Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher and mathematician who
taught at various institutions beginning with his alma mater, Trinity College
at the University of Cambridge and ending with Harvard University at the other
academic Cambridge, said a lot of things over his long career, most of them
being forgettable, lamentable, or pure rot.
He did, however, produce one gem when he characterized the entire
Western philosophical tradition as being “a series of footnotes to Plato”. There would have been no Plato, however, had
there not been a Socrates. It was Socrates,
the legendary teacher of Plato and Xenophon as well as a number of individuals who
are otherwise most famous for the various ways in which they disgraced
themselves in the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, who laid the foundation
for Platonic and all subsequent Western philosophy. He did so by asking questions. To this day the didactic trick of getting
someone to assert something and then picking away at it with questions is known
as the Socratic Method.
The best account of that method remains that which Plato
placed in the mouth of Socrates himself in his Apology. The title of this
dialogue is the source of our English word apology although it had nothing to
do with apologizing in the sense of saying that you are sorry for
something. Apologetics, which in
Christian theology is the art of making arguments for the faith against the
objections of unbelievers (and originally against those in the state who
thought the faith ought to be illegal), is much closer to the original meaning
of the word which was “defence” and more specifically the legal defence of the
accused at a trial. When Athenian
democracy was restored after the short-lived rule of the hundred tyrants
following the Spartan victory that brought the Peloponnesian War to an end,
Socrates was charged with a number of offences such as corrupting the youth of
Athens and put on trial before the Athenian assembly. Plato’s Apology
purports to be an account of the speech Socrates gave in his defence on that
occasion and indeed, the full title is Ἀπολογία Σωκράτους (“The Defence
of Socrates”).
Early in the dialogue Socrates gives an account of how he
came have the reputation that landed him on trial. He discusses Chaerophon, who had been a
friend of his since his youth and who also, not incidentally, was a friend of
the Athenian democrats, i.e., Socrates’ accusers, and one who had shared in their recent
misfortunes. Chaerophon had gone to Delphi and asked the Pythian priestess of Apollo whether there was anyone σοφώτερος
(wiser) than Socrates and had received the answer μηδένα σοφώτερον εἶναι
(there is no one wiser). Socrates, when
he had heard this, had thought to himself:
‘τί ποτε λέγει ὁ θεός, καὶ τί ποτε αἰνίττεται; ἐγὼ γὰρ δὴ οὔτε μέγα οὔτε σμικρὸν σύνοιδα ἐμαυτῷ σοφὸς ὤν: τί οὖν ποτε λέγει φάσκων ἐμὲ σοφώτατον εἶναι; οὐ γὰρ δήπου ψεύδεταί γε: οὐ γὰρ θέμις αὐτῷ.’
(“Whatever is the god saying and
why ever does he speak in riddles? For truly
I know myself to have wisdom neither great nor small and so whatever is he
saying in asserting me to be the wisest?
For surely he is not lying, at any rate, since that is not his custom.”)
This launched Socrates on his
quest to find someone wiser than himself so as to rebut the oracle. He began by going to a politician with a
reputation for wisdom. After having a
dialogue with him he concluded:
ἔδοξέ μοι οὗτος ὁ ἀνὴρ δοκεῖν μὲν εἶναι σοφὸς ἄλλοις τε πολλοῖς ἀνθρώποις καὶ μάλιστα ἑαυτῷ, εἶναι δ᾽ οὔ:
(this man seemed to me to seem
to be wise to others and to many men and
most especially to himself but not to actually be so)
He promptly shared this conclusion
with the man in question and so earned his enmity and hatred. As he left the man he thought to himself:
τούτου μὲν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐγὼ σοφώτερός εἰμι: κινδυνεύει μὲν γὰρ ἡμῶν οὐδέτερος οὐδὲν καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι, ἀλλ᾽ οὗτος μὲν οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι οὐκ εἰδώς, ἐγὼ δέ, ὥσπερ οὖν οὐκ οἶδα, οὐδὲ οἴομαι: ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι.
