I started out writing about the trial and execution of Socrates. This brought me to the nature of subversiveness and the role of subversive elements in a democracy.
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To gain perspective on today’s politics, I have set out on a journey. Here’s where we’ve been so far:
- Introduction. (Given the nature of our current information disruption and what I was seeing in both left-leaning and right-leaning media bubbles during the Biden years, I decided to change the direction of my blog. It seemed to me we needed more wisdom and perspective and fewer rage-inducing simplifications.)
- Part 1: Euthyphro, The Spirit of Liberty, TV Lawyers and more.
- Part 2: Antigone: Rule of Law or my Conscience
- Part 3: Democracy, Oligarchy, and Tyranny.
- Part 4: Socrates and the Subversive Element
It’s always best to start at the beginning, but each blog post was written to stand alone, so don’t be afraid to jump in.
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I. The Trial and Execution of Socrates
Plato’s The Apology recounts the defense Socrates offered at his trial. (I’ll use this translation). It’s called the The Apology, but make no mistake: Socrates does not offer an apology. If anything, he thumbs his nose a bit at his judges. What he offers is a defense of the way he lived his life. (The word “apology” comes from the ancient Greek word, “apologia,” which means “defense.”)
By the time Socrates was put on trial, he was well known throughout Athens. He had been lampooned by major playwrights, briefly served in public office, and over the years, made a great many political enemies.
Recall from Part 3 that Socrates was critical of democracy as a form of government. (He was also critical of oligarchy.) To understand the political context for the trial, we need a timeline:
About 501 BCE: A representative democracy was established in Athens. All free males (not all people) had an equal voice in government. For why we call this a democracy, see last week’s blog post. Also recall that all positions in Athenian government, including military generals, were elected.
415 – 413 BCE: Sicilian Disaster: The Athenians undertook a disastrous military campaign in Sicily. The campaign had popular support, but it was poorly conceived and executed. Afterward, many Athenians blamed the disaster on the democratic government because the military leaders, who relied on votes, made crowd-pleasing decisions instead of smart military decisions.
411 BCE: Because of the Sicilian Disaster, democracy as a form of government lost the support of a number of prominent (aristocratic) Athenians. As a result, an Oligarchy of the 400 was able to take over the government. Under the Oligarchy of 400, only 5,000 citizens selected by the 400 oligarchs had political power.
The Oligarchy of 400 lasted only 4 months before it was replaced by yet another government, this time fully in the hands of the 5,000 and a bit more democratic.
406 BCE: Six generals won a battle, but failed to collect the fallen from the battlefield. If you read Part II, Antigone, you know how important it was for Athenians to give the dead a proper burial. The six generals were put on trial and executed. It turned out that a violent storm prevented the generals from collecting the bodies. Socrates, who was then a senator (the only time he held public office) was critical of the trial, which he believed was conducted illegally partly because the generals were tried together instead of individually.
404-403 BCE: The thirty tyrants, a group of oligarchs led by the brutal tyrant Critias, took over the government. Critias was a “student” of Socrates. (I put “student” in parenthesis because, in his defense, Socrates denied that he was a teacher, which meant Critias could not be his student.) The fact one of his “students” or admirers became a brutal dictator did not endear Socrates to the public.
403: BCE: Democracy was restored in Athens after Critias died.
399 BCE: Socrates was put on trial and executed.
You can see from this timeline where Socrates got the idea that all governments have beginnings and ends, with one form of government giving way to another.
Another reason Socrates was unpopular: Recall that Socrates spent his time out and about Athens, where he annoyed people by calling into question their firmly held beliefs. As a general rule, if you want to be popular, tell people what they want to hear or what they already know. Avoid calling into question their deeply held views or biases. (I talked about this in the Introduction and Part 1.)
Socrates was charged with impiety and corrupting the youth. Here is how he describes the charges against him:
As part of his defense, Socrates explains that he has two sets of accusers: Those who are currently bringing charges against him, and those who have been spreading rumors about him for years. Nobody ever answered the early rumor-spreaders. Now he must do so, and it’s harder to address rumors and innuendos than direct accusations, so the rumor-spreaders are more dangerous than his actual accusers. Because the rumors have been spreading since his accusers and judges were children, the rumors have “taken possession” of their minds.
