Authors: Cornel West
He who claims your indulgence as having acted for the good of the commonwealth must be shown to possess the spirit of the commonwealth. That spirit is a spirit of compassion for the helpless, and of resistance
to the intimidation of the strong and powerful; it does not inspire brutal treatment of the populace, and subservience to the potentates of the day.
Solon’s reforms did not establish Athenian democracy, but they did constitute a compromise between clashing classes and groups that put Athens on the road toward democracy. When Cleisthenes triumphed over his foe Isagoras by siding with the demos in 508 BC, he immediately set in place a new political system of demes. The demes were vibrant forms of local democratic participation and communal activity that bring to mind New England township democracy centuries ago, and they replaced the old Greek system of kinship tribes based on birth. Like juries, the demes were grassroots training grounds for democratic temperaments that undercut blind allegiances to family, clan, or tribe. In addition, Cleisthenes established a new democratic council of five hundred representatives that replaced the old aristocratic council of the Areopagus. Athenian democracy was born.
This historic evolution from a society and government based on loyalty to a narrow kinship group into a broader citizenship model was, in the wonderful phrase of Eli Sagan in his superb book
The Honey and the Hemlock
(1991), “the conscious moralization of democratic energy.” And when Pericles ascended to power in 443 BC and later instituted the first pay for public service—along with a system of annual rotation in office and the lot for holding office—Athenian democracy was solidified. This experiment was less a static constitutional order than a dynamic democratic culture of civic participation. As Sheldon Wolin notes, this “great achievement
of self-government was to transform politics in sight and speech; power was made visible; decision making was opened so that citizens could see its workings; ordinary men personified power, spoke to it unservilely, and held themselves answerable.”
This remarkable unleashing of deep democratic energies went hand in hand with clever oligarchic efforts to subvert the will of the demos, whether by overt corruption or covert manipulation. This corruption or manipulation often resulted from the widespread market activity that was widely viewed to be incompatible or at odds with Athenian public life. The Athenians were well aware that the voices of the demos could be offset by powerful market elites bending the system to serve the interests of the few. The economic power of the oligarchs was recognized to be the primary source of the corruptions of Athenian democratic governance.
It is no accident that the Greek invention of Socratic dialogue was motivated, in part, by opposition to the market-driven Sophists obsessed with moneymaking. The major foes of Socrates in the writings that popularized his ideas—like Thrasymachus in Plato’s
Republic
—were cast as greedy merchants and clever rhetoricians with little regard for the quality of democratic public life. In fact, the Socratic love of wisdom was contrasted sharply against the Sophistic love of money.
The leading Sophist of the day—Gorgias—was described by Isocrates in the
Antidosis:
This man spent time among the Thessalians when these people were the wealthiest of the Greeks; he lived a long life and was devoted to making money;
he had no fixed dwelling in any city and therefore did not spend money for the benefit of the public.
And the contemporary historian K. J. Dover writes in his essay “The Freedom of the Intellectual in Greek Society,” the Sophists as intellectuals “were widely regarded as exercising, through their wealthy Athenian patrons, great influence over Athenian policy, while not themselves accountable for the execution of policy.”
In the great story of Athenian democracy, Socrates is the towering figure precisely because it was his central mission to combat the corruptions of elite power by questioning the narrow ideological and prejudicial thinking of his day. He was an exemplary democratic citizen—serving on the council and partaking in three major military campaigns (Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis)—and he took it as his calling to go out to the demos to “infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself” (Plato,
Meno
80c—d).
The Socratic love of wisdom holds not only that the unexamined life is not worth living (
Apology
38a) but also that to be human and a democratic citizen requires that one muster the courage to think critically for oneself. This love of wisdom is a perennial pursuit into the dark corners of one’s own soul, the night alleys of one’s society, and the back roads of the world in order to grasp the deep truths about one’s soul, society, and world. This pursuit shatters one’s petty idols, false illusions, and seductive fetishes; it undermines blind conformity, glib complacency, and pathetic cowardice. Socratic questioning yields intellectual integrity, philosophic humility, and personal sincerity—all essential elements
of our democratic armor for the fight against corrupt elite power.
