Socrates and the Cave Dwellers
By Baba Galleh Jallow
Thousands of years ago, the people of Athens committed a crime that is being decried to this day. Their trial and condemnation to death of Socrates, their city’s greatest thinker, acknowledged to this day as the world’s greatest philosopher, was the result of the common propensity to falsely accuse lovers of truth and justice that continues to plague human society. Socrates, who had spent all his life teaching the virtues of wisdom, truth and justice, and striving to raise the common people from the dungeon of ignorance to the tower of wisdom, was accused by the powers that be of corrupting the youth of Athens and not believing in the gods of the city. Both charges, of course, were false.
In ‘The Republic,’ his classical treatise on political society and the nature of the Good, Plato, a student of Socrates, sets out to prove the falsity of the charges for which his teacher was forced to drink poison. The basis of Plato’s defense of Philosophy against the charge that it undermined political society is the fact that throughout The Republic, the philosopher, in the person of Socrates, seeks only what is best for a healthy political society. He is constantly engaged in the arduous task of enlightening society, teaching the requirements of justice, truth, wisdom and all the virtues that make for a good person and a good society. Socrates is particularly concerned with the proper education of the youth. He decries immoderation and excess, and emphasizes the need for the predominance of reason over sprit and desire in the human soul. To have a good society, he teaches, you must have a good individual. It is an aggregate of good people that make up a good society. Thus, there is nothing in what Socrates teaches that, objectively speaking, does not promote the well being of society. It was for this good crime that he was killed.
Socrates teaches that the chief function of the State is the education of the youth to become good human beings. Therefore, he advocates a strict supervision of what is taught in schools, what parents teach their children, what peers learn from each other and in general, the need for children to learn discernment, discrimination and unshaking loyalty to the State as an institution (e.g., The Gambia), as opposed to the rulers, among other virtues.
It is in the quest for this proper education that Socrates advocates censorship in The Republic. He points out the numerous dangers of teaching young children the stories of the gods according to the ancient poets Homer and Hesiod. These two poets, among others, portray the gods as if they have all the shortcomings and evil propensities of human beings. He proves to his audience that the gods, being good and perfect, should not be portrayed as capable of bad things or transforming themselves into something less than perfect. Accounts of the gods weeping and wailing over their misfortunes, taking human or animal forms to rape women, doling out evil fortunes to human beings or practicing deceit, Socrates argues, should be purged from the poetry taught to children because they have the potential to corrupt their young impressionable minds by not teaching respect for just authority and harmony among the powerful, among other virtues.
Socrates further argues for the purging from contemporary poetry of all details likely to cause young people to prefer slavery to death. Death should be preferred to slavery, particularly slavery of the mind. Dark and horrendous accounts of Hades (the world of the death in Greek mythology) as a place of torment and misery, Socrates argues, are likely to cause young people to fear death and instill in them a spirit of cowardice and timidity. Poetic accounts of death must be such as to make the young eager to die for the nation, truth and justice when the need arises. Poets, Socrates argues, must not be allowed to extol tyranny in the city because it would make this worst form of government look appealing to the minds of the young. Socrates advocates that children must be taught to be reasonable and disciplined, to love truth, wisdom, justice, courage, honesty and moderation, and to shun excessive laughter, drunkenness, sexual indulgence, and all forms of immoderation, deceit and injustice. As he says in Book Three of The Republic, future leaders must, from childhood on, “ . . . pattern themselves after men who are - among other things - courageous, temperate, reverent and free.” By giving them the right kind of education, Socrates argues, “ . . . we could protect our guardians from growing up in the presence of evil, in a veritable pasture of poisonous herbs where by grazing at will, little by little and day by day, they should accumulate a huge mass of corruption in their souls.”
Plato perhaps makes his case for the philosopher most poignantly in the allegory of the cave. Society, including the philosopher, is imprisoned in a dark cave where everyone is chained to a chair facing a wall across which shadows move. They cannot turn their heads to see the source of the shadows and so they believe that the shadows are the reality. Released from his shackles and binders, the philosopher is forced out of the dark cave and forced to look upon the light - to see the good and appreciate the beauty of knowledge, truth and wisdom. Thus enlightened, he is duty bound to descend back into the dark cave to try to convince those prisoners that what they see on the wall in front of them are mere shadows and fake images of reality. Of course, Plato argues, the philosopher would be hated and ridiculed by the shackled cave dwellers, particularly their leaders, because he would be challenging the very foundations of their entire existence. Life in the cave is defined by a common perception of reality on which the honor and prestige of many are based. The philosopher thus faces not only the difficulty of convincing the prisoners, but also the danger of being accused of denying the most fundamental beliefs of the cave dwellers and corrupting the minds of the young among them.
Plato seems to suggest that while the charge against philosophy is, objectively speaking, untrue, it is, in a sense, true. Socrates’ ideas, he grants, are inherently subversive of the status quo because he teaches that the existing educational structure is the prime source of individual and social injustice in the city and advocates its dismantling and replacement by a curriculum that would teach men to be just. He exposes the corruption of the Athenian regime and calls for the use of reason and wisdom and the practice of justice in the art of governance. Socrates was killed because he advocated a radical paradigm shift, a total overhaul of existing corrupt structures of power and privilege. He was killed because he taught truth and courage, and challenged the regime to act in the interest of the people rather than in their own selfish interests.
Today, part of the Socratic role is played by the media. Most people living under dictatorships are comparable to the Socratic prisoners living in a cave in which shadows are made to look like reality.
Which is why tyrants and despots are so hostile to the media and all who advocate contrary ideas and opinions. Those who rule in their own selfish interests, those who would keep the people shackled in the dark cave of ignorance and mental poverty, those who would be lords and masters rather than servants of the people, power-drunk despots enslaved by their greed and base desires - those people will do anything and everything within their means – including the murder of innocent persons – in order to snuff out the light of truth and justice, to keep the light outside the cave, to perpetuate the myth of the shadows as representations of reality. They may succeed in snuffing out the lives of individuals, in blocking the flow of truth in the form of media information to the people, but they can never snuff out the light of truth and justice because this light is of the essence of God and cannot be touched by the soiled hands of power-crazed despots. Eventually, the light will filter through to the eyes and minds of the cave dwellers, and the power of knowledge will triumph of the darkness of ignorance and lies. Socrates has long been vindicated and he will continue to be vindicated till the end of times. So will all those media dedicated to the propagation of truth and justice, in spite of the doomed efforts of tyrants to prevent this from happening.
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! MSN Messenger
_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE!
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html
To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
|