(I am wiser than this man, for indeed it is likely that neither
of the two of us knows even one good and beautiful thing, but whereas this man
thinks that he knows something he does not know, I, on the other hand, as I do
not know, neither do I think I know. I
seem, at least then, in this little thing at any rate, to be wiser than him,
that what things I do not know, neither do I think that I know.)
He repeated this procedure with others reputed to be wise
with the same result every time. Later
in the dialogue – apart from this it would more properly be called a monologue
– he provides a demonstration when he cross-examines his accuser Meletus.
The Apology
presents to us the two major failures of Socrates. The obvious one is his failure to persuade
the assembly, which resulted in him losing his case, being convicted, and then
largely because of his own flippant attitude when asked to propose an
alternative sentence, condemned to death.
The other is his failure in his self-appointed task of rebutting the oracle of Delphi. In failing to find someone wiser than
himself and demonstrating that those reputed to be wise lacked both knowledge
and an awareness of their own ignorance Socrates confirmed the oracle’s
judgement - Socrates’ awareness of his own ignorance, a self-awareness that his
interlocutors lacked, made him indeed, the wisest man of his day. This awareness of a lack of knowledge,
willingness to acknowledge it openly, and to seek out knowledge by asking
questions, became the starting point and foundation of the long philosophical
tradition of Western Civilization.
Is it not then perverse that in
academe, that is, the collective of institutions of higher learning which takes
its name from the olive grove outside of the walls of Athens dedicated to that
city’s patron goddess where Socrates’ greatest disciple Plato taught his own
pupils, this spirit of acknowledging one’s ignorance, asking questions and
being willing to learn is no longer welcome?
In the academe of today the idea
is almost ubiquitous that the campus ought to be a “safe space” for groups which
in progressive ideology deserve special rights and protections now because of
past wrongs done to them, real and imagined.
What this means in practice is that such groups are to be protected on
campus from acts and, more importantly, words, that, in their opinion at least,
are hostile or offensive to themselves.
This translates into all criticism of these groups or even of individual
members of these groups being forbidden because any such criticism could be and
often is taken by these groups as being hostile or offensive. This in turn means that members of these
groups cannot be questioned when sharing their “lived experience” (the
progressive term for a member of a designated victim group talking about having
experienced discrimination, marginalization, and whichever of the growing list
of forbidden isms or phobias happens to apply) or “their truth” (when the word
truth is modified by a possessive pronoun this is an progressive euphemism for
claims made about one’s – usually sexual or gender – identity that are backed
only by one’s experience and interpretation of such and not by conformity with
objective reality), because such questioning is taken as criticism which is
taken as hostility.
This is only one of many ways in
which asking questions, at least if they are questions pertaining to
progressive sacred cows, is discouraged, frowned upon, or outright forbidden on
academic campuses.
Asking questions is fundamental
not only to the philosophical tradition that began with Socrates and Plato but
to something that if it were properly regarded would be considered but one
branch of that tradition. That
something is what we call science today.
It would be better if we still called it natural philosophy. The term science is the Anglicized spelling
of the Latin word for “knowledge” and its limitation, as in most contemporary
English usage, to natural philosophy, its methodology, and its discoveries, has
materialistic connotations. Science or
natural philosophy, is that branch of knowledge-seeking that has as its subject
matter the physical or natural world and how it works. It has greater utility than many other
branches of philosophy which is why Modern man whose thinking is permeated by
liberalism which places an exaggerated value on utility tends to think of
science as something other than and superior to philosophy rather than one of
its branches. It would have no utility
whatsoever, however, were it not for asking questions and/or activities that
are the equivalent of question asking.
From Thales, Pythagoras and Aristotle in the Ancient world to Isaac
Newton, Galileo Galilei, Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein,
Max Planck, Francis Crick, et al. in the Modern, none of these would have
discovered anything had they not asked questions and especially questions about
what was already being taught as science.
