I had an idea for writing a Note about Elementary and Sherlock Holmes but thing I’ve read post essays of basically what I was planning to say at least ten times over. But then I thought about this, in part because I’ve been playing too much Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and I’ve given up looking at my Facebook News Feed because it tends to be a garbage fire.
As always, when I’m complaining about people and politics on social media, I’m talking about stupid politics; I don’t mean informing people about issues or organizing events. That’s all fine and good.
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We All Need a Little Socrates
Socrates was, by all accounts, one of the most annoying people in history. Believing that ‘The unexamined life was not worth living,’ he decided he would help people examine their lives and beliefs by going around asking people questions about seemingly the most basic ideas. You know that little kid who is constantly asking ‘Why?’ to all your questions? Socrates was a bit like that. Because nothing was meant to be taken as a given--he hoped that the people he talked to would realize that there are many assumptions we live with that aren’t necessarily bad, but we haven’t thought about why they’re good. We just accept them.
And that’s kind of annoying to deal with. Because let’s say you’re someone that supports literacy for all. That sounds like basically a good thing, and I don’t think Socrates would disagree with that. But if you brought it up in front of him he would start asking a bunch of questions to make sure that you both understood why it was a good thing.
[Although to be fair, exactly how much Socrates wanted to challenge society’s conventions is a bit unclear, considering how much of what we know about him is from his student Plato, who may have been shoving words in his teacher’s mouth. We know that some students of Socrates disagreed with how Plato portrayed Socrates--Diogenes the Cynic, for instance, basically worked on the assumption that according the Socrates, you should reject society and he went around naked, eating in places it wasn’t considered acceptable, and masturbated in public. I’d like to think Socrates’s beliefs were somewhere in the middle.]
So Socrates was an irritating twit sometimes. But I think we kind of need that sort of willingness to question everything. We’re not really people who do that anymore.
You would think that the rising number of atheists in the world would mean that people are questioning authority more and more, and commonly-held beliefs are being peeled away. But that’s only sort of true. Yes, more people are disdaining religious authority and those commonly-held beliefs… but what’s replacing them isn’t more solid. I’m not criticizing atheism itself, but what I end to call Internet Atheism.
You would be amazed how many how many times I’ve seen arguments for atheism that aren’t built on facts but on things copied and pasted from the Internet. Every time Easter rolls around, there is for instance a wave of people claiming that Easter is actually the celebration of a pagan goddess Eostre because the English word ‘Easter’ is derived from her name. Never mind that the word ‘Easter’ is the English word, and other cultures use words that are completely unrelated. I’ve also recently seen the claim that Easter is actually derived from Ishtar, because somehow the English word is derived from a Mesopotamian deity.
Like I said, this isn’t a condemnation of atheists or atheism. After all, the website History for Atheists has a great takedown of the whole thing right here. It’s a criticism of stupidity dressed as intellectual atheism; taking something at face value that doesn’t make much sense once you stop and think about it because it fits with your established beliefs is exactly the sort of thing atheism should be rebelling against.
This is part of why I absolutely despise those screenshots of Twitter posts to make ‘GOTCHA!’ political points. Most of them can be taken apart if you interrogate it for more than a minute. It is not an argument for or against something; it is not argument at all. It is an attempt to beg for applause. It is built on an assumption that remains unproven.
I’m not saying that you have to sit and contemplate every belief you have every second of every day. But if you’re going to try to build or share an argument putting forth that it is the correct belief, you will need to do more than accept your thoughts on it as given, and you shouldn’t copy and paste something off the Internet as an argument if it isn’t even actually an argument.
And if we see someone arguing something based on an assumption then we should challenge those assumptions, whether or not we agree with the conclusion that the argument endorses. I am not saying you cannot believe in anything; by all means, you should believe in something. But you should also believe in that something because you’ve decided, by questioning the subject and deciding that it makes sense.
Be a bit like Socrates, because the unexamined life is not worth living. Just, maybe, not as annoying as he was.
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