Socratic questioning is the enactment of
parrhesia
—frank and fearless speech—that is the lifeblood of any democracy. Socrates admits that
parrhesia
was “the cause of my unpopularity” (
Apology
24a). And it was the reason for his tragic death. Yet he chose to die rather than live a lie. His noble death—at the hands of dogmatic and nihilistic elites—gave rise to a new literary genre that kept his memory alive. This famous genre of questioning—immortalized by his student Plato—consists of intense interrogation and sustained examination of how we ought to live. It wrestles with basic questions such as, What is justice? What is courage? What is piety? What is love? And although Socrates never wrote a word, Socratic writers like Plato, Xenophon, and Aeschines left powerful and poignant portraits of the democratic practice of Socratic questioning. In fact, Plato’s dramatic portraits of this democratic practice constitute the foundations of Western philosophy (
philosophia
, or love of wisdom). The democratic energies of Socratic questioning tend to brazenly and forcefully challenge the corrupt rule of elites and often subject its practitioners to ridicule and censure of various kinds. Yet Socratic questioning is indispensable to any democratic experiment.
Ironically, Plato’s love of Socrates and his hatred of those who put Socrates to death—corrupt elites of Athenian democracy—produced a schizophrenia in Plato’s thought. As S. Sara Monoson’s excellent book,
Plato’s Democratic Entanglements
(2000), shows, this schizophrenia is central to Plato’s philosophy. On the one
hand, his texts embody a vibrant democratic energy of Socratic questioning that shuns the dogmatism and nihilism of corrupt rulers. On the other hand, his vision of order and hierarchy legitimate an antidemocratic authoritarianism. Plato’s famous vertical chain of being trumps any democracy. Yet his magnificent development of the Socratic literary genre was rooted in a ferocious scrutiny of the lived experience of the demos. Plato’s writings were indebted to poetic forms that focused on the experiences of ordinary Athenians. These forms consisted of the mimes of Sophron and his son Xenarchus and the comedies of Aristophanes. Mimes were a form of popular entertainment, akin to a play, in which actors depicted scenes from everyday life that were focused on revealing aspects of people’s character. Both these mimes and the comedies highlighted the lives of lower-class men and women, or “low characters,” who were “laughable and without any grandeur.” Plato’s fear of the blind passions and anarchic potential of the demos led him to use his essentially democratic genre for antidemocratic ends.
His fierce Socratic questioning led to aristocratic conclusions. In Plato’s mind, as in the minds of the American Founding Fathers, democratic energies were both appreciated and feared—the voices of the demos required not only acknowledgment but also containment. In book eight of the
Republic
, Plato defines democracy as “a polis full of freedom and frank speech (
Parrhesia
)” that can never resolve the perennial problem of corruption or creeping despotism. For him, only the rule of philosopher-kings equipped with knowledge of the good life could control the unruly passions of the demos. American democracy emerged as a republic (representative
government) rather than an Athenian-like direct democracy primarily owing to the same elite fear of the passions and ignorance of the demos. As James Madison notes in his famous sentence in
The Federalist Papers:
Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates every
Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
For the Founding Fathers—just as for Plato—too much Socratic questioning from the demos and too much power sharing of elites with the demos were expected to lead to anarchy, instability, or perpetual rebellion. The democratic genius of the Founding Fathers was to nevertheless incorporate Socratic questioning into our government in the form of a procedure for constitutional revision and to create the Bill of Rights to protect
parrhesia
, despite their fear of the unruly demos. Without these Socratic dimensions of American democracy, American tyranny would have triumphed. Without Socratic questioning by the demos, elite greed at home and imperial domination abroad devour any democracy.
