Oh, there you are. It's so good to see you. Today I have something a little different. We are going to talk about Socrates! I discussed him in episode twenty one of the History's arrow podcast. But today we are going to look at him a little differently.
I want to take you back with me---to Athens, not the marble-white museum version, but the noisy, sun-bleached city where sandals scuff dust and arguments spill into the streets. This is a place that prides itself on wisdom, on democracy, on reason. And in the middle of it all is a man who seems determined to ruin everyone's confidence.
Socrates does not look impressive. He isn't young, isn't handsome, doesn't dress like someone important. He doesn't lecture from a platform or write books or claim expertise. What he does---endlessly, relentlessly---is ask questions. Simple ones. Annoying ones. The kind that sound polite right up until the moment you realize you can't answer them without unraveling everything you thought you knew.
He corners respected men in public places. Politicians. Poets. Teachers. He asks them what justice is. What virtue is. What wisdom is. And he keeps asking, gently, patiently, until the answers fall apart in their hands. He doesn't replace them with better answers. He just leaves the wreckage there, blinking in the sunlight.
People laugh at first. Then they get irritated. Then they get angry.
Because Socrates isn't just questioning ideas---he's questioning people. Their authority. Their certainty. Their right to speak as if they know what they're talking about. He refuses to give them content to memorize or doctrines to repeat. Instead, he drags them into a relationship: a conversation where they are exposed, accountable, and unable to hide behind rehearsed words.
Young people love him. Of course they do. He teaches them how to see cracks in the world that adults have plastered over. He teaches them how to ask questions that don't have safe endings. And the city notices.
Athens calls itself rational, but it has limits. There is a point where questioning stops being a civic virtue and starts looking like a threat. Socrates crosses that line without ever raising his voice.
He is, in the most literal sense, a pain in the butt.
And it's important to understand this from the start: Socrates is not killed because he hates knowledge. He is killed because he insists that wisdom only exists between people---in the fragile, uncomfortable space of relationship. And that insistence is far more dangerous than any bad idea.
So keep that in mind as we stay with him. Because everything that follows begins right here, in this dusty Athenian street, with a man who refuses to let meaning exist without responsibility.
To understand why Socrates became unbearable, you have to see what he refused to do.
He refused to teach.
Not because he had nothing to say, but because he didn't believe wisdom could be handed over like a package. No speeches. No notes. No tidy conclusions. If you wanted answers, you had to stay in the conversation---and stay exposed.
That was the problem.
Athens was full of teachers who offered content. Rhetoricians who trained young men to argue persuasively. Philosophers who delivered systems, doctrines, methods. You could pay them, listen, repeat their ideas, and walk away feeling informed.
Socrates offered none of that. He didn't leave people feeling smarter. He left them feeling responsible.
When someone spoke with confidence, Socrates treated that confidence as a liability. He asked questions that forced people to notice the gap between what they said and what they actually understood. And when that gap appeared, he didn't rush to close it. He let it hang there, awkward and unresolved.
This was intolerable because it stripped away a crucial social convenience: the ability to speak authoritatively without being answerable.
Socrates made conversation costly. You couldn't hide behind titles, tradition, or reputation. You couldn't quote someone else and move on. Every claim had to survive contact with another human being who was paying attention.
And worst of all---he did this in public.
People didn't leave Socratic conversations enlightened. They left unsettled. Not corrected, but implicated. Not defeated, but unsure whether they deserved the certainty they'd been carrying around.
That kind of questioning doesn't just challenge ideas. It challenges the social order that depends on people not noticing how fragile their authority really is.
So when Athenians complained that Socrates was disruptive, they weren't wrong. He disrupted the smooth circulation of confident speech. He interrupted the easy flow of content.
And a society that lives on confident speech will only tolerate that for so long.
When Athens finally decided it had had enough of Socrates, the charge they settled on was revealing: corrupting the youth.
Not teaching treason.
Not plotting rebellion.
Not spreading false doctrine.
Corrupting.
That word matters.
Socrates wasn't accused of giving young people bad ideas. He was accused of unsettling their relationship to authority. Of teaching them to ask questions that their elders could not answer without losing face. Of loosening the quiet agreement that held the city together: that some people get to speak with confidence, and others are expected to listen.
