I shall never stop practicing philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet. I shall go on saying…Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honor and give no attention to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?…I shall do this to everyone I meet, young or old, foreigner or fellow citizen, but especially to you, my fellow citizens.
—SOCRATES, from Plato’s Apology 29d—30a
And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee: and there went out a fame of him through all the region round about. And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified of all. And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are oppressed.
—Luke 4:14—18
Democracy is, or should be, the most disinterested form of love.
—RALPH ELLISON, “Letter to Albert Murray,” August 17, 1957
In all of Lester Young’s finest solos (as in Ellington’s always ambivalent foxtrots) there are overtones of unsentimental sadness that suggest that he was never unmindful of human vulnerability and was doing what he was doing with such imperturbable casualness not only in spite of but also as a result of all the trouble he had seen, been beset by, and somehow survived. In a sense, the elegance of earned self-togetherness and with-it-ness so immediately evident in all his quirky lyricism is the musical equivalent of the somewhat painful but nonetheless charismatic parade-ground strut of the campaign-weary soldier who has been there one more time and made it back in spite of hell and high water with shrapnel exploding all around him.
—ALBERT MURRAY, Stomping the Blues (1976)
September 11 was a deeply traumatic event for us. It shattered our illusions of security and invincibility and shocked us about the degree of hatred the terrorists harbored for us. After a brief moment of national unity, disillusionment and division set in. Deep polarization resurfaced with more vengeance as we turned on one another with anger and frustration. The raw debates about Iraq, the Patriotic Act, tax cuts, gay marriage, and the down-and-dirty presidential election of 2004 have left us feeling almost like two countries, disenchanted and, at times, in downright despair. The pervasive depression and disaffection of youth, the flight of so many adults into mindless escapism to combat loneliness and the lack of a sense of purpose in their lives, and the plunge into frenetic consumerism to offset our restlessness all reveal the fissures in our civic life. Neither a new president (though badly needed) nor a fresh administration will satisfy our democratic longings. The profound dismay with our democracy goes beyond the bounds of the current moment.
In our disillusionment with our politicians and plutocrats—and with our media watchdogs—we have focused on the corruptions of our democratic system and have lost our sense of connection to the vital roles played in any democracy by an enlightened and motivated democratic citizenry, and by the principled coalitions that can so effectively push for democratic change. Democracy is not simply a matter of an electoral system in which citizens get the right to vote and elected officials must compete for the public’s favor (or find ways to manipulate the public into favoring them, or rig the electoral system to limit competition, as is too often the case today in America). All systems set up to enact democracy are subject to corrupt manipulations, and that is why the public commitment to democratic involvement is so vital. Genuine, robust democracy must be brought to life through democratic individuality, democratic community, and democratic society.
In America, we have tended to underplay the crucial role of the foundational motivation of democracy. From the time of that first Athenian democratic experiment in the fifth century BC to the birth of the American democratic experiment in the eighteenth century, the consolidation of elite power was the primary object of democratic revolt. This will to transform corrupted forms of elite rule into more democratic ways of life is an extraordinary force, though each new democratic result of the exercise of this will falls short of democratic ideals. This is why all democracies are incomplete and unfinished, and this is why American democracy is a work in progress.
We have seen that there are two opposing tendencies in American democracy—toward imperialism and toward democratization—and we are in a period of intense battle between the two. At this moment our imperialist elites are casting themselves as the defenders of our democracy. The Bush administration has subverted the public will in order to lead its war against terrorism in the way it wanted to—attacking Iraq and instituting the dangerous doctrine of preemptive strike rather than focusing on the real terrorist threat. Our business elites have cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of the unfettered free market and of the inevitable juggernaut of corporate globalization, justifying an obscene exacerbation of wealth inequality. It is in the face of such egregious misrepresentations of democracy that the example of the original Greek experiment with democracy—especially the witness of Socrates—is so relevant.
The historic emergence of Athenian democracy and the Greek invention of Socratic dialogue must instruct and inspire our practice of democratic citizenship in present-day America. Athenian democracy was created by the revolt of organized peasants against the abusive power of oligarchic rulers. These peasants refused to be passive victims in the face of plutocratic policies that redistributed wealth upward—from the vast majority to the privileged few. The Greek conception of democracy elevated abused peasants into active citizens who demanded public accountability of their elected officials. Their democratic calls for land reform and the cancellation of debts to greedy elites produced an unprecedented experiment in self-government.
