Socrates

It's Socrates and the Socratics (including that dog Diogenes) today in CoPhi.*

In A&P, Billy Graham scared the devil (and a load of groundless guilt and shame he couldn't shake in college) into a young Minnesotan named David,with his god-fearing Southern Baptist "graphic description of eternal damnation." But then he had a driveway moment with the inestimable Julia Sweeney and began letting go of the fear, guilt, shame, and (eventually) faith. Soon he saw the incoherence of a theology that would hold finite beings like ourselves ultimately responsible for an infinite creator's "preordained outcome."

(My favorite moment from Sweeney's tour de force one-woman show, btw, is her profane (though still somehow gentle) take-down of Deepak Chopra.)

A good question on this Valentine's Day eve: do religious couples have happier relationships? Do atheists have better sex? To the latter, "one large correlational study"says yes. But Ethan found something more gratifying than the hunt for an atheist partner. And, he points out, being raised without religion is not the same as being raised atheist.

Here's a problem I don't recall wrestling with as a kid, perhaps because I "went forward" in terrified quest of formal salvation while still an only child - and only a child. Sen wonders "why God would send my nonbelieving brother to burn for all eternity and expect me to forget about him if I was in Heaven."

The most disgraceful, pathetic, yet still laughable words directed to an inquiring child I've yet encountered were Ronnelle's mother's in reaction to his coming out,. "I rebuke you, you abominable lil codependent [?!] faggot. I curse the day I had you. You are dead to me. Get thee behind me Satan." Wow. Thanks Mom.

Also in A&P today, we'll hear a Fantasyland report. Kurt Andersen says religion is the ultimate conspiracy theory, with "God the mastermind plotting and executing His all-encompassing scheme, assisted by a team of co-conspirators, the angels and prophets."

That may provide a smooth segue to Bioethics, where today we're scheduled to hear a report on Dan Brown's Origins. I haven't read it, and am curious to know what it might have to do with our course topic. A clue, from an ambivalent review:

“Origin” grows out of questions raised by scientists who adopt atheism in a world where strict creationism has less and less relevance. The novel doesn’t paint Kirsch as an enemy of religion, though its prologue does show him arriving threateningly at a scenic abbey in Montserrat to challenge three religious leaders just after a meeting of the Parliament of the World’s Religions... But in the world of quantum computing, where Kirsch’s earlier pioneering work had broken boundaries, the divine was harder to apprehend. The book’s final destination reveals the essence of what Kirsch saw and created, and it inspires awe. Getting there is worth the roundabout journey."

So, a mystery awaits.

*Socrates, they say, was firmly devoted to argumentative reason as a better method than revelation or hope. Should we call his devotion "faith"? Not if that means an unwavering refusal to seek and ponder all evidence, to entertain challenging questions, even to welcome those that question the utility of argumentative reason itself. His fabled humility, his ignorant form of wisdom, officially invites every challenge.

But unofficially, Socrates was definitely betting on reason against superstition and tradition for their own sake. His trust in reason was firm, his delight in philosophical argument was inextinguishable. He drew his dying breath in the middle of an argument his successors have continued to this day, as to the meaning and practical value of a life committed to virtue, curious inquiry, and intellectual integrity. He died in contempt of what he considered the misplaced presumption of fearing death more than vice, "which runs faster than death."

That's how we've come to see him, as a pedestal-mounted figure larger than life, gazing across the centuries in reproach of small-mindedness and irrational fear. We downplay his personal shabbiness and eccentricity, forgetting the actual figure he must have cut as the ancient Athenian equivalent of a street person. How did such a vagabond manage to ingratiate himself with the upper crust elites of his city? It was his spellbinding gift of gab, tiresome to many but entrancing ("bewitching," said the smitten Alcibiades) to many more. People looked beyond the pug nose and the ugly-ass mouth ("more ugly even than an ass's") to the beauty within.

His conversation was compelling but it was not personally revealing. His version of dialectic withheld affirmative assertion, instead soliciting others' definitions and demonstrations in order to trip them over their own inconsistencies and send them (and us, peering over their shoulders) back to the philosophical drawing board.

Athenian democracy had just been overthrown by the Spartans and decimated by their Thirty Tyrants, as Socrates went to trial. His own anti-democratic leanings were well-known. 

If you were heading out on a journey by sea, Socrates asks Adeimantus in Plato's Republic, who would you ideally want deciding who was in charge of the vessel? Just anyone or people educated in the rules and demands of seafaring? The latter of course, says Adeimantus, so why then, responds Socrates, do we keep thinking that any old person should be fit to judge who should be a ruler of a country? Socrates’s point is that voting in an election is a skill, not a random intuition. And like any skill, it needs to be taught systematically to people. Letting the citizenry vote without an education is as irresponsible as putting them in charge of a trireme sailing to Samos in a storm.  Why Socrates Hated Democracy, SoL

But did he really hate democracy? Gottlieb says no, he was in fact too democratic for his time and place. He was an ultra-democrat, committed to the examined life for all. This may have sounded to some like an endorsement of "exaggerated individualism" but for Socrates the examined life is also the collaborative conversational life. "Philosophy is an intimate and collaborative activity: it is a matter for discussions among small groups of people who argue together in order that each might find the truth for himself. The spirit of such a pastime cannot accurately be captured in a lecture or a treatise." It's best captured in talk, preferably while walking. Hence Plato's dialogues, and ours.

