There is a saying that what happens in the United States is ten years away from happening in Canada, and although not inscribed in the book of nature it appears safe to interpret from the far-right overtures that have already made their way up from the South that what is happening there now will soon happen here.
Mainstream American news has it that what is at stake is disregard for the law. As I write this, the Associated Press lists five top stories, all of them addressing the relationship between the U.S. President and the law. I have no doubt that I share with most readers of AP a total lack of formal legal training, but I do question that if Trump can simply ignore the legally defined limits to his power whether what is at stake is answerable from a legal perspective.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt describes how the law became a means for the Nazis to distract the conscience of the German people. Even someone like Adolf Eichmann, who beyond any reasonable doubt was a willing participant in the final solution, was perfectly honest in describing himself as a law-abiding citizen. The problem, for Arendt, was that Eichmann never questioned whether the law was morally sound.
Trump’s frequent appeals to the immorality of the American legal system suggests that his base possesses a conscience, and does not believe that their moral considerations have adequate legal representation. On the other hand, the outrage from Americans outside that base towards Trump’s legal transgressions suggests that there is at least some legal representation of moral considerations. But if the question is about inadequate representation, why does the news continue to express moral problems in legal terms?
The beginning of an answer is found in Plato’s Euthyphro, wherein while Socrates is on his way to court he runs into Euthyphro, a prophet, and they begin discussing the nature of piousness in relation to their respective court cases. The dialogue is remembered today for posing a dilemma, which asks whether something is pious because it is loved by the gods or the gods love it because it is pious, but the dialogue as a whole provokes much needed commentary on current political developments and is worth reading closely.
Piousness was serious business in ancient Athens. Occasionally, it was a matter of life and death. Such was it with Socrates, for whom blasphemy was one of two charges resulting in his death. Over the course of Socrates’s life, piousness became more serious as Athenian citizens attempted to come to terms with a series of traumatic experiences that accompanied the Peloponnesian War. Here is how Thucydides, Socrates’s contemporary, an Athenian general and historian, summarizes these experiences:
Never before had so many cities been captured and then devastated, whether by foreign armies or by the Hellenic powers themselves (some of these cities, after capture, were resettled with new inhabitants); never had there been so many exiles; never such loss of life—both in the actual warfare and in internal revolutions. Old stories of past prodigies, which had not found much confirmation in recent experience, now became credible. Wide areas, for instance, were affected by violent earthquakes; there were more frequent eclipses of the sun than had ever been recorded before; in various parts of the country there were extensive droughts followed by famine; and there was the plague which did more harm and destroyed more life than almost any other single factor. All these calamities fell together upon the Hellenes after the outbreak of the war.1
The description is of violent and inscrutable nature, both environmental and human, let loose on the world, and with it the overtaking of reason by superstition. Superstition as a response to inscrutable nature encourages religious posturing, and while Socrates was no atheist—he believed in and respected the gods—he knew that to take the gods seriously depended on our taking reason seriously.
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Athenian citizens sought the wisdom of pious men to make sense of their experiences, and to learn how best to live with them. Unfortunately, they were also willing to pay considerably amounts of money for it. Naturally, this attracted professional wise men. Socrates, who was among those suffering the calamities of the Peloponnesian War, also sought wisdom, but recognized these wise men as purveyors of fraud. He also recognized that false wisdom was further degrading citizens’ ability to work through their experiences. As a means of correction, he developed the elenchus, a method by which our natural capacity for reason could be used to expose inconsistencies in speech.
Socrates’s innovation was a response to the spiritual crisis of Athens. In Euthyphro, we encounter Socrates on his way to court because Meletus, a “young and unknown” Athenian citizen, has decided to make a name for himself by indicting Socrates for falsely invoking the gods, the same indictment that will shortly contribute to Socrates’s death.2 He explains it to Euthyphro, as follows:
SOCRATES: Strange things, to hear him tell it, for he says that I am a maker of gods, and on the ground that I create new gods while not believing in the old gods, he has indicted me for their sake, as he puts it.
EUTHYPHRO: I understand, Socrates. This is because you say that the divine sign keeps coming to you. So he has written this indictment against you as one who makes innovations in religious matters, and he comes to court to slander you, knowing that such things are easily misrepresented to the crowd. The same is true in my case. Whenever I speak of divine matters in the assembly and foretell the future, they laugh me down as if I were crazy and yet I have foretold nothing that did not happen. Nevertheless, they envy all of us who do this. One need not worry about them, but meet them head-on.