The move away from the rule of kings evolved gradually in Athens, with a crucial step being the separation of authority between the king and the new office of Archon, which assumed many of the operational responsibilities of the government. That reform may have been enacted as early as 1088 BC. In 594 BC, Solon was elected Archon and he responded to the power of organized independent farmers and wealthy nonnoble peasants by establishing legal reforms that incorporated these excluded Athenians into the highest government body (the council of the Areopagus) and into the juries of new courts. These reforms set in motion ideals of equality—of political and judicial equality—and notions of public life predicated on trust between conflicting classes and groups in Athenian society. As Demosthenes, the greatest public orator of his day, proclaimed regarding this democratizing motivation:
He who claims your indulgence as having acted for the good of the commonwealth must be shown to possess the spirit of the commonwealth. That spirit is a spirit of compassion for the helpless, and of resistance to the intimidation of the strong and powerful; it does not inspire brutal treatment of the populace, and subservience to the potentates of the day.
Solon’s reforms did not establish Athenian democracy, but they did constitute a compromise between clashing classes and groups that put Athens on the road toward democracy. When Cleisthenes triumphed over his foe Isagoras by siding with the demos in 508 BC, he immediately set in place a new political system of demes. The demes were vibrant forms of local democratic participation and communal activity that bring to mind New England township democracy centuries ago, and they replaced the old Greek system of kinship tribes based on birth. Like juries, the demes were grassroots training grounds for democratic temperaments that undercut blind allegiances to family, clan, or tribe. In addition, Cleisthenes established a new democratic council of five hundred representatives that replaced the old aristocratic council of the Areopagus. Athenian democracy was born.
This historic evolution from a society and government based on loyalty to a narrow kinship group into a broader citizenship model was, in the wonderful phrase of Eli Sagan in his superb book The Honey and the Hemlock (1991), “the conscious moralization of democratic energy.” And when Pericles ascended to power in 443 BC and later instituted the first pay for public service—along with a system of annual rotation in office and the lot for holding office—Athenian democracy was solidified. This experiment was less a static constitutional order than a dynamic democratic culture of civic participation. As Sheldon Wolin notes, this “great achievement of self-government was to transform politics in sight and speech; power was made visible; decision making was opened so that citizens could see its workings; ordinary men personified power, spoke to it unservilely, and held themselves answerable.”
This remarkable unleashing of deep democratic energies went hand in hand with clever oligarchic efforts to subvert the will of the demos, whether by overt corruption or covert manipulation. This corruption or manipulation often resulted from the widespread market activity that was widely viewed to be incompatible or at odds with Athenian public life. The Athenians were well aware that the voices of the demos could be offset by powerful market elites bending the system to serve the interests of the few. The economic power of the oligarchs was recognized to be the primary source of the corruptions of Athenian democratic governance.
It is no accident that the Greek invention of Socratic dialogue was motivated, in part, by opposition to the market-driven Sophists obsessed with moneymaking. The major foes of Socrates in the writings that popularized his ideas—like Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic—were cast as greedy merchants and clever rhetoricians with little regard for the quality of democratic public life. In fact, the Socratic love of wisdom was contrasted sharply against the Sophistic love of money.
The leading Sophist of the day—Gorgias—was described by Isocrates in the Antidosis:
This man spent time among the Thessalians when these people were the wealthiest of the Greeks; he lived a long life and was devoted to making money; he had no fixed dwelling in any city and therefore did not spend money for the benefit of the public.
And the contemporary historian K. J. Dover writes in his essay “The Freedom of the Intellectual in Greek Society,” the Sophists as intellectuals “were widely regarded as exercising, through their wealthy Athenian patrons, great influence over Athenian policy, while not themselves accountable for the execution of policy.”
In the great story of Athenian democracy, Socrates is the towering figure precisely because it was his central mission to combat the corruptions of elite power by questioning the narrow ideological and prejudicial thinking of his day. He was an exemplary democratic citizen—serving on the council and partaking in three major military campaigns (Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis)—and he took it as his calling to go out to the demos to “infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself” (Plato, Meno 80c—d).
