Plato loved democracy, a paragraph below.
I love the ancient Greeks as I love our founding fathers. They sturggled with brand new ideas. The greeks: justice, democracy and reason: and the founding fathers: democracy and justice.
But in both cases they were just learning about reason, justice and democracy and compared to todays thinking each had huge holes in their thinking, just as they also had the grandest of ideas.
The ancient Greeks knew they were just trying to figure it out. They felt, as do I, that the true philosopher is one who understands their ignorance. They knew they were ignorant.
In the "Allegory of The Cave" (my favorite) Plato talks about how life is an illusion people cling onto, Shadows on the wall (like religion) and if someone sees a more beautiful truth (like the fellow who stumbled outside of the cave into the green meadows, blue sky, etc, and goes back to try and tell the people they kill him.
Just as conservative's have been killing the liberals (independent thinkers of history)since time immemorial.
And although these two groups were so important to our present civilization, neither was even able to wrap their minds around the horrible injustice of slavery.
Imagine, both Jefferson and Washington held slaves, slaves!, and only released them on their death. So they knew it was wrong!
Still, both the ancient Greeks and our founding fathers were light years ahead of everyone else in their thinking and all hard core liberals by the very dictionary definition of liberal.
Which is what I use to decribe my liberalism. A simple dictionary definition.
<<The result is a "democracy" (dêmokratia; dêmos, "people"), the rule of the people. Plato pays grudging respect to democracy as the "fairest" (kallistê, "most beautiful") of constitutions. The principle of this state is the desire of the many. This is "democratic" in the sense that all desires are equally good, which means anything goes. Because the desires and possessions of some inevitably interfere with the desires and acquisitiveness of others, Plato thinks that democracies will become increasing undisciplined and chaotic. In the end, people will want someone to institute law and order and quiet things down. Giving sufficient power to someone to do that leads to the next kind of state. >> |