In other words, he claims that the judges (and jurors) are biased against him.
At the same time, Socrates acknowledges that, had he lived like other men, “All this great fame and talk” about him would never have arisen.
He explains how he made enemies: When the Oracle of Delphi revealed that he was the wisest man in Athens, he didn’t believe it because he knew he wasn’t wise. But the gods never lie, so he set out to prove the oracle wrong by trying to find a man wiser than him. His method was to closely question anyone who claimed to have wisdom. As a result, he went around Athens questioning people and revealing their ignorance. He understood, to his “sorrow and alarm” that he was becoming unpopular, but he felt compelled to continue his investigation.
What he learned was that the only difference between him and those who believed themselves wise, or who had a reputation for being wise, was that he knew he was ignorant whereas they wrongly believed they possessed knowledge.
He denies that he was ever a teacher, evidently to rebut the unspoken accusation that he was responsible for Critias’s actions:
“if you have heard from anyone that I undertake to teach people and charge a fee for it, that is not true either.”
He is referring here to the sophists, the teachers in ancient Greece who traveled and charged money for lessons, mostly in rhetoric and methods of persuasion. They were often loathed because (in the view of listeners) they made the worse argument appear stronger. The word “sophist” comes from the Greek word for “wisdom,” but because the sophists were widely despised, the word “sophistry” still has a bad connotation today.)
“Making the worse argument appear stronger” is an interesting accusation. Isn’t that just another way of saying, “That person is giving credence to something I believe is obviously wrong?” I suppose lawyers, who are often arguing the “wrong” side (particularly criminal defense lawyers!) evoke similar emotions.
Socrates insisted that he never possessed enough wisdom to be a teacher, so he never put himself forward as one. He distinguished himself from the sophists (teachers) because he never charged a fee.
If you google “Socrates, Plato, teacher” you will find that modern scholars accept without question that Socrates was Plato’s teacher, which means they think Socrates was a teacher. Socrates’s argument goes like this: Teachers charge money. I don’t charge money. Therefore, I am not a teacher.
He then explained how he acquired a reputation for corrupting the young:
“The young men who follow me around of their own free will, those who have most leisure, the sons of the very rich, take pleasure in hearing people questioned; they themselves often imitate me and try to question others.”
“The result is that those whom they question are angry, not with themselves but with me. They say: ‘That man Socrates is a pestilential fellow who corrupts the young.'”
“If one asks them what he does and what he teaches to corrupt them, they are silent, as they do not know, but, so as not to appear at a loss, they mention those accusations that are available against all philosophers, about “things in the sky and things below the earth,” about “not believing in the gods” and “making the worse the stronger argument.”
Next Socrates turns his attention to one of his accusers, Meletus. In the course of questioning Meletus, he gets Meletus to say that all people in Athens “educate and improve” the young while only Socrates “corrupts” them.
Socrates responds by saying, “It would be a very happy state of affairs if only one person corrupted our youth, while all others improved them.”
He argues that nobody wants to live among corrupt people, so if he is, indeed, corrupting the youth, what he requires is instruction and not punishment.
He then points out a contradiction in the indictment. He is accused of being an atheist. He is also accused of teaching “new spiritual things” instead of the accepted religion of Athens. He points out that he can’t be both an atheist and a believer in “new spiritual things” because spiritual things are immortal and therefore exist in the realm of the gods, so believing in “new spiritual” things but not believing in gods would be like beliving in flute playing but not flute players.
The Gadfly Defense
For me, the most interesting part of his defense is where he describes himself as gadfly. Like all gadflies, he despised, but in his case, he claims to be a useful gadfly. The state, he says, is like a great noble horse which is sluggish because of its size and needs to be “stirred up” by a gadfly. He is the gadfly who “stirs up” the sluggish horse.
“It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me in the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade and reproach you all day long and whenever I find myself in your company.”
His accusers are swatting at him as if “aroused from a doze.” He says:
“You could easily kill me, and then you could sleep on for the rest of your days, unless the god, in his care for you sends you someone else.”
