Why Socrates Was Wrong
Some settlers who thought for themselves died. The ones who followed tradition survived.
In the early twentieth century, when maize-heavy diets became common among poorer communities in the American South, pellagra caused devastating suffering including skin lesions, diarrhoea, dementia and death. Yet Indigenous peoples across the Americas had eaten maize for thousands of years without such epidemics.
Why? Because many Indigenous traditions processed maize with an alkali, often lime or hardwood ash, a step that makes niacin available. Each generation taught the next to do this, without needing to know the biochemical reason. They simply did as they were taught. And they survived.
Many European settlers, by contrast, treated the extra step as unnecessary. They saw no obvious reason for the ash or lime and skipped it. They thought for themselves.
And many died.
Socrates is every educator’s hero. He taught the young people of Athens to question everything, to think for themselves, to never accept received wisdom without examination. For this, he was condemned to death; and for this, we celebrate him as the father of critical thinking.
But what if the injunction to “think for yourself” and “question everything” is, taken literally, a recipe for disaster?
As the anthropologist Joseph Henrich has argued, our survival depends on cumulative cultural know-how and on faithful social learning. If each generation had insisted on reinventing everything from scratch, we would be far less capable, and might not be here at all.
Dressed to survive
Consider the Inuit. Outsiders have repeatedly underestimated what it takes to survive in extreme Arctic cold, even when they are clever and well supplied. The Inuit, however, solved this challenge millennia ago.
Their clothing system is astonishingly sophisticated: caribou skin gathered at precisely the right time of year, prepared through repeated stretching, scraping, and moistening, shaped to maximise heat retention while allowing moisture to escape. A ruff of wolverine fur, selected for specific length. Five separate layers of footwear, each with a different design.
No individual, however intelligent, could easily reason their way to this solution from first principles within a single lifetime. It represents thousands of years of accumulated trial and error, preserved through teaching. When elders are lost—through epidemic, displacement, or simple disruption, fine-grained survival knowledge can disappear with shocking speed.
It’s not just the Amerindians or the Inuit who survive because of the accurate transmission of complex cultural knowledge, we all depend on this. Most of us don’t know how even the simplest technology around us works, and if a disaster wiped out those who did know, we could not rebuild civilisation quickly just by asking difficult questions and doing some critical thinking.
The paradox
So if unquestioning acceptance of tradition keeps us alive, why teach critical thinking at all?
Most of our automatic, intuitive responses aren’t hardwired. They’re cultural. They’re the accumulated wisdom of generations, externalised in technology, or internalised so deeply we don’t notice it. This cultural inheritance is slow, collective thinking crystallised into habit and infrastructure.
Children are naturally primed to absorb this inheritance. With guidance and modelling, they learn stories, routines, and who to trust long before they can explain why. What doesn’t come naturally is the effortful pause, the willingness to ask “but what if we’re wrong?”
And sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes traditions encode prejudices rather than wisdom. Sometimes the world changes and old solutions stop working. Sometimes we inherit practices that made sense in one context but become harmful in another.
To correct these errors, we need to step back and engage in slower, more careful reflection. This is hard. It requires explicit teaching. That’s why we still need Socrates.
The apparent conflict between “traditional” education - direct instruction, imitation, correction - and “progressive” education - questioning, reflection, creativity - dissolves when we see how they complement each other. In any open, living culture, both are essential: the transmission of accumulated wisdom, and the capacity to question and reform that wisdom when necessary.
Socrates wasn’t wrong to value questioning. But questioning only works because we first accept so much on trust. To turn back and ask questions, you need language—and language itself is a vast inheritance of tradition, absorbed uncritically in childhood.
Education, at its best, teaches us when to follow and when to question.
Socrates claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. Perhaps. But life itself depends on an enormous amount that we are not able to examine and are wise to take on trust.
Of course I am being very unfair to the real historical Socrates who saw himself as a loyal servant of Athens questioning traditions only in order to help improve them through restoring deep memory. But there is a modern version of Socrates which says think for yourself and question everything. It is this modern Socrates that I am questioning.
Or, in the trivium, the relationship between grammar and dialectic. Potentially mutually destructive, they can be held together through ‘negative capability’