The Socratic love of wisdom holds not only that the unexamined life is not worth living (Apology 38a) but also that to be human and a democratic citizen requires that one muster the courage to think critically for oneself. This love of wisdom is a perennial pursuit into the dark corners of one’s own soul, the night alleys of one’s society, and the back roads of the world in order to grasp the deep truths about one’s soul, society, and world. This pursuit shatters one’s petty idols, false illusions, and seductive fetishes; it undermines blind conformity, glib complacency, and pathetic cowardice. Socratic questioning yields intellectual integrity, philosophic humility, and personal sincerity—all essential elements of our democratic armor for the fight against corrupt elite power.
Socratic questioning is the enactment of parrhesia—frank and fearless speech—that is the lifeblood of any democracy. Socrates admits that parrhesia was “the cause of my unpopularity” (Apology 24a). And it was the reason for his tragic death. Yet he chose to die rather than live a lie. His noble death—at the hands of dogmatic and nihilistic elites—gave rise to a new literary genre that kept his memory alive. This famous genre of questioning—immortalized by his student Plato—consists of intense interrogation and sustained examination of how we ought to live. It wrestles with basic questions such as, What is justice? What is courage? What is piety? What is love? And although Socrates never wrote a word, Socratic writers like Plato, Xenophon, and Aeschines left powerful and poignant portraits of the democratic practice of Socratic questioning. In fact, Plato’s dramatic portraits of this democratic practice constitute the foundations of Western philosophy (philosophia, or love of wisdom). The democratic energies of Socratic questioning tend to brazenly and forcefully challenge the corrupt rule of elites and often subject its practitioners to ridicule and censure of various kinds. Yet Socratic questioning is indispensable to any democratic experiment.
Ironically, Plato’s love of Socrates and his hatred of those who put Socrates to death—corrupt elites of Athenian democracy—produced a schizophrenia in Plato’s thought. As S. Sara Monoson’s excellent book, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements (2000), shows, this schizophrenia is central to Plato’s philosophy. On the one hand, his texts embody a vibrant democratic energy of Socratic questioning that shuns the dogmatism and nihilism of corrupt rulers. On the other hand, his vision of order and hierarchy legitimate an antidemocratic authoritarianism. Plato’s famous vertical chain of being trumps any democracy. Yet his magnificent development of the Socratic literary genre was rooted in a ferocious scrutiny of the lived experience of the demos. Plato’s writings were indebted to poetic forms that focused on the experiences of ordinary Athenians. These forms consisted of the mimes of Sophron and his son Xenarchus and the comedies of Aristophanes. Mimes were a form of popular entertainment, akin to a play, in which actors depicted scenes from everyday life that were focused on revealing aspects of people’s character. Both these mimes and the comedies highlighted the lives of lower-class men and women, or “low characters,” who were “laughable and without any grandeur.” Plato’s fear of the blind passions and anarchic potential of the demos led him to use his essentially democratic genre for antidemocratic ends.
His fierce Socratic questioning led to aristocratic conclusions. In Plato’s mind, as in the minds of the American Founding Fathers, democratic energies were both appreciated and feared—the voices of the demos required not only acknowledgment but also containment. In book eight of the Republic, Plato defines democracy as “a polis full of freedom and frank speech (Parrhesia)” that can never resolve the perennial problem of corruption or creeping despotism. For him, only the rule of philosopher-kings equipped with knowledge of the good life could control the unruly passions of the demos. American democracy emerged as a republic (representative government) rather than an Athenian-like direct democracy primarily owing to the same elite fear of the passions and ignorance of the demos. As James Madison notes in his famous sentence in The Federalist Papers:
Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates every
Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
For the Founding Fathers—just as for Plato—too much Socratic questioning from the demos and too much power sharing of elites with the demos were expected to lead to anarchy, instability, or perpetual rebellion. The democratic genius of the Founding Fathers was to nevertheless incorporate Socratic questioning into our government in the form of a procedure for constitutional revision and to create the Bill of Rights to protect parrhesia, despite their fear of the unruly demos. Without these Socratic dimensions of American democracy, American tyranny would have triumphed. Without Socratic questioning by the demos, elite greed at home and imperial domination abroad devour any democracy.