He reminds them about how, the one time he held public office, he spoke against the trial of the generals. What he describes sounds like mob rule:
“The trial was illegal, as you all recognized later. I was the only member of the presiding committee to oppose your doing something contrary to the laws, and I voted against it. The orators were ready to prosecute me and take me away, and your shouts were encouraging them. . . I might have been put to death had not the government fallen shortly afterward.”
He expains why he became a private citizen:
“Do you think I would have survived all these years if I were engaged in public affairs and acted as a good man must? Be sure, gentlemen of the jury, that if I attempted to take part in politics, I would have died long ago . . . no man will survive who genuinely opposes you.“
🔥 “No man will survive who genuinely opposes you” is a scorching statement to make about a democratic society, but not surprising if you’ve experienced the dynamics of group think or tried to put forward an opinion contrary to the accepted narrative of your group. Is a democracy really a democracy is everyone has to fall in line?
Socrates says this:
“I have lived as a private man and have never been anyone’s teacher. If anyone, young or old, desires to listen to me when I am talking and dealing with my own concerns, I have never begrudged this to anyone, but I do not converse when I receive a fee and not when I do not. I am equally ready to question the rich and the poor if anyone is willing to answer my questions. And I cannot justly be held responsible for the good or bad conduct of these people, as I never promised to teach them anything and have not done so.”
In other words, he says he should not be held responsible for what his followers and admirers do.
“Why then do some people enjoy spending considerable time in my company? You have heard why, gentlemen of the jury, I have told you the whole truth. They enjoy hearing those being questioned who think they are wise, but are not. And this is not unpleasant. To do this has, as I say, been enjoined upon me by the god, by means of oracles and dreams, and in every other way that a divine manifestation has ever ordered a man to do anything. This is true, gentlemen, and can easily be established.”
He also notes that none of the young men who followed him around are testifying against him. Many have grown to manhood, and surely at least one, after reaching maturity, would know that he had been corrupted. But none are stepping forward to be witnesses against him.
Socrates notes that he is not doing the usual thing when facing a jury:
“I am not begging and pleading and imploring the jury with many tears. I am not bringing family and friends to testify on my behalf.”
He explains why:
“I do not think it right to supplicate the jury and to be acquitted because of this but to teach and persuade them. It is not the purpose of a juryman’s office to give justice as a favor to whoever seems good to him, but to judge according to law, and this he has sworn to do. We should not accustom you to perjure yourselves, nor should you make a habit of it. This is irreverent conduct for either of us.”
Plato was one of Socrates’s young aristocratic followers. He witnessed the trial and later wrote his version of the defense Socrates offered.
The Subversive Element in a Democracy
Democracy — which allows for freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and the right to criticize the government — will always have a subversive element because there will always be people dissatisfied with the status quo. A democracy can never eliminate the subversive element because any government that attempts to police and stop all subversive behavior becomes a totalitarian state.
In 1960, the status quo was racial segregation and women in the home. Then along came a subversive element, which sounded something like this:
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin.’
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin.’
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin.’
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin.’
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.
(Confession: I recently watched A Complete Unknown, and that song got stuck in my head. So you’ll have to forgive me if I throw in a few more Bob Dylan lines.)
Bob Dylan’s, “The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind” suggests the aporia of many of Plato’s dialogues: The answer is there, but unknowable.
Before law school, I taught college English. (It feels like a previous lifetime!) I once taught a course in children’s literature, and what struck me was how much of children’s literature is subversive. Consider the story of a child who announces, “I am not going to get up today,” and remains in bed all day.
Or Mary Lennox, who disobeys the house rules, enters the secret garden where nobody is allowed to go, and helps her cousin disobey the (evil) doctor’s orders.
Or Toni Morrison’s story about a group of children who were put into a box because they used their freedom to break rules:
Who can forget Max, who makes lots of mischief and then becomes king of the wild things and leads the wild rumpus?
This poem is every two-year-old enjoying something that would horrify the parents:
I am sitting
In the middle
Of a rather
Muddy Puddle,
With my bottom
Full of bubbles
And my rubbers
Full of Mud,
While my jacket
And my sweater
Go on slowly
Getting wetter
As I very
Slowly settle
To the Bottom
Of the Mud.
And I find that
What a person
With a puddle
Round his middle
Thinks of mostly
In the muddle
Is the Muddi-
Ness of Mud.
