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Introduction

Good evening, I am Eric Metaxas, and welcome to Socrates in the City, the thinking person’s alternative to standing in front of Trump Tower and having your picture taken.

By the way, in passing, I want to publicly thank Donald Trump for adding to the aesthetic value of Fifth Avenue with that fabulous banner. It’s so charming that it really is almost Dickensian. It’s just wonderful to have somebody scowling at you from a building, isn’t it?¹

Anyway, it is a pleasure to be here tonight and to see all of you. As many of you already know, the idea behind these Socrates in the City events comes from Socrates’s famous maxim that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” It follows logically that the unexamined maxim is not worth remembering. So, I think the fact that this Socratic maxim has been remembered for lo, these twenty-five centuries means that it has been examined and been worth remembering, although I am not sure if that is true, because I really can’t remember.

Anyway, our thesis here at Socrates in the City is that the illustrious inhabitants of our fair city— that’s us— are less likely to lead examined lives than people in other parts of the world, principally because we New Yorkers are very, very good at distracting ourselves with high-flying careers and low-flying entertainments. I am not certain that this is true. I have no data, but it is a thesis. And I will be sticking with this for the remainder of the evening. So, please humor me.

In any case, over the last five years, we have scoured the known world for brilliant thinkers who have led particularly examined lives so that they might share the benefit of their examinations with us here in our unexamined burg, as it were. Of course, we inevitably have had to look far beyond New York City for these thinkers— the thesis again being that New Yorkers are, by definition, too successful and too distracted and too ambitious to ever attain the level of self-examination and philosophical brilliance necessary to address one of these august gatherings we like to call Socrates in the City.

Here at Socrates, we have had speakers from everywhere but New York. We have had speakers from Boston, actually three: Dr. Armand Nicholi, who spoke on C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud and teaches at the Harvard Medical School; Dr. Thomas Howard on Chance or the Dance?, from Saint John’s Seminary in Boston; and the illustrious Dr. Peter Kreeft, who is a philosophy professor at Boston College. So, three from Boston, none from New York. We have had three speakers from the Washington, DC, area: David Aikman, the journalist and former senior editor at Time; we had Frederica Mathewes-Green just a couple of months ago; and of course, we have had Os Guinness, who has spoken at something like eight Socrates events now. That is a world record, I believe— a Guinness world record.

We have had speakers from Boston, speakers from Washington, DC, and we even have had a speaker come to us from merry olde England, and not just an Englishman but a bona fide Knight of the British Empire, Sir John Polk-inghorne. But as I say, we have never looked to our own here in Gotham for a Socrates speaker. Until tonight, my friends.

The presumption had been, as I said, that there simply did not exist a New Yorker of such brilliance and erudition and self-examination as to warrant an invitation to our happy convocation.

So, that was my presumption, and, dare I say, the presumption of more folks than would care to admit. Some of them are perhaps in this very room. But on behalf of all those whose presumption that was, let me tonight say that in the person of Dr. Paul Vitz, we present our admission of error and our most profound apologies. That’s right. Horrid as it is to fathom, Dr. Paul Vitz is that extraordinarily rare New Yorker who is able to live, indeed thrive, amidst the inescapable din and the infinite enticements of this great city— and yet to be a self-examined soul.

And for this, my fellow New Yorkers, I think he deserves some kind of prize. Unfortunately, we have no prizes to give away tonight, save one, that being an attentive audience, which is to say, all of you. Yes, you, ladies and gentlemen, are that prize of which I speak. Doesn’t that make you feel good? Perhaps it just makes you feel cheap. In any case, that is the situation.

So, now, a word of introduction about our indigenous speaker, Dr. Paul Vitz. Dr. Vitz lives right here in the belly of the unexamined beast that is New York City. He is a professor of psychology at New York University, which is also located in that self-same unexamined beast’s belly. Dr. Vitz is a senior scholar at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, and he is the author of hundreds of articles and several books, among them Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship; Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism— he will be touching on that thesis today, among other things; Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious; and others. Most of these books are available at our book table at a reasonable discount, and I am sure Dr. Vitz will be happy to autograph them for you, if you ask nicely.

Dr. Vitz lives here in New York, in Greenwich Village, with his wife, who is a professor of French, also at New York University. They have six children, and I would assume that this alone gives Dr. Vitz all the credentials he needs to say something worth hearing on the subject of fatherhood.

Fatherhood is one of those subjects that seems, at least in my lifetime anyway, to be somewhat neglected. We hear a lot about motherhood these days, but fatherhood seems somehow to have gone, shall we say, out of vogue. The happy images that we would get of fatherhood from such past movies as Life with Father and such TV series as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, however unrealistic they might have been, nonetheless had their fingers on the idealized essence of fatherhood, and I think it is safe to say those images could be reassuring in a good way.

But the four-decade backlash against these images sometimes gives us a contemporary view of fatherhood that, on the fictional side, would be Al Bundy and Homer Simpson and on the nonfictional side would give us something like, for example, Michael Jackson hanging Junior over a balcony at a fancy high-rise hotel— not exactly the kind of thing that Andy Griffith or Robert Young would have done. They certainly would not have made their children wear masks.²

But, in any case, things have changed. I think some of these changes make me long for what Dr. Vitz has to say on the subject of fatherhood, whatever that will be.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Paul Vitz.

¹ A massive advertising banner for The Apprentice starring Donald Trump hung from the Trump building located just across Fifth Avenue from the University Club, at which this event was held.

² The late pop star and singer Michael Jackson was in the habit of appearing in public with his children wearing masks, and in 2002 he famously shocked his fans when he impulsively dangled his infant son, Prince, from the fourth-floor balcony of the high-rise Hotel Adlon in Berlin, Germany.