An Obvious Defense of the Socratic Method

December 7, 2023 | OPINION | By Charlotte Maley

The Socratic method is a system of inquiry which seeks, above all else, to question that which we believe is most obvious in an attempt to discover a clear and consistent truth. This is a practice that is allegedly treasured at liberal arts institutions such as Colorado College, which markets itself as valuing courageous conversations. It is also a method which is commonly flagged in radical circles as being not only dangerous, but completely and utterly destructive to the good of humanity.

To question it is to put at risk the very foundation of any fringe movement, especially ones whose claims are not yet thought to be factual in the common cultural lexicon. It is because of this, that progressive institutions like CC have trouble applying free inquiry to campus culture.

The narrative is as follows: to not take certain statements as a given, such as the idea that men and women are equal, is to put the basic human rights of historically disenfranchised groups in jeopardy. If not put to rest, this is a phenomenon that will end in America being a socially conservative dystopia.

At the moment, conservative politicians, media creators and other celebrities are gaining extreme popularity because they are rallying around their identity as being part of the party that wants to protect free speech. In response, the liberal media has begun to treat anyone that dares to ‘just ask questions’ as a severe enemy to their cause. The claim is that ‘asking questions’ is simply a sneaky way of trying to undermine the progressive mission toward a more just world.

In my experience, “I’m not going to debate my humanity with you,” has been a celebrated response to people who ask questions about why trans women should be allowed to participate in women’s sports, or why low-income people deserve reduced cost housing.

That is not to say that many conservative circles don’t operate along similar lines to reject free inquiry into their dogmas – of course they do. However, what conservative ideological systems have that progressive ones do not is pre-established ground; Conservatives, by definition, seek the preservation of historically held political views. They already have a long list of justifications and proofs for why their maxims are reasonable; Progressives do not.

That, however, is not to say that the conservative way is the right one. Just because it was believed that leeches could cure fevers does mean that it was true. In fact, any reasonable person today would call you crazy for saying such a thing. To reach a place where we could grow away from this belief, people had to be able to prove that their new concept of how the human body works was correct. It should be obvious, but the same rule goes for matters of social justice.

You cannot simply state that women are equal to men or that gender is a spectrum without being able to justify those claims as favorable to current traditional ideologies. This is not to say that many scholars and public intellectuals have not ventured to do these things. There are entire academic disciplines dedicated to proving the claims that are so aggressively marketed in progressive circles.

However, many people who identify as progressive, who are mostly young people, are not scholars or even casual readers of these essays or theories. When taking these progressive postulates as absolute truths, they are assuming that their beliefs are as obviously rational as the statement which claims that the sky is blue. If there is one thing that CC has failed to instill in many of its progressive students, it’s that their closely held beliefs are not yet fact.

If your beliefs have merit, or can be thought to contain any reasonable truth, you should be able to defend them using logic.

I believe there are two kinds of people that cower in the face of debate. One is a person who, although they know intuitively that their political views have legitimate cause, is unable to articulate how or why. The other person is less common but far more often weaponized against progressives. This is the person who lives in a sort of fairytale land, wanting the world to be how they delusionally perceive it and not how it actually is.

We’ve all seen those videos titled something like, “Feminist Gets Owned.”These are not only the hateful creations of right-wing trolls but products of progressive intellectuals neglecting their duty to widely circulate reasonable and accessible debate points in favor of their positions.

Before the progressive social movement can make any headway, we must first and foremost eradicate the concept that to question is to hate, that to question is to commit an act of violence. The most harmful thing we can do to the people that we so adamantly fight for – gender minorities, disabled people and people of color – as activists of social justice is disintegrate our merit by being unable to reasonably respond to and acknowledge popular suspicions of our movement.

This is not a revolutionary article in any sense, but one that needed to be written, nonetheless. It is no secret that most CC students feel completely unable to question the status quo of radical and social media-projected liberal virtue signals without being ridiculed or ostracized, and it has resulted in more and more people abandoning radically progressive movements in favor of passive, centrist positions away from politics altogether.

If we want a future closer to social equality, where people are free of capitalist, racist and other forms of bigoted oppression, we must first venture to consider as comprehensible the claims of those who seek to hold us back. In short, progressives must be the ones to take back the Socratic method, viewing it as the weapon in favor of our cause, and never against us. If we fail to defend our convictions to ourselves, which is what the Socratic method threatens, then we should reconsider them, for that means that they were never to do us any good in the first place.

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