SOCRATES: My dear Euthyphro, to be laughed at does not matter perhaps, for the Athenians do not mind anyone they think clever, as long as he does not teach his own wisdom, but if they think that he makes others to be like himself they get angry, whether through envy, as you say, or for some other reason.
EUTHYPHRO: I have certainly no desire to test their feelings towards me in this matter.
SOCRATES: Perhaps you seem to make yourself but rarely available, and not be willing to teach your own wisdom, but I’m afraid that my liking for people makes them think that I pour out to anybody anything I have to say, not only without charging a fee but even glad to reward anyone who is willing to listen. If then they were intending to laugh at me, as you say they laugh at you, there would be nothing unpleasant in their spending their time in court laughing and jesting, but if they are going to be serious, the outcome is not clear except to you prophets.3
What is remarkable about this passage is its description of the cynicism pervasive within Athenian society. Meletus is probably as much a victim of this cynicism as he is an enabler of it. He misrepresents Socrates as someone attempting to invoke the gods as a means of benefitting himself through proximity with them, but, confusedly, would also laugh at Socrates for not receiving fees and thus not standing to benefit directly from the invocation. Cynicism, however, is so much the norm that, as Socrates also points out, any wisdom originating from within the speaker already elicits suspicion on delivery, and this he will directly challenge through his teaching that wisdom begins and ends with oneself.
When Socrates runs into Euthyphro, the latter has been prosecuting his father for murder. As the dialogue unfolds, we discover that Euthyphro’s father had accidentally killed a servant, who had himself murdered a slave. Therefore, the series of events begins with a murder that leads to another murder, until, what is worst of all, a son is prosecuting his father. Coupled with Meletus’s cynical indictment of his elder, Socrates, Plato’s depiction of Athens is of a city in an advanced state of moral decay.
Euthyphro’s express purpose is to rid Athens of the “pollution” that will accompany the first two murders.4 He believes that getting rid of this pollution depends on piousness, on following the will of the gods, which he, as a prophet, possesses special knowledge of and, through the law, intends to coerce others, including his father, into conformity with that knowledge, thereby cleansing the city. Socrates asks him to explain piousness, pointing out that for his plan to work he will need to explain himself to a jury. Euthyphro responds that to be
pious is to do what I am doing now, to prosecute the wrongdoer, be it about murder or temple robbery or anything else, whether the wrongdoer is your father or our mother or anyone else; not to prosecute is impious. And observe, Socrates, that I can cite powerful evidence that the law is so. I have already said to others that such actions are right, not to favor the ungodly, whoever they are. These people themselves believe that Zeus is the best and most just of the gods, yet they agree that he bound his father because he unjustly swallowed his sons, and that he in turn castrated his father for similar reasons. But they are angry with me because I am prosecuting my father for his wrongdoing. They contradict themselves in what they say about the gods and about me.5
There is no reason to believe that Euthyphro is inaccurate in his description of others contradicting themselves, but the implication that this constitutes “powerful evidence”—in fact, the only evidence he provides—that he has knowledge of piousness is unfounded, and his definition appears to say nothing more than that what he does is pious. When Socrates calls him out on this, he offers a second definition:
what is dear to the gods is pious, what is not is impious.6
And from this will Socrates introduce the famous Euthyphro’s dilemma. The problem is that it is not clear whether the gods love what is pious because it is pious or what is pious is pious because it is loved by the gods.
After some back and forth, it becomes obvious that Euthyphro cannot resolve the dilemma, and he turns his attention to the circularity of the argument:
I have no way of telling you what I have in mind, for whatever proposition we put forward goes around and refuses to stay put where we establish it.7
However, Socrates rejects the circularity as anything other than Euthyphro’s confusion. Euthyphro does not take this well, and accuses Socrates of forcing the argument into circularity:
I am not the one who makes them go round and not remain in the same place; it is you who are the Daedalus; for as far as I am concerned they would remain as they were.8
Socrates rejects the accusation on the grounds that the argument Euthyphro employs is informed by knowledge to which only Euthyphro has access. Socrates’s method merely exposes inconsistencies in the articulation of that knowledge, and he cannot fix these inconsistencies into Euthyphro’s mind. Were Socrates to attempt to speak on Euthyphro’s behalf, he would inevitably fall into contradictions of his own making.
