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Gore's Socratic decision
By Sharon Schuman
Socrates, one of the most famous losers in history, can help us ponder the aftermath of the presidential election.
Just before his execution in 399 B.C., he listened patiently while his friend Crito tried to persuade him to escape the death sentence pronounced by the Athenian Assembly. After all, they both considered him innocent of the charges of impiety and corrupting youths. To them, the verdict was a perversion of justice.
Socrates' admirers also had arranged safe havens in other city states, and they had plenty of money to implement their plans. If "the unexamined life is not worth living," surely the examined life was worth saving. Crito was confident that Socrates would see the light.
Some people say Socrates was just too much of a martyr to take Crito's advice. He was showboating for history. Others argue that he deserved what he got, having disdained democracy, encouraged tyranny, and produced as his star student Alcibiades, the traitor who betrayed Athens to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.
Socrates, though, had his own fix on the situation. He answered Crito not directly but with an elaborate personification of the Laws of Athens as his parents. He asked Crito to consider the reaction of these Laws, which had formed, educated and nourished him.
The Laws might ask, "What are you trying to do, destroy us, the Laws, and the whole state as well?" They had created the institutions of marriage, education, art, war, debate and democracy, according to which Socrates had flourished. According to them, there were only two choices: "You must either persuade your country or do whatever it orders."
Socrates' point was that having failed to convince the Assembly of his innocence, he was now honor-bound to abide by its findings, however erroneous he considered them to be. Make no mistake, he did consider them erroneous. During his trial, as documented by Plato and others, he was contemptuous of 'his accusers and repeatedly had to beg his listeners not to interrupt when they could restrain themselves no longer in the face of his insults.
It was just this contempt that Crito was counting on as he urged Socrates to escape. What he did not count on was the distinction Socrates would draw between the decisions of a body of fallible humans (the Assembly) and the sacred constitution of that body (500 citizens chosen by lot to govern and act as a court) empowered with the responsibility to decide his fate. Rejecting the decision of that body because he found it lacking in logic, evidence and justice was to him the same as a child turning on its parent, seeking to destroy the root of his own life.
Thus Socrates drank the hemlock and died of poison at 71 instead of a few years later of old age. Before he died, he had two further points to make.
First, he was sure that he was not really being banned by the sentence of the court, because the only way to harm someone is to get him to do something he knows is unjust (such as escaping), and no one had succeeded in doing this.
Second, he was equally sure that the court was banning itself by putting a man to death unjustly. He was so sure of this point, in fact, that he made a prophecy: "When I leave this court, I shall go away condemned by you to death, but they (his judges) will go away convicted by Truth herself of depravity and injustice." He went on to warn of a vengeance more painful than the punishment he was about to suffer, because it would be exacted over time. Athens would live in infamy. The only way to avoid this fate, according to him, would be "to make yourselves as well behaved as possible."
Detractors of Al Gore would probably see a parallel between him and the Socrates who alienated his jurors by talking down to them. Supporters would see in him one who distinguished between the decisions of fallible humans and the sacred obligation to abide by those decisions - one who saw the Laws as his parents and could distinguish between unjust humans, and the courts, legislatures or elective offices they duly inhabit.
History, though, will be a harsher judge than either Gore's detractors or his defenders, because it will survey with a cold eye the institutions wounded during this election process. It will make its pronouncements not from televisions or editorial pages, but gradually and indirectly in the behavior of people. Some will question the value of voting, others, the integrity of office holders and legislators, or the nonpartisanship of judges, or the value of logic' and truth, in the process of persuasion that Socrates considered so vital to the "examined life." In an age when cynicism is already seen as the great corrosive force acting upon the moral framework of our culture, what is to prevent cynicism rampant from finishing us off?
Our only defense must be to show citizens throughout the nation and the world that the fallible humans who at every level enact our system of government can now try to make themselves "as well behaved as possible." Whether this defense will be adequate, or whether we, like Athens, are to be remembered as the great democracy that failed, remains to be seen.
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