How Socrates and Christ Revealed The Truth

Socrates is a pivotal character in the history of Western civilization, a paragon of integrity and of the truth-seeking philosopher. He appeared in the fifth century BC as the Greeks were emerging from the old mythological mindset into a new era in which man felt free to use his rational intellect without relying on the external authority of gods. The Greeks of this transitional era were the first to measure and plumb the world around them in a way we recognize as modern. Philosophers and teachers sprang up offering numerous explanations regarding the nature of the universe, ethics, art and politics, until it seemed to many that chaos reigned and that perhaps all that mattered was “getting ahead” in whatever way seemed personally advantageous.

Among these philosophers, Socrates seems to have been a singularly charismatic and powerful personality: committed to truth yet witty, open-minded yet uncompromising, wise yet without pretension, and above-all unconcerned with the regard of others. Yet he never wrote a thing as far as we know. It’s as though his personality—the living out of an unfettered soul—was fulfillment enough for him. His life was his work of art.

We know about Socrates mainly through the writings of one of his admirers and pupils, Plato. After Socrates’ inspirational death, refusing to compromise his character, Plato did feel the need to write, but he presented his philosophy in an interesting way: in the form of dialogues—plays almost—usually between Socrates and others. This means that it’s hard to disentangle where Socrates ends and Plato begins. 2500 years later, we can only experience Socrates through the prism of Plato. What Plato seems to have done is to attempt a “grand theory” that he either believed Socrates would have agreed with or that he believed was a fitting extension of Socrates’ ideas.

There’s an interesting parallel here with another powerful personality in the Western psyche. Like Socrates, Christ never wrote a thing. We know of him only through the writings of others, who probably wrote between 60 and 100 years after Christ died. Those others were, of course Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, the authors of the “official” Gospels. These authors, though, mainly sought to record Christ’s acts and words, not to interpret or make sense of the ramifications of Christ’s teachings. The man who took on the role of codifier and explainer of Christ’s message was Paul.

Just as Plato presented Socrates to the world, Paul presented Christ. However, in Paul’s case, we may have a better idea of just what he added or subtracted from the original, for we can compare Paul’s ideas—which he of course believed Christ would agree with—with the Jesus presented in the four Gospels. Regardless of how well his ideas actually do match the original spirit of Christ the man, Paul was the principal authority in the earliest establishment of Christian churches, and his ideas have had a powerful influence on subsequent Christian thought.

So neither of the two most luminous figures in Western civilization felt the need to record his ideas or “make sense of them.” (Neither did Buddha, the single most powerful figure in Eastern thought, but I will here focus only on the West.) Both Socrates and Christ were powerful personalities who seemed to have accessed a fundamental truth but who never felt the need to organize or make rules concerning this truth. That’s because this truth cannot be codified and imposed on others. That task fell to dedicated yet “lesser” personalities—the Platos and Pauls of the world. The real truth— what Socrates and Christ knew—was more shadowy, more subtle. The real truth could only be lived, displayed, experienced. It could only be approached indirectly through parables and Socratic conversation. It was, above all, alive.

The world is full of Platos and Pauls, with varying degrees of integrity, energy and inspiration: they include dogmatic philosophers and religious authorities, political leaders and lawmakers, and any others who attempt to impose upon the incandescent life force of each unprecedented individual. Most people look to an outside authority or set of rules for guidance and mistrust themselves. What we miss is the authority of our own personality. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.” The truth that Socrates and Christ knew was the truth of their own divinity. Their capacity to personify, in their unique human form, a universal divine energy was what made them so charismatic, such powerful examples and teachers. There was no truth to write down—both figures were the truth.

Got a Problem? Call it Evil and Declare War

According to the 2011 report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, the worldwide war on drugs has been a “total failure.” In severely overcrowded US prisons, for example, fifty percent of inmates are in for drug-related offenses, whereas violent crime rates have been declining. In this year’s October 17 issue of The New Yorker, Michael Specter reports on one country’s different approach to the drug problem.

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized personal drug use. Instead of prosecuting people found with no more then a ten-day supply of coke, pot, heroin or anything else, Portugal requires that they appear before a three-person panel, typically a lawyer or judge, a doctor, and a psychologist or social worker. The panel can choose between imposing a small fine, recommending treatment or doing nothing. (Dealing drugs, as opposed to possession, is still illegal.)
Before decriminalization, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with one percent of the population addicted to heroin and the highest rate of drugs-related AIDS deaths in the EU. The usual approach–harsher sentencing and more money for prosecutions–only saw matters grow worse. Since decriminalization, Specter writes, “the law seems to have worked: serious drug use is down significantly, particularly among young people; the burden on the criminal-justice system has eased; the number of people seeking treatment has grown; and the rates of drug-related deaths and cases of infectious diseases have fallen.”

