Re: OT ; Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Mon, 30 Sep 2024 14:19:49 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

I’m convinced that it was the conflicts between the popes and the
temporal rulers led directly to democracy in the West.

Democracy predated Christianity by several centuries. The ancient Greeks,
I think, had this cultural characteristic where they hated the idea of
somebody thinking of themselves as better than anybody else. This applied
to their rulers as well.

So they came up with the idea of checks and balances. Other nations, once
they appointed somebody king, found it very hard to rein them in once they
started to abuse their power. The Greeks came up with various solutions to
this: for example, the Spartans had two kings, who kept an eye on each
other. Another city-state came up with the idea of redistributing all the
land every 20 years, to stop any one person becoming too rich (an early
form of Communism, if you like).

And the Athenians, of course, came up with what they called “democracy”.
We use the term nowadays, but we use it for quite a different concept from
the way they practised it (because our concepts of equality and fairness
have evolved a bit beyond the era of slavery and women as property).