Twenty years after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, Morgan Meis reviews If I Did It, the bizarre hypothetical recounting of the incidents O.J. Simpson published in 2007. Rather than dwelling on the salacious details of this “extremely confusing book written by an extremely confused man,” Meis connects the confessor’s impulse to the Western canon, comparing Socratic and Augustinian approaches to guilt:
There’s a long tradition in Western culture of responding to accusations with an affirmation of the self. Think of it as the Socratic impulse. It is the need to give an apology — not in the sense of saying “I’m sorry,” but in the sense of the Greek word apologia. An apologia is not an admission of guilt or an expression of regret. It is, literally, a “talking back.” It is a response to an accusation in which the accused tells his side of the story. That’s what Socrates does in his apology. He tells his side of the story. He affirms who he is and what he is about. Let’s not forget that Socrates was guilty of his crimes. Just read I. F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates. Socrates was, in fact, corrupting the youth of Athens. Socrates’ students and admirers — men like Alcibiades — were, in fact, being taught by Socrates to have contempt for the structures of Athenian democracy. Some of Socrates’ students did, in fact, overthrow and abolish Athenian democracy. So Socrates, in his apology, is not protesting his innocence so much as asserting himself, affirming his own point of view. “This is who I really am,” says Socrates, “this is what I am about.”
O. J. was grasping at something similar when he said, “I did what all accused men do at the moment of truth: I proclaimed my innocence.” Defending the truth or falsity of the accusations against him didn’t matter as much to O. J. The important thing to defend when you stand alone, accused, is your self. This is when you have a chance to say, “Here’s who I am, here’s my story and I will not surrender this story.” But there is another side to O. J.
This side does want to confess, wants to be able to discuss and come to terms with the actual murders. This side of O. J. wants to be released from the burden of self that he affirms in the Socratic impulse. In his confessional mode, O. J. doesn’t want to be responsible for his story. He wants to be able to give his story away. This desire to confess is the Augustinian impulse and it is fundamentally incompatible with the Socratic impulse.
Augustine’s Confessions are the writings of a man unburdening himself. Augustine wants to find himself by throwing himself away. He wants to loosen the bonds of self. He wants to find relief from his own story by giving it away to God. “For behold,” Augustine writes, “Thou lovest the truth, and he that doth it, cometh to the light. This would I do in my heart before Thee in confession: and in my writing, before many witnesses.” That is, more or less, what O. J. tries to do by embedding a confession in the sixth chapter of his strange book. Except that he cannot do it completely. He does it by way of a hypothetical, and then toggles back into Socratic mode for the rest of the book, in an attempt to reclaim his “self” once more.
The Dish 