Socrates’s point is that only Euthyphro can know why he is prosecuting his father. Any attempt by Euthyphro to equate his doing with the will of the gods only implicates his aversion to the reason behind the prosecution. In truth, there is no genuine dilemma because knowledge of piousness is only found within the one who questions it. Unfortunately, Euthyphro misses the point, becomes frustrated, and excuses himself from the discussion, resulting in an aporia.
Within an aporia resides the self, and no knowledge can be articulated without also including oneself as part of that articulation. Ironically, Euthyphro was probably closest to an accurate definition of piousness when he equated it with what he did, but because he wanted a law by which to generalize his definition of piousness to other Athenian citizens the law became for him an instrument of ignorance rather than knowledge. Reduced to inarticulate religious posturing through Socrates’s elenchus, Euthyphro was forced to choose between genuine philosophical inquiry that begins and ends with self-knowledge or continuing his self-deception.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt repeatedly notes Eichmann’s difficulty speaking, and his tendency to rely on clichés rather than generate sentences of his own. She attributed his poor handle on speech to his thoughtlessness, his refusal to connect language to anything but his career as a Nazi officer. To have deliberated his position beyond the choices made available to him by his superiors would have endangered his career.
What Arendt calls “the banality of evil” refers not the dispossession of Eichmann’s capacity for thinking through a career in the Nazi bureaucracy but the constraints on thinking that he imposed on himself to get on well with his employers.9 In response to one instance where Eichmann chose to act contrary to his orders with “considerable trouble” to himself by diverting a transport of twenty thousand Jews and five thousand Gypsies from certain death, she describes how
we are perhaps in a position to answer Judge Landau’s question—the question uppermost in the minds of nearly everyone who followed the trial—of whether the accused had a conscience: yes, he had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the other way around.10
For Eichmann, “the other way around” was the lawful way, the way by which he avoided trouble that almost by necessity of Nazi law would have followed from the moral consideration of himself.
Like Euthyphro, the law became for Eichmann an instrument of ignorance, a means to self-deception. Like Athens, Germany had undergone successive traumatic experiences before Hitler took power, and in their attempt to come to terms with these experiences German citizens were inclined to substitute lawfulness for redemption. The legal jargon of American news suggests that we may be repeating the mistakes of the past.
I contend that there is a transformation of moral considerations into legal terms which belies our concealment of morality beneath a language of obedience. Euthyphro’s mistake was to think that Athens might find its redemption through the law, but attempting to redeem others through coercion gets things backwards. In an essay that Arendt wrote after she published Eichmann in Jerusalem to defend herself from the confusions of both her accusers and defenders, she concluded that we would be better off ridding ourselves of any notion of being morally coerced and instead ask why we were willing participants.11 This is the philosophically correct answer because it begins and ends with self-knowledge, and, it seems to me, the only meaningfully moral answer. If history is any indication, however, violent and inscrutable nature will not long be contained.
Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982 (1954), p. 48 (24).
Plato. “Euthyphro.” Plato: The Complete Works. Translated by G.M.A. Grube, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1997, p. 2 (2b).
Ibid. p. 3 (3b-e).
Ibid. p. 4 (4c).
Ibid. p. 5 (5d-6a).
Ibid. p. 6 (6e).
Ibid. p. 11 (11b).
Ibid. p. 11 (11c-d).
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985 (1963), p. 252. This distinction has been widely misunderstood, even among those who profess themselves students of Arendt. I plan to write about the late Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist of Stanford Prison Experiment fame, who in 2006 attempted to refashion the banality of evil “thesis” into his own invention, the banality of heroism. Zimbardo spectacularly mistook Arendt’s position, and takes precisely the position that Arendt is criticizing, that of Eichmann.
Ibid. p. 94-5.
Arendt, Hannah. “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship.” Responsibility and Judgement. Edited by Jerome Kohn, New York, Schocken, 2003 (1964), p. 48. In her own words, Arendt concludes that “the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, ‘Why did you obey?’ but ‘Why did you support?’ This change of words is no semantic irrelevancy for those who know the strange and powerful influence mere ‘words’ have over the minds of men who, first of all, are speaking animals. Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word ‘obedience’ from our vocabulary of moral and political thought. If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human.”