As the great Reinhold Niebuhr noted, democracy is a proximate solution to insoluble problems—it is always messy and subject to corrupt manipulation, yet it is still the best civic project for the demos. Does not Thucydides’ classic
History of the Peloponnesian War
lay bare the insidious seeds of domestic greed and imperial domination as the primary causes of the decay and decline of Athenian democracy? The Macedonian and Roman dominations of a weak and corrupt Athenian democracy were the ugly results of these poisonous seeds. Can we learn from this tragic example? Only
if we avoid the paralyzing paranoia of Manichaean thinking, the debilitating hubris of dogmatic arrogance, and the myopic self-righteousness of nihilistic imperialism. And we avoid these best when we are Socratic as individuals, as communities, and as a society. The fragile health of a democracy rests upon the Socratic health of its demos. As the wise and reluctant democrat Matthew Arnold, an English critic and poet, concluded in his classic
Culture and Anarchy
(1869):
…but in his own breast does not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates, in that power of a disinterested play of consciousness upon his stock notions and habits, of which this wise and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the great example, and which was the secret of his incomparable influence? And he who leads men to call forth and exercise in themselves this power, and who busily calls it forth and exercises it in himself, is at the present moment, perhaps, as Socrates was in his time, more in concert with the vital working of men’s minds, and more effectually significant, than any…practical operator in politics.
This Arnoldian sentiment is expressed in an American idiom by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the godfather of our deep democratic tradition, in his essay “Plato; or the Philosopher,” a tribute to the Socrates of Plato’s texts:
The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr, the keen street and market debater with the sweetest saint known to any history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, so capacious of these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates, by a necessity, placed itself in the foreground of the scene, as the fittest dispenser of the intellectual treasures he had to communicate. It was a rare fortune, that this Aesop of the mob, and this robed scholar, should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual faculty.
For Emerson, every democratic citizen must aspire to the Socratic love of wisdom, to a vigilant questioning that transforms the unruly mob into mature seekers of the tougher, deeper truths that sustain democratic individuals, democratic communities, and democratic societies.
Yet our Socratic questioning must go beyond Socrates. We must out-Socratize Socrates by revealing the limits of the great Socratic tradition. My own philosophy of democracy that emerges from the nightside of American democracy is rooted in the guttural cries and silent tears of oppressed people. And it has always bothered me that Socrates never cries—he never sheds a tear. His profound yet insufficient rationalism refuses to connect noble self-mastery to a heartfelt solidarity with the agony and anguish of oppressed peoples. Why this glaring defect in Socratic love of wisdom? Does not the rich Socratic legacy of Athens need the deep prophetic legacy
of Jerusalem? Must not the rigorous questioning and quest for wisdom of the Socratic be infused with the passionate fervor and quest for justice of the prophetic?
The Jewish invention of the prophetic begins with the cries for help and tears of sorrow of an oppressed people. This profound grief and particular grievances are directed against imperial Egypt. God hears their cries and is moved by their tears because God is first and foremost a lover of justice (Psalms 99:4 and 37:28; Isaiah 61:8). The Judaic God declares, “I will surely hear their cry…. For I am compassionate” (Exodus 22:23, 27). Divine compassion undergirds the divine love of justice just as human compassion undergirds the prophetic love of justice. The premier prophetic language is the language of cries and tears because human hurt and misery give rise to visions of justice and deeds of compassion. For the prophetic tradition, the cries and tears of an oppressed people signify an alternative to oppression and symbolize an allegiance to a God who requires human deeds that address these cries and tears.
The Christian movement that emerged out of prophetic Judaism made the language of cries and tears a new way of life and struggle in the world. My philosophy of democracy is deeply shaped by that particular Jew named Jesus who put the love of God and neighbor at the core of his vision of justice and his deeds of compassion. His vision of a just future consoles those who cry and his deeds of compassion comfort those who shed tears. His loving gift of ministry, grace, and death under the rule of nihilistic imperial elites enacts divine compassion and justice in human flesh. The ultimate Christian paradox of God crucified in history under the Roman empire is that the love and justice that appear so weak may be
strong, that seem so foolish may be wise, and that strike imperial elites as easily disposable may be inescapably indispensable. The prophetic tradition is fueled by a righteous indignation at injustice—a moral urgency to address the cries and tears of oppressed peoples.