The Greeks Get It

Pynx Hill, behind the Agora’s middle stoa – where Athenians voted 280 to 220 against Socrates in 399 BC

Greeks learn once more the lesson

That Socrates taught

Until his soul was silenced.

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Socrates never wrote anything down, but Plato, his best-known student, attributed the following quote to Socrates when he spoke at his trial on the Pynx Hill, just north of the Agora:

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An unexamined life is not worth living.

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Socrates preferred to drink hemlock rather than face a sentence of exile or enforced silence enforced by the powerful, ignorant and  selfish in an Athens recently humiliated by Sparta.

The vast majority of  21st century humans have absorbed nothing of ethical importance in the 24 centuries since Socrates.

Simon and Garfunkel had it figured out as early as 1966: The Sound of Silence:

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We are praying to a Neon god.

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Smug, we ridicule the Greeks, quoting from neoliberal scripture, while not getting what’s really going on. Being already victimized makes them wiser than us.  So are Palestinians, Southern Sudanese, the Nile fellahin who have been displaced over the past several years from their farmland by the rush to build hotels for the smug, etc. etc. fere ad infinitum.

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