Thursday, February 10, 2011
Luban on King on civil disobedience
Years ago, David Luban wrote an article about Martin Luther King, the legal system, and King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. (87 Mich. L. Rev. 2152) This part really grabbed my attention:
[T]here is an important sense in which Socrates, like Paul and Amos and Shadrach and Luther and Bunyan, does not belong in the same political narrative as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The defining relationship of Socrates's public stance, like the figures in the biblical narratives, was a relationship with a divine voice. This relationship, to be sure, manifested itself in a politically significant action, but in the case of Socrates that was happenstance. . . . [U]nless we take Paul and Luther to be lying at the core of their being, their political acumen accrued to them (to speak scholastically) per accidens . . . [T]he theological narratives contained in King's Letter may actually suppress or displace an explicitly political self-understanding of political action by substituting relationships with the divinity for political relationships.
Luban here is expanding on Hannah Arendt's point that "conscience is unpolitical." Thoughts?
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/02/luban-on-king-on-civil-disobedience.html
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I’d find too many complications, in the cases of both Socrates and Dr. King, to say that they differ starkly in the respective fundamentality of politics, or of religion.
I’ll just mention a few complications in the case of Socrates, for the sake of merciful brevity.
And I’ll stipulate up front to my ignorance of Greek.
But apparently the Socrates of the Apology takes the Oracle at Delphi to have not only communicated that Socrates, who knows relatively little (hardly “nothing,” though), is at least as wise as anyone else, but, beyond that, to have also issued a command to confirm the truth of that message--or at least to somehow have intimated that Socrates should exert no end of personal effort to confirm the truth of the Oracle’s communication.
Personally, I detect a certain logical gap between the Oracle's making an admittedly puzzling or mysterious (oracular) remark, and commanding or even permitting the relevant person to spend their life not just confirming faithfully the message in question, but “testing” the validity of that message.
Be that as it may, the inner daimon, or “negative/dissuasive conscience” to which Socrates elsewhere refers may itself also incorporate an element of the divine as well (real scholars would know). Even Aristotle is willing later on to refer, if not to something actually divine, at least to the most divine-like elements within the contemplative human soul.
And there may also be a theological element in Socrates’ argument not only about an afterlife in general, but to his famous argument, otherwise apparently secular, that it is better to be the recipient than the victim of injustice. Socrates (like Antigone) expects a more hospitable reception if he enters the next world as a victim rather than as a perpetrator of injustice.
On the other hand, it does seem that Socrates’ references to the group trial of the admirals accused of not attempting to rescue Athenian soldiers/sailors at sea, and to his refusal to arrest Leon of Salamis under the 30 Tyrants [they needed a better PR firm, by the way], can be accounted for on Socrates’ apparently largely secular preference for suffering to committing injustice.
That theory seems to reflect the logic of his argument in The Republic that to act unjustly is to make oneself into a worse person, in the sense of more disordered, less flourishing, less well-functioning; less excellent as the kind of thing one is or should aspire to be. The proper role of reason is in that case usurped by the emotion of fear, or by some appetite which should be subordinated to reason in the eudaimonistic person.
Maybe even the word ‘eudaimonia’ has an inescapably religious component or connotation. Again, real scholars would know.
Both of the above specific instances of Socrates’ “defiance” involve not so much pure civil disobedience, as defying the impulses of legal or judicial officials (whether they are ruling legitimately or not) for the sake of upholding positive law as Socrates understands it (mass trials are prohibited; the arrest of legally innocent political opponents partly for the sake of inculpating other persons in the rule of the 30 Tyrants is also a violation of Athenian law).
Socrates does also say he would defy a legal command or a sentence preventing him from philosophizing, but if that would constitute civil disobedience, it remains purely hypothetical.
Ultimately, Socrates accepts the sentence, perhaps largely to validate the rule of law, rather than the hypocritical and disordered Athenian custom of allowing even condemned prisoners to escape, leave Athens for a time, and then perhaps later return. I assume Socrates can distinguish formal positive law from the customary and expected evasion thereof, even if he were to use the word nomoi to cover both. His acceptance of his sentence may be a defiance of custom or expectation, but a validation of positive Athenian law.
Hard for me to tell—the personified Laws of Athens don’t speak for Socrates in the Crito—but it’s also possible that Socrates recognizes that even if there would be an element of justice in Socrates' escaping—at age 70—his conspicuous example would be overextended, and incorrectly applied, by persons who would improperly cite Socrates’ example in an attempt to legitimize their own evasion of the positive law.
A great deal of complex divine and political and general moral intertwining, it seems to me.