![]() Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education.In Athenian democracy, idiots were born and citizens were made through education… Here’s a clip from Wikipedia about ancient Athens.Īn idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private-as opposed to public-affairs. ![]() The affairs of “the public” are not their affairs and it is to that meaning of the word that idiotēs points. They do live in a very tightly confined space of information and attention, however. Also, the people of Feathertown are not idiots, as we use the word in modern English. ![]() It will be obvious to all that we get the English word idiot from this Greek word, but I am going to use the Greek version because I want to set it in the Greek setting. That brings us to the Greek term, idiotēs. ![]() ![]() One horn of this dilemma concerns the reactions of the local citizens to the plight of the butterfly and that is the horn of concern to us today. She has set a major dilemma in Feathertown: what to do about the disordered migration of the monarch butterflies. I am going to offer some information about Feathertown from Barbara Kingsolver, who invented it and described it in her marvelous novel, Flight Behavior. ![]()
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