As the great Reinhold Niebuhr noted, democracy is a proximate solution to insoluble problems—it is always messy and subject to corrupt manipulation, yet it is still the best civic project for the demos. Does not Thucydides’ classic History of the Peloponnesian War lay bare the insidious seeds of domestic greed and imperial domination as the primary causes of the decay and decline of Athenian democracy? The Macedonian and Roman dominations of a weak and corrupt Athenian democracy were the ugly results of these poisonous seeds. Can we learn from this tragic example? Only if we avoid the paralyzing paranoia of Manichaean thinking, the debilitating hubris of dogmatic arrogance, and the myopic self-righteousness of nihilistic imperialism. And we avoid these best when we are Socratic as individuals, as communities, and as a society. The fragile health of a democracy rests upon the Socratic health of its demos. As the wise and reluctant democrat Matthew Arnold, an English critic and poet, concluded in his classic Culture and Anarchy (1869):
…but in his own breast does not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates, in that power of a disinterested play of consciousness upon his stock notions and habits, of which this wise and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the great example, and which was the secret of his incomparable influence? And he who leads men to call forth and exercise in themselves this power, and who busily calls it forth and exercises it in himself, is at the present moment, perhaps, as Socrates was in his time, more in concert with the vital working of men’s minds, and more effectually significant, than any…practical operator in politics.
This Arnoldian sentiment is expressed in an American idiom by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the godfather of our deep democratic tradition, in his essay “Plato; or the Philosopher,” a tribute to the Socrates of Plato’s texts:
The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr, the keen street and market debater with the sweetest saint known to any history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, so capacious of these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates, by a necessity, placed itself in the foreground of the scene, as the fittest dispenser of the intellectual treasures he had to communicate. It was a rare fortune, that this Aesop of the mob, and this robed scholar, should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual faculty.
For Emerson, every democratic citizen must aspire to the Socratic love of wisdom, to a vigilant questioning that transforms the unruly mob into mature seekers of the tougher, deeper truths that sustain democratic individuals, democratic communities, and democratic societies.
Yet our Socratic questioning must go beyond Socrates. We must out-Socratize Socrates by revealing the limits of the great Socratic tradition. My own philosophy of democracy that emerges from the nightside of American democracy is rooted in the guttural cries and silent tears of oppressed people. And it has always bothered me that Socrates never cries—he never sheds a tear. His profound yet insufficient rationalism refuses to connect noble self-mastery to a heartfelt solidarity with the agony and anguish of oppressed peoples. Why this glaring defect in Socratic love of wisdom? Does not the rich Socratic legacy of Athens need the deep prophetic legacy of Jerusalem? Must not the rigorous questioning and quest for wisdom of the Socratic be infused with the passionate fervor and quest for justice of the prophetic?
The Jewish invention of the prophetic begins with the cries for help and tears of sorrow of an oppressed people. This profound grief and particular grievances are directed against imperial Egypt. God hears their cries and is moved by their tears because God is first and foremost a lover of justice (Psalms 99:4 and 37:28; Isaiah 61:8). The Judaic God declares, “I will surely hear their cry…. For I am compassionate” (Exodus 22:23, 27). Divine compassion undergirds the divine love of justice just as human compassion undergirds the prophetic love of justice. The premier prophetic language is the language of cries and tears because human hurt and misery give rise to visions of justice and deeds of compassion. For the prophetic tradition, the cries and tears of an oppressed people signify an alternative to oppression and symbolize an allegiance to a God who requires human deeds that address these cries and tears.
The Christian movement that emerged out of prophetic Judaism made the language of cries and tears a new way of life and struggle in the world. My philosophy of democracy is deeply shaped by that particular Jew named Jesus who put the love of God and neighbor at the core of his vision of justice and his deeds of compassion. His vision of a just future consoles those who cry and his deeds of compassion comfort those who shed tears. His loving gift of ministry, grace, and death under the rule of nihilistic imperial elites enacts divine compassion and justice in human flesh. The ultimate Christian paradox of God crucified in history under the Roman empire is that the love and justice that appear so weak may be strong, that seem so foolish may be wise, and that strike imperial elites as easily disposable may be inescapably indispensable. The prophetic tradition is fueled by a righteous indignation at injustice—a moral urgency to address the cries and tears of oppressed peoples.
