Survival

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The rot that could bring Western civilisation down began with these ancient Greek teachers

In the battle between sophistry and the pursuit of truth, the former is clearly winning

In 399BC, a panel of Athenian judges voted to execute Socrates. Among the charges levelled against the great philosopher was the accusation that he was a Sophist. Both he and the Sophists, after all, moved through the same world of argument and ideas. But they could not have been any more different.

For Socrates, philosophical inquiry was the pursuit of truth. To inquire was to contemplate what was true without relying on rhetorical tricks. For, he says, “if a speech is to be good” then it matters that “the speaker know[s] the truth about the matters of which he is to speak.”

Traipsing through the streets of Athens, and charging extraordinary fees for their rhetorical tutelage, the Sophists were more interested in teaching their pupils how to “win” arguments and become famous than in cultivating wisdom.

Their services were sold to young noblemen and politicians who wanted to “persuade” their citizens. An orator, they thought, “does not need to know what is really just”, nor what is “really good or noble”. Persuasion, on their account, “comes from what seems to be true, not from the truth.”

This was not, for Socrates, merely a rival approach to truth. It was more serious than that. What was at stake in Athens was the question of whether public life ought to be anchored to anything real or whether it would dissolve into a competition of performances.

Western civilisation is the inheritor of the Socratic tradition which insists that reality is more important than appearances. This inheritance has, however, never been fully settled, and each generation must fight to maintain it.

Today we are losing that battle, and slipping deeper into Sophistic postures across our politics, our universities, and our digital lives.

Plato saw this coming. In the Republic, he traced the cycle of inevitable political decline as the story of what happens when sophistry prevails over wisdom.

A just leader, on the Socratic account, is not the politically cunning one, where justice is determined by wavering public opinion. For justice which is not grounded in a stable account of truth and goodness is not justice at all; it is the performance of an empty gesture that seeks to manipulate public opinion.

In Britain today, politicians on both the Left and Right are less interested in governing well than in appearing to govern well. Less concerned with saying the right thing than saying what will keep them in power.

Or as Plato wrote of the Sophists, they are concerned with “appearing and seeming, but not being, and of saying things, but not true ones”.

For example, Reform’s Kent Council leaflets pledged to cut taxes; Nigel Farage now says council tax “has to rise”. Zack Polanski’s Green Party economic proposal, meanwhile, promises to simultaneously renationalise all industries, cut bills, and eliminate debt. Don’t worry about the reality of delivering such promises (as long as it sounds good).

The structure of our government compounds the problem. The House of Commons is hardly a dialogical forum of collaborative searching for solutions that actually work. It operates instead as a gladiatorial arena where the objective is to outcompete your opponent. This is now not just a feature of the weekly PMQs but the purpose of them. This debate-club-style argumentation is well-geared up for the Sophist, neither acknowledging the role of complexity nor allowing us to learn from one another.

Furthermore, where traditional news sources are, at least in theory, held to some standard of regulation via the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, non-traditional forms of media are essentially free to say whatever they like in order to get as many views as possible.

In Louis Theroux’s recent documentary on the manosphere, we witnessed a group of male influencers who were interested solely in making money regardless of what they promoted, espousing values that they themselves don’t uphold, and “owning” their opponents in debate. But we also saw that, when pressed, their views totally collapsed.

This is not exclusive to the manosphere but happens across the internet: social media personalities spread misinformation, create clickbait and sell products they don’t believe in.

Is this the victory of the Sophists? In the history of ideas, Socrates’ commitment to truth has proved more durable. What is preserved in Plato is the contemplative spirit that underpinned the Enlightenment and laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution.

Yet even institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, whose entire identity rests on the pursuit of truth for its own sake, have now submitted themselves to a system more interested in the maximisation of profit and output than in the production of knowledge.

Plato’s Socrates emphasised that wisdom and justice are not products to be purchased or performances to be applauded, but the ongoing and collaborative practice of truth-seeking.

If we abandon the Socratic commitment to truth in favour of the Sophist’s performance of appearances, we might as well wave goodbye to everything that has made the West great.

Elise Morrison is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge

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