Apologia

Sunday Kinutil is being retired and from hereon Kinutil may be read still on the Wednesday edition of this paper.

This particular essay happily celebrates this honorable ending of what was for this writer difficult though fulfilling work. This one last Sunday Kinutil is therefore dedicated to retired editor Eileen Mangubat and the memory of the late Ivan Suansing who first invited me to write for the Sunday CDN many years ago.

“To back the right horse!” That is how to succeed in politics. To do the opposite is therefore the way to lose? Does the universe consist of only two sides to every argument? Is everything a dichotomy?

Let me pose to you this riddle: If in an argument, your first premise is wrong, does it follow that for every step of logic, every conclusion from then on, every right conclusion will be false, and every false one, right?

I am speaking of course of our newly elected President, Rodrigo Duterte. And wondering…

“Apologia” was written by Plato as if to document how his teacher Socrates had defended himself of accusations of “impiety and of corrupting young men.” He was judged by 501 citizens of Athens.

Though not mentioned directly in the accusations, Socrates was also being accused of being of the intellectual elite. “There is a certain Socrates, a highbrow; brainy in skylore has investigated what is under the earth, makes the weaker argument the stronger.”

To be of the intellectual elite is an accusation hard to counter especially in our day and age where all wisdom must be contained inside the few phrases of a meme. To counter the accusation is self-defeating. Anyone in this country who has ever passed Grade Three, who is a student, or a teacher, or keeps a steady job, knows how to read and write, is of the intellectual elite. For a person like that to deny his or her intellectual elitism is pretentious and does a foolish disservice to most of our countrymen who could stand better education than what they have.

But, of course, wisdom may have nothing at all to do with education. And as Plato’s character Socrates had been pointed out by an oracle to be the wisest in Athens, he could only investigate the truthfulness of this notion by going about investigating others known for their wisdom. Having found none who was truly wise, his final conclusion was: “..so I am wiser than he only by this trifle, that what I do not know I don’t think I do.”

Needless to say, Athens found Socrates guilty, though only by 61 votes. He might have chosen to go to jail or exile but Socrates would not choose to compromise. He chose the proper punishment, which was death by drinking hemlock, a type of slow poison. He did this out of allegiance to his own teachings and the sanctity of the will of the people of Athens; which city he truly loved for its democracy, which city and democracy he intended to die in. He was 70.

And yet like all of us, the people of Athens may as well have been called “the mob.” Since the sense of these words is that we are all “the mob.” Then the wise Socrates may as well have said it this way: “The mob has spoken its will. The will of the mob must be obeyed.”

And as this tale ends, his dying last words were: “Criton, we owe a cock to Ascepios; pay it without fail.”