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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: OT ; Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 23:34:55 -0000 (UTC)
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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).