Socrates and the Modern Gadflies of American Politics
Over the past several years, political satire and comedy have been gaining considerable credibility with the American public. In 2014, one popular study concluded that viewers of The Colbert Report were actually better informed than viewers of traditional news such as MSNBC, Fox News, or CNN. Similar arguments have been made recently for fans of political comedians like Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee, and Trevor Noah. Regardless of the obvious problems with measuring credibility, bias, and political knowledge, this phenomenon cannot be dismissed as a mere grasp for entertainment over journalism. More and more citizens are seeking refuge from traditional media sources in these outlets, and they are treating them as more valid, less biased sources of real information — not just another joke.
How seriously, then, should we take these reporters who intentionally avoid being taken seriously? Even the most solemn moments on an episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight risk being interrupted by an irreverent gag or crude insult. Surely, many would say, this cannot be part of a dignified conversation on our most sacred democratic processes.
Yet a video released by Vox earlier this month makes the case that it is that very lack of dignity that allows political satire to rise above the mire of today’s media crisis:
Do not think that this elevation of comedy is a coincidence; satirists are inherently better equipped to deal with today’s political climate in which statements are over-legitimized by under-informed conversations. The only way traditional journalists can keep up is to embrace sarcasm and a healthy sense of the ridiculous. According to Vox, comedy and satire enjoy a lower “tolerance for bullshit.” The implications are pretty simple: with the latest influx of bullshit, we can now — unlike in years past — only trust our most flippant reporters.
But is this journalistic style legitimate only because Donald Trump is such a ridiculous politician? Is it only worth taking seriously (or semi-seriously) because of contemporary political conditions? A sidelong glance at history tells us that nothing about this insight is really unique to 2017 — understanding the universality of political absurdity might help us stem the tide of foolishness even when it is not so readily apparent.
Socrates, the Gadfly of Athens
John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher — before all of these comedic political antagonists, there was Socrates. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates stands before his accusers and a jury that is ready to sentence him to death. For what? Godlessness and corrupting the youth.
But these are, from Socrates’ perspective, fabrications. At the very least, his accusers end up interpreting his actions in lieu of describing them. What exactly did Socrates do to corrupt the youth? How did he express his godlessness?
Simply put, he questioned the cultural, political, and moral authorities of Athens — anyone in the city who might be considered wise. See, the oracle of Delphi had told Socrates that no one was wiser than he, but he couldn’t believe it. He knew himself too well, saying, “For I am conscious that I am not at all wise, either much or little.”
So he went to the politicians, the poets, and the artisans, each in turn, and asked them to prove themselves in wisdom. The politicians were considered wise by all the people, but this only inflated their false sense of wisdom. The poets could not adequately explain their own work. The artisans, while experts in some areas, assumed themselves to be experts in all areas besides. Socrates walked away from each encounter with one basic insight:
For my part, as I went away, I reasoned with regard to myself: “I am wiser than this human being. For probably neither of us knows anything noble and good, but he supposes he knows something when he does not know, while I, just as I do not know, do not even suppose that I do. I am likely to be a little bit wiser than he in this very thing: that whatever I do not know, I do not even suppose I know.”
In other words, everybody’s stupid, but at least Socrates knows it. And now maybe you can see why the politicians would accuse him of corrupting the youth — more to the point, Socrates displaced young citizens’ faith in their authorities. He systematically made the old hotshots of Athens look ridiculous.
This wasn’t for Socrates’ own benefit or amusement, either. He had a purpose. This passage from Apology illustrates the logic behind his incessant questioning:
So I, men of Athens, am now far from making a defense speech on my own behalf, as someone might suppose. I do it rather on your behalf, so that you do not do something wrong concerning the gift of the god to you by voting to condemn me. For if you kill me, you will not easily discover another of my sort, who — even if it is rather ridiculous to say — has simply been set upon the city by the god, as though upon a great and well-born horse who is rather sluggish because of his great size and needs to be awakened by some gadfly. Just so, in fact, the god seems to me to have set me upon the city as someone of this sort: I awaken and persuade and reproach each one of you, and I do not stop settling down everywhere upon you the whole day. Someone else of this sort will certainly not easily arise for you, men. Well, if you obey me, you will spare me. But perhaps you may be vexed, like the drowsy when they are awakened, and if you obey Anytus and slap me, you would easily kill me. Then you would spend the rest of your lives asleep, unless the god sends you someone else in his concern for you.
If Athens can be considered “a great and well-born horse who is rather sluggish because of his great size,” how much more might America be considered the same? And while Athens might be in need of one gadfly, it seems like our overgrown political complex calls for much, much more.
The Gadflies of America
Comparing Socrates to modern political satirists is not an ambitious step. The Wikipedia entry on ‘social gadfly’ defines it as “a person who interferes with the status quo of a society or community by posing novel, potently upsetting questions, usually directed at authorities.”
Yet this definition has mostly been applied not to comedians but to self-serious journalists and academics who rarely register any validity in the public consciousness. By rethinking the direct comparison between, let’s say, Samantha Bee and Socrates, we can properly appreciate their chosen mode of discourse and possibly uncover a deeper truth about the fabric of our democracy. Three comparisons stand out beyond the Wikipedia definition:
- Both Socrates and political satirists are funny.
- Both Socrates and political satirists are perceived as corrupting the youth.
- Both Socrates and political satirists approach discourse with a healthy view of human fallibility — i.e. they acknowledge that everyone is stupid. Both Socrates and today’s comedians are as willing to deprecate themselves as the authorities they target.
