“I HAVE HEARD IT SAID that in the time of Socrates, in Athens, there were many travails familiar to our modern circumstance, however novel they may appear in present guises. It was a time of crisis and sudden transformation, of propaganda and war — and the culture was struggling to survive its own birth in an atmosphere of lies, invective, and the currying of wealth, military force, public favor and economic or social power. A clusterfuck of conflicting imperatives, many of which were the ironic opposites of all they were presented as. These are matters with which we are all intimately familiar. As in ‘matters of the collective, the marketplace, the courtroom… the family, the mob’.
In spirit, we may suppose that, as today, many of the worthiest philosophers despised counterfeiting, satire and hyperbole. More than a few were painfully aware that ‘entertainment’ was a lethal idea that too easily became a soporific. Some surely dismissed as outright lies the emotional pandering of ‘dramas and tragedies produced for the masses’, and were intent upon interrupting a process that simulated virtues by way of promoting and celebrating their lethal opposites or even their absence.
As bait for spectators.
Like us, the philosophers were aware that they were everywhere surrounded by ‘traditions’ and behaviors that, allowed to simply proceed, would quickly overwhelm the origins and roots of our humanity, possible divinity, insight and the true benefits of communal agency or endeavor. And thus demand ironic tragedy as their result.
Their situations are our own, and we owe the foundations of many of our common ideas to their struggles, successes, and failures. And much of our experience of language is forged of something like the ossified remains of theirs.
Fossils.”
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