The story of Socrates' death is seared into my mind. When I heard it and read it, what always stood out as clear as light of day was the ending. It was not his death, unfair and questionable though it was, but how the story ends. It does not end with his death. It ends with the city mourning the loss of the life they had sentenced to death and now regretted. So, what did the city now decide? That it would sentence to death the man who had brought the charges against Socrates and they did. The story ends with his death. Clearly, the people of that city did not learn their lesson.
Jesus, beloved, son of God in the eyes of many in the world, healed and helped through the course of his life and was then crucified after facing a trial, where unlike Socrates, he apparently did not defend himself. In both these accounts, the men were blamed for introducing ideas and making claims about themselves or the world they were in which was shifting the pre-existing nature of the society. Never in history has such an event been peaceful, let alone welcoming. And it has often meant death for the ones who introduced such changes into a society.
Both the people of Socrates' city and Jesus' one were religious and God-fearing/loving. Yet, they did not value God's creations and responded to new ideas that threatened them by eradicating the human point which appeared to be the source. But is a human being, or anything in this world, and its actions its own source?
In Doris Lessing's book of essays "Prisons we choose to live inside," the first essay is called "When in the future they look back on us". The name is telling. Anyway, it starts with an anecdotal story of a farmer in old Southern Rhodesia, present-day Zimbabwe who buys a prized bull. I will revert to the original writing here since I cannot capture her potency with my words:
I knew this farmer and his family well. The farmer, who was Scotch by origin, decided to import a very special bull from Scotland. This was just before science had discovered how to send potential calves from one continent to another by airmail in small packages. The beast in due course arrived, flown in, naturally, and was welcomed by a reception committee of farmers, friends, experts. He cost £10,000. I don’t know what that would be
now, but it was a very large sum for the farmer. A special home was made for him. He was a massive, impressive animal, mild as a lamb, it was claimed, and he liked to be tickled at the back of his head with a stick held safely at a distance, from behind the bars of his pen. He had his own keeper, a black boy of about twelve. All went well; it was clear the bull would soon become the father of a satisfactory number of calves. He remained an
attraction for visitors, who would drive out on a Sunday afternoon to stand about the pen, brooding over this fabulous beast, who looked so powerful and who was so docile. And then he suddenly and quite inexplicably killed his keeper, the black boy.
Something like a court of justice was held. The boy’s relatives demanded, and got, compensation. But that was not the end of it. The farmer decided that the bull must be killed. When this became known, a great many people went to him and pleaded for the magnificent beast’s life. After all, it was in the nature of bulls to suddenly go berserk, everyone knew that. The herd boy had been warned, and he must have been careless.
Obviously, it would never happen again … to waste all that power, potential, and not to mention money—what for?
“The bull has killed, the bull is a murderer, and he must be punished. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” said the inexorable farmer, and the bull was duly executed by firing squad and buried.
Now, as I’ve said, this farmer was not some ignoramus, or bumpkin. Moreover, like all his kind—the ruling white minority—he spent a good deal of time condemning the blacks who lived all around him for being primitive, backward, pagan, and so forth. But what he had done—this act of condemning an animal to death for wrong-doing—went back into the far past of mankind, so far back we don’t know where it began, but certainly it was when man hardly knew how to differentiate between humans and beasts. Any tactful suggestions along these lines from friends or from other farmers were simply dismissed with: “I know how to tell right from wrong, thank you very much.”
There is another incident. A certain tree was once sentenced to death, at the end of the last war. The tree was associated with General Pétain, for a time considered France’s saviour, then France’s betrayer. When Pétain was disgraced, the tree was solemnly sentenced and executed for collaborating with the enemy.
I often think about these incidents: they represent those happenings that seem to give up more meaning as time goes on. Whenever things seem to be going along quite smoothly—and I am talking about human affairs in general—then it is as if suddenly some awful primitivism surges up and people revert to barbaric behaviour.
These three stories (in the sense of what I've read/heard) keep appearing in my mind. I often look at how I am far removed in time from each of these happenings but not a lot has changed in the world. Is the evolution of kindness in human beings really so slow? Are we deep down really so banal that we condemn all lives whenever we cannot deal with the reality that being alive means to be alive with a lot of pain and suffering? Is our response to whatever causes a tear or shift in the social fabric going to be murder or ruthlessness?
Doris' fate was similar to that of Socrates and Jesus. Since the world was slightly "more civilized" she wasn't put to death. But she was largely ignored by the "mainstream" literary society for most of her life, rejected by the Nobel committee over and over until she was at the ripe old age of 88, and categorized as a "science-fiction writer" which is an insult only to those who believe in elitist literary divides.
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