Despite the Constantinian captivity of much of the Christian movement here and abroad, the prophetic tradition has a deep legacy of providing extraordinary strength of commitment and vision that helps us to care in a palpable way about the injustices we see around us. In our own time this was the fire that drove Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dorothy Day, and millions of other Americans to deepen our democratic project. This prophetic tradition is an infectious and invigorating way of life and struggle. It generates the courage to care and act in light of a universal moral vision that indicts the pervasive corruption, greed, and bigotry in our souls and society. It awakens us from the fashionable ways of being indifferent to other people’s suffering or from subtle ways of remaining numb to the social misery in our midst. Prophetic love of justice unleashes ethical energy and political engagement that explodes all forms of our egocentric predicaments or tribalistic mind-sets. Its telling signs are ethical witness (including maybe martyrdom for some), moral consistency, and political activism—all crucial elements of our democratic armor for the fight against corrupt elite power.
Yet in our postmodern world of pervasive consumerism and hedonism, narcissism and cynicism, skepticism and nihilism, the Socratic love of wisdom and prophetic love of justice may appear hopeless. Who has not felt overwhelmed by dread and despair when confronting the atrocities and barbarities of our world? And surely a cheap optimism or trite sentimentalism will not sustain us. We need a bloodstained Socratic love and tear-soaked prophetic love fueled by a hard-won tragicomic hope. Our democratic fight against corrupt elite power needs the vital strength provided by the black American invention of the blues. The blues is the most profound interpretation of tragicomic hope in America. The blues encourages us to confront the harsh realities of our personal and political lives unflinchingly without innocent sentimentalism or coldhearted cynicism. The blues forges a mature hope that fortifies us on the slippery tightrope of Socratic questioning and prophetic witness in imperial America.
This black American interpretation of tragicomic hope is rooted in a love of freedom. It proceeds from a free inquisitive spirit that highlights imperial America’s weak will to racial justice. It is a sad yet sweet indictment of abusive power and blind greed run amok. It is a melancholic yet melioristic stance toward America’s denial of its terrors and horrors heaped on others. It yields a courage to hope for betterment against the odds without a sense of revenge or resentment. It revels in a dark joy of freely thinking, acting, and loving under severe constraints of unfreedom.
I have always marveled at how such an unfree people as blacks in America created the freest forms in America, such as blues and jazz. I have often pondered how we victims of American democracy invented such odes to democratic individuality and community as in the blues and jazz. And I now wonder whether American democracy can survive without learning from the often-untapped democratic energies and lessons of black Americans. How does one affirm a life of mature autonomy while recognizing that evil is inseparable from freedom? How does one remain open and ready for meaningful solidarity with the very people who hate you? Frederick Douglass and Bessie Smith, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan and Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker and Louis Armstrong all are wise voices in a deep democratic tradition in America that may provide some clue to these crucial questions in our time. They all knew that even if the tears of the world are a constant quantity and that the air is full of our cries, we can and should still embark on a democratic quest for wisdom, justice, and freedom.
This kind of tragicomic hope is dangerous—and potentially subversive—because it can never be extinguished. Like laughter, dance, and music, it is a form of elemental freedom that cannot be eliminated or snuffed out by any elite power. Instead, it is inexorably resilient and inescapably seductive—even contagious. It is wedded to a long and rich tradition of humanist pursuits of wisdom, justice, and freedom from Amos through Socrates to Ellison. The high modern moments in this tradition—Shakespeare, Beethoven, Chekhov, Coltrane—enact and embody a creative weaving of the Socratic, prophetic, and tragicomic elements into profound interpretations of what it means to be human. These three elements constitute the most sturdy democratic armor available to us in our fight against corrupt elite power. They represent the best of what has been bequeathed to us and what we look like when we are at our best—as deep democrats and as human beings.
This democratic armor allows us to absorb any imperial and xenophobic blows yet still persist. It permits us to face any antidemocratic foe and still persevere. It encourages us to fight any form of dogma or nihilism and still endure. It only requires that we be true to ourselves by choosing to be certain kinds of human beings and democratic citizens indebted to a deep democratic tradition and committed to keeping it vital and vibrant. This democratic vocation wedded to an unstoppable predilection for possibility may not guarantee victory, but it does enhance the probability of hard-won progress. And if we lose our precious democratic experiment, let it be said that we went down swinging like Ella Fitzgerald and Muhammad Ali—with style, grace, and a smile that signifies that the seeds of democracy matters will flower and flourish somewhere and somehow and remember our gallant efforts.