Old Works

I find it interesting how people never change over the centuries. It doesn't matter if you are reading Greek stories and philosophies, the Bible, old English literature, or poems, the struggles and ideas are similar to today. The good thing is that we can see how things turned out for them. Their feelings match ours and we can empathize with their struggles. Having so much less communication it took quite a person to get his word out. This gives me an appreciation for not only how old works were preserved but the content. It only seems right, after all the effort, the least we could do is read what they have written and enjoy it. Today we have email and texts.What comes from the heart and reasoning is important and gets lost in our world of superficial media.
What we have been looking at is Aristotle's Politics and I took a little detour into the book "Utopia". I thought it pertinent to the study of politics. With political study, we look at the best ways a society can be structured with the purpose of bringing the most happiness to the individuals. This builds on ethics, an earlier review we had here that pertained to having wholesome relationships with ourselves and others. In ethics, we looked at three areas of friendships, those for pleasure or fun; those for utility or fulfilling a material need; and those for commonality or closeness. Politics deals with utility areas. The lack of fun and romance makes it seems like a boring study. We don't have to enjoy these type of relationships or feel close to them, but we do want them to keep their word and fulfill their duty.
At the beginning of Politics, we saw that these organizations originate from family relationships. He spent some time on the role of women and interesting takes on property ownership versus private ownership. The rest of the book has comparisons between different states and their laws. We are going to review a few of them but not too much so we can keep this interesting. I don't want to fall asleep writing either...