- Citation:
- Permalink:
Response to Athens Dialogues: Democracy and Politeia; Ober and Monoson
I’d like to thank the Onassis Foundation for inviting me here to respond on this panel. I have been asked to comment on Professor Ober and Professor Monoson’s papers, which I am very pleased about, because I think that they are exemplary contributions to the dialogues taking place here during this program, that very self-consciously attempt to bridge the ancient and the modern, and to make certain aspects of classical Greece relevant to issues of the present day. Professor Monoson’s paper is an exploration of the figure of Socrates through the techniques of classical reception theory, while Professor Ober’s is an exercise in comparative political theory, but both papers point to a fruitful way of approaching the political and ethical concerns of citizens of contemporary democracies through the well-known stories and individuals of ancient Greece, often by interpreting the classics in new ways and offering up new visions of familiar material. Two days ago at the opening ceremony it was asked how much the ancients were applicable to the moderns. The answer, as I think these papers show, is, “Very!” For the next few minutes I want to explain what I think are the most interesting aspects of the papers and to raise a few questions about the ideas presented in them.
Professor Ober’s paper, as I said, is a work of comparative political theory. It starts with questions that need not have anything to do with ancient Greece, namely, What exactly is dignity and what is its role in political life?, but it answers those questions through the use of a historical example, democratic Athens, which also provides a crucial third way of understanding the scope and meaning of dignity. Basically, that third way is a notion of “civic dignity,” which avoids the ethical undesirability of meritocratic dignity, which is based on a zero-sum conception of competition for prestige among an elite few, and improves upon the practical infeasibility of a universal form of human dignity. In this way Professor Ober incorporates both ethical concerns and practical considerations; he navigates between so-called positive and norm ative political theory, that is between a description of politics based on how we think human beings will act and a vision of politics based on how we think human beings ought to act.
Here I’d like to unpack a bit those practical concerns that Professor Ober raises, specifically about universal human dignity. We need to understand what he thinks the obstacles are to realizing certain over-ambitious forms of political action, which in turn help explain why his notion of civic dignity might arise and why it might survive where other forms of dignity founder. Professor Ober’s explanation is that universal human dignity, while an honorable ideal, is in a sense too broad to adequately motivate people to act in defense of others’ dignity. “Responsibility for the defense of human dignity,” he says, “tends to be highly diffuse.” What this diffusion entails is a tendency on the part of individuals to take their dignity for granted; since everyone has dignity, no one is responsible for policing and enforcing it, and so people come to shirk their duties in maintaining the scheme of dignity. When enough people casually free ride and assume others are taking care of the problem, however, the enforcement of dignity collapses. While everyone would be better off with their dignity being respected, diffuse responsibility leads people to abdicate their duty out of more narrow self interests. When Professor Ober says later in his written paper that civic dignity resists devolution into a commons tragedy, he means that it avoids the problem just stated concerning universal dignity: when dignity is fully common, no one takes responsibility for it, and so people acting in their individual self-interest eventually destroy it out of ignorance. This picture corresponds to the well-known parable told by the scientist Garrett Hardin, of the common field that is slowly but surely overgrazed by individual shepherds who have an interest in letting their herds eat more and more grass. This scenario has come to be known as the tragedy of the commons.
Civic dignity, on the other hand, has the capacity to motivate and to mobilize defense, as Professor Ober says. Unlike universal human dignity, it is robust, that is, likely to survive, because it is sustained by “rational self-interest, well-known and well-respected rules, and by the habitual behavior developed as a result of living according to those rules.” Because political communities, unlike the world population, have the capacity to punish individuals and provide incentives to follow the rules, the enforcement of dignity, once gotten off the ground, can sustain itself because people have a more direct interest in seeing it survive; furthermore, the effects of their individual contributions are felt to be meaningful and important.
This is just the sort of situation we see in democratic Athens, Professor Ober argues. Once democracy was established, the Athenians developed a series of rules and norms that gave everyone a stake in seeing dignity sustained. By punishing free riders and offering rewards to zealous defenders of dignity, the Athenians were able to keep their scheme of civic dignity from falling prey to the tragedy of the commons. Feasible scope meant enforceability; collective, public, commonly known rules provided incentives.
