Claremont Independent

Last Updated: 12/3/07 Section: News

The Death of Socrates

On my last day in Civilization 10 nearly one year ago, the professor asked the class what value we received from his course. Most of us simply said which book we liked best; there was really no debate or discussion. No one said anything controversial until, to my surprise, I did. I said my favorite text was Sophocles' Antigone because it examined the concept of a higher moral law.

I remember thinking of the passage where Creon confronts Antigone for burying her brother, deliberately disobeying Creon's dictate. "I did not believe your proclamation had such power," says Antigone, "to enable one who will someday die to override God's ordinances, unwritten and secure. They are not of today and yesterday; they live forever; none knows when first they were."

I then asked the professor, and the class generally, whether they agreed with me that some higher law exists. That law could be derived from divine authority, or it could be a natural form of justice, discernable by reason. Most not only disagreed, but also were quick to accept that such thinking was obviously backward.

Drawing from Allan Bloom's modern classic on higher education, The Closing of the American Mind, I decided to illustrate my question with an example. I asked if one of us had been in imperial India like Phileas Fogg-the hero of Jules Vernes's Around the World in 80 Days -would we have saved the widow from the funeral pyre? Would we have put a stop to the traditional practice of sati? The responses were consistent: "What right do we have to say that our culture is better?"

In retrospect, what should have been more surprising was not the responses of my fellow students, but rather that in a class supposed to probe the question "What does it mean to be human?" or "What is Man?" we had not even talked about the possibility that our morality can be discerned by reason and grounded in a natural, right way to live.

In that class, history seemed to have won: because history has shown that different cultures in different ages have had different notions of right and wrong, there cannot be an absolute right or wrong. Bloom, however, points out the ludicrousness of such an argument: "[T]he fact that there have been different opinions about good and bad in different times and places in no way proves that none is true or superior to others. To say that it does…is as absurd as to say that the diversity of points of view expressed in a college bull session proves there is no truth."

Thus, just because the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, or because Hindu widows were burned on their husbands' funeral pyres, does not make those practices defensible. It does not make them right. A course on the questions of civilization should not merely pursue knowledge of other cultural practices and civilizations; rather, it should vigorously pursue truth. Students must ask themselves why certain human acts and cultural practices are right or wrong.

The most prominent allegory in classical political philosophy is that of the cave found in Plato's Republic. What men know to be true in the cave is based only on their limited experience; they see shadows cast from figures behind a fire, and think those shadows are. The figures casting the shadows are what we experience in reality-corruptions of what is true, perfect, and good. This is the realm of opinion, not knowledge. But Plato calls us above the cave, to seek uncorrupted and eternal truth.

As Bloom observes, today's students are taught that culture is a cave, but are not taught to search outside the cave and seek truth. Rather, we are taught that each cave is simply based on random variables and accidents (in other words, fate) and that no one cave is better than the other. Who's to say, after all, that my cave is better than his?

In my class, there was an unspoken understanding that when reading the different texts we needed simply to appreciate the other cultures for the sake of multiculturalism. We were never told to reason about and examine the different texts to find what is good (and bad) about different cultures or to see what transcends all cultures, to find what is best for man across all times and places.

But to ignore this pursuit is absurd. People have opinions and make judgments all the time; they are not animals. They use reason to ask questions about what is just and unjust. They seek a standard to judge their actions that extends beyond culture and age. Classical philosophers understood that standard to be nature.

Without a natural standard, and by accepting multiculturalism as an inherent good, one could not reasonably say that the sati is an abhorrent practice. One could not even call the holocaust evil, or even slightly so. But every multiculturalist college kid "knows" the holocaust was evil-yet his condemnation is hollow. For how could he be so insensitive to Nazi culture? And, he might ask, is his own knowledge of relativism not simply an arbitrary product of his time and culture?

But, alas, is our liberal defense really so puny and weak against totalitarians who claim they do not need reason to force their way? Is our repulsion really nothing more than an accumulation of petty passions that spring from biology and culture? Or maybe our disgust is real. Perhaps when we perceive injustice, we perceive some real discord with nature and we reason against it. It is this recognition that suggests reason can guide us to a natural justice.

In America, we are fortunate to have a government founded in a natural claim to justice. The Founders reasoned from human equality that all men must have natural rights that government must secure. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

If we do not derive rights from nature, then no rights are truly "unalienable." If God, or nature, does not grant us immutable rights-if all rights are simply positive rights granted by the state-then they can be stripped away as easily as they can be endowed. Likewise, if all cultural practices are acceptable, then there is no right they cannot abuse.

The first thing we learn in Civilization 10 is that the unexamined life is not worth living. But Civilization 10 fails on this count. Socrates did not see examination as a fruitless enterprise; he sought truth and human excellence. The point of studying different cultures, then, should be to evaluate them and decide what is best in each culture so one can find what is best in Man. It should be to find the immutable and eternal.

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