato and less Trump.)
I’ll be here on January 5. I hope you will, too.
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If you missed my announcement, see Rebels, Robbers, and Radicals: The Story of the Bill of Rights.
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