For the past three years we have
had to listen to politicians, government bureaucrats, the majority of media
commentators and even many clergy speak of “the science” as something to be
“believed” and “followed”. Questioning “the
science” was declared to be “misinformation” and “disinformation” and
“conspiracy theory” by these same people and treated as such by the censorious
tech companies who operate the major social media platforms. The vile and odious twit whom we have been
saddled with as Prime Minister here in Canada since 2015, around the time of
last year’s Dominion Election equated people who according to him “don’t
believe in science” with “racists” and “misogynists” said that their views were
“unacceptable” and that we ought to be asking ourselves whether we should
continue to tolerate such people in our midst.
All of this pertained to the “scientific” arguments that were being
claimed in support of draconian government measures such as the enforced
closing of schools, churches, businesses etc. that came to be known as
“lockdowns”, mandatory masking, and ultimately compelled vaccination introduced
in the panic over the bat flu. Anybody
who has dared to question the doomsday predictions coming from Green activists
masquerading as climatologists over the last three decades or so will have
already been familiar with this sort of talk long before the pandemic. Regardless, however, of whether this talk
about how we are under some sort of moral imperative to “believe” and “follow”
“the science” and how those who do not are evil “deniers” comes up in the
context of pandemic policy or climate policy it betrays the speaker as being
thoroughly unscientific in the way he views science. Real scientists who make real discoveries
that benefit mankind in real ways do not place a definite article before
science and treat it as an object of unquestioning faith and obedience. Those who do speak about “the science” this
way are speaking about something that is not really science. It is interesting, is it not, that what
those who spoke this way in the pandemic and those who speak this way about
“climate change” have in common, is that they all want more powers for the
government, more limitations on personal rights and freedoms, and for the
ordinary middle class people in Western countries to accept a severe reduction
in their standard of living?
Asking questions is fundamental to
yet another important discipline, that of history. Indeed, the very name of the discipline
refers to the process of asking questions.
Herodotus, who was about fourteen years older than Socrates, was born in
Halicarnassus, a Greek city in Anatolia or Asia Minor, which at the time was
part of the Persian Empire. A man of
means, he travelled much throughout the Mediterranean world and about five
years before he died, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War between Athens
and her allies and Sparta and her allies, wrote a ten book account of the
peoples, customs, and past events of the region, concentrating on the
Greco-Persian Wars fought in the first half of the fifth century BC, i.e., the
century in which he lived. He
introduced the first book and the entire work with the words “Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε”
which mean simply “This is the publication of the inquiry of Herodotus of
Halicarnassus”. The word which means
“inquiry” or “investigation” here is ἱστορίης which put in Latin characters is histories. It has ever since served not only as the
title of Herodotus’ magnus opus but as the name of the entire field of looking into the events of the past to determine what
happened and why of which Herodotus is quite properly remembered as the father.
The remainder of the opening sentence provides us with the
subject and purpose of Herodotus’ investigation:
ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι.
This means: “so that the things done by men do not become
forgotten with time, nor the works both great and marvelous, some performed by
Greeks others by foreigners, become inglorious, and with these other things
also the reason for which they went to war with each other.”
To this day the historical discipline remains summed up well
in this introduction. The methodology of historical inquiry is most comparable
to that of the courtroom and this, of course, means asking plenty of questions
of first hand witnesses to events if available and of others who have relevant
knowledge. For Herodotus this meant asking
the λόγιοι (learned men) of the various countries he visited for their
accounts of their own customs, past events, and of various local natural, geographical,
and architectural phenomenon. As an example, the very first thing that
follows the opening sentence given above is his record of the account given by
the Persian λόγιοι of that matter emphasized at the very end of his
introduction, i.e., the cause of the Greco-Persian Wars. According to him the Persians traced the
ultimate cause to the Phoenicians, who in the abduction of Io, princess of
Argos, started a series of reciprocal abductions of women of rank (Europa,
Medea, Helen) that culminated in the Greek onslaught of Troy, which event,
judged to be gross overreaction by the Asians, was the immediate cause of the
hatred and enmity of the Asians for the Greeks.