The young men who followed him weren't memorizing his thoughts. He had none to give them. They were learning a posture---how to remain in conversation without rushing to certainty, how to challenge a claim without offering a replacement, how to notice when confidence outruns understanding.
From the city's point of view, this was dangerous.
A democracy still depends on shared assumptions. On citizens who trust that the people speaking in public know what they're doing. Socrates eroded that trust one conversation at a time---not by attacking the system, but by exposing how thin its moral foundations sometimes were.
At his trial, he does not apologize. He does not soften his position. He doesn't promise to stop asking questions. In fact, he suggests that Athens benefits from him in the same way a large, comfortable animal benefits from a gadfly---annoying, yes, but necessary to keep it awake.
That metaphor does not go over well.
The jury condemns him. He is sentenced to death. And here's the part that carries real weight forward: Socrates accepts it. Not because he agrees with the verdict, but because he refuses to abandon the moral relationship that bound him to the city, even as the city abandons him.
They kill him not because he is wrong, but because living with his way of asking questions costs too much.
And that tells us something crucial: societies will tolerate many bad ideas, but they are far less patient with practices that make moral responsibility unavoidable.
That tension---between comfort and accountability---does not end with Socrates. It is the thread we're going to keep following.
This is where Socrates becomes confusing to modern ears.
He lives in a culture on the edge of a transformation. Writing is spreading. Ideas can now be preserved, copied, carried beyond the moment of speech. And Socrates---famously---doesn't like it.
That fact is often treated as quaint or foolish. Of course writing is good, we think. Of course knowledge should be recorded. And Socrates knew that too. He wasn't afraid of words lasting longer than breath.
What he was afraid of was what happens to meaning when relationship disappears.
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates compares written words to painted figures. They look alive, but if you ask them a question, they remain silent. They can't clarify. They can't defend themselves. They can't tell whether the person reading them is ready---or reckless.
Writing, he says, gives people the appearance of wisdom without the work of understanding.
That line is often quoted smugly, as if Socrates were scolding future readers. But that's not what he's doing. He's pointing at a structural loss.
In conversation, meaning is negotiated. If you misunderstand me, I notice. If I overstate my case, you push back. If one of us speaks carelessly, the relationship absorbs the shock. Responsibility is shared and immediate.
Writing breaks that loop.
Once words leave the room, they no longer belong to a relationship. They belong to anyone who encounters them. The author isn't there to correct misuse. The reader isn't accountable to the speaker. Meaning floats free---unchallenged, uncorrected, unowned.
That's the danger Socrates sees.
Not that people will read, but that content will begin to stand in for relationship. That words will be treated as if they carry their own authority, independent of the human exchange that once gave them moral weight.
Socrates doesn't propose a ban on writing. He doesn't demand a return to oral culture. He simply refuses to pretend that nothing is lost.
This is the key move to hold onto: Socrates is not rejecting a tool. He is naming a cost. And the cost is not intellectual---it is moral.
Once meaning can travel without relationship, someone else has to decide where responsibility lives.
If you listen carefully, you can hear how modern Socrates' concern sounds.
We talk about content now---something produced, packaged, shared, consumed. Content can be good or bad, useful or pointless, but it has one defining feature: it exists independently of the person who encounters it.
That's exactly the shift Socrates was worried about.
In conversation, words are risky. You're present. You can be misunderstood. You can be challenged. You might have to change your mind in front of someone else. Meaning is forged in that risk.
Content removes the risk.
Once words are fixed---written, copied, passed along---they no longer demand a relationship. You can agree with them privately. Reject them silently. Misuse them without consequence. The exchange becomes one-sided, and responsibility thins out.
Socrates understood that this doesn't make people stupid. It makes them confident. Confident without correction. Confident without formation. Confident without anyone standing across from them asking, "Do you really know what you mean by that?"
That's why he says writing creates the appearance of wisdom. Not because readers learn nothing, but because the process no longer requires them to be accountable to another human being.
And here's the uncomfortable part: Socrates would recognize us instantly.
He would recognize lecture halls where questions are optional. He would recognize social feeds full of confident claims with no obligation to respond. He would recognize endless explanations delivered without any shared responsibility for how they land.