There is certainly an intuitive plausibility to Professor Ober’s claim that more diffuse responsibility creates a greater likelihood of neglect and eventual disuse. Still, I would like to press upon this point for a moment. I think such a move is justified by the plausible existence of an interlocutor, let’s call him or her the “cosmopolitan,” who might subscribe to the universal variety of human dignity and who might find the arguments for a more circumscribed and localized civic dignity unpersuasive. Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment and voice this cosmopolitan’s concerns. “The purported reason for the success of civic dignity,” he or she might say, “is feasibility: it is premised upon the notion of a more restricted group in which monitoring and rewarding are easier and more likely to succeed. But how do we know what is too broad and what is narrow enough? And what is there in your account which prevents us from imagining a world government in which each person is like the member of one giant polis? — just as in the civic dignity of ancient Athens, the ties between people in such a community would be political without being personal. And if indeed it turned out that people in such a community failed to uphold their scheme of civic dignity through irresponsibility, couldn’t we chalk that up to their own moral laziness? There need not be a “natural” level at which people understandably become irresponsible — they are blameworthy no matter what. After all, since people are capable of being responsible at one scale, as in democratic Athens, why not at another? How can we know they’ll be irresponsible till we’ve tried?”
That is one possible version of what a cosmopolitan might say. They could push against what they perceive as the arbitrariness of the lines drawn. But they might also have legitimate claims from a more normative angle. After all, in today’s rapidly globalizing and increasingly interconnected world, the nation-state is starting to some to look more and more like a contingent historical relic, an arbitrarily drawn product of nationalism with little ethical pull on peoples’ own political conscience. Local, community politics, sure, and cosmopolitan world politics, perhaps hopefully, but do we have to continue to give our energies to the nation-state? I would be interested to hear Professor Ober’s thoughts about how we might determine feasible and legitimate scope. As I said before, I am very sympathetic to the idea that smaller size might mean greater practicability, but that prediction rests on an assumption about how we think human beings will act rather than on how they could act given the right circumstances. Might world government still be a desirable and achievable goal? What if we are reaching the age of Zeno of Citium rather than Demosthenes of Athens?
Let me turn now to Professor Monoson’s paper on the reception of Socrates in mid-twentieth century America. She has meticulously researched these various works of fiction, theater, and television, and provides a vivid picture of the political climate at the time and of the ways in which artists and intellectuals found the figure of Socrates a productive one for exploring the problems of civil rights, free speech, the toleration of dissent, and, in what is definitely a more contemporary issue, pluralism against both Stalinism and McCarthyism. The first thing I thought after finishing this paper was, how do I learn more?, and then, did this phenomenon of appropriating Socrates extend to other countries and other political regimes and ideologies? That would be truly fascinating to know and to compare with the American examples given in the paper.
I would like to focus, however, on another question, this one based on the title of the paper: “The Making of a Democratic Symbol.” What comes out strongly in all of the cases surveyed by Professor Monoson is the use, and I would argue the rehabilitation, of Socrates as a specifically democratic icon. The dissenting, deconstructing, and, let’s not kid ourselves, rather annoying figure of Plato’s dialogues becomes, in a sense, a seal of quality in each case for the artist’s own political views. Socrates is made the classical archetype, the legitimating force, the trump card, as it were, for the values and ideologies of the writer, who in some cases seems uncomfortably close to being the actual hero of the story, for whom Socrates is the historical stand-in. Perhaps we should not begrudge the artists too much for graspi ng at what cultural capital they could in the fight against some very serious, quite high-stakes contemporary political problems. But if I may, I would like to take Professor Monoson’s paper as an invitation to think about our possible uses of Socrates today — because my problem with the depiction of Socrates in the works she describes is a matter of both historical accuracy and ethical reflection.