This is startling and very good news. Portugal’s experiment suggests decriminalization is a cheaper and more effective approach than the US’s own failed drug war, now in it’s forty-first year. We could potentially save billions of dollars and help millions of people. Instead of jumping up and down with eagerness to try a similar approach, however, we ignore the evidence. Why?

When people  see the world through a certain set of beliefs, they ignore evidence contrary to those beliefs. The war on drugs is a case in point. With regard to the drug problem in the US, the first belief we insist on in is that drugs and drug-users are evil or at least immoral. The second belief is that war is the correct, strong and moral response. Anything less, in our collective mind, is coddling or condoning the evil behavior. Armed with these two beliefs, it doesn’t matter if some other approach actually works to reduce the problem.  It doesn’t matter that decriminalization in Portugal significantly lowered serious drug use while also saving money. This result didn’t happen through treating drug users as immoral and going to war on them; therefore the result are invisible.  Seen from this perspective, it makes perfect sense that we ignore what works.

We use a word to designate a fanatical crusade against peceived evil: jihad. Given our fixation, dressed up as “morality,” on attacking and punishing those of whom we disapprove, it is no surprise that we’re also fixated on an enemy with a similar, if more extreme, mindset. For we attract and become obsessed by those that reflect our own, often hidden, nature. When Muslim terrorists, however, declare war in the name of religion, we easily spot the hypocrisy. In our enemy’s acts, we see the destruction and not the morality. In our own acts, we see the morality and not the destruction. Our enemies wear the very same blinders. And so it goes.

Instinct

I am impatient with the notion that human nature, left uncivilized, is a brutal and immoral force. As though it is only an army of churches, jails, and schools that defeats our urge to stab a fellow bus rider for our own profit. For the thought of doing violence to the flesh of another feels alien to my nature—I am sick at the thought. A murderous river runs through our beings that we must divert or dam? It is rather the reverse: it requires the utmost force—a sustained onslaught on our natural impulses, a dogged campaign of mistrust of the spontaneous and instinctive, such as we experience from our schools, religions and parents—to block the stream of native tenderness that runs through the human soul.

If you love someone, set them free

or at the very least, line the bottom of their cage with newspaper. It is absorbent and will provide some padding.

John and Paul

For my money, there is no greater miracle in the world than the music of The Beatles. Their records fairly burst with exuberance at the same time seeming flawlessly arranged; the melodies felt inevitable, as though they existed in the collective ether, yet they constantly delighted and surprised; and their lyrics—running the gamut from simple, elegant, funny, allusive, deeply felt, and spiritual—seemed to combine realism with uplift and intelligence with accessibility. The 213 tracks that comprise their officially released catalogue is as close to perfect as pop gets. No one else has come close.

The Beatles were actually a string of miracles. The first was John Lennon, the second McCartney, and the third that they met. There were two people in the world, it would turn out, who could rival Lennon as a singer and songwriter in popular music. One of them, Bob Dylan, lived in Minnesota. The other happened to live a mile and a half away.

Lennon and McCartney’s cooperative as well as competitive songwriting partnership, spurring each to ever greater heights, has been widely recognized by commentators, biographers and Lennon and McCartney themselves. But there was something more poignant going on that hasn’t been adequately acknowledged:  John and Paul saved each other. Each made the others’ life what it turned out to be, something beyond anything they—or the world—could have imagined.

To understand what I mean, you have to know a bit about John and Paul.  When John met Paul, he was an angry, self-destructive sixteen-year-old. His father permanently away at sea, his mother deemed too irresponsible and preoccupied with her new partner, John was raised by his strict and puritanical Aunt Mimi. He found comforting adult companionship in the form of Mimi’s more easygoing husband, George, whom John loved.

When John was fourteen, however, George suddenly died. Not long after, John began to reconnect with his mother, largely through their shared love for and taste in music. In what must have felt like the cruelest of jokes to young John, however, she too died shortly thereafter, struck by a car. It was more than he could bear. Already prone to rebellion and disenchantment with the options society offered an imaginative English school kid, he went over the edge. Unable to get into a university due to poor grades, he was sent as a last ditch effort to art school. There he fared no better. Caring only about rock and roll, he did practically no work (fellow students would loan him theirs so he had something to show his instructors). Instead he played the class clown while getting drunk and picking fights in his free time, aided in these pastimes by his sharp wit and predilection for cruel mockery.