Not even the Delphic Oracle's authoritative declaration of Socrates' wisdom could stifle the gadfly's appetite for rational argument and inquiry, provoking him to "check the truth of it" for himself. Can we possibly take literally, then, his claim to philosophize at the behests of God or his daimon? No. He just did it because he thought it was the right thing to do. 

He also thought it best not to weep and wail for our finitude, even at death's door. "No one knows with regard to death whether it is really the greatest blessing..." Maybe he'll get to meet his "heroes of the old days." Or maybe he'll just have a nice long sleep. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him to worry about an unpleasant or hellish alternative. He was ahead of his time, and Epicurus's, in this regard.

Socrates and Plato were both "unworldly" but in different ways, the former in his shambling indifference to social status, hygiene,and finery, the latter in regarding carnal existence as a form of incarceration in the shadow of eternal essences and Ideas. Socrates kept a sharper focus on the duties and blessings of this world, "not simply a preparation for something else." And he thought we could all do that. "For Plato, philosophy was the ladder to this elevated world of the Forms, but not everyone could climb it." For Socrates, "anybody could examine his own life and ideas and thus lead a worthwhile existence."

The paradigmatic Socratic question: Is something good because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it's good? The Socratic answer: it can't be the former, that's arbitrary. Real gods don't play darts with the universe. Hypothetical gods shouldn't, either.

What would he say about people who achieve wealth and success by behaving badly? Or about the state of our democracy? Would he agree with William James regarding "our national disease"? Would you?

We know how it ended for Socrates. They told him to shut up. He persisted (like Elizabeth Warren, and like Paul Kalinithi), until the hemlock shut him down. It's up to the rest of us, now, to persist when we're told to "shut up about the bad stuff."

In Fantasyland, in addition to the aforementioned dot-connecting between conspiracy theorists and theists, we read of the Freemasons. What was their secret? Poore Richard said it's no secret at all. It's an open secret, isn't it, that like fraternal boys' clubs everywhere the Masons wear funny hats and engage in silly rituals? They're not just for boys anymore, though. Lots of reputable (or famous) folk (including my old Dad) were in the club, leading some to suspect a nefarious world-historical plot. Cue Dan Brown again.

It's all too common to hear Bible Belt evangelicals claim that AIDS or 9/11 or the latest natural disaster is God's razor strap, designed to whack his children back into line. But did you know that many Yankees thought God whipped their butts in some early Civil War skirmishes to punish them for not yet outlawing slavery?

Mark Twain, quirky as always, had his own scapegoat for that war: Sir Walter Scott's popular novels romanticizing the feudal old South. Scott's "sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless" society is largely to blame for the war. Twain was a spinner of yarns and tall tales, but maybe that one's not entirely fabricated of whole cloth.
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Feb.13, 2000: Charles Schulz's last Peanuts...
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Happy Darwin Day (+1), a highly tweetable holiday #DarwinDay2018...

•  “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
• “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
• “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
• “As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him." [A colleague objects that this is an invitation to nationalism and war. It would be, if the progressive movement to expand our tribe stopped with the nation-state. A more expansive  and hopeful Darwinism predicts we won't stop there, and thus may yet avoid blowing ourselves to bits in the name of our nationalist "sympathies."]
• "any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man."
• “Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.”
• “We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.”
• "I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for...the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished."
• "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one... whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

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9.20.17. Today is the birthday of American poet and essayist Donald Hall (books by this author) born in Hamden, Connecticut (1928), who once said, “Every good poet in the world has written only a few terrific poems.”

At 89 years old, he longer writes poetry. “Not enough testosterone,” he says. Instead, he’s turned to prose: his last book is collection called Essays After Eighty (2014). Starting the book was simple. He said, “One day I looked out the window and began writing about being an old man looking out the window at the year going by.”

Hall was educated at Exeter, where he played softball with visiting poet Robert Frost, whom Hall remembers as “a spoiled brat,” even though Frost was 79 years old at the time... WA==
On Ken Burns' Vietnam last night, LBJ told an aide it's easy to get into a war but hard to get out. Then he jumped in with both feet. When will we ever learn?
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It's Constitution Day on our campus, with patriotic music blaring ("Stars and Stripes Forever") ahead of a public reading of that most sacred of human documents. But as a recent op-ed asked, is it still up to the task of governing a society marked increasingly by a wealth gap?
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2.9.17. 5:40/6:42, 32/40/26, 5:20. Happy Birthday  to Alice Walker, who said “no person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow”... and to Irish rebel Brendan Behan, who said "Never throw stones at your mother,You'll be sorry for it when she's dead, Never throw stones at your mother, Throw bricks at your father instead." On this day in 1964, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time...