The subversive element is curious, disobedient, and questioning. The subversive element tries new things and often gets into trouble. Sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes more overtly, the subversive element seeks to topple the established rules and order.
Subversiveness can have a great deal of appeal. It can also be frightening — depending on what is being subverted. Socrates was subversive. In his view, this was why he was on trial and executed. He also warned his judges against trying to eliminate the subversive element in a democracy.
Bob Dylan’s line, “the present now will later be past,” was prophetic. The counterculture of the 1960s became the mainstream culture in the twenty-first century. When the old social order changed and the counter-culture ideals became mainstream, a lot of people who, under the old order were first (privileged) found themselves having to compete for what was once handed to them. Lots of people either didn’t like the new order or they were afraid of it, and a new subversive element arose called MAGA that sought to turn back the clock. The “again” part of MAGA signifies a subversive, reactionary manifesto. There are those who remain confused why so many people voted for Trump despite his history of lawbreaking. The answer is obvious: They either like or overlook his rulebreaking because they dislike what he is trying to subvert.
Stabilizing the Subversive Element
The drafters of the United States Constitution — who were well-versed in the Greek classics — understood that democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction because, at any time, the people can choose to end the democracy. Specifically the founders feared that a demagogue, or a leader of the people, would lead the people to disaster.
The founders undersood the folly in selecting military generals by popular vote. They gave federal judges lifetime appointment on the theory that if judges didn’t have to worry about reelection or pleasing the people who keep them in power, they would be more likely to do what was right.
(At times, lifetime appointment for federal judges worked well for progressives. Racial segregation was overturned by the federal courts. When Thugood Marshall and his legal team set out on the 1930s to end racial segregation in America, they understood that elected officials, who answered to a white electorate, would never be able to embrace desegregation. In the 1950s and 1960s we had a liberal Supreme Court, partly becaues Franklin Delano Roosevelt served so long and appointed so many federal judges and Supreme Court justices. Through most of our history, the Supreme Court has been conservative, so lifetime appointment has more often benefited conservative politics.)
The drafters of the Constitution knew that Athenian democracy was unstable and ultimately failed. To create stability, they made change difficult. They made the Constitution difficult to amend. To create stability and slow down change, they divided power between three branches of government and between the states and the federal government.
The same safeguards they put into place to prevent a tyrant, should one come to power, from seizing too much power similarly work to slow down change.
Change is constant. We are currently in a backslide. Will we keep sliding back, will we push forward again?
I don’t know the answer because it depends on what people do. I do know that the people who have led us forward, the liberal heroes of the past, understood the dangers but kept cool heads, organized, and did the hard work of pushing us forward. Before the 1920s our country was not very democratic. College was only for a few. There was no minimum wage, no 40-hour workweek, no social security, and almost no worker protections. The middle class was relatively small. Most people in poverty could not break out. Many “owed their souls” to the company stores.
Then along came Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his New deal. Much of his success came from his ability to communicate calmly and clearly to the people. His New Deal enlarged middle class, reduced income inequality and in general made the country more democratic.
The safeguards that create stability means that bringing about change is hard work. Slow, difficult change is the price we pay for stability.
I know something about this because I wrote books about a few of our liberal heroes and how they made our country more democratic. They didn’t behave like demagogues stirring people to rage. They were not interested in popularity or fame. They were serious people who got to work and dedicated their lives to bringing about positive change. Each was subversive in that they worked to radically change the established social order.
And of course, 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns:
The world that Susan B. Anthony envisioned came about. Women are able to freely enter the professions. The world that Thurgood Marshall envisioned came about: Racial segregation in America has been outlawed. The world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt envisioned came about: Americans have social security, a minimum wage, a 40 hour workweek, and worker protections.
The result of those changes is that the federal government grew exponentially larger. The face of America changed and a lot of people don’t like it and are trying to subvert the new order.
To what extent will they succeed? “Will the loser now be later to win?”
The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind.
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Subscribe and I will let you know when the next blog post is available. I may continue with Plato, or move ahead to Aristotle.
I wonder if the whole series should be called Make Philosophy Cool Again.
If you missed my announcement, see Rebels, Robbers, and Radicals: The Story of the Bill of Rights.
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