Before he met Paul, John could only sense his brilliance in flashes amid the chaos of his soul. Paul, though, was a like a mirror in which Lennon could see a stable image of this inner self. As such, Paul was a lifeline towards a future for John. Since high school, John had kept a band going with rotating personnel but they weren’t going anywhere. It was only Paul’s incandescent talent along with his ambition, discipline, charm and diplomacy that allowed The Beatles to march doggedly forward and corral John’s feral genius . Perhaps crucially for their connection as well—another synchronicity in the dazzling array that blessed The Beatles’ career—Paul had also lost his mother, to cancer, at about the same age as John. (Much has been made of this parallel in both musicians’ early lives.)

After they met, it was clear to everyone around them that they were the nucleus of something—and things began happening for the group. Skilled and dedicated themselves, they began tolerating less amateurism in other group members. A new determination and sense of purpose took form. It was Paul who suggested George become a member. It was Paul too who sparked John’s songwriting. To an English kid in the early sixties, songwriting seemed unreachable, the province of “experts.” No groups in Liverpool wrote their own songs, and before meeting Paul, John too was content to sing the rock and roll hits of his day. But Paul, with his own brand of boldness, had written a few songs, which he played for Lennon.

If McCartney likely saved Lennon from an early death, Lennon saved McCartney from an early life. For without John, Paul would likely have eased unnoticed into Liverpudlian adulthood to lead a comfortable existence as a school teacher who played music on the side, just like his dad. Unlike John, Paul had options. He was self-possessed, canny, successful in school and surrounded by loving parents and other relatives. Though, like John, he had been robbed of his mother at an early age, his upbringing allowed him to absorb the blow with less world-negating despair.

True, McCartney loved rock and roll. But he also loved music hall tunes and much of the other tamer fare of the kind his piano-playing father exposed him to. On his own, McCartney lacked the drive or desperation to form a rock and roll band. He was not actively seeking a band when he met John, nor had he ever formed one of his own. To fork in the direction of the trail-blazing pop-star he became, he needed John’s go-for-broke energy. John’s middle finger to society’s boredom was a rallying flag for the secretly irreverent, Little-Richard-loving rocker in Paul, who would  emerge over the course of the sixties as a musical genius with a mind-boggling array of talents.

In McCartney’s touching 1985 song about Lennon, “Here Today,” he wrote that, through everything , John was “always there with a smile.” That smile is what roused Paul in the first place. It said, “Life is supposed to be fun!” It’s the smile the two of them spread across the world.

The Sun Said to the Desk Lamp

The sun said

to the desk lamp:

even from 93 million

miles away

I can still

kick your ass

Faith

“The most pervasive falsehoods are the hardest to see.”

If faith is belief in what cannot be proven, then all human endeavor rests on faith. This is as true for science, mathematics, and every aspect of our personal lives as it is for philosophies and religions. Schools of thought, bodies of knowledge and everything we do from the moment we get up and brush our teeth in the morning, all rise up from and depend upon an assembly of beliefs accepted on faith. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, Hindu or atheist, faith is the bedrock of your reality.

It’s easy to see that religions are based on a set of beliefs subject to question by those who do not believe. Indeed, one of the admirable aspects of religions is their honesty about the role of faith as a foundation for everything they claim. We also accept that people have philosophical beliefs upon which they may base their actions or entire lives. We don’t see as clearly, however, that mathematics, science and our daily existence are all likewise based on unprovable beliefs. This has been widely affirmed over the centuries by wisdom traditions of all stripes. It’s a central principle of Buddhism, in Christ’s message, in Socrates’s probing approach to philosophy and in what quantum physicists have discovered about the nature of reality on a fundamental level. We would be better served were we daily more mindful of the ground of belief upon which we walk, and through which we experience what we call reality.

Take mathematics, a field we think of—when we are forced to think of it all—as logically airtight and having no truck with faith whatsoever. For mathematics is based on proofs. A mathematician only accepts into the canon of his field a “truth” that can be proven, at which point this truth becomes a “theorem.” But what are used to prove theorems? Other theorems! Clearly, though, this can’t go on forever. Eventually the most fundamental theorems have to come from somewhere else. Eventually something has to provide a foundation for the theorems. And so it is. Mathematicians call these “somethings” axioms. But we can call them beliefs.

Why? Because axioms aren’t proven. An axiom (also known as a “postulate”) is a statement taken at face value. It’s a statement mathematicians—who are human beings, I hasten to add (despite common misconception)—have agreed to accept as obvious.  An example of an axiom in geometry is “the unique line assumption,” which says that through any two points there can be drawn exactly one line. Part of the wikipedia definition of an axiom is that its “truth is taken for granted, and serves as a starting point for deducing and inferring other truths.”So it seems that, just as is the case for religion, the foundation for mathematics are also truths that are “taken for granted.”

