A UN initiative to get municipal authorities better able to reduce poverty in their cities is being held in Athens, as this year is apparently the 2500th anniversary of the birth of democracy there. This, for an anniversary, is quite giant, especially when written in French (as 2500ieme is even longer).* The sceptic may say, This is a joke because Athens didn't have democracy for the vast majority of that period - but come now, be reasonable, can't we look back from having arrived at the final destination and say Look at what got us here? Of course we can. But hold on, was the democracy of Athens anything to celebrate, what with women and slaves being excluded? Sure, note the improvements that have been made, but also note that the attitudes of a time determine its institutions - we don't let children, prisoners or foreigners vote, is this right? But hold more on, are we really sure about our dating here? Even leaving Gregory aside, how are we so damn sure anything happened at a fixed point BC? Come - this is all symbolism, it's just a bit easier with some numerologically-pseudo-significant attachment to right now.
But Athenian democracy supposedly worked directly, on a scale appropriate for collective decision-making (albeit through excluding many people). Fair point, but in our ongoing and effusive efforts to improve our democratic system, ensuring representation of the views of people in a proportionate and substantial way, and (with the added and indispensible epithet 'liberal') fully respecting and promoting the rights of minority groups, we are trying to overcome what backsliding has happened in the last twenty-five centuries...
So long live Athens, democracy, backslapping and the Millennium Development Goals! (Nice typo in the draft press release: "...the MDGs, adopted by the world government at the UN in 2000..."!)
*An aside on the relationship of writing to speech: bigger numbers such as twenty-five hundred, or even two thousand five hundred, are shorter to say than one hundred and twenty-three, or eighteen hundred and seventy-six.
2 comments:
It's all them zeroes wot does it.
i don't know - 1000 has more, but i suppose 1 has a weak phenotype. 2000 harder to argue with, although despite five-fingers-per-hand, a quarter (of a thousand) is chewier than a fifth. anything with lots of nines in immediately rejected for looking like a vain attempt to keep the price under ten pounds.
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