A Reader on Reading

A little over twenty-four centuries ago, in the year 399 B.c., three Athenian citizens brought a public action against the philosopher Socrates for being a menace to society. After the trial, in which both the prosecution and the defendant presented their case, the majority of the jury of representative Athenian citizens found Socrates guilty and, with peculiar severity, condemned him to death. Plato, the disciple who perhaps loved Socrates best, wrote some time afterwards a record of his defense, which has come down to us under the title of the Apology. In it, Plato has Socrates discuss many subjects: the notion of impiety, the character of his accusers, the charges of heresy, of corrupting the young, and of insulting the Athenian democratic identity: this latter charge carries for us today a curious familiar ring. And like a luminous thread running through the entire allocution, Socrates discusses the question of a citizen’s responsibilities in a just society.

Halfway through the speech, Socrates considers the risks a man will run who is willing to tell the truth in the world of politics. “No man on earth who conscientiously,” says Socrates, “prevents a great many wrongs and illegalities from taking place in the state to which he belongs, can possibly escape with his life. The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.”

Indeed. A long roll-call of truth-sayers, dating back to the first prophets, have paid with their lives for this human vocation, and every year Amnesty International publishes a bulky reminder of how many of them are kept today in prison, all around the world, for no other reason than that of speaking out. Hans Christian Andersen, in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” forgot to tell us what happened to the little boy who pointed out that the Emperor had in fact no clothes on. Surely we would not be surprised to learn that his fate was not a happy one.

Socrates explains to the court that he is well aware of the risks of telling the truth. The person who opposes wrongs and illegalities, says Socrates, pays for telling the truth about these wrongs and illegalities with his own life. So much is clear. But then, Socrates — Socrates, for whom the pursuit of truth is, as it should be for everyone, the primary purpose in life—Socrates goes on to say that, if a person wants to save his skin “even for a short time,” this pursuit must be restricted to his private circle and not be allowed to overflow into the vaster circles of society itself.

But how is such a thing possible?

Unless Socrates is being dangerously ironic, he of all people must know that every pursuit of the truth, every questioning of a lie, every attempt to bring into the light fraud, imposture, and deceit, every pointing out that the Emperor is in fact naked must, necessarily, spill over into the common ground, into the world we share with our fellow citizens. At either end of our life we are alone, in the womb and in the grave, but the space in between is a common realm in which rights and responsibilities are defined by each of our neighbors’ rights and responsibilities, and every perjury, every falsehood, every attempt to conceal the truth damages everyone in that realm — including, in the final account, the liar himself. After Socrates was forced to put an end to his life, the Athenians repented, closed the wrestling yards and the gymnasia in a sign of mourning, and banished two of the accusers from Athens while condemning the third one to death.

As Socrates knew well, every society defines itself in two ways: through what it allows and through what it forbids — through that which it includes and recognizes as its own image and through that which it excludes, ignores, and denies. And every citizen living within the walls of a society has a double obligation: an obligation to obey those common inclusions and exclusions (that is to say, society’s laws) and an obligation to his or her own self. A living society must have, within its fabric, the means to allow every citizen the performance of this double duty: both to obey and to question, both to comply and to change society’s laws. A society in which citizens are allowed one but not the other (a dictatorship or an anarchic state) is a society that does not trust its own tenets and is therefore threatened with extinction. Human beings require the common protection of the law, together with the freedom to voice their thoughts and testimonies and doubts, as much as they need the freedom to breathe. This is of the essence.