Post #131: Of Questions and Crises

21 Aug. 2024 (Berlin, Café Einstein, Unter den Linden)

“Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend; but as long as I draw breath, I shall not cease to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: ‘Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?’”

—Plato, Apology 29e*

     A few weeks ago, in the earlier stages of my summer’s Odyssey, I found myself (without thinking much of it at the time) in a position to raise a somewhat indelicate but highly pertinent legal question that turned out, to my chagrin and despite all its undeniable relevance, to be treated as gravely inappropriate, or even impertinent. Though it occurred very much in an Old World setting, it was done somewhat in the spirit of a naïve and curious visitor to the contemporary New World (from another planet, say) who expresses his sincere astonishment at the current profusion of protocols restraining free speech on college campuses, to give just one possible analogy.

     Knowing American universities only from old textbooks still in use in other galaxies, such a visitor might ask, in honest perplexity, how these recent developments might fit with the First Amendment, with venerable traditions of academic freedom and untrammeled inquiry, and with the once-intimate affinity between the left-leaning professoriate and the free-speech movement of the 1960s. It seems safe to say that although such a query, if insisted upon, might be forgiven in the end, as coming from an obvious ignoramus, it would not be much appreciated, and perhaps dismissed as an obvious faux pas at best, an act of insolence at worst.

     Questions of this nature, touching upon still-contentious transformations that have not yet hardened into a fully established legal consensus, are so inherently provocative not because they miss the point, but rather because they hit the tender spot so precisely—or, to the offended parties’ minds, so tactlessly and tendentiously. To raise such touchy questions falls well short of taking a definite position, admittedly; it in no way alleges that there is anything wrong with the scantiness of the emperor’s new clothes; but it offends nonetheless because the very willingness to ask implies traces of scepticism as to the what is so becoming about appearing naked in public.

     Questioning in this vein will not often be considered innocent, because it threatens to cast doubt on arrangements that have not been fully settled and that depend, in their as yet unresolved though hardening state, on not being unduly disturbed by unwelcome discussion. Cement that has just been poured to make a tidy new sidewalk can be easily repaired when it is still fluid, and once it has set, no longer has much to fear from careless passers-by. But at the intermediate stage, when the setting has begun but remains in progress, that the forces of law and order will be at their most vigilant about loose feet, or in our case, loose tongues. At this precarious moment, the nascent moral institutions may get defended with all the hysterical overreaction that normally marks the breaking of a taboo. And since one is expected, as a member of polite society in good standing, to know what one may say or not say in equally polite company, ignorance is no excuse, as it generally is not in legal matters.

     (I wonder whether there is an analogy to be drawn here with the difficulties I’ve been encountering lately around keeping male and female toilets apart in Europe. Whatever the reason for my cognitive lapses, I am confident that they have nothing whatsoever to do with wishing to involve myself in embarrassing and potentially compromising situations around bathrooms forbidden to my sex; but I doubt my plea of innocence would count for much before my accusers, who would find me guilty not of idiocy, which I would have to accept with a heavy heart, but of evidently not caring enough, when nature calls, about so defining a life-or-death issue. Someone who is not always scrupulously alert to the nuances of toilet labeling is capable of anything.)

     It might be added here, in a more philosophical vein, that power (not the chimera of the postmodern mind, but the real thing) will, by its very nature, not suffer questions gladly, any more than it will usually tolerate more than token opposition. (Questioning and opposing are by no means the same thing, but they will often be equated by the powers that be, big or small.) In the incident that I began with, for example, I could hardly believe my graying ears when I heard myself charged with “back-talk,” as if I were a truant schoolboy being reprimanded for his waywardness.

     The last time someone had the gall to throw such a charge in my face was back in high-school—a rather modestly endowed educator in the Midwestern mold. I conveyed to him, in the forthright spirit of a neo-German upbringing, that I did not recognize anyone’s right to shut me up with such imperious fiats. In this recent case I thought it more prudent to refrain from taking a vigorous stand on first principle and talking back on the back-talk nonsense. Doing so would have risked aggravating a situation that was already absurd enough—a mere pimple that should not have come up for discussion in the first place, and that I did not wish to see inflamed and perhaps infected until it might turn into a serious threat to life and limb and end with the amputation of my nose. I felt freer and safer before my accusers at sixteen than I do now; the mind boggles.

