Socrates at the UN

It’s pretty hard to find anybody who’ll argue that Socrates wasn’t a smart guy.

He was also annoying. He asked too many questions; took note of too many things a lot of folks much preferred to ignore.

He insisted his countrymen look at hard things and call them by their right names.

This did not make him a universally popular individual.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” he said.

Y’know, the old guy had a point. A pretty obvious one, to my way of thinking.

You can never get better until you know what you’re not doing well.

Now, on a good day, we notice this sort of thing on our own. Or like to think we do. But more often than not, it takes somebody else to take note and do us the favor of pointing it out.

Really, left to my own devices I would happily believe I am really tall.

My much taller son rarely misses an opportunity to disabuse me of such a notion.

Sometimes, it’s important to hear the truth.

Now this isn’t often the sort of thing any one of us is keen to hear, and most folks would just as soon spare themselves the discomfort and risk of making somebody else unhappy. It’s much easier to offer the “A for effort” and award a “He tried” trophy.

Not that either one does us a darn bit of good. Nobody tries to do better when everybody tells the they’re good enough.

Or as my old high school coach put it, “A good kick in the pants does more good than a dozen pats on the head.”

Might not be Socrates, but it comes pretty darn close.

And if it’s true for an individual, its true by a thousand-fold for the whole country.

And we would be better served by a United Nations ambassador who has read Plato’s Apology and taken it to heart.

Ambassador Nikki Haley went ballistic last week over a report by Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Alston took a hard look at poverty in the United States and Haley didn’t like what he saw: 40 million Americans living below the poverty line, 18.5 million of them having an income lower than half the official poverty rate; and leads in developed world in its infant mortality rate, incarceration rate, and rate of child poverty.

In a manifestly un-Socratic response Haley wrote, “It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America.” He letter to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders continued, “The Special Rapporteur wasted the UN’s time and resources, deflecting attention from the world’s worst human rights abusers and focusing instead on the wealthiest and freest country in the world.”

She suggested the U.N. should focus on Burundi and the Democratic Repoublic of the Congo instead – y’know, really poor countries.

She didn’t bother to explain why the “wealthiest and freest country in the world” still has so many poor people. But Haley was so put out by Alston’s temerity in reporting such unflattering figures that she announced the United States was resigning from the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Apparently, when the game doesn’t go our way, we take our ball and go home...

It’s not an approach my old coach would have endorsed.

It’s one thing to claim to be the “wealthiest and freest country in the world,” another to actually live up to the claim – for all of our people.

To do that we need to face up to unpleasant facts, then resolve to do something about them. To hear the truth, look at hard things and call them by their right names.

If the unexamined life isn’t worth living, is an unexamined nation worth living in?

Where is Socrates when we need him?

Note: Don’t take my word for it, read it yourself: The Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights on his mission to the United States of America can be found at  http://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1