"To Daily Converse About Virtue"

"Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good," said Socrates, according to his student Plato, "I am better off than he is -- for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know."

This is one of his most famous assertions. Whether it's true or not, can be debated. Self-evidently, he knew more than nothing. My mother used to say, whenever I thought I'd caught her in an inconsistency, "All wise people change their minds." It was a frustrating parry in the same way I imagine Socrates' claim was frustrating to those who sought to debate the famed orator.

And he was quite famous in his lifetime, at least in Athens where he spent most of his life. When he was still a relatively young man, Aristophanes' play The Clouds was first performed, portraying Socrates as a ridiculous intellectual clown teaching young people to undermine traditional beliefs. He was sufficiently famous even then that audiences were expected to recognize him. 

It's hard not to compare him to, say, The Beatles, who were initially laughed at, then criticized as corruptors of youth. Or maybe he was more like a modern influencer, who many of us old people view as lightweights, at least until one of them pops through our bubble and we find ourselves outraged at the things they are saying. I'm not saying that any of them are Socrates, but then again, the Beatles were a bunch of silly mop tops before they became icons.

The Beatles, of course, didn't have the internet, but they did have radio and television, which allowed them to "converse" directly with their young audience. Today, most of us know about Socrates through Plato's writing, but Socrates himself wasn't a fan of the phonetic alphabet and its ability to lock things down. As he complained, if you want to question the written word, it cannot reply. Things that are written are fixed, whereas direct discourse between people allows for the kind of public square give-and-take he was, and still is, famous for.

Another of Socrates' most well-known assertions is that "the life which is unexamined is not worth living." But what he actually said (again, according to Plato who was writing it down) was, to me, far more interesting. The fuller quote from his Apology, in which he was defending his life against accusations goes, ". . . the greatest good of man is to daily converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that life which is unexamined is not worth living."

"The greatest good of man is to daily converse about virtue."

The Greek word that gets translated as "virtue" is aretē, which carries a broader meaning of excellence and fulfilling one's potential. He's not advocating for endless conversations about being morally upright, but rather asking what it means to live well, to be a good human. In other words, what he is advocating is something far beyond mere introspection. He is calling for conversations, daily, in which we engage our fellow human beings about what it means to be fully human.

I doubt anyone would have cared about Socrates had he been content to sit in his ivory tower examining his life and writing books about virtue. What outraged the establishment to the point that they condemned him to death was his insistence on conversing about it in the public square.

He was condemned by a jury of what was, by tradition, comprised of 501 fellow citizens (all free men). Apparently, his death sentence was decided by a slim majority, illustrating one of Socrates' objections to the kind of direct democracy practiced in Athens at the time: the tyranny of the majority. Without protections like "freedom of speech" and "freedom of assembly" his ideal of "daily converse" was a dangerous thing.

It doesn't seem that Socrates thought of "free speech" in the way we do today, as a legal protection for everyone. He was more focused on the moral obligation to speak one's truth and ask challenging questions, even if it did lead to ridicule and even death.

Although Socrates is recognized as one of the foundational figures of our Western traditions of thought and philosophy, his notions of democracy were different from how we understand it today. Indeed, he wasn't a fan, even though, in the end, he accepted his democratically decided fate. 

Our current experiments in democracy are attempts to fix the flaws of ancient democracy. The written US Constitution along with The Bill of Rights and the mechanisms of amendment were an attempt to balance majority rule with individual rights. It was intended as a living document, one that could be changed, just not in a willy-nilly-wims-of-the-moment fashion. It was, one might say, intended to be an ongoing, daily, conversation among we the people; a dialog about excellence, fulfilling potential, living a good life, and, yes, virtue. The fact that it has evolved beyond the framer's original ideas about gender, race, and other matters is evidence of this.

The fact that so many of us avoid politics is evidence that we are failing. I've long believed that "voting" is the bare minimum of democratic participation. The real work and promise of democracy is the conversations we have with our fellow humans. That includes through the media, social and otherwise, but perhaps even more central are those conversations we have with the actual humans in our lives -- our neighbors, those with whom we do business, in our churches, our workplaces, and above all, in our schools.

Preschoolers engage in daily converse about virtue. It happens every day, all day long as they express their opinions and show their emotions. It happens in each negotiation, in each agreement, in each decision about with whom and what we play. In my role as an adult who works with young children, my responsibilities are clearly defined as keeping the children safe and doing what I can to ensure their physical and psychological needs are met. And as a member of the community, one who perhaps knows 'nothing,' my role is not to direct, but to interact as much as possible as an equal. The rest, then, is up to all of us, and that is to engage in daily converse about excellence, living well, being righteous, and to discover, together, what means to be fully human.

This is a life worth living.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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