     The deplorable scene was of a piece, I reckon, with the turn in our social mores that now makes the mental comfort of certain favored parties (privileged classes in the strict sense) the measure of all things, because mere questions can, of course, be highly uncomfortable, unsettling even, and upsetting. (Nobody seems much concerned with the mental comfort of the heterosexual white male, or with his chances of retaining an increasingly precarious hold on sanity—perhaps out of sheer disregard, but possibly also in a curious perpetuation of the old ethos whereby the men in question are expected to be strong enough to have anything at all thrown at them without quivering or quaking.**)

     Socrates, to be sure, was not put on trial for the impertinence of his questioning alone, but also for his association with a number of young troublemakers with whom the renascent democracy wished to settle scores. Admittedly, he forced the issue with his seemingly outrageous conduct during the trial—giving the very opposite of a defense speech and being apparently less willing than ever to yield an inch before his detractors, let alone to recant or repudiate his ways so late in life. Plato does not tell the whole story in the Apology, granted, but his version is nonetheless credible enough so far as Socrates well-documented habit of publicly embarrassing his compatriots is concerned—annoying them at every turn with back-talk that they could not answer very convincingly, and undermining his own position and standing with them every time he exposed another glaring case of unwarranted self-confidence.

     Not that it is always, or even primarily, our questioning of others that gets us most reliably into hot water. Some of the most unsettling questions concern our very selves. We imagine that we understand well enough the reasons for how and why we are what we are, and we may smile at the famous Delphic injunction to know thyself (γνῶθι σεαυτόν) as if it were little more than a quaint antiquarianism, or something that applies only to others more ignorant and benighted than we take ourselves to be. It is the crises in our lives that set us right: unexpectedly, we become mysteries to ourselves, as St. Augustine put it so aptly, and realize how mistaken we were in our earlier confidence of self.

     When we hear the word “crisis,” we tend to shrink from it as if it were synonymous with a menace or disaster; but the original Greek κρίσις pointed in a subtler direction. Derived from the verb κρίνω (krinō: to distinguish, choose, or decide), a crisis in the original sense was not necessarily a dreadful thing; it might be most needful and highly salutary instead. What a krisis was understood to do, rather, was to mark an intensification, a raising of the stakes—perhaps even a vital tipping point—and in all cases, a time for making decisions and choosing (or perhaps reaffirming) a direction in life. At times of crisis, the paths before us diverge more noticeably and dramatically than at other times, and instead of proceeding on the plotted course or on auto-pilot, we must make up our minds more consciously and deliberately about what matters most and what does not.

     Taken in this sense, the famous midlife crisis, lately much-questioned, appears unmistakably real, though not in the sense of anything being necessarily wrong with the sufferer. Perhaps things are, in fact, going quite well for him, or at any rate as they should or must go; still, what with the equator crossed and the halfway line clearly passed towards the archetypal four-score years, certain questions will almost invariably present themselves with unprecedented urgency. What parts of one’s by now well-cluttered mental furniture—what plans and projects, what dreams and aspirations—remain as relevant and important as ever, or more than ever, and what can, or should, be given up as an unnecessary encumbrance?

     What do I still want, or need, to do with my life, and what am I willing to pay for it in the various relevant currencies, dwindling reserves of energy and vitality being perhaps the ultimate? And what, by the same token, am I ready to discard as no longer relevant, useful, or necessary? Such a reckoning may be a very good thing indeed, indispensable even; but who would deny that it is a krisis in the Greek sense—meaningful in the highest degree, perhaps, but not necessarily enjoyable, to say the least.

*I’ve shortened the passage slightly and added the italics for emphasis.

**I catch myself wondering whether the current ethos of routine male-bashing could ever have gone so far—often with the complaisance or even active support of men themselves—if it were not for the tacit willingness of men to abide by the old standards and face whatever is thrown at them without making an undue fuss. It would be a fascinating, if terrifying, thought-experiment to contemplate what would happen to our most immediately life-preserving social institutions if the alleged predators and oppressors of the fair sex laid down their work for a day or two—not only at schools and universities, or cafés and yoga studios (much as they mean to me), but across the board.

     Imagine what would happen to the internet, for example, to all manner of security and emergency services, to the maintenance of the electricity grid, or to plumbing. Could the most ardent defunder of police forces really wish to see all male cops disappear along with all other security personnel? The nightmare scenario bears insisting on, not in an effort to pit the sexes against each other, a wretched game that has already gone too far by half, but on the contrary, in a spirit of renewed amity between the sexes that recognizes how profoundly they depend on each other for their mutual welfare—much as the plebs of Rome were reminded by the emissary of the senatorial party, Menenius Agrippa (when they marched off in one body and seceded to a nearby hill), that the different parts of a society need each other as much as the parts of the body do.