I have long puzzled over why it is that the Socratic Method has all but disappeared from our public discourse. And it has occurred to me of late that the banality of shallow arguments and lack of intellectual integrity that is indicative of modern debate is actually in many ways reminiscent of the Sophists that Socrates regularly engaged. The very same Sophists who maligned Socrates as being a corrupting influence on the young minds of Athens, because he promoted the value of critical thinking. So they put him on trial and found him guilty, and then sentenced him to death – because apparently, allowing people to actually think through the implications of their beliefs . . . would clearly make them harder to manipulate.
Socrates’ beliefs could be summed up in this quote “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” This is an important confession of epistemological self-awareness that promotes our need to humbly ponder just how finite is our understanding of everything. A confession the Sophists were unable to embrace – because they were unwilling to have their intellectual authority questioned. For the Sophist, winning the debate had nothing to do with making a better argument – rather it was about appealing to emotional response, reframing the argument by spinning up a narrative designed to push all the buttons of fear and desire, hoping to invoke a reaction . . . before the mind has a chance to sort out whether the narrative even makes sense.
So I have come to conclude that we live in a new era of the sophist. This is why nearly every debate on social media devolves into ad hominem marginalizing invectives, arrogantly employing every fallacy known to logic – as if such self-possessed banality could somehow pass for a sound argument. And given that this is the cultural zeitgeist, it is of little surprise that such an ethos would play into the hands of all our institutional sources of information, who are more than willing to placate the lowest common denominator with dumbed-down “us versus them” narratives – because a society incapable of thinking for itself is far more easily manipulated.
Remember it was the beguiling bravado of the Sophists that convinced the people of Athens that the Socratic paradigm of believing we might want to take a minute to think about our thinking, was so perverse – so Socrates must die. This is an archetypal critical tipping point well-rehearsed throughout history – where people have been willfully seduced by their own fears and desires into accepting atrocities as being unavoidably necessary.
Beneath the sophist’s spin, I can’t help but imagine the voice of the Serpent in the Garden – questioning the very fabric of reality that God has created . . . stirring up within Adam and Eve a discontent with being image bearers of God and tempting them to believe that they could be their own gods.
It is the practice of the Eastern Orthodox Church to pray the Jesus Prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” It is prayed in repetition as a conscious meditation until it begins to seep into the subconscious where it drops anchor down into the depths of reality. For it is a humble confession much akin to St Paul’s confession “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” ~ Galatians 2:20. This is the wisdom of God gifted to us as mystery – for it is a stumbling block and folly to the [sophists] of this world, but for those in Christ it is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:23, 24).
. . . for it is on the humble path where we discover true wisdom.
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