He Died with a Microphone in His Hand

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Why has the murder of Charlie Kirk resonated so powerfully through the culture? Is it because he was cut down so brutally in his prime? That he left behind a wife and two very young children? That no one deserves to die that way? Certainly for all of those reasons. But I am convinced there is something more, and it has to do with the fact that he died with a microphone in his hand—not a gun or a knife or a grenade, but a microphone.

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In employing this method, Charlie was standing in a venerable tradition that stretches back to ancient times and provides one of the foundations of Western civilization. In the streets and byways of fifth-century b.c. Athens, Socrates spoke, especially to the young, not through diatribes, but through conversations. He asked probing questions, criticized the answers he received, pressed his opponents to formulate their views more exactly, admitted when he hadn’t seen something important, and so forth. Socrates’s greatest disciple Plato gave us, in his famous dialogues, a literary version of these complex conversations. And Plato’s mentee Aristotle cultivated a philosophical school called “peripatetic,” since the learning took place as teacher and student walked together while sharing their points of view. A version of this can be seen in the Oxford and Cambridge university tradition, whereby the real learning takes place not so much through formal lectures as through the back and forth between individual tutors and pupils.

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All of this brings me back to Charlie Kirk. Up until his dying moment, Charlie was engaging in a practice that goes back to Socrates and that informs the West at its best. And that is precisely why we all feel so unnerved by his death. We sense that something basic to our civilization, something axiomatic and fundamental, is teetering—and that truly fetid cultural influences have found their way into our institutions and the minds of our kids. My sincere hope and prayer is that we can take renewed inspiration from a courageous and religious man who died, not with a gun in his hand, but rather an instrument of communication.

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