It has been suggested by subsequent historians, including
his own contemporary Thucydides that Herodotus was less critical than he ought
to have been towards his sources.
Evidence, however, continues to accumulate to this very day that he was
far more accurate than he has often been given credit for. For example, until very recently the prime
example pointed to by his critics of his utterly credulity was his account in Book III of his History of a region in India where furry, fox-sized, ants, dig up
gold dust which is then harvested by the locals, long ridiculed as outlandish
and absurd. It was essentially confirmed
by a French ethnologist four decades ago when he published his findings
about a species of marmot (big squirrels who live in burrows rather than trees)
in a particularly difficult to reach part of the Karakoram mountains on the
side of the range belonging to Pakistan that does exactly what Herodotus said
these “ants” do with the locals, the Minaro or Brokpas, continuing to harvest
the gold. The Persians called these marmots
“mountain ants”, presumably because of the similar habit of digging and making
mounds, a rather more obvious basis of comparison that that which the person
who gave the same species the alternative name “Tibetan snow pig” had in mind,
although whatever that happened to have been was apparently also evident to
whoever was the first to call the creature’s North American cousin the
“groundhog”. The relevance of this to
our point regarding history is simply this – it was by asking questions, first
by those who questioned Herodotus’ account where it contained elements that
seemed fanciful and for which they could find no other evidence and then by
those who dug deeper, questioned the original questioners, and found evidence
supporting his claims, that his work has been vindicated as being far more
accurate than had been previously thought.
History then, like Socratic philosophy and empirical science
– real empirical science, which never takes a definite article, is never
settled, is not an object of faith to be believed or a leader to be followed –
has truth as its end, and asking and seeking as its means and method. It is therefore rather disturbing or comical
or both that our Parliamentarians seem to have adopted the attitude that
historical truth is not something that is out there to be discovered by those
who seek it but rather something to be declared and decided by their own
authoritative fiat.
Earlier this year, in a shameless attempt to deflect public
attention away from their own fascist behavior in declaring the equivalent of
martial law in order to brutally crush a peaceful protest against their cruel
vaccine mandates and other draconian health measures – this description has
been borne out completely by the testimony in the inquiry over the last month
or so – the evil Prime Minister Trudeau and his Cabinet of knuckle-dragging,
simian, louts and thugs declared their intention to make “Holocaust denial”
into a crime in Canada. Since in the
progressive lexicon asking a valid and important question about something
progressives have declared to be a sacred cow constitutes “denial” this meant
in effect that asking tough, challenging, questions about the Holocaust was to
be criminalized. As a sleight of hand
it was rather impressive. “Yes, I just
suspended everyone’s civil rights and freedoms in order to crush people who
were embarrassing me” the Prime Minister was essentially saying “but it’s these
other people who are Hitler, not me, therefore I am going to make it so that
they go to prison for saying things and asking questions that I don’t like,
just like in Germany.”
More recently, the member of the official socialist party
(the ones propping up the current government) who represents Winnipeg Centre in
the House of Commons introduced a motion calling upon the government to
recognize the Indian Residential Schools as a “genocide”. The motion passed unanimously. Now, a motion of this nature does not by
itself actually do anything except send a message about who in the House has
signed on to an asserted narrative.
