SOCRATES: A Man for Our Times | Paul Johnson | Viking, 224 pages.
On a spring morning in 399 BC, Athenians brought a 70-year-old Philosopher to trial after years of domestic unrest. Socrates was tried in the court of public opinion (the media), found guilty by the people (democratic voters), and was infamously sentenced to ritual suicide by gulping hemlock.
If Western Thought has a father, it is Socrates.
He died for being an iconoclast; Socrates gained immortality by asking questions.
Paul Johnson brings to life in this short, accessible bio-lecture the story, life, and times of Socrates. He was a war veteran, a heavy drinker, a storyteller, a teacher, and a philosopher. Given man’s immutable nature, much of today has happened before, and the experiences are illustrative if we recall them.
Socrates battled the emerging technology of the written word. It was a challenge and trend threatening to overtake the primacy of face-to-face conversation.
He railed against fancy rhetoric or pretty talk lacking Truth. He pushed a private relationship with virtue rather than public religion. From its inception, he showed why a full democracy was destructive, wicked, and evil. Socrates routinely tackled crass consumerism and vain obsessions with appearances. If it were sacred, he challenged it.
To be reminded there is little special or unique about our age is humbling. Emerging technologies, displacement, wars, and recessions are a pattern of our story - a never-ending cycle. How we intentionally order ourselves amidst this noise is what interested Socrates.
It’s difficult to be critical of any work addressing Socrates because the subject matter is so compelling, if not convicting. But Johnson attempts to Christianize Socrates in a way that seems unnecessary and ultimately untruthful. Socrates can stand or fall on his own merit in the same fashion that Aristotle does not require conversion by Aquinas or Plato by Augustine.
But this book has me looking forward to reading more Paul Johnson and more Socrates.