Socrates on Blind Nationalism

           There is something that has been troubling my mind about Socrates and his seemingly advanced thinking. In Plato’s Crito, Socrates suggests that he has an obligation to live out his sentence because he has somehow contractually agreed to the rules of Athens. He suggests that continued residency is an implicit agreement to submit yourself fully to their governance. Hence, he says, when he is punished he has no right to try to escape, because he has lived his whole life knowing of the laws which now punish him to death. For as smart as I take Socrates to be, I’m incredibly disappointed by his counterrevolutionary support of oppressively blind nationalism.

            For starters, how exactly is one to ever forward enlightened change without breaking the rules of an intellectually suppressive society? Socrates was sentenced to death because he had the audacity to question the theocratic status-quo, but if one is to follow Socrates’ moral model, this status-quo could never be broken. The argument form lends itself to the following scenario: one wants to enact unorthodox change in Athens, so one must live in Athens, so one must contract to the practices and punishments of Athens, and so one must accept death or exile when they are found spreading revolutionary ideas. It is clear how problematic this is—by advancing a contrarian idea they have accepted death; or conversely, if you wish not to die you must necessarily accept the perpetuation of an intellectual dark age. In the fashion that Socrates himself is so admirable of, I would question him: how exactly is society ever supposed to reform when death is a necessary premise of promoting change?

            It is clear that such an approach goes directly against progressing the enlightenment that Socrates himself so proudly espouses, but is this approach even true? Is it the case that from continued residency we have implicitly agreed with our nation’s rules? Certainly this cannot be the case; residency depends on a number of factors and while a moneyed and privileged aristocrat like Socrates may suggest that the solution to such a disagreement is as simple as moving, many people simply do not have the means—nor is it necessary. It is critical to distinguish that although one has accepted the laws of a country, they have in absolutely no way accepted that such laws are just or fairly imposed. Although the opposite is surely appealing to the dominant class, if one is unjustly oppressed by their government they have no obligation to leave the country and drop the issue. At the very least, internal revolution through peaceful means is a legitimate way to push for laws that reflect justice. In class we discussed Martin Luther King, who I think very persuasively argued that it is surely moral to resist unjust laws—in his case, formal segregation; for Socrates, the suppression of his speech. In the end, it seems that if the government is really interested in their people, such discourse and revolution can only be good for the country. And if their people are not their foremost interest, well then the country should be force to collapse from the inside and blind nationalism like Socrates’ is doing nothing but helping cool the pressure.

            With all of this being said, it seems more likely that Socrates chose death for the reasons explained in Xenophon’s Socrates’ Defense To The Jury. Socrates has neared the end of his life and quite rationally, he would like to end on a high note. He is confident that he has lived piously and that this in fact may be the preferable out: “…god, in his kindness, is letting me leave life not only at the right time, but also in the easiest way.” (Reeve, 179) It is my hope and belief that this is the more accurate account of Socrates’s embrace of the death penalty. He accepted his penalty because it was what was best for him, rather than to suggest it was what he must do for Athens.

            In two different parts, Plato and Xenophon offer very different accounts for why Socrates chose death. Plato suggests that it was because Socrates believed his residency contracted his unwavering obedience to Athenian punishment. On the other hand, Xenophon reports that Socrates found the death sentence to be a convenient out of a life he could not imagine getting much better.  If it is for the former reason, Socrates has certainly proposed a very anti-enlightenment argument—in no logical form should death be a necessary premise of social change.