This is bad enough, however, because a) we elect Members to represent us
in the House to look out for our interests on matters pertaining to the taxes
we pay, the laws we live under, the wars, heaven forbid, that we fight, and the
like and not to affirm or deny some narrative or another, b) the truth or
falseness of such narratives is something that cannot possibly be affected by
government pronouncements one way or another – to assert otherwise is to
attribute to government a power closely akin to that which those who believe in
magic spells attribute to spell-casting, to alter reality by uttering words -
and c) the truth or falseness of these narratives is something that can only be
discovered through open and honest inquiry and government proclamations of this
nature, while they don’t actually forbid such, tend to discourage it. It is
much worse that this motion passed unanimously, that not a single Member of
Parliament could be found with the courage to challenge it. What makes this even worse is that the
narrative in question is a claim which a) even apart from the evidence seems
palpably absurd on the face of it, i.e., that the cooperative efforts of Canada’s
government and churches to provide the education requested by the Indian bands
and agreed to in the treaties, whatever might have gone wrong with them in
practice, amounted to something that is categorically identical to or
comparable with what the Hutus did to the Tutsis in 1994 Rwanda, b) has had its
evidentiary basis crumble into nothing under scrutiny (see the essay “Kamloops
Update: Still Not One Body” by Jacques Rouillard, Professor Emeritus in History
at the Université de Montréal, in Dorchester
Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2022, pp.27-36, and the article “Canada’s
‘Genocide’ – Case Closed?” by Michael Melanson and Nina Green posted
on the same journal’s website on October 27, 2022), and c) has been
heavy-handedly protected by those asserting it against the very sort of
questioning which it would need to withstand to establish its truth-claims from
the very beginning. The
firing, last December, of Mount Royal University’s tenured Frances Widdowson
for questioning woke ideology in general, and the Residential Schools narrative
in particular, is but one example that could be given of the latter
point.
It is unlikely to
have escaped your attention if you have remained with us this far that in each
of these cases where a cold, hostile, forbidding attitude towards those who ask
questions has taken over an intellectual institution or disciple that had been
built upon a foundation of seeking and asking the culprit has been the same
each time, at least in terms of it being the same way of thinking (or avoiding
thought) although often the same individuals have been involved as well. Progressivism has never been as tolerant towards
differing viewpoints as it professed to be under its liberal guise but what we are
seeing in this latest incarnation of progressivism is the most illiberal face
it has ever shown outside of regimes such as Cromwell’s, the French Reign of
Terror, and the People’s Republics of Communism. The new
progressivism is exemplified by our idiot Prime Minister who likes to
sanctimoniously lecture people in the first person plural about the need to
listen to others who disagree with us even though everyone who hears him knows that
he ought to be using the second person because he has no intention of ever listening
to anyone who disagrees with him and that what he really means is that everyone
who disagrees with him needs to listen to what he has to say and change their
views accordingly. This man frequently
makes false affirmations of his belief in “free speech” and the need to defend
such but never does so without including a qualifying provision that completely
negates the affirmation and he has made it abundantly clear that he thinks the
public need to be protected from speech that might “harm” which he calls by
such terms as “hate”, “misinformation” and “disinformation” all of which merely
mean speech that he disagrees with. His
attitude towards questioning is what is most relevant, however, and it is quite
instructive. Towards the end of the
first term of his premiership, as his government was rocked by scandal, he
bought off most of the private media companies in Canada with a $600 million
bailout. To further ensure that he
never faces questions tougher than what colour of socks he is wearing he has
repeatedly sought to ban reporters representing the handful of independent
media companies that had refused his money from his press conferences. Having gone to such lengths to ensure that he
is only asked friendly questions, he never actually answers any of them, but
instead only replies with pre-written remarks which may or may not have something
to do with what he was asked. If the
reporter recognizes that he has not gotten an answer and repeats the question,
the Prime Minister merely repeats his initial response, usually almost verbatim
as he lacks the intelligence required to reword it on the spot. The
academic progressive thinks that members of designated victim groups should be
protected from having “their truth” and their “lived experience” questioned, lockdown
enthusiasts and Green activists think that “the science” should not be
questioned but blindly believed and followed, and many, including members of
our Parliament, think that certain historical assertions ought not to be
questioned. In a Prime Minister who
avoids questions that he has not approved in advance like the plague and who
sidesteps answering those that are put to him these foes of what is most basic
and foundational to any genuine intellectual pursuit have found their champion.