First, I think we ought to spend more time in the public sphere debating the complex relationship between the historical Socrates and ancient Athenian democracy. There is too often an easy conflation of Socrates with all we hold dear in our modern tolerant liberal republics, whereas I would argue against any neat system where “Socrates + democracy + free speech” conveniently all hang together. Partly this can be overcome by extending our view of Socrates beyond the portrait derived from Plato and investigating his early reception in Athenian cultural memory. It’s understandable that we have traditionally relied on Plato to get at the “true Socrates,” not least because Plato is, in my opinion at least, one of the greatest writers, not only in ancient Greek but in any language. But for the sake of reconstructing the social image of Socrates outside of Platonic philosophical circles, I think we should look for representations of Socrates not only in Xenophon and in Aristophanes, but also in the fragments of Old Comedy, where Socrates is mocked, a la Aristophanes’ Clouds, on more than one occasion; in a speech, albeit a fragmentary one, of Lysias, where a pupil of Socrates is prosecuted; in the oratory of Aeschines half a century later, where the orator can casually toss out a comment about Socrates being a sophist who taught members of the Thirty Tyrants; and even in the unreliable biographical tidbits found in later compilers like Athenaeus and Diogenes Laertius, whose stories, sometimes moralizing and sometimes scandalous, nevertheless might contain some reflection of the early memories of Socrates in fourth century Athens. This would productively complicate our picture of the “last days of Socrates” as presented by Plato and as brought to visual life, perhaps too credulously, by Walter Cronkite and the crew of CBS’s You Are There . (And I’m relying on Professor Monoson’s description here because I haven’t yet seen the film.) While I cannot go into detail about all these sources here, I will say that I think that they give us a picture of Socrates as a person constantly at odds with his city’s political mainstream, constantly jostling with Athenian democracy in skeptical and borderline pernicious ways. Even Plato gives us hints of this in his dialogues, as when Socrates states in the Gorgias that he is the only one to truly do politics in Athens, a claim that would surely not have gone uncontested by the average Athenian democrat. We also learn from the Apology that Socrates stayed in the city during the brief regime of the Thirty, unlike his friend Chaerephon, who went into exile and returned with the demos.
Now, I want to be clear: I am not saying that Socrates was guilty of the charges brought against him, or that his views were totally incompatible with democracy. Instead I wish to emphasize that there is certainly enough evidence to question his credentials as a specifically democratic icon. But this also points to potential differences between the democracy of Athens and our democratic regimes today. If Socrates was intolerable in Athens but tolerable today, does that simply mean that the Athenians made a temporary mistake, or could it be that their political ideology was in some ways fundamentally different from ours now? This is surely worth exploring.
That is a very brief summary of the case for more historical exactitude in dealing with Socrates. I’d like to conclude with the ethical case. Pro fessor Monoson is right to point out in several places in her paper that a Socrates devoid of the unsettling, provocative, gadfly spirit is a very sorry Socrates indeed. And it is just this Socrates, the unnerving one, that we need more of, not to win our own political battles with, as some of the Cold War-era artists did, but to turn upon ourselves in critical self-reflection. Socrates has given us a dialectical tool, called the elenchus , that we can use to probe our everyday assumptions and inherited traditions. It is this tool that allows the logoi of Socrates to go on, even after his death, as Professor Gregory Nagy suggested yesterday. Socrates predicted at the time of his death sentence in Plato’s Apology that this skill of his would live on after him, and that the Athenians would find that they could not escape Socrates’ questioning after all, thanks to those inspired by him who would carry on his mission. We can thus all be Socrates’ disciples, but first and foremost we should train this elenchus on ourselves. After all it is this willingness to turn the scalpel on oneself and dissect one’s own opinions, so to speak, that caused the philosopher Nietzsche to so admire Socrates in the end.
Therefore we should unsettle ourselves in bringing Socrates back to life. While we are engaged this week in a dialogue between ancient and modern and beyond, and while we may feel the need to ask in what ways we have fallen short of the ancients and in what ways we have surpassed them, the role of Socrates in all this, I think, is to say to us: “I don’t care about history, about times or places. My question is, has either of you done what is right , and how do you know?” (Coincidentally, this is one of the main points of Professor Ober’s paper, to ask an ethical question — that is, how can one live well, in dignified ways, and how have different people accomplished this?) This is perhaps not a question we typically ask ourselves, but it is very much worth asking, even if, as in conversation with Socrates, we end up unsure of ourselves, in aporia . We can and should continue to engage with Socrates in this way, even if it is not easy and even if Socrates might not always tell us what we want to hear. Yesterday Professor Richard Hunter gave us the evocative image of the Delphic Oracle telling Zeno of Citium (there he is again!) to “sleep with the dead.” We should try to sleep with Socrates, but as we know from Alcibiades’ own story in the Symposium of his attempt to seduce Socrates, our advances may be resisted. But perhaps, now as then, our souls will be better for it. Thank you.