Modern Day Socrates

I really don't think there is a modern day Socrates. He wasn't just a unique man but he was living in a unique situation, a world very different from our own. In the day of Socrates you could be noticed by walking down the street. People knew eachother. Not by an image on a screen, but either by their voice and face or in some cases by a book or letter. There weren't any celebrities like we know today. The streets of Rome were full of both ordinary people and political figures, intermingling in the same space, and Socrates could walk outside his door and find both his audience and his subject of ridicule on the same street. It was a time when someone walking around outside and asking thought provoking but entertaining questions could not only be noticed, but could make his way to the forefront of the consciousness of his nation and be remembered vividly for thousands of years.

Today the busy streets of Rome seem desolate and empty. The people walked about and saw maybe a hundred people around them, but these were the only people they saw. There were no television screens in their pockets. No newspapers. No instant communication with people perhaps thousands of miles away. No ads on the subway and no voices on the radio. All that they experienced were the people who were truly corporeal and visible in front of them. And if you're looking at a hundred boring people then it's easy to spot one interesting one. Today, however, we are looking at thousands of people constantly vying for our attention. I really can't stress enough just how many ideas are constantly pouring in to our heads as we walk outside. There's no escaping it. Our nation, and really every part of the world with electricity, has become a sea of human faces and words and ideas and letters flying across the air and landing on our walls and in our ears and eyes in the hope that perhaps one shred of it all will register in some part of our brain and we might remember it. And the motivation for nearly all of this is money. That's not an oversimplification or an overstatement. Advertising, radio shows, newspapers, all of it is ultimately based on the concept of capitalism.

But a modern day Socrates would not be a capitalist. He, or (of course) she, would be honestly interested in people listening to her questions and thoughts and would really just like to be heard. She wouldn't want to make money off of her opinions or her face, her identity, her name or her brand. She'd just want people, like those bemused romans, to perk up their ears at her voice and tone and words and to listen and maybe consider one or two of the things she said. Today, this sort of person will not be heard.

Nonetheless, authors of books are still heard. And I can't say there is no honesty or decency left in the world. But it's just not the same and isn't quite a worthy comparison. Today Socrates is just a name in a sea of names. A drop of water in an ocean, almost literally. But at the time, Socrates was the man. He was genuinely saying something that nobody else was saying and that nobody else had ever said. His ideas were truly, literally, inescapably new and compelling. I think that for some people he was the only voice in their world that  developed what they thought and made them say "Yes! I've always felt that and never known how to say it. Tell me more!" But today, everything ever you could possibly think is being said quite publicly by somebody somewhere. You won't just find what you want or need to hear by seeking it out; you've probably already heard it and just ignored it because of the constant drone of other thoughts barraging your head!

Socrates was not just an interesting and unique man but was also a product of his environment. Our environment is just so inescapably and irreversibly changed that there is no modern day Socrates, that there can't be, and that there may never be one again.