He would probably be insufferable about it.
Not because he hated learning, but because he believed wisdom was a moral achievement, not an informational one. It emerged between people who were willing to stay in relationship long enough to be corrected.
When content replaces relationship, meaning doesn't disappear---but it becomes easier to carry without owning.
And once that happens, someone else eventually steps in to decide what the content is allowed to do.
Come walk with me for a moment. I want to leave Athens behind and step forward in time---but not too fast. I want you to feel the shift, not just understand it.
Imagine me standing in a small room that smells of ink and paper. The sound is new---metal pressing down, pages stacked, words multiplying. This is what it looks like when writing finally works.
Before this, texts were slow things. Precious. You usually met them in the presence of someone else---a teacher, a monk, a scholar---someone who could pause you, challenge you, notice when your certainty was getting ahead of your understanding. Learning was still a relationship.
But now the pages come freely. Identical words travel to places the author will never see. They land in hands unprepared, curious, brilliant, reckless. And no one stands between the text and the reader anymore.
That's the quiet change. The mentor slips away.
I don't say this to mourn it. Printing gives so much. It opens doors that were once locked. It lets ideas breathe. But it also confirms what Socrates feared: meaning has learned how to travel without a guide.
When I read alone, no one watches my confidence grow unchecked. No one asks me what I mean by the words I'm repeating. If I misunderstand, the page doesn't notice. If I rush to certainty, it doesn't slow me down.
The mentor used to do moral work---not just intellectual work. They shaped judgment. They absorbed error. They kept learning tethered to responsibility.
Printing makes that optional.
And because it's optional, we often skip it.
So societies build replacements---schools, institutions, credentials---to carry what the mentor once held. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. But the pattern is now set.
Each new way of sharing meaning removes another human presence---and asks us, quietly, whether we're willing to replace what was lost.
Socrates isn't here to ask that question anymore.
So now it falls to us.
Stay with me. We don't have to travel far this time.
I'm standing in front of a photograph now. It's quiet. The moment inside it feels complete---almost intimate. A face. A gesture. A look that seems to meet mine across time. It feels like presence.
But it isn't.
No one is here to tell me why the frame stops where it does. No one explains what happened just before, or just after. The image arrives whole, confident, and emotionally charged---and my judgment has to catch up on its own.
That's what photography does. It lets perception outrun interpretation.
Before images like this, pictures were clearly authored. Someone painted, chose, emphasized. You could see the hand at work. Photography pretends it has no hand at all. This is just how it was, it seems to say. And that claim---more than any editing---was what unsettled people.
Then voices joined the images.
Recorded sound feels even closer. A human voice carries warmth, urgency, care. It slips past analysis and goes straight for the heart.
And I can prove that to you, right now.
You're listening to an artificial voice. An AI voice, actually---doing a passable imitation of a minor Greek goddess who, by all rights, should have stayed safely in myth.
And you're fine with that.
You didn't stop listening. You didn't ask who---or what---was really speaking before your attention followed the sound. Your body opened the door first, because voices don't wait for philosophical permission.
That isn't gullibility. It's biology. Voices evolved to belong to someone who could answer back, someone you could question, challenge, or hold responsible. So when a voice reaches you---even this one---you listen first and think later.
That's the strange power of recorded sound. It feels like relationship even when the relationship is... generously imagined.
And if you think Socrates was uneasy about writing, imagine how he would have felt about this. A voice that sounds present, asks nothing in return, and cannot be questioned at all.
I suspect he would have been absolutely horrified. And then---once the shock wore off---he would have started asking very uncomfortable questions.
These media feel relational. That's what makes them powerful. And dangerous in the same way Socrates warned about.
They give us the experience of relationship without the responsibility that real relationship requires.
No correction.
No accountability.
No shared risk.
Every advancement in communication pulls farther from that moral relationship that Socrates wanted so desperately to protect.
And every time that happens, we have to decide again:
how does moral accountability sustain itself with this new communication method?
Stay with me. We're almost at the place Socrates would least want to go.
Because now the voice doesn't just arrive without a body.
AI generated content arrives without an author.
