Socrates and the Culture Wars

Roger Berkowitz
Peter Minowitz writes about how teaching Socrates’ Apology can push us past the binaries of our culture wars. 

“Woke” today is one side of a stark binary, and its celebrants are sometimes accused of cultishness. James A. Lindsay pulls no punches: fearing that wokeness is a “totalizing and totalitarian worldview” that could be “installed as the de facto state religion,” Lindsay speculates about using the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses to combat it.[6] Even Aja Romano, a sympathetic and sober analyst, maintains that “woke” has “evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory.”...

In the Apology (and elsewhere) Socrates says many things that appear exaggerated or even doctrinaire, and one could complain similarly about the unnamed philosophers who dominate discussion within Plato’s Laws, Statesman, and Sophist. To appropriate Plato’s most famous allegory, every human society resembles a cave (Republic, 514a – 518b) in which the vast majority of inhabitants are manipulated into accepting views that are profoundly incomplete or distorted. If such blinders are inevitable, every community must regularly draw questioning to a close—and cannot function without slogans, cheerleading, talking points, and inspirational leadership. When implementing a decision, furthermore, we often need to shut down debate as we plow ahead. Our predictive knowledge is rarely certain.

Socratic teaching, with open-ended small-group exercises that encourage students to render judgments and develop comparisons, can combat dogmatism in many different disciplines, and it may be invaluable for studying Plato. Does anyone who assigns the Republic want students to consider expelling everyone older than ten (540e-541a) while launching a radically communist society in which philosopher kings wield absolute power? If nothing else, professors can acknowledge how sharply divided Plato interpreters are on an array of central issues. According to Karl Popper, Myles Burnyeat, Christopher Bobonich, and many other scholars, for example, the Republic elaborates a societal blueprint that Plato hoped would someday be realized. At the other extreme lie scholars such as Allan Bloom, who called it “the greatest critique of political idealism ever written.”[8]

It may be impossible to do justice to the complexity of things, but it is one of the noblest goals anyone can pursue, and intellectual humility will always be invaluable. Few would suggest that contemporary leaders generally exude it, and many worry that it is withering in American higher education. Like the rest of us, including every adult who was ever abused or unjustly maligned, Socrates knew all sorts of important things. But it was never enough.