Now you are doubtless thinking, “Hold on, brother. If the ‘unique line assumption’ is anything to go by, these mathematical beliefs are a lot more obvious than religious beliefs. Surely mathematical axioms are no-brainers—only a crazy person would doubt their truth.” Indeed, this seems true, but as I’ll later explore in more detail, many things once thought self-evident have turned out to be false. For now, let’s move on to see how science is also based on unprovable beliefs.

How does science rest on faith in the same way that religion and mathematics do? You could say that the business of science is to explain phenomena. To explain something, we depend on the concept of cause and effect: “A causes B and B causes C” and so on. However, as the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out around 1740, the very concept of cause and effect is actually a belief. There may be no such thing.

Think about it. When a pool stick hits a billiard ball and it rolls, there is no way to prove that the stick caused the ball to roll. All you can say is that in every case up till now, when someone has hit a billiard ball with a pool stick, the billiard ball has rolled. The past being all we have to go on, you can only say that in the past we have always observed the two activities occurring together in sequence. The concept that the stick caused the ball to roll is a belief we impose on the events. Perhaps in the future one might push a billiard ball and the ball might not move, or might roll up the stick, or jump around and whistle dixie. One cannot prove otherwise. As Hume put it in his Treatise on Human Nature: “[cause and effect]… are… qualities of perceptions, not of objects… felt by the soul and not perceived externally in bodies.” We believe in cause and effect. It’s not a fact.

Now let’s address the objection that the truths taken for granted in math and science are a lot more obvious and universally accepted than those taken for granted by religions—that one would have to be practically insane not to believe them, whereas religious beliefs are clearly open to question. The belief that two points determine exactly one line is a far cry from the belief that Jesus Christ was the only son of God. True enough. But they are beliefs nonetheless. And even beliefs considered obvious are not necessarily true.  The earth certainly seemed flat until we discovered the truth. Indeed, the greatest breakthroughs in human progress have occurred when some genius—or is that “insane person?”—questioned widely-accepted beliefs.

Take our concept of time. Before Einstein, it seemed apparent that time marches at a steady rate for everyone everywhere. In 1905, though, Einstein contended that time moves at different speeds depending on how fast we’re traveling and on the force of gravity. Even more than a hundred years later this idea seems at the very least bizarre if not downright crazy. And yet it has been borne out by experiments. Given this capsizing of accepted wisdom with regard to the nature of time, it is not completely bonkers to imagine a similar assault on the concept of cause and effect. Actually, this assault has already begun, as observations in the tiny world of quantum physics appear to challenge our notions of cause and effect (one example being that Newton’s third law of physics—”for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”—doesn’t always seem to apply down there).

Just as our notion of cause and effect is suspect, so too may be the “common sense” belief in the separation between matter and “spirit,” which we could also call energy. Since the Enlightenment, science has operated on the assumption that matter is “dead,” in other words there is no animating spirit or consciousness in matter. We tend to think this way in our everyday lives: there are forces on the one hand and stuff that gets pushed around by these forces on the other. But this belief has been challenged by quantum physics ever since 1905 when Einstein sprung his famous equation E = mc² on the world. E stands for energy, m for matter. The equation states mathematically that energy equals matter (after the amount of matter is multiplied by the speed of light squared). They’re actually the same thing! As such, they can theoretically be converted back and forth. We don’t know how to turn any matter into energy but physicists have since shown that energy can “pop out of nowhere” as a particle, and a particle can “disappear” into pure energy. Matter is only inert in our minds.

You might agree that scientific ideas are always open to challenge and revision, but surely our mathematical axioms are completely obvious and safe from attack? Well, maybe. But it turns out that at least in the world of geometry there are theoretically infinite different sets of axioms upon which different systems of geometry could be based. Each set of axioms leads to a different geometrical system that is internally consistent and therefore “logical” on its own terms. The type of geometry we learned in high school was Euclidean. It’s quite handy for flat situations like paper. You could say “it believes in flatness,” for it rests on a foundation of assumed flatness. But another thing Einstein showed is that space itself is not Euclidean but curved. Therefore a different geometry, based on “curvedness” and using different axioms is needed for calculations involving curved space.

The beliefs most fundamental to a way of thinking become second nature. Through long habit, they are ingrained, taken for granted and unquestioned. But a fresh, active mind explores beliefs. It probes and tests them and is willing to discard dry, cob-webbed beliefs in favor of those more vital, supple or nuanced. This is called being re-born. This is called life in the most vigorous and broad meaning of that word. This is what Socrates meant by “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and why he, and Christ, walked around questioning the accepted wisdom of their day.

Our most fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world are like a pair of colored glasses we wear all the time. If they are yellow glasses, all we ever see are yellow things. Most never realize they can take the glasses off and try another pair. Most never realize the profundity of the bumper sticker that reads “Don’t trust everything you think.” Most never realize that they can be the Einsteins of their own lives.