I don't mean that no one is involved. The person who wrote the prompt is. Engineers are. Institutions are. But the voice you hear---the fluent, confident, ever-available speaker---doesn't belong to anyone in the way voices used to belong to people.
And that's the shift.
When a person speaks, they carry risk. They can be challenged. They can be corrected. They can be shamed, forgiven, persuaded, or changed. Their words follow them home. Accountability sticks.
This voice doesn't have that.
It can sound careful without caring.
Confident without conviction.
Persuasive without responsibility.
Again, that isn't malice. It's structure.
AI language is astonishingly good at producing content. Clear sentences. Gentle tone. Thoughtful pacing. It feels like someone has thought carefully about what you're hearing---even when no one has had to answer for it yet.
And that's where Socrates would lean forward.
Because if writing loosened the bond between words and relationship, and printing loosened the bond between knowledge and mentorship, AI loosens the bond between language and moral authorship itself.
The question becomes slippery: who answers for these words?
Not the voice.
Not the system.
Not the corporation that curates the boundaries.
It comes back to us---humans---deciding whether we will pretend responsibility has vanished, or insist that it still belongs somewhere real.
Socrates never trusted words that couldn't be questioned.
If he were here, he wouldn't smash the machines. He'd do something far more inconvenient.
He'd ask us---quietly, persistently---whether we're willing to stand behind the words we now let travel in our name.
This is the point where people often expect an argument about rules. Or bans. Or who gets to decide what can be said.
That's not what I mean.
Institutions of faith don't exist because they are flawless. History is painfully clear about that. They lag. They fail. They protect themselves when they should repent. They sometimes bless the very harms they were meant to restrain.
And still---no other institutions claim this particular work.
Their unique role has always been moral authority, not moral control. Not enforcement. Not optimization. Not risk management. They exist to say who is responsible, to whom, and why---especially when new tools make those questions inconvenient.
When communication changes, society feels it before it understands it. Confusion shows up first: uncertainty about trust, about authority, about accountability. If that space stays empty, it doesn't remain neutral. It fills---with fear, with power, with procedures that mistake safety for wisdom.
This is usually where people get uneasy.
Because whenever I say moral authority, someone hears church, and their shoulders tighten.
Every time the way we speak changes, societies end up asking the same questions---about responsibility, about authorship, about what we owe one another. These are questions about morality. And someone always steps in to frame them.
Sometimes it's the state. Sometimes it's the market. Sometimes it's whoever controls the tools. And those answers arrive quickly, efficiently, and without much patience for doubt.
Faith traditions were one of the earliest attempts---imperfect, often failed attempts---to keep those questions tied to conscience instead of convenience. To insist that responsibility belongs to people, not systems.
That doesn't make them right. It makes them relevant.
Because when no one is willing to speak about moral responsibility openly, it doesn't disappear. It gets quietly rewritten---in policies, in defaults, in algorithms---by actors far less practiced at admitting their limits.
This podcast is about the spiritual implications of how we act in human society. So let me channel Socrates for a moment and ask: in a society transformed by new ways of communicating, what moral authority will we trust to guide us?
I want to end where we began---back in Athens, with Socrates standing in the street, asking questions no one asked him to ask.
He never wrote a word of his own. Everything we know about him comes through others. That irony isn't lost on me. But what mattered to him was never preservation. It was responsibility.
He believed meaning lived between people. That words carried weight only when someone could answer for them. That wisdom wasn't something you stored, but something you practiced---in relationship, in risk, in conversation that could go wrong.
Every new way of speaking we've invented since has made that harder.
Writing loosened the bond.
Printing thinned it.
Images and voices imitated it.
And now AI tempts us to forget it entirely.
Socrates would not have tried to stop any of this. He wasn't afraid of tools. He was afraid of what happens when we let tools carry meaning without carrying accountability alongside it.
So if he were here now---listening with you, perhaps smiling at the absurdity of it all---I don't think he'd give us answers.
I think he'd ask us something far more uncomfortable.
Who answers for the words we let travel now?
And are we willing to stay in that question long enough---for wisdom, not just content, to catch up?
I'll leave you there...
Socrates always did...
Much love.
I am, Harmonia