After Socrates
The demagogues in Athens tried Socrates in 399 B.C. for corrupting the youth. They sought to show how he was undermining democracy by his teaching. But the prosecution of Socrates backfired.
His defense became an indictment of Athenian tyranny, a declaration of faith for liberal thought from his time to ours, and an expression of the ideals of Greek culture so powerful that we approach the ancient Greeks first through Socrates’ Apology. Likewise, Galileo’s 1633 trial by the Inquisition does for the natural sciences in Western civilization what the trial of Socrates does for the humanities. Just as Socrates lived and was tried at the dawn of our culture, so Galileo’s life, time, and work represent the beginnings of modern science, and his trial gives us an understanding of its moral dimension. Both dissenters stand for the struggle of the independent mind against mindless orthodoxy. Our conscience is shaped by both.Yet the fact is that Socrates had earlier made his peace with brutal tyrants and did not call them to account.8 The stumbling block in the Galileo case is not that as an old man he was frightened and dragooned by the Inquisition to retract, but that seventeen years earlier he was unable to offer any scientific proof of his positions.9 If Socrates once sided with tyranny and Galileo resorted to dogmatic claim instead of empirical evidence, does that destroy the significance of their trials for the causes of liberal thought and free scientific inquiry? Not if we recognize that the trials have a symbolic meaning far greater than any imagined at the time by the participants, especially the defendants. Nor does the truth of the causes represented by the trial of Socrates and Galileo depend upon the factual truth of the events surrounding the trial. We do need, nevertheless, the trials as fulcrums for judgment.
As a consequence, our understanding of such trials parallels a problem in theology concerning the life, trial, and crucifixion of Christ. Should the New Testament account be demythologized?10 Orthodox, fundamentalist, and liberal schools emerge to explain the historical facts, the myth, and the message (kerygma) about the trial of Jesus. How these conflicts are resolved determines how important issues of history and value are settled. The same is true with the trials of Socrates and Galileo and other dissenters including Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss, and the Rosenbergs. The October 1983 debate in New York between the team of Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, who argued that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of low-level spying but that the trial was unfair, and the team of Walter and Miriam Schneir, who maintained that the Rosenbergs were innocent, illustrates how central the interpretation of certain trials can be even three decades later. Tickets for the Rosenberg debate sold out a month in advance; the Town Hall was filled with a crowd of 1,500, and the sharp exchanges in the debate itself became national news.11 It works both ways with political trials which become fulcrums on which our political judgments turn: The schools of interpretation decipher the trial, and the trial becomes a crucible for the cause. In this way our public judgment evolves.Which trials are that important? Which become not merely attention grabbers but fulcrums? Apart from the trial of Socrates, which is the exemplar, other trials of dissenters become morally paradigmatic as movements develop the myths of their struggles. For the American labor movement, for instance, the trials of Eugene Debs, in 1895 for the Pullman strike and in 1918 for denouncing the government’s persecution of dissent, plus the trials of Big Bill Haywood and other IWW organizers (1907, 1917, and 1918) provide insight into their cause, what they faced in their struggle, and how the modern labor movement has attained its identity because of them.12 For the same reason attention has been drawn to the 1873 trial of Susan B.
Anthony for daring to attempt to vote, a trial which provides the feminist movement with a sense of its struggle and identity. The civil rights movement, likewise, finds the expression of conscience in the trials of those who have protested against racial injustice, from John Brown’s 1859 trial for raising a slave rebellion to Martin Luther King’s 1963 trial for demonstrating in Birmingham, Alabama. Certainly the peace movement has no difficulty in listing its central trials with the trial of the Catonsville nine in 1968 heading the list. In such trials the trial itself acquires a symbolic value from which the movement finds its sense of mission and the rest of society learns its public values.The poetry of movements comes from the inspired statements in trials. It emerges from the routine of legal process and the formality of legal language like prophetic scripture. For feminism Susan B. Anthony’s stirring statement before sentence was pronounced provides a concise homily of the movement’s purposes.13 Eugene Debs’s speech to the jury in his 1918 trial can be read as a capsule narrative of the legend of American radicalism and the rise of American labor.14 Statements during their trials by Daniel and Philip Berrigan are poetic sermons on peace.15 Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” has become the classic on civil disobedience.16
The prototype of all such statements is Socrates’ Apology. Just as Socrates told the Athenian court that his mission had been imposed on him by the god of Delphi,17 so Anthony, Debs, the Berrigans, and King find that their dissent is required of them by a moral covenant contained in the Declaration of Independence, the message of Christianity, or both. Dissenters disobey the law, not because of a criminal desire for gain in wealth or power, but because they must obey a higher law. Their appeal is to the joint knowledge of conscience.
Dissenters, following Socrates’ example, seek to teach their fellow citizens, not frighten or coerce them.
Socrates characterized himself as a gadfly arousing, persuading, reproaching, and exhorting his fellow Athenians to do what was best for themselves: seek virtue, not private interest. Anthony said that her purpose “was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison, and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation.”18 Debs told the jury in 1918 that his “purpose was to have the people understand something about the social system in which we live and to prepare them to change this system by perfectly peaceable and orderly means to what I, as a Socialist, conceive to be a real democracy.”19 The Berrigans and most dissenters would concur with Martin Luther King: “Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having non-violent gadflies to create that kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”20Finally, dissenters see that the way to change law is not by escaping from it or evading its impact but by urging that it be applied fully and by confronting its injustices. Although his friends had bribed the guards and arranged for his escape from death row, Socrates refused to leave. To do so would undermine the rule of law and deny the principles on which he built his life and teaching.21 Anthony, like Socrates, told the judge that she had hoped for a broad interpretation of the Constitution “that should declare equality of rights the national guarantee to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. But failing to get justice—failing, even, to get a trial by a jury not of my peers—I ask not leniency at your hands but rather the full rigors of the law.”22 King and the Berrigans have made statements similar to Debs’s admission to the jury that he not only did what he was accused of doing but that it is what others should do and accept the consequences under law: “Yes, I was opposed to the war. I am perfectly willing, on that count, to be branded as a disloyalist, and if it is a crime under American law, punishable by imprisonment, for being opposed to human bloodshed, I am perfectly willing to be clothed in the stripes of a convict and to end my days in a prison cell.”23