A first-time reader of Plato’s dialogues might not realize just how funny Socrates is. This is the most important component of his method, though. Socrates’ followers found his systematic deconstruction of authority amusing. And who wouldn’t? We all like to see public figures squirm under the weight of scrutiny, and we are delighted to find them outright embarrassed by an obvious mistake.
It’s easy to see why older citizens, more used to conventional authorities or conventional media, might perceive these gadflies as corrupting the youth. In their view, the comedians are laying out a honey trap — irreverent humor. Then, after luring the otherwise neutral youth with amusement, they indoctrinate them with a particular anti-establishment ideology.
The opposite might be true: the attraction of these comedians is not that they are funny. Otherwise, the youth might amuse themselves with any number of less politicized humorists, or even just the jokes of their peers. The attraction of the gadflies is the ideology itself. Deep down, the younger generation already believes what Socrates is teaching — that the authorities who claim to be wise are just as foolish as the rest of us. He articulates the unspoken claims of an already anti-establishment group. The jokes are just a surplus that allow viewers to normalize the experience of upending authority — not a honey trap, but a sweetener to make the bitter truth a little more palatable.
An Unexamined Country
…the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being…
Someone might object that this philosophy is a dead end, that it is too pessimistic. After all, if everyone is stupid, if we cannot trust anyone to lead us or to offer wisdom in any circumstance, then there is no direction, no progress, no solution to the problems at hand. It really sounds like the youth are doing as youth do, rejecting their parents and running from authority without any idea how to actually take care of things.
In the end, these people — Socrates, the political satirists, their followers — are not saying that we cannot find truth. They are saying we obscure the truth by leaving so many sources of authority unexamined. That’s why Socrates’ apology, in the context of the quote above and his role as a gadfly, is redeemed from his own claimed ignorance.
Socrates knows that he is very wise, no matter how many times he denies it. It’s part of his humor. Now he’s training the youth to share in his wisdom — the ability to think critically and ask the questions that keep an entire political edifice from drowsily doing as it has always done before.
The process of critical examination is not just a pessimistic debunking of all authority figures. It is an antidote to bullshit. If the unexamined life is not worth living, then the unexamined country is not worth living in. If we let the systems persist, we are bound unthinkingly to allow atrocities without even recognizing them. As Sophia McClennen, featured in the Vox video, pointed out: “political satire is about showing you that the system is faking you out.”
Spending the Rest of Our Lives Asleep
This week, I’ve read a rather disheartening op-ed by David Brooks in the New York Times. According to him, everything was going pretty well for Western civilization as long as we believed in liberalism and its democratic ideals. Then we made a terrible mistake. I will let Brooks speak for himself:
Starting decades ago, many people, especially in the universities, lost faith in the Western civilization narrative. They stopped teaching it, and the great cultural transmission belt broke. Now many students, if they encounter it, are taught that Western civilization is a history of oppression.
Basically, Brooks accuses the cultural critics of corrupting the youth. Much like Socrates, they’ve displaced young citizens’ faith in their appointed authorities. The result of this is that today’s citizens seem not to care when the glorious rules of liberalism are shattered:
While running for office, Donald Trump violated every norm of statesmanship built up over these many centuries, and it turned out many people didn’t notice or didn’t care.
It’s hard for me to buy Brooks’ claim that the sluggish response to Trump is somehow a direct result of our criticisms of Western civilization — that educators have thrown the baby out with the bathwater by questioning the grand narrative of liberalism. Who, after all, are the supporters of Trump? Certainly not a professor who has “lost faith” in the presuppositions of Western democracy. Certainly not an undergraduate who has been convinced that the history of the West is a history of oppression. These people are more likely than ever to identify Trump as the very face of that oppression.
My point here is that the entire Trump ideology is not a side effect of academic critique. We haven’t toppled the great edifice of Western civilization and allowed a demagogue to peak from its ruins. Trump is the embodiment of that edifice and of the tendency to silence criticism and questioning that could otherwise wake up a country to its actual problems.
During his explanation, Brooks ironically identifies Socrates as the first “certain great figure” who helped “fitfully propel the nations to higher reaches of the humanistic ideal.” But whose side would Socrates really be on? I doubt he would be making a list of great figures and certain values and demanding that young people adhere to the “cultural transmission belt.” He’d likely be one of the very critics that Brooks blames for the current crisis.
If you have trouble equating Trump with traditional Western values, consider that the slogan “Make America Great Again” is no coincidence. The efficacy of this slogan relies upon the contiguous narrative of Western exceptionalism — that with American democracy we finally got everything figured out, and now it is better left alone. This is the system faking you out. We need the gadflies, we need a little lack of faith, to find the courage to reach out and seize on truths that defy the present authority.
But Trump, actually, is a little bit of a gift to democracy. While he has attracted an inordinate amount of these gadflies, it is only because he is such an easy target. With authorities like this, who needs a Socrates? The satirists still play a very important role, but their contributions are slightly less essential thanks to the transparency of Trump’s bullshit.
The really dangerous times are when no one can recognize the inconsistencies on their own. Socrates’ method is universal — he questioned politicians, poets, artisans. Today, he would surely question Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and Marxists. And he’d continue to do so, even if the establishment was not so clearly abhorrent. The point is that examination, critique, and skepticism are always valuable.
Our political satirists will always be here to pull back the curtain on anything that tries to hide its foolishness. Rest assured, there will always be plenty of foolishness in a system so large. We must be careful to listen to our gadflies, especially